Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature

by Albrecht Classen

  74 Siegfried Wollgast, “Weigel, Valentin” (2011), 221–22. See also Andrew Weeks, Valentin Weigel (1533–1588) (2000); Horst Pfefferl, “‘Omnia me Christi vita docere potest’” (2004), 60–75; Andrew Weeks, “Valentin Weigel and the Fourfold Interpretation of the Creation” (2005), 1–22; Horst Pfefferl, “Religiöse Toleranz und Friedensidee bei Valentin Weigel (1553–1588)” (2007): 24–46.

  75 Valentin Weigel, Vom wahren seligmachenden Glauben …, Sämtliche Schriften, 5 (2013).

  76 Mirjam van Veen, Die Freiheit des Denkens (2015), 29.

  77 Mirjam van Veen, Die Freiheit des Denkens (2015), 126–29. See also Hans R. Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio (1997); cf. also the contributions to Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (1996).

  78 See the contributions to Reformed Majorities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis and J. Marius J. Lange van Ravenswaay (2015).

  79 Valentin Weigel, Von Vergebung der Sünden. Dialogus de christianismo, Lazaruspredigt. Sämtliche Schriften, 13 (2015), 75.

  80 Valentin Weigel, Vom Ort der Welt. Scholasterium christianum. Sämtliche Schriften, 10 (2014).

  81 Valentin Weigel, Seligmachende Erkenntnis Gottes. Unterricht Predigte. Bericht vom Glauben. Sämtliche Schriften, 9 (2008), 29.

  82 Valentin Weigel, Handschriftliche Predigtsammlung (Unvollständige Teilpostille). Einfältiger Unterricht. Vom himmlischen Jerusalem. Sämtliche Schriften, 6 (2013).

  83 Valentin Weigel, Informatorium. Natürliche Auslegung von der Schöpfung. Vom Ursprung aller Dinge. Viererlei Auslegung von der Schöpfung. Sämtliche Schriften, 11 (2007).

  84 Stephanie Armer, “Der Fall David Altenstetter” (2017), 236; Caroline Gritschke, “Vita Media”: Spiritualistische Lebenswelten und Konfessionalisierung (2006), 35–37; Bernd Roeck, Ketzer, Künstler und Dämonen (2009), 100–34; see also Augsburg During the Reformation Era: An Anthology of Sources, ed. and trans. B. Ann Tlusty (2012), 54–62.

  85 Gegenreformation und Dreißigjähriger Krieg 1555–1648, ed. Bernd Roeck (1996), 104–09; here 108.

  86 Stephanie Armer, “Der Fall David Altenstetter” (2017), 236.

  87 Augsburg During the Reformation Era, ed. and trans. Tlusty (2012), offers additional texts in English translation, esp. 60–62, from which I am citing here.

  88 I would like to express my thanks to my dear colleague Thomas Willard, University of Arizona, for a critical reading of this chapter.

  Epilogue

  I began this book with reflections on famous Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and his struggles to come to terms with the idea of tolerance and how to explain it convincingly to his audience by way of a theater play, Nathan der Weise (1779). Lessing himself experienced serious difficulties with members of the Protestant clergy and resorted to the literary world as a means to defend himself and to teach a profound lesson, which continues to ring true throughout the world until today. As scholarship has already demonstrated repeatedly, Lessing drew on a slew of medieval sources and translated them into material for his own enlightened perspectives, which invites us to investigate the discourse of toleration and tolerance in a much wider context and to connect historical, philosophical, and religious materials from various periods.

  But that introductory study was only the stepping-stone in my effort to explore the emergence and development of the issue as far back as possible, pursuing a three-pronged approach. First, I have been mostly interested in literary testimonies from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, roaming widely backward and forward, and all across Europe, including Icelandic, French, Spanish, German, English, and Italian sources. Many more could have been added, but the selection provided here has already documented clearly that fictional authors and poets in the pre-modern era obviously enjoyed much more freedom in the treatment of non-Christians and non-white characters than we might have assumed for medieval and early modern society. This does not mean that these writers were not filled with prejudice and even bigotry, but they managed to create new inroads into a very difficult field of intercultural relations, and this already in the pre-modern era.

