Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration

A Letter Concerning Toleration
John Locke
[1689]

In this influential essay Locke sets forth a vision of the relationship between civil and religious authorities. Its basic argument is that the two spheres are “absolutely separate and distinct”, or, in another place, “perfectly distinct and infinitely different”, and that in consequence it is a blunder to mix them. Churchmen ought to have no influence over civil affairs, and civil magistrates, likewise, no influence over religious affairs.

This sounds unremarkable to us because our society has been built along the lines proposed by Locke. This vision of his is our vision too, in practice, and usually in theory also. It is interesting, though, to look at the arguments Locke gives for his position.

Religion, he argues, benefits from separation from civil authority principally because civil magistrates have no special competence in religious matters. Care of souls has not been entrusted to them by God. “Neither the right nor the art of ruling does necessarily carry along with it the certain knowledge of other things, and least of all of true religion.”

The power wielded by civil authority is that of force, but the use of force in religion is absurd, for “God Himself will not save men against their wills”. Instead, religion should be the realm of argument and persuasion, for “the truth certainly would do well enough if she were once left to shift for herself.” Indeed, he goes on to argue that it is actually not possible to believe something simply because of an obligation to do so; rather, one must be convinced in order to truly believe. To impose a religion, therefore, simply results in men lying: “A sweet religion, indeed, that obliges men to dissemble and tell lies, both to God and man, for the salvation of their souls!” We see the sense in this view, of course, though perhaps we also feel a tension with our knowledge that the sanction of civil authority for a particular view is itself, for many people, persuasive.

Instead of meddling in religion, civil authorities should tend to their principal duties, which for Locke are the provision of security of each man’s private possessions, preserving the peace, riches, and public commodities of the whole people, and providing defence against foreign invasion. Since the state does not care for the health or the material well-being of its citizens, if the citizens themselves do not care for them, it should likewise not concern itself with their souls. This is an argument that will be more persuasive to conservatives than to liberals, the latter being less likely to grant the premise of the analogy.

The complementary principle to the ousting of civil authority from religious affairs is the ousting of religious authorities from civil affairs. After all, the two realms are “infinitely different”. Religious authorities should therefore concern themselves with religious matters. And who are religious authorities? Locke’s answer is “churches”. And what is a church? Locke’s answer is as follows:

“A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshiping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of souls.”

This answer poses certain difficulties. How is it that these voluntary societies of men who have joined themselves together of their own accord have also had religious authority conferred upon them? Is it simply because they claimed such authority for themselves? If so, what prevents the civil authority from likewise claiming such authority for itself? A competent religious authority is presumably one who teaches truths about religion and religious practices, but it is hard to see how these voluntary societies, simply as such, become competent to know such truths. And, as it turns out, Locke is aware of this problem and has an answer: no church really knows truths about religion. “Every church is orthodox to itself” is all that can be said. This is a fatal admission for Locke, since it collapses the all-important distinction he wants to maintain between religious and civil authorities.

Even if genuine religious authority existed, however, the neat separation he would like to make between civil and religious affairs is complicated by the fact that they are not actually separable, and this is perhaps clearest in the realm of morality, which bears both on acts (having, in his scheme, civil consequences) and conscience (having, in his scheme, religious import). He does grapple with this problem. His leading principle is a sound one: “Obedience is due, in the first place, to God and, afterwards, to the laws.” (Indeed, this, and not the relativity of religious truth, is the proper rationale for religious toleration.) If, therefore, a civil law imposes upon the conscience of a citizen, he should not obey the law, but he should also accept the punishment prescribed by law. If, however, the law in question pertains to matters that do not properly lie within the sphere of competence of the civil authority, then the citizen ought to protest against the law and refuse to submit. In cases of irresolvable conflict, God alone can judge between the magistrate and the subject. But we must ask: if conscience resides in the realm of religious authority, what are these putative civil laws which impose upon the conscience without thereby also straying outside their sphere of civil competence?

