Glenn Beck is ignorant

Here's some undeniable proof that Glenn Beck is ignorant, at least with regards to history, has no clue whatsoever what he's talking about. This is wrong on so many levels.

Sacral Kingship: The Christian Revolution (part 3)

We are now up to the third chapter on my thesis on Christian sacral kingship, in which I examine how Christianity both altered prevailing concepts of political authority in the Mediterranean world and fused the older traditions of power, both eastern and western, in the new relation between Church and State, Sacerdos and Imperium. As always, I welcome comments and critiques.

 

Chapter Two: The Christian Revolution

 The reason the pagan world could never integrate an eastern, “theocratic” view of kingship with the western, “popular” view of authority was that, from a pagan standpoint, the two systems were mutually exclusive. For those peoples of the eastern lands who were accustomed to autocratic rule, the idea of giving power to the people seemed like the height of folly. To the Greeks and Romans, the idea of absolute authority coming from the gods could not but imply arbitrariness, despotism and tyranny. The Greeks and Romans could never adequately conceive of an authority whose sanction to rule came straight from the gods/God, but whose power was mitigated and mediated into something other than despotism. This was the function the Christian Church would play. But what was so revolutionary about Christianity politically? Jesus had not been the first preacher of a coming kingdom, nor was He the last. What was different about His message that changed the face of ancient political power?

In the New Testament

Paradoxically, the fact is that Christianity was able to alter the way mankind viewed politics because it had so little to say about politics. The Gospels come with no indication of any sort of ideal political state. If philosophers were to turn to the Gospels and Epistles to find out whether an autocracy was better than a democracy or how much authority a king should have, they would be very disappointed, for the New Testament says very little on the subject. The most significant, and indeed only, passage in which Jesus addresses the issue is when he teaches His disciples to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”1 This answer is perplexing, because it is at once an answer and the evasion of an answer. He gives this injunction, but does not delineate what is Caesar’s and what exactly is God’s. Where does the authority of the one sphere end and the other begin? Where do they meet? The whole tumultuous history of Church and State relations throughout the Middle Ages is an attempt to answer these questions.

The only other statements about temporal rulership in the New Testament are found in the works of St. Paul, who briefly discusses the topic in his famous treatise on Christian political life in the Epistle to the Romans. There he explains that the Christian is obliged to obey those in government as they obey God, because all temporal authority comes from God. “For,” he writes, “there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted from God. Therefore, he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and…will incur judgment.”2 Jesus Himself seemed to hint at this same idea when He said to Pilate, “You would have no power over me had it not been given you from above,”3 implying that even the authority that Pilate was abusing in order to crucify the Son of God was itself from God. The view of temporal authority alluded to in the Gospels seems then to be that all authority, even when it is abused, comes from God and must be respected as such.4 This is manifest in Paul’s frequent commands, carried on by subsequent generations of Christians, to offer up prayers for those in authority.5

Two things are revolutionary about the strikingly simple view of political authority presented in the New Testament. First, it is a religious philosophy that does not have a corresponding idealized political structure to go with it. This is a true novelty, for the ancient world rarely produced religions that were not state religions and never really produced gods unless they were state gods.6 The Old Testament had the Law of Moses, but also the divinely instituted Kingdom of David under the house of David centered around Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon. Yahweh, though Creator of all mankind, was primarily the Lord God of Israel, a national God. The old Roman religion, centered on the worship of Mars and later Jupiter, was a civic religion entirely. The numerous deities of the city-states of Mesopotamia, from Uruk to Lagash were likewise all civic in nature; not to mention the highly state oriented view of religion in Pharonic Egypt. The otherwise abstract minds of the Greeks likewise identified the gods with state and community. Even in the skeptical age of Socrates and the Peloponnesian War they still identified their gods with the welfare of the state to such a degree that the defacing of some Hermae statues in Athens was taken as an act of treason against the state and the general Alcibiades was sentenced to death in absentia; several other Athenians were actually executed for similar crimes.7 Plato, too, had a ready made model state, put forward in his Republic, to go with his religious philosophy. All of these pre-Christian religions were also state systems and cultures. Though it is not within the scope of this work, we could also cite Islam as an example of a religious system that is also a political system. Christianity was revolutionary in that the Gospel did not come with a corresponding state system set up to go with it. It certainly had its foundation in the culture of the Jews, but the Church itself was like a chameleon that was able to take on the cultural trappings of whatever society it found itself in. This was the key to its unity and the reason why it alone has managed to become a truly world religion in a way that cultural-religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism and even Judaism never could.

The second innovative thing about Christianity was that, unlike Old Testament Judaism, it asserted that all authority, unequivocally, came from God. Being that it is an historically eastern religion, this is not surprising. But in the specific context of Christianity’s Jewish origins, it certainly is. Jews had always believed that the authority of the king came down from God, but only their king; the kings of the Gentiles were a different matter altogether. A Jew and a Christian could both easily assert that King Solomon was a king anointed by God and ruling Israel with God’s authority, but no pious Jew would have put forward the idea that the authority of persons like Antiochus IV Epiphanes or Emperor Caligula (both who committed outrages against the Jewish nation) came from God. This is contrasted greatly with the image Eusebius gives us of the Christian faithful, praying for the Emperors Diocletian, Galerius and Licinius even as the latter subject them to the most monstrous tortures. In short, the Christian revolution universalized the idea of the authority of the king coming from God. It was no longer just the authority of the Jewish king, or just the Pharaoh, or only the petty priest-kings of this or that Mesopotamian city-state, but all authority that descended from God. This idea, at least theoretically, made any type of Christian nationalism (akin to the Jewish type rampant in Judea from the time of Augustus to the time of Hadrian) an impossibility. Since every king held his authority from God, every king equally had a right to respect and honor; Christians were to give “respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due…Honor all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.”8 This ideal of the universal divine origin of all authority did much to establish the early medieval idea of sacrosanct kingship.9 In the earliest centuries of the Church, this honor would have been reserved to the Roman Emperor alone, the only "king" known in the west. Yet, as the Middle Ages progressed and national kings asserted their power against that of an ever weakening Roman (and then Holy Roman) Empire, this teaching on the authority of kings was applied to all in authority. "A king is an emperor in his kingdom," went the popular saying of the Middle Ages.

Render to Caesar

Christ’s command to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” was relatively easy to fulfill in the early centuries of Christianity. The world of the Church and the secular world of Rome were divided by a deep chasm. Christians generally fulfilled Christ’s precept in two ways. On the positive side, they were submissive to the laws, paid their taxes in due time, showed fitting honor to the civil magistrates and performed social works of charity. On the negative side, they usually refrained from military service, tried not to make use of the Roman courts,10 stayed out of civic positions early on, remained aloof from the circuses and spectacles, and were conspicuously absent at civic religious services, where sacrifices were made to the state gods, the emperor, and the “Genius of the Roman People.”11 Later, many retreated from civic life all together and went into monasteries. It was generally pretty clear cut where the dividing line was between the City of God and the City of Man, and Christians could easily steer clear of the latter if they had enough fortitude to turn their back on the culture of their day.

This is attested to by the fact that the Church Fathers of the ante-Nicean period spent very little time writing on matters of state and politics. By the time of Emperor Septimius Severus (r.193-211), Christianity had become more entrenched and Christians were taking up civil posts in the government; yet even then few Christian authors of the time address the issue of Church-State relations. The one exception perhaps is Tertullian, who dourly complained from the harsh deserts of North Africa, declaring that “no official position in the state ought to be held by any true Christian.”12 Most Church Fathers of the time were writing treatises against heresies (Irenaeus), exegetical works (Origen), or catechetical materials (Cyril of Jerusalem). The question about where the temporal and spiritual spheres met and ended remained untouched since Church-State integration was not a lively issue in the days of the persecutions.

The advent of a Christian Emperor changed this arrangement and threw endless complexities into the question of how a Christian was supposed to relate to the secular state. It was easy to render to Caesar the things that were Caesar's and to God the things that were God’s, but what was one to do when Caesar and God were on the same team? The ascension of Constantine as sole emperor in 324 ushered in a new era of ideology regarding the relations of Church and State. His embrace of the faith following the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 has provided grounds for endless speculation among historians about his motives; modern popular history tends to see his conversion as a political convention with little personal conviction done in order to secure power, using the Church as his tool.

Two common errors must be refuted in dealing with this topic. One is to believe that the post-Nicene Church was largely a political construction of Constantine made to serve his personal agenda, whose clergy were subsequently knavish goons ready to act on his every beckon call. Some of the more unscholarly of Protestant historians hold this view, which tends to transform the Catholic Church into just another Roman institution created by Constantine. The second common error is to assume that the Church, once invested with political clout, began to pander to the idols of power and money and stopped criticizing the establishment in exchange for imperial patronage.

