The Society of Jesus has always been a highly “political” religious order. The context for its political thought was its engagement with higher-level education, its antiheretical, pastoral, and missionary activities, and its close relationships with secular rulers. Although there was no single, cohesive, or exclusively Jesuit political doctrine its members shared some premises: the premise that reason and revelation are complementary; that prudence is a pre-eminent virtue in all practical activity; and that the principles of good order are the same (...) for church, polity, and any other “body” or corporation . Inferences could therefore be drawn from reason to revelation and from one kind of body to another. Reason and revelation concurred that the polity requires coordination of individuals to the common good by coercive authority, and therefore hierarchy and headship, although that headship need not be monarchical. However, like most of their contemporaries, Jesuits regarded monarchy as the best form of government. Although authority as such is natural and necessary, the element of consent is the political community’s freedom to choose its own form of government. The alterability of most laws implies an “absolute” ruler. However, the authority of any ruler or regime is limited by fundamental laws, natural and divine law, and the natural and legal rights of subjects, as well as the right or threat of tyrannicide. The Society’s antiheretical activities were centered on defending the ultimate authority of the papacy over the church, especially as supreme arbiter of controversies about faith and morals. Jesuit theologians defended the papal “indirect power” to intervene in secular government where the salvation of souls was involved. This could threaten the independent authority of secular rulers. However, the Society was normally highly sympathetic to the position of secular rulers; indeed Jesuit theologians and controversialists made substantial concessions to “reason of state.” Almost from the establishment of the Society of Jesus , Jesuits have been involved with things political. The Society’s founders, preeminent among them Ignatius Loyola, had not intended this. However, their placing the Society at the papacy’s disposal, the remarkable gifts and educational attainments of its members, and its adaptability meant that even in the lifetime of the founding fathers , its activities came to center on secondary- and tertiary-level education and antiheretical engagements, as well as retaining the original focus on foreign and domestic missions, and spiritual guidance. For all these activities, the Society needed patrons among prelates and secular rulers to fund and protect it, and in dealing with them it acquired a vast collective political experience, as well as political enemies. Its various engagements also demanded theoretical reflection about politics. (shrink)

John Calvin, 1509–1564, Reformer of Geneva, Frenchman, naturalized Genevan bourgeois 1559, authority for Reformed Christians throughout Europe, translator of the Bible into French, author of a famed theological text, the Institution of the Christian Religion in successive Latin and French versions , 1560 ), pastor, ecclesiastical organizer, bilingual preacher, and polemicist whose sermons and catechetical, controversial, and organizational works were very widely diffused.

Martin Luther was a German Reformer, theologian, translator of the Bible into German, priest, theology professor at the university of Wittenberg in Electoral Saxony, preacher and pastor, prolific author in both German and Latin, former Augustinian monk, and excommunicated by the papacy in 1521. His best known political doctrines are the Zwei Reiche/Regimente Lehre ; political obedience and hostility to rebellion and millennialism; endorsement of princely “absolutism”; the territorial “prince’s church” . Slightly less well known are his opposition to usury, (...) his anti-Jewish attitudes, his very “secular” interpretation of marriage and divorce, his doctrine of the three estates , his “congregational” tendencies in church government, and his belief that his was the “end-time” when Satan and Anti-Christ ruled the world. His principal political doctrines were not unfamiliar; they resemble Augustine’s conception of the two civitates, the medieval “two swords” controversy, and conventional doctrines of obedience and good order of his time. Luther, moreover, set out his political ideas in pamphlets prompted by specific emergencies, and never consolidated them in a definitive text. Some interpreters see them as an expression of “social conservatism” rather than as inferences from his theology. (shrink)

A term of art, originally Italian, becoming common usage in other European vernaculars in the late sixteenth century. It meant practical reflection, albeit in writing and general in form, about all aspects of statecraft . It claimed practical usefulness in virtue of its grounding in experience and history, contrasting itself with “mirrors of princes,” which were supposedly ignorant of the realities of politics. More narrowly, reason of state meant a “Machiavellian” disregard for legal, moral, and religious considerations when the “interests (...) of the state” or “necessity” required it. Particularly contentious were the justifiability of dishonesty, duplicity, breach of faith and even treaty obligations, violence against opponents and competitors, illegal taxation, disregard of the claims of traditional institutions and officeholders, and the practice of religious toleration. Opponents of “reason of state” attempted to demonstrate that, on the contrary, adherence to religion, morality, and legality was the best policy, in that it earned providential rewards, but also that in strictly pragmatic terms it was most likely to bring political success. However, these proponents of “true reason of state” acknowledged that strict adherence to these norms was sometimes impossible, and when it was, statesmen must attempt to avoid the greater evil. Having become the subject of a vast literature and even a standard university topic, reason of state faded as an issue in the later seventeenth century. Realpolitik from the nineteenth century onwards resembles it, with the state representing a morality superior to the norms of legality and private morality, a view in turn contested by advocates of human rights and international morality. (shrink)

Thomas Fitzherbert's two-part Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (1606, 1610) was a rebuttal of unidentified Machiavellians, statists or politikes and their politics and policies. The work was apparently still well-regarded in the following century. Fitzherbert's objections to ‘statism’ were principally religious, and he himself thought the providentialist case against it unanswerable. But for those who did not share his convictions, he attempted to undermine Machiavellism on its own ground. Like both ‘Machiavellians’ and their opponents, he argued by inference from historical (...) examples, but with a particularly copious knowledge of historians ancient, medieval and modern to draw on. Equally, however, he deployed the principles of speculative (principally Aristotelian) ‘political science,’ as well as theology and jurisprudence, to demonstrate that the kind of knowledge that Machiavellians required to guarantee the success of their ‘reason of state’ policies was simply unobtainable. A particularly striking strategy (perhaps modelled on that of his mentor and friend Robert Persons) was Fitzherbert's attempt to demonstrate, on the Machiavellians’ own premises, that they advocated policies which were very likely to fail, and would be visited with divine punishments sooner as well as later, whereas policies that were compatible with faith and morals were also much more likely to succeed, even judged in purely human and ‘statist’ terms. (shrink)