Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature

by Albrecht Classen

  The treatment of the ‘good heathen’, in many ways certainly an essentializing trope, as many critics will claim, mirrors much of this rising interest in leaving the religious and ethnic conflicts behind, though this, of course, once again from a European, hence hegemonic, perspective. We hardly can expect much more, but the little that we can unearth here already illustrates an enormous amount of intellectual, spiritual, religious, and literary discovery that altogether laid the foundation for the emergence of the discourse on tolerance by Lessing, Locke, Voltaire, or Kant.

  Tolerance Today: Menschlichkeit

  It amounts to a fairly easy task to identify intolerance in the past, just as it is easy to determine examples of evil behavior and thinking at many different times and locations because they stand out starkly and represent the transgression of the norms and values of a society. Chroniclers, for instance, tend to report much more about crime, war, and natural disasters than about the lives of good people, about peace times, and about good weather. Catastrophic news sells; ordinary accounts do not attract an audience. Since the Christian Church dominated the European Middle Ages and early modern period, its representatives made sure that all attempts from the outside to enter the Christian mind and to convert it failed utterly.34 At the same time, Christian authorities exerted all their available muscles to repress other religious groups, and they only faced series competition and opposition from within when the Protestant Reformation emerged.35

  One of the central tenets of many Western societies today is predicated on the idea of tolerance, i.e. on mutual respect and acceptance in a multicultural and multilingual world.36 However, this is a thin veneer—a sheen—and our historical experiences combined with our understanding of constantly new crises in the world in the twenty-first century, of terrifying eruptions of violence and hostility, alert us to the critical need to be attentive, to work toward the goal of improving humanity/humanness, to transform our traditional social structures to meet the demands of tomorrow in a much more multicultural world, and to lay the foundations upon which new generations can grow into the future determined by Menschlichkeit—an attitude that radically prioritizes human values and ideals in an integrative social context, as we have learned them already in antiquity but which seem to slip through our fingers all the time in face of material, financial, and military, and then also religious challenges.37

  People in the United States have regularly tended to regard themselves as being beyond the racist and prejudiced past, as it had dominated Europe well up to the middle of the twentieth century, but recent events everywhere, from coast to coast and beyond, have sadly uncovered hidden movements and ideologies based on the old fascist ideologies, so there is no reason today to be complacent. As Martha Nussbaum alerts us, “Our situation calls urgently for searching critical self-examination, as we try to uncover the roots of ugly fears and suspicions that currently disfigure all Western societies.”38 In face of this new intolerance, a revisit of early, unsuspected attempts to open the own perspective, to leave the traditional agenda behind, and to recognize the other people (in terms of race, religion, or culture) promises to sensitize us to the historical nature of our modern value system and to its precarious nature.

  These idealistic efforts can only achieve their goal if they are carried also by historical-cultural awareness and a sensibility to listen to past voices.39 Hence, I hope that this book will contribute to this enormously difficult but essential task by bringing to light important voices from the Middle Ages and the early modern age who were, whether situated in the center or at the margin, whether vociferous or muted, the antecedents of the current world and can help us to move forward through their encouragement.40 We are, after all, the avatars of a discourse that was started latest in the twelfth century and continues until today because it concerns fundamentally the relationship between ourselves and others.

  Coda

  The deep concerns about human freedom, justice, equality, and also tolerance continue to be of central importance today, as the author and public defender Ferdinand von Schirach so eloquently formulated in his welcoming speech at the Salzburg Festival in July 2017. Even though he did not go so far back as this book will endeavor to do, by primarily focusing on the courageous contributions by Voltaire and Rousseau, von Schirach reminded the audience of the supreme importance of historical or literary-historical lessons once again.41 The discourse on tolerance is one of the extremely important benchmarks of humanity, especially because there are constant struggles going on between majority and minority groups, between the insiders and the outsiders, between the well established and the newcomers. To learn tolerance requires a great degree of inner strength and ethical ideals, which motivate the individual to respond to the representatives of other races or religions with openness and a strong welcome. We need to turn into “gracious hostes[es],” as Nussbaum has called it.42 We must, as she insists, overcome fear; fear of losing privileges, fear of ceding political and economic ground, and fear of abandoning one’s own cultural identity, which is all very complicated and difficult to achieve unless we pay attention also to past situations, conditions, events, and then also texts where those issues have already been played out and examined from many different perspectives. In light of recent political developments all over the world, commonly called ‘populism’, it deserves to be noted, to quote Andreas Voßkuhle, the chief justice of the German Supreme Court and Director of the Freiburg Institute for “Staatswissenschaft und Rechtsphilosophie” (in 2017):

