133J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

Aziz al-Azmeh

Monotheistic Monarchy

Abstract: In the first part of this text, the authorattempts to demonstrate that sacral kingship might, inanthropological terms, be regarded an ElementaryForm of socio-political life; not an autonomous el-ementary form, but one falling under the category ofrulership. The reference to the anthropological notionof Elementary Forms renders virtually irrelevant therigidity with which categorical distinctions are madebetween polytheistic and monotheistic kingship, aswell as any civilisational divisions that might beimagined between Orient and Occident. The secondpart of the text provides an illustration of thesepresuppositions, the author taking several examplesfrom the history of monarchy – both in the WesternWorld and in the Arab World.

“[die Kultur ist] recht ei­gent­lich die fromme und or­dnende,ich möchte sagen, begütigende Ein­be­ziehung des Unge­heueren

in den Kultus der Götter.”Thomas Mann

“Eine politisch-religiöse Feier­lichkeit hat einen un­endlichenReiz. Wir sehen die irdische Majestät vor Augen, um­geben von

allen Sym­bolen ihrer Macht; aber in­dem sie sich vor derhimm­lichen beugt, bringt sie uns die Gemeinschaft beider vor dieSinne. Denn auch der ein­zelne vermag seine Ver­wandt­schaft mit

der Gott­heit nur dadurch zu be­täti­gen, dass er sich unterwirftund anbetet.”

J. - W. von Goethe

I should like to state at the very beginning my convic-tion that sacral kingship, in its variety of forms and rep-resentations one of which is monotheistic kingship,

Aziz al-AzmehProfessor, Ph.D., CentralEuropean University,Budapest, Hungary.

Author of the books:Ibn Khaldun in ModernScholarship (1981), AnEssay in Reinterpreta-tion (1982), ArabicThought and IslamicSocieties (1986), Islamand Modernities (1993),Muslim Kingship (2001).E-mail:azizalazmeh0@yahoo.com

134J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

might in anthropological terms be regarded an Elemen-tary Form of socio-political life: not an autonomous el-ementary form, but one falling under the category ofrulership, of sovereignty in the sense given to the termby Georges Dumézil, without this necessarily entailingthe adoption of his trifunctional model which Le Goffsaw to be eminently fitting for medieval Europe. Like allother Elementary Forms for the representation of humansociality, this is one of an historical, mutable characterwhich was central to the political and religious life of vir-tually all polities — not the least paradigmatic of whichis the history of ancient Egypt — prior to the great trans-formation that overcame us all beginning with the seven-teenth century. It is an Elementary Form in which sover-eign and deity are related by manners and degrees ofidentification and mimesis. At one extremity of thisspectrum of possible relations, full identity ontologicallyunderstood is expressed in epiphany, transsubstantialityand consubstantiality; At the other extremity, the rela-tionship is expressed in terms of a variety of mimeticstrategies comprehended by the figures of apostolate,prophecy, and priesthood, or by the altogether morenebuluous and spectral — but nevertheless effective —tropes of representation, such as “the shadow of God onearth”, a trope that goes at least as far back as theAssyrians and was later to be so important in discourseson Muslim kingship.

I do not alas have the opportunity here to discusswhy sacral kingship should be such an Elementary Form,or why Hocart in his famous work was moved to assertthat: “We have no right, in the present state of ourknowledge, to assert that the worship of gods precededthat of kings … Perhaps there never were any gods with-out kings, or kings without gods”1: This is a matter thatwould take us into a discussion of psychoanalytic, social-psychological, and anthropological theories that recallnames such as Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Pierre

Clastres, René Girard, Rudolf Otto, and many others.The lack of space here is particularly unfortunate for me,as I do so much wish to think through that most compel-ling tautology implied by Durkheim’s (and, before him,Feuerbach’s) conception of the sacred as an irreducibleform of societal self-representation2, as something notamenable to specific formulation apart from its relation-ship to its profane contrary, indeed as “a category of thesensibility” or “a veritably immediate datum of con-sciousness” 3. I will therefore have to rest content withasserting that sacral kingship was a constant motif in allroyalist and imperial arrangements that spanned the en-tire œcumenical expanse of Eurasia from the very dawnof recorded history until modern times, a vast perspec-tive in which the primitive republicanist image of Romeor of Athens seems aberrant, paltry and inconsequential,if indeed this image of republicanist purity, of the splen-did childhood of rational political man, has any historicalcredibility or verisimilitude.

Before going any further with the comparative per-spective, a few prefatory words on sacrality will neverthe-less be in order. Sacrality, like kingship, expresses princi-pally a relationship articulated in dominanttranscendence; there is a striking degree of resemblancebetween epithets applied to Christ and those applied toHellenistic and Roman emperors, such as epiphaneiaand parousia, with reference to the solemn arrival of theemperor. Sacrality denotes irreducible removal, a struc-ture of irreducible polarity and subordination, an hierar-chical instance beyond hierarchy, a self-referential puritybeyond purity and impurity as normally perceived, an ir-reducible potency (such as the logos) incommensuratewith any gradations of power. Nevertheless, transcen-dent sacrality may and often does substantively dissemi-nate lower beings, like kings, or may cast its potentshadow upon them; it is not, like Aristotles’s supremebeing, only a passive instance of self-reflection and self-

Key words:

sacral kingship,monarchy, monotheism,Elementary Form,anthropology, history,caliphate

135J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

referentiality, but is rather related in dominance in amanner that is rather Platonic, or, better, Neo-Platonic,acting by energetic emanation. Eliade was perfectly cor-rect in maintaining that Plato was “the outstanding phi-losopher” of primitive mentalities, mentalities which, heproposed, are not confined to so-called primitivepeoples4. From this statement a number of implicationsmay be drawn, not the least important of which, for mypurpose, is that this relationship, articulated in the tran-scendent dominance of the sacred, is one in which thestructure of the cosmos, like that of political society un-der royal aegis, is articulated by diminishing degrees ofmimetic capacity.

I will be more specific. To these diminishing degreesof mimetic capacity correspond greater degrees of pollu-tion, of adulteration with materiality, with humanity in-creasingly more common and soiled. Yet this structure ofcontinuous passage across degrees and ways of commen-surability — from self-identity through to shadowy reflec-tions, as I indicated — is nevertheless governed by an ir-reducible categorical distinction, indifferentlydistinguishing, in parallel, God from man and king fromsubject, and relating God and king together in a com-mon distinction from the common run of humanity insuch a way that Louis IX of France could state that “lirois ne tient de nului, fors de Dieu et de lui”5.

