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John Marshall. John Lockey Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006. Pp. viii + 762. $129.
Mr. Marshall explores the roots of the Enlightenment within Christianity. Religious toleration and religious liberty, its central themes, are related. Toleration is the accommodation of diverse religious beliefs and the communities that profess them within a society, secular or religious; religious liberty is the right of individuals to practice their religion. Location of their roots within Christianity requires explanation. From its beginnings, Christianity has been neither institutionally nor ideologically disposed to practice toleration internally or externally, and its appeals to religious liberty have generally arisen from self-interest rather than from principle. The change in attitude, no doubt motivated by the religious wars that ravaged Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century, is what this book attempts to explain. Necessarily, therefore, the first two parts of the book are devoted to Catholic and Protestant intolerance during the seventeenth century up through the period under review (Part I) and to the long history of intolerance that preceded it, its practice and justification from late Antiquity through the Middle Ages to 1700 (Part II). Given this long unbroken history of intolerance punctuated with violent, even savage persecution by Christians against other Christians and against pagans, Jews, Muslims, and others, that a remarkable spirit of toleration should have arisen within Christianity,...