Abstract :
This article analyses the interplay of arguments for religious reconciliation and peace on the
one hand and a patriotic vocabulary or programme in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the
other. Focusing on different phases of irenic debate in the Empire, various types of what will be termed ‘irenic
patriotism’ will be identified. Irenic patriotism could employ both utilitarian politique and more principled
arguments for a religious peace. Finally, a consideration of Hugo Grotius’s irenicism, which drew heavily on
German sources, will show how a distinct humanist critique of theological controversies and their political
consequences resulted in an emphasis on a minimalist and ethical concept of Christianity, as well as the idea
of a total submission of the church and its doctrines to the authority of the magistrate and the patria. The
distinctively civil type of irenicism, which arose from this debate, was less concerned with the unity of the
church than with the integrity of the civitas, respublica, and patria.
