The Ghibelline Kernel

According to the Ghibelline theology, the Empire was an institution of supernatural origin and character, like the Church...It had its own sacred nature, just as, during the Middle Ages, the dignity of the Kings themselves had an almost priestly nature...On this basis, the Ghibelline emperors - who were the representatives of a universal and supernational idea, embodying a lex animata in terris [a living law on earth] - opposed the hegemonic claims of the clergy.

-Julius Evola, from Men Among the Ruins

The ideal of the empire reemerged one more time in the Ghibelline Middle Ages with the same metahistorical content, that is, as a supernatural universal institution created by Providence as a remedium contra infirmitatem peccati in order to straighten the fallen human nature and direct people to eternal salvation. This ideal was for all practical purposes paralyzed both by the Church and by historical circumstances, which precluded its comprehension as well as its effective realization according to its higher meaning. Dante, for instance, from a traditional point of view was correct in claiming for the empire the same origins and supernatural destiny of the Church. He was also correct in talking about the emperor as one who, "owning everything and no longer wishing for anything else," is free of concupiscence, and who can therefore allow peace and justice to reign and thus strengthen the active life of his subjects; after the original sin, this life can no longer resist the seductions of cupiditas unless a higher power controls it and directs it.

Although he expressed traditionally correct views about the empire, Dante Alighieri was unable to carry these ideas beyond the political and material plane. In Dante's view, the emperor's "perfect possession" is not an inner possession, typical of "those who are" but it is rather a territorial possession. Also, the cupiditas that he abhors is not the root of an unregenerated life tied to the law of becoming and lived out in a naturalistic state, but rather the cupiditas of the princes competing for power and riches. Again, according to him, "peace" is that of the "world," which constitutes the anticipation of a different order beyond that of the empire and of a contemplative life in an ascetical Christian sense.

Tradition lives on, however, although only in faint echoes. With the Hohenstaufen dynasty Tradition had a last bright flicker; eventually the empires would be replaced by "imperialisms" and the state would be understood only as a temporal, national, particularistic, social, and plebeian organization(28).

...The Guelph(Gregorian-Thomist) view is the expression of an emasculated spirituality to which a temporal power is superimposed from the outside in order to strengthen it and render it efficient; this view eventually replaced the synthesis of spirituality and power, of regal supernaturality and centrality typical of the pure traditional idea. The Thomist worldview attempted to correct such an absurdity by conceiving a certain continuity between state and Church and by seeing in the state a "providential" institution. According to this view, the state cannot act beyond a certain limit; the Church takes over beyond that limit as an eminently and directly supernatural institution by perfecting the overall sociopolitical order and by actualizing the goal that excedit proportionem naturalis facultatis humanae. While this view is not too far off from traditional truth, it unfortunately encounters, in the order of ideas to which it belongs, an insurmountable difficulty represented by the essential difference in the types of relationship with the divine that are proper to regality and to priesthood respectively. In order for a real continuity, rather than a hiatus, to exist between the two successive degrees of a unitary organization (Scholasticism identified them with state and Church), it would have been necessary for the Church to embody in the supernatural order the same spirit that the imperium, strictly speaking, embodied on the material plane; this spirit is what I have called "spiritual virility." The "religious" view typical of Christianity, however, did not allow for anything of this sort; from Pope Gelasius I onward the Church's claim was that since Christ had come, nobody could be king and priest at the same time. Despite her hierocratic claims, the Church does not embody the virile (solar) pole of the spirit, but the feminine(lunar) pole. She may lay claim to the key but not the scepter. Because of her role as mediatrix of the divine conceived theistically, and because of her view of spirituality as "contemplative life" essentially different from "active life" (not even Dante was able to go beyond this opposition), the Church cannot represent the best integration of all particular organizations - that is to say, she cannot represent the pinnacle of a great, homogenous ordinatio ad unum capable of encompassing both the peak and the essence of the "providential" design that is foreshadowed, according tot he abovementioned view, in single organic and hierarchical political unities.

If a body is free only when it obeys its soul - and not a heterogeneous soul - than we must give credit to Frederick II's claim, according to which the states that recognize the authority of the Empire are free, while those states that submit to the Church, which represents another spirituality, are the real slaves(78).

-Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World