I am perhaps anticipating too much by this direct ref-erence to St. Louis in the thirteenth century, for the com-plex history of the relationship between gods and kingsis a very long one, and is yet remarkably constant. This isnot a history that I might reasonably hope to sketch be-fore you on this occasion. What I wish to suggest to youare some considerations on the constant motifs involvedin enunciations about œcumenical sacral kingship,which connect deity and king by relations of emanation,analogy, genealogy, metonymy, figuration, andapostolate, all of these involving functional parity be-

tween king and god in their common functional capacityas demiurges of order, cosmic and human. In the mun-dane world, this parity realised by mimesis, by rhetoricalor substantive participation in the common terms heldby both of them: limitless energy, boundless majesty,and absolute virtue.

Let it be said at this stage that I have used the word“enunciations” quite deliberately, as the enunciations ofkingship I have in mind, albeit largely discursive, are alsoiconographic, ceremonial, ritual, and magical, all ofthese equally performing the function of crystallisingroyal energy in tangible and transmissible forms,crystallising it in virtually immobile formal and formulaicmoulds, most visible in iconography, that freeze out his-tory, politics and society and render complete the impec-cability of kingship, immune from pollution, and reflect-ing it in the verbal, iconographic, and ceremonialcultivation of the impeccable majesty attaching to theroyal person.

Before I start reviewing some relevant historicalmaterial I should add the following caveats: I do notmean to imply that all enunciations about kingship aresacral, nor do I by any means wish to imply that all suchenunciations rest by necessity upon the full realisation ofthe despotic potential latent to them. Not all impeccablesacred emperors in Baghdad and Constantinople en-joyed the limitless power or deployed the boundlessnessenergy attributed to them, and the heightened hallucina-tory character of enunciations concerning the sublimityof the imperial office did not often tally with political re-alities: witness, for instance, the conjunction of vox deiand vox populi in the acclamation of Byzantine emper-ors by their assertive and demanding armies. Witnessalso the receipt by overpowering Muslim princes (suchas the saljuqs and the Buyids) of their investiture with al-most absolute rule in Baghdad in the course of humiliat-ing ceremonials before Caliphs dependent upon their

136J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

bounty and protection (this might remind some of us ofthe relationship at certain points in time between theBasileus in Constantinople and Bulgarian and Serbiankings, of the conferment upon Clovis of an honoraryConsulate, or of the so-called Donatio Constantini, onlyrevealed as a fraud by Lorenzo Valla’s argument fromanachronism during the Quattrocento). Witness also theconjunction of divine unction and Frankish esprit declan in Carolingian coronation ceremonies, and, ofcourse the deliciously euphemistic vagueness of dis-course on the term potestas ligendi et solvendi, so veryimportant to the central legal conception Muslim king-ship under the name of ahl al-hall wa’l-‘aqd, and in allcases a polite euphemism for king-makers who were byno means always polite — or consider, indeed, QueenElizabeth II of Great Britain, reigning by Grace of Godyet entirely subject to her Parliament and Prime Minister.

And finally, the reference to the anthropological no-tion of Elementary Forms with which I opened my talkmilitate against, and indeed render virtually irrelevant,the habitual rigidity with which categorical distinctionsare made between polytheistic and monotheistic king-ship, and by extension renders generically connectedByzantine, Muslim and Latin enunciations on sacral king-ship, beyond any civilisational divisions that might beimagined in terms of a totemic geography of Orient andOccident or of Islam, Orthodoxy, and the West.

***

In close connection with the contention I have justmade about the illusory character of certain categoricaldistinctions, arising from institutional academic inertiano less than from ideological and political exigencies isthe main thesis that I wish to propose: Far from being

generically closed in any conceivable manner, monothe-istic kingship in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, andbeyond, is but a constellation of specific inflectionswithin the more general phenomenon or ElementaryForm of sacral kingship, just as monotheism is a specifictheological and cultic inflection within the more generalForm of the theological, political and social manifesta-tions of divinity. For it might very well be asked whetherthe contrast between monotheism and polytheism is atall relevant to notions of divinity in general, quite apartfrom its interest to dogmatic theology and the history ofreligions. It might, further, be maintained that the no-tion of polytheism itself appears as a polemical notionarising from monotheistic self-definition, and is ofdoubtful systematic and analytical value, just as it couldbe maintained that there is little historical force in thedeistic notion, much elaborated in the nineteenth cen-tury, that polytheism is a degenerate form of an originalmonotheism, or of Hume’s theory (later taken up bynineteenth century Muslim reformers such as Afghaniand Muhammad ‘Abduh) that the history of religions isone of evolution from polytheism to monotheism6.

Be that as it may, it can be maintained that, in con-ceptual terms, transitions from sacral kingship of a poly-theistic to one of a monotheistic profession of faith havegenerally been fairly smooth at the conceptual level, andrequired in general what we might characterise as adjust-ments in terms of rhetorical and sometimes institutionaltransferences. The christianisation of Germanic or Slavicpolities are interesting cases. Of these one might almostrandomly to select for consideration a relatively simple,local and clannish polity such as that of Anglo-Saxon En-gland, we would observe a number of patterns superven-ing in the transition between pagan and Christian king-ship which repeated developments in more complex andmore central polities, most specifically that of the centralareas of late Romanity.

137J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

Relationships of filiations as well as transference ofcapacity had related the supreme deity to these Ger-manic kings of England7, whose authority derived fromtheir being sprung from Woden. Of the eight Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies that survive, seven record de-scent from Woden. With the christianisation of thesekingdoms, at least one did not shed these memories,duly inscribed in an appropriate new register, asAethelwulf of Wessex in the ninth century recordedWoden as the sixteenth descendent from Scalf, son ofNoah, born on the Ark during the Deluge, and thereforea collateral cousin of Jesus Christ himself. In all cases, itseems that the authority of Christ, like that of kings, wasunderstood as deriving from the force of descent, he be-ing the Son of God, just as Aethelwulf’s authority derivedfrom his descent, and his status as the kinsman of Jesus,however distant.

Divine capacities were also transferred. God’s charis-matic energy, generically a supreme form of pure energy,passed on to humankind by way of the king’s person —miht, craeft, maegan, corresponding to the xwarra ofIrann gods and kings, often iconographically repre-sented as a rayed nimbus or as a halo, and occasionallyas a hand — was christianised as Grace, which is after alla manifestation of pure energy. To the heavenly monar-chy of God corresponds the mundane dominion of theking who, like the christian God and like Woden and hissubaltern associates before him, is the possessor, protec-tor, governor and wielder, dispenser, and gift-giver, ca-pacities altogether associated with the term frea, usedequally for god and for king. Giftstol was the term usedequally for altar and for throne. And while the Churchdestroyed the sacrificial king in a sacramental sense, theydubbed him Christus Domini, the Lord’s Anointed.

