Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  The distinction of having been the last person in the British Isles to be executed for heresy by burning belonged to one Edward Wightman, a cloth trader. Wightman, who was drawn to a particularly strict form of Puritanism that rejected the Book of Common Prayer (as heretical a position as rejecting the King James Bible during the reign of James I), eventually wound up quarreling with church authorities about everything from demonic possession to—what else?—the Trinity. On his execution day, Wightman screamed and recanted his views when he felt the first heat of the flames. As a local history of the town of Burton-on-Trent recounts, “A written retraction was prepared and Edward, in pain and weakness, orally agreed as it was read to him. Later, however, no longer fearing the flames, he refused to sign the retraction and blasphemed louder than before.”4 After the Wightman case, King James decided that burning heretics had no exemplary value and that religious dissenters would be imprisoned in solitary confinement rather than burned publicly (though, as can be seen from Aikenhead’s hanging in 1697, that mercy was not extended to bar other forms of capital punishment for religious dissent).

  The penalty of burning occupies a special place in the history of the criminalization of both religious and political dissent. Throughout Europe, burning at the stake was originally a punishment reserved for women convicted of treason; this was considered more merciful than the punishment inflicted on treasonous men—being hanged, cut down alive, and drawn and quartered. From the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, however, burning was imposed on both sexes for heresy, blasphemy, and, above all, witchcraft. In many instances, the charge of witchcraft involved not only the alleged conjuring of demonic forces but the seduction of others from whatever the “true faith” was considered to be by the governing authorities. The right of the English king to sentence heretics to death by burning, instituted in 1401 in the reign of Henry IV, was only removed by Parliament in 1677, although courts still had the power to impose such sentences.*4 Another 114 years would pass before the idea that there ought to be some limits on penalties imposed by all government institutions would find full expression in the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.” (The definition of “cruel and unusual” naturally remains the core issue in the continuing procession of American court cases about everything from mandatory sentences to capital punishment.)

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  One of the most striking example of the degree of religious intolerance in Restoration England was the 1670 trial of William Penn, the future founder of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Penn was charged with rioting for holding a Quaker meeting outdoors. The al fresco services were necessary because Charles II had ordered the destruction of all meeting places for dissident Protestants. In what would become an ironic historical footnote, the task of reducing nonconformist Protestant churches to rubble was supervised by Christopher Wren, the architect of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, in his capacity as surveyor general of England. There are no records of Wren’s personal feelings about building one of the most glorious examples of Restoration church architecture while presiding over the destruction of other, more modest places of worship.

  Throughout Penn’s trial, he foreshadowed Locke and Adam Smith by linking the right to liberty of conscience and worship with the right to property. Penn argued before the jury in the Old Bailey that unless the “ancient fundamental laws which relate to liberty and property” also apply to people regardless of their religion, no one “can say that he hath the right to the coat upon his back.”5 Penn’s ability to speak eloquently and wittily in his own defense had been demonstrated at the opening of the trial in an exchange with the presiding officer:

  PENN: I desire you would let me know by what law it is you prosecute me, and upon what law you ground my indictment.

  JUDGE: Upon the common-law.

  PENN: Where is that common-law?

  JUDGE: You must not think that I am able to run up so many years and over so many adjudged cases, which we call common-law, to satisfy your curiosity.

  PENN: This answer I am sure is very short for my question, for if it be common, it should not be so hard to produce.6

  The jury was persuaded by Penn’s argument and refused to convict him, and the Recorder of the Court responded by announcing that he at last understood “the reason of the policy and prudence of the Spaniards, in suffering the Inquisition among them.” He added, in a statement that would have been considered treasonous at the time of the Spanish Armada, that “certainly it will never be well with us, till something like the Spanish Inquisition be in England.”7 The Recorder, Sir John Howell, then jailed the jury members when they refused to change their verdict. Penn was kept in prison for failing to pay a fine, imposed because he refused to take off his hat in court. A year later, a higher court reversed the decision that had imprisoned the jury (though not the incarceration of Penn). But the very fact that a judge had cited the Inquisition as a desirable example for England—and had directly sabotaged the cherished institution of trial by jury—demonstrated the degree of intolerance in a country that prided itself (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not) on being more tolerant and observant of individual rights than the Catholic nations of Europe.

