Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature
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Originally, in the ancient sources, tolerance, or “tolerantia,” referred to a type of virtue, that is, the ability to sustain pain, torture, or bad fate. In the history of the Old Testament and of the Christian Church fathers, tolerance implied the inner strength of the faithful to resist all persecutions without fighting back, such as formulated by the Bishop of Carthage, Cyprian (ca. 200–258 (“tolerantia passionis”).75 Alternative terms were “patientia” (patience), “sustinentia” (endurance), and “sufferentia” (suffering). St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (350–430), was the first, however, to suggest a more social-oriented concept of tolerance, arguing that it would be better to accept non-Christians, Jews, or prostitutes within the same community instead of creating internecine strife and deep conflicts with unforeseeable consequences. Moreover, Augustine underscored how much the Christian Church would profit from demonstrating toleration and patience even in face of the worst suppression, developing a true sense of Christian love for all neighbors.
However, even he defended the application of violence in the struggle against the Donatists and schismatics.76 Among medieval scholastic thinking, this general idea was also embraced, the “permissio comparativa,” implying to accept disbelievers rather then to launch a war against fellow citizens. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1275) distinguished specifically between pagans, Jews, and Heretics and supported that the former two groups should be allowed to live among Christians since they served as witnesses of the Christian faith, as it had grown out of their own belief systems (Summa theologica II–II, 10, 11). He also rejected forceful baptism as opposed to the principles of natural law. As to heretics, however, he propounded their exclusion from the Church and even the death penalty.
In their overview, Schlüter and Gröker basically skip the entire Middle Ages, apart from the brief references to Aquinas, and set in again with comments on the Bishop Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who in his De pace fidei (1453), shortly after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, pleaded for a “concordia” (concordance), that is, for a “religio una in rituum varietate” (1253; one religion in a variety of rituals), which was still entirely based on the foundation of the Christian Church. Different rites and customs should not divide the Christian community, which was, in Nicholas’s view, the only viable path toward salvation. Nevertheless, as we’ll see further below in a dedicated chapter, Nicholas, like other contemporaries, was willing to integrate many different voices and paid considerable respect to people from all over the world.77
Similarly, Thomas Morus (or More; 1478–1535) rejected military strategies in the debate about the true religion and warned against propaganda against other religionists inciting violence. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) admonished that only the secular princes should persecute heretics, and only then when they represented a danger for the Christian community. Moreover, he also insisted that the idea of God is beyond all human comprehension, hence it would not make sense to pursue religious truth in a specific religion by itself. In particular, in his Adagia, he emphasized that difference of opinion would be characteristic of all human beings and that a rigid religious system would be contradictory to the very essence of piety. For Erasmus, piety constituted the ideal that every person should pursue, while faith, as laudable as it appears, contains the danger of ideological persecutions.78 Surprisingly, he drew from the highest possible authority to support his claim, citing Paul’s letter to the Romans (14), but his opinion was quickly side swept by the imminent religious conflicts raging through the sixteenth century. For instance, Martin Luther (1483–1546), who coined the German phrase “tollerantz,” argued vehemently for the strict persecutions of Jews and Anabaptists and did not exclude the death penalty for them.79 John Calvin (1509–1564) followed suit in the same vein, while his former disciple Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) and the Dutchman Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522–1590) argued against the persecution of heretics and propounded early forms of tolerance.80 Similarly, Jean Bodin (1530–1596) promoted the idea of tolerance in his Six Livres de la République (1576), and yet most individuals in the early modern age were deeply determined by strong religious convictions and tried hard to repress the ‘non-believers.’81 For a remarkable contrast, here, I will investigate the relevance of sixteenth-century Spiritualism as a foundation of more tolerant attitudes in a separate chapter, focusing on Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel.
