Arthurian Republicanism: The Holy Roman Empire

Suscipient autem regnum sancti Dei altissimi, et obtinebunt regnum usque in saeculum, et saeculum saeculorum. (Daniel 7:18)

What happened on Christmas Day 800?

By the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 the Catholic Faith became the religion of the Roman Empire. The Pontifex Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, as the head of the College of Bishops, thereby became the highest ranking magistrate of the Republic and from 445 everything sanctioned by the authority of the Apostolic See became law.

On 19 August 797 the Empress Irene deposed and inadvertently murdered her son Constantine VI and attempted to rule as Roman Emperor in her own right. Roman Law does not permit women to hold office. It was considered therefore by many that the imperial office was occupied but vacant. As a result it was thought that the restrainer of 2 Thessalonians 2:7 was absent.

According to St Jerome’s Chronicon, widely read in the west in the eighth century (which ironically diverges from his later Vulgate translation of Scripture), the creation of the world occurred in 5201 BC. This would mean that the tradition mentioned by St Irenaeus and Lactantius that the Antichrist would appear in the six thousandth year after the creation seemed about to be fulfilled. In the eighth century new year’s day was 25th December. The year 6000 AM would therefore begin on Christmas Day 800 by our reckoning.

In 799 this crisis reached fever pitch after the relatives of Adrian I attempted to mutilate and depose Pope Leo III. The pope escaped and fled to King Charles of the Franks and sought his aid in restoring the City of Rome to his control. It seems that, at this point, it was agreed that Charles would be constituted as Roman Emperor. After Charles restored Leo III in Rome, a council of Roman ecclesiastical and lay notables was held at which Leo III purged himself by oath of the various charges made by his enemies to justify his attempted deposition and Charles accepted a request that he adopt the title of Roman Emperor.

On Christmas Day 800 Charles attended Mass in St Peter’s Basilica. After the singing of the Gospel Leo III proclaimed over the kneeling Charles the formula of imperial acclamation and, as the people repeated his words, imposed the diadem upon him. Einhard tells us that Charles was very angry about the events of 25th December 800. Certainly, he never returned to Rome and he attempted to constitute his son Louis emperor directly without papal involvement.

So what happened? The Roman People anywhere have the right to acclaim someone Emperor if the position is vacant either through death or because the occupant has lost office though tyranny. This needs to be ratified by the Senate. The ceremony of acclamation in Constantinople incorporated senators, soldiers and civilians. Since the reign of Leo I (457-474) it was assumed that the procedure would conclude with a coronation but whether this was required for legitimacy was unclear.

Charles was acclaimed by ‘the Roman People’ and by individuals who might be taken as equivalent to senators in the City of Rome had such a body still met (it ceased to do so sometime around 600). There had been no elections for the offices which conferred senatorial rank since 14 AD. Imperial appointment to those offices (legalised by the Lex de imperio which became the process of acclamation) since that year had constituted someone as a senator. The pope, of course, was elected. As Pontiff presumably he was of the highest senatorial rank. Did he alone supply for the office of the Senate or were his own clerical electors now the western Senate? Since 750 the region around Rome had ceased to answer even theoretically to the government in Constantinople, but did that make the people there non-Romans? Were the people who acclaimed Charles Romans because they lived in Rome or because they were Catholics (as Gregory of Tours observed “Romanos enim vocitant nostrae homines religionis”)? If the latter, can any multitude of Catholics (identified by the tria vincula) perform the popular half of the task of constituting the princeps?

Setting these questions aside, however, the initiative on the morning of 25th December 800 was taken by Leo III. He first spoke the words of acclamation and performed the act which in Constantinople would merely bless and consecrate the individual already constituted as emperor hours earlier. Leo III’s actions would be taken in later years as indicating that the pope had made Charles emperor. It seems from Charles’s own actions between 800 and 814 that he was concerned that that was indeed what they implied. Where then did the Senate and the People come in? Either they played their part in the council a few days earlier in which case their role might be taken as necessary but insufficient (with the pope’s action completing the required elements) or they merely recognised an act entirely accomplished by the pope or the pope and the people both accomplished it simultaneously with the pope acting as sole senator or the clergy acting as the Roman Senate.

What then was the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ from 962 to 1806? It does not seem that the pope or the emperor or anyone else constituted the Kingdom of the Franks or the eastern portion of the Kingdom of the Franks as the Roman Republic. Neither Franks nor Germans ever claimed to be ‘Romans’ in any sense distinct or superior to the claims of all Catholics, the subjects of the Emperor in Constantinople or the inhabitants of Rome. The convention of treating the Rex Teutonicorum as the nominee for papal coronation as Emperor (and from 1508 Imperator electus) can be no more than that, a convention of the popes. Neither the regnum Teutonicorum nor the aggregate of the Kingdoms of Germany, Italy, Burgundy and Bohemia were ever the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire (except per accidens as the territory over which the nominee for the imperial title happened to rule). The popular functions in the imperial election were fulfilled either by the congregation at the papal coronation (and therefore might have been fulfilled by any gathering of Catholic laymen anywhere) or by the electors of the Rex Teutonicorum by the double title of simply being baptised Catholics and the convention that the pope considered the Rex Teutonicorum the nominee for coronation as Emperor.

