locke-montesquieu

From Locke's Letter to Montesquieu's Lettres[1] In his essay on Montesquieu, Isaiah Berlin appropriates a line from Jeremy Bentham, which I wish to reappropriate here, for a different purpose. Bentham had made the following contrast between Locke and Montesquieu: "Locke - dry, cold, languid, wearisome - will live forever. Montesquieu - rapid, brilliant, glorious, enchanting - will not outlive his century."[2] There is, I think, some truth in this unhappy comparison. It may be unfair to Locke, who surely would not have had the influence he had if reading him were quite as tedious as Bentham suggests; and it is certainly too pessimistic about Montesquieu, whose works have outlived their century after all, and are still being freshly translated and kept in print. Nevertheless, Montesquieu has lost his place in the pantheon. For all his influence on the founders of our republic, historians of philosophy nowadays pay him little attention, whereas Locke still looms large on our horizons. This is particularly true in the area which is my concern here. Locke dominates English-language historiography of the development of arguments for religious toleration. Montesquieu is barely mentioned.[3] I shall argue that this neglect is unfortunate, that whatever the merits of Locke's arguments, Montesquieu added something distinctive to the conversation, something which needed saying, and which may actually have been influential on the politicians who formalized the commitment to toleration which emerged in Western Europe and North America during the Enlightenment. I shall leave the question of Montesquieu's influence for another day. My purpose here is to give an account of the argument for religious toleration in the Persian Letters. But before I celebrate the virtues of Montesquieu, I'm afraid I have a few unpleasant things to say about Locke, whose treatment of the subject seems to me to be generally overrated. It's a common observation that Locke's treatment of toleration is unhappily limited. His subject is "mutual toleration among Christians,"[4] i.e., he speaks as a Christian to other Christians, urging that the various Christian denominations practice toleration toward one another. Or more precisely, since he does not think that a state in which the majority of Christians are Protestant ought to tolerate Roman Catholicism (K/G, 131- 135; W, 425-426), he urges that the various kinds of Protestants should practice toleration toward one another. He does suggest in passing that a state whose dominant religion is Christianity ought to tolerate Jews, pagans, and perhaps even Muslims.[5] He does not think that any state ought to tolerate atheists. (K/G, 135; W, 426) Locke argues that church and state ought to be separate both on religious grounds and on the grounds of a theory about the nature of church and state. Let us take the religious argument first[6]: among other things, it appeals to the principle that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and contends, plausibly enough, that we do not act lovingly towards our neighbors if we confiscate their property, or imprison them, or torture them, or mutilate their bodies, or kill them, claiming to do this for the salvation of their souls. Locke is inclined to suspect the good faith of those who would use state power to do such things. Those who wish to use coercion to change the beliefs of those they disagree with do not use it to change the conduct of those they agree with, even when their brothers in faith act in ways which might seem highly prejudicial to their salvation. This raises the suspicion that their professed reasons for acting are not their real reasons. More crucially, Locke does not think that a truly saving faith can be coerced. A saving faith involves an inward persuasion of the mind, which coercion by the state cannot produce. All state coercion can produce is external conformity, which will save no one if it is insincere, even if it happens to be conformity to the true religion. (K/G, 67-69; W, 394-95) Moreover, the persecutors' efforts to insure uniformity of belief typically involve subtle matters of dogmatic theology, beyond the comprehension of ordinary men, matters not truly essential to salvation. (K/G, 61, 93; W, 391, 407) No opinion can be essential for salvation if it is not expressly taught in the Christian scriptures. When we seek to determine what those scriptures tell us is necessary for salvation, we are not permitted to make inferences from, or interpretations of, the scriptures. (K/G, 151-55; W, 434-35) The arcane matters which Christians typically dispute about, and which provide a pretext for persecution, do not have clear scriptural authority. If they did, they would not be matters of dispute. No doubt this part of Locke's argument sounds very agreeable to modern ears, particularly to the ears of those modern Christians who favor a liberal version of Christianity, which privileges conduct over faith and blurs the doctrinal differences between denominations. But it does rather miss the point of the classical arguments for persecuting non-believers. And more generally, I think it fails to see what a radical change in Christianity this doctrine of toleration might require. Thomas Aquinas, for example, would concede that a faith embraced at the point of the sword has no value for salvation: those nonbelievers "who have never received the faith, such as the heathens and the Jews... are by no means to be compelled to the faith in order that they may believe, because to believe depends on the will."[7] I take this last to mean that for Thomas the faith which is conducive to salvation must be voluntary in the sense that it is not coerced. But this does not mean that nonbelievers who have never embraced the faith cannot be coerced for other reasons. They can be compelled to the faith - or perhaps we should say, compelled to conform externally - to prevent them from hindering the faith of believers, whether by blasphemy, or by persecution of their own, or by what Thomas ominously calls 'evil persuasions.' If these are acceptable grounds for persecuting those who have never embraced the faith, they would also justify the persecution of those nonbelievers (perhaps a more dangerous group) who once embraced the faith, but have gone astray, i.e., heretics and apostates.