The Book of Books (23 page)

In that sense, the Bible served a vital purpose. It was the whetstone and the essential opposition. Where would the Enlightenment have been without it? It enabled arguments to be developed and provoked them because its domain was so vast
and self-contradictory. A new orthodoxy of thought, reason, gained a purchase on thoughts and systems which its apostles considered to be not only superior to the Bible, but to supersede it and render it obsolete. At the very least the Bible provided an essential negative dynamic for the birth and progress of the Enlightenment.

Moreover, though the Enlightenment is now considered to have swept away any intelligent claims for the Bible that has not proved to be the case with everyone. Great congregations still attend churches and chapels and meeting houses and prayer meetings unfazed by the news from the intellectuals on high that the day of the Bible is doomed. Theologians, artists, teachers, philanthropists, politicians, men and women in many professions, including the sciences, and ordinary people in their millions continued to keep faith and draw intelligent comfort as well as spiritual satisfaction from the ancient Scriptures.

Yet the Enlightenment did change the landscape in which, for centuries, the Bible had been supreme and unchallenged. It had been the sum of the human knowledge of the human condition, its history, its eternal promise and its purpose. By the sixteenth century, Christianity had long ago gathered monopolistic strength through the Roman Catholic Church. It had absorbed paganism, tamed, though not eradicated, superstition, and in holy crusades savagely and bloodily defined itself against what it saw as heretics or non-believers or followers of other threatening, competitive creeds.

The Roman Catholic Church covered its territory under a canopy which was as pervasive as the atmosphere. Some see this as a time of darkness, bigotry, ignorance, injustice, prejudice, cruelty, authoritarian excess and enforced intellectual stagnation. Others find great beauty there, deep comfort and occasional ecstasy, an order of things and people which makes perfect sense in what they
see as a spiritually purposed world. They see the Roman Catholic supremacy, despite its failings, as an era of truth, the one Church as a keeper of the keys to salvation, unflinching at the harshness of the narrow path to that glorious destination.

There had been disputes within the Roman Catholic Church, and later with and inside the Protestant Church. There had been divisions and revisions. But little to compare with the force of change and threat brought in by the Enlightenment with its insistence on a totally new world: a world based not on faith, not on good works, not on ancient Scriptures but on the unchallengeable power of reason.

 

In his book ‘
Religion
'
and the Religions in the English Enlightenment
, Peter Harrison claims that it was in England, in the seventeenth century, that ‘the groundwork was laid' for the Enlightenment. ‘The Religious upheavals of the 16th and 17th century,' he writes, ‘meant that Englishmen enjoyed a freedom of religious experience which was matched nowhere in Europe with the possible exception of the Netherlands.' And, as the philosopher Locke wrote, the kings and queens of post-Reformation England had been ‘of such different minds in point of religion that no sincere and upright worshipper of God could, with a safe conscience, obey their several decrees' .

In the sixteenth century, under Henry VIII you were expected to be a faithful Roman Catholic and after his divorce an Anglican Protestant; under King Edward VI, a Protestant; under Queen Mary, a Roman Catholic; under Elizabeth I, a Protestant; under James I, a Presbyterian in Scotland and an Anglican in England; under Charles I, an Anglo-Catholic; under Cromwell, a Presbyterian; under Charles II, an indifferent Anglican; under James II, Roman Catholic. So where was guidance from the monarch?

One starting point is once again with the lawyer, politician, essayist and natural philosopher, Francis Bacon. The fruitful and scandalous last phase of his life was contemporaneous with the publication of the King James Bible. He spoke of the two books of life – the one to be read in nature, the other in the Scriptures. ‘The one, that which springeth from reason, sense, induction, argument, according to the laws of heaven and earth; the other, that which is imprinted upon the spirit of man by inward instinct, according to the law of conscience.'

As Pope was to write in the eighteenth century: ‘The State of Nature was the State of God'.

Both nature and the Scriptures were to be tested. As the centuries rolled on, nature proved increasingly boundless, enlarged and empowered by being tested: the Scriptures were found increasingly vulnerable and frail, needing more and more faith. But the space for faith was still defended.

It was a time of major shifts in society in the English-speaking and other worlds. The Reformation introduced the astonishing and liberating idea that the Bible could be read by an individual who could have their own ‘discussion' with it. The Bible in the vernacular – German, Italian, French, but, as it proved, most influentially, English – meant that control had passed out of the power of the priesthood.

The Renaissance retrieved classical learning from Greece and Rome which had achieved glories without Christianity. The navigational compass and an urge to trade brought other religions firmly on to the scene. How were they to be dealt with? Was Christianity the major, the supreme religion or just one of many? Were the others Saved?
Could
they be Saved?

