Quick Take: Pope Francis, the Catholic Akhenaten

Like Lady Di, Francis wanted personal influence & popularity, not institutional devotion

(This Quick Take is free. About two-thirds of my posts, those of the History of Mankind series, are for paying subscribers only. Don’t hesitate to comment and let me know what you think I got wrong, or right or whatever: the chance to get that kind of feedback from a larger audience precisely is one of the main reasons why most of my Quick Takes are free.)

The late Pope Francis reminded me of some other people in history. His office wasn’t enough for him, indeed it was a hindrance for him: he wanted to be loved because of himself, not because his subjects were mandated to love him. This happens in history, in life, a lot more than you would think.

Egypt’s Pharaoh Akhenaten was the world’s first celebrity because, unlike other Pharaohs, he always put himself first, to the point of launching deep reforms within his church that only shored up his profile among those who never liked that church to start with, and had long-term disastrous consequences. I’ve examined Akhenaten’s reign and impact at length in two long posts:

Akhenaten, the First Monotheistic King (1): the Rise

Akhenaten, the First Monotheistic King (2): the Fall

In the first of these posts, in particular, I looked at the way Akhenaten essentially invented monotheism just so he would create a religion of one, the Sun, that he’d be identified with, instead of the traditional panoply of Egyptian gods.

It’s important to understand that, for Akhenaten, as for Francis and Lady Di, high office can be extremely suffocating. If you’ve ever met even the CEO of a middling firm, you can see how his entire life is scheduled in a flurry of meetings, visits and briefings. You are rich and powerful, yes, but your entire existence is constrained to a degree that not even top executives experience.

There’s this wonderful moment in Chinese history involving the 10th century Emperor Taizu, the first Song Dynasty ruler. In the story, Taizu shortly after his ascension orders the palace workshops to make him a new bamboo steamer for the kitchen. After several days, the steamer has still not arrived. His retainers explain that his order was referred to the Department of State Affairs, which sent his request down to the relevant ministry, the ministry then down to the relevant agency, and the relevant agency down to the workshop.

The workshop would have to request confirmation of the validity of the order, and that request would then have to be submitted upward through the same chain of command and be approved by His Majesty, the retainers explain. Only then could the workshop make the steamer. A frustrated emperor demands to know why he should suffer such a circuitous, bureaucratic delay when he could buy a steamer in the market for little money. His chief councilor patiently explains that the procedures were designed not to thwart His Majesty but to restrain his posterity.

Routing palace requisitions through civil administration would prevent his successors from squandering resources on personal extravagance, the councilor notes. Since this is a Chinese story, Emperor Taizu, now enlightened, agrees that the overdue steamer was a small price to pay for a permanent safeguard against the potential profligacy of his offspring.

Francis wouldn’t have agreed. Nor would Akhenaten. In the first of an endless processions of populist takeovers (or self-coups, as they are called in Latin America, because it’s so common there that people like Francis decide that the constraints of their office no longer suit them), Akhenaten organized an expensive Sed Festival in his second or third years in the throne, breaking with previous Egyptian tradition.

This festival was a ritual rejuvenation for aging pharaohs, which traditionally took place around their 30th regnal year, and only if they got that far. But Akhenaten used the occasion to promote himself with the masses attending the event when he was only in his early twenties.

Like other dynasts the world over who felt great changes were needed to do good things (in their opinion) and centralize power in their person, Akhenaten's every move had the effect of removing authority and power from the institution itself (the Egyptian dual papacy-monarchy). In the process, his person and his own administration gained the same measure of authority and power, establishing a direct contact with a populace to which they wanted to appear closer, all the while staying on a superior, untouchable plane.

This took complex, not always well-understood or well-judged contortions: for example, soon after the move to Amarna local monuments displayed the pharaoh's features, and those of his family members and even some courtiers and commoners, in an exaggerated way so that they looked like caricatures; this was perhaps a crude attempt to make them more appealing to common people who didn't have much knowledge of traditional Egyptian art.

Indeed, we may be witnessing the invention of celebrity culture – one directed at a populace that is provided with a phony, seemingly unadorned and direct connection with the lives of the powerful and famous, in exchange for their reverence, admiration and obedience.

The same objectives may be behind the scenes in which the royal family is shown displaying unheard-of intimacy, for example kissing and embracing under the beneficent rays of Aten.

Another characteristic feature of Amarna's populist style is a new sense of movement and speed, a general looseness' and freedom of expression that was to have a lasting influence on Egyptian art for centuries, and possibly on Greek art as well. Everyone has seen the most famous example of Amarna art, and it’s one that is very unique and had a very precise objective: presenting the Pharaoh’s wife, traditionally a background figure, front and center as part of a Brangelina power couple:

Millennia later, Lady Di would the world’s most famous and dramatic example of the Nefertiti Play. As in the first example, the prominence and publicity won with the move would backfire spectacularly. Egypt’s politico-religious arrangement survived for a few centuries after Akhenaten but it was mortally wounded:

The Rise of Assyria & the Fall of Egypt

Populist power plays to take over institutions from the inside became commonplace after Akhenaten. The Gracchi Brothers were killed by fellow oligarchs when they tried to short-circuit the Roman Republic to rise to the top over the oligarchs’ objections. Julius Caesar met exactly the same end. Endless cases can be cited ever since, including the likes of the arch-aristocrat Philip Egalité in the French Revolution and, some may argue, Donald Trump in the contemporary American Empire.

Francis’ much celebrated reforms in the Catholic Church had the same effect as all these other populist power plays: he was celebrated by outsiders who are typically not Catholics and derided by hardcore Catholics; and the Church is now weaker than it’s ever been since at least the 11th century. At least it survives for now: the Roman Republic didn’t survive Caesar for long.