The Undivided Past Page 6
Notwithstanding the powerful urgings of conciliatory writers such as Castellio and Bodin, and the contrary examples of Transylvania, Poland-Lithuania, and France, it took most rulers of early modern Europe a long time to learn the simple lesson that wars waged against fellow Christians were decidedly ill-advised. But away from the theological disputations and the body-strewn battlefields, many of their humble subjects, who were also confronted with the challenges of living, coping, and surviving in an era of unprecedented religious turmoil and animosity, had already reached these more measured conclusions. For in the wake of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, as historian Benjamin J. Kaplan notes, “millions of Europeans” were compelled to struggle with an elemental question: “can people whose basic beliefs are irreconcilably opposed live together peacefully?” “More often than usually recognized,” the author concludes, “the answer in that earlier era was yes.” Despite so much evidence to the contrary, many “viable alternatives to bloodshed” were developed and practiced, which proved both compelling and appealing. Unlike many of their temporal and spiritual superiors, the ordinary men and women of Europe “did not have to love each other in order not to kill each other,” and even in the darkest periods of religious persecution and interfaith conflict, they worked out many successful “arrangements for peaceful co-existence.”111
The result was that there developed during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation a widespread, pragmatic, and accommodating “indifference to certain kinds of difference.” Such attitudes, modes of behavior, and resulting interactions, reminiscent of those in late antiquity between pagans and Christians, and in the medieval and early modern periods between Christians and Muslims, were again found in the unofficial spaces of private life, where the practical necessity for day-to-day negotiation could successfully override political imperatives or military demands or theological exhortations.112 Arcane scholastic disputes, about issues such as the role of the priesthood, or the metaphysics of the eucharist, or the status of scriptural authority, might be deeply contentious matters between elite and educated Catholics and Protestants, yet they were not only impossible to resolve or reconcile, but they also meant less to most people, whose knowledge of religious doctrine was rudimentary and unlettered. From this perspective, confessional enmities, talked up and exaggerated by princes and prelates, were less important than the abiding realities of a shared humanity and a common Christian faith. As the Catholic author of a Dutch pamphlet put it in 1579, “we have been told that these [Protestant] people are monsters. We have been sent after them as after dogs. [Yet] if we consider them, they are men of the same nature and condition as ourselves … worshipping the same God as us, seeking salvation in the same Christ, believing in the same Bible, children of the same Father, asking a share of the same heritage by virtue of the same Testament.”113
Put another way, this meant that within the increasingly fissured territories of European Christendom, the venerable principles and hallowed practices of charity, generosity, friendliness, loving-kindness, and good-neighborliness, which long antedated the Catholic and Protestant split, were alive and well; indeed, they were much more prevalent, tenacious, and important than has until relatively recently been recognized by historians working on this period. This general sentiment was expressed by the Polish Jesuit Peter Skarga, who remarked of Protestants in 1592, “their heresy is bad, but they are good neighbours and brethren, to whom we are linked by bonds of love in the common fatherland.”114 So while official records and the Catholic and Protestant histories subsequently fashioned from them suggest deep and complete polarization, a broader and more nuanced investigation (including an appreciation of those many significant social spaces from which little or no evidence survives) suggests that ordinary lives were often lived in more peaceful ways and on less sectarian terms. If there was a persistent and unbridgeable gulf, it was between “the rhetoric of intolerance” and the “generally benign and conciliatory character of inter-confessional relations.” Most ordinary people, left to their own devices and decisions, were eager to continue living with their neighbors, whatever their unresolved religious differences, and despite what prelates and princes urged, they were not minded to denounce or to kill those of other faiths.115
To this end, a whole range of stratagems were successfully devised for coping with the demands of officialdom and for getting on with one’s life and one’s neighbors beyond the confessional boundary.116 During the closing decades of the sixteenth century, Protestant burghers living in Catholic Vienna left the city on Sundays to worship on neighboring estates and in village churches where they were free to practice their own religion. In the same way, at the Jacobskerk in Utrecht, the pastor Hubert Duifhuis welcomed all Christians to Communion, Catholic and Calvinist alike, and he was supported in this ecumenical work by the city magistrates. In many parts of Europe, “clandestine churches” (“schuilkerk”) were constructed, allowing Catholic majorities to tolerate Protestant minorities and vice versa, and the existence of such buildings and services was an open secret.117 Alternatively, and much more publicly, Catholics and Protestants might agree to share the same church (“simultankirche”), or at least the same city, and many such “bi-confessional arrangements” were to be found in the urban centers of Switzerland, Transylvania, the Holy Roman Empire, and France (after the Edict of Nantes). In some cities, and especially in the Dutch Republic, diverse creeds were jumbled up together in what has rightly been termed a “religious melting pot”; in others, such as Augsburg, religious freedom depended not so much on integration as segregation, as different religious groups were sharply separated. By such varied means were those of divergent religious faiths able to cohabit on amicable terms.118
So while Protestants and Catholics might be urged by their spiritual and political leaders to disapprove of each other en masse, on the grounds that “he that is not with me is against me,” most ordinary people preferred to obey Christ’s alternative command, to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and sought to live accordingly.119 As a result, interpersonal relations were much informed by the inclination to accommodate and to cooperate across religious divides. Although, for example, all churches harshly condemned intermarriages between those of different Christian denominations, none denied that such unions were an “honorable state of matrimony,” and mixed unions were regularly presided over by Calvinist, Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican clergy. In diverse religious communities, families habitually hired domestics of other faiths, and this practice was especially widespread in Dutch, French, and German cities, where Protestants often employed Catholic servants. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the reputation of Jesuit colleges in France and in Poland was so high that they attracted many Protestant students who wanted the best education available, regardless of its alien religious doctrines. And Protestants and Catholics often participated in common recreations—so much so that in France, Calvinist clergy vainly reprimanded Huguenots who habitually joined Catholics in dances, hunting parties, fairs, carnival celebrations, and saints’ day festivals.120
As with relations between pagans and Christians, and between Christians and Muslims, most encounters between Catholics and Protestants were generally conducted individually rather than collectively, and amicably rather than adversarially. Recent work on villages, towns, and cities in early modern England, France, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire strongly supports the view that “co-existence and inter-confessional co-operation” more aptly described the encounters than “ubiquitous conflict and fratricidal strife,” at least in the lived experiences of ordinary people.121 Even in Habsburg Spain, which since the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478 and the conquest of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492, had become the most intolerant of the Catholic nations, there is evidence that in practice later relations between those of different faiths were more relaxed and harmonious at the local and the individual level; and the same may also have been true across the Atlantic
in the Spanish Empire in Mexico and Peru, whose native inhabitants and (later) African slaves were in thrall to very different systems of belief. It was even occasionally suggested that there might be alternative roads to salvation in addition to the strictly Catholic one: in the words of Francisco de Amores, defending himself against the Inquisition, “each person can be saved in his own law, the Moor in his, the Jew in his, the Christian in his, and the Lutheran in his.”122 The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation may in many ways have been very dark times, but humanity and decency, cooperation and conciliation kept making their voices heard.123
RELIGIOUS WAR, RELIGIOUS PEACE
It cannot be denied that during the last two millennia, across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, Manichean modes of thinking about confessional identities and interactions have often been pervasively seductive and tenaciously appealing. Time and again, temptations and exhortations to hatred and rage, to demonization and negative stereotyping, and to torture and murder and war, all in the name of one true faith rather than of another, have proved to be irresistible; incitements by secular leaders and religious fanatics have regularly proclaimed that “he that is not with me is against me.” So it is scarcely surprising that in turn, historians have often taken a highly partisan view of these matters, and have been more interested in replicating and justifying these creedal confrontations than in explaining them or setting them in the broader context of critical perspective. Yet these simplistic and fractious identifications have never exhaustively described the historic experience of men and women, even as people of faith. Some leaders, both religious and secular, have urged the importance of moderation, dialogue, and conciliation, while at the day-to-day level of personal encounters, those of different creeds have often sought to get along, and have found many ways of successfully doing so. Whatever the claims of political or scriptural authorities to the contrary, the intuitive apprehension of a common humanity, transcending religious differences, has always moderated the extravagant and invariably overstated claims of faith on individuals.
Similar arguments about the ambiguities and limitations of religious identities may also be made for other places and other times, although only two further examples can be given here. It is, for instance, both possible and (for some) tempting to present South Asian history as a perpetual confessional conflict between Hindus and Muslims, as exemplified by the protests and massacres during India’s independence and partition in 1947, and by the more recent displays of Hindu assertiveness following from the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party.124 But against this tableau of religious antagonism may be set an alternative history of interfaith encounters and conversations, vividly exemplified by the reign of the Muslim Indian emperor Akbar, who in the 1590s, in support of dialogues between the adherents of different faiths (including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Jews, and even atheists), adumbrated principles of confessional freedom very much like those that had recently been adopted in Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania, proposing that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.”125 In the same way, the history of relations between Israelis and Palestinians since 1948 has sometimes been presented as one of irreconcilable conflict and perpetual confrontation between different and hostile religious communities. Yet there have also been, and still are, voices in that region calling for “understanding, peaceful co-existence and acceptance of common humanity,” while many Palestinians and Israelis try to share their lives together despite their different faiths.126 In the present as in the past, humanity and decency keep making their voices heard, and compromises and accommodations are made: and humanity and decency and compromises and accommodations have their own histories.
