Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 390 - Born to Be Contrary - Toleration in the Netherlands.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 historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Born to be Contrary, Toleration in the Netherlands. We seem to be living in a time when people are not very good at disagreeing with one another. Or rather, we find it exceedingly easy to disagree. What we are not so good at is resolving disagreement. Social and political disputes lead to distrust between implacably opposed camps, instead of leading to attempts at resolution. Much ink has been spilled and many hands wrung over this contemporary situation and its causes. I'd like to suggest an unusual approach, namely that we might look back to an earlier period of intense dispute to see what lessons we might learn. I have in mind Europe in the late 16th century, which makes the early 21st century look like a singalong hosted by Mr. Rogers. In a time of violent disagreement, violent rhetoric, and plain old violence, the Netherlands were a scene of particularly intense conflict. Mr. Rogers's gentle question, won't you be my neighbour, would typically have been answered, sure, but only if you accept my highly specific interpretation of Christianity. Most obviously there was the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism. The Catholics were represented by King Philip II, who claimed authority over the Low Countries and ruled them from distant Spain. Ranged against him were the Protestants, especially the Dutch Reformed Church, which adopted a broadly Calvinist theological outlook. But other groups joined the fray. There were Lutherans, who argued with the Reformed, and there were Anabaptists, especially the followers of Meno-Simons or Mennonites. They adopted a pacifist approach to avoid being associated with the sort of upheaval seen when an earlier group of Anabaptists took over Munster. As this already implies, there were a variety of subgroups among the Anabaptist movement, with no little friction between them. And as we'll see momentarily, there were also the Armenians. In short, there was no shortage of opportunity for disagreement, even, or perhaps especially, between those who mostly agreed with one another. Nor was this disagreement exclusively verbal. A wave of iconoclasm led to destruction of church images beginning in 1566, and war pitted the Protestant William of Orange and his followers against the Spanish. In 1581, the States General of the provinces in the Netherlands officially repudiated Philip II, making themselves a Protestant state. But then, and still today, the Low Countries were divided between Catholicism and Protestantism. After the brutal Duke of Alva staged a reconquest of the South in the 1580s, many Protestants left for the North. The town of Ghent was a Calvinist stronghold, sometimes called the Geneva of Flanders. Now, about half the population abandoned it and went into exile. Making matters more complex, rivalry between religious factions was overlaid atop competition within the political order. There was a long and healthy tradition of uprisings by Dutch towns against their overlords going back to the late Middle Ages. The scholar Lourevico Guicciardini, nephew of Francesco Guicciardini, a historian whom we met in the series on the Italian Renaissance, lived in Antwerp and praised its mixed constitution. The city was under the princely rule of the Duke of Brabant, but enjoyed many freedoms or privileges that allowed the city to govern itself practically as an independent republic. So it was nothing new when the Dutch chafed under the monarch Philip II. One can even argue that the religious complexion of the debate masked a more fundamental conflict between decentralized and centralized political authority. In fact, the Dutch states themselves made exactly this argument when they defied the Spanish crown. They were fighting for political liberty, not religious freedom. In the latter half of the 16th century, it became impossible to disentangle the two goals though, as we see with Dutch opposition to the arrival of the Inquisition in their lands. They disliked the Inquisition, in part because it infringed their freedom of conscience, in part because it struck them as an illegitimate transfer of coercive power from secular magistrates to the church. Still, it's worth realizing that the goal of religious freedom was really an extension or corollary of the longstanding tradition of political freedom, whether for provinces, towns, or individuals. Since the 14th century, each Duke of Brabant had been sworn in with an excitingly named ceremony, the Joyous Entry, during which he had to promise not to abuse anyone in any manner. Once the Reformation came along, these words were somewhat tendentiously taken to imply that he must not exercise coercion in matters of faith. So a commitment to political independence predated and paved the way for ideas of religious liberty. Here we have the ultimate root of the tolerant, open-minded reputation that the Dutch still enjoy today. It was an attitude that was expressed in many Dutch political treatises of the time. These