More complex but conceptually analogous were de-velopments in more central lands during Late Antiquity.The period witnessed a wholesale transferrence of the

powers and prerogatives of the many pagan gods to theunique — but nevertheless triune — Christian God andlater to his Muslim cognate Allah, and their subordina-tion under His exclusive preserve in a universe wherethey became demons or jinn — there was never a denialof the existence of these invisible powers, as any readingof Origen, and after him of Eusebius, Augustine, andother the Church Fathers, or of the Koran, would makeclear. The irreducibility of the sacred is tidied up inmonotheism by the ingathering of divine functions andenergies, hitherto dispersed, and their allocation to onedeity, thereby rendering the irreducibility of divinity indi-visible, like the indivisibility of royal power. This matteris betokened by the transfer of attributes, epithets andnames of energy, majesty, protection, destruction, andkingship, from one theological universe to another, suchas the Greek translations of the Old Testament, in whichAdonai becomes kyrios, a term used for various deitiesas well as emperors, and Shaddai becomes Pantocrator,and El Elyon becomes theos hypsystos, a name and celes-tial attribute habitually applied to Zeus8. Similarly, Christand, after him, Constantine, took over wholesale the dis-cursive and some of the iconographikc attributes of SolInvictus9. In an analogous continuity of reference to vis-ible and invisible majesty in transcendence, this theoshypsystos just mentioned became, in the Koran, al-‘Aliy,an exclusive epithet of Allah, as did al-‘Aziz and manyother terms derived from names of particular deities andfrom the attributes of Ba‘l and El in Semitic religions,later being the occasion for philosophical theologies andtheophoric names.

Quite apart from these rhetorical participations andcultic transferences, it must be stressed that late Romanreligions had a pronounced henotheistic tendency thatbecame, with time, fully-fledged monotheism under thecombined impact of oecumenical empire, Stoiccosmopolitism and Neo-Platonism. This henotheistic

138J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

streak, which was clearly evident in imperial Roman no-tions of kingship, can be usefully comprehended underwhat is called the Orientalism of the late empire. I hopeit will be taken for granted that this Orientalism does notindicate the degeneration and adulteration of thingspurely Roman, whatever these may have been, but that itindicates rather the growth of Rome into imperial matu-rity, its de-provincialisation, at a time when the social,economic and geopolitical centre of gravity of the em-pire, and ultimately the imperial residences and the capi-tal itself, moved eastwards. If origins and influences wereto be sought, then these could safely be specified as theadoption under Hellenistic influence, especially that ofthe Seleucids, of imperial norms deriving ultimately fromAchamaenean Iran. This is an influence which was feltquite early: long after the Athenians and theMacedonians and tyrants of Magna Graecia sought toemulate the political arrangements, the architecture, themanners of dress, and the pottery of the Achamaeneansatraps in Anatolia; and long after Cyrus had been set upas an exemplary political figure by Xenophon and afterboth Plato and Aristotle had praised the political arrange-ments of the Iranians and the views of pagan politicalthinkers who thought of God on analogy with the Kingof Kings — long after these events, late republican Ro-mans came to regard rulers, in the Seleucid manner, asthe law animate, as lex animata or nomos empsychos.The term was to remain in use well into the Byzantineempire, exemplified most meaningfully and in complexways by the imperial lawgivers Theodosius and Justin-ian10, and the question of whether the Roman Pope, asthe canonical lawmaker, should not be above the lawwas to remain with latin Christianity well into the HighMiddle Ages. Rulers of imperial Rome were construed asthe mimetic medium of divine virtue and reason; for allhis scepticism about the exhibitionist tendencies andpostures of Roman sovereigns, Plutarch himself con-

strued the just king as eikon theon, and Eusebiusthought God the father to be related to Christ as the Em-peror did to his own icon, an analogy taken up by theCappadocian Fathers. Similarly, Philo regarded such afigure of divinity, in the person of Moses, as nomosempsychos and as o orthos logos 11 — and I quote Philobecause his enormous influence was of special perti-nence to Roman and early Christian conceptions of mon-archy; his idea of cosmocracy and of the divine electionof the Jews was transmuted from an idea restricted to atribal collectivity not much interested in it, to an ecu-menical and universalist idea of dominion.

It will have been noticed that much of the vocabu-lary thus used to enunciate kingship is philosophical,and I shall come to this matter presently. Yet there was amagical and mythological substructure to this philo-sophical elaboration, undertaken by figures such asDiotogenes, Stenidas, and Ecphantus, and in rathermore abstract fashion by Themistius and Iamblichus, interms of the late Neo-Platonic, late Stoic, and Neo-Pythagorean vocabularies which constituted the philo-sophical pillars of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.There was a cultic infrastructure connected with the di-vine philosophical associations of royalty. Let it be re-membered that Alexander sacrificed to Marduk inBabylon in his capacity as the last Achamaenean emperorand Apostle of the great deity, and in Egypt to his fatherRa‘. He was also, on his mother’s side, descended fromPoseidon and hence from Chronos himself, just as JuliusCaesar, who set up for himself an empire-wide cult,hailed from the Iulii, descendants of Romulus, son ofMars: this was a divine connection so real that some le-gions of Augustus used missiles which bore the inscrip-tion “Divum Iulium”, and defeated enemies were sacri-ficed at the altar of Divus Iulius. Not dissimilarly, theEgyptian Ptolemys were sons and daughters of Horus,and, following Seleucid practice, from the death of

139J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

Augustus in AD 14 to the burial in 337 of Constantineshortly after his baptism, 36 of 60 Roman emperors wereapotheosised, as were many members of their families.That the emperors Domitian and Diocletian were termeddominus et deus is entirely characteristic of this mytho-logical and cultic turn.

The cultic aspect is crucial: imperial cults — the aver-sion to which, as is well known, was the litmus-test foridentifying Christians during the various Roman prosecu-tions — were instituted to render worshipful homage tothe idea of universal empire personified by the emperorwho, well into Byzantine times, sent a representation ofhimself or fully expected one to be made available by Ro-man governors or provincial citizens, a statue and lateran icon, to the provinces in order to receive homage tohis holy person, and by implication to the universal em-pire — an instance of civic religion according to Varros’swell-known and analytically most serviceable distinctionin Roman religions between the mythological, the physi-cal, and the civic12. There is a very complex history of thisphenomenon, marked by episodic ebbs and flown, an ef-fervescent variety of local forms and changes of taste forthe divine among the emperors and the populace ofRome and the provinces, not the least significant ofwhich was whether emperors regarded themselves as di-vine, after the Egyptian and the Seleucid fashion, or sim-ply as sacred persons apostolically charged by divinitywith the affairs of the world, after the manner generally— but not exclusively — prevalent among populationsand states of the Near East. Whereas Diocletian, for in-stance, was dubbed dominus et deus, the EmperorJulian, harking back no matter how ambiguously tomore classical ideas of res publica13, preferred to declarein his Epistle to the Alexandrians in 362 that the gods,and above all the great Serapis, had judged fit that heshould rule the world14 — and that as a consequenceRoman citizens must surrender to him the power that

