Abstract
In this chapter, the political theology and ethical imperatives which have already been to the fore in this study will narrow in on one of the concrete controversies of the age, touched on repeatedly in the previous chapters: religious toleration. Like Jonathan Israel, I shall compare and contrast the approaches of Benedict de Spinoza, John Locke, and Pierre Bayle. The plausibility of placing these figures in categories of ‘radical’ or ‘moderate’ Enlightenments will be challenged, and the theological dimension of their writings will be emphasised. All three figures drew on the philosophical and biblical traditions of Jewish and Christian thought: Jesus featured prominently in their cases for toleration (especially in Locke and Bayle), and he had a role in all three philosophers articulation of the general relationship between the sacred and the civil dimensions of society (especially in Spinoza and Locke). For all his sympathy with democratic politics, Spinoza’s political theology emerges as the most authoritarian, while Locke (for all the exceptions he makes to toleration ) argues for the kind of structural separation of civil and sacred powers which have underpinned secular constitutional arrangements in later modernity. Bayle produced the most passionate and sustained argument against religious intolerance, combining philosophical reason with a commitment to the authority of biblical revelation which is underestimated in some scholarship on this enigmatic figure.
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Notes
- 1.
See Israel, Democratic , p. 12.
- 2.
These are the theological/metaphysical worldviews that Israel associates with radical Enlightenment (see Radical, pp. 11–12).
- 3.
See Dimitry Pospielovsky, A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice (3 vols.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987–1988; Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution , 1945–1957, London: Bloomsbury, 2013; The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976, London: Bloomsbury, 2016; and Ian Johnson, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, London: Allen Lane, 2017.
- 4.
Joseph Priestley and Thomas Jefferson, who were both highly engaged with questions of religious toleration, will be the focus of my next chapter.
- 5.
See Chubb , Supremacy of the Father and Supremacy of the Father Vindicated.
- 6.
See Chubb’s initial dissertation on providence appended to the True Gospel (pp. 197–233) and defended in The True Gospel of Jesus Christ Vindicated: And also a Vindication of the Author’s Short Dissertation on Providence, London: printed for T. Cox, 1739.
- 7.
See ‘The Personal Character of Jesus Christ’, in Posthumous Works (vol. 2), pp. 265–311.
- 8.
See Bushell, Sage of Salisbury, p. 18. Indeed, Israel s pecifically distances Chubb and Morgan (discussed below) from the radical Enlightenment (see ‘Game-changing Concept’, p. 56).
- 9.
Chubb , True Gospel Vindicated, p. 46.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 46.
- 14.
See ibid., p. 46.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 46.
- 16.
See Morgan, A Brief Examination of the Rev. Mr Warbutton’s Divine Legation of Moses, London, 1742, p. 48.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 48.
- 18.
In his Pensées diverses à l’occasion de la Comète (1680) Bayle argued that it was reasonable to suppose that a ‘Society of Atheists wou’d observe all Civil and Moral Dutys, as Other Societys do’; in this particular context he seems to have in mind people ‘ignorant’ of God rather than those who possess the relevant concept but deny it mind independent existence: see Piere Bayle, Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasion’d by the Comet which Appear’d in December 1680 (vol. 2 of 2), anonymous (trans). London: J. Morphew, 1708, sect. clxxII. Later Bayle does consider examples of knowingly atheist philosophers from the ancient world who he considers virtuous (or at least not corrupt) including Diagoras, Theodorus, and Evemerus (sect. clxxiv).
- 19.
See my discussion in the next chapter.
- 20.
See Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Stockdale: London, 1786, p. 292: ‘We are answerable for them to our God . The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.’
- 21.
For an analysis of Werkmeister and others in a similar mould, see Lehner , Enlightened Monks; on Grégoire , see Popkin and Popkin (eds.), Grégoire and His World; and Alyssa Goldstein, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
- 22.
See Rita Hermon-Belot, ‘The Abbé Grégoire’s Program for the Jews: Social Reform and Spiritual Project’, in Grégoire and His World, pp. 13–26; and Ruth F. Necheles, ‘The Abbé Grégoire’s Work in Behalf of Jews 1788–1791’, French Studies (vol. 6.2), Autumn 1969, pp. 172–184.
- 23.
See Marcel Dorigny, ‘The Abbé Grégoire and the Société des Amis des Noirs’, in Grégoire and His World, pp. 27–40.
- 24.
See Israel, especially in Radical, Contested, and Democratic.
- 25.
