What was a result of the increased religious diversity at the end of the eighteenth century

ABSTRACT

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Religious Toleration in the Age of Enlightenment’. It begins by characterizing the Enlightenment's attitude towards religion as an opposition to bigotry and ecclesiastic authority based on a particular interpretation of the European Wars of Religion. Then it acknowledges the problematic nature of the phrase ‘Age of Enlightenment’, which seems to push some of the most relevant eighteenth-century realities to the margins of history. Next, it challenges some common scholarly assumptions regarding Enlightenment ideas on tolerance. In particular, it disputes that these ideas were essentially principled, secular, pluralist and liberal. By way of conclusion, this introductory article suggests that the Enlightenment's main contribution to the history of toleration is found not in the originality or subtlety of its ideas, but rather in the promotion of a new mentality according to which toleration came to be regarded as an essential feature of modern civilization.

In the eighteenth century, many French writers described their age as one in which the lumières were spreading over Europe like never before.1 Likewise, there was a growing perception among German intellectuals that times of darkness were giving way to an age of Aufklärung.2 While the word ‘Enlightenment’ did not yet exist, writers in English employed similar luminous metaphors to describe their epoch. Writers in other European languages did the same. The eighteenth century was, according to many, an ‘age of light’.3

It is not easy, however, to translate that figurative language into a more literal one. What exactly were those lights, those lumières, that brightened the eighteenth century? Enlightenment thinkers responded diversely to this question and later scholars have expanded the range of answers to the point that it now seems almost unanswerable.

Those who claimed to be living in an age of Enlightenment during the eighteenth century usually included reason, civility, tolerance, commerce and freedom among its defining achievements. Many linked this progress to ‘the light which philosophy has diffused over the world’4 and some considered Paris to be the epicentre of that philosophy.5 There, the so-called philosophes were allegedly trying to change the world with their writings. They did subscribe to some common goals. For instance, most of them agreed with Voltaire on the need to crush l'infâme, an expression which, depending on its interpretation, can mean the Catholic Church, institutional Christianity, or religious fanaticism in general. However, if the philosophes were perceived as a unified movement, it was above all thanks to the writings of their enemies.6 Counter-Enlightenment writers saw the new philosophy as a coordinated campaign against religion that threatened to ruin Christian civilization as a whole. Hence, they argued that the ‘siècle des lumières’ was not as luminous as many thought.7

Modern scholars have often based their interpretation of the Enlightenment upon these eighteenth-century perceptions, but at the same time they have increasingly questioned them. Research was initially focused in France, but, in the second half of the last century, the Enlightenment was redefined as an Atlantic phenomenon with a wide variety of national contexts and characteristics.8 Likewise, philosophy-centred research gave way to research on the many forms, high and low, of Enlightenment culture.9 In addition, and of special relevance here, an understanding of the Enlightenment as a secular or even anti-religious movement has given way to one that stresses the role of several religious trends within the Enlightenment.10 In recent academic literature, there is not only room for a religious or Christian Enlightenment, but even for a Catholic one.11 As a consequence of these revisions, the Enlightenment is now seen less as a unified phenomenon, and more as a spectrum of many different, and even opposed, ‘lights’. The Enlightenment is giving way to ‘the Enlightenments’.12

There is still considerable historiographical support for the conventional view according to which almost everything that is good in the modern Western world comes from the Enlightenment, including science, political freedom, human rights and, of course, religious tolerance. Recent scholars, however, tend to complicate this perception. To keep within the topic of this special issue, academic research has shown, among other things, that the ideal of religious toleration long preceded the Enlightenment, that religious persecution continued in many parts of Europe throughout the eighteenth century, and that Enlightenment thinkers not only held a vast range of religious and political ideas, but also often advanced arguments for both tolerance and intolerance.13

Given the above, it is not easy to make general remarks on the relationship between Enlightenment and toleration. The seven contributions to this special issue of History of European ideas clearly show the benefits of research focused on particular authors, problems and contexts. But, at the same time, these diverse contributions raise a number of general questions, some of which will be addressed in the present introduction. The first of these questions is the same one Kant tried to answer in 1784: ‘What is the Enlightenment?’ I do not pretend to downplay the plurality of realities encompassed in this term, but I think that, even if one prefers to pose it in the plural form, the question of what the different Enlightenments have in common still demands an answer. Herein, I will offer a rather tentative characterization of this complex historical phenomenon, focusing on its relationship to religion.

This characterization cannot present the Enlightenment as a coherent set of ideas. Although it has been associated with a particular philosophy since the eighteenth century, it seems clear that the Enlightenment comprises very different philosophies. For instance, D’Alembert’s ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie identified the lumières with empiricism, but we cannot accept this identification without excluding from the Enlightenment relevant figures such as Kant himself.

However, looking closely at the versions of the Enlightenment that D'Alembert and Kant defended may help us to find their common denominator. In their very different depictions of the Enlightenment, both authors pointed out that its chief enemy was of a religious nature: the ‘abuse of spiritual authority’ in the words of D'Alembert and ‘ecclesiastical despotism’ in those of Kant.14 All Enlightenment thinkers, in one way or another, expressed this same concern.

In this sense, the Enlightenment arose from a particular understanding of the European Wars of Religion. Enlightenment authors were convinced that, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religion had immersed European societies in war, instability and persecution. This conviction led to what J. G. A. Pocock has described as ‘a series of programmes for reducing the power of either churches or congregations to disturb the peace of civil society by challenging its authority’.15 The Enlightenment, at least with regard to religious matters, is precisely that set of programmes. Most of them were not aimed at putting an end to religion, but rather aspired to reform churches and beliefs so that they ceased to be an obstacle to political stability, social harmony, economic growth and intellectual development.

This characterization of the Enlightenment reveals the existing commonalities between very different authors, from atheists that pursued religion's decline in the name of progress to Catholics who aimed to cleanse their Church from what they perceived as threats to civil authority, scientific progress and social cohesion. Of course, the different brands of Enlightenment were not necessarily friendly to each other, but they had some common enemies and, in a broad sense, can be regarded as part of the same historical phenomenon.

This wide definition of the Enlightenment has, nonetheless, its difficulties. Among other things, it seems problematic to confine such a general intellectual trend to the eighteenth century. Prior to the European wars of religion, there were relevant intellectual attempts to submit religious authority to political power.16 In the sixteenth century, programmes aimed at neutralizing religious threats to civil authority and social peace multiplied in response to the Reformation and the wars of religion. Religious concord, royal supremacy, sceptical rhetoric and reason of state were some of the various means insistently proposed during the sixteenth and seventeenth century for restoring European societies to peace, unity and political stability.17 It can be argued that the Enlightenment is distinguished by the fact that it took place once the wars of religion were over, although it is not completely clear when that happened. In any case, the Enlightenment entailed a renewal of older programmes for removing religious obstacles to progress, as well as the rise of some new and more radical programmes.

