What was there so significant in this doctrine of Necessity, which contemporaries labelled as a peculiar Ghibelline invention, and took to be a slogan of the Hohenstaufen’s court, so characteristic that forged letters and exercises in style which sought to catch the note of the Hohenstaufen chancery rarely forgot to drag in the necessitas rerum? People have often dubbed Frederick II an Apostle of Enlightenment. He was the most many-sided man of his age and unquestionably also the most learned, a philosopher and dialectician trained not only in scholastic and classical learning but also in the learning of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes. In Frederick’s scheme of State-Wisdom, Necessitas represents the essential watchword necessary to every movement of enlightenment, to every effort, that is, to break asunder mental bonds felt to be repressive and against nature—Necessitas, the implicit inevitability of things, which weaves the threads of Fate in accordance with the law of cause and effect; the Law of God, the Law of Man, the Law of Nature, in sum the fitness of things. How revolutionary this doctrine was, needs no emphasis. As long as Miracle held the field, world-creative, world-preserving, all causation could be abrogated in favour of the providential; natural consequences explained as divine intervention. No one wished to think it otherwise—even if he had had the power—for no importance attached to other things; the God he sought, the God in whom he believed, revealed himself not in the law of cause and effect but in the marvels of divine grace. As long as the causal relationships of phenomena sheltered behind the miraculous, man had no perception of human fate: the most eventful life was full of magic and fairy tale—never fateful, never ruled by its own laws, never “demonic.”
The doctrine of Necessity made for enlightenment in so far as the recognition of natural laws inherent in things themselves, broke the spell of magic. In this sense Frederick II, the vir inquisitor, as his own son terms him, may be called an Apostle of Enlightenment, or to be more accurate: he helped the cause by raising knowledge to the same plane as magic. For although he began by dissolving magic and myth and miracle, he utilised and realised them too, and even created more; he did not destroy the miraculous, but he placed the scientific alongside it, and thus called into existence one of those rare and priceless transition moments in which all and everything is valid simultaneously: myth and insight, faith and knowledge, miracle and law, corroborating yet belying each other, co-operating yet conflicting. Such was the atmosphere in which Frederick moved and had his being—astoundingly learned yet childishly naive, clearsighted yet credulous: at once stark and hard and passionate. Such too was the air which Dante breathed.
The knowledge of the inevitability of Law throughout the whole realm of Nature, subjected life to these same laws which governed the rest. When Frederick breathed Necessitas, the unalterable laws of Nature, as a power unto the structure of his State, he evaded, as he had also done in the case of Justitia, the medieval conception of Nature as a Duality—a state on the one hand of mortality and sin, as far as mankind was concerned, and on the other of immortality and sanctity as far as God was concerned. Frederick II never attacked this conception. He demonstrated the same natural force and natural law operative in the higher and the lower spheres, potent throughout the entire Cosmos—Necessitas. Where this law held sway there existed also human fate, primarily revealed in the Emperor himself as he expounded and explained the meaning of the present need.