Spinoza and Bayle are two of ‘the three principal architects of the Radical Enlightenment’ in Israel’s analysis (Contested, p. 42); the third is Diderot . Israel analyses their approaches to toleration in Contested, chap. 6. Spinoza’s one-substance monism and hyper-rationalism are not really in doubt. Israel ’s interpretation of Pierre Bayle as a ‘rationalist ’ is plausible (Radical, p. 329), especially when measured against examples of Bayle’s writing of the kind considered below. But it is one assessment among many. The so-called ‘Bayle enigma’ is illustrated by Lennon and Michael Hickson : ‘According to just the twentieth-century interpretations, Bayle might have been a positivist, an atheist , a deist , a skeptic , a fideist , a Socinian , a liberal Calvinist , a conservative Calvinist, a libertine, a Judaizing Christian, a Judeo-Christian, or even a secret Jew, a Manichean , an existentialist ’ (‘Pierre Bayle’, SEP, Winter 2017, sect. 2, accessed 17 August 2018: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayle/). Some of these conceptions of Bayle are more tenuous than others in their evidential support, but serious candidates include those who understand Bayle as some kind of sceptic , including the doyen of early modern scepticism —see R. Popkin , History of Scepticism—and the scholar widely regarded as the most important Bayle specialist of the twentieth century, who locates Bayle within fideistic Calvinism : see Elisabeth Labrousse , Bayle (2 vols.), La Haye: Nijhoff, 1963–1964. Israel’s view of Bayle as a ‘crypto-Spinozist’ (Contested, pp. 87, 92–93, 413, 426, 528) is also controversial. Given the priority Israel gives to one-substance monism in his vision of radical Enlightenment, it seems problematic to identify Bayle with a tradition underscored by a metaphysical vision he showed no affinity with: although Bayle admired Spinoza ’s integrity and tolerance, he subjected his metaphysics to sustained criticism in his Dictionaire historique et critique [1697]: see Bayle , ‘Spinoza’, in R. Popkin (ed. & trans.), Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Inc., 1991, pp. 288–238.
- 26.
See Erasmu s’s Christian Knight, chap. viii, on ‘Certain general rules of true christendom’.
- 27.
For his discussion of the ‘notitiae communes’, see Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury , De Veritate, M. H. Carré (trans.), Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1937, pp. 291–307. In summary, they are (1) that God exists, (2) that God ought to be worshipped, (3) that the practice of virtue is central to worship, (4) that one must repent of one’s sins to receive God’s forgiveness , and (5) that God will pass judgement on one’s moral fitness in the afterlife.
- 28.
See Martin I. Klauber, ‘Between Protestant Orthodoxy and Rationalism: Fundamental Articles in the Early Career of Jean LeClerc’, JHI (vol. 54.4), October 1993, pp. 611–636, where the main focus here is on LeClerc but all three figures are considered.
- 29.
See Israel, Dutch Republic , especially chaps. 7–24.
- 30.
See Israel, Dutch Republic, chaps. 12, 20.
- 31.
See Seymour Feldman , ‘Introduction to Spinoza’, TPT, pp. vii–xlvii: xvi–xvii; and Israel, Radical , pp. 165–167.
- 32.
Michael A. Rosenthal, ‘Tolerance as a Virtue in Spinoza’s Ethics ’, JHP (vol. 39.4), October 2001, pp. 535–557: 536.
- 33.
See Spinoza, TPT, p. 164.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 163.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 163.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 163.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 164. Spinoza l ater spells this out: ‘[P]hilosophy rests on the basis of universally valid axioms, and must be constructed by Nature alone, whereas faith is based on history and language, and must be derived only from Scripture and revelation ’ (p. 169).
- 38.
If Spinoza ’s Ethics is an example of what he means by philosophy , and it surely is, then one might very well regard it as a sustained study of God (the first book claims to be nothing less). This, then, is the speculative, metaphysical theology which Spinoza considers to be the business of the philosopher .
- 39.
Spinoza, TPT, p. 164.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 164.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 164.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 164.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 164.
- 44.
See ibid., pp. 163–164.
- 45.
Reimarus’s propositional conception of revealed religion, and his opposition to it, is everywhere apparent in the Apologie and the Fragments.
- 46.
Spinoza, TPT, p. 166.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 165.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 165.
- 49.
See ibid., pp. 165–166.
- 50.
Ibid., pp. 166–167.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 52.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 58.
See ibid., p. 8: in the Preface to the main text, Spinoza writes derisively of the ‘masses’ with their ‘superstition ’, ‘prejudices’, and ‘obstinacy’; he did ‘not invite the common people to read this work, nor all those who are victims of the same emotional attitudes’.
- 59.
See Curley, ‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Kahn’, in Companion to Spinoza, pp. 315–342.
- 60.
Spinoza, TPT, p. 167.
- 61.
This complaint is closely associated with the thought of Marx , Freud, and their many acolytes and imitators.
- 62.
They include the finer points of God’s omnipresence and his freedom of will: see Spinoza, TPT, p. 168.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 168.
