by Susan Jacoby
Unlike the Lutherans, who have apologized for past persecutions, the small numbers of unreconstructed Calvinists remaining in the twenty-first century are still trying to defend their founder’s role in the murder of Servetus. “It is true that Calvin and his fellow pastors in Geneva were involved in the death of Servetus,” acknowledges a historical Web site maintained by Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.*3 “However, it would be difficult to find any church leader in the sixteenth century who advocated a more gentle approach….Toleration and acceptance of doctrinal differences were simply not sixteenth-century concepts.”9 That is exactly the point. Of course it would have been difficult to find any church leader in the sixteenth century who advocated a “gentler” approach. But there were dissidents and humanists of Calvin’s generation who saw him for exactly what he was. To think about the religious conversions that took place throughout the Reformation as a great step forward for freedom of conscience is to look back, in anachronistic fashion, from a world of religious pluralism to a world in which reformation usually meant the substitution of one absolute truth for another.
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Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, strife between Protestant sects was accompanied and often overshadowed by the continuing battle of the Catholic Church to regain the hegemony it had enjoyed before the Reformation. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 24, 1572, in which thousands of prominent Huguenots were slaughtered by Catholics in Paris, was the era’s most notorious and inflammatory event, with far-reaching consequences that influenced later Enlightenment thinkers as well as contemporary attitudes. The initial massacre took place on a day when thousands of the most prominent Huguenots in France had traveled to Paris for the wedding of Henry of Navarre, who later succeeded to the French throne as King Henry IV, to Marguerite of Valois, a daughter of Catherine de’ Medici. Henry was raised as a Protestant, and his marriage to the Catholic Marguerite was supposed to promote harmony between the Protestant minority and the Catholic (90 percent) majority. Instead, soldiers (in a plot possibly organized by Catherine as well as French Catholic nobles) took advantage of the celebration to surprise the Huguenots. The first to die was Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, whose body was chopped to pieces by a soldier in the service of the Catholic duke of Guise. But the massacre did not stop there; for at least two months, Huguenots were hunted down in provincial cities, and contemporary reports describe rivers running red with Protestant blood. These gory accounts soon reached England and resulted in new repressive measures against English Catholics. Mary, Queen of Scots, was a member of the Guise family, and her cousin Elizabeth could hardly have failed to draw a cautionary lesson about the threat to her monarchy posed by wealthy Catholics with strong connections to the Vatican. Even today, many official Catholic publications deny that the Vatican had any role in instigating the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, but there is no question that the church was pleased by the slaughter. Pope Gregory XIII commissioned a special medal in honor of the event and sent the memento to Catherine de’ Medici and to every Catholic bishop in France. The massacre set off decades of religious wars in France, where members of the Huguenot minority were mainly followers of Calvin. Henry of Navarre would lead Protestant forces against Catholics in the decades after his wedding had been spoiled—to understate the case—by blood in the streets. In 1598, as King Henry IV, he issued the Edict of Nantes, which permitted, with strict limitations, the practice of the Protestant religion. The king’s caution about offending Catholics was exemplified by a provision for the feast of Corpus Christi, in which houses along the route of elaborate Catholic processions were supposed to be decorated with banners to honor the day. Huguenots were not required to do the decorating themselves, but the edict allowed Catholics, at their own expense, to hang decorations on Huguenot houses. Given the religious invasion of citizens’ homes, it is easy to understand why Corpus Christi became an occasion for violent clashes between Catholics and Huguenots. “The matter occasioned dozens, perhaps hundreds, of confrontations in France,” notes one religious historian. “Houses that were not properly decorated were attacked and looted. Even after the revocation of the edict [of Nantes], Huguenots would sometimes ‘forget’ to decorate their homes, risking draconian punishment.”10
No religious settlements in Europe really involved tolerance in the modern sense; at best, they allowed toleration—a recognition that someone’s disagreement with the majority about, for instance, the Holy Trinity, was not grounds for chopping him to pieces. Nevertheless, the limited Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685 by that great progressive King Louis XIV. Louis’ retrograde legislation not only prohibited the practice of Protestantism in France but also ordered Huguenots to renounce formally their allegiance to their faith. The death penalty was established for Huguenots caught attempting to flee France. Louis commissioned three hundred thousand special troops specifically to hunt Huguenots and confiscate their property for the throne. Nevertheless, it is believed that at least a quarter-million Huguenots did succeed in leaving France, mainly for the Netherlands, England, Protestant regions of Germany, and the dour Geneva created by Calvin (which many of the French Huguenots did not find agreeable, since their version of Calvinism did not always extend to the renunciation of wine, fine clothes, and other worldly pleasures). One of the unintended consequences of the persecution of French Huguenots was the immigration of many of their ancestors to the American colonies. Paul Revere’s father was Apollo Rivoire, a goldsmith. George Washington was the grandson of a Huguenot on the maternal side of his family.
