WHEN THE FUNDIES RULED

The American fundamentalists want a modern-day totalitarian theocracy and often claim that is what the Founders wanted. That of course is nonsense but I wanted to find out if there had been a period in the West when something like that ocurred. Russell Kirk recommended the historical work of Christopher Dawson, so I read one of them, "Religion and the Rise of Western Culture." According to Dawson, there was a period when the Church and the State were united, just as D. James Kennedy wished. This excerpt is from pages 88 and 89 of the hardcover edition:


"The appeals of Popes Stephen II and Paul I to King Pepin and that of Hadrian I to Charlemagne created a new political bond between the Papacy and the Frankish monarchy and ultimately led to the destruction of the Lombard kingdom, the abolition of the Byzantine sovereignty over Rome and Ravenna and the recognition of the king of the Franks as the patron and protector of the Holy See. In return, the Pope accepted the control of the Carolingian monarchy over the property and personnnel of the Church, and the way was prepared for the establishment of the new Western Empire, which gave institutional form and ritual consecration to the new relation between the Papacy and the Frankish kingdom.


For the new Empire was an essentially theocratic institution. It expressed both the new conception of Christendom as the ultimate social unity, and the sacred character of the ruler as the divinely appointed leader of the Christian people. The traditional expressions that convey the sacred or numinous nature of the imperial power sacrum imperium, sancta majestas, divus Augustus, and the like, which had been preserved in the Byzantine Empire—acquired a new significance in the West, for, as we see from Alcuin's correspondence,'the conception of the theocratic mission of the Frankish monarchy preceded Charles's assumption of the imperial title and was psychologically its cause rather than its consequence. In fact the fusion of the temporal and spiritual powers was far more complete in the Carolingian state than it had been in the Christian barbarian kingdoms, or even in the Byzantine Empire. The legislation of Charles the Great, which was of such importance for the development of Western culture, is the supreme expression of this theocratic conception of authority. It is the legislation of a unitary Church State and covers every aspect of the common life of the Christian people from economics and police to liturgy and higher education and preaching. In the same way the administration of the Carolingian state was equally unitary, since the bishop, no less than the count, was appointed and controlled by the emperor and acted with the Count as joint representative of the imperial authority. "

This period lasted from 800 A.D. until the fall of Charles III in 887.