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F I V E Recourse to Alternative Traditions: Political Calvinism, Aristotle, and Germanic Communitarianism ALTHUSIUS DERIVED HISPOLITICAL CONVICTIONS and theoretical strength from three mutually reinforcing strands in political theory and practice that all converged at the time: political Calvinism as a newly developed survival doctrine for religious minorities, the Politics of Aristotle as a rediscovered classical affirmation of the co-operative sociability embedded in human nature, and finally the living tradition of Germanic communitarianism and fellowship. The new divisions of faith after the Reformation mainly derived their dogmatic intransigence from different interpretations of the New Testament. The original Calvinist Reformators, Zwingli, Bullinger, and Calvin, had not intended such a division. They also differed from the much more politically inclined Luther who had, on the basis of Romans 13,1 postulated the separation of conscience and obedience similar to both Bodin's demand of religious toleration or Hobbes' separation of private and public interest. There was to be individual freedom of thought and faith, but also submission to civil authority, giving to the Emperor what was the Emperor's, a socially and politically unmediated source of authority . These early Reformators had probably not envisaged the degree of autocratic moral supervision and leadership that would later develop in Winthrop's Puritan New England,2 or even in Calvin's own Geneva, where dissent from the new public morality soon meant at least excommunication and, consequently, economic ruin,3 if not death for heresy.4 1 You must all obey the governing authorities... 2 SeePerry Miller, The New England Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 422. 3 H.G. Koenigsberger and G.L. Mosse, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans & Green, 1969), 150. 4 In 1553, Michael Servetus, an eclectic Spanish scholar of many professions, including medicine and astrology, and with pantheistic inclinations, was tried and burned at the stake at Calvin's personal instigation. Servetus was not even 56 Recourse to Alternative Traditions 57 No, these church reformers were first and foremost concerned about how to regain the unity of the Christian faith, and, as a consequence of their struggle for survival,about the limits on those who ruled to impose unilaterally their version of faith and obedience. In this effort, they took recourse in the Jewish Covenant in the Old Testament,5 which they interpreted generally as encompassing all men from the beginning of time and for all times to come. Calvin may have been first to make use of the old Roman Law formula of "mutual obligation"6 in order to express the existential right of the people as direct and primary participants in the covenant with God. Philip Melanchthon, a great humanist among the early church reformers, and for this reason increasingly distanced from his earlier role as Luther's closest collaborator, had subsequently developed the new doctrine of the religious covenant into one of natural law: the Jewish Covenant was for him only a renewed expression of the fact that the knowledge of God's will was irreversibly embedded in human nature.7 Calvin's use of the mutual obligation formula had not yet included the reservation that one party of the covenant would remain obliged only as long as the other party fulfilled its part. Such a contractualist reinterpretation of the covenant idea mainly emerged from the writings of the so-called Monarchomachs, primarily those Calvinist-Huguenot publicists trying to defend their religion against the Catholic monarchy of France in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. They extended the covenant idea to a "double covenant": because God had entered this covenant directly with the Israelites as his people, and not just with its rulers as his vassals, the Calvinists concluded that there was also a mutual obligation between people and ruler inherent in it that both had to adhere to.8 In Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, this transformation of the covenant idea into a fundamentalprinciple of contractual mutuality between people a citizen of Geneva. It would appear that public opinion for some time turned against Calvin, and that opposition to capital punishment of heretics subsequently gained ground in Protestant communities. SeeEarl Morse Wilbur, "Life of Servetus," in Michael Servetus, The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932; repr. New York: Kraus, 1969), xix-xxviii. 5 Esp. Deuteronomy 26: 17-19. 6 Mutua obligatio 7 This section is mainly based on two classical German sources: Gerhard Oestreich, "Die Idee des religiosen Bundes und die Lehre vom Staatsvertrag," in Zur Geschichte und...

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