invoked the ancient liberties of the cities and presented these liberties as a factor in the economic prosperity enjoyed by the Dutch. An advisor of William of Orange, named Junius de Jong, went so far as to say that a monarch like William wields power only at the pleasure of his subjects and thus must rule in close cooperation with the state's general, who represent popular opinion. Another treatise stated that humans have been created free by God. They cannot become slaves by the will of him who has no power over them, save that they themselves have granted and given it to him. Agijus van Albera, a spokesman for the states, was the first Dutch thinker to suggest that the people are actually above the state, so that all legitimate political sovereignty is popular in nature. This was unusually bold, but it was quite common to suppose that rulers wield their power through a kind of contract with the people or with their representatives in the form of city governments. And it was written right into such documents as the joyous entry that a ruler who turned tyrant could be rightly resisted by the people. All this might lead us to expect the low countries, or at least the part under Protestant control, to be a paradise of individual liberty. But in an introduction to a book on religious toleration in the Netherlands, the editors say that Actually, this may not be quite so paradoxical. The Reformed were a minority in the low countries, even in the Protestant areas, and so they were forced to tolerate other points of view simply as a matter of practical necessity. Sometimes, toleration was a more formal result of political settlement, as when a 1576 peace treaty, called the Pacification of Ghent, required the states general to allow freedom of worship to Catholics. And when it came to the relation between Protestant confessions, toleration was not merely a grudgingly accepted constraint. The Protestants liked to present themselves as defending freedom of conscience against Catholic tyranny. They took pride in combating heresy not with fire and sword, but by using their words, as parents like to tell their kids today. Magistrates were encouraged to stand against religious dissidents, but by means of debate and refutation, not execution or imprisonment. Then again, parents also like to say, do as we say, not as we do. While the Reformed might tolerate other mainstream Protestants, and peacefully debate with them, they were not always so patient with groups like the Anabaptists, who were thought to be beyond the pale. An interesting test case were the Arminians, also called Remonstrants, whose ideas would ultimately be ruled out of bounds in the Seinout of Dort in 1619. They were followers of Jacob Arminius, whose distinctive teaching involved an issue we've discussed in several recent episodes, the relation between the saving power of God's grace and human freedom. Like many Protestant intellectuals in the Netherlands, Arminius was a student at Leiden, where a university was founded at the behest of William of Orange in 1575. Also like many Dutch intellectuals, he then went to study in Geneva, where he came into contact with Theodore Beza. But he was no follower of Beza's. To the contrary, he developed an understanding of freedom that was dramatically opposed to that of Beza, or at least dramatically opposed within the spectrum of positions that could be defended by a Protestant. Beza took Calvin's doctrine of predestination so seriously that he adopted what is called supralapsarianism, which is a mouthful but expresses a pretty simple idea. Namely that God does not just predetermine which people will be elected or saved and which will be reprobate or damned. He does this even before original sin has happened. The Fall, which is the lapse in the word supralapsarianism, was a foredained event, always planned to be rectified by God's gift of grace. The story of redemption and damnation thus follows a script that has been written in advance, both in general and for each individual character in the story. If you're thinking that this sounds like it would leave no place for human freedom at all, then Arminius would agree. He argued that according to Beza, God punishes people who had no opportunity to avoid being punished, which is unjust. Arminius thus proposed a different theory, one that also involves God's knowledge of future events. On this theory, God does not predetermine those events. Instead, he decides in advance to give grace to those who he already knows will freely choose not to resist that grace. Speaking of doing things one has decided to do in advance, I can now come back to David Gorleos. In the last episode, I promised to explain how his religious context may have helped to inspire his innovative account of matter. In particular, this concerns his description of the human as only accidentally a being, that is, as an aggregate of atoms that has an accidental relationship to its soul. The modern scholar Christoph Lüti has argued that this aspect of Gorleos' thought may relate to his Arminianism. For Gorleos, the body is a purely material thing, rather than being substantially unified with the soul that