Nationalism and Culture (9 page)

And did not Alexand er of Macedonia, whom history calls "The

* Alexander Ular, Die Politik. Frankfurt a/M. igo6, S. 44.

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 Zeus-Ammon in the oasis of Siva. The compliant priests greeted him as the son of the "Great God" and offered him. divine honors. 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 honors 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 self-esteem and blinded him to all reality. He introduced at his court the ceremony of the Persian kings which symbolized 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 rumor 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 honor 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 honors 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 landj the people and the Senate, too, outdid theniselves in cringing humility and despicable servility. Virgil in his Aeneid glori fied Caesa r Augustus in slavish fashion, and legions oF otTiers followed his example. 1 he" Roman astrologer, Firmicus Maternus, who lived in the reign of Constantine, declared in his work De erroribus ■projanarum 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 honors which were offered to the Byzantine emperors are even today embraced in the meaning of the word "Byzantine." In Byzantium the religious honors paid to the emperor culminated in the Kow-Tow, 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 so-called "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 Caesaro-Papism lived on after the decline of the great Eastern Empire and gradually infected the untamed oyoung 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 scepter 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 StuartSj and the dynasties of the Gzars. While the person of the ruler is no longer worshiped directly as a god, he is king "by the grace of God" ^iid'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, ana to plant~the feefing 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 sank—he, the real creator of God—into 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 state-theologians 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 favorable 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 thatj according to his own confession, he for a long time flirted with the idea of achieving world rulership with the aid of the popej 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 recognize 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.