Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (145 page)

Darwin was by no means the first to popularize evolution. In 1844 the Scottish publisher and amateur geologist Robert Chambers presented the idea in his anonymously published
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, in many ways an eccentric and credulous book, despite the elegance of Chambers's literary style, but hugely popular. Chambers was himself an interesting product of evolution, since he possessed twin sets of six fingers and six toes. It was easier to rebut him than Darwin, who in contrast to the apparent atheism of Chambers's work (Chambers was in reality a deist) ended
On the Origin of Species
in 1859 with a lyrical reference to the 'grandeur' breathed into life by the Creator 'from so simple a beginning'.
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Between that much-revised work and his later major book
The Descent of Man
in 1871, Darwin retreated from his insistence on natural selection; subsequent work on genetics stemming from the observations of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel shows that he should have stuck to his earlier insight. Yet he remained unmoved in his central contention that humankind was not a special creation of God, but part of the chain of evolution. His family in its various ramifications had been at the heart of William Wilberforce's and Thomas Clarkson's fight against slavery since the 1780s (see pp. 870-73), and Darwin was no exception to that general enthusiasm, even if he left behind the Evangelical Christianity which had inspired so many of his relatives. He saw his experimental demonstrations of the essential unity of all life as affirmations of the unity of all humankind across racial divides. Whatever uses so-called 'scientific' racists have made of the theory of evolution are perpetrated in the face of Darwin's ringing affirmations in
The Descent of Man
:

all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only through inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterized would probably have deserved to rank as man.
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There has been no intellectually serious scientific challenge to Darwin's general propositions since his time. The modern conservative Christian (and Islamic) fashion for Creationism is no more than a set of circular logical arguments, and Creationist 'science' has been unique among modern aspirations to scientific systems in producing no original discoveries at all. From the 1860s, the idea of evolution gained wide acceptance among the educated public of the Western world, which was still overwhelmingly Christian in outlook and belief. Darwinian theory fitted the Hegelian scheme of an evolutionary universe, and far from seeming unremittingly bleak, it chimed in with the optimism about the possibility of human progress which was widespread in the vigorous and expansive society of the industrial revolutions. Many Protestant theologians began constructing a new natural theology which saw evolution as a gradual unfolding of God's providential plan (see Plates 42 and 43). James McCosh, an Ulsterman appointed president of that powerhouse of Reformed Protestantism, Princeton University, in 1868, did not allow his enthusiasm for the revivalist movements of Ulster and America to chill his friendly reception of Darwin's work.
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Equally, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Anglican Communion was headed by an Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, who in earlier years had presented a series of lectures in Oxford on the relation between religion and science which depended on the assumption that evolution was basic truth.
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More fundamentally challenging to the authority of the Christian Churches than the discoveries of nineteenth-century science was the reassessment of the Christian Bible, which now spread beyond the various scepticisms of earlier radical Christianity and the Enlightenment into the mainstream of the Western Church. French Maurist monks and French Huguenots between them had provided the scholarly tools in the seventeenth century when they edited medieval and ancient texts with scrupulous concern for forgery and contextual dating. German biblical scholars followed them with increasing tenacity over the next hundred years, and the impulse to stand back from the Bible and scrutinize it afresh was much encouraged by Hegel's evolutionary approach to human affairs. Since Hegel saw the Christian God as an image of Absolute Spirit, the stories about God in the Bible must also be images of greater truths which lay behind them. The biblical narratives could be described as myths, and that put them in the same league as the myths of other world religions.

