ABSTRACT
WE HAVE NOW attempted to present the function of the theocratic king in its pure and uncontaminated state. What, to choose a short formula, gave the theocratic king his particular complexion was his monarchic function. From Constantine onwards throughout the medieval period it was this monarchic function of the theocratic king which appeared as his most manifest feature. We remember that he presided over councils which issued ecclesiastical and mundane laws; we recall that as a monarch he appointed and invested clerics; we have tried to understand why only in a correctly perceived monarchic setting the voluntas principis was the law and why he was above its observance; we have borne in mind that by virtue of his monarchic function, and of the kingdom divinely entrusted to him, his duty was to see that peace and order were maintained and consequently to make culpable clerics answer before his courts; we have realized that the pope qua pope was not, and could not be, entitled to issue binding orders to the theocratic king as to what to do and what not to do, as to what principles to make into law, and so forth; what within this framework remained for the pope to do was to give advice, counsel, exhortation, but certainly not, as the hierocratic scheme demanded, to issue the binding order. In a word, the principle of totality, which we have met in a different context, can without hesitation be applied to the theocratic king: whatever happened in his kingdom, he was as a result of the divine trust responsible to God alone for it. He was, literally speaking, the one ruler, the mon-arch. Whether or not he accepted the advice of the pope-or for that matter of anyone else-was a matter of his own voluntas.