A peculiarity of his system is that, for him, religion is individualistic and purely voluntary. One inherits nothing from others and belongs to no community that precedes one’s voluntary association with it:

“Nobody is born a member of any church… [otherwise] everyone would hold his faith by the same tenure he does his lands, than which nothing can be imagined more absurd.”

(But is it not also absurd to inherit lands?)

The motive underlying the scheme Locke outlines in his essay is the promotion of religious toleration. There is an important sense in which we owe a debt to Locke for making these arguments. After religiously-implicated wars had racked European societies it was important to Locke to lower the stakes of civil government, and removing religion from its sphere of influence was an effective strategy from which, in real and tangible ways, we have benefited. This needn’t prevent our noting the weaknesses in his arguments, nor stop us from thinking about what we have lost as the price of what we have gained, but most of us, most of the time, are probably glad to live in a society where religious toleration is valued. It is perhaps especially true as governments have become more self-consciously secular that the state’s commitment, at least theoretically, to religious toleration has been, so to speak, a saving grace for religious citizens.

The confidence we can have in this at-least-theoretical commitment to religious tolerance is not, however, unbounded, and this is illustrated already by Locke, who concludes his robust defence of religious tolerance by naming a few religious groups that ought not to be tolerated — namely, Catholics and atheists, the former because they “deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince” (that is, the Pope) and the latter because the denial of God’s existence “dissolves all”.

**

As I said at the top, Locke’s scheme for how politics and religion ought to relate is familiar to us because it is the blueprint for our own society’s approach to such matters. I can appreciate his motives, though it is evident that his system tries to make neat something that is in fact messy. His conception of what kind of thing a religion is, akin to a gentleman’s dinner club, is especially weak and certainly at odds with the self-understanding of most religions. Indeed, insofar as his proposal relies on the premise that there is no such thing as a genuine religious authority it could never be acceptable to a Catholic, nor to many other religious groups either, even if we are, for the sake of social harmony, willing to play along for now. Heaven, we are confident, will not be governed along Lockean lines.

Linked links

Today a set of items sewn together by threads firm and flimsy:

• Some of us read not so much for plot as for style, but what is style? At The New Criterion Dominic Green has some ideas about it, expressed with style. It’s a splendid essay.
• Joseph Epstein has written a nice appreciation of that delightful stylist P.G. Wodehouse. It led me to Roger Kimball’s older essay in a similar vein. And that led me to Christopher Hitchens’ thoughts on the subject. Wodehouse has been an obsession of mine of late; I’ve nearly completed all the Jeeves and Wooster novels. As displays of wit they are hard to beat.
• And what about displays of Whit?
• The film that won the Best Picture Oscar this year was del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which Ross Douthat sees as a rather unsubtle example of liberal myth-making. I’ve not seen it myself.
• Neither have I seen — it was a strictly auditory affair — a recent debate between Jordan Peterson and philosophy’s own Angel of Death, David Benatar. At issue is anti-natalism, a view that holds that sentient life is an evil. (Peterson’s against it; so am I.)
• I’m more likely to throw my support behind a proposition implicit in the novels of our great English moralist Charles Dickens: that coffee is an evil.
• You have to wonder what the dickens the consciousness deniers are thinking. (Technical answer: nothing.) The linked essay is a good one, but over contented with its preferred solution, and not quite grappling with the scope of the problem. Most educated Westerners today are committed to a metaphysics that leads where the consciousness deniers have ended up. Do I hear someone whistling past this graveyard?
• I think so, and I think I know the tune. Didn’t Ian Bostridge mention it in his reflections on the English choral tradition?

As an envoi, let’s hear something from that tradition. Here is Herbert Howells’ A Spotless Rose, sung by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge.

Caussade: Abandonment to Divine Providence

Abandonment to Divine Providence
Jean Pierre de Caussade, SJ
Translated from the French by Ella McMahon
(Benziger, 1887) [c.1750]
200 p.