  Die Demokratie beruht also einerseits auf der Bereitschaft der Minderheit, die ordnungsgemäß getroffene Mehrheitsentscheidung loyal zu befolgen. Andererseits wird die Minderheit nicht nur begrifflich vorausgesetzt, sondern auch politisch anerkannt und durch die Grund- und Freiheitsrechte geschützt, so dass sie “nicht absolut im Unrecht, nicht absolut rechtlos ist” (Hans Kelsen), sondern die Chance hat und haben muss, selbst zur Mehrheit zu werden.43

  [On the one side, democracy is based on the readiness of the minority to observe loyally the decisions correctly established by the majority. On the other, the minority is not just a terminological entity, but must also be acknowledged politically and protected through the fundamental and freedom laws, meaning that it is not “absolutely in the wrong, and is not absolutely without rights” (Hans Kelsen). Instead, the minority must have a chance possibly to turn into the majority itself.]

  While this pertains to modern, current concerns, these insights contribute essentially to a better understanding of the meaning of tolerance and the relationship between a majority and a minority.

  Taking a historical approach, medieval voices likewise ought to be heard and reflected upon regarding the relationship between the majority and the minority in religious terms, and they might even serve our modern purpose better than many contemporary documents because of the distance between them and us, making it more likely that we might approach the central issue of toleration/tolerance in an objective fashion.44 To quote Nussbaum once again,

  a political culture that is to remain stable needs to think about people and how they see the world…. Our current climate of fear shows that people are all too easily turned away from good values and laws, in a time of genuine insecurity and threat.45

  Unfortunately, we have not moved far away from fear as it dominated the Middle Ages, for instance, so we might be able to mirror ourselves powerfully in medieval literary, didactic, political, philosophical, and religious narratives and learn from those voices.

  We also have to keep in mind how much the topic addressed here deeply challenges many popular, now even politicized, views of the medieval past, which easily becomes a treasury of icons for white, Christian supremacists who cherry-pick isolated aspects from the pre-modern world and idealize and universalize them, ignoring, on the one hand, how much non-white and non-Christians operated significantly within the European Middle Ages and, on the other, that many writers—whom I will bring to the fore in the subsequent chapters—actively, constru
ctively, and open-mindedly projected scenes or episodes where surprising moments of toleration or even tolerance occur, very much in contrast to the images projected today in public media, in the streets, and in right-wing political circles.46

  Even though this book will focus entirely on academic aspects in medieval and early modern literature, religion, and philosophy, I have to acknowledge and underscore its deeply political nature after all because when the literary and historical archives suddenly reveal how much efforts to establish toleration and perhaps also tolerance were pursued already in the past, how could then-modern, radicalized individuals claim the European Middle Ages for their ideological agendas of racism and Islamophobia, for instance? This is not to say at all that racism and bigotry were not part of the European landscape in the pre-modern world, but we cannot achieve any understanding of the past or the present if we rely entirely on blanket statements or generalize individual opinions voiced in specific texts or images. My intention here, hence, is to allow alternative voices to speak up, to bring to light unsuspected scenes in medieval and early modern narratives, and to uncover a relatively strong discourse on toleration throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern age.47

  Even the testimony of art history can be adduced to strengthen this point because artists included images of black people more often than not, suggesting, thereby, a basis for possible toleration within mostly white-skinned Europe.48 Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise drew deeply from medieval and eighteenth-century sources and created, in that process, a fanal on the theater stage of greatest significance for his contemporaries and the subsequent generations, especially for us today.49 This is not to ignore the deep impact that Lessing’s own personal history had on writing his play; that is, his suffering, sorrow, and pain, which he managed to overcome, however, by means of reflecting on the rational basis of human existence.50

  Notes

  1 For the mythical figure of Saladin, see, for instance, Moustafa Maher, “Saladin – Salaheddin” (1996), 157–72; John France, Hattin (2015); Anne-Marie Eddé, Saladin (2016).

