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 This is a previously (before ~1988) unpublished work by the great, 17th-century Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius, best known today for formulating international law.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 It's short, about 30 pages, and he felt it was superseded by his later and more complete apologetics book (which is actually written in rhyming verse, in Dutch!).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.

Continuing the trend on "Lost"

Last week's episode of "Lost" was weird and interesting for a number of reasons. Without giving away spoilers yet, let me say first that we now have the Scotsman's full name: Desmond David Hume.

David Hume. John Locke. Rousseau. Edmund Burke.

Heh, heh, heh! I love it--they've been including the leading political philosophers of the Enlightenment in the cast of the show. I picked up on this early, when a leading character was named John Locke (perhaps my favorite Enlightenment philosopher, outside of Thomas Jefferson), and he was clearly the one advocating the individuals to achieve their best, use the situation to make a fresh start and create civilization out of the state of nature they found themselves in. Then there was the wildwoman in the jungle, Rousseau, who was clearly state-of-nature-girl incarnate. The near-opposite of Locke.

The guys over at The Corner picked up on an Edmund Burke character introduced two episodes back. I missed the name when I watched it, but apparently he was an unsavory character. Shame--the real Burke seems to have been a good and humane guy. And he's considered by many to be the father of English and American-style conservatism. Doesn't seem like "Lost" made any allusions to Burke beyond the name.

Now, on to Hume, which is just tickling me pink:

***SPOILER ALERT***

OK, now you've been warned. The last episode centers on Hume, our Scotsman friend who sacrificed himself in the hatch to save Locke and the others, at the end of the last season. He's since woken up, stark naked, in the jungle, apparently blown out by the explosion that destroyed the hatch but presumably saved the world from the poorly-understood electromagnetic quirkiness going on there.

Ever since he's been back among the living, he's gotten these glimpses of the immediate future. Enough to save people from drowning or set up a lightning rod before the bolt hits. We find out why in this episode. It turns out that when he blew the hatch, he woke up back in civilization, a few years(?) earlier, in his old life. He gets to relive it, but he's occasionally conscious that it's all happened before. He's got vague memories of things that happened, just before they do (again). So he tries to change some of them, without avail.

All of his attempts to change his life, to improve things for himself and others, or for that matter to apparently see the future--all of these come from the fact that he's lived the exact same things before.

Now, here they've done a clever little twist on the actual David Hume's philosophy: Hume was the founder of skepticism as a philosophy. Not "I'm a skeptic--I don't believe in anything," but the idea that "all knowledge is based on experience." He didn't believe that there were natural laws out there to be discovered. You could drop musket balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa all day, measuring their fall times, and finding remarkable consitency. You might think that if you do it exactly the same way again, it will fall at the same rate again (to within measurement errors). Why do you think so? Because you see the trend you've established. There appears to be a law of nature that you're uncovering, and you can...deduce (? I always get deduction and induction mixed up) from it to predict what will happen in other situations.

But Hume thought that you could not make that claim. You can't predict for certain what will happen. Why? Because you don't know anything beyond what you've already experienced. Just because the musket ball fell a certain way a thousand times, you can't say it will do it again the 1,001st time. Maybe it will fall sideways!

So what's the connection with our "Lost" Scotsman? This Hume's knowledge is also based on experience, with the twist that he knows the immediate future because he's reliving it.

Very spooky and interesting.