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  In France, there were no juries to stand up to the Crown when it came to religious dissent. Forced conversion—by any means necessary—was the aim and core of the religious violence against Huguenots both before and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. One matter-of-fact document, dated 1680, in the town of Alençon, listed all of the local Huguenot children scheduled to be taken forcibly from their parents. In the margins, the man in charge had written, “Take Jean and Anne Marie,” “Take Louise and Marie,” and “Take Anne if she is in [good enough] condition.” Anne, if she was too sick to be safely moved, would presumably be taken later, when she was well enough to begin her new life in a new Catholic home.8 One is reminded by this cool bureaucratic memo, resembling earlier accounts kept by the Spanish Inquisition, that the Nazis were not the first to keep unashamed, meticulous records of the most repulsive and revealing details of their crimes.

  It is against this background—in which all societies upheld, to a greater or lesser degree, the right of the community and the state to control the consciences of their citizens—that the importance of the early Enlightenment must be assessed. This was a world where nearly everyone believed in witchcraft and in subjecting witches to the death penalty, and where governments decided which worship services could be conducted in public, which could be conducted only in private, and which could not be held at all. It was a world that had, in some ways, changed immensely since the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but in other ways had changed very little. One thing that had changed was the insistence of large numbers of people in the realm of Christendom on the right to choose new, different forms of Jesus-centered faith. What had not changed was the determination of the leaders of dominant religions, backed by the power of government, to force people to convert to their own faiths or to keep them from converting to another.

  •

  In this environment, it is not surprising that thinkers advocating religious toleration were greatly outnumbered by philosophers and theologians, Catholic and Protestant, advocating stringent religious intolerance as a moral and political necessity. Only the tolerationist writers are widely read today (insofar as any seventeenth-century thinkers can be said to be read “widely”), because religious toleration proved to be a necessary, though far from sufficient, condition for the establishment of modern political democracies.

  Of the then outnumbered tolerationists, the two whose works are especially important in terms of the future Enlightenment argument against forced conversion are Locke and Spinoza.*5 Spinoza, the outcast Jew whose ancestors had fled the Inquisition in Portugal, was called an atheist because he was far ahead of his time in upholding absolute liberty of thought rather than mere toleration. Locke,
by contrast, was a man only somewhat ahead of his time. Contemporary (and, later, Enlightenment) opinion was always split between critics who considered Locke too orthodox a Christian and those who considered his form of Christianity a mask for “infidelity.” Both views have some validity: in retrospect, Locke’s essays may be seen as a bridge between the religious and political culture of the early Enlightenment (and late Reformation) and the more radical Enlightenment that influenced many American as well as French revolutionaries. Spinoza’s philosophy, by contrast, was a beacon from a far-off lighthouse, a message from a world that did not even begin to take shape until the late eighteenth century. One may read Spinoza’s exegesis of divine action, for example, without finding any contradiction between his philosophy and Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. “By the help of God,” Spinoza wrote in the 1660s, “I mean the fixed and unchangeable order of nature or the chain of natural events: for I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involve truth and necessity.”9

  •

  Spinoza and Locke were exact contemporaries, born in 1632 in Amsterdam and Wrington (a parish in Somerset), respectively. Unfortunately, the two men never met: Spinoza had been dead for six years by the time Locke arrived in the Netherlands as a political refugee in 1683. Locke left England because he feared that he might be persecuted on account of the political problems of his friend and patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and he did not return to his native land until after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. (After that revolution, the Dutch William of Orange and his Protestant English wife, Mary, succeeded the Catholic James II on the throne of England. The settlement surrounding these events confirmed the Church of England, once and for all, as the state-established religion.)