animates it, as more Aristotelian philosophers held. This makes it possible for him to associate the blight of sin with the body, passed down from one generation to the next in a kind of biological determinism. The soul, however, floats free of the atomic body, and is able to make free choices unimpeded by material influence. It must be said that Gorleos does not himself draw a connection between his natural philosophy and his theological affiliation, so this interpretation remains somewhat speculative, but it does nicely explain why a partisan of Arminius' theology would have rejected the Aristotelian anthropology in favor of an atomist one. As for Arminius' opponents, they accused him of taking up a position much like that of the Catholics. In fact, they said it amounted to the idea put forward by Catholic schoolmen like Gabriel Biel and thunderously condemned by Luther, namely that God promises to, as it were, help those who help themselves. Christians must simply do what is in them by trying to be good, and God will give them grace as a reward. Arminius was aware of this problem, which is why he spoke about not resisting grace. The believers' contribution is negative, so they do not do anything to earn grace. Like other Protestants, Arminius accepted that salvation is worked through God's unconstrained generosity and cannot be merited through works. He offered a nice metaphor. If a rich man gives charity to a beggar, does it make this less of a freely given gift if the beggar stretches out his hand to take what is offered? It is also important to Arminius that grace is not, as he put it, an irresistible force. If it were, then God would just be imposing a fate upon his whether for good or for ill, which again would be unjust. Arminius went so far as to say that God's rights do not extend over them as far as this. Some of the philosophical issues here are familiar to us from looking at the debate between Luther and Erasmus, but there are a couple that are more distinctive and worth dwelling on. First, Arminius seems to be saying that God decides in advance to give grace to those who he already knows will not resist when the time comes. In other words, God is, so to speak, planning out his own actions by taking into account what people will freely do in the future. Does this make sense? Well, I too can look into the future and tell you that we'll be talking about this in depth when we get to the Spanish scholastics of the Counter-Reformation, especially with reference to Molina's theory of middle knowledge. For now, let's just observe that Arminius gave some thought to the logical implications of his theological position. In a letter to a friend written in 1598, he suggests that a future freely chosen action can be determined in the sense that it cannot fail to happen, which is why God can know about it already. The future is open only in being unknowable to finite minds like ours. This is rather surprising, since it turns out that the staunch upholder of free will, Arminius, was in a sense a determinist. Once grace has been given to the believer, the epistemic indeterminacy falls away. In other words, the believer can be totally sure that they are among the elect. This is a less famous, but for Arminius, totally crucial point. Like many other reformers, he wanted to reassure the faithful that they could be certain of their own salvation and need not live their lives in terror of a foreordained punishment. That was a form of reassurance also promised by his opponents, including Franciscus Gomaros, who became his leading critic. But it was easier for Arminius to make the point, since on his view, believers are actually involved in the bestowal of grace, having decided not to refuse that grace. So they are in a good position to know that they are indeed faithful. Hardline Reformed thinkers like Gomaros instead left absolutely everything up to God. So they could only advise their fellow Christians to trust in God's mercy and insist that one can feel totally certain that God will grant entirely unmerited redemption. That sounds rather unconvincing, but it does fit well with the Calvinist understanding of faith as unshakable belief without any need for justification or argument. While Arminius adopted a position on freedom and grace that may strike us as more moderate, when it came to the question of toleration, he was not that far away from the Reformed theologians who eventually got his teachings banned. He said that a hardline predestination theory like that of Beza ought in no way to be allowed in the church. So freedom to accept grace? Yes. But freedom to promulgate the contrary view? Not so much. In this, he was unlike a final Dutch thinker I'd like to discuss in this episode, and for my money, the most interesting when it comes to the issue of tolerance, Dirk Volker Zun-Kornherdt. As far as his theology goes, he thought, much like Arminius, that a strict teaching on predestination would take away the believers' motivation to strive for goodness. But he ventured still further away from Calvinist teaching by stating that it lies within human resources to achieve that goodness. This is an easy and blissful process, itself