Neville Figgis Quotes

Lastly we come to the toleration of the Politiques. Their theory asserts definitely that the State is in fact indifferent to religious unity and gives up the entire attempt to identify Church with State, never abandoned in England till 1688, and not altogether even then.

Machiavelli was always considering the practical problem, how is Italy to be saved?

Our generation has seen one further step taken in the extension of the principles of Machiavelli. The doctrines associated with the name of Nietzsche are exactly similar to those of Machiavelli, except that they are now purely limited to individual ends ...

The gulf between the Christian ideal of Love, and the ideals of Buddha, Schopenhauer and Tolstoi, which mean the destruction of the individual, is at bottom irreconcilable; yet both by adversaries and believers, the mistake of confounding the one with the other is often made.

The despots of Italy were, in fact, in the Greek sense, tyrants, and Machiavelli did little more than say so. What gives him his importance is that what was true of the small despots of Italy was going to become true of the national monarchs of Europe.

It would be impossible to gain any adequate notion of the intellectual forces, that made up the mind of the average European statesman from 1600–1800 if we altogether omitted a consideration of the influence of Machiavelli.

The ideal of Christendom as a whole, with Pope and Emperor at its head, gave way to the notion of the godly prince; and potent in some respects as was Luther's nationalist influence, it was not so much the German people as the sovereign territorial prince that reaped the benefit.

... the medieval mind conceived of its universal Church-State, with power ultimately fixed in the Spiritual head bounded by no territorial frontier; the Protestant mind places all ecclesiastical authority below the jurisdiction and subject to the control of the "Godly prince," who is omnipotent in his own dominion.

How far are unjust laws to be obeyed? Need they be considered laws at all, if we understand St Thomas aright? Can any government exist or claim rights apart from the consent of the governed?

The medieval struggles between Popes and Emperors are wrongly regarded as a conflict between Church and State, if by that is meant the relations between two societies. The medieval mind, whether clerical or anticlerical, envisaged the struggle as one between different officers of the same society, never between two separate bodies; this is as true of Dante and Marsilius, as it is of Boniface and Augustinus.

From one point of view we might assert the the Middle Ages ended with the visit of Nogaret to Anagni, and from another it might be said to end only when the troops of Victor Emmanuel entered Rome and the Lord of the world became the prisoner of the Vatican, and of course it ended at different times in different places. Hence arises the extreme difficulty of disentangling the conflicting tendencies and complex political combination of our period.

We cannot overestimate the change in men's minds required to produce the ideal of heterogeneity in religion within one State.
... In the Middle Ages politics was a branch of Theology, with whatever admixture derived from Aristotle and the Civil Law. Its basis was theocratic. Machiavelli represents the antithesis of this view, discarding ethical and rural as well as theological Criteria of State action.

The medieval state had one basis of unity denied to the modern—religion. Baptism was a necessary element in true citizenship in the Middle Ages and excommunication was its antithesis. No heretic, no schismatic, no excommunicate has the rights of citizenship. ... Philip of Spain's famous remark, that he would rather not reign at all than reign over heretics, was merely an assertion of medieval principles by a man who really believed in them.

It is not to revive of the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of to-day, and to help us to envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective.

If ideas in politics more than elsewhere are the children of practical needs, none the less is it true, that the actual world is the result of men's thoughts.