  It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Netherlands as a shelter, providing a protective cultural space for the refugee writers and thinkers who helped give birth to the Enlightenment. Despite the status of the Dutch Reformed Church as the state-financed religion, there was no legal compulsion (as there was in Calvinist Geneva and sometimes in England) for people to attend services. There were certainly advantages in belonging to the “public” church for those who wished to hold public office, but there was no punishment for those who kept their distance from the Dutch Calvinists, or even for those, like Vermeer, who apparently converted to another faith. The power and severity of the Dutch Reformed Church administration varied from city to city, and the conservatism of Dutch Calvinists was, ironically, reinforced by the arrival of even more conservative Calvinist Huguenot refugees from France in the 1680s. There was a double irony attached to the large-scale arrival of French Calvinist refugees, in that Holland also provided a haven for the few tolerationist French Protestant philosophers, most notably Pierre Bayle. The lack of national uniformity in enforcement of anti-heresy policies produced an everyday society of religious pluralism that simply did not exist elsewhere on the continent. (The relative liberty of conscience exercised by residents of the Netherlands is best described by the difficult-to-translate Dutch term gedogen, which means, roughly, “technically illegal but tolerated and not punished.” Today, the term is used to describe Dutch legal practices regarding prostitution and the sale of marijuana.)

  Gedogen was far from a perfect solution for seventeenth-century religious conflicts. Religious pluralism (especially with regard to Catholics and anti-Trinitarian Protestants) could never be taken for granted, since it was never guaranteed and was actually opposed by many laws. In Rotterdam, for example, where the English Quaker missionary William Ames had been thrown into the city insane asylum in 1657, disruptions of Quaker meetings and violence against Quaker meeting places remained a regular feature of life into the 1690s. When Quakers protested, the response of the civil authorities was to blame the victim by banning Quaker gatherings, thereby ensuring that there would be no further violence directed against them.

  And yet the Netherlands continued to provide an environment in which dissenting intellectuals of every variety, from every country, could work out their ideas in relative peace and security. In no area of culture was this more apparent than in the Dutch publishing business, one of the marvels of the seventeenth-century Western world. The main reason we know so much about religious dissent in Holland is that the dissidents were constantly publishing first-person accounts of their travails—something impossible in England and France. Ames, for example, wrote an entertaining personal history, in Dutch, of the many visits made to him in prison by Dutch Reformed ministers. In An Account of the Persecution and Imprisonment of William Ames and Maerten Maertensz, Ames noted that the preachers disagreed on whether the Quakers should be banished from Holland, burned at the stake, or burned with their books. The story of his incarceration appeared in 1659, not long after his release.

  By the 1680s, the Netherlands had five cities with concentrations of important publishers—Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden, The Hague, and Utrecht. There were more urban publishing centers in Holland than in France, England, and Germany combined. Because of its large Jewish refugee community, the Netherlands also replaced Venice as the center of European Jewish book publishing. In addition to printing classic Judaic texts for export to Jewish communities throughout Europe, some Jewish publishers even produced non-Jewish books—including, in at least one case, the New Testament. The Jewish printer Joseph Athias was granted the exclusive right to print English Bibles for export by the States of Holland in 1670 and even claimed to have produced a million Bibles for the reading of every “plow boy or servant girl” in the British Isles.10 (The numbers in this claim were surely exaggerated. Athias had undoubtedly heard about the doomed William Tyndale’s promise that if God spared his life, Tyndale’s vernacular translation would “cause a boy that driveth the plow in England to know more about the Scriptures” than theologians.)

