The Metal Hat
On the magic of the Crown
“I know which of our unelected leaders I prefer,” quipped David Mitchell in the Observer column he somehow managed to squeeze into the five-minute window last October when Ms Truss was Prime Minister. The other unelected leader, of course, was our new King, though he could not help noting how “bonkers” it is that “the figurehead of a G7 economy must first be drizzled with sacred goo and fitted with a metal hat before we can all relax into bowing whenever he walks into a room.”
The implication is that there should be no place in a modern, democratic society for such ritualistic fuss. You may have noticed similar sentiments popping up on social media, from familiar quarters, as proud wearers of “Not my King” badges sneer that they are far too clever to obey someone just because some bloke in a dress put a piece of metal on his head.
But isn’t that a little like saying, “just because I put a piece of metal on her finger, doesn’t mean I’m going to stay faithful to her”? Or, “just because that piece of cloth on a stick has your national/regimental/sexual minority community colours daubed on it, doesn’t mean I can’t burn it.”
Crowns, rings, flags… Aren’t they just so much stuff at the end of the day?
In practice, people tend to have rather more attachment to such stuff than they like to let on. Many people would acknowledge that their wedding ring is more than just a replaceable symbol of their marriage, for example. We get more upset if thieves steal things of such “sentimental value” than items of greater monetary worth. Few, if offered, would accept even an identical substitute for their wedding ring or their grandfather’s watch if offered. It has to be that one. The thing itself carries meaning, and more than meaning: it is a physical instantiation of an invisible bond, and while the invisible bond means more, the physical instantiation makes it real.
So with the metal hat and, even more so, the sacred goo. Those material things participate in a higher, immaterial reality. They communicate something more than they are. It is not so much that they contain some magical power as that the power contains them and communicates itself through them. This is what we in the theologians’ trade call a sacrament.
Now, I don’t want to get into the old Reformation arguments about how many sacraments there are. Yes, the Prayer Book says that there are two “generally (i.e. universally) necessary for salvation,” namely Baptism and the Eucharist. It acknowledges in addition the further five recognised by the mediaeval Western Church. And yet even these seven are not enough to exhaust the sacramental potential of the cosmos. For if the definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” then there are surely a myriad more. Icons and holy water would be one example, as would the Bible itself, when its visible and audible words communicate the invisible and inaudible Word which is Christ Himself. Indeed, in several places in Scripture, not least the Psalms, the whole cosmos seems to be a visible sign of inward grace, with the stars of heaven and the trees and mountains communicating God’s presence through their silent song. And surely, amid all the sacramental ways God communicates His presence under material signs, the Coronation of a monarch is no mean example.
To tighten up this definition a little, we might profitably turn to the great sacramental theologian who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite, but was probably a monk living in 5th-6th century Syria. He drew on an Eastern current of Platonic philosophy called “theurgy” to help understand the sacramental nature of reality. Theurgy literally means “divine work,” and while it is a kind of magic, it should not be mistaken for any attempt to manipulate the will of God, or among pagans, the gods. On the contrary, the theurgists used what they called “sunthemata,” sympathetic symbols, as channels for divine energies and the divine will. You could call it a sort of existential homeopathy. For the pagans, this might mean taking a certain kind of precious jewel that has an affinity with the sun to call on the powers of Apollo, the sun god. But for Dionysius, a Christian, there was only one God at work in the cosmos, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Moses, revealed in Jesus.
This Jesus gave sunthemata, material things from the natural world as enduring vehicles of his grace and presence. Chief among them was the bread and wine of the Eucharist. For the likes of Dionysius, these foods were not mere symbolic representations of the grace they conveyed, as though the bread and wine were separate, discrete things from the Body and Blood of Christ. In a more nominalist and materialist age, we find it counterintuitive to fathom the idea that things can participate in other, higher things. We suppose that things are basically separate, right down to their atoms, and that any apparent similarity between them is a convenient act of mental classification on our part. If one thing is by definition separate from another, then no two things can “participate” in each other. They can at most be signs, representations of one another, like a photograph to its subject. This, however, is quite contrary to the sacramental logic of the Eucharist, where the bread and wine are neither destroyed and replaced with the perfect food of Christ’s Body and Blood, but rather are brought to their perfection by participation in that ideal food, that heavenly reality. “Give us this day our daily” - or in more literal translation, supernatural - “bread” is concomitant with “thy kingdom come” and “thy will be done.” We do not plead with God to destroy the earth and replace it with something better, but for earth to be perfected in the Kingdom of heaven.