  Religious and ethnic differences appear to matter much less than has often been claimed for the Middle Ages, especially if we focus on a specific selection of verse romances, lyric poetry, the chantefable, but also some heroic epics. Much depends on the filter we use in our approach to the critical question whether the phenomena of toleration and tolerance might have existed already in that early time or whether the examples chosen do not rather mirror hidden xenophobia, racial prejudice, religious ideologies, a belief in cultural superiority, that is, altogether, bigotry, hypocrisy, and arrogance based on white Christian culture in Europe. If we turn our attention to Old French chansons de geste, or the Middle High German Rolandslied by the Priest Konrad, if we allow clerical authors to supersede all others in our modern perception, or if we accept didactic literature, such as Hugo von Trimberg’s Der Renner (ca. 1250), as all decisive in this regard, we become easily victims of ideological perspectives driven by specific modern agendas, which I can only salute, directed against religious hatred, racism, and other stereotypes, and this both in the Middle Ages and today. A blanket condemnation of the pre-modern world as determined by those hateful, exclusionary, ostracizing, and persecuting tendencies simply throws the proverbial baby out with the bath water. We must discriminate much more in depth, open our perspectives, give credit where it is due, and acknowledge the myriad of testimonies well before the eighteenth century about early forms of toleration, if not tolerance.

  Some of the cases examined here have already been the object of intensive investigations, and the resulting modern ideological rifts between utter condemnation and constructive perceptions cannot be simply covered through a rereading of the relevant narratives in any naïve fashion. I am fully aware of the numerous traps that await anyone who ventures into those literary documents where representatives of different races and religions encounter each other and strike friendship (male-male) or fall in love with each other (male-female). However, even though we often face rather ambiguous situations, there are also specific cases where we do not only observe forms of toleration, but even of clear-cut tolerance, unequivocal antecedents to the voices in the eighteenth century (Voltaire, John Locke, Lessing, Immanuel Kant, etc.). The best examples prove to be, as far as I can currently tell, Rudolf von Ems’s Der guote Gêrhart and some of Boccaccio’s tales in his Decameron, where the protagonists demonstrate not only toleration, but also appear to embrace actual tolerance, very much in the vein as Lessing had projected it in his play.

  Then there are numerous other situations in Icelandic, Spanish, English, French, or German literature where people from different parts of the world meet, engage with each other, and cooperate collaboratively, without voicing any particular concerns about alterity, alienation, or clash of cultures or religions. It is, however, almost always clear that European Christian authors or poets were fully committed to their own religion, Christianity, and ardently hoped that the opponent or new partner would convert to Christianity. We practically never hear of the opposite, such as of Christian protagonists who might have accepted the Jewish or Muslim faith.

  Unfortunately, our modern perceptions of the past have been deeply shaped by the general impression conveyed by the early medieval conflicts between the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula and the Christian Franks to the north (seventh through tenth centuries), the Crusades since the late eleventh century, and the military attacks against Southeastern Europe by the Ottomans since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It would be erroneous, however, to take all those major events as entirely dominating, all-thinking and actions at that time, affecting every individual in pre-modern societies. Even on the highest political level, we find some people, such as Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), who did not agree with the traditional concept of crusading and opted for alternative methods of regaining access to Jerusalem by diplomatic means, and this very much to the chag
rin of the pope and the upper-church hierarchy.

