TOLERANCE
TOLERANCE
_By_
HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON
_The final end of the State consists not in dominating over
men, restraining them by fear, subjecting them to the will of
others. Rather it has for its end so to act that its citizens
shall in security develop soul and body and make free use of
their reason. For the true end of the State is Liberty._
SPINOZA.
_Farewell, good Sirs, I am leaving for the future. I will wait
for Humanity at the crossroads, three hundred years hence._
LUIGI LUCATELLI.
[Illustration]
_NEW YORK_
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1925
COPYRIGHT 1925 [Illustration] BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration]
TO THE MEMORY OF
JOHN W. T. NICHOLS
CONTENTS
PAGE
PROLOGUE 11
CHAPTER
I. THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE 17
II. THE GREEKS 28
III. THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT 68
IV. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 80
V. IMPRISONMENT 104
VI. THE PURE OF LIFE 114
VII. THE INQUISITION 126
VIII. THE CURIOUS ONES 146
IX. THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD 160
X. CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL
AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR 168
XI. RENAISSANCE 172
XII. THE REFORMATION 181
XIII. ERASMUS 195
XIV. RABELAIS 212
XV. NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD 223
XVI. THE ANABAPTISTS 246
XVII. THE SOZZINI FAMILY 257
XVIII. MONTAIGNE 269
XIX. ARMINIUS 275
XX. BRUNO 286
XXI. SPINOZA 292
XXII. THE NEW ZION 307
XXIII. THE SUN KING 321
XXIV. FREDERICK THE GREAT 326
XXV. VOLTAIRE 330
XXVI. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA 352
XXVII. THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION 361
XXVIII. LESSING 372
XXIX. TOM PAINE 387
XXX. THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS 393
TOLERANCE
TOLERANCE
PROLOGUE
Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.
To the north, to the south, to the west and to the east stretched the
ridges of the Hills Everlasting.
A little stream of Knowledge trickled slowly through a deep worn gully.
It came out of the Mountains of the Past.
It lost itself in the Marshes of the Future.
It was not much, as rivers go. But it was enough for the humble needs of
the villagers.
In the evening, when they had watered their cattle and had filled their
casks, they were content to sit down to enjoy life.
The Old Men Who Knew were brought forth from the shady corners where they
had spent their day, pondering over the mysterious pages of an old book.
They mumbled strange words to their grandchildren, who would have
preferred to play with the pretty pebbles, brought down from distant
lands.
Often these words were not very clear.
But they were writ a thousand years ago by a forgotten race. Hence they
were holy.
For in the Valley of Ignorance, whatever was old was venerable. And those
who dared to gainsay the wisdom of the fathers were shunned by all decent
people.
And so they kept their peace.
Fear was ever with them. What if they should be refused the common share
of the products of the garden?
Vague stories there were, whispered at night among the narrow streets
of the little town, vague stories of men and women who had dared to ask
questions.
They had gone forth, and never again had they been seen.
A few had tried to scale the high walls of the rocky range that hid the
sun.
Their whitened bones lay at the foot of the cliffs.
The years came and the years went by.
Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.
* * * * *
Out of the darkness crept a man.
The nails of his hands were torn.
His feet were covered with rags, red with the blood of long marches.
He stumbled to the door of the nearest hut and knocked.
Then he fainted. By the light of a frightened candle, he was carried to a
cot.
In the morning throughout the village it was known: “He has come back.”
The neighbors stood around and shook their heads. They had always known
that this was to be the end.
Defeat and surrender awaited those who dared to stroll away from the foot
of the mountains.
And in one corner of the village the Old Men shook their heads and
whispered burning words.
They did not mean to be cruel, but the Law was the Law. Bitterly this man
had sinned against the wishes of Those Who Knew.
As soon as his wounds were healed he must be brought to trial.
They meant to be lenient.
They remembered the strange, burning eyes of his mother. They recalled
the tragedy of his father, lost in the desert these thirty years ago.
The Law, however, was the Law; and the Law must be obeyed.
The Men Who Knew would see to that.
* * * * *
They carried the wanderer to the Market Place, and the people stood
around in respectful silence.
He was still weak from hunger and thirst and the Elders bade him sit down.
He refused.
They ordered him to be silent.
But he spoke.
