TOLLERANZA. Momenti e percorsi della modernità fino a Voltaire

The key word ‘tolerance’ implying as it did with its classical (i.e. Ciceronian ) meaning of a personal capacity to put up with taxes or endure the pangs of hunger (“tributa et famem tolerare”) implies an objective disparity. That is to say, the presence of values that are not shared by the tolerator (i.e. the one who tolerates) who allows them to exist in the tolerated (i.e. the person who is tolerated), and yet refrains from finding fault with and criticising them for reasons of prudence or for practical convenience. Meaningless in a context of war, the tolerator’s assumed superiority matures only in a climate of mediation and moderation, indirectly attesting the negative character of the tolerance virtue, as it implies what it should contribute towards creating. And yet it is opportune to examine more closely this first negative meaning of the term, which is nevertheless most widespread in common language, without dwelling on abstract narrative or historiographic formulae like those, albeit authoritative ones, of Bainton-type origin which, under the banner of the “struggle for religious freedom”, have accepted irenical, ecumenical and libertarian theories that are worlds apart from each other. A real and proper refuge for dissident philosophers, politicians and theologians the fatherland of Erasmus was the country whose economic-commercial development between the 16th and 18th centuries was further enhanced by a contribution made through the complex web of political programmes and bitter philosophical-theological disputes on certain questions, including irenical and ‘ecumenical’ perspectives of various orientations, proposals of civil and ecclesiastical tolerance, and claims to freedom of conscience. If the ordering of such a complex scenario of problems has necessitated a pre-selection of arguments and authors, it has likewise favoured the study of certain basic combinations of themes in the modern European history of tolerance, including religious pluralism and the grounds for faith between freedom of religion and freedom of conscience; the existence of “truth” and the themes of “evidence”, “belief”, and of “error”; the secular authority’s rights circa sacra and the definition of the competences and limits of Church government; the rejection of the confessional State and, in general, the refusal to adopt coercion in “movements” regarding human conscience. The story of tolerance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been studied and continues to be studied in its every aspect. And yet many studies, even the more recent ones, are based on the tacit or explicit assumption that the concept examined is in itself commonplace and generic, so that the inevitable consequence has been that of outlining an unforthcoming profile thereof, at the best one susceptible to merely descriptive historiographical analysis. It is more appropriate, in contrast, to consider “un tableau unitaire où il n'est pas rare que s'opposent, tout en se nouant et en cohabitant, trois grands éléments: irénismes des différentes tendances; projets d’une tolérance civile distincte de la tolérance ecclésiastique et entendue comme capacité de neutraliser les effets de l'intolérance ecclésiastique; revendications de la liberté de conscience”. Thus wrote Antonio Rotondò in 1992 when presenting the lines of a research programme of his on the theme “Europe et Pays-Bas: évolution, réélaboration et diffusion de la tolérance aux XVIIe et XVIII e siècles”. And it was from this initiative that the pages of this present study got underway, which expound on 18th-century Dutch and Italian culture, and on three symbolical figures of the epoch, namely Gerard Noodt, Jean Barbeyrac and Gianfrancesco Conforti. At the centre of the investigation is the progression from the ancient virtue of tolerance of an exclusively Christian mould to the right of the freedom of religion and conscience backed by the new civil virtue of prudentia. Hence, in analyzing Noodt and Barbeyrac’s writings, considerable room is given to the argumentations of iurisprudentia and, more especially, of modern natural law. The centrality of the seventeenth–century model of natural law founded by Grotius and Pufendorf has been emphasized by examining within a broad historical spectrum some wide-ranging themes of the contemporary debate, including: religious pluralism in the State; the definition of the obligations and limits of legislation, and the rights of sovereign power in religion; the rejection of the confessional State and the use of “force” against “evolutionary movements” of the human conscience; the justification of the right to resist, and the elaboration of the characteristics and limits of the new notion of “civil tolerance”; the voluntaristic and anti-Hobbesian perspective preferred by Barbeyrac in his commentary on Pufendorf through the critical use of Locke’s teachings and the theory of “obligation”. The encounter with the teachings of late-seventeenth century Dutch Arminianism (of Philippus van Limborch and Jean Le Clerc) and the continuous dialogue with Grotius regarding the origins and limits of summa potestas represent the underlying argument of the entire volume. By adhering closely to the specific theme of interest, the research has not failed to emphasize either explicitly or implicitly in the modern reflection on tolerance the presence of philosophical problems which developed on the fringe of late seventeenth-century Dutch Cartesianesim, including the existence of truth and the possibility for human reasoning to reach and accept its relationships with the themes of “evidence”, “belief” and “error”; the disapproval of the outcomes of historical Pyrrhonism and the rejection of Pierre Bayle’s theses. Hence Barbeyrac’s reflection has been reconstructed by stressing the theoretical relevance of being in keeping with Jean Pierre De Crousaz’s anti-Pyrrhonistic theses and the critical comparison with Matthew Tindal’s deism in the pages of the “Bibliothèque raisonnée”. If the ‘word’ in question has a highly evocative content directly proportional to its degree of imprecision and ambivalence, then it becomes ever more necessary to specify the setting of one’s theoretical discourse and to define its chronological and geographical limits, as well as its thematic and lexical fields in the light of pre-established cultural, political, religious and philosophical contexts. In our case this leads us on to state from the outset that the history of the ‘difficult’ times and the relative historical-philosophical exempla of tolerance (here briefly outlined for a mainly didactic rather than a ‘general’ purpose) has been reappraised from a certain viewpoint. In a word a setting and phase of modern Western culture have been selected, namely the seventeenth-eighteenth century Dutch culture that acted as backcloth to the complex transition from the virtue of tolerance to the codification of the right to religious freedom in Voltaire, in the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and in the French culture of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, sanctioned by the 1789 Revolution.