emerges from them. There is not here the implication, aswith Julian’s correspondent Themistius, that the em-peror was of divine origin, and no suggestion, as withEusebius, that Constantine was powered by the HolySpirit. — interestingly enough, the part of Themistius’Second Epistle concerning the divine origin of the kingis absent from the Arabic translation of this text by IbnZur‘a (d. 1056)15. Julian preferred instead a rather morehumble, mimetic role with respect to divinity; as shep-herd and father to men, a mere icon of divinity16, all ofthese attributes of Christ — though he on other occa-sions saw himself as the incarnation of Helios17, an am-bivalence reflecting the incomsummateness of a processas yet incomplete. And while earlier Pagan thinkers likeCelsus had regarded the denial of divine multiplicity tobe an act of sedition because it derogated local gods and,by extension, Romanity itself, later times saw emperorssetting up particular oriental deities as patrons of them-selves and of the empire: Mithras for Diocletian, Serapisand Mithras for Julian, and Sol Invictus, identified with avariety of other deities, for a number of others (includingConstantine).

Yet beyond this variety, there were elements ofunity of direction, a development at once combined anduneven, which characterises the majestic swell of LateAntiquity, an emergent unity which calls up interestingand important questions of periodisation, of delimitingin a complex way a trés longue durée of the sort pro-posed by Jacques Le Goff for the Middle Ages, which Icannot consider at present. Suffice it to say that Late An-tiquity “decanted” — the expression is Le Goff’s18 — thevarious legacies of Antiquity, Greek, Hellenistic, Roman,and Oriental, all of these most intimately and inseparablyimbricated, and that, in so doing, tidied up the civilisedworld of the day in terms of the immanent trends, all in-terrelated, that constituted it: namely, monotheism, ab-solutism, and universalism.

140J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

We have available important studies of the con-junction between these three components, monotheism,absolutism, and universalism, most notably the olderstudy of Erik Peterson19 and the recent work of GarthFowden20. Quite apart from any imputation of causalitybetween monotheism and universalism, which Fowden21

has denied with reference to the restricted tribal politiesof the Israelites, it is important to signal that the trendtowards universalism, syncretistic or homogenising, isevident from the long history of attempts to set up uni-versal empires — first by Cyrus, followed rather incon-clusively by Alexander, on to the Romans following thepax augusti and continuing in claims to universality bythe Byzantines and their tributaries and successors (cop-ied in the West by ideas of the Holy Roman Empire andnotions of translatio imperii), and reaching perhaps itsmost stupendous success under the Caliphate, whichcombined the geopolitical achievement of Cyrus withConstantine’s dream of universal monotheism22.

Questions of causality apart, there can be littledoubt that the crystallisation and the pervasive accentua-tion of divine kingship was closely allied to the universal-ist vocation of empire — what I have called the de-provincialisation of Rome — and that both were to a verylarge extent premised on a number of allied develop-ments relative to the centralisation of provincial rule, theatrophy of civic structures and of evgeretism, and theethnically and culturally homogenising policies of theempire, most saliently under the Antonines and theSeverans. These processes ran parallel, and were alwaysgradual: it is not often not often enough appreciatedthat Constantine was worshipped in his own lifetime,and addressed as theos in his new capital, or that in thefifth century Theodosius still set up flamines to his owncult in the provinces — the cult of the emperor was onlybrought to an official end under Valentinian23 — andthat overall polytheism and monotheism had boundaries

that were altogether porous. Both were elaborated interms of a subordanionist theology that subjected localdeities to a supreme deity, such as Jupiter, Sol, Serapis,or Mithras, local deities being represented by Celsus, forinstance, as satraps of the supreme deity24. In all, the co-herence of the political tradition built around the cult ofemperors gradually gave away to a coherence emergingfrom confessional religions, in such a way that ritual co-herence gave way gradually to a textual, scriptural coher-ence. We should not underestimate the great moment ofsubordinationism with respect to the Emperor’s standingrelative to Christ: that he is Christ’s figure rather than hisepiphany, or that he is the dynamis of the Holy Spirit, isa serious matter which requires close anthropologicaland historical consideration which I cannot initiate now.

The central figure in this development was ofcourse Eusebius25, Bishop of Caesarea and Constantine’spolitical theologian, whose thinking on matters that fol-low was to exercise important influences in both east(on John Chrisostom, among others) and west (on St.Ambrose)26. Building at once on early patristic, late-Neoplatonic subordinationist metaphysics (correspond-ing to Varro’s “physical” religion), on Biblical exegesisand most particularly on Origen’s reclamation ofRomanity in the context of salvation history (this waslater expressed by Augustine in the West27, in his concep-tion of Rome as the Second Babylon, thus forming thecentrepiece of God’s design to conquer the worldthrough her, and transposed by his acolyte Orosius28

into a veritable theology of history, in a line that contin-ues on to John of Salisbury29 and to Dante 30), and fi-nally on the willingness of the Church Fathers such asJohn Chrisostom “unblushingly”31 to place the emperorin the worldly role of God himself, once the empire ap-peared to have been won for Christianity. The result wasthe continuous claim on history for Christian typology,in which history “lapped over”32 into political philoso-

141J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

phy, and a conception of the emperor set in an universaland indeed a cosmic hierarchy premised on the transcen-dent and incommensurable removal of its apex — Christthe Pantocrator and his worldly analogue the Emperor,the earthly Autokrator — from what lies beneath. Bothare equally participants, rhetorically and without regardto the dogmatic distinction between the two, in the com-mon terms of energy and majesty, and both mirror eachother in upholding the principle of monarchy: to theone monarch on earth corresponds the one monarch inheaven, an idea that was to be ceaselessly repeated alikeby Byzantine and Muslim writers on politics. One medi-eval Muslim theologian indeed suggested that the bestproof for the unicity of God was to be had by analogywith the uniqueness of worldly kingship33.

Cosmic and wordly monarchy as the contraries of di-vine and political polyarchy34 corresponds entirely in thisscheme. But this very scheme in its monotheistic inflec-tion renders doctrinally very difficult the identification ofimperial monarchy with divinity or the consubstantialityof kingship with divinity. The quasi-divinisation of Byz-antine emperors was attenuated and ritualised35, beingconverted into sanctity, and what remain of suchdivinisation are figures, eikones, figures no less real andabsolutist for being virtual: figures of mimesis, of emana-tion, of typology, and of magical contiguity between em-peror and cosmocrator. I have already stated that whatremains was rhetorical participation; and if we excludeNeo-Platonic elaborations of the imperial office byEusebius, most particularly in his Tricennial Orations(esp. part 1), in terms of emanation from the divinelogos, we are left only with figuration in which thatwhich is doctrinally and theologically unthinkable andinexpressible is enunciated: this is figuration which ac-quires reality by repetition rather than through the theo-logical justification which is barred to it, a figurationwhose force derives from the illocutionary energy ac-

quired as language, highly formalised and allusive in in-stances such as this, is subjected to a diminution inpropositional energy which is theologically beyond it.

