Historical Perspectives

Extract

I want us to address a question or two to each other. I would like to begin with a bit of discourse with John Noonan, because there are two whole sides to the question of the Middle Ages and rights. There is a positive side that I was discussing—it is surprising the extent to which rights theories and rights practices did grow up. And, there is a negative side, and I ignored it because I knew John was going to do it, but it is equally important. Why did middle age theologians fail to recognize what is, to us, the most obvious right, that of religious liberty, when, to us, it seems that it is not just pragmatically useful, but, as John was saying at the end, that it is intrinsically right and follows from the precepts of the Gospel? But nobody in the thirteenth century grasped this, even though they had all the elements from which you can make a theory of religious liberty. Every decent theologian and canonist between 1150 and 1250 held that a person can not be forcibly converted to Christianity and that Christ will accept only a willing believer. Every one held that a person has an absolute duty to follow his own conscience, and to a twentieth century mind the obvious conclusion is, religious liberty is permitted. And, yet the thought simply never occurred to anybody. And, I think John might even have put the case more extremely. It is not just that Thomas Aquinas got it wrong, that buried in his books he made intellectual errors. Every single commonsensical, kind, decent person in the thirteenth century thought it was obviously necessary to repress heretics. I am going to ask John why, at the end of all this.