This chapter, recounting Hanno's conversation with Cardinal Richelieu, creates the impression of abruptly jumping the narrative into comparatively modern history although it is set only seventy years after Asagoa's and Tu Shan's sojourn on the foothills of the Tibetan mountains. Times change more quickly in some parts of the world than in others. That is all.
I never knew Richelieu's full name or that he was a duke as well as a Cardinal. Church-state separation!
James Joyce wrote:
O Ireland my first and only love
Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove!-copied from here.
(I had thought that these lines ended with "land" and "hand," not with "love" and "glove," so it has been helpful to look them up.)
Hanno approaches Richelieu not because he is a clergyman - a potential Pope! - but because he wields power in turbulent times. The French Revolution is just under a century and a half away - a very short time in history or for an immortal. Richelieu shrewdly decides against risking even greater turbulence. The existence of immortals remains a secret until a remote future.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think you are projecting back into the past your preferred views--ideas which 17th century had never heard of and would dislike informed of them. So it was not thought unusual for bishops to sometimes be prime ministers. I also point out most Protestants, such as Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, did not object to state controlled churches, as long as they were the ones doing the controlling. Luther wrote a book defending the idea of Protestant state churches. Protestants who opposed this were mostly groups which failed to take over a state.
It was actually the Catholic Church which came closest to "separation of Church and State," because of her long history of resisting attempts by any State at controlling her. Not always successfully, as in times when the Papacy had to grudgingly agree to, say, Spain or France nominating the bishops (which is what the Maoists in China are doing). But, always the long term goal of the Church has been to extricate herself from the clutches of any State.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Weren't the Guelphs and Ghibelines about that issue?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Partly, yes, because of the Popes fear that if Emperor Frederick II became supreme in both northern Italy as well as the southern half of the peninsula, the Kingdom of Sicily, the Papacy would fall under his domination. But plenty of merely local feuds and vendettas got mixed up in this conflict.
See Anderson's "Amazement of the World," and Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, both of which touches on these issues.
Ad astra! Sean
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