Absolution

Absolution The late-sixteenth, seventeenth, and early-eighteenth centuries in Europe are sometimes described as the age of absolutism. In many European countries, the power of the state - typically governed by a king - grew at the expense of regional and individual liberties. In France, for example, royal power had fallen to a low point in the late sixteenth century during a period of religious civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots, but then began to rise sharply under Henry IV , under Louis XIII and his chief minister Cardinal Richelieu, and especially under Louis XIV. One of the most famous and influential theorists of absolutism was Jean Bodin. After receiving a good education in classical languages and literature, he studied law, and became a successful lawyer, judge, and advisor to members of the royal family. People like Bodin who put political before religious considerations were called politiques (a word closely connected with the English terms "politic" and "politics”). It is possible that Bodin personally came to believe in a religion that contained Islamic and especially Jewish elements, as well as Christian ones, and that he wrote a book called the Colloquium of the Seven in which he develops his diverse and syncretistic ideas. The Colloquium was attributed to Bodin and circulated in manuscript in the seventeenth century, and published as his in the nineteenth, but his authorship has recently been questioned. Though Bodin supported religious toleration, he strongly advocated the persecution of witches, and wrote a lengthy book on witchcraft. Bodin's major political work was the Six Books of the Commonweal, which was published in French in 1576 - at the time of the religious wars - and in a Latin translation (by Bodin himself) ten years later when the religious wars were still going on. Especially important for the later development of political theory was Bodin central doctrine - of unlimited and indivisible sovereignty. According to this doctrine, in every state there must be one person (or one defined group of people) who has all the powers necessary to govern the community, and who is its sovereign. If one person made laws, but another commanded the army, and a third ran the economy, there would be eternal disagreements, and the state would soon collapse. So sovereignty cannot be divisible between different people. Again, a sovereign who was accountable to someone else would not really be sovereign; so no one can have the right to impose limitations on the power of sovereigns, or to resist them by force of arms. Though Bodin held that people have no right to rebel against the sovereign, he argued that we ought not to obey sovereigns if they command things that are contrary to the law of God or the law of nature. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was France's most important exponent of absolutism during the seventeenth century. The foremost orator of his day, he was also tutor to Louis XIV's son, Louis the Dauphin, and an influential Bishop. His Politique tirée (1709) - Politics taken from the very words of Scripture - was an attempt to found a system of political ideas purely on Scriptural sources. (Most contemporary thinkers thought that reason also had an important role to play, and in fact Bossuet himself also drew on arguments based on reason). In Bossuet's view, Louis XIV's France greatly resembled Solomon's Israel. Sources: www. history.wisc.edu/sommerville/351/351-172.htm. www. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Bénigne_Bossuet.