Eighteenth-century philosophes already began to place the Enlightenment's beginnings in the latter half of the seventeenth century with thinkers such as John Locke and Pierre Bayle; modern scholars have long maintained the same position.18 This period is regarded as the origin of the Enlightenment for several reasons, among which it is worth highlighting the rise of the ‘republic of letters’, the intensification of the campaign against religious persecution, and the diffusion of new views on human understanding (such as rationalism, empiricism, historical criticism, etc.) that challenged the authority of Scripture, of theological claims and of religious traditions.

The relevance of this so-called early Enlightenment has been particularly stressed in the histories of toleration. Scholars have studied the contributions of later Enlightenment authors, such as Voltaire or Kant, but there is still a general tendency to consider the ideas of Bayle, Locke, and other contemporaries as the almost definitive theories on toleration.19 This tendency to focus on the early Enlightenment is apparent in the present special issue, whose essays deal mostly with authors and problems from the last decades of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth century.

The articles herein included touch on some of the main canonical Enlightenment figures, as well as on authors and trends that are often relegated to the margins of the Enlightenment, if not entirely excluded from it. This fact begs the question of the adequacy of the phrase the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. It seems to imply that the Enlightenment is the defining feature of an entire period in European history. But one could rightly ask why Locke, Bayle or Toland should be deemed more representative of their epoch than the millenarian prophets and mystics that Lionel Laborie presents in his contribution to this special issue. As Laborie rightly states: ‘Staring at the Enlightenment can be blinding when assessing religious tolerance in the long eighteenth century.’ Too many significant realities of that time are forgotten when one focuses on the Enlightenment, even when defined in the broad terms used above.

The Enlightenment was a source of tolerance, but also of discrimination. The very idea of toleration was used to trace a line between enlightened, acceptable citizens and intolerable fanatics. Enlightenment authors often denied toleration to those deemed intolerant and argued that most religious confessions were intolerant.20 Paradoxically, these authors' arguments reveal their own touch of intolerance since one can argue that they only demanded toleration for a reduced elite of educated and open-minded contemporaries, in which they of course included themselves.

Counter-Enlightenment writers were well aware of the limits their opponents assigned to toleration. The anti-philosophes seized every opportunity to point out that Bayle and Locke denied toleration to Catholics, that several articles of the Encyclopédie advocated the repression of atheists, and that Rousseau favoured a compulsory civic religion.21 According to the enemies of the Enlightenment, these examples revealed the philosophe's claims for tolerance as absolutely inconsequential.22 Modern commentators, for their part, have often interpreted the intolerant traces in Enlightenment theories as paradoxes and blind spots in an otherwise clear commitment to freedom from and of religion. Most of the time, however, these alleged incoherencies were logical outcomes of diverse Enlightenment views on the public good and its enemies. Erastianism, civic religion, proscription of atheism, discrimination against Catholics, and the expulsion of Jesuits were all different measures, among many others, that were coherently proposed as means for crushing clerical power and religious enthusiasm, for strengthening civil authority, and for promoting economic, social and intellectual progress. Any idea or policy concerning toleration always implies drawing a line to separate what can and cannot be tolerated. Enlightenment authors had very different opinions regarding where to draw that line, but most of them shared a certain general idea on why it should be drawn.

If we focus on religious confessions, it is obvious that Catholics, or at least orthodox and ultramontane Catholics, were most excluded from the Enlightenment. This does not imply, of course, that they wanted to be included. In fact, in the eighteenth century, both orthodox Catholicism and the Enlightenment defined themselves through a process of mutual opposition. The Enlightenment involved a series of campaigns against the existence, or at least the supremacy, of ecclesiastical authority, which was precisely the one thing that the Church of Rome was not willing to give up. Generally speaking, both Enlightenment thinkers and ultramontane theologians coincided in rejecting the complete separation between church and state, but they dramatically differed on each element's relative position. Hume expressed a very common Enlightenment view when he considered that Catholicism is reprehensible because

not contented with dividing the sacerdotal from the regal office (which must be prejudicial to any state) it bestows the former on a foreigner, who has always a separate, and may often have an opposite interest to that of the public.23

In Early Modern Europe, the ideal of toleration usually came before that of the supremacy of civil authority.24 Hence, only those Catholics who embraced one form or another of Erastian ecclesiology were able to accept the Enlightenment theories on toleration.25

After Catholicism, Calvinism is, arguably, the Christian denomination most clearly discriminated by the Enlightenment, and for similar reasons. Among Protestant branches, Calvinism was most reluctant to accept the submission of the church to civil authorities. Some of the best-known Early Modern theories of toleration were largely constructed against orthodox Calvinism. Historians of toleration have insisted on the confrontation between Castellio and Calvin, the Arminians and the Dutch Reformed Church, Pierre Bayle and Pierre Jurieu, and so on and so forth. Enlightenment authors often blamed puritans for the British Civil Wars and thought that Huguenots, if not as guilty as the ligeurs, were also responsible for the French Wars of Religion.26 As Manfred Svensson shows in his contribution to this special issue, confessional Calvinists such as John Owen also held theories of toleration, but historians often prefer to pay attention to those authors whose doctrinal minimalism and distinct rejection of religious war seems more appropriate for opposing spiritual authority. This preference essentially coincides with that of the Enlightenment authors themselves. However, some of them acknowledged the role of Calvinist ‘enthusiasts’ in the history of religious freedom. Regarding the English independents and their early defence of ‘the principle of toleration’, Hume wrote: ‘It is remarkable that so reasonable a doctrine owed its origin, not to reasoning, but to the height of extravagance and enthusiasm.’27

The case of William Penn, which Andrew Murphy studies in this special issue, is further proof of how scholars' fixation on the Enlightenment has diverted attention from some of the main advocates of toleration. Generally, Penn is not perceived as opposed to the Enlightenment, but neither is he placed at its core. The fact that Murphy never mentions the word Enlightenment in his article is sufficiently telling. It is true that Penn does not seem to fit into the description of the Enlightenment advanced above; his campaign for toleration was not primarily intended to curtail religious authority, but rather to stop the persecution he and his fellow Quakers suffered at the hands of civil authorities. In fact, some early Enlightenment figures perceived Quakers as potentially dangerous because they reject oaths and other political and social conventions.28 However, due to their tolerance and their lack of clergy, the Quakers were soon perceived as ‘the most innocent enthusiasts’.29 Penn himself did much to increase the intellectual prestige of his coreligionists and he was highly admired by some Enlightenment authors.30 He certainly advocated for broader toleration than Locke or Bayle, regardless of his less apparent association with the Enlightenment.