- 64.
See Spinoza, Ethics , schol. to prop. 35.
- 65.
See Israel’s interpretation, ‘Introduction’, pp. xix–xx.
- 66.
Spinoza, TPT, p. 55.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 153.
- 68.
See ibid., especially chap. 19.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 179.
- 70.
See ibid., chap. 16.
- 71.
- 72.
Spinoza, TPT, p. 219.
- 73.
Spinoza argues that this is not just a problem regarding heads of government, since clerics are just as likely to go astray (see ibid., p. 226). This is true, but Spinoza is surprisingly insensitive to the dangers of reserving so much authority in spiritual matters for the governing political power , clearly feeling that the dangers of this are outweighed by the threat that ‘private citizens’ might ‘seditiously seek to be the champions of religious law ’ (p. 226): for all that the Hebrew prophets were ‘endowed with a divine virtue’ (p. 226), Spinoza judges that it was kings not prophets who exerted the more positive influence over the people, since they had the power to do so; prophets, according to Spinoza, had the effect of ‘provoking men rather than reforming them’ (p. 266).
- 74.
Ibid., p. 189.
- 75.
Ibid., p. 222.
- 76.
See Matthew 15:15-22.
- 77.
Spinoza, TPT, p. 224.
- 78.
Ibid., p. 225. Spinoza does not appeal to chap. 13 of Paul ’s Letter to the Romans to formulate his doctrine, but his thinking does at times bear comparison to that of ‘divine right’ theorists. For Spinoza, however, the ‘divine right ’ belongs to whoever happens to hold the power : king, military dictator, or, Spinoza’s preferred choice, a man of good moral character who is the elected head of a democratic government and will uphold the principles of the universal faith .
- 79.
Spinoza is associated with the denial of miracles (see Israel , Radical, chap. 12), but what he actually does in chap. 6 of the TPT is adopt an epistemological rather than ontological definition, rejecting a notion which had been popular among some modern religious apologists, but perhaps even more so among religious sceptics (certainly since David Hume ), namely that a ‘miracle’ must constitute some kind of a ‘violation of the law of nature ’. For Spinoza, as for Augustine before him in De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, the natural world in all its wonder is an outworking of God’s activity, some of which we understand (the mundane) and some of which we do not (the miraculous ), but God does not make corrective interventions into a world already endowed by God with all its productive powers: see Augustine, City of God (3 vols.), Demetrius B. Zema and Gerald G. Walsh (trans.), Etienne Gilson (intro.), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1950. (bk. xi, chap. 8). For Hume’s famous critique of the reasonableness of believing in reports of miracles (or believing that miracles are even possible, depending on one’s interpretation of his argument), see sect. 10 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
- 80.
See Spinoza, TPT, p. 223
- 81.
Ibid., pp. 228–229.
- 82.
According to Israel , Spinoza feared the power of ecclesiastical figures ‘inflaming the ignorant and credulous against ministers of state’ (Contested, p. 157). Spinoza was disturbed in particular by the savage murder of the De Witt brothers, leading Republican figures in the Dutch Republic, in 1672.
- 83.
Spinoza ’s philosophy , though not his personal inclination would, presumably, have allowed for the dissolution of the monasteries of England ; forced mass attendance in France and forbidding Protestant worship ; the destruction of Orthodox churches in Russia; and, less dramatically, the more recent French ban on the wearing of certain forms of religious dress in public spaces (a coercive policy which has disproportionately impacted the Islamic community: see John Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). All these destructive, coercive , or restrictive actions concern public religiosity, and they have all been justified on the basis that they are good for the commonwealth as a whole.
- 84.
As one sympathetic commentator has written: ‘If we cannot make sense of the idea that people have a natural right to such things [the ‘things’ referred to here are ‘lives’, ‘property’ and ‘honour’ of Britons under the heal of the Roman Empire], then we seem to be handicapped in the criticism we want to make of the Roman conduct (or of a tyrant’s treatment of his own people)’ (Curley, ‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan’, p. 335).
- 85.
Spinoza, TPT, p. 223.
- 86.
See Steven Nadler , A Book Forged in Hell : Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
- 87.
For a comprehensive biography, see Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; see chap. 1 for his childhood and early education. Locke ’s family was from Somerset . His father had fought on the side of the Parliamentarians , and the contacts he made in the army facilitated Locke’s education.
- 88.
See Ross Harrison, Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion’s Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth-Century Political Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- 89.
See Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology (2 vols.), London: Routledge, 1991.
- 90.
See Spinoza, TPT, p. 223.
- 91.
