Sociology of Rulership and Religion

2. Hierocratic Domination

Wherever hierocratic charisma is stronger than political authority it seeks to degrade it, if it does not appropriate it outright. Since political power claims a competing charisma of its own, it may be made to appear as the work of Satan; time and again the most consistent ethico-hierocratic trends in Christianity have tried to impose this viewpoint. Alternatively, since God has permitted the existence of political power, it may also be considered an inevitable concession to the sinfulness of the world; the believer should resign her/himself to political power, but s/he should avoid contact with it as much as possible; at any rate its specific form appears ethically irrelevant. This was the attitude of Christianity in its eschatological early period. Finally, political authority may be considered a God-given tool for the subjection of anti-ecclesiastic forces, and then it is expected to put itself at the disposal of the hierocratic authority. In practice, therefore, hierocracy seeks to turn the political ruler into a vassal and to deprive her/him of independent means of power, insofar as this is compatible with its own interests in the survival of the political structure. If the priests do not assume political powers directly, they legitimize the king through the oracle (as in the case of Judah), or by confirming, anointing and crowning her/him. They may prevent her/him from accumulating a royal treasure, so that s/he cannot create a personal following and maintain her/his own mercenaries (witness again the characteristic case of Josiah in Judah). Hierocracy creates an autonomous administrative apparatus, a tax system (tithes) and legal forms (endowments) for the protection of ecclesiastic landholdings. The charismatic administering of magic blessings, which is at first a freely chosen vocation and living, develops into the patrimonial office of royal or seigneurial benefice-holders, for whose maintenance a benefice--as an endowment --may be established with some temple, where it is to some extent protected from unholy powers. A case in point are the commensality of the Egyptian, Oriental and East Asian temple priests, and the prebends in kind deriving therefrom.

Four features characterize the emergence of a church out of a hierocracy: (1) the rise of a professional priesthood removed from the "world," with salaries, promotions, professional duties, and a distinctive way of life; (2) claims to universal domination; that means, hierocracy must at least have overcome household, sib and tribal ties, and of a church in the full sense of the word we speak only when ethnic and national barriers have been eliminated, hence after the levelling of all non-religious distinctions; (3) dogma and rites must have been rationalized, recorded in holy scriptures, provided with commentaries, and turned into objects of a systematic education, as distinct from mere training in technical skills; (4) all of these features must occur in some kind of compulsory organization. For the decisive fact is the separation of charisma from the person and its linkage with the institution and, particularly, with the office: from this fact derive all the above features, which we find developed in different degrees of typicality. Sociologically, the church differs from the sect by considering itself the trustee of a "trust fund" of eternal blessings that are offered to everyone; as a rule, it is not joined voluntarily, like an association, but its members are born into it; hence even those who lack religious qualification, who are heretical, are subject to its discipline. In one word, the church is the bearer and trustee of an office charisma, not a community of personally charismatic individuals, like the sect. In the full sense of the term, churches have arisen only in Islam and Lamaist Buddhism, apart from Christianity; in a more restricted sense--because of the national delimitation--churches were also created by Mahdism, Judaism and, apparently, the ancient Egyptian hierocracy.

The church advances its demands toward the political power on the basis of its claims to office charisma. This charisma is used for a radical elevation of its bearer's dignity. For its officials the church secures immunity from secular jurisdiction, exemption from taxation and all other public duties, and protection, through heavy penalties, against any show of disrespect. In particular, the church establishes a distinctive way of life for its officials. This requires a specific course of training and hence a regular hierocratic education. Once it has created the latter, it also gains control over lay education and, through it, provides the political authorities with officials and subjects who have been properly brought up in the hierocratic spirit.

By virtue of its power, the hierocratic church also establishes a comprehensive ethico-religious regulation of all spheres of conduct; in principle, this system has never tolerated any substantive limitations, just as today Catholic doctrine cannot recognize any limits for its claims upon the moral discipline. For the enforcement of its claims hierocracy disposes of very considerable means of power, even beyond the support of the political authorities. Excommunication, the exclusion from the church service, has the same effect as the strictest social boycott and in one way or another all hierocracies resort to economic boycott by means of the injunction against social intercourse with those ostracized. Insofar as this regulation of conduct is determined by hierocratic power interests--and that, after all, is true to a large extent--, it is directed against the rise of competing powers. This has several consequences: The "weak"--those subject to non-hierocratic power--are defended; hence slaves, serfs, women and children are championed against the arbitrariness of their master, and small citizen strata and peasants against usury; the rise of economic powers that cannot be controlled by hierocratic means is impeded, especially that of new powers alien to tradition, such as capitalism; in general, any threat to tradition and the belief in its sanctity is opposed, since this is the inner basis of hierocratic power; therefore, the established and traditional authorities are strongly supported.