Despite some scholars’ recognition of the role that mystics, prophets and millenarians played in the history of early modern toleration, it has not received nearly the attention it deserves.31 In his contribution to this special issue, Laborie shows how certain ecumenical and millenarian groups believed and practised tolerance more thoroughly than most of their contemporaries. Enlightenment authors, however, usually regarded these groups as irrational enthusiasts. Bayle, for instance, hated millenarians with a passion. He regarded them as seditious enthusiasts who, along with other believers in modern revelations, prophecies and miracles, deserved to be punished with death.32 It is true that eighteenth-century mysticism, with its downplaying of theological distinctions, shared some traits with the Enlightenment and that a few relevant figures during that era, such as Joseph Priestley, can be said to combine millenarianism with the language of ‘reasonable religion’.33 However, prophets and their followers are not usually considered part of the Enlightenment. They were, nonetheless, a significant social and religious reality, thus questioning the adequacy of describing the long eighteenth century as an Age of Enlightenment.

It is frequently stated that the modern conception of tolerance arose with the Enlightenment. The nature of this conception is not, however, very clear. María José Villaverde's contribution to this special issue, concerning Émeric Crucé, raises pertinent questions about the originality of the Enlightenment's ideas on toleration. Crucé's only known book was published in 1623 and, according to Villaverde, it advocates for wider toleration than most of the main Enlightenment works. Moreover, Crucé's theories share the Enlightenment's central concerns because they were constructed against the traumatic memory of the Wars of Religion and because they aspired to bring back social peace and political stability to Europe, as well as to a wider international community.

It is possible, in any case, to maintain that Crucé was an exception, a very singular precursor to the Enlightenment. Villaverde explicitly notes Crucé's admiration for Henry IV and his intellectual debt to Jean Bodin, but she also distinguishes Crucé from the politiques, arguing that he did not conceive of toleration merely as a means to ensure political stability. For some scholars, the novelty of the Enlightenment theory of toleration is found in this precise distinction. According to them, the Enlightenment understanding of toleration as an unconditional principle radically differs from previous views in which toleration was essentially a practical means for achieving a political goal. This interpretation ignores the fact that defences of toleration were sometimes thoroughly principled in the sixteenth century and often essentially pragmatic in the Age of Enlightenment.34

Scholarly focus on a few ‘higher’ philosophical or theological matters has often obscured the fact that insistence on the utility of toleration for commerce, population growth, political stability and social peace was a constant feature of Enlightenment writings.35 The Enlightenment did not bring a more principled view of toleration, but rather diffused the conviction that allowing a certain degree of religious diversity was less dangerous for social cohesion and civil authority than pursuing religious uniformity. Bodin differs from Enlightenment tolerationists in that he remained unconvinced that toleration was necessarily better suited than religious unity for achieving peace and political stability. Thus, in Les Six Livres de la République, he still regarded religious unity as an ideal alternative to religious wars. Nonetheless, he advanced another possible solution that Voltaire himself later repeatedly defended: having as many religions as necessary to defuse conflict, rather than just two.36

In general, Enlightenment authors remained worried about the dangers of religious pluralism. Bayle was far from alone in considering that sectarian divisions and theological dogmas always threaten the public repose.37 If he, like other Enlightenment authors, did not propose enforcing religious unity, it was mainly because he believed that such a remedy would be even worse than the disease.

In his History of England, David Hume explicitly acknowledged the pragmatic nature of Enlightenment toleration:

In all former ages, not wholly excepting even those of Greece and Rome, religious sects and heresies and schisms, had been esteemed dangerous, if not pernicious to civil government, and were regarded as the source of faction, and private combination, and opposition to the laws. The magistrate, therefore, applied himself directly to the cure of this evil as of every other; and very naturally attempted, by penal statutes, to suppress those separate communities, and punish obstinate innovators. But it was found by fatal experience, and after spilling an ocean of blood in those theological quarrels, that the evil was of a peculiar nature, and was both enflamed by violent remedies, and diffused itself more rapidly throughout the whole society. Hence, though late, arose the paradoxical principle and salutary practice of toleration.38

Scholars often argue that there was a ‘long and complex journey from the Reason of State to the Enlightenment’.39 In doing so, they lose sight of the fact that the reason of state played a central role in most of the Enlightenment's political and religious programmes.

According to some scholarly accounts, a reliance on rational, non-religious arguments most distinguishes Enlightenment theories on toleration from previous ones. It must be stated, however, that pre-Enlightenment authors, such as Bodin himself, were perfectly capable of offering non-religious reasons for toleration and that religious arguments remained prevalent during the eighteenth century. The notable involvement of freethinkers and atheists in Enlightenment debates on toleration was, no doubt, an historical novelty. However, in the eighteenth century, most European toleration advocates were still Christians and often employed religious doctrines to promote their views. Even nonbelievers knew that most of their readers would be more convinced by appealing to the Scriptures than to any other source. That circumstance may explain, for instance, why someone like Diderot, who despised religions as essentially fanatical, repeated various traditional Christian arguments for toleration in his Encyclopédie article on intolerance.40 As Diego Lucci shows in his contribution to this special issue, ‘theological lying’ was so common in the Enlightenment that debates about what its main exponents really believed are continuous and sometimes unsolvable.

In the last decades, increasing research on the religious Enlightenment has highlighted the role of Christian doctrines in Enlightenment toleration debates. Scholars have stressed the religious roots of early Enlightenment ideas concerning freedom of conscience and worship, as well as the role that religious groups, such as English dissenters and French Jansenists, played in eighteenth-century debates on toleration.41 In response to this trend, scholars who understand the Enlightenment as a decline of religion have stressed the importance of secular theories of toleration, particularly highlighting Spinoza's influence as a thinker with no more religion than nature and reason. They argue that he allegedly went beyond religious toleration and fostered complete intellectual freedom.42 However, as Lucci's essay indicates, even the followers of Spinoza's radical Enlightenment often based his claims on religious sources and traditions. In the case of the English freethinkers that Lucci studies, it is apparent that their ideas on toleration emerged both from and against a Christian worldview. Among other things, Lucci shows that the very notion of freethinking comes from the Protestant principle of free examination and that the lines separating Protestantism from Socinianism, Socinianism from deism, deism from pantheism, and pantheism from atheism are extremely blurred.

