ABSTRACT
Lambert Daneau (1530–1590) taught theology at the Reformed academies at Geneva and Béarn, and briefly at the University of Leiden, in the 1570s and 1580s. The first extract that we present, from the Ethices Christianae Libri Tres of 1577, demonstrates the reluctance of this Reformed theologian to ground ethics or politics in damaged human reason and in natural law. According to Daneau, it was rather the Holy Spirit that was the direct source of all knowledge of right and wrong. This was a very different way of conceiving of politics to that prominent among Catholic theologians, who were confident enough in human reason to construct grand theories of natural law. Nevertheless, Daneau was just as horrified by the politics of Niccolò Machiavelli as his Catholic contemporaries as our extract from his Politices christianae libri septem (Geneva: Vignon, 1596) demonstrates. Finally, we include an extract from Daneau’s Tractatvs de Antichristo (Geneva: Vignon, 1576) in which he insisted that the struggle against the Antichrist recommended by the Book of Revelation was a spiritual struggle and not a physical one. The Bible did not, he believed, command war against the pope.
