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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... philosopher Spinoza) to the work of Christian thinkers, mostly unorthodox Protestants, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all of whom were powerfully motivated by their religious beliefs to fight against the intolerance of both ...
... philosopher A. J. Ayer observed in an essay entitled “Sources of Intolerance” that religious intolerance has probably done greater harm than all other forms of intolerance and was also exceptionally hard to explain. “I do consider it ...
... 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 wide general ...
... philosophers or political writers.5 Rome's religious pluralism, however, although officially tolerant of Judaism, did not extend to Christianity. Christians were intermittently persecuted and put to death by the Roman government from ...
... philosophers and historians, taking the first of these meanings as their point of departure, regard toleration and religious freedom as quite distinct things and emphasize the differences between the two. They understand toleration to ...
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 |