Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (134 page)

Women alert to the change in atmosphere began seeking their own reconstructed place in the Church. Mary Astell was a celibate High Church Anglican Tory with a lively interest in contemporary philosophy, and her Toryism made her a clear-eyed critic of the limitations of Whig proponents of a renewed Christianity like John Locke, who seemed to talk much of freedom for men, but not for half the human race (or indeed more than half, given Locke's attitude to enslaved Africans). During the 1690s she began publishing her own vision, which amounted to a new Christian feminism: 'That the Custom of the World has put Women, generally speaking, into a State of Subjection, is not denied; but the Right can no more be prov'd from the Fact, than the Predominancy of Vice can justify it.' She was indignant that girls were deprived of decent education in favour of boys, and seized on what Allestree and other sympathetic commentators were saying, making their arguments her own, with a certain added sarcasm: 'One wou'd . . . almost think, that the wise disposer of all things, foreseeing how unjustly Women are denied opportunities of improvement from
without
, has therefore by way of compensation endow'd them with greater propensions to Vertue, and a natural goodness of Temper
within
.'
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Much of this feminism would be absorbed into the Evangelical movements, which benefited from its activist enthusiasm and provided its chief outlet in Western culture right into the twentieth century (see pp. 828-30); but Evangelical Protestantism was ultimately not able to set boundaries to the feminism of Western culture, as will become apparent.

ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The history of the Enlightenment, a story usually associated with the eighteenth century, therefore saw virtually all its elements in place by 1700. Many of its assumptions derived from the Old and New Testaments and the two religions which had created this literature, Judaism and Christianity. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe produced two apparently contrary but actually deeply entangled movements, both of which were destined to affect a world far beyond their original settings in countries around the North Sea. The Enlightenment bred an open scepticism as to whether there can be definitive truths in specially privileged writings exempt from detached analysis, or whether any one religion has the last word against any other; in its optimism, commitment to progress and steadily more material, secularizing character, it represented a revulsion against Augustine of Hippo's proclamation of original sin. Yet beside the Enlightenment, the series of Protestant awakenings drew their inspiration from that same Augustine and from his interpretation in the Reformation. The mainstream Reformers had not merely proclaimed original sin as the key problem for humanity, capable of being solved only by a gracious God, but in their proclamation, they affirmed the authority and transcendence of the biblical text and jettisoned a whole raft of creative allegorical ways in which its meaning might be extended. It is possible to read the Protestant awakenings as a shocked reaction to the social and intellectual innovations of the early Enlightenment.

The two movements might therefore seem to be radically opposed. The reality was more complicated, for they constantly interacted and tangled. Key figures of the Evangelical awakenings respected the impulse to rationality which informed Enlightenment thought, and were fascinated by the intellectual ferment and the extensions of knowledge around them. Jonathan Edwards saw the Enlightenment philosophy's use of reason as an essential ally in reaffirming the Reformation message of the bondage of the human will. John Wesley, an intellectual omnivore himself, was determined as much as the Halle Pietists to introduce his flocks to the excitement of knowledge and the achievements of natural philosophy. To do so he published voluminously: one of the attractions of Methodism was its encouragement of self-education and self-improvement among its flocks (see p. 754). Among Wesley's best-selling books was his steadily extended handbook of practical medicine,
Primitive Physick
, based on both wide amateur reading and much personal observation. Having deplored the way in which in the history of medicine, 'Men of Learning began to set Experience aside, to build Physick upon Hypotheses', he reversed the process with Baconian empirical brio in favour of remedies which could be proved to work, although he coupled with experiment 'that Old, Unfashionable Medicine, Prayer'.
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Indeed, the Enlightenment in northern Europe was generally led not by those who hated Christianity but by Christians troubled by the formulations of traditional Christianity. In some measure, in its attempts to improve the human condition, the Enlightenment was a project for the reconstruction of the Christian religion, and it was in dialogue with the other projects for human improvement contained in Evangelicalism. The great exception was the Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose consideration of morality led him to the conclusion that it was entirely based on human feeling or 'moral sentiment', and that human experience could not move beyond knowledge of itself to provide real answers to such problems as the creation of all things. He therefore found revealed religion incredible in a literal sense, and, as Bayle had done before him, he radically separated morality from the practice of organized religion. The problem for pious Christians who knew Hume in his everyday life in Edinburgh was that he was a thoroughly likeable man; abuse of him generally came from those who had not met him. Dr Johnson's celebratory biographer James Boswell, a devout member of the Kirk who tried to frighten Hume with the fear of death, was baffled by his cheerful indifference to the prospect: 'I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts,' Boswell admitted, 'while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated.'
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In the end, some thoughtful Christian critics even felt that Hume might have done good 'by purging our religion of all the absurdities it contains . . . thereby enabling it to triumph over all opposition'.
⁵⁶

