second marriage comprises also the burning of Moscow and the battle of Leipzig. The history of the Papacy is, right into the eighteenth century, that of a few noble families which competed for the tiara in order to found princely family-fortunes. This is true equally of Byzantine dignitaries and English premiers (witness the Cecils) and even, in numerous instances, of great revolution-leaders.
Of all this the priesthood (and philosophy so far as it is priesthood) is the direct negative. The Estate of pure waking-consciousness and eternal truths combats time and race and sex in every sense. Man as peasant or noble turns towards, man as priest turns away from, woman. Aristocracy runs the danger of dissipating and losing the broad being-stream of public life in the petty channels of its minor ancestors and relatives. The true priest, on the other hand, refuses in principle to recognize private life, sex, family, the "house." For the man of race death begins to be real and appalling only when it is death without heirs — Icelandic sagas no less than Chinese ancestor-worship teach us this. He does not entirely die who lives on in sons and nephews. But for the true priest media vita in morte sumus; what he shall bequeath is intellectual, and rejected woman bears no part in it. The phenomenal forms of this second Estate that occur again and again are celibacy, cloister, battlings with sex-impulse fought to the extreme of self-emasculation, and a contempt for motherhood which expresses itself in orgiasm and hallowed prostitution, and not less in the intellectual devaluation of sexual life down to the level of Kant's vile definition of marriage.[1] Throughout the Classical world it was the rule that in the sacred precinct, the Temenos, no one must be born or die. The timeless must not come into contact with time. It is possible for the priest to have an intellectual recognition of the great moments of generation and birth, and to honour them sacramentally, but experience them he may not.
For while nobility is something, priesthood signifies something, and this alone would be enough to tell us that it is the opposite of all that is Destiny and Race and Estate. The castle, with its chambers and towers, walls and moats, tells of a strong-flowing life, but the cathedral, with its vaulting and pillars and choir, is, through and through, Meaning — that is to say, Ornament — and every venerable priesthood has developed itself up to that marvellous gravity and beauty of bearing in which every item, from facial expression and voice-inflection to costume and walk, is ornament, from which private life and even inward life have been eliminated as unessential — whereas that which a ripe aristocracy (such as that of eighteenth-century France) displays and parades is a finished living. It was Gothic thought that developed out of the priest-concept the character indelebilis, which makes the idea indestructible and wholly independent of the worthiness of its bearer's life in the world-as-
- ↑ As a treaty of reciprocal possession by the two parties which is made effective by the reciprocal use of their sex-properties.