See Woolhouse, Locke, chap. 2. Locke was elected to the Royal Society on 22 November 1668, when he stated his profession as ‘Physician’: see ‘Fellow Details’, The Royal Society, accessed 30 July 2018: https://collections.royalsociety.org/DServe.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Persons&dsqSearch=Code==NA8232&dsqCmd=Show.tcl.
- 92.
See John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke : An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. For a more recent account which emphasises the Christian underpinning of Locke’s political philosophy , see Jeremy Waldron , God, Locke, and Equality : Christian foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002.
- 93.
See Woolhouse, Locke, chap. 3; and Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
- 94.
There is an ongoing debate about the extent to which Locke’s involvement with his country’s colonial trade policies made him complicit with the systems of African-American Slavery , and whether or not his very definition of slavery in his political writings was conceived with a view to legitimising those policies: see William L. Uzgalis, ‘John Locke , Racism , Slavery and Indian Lands’, in Naomi Zack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Philosophy and Race , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 21–30; and James Farr, ‘Locke, Natural Law and New World Slavery’, Political Theory (vol. 36.4), August 2008, pp. 495–522; and David Armitage, ‘John Locke , Carolina and the Two Treatises of Government’, Political Theory (vol. 32.5), October 2004, pp. 602–627. Locke’s moral philosophy provides no justification for slavery , but his personal investment in slave-owning companies is a stain on his reputation as a philosopher of liberty.
- 95.
See Jolley , Locke’s Touchy Subjects: Materialism and Immortality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- 96.
This is found in bk. iv, chap. 3 of Locke’s most important technical work: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: In Four Books, London: Tho. Basset, 1690.
- 97.
See Locke, The Two Treatises of Civil Government, Richard Ashcraft (ed.), London: Routledge, 1987; it is the Second Treatise, chaps. 17–19 (on ‘Usurpation’, ‘Tyranny’, and the ‘Dissolution of Government’) that are really significant here. On the connection between Locke ’s work and revolutionary politics, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
- 98.
See Woolhouse, Locke, chap. 1.
- 99.
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 4, chap. xii, sect. 24.
- 100.
See Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity , as Delivered in the Scriptures, London: Awnsham and John Churchil, 1695.
- 101.
In addition to Reasonableness, Locke also produced a standalone Discourse of Miracles which was published posthumously (1706). These texts, along from fragments from Locke’s Third Letter Concerning Toleration (1692), which also addressed the topic of miracles, are collected together in Locke , Reasonableness of Christianity with A Discourse on Miracles and part of a Third Letter Concerning Toleration, I. T. Ramsey (ed.), London: Adam and Charles Black, 1967.
- 102.
For examples of how this worked with particular writers, English and German speaking, see Birch, ‘Cracking the Canon: John Toland, “Lost” Gospels and the Challenge to Religious Hegemony’, in A. K. M. Adam and Samuel Tongue, Looking Through a Glass Bible: Post Disciplinary Interpretations from the Glasgow School, Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 85–112; and ‘Gospel Narratives, Miracles, and the “Critical” Reader: The Eclipse of the Supernatural—Case Studies in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Biblical Hermeneutics’, Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception (vol. 5.1), 2015, pp. 61–93.
- 103.
This was the conclusion of, among others, Peter Annet in works such as Deism Fairly Stated, and Fully Vindicated from the Gross Imputations and Groundless Calumnies of Modern Believers, London: W. Webb, 1746.
- 104.
For an outstanding study of Locke , religious controversy, and his wider intellectual project, see Marshall’s Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, where the development of Locke’s alleged Socinian tendencies is well documented. For a defence of Locke against charges of heresy , including Socinianism and Pelagianism , see W. M. Spellman, John Locke and the Problem of Depravity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
- 105.
Locke responded to the charge in the first three sections of A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity , London: A. and J. Churchill, and Edward Castle, 1697.
- 106.
These would include the earlier Essay Concerning Toleration, composed in the 1660s and unpublished in Locke’s lifetime, and the second (1690) and third (1692), Letter Concerning Toleration: see J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (eds.), An Essay Concerning Toleration: And Other Writings on Law and Politics (1667–1683), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. The original Epistola de tolerantia was quickly translated into English by William Popple: see Mark Goldie (ed.), John Locke : A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010, pp. 36–67. Due to spatial limitations, I will restrict the scope of my discussion to the latter edition of the first Letter.
- 107.
See Milton and Milton, ‘General Introduction’ to Essay Concerning Toleration, pp. 1–161: 11.
- 108.
The major points of dispute were between the majority Anglicans and the Presbyterians : the issues at stake ranged from the contested practice of kneeling to receive Holy Communion to some of the Thirty Nine Articles concerning Church government (see Milton and Milton , ‘Introduction’, pp. 14–22).
- 109.
See ibid., pp. 14–22.
- 110.
There is a concise review of the key literature in ibid., pp. 22–26.
