Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World

Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives

Eliane Glaser

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137028037
• eBook ISBN: 9781137028044
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Placing topical debates in historical perspective, the essays by leading scholars of history, literature and political science explore issues of difference and diversity, inclusion and exclusion, and faith in relation to a variety of Christian groups, Jews and Muslims in the context of both early modern and contemporary England and America.

1

Scripture and Toleration between Reformation and Enlightenment

John Coffey

That recent years have witnessed a resurgence of historical scholarship on religious toleration is hardly surprising. Rarely has the subject seemed so relevant or so pressing. Of course, earlier historians were equally convinced that it mattered in their own time. W. K. Jordan published his four-volume history of The Development of Toleration in England under the growing shadow of fascism in the 1930s, and it was designed as an apologia for fragile liberal values.¹ The Jesuit Joseph Lecler’s great work Histoire de la Tolérance au Siècle de la Réforme (1955) appeared in the midst of Catholic debates over church–state relations that culminated in the Second Vatican Council landmark Declaration on Religious Freedom.² But twenty-first-century anxieties over religion and politics have injected a new sense of urgency into what might otherwise be a quiet backwater of historical enquiry. While the clash between Islamic militants and the West has caused many to revisit the Crusades and the history of Muslim–Christian interaction, public intellectuals have been equally inclined to turn to the early modern era. This is perhaps most marked in the US, where controversies over church and state are routinely rooted in the eighteenth century. Here the Religious Right fights the secular Left over the Founding Fathers as Protestants and Catholics once fought over Augustine. As Gordon Wood remarked, the Founders have become America’s church fathers.³ But we find the retrospective turn in Europe too. Salman Rushdie once pronounced that the problem with Islam was that it had never had a Reformation; he later corrected himself. What Islam needs, he explained, is ‘not so much a reformation . . . as an Enlightenment’. Either way, he recommended a recapitulation of Europe’s early modern learning experience.⁴

In the wake of 9/11, various historians have joined the ongoing debate, keen to demonstrate that early modern history has something valuable to teach us. For sheer ambition, none compares to Jonathan Israel. His 3,000-page trilogy on the radical Enlightenment and its foes is an intervention in contemporary debates about religion and politics, and pits the (allegedly) liberal democratic secularism of Spinoza against the evils of fundamentalism and traditionalism, the spinelessness of postmodernism and multiculturalism.⁵ Another tract for the times (albeit a good deal briefer) is Perez Zagorin’s How the Idea of Toleration Came to the West (2003). Zagorin argues that ‘the modern concepts of religious toleration and freedom’ are ‘the offspring of Western civilisation’, and traces their emergence in the writings of radical Protestants such as Castellio, Milton and Locke. His book concludes with the wish that these ideals would be embraced where they do not exist today – ‘including considerable parts of the Islamic world and the few remaining communist countries’.⁶ Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided by Faith (2007) sets out to undercut the kind of grand narratives told by Zagorin and Israel, Whiggish constructs centred on the liberating feats of progressive intellectuals. But he too has no doubt about what he called the ‘immediacy and relevance’ of early modern European history. Modern Europeans are now asking themselves the same question as their ancestors: ‘Can people whose basic beliefs are irreconcilably opposed live together peacefully?’ The early modern answer, suggests Kaplan, was (often, surprisingly) yes. There were ‘viable alternatives to bloodshed’. And they were worked out not by grand theorists but by local magistrates and everyday folk who devised various means of coexistence. From this fact, Kaplan draws a moral lesson. The practice of toleration does not depend on other cultures accepting the West’s post-Enlightenment secular values – it can develop within deeply traditional religious cultures.⁷

By constructing different narratives about religion, toleration and coexistence, these historians have offered alternative approaches to the challenge of militant religion, and especially resurgent Islam. For Israel, the solution is radical Enlightenment secularism. For Zagorin, it is the moderate Enlightenment value of toleration that emerged from within the Western Christian tradition thanks to its bolder spirits. For Kaplan, our best hope lies in practical, piecemeal practices of accommodation – regimes of toleration that may well look quite different from one culture to another.