Upon the Old Men he turned his back and his eyes sought those who but a
short time before had been his comrades.
“Listen to me,” he implored. “Listen to me and be rejoiced. I have come
back from beyond the mountains. My feet have trod a fresh soil. My hands
have felt the touch of other races. My eyes have seen wondrous sights.
“When I was a child, my world was the garden of my father.
“To the west and to the east, to the south and to the north lay the
ranges from the Beginning of Time.
“When I asked what they were hiding, there was a hush and a hasty shaking
of heads. When I insisted, I was taken to the rocks and shown the
bleached bones of those who had dared to defy the Gods.
“When I cried out and said, ‘It is a lie! The Gods love those who are
brave!’ the Men Who Knew came and read to me from their sacred books. The
Law, they explained, had ordained all things of Heaven and Earth. The
Valley was ours to have and to hold. The animals and the flowers, the
fruit and the fishes were ours, to do our bidding. But the mountains were
of the Gods. What lay beyond was to remain unknown until the End of Time.
“So they spoke, and they lied. They lied to me, even as they have lied to
you.
“There are pastures in those hills. Meadows too, as rich as any. And men
and women of our own flesh and blood. And cities resplendent with the
glories of a thousand years of labor.
“I have found the road to a better home. I have seen the promise of a
happier life. Follow me and I shall lead you thither. For the smile of
the Gods is the same there as here and everywhere.”
* * * * *
He stopped and there went up a great cry of horror.
“Blasphemy!” cried the Old Men. “Blasphemy and sacrilege! A fit
punishment for his crime! He has lost his reason. He dares to scoff at
the Law as it was written down a thousand years ago. He deserves to die!”
And they took up heavy stones.
And they killed him.
And his body they threw at the foot of the cliffs, that it might lie
there as a warning to all who questioned the wisdom of the ancestors.
* * * * *
Then it happened a short time later that there was a great drought. The
little Brook of Knowledge ran dry. The cattle died of thirst. The harvest
perished in the fields, and there was hunger in the Valley of Ignorance.
The Old Men Who Knew, however, were not disheartened. Everything would
all come right in the end, they prophesied, for so it was writ in their
most Holy Chapters.
Besides, they themselves needed but little food. They were so very old.
* * * * *
Winter came.
The village was deserted.
More than half of the populace died from sheer want.
The only hope for those who survived lay beyond the mountains.
But the Law said “No!”
And the Law must be obeyed.
* * * * *
One night there was a rebellion.
Despair gave courage to those whom fear had forced into silence.
Feebly the Old Men protested.
They were pushed aside. They complained of their lot. They bewailed the
ingratitude of their children, but when the last wagon pulled out of the
village, they stopped the driver and forced him to take them along.
The flight into the unknown had begun.
* * * * *
It was many years since the Wanderer had returned. It was no easy task to
discover the road he had mapped out.
Thousands fell a victim to hunger and thirst before the first cairn was
found.
From there on the trip was less difficult.
The careful pioneer had blazed a clear trail through the woods and amidst
the endless wilderness of rock.
By easy stages it led to the green pastures of the new land.
Silently the people looked at each other.
“He was right after all,” they said. “He was right, and the Old Men were
wrong....
“He spoke the truth, and the Old Men lied....
“His bones lie rotting at the foot of the cliffs, but the Old Men sit in
our carts and chant their ancient lays....
“He saved us, and we slew him....
“We are sorry that it happened, but of course, if we could have known at
the time....”
Then they unharnessed their horses and their oxen and they drove their
cows and their goats into the pastures and they built themselves houses
and laid out their fields and they lived happily for a long time
afterwards.
* * * * *
A few years later an attempt was made to bury the brave pioneer in the
fine new edifice which had been erected as a home for the Wise Old Men.
A solemn procession went back to the now deserted valley, but when the
spot was reached where his body ought to have been, it was no longer
there.
A hungry jackal had dragged it to his lair.
A small stone was then placed at the foot of the trail (now a magnificent
highway). It gave the name of the man who had first defied the dark
terror of the unknown, that his people might be guided into a new freedom.
And it stated that it had been erected by a grateful posterity.
* * * * *
As it was in the beginning—as it is now—and as some day (so we hope) it
shall no longer be.
