The Big Deal v. the Enlightenment

Which comes first, democracy or enlightenment? Continue reading

I know very little about the details of the struggle to establish something resembling democracy in the Middle East. I also am uncertain as to whether the chicken came before the egg. I am pretty certain of one thing, however, and that is that enlightenment is a prerequisite for democracy.

The Enlightenment began in Europe in the sixteenth century or, arguably, as early as the end of the fourteenth century. It was a reaction against what I like to call The Big Deal, the agreement between the papacy and the nobility to control everything. This arrangement began in the late years of the eighth century when the papacy was under siege on all sides by the Lombards, the last of the Germanic troops to invade the Italian peninsula. In Pope Stephen II (or III if you count the guy who was pope for three days in 752) crossed the Alps to meet with Pepin, the nomadic ruler of the Franks. The details of this meeting are sketchy, at best. The pope probably used some forged documents known as the Donation of Constantine to convince Pepin that he, the pope, was the rightful ruler of all of western Europe. The two agreed to share power. In 800 Pepin’s son Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III, and, in return for papal recognition of the ascendancy of his family, he effected his own “donation” of a swath of central Italy to the papacy and swore to protect it from any and all invasions. For 1,000 years this agreement formed the basis for government in central and western Europe.

The details of this arrangement varied considerably over the next millennium, but the essential elements remained constant. The pope made binding moral judgments; the emperor and all the nobility enforced them. Emperor Frederick II — not the pope — made heresy, which is essentially anything that questions a papal decree, a capital crime throughout the empire. Untold thousands of heretics were executed. The popes called for crusades over a dozen times, and the kings and emperors were expected to spring into action. In return the popes made it clear that it was always sinful to question the authority of the princes. One hand washed the other.

David's Coronation of Napoleon

David considered The Coronation of Napoleon so important that he painted it twice.

This relationship held firm until the time of the Thirty Years War. Thereafter it was still dominant in Catholic countries until Napoleon crushed it by crowning himself emperor. He even forced Pope Pius VII to watch him do it. The contract was officially abrogated in 1870 when the fledgling Italian republic officially eliminated the pope’s status as a ruler of a portion of Italy and let him run things only in the world’s tiniest country, Vatican City.

I would be willing to bet that the Vatican never becomes a democracy, or, at the very least, it will be one of the last places on earth that allows popular rule. The Big Deal is still in effect there, but it is between the pope as spiritual ruler of Catholicism and the pope as civil ruler of his postage-stamp-sized kingdom.

Most of the rest of the world did not suffer through the pain of replacing the Big Deal with a different model. In the United States people who set up the government were English citizens who were intimately familiar with the perils of an established church. They specifically prohibited any such idea in the constitution. South America, on the other hand was settled by Europeans from countries that still supported the Big Deal. Their colonies have had a much more difficult time implementing and sustaining popular rule.

That brings us to the Middle East, the place in which the Enlightenment is just now in its infancy. Israel has a state religion. Nearly all of the Arab countries also have one. Some of them call themselves “Islamic republics,” but to my way of thinking, the nomenclature is as ludicrous as the “people’s republics” of the countries behind the Iron Curtain. It is difficult to think of a single example in which establishment of popular rule was not preceded by a bloody period of Enlightenment. It just makes sense that as long as the opinions of religious leaders are officially considered divinely inspired, the will of the people will take a back seat. Those who have been in power are unlikely to relinquish it willingly.

So, it seems inevitable that there will be continued clashes in the Middle East between religions, between the religious leaders and the privileged military and civilian authorities, and between the underprivileged and everyone else. The task ahead for a nation like ours that would simply like to speed up the process and minimize the bloodshed there will be difficult. Just think of Egypt, in which the secularists, the Islamists, and the military/bureaucracy complex are vying for power. Whom should we support? Anyone? Does our support cause as much long-term damage as short-term gain? In Egypt today the U.S. is vilified both for supporting the military and for supporting Morsi’s government.

