Christian Thomasius

The works found in Essays on Church, State, and Politics, which originated as disputations, theses, and pamphlets, were direct interventions in the unresolved issue of the political role of religion in Brandenburg-Prussia, a state in which a Calvinist dynasty ruled over a largely Lutheran population and nobility as well as a significant Catholic minority.Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) was a German philosopher and legal theorist.Ian Hunter is Australian Professorial Fellow at the Centre for the...

Christian Thomasius’s natural jurisprudence is essential to understanding the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany, where his importance was comparable to that of John Locke’s in England.First published in 1688, Thomasius’s Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae (Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence) attempted to draw a clear distinction between natural and revealed law and to emphasize that human reason was able to know the precepts of natural law without the aid of Scripture. Thomasius also...