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07.05.02, Al-Azmeh and Bak, eds., Monotheistic Kingship

07.05.02, Al-Azmeh and Bak, eds., Monotheistic Kingship


Monotheistic Kingship: The Medieval Variants publishes papers delivered at an interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University and Majestas in 2002. Two papers were added later as special contributions to this collection. Monotheistic Kingship is intended to stimulate further comparative research into the influence of monotheistic religion upon political thought and its expression in medieval states.

Aziz Al-Azmeh begins by defining monotheistic kingship as a species of the sacral kingship found throughout Eurasia before the onset of the modern era. This very ancient type of kingship attributes to the king god-like sovereignty, virtue, and power, regardless of actual political conditions within his kingdom. Remarkably, conversion from polytheism to monotheism, which looms so large in modern understanding of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, did not alter the monarch's relationship to the divine. The sacral monarchy so often considered peculiar to Christianity and Islam actually originated in the pretensions of the later Roman emperors to rule a universal empire with the absolute authority of a henotheistic deity, much in the style of their remote forebears, the Achaemenid kings of Persia. These claims were reinforced by the imperial cult, the civic religion of an ecumenical empire. With conversion to Christianity, the Roman emperor assumed a subordinate role, according to Neo-platonic concepts, and ruled as Christ's icon. With modifications, this form of monotheistic monarchy survived in Byzantium, the West, and the Islamic Caliphate.

György Geréby considers how Carl Schmitt, Erik Petersen, and Ernst Kantorowicz defined "political theology" against the background of Nazi Germany's rise and fall. In the 1930s, Schmitt's Nazi sympathies led him to conclude that early modern European monarchies created an absolutist "political theology" by gradually secularizing theological doctrines concerning God's sovereignty. The modern nation state inherited this "political theology" in turn, and further expanded its claims to exercise an omnipotent will. Schmitt's friend turned intellectual adversary, Petersen, denied all legitimate connection between Christianity and "political theology" and sent coded warnings to Schmitt about the Nazi state's "political theology." In the 1950s, Kantorowicz accepted Schmitt's definition of "political theology." Although he realized that this unorthodox use of theological doctrines brought terrible suffering to twentieth-century Europe, Kantorowicz still recognized the importance of "political theology" for the medieval origins of the modern state.

These two theoretical papers raise a number of issues explored in subsequent "case studies" examining monotheistic kingship in a variety of medieval kingdoms. In a discussion of the Neo-platonic philosopher Eunapius of Sardis and Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, Cristian Gaspar demonstrates that pagans and Christians indeed shared concepts of the ruler's proper relationship with the divine. Both authors admonished Christian Roman emperors to heed the advice of holy men. A dispirited Eunapius accused Constantine and his sons of jeopardizing the empire by excluding pagan philosophers from the imperial court. Theodoret rebuked Theodosius II for rejecting the christological doctrines he and his episcopal colleagues advocated. Suffering under imperial displeasure, Theodoret imagined an ideal Christian emperor listening to his saintly bishops and refraining from interference in sacred matters.

Like Theodoret, ninth-century Carolingian clergy assigned holy men a mediatory role in the ruler's contact with God. Ildar Garipzanov analyzes subtle changes in Carolingian royal iconography associated with evolving concepts of a ruler's authority. While Louis the Pious's portrait emphasized his authority as Christ's soldier within a universal Christian empire, the breakdown of imperial unity brought new developments. After ca. 840, royal portraits appeared in Gospels, Psalters, Bibles, and prayerbooks intended for devotional use by ecclesiastical communities or by the rulers themselves. In particular, manuscripts made for Charles the Bald rely on Christian symbols to locate the origin of the king's authority in the divine order, while demonstrating the clergy's crucial role in securing God's favor for him.

Several papers demonstrate that concepts of monotheistic kingship developed in response to political conditions. Nikolaus Gussone explains how Otto III's funeral enacted a liturgical drama of penance and resurrection that denied the terrible possibility that God had punished the young ruler's sins with sudden death, depriving his kingdom of an obvious heir. After his coronation in Mainz, Otto's successor, Henry II, asserted his legitimacy as the new king chosen by God in a series of liturgical ceremonies held in key locations throughout his kingdom. These liturgical dramas averted political chaos by demonstrating that each ruler stood in a positive relationship with God.

According to Ágoston Schmelowsky, Don Isaac Abravanel's views on messianic kingship evolved in reaction to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Rejecting Maimonides's interpretation of key biblical texts, Abravanel despaired of human capacity to bring about change through political means. Instead, he concluded that the messiah's reign is possible only if God transforms the world and human nature, freeing monarchy from its historical tendency to exercise power arbitrarily. In the final analysis, Abravanel's views inhibited political action among Jews, fostering instead passive expectation of divinely effected change.

