Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 20

GRIPLA20
concept of sacred kingship) is both a recurrent phenomenon in other­
wise different civilizational settings, and open to a wide range of varia­
tions in form as well as content that reflect and affect broader civiliza­
tional patterns. It is therefore a particularly promising – but so far not
thoroughly explored – topic for comparative civilizational analysis.
And there is another side to it: traditions of sacral rulership can func­
tion as bridges between different civilizational universes, and the result
may be a unilateral transfer or a creative refashioning of older models.
not that the varieties of sacral rulership are uniformly adaptable: the
mutual exclusivity of the three post­Roman paradigms is a striking
counter-example. But the late Roman Empire, out of which the succes­
sor civilizations emerged, was the product of an intercivilizational
encounter which transformed both sides. The progressive sacralization
of the imperial institution paved the way for the Constantinian turn,
which imposed a Christian version of sacral rulership. There was no
pre-existing model of the latter, but the invention that began with
Constantine’s conversion could draw on evolving conceptions of the
relationship between divine and human authority within the Christian
counterculture, and this emerging tradition was in turn rooted in the
civilizational innovation of Jewish monotheism. As has recently been
argued, this theme is of key importance for comparative studies of the
nordic region as a civilizational area. Within the limits of this paper,
there is no space to discuss Gro Steinsland’s work (2000); suffice it to
say that – in the present writer’s opinion – the idea of sacred kingship
in pre­Christian Scandinavia has been successfully rehabilitated.
Steinsland’s analyses of the specific nordic version of this near­univer­
sal institution are sometimes convincing and always thought-provok­
ing.
4. I have already used the term “intercivilizational encounter”; but the
variations and vicissitudes of sacral rulership are only a part of the vast
spectrum of phenomena to which this category can be applied. This is
a highly significant but relatively neglected topic of civilizational stud­
ies. One of the most persistent weaknesses of traditional approaches to
that field was a tendency to think of civilizations as mutually closed
worlds. In fact, their interaction – at different levels, with more or less
mutually formative results – is one of the most fundamental constitu­