Conclusion: Exit Divinity

If one ecumenical trend in political practice can be distinguished over the course of the seventeenth century, it must be associated with the enhancement of the authority of the prince at the expense of rival power arrangements, including clerical ones, in the territorial community. Reason of state, indeed the very continuation of the state as an autonomous entity in the face of enormous commercial, colonial, religious and military rivalries, pointed in the direction of a greater arrogation of power at the centre, at the diminution and in some cases the elimination of regional autonomy and cultural particularism, and at increased financial and service burdens being borne by the population at large.1 While all rulers had to be responsive to the interests of noble supporters, and although these same rulers had to cooperate skilfully with representative bodies, on the whole crown efforts were successful, and the encroachment of central power into many aspects of life was both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the type of power enjoyed by earlier Renaissance-style princes. Importantly, as Marc Raeff has pointed out, ‘Centralization had the paradoxical result of fostering greater separation and division within Europe’ after the Reformation, which in turn forwarded the drive towards self-sufficient and mutually hostile political units, each with its own public-relations machinery in the state church and with what amounted to a monopoly over organized violence through an increasingly professionalized military.2