The Invention of Tolerance

Jeffrey Collins reviews Jed W. Atkins’s “The Christian Origins of Tolerance.”

By Jeffrey CollinsNovember 22, 2024

• Philosophy & Religion

• History

IN THE YEAR 384 AD, the Roman senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus composed a public letter to Emperor Valentinian II. Symmachus remained a devoted pagan in an empire that was now officially Christian. He wrote on behalf of the ancient gods and rites of Rome. He urged the restoration of the Altar of Victory in the Senate House. It was a forlorn plea for a fading system of belief: “Allow us, we beseech you, as old men to leave to posterity what we received as boys.”

Symmachus wrote amid one of the great watersheds in global history: the religious conversion of the Roman Empire. Earlier in the century, Christians had suffered the last of the imperial persecutions. The emperor Diocletian had razed Christian churches, destroyed the scriptures, and burned believers on gridirons. The emperor Constantine and his successors, however, favored the new faith. By 384 AD, it was the dwindling pagan minority that was forced to plead for toleration.

Jed W. Atkins’s superb new book, The Christian Origins of Tolerance, is set against this world-making history. It explores the origin of our ideals of toleration and pluralism, specifically the “ancient background” that precedes our modern liberal notions. An early Christian tradition often presented as a dogmatic, intolerant foil emerges as a rich resource for thinking through the enduring challenge of moral disagreement.

A very long tradition has blamed Christianity for destroying the cultural cohesion of the Roman Empire, replacing its cosmopolitan pluralism with dogmatism and its triumphant, worldly spirit with a sicky asceticism. This indictment traces from antiquity itself through Machiavelli in the Renaissance and Edward Gibbon in the Enlightenment. It suffers a blow here, in Atkins’s absorbing account of a Christian inheritance descending from the patristic writers Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and Augustine.

Emerging from the North African provinces of the Roman Empire in the third through fifth centuries AD, this tradition has been neglected by historians of Western thought, or dismissed (in the manner of Gibbon) as a crabbed fanaticism. But Atkins presents an ancient Christian philosophy deeply versed in the writings of Greece and Rome, open to its ethical and political insights.

Atkins offers a boldly revisionist account. While both are often celebrated, neither the cosmopolitan practices of the Roman Empire nor the intellectual resources of Stoicism provided the intellectual tools required for a recognizable toleration. Tolerance emerged from a pagan philosophical tradition transformed by Christianity, and not before.

In his first two chapters, Atkins gores several sacred cows, so to speak. Rome’s polytheism is often thought to have been more “inclusive” than Jewish or Christian monotheism. Certainly, the imperial pantheon was receptive to the incorporation of foreign cults, but absorption was hierarchical, reinforcing Roman supremacy and foreign subjection. It was a policy of pacification, a provisional indulgence of the weaker by the stronger.

Stoicism, for its part, cultivated patience and toleration in the face of suffering. But Stoicism was an elitist discipline fit for the “perfectly rational sage.” It was at its core a personal ethic and only minimally regarded others.

An egalitarian and other-regarding social tolerance, defined by Atkins as “patience amid plurality,” required the moral revolution represented by Christianity. Atkins keeps theology at the center of his account. The Stoic God was a Platonic demiurge, “a rational divinity immanent in the world, not a transcendent, personal being outside of space and time.” Jews and Christians worshipped a more providential God, infinitely rational and just in a manner imperfectly reflected in his human creations. Humans in the Christian scheme also move through a time-bound middle passage between creation and final judgment. This linear time-scheme—culminating in a world made new—was unknown to ancient paganism.

The Christian God is thus a divine judge of fallen humans moving through time. Divine mercy, in this theology, revealed itself as a perfect, transcendent patience, a withholding of inevitable judgment. This divine patience modeled, for human authorities in church and state, a more provisional indulgence of wrongs where tolerance might benefit society or individual offenders. A loving, modest patience also informed a virtuous disposition in individuals.

