In the Carolingian pre-Culture men distinguished _Knechte_, _Freie_, and _Edle_. This is a primitive differentiation based merely on the facts of external life. But in Early Gothic times it runs:

God hath shapen lives three, Boor and knight and priest they be.[584]

Here we have status-differences of a high Culture that has just awakened. And the stole and the sword stand together in face of the plough in strongest assertiveness as estates _vis-à-vis_ the rest, the Non-Estate, that which, like themselves, is fact, but, unlike themselves, fact without deeper significance. The separation, inward and felt, is so destined, so potent, that no understanding can ignore it. Hatred wells up out of the villages, contempt flashes back from the castles. Neither possession nor power nor calling produced this abyss between the “lives.” Logical justification for it there is none. It is metaphysical nature.

Later, with the cities, but younger than they, _burgherdom, bourgeoisie_, arises as the “Third Estate.” The burgher, too, now looks with contempt upon the countryside, which lies about him dull, unaltered, and patient, and in contrast to which he feels himself more awake and freer and therefore further advanced on the road of the Culture. He despises also the primary estates, “squire and parson,” as something lying intellectually below him and historically behind him. Yet, as compared with these two, the burgher is, as the boor was, a residue, a non-estate. In the minds of the “privileged” the peasant hardly now counts at all--the burgher counts, but as an opposite and a background. He is the foil against which the others become conscious of their own significance and of the fact that this significance is something lying outside all practical considerations. When we find that in all Cultures the same occurs in exactly the same form, and that, however different the symbolism of one Culture from that of another, their history fulfils itself everywhere in and by opposition of these groups--impulsive peasant wars in the Springtime, intellectually-based _civil_ wars in the later period--then it is evident that the meaning of the facts must be looked for in the deepest foundations of Life itself.

It is an _idea_ that lies at the base of these two prime Estates, and only these. It gives them the potent feeling of a rank derived from a divine investiture and therefore beyond all criticism--a standing which imposes self-respect and self-consciousness, but the sternest self-discipline as well (and death itself if need be), as a duty and imbues both with the historical superiority, the soul-magic, that does not draw upon power but actually generates it. Those who--inwardly, and not merely nominally--belong to these Estates are _actually_ something other than the residue; their lives, in contrast to those of burgher and peasant, are sustained in every part by a symbolic dignity. These lives do not exist in order to be merely lived, but to have meaning. It is the two sides of all freely moving life that come to expression in these Estates; _the one is wholly being, the other wholly waking-consciousness_.

Every nobility is a living symbol of _Time_, every priesthood of _Space_. Destiny and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When and the Where, race and language, sex-life and feeling-life--all these attain in them to the highest possible expression. The noble lives in a world of facts, the priest in one of truths; the one has shrewdness, the other knowledge; the one is a doer, the other a thinker. Aristocratic world-feeling is essentially pulse-sense; priestly world-feeling proceeds entirely by tensions. Between the time of Charlemagne and that of Conrad II something formed itself in the time-stream that cannot be elucidated, but has to be felt if we are to understand the dawn of the new Culture. There had long been noblemen and ecclesiastics, but then first--and not for long--there were nobility and clergy, in the grand sense of the words and the full force of their symbolic significance.[585] So mighty is this onset of a symbolism that at first all other distinctions, such as those of country, people, and language, fall into the background. In all the lands from Ireland to Calabria the Gothic hierarchy was a single great community; the Early Classical chivalry before Troy, or the Early Gothic before Jerusalem, seems to us as of _one_ great family. The old Egyptian nomes and the feudal states of the first Chóu times appear, in comparison with such Estates as these (and _because_ of the comparison) just as colourless as Burgundy and Lorraine in the Hohenstaufen period. There is a cosmopolitan condition both at the beginning and at the end of every Culture, but in the first case it exists because the symbolic might of aristocratic-hierarchic forms still towers above those of nationality, and in the second because the formless mass sinks below them.