Frederick II treated the inevitability of himself and of his state as a matter of immense importance, an affair of World Necessity, he himself becoming the Fate Incarnate of his subjects. The imperial doctrine, that without an Emperor the world would perish of self-annihilation, showed to what degree the Emperor was Fate; and Frederick states unambiguously in his laws, “the subjects, under God, draw breath only by the force of the illustrious Caesar.” The fideles, the faithful and the true, had no destiny of their own; the lex regia had committed them into the Emperor’s hand and their fate fulfilled itself in his, whose “life was the life of all.” As is inevitable in this type of autocracy he was the sole and only individual in his State, because he and he only is a “One, that is not a fraction of another”—to quote Dante’s phrase—he and he alone had direct access to God. On his dangerous, threatening, icy heights he alone perceived the free towering summit of the world, earthly need and earthly development, the rarefied air of World-Necessity, the inexorable operation of the forces of the upper and lower spheres comprised within himself. None has ever experienced so directly in his own person as this star-reading Hohenstaufen, the fates of Heaven and of Earth; he felt himself bound with God and with the stars in their courses in the march of inalterable law. He is the mediator, the expositor, the interpreter who observed the paths of the heavenly bodies to ascertain the future of himself and of the world, and conversely to approximate the course of finite things to the courses of the stars. Such interplay between the individual man and the universal law makes possible the beginning of Doom and Fate. All great men who have grasped the cosmos as one gigantic whole have been, each after his kind, of the same opinion as Frederick II, that “by the indication of the heavenly will the position of the planets affects the welfare of the lower bodies.” It was natural that this blending of heavenly and earthly nature was accomplished in the Emperor as the peak of the universal edifice, in the person who because of his dual nature was accorded the character of a kind of angel or genius, whom men called a “cherub” and even compared to the Saviour. In this blending of the eternal nature, the “better nature” as Frederick II styled it, with the temporal nature of man, degenerate from the original model, lies the purpose and aim of the earthly state. The unity which Frederick II strove to create, of Human Law, Divine Law, and Natural Law, which he at first himself lived, is clearly expressed in the words of a chronicler: “This Emperor, the true Ruler of the World, whose fame extends through the whole circuit of the earth, was convinced that he could approximate his own nature to the heavenly nature, perhaps by his experience in Mathematics.”
It is unquestionable that Frederick did hold this belief: that he even strove to reverse the process and to approximate the nature of God to his own imperial nature. He took a much more anthropomorphic view of the Deity in action than earlier times had done. In the Book of Laws he unhesitatingly takes up his position to the philosophical query of the day: Did God create the World or did God only mould existing primeval matter? God fashioned existing matter, he says—that is: just like the Emperor! In another way he strives to set God his limits. The preface to the Liber Augustalis places in tense proximity the two powers who founded the ruler’s office, “the imperative necessity of things and not less the inspiration of the divine foresight.” No opposition was intended. The inherent law of Nature was not distinct in action from the divine foresight. Nature obeyed her own law, the imperative necessity of things, and if God were not to destroy his own creation he could not act against the laws of Nature: God is thus a slave to the law of his own creation. This was no denial of the divine Freewill: for God obeyed no other law than that which he had himself wished and foreseen, his own divine law. Here was the same mystery of obedience and freedom that was valid for the Emperor who was also “father and son, lord and servant of his own laws.” He would not have submitted to the position if he had thereby ceased to be a symbol of the Deity. The Emperor’s laws corresponded to the Necessitas of his creature the State, as God’s law resembled the Necessitas of the divine creation—Nature. There is here no echo of the classical thought: that even the Gods cannot fight against Necessitas. The mystery of freedom and law is to be here understood wholly in the Christian sense. A later contemporary of the Emperor’s thus sets it forth: The king—he says—is obedient to no man, but to God and to the Law. The king ascribes to the Law only what the Law ascribes to the king. “And that the king must be beneath the Law, though he stand in the place of God, is clearly demonstrated by Jesus Christ in whose room the king rules on earth, since the Son of God himself… was willing to be under the Law.”
; The mystery of salvation and redemption for the Emperor and for the earthly State lies, therefore, in the fulfilling of the Law. A capricious God—however merciful—working miracles and not amenable to Law, would be intolerable; an arbitrary Providence, acting without regard to reason or the laws of Nature, would rend a state asunder. That was perfectly clear to Frederick. Though the Emperor would have been loath to forego the personal attentions of a wonder-working Providence which had been ceaselessly manifest in his own life, he firmly denied the possibility of any supernatural power intervening directly in the State and not through its head, an irresponsible miraculous Providence acting in defiance of the laws of reason and of nature. Frederick abolished trials by ordeal—not because they “tempted God,” as Pope Innocent III expressed it, but because they defied nature and reason. “How could a man believe that the natural heat of glowing iron will become cool or cold without an adequate cause… or that, because of a seared conscience, the element of cold water will refuse to accept the accused.” Mockingly the Emperor continues: “These judgments of God by ordeal which men call ‘truth-revealing’ might better be styled ‘truth-concealing.’” Similarly, he did away with the legal duel, another type of ordeal, in future only permitted in case of treason. This was only logical and, moreover, characteristic, for this duel was a Divinatio and concerned the sacred and divine person of the Emperor himself, in which case human knowledge did not come in question, and only God could intervene.
