A Reflection For Easter

I thought to take the occasion of this Easter Season to repeat a relevant passage from an earlier essay:

“This point leads us to observe a further ethical dimension of kingly rule. The warriors take upon themselves the moral responsibility of the evil necessarily involved in ruling. Even if they cannot transmute this evil into good through their inner attitudes to it, they nonetheless have the virtue of shouldering the blame for the evil acts necessary for the well-being of mass society, absolving of guilt the masses who benefit from these acts. This could be seen as an extension of the function of royalty as “sacrificial king” as discussed by Frazer in The Golden Bough. In more primordial times, the king would – both symbolically and literally – take on the risk of activities necessary for the welfare of the collectivity. An instructive example of this is tasting the first of freshly caught fish to test if they are poisonous. In the same way that early kings assumed the physical risk for the collective, the later kings bore the moral risk for the masses.

Perhaps the most prominent symbol of this royal function is Christ’s crown of thorns. Christ’s crown simultaneously embodies the archetypes of Christ the King and Christ as sacrifice for the sins of man. To quote Kate Crosby, “this can [also] be seen in the traditional Theravada understanding that righteous kings, who undertake violence in order to preserve law and order, are bodhisatta (bodhisattva, Sanskrit), because they take on the bad kamma of their role for the benefit of the many.” Further, the same attitude is to be found in the prayer offered to Heaven by King Tang, founder of the Shang Dynasty, as quoted in the Analects (20:1): “If I transgress, let not the ten thousand states suffer because of me; but if the ten thousand states transgress, the guilt is mine alone.”

In democracy, because rule is not a restricted activity but the concern of the whole populace, necessary acts of wickedness are no longer something done by the warriors for the sake of the many, but something the many authorize in their own interest. The violence, theft and deceit of the state is no longer an act of charity by the rulers, but something self-serving on the part of the masses.”