Consequences, Conscience, and Fallibility: Early Modern Roots of Toleration

ABSTRACT

The transition away from the highly intolerant and persecutory regimes of late-medieval and early-modern Europe was facilitated by four important developments. First, Europeans learned that social order and cohesion are threatened less by diversity than by intolerance of it. Second, the traditionally paternalist vision of the state’s role was called into question by a new valuation of the individual conscience and consequently of individual liberties. Third, the assumption that the meaning of symbols is objectively determined was replaced by the recognition that symbols are intersubjectively determined by convention. Fourth, Europeans began to distinguish two senses of publicity: visibility and representativeness. The tenacious hold of these four assumptions is illustrated by laws of laïcité, which harken back to the medieval mindset on all four counts.

Keywords:

• conscience
• diversity
• heresy
• intolerance
• laïcité
• paternalism
• politiques

Notes

1 On Augustine and the Christian theory of persecution, see Lecler 1955, vol. 1, 85; Zagorin 2003, ch. 2.

2 The widely held view that there is only one permissible way to worship God, for example, was enshrined in England in the 1646 Confession of Faith of the Westminster Assembly, which declared that “the acceptable way of Worshiping the true God, is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed Will, that he may not be Worshipped according to … any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture.” It is hardly a step from this to the conclusion that bearers of “erroneous Opinions or Practices … may lawfully be called to account, and proceeded against by the Censures of the Church, and by the Power of the civil Magistrate” (Westminster Assembly 1646, 34-35). As the Presbyterian cleric Daniel Cawdrey (1657, 24-25) put it a few years later (during the Interregnum), “if Christ hath instituted any way of Religion and worship,” then “that alone must be enforced on all the members of the Church.” It is entirely “reasonable” that “professed Christians should be compelled to the externall profession of that only way of worship, which Christ hath instituted,” and “he that denyes this, seems to mee, to bee, if not an Atheist, a Skeptick in Religion.” To tolerationists who argued that to “compell uniformitie” in religion is merely to breed “Hypocrisie, Formality, Atheism, and Anxietie of conscience,” Cawdrey gave the Augustinian response that while “by the corruptions of mens hearts” these “may” occur “in some,” yet “good and gracious souls, have been discovered, and purified by … that compulsion” and, indeed, have subsequently “blessed God for” it.

3 This view mirrors early-modern essentialist theorists of language who supposed that the meaning of words, in the original Adamic language, had been determined by God in accordance with the true essences of things (Aarsleff 1982).

4 As István Bejczy (1997) has noted, there had been a medieval notion of toleration that involved prudentially tolerating a lesser ostensible evil, such as Judaism or prostitution, to avoid an ostensibly greater evil, such as forced conversion or sodomy. What is distinctive about the politiques’ view is that it applied toleration to heretics, and that the greater evil to be avoided concerned reasons of state.

5 Not diversity but “Oppression raises Ferments, and makes men struggle to cast off an uneasie and tyrannical Yoke” (Locke 1983, 52).

6 For emphasis on this distinction, see Bejczy 1997; Collins 2009; Jordan 1932-40, vol. 1, 17.

7 Some modern liberals take this to imply the anti-perfectionist idea that the state should not endorse, promote, or be grounded in any particular conception of the good (Dworkin 1985). Others embrace perfectionism, but require that perfectionist political projects be compatible with individuals’ autonomy (Raz 1986).