ABSTRACT Eric Voegelin’s intellectual project has typically been described as involved in the rehabilitation of classical political philosophy and in the diagnosis of Gnostic tendencies in modernity. In his work, however, he repeatedly points to the late-medieval/early modern concept of toleration as a necessary addition to the Platonic-Aristotelian legacy he was concerned with retrieving. This article explores Voegelin’s understanding of toleration, and especially its Bodinian origins. As the article demonstrates, his understanding of toleration is deeply intertwined with a Bodinian understanding (...) of religion, and as such it may be more difficult to integrate with other elements of Voegelin’s thought than he himself believed. (shrink)

This response suggests that in writing the history of ethics, it is important to take seriously what the principals wrote and believed, distinguishing it carefully from our own responses to their writings, or from subsequent uses to which their writings may have been put. For example, when reading Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Vitoria on just war against non‐Christian peoples, forcible conversion and conquest are clearly condemned. Whatever the attitudes of their contemporaries, not to mention later thinkers up to the (...) present, there is no foundation in Aquinas and Vitoria for holy war or “exceptionalism,” American or otherwise. (shrink)