Philosophy in the 17th century – The conception of human nature: authority and absolutism (3)

In the second current the spirit of free examination of the Reformation is maintained; but even this free examination is only made, in the intention of those who defend it, to gradually suppress, by an independent criticism, all that Bossuet called “particular opinions” and “variations”; it is therefore a means of arriving at “catholicity”, although by a different path from that of authority. This freedom, with the conflicts that it supposes, appears to Milton (Areopagitica, written in 1644, after Cromwell’s victory) the condition of a truth that must be conquered by a continuous progress, the waters of truth “become corrupted in the muddy pools of orthodoxy and tradition”[1]. Without doubt, truth takes changing forms and “perhaps it puts its voice in unison with the times”; this is not skepticism; Truth itself remains “the strongest thing after the Almighty.”

If tolerance is linked to a strong religious sentiment, which unites men, conversely, the skepticism of freethinkers leads to religious intolerance, another way of achieving unity: it was they, the disciples of Machiavelli, who supported the necessity of a state religion; Hobbes would give us the example; and James Harrington, in his Oceana, described a state church that would control the training of the clergy in universities. Conversely, it was in religious circles that the idea of a secular state, completely independent of religious matters, was formed in England[2]: it was the Anabaptists who, at the beginning of the century, proclaimed that a national church, to which one belongs by birth, is in contradiction with faith, a personal gift of the Holy Spirit; They are the ones who preach revolt against intolerant princes.

Despite all these conflicts, supporters of natural religion and upholders of revelation, defenders of tolerance and apologists for state religion, seek the same thing: a unity capable of binding and holding individuals together.