- 111.
See ibid., pp. 14–22.
- 112.
Locke ’s Letter Concerning Toleration appeared in the same year that the Act of Toleration (1689) was passed: the legislation granted freedom of worship and assembly to Dissenting Protestants.
- 113.
Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 55.
- 114.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 115.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 116.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 117.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 118.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 119.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 120.
Ibid., p. 40.
- 121.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 122.
See ibid., p. 49: Henry VIII , Edward VI , [Bloody] Mary I and Elizabeth I are his chosen examples.
- 123.
In universalising his case, Locke is trying to undermine the intellectual integrity of the case for conformity, at least for those who were not wedded to some form of English exceptionalism. Locke considers the hypothetical case of two minority Christian communities (Arm inian and Calvinist ) based in Constantinople and asks which has the right to force conformity on the other. According to Locke, appeals to orthodoxy will simply not do, ‘For every Church is Orthodox to itself; to others, Erroneous or Heretical’ (ibid., p. 44). The implication of this is that there is no independent, universally recognised authority to judge what counts as orthodox; as such, ‘The Decision of that question belongs only to the Supream Judge of all men’ (p. 44). Having already argued for a separation of powers, civil, and religious, Locke then considers whether the civil authority has any right to take sides in this case and presents his reader with the rhetorical question, ‘Will any man say that any Right can be derived unto a Christian Church over its Brethren from a Turkish Emperor?’ (p. 44). Assuming his readers’ answer will be an emphatic no, he draws the following conclusion: ‘The Civil Power is the same in every place. Nor can that power , in the Hands of a Christian Prince, confer any greater Authority upon the Church than in the Hands of a Heathen; which is to say, just none at all’ (p. 44).
- 124.
Ibid., p. 50.
- 125.
Milton and Milton, ‘Introduction’, p. 29.
- 126.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 127.
In his Tractatus Politicus, Spinoza argues that ‘it is very important, that the temples consecrated to the national religion should be large and costly, and that only patricians or senators should be allowed to administer its principal rites, and thus that patricians only be suffered to baptize, celebrate marriages, and lay on hands, and that in general they be recognized as the priests of the temples and the champions and interpreters of the national religion ’ (chap. viii, sect. 46).
- 128.
Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 60.
- 129.
Locke might have appealed to the Bible as a theological source for the practice of oath taking, although in the New Testament the whole practice of swearing oaths is called into question (see Matthew 5:34–37, James 5:12, and Hebrews 7:21).
- 130.
Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 60.
- 131.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 132.
Indeed, Israel argues, ‘As a system it not only did not, but inherently could not, concede a full equality of religious status and expression to agnostics, Buddhists , Confucianists , Hindus or Muslims ’ (Contested, p. 139). Israel may be rights on agnostics, but Locke does not regard the state as a fundamentally Christian construct, so it is hard to see why his system inherently forbids equality of status for all those other traditions; as Locke writes: ‘Neither pagan, nor Mahumetan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth, because of his Religion ’ (Letter Concerning Toleration, pp. 58–59).
- 133.
Locke, Letter, p. 60.
- 134.
Ibid., pp. 59–60.
- 135.
For a detailed discussion of the contexts for Locke’s views of tolerance , see Marshall , John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment” Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; pt. 1 deals specifically with Catholicism . Waldron deals with the question of toleration and atheism in God, Locke, and Equality , chap. 8.
- 136.
Compare Spinoza ’s acquiescence to tyrannical rule with John Locke’s defence of revolution in the second of his Two Treatise on Government (1689), which was translated into French and warmly received by French radicals with revolutionary impulses of their own: see Jacob, ‘The Crisis of the European Mind: Hazard Revisited’, in Phyllis Mack and Jacob (eds.), Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, pp. 253–260: 257.
- 137.
See Waldron, Locke, chap. 7.
- 138.
Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, ibid., p. 36. The reference here is to Galatians 5:6.
- 139.
Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 136.
- 140.
Ibid., p. 36.
- 141.
Ibid., p. 36.
- 142.
Ibid., pp. 37–38.
- 143.
Ibid., p. 41.
- 144.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 145.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 146.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 147.
Indeed, he was criticised by more Augustinian theologians on this and other points: see Jonas Proast , The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration Briefly Consider’d and Answer’d, Oxford, 1690. I shall say more about the influence of Augustine’s arguments on religious toleration/coercion below.
- 148.
E. Lamirande , quoted in Peter R. L. Brown , ‘St Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion ’, The Journal of Roman Studies (vol. 54), pts. 1 & 2, 1964, pp. 107–116: 107.
- 149.
The work originally appeared in four volumes (1686–1688). I am referring here to the two-volume English edition, translated anonymously in 1708. I will use the pagination of a recent edition which largely follows the latter translation: Bayle , A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, John Kilcullen and Chandran Kukathas (eds.), Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Inc., 2005.