The seminal article on tolerance by Gerhard Besier pursues mostly the same approach, covering the etymology of the word, examining the discourse on accepting or rejecting non-believers in the early-medieval Church, and then, after a brief consideration of the ideas as espoused by Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa, leaping over the Middle Ages in order to turn his attention to the intellectuals and their interest in this issue since the sixteenth century, treating Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Petrus Canisius, Jean Bodin, Johannes Gerhard, Johannes Althusius, Andreas Cranius, etc.82 Finally, the article on toleration by John Christian Laursen also deserves mention because he covers all major periods from antiquity to the present, even though the section on the Middle Ages is minimal at best.83 Interestingly, he relies on such voices as Peter Abelard, John of Salisbury, Marsilius of Padua, John Wycliffe, Menachem Ha-Me’iri, Nicholas of Cusa, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, but all of who would have to be examined more closely before we could recognize them as true representatives of toleration. Nicholas of Cusa certainly will be an important voice to be considered here as well, but he did not specifically argue in favor of toleration. This will have to be analyzed much more carefully. At the same time, we can productively draw from the general definition of toleration offered here: “toleration referred largely to a policy or attitude toward different religions. Intolerance could mean burning at the stake of heretics or apostates and forced conversions of adherents to different religions, and tolerance could mean anything short of that.”84
Altogether, this first brief overview, which will have to be deepened considerably by way of carrying out careful case studies, already indicates how tenuous and difficult the notion itself has always been, since strong religious beliefs have regularly demonized ‘the other’ and could concede at best only a form of coexistence, abstaining from persecutions and executions. Christian authors, however, consistently posited the absoluteness of their own faith and took a very harsh stance against all other religions, and especially against heretics, hence individuals who had grown up in their own faith and yet had then deviated from it against all admonishments.85
The famous Cistercian novice master and prior, Caesarius of Heisterbach, formulated once in his Dialogus miraculorum (ca. 1240) that there were no worse people but heretics. He was even willing to accept Jews and Muslims rather than heretics and found the ‘blindness’ of the former two groups more acceptable than the evil nature of the latter.86 This was not an expression of tolerance, of course, but it serves us well to understand how much either toleration or tolerance are a matter of debate and mirror a long-term discourse that was already at place in the high Middle Ages and then continued throughout the ages, until today!87 The conflicts between the various religions continue to impact human society deeply, and the task to come to terms with differences in race, gender, age, and religion will not simply dissipate in the modern world. Hatred and distrust, rejection and self-isolation are strategies and attitudes that can be found both in the past and in the present.88 The issue of defining and dealing with hereticism, however determined by whichever side, underlies specifically the notion of a tolerant attitude. Only seemingly do we today operate on an open-minded level and assume that intolerance was the absolute norm in the pre-modern world. As Klaus Schreiner almost prophetically formulated,
Aus passiver aktive Toleranz zu machen, bleibt eine ständige ethische Herausforderung. Am Begriff ‘Toleranz’ haftet der Charakter grundsätzlicher Überholbarkeit durch idealere Formen zwischenmenschlichen, gesellschaftlichen und politischen Verhaltens.89
[To transform the passive t
olerance into an active one remains a continuous ethical challenge. The notion of ‘tolerance’ is characterized as being open to being fundamentally reformed through more ideal forms of intra-human, social, and political behavior.]
And:
Toleranz als Bedingung persönlicher und kollektiver Freiheit verdankt ihre politisch und sozial ausgleichende Kraft nicht der Stimmigkeit juristischer Konklusionen, sondern der Entschlossenheit, Interessengegensätze auf der Grundlage gemeinsamer Wertüberzeugungen auszutragen.90
[Tolerance as the condition for personal and collective freedom derives its politically and socially balancing power not from the correctness of legal conclusions, but from the determination, to balance out differences in interests on the basis of shared convictions regarding values.]
There is no question that this approach to tolerance is predicated on a profound sense of idealism as to people’s readiness, preparedness, willingness, and intellectual acumen to let go of some of their own power, material possessions, and individuality to help the other find his/her own position within society.