Christian sacramentalism, including the sacramental rite of coronation, makes a metaphysical claim: namely, that there is a spiritual reality which is higher than the material realm, both because it is logically prior to it, and because it is its ultimate destiny. That is, it is necessarily bound to philosophical “realism,” the notion that the commonalities and connections between things, while having no material form, are nonetheless real: and because these immaterial similarities are necessary for the existence of material things, they are in fact more real than the things conceived of in an atomistic sense. The human as a whole person, for example, is more truly human than a pile of limbs on the floor, even though they may be materially equivalent. It is their interconnectedness into a recognisable human form which makes them capable of existence and life. Likewise, the laws which govern the cosmos are logically prior to the matter of the cosmos. There could be nothing without mathematical truths, which again, are not things one can grasp hold of, weigh or measure.
The realist claim, which I insist is necessary if sacraments are to be anything more than bare signs, implies that nothing exists in atomised individuality, but always by participation in other realities. You and I, unless you are an AI trawling the net, participate in the common form of humanity, but not in the form of a tree or frog. All three of us, however, the human, the tree and the frog, participate in the form of life. And whether we are living or not, we all aspire to continue to exist; at the very least, we resist obliteration. The tree’s roots stretch toward the water, the baby’s arms for the breast. We seek life because it is what is good for us. Even when we seek bad things, deliberate or not, we do so because we think that in some way, they are leading to a greater or more immediate good. It is therefore the Good that is the universal form which all things seek and in which all things, insofar as they exist, participate.
So… what good is monarchy? In what might it be held to participate sacramentally?
Genesis 1 has the answer, or leads us closer to it. On the seventh day, after completing creation, God rests. That is not to say that he puts up his feet after a hard week and watches some kind of celestial Eastenders. God does not tire, and this is not a children’s story. Rather, God is at rest, enthroned over creation. Everything is as it should be. Such is shalom: peace, harmony, and the justice of God. Heaven and earth are at rest in themselves and with God. To preserve this order, God bequeathes “dominion” to humanity, letting them share in his kingship. He is not giving them the tyrannical prerogative to do as they wish, but is rather conferring upon them something of his nature so that they might preserve the harmony of the cosmic order he has established. It is their divergence from this order, signified by the taking of the apple from the forbidden tree, which lets chaos, death and sin enter and distort the world.
The crowning of the monarch is a participation in this primal “crowning” of Adam and Eve, and the monarchy itself a sacrament of the peaceful kingship of God. It expresses a metaphysical continuity with the divine nature. This runs quite contrary to the narratives of discontinuity professed by certain strands of Christianity, who see Christ’s Kingship as radically rupturing or even ovethrowing the cosmic order. Rather, while Christ’s Kingship certainly does overthrow the illegitimate rule of tyranny and violence in this world, it does so only to restore the proper kingly order of God’s rule. There is nothing unChristian about a good monarch. Anointed by Christ in His Church, the King is charged with the grace to conform the earthly hierarchy of his nation to the celestial hierarchy revealed by the King of Kings. Whether any given king lives up to that charge is another matter, as even Solomon the Wise showed by his errors. But that God’s grace, poured from the Cross, makes the restoration of God’s peace possible, Christians must not doubt. A sacrament is not a bare symbol, but an effective sign, a vessel of God’s work.
Finally, a sacrament is also a vehicle of memory. When Our Lord broke bread at the Last Supper, he said, do this in “remembrance” of me. Plato also used the word anamnesis, “remembrance,” to describe the process of knowing. Our minds, he averred, are not blank slates, but are precharged with knowledge because they participate in the rational order of the universe. The universe is as it were hardwired with such things as number, sameness, difference and harmony, and there is no reason to suppose that our minds are not hardwired in the same way. There is, we might say, a certain architecture to the human mind, and among its cloisters roam certain archetypes.
The King is among those archetypes. At a practical and comparatively cosmetic level, the monarchy preserves something of the memory of the nation, and indeed the hereditary principle ensures a smooth transition of that memory. Important though this is, however, the splendor of the King awakens a memory more primal from deep within us. The rites and robes of the coronation are all aids in this awakening, rude as it may be: outward but nonetheless necessary signs of a real inward change, by God’s grace. That change is the restoration of a deep memory: the memory of divine order, harmony, unity and goodness.
As our King is crowned, may Britons remember who we really are.
Fascinating unpacking of just what a sacrament is. I also found your interpretation of Genesis 1 very helpful!