Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence, with Selections from Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations. Christian Thomasius
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of Paul, and has created a confused and disorderly mass, in one word, a kind of amorphous chaos. But it is also the fault of philosophers and jurists who neglected letters35 before the Reformation and so gave the papal theologians the chance to seize what was left derelict. That is what happened to natural jurisprudence, as I say in the Institutes themselves, since the law of nature and nations and theology are entirely different. This I prove in book 1, chapter 1, §§163ff., and chapter 2, §§137ff. The news from the capital of Spain has recently brought us an excellent illustration of my opinion: “One suspects that the Dutch extraordinary envoy will receive satisfaction against the Inquisition for the insolent acts committed in his house in the case of Mr. Chares. These acts were condemned without exception by all high-ranking ministers, especially as Mr. De Lyra himself said that the inquisitors were people who understood theology, but not the law of nations, and thus did not know what was due to a public minister.”36 Nor do I conceal my belief that the power to declare a heretic does not pertain to either private persons or the clergy, but is a regalian right and pertains to the prince’s right in sacred affairs, even though this regalian right must be exercised according to the standard of the divine word. I see that this is how it has been observed in the primitive church and in the first ecumenical councils, and the genuine principles of political science teach me the same. I believe also that it belongs to the duty of a good citizen in the Holy
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Roman Empire, not to speak disparagingly either in public or in private about the religions that are tolerated in the Empire, because this is what the peace treaty of Westphalia teaches me. I believe furthermore that the rules on the duties of the good citizen also apply to the clergy and that this doctrine does not contradict the word of God. I believe that the prince makes proper use of his right if he coerces those with just punishments who are refractory and driven by some intemperate zeal: I believe that gentleness does more to convert adversaries in the church than harsh methods full of verbal abuse, etc. If there is anything heterodox in any of this, I will most willingly suffer correction by those to whom this power belongs.
§32. I turn to impiety; I hear that the supposed sign of this is that I strongly disagree with my late blessed father. From this someone inferred that I did not care about divine laws, but wanted all of them to be purged from sacred Scripture. This is certainly a cheeky argument, and one that is in many ways contrary to logic. I confess that I sometimes dissent from my father, but the Catechism does teach me that I may do so with a clear conscience and without violating the fourth precept [of the Decalogue]. If someone wanted to extend this to the point of saying that the honor and reverence owed to parents also included some sort of adulatory denial of truth, though truth is guided not by authority, but by right reason, I fear that this person would be hissed and booed even by the catechumens, who are still learning the Catechism. It is not true and even a lie to say that I think harshly of my father. I appeal to all of you to say whether I ever uttered a single little word which could be interpreted as disparaging my father, whenever I indicated to you my disagreement with him. As I have pointed out above, it is possible for me not to mention the name of my father or of others to whom I owe reverence without damaging the reliability of the information. It is true that I did not think highly of some doctrines of the Peripatetics, because I noticed that they did not rest on any firm reason; it is also true, and I acknowledge it, that I sometimes referred to the philosophical writings of my father on this in my lecture, since he was, to my knowledge, the best interpreter of Peripatetic philosophy, whose ideas I developed further. But then there was no more of a disagreement between my father and myself than there is in a court of law between a plaintiff and the lawyer of the accused, especially as my blessed
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father himself diverged from common opinion in many ways, since he had better reasons, not only in his published writings but also in hitherto unpublished manuscripts (as we will show in an example in the following passages), thus setting a praiseworthy example to me.
§33. There remains the accusation of being an innovator. The disciples of true wisdom do not take this very seriously, since it is to be considered a matter of pride not to want to see everything with the eyes of others, but to find out something that has been overlooked by others, on the basis of one’s own reasoning powers. And that is the specific characteristic of Eclectic Philosophy, which I have adopted. Its superiority over sectarian philosophy is demonstrated in an erudite dissertation by Johann Christoph Sturm, which preceded a treatise on Eclectic Philosophy that appeared in the previous year:37 But none of the Sectarians or none of those who worship antiquity as if it were a deity will refute this [eclectic philosophy], nor can they refute it, as I have shown to you on another occasion.38 Thus I embrace many new ideas and I reject many new ones. Many new ideas I introduce myself by making use of my liberty of philosophizing and by being guided by reason which accepts new and old ideas equally. If a reply were required, I could fittingly use the sharp-witted epigram of a man among us who is both an excellent theologian by virtue of his life and his doctrine, as well as a most elegant poet—an epigram with which he recently honored participants in a public disputation:39
Whoever, in oral debate, wants to protect the errors of the ancients
And boasts that everything he teaches is ancient
He, while he mocks the others by the name of innovators
Will graduate in the class of the obsolete.
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I know that it is not easy to introduce something new in theological matters because the peace within the church must not be disturbed, though novelty can be defended if it is put forward properly. But I deny having introduced any novelty in that sense and have submitted my Institutes to public censorship.
§34. Yet these calumnies allowed me to see that some had taken the concise brevity which I used in the first book as an opportunity to distort my words. I therefore not only expressed my meaning in the second and third books more elaborately than I had originally intended to, but also conferred privately on the matters in the first book with some friends, men whom I revere for their supreme zeal for piety which is the true theological virtue. I asked them to warn me in time if they detected anything there which was contrary to the articles of faith, or might seem to be so, or could be interpreted in a bad sense because it was ambiguously expressed, or which promoted some novelty dangerous to sacred doctrine. And they were very happy to do so, discussing various objections with me in a peaceful manner. I accepted these gratefully, and in order to explain what is expressed rather obscurely in the first book and to reaffirm what is doubtful, I can only communicate to you the ideas which came into my mind as a result and from my own rereading of that book. Insofar as possible, I do this very briefly and according to the rule that I either teach you how to avoid an objection through an appropriate interpretation of my intention or that I show that the opinion I defend, even if new, is not theological, and not even so new, but resting on the authority of men who are above suspicion, and often on that of our own theologians, even if this opinion is not commonly accepted.
§35. In chapter 1, §§3ff., I set out a much improved and corrected classification of faculties, and in §22 of the same chapter I assert that the common doctrine of the Peripatetics in this matter is full of endless errors. And I do not change my opinion on this matter now. However, this doctrine is certainly not theological, nor even new. For while I believed at the time that I had been the first to detect these errors, since I only remembered one error that my father pointed out in his history of metaphysics, published
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together with his metaphysical questions,40 namely that the Scholastics described their metaphysics as wisdom, when it was nothing other than a dictionary of terms, many of which do not serve wisdom, but sophistry. Another error he pointed out in his annotations on practical philosophy was that intelligence was listed among the theoretical faculties. Yet, while doing something else recently, I noticed an elegant meditation in the manuscripts of my blessed father, which showed that the other observations I had made on the common division of qualities were already made by him around 1660. On this account I congratulated myself on the similarity of my thoughts with those of my father. This discussion is a little too long to be inserted conveniently into this preface.