This attitude was given wide publicity by a young Lutheran pastor and lecturer at the University of Tubingen, David Friedrich Strauss. Before Strauss, most critical reassessment of the biblical text had concentrated on the Old Testament. Strauss, enthusiastic for Hegel's symbolic approach to Christianity, wanted to apply his analytical skills to the New Testament as well. In 1835 he published the result, usually known by its shortened German title
Leben Jesu
, or in the English translation made by the freethinking novelist Marian Evans or 'George Eliot',
The Life of Jesus Critically Examined
. The Jesus Strauss portrayed was a great Jewish teacher whose followers had retold the story of his life in the best way they knew by borrowing themes from Old Testament stories and fitting their hero's life into them. No conscious deception was involved, but the New Testament narratives were works of theological symbolism rather than historic fact. Much of my own survey of the life of Jesus (see Chapter 3) has drawn on these insights, which have become fundamental to Western biblical scholarship, but at the time the public shock was profound. Strauss's job in Tubingen came to an end; when he was proposed for a chair in Zurich, there were riots on the streets, and it was impossible to appoint him. We should not feel too sorry for him, since he was paid his professorial salary for the rest of his life, but he gradually moved further and further from Christianity in his disillusionment. For many, he had destroyed faith. Friedrich Engels started on his journey away from Lutheran Christianity through his enthusiasm for the Hegelianism of the
Leben Jesu
.

Much else followed from that scrutiny; Tubingen's transforming role in biblical scholarship did not stop with Strauss. Ferdinand Christian Baur took the treatment of the Bible as a historical document to the point where he argued that the whole New Testament was a product of violent conflicts between the continuing commitment to Judaism of Peter and the older disciples against the Gentile mission strategy of Paul. The search had begun for a 'historical Jesus', a figure in whom the Church could believe despite the huge gap separating thought-forms and assumptions of the first Christians from those of the nineteenth century. In 1906 the theologian and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, son of a Lutheran pastor in Alsace, wrote
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
, which argued that this preoccupation of liberal scholarship was misguided. The historical Christ Schweitzer saw in the Gospels was a man who believed that the end of the world was coming immediately, and had gone on to offer up his life in Jerusalem, to hasten on the time of tribulation. His career had therefore been built round a mistake. If there was a historical Jesus to be found in the Gospels, he was a figure of failure and tragedy who could only speak of failure and tragedy to the modern world.
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Kierkegaard had reached this vision by another route: it was a faith infinitely remote both from the old Christianity of dogmatic systems and from the rationalizing Christianity of the nineteenth-century liberals.

