セバスティアン・カステリヨンにおける寛容と良心

―『疑うすべについて』を手掛かりとして―

抄録

Tolerance for others, freedom of conscience, and the faculty of human reason, these we now take for granted as virtues. They became principles of modern society in seventeenth-century Western Europe in the time of John Locke and Pierre Bayle. That is, however, very curious because those virtues had been a kind of vice within Western Christianity until the sixteenth century. Perez Zagorin said in How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, “Of all the great world religious past and present, Christianity has been by far the most intolerant.” What was the turning point of tolerance, conscience and reason? This study aims to reveal that mechanism by analysing Sebastian Castellio’s last work, De arte dubitandi et confidendi, ignorandi et sciendi (1563).

Castellio was a Christian theologian in the Reformation era living in Basel, Switzerland and also known as an adversary of John Calvin of Geneva. After the violent execution of Michael Servetus for blasphemy in 1553, Castellio released De haereticis, an sint persequendi under the pseudonym of Martinus Bellius, advocating the tolerance for heresy while Calvin justified persecution or execution for such blasphemy in Defensio orthodoxae fidei. As the controversy between Basel and Geneva intensified, Castellio developed his most recognized thoughts. Then, in 1563, the year of his death, he attempted to complete De arte dubitandi as a compilation of his ideas. Although it was not published during his lifetime, some parts were circulated among philosophers or thinkers in Western Europe.

In Castellio’s last work, his religious tolerance had a dual aspect. First, it consisted of the conscientiarum tranquillitas by suspending any judgement. This attitude derived from Pyrrhonism, philosophical skepticism from ancient Greece, in order to avoid errors in punishing the innocent. Then, as to the other aspect, Castellio expected the perfectibility of man. He asserted it was inevitable for everyone to use reason as the definitive principles to draw theological controversies to a permanent close. Although Calvin and many sixteenth-century Protestants denied the faculty of man’s reason, Castellio praised it and regarded it as the daughter of God or Logos. He thought the collaboration of reason and faith would be able to make man perfect; in other words, every man has the opportunity to improve himself with reason and faith. Consequently, he insisted no one should prevent this opportunity and people should tolerate each other.

Castellio’s claim of religious tolerance was so radical that it required Christian authority to be doubted and profoundly examined. Therefore, while living in the Reformation, he deserves to be regarded as a valid precursor to the age of Enlightenment and modern educational thought.