Irma Karaulashvili examines the reception of the apocryphal legend of King Abgar of Edessa, Christ's contemporary and the first king to convert to Christianity, in Byzantium, Armenia, and Georgia. According to early variants of this legend, Christ wrote a letter and sent his image, the Mandylion, to extend his personal protection to Abgar and his city. In the tenth century, Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos brought the Mandylion to Constantinople in a triumphant assertion of his legitimacy as the emperor chosen by Christ. Afterwards, Byzantine emperors carried both the Mandylion and the cross, Constantine's token of victory, into battle, as guarantees of Christ's protection and victory. The Armenian and Georgian variants of the Abgar legend affirmed the apostolic foundation of their churches and their kings' special status as the human representatives of Christ's divine monarchy.

Rulers sometimes modified claims about their relationship to God when political circumstances changed. According to Zbigniew Dalewski, after failing to secure the title of king permanently, the eleventh-century Piast dukes of Poland still managed to surround themselves with the aura of sacred monarchy. Liturgical ceremonies exalted the dukes as rulers chosen by God, and, remarkably, the twelfth-centuty Gesta principum Polonorum attributed the duke's election to Christ, the "Duke of Dukes" (226). Vladimir Ja. Petrukhin suggests that conversion to Judaism rendered Turkish sacral monarchy obsolete among the Khazars, although their pagan subjects preserved memories of its traditions. After conversion, Khazar kings represented God's Law, after the model of biblical Judges. The Russian princes who assumed the title of Khagan in the tenth century adopted this form of Khazar monarchy, to support their claim to exercise legitimate hegemony over other peoples.

Two papers examine how medieval authors synthesized concepts of monotheistic kingship from a variety of sources. For Georges Tamer, Alfarabi (870-950) represents an Arabic philosophical culture that harmonized ancient Greek and Persian traditions with Islam. Relying on both philosophical understanding and revelation from God, Alfarabi's ideal ruler acts as intermediary between the divine and human realms. Moreover, he rules in God's image, establishing hierarchical order in the human community, providing a model of virtuous conduct, and guiding his people to true happiness. Elod Nemerkényi's traces the sources of the Admonitions, an anonymous early eleventh-century mirror of princes attributed to King Saint Stephan, revealing the complex origins of sacral kingship in Hungary. The cleric who wrote the Admonitions drew upon the Bible as well as classical, patristic, and liturgical sources to comment on the shared responsibility of king and bishops in the government of a sacralized kingdom, to evoke Rome's imperial traditions, and to portray the king as rex et sacerdos.

Other papers suggest that conversion to Christianity made little difference in the ideology of kingship in early Georgia and among the Kievan Rus'. Steven H. Rapp, Jr., examines two histories written ca. 800, The Life of the Kings and The Life of Vaxtang, for insights into K'art'velian political traditions in eastern Georgia before the sixth century. These traditions were strongly influenced by Sasanid Iran's emphasis on the king's heroic exploits in battle as the primary source of legitimacy. After reaching Georgia in the fourth century, Christianity did little to change this traditional model of kingship. Christianization of kingship came later, with increasing Byzantine influence on late ninth-century Bagratid kings. Oleksyi Tolochko finds little evidence that Byzantine ideology of Christian kingship influenced the Rurikid warlords who converted to Christianity in the tenth century, beyond serving as a means of winning recognition of their status from other Christian monarchs. Instead, the clan that ruled Kievan Rus' relied on ancestral charisma for legitimacy. Since no one branch of this clan managed to elevate its status over others, the Rurikids lacked incentives to develop the ideology and trappings of sacral kingship.

Finally, Gerson Moreno-Riaño examines Marsilius of Padua's opinion that a ruler cannot imitate Christ's humility and poverty if he wants to maintain effective control of his principality. In effect, Marsilius removed the veneer of Christianity from monarchy at the end of the Middle Ages, opening the way for the early modern era's absolutism.

The papers in Monotheistic Kingship challenge the automatic association of monotheistic kingship with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The ideology that surrounded medieval rulers derives from hellenistic and late antique political thought, incorporated into a monotheistic world view after Constantine's conversion. As a result, the "political theology" espoused by Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thinkers and rulers is filled with incongruities and areas of tension and doubt, and is subject to intense negotiation. Indeed, these papers deny the existence of any fixed ideas about a ruler's relationship to the one God, even with regard to the widely held view that the ruler is the image, or icon, of God. The concept and practice of monotheistic kingship fluctuated in response to contemporary political conditions and a ruler's relationship with powerful groups within the kingdom. The near irrelevance of monotheistic faith to a ruler's status appears clearly in early Georgia, Kievan Rus', and the political thought of Marsilius of Padua.

Further progress in understanding the "political theology" of the medieval and early modern eras will depend on comparative research that reveals the complex influence of political conditions on ideology, the manifold ways in which this ideology was expressed, and, finally, the exact, and sometimes limited, contribution of monotheistic faiths to a ruler's status as God's representative. Although some papers assume a specialist's knowledge, this stimulating collection challenges old assumptions while suggesting further avenues of research on a topic essential for understanding the development of medieval and modern states.