It is true that, during the Age of Enlightenment, relevant thinkers relied on natural law in search of a common ground for moral civility regardless of the doctrinal disputes that divided Christianity. But, for many of them, natural law was of divine origin and included religious duties. Locke, along with many other Enlightenment authors, thought that atheists should not be tolerated because of their inability to follow natural law.43 In the eighteenth century, even unbelievers and sceptics tended to think that religion had some kind of social utility. Rousseau approvingly quoted Machiavelli's opinion, according to which rulers should recur to God's authority if they want new laws to be accepted by their non-enlightened subjects.44 Like the Roman philosophers and magistrates described in Edward Gibbon's Decadence and fall, philosophes may have thought that a religion was false, but that did not mean they necessarily considered it useless.45 Voltaire even stated that the worst form of superstition was not as dangerous as atheism because most people would not follow moral and civic laws if they did not consider them to be divinely sanctioned.46 It is not even clear if Spinoza favoured toleration for atheists. He stressed that philosophers should be freed from every impediment to the discovery of the truth, but for the whole of society he prescribed a public religion that is almost identical with ethics, but that nonetheless depends on obedience to God.47

Christian notions highly influenced Enlightenment rhetoric on toleration. The role of the Christian idea of conscience is, for instance, pretty evident. For both Locke and Bayle, following one's conscience was, above all, a religious duty. The idea of conscience as a moral guide has been central to the Christian tradition since the teachings of Paul.48 Even scholastic theologians, such as Thomas of Aquinas, insisted that obeying one's conscience was always a moral imperative. What distinguished Bayle from Aquinas is that, for Aquinas, one was to blame if one failed to acquire a correct conscience, whereas Bayle's views on the human mind led him to a much more complex understanding of the relation between conscience and truth.49 In early modern times, the process of conscience formation became increasingly perceived as not entirely subject to the will and as not totally conducive to the truth. Hence, a sincere conscience became much more central to religion than a correct one.

The centrality of Christian ideas on conscience and belief set important limits to early Enlightenment discourses on toleration. The example of Locke clearly shows that focusing on the religious duty to believe in and worship God according to one’s own conscience often led to paying much less attention, if any, to the more general freedoms of thought, speech, or private conduct.50 Marta García Alonso, in her contribution to this special issue, notes that, according to Bayle, civil magistrates should respect the believing conscience, but can interfere in external ecclesiastical matters since they do not belong to the essence of religion. Such opinions were common among Enlightenment thinkers, who often equally defended the right of sovereigns over ecclesiastical matters and the right of individuals over their own consciences. Religious freedom, of course, could be severely curtailed in this way. After all, even the apologists of the Spanish Inquisition held that inquisitors respected the individual conscience and only punished the external breach of religious laws.51

However, Enlightenment thinkers did not always commit to the Christian idea of conscience. In fact, the alleged religious duty to follow one's conscience was sometimes perceived as dangerously similar to religious enthusiasm, in which allegiance to one's own beliefs frees the individual from obeying the laws. This perception is evident in the Enlightenment interpretation of the wars of religion, which usually laid the blame on those groups who opposed political authority claiming reasons of conscience. It explains why authors as diverse as Christian Thomasius and Edward Gibbon praised civil authorities who enacted toleration in their states, but, at the same time, branded sects or individuals who refused to comply with existing religious laws as enthusiasts.52

Several Enlightenment authors denied that conscience was innate, God given, and a reliable source of morality.53 There is, thus, some truth in Edward G. Andrew's assertion that ‘modernity is the product of tensions between Protestant conscience and Enlightenment reason’.54 However, those tensions are often present within the same body of work. The language of freedom of conscience is usually employed in the toleration theories purported by Enlightenment authors who elsewhere voiced mistrust of conscience. Andrew himself has stressed this ambiguity in Locke's work.

García Alonso's take on Bayle shows how one of the most prominent defendants of the rights of the erring conscience also rejected any conscientious claim to subversion of established laws. Bayle condemned the idea ‘that part of the subjects can resist the sovereigns who want to strip them of freedom to serve God in a different way than the one established in the country’ as equally fanatical as the doctrine of persecution.55 In fact, he acknowledged that claiming the rights of conscience (although rhetorically powerful and religiously convincing) was of little political consequence. Bayle knew that such rights could be adduced to justify any behaviour allegedly demanded by conscience. Thus, in the end, he assigned the magistrates the right to determine the extent of toleration in accordance with public interest.56

Even authors more clearly indebted to the Christian idea of conscience realized that, if they wanted to be tolerated, they should convince civil authorities that their religious denominations did not present a threat to society or the state. This fact is apparent in the works of William Penn, as Andrew Murphy analyses in this special issue. Penn was repeatedly persecuted for his Quaker beliefs and he consistently defended the rights of conscience along with the ‘English freedoms’. But, at the same time, he insisted that the Quaker faith was completely otherworldly and posed no danger to secular affairs. Penn wanted to make clear that toleration of his and other equally peaceful religions was not just a matter of respecting freedom of conscience, but also entailed great benefit to the commonwealth because it would foster moral unity, social peace and economic growth.

According to some scholars, tolerance understood as the legitimacy of religious diversity was almost absent from sixteenth-century political and religious discourse. Tolerance was accepted at most as a temporal means to achieving the real objective behind the more moderate and conciliatory authors, politicians and churchmen of the time, namely religious concord. Advocates of concord did not want a steady regime of legal recognition of religious plurality, but rather the reunion of all Christians in one Church through mutual doctrinal and disciplinary concessions.57 Following this interpretation, one can conclude that the ideal of religious concord did not give way to that of toleration until the Enlightenment came along. The truth is, however, a bit more complex.

The distinction between tolerance and concord was already used in early modern Europe. In English debates, for instance, it was quite common to talk about comprehension and indulgence. The former meant widening the Church of England's doctrine and discipline to include a greater variety of members. The latter meant according legal rights to dissenting groups that were not part of the Church. Comprehension and indulgence were, thus, different ideas, but they were not at all incompatible. It is in this sense that, in 1689, the early Enlightenment theologian Philipp van Limborch wrote that ‘truly Christian toleration’ was ‘well represented under the two heads of Comprehension and Indulgence’. He hoped for the establishment of a ‘truly Catholic and Christian Church’ that embraces ‘all who by the rule of the Gospel are manifestly not shut out from heaven’. But, in the meantime, he was content with a progressive broadening of the limits of the church accompanied with forbearance of those who remained outside those limits.58

Many Enlightenment authors still believed that toleration could produce ‘not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord’.59 Of course, as time went on and the divisions created by the Reformation increasingly consolidated, the reunion of the different branches of Christianity seemed more and more complicated. However, most eighteenth-century Christians (including Enlightenment Christians) still aimed for unity, whether through combating the beliefs and practices of rival churches or through mutual concessions and doctrinal minimalism. Both options were sometimes combined as in the case, for instance, of those who worked for unity among Protestants, while at the same time harshly fighting the Catholic Church.