I entirely agree with Gilbert Dagron’s statement that,for Oriental Christians, sacerdotal royalty was neither anidea nor a theory, but rather a figure36 : the emperor asthe ritual figure of Christomimesis, whose sites were ico-nography, ceremonial, metaphor and political etiquette,which enunciated the rhetorical participation of Christand of the emperor in the common terms of energy andmajesty, yielding a field of magical contiguity and thetransferrence within this field of efficacious grace fromGod to the emperor. This was expressed in the confer-ment upon the Basileus of the epithet hiereus by theSynod of Constantinople in 449 and the Council ofChalcedon in 45137, and the application of the qualifierthéos to all matters that pertained to the person of theemperor38, including his icon, which is after all related tohim in very much the same way as he related to God theSon, by figuration and magical participation39. Thus thewide range of other qualifiers studied by OttoTreitinger40: that the emperor is the like of God “in so faras this possible”, that he is an emanation of the Trinity,the Trinity’s elect, king in God and in Christ the eternalking. Thus also is the plastic extension of the emperor’smystical — indeed, mystagogic41 — personality, as fro-zen in ceremonial postures and mimetic tropes wellstudied by André Grabar42. And thus finally, by plausiblemagical exaggeration, was the divine unction received bythe porphyrogennetoi while still in their mothers’wombs43 : magical exaggeration, but also a typologicalvariation on the theme of the Immaculate Conception; itmust not be forgotten that the kings of France fromClovis onwards were anointed with holy oil containedwithin a phial delivered to St. Remy by no less a beingthan the Holy Spirit, and that later the Virgin herself was

142J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

to deliver holy oil to Thomas à Becket for the anoint-ment of English kings44.

The imitation of Christ of which I have been speak-ing was not confined to mysteries, but extended to thevery real ecumenical order whose lynch-pin was the Em-peror, calling up, again typologically, the hierarchical or-der by means of which the cosmocrator orders the uni-verse, just as ancient deities imposed order uponprimordial chaos. The Emperor establishes and main-tains taxiarchia, proper order, ritual and otherwise, instate, society, church and army45. This order, as I havesuggested, is located in the irreducible difference and ge-neric disparity between God and man as between Em-peror and his subjects, premised on a simple structure ofsubordination and superordination. It is as if subjectswere enculturated by the presence of the king who, withhis capacity for violence (and violence, as we learn fromAugustine most especially, is a primary instrument forthe imitation of Christ 46) , alone remains within therealm of nature and outside the compass of culturewhich is guaranteed by his presence. Order is conceivedafter a Neo-Platonic fashion, in which hierarchy is pre-sided over by an imperturable instance removed from itgenerically, in self-referential sacrality, energy in a stateof pristine purity, beyond refrain or reciprocity yet regu-lative of all recall and reciprocity that create culture, mar-shalled by Christ and Emperor for the greater glory ofGod.

Last but not least, this charter for absolutism, oftensurreal and hallucinatory, was as I suggested wedded toa theology of history. Typology is not only a discursivedevice in which allegory moves along the axis of time,but also an intimation of magical participation, as withthe icon, where the figure conjures up the presence ofthe type. It was not only deployed to figure Christ, but tofigure also the dominion of Christ in the context of a sal-vation-historical scheme. In this scheme, imperial

Romanity was the universal premise of salvation withinhistorical time. Byzantine as well as western emperorsfigured not only the timelessness of Christ, but the pre-history and history of his dominions. They were inheri-tors not only of the pax augusti, but also ofveterotestamental kings47, just as the Crusaders too wereto see themselves as the true Israelites48, and as theChurch was the legatee and indeed the typological re-en-actment of Noah’s arc — although, as is very wellknown, conditions differed between Orthodoxy andLatinity on this score. Constantine was a Second Davidand Augustus, and several later Byzantine emperors werecalled a Second Constantine — similarly, Constantine’snew capital was a Second Rome, and a Third was later tobe declared in Moscow.

Without going into the vexed question of so-calledCaesaropapism, the net result of the differences to whichI have just hinted between ecclesiastical arrangements ofthe Orthodox and Latin churches, was that the separa-tion in the West of Church and state, which led to thecreation of an impuissant theocracy, while in Orthodoxythe unity of church and empire led to the history of asomewhat less interesting “war of positions” 49. The con-tinuous assertion of the transcendent status of the em-peror was perhaps most acutely expressed when, afterthe fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453,the Sultan received the monk Gennadius in audienceand granted him the insignia of the patriarchal office, in-cluding his staff and pectoral cross50 — while the Sultan,though styling himself Caesar of the Romans, was not ina position to have himself anointed by the patriarch, andwould not have wished to have arrogated to himself thesacerdotal aspect of the Basileus (which was achieved byat least one Crusader king of Constantinople), he wasstill the instance in political control of the Orthodoxchurch, a fact which led to the emergence of Orthodoxautocephaly everywhere. That apart, time permits me to

143J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

add only that the sacrality of medieval western kings andemperors was rarely formalised and infrequentlyritualised, but was rather diffused, with variations overtime, in a setting of sacrality which englobed these kingsfunctionally 51, rather than being determined by theirown sacral person, a situation which allowed the popesto have an aggressively profane notion of kingship. Andthough the basic flaw of the papal theory was that nopope managed to find “an emperor who would acceptthe subordinate role devised for him”52, the relationshipwas managed by piecemeal rapprochements until thecentral part of the Middle Ages, when as the Sacerdotiumacquired a decided “imperial appearance”, the regnummanaged to acquire only “a clerical touch” 53.

So far, I have said precious little about Islam, andI propose to continue from where I left off with regardto this particular historical experience of monotheistickingship. I have already said that the Muslim Caliphal re-gime had consummated the universalist trends of LateAntiquity and was the culmination of its tendential orien-tation. I have also said that, apart from the historical dis-cussion, I am dwelling upon the enunciative form ofwhat I have repeatedly described as an Elementary Form.Comparatism should be no means be confined to a ge-netic perspective, although I am nevertheless insistingthat there is no crucial generic differentiation betweenMuslim kingship and forms of sacral kingship that pre-ceded it.

The great Franz Cumont once stated that, at the turnof the fourth century, under the Roman EmperorGalerius whose Irannising predilections in matters ofstate were well-known, “ancient Caesarism founded onthe will of the people seemed about to be transformedinto a sort of Caliphate”54. For all its rhetorical flourish,this is a statement of tremendous suggestiveness: it sug-gests that, polemics aside, a certain conceptual con-tinuum relates the Caliphate as a form of sacral kingship

to trends immanent in Late Antiquity which it, in its ownway, completed. This is entirely borne out by history, forit is indeed a fact that the regime of the classical caliph-ate recapitulated and accentuated these trends, formingitself as a specific inflection within them.

