{"id":17190,"date":"2022-09-12T13:41:19","date_gmt":"2022-09-12T09:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/?p=17190"},"modified":"2022-09-15T15:26:12","modified_gmt":"2022-09-15T11:26:12","slug":"toleration-liberalism-and-lessons-for-a-fractured-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/toleration-liberalism-and-lessons-for-a-fractured-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Toleration, Liberalism, and Lessons for a Fractured America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The bitter sectarianism that enveloped sixteenth-century Europe offers a warning about the tribalism that now darkens American public life.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

TRENTO, Italy\u2014Just two years after the Catholic Church completed its repudiation of Protestant doctrine at the\u00a0Council of Trent<\/a>\u00a0(1545-1563), an Italian convert to Protestantism jumped into the fray. A layman trained as a lawyer, Jacopo Acontius delivered a brief that exposed the dark psychology of persecution in ways no one had ever attempted. His singular work,\u00a0Darkness Discovered: Or the Devil\u2019s Secret Stratagems Laid Open<\/em>\u00a0(1565), offered a defense of religious freedom that helped to revolutionize the relationship between church and state in the West.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe best way to find out the devil\u2019s Stratagems,\u201d Acontius wrote, \u201cis to take into serious consideration what the end is at which all his consultations aim, which is not Very hard to tell.\u201d Satan\u2019s great purpose, he said, is to lead men and women away from life with God\u2014to lead them into conflict, misery, and death. This, he explained, was the consequence of the disputes over religion that threatened to overwhelm Europe. \u201cThus is the people divided into Sects which hate one another with deadly feud, abstaining from no kind of injuries, and \u2026 do not observe how in so doing they obey their own passions, but think they very much please God.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bitter sectarianism that enveloped sixteenth-century Europe offers a warning about the tribalism<\/a> that now darkens American public life. Just as our modern culture wars have taken on a militant quality, so, too, did the disagreements over fundamental religious questions degenerate into violence. Europeans no longer seemed able to live together, as every dispute became a political question, framed in apocalyptic terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such was the world as Acontius encountered it early in his career. Born into a Catholic family in about 1500 in or near Trento, he received a classical education, evidently immersed in the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Archimedes. We don\u2019t know what circumstances led to his conversion, but as the Protestant Reformation spread through the continent, Acontius joined other Italian Protestants who fled to Switzerland. He met Italian Academicians educated in the humanism of the Renaissance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acontius<\/a>\u00a0also encountered the repressive policies of the contending religious communities. In Geneva, John Calvin set off a debate among Protestants when, in 1553, he authorized the execution of Servetus on charges of heresy. In the Netherlands, Catholic Spain struggled to contain the growing Calvinist minority. In France, the religious wars between Calvinists and Catholics (1562-1593) were already devastating much of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What distinguished Acontius from other defenders of religious toleration\u2014and there were not many in his day\u2014was his desire to expose the scandal of persecution by getting to the root of the problem: the moral disposition of man. \u201cAcontius sought to analyze and explain the psychology which underlies all religious persecution,\u201d writes<\/a> W.K. Jordan in The Development of Religious Toleration in England<\/em>, \u201cand his contribution in this regard has probably never been equaled.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arguing from Scripture, Acontius agreed that mankind was a being created good and in every way perfect, \u201cyet breaking the command of God, he became of another Nature quite contrary, exceedingly corrupt and liable to all manner of vice.\u201d Humanity\u2019s vices\u2014which Satan sought to exploit\u2014included inordinate self-love, moral blindness, and self-righteousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The desire to persecute others, Acontius believed, was primarily the result of intellectual arrogance: a supreme confidence in the truth and rightness of one\u2019s views. It was a weakness that afflicted ministers as readily as monarchs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The character of European society, in which religious leaders held unquestioned authority, created a repressive dynamic. As Acontius summarized it, \u201cevery man\u2019s life and reputation lies open to the lash of those they call Preachers.\u201d And the preachers, he wrote, were especially prone to pride. If an individual disagreed with them\u2014and thus challenged their knowledge or competence\u2014he would \u201ccome under their censure\u201d and \u201cshall quite lose his credit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem was exacerbated by the church-state<\/a> relationship. Once the pattern was set that religious controversies would be decided by the magistrate, he would not resist the temptation to abuse his power. Like the preacher, he would regard anyone who contradicted him as a heretic. Thus, Satan\u2019s strategy, Acontius wrote<\/a>, was to manipulate the political authority to implement the whims of an arrogant and embittered clergy. \u201cBut who is there bearing the sword, that will not be accounted godly, and that will not account for an Heretic whosoever thwarts him in matters of Religion?\u201d The final arbiter of truth would be the hangman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Persecution, instead of dampening disagreements over religion, made the problem worse. Dissenters hardened their position, convinced that their opponents were acting out of malice. \u201cFor they do not destroy errors, but make them invincible; they do not pluck them up, but they propagate them; they do not destroy them, but the multiply them in great abundance.\u201d The result: the growth not only of sects and heresies but also of hatred and disorder. \u201cAnd thus by a kind of Contagion the evil is spread far and near.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This cycle of repression and social unrest, Acontius emphasized repeatedly, was rooted in \u201cthe disposition of man, naturally prone to pride and over great haughtiness of mind.