Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  Of what nature was this Salvation which the earthly monarchy of the Emperor promised? Which Dante with such fire revealed anew, deepened, extended? In the early days of Frederick II, Francis of Assisi in wandering and in word renewed the sacred gospel of the Crucified: that Poverty and Love lead to salvation—love to every creature into whom God had breathed the breath of life. With equal insistence Frederick II preached the gospel of the Glorified, who—himself a king and of kingly race—pointed the path to salvation when, in spite of his divine Sonship, he submitted to the Law and as man fulfilled the Law. Such was the Gospel of the Emperor: the fulfilment of Law is Salvation; the service of Law is freedom; and obedience to Law leads to the righteousness and uprightness of man. For Justice implied not only the penalising, avenging power which guarded mankind from destruction, but was also the corrective of degenerate human nature which in the beginning God had willed “upright and simple”; Justice was the power which led to the highest goal; to the realisation of that better “nature” possessed by godlike man before the Fall.

  Hence, the Emperor sets up for “man incorporating the divine idea” the dogma: that “of necessity man’s nature is subject to Justice, and freedom is the handmaid of the Law.” Only by homage to the law of Justice can man attain to freedom or, in Christian phrase, to the sinlessness of Heaven. For Sin is slavery.

  Justice, therefore, shall create again the naturally simple and upright man, the image of God. The Justice to which it behoved man to submit was no abstraction (as, for instance, “conscience” later became) for—so said the Emperor—it was not seemly that the Divine Idea incarnate in man should bow to another order of beings from elsewhere; rather had Man been exalted over men. According to the word of the Lord the Emperor reigned over all men. He was incarnate Justice, to which mankind was subject, and that man achieved freedom who fulfilled the Law of the Emperor, who alone was responsible to God for the righteousness of that law. The judgment of God on the Emperor corresponded to the judgment of the Emperor on the subject. Since, however, Reason was inherent in Justice, the Emperor was the guide to Reason also. Piero della Vigna wrote in admiration of his adored Emperor, the first who attained salvation through Justice and restored the divine image: “The path of reason required him for Guide.” The Emperors had, of course, been long since styled the imago Dei, but Frederick was God’s image in a special sense, for he was the first to whom was granted that salvation through Justice which he proclaimed. Though “whatever the Emperor decrees has the force of Law,” he was above all others the servant, the debtor, the son of Justice; more than any other he was bound by and subject to Law; and in him therefore was again incarnate that originally God-like human form which the Saviour also wore: “From the likeness of Jesus Christ, in whose stead the King rules on earth, it is evident… that the King must be subject to the Law… since the Son of God also of his own will was subject to the Law,” thus declared the Emperor’s later contemporary, and we may here recall Goethe’s phrase that there is no freedom on the highest rung.

  Since Justice led back to true freedom, to the state of innocence, a further inference follows: the Emperor corresponds to the First Man in Paradise whom God created after his own image, the still sinless Adam whose better nature was once scarce inferior to the nature of the angels. The Cosmology in the Preface to the Liber Augustalis points out: “After the Universe and its motion had been created by Divine Providence, and primeval matter, which was to realise the better nature, had been distributed among the primeval forms, He who had foreseen all that was to be accomplished… seeing Man as the noblest of all creatures from the sphere of the moon downwards (i.e. on earth), formed after His own image and likeness, whom He created a little lower than the angels, placed Man above all other created beings on the earth according to His well-considered plan. Taking Man from a clod of earth He breathed life into him and Spirit and crowned him with the diadem of honour and fame. …” Adam, the first man, created by God himself, free as yet from sin, is here taken by the Emperor as a symbol of the first World-Ruler; he is ruler over all the creatures of the earth and crowned with the diadem of honour and of fame, is symbol also of the first stainless man, immediately dependent on God, who was free so long as he did not transgress the “precept of God’s Law.” The World-King was like unto the First Man whom God created: Frederick’s office therefore and his first predecessor were created when God created man, and existed therefore BEFORE the Fall, and were therefore not the consequence of the Fall. The Saviour on earth had revived the first stainless world king, Adam, was himself the “new Adam,” begotten of God himself, so that he, like our first father Adam, was free from original sin: he also was a World King and subject to Law. The Emperor’s words echo a text of Scripture: “Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels; thou hast crowned him with glory and honour.” Frederick added to the text (which in the Psalm applied to Adam and in the Epistle to the Hebrews to Christ) one single weighty word: “diadem of glory and honour” is Frederick’s phrase—the diadem of the World King which Frederick wore himself as Roman Emperor! Almost as if to banish any doubt that might exist of Frederick’s intention to liken himself to the only two men directly created free from sin by God—as Innocent III had likened himself to the Priest-King Melchizedek—his most intimate friend in a written eulogy directly styles his imperial master “the stainless prince… whom the Great Artificer’s hand created man.”

