Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration.

Gary Remer. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. x + 318 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-271-01480-6.

This study demonstrates the importance of classical rhetoric as a vehicle for the values implicit in toleration, even if it is selective in its examples and ignores instances where the rhetorical mode is less significant. Others have stressed the philosophical consequences of rhetoric in humanist thinking, but no one has defined its relevance to toleration with such exactitude. Remer shows that it was not the deliberative, forensic or epideictic aspects of rhetoric that fostered tolerant attitudes, but rather the rhetorical mode of conversation, which eschewed emotion and sought understanding by exploring all sides of an issue. Sermo and its rules of civility, not contentio and its confrontational methods, formed the model, and Cicero's dialogues On the Nature of the Gods and Tusculan Disputations provided the humanists with the technique of undermining philosophical certainty and substituting standards of probable truth. Applied to religious disputes, this method allowed the humanists to reduce the truth necessary to salvation to a minimum, and to treat most doctrinal issues as adiaphora.

Remer provides a detailed analysis of the views on toleration of Desiderius Erasmus, Jacobus Acontius, and William Chillingworth, all of whom exemplify his central thesis. The opinions upon toleration of Thomas Hobbes, Jean Bodin, and John Locke are also closely examined, not so much because they support the standard humanist approach, but, with Bodin and Locke, because they modify it substantially, and, in the case of Hobbes, because he directly subverts it. The reader may be puzzled to find the chapter on Hobbes preceding that on Bodin on the grounds that in some way Bodin's Colloquium, completed in the year in which Hobbes was born, supposedly provides an answer to the philosopher of Malmesbury. Logic, it seems, has priority over context. Much less space is accorded Richard Hooker, who fits the paradigm of comprehension, and Pierre Bayle, who for Remer exemplifies scepticism and the doctrine of natural right. John Milton and John Stuart Mill are discussed briefly in terms of general patterns of intellectual freedom derived from the debate on religious toleration. Given the author's strictures on the fallacy of reading modernity into humanist premises, it is less easy to justify a long concluding section on U.S. Supreme Court rulings on such matters as racial bigotry and pornography.

It is surprising to find so little on Sebastien Castellio, described in a note referring to Acontius as "the other great sixteenth-century defender of toleration" (128, n. 65). Castellio is quoted twice in the text, once on agreement upon morals being much easier than concord about doctrine, and again on the evil of forcing conscience. Both quotations are made via Roland Bainton's Concerning Heretics (New York, 1935). There is no mention of such standard pleas for toleration as Leonard Busher's Religious Peace (1614), Roger Williams's Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), or Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying (1647), presumably because these works fit less well into the argument. Nor is there reference to Sir Thomas More's account of King Utopos's edict of toleration, or to James Harrington's 'demand for liberty of conscience in the constitution of Oceana (1656). The insistence of the Dutch Arminians that sola scriptura implied the individual's right to interpret the Bible is also omitted. Little attention is given the Huguenot struggle for toleration or to its advocacy, for prudential reasons, by Politiques. Michel de l'Hopital and Innocent Gentillet are ignored.

In the period in which it is ostensibly set Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration pursues a narrow path in the association of ideas with little regard for their context, but, despite these criticisms, it sheds new light on the way some particular minds, trained in classical rhetoric, contributed to the debate on toleration.

J.H.M. SALMON Bryn Mawr College