How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

PEREZ ZAGORIN

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press

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Zagorin, Perez.

How the idea of religious toleration came to the West / Peter Zagorin.

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Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

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1. Religious tolerance—Christianity—History. I. Title.

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THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY WIFE,

Honoré Sharrer,

WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE FOR OVER FIFTY YEARS OF MARRIED HAPPINESS AND INTELLECTUAL COMPANIONSHIP.

God is always on the side of the persecuted. If a just man is persecuted by a wicked one, God is with the persecuted just man. If a wicked man is persecuted by a wicked man, God is with the persecuted. And if a wicked man is persecuted by a just man, God is on the side of the persecuted wicked man against the persecutor.

—The Talmud

To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man. When the Genevans killed Servetus, they did not defend a doctrine, they killed a man.

—Sebastian Castellio, Contra libellum Calvini

After a careful investigation into the meaning of the term heretic, I can discover no more than this, that we regard those as heretics with whom we disagree.

—Sebastian Castellio, De haereticis

It is accordingly on this battlefield [of religion], almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly controverted. The great writers to whom the world owes what liberty it possesses, have most asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to another for his religious belief.

—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

CONTENTS

PREFACE

In August 1790 the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, sent an address of praise and congratulations to President George Washington on the occasion of his visit to Newport. Speaking in the name of the children of the stock of Abraham, it voiced gratitude for a government erected by the Majesty of the People … which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance, but generously affords to everyone liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship. Washington’s cordial letter of reply, which thanked the congregation, also confirmed its sentiments, extolling the Citizens of the United States for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy … worthy of imitation in which all people enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, including liberty of conscience.

This noteworthy exchange between the Hebrew Congregation of Newport and the first president of the United States is even more memorable because Washington directed his remarks to Jewish citizens, members of a religious community that had been oppressed and persecuted by the Christian world for many centuries. His words may be taken as an eloquent testimony to the central importance religious toleration and the free exercise of religion have held among American values since the founding of the United States. The Bill of Rights, which became part of the United States Constitution in the following year, 1791, prohibits Congress from establishing any state religion, thereby forbidding the introduction of any government-imposed barrier to religious pluralism. Needless to say, Americans have not always lived up to the ideal of religious freedom that the founders of the United States professed. The past two centuries of American history contain numerous examples of episodes and entrenched institutional policies reflecting animosity and systematic discrimination, bigotry, and exclusion directed against Catholics, Jews, and other religious minorities. In spite of this, however, it is also true that most of the American people have never ceased to regard freedom of religion as one of their basic and most precious rights. Today, following our recent entrance into the new millennium and the deadly attack on the United States by Islamic terrorists on 11 September 2001, we cherish this right more than ever as an essential attribute of a free society.

But how and where did the concept of religious tolerance and freedom originate? In the United States, to the extent that Americans may think about this question at all, they are most likely to look for the answer in the writings of the American founders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and in the United States Constitution with its provisions for the toleration of religious differences and the protection of religious freedom. The founders’ thoughts on this subject were largely derivative, however, and a product of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and of what came before. The rationale of religious toleration and the theological, moral, and philosophical justification of religious freedom had their real beginning in the sixteenth century; they were forged in the bitter denominational conflicts, the continued struggle against persecution, and the fierce intellectual controversies arising out of the religious divisions created in Europe by the Protestant Reformation.

The modern concepts of religious toleration and freedom are thus Western in origin and the offspring of European civilization. They are almost entirely due (the main exception is the Jewish philosopher Spinoza) to the work of Christian thinkers, mostly unorthodox Protestants, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all of whom were powerfully motivated by their religious beliefs to fight against the intolerance of both the Catholic and Protestant churches. It is very true that expressions and values of tolerance, respect for other faiths, and religious coexistence can be found in the teachings of other world religions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, even though fanaticism and religious hatreds on the part of members of these religions, past and present, have often belied such teachings. It is only in Western society, nevertheless, and only since the sixteenth century because of the conflicts and debates between contending Christian churches, sects, and confessions, that there has appeared a massive body of writings by many different authors exploring the problem of religious toleration from many angles and presenting an array of arguments in behalf of the principles of liberty of conscience, mutual tolerance, and religious coexistence and diversity. This literature was produced at a time when, as in the previous five centuries of Christian history, an accusation of heresy could mean death for the person charged. At its heart, the controversy over religious toleration and liberty of conscience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a combat against the cruelty of persecution, a refutation of its rationale, and a plea to end the bloodshed and killing among Christians caused by confessional enmity. This controversy played a vital role in the long-term development of religious freedom as one of the distinctive features of contemporary Western civilization.

A few years ago, the British philosopher A. J. Ayer observed in an essay entitled Sources of Intolerance that religious intolerance has probably done greater harm than all other forms of intolerance and was also exceptionally hard to explain. I do consider it extraordinary, he said,

that persons who have somehow managed to convince themselves that the course of nature is dependent on the volition of one or more supernatural beings should consequently be impelled not merely to despise and traduce but to torture and murder those who do not share their view. Not only that but those who affirm their faith in the existence of what is nominally the same supernatural being have been as viciously divided among themselves. If anything, they have displayed even more enthusiasm in reviling, oppressing, torturing, and murdering those who held a different opinion concerning the properties of this being or the details of the ritual which was appropriate for its worship.

I have undertaken this book with the question Ayer broached never far from my mind. Its aim is to present readers with a broad historical account of the ideas of tolerance and religious freedom in their appearance and formative period in the early modern era between the sixteenth and the first decades of the eighteenth century. Within these years I have concentrated on a considerable number of writers and thinkers whose work concerned with toleration seems to me of particular importance, and which I have tried to set in its historical context. Although I have had to be very selective, I have done my best to include an adequate representation of the authors and works that made a major contribution to the discussion and defense of toleration. The book begins with a chapter on the historical problem of explaining the emergence of religious toleration in the West and which also examines the meaning of the concept of tolerance and its relation to religious freedom. The second chapter, on the Christian theory of persecution, deals with the evolution of the concept of heresy and the rationale that enabled Christians of high intellectual and moral standing, like the church father Saint Augustine, to persecute and approve the persecution of other Christians for religious error. The next five chapters survey the controversy over religious toleration in Europe from the time of humanists like Erasmus and Sir Thomas More and the great persecuting Protestant reformers Luther and Calvin, in the sixteenth century, until that of the two foremost champions of toleration at the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke and Pierre Bayle. In these five chapters I have discussed a number of the most significant writings on toleration, in several different countries where the controversy raged, by thinkers such as Sebastian Franck, Sebastian Castellio, Dirck Coornhert and the Dutch Arminians, Roger Williams, the poet Milton, and others. The fourth chapter, on the work and career of Calvin’s courageous opponent the Frenchman Castellio—a seminal thinker and fighter in the history of the idea of toleration—is, I believe, the fullest modern account of Castellio in English since the publication in 1935 of an English translation and edition of his book De haereticis, by the distinguished American historian of religious liberty Roland Bainton. The concluding chapter contains a concise overview of the progress of the idea of toleration in Europe and America from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Voltaire, Jefferson, and Madison up to the present, which includes a discussion of the view of religious freedom in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church’s Declaration on Religious Liberty of 1965. Although I touch in the following pages on the subjects of both anti-Semitism and attitudes toward Jews and of irenic conceptions of tolerance between different faiths, I have done so only occasionally, since my focus in this work is on the problem that was of the greatest import in the West, that of toleration between Christians.

While engaged in the research for this project, I have been able to draw on a large number of historical studies dealing with the idea and practice of toleration, and on recent discussions of toleration by moral and political philosophers. Most of the former are quite specialized rather than broad, while the writings on the subject by philosophers are sometimes not well grounded historically. I have striven in the present book to convey a wide general understanding of the history of the idea of toleration by centering on the succession of writers who figure the largest in this history. So far as I am aware, no work of this kind exists at present in the English language. Within the historical literature from which I have profited, I owe a special debt to the American historian W. K. Jordan’s The Development of Religious Toleration in England, and the French historian Joseph Lecler’s Toleration and the Reformation, two outstanding large-scale and indispensable works of synthesis and scholarship. I should also draw the reader’s attention to Henry Kamen’s The Rise of Toleration as a short, well-informed treatment of the subject.

At the conclusion of this preface, I must express my thanks to the friends and colleagues with whom I have frequently discussed the subject of religious toleration; to the Shannon Center for Advanced Study at the University of Virginia, which has encouraged my work by making me a Fellow; and to the library staff of the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia for their unfailing assistance and cooperation.