Contrary to those who see the post-Nicene Church as a tool of Constantine created by him to serve his purposes, it is evident that the structure and hierarchy of the Church were intact and functioning well before the advent of Constantine. Though his ascension increased prestige of the Church greatly, there was very little alteration to the structure or organization of the Church during the Constantinian period; if there was a change, it was certainly not done by Constantine.¹³ Changes in organization certainly would come later, but they were long after the period of Constantine and instituted equally by the Church and State. It is often emphasized how zealous Constantine was in supporting Christianity and stomping out paganism, but what is often under emphasized is how enthusiastically the Church supported Constantine and flocked to his cause. Christians had labored many long years under godless emperors and were quite willing to openly praise the first Christian emperor as a new David or a new Solomon. It seemed like a new golden age was dawning, ushered in by Constantine.

The second error, that the Church relaxed its preaching of the Gospel in exchange for wealth, prestige and power, is refuted by a look at the ancient practice of parrhesia. In contrast to the pre-Constantinian fathers, who wrote little about politics and generally derided those in authority as godless, it now became the standard in ecclesiastical circles to praise the emperor as a friend of God and at the same time pay close attention to his political actions. After all, one had to make certain that the emperor was not also giving an upper hand to heretics, pagans or Jews. Not only did bishops gradually come to pay close attention to imperial affairs, but they began to speak their mind to the emperors freely when the latter might be tempted to enact a piece of legislation that the bishops thought was less than Christian. This boldness of speech came to be viewed subsequently as a right and prerogative of the clergy, called parrhesia in the east. For example, St. Ambrose boldly says to the usurper-emperor Eugenius in 393, “I have no fear telling your majesties, the emperors, what I feel with my own conviction,” and later says of the emperor Theodosius I, “I did not hesitate to speak with him face to face.”14 He cites Psalm 118:46, “I was not ashamed to speak in the presence of the king,” as justification for his considerable license in speaking to the Imperial Majesty. In the same letter to Eugenius, Ambrose strictly censures the Emperor for giving large donations to supporters who were pagans, saying, “The imperial power is great, but consider, O emperor, how great God is…You are indeed the emperor, but you must all the more submit to God.”15 When pestering Theodosius about the way he handled a synagogue burning affair, Ambrose bluntly opens the body of his epistle with the statement, “It is not fitting for an emperor to refuse freedom of speech or for a bishop not to say what he thinks.”16 No one of any rank under Caligula or Domitian or even better emperors like Trajan and Severus, would have ever been permitted to take such a tone with His Imperial Majesty; this was something new.

A great example of this freedom of speech exercised by clergy in the presence of the emperors comes from the life of St. Athanasius. He had the boldness to track down Constantine himself while the emperor was out on a hunting trip and stand in the way of his entourage, refusing to move until the emperor allowed him to vindicate himself before his Arian accusers. Constantine himself recorded his amazement at Athanasius’ boldness: 

As I was entering on a late occasion our all-happy home of Constantinople, which bears our name (I chanced at the time to be on horseback) on a sudden the Bishop Athanasius, with certain others whom he had with him, approached me in the middle of the road, so unexpectedly as to occasion me much amazement….I did not however enter into conversation with him at that time, nor grant him an interview…but gave orders for his removal, when with increasing boldness he claimed only this favor [i.e., that he should be allowed to plead his case before the Emperor]…17

This new air of boldness to speak on the part of the clergy was something quite different from the imperial flattery and proskynesis that Diocletian required of his attendants (and that lay people were still required to pay to the Christian emperors).

This idea of parrhesia, the freedom and duty of the clergy to speak freely with and even rebuke the Christian emperors, disproves the commonly held assumption of modern history that the Church slavishly pandered to the imperial will, part out of servile fear and part from a hope of gaining influence. On the contrary, from the very beginning of the Middle Ages the trend is the Church and the bishops knocking heads with the leaders of state, continually beseeching and imploring the temporal authorities to obey the Gospel and respect the rights of the Church. The Church and State were like an old married couple who bickered constantly, the Church playing the part of the nagging wife, the State of the sometimes disinterested husband. The relation of the bishops to the Emperor in the age of Constantine is indeed complex, but it was certainly not one of knavish servitude nor one of arrogant independence. The Church was ready to praise Constantine, but not pander to him. It was eager enough to applaud his legislation that favored Catholics, but equally eager to condemn his acts that favored Arians. The Church was more than willing to laud and acclaim a pious and God-fearing Christian ruler, as the Christians of the fourth century welcomed Constantine and the Israelites of the eleventh century B.C. welcomed David. At the same time, the Church was always ready to step in and rebuke a king who had acted wickedly, as Ambrose did when Theodosius massacred the people of Thessalonica and Nathan did when David killed Uriah.

Eternal Victory

Very early on, during the reign of Constantine, Christian writers and imperial propagandists began to merge the ideas of the eternal Roman Empire with the eternal reign of God. The two were never totally confused (as in ancient Egypt where the Pharaoh was first the incarnate Horus and later the divine son of Ra) but they were integrated.18 Had not the book of Proverbs said, “the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord”?19 All that the reign of God and the reign of the Emperor needed to integrate was a point on which they could meet, a fulcrum on which the two sides could balance. That crux was military triumph.

This goes back to the very beginning, to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. Though the reported vision of Constantine, the cross emblazoned with the words “In this sign thou shalt conquer” (In hoc signo vinces) was later applied by ecclesiastics like Eusebius to the spiritual triumph of Christianity over paganism, its initial context was that of a military victory. Constantine certainly took it this way, and ordered the chi rho sign painted on all his soldiers’ shields. The victory of his forces that day seemed to confirm that the Christian God was not only the true God, but the God who ensured military victory. The first fusion of Church and State functions was a military one. Thus, from the very beginning the idea of the pious Christian ruler was connected with the idea of military glory. This connection would prevail over all Christendom, from the Byzantine east to the remotest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

The Christian message had revolutionized the way men thought about government. No longer was God seen as a state god bound up with the interests of a particular people, as Jupiter Capitolinus, Athena Parthenos or the Lord God of Israel, but as a God who was God of all peoples and thus all authority, even corrupt authority, got its mandate from Him. This lack of a nationalistic emphasis enabled Christianity to flourish in whatever culture it took root in and prosper under whatever governor or emperor happened to be in power at the time.

The early Christians respected all authority as coming from God and prayed for their rulers, even bad ones. The advent of Constantine and the subsequent Christianization of the Roman Empire complicated the relationship, but the two remained separate entities and were not merged but integrated. The post-Constantinian Church was obedient to the Christian emperors, as it had been to all emperors, but enjoyed a new boldness (parrhesia) to evaluate their acts in light of the Gospels and criticize them accordingly. This duty fell largely to the bishops. With its insistence that all authority was not of human origin but came from God, as well as its degree of responsibility and accountability that it required of Christian rulers, Christianity became the perfect synthesis of the older, pagan political traditions of the east and the west and thus accomplished peacefully what Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar and Diocletian had been unable to do militarily or politically. In its emphasis on the authority of the ruler coming straight from heaven, it preserved the best qualities of the eastern theocratic monarchies. In its utilization of the body of bishops as a kind of ecclesiastical senate that had the ear of the emperors and enjoyed a considerable amount of free speech (parrhesia) with him, it also provided an outlet for the continuation of the western, senatorial tradition based around the assembly to continue. After all, the Greek word for Church, ekklesia, is the same word used for assemblies of the Greek city-states. In the Christian Church, the representative assemblies of the west were finally able to coexist with the sacerdotal monarchs of the east.

As Church and State gradually grew used to existing side-by-side, certain ecclesiastical rights were introduced into political functions, so that specific state rituals also became Church rituals. The first aspect that the two institutions were able to converge on was that of military triumph. The idea of the pious Christian emperor as Victor was most popular in the east, where imperial custom prevailed much longer than in the west, which was becoming increasingly germanicized. It is to the post-Constantinian emperors of Constantinople that we must now turn.

 

Footnotes

1 Matt. 22:21

2Rom. 13:1-2 (see also Tit. 3:1, I Pet. 2:13-17)

3 John 19:11

4 As in the example of David, refusing to strike down Saul even when he had both the right and the opportunity (I Sam. 24:1-22; 26:1-25).

