Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (132 page)

So around Spinoza other voices began to be raised also challenging the ancient wisdom of religion and suggesting that the Bible was not quite what it seemed: a point which Erasmus had made much more discreetly in the previous century. Few of them had the dour talent of the Englishman Thomas Hobbes, but many were excited by Hobbes's sledgehammer demolition of the sacred authority of clergy in the interests of civil power, and by the boldness of his theological revisions: Hobbes denied that it was possible for a God to exist without material substance, delicately ridiculed the Trinity out of existence and gave broad hints to his readers that they should take no Christian doctrine on trust.
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When other anti-Trinitarians followed Hobbes, their main weapon against Christian orthodoxy was the biblical text itself, which, as was rapidly becoming apparent, was full of variant readings between manuscripts - by 1707 one distinguished mainstream English biblical scholar, John Mill, reckoned these to be around thirty thousand in number. Some of these variant readings could plausibly be considered as later interpolations in the interests of Trinitarian belief.

Important in this questioning were the early Quakers. Since Quakers drew divine authority from the light of the Spirit within them, they were inclined to demonstrate this by denigrating the authority of the Bible. Already Martin Luther had moved the boundaries of the biblical texts by creating the category of Apocrypha, which he had cordoned off from the Old Testament, even though Jews and the pre-Reformation Christian Church had made no such distinction. Now Quakers noted scholars' increasing rediscovery of manuscripts containing inter-testamental literature or Christian apocrypha, much of which looked remarkably like the Bible. The gifted Hebrew scholar and Quaker Samuel Fisher, who may have used the young Spinoza to translate tracts into Hebrew, and who certainly got to know the Amsterdam synagogues in his efforts to convert Dutch Jews, gleefully pointed out in 1660 that Paul's Epistle to the Laodiceans (which Paul had demanded be read in community worship, and so should be considered canonical), appeared to have gone missing altogether - or rather did exist, in a text extant but not acknowledged by the Church. He also drew attention to Jesus Christ's supposed correspondence with King Abgar of Edessa (see pp. 180-81) - why were these texts outside the Bible, when a trivial letter of Paul's to Philemon was in?
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Europe's encounter with the Americas, so highly populated with other humans, had long posed doubts about humanity's single descent from the dwellers in Eden. More ambitiously still, others who accepted Copernican cosmology suggested that there were other inhabited worlds. A major contribution to that question in the years when Spinoza was reaching his moment of crisis with the Amsterdam synagogue was made by Isaac La Peyrere, a French Huguenot but with a name which reveals underneath its French guise a further descendant of the Iberian diaspora. His publication in Amsterdam and elsewhere of
Prae-Adamitae
('Men before Adam') was one of the publishing sensations of 1655: reputedly it even became light reading for the Pope and his cardinals. La Peyrere was one of the most fervent apocalypticists of his day, and he urged Jews and Christians to reunite to bring on the Last Days, but his book, as its title indicated, threw the Creation story into the melting pot by arguing that there had been races of humans earlier than Adam and Eve, who were the ancestors of the Jews only.

