The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  If, now, we look about us for a visible example which shall do justice to the pomp and splendour of this power, and soar to the height of this well-nigh superhuman majesty, the image of Louis XIV rises spontaneously to our eyes. It haunts us with its very splendour, this symbol of regal state; it pursues us across the gulf of time, it is with us, here and now; it is living still. There yet linger in our memory the famous words which the Grand Monarque—we can almost hear him saying them, as on the day he signalized the inauguration of his personal sway—l’état, c’est moi: I am the State. We know how he made up his mind to fulfil to the letter the motto: One King, One Faith, One Law; how he crushed every attempt at resistance; how, in the presence of the Pope himself, the helmsman of Christ’s Church, he upheld the rights of the captain who is responsible for the Ship of State; the captain being, of course, himself. He is the commanding exemplar, the hero, of the Monarchy. At Versailles we wait to see him pass through the halls and the courts, we follow him as he enters the Gallery of Mirrors surrounded by courtiers eager to interpret and obey his slightest gesture; and when, as the shades of evening begin to fall, we prepare to leave the groves and alley-ways laid out in accordance with his sovereign pleasure, we seem, as we retrace our steps towards the Château, to behold at one of the windows the figure called back for us by La Bruyère from the land of shadows: “He himself, in a manner of speaking, is his own Prime Minister. His mind forever dwelling on his people’s needs, there is for him no leisure time, no hours that he can call his own. Night draws on, the guards have been relieved at the approaches to his palace; the stars come out in the heavens, and proceed on their appointed way; all nature sleeps, buried deep in shadow, now that the day is done; and we too, take our rest; not so the King; quitting the balcony, he retires within his chamber, there, with sleepless eye, to watch over us and all his realm.”

  But from a very different source there came ideas favouring the doctrine that absolute power should be vested in the ruling prince, ideas, the reverse of religious, which were intended to prove that men could only be governed if they were treated as instruments, as tools. Machiavelli was a far-off figure, but the memory of him still survived. Nearer, in point of time, was Hobbes. As early as 1642, that keen and cynical philosopher had made a preliminary sketch of his theory. In 1651, in his Leviathan, he presented it in its finished and final form. Not a single European thinker but had been profoundly impressed by it, but had had to take it into account, were it but to refute it. How often, perusing some doctrinal work, one came across the name Hobbes at a turn of the page! What a profound commotion his ideas provoked! How they echoed and reverberated throughout the world!

  You are by nature evil, said Hobbes, addressing mankind at large. There is no spiritual principle anywhere in all the world: pleasure is the one and only good; pain the one and only evil; self-interest the one and only aim; and freedom is but the absence of whatever hinders the indulgence of the passions. The principle of the conservation of life being selfishness, and everyone defending his right to live, man’s natural state is a state of war; they live like wolves. Man’s state, in this natural freedom, is a state of war, for war is none other than the time in which the will and the endeavour to attack and to resist, by word or deed, are made sufficiently evident. The time which is not war is called peace. Will the destruction of the species result therefrom? Assuredly; unless something is devised to remedy the evils of the natural state, unless equality among men is replaced by a régime of inequality, which alone can save them from themselves. Hence the institution of a body-politic under the authority of a monarch, who, from the nature of the case, must be a tyrant.

  Pacts and pledges would be useless to maintain peace, for they would constantly be violated. Force alone can control men’s savage instincts, force, and the fear which it inspires; therefore the King must wield the sword of war and the sword of justice. Power of every description, complete and absolute, must be concentrated in his person. To limit his authority by some democratic device, such as an assembly of the people, would be to invite anarchy and, very soon, to relapse again into the natural state of chaos. The King is answerable to no one; he cannot be called to account; he is all in all. No doubt this means surrendering our freedom to him, and freedom is something to which we all cling more or less. But what would you? Since it is impossible to enjoy both freedom and life, better choose life. Man’s ingenuity is astonishing. He has learnt to construct artificial animals, automata that can walk about, sit down, wag their heads, open their mouths, and wink their eyes. So also he has contrived to create an artificial society, a monstrous machine, a political automaton which, with the happiest results, takes the place of natural society. This automaton is called Leviathan. “That great Leviathan called the Commonwealth or State is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended.” But over against these theories, which, though they derive from such widely different sources, all combine to fortify the principle of authority, other, and contrary, theories were to arise. Another battle was to be joined, a battle of abstractions to begin with, but not without a certain pathetic beauty of its own. We see ideas coming to birth, timid, fragile and promptly opposed; we see them grow in stature. Not one of them is confined to its native soil. They take wing, they laugh at frontiers, for that is their nature, their very life. They seem to gather new strength in the lands to which they fare. Constantly attacked, they are as constantly on the defensive, and, refashioned and disciplined in the process, they gain ground, they seize the initiative. At last they feel powerful enough to supersede the ideas by which men were actuated of old, and to guide them towards what they hope will be a happier future. Natural law was the offspring of a philosophy which rejected the supernatural, the divine, and substituted, for the acts and purposes of a personal God, an immanent order of Nature. It further proceeded from a rational tendency which affirmed itself in the social order. To every human being certain inherent faculties are attached, and, with them, the duty of putting them to their natural use. Finally, it derived from a sentiment, a state of feeling: the authority which at home arbitrarily determines the relations between subject and ruler, and which, abroad, is the cause of nothing but wars, must be done away with, and replaced by a new law, from which happiness may perhaps result, a political law which shall regulate the relations of the various peoples imbued with the idea that they themselves are the architects of their own destiny. The law of the people. . . .

