by Matthew Gaetano

TRF hosted some interesting debates about religious freedom, the Second Vatican Council, and the development of doctrine back in 2017. For the last several years, there has been quite a lot of debate about Integralism, Christian nationalism, and other post-liberal (or often pre-liberal!) approaches to state and society. Back in 2019, Pater Edmund Waldstein, a leading defender of Integralism, asserted that the subjection of “all the baptized” to the Church meant that, “in certain circumstances,” the need to punish those who “violate their baptismal obligations” can “mean that she needs to call in the secular arm to put heretics to death.”

I am well aware of the arguments for (this version of) Integralism based on the historical circumstances of the Catholic Church and on the need for the Church to do what must be done to bring humanity to its ultimate end, i.e., the Beatific Vision. I’m also aware of the developments and clarifications of what Integralists might really be advocating. But I also know that I generally find key elements of the Integralist view morally repugnant and that Christians, however few, have raised serious questions about the use of lethal force against heretics long before the Enlightenment (here, #9).

But moral repugnance, the “minority report” of Catholic theologians over the centuries, and practical arguments about modern American liberal tolerance will only get us so far. How does one embrace the teaching that the Holy Spirit has guided Christ’s mystical body, the Church, into truth through the ages and, at the same time, reject the practice for many centuries of handing over heretics to be punished by the “secular arm” – sometimes with death? There are quite a number of ways to begin approaching the problem, of course (here, here, here, here). But when I have discussed these issues, even with strong defenders of religious freedom, I have seen many interlocutors worry about preserving the “tradition” and about respecting our ancestors and about avoiding a sort of modern arrogance regarding our supposedly greater enlightenment on these topics. As a student of the Renaissance and Reformation and their efforts to renew society by looking back to ancient sources (ad fontes), I appreciate these concerns. And I also acknowledge that the profound challenges of the world that we live in now might sensibly lead Christians to be nostalgic about the religious unity that existed in some places a few centuries ago. So, we have some work to do.

I love political theology as much as the next person, but, as a starting point for this series, we need to recognize the concrete circumstances that gave rise to the demand for changing our conceptions of the relationship of church and state. Early Enlightenment views of toleration do not only (or even primarily) come from alternative (or heterodox) theologies, metaphysics, or epistemologies. (I’m certainly not denying the critique of orthodox Christianity by some of the most famous figures during the Enlightenment.) These conceptions of religious toleration emerged, at least in part, from the experience or at least the observation of actual persecution.

One of the most stunning examples of the consequences of a persecuting society can be found in the France of Louis XIV and his Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685. After the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) that featured the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, King Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598 which granted limited toleration to Huguenots (French Reformed Protestants). Henry IV’s grandson, Louis XIV, revoked this edict in the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685). According to the scholar Geoffrey Adams, Louis XIV actually had to struggle against the assumption that his grandfather’s edict was “irrevocable” (also here, cf. here). There was perhaps more of a sense of a permanent arrangement of religious peace in seventeenth-century France than we might imagine; powerful rulers, however, can unmake such arrangements. However much this might have been a measure to solidify Louis’s absolutist conception of the state, he justified depriving the Reformed Protestants in France of toleration by saying that Henry IV only intended the Edict of Nantes as an interim measure “in order to be better able, as he had all along resolved, to bring back into the church those who had so casually strayed from it” (8). He was seeking a France with one king, one law, and one faith.

The goals of this new edict were expansive. Louis XIV intended to destroy all Huguenot churches and forbid all publish worship in the Reformed rite. Calvinist schools were to be closed. Pastors could become Catholic and thus retain their degrees in theology (about one-sixth of them did abjure to stay in France); otherwise, they needed to leave the country and, if they returned as Calvinists, would be sent to the galleys. Ordinary lay Huguenots were forbidden to emigrate (they could not practice the Protestant faith but were not at first compelled to abjure), though about 200,000 Protestants (out of about 900,000 Huguenots) fled in the immediate aftermath of the law, and tens of thousands emigrated during the next several decades (35).

Apparently — and this might be a later expansion of the Edict of Fontainebleau — if anyone refused last rites (extreme unction or the sacrament of anointing at the point of death), then that person was exposed as a secret Huguenot. If such a man survived after admitting his earlier hypocrisy, he was sent to the galleys; if he actually died, his body was dragged around the streets. Even the king worried about the harshness of actually enforcing this declaration. (If anyone has even more solid information about the details here, I’d love to learn about them in the comments.) All of this is especially shocking when one discovers that seventeenth-century French Catholics sometimes referred to the Huguenots as “separated brethren”! (Adams, pp. 9, 216).

Basically no one in France’s spiritual and intellectual leadership opposed Louis XIV’s actions at the end of the 1600s (19). A major bishop, preacher, theologian, and correspondent of Leibniz, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (d. 1704) by no means defended his fellow Frenchmen from oppression and violence but rather saw this moment as surpassing the Patristic era in some respects; the Church Fathers had “not witnessed, as you have witnessed, the sudden dissolution of an inveterate heresy.” This (supposedly) sudden end of Reformed Protestantism in France led Bossuet to call upon other clergy to “salute” Louis XIV as “this new Constantine, … this new Charlemagne,” worthy of the sort of honor from churchmen that the emperor received at the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon (23). According to Adams, Bossuet wanted confiscated property of Huguenots who emigrated (illegally) to go to missionary work. He encouraged the abduction and confinement of children of Calvinists to make sure that they were educated in the Catholic faith. And he defended the use of the dragonnades in the the years before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes — Louis XIV’s quartering of dragoons (mounted infantry) and other soldiers in the houses of Huguenots to encourage them to convert to Catholicism.

Is it an accident that John Locke wrote his Latin argument for toleration – however inadequate – in 1685? No, of course not. According to John Marshall, “Locke had been concerned about increasing restrictions upon French Protestants during his years in France. In England in the early 1680s he followed their worsening position. In 1685 Louis XIV finally revoked the Edict of Nantes. … Refugees flooded into England and the Netherlands. … It was in this atmosphere in the winter of 1685 that Locke composed a Latin argument for toleration” (357), which was later published in 1689. It seems to me that, whenever theologians or commentators criticize Locke’s doctrine of toleration, they should also make a note of some of the facts surrounding the Edict of Fontainebleau — an astonishingly harsh act against others who worshipped the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ, an act that should have benefited from the historical experiences gained by Louis’s grandfather during the French Wars of Religion and by many European rulers during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) when millions of Christians died in a terrible conflict which mixed religious and political hostility.

I’m planning to revisit some of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates about religious persecution over the next several weeks. But for now, if anyone wants to claim to offer a post-liberal account of politics, society, and religion, they really need to show how their arguments surpass Locke’s vision of peace, social harmony, and freedom. If these commentators offer nothing but prudential arguments against – let alone defenses of – policies like those of Louis XIV (the sorts of policies, laws, and actions being opposed by Locke), then there is nothing post-liberal about them.