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On the Rise of Modern Europe |
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Written by Michael R. Walker
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Monday, 19 April 2010 07:41 |
For a few reasons this (extremely) concise description of one way of accounting for the "Rise of Modern Europe" struck me as interesting, one reason being the confident characterization of modern political theory as rooted in natural law. That may have been somewhat controversial in the early 1970s, when it was written, but my guess is one would be perceived as trying pick a fight by stating it that way in a mainstream academic journal today....
From Walter F. Bense, “Paris Theologians on War and Peace, 1521-1529,” in Church History, 41(2):168.
"The period from 1521 to 1529 marks the transition from the suppression of the personal Protestantism of Luther to the emergence of political Protestantism as a force to be reckoned with. Unavoidably, perhaps, this transition brought with it a change in the general attitude toward war and peace, indeed, in the self-understanding of Europe. The medieval model of a Christendom united under the cross and the papacy, ideally at peace within and at war only with the infidel, was becoming obsolete. Having entered upon its period of dominance with the simultaneous proclamation of the Peace of God and the First Crusade by Pope Urban II in 1095, it may be said to expire with the Peace of Cambrai of 1529. The modern model, of a community of independent states whose autonomy is grounded in natural law and whose bond of union is vaguely cultural rather than specifically religious, is already reflected in Luther's 1529 treatise, On War Against the Turk. The short-range effect of the transformation of 1521/29 was the desacralization of the Turkish war and the redirection of the crusading spirit against the Protestants. The long-range effect would seem to have been the rise of modern Europe-out of the throes of the Wars of Religion-as a system of more or less secular and national states."
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