The basic counsel of Fr Caussade’s book is that if we wish to discover God’s will for our lives, we should do so by heeding and accepting “the duties, attractions, and crosses of every moment”. This advice he founds on two sturdy pillars of Christian doctrine: God is good, and God is omnipotent. Therefore his good will cannot be thwarted, and his Providence governs the world. Therefore “that which comes to us each moment by the order of God is best and holiest and most divine for us.”

On this conception of the spiritual life, it is not a matter of finding God’s will, exactly, so much as it is a matter of apprehending it. We are living within God’s providential plan already and have only to learn to see it and then to align our own will with that of God by loving and accepting it:

O dear souls who read this, let me repeat to you: Sanctity will cost you no more; do what you are doing; suffer what you are suffering: it is only your heart that need be changed. By the heart we mean the will. This change, then, consists in willing what comes to us by the order of God.

This attentiveness to the present moment, the present moment which “is like an ambassador which declares the will of God”, is the core spiritual discipline to be cultivated. In the months since I first read this book I’ve been trying, by fits and starts, to practice this discipline. It’s not at all easy. If it is truly a path to spiritual maturity then of course we’d not expect it to be easy, but perhaps it is also not easy for some other reasons, which I’ll get to. Fr Caussade writes that the fruit of the attentiveness and openness he advocates is an inner simplicity of spirit, an uncomplicated docility, taking its daily bread from God’s hands and not bestirring itself with worry or frustration. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished:

The work of a soul in this state of simplicity is nothing less than marvellous to eyes and minds divinely enlightened. Without rule, yet exactness itself; without measure, yet nothing better proportioned; without reflection, yet nothing more profound; without ingenuity, yet nothing better managed; without effort, yet nothing more efficacious; without forethought, yet nothing better fitted to unforeseen events.

The growth of this simplicity of heart requires faith and hope and love, and in turn fosters these same virtues in a never-ending, burgeoning cycle:

The present moment is always filled with infinite treasures: it contains more than you are capable of receiving. Faith is the measure of these blessings: in proportion to your faith will you receive. By love also are they measured: the more your heart loves the more it desires, and the more it desires the more it receives. The will of God is constantly before you as an unfathomable sea, which the heart cannot exhaust: only in proportion as the heart is expanded by faith, confidence, and love can it receive of its fulness. All created things could not fill your heart, for its capacity is greater than anything which is not God.

The self-abandonment Fr Caussade recommends is, of course, intended not only for the good times, but also the bad. When we experience joy it is easy to accept it gratefully from God’s hand; when we experience suffering it is not. In suffering we are tempted to reject what the present moment offers us, poisonous waters that threaten to wash us away. But we must not do so, says Fr Caussade, for here is the true test of our simplicity. Instead, we must keep our door open, even as the flood of destruction comes pouring through, not hiding or even shielding ourselves:

Weep, dear souls; tremble, suffer disquiet and anguish; make no effort to escape these divine terrors, these heavenly lamentations. Receive into the depth of your being the waters of that sea of bitterness which inundated the soul of Christ. Continue to sow in tears at the will of divine grace, and insensibly by the same will their source shall be dried. The clouds will dissolve, the sun will shed its light, the springtime will strew your path with flowers, and your self-abandonment will manifest to you the whole extent of the admirable variety of the divine action.

All shall be well, in the end, if we but stay the course. We are asked only to apprehend that everything, whatever may come, “is a banner to guide you, a stay to uphold you, an easy and safe vehicle to bear you on.”

**

This, it seems to me, summarizes the main argument in brief compass. I have attributed the book to Fr Caussade, and the attribution is traditional, although there is some doubt about it. The book was not published until 1861, over a century after Fr Caussade’s death, apparently out of concern that the book advocated self-abandonment to an excessive degree.

