More and more, we are learning that there was no such thing as a pure theory of early modern religious toleration, or even religious peace or coexistence, in some single reified and essentialist sense. Rather, there were many, many variations on the theme. Almost every author who touched on the theme had a different take. This volume contributes to our understanding of the era by juxtaposing the ideas of four people: Pierre Charron, Justus Lipsius, Paolo Sarpi, and James VI/I. Author Natasha Constantinidou rightly explains that each of these authors wrote from a different point within widely spread networks of correspondence and publishing, but each knew the work of the others, or of others who knew the work of the others, in a web of intersecting and interacting thinkers and doers. All were thinkers, but Sarpi and James were also doers, involved in high-level diplomacy and political action.
The author’s discussion of Charron brings out some puzzles about him. She reviews at length the ways in which he contradicts and undermines his own claims. He makes it very clear that he thinks he is refuting the skeptics, but Richard Popkin and Jose Maia Neto have interpreted him as a skeptic. In his own time Marin Mersenne drew attention to the ambiguity of his work. We are left with the feeling that Charron was either too smart or not smart enough to be consistent. Was ambiguous eclecticism a strategy to send a message while avoiding persecution, or was it just plain philosophical incompetence? There is no clear answer to this question.
Justus Lipsius is one of the great examples of opportunism in the scholarly life, converting from Catholic to Lutheran to Catholic again to Calvinist to Catholic again. Perhaps a key to understanding him is his major edition of Tacitus, who may have taught him to dissimulate when it was in his interest. Perhaps his most interesting contribution to the religious-difference debate is his effort to distinguish the permissibility of lying in public life from its impermissibility in private life. Needless to say, there would be a tendency to justify one’s own lies by placing them in their public contexts, and to condemn other people’s lies by placing them in their private contexts.
With Sarpi and James we have two good examples of the ur-history of the idea of separation of church and state. Both were men of action, but both thought it important to put their ideas in writing. Each thought that he was in some way contributing to religious peace by emphasizing some sort of jurisdictional distinction that would keep church and state in their own spheres. Both thought of themselves as moderates, trying to open a path between the extremes. Sarpi called himself a chameleon, and James called himself temperate. Their supporters might have seen these positions as beneficial; their detractors would have seen them as disasters.
The methodology here is juxtaposition. Each writer has some things in common with and some things different from the others. The author carefully notes the points at which each of these writers modified their positions over time. One of the upshots of this methodological individualism and attention to change is that one cannot say that any one author belonged consistently to any one school, nor that any school can be identified that endured for any length of time. This is not history of timeless grand ideas, but rather documentation of four changing positions with some overlaps and some differences. It is a valuable corrective to theories that assume we can have more. The implication is that variations on several themes, a moving target of evolving ideas, and contributions from many voices building up over time is probably all that we can find in the history of responses to religious conflict.