Alongside this textual investigation was a virtually new science, archaeology, which explored the lands in the Middle East where the Bible stories were actually set. Christians enthusiastically promoted this, believing that it would confirm biblical truths; they set up funds for such exploration. The results were in fact equivocal: ancient Israel seemed much less important or even visible than in its own accounts in the Old Testament, and many works of literature from other cultures were revealed, which indicated that biblical writers had borrowed plenty of their ideas and even texts from elsewhere.
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Yet the first golden age of these sciences of history and archaeology in the new universities failed to daunt liberal Protestants any more than they were unnerved by Darwin. One of the greatest of them, Adolf von Harnack - like von Ranke, ennobled by the Reich for his contribution to scholarship - was gleeful in his conviction that the work of the Reformation was thus completed: 'Cardinal Manning once made the frivolous remark "One must overcome history with dogma." We say just the opposite. Dogma must be purified by history. As Protestants we are confident that by doing this we do not break down but build up.'
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Nevertheless, for many sensitive people, science and history between them had irretrievably shaken the basis of revealed religion. Hegel had pictured the world of being and ideas as a continuous struggle; now the struggle, mindless, amoral and utterly selfish, extended to the natural world. In an age deeply concerned to live by moral principles, it was unnerving to suppose that the Creator did not share that concern. Evolution turns some of the human characteristics which seem most divine - moral fastidiousness, love - into products of self-interested evolution. It robs the world of moral or benevolent purpose, and even if God is taken as a first cause as the
Origin
still proclaimed, it is difficult to summon up enthusiasm for worshipping an axiom in physics.
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If evolution suggested that humanity partakes of the world's general selfishness and amorality, then a subsequent Western thinker, Sigmund Freud, who published his first work on psychoanalysis thirteen years after Darwin's death, and who remained fascinated by the myths of his ancestral Judaism and their development in Christianity, completed this picture of the amoral basis of human motivation beyond consciousness or public profession. The sexual drive was the most important force lying behind human behaviour.
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Darwin himself, whose first publication was actually a defence of Christian missions co-written during his Galapagos adventure, lost any sense of a purpose in the universe, though he did so without public drama.
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'I never gave up Christianity till I was forty years of age . . . It is not supported by evidence,' he responded to uncourteously persistent questioning a few months before his death in 1882. Still he was given a funeral in Westminster Abbey, with a grave near that unconventional Christian, Sir Isaac Newton, and with two dukes and an earl among those bearing his coffin.
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An article in
The Times
of London in 1864 had spoken of the conflict between science and religion, and the idea of this conflict became one of the cliches of Western public discourse. Marx clearly believed in it, for in admiration he sent Darwin a signed copy of
Das Kapital
(it remained uncut in Darwin's library).
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Many, like Darwin, identified themselves as not prepared definitely to pronounce on matters of divinity. They called themselves 'agnostics', yet another of those newly minted words which were signs of nineteenth-century struggles to describe phenomena with no precedent, in this case a coinage of 1869 from Darwin's extrovert and aggressive friend Thomas Huxley. A few were driven by nineteenth-century seriousness to reject God in an almost religious fashion, giving that ancient insult 'atheist' a new resonance, and borrowing the word 'humanist' from its previous incarnation as an attitude to a branch of learning. They founded atheist or humanist associations with the sort of improving activism which one might expect from contemporary Protestant Free Churches: Sunday Schools, lectures, social activities, even hymn books. Perhaps their beliefs were the ultimate form of Protestant dissent.

Some who felt that science had won the struggle with Christianity were driven to explore the great religions of eastern Asia. A curious construct of religious belief newly named 'Theosophy' (from its emphasis on the search for divine wisdom) gained an enthusiastic anglophone middle-class following during the 1890s; it was one of the earliest expressions of that major component of modern Western religion, 'New Age' spirituality. One of the most dramatic of the many dramatic conversion experiences of the nineteenth century was that of the former Anglican country parson's wife Mrs Annie Besant, who after years as president of the National Secular Society, horrified her fellow secularists by her transfer in 1889 to Theosophy. Soon she was once more exercising her lifelong gift for leadership by presidency of the Theosophical Society, sharing her new ministry with an even more exotic exponent of the New Age, Madame Blavatsky.
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It is no coincidence that several eminent late-nineteenth-century researchers in physics and chemistry were affected by the allied craze for spiritualism. This was a movement imported from the United States, which seemed able to restore the connection between the material and the spiritual in 'seances' which closely resembled the method of the scientific experiment. Darwin despised spiritualism, which he considered no more evidence-based than conventional Christianity, and he left in disgust the one seance he was persuaded to attend (perceptively, since the medium was later revealed as a fraud). His fellow explorer in evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, by contrast enthusiastically went into print to celebrate the movement, undaunted by such disappointments.
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Roman Catholicism had a predictably more combative relationship than mainstream Protestantism with developments in scientific and historical study. The pattern was set in the career of Joseph Ernest Renan, a Breton destined for the priesthood, who found that the combination of his reading in German biblical scholarship and his contempt for the superficial religion he met with in Paris drove him beyond Christian faith. In 1863 Renan produced a
Life of Jesus
which utterly denied that this Jewish teacher had any divine character. It was with that in mind, against a background of bruising conflicts with liberal Protestantism in Germany and aggressive secularity in France, that the mood in Rome turned decisively against adventurous scholarly enquiry. Leo XIII initiated a drive against 'Modernism' in the Church, which intensified under his successor, Pius X, and destroyed any chance of Roman Catholicism taking a positive attitude to new ideas in biblical and theological scholarship until well into the twentieth century.