The dawn of the age of toleration: Samuel Pufendorf and the road not taken.

Extract

---

The dawn of the age of toleration: Samuel Pufendorf and the road not taken.

It was the last gasp of the ancient regime of privileged tolerance. When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, he did what generations of kings, emperors and princes had done for millennia before him--either grant or revoke the right of their subjects to freely practice and worship their religion. The French Huguenots had existed under the Edict's parsimonious protections since 1598. Overnight, however, the Edictbanned French protestant worship, its churches ordered destroyed, its pastors exiled, and its members dispossessed or worse. Despite order-s that Protestant lay people should not leave the country, about 200,000 fled France. The resulting diaspora enriched the skilled labor and intellectual pools of Holland, England, Germany, Switzerland, as well as the American colonies. (1)

But the revocation's significance reached beyond the immediate human interest story. Its implications for the relationships between the individual, church, and society echoed through church sanctuaries, government corridors, and university halls across Europe. In hindsight, it may appear that at that time the old world of monarchical privilege and absolutism was slowly but inexorably passing into a world of republican consent and individual rights. But these new theories remained in their infancy, and to onlookers their survival was precarious and not at all guaranteed. The revocation threatened to undue the tenuous 1648 Peace of Westphalia--and the limited yet meaningful religious tolerance it had brought to much of the continent.

If religious toleration depended upon royal whim and caprice, nowhere were religious minorities safe. Further, the Peace of Westphalia was in jeopardy and Europe could well return to its destructive and fratricidal wars of religion. The revocation thus caused the writing of several treatises on the nature and importance of religious toleration in civil society. The revocation represented the old system of position and privilege; the breadth and depth of the response to it, however, showed that a new system of pluralism and rights was emerging.

One of the primary authors at the intersection of these two systems was Samuel Pufendorf, Lutheran thinker, professor of natural law, and counselor to the King of Sweden. (2) Born in 1632, in Saxony, Pufendorf was best known for his works on natural and international law, including the The Law of Nature and Nations. Published in 1672, this work had wide influence on the continent, in Scotland, and in the newly formed American colonies. (3)

When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, Pufendorf took the opportunity to write what has been described as an "appendix," or application of his natural law theory" to the question of church and state. (4) Entitled Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society ("Religion and Ci...

See the full content of this document

---