  Free and stainless and innocent of sin are the three World Kings, because as men they sought their own fulfilment in the Law. Another speculative thought arises which equates the Emperor with Adam in Paradise and with the Saviour: the belief that the “Golden Age” is near at hand. It was a commonplace that the Creation (Adam in Paradise) and the Redemption (the Birth of Christ) were the beginning and the middle of an epoch, to which the end should be like. This fulness of time had now come, under the sceptre of the Emperor of Justice, Frederick II, the expected Messianic ruler whom the Sibyls had foretold. That this World King should resemble the Saviour is no matter for surprise, and the essential resemblance between Adam and the Messiah was set forth at length to the Emperor by an Arab philosopher. This completes the circle of the Imperial Gospel: subjection to the Emperor’s Justitia leads man on earth to innocence of sin, to the better nature of unfallen man. If the rest of the world, taking example by the Emperor, the first human being to live in a state of freedom, would obey the Laws of Justice, then Paradise would be realised on earth and the Golden Age would dawn, whose Deity according to the oldest myths was named Justitia.

  Let us here recall Dante—for all these conceptions are deep imbedded in the Divina Commedia, in which the poet points the way from a state of sin back to the earthly and then to the heavenly Paradise, and to the original God-like man, beholding God. In his eyes, too, the Empire is potent to lead to purity from sin. Vergil, the poet of the Caesars, the representative of the Roman Empire, and of the highest Reason was the Guide to the earthly Paradise, till Dante, freed from all sin, with spotless brow, was permitted as a stainless one to enter the Garden with the Tree of Knowledge. Here Vergil left him, but not before he had crowned him—now like unto the Emperor in sinlessness—with mitre and with crown.

  The Guide’s duty ended here for the mythical Dante-king. The actual Frederick reckoned only with the earthly Paradise; and because of his indifference to eternal life Dante assigned him a place in the fiery sepulchres of those who despise immortality, the “Epicureans.” Yet Dante had the most profound respect and admiration for the Hohenstaufen. All his life Frederick II was the model of the Ruler, and Judge, the Scholar and Poet, the perfect Prince, the “illustrious Hero” who—“so long as his good fortune lasted”—sought after the humane, the humanum, and who as a crowned monarch gathered round him the noblest and most brilliant spirits of the earth. Frederick II figures in the poet’s works, not so much as an historic character but as an ideal of the Justitia Emperor. The Emperor’s earthly goal: to attain once more the divine image by the
fulfilment of the Law on earth and in the State, was the exact premise of Dante’s formula of faith, that in every man the contemplative element needs salvation through the Church, the active element needs a no less sacred fulfilment on earth in Law and in the State: “For the ineffable Divine Foresight has set two goals before man to enkindle him: the happiness of this life which consists in works of his own strength and is represented in the earthly paradise… and the bliss of eternal life which is the enjoyment of the sight of God which man cannot attain to by his own strength without help from the divine light, and the understanding of this is offered in the heavenly paradise.”

  In contrast to the Hohenstaufen, Dante conceived the heavenly paradise as accessible already on earth to living men. For man’s powers are not exhausted in the accomplishment of works of his own strength and of the highest Reason: the pastures of the Blessed, yea even the Deity himself, may be perceived by the enraptured Love which animates the man who prays: St. Francis and above all St. Bernard, the last Guide to the Throne of God. The loftiest insight and the loftiest deed were necessary if a man was to recognise in himself the reflection of God; to see a man’s self in God needed yet something more, illuminated by the grace of the divine light. Thus, from the first canto to the last, the poet’s path was the path of the living man. The man who, like the Emperor, was the imago Dei, and then, in spite of highest knowledge, remained capable of the simple faith of the man who prays: to him the Deity reveals himself in the vision in which the sin-freed man, the image of God, sees shimmering the features della nostra effige.

  II

  The Emperor’s law-giving aroused the most profound mistrust in Gregory IX. Even before the publication of the Constitutions the Pope addressed himself to the Emperor in a letter which clearly shows how accurately he appraised the danger of the work. “It has reached our ears that thou hast it in mind to promulgate new laws, either of thine own impulse, or led astray by the pernicious counsels of abandoned men. From this it follows that men call thee a persecutor of the Church, an overthrower of the freedom of the State: thus dost thou with thy own forces rage against thyself. … If thou, of thine own motion, hast contemplated this, then must we gravely fear that God hath withdrawn from thee his grace, since thou so openly underminest thine own good name and thine own salvation. If thou art egged on thereto by others, then we must marvel that thou canst tolerate such counsellors who, inspired by the spirit of destruction, are bent on making thee the enemy of God and Man.” Gregory expressed himself not less sharply in writing to the Archbishop Jacob of Capua who had co-operated in collecting the laws. He reproved the Archbishop sternly because instead of publicly protesting he had allowed himself to be used as the Emperor’s “writing reed” for these laws “which have renounced salvation and conjured up immeasurable ill,” and which the Pope “will by no means calmly tolerate.” The Pope’s anxieties were well-founded enough, but the Emperor was in so strong a position that Gregory was presently compelled to placate him, for he had been stirred to profound anger by the papal letter: it had been no public reproof but a confidential remonstrance such as no son could take amiss on a father’s part. Pope Gregory had no illusions, however, about the Liber Augustalis.