5 I Tim. 2:1-2. Eusebius reveals how seriously Christians took this command to pray for those in authority when he says that the Christian communities of Asia Minor offered up prayers for the welfare of the Co-Emperor Licinius (319) even when he was in the process of pursuing a savage campaign of persecution against them. Eusebius calls this act of praying for rulers the “ancestral custom” of the Christians (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 10.8).

6 Not unless one counts the deities of sky and earth, such as Gaea, Cybele, etc. But these most ancient of deities probably represent the remnants of a primal religion left over from before such a time as there was organized states. But once ancient cultures civilized and urbanized, the gods they developed were always state gods.

7Thucydides, History, 6.27-28,61

8 Rom 13:7; I Pet. 2:13-17

9 One result of this is that assassination of monarchs was a relatively rare occurrence in the Middle Ages. Most medieval kings met their ends peacefully. By contrast, a majority of the final Roman emperors died unnatural deaths.

10 Following St. Paul’s injunction of I Cor. 6:1-8: “When one of you has a grievance against a brother, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?…I say this to your shame…brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?”

11Michael Grant, History of Rome (Michael Grant Publications: London, 1979), 304

12 Grant, 307

13Some might object that the Council of Nicaea was called at Constantine’s request, and that this constitutes a major change in the Church at the hand of the Emperor. But though the Council was certainly pivotal, it only reaffirmed what had been the orthodox position all along and proposed no novelty.

14 St. Ambrose, Letter 57

15ibid.

16St. Ambrose, Letter 40

17William Thomas Walsh, Saints in Action, (Hanover House: Garden City, NY, 1961),191

18Jan Assman, The Mind of Egypt, Translated by Andrew Jenkins (Metropolitan Books: New York, 1996), 184

19Pr. 21:1

Communion Straw Men

In our Diocesan publication, "FAITH Magazine," I recently came across an article on the reception of Holy Communion that made my eye-twitch; not necessarily because it said anything wrong per se, but because it gave only half of the answer and neglected to provide a ton of historical and liturgical information that would have been more helpful in answering the question. The question posed was whether or not communion in the hand was disrespectful. The question is answered by Fr. Joe Krupp, a popular priest in our diocese who runs a Q&A segment in the diocesan magazine. Here is the article in its entirety, which I will comment on afterward:

Q: Recently, at church, someone told me receiving communion in the hand is disrespectful. Is this accurate? How should I receive communion?

A: I’ve gotten this one and variations on it from a few readers – I hope my information helps. Before we dive into the “how” and the “why” though, I’d like to take a moment and explain why these are important issues and not “nit-picking.”

We call the Eucharist the blessed sacrament. All of our sacraments are amazing, but when we talk about the Eucharist, we are talking about the one from which all the others flow. It is the most potent spiritual medicine available to us. Because of its amazing power and beauty, we are always to use one word above all others in relation to it: reverence. Here’s a pretty powerful passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

“Therefore, whoever eats the body or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 11:27)

So, with that in mind, how are we to receive? According to the laws of the church, there are two ways we can receive Communion: on the hand or on the tongue. To be clear, both ways of receiving are approved by the church. The folks who told you receiving Communion in the hand is a mortal sin were wrong.

So, if we receive on the hand, how do we do it? Look at this quote from St. Cyril of Jerusalem: “When you approach holy Communion, make the left hand into a throne for the right, which will receive the king.” Pope Paul VI added, “Then, with your lower hand, take the consecrated host and place it in your mouth.” For those who receive Communion on the hand, please be sure and follow this practice. Receiving one-handed or cupping the hand is not the right way to receive.

For those who receive in the mouth, the key is to tilt your head back and extend your tongue so that there is no danger of the host falling. Simply opening your mouth is not safe or sanitary. This practice also is affirmed by our history – Pope Leo the Great referred to receiving in the mouth when he wrote about the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John.

In both cases, focus on being reverent. I’ve seen both Communion-in-the-hand and Communion-in-the-mouth folks approach the Eucharist with tremendous respect and honor; and I’ve seen the opposite as well.

Our posture in approaching the Eucharist needs to be different, as well: We should stand ready – alert and prepared to receive Jesus attentiveness and love in our hearts. Our “Amen” should be loud and clear – a strong affirmation of our communal belief.

I’ve received letters from folks about priests not allowing them to receive Communion on the hand and from folks whose priests do not allow them to receive on the tongue. The priest has no authority to do such a thing on either side. I would suggest you politely share with your priest your concerns and ask him to change his personal rule. If not, then I would follow up with a letter to the bishop.

For those of you who have a strong opinion about how others should receive, I invite you to focus on how you and your family receive. Don’t worry about others. Jesus promised that he would guide us as a church and we need to cling to those words. It’s not our duty to save the church, but to let Jesus save us through it.

Enjoy another day in God’s presence!

First of all, kudos to Fr. Joe for pointing out that this is an important issue, is not "nit-picking" and that those who find themselves being forced to receive according to the priest's whim ought to take a stand on it. However, I do have several concerns about the approach Fr. Joe took that jumped out at me the very first time I read this article.

My first problem is the straw-man that Fr. Joe sets up to answer the question. Let's look at the original question again: "Recently, at church, someone told me receiving communion in the hand is disrespectful. Is this accurate? How should I receive communion?" The question is whether or not receiving communion in the hand is "disrespectful." Now let's see how Fr. Joe answers: "The folks who told you receiving Communion in the hand is a mortal sin were wrong." The person did not ask if communion in the hand was a mortal sin; they asked if it was "disrespectful," by which I am assuming they mean irreverent. Fr. Joe completely passes up the question as to whether or not communion in the hand is disrespectful and merely says that it is not a "mortal sin", which is something completely different. To be sure, every liturgical derivation which is a mortal sin is also disrespectful, but not everything disrespectful is a mortal sin.

Delving into this issue of disrespect a little more, note that the entire answer to the question is framed not in terms of which way of reception is intrinsically more reverent, but around whether or not both forms are equally permissible. Here is Fr. Joe's essential argument:

So, with that in mind, how are we to receive? According to the laws of the church, there are two ways we can receive Communion: on the hand or on the tongue. To be clear, both ways of receiving are approved by the church. The folks who told you receiving Communion in the hand is a mortal sin were wrong.

This is another straw-man. The person asked whether communion in the hand is irreverent; Fr. Joe answers that communion in the hand is legal. Perhaps he is making the assumption that no option the Church legalizes could be any more or less reverent than any other option, that all options are created equal, so to speak; but even if so, the question of the legality of communion in the hand is not in question. It is the reverence of communion in the hand that has been challenged, and it is a little bit misleading to answer the question by appealing to legality as if legality and reverence were equivocal terms. We all know that in many liturgical areas the Church allows many "options", some of which are less reverent than others. 

This, by the way, is the standard answer I have usually seen given by non-traditionalist Catholic apologists, at least when questioned on communion publicly: an appeal to the equal legality of either form of reception with the implicit assumption that one is just as good as the other because they are both "approved."

The appeal to history is also a little one-sided. Fr. Joe cites the famous quote by St. Cyril on how to receive in the hand; after discussing communion in the hand, he goes on to the communion on the tongue with the casual statement, "This practice also is affirmed by our history," as if communion in the hand and communion in the tongue were two practices that have always existed side by side with equal usage! As if reception in the hand was the historic norm but that reception on the tongue was "also affirmed!" To simply refer to the whole 1500 year tradition of communion on the tongue, which was the universal norm throughout the whole Church for most of her history and affirmed by so many saints and popes, with the casual statement "This practice also is affirmed" is a colossal understatement and (in my opinion) misleading, as if one were to say that the Church allows altar girls but that using boys for altar servers is "also" historical.

Regarding the history of the practice, notice that nowhere in the article does Fr. Joe point out that communion on the tongue has been the norm for centuries upon centuries and that even now it is the norm in many parts of the world. He does not say that communion in the hand was only accepted in the past few decades and only as a concession. Rather, he tries to paint both forms as equally historical with an equally valid historical pedigree. While it is certainly true that communion in the hand existed in the early Church, it is patently false to insinuate that it has just as impressive a historical pedigree as communion on the tongue or that it was just one of two equally used modes of reception. It is well known that Communion in the hand began spreading during the early nineteen-sixties, in Catholic circles in Holland and originally as a form of dissent. It began, then, as an aping of the Protestant practice, or at the very least as a "false archaeologism" - it certainly does not have the venerable sanction of tradition that communion on the tongue does, and Catholics deserve to know this.