James Simpson tells another kind of story about religion and intolerance in his much discussed work Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents. It displays the same sense of urgency that we see in Israel, Zagorin and Kaplan. He writes against a political context in which ‘fundamentalist reading practices’ are driving the legislative programme of the Religious Right and the militancy of Islamic terrorism. ‘Reading and its consequences’, he warns, ‘are once again becoming capable of violently changing the world.’ Burning to Read traces the problem (at least within Christianity) to the harsh literalism ushered in by the Reformation. And he takes aim at the celebration of the Protestant Bible that one finds in scholars such as David Daniell (or broadcasters such as Melvyn Bragg), who see Reformation biblicism as a liberating and democratic development. For Simpson, this Whiggish complacency ignores the dark side of Protestant literalism. Reformation styles of Biblereading, he alleges, produced nearly ‘Two Hundred Years of Biblical Violence’ in western Europe. Much of this violence was psychological (such as the fear of damnation wrought by reading about predestination). But sometimes it was physical, as when Calvinists re-enacted the iconoclastic purges of Israel’s godly kings.⁸

Scripture and toleration

In this chapter I want to pick up Simpson’s themes of biblical interpretation and ‘biblical violence’. In particular, I will explore the scriptural reasoning of seventeenth-century tolerationists, who sought to neutralise the ‘texts of terror’ used to justify religious persecution.⁹ And I will argue that the post-Reformation toleration controversy was a textual affair. From Castellio to Bayle, tolerationists were preoccupied by the challenge of biblical hermeneutics.

Until the recent surge of interest in Christian Hebraism and the reception history of the Bible, this topic received little systematic attention.¹⁰ For the most part, scholars concentrated on arguments that were deemed ‘relevant’ in a secular age. Students of Locke’s Letters Concerning Toleration, for example, devoted exhaustive analysis to his philosophical arguments, but largely bypassed his biblical hermeneutics.¹¹ Even John Marshall’s magnum opus, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, devoted a number of chapters to expounding the main lines of argument used by tolerationists, but largely bypassed their engagement with the Bible.¹²

This neglect of the scriptural dimension is problematic, for several reasons. In the first place, it is a-historical. It ignores a prominent strand in Locke’s texts, and in many other tolerationist works. To marginalise it because it seems irrelevant in the modern age is to distort the text, misrepresent the past and prematurely secularise our subjects.¹³ Second, when scholars ignore the biblical, they forget that the Christian doctrine of religious coercion was scripturally constructed (and so had to be scripturally deconstructed). It was erected by St Augustine in the early fifth century, in seminal letters justifying the repression of the Donatists. And while Augustine advanced abstract theological or philosophical arguments, his case drew heavily on biblical materials. Most famously, he appealed to Christ’s Parable of the Great Banquet, in which the host commands his servants to go into the highways and byways to find guests, declaring ‘compelle intrare’.¹⁴

Finally, glossing over scriptural argument is intellectually parochial and misses a feature of these debates that is becoming more rather than less relevant. As the philosopher John Gray puts it (in characteristically provocative fashion):

The return of religion as a pivotal factor in politics and war is one of the defining features of the age, and it is time Paine, Marx and other secular prophets were gently shelved in the stacks. The writings of these Enlightenment savants have stirred events for a very brief period in history, now clearly coming to an end. . . . But the books that have most formed the past, and which are sure also to shape the future, are the central texts of the world religions.¹⁵

Gray’s prophecy about the shelf-life of secular Enlightenment classics may well prove false, but his point about the persistent power and appeal of scriptural texts remains. The Bible and the Koran are read as intensively as ever, and more extensively than ever before. Across the global South, we see the emergence of what Philip Jenkins calls ‘new Christendoms’, where the Bible is read devoutly and often taken literally. The problem of violence in sacred texts has taken on a new significance.¹⁶ Given this contemporary context, the scriptural dimension of the early modern toleration controversy merits renewed attention. Indeed, as we shall see, there are striking parallels between the current intra-Islamic debate over apostasy, a debate which turns on the interpretation of the Qur’an and the hadith, and the post-Reformation dispute over religious coercion.

