Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (133 page)

This had momentous consequences. An increasingly general distribution of surplus wealth opened up for the Dutch and the English. By 1700 these two nations were establishing their dominance in an ever-growing trade with Asia. Merchants shipped home a range of goods which had the especial attraction that the cheaper end of the market could successfully imitate luxury items: principally textiles and pottery - even that unprecedented household amenity, wallpaper. Manufactures at home sustained this trade and added to the abundance of goods now available. Ordinary people in these late-seventeenth-century societies revelled in the unfamiliar sensation of possessing more and more objects which they did not strictly need, and just as much, they enjoyed access to a degree of leisure, now that the provision of food was not a constant anxiety. Such leisure, consumer durables and spare money might look trivial by modern standards of prosperity, but previously these commodities were restricted to a tiny privileged elite. Now choice was becoming democratized in society, long before democracy had customarily been extended into politics.
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Christianity must now face the consequences in many different ways.

Take one significant shift in seventeenth-century Europe: a proportion of public Christian devotional music was being turned into a personal leisure activity. Without doubt throughout Christian history, there had been a very considerable element of pure aesthetic satisfaction in listening to sacred music, but listening had always been done in the context of worship. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch developed the concept of the organ recital: a use of church buildings without specific devotional reference which was to spread throughout the Western Christian world. These recitals were detached from church services, for the very good reason that major Dutch parish churches had magnificent pipe organs of which their clergy disapproved, but which were protected from clerical wrath and maintained by the civic authorities - organs were in fact one of the symptoms of the Dutch regents' consistent aim to keep the clergy from tyrannizing them (see Plate 35). Dutch and north German composers led by the great Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck wrote intricate compositions to show off the splendours of these organs, which might take as the theme of their ingenious variations the metrical psalm tunes of the Reformed Church, but which were by their nature unlikely to form part of worship.

A musical, social and religious straw in the wind beyond this was the changing fortunes of the oratorio. As its name implied, this was originally an Italian and therefore Catholic musical form suitable for staging by an 'oratory' or confraternity: a choral and orchestral work on a sacred subject. By 1700 in Protestant Europe oratorio performances were moving out of churches into secular public buildings, and sometimes acquiring secular subjects to match; that was not such a common phenomenon in the Catholic south, and it brought the oratorio close to another new choral musical form, the opera, which it had originally been designed to supplant during the solemnity of the Catholic Lent. The English got the best of both worlds with their acquisition in 1712 of a Protestant composer of opera and oratorio from Halle, Georg Frideric Handel. Domesticated as George Frederick Handel, he gave them in 1742 an oratorio on the birth, life, death, resurrection and second coming of Christ,
Messiah
, which became a national trophy of musical culture even for the unmusical - it was given an agreeable moral edge by being a frequently performed work at charity concerts.
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But the
Messiah
was first performed in a Dublin public concert hall, a building which was itself an innovation - not in either of Dublin's Protestant cathedrals, even though the two cathedral choirs combined to sing it. This was an unmistakable transition of sacred music from worship to leisure, and it began a process by which the performance of or experience of music became for many Europeans the basis of an alternative spirituality to the text-based propositions of their Christian faith.

There are other hints that even public institutions in Protestant nations were beginning to accept society's gradual shift from its construction around Christian revelation and biblical story, even within its worship. The clergy's sermons on state occasions in Anglican England, Lutheran Sweden and the Reformed Netherlands can be shown to have changed emphasis in their themes after the 1740s, with England being the most precocious, but even the very confessionally uniform Sweden following suit in due course. There was less construction of the nation as chosen like the kingdom of Israel, following God's judgement and fearing the collective sin of its people: instead, much more celebration of the nation's honour, its ability to generate prosperity and liberty and therefore personal happiness. These were still rewards from God for society's good behaviour, but the reward was seen more as a matter of logical consequence than of direct divine intervention. Rome as much as Israel now shaped the preachers' rhetoric as they tried to describe the nation's glories to itself. For such a major turnaround on occasions when kings and clergy were at their most self-conscious as representatives of wider society, more general changes in society must have emerged over many previous decades. These new emphases reflected the influence of deism, that view of God which envisaged a separation between creator God and creation.
⁴¹

While Western Europe's spirituality was showing signs of becoming detached from its liturgy, divinity parted company with revelation, and patterns of society were being shaped by other sources besides Christianity's sacred book, Western discourse on philosophy came to be dominated by a philosopher whose assumptions likewise radically detached the spiritual from the material. Rene Descartes was a devout French Catholic who from 1628 had found that the Protestant but pluralist northern Netherlands were the refuge best enabling him to express himself without inhibition and to strip away philosophical assumptions which he found constricting. He was the decisive influence in encouraging his contemporaries and successors to think of a human being as dual in nature: material and immaterial. The problem which has haunted Cartesian views of personality thereafter has been to show how in any sense the two natures might be united. The Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949 satirically characterized this approach to consciousness as the 'ghost in the machine': a spirit lurking in a contraption of material components, which together somehow interact to spring from consciousness to motivation to action.
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As Ryle pointed out, Descartes would have been aware of the long history of Christian arguments about the soul; equally, when he created his own dualism for humanity, the Jesuits had schooled him in understanding the orthodox concept of the dual nature or natures of Christ, divine and human. While Chalcedonian Christianity had sought to settle that difficulty by insistent formulae of balance, Cartesian dualism, combined with Thomas Hobbes's relentless materialism and Isaac Newton's demonstration of the mechanical operation of the universe, has tended to resolve the difficulty by privileging the material over the spiritual - after all, material substance seems a good deal easier to encounter, register or measure than spirit. The eternal problem for Cartesian views of consciousness, or for the Baconian empiricism which allied itself with Cartesianism, was to account for the criteria by which the mind registers or measures these material encounters. John Locke, considering problems of consciousness, had written that since the human mind 'hath no other immediate Object but its own
Ideas
. . . it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant about them'.
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What, then, is the source of those ideas? The problem has not ceased to trouble the heirs of Descartes.

