State, and Nation in one,[1] as Augustine described it in his Civitas Dei. The Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the historical world; his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it. But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate — to God's Vicar on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the Emperor, he chose a new ruler for himself in order that he himself might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to Magian world-feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior, an Emperor in the Frank lands was his servant in spiritual matters, besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope is included in the Caliph.
For this very reason, however, the choice of the Magian ruler cannot be bound down to a genealogical succession-law. It issues from the consensus of the ruling blood-kindred, out of whom the Holy Ghost speaks and designates the Chosen One. When Theodosius died, in 550, a relative, the nun Pulcheria, formally gave her hand to the old senator Marcianus, thereby incorporating this statesman in the family and securing the throne to him and continuance to the "dynasty";[2] and this act, like many similar occurrences in the Sassanid and Abbassid houses, was taken as the outcome of a hint from above.
In China, the Emperor-idea of the early Chóu period, which was strictly bound up with feudalism, soon became a dream, which, rapidly and with increasing distinctness, came to reflect a whole preceding world in the form of three dynasties of Emperors and myth-Emperors more ancient still.[3] But, for the dynasties of the system of states that thereupon grew up (in which the title King, Wang, came at last into perfectly general use) strict rules came into force for royal successions, legitimacy — a notion quite alien to the early time — became a power to conjure with,[4] and extinction of lines, adoptions and mésalliances led, as in the Baroque of the West, to innumerable wars of succession.[5] Some principle of legitimacy, too, surely underlay the remarkable
- ↑ See p. 243.
- ↑ Krumbacher, Byzant. Literaturegesch., p. 918.
- ↑ A bright light is thrown upon the formation of this picture by the fact that the descendants of the repeatedly overthrown dynasties of Hia and Shang reigned in the states of Ki-Sung throughout the Chóu period (Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China, I, p. 30). This shows, firstly, that the picture of the Empire was mirrored back on some earlier or even perhaps a contemporary eminence of these states; and, secondly and above all, that here too "dynasty" was not what we currently mean by the name, but followed some quite different idea of the family. We may compare the fiction which made the German King, who was always chosen on Frankish territory and crowned in the sepulchral chapel of Charlemagne, into a "Frank," so that if circumstances had been different, there might have evolved the notion of a Frankish dynasty running from Charles to Conradin (see Amira, German. Recht in Herm. Paul, Grundriss, III, p. 147, note). From the Confucian age of enlightenment this picture became the basis of a State-theory, and later still it was turned to account by the Cæsars (p. 313).
- ↑ O. Franke, Studien zur Gesch. d. Konfuz. Dogmas, pp. 247, 251.
- ↑ An illuminating example is the "personal union" of the Ki and Tseng states, contested as contrary to law (Franke, op. cit., p. 251.