  2 Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb, “The Rise of Saladin, 1169–1189” (1955; 1969), 563–89; W. B. Bartlett, Downfall of the Crusader Kingdom (2007; 2010); as to Saladin, see now ‘Ali Muhammad Muhammad Sallabi and Nasiruddin Khattab, Salâh ad-Deen al-Ayubi (2010). The literature on the Crusades is legion, of course; see Andrew Holt, “Crusades Historiography” (2010), 379–92.

  3 Peter W. Edbury, The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade (1996); James Reston, Jr., Warriors of God (2001); Hannes Möhring, Saladin, the Sultan and His Times, 1138–1193, (2005; 2008); Wilfried Westphal, Richard Löwenherz und Saladin (2006); Jonathan Phillips, The Crusades, 1095–1204. 2nd ed. (2002; 2014).

  4 Quoted from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke (178–1780), ed. Klaus Bohnen and Arno Schilson (1993), 483–627. For an online version, see http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/nathan-der-weise-1179/1, which is based on the 1995 edition published in Stuttgart by Philipp Reclam jun. For an English online translation, see www.gutenberg.org/files/3820/3820-h/3820-h.htm (both last accessed on April 18, 2017). The latter is based on the 1893 publication of this text.

  5 Karl-Josef Kuschel, “Jud, Christ und Muselmann vereinigt”? (2004), 110–13.

  6 I will discuss Boccaccio in a separate chapter.

  7 See the contributions to Lessing and the Enlightenment, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (1986).

  8 Edward Peters, Inquisition (1988), 1–2; F. E. Beemon, “The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition and the Preconditions of the Dutch Revolt” (1994): 246–63; Katrina B. Olds, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (2015); Stephan Quensel, Hexen, Satan, Inquisition (2017); for a convenient overview, see Jorg Oberste, Ketzerei und Inquisition im Mittelalter (2014).

  9 Peter Sloterdijks, Gottes Eifer (2007), 169; cf. the reflections on the larger discourse on tolerance already in the pre-modern era by Oliver Bach, Michael Multhammer, and Friedrich Vollhardt,” Einleitung” (2015), 1–9.

  10 Peter Dinzelbacher, “Kritische Bemerkungen zur Geschichte der religiösen Toleranz” (2008); cf. also Markus Pohlmeyer, Lessing, “Nathan” und die Toleranz (2007); Thomas Möbius, Erläuterungen zu Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Nathan der Weise (2010); David H. Price, “The Philosophical Jew and the Identity Crisis of Christianity in Lessing’s ‘Nathan der Weise’” (2016), 203–23.

  11 Die drei Ringe: Entstehung, Wandel und Wirkung der Ringparabel in der europäischen Literatur und Kultur, ed. Achim Aurnhammer, Giulia Cantarutti, and Friedrich Vollhardt (2016).

  12 Nathan und seine Erben, ed. Oxana Zielke together with Thorsten Meier (2005). The publication data of the various translations are taken from WorldCat, online (August 19, 2017).

  13 Considering Lessing’s status as a major ‘classical’ author in the German literary canon, there is no wonder that much research has been published on his Nathan the Wise; see, for instance, Hans-Friedrich Wessels, Lessings “Nathan der Weise” (1979); Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Vernunft als Weisheit (1991); Timotheus Will, Lessings dramatisches Gedicht Nathan der Weise und die Philosophie der Aufklärungszeit (1999).

  14 Astrid J. Vonhausen, Rolle und Individualität: Zur Funktion der Familie (1993), 117–58. She emphasizes, above all, that neither the Sultan Saladin nor Nathan have been narrowly associated with a collective role, and hence with a ‘false self’, and consequently they are both capable of accomplishing their tasks as individuals in the public sphere in a human manner without opposing their own families. Lessing thus succeeds in ‘humanizing’ his world (157).

