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  • Samuel Werenfels: Il dibattito sulla libertà di coscienza a Basilea agli inizi del settecento
  • Randolph C. Head
Samuel Werenfels: Il dibattito sulla libertà di coscienza a Basilea agli inizi del settecento. By Camilla Hermanin. [Studi e Testi per la Storia della Tolleranza in Europa nei Secoli XVI–XVIII, Volume 7.] (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore. 2003. Pp. xii, 352. €33.00 paperback.)

Camilla Hermanin offers a broadly situated intellectual biography of the Basel theologian and professor Samuel Werenfels (1657-1740), concentrating in particular on his conception of the liberty of conscience within Reformed Protestant regimes. The book also includes Werenfels' Epistola de iure in conscientias ab homine non usurpando (1702) and thirteen letters from Werenfels' correspondence. Werenfels belonged to the triumvirate of Swiss "orthodox reformers" that included Turrettini in Geneva and Ostervald in Neuchâtel, who challenged the authoritarian approach to religious dissent they saw embodied in the Formula Consensus Ecclesiarum Helveticarum Reformatarum, which Basel imposed on all pastors and teachers between 1674 and 1723. In Hermanin's view, "the liberty of conscience was officially denied in Switzerland" (p. 12) through this document, which explicitly rejected seventeenth-century universalism, ecumenicism, and historical/philological approaches to the sacred canon.

Hermanin's first two chapters effectively introduce late seventeenth-century Basel and Werenfels' own life. Although the confessional views that ruled at the time might seem inhospitable to a moderate defender of consciences, Werenfels (scion of the Werenfels and Grynaeus dynasties) enjoyed an excellent education with the Cartesian Johann Jacob Hoffmann and the younger Buxtorff before completing his degree in theology under the influence of Johann Rudolf Wettstein, who had refused to sign the Formula Consensus but retained his chair. After formative journeys through Reformed Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, Werenfels joined the Basel faculty. Although Hermanin describes his career as restless, he successively occupied the chairs of Greek, Christian rhetoric, dogmatics, and the Old and New Testaments, as well as becoming rector of the university: his nonconformity and provocative publications may have caused awkward moments, but never interrupted his life. His first high-profile contribution set the tone by attacking the "logomachies" of religious controversialists of all stripes.

The remaining three chapters of Hermanin's book set Werenfels, and particularly his Epistola, in larger intellectual context. In Chapter 3, she argues that the irenic and humanist approach championed by Werenfels responded not only to external intellectual developments, but also had roots in Basel's own intellectual milieu reaching back to the era of Erasmus. Humanism and philology, as well as rationalism and natural law, shaped the way Werenfels and his reforming colleagues approached the problem of conscience and authority. In Chapter 4, Hermanin turns directly to the key question addressed in Werenfels's Epistola: the proper balance among power, law, and individual conscience. Although insisting on the ultimate sovereignty of the conscience, Werenfels fully recognized the authority of magistrates to preserve an ordered society in [End Page 181] which orthodox doctrine enjoyed public encouragement and protection. His position thus remained inside the cultural framework of early modern orthodoxy, even if his insistence that reason provided one foundation for true faith pointed toward the paradoxes that eventually undermined the entire system. He also remained consistently Erastian in his conviction that the magistrate might punish "professed Christians who act against the teachings of Christ" (p. 219), whereas theologians should play a limited role in such matters.

The book's final chapter addresses European responses to Werenfels' work by looking at two specific conflicts. During the Bangorian controversy in England, Werenfels' Epistola was translated by the Latitudinarian and Erastian thinkers supporting the Bishop of Bangor's defense of royal authority to tolerate dissent. In the Netherlands, ironically, the same work was republished (with a crucially modified title) to support the Reformed church's authority against alleged Socinians during the Stinstra affair, recently analyzed by Joris van Eijnatten. In both cases, the debate involved not traditional persecution of heresy, but rather the limits of clerical and state authority in the face of learned individuals' interpretation of Scripture. Hermanin's erudite study therefore helps characterize a distinctive phase of Reformed Protestant debates over religious toleration, though one soon marginalized by the very different approaches...

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