- 150.
In his early twenties, Bayle was educated at a Jesuit College in Toulouse , where he was introduced to the Aristotelian philosophy which still informed much orthodox Catholic thought. Bayle was sufficiently impressed by this system to embrace Catholicism for a period: see Kilcullen and Kukathas , editorial ‘Introduction’ to Commentary, pp. ix–xxii: ix–x.
- 151.
Bayle’s positive encounter with Catholicism was already fading by the time he came to defend his Master’s thesis in 1670 (see ibid., p. x).
- 152.
See ibid., p. xiv. The contemporary historical study which has underpinned most subsequent work on the Edict of Nantes and its revocation is Elie Benoist ’s five volumn Histoire de l’édit de Nantes (1693–1695). The vast work of meticulous scholarship by this French Protestant minister, who was already in hiding at the time the Edict was revoked, is available in English: The History of the Famous Edict of Nantes: Containing an Account of all the Persecutions… (2 vols.), Edward Cooke (trans.), London: John Dunton, 1694. For more recent perspectives, which take into account the implications for some of France’s European neighbours, see Ruth Whelan and Carol Baxter (eds.), Toleration and Religious Identity: The Edict of Nantes and Its Implication for France, Britain, and Ireland, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003.
- 153.
See Kilcullen and Kukathas, ‘Introduction’, pp. xiv–xv.
- 154.
Ibid., p. x: ‘Under French law “relapsed heretics” incurred heavy penalties’.
- 155.
In the first instance, Bayle fled to Geneva where he worked as a private tutor; having returned to France, he adopted the name Béle (see ibid., x).
- 156.
See Benoise, Edict of Nantes; and Benedict Philip, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority, Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1991.
- 157.
See Kilcullen and Kukathas, ‘Introduction’, p. x.
- 158.
See ibid., ‘Introduction’, p. xi.
- 159.
Whether Bayle remained a Calvinist to the end of his days is a matter of debate: Israel gives the impression that he did not (see Radical , pp. 339–341; Contested, pp. 145–154). Gianluca Mori has argued that, whatever Bayle may or may not have believed, the logic of his corpus as a whole leads to atheism : see Mori, Bayle: Philosophe, Paris: Honoré Champion, 1992.
- 160.
Calvin provided the moral and spiritual authority for the execution of Michael Servetus : see Calvin, Defensio Orthodoxae fidei de sacra Trinitate, contra prodigiosos errores Michaelis Serueti, Geneva: Robert Estienne, 1554.
- 161.
See Kilcullen and Kukathas, ‘Introduction’, p. xv.
- 162.
See Matthew J. Tuininga, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- 163.
See Kilcullen and Kukatha, ‘Introduction’, pp. xv–xvi.
- 164.
See Whelan , The Anatomy of Superstition : A Study of the Historical Theory and Practise of Pierre Bayle , Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institute, 1989. On how Bayle’s historical critical sensibility manifested itself in his biblical criticism, see Birch, ‘Road to Reimarus’, pp. 26–29.
- 165.
Bayle , Commentary, pt. i, pp. 65–66.
- 166.
Israel certainly does not dissent from an opinion of one of Bayle ’s contemporaries: that he belonged to the ‘notre partie’ (quoted in, Radical , p. 339), referring to ‘those who identify God with Nature , meaning non providential “deists”, pantheists, and atheists’ (p. 339).
- 167.
For a general overview of Enlightenment conceptions of rationality , see Gary Hatfield, ‘Reason’, in EOE (vol. 4), pp. 404–409; with a focus on moral reason , see MacIntyre , Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988; and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
- 168.
Bayle , Commentary, pt. 1, pp. 67–68.
- 169.
Philosophy and the Making of Modernity is the subtitle to Israel ’s Radical Enlightenment, and the supremacy of philosophy over theology is a consistent theme.
- 170.
See Cottingham , ‘A New Start? Cartesian Metaphysics and the Emergence of Modern Philosophy ’, in Cartesian Reflections, pp. 53–74.
- 171.
