Positive Liberty

Besides offering some high praise for Positive Liberty, Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars has recently suggested I should support my claim that the Enlightenment, not the Reformation, was the true source of religious tolerance as we now understand it.

He asks, “Didn’t the Reformation pave the way for the Enlightenment in many ways?”

In a sense, the answer to his question is yes–but the Reformation paved the way for the Enlightenment in much the same way that the existence of smallpox paved the way for vaccination, or in the same way that Marxism paved the way for the Austrian School in the twentieth century.

And yet I often hear just the opposite: “Martin Luther… ah, he helped establish religious tolerance!”

Would that it were, but it is not.

It could be that a good deal of what I’m about to write won’t even address Mr. Brayton’s original concern; quite possibly, he shares none of the misconceptions that I’m about to attack. And on the off chance that he does share them, I will gladly look the other way if he wants to abandon them in private.

To state the key contention as baldly as possible: Christianity is more tolerant than any other world religion, and that it owes this tolerance to the Reformation.

No doubt it is a comforting belief. And in practice, both Protestants and Catholics today do tend to be quite tolerant. A few exceptions exist, but we need not consider them here. In general, one could do far worse than to live in a majority-Christian country.

But there is nothing inherent about Christianity’s tolerance. On the contrary, Christianity became tolerant almost in spite of itself, and it only did so when the other alternatives had been exhausted.

I say this not to deprecate Christianity, but because there is a grave danger in thinking that we need no longer attend to the problem of religious tolerance. In every age, the urge to intolerance presents itself anew. We must not become complacent about the freedom of conscience any more than we would take for granted the other rights that we now enjoy.

I will argue in this essay that the Enlightenment is the true intellectual origin of tolerance as we know it, and, while there could not have been an Enlightenment without a Reformation, it is a serious mistake to confuse or equate the two.

Nor do individual instances of tolerance before the Enlightenment tell us very much about the origins of present-day attitudes: Until the Enlightenment, wherever an official tolerance existed, it was almost always a particular and revocable license to practice one specific minority religion, and to do so only under highly restrictive conditions. In a sense, these were merely truces in the fighting, often agreed to simply because it was impossible to eradicate the religious minority. These early and frankly misnamed “tolerances” were in no sense predicated on the notion that an individual has a moral obligation to seek the truth for himself, unconstrained by the civil authority.

This last is what we now expect, and until the late seventeenth century, nothing even close to it could be found in Europe. It was also not until this time–the era of John Locke and Pierre Bayle–that an organized, philosophical defense appeared for the principle of general religious toleration.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

In 1520, the Catholic Church excommunicated Martin Luther. As we all know, he had been an irritation to them for the past three years. He had refused to recant his beliefs about the efficacy of indulgences first articulated in 1517; in the meantime he added complaints about Church venality, unneeded ceremonial, ecclesiastical misrule, the celibacy of priests, and a number of other theological issues.

Famously, Luther also said that every man should be his own priest and interpret Scripture according to reason, not tradition. Wikipedia attributes the following well-known quotes to him:

Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason — I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other — my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

And now the trouble begins, for Luther’s words sound to modern ears a great deal like religious tolerance.

In reality, they were nothing of the sort. While Luther deserves real credit for his scholarship and his spirit of inquisitiveness, still he believed quite firmly that anyone who read the Bible honestly and who applied right reason would come to precisely the same conclusions that he himself had reached. He believed that anything short of these conclusions was inspired of the devil and must be eradicated by any available means. His Open Letter to the Christian Nobility called upon secular rulers to implement the Reformation by force if necessary.

Where we see this as intolerance, Luther explicitly termed it an act of charity. To understand why this made sense to him, we should look at the world as Luther saw it.

Imagine that you are in a room with a total stranger. There are only two exits from the room. One is labeled “Heaven;” the other, “Hell.” When you step through a door, you will be there–with no turning back. And the stranger desperately wants to go to Hell.

You try to reason with him, but the stranger just won’t hear it. He keeps trying to go to Hell. So finally you grab a baseball bat, crack him over the head, and drag him into Heaven. He revives instantly and is grateful for all eternity. To Luther, civil government had to be the man with the baseball bat; it had to drag the ignorant masses into Heaven whether they liked it or not.

For anyone who believes in a literal Heaven and Hell, the argument is terribly strong: No matter how much violence you may do on Earth, you are justified if you help bring more people to Heaven. If you torture them into accepting the One True Church, well, that torture lasts only for hours or days. The torture of Hell lasts forever.