Laursen emphasizes that the entire debate concerning toleration and tolerance mostly falls into the realm of religion, but that it also addresses simply individual relationship within society. This implies that only if we have answered fully what tolerance, for instance, truly means, can we hope to build our society further. Looking backward, we quickly realize that human history has been consistently determined by the struggle to identify one’s own community and to differentiate it from countless others. Little wonder that the idea of tolerance has, hence, been viewed rather critically at many times and has triggered a plethora of reactions, either negative or positive, throughout history.
A debate of that kind, however, already suggests the presence of conflicting ideas about how to respond to representatives of other cultures, religions, language groups, or races. Silence in that regard would constitute a devastating blow to any effort to consider at least in basic terms who the others are and what they might matter for one’s own self. This silence can be found particularly in strongly racist, theocratic, or dictatorial systems. The present book explicitly resists those attempts to impose silence and acknowledges from the start that all religions are ‘bedeviled’ intrinsically by the stark contrast between us versus them, right versus wrong, and good versus evil. If we historicize this phenomenon, we will be able to grasp rather profoundly an ongoing discourse already in late antiquity and then in the Middle Ages.91
If we can identify some voices that ventured to contextualize, relativize, decenter, and to acknowledge others both at the margin and within, then we are in a very good shape tracing the discourse of tolerance/toleration both in our own time and in the past.92 We might go so far as to claim that the degree of toleration/tolerance in any given society might be the benchmark of its cultural development.
In fact, as soon as we turn our lens toward any historical and cultural period and examine more closely what some individuals might have formulated in that regard, we will easily detect a highly complex and diverse system of opinions and ideas, even in the most orthodox Christian or Muslim society.93 After all, as many people have quickly realized, both in Elizabethan England and in the United States in the twenty-first century, once a society begins to persecute or ostracize foreigners, or simply others, then the members of one’s own country or community will soon experience the same repressions in the other parts of the world. Human relations are never a one-way street.94
The value of tolerance and toleration is not self-evident, and it continues to be questioned by many people both on the political left and right. But there are high values attached to them. As Alan Levine emphasizes,
prudence dictates that one restrict one’s pursuit of self-interest to secure the rest of it. It admits that individuals do not have natural or divine rights but argues that one should relinquish one’s right to victimize others because not to do so would risk being subject to victimization oneself.95
However, he also warns us to absolutize this self-centered perspective insofar as not everyone is thinking only in pragmatic terms and is open to rational suggestions. As we might have to add, religious concepts very often tend to pursue a much more radical agenda irrespective of the costs for one’s own group or society. Considering the role of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages, it becomes immediately clear that there were hardly any convincing arguments for the clergy to tolerate other religious groups, such as the Jews, unless they could serve as living proof of the validity of the Old Testament, as St. Augustine, in his De vera religione (26.49–27.50), had argued already in his historical overview of the rise of the Christian faith.96
It would be true that the idea of tolerance was not critically discussed in any full fashion until the sixteenth century, at least within the realm of philosophy, religion, and related fields.97 However, could we not assume that some poets and artists might have voiced different viewpoints, relying on a considerably greater latitude concerning their attitudes toward members of minority groups? In fact, we will encounter a larger number of significant writers who addressed at least toleration already in the Middle Ages, and once we will have opened up the literary quarry, so to speak, it might well happen that we will unleash a whole avalanche of relevant voices inviting us to view the world through different lenses, such as tolerance.