You can see the problem: if we should abandon our own will, is it possible that we should carry this self-abandonment so far as to desire, or at least to accept with equanimity, harm to ourselves? Is the health of our own souls included among those self-interests which we ought to be ready to forsake? There were some in Fr Caussade’s time who argued that true submission to God’s will required consent even to our own damnation, if God should will it, and a spirituality of self-abandonment could be quite dangerous in the hands of such people.

In a prefatory essay in this volume, the editor argues that we must therefore set “just limits” to our abandonment, which is sensible, but which makes it sound not so much like abandonment anymore. But he has good reason:

… the Church has condemned this doctrine which, in proposing to man a perfection contrary to his nature, reverses the order of God’s designs. How, in fact, can perfection consist in destroying the most essential law of our moral nature, viz., that irresistible inclination which leads us to seek our happiness? How could love of God require that we rob God of one of His attributes—the one which makes Him the supreme object of our beatitude? How could one of the theological virtues be contrary to another, and charity exclude hope?

A lesser, but still probing, criticism of the discipline of self-abandonment to the present moment is that it turns us away from our duties. If I were devoted to accepting whatever life brings me as a gift from God to be received with love, I might take a rather peculiar view of my children’s misbehaviour, for instance, taking it as an occasion of divine chastisement rather than an occasion for fatherly intervention and correction. I might stay home from work, day after day, preparing myself to receive as a gift the poverty and attendant suffering that I would undoubtedly receive from God’s hand by way of my employer’s boot. Fr Caussade does make some effort to address this problem:

The soul must follow no inspiration which she assumes comes from God without first assuring herself that it does not interfere with the duties of her state in life. These duties are the most certain indications of the will of God, and nothing should be preferred to them.

This is a necessary qualification, but it carves off a rather large — indeed, on some days, a nearly comprehensive — range of activity for exemption from the self-abandonment discipline. Sometimes we have to act. Sometimes we have to fight.

Sometimes we have to decide. It has been interesting, in fact, to read a book on God’s will which never really takes up the question of how to discern God’s will. For Fr Caussade it doesn’t arise, because God’s will is whatever is happening. But a common difficulty with which Christians often contend is that of facing a decision and trying to discern which choice best aligns with God’s will. Sometimes — actually, pretty often — this takes a crude form of wanting some sort of private revelation to show the way, but there are developed traditions of discernment, such as that of St Ignatius, intended to help with exactly this kind of question. We are constantly confronted with the need to make decisions. Should I accept what is happening to me, and learn to deal with it, or should I take action to change my situation? I’m afraid that Fr Caussade’s approach to life seems pretty useless in this respect.

It seems to me, in fact, that the method of abandonment, founded on confidence in God’s goodness and Providence, is missing an important theological ingredient: an awareness of the corrupting power of sin and evil. I have to be careful here, so as not to stumble. Sin and evil are contrary to God’s will, yet they undoubtedly affect what happens in the world. How, then, can I truly accept that everything that wafts toward me in the present moment “is like an ambassador which declares the will of God”? Sometimes things that happen are just evil, and they don’t declare the will of God. It is a teaching of Scripture that God brings good out of evil, but this, I think (and hope) is different from a declaration that whatever is is good. Therefore, given the reality of evil (in the phenomenological, though not metaphysical, sense) we must be discerning first, and only docile and abandoned when circumstances call for it.

And this appears to me a problem with Fr Caussade’s approach to the spiritual life. Perhaps I am wrong in my understanding of Providence, in which case I hope to be corrected. Even if I am right, however, I nonetheless do think that the discipline Fr Caussade counsels has rich potential, in its proper place, for fostering humility and a more intimate relationship to God. As I said, I’ve been trying it, with predictably mixed results. Late in the book Fr Caussade notes that his book is addressed especially to readers who “have already attained a high degree of perfection”, and so evidently I ought not to have read it in the first place.

