Christian Thomasius was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 jurist and philosopher.

Biography

He was born at Leipzig

Leipzig

Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...

 and was educated by his father, Jakob Thomasius

Jakob Thomasius

Jakob Thomasius was a German academic philosopher and jurist. He is now regarded as an important founding figure in the scholarly study of the history of philosophy. His views were eclectic, and were taken up by his son Christian Thomasius....

 (1622–1684), at that time head master of Thomasschule zu Leipzig

Thomasschule zu Leipzig

St. Thomas School, Leipzig is a co-educational and public boarding school in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. It was founded by the Augustinians in 1212 and is one of the oldest schools in the world.St. Thomas is known for its art, language and music education...

. Through his father's lectures, Christian came under the influence of the political philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 of Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius , also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot, was a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law...

 and Samuel Pufendorf, and continued the study of law at Frankfurt an der Oder

Frankfurt (Oder)

Frankfurt is a town in Brandenburg, Germany, located on the Oder River, on the German-Polish border directly opposite the town of Słubice which was a part of Frankfurt until 1945. At the end of the 1980s it reached a population peak with more than 87,000 inhabitants...

 in 1675, completing his doctorate in 1679. In 1680, he married Anna Christine Heyland and started a legal practice in Leipzig; the following year he began teaching at the university’s law school as well. In 1684 he became professor of natural law, soon attracting attention by his abilities, and particularly by his attack on traditional prejudices, in theology

Theology

Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...

 and jurisprudence

Jurisprudence

Jurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. Scholars of jurisprudence, or legal theorists , hope to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of law, of legal reasoning, legal systems and of legal institutions...

. In 1685 he published a provocative dissertation, De crimine bigamiae (The crime of bigamy), in which he argued that bigamy is permissible under natural law.

In 1687 he made the daring innovation of lecturing in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 instead of Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 and gave a lecture on the topic "How One Should Emulate the French Way of Life," referring to the French use of their native language not only in everyday life but in scholarship as well; according to scholar Klaus Luig, this event marks the real beginning of the Enlightenment in Germany. In the following year he began publishing a monthly periodical (Scherzhafte und ernsthafte, vernüftige und einfältige Gedanken über allerhand lustige und nutzliche Bücher und Fragen) in which he ridiculed the pedantic weaknesses of the learned, taking the side of the Pietists in their controversy with the orthodox

Lutheran Orthodoxy

Lutheran orthodoxy was an era in the history of Lutheranism, which began in 1580 from the writing of the Book of Concord and ended at the Age of Enlightenment. Lutheran orthodoxy was paralleled by similar eras in Calvinism and tridentine Roman Catholicism after the...

, and defending mixed marriages of Luther

Martin Luther

Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...

ans and Calvin

John Calvin

John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530...

ists; he also published a volume on natural law which emphasized natural reason and a paper defending marriage between Lutherans and members of the Reformed church.

In consequence of these and other views, on May 10, 1690 he was denounced from the pulpits, forbidden to lecture or to write, and his arrest was ordered. He escaped by going to Berlin, and the elector Frederick III offered him a refuge in Halle

Halle, Saxony-Anhalt

Halle is the largest city in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is also called Halle an der Saale in order to distinguish it from the town of Halle in North Rhine-Westphalia...

, with a salary of 500 thaler

Thaler

The Thaler was a silver coin used throughout Europe for almost four hundred years. Its name lives on in various currencies as the dollar or tolar. Etymologically, "Thaler" is an abbreviation of "Joachimsthaler", a coin type from the city of Joachimsthal in Bohemia, where some of the first such...

 and permission to lecture. He helped found the University of Halle (1694), where he became second and then first professor of law and (in 1710) rector of the university. He was one of the most esteemed university teachers and influential writers of his day, and in 1709 he was appointed to the privy council.

Though not a profound philosophical thinker, Thomasius prepared the way for great reforms in philosophy, as well as in law, literature, social life and theology. It was his mission to introduce a rational, common-sense point of view, and to bring the divine and human sciences to bear on the everyday world. He thus created an epoch in German literature

German literature

German literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German part of Switzerland, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora. German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there...

, philosophy and law, and, along with Spittler

Ludwig Timotheus Spittler

Ludwig Timotheus Spittler was a German historian who was born in Stuttgart. He published works on national, church and political history....

, began the modern period of ecclesiastical history. One of the aims of his life was to free politics and jurisprudence from the control of theology. He fought bravely and consistently for freedom of thought and speech on religious matters and mediated between the academic and the public sphere. In law, he tried to prove that the rules of Roman law

Roman law

Roman law is the legal system of ancient Rome, and the legal developments which occurred before the 7th century AD — when the Roman–Byzantine state adopted Greek as the language of government. The development of Roman law comprises more than a thousand years of jurisprudence — from the Twelve...

, which contradicted his own principles of natural law

Natural law

Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...

, had never actually been accepted and were therefore invalid; he also tried to legitimize his own principles by showing them to be common law built on Germanic foundations. In this way he contributed to the creation of scholarship of private law separate from that of Roman law.

Thomasius is often spoken of in German works as the author of the "territorial system," or Erastian theory of ecclesiastical government; but he taught that the state may interfere with legal or public duties only, and not with moral or private ones. He would not have even atheists

Atheism

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...

 punished, though they should be expelled from the country, and he came forward as an earnest opponent of the prosecution of witches and of the use of torture

Torture

Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...

. In theology he was not a naturalist or a deist

Deism

Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the...

, but a believer in the necessity of revealed religion for salvation. He came strongly under the influence of the pietists, particularly of Spener

Philipp Jakob Spener

Philipp Jakob Spener was a German Christian theologian known as the "Father of Pietism."...

, and there was a mystic vein in his thought; but other elements of his nature were too powerful to allow him to attach himself wholly to that party.

Thomasius's most popular and influential German publications were his periodical already referred to (1688–1689); Einleitung zur Vernunftlehre (1691, 5th ed. 1719); Vernünflige Gedanken über allerhand auserlesene und juristische Handel (1720–1721); Historie der Weisheit und Torheit (3 vols., 1693); Kurze Lehrsätze van dem Laster der Zauberei mit dem Hexenprozess (1704); Weitere Erläuterungen der neueren Wissenschaft anderer Gedanken kennen zu lernen (1711). He expressed his pedagogical principles in two main Latin works, Institutiones iurisprudentiae divinae (Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence, 1688), based on a lecture on Pufendorf’s natural law, and Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium (Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations, 1705).