R YSZARD LEGUTKO
611
modern liberal conscience?
In the classical formulations of toleration, those of Bayle, Locke, and
Voltaire, the first problem one stumbles upon is to what extent toleration
has a distinct meaning of its own and to what extent it can be reduced to
other notions. Voltaire's
Traite sur La tolerance,
for example, was occasioned
by the unjust sentencing to death of Jean Calas, a French Protestant ac–
cused of killing his own Catholic son. One wonders to what degree the
famous
philosophe
was entitled to speak of toleration in this context. Is jus–
tice, fairness, rule of law not enough to prevent similar cases from
happening again? Will our judicial system work better if to good laws,
good legal institutions, and good judges we add "toleration"? Was Jean
Calas sentenced to death because the judiciary system in France did not
function properly and because the French did not respect the elementary
requirements ofjustice, or did he die because the French Catholics lacked
tolerance?
One of the reasons why these and similar doubts arise is that the in–
tolerance, the opposite of toleration, of which Bayle, Locke, and Voltaire
spoke was most often identified with violence of the most brutal kind, as
in Locke's "persecute, torment, destroy, and kill other men upon pre–
tence of religion."
It
is even more strongly illustrated by Voltaire, who
wrote of Irish Catholics
... sacrificing, as an acceptable offering, the lives of their Protestant
brethren, by burying them alive, hanging up mothers upon gibbets,
and tying their daughters round their necks to see them expire to–
gether; ripping up women with child, taking the half-formed infant
from the womb, and throwing it to swine or dogs to be devoured;
putting a dagger into the hands of their manacled prisoners and forc–
ing them to plunge it into the breasts of their fathers, their mothers,
their wives, or children, thereby hoping to make them guilty of parri–
cide, and damn their souls while they destroyed their bodies.
The consequence of identifYing intolerance with violence, persecu–
tion, and cruelty was the conviction that anything lessening the risk of
violence, persecution, and cruelty counted as toleration. Thus a call for
toleration was, in Locke's
Letter Concerning ToLeration,
a call for "charity,"
"faith which works ... by love," "meekness," "good-will." To these
could be added other virtues and rules of behavior to make people's inter–
actions more harmonious: good manners, a sense of justice, tact, knowl–
edge, honesty, respect for others, open-mindedness. It was also asserted
that toleration was linked to self-preservation and self-interest: the first
manifesting itself in the need for social peace rather than civil wars to
