Introduction: Religious toleration in the Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

This article is an introduction to a special issue on 'Religious Toleration in the Age of Enlightenment'. It begins by characterizing the Enlightenment's attitude towards religion as an opposition to bigotry and ecclesiastic authority based on a particular interpretation of the European Wars of Religion. Then it acknowledges the problematic nature of the phrase 'Age of Enlightenment', which seems to push some of the most relevant eighteenth-century realities to the margins of history. Next, it challenges some common scholarly assumptions regarding Enlightenment ideas on tolerance. In particular, it disputes that these ideas were essentially principled, secular, pluralist and liberal. By way of conclusion, this introductory article suggests that the Enlightenment's main contribution to the history of toleration is found not in the originality or subtlety of its ideas, but rather in the promotion of a new mentality according to which toleration came to be regarded as an essential feature of modern civilization.

Religion and Persecution

“…34 Specifically, we include in all columns distance from Rome with the aim of accounting for the influence of the Church, which can help us further isolate local ecclesiastical power. In column (2) we add a dummy variable for university presence and one for parliamentary activity: universities, which started being established from around the 12th century in Europe, have been shown to be positively related with growth (Cantoni and Yuchtman, 2014), and can thus be considered an additional proxy for economic development; moreover from the enlightenment onwards, universities have been associated with religious toleration, opposition to bigotry and ecclesiastic authority (Domínguez, 2017). The parliamentary activity dummy, which indicates whether a city had representatives in an active parliament, aims at capturing the institutional developments that have been associated with Europe's economic growth (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2005).…”

Religious Authority as Human Life Guidelines

“…This second view originated in the epoch of European enlightenment. The era was characterized by almost unlimited criticism of tradition and religion (Grote, 2014) along with a positive evaluation of the success of enlightenment thoughts (Aufklarung) and extraordinary optimism for the future of humans controlled by sovereign reason (Domínguez, 2017). Although European enlightenment thinkers were in no way not paying attention and even appreciating certain aspects of civilizations outside Europe, most of them assumed that European culture was the most advanced and brought about universal human reasoning that would bring all human beings to similar thoughts and civilizations (Israel, 2001, p. vi) Although in different forms and contexts, in the following centuries the same view remained prominent, both in the idealist philosophy G.W.F.…”