Theocracy: What Libs Don't Want You to Know

Haller on the Sweetness of Life under Ecclesiastical States.

In all of Liberal villainy there is no bogeyman as much feared and reviled as the figure of the "theocrat", not even those of patriarch and King. "Theocracy" (a word for which no rigorous definition is given, other than consisting in a State where Christianity is allowed to exert any social influence whatsoever, or exist at all), in the Liberal imagination, automatically conjures up the most lurid images of persecution and tyranny supposed to have taken place during the reign of an empire of darkness and unreason in which evil priests kept the common people in a state of ignorance, disease, and squalour, suppressed all science and technology, all learning, abused and oppressed women as a sex, and visited genocidal atrocities upon colonized peoples. The absolute disconnect between the actual facts of history and the inflamed hallucinations of these libels, from the 18th century or so cut from whole cloth by extraordinarily manipulative bad-faith actors who sought to unseat the authority of Christian religion in order to establish their own in its place, and called themselves "Enlightened", coupled with the incredible ignorance and child-like gullibility of those who, in this day and age still, actually believe this hackneyed and shopworn propaganda, alone go to show just who the forces of darkness and unreason are, just who the enemies of the intellect, critical thinking, and all scholarship of substance, and just who exactly is ignorant and superstitious- even though they live under Regimes in which they have received the Blessings of Liberty (viz. blessed with the liberty to think Party thoughts exclusively, passively and unconditionally receive and accredit whatever official "experts", educators, and even journalists have to say about anything, and repeat all approved talking-points like so many parrots wherever they go).    

     That aside, we know, from the best social-scientific theory and empirical evidence, that in primitive societies as well as during the initial development of civilizations, the functions of temporal and intellectual-spiritual authority alike are carried out by one and the same social superiors, by tribal elders, sacral Kings, and so on like that. Later on, as civilizations grow larger and more complex, there emerges an increasing division of social functions, analogous to anatomico-physiological differentiation in the biological organism, among which is a parcelling-out of religious and secular authority to specialists: pontiffs, priests, and scholars on the one hand, temporal lords and Sovereigns wielding patrimonial and/or military power on the other. This division of labour, as Georges Dumézil has famously shown, is present in the social structure of every civilization in which an Indo-European language is spoken, and as far back as recorded history extends. This bifurcation, by extension, is of course also present in Christian civilizations, which institutionally distinguish "Church" and "State"; but European history has from time to time seen the Church adduce sovereign final authority over various territories to its pre-existing final authority in spiritual and intellectual matters under various circumstances, thus forming fully-fledged States (some of which endured well into the Modern period) whose heads pulled double-duty as lords both spiritual and temporal. Our Liberal educators and people like that don't like talking about this, for reasons that will be made clear presently.

     Haller's account of life and government in these theocracies or "ecclesiastical States", as he likes to call them, in just a few short pages gives the abovementioned genre of Jacobin propaganda, repeated across generations in an unbroken chain of succession whose links include people who really should have known better (first Protestants too blinded by sectarianism to notice that it was intended as a libel against Christianity in general, not just the Roman Church, and today, Libertarians too blinded by irreligion and libertinism to see that this libel was intended above all to help advance the complete triumph and the totalitarian monopoly-power of Leviathan), a decisive, definitive, and sufficient lie- the only one it need be given, or should be.

     Haller observes that a hallmark of these States was an uncommon light-handedness of government, along with uncommon levels of order, personal liberty, and human flourishing more generally- things he attributes to the "double basis" of their authority in both spiritual-intellectual and secular-material power. Spiritual-intellectual authority, by definition, works primarily by persuasion, by winning over hearts and minds; and this gives the ecclesiastical State an edge over purely temporal government in its capacity to secure voluntary obedience where purely secular-material (patrimonial and/or military) power, whose repertoire is limited to external rewards and punishments, carrots and sticks, can only go so far. And it is tautologically true that coercion decreases as voluntary obedience increases- something that can only enhance a public peace and quiet that is disrupted not just by crimes, but the punishments they occasion, the disquieting public shows of brute force that presently cause so much strife across both aisles of our secular polities (e.g. "police brutality" on the Left, or "weaponized justice" on the Right). Finally, this voluntary obedience also obviates the need for most of the infinity of micro-managing rules and regulations, and the obscenely bloated and insatiably ravenous bureaucratic hippopotamus responsible for enforcing them, that characterize the administrative State we Hallerists, staunch friends of liberty one and all, no less than the Libertarians have come to loathe.      

