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In his fundamental investigation of the individual and society in the political philosophy of Leibniz, Luca Basso devotes one section to 'res publica christiana' 1. The goal of the present contribution is to amplify the points made there and to discuss them more closely with a view to Leibniz's understanding of churches. The concept of 'res publica christiana' (so formulated) rarely occurs in Leibniz. The few relevant places that one can narrow down to a specific use of the phrase "Christian Republic". In the political writings in a restricted sense the concept occurs to indicate more or less what one today might be called the Christian West, or simply to express the fact that the Imperium Romanum, the "Holy Roman Empire", sees itself as a Christian realm; for instance, in more or less the way Leibniz, defending the rights of the estates of the Empire vis-àvis the emperor's claims to the postal rights, can speak of the orbis christianus in the sense of all of Christendom (corpus Christianitatis or corpus nationum Christianarum), or precisely of the respublica christiana, where this last case is doubtlessly owing to the linguistic usage of the author with whose work Leibniz is here critically engaged2. However even without such an impetus he, Leibniz, can employ the concept in the general sense of Christendom3.
1. The Church as "Christian Republic"
All the same, Leibniz can speak of the "Christian Republic" in a more restricted sense, i. e. when this concept refers to the Church. We find such a usage in his early Hanover period. Leibniz - not yet directly drawn into the efforts concerning Reunion - is occupied with the question of the Church at a highly abstract level: how it is to be defined, including the tensions and confessional splits4. In these definitions the concept of the res publica christiana turns up, albeit marginally. A note (probably from the year 1677) offers, as its title says, "various definitions of the church"5. The document contains seven definitions in a sequence based on a recognizable systematics.
The first three determinations6 are assigned by Leibniz to the invisible church and the remaining four to the visible one. Within this differentiation (one, incidentally, that the Church Fathers had already made) the definitions are...