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

CHAPTER 1

Religious Toleration: The Historical Problem

Of all the great world religions past and present, Christianity has been by far the most intolerant. This statement may come as a shock, but it is nevertheless true. In spite of the fact that Jesus Christ, the Jewish founder of the Christian religion, is shown in the New Testament as a prophet and savior who preached mutual love and nonviolence to his followers, the Christian church was for a great part of its history an extremely intolerant institution. From its inception it was intolerant of other, non-Christian religions, first Greco-Roman polytheism, then Judaism, from which it had to separate itself, and later on Islam. Early in its history, from the time of the apostles, it also became increasingly intolerant of heresy and heretics, those persons who, although worshipers of Christ, dissented from orthodox doctrine by maintaining and disseminating beliefs—about the nature of Christ, the Trinity, the priesthood, the church, and other matters—that ecclesiastical authority condemned as false, and incurring the penalty of damnation. During the fourth century C.E., following the grant by the first Christian emperor Constantine and his colleague Licinius of legal toleration to Christianity, and their imperial successors’ decision to make it the sole legal religion of the Roman Empire, the Christian or Catholic Church, as we may now call it, approved both the Roman government’s suppression of paganism as idolatry and its use of punitive laws and coercion against Christian heretics who denied Catholic teaching and formed schismatic churches. This initiated a development that led during the Middle Ages to the forcible conversion of pagan Germans and Slavs, Jews, and Muslims at the hands of Christian rulers, and to the long Christian enmity toward the religion of Islam, which gave rise to the crusading movement of holy war in medieval Europe. It likewise led, because of the prevailing hatred of Jews as enemies of Christ, to frequent charges of ritual murder against Jews and to the instigation by Catholic religious preachers of repeated massacres of Jews in Europe. And it led also to the medieval church’s legitimation of religious persecution, the creation of the papal Inquisition and its machinery of heresy hunting and prosecution, the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century against the Catharist heresy in southern France, and the killing of innumerable fellow Christians whom the church denounced as heretics.¹

The sixteenth century, which witnessed the Reformation and the beginning and spread of Protestantism, was probably the most intolerant period in Christian history, marked not only by violent conflict between contending Christian denominations but by an upsurge of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in western Europe. When Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other outstanding religious reformers undertook their successful revolt against the Catholic Church and established their own Protestant churches, the latter showed themselves to be no less intolerant of heretics and dissenting Christians than was the Catholic Church. In the attempt by Catholic and Protestant governments in Europe to stop the spread of heresy, and in the civil and external wars of religion waged between Catholicism and Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countless thousands of people on both sides perished or were forced to go into exile as the victims of religious persecution. It was the long and terrible history of the inhumanity of Christianity in its dealing with differences of religious belief, a history not yet ended even in his own time, that caused the famous eighteenth-century French thinker Voltaire to declare that of all religions the Christian is undoubtedly that which should instill the greatest toleration, although so far Christians have been the most intolerant of men.²

It is at this point that we confront the problem mentioned in this chapter’s title. If Christian Europe and the Western world were so intolerant in religion for so many hundreds of years, and indeed in some places down to the later nineteenth century and even beyond,³ how did it happen that their leaders and members came eventually to change their opinion and to endorse the principle of religious toleration? Anyone today who looks at the values and practices associated with Western liberal democracies in Europe and America can hardly fail to observe that most of their citizens prize none of them more highly than they do religious toleration and freedom of religion. To be sure, they regard political freedom as equally precious and indispensable; but they also commonly recognize that in our own time this freedom with its related political rights is so closely tied to the existence of religious toleration and liberty that the two have become essentially inseparable.⁴

Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, therefore, a huge and enormously significant shift of attitudes and values regarding differences in religion gradually occurred in Western societies. Instead of the age-old assumption that it is right and justifiable to maintain religious unity by force and to kill heretics and dissenters if necessary, the opposite assumption came to prevail that it is wrong and unjustifiable to use force and to kill in the cause of religion, and, moreover, that religious toleration and freedom are morally and politically desirable and should be given effect in laws and institutions. This is the very momentous, far-reaching change in Western civilization that needs to be explained, and with whose origins and earlier development this book is concerned.