[8] If Locke were to object that coercion can produce only external conformity, not belief, Thomas might reply that compelling the external conformity of non-believers, or at least, compelling them not to express their non-Christian beliefs, may still be very useful in preserving the faith of believers. Those who reject the faith will not be permitted to undermine the faith of those who don't. If religious belief is typically acquired by growing up in a community in which it is regarded as normal and natural, then the suppression of dissident views may be very important to the maintenance of the faith. And if we acknowledge Pascal's psychological insight, that external conformity, if practiced long enough, can lead to genuine belief,[9] the coercion need not be only for the benefit of others. Moreover, even if forced external conformity does not yield favorable results in the first generation of those who have been coerced, it may still do so in subsequent generations. This seems to have happened among the Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in late medieval Spain. In the first generation some did eventually become sincere Christians; in the second, many more did. The restrictions placed on the conversos, as they were called, meant that it was very dangerous for them to attempt to secretly give their children a traditional Jewish education. And early childhood education seems to be a major factor in determining the religious beliefs a person will hold as an adult. Jeremy Waldron writes that, although Locke's religious argument has only limited value, insofar as it relies on assumptions a non-Christian ruler could not be presumed to share, "as an ad hominem argument addressed to... Christian authorities, it is... devastating, for it exposes an evident and embarrassing inconsistency between the content of their theory and their practice in propagating it."[10] I take a less sanguine view of the religious argument, which seems to me defective in ways Waldron does not contemplate. Apart from the considerations mentioned above, Locke completely ignores the scriptural passage persecutors had traditionally relied on as providing the strongest support for their practices, the parable of the great dinner in Luke. Recall the parable of the man who gave a great dinner in Luke 14. He sent a servant to invite his friends to come; when his friends made excuses, he sent the servant out again to bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame; when these were not enough to fill the places at the table, he sent the servant out again with instructions to compel others to come in. Bayle thought it worth while to write an entire book disputing the traditional interpretation of this parable.[11] Locke never mentions it.[12] Locke also seems somewhat naive when he claims that only doctrines which scripture clearly teaches are required for salvation. This is itself a claim which is controversial within Christianity, not a claim, for example, which would be accepted by those Christians who believe, with Pascal, that God deliberately chose not to make the path to salvation too easy to discern.[13] The Christian scriptures are, in fact, quite ambiguous on the fundamental issue of the conditions for salvation. Some passages suggest that the path to heaven runs through a strict adherence to the commandments, as in the story of the rich man, told with slight variations in all three of the synoptic gospels (cf. Mark 10, Matthew 19, and Luke 18). A man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus advises him to keep the ten commandments and reminds him what they are. The man replies that he has kept those commandments since his youth. Jesus then says to him: "There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." (Luke 18:22) And the man is said to have become very sad on hearing this, "for he was very rich." The path to salvation is not represented as being easy here, but it is represented as possible to find, through loving obedience to some very rigorous commandments, not the acceptance of any christological doctrines.[14] Other passages make it appear that the path to salvation involves acceptance of some special belief about Jesus, as in the verse Luther called "the Gospel in miniature": For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life... Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.[15] Texts like this suggest that some belief about Jesus is both necessary and sufficient for salvation. These texts do not specify the nature of that belief as precisely as we might wish, but a plausible and historically popular elaboration of this text would say that the believer must accept that he is a sinner, whose sinful nature has been redeemed by God's sacrifice of his only son, himself innocent, who nonetheless suffered on the cross for our sins. Anyone familiar with the Reformation debates about the relative importance of faith versus works must, I think, acknowledge that it is a matter for controversy, among those otherwise united by their acceptance of the Christian scriptures as the word of God, just what those scriptures say is the path to salvation. Tolerationists like Locke emphasize the importance of works and the unimportance of faith. Persecutionists, on the other hand, like Luther and Calvin, emphasize the importance of faith and dismiss the possibility of achieving salvation by works as mere wishful thinking, given our fallen nature. The skeptical reader of Locke might also question whether he is right to hold that Christian love requires us not to use physical mutilation, torture and killing against non-believers. How, Locke asks, can these practices be consistent with Christian love? But suppose that the forcible repression of heretical views can help preserve the faith of those who have not yet strayed. Those are the people whose souls the persecutionists seem to have been most concerned with. Here is Calvin defending the burning of Michael Servetus: That clemency which [those who wish to pardon heretics] praise is cruel: it exposes the [poor] sheep to being taken as prey, in order to be merciful to the wolves. [I ask you, is it reasonable that the heretics] should murder souls with the poison of their faulty doctrines and that their bodies should be protected from the legitimate power of the sword? Shall the whole body of Christ be torn apart, that the stench of one rotten member may be preserved intact?