  The economic dependence of the Netherlands on trade, and the importance of the Jews in every aspect of international trade and finance conducted within the Dutch states, was the critical factor creating a sense of safety for the Jewish community that did not exist elsewhere in Europe. In what was meant as a compliment to, not a criticism of, the Dutch, Spinoza remarked, “All they bother to find out, before trusting goods to anyone, is whether he is rich or poor and whether he is honest or a fraud.”11 In a society that placed a high value on honest dealing and sound financing, a Jew might feel secure—certainly more secure than Spinoza’s ancestors had felt in Catholic Portugal and France. That the importance of Jews in trade and finance would not protect them from “racial” and ultimately exterminationist anti-Semitism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe has little bearing on the situation of Sephardic Jews in seventeenth-century Holland. Trade was lifeblood, not a sideline, in a small country (actually, a collection of states) whose low-lying agricultural land was perilously exposed to the sea. Jewish businessmen were not merely tolerated but welcomed—a phenomenon that surprised even Quaker missionaries from England. William Caton, who, along with Ames, was among the first Quaker missionaries to Holland, wrote Margaret Fell that he had discussed religion many times with Jews, but “they could scarce endure to hear Christ mentioned.” He added that although the Jews were a “high, lofty, proud and conceited people, far from the Truth…there is a seed among them, which God in the fulness of Time will gather into his garner.”12

  Spinoza’s ancestors had fled Spain for Portugal in 1492—a move that did not prevent the family from being forcibly converted in 1498. When the Inquisition cracked down on all Portuguese Conversos in 1536, the Spinozas left the Iberian Peninsula and settled in France. Spinoza’s father, Miguel, moved to Amsterdam in 1627, renounced Catholicism, and returned to the Judaism of his ancestors. It might be seen as one of the great ironies in the history of conversion that Miguel’s son, Baruch, would one day be excommunicated by the Amsterdam synagogue for claiming
his own right to freedom of conscience and thought.

  As Rebecca Newberger Goldstein notes in her provocative study Betraying Spinoza (2006), Spinoza’s circle included freethinking*6 Christians as well as longtime Jewish friends not scared off by the order of excommunication. In Amsterdam’s Jewish community, excommunication was not the absolute penalty implied by its usage in Christian terminology. “Whereas others among the chastised had obediently—and sometimes desperately—sought reconciliation,” Goldstein writes, “Spinoza calmly removed himself from any further form of Jewish life. Nor did Spinoza seek out another religion. In particular, he did not convert to Christianity, although it would have been convenient for him to do so. Spinoza opted for secularism at a time when the concept had not yet been formulated.”13 Like the unclassifiable Christian Servetus, Spinoza was an anti-convert. It is known that the philosopher, both before and after his excommunication by the synagogue, met with dissenting Amsterdam Protestants, including Quakers and Mennonites, who called themselves Collegiants. The term was derived from bimonthly meetings, or “colleges,” in which the dissenters studied the Bible, argued with one another, and took for granted that each had the right to interpret the Scriptures for himself.

  Some would contend that Spinoza opted not for secularism but simply for an individual’s right to formulate his or her religious beliefs, but this is a distinction without a difference. The right to believe or not believe as one wishes is a secular idea that vitiates every form of religion based on absolute truth claims.

  It is certainly understandable that Spinoza’s ideas were as repellent to rabbis as they would be, once they began circulating in print, to orthodox Christians. One can only imagine the reactions of both a rabbi and a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church if either happened to read, in 1670, this “anonymous” author’s analysis of the so-called chosenness of the Jews.*7 When the biblical God spoke to the Hebrews, according to Spinoza, the Lord’s law revealed itself “only according to the understanding of its hearers.” The Jews “would have been no less blessed if God had called all men equally to salvation, nor would God have been less present to them for being equally present to others; their laws would have been no less just if they had been ordained for all, and they themselves would have been no less wise.”14 Oh my. The chosenness of a covenanted people is the foundation of historical Judaism, and insistence on the Gospel of Christ as the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy is the foundation of Christianity. Spinoza was the philosopher who offered something to offend everyone. The inscription on the frontispiece of the Tractatus says it all: