Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment

Atheist's Progress

Eric MacPhail

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000767469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This new study examines the relationship of atheism to religious tolerance from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in a broad array of literary texts and political and religious controversies written in Latin and the vernacular primarily in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The main authors featured are Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio, Jean Bodin, Michel de Montaigne, Dirck Coornhert, Justus Lipsius, Gisbertus Voetius, the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus, and Pierre Bayle. These authors reflect and inform changing attitudes to religious tolerance inspired by a complete reconceptualization of atheism over the course of three centuries of literary and intellectual history. By integrating the history of tolerance in the history of atheism, Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist's Progress should prove stimulating to historians of philosophy as well as literary specialists and students of Reformation history.

1
The Theory of Tolerance From Erasmus to Castellio

The Renaissance marks a new era in the history of the idea of tolerance because of the advent of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Not only did the Reformation challenge Roman Catholic orthodoxy but it also founded a plurality of new orthodoxies, each of which regarded dissent as heresy. In effect, the Age of Reformation witnessed a proliferation of heresy and an accompanying intensification of the debate over persecution or tolerance. The key issue for the sixteenth century was the proper response of political and ecclesiastical authorities to heresy and the threat of schism. Should heretics be persecuted or not? To answer in the negative was to advocate tolerance, though not in the fullest modern sense of proclaiming the intrinsic value of religious pluralism. The role of Erasmus in this debate was both pivotal and equivocal.

As the Reformation began, Erasmus distinguished himself through his courageous opposition to religious persecution, but at the same time, Erasmus was much more interested in advocating peace and concord within the Christian church than in defending religious pluralism. Mario Turchetti has drawn a useful distinction between concord and tolerance, and Erasmus clearly subscribes to the former term in this dichotomy.¹ However, others have challenged what they view as a too rigid distinction that tends to diminish the importance of tolerance and its advocates, and their point is well taken that concord and tolerance are compatible goals.² In our own study, we will tend to conflate what Turchetti would segregate while recognizing that concord is an historically conditioned program that ultimately was overtaken by changing historical circumstances. Tolerance of religious dissent within Christianity was already an urgent issue during Erasmus’ lifetime, but in the course of a long century of persecution and revolt, the Reformation raised a further question that proved decisive in the history of tolerance: how to deal with dissent within Protestantism. The turning point in this debate was the trial and execution of Michel Servet, which can serve as a terminus ad quem for this preliminary survey.

Rainer Forst has identified the work of St. Augustine as “a decisive turning point in the history of Christian toleration,” and he associates Augustine with what he calls “the Janus face of tolerance” whereby arguments for tolerance can be inverted into justifications of intolerance.³ This is the legacy that the Renaissance inherited from the patristic tradition and applied to its own controversies over the treatment of Christian heretics. The Renaissance tended to view its own upheavals through the lens of Augustine’s reaction to the Donatist movement of North Africa in the late Roman Empire. The Renaissance knew Augustine as someone who had converted from tolerance to intolerance and who championed the persecution of the Donatists. Erasmus for his part was most sensitive in Augustine’s work to signs of mansuetudo or leniency that brought Augustine’s teaching closer to the philosophy of Christ. In the aftermath of Luther’s 95 theses, Erasmus frequently invokes Augustine’s clemency or leniency toward his implacable foes the Donatists. Writing to Albert of Brandenburg in October 1519, he deplores the eagerness of the Louvain theologians to persecute Luther when Augustine, even against the Donatists, who were more brigands than heretics, would not countenance those who rely on force rather than teaching.⁴ The following year Erasmus recalls to Lorenzo Campeggi how Augustine interceded on behalf of the Donatists to spare them capital punishment, in part to justify his own intermittent sympathies for Luther.⁵ He probably has in mind the epistles that Augustine wrote to the imperial officials entrusted with the suppression of the Donatists. To Count Marcellinus, Augustine recommends, perhaps disingenuously, the model of apostolic mansuetudo, citing Paul’s epistle to the Philippians 4, 5: “Mansuetudo vestra nota sit omnibus hominibus” or “Let all men know your forbearance.”⁶ Erasmus also had in mind a long letter of Augustine subtitled De correctione Donatistarum liber where Augustine recalls that initially he discouraged severity toward recalcitrant Donatists lest coercion lead to religious imposture and the Churches of Africa end up with a horde of fake Catholics on their hands.⁷ Erasmus remembers this letter in his Apology against certain Spanish monks written in the aftermath of the Conference of Vallodolid convened in 1527 by the Spanish Inquisition in order to examine the orthodoxy of his writings. To answer the accusation of enmity toward the holy inquisition of heretics, Erasmus turns once again to Augustine and the Donatists, reminding his zealous foes that upon the defeat of the Donatists, the more lenient of the orthodox, mansuetiores, including Augustine, argued against the violent coercion of heretics, not only so as to follow the example of Christ but also out of fear that in lieu of heretics they’d end up with fake Christians, which would endanger the Catholic flock.⁸ In all these instances, Erasmus speaks out not so much for tolerance as for mansuetudo, which presupposes the triumph of orthodoxy and the reintegration of religious dissidents within the orthodox fold. Mansuetudo operates within one church and not between churches.