[16] The persecutionists fear that permitting heretics to publicly embrace, articulate and perhaps defend their views will lead many believers to reject the beliefs in which they have been raised. On the evidence of our experiment with freedom of thought and expression over the past two centuries in this country, their fear was not irrational. If the persecutors are genuinely concerned about the salvation of their flocks, then, holding the theological beliefs they do, they act quite reasonably in treating non-believers severely. We are told that a loving God subjects the damned to horrendous eternal torment, as punishment for their lack of faith. Humans may be excused for thinking that any pain they might inflict on non-believers, to save believers from that fate, is trifling by comparison, no violation of the obligations of love, and well-justified if it succeeds in its achieving its purpose. D. P Walker has demonstrated[17] that the traditional doctrine of hell was under assault in Locke's day; by the end of the 17th Century many more Christians rejected it than had at the beginning of that century. I have the impression that now even more Christians regard this doctrine as an embarrassment. But the conservative defenders of the doctrine are right about this much, at least: the prima facie support for it in the Christian scriptures is strong.[18] As appalling as the doctrine may be from a moral point of view, I doubt that Christians can reject it without rejecting the Christian scriptures as a reliable guide to our proper conduct in this life, and to the fate which awaits us in the life to come, if we fail to please God. And that's a step I don't think Locke was prepared to contemplate. There has been a tendency, I suggest, for Locke's readers to nod with approval when they consider his religious argument, because they like its conclusion, and to ignore the fact that the argument itself preaches only to those who are already converted. I fear the same thing has happened with his political argument. The main theme of that argument is that church and state are human institutions, which have fundamentally different purposes, purposes which do not, and cannot legitimately, overlap. As a first approximation, we might understand the argument to proceed as follows. The state may be defined as an association of men who have established among themselves a body which has the power to make laws, whose violation it may punish by death and all lesser penalties, but only for the purposes for which it is instituted, which include the furtherance of its citizens' civil interests - life, liberty, bodily health, freedom from pain, and the possession of property - but which do not include furtherance of its citizens' spiritual interests.[19] It is not, and cannot be, the function of the state to secure our salvation. For the means definitive of the state involve the use of force, and hence are inherently unsuited to the pursuit of spiritual interests. It would be irrational for the state to use coercion to pursue the salvation of its citizens; hence this cannot be one of the proper functions of government.[20] The church, on the other hand, is a voluntary association of men, "joining together of their own accord, for the public worship of God, in such manner as they believe will be acceptable to the Deity, for the salvation of their souls." (K/G, p. 71; W, p. 396) The church has an end which might make it a suitable agent for the repression of religious error. But it does not have the necessary means available to it. It can use exhortation, admonition, and advice, but not force, which belongs properly only to the civil magistrate. Its ultimate sanction is excommunication, exclusion from membership, a sanction it must use in a way which does not harm the civil interests of the excluded member. (K/G, 77-81; W, 399-400) Now as Waldron has pointed out, one weakness of the argument just sketched is its dubious assumption about the necessary ineffectiveness of persecution, the assumption that coercion cannot produce genuine faith. From this assumption it infers that persecution to insure correct belief is not an activity the state can rationally or legitimately engage in. As I've presented the religious argument, the same assumption about the ineffectiveness of persecution also appears there, and we've already seen in that context why it's dubious. But there is another way of reading the political argument, which seems to me to give a more accurate account of Locke's reasoning, and may give Locke a better argument. David Wootton has suggested[21] that Locke's main point is not so much that it is irrational for the state to attempt to coerce people into having correct religious beliefs (because such attempts are necessarily ineffective), as that it would be irrational for the citizens to consent to the state's doing this (because such consent would be imprudent). Locke's contractarian political philosophy requires that the legitimate powers of the state be ones a citizen could rationally consent to. But it is not rational for a citizen to consent to let the state determine his religion for him, even if he supposes that it can. Why is that? Suppose we assume, for the sake of argument, that the...