THE PLACE OF God in the constitution has been one of the most sensitive issues in the debate on the constitutional treaty of the European Union, and this has influenced the process of ratification.
1 In the five decades since the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, European leaders have tried to build a united Europe on a
secular foundation of treaties and economic regulations. These no longer seem to be adequate to the task. Lately, efforts have been made to include another factor—
religion. In 2006 Chancellor Merkel spoke in favor of a
reference to God in the European constitution; her views were opposed by secularist France and received with warm support by Spain, Italy, Ireland, Slovakia, and Poland.
2
The debate on the EU treaty occurs in a time of religious renaissance and testifies to the transformation of the liberal culture from a project of ideological secularization to one that is willing to encourage the encounter between the secular and the religious.
3 In Jürgen Habermas’s words, “Western culture has witnessed a transformation of religious consciousness since the Reformation and the Enlightenment” that can be described as a “modernization” of religious discourse; it has also witnessed a parallel transformation of secular consciousness from an intransigent secularism to a “respectful sensibility for the possible existential significance of religion.”
4 This comprehensive transformation was facilitated by the liberal framework of modern democratic societies, which has encouraged a renaissance of social concord on a new terrain, one in which the sacred and the profane are no longer estranged from each other but equal participants in the making of a more inclusive and unified public sphere. It is accurate to say that the ideal of Concordia is the
koiné of contemporary secular Europe.
5Preceding the secular transformation of the state and liberal toleration, the humanist ideal of Concordia relied on the premise that religion was the leading feature of Europe’s collective identity and the foundation of its political order; it prompted the belief that “discord on religious issues would engender the worst possible disorders and the gravest enmities among men.”
6 This ideal engaged Christian philosophers like Erasmus of Rotterdam and politicians like Catherine de’ Medici and was steered by the conviction that public dialogue among representatives of opposite Christian denominations would be possible and, in addition, would allow them to overcome their divisions, reach a deeper unity, and secure a perpetual peace. Sixteenth-century Concordia thus meant “harmony and unison of minds and hearts”; its opposite was error and discord, conflict of ideas and between minds and hearts. The art of eloquence and the strategy of dialogue upon which the humanists relied presumed such a consensus of values.
In this chapter I propose a critical examination of this ideal and inquire as to what went wrong with it. My purpose is to spread some grain of skepticism toward the enthusiastic welcome of religions in the public sphere of contemporary democratic societies and call attention instead to the limits of dialogue, rational scrutiny, and persuasion, when issues that involve religious creeds are at stake, and the role of pluralism in the preservation of individual freedom of conscience and social peace. I shall revisit the humanist project of Concordia and the reasons that made its theorists and believers unable to fulfill the promise of fostering the “spiritual unity” of Europe. Christian humanists thought it possible to achieve dialogic cooperation for truth seeking without removing theological dogmas from public forum. But, as we shall see in the analysis of the exemplary case of the Colloquy of Poissy (1560–61), that assumption produced the opposite: it jeopardized the humanists’ irenic goal, radicalized religious disagreements, and opened the door to the wars of religions.
I first briefly reconstruct the historical-political context within which preliberal tolerance emerged and the humanist ideal of Christian Concord ac-squired the meaning of a spiritual and political
koiné to be achieved through rational conviction in frank and open dialogue; next I elucidate the differences between that rendering of dialogue and tolerance of dissent and its classical background, namely, Cicero’s philosophy of universal concord. This will allow me to set the contextual and theoretical premises for analyzing the case of the colloquy for reconciliation of religious disagreements that was held in Poissy a few years before the massacre of the Huguenots. It will appear that the acceptance of pluralism, which is the necessary premise of both freedom of religion and social peace, in fact requires a skeptical attitude and demands a suspension of dialogue and the acceptance of the other, without an attempt to overcome divisions or differences. The recognition of the boundaries that separate persuasion from proselytism intersects with the awareness of the limits of dialogue. This was the insight coming from Jean Bodin, who maintained, as we shall see by the end of the chapter, that religions can hardly be conducive of social unity and harmony when and if their truths are thrown in the public arena as criteria for making decisions on right and wrong.
SUFFERING DIFFERENCE, PERMITTING PLURALISM
CUIUS REGIO, EIUS RELIGIO
Religious pluralism was Christian Europe’s most arduous achievement. Its de facto recognition came from the secular authority for reasons that were, strictly speaking, mundane and pertained to the preservation of civil peace and the regulation of social interactions among Catholics and Protestants. Beginning with the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the formula
cuius regio, eius religio symbolized the attempt to reestablish domestic and international peace after the schism. In the course of several national councils that took place in the German territories and in France a few years after Martin Luther’s break (1517), that formula was later on rendered as “one faith, one law, one king,” a doctrine that reached its apogee at the end of the wars of religions with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648).
7 It was revered at least until the revolutionary turn prompted by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The politics of rights and the doctrine of the wall between church and state put an end to both toleration as state politics and the humanist ideal of Concordia Christiana as a political project.
8Cuius regio, eius religio had a huge impact in the debates on the authority of the civil power in religious issues and on the destiny of Christian concord. It was meant to give secular authorities the power to contain social unrests by regulating contention over religious practices (yet not dogmas) that the geographical proximity of Catholics and Protestants provoked. It was conceived as a temporarily valid remedy, though. The long-term and ideal solution was that of restoring Concordia Christiana, a goal that enjoyed strong support among theologians, philosophers, and politicians in the early stage of the Reformation.
9
Clearly, the formula
cuius regio, eius religio had implications that were unequivocally antipluralistic at the state level (territorialization of each religion), but pluralistic at the continental level (territorialization of state sovereignty). Predictably, therefore, it was met with opposition by medieval cosmopolitan institutions like the Church of Rome (“How dare one nation alter the Church’s ordinances?”) and the empire (Charles V opposed it in the name of “universal monarchy”).
10 Concordia was the political and theological response against that formula. It was meant to provide an ultimate solution to the two challenges for which that
statist formula was devised: the exigency of social peace and the given fact of pluralism of faiths. Thus it made room for realistic prudence in cases in which dogmatic principles (the so-called fundamentals of faith) were not at stake, but faced religious pluralism with hostility, as a scandal to be stopped or a sin to be repaired. Supporters of Concordia opposed their idea of unity against models of empire that were based on religious pluralism, like the Ottoman Empire or the old Roman Empire.
11Yet doubts about the likelihood of the renewal of religious concord surfaced very soon. For instance, in a meeting that the Estates General of Orleans held in the winter 1560–61 to deal with the civil unrest caused by conflicts between Catholics and Calvinists, Michel de L’Hospital, a remarkable humanist, chancellor of Catherina de’ Medici (the regent of the French crown), and leader of the “Politique” party in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, defended the formula
cuius regio, eius religio as a strategy for peace: “La division des langues ne fait la séparation des royaumes, mais celle de la religion et des lois, qui d’un royaume en fait deux. De là sort le vieil proverb, Une foy, une loy, un roy. Et est difficile que les hommes étant en telle diversité et contrariété d’opinions, se puissent contenir de venir aux armes: car la guerre, comme dit le poète, suit de près, et accompagne discorde et débat.”