Even among theologians from the late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, such as Tertullian, Origen, St. Cyprian, and also Augustine, there was a general acceptance of people’s fallibility and, hence, the diversity of faiths due to a lack of human ability ever to grasp the full truth. Eradicating everyone who might not be a completely developed Christian in the name of the purity of the faith would, as they commonly argued, lead to the weeding of many good plants in God’s garden out of ignorance as to how to differentiate among them. Significantly, “[f]orced belief was considered to be worthless because faith had to be embraced freely and be held sincerely for salvation to be achieved.”98 He also adds: “Finally, it was argued that Christian love and charity should be directed towards the unenlightened, weak, or misguided, not violence.”99 However, the very same Augustine also formulated, in his Ad Donatistas (10), “what death is worse for the soul than the freedom to err?”100 Throughout the Middle Ages, the Inquisition was happy to refer to this idea and thus to embrace a vehement form of intolerance.
While the presence of Jews was a matter mostly accepted, at least in theological terms—here disregarding the many pogroms and expulsions, which were bad enough101—and while Muslim Arabs living in Southern Europe experienced a certain degree of toleration,102 heretics were regarded with greatest suspicion and fear since they had fallen away from their own faith and, thus, could represent the endangerment of the entire Church because of their criticism and skepticism. Moreover, there were many deviants throughout the entire Middle Ages, some tolerated, others persecuted, some acculturated, others excluded or ostracized. Nothing was really easy in the medieval Christian world, a time of intensive religious struggles.103 However, as a side note, the situation has not become really easier in the modern world, especially if we think of the countless conflicts between the various religious factions in Islam and Judaism.
As R. I. Moore reminds us, despite the introduction of Christianity in virtually all parts of medieval Europe since the fifth and sixth centuries onward, many ancient, pagan, and alternative faiths remained and continued to exert a subtle and not so insignificant influence. In fact, “diversities of belief and practice rapidly began to become matters of controversy which emphasizes the point that, though no regular or coherent tradition of heresy either learned or popular emerged at that time, its potentiality was inherent in the religion itself.”104 Not surprisingly, the closer we get to our own time, the more loudly individual speakers expressed themselves arguing in favor of toleration/tolerance. By the same token, the chorus of intolerance has never been far behind and has actually won the race numerous times especially in the twentieth a
nd twenty-first centuries, if we think, for instance, of the German National Socialists with their nefarious concept of the Holocaust, South African Apartheid, the genocide committed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, the terror organization ISIS, and of other horrors all over the world.
Most scholars have happily pointed toward the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when monumental individuals such as Montesquieu and Descartes, Voltaire and Diderot, Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, Locke and Bailey formulated ideas about accepting other religions, cultures, and ideas that have become the cornerstones of our modern discourse.105 A more careful examination of the archives can also easily yield the names of many other intellectuals who certainly embraced the idea of tolerance in earlier times, such as Michael Ramsay (1688–1743).106 Curiously, however, it seems as if we today are slipping away quite dramatically from that idealistic level as established by our forerunners, considering the vast number of hate crimes, religious wars, genocide, and other conflicts driven by religious ideologies and other perspectives.107 Tolerance, in its purest form, proves to be an ephemeral, perhaps even evanescent, phenomenon, constantly under threat by extremist groups that thrive more by espousing hatred than love. The issues that vex us today rather painfully all over the world simply constitute the continuation of ancient struggles endemic to human society.
How would the Middle Ages fit into this large intellectual, ethical, moral, and religious framework? Could we even consider the possibility of tolerant attitudes, or at least a form of toleration? The Christians ruling over the Holy Land after the First Crusade (1096–99) treated their new subjects rather ruthlessly and cruelly, but subsequently the situation there changed considerably since they had to accommodate to the local conditions as well. But since the Crusaders did not commit genocide as such, were they hence somewhat tolerant?108 As Crusaders, however, their entire raison d’être was predicated on a military form of intolerance, at least as far as the first generation was concerned. In the Latin kingdoms, the situation quickly changed, and there were a good number of Christian individuals who spoke Arabic fluently and cooperated with their Arabic neighbors in a rather open-minded attitude.109 The later Middle Ages witnessed the rise of many different voices claiming a peaceful relationship with members of other faiths, and this at a time when many hostile and aggressive individuals happily embraced radical concepts of intolerance.110