Benjamin J. Kaplan: A Revisionist Historian Looks at Religious Toleration
At this moment, there may be no more important story than the one Europeans and Americans proudly tell themselves about the rise of religious toleration. So please take note of Benjamin J. Kaplan’s argument that the story may be dangerously flawed.
Mr. Kaplan makes that argument in “Divided by Faith,” just published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The book’s subtitle is “Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.” The crucial word is “practice.” Compare it with “idea” in “How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West” (Princeton, 2003), a recent overview of the same history by Perez Zagorin.
In his account, Mr. Zagorin, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Rochester, moves swiftly from St. Augustine’s case for the persecution of heretics to the Protestant Reformers, who challenged the Roman Catholic monopoly on doctrinal authority but not the belief in using coercion to defend true teaching. Finally, Mr. Zagorin marches through his pages a regiment of champions of religious toleration....
This is a familiar kind of triumphal history. It pits the forces of progress, i.e., those who share our modern values, against the forces of resistance, i.e., those who don’t. Whatever the struggle, each step mounts another rung on a single ladder leading, by natural stages, to ourselves.
Mr. Kaplan, a professor of Dutch history at University College London and the University of Amsterdam, does not set out to refute this account but to shift the focus, from elite thinkers and theories to popular beliefs and behavior.
His first achievement is to convey the communal nature of early modern religion. Every town and village was a microcosm of the body of Christianity. Civic rituals were not separate from sacred ones. Daily, weekly and seasonal time had a religious dimension. Communal welfare depended on divine wrath or favor, which might bring on flood, famine or bountiful harvest. Tolerating heretical deviations was a high-stakes business.
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Jefferson could write in 1781. A century earlier, such individualism was unthinkable to most Europeans. Indulging heresy, as Mr. Kaplan points out, threatened not only to pick their pockets but also to endanger their souls.
Contrary to the once-popular notion that religious toleration rose steadily from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and on to the Enlightenment, Mr. Kaplan maintains that religious toleration declined from around 1550 to 1750....
Read entire article at Peter Steinfels in the NYT
Mr. Kaplan makes that argument in “Divided by Faith,” just published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The book’s subtitle is “Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.” The crucial word is “practice.” Compare it with “idea” in “How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West” (Princeton, 2003), a recent overview of the same history by Perez Zagorin.
In his account, Mr. Zagorin, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Rochester, moves swiftly from St. Augustine’s case for the persecution of heretics to the Protestant Reformers, who challenged the Roman Catholic monopoly on doctrinal authority but not the belief in using coercion to defend true teaching. Finally, Mr. Zagorin marches through his pages a regiment of champions of religious toleration....
This is a familiar kind of triumphal history. It pits the forces of progress, i.e., those who share our modern values, against the forces of resistance, i.e., those who don’t. Whatever the struggle, each step mounts another rung on a single ladder leading, by natural stages, to ourselves.
Mr. Kaplan, a professor of Dutch history at University College London and the University of Amsterdam, does not set out to refute this account but to shift the focus, from elite thinkers and theories to popular beliefs and behavior.
His first achievement is to convey the communal nature of early modern religion. Every town and village was a microcosm of the body of Christianity. Civic rituals were not separate from sacred ones. Daily, weekly and seasonal time had a religious dimension. Communal welfare depended on divine wrath or favor, which might bring on flood, famine or bountiful harvest. Tolerating heretical deviations was a high-stakes business.
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Jefferson could write in 1781. A century earlier, such individualism was unthinkable to most Europeans. Indulging heresy, as Mr. Kaplan points out, threatened not only to pick their pockets but also to endanger their souls.
Contrary to the once-popular notion that religious toleration rose steadily from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and on to the Enlightenment, Mr. Kaplan maintains that religious toleration declined from around 1550 to 1750....