Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T13:40:18.510Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Power politics and religious faith: the fifth Martin Wight Memorial Lecture*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Donald M. MacKinnon
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In choosing a subject for this lecture, my mind turned to two books: both published during the war years, the first in 1941, Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminencel: the second at its very end, Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar The titles of both have been incorporated into the language. The former was not its author's invention; but his use of it as the title of his study of Father Joseph won it a near universality of currency. So Lindemann is still spoken of as Churchill's scientific éminence grise. But the title of Koestler's essay, though less heard to-day, advertises dramatically a very important bifurcation of approach to the problems of human life and society, the one typified by the devotee in his ashram, the other by the commissar, the dedicated ‘social surgeon’ serving the cause of the total transformation of a given human society in the light of the directives of the party to which he belongs. But of course there is an important sense in which in Father Joseph, the subject of Huxley's book (which was incidentally a very well researched piece of work), the two life-styles are to a considerable extent conjoined. Father Joseph is at one and the same time the devoted fanatical Capuchin, the father-founder of the Calvarian order of nuns and the skilled, ruthless agent of Richelieu's purposes. He was no yogi, still less a commissar, but a man whose spiritual teachings rate an admittedly short and critical reference in Bremond's famous history of 17th century French spirituality, and one who played an unquestionably important part in the diplomatic history of a period, wherein diplomacy might well be characterized as war carried on by other means.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , April 1980 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 1 note 1 London, 1941.

page 1 note 2 London, 1945.

page 2 note 1 Dr Geoffrey Parker, of St Andrews University, to whom this lecture owes a great deal.

page 2 note 2 It is Matthew who never speaks of the Kingdom of God, always the Kingdom of Heaven (basileia ton ouranon).

page 3 note 1 I quote from the English translation (London, 1970), pp. 250–51.

page 5 note 1 Dr Parker has warned me that Duplessis-Mornay's authorship of this work (taken more or less for granted by Professor Quentin Skinner in Vol. 2 of his Foundation of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge, 1979Google Scholar) should not be regarded as more than extremely likely.

page 6 note 1 Ithaca, 1940.

page 6 note 2 Professor Arnaldo Momigliano.

page 6 note 3 I find it hard to exaggerate my debt to Professor Church's very important book ‘Richelieu and Raison D'État (Princeton, 1972)Google Scholar, and to his other writings dealing with the history and development of French absolutism.

page 7 note 1 This somewhat cumbrous translation is my own.

page 8 note 1 The founder of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the so-called ‘Gowley Fathers’.

page 8 note 2 See Auguste, , Leman, Richelieu et Olivarès, (leurs négotiations secretes de 1636 a 1642 pour le retablissement de la paix) (Lille, 1938)Google Scholar.

page 8 note 3 NRF: Éditions Gallimard.

page 9 note 1 At this point I must acknowledge gratefully my debt to Professor Anthony Levi of St Andrews University.

page 9 note 2 Professor Bernard Williams in his recent book on Descartes (London, 1978) remarks that it was Bèrulle who made Descartes promise to devote himself to philosophy.

page 11 note 1 See his article in the periodical (then a monthly) Theology for 1936

page 12 note 1 London, 1940.

page 13 note 1 Constantine the Great and the Christian Church, second edition with preface by Chadwick, Henry (Oxford for the British Academy, 1972)Google Scholar.

page 13 note 2 Soldaten, Rowohlt Verlag, Reimbek bei Hamburg, 1967.

page 14 note 1 Oxford, 1967.

page 14 note 2 Especially as their could be no frontal assault across the English Channel that year.