Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
The concluding part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984. In the first part of this study of the relationship between the religious use of political images and concepts and their use in political rhetoric (published in January) the author focussed on the political and religious language of early seventeenth-century England.
With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 a kind of stability returned to England; conflicts and controversies there, of course, were in the political sphere, and even a ‘glorious revolution’, but compared with the preceding decades a certain peace and order is evident. There was a strong desire for peace among various sections of the population, and the economic and social foundations were being established upon which was to rise the political stability of the following century. By 1688, writes J. Carswell, ‘Englishmen were becoming used to the idea of reading about their domestic politics rather than fighting about them’. Ideas of arbitrary power were assailed and the notion of a law depending not simply on the dictate of a sovereign once more became predominant. This is particularly evident in the deist and rationalist writers of the period. God is not ‘an arbitrary being’, insisted Matthew Tindal, but the reasonable governor of a regulated universe. The order, stability and rationality of ‘the spacious firmament on high’ provided a model for social and political relationships. It would be little less than horrid and dreadful blasphemy, declared the influential archbishop John Tillotson, ‘to say that God out of his sovereign will and pleasure can do anything that contradicts the nature of God, or the essential perfections of his deity’.
45 Plumb, J.H., The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725, London 1967CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Carswell, J., From Revolution to Revolution: England 1688–1776, London 1973, p. 29Google Scholar
46 Christianity as Old as Creation, London 1730, i, p. 9Google Scholar.
47 Tillotson, J., Sermons, London 1700, vi, p. 216Google Scholar.
48 Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, quoted in Weston & Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns, p. 12. M.C. Jacob has illuminating things to say on these matters in The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720, Hassocks, Sussex 1976.
49 Hill, C., The Century of Revolution, London 1981 ed., pp. 22 & 3Google Scholar.
50 Proudhon à l'abbé X, 22 Janvier 1849, in Oeuvres complètes de P‐J Proudhon, Paris, i, 1923, p. 375nGoogle Scholar.
51 Maximoff, G.P. ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, New York, 1964, p. 62Google Scholar.
52 Sermons on Subjects of the Day, London, 1873, p. 273Google Scholar.
53 Kitamori, K., Theology of the Pain of God, London, 1958Google Scholar; Moltmann, J., The Crucified God, London 1974CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 Quoted in Nicholls, David, From Dessalines to Duvalier, Cambridge, 1979, p. 297Google Scholar.
55 Yates, Frances, Astrea, the Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 26Google Scholar; Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, pp. 214f.
56 The Education of a Christian Prince (1516), Brown, L.K. ed., New York 1936, pp. 170–1Google Scholar.
57 On the Haitian dictator's use of supernatural images see Nicholls, David, From Dessalines to Duvalier, pp. 232fGoogle Scholar.
58 Perry Miller, The New England Mind, p. 413.
59 Brown, , The Cult of the Saints, London, 1981, p. 63Google Scholar.
60 Breasted, J., The Dawn of Conscience, New York, 1934, p. 275Google Scholar.
61 For a discussion of this issue, see Nicholls, David, The Pluralist Stale, London, 1975, pp. 36fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.