The Catholic world was the intellectual center during this period of church
breakdown and exhaustion because it remained the cosmopolitan center. That
was its structural advantage over the parochial national churches of the Prot-
estants; that is why English and German intellectuals made their key network
ties to the Paris of Richelieu and Mazarin.
Balance of power among cross-cutting networks had effects at three differ-
ent levels. The exhaustion of politicized church conflict led to secularization,
the gradual neutralization and downgrading of the role of the church in the
state, and the loss of church control over the means of intellectual production.
For intellectuals, cross-cutting networks were the formula for a period of
creativity. The stars, such as Descartes and Leibniz, are the persons situated at
the nodes among the inner circle of circles. The character of ideas was also
affected: the cosmopolitan networks, especially during the time of political
compromise when particularistic doctrines were tainted with the failure of
fanaticism, drove up the level of abstraction which constituted the terrain of
philosophical discovery. Religion turned universalistic; once again, as in the
Spain of Averroës and Maimonides, philosophers provided a religion of reason
beyond sectarian strife. But this too was doomed by the structural shifts of
secularization; no religious doctrine, even the most universalistic, could recover
the dominance once held by the old state-enforced faith. Depoliticization of
the church opened an inner space for intellectuals to pursue their own puzzles.
Philosophy recovered from its eclipse, launching a new era in the higher regions
of metaphysics and epistemology.
Geopolitics and Cleavages within Catholicism
Spain was an early center of intellectual ferment because it was the first great
state power and the dominant force in the Catholic world. The creation of the
modern state structure was largely a matter of geopolitics and military organi-
zation and of the internal fiscal structures to support it. Spain was the first to
carry out the military revolution, shifting to a disciplined and centrally armed
infantry; along with this went intensified struggle with the landed nobility over
the increased fiscal requirements of the state. Religious organizations were
entwined with both sides; the Inquisition, the monasteries, the universities, the
church lands, which made up almost 50 percent of Spain (Wuthnow, 1989:
34), were simultaneously places where aristocrats made their careers and
resources the government grasped for its own power. This tug-of-war was
taking place not between haves and have-nots, but between rival ways of
organizing at the top; this meant that there would be factions rich in resources
in the heart of the church itself, a major ingredient for intellectual action.
Spain of the 1500s was becoming the first great European empire, expand-574 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths