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Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist's Progress
This new study examines the relationship of atheism to religious tolerance from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in a broad array of literary texts and political and religious controversies written in Latin and the vernacular primarily in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The main authors featured are Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio, Jean Bodin, Michel de Montaigne, Dirck Coornhert, Justus Lipsius, Gisbertus Voetius, the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus, and Pierre Bayle. These authors reflect and inform changing attitudes to religious tolerance inspired by a complete reconceptualization of atheism over the course of three centuries of literary and intellectual history. By integrating the history of tolerance in the history of atheism, Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist's Progress should prove stimulating to historians of philosophy as well as literary specialists and students of Reformation history.
154 pages, ebook
Published November 22, 2019
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August 29, 2024
I have very mixed feelings about this book. Undoubtedly, it is an excellent contribution to the history of atheism, and MacPhail's opening premise, that atheism was more of a social condition than a private belief, is an important one.
I work on the 17th and 18th centuries, so I was more familiar with the figures discussed towards the end of the book. Before reaching those figures, I thought that MacPhail had told a compelling narrative about the development of arguments for religious toleration, which initially treated atheism as their limit, but which ultimately came to encompass it as well. This change happened for several reasons, including the change in the grounds of toleration, from being just a good policy for the state's survival to a worthy end in itself.
With the chapter on Bayle, I began to have my doubts. The author's claims about Bayle are very dubious, and much of this chapter is straightforwardly contradicted by the majority of the current secondary literature on Bayle. As for the 18th-century figures considered in the epilogue (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Holbach), I was similarly unconvinced by the portrayal of their ideas. Perhaps the most shocking claim of all was that, because Montesquieu disagrees with Bayle on whether there can be a society of atheists, his understanding of statecraft is more at home in the 16th than the 18th century! This says nothing about Montesquieu's exploration of Bayle's ideas in the Persian Letters (especially the famous Letter on the Troglodytes). Montesquieu certainly does disagree with Bayle, but he is also in some sense the definitive political theorist of the French Enlightenment. If anyone's understanding of statecraft belongs to the 18th century, it's Montesquieu's.
With the patchy treatment of the 17th and 18th centuries, I began to have doubts about the strength of the previous chapters in the book. But there are also some countervailing considerations here. The author is mainly a specialist in history before the 17th century. And I work mostly on the 17th century afterwards. So perhaps the earlier chapters, which are more squarely within his field of expertise, are better researched.
Either way, it is a compelling book to read, and one which I am surprised is not more generally appreciated among historians of atheism today.
I work on the 17th and 18th centuries, so I was more familiar with the figures discussed towards the end of the book. Before reaching those figures, I thought that MacPhail had told a compelling narrative about the development of arguments for religious toleration, which initially treated atheism as their limit, but which ultimately came to encompass it as well. This change happened for several reasons, including the change in the grounds of toleration, from being just a good policy for the state's survival to a worthy end in itself.
With the chapter on Bayle, I began to have my doubts. The author's claims about Bayle are very dubious, and much of this chapter is straightforwardly contradicted by the majority of the current secondary literature on Bayle. As for the 18th-century figures considered in the epilogue (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Holbach), I was similarly unconvinced by the portrayal of their ideas. Perhaps the most shocking claim of all was that, because Montesquieu disagrees with Bayle on whether there can be a society of atheists, his understanding of statecraft is more at home in the 16th than the 18th century! This says nothing about Montesquieu's exploration of Bayle's ideas in the Persian Letters (especially the famous Letter on the Troglodytes). Montesquieu certainly does disagree with Bayle, but he is also in some sense the definitive political theorist of the French Enlightenment. If anyone's understanding of statecraft belongs to the 18th century, it's Montesquieu's.
With the patchy treatment of the 17th and 18th centuries, I began to have doubts about the strength of the previous chapters in the book. But there are also some countervailing considerations here. The author is mainly a specialist in history before the 17th century. And I work mostly on the 17th century afterwards. So perhaps the earlier chapters, which are more squarely within his field of expertise, are better researched.
Either way, it is a compelling book to read, and one which I am surprised is not more generally appreciated among historians of atheism today.
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