THE POLITICAL UTILITY OF INTOLERANCE

The decisive argument to persuade princes to enforce Catholic orthodoxy was that heresy endangered the ‘state’. The argument was intended to stiffen the resolve of rulers sufficiently intimidated by the difficulties involved in attempting to restore religious uniformity by force to listen to the seductive advocates of toleration. For the Society itself, the welfare of the Church and of endangered souls was justification enough for the enforcement of religious uniformity. Ignatius had mentioned no other consideration in his seminal letters to Canisius, and extra-spiritual concerns were still only an afterthought for Bellarmine decades later. Possevino in his ultra-orthodox Verdict normally regarded his work as done when politiques, heretics, and Machiavellians had been shown up as doctrinally deplorable.

Jesuits were not alone in regarding the political dangers of heresy as the clinching argument against toleration; even Lipsius found it persuasive. The case for intolerance that Jesuits produced was impeccably ‘reason of state’. Some of them even enlisted Machiavelli himself. The same argument, mutatis mutandis, appears in Bellarmine's De Laicis, Botero's Della ragion di stato, Possevino's Iudicium, Bibliotheca selecta, Ribadeneira's Tratado/Princeps Christianus, Robert Persons's Conference, Juan Mariana's De rege et regis institutione, Thomas Fitzherbert's An sit utilitas in scelere, and his First and Second part of a Treatise concerning Policy and Religion, Becanus's Manuale and De fide haereticis servanda, Scribani's Politicus Christianus, Adam Contzen's Politicorum libri decem, and other such works.