a kind of joyous entry, guided by reason and achieved through knowledge of oneself and of morality. Which hardly sounds Protestant at all, right? Well, exactly. Kornherdt was not aligned with any of the established, or visible, churches on offer in the Netherlands. You might find that surprising. Didn't everyone have to choose a team? No, actually. It's been estimated that about half of the Dutch population were the equivalent of undecided voters when it came to their religious disputes tearing their country apart. Whether they were waiting to see who would win, genuinely torn over which church to support, or just couldn't be bothered to engage with the fine points that university-trained theologians thought were so important, these people were not committed adherents of any one confession. They were on the fence, and along with Mr. Rogers, hoping that that fence would make for good neighbors. Kornherdt was the Dutch intellectual who most fully articulated that hope. He argued that the Reformed Church, no less than the Catholics, ought to refrain from prosecuting heretics, letting religious views be tested in the arena of public debate, rather than simply imposing one view and enforcing its adoption by the whole community. He was duly invited to participate in public disputations still carried out in the style of medieval scholasticism, but with the addition of techniques learned from the writings of rhetoricians like Agricola. The magistrates who organized these disputes were not thereby accepting his ideas about open debate. To the contrary, they wanted to stop his mouth by letting him be seen to lose the argument. The modern-day reader, though, is apt to think that he had the better of the disputes. Kornherdt was then a controversialist. It was once said of him that he was born to be contrary. He was also a humanist who translated into Dutch works by Cicero, Seneca, Homer, and Boethius, and himself wrote in Dutch in an effort to carry the tradition of learned literature into this language. He was a true heir of Erasmus, using carefully crafted rhetoric in the cause of Christian peace. A powerful work dedicated to that ideal is his Synod on the Freedom of Conscience, a dialogue which pits representatives of the Reformation, including fictionalized versions of Calvin and Beza, against a Catholic spokesman. Their unedifying squabbles put into sharp relief the calm and temperate remarks of an imaginary character named Gamaliel. He is Kornherdt's mouthpiece, whose name is taken from a figure in the New Testament who urges restraint in religious persecution, saying, If this work is of men, it will come to nothing, but if it is of God, you cannot overthrow it. This scriptural passage connects to a deeply held conviction of Kornherdt's, namely that human efforts to discover truth, even by sincerely faithful Christians, are inevitably liable to error. He can sometimes sound like Agrippa at the end of On Uncertainty, saying that only God is truthful and all humans liars. Kornherdt applies the skeptical point to the exegesis of scripture. Reformers like Luther and Svingle felt sure in adopting their opposed views of, say, the meaning of Christ telling his disciples to eat his body. But as far as Kornherdt is concerned, scriptural interpretation is always just that, a matter of interpretation. In fact, he wanted ministers to preach directly from scripture in church rather than trying to explain what it might mean. There is, as he put it, no rule of faith to help us decide which teachings are true and which false. Mind you, he did not take this to mean that people should stop trying to find religious truth, he just thought it was a process subject to error and one that was not yet complete. He called his own time a night of unknowing. Ideally, in the future, all Christians, or even all humans, would converge on a single shared doctrine, but for the moment, and in the Netherlands, Christians were far from having achieved that. As Kornherdt remarks, if you go before a group of people and ask all the Christians to stand up, they will all rise despite their bitter disagreements. They're all sure that they are right, yet clearly this can't be so, since their views are mutually contradictory. What is needed, but sorely lacking, is an impartial judge who could adjudicate the rival claims of Catholics, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Anabaptists, and so on. In the absence of such a judge, it is inevitably the group that has numerical or political superiority, however temporarily, that determines which views are acceptable and which heretical. Given this situation, it would behoove all parties to refrain from compulsion and coercion in matters of religion. The inquisitorial Catholics are obvious offenders against this principle, but so are the Protestants. Several times in the dialogue, Kornherdt alludes to Calvin's role in the execution of servitus at Geneva, and he constantly attacks Beza for having written in support of using violence against heretics. This position is hypocritical, given the Protestants' demands for religious liberty, and doesn't even make sense in light of Protestant theology. After