ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how important earthly peace and order were to Augustine by considering a specific example of threatened disruption to that peace: his position on the coercion of heretics during the Donatist controversy. If purity-inspired schism threatened social order and traditional church structures in Augustine’s dispute with the Donatists, events in seventeenth-century England reinforced the fears of orthodox Protestants on broadly similar grounds. From the turmoil of the Civil Wars of the 1640s through the Revolution of 1688, religious and political debate over issues of coercion, dissent, authority, and persecution raged in England. In addition to the psychological argument about will and understanding, religious dissenters increasingly emphasized the necessity of subjective assent in matters of faith, an approach that in their minds forswore coercion. Behind the orthodox opposition to the subjectification of conscience lay recurrent concerns about violence, anarchy, and the potential for theological dissent to lapse into licentiousness.