     Furthermore, the specific form of superiority that defines intellectual-spiritual authority is superiority of intellectual and spiritual gifts, superlative innate powers of reason and discernment as well as a hard-earned stockpile of acquired wisdom and learning; for this reason alone, for Haller religion is everywhere the flagship of the rationalization or systematic development of ethics, devoting a greater or lesser part of its intellectual firepower to the rational elucidation and elaboration, and explicit formal promulgation, of the natural and Divine laws that must order human conduct if society is to function adequately or even exist at all. Christian religion, from the start, having already inherited a foundation of highly rationalized ethics from its predecessor, has carried this rational ethical development to an extraordinarily high degree with its emphasis both on duties of brotherly love, charity, forgiveness, etc. and the importance of inward commitment to those duties in addition to their simple outward performance. This voluntary commitment is especially important in that the performance of what Haller calls "duties of charity and humanity", unlike legalistic "duties of strict justice", cannot be compelled; and the most cogent among the great 20th century sociologists were later forced to concur that no State, no society, could function or subsist on strict justice or external coercion alone.   

     Although the Church, like any religion or any school, is necessarily a top-down and hierarchical affair, never a "democracy", it nonetheless organizes its faithful into a community strictly so-called, i.e. an association in which every member is, in his capacity as a member, the equal of every other and has the same baseline set of rights (hence the centrality of fraternal love for one's neighbour as the overarching principle of its ethics); and this, according to Haller, enabled the ecclesiastical States of Christendom to attain, in a substantive sense, the vaunted "equality" the Liberal State claims to have attained, or at least most diligently work towards attaining, but never quite seems to actually attain, for all its self-aggrandizing boasts and sloganeering. The terrible coercive power the Liberal State wields can't in fact compel true brotherly love; and the doctrine upon which it is founded, and which steers its actions, from the start, and self-consciously, has sought to do the very opposite, fomenting social strife, enmity, faction, and everything up to and including fratricidal civil wars, expulsions, and exterminations, and at every available opportunity. (Indeed, Liberalism, in its iterations from Jacobinism through Marxism to Critical Race Theory, has consistently held throughout the centuries that such Christian ethical ideals as brotherly love and the Golden Rule are nothing less than crimes of injustice, insidious ideological devices that perpetuate the oppressions of, successively, the great landed nobles and Kings, the "bourgeoisie", or today, the White race, by enfeebling the popular, proletarian, or Black and Indigenous "oppressed").

     Likewise, and finally, in their style of governance the theocracies actually approximated, in real life, the sort of Libertarian paradise that the Libertarians themselves, bogged down as they are in the self-defeating foibles of anarchist thought, know only in their pipe dreams, their rhetoric, and the hollow abstractions and fictions of their paper systems: small government, low taxes and government expenditures, little bureaucracy, few and general laws as opposed to exhaustive regulatory micro-management of everything, no military conscription, etc. The well-ordered theocracies, it must be admitted, and unlike our Regimes, neglected to bless their subjects with the liberty to abuse their bodies with pornography, perversion, and castration, their minds with drugs, their fine arts and letters with obscenity, or their souls with impiety and blasphemy. The Libertarians may or may not consider it a fair trade-off according to some hedonic calculus of theirs; but they ought to understand that it is indeed a trade-off, that you can have true and meaningful liberty, or an empty plastic surrogate in the form of officially-tolerated vice, but not both- something the smarter set among past generations of Liberals themselves acknowledged (Bolingbroke: "the nations that bore the libertines, bore the tyrants").     

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(Adapted from: Restoration of Political Science, or Theory of the Natural Social State against the Fiction of the Artificial Civil State, Fifth Volume: Of Independent Spiritual Lords, or Pontifical States (Paris: Emile Vaton, 1875). Trans. and ed. mine).

     Since the head of an independent Church unites spiritual authority and subsequently-acquired temporal power, it follows that his power is more extensive than that of the simple territorial lord. Where the rule of the territorial Prince stops, he can intervene further as spiritual Prince through his moral influence. Sovereign authority, in the spiritual and temporal double-Kingdom, is the greatest power that it is possible to conceive of; for men can only be subjected by superiority of intellectual and material force. 

     Another characteristic that profitably distinguishes ecclesiastical States from all others, is the light-handedness (douceur) of their government, the affectionate and paternal treatment of their subjects. There you won't hear resounding pompous and sonorous phrases on the Rights of Man, on individual liberty and national prosperity; one contents oneself, there, with teaching, with faith, justice and morality; but the observance of justice is the reign of liberty, and good morals make nations prosper and flourish. The sweetness (douceur) of the ecclesiastical regime is born of the very nature of the social relation; whereas the temporal conqueror always sees, in those he has vanquished by force of arms, more or less formidable enemies, the spiritual Lord on the contrary sees those he has won to his faith, that is to say spiritually conquered, as his brothers or rather his sons, and feels his sentiments of confidence and affection for them redoubled.   