One other thing that ought to be cleared up - when Fr. Joe goes on to speak about how to receive, he says:

In both cases, focus on being reverent. I’ve seen both Communion-in-the-hand and Communion-in-the-mouth folks approach the Eucharist with tremendous respect and honor; and I’ve seen the opposite as well.

In this and the suceeding paragraphs, he seems to imply that whether or not a reception is reverent is entirely dependent upon the subjective disposition and actions of the recipient. There is of course some truth to this, but as I said above, this is not the whole truth. When the questioner asked whether communion in the hand was disrespectful, he was not asking about one's personal dispositions but whether the mode of reception in the hand was objectively disrespectful. Sometimes we can have the best dispositions, be in a state of grace, etc. but the mode of reception itself can be irreverent; for example, unleavened hosts distributed by a lay person dressed up like a clown. That is an extreme example, but the point is that sometimes we need to look not at the disposition of the recipient but at the mode of distribution itself - this is what the question was addressing, whether taken objectively, communion in the hand is less reverent than communion in the tongue. Instead of answering this, Fr. Joe seems to say that as each mode is equally legal, so each mode is equally reverent depending on the disposition of the recipient.

Also, why no mention that Pope Benedict himself mandates that at papal masses communion must be received not only on the tongue but kneeling? Surely the pope's own actions would have provided a valuable insight into which "option" the Church seems to think is best?

Regarding the actual question as to whether or not communion in the hand is intrinsically more disrespectful than communion in the tongue (the question Fr. Joe should have answered), I refer you to this article by Jude Huntz in a 1997 edition of "Homiletic and Pastoral Review."

I'm not going to go on and on about all the arguments in favor of communion in the hand; that's not the point of this post. The point is that if people bring up this question, they deserve an honest answer, one that is at least true to history and logically consistent. Simply pointing out that both modes of reception are legal is hardly an answer; it is the absence of an answer. I like Fr. Joe and usually read his Q&A column with a smile, but I think this time a more thorough answer would have been better, especially as this is likely to become a more live issue in the near future as the Church continues to realign herself with Tradition.

What does God have against us?

This is an interesting question that has come up in the course of my studies of the Book of Revelation in the context of some talks I am preparing for my Youth Group on discerning the will of God.This question deals with the phrase "I have this against you", which is oft repeated by the Lord in His letters to the seven churches found in Rev. 2-3. After greeting each local church and commending them for their fidelity, He calls to mind their sins and says "I have this against you." Consider the following verses:

• "But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first" (Rev. 2:4)
  
  
• "But I have a few things against you; you have some who hold the teaching of Balaam...you also have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent then" (Rev. 2:15).
  
  
• "But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess..." (Rev. 2:20).

So Scripture very clearly says that God has things "against" these churches. Since these are churches that God is speaking to, it is evident that, at face value, God can be "against" believers if they are unfaithful, which at the very least should be an admonition for us to remain in God's favor!

And yet, if we turn to the Epistle to the Romans, we see a very different statement, where St. Paul assures us that God is for us, not against us:

"And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?" (Rom. 8:28-31)

Since Paul is speaking here of those He "foreknew", those who are "justified" and "glorified", we may presume he is speaking of the Church. Speaking of the Church he says "If God is for us, who can be against us?" The implied answer is "nobody." Why? Again, the implication is because God is always for us and never against us. How could God be "against" His own Church? How could Christ be "against" His Bride? "No man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church, because we are members of His body" (Eph. 5:29). So we seem to have a contradiction - St. Paul teaches that God is for us, not against us, and that because we are His Body, the Bride of Christ, for this very reason does Christ cherish and nurture us rather than being "against" us. Yet St. John tells us very plainly that in some cases, God can be "against" the Church.

An easy answer would be to say that God is for us if we are righteous but becomes against us when we sin, since the instances mentioned in Revelation clearly deal with sin. I don't think this answer really does the issue justice though; is God really so fickle that He pledges eternal devotion to us, as a husband does a wife, but that the second we make a mistake He suddenly becomes "against" us? In some ways yes. If we commit a mortal sin, we know that we put ourselves outside God's grace; if we were to die in that state, we would find God "against" us in that we would face exclusion from heaven. But apart from the case of the sinner who actually dies in mortal sin, is the disposition of God rightly said to be "against" the believer when he commits a sin? Can God ever really be "against" a baptized believer?

One could of course try to say that one ceases being a "believer" or one of the "faithful" when they commit a sin, but this would be a Manichean view of the Church as a community of the "perfect", such as adopted by various Calvinist communities throughout history. No; the words of Christ that He has something "against" someone are addressed not to people in the world, but to the Church. So, again, can God ever be "against" a baptized believer?

Of course, if we start with St. Paul's statement that God is for us, we ought to assume that this is an absolute statement with regards to the Elect; that is, God is always for us, not just when we happen to be on the straight and narrow, but even if we screw up. If there could be windows or segments of time when God was not for us but against us, then Paul would not have been able to boast rhetorically "who can be against us?" The structure of the sentence implies that God is always for us. If nothing else, the parable of the Prodigal Son reminds us that even if we flee from God and become mired in sin, God is still "for us", still on "our side." Did the father suddenly become an enemy of the prodigal once he left home? Is the father's disposition such that he becomes against his own son when the latter leaves but then changes his disposition when the son returns? On the contrary, we see in the parable of the Prodigal Son a fatherly love that is ever for his son, even when the latter wanders.

If God is always for us, then it follows that when it says that He has things "against" us that it cannot mean in a literal sense that God has turned against us, just like those who believe in penal substitution assert happened when God the Father allegedly "turned his back" on our Lord while He suffered. But what other way can we take Christ's phrase in Revelation that He has things "against" different churches?

We know that when we speak of God changing His dispositions towards us, it is really an anthropomorphic way of saying that we have changed. Since God is simple and changeless, He cannot "get mad" and then "calm down" afterward; when we speak of God being angry when we sin and then being restored to His friendship, this assuaging His anger, we know that it is not as if He was sitting there in heaven all blissful until we sinned and then we disturbed His peace and made Him angry; rather, our language and ways of speaking metaphorically about God's changing passions are really descriptions of our changing relationship with Him. When we say God was angry with us when we sinned but now we are in His favor, we are not describing the whims of a Persian potentate but are rather explaining that we ourselves have changed our relation to Him - we have gone from a state of deprivation of sanctifying grace (being under God's "anger") to a state of possessing sanctifying grace (being in God's "favor"). But it is we who have changed, not God.

So, when God lists things He has against us in Revelation, He is not calling them to mind for His benefit, but rather for ours. When God, who is perfect, says to a man, "I have this against you," is He not rather saying, "You have done this against Me?" Remember, the Holy Spirit, our Lord tells us, plays an important role in "convicting" us of sin (John 16:8). When God speaks to us, it is often to awaken our own consciences to our need for His grace, especially in the case of those in the Church who, as in Revelation, think they are spiritually mature when really they are weak. "You have the name of being alive, yet you are dead" (Rev. 3:1). "You say, 'I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing;' not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked" (Rev. 3:17).

When God asks Adam, "Where are you?" He does not ask because He doesn't know where Adam is; He does it so Adam will realize that he is estranged from God. Likewise, when God lists all the things He has "against" us, it is because He wants us to understand the things we have against Him - and in thus knowing what we have done against God can we truly repent, for it is necessary to admit our sins in order to be restored to grace. If we do not see this, we are hypocrites and liars  and "the truth is not in us" (1 John 1:8).

God is our Father. He sent His Son to atone for our sins by making a perfect sacrifice of Himself on the cross. Out of this sacrificial love was born the Church, the Bride of Christ, for whom our Lord ever intercedes at the right hand of the Father. Even when we sin, though we lose God's grace, God doesn't stop loving us or alter His fundamental disposition of mercy towards us, just as the father of the Prodigal Son did not cease loving the prodigal or ever stop being "for" him. When God mentions in Revelation that He holds things "against" us, it is not He who is compiling a hit list against us, as if he is our political enemy, but it is His way of showing us what we have done against Him, and even then always with a view of bringing about repentance, as our Lord says in Revelation: ""But I have a few things against you; you have some who hold the teaching of Balaam...you also have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent then" (Rev. 2:15).

I think this is a biblical and orthodox solution to the problem; of course, much hinges on what we mean by God being "for" or "against" somebody, but I think this explanation solves the problem without getting bogged down in semantics. I'm sure you will all let me know if this is heresy or not.