It will help us grasp the magnitude of this change if we keep in mind that it is in some ways even more novel than the emergence in the West of liberal and democratic societies during the past several hundred years in the aftermath and principally as the result of the English, American, and French revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I stress this point because some of the conceptions and practices underlying liberal and democratic polities were of very old origin, having been a part of the Western tradition since classical antiquity and familiar in both Greek and Roman political thought and experience. Ancient Athens in one of the greatest periods of its history was, despite the existence of slavery, a democracy of free (male) citizens, and there were other Greek city-states, although we know much less about them, that were also democracies. Similarly, republican Rome, the feudal regime in medieval Europe, and numerous cities of medieval and Renaissance Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany, were all well acquainted with certain ideas, institutions, and principles of civic and political liberty, ruler limitation, and self-government. In comparison with these, the fundamental principles and values that sustain religious toleration and freedom of religion are innovations and late arrivals in world history and did not become a part of the Western tradition until recent times. Imperial Rome, it is true, was tolerant in practice in permitting the existence of many diverse religious cults, provided their votaries also complied with the worship of the divine emperor as part of the state religion. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, Roman religion had no sacred scriptures and did not depend on any creed, dogmas, or ethical principles. It consisted very largely of participation in cult acts connected with the worship of various deities and spirits that protected the Roman state and were associated with public, family, and domestic life. At nearly all stages of their history the Romans were willing to accept foreign cults and practices; this de facto religious pluralism is entirely attributable to the polytheistic character of Roman religion and had nothing to do with principles or values sanctioning religious toleration, a concept unknown to Roman society or law and never debated by Roman philosophers or political writers.⁵

Rome’s religious pluralism, however, although officially tolerant of Judaism, did not extend to Christianity. Christians were intermittently persecuted and put to death by the Roman government from the first century C.E. to the beginning of the fourth century, a history culminating in the great persecution under Emperor Diocletian between 303 and 305. The main reason for this treatment was the refusal of Christians to worship any god but their own or take part in the imperial cult by offering sacrifices to the gods on the emperor’s behalf. Christians proclaimed that the pagan gods did not exist or were malevolent demons, an attitude deeply offensive to Romans, who believed that it endangered the relationship between gods and men and alienated the goodwill of the gods. On the other hand, the Roman regime tolerated Judaism despite its exclusive monotheism. The Jews were widely regarded as devotees of an ancient and venerable faith; unlike Christians, they did not attack Roman paganism as a religion of demons, and while they would not participate in the imperial cult, their priests could offer prayers for the emperor in the Temple at Jerusalem.⁶

Thus far in my discussion, I have been speaking of religious toleration and religious freedom as though they are closely related or synonymous. Before going further, however, I feel it essential to offer a few clarifications concerning the use of these two concepts.

The English word tolerance, which is virtually identical in other Western languages (French tolérance, German Toleranz, Italian tolleranza, etc.), stems from the Latin verb tolerare, which is defined as to bear or endure and carries the further meaning to nourish, sustain, or preserve. Some philosophers and historians, taking the first of these meanings as their point of departure, regard toleration and religious freedom as quite distinct things and emphasize the differences between the two. They understand toleration to signify no more than forbearance and the permission given by the adherents of a dominant religion for other religions to exist, even though the latter are looked upon with disapproval as inferior, mistaken, or harmful. In contrast, these thinkers see religious liberty as the recognition of equal freedom for all religions and denominations without any kind of discrimination among them. In the case of toleration, it is also pointed out that those in authority who have the power to tolerate a religion have likewise the power to refuse or withdraw toleration, whereas in the case of religious liberty, no one is rightfully possessed of the power not to tolerate or to cancel this liberty. A typical formulation of this view of the subject is the statement by D. D. Raphael that toleration is the practice of deliberately allowing or permitting a thing of which one disapproves. One can meaningfully speak of tolerating, i.e. of allowing or permitting, only if one is in a position to disallow.⁷

