Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (135 page)

It was not surprising that when reaction came, it was in the name of a wider freedom of life. Attacks on the Church establishment came from angry Jansenists, lawyers and repressed Protestants as well as Freemasons and actors who wanted a wife; soon scepticism or hatred of the Church moved on to become what we would define as atheism. The battle had its self-appointed generals in a group of intellectuals who all knew each other (though were not all necessarily friends) and who had no hesitation in styling themselves
philosophes
: a label which would have done them no favours in an anglophone society, but which has continued to command respect in France. Two of them, Voltaire and Rousseau, were to achieve a secular form of sainting in the new France of the Revolution, when the former showpiece city church, Ste-Genevieve, rebuilt at the expense of France's penultimate monarch in the old regime, was transformed into the 'Pantheon', a giant holding pen for the corpses of the specially honoured heroes of a self-consciously renewed and secularized society. There they still lie in great solemnity, their bones brought to the former church in the 1790s amid a welter of non-Christian pageantry.

The most famous publicist for the French Enlightenment was the writer Francois-Marie Arouet, usually known by his pen name, Voltaire. Not an especially profound writer, without any formal university training, but equipped with charm, immensely quick wit and a genius for making money which gave him the chance to live independently and write what he wanted, he was perhaps the most famous man in Europe when he died in 1778: the Erasmus of his age, read with delight in multiple translations, and master of the usefully calculated relationship, especially with monarchs. His effect on the reputation of the Catholic Church was even more immediately disruptive than Erasmus's: he set himself up as a lifelong campaigner against it. He much admired England, where he had spent a couple of years when he needed to escape from French officialdom after two spells of imprisonment in the Bastille. If the philosophy of Locke and the mechanical universe of Newton had banished mystery from human affairs, Voltaire saw Catholicism as a self-interested conspirator to perpetuate that mystery.
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Voltaire's was an elitist view of Enlightenment: he added an aristocratic 'de' prefix to his pseudonym, and loved the life of the great seigneur that he had created for himself out of harm's way at Ferney in the Swiss Confederation. From that safe refuge just beyond the French border, he spoke out against injustices perpetrated by French Catholic authorities against Huguenots and those accused of blasphemy, but it was the Church's capacity to interfere with the minds of the intelligent that he chiefly detested; religion could be left to the 'rabble' (
canaille
), a favourite word of his. His Jesuit education had left him with an intimate knowledge of the Bible, which he was almost obsessively ready to employ, far more than most of his
philosophe
contemporaries. It has been calculated that around 13 per cent of his letters contain biblical quotations, but most of them are there in order to structure a joke. Jesus he often referred to with a sneer as 'the hanged man', or elsewhere 'the first theist'.
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Towards the end of his life, he famously said, 'If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him': significantly, this was in a poem addressed to his far less talented predecessors, the anonymous authors of
Treatise of the three impostors
. Couched as an attack on them, its snarls at organized religion were as thoroughgoing as theirs, but, with his usual oblique wit, Voltaire seemed to be saying that even an imagined God might preserve the morality of society when the 'coarse atheism' of the
Treatise
would not. The effect of his attacks on organized religion was to deny any meaningful place to God in human affairs.

Voltaire, with characteristic prudence, kept his distance from and wrote little in the most substantial as well as the most risky enterprise of the French Enlightenment, the
Encyclopedie.
Its editor and major contributor was Denis Diderot, a former seminarian turned unmemorable novelist, whose atheism was much more thoroughgoing than that glimpsed in Voltaire's carefully modulated sarcasm. Diderot's view of knowledge was severely material: the world was a collection of molecules, and knowledge was that available to the senses, which might structure morality - why should a blind person have any shame in being publicly naked? His project, the most significant product of the contemporary fashion for encyclopedias, was a vast compendium of knowledge, arranged now in no hierarchy of being but in the fashionable alphabetical style (a rather tricky business if one was to be consistent over an enterprise which eventually ran to twenty-eight volumes). Alphabetic order was the eighteenth century's levelling riposte to the systems and classifications of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and the insistence on subverting contemporary hierarchy was all-pervasive. Even within a single article, the subject matter might begin with discussion of a rare and monstrous bird, and end with discussion of a duke.