St. Bede the Venerable

Today is the feast of St. Bede the Venerable, one of my favorite saints of the Church. Bede, a Doctor of the Church, was born in 672 in Northumberland and lived his whole life in this region in the vicinity of the monastery of Jarrow, where he was to spend all but seven years of his life. Bede was dedicated to God at the tender age of seven as an oblate at a time when the custom of dedicating children to the monastic life was widely practiced. Bede describes his own upbringing in the last chapter of his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People":

A the age of seven I was, by the care of my relations, given to the most reverend Abbot Benedict, and afterward to Ceolfrid, to be educated. From that time I have spent the whole of my life within that monastery, devoting all my pains to the study of the Scriptures, and amid the observance of monastic discipline and the daily charge of singing in the Church, it has been ever my delight to learn or teach or write.

Thus did St. Bede labor for the remainder of his life in the scholarly work of a monk, toiling away in the scriptorium at Jarrow, copying and explicating the Sacred Scriptures. Though remembered primarily by medievalists as a historian for his history on the English Church, Bede considered himself first a Scripture scholar and a scribe whose job it was to make known the wisdom of the Scriptures. He says:

From the time of my admission to the priesthood to my present fifty-ninth year, I have endeavored for my own use and that of my brethren, to make brief notes upon the holy Scripture, either out of the works of the venerable Fathers or in conformity with their meaning and interpretation.

St. Bede toiled endlessly in the tedious but monumental work of a monastic scribe, according to tradition, working even until the very hour of his death on the vigil of the Ascension in 735. The day he died the saint was still busy dictating a translation of the Gospel of St. John. In the evening the boy Wilbert, who was writing it, said to him: "There is still one sentence, dear master, which is not written down." And when this had been supplied, and the boy had told him it was finished, "Thou hast spoken truth", Bede answered, "it is finished. Take my head in thy hands for it much delights me to sit opposite any holy place where I used to pray, that so sitting I may call upon my Father." And thus upon the floor of his cell singing, "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost" and the rest, he peacefully breathed his last breath, according to the account of Cuthbert, his beloved disciple.

St. Bede is a wonderful example for the modern Church, for just as he labored to bring the light of Christ to the people in the midst of the Dark Ages, so is our world, which is plunged into an age darker than anything Bede could have known, in need of the light of Christ.

One of his most beautiful prayers:

And I pray thee, loving Jesus, that as Thou hast graciously given me to drink in with delight the words of Thy knowledge, so Thou wouldst mercifully grant me to attain one day to Thee, the fountain of all wisdom and to appear forever before Thy face. Amen.

Why "dialogue" will never win converts

Why has "dialogue" as a model for interaction between Christians and other religions failed to produce any fruit? Undoubtedly because in a model of interaction between the Church and non-Christian religions that is based on "dialogue" and "meaningful exchange of experiences" there is a misplaced emphasis on learning about one another rather than on the salvation of souls. For a long time I thought this failure of the dialogue approach was a strategic blunder; i.e., I thought it was poorly thought out, untested in Christian history, prone to engender confusion and all in all was just a bad idea. While maintaining all of these things, I now see that any approach to non-Christian religions that is based solely on "dialogue" as its cornerstone is not only strategically a bad move but is actually antithetical to the spirit of the Gospel and is doomed to failure essentially and innately. One who chooses to pursue the route of "dialogue" by that very fact ensures the failure of their efforts.

This thought came to me while reading Josef Pieper's book Tradition: Concept and Claim, which is not so much about the theological or ecclesiological concepts of tradition but rather tradition in the broader, philosophical sense. Pieper points out that Tradition is too often defined as the simple handing on of information from one group to another; this is the definition one gets of tradition in secular dictionaries of sociological college courses that study "folklore." Yet, Pieper says, this in itself cannot be tradition, for otherwise such things as simple reporting would be considered tradition: a reporter goes out and gains information and conveys this information to an audience, yet nobody would claim that tradition has taken place. The same could be said for a scholar publishing a work on an historical epoch. I can write a book about ancient Rome and  pass on the knowledge of ancient Rome to a third party reader via the book, but I am not really passing on a tradition, just knowledge.

One difference, of course, is that Tradition doesn't just pass on knowledge, but passes on knowledge in its cultural context. But the critical distinction needs to be placed on the recipient of the tradition. When a true act of tradition takes place, someone passes on the tradition to a recipient, who assents to it and makes it his own. Pieper says of the act of receiving tradition:

"[This] is what the act looks like, in which the activity of tradition first reaches its goal and is consummated, by means of which alone someone "is part of a tradition" and participates in it. This is reception in the strictest meaning of the term, hearing something and really taking it seriously. I accept what someone else offers me and presents to me. I allow him to give it to me...Taken all together, this means that accepting and receiving tradition has the structure of belief. It is belief, since belief means accepting something as true and valid not on the basis of my own insight. but by relying on someone else" (Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim. St. Augustine Press, 2010.pp. 18-19).

According to Pieper, the act of "receiving" a tradition is akin to an act of faith - when receiving a tradition, one is put in a disposition of humility, receiving as a gift something being given by another (hence the verbs about something being "passed on" or "handed down" in relation to tradition). To accept what is handed down is not to just understand facts; rather, it is to assent to and receive the tradition, thus making oneself "part of the tradition" and the next line in the chain. In fact, it is only in assenting to the tradition and becoming part of the tradition that one can even fully understand the tradition.

Here is where the problem with dialogue comes in. The entire Christian message -call it the Gospel, the Good News, the Faith, the Teaching, whatever - is, in its most essential form, Tradition. All throughout the New Testament and the Fathers, the Gospel is spoken of as something that is received and then handed on; i.e., a Tradition, something that is given and that as a tradition demands assent. It is not a set of facts given out for one to ponder, but a tradition that is given and that the recipient must actively receive. Consider these verses and how the Faith is portrayed as a tradition:

Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a narration of the things that have been accomplished among us, according as they have delivered them unto us... (Luke 1:1-2).

For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures: And that he was buried: and that he rose again according to the scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3-4).

For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread... (1 Cor. 11:23).


And the things which thou hast heard of me by many witnesses, the same commend to faithful men who shall be fit to teach others also (2 Tim. 2:2).

Therefore, brethren, stand fast: and hold the traditions, which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle (2 Thess. 2:15).

In all these verses we see that the Gospel is essentially a Tradition. So he who would really know the Gospel and enter into it must not only learn about it but receive it as a Tradition. But in a situation where the Gospel as tradition is replaced by dialoguing "about" the Gospel, we see that the message is robbed of all its power and vitality because we are no longer seeking to pass on a tradition but to simply relate facts and experiences. No matter how weighty our facts or how compelling our experiences, these can ultimately never produce conversions or belief because the essence of what the Gospel is has now been removed. Without the element of "handing on and receiving" that St. Paul sees as central to the Gospel, how can we be surprised if efforts at simple "dialogue" do not produce conversions? Indeed, they are incapable of doing so, just like a car with its engine removed is no longer capable of transporting anybody anywhere.

When we approach non-Christians from a position of dialogue (versus handing on a message that demands assent, that actually asks something of the hearer), we are merely telling facts and experiences about the Gospel without even preaching the Gospel to them. This is infidelity to the call of Christ and unfair to the hearer, who has a right to hear the Word of Life from the Body of Christ.

Given that this approach has been a dismal failure, we see that the proponents of dialogue have tried to rework the entire notion of Christian missions to say, in effect, "That's okay that our dialogue-based model has not produced any conversions, because we're not really trying to "convert" people anymore anyway. We just want to share mutually validating experiences enriched through dialogue about the contributions our respective faith communities make to our spiritual growth." In other words, they failed to find gold and covered it up by claiming they were never looking for it in the first place. Dialogue-based approaches have failed to win souls for Christ and it is now denied that winning souls is even a goal. That's too outmoded and based on an "ecclesiology of conversion." How medieval.

Is there a place for dialogue? Of course. Every evangelical encounter starts as dialogue, but i(and this is the distinction) t is a dialogue that goes someplace - that leads from the conveyance of facts to the proposition that the hearers take some of concrete action on what they have heard. St. Paul might begin his sermon on the Areopagus with a dialogue about the comparative merits of Greek religion, but this only serves as a springboard to lead him into the essential message - the preaching of the Gospel, where he warns them that God will no longer overlook their ignorance, that He demands all nations repent of their sins because God has fixed a Day of Judgment, and that this Judge will be none other than Jesus Christ. What St. Paul certainly does not do is tell the Greeks how great their paganism is and then encourage them to continue to worship their false gods and petition then for worldly favors like "peace on earth." This is the difference between limp-wristed dialogue and real, Spirit-filled preaching that leads to repentance, conversions and baptisms.

