Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gvh9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T19:23:43.056Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dialogues of Toleration: Erasmus and Bodin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Gary Remer
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The article examines two different types of “tolerant” dialogues, represented by Desiderius Erasmus and Jean Bodin. Erasmus offers a traditional conception of dialogue, in which the speakers are engaged in a common search for truth. This search for truth justifies toleration. To discover truth, the speakers must be free to question the other speakers' views, as well as their own. And they must respect each other because civility promotes the discovery of truth. Bodin, by contrast, presents an alternative version of the tolerant dialogue in his Colloquium heptaplomeres, a dialogue between representatives of seven different religions. While the Erasmian dialogue presupposes that (1) there is a single truth and that (2) the greater the consensus, the more successful the dialogue, in Bodin's Colloquium, the speakers do not pursue a common truth. Rather, they offer up their own particular versions of truth, unwilling to change their positions. The speakers do not agree on the truth because truth—especially religious truth—is complex, and each speaker represents a different facet of that multifaceted truth. And though the speakers remain firm in their initial convictions, they gain from the dialogue a clearer perception of their own opinions. By comparing their views with one another, the speakers come to better understand their separate truths, the sum of which constitutes the whole truth.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , Spring 1994 , pp. 305 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

I would like to thank Professors Marion Leathers Kuntz, Eric Gorham, Martyn Thompson, Anthony Cummings, and Gordon Schochet for their helpful comments.

1. Joris, David, Een suyverlijcke bewijsreden, as cited in Bainton, Roland, David Joris Wiedertäufer und Kämpfer für Toleranz im 16. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1937), p. 80.Google Scholar

2. See Pineas, Rainer, “Thomas More's Use of the Dialogue Form as a Weapon of Religious Controversy,” Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1960):200–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Lawler, Thomas M. C., Marc'hadour, Germain, and Marius, Richard C. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), vol. 6, part 2, pp. 440–41Google Scholar.

3. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4. 4. 7. See also Ibid. 2. 26. 63–64; 5. 29. 83; Cicero, De natura deorum 1. 7. 17; Cicero, De finibus 5. 26. 76. All citations from Cicero, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Loeb Classical Library editions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

4. Hirzel, Rudlof, Der Dialog: Ein Literarhistorischer Versuch, 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1895Google Scholar; reprint ed.; Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1963), 2: 43.

5. Justice Holmes writes in his Abrams dissent: “Time has upset many fighting faiths.” Abrams v. U.S., 250 U.S. 616 (1919). Erasmus's skepticism, however, is far more limited than the Supreme Court's.

6. Kuntz, Marion Leathers Daniels, Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime (hereafter cited as Kuntz, Colloquium) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. xxxvii.Google Scholar

7. On the Socratic dialogue as a “common search” for the truth, see Guthrie, W. K. C., Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. See Milton, John, Areopagitica, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 7 volumes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1974), 2: 565Google Scholar; Levy, Leonard, Emergence of a Free Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 95–96.Google Scholar

9. Areopagitica, 2: 551.Google Scholar

10. Bainton, Roland H., Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Crossroad, 1969), p. 3.Google Scholar

11. The five traditional humanistic studies are grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. On defining Renaissance humanism, see Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), pp. 9–10Google Scholar; Thompson, Craig, “The Humanism of More Reappraised,” Thought 52 (09 1977): 233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. As Kristeller, Paul Oskar has observed, Renaissance humanism “must be understood as a characteristic phase in what may be called the rhetorical tradition in Western culture.” Renaissance Thought, pp. 11–13.Google Scholar

13. Erasmus, , Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (hereafter cited as EE), ed. Allen, P. S., Allen, H. M., and Garrod, H. W., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–1957), 1:30.1–3 (letter to John Botzheim, 30 01 1523).Google Scholar

14. Recent discussions of the humanist dialogue include: Marsh, David, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tinkler, J. F., “Humanism and Dialogue,” Parergon: Bulletin of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1988): 197–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wilson, K. J., Incomplete Fictbns: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985).Google Scholar

15. On the historical development of the concept “adiaphora,” see Verkamp, Bernard J., The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554, Studies in the Reformation, vol. 1 (Athens, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan: Ohio University Press and Wayne State University Press, 1977), pp. 20–25.Google Scholar

16. Convivium religiosum (1522), The Colbquies of Erasmus, trans. Thompson, Craig R. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 58, 61Google Scholar; Boyle, Marjorie O'rourke, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 138.Google Scholar

17. See Erasmus, , Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia (hereafter cited as LB), ed. Clericus, J., 10 volumes (Leyden: 1703–6), 5: 1265D-E (Diputatiuncula de taedio, pavore, tristitia Jesu, instante supplicio crucis: deque verbus, quibus visus est mortem deprecari, ‘Pater, si fieri potest, transeat a me calix iste' [Little Disputation on the Dread, Fear, and Sadness of Jesus, when the Punishment of the Cross was pressing upon him….]).Google Scholar

18. On the classical use of diatribl, see Oltramaré, Andre, Les Origines de la Diatribe Romaine (Geneva: Imprimeries Populaire, 1926), especially pp. 9–17, 116–25Google Scholar; Boyle, Marjorie O'Rourke, Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus' Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 6–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Rupp, E. Gordon and Watson, Philip S., eds., Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation The Library of Christian Classics: Icthus Edition. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), pp. 116–117.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., p. 109. See Boyle, , Rhetoric and Reform, particularly pp. 43–66.Google Scholar

21. LB 9:1218B-C (De libero arbitrio). See also LB 10:1663B (Spongia adversus adspergines Hutteni); Erasmus, Desiderius, Collected Works of Erasmus (hereafter cited as CWE), still in progress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974-), 8: 280. 358–60 (Letter to Pierre Barbier, 13 August 1521).Google Scholar

22. Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, p. 37. Cf. CWE 27:118 (Praise of Folly).

23. Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, p. 106.

24. Cicero, De officiis 2. 2. 8. See also Tusculan Disputations 2. 3. 9; Cicero, Academica 2.3.7–8; Michel, Alain, Rhétorique et Philosophie chez Cicéron: Essai sur les Fondements Philosophique de I'art de Persuader (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), pp. 158–73.Google Scholar

25. Boyle, , Rhetoric and Reform, pp. 20–21, pp. 43–46Google Scholar; Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, p. 47; LB 9:1220F (De libero arbitrio); LB 10:1312C-D (Hyperaspistes I).

26. Cicero, , De inventione 1.30. 47–49.Google Scholar

27. LB 9:1241D (De libero arbitrio).

28. LB 9:1224C (De libero arbitrio); See Ibid. 1241C; LB 10:1327B-C (Hyperaspistes I).

29. De finibus 2. 6. 17; Tusculan disputations 1. 47.112.

30. Although judicial oratory concerns past facts that are, in theory, ascertainable and could not be other than they were, the judicial genre still deals with matters that are, at least in the present, under contention. See Fabius, M.Quintilian Institutwne Oratoria 5, chaps. 1–7.Google Scholar

31. John Tinkler also observes that while Academic skepticism is generally characteristic of rhetoric, in judicial oratory the orator is not, himself, permitted to speak skeptically. In public, he is expected to argue, unambivalently, either for or against a position. See Tinkler, John F., “Renaissance Humanism and the genera eloquentiae,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 5 (1987): 295CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. De oratore 2.19.78; De natura deorum 1.6.14. See also Hirzel, , Der Dialog, 1: 531Google Scholar.

33. Thus, Cicero, despite his disdain for Epicureanism, concedes that he may be in error: “‘many men, many minds’—so it is possible that I am mistaken” (De finibus 1. 5.15).

34. Tuck, Richard, “Scepticism and toleration in the seventeenth century,” Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and historical perspectives, ed. Mendus, Susan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 25.Google Scholar

35. Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, p. 97.

36. See above, note 3.

37. CWE 9:252. 232–234 (Letter to Jean de Carondelet, 5 January 1523). See also Ibid. 250. 172–51.188; 253. 244–46.

38. LB:10 1335C (Hyperaspistes I). See also CWE 7:126. 235–45 (Letter to Jan Slechta, 1 November 1519).

39. LB 10:1259F-1260A (Hyperaspistes I, 1526).

40. LB 6:696C-D (Note on I Cor. 7:39, Novum Testamentum, 1519); CWE 9:264. 649–651 (Letter to Jean de Carondelet, 5 January 1523); LB 10:1663A-B (Spongia adversus adspergines Hutteni, 1523); LB 6:926–928 (In Epistolam ad Timotheum I); Erasmus, Desiderius, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Holborn, Hajor with Holborn, Annemarie (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1933), p. 193, lines 9–28Google Scholar (Ratio verae theologiae); LB 5:1079B (Ecclesiastes); CWE 66:11, cited in Cornells Augustijn, , Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence, trans. Grayson, J. C. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 78–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also CWE 7:126. 235 - 127. 260 (Letter to Jan Slechta, 1 November 1519); Bainton, , Erasmus of Christendom, pp. 185–186Google Scholar; Lecler, Joseph, Toleration and the Reformation, trans. Westow, T. L., 2 vols. (New York: Association Press, 1960), 1:126-27Google Scholar; and Thompson, Craig R., Inquisitio de Fide, rev. ed. (Hamden Connecticut: Archon Books, 1975), pp. 39–48.Google Scholar

41. EE 5:465.1–468.155 (Letter to William Warham, 1 June 1524); CWE 9:261. 526–36 (Letter to Jean de Carondelet, 5 January 1523).

42. LB 9:1059E (Apologia adversus Monachos quosdam Hispanos, 1528).

43. LB 10:1576B-C (Epistola contra quosdam qui se falso jactant evangelicos).

44. Bainton, , Erasmus of Christendom, p. 257.Google Scholar

45. Cicero, Orator 22. 72.

46. Orator 35.123.

47. Quintilian 3.4.15; Cicero, Brutus 80. 279.

48. Quintilian 5.14. 29.

49. Quintilian 12.1.1.

50. Tusculan Disputations 2.1.4. Cf. Plato Republic 494a.

51. Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, p. 36.

52. LB 5:858E-859A, 870D-881C (Ecclesiastes). See Weiss, James Michael, “Ecclesiastes and Erasmus: The Mirror and the Image.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 65 (1974):100–101Google Scholar; O'malley, John, “Content and Rhetorical Forms in Sixteenth-Century Treatises on Preaching,” Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Murphy, James J. (Berkele: University of California Press, 1983), p. 244.Google Scholar

53. De oratore 1. 59. 255; De officiis 1.1. 3.

54. Luther and Erasmus: Tree Will and Salvation, p. 96.

55. Aristotle established, and subsequent rhetoricians have accepted, three modes of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logical proof. Aristotle, , Rhetoric 1356a 1–4Google Scholar; 1358a 3–13; 1356a 13–19; 1356a 19–21.

56. Cf. Cicero's De natura deorum 1. 5. 10 and Erasmus's Hyperaspistes I, LB 10:1305F.

57. Tusculan Disputations 5.15. 43; 4. 28. 61; 4. 21. 47–48.

58. Academica 2.3.9; De natura deorum 1. 6.15; Ruch, Michel, Le Preamble Dans Les Oeuvres Philosophiques De Ciceron: Essai sur la Genese et I'arl du Dialogue (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1958), pp. 80–82Google Scholar; Introduction to Loeb Classical Library edition of De finibus, trans. Rackham, H., p. xvi.Google Scholar

59. See Colloquies, p. 49; p. 78; Ryan, Lawrence V., “Erasmis Convivia: The Banquet Colloquies of Erasmus,” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, new series 8 (1977): 205Google Scholar; Boyle, , Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology, p. 139.Google Scholar

60. See Hostetler, John A., Amish Society (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 33–41, 86–89Google Scholar; Kraybill, Donald B., The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

61. Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, pp. 36–37; LB 10:1287C (Hyperaspistes I). In contrast to Diatriba, Erasmus's stance in Hyperaspistes—responding to Luther's combative De servo arbitrio—is more contentious. See, for example, LB 10:1312A; 1364D-E.

62. Kuntz, , Colloquium, pp. 3–5.Google Scholar

63. Ibid., p. 15. See also Kuntz, Marion Leathers, “The Home of Coronaeus in Jean Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres: An Example of a Venetian Academy,” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis, Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Bologna, 26 08 to 1 09 1979, pp. 278–79.Google Scholar

64. An exception is Marion Leathers Kuntz. Professor Kuntz graciously shared with me her views on the Colloquium as anything but a failed dialogue. See expresses some of these ideas in her soon-to-be-published essay “Structure, Form and Meaning in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin.”

65. Roellenbleck, Georg, “Les Poèmes Intercalés dans L'Heptaplomeres,” Jean Bodin: Actes du Colloque Interdisciplinaire d'Angers, 24 au 27 Mai 1984, 2 vols. (Angers: Presses de l'Universite D'Angers, 1985), 2: 448.Google Scholar

66. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 471Google Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 2: 249.Google Scholar

67. Lecler, , Toleration and the Reformation, 2:180.Google Scholar

68. Roellenbleck, , “Les Poèmes Intercalés dans L'Heptaplomeres,” 2: 448.Google Scholar

69. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 292Google Scholar.

70. Ibid., p. 170.

71. Ibid., pp. 165–70. Cf. Bodin, Jean, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, ed. with Introduction McRae, Kenneth Douglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 535–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 170Google Scholar.

73. Ibid., p. 205.

74. Cf. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, C. B. (London: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 132–34Google Scholar; 179–83.

75. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 169Google Scholar. Cf. The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, p. 535.

76. Ibid., p. 471.

77. Ibid., p. 148. Cf. Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Robson, J. M., with an Introduction by Alexander Brady, vol 18: Essays on Politics and Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 244–45Google Scholar.

78. Ibid., p. 471. The general argument that the movement in song suggests a higher understanding is made by Kuntz, in “Structure, Form and Meaning in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres,” pp. 26–27.Google Scholar On the ancient Greek understanding of enharmonic music, see Ancient and Oriental Music, ed. Wellesz, Egon, New Oxford History of Music, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957): 387–90.Google Scholar

79. Lowinsky, Edward E., Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands Motet, trans. Buchman, Carl (New York: Russell and Russell, 1946), p. 90.Google Scholar

80. Yates, Frances E., “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science,” in Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, ed. Singleton, Charles S. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 264.Google Scholar On Bodin's ties to Hermeticism and other mystical traditions, see Kuntz, , Colloquium, pp. liv–lvi.Google Scholar

81. See Kuntz, , “Structure, Form and Meaning in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres,” p. 28.Google Scholar

82. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2, 2, q. 11, art. 3.

83. Kuntz, Marion Daniels, “Harmony and the Heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (1974): 35–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

84. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 144Google Scholar. See also “Harmony and the Heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin,” pp. 35–36; “The Home of Coronaeus in Jean Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres,” pp. 279–80.

85. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 145.Google Scholar

86. Ibid., p. 147.

87. Ibid., p. 146.

88. Ibid., p. 157.

89. Ibid., p. 465.

90. Ibid., pp. xli-xlii.

91. Ibid., p. 149.

92. Ibid., pp. 146–51.

93. “Lo, how good and pleasing it is for brothers to live in unity” (Ibid., p. 471).

94. Ibid., pp. 165–66.

95. Ibid., p. 186.

96. Ibid., p. 468. See also Ibid., pp. 469–71.

97. Ibid., pp. 465–66.

98. Ibid., pp. 151,467. Octavius, however, also praises the Persians and Turks for forbidding discussions about religion because they lead to civil unrest (p. 167). The key for Octavius is that religious discussion must not degenerate into violence.

99. Ibid., pp. 468–69.

100. Ibid., p. 471.

101. Ibid., p. 241. See also Ibid., p. 243.

102. Ibid., pp. 243, 251.

103. Ibid., pp. 157–58.

104. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 163Google Scholar; Lecler, , Toleratwn and the Reformation, 2: 180–181Google Scholar. St. Thomas Aquinas did not consider that heretics may honestly be mistaken; to him the heretic always chose to disbelieve. See Summa theologiae 2, 2, q. 11, a. 1.

105. See St.Augustine, , Letters, vol. 4, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, trans. SisterParsons, Wilfrid (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1955), pp. 161–62Google Scholar; Deane, Herbert, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 204, 217, 197.Google Scholar

106. Summa theologiae, 2, 2, q. 11, a. 3.

107. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 239.Google Scholar Cf. The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, pp. 539–40.

108. Montuori, John, John Locke on Toleration and the Unity of God (Amsterdam: J. G. Gieben, 1983), p. 93.Google Scholar

109. Oehler, Klaus, “Der Consensus omnium als Kriterium der Wahrheit in der antiken Philosophie und der Patristik,” Antike und Abendland 10 (1961): 103–129.Google Scholar

110. Kuntz, , Colloquium, p. 325.Google Scholar

111. Ibid., p. 465.

112. Ibid., pp. 236–37.

113. Shiffrin, Steven H., The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

114. Emerson, Thomas, The System of Freedom of Expression (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar; Baker, Edwin E., Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

115. Dworkin, , A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 386.Google Scholar