La Peyrere's argument in fact gave a particular privilege to the Jewish race, but it also wiped out the Western Christian doctrine of original sin: if the Gentiles were descended from the race before Adam, presumably they could not be participants in Adam's Fall. La Peyrere was imprisoned, embraced Catholicism and died in a French monastery, but at least he did not suffer the fate of Jacob Palaeologos, a Greek exile in Prague who a century before had made the same argument about Adam, and had been executed in Rome in 1585.
Prae-Adamitae
went on selling, and did so because its author was increasingly not alone in his questions. If there were other worlds, not merely original sin seemed a dubious doctrine; how could the Church proclaim the uniqueness of biblical revelation?
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Around 1680 there followed yet another work from the Netherlands. The anonymous
Treatise of the three impostors
was too shocking to put in print until 1719, but it had circulated widely throughout Europe in manuscript, often with a false attribution to Spinoza to give it authority. Written in French, probably by renegade Huguenots in exile from France, it was a crude attempt to popularize an anti-religious version of the message of Spinoza's
Tractatus
, married with ideas freely adapted from Hobbes and other sceptical writers. Its 'three impostors' were Moses, Jesus Christ and Muhammad, and in its condemnation of all three Semitic faiths, it proclaimed that 'there are no such things in Nature as either God or Devil or Soul or Heaven or Hell . . . [T]heologians . . . are all of them except for some few ignorant dunces . . . people of villainous principles, who maliciously abuse and impose on the credulous populace'.
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Behind the stories of doubters from Spinoza and La Peyrere to Bayle and the
Treatise of the three impostors
were two imperilled and highly articulate communities, producing radical spirits who contributed to the reassessment of religion: Jews and Huguenots. The Huguenots were part of the international Reformed Protestant bloc which, like Jews at the same time, embraced high hopes of apocalypse and divine consummation, only to have them dashed in the political disappointments of the mid-seventeenth century which ranged from England to Transylvania. After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Huguenots had their own catastrophe to ponder as they followed the Jews into continent-wide exile. Even before that, Huguenots had been among the first to make a consistent return to Erasmus's project of historical criticism of the biblical text, particularly at Saumur's Royal Academy for Protestant theology, before Louis XIV closed it (Louis did not close Saumur's pioneering Academy for cavalry instruction, which formed part of the same foundation). The first major controversy was provoked in the early seventeenth century by the Saumur scholar Louis Cappel's demonstration that the elaborate Hebrew system of vowel pointing and accenting in the text of the Tanakh was not as ancient as it claimed to be. Many regarded this comparatively minor philological correction as a dangerous attack on the integrity and divine inspiration of scripture; but Cappel was clearly right in his conclusions, and by the end of the century they were accepted wisdom among Protestants.

This was a basis for much more searching scholarly investigation of both Old and New Testaments, which has continued ever since. Saumur led the way, but the systematic application of critical principles to textual scholarship in general was actually a product of the Counter-Reformation in the same kingdom. A seventeenth-century Congregation of reformed French Benedictine monasteries dedicated to St Maur (a disciple of St Benedict credited with introducing his Rule to France) developed the ancient Benedictine commitment to scholarship in a specialized direction: Church history. Generally they eschewed the delicate business of scrutinizing the Bible itself, but they established, on a scale so comprehensive as to be impossible to ignore, the requirement to scrutinize historical texts without sentiment or regard for their sacred character. All texts were there as part of the range of historical evidence, not simply the familiar material of narrative historical sources such as chronicles, but official and legal documents.

Even if the Maurists did not follow the logic of this through into biblical scholarship, others would. The Pope might laugh at La Peyrere, but the questions about the Bible troubled Catholics as well as Protestants. One Jesuit working in China, Martino Martini, was driven by his fascination with Chinese civilization and its historical writing to point to the shakiness of biblical chronology, in a work published three years after La Peyrere's best-seller.
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Protestants were nevertheless more seriously affected than Catholics, because of their general rejection of allegory in interpreting the Bible unless absolutely necessary (see pp. 596-7). They were left with the literal sense of the biblical text, if sense there was (try some of the visions of Ezekiel), and scholarship proved alarming for literalists then as now. La Peyrere had been joined by Hobbes and Spinoza in pointing out a conclusion now obvious to the historically minded, but which with enough willpower can be avoided for centuries, that Moses could not have written the entire Pentateuch.