12 Yet although L’Hospital’s words enjoyed wide support in the meeting, some of the delegates were skeptical about the overcoming of pluralism in a new Christian concord. To the Abby Jacques Bienassis, the general vicar of Tours, no alternative seemed feasible in the short term to the fact that France was “to suffer [the presence of] two religions” and any political answer to such a division should start from this basic recognition.
13 Suffering religious difference,
permitting pluralism—this was the very first step toward the recognition of religious freedom and pluralism. In the following section I will examine that early appearance of toleration within Concordia, which I propose to call toleration before liberal toleration.
TOLERATION BEFORE LIBERAL TOLERATION
Toleration developed well before its liberal codification. It made its appearance in a cultural milieu that was opposite of religious indifference and in which spiritual unity was regarded as a supreme good for individuals and communities. Toleration before liberal toleration was a composite phenomenon whose meaning and practices were rooted in antiquity (and Stoicism in particular) and the Middle Ages.
14 The advent of the Reformation, and the traumatic experience of the wars of religion, contributed to changing both its meaning and practice. But in the sixteenth century, before it became an indication of individual liberty of conscience—as in John Locke’s formulation—toleration consisted in state policy and a social practice and in both cases was perceived as provisional acceptance of religious difference.
Toleration consisted in a politics of edicts of “clemency” by civil authorities;
tolerance was a virtue that allowed for a practice of dialogue among believers.
Toleration acquired a legal meaning as “approbation” of the practice of a minority religion by civil authority with the view of managing conflicts between communities of believers. In sixteenth-century France, for instance, “until” the monarch did not give his approval, a minority confession was temporarily tolerated in the sense that the state suspended its coercive interference with it. As an anticipation of negative liberty, preliberal toleration designated a sphere of human actions that was legally “indifferent” and in this sense free because the state ignored it. This noninterference would cease at the sovereign’s discretion whenever it was accompanied by social intolerance and unrest. Toleration was a state policy and, moreover, a “provisional freedom of religion” (
liberté provisoire de religion) that the state accorded in order to allow believers “to live in peace … while waiting for the council.”
15 But by the time the Council of Trent ended (1563), hopes for reconciliation had faded away, and at that point pluralism was a reality the politics of toleration registered and justified without trying to overcome—liberal toleration as modus vivendi may be understood to start then.
Tolerance denoted the individual’s moral and psychological disposition toward benevolence and respect, virtues essential for dialogue. As a social practice, it was professed and performed in the numerous councils that were held by elite representatives of the various Christian denominations in order to overcome their divisions (the Colloquy of Poissy was an example). This kind of tolerance too was foreign to the spirit of what would later on characterize liberal toleration because it made theological discussion and thus “suffering” of dissent, “a means to a higher end: religious reconciliations.”
16 It was not obtained by taking theology out of public dialogue, or making religion a personal or private business, but was intended to be an appreciation of theology as a communal grammar for achieving agreement: the dialogue it promoted was meant to be epistemic since its goal was to demonstrate divine truth with logical discussion and in this way put an end to disagreement on fundamentals of faith.
To conclude, the aim of toleration before liberal toleration was dual: the attainment of social peace by imposing state authority over religious communities and the practice of benevolence toward, although not acceptance of, religious difference.
17 This made it the opposite of a secularist project, as for instance, toleration during the Enlightenment, but also not naturally disposed toward liberal toleration as an art of separation of spheres because it was inspired by an ideal of community rather than individual freedom of conscience. Toleration before liberal toleration was internal to religious discourse and conceived not as a process that would help the differentiation of the spheres of life, but as one that was meant to promote an articulation of those spheres within a unitary horizon of meaning and value that was profoundly religious. Toleration as a state practice was thus not necessarily followed by a practice of tolerance by the believers.
18 In fact, its endorsement by the state or civil authority meant that subjects holding different religious faiths did not tolerate each other, because they did not accept disagreement on issues of faith. When that acceptance finally became a given fact, religious concord as a political project faded away.
DOCTRINAL FLUIDITY
Catholic authorities (the empire and the Church of Rome) dealt with religious pluralism by means of a complex strategy that was simultaneously against
external threats of division (Protestant churches) and against
internal ones (heresies, the target of an old battle within Catholicism to be revived in the years of Reformation).
19 It is worth stressing however that while pluralism was opposed at the doctrinal level, realistic prudence and accommodation, particularly in the domain of jurisprudence and municipal administration, played an important role as an avenue toward a permitted practice of tolerance in civil relations. Historians have thus spoken of “fluidity and uncertainty” when describing the status of intolerance and relations among Christian denominations in the years that preceded the wars of religion. For instance, in the case of imperial authority, on some important occasions the implementation of its decisions at the local level was left to the discretion of civil magistrates; this could, and actually did, entail the possibility of moderate decisions and even tolerance of non-Catholic practices.
20The practice of “prudence” reflected the condition of social and religious “fluidity,” which was testified by an interesting and far from uncommon phenomenon: the conversions or the changing of denominations by Catholics and Protestants alike, which was partly the result of a sincere renewal in spiritual searching and partly the effect of a reasonable difficulty for believers to have a reliable knowledge of the various new Christian confessions and their specificities. But the implications of fluidity were predictable in light of the two above-mentioned approaches by secular and religious authorities. On the one hand, changing denomination was in conflict with the dogmatic identification of religions as well as with the formula
cuius regio, eius religio, but, on the other hand, it encouraged the idea that the rebirth of Christian unity was possible and close at hand. In addition, such complexity and fluidity was testified by another important phenomenon that characterized the early stage of Reformation and overlapped with the philosophy of Concordia: Nicodemism.
With the official intention of reconciling Christian theologies, some radical ecumenists started practicing a strategy of “programmed religious simulation,” a move that acquired very soon the character of a philosophical project of radical humanism rather than religious concord. Reformers were particularly worried by what they saw as an infiltration among their believers of libertines and rationalists whose philosophical disquisitions of religious texts were seen as attempts against religion in and of itself, although played in the name of universalism and harmony. As historians have shown, the dogmatic rigidity of John Calvin (who in 1544 published his
Excuse à Messieurs les Nicodemites) in matters of ritual, ceremony, and what he himself had once denounced as a Catholic cult for externality was a reaction against precisely that condition of philosophical fluidity.
21 Reformed Christians propelled and necessarily practiced a “politics of identity” that could not be reconciled with Concordia, which they endorsed more as an honorable ideal than as a desired project. The politics of dialogue, which inspired the several councils for religious reconciliation and began in the first half of the sixteenth century, was therefore a failure from the start because, if successful, it would entail the overcoming of dogmatic pluralism (and Reformed churches). Indeed, as we shall see, those dialogues were meant to achieve not merely the “mutual edification” of a common religion but moreover the “demonstration” and acceptance of some fundamental principles of faith in relation to which only temporary forbearance was granted.
22 Dialogues were for the sake of conviction, more than simply conversation, because differences were conceived and treated as indications of error and imperfection.
In a study on religious simulation in the sixteenth century, Carlo Ginzburg has demonstrated that starting from the perspective of spirituality as the true mark of religious faith regardless of rituals and dogmas it would not be hard to dissolve Christianity in a natural religion. This radical irenicism would destroy all positive religions and lead the believers beyond the distinction of confessions and toward a view of the divine that would be purely philosophical, a conclusion that Christian humanists (certainly Erasmus) foresaw and rejected.
23 Secular humanism and Christian humanism competed on the terrain of Concordia, the one by advancing a pantheist perspective and the other by reaffirming a transcendent one; of the two, the latter played certainly a much more prominent role in shaping the destiny of modern Europe. To it we should pay attention if we want to understand the politics of theological dialogue for reconciliation and its failure, at the eve of the wars of religion.
The doctrine of Concordia Christiana acquired momentum after the movement of conciliarism. Whereas the latter represented a request of participation in the government of the Church, the former was meant to be a remedy to the risk of the Church’s dismemberment. In political terminology we might say that conciliarism embodied a request for democracy and concord one of sovereign authority.
24 The philosophy of concord built on the Neoplatonic ideal of a polyphonic unity of believers and regarded Christians’ accord as the supreme good that alone could keep society in peace. Irenicism was the best product of the Renaissance’s ideal of the unity of the world—“
Pax philosophiae and
Pax fidei”—and was embedded in the universalism of such quattrocento personalities as Pico della Mirandola and, above all, Nicholas of Cusa.
25Nicholas of Cusa, writing in the context of the Council of Basel (1433), thus before the Reform, regarded
concordantia as a restoration of a divine harmony in the Church, the overcoming of the reasons of discord that followed the dual papacy (Avignon and Rome) and resided in the mixing of temporal and spiritual power: on the one hand, the contestation of pontifical and clerical officials for raising taxes to support the curia and the clergy, on the other, the tension between the Roman center and the localities when bishops had to be appointed. Cusa depicted discord as a lack of consent between the Church’s highest hierarchy and the members of the religious communities. Concordia was then a quest of preservation of unity through a regaining of legitimacy. Hence Cusa stated three principles of
concordantia: harmony; consensus; acceptance. Harmony was the inspiring principle, consensus through dialogue the means to acquire it, and acceptance of the truth the celebration of the restored authority. These spiritual and theological features were rooted in the Christian Neoplatonist idea of harmony as a divine work of creation that humans could grasp through faith (and a reason that was enlightened by faith). “There can be only one wisdom. For if it were possible for there to be plural wisdoms, they would have to derive from one wisdom, for before all plurality is unity.”
26 In this divine work, variety of forms was a manifestation of the divine, complementary to the good of the whole. Concordia held for nature as well as for the Church, which was also made of a gradation and diversification of functions (hierarchy) for the good of the general (on this idea the distinction between fundamentals and nonfundamentals of faith rested). The analogy with marriage (
agape) was paradigmatic: men and wife created a
consensus communis within which the good of the whole came first and as a result of their components’ responsible participation.
27 These were, in brief, the foundations of the philosophical view that inspired the councils for reconciliation after the Reformation, that is to say, when the schism was an incontrovertible fact and the unity of Christianity broken.
Within this new scenario, differences among Christians became an obstacle to be overcome when they pertained to ideas and practices that would contradict the “essentials of faith.” Differences were accepted as manifestations of local traditions and rituals, practical variations within a common doctrinal system. They were an enrichment of the divine unity of Christianity if conceived and practiced as complementary to the good of the whole.
Adiaphora—or “things that make no difference”—was the name for those nonfundamentals of faith that were taken to be not decisive in the moral and religious life of an individual and could thus be tolerated and openly practiced.
28 They were “external” to doctrinal theology and for this reason indifferent to the main goal of doctrinal unity. Actually, Cusa, who was also one of the earliest proponents of a hermeneutical approach to religious texts, interpreted
concordantia of the essentials of faith as appreciation of theology beyond Christianity itself (although not monotheism). To him, for instance, the Qur’an was not merely a moral and ethical code of a people, but first of all a “book of doctrines” that should be appreciated as such by all believers.
Cusa’s humanism was as much unitary as Erasmus’s since it did not contain any invitation to secularize religious discourse and pluralize loyalties; the message it conveyed was that of “finding the presence of the Gospel in all other religions,” of seeing all religions as expressions of humans’ longing for transcendence.
29 This was also the main inspiration of Erasmus’s work, which became the most authoritative source of catholicity in the age of the councils for reconciliation. “The sum and substance of our religion,” Erasmus wrote in 1523, “is peace and concord. This can hardly remain the case unless we define as few matters as possible and leave each individual’s judgment free on many questions.”
30
Only men, who above all other species should agree with one another and who need mutual understanding most of all, cannot be united in mutual love
by nature (so powerful everywhere else), nor by training, nor by all the advantages to be anticipated from concord, nor even by awareness of the many evils resulting from war. Only this one animal is capable of speech, and the best reconciler of conflicting needs; he has also been granted the seeds of science and virtue, an intelligence which is gentle in itself and naturally inclines him to benevolence. Just look at all the ways in which nature herself persuades us toward agreement. Not content with the allurements of mutual benevolence, she makes harmonious relations not only convenient but necessary. Thus she divided up the gifts of body and mind in such a way that nobody has them all, or so many that he may not some time need help from another, however insignificant. In all these different ways, nature teaches us peace and concord.
31
In these words by Erasmus (a premonition of Immanuel Kant’s perpetual peace) are contained the main ingredients of humanist Concordia operating in the sixteenth century: a) the idea that the condition of the unity of mankind is written within human nature (human beings are members of one common species); b) the idea that differences among human beings are varieties that develop from within their commonality as an enrichment of it, not a reason for divorce; c) the idea that the arts of language along with reason and the virtues of civility and benevolence are qualities that the moderns should take from the ancients; d) the idea that peace as harmony is the destiny of mankind; and e) the idea that religion is a road to harmony, not to conflicts and divisions. The first four of these aspects testified to the humanists’ belonging in the Latin tradition of civil eloquence, the latter was instead what most characterized Christian humanism’s Concordia and also, as we shall see, the reason for its failure.
The Latin tradition of eloquence, in particular Cicero’s and Quintilian’s, was consistently based on Hellenistic universalism and the philosophy of natural equality of human beings as creatures that were able to understand justice and interact by speech, thus naturally disposed toward peace and dialogue, two goals that civil government had the duty to promote or not hinder.
32 It was also ingrained in a moderate skeptical approach that allowed probability and the acceptance of approximations of the truth rather than dogmatic assertions of it. Verisimilitude was the Ciceronian attitude toward achieving truth. Concordia and dialogue or harmony via open discourse were two crucial and intertwined ideals that the ancients bequeathed to the humanists. Let us examine them.
CLASSICAL AND HUMANIST CONCORDIA
Concordia entailed an ideal of peace that was not identical with the kind of peace that states or strangers could reach. In the ancient world, where the
poleis were in permanent conflict with only temporary intervals of peace, war was an ever present feature of relations between them, a constant and mutual disposition to destroy the enemy or at least weaken it. The logic of relations between states was the law of the strongest, which made peace an always precarious truce among equal partners. But domestic society was not supposed to follow that logic, because conflicts between neighbors could easily degenerate into brutal and radical violence. Concord (
homonoia), then, was not seen as international peace (
eirene), but as peace within the city. Indeed the unity of the city required a much more robust peace than that entailed by a truce between previous enemies; the reason was that of avoiding fratricidal wars that would tear apart the polis and decree its death.