The overall tone of the
Encyclopedie
was deist, and despite official French censorship the assumptions behind it were those of natural religion; in the Baconian manner, hard facts were hard facts. No Jesuit wrote in the
Encyclopedie
, and Jansenists were offended by its tone. Religious articles were dealt with largely by an apparently pedantic and ultra-conservative cleric, neither Jesuit nor Jansenist, who was Royal Professor of Theology in Paris's College de Navarre, the Abbe Edme-Francois Mallet. His work was so crassly unimaginative - for instance, in its solemn discussion of the precise location of Hell or the problems associated with Noah's Ark - that some have considered that it was intended to make religion look ridiculous. Even the cross-references of the
Encyclopedie
(an innovative way of making novel links between subjects) appeared subversive - in the reference to
Anthropophages
(cannibals) was the straight-faced instruction to 'see Eucharist, Communion'.
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If God departed from our consciousness, or had become impersonal or a mere abstraction, the world would be a cold and empty place. Diderot's close friend and contributor to the
Encyclopedie
Jean-Jacques Rousseau tried to remedy this by devising a 'natural' religion, based on the Christian Gospels, that sought to avoid what he saw as the unhealthy dogmatism disfiguring traditional Christian belief. Like so many of these intellectual systems formed in admiring consciousness of Francis Bacon's proposals for 'instauration', Rousseau's was based on an optimistic view of humankind's potential. A century before, Thomas Hobbes had seen the state of nature as a state of brutality, but Rousseau believed that we are born good, and it is the fault of social institutions that we are pushed towards vice and selfishness. Even the structure of traditional knowledge in arts and sciences is part of the distortion which stops people from knowing their true liberty. So although Rousseau looked to a past golden age, like traditional Christianity, his Fall was merely a wrong turning, a mistake, rather than a catastrophe which humankind had brought upon itself. The force of love and the right ordering of human affairs would put right the mistakes of the past.

Much of this Rousseau expressed in what are avowedly romantic novels. When the chance came in 1789 to change the world, many looked to a future where love would dissolve traditional corruption and constraints on human potential. Events did not quite turn out that way. The reason why is hinted at in the expansive paradox contained in Rousseau's doctrine of a 'General Will', the consent of the generality of society, whose urge to seek equality is irresistible and the embodiment of right: 'whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free . . . for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to the nation, secures him against all personal dependence'.
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Rousseau's own personal life had already suggested the shortcomings of his love ethic: he consigned his five children to a foundling hospital, and his visit to Britain to stay with David Hume turned into a saga of exploitation of Hume's hospitality and friendship, which in turn provoked an unwonted deviousness in that normally serene philosopher.
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Alongside the gleeful and publicity-seeking assaults on the Church and Christianity from
philosophes
came a more profound challenge from an academic far to the north in the University of Konigsberg, Immanuel Kant. He was a total contrast to Rousseau: no whiff of scandal came out of a very private single life, and no open deviation from the Lutheran Pietism of his parents. Yet he shaped the way that the West did its thinking through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the effect of his work was to reduce still further the place that a historical Christian faith and its institutions might have in the concerns of Western culture. It was he who in a short essay of 1784 gave the most celebrated answer to a question about this new movement posed by one of his Berlin contemporaries, 'What is Enlightenment?': 'Enlightenment is mankind's exit from its self-incurred immaturity'.
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Determined to use the mechanist method of Newton to rebuild philosophy, analysing observed phenomena in order to create clarity of definition, Kant argued like Descartes from the existence of individual consciousness rather than from the givenness of a God found in revelation. He developed the questions about human consciousness posed by David Hume; he denied that it was possible to prove the existence of the self even by Descartes' formulation 'I think, therefore I am.' He could say that the mind orders everything which it experiences, and that somehow it has a set of rules by which it can judge those experiences. These rules enable the mind to order the information which it receives about space and time within the universe. Yet the rules themselves come before any experience of space and time, and it is impossible to prove that these rules are true. All that can be said is that they are absolutely necessary to ordering what we perceive and giving it a quality we can label objectivity.