Had the ruler of Constantinople at any time from 800 to 1439 presented himself for papal coronation would he already have been Imperator electus? Surely the answer is yes. In fact, from 6th July 1439 he was recognised by the Holy See and the Church herself via the definition of an Ecumencial Council as βασιλεύς Ῥωμαίων without papal coronation. Thus, the Roman Republic in the east retained the right to constitute a Roman Emperor, a right which no western state ever acquired.

Who then are the Populus Romanus today? Who is competent to constitute the Roman Emperor? Any multitude of Catholics (identified by the tria vincula) may perform the popular portion of the constitutive act. The pope alone may complete this act and constitute the candidate as Emperor. An actual commonwealth could only become the Roman Republic and acquire the right to constitute its ruler as Emperor, only if, after it’s ruler had received the imperial dignity at the hands of the pope, its people, possessing the sovereign power in a temporal commonwealth, willingly extended the rights of citizenship to all Catholics (identified by the tria vincula) resident within their borders. That this right does not arise merely from unbroken possession of the Roman civic institutions is demonstrated by the fact that those institutions were defunct between 1204 and 1261 and the right to constitute a Roman Emperor was still recognised in 1439 as inherent in the polity reconstituted in 1261.

What rights are conferred on a ruler by the Roman title? The Roman Emperor has primacy of honour over all other Christian temporal rulers and the right to extend his sovereignty over any pagan territory subdued in a just war without further papal grant.

“O Almighty and Eternal God, in Whose hands are the powers of all men and the rights of all Kingdoms; graciously look down upon the Roman Empire, that the nations that confide in their fierceness may be repressed by the power of Thy right hand. Through Our Lord. R. Amen.”

This is, in fact, no small privilege in a world in which almost every state is a tyranny and therefore open to overthrow by any legitimate power of sufficient magnitude. The faithful continue to constitute the Populus Romanus and were they able to constitute the Respublica in the temporal order their rights of conquest would be extensive. The damage inflicted by the culture of death on each nation and on the community of nations is undoubtedly lasting, grave, and certain. Wherever there is a serious prospect of success and the use of arms would not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated what could stand against the triumphant Labarum of the Republic founded and ruled by Christ?

 

“One cannot then appeal to these rights of man in order to oppose the interventions of the Magisterium” – Donum Veritatis §36

 

Equality by C.S. Lewis

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought man- kind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure.

I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. 1 don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people—all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a de- grading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. And that is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values: offers food to some need which we have starved.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.

We must wear clothes since the Fall. Yes, but inside, under what Milton called “these troublesome disguises,” we want the naked body, that is, the real body, to be alive. We want it, on proper occasions, to appear: in the marriage-chamber, in the public privacy of a men’s bathing-place, and (of course) when any medical or other emergency demands. In the same way, under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive. It is there, of course, in our life as Christians: there, as laymen, we can obey—all the more because the priest has no authority over us on the political level. It is there in our relation to parents and teachers—all the more because it is now a willed and wholly spiritual reverence. It should be there also in marriage.

This last point needs a little plain speaking. Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives, of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal. But Mrs. Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. Have as much equality as’ you please—the more the better—in our marriage laws: but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity. Mrs. Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. Marriages are thus shipwrecked. This is the tragi-comedy of the modern woman; taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman’s part.

The error here has been to assimilate all forms of affection to that special form we call friendship. It indeed does imply equality. But it is quite different from the various loves within the same household. Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up— painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophising, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends work in the same direction. Lovers look at each other: that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be “debunked”; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

And that is why this whole question is of practical importance. Every intrusion of the spirit that says “I’m as good as you” into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.

The Spectator 27th August 1943

 

The Ecumenism of the Saints

“When you are assembled, and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” – St Paul

“Those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God. If, then, those who do this as respects the flesh have suffered death, how much more shall this be the case with any one who corrupts by wicked doctrine the faith of God, for which Jesus Christ was crucified!” – St Ignatius of Antioch

“No mortal sins more grievously than do the heretics who deny Christ after they have known Him.” – St Bede

“[T]he spirit of error and lying hath taken his wretched soul with him straight from the short fire to the fire everlasting … the devil’s stinking ‘martyr'” – St Thomas More

“[The heresiarch] should meet with no mercy: he assumes the office of the Tempter; and, so far forth as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable towards himself.” – St John Henry Newman

“If in order to save an earthly life it is praiseworthy to use force to stop a man from committing suicide, are we not to be allowed use the same force — holy coercion — to save the Life (with a capital) of many who are stupidly bent on killing their souls?” – St Jose Maria Escrivá

 

The Dogmatic Authority of the Unanimous Consent of the Fathers

Popular apologist Jimmy Akin (appropriately distinguished by the fact that he sports a cowboy hat) has been propagating a serious error concerning the authority of the Fathers of the Church. He has been claiming that because Trent’s Decree Concerning The Edition And Use Of The Sacred Books was issued on the same day as the Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (8th April 1546) it should be taken as a disciplinary decree and therefore its requirement that the Scriptures never be interpreted ‘contrary to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers’ should be taken as purely disciplinary. Furthermore, he opines, because the 1983 Code of Canon Law makes no reference to this ‘rule’ it is lapsed and no longer binds the faithful. The motive for this preposterous claim appears to be the desire to unburden himself of unfashionable teachings of the Fathers and to clear the ground for ultramontane magisterial positivism (especially in regard to the interpretation of Genesis).

