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.[1] 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
- ↑ The ease with which Bolshevism extinguished the four so-called estates or classes of Petrine Russia — nobles, merchants, small townspeople, and peasants — shows that these were mere imitations and administrative conveniences, and destitute of all symbolism — for symbolism no power on earth can choke. They correspond to the outward differences of rank and possessions that existed in the Visigothic and Frankish Kingdoms, and — as glimpses afforded by the earliest parts of the Iliad show — in Mycenæan times. It is reserved for the future to develop a true nobility and clergy in Russia.
