stand alone; the organisation of a spiritual and secular aristocracy is necessarily and invariably hierarchical.
Medieval Christianity, the Catholic church, is essentially aristocratic. Not merely does there exist a temporal juxtaposition of political and ecclesiastical aristocracy; the union between the two forms is intimate and organic. Divine right, whether political or priestly, is vested in but few hands; physical and spiritual authority has in the past inevitably taken an aristocratic and hierarchical form, culminating in absolute monarchy dlike in state and church. ("Legitimists need a master to enable themselves to have servants," wrote Anzengruber.) Thomas Aquinas found arguments, not only in favour of inflicting the death penalty upon heretics, but also in proof that slavery was a natural institution, the Catholic Christian being in this matter perfectly at one with the pagan Aristotle.[1]
The political and social aim of democracy is to abolish a relationship of subjection and rule. The derivative meaning of the term democracy is "people's rule." Modern democracy does not aim at rule at all, but at administration, at the administration of the people, by the people, for the people. How this new conception, this new estimate, of state organisation and social organisation can be carried out in practice, is no mere question of power; it is a difficult problem of administrative technique. Since the days of Rousseau, philosophers and statesmen have been concerned with the problem of direct and indirect government and administration.
- ↑ De Maistre, the exponent of postrevolutionary theocracy, writing to Count J. Potocki in 1810, formulated as follows the intimate relationship between Political aristocracy and ecclesiastico-religious aristocracy: "Le patricien est un prêtre laïque; la religion nationale est sa première propriété et la plus sacrée, puisqu'elle conserve son privilège qui tombe toujours avec elle. Il n'y a pas de plus grand crime pour un noble que d'attaquer les dogmes." Compare what James I said at the Hampton Court conference (I quote from S. R. Gardiner's History of England): "At the word Presbyters James fired up. He told the Puritans that they were aiming at 'a Scottish Presbytery, which,' he said, 'agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the devil. . . . Then Jack and Tom, and Will and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up, and say, "it must be thus"; then Dick shall reply, and say, "Nay, marry, but we will have it thus."' . . . More and more the maxim, 'No Bishop, no King,' became the rule of his conduct." Compare, again, with this utterance Napoleon's concordat with the pope, which contains (§§ 6 and 7) the following oath for the bishops: "{{lang|fr|Si dans mon diocèse ou ailleurs, j'apprends qu'il se trouve quelque chose au préjudice de l'Etat, je le ferai savoir au gouvernement."