CHAPTER I
THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE
In the year 527 Flavius Anicius Justinianus became ruler of the eastern
half of the Roman Empire.
This Serbian peasant (he came from Uskub, the much disputed railroad
junction of the late war) had no use for “book-learnin’.” It was by
his orders that the ancient Athenian school of philosophy was finally
suppressed. And it was he who closed the doors of the only Egyptian
temple that had continued to do business centuries after the valley of
the Nile had been invaded by the monks of the new Christian faith.
This temple stood on a little island called Philae, not far from the
first great waterfall of the Nile. Ever since men could remember, the
spot had been dedicated to the worship of Isis and for some curious
reason, the Goddess had survived where all her African and Greek and
Roman rivals had miserably perished. Until finally, in the sixth
century, the island was the only spot where the old and most holy art of
picture writing was still understood and where a small number of priests
continued to practice a trade which had been forgotten in every other
part of the land of Cheops.
And now, by order of an illiterate farmhand, known as His Imperial
Majesty, the temple and the adjoining school were declared state
property, the statues and images were sent to the museum of
Constantinople and the priests and the writing-masters were thrown into
jail. And when the last of them had died from hunger and neglect, the
age-old trade of making hieroglyphics had become a lost art.
All this was a great pity.
If Justinian (a plague upon his head!) had been a little less thorough
and had saved just a few of those old picture experts in a sort of
literary Noah’s Ark, he would have made the task of the historian a
great deal easier. For while (owing to the genius of Champollion) we can
once more spell out the strange Egyptian words, it remains exceedingly
difficult for us to understand the inner meaning of their message to
posterity.
And the same holds true for all other nations of the ancient world.
What did those strangely bearded Babylonians, who left us whole
brickyards full of religious tracts, have in mind when they exclaimed
piously, “Who shall ever be able to understand the counsel of the Gods
in Heaven?” How did they feel towards those divine spirits which they
invoked so continually, whose laws they endeavored to interpret, whose
commands they engraved upon the granite shafts of their most holy city?
Why were they at once the most tolerant of men, encouraging their priests
to study the high heavens, and to explore the land and the sea, and
at the same time the most cruel of executioners, inflicting hideous
punishments upon those of their neighbors who had committed some breach
of divine etiquette which today would pass unnoticed?
Until recently we did not know.
We sent expeditions to Nineveh, we dug holes in the sand of Sinai and
deciphered miles of cuneiform tablets. And everywhere in Mesopotamia and
Egypt we did our best to find the key that should unlock the front door
of this mysterious store-house of wisdom.
And then, suddenly and almost by accident, we discovered that the back
door had been wide open all the time and that we could enter the premises
at will.
But that convenient little gate was not situated in the neighborhood of
Akkad or Memphis.
It stood in the very heart of the jungle.
And it was almost hidden by the wooden pillars of a pagan temple.
* * * * *
Our ancestors, in search of easy plunder, had come in contact with what
they were pleased to call “wild men” or “savages.”
The meeting had not been a pleasant one.
The poor heathen, misunderstanding the intentions of the white men, had
welcomed them with a salvo of spears and arrows.
The visitors had retaliated with their blunderbusses.
After that there had been little chance for a quiet and unprejudiced
exchange of ideas.
The savage was invariably depicted as a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing
loafer who worshiped crocodiles and dead trees and deserved all that was
coming to him.
Then came the reaction of the eighteenth century. Jean Jacques Rousseau
began to contemplate the world through a haze of sentimental tears.
His contemporaries, much impressed by his ideas, pulled out their
handkerchiefs and joined in the weeping.
The benighted heathen was one of their most favorite subjects. In their
hands (although they had never seen one) he became the unfortunate victim
of circumstances and the true representative of all those manifold
virtues of which the human race had been deprived by three thousand years
of a corrupt system of civilization.
Today, at least in this particular field of investigation, we know better.
We study primitive man as we study the higher domesticated animals, from
which as a rule he is not so very far removed.
In most instances we are fully repaid for our trouble. The savage,
but for the grace of God, is our own self under much less favorable
conditions. By examining him carefully we begin to understand the early
society of the valley of the Nile and of the peninsula of Mesopotamia
and by knowing him thoroughly we get a glimpse of many of those strange
hidden instincts which lie buried deep down beneath the thin crust of
manners and customs which our own species of mammal has acquired during
the last five thousand years.