     In the wake of military conquest, once one has inflicted the most profound humiliation upon a people; violently offended against its memories, its traditions, its nationality; ravished it of liberty, independence, and part of its goods; can reconciliation be prompt and sincere, and without secret reticence? But what does spiritual conquest do? It attaches the whole man through voluntary and heartfelt ties, it subjects the mind with the incontrovertibility of the truth and wins the heart with the charms of love; thereafter no hate, no enmity, no resentment whatsoever; the reconciliation is effectuated at the moment of victory, and peace solidifies itself forever. The conquest of souls turns the enemy into a friend.  

     There is no tie more intimate than that formed by the community of faith, no amity more solid than that which results from the identity of principles and sentiments. This amity surpasses the affection of a father for his children, a brother for his brothers; affection that sometimes gives way to hate, discord, and bloody struggle. If the most humble master of whatever science has a sort of paternal affection for his disciples, how much more ought they to love one another, those who are bound by a common faith, who so to speak share the same will, hope for the same goods, stand against the same evils, acknowledge the same law and aim at the same goal!

     Hence the entirety of history discloses to us, on the one hand, the union that assembles the members of a spiritual society into a single body, on the other, the softness of ecclesiastical governments and heads. Christianity is, in fact, the only religion that prescribes the love of God and neighbour, that is to say, the fulfillment of duties of justice and humanity towards all men without exception; but there is no Church, nor even religious sect, that doesn't make manifest the affectionate relations that bind the master and the disciples, and the disciples amongst themselves.  How great the gentleness and humanity of the laws of Moses! They aimed directly at forming a society of brothers. In their touching solicitude, they commanded that the Hebrew slave be freed in the seventh year, at least if he didn't wish to freely continue his service. The Israelites were neither to mistreat nor attack foreigners, but receive them in the country, as nationals. They were not to harvest the fruit of fields, vineyards, and olive groves too thoroughly, but leave some for travellers, widows, and orphans; to stand up before grey-hairs, and honour age; not speak badly of a deaf-mute who can't defend himself, nor put any object over which a blind man could trip in front of him; help and protect widows and orphans especially, as having the most need of assistance; permit the parents and friends of a poor debtor to buy back on his behalf the goods he sold out of necessity; never harden their hearts against their indigent brothers, but open their hands for the benefit of the poor and lend to them without interest. Here are yet more charitable obligations the beneficent laws of Moses imposed upon the people of God: allow rest on the seventh day; not send freed slaves off empty-handed, but give them parting gifts; exempt from military service young men in the first year of their marriage, in order that they might spend it with the women God gave them; never destroy fruit trees in time of war; bring stray animals back to the proprietor, and even the foreigner, and return other lost items; in no case lend at usury to their brothers, nor profit excessively from their need; not take flour, clothing, or other things that are necessities of the life of the debtor; finally, maintain a light hand and a certain measure in punishing.  

     No purely temporal legislation contains prescriptions as gentle, as charitable. And what's infinitely remarkable about it, and which demonstrates the profound wisdom of Moses, is that he wants the acts of humanity prescribed by his laws to be carried out voluntarily and without compulsion; for he threatens no legal pains against those who neglect to fulfill them, even as he never omits to specify the punishment that must follow the violation of duties of strict justice.       

     This lightness of government and this fraternal charity of the heads are also encountered in other spiritual societies that have preserved some debris of the true religion. Filled with fury and rage against the adversaries of his doctrine, Mohammed seemed to be another person when he spoke of the duties that were to unite the believers amongst themselves. The Incas of Peru called themselves the friends of the poor, and the fields of widows enjoyed more attention than those of the Inca, temporal and spiritual Sovereign of the land.

     But the Christian Church surpasses all others, and distinguishes itself, both by the purity of its precepts, and the universality of their application. She commands not only to love one's brothers, but do good for one's enemies as well. Among the true Christians, brotherly love isn't a veiled egotism that seeks to dominate through the number of one's friends; it isn't a conceited vanity that flatters men in order to be lauded; but it proceeds from the good-heartedness which honours God in His creations and spreads good in order to fulfill His holy law. Inspired by the example and words of Jesus Christ, who has placed the fulfillment of the law in love for God and neighbour, who gave His life for all men and prayed for His executioners on the tree of the Cross; who said to His own: You will be recognized as my disciples if you love one another; roused by these words and this example, I say, the first Christians formed as a family united by the most close-knit of ties. Discord rarely disturbed the harmony of this great family; and when there arose disputes, they ended amiably. Exhortations and mere warnings had more force in this sacred abode than the most severe punishments in other societies. The faithful had but one heart and one soul. As with principles and sentiments, goods too were in a certain sense common; not that there was no private property at all or that they equally divided them, but one didn't use them exclusively for oneself, they were considered as a means of helping one's brothers; and each was given according to his need.      

