politics and religion
...ip over others. But no power can in the long run rely on brute force alone. Brutal force may be the immediate means for the subjugation of men, but alone it is incapable of maintaining the rule of the individual or of a special caste over whole groups of humanity. For that more is needed; the belief of man in the inevitability of such power, the belief in its divinely willed mission. Such a belief is rooted deeply in man's religious feelings and gains power with tradition, for above the traditional hovers the radiance of religious concepts and mystical obligation. This is the reason why the victors frequently imposed their gods upon the vanquished, for they recognised very clearly that a unification of religious rites would further their own power. It usually mattered little to them if the gods of the vanquished continued to be on show so long as this was not dangerous to their leadership, and so long as the old gods were assigned a role subordinate to that of the new ones. But this could only happen when their priests favoured the rulership of the victors or themselves participated in the drive for political power, as often happened. Thus it is easy to prove the political influence on the later religious forms of the Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, and many others. And just as easily can the famous monotheism of the Jews be traced to the struggle for the political unification of the arising monarchy. All systems of rulership and dynasties of antiquity derived their origin from some godhead, and their possessors soon learned to recognise that the belief of their subjects in the divine origin of the ruler was the one unshakeable foundation of every kind of power. Fear of God was always the mental preliminary of voluntary subjection. This alone is necessary; it forms the eternal foundation of every tyranny under whatever mask it may appear. Voluntary subjection cannot be forced; only belief in the divinity of the ruler can create it. It has, therefore, been up to now the foremost aim of all politics to awaken this belief in the people and to make it a mental fixture. Religion is the prevailing principle in history; it binds the spirit of man and forces his thought into definite forms so that habitually he favours the continuation of the traditional and confronts every innovation with misgivings. It is the inner fear of falling into a bottomless abyss which chains man to the old forms of things as they are. That determined champion of the principle of absolute power, Louis de Bonald, understood the connection between religion and politics very well when he wrote the words: "God is the sovereign power over all things; the godman is the power over all mankind; the head of the state is the power over the subjects; the head of the family is the power in his own house. But as all power is made in the image of God and originates with God, therefore all power is absolute." All power has its roots in God, all rulership is in its inmost essence divine. Moses received directly from the hand of God the tables of the law, which begin with the words: "I am the Lord, thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me," and which sealed the covenant of the Lord with his people. The famous stone on which the laws of Hammurabi are recorded, which have carried the name of the Babylonian king through the millenniums, shows us Hammurabi before the face of the sun god Chamasch. The introduction which precedes the statement of the law begins thus: When Anu, the exalted, the king of the Anunnaki, and Bel, the lord of heaven and earth, who carries the destiny of the world in his hand, partitioned the masses of mankind to Marduk, the firstborn of Ea, the divine lord of the law, they made him great among the Igigi. In Babylon they proclaimed his exalted name, which is praised in all lands which they have destined to him for his kingdom, and which is eternal as are heaven and earth. Afterwards Anu and Bel made glad the body of mankind when they called upon me, the glorious ruler and godfearing Hammurabi, that I may establish justice upon earth, destroy the wicked and the ruthless, ward off the strong and succour the weak, reign like the sun god over the destiny of blackhaired men and illumine the land. In Egypt, where the religious cult under the influence of a powerful priestly caste had shown its power in all social institutions, the deification of the ruler had assumed quite uncanny forms. The Pharaoh, or priest-king, was not alone the representative of God on earth, he was himself a god and received godlike honours. Already in the age of the first six dynasties the kings were regarded as sons of the sun god, Ra. Chufu (Cheops), in whose reign the great pyramids were built, called himself "the incarnate Horus." In a vaulted cave at Ibrim, King Amenhotep III was pictured as a god in a circle of other gods. This same ruler also built a temple at Soleb where religious veneration was offered to his own person. When his successor, Amenhotep IV, later on prohibited in Egypt the veneration of any other god, and raised the cult of the radiant sun god, Aton, who became alive in the person of the king, to the dignity of a state religion, it was doubtless political motives which moved him to it. The unity of faith was to be made to render postchaise service to the unity of earthly power in the hands of the Pharaohs. In the old Hindu lawbook of Manu it is written: God has made the Icing that he may protect creation. For this purpose he took parts from Indra, from the winds, from Jama, from the sun, from fire, from the heavens, from the moon and from the lord of creation. Therefore, since the king has been created from parts of these lords of the gods, his glory outshines the splendor of all created beings, and like the sun he blinds the eye and the heart, and no one can look into his face. He is fire and air, sun and moon. He is the god