  The second prong that I have pursued here consists of a critical reading of some of the greatest medieval philosophers who demonstrated great interest in reaching out to the representatives of other faiths and in convincing them in a rational fashion that Christianity was the only true faith. We would search in vain for forms of tolerance in the writings of Peter Abelard, Ramon Llull, or Nicholas of Cusa, but the framework that they subscribed to deserves careful attention. All three of them regarded the intellectual exchange as fundamental for all their strategic efforts. Such an exchange meant that they included, at least in an imaginary manner, speakers representing Judaism, Islam, and other religions. The outcome was always the same, of course, the demonstration that the Christian religion was the only true one and that the others were simply ignorant or blind in their thinking. These three philosophers assumed that it would be possible to develop such a rational argument about God and the divine message that Jews and Muslims, among others, would voluntarily abandon their traditional faith and convert to Christianity.

  Why would we then include those three authors in the current book? They did not practice tolerance, but they paid considerable respect to the vast variety of non-Christians, invited them, at least theoretically, to join a debate, and, hence, allowed them to present their own viewpoints, teachings, understanding, and beliefs. Here I recognize a great degree of toleration, which, therefore, explains the inclusion of those philosophers into the present investigations. Even though Abelard, Llull, and Nicholas represented the Christian Church without any doubt, and even though they developed their debate treatises with the explicit purpose of demonstrating the absolute truth of their own faith, they also believed in the philosophical foundations of all intellectual exchanges, giving equal chances to each speaker and paying full respect to their endeavors. In other words, here we come across a remarkable degree of openness and willingness to allow the religious and intellectual opponent to join the discussion, to speak up, and to explain in detail what their own concept of God entailed and why they wanted to maintain their own faith. In other words, these Christian philosophers demonstrated an impressive degree of respect for the others and illustrated for their audiences the only reasonable way of how to engage with Jews or Muslims, for instance, in a constructive manner.

  The third prong in this book consists of an in-depth investigation of sixteenth-century voices who were significantly involved in the Protestant Reformation and subsequent church history, but who soon found themselves on the other side of the, by then, suddenly rather orthodox and conservative Protestant authorities. In particular, I have focused on the writings by Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel, both of who turned into major sources of influence on subsequent generations. While Franck managed to express himself quite vocally and publicly, Weigel, who was the former’s disciple, kept silent for all of his life and maintained his profession as a priest in the provincial Zschopau in the Erzgebirge. However, posthumously, it turned out that he had been a prolific author and had written privately many important texts that, once they became known and were printed, soon began to exert considerable influence on other writers and thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  Curiously, Franck and Weigel did not essentially differ from the medieval philosophers insofar as they were devout Christians and demonstrated a very firm belief. However, both, certainly in striking parallel to the famous provocative theologian Sebastian (Sebastien) Castellio (1515–1563), argued vehemently against the use of force, favored a spiritual approach in the quest for God, refused to allow Church authorities to impose their political power on the faithful, and argued for a peaceful strategy in all religious exchanges. In fact, here we discover, once again, major spokespersons for toleration, though I would certainly admit that they did not argue for toleration in the modern sense.

  Altogether, as I need to repeat here once again, this project, as academic and philological it is supposed to be, based on very close readings of medieval and early modern texts, cannot hide its own political nature. It is, after all, predicated—and how else could it be in our day and age despite much rumbling on the far right of the spectrum?—on the firm belief that all our humanistic efforts must aim at strengthening our concepts of tolerance, human rights, intellectual and religious freedom, mutual respect, and peace. My intentions were to draw from a rich reservoir of medieval and early modern voices who made already early efforts to reach out to the representatives of other religions and races, embracing more toleration than many scholars have been willing to accept previously, and at times even early forms of true tolerance.

  Undoubtedly, the Christian Church strove very hard, at times brutally, to eradicate any other religion, any other pagan belief, practice, ritual, charms, etc., and much of medieval and early modern history is deeply determined by this ongoing struggle. But we must gain some distance to the world of the medieval Church as well and accept that there were many more individuals, groups, even whole societies that did not simply submit under this binary opposition of good versus evil, divine versus satanic, and truth versus illusion. Particularly literature proves to be a rich field where many voices could formulate alternative perspectives and ideals, where many more forms of intercultural exchanges and contacts could be practiced and explored, and where, consequently, significant forms of toleration could emerge, and this long before the eighteenth century. In fact, many of the famous enlightened philosophers, writers, artists, and politicians drew from medieval sources when they examined ways on how to develop innovative methods of tolerant interactions. I strongly suggest, hence, that the contemporary discourse on tolerance must rely also on the pre-modern voices both in literature, philosophy, and theology.