I do not deny that this distinction is a valid one, or that it can be very useful at times in its application to certain historical circumstances. It is also feasible, nevertheless, to think of religious toleration in its broadest terms as equivalent to the condition of religious freedom, and this, I believe, is not only how it is widely understood today, but also how some of the best-known historians of toleration, such as W. K. Jordan and Joseph Lecler, have often regarded it in tracing its evolution.⁸ The British historian Henry Kamen states in his Rise of Toleration that in its widest sense toleration means the concession of liberty to those who dissent in religion and can be seen as part of the process in history which has led to a gradual development of the principle of human freedom.⁹ Johannes Kuhn, a German scholar of the subject, speaks of the historical sense of toleration as encompassing both forbearance toward another and treating another with respect.¹⁰ In the latter formulation, we can perceive the germ of an approximation to the condition of religious freedom. The Swiss historian Hans R. Guggisberg, one of the foremost recent students of the history of toleration, noted that among the latter’s synonyms in European tongues were such terms as souffrance, indulgence, caritas (love or charity), and mansuetudo (gentleness or mildness), and also pointed out its close relationship to phrases like religious freedom, liberty of conscience and belief, and freedom of worship.¹¹ In the 1560s in France, we find the words liberté de conscience beginning to be used to oppose the forcing of consciences as a form of oppression.¹² As we shall see later, moreover, the most noted early fighters for toleration, such as Sebastian Castellio, Roger Williams, and John Locke, also tended to conceive of religious toleration as related to religious freedom. Unless I indicate otherwise, therefore, I shall treat the concept of religious toleration as also implying religious freedom in some measure. In this sense, the belief in and the practice of toleration, as they have evolved and become established in the United States and other countries of the Western world, depend on a very simple and basic principle. This principle is that society and the state should, as a matter of right, extend complete freedom of religious belief and expression to all their members and citizens and should refrain from imposing any religious tests, doctrines, or form of worship or religious association upon them. I take this to be the proper understanding of religious toleration, in its fullest meaning, as it would be conceived today. The struggle to achieve such toleration has the further significance, moreover, that its effects extend beyond the domain of religion and are closely connected with the broader goals of freedom from censorship and intellectual freedom. For the centuries in which intolerance reigned also witnessed the attempt by religious authorities and governments to censor and control the expression of philosophical, political, and other ideas in speech and writing in the interests of a dominant religious orthodoxy. Hence the advance of toleration, by helping to weaken such efforts, played a major role over time in widening the scope of freedom of thought and expression in areas other than religion.

Toleration entails at a minimum the willingness to recognize and accept a degree of religious coexistence and pluralism. In Europe it has pertained historically to the acceptance of coexistence both with members of non-Christian minorities, like Jews and Muslims, and with people who were defined as heretics or belonged to other Christian churches. Those in the former category, not having been baptized into the Christian faith, were regarded by the Catholic Church or Christian governments not as religious traitors or schismatics, but as infidels and external religious enemies, and were therefore often officially tolerated under various disabilities and despite intermittent outbursts of persecution. Such was the case, for example, of the Muslim and Jewish communities that lived in Spain amid Christian populations and under Christian rulers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and also of the Jewish communities that could be found in various parts of Europe since Roman times. As regards the Hispanic Jews, their relatively peaceful convivencia with Spanish Christians until the late fourteenth century is well known. Thereafter, however, the intensification of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism fueled by a variety of motives led to increasing persecution, massacres and forced conversions, and finally to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.¹³ In the course of the sixteenth century the Muslim Moriscos in Spain were subjected to growing persecution and forced conversion, which drove them to revolt, and in 1609 were also expelled from Spain.¹⁴

Beyond non-Christians the problem of coexistence and pluralism was one that concerned the relationship of the Catholic Church to Christian heretics during the Middle Ages and, after the coming of the Reformation, the relationships among Catholics, the new Protestant churches—chiefly Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican—and the new religious communities and sects, such as Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Antitrinitarians, who dissented from both Catholicism and the major Protestant denominations. To the medieval church and papacy, coexistence with heretics was unthinkable, and its possibility was never considered. Thus it was only with the appearance and steady expansion of Protestantism in the sixteenth century that ecclesiastical authorities, secular rulers, and European intellectuals were forced for the first time to confront the issue of reconciling themselves to some degree of toleration and coexistence.