While acknowledging that religious identities have often been (and still are) individual as well as collective, and that modes of religious practice behavior have often been (and still are) adaptive rather than confrontational, it is also important to avoid what the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has rightly called an “exaggerated focus on religiosity,” by recognizing that for relatively few people of any faith is religion the be-all and end-all of existence. There are many facets of lives, activities, and identity, among both elites and common folk, not significantly informed or significantly explained by religious sentiment.127 On many occasions in the past (and in the present?), rulers and other political leaders have invoked the imperatives of a shared religious identity, largely as a proxy for alternative and more compelling considerations such as dynastic ambition, national rivalry, economic competition, territorial acquisitiveness, and so on, while life for ordinary people has never been organized, undertaken, carried on, and ended on the basis of religious beliefs and injunctions alone.128 To see, describe, and explain the conduct of men and women, either individually or collectively, exclusively in terms of their religious identity is thus to deny the obvious: that one’s sense of self is always constituted by many identities at the same time. As the historian, economist, and political analyst Zachary Karabell rightly puts it, in words that may apply equally well to relations between pagans and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, Hindus and Muslims, and Jews and Muslims, “in both ‘Christendom’ and the ‘house of Islam’ (as Muslims have called their world), religion was one identity among many. And what that identity meant to the political, social or cultural life of any particular village, town, state or society is beyond generalization.”129
As a contrasting example, the recent tragic history of Northern Ireland affords a cautionary case study of what happens when collective religious identity is exaggerated to define and divide people, and is also institutionalized in order to entrench and perpetuate such communal antagonism. When Ireland was partitioned in 1921, the educational system established in the north was completely bifurcated, between relatively well-funded state schools, which were Protestant, and less well-funded independent schools, which were Catholic. Protestants sent their children to state (that is, Protestant) schools, while Catholic parents educated their children in independent (that is, Catholic) schools, in both cases to protect and preserve their separate faiths, which also had the intended effect of perpetuating antagonisms in the next generation. Indeed, from the 1960s until the 1990s, surveys reveal percentages “in the high nineties” of pupils attending schools wholly segregated between Protestants and Catholics. Moreover, these institutions taught irreconcilable accounts of Irish history: one of a strong, stern, fortified resolve on the part of the Protestants, with such iconic events as the Battle of the Boyne and the Ulster Covenant of 1912; the other a narrative of grievance and victimhood on the part of Catholics, stressing the Cromwell massacres of 1649 and the famine of the 1840s. As a result, hostile negative stereotyping prevailed on both sides, and a scheme of inimical collective identities was inculcated in all Ulster schoolchildren, expressing and embodying “entirely incompatible social cosmologies and grossly inaccurate views of each other.”130
To be sure, there has been an integrated schooling movement in Ulster since the early 1970s, entitled All Children Together—a valiant but largely vain attempt to open up a conversation across the hitherto mostly impermeable boundaries of educationally conditioned religious identity.131 It draws its membership from across the spectrum of religious and nonreligious groupings, though they are (perhaps unsurprisingly) generally liberal, middle-class, and committed (but tolerant) Christians. In 1978, All Children Together helped bring about the passage of the Education (Northern Ireland) Act, permitting the establishment of multidenominational schools where desired by sufficient numbers of parents. But the legislation did not affect the existing segregated system, and alternative schools had to be self-funding until they had signed up enough pupils—a serious challenge since Northern Ireland opinion generally supports denominational education.132 So while many Catholic and Protestant politicians and clergy increasingly urge interfaith dialogue and cooperation, and although the integrated schools movem
ent grows steadily, these institutions serve at present less than 5 percent of the attending population, which means that even in the more placid and prosperous Ulster of the early twenty-first century, these conversations are still pitifully few among young people across these still powerfully institutionalized sectarian identities.133
As the unhappy experience of Northern Ireland suggests, this is what happens, and this is what can go wrong, when a religious identity is officially imposed and promoted as the only one that matters. For obviously these Ulster schoolchildren cannot possibly be described wholly and exclusively in terms of their religious beliefs and identities: they are also boys and girls, working-class and middle-class, straight and gay, and so on. As the historian Marianne Elliott rightly notes, having investigated both Protestant Ireland and Catholic Ireland, it is “absurd to think that religious … identities take primacy over others in deciding human behaviour,” be that behavior individual or collective.134 But instead of encouraging young people to think about their many and varied identities, faith-based schools ghettoize them, so that the only contemporaries they are likely to encounter are also their coreligionists, the purpose of their education being in significant part to reinforce their sense not only of collective religious identity, but also of collective religious superiority. Thus can schooling fail at what must surely count as one of its essential purposes in a pluralistic world, namely to foster an understanding of who other people are, and of what one might oneself become. For as has often been recognized, it is better to be kind to strangers than to embrace the bigotry and intolerance of militant Manicheanism, and this in turn means that the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew needs to be read with considerable care.135