What was Islam, after all, but a recovery for monothe-ism of the last remaining reservation of ancient pagan-ism, this being the Arabian peninsula, and most particu-larly its western part, from whence the ruling dynastiesof the Islamic empire originated? Close scrutiny of theemergence of Islam will show that it recapitulated in thenew linguistic medium of Arabic, now become a a lan-guage of a universal high culture, the historical processesI have been describing whereby henotheism,subordinationist theology, and polytheism gave way to auniversalist monotheism correlative with empire. And letit not be supposed that, for all its importance, it was theKoran that gave rise to the Muslim empires of theUmayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad:not only because the Koran is by no means the sum-totalof the Muslim canon, and because for generating a con-cept of a polity it is but stony ground, but also becausethe Koran related to Muslim polities in much the samehighly complex way as the Old and New Testaments re-lated to Christian polities: as a quarry of quotations, ex-amples, and exegetical occasions for the elaboration ofconcepts of public order that do not emerge from thetexts, and when they do so, they do so only partially andto a large extent symbolically and genealogically (I usethe latter term with reference to Pierre Bourdieu). TheKoran was edited during a period which we might callpalaeo-Islamic — a period which, I submit, lasted wellinto the eighth century, giving Muslim monarchs the lee-way to toy with traditions in place, sometimes with inge-nious playfulness, at a time when they had found them-selves suddenly propelled to being masters of most ofwhat mattered in the Late Antique world, from

144J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

Carcassonne to Tibet, in a period of very rapid transfor-mation, and when the prospect of conqueringConstantinople was still very tangible — a fact reflectedin the rebuilding of the centre of their capital Damascusin the first half of the eighth century after a manner thatresembled, typologically and hopefully, the centre ofConstantinople55.

Very much in the way we saw Orthodox polities dis-place matters of enunciating that which is doctrinally in-admissible for monotheism to the realm of hyperbole,we find that the relentlessly hubristic enunciations onthe Caliphate find their proper place in the historicalanalogies and typologies that we find in historical works,in Belles-Lettres, Fürstenspiegel, panaegeric poetry, ad-ministrative manuals, epistolary and testamentary litera-ture, coins, and official documents, and certain theologi-cal and philosophical works, no less than in thenon-discursive media of ceremonial, architecture, courtlyetiquette, emblematic, and caliphal biographies.

In all, kingship, by which is meant absolutism onanalogy with the exclusive singularity of God in the cos-mos and the indivisibility of His sovereignty, is construedas the form of artificial sociality. In this, the monarch-Ca-liph imposes culture, that is to say, order, upon humans,and maintains this cultural order by resort to instru-ments of nature, by the constant use of force and vigi-lance; for mankind is congenitally recidivist, always han-kering after the war of all against all. This is generallypremised on a pessimistic anthropology, perhaps mosteloquently expressed in the statement by the lastUmayyad caliphal secretary Yahyâ b. ‘Abd al-Hamîd al-Kâtib in the middle of the eighth century, that “evil in-heres in men as fire inheres in a flint-stone”. Kingship —and prophecy — are the corrective. Like God, kings andprophets stand at the apex of a hierarchy of the Neo-Pla-tonic type, of which they form no part, with respect towhich they are transcendent, and with which they stand

in no reciprocity, for without absolute monarchy onlychaos is conceivable. This theme of the Caliph as thedemiurge of sociality — of culture — was particularly ac-centuated in Muslim discourses. The Caliph’s transcen-dence figures as an energy yielding a force which acts, bythe violent means of nature, upon human nature in or-der to produce culture, but yet remains beyond this cul-ture as a reserve of untrammelled nature ever producingand maintaining culture: The Caliph is the untameabletamer and the savage domesticator, continuously exercis-ing the corrective primal violence with which chaos wassubdued in primeval times, rather more in the mood ofthe Enuma Elish than that of Greek myths of creation. .This is reflected in the caprice of the Caliph and the pre-cariousness of life around him — a caprice and a precari-ousness which repeat the transcendentally narcissisticamorality of the supreme Koranic and Old Testamentaldeity.

The Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, after the earliest pe-riod of their rule, enhanced the illocutionary power ofthis description by their absence, for they virtually neverappeared in public, and remained instead in the fastnessof their palaces, from whence they radiated the invisiblesacredness and terrible energy of majesty, and withinwhich they instituted palatine ceremonial of consum-mate elaborateness, splendour and solemnity, visually asgrandiloquent as any ceremonial seen inConnstantinople, and on occasion in deliberate competi-tion with it — let us not forget the transplantation ofmany palatine and even bourgeois conventions andmanners of dress and sumptuousness from Baghdad toByzantium. The caliphal presence was often qualified asmuqaddas, sacred, and called the Second Ka‘ba; theCaliph’s face, rarely seen except by his private entourage,was very often qualified as luminous, in line with thelight symbolism of Late Antique kingship with its solarassociations.

145J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

The Caliph’s palatine compounds were often treatedas safe havens for lives and treasures in times of trouble,and Caliph’s tombs in Baghdad were often venerated.Other magical and typological motifs abounded plenti-fully, for the caliphate was also the custodian of holy rel-ics: the chosen ceremonial colour of the ‘Abbasid Ca-liphs, black, supposedly the Prophet’s, was the colourceremonially worn by all public officials, and figured theCaliphate against the grain on their skin, with the differ-ence that certain tissues were reserved for the Caliphs, aswas red footwear. When Ibn Fadlan visited the Bulgars atthe Volga Bend in the middle of the ninth century toforge an alliance against the Khazars, the Bulgar chiefprostrated himself before the black cloak sent him fromBaghdad, as did Saladin in Cairo more than three centu-ries later — just as they would, according to custom,have prostrated themselves before the Caliph’s person,and just as Byzantines would have performedproskynesis before the imperial person and his icon.When in audience, the Caliphs from an uncertain andfairly late date would wear the Prophet Muhammad’sCloak (recently worn by Mullah Omar in Afghanistan —how it might have got to Central Asia I have no way oftelling), and had beside them Muhammad’s staff and be-fore them the Koranic codex of ‘Uthman, the third Ca-liph in succession to Muhammad — the Prophet’s stan-dard only surfaced in the sixteenth century, having beenbought by the Ottomans in a Damascus market, and wasfor the first time displayed during a military campaign inHungary. Ground on which Caliphs sat was hallowed,and letters received from them were boiled and the re-volting liquid drunk, as it brought the drinker theCaliph’s baraka, the benign Fortuna he commandedwhich, unlike the Roman fortuna augusti, had no culticstructure. Indeed, the pleasure and justice of the Caliphcaused prosperity and plenty, by magical means quiteapart from socio-economic considerations.