\u201d Its ultimate cause could be found in the Creation story: the temptation from the serpent in paradise that man could become like God. \u201cSo hath there ever since stuck such a persuasion in Mankind, that every man takes himself to be a kind of Deity.\u201d In Darkness Discovered<\/em>, Satan could be viewed not only as an actual malevolent being, but also as a symbol of human arrogance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer to the problem of persecution was multi-faceted. First, Acontius placed an enormous emphasis on the need for rational argument, civil debate, and free inquiry. The persecution<\/a> of alleged heretics simply encouraged the base motives of political and religious leaders. \u201cHis solution,\u201d writes W.K. Jordan, \u201cwas rather to use moral and rational persuasion and to leave the heretic to the working out of his own salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, Acontius offered an approach to religious belief that would move it out of the realm of politics, beyond the reach of the state. \u201cIf there be controversies in Religion, let them contend on both sides with Scriptures and Arguments, but let the Magistrates look to it again and again, that they may under a penalty abstain from whatsoever may tend to provoke one another.\u201d It was not the job of the political authority to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deepest remedy to the \u201ccontagion\u201d of persecution, though, was a return to basic biblical concepts about God and his great patience toward sinners. The person who seemed to be in grave spiritual error, who had wandered from the fold of God, may not always remain so. Isn\u2019t it possible, Acontius asked, that he \u201cshall at length be found by that best of shepherds, healed and brought back to the flock?\u201d The possibility demanded charity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Acontius, the supreme example of mercy was Jesus. The accuser\u2019s eye should be fixed on him and not on the man he considered a heretic. \u201cThou oughtest not therefore to look upon his person, but upon the person of Christ whom he represents, and to remember how great his love hath been to thee,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIn so much as he refused not, being himself just and innocent, to die for thee an unjust person, and the greatest of sinners, especially by so cruel and bloody a death.\u201d In other words, the prime obligation of Christians caught up in theological disputes was to ponder the great love and mercy of Christ for them, expressed in his sacrificial death on the cross.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here was a plea for Christian charity that would not be forgotten. When the English philosopher John Locke<\/a> was in political exile in the 1680s in the Netherlands, shortly before he wrote his signature defense of religious freedom, he read Darkness Discovered<\/em>, which was circulating among the dissenting Protestant community that had befriended him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Locke purchased other tolerationist works while he was in Holland, but he seems to have been especially moved by the arguments he encountered from Acontius. Locke began A Letter Concerning Toleration<\/em> (1689), for example, by insisting that a demonstration of humility over religious differences was the identifying mark of the followers of Jesus. \u201cIf, like the Captain of our salvation, they sincerely desired the good of souls, they would tread in the steps and follow the perfect example of the Prince of Peace\u201d\u2014an example of patience and love in the face of intense hostility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Acontius, Locke elevated the faculty of reason and the \u201cinner persuasion of the mind\u201d in matters of faith. \u201cIt is only light and evidence that can work a change in men\u2019s opinions; and that light can in no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties.\u201d Coercion produced hypocrites, he wrote, not true believers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Locke also picked up on the idea of keeping the magistrate out of religious disputes\u2014and took it to its logical conclusion. The power of the state, he wrote, \u201cis confined to the care of the things of this world, and hath nothing to do with the world to come,\u201d whereas “the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth.\u201d The boundaries between these two institutions, Locke declared, \u201care fixed and immovable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, the roots of liberal democracy\u2014a political society based upon religious freedom and characterized by religious pluralism\u2014were planted deeply into the soil of European thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other thinkers, authors, and rebels would nurture this concept of freedom over the course of two centuries. Yet they were always in the minority. Jacopo Acontius stands out among them. His bold and generous vision was noted by John Dury in his prefatory note to the 1648 English translation of\u00a0Darkness Discovered:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be carried along with the stream, or to be silent when matters are not carried according to our mind, is no hard matter to any that hath any measure of discretion; but to row against the stream, to labor against the wind and tide, and the whole current of an age\u2026is not the work of an ordinary Courage.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man struggling against the strongest tides of convention in his day\u2014against the authorities of church and state, and the threat of censure, disgrace, and persecution\u2014with little to gain and, in worldly terms, everything to lose. Yes, no ordinary work of courage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joseph Loconte is a distinguished visiting professor at Grove City College and a senior fellow at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. He is the author of\u00a0<\/em>God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is\u00a0<\/em>A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, which is being made into a documentary film at hobbitwardrobe.com.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/nationalinterest.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The bitter sectarianism that enveloped sixteenth-century Europe offers a warning about the tribalism that now darkens American public life. TRENTO, Italy\u2014Just two years after the Catholic Church completed its repudiation of Protestant doctrine at the\u00a0Council of Trent\u00a0(1545-1563), an Italian convert to Protestantism jumped into the fray. A layman trained as a lawyer, Jacopo Acontius delivered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17191,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17192,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17190\/revisions\/17192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}