Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 406 - Believe at Your Own Risk - Toleration in France.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Believe at Your Own Risk, Toleration in France. Let's agree to disagree. Superficially, it sounds like a friendly thing to say, but it usually comes with an implication. I've given you extremely good reasons to agree with me, but you are stubbornly refusing to accept them, so I'm just going to give up on convincing you, for now. It's the argumentative equivalent of breaking up with someone and using the obviously insincere excuse, the problem isn't you, it's me. Presumably, French people have their own equivalents of such phrases, at least back in the 16th century, when people in France grudgingly agreed to disagree about the religious disputes that tore their society apart. That offer was almost always coupled with an unspoken or spoken caveat. The problem isn't us, it's you. Even the high points of religious toleration in the second half of the fifteen hundreds were arrived at grudgingly. They were hedged with caveats and time limits. The fervent hope was that tolerance would not be necessary for long. Civil war between Catholics and the French Protestants, or Huguenots, broke out in 1562 after a rapid proliferation of Protestant churches starting around 1555. And if you're wondering why they were called the Huguenots, join the club. No one knows for sure, but it may be derived from the German term eidgenossen, meaning Confederates, which would be appropriate for a civil war. The Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, announced an edict of toleration for Protestantism at the beginning of 1562, which was explicitly labeled as a temporary measure. But this did not succeed in calming the situation. By 1585, the French crown would be announcing a very different policy that all Frenchmen must be Catholic, with a six month period allowed for conversion. Across the two intervening decades, there was open warfare between the Huguenots and their Catholic enemies, whose cause was led by the powerful Guise family. There were also public executions. Already in 1546, fourteen Protestants were burned alive in Mô, where Bishop Brissonnet had gathered an early circle of reform-minded intellectuals, including, as we saw, Lefebvre de Tapie. And then there were the popular conflicts that erupted when, say, Protestants smashed up a church out of iconoclast zeal, leading to violent battle with local Catholics. A temporary end to the conflict came near the end of the century with the 1598 Edict of Nantes. This new proclamation of tolerance for Protestants remained in force until it was revoked in 1685. At no stage during all this bloodshed did it occur to either of the warring parties that the problem might be them. Attempts at reconciliation, like the 1561 Colloquy of Poissy, were intended not so much to bury the hatchet as use it to cut off the heretical growth within Christianity. The Catholics spoke of conquering and leading back the brothers who have strayed, while the Huguenots boasted, We shall make them admit before this holy assembly that it is we and not they who follow the true Church. Even the word tolerance, which to our ears has peaceful and generous connotations, had a more negative meaning in this context. The French verb toleré conveyed the idea of suffering through something, not the idea of genuinely agreeing to disagree. For the Catholics, offering toleration was a pragmatic concession, a last resort after persuasion and military action had failed. And when the Huguenots asked to be tolerated by the state, they were just playing for time. Minimally enough time to build up military strength for the next round of warfare, but ideally enough time to convert so many of their countrymen that France would become intolerant of Catholics instead. A turning point for both sides was the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572, which as you'll remember claimed the life of Peter Ramez. He was one of thousands of victims in Paris and in the provinces. Protestants blamed the government, with only partial accuracy, for organizing this mass murder. It was no coincidence in their eyes that Catherine de' Medici was the daughter of the man to whom Machiavelli's famously cynical work of political advice, The Prince, was dedicated. They said she taught her children from its pages, and that it might be described as her Bible. As for the Catholics, the fact that even this paroxysm of violence failed to stamp out Protestantism convinced them that the Huguenots might be here to stay. Even before the massacre, Michel de L'Oc et al., who was Chancellor under Catherine de Medici, argued that peace with the Huguenots would be preferable to the warfare that he saw coming. Other reluctant pragmatists included Etienne Pasquier, Louis Loraux, and Etienne de Les Boetie, all of whom reckoned that the way to bring the Protestants back to the fold was not force, but a spiritual renewal of the church. Similarly, the more tolerant leaders at the Estates General of 1576, those who unsuccessfully argued for a settlement with the Huguenots, did so while assuring their more militant colleagues that toleration was only a stopgap measure, until God can bless us with only one religion. Hardly anyone then was envisioning a situation of indefinite peaceful coexistence between Protestants and Catholics. The peacemakers on the Catholic side wanted concord and Christian unity, not a pluralistic society. If they counted as tolerant, it was because they continued to hope that concord could be reached through peaceful means. In this respect, men like Pasquier, Loraux, and Boetie were true heirs of Erasmus, and it's not a coincidence that they were humanists like him. As we saw, Erasmus argued tirelessly for peace, and he stayed on the