Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature

by Albrecht Classen

  The tenth paragraph begins this way:

  It is one of the major tenets of Catholic doctrine that man’s response to God in faith must be free: no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the Christian faith against his own will. This doctrine is contained in the word of God and it was constantly proclaimed by the Fathers of the Church.16 The act of faith is of its very nature a free act.

  It was a very long way for the Catholic Church to reach that position, leaving behind nearly 2,000 years of bitter fights against any deviant thinkers, believers, and spiritualists and embarking on a new approach appropriate for the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, century.

  While this very brief historical outline from late antiquity to the modern times seems to address only the European history, the very same issues and conflicts can be detected in the history of other continents. Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and so also Judaism, had their share of internal tensions, internecine strife, bloody wars against each other, and yet also witnessed amazing attempts at and efforts to restore peace and find a manageable balance of life within the larger framework of religious communities. Although the present time witnesses countless attacks by Islamic fundamentalists against the West, and recently even against traditional Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia and Iran, we could not argue that Islam by itself was or is determined by intolerance.17 In fact, both in the past and in the present, most Islamic societies have been rather peaceful and pursued, more or less at least, tolerant approaches—though certainly not tolerance in the modern sense of the word.18 Christianity is not tolerant by itself sui generis, and the same struggles as in the Islamic world can be identified in the history of the Christian Church/es. Similarly, the Mongol Empire, for instance, which existed from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century and represented the greatest political and military entity in history until then, witnessed a rather surprising openness to other religions, as long as those did not question the Mongol rulers as such.19

  Despite all those deep tensions, we can identify individual voices that emerged here and there and from time to time clamoring for a different approach, basically arguing for some forms of tolerance, i.e. toleration, or simply peaceful cohabitation. Those voices were actively involved in creating a social interaction with representatives of other cultures, religions, and races, working toward an “aktiv integrierendes Lernverhalten” (actively integrating learning behavior), being a dynamic process that ultimately can or should lead to constructive toleration, whereas simple tolerance, in the original sense of the word—such as, to tolerate a certain level of pain—would be, as some critics claim, tantamount to insult.20

  Even though we seem to live in a Western world today where mutual respect, the existence of a “Willkommenskultur” (a culture predicated on welcoming foreigners), and hence tolerance are more dominant than before, though also contested by various forces, the thin veneer of our culture can also easily collapse.21 In 2016 and 2017, for instance, elections all over Europe and in the United States have brought right-wing forces into the political limelight, giving them much more representative power that they use to fight against the wave of migration. Anti-Semitism, intolerance, violence, aggression, and even brutal wars are not at all just matters of the past, especially considering the ongoing terrorism committed by fundamentalist Islamic groups, but also other groups all over the world in the very present situation, including radicalized Christians, Hindus, and Jews. The struggle to establish or to maintain tolerance goes on and will not easily, if ever, come to an end since this value is easily slipping away, giving way to ever-new violent approaches to universal problems.22

  Human societies easily come under great stress as a result of external and internal pressures and conflicts, and then quickly resort to brutal forms of exclusion, ostracization, and expulsion in order to identify a culprit and to compensate for an internal sense of frustration and dissatisfaction. Pogroms and genocide have not become simply matters of the past, on the contrary. Hence the great need today, perhaps once again more than ever, is to explore in depth what tolerance might mean and how it emerged in the course of a very long, dense, and often also convoluted discourse from the Middle Ages until today.23 Representatives of all three world religions in Europe have tried to engage in dialogues with each other throughout the centuries, but they have basically always failed, primarily in the past prior to the second half of the twentieth century, particularly because of their monotheistic concept that automatically excludes any other religious belief system.

  Nevertheless, there is clear evidence that the idea of engaging with representatives of different religions existed, as we know from specific events involving public debates and from a good number of fictionalized exchanges such as by Peter Abelard, Ramon Llull, and Nicholas of Cusa, which I will investigate in a separate chapter.24 We would also have to consider treatises such as the Dialogus inter Iudaeum requirentem et Christianum respondentem by Petrus Damianus (1007–1072) or Annulus sive dialogus Christianum et Iudaeum by Rupert of Deutz (d. 1135), and each time we would discover the fundamental principle that the authors acknowledged their opponents’ rational abilities to carry out a reasonable and logical debate over the religious differences. As we will recognize, all those scholars were driven by a strong intention to convince their partners to convert to Christianity, but their efforts were systematically determined by their own willingness to acknowledge their “Verstandespotenzen” (potentiality to utilize one’s reason), as I will discuss further in a separate chapter.25 As Cary J. Nederman has observed, the entire discourse on toleration has deep roots already in the high Middle Ages, as a vast number of philosophers, theologians, historiographers, and writers confirmed, whether they investigated the concept of religious toleration or whether they considered the idea of working out compromises and collaboration with intellectual opponents. This global realization, connecting the Middle Ages with the modern age, allows us to expand further toward an examination of the religious conflicts and confrontations throughout the ages.26

  Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1190–1153) advocated, specifically on the basis of the biblical word, that the Jews should not be eliminated because they suffered their destiny of the diaspora already here on earth and would eventually, at the Day of Judgment, learn the truth and then would convert voluntarily.27 No doubt a rather comforting idea for the Jews of his time since they were simply not condemned to die right away and had to wait until that unspecified time in the future, putting their entire existence on permanent hold. Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1292) followed suit, but not by accepting Jews and Muslims as equals, but by renouncing all physical activities against them and resorting only to the power of the word and ‘love’. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) alerted his contemporaries that it would be futile to draw from biblical or philosophical authorities in the dialogue with non-Christians if they would not accept those authorities in the first place. In his treatise Summa contra gentiles he thus emphasized that it would be essential to rely on natural rationality and to find common ground, even if this would not be sufficient with respect to divine matters.28

  Most historical investigations have successfully unearthed elements or aspects of toleration and even tolerance, all the more so at times when intolerance was the major driving force and concept, such as in eighteenth-century absolutist France of Louis XVI and then the French Revolution.29 Much of early modern intellectual history has been deeply engaged with those issues of religious freedom, and hence tolerance, as the countless voices addressing those questions confirm.30 Toleration, however, its early stage of development, constitutes a lesser form of mutual acceptance and always implies, indirectly at least, the wish that a certain situation or condition would be different than it is in reality. In other words, there always remains a certain degree of disagreement and maybe even resentment, a strong difference in opinion. Jay Newman defines this as follows: “tolerating a belief is primarily a matter of making a judgment about specific cases of believing.”31 He warns us, however, th
at most people who hold a religious belief face grave difficulties accepting those individuals who embrace a different religion because their own position is predicated on a deeply ingrained form of irrational approach to all matters spiritual.32 Even a very liberal, modern, Western society has its self-imposed limits, defends itself against its own enemies, and demarcates clearly the scope of tolerance it can accept. Members of minorities can live freely in such a society, but their minority status will always remain noticeable and their continued presence tenuous, as long as the majority does not feel fully self-content, strong, and independent.33 After all, intolerance has much to do with fear, insecurity, weakness, and deep worries about one’s own position within society.

  As the introductory chapter has already indicated, it is fairly easy, almost expected, to turn to the late eighteenth century as the age when the discourse on tolerance reached its first peak and succeeded to be practiced even on the stage as a means to provide direct didactic instructions.34 Names such as Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Pierre Bayle, René Descartes, Denis Diderot, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Honoré Gabriel Mirabeau, Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Pufendorf, or Voltaire deserve our special attention in this context.35 It is, however, a modern myth that the world of the Middle Ages and the early modern age was simply dark and profoundly intolerant, not willing to consider or accept alternative social and religious groups, especially because Christianity, i.e. the Catholic Church, ruled supreme, as many scholars have previously affirmed.36 Negative news from that time has always provided more attractive tidbits of a highly sensational nature than more quotidian ones, in which the differences between religions might not have mattered and where friendship and love were simply possible irrespective of religious, social, or racial barriers.37 As I will discuss later, the examples provided by Boccaccio in his Decameron (ca. 1350) indicate most specifically that some intellectuals—poets, writers, theologians, philosophers—at least were able and willing to consider and even tolerate representatives of minority groups and integrate them into their own framework of mind. As Nederman emphasizes, “Beneath the veneer of religious singularity, European Christendom during the Middle Ages struggled endlessly with manifestations of difference.”38 The concept of toleration, or even of tolerance, was, for a very long time, already in the making and can be traced as far back as to late antiquity, such as to Bishop Cyprian of Carthage (ca. 200–258)39 and the various church fathers, especially St. Augustine (354–430).40

  The entire discourse in the epoch of the Protestant Reformation was also deeply concerned with questions concerning tolerance, or at least toleration, although the Protestant churches, that is, their authority figures, soon turned out to be highly orthodox and intolerant, as I will discuss in a separate chapter.41 I will not investigate here whether Martin Luther was a true proponent of an open mind regarding representatives of other religions, unfortunately a rather spurious notion considering his many rather hateful and very hostile statements about Jews, Anabaptists, and other opponents, but the issue itself was certainly of relevance for some of his contemporaries.42

  Thus, we cannot be certain at all whether the Protestant Reformation brought about tolerance, far from it. Yet, even if not operating on the main radar screens of that age, individual intellectuals, some of whom kept their ideas very private, developed significant perspectives regarding the representatives of other faiths and propounded noteworthy perspectives that I will pursue at greater length in a separate chapter. Those Spiritualists and Anabaptists were quiet and yet strong voices and deserve to be included in our examination, especially because they contributed to the establishment of private space where the individual could practice his/her own faith without insisting that everyone else had to follow their concept.43