As a result of this new scrutiny of the Bible, there was a growing feeling among some Western Christians that not merely other Christianities or even Judaism, but other world religions, might provide insight into truth - a conclusion opposed to the scabrous abuse in the
Treatise of the three impostors
.
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This new spirit of reverent openness directly related to the worldwide reach of Western power and trade by 1700. Islam seemed much less threatening politically as the Ottoman, Iranian and Moghul empires fell into decay. Now educated Europeans had a much better chance of understanding this other monotheism. Thanks to Andre du Ryer, a French diplomat who spent much of his career in Alexandria, they had access to a Turkish grammar in Latin and French translations of Turkish and Persian literary texts, something almost unprecedented in the West - but above all, du Ryer's reliable translation (1647) of the Qur'an into French, which was rapidly taking over from Latin as the international language of scholarship. That translation was the source of all Europe's vernacular translations of the Qur'an. English came first in 1649, not without incident in a turbulent year for England, the translation meeting a storm of abuse from all sides. Parliament briefly imprisoned the English printer, while one High Church pamphleteer ascribed the work to the Devil - rather paradoxically, since the principal translator appears to have been a former protege of Archbishop Laud, and elsewhere denounced Copernicus, Spinoza and Descartes.
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The Jesuits had already stimulated Western curiosity about China; Franco-British rivalry in India aroused equal interest in the cultures and religions of the subcontinent. Sir Isaac Newton was among those who concluded from these various stirrings that all the world's cultures sprang from a single civilization informed by knowledge of the divine, but scattered in Noah's Flood.
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Between 1640 and 1700 a growing divide opened up between scepticism or openness on biblical matters among an educated and privileged minority, which parted with the passions of the Reformation, and continuing untroubled if miscellaneous beliefs among the multitude. In place of the idea which runs through the Tanakh and New Testament of a God intimately involved with his creation and providentially repeatedly intervening in it, there was the concept of a God who had certainly created the world and set up its laws in structures understandable by human reason, but who after that allowed it to go its own way, precisely because reason was one of his chief gifts to humanity, and order a gift to his creation. This was the approach to divinity known as deism. Deist Christians have been much sneered at by later generations who like religion to be full of urgent propositions granted by revelation. It is worth reaching beyond such criticism to hear the voice of one English deist of the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison. He was son of an Anglican cathedral dean, a poet, playwright and an undistinguished politician whose serenity was capable of rising above the disappointments of his life: for that considerable virtue he was widely loved. Taking inspiration from Psalm 19, Addison thus expressed his calm confidence in the benevolence of the Creator God:

The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame
Their great Original proclaim.
Th'unwearied sun, from day to day,
Does his Creator's powers display,
And publishes to every land
The work of an Almighty Hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
While all the stars that round her burn
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball?
What though no real voice nor sound
Amid the radiant orbs be found?
In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'
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It was tempting even for clergy in established Churches to sit easily to confessional statements which they had inherited from the deplorably violent age of the Reformation, and see the reasonableness of deism as both congenial and morally superior to what had gone before. It was the same mood which after 1660 had produced the 'Latitudinarian' outlook in the Church of England (see pp. 653-4). Ranged against the rationalists or deists were the anxious voices of other members of the same intellectual elite, who were promoting the view of an intensely personal, interventionist God in the various Protestant Evangelical Awakenings, from Pietism in Germany to Jonathan Edwards on the eastern American seaboard. We cannot understand the rise of Evangelicalism without seeing it against the background of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Christian and post-Christian rationalism - but also in the context of other profound changes in European society of which the Evangelicals were uncomfortably aware.

SOCIAL WATERSHEDS IN THE NETHERLANDS AND ENGLAND (1650-1750)

If Judaism and Reformed Protestantism were one fundamental pairing behind the creation of a new spirit in Christian religion and metaphysics, the other came through those sometimes uncomfortably yoked Protestant states, the Netherlands and England. The chief settings in which the millenarian, messianic or apocalyptic excitements of Reformed Protestantism and Judaism united, they pioneered the future in another and very different respect: towards the end of the seventeenth century, both societies began a long process of moving Christian doctrine and practice from the central place in European everyday life which it had enjoyed for more than a millennium, and placing it among a range of personal choices. The background to this was a conjunction of political, social and economic peculiarities in the two countries flanking the North Sea. Quite apart from their crabwise and often reluctant embrace of religious toleration for a wide variety of religious dissidence, both countries achieved a wider distribution of prosperity than any other part of seventeenth-century Europe. By improving their farming techniques and breeding new money through an exceptional range of manufactures and commercial enterprises, they were the first regions to escape famine, the constant danger of mass starvation following harvest failure.
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