Catholic Europe was not immune to the excitement of the Enlightenment.
⁵⁷
By the mid-eighteenth century the Jesuits were running the largest single directed system of education that the world had ever known, an intellectual network unique at the time in its cultivation of scientific and cultural investigations, and inevitably their research culture formed an important component of the Enlightenment. Even when they were suppressed in 1773 (see pp. 804-5), the impulse to reform continued. Pius VI, whose predecessor had been forced into that humiliating betrayal of the Jesuits, pushed forward an ambitious programme of building in Rome after his election in 1775, putting finishing touches to St Peter's Basilica, the church which had helped to spark the Reformation, just in time for the equally severe challenge to the Church sparked by the French Revolution). He promoted the past vglories of the Vatican in an age which had otherwise seen a brutal diminution in power for the papacy, by founding a papal museum, but he also followed his fellow monarchs elsewhere in Europe by permitting the suppression of small monasteries when a terrible earthquake hit southern Italy in 1783. The intention was to help the poor; in the fashion of many such suppressions, the proceeds ended up at the mercy of landed interests who had a good less concern for the poor than their clerical predecessors.
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It was the Catholic world rather than the Protestant which produced a form of Enlightenment consciously setting itself against Christianity, proclaiming itself the enemy of mystery and the emancipator of humankind from the chains of revealed religion. Much of this was focused on France and started as being anti-Catholic rather than anti-Christian; to see why requires understanding the peculiar situation of the Catholic Church in France. The French Church had won a long-drawn-out victory against Protestantism, culminating in Louis XIV's great betrayal of trust in revoking the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It showed every sign of life and success; its monasteries great and small were being rebuilt to look like imposing modern chateaux. Its greater churches resounded to splendid brand-new organs, tailor-made for the distinctive style of French organ and choral music, their splendid cases major features of lavishly redesigned church interiors, from which medieval furnishings had been banished in favour of opening up sweeping vistas highlighting the drama of the Counter-Reformation High Mass.
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Beyond this liturgical magnificence, the Church in France was bitterly divided by disputes looking back to the Reformation years. Throughout the civil wars of the sixteenth century, a great polarity remained among French Catholics. On one extreme were those prepared to compromise with Protestants for the sake of preserving France in its sacred trust of being the Catholic Church for French people: a 'Gallican' version of Catholicism, sneeringly styled '
politique
' by its enemies. On the other were those anxious to cement France in its commitment to Counter-Reformation, and to an allegiance to the papacy which might run counter to the priorities of the monarchy. Running through this was yet another theological dispute which involved the ways in which that multifaceted theologian Augustine of Hippo might be used to explore the problems which agitated Western Christianity through the Reformation. Although Protestants from Martin Luther onwards took up Augustine's theology of God's grace, some theologians who stayed loyal to Rome were also compelled by his pessimistic account of the human condition unaided by grace.