In this manner hierocracy leads to typification just as much as its very opposite, especially in its most characteristic features. The rational organization for administering divine blessings is an institution (Anstalt), and charismatic sanctity is transferred to the institution as such; this is typical of every church. Hence fully developed office charisma inevitably becomes the most uncompromising foe of all genuinely personal charisma, which propagates and preaches its own way to God and is prophetic, mystic and ecstatic. Office charisma must oppose it, in order to preserve the dignity of the organization. Whoever works miracles on her/his own, without an office, is suspect as a heretic or magician. (An early example can be found in the inscriptions of the period of the Sutras, and one of the four deadly sins of the Buddhist monastic order is the claim to personal supernatural powers.) The miracle is incorporated into the regular organization, as for example the miracle of the sacraments. Charismatic qualification is depersonalized; it adheres to the ordination as such and is, in principle, detached from the personal worthiness of the officeholder --this was the subject matter of the Donatist controversy. In accordance with the overall scheme, the incumbent is distinguished from the office; otherwise her/his unworthiness would compromise the office charisma. The position of the charismatic prophets and teachers in the old church declines as the church administration is bureaucratized in the hands of the bishops and presbyters, again in accordance with the familiar scheme of depersonalization. The structure of the apparatus is adapted, in technical and economic respects, to the conditions of everyday operations. This results in an office hierarchy with delimited jurisdictions, regular channels, regulation, fees, benefices, a disciplinary order, rationalization of doctrine and of office-holding as a "vocation"--in fact, these features were first developed, at least in the Occident, by the church as the heir to ancient traditions, which in some respects probably originated in Egypt. This is not at all surprising, since the typically bureaucratic policy of distinguishing the unworthy incumbent from the holy office had to be carried through consistently as soon as the development toward the charisma of office had gotten under way.

Here arises one of the great problems of hierocracy: How is the official apparatus to cope with the emergence of a charismatic following of God, the monks, who adhere to the demands of the charismatic founder and therefore reject any compromise with mundane concerns? Monastic asceticism can have two very different meanings:

(1) Individual salvation through finding a personal, direct path to God. This has been of primary importance in the religions of salvation, hence for Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Christian ascetics. The radical demands of the revolutionary and almost always eschatological charisma can never be realized within those religious organizations that insist upon compromises with the economic and other mundane power interests, and the withdrawal from the world--from marriage, occupation, office, property, political and any other community--is only the consequence of this state of affairs. Originally, in all religions the successful ascetic, accomplishing the extraordinary, acquires the charismatic ability of forcing God's hands and of working of miracles. Of course, such personal charisma is ultimately irreconcilable with the hierocratic claims of an institution of salvation that seeks to monopolize the way to God--no salvation without the church is the motto of all churches. This conflict is exacerbated when such saintly individuals form exclusive communities; such a step negates the universalist and levelling claims to domination which the church shares with every bureaucracy, as well as the exclusive significance of its office charisma. But each of the great churches was forced to compromise with monasticism. A monastic order is unknown only in Mahdism and Judaism, which in principle recognize no other path to salvation but the faithful observance of the law. There were perhaps monastic beginnings in the late Egyptian church. The Christian church, in particular, could not reject the consistent application of its scriptural principles. But it reinterpreted asceticism as a specific "vocation" within its own ranks. The ecclesiastic recommendation were the highest ideal, but considered too demanding for the average believer. Therefore, full adherence to them was treated as an extraordinary achievement to be utilized as a repository of blessings for the benefit of those deficient in charismatic gifts.

(2) Eventually, asceticism is completely reinterpreted into a means, not primarily of attaining individual salvation in one's own way, but of preparing the monk for work on behalf of the hierocratic authority--the foreign and home mission and the struggle against competing authorities. Buttressed by its own charisma, such inner-worldly asceticism always remained dubious to ecclesiastic authority, which relied solely on office charisma. But the advantages prevailed. Asceticism thus leaves the monastic cell and seeks to dominate the world; through its competition it imposes its own way of life, in different degrees, upon the office-holding priesthood and partakes in the administration of the charisma of office vis-a-vis the subjects (laymen). However, the tensions always persist. The integration of ecstatic asceticism into the Islamic church, through the orders, can hardly be considered consistent, even though it was theologically facilitated by al-Ghazali's establishment of the orthodox dogma. Buddhism had the smoothest solution, since from the beginning it was a religion created by and for monks and propagated by them: the church was completely dominated by the monks, who constituted a charismatic aristocracy. Theologically, this solution was particularly easy in the case of Buddhism. The Eastern churches found an essentially mechanical solution by increasingly reserving all higher-ranking offices for the monks. On the one hand, irrational and individual asceticism was glorified, on the other there were institutionalized churches which had been bureaucratized by the state; in Russia the church did not even have its own monocratic leader. This inconsistency Corresponded to a hierocratic development that was deflected by foreign domination and caesaro-papism. In Russia the reform movement of the Josephites offered its services to caesaro-papism as the strongest power, and therefore only useful instrument of reform, just as the Cluniac reformers found their support in Henry III [ 1039-56].

Friction and compromise can be observed most clearly in the Occidental church, whose internal history is largely made up of them. Eventually a consistent solution was found by integrating the monks into a bureaucratic organization; subject to a specific discipline and removed from everyday life by the vows of poverty and chastity, they became the troops of the monocratic head of the church. This development took the form of the ever recurrent founding of new orders. It is quite possible that Irish monasticism, which for a time was the trustee of a significant part of the cultural traditions of Antiquity, might have created a distinctively monastic church in the Occidental mission territories if it had not entered into close relations with the Holy See. By contrast, the Benedictine order established monastic manors once its charismatic period was over. Even the Cluniac Benedictines (and all the more so, the Premonstratensians) were seigneurial orders of notables, whose very moderate asceticism--witness their lenient dress regulations-- was limited to what was compatible with their status. Here, too, interlocal organization existed only in the form of filiation. The significance of these orders consisted essentially in the re-emergence of monasticism as an instrument of hierocratic control. The Cistercian order combined the first strong interlocal organization with an ascetic organization of agricultural work which made possible its well-known achievements in colonization.