This encounter is not always flattering to our pride. On the other hand a
realization of the conditions from which we have escaped, together with
an appreciation of the many things that have actually been accomplished,
can only tend to give us new courage for the work in hand and if anything
it will make us a little more tolerant towards those among our distant
cousins who have failed to keep up the pace.
This is not a handbook of anthropology.
It is a volume dedicated to the subject of tolerance.
But tolerance is a very broad theme.
The temptation to wander will be great. And once we leave the beaten
track, Heaven alone knows where we will land.
I therefore suggest that I be given half a page to state exactly and
specifically what I mean by tolerance.
Language is one of the most deceptive inventions of the human race and
all definitions are bound to be arbitrary. It therefore behooves an
humble student to go to that authority which is accepted as final by
the largest number of those who speak the language in which this book is
written.
I refer to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
There on page 1052 of volume XXVI stands written: “Tolerance (from Latin
_tolerare_—to endure):—The allowance of freedom of action or judgment
to other people, the patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from
one’s own or the generally received course or view.”
There may be other definitions but for the purpose of this book I shall
let myself be guided by the words of the Britannica.
And having committed myself (for better or worse) to a definite policy, I
shall return to my savages and tell you what I have been able to discover
about tolerance in the earliest forms of society of which we have any
record.
* * * * *
It is still generally believed that primitive society was very simple,
that primitive language consisted of a few simple grunts and that
primitive man possessed a degree of liberty which was lost only when the
world became “complex.”
The investigations of the last fifty years made by explorers and
missionaries and doctors among the aborigines of central Africa and the
Polar regions and Polynesia show the exact opposite. Primitive society
was exceedingly complicated, primitive language had more forms and tenses
and declensions than Russian or Arabic, and primitive man was a slave not
only to the present, but also to the past and to the future; in short, an
abject and miserable creature who lived in fear and died in terror.
This may seem far removed from the popular picture of brave red-skins
merrily roaming the prairies in search of buffaloes and scalps, but it is
a little nearer to the truth.
And how could it have been otherwise?
I have read the stories of many miracles.
But one of them was lacking; the miracle of the survival of man.
How and in what manner and why the most defenseless of all mammals should
have been able to maintain himself against microbes and mastodons and ice
and heat and eventually become master of all creation, is something I
shall not try to solve in the present chapter.
One thing, however, is certain. He never could have accomplished all this
alone.
In order to succeed he was obliged to sink his individuality in the
composite character of the tribe.
* * * * *
Primitive society therefore was dominated by a single idea, an
all-overpowering desire to survive.
This was very difficult.
And as a result all other considerations were sacrificed to the one
supreme demand—to live.
The individual counted for nothing, the community at large counted for
everything, and the tribe became a roaming fortress which lived by itself
and for itself and of itself and found safety only in exclusiveness.
But the problem was even more complicated than at first appears. What
I have just said held good only for the visible world, and the visible
world in those early times was a negligible quantity compared to the
realm of the invisible.
In order to understand this fully we must remember that primitive people
are different from ourselves. They are not familiar with the law of cause
and effect.
If I sit me down among the poison ivy, I curse my negligence, send
for the doctor and tell my young son to get rid of the stuff as soon
as he can. My ability to recognize cause and effect tells me that the
poison ivy has caused the rash, that the doctor will be able to give me
something that will make the itch stop and that the removal of the vine
will prevent a repetition of this painful experience.
The true savage would act quite differently. He would not connect the
rash with the poison ivy at all. He lives in a world in which past,
present and future are inextricably interwoven. All his dead leaders
survive as Gods and his dead neighbors survive as spirits and they all
continue to be invisible members of the clan and they accompany each
individual member wherever he goes. They eat with him and sleep with him
and they stand watch over his door. It is his business to keep them at
arm’s length or gain their friendship. If ever he fail to do this he will
be immediately punished and as he cannot possibly know how to please all
those spirits all the time, he is in constant fear of that misfortune
which comes as the revenge of the Gods.
He therefore reduces every event that is at all out of the ordinary
not to a primary cause but to interference on the part of an invisible
spirit and when he notices a rash on his arms he does not say, “Damn that
poison ivy!” but he mumbles, “I have offended a God. The God has punished
me,” and he runs to the medicine-man, not however to get a lotion to
counteract the poison of the ivy but to get a “charm” that shall prove
stronger than the charm which the irate God (and not the ivy) has thrown
upon him.
