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Authors: Anthony Esolen

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (37 page)

BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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The heritage of the Enlightenment is therefore profoundly ambivalent. If we credit it for the breakneck progress of the natural sciences, we may also blame it for that fog wherein we still labor, requiring that all knowledge be expressible as formulae or data gathered by “experts,” and ruling out ancient questions regarding the nature and the end of man.
 
That is ironic, since the Enlightenment was a creature begotten of the religious and political zeal of the Renaissance.
 
The will enslaved
 
What exercised Martin Luther most about the Church of his day, when the papacy lay in the grip of a few worldly Italian families, was not that bad men wore the robes of the hierarchy. Wherever there are men and robes, there are going to be some bad men wearing them. What really prompted Luther to declare, at his trial at the Diet of Worms, “Here I stand. I can do no other,” was his revolt against the idea that man could attain an acceptable, bland level of “goodness,” that he could buy the grace of God with a couple of well-chosen works, clearing his way to eternal bliss. Luther was rebelling against the very Enlightenment which his own break with the Church, in the sad tangle of human affairs, would help to usher in.
 
Luther had struggled to attain holiness as a long-fasting Augustinian monk, only to find himself plagued with failure, with what he feared was an unforgivable sin.
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Only when he read Saint Paul’s affirmation in the Epistle to the Romans that man is saved not by works—Paul had in mind especially the detailed prescriptions of the Jewish Law—but by faith, did Luther feel set free. The liberating point is that salvation cannot be earned. It is given to the faithful as a free gift by God. So when Luther heard that Dominicans were on the road in Germany, trawling for money to rebuild Saint Peter’s, he was outraged. The people were being told that, if they gave a coin or two, a poor soul in Purgatory would be released from suffering;
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or they themselves might win an indulgence in the hereafter for the sins they had confessed. The doctrine of indulgences demanded genuine penitence and a commitment to mend your life, but doctrine and practice, or even doctrine and appearance, are different things. Nor did it help that Italian hierarchs seemed to pay more attention to Cicero than to Christ; they too had caught the Renaissance fascination with man.
 
The Catholic Church was late in responding to the Lutheran challenge, largely because of political chaos in central and northern Italy, invaded in turn by France and Spain. Finally, at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), while condemning much of Luther’s theology and ecclesiology, she declared her substantial agreement with the reformers on one point that sets both orthodox Catholic and reformed churches across a theological Grand Canyon from the easy assumptions of the modern world. For the modern world is at one with the worldly churchmen. Both believe that if there is a heaven, good people go there—“good” by the standards of the time. We are all Pelagians now.
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God is the affable uncle in the sky, who snaps his fingers and makes things all right for us, if only we recycle, give to the United Way, pat dogs on the head, and meet standards of similar difficulty. The reformers and the Tridentine fathers both assert that without the grace of God man can do no good, and that such grace is by definition a free gift.
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Abolish Christianity?
 
It is likewise proposed as a great Advantage to the Publick, that if we once discard the System of the Gospel, all Religion will of course be banished for ever, and consequently along with it, those grievous Prejudices of Education, which under the Names of Virtue, Conscience, Honor, Justice, and the like, are so apt to disturb the Peace of human Minds.
Jonathan Swift
,
An Argument Against the Abolishing of Christianity
 
 
Not to worry, says Swift’s satirical persona. Why abolish Christianity, when our modern “Methods of Education” have already seen to it that graduates possess not the least taint of those terrible virtues named above? He might have written that passage today.
 
 
The crucial difference between reformed and Catholic theology concerns the freedom of the will, and the genuine goodness of actions performed in agreement with God’s grace. Trent affirms that man remains free to surrender to the grace or to reject it, and that, by grace, he can actually perform deeds that God considers worthy of merit. He can rush into the burning house to save his enemy’s child. Without God’s grace he would never do it; he may still choose not to do it; but he does, and it is good. The later reformers, such as Calvin, claimed that grace was irresistible. If God gives the grace, you will perform the act. It would be “good,” insofar as we in the world can compare it with the wickedness of setting the fire, but it would remain infinitely far from the goodness of God, nor would it merit anything.
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Now this is not simply a debate about sin. It is a debate about the nature of man, and about what kind of authority men must acknowledge in their dealings with one another. The printing press allowed anyone who had the money to read the Bible for himself, thus weakening the bond between an individual and the Church. But the focus on man’s fallen nature reminded everyone of the desperate need to belong to the right community of believers, for support and instruction. So a bewildering array of new churches sprang up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a certain kind of Pelagianism crept in with them. This time it was the vague belief (taught by no reputable theologian) that if you joined the correct church, perhaps the church that most clearly affirmed that you could not earn your salvation, you would earn your salvation. Some of these breakaway communities veered into the quaint or silly or bizarre. The gentle Quakers trembled at their meetings, under the influence of the Holy Spirit. A cult under the leadership of John of Leyden seized the town of Muenster and ruled it for a year or two under communistic rules (including, their enemies said, the sharing of wives), until the nearby duke, supported by Luther, laid siege to the city and starved the people out. Adamists in seventeenth century England thought they had regained Eden already, so they walked down the streets stark naked. The Family of Love were accused of group orgies.
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It was a volatile time. If you were a duke with a small army, you might place yourself in the service of the church you had been persuaded was the true one. Or you might use the conflict to enlarge your lands at the expense of your neighbors. You might do some of both; such is the knot of human motives. Confusion was rife in Germany, where some local princes were eager to cast off the yoke of their Hapsburg ruler, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was also the Catholic King Charles I of Spain. But enemies of such princes might ally themselves with Charles and the Catholics. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 only deferred the inevitable explosion. It ignored the Calvinists completely, and declared that if your prince was Lutheran, unless you wanted to sell your property and move away, you would be Lutheran too, and if your prince was Catholic, you would be Catholic. Such a “compromise” could not endure. Notice, too, how truth and conscience are subordinated to the harmony of the State.
 