In classical times this terrifying possibility was frequently invoked to justify exceptional political measures, as in the case of the Thirty Tyrants who justified their coup d’état in 403
BC as a necessary means to put an end to conflicts that divided the Athenians or, as in the case of the Romans who resorted to the supreme good of concord (
salus rei publicae) to justify the institution of dictatorship. Dialogue was the strategy to solve disagreements among citizens or members of the same state, a method that relied only on the force of reason and persuasion. In extreme cases of divisions, other strategies besides dialogue were also adopted for restoring concord, like amnesty and oblivion. Finally, in situations of devastating conflicts, when concord was lost, harmony could become the name of a myth or even a utopia. For instance, in the bloody century that preceded the end of the Roman republic,
concordia ordinum converted into the myth that gave Augustus’s empire a moral legitimacy.
33 Likewise, whereas before the Reformation
concordantia was a feasible goal (Cusa thought it was), once the wars of religion buried Concordia Christiana, harmony persisted as a myth to reemerge under various features, religious or secular, from the Enlightenment idea of a perpetual peace to the unity of Europe and the ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council in the twentieth century.
The Christian humanists’ source of inspiration was Rome and, moreover, the philosophy of Cicero, who spoke of
civitas as a “spirit of harmony and tastes” that existed when “the interests of all [were] the same” because “discord arises from conflicting interests” (
ex utilititatis varietatibus, cum aliis aliud expediat, nasci discordias).
34 Cicero did not intend to say that all citizens must be perfectly equal in order for the city to enjoy Concordia. He thought instead that inequalities of social status and public honors were variations essential to the making of a just and harmonious society. But inequalities should stir recognition and emulation, not envy or resentment.
35 In sum, Republican Concordia entailed not identical status or sameness but some identity of values or an ethical unity that would make all the citizens
feel justly treated regardless of their different social condition and inequality.
Concordia animi is the right way of reading Cicero’s appeal to unity.
Clearly, Concordia was a project to be continuously reinforced through civic education or by instilling communal values, relying upon the historical memories of the republic, and constructing exemplary models of virtuous citizens.
36 Cicero rendered harmony as love, or
caritas, or the condition for civic tranquillity and a life without fear that could exist
only among citizens, not with the barbarians or the foreigners because it presumed a commonalty of language and laws, of traditions and ethical values, conditions without which dialogue could not take place, but only violence and war.
37 As with conversation among friends, dialogue among citizens was meant to prepare for and cultivate peace as harmony.
Sixteenth-century humanists applied Cicero’s ideas to Christianity and endorsed his maxim of
struggle against the factions as necessary premise for avoiding the dilacerations of the
Res publica Christiana. Christians fighting against Christians, wrote Erasmus, is equivalent to “fratricide” within the republic. Like civil war, religious war “creates its own priests, bishops, and even cardinals,” thinkers and activists who perpetrate hatred, hostility, and division. Thus concord was meant to counter both actual seditious and doctrinal disagreements and to create peace among equals by overcoming disagreements and reinforcing rather than questioning the “spiritual unity” of European Christians.
38 As a consequence, religious toleration was acceptable only as a means for theological and ethical reunification; in fact, to some scholars it was “a choice for the lesser of two evils.”
39 To understand the reasons for Concordia’s failure we have to turn to its practical component, namely, the role of dialogue in the handling of disagreement.
DIALOGUE AND THE CONSTRAIN OF TIME
Cicero dealt with disagreement in relation to disputes within philosophical schools and among philosophers, not within religious churches and among theologians. This difference is paramount, as we shall see in this section. Cicero argued that when agreement was not possible the individual participant in a philosophical debate (
sermo) could freely decide to follow his own judgment, if his philosophical school did not offer him any secure guidance on how to solve the conflict between basic assumptions. “But let everyone defend his views, for judgment is free: I shall cling to my rule and without being tied to the laws of any single school of thought which I feel bound to obey, shall always search for the most probable solution in every problem.”
40 Cicero did not, of course, intend to say that philosophers should be free in all their opinions or tolerant of all beliefs. His theory of disagreement and the distinction between truth and probability relied upon a basic agreement on what human reasonability (or republican values) was, as we said earlier.
Yet the rules of eloquence were dictated by prudence (
decorum), which contended that the orator should accommodate himself to the character of the audience and avoid imposing a standard of certainty on materials that had do with conviction and persuasion. Cicero’s philosophical school was the Academy, whose basic moderate skepticism was equally distant from Pyrrhonism or absolute skepticism on the one hand and Platonism on the other. Probability instead of total suspension of judgment and arguing
in utramque partem instead of dogmatic assertiveness were the basic rules of the Academy and civil eloquence.
41 A moderate skepticism was for Cicero the key to the continuation of dialogue: “The philosophers of the Academy have been wise in withholding their consent from any proposition that has not been proved. There is nothing worse than a hasty judgment, and nothing could be more unworthy of the dignity and integrity of a philosopher than to adopt a false opinion or to maintain as certain some theory which has not been fully explored and understood.”
42Let us now consider the rules of rhetoric. Notice the difference in Cicero’s theory between oratory in contestation environments (like a court or a political assembly) in which decisions must be made within a certain time and do not require necessarily unanimity and conversation (
sermo) in “social gatherings, in informal discussions, and in intercourse with friends,” which could go on forever and whose aim is consensus.
43 The former were the site of oratory (judicial and deliberative) while the latter was the site of dialogue or conversation to deal with philosophical questions that were ungraspable by ordinary persons and not to be dealt with by strategic persuasion or resolved by a vote.
44 Moreover, the appropriate places for oratory were large gatherings, but dialogue occurred in small symposia. Whereas rhetoric fits the masses, conversation is for the few. In the case of the humanists, colloquies or councils were the places in which dialogue was performed; it excluded rhetoric and was meant to be a frank and rational discussion among competent theologians to achieve a consensus that was comprehensive and thorough. Finally, as Cicero distinguished between genres of oratory and discussion, he also distinguished between what was fundamental and what was nonfundamental or open to toleration; humanists based theological dialogue on a prior distinction between fundamentals of faith and nonfundamentals of faith. Regarding the former, agreement should go unquestioned, while in the latter disagreement could be accepted and tolerance was not an issue. Dialogues were held in order to restore agreement on the former. In a word, humanists applied Cicero’s rules and maxims of philosophical dialogue to theological disputations.
45Sixteenth-century humanists were “men of faith” who regarded Concordia as an ideal toward which human life must tend as toward its supreme good, as with the ideal marriage, it was never a given but always a goal, a tendency, and a permanent process of faith renewal; the relationship among believers was supposed to follow the same logic. The moral justification of tolerance within Concordia was that of a
permanent effort “of ratifications, subtractions, additions, and accommodations.”
46 Its Ciceronian equivalent was indeed
sermo, or the informal discussion between friends or philosophical interlocutors. Yet adaptation and accommodation were not for the sake of combination or syncretism, as with Cicero. Humanists like Erasmus were repelled by oxymoronic and hybrid unions as well as by indifferentism. All these were examples of monstrosities, like the ancient myths of the Centaur, Chiron, or the Chimera; negative myths that Erasmus used to represent the inconstant and fickle individual as opposed to the virtuous one who practiced the ethics of coherence.
47 In sum, the humanists’ revision and adaptation of Cicero’s philosophy to make it fit theology entailed a departure from classical Hellenism and became the main source of problems in the colloquies between Catholic and Protestant theologians. “This is the difference between the searching of a person of faith and of a philosopher: the former searches that which he has already found, the latter does not sometime find even that which he had intensely searched.”