Even when desired unity was conceived of as the triumph of one religion over others, toleration was still sometimes considered as a means to achieve it. Voltaire stated that ‘in all countries where liberty of conscience is allowed, the established religion will at last swallow up the rest’.60 Christian writers, for their part, often considered ‘that general and equal toleration, by giving a free circulation to fair argument, is the most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians to an unity of faith’.61 In spite of its triumphalistic appearance, this view was frequently accompanied by a notable degree of self-criticism. Such was the case in the Catholic Enlightenment, which often involved an effort to free the Church from aspects that rendered it unacceptable in the eyes of other Christians.62

Manfred Svensson's contribution to this special issue highlights the role that doctrinal minimalism played in Locke's toleration theories. This minimalism, so rife in Christian Enlightenment, was obviously intended as a way of overcoming doctrinal barriers and reuniting Christianity. Of course, minimalism was also divisive, but this paradox accompanied most efforts towards Christian concord. From the perspective of doctrinal minimalism, those who rejected theological concessions and clung to their dogmas, were deemed fanatics and often excluded from toleration.

Concord, toleration and exclusion were easily combined in Locke's writings. In his opinion, there were only two kinds of Christians, those who ‘arrogate to themselves dominion over the consciences of others’ and those who seek truth for themselves and tolerate the rest.63 He excluded the former from toleration, but trusted that toleration among the latter would lay the foundations ‘of that liberty and peace in which the church of Christ is one day to be established'.64 In Locke's view, toleration was the best way to concord. As he wrote to his friend van Limborch:

Men will always differ on religious questions and rival parties will continue to quarrel and wage war on each other unless the establishment of equal liberty for all provides a bond of mutual charity by which all may be brought together into one body.65

An aspiration for unity and concord was present even in the non-Christian Enlightenment. Deism, for instance, is clearly a form of religious minimalism that aspired to bring together a society divided by dogmatic disputes. As Lucci's contribution to this special issue clearly demonstrates, deism did not necessarily mean the rejection of positive religions. Within deism, natural religion was often considered the core of all religions, whose particular aspects were regarded as adiaphora or inessentials that were acceptable as long as they did not corrupt the true, essential religion. Once again, both toleration and exclusion were at play in deism. And the same could be said of Kant's ‘pure rational system of religion’. According to Kant ‘there is only one (true) religion; but there can be several kinds of faith’.66 Kant aimed for religious concord by harmonizing uniformity and diversity, but the truth is that many actual faiths fell outside his rational religion. As Svensson insightfully notes in his contribution to this special issue, Enlightenment thinkers often demanded that churches dilute their confessional claims in order to be fully tolerated. They could only tolerate religions after decisively transforming them.

The Enlightenment, as a whole, was an effort to overcome the divisions created by the Wars of Religion. Voltaire insisted that only philosophy could put an end to the divisions that theological quarrels had created in Europe.67 And the same unifying goal was often attributed to natural law, to the supremacy of civil authority, and to toleration. For their part, atheists like Holbach insisted that religion constituted a ‘source of divisions’ and was thus incompatible with the desirable ‘union and concord among citizens’.68 Projects for concord diversified, rather than disappeared, during the Enlightenment. Most of those projects, though, remained patently religious.

Sometimes religious pluralism, understood as respect for and even approval of all forms of religion, is considered a mark of the modern (that is to say Enlightenment) mode of toleration. According to this view, Christian authors such as Roger Williams or William Penn could be considered less tolerant since they despised some forms of religion and did not oppose proselytism.69 This argument, however, holds no water. Most Enlightenment authors are known for publicly despising many forms of religion. A few of them, in fact, despised all forms of religion. Even those who believed all religions to be part of the same truth or who searched for a minimal religion that could embrace many different beliefs tended to loathe actual religions for claiming to be the one true religion and for considering their faith incompatible with others. For their part, religious sceptics easily accused those who held any strong beliefs of enthusiasm. Counter-Enlightenment writers were not completely wrong when talking about the fanaticism of the philosophes. 70 At least some of them were aggressively anti-fanatical.

In the Age of Enlightenment, to tolerate still meant to forbear something without liking it. Hence, regarding the situation of Judaism in the Roman Empire, Gibbon could say that, ‘according to the maxims of universal toleration, the Romans protected a superstition which they despised’.71 It is well know that, by the end of the eighteenth century, relevant figures such as Kant and Paine started to argue that toleration is opposed to true freedom.72 In their opinion, no authority has the right to declare an official religion and decide which religions should simply be tolerated. But that does not in any way mean that these authors approved of all kinds of religion or that they refrained from harshly criticizing bigotry, enthusiasm and any other opinions or beliefs they disliked.

Even scholars more interested in earlier traditions of tolerance often attribute the emergence of a new, liberal view on the subject to the Enlightenment.73 Accordingly, it is often claimed that Bayle, Locke and the like replaced traditional communitarian views of toleration with a new understanding of freedom of conscience as an individual right. Lately, however, relevant studies have argued that early Enlightenment advocates of tolerance usually based their theories on an understanding of natural law that was not individualistic or primarily concerned with subjective rights.74 Moreover, it seems that this understanding of natural law, which gave primacy to public well-being and the stability of the state, remained prevalent throughout the eighteenth century.75

It is true that Kant and a few late Enlightenment thinkers advanced ideas that led to a more individualistic and subjective view of the rights. It is also clear that, during the eighteenth century, the language of rights was increasingly employed as a powerful rhetorical tool to defend one's politics. This is in itself a most relevant change in political discourse, but it does not really mean that individual rights were placed above public good or the interest of the state. Recently, for instance, Scott Sowerby has noted that, around 1687, James II of England abandoned the traditional defence of freedom of conscience as ‘a privilege or a royal grant’ and ‘elevated it to the status of an indefeasible right’.76 However, this rhetorical shift did not stop the king from limiting the religious liberty of his subjects when he thought his political authority or the interest of the state was endangered.77 One century later, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen passed by France’s National Constituent Assembly still made clear that the interest of the state should prevail against individual rights. Regarding religion, the Declaration established that no one was to be disturbed ‘for his opinions, including religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law’.78 This proviso could justify, and did justify, significant restrictions to religious freedom.