As for the ivy, the primary cause of all his suffering, he lets it grow
right there where it has always grown. And if perchance the white man
comes with a can of kerosene and burns the shrub down, he will curse him
for his trouble.
It follows that a society in which everything happens as the result of
the direct personal interference on the part of an invisible being must
depend for its continued existence upon a strict obedience of such laws
as seem to appease the wrath of the Gods.
Such a law, according to the opinion of a savage, existed. His ancestors
had devised it and had bestowed it upon him and it was his most sacred
duty to keep that law intact and hand it over in its present and perfect
form to his own children.
This, of course, seems absurd to us. We firmly believe in progress, in
growth, in constant and uninterrupted improvement.
But “progress” is an expression that was coined only year before last,
and it is typical of all low forms of society that the people see no
possible reason why they should improve what (to them) is the best of all
possible worlds because they never knew any other.
* * * * *
Granted that all this be true, then how does one prevent a change in the
laws and in the established forms of society?
The answer is simple.
By the immediate punishment of those who refuse to regard common police
regulations as an expression of the divine will, or in plain language, by
a rigid system of intolerance.
* * * * *
If I hereby state that the savage was the most intolerant of human
beings, I do not mean to insult him, for I hasten to add that given the
circumstances under which he lived, it was his duty to be intolerant. Had
he allowed any one to interfere with the thousand and one rules upon
which his tribe depended for its continued safety and peace of mind, the
life of the tribe would have been put in jeopardy and that would have
been the greatest of all possible crimes.
But (and the question is worth asking) how could a group of people,
relatively limited in number, protect a most complex system of verbal
regulations when we in our own day with millions of soldiers and
thousands of policemen find it difficult to enforce a few plain laws?
Again the answer is simple.
The savage was a great deal cleverer than we are. He accomplished by
shrewd calculation what he could not do by force.
He invented the idea of “taboo.”
Perhaps the word “invented” is not the right expression. Such things are
rarely the product of a sudden inspiration. They are the result of long
years of growth and experiment. Let that be as it may, the wild men of
Africa and Polynesia devised the taboo, and thereby saved themselves a
great deal of trouble.
The word taboo is of Australian origin. We all know more or less what it
means. Our own world is full of taboos, things we simply must not do or
say, like mentioning our latest operation at the dinner table, or leaving
our spoon in our cup of coffee. But our taboos are never of a very
serious nature. They are part of the handbook of etiquette and rarely
interfere with our own personal happiness.
To primitive man, on the other hand, the taboo was of the utmost
importance.
It meant that certain persons or inanimate objects had been “set apart”
from the rest of the world, that they (to use the Hebrew equivalent) were
“holy” and must not be discussed or touched on pain of instant death and
everlasting torture. A fairly large order but woe unto him or her who
dared to disobey the will of the spirit-ancestors.
* * * * *
Whether the taboo was an invention of the priests or the priesthood was
created to maintain the taboo is a problem which had not yet been solved.
As tradition is much older than religion, it seems more than likely
that taboos existed long before the world had heard of sorcerers and
witch-doctors. But as soon as the latter had made their appearance, they
became the staunch supporters of the idea of taboo and used it with such
great virtuosity that the taboo became the “verboten” sign of prehistoric
ages.
When first we hear the names of Babylon and Egypt, those countries were
still in a state of development in which the taboo counted for a great
deal. Not a taboo in the crude and primitive form as it was afterwards
found in New Zealand, but solemnly transformed into negative rules of
conduct, the sort of “thou-shalt-not” decrees with which we are all
familiar through six of our Ten Commandments.
Needless to add that the idea of tolerance was entirely unknown in those
lands at that early age.
What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely indifference caused by
ignorance.
But we can find no trace of any willingness (however vague) on the part
of either kings or priests to allow others to exercise that “freedom of
action or judgment” or of that “patient and unprejudiced endurance of
dissent from the generally received cause or view” which has become the
ideal of our modern age.
* * * * *
Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not interested in
prehistoric history or what is commonly called “ancient history.”
The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the discovery of the
individual.
And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations, belongs
to the Greeks.