2 - Prophets, Popes and Princes

Summary

Solomon the Wise, Ashoka the Great and Suleiman the Magnificent were all powerful rulers who were especially esteemed and celebrated because they were wise. All three were also distinguished by their piety, Solomon as the builder of the First Temple in Jerusalem, Suleiman as Kanuni or ‘Law Giver’ who harmonised kanun or sultanic law with Sharia, and Ashoka whose Edicts promoted dharma and Buddhism. The importance of faith and religion for these wise kings prompts us to ask to what extent does piety reconceive and resolve the paradox of the philosopher king, reconciling wisdom and power, philosophy and politics? Classical political philosophy inevitably had to confront the gods as sacred founders, dangerous demons, hearth and boundary deities. And of course each great religion with its unique conception of the sacred adopted a diverse range of responses in its engagement with philosophy and politics. As we have seen, the religions of the book, or the Abrahamic revealed religions, with their conception of a monotheistic, all powerful and providential god that promised immortality of the soul, fundamentally challenged and redefined both philosophy and politics, reconceiving the relationship between wisdom and power and thereby redefining the promise of the philosopher king. The orthopraxy of Judaism and Islam, where Moses who revealed the Torah and Mohammed who received the Qur’an were both regarded as prophets and lawgivers, meant that the prophet–lawgiver resembled in important respects the philosopher king. Thus Islamic philosophers such as Al-Farabi could introduce and reconcile the Platonic conception of virtuous rule and the philosopher king with the Qur’an, and in doing so, their ideas were adopted, subject to halakhic modifications, into Jewish thought, beginning with Philo of Alexandria, reaching its zenith with Maimonides and ending with Spinoza. By contrast, the philosopher king was more theologically problematic for Christianity as a religion of orthodoxy that distinguished between faith and law. In this chapter we will focus on the way Christianity reconceived and transformed the philosopher king, not only because these innovations had far-reaching political implications, but because the ambiguous place of the philosopher king in Christian thought allows us to see more clearly the philosophical and political promise and limitations of the ‘pious king’ as the modern philosopher king.