The problem for Mr Akin is that, even granting his claims about the disciplinary character of the Decree Concerning The Edition And Use Of The Sacred Books, the requirement that the Scriptures never be interpreted ‘contrary to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers’ is not confined to this decree. Exactly the same requirement in included in the Creed of Pius IV or Professio Fidei Tridentina the Church’s rule of faith for four centuries proclaimed at the end of Trent by Pius IV and solemnly affirmed not once but twice by Vatican I. This dogmatic and irreformable statement of the ‘true Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved’ resoundingly affirms that:

“I also accept the Holy Scripture according to that sense which holy mother the Church hath held, and doth hold, and to whom it belongeth to judge the true sense and interpretations of the Scriptures. Neither will I ever take and interpret them otherwise than according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers.”

The authority of the Fathers, which reaches its highest point in their unanimous interpretation of scripture, is the guarantee of the unchanging sense of the Church’s teaching delivered once and for all to the Apostles and preserved inviolate until the Lord’s return. As Vatican I put it,

“For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated. Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy mother Church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.”

 

Implicitism is a heresy which makes a mockery of Infallibility

 

Feeney, Florence and St Thomas More

The holy Roman church, founded on the words of our Lord and Saviour … firmly believes, professes and teaches that the legal prescriptions of the old Testament or the Mosaic law, which are divided into ceremonies, holy sacrifices and sacraments, because they were instituted to signify something in the future, although they were adequate for the divine cult of that age, once our lord Jesus Christ who was signified by them had come, came to an end and the sacraments of the new Testament had their beginning. Whoever, after the passion, places his hope in the legal prescriptions and submits himself to them as necessary for salvation and as if faith in Christ without them could not save, sins mortally. It does not deny that from Christ’s passion until the promulgation of the gospel they could have been retained, provided they were in no way believed to be necessary for salvation. But it asserts that after the promulgation of the gospel they cannot be observed without loss of eternal salvation. Therefore it denounces all who after that time observe circumcision, the sabbath and other legal prescriptions as strangers to the faith of Christ and unable to share in eternal salvation, unless they recoil at some time from these errors. Therefore it strictly orders all who glory in the name of Christian, not to practise circumcision either before or after baptism, since whether or not they place their hope in it, it cannot possibly be observed without loss of eternal salvation.

The baptismal part of Feeneyism consists in the claim that, while baptism of desire and blood are possible (they don’t like the terms) they never actually save anyone. More precisely, if elect persons do receive baptism of desire they will subsequently receive water baptism and if elect persons receive baptism of blood that means, having already received water baptism and fallen into (now forgiven mortal or) venial sin, they have the temporal punishment for this entirely remitted (as if in a second water baptism) by martyrdom. A person could die with baptism of desire and be saved but no one ever is. The basis for this claim is John 3:5 which is interpreted as meaning that no one who fails to receive water baptism is predestined. This appears to have been the mature position of St Augustine (Rahner thought so).

The above definition of Florence (Cantate Domino) is interesting from this perspective. St Thomas More held that no living human person other than Our Lady was in a state of grace at 3pm on 15th Nisan 30 A.D. If he was right then the above definition of Florence is not interesting from this perspective. Imagine, however, for the sake of argument that St Thomas More was wrong. It would be reasonable to assume that there were Jews (say in India or China) invincibly ignorance of Jesus of Nazareth and in a state of grace on on 15th Nisan 30 A.D. It is not unreasonable to imagine some of them persisting in a state of grace and invincible ignorance of Jesus of Nazareth until 20th Nisan 30 A.D. and then dying and being saved. However, this definition excludes that possibility. It says “from Christ’s passion until the promulgation of the gospel they [the ceremonies of the Old Law] could have been retained, provided they were in no way believed to be necessary for salvation”. This seems to imply that a person invincibly ignorance of Jesus of Nazareth and in a state of grace after the Passion cannot be saved. As invincible ignorance is not a sin and the performance of the rites of the Old Law does not offend against natural law the only explanation for this would be that no one who is invincibly ignorant of Jesus of Nazareth is predestined.

This by no means proves Feeneyism and rests on the hypothetical assumption that St Thomas More is wrong on this point (and, for the record, I don’t think he is) but it is interesting none the less and makes the scenario the Feeneyites propose fractionally more probable. 

 

 

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” – Samuel Johnson (1775)

 

Fairer Flowers

“The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.” John 12:35

“The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” Roman 8:16-17

“He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” 1 John 2:2

“As it is said, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.'” Hebrews 3:15

“But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.” 1 Corinthians 9:27

 

SNP says you are allowed to hold Pro-Life views so long as you don’t ‘verbalise’ them.

‘Freedom of speech and expression…’