While Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) is mostly known for his treatises on natural law, he also wrote extensively on issues of religious toleration.

Owing to numerous religious-political conflicts, toleration became one of the central concepts of political-philosophical discourse in late seventeenth­century Europe. Pufendorf's main work on toleration and church-state rela­tions, De habitu religionis christianae ad vitam civilem (1687) (hereafter De habitu), belongs to the body of literature that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) which led to the violent persecution of Huguenots in their native France.¹ The posthumously published Jus feciale divinum (1695), attempting to reconcile Lutherans and Calvinists in the Holy Roman Empire, can be seen as an accompanying treatise on toleration.^{[792] [793] In De habitu, Pufendorf advocates the separation of church and state and the view that the salvation of souls does not belong to the scope of the sovereign's author­ity.}

As a result of this apparent ambiguity, Pufendorf's theory of toleration is open to more than one interpretation. Some scholars have stressed the con­tinuities between Pufendorf's theological commitments and his treatment of toleration. Detlef Doring argues that, because Pufendorf's commitments to Lutheran theology and passionate anti-Catholicism, his theory of toleration was limited and �never more than a liberal Lutheranism’.^[794] Thomas Ahnert fol­lows Doring by contending that Pufendorf was not a principled defender of a secular concept of natural law and toleration but �continued to be guided to a very considerable extent by a strong concern with restoring and preserving Christian religious orthodoxy’.^[795] In turn, Simone Zurbuchen argues that, rather than his Lutheranism, Pufendorf’s treatment of the coexistence of different religious groups is driven more by political intentions.

This chapter does not examine Pufendorf’s theory of toleration as a whole or his many arguments for religious toleration in their specific context; rather, my focus is limited to Pufendorf’s treatment of religious coercion, that is, an attempt to force individuals to adopt specific religious beliefs.^[799] The contro­versial notion of the person as a free chooser of his or her religious beliefs lies at the heart of the contemporary liberal concept of toleration. Liberal theo­ries of tolerance tend to emphasize the view that external coercion is both morally wrong and practically impossible because the authority of judgement resides within the individual’s free exercise of his or her reason. This was also the view of Hugo Grotius in his Ordinum pietas (1613) and De imperio circa sacra (1614-6, publ. 1647). Today the view that tolerance is grounded in the individual’s autonomous capacity to choose one’s religious beliefs is most often attributed to Pufendorf’s immediate contemporary John Locke.^[800] It is rather surprising that scholars have not so far attempted to examine Samuel Pufendorf’s concept of toleration from the perspective of his account of the limits of coercing belief.

The most obvious novelty of this chapter lies in its particular focus on the interrelations between Pufendorf’s theory of human action and his writings on toleration. I shall argue that Pufendorf does not base his theory of tolera­tion on the individual’s rational capacity to choose one’s religious beliefs, nor does he straightforwardly support the epistemological claim that it is impos­sible to coerce belief. Pufendorf defends the freedom of understanding and will as a precondition of moral accountability. However, he is simultaneously unconvinced about people’s rational capacity to recognize the precepts of nat­ural religion through reason. Therefore, the sovereign ought to employ coer­cion and the threat of punishment to ensure that people uphold, at least exter­nally, the proper natural theological beliefs that are essential to sociability and political stability. In turn, Pufendorf reserves freedom from coercion only for the doctrines of revealed religion that fall outside the scope of natural rea­son. Thus, his argument for freedom from coercion is not based on a person's rational autonomy to choose one's religious beliefs but on reason's limits with regard to revealed religion.

In what follows, in the first section I will outline Pufendorf's account of the freedom of human actions and his view on the possibility of coercing belief. In the sections that follow, I will show that coercion plays different roles with regard to natural religion and revealed religion. The second section deals with Pufendorf's treatment of natural religion; the third section focuses on Pufendorf's view of the individual's freedom to accept or refuse Christian doctrine.

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