IRENIC PATRIOTISM IN SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

This article analyses the interplay of arguments for religious reconciliation and peace on the one hand and a patriotic vocabulary or programme in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the other. Focusing on different phases of irenic debate in the Empire, various types of what will be termed ‘irenic patriotism’ will be identified. Irenic patriotism could employ both utilitarian politique and more principled arguments for a religious peace. Finally, a consideration of Hugo Grotius’s irenicism, which drew heavily on German sources, will show how a distinct humanist critique of theological controversies and their political consequences resulted in an emphasis on a minimalist and ethical concept of Christianity, as well as the idea of a total submission of the church and its doctrines to the authority of the magistrate and the patria. The distinctively civil type of irenicism, which arose from this debate, was less concerned with the unity of the church than with the integrity of the civitas, respublica, and patria.