Sometimes the Enlightenment is deemed as liberal because it produced ‘radical assaults against absolutism in both government and dogma’.79 However, as García Alonso's reading of Bayle clearly shows, attacks on religious bigotry could go hand in hand with defences of the indivisible sovereignty of kings. Given its drive against religious authority, the Enlightenment was all about strengthening civil power and could easily lead to monarchism. Of course, a strong civil power can also be republican, and even democratic, and thus those political forms also fit in with the Enlightenment. Any effort to reduce Enlightenment politics to a single ideology is bound to fail.80 In fact, most Enlightenment thinkers were not as interested in finding the right form of government as in promoting a series of reforms (often related with curbing ecclesiastical authority) that could be implemented by very different, and even opposed, kinds of government. Baron d'Holbach, for instance, was a very harsh critic of monarchs for protecting churches and fostering religious fanaticism, but also wrote that absolute power could be a very useful tool if employed against the real enemies of society.81

Enlightenment theories on toleration often insisted that allowing for different religions in the same state would not disrupt moral uniformity and political stability in any way. It is true that, as the eighteenth century progressed, Enlightenment authors increasingly defended the convenience of granting freedom of thought beyond religious matters. But even those like Kant who signalled the benefits of a public discussion about politics, usually denied freedom of seditious speech that could promote resistance to established authority.82 To make clear that Aufklärung was not a danger to princes' authority, Kant noted that philosophers never formed ‘seditious factions’.83 Voltaire, for his part, insisted that philosophers were not a threat to authorities because they ‘will never form a religious sect’ and their writings were ‘not calculated for the vulgar’.84 It is true that, elsewhere, the philosophes showed interest in changing society and creating public opinion, but they were also concerned that a generalization of political freedoms could lead to the triumph of the masses' prejudices over Enlightenment reforms.85

If we consider the separation of church and state as a feature of liberalism, it becomes even more obvious that Enlightenment was not necessarily liberal. Such relevant thinkers as Hume, Diderot and Voltaire openly stated that the state's sovereigns and magistrates should govern the church.86 But even those less inclined to Erastianism usually conceded civil authorities very broad rights to supervise religious beliefs and practices so that they could not become a threat to the state. Most Enlightenment authors were convinced that the only way to fight religious authority was to firmly subjugate it to political power.

In his classic study on The Rise of Toleration, Henry Kamen argued that the theory of toleration was essentially completed with Locke and Bayle. Thus he regarded ‘the recrudescence of persecution in the later seventeenth century’ as evidence ‘that practice lagged behind theory’.87 Recently, Benjamin Kaplan has insisted that the principles of toleration that the philosophes defended made little impact on the vast majority of the European population, including eighteenth-century rulers. If sovereigns like Joseph II of Austria enacted laws broadening religious toleration, it was not under the influence of philosophical ideals, but for merely political and pragmatic reasons.88 In contrast, scholars who believe that ‘in a certain sense ideas rule the world’ have stressed the social and political influence of Enlightenment theories of toleration.89

The contributions to this special issue make clear that the relationship between the theory and practice of toleration in the Age of Enlightenment is more complex than is often assumed. In Murphy's analysis of the imprisonments of William Penn, we see how personal experience fed theory and how theory led to political reform. Penn's example also reveals that advocates of toleration employed very diverse writing genres and aimed to influence both their readers' sentiment and their reason. Laborie's take on ‘radical tolerance’ shows how religious doctrines, such as universalism, inspired practices and beliefs of toleration. It also suggests that radical ecumenical experiences influenced Enlightenment authors' philosophical views. Moreover, in Laborie's article we find people of every social condition proclaiming toleration and engaging in tolerant religious practices; this is in itself proof of certain religious beliefs' capacity to disseminate tolerance.

It is not easy to measure the diffusion of theories of toleration by examining the presence of tolerant attitudes in society. As we have seen, Enlightenment theories often combined tolerance and intolerance and advocates of toleration did not always personally exhibit a tolerant attitude. Counter-Enlightenment writers, on the other hand, often combined calls to political intolerance with an insistence that private individuals should treat everyone with charity regardless of their religion.90

The relationship between toleration theories and policies is also a very complex one. As already noted, the distinction between pragmatic and Enlightenment toleration does not reflect a historical reality. Enlightenment authors insistently defended the economic, social and political benefits of tolerance. And the rulers who enacted toleration in order to strengthen their states recurred to Enlightenment publicists to defend these measures with both pragmatic and theoretical arguments.91

Histories of toleration frequently aim to trace the origins of the rational, universal and definitive theory of tolerance. The problem with this approach is that it is still unclear that such a theory has ever existed. Arguments for toleration, past and present, are frequently incompatible and have almost always been contested. Historians of toleration exhibit the same discordance when arguing whether Castellio, Spinoza, Bayle or Kant constructed the definitive argument for toleration.92

Reading the history of religious freedom as the progressive appearance of new and more convincing arguments for toleration can be seriously misleading. Arguments for toleration are almost as old as religious persecution. Even the theologians that supported the medieval ‘persecuting society’ insisted that faith was always free and that no one could be coerced to accept Christianity.93 Their main justification for intolerance, namely that baptism implied a promise that should be kept, does not sound very convincing, but this did not stop them from demanding the harshest punishments for heretics.94 Martin Luther, for his part, would have been esteemed as one of the greatest historical champions of tolerance if his last words on the subject had been those found in his 1523 tract, ‘On secular authority’.95 There, we find some of the main arguments that advocates of toleration employed in the next centuries. Historical circumstances, however, ultimately led Luther to ignore his own reasons and demand that public authority ‘repress blasphemy, false doctrines and heresy’.96 Enlightenment writers were well aware of the distance between reasons for toleration and the practice of tolerance. Voltaire made this perfectly clear in his Traité sur la tolérance, by presenting many quotes from Christian authorities arguing for toleration and then stressing the countless times Christians have failed to practise a theory they know perfectly well.97

There is a tendency among historians of toleration to exaggerate the novelty of early Enlightenment theories and to downplay the importance of eighteenth-century writings. It is often said that, after Locke and Bayle, defences of toleration lost originality.98 I think, however, that the relevance of the Enlightenment for the history of toleration is not so much found in the originality of its ideas, as it is in their increased diffusion. The early Enlightenment already prompted a notable intensification, especially in England and Holland, of previous campaigns for toleration. But it was during the eighteenth century that much of the European intellectual elite accepted the ideal of toleration and began to express it in the most diverse kinds of texts. The alleged lack of originality and philosophical depth of works such as the Traité sur la tolérance is, in fact, symptomatic of this eighteenth-century cultural change. At least since the mid-eighteenth century, advocates of tolerance started to write as if there were no need for subtle theories justifying religious freedom. Toleration was, simply, a sign of progress, a requisite of modernity, an essential quality of advanced, rich and peaceful countries. Hundreds of eighteenth-century writings reflect the conviction that religious wars and persecutions had filled Europe with blood, instability and backwardness, and that tolerance was reversing that sad history. Voltaire put it very clearly: every age has its own ways and toleration was the proper way for an age in which ‘everywhere government has gotten stronger and society gentler’.99 The Enlightenment's toleration was, above all, a new mentality, a new belief. It certainly did not require any philosophical consensus.

