The Anatomy of Melancholy

And at one point in Maximinus’s reign, as Eusebius records in his Church History, book 9, chapter 9, a decree was made to this effect: No one shall be compelled against his will to adopt this or that worship of the gods. Constantine likewise decreed in the nineteenth year of his reign, as Baronius tells us: Let no one trouble another; let each person do what his own soul desires.

New gods, new lawgivers and new priests will have new ceremonies, customs and religions, to which every prudent person, as a good conformist, should adapt himself.

Saturn has perished, and his laws have perished too; The world is now under Jove: obey Jove’s commands.

That same emperor Constantine, as Eusebius writes, threw down and destroyed all the pagan gods, statues of silver and gold, altars, images and temples, and converted them all into Christian churches: hostile to pagan monuments, he exposed them to ridicule. The Turk now converts them in turn into Muslim mosques. A similar edict appeared in the reign of Arcadius and Honorius.

The orator Symmachus, seeking general toleration in his time, used this argument: Since God is immense and infinite, and his nature cannot be perfectly known, it is fitting that he should be worshipped in as many different ways as people perceive or understand him.

He thought it impossible for one religion to be universal. You see that one small province can scarcely be governed by a single civil or spiritual law; how, then, can so many separate and vast empires of the world be united into one? It never has happened, and never will.

Besides, if there are infinitely many planetary and stellar worlds, as some maintain, there are infinitely many guardian or ruling spirits belonging to each of them; and consequently, since they will all be worshipped, infinitely many religions. Let every territory therefore retain its own rites and ceremonies as its tutelary gods—as Maximus of Tyre calls them—wish, and according to the region they govern: its own institutions, revelations, ordinances and oracles, which these gods dictate from time to time or teach their priests or ministers.

This doctrine was stoutly maintained in Turkey not long ago, as you may read in Busbecq’s third letter: everyone who lived a holy and innocent life should share in eternal happiness, whatever religion they professed. Rüstem Pasha was a strong supporter of it, although Muhammad himself was sent by the power of the sword to compel everyone to follow him, as he writes in his Quran.

Others approve of this for Jews, pagans and unbelievers outside the fold. They are willing to show them every consideration and favour, but by no means to those within the bounds of our own Church who are called Christians—to heretics, schismatics or the like. Let the Spanish Inquisition, that fourth Fury, speak for some of them, along with the civil wars and massacres in France and our own Marian times.