Not statue, stature.

Not statue, stature.

To me the scary people are those who think that these questions have clear answers. It was much easier for Lafayette. He supported our revolt against England in large part because of his respect for enlightened people like George Washington, Ben Franklin, and John Adams. If there are any people of George Washington’s stature in the Middle East today I have not heard of them.

“The Pope”

Why are popes so often anonymous? Continue reading

I have been reading Margaret Armstrong’s romanticized biography of Edward John Trelawny, a controversial figure associated with the English poets Byron and Shelley. I came across the following pair of sentences that set me off:

[Teresa Guiccioli’s husband] thought that she had been away from home long enough. So did the Pope — from the first, the Pope had taken a benevolent interest in the Byron-Guiccioli triangle.

“The Pope?” I immediately wondered which pope had so little on his plate that he involved himself in one of Lord Byron’s trysts. This common technique of neglecting to disclose the pope’s name is a pet peeve of mine. I cannot list how many times authors have talked about the pope without identifying the man in question.

Does it matter? I think that it matters a great deal. In this case I deduced from the book’s index that the pontiff in question was, in fact, Pius VII, who ruled the Church from 1800 to 1823. If you are interested in the details of his long and arduous pontificate, you can read about them here.

IMHO Pius VII was one of the most interesting of all the popes. He assumed the papacy at a critical period in Church history. His predecessor, Pius VI, had been apprehended by Napoleon’s men and transported to France, where, in fact, he died. Because Rome was considered too dangerous, Pius VII was elected and crowned (with a papier-mâché tiara!) in Venice, which was then controlled by the Austrian Emperor.

David’s Le Sacre de Napoléon

A few years later Pope Pius was persuaded by Napoleon to come to Paris as his guest and to crown him as emperor. Not only did Napoleon switch signals at the last minute and crown himself in front of an astonished pontiff (a moment captured not once but twice by Jacques-Louis David), he refused to allow the pope to return to Rome. Until Napoleon was overthrown and imprisoned, Pius VII, along with thirteen of his cardinals, was held captive in France for several years.

The primary title of the pope, remember, is the Bishop of Rome. When Pius was finally able to return to the Holy See, he faced the monumental task of reestablishing order there. At the time the pope was not just the unquestioned ruler of the Church. He was also the king of the Papal States, a territory that stretched across the center of the Italian peninsula. Napoleon had seized these lands, but they were returned to the pope in the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Pope Pius VII

And there’s the rub. The pope was probably not interested in Byron or Teresa as much as he was in her husband, Count Guiccioli. During the pope’s exile the count had backed Napoleon, and he had made a fortune doing so at a time when most of Italy suffered. After Napoleon had been deposed, Guiccioli somehow managed to retain much of the property that he had acquired in the Romagna, which was part of the Papal States. He was also closely associated with both the Freemasons and the Carbonari, two secret organizations that were thorns in the papacy’s side in the nineteenth century.

From the pope’s perspective, Count Guiccioli had stolen from the Church by aligning himself with a monster who had both humiliated and imprisoned the Vicar of Christ and then joined up with the heretics trying to undermine the papacy itself. So, when Teresa’s father (!) petitioned Pope Pius VII to approve a separation of his daughter from Count Guiccioli, the pontiff probably did not give Byron a moment’s thought. Guiccioli, on the other hand, was already on his enemies list. In short, knowing who the pope was puts a much different twist on the story.

The inability of most authors to distinguish one pope from another seems not to apply to the last two popes. At any given time most people can remember who the previous pope was and how he differed from the current one. So, most people today know that Benedict XVI is as different from John Paul II as Germany is from Poland. But what about the previous popes? I wager that even most Catholics would have a hard time naming JP II’s predecessors (one only lasted a month) and identifying what they stood for. Almost no one can identify any pope who was dead before he/she was born.

I think that that is a shame. The popes are interesting (to me).