Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ not make error any less culpable. And because Luther usually saw Anabaptists as rebels who deserved secular punishment anyway, there was much less to his proclaimed tolerance than met the eye.¹⁵

      But the idea did not disappear. It would resurface in two streams, one philosophical, the other practical. The fountainhead of the philosophical tradition was Sebastian Castellio, a Protestant refugee in Geneva who fell out bitterly with John Calvin. It was Castellio who made the execution of Miguel Servetus notorious. He argued that it was simply wrong in principle to kill someone for their beliefs, even someone as offensive as Servetus. Castellio’s appeal to freedom of conscience was idiosyncratic in its day, but it was taken up in the seventeenth century and in the 1690s was canonized by two of Protestantism’s greatest philosophers, John Locke and Pierre Bayle.

      This tradition is inspiring but had its limits. Castellio famously argued that “to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man”. Like Luther, he believed that compulsion was wrong, not that freedom of belief was right. He argued, “I must be saved by my own faith and not that of another.” So religious compulsion is futile, but religious error is fatal. It is an oddly callous argument: my neighbor is hurtling towards hell, and I will do nothing about it. Locke’s famous Letter Concerning Toleration is similarly measured. His core argument for religious tolerance is indebted to Luther’s two kingdoms: princes simply do not have authority over their subjects’ souls, because souls are under God’s jurisdiction alone and no earthly power can compel them. But this does not mean an open-ended right to believe whatever you want. Princes can legitimately stamp out opinions that are dangerous to other people – such as Catholicism, the religion of bloodthirsty plots. Likewise, they can persecute atheism, not merely because atheists were assumed to be antisocial monsters, but because they had by definition denied God’s authority over their souls, making it legitimate for princes to step in. The tolerance that Castellio and Locke taught was real, honourable, and costly, but it was a long way from what we would now recognize as genuine religious freedom.¹⁶

      What gave their ideas increasing traction was the other, more pragmatic stream of Protestant toleration, arising chiefly from the experience of persecution. There was no logical reason why Protestants could not demand religious freedom for themselves while denying it to others. If error has a duty to tolerate truth, truth does not therefore have a duty to tolerate error. In practice, however, because Protestants made so much of tales of Catholic cruelty, it was only natural to try to differentiate themselves from their oppressors.

      One dramatic way to do this was simply to refuse to kill people for their beliefs, a principle the Dutch rebels made their own. It was a moral stance but also a prudent one, because it reassured the Netherlands’ wildly plural religious communities that they would be safe under Calvinist rule. When the new Dutch Republic was established in 1581, “freedom of conscience” became one of its guiding principles. Again, it is important to be clear what this “freedom” meant. The Dutch Republic had an established Calvinist church, and non-Calvinists’ civil rights were restricted. Catholics were permitted simply to practice their religion in private, without larger gatherings and certainly without the services of priests. Until 1648, the Dutch were locked in a war of survival against their former Catholic rulers, and Catholics were sometimes the targets of vicious reprisals.

      Yet the Netherlands was by the early seventeenth century the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan territory on earth. Any real religious intolerance would be terrible for business. In the 1630s, the city of Amsterdam allowed both Lutherans and Jews to build public places for worship. The freedoms granted to Jews were particularly astonishing at the time, not least to the city’s Jews themselves. Visitors to the city goggled at the synagogue, just as they do today at the red-light district and coffee shops. Not everyone was impressed. The English poet Andrew Marvell wrote:

      Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew,

      Staple of sects and mint of schism . . .

      That bank of conscience, where not one so strange

      Opinion but finds credit, and exchange.¹⁷

      As he insinuated, it was commercial interest rather than principle that had made the rapid growth of Amsterdam’s Jewish community possible. Jews brought lucrative trading links, and they posed no real threat. Like the Lutherans, all of whom were German or Scandinavian, the Jews were understood to be a self-contained community of foreigners. They could be used to demonstrate Dutch tolerance without any risk that they would start winning converts.

      Not that the indigenous population was short of choices. Although the Dutch Republic was officially Calvinist, only a minority of the population, perhaps a fifth, were formal members of the Calvinist church. Another third or more were loosely affiliated, attending services and bringing their children to baptism without accepting the discipline that went with full membership. The rest were scattered between all churches and none. Mixed marriages and opportunistic conversions were widespread. One bewildered visitor to the Netherlands in 1618 stayed with a family where the mother and daughter were Calvinist, the father and son Catholic, the grandmother Anabaptist, and the uncle a Jesuit priest.¹⁸ The Dutch did not have freedom of religion in the modern sense, and many, even most of them still believed that in principle a Christian society should enjoy religious unity. Even so, the achievement of Dutch religious liberty during the seventeenth century remains astonishing.

      Can Protestantism claim that achievement? Certainly no Catholic territory could have managed such a thing. But Protestants neither had set out to achieve this nor were particularly proud of having done so. Protestant pluralism emerged in practice before it was articulated in theory. The principled pursuit of religious unity had taken France to the brink of ruin in the sixteenth century, and Germany over it in the seventeenth. Meanwhile, the Netherlands had become the richest society in the world. The single-minded pursuit of religious unity might have been ideal, but for many people it was better to be rich.

      The most obvious Protestant beneficiaries of this policy were the radicals. The watershed moment for Anabaptists was the disaster at Münster in 1534–35, where an apocalyptic, utopian revolution had ended in a mass slaughter. After that, while a few still nursed violent fantasies, most radicals chose different paths. Two alternatives were open to them. One party of post-Münster Anabaptists withdrew into mysticism and into hiding, cutting themselves off from a world from which they expected nothing and to which they owed nothing. They would not fight, but they would deceive, feigning outward conformity while awaiting their deliverance. In 1544, their prophet David Joris moved incognito to the eclectic metropolis of Basel, where he lived out his life, continuing to publish works of mystical piety while remaining anonymous. Only in 1559, three years after his death, was his identity uncovered, at which point his body was exhumed and burned.¹⁹

      Joris’s exposure sent a thrill of fear around Europe. Who knew how many others remained hidden, binding each other to secrecy with devilish rites? Another mystical sect of Dutch origins, known by the sinister name the Family of Love, sparked a wave of panic in England in the early 1580s precisely because its members were almost impossible to detect. Familists called each other simply by their initials, and so although it eventually became plain that they had friends at Queen Elizabeth’s court, it was impossible to establish the identity of the disciple they called “E.R.”: not, we may assume, the queen herself. Familists conformed outwardly in all things, merely gathering to whisper forbidden doctrines. Movements like this terrified contemporaries, but their very secrecy doomed them to marginal status. It was very hard for underground sects to attract converts at all. They could even die out without anyone noticing that they had gone.²⁰

      A different path was chosen by Menno Simons, a Dutch Anabaptist whose Mennonite movement survives to the present. Simons preached pacifism and non-compliance with a positively suicidal integrity. Mennonites quickly became renowned for their readiness to lay down their lives for their faith and their refusal to lift a finger to fight for it. It was this small community, not the more numerous and more СКАЧАТЬ