Another seven hundred thousand Huguenots were legally prevented from emigrating and forced to attend Catholic services.*4 The forced conversion and/or exile of the Huguenots is comparable in pre-modern European history only to the forced conversions and expulsions of Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. Huguenots themselves frequently made the comparison between their fate and that of the Jews in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. In 1682, the French Huguenot minister Pierre Jurieu explicitly compared the forced baptisms of Jewish children by King Manuel I in Portugal in 1497 to the removal of many children from their French Huguenot homes in order that they might be “adopted” by Catholic families and raised as Christians.11 (The identification of French Huguenots with persecuted Jews was to last for centuries. During the Second World War, a number of Huguenot pastors and parishioners in Vichy France would play a major role, rooted in religious principles, in hiding and rescuing Jews attempting to escape both the Nazis and the French collaborators.*5)
The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was still celebrated by French Catholics in the eighteenth century, even as it was decried by Enlightenment freethinkers as a symbol of everything wrong with an autocracy and absolutism that united church and state. French supporters of the American Revolution were deeply impressed by the flourishing of a multiplicity of faiths in the colonies even before independence. The Marquis de Lafayette, the greatest French friend of the American founders, was well aware of the Huguenot descent of many prominent members of the American revolutionary generation. In 1787, Lafayette cited the loss of Huguenots to the New World as an argument in favor of a law guaranteeing religious toleration for Protestants remaining in France. King Louis XVI was persuaded to agree, but that decision did nothing to help him keep his head in the bloody Jacobin phase of the French Revolution.
The European religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were critical factors in the thinking of the authors of the U.S. Constitution. One of the great ironies of life in seventeenth-century England and continental Europe was the juxtaposition of bitter religion-driven political conflict with the dawn of an Enlightenment that gave primacy to liberty of individual conscience. The same century saw the birth of the first modern faiths, most notably Quakerism, that truly viewed religious belief, in practice as well as theory, as an individual choice rather than a social imperative to be imposed by force.
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*1 The First Gr
eat Awakening in the United States is generally dated from the 1730s to the 1760s; the Second Great Awakening began after the Revolution and lasted until, roughly, the early 1840s.
*2 The Arab physician Ibn al-Nafis (c. 1213–88), born in Damascus, also wrote a treatise questioning Galen’s theory. His theories—which, like those of Servetus, were not complete but were a major step toward the truth about blood circulation—were largely ignored by his Arab contemporaries, as well as by later Europeans.
*3 Many of the early settlers of Grand Rapids were Calvinists who emigrated from the Netherlands in the 1820s and 1830s. The area was long known as one of the most religiously conservative in the state of Michigan and the Midwest.
*4 These figures represent the lower end of standard scholarly estimates. Huguenots who refused to attend Catholic ceremonies were frequently imprisoned, tortured, killed, or sentenced to become galley slaves (the equivalent of execution, given that the life span of a galley slave was no longer in seventeenth-century Europe than it had been in Roman times).
*5 For an account of what happened in one Huguenot village, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, see Phillip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
· PART IV ·
CONVERSIONS IN THE DAWN OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
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MARGARET FELL (1614–1702): WOMAN’S MIND, WOMAN’S VOICE
You that deny Women’s Speaking, answer: Doth it not consist of Women, as well as Men? Is not the Bride compared to the whole Church? And doth not the Bride say, Come? Doth not the Woman speak then, the Husband, Christ Jesus, the Amen? And doth not the false Church go about to stop the Bride’s Mouth?
—MARGARET FELL, WOMEN’S SPEAKING JUSTIFIED, 1666
FOR THE OBVIOUS REASON that a literate woman was an even rarer creature than a literate man throughout most of recorded history, we know relatively little about the women whose religious conversions played a critical role in transmitting new faiths to future generations. The stories of iconographic female converts in early Christian history, such as Augustine’s mother, Monica, and Constantine’s mother, Helena, were told by men.