  It might well seem as if the new secular state, based on Law, Nature and Reason, and entirely self-contained, formed so independent and complete a whole that it had neither need nor room for the Church. Wherever Frederick II held sway, however, his motto was: a secular state plus the Church. One reason—apart from a thousand others—was the simple and personal; the authority of the Church was well-nigh indispensable to him. Reason made clear the necessity for a Ruler, but Reason in no wise proved the necessity of this particular Hohenstaufen’s being that Ruler. The belief in Frederick’s person was certainly at that moment still bound up in the authority of the Church. The Emperor had it is true to a large extent emancipated himself from unconditional dependence on the Church, by calling to witness the wonders done on his behalf, which proved his immediate call by God to his high office, the amazing rise to power for instance of the Puer Apuliae, which he once more recalled in the Preface to the Book of Laws. It was impossible, however, to sever faith in his providential call from the credulity demanded by the Church, for the age was not ripe to grasp the Hero as such, and the Emperor’s power singlehanded to evoke faith in his own person was strictly limited. To enhance his unconditional claim, especially for more distant regions where people rarely saw his face, the consecration and endorsement of the Church were necessary. It was a sufficient miracle, and a proof of the personal magic of this Frederick that after the second excommunication, when the Curia sought by every means in her power to shake the faith in the mysterious person of the Hohenstaufen, one half the world still clung—in defiance of the Church—to its faith in Frederick II as the Chosen. But in those later days, when he strained to the uttermost the powers at his command to outweigh the lack of the Church’s consecration and support, and when in public he had to minimise the importance thereof, his whole conduct proclaims how grievously he missed the Church’s backing. The fact that, sorely against his will, Frederick II provided the proof that the Church’s blessing was not in fact indispensable, was a staggering blow to the Papacy.

  The Church was to strengthen faith in the Emperor’s person. More: the bulk of Frederick’s laws, the whole cult of Justitia, presupposed the subjects’ religious faith; however much the Emperor might appeal to Nature and Reason as non-dogmatic axioms, these yet were one with the God of the Church’s worship. Thus it came about that in a certain sense the Emperor felt a heretic to be more dangerous than a rebel. The rebel in his folly offended against a law of Reason and of Nature by revolting against the imperial government, which every wise man must acknowledge to be necessary. The heretic, in shaking the foundation of the Catholic Faith, shook also the faith in the Emperor’s person and the basis of the Emperor’s laws. The Emperor’s rôle of Defender of the Faith, Protector and Guardian of the Church, was dictated by immediate state necessity.

  Frederick II felt himself at one with the Church in virtue of this office of Defender of the Faith. In the Preface he writes: “The King of Kings and Lord of Lords demands this above all at the hand of a Ruler, that he should not permit the most holy Roman Church, the Mother of the Christian covenant, to be bespattered by the secret faithlessness of those who distort the faith, and should protect her by the might of the secular sword against the attacks of the enemies of the State.” Following the example of Justinian, Frederick II opened his work by an edict against the heretics, the enemies of the state. At the first glance it would be easy to overlook the skill and thought which introduced this sole and only allusion in the whole Liber Augustalis to the relation between Church and State. Otherwise it contains only casual instructions about the Sicilian clergy. It has been held that the heresy edict was a courteous gesture toward the Pope: it was in fact almost the exact opposite. It was intended to demonstrate to the Church that she could not dispense with the protection of the State. This reminder of the princely protectorship brought into relief the one and only relation in which the Church showed dependence on the State. The Emperor studiously avoided mention of any other relationship, for every other would have impaired the self-contained integrity of the State. There could be no graver misconception than to read into the frequent emphasising of the imperial protectorship a weak amiability towards the Pope, or, worse, to interpret as hypocritical zeal Frederick II’s campaign of fire and sword against the “plague of heresy.” Other things were here decisive. The Catholic Faith was conceived by Frederick as a State Religion in an almost classical sense: it might be in a wider sense a universal faith, immediately, however, it was the religion of the State. Frederick followed Justinian in opening his Lawbook with an edict against heretics; in each case Hohenstaufen and Byzantine meant no more than to set a seal on the religion whereon State and Laws alike were founded. The strictly state-conception of religion is brought out much more strongly in the phrasing of th
e edicts designed for Sicily than in those relating to the Empire. Frederick II always emphasised the co-existence of Imperium and Sacerdotium in the Roman Empire—for here the Church was primarily the tie that bound in spiritual unity the many-peopled Empire—while for self-contained Sicily the State was not dependent on the universal Church, nor was the Church even co-ordinate with the State, but the State embraced the Church as a protégée and absorbed her. In the Sicilian edict, therefore, the Papacy is not even alluded to, and the Roman Church is only casually mentioned as the orthodox one, which is to be considered the head of all other churches. For heresy was for Frederick II not a crime against the Church, but a blasphemy against God and therefore treason against the King’s Majesty, and a crime against the State.