A new Augustinianism surfaced in the University of Leuven in the Spanish Netherlands, in particular in the thought of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), who as an exile from the Protestant northern provinces of the Netherlands had particular reason to be conscious of the power in Reformed accounts of salvation based on Augustine. Jansen, who became Bishop of Ypres, clashed bitterly with Jesuit theologians attempting their own finessing of Augustine's thought in order to defend human free will. Jansen ensured that his exposition of a predestinarian theology as thoroughgoing as anything that Calvin wrote was published by his executors when he was safely dead; it was a treatise aggressively titled
Augustinus
. A condemnation of
Augustinus
secured from the Pope by the Jesuits in 1641 did not stop leading French theologians reading it with fascination. 'Jansenist' theology became a rallying point for those who had diverse grievances against the Jesuits: these ranged from their encouragement of Catholic extremism during the civil wars of the previous century, through their scandalous love of theatre and dance as an educational tool, to their shocking tolerance of aspects of Chinese and Indian religion (see pp. 705-7). Jansenism was a call to seriousness.

From the mid-seventeenth century, therefore, disputes about Jansenism turned into a struggle for the soul of the French Church, now vigorously resurgent against a steadily more beleaguered Reformed Protestantism. Jansenism was championed in Paris by an austere and much-respected community of nuns who originated among the newly reformed Cistercian houses, and who then secured their own autonomy, exporting the name of their original rural monastery of Port-Royal when they opened two new establishments around the city. The struggle between Jansenist supporters of Port-Royal and the Jesuits became entangled with the politics of the French Court, and among the several strands of conflict in this situation was a contrasting vision of the future of the whole Catholic Church, which reopened old questions agitated by Conciliarists before the storm of the Reformation stilled their voices. Was Catholicism to be directed by the wisdom of the pope in Rome, or was its theology to be constructed from the creative arguments of the wider Church, such as theologians in the Sorbonne? Where did authority lie to make decisions in such controversies, with a papal monarch, or with a collegiate decision by the bishops of the Church?

Louis XIV, influenced by his devout mistress Madame de Maintenon, eventually sided with the papalists against the Jansenists. Debates did not end with the persecution of the Port-Royal community, which culminated in an official order for the destruction and deliberate profanation of its chief house in 1710; a new papal condemnation of the whole movement in the bull
Unigenitus
followed in 1713. Louis' initiative in obtaining this from the Pope was his most disastrous legacy to the French Church, because the Jansenists would not go away. From 1727 crowds began gathering at the cemetery of St-Medard in Paris, where miracles had been reported at the grave of a Jansenist deacon. After six years, with thousands of people gathering, and frequent scenes of people rolling in convulsions and fanatically prophesying national disaster, the cemetery was closed. What was worse still was that these phenomena had previously been more associated with desperate groups of French Protestants, who had only been crushed in armed rebellion a couple of decades before; now leading lawyers were seen in the crowds, linking their protest to their resistance to centralizing royal policies.
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Around Jansenism gathered all sorts of dissident strains in both Church and State. When the Society of Jesus came under attack, it was not unbelievers of the Enlightenment but a surviving network of Jansenists who contrived its destruction in France, and the degree of viciousness inflicted on the dispersed Jesuits was extraordinary, considering that both sides professed loyalty to the Catholic Church.
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The line connecting the Jansenists to the French Enlightenment is not straightforward, because their theology could be seen as deeply opposed to reasonable religion, of which a prime example was the theology and philosophy taught in the network of educational institutions maintained by the Jesuits. The wild scenes at St-Medard are remarkably reminiscent of the crowd phenomena in the revivals which were about to sweep through Protestantism in Britain and North America, as well as of those associated with recent 'prophets' among the repressed Huguenot communities of southern France; yet it is significant that Jansenist lawyers who trooped to the cemetery linked their oppositionist politics to their religious enthusiasm. The Jansenist disputes created continuing bitterness and schism in a Church which was also fighting on other fronts. The French Church was an unstable mixture of triumphalism and disarray. It aspired to a stricter Counter-Reformation control of society than any other part of the Catholic Church in Europe, fitfully backed by coercion from the monarchy and yet encouraged by Jansenist campaigns for purity and austerity in everyday life. Its confrontation with the secular stage, for instance, reached levels equalling that of English Puritans in the 1650s, and tipped over into the tragically absurd. In the 1690s, the Archbishop of Paris banned his clergy from presiding over the weddings of anyone connected with the theatre, and actors remained banned from receiving the last rites, which meant that they could not be buried in consecrated ground.
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