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Dialogues of Toleration: Erasmus and Bodin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Gary Remer
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Extract

The article examines two different types of “tolerant” dialogues, represented by Desiderius Erasmus and Jean Bodin. Erasmus offers a traditional conception of dialogue, in which the speakers are engaged in a common search for truth. This search for truth justifies toleration. To discover truth, the speakers must be free to question the other speakers' views, as well as their own. And they must respect each other because civility promotes the discovery of truth. Bodin, by contrast, presents an alternative version of the tolerant dialogue in his Colloquium heptaplomeres, a dialogue between representatives of seven different religions. While the Erasmian dialogue presupposes that (1) there is a single truth and that (2) the greater the consensus, the more successful the dialogue, in Bodin's Colloquium, the speakers do not pursue a common truth. Rather, they offer up their own particular versions of truth, unwilling to change their positions. The speakers do not agree on the truth because truth—especially religious truth—is complex, and each speaker represents a different facet of that multifaceted truth. And though the speakers remain firm in their initial convictions, they gain from the dialogue a clearer perception of their own opinions. By comparing their views with one another, the speakers come to better understand their separate truths, the sum of which constitutes the whole truth.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , Spring 1994 , pp. 305 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1994

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References

I would like to thank Professors Marion Leathers Kuntz, Eric Gorham, Martyn Thompson, Anthony Cummings, and Gordon Schochet for their helpful comments.

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92. Ibid., pp. 146–51.

93. “Lo, how good and pleasing it is for brothers to live in unity” (Ibid., p. 471).

94. Ibid., pp. 165–66.

95. Ibid., p. 186.

96. Ibid., p. 468. See also Ibid., pp. 469–71.

97. Ibid., pp. 465–66.

98. Ibid., pp. 151,467. Octavius, however, also praises the Persians and Turks for forbidding discussions about religion because they lead to civil unrest (p. 167). The key for Octavius is that religious discussion must not degenerate into violence.

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