There have
been a few political thinkers in the United States through the years worthy of
attention, but many of those here who comment on such things are awful guides,
their views being badly skewed by their belief in American exceptionalism. Mr William Federer is a great example: His articles, while full of interesting
details most of the time, too often place them in a distorted metaphysical
frame. What he posted
recently about kings is unfortunately not a departure from his established
norm:
‘Slavery did not
start in 1619. It began with kings. Whenever you had the first king on top you had
slaves on the bottom.’
This is
about as unserious and childish a statement as one could make about
monarchy. So why bother about it,
then? Because it is representative of
the way many, if not most, people in the States think about kings. And that thinking is such a distortion of
reality, political and otherwise, that it calls out for a response of some kind,
if only to try to ward off any worse evils than we have been living through
recently.
Christian
monarchy, contra Mr Federer, is a great blessing to people in a number of
ways. First, it draws their collective
attention away from the mundane to heavenly realities. The Orthodox priest Father James Thornton
writes in his book Pious
Kings and Right-Believing Queens,
‘The
throne of a Christian Emperor, King, or ruling Prince, is not an earthly contrivance
but is of a much higher order. It is ordained and blessed by God and belongs to
Him. It is written in the Old Testament that, “Solomon
sat on the throne of the LORD.”4 The throne, thus, was not Solomon’s but was God’s.5
The thrones in all Christian monarchies are the same; they belong to God and
are occupied by God’s anointed. In
the Orthodox Church, the monarch is anointed in a Mysteriological (or
“Sacramental”) act. At the coronation of Saint Edgar the Peaceable in 973, for
example, “[t]he climax of the ceremony was not the crowning, but the anointing
with holy oil which conferred near-priestly status….” 6 Precisely the same was
true of the coronation of Saint Nicholas the Tsar Martyr in 1896, almost a
thousand years later. As Bishop Nektary of Seattle (1905-1983) writes, “The
Tsar was and is the anointed of God.”7 After the anointing, the monarch’s
person is sacred and, consequently, to lay violent hands on an Orthodox monarch
is a grave sacrilege; in fact, among the worst sacrileges possible. Conversely,
a monarch is held by God to a much higher standard than ordinary men and women,
for the monarch holds, by God’s Grace, special powers in his hands, which
powers he is sworn to use in a God-pleasing manner. He is also an example to
his subjects, on which, if his example is a wholesome one, those subjects
should model their own lives, to the extent possible. Monarchs, consequently,
must use their powers with fear and trembling, not arbitrarily, and must be
mindful that the eyes of God and of His people are ever upon him. The monarch’s
purpose or role is to uphold the law of God in his country, to protect his
country and people from adversaries, to shelter the poor, widows, and orphans,
to contribute to the prosperity of his people, and to provide, through the
Church and in cooperation with the Church, spiritual sustenance, thereby
guiding his subjects to eternal salvation.’
Modern
Western democracies/republics, with their official detachment from anything
Christian, simply cannot provide the kind of spiritual uplifting that a
Christian king and the rites involving him and his people can.
Nor can they
offer quite as powerful of a moral example needed to sustain other important
institutions in society like the family.
His Eminence Archbishop Chyrsostomos writes in the ‘Introduction’ to the
same book,
‘ . . . we
can . . . see in the lives of pious kings and queens from the past how they
cultivated virtue in their subjects and how virtuous subjects, in turn, inspired
selfless leadership in their rulers. This reciprocal relationship, centered, at
least in Christian monarchies, on self-sacrifice and the concern of the monarch
and his subjects for the goal of living a Godly
earthly life in preparation for eternal perfection, is ideally reflected in the
life of the family. The monarch, like a mother or father, cares for his or her
subjects with love and concern, just as his or her subjects, like children
looking up to a parent, feel an obligation to the monarch who nurtured and
protected them. Monarchism, therefore, is intimately related to the family, a
basic element in the structure of society, and draws on many of the same powers
that have made the family such an enduring force in human history and in our
personal formation.’
Modern elected politicians are prone to selfishness and not to
self-sacrifice, seeking after power and wealth, unwilling to let go of them (some
even dying while still holding their elected or appointed posts; recent US
Supreme Court justices like William Rehnquist and Ruth Bader Ginsburg come
quickly to mind). The Christian
monarchs, His Eminence goes on to say, show us the opposing virtues:
‘The most
amazing lesson that we learn from the lives of the virtuous monarchs of our
Orthodox Christian Faith is singular virtue of fearing, following, and then
loving God. Our royal Saints were men and women who feared
the lure of the world and ruled according to Divine
precepts, following the examples of the Saints. Many
of them, in so doing, came to such love of God that
they became monastics at the end of their lives, giving up power and privilege
for the simplicity, poverty, and humility of the angelic life. Virtue so
transformed them that they became, in the parlance and thought of the modern
world, social parasites. But as the very lives of these righteous royals aver,
in the course of embracing virtue they elevated and benefited humanity and
society, giving it essential life. They expose, by their example, those who
eschew virtue, who suck the marrow from human life, exploiting it for the sake
of selfish passions and personal gain, as the real parasites.
Trading social preëminence for humility, wealth for poverty, leadership for
obedience, and self-interest for self-transformation in Christ, the Orthodox
royals who sacrificed their lives for their people, who set an example of Godly
life and self-abnegation in abundance and luxury, and who, in the most severe
and extreme expression of their commitment to God and others, embraced the
monastic life—these extraordinary figures pose a challenge to our increasingly
unreligious societies, to our materialistic and passion-centered way of life,
and to our deviation from the path of achieving human perfection in
selflessness. They throw down the gauntlet to all of us in an epoch where we
have made depravity available to all, calling us to spiritual nobility, the
lowly and the mighty alike; to an egalitarianism of humility; to a common aristocracy
of virtue; and to an abandonment of the material world and the passions for the
spiritual gifts of goodness and purity.’
But this is not all. Most
admirers of US constitutionalism and the Founding Fathers fail to realize how
friendly towards monarchy many of those Founders were. John Adams, for instance, writes,
. . .
The rest is
at https://thesaker.is/the-antimonarchists-jump-the-shark/.
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!
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