2. Political Phase
the Northern War brought Orthodox
Russia into the sphere of European
affairs; colonial growth widened the
arena of political activity by offering new fields
for material development wherein the religious
element was of relative
unimportance. Diplomacy
abandoned the religious view-point and became
Machiavellian with the reason of State as its
guiding principle. Within the states the ancient
pretensions of the Church yielded to the interests
of a society that was rapidly being reorganized
on the basis of commercialism, militarism, and
bureaucracy. Formally, orthodoxy retained its
own and established religions paevailed; yet the
secular principle determined the attitude of the
governments to the Church and toward their
subjects. This is the period of
Concordats (q.v.),
of the persecution of the Jesuits and of territorial
church legislation. The theory of sovereignty,
fostered by the revival of the Roman .law and the
Reformation, developed into absolutism, which
in turn subordinated Church to State completely,
and broke the political influence of creed. With
these changes in the conception of the purpose
and authority of the State appeared new theories
as to its nature and origin. Following out the
traditions of Aristotle and Machiavelli, Jean Bodin
(d. 1596) advanced a purely rational origin of society and in his Colloquium heptaplomeres, widely read
in manuscript (ed. Noack, Schwerin, 1857), devel
oped the destructive effects of such a theory on
the religious power in the State. But it was Gro
tius (d. 1645; see
Grotius, Hugo) who destroyed
the scholastic dualism of lax natura: and lax diving
and found sanction for the law of nature, the law
of nations, public law, and
natural morality in
the human understanding unaided by revelation.
His
cause was strengthened by the rise of the mod
ern Stoics in Holland and by Hobbes (d. 1679;
see
Hobbes, Thomas) with his Epicurean teach
ings. Pufendorf (d. 1694), in Germany, and
Locks (d. 1704), in England (see
Pufendorf, Samuel;
Locke, John), made the new ideas the
common possession of European culture. In this
newly developed theory of the State is the true
precursor of the
Enlightenment; for, though it
assumed no radical attitude in the beginning and
maintained friendly relations with the religious
creeds of the time, its result was the destruction
of the theological bases of the prevailing culture.
It exercised a powerful influence on the remodeling
of church law, especially among the Protestants,
marking, as it did, the beginning of ecclesiastical
legislation on purely political principles. It furthered the growth of toleration and attained its
final development in the theory of the freedom of
religion and of conscience, and further still, of
the universal rights of man. Yet so complex
are the sources of the various manifestations which
in their entirety are known as the Enlightenment,
that the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the
French States-General in 1789 is more immediately
to be traced to the influence of the constitution of
the United States (1783) than to Rousseau's Contrat
social (1762).
