Machiavelli accuses Christians of un-civic softness. His attention distracted by Heaven, the Christian neglects reality on earth. Since material reality turns out to be the only kind Machiavelli admits, head-in-the-clouds Christians bemuse themselves, sometimes to the Florentine's amusement but more usually to his irritation. He works to replace the Prince of Peace with the Prince of War.
Insofar as he succeeded, his princelings initially availed themselves of Christianity as a civil, no longer a prophetic religion, asserting the "divine right" of princes in Europe's absolute monarchies, the characteristic regime of the early modern, centralized state Machiavelli had conceived as the successor both to petty city-states and the spiritual empire of the Christian Church. But Christianity's prophetic character proved persistent; the new states fell into uncompromising (because uncompromisable) religious warfare, both amongst and within themselves.
Rightly alarmed by this combination of power-politics with religious fervor, Machiavelli's philosophic progeny began to formulate regimes that might settle this "theological-political" problem: the forthrightly materialist or "secular" absolutism of Hobbes, whereby the monarch alone would determine the religion of his subjects while funneling them into the peaceful pursuits of commerce; or the republicanism of Locke and Montesquieu, whose equally commercial regimes would take strong religiosity out of politics by tolerating every sect that respected the natural and civil rights of citizens. Although the older, monarchic Christians fought back (as in Europe's Holy Alliance), by the end of the nineteenth century Europe saw itself divided between largely secular republics in England and France and largely secular oligarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Hence the Great War.
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