The real place of dialogue, as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us in the introduction to the Summa (I.Q.1,art.8), is to establish common ground with somebody so as to delineate the parameters of the debate. But that this dialogue should lead to a disputation, with the express purpose of coming to a conclusion, is never questioned by St. Thomas. When we do dialogue with someone, it is to establish our common ground; to know basically from which angle we have to deliver the Gospel message. But to dialogue endlessly without ever delivering the message is to not only fail to fulfill the mandate of Christ to preach to every creature, but is also a failure to even properly use dialogue as a tool, since it substitutes for an end what is only a means.

So long as dialogue and "mutual enrichment" are treated as ends in themselves, no pagans will be moved or impressed with the Catholic Faith. They will only further look down on us for compromising our principles and will continue to siphon off weak members of the Body of Christ who no longer know why they call themselves Christians. I highly recommend Pieper's short and very readable little book on Tradition for a refresher on what Tradition is and how it is handed on. But let us all in the meantime remember St. Paul's malediction in 1 Corinthians and make it our own: "Woe unto me if I preach not the gospel!" (1 Cor. 9:16).

Veni Sancte Spiritus from Milan

Sacral Kingship: Two Traditions (part 2)

Here is the second installment of my 2005 senior thesis on Catholic kingship that I began posting last week. Thanks for the feedback so far! (Click here for part 1).

I do know that all of these chapters will suffer from being too broad; being that I was somewhat limited by time and length, and I was not able to develop them as much as I would have wanted. This is perhaps most true in today's post, which is the most speculative and theoretical chapter of the work and probably the easiest to find gaps and holes in the argument. I basically make the case that the east had its own tradition of authority and the west its own distinct way of viewing authority. In the antique world, these traditions were opposed to each other. But in Christianity, which was born of Asia but became European, the eastern and western traditions are fused together successfully - the result is the Catholic monarch, who is certainly not an eastern despot but is also far removed from the republican-democratic traditions of Greece and Rome.

I look forward to your feedback. Footnotes can be found at the end of the post, which I recommend you browse also because they have some interesting supplemental information.

Chapter One: Two Traditions of Power

In the European political tradition, two ideologies of power have been predominant; namely, that of the west (the Greco-Roman, and later Germanic, traditions) and those influenced by the east (the Mesopotamian-Egyptian model). In the western tradition, power comes up from below, from the people. In the Greco-Roman civilizations, this power is vested in any number of assemblies or magistrates; in the Germanic cultures, it is vested in the tribal assembly or warrior band. By contrast, power in the eastern model is seen as descending from above, coming down from the gods and being bestowed on a single individual, be he a pharaoh, Persian king or just some local priest-king of a city-state. This conception of power held true even in the Far East, where the Emperor of China was also the “Son of Heaven.” In Christianity, a unique union of these two ideals of authority arises. Coming out of the Middle East as it did, it possessed by its nature an eastern and autocratic ideal of kingship. However, when it took hold in the Roman west and amongst the German tribes, the classical and Germanic tribal ideals of kingship entered as well, blending with the eastern ideas. The result was the Christian monarchy of the Middle Ages. The following sections may seem like a digression, but an understanding of them is essential in order to understand where the Christian monarch of the Middle Ages got his ideas of kingship.

Eastern Models

In the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, the prevailing view of authority was that it was a divine right that was given from above. The ruling monarch was chosen by the gods for the task of kingship; if he was part of a dynastic government, then he was chosen even from birth for lordship. The authority was vested in the very person of the king, not just in his office. An example of this is the Egyptian Pharaoh. In the Old Kingdom, the very person of the Pharaoh was believed to be the incarnation of Horus on earth (later in the Middle Kingdom, it was modified and the Pharaoh became the son of Re and mediator between men and the sun god).1

This idea of authority being vested in the person and not just the office is a crucial distinction between the eastern and western models. The fact that the authority was vested in the person himself meant that it gave divine sanction to the ruling monarch’s whims, which tended to give authority in the Middle East a very arbitrary character. A king might command anything, no matter how cruel or mad, and expect the submission of his subjects. Mesopotamian scholar Jean Bottero comments on the relationship between the king and subjects in the ancient Near East:

"Subjects had no other purpose in life than to obey their king and his representatives, and to provide those rulers, through their constant labor, with what they needed to lead an opulent and leisurely life, free of all worries and thus free to govern their people with a view to their prosperity."2

The structure was that of a social pyramid, with the monarch at the top vested with supreme authority sanctioned by the divinities of the city-state (Mesopotamia) or centralized nation (Egypt). Everybody else existed in the pyramid to obey and serve him. Given this view, it is not surprising that pyramids and ziggurats, which seemed to typify this social system, were first devised in such cultures.

This arbitrary nature of authority in the eastern model is evident in many examples from antiquity. A well known story from Persia is the account of King Xerxes ordering his men to give the Hellespont three hundred lashes as punishment for a storm which destroyed his bridge across the channel. “You bitter water,” he cursed the strait, “your lord lays on you this punishment because you have wronged him without a cause…for you are of a truth a treacherous and unsavory river.”3 Evidently, this Persian monarch considered himself not only King of Perisa, but lord over nature as well. The Median King Astyages is said to have killed and cooked the son of one of his officers, Harpagus, and served the stewed boy to his own father for dinner. When Harpagus realized what the king had done, he merely bowed and said, “Whatever the king did must be right.”4 The Biblical stories of the Babylonian and Persian periods further attest to the arbitrary nature of authority as well as the exalted idea of the ruler in the ancient Middle East. King Nebuchadnezzar ordering all his subjects to worship a golden image on pain of death, Darius’ interdict forbidding prayer to any god but himself, and King Ahasuerus of Persia’s law punishing with death anybody who entered his court unbidden are all examples.5 “The king,” says Bottero, “was…all powerful in the land…he was capable, on a whim, of reducing them [his subjects] to nothing, or of heaping good things upon them, provided he was moved enough through offerings, ostentation, and requests.”6

This divine authority wielded by the Middle Eastern monarch should not be conceived as being some kind of tyranny imposed on an unwilling populace from above, though the ancient Middle Eastern monarch certainly had the power to tyrannize his people if he wanted; rather, it was a system that the people themselves assented to and adhered to rigorously. The response of Harpagus to King Astyages of Media is a telling example of how the average person viewed royal authority. On the sadistic murder of his son, he only responds, “Whatever the king did must be right.” The Middle Eastern monarch did not have to impose his authority on the people tyrannically as someone like Caligula or Commodus did, because the cultural mentality of Middle Eastern culture rendered the populace more than willing to accede to his authority voluntarily. There was very little dividing the gods from the king, and a king who won renown by performing great deeds could be assured not only of the homage of his subjects, but of their adoration and worship.7

While looking at eastern models, the ideology of kingship in ancient Israel is worth studying in some depth since it contributes so much to later Christian views of kingship and authority. The system of kingship takes on a peculiar form in ancient Israel because of its monotheistic faith. The ancient Israelites would never make the mistake of equating their temporal king with a god, for there was only one God who was so far beyond mere mortals that any equation of Him with even the greatest of kings was a terrible blasphemy. Nor would the Israelites, with their strict moral code, approve of the idea that “whatever the king did must be right.” Israelite kings were expected to fulfill strict moral obligations; if they did not, they were censured by the scribes and prophets.8

That is not to say, however, that the Israelite conception of kingship was fundamentally different from the Persian, Mesopotamian or Egyptian views. Royal authority was still something supernatural that descended upon the king from above. The Scriptures are replete with such examples of this ideal of sacral kingship. Right from the first time Israelite kings are mentioned, in the Mosaic code, the king is presented as someone “whom the Lord your God will choose.”9 The exemplar of biblical kingship is found in the stories of David and Solomon in the books of Samuel and I Kings. These exemplars can be contrasted with the biblical type of the wicked king, Saul, who reigns just prior to David.

In all cases, kingship is conferred upon the would-be monarch by the act of anointing with oil. This symbolizes that the king has been chosen by God; the oil, administered by a prophet (later a priest) is a type of sacramental sign that symbolizes the Spirit of God resting upon the king. This is a mixed blessing: it at the same time gives the king sacral-royal power to rule with authority given from God and also binds the king to strictly obey the precepts of kingship set down by God. Blessings follow if the king is pious and obedient to the Lord; if not, curses befall the kingdom and it is torn from the hand of the rebellious monarch.

