The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, June 23, 2024

Notably: The American pathology of “exceptionalism” extends to Amricans’ insistence that they are trailblazers in all things, good and bad, so that even as we deplore the aberrance of Donald Trump, we imagine him unique to America’s ability to shock outside the box. The presumption relies on an amnesiac, or nonexistent, relationship with history, which humbles us every time we look. One example: France’s Philip IV in 1303 was at war with Boniface VIII, the pope. It wasn’t unusual, as kings and popes warred frequently for supremacy. Popes could excommunicate kings and emperors and did so with metronomic regularity. Kings couldn’t excommunicate popes. But they could go Trump on them, as Philip did on Boniface, calling him “a heretic, a murderer, a sodomite, and a devil worshiper,” according to the Medieval historian Philip Daileader. Philip or some mercenaries who thought they were acting on his behalf (the Proud Boys of the day, going Gretchen Whitmer on Boniface) eventually had Boniface captured, but only for two days: they couldn’t agree on what to do with him next. Dante was no fan of Boniface, but he criticized Philip for daring to have a pope so mistreated. Boniface died a month later, supposedly of shock. Philip whipped out the “sodomite” slur on the Templars, too, when he went after them a bit later, aided by the cowed, post-Boniface papacy, putting them all on sham trials, torturing them and burning them so he could grasp their riches. The papacy happily blew on the flames, leading Wyclif to say that “To get rid of such a demon [meaning the papacy] would not harm the Church, but would be useful to it.” Not that the Templars, who did to Arabs for a couple of centuries nothing different than what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for the past 70 years, have much to their credit. But Philip’s treatment of them was one of the great crimes of history. A side note: George W. Bush’s zany “unitary executive theory,” an authoritarian, nearly despotic interpretation of executive power (we forget what a thuggish Mussolini Bush and Cheney could be, viewed through Trump’s prism) could be said to have its origin in Boniface VIII’s identical Unam sanctam papal bull of 1302, which places the Catholic church supreme above all else on earth, “and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins, […] Therefore, of the one and only Church there is one body and one head, not two heads like a monster,” and so on and so forth. That amnesiac impulse has us longing for the Bush years from time to time, but that, too, is a pathology proper to every successively disastrous presidency in this road-to-perdition America. 

—P.T.

To these accumulated honors, the policy of Augustus soon added the splendid as well as important dignities of supreme pontiff, and of censor. By the former he acquired the management of the religion, and by the latter a legal inspection over the manners and fortunes, of the Roman people. If so many distinct and independent powers did not exactly unite with each other, the complaisance of the senate was prepared to supply every deficiency by the most ample and extraordinary concessions. The emperors, as the first ministers of the republic, were exempted from the obligation and penalty of many inconvenient laws: they were authorized to convoke the senate, to make several motions in the same day, to recommend candidates for the honors of the state, to enlarge the bounds of the city, to employ the revenue at their discretion, to declare peace and war, to ratify treaties; and by a most comprehensive clause, they were empowered to execute whatsoever they should judge advantageous to the empire, and agreeable to the majesty of things private or public, human of divine.

—From Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 (1776).  .

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