  In this regard, Medieval and Early Modern Studies can contribute in a rather meaningful manner to the currently ongoing debate about the role of academia for public life, the relevance of philology for modern political issues, and, thus, to the further development of the Western world in twenty-first-century society. The past is not simply a pillow for our heads to rest on, and then to put it away as something for aficionados of history only. The past proves to be virulent, provocative, foresightful, relevant, and influential even for our own culture, values, and thinking. Our own debate about toleration and tolerance is deeply anchored in the same debate as it emerged already in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, and this within a deeply Christian world.

  Bibliography

  A Companion to Medieval Christian Humanism: Essays on Principle Thinkers, ed. John P. Bequette. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, 69 (Boston, MA and Leiden: Brill, 2016).

  A Companion to Mediterranean History, ed. Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita. Wiley Blackwell Companions to European History (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014).

  A Companion to Wolfram’s ‘Parzival’, ed. Will Hasty. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999).

  (Abelard, Peter) Petrus Abaelardus, Dialogus inter Philosophum, Iudaeum, et Christianum. Textkritische Edition von Rudolf Thomas (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann, 1970).

  Abelard, Peter, A Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew, and a Christian, trans. Pierre J. Payer. Mediaeval Sources in Translation, 20 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979).

  Ablehnung, Duldung, Anerkennung: Toleranz in den Niederlanden und in Deutschland, ein historischer und aktueller Vergleich, ed. Horst Lademacher, Renate Loos, and Simon Groenveld. Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur Nordwesteuropas, 9 (Münster, Munich, Berlin, and New York: Waxmann, 2004).

  Abou-El-Ela, Nadia, Ôwê nu des mordes, der dâ geschach ze bêder sît: Die Feindbildkonzeption in Wolframs “Willehalm” und Usamas “Kitāb al-i’ibār”. Bibliotheca academica, 7 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2001).

  Achnitz, Wolfgang, Babylon und Jerusalem: Sinnkonstituierung im “Reinfried von Braunschweig” und im “Apollonius von Tyrland” Heinrichs von Neustadt. Hermaea. Germanistische Forschu
ngen, Neue Folge, 98 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002).

  Adams, Robert, “Langland’s Theology,” A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkely, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), 7–114.

  Aigle, Denise, The Mongol Empire Between Myth and Reality: Studies in Anthropological History. Iran Studies, 11 (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2014).

  Akasoy, Anna A., “Zur Toleranz gegenüber dem Islam bei Lullus und Cusanus,” Ramon Llull und Nikolaus von Kues: Eine Begegnung im Zeichen der Toleranz: Akten des Internationalen Kongresses zu Ramon Llull und Nikolaus von Kues (Brixen und Bozen, 25.–27. November 2004), ed. Ermenegildo Bidese, Alexander Fidora, and Paul Renner. Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia; 46 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 105–24.

  Alfonsi, Petrus, Dialogue against the Jews; Dialogus contra Iudaeos, trans. Resnick. The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation, 8 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006).

  Almond, Ian, Two Faiths, one Banner: When Muslims Marched with Christians Across Europe’s Battlegrounds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  Althoff, Gerd, “Otto IV. – Woran scheiterte der welfische Traum vom Kaisertum?,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 43 (2009): 199–214.

  Ambiguität im Mittelalter: Formen zeitgenössischer Reflexion und interdisziplinärer Rezeption, ed. Oliver Auge and Christiane Witthöft. Trends in Medieval Philology, 30 (Berlin and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter, 2016).