Essays on Church, State, and Politics

Introductory Dissertation, Addressed to My Audience

Introductory Dissertation, Addressed to My Audience§1. It is customary for the authors of books to preface the treatises they publish with a discourse in which they either recommend the work or discuss various other matters for the reader. I will not inquire here whether these discourses are useful or irrelevant, nor am I concerned with their title, whether they are more properly called a prooemium, a praefatio, or an antefatio, which is a term I have seen some people prefer. I believe that this should be left to the judgment of each individual and that the common proverb “everybody prefers his own way” is very appropriate here.§2. I have various reasons for prefacing my Institutes with an introductory dissertation. First, I want you to have a clearer idea of my intention; second , I want to defend myself against the accusation of literary plagiarism and render the authors I have used in this work their proper due; third, to clarify certain opinions, which have been expressed a little obscurely and could expose me to slander, and to fortify them against objections; and finally, to say something about amendments to some passages.§3. But I address you, my beloved audience, not only because I produced these Institutes of public law for your sake, and it is thus your immediate concern to know what is relevant to understanding them. It also seemed to some extent to be in my interest to justify my teaching and my studies to you, you whose fees and love by the grace of God sustain me, and who have encouraged me to be diligent and to contemplate true philosophy, since I had no opportunity to abuse public funds in order to 1 2 institutes of divine jurisprudence be lazy or to profess a false wisdom, which rests on authority rather than reason.1§4. So, I would have wasted my time and my efforts, if I had seized my quill to refute those who examine my writings insidiously and anxiously, not for the sake of learning, but with the intention of putting obstacles in the way of my honest endeavors, and of ensnaring my words. Yet I live under an obligation to those people who are free from passion when they read my Institutes or the present dissertation and believe that I, too, can put forward opinions which may not always and directly discover the truth, but which can nevertheless be of some use in inquiring about it and finding it, and who believe that one should not ask who says something, but what is said, and that often even the vegetable gardener makes appropriate comments.§5. Thus, when I moved from school to university, I did not immediately enter one of the higher faculties, as our young people, unfortunately, often do. Instead, I first spent a number of years studying philosophy.2 There I had the opportunity to hear my blessed father3 lecturing on Grotius’s books On the Rights of War and Peace; and even though I did not understand very much at that time, nevertheless the dignity and elegance of the doctrine captivated me. Soon I was seriously devoting myself to understanding it better than others and of absorbing it into my very flesh and blood. I also remembered that my father had in his lectures often referred his audience to the theologians, who drew attention to Grotius’s errors in religion, and to the jurists. It was to the latter that Grotius’s work was mainly relevant. My father himself declared in his prolegomena that he had chosen this treatise to support the noblest part of jurispru1 . At the time of writing the Institutes Thomasius did not hold a university position but depended on the income he received from private teaching of university students. 2. The higher faculties were usually law, medicine, and theology. All other subjects, such as ethics, logic, metaphysics, and natural philosophy, were taught in the lower faculty of philosophy. 3. Jacob Thomasius (1622–84), professor of rhetoric and moral philosophy at the University of Leipzig. introductory dissertation 3 dence. I therefore thought it necessary in my private studies to add two of Grotius’s commentators to my reading of him. One of them is a jurist, who is very learned in divine and human affairs and is the ornament of the University of Wittenberg, Caspar Ziegler;4 the other is a theologian in Tübingen, whose...