Francis Bacon on religious warfare

Abstract

ABSTRACT For Francis Bacon (1561–1626), toleration is an end-state goal. In his New Atlantis, Christians and Jews alike live peaceably together as they did not in the England of his time, from which Jews were banned. Yet, for Bacon, toleration was not always, in the first instance, regarded as the means for its own attainment. The present article situates Bacon's utterances on religious warfare within four contexts: the writings of Richard Knolles, Giovanni Botero, Alberico Gentili, and Bacon's own works advocating British imperial hegemony and a pan-European league of (Protestant) Christians. Having situated Bacon's advocacy of religious warfare within these contexts, the present article argues that Bacon invokes the rhetoric of religious warfare as part of a strategy to secure British (and Protestant) dominance in global politics, not least against the rival power of the Spanish Habsburgs. The article thus aims to lay out Bacon's various pronouncements on religious warfare with and against the contextual material for a fuller and richer understanding of Bacon's project. Bacon aims, the article argues, at a peace requisite to the fulfilment and advancement of scientific progress and aims at an ultimate toleration in religious affairs. Yet, for the success of that project, Bacon regards the defeat of the Inquisition and the political power that supports it as a necessary precondition, for which the invocation of all requisite means, including targeted and specific injunctions to ‘holy war’, is held, by Bacon, to be politic. For Bacon, the problem of religious warfare is that such warfare must, in his view, however infelicitously, be urged and waged for the very purpose that it may (at some future time) be abated and, finally, ended.