The Holy Roman Empire can help inspire a different European Union

The Holy Roman Empire can help inspire a different European Union

Peter Wilson

Ex: http://www.ft.com

We should look to the example of Charlemagne, writes Peter Wilson

Germany’s past casts a long shadow. Last summer, Greeks protesting against the stringent terms of the EU bailout brandished pictures of Angela Merkel sporting a Hitler moustache and a Nazi armband, with the swastika replaced by the euro sign.

Such images remain potent but they hinder real engagement with the questions of how Germany will use its current economic and political influence, and how far the EU can or should contain that power. For answers we should look back in time to when Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The empire scarcely seems worthy of discussion today. If it has any resonance at all, it is usually thanks to Voltaire’s quip that it was “neither holy, Roman nor an empire”. Founded by Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800, the empire appeared to go into decline almost immediately until being swept away as an obsolete irrelevance by Napoleon in 1806. In the words of James Madison, the fourth president of the US, the empire was “a nerveless body; incapable of regulating its own members; insecure against external dangers and agitated with unceasing fermentations in its own bowels.”

Knowing why the empire has been interpreted this way can help us to understand present-day Germany’s position in Europe, particularly its leading role within the EU.

The legacy of two world wars has encouraged those outside Germany to fear its leadership as potential hegemony but the history of the Holy Roman Empire reveals a time when Germany was part of a wider pacific order.

The negative interpretation of the empire rests on seeing it as a series of failed attempts to create a German nation state. In this version of history, a succession of monarchs tried to create central institutions capable of imposing a uniform system of rule, only to be thwarted by the selfish ambitions of petty German princes.

In fact, the empire was never simply “Germany”. It covered what is now Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, the Czech Republic, much of Italy, and parts of France and Poland.

Historians in all these countries found no use for the empire when they came to write their national stories in the 19th century. For them, like the Greek protesters, “empire” meant foreign domination.

"Power was always multiple and plural. The management of daily life was devolved to more local

The imperial aspect of the empire is perhaps the hardest for us to grasp today, largely because we tend to conceive empire through the experience of European colonial power.

We expect empires to have a clear and stable core inhabited by an imperial people that imposes its will on peripheral regions. But the Holy Roman Empire had no core, because it never possessed a clear centre of government or even an official capital. Instead, power was always multiple and plural. The management of daily life was devolved to more local powers.

The most significant change across the centuries was not a progressive fragmentation of an originally centralised power, as previous generations of historians believed.

Rather, it was a gradual thickening of local power that drew its legitimacy from its relationship to the empire as a whole. Imperial charters and laws sanctioned local rights and liberties.

Additional layers were added over time in response to circumstances, most notably during the 16th and 17th centuries, when Protestants acquired the same legal safeguards as Roman Catholics.

"Its inhabitants generally identified with it positively because it preserved their own autonomy and ways of life"

However, long before this Jews had received protective rights which generally functioned better than those granted by monarchs in Europe’s more centralised kingdoms.

And it is here that we see most clearly what the empire can tell us about Europe’s possible future. Its inhabitants generally identified with it positively because it preserved their own autonomy and ways of life.

It cannot be a blueprint for today’s EU, because the social order which underpinned that local autonomy was also riddled with inequalities we would find abhorrent.

Yet it does suggest an alternative to the stark choice between the EU as a single, homogeneous superstate or fatally weakening Europe’s global position by fragmenting it into a mosaic of national states.

The writer is Chichele professor of the history of war at the University of Oxford and the author of The Holy Roman Empire

The Road from Dante to Guenon

Ex: http://www.gornahoor.net

Vintila Horia was a Romanian Traditional author. In a collection dedicated to the thought of Rene Guenon, titled Rene Guenon Colloque du Centenaire, he contributed an essay Mon Chemin de Dante à Guenon, or, My Path from Dante to Guenon. (I’m looking for a hard or soft copy of the full text if anyone can find it.)

The Project Rene Guenon published some excerpts from it here. In the section below titled “Reading Notes”, there is my translation of the notes from French to English.

Even this little taste is quite suggestive. Usually applied to Sacred Texts, Horia points out that the Divine Comedy by Dante can also be understood on four levels. It is no surprise that he names Rene Guenon as providing to key to the highest level of interpretation.

An interesting wrinkle is that Horia names Soren Kierkegaard as providing to key to understand the Comedy at the moral level. That is certainly worth exploring. Kierkegaard describes the phenomenological states of consciousness for many types of men. Perhaps then, we should understand Dante’s descriptions of the punishments of hell for the various class of sinners as pictorial representations of their inner soul life.

Horia then points out the roles of the Cross and the Eagle, i.e., Church and Empire (or Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, in Guenon’s terms). A one-sided effort is certain to fail.

Horia ends on a note reminiscent of Boris Mouravieff: a small group of the just will witness the coming Age of the Holy Spirit.

