How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
Corrigan, John
September 01, 2005
Church History, 670, Volume 74; Issue 3; ISSN: 00096407
How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West.
By Perez Zagorin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2003. xvii + 371 pp. $29.95 cloth.
 This
intellectual history proposes that during the last four hundred
years a fundamental shift in values and attitudes has occurred
in the West, and that the embrace of toleration is a central
part of that process of change. The emergence of a critical
attitude towards intolerance, and the coalescence of ideas
and arguments that eventuated in a theory of universal toleration
preceded, at each step along the way, the realization of toleration.
In our global society, toleration to a large extent remains
an unrealized ideal.
Zagorin explains how the fourth-century Christian church
came to enforce religious uniformity, and, with particular
attention to Augustine's writings against the Donatists, how
a theory of weeding out heretics from among the faithful (drawing
on the parable of the tares in Matthew 13:24-30) and of "compelling
them to come in" (from Luke 14:21-23) came to serve as
a biblically grounded, enduring platform for persecution of
Dissenters. Luther and Calvin are cast as culprits in advancing
this agenda through their anxieties about heresy, and, especially
in the case of Calvin, their willingness to exercise power
ruthlessly in stamping it out. The pioneering efforts of Erasmus,
whose imaging of Jesus as a loving, generous, and appealingly
simple manifestation of God opposed him to violence of every
sort, and the vision of social solidarity based on the exercise
of conscience in Thomas More's Utopia (1516) were buried under
a mountain of internecine Christian slaughter in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Anabaptists, persecuted throughout
the sixteenth century, had little opportunity to remake the
social order through their emphasis on religious groups as
voluntary societies.
Some of Zagorin's heroes are familiar, and some are known
less for their contributions to the idea of toleration than
for other accomplishments. The most interesting of Zagorin's
cases is that of the Geneva-trained humanist scholar Sebastian
Castellio. Castellio's Concerning Heretics, occasioned in
1553 by the author's revulsion at the burning of the heretic
Michael Servetus earlier that year in Geneva, argued passionately
against the notion of heresy and persecution, and proposed
that toleration was beneficial to a society. Castellio criticized
the Calvinists for playing God and ignoring the conscience
of individuals, and he challenged Calvin directly by maintaining
that reason and religion worked together in bringing about
the good society. For Zagorin, his "achievement should
be far more widely known and recognized," because of
"the character of his thought and his intellectual and
moral firmness in the struggle for toleration" (144).
Likewise underestimated, according to Zagorin, is the Dutch
writer Dirck Coornhert, a somewhat unorthodox Catholic, who,
in the early years of the Republic, fashioned, in several
publications, a plea for toleration in which he claimed that
religious freedom, the exercise of individual conscience,
and pluralism were good for the state. In an atmosphere of
free and open discussion of ideas, with Scripture as the final
arbiter, morality would be strengthened as debate revealed
right and wrong belief. Hugo Grotius and Jacob Arminius are
more familiar figures who make an appearance here, and so
is Roger Williams, the Cambridge-trained nonconformist who
is best known for his role in placing the colony of Rhode
Island on a foundation of religious liberty. Zagorin's interest
in Williams is for his authorship of The Bloudy Tenent (1644),
however. Characterizing it as the first unflinching indictment
of religious persecution written by an English person, "a
work of exceptional courage, vision, and consistency"
(208), Zagorin stresses that it extolled freedom of conscience
and proposed that toleration be extended to Catholics and
non-Christians, and not merely to minority Protestant groups.
Zagorin subsequently explores the efforts of English writers
such as Milton (and his similar emphasis on conscience), and
others associated with the Puritan revolution, before bringing
his narrative to a close with a rich discussion of writings
on toleration by John Locke and Pierre Bayle. The former of
these is important for his claim that religion is a matter
involving the individual and that the state's concern is with
the group, and that toleration is in fact a better safeguard
of peace than the state's insistence on imposing religion
upon its citizenry. Bayle's writings include an important
reinterpretation of the Lukan language "compel them to
come in" that challenged Christian deployment of the
text since Augustine in defense of persecution. Bayle, who
argued for universal toleration and pluralism, also advised
that the reality of the "erring conscience" must
be accepted as a consequence of toleration.
Zagorin's history of the idea of toleration offers an opportunity
for the reader to reflect upon how the issue of toleration
was closely wound up with thinking about the nature of society,
and theory about how social bodies held their shape through
religiously grounded solidarity. One wishes, however, for
a more pointed analysis of that central thread to the story,
and, especially, for some reference to the social upheavals
that spurred thinking about toleration in the first place.
We learn about Servetus and a few other figures, and there
is some discussion of the political and religious struggles
in England in the twenty or so years after 1640. Zagorin,
however, does not reference the appallingly cruel Thirty Years
War or other wars of religion that burned themselves into
the collective memory of Europeans and framed their thinking
about toleration in profound ways after the mid-seventeenth
century. The consequence is that the men in these pages, cast
largely as heroes by the author, remain somewhat adrift in
history, at risk, still, of being underappreciated for their
contributions to making social worlds in which pluralism is
accepted as beneficial to collective livelihood. If we knew
more about their times, we might be in a better position to
understand how tolerance, first used as a term in the modern
sense in connection with religion in France in 1562, seems
such a distant reality when considered in relation to present
day global conflicts involving religion.
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