Bossuet

Bossuet was an ordained priest. Winning favor at the Court, he was appointed tutor to the dauphin, the son of Louis XIV.

All Bossuet's thinking was influenced by Augustine and characterized by an emphasis on authority. In his eyes, obedience and discipline are virtues. He is in favor of the absolute monarch, chosen by God and responsible to Him alone (distinguished, however, from the arbitrary monarch, a tyrant who merely gratifies his own whims).

He was curiously ambivalent in his relations with Protestants, converting many individuals, and courteously corresponding with Leibniz in an attempt to effect a reconciliation, while greeting the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, followed as it was by persecution, with an embarrassingly effusive eulogy of Louis' piety. Bossuet played a leading role in the campaign against the Protestants. Here again he took the middle position, supporting royal policy but disagreeing with actual persecution. He held that it was for the state to persuade, and to coerce if necessary, but for the church to convince and to make the orthodox position clear to fair-minded hearers.

Bossuet became involved in the quarrel between Louis XIV and the Pope over the respective rights of king and pope in France. Favoring the king, Bossuet's opinions became the basis for subsequent claims of king and church in France for independence from the papacy. His sermon on the unity of the church was an attempt to avoid the schism which the conflict between pope and king was rendering immanent. Behind the words, however, lay negotiations concerned with the dispute over the royal insistence on its rights to demand a portion of the church’s income. The result was a declaration issued and accepted by all parties in 1682.

Bossuet was smart enough not to oppose or contradict Louis XIV directly, but subtle critiques of Louis are detectable to the careful reader. Bossuet saw the monarch as absolute, yet answerable to God, and confined to the limits of human reason - thus the absolute monarch in Bossuet is “less absolute” than in the first half of the Leviathan by Hobbes.

Bossuet was also more optimistic than the first half of the Leviathan, because he saw opportunities for humans to learn and be trained in virtue, whereas the first half of the Leviathan saw humans as immutably selfish and violent.

Bossuet is more much similar to the second half of the Leviathan, in which Hobbes Bossuet, page 1 outlines a more moderate absolutism.

Bossuet wrote his Political Economy Drawn from Holy Scripture as instructions for the dauphin. It is one of the best-known statements of the divine right of kings to govern. By finding support for his statements in Scripture, he hoped to appeal to Protestants, and thus overcome the religious differences in France to create more national and spiritual unity. He hoped to rationalize the absolutism of Louis XIV, and yet at the same time, place limits upon it, and perhaps even subtly critique it. Bossuet considers the characteristics of royal authority, the relationship between the monarch and God, the source and origin of kingship, the nature of the royal person, responsibilities and duties of subjects toward their rulers, limits of royal authority, and the sources of information to which he wants to direct the dauphin

The unfinished Discourse on Universal History was intended to teach the dauphin not so much what had happened as why. In tracing the fortunes of empires down to Karl (“Charlemagne”) the Great (and to Louis XIV, if he had completed his plan), Bossuet emphasized moral and religious development, regarding too much freedom as risking of decadence. Obedience and discipline were not only for the subjects, however, as Bossuet insists that the absolute monarch must see himself as obedient to God, limited by reason, and obliged to use his power only for the benefit of his subjects. Bossuet’s search, both patient and informed, for a thread of meaning through the upheavals of the ancient world must be counted as an important new departure in historical writing. His method, which establishes the principle that in order to refute an opponent it is necessary to learn what he means, is original and important.

Bossuet, page 2