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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... spiritual as well as material,” which made room for reason-of-state and hence the possibility of political solutions and compromises. He also noted that wherever religious toleration was established in the sixteenth century, it was ...
... accepted as a political necessity. Most Catholics and their spiritual guides remained unreconciled to the existence of Protestantism in their midst and considered the concessions granted to the Protestant minority THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM 11.
... spiritual and temporal. They inflicted, as far as they could, the penalties of death and damnation on everybody who resisted it. They constructed quite a new system of procedure, with unheard of cruelties, for its maintenance. They ...
... spiritual and theological mentors were so intolerant of other Christians in the past that they were even willing to punish or kill them for their beliefs. Was it, as Acton thought, because the persecutors and those who justified ...
... spiritual and political authority its bishops wielded, it had the power of the state at its disposal to enforce its faith against heretics. The practical toleration and religious pluralism that had formerly been the Roman custom no ...
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 |