Hugo Grotius on Christian Tolerance

I'm reading Meletius, or, Letter on the points of agreement between Christians. This is a previously (before ~1988) unpublished work by the great, 17th-century Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius, best known today for formulating international law.

I was surprised to learn that Grotius was not just a jurist, but also a theologian and political philosopher. After the Dutch won their independence from Spain, the Protestants were free to practice their religion, but a new fight broke out between the Calvinist and Arminian schools of theology. The Calvinists had a majority and, in the end, outlawed the Arminian position. Grotius was a young government staffer at the time but already showing his promise, and he wrote a treatise on religious toleration and church-state relations, defending the Arminian "Remonstrants." Another time, he wrote the first major piece of Christian apologetics from a Protestant perspective.

Meletius is a kind of draft of the latter. It's short, about 30 pages, and he felt it was superseded by his later and more complete apologetics book (which is actually written in rhyming verse, in Dutch!). But it's still an interesting work in its own right. It includes some of the arguments on toleration, which are what interest me the most.

Surprisingly, most of Grotius' citations and arguments come from Classical Roman and Greek philosophers, rather than from scripture. Not that he's devoid of the latter (and he argues that philosophy and reason have to answer to revelation, rather than the other way around), but his background as a classicist really shows through. He likes to show how even the pagan philosophers crudely pointed the way to the Jewish and later Christian fullness of truth. This was true for some of the early church fathers, as well.

The bit on toleration is what interests me at the moment. He argues that Christians of different denominations agree most easily on questions of moral behavior, and they disagree mostly on doctrinal points. His position (if I've gotten this right) is that the dogmatic points can be taken down to a small number that we all need to agree on, and the rest laid to conscience. While it is the issues of moral behavior that we can be united in.

Hmm... Well, I don't think I've written that last part very clearly. It's probably basically true, as written, but Grotius' points are more detailed. OK, I'll post more on this later. I'm especially eager to read his treatise on church/state relations, and I'll blog about that, too.