The Robinson circle and the Furly circle

In exploring this particular battle for the Bible, I want to focus on two influential coteries of Protestant tolerationists, one based in London in the 1640s, the other centred on Rotterdam in the 1680s.The first group included the poet and pamphleteer John Milton. Recent analysis by David Adams suggests that Milton’s Areopagitica was printed on a press owned by Henry Robinson, a London merchant who was part of the intellectual circle of Samuel Hartlib. The press also published pro-toleration works by the future Leveller leader William Walwyn and the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams.¹⁷ Certainly, these figures belonged to a network of London-based radical Independents who agitated for far-reaching religious toleration.¹⁸ Four decades later, another tolerationist grouping was hosted in Rotterdam by the Quaker Benjamin Furly. His personal library contained over 4,000 books, including a remarkable range of early tolerationist works, among them Williams’s Bloudy Tenent of Persecution and its sequel The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy and Milton’s Treatise of Civil Power.¹⁹ Among Furly’s conversation partners were the English philosopher John Locke, the Huguenot scholar Pierre Bayle and the Arminian divine Philip van Limborch. According to John Marshall, these figures were ‘at the epicentre of the early Enlightenment’.²⁰

Each of these groups was deeply preoccupied by the problem of Scripture and toleration. That may seem surprising, for to turn from Robinson’s circle in the 1640s to Furly’s circle in the 1680s is to turn from the world of the Puritan Revolution to the era of the early Enlightenment. It is tempting to draw a sharp contrast between Puritan biblicists and Enlightenment rationalists. Yet Locke and van Limborch were absorbed in questions of biblical exegesis. As a professor of theology at the Remonstrant seminary, van Limborch naturally cited Scripture copiously in his systematic theology.²¹ For his part, Locke was as much a lay theologian as Milton. He wrote a paraphrase of Paul’s epistles, and engaged in intensive exegesis in both The Reasonableness of Christianity and the First Treatise of Government.²² In one manuscript he listed 21 biblical passages that could be used to teach toleration.²³ As for Bayle, his Philosophical Commentary was devoted to countering Augustine’s literalist reading of ces Paroles de Jésus-Christ, ‘Constrain-les d’Entrer’.²⁴

With hindsight, historians have suggested that Europeans were on the cusp of a new intellectual era, and witnessing a major crisis of scriptural authority. And we do indeed see the origins of modern biblical criticism in the writings of Hobbes, Spinoza and Richard Simon.²⁵ But contemporaries living through the 1680s were hardly conscious of entering an age of Enlightenment. As John Marshall has vividly demonstrated, this was ‘one of the most religiously repressive decades in European history’, epitomised by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.²⁶ If Milton had to worry about Parliament’s Blasphemy Act in 1648 and the coercive schemes of Presbyterians and Anglicans, Locke and van Limborch lived to see the persecution of French Huguenots, Italian Waldensians and English Dissenters, the Scottish and English Blasphemy Acts of 1695 and 1697, and the execution of the freethinking Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead.²⁷

Moreover, during both periods the practice of religious coercion was underpinned by a scriptural rationale.²⁸ Seventeenth-century political thinkers were immersed in the Old Testament, and defenders of religious uniformity leaned especially heavily on Hebrew Scripture. Not for nothing has Eric Nelson dubbed this ‘the Biblical Century’ in the history of political thought.²⁹ Roger Williams explained that he would give careful consideration to the case of ancient Israel because ‘so great a waeight [sic] of this controversie lyes upon this president of the Old Testament’.³⁰ ‘The Inquisitors of these days’, noted Henry Robinson, ‘have no better ground for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World: Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives
• 1. Scripture and Toleration between Reformation and Enlightenment
• 2. Some Forms of Religious Liberty: Political Thinking, Ecclesiology and Religious Freedom in Early Modern England
• 3. Moral Logics of Enmity: Indians and English in Early America
• 4. Law and Civil Interest: William Penn’s Tolerationism
• 5. John Milton and Religious Tolerance: The Origins and Contradictions of the Western Tradition
• 6. Conformity, Loyalty and the Jesuit Mission to England of 1580
• 7. Commonwealth, Chosenness and Toleration: Reconsidering the Jews’ Readmission to England and the Idea of an Elect Nation
• 8. Present at the Creation: Diaspora, Hybridity and the Place of Jews in the History of English Toleration
• 9. Tolerating ‘Mahomet’: Or, Thinking about Then, Now
• 10. A Feminism of Convenience: Roger Williams, Egyptian Salafists and Liberty of Conscience for Women
• Select Bibliography
• Index