The Caliphate is therefore an almost primordial of-fice, inscribing itself in a universal history of typology,and this is where political theory and historical theologymeet. Adam was, according to the Koran, God’s first Ca-liph (khalîfa) on earth — his vicar, apostle, viceregent,legatee, and successor, if such could be conceived; hewas, in sum, his figure. The Baghdad Caliphs like thosebefore them were God’s Caliphs as well as Caliphs ofMuhammad, the Seal of the Prophets who inauguratedthe last, universal phase in the history of the world. Thishistory was regarded by Muslims generally as a vast typo-logical drama in which Muhammad recapitulates all pre-vious prophecies and polities and restores them to theoriginal and pristine condition of that primordial reli-gion which is Islam (echoes here of a tradition identifiedwith Origen and Eusebius, but also with Late Antique no-tions of a Perennial Philosophy).

It is in one particular consequence of this double ca-pacity that the distinctiveness of this Muslim inflection ofmonotheistic kingship lies: Caliphs were, first of all, in-stances of mimesis of the divine in their constitutive andpreservative capacities and figures thereof, in the indivis-ible nature of their sovereignty. They are Caliphs ofMuhammad in that they figure, in time, both his univer-salist historical enterprise and his election, which allowsfor the transmission of charisma through a dynastic linerelated to him by blood. Muslim Kingship in its Caliphalform represents God therefore at once directly andthrough the historical mediation of the Muhammadanfact — a fact both of historical theology and of dynasticgenealogy. Unlike Byzantium, this is an election — and Iremind you here of the in vitro unction ofporphyrogennetoi — which does not involve the insinua-tion of the Holy Spirit into the bodies of unsuspectingempresses, although the mythological register takes amore ebullient form among the Fatimid Caliphs of Egyptand Syria (10th-12th centuries). They believed that mem-

146J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

bers of their dynastic line had pre-existed the creation ofthe world, in spectral form in which they persisted untilthe arrival of the appointed time for their successive per-sonal incarnations as Caliphs. The Twelver Shi‘ites sup-posed that the seeds of their individual Imâms had beenphysically extracted from Adam’s body by God beforetime itself was created.

Last but not least — and this, as a totalising historicaltendency, is the crux of the distinctiveness that I shouldlike to convey to you, though in many disparate andunarticulated details many of its elements bear compari-son with Byzantine kingship — the Caliphs wereMuhammad’s Caliphs in that they invigilated the applica-tion of his new dispensation, his sharî‘a, which inciden-tally renders all thought of kings as lex animata incon-ceivable (except among the Fatimids). Muhammad is auniversal historical figure not only because he completedthe great universal cycle of prophecy, but because in sodoing he at once absorbed and elevated prophetic his-tory to its Adamic and Abrahamic beginnings.

I have said that the distinctiveness of the Caliphatewithin the possible structures of monotheistic kingshipresided in the concomitance of both a direct and time-less relationship to God, and a relationship historicallymediated through Muhammad, and that with respect tothe latter, the Caliph was the guardian in his own time ofMuhammad’s dispensation. It was this last tendency thatwas accentuated with time, and most particularly withthe extinction of the ‘Abbadids after seven hundred yearsof continuous rule of varying power and extent, with thedestruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and theexecution of the last Caliph. This nomocratic trend hadexisted for a long time among pietistic and legalisticcircles which were resistant the sacral pretensions of theCaliphate.

Along with the rise of these circles into prominenceas the Muslim priesthood — and I use the term ‘priest-

hood” advisedly, in a sociological and not in a sacramen-tal sense, although Muslim priests are of course also in-volved in practices of magical healing and mediation be-tween individual and God and indeed of a logocraticsacramentalism, the Word of God being to them the onlyauthentic sacrament — this priesthood acquired a stronginstitutional consistency from around the twelfth cen-tury, when the central lands of Islam were overcomewith secular kingship, with so-called sultanism, whichgranted considerable independence in matters of doc-trine, including doctrines of legal order, to this priestlycorporation, to this “sodality’ in the Weberian sense ofthe term. One very important result was that the threecomponents of classical Muslim enunciations of kingshipdiverged: while these had previously been sited as con-tiguous discourses in the same courtly milieu, they nowtook over different institutional sites, with the Sultansbeing given many of the worldly prerogatives of the Ca-liphate, and several of their metaphorical connectionswith divinity as well, in a form that was highly attenuatedin comparison with what had been the Caliphs’: theywere shadows of God and preserving energies, but notin general sacred presences. The prerogative of figuringthe Prophet and his nomocratic dispensation, on theother hand, fell upon the priestly corporation, in con-junction with which the cult of the Prophet itself wasroyalised from the twelfth century onwards. With the dis-placement of Caliphal charisma to the priestly corpora-tion and its endowment with the legalistic form of thesharî`a, came also the displacement of this royalist cha-risma exclusively to the equally absent figure of theProphet, wherein resided henceforth the ElementaryForm of sacral kingship. And whereas previously the Ca-liphate was a technical legal distinction within the largerconcept of kingship, kingship — sultanism — was nowshorn of the mimetic and genealogical prerogatives ofthe Caliphate. What emerged discursively after this dis-

147J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

persion of royalist charisma was a genre of priestly writ-ing on politics called siyâsa shar`îya, a form of legaland scripturalist writing on politics that came into itsown in the thirteenth century, the outstanding Europeananalogue to which is Bossuet’s Politique tirée despropres paroles de l’Ecriture Sainte some four centurieslater.

What I outlined just now corresponds more orless to the picture commonly held of Muslim public or-der and of its Levitical legalism. But this, as I hope tohave shown, was a development that required severalcenturies in order to detach itself from the heritage ofLate Antique kingship, and, in the same movement, fromsacral kingship itself, now transformed into a heathenishveneration of sheer sultanic power. It is this end-resultwhich is probably most present to minds of readers to-day. Yet in all cases, a profound continuity persisted, andI can do no better than quote the great philosopher,theologian and astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi, advisor toHülegü during the siege and sack of Baghdad in 1258,speaking of the person who directs the affairs of theworld with divine support: “Such a person”, he said, inthe terminology of the Ancients, was called AbsoluteKing [al-mata` al-mutlaq: autokrator] ... the Modernsrefer to him as the imam ....Plato calls him Regulator ofthe World [al-mudabbir: oikonomos/hegemon”]56.