To the question of why the willingness to tolerate and accept coexistence between rival religious confessions emerged in Christian Europe, several answers have been given. Perhaps the two most common reasons cited for this development are the growth of religious indifference and unbelief, and political expediency.¹⁵ With regard to the first, it is impossible to deny that these two factors, indifference and unbelief, made an important contribution over the long run to the creation of a climate of opinion averse to religious fanaticism and zealotry and therefore conducive to a willingness to tolerate. This is obvious when we consider the widening presence between the years 1600 and 1700 of a number of interrelated trends, such as skepticism, libertinism, latitudinarianism, rationalism, the movement of scientific ideas, biblical criticism, deism, and natural religion, all precursors of the Enlightenment in Europe, which had the effect of modifying and liberalizing religious beliefs, weakening clerical authority, and undermining theological orthodoxy.¹⁶

It should be borne in mind, however, that the impact of these various trends was largely limited to intellectual elites and the educated. Moreover, indifference, incredulity, and the dominance of a secular mentality do not necessarily make for toleration; in some people, on the contrary, they may give rise to a lack of concern about toleration and whether it exists or not. There were quite a few skeptical thinkers in early modern Europe who supported persecution in the interests of political stability and were convinced that maintaining religious faith and conformity among the masses of common people was an essential safeguard of social and political order and subordination.¹⁷ In any case, though, the intellectual changes mentioned above, since they occurred only gradually, cannot possibly account for the theories and defenses of toleration that appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century. The latter were the work of profoundly Christian if also unorthodox thinkers, not of minds inclined to religious indifference or unbelief; and the same is also true of nearly all the major theorists of toleration in the seventeenth century. We must therefore dismiss these factors as an explanation of the emergence of a willingness to accept religious coexistence.

The second reason cited for the appearance of the latter is political expediency, of which a good account has been given by Herbert Butterfield, an eminent English historian of early modern Europe, who emphasized the overwhelming importance of the political factor. Butterfield maintained that the emergence of toleration was entirely due to the mutual exhaustion resulting from the religious conflicts of the Reformation era. As then understood, he argued, toleration was not an ideal or positive end but simply the lesser evil and last resort for those who often still hated one another but found it impossible to go on fighting any more. Moreover, it was hardly even an idea but something that appeared when no other choice or hope of further struggle remained. It did not stem from any belief in freedom of religion and assuredly not from the belief that religion doesn’t matter. Rather, he considered, it "came in the end through exhaustion, spiritual as well as material," which made room for reason-of-state and hence the possibility of political solutions and compromises. He also noted that wherever religious toleration was established in the sixteenth century, it was always subject to serious limitations and regarded as no more than a temporary measure.¹⁸

There is undoubtedly a fair amount of truth in Butterfield’s explanation. Although he doesn’t expressly say so, he seems to have had in mind chiefly the effects of the religious divisions of the sixteenth century in the Holy Roman Empire, which included all of the German principalities, and in France. In the former, years of conflict and religious war between Catholic and Lutheran princes brought about their agreement in 1555 to the Peace of Augsburg, which provided for the coexistence in the empire of both Catholic and Lutheran states and princes, together with the right of each territorial ruler to determine the religion of his subjects. It also envisaged the parity of Catholics and Protestants in the imperial cities. Calvinists were excluded from this compromise, and the alternative of emigration to another territory was accorded to persons unwilling to conform to the religion of the ruler and state under which they lived.¹⁹

In France, the religious settlement known as the Edict of Nantes was promulgated in 1598 by the Catholic monarch Henry IV in order to put an end to the bloody and anarchic civil war between French Catholics and Calvinist Protestants, or Huguenots, of the Reformed Church, which had continued for more than thirty years.²⁰ A religious compromise that sprang from the urgent need to restore peace, order, and the political authority of the French monarchy, the edict reflected the realization by the Catholics that they could not extirpate Protestantism in France, and by the Protestants that they had no hope of making France into a Protestant country. It granted legal toleration to the Protestant minority, who were allowed to have their own churches and freedom of worship in a number of designated places, and were also given certain political and military privileges as securities for their religious liberties.²¹