[Love of God]
The earnest desire to love God is loving Him.

Canonic Gloria

More music from my beloved Matteo da Perugia, this time a Gloria written in canon:

I do not know who the musicians are. The transcription is courtesy, once again, Jordan Alexander Key.

Terence: The Comedies

The Comedies
Publius Terentius Afer
Translated from the Latin by Peter Brown
(Oxford, 2006) [c.160 BC]
xxvii + 338 p.

Terence was a talented young playwright whose literary career, though brief, nonetheless earned him an enduring place in the history of Western literature. Seutonius tells us that he was from Carthage, originally a slave but freed “because of his intelligence and good looks”; in his notes, Peter Brown counsels skepticism about this biography. But we can be more or less confident about his end: he died at an early age (of either 25 or 35, depending on whom you believe).

He left us just six plays, all comedies, and all based on Greek originals from a century earlier. In this tradition of adapting Greek drama he belongs to the same stream of Roman literature as Plautus, and his was an honourable vocation, for Greek literature was considered the gold standard by the Romans, even as Greek territories, during Terence’s lifetime, were increasingly found to furnish a different, more literal, kind of gold. His plays have many of the same features as did Plautus’: Greek settings, Greek characters, scheming slaves, dimwitted soldiers, wayward sons, and the comedic situations typically revolve around the love lives of young men and the conflicts they engender with their fathers. The plays were originally produced for audiences of men, and though there are women in the plays, none have leading roles.

Let’s take a brief look at each of them.

**

Terence’s first play was The Girl from Andros, first staged in 166 BC. Adapted from two plays of Menander, it tells of a young man whose marriage has been arranged by his father, but who meanwhile has conceived a child with a prostitute whom he loves and wishes to marry. A clever household slave tries to help him, opposing the father, to weasel out of the planned marriage. Things look up when a traveller arrives from across the sea saying that the prostitute is actually a Greek citizen (and therefore marriageable). In fact, she turns out to be a long lost sister of the girl the young man was originally supposed to marry! This being discovered, her father grants permission for the young man to marry her instead of his previously-intended daughter, and they live happily ever after.

We see in this play one of the common devices in Terence’s plays: the reveal, in which one of the characters turns out to be someone other than whom we had thought.

**

If we are looking for a good example of how the moral universe of the Romans differed from ours, we might well consider The Mother-in-Law, an amusing comedy in which the central conflict is resolved by the happy discovery that the protagonist is a rapist.

Pamphilus and Philumena have been married for less than 9 months, and he has been away for a few months on business. Returning, he finds that his wife is pregnant, and in fact she gives birth on the very day of his return. Who is the father? What will happen to Philumena now that her disgrace has been discovered? Parents, children, and slaves scheme, at cross-purposes, to control this delicate situation. But then, ever so happily, it falls out that — well, don’t you remember that night, shortly before the wedding, when Pamphilus had been out on the town and had raped that girl in the dark? That was his bride-to-be! The baby is his, and all is disconcertingly well.

Running in parallel to this story is another, in which Philumena has left the home of her husband not because she wants to conceal her pregnancy, but because she cannot stand to live with her mother-in-law. Terence was in fact known and admired for his “double plots”; Shakespearean comedy would eventually inherit this feature, with happy results.

**

Fathers, take care when you offer your sons advice, lest they heed it. In The Self-Tormentor, first staged in 163, a father upbraids his son for failing to make a name for himself, noting that at the same age he, the father, had already fought abroad in a war, whereupon the son, taking the lesson to heart, enlists and is sent to the front, leaving his father behind, aghast, fearful for his son’s life. Thinking only of the hardships his son must be enduring, and angry at himself for his rash counsel, the father vows to enjoy nothing in life until his son’s safe return — he, then, is the “self-tormentor” of the title. All this in the first few pages. Soon enough the son returns, perfectly well, and the play develops into a comedy of situation in which various friends, slaves, and lovers scheme to — you see, they’re trying to… — of course, I’m sure they’re up to something. The play is based on an original by Menander, now lost, though not so lost as I became as the machinations of the plot spooled up. I even read the plot summary at Wikipedia a few times, and I still can’t untangle what happened, or why. I’m afraid to try again.