Reading Notes

There are several keys to Dante. Rene Guenon provides us one: that of esoterism, which would make the “Divine Comedy” the poem par excellence from the standpoint of traditional studies. (p 93)

Among the studies devoted to Dante, the closest to the poet’s spirit are:

1. that of Rene Guenon
2. that of the Italian scholar Luigi Valli
3. that of the Spaniard Asin Palacios, entitled “Dante and Islam.”

“With the fourteenth century, and especially with Petrarch, the path takes a turning point, it tries to rise, with the return of Platonism to power, along the first part of the Renaissance at least, but it sinks, after Marsilio Ficino, into a hopeless landscape, or terminal end, of which the eighteenth century constitutes a type of spiritualist error, so to speak, by following the teaching that Guenon suggests to us as an example of what we should not do especially at times when poetry, like politics together, as in Dante’s time a tragic inseparability. Hölderlin, already at the beginning of the last century, placed in relation the “times of distress” and the “presence of the poet.” (p 94)

Our time is perhaps one of the closest to Dantean exegesis.

“Dante was above all a poet faithful to poiesis and then to creation, and, in the most logical way, he found himself tempted by all the paths to the very source of creation, which is Truth. To reach it, he let himself be guided by the two poles of our poetic soul: inspiration, which proceeds in a straight line from the unconscious world, and reason, linked to the consciousness above any partial separation, classical in one sense, romantic in another, and which removed from his work that tone of impartiality — I would not say objectivity, because this word has no meaning in this context — that characterizes it despite permanent injunctions of his ego and of the historical sufferings that inspire it and, often, determine it in his creative action. Dante is a world, in the fullest sense, and it even lets us embrace it, even if we are situated almost seven centuries after his adventure.” (p 94)

There is a literary key of “The Divine Comedy” and of Dante in general. Next, there is an allegorical key, which is a first way to add a veil above the literal sense. Then a moral key, proposed by Kierkegaard. The last one, the anagogical key, was given by Guenon and Luigi Valli.

“What Guenon did for me and, I imagine, for most of those who found in him the same remedy, was to draw me away from minor or partial truths, to put me in contact, at least wavering, with Truth, which is one and that, by following ever more complicated and hidden paths, drew me to Plato and made me understand the most prominent and the most spectacular aspects of current physics, for example, through Heisenberg, to name a stage, as efforts as part of a broader effort whose aim was that to help me advance towards something after going through hell —  the last two centuries of history Western form, in this perspective, the nine circles of hell and it is possible that we are going through the last, that of eternal ice and traitors, those who betrayed man —  to lead us to an indispensable Purgatory to make the last jump, one that implies an end and a beginning, and that is surely one of the end and a new beginning, ‘Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars’, which is the last verse of Dante’s Purgatory.” (p 97)

The metapolitical goal of “The Divine Comedy” is to present to a sick mankind the double remedy of the Cross (the Catholic Church) and the Eagle (the Empire). The Cross has the role to cure ignorance and the Eagle, distress. Lust was to be annihilated by the victory of the Cross, and injustice by the victory of the Eagle.

“So don’t we owe our terrible entrance into the deterministic and entropic night to the separation between the Cross and the Eagle? The Cross alone would now solve the problems that it could solve neither at the end of the Middle Ages, when it was strong and universal, nor in the age of the Revolution, when it was abandoned by poets causing the flight of the gods which Hölderlin speaks about. The Eagle soared, too, on other worlds, very far away from us, imitated by fake eagles, imperial in space but not in time, which belongs to the reign of the Cross. We live under the oppression of invalid empires, not only because sick of tyranny and inhumane separations, fated to protect the ultimate fall and decay, but also because they do not want the Cross, their most mysterious and fiercest enemy, alone but surviving. I think that Dante and Guenon complement each other on the threshold of the catastrophic loss of the relationship with being and of finding again complementary phases in the path of salvation that explain the history of this time with a clarity that other specialized disciplines are not able to explain because they unable to understand. Beyond the end of time, that time already many centuries old, we may find ourselves in the fullness of Being, according to the voice full of the bitterness and hope of the best prophets. Everything will only be the pile of the useless, arrogant and vain. Only a voice of the righteous, that is to say, those that have been formed in a different light, will accompany us in the great alchemical change in the third millennium.” (p 100-101)

Hinterhalt in Germanien - Kampftechniken germanischer Krieger

Hinterhalt in Germanien - Kampftechniken germanischer Krieger

Germanien im Jahr 9 nach Christus: Die Römer sind auf dem Höhepunkt ihrer Macht und verfügen über die größte und stärkste Armee der Welt. Doch bei der Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald werden der römische Feldherr Varus und seine Legionen von den germanischen Stammeskriegern regelrecht niedergemetzelt. Was war das Geheimnis der germanischen Krieger? Der Ex-Berufssoldat und Kämpfer eines US-Sonderkommandos, Terry Schappert, ist Moderator der Reihe "Die Krieger". Er führt die Zuschauer durch die Welt der Krieger und Kämpfer aus allen Epochen der Geschichte.