These two attempts at religious coexistence between antagonistic Christian denominations, though quite limited, are certainly landmarks in the early history of toleration, and they fit Butterfield’s argument, since they were very largely due to political expediency, which accepted them as lesser evils in preference to unending religious war. But what we cannot overlook is that both of these settlements were unstable, and neither lasted for very long. To recall some well-known facts, during the later sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth, frequent violations and local conflicts, as well as the exclusion in its provisions of toleration for Calvinism, undermined the Peace of Augsburg. Confessional enmity in Germany increased and was aggravated by the growing successes of the Catholic Counter Reformation in its battle to reverse the spread of Protestantism. In 1618, as the result of a Protestant rebellion in Bohemia, one of the states of the Holy Roman Empire, a new religious struggle began, the Thirty Years War, which by stages engulfed most of Germany and also drew in other powers to become a major European war.²² As several recent historians of toleration in early modern Germany have pointed out, pragmatism was a fragile support for the meager degree of religious pluralism among the German states and cities, and sixteenth-century Germans lacked the intellectual means to conceptualize the amicable coexistence of religious communities divided by fundamental doctrinal differences.²³

In France, as elsewhere, neither Catholics nor Protestants believed in religious toleration, which they had reluctantly accepted as a political necessity. Most Catholics and their spiritual guides remained unreconciled to the existence of Protestantism in their midst and considered the concessions granted to the Protestant minority as merely temporary. In the earlier seventeenth century, the Protestants themselves launched several revolts, as a result of which they lost the political and military privileges given them by the Edict of Nantes. During the second half of the century, Louis XIV’s government, after subjecting the Protestants to increasing persecution to compel them to become Catholics, finally revoked the edict in 1685 and decreed the abolition of Protestantism in France. This action forced many thousands of Protestants to leave their homes and seek refuge in other countries willing to receive them.²⁴

Thus the legal regime of coexistence between Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth-century Germany and seventeenth-century France, each the product of political expediency, failed to survive or to create an enduring foundation for toleration. We could cite other historical instances of such failures of what might be called pragmatic coexistence. Among them would be the breakdown of the previously mentioned Christian-Jewish convivencia in medieval Spain, and, in our own time, the calamitous collapse of peace and tolerance between Serbian Christians and Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia as a consequence of abiding religious and ethnic division and animosities.

These cases suffice to show that, contrary to Butterfield’s view, while political expediency may have been a reinforcing factor, it alone, unaccompanied by a genuine belief in and commitment to toleration as something inherently good and valuable, was not enough to bring about a permanent peaceful coexistence between hostile religious confessions in Reformation Europe. What this distinguished scholar’s discussion strangely ignored is the very great contribution made to the achievement of toleration and denominational coexistence by the formation of religious, philosophical, moral, and humanitarian arguments that can support and justify them. For in a certain sense ideas rule the world, and the attitudes and actions of human beings are greatly affected by reasons and justifications. In the absence of convincing reasons showing why toleration is right and desirable, the institutional accommodation and the change in individual and social values needed to establish it could hardly occur.

Moreover, Butterfield was mistaken in claiming that toleration had scarcely become even an idea in the sixteenth century, when expediency and the exhaustion from religious strife supervened to try to free Germany and France from that strife. For by the latter part of the sixteenth century, a conception and theory of religious toleration had definitely come into being. Generally speaking, moreover, and in spite of the previously mentioned examples of pragmatic toleration in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the appearance and development of the idea of toleration largely preceded its realization. This development required a long and arduous intellectual effort down through the seventeenth century and was the work of a number of thinkers. Without an underlying theoretical rationale that was both philosophical and religious—one that reflected a complex mixture of scriptural, theological, ecclesiological, epistemological, ethical, political, and pragmatic arguments—and without the gradual acceptance by political and intellectual elites and others of principles and values enabling them to subordinate and set aside religious differences and strive for concord through mutual understanding, religious toleration and the freedom it implied could not have been attained as one of the predominant and most cherished attributes of modern and contemporary Western societies. That proposition is the main thesis of this book, and it explains why I have chosen to discuss the notable writers and the religious and intellectual controversies concerning toleration that are the subject of the following chapters.

CHAPTER 2

The Christian Theory of Religious Persecution

In 1887 the famous English historian and liberal Catholic Lord Acton had an exchange of correspondence with Dr. Mandell Creighton concerning the latter’s History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, in which he commented as follows about the popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and their responsibility for the medieval Inquisition:

These men instituted a system of Persecution, with a special tribunal, special functionaries, special laws. They carefully elaborated, and developed, and applied it. They protected it with every sanction, spiritual and temporal. They inflicted, as far as they could, the penalties of death and damnation on everybody who