**

As in The Mother-in-Law, rape is central to the plot of The Eunuch, and in an even more disturbing way. A young man falls in love with a slave girl, disguises himself as a eunuch to gain access to her home, and rapes her. It is later revealed that she is, in fact, the long-lost daughter of a distinguished Athenian family, and so a citizen. This is an awful realization, of course, because to rape a girl citizen is a crime, but it’s also a happy realization, because the young rapist, also a citizen, can now marry her. And so they live happily ever after.

There are other plot lines intersecting with this one, involving a jealous soldier, another young man in love with another slave girl, and so on, but Terence makes the rape central to the action and to the happy resolution of the various knots the characters must untie to find happiness. In his notes, Peter Green comments on the centrality of rape in this play and others. He says that, paradoxically, having a female character suffer rape was, for the Romans, a way of saving her honour; an unmarried woman who consented to sex was shameful, whereas a woman who was raped, though of course she suffered, committed no personal fault. She would have, in their minds, been more tarnished had she consented. This is logical, on its own terms, but, speaking for myself, I would still rather not have rapes in my comedies.

It is worth nothing that Romans felt otherwise; The Eunuch was Terence’s first major success. This good opinion lasted, and then did not last; more than 500 years later St Augustine was made to read the play in school, but he remembers the fact only to criticize it, and by the time we reach Erasmus we find him defending the play, and others by Terence, on the weak grounds that they teach us how not to act.

**

Phormio, from 161, is an amusing play in which two fathers, who are brothers, attempt to thwart the intended marriages of their respective sons to unsuitable women. One son they instead plan to marry to an illegitimate daughter of one of the fathers, who has just come to Athens disguised as a slave girl. The title character, Phormio, is a trickster recruited by the sons to thwart the fathers’ plans. Much of the amusement comes from the fact that the daughter whom the fathers want to marry to the son (her cousin) is already, unbeknownst to the fathers, the woman whom that son wants to marry. The fathers are therefore unwittingly trying to prevent the very marriage they are trying to arrange. The play is a good read, with many funny situations.

**

Parenting raises certain perennial questions, and among them are these: how much freedom should I allow my child, and how much discipline should I apply? In The Brothers we see two fathers who take opposite approaches to rearing their sons: Demea is strict, and raises a son who is respectable, while Micio is permissive, and raises a son who openly commits follies and crimes. The former hopes that his son will learn good habits and stay on the narrow path, while the latter hopes that his tolerant attitude, and the absence of subterfuge or deception in his relationship with his son, will eventually bring his son around to an honourable adulthood. The joke is on Demea, whose son is outwardly obedient but secretly just as debauched as the other. This occasions some good comedy, although, as Peter Green says in his introductory notes, while you laugh you cannot help but think.

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Terence’s fame lasted as long as did Rome. His Latin style was admired by the medievals, and it is perhaps because of this that we have his plays today. Alas, this aspect of his art is closed to me. The morality of his plays has been debated, and not without reason. St Ignatius of Loyola proposed making expurgated versions for use in Jesuit schools; Cardinal Newman actually did so for his school. For centuries, knowing Terence was part of being educated.

In the prologue to one of the plays, he remarks that a production of his previous play had been abandoned because a gladiatorial combat nearby had distracted the audience. The twentieth century was, insofar as Terence was concerned — though also in certain other respects — much like a giant gladiatorial combat. It is rare to find the plays staged today, but they remain interesting and enjoyable to read, even if, as is true, I myself did not enjoy them quite as much as I enjoyed reading Plautus’ plays. I am nonetheless glad to have made their acquaintance.