MediaArhiv

Part 4

page 49/124

Is the absolutism of a certain church closely related to the absolutism of the state?). The spiritual and secular rulers stood for the monopoly of absolutism, but not for its destruction, although through their struggle they shook respect for the truth of both types of human oppression, secular and spiritual. History clearly shows the mutual support of both types of absolutism 3). The unity of justifications for their power in relation to the individual has become too clear. Despite the fact that in the court circles of Louis, starting with Louis the 14th, freethinking was encouraged, some of their subjects felt the yoke of Catholicism was more unbearable and more hateful, the clergy remembered the Edict of Nantes.

It is only a stretch to classify the aforementioned philosophers and publicists, who spoke out clearly against both types of despotism, as theorists of enlightened despotism." Their ideas opened the way for the future, i.e., revolutionary doctrine. This is best shown by the attitude

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2) King Takov said: where there is a bishop, there is no king.

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4“) Even D’Argeson, speaking in the same spirit, writes that France, even during the reign of Louis, established the principle among the parliament and the Jansenists that the people are as much higher than the king as the church is higher than the pope. 21*

those

Dfotchtieitchy authorities k ikh sochinesham. For example, the modern power of Evil looked at the book of Helvesh Oe Rezrgy as a book about vile and shameful passions that legitimizes them.

The same opinion was formed regarding the encyclopedia, whose article on freedom of conscience, on the origin of power through the birth of kings, etc., violated, in her opinion, the laws of God and man and destroyed society. Exactly the same negative view of the authorities expressed about Voltaire, Guelveshi and others, was extended, according to contemporaries, to all philosophy, which, in their opinion, was the source of revolutionary ideas.

The authorities more correctly assessed the significance of these writers and hardly initiated their persecution, seeing their commitment to enlightened absolutism.

We do not deny that there is one reason that made it possible to classify some of the named French authors as supporters of the theories of enlightened absolutism. This is the point of their teaching that we pointed out: the subordination of law to morality.

Law, subordinate to morality, allows the legislator to lay his hand on the personal life of a citizen. As we will see below, V. Humboldt rebelled against this with all his might. A legislator and ruler, inspired by good intentions, which characterizes, for example, the activity of the loser Tosiea P., may wish to carry out experiments on the moral education of the people with the help of law?). From a careful acquaintance with the content of their guiding thoughts, we, in contrast to Henri Michel, came away with the impression that the dependence of law on morality has more of a methodological and systematic subordination in them.

1) See the corresponding atYe]ez encyclopedias: especially Aschogiyo Ogoy, Tugapie, Ropuoy, Petosgaie, etc.

2) It is known that the legislative acts of this monarch, in their own way,

Their inspiration and content were much higher than the morals of the people for whom they were written.

For.

EVE

related areas to a single deductive principle—a characteristic feature of rationalism—have any practical significance.

If Helvesh in his posthumous production: Oe Rvopishe, 4e zez asi 6z her 4e zop e@psamol (X. p. 1) assert that “one who is brought up can do anything,” or Golbach in his

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(which came out almost simultaneously) to dream of the universal dominance of the universal principles of natural morality, then they say this as utopian philosophers, but not as statesmen, which, in essence, they never were. Of course, this does not diminish them by contradicting the very principles of political individualism: freedoms and equality for which they stood. But on the other hand, this contradiction does not give the right to classify them as the ideologists of enlightened absolutism, which, in the form of “Aesroiste 1ecae,” seemed to Holbach himself to be the opposite of human nature.

This contradiction is easily explained by the thoughts that arise when reading their works.