     The light-handedness of the ecclesiastical regime confirms itself yet again in the history of Popes, bishops, and monasteries that acquired a certain temporal authority through their territorial possessions. The charity passed down from Calvary was in no way taken from the hearts of these heroes of penitence, of devotion, of virtue. Everywhere they ameliorated the lot of men put under their dependence and rendered the greatest services to arts and science. It was they who inaugurated the softening and the abolition of slavery and emancipation from humiliating and most onerous obligations. It was they who commenced to found all sorts of useful public establishments. It was they who [first] gave to a great many towns and States that flourish today, their existence, weal, and liberty; for the ecclesiastical Princes, following the goodness of their hearts or the love of peace, were relaxed in their rule (se relâchaient de leur droit) and didn't at all have the mania for meddling in everything and governing everything. The entirety of history is a perpetual witness to their good deeds.

     Lingard recounts that, among the Anglo-Saxons, the authority of the ecclesiastical Thanes was exercised with greater moderation than that of the secular Thanes. Men, he said, quickly learned to "prefer the equity of the former in their rulings to decisions made by ignorant warriors, and this aspect of peace and tranquility led artisans and merchants to place themselves under their protection. While the secular proprietors reigned in a solitary grandeur over their immense, but infertile, domains, the lands of the clergy were cultivated and improved, their towns had a superabundance of inhabitants, and it is thus that many of the chief towns of England came to be formed".

     Under the crosier one governs (and by itself it's a guarantee of liberty) more by doctrine and persuasion than by force and compulsion; and obedience, being voluntary, is in no way a burden. Legislation always retains a certain moral character, and the rigour of law is tempered with charitable care. Always founding themselves upon Divine law, ecclesiastical Princes torment their subjects with vexatious and arbitrary ordinances less. They prohibit acts that are licit by nature less often, and suppress iniquity more severely. They attach more importance to spirit of justice than to purely auxiliary and often useless formalities; their rulings conform to natural equity more than to the letter of positive of law, often bad and subject to false interpretation. The penal laws aim more to correct the offender than incapacitate him from doing harm, and in spite of this light-handedness of theirs, they are no less effective nor less proportionate to various types of offenses. Generally speaking, high-ranking ecclesiastics are more faithful to their duties than secular lords and functionaries; for this fidelity, this exactitude, scrupulous along the path of commandments, is not only imposed on them in their conduct by the spirit of religion, but additionally imprinted on the soul by the custom and discipline of their position; and habit once taken is second nature.

     And science and enlightenment, who would dare refuse them to ecclesiastics? Are they not necessary for them in their position? Don't their very functions mandate long and serious studies for them? On the other hand, in ecclesiastical States one always encounters more scientific, artistic, and literary establishments, more charitable foundations for the relief of the poor, the sick, the unfortunate; and if secular States have similar institutions, they owe them to the beneficent influence of the Church. To whom do painting, architecture, and music owe their luster, their grandeur, their marvel? Bishops and monks. The bigger seminaries- here are the first universities of Europe. In ecclesiastical States, more importance is attached to schools than to armies, since it is schools, and not armies, that strengthen faith and by consequence, voluntary obedience. Hospitals, in spiritual Kingdoms, are organized with a sagacity, administered with a charity, nowhere surpassed- I would say, nowhere equaled. It is there, it is in those States governed by the spirit of Christ, that the idea of establishing houses for orphans and foundlings, free schools and grants for poor students, public funds for paupers, shelters for the elderly and the abandoned, was born. All that Europe has and has had of scientific, benevolent, and charitable institutions, she owes mainly to the Church. In our day still, the Church, wherever Liberal impiety doesn't hamper her efforts, is rebuilding the establishments that philosophical and revolutionary fury despoiled, sacked, and destroyed.            

     With respect to the temporal relation, ecclesiastical States by nature are inoffensive. They have no armies at all, or only armies small in number. Hence, no forced conscription at all. When subjects suffer military duties, the lodging of soldiers, military requisitions, they owe these agreements to external enemies.    

