How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the WestReligious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. |
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... moral, and philosophical justification of religious freedom had their real beginning in the sixteenth century; they were forged in the bitter denominational conflicts, the continued struggle against persecution, and the fierce ...
... moral standing, like the church father Saint Augustine, to persecute and approve the persecution of other Christians for religious error. The next five chapters survey the controversy over religious toleration in Europe from the time of ...
... moral and political philosophers. Most of the former are quite specialized rather than broad, while the writings on the subject by philosophers are sometimes not well grounded historically. I have striven in the present book to convey a ...
... morally and politically desirable and should be given effect in laws and institutions. This is the very momentous, far-reaching change in Western civilization that needs to be explained, and with whose origins and earlier development ...
... moral, and humanitarian arguments that can support and justify them. For in a certain sense ideas rule the world, and the attitudes and actions of human beings are greatly affected by reasons and justifications. In the absence of ...
Contents
1 | |
14 | |
The Advent of Protestantism and the Toleration Problem | 46 |
The First Champion of Religious Toleration Sebastian Castellio | 93 |
The Toleration Controversy in the Netherlands | 145 |
The Great English Toleration Controversy 16401660 | 188 |
John Locke and Pierre Bayle | 240 |
Conclusion The Idea of Religious Toleration in the Enlightenment and After | 289 |
NOTES | 313 |
INDEX | 367 |