On the surface, this is an obvious interpretation of almost any Heaven-or-Hell religion.

Of course, the practical difficulty was that virtually every single Church believed that fire and the sword were the fully proper instruments of salvation. As the Churches multiplied, so did their conflicts. The Peasants Revolt was only the beginning; the Anabaptists, the Zwinglians in Zurich, the Calvinists in Geneva, Henry VIII’s Church of England, and the good old Roman Catholic Church… All of them had different rituals, different theological perspectives–and a shared belief that you both could and should force people into Heaven.

In England, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and Italy, most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were spent in the disastrous consequences of this one idea. To avoid being tedious, I have decided to spare you most of the details. For further reading, do consider some of the following episodes: The reign of Queen Mary I in England; the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Catholic League in France; and the Spanish treatment of the conversos, Jews who were forced to abandon their religion in favor of Catholicism.

(I should note, however, the recent scholarship that has tended to minimize the cruelty of Catholic Inquisitions, whose tortures, while real, were certainly inflated during the Enlightenment and afterward. The importance of the Inquisition for us remains the same: It was an official agency of the Church, tasked with creating religious uniformity. Whether they were cruel or merely heavyhanded, in no sense were they tolerant.)

Beyond the words of Luther, I can really think of only three other places where the popular misconception of a tolerant Reformation may gain some traction. The first is the Peace of Augsburg; the second is the Edict of Nantes; the third is the English Civil War.

In 1555, there arrived the Peace of Augsburg. It temporarily–but only temporarily–ended the religious strife that had engulfed the Holy Roman Empire. If there is one thing that educated people remember about the Peace of Augsburg, it is the Latin dictum cuius regio eius religio: The religion of the area is the religion of the prince.

Yet this principle did not establish religious tolerance: It left only a handful of people free to choose their own religion, and these could choose only between Catholicism and Lutheranism. All other faiths were forbidden, and the subjects were always obliged to follow their princes’ decisions.

The Edict of Nantes was hardly much better: In 1598, Henry IV of France allowed Protestants to keep churches in certain designated locations while restoring many of their civil rights. Protestants could worship only on the condition that no new churches were built and that no proselytizing occurred. Religions beyond mainstream French Protestantism were all forbidden, and Protestants still faced considerable obstacles in their civic life. The Edict itself spelled out many further restrictions, and these were periodically tightened or loosened as a way of manipulating the Protestant minority. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict, prompting a mass exodus of French Protestants. Many of these went to the places where religious toleration was already starting to appear: the Netherlands, the American colonies, and England.

Deeply flawed and temporary as it was, the Edict of Nantes bought France a measure of breathing room; it too had spent much of the sixteenth century in religious civil war. To be cynical about it, the Edict of Nantes allowed France to fight with its neighbors during the seventeenth century rather than continue to fight with itself.

At the risk of gross oversimplification–which I’ve already run quite often in this essay–the English Civil War of 1642-1649 was fought between two sides that split in large measure over official religious policy: Each side wanted to enforce its own vision of Protestantism as the sole official religion.

The result–and a quite inadvertent one–was a religious chaos, leading to a de facto toleration for many forms of Protestantism.

King Charles I’s side wished to preserve the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Church of England, including bishops and archbishops; it wished also to retain the high ceremonial that the Church had been employing. The king and his supporters viewed their policies as moderate, because they were neither Roman Catholics nor strict Genevan Calvinists. And since they were fully convinced of the truth of their cause, they of course demanded absolute conformity from others.

The leaders of the Parliamentary opposition, though, preferred a simpler, “purified” style of worship, without images or impressive ceremonial in the Church. They even proposed eliminating the Episcopacy “root and branch,” and that phrase has endured to the present. Puritans demanded that the state should finish off the work of Reformation, once again by fire and the sword. Those Puritans who left England during the early seventeenth century did so not to establish religious toleration, but to create a new jurisdiction where their own Church would be the official one, and where all others could be excluded.

Thus the colony of Massachusetts was founded, and it exiled malcontents like Roger Williams to unpleasant places like Rhode Island. Williams was a dangerous radical: He was among the first ever to suggest something like a separation of Church and State.

In the conventional wisdom of the day, the Church and the State were two sides of a very large coin, or two arms of the very same body. Separation was unthinkable, as both sides in the English Civil War generally agreed. They both claimed–and try not to laugh–that a separation of Church and State would cause unending civil strife.

