Hobbes and Pufendorf explicitly associate
the contemporary renovation of classical
civic culture, as refracted through the concerns
of humanistically trained Reformation
theologians, with the religious and political
chaos of their era. According to Pufendorf it
is the ‘absurd and erroneous’ political
‘dogmas’ of Plato and Aristotle, as transmitted
through the early modern university
curriculum, which have brought tumult and
convulsion to modern states (Pufendorf,
1955: ‘Praefatio lectori benevolos’).1
Hobbes blames the ancient civic tradition for
all the tumults of his time, and ‘the effusion
of so much blood’: ‘there was never anything
so dearly bought, as these Western
parts have bought the learning of the Greek
and Latin tongues’. Just as the Reformation
theologians’ location of spiritual authority
within the individual believer’s breast led to
interminable religious dispute, so the republicans’
location of moral authority within the
breast of the individual citizen would lead to
endless religious conflict. Worse still, if
primacy of the spiritual conscience in religious
belief were allied to civic activism in
political belief, neither established religion