48In their attempt to distinguish between humanist toleration and liberal toleration and rescue the former from oblivion and misunderstanding, Gary Remer and Cary Nederman have stressed the link between the classical tradition and the humanist culture of dialogue and singled out three common characteristics: a) proposing “persuasion over force” (which meant that the practice of dialogue was more important than the very adhesion to some principles), b) endorsing a moderate skepticism on nonessentials of faith and thus making toleration ethically superior to a blind adhesion to both dogmas and traditions, and, c) finally, stressing decorum or the civility and propriety in arguing both sides of an issue and thus keeping dialogue always open.
49 In their reinterpretation Remer and Nederman argue that the humanists adapted Cicero’s moderate skepticism and Concordia to religious issues so as to achieve the same
minimal consensus as Cicero’s, even if the object of benevolence toward disagreement pertained to theological creeds rather than philosophical schools. “Cicero had believed that
decorum of
sermo, determined by
sermo’s goal of truth, required that the participants be allowed to debate their ideas freely. Erasmus thought that the same
decorum, with its attendant respect and civility for all participants, demanded toleration for many of the period’s theological debates.”
50 The problem with this perspicacious and compelling reinterpretation is that it obfuscates what was distinctive about Christian Concordia: portraying as minor or secondary that which was instead major and determinant, a distinction that will emerge in the analysis of the Colloquy of Poissy.
When Cicero discussed the place and the limits of disagreement, he referred to philosophical doctrines, not religious dogmas; he did not presume that natural reason would be in need of the light of religious faith or of the authority of a Church. He thought that “in every inquiry the unanimity of the races of the world must be regarded as a law of nature.”
51 Philosophical dialogue was not all inclusive thus, because, to enter it, the interlocutors had to accept the assumption that reasoned speech was the means for conviction, not authority, force, and not even rhetorical stratagems. Cicero could not have contemplated limitless toleration since this would clearly entail a defeat of philosophy itself.
When humanists applied Cicero’s rules of
sermo to theological disputations, they changed the context of dialogue. Indeed, whereas Cicero declared conversation to be philosophical rather than rhetorical because it accepted the minimal premise of reason as a condition of unrestricted investigation, Christian humanists, by making religious dogmas (like the Eucharist, as we shall see) into fundamentals on which participants in the dialogue could not disagree, turned away from
sermo and were forced to adopt rhetoric and finally interrupt the colloquy. The outcome was that whereas Cicero’s fundamentals of reason could not be an object of toleration for the simple reason that this would imply tolerating the wrong, Christian humanists could not make the same assumption on fundamentals of faith, which had to be tolerated precisely because they could not be agreed upon by reason alone or through a frank and an unrestricted dialogue. Were this agreement possible, all Christian denominations would be diluted in one religion with no substantial distinctions; an outcome that was confronted by Christian theologians with anxiety and certainly not desired, either because it could mean a new Catholic hegemony or because it could mean a rationalist rendering of universality with the erasure of all transcendence (as we saw, Calvin’s attack against Nicodemism foresaw the antireligious danger contained in the myth of concord). When the difference between Ciceronian dialogue and their religious dialogue emerged during the Colloquy of Poissy, the recognition that Christian Concordia could no longer exist became fatal. As that point, dialogue gave way to rhetoric and the search for unity translated into (or was seen as) a project of conversion or proselytism.
Remer and Nederman stressed the continuity between classical eloquence and Christian humanists’ eloquence on their common habit of the mind as reluctance to exclude the possibility of achieving consensus. This would explain the humanists’ “reluctance to condemn others for heresy,” because condemnation would eventually result in the recognition that division among Christians had won over concord.
52 Moreover, since faith was a process of spiritual search and perfection that was never concluded and belief was always malleable, none could actually decree at what point a person was in the wrong or a heretic, unless one assumed that faith was a status rather than a spiritual condition of searching; unless one assumed that there were as many denominations as individual citadels—according to Locke’s principle of freedom of conscience. The condition of search that
sermo entailed was timeless and permanent.
The problem is that when the classical maxims of
sermo were applied in the colloquia for reconciliation,
time schedule became essential and had to be presumed. Dialogue was not merely conversation but a strategy for attaining unanimity. At that point the problematic nature of Concordia and its view of toleration as temporary suspension of disunity became manifest. The very principle that was supposed to keep the dialogue open (the endless prospect of convincing the other on a given disagreement or of attaining conversion or assent) became a reason for exacerbating divisions rather than promoting benevolence and tolerance. A century later, Pierre Bayle would render those theological dialogues with Tertullian’s formula
compelle intrare (compel the people to enter the Church) and regard them as the ground for persecution.
53THE COLLOQUY OF POISSY
The Colloquy of Poissy is a paradigmatic case of the failure of Concordia Christiana and its ambition of making religious dialogue able to achieve a spiritual unity that was respectful of diversities without conceding to pluralism. It followed previous failed attempts from Worms (1521) and Ratisbon (1541) that were arranged in preparation to the Vatican Council of Trent. The failure of Poissy was a premonition of the failure of Trent, which became the council in which Catholicism codified both its fundamentals of faith as undisputable dogmas and a divorce within European Christianity. In his reconstruction of the colloquy, Donald Nugent has thus suggested that Poissy “both confirms the Reformation and points up the merging Counter-Reformation.”
54The colloquy was inspired by Catherina de’ Medici and her chancellor, Michel L’Hospital, with the ambitious task of reconciling Catholics and Calvinists within the frame of French religious unity.
55 It took place at the end of the summer of 1561, eleven years before the massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572). The queen mother invited 113 prelates and theologians, Catholics and Calvinists, but just 50 of them arrived at Poissy, a sign that only a minority of Christians thought that reconciliation was feasible or even desirable. Theodore Beza, the representative sent by John Calvin, and the Cardinal de Lorrain were the leading protagonists of the theological discussions.
Deliberative procedures were defined and conceived to establish a dialogue that would allow all the participants to feel secure, free, and respected. Although the host was a Catholic king, Protestants “were to be received kindly and to be instructed with no force save persuasion.”
56 The representative of Calvin was given the task of opening the colloquy. In his oration, Beza, anything but a moderate and conciliatory man of faith, perorated the noble cause of Concordia by indicating two things they should avoid, as Nugent comments: “the denial of any substantial differences between the two faiths and the assertion that there were no similarities. Neither was the way to concord.”
57 Beza then went on to classify differences within their creeds as “matters of interpretations; and unnecessary accretions” and thereby hoped to clear the floor of useless disquisitions.
But it appeared very soon that the nonfundamentals of faith (rituals, prayers, symbols, community, or local traditions, etc.) did not attract the attention and interest of the participants, who started disagreeing precisely on issues that were supposed to be unanimously accepted. Indeed, moving to discuss sacraments, Beza gave the Eucharist a definition that provoked the first blow of radical dissent: he denied that that sacrament entailed a miraculous change in substance from bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Not only did Beza deny the dogma of transubstantiation but moreover he attempted a definition of sacraments that was primed to broaden disagreement by asserting the incompatibility between sacrament and dogma.
58 In claiming that a dogma was “directly contrary” to the symbolic nature of a sacrament, Beza, from the start, jeopardized not only a possible convergence of ideas but above all the possibility of a common denominator for dialogue, that is to say, the Ciceronian premises of
sermo. “He held that the signs are, as it were, the substance of the sacrament; if they are transformed, the sacrament is abolished. This is the firm distinction between the sign and the thing signified.”