of right, the genius of riches, the ruler of the floods and the commander of the firmament. In no other country outside of Egypt and Tibet has an organised priestcraft attained to such power as in India. This has left its impress on the whole social evolution of the enormous land, and by the cunning caste division of the whole population, pressed all events into iron forms, which have proved the more enduring because they are anchored in the traditions of faith. Quite early the Brahmans entered into a compact with the warrior caste to share with it the rulership of the people of India, wherein the priestcaste was always careful to see that the real power remained in their hands, that the king remained a tool of their desires. Priests and warriors were both of divine origin, the Brahmans sprang from the head of Brahma, the warriors from Brahma's breast. Both had the same objective and the law commanded: "The two castes must act in unison, for neither can do without the other." In this manner arose the system of CaesaroPapism, in which the union of religious and political lust for power found its fullest expression. In ancient Persia, also, the ruler was the living incarnation of divinity. When he entered a town he was received by the Magi in white garments and with the chanting of religious songs. The road along which he was carried was strewn with myrtle branches and roses and on the side stood silver altars on which incense was burned. His power was unlimited, his will the highest law, his command irrevocable, as stated in the Zendavesta) the sacred book of the old Persians. Only on rare occasions did he show himself to the people, and when he appeared all had to grovel in the dust and hide their faces. In Persia, also, there were castes and an organised priestly class, which, while it did not have the omnipotent power of that of India, was, nevertheless, the first caste in the land, whose representatives, as the closest council of the king, always had the opportunity to make their influence felt and definitely to affect the destiny of the realm. Concerning the parts played by the priests in the social order, we are informed by a passage in the Zendavesta which reads: Though your good works were more numerous than the leaves of the trees, the drops of rain, the stars in heaven, or the sands of the sea, they would not profit you, if they were not pleasing to the Destur (priest). To gain the favour of this guide on the way of salvation you must faithfully give to him the tithe of all you possess, of your goods, of your land, and of your money. If you have satisfied the Destur, your soul will have escaped the tortures of hell, and you will find peace in this world and happiness in the one beyond; for the Desturs are teachers of religion, they know all things, and they grant absolution to all mankind. Fuhi, whom the Chinese designate as the first ruler of the Celestial Kingdom, and who, according to their chronicles, is said to have lived about twentyeight centuries before our era, is venerated in Chinese mythology as a supernatural being and usually appears in their pictures as a man with a fish tail, looking like a Triton. Tradition acclaims him as the real awakener of the Chinese people, who, before his coming, lived in the wilderness in separate groups like packs of animals, and were only through him shown the way to a social order which had its foundation in the family and the veneration of ancestors. All dynasties which since that time have succeeded one another in the Middle Kingdom have traced their origin from the gods. The Emperor called himself the "Son of Heaven"; and since China never had an organised priestly class, the practice of the cult, in so far as it concerned the state religion, rested in the hands of the highest imperial official, who, however, influenced only the upper strata of the Chinese social order. In Japan, the Mikado, the "High Gate," is regarded as a descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess, who in that country is worshiped as the highest divinity. She makes known her will through the person of the ruler, and in his name she governs the people. The Mikado is the living incarnation of the godhead, wherefore his palace is called "Miya," that is, shrine of the soul. Even in the time of the Shogunate, when the leaders of the military caste for hundreds of years exercised the real rulership of the land, and the Mikado played only the part of a decorative figure, the sanctity of his person remained inviolate in the eyes of the people. Likewise, the foundation of the mighty Inca Empire, whose obscure history has presented so many problems to modern research, is ascribed by tradition to the work of the gods. The saga recounts how Manco Capac with his wife, Ocllo Huaco, appeared one day to the natives of the high plateau of Cuzco, presented himself to them as Intipchuri, the son of the sun, and induced them to acknowledge him as their king. He taught them agriculture and brought them much useful knowledge, which enabled them to become the creators of a great culture. In Tibet there arose under the mighty influence of a powerlustful priestcaste, that strange churchstate whose inner organization has such a curious kinship with Roman Papism. Like it, it has oral confession, the rosary, smoking censers, the veneration of relics, and the tonsure of the priest. At the head of the state stands the Dalai-Lama and the Bogdo-Lama, or Pentschenrhinpotsche. The former is regarded as the incarnation of Gautama, the sacred founder of the Buddhist religion; the latter as the living personification of Tsongkapa, the great reformer of Lamaism to him, even as to the Dalai Lama, divine honours are offered, extending even to his most intimate physical products. Genghis Khan, the mighty Mongol ruler, whose great wars and conquests once held half the world in terror, quite openly used religion as the chief instrument of his power