The North African patristics synthesized Christian teaching with ethical truths drawn from Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and other pagans. They also adapted a venerable Roman account of freedom. The Romans valued not just the presence of freedom but also its conditions. They defined liberty as “non-domination” and dismissed any liberty that was a provisional gift from a master or sovereign as a mere favor to a slave. This autonomous liberty was the possession of a small class of elite men. The patristic writers widened this non-domination account of liberty, applying it to all human beings. They removed it from the political sphere and deployed it to defend religious freedom. Tertullian, for instance, argued that “the treatment of Christians by the Roman emperor and magistrates amount[ed] to a state of ‘unjust domination.’” This position informed a defense of religious pluralism: not one of autonomous individuals and subjective beliefs but one of “minority religious communities living within the wider political community.”

“Patience amid plurality” only emerged, according to Atkins, when the Roman account of just liberty was adapted to defend religious freedom, and when the Christian account of God modeled the patient withholding of judgment in the hopes of future redemption. These developments unfolded before and after the conversion of the empire. First confronting persecution, and later the temptation to persecute, the African patristics wrote “apologies” for Christianity and a series of meditations on the virtue of patience.

Atkins brilliantly presents this textual legacy. His book culminates with a revisionist reading of Saint Augustine. The most celebrated of the African patristics, Augustine wrote after the Christianization of the empire and during a violent Christian schism. The Donatist faction promoted a perfectionist church with a narrow membership. They sought to banish any Christians who had betrayed the faith during the pagan persecutions. Augustine’s own vision of the church was broader, and more tolerant of imperfection and the lapsed. He did, however, countenance some coercion to suppress the Donatists themselves.

For this, Augustine is often remembered as a theorist of religious intolerance. Atkins offers a qualified revision. Coercion, he notes, was theoretically reserved by Augustine for those who had themselves used violence and was not justified against peaceful dissenters. It was an intolerance for the intolerant. Furthermore, it was precisely against the Donatists’ own rigorist vision that Augustine marshaled the theories of toleration developed by his patristic forebears. It was necessary to judge the heretical Donatists, but judgment did not necessarily require punishment and could instead counsel patience and forbearance. “Judgment and tolerance are not mutually opposed but logically and conceptually related,” Atkins concludes.

Critics will note that this book present ideals, not the actual behavior of ancient Christian communities. As Atkins well knows, peaceful pluralism was a rare achievement in these centuries. But it was exactly such conditions of religious violence and intolerance—by both pagans and Christians—that provoked new thinking. Given the misrepresentations that have bedeviled our understanding of the patristic texts from this era, a careful reconstruction of early Christian ideals of tolerance is an essential scholarly achievement.

In a study of normative ideals, Atkins means to make a normative point of his own. The toleration theory of the African patristics may well seem deficient to many readers. It was not simply a hard-nosed modus vivendi that might serve as an imperial ruling strategy. It was more principled than that. Nor, however, did it offer the individualized and morally “neutral” pluralism to which modern liberals are accustomed. It freed the public practices of structured religious communities, not the private belief of individuals. It held to foundational truths, and understood pluralism as a fallen condition, not the reflection of a relativistic, subjective reality. It directed patience toward error and evil, in the hope of reformation. It suspended the consequences of judgment but did not withhold judgment itself.

In contrast, our modern toleration emerged from a “new framework unknown to the ancients.” We understand conscience as individual opinion, religious worship as private, and the public space as neutral. Moral disagreement is no human failure but a reflection of a random, perhaps meaningless universe. Pluralism is not to be endured but celebrated. As Atkins demonstrates, this new form of toleration reflected the claim that communal religion—and the moral judgment that it entailed—caused violent instability. The solution was “the separation of church and state, with the latter institution now having the sole authority to punish violence and protect the individual rights of conscience and freedom of religion as a matter of justice.” In this dispensation, patience and love are no longer required.

Without denying the achievements of liberal toleration, Atkins conveys its ethical limitations. A pluralistic tolerance based on rights and self-ownership, however politically successful, can seem morally barren, and prone to social agonism. Modern Americans demand acceptance and recognition but are less eager to offer it. As individuals, we are increasingly litigious, outraged when slighted or judged, rarely inclined to deference.

We have forgotten how to be “poor in spirit.” Can Jed Atkins’s new book remind us? Practicing Christians will find in it a profound exploration of their tradition, and a resource for navigating an increasingly estranged “secular” age. The question is whether such a book can speak to a broader culture slipping ever further from the beliefs that once sustained it. For those whose only sacred is the here and now, patience may be no virtue.