59 Beza’s “unfortunate error” was to start his oration with an
interpretation; this move would hardly allow the dialogue to proceed and people to remain open to the possibility of changing their mind.
60 Nugent, commenting on this “error,” argued that Beza’s contradictory intentions—concord on the one hand and dogmatic assertiveness on the other—epitomized the “illogical” goal of Concordia as a strategy of unity to be achieved on theological issues, that is to say, without admitting toleration of pluralism.
The failure of Poissy was exemplified by the two “illogical” things Beza’s inaugural speech wanted to keep together: a) the denial of any substantial difference and the declaration that some fundamentals of faith were necessary, wherein it is clear that differences existed precisely on those fundamentals whose interpretation was supposed to be shared by all; and b) the assertion that Calvinists and Catholics were different and there were actually few similarities between them. Given his incipit on the value and goal of Concordia, these two assertions were illogical. Rather than bowing to the ritualistic speech of concord and the rhetoric of dialogue, Beza would help the dialogue by acknowledging from the start, rather than concealing, the fact that their reasons for disagreement were substantive and pertained to fundamentals of faiths. Yet the ideal of Concordia was the source of the problem because its philosophy could not allow this move since it did not entertain the idea of an accord that was only instrumental and for sake of mere coexistence. For the colloquy to continue and produce some good results, agreement should have been the goal instead of spiritual unity, that is to say, eirene instead of homonoia.
The fact is that had Beza explicitly recognized the differences between Calvinists and Catholics he would have left no room for the kind of dialogue that Concordia prized and to restore which he was sent to Poissy. The paradox was that insincerity was at the same time the condition for a dialogue to persist and the obstacle of a meaningful dialogue. Beza could not openly admit that the age of Concordia was over and pluralism was a reality if the colloquy were to continue. Nevertheless, it was not credible that he or Calvin were truly ready to give up proselytism and accept cohabitation with their direct adversaries.
61 Hence the “illogical” incipit of Beza’s introduction: he declared, on the one hand, that differences were secondary and, on the other, that they were fundamental.
That contradiction poisoned the colloquy because the interlocutors were de facto unable or unwilling to declare openly which fundamentals of faith they shared and which they did not. All of them praised Concordia but were unable to tell openly in what Concordia consisted. As soon as they tried to clarify this point they plunged into a panoply of contradictions that made their disagreements even worse than before the colloquy started. As Mario Turchetti noticed, the room for compromise was broader when Christians did not know each other’s positions well.
62 Thus, contrary to Erasmus’s hope, which was a theoretical inspiration for both Catholics and Calvinists, the fundamentals, rather than the nonfundamentals, of faith became the source of discord. The colloquy exemplified a phenomenon that social scientists have in recent years tested experimentally: the result of deliberation among groups whose members share definite beliefs tends to radicalize their respective loyalties rather than weaken them. “It is the persuasive content of arguments which causes polarization rather than comparisons between oneself and others.”
63 The result of discussion is in this case primed to consolidate homogeneity within each group and sharpen divisions with others.
64The disagreement over the Eucharist became so intractable that a decision was made to have a few theologians debate it behind closed doors. Thus the original plan and ideal of a public colloquy, with a large audience made of laics and religious representatives of the nobility, the clergy and ordinary people, was renounced. It soon became clear that
publicity could not bear disagreements because religious pluralism could not be publicly manifested and accepted (a frightening anticipation of the ensuing wars).
65 Moreover, it also became clear that the “experts” or theologians to whom Erasmus had acknowledged toleration, because of their devotion to reason, did not facilitate concord; their disputations and disquisitions actually strengthened divisions (the ethics of coherence strengthened their logical rigidity and promoted intolerance).
66 Finally, it became clear that dialogue would grow vacuously rhetorical, for the most part, because none of the participants was ready to compromise on his faith, confess his disagreement, or listen to what was epitomized as a heretical interpretation of fundamentals of faith. Given all this, not only was the Erasmian ideal of dialogue as a means for the continuation of dialogue abandoned. More fatally, the experience of dialogue actually blocked that ideal and convinced interlocutors that force was perhaps inevitable. The colloquy persuaded the Calvinists and Catholics that the human quality of speech and the virtues associated by humanists with eloquence were not the only means to solve radical disagreement. “Sixteenth century dialogue was just a shade short of war.”
67The failure of Poissy proves what we have said previously: the humanists’ adaptation of Cicero’s Concordia to a revealed religion ruled by authorized interpreters and structured according to dogmas could not work. In ancient religion there was no distinction between doctrine/nondoctrine (fundamentals and nonfundamentals of faith) because religion was a system of rituals and cults that relied upon ceremonial habits. Pagan religion meant codification of certain practices rather than sincerity of the heart or adhesion to an authoritative declaration of doctrinal validity.
68 So in Cicero’s work the distinction between fundamentals and nonfundamentals, as a distinction between those things that could be or could not be tolerated, had no sense because it would amount to a call for tolerating the wrong or an incorrect theory. To Cicero, thus, moderate skepticism and dialogue were for the sake of
achieving clarity of knowledge: tolerance was not tolerance at all, but suspension of judgment until truth was gained, discovered, or achieved. The contradiction that characterized the ecumenical goal of Christian humanists was that in order to apply Cicero’s maxims of eloquence to disputation among doctrines of faith they had to introduce a distinction that would make those maxims unusable: that between the domain in which reason (or dialogue) can operate and the domain of faith in which reason is hardly effective, because of course decisions on the fundamentals of faith could not be made in the name of reason alone and according to the rules of eloquence, although reason and the rules of eloquence were employed by theologians in order to make their case. Humanists applied the maxims of what today we would call reasonable deliberation (ancient eloquence) to an environment that was structurally dualistic and not wholly malleable by philosophical reason. As we have seen, for Christians Concordia was not to be confused with syncretism (Nicodemism was a vice to be avoided as much as religious pluralism).
In consequence, whereas the ancients could take into account the possibility of persuasion to solve those disagreements that civil laws or local traditions left unresolved, Christians had first to delimit the space within which dialogue was not admitted in order to start the dialogue. The paradox was that this preventive limitation could not be made through dialogue because it pertained to dogmas of faith that no rational argument could help explain, as Beza’s failed attempt to define a sacrament showed. The preventive separation of what could or could not be discussed could only be made in a dogmatic manner, yet this precluded the possibility of not only finding an accord, but, much more radically, of pursuing it in the dialogue itself. The Colloquy of Poissy proved that a discursive approach to the Eucharist was out of place and could not be made.
As a matter of fact, the choice of having the Eucharist as a fundamental of faith had to be taken as a given in the sense that each Christian had to assume it with no disputation. Differences of opinion could not be allowed as a matter of principle (and not even suspension of judgment in the wait for an ensuing clarification), according to Cicero’s notion of the limits of disagreement. In a word, a decision that could not be the result of an open deliberation was needed—it had to be made through an act of authority or through faith, but not through dialogical reasoning. The only possibility was a renunciation of talk and a stop on discussion, publicly or totally.
69Dialogue proved to be out of place because the views that caused disagreement could not be made the object of rational discussion (Hans Kelsen was to develop from this his theory that democracy cannot operate with dogmatic creeds).
