Main news for 18 April 2013

What can and what can a ruler not do, even an absolute monarch, the head of a great power of his time? Reading some chapters from the Book of Daniel, at times it appears that he can do almost nothing. Or at least that he cannot do the main thing: make the decision that in a concrete situation seems to him the only right one. So it is with Darius: he does not want Daniel's death, he would gladly change the decision he had previously made and cancel the decree he himself had issued, but he is unable to do so. The laws accepted in the Persian Empire were irrevocable, and even the king could do nothing about it.

It is hard today to say with certainty whether this was actually so, or whether before us is one of the many legends about the Persian Empire and its rulers. But in this case it does not matter: whatever the case, the author of the book noticed one characteristic feature of the position of a ruler standing at the head of any state that lives according to the laws of the untransformed world. He has power neither over himself nor over the situations in which he finds himself as ruler. And the point here is not the sacredness of laws or authority, and not the fact that, as the well-known saying has it, "the retinue makes the king."

Of course, one can speak in a certain sense and in certain eras about the sacredness of laws, and the influence of a ruler's circle on the ruler is a reality with which any ruler has to reckon. But both of these, and much else that any ruler faces, ultimately represent nothing other than what could be called the logic of power. Of course, much depends on the concrete person. And yet the authors of all the biblical books are unanimous: in the fallen world there is no good power; there is only bad or very bad power. And this is not because all its representatives are necessarily and originally malicious, but because any state has always been and remains a machine, a mechanism that either functions according to the laws proper to it or does not function at all. And the more complex and large-scale the mechanism, the more there manifests in it that evil in which, according to the word of the Gospel, the world lies.

For the author of the Books of Samuel, theocracy is better than monarchy, even an elective monarchy such as it was in the days of Saul and David, not only because charismatic leaders guided by God then come to power, since in those same books real theocracy is described as an institution both spiritually and politically ambiguous, but also, and perhaps even primarily, because it makes it possible to avoid the formation of a state mechanism.

Although, of course, in the fallen world theocracy is no panacea either. For both the prophets and the sages, the Torah is the best legislation possible, but even it will not make society ideal; it can make it only, in Plato's phrase, "second after the best." And in an ordinary society, in a great empire, the ruler at times is left only to suffer pangs of conscience and the inability to help someone whom he does not consider guilty at all. And only these pangs of conscience will he be able to present to God on the day of Judgment as testimony to his best unrealized intentions.

The image of a pagan ruler in the Book of Daniel is not painted only in black. Such a ruler is not always and not necessarily the embodiment of pure evil, a fiend of hell with nothing human in him. On the one hand there is Belshazzar, a cynic ready to violate any norms and rules and trample any holy things because for him there is nothing sacred at all, no norms or rules except his own will and his own desires. On the other hand there is Darius, a person of a completely different sort, with his own ideas of good and evil and corresponding rules of life and government, which in general Darius is ready to follow. Forced to throw to the lions a man whom Darius himself understands to be innocent and undeserving of execution, the ruler can find no peace because he has violated moral norms that are obvious to him and binding upon him.

But here the laws of the state begin to operate, that very state machine which takes no account of moral norms, just as no machine takes account of them at all. Its symbol becomes the irrevocability of a law adopted in the Persian Empire and its absolute binding force for everyone without exception. Giving orders and signing decrees, the king becomes their prisoner. He cannot revoke his decisions; he cannot stop the machine he himself has set in motion. Near him and around him are courtiers who will not allow the king to do so, even if the king himself wants it. The retinue really does, to a certain degree, make the king, often a very cruel king, and so it has been in every age.

Of course, much here depends on the concrete person, on the extent to which the person himself is ready to follow the rules of the game and allow the state machine to define him and his existence as a person, as a politician, as a statesman. Yet, as has often happened in history, a person who does not want to play by the rules ends up outside the game, whether voluntarily or by force. Understanding this, people who sought spiritual and everyday independence have in every age tried to stay away from affairs of state and politics. Often they were guided not by cowardice and not by snobbish escapism, but by a sober assessment of the situation and the realism proper to people who know the true state of things.

There have, of course, been exceptions: people who, even in high posts and at the head of a state, did what they considered right. But such people have been few, and their fate has never been simple. Darius, the hero of the Book of Daniel, as one can see, is not one of them. He is left only to grieve while continuing to do what the machine he himself has set in motion demands. In his spiritual condition, the condition of a pagan who has fallen under the power of the ruler of this world, he has no other choice.