Bodin, Jean — Azione Romana

BODIN, JEAN. - One of the most remarkable thinkers of the French Renaissance, b. at Angers in 1529 or 1530, d. at Laon in 1596. He first practiced law, then entered the service of the monarchy; in 1577-78 he was made king's procurator at Laon. He represents a Renaissance that was already turning into the Baroque: symptomatic in this regard is his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566), where history is conceived as the outward manifestation of human will and of necessity, and historiography as the interpretation of the past carried out freely by man, but at the same time subject to a political reason and to a cosmological and naturalistic fatality.

Les six livres de la République (1576) represent his most complex and original effort as a political thinker: against the Machiavellian concept of the political State as destroyer of morality and law, he affirms the concept of the juridical State, in which justice is realized by moral forces operating outside revealed religion, and where religion is reduced to an instrument of public morality; as a direct echo of the wars of religion that he deplores, he defends a State outside of every confession, in which tolerance must represent an effective method of pacification. Among B.'s minor works are La démonomanie des sorciers (1580), where the reality of sorcery is affirmed, and the Universae naturae theatrum (1596), placed on the Index (1628), for its concept of natural religion, and for its concept of the soul akin to the Averroist one, which appears reaffirmed in the Heptaplomeres (published in full only in 1853); for B. only natural religion is valid, innate in the human mind and prior to all positive historical forms, but at the same time he maintains the divine derivation of every religious faith.

BIBL.: sources

H. Baudrillart, J. B. et son temps, Paris 1853; R. Chauviré, J. B. auteur de la République, ibid. 1914; B. Reynolds, Proponents of limited Monarchy in sixteenth century France: Francis Hotman and J. B., New York 1931; J. Moreau-Reibel, B. et le droit public comparé dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l'histoire, Paris 1933; A. Garosci, J. B. Politica e diritto nel Rinascimento francese, Milan 1934; W. F. Church, Constitutional thought in sixteenth-century France, Cambridge 1941, pp. 194-242; F. Meinecke, L'idea della Ragion di Stato nella storia moderna, I, Italian trans. by D. Scolari, Florence 1942, p. 81 ff.; G. Santonastaso, Le dottrine politiche da Lutero a Suarez, Milan 1946, p. 77 ff. On occultism: F. von Bezold, J. B. als Okultist und seine Démonomanie, in Aus Mittelalter und Renaissance, Munich 1918, pp. 204-328, 433-51. On the religious problem: G. Radetti, Il problema della religione nel pensiero di Giovanni B., in Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 19 (1938), pp. 265-94.

About this entry