Word: absolutist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fails to achieve anything approaching profundity. It is, nonetheless, provocative. According to Evans, most of today's conservatives derive their political and economic beliefs from their more basic ethical commitments. (In fact, the word 'conservatism' comes to mean the retention of an ethical rather than a political tradition.) Their absolutist moral convictions (based either on natural law or on revealed religion) lead them--over several different paths--to an extreme individualism. One student, whom Evans quotes, remarks that the concept of morality assumes man to be a free agent capable of improving himself. "Man's pursuit of virtue," the student...
...case for cautious hope: signs that Nenni would like to break out of his longstanding and smothering alliance with the Communists. He bitterly condemned Khrushchev when Russia resumed atomic testing, has criticized Moscow's absolutist methods, which he describes as a "policy of the Last Judgment." Thus, while Italy faces an opening to the left, for Nenni and his Socialists it may become an opening to the right...
...state, they have not only endured in peace (by and large) but also they have greatly nourished their common society. Not that they have understood or loved one another. A great many Americans still see their Catholic fellow citizens as vaguely alien and as narrow-minded servants of an absolutist theology. Because their church is vast diverse and all too easily regarded as monolithic," American Catholics are often taxed with everything from Spanish Catholic intolerance to Italian Catholic cynicism, from Legion of Decency censorship to neo-Thomist philosophy...
...with the rise of the absolutist monarchies in the 17th century, Gelasius' finely balanced dyarchy was shattered. Between Pope and King stood a saint who took 309 years to be canonized, Robert Francis Romulus Bellarmine (1542-1621), whose influence reached far beyond his lifetime. His was a time of upheaval; Galileo was turning the old earth-centered cosmos upside down, a new national consciousness was breaking up the Holy Roman Empire, and the "heresy" of Protestantism was digging in throughout the world. As one of the greatest polemical theologians in his church's history, Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine...
Different Revolution. In the long run, it was the supporters of state power who won out against the champions of church power. In the words of Father Murray, the Gelasian principle of "two there are" became "one there is"-one increasingly powerful state. From absolutist monarchy, Murray sees a straight line of development to modern "totalitarian democracy" via the French Revolution's Jacobin republic, which put the civil government in almost complete control of church affairs. To this day, French separation of church and state makes Thomas Jefferson's famous "wall" look like a split-rail fence...