THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS OF SOME GREAT THINKERS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES I INTRODUCTORY THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH T CENTURIES HE present course of lectures is the third delivered at The first course treated of the Middle Ages.1 Its main theme was the Christian Commonwealth-the Respublica Christiana or Civitas Dei-the great medieval Church-State which the prudence of Constantine, the genius of Augustine, and the statesmanship of a long line of Imperial Popes had established upon the ruins of Cæsarian Rome, constructing it out of the rude and crude materials furnished by the new nations into whose hands the heritage of the Western Emperors had passed. The central political problem of the medieval millennium (A.D. 450-1450) was the problem of the Two Powers, that is to say, the relation of the ecclesiastical to the secular, the spiritual to the temporal, the clerical to the lay; of the sacerdotium to the regnum, the Papacy to the Empire, or, in modern phraseology, the Church to the State. The central social problem of the period was the emancipation of the slave, the elevation of the serf, the edification of the freeman, and in general the establishment of conditions which would render possible the liberation and the self-realisation of the individual soul. 1 The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval Thinkers (Harrap). The second course of lectures dealt with the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation.1 Its main theme was the transition from mediæval to modern Europe, that is to say, the change which accompanied the gradual substitution of independence for authority, of contract for status, of freedom for tutelage, of movement for stability, of speculation for credulity, of progress for order. It depicted, on the one hand, the disintegration of Christendom, the decay of the Holy Roman Empire, the degradation of the papal monarchy, the disappearance of the ideal unity of the Faith. On the other hand, it displayed the formation of national states, the rise of strong dynastic kingships, the advent of the middle class to prominence and power, the revolution in the art of war due to the introduction of firearms, the emergence of the individual; together with the moral and intellectual transformation which was effected by the Copernican discovery of the Universe, the Iberian discovery of the New World, the Humanistic discovery of Man, and the Academic discovery of Primitive Christianity as revealed in the Greek New Testament and the writings of the Early Fathers. The central political problem of this transitional period was the position of the new national state and its secularised government in respect of the old cosmopolitan authorities, and in relation to the Christian principles which had so long dominated Western affairs. The central social problem was how to restrain and limit the dangerous liberty of the emancipated individual, and how to turn to the advantage of the community the exuberance of his egoistic activity. The present course takes up the story about the middle of the sixteenth century and carries it to about the middle of the seventeenth. It examines the ideas of eight typical and representative writers. If the biographies of these writers be surveyed, it will be found that the earliest of them, Bodin, was born in 1530, while the latest of them, Hobbes, died in extreme old age in 1679. Thus the whole period of their lives covers a century and a half. The problems with which their works deal, however, fall within a somewhat narrower field of time. They are the problems of the era of the great Wars of Religion which may be regarded as beginning soon 1 The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Thinkers of the Renaissance and the Reformation (Harrap). |