     It is true that Popes and bishops have also made war, but, history records, they made it with the greatest finesse, in rare periods and always under duress for the necessary defense of their territory. Ordinarily, in these paternal empires, few or no taxes at all are paid, whether because the temporal lords don't have sufficient means to levy them by force, or because they can do without them that much more easily, having no armies to salary, no children to bequeath to, no luxurious courts to maintain. If, by an exception that confirms the rule, ecclesiastical States sometimes have debts and yield to the necessity of taxation, these burdens derive from military contributions imposed by their enemies, or voluntary sacrifices for the defense of the country or its allies: transient expenses and woes that sound public policy (une sage économie) promptly repairs. [O]ne doesn't see that innumerable throng of bureaucrats (employés) which ruins the finances of the richest Kingdoms; the needs of governments aren't bottomless pits, since they don't aspire to control, regulate, and regiment all things.

     Here everything has the character of stability; everything suggests the image of a great tree, which protects justice and peace in its shade. In our time, where the most miserable pretexts for accusing bishops and monasteries are seized upon, ecclesiastical States are reproached for not having as well-organized a police as those of temporal States. There are two types of police, The one, protecting justice, guarantees citizens tranquility, well-being, the conveniences of life, and that's the police of ecclesiastical governments; the other, following partisanship, molests honest folk and leaves licentiousness, disorder, fraud, usury, high crime (crime puissant) unpunished, and that's the police of revolutionary governments (compare the "weaponized" justice system in the USA today -trans.]. The facts thus set aright in their true light, we subscribe to the objection without reservation. 

     Experience attests to the advantages of these ecclesiastical States to this day. Travelers and foreigners, even those who by birth and education are filled with prejudice against Popes, acknowledge the sweetness and beneficence of pontifical government in the Papal States. Following Addison, whose testimony allows no gainsaying whatsoever, the famous Gibbon lauded the attachment and fidelity that the Romans inviolably kept to their ecclesiastical Sovereigns. 

     "And how could they have", said an eloquent voice in 1814, "not loved a government whose foundation was economy, whose fruit was peace, whose distinctive characteristic is paternal gentleness; where the two powers, united in the same hand, could never be rivals; where there was no talk of liberty, but where there is more liberty of speech than anywhere else; where equality isn't decreed, but realized; where it is nowhere established in theory that there are no social distinctions other than that of talent and virtues, but where, in fact, virtues and talents lead to all distinctions, and where there is nobody, even the son of an artisan and even a poor shepherd, who can't become a [Pope] Sixtus V".   

     Let us, in thought, cast our eyes on the former ecclesiastical principalities of Germany, unfortunately destroyed. Nowhere was found a government more paternal and more enlightened; nowhere was life sweeter, more peaceful and more free. The old hospitality seemed to have made a home for itself (s'être réservé un séjour) in these auspicious regions, and money abounded for all useful things. Only there one saw fewer arsenals, fewer barracks and fewer prisons than in modern States. At Mainz, at Cologne, at Wurzburg, at Bamberg, at Salzburg, tears of tenderness still moisten the eyelids of locals when they speak of their former Princes. In no country were lands better cultivated, towns better built, true science sought after with more ardour, weakness protected with more solicitude, human infirmity helped with more charity, industry more ingeniously productive, and commerce more honestly prosperous, than in these ecclesiastical Principalities. Monasteries also spread urbanity and education, ease and happiness, far and wide; they were not only the school of sagacity, but furthermore the arms of Providence for the peoples that lived under their beneficent authority.

     Today, we see ruin and desolation, where once flourished all arts of peace; destitution and indigence; where industrious honesty found abundantly remunerative work and guaranteed resources everywhere; unsustainable taxes and public burdens, where the landowner cultivated his field and his vineyard for himself and not others. The subjects of religious heads rarely quit their auspicious stay, and returned gladly. Everywhere, even in Modern times, they remained faithful and attached to their Sovereigns. Moreover, the ecclesiastical Princes of Germany were ones that, in times of peace as times of war, most scrupulously and most consistently fulfilled their duties towards Emperor and Empire. Always ready to make the greatest  sacrifices for the defense of the fatherland, they never abandoned it, although they were sometimes abandoned by it. And it is yet another thing that does little honour to the spirit of the times that, in spite of this consistent fidelity, these States were sacrificed in supposed peace treaties, in order to indemnify or rather enrich, with their spoils, certain secular Princes whose conduct was much less honourable, and who hadn't found favour even in happier times, when so many others were restored to what was theirs and when everybody emphatically spoke out about wanting to restore an order of things founded on justice.