Alleviating division doesn’t mean we must accept evil as normal. That isn’t tolerance but an abdication of responsibility to others.
Jeremy Taylor and division
John 3:11–21
One of my favorite parts of celebrating the lives of saints is how frequently their lives speak into our present moment.
It is a delight to learn and reflect on saints famous and not-so-famous, known and unknown. Because we not only learn about them, but have the chance to learn from them.
And it is probably safe to say that Jeremy Taylor’s contemporaries expected that we would be learning from him. Such was his renown. His peers regarded him as an equal of Shakespeare and Milton. An idea that passes for hyperbole today.
His way with words, the depth of his intellect, the quality and clarity of his vision were unrivaled. He didn’t need Oprah’s Book Club to elevate his work. The greats read it.
It’s a strange twist of fate that this elevated stature wouldn’t last. Not because of any dubious decisions, but that, like many of our greatest creatives, fame would not be eternal.
But we are probably not honoring Jeremy Taylor today because his writing was pretty. He was part of a movement of religious writers called to make the majesty of the divine more popularly known.
How about we take this slight detour for a moment, just taking the scenic route?
Life of the Mind
Outside of preaching, which often involves storytelling, most talk of religion is kind of sterile. It approaches the discussion of God, metaphysics, and the makeup of the world with a cold rationality or a rigid particularity. Theology becomes entirely abstract—a process of mental gymnastics quarantined to the mind.
The other place is the physical, embodied experience of faith. We talk about our grandmother’s hands, church pot lucks, and our weakening legs on the kneelers during achingly long prayers.
We sometimes allow our bodies to inform our faith, but we always let the mind have the last word. It declares what counts.
The one place that short-circuits that reality is music, especially from the pipe organ. Its vaunted depth and etherial heights lift our embodied selves to sing and drowns out our reason through a sheer wall of sound. Music is the sanctioned creative spectacle in almost any church, and in that sense, the one place we allow ourselves to fully experience the divine.
I say this as one who uses words rather than notes to express the divine’s song. And especially as one who loves the logic puzzle of modern theology. So I know I’m part of the problem!
But it isn’t this truth about the divine that was at play in the Reformation or the battles in England for supremacy. It was the will of the powerful and the certainty of conviction. In this way, Jeremy Taylor and the Caroline Divines were offering a tremendous detour from the squabbles and wars of the world. Squabbles that were hostile to the faith and to human society.
A New Option
They reasoned that the famous via media offered by Anglicanism wasn’t merely a compromise but truly a new and wholly divine option. Too many were thinking of their faith as half of this and half of that, rather than the product of decisions in our pursuit of the divine. Beauty and tradition aren’t Roman, they are universal. Nor should tradition seem more important than the divinely pursuit.
There’s a wisdom to this that continues to resonate. Especially as Anglicanism was forged in the fires of compromise. But it revealed that compromise itself offered another way of seeing the world they would never have known.
All of this is beautiful and eternally relevant. Especially to we Anglicans who walk the wide highway of the via media. But I want to bring up one more piece of Jeremy Taylor’s thought which is particularly relevant to us.
Tolerance
Taylor’s great focus was on tolerance. Because it is impossible for us all to agree, we must tolerate our disagreement.
His reasoned vision for the world would no doubt recognize our constant struggles with the first amendment to the US Constitution, with not only desire for free speech, but, given time, perhaps even the tolerance of other religions. With current debates about “cancel culture”, many might see Taylor’s tolerance as akin to free speech fundamentalism.
But Taylor also recognizes not only the limits of opinion, but of tolerance. He argued that there must be differences of opinion, but heresy is an error of the will. Evil, villainy, and destruction don’t simply cease to exist because we allow for opinions to run free. Our sins aren’t removed when our opinion says that greed is good.
Taylor makes the intentional and measured virtue of tolerance precisely because it must have limits. Limits that the philosopher Karl Popper would later set with the Paradox of Tolerance: that the limit of tolerance must be intolerance.
Taylor described the limits of tolerance as things that were contrary to the foundation of faith and the good life and destructive to human society. And he believed peace could be built if we allowed more than religion and opinion to govern our decisions.
We aren’t called to tolerate Evil.
Reading about Jeremy Taylor, I was moved by just how relevant his thinking is right now. We are having the same exact conversations. We’re caught between a pair of terrible extremes: rampant intolerance and lust for division and unfettered tolerance, allowing intolerance, violence, and abuse to be simply “opinion.”
Right now, we are struggling with things that erode human society. Violence, hatred, abuse. And people are using opinion (and their religion) as equal or superior to scientific study.
As a doctor put it recently, I went to school for 21 years, practiced medicine for twelve more, and have been studying epidemiology specifically for 15 of those years, so sure, treat my findings as opinion equal to a random stranger on YouTube.
The genius of Taylor’s view of tolerance is that it is simple, beautiful, and obviously true. That tolerance is necessary. And it goes beyond compromise, but it begins there. It begins with a personal sacrifice. And one we expect of everyone.
The Limits of Tolerance
Peace is not waged by tolerating evil or by refusing to require that evil comply to the same standards. This is what the Paradox of tolerance reveals—that tolerating the intolerant is requiring a sacrifice of everyone but the source of destruction. They get to remain blissfully intolerant.
As it is impossible for us to be of one mind, it is also impossible for us to be of equal compatibility without compromise. Extreme tolerance, like free speech fundamentalism, isn’t only rigidly impractical, but it is intellectually compromised by its own purity.
We might take from Taylor that the epitome of Anglican Christianity is its incredible tolerance—for various theologies, ecclesiologies, and matters of civic engagement. But it also demands a strong commitment to justice and human society. It demands we continue to stand for something, not to abdicate responsibility by simply tolerating all things.
That’s a lesson we need to keep learning.