Sociology of Rulership and Religion

I. Types of Rulership

Just as the powerlessness of the parliamentary monarch permits the legitimate rule of the party leader, so the powerlessness of the "insulated" monarch, who is an incarnation, results either in priestly domination or, at least frequently, in the seizure of power by a family that is not encumbered with the monarch's charismatic obligations and hence can provide the real ruler (major domus, Shogun). Here too, the formal ruler must be retained because only her/his specific charisma can guarantee the proper relation to the deities, which is indispensable for the legitimacy of the whole political structure, including the position of the actual ruler. If the official ruler has genuine charisma--if it is personal not derived--s/he cannot be removed in the same manner as the Merovingians, in whose case the papacy provided a charismatically qualified power for the legitimation of the new ruling house. If an incarnated deity or a descendant of deity (for example, the Mikado) exercises genuinely charismatic authority, any attempt at deposing not just the incumbent--which, of course, is always possible in some violent or peaceful manner--but the whole charismatic house will endanger the legitimacy of all powers and weaken all traditional buttresses of the subjects' compliance. Even under the worst conditions, therefore, such a removal is anxiously avoided by all groups which benefit from the existing order; it remains to be seen whether such a dethronement is permanently feasible even when the ruling dynasty is considered representative of an alien regime, as now in China [1911-13].

The papal confirmation of Carolingian rule is typical of all those numerous cases in which the ruler is not her/himself a deity or, at any rate, cannot sufficiently legitimize her/himself through charisma that is unambiguously secured through hereditary succession or some other rule; hence s/he is dependent upon legitimation by another power, most naturally the priesthood. This has usually happened wherever the development of religious charisma into a priestly attribute was sufficiently advanced, and its bearers were not identical with the political power-holders. The qualified bearer of royal charisma is then legitimated by God, that means, by the priests, or, at the least, her/his legitimacy is confirmed by them; as experts in all things divine, they recognize the ruler who appears as the incarnation of a deity. In the Judaic Kingdom the priesthood consulted an oracle of lots about the king; the priests of Amon-Re actually controlled the crown after defeating the descendants of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaton; the Babylonian king clasped the hands of the empire-god [Marduk]; there are many other examples up to the exemplary case of the Holy Roman Empire. In all these cases legitimation can, in principle, not be denied to any genuine bearer of charisma. This was also true of the Imperial Crown during the Middle Ages, and the Electors' resolution at Rhense [where they formed an alliance, in 1338, against the Pope's claim to confirm the election of the German king] reaffirmed this very principle. For it is a question of recognition, not of discretion, whether charismatic qualification exists. At the same time, however, it is believed that only the manipulations of the priests can assure the full effectiveness of charisma, and to that extent a depersonalization of charisma occurs here also. In the extreme case, the priests' control over the crown may lead to a priestly kingship, with the head-priest her/himself exercising secular authority. This has indeed happened several times.

In the reverse case the high priest is subject to secular authority: witness the Roman Principate, China, the Caliphate, perhaps the Arian rulers, and certainly the Anglican, Lutheran, Russian and Greek Catholic rulers, who in part still hold this power. Secular control over the church varies greatly, from mere administrative and judicial prerogatives to the Byzantine monarch's influence on the formulation of church doctrine and to the ruler's preaching function, as in the Caliphate.

At any rate, the relations between secular and ecclesiastic power differ greatly depending on whether we deal with (1) a ruler who is legitimated by priests, either as an incarnation or in the name of God, (2) a high priest who is also king--these are the two cases of hierocracy --or, finally, (3) a secular, caesaro-papist ruler who exercises supreme authority in ecclesiastic matters by virtue of her/his autonomous legitimacy. Wherever hierocracy in this sense occurred--theocracy proper is limited to the second case--, it had far-reaching effects on the administrative structure. Hierocracy must forestall the rise of secular powers capable of emancipating themselves. Wherever a co-ordinate or subordinate royal position exists, hierocracy seeks to prevent the king from securing independent resources; it impedes the accumulation of the royal treasure which was indispensable to all kings of early history, and the strengthening of her/his bodyguard in order to vitiate the establishment of an independent royal army--witness the early case of Josiah in Judah. Furthermore, hierocracy checks as much as possible the rise of an autonomous and secular military nobility, since this would threaten its predominance, and therefore it frequently favors the (relatively) peaceful "citizen." The elective affinity between citizen and religious powers, which is typical of a certain stage in their development, may grow into a formal alliance against the feudal powers; this happened rather frequently in the Orient and also in Italy at the time of the struggle over lay investiture [ 11th century]. This opposition to political charisma has everywhere recommended hierocracy to conquerors as a means of domesticating a subject population. Thus, the Tibetan, the Jewish and the late Egyptian hierocracy were in part supported, and in part directly created, by foreign rulers, and according to all available historical clues the Greek temple priests, especially those at Delphi, would have been willing to play a similar role in the event of a Persian victory. It appears that the most significant features of Hellenism and Judaism are products, respectively, of the defense against Persian domination and of subjection to it. How effective domestication by hierocratic powers can be is demonstrated by the fate of the Mongols, who were almost completely pacified by Lamaism; time and again, during one and a half thousand years, they had invaded the neighboring pacified civilization and had endangered the very survival of culture.