policy; although he himself apparently belonged in the class of "enlightened despots." His own tribe regarded him as a descendant of the sun, but as in his enormous realm, which extended from the banks of the Dnieper to the Chinese Sea, there lived men of the most varied religious convictions, his clever instinct recognised that his rule over the subjected nations even as over the core people of his realm, could only be confirmed through priestly power. His Sunpapacy no longer sufficed. Nestorian Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Confucianists and Jews inhabited his lands by the million. He had to be the high priest of every religious cult. With his North-Asiastic Shamanists he cultivated magic and inquired of the oracle which manifested itself in the cracks of the shoulder blades of sheep when thrown into fire. Sundays he went to Mass, celebrated communion with wine, held discussions with Christian priests. On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue and showed himselfas Chahan, as Cohen. On Fridays he held a sort of Selamik and was just as good a Caliph as, later on, the Turk in Constantinople. But preferably he was a Buddhist; held religious discourses with Lamas, and even summoned the Grand Lama of Ssatya to him; for since he intended to change the centre of his realm to Buddhistic territory in Northern Asia, he conceived the grandiose plan of setting up Buddhism as the state religion. [1] And did not Alexander of Macedonia, whom history calls "The Great," act with the same calculation, apparently animated by the same motives, as, long after, Genghis Khan? After he had conquered a world and cemented it together with streams of blood, he must have felt that such a work could not be made permanent by brute force alone. He therefore tried to anchor his rule in the religious beliefs of the conquered people. So he, "the Hellene," sacrificed to the Egyptian gods in the temple at Memphis and led his army through the burning deserts of Libya to consult the oracle of ZeusAmmon in the oasis of Siva. The compliant priests greeted him as the son of the "Great God" and offered him divine honours. Thus Alexander became a god and appeared before the Persians in his second campaign against Darius as a descendant of the mighty Zeus-Ammon. Only thus can we explain the complete subjugation of the enormous empire by the Macedonians, a thing which even the Persian kings had not been able to accomplish to the same degree. Alexander had used this means only to further his political plans, but gradually he became so intoxicated with the thought of his godlikeness that he demanded divine honours not only from the subjected nations but even from his own countrymen, to whom such a cult must have remained strange, since they knew him only as Philip's son. The slightest opposition could goad him to madness and frequently led him into abominable crimes. His insatiable desire for ever greater extension of power, strengthened by his military successes, set aside all limits to his selfesteem and blinded him to all reality. He introduced at his court the ceremony of the Persian kings which symbolised the complete subjection of all mankind to the potent will of the despot. Indeed, in him, the "Hellene," the megalomania of barbaric tyranny achieved its most genuine expression. Alexander was the first to transplant Caesarism and the idea of the divinity of the king to Europe, for up to now it had only prospered on Asiatic soil, where the state had developed with the least hindrance and where the relationship between religion and politics had come to earliest maturity. We must not conclude from this, however, that we are here concerned with a special proclivity of a race. The prevalence which Caesarism has since attained in Europe is patent proof that we are here dealing with a special type of the instinct of religious veneration, which, under similar circumstances, may appear among men of all races and nations. It is not to be denied, however, that its outward forms are bound up with the conditions of its social environment. It was from the Orient, too, that the Romans took over Caesarism and developed it in a manner that can hardly be observed earlier in any other country. When Julius Caesar raised himself to the dictatorship of Rome, he tried to root his power in the religious concepts of the people. He traced the origin of his family from the gods and claimed Venus as an ancestress. His every effort was directed toward making himself the unlimited ruler of the realm and into an actual god, whom no interrelationship connected with ordinary mortals. His statue was set among those Of the seven kings of Rome, and his adherents quickly spread the rumour that the Oracle had designated him to be the sole ruler of the realm, in order to conquer the Parthians who thus far had defied the Roman power. His image was placed among those of the immortal gods of the Pompa Circensis. A statue of him was erected in the Temple of Quirinus, and on its pedestal the inscription read: "To the unconquerable god." A college was established in his honour at Luperci and special priests were appointed to serve his divinity. Caesar's murder put a sudden end to his ambitious plans, but his successors completed his work, so that presently there shone about the emperor the aura of the godhead. They erected altars to him and rendered to him religious veneration. Caligula, who had the ambition to raise himself to the highest protective divinity of the Roman state, Capitoline Jupiter, maintained the divinity of the Caesars with these words: "Just as men, who herd sheep and oxen, are not themselves sheep and oxen, but of a nature superior to these, so are those who have been set as rulers above men, not men like the others, but gods." The Romans, who did not find it objectionable that the leaders of their army had divine honours offered to them in the Orient and Greece, at first