Notes:

1 A. M. Hocart, Kingship, Oxford, 1927, p. 72 E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Reli-

gious Life, London, 1915, pp 423-4 and passim3 R. Caillois, L’Homme et le sacré, Paris, 1950, p. 184 M. Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, New York,

1955, p. 345 J. Le Goff, Saint Louis, Paris, Gallimard, 1996, p. 746 G. Ahn, “ ‘Monotheismus’ - ‘Polytheismus’. Grenzen

und Möglichkeiten einer Klassifikation vonGottesvorstellungen “, in Mesopotamica-Ugaritica-Biblica. Festschrift fµr Kurt Bergerhof, ed. ManfriedDietrich & Oswald Lorentz, Neukirchen-Vluyn, VerlagButzon & Bercker Kevelaer, 1993, pp. 1-24(Veröffentlichungen zur Kultur und Geschichte des AltenOrients und des Alten Testaments, Bd. 232), passim

7 For the following, see W. A. Chaney, The Cult ofKingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Berkeley and Los An-geles, University of California Press, 1970, pp. 9, 42, 46-7, 50, ff, 77, 251

8 H. A. Wolfson, Philo, Cambridge, Mass., 1948,vol. 1,pp. 12-13

9 Martin Wallraff, Christus versus Sol.Sonnenverehrung und Christentum in der Spätantike,Mµnster, Aschendorfsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2001(Jahrbuch fµr Antike und Christentum, Ergänzungzband32)

10 J. Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity, Cam-bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 212 ff.

11 G. F. Chesnut, The First Christian Historians:Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius,Paris, Editions Beauchesne, 1977 (Théologie Historique,vol. 46), pp. 134 ff., 144, 150

12 Augustine, De Civ. Dei, vi: 5 ff.

148J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

13 F. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Politi-cal Philosophy. Origins and Background, 2 vols. Wash-ington D.C., Dumbenton Oaks, Centre on ByzantineTrustees on Harvard University, 1966, pp. 73 ff.

14 Works of the Emperor Julian, 3 vols., tr. WilmerCave Wright, London and New York: Heinemann andMacmillan , 1913 (Loeb Classical Library), vol. 3, p. 63

15 J. Croissant, “Un nouveau Discours de Thémistius”,Serta Leondiensa (Bibliothèque de la Faculté dePhilosophie et des Lettres, Université de Liège, XLIV,1930), p. 10

16 A. Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, pp. 131 ff.17 W. J. Malley, Hellenism and Christianity. The Con-

flict between Hellenic and Christian Wisdom in the Con-tra Galileos of Julian the Apostate and the ContraJulianum of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Roma, UniversitàGregoriana, 1978 (Analecta Gregoriana, vol. 210. SeriesFacultatis Theologiae, Sectio B., n. 68), pp. 76 ff., 203

18 J. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, Chicago, 1984,p. 12

19 Der Monotheismus als politiches Problem, Leipzig,1935

20 Empire to Commonwealth, Princeton, 199321 ibid., p. 7122 One scholar only has noted similarities between

Byzantine and Muslim notions relative to this and somerelated questions: A. Vasiliev, “Medieval Ideas of the Endof the World: West and East”, in Byzantion, XVI/2 (1942-43), pp. 462-502; See in general G. Podskalsky, DieByzantinische Reichsideologie: Die Periodisierung derWeltgeschichte in den vier Grossreichen und demtausendjährigen Friedensreiche, Munich, 1972

23 See for instance: G. Bowersock, ‘Polytheism andMonotheism in Arabia and the Three Palestines’, inDumbarton Oaks Papers, 1997, 4 ff; Cameron, Later Ro-man Empire, 124 ff.

24 Among others: H. Chadwick, “Introduction” toOrigen, Contra Celsum, Cambridge, 1953, xvii ff. ;Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 51

25 Among others: T. D. Barnes, Constantine andEusebius, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, passim; Peterson,Monotheismus, pp. 66 ff.

26 Peterson, Monotheismus, pp. 82 ff.27 St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, xviii:22128 Adv. Haer., iii:8, vii:1, and passim29 Polycraticus, v:130 De Monarchia, i: 9 f., ii: 4 ff.31 A. Cameron, Later Roman Empire, p. 13732 Chesnut, The First Christian Historians, p. 13333 All material pertaining to Muslim discourses are de-

rived from A. Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, London, 199734 Cf. Eusebius, in H. A. Drake, In Praise of

Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation ofEusebius’ Tricennial Orations (University of CaliforniaPublications: Classical Studies, vol. 15), Berkeley & LA,University of California Press, p. 87

35 G. Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, Paris, 1996, p. 15036 Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, p. 18437 A. W. Ziegler, “Die byzantinische Religionspolitik

und der sog. Cäsaropapismus”, in: E. Koschmieder (ed.),Festgabe fµr Paul Diels, Mµnchen 1953, 81-97, pp. 93-4

38 Ahlweiler, L’ideologie politique de l’empirebyzantin, Paris, 1975, p. 141

39 Among others, St. John of Damascus, On the Di-vine Images. Three Apologies against Those who attackthe Divine Images, tr. David Anderson, Crestwood, N. Y.,St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980, passim

40 Die oströmische Kaiser- und Reichsidee nach ihreGestaltung im höfischen Zeremoniell, Jena, 1938; 2nded., Darmstadt: Hermann Gentner Verlag, 1956, passim

41 ibid., p. 12842 L’empereur dans l’art byzantin, Paris, 193643 Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, p. 61

149J S R I • N o. 10 / Spring 2 0 0 5

44 J. Le Goff, “Introduction”, to M. Bloch, Les roisthaumaturgiques, Paris, 1983, p. xvii; idem., “Aspectsreligieux et sacrés de la monarchie française du Xe auXIIIe siècle”, in A. Boureau & C.-S. Ingerflom (eds.), Laroyauté sacrée dans le monde chrétien, Paris: Ecole desHautes Etudes en Sciènces Sociales, 1992, p. 20

45 Ahlweiler, L’ideologie politique, pp. 136 f.46 K. F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform

in the West, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982,pp. 82-93

47 Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, pp. 21 ff. and passim ;Le Goff, Saint Louis, pp. 388 ff.; J. M. Burns in idem(ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval PoliticalThought, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 136 f.

48 Among others, Le Goff, Saint Louis, p. 17049Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, pp. 312 ff.50 S. Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, Cam-

bridge, 1990. pp. 155 ff.

51 M. Boureau, “Un obstacle à la sacralité royale enOccident. Le principe hiérarchique”, in Boureau &Ingerflom (eds.), La royauté sacré, pp. 29 ff.

52I. S. Robinson, “Church and Papacy”, in Burns(ed.), Cambridge History of medieval political thought,p. 296

53 E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton,1957, p. 193; Le Goff, “Introduction” to Bloch, Rois, p.xxii

54 F. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in RomanPaganism , Authorized translation [1911], New York,Dover Publications, 1956, p. 141

55 B. F. Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus.Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture,Leiden, Brill, 2001(Islamic History and Civilization,Studies and Texts, vol 33), passim

56 The Nasirean Ethics, tr. G. E. Wickens, London,1964 p. 192