Thursday, June 27, 2013
5.55 (PC Hoofthuis)
The use of the term tolerance in the official documents of the seventeenth century never meant an acceptance of a certain behaviour, but only the permission of something that was normally forbidden. Such an idea of tolerance was part of a political project aiming to establish pacific cohabitation in a Europe torn by religious conflicts. This attempt of reconciliation took place through a “Reduktiontheologie” but was constantly perturbed by adversary forces that fought for the religious unification under a single confession. Many historians have emphasized the conflictual nature and the limits of this conception of tolerance, understanding it as an aspect of the legal system. The fragmentation of the national identity in religious identity was one of the skewed consequences of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) whose principle, the cuiu sregius eius religius, made difficult the possibility to think about a European religious dimension. Paradoxically we can consider persecution and religious ‘diaspora’ as a main factor of intellectual exchange in Europe. The sinusoidal course of the concept of tolerance, caught between unifying instances and forward-looking political choices, resulted in the failure of the project of modernity in Europe, still firmly anchored to the idea of national sovereignty. Within this controversy a proposal for not exclusive tolerance, with an implicit universal character, arose from the most radical religious groups in the United Provinces and in England. Mennonites, Waterlanders, Collegiants (Doopsgesiders) and the nonconformist of the Cromwellian period represented an alternative to the dichotomies between exclusive and negative tolerance. This proposal was set forth in a Dutch polemical pamphlet, the Onbepaalde Verdraagzaamheid (unlimited tolerance). The vedraagzaamheid represent a paradigmatic attitude that tries to resolve religious conflicts through the critique of both religious indifference and hierarchical orthodoxy. The ‘anomalous’ situation of Holland as well as some outbursts of democracy in England and the widespread religious dissimulation were cracks that allowed a glimpse on nonexclusive tolerance and on its transnational solidarity. During this paper I will analyse the sources that show in which way Dutch radical religious groups understood Vedraagzaamheid. In conclusion I will discuss how this kind of non-exclusive tolerance, together with the practice of transnational solidarity, was an answer to the Thirty Years’ War and represented an alternative (even if marginal) way to rethink religious pluralism as a European solution.