  15 Simonetta Sanna, Von der ratio zur Weisheit: Drei Studien zu Lessing (1999), 91–148.

  16 See also Thomas Dreßler, Dramaturgie der Menschheit – Lessing (1996), 335–42; H. B. Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (2008), 601–23. For an older, but still valid study, see Gustav Kettner, Lessings Dramen im Lichte ihrer und unserer Zeit (1904).

  17 Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (2008), 622–23; Rainer Forst, Toleranz im Konflikt (2003), 596–97, 604, 642. See also Rainer Forst, Toleranz und Fortschritt (2015).

  18 Markus Schmitz, “Die eine Religion in der Mannigfaltigkeit der Riten” (2005), 181–95. He alerts us to Daniel Müller Nielaba, Die Wendung zum Besseren (2000), esp. 277, who interpreted the conclusion as nothing but an illusion and false theatrical logic. However, Schmitz also rejects this postmodern perspective and takes us back to the discourse on tolerance which Lessing has offered here, after all.

  19 Monika Fick, Lessing–Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (2000), 402–24, offers an excellent summary of the various interpretations and schools of thought regarding Nathan.

  20 Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopia” (2005), 2403–9.

  21 R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987).

  22 Beyond the Persecuting Society (1998/2011); see especially Cary J. Nederman, “Introduction”; see also István Bejczy, “Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept” (1997): 365–84.

  23 This is the case, for instance, with Jerold C. Frakes, Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (2011). See my review in Mediaevistik 25 (2012/2013): 390–92. There will be several occasions in subsequent chapters where I engage more specifically with his theses.

  24 Umstrittene Religionsfreiheit: Zur Diskussion um ein Menschenrecht, ed. Thomas Brose and Philipp W. Hildmann (2016); Christentum und Menschenrechte in Europa, ed. Vasilios N. Makrides, Jennifer Wasmuth, and Stefan Kube (2016); see also Uwe Gerber, Fundamentalismen in Europa (2015). Very similar debates also affect the other religions; see, for instance, Muhammad Haniff Hassan, Civil Disobedience in Islam (2017); Global Declarations on Freedom of Religion or Belief and Human Rights, selected and ed. Thomas K. Johnson with Thomas Schirrmacher and Christof Sauer (2017).

  25 www.tertullian.org/fathers/timothy_i_apology_01_text.htm; translated into English by Alphonse Mingana, “Timothy I, Apology for Christianity,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (1928): v–vii, 1–90.

  26 The text can
be found online a few lines above note 89.

  27 For a German translation, see Schevet Jehuda: Ein Buch über das Leiden des jüdischen Volkes im Exil. In der Übersetzung von Me’ir Wiener. Herausgegeben, eingeleitet und mit einem Nachwort zur Geschichtsdeutung Salomo Ibn Vergas versehen von Sina Rauschenbach (2006). See also F. Cantera, “Schébet Jehuda (La vara de Judá) de Salomón ben Verga” (1924), 83–296; 15 (1925), 1–74.

  28 For an initial overview, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomo_ibn_Verga#Schewet_Jehuda (last accessed on July 29, 2017). Friedrich Niewöhner, Veritas sive Varietas (1988), 48ff. Cf. also Peter Dinzelbacher, “Kritische Bemerkungen zur Geschichte der religiösen Toleranz und zur Tradition der Lessing’schen Ringparabel” (2008), 1–26.

  29 Stephani de Borbone, Tractatus de diversis materiis (2002).

  30 Alan E. Bernstein, “The Exemplum as ‘Incorporation’ of Abstract Truth in the Thought of Humbert of Romans and Stephen of Bourbon” (1990), 82–96. For the history of the motif, see also Mario Penna, La parabola di tre anelli e la tolleranza nel medio evo (1952), 54; see also Eberhard Hermes, Die drei Ringe (1964); Dinzelbacher, “Kritische Bemerkungen zur Geschichte der religiösen Toleranz und zur Tradition” (2008).