  Law, philosophy of life, social values, practical values; law, a tree deep-rooted, with branches laden with foliage, does not change its character without much travail. Massive works of controversy stand out along the road. To take them in their due order, looking at each against the background of the period to which it belongs, all this is to take part in a prodigious effort, which, at every stage, increases its awareness of the object it pursues.

  1625. Hugo de Groot, De jure belli et pacis. It was a Dutchman who had sought refuge in Paris who gave the first signal. A man of highly sensitive nature, rich in knowledge and in intellectual endowments, in the fore-front of the political disputes, in the very centre of the religious controversies of his time, he grew sick at heart as he contemplated the ceaseless strife by which Europe was laid waste. “I beheld throughout Christendom an orgy of bloodshed of which even the barbarian races would have been ashamed. For frivolous reasons, or for none at all, men flew to arms and, once those arms were in their hands, no heed was paid to any law of God or man, as though, in obedience to some universal urge, the Furies were rushing unchecked along the road to every crime.” Grotius, who had suffered persecution for his opinions, made a romantic escape from the prison in which his enemies had confined him, and took refuge in France. It was to our King Louis XIII that he dedicated, in 1625, his treatise on the Law of War and Peace, a great work which passed unnoticed by the masses, the usual fate of authors who have had the profoundest influence on the people’s destiny. Who pay
s any attention to that department of the law which concerns the mutual relationship of peoples and their rulers? In Grotius’ opinion, no one. Nay, it is commonly held that war is something incompatible with law of any kind, and that by virtue of certain state reasons alleged by Machiavelli, perfidy and violence of every description should be recognized and excused. This is not true; there is a law which holds good even in time of war, a law which governs war, and that law is named Natural Law. The truth is that Nature has graven it on the hearts of men, whom it desired to live sociably together; nothing can prevail against this unwritten, but vital law. “In order that war should be a just war, it must not be carried on with less regard for religion than is usually observed in the administration of justice.” “When war is being waged, the civil laws are silent, but not those unwritten laws which are laid down by Nature.” But what of divine law? Grotius does his best to safeguard it. “What we have just said”, he declares, “would hold good even if we were to agree (which we could not do without sinning) that there is no God, or that He is indifferent to the affairs of men. Since God and Providence are undoubted realities, we have in them a source of law other than that emanating from Nature, the source which derives from the will of God. Natural law itself may be attributed to God, since God it was who willed that such principles should exist in us.”

  The law of God, the law of Nature. . . . It was not Grotius who invented this twofold formula. It had done duty long before his time; the Middle Ages were acquainted with it. What then was it that was new about it? How came it to be criticized and condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities? Why did it create such a stir?

  Its novelty lay in the patent separation of the two terms; in the no less evident tendency to stretch their opposition; and then in an attempt to reconcile the two, which of itself implied that the rift was a real one. Above all, it lay in an idea of which we have already made mention, an idea which, though not as yet clearly defined, was full of vigour: War, violence, disorder, which the law of God does not repress but suffers rather, and even justifies, as being part of an inscrutable design, all the ills which man is heir to—perhaps the day will come when some human law will bring about their mitigation, their abolition. Thus it is that we are invited, with manifold excuses for such boldness, to pass from the Order of Providence to the Order of Humanity. Throughout the century, translations of the book were constantly appearing; it was expounded and commented upon in every seat of learning.

  1670. Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus.

  1677. Ethic.

  The idea that kings are impostors, making use of religion to consolidate their unlawful power; and this other one, no less profound in its way, the idea that everything strives of necessity to persevere in its being:

  Demonstration. Individual things are modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a certain and determinate manner; that is to say, they are things which express in a certain and determinate manner the power of God, by which He is and acts. A thing, too, has nothing in itself by which it can be destroyed, or which can negate its existence, but, on the contrary, it is opposed to everything which could negate its existence. Therefore, in so far as it can and is in itself, it endeavours to persevere in its own being. Q.E.D.