protested against the claim that the same should be demanded of Roman citizens, but they got used to it as quickly as did the Greeks in the time of their social decline, and subsided quietly into cowardly self-debasement. Not alone did numbers of poets and artists sound the praise of "the divine Caesar" continuously throughout the land; the people and the Senate, too, outdid themselves in cringing humility and despicable servility. Virgil in his Aeneid glorified Caesar Augustus in slavish fashion, and legions of others followed his example. The Roman astrologer, Firmicus Maternus, who lived in the reign of Constantine, declared in his work De erroribus profanarum religiosum: "Caesar alone is not dependent on the stars. He is the lord of the whole world, which he guides by the fiat of the highest gods. He, himself, belongs to the circle of the gods, whom the primal godhead has designated for the carrying on and completion of all that occurs." The divine honours which were offered to the Byzantine emperors are even today embraced in the meaning of the word "Byzantine." In Byzantium the religious honours paid to the emperor culminated in the KowTow, an old Oriental custom which required the ordinary mortal to prostrate himself and to touch the earth with his forehead. The Roman Empire fell in ruins. The megalomania of its rulers, which in the course of the centuries had led to the extinction of all human dignity in millions of their subjects, the horrible exploitation of all subject peoples, and the increasing corruption in the whole empire, had rotted men morally, killed their social consciousness and robbed them of all power of resistance. Thus in the long run they could not withstand the attack of the socalled "barbarians" who assailed the powerful realm from all sides. But the "Spirit of Rome," as Schlegel called it, lived on, just as the spirit of CaesaroPapism lived on after the decline of the great Eastern Empire and gradually infected the untamed young forces of the Germanic tribes whose military leaders had taken over the fateful legacy of the Caesars; and Rome lived on in the Church, which developed Caesarism in the shape of Papism to the highest perfection of power, and with persistent energy pursued the aim of converting the whole of mankind into one gigantic herd and forcing it under the sceptre of the high priest of Rome. Animated also by the spirit of Rome were all those later efforts for political unification embodied in the German Kaiser concept: in the mighty empires of the Hapsburgs, Charles V and Philip II; in the Bourbons, the Stuarts, and the dynasties of the Czars. While the person of the ruler is no longer worshiped directly as a god, he is king "by the grace of God" and receives the silent veneration of his subjects, to whom he appears as a being of a superior order. The god concept changes in the course of time, just as the state concept has seen many changes. But the innermost character of all religion remains evermore untouched, just as the kernel of all politics has never undergone a change. It is the principle of power which the possessors of earthly and celestial authority made effective against men, and it is always the religious feeling of dependence which forces the masses to obedience. The head of the state is no longer worshiped as a god in public temples, but he says with Louis XIV, "I am the state!" But the state is the earthly providence which watches over man and directs his steps that he may not depart from the way of the law. The wielder of the force of the state is, therefore, only the high priest of a power which finds its expression in politics just as reverence for God finds it in religion. Although the priest is the mediator between man and this higher power on which the subject feels himself dependent and which, therefore, becomes fate to him, Volney's contention that religion is the invention of the priest shoots wide of the mark; for there were religious concepts long before there was a priestly caste. It can also be safely assumed that the priest himself was originally convinced of the correctness of his understanding. But gradually there dawned on him the idea of what unlimited power the blind belief and gloomy fear of his fellowmen had put into his hands, and what benefit could accrue to him from this. Thus awoke in the priest the consciousness of power, and with this the lust for power, which grew constantly greater as the priesthood became more and more definitely a separate caste in society. Out of the lust for power there developed the "will to power," and with that there evolved in the priesthood a peculiar need. Impelled by this, they tried to direct the religious feelings of believers into definite courses and so to shape the impulses of their faith as to make them serve the priestly quest for power. All power was at the outset priestly power and in its inmost essence has remained so till this day. Ancient history knows many instances where the role of the priest fused with that of the ruler and lawgiver in one person. Even the derivation of countless lordly titles from names in which the priestly function of their former bearers is clearly revealed, points with certainty to the common origin of religious and temporal power. Alexander Ular hit the nail on the head when he said in his brilliant essay, "Politics," that the Papacy never engaged in temporal politics, but that every temporal ruler has always tried to play papal politics. This is also the reason why every system of government, without distinction of form, has a certain basic theocratic character. Every church is constantly striving to extend the limits of its power, and to plant the feeling of dependence deeper in the hearts of men. But every temporal power is animated by the same desire, so in both cases the efforts take the same direction. Just as in religion God is everything and man nothing, so in politics the state is everything, the