See Todd Ryan, Pierre Bayle’s Cartesian Metaphysics: Rediscovering Early Modern Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2009. One of the most important roles played by God in the philosophy of Descartes is as our epistemic guarantor: our cognitive capacities can aspire to truth, to know reality through clear and distinct ideas, because a benevolent God ensures that this is so (see Meditationes three and four). For Descartes, the natural light of reason is a reflection of the divine light which has illuminated all creation and enables rational beings to understand themselves and the world. Bayle is writing in this vein when he justifies the status he accords to reason in biblical hermeneutics : ‘tis this, there being a distinct and sprightly Light which enlightens all Men the moment they open the Eyes of the Attention, and which irresistibly Convinces ‘em of its Truth; we must conclude, it’s God himself, the essential Truth, who then most immediately Illuminates ‘em, and makes ‘em perceive in his own Excellence the ideas of those eternal Truths contain’d in the First Principles of Reason’ (Commentary, p. 68). This rationalist view of God as creator , and enabler of our understanding, is prominent in the metaphysical tradition in which both Descartes and (more briefly) Bayle were schooled; it is perhaps manifest most plainly in the Christian tradition in Aquinas’s treatment of God’s relationship to the human intellect in ST, pt. i, q. 105, art. 3. The roots of this go back to Plato, however, whose ideas were Christianised by Augustine and St. Bonaventure (1221–1274), and this formed part of the philosophical inheritance of Descartes (see Cottingham , ‘Plato’s Sun and Descartes’s Stove’, in Cartesian Reflections, pp. 272–318.
- 172.
Israel, Radical , p. 336.
- 173.
Ibid., p. 336.
- 174.
Ibid., p. 336: other examples used by Bayle , and reiterated by Israel , include the logical necessity ‘that if from two equal quantities one subtracts equal amounts, the residues must be equal’, and the logical fallacy that one might ‘supposed the essence of a thing can truly survive its destruction’. Compare this with Aquinas’s treatment of God’s power in pt. i, q. 25, art. 4 of the ST, where he argues that ‘there does not fall under the scope of God’s omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction’. Here, it is God, not merely human knowledge, that is bound by reason .
- 175.
Bayle , Commentary, pt. i, p. 80.
- 176.
Ibid., p. 65.
- 177.
On Aquinas and Thomism , see ibid., pt. i, pp. 110–113, pt. ii, pp. 257–258, ‘A Supplement to the Philosophical Commentary’, pp. 505, 522, 524.
- 178.
See ibid., pt. i, p. 91, ‘Supplement’, p. 541.
- 179.
See ibid., ‘Supplement’, pp. 413–414, 541.
- 180.
See ibid., pt. i, pp. 67, 74. Whereas Suárez and Ballarmine were prominent Jesuits , Magnus was a Capuchin .
- 181.
See ibid., ‘Supplement’, p. 537.
- 182.
Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 1, art. 1.
- 183.
See ibid., pt. i, q. 1.
- 184.
Ibid., pt. i, q. 1, art., 1. Here Aquinas explicitly affirms something that Bayle would later claim that other theologians do implicitly: taking the authority of scripture as the point of departure for a process of reasoning which tries to render an interpretation of scripture intellectually persuasive to readers (see Commentary, pt. 1, pp. 67–68).
- 185.
Whether the concept of ‘critique ’ belongs exclusively to secular discourse has emerged as a lively research topic, prompted in part by supposed conflicts between Western democratic traditions and those of the Islamic world: see Talal Asad , Judith Butler , Saba Mahmood , and Wendy Brown , Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009.
- 186.
Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 1, art. 1.
- 187.
Seventeenth-century examples would be Descartes , Leibniz , Malebranche , and to some extent Spinoza .
- 188.
The Reformation is obviously the seminal transformation in this regard. The shift in the opposite direction, towards rationalism , is evident in the three Christian philosophers cited above, who wrote little about the Bible . But for many philosophers of the period, engagement with both ‘books’ was more balanced: see Popkin and Force (eds.), Books of Nature and Scripture : Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994. The metaphor of ‘nature ’ as a ‘book ’ to be read alongside the literal book of scripture is closely associated with the seventeenth century, but it goes back to the early Fathers of the Church : see G. Tanzella-Nitti, ‘The Two Books prior to the Scientific Revolution ’, Annales Theologici (vol. 18), 2004, pp. 51–83.
- 189.
Jumping forward into modern American politics, one might cite the rise of neo-conservatism in the Republican party in the late twentieth century, which was accompanied by the denigration of features of the more traditional (or ‘paleo -conservative’) element of the tradition. Here, the anti-imperialist pretensions of the latter were recast as complicity in the domination of undemocratic regimes over their own people, and antithetical to an established conservative commitment to objective, universal values, and American exceptionalism : see John Erhman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. A very different example would be a major trend in twentieth-century literary criticism, when some critics dramatically announced the ‘death of the author’ in response to a perceived over emphasis on the recovery of a writer’s intentions, challenging this form of criticism with a call to return to the integrity of the text as it stands and the response of its readers: see Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (3rd edn.), Edinburgh University Press, 2010. These radical internal oppositions do not usually last, but they represent important renegotiations in the balance of influence and power within traditions.
- 190.
Bayle , Commentary, pt. i, p. 69.
- 191.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 69.
- 192.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 69.