  1672. Samuel Pufendorf. De jure naturae et gentium libri octo.

  1673. De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem libri duo.

  A German, engaged as a teacher in Sweden, took up the task, and set his indelible seal on the theories which were taking shape. Samuel Pufendorf was the first to occupy the chair of natural and international law at the University of Heidelberg. In 1670, he accepted a chair at the University of Lund offered him by Charles XI of Sweden. “The duty of the man and the citizen”: strange to hear those words, at that early date! We seem to be at least a hundred years ahead of the times. If anyone had asked us to what era they appertained, we should unhesitatingly have answered that they belonged to the phraseology of the French Revolution; and it is a fact that the work did contain certain basic ideas which, handed on from one thinker to another, came finally to exert a decisive influence on the collective mentality of the ensuing century: philosophical abstraction taking the place of history, since we may look upon “the first man as having fallen from the clouds, so to speak, with the same inclinations as those possessed by men when they come into the world to-day”; social morality, duty, being human action precisely conforming to the laws which command us to perform it; the political pact. Civil society which succeeds the state of nature by way of marriage, the family, the constitution of the body-politic, reposes of necessity on agreements: the several individuals covenanting together to unite in one body, and to regulate by common consent whatever concerns the common safety, and the common weal; those to whom the sovereign authority is entrusted pledge themselves to do all that in them lies to preserve the security and welfare of all; the rest promising them their loyal obedience.

  Natural Law gains form and substance; it now not only asserts its rights in war, it imperiously demands a place, and takes it, in the political constitution of the different states; it plays a predominant part in social life: “the law of nature is one which is so uniformly adapted to all that is sociable and reasonable in human nature that, unless its dictates were obeyed, it would be impossible for mankind to live together in peace and security.” Pufendorf does not deny the divine power, but he relegates it to another plane: there is the plane of pure reason, and there is the plane of Revelation; in the same manner, there is the plane of natural law and the plane of moral theology; the plane of duties which impose themselves upon us because the right use of our natural reason makes us regard them as essential to the maintenance of human society as a whole, and there is the plane of duties which we are called upon to fulfil because God in Holy Writ has laid them upon us. That said, he adduces arguments designed to show that these two planes do not clash, that they may work together, and only succeeds in demonstrating how profoundly they disagree. Theology is concerned with Heaven; human reason, with earth. Pufendorf confines himself to earth; Heaven seemed to him altogether too remote.

  The Swedish pastors saw only too plainly the dangers of this divided, or rather, avowedly one-sided allegiance; and against this exponent of the theory of natural law there arose such a storm of indignation that he was compelled to call in the aid of the secular arm to avoid being driven from his post. He was not driven from it; on the contrary, he won the day.

  1672. Richard Cumberland, De legibus naturae disquisitio philosophica.

  Now it is England that brings her contribution: the Reverend Richard Cumberland, Doctor of Divinity, and a future Bishop, refutes the abominable ideas put forth by Hobbes. What is the backbone of his argument? Why, precisely that same natural law which is in direct opposition to the violence that loomed so large in the mind of the author of Leviathan: natural laws amount simply to this, that we should be well-disposed to every reasonable being.

  But it was a different order of assistance that was to come from that ancient land in which politics have always entered into the intellectual, moral and religious life of the nation; in which the throne, in jeopardy all through the seventeenth century, overthrown, then restored, again overthrown, again restored, but essentially modified in character, was the centre of a passionate controversy in which the people, the nobility and gentry, poets and philosophers, and the kings themselves, were all anxious to play a part. But all in good time. For the moment things must needs wait a little.

  1685. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

  From the France which had established itself outside the borders of the motherland, from France in exile under foreign skies, there arose the voice of revolt. True, not all the reformers, not all even of those who suffered persecution and exile, deemed themselves released from their oath of allegiance to the King; they did not all apply the same solution to the problem of conscience which confronted them, for some there were who still thought, obedience to the King being the
due of his Divine Right, no faults he might commit could ever diminish the authority of one so appointed. But there were others, more vociferous, who loudly demanded that violence should be repaid with violence. From 1686 to 1689, Jurieu poured forth his Lettres pastorales aux fidèles qui gémissent sous la captivité de Babylone; letters in which he proclaims aloud the right to rebel. “The right of princes to use the sword does not extend to matters of conscience.” Louis XIV, having used the sword to coerce men’s consciences, had put himself outside the pale of the law: so now revolt is lawful.

  Hearing such doctrine expounded, Bossuet was scandalized, and to refute it he devotes his Fifth warning to Protestants concerning the letters of the minister Jurieu against the Histoire des Variations (1690): The foundations of empires undermined by the said minister. M. Jurieu disseminates “seditious teachings which tend to the overthrow of all empires and to the degradation of all dominions set up by God”. Eh, what! Shall the ancient Christian Church suffer persecution and not rise up against it? The Protestants themselves have long disclaimed ever having rebelled, whether in France or England, against the power of the Throne; yet now, to-day, Jurieu declares that men have the right to levy war on their own king, their own country! This spirit of rebellion is an abomination. “I undertake to prove to you that your Reformation is an unchristian thing, because it has failed in loyalty to King and country.”