The Renaissance and Religious Toleration

Joe Loconte

Historians debate the most significant achievements of the Renaissance, the cultural revival that began in Italy and swept through Europe from roughly the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. There were scientific advances, a return to the study of the classics, and political theorizing a la Machiavelli. A visit to Florence provides an almost overwhelming sense of the artistic accomplishments of the era. Yet a crucial aspect of Renaissance history is often overlooked: its contribution to religious liberty, an ideal whose origins have implications for our own age of religious violence.

The closing years of the Renaissance marked a brutal period of intolerance and sectarian strife, thanks in part to the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Eventually, the Protestant emphasis on individual conscience would be the great instigator of religious freedom, a story that is well known, but a leading Catholic thinker, a child of the Renaissance, also played a vital, though indirect role: Erasmus of Rotterdam. Outraged by the hypocrisy and ignorance of the Catholic clergy, Erasmus helped launch one of the most important reform movements of the Renaissance. Known as Christian humanism, it was a campaign to reclaim those elements of Christianity that promoted peace, piety, the love of truth, and human dignity.

Erasmus enlisted his considerable literary skill toward a single end: to encourage ordinary believers to embrace “the philosophy of Christ”—the Spirit-led life of virtue and grace, patterned on the life of Jesus. Though himself a scholar, Erasmus had no patience for the “maze of disputations” that occupied Catholic academics. They produced nothing but quarrels and thwarted authentic Christianity: “What else is the philosophy of Christ, which He Himself calls a rebirth, than the restoration of human nature originally well formed?”

Personal transformation was impossible, Erasmus believed, apart from the word of God. A return to Scripture was “our chiefest hope for the restoration and rebuilding of the Christian religion.” The first priority, then, was to put the Bible into the hands of laymen. In 1516, Erasmus produced and published the first Greek edition of the New Testament, with Latin translation and commentaries, a year before Martin Luther shook the Catholic Church with his frontal assault on papal indulgences. “I disagree very much with those who are unwilling that Holy Scripture, translated into the vulgar tongue, be read by the uneducated . . . as if the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men’s ignorance of it,” he wrote. “The mysteries of kings, perhaps, are better concealed, but Christ wishes His mysteries published as openly as possible.” His Greek New Testament was a great spur to Luther’s own translation work.

A lifelong study of the Bible, especially of the life of Christ in the gospels, gave Erasmus a deep appreciation for the mercy and love of God. The legalistic temper of the church, he complained, had become a substitute for genuine spirituality; dogma had trumped devotion. “Articles [of faith] increased, but sincerity decreased,” he observed. “Contention boiled over, charity grew cold.” The scandalous result was that the church substituted outward conformity—achieved by threats, imprisonments, and lethal violence—for the effective preaching of the gospel. “We force men by intimidation to believe what they do not believe, to love what they do not love, and to understand what they do not understand,” he wrote. “Compulsion is incompatible with sincerity, and nothing is pleasing to Christ unless it is voluntary.”

Erasmus never developed a comprehensive view of religious liberty. He agreed that “blasphemers” represented a threat to social order and could legitimately be executed. He failed to challenge the pattern of state-dominated religion. Nevertheless, his emphasis on reason, dialogue, civility, and personal study of the Bible anticipated the principles championed by other reformers. His passion for the inner life of faith helped make later arguments for freedom of conscience plausible.

Erasmus remained a Catholic, even as he openly criticized the moral and spiritual corruption of the church. Catholic authorities considered him a traitor and condemned his work. Yet he continued to speak against religious persecution, which he called “the work of hangmen, and not of divines.” Despite his opponents, Erasmus made Christian charity his cardinal virtue: “No one is so great an enemy that I would not want to turn him, if possible, into a friend.” This is not the language, or the temperament, of the humanist of secular imagination. It is the spirit of the Christian humanist, the man of faith, the follower of Jesus. “The humanists did not accept the rationalism of the Enlightenment,” writes Gary Remer in Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration. “They were deeply religious men who believed in divinely revealed truths.”

Surely we could use more of their kind today, inside and outside the church. 

Joe Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.

Columns, Joseph Loconte, Being Human, Public Square, Religious Liberty, Thu 26 Jun 2008