Margaret Fell, one of the founders of the Society of Friends in England, told her own story.*1 This remained exceptional in the seventeenth century, even though more women, at least among the gentry, were learning to read and write than in previous centuries. Known to her co-religionists as the “mother of Quakerism,” Fell became a prolific correspondent and activist in the only contemporary faith that encouraged women to take an influential role in spiritual matters. In a long life—spanning wars between anti-monarchist Puritans and supporters of the Church of England (and the Crown), the Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration, and the dawn of the Enlightenment—Fell spoke out against war, religious persecution, and the treatment of women as inferior moral beings. She spoke in a voice of early Enlightenment religious liberalism that preceded, but is linked to, the more secular “High Enlightenment” voices of the eighteenth century. Women’s Speaking Justified was written from prison, where Fell spent nearly four years, from 1664 to 1668, for holding Quaker meetings in her home and failing to take an oath of loyalty to the government. Quakers refused to take all oaths, on the grounds that Jesus himself denounced the practice.*2 Fell made countless personal appeals for the release of persecuted religious dissidents, to rulers of different faiths (including Cromwell, and King Charles II after the Restoration). A voluminous correspondent with Quakers at home and abroad, and a ceaseless proselytizer for a faith that operated with little ritual and regard for traditional ecclesiastical hierarchies, Fell left a legacy that was not fully realized until religious feminists in the last quarter of the twentieth century began to battle for an equality that had been pioneered (although in decidedly uneven fashion) by Quakers.*3
The wife of an influential judge, Thomas Fell, and the mother of eight children, Margaret Askew Fell originally belonged to an ordinary parish and practiced a Calvinist-influenced brand of Puritanism. In 1652, while Margaret’s husband was away carrying out his duties on the judicial circuit, the charismatic, self-educated preacher George Fox visited the Fell home, Swarthmoor Hall, in Lancashire. Fox’s teachings, during a period of intense religious strife, differed radically from all of the other contending faiths. The basis of Quakerism was its reliance on an “Inner Light” that lived in each man and woman and required the intervention of neither a church hierarchy nor the state. Even Baptists, who also adhered to a much more individualistic brand of faith than establishment Protestants and opposed state involvement with religion, did not approach the Quakers in their disdain for state-established churches. The Quakers’ distaste for authority imposed from above, whether ecclesiastical or political, was later demonstrated not only by their abjuring of oaths but by the refusal of their men to tip hats, or their women to curtsy to their putative superiors.
Another important difference between Quakers and other Protestant denominations, whether mainstream or nonconformist, was their rejection of a literal interpretation of the Bible. Although Quaker leaders, including Fox and Fell, knew their Bible from Genesis to Revelation and quoted extensively from both testaments in theological argument, they believed that God resided within each man and woman, and it must therefore follow that the individual’s Inner Light was the final authority. The nature of the Trinity and distinctions among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—a subject over which other Christians were still killing one another—never became an absolutist loyalty test for Quakers.
When Fell first heard Fox speak, she said he had “opened us a book that we had never read in, nor indeed never heard that it was our duty to read in it (to wit) the Light of Christ in our consciences….”1 That Margaret made her own religious choices in her husband’s absence is itself a demonstration of her extraordinary independence of mind. Conversion to a dissident Protestant faith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a decision that could result in loss of property, torture, imprisonment, and death—sometimes all of the above. In England, varying degrees of religious persecution—its targets depending on the sympathies of the head of government—were the rule rather than the exception. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought the Dutch William of Orange to the throne (he ruled England jointly with Queen Mary II), brought an end to religious violence in England, established Anglicanism as the state religion, provided limited toleration for nonconformist Protestants, and imposed stronger civil penalties on Catholics. (Even today, bishops of the Church of England are formally appointed by the monarch from a list supplied by Anglican officials, and any non-Anglican prime minister is explicitly forbidden, under a law passed in 1829, to advise the sovereign on ecclesiastical affairs. Although the Crown’s role in ecclesiastical appointments is only a formality under today’s constitutional monarchy, Tony Blair waited until he left the prime minister’s office in 2007 before converting from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism. Benjamin Disraeli, born a Jew, would have been legally barred from becoming prime minister in the nineteenth century had his father, Isaac, not had him baptized in the Church of England at age thirteen. Isaac, a man of letters who spelled his name D’Israeli and did not convert to Christianity himself—though he broke formal ties with his Reform synagogue after his father died—knew that an unconverted Jew’s professional and social opportunities would be severely limited.)
Fell was aware of the personal as well as the political implications of her embrace of Quakerism. “I was struck into such a sadness,” she wrote years after Fox’s death. “I knew not what to do, my husband being from home. I saw it was the truth, and I could not deny it; and I did as the Apostle saith, ‘I received the truth in the love of it’; and it was opened to me so clear, that I never had a tittle in my heart against it; but I desired the Lord that I might be kept in it; and then I desired no greater portion.”2