The Pope's speech to the German Parliament

[fpb]

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_listening_heart
As ever, the man is worth listening to. But the responses in the comments thread just show how bloody useless it is to deliver intellectually distinguished and morally valuable speeches in a world where most people know no history but are stuffed full of out-of-context factoids and believe themselves entitled to judge.

Comments

Two

[fpb.livejournal.com]

There was no such thing as "the divine right of kings" in mediaeval Europe; it is a French invention, dates about 1500, and was justly dead by 1792. All the European rulers, apart of course from those who were full-blown republics, were flanked and limited by representative parliamentary bodies. It is significant that every single historical European language has a native word for "Parliament" - English, French (Etats-Generaux), Spanish (Cortes), German (Diet, Tag), Italian (Maggior Consiglio, Arengo), Sardinian (Corona de Logu), Serbo-Croat (Skrupshtina), Russian (Duma), Scandinavian languages (Thing, Folketing, Althing), Welsh (Senedd), not to mention a few defunct ones - Longobard (Gairethinx), Anglo-Saxon (Witangemot). Representative government is native to the Christian West, and was theorized as early as St.Thomas Aquinas in 1200. "The divine right of kings" is a fallacious invention in the service of the creeping usurpation that was the modenr French monarchy, which continously bent and broke its own legal support.

Re: Two

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Representative democracy of the kinds you listed only came into being around the Enlightenment. Thomas Aqinas was certainly inspired by the representative ideals of the Roman republic but his was a minority viewpoint at the time. In the end all that the middle ages manage to cough up were nobles who advised the king, who still had the ultimate authority. It certainly primed the people to accept representative democracy later, but it was not the same thing.

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[fpb.livejournal.com]

What you say is factually wrong. IN European practice, the King has always been made by Parliament; the predatory and illegitimate behaviour of the French kings was an imposition; and the spread of French practice and influence was constantly disastrous. For instance, George Garnett shows, in the opening chapters of his Conquered England, that the failure of French-speaking Normans and native English to understand each other on this fundamental point was the cause of an immense amount of violence and effective illegality. Quite simply, the English believed that once their leaders had made an act of recognition to the prospective king, as a collective body - Garnett uses the term Witan - that man was the King, end of discussion; whereas the French-speaking, French feudatary William (however much he might owe culturally to his Viking ancestors) was sure that he would only be King once he had been anointed. Hence he ignored their act of recognition and continued savaging the country until the desperate Londoners rushed to some sort of ceremony. But the tradition was on the side of the appointment of the king by the Witan, and William was the (brutal) innovator. It did not last, either; within 250 years, Parliament had reasserted its right to nominate and dethrone a King (Richard II). For that matter, laws could not be passed except with the approval and support of a parliamentary body; 250 years before William, Charlemagne and his successors legislated in the form of Capitularies, orders and laws emanated in the presence and with the support of assemblies of nobles and priests; and 250 years before them, King Rothari of the Longobards emanated his great code of laws with the advice and approval of the Gairethinx, or assembly of nobles. The Parliamentary institution was as universal in mediaeval Europe as it was utterly unknown elsewhere: you will dig forever in Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Aztec history without finding any such body of elected representatives, not only advising kings, but making and unmaking them. And in spite of the French poison, the practice remained in Europe: as late as 1861, the victorious King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, did not wear the title of King of Italy until he had summoned an elected Parliament to Turin to vote him in.

THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT IN THE ANCIENT WORLD. The very principle was unknown. There were some elected magistracies, but they could as easily be appointed by lot; the important principle being, not the idea of representing the people in any way, but of fulfilling a public office in a way that prevented it being monopolized. The Greek cities were governed by assemblies of free citizens, with no elected grouping of any kind; Rome, by a Senate whose members were not selected but appointed by a magistrate, the Censor, who had no other duty but to appoint, control the behaviour, and if necessary dismiss, Senators. The relationship of the Roman Senate to the Roman people was precisely this, zero, and that is why the famous name of the Roman state, SPQR, emphasized both, "The Senate AND The People of Rome": they were two separate components of the State. The elected Parliament is a mediaeval invention, and through most of the middle ages it was the dominant institution in the Christian West, the more dominant the more rich and advanced were conditions - for instance, openly republican "communes" or city states dominated the rich landscape of Italy and of the Low Countries. Monarchy by divine right was invented by French theorists in the late fifteen hundreds, and had a short and ultimately catastrophic ride.

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[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Such instances like the Magna Carta and other similar arrangements were due to political factors: namely the unelected nobles and landholders putting pressure on the King to share power, as opposed to religious revelation. Pre-Christian Norse and Slavs were also indicated by scholars of the time as practicing representative democracy, but even then it was mainly the higher status individuals.

However, universal participation in politics of the kind we think of today when we say "democracy" is more recent, and an artifact of the continuing, ever-more-secular Enlightenment project that started in the late 14th century. These ended up including suffrage for women (opposed by the Catholic Church in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and spoken of disparagingly by the Catholic Encyclopedia of the time), non-whites and non-landed gentry, as well as the establishment of additional rights that did not exist during the middle ages or before.

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[fpb.livejournal.com]

I never spoke about democracy, if nothing else because I wanted clear blue water between European civilization and the political structure of ancient Athens. I spoke, repeatedly, continuously, insistingly, of representative government, and of the sovereign (executive power) nominated and conditioned by the parliamentary assembly. That is what I am speaking of. That is what is fundamental to western civilization.

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[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

I meant "representative democracy (a.k.a. a republic)" by "democracy".