In the Age of Enlightenment, tolerance gradually ceased to be seen as a sign of weakness or a lesser evil and started to be regarded as a requirement of progress. This new discourse did not just spread through philosophical or theological treatises, but rather, and perhaps to a greater extent, by sermons, plays, travel books, novels, newspapers, histories, political speeches, etc. In the case of France, for instance, toleration gained such a good name in the central decades of the eighteenth century, that even those who most openly denied the rights of religious minorities started to do so in the name of tolerance.100

The extent to which this mentality, this new regard for tolerance, expanded beyond the intellectual elite in Enlightenment Europe is arguable. However, it is clear that it eventually found its way to a large portion of the population, as our Western liberal societies can attest.

The articles in this special issue were first presented as papers at the International Conference ‘Religious Toleration in the Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800)’, which was held at the University of Navarra in June 2015. I wish to thank the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) for their material and organizational support. I am especially grateful to Montserrat Herrero, Rafael García Pérez and all the other members of the Religion and Civil Society project at the ICS.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Roland Mortier, Clartés et ombres du siècle des lumières (Geneva, 1969), 13–59.

2 What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley, CA, 1996), 45–232.

3 Authentic Memoirs concerning the Portuguese Inquisition (London, 1761), 2; Andrew Kippis, A Sermon Preached at the Old Jewry (London, 1788), 2; Manuel Blaya, ‘Disertación sobre la Ley 37. Tit. 3. Lib. I. de la Recopilación’, in Espíritu de los mejores diarios literarios que se publican en Europa, 203 (Madrid, 1789), 151–82 (152); Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1790), 32; John Cartwright, An Appeal, on the Subject of the English Constitution (Boston, 1797), 25.

4 Simon Search, ‘To the People of England’, in Spirit of the Times (London, 1790), 83–115, (103).

5 Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Toleration and the Enlightenment Movement’, in Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 2006), 23–69.

6 Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 11.

7 Claude-François Nonnotte, Dictionnaire philosophique de la religion (Liège, 1773), 362, 389–90; Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis, La religion considérée comme l’unique base du bonheur et de la véritable philosophie (Paris, 1787), 373.

8 Jean Sarrailh, La España ilustrada de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII (Mexico, 1957); Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore: Da Muratori a Beccaria (Turin, 1969); Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976); The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy S. Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge, 1981).

9 Robert Darnton, ‘The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France’, Past and Present, 51 (1971): 81–115.

10 Jonathan Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization. A Review Essay’. American Historical Review, 108 (2003): 1061–1080; S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester, 2003); David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ, 2011).

11 A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe, ed. Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (Leiden, 2010); Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe. A Transnational History, ed. Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner (Notre Dame, IN, 2014); Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment. The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford, 2016).

12 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume One. The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge, 1999), 5–10.

13 Andrew R. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA, 2001); Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith. Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 333–58; Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter; Paradoxes of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Political Thought, ed. John Christian Laursen and María José Villaverde (Lanham, MD, 2012).

14 Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, ‘Discours préliminaire’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (Paris, 1751), vol. I, i–xlv (xxiv); Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784)’, What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers, 58–64 (62).

15 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume One, 7.

16 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis (Cambridge, 2005); Nathan Tarcov, ‘Machiavelli's Critique of Religion’, Social Research, 81 (New York, 2014), 193–216.

17 Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park, PA, 1996); Daniel Eppley, Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God's Will in Tudor England (Aldershot–Burlington, VT, 2007); Olivier Christin, La Paix de religion. L'autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1997).

18 Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation (London, 1733), letters VII and XIII, 40–4 and 81–93; Frederick II of Prussia to Voltaire, 10 February 1767, Voltaire's Correspondence (Geneva, 1961), vol. 69, 193; Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne (Paris, 1935).

19 Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London, 1967), 216–39; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 265–70; Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 240–88; (Cambridge, 2006); Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict. Past and Present (Cambridge, 2013), 170–265.

20 Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary (Indianapolis, IN, 2005), part II, ch. VII, 214; ch. XIX, 554.

21 Antonio José Rodríguez, El Philoteo en conversaciones del tiempo (Madrid, 1776), vol. II, 230–2; Juan Nuix, Reflexiones imparciales sobre la humanidad de los españoles en las Indias (Madrid, 1782) 95, 193; Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, Traité historique et dogmatique de la vraie religion (Paris, 1784), vol. IV, 7–11.

22 Claude-François Nonnotte, Dictionnaire philosophique de la religion (Liège, 1773) 304–7; Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis, La religion considérée comme l’unique base du Bonheur et de la véritable philosophie (Paris, 1787), 215–33; Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, Encyclopédie méthodique. Théologie (Paris, 1789), vol. II, 5–9.

23 David Hume, ‘On the Protestant Succession’, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, 1758), 265–71 (70).

24 Juan Pablo Domínguez, ‘Reformismo cristiano y tolerancia en España a finales del siglo XVIII’, Hispania Sacra, LXV (2013), 113–72 (129–31).

25 Bernard Bourdin, La genèse théologico-politique de l’État moderne (Paris, 2004).

26 John Seed, ‘Enthusiasts, Puritans and Politics: David Hume's History of England’, in Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. John Seed (Edinburgh, 2008), 73–98; Voltaire, An Essay Upon the Civil Wars of France (London, 1727).

27 David Hume, The History of Great Britain, under the House of Stuart (London, 1759), vol. I. 371.

28 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration (Oxford, 2006), 269–302 (286).

29 David Hume, ‘On Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in Essays and Treatises, 48–51 (49).

30 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English, letters I–V, 1–29; Histoire de Jenni, ou Le sage et l’athée (London, 1775), 84, 102.

31 Richard H. Popkin, ‘Skepticism about Religion and Millenarian Dogmatism: Two Sources of Toleration in the Seventeenth Century’, in Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment, ed. John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman (Philadelphia, 1988), 232–50.

32 John Christian Laursen, ‘Bayle's Anti-Millenarianism: The Dangers of those Who Claim to Know the Future’, in Millenarianism and Messianism, Volume IV, ed. Richard H. Popkin and John Christian Laursen (Dordrecht, 2001), 95–106.

33 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume One, 71.

34 Balthasar Hubmaier, ‘On heretics and those who burn them’, in Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, ed. H. Wayne Pipkin, & John H. Yoder (Scottdale, 1989), 58–66.

35 John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 536–66.

36 Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République (Paris, 1577), lib. IV, cap. VII, 463–85; Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English, letter IV, 45 ; ‘Tolerance’, in Dictionnaire Philosophique (London, 1767), vol. II, 490–4.

