The Undivided Past (8 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 K
arabell 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.”
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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.”
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