On purely rational grounds love-potions were forbidden, and many other ordinances were issued: no miracle was tolerated in the State. It would have undermined the regularity of the State if God’s Providence, instead of being itself Law, had by miracles disturbed the operation of Justice, the State God.
God’s Foresight as Law—that is: a Providence continuously and actively aiming at a state and world order obedient to law; a Providence therefore indistinguishable from the Law of Nature because the natural order was also the completely divine order—such a Providence is called Reason. Scholastic learning defined it: “Providence is the Reason of a purposeful order of things.” The Hohenstaufen Court disputed eagerly about the “Aim in Nature.” If, however, Providence in its working was indistinguishable from the Law of Necessity, we must not be surprised occasionally in Manfred’s writings to meet with Ratio, where in the imperial formularies of his father—at once more comprehensive, more practical and more profound—Necessitas still reigned.
Familiar circumstances repeat themselves in the question of Providentia, who, with Justitia and Necessitas, form the trinity of state-creating forces. On the one hand the image was retained: the Provisio, the world plan of God, was mirrored on earth in the Provisio, the state plan of the Emperor. Whereas, however, scholastic philosophy rigorously distinguished the two and expressly designated the one temporal and the other eternal, the Emperor set all this aside and emphasised the practical extension of Provisio: “as executors of Divine Providence the rulers assigned fate, share and rank to the peoples, as befitted each.” In this also the Emperor was the mediator and interpreter of the divine plan who, as well as Justitia and Necessitas, embodied in himself the Divine Providence as far as this aimed at the ordering of the State. Providence was here conceived in her specifically state-creating capacity, as a continuously-active force, and correlated with the Emperor. Yet Frederick II had assuredly not eliminated the Providence of God, active in beneficent miracle; he claimed to rule “by the Grace of God” like every other medieval prince. Divine Providence had singled him out, him only, and elevated him directly to the throne, and the marvel of her grace had enveloped the last of the Hohenstaufens in a mist of magic glory far beyond that of any other prince, far from the ken of the profane. The purposeful active Foresight of God did not enshroud the Emperor but revealed herself in him as the highest Reason: “Leader in Reason’s path” he has been called.
It is almost superfluous to distinguish between this and the later rationalism. Reason is here conceived as the highest illumination of the specially favoured ones, the Emperor in particular, and this is her first appearance; she is still a shy, remote, ultimate goal for man into whom God might enter in this guise. Reason was in no wise merely a means; the goal by no means merely welfare and advantage. The “means” in Frederick’s State was Justitia, which also was once “Goal.” Ratio therefore had value only in relation to Law and Right. “Justly and reasonably” (juste et rationabiliter) is an age-old juxtaposition, and the new thing is this, that Justice and Reason are now linked with the Law of living Nature, with Necessity. It is Law that first yields these juxtapositions: the strong emphasis on Ratio emanates from the jurists of Bologna and the blending in Justice of Nature, Reason, Foresight, was a product of Roman law. All these equal forces frequently merged in each other: “the Emperor receives his impulse from Providence” is a frequent assertion; another time “the Emperor is impelled to action by Reason, not distinguished from Nature.” Ultimately it all points to this: Justice was the living Deity. She varied with the varying need of the State and was thus linked with mortal life. Justice again was subservient to divine Reason which linked her to the immortal—a reflection of the Emperor himself: “Although our illustriousness is free of every law, yet it is not exalted above the dictates of Reason, herself the Mother of all Law.” The Emperor was thus the image of God by his bondage to Reason, above which God does not soar, for God and Reason are one. With the new Justice, incarnate in the Emperor, and placed like him between the Law of God and the Law of Nature, the gulf was bridged that had yawned between positive or human law and the eternal divine or natural law: an emancipating achievement of Frederick II.
