Enlightenment and religion

Mark Knights

Secular or religious Enlightenment?

• Historiographical debate: • Carl Becker (The Heavenly City of Eighteenth-Century

Philosophers 1932) asserted Enlightenment was akin to medieval Christianity

• Argued for a predominately-Christian outlook in the foundations of the Enlightenment

• Enlightenment merely substituted a new deity for the existing deity, and thus should be more correctly considered an example of medieval philosophy, not modern

• eighteenth century philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials”.

Modern Paganism• This provoked a counter-blast that emphasised

the secular, atheistic and even pagan (Peter Gay, Enlightenment… The Rise of Modern Paganism 1967):

• Replacement of myth and superstition by reason that had characterised antiquity

• But also ‘modern pagans’ because they sought to go further: ‘What made the pagans modern and gave them hope for the future was that they could use science to control their classicism by establishing the superiority of their own, second age of criticism over the first’.

Jonathan Israel and Spinoza as the key influence

• divides Enlightenment thinkers into two categories, radical and moderate

• each respond to the philosophy of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77):

• Rejected Jewish theology and expelled from Jewish community in Amsterdam– ruled out teleology, miracles, providence,

revelation, and the immortality of the soul– Denied moral principles have divine origins– rejected ecclesiastical authority– denied that social hierarchy, noble privilege,

and monarchical power are ordained by God – robustly supported freedom of thought and

political egalitarianism– This was path to modernity

• Moderates were reformers but reacted vs the radicalism of this

Religious Enlightenment

• Attempts to argue that the religion was in part an engine of Enlightenment

• Knud Haakonson, Enlightenment and Religion (1996)• John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth Century

France (1998-9): church challenged by ‘not only educated laymen, but also the more intelligent churchmen’ (Abbé Nollet and Abbé Spallanzi, condoms and frogs, 1785)

• Sheehan, American Historical Review (2003)• Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe 1750-1830

(2003)• S J Barnett, Enlightenment and Religion (2003)• Simon Grote, review essay in Journal of History of Ideas 2014)

An interesting historiographical debate• Goes to the heart of what the Enlightenment was and

whether we can find anything coherent about it (can you have multiple Enlightenments?)

• And to the link between Enlightenment and modernity: Modern resonances – the rise of religious fundamentalism

• and how change occurs• Shows the power of arguments in history• And defining categories: what is ‘religion’? Faith, theology,

institutions. How do you measure it? Peter Harrison, 'Religion' and the religions in the English Enlightenment (1990) argues Enlightenment ‘invented’ modern concept/science of religion

The case for new attitudes to religion• Extension of inquiry across all

boundaries – application to science, authority and religion

• Reason and scepticism; attack on superstition (Voltaire – ‘Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them’) - and miracles

• Disenchantment; • Laws of nature, empiricism:

mechanical universe; Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1748), L’homme machine [Man a machine]

• Deism, freethinking and atheism

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRxqFQoTCMHhk-ae28gCFQKHGgodHigN1w&url=http://wflatheism.com/category/quotes/baron-dholbach/&psig=AFQjCNEJl6m-REFbp3irL1QuciAZQgWLIQ&ust=1445780569209868

Toleration• Locke• Voltaire and the Calas

affair, 1762: victim of a biased trial as a Protestant in Catholic France. Alleged to have murdered his son to prevent him converting to catholicism. Tortured and executed (on a wheel), despite evidence of suicide. Calas became a symbol of religious intolerance

Toulouse

Voltaire used the case to blast the Church for its intolerant and fanatical views in his 1763 work Treatise on Tolerance

Deist…"It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason."

Champion of Newtonian science: Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton (1738) and expanded in 1745

• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)

• German dramatist• Close friends with Moses

Mendelssohn from 1754, Jewish philosopher who published Jerusalem (1783) as forcible plea for freedom of conscience, including Jews

• Lessing wrote Nathan the Wise (1779): wise Jewish merchant, the enlightened sultan and knight templar bridge gaps between Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Its major themes are friendship, tolerance, relativism of God, a rejection of miracles and a need for communication.

Reconsidering the place of the Jews

The attack on religious institutions• Attack on counter-reformation

institutions: Jesuits (est. 1540) disbanded, 1755-64 in France and its empire; 1759 Portugal; Austria 1767; Spanish Empire 1767-8

• The narrative of Enlightenment as a step to modernity in its diminution of religion:– separation of church and state– critiques of the spiritual and political

prerogatives of the clergy and religious institutions, leading to the loss of its power

– Separation of church and state

French revolution (1789)• abolished Catholic church

– 1790 church lands confiscated– 1790 National Assembly stripped clergy of special rights (became state employees)– 1792 legalisation of divorce– 1792 physical attacks on clergy– 1793 de-Christianisation process

• celebration of the goddess "Reason" in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November 1793.