all, Calvin and Beza are convinced that earthly rulers are typically deluded and sunk in sin. Giving such leaders the power to coerce religious thought is bound to lead to the punishment of the righteous more often than the killing of genuine heretics. Philosophically speaking, the most interesting thing about Kornherdt's arguments is that they are generalizable. Take any dispute you like, whether it is about morality, politics, or the relative merits of two television shows. When there are firmly entrenched views, it is simply illegitimate to allow one camp to decide the issue, as when Catholics determined who counted as a heretic in Catholic lands and the Reformed Church, likewise, in their own territory. This would be like allowing one party to a legal dispute to act also as the judge. Kornherdt's flair for satire is on show when he says that he'd be better off letting non-Christians like the pagans, Jews, or Turks decide the issue. He also points out that when it comes to the use of coercive power, it is prudent to tread carefully. It is hard to transgress by not condemning someone, but one who condemns may transgress greatly. All this amounts to a powerful case for freedom of expression, which in true Dutch style, Kornherdt links to political as well as religious liberty. He has one of his characters say, Kornherdt was not the first, and certainly not the last, to express such sentiments. In particular, he was following in the wake of French Protestant thinkers, notably Sebastien Castellio, who argued that violence should not be used against heretics, and here I'll look into the future once again to assure you that we'll get to them before long. Taking things up to the present, religious toleration now enjoys widespread acceptance. Yet we still struggle with limits on freedom of speech. Where, if anywhere, should we draw the line? Kornherdt himself addresses this question, reassuring his readers that he is still in favor of banning books that incite to sedition, on the grounds that such views undermine the peace. While this remark is made only in passing, it is a telling one. It reminds us that Kornherdt's main priority is not an abstract ideal of free thought, but the keeping of the peace, and avoidance of wrongful persecution. In fact, his ideal world would not be a pluralist one, with many religious views coexisting in harmony. His plea for tolerance was intended more as a temporary solution to what he hoped would be a limited period of fractious disagreement. It was entirely possible to share the goal of peace without sharing Kornherdt's views on toleration. For all their disputes, intellectuals of all parties agreed that civic harmony was vital. Drawing on their humanist education, they would quote authors like Cicero and Seneca for the idea that, whereas Concord makes small commonwealth great, discord disrupts the greatest ones. And in this period, no Dutch humanist was more outstanding than Justus Lipsius. He fell out with Kornherdt over both forms of freedom we've discussed in this episode, moral and political. On the moral side, the tension between the two men arose because Kornherdt wanted to translate Lipsius's Stoic-inspired work on constancy. There was one passage in it he didn't much like, though, where Lipsius insisted that humans cannot avoid sin without divine assistance. Lipsius was true to mainstream Protestant thought, comparing the human agent to a musical instrument played by God, and in most cases, an instrument that is out of tune. Given his perfectionist moral theory, Kornherdt could not agree with this. The two then came into dispute over political freedom because of Lipsius's view that secular powers should indeed enforce religious orthodoxy. Again, Kornherdt could, of course, not agree. In his own writings, he had pointed out that this would make religion dependent on the whims of individual rulers. What, he asked, would be less sure than our faith. But for Lipsius, religion is such an important binding force within society that one cannot imagine a harmonious state without religious unity. He did not take this to mean that rulers should themselves decide matters of religious doctrine. Instead, he advised them simply to enforce whatever religion they find dominant in their territories. Kornherdt was able to pounce here. Wouldn't that mean that the hated Catholics had been right in trying to stamp out the Reformation when it first broke out? For that matter, couldn't pagan or Muslim rulers use the same rationale to persecute all Christians as heretics? Of course, Lipsius did not want to concede such embarrassing analogies, and applied his principle of peace only in cases of acceptably Protestant rulership, but you have to admit that Kornherdt had a point. Which is not to say that Lipsius is a finger undeserving of our time and attention. In fact, he's going to get a whole episode to himself, in which we'll be considering his wider political thought and, above all, his role in the revival of Stoic philosophy around the turn of the 17th century. I already know that you'll make the right choice and join me for that next time here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.