The two Estates in principle exclude one another. The prime opposition of cosmic and microcosmic, which pervades all being that moves freely in space, underlies this dual existence also. Each is possible and necessary only through the other. The Homeric world maintained a conspiracy of hostile silence towards the Orphic, and in turn (as we see from the Pre-Socratics) the former became an object of anger and contempt for the latter. In Gothic times the reforming spirits set themselves with a sacred enthusiasm across the path of the Renaissance-natures. State and Church have never really come to equilibrium, and in the conflict of Empire and Papacy their opposition rose to an intensity only possible for Faustian man.

Of the two, moreover, it is the nobility that is the true Estate, the sum of blood and race, being-stream in the fullest imaginable form. And therefore nobility is a higher peasantry. Even in 1250 the West had a widespread proverb: “One who ploughs in the forenoon jousts in the afternoon,” and it was quite usual for a knight to marry the daughter of a peasant. In contrast to the cathedral, the castle was a development, by way of the country noble’s house of Frankish times, from the peasant-dwelling. In the Icelandic sagas peasants’ crofts are besieged and stormed like castles. Nobility and peasantry are plantlike and instinctive, deep-rooted in the ancestral land, propagating themselves in the family tree, breeding and bred. In comparison with them the priesthood is essentially the counter-estate, the estate of negation, of non-race, of detachment from earth--of free, timeless, and historyless waking-consciousness. In every peasant village, in every peasant family from the Stone Age to the peaks of the Culture, world-history plays itself out in little. Substitute for peoples families, and for lands farms--still the ultimate meaning of their strivings is the same--the maintenance of the blood, the succession of the generations, the cosmic, woman, power. _Macbeth_ and _King Lear_ might perfectly well have been thought out as village tragedies--and the fact is a proof of their tragic truth. In all Cultures nobility and peasantry appear in forms of _family descent_, and language itself connects them with the sexes, through which life propagates itself, has history, and is history. And as woman _is_ history, the inward rank of peasant and noble families is determined by how much of race their women have in them, how far they _are_ Destiny. And, therefore, there is deep meaning in the fact that the purer and more race-pervaded world-history is, the more the stream of its public life passes into and adapts itself to the private lives of individual great families. This, of course, is the basis of the dynastic principle, and not only that, but the basis of the idea of world-historical personality. The existence of entire states comes to depend on a few private destinies, vastly magnified. The history of Athens in the fifth century is in the main that of the Alcmæonidæ, the history of Rome is that of a few families of the type of the Fabii or the Claudii. The history of states in the Baroque is, broadly speaking, that of the operations of Habsburg and Bourbon family-politics, and its crises take form as marriages and wars of succession. The history of Napoleon’s second marriage comprises also the burning of Moscow and the battle of Leipzig. The history of the Papacy is, right into the eighteenth century, that of a few noble families which competed for the tiara in order to found princely family-fortunes. This is true equally of Byzantine dignitaries and English premiers (witness the Cecils) and even, in numerous instances, of great revolution-leaders.

Of all this the priesthood (and philosophy so far as it is priesthood) is the direct negative. The Estate of pure waking-consciousness and eternal truths combats time and race and sex in every sense. Man as peasant or noble turns towards, man as priest turns away from, woman. Aristocracy runs the danger of dissipating and losing the broad being-stream of public life in the petty channels of its minor ancestors and relatives. The true priest, on the other hand, refuses in principle to recognize private life, sex, family, the “house.” For the man of race death begins to be real and appalling only when it is death without heirs--Icelandic sagas no less than Chinese ancestor-worship teach us this. He does not entirely die who lives on in sons and nephews. But for the true priest _media vita in morte sumus_; what he shall bequeath is intellectual, and rejected woman bears no part in it. The phenomenal forms of this second Estate that occur again and again are celibacy, cloister, battlings with sex-impulse fought to the extreme of self-emasculation, and a contempt for motherhood which expresses itself in orgiasm and hallowed prostitution, and not less in the intellectual devaluation of sexual life down to the level of Kant’s vile definition of marriage.[586] Throughout the Classical world it was the rule that in the sacred precinct, the Temenos, no one must be born or die. The timeless must not come into contact with time. It is possible for the priest to have an intellectual recognition of the great moments of generation and birth, and to honour them sacramentally, but experience them he may not.