- 193.
d’Entrèves, Natural Law , p. 79.
- 194.
Ralph McInery and John O’Callaghan, ‘Saint Thomas Aquinas’, SEP, Summer 2018, sect. 12.2 on ‘Natural Law ’, accessed 30 July 2018: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/.
- 195.
See ibid., sect. 12.2.
- 196.
Ibid., sect. 12.2.
- 197.
Bayle , Commentary, pt. ii, p. 184.
- 198.
Augustine , quoted in ibid., pt. i, p. 66.
- 199.
Arguments in pt. i of the Commentary focus on moral contradictions within Christian nations, leading to social disorder and acts of depravity (see chaps. iv, vi, x), providing a justification for the leaders of non-Christian nations to persecute Christian minorities (chap. v), and sabotaging one of the most popular charges levelled against Islam (chap. vii), and the pagans of antiquity (chap. ix), by behaving in exactly the same way. Like Locke , Bayle permits intolerance if a religious minority is judged to pose a threat to a legitimate state authority, and, like Locke, he has Catholics in mind (see ‘Preliminary Discourse’, pp. 46–50).
- 200.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 70.
- 201.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 70.
- 202.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 70.
- 203.
Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 94, art. 4.
- 204.
Augustine argued that: ‘The most certain sciences are like things lit up by the sun so as to be seen. Now God Himself is He Whom sheds the light . And reason is in the mind as sight is in the eye’: Aquinas cites this as an argument against the idea that persons can attain truth without grace in ibid., pt. ii, q. 109, art. 1.
- 205.
See ibid., pt. ii, q. 109–110. For Aquinas , the corruption of nature by original sin is more destructive to our desire for good than for knowledge (q. 109, art. 2).
- 206.
See ibid., (‘Supplement’, pp. 496–500), where Bayle doubts the singular importance of original sin as the ‘[c]ause of all the false Judgements which Men make’ (p. 496). Bayle takes one theological flashpoint crucial to this subject, which centres on two competing propositions—1) that ‘God wills that all Men shou’d be sav’d, and affords ‘em Aid sufficient for this purpose’ (p. 532); and 2) that God wills not that all Men shou’d be sav’d, and does not afford ‘em all Aid sufficient for this purpose’ (pp. 532–533). He judges both to be well supported by scriptu ral and philosophical argument, such that an open-minded inquirer, without prior investment in one side or the other, could be excused for being at a loss to know how to establish the truth of the matter (pp. 532–536). This is the kind of evidence one could cite in reading Bayle as a religious sceptic . There is, however, an implicit preference for the former proposition in Bayle’s appreciation of ‘Free-will ’ (p. 476), ‘[d]etermination towards truth’ (p. 476) and the influence of education as a response to original sin (see, pt. 4, chap. xv). Here, as so often in the Enlightenment, there are echoes of Erasmus .
- 207.
See ibid., pt. i, chap. iii.
- 208.
See ibid., pt. i, chap. iii.
- 209.
See ibid., pt. i, p. 80.
- 210.
See ibid., pt. i, p. 80.
- 211.
See ibid., pt. i, p. 80.
- 212.
See ibid., pt. i, p. 80.
- 213.
See ibid., pt. i, p. 80.
- 214.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 81.
- 215.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 81.
- 216.
Ibid., pt. i, pp. 81–82.
- 217.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 81.
- 218.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 83.
- 219.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 85.
- 220.
Ibid., pt. i, pp. 83–84.
- 221.
In addition to the epistemological and moral warrants provided by God , there are other arguments which depend on theological premises, including the argument that ‘[a]cts of Religion purely external can’t please God’ (ibid., ‘The Contents of the Whole Work’, pp. 7–34: 8; see also pt. i, pp. 76–77); that ‘God ought not...be imitated in the Conversion of Hereticks’ (‘Contents’, p. 20, see also pt. iii, pp. 301–303); that ‘God does not require us to labour for the Salvation of our Brethren, by disobeying his Orders’ (‘Contents’, p. 31, see also pt. iii, pp. 311–312).
- 222.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 84.
- 223.
See ibid., ‘Preliminary Discourse’, pp. 39–41, 54–56, 57–64; and pt. ii, pp. 159–161.
- 224.
Ibid., pt. i, pp. 84–85.
- 225.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 84.
- 226.
Bayle also acknowledged the role of the non-Christian state, whether by design or benign indifference, in facilitating the preservation of Christianity in the early centuries of its existence, when ‘intervals of Peace and Respite…contributed mainly to the Establishing [of] the Christian religion ’ (ibid., ‘Preliminary Discourse’, p. 61).
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Birch, J.C.P. (2019). What Would Jesus Tolerate? Reason and Revelation in Spinoza, Locke, and Bayle. In: Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51276-5_6
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