37 Pierre Bayle, Reponse aux questions d’un provincial (Rotterdam, 1707), vol. 5, ch. I, 1011–4.

38 David Hume, The History of England (London, 1786), vol. VI, 165.

39 Fabrizio Lomonaco, Jean Barbeyrac editor of Gerard Noodt (Berlin, 2012), 5.

40 Diderot, ‘Intoleránce’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné (Paris, 1765), vol. VIII, 843–4.

41 S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion, 130–59; Martin Hugh Fitzpatrick, ‘Enlightenment, Dissent and Toleration’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 29 (2012), 42–72.

42 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 265–70.

43 Ian Harris, ‘John Locke and Natural Law: Free Worship and Toleration’, in Natural Law in the Early Enlightenment, ed. Jon Parkin and Timothy Stanton (Oxford, 2011), 59–105.

44 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (Amsterdam, 1762) ch. VII, 101.

45 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776), vol. I, ch. II, 29.

46 Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance (1763), ch. XX, 178.

47 John Christian Laursen, ‘Spinoza on Lying for Toleration and His Intolerance of Atheists’, in Paradoxes of Religious Toleration, 39–52.

48 Edward G. Andrew, Conscience and Its Critics. Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason, and Modern Subjectivity (Toronto, 2001), 13–8.

49 Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary, book II, chs. XIII–XVII, 466–506.

50 John Dunn, ‘The Claim to Freedom of Conscience: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Worship?’, in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), 171–93.

51 Juan Nuix, Reflexiones imparciales, 190–7; José Isidro de Torres Flores, Disertación sobre la libertad natural jurídica del hombre (León, 1995), 117.

52 Christian Thomasius, ‘On the Power of Secular Government to Command its Subjects to Attend Church Diligently’, Essays on Church, State, and Politics (Indianapolis, IN, 2007), 128–47; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776), vol. I, ch. XVI, 526; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume One, 67.

53 Voltaire, ‘Conscience’, in Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (Geneve, 1774), vol. IV, 221–6.

54 Edward G. Andrew, Conscience and Its Critics. Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason, and Modern Subjectivity (Toronto, 2001), 9.

55 Pierre Bayle, Reponse aux questions d’un provincial, vol. 5, ch. I, 1012.

56 José Luis Colomer, ‘Política, conciencia y tolerancia religiosa. La Francia del edicto de Nantes y el Comentario de Pierre Bayle’, in Pierre Bayle, Comentario filosófico sobre las palabras de Jesucristo “oblígales a entrar” (Madrid, 2006), I-CXXXVII.

57 Mario Turchetti, ‘Religious Concord and Political Tolerance in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 22 (1991), 15–25.

58 Van Limborch to Locke, 2/12 April 1698, in John Locke, Selected Correspondence (Oxford, 2002), 138.

59 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall, vol. I, ch. II, 29.

60 Voltaire, Letters concerning the English, letter IV, 29.

61 John Carroll. An Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of America (Annapolis, 1784), 114.

62 Michael Printy, ‘Gallican Longings. Church and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, in The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered (New York, 2010), 249–64.

63 Locke to van Limborch, Selected Correspondence, 4 and 18 October 1698, 270.

64 Locke to van Limborch, Selected Correspondence, 6 June 1698, 140.

65 Locke to van Limborch, Selected Correspondence, 10 September 1689, 142.

66 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Cambridge, 1998), 6: 12, 6: 108.

67 Voltaire, Essay sur l’histoire générale, v. VIII, ch. 62, 340; ‘Pensées sur l’administration publique’, in Melanges philosophiques, litteraires, historiques, etc (Geneve, 1771), 9–10; ‘Dieu, Dieux’, in Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (Geneve, 1774), vol. IV, 304.

68 Holbach, Système de la nature (London, 1770), vol. I, ch. XIII, 371; Le christianisme dévoilé (London, 1777), ch. I, 12; ch. XIV, 72.

69 William Penn, Truth Exalted, in a Short, but Sure Testimony Against all those Religions, Faiths, and Worships that Have Been Formed and Followed in the Darkness of Apostacy (London, 1668); Teresa M. Bejan, ‘The Bond of Civility: Roger Williams on toleration and its limits’, History of European Ideas, 37 (Philadelphia, 2011), 409–20.

70 Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, Le Fanatisme des philosophes (London, 1764).

71 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776), vol. I, ch. XV, 451.

72 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (London, 1791), 78–9. Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784)’, What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers, 58–64 (62).

73 Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, ‘Difference and Dissent: Introduction’, in Difference and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, 1996), 1–16 (5–9).

74 Knud Haakonsen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1996); Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment, ed. Jon Parkin and Timothy Stanton.

75 Martin Hugh Fitzpatrick, ‘From Natural Law to Natural Rights? Protestant Dissent and Toleration in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History of European Ideas, 42 (2016), 195–221.

76 Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 42.

77 Steve Pincus, 1688. The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2009), 143–79.

78 La Constitution française, présentée au Roi par l’Assemblée nationale, le 3 Septembre 1791 (Paris, 1791), 3.

79 Margaret C. Jacob, ‘Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750’, The Journal of Modern History, 57 (2003), 387–9.

80 Annelien de Dijn, ‘The Politics of Enlightenment: From Peter Gay to Jonathan Israel’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 785–805.

81 Paul Heinrich d’Holbach, Éthocratie ou Le government fondé sur la morale (Amsterdam, 1776), ch. I, 6.

82 Helga Varden, ‘A Kantian Conception of Free Speech’, in Freedom of Expression in a Diverse World, ed. Deirdre Golash (New York, 2000), 39–55.

83 Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual peace’, in Political Writings (Cambridge, 2003), 115.

84 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English, letter XIII, 107.

85 Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Toleration and the Enlightenment movement’, 54.

86 Voltaire, La voix du sage et du people (Amsterdam, 1759), 8; David Hume, ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in Essays and Treatises, 270–80 (278); Denis Diderot, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes (Geneva, 1780), vol X, book XIX, ch. II, 88–92.

87 Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration, 217.

88 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 336–51.

89 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 12.

90 Juan Pablo Domínguez, ‘Reformismo cristiano y tolerancia en España’, 138–41.

91 Charles H. O’Brien, Ideas of Religious Toleration at the Time of Joseph II (Philadelphia, 1969).

92 Ian Hunter, ‘Religious Freedom in Early Modern Germany: Theology, Philosophy, and Legal Casuistry’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 113 (Durham, NC, 2014): 37–62 (40).

93 R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250 (Hoboken, 2007).

94 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIª-IIae, questions 10–12; Las Siete Partidas, sixth partida, titles 24–6.

95 Martin Luther, ‘On Secular Authority’, in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, ed. Harro Höpfl (Cambridge, 1991), 3–43.

96 Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration, 41.

97 Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, ch. XV, 155–9.

98 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 292.

99 Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, ch. IV, 30.

100 Jean Pey, La Tolérance chrétienne opposée au tolérantisme philosophique (Fribourg, 1784).