subject nothing. The two maxims of celestial and earthly authority, "I am the Lord thy God!" and "Be ye subject unto authority!" spring from the same source and are united as are the Siamese twins. The more man learned to venerate in God the epitome of all perfection, the deeper he sankhe, the real creator of Godinto a miserable earthworm, into a living incarnation of all earthly nullity and weakness. The theologian and scribe never tired of assuring him that he was "a sinner conceived in sin," who could only be saved from eternal damnation by a revelation of God's commandments and strict obedience to them. And when the former subject and present citizen endowed the state with all the qualities of perfection, he degraded himself to an impotent and childish puppet on whom the legal pundits and statetheologians never ceased to impress the shameful conviction that in the core of his being he was afflicted with the evil impulses of the born transgressor, who could only be guided on the path of officially defined virtue by the law of the state. The doctrine of original sin is fundamental not only in all the great religious systems, but in every theory of the state. The complete degradation of man, the fateful belief in the worthlessness and sinfulness of his own nature, has ever been the firmest foundation of all spiritual and temporal authority. The divine "Thou shalt!" and the governmental "Thou must!" complement each other perfectly: commandment and law are merely different expressions of the same idea. This is the reason why no temporal power up to now has been able to dispense with religion, which is in itself the fundamental assumption of power. Where the rulers of the state opposed for political reasons a certain form of religious system, it was always easy to introduce some other systems of belief more favourable to their purposes. Even the so-called "enlightened rulers," who themselves were infidels, were no exception to this rule. When Frederick II of Prussia declared that in his kingdom "everyone could be saved according to his own fashion," he assumed, of course, that such salvation would in no wise conflict with his own powers. The much lauded toleration of the great Frederick would have looked quite different if his subjects, or even a part of them, had conceived the idea that their salvation might be won by lowering the royal dignity, or by disregarding his laws, as the Dukhobors tried to do in Russia. Napoleon I, who as a young artillery officer had called theology a "cesspool of every superstition and confusion" and had maintained that "the people should be given a handbook of geometry instead of a catechism" radically changed his point of view after he had made himself Emperor of the French. Not only that; according to his own confession, he for a long time flirted with the idea of achieving world rulership with the aid of the pope; he even raised the question whether a state could maintain itself without religion. And he himself gave the answer: "Society cannot exist without inequality of property and the inequality not without religion. A man who is dying of hunger, next to one who has too much, could not possibly reconcile himself to it if it were not for a power which says to him: 'It is the will of God that here on Earth there must be rich and poor, but yonder, in eternity, it will be different.' The shameless frankness of this utterance comes all the more convincingly from a man who himself believed in nothing, but who was clever enough to recognise that no power can in the long run maintain itself if it is not capable of taking root in the religious consciousness of mankind. The close connection between religion and politics is, however, not confined to the fetishist period of the state, when public power still found its highest expression in the person of the absolute monarch. It would be a bitter illusion to assume that in the modern law of the constitutional state this relationship had been fundamentally altered. Just as in later religious systems the god idea became more abstract and impersonal, so has the concept of the state lost most of its concrete character as personified in the single ruler. But even in those countries where the separation of church and state had been publicly accomplished, the interrelation between the temporal power and religion as such has in no way been changed. However, the present possessors of power have frequently tried to concentrate the religious impulses of their citizens exclusively on the state, in order that they might not have to share their power with the church. It is a fact that the great pioneers of the modern constitutional state have emphasised the necessity of religion for the prosperity of the governmental power just as energetically as did formerly the advocates of princely absolutism. Thus, Rousseau, who in his work, The Social Contract, inflicted such incurable wounds on absolute monarchy, declared quite frankly: In order that an evolving people should learn to value the sacred fundamentals of statecraft, and obey the elementary principles of state law, it is necessary that the effect should become cause. The social spirit which would be the result of the constitution would have to play the leading part in the creation of the constitution, and men, even before the establishment of the laws, would have to be that which they would become through these laws. But since the lawgiver can neither compel nor convince, he must needs take refuge in a higher authority which, without external pressure, is able to persuade men and enthuse them without having to convince them. This is the reason why the founding fathers of the nation have at all times felt compelled to take refuge in heaven and to honour the gods for reasons of politics. Thus would men, who are subject to both the laws of the state and those of nature, voluntarily be obedient to the power which has formed both man and th...