The biblical perspective on kingship is clearly in line with the other prevailing models of the ancient Middle East in its emphasis on the king being chosen from above. Consider the stories of Saul and David. Saul is the king who is tall, strong and handsome, the natural choice of the people. Thus when the people clamor for a king in I Samuel 8, Saul is a natural choice. Yet the Scriptures seem to condemn the selection of this first king of Israel. The motion of the people for a king is presented as a rejection of God’s lordship. God tells Samuel, “Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but have rejected me from being king over them.”10 Nevertheless, God accepts the “democratic” will of the people and gives them Saul to be their first king.

By contrast, David, the man after God’s own heart, is the complete opposite of Saul. Unlike Saul, he is small, weak and unimpressive. He is not at all a king that would be chosen by popular vote; even Samuel fails to recognize David and instead believes that one of his older, larger brothers is the Lord’s chosen.11 David is in every way a man chosen not by human wisdom but by God and receives a different kind of authority than Saul. While Saul is rejected by God as soon as he sins ( I Sam. 15), David is promised by God that He will establish his house forever and will never cease to provide an heir from David’s line ( II Sam. 7), even though David committed a greater sin in the Uriah affair than Saul had by not destroying some Amalekite cattle! The nature of their kingships is different. A close inspection of the anointing narrative of each king reveals this. Saul is anointed with a vial, a man-made object, while David is anointed with a horn.12 This seems to indicate that Saul’s authority, symbolically portrayed by his anointing, was given him by man; hence, the vial, a man-made object. This is born out by Saul’s own testimony. When he sins and is confronted by Samuel, his excuse is that “I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice.”13 On the other hand, David is anointed by a ram’s horn, something not man-made, which seems to indicate that his kingship is entirely from God and not due in any part to human consensus.

One theme that is constant throughout the chronicles of the Israelite kings is the idea of rewards and punishments. If a king is pious and obedient, like David, he can expect temporal blessings from God: security at home, influence abroad, wealth, healthy heirs and the destruction of enemies. However, if the king is faithless, like Saul, then he can expect curses: internal rebellions, defeats at the hands of foreigners and the premature death of his heirs, leading subsequently to the end of his house. When Samuel confronts Saul for his disobedience, he tells him, “Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you from being king…The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day.” 14 This connection between sin and the collapse of the kingdom is reiterated again and again throughout the Scriptures. Later, in the book of I Kings, God tells Solomon, “Since …you have not kept my covenant and my statutes which I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you…”15 It is in the person of Solomon that the blessings and curses of sacral kingship are seen most clearly, for he is both extraordinarily faithful and very wicked during his long reign. On the one hand, his virtues set the bar for all future Christian kings from Constantine to Charlemagne and Alfred. He excels in wisdom, is well versed in God’s word, builds the holy Temple of Jerusalem and receives honor and tribute from foreign nations. On the other hand, he burdens his people with harsh taxes, sacrifices to foreign gods and greatly multiplies both his wealth and his harem.16 In these vices he is the type of the good king gone bad and receives from God the punishment due to an unfaithful king: the “tearing” of the kingdom out of his hand.

The king receives a mighty grace from God. The Book of Proverbs goes so far as to say that the decisions of the king are “inspired” by God.17 The Book of Ecclesiastes warns that it is wrong to wish the king harm, “even in your thought.”18 Because the king receives such great graces from God, it is especially heinous when he turns to wickedness, like Solomon. Essential to Israelite (and all ancient Middle Eastern) political thought is that the fate of the nation is bound up with the person of the king. If the king is very wicked, he curses not only himself but brings his curse upon the entire nation. When Manasseh sacrificed his children to the pagan god Moloch, God was so outraged that even the righteous reforms of King Josiah were unable to dissuade the Lord from punishing Israel, and the Babylonian Captivity resulted, which the Scriptures explicitly affirm was the punishment for the sins of Manasseh.19

So, to sum up the eastern models of kingship: First, the authority to reign comes from the gods/God, down from heaven and rests upon the monarch. This ideal is sacramentalized in several cultures by the act of anointing, whereby the king is symbolically chosen by the gods and given their authority to rule in their name. Secondly, this authority rests with the person of the king (not just his office), which authorizes and potentially “divinizes” every act of his will as a sacred and royal command.20 Thirdly, because of this emphasis on sacred kingship, any authority coming from popular consensus is suspect. The people are simply an “undifferentiated mass”21 who cannot be trusted. King Saul explains his sin by saying, “I feared the people and obeyed their voice.” The prevalent social structure was that of a pyramid with the king supreme at the top supported by an “inchoate mass of subjects”22 whose job it was to support him and his bureaucracy. This is not an active act of tyranny on the part of the monarch, but a system found in the east from time immemorial and bound up with Middle Eastern cultural tradition. Finally, a just and pious king can be expected to receive temporal blessings of the gods upon his realm and (in some cultures) deification after death. The wicked king can expect his kingdom to suffer. This is the idea of rewards and punishments, in which the fate of the nation is inextricably bound up with the king. In Babylon, Egypt and Persia, a king’s “goodness” is his legal equity and his piety to the state gods; in ancient Israel, it is his morality and adherence to Mosaic law.

Christian kings, seeing themselves in light of Old Testament kings like David and Solomon, will pick up several of these ideas. There will be a particular emphasis towards the eastern model in the reigns of the earliest Christian monarchs, the Emperors of Byzantium. Later, western kings will adopt a version of kingship that was more of a mixture between the eastern models and the Greco-Roman model, which will be examined in the next section.

Western Models

Ideas about government and authority were drastically different in the west, in those lands lying west of the Bosphorus. In antiquity this region was shaped by Greco-Roman civilization and it is to the governments of Greece and Rome that we must now turn.

The Greco-Roman ideology of power sees authority not as something that primarily comes down from heaven as a gift of the gods to the person of the monarch, but as something that comes up from the consensus of the people and is vested in an office, not a person. An example of this is the Roman legend of the patriot Cincinnatus. Called from his farm to help save a beleaguered Roman army, he accepted the authority of the dictatorship, saved the army and routed the enemy, then promptly resigned his dictatorship to return to his plow. This popular, though legendary, example demonstrates how the power was vested in the office of the dictator, never in the individual person.

This power is given by the assent of the state and the gods are called upon by the people to bear witness to the authority wielded by the magistrate. In the previous section, the model of the pyramid or ziggurat was proposed as an analogy to the Mesopotamian/Egyptian style of government. In the west, a more fitting model is the Greek temple. The structure is composed of several columns, each equally bearing the weight of the roof. Again, it is fitting that a structure such as the Greek temple should have emerged amongst a people who viewed authority as something coming up from below, granted to the magistrate by the public.

The Greeks and Romans alike found a distaste for kingship early on. Many of the Greek city-states were ruled by tyrants, such as Pisistratus of Athens or Pheidon of Argos who were different from kings only in name, until the 6th century BC when they began to be overthrown and driven out by a series of popular revolutions. After this, the Greek city-states began to adopt the democratic governments that the classical age is remembered for. This advent of democracy was especially powerful in Athens. In Rome, according to tradition and some scant archaeological evidence, a dynasty of Etruscan kings was overthrown sometime around 509 B.C. and replaced by the Republican form of government that Rome operated under successfully for almost five hundred years. The experience of Greece under the tyrants and Rome under the Etruscans bred a hearty dislike of the idea of power being vested solely in one individual.

The very names that the Greeks and Romans chose for their governments emphasizes how different their view of the state was from those views in the east. In Greek, demokratia means “power of the people.” Likewise, the Latin phrase for Republic, res publica, can be literally translated to mean “the public thing” or the “thing of the public.” In both cases, it the people who are seen to be the foundation of the authority of the state.

