Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment

by John Christian Laursen (Editor), Cary J. Nederman (Editor)

There is a myth--easily shattered--that Western societies since the Enlightenment have been dedicated to the ideal of protecting the differences between individuals and groups, and another--too readily accepted--that before the rise of secularism in the modern period, intolerance and persecution held sway throughout Europe. In Beyond the Persecuting Society John Christian Laursen, Cary J. Nederman, and nine other scholars dismantle this second generalization.

If intolerance and religious persecution have been at the root of some of the greatest suffering in human history, it is nevertheless the case that toleration was practiced and theorized in medieval and early modern Europe on a scale few have realized: Christians and Jews, the English, French, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, Italians, and Spanish had their proponents of and experiments with tolerance well before John Locke penned his famous Letter Concerning Toleration. Moving from Abelard to Aphra Behn, from the apology for the gentiles of the fourteenth-century Talmudic scholar, Menahem ben Solomon Ha-MeIiri, to the rejection of intolerance in the "New Israel" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Beyond the Persecuting Society offers a detailed and decisive correction to a vision of the past as any less complex in its embrace and abhorrence of diversity than the present.

In addition to the editors, contributors are Detlef D^ring, Arlen Feldwick, Randolph C. Head, Marion Leathers Kuntz, Thomas F. Mayer, Constant J. Mews, Richard Popkin, Gary Remer, and H. Frank Way.

John Christian Laursen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The Politics of Skepticism in the Ancients, Montaigne, Hume and Kant. Cary J. Nederman is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona and author of Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padua's "Defensor Pacis."

Genres: Religion

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Rory Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

A set of essays, covering the early medieval to the Enlightenment era, with a stronger focus on the later period.

The essays were planned carefully to include Christian (Abelard, John of Salisbury) and Jewish figures (Ha Me’iri), as well as a range of different Christian denominations. The inclusion of the female figure of Aphra Behn also extended the diversity of sources.

What the book set out to challenge was the simplistic idea that Europe was essentially full of intolerance in the early medieval era, but it learned tolerance in the Enlightenment and that stuck to grow into the world we now experience. What the essays show instead is that there was tolerance and intolerance across the full era. There is no neat division or progressive development of ideas. Rather there is a range of different emphases with different nuances of tolerance and intolerance. The tolerance we now know as religious freedom was also influenced by atheism and scepticism, which themselves were influenced by changing ideas and discoveries of ancient sources in the post-reformation time.

One of the issues which I think the book could have explained a little more helpfully was the place of Jews in medieval society. The issue crops up in several essays, in passing, as Jews were (sort of) tolerated throughout the medieval era, but that is a very nuanced form of tolerance, as Judaism had a role in pointing towards Christianity. Yet, at the same time, leading theologians defended the right of Jewish parents to bring their children up in the Jewish faith, even though according to Christian doctrine of the era, the refusal of baptism would mean the parents were inflicting eternal damnation on their children. It would have been helpful if one of the essays, or the introduction could have probed the questions raised by the treatment of Judaism.

As a separate point, I also think that the way Judaism was delineated from Christianity was not quite right. Essentially Judaism is portryed as prioritising ‘practice over doctrine’ (ie orthopraxy over orthodoxy) p.75. While Christianity was portrayed with the opposite priority. But is that accurate? Yes there were certainly disputes about concepts and ideas, but what brought matters to a heading was often the practical implications of the issues. For example, fourth century Arianism became a problem partially because there was reluctance to pray to Christ and the Holy Spirit, so the disputes about orthodoxy were driven by differences of orthopraxy. Similarly, the Nestorian heresy about whether Christ had two natures or not was driven in part by disputes about whether Mary could be honoured with the title ‘mother of God.’ What this means is that it is too crude and simplistic to separate Judaism and Christianity in the way that the book tries to do so.

Overall, the content of the essays was otherwise interesting and informative, but the coverages was a little misleading with respect to Catholic ideas, as Cardinal Pole’s (possible) tolerance was an arguably unrepresentative theme in terms of wider theological views. Still, a book of this size cannot cover all aspects, so some limitations are to be expected.

[Sebastião Martins · Rating 2 out of 5]

Acho muito engraçado como se brinca com os conceitos, mas na introdução desrespeitam-nos à cabeça, dizendo que a tolerância e o "ser tolerante" são duas ideias com histórias diferentes mas que significam o mesmo.

O resultado? Voltar a olhar para a tolerância apenas sob o foro filosófico e não emocional. Assim não dá, pá.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book of scholarly essays, and those are always uneven in quality and sort of boring. But it's on an interesting topic!