Everywhere state and society have been greatly influenced by the struggle between military and temple nobility, between royal and priestly following. This struggle did not always lead to an open conflict, but it produced distinctive features and differences, whether we refer to the relationship between the priestly and the warrior caste in India, the partly manifest and partly latent conflict between military nobility and priesthood in the oldest city-states of Mesopotamia, in Egypt and Palestine, or to the complete takeover of priestly positions by the secular nobility in the Hellenic city-state and particularly in Rome. The clash of the two powers in medieval Europe and in the Islam resulted in the the greatest differences between the cultural development of the Orient and the Occident.

The extreme opposite of any kind of hierocracy, caesaro-papism--the complete subordination of priestly to secular power--, can nowhere be found in its pure type. Caesaro-papist powers are wielded not only by the Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Persian ruler but also by the English and German ruler, who is the head of the church , yet these powers are everywhere limited by autonomous ecclesiastic charisma. The Byzantine emperor, like the pharaoh, Indian and Chinese monarchs, and also the Protestant kings, attempted repeatedly, and mostly without success, to impose religious beliefs and norms of their own making. Such attempts were always extremely dangerous for them. In general, the subjugation of religious to royal authority was most successful when religious qualification still functioned as a magical charisma of its bearers and had not yet been rationalized into a bureaucratic apparatus with its own doctrinal system--two usually related phenomena; subjugation was feasible especially when ethics or salvation were not yet dominant in religious thought or had been abandoned again. But wherever they prevail, hierocracy is often invincible, and secular authority must compromise with it. By contrast, magic-ritual forces were controlled most thoroughly in the ancient city-state, rather well by the feudal powers in Japan and the patrimonial ones in China, and at least reasonably well by the bureaucratic state in Byzantium and Russia. But wherever religious charisma developed a doctrinal system and an organizational apparatus, the caesaro-papist state, too, contained a strong hierocratic admixture.

As a rule, priestly charisma compromised with the secular power, most of the time tacitly but sometimes also through a concordat. Thus the spheres of control were mutually guaranteed, and each power was permitted to exert certain influences in the other's realm in order to minimize collisions of interest; the secular authorities, for example, participated in the appointment of certain clerical officials, and the priests influenced the educational institutions of the state. These compromises also committed the two powers to mutual assistance. Examples of this kind are found in the ecclesiastic and secular organizations of the predominantly caesaro-papist Carolingian empire, in the Holy Roman empire, which had similar features under the Ottoman and early Salic rulers, and in the many Protestant countries that were largely caesaro-papist. Under a different power distribution, such compromises also occurred in the areas of the Counter-Reformation, the Concordats and the Bulls of Circumscription. The secular ruler makes available to the priests the external means of enforcement for the maintenance of their the power or at least for the collection of church taxes and other contributions. In return, the priests offer their religious sanctions in support of the ruler's legitimacy and for the domestication of the subjects. Powerful ecclesiastic reform movements, such as the Gregorian, attempted at times to negate completely the autonomous charisma of the political power, but they were not permanently successful. Similar to the [way in which the] doctrine of equal social rank [was adjusted by the nobility], the Catholic church today acknowledges the autonomy of political charisma by the very fact that it makes acceptance and submission a religious duty in the face of every government that indisputably holds actual power, as long as such a regime does not despoil the church.

Some theocratic or caesaro-papist elements tend to be present in every legitimate political power, since ultimately every charisma is akin to religious powers in that it claims at least some remnant of supernatural derivation; in one way or another, legitimate political power therefore always claims the "grace of God."

It should be clearly understood that the dominance of any of these systems does not depend upon the influence that religion in general exerts upon the life of a people. Hellenic, Roman or Japanese life was as much pervaded by religion as that of any hierocratic community; the ancient city-state has even been interpreted--correctly, but with some exaggeration--as primarily a religious association; by and large, a historian like Tacitus related no fewer prodigies and miracles than did medieval folk literature, and the Russian peasant is immersed in religion as much as any Jew or Egyptian. Only the manner in which social domination is organized varies greatly, and this has consequences for the course of religious development.

Caesaro-papist government treats ecclesiastic affairs simply as a branch of political administration. A rather pure type is found in the states of Occidental Antiquity, and regimes of lesser degrees of purity are found in the Byzantine Empire, the Oriental states, the states of the Eastern church, and in the era of "enlightened" despotism in Europe. Gods and saints are deities of the state, their worship is a state affair, and new gods, dogmas and cults are accepted or rejected at the ruler's discretion. If the political official does not fulfill these religious obligations her/himself, merely with the assistance of the priestly professionals, these technicalities will be put into the hands of a priesthood which is politically controlled. The state-maintained priesthood lacks economic autonomy, property and an independent administrative apparatus. All official priestly acts are supervised by the state. There is no specifically clerical way of life, apart from some technical training for ritual functions, and hence also no specifically priestly education. Theology proper does not develop under these conditions, and this in turn prevents an autonomous hierocratic regulation of the laymen's way of life: Hierocratic charisma is degraded to the level of mere administrative technique. Moreover, a caesaro-papist nobility transforms the high-ranking priestly positions into hereditary family property, exploitable as sources of income, prestige and power, and the lower-ranking ones into prebends which it fills like positions on its manorial dependencies; monastic and similar foundations become "welfare" benefices for unmarried daughters and younger sons, and compliance with the traditional ritual prescriptions becomes part of the aristocratic status ceremonial and status conventions. Whenever caesaro-papism predominates in this fashion it is inevitable that the substance of religion is stereotyped in terms of the purely technical, ritualist manipulation of supernatural powers, and any development toward a religion of salvation is impeded.