On some levels, it is uncertain how the Greeks and Romans came to these forms of government. The historical acts and political drama behind their developments is clearly visible, but where these peoples got their political ideology from is uncertain. It is easy to see the laws of Solon, the administration of Pericles, the Sexto-Licinian Compromise and the publishing of the Twelve Tables and to attribute the development of Greco-Roman popular governments to such acts, but it is difficult to say where the Greeks and Romans first developed their penchant for representative government was behind these acts of legislation and assumed by them. The easiest answer, but also the most dissatisfying from a historic viewpoint, is that the Greeks and Romans had an innate sense of justice and law that they manifested in their social and political structures. Historian of antiquity Michael Grant seems to adopt this view and says of the early Romans:

"It is impressive that a people at such a relatively early stage of development were so clearly able to disentangle law from religion, deriving the sanction of their legal pronouncements not from any divine or wholly or partly legendary lawgiver, as so many of their predecessors in other places had done, but from a sense of justice and equality, still narrow, yet already strong."23

Both cultures placed high value in social justice and in the moral quality of the individual, especially of the magistrate. The Greeks prized a virtue they called arête, which originally meant “warrior prowess” but came to be understood in terms of diplomatic excellence exercised in any of the many public assemblies that dotted ancient Greece. Likewise, the Romans valued virtus. Like arête, virtus was originally a war term and meant “manliness.” But in time it came to have a broader application and can be rendered accurately as “virtue” by middle-Republican times and denoted excellence in both war and government. These characteristics were seen by the Greeks and Romans as essential to any magistrate. If a government was to be by the people, then the people had to be good people.24

With such ideas, acts of the Greeks and Romans were always viewed communally. It was never an individual alone who acted, but the community who acted out its will through the agency of the individual. Herodotus and Thucydides recount in their writings the very public nature of Greek government. In the Persian War (Herodotus) and the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), whether or not to go to war or make an alliance was decided by furious debate in the assembly hall, after which a vote was taken. Even military matters, such as where to move a fleet or when to attack were put to a vote amongst military commanders. Any act of authority had to be sanctioned by the citizenry. Thus, “acts of state were attributed not to a personified polis but to the community-for example, not to Thera but to “the Thereans,” not to Sybaris but to “the Sybarites,” The emphasis is on the plurality.”25 In Rome, likewise, official acts are and monuments are sanctioned by the Senatus Populusque Romanus, “The Senate and the Roman People.”

The will of the people was expressed in any number of assemblies in the Greco-Roman world. Athens had its Council of 500 and its older Areopagus Council, while Rome had the Curial Assembly, the Centurial Assembly, the Council of the Plebs and of course, the Senate. Though membership in these councils was restricted to citizens (which usually meant free male landowners who possessed over a certain amount of wealth) to the exclusion of many other members of society, these assemblies provided the creative outlet for the development of politics and law. By being a citizen, a man was seen as possessing a kind of common interest in the good of the state. Unlike the modern man, who believes in communal responsibilities and individual rights, the Greeks and Romans believed in communal rights and individual responsibilities. Because it was a communion of citizens who formed the state, the citizen was entitled to certain benefits from the state, mainly through its legal advantages. The making of laws, judgment of courts and matters of war were all left up to the discretion of the citizen body. When the citizens came together in the assembly, their authority was supreme and their word was law.

Unlike in the east, the assembly did not receive this authority from the gods, but from the people. But the gods did have a role to play as a kind of supernatural legal “witness” to the laws enacted by the assemblies. New legislation was often proclaimed in the local temple (such as the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome) and accompanied by sacrifices. This represented a kind of oath between the gods and the state; the state promised that its legislation would be fair and equitable to the citizens and the gods promised to uphold the state so long as they were propitiated by the appropriate rites and the practice of pietas-devotion to the gods, family and the state. This ensured the good faith (fides) of the magistrate and the pax deorum, which was the peace and blessing of the gods upon the state.26

Essentially, like much in the Greco-Roman world, the relationship between the gods and the state was like a legal contract, akin to a Roman patron-client agreement.

To sum up the western model: First, the authority to rule came not from the gods but from the collective consensus of the people, not understood in terms of the masses but in terms of the land owning male citizenry. Secondly, the authority and will of the people was vested in any number of elected citizen assemblies who undertook the task of governing the state. Levying taxes, making laws, regulating trade and waging war were all public matters decided by the assemblies. Third, magistrates were chosen from out of these assemblies, in whom was vested authority by virtue of their office, not their person, as in the east. The Greeks and Romans possessed an innate valuation of certain virtues that they believed made for good magistrates, such as arête and virtus. Finally, the proper governing of the state under worthy magistrates ensured peace at home, good will between the state and its people (fides) and the blessings of the gods (pax deorum).

The Problem of Integration

Christian Europe would work hard to integrate its rich Greco-Roman past into its culture. While Biblical heroes such as David and Solomon were the exemplars for medieval Christian kings, classical role models of virtue like Leonidas of Sparta, Marcus Atilius Regulus, Cato the Censor and Augustus were never far from the memory of those who were educated enough to read the Greek and Latin classics.27 Christian monarchs tried, intentionally and unintentionally, to successfully blend the eastern Biblical ideology of kingship with the classical western models they had inherited from Greece and Rome. Thus Charlemagne was seen not only as a new David, but also as a new Augustus.

It took the creative impulse of Christianity to unite these two ideologies of power into one system. The ancients were never able to do it effectively. The ancient Greeks, though warring incessantly against themselves, united and battled furiously what they considered to be the threat of Persian despotism under Xerxes. Alexander, though he succeeded to unite Greece and Persia where Xerxes had failed, faced a considerably greater struggle in his attempts to jointly rule the Greeks and Persians. As ruler of Persia, court protocol demanded the prostration, proskynesis, of all who approached him. But as King of Macedonia, court protocol forbid such acts of flattery as the worst form of syncophancy and there was always tension between the Macedonian and Persian elements of Alexander’s entourage.28

In the Roman world, Marc Antony fancied a union between Rome and Egypt in the person of Cleopatra, but was despised at home for it. Anti-Antony propaganda of the time condemns him as an effeminate Egyptianizer of the manly Roman state.29 Later Roman rulers like Diocletian attempted to introduce eastern ritual into the Imperial court protocol, but at the expense of thoroughly destroying any remnants of Republican modesty that earlier emperors like Augustus, Vespasian and Trajan had exhibited. Throughout the ancient world, all attempts to find a way to implement both eastern and western ideas of power and government failed until the advent of the Catholic kings of the Middle Ages. How Christianity revolutionized the ideologies of power in the ancient world, harmonized them and formed them into the institution of the Christian monarchy will be taken up in the next chapter.

Footnotes

1 Jan Assman, The Mind of Egypt, Translated by Andrew Jenkins (Metropolitan Books: New York, 1996), 184

2 Jean Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, Translated by Teresa Lavander Fagan (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2001), 103

3 M.I. Finley, The Portable Greek Historians (Viking Penguin: New York, 1959), 97

4 Stuart & Doris Flexner, The Pessimist’s Guide to History (Avon Books: New York, 1992), 7

5Dan. 3:1-6, 6:6-9; Esther 4:11

6 Bottero, 114

7“Superior abilities, functions, prowess, and merits could, without affecting their true nature, place…humans rather close to the edge so that they were induced, more or less consciously, to cross over it, thus becoming ‘divinized.’” Ibid., 64

8 The Israelite “Law of the King” appears in Deuteronomy, where the king is forbidden three things: the multiplication of wives, gold, and chariots (Deut. 17:14-20). Solomon will violate all three precepts.

9 Deut. 17:15

10 I Sam. 8:7

11 Ibid., 16:1-13

12 Ibid., 10:1, 16:3

13 Ibid., 15:24

14 Ibid., 23,28

15 I Kings 11:11

16 Ibid. 3:1-15,26; 6:1-38; 10:1-29; 11:1-8

17 Prov. 16:10

18 Ecc. 10:20

19 II Kings 21:10-15; 23:26; 24:1-4

20 This is still true in ancient Israel, even though the kings had a stricter ethical code than say Assyria or Babylon. The value placed on the person of the king is revealed in the accounts of how David refused to strike down Saul, even when he had lost God’s favor, because he was “the Lord’s anointed” ( II Sam. 1:14). He even has the man who killed Saul executed (v. 15). This is similar to the accounts of Alexander executing the men who had assassinated Darius III, though the latter was his enemy. Since sacred authority rested with the king, it was a sacrilege to strike him down, even if he deserved it.

21Assman, 51

22 Ibid.

23 Michael Grant, History of Rome (Michael Grant Publications: London, 1979), 66

24 Thomas F.X. Noble, Barry S. Strauss, Duane J. Osheim, Kristen B. Neuschel, William B. Cohen, David D. Roberts, Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment, 3rd Edition, vol. A (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 2002), 73, 149

25 Ibid., 75

26 Grant, 19

27 St. Augustine spends a considerable amount of space in Book I of the Dei Civitas praising the virtues of M. Atilius Regulus, a hero of the Punic Wars, though grudgingly admitting that his virtue came from the worship of the pagan gods. He says of him, “Among all their heroes, men worthy of honor and renowned for virtue, the Romans have none greater to produce.” St. Augustine, Dei Civitas, 1.15,24

28 For the hostility of the Macedonians when Alexander attempted to introduce proskynesis amongst them, see Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander (Pantheon Books: New York, 1975), 172-178: “The image of the Oriental was linked in [the Macedonians’] minds…to the cruel caprices of despotic power slavishly endured, of which the prostration [proskynesis] was a symbol.”pp 177-178

29Grant, 200-201