• Established cult of reason and the supreme being 1794 • 1801 Concordat stopped the process but still brought church under state

Inscription on church at Ivry –la-Bataille.

The counter-narrative: Religious Enlightenment

• Building on the Reformation’s attack on superstition and ignorance

• Vs tendency to take France as the model of Enlightenment: anticlerical, atheistic

• revealed truths not inconsistent with truths discovered by human reason – there could be a ‘reasonable religion’ or ‘enlightened religion’: John Locke for Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn

• Religion embraced modernity

Religion and science/knowledge were compatible

• Isaac Newton• Encyclopédie – often critical of catholic church but

many contributors and readers were religious – Holbach but also Abbé Claude Yvon

• 20% of provincial Academicians in France were clerics• Christian Thomasius (1655–1738), professor of law and

philosophy at Halle, among the founding luminaries of the German Enlightenment – not the champion of secularism he used to be characterised as

Catholic Enlightenment?

• Jean Mabillon – late C17th monk, founder of paleography. ‘All truth is of God and by consequence one must love it. All truth can carry us to God’.

• Critique of Louis XIV by Archbishop Francois Fenelon (1651-1715) – Lettre à Louis XIV; The Adventures of Telemachus, the son of Ulysses.

• Joseph Eybel, late C18th leading exponent of reform Catholicism in the Austrian lands and architect of Emperor Joseph II’s religious reforms late in the century

• Disbanding of Jesuits was result of pressure from Catholic regimes and from reform movement (Jansenism) within catholicism

Religion as an enduring force

• Religion and religious institutions continued to be important, playing a major role in politics, culture and everyday life.

• The Bible remained a key text• Enduring belief in miracles• End of witchcraft executions (1682 England, 1727

Scotland, 1745 France, 1775 Germany, 1782 Switzerland, 1783 Poland, 1811 Russia). is not evidence of sudden change of religious culture – persistence of supernatural

• Ancien régime still closely tied church and state

‘Enlightenment’ victories as religious ones

• Abolition of slavery, GB 1807.• William Wilberforce: ‘God Almighty has set

before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and Reformation of Morals’

• Quaker opposition – 9 of 12 founding members of the 1787 Society for effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade were Quakers

• Anglican Thomas Clarkson rode 35,000m: “We cannot suppose therefore that God has made an order of beings, with such mental qualities and powers, for the sole purpose of being used as beasts, or instruments of labour.” 1786

Josiah Wdgewood’s design for medallion – he was a

Unitarian

Enlightenment as a battle between religious forces

• Joseph Priestley• Rational dissenter (unitarian),

scientist, civil liberties, seen as supporter of French revolution

• Opposed by ‘Church and King’ mob that destroyed his house in Birmingham 1791

• Enemies of the Enlightenment (2001), historian Darrin McMahon extends the Counter-Enlightenment both back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of 'Grub Street’ – defence of ‘religion’ and established order

Or religion fuelled the counter-Enlightenment

• Giambattista Vico, Naples, early C18th philosopher, rhetorician, historian – critic of stress on rationalism

• Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre: post-revolutionary argument that monarchy was a sacred institution; Pope should have ultimate authority in temporal matters; rationalist rejection of Christianity had led to Terror

• Authoritarian: any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government, and that this, in turn, will lead to violence and chaos

Secular or religious Enlightenment?

• Answer to initial question: both! Secular and religious Enlightenment – tensions existed within it (and even within a single philosophe eg Voltaire’s doubts 1755)

• Enlightenment was not a unified movement• Indeed, contestation over religion was key: debates

over toleration, over the relationship between church and state, over the supernatural, over the freedom to publish heterodox views all contributed to Enlightenment values

• Does that make the term ‘Enlightenment’ problematic?!

Reading on the Religious Enlightenment

• David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

• Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

• Ulrich Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

• Thomas Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006).

• Jonathan Sheehan, ‘‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,’’ American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1061–80

• Simon Grote Review-Essay: Religion and Enlightenment Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 75, Number 1, January 2014, pp. 137-160 (Article)

• Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment,’’ in The European Witch Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Trevor-Roper (New York: Harper, 1968), 193–236

• S J Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion (2003)