70 Concordia turned out to be an untenable myth. Moreover, it was counterproductive because any attempt to convince the interlocutor was inevitably experienced as proselytism, a perception that was primed to unleash animosity and disagreement rather than help peace and accord. In sum, the colloquy compromised the very assumption of Concordia Cristiana—the idea that it was not necessary to take theological issues out of dialogue to continue the dialogue and live in peace. Finally, it proved that not all issues can become an object of dialogue and that not all dialogue is a vehicle for peace.
71MISTAKE OR DIVERSITY?
From Nugent’s reconstruction of the Colloquy of Poissy it appears that by the time the council met, in late summer 1651, the Protestants had already evolved into a form of scholasticism, and their early enthusiasm for
Renovatio Christiana had crystallized in separate bodies of dogmatic assumptions. Room for dialogue narrowed along with the passage of time, while timing is, as scholars have abundantly shown, a crucial factor in the success or failure of a process of reconciliation.
72 This seemed to disprove Christian humanists’ belief that continuation of dialogue was even more important than achieving an agreement. Indeed, if achieving unity is the goal, time delay might not be a good strategy. It is true that in the trial of separation before the final divorce (as before religious divorce), a delay in the process of reconciliation might allow passions to calm down. Yet, in this case, delay is intended to help configure the prospect of accepting and managing divorce, not reconciliation.
73When the delegates met in Poissy, the conditions for divorce were there and hardly revisable. Variations in theological interpretation had already hardened into ideological loyalties defining friends and enemies, like irreducible partisanships in cold war–style parties. Language’s malleability, which Cicero’s rules of sermo presumed and Christian humanists prized as pivotal for solving disagreements, could work insofar as and only while beliefs were also malleable. Divisions, on the other hand, went together with antidialogical emotions like resentment and mistrust. But these emotions, which were present in Poissy, made words correspond to unchangeable beliefs, rather than malleable tools of mediation among transformable ideas.
It is reasonable to think that the passage of time and escalation of violence that had, meanwhile, started in many European countries between opposing Christian denominations were not secondary factors in the failure of the colloquy and Concordia more generally. The level of reciprocal prejudices that participants in Poissy showed was insurmountable, so that words compromised dialogue rather than helped it because they were not received with trust but rather as signs of manipulating intentions.
74 Rhetoric came to be seen as sophistry, not eloquence in Cicero’s style, and words served to escalate divisions and disagreements instead of helping unity and agreement. (It might be interesting to mention that the decline of Concordia was accompanied by a deep reaction against eloquence and rhetoric, which were accused of helping discord and civil war—this opinion was equally shared by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke).
75 It is fair to say that dialogic concord presumes a concord of values that cannot create itself. Concordia must exist as a viable promise in order for dialogue to occur and for reconciliation to be perceived as a reasonable goal.
This brings me back to the question with which I started this chapter, on whether religious toleration and religious pluralism are feasible within the ideal framework or
koiné of Concordia. If we recall the view of tolerance that the humanists praised we can say that, despite their assertion to the contrary, they (and in particular Erasmus) regarded toleration as instrumental to dialogue for achieving the unification of faiths, not syncretism as diluting of differences in a kind of natural or minimalist religion.
76 Indeed, in order for their differences to merge, both Catholics and Protestants should have necessarily gone through a process of transformation of their respective creeds: this was actually the goal that justified the continuation of dialogue. This means that a sincere dialogue for conviction would probably have risked making them change their minds and converging unanimously toward some fundamentals of faith that were not necessarily similar to their own. Dialogue within Concord was supposed to deradicalize disagreement and make differences look like variations within one religion, a solution that would translate into reconstituting a catholic perspective and overcoming both Protestant and Catholic creeds.
This ecumenical outcome would perhaps be in agreement with Cicero’s goal of a philosophical dialogue and its injunction to suspend judgment when disagreement occurred in order to keep the door open to the possibility of changing one’s mind (the Second Vatican Council relaunched the project of ecumenism on this pluralistic premise and significantly emended the sixteenth-century unitary view of concord). But none of the interlocutors who gathered in Poissy wanted to suspend their judgment on their reciprocal interpretations of the fundamentals of faith because none of them questioned the validity of their own creeds. Neither side wanted to become anything other than what they already were. They discussed in order to convince the other without being willing to be convinced by them. This means that their mental habit was radically inimical to reciprocity (on which dialogue needs to rest) and naturally disposed to proselytism. Thus, if dialogue had to continue, it would have to concern nonfundamentals of faith, as actually happened when radical conflict and the wars forced European peoples to practice toleration as an art of negotiating between their different beliefs and abandoning ambitions to overcome their differences.
Within the ideal scenario of a transformative function of dialogue, tolerance would actually be not tolerance of errors but more appropriately a time delay or the suspension of any decision in order to allow more time for persuasion. As we have seen, this would give more of a chance to dialogue in view of a superior stage in which consensus would no longer be questioned. Christian humanists were the representatives of this transitory view of toleration. They were the first scholars to face a schism within European Christianity and invoke toleration as a means of conjugating up differences within a substantial religious unity. Their distinction between fundamentals and nonfundamentals of faith defined the threshold of both pluralism and freedom of dissent. It revealed the failure of the goal of unity and the impossibility of applying the Ciceronian philosophy of dialogue in a domain in which specific doctrinal premises needed to be removed from dialogue because they could not be made an object of transformation. The outcome of Concordia would be either instrumental agreement for reason of stability (peace as agreement, rather than harmony) or war. In both cases the two conditions of Concordia would evanesce (as they did): harmony within a unified spiritual community and absence of religious pluralism.
The failure of the several colloquies and councils inspired by the humanist philosophy of Concordia, from that of Ratisbon (1541) to that of Poissy (1561), indicates that it was precisely the translation of Cicero’s
Concordia Philosophia into
Concordia Theologia that failed, and
pour cause. Its failure proves that dialogue and deliberative rationality cannot hold when they are applied to religious creeds (unless we do not take the latter to be as prerational manifestations of ideas that rational dialogue can allow to fully illuminate and revolve, as in Hegel’s philosophy and, so it seems, Habermas’s).
77 That failure proves, first, how improbable the goal was of the humanists who wanted to practice toleration while remaining within a single system of faith or truth (since they did not recognize other religions, save those emerging from within Christianity). Second, it proves that Concordia through frank dialogue cannot be conceived as unanimous conviction but has to make room for pluralism. To be successful and stable over time, toleration must presume and respect pluralism of both creeds and the interpretations of common religious texts on which creeds rely. It must presume, and respect, resistance against changing or refusal to change one’s creeds.
Yet not to have a transformative dialogue of this kind does not mean not having any dialogue or not being able to reach a “negotiated” outcome or some reasonable convergence in respect to people’s creeds or “fundamentals of faith.”
78 As the historical development of the role of secular actors and institutions shows, the failure of the philosophy and practice of Concordia Christiana contributed to strengthening the practice of agreement on nonfundamentals of faith or externalities (
adiaphora) such as laws and regulations on matters of rituals and social and economic relations among people of different creeds. As it were, Concordia moved from inward to outward; it ended with pertaining to strategies and methods that could make different people coexist within the same geopolitical space, without being requested to change their beliefs or treat them as “mistakes.”