  Thus, turning to the Middle Ages and probing to what extent we might be able to identify important traces of an emerging discourse on tolerance (or toleration) will offer us the great opportunity to look at the same issue as it concerns us today through an unexpected and, hence, refreshing lens. However, would it even be reasonable to search for tolerance in a seemingly utterly intolerant Western (and probably also Eastern) world? After all, most scholars would emphasize immediately the strong role played by the Christian Church, the phenomenon of the Crusades, and later of the Inquisition and the witch craze, all expressions of the authorities.44 What might we gain thereby? If we might be able to confirm the beginning of this discourse on tolerance, or at least trace it further back, most likely in a literary-historical and philosophical-religious context where we can find early attempts at reaching out to others, embracing other races and religions, we will recognize most intriguingly the fundamental process of how tolerance can come into this world and be productive.45 Quoting Nederman,

  the very period in which the rise of persecution has been detected also witnessed an upsurge in writings that took the form of inter-religious dialogue, that is, discussions between persons of different faiths, sects, or both, directed toward the discovery of truth or, at least, common ground.46

  In another context, Nederman emphasizes the numerous conflicts within the Christian Church during the Middle Ages, which opened many different loopholes for individuals who did not adhere to Christianity, whether Jews or heretics, atheists or Muslims.47

  Several scholars have pointed out in this context the significant Ludus de Antichristo, composed ca. 1157–1160 at the imperial monastery of Tegernsee, Bavaria, in which the conflict between the temporal and the papal powers comes to the surface, with the poet apparently arguing for a more humanistic approach to worldly existence.48 The playwright allows the Gentilitas, that is, the pre-Christian pagan world, to speak up first and to explain their polytheism with fairly rational arguments (“ratione”), pointing out how complex this world really is (“pluralitas”) and that it would seem hypocritical to assume that there could be only one god, especially because the material dimension consists of an infinite amount of elements. Then, the Jew is entitled to appear and to defend his religion, although at the end, they both are rejected after all and have to submit under the Christian faith. The fact by itself that both are granted space at the beginning of this play underscores how much the playwright was aware of the historical development of all religions and paid attention to the earliest stages, before the Christian Church arrives and then dominates all. When the emperor speaks, he explicitly formulates a statement predicated on toleration: “Triumphi gloria est parcere devitis” (12, 87; To enjoy the glory of triumph is to spare the defeated).

  As in all high and late medieval dialogue narratives with Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other religionists talking about their faiths, the first always win the debate, of course, especially because those texts were written by and for members of the Church and for a Christian audience at large. Nevertheless, here as well it helps to keep in mind that high medieval society was openly interested in allowing the voices of the other religions to come to the fore, which, thus, actually allowed the public to reconfirm the validity of the Christian faith, which often seems to be incomprehensible for the ordinary person. As the Jew marvels, for instance, how could Christ who granted life to others not save Himself (7). The allegorical figures of hypocrisy and heresy appear as well and remind the audience of the Christian clergy’s fallibility (23). The greatest enemy of all is the Anti-Christ, and he is the one who tries to deceive everybody.

  Most importantly, however, as Hans-Dietrich Kahl has pointed out,49 the traditional crusade is rejected, and thereby also all previous attempts to utilize the threat to the Holy Land as an excuse to impose imperial rule over the entire Middle Eastern realm; instead, the emperor will only embark on a crusade to defend the specifically Christian sites against the King of Babylon and then be content with it. The Muslims—here equated with the Babylonians—might intend, as the play indicates, to destroy Christianity altogether, but the Benedictine monk argues explicitly that the Christians are not entitled to
resort to the same military strategy.

  Of course, the medieval Crusaders and the masses of their followers were deeply determined by intolerance and driven by strong religious fervor, but this would not make everyone involved on either the Christian or the Muslim side automatically into an intolerant person.50 The chronicler William of Tyre (ca. 1130–1186), for instance, formulated quite surprisingly open-minded opinions about the Muslim world, and he was not the only one.51 Even though he insisted, like everyone else, that the Holy Land belonged to Christianity, he did not deny that the Muslims also had some legitimate claim on it. Only God would decide the final outcome of this conflict.52 William regarded the Muslims simply as a deviant sect of Christianity and only followed a false prophet. After all, he did not only compose an account of the Lateran Council, apart from his famous Crusade Chronicle, the Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, or Historia Ierosolimitana (1170–1184), but also a history of the Islamic world from the time of Muhammed until 1184, both works unfortunately not having survived.

  Quite commonly, this chronicler heaps praise on the various Muslim leaders, such as Mu’in ad-Din Unur, Nur ad-Din, Shirkuh, and especially Saladin, whom he regarded as honorable and pious men.53 Whether we might use the term ‘tolerance’, or better ‘toleration’, in this context is rather contested, but he harshly criticized those Christians who broke treatises with the Muslims and regarded the defeat of the former at the hand of the latter simply as God’s punishment for the Christians’ wrongdoing.54 At the same time, he did not leave any doubt that the Muslims were utterly wrong in their faith, fully in accordance with the overarching religious ideology in the West. But his condemnation did not aim at all and everyone within the Muslim world, since he judged people according to their deeds, or their ethical principles or honorable behavior, and not according to their faith—certainly a most significant approach in the general evaluation of societies, religions, and individuals, which we could certainly identify as a form of toleration.55