For while nobility _is_ something, priesthood _signifies_ something, and this alone would be enough to tell us that it is the opposite of all that is Destiny and Race and Estate. The castle, with its chambers and towers, walls and moats, tells of a strong-flowing life, but the cathedral, with its vaulting and pillars and choir, is, through and through, Meaning--that is to say, Ornament--and every venerable priesthood has developed itself up to that marvellous gravity and beauty of bearing in which every item, from facial expression and voice-inflection to costume and walk, is ornament, from which private life and even inward life have been eliminated as unessential--whereas that which a ripe aristocracy (such as that of eighteenth-century France) displays and parades is a finished living. It was Gothic thought that developed out of the priest-concept the _character indelebilis_, which makes the idea indestructible and wholly independent of the worthiness of its bearer’s life in the world-as-history--but every priesthood, and consequently also all philosophy (in the sense of the schools), contain it implicitly. If a priest has race, he leads an outward existence like peasant, knight, or prince. The Pope and cardinals of the Gothic period were feudal princes, leaders of armies, fond of the chase, connoisseurs and adepts in family politics. Among the Brahmins of the pre-Buddha “Baroque” were great landowners, well-groomed abbés, courtiers, spendthrifts, gourmets.[587] But it was the early period that had learned to distinguish the idea from the person--a notion diametrically opposed to the essence of nobility--and not until the Age of Enlightenment did the priest come to be judged, as priest, by his private life, and then not because that age had acquired sharper eyes, but because it had lost the idea.

The noble is the _man as history_, the priest is _the man as nature_. History of the high kind is always the expression and effect of the being of a noble society; and the criterion for the relative importance of its different events is always the pulse of this stream of being. That is why the battle of Cannæ matters much and the battles of Late Roman emperors matter not at all. The coming of a Springtime consistently coincides with the birth of a primary nobility, in whose sentiments the prince is merely “_primus inter pares_” and an object of mistrust. For not only does a strong race not need the big individual, but his existence is a reflection upon its worth; hence vassal-wars are pre-eminently the form in which the history of Early periods fulfils itself, and thenceforth the nobility has the fate of the Culture in hand. With a creative force that is all the more impressive because it is silent, Being is brought into form and “condition.” The pulse in the blood is heightened and confirmed, _and for good_. For what this creative rise to living form is to the Spring--every Spring--the _might of tradition_ is for the Late--every Late--period--namely, the old firm discipline, the life-beat, so sure that it outlives the extinction of all the old families and continually draws under its spell new men and new being-streams out of the deep. Beyond a shadow of doubt, all the history of Late periods, in respect of form and beat and tempo, is inherent (and irrevocably so) in the very earliest generations. Its successes are neither more nor less than the strength of the tradition in the blood. In politics, as in all other great and mature arts, success presupposes a being in high condition, a great stock of pristine experiences unconsciously and unquestioningly stored up as instincts and impulses. There is no other sort of political _maestria_ but this. The big individual is only something better than an incident, only master of the future, in that he is effective (or is made effective), is Destiny (or has Destiny), in and through this form. This is what distinguishes necessary from superfluous art and therefore, also, _historically necessary from unnecessary politics_. It matters little if many of the big men come up out of the “people” (that is, the aggregate of the traditionless) into the governing stratum, or even if they are the only ones left to occupy it--the great tide of tradition takes charge of them, all unwitting, forms their intellectual and practical conduct, and rules their methods. And this tradition is nothing but the pulse of ancient and long-extinguished lines.

But Civilization, the real “return to Nature,” is the extinction of nobility--not as physical stock (which would not matter), but as living tradition--and the supplanting of destiny-pulse by causal intelligence. With this, nobility becomes no more than a prefix. And, for that very reason, Civilized history is superficial history, directed disjointedly to obvious aims, and so become formless in the cosmic, dependent on the accident of great individuals, destitute of inward sureness, line, and meaning. With Cæsarism history relapses back into the historyless, the old beat of primitive life, with endless and meaningless battles for material power, such as those of the Roman soldier-emperors of the third century and the corresponding “Sixteen States” of China (265-420), which differ only in unessentials from the events of beast-life in a jungle.