Erasmus was particularly interested in those places where Augustine appeals to the parable of the wheat and the tares from Matthew 13 in his polemics against the Donatists. The key text here is Contra epistulam Parmeniani refuting the arguments of Parmenian, the successor to Donatus as bishop of Carthage. Parmenian had written to Tyconius to insist on the exclusive claim of the Donatist Church to be the true church, free of all taint of traditio or betrayal of the faith. Apparently Parmenian had appealed to Jesus’ parable of the tares to bolster his argument. In chapter 13 of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus preaches from a boat to a crowd on shore a sermon full of parables. Among other parables, he tells the crowd that the kingdom of heaven is like the man who sowed his field with good seed, but while his servants slept, his enemy came and sowed tares amid the wheat, “zizania in medio tritici” (Matthew 13, 25). When the tares began to grow above ground, the servants asked the landowner if he wanted them to pull them out, but he said no, lest they pull out the wheat with the tares. Instead, they should let them both grow until the harvest, when he would call his harvesters first to gather the tares to be burned and then collect the wheat to put in the storehouse. After the crowd disperses, Jesus is so good as to explain the parable to his disciples in terms that ought to have preempted the ingenuity of future exegetes. The landowner is the Son of Man; the field is the world; the good seed is the elect; the tares are the damned; the enemy is the devil; and the harvest is the end of the world, when the Lord will send his angels to punish the unjust and reward the just. Crucially, in this series of correspondences, Jesus leaves out the servi, the slaves or servants, but Erasmus and others obligingly fill in the lacuna. From Augustine’s rebuttal, we can gather that Parmenian identified the Donatists as the wheat and everyone else as the tares or lapsed Christians who had to be shunned in order to preserve the purity of the true believers. Augustine is not impressed by this logic, and he warns the Donatists not to create a schism but to coexist with other Christians in the field, that is the Universal Church.⁹ The time for the harvest has not come. In this way, in order to rebut Donatist puritanism, Augustine provides a scriptural rationale for tolerance of religious deviance that would be largely debated in the Renaissance.

Erasmus returns to this parable when he prepares his Paraphrase on Matthew for publication with Johann Froben in 1522. The episode of Jesus preaching in parables is not without challenges for the paraphrast, since Jesus has already paraphrased his own parable by explaining it to the disciples. What’s left to paraphrase? Erasmus’ solution is to complete the incomplete gloss offered by Jesus by identifying the servi who are eager to pull out the tares before the harvest and have to be restrained by their master. Here is Erasmus’ contribution to the parable:

The slaves who want to collect the cockles before the time is right are those who think that false apostles and heretics should be removed from our midst by the sword and by death, though the householder does not want them to be destroyed, but to be tolerated, if by chance they might come to their senses and repent, and be turned from cock-les into wheat. If they do not repent, let them be saved for their judge, to whom they will pay the penalty some day. The time for the harvest is the consummation of the age. The reapers are the angels. Therefore, in the meantime, evil persons mixed with the good must be endured, since they are tolerated with less harm than they could be removed.

(CWE 45:215)

This is the capital and classic expression of religious tolerance in the works of Desiderius Erasmus. In the very last sentence quoted, Erasmus has recourse to a play on words that requires some attention to the Latin original: “Interim igitur mali bonis admixti ferendi sunt, quando minore pernicie tolerantur, quam tollerentur” (LB 7:80F). The passage does not advocate tolerance as a positive value but rather as the lesser of two evils, “minore pernicie,” and it makes us hear the priority of tolerare over tollere. Yet, neither does Erasmus advocate tolerance as a provisional measure in view of some future reconciliation or purge. The bad are to be endured among the good until the end of time. There is also a strong hint of skepticism that would appeal to Michel de Montaigne when Erasmus reminds us that only the angels can discern between the wheat and the tares. Persecution requires a certainty that is not available to human faculties.

Erasmus’ defense of tolerance in his Paraphrase on Matthew provoked an acrimonious conflict with defenders of Catholic orthodoxy precisely in those years when the Lutheran schism had reached a crisis point. Originally deputed by the Paris Parliament to certify the orthodoxy of Erasmus’ Paraphrases in view of granting a privilege that was ultimately denied, the Parisian theologian Noël Béda, after some epistolary skirmishes, published his criticisms of the Paraphrases in a composite work titled Annotationes in May 1526. With customary alacrity, Erasmus published a refutation of Béda within a month, and several more rebuttals followed in a quarrel that lingered in print until 1532. In one of the earliest installments of this quarrel, known as the Divinationes or conjectures, Erasmus defends his treatment of Jesus’ parable of the tares by mustering several patristic authorities for religious tolerance including Augustine, who interceded with the imperial officials on behalf of the Donatists (ASD IX-5:80). Later, in the more extensive rebuttal titled Supputationes and divided into 198 numbered propositions, proposition 32 addresses Béda’s objection to Erasmus’ paraphrase of Matthew 13 as “the damned heresy of Luther” and a violation of Church law.¹⁰ Erasmus is quick to point out that he was merely paraphrasing Christ’s words and wonders if Béda would consider Christ a heretic. He also explains that the Church has no legal authority to put heretics to death, as Béda seems to believe, nor does Erasmus challenge the authority of secular rulers to punish heretics who dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Atheism Before Enlightenment
• 1 The Theory of Tolerance From Erasmus to Castellio
• 2 French Wars of Religion
• 3 The Dutch Revolt
• 4 Atheism and Orthodoxy in Gisbertus Voetius
• 5 Atheism and Pluralism in the Theophrastus redivivus
• 6 Pierre Bayle Beyond Tolerance
• Epilogue: The Afterlife of Bayle’s Paradox
• Bibliography
• Index