fence when the Reformation began, in part because he hoped that the rift between Luther and the church could be healed. But he would not have welcomed official state sanction of two alternative confessions, nor was he committed to the value of freedom of religion as an end in itself. So was anyone adopting a more genuinely liberal, pluralist vision at this point in history? Yes indeed. His name was Sebastien Castello. He was a Frenchman born near Lyon, but he moved to Strasbourg and then Geneva to work with Calvin after converting. He became principal of the college at Geneva, but then went on to Basel, where he became a professor of Greek. This makes him sound like yet another Protestant humanist, like Melanchthon or indeed Calvin himself. And indeed, some of his projects fit that pattern, translating the Bible into Latin and French, and even rendering the story of Jonah into Homeric Greek. But he is best known for his expression of outrage after Calvin supported the execution of the Spaniard Michael Servetus in 1533, an event we discussed in episode 384 on Calvin. As with Jonah and the Whale, Castello found this event hard to swallow. He decried it as an indefensible act of tyranny, which he attacked in a work called On Heretics, printed in both Latin and a French translation in 1554. This work is reminiscent of others we've looked at in this series in that it is largely a patchwork of quotations from earlier sources. Less than half of it is by Castello himself, and even these parts include material ascribed to fictional pseudonyms. The book as a whole was prudently published anonymously. Among the sources cited are Luther and, with heavy irony, Calvin himself, using well-chosen passages to make it sound like they were in support of tolerance. There is at least some rationale for this in the case of Luther. He was known for teaching that, in the words of Thomas More, each of us believes at his own risk, and that conscience cannot be compelled. But Castello has to quote him very selectively. You won't find him, for example, mentioning Luther's remark on the importance of maintaining doctrinal correctness in his church. The children may be dirty, but the bath at least must be pure. Castello is even more tendentious in the case of Calvin, of whom Roland Bainton, the modern translator of Castello, remarks, If Calvin ever wrote anything in favor of liberty, it was a typographical error. Calvin was himself a victim of censorship and persecution. He fled to Switzerland to get away from the French state, and his books were placed on the index of prescribed books by the Sorbonne, starting in 1542. But he would have said that the theologians and politicians of Paris were not wrong simply because they persecuted. They were wrong because they were persecuting the wrong people, people who taught the truth, people like himself. Castello framed his polemic by saying, Indeed, he went further, admitting, For one thing, there are pragmatic considerations of the sort others were invoking at the time, though Castello explores these in greater depth. Unsuccessful attempts to suppress the Anabaptists had already shown that persecution simply leads to a cycle of tit-for-tat violence. Calvin's policy, if adopted by everyone, would simply guarantee that people of different religious persuasions would try to kill each other indefinitely. Furthermore, even if you can get someone to disclaim their supposedly heretical views under duress, this will just be hypocrisy. Castello aptly notes the example of England, where vast swathes of the population claimed to be Protestant under King Edward, when in fact they maintain Catholic beliefs. Finally, using force against heresy is counterproductive, since people tend to admire martyrs, and the fuss caused by trials and executions helps publicize the heretics' ideas. Indeed, Castello points out that the only reason most people even know the name of Servetos was that Calvin had him put to death. Still, true today, he wouldn't have appeared in this podcast otherwise. These are persuasive arguments, but two other considerations involve more philosophical depth. Castello lays them out in brief just after saying that he hates heretics, and develops them throughout the whole work. First, even if we assume that heretics are in error, it is not appropriate to punish them with physical violence. Physical force should only be used in response to physical crimes. For spiritual missteps, we should offer a spiritual remedy, in the form of debate and pastoral care. This will give heretics both reason and chance to change their views, as violent retribution would not. As Castello nicely puts it, to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. He also points out the obvious irony of murdering people in the name of Christ, asking the reader to imagine Jesus returning to Earth and watching men burn to death while calling out his name. Calvin's Christ, who would thoroughly approve of this, would be hard to tell apart from Satan, a remark that particularly outraged Calvin, as you can imagine. Castello unabashedly encourages us to sympathize with Servetos. A man like this might be pious and even good, despite his erroneous theological views. Which brings us to a second reason for genuine toleration, namely that for all we know, in persecuting a heretic we might be suppressing views that are true. As Castello said, the working definition of heretic seems to be anyone we disagree with, and of course he was well aware that the Catholics thought him and other reformers to be heretics. This calls to mind a sentiment already expressed by a Lutheran author, cited by Castello in On Heretics, named Sebastian Frank. He said, Socrates was right that we know only that we do not know. We may be heretics quite as much as our opponents. It's not just that we should play it safe and