Toss into this brew the national ambitions of England, France, Spain, and others, and you have the makings of the most brutal war that Europe had ever seen, the Thirty Years’ War. You also have the makings of secessionist communities, retaining a tenuous relationship with their mother nations, or consigning them to an unredeemed world of sin and darkness. That would describe the pacifist Mennonites and the Hutterites, the Anabaptists who welcomed the Turks along the Danube, and, to a lesser extent, the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed to the New World to found a community of piety and peace.
 
“Enlightenment” yields tyranny
 
The horrors of the Thirty Years’ War (and of the English Civil War that followed hard upon it) caused some European thinkers to believe that religion is essentially dangerous and divisive. Two options remained, they thought: absorb religion into the State, or dissociate religion from the State, relegating the Scriptures to individual interpretation and church membership to individual choice. The irony is that until the recent strife among Catholics and Protestants, religion had not been a motive for war among European nations, but rather had curbed the warring impulse among the nobility. Moreover, the Thirty Years’ War itself was as much about competing nation-states as about competing churches; its most destructive phase came when
Catholic
France joined forces with the struggling Protestant states against their common enemy the Emperor. It would be the last religious war in Europe. It was nigh unto being the first religious war in Europe. But the “lesson” was learned.
 
 
 
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
 
Reflections on the Revolution in France
by Edmund Burke; New York: Oxford University Press USA, 1999.
 
The closest friend America’s rebels had in England was also the most eloquent critic of the French Revolution. Arguing that order, hierarchy, and tradition ought not be lightly discarded even for high ideals such as
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
, this book is one of the finest articulations of conservatism, in the most meaningful sense of the word.
 
 
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for one, claimed that the only way men might live under an uneasy truce would be for them to concede their natural “rights” to all goods. We all, he argued, have an equal claim to the plums from that tree, the iron in that hill, John’s wife, or Mary’s gold. Such equality breeds war. So we yield our claims up to a sovereign state—the so-called “Leviathan.”
 
Hobbes did not argue that the Leviathan had to be ruled by a divinely anointed king. There was no divine anointing. There need not even be a king; a council might serve as well. The point is that the Leviathan’s will is absolute. The unitary state is a divinity by comparison with the individual. It alone has rights. It can determine what or how much you will own. It can determine whom and how you will worship. It directs your comings and goings. It must direct them, since men are, individually, random atoms of willfulness, colliding against one another in a meaningless existence. There is, as the nominalists said, no such thing as “mankind” except as a convenient term, and no such thing as human nature; only individual human beings seeking pleasure and fleeing pain. Nature cannot guide us here. For the life of natural man, said Hobbes in his most famous sentence, in that ugly non-Eden before the rise of the Leviathan, is embroiled in the war of all against all. It is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
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There will be a Hobbesian streak in many of the states and revolutions to come. Louis XIV, the “Sun King” of France, rejected the quasi-atheism of the Englishman who camped out in his country during the Puritan revolt, but agreed that in his capacity as head of state the king must demand the homage of a divinity. “
L’état, c’est moi,
” said Louis, “The State, that is myself!” Louis’ most eloquent critic, the saintly Bishop Bossuet, condemned the luxury of the royal court, yet also confirmed the propriety of absolute monarchy, and claimed that people had no right to rise up against the divinely anointed ruler even if he proved to be a tyrant. Their recourse was to plead, and pray.
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The revolutionists in Paris tore down the statue of Mary in the cathedral of Notre Dame and paraded a scantily clad woman as the goddess Reason in her place. Eventually their leaders would wrest law to their will, calling it the will of the people and pronouncing it supreme. They dethroned one monarch to establish a million, dulling the blades of many an ax against the necks of their enemies. The Leviathan rears its head too in the Marxist tyranny, in the Nazi worship of the fatherland, and in the womb-to-tomb welfare state, choking the soul with its hardhearted benevolence.
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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