Political Atheism and Early Modern Natural Law

Abstract

This essay examines how natural law ideas of early modern Protestant and Catholic thinkers unwittingly conspired to undergird the conceptual possibility of political atheism. Political atheism refers to the idea that there could be a domain of action, the temporal, which could be effectively governed without need for recourse to spiritual instruments or authority. Pierre Bayle shocked his contemporaries in 1682 when he argued for the possibility of a well ordered society of atheists. The essay looks at the foundations of this kind of argument in the epicurean anthropology of Protestant jurisconsults, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, and in the concept of “indirect papal power” developed by Catholic canon lawyer Robert Bellarmine. The essay takes as its case study the papal interdict issued to Republican Venice in 1606-1607.

Keywords: Early Modern Natural Law, Catholic Natural Law, Protestant Natural Law, Bayle, Pufendorf, Thomasius, Bellarmine