not take the risk of executing an innocent man. Castello does make that point, remarking that it would be better to let a hundred or even a thousand heretics live than to kill one upright man. But in addition, Castello is skeptical that we are in any position to be sure about such topics as God's Trinitarian nature, which had been scandalously denied by servitus. Scripture is very difficult to interpret, which is why theologians are constantly at odds with each other about correct doctrine. Castello does hasten to assure us that he is not a global skeptic. For example, he is confident that we can know that God exists, and more on that in a moment. But when it comes to the fine points of theology, we really cannot be confident that our preferred version of Christianity is the right one. How, he asks rhetorically, can Calvin prove that he alone knows? In this respect, Castello does seem to be echoing the stance of Erasmus and, more generally, the humanist tendency to prize simple spirituality over the fine-grained doctrinal distinctions of the theologians. It's been well remarked that Castello belonged to the university-trained men who celebrated commoners. He would have sympathized with untutored Christians instructed to accept formulas of belief handed down by this or that church, which they were in no position to assess. Around this time, one man confronted by such a statement of orthodoxy said, This is over my head, and I'm reluctant to bind my conscience to it. For Castello, technicalities about the Incarnation, Grace, or the Trinity were far too abstruse to be used as litmus tests for acceptable belief. The only thing we can really demand is that people believe in a single, good, omnipotent God who is worthy of our worship. We can know this much through our natural powers without wading into the controversies of scriptural exegesis. And here we reach the limits of Castello's tolerance. He would have no patience with anyone who denies Abrahamic monotheism. Those who do deny it should be punished not because of their religion, for they do not have any, but because of their irreligion. So Castello is not saying that literally anything goes, but for him the range of tolerable belief is wide enough even to accommodate Jews and Muslims. Indeed, this was the basis for one of his attacks on Calvin. In an early edition of his Institutes, Calvin had expressed a relatively benign attitude toward Jews and Turks, in other words Muslims. But this remark was then removed in later printings, which for Castello was a clear sign of Calvin's drift toward intolerance and persecution. It was also predictable, ironically enough, that Castello would attack Calvin's doctrine of predestination. He saw this as yet another needless indulgence in scholastic theological controversy, but also showed that he could play that game if necessary. True to form, his account of sin and redemption allowed more liberty to humans. We do need divine grace to be saved, but God offers that to everyone. It's just that some people freely accept it, while others freely refuse. Calvin's murderous Christ, who gleefully watches pious, well-meaning Christians burn in the name of doctrinal exactitude, is matched by Calvin's unjust God, who sends people to eternal damnation after giving them no chance to save themselves. Something else you might predict is that Calvin and his allies would respond furiously to this attack from Castello, which is exactly what happened. There was an exchange of refutation and counter-refutation between Calvin himself and Castello, and Calvin's faithful associate, Theodore Beza, also wrote in defense of executing heretics. Beza presumably wouldn't have minded seeing Castello himself burn. He complained that Castello was no better than an ancient skeptic, accused him of undermining belief in the Trinity by expressing sympathy for servitus, and for good measure judged Castello to be, of all men that have ever lived, the most wicked and blasphemous. But others were more favorable. We already know that Dirk Kornhert took up the cause for genuine toleration later on in the Netherlands, and he was powerfully influenced by Castello. In fact, Korn had even translated some of Castello's writings. Fausto Sozzini, founder of the Sozzinian movement, edited works by Castello and saw himself as his successor. The reformist writer Katarina Zell in Strasbourg also took inspiration from him, writing, Let the magistrate punish the evildoer, but not constrain faith, which belongs to the heart and conscience, and not to the outward man. Castello's star has faded since then. He is not a household name, yet he deserves to be remembered as a pioneer in the cause of freedom of conscience. If people had listened to him in the 1550s, then Huguenots and Catholics alike could have avoided killing each other by the thousands in the 1560s. Sadly, the message of tolerance has always been hard for some people to hear. An early modern study of his thought was published by Stefan Zweig in 1936, with the intention of persuading people not to support the Nazis. This time, the audience was German, not French or Swiss, and Castello was ignored again. Given the intrinsic importance of this topic, and the centrality of the 16th century as a time for shaping our modern ideas about religious freedom and tolerance, it seems worthwhile to spend another episode thinking about it. Especially since it just so happens that I have a good friend who has thought about it a lot more than I have, one of my colleagues from King's College London, whose work on Leibniz has led her to explore the background to his ideas about religious pluralism. Still, I guess that after this episode I should tolerate it, if you want to make the error of skipping my conversation with Maria Rosa Antoniadza next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.