Kant was therefore reversing the priorities of previous philosophies, in what he saw as a revolution equal to that of Copernicus. Philosophy had worked on the premise that each individual mind gives a picture of structures in a real world which lies outside that mind. Now Kant maintained that the mind orders the world by the way in which it interprets experience. There are vital 'Ideas' which are beyond the possibility of experience, and therefore beyond any traditional proof derived by reasoning: Kant called these God, Freedom and Immortality. Although these are not accessible through reason, they can be reached by the conscience within the individual, a conscience which forces us to regulate our affairs according to its dictates. This is a new sort of faith to meet the battle between faith and reason: in a famous phrase, Kant said, 'I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith'.
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Thus there is a God in Kant's system: the ultimate goal to which (rather than to whom) the individual turns, hoping to meet this goal in an immortality which stretches out beyond our imperfect world. Yet this is a God whose existence cannot be proved; who needs no revelation in Bethlehem or on the Cross, no Bible, but the inner conscience calling us towards a distant image. Kant's removal of knowledge in the interests of faith is a solvent of Christian dogma, though it would present no problem for many Christian mystics throughout the history of the Church, who have ended up saying much the same thing. It may be that Kant would have known the writings of one of the more difficult characters of the Reformation, Andreas Osiander, distrusted by most of his fellow Lutherans and attacked by Calvin for his attempt to create a mystical theology within a Protestant framework; Kant's own University of Konigsberg in its early years had provided the final refuge for that prickly but determinedly original Protestant pioneer. Yet Kant discarded the religion of revelation which had still underpinned Osiander's mystical version of Lutheranism.
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Kant was an optimist whose optimism was not even completely dimmed by the violence which followed the French Revolution, and he had seen the century embodied in the ruler of Konigsberg, King Friedrich 'the Great' of Prussia. He was not the only philosopher of the Enlightenment to have high hopes of a generation of monarchs in central and eastern Europe who took sufficient interest in the ideas of change promoted by their contemporaries to gain the name 'Enlightened Despots': besides Friedrich, the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great of Russia, the Emperor Leopold of Austria, and a host of lesser rulers in their shadow. Even while they flattered
philosophes
into thinking that Enlightenment ideas were shaping government policy, their main concerns could be called enlightened self-interest: increasing their own power and grabbing territory, for which purpose huge standing armies were necessary. Medieval tradition, ancient local privileges and inherited intricacies of government were an obstacle to their plans, making their countries inefficient producers of taxes to pay for their armies. Medieval institutions were left alone if they did not get in the way; there was no change for change's sake. If benefiting the people at large clashed with the interests of government, that would be a reform too far, though if both could be accommodated, that was eminently desirable. But rival powers must be crushed, ecclesiastical powers included.

Accordingly, Catholic monarchs beginning with King Jose I of Portugal in 1759 brought mounting pressure on successive popes to dissolve the whole Society of Jesus, because they resented its vision of priorities wider than their own, including its loyalty to the papacy. After individual suppressions in various empires, they finally bullied the Pope into complete suppression in 1773. The dismantling of the Society led to the disintegration of the unrivalled Jesuit network of schools and colleges.
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Such a wanton act of cultural vandalism was a sign that the religious outlook of such monarchs had shifted far from the confessional warfare of the Reformation; more evidence was the cynical process which, between 1772 and 1795, witnessed Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox great powers, respectively Austria, Prussia and Russia, amicably dividing up the diminished remnant of the once-great Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, and exiling its Catholic monarch to St Petersburg. More creditably, and with considerable irony, the Society of Jesus could maintain a covert existence only beyond the boundaries of Catholic Europe, through the connivance of Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia, whose respective monarchs Friedrich and Catherine, neither high-temperature Christians, were alarmed at the likely destruction of educational institutions in their Catholic lands.
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Equally, the repression of religious minorities had gone out of fashion in these countries: when the Prince-Bishop of Salzburg sent his Protestant subjects packing in 1731, he incurred widespread disapproval from other rulers, including Catholics, and by the end of the century, edicts of toleration began the restoration of a public life to formerly persecuted groups from Ireland and Britain to France, Austria and Russia.