THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

One of the Pope's titles that people hear a lot is Pontifex Maximus. It was inherited from among the titles assumed by the Emperors.

What is interesting is something most people do not know about. Pontifex Maximus is NOT a Roman title, it is pre-Roman.

The Tarquins were Etruscan kings of Rome until the Romans threw them out around the sixth century B.C. The Romans swore they would never have a king again.

Romans hated the word "king" so much that when they returned to monarchy under the Caesars five hundred years later, they never called their monarchs "kings."

Today an Emperor" is looked upon as a superior rank to kingship. A king is above a Duke and an emperor is above a king. It is considered the same thing, only moreso.

In fact, this was a ore point with Queen Victoria. By 1871, the King of Prussia had united Germany and was made the Kaiser, which meant "Caesar," which meant he was now of imperial, not merely royal, rank.

Napolean III had been Emperor of France. The Czar of Russia also had a title which meant "Caesar." Even BULGARIA'S monarch called himself an imperial Czar. None of this sat well with Victoria, who was the head of the most powerful empire on earth in the middle of the Pax Britannia. Here she was one rank down from other monarchs.

But there was no way in the world that the British would make their sovereign an Emperor. It smacked of Oriental despotism to them, and the British kingship was too rooted in tradition.

Prime Miniser Gladstone or D'Israeli, I forget which, received Victoria's undying gratitude for solving this dilemma. He made Victoria Empress of India, and no one minded India having an Oriental title for its monarch.

Somehow, the Romans had a somewhat similar problem when they threw out the Etruscan kings. We have no idea what it was. But they needed a title for first among equals, and they searched around among the Etruscan titles that they might choose.

Certainly it could not be kingly title or even a title of nobility. Nobility was associated with kingship.

But there was one title which was of supreme importance but had no connection with nobility.

That office bore the Etruscan name of Chief Builder of Bridges. Probably it had a lot more connotations at the time, but we will never even know what the original title was, since Etruscan is a lost language. But Chief Bridge Bulder, Pontifex Maximus, held a meaning throughout the republic which we do not understnad today, and when Caesar was made dictator for like, one of his titles was Pontifex Maximus, Chief Bridge Builder.

After Caesar, the age of the emperors began iwth his nephew Augustus, and Pontifex Maximus stayed as one of the Imperial titles. When Constatntine moved he Roamn Empire to Byzantium, later Constantinople, he retained the title Pontifex Maximus, thought it soon said in Greek rather than in Latin.

But in the West, Rome became subject more and more to the Pope, who crowned his own Emperor in the person of Charlemagne, who didn't want it. But it was the pope who assumed the title of Pontifex Maximus instead of giving it to the Emperor. I don't know why,and I don't know if any historians are interested in why the title went from Emperor to Pope in the West.

I wonder about the POLITICS of this.

The Pope became a monarch about this time. The Papal States were his until 1870, and they contituted about a third of Italy. Since the pope would not deign to call himself a mere king, maybe he felt he needed the secular title Pontifex Maximus.

For over a thousand years the Pope was both head of the Roman Church and a head of state. He freely used his religious power to put monarchs and their countries under the interdict and to excomunicate sovereigns for the specific purpose of protecting his own state.

This is not trivia. Like it or not, the Roman Catholic Church was THE Church in the formative yeras of Western Civilization. We still have public buildings in the Roman style, and not just beause of the Roman Republic.

I am not trying to bring back Etruscan religion. We only have a vague idea of what Etruscan religion WAS.

I am not trying to bring back Zoroastrianism. For in the first six centuries of the founding of hte Christian religion, Mohammed had not yet been born. The greatest single religion known to the Roman Empire was that of Persia. Zoroastrianism was its official religion all hte time Rome was fighting over going from pagan to Christian.

Even back when the Etruscans ruled, Greece was invaded by the Persians. The Persians did to the Greeks exactly what Christians wold do almost a thousand years later: They burned the "pagan" temples. Zoroastrians were fervent monotheists. Their sabbath was Sunday. They celebrated with bread and wine.

Christian theologians who are aware of Zoroastrianism nearly go nuts trying to trace everything to the Old Testament into Old Testament HISTORY.

Including our obsession with chastity, of which there is not a hint in the Old Testament. That obsession dominates much of our thought today. This is NOT a matter of religion today. Many atheists in Women's Lib are as obsessed with chastity as the early Christians were.

My father used to say that even an atheist should know his Bible.

Even a Jew who wants to understand the Third Reich has to have some acquaintance with Mein Kampf.

History is critical. The fact that it is mixed up with religious doctrine is just a fact. To study where we are now, you have to know economic history, military history, and religious history. Ignore one and you simply cannot understand the whole.

This is HISTORY, NOT theology.