PLURALISM AND THE LIMITS OF DIALOGUE
The difference between variations internal to a faith and pluralism of faiths was brilliantly illustrated by Jean Bodin, perhaps the most acute theorist of religious pluralism in the age of Concordia, that is to say, prior to liberal toleration. In his
Colloquium heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis (Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime, written between 1593 and 1596, published in 1857), a basic treatise on religious concord-discord, Bodin wrote that without diversity of religions, or with only two dominant and rival religions, political society lacks a constraint that is effective enough to curb the instrumentalist use of public authority by factions of religious citizens and churches without the need for state repression.
79 Moreover, it misses the opportunity to make religions express their richness, an opportunity that only a pluralistic environment can provide. “Otherwise, if one opposite were joined to another opposite with no middle ground between, there would necessarily be continual battle.”
80 In a word, civil law was the medium—the common grammar that all must accept—thanks to which religious pluralism and freedom of religion could exist.
81Much less worried about pluralism than Locke, Bodin included all positions in his claim for pluralism—Catholics, Calvinists, Muslims, Lutherans, Jews, proto-Deists, Skeptics (though not professed atheists)—and reached the conclusion that friendship among political subjects, as among friends,
can exist if people share radically different ideas on important issues. He made this claim after having demonstrated that no religion is able to prove itself to be the true one. Bodin’s argument for toleration was based not on indifference or Pyrrhonian skepticism but on opposition to conflict among believers in the name of the acceptance of doctrinal diversity with no attempt to convince. His position was not too different from Locke’s in that both of them “based their opposition to religious intolerance on the assumption that
their practices (whoever they be assuming belief in God) are probably no more mistaken than
ours.”
82 Yet Bodin’s conclusion on pluralism seemed to be more generous than Locke’s: not only would believers have no rational arguments for persuading each other on the truthfulness of their religion (since no religion could make epistemic claims that all would accept on rational grounds), but religion could not be “the subject for discursive argument.”
83 The strategy was that of minimizing the doctrinal content of religion and in this way deflating the ethics of coherence and strengthening that of respect.
84 But, after almost four hundred pages of dialogue between representatives of those seven faiths, Bodin concluded with a confession of coexistence among decidedly different faiths:
Coronaeus bade me to summon the boys to whom he offered the song: “Lo, how good and pleasing it is for brothers to live in unity, arranged not in common diatonics or chromatics, but in enharmonics with a certain, more divine modulation.” All were most sweetly delighted with this song, and they withdrew, having embraced each other in mutual love. Henceforth, they nourished their piety in remarkable harmony and their integrity of life in common pursuits and intimacy. However, afterwards they held no other conversation about religions, although each one defended his own religion with the supreme sanctity of his life.
85
Theological disputations left Bodin’s interlocutors with the same religious beliefs as they had at the beginning of the dialogue. Moreover, it left them with the conviction that they should be free to practice their faith while also dropping any ambition to convince others or overcome their disagreements or merge differences on issues of religion. Toleration was, more than with Locke, a politics of difference, one in which religions not only could, but would coexist if they abandoned their respective presumption of truth; indeed, by coexisting they would have the chance to express their differences more completely than if they lived segregated and separated. Pluralism of religions worked as a checks-and-balance mechanism (concord-discord) that would help stability and peace. Bodin’s outcome was an argument in favor of diversity and pluralism, while clearly separating civil law and religious law. Without acknowledging this dual source of behavior—the one inspiring piety and the other inspiring truth—it would have been hard to achieve both religious peace and liberty of religious beliefs. Bodin’s restraint in welcoming religions’ participation in public debate over their fundamentals was, of course, marked by the tragic experience of the massacre of the Huguenots and the wars of religion, which led him to conclude that monarchical sovereignty (the state) was the only secure form of Concordia and thereby civil, not religious.
86We do not need to embrace Bodin’s doctrine of absolute monarchy to appreciate his insight that however prepared we are to cooperate in a “reconstructive work” of dialogue that is primed to free both religions and philosophies of their respective rigidity, we should not want public dialogue to make us overcome the dualism of faith and reason or their interpretations or finally religious pluralism—in other words, we should not want to fully pursue the “reconstructive work” that dialogue for reconciliation is to encourage if performed sincerely and thoroughly. A nonperfectionist regime of toleration does not demand that all citizens have an equal degree of virtue of toleration or that the attitude toward toleration is the same for all.
87 It does not, above all, demand that toleration be identified with religious concord on the fundamentals of faith because it considers toleration an invitation not to overcome differences but to respect them. In Bodin’s rendering, toleration teaches us how to live with substantive differences and renounce transforming them into mere variations of tonality within a harmonious unity.
The analysis of the character and decline of the ideal of Concordia Christiana on the eve of the wars of religion shows us that toleration emerged as a peaceful acceptance of different faiths when government and church leaders as well as believers started considering it as a complex set of practices of peaceful coexistence situated between two extreme and persistent possibilities of either violent conflict or spiritual homogeneity. Seen from the perspective of this tension, toleration acquires the character of a practical habit of respect for each individual, the recognition that in each of us there is something inviolable and unreachable to respect, in which the interruption of dialogue on what we regard as a matter of fundamentals (of faith) may be indispensable. To paraphrase Bodin, the moral of respect rests on the recognition of difference with no attempt to persuade.
The seven protagonists of his dialogue resolved to have peaceful conversation after each of them abandoned all attempts to advance their points of view as prerogatives of true religion. Conversation among believers of different religions could thus continue because and insofar as it was, so to speak, a purposeless or, more correctly, not driven by the goal of solving dissent and embracing consensus. Exchanging disagreement for difference, error for pluralism, was a remarkable transformation that brought Concordia Christiana to an end and opened the door to a perspective that was more audacious than Locke’s principle of privatization of creeds because it was more consistently pluralist, since faiths were not simply allowed to exist but invited to interact and respect each other. Bodin dissociated benevolence from the goal of persuasion, linking it to an acceptance of diversity and made it a civic virtue. The motor of dialogue was not the emendation of errors, because consent could not be the goal of a discourse that had no truth as its object. The motor was, instead, the recognition that social harmony requires the ability to make dissonances coexist: thanks to their coexistence, the intermediary tones that make polyphony possible and agreeable can be found. Bodin was not the only one who thought that a state with two religions was not more secure for peace than a state having one religion. Moreover, he thought that the more numerous religions in a society the more each of them could give the better of itself without jeopardizing civil peace because it was too weak to cultivate the ambition of achieving total power.
Besides reasons of prudence and stability, a sincere and irreducible plurality was to Bodin the condition for a cultural environment that respected the particularity of each believer because it was better disposed to facilitate median and mediating positions. The interlocutors of his dialogue, while unable and unwilling to achieve a comprehensive consensus on their fundamentals of faith, were, however, able and willing to find local consent on specific issues under discussion. Within each religion, Bodin believed, there was at least one principle that could be bridged with at least one principle of another, so that all faiths could, at the end, contribute to making a network of relations. Interreligious relations looked like a constellation of partial overlapping. If the Ciceronian idea of a
natura communis was to be consistently pursued, then a consensus achieved by overcoming pluralism would not be the goal. Instead, the coexistence of differences through the creation of chains of relations that did not command either absolute communication (dialogue until the resolution of disagreement), monadic isolation, or the refusal of any form of dialogue would be strived for.
NOTES