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Before passing to the goal of the imperial doctrine of salvation we must review the whole magnificent structure of his State—like every work of art, a unity. The postulates were a Tyrannis which was part of an Empire, a transition period between two epochs, a philosopher as king. It is vain to question whether Frederick’s Sicilian State belongs to the Middle Ages or to the Renaissance: founded in the fulness of time it belongs to neither—and to both. Sundered from the Middle Ages in this: that the State bore in its own bosom its own goal and spiritual meaning, and that the prince instead of steering his kingdom with a view to salvation in the next world, drew God down into the earthly State and represented him therein. Another innovation: this State throbbing with living forces, associated with a third strange power, the Law of Nature, with the medieval duality of the Law of God and the Law of Man. The State thus acquired depth, and the embodied trinity made possible a living circulation of forces. All this smacks of the Renaissance. The Renaissance State, however, completely lacked the hieratic element of the priestly-imperial Sicily, and lacked too the actual or imaginary breath and universality conferred by the Imperium. The Renaissance State was a means and embraced no world: the prince, the individual of the Renaissance, might be cosmopolitan and of cosmic importance—but not the State.
It is a matter of indifference whether we consider the chief importance to lie in Frederick’s adaptation of the conceptions of Roman law, or the Arab influx of Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic ideas, or the adoption of the Christian priestly elements: for all these are welded into a new unity; firm and stern and clear is the imperial Law-State based on the three world forces: Necessitas, Justitia, Providentia. This trinity of power pulses through the state in indistinguishable rhythm, recurs in every part as the Three-in-One of Natural Law, Divine Law, Human Law. The absolute symmetry of this construction, in which the upper and the lower spheres are related like reflections in a mirror and yet together form a whole, would, if graphically rendered, recall the architectural symmetries of the Renaissance. For these three forces rule in the Universe as in the State, stand above the Emperor and below, flow as power through the mediator from the heavenly into the earthly kingdom and back again, fed upon by land and people: each acting on the other and acted upon by the other.
This State was a “work of art” not because of its skilful
administrative methods, but because the union of the laws of God, Man, and Nature made it an approximation to an ideal original. Consciously or unconsciously this new monarchy served as a model and a standard for centuries. This Justice-State of the Hohenstaufen Emperor almost seemed to be a late realisation of the picture that Plato had once borne to Sicily in his search for Dikaiosyne, and which Plotinus centuries later sought to realise in Campania on the Platonic model. The ground was strangely well prepared, and Frederick II may well have felt that he had created something approaching the “ideal state” when he had the entry made in his Book of Laws: “Sicily shall be a mirror of likeness for all who marvel at it, the envy of princes, the pattern of kingdoms.”
Frederick II remodelled Italy on the Sicilian pattern. The dream which was assuredly present in the mind of the Hohenstaufen—to enforce these same proportions on the whole earth “throughout the Roman Empire stretching from sea to sea”—was not advanced till Dante painted his immeasurably powerful picture of the one Roman World-monarchy: not by a long way so Utopian a dream as is sometimes supposed. For the poet’s model State had its prototype in reality, had been lived, no less than the platonic State of Plato. His work is called de Monarchia not de Imperio, and in its treble subdivision we see the reflection of the triple power of the Hohenstaufen monarchy. In the first book of this State Gospel Dante treats of “The Necessity of Monarchy”; in the second he seeks to prove that Justice has been from the beginning inherent in the Roman Empire; and in the third that the Emperor has been immediately appointed by God as the executor of the world—directing Divine Foresight and the guide to the highest reason. Dante seeks proofs, justification for monarchy. Frederick had created monarchy, albeit on a smaller scale. The three essential forces Necessitas, Justitia, Providentia, are identical in Dante’s vision and in Frederick’s State. True, the poet’s writing exhibits not only the extension of this complex of power to the whole world, but at the same time its concentration in one single person, the Individual. That is the culmination: the world as one unified State of immense extent and therewith the unity and harmony of the whole in each unit. Since the days of Plato and of Dante the Cosmos has never again been so envisaged and so expounded as a living State and the State as Cosmos. Frederick II, the Man of Action, only outlined this extension, this concentration: on the one hand he founded the colossal pan-Italian Signoria, on the other he scarcely wished and certainly did not achieve the concentration of the whole in any individual—except himself. He himself was the first whose soul was saved by the Sacrament of the State.
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