GENDER ROLES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT

It was that genial eighteenth-century sceptic David Hume, uncommonly sharp in seeing how philosophy and economics interacted, who observed of the consumer revolution around him that 'a commerce with strangers ... rouses men from their indolence; and . . . raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed'.
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Varied possessions stimulate the imagination because they stimulate choice. Equally, leisure stimulates the imagination and provides the chance to make very profound choices: to reflect on personal identity beyond prescriptions laid down by others. That is a practical application of Locke's principle about the human mind, with all its attendant complications. In that most personal of realms, human sexuality, the late seventeenth century witnessed great shifts in the way in which masculinity and femininity were understood, and much remains mysterious about the reasons for this change. Gender roles became more rigidly divided. Most choices still favoured men: so where once women had been regarded as uncontrollable and lustful like fallen Eve, now they were increasingly regarded as naturally frail and passive, in need of male protection.
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Most surprising of all was a new phenomenon in both Amsterdam and London: from the 1690s, both hosted a male homosexual public subculture, braving official hostility and developing a social network of bars and clubs. 'Lesbians' were so named in the early eighteenth century, a century and more before the invention of the word 'homosexual', but the activities of women did not excite so much public emotion as those of men, and it was the new visibility of gay men which provoked periodic purges and moral panics in both cities - no wonder the Societies for the Reformation of Manners were such urgent causes.
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None of these developments owed much to existing Christian ethical teaching: Christianity was going to have to engage in new thinking for a new society which constructed its own priorities with an increasing lack of respect for Christian tradition. Even patterns of churchgoing were affected. It was in Dutch and anglophone Protestantism during the seventeenth century that there developed one of the distinctive features of modern Western religion: Christianity was becoming an activity in which more women than men participated. The spectacular growth of female religious communities like the Ursulines in Counter-Reformation Catholicism was one symptom, but in Protestantism there was a different and more fundamental phenomenon: in various settings, church attendance was becoming skewed, and congregations were beginning to contain more women than men.

Once again, this was a matter of personal choice, and hence first perceptible where voluntary religion was possible. Studies of the far north of the United Provinces in the early seventeenth century, the province of Friesland, where so many people had opted to join radical groups like the Mennonites (see pp. 919-20), already show an imbalance in membership between men and women, even for the official Church.
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In the English civil wars of the 1640s, when the coercive structures of the established Church collapsed, membership lists of the growing number of voluntary churches - Independents, Baptists, Quakers and the like - often reveal women outnumbering men by two to one.
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At much the same time on the other side of the Atlantic, the authorities in the established Congregational Church of Massachusetts also began to notice the phenomenon of gender-skewed church attendance.

It is likely that a disproportionate number of women joined the English voluntary congregations because they had more room to assert themselves than in the established Church. This assertion was at its greatest among new radical groups such as the early Quakers: in the 1650s, Quaker women could enjoy prophetic roles reminiscent of those in the early days of some radical groups in the 1520s and 1530s, and just as in sixteenth-century radicalism, the male leadership of the Quakers over subsequent decades steadily moved to restrict women's activism.
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By the early eighteenth century, the appeal of the Quakers to women may have changed because the ethos of the Quakers changed: the quiet waiting on the Lord which now characterized the worship of the Friends resonated with a traditional and predominantly female form of spirituality. The
collegia pietatis
of Pietism (see pp. 739-40) developed a spirituality which likewise emphasized an inner encounter with the divine, although in this case the devotional group took its place alongside Lutheran public worship. It is interesting that these Pietists were among the few people to take an interest in the writings of women activists from the earliest days of the Lutheran Reformation, like those of an outspoken noblewoman of the 1520s and 1530s then otherwise long forgotten, Argula von Grumbach.
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The phenomenon of gender-skewed congregations was already noticed in the late seventeenth century, and it contributed to new Christian reflections on gender. The English clergyman and ethical writer Richard Allestree and the leading Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather agreed in finding women more spiritual than men, who were slaves to passions: 'Devotion is a tender Plant', said Allestree, 'that . . . requires a supple gentle soil; and therefore the feminine softness and plyableness is very apt and proper for it . . . I know there are many Ladies whose Examples are reproaches to the other Sex, that help to fill our Congregations, when Gentlemen desert them'. That Protestant Oxford don even regretted the Reformation's abolition of nunneries. Mather felt that women had a greater moral seriousness than men because of their constant consciousness of death in childbirth.
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Whether he was right or not, such notions were a striking turnaround from traditional medical talk of humours and a continuous spectrum of gender, or of Augustine of Hippo's disparaging theological comments on women's uncontrolled natures.
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As women apparently showed themselves more devout than their menfolk (and perhaps more gratifyingly appreciative of the clergy's efforts), the ancient Christian stereotype of women as naturally more disordered than men and more open to Satan's temptations began to look steadily less convincing. That probably contributed to the growing elite distaste for hunting down witches.