One wonders what they thought when they looked out their windows, but I digress. During the English Civil War, two very important events took place for the intellectual historian.

First, the censorship collapsed. With the king and the Parliament busy fighting one another, it simply was not possible to continue the licensure of the press as it had once existed. Writers were free to print whatever they could get away with, and at times this was a remarkable lot indeed.

The second event was a great outpouring of religious fervor that spread in many different directions. Sects including Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, Muggletonians, new Anabaptist movements, and many others arose during this time–and here, we’re talking only about England. Many individual congregations began to decide for themselves on all matters of Church doctrine and discipline, something that they had not been free to do before.

After Charles was executed in 1649, Parliament made various attempts at resolving the religious issues of the era. But it proved quite unable to do so; the old order had broken down so thoroughly that it proved essentially impossible to restore.

During the Protectorate–essentially a military dictatorship–Oliver Cromwell invited the Jews back into England, a country where they had been forbidden since Edward I expelled them in 1290. Cromwell reversed this longstanding policy not because he favored a general religious toleration, but because the Bible states that the Jews must convert to Christianity before the End of Days, an event that Cromwell very much wanted to see.

The Jews did come back to England; thankfully, they declined to spark the Apocalypse.

In 1660, Parliament invited the exiled King Charles II to return. Exhausted by two decades of disruption, England’s Protectorate collapsed with scarcely a fight. Charles II also attempted to restore uniformity, this time to a more conventionally-structured Church of England, but religious dissent continued all the same.

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Toleration Act of the following year allowed Catholics and most Protestants to worship more or less without fear of reprisals. Unitarians were excluded, as they were thought to be unacceptably dangerous.

Heavy restrictions remained on Catholic participation in English civic life as well, and full tolerance for English Catholics took a remarkably long time to achieve. Only in 1829 were Catholics fully emancipated in England. Thus Voltaire’s 1733 Letters Concerning the English Nation were rather optimistic about the state of religious tolerance in that country. Still, England was better there than virtually anywhere else.

By the end of the seventeenth century, a de facto toleration also existed in the Netherlands, largely because its government was too decentralized and its people too religiously disunited for the laws on religious unity to be enforced. Tolerance had also existed in Poland, partly because the Polish government was more or less an anarchy. Elsewhere, an official state religion remained the rule, and dissenters were usually punished with forfeiture of their civil status.

This was the world of Locke and Bayle, of Hume, Voltaire, and even Jefferson. This was the history that they knew, and hopefully it gives some idea of what they were up against. The Enlightenment inherited almost two centuries of religious warfare–and then tried desperately to stop it.

I know that my academic advisor reads this space, and I am sure that by now he has thought of several dozen important facts that I have failed to mention. In my defense, I’ve only tried to write a little more than a sketch, both because I fear its theft and because I only wanted to address the specific misconception that I laid out above. Now that I’ve posted some poor freshman’s term paper on my blog, I wonder if he will take the trouble to excise this paragraph.

In any event, when John Locke wrote the passage that I am about to cite, he was making a revolutionary claim. Today, it seems almost to belabor the obvious, but in the context of his own era–when forcing people into Heaven was seemingly doing them a favor–Locke’s voice was distinctly in the minority:

Although the magistrate’s opinion in religion be sound… yet if I be not thoroughly persuaded thereof in my own mind, there will be no safety for me in following it. No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience, will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed. I may grow rich by an art that I take not delight in; I may be cured of some disease by remedies that I have not faith in; but I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust, and by a worship that I abhor. It is in vain for an unbeliever to take up the outward show of another man’s profession… No religion, which I believe not to be true, can be either true or profitable unto me. In vain, therefore, do princes compel their subjects to come into their church-communion, under pretense of saving their souls… men cannot be forced to be saved.

I hope that this essay has cleared up why I said what I did about the Reformation and the Enlightenment. I know that it is always difficult to prove a negative proposition (”The Reformation did not create…”). And indeed, it may well be that some relatively unknown writer of the sixteenth century did defend the idea of religious tolerance after all. But that writer, if he exists, is unknown to intellectual historians.

We would gladly hail the discovery of this unknown writer, because his works would be the only evidence I can think of for the popular misconception as it stands today. Finding him would be a coup in the history of ideas, as it would suggest that Locke, Bayle, or even Roger Williams may have been derivative rather than highly original thinkers.

(Okay, that’s another promise taken care of… Be patient, I’m trying to remember the rest.)

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