The blunter young bloods of the new experimental sciences whetted their mental appetites on crunching the Bible. It was a tempest: looking back, the Middle Ages seemed an inland lake of
calm compared with the storms out on the high seas of the new knowledge. For some English speakers the King James Bible was the Ark, for others it was the wreckage.

The questions intensified. What did religion itself come from? The Greeks believed it had begun in man's fear. Fear was certainly core to the Catholic project. Sin and be damned. What is sin? We will decide. Dare it be suggested that it was man-made? Voltaire, the epitome of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, asserted that ‘if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.' The two arguments brought in to support religion were reason and nature: reason which grew in authority in this period was increasingly thought to be on the side of nature. Yet, in its fight to hold its ground, the Church scholars in England in the seventeenth century and subsequently held to the words of the theologian Benjamin Whichcote that ‘Reason
discovers
what is Natural; and Reason
receives
what is Supernatural' (my italics). The supernatural still had its place.

Whichcote hailed back to Plato who wrote that reason was man's highest faculty
because
it corresponded to divine reason. For Defenders of Faith in the King James Bible this was a classic knockout to petty post-Platonist opponents. Plato was the great fountain of philosophy and to be able to call on him was to have a majestic ally in the battle to save what the guardians of the faith saw as the survival of their God-given Scriptures.

Then there was the mire of whether those of faiths other than Christianity should be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Culverwell, a contemporary of Whichcote, wrote: ‘I am farre from the minds of those Patrons of Universal Grace, that make all men equal in propinquity to salvation, whether Jews or pagans or Christians.'

He points out the privilege of the Christian that ‘God planted thee in a place of light, when he shut up and imprisoned the world in palpable darkenesse.' Once again the King James Bible was
used as a shield to protect the Protestant believer from the spears of the gathering hordes.

And as the Protestants were driven back, they still found what they believed to be sure footholds. Their innate faith and the God-given conscience were argued to be superior to deduction. The traditions and authority which were being so battered by the growing attacks on the accuracy of the Bible and its relevance to the natural world were still claimed to have greater authority than all that reason could offer.

Protestants who saw themselves as the saviours of the faith were well capable of rational argument but in facing this onslaught from the Enlightenment, they found their redoubt in the idea of inner strength. This was the strength of a belief which was beyond examination but available to the senses: an experience rather than a thought, felt and not, finally, wholly available to reason.

The Bible, long regarded as the sole and perfect history of humankind, was beginning to buckle. The greatest of all the Fathers of the Church, St Augustine, in ‘The City of God', in the fifth century, states that the ‘fable . . . of the Antipodes' as ‘on no ground credible'. That ‘it is too absurd to suppose that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean', and that Scripture is never wrong. But by the mid-seventeenth century, it was embarrassingly apparent that Augustine was wrong on both these claims. The sacred text was not infallible. And what did the discovery of America and its Indians say about the story of Adam and Eve, the enclosed Garden of Eden, when over a vast ocean men had discovered another sort of paradise – inhabited?

Harrison quotes Hans Frei who, he says:

Its use and its purpose could appear to have come to an end. The weapon of destruction, of course, was a book, by the leading star in the constellation of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. In 1757, he wrote
The Natural History of Religion
. Hume seems to put the cap on it. All religions, he implied, were no more than made or socially constructed artefacts based on acceptable superstitions. For Hume, there was no primary religious sentiment or predisposition.

He went back to the early Greeks who saw religion as best accounted for by the need to explain natural phenomena: thunder, lightning, storms, famine, plague, death – all, in days of limited natural science, most satisfyingly explained by imagining gods ‘up in the sky' venting their wrath and, less often, displaying some kindness at the antics of mere humans. Hume wrote that ‘polytheism was the primary religion of man'.

Reason, Hume argued, played no role in the development of religion. The origin of religion could be explained fully in ‘natural', non-religious instincts – primarily fear and the ‘universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious'. In short, God was no more than a human father blown up to gigantic size and significance by fallible human beings who, at that stage, needed a simple explanation for complicated phenomena.

For many intellectuals religion was all over. Yet, in a quite extraordinary comeback, the full power of the King James Bible was yet to be unleashed.

 

The slow-motion crunch of ideas which rolled through Europe and America from the Reformation until the French Revolution was a time when thought and belief and society's view of itself began on a journey of constant change which continues to this day. The King James Bible played many parts. It would be thought to be the stopper in the spring which, once removed by Hume and others, let flow a waterfall of liberated ideas. It could also be seen as a chameleon, forever changing its shape and its character to the demands of the time, or even the good shepherd, still guiding the new flocks though often unseen by them.

It was not only an intellectual debate. There were the deeper economic causes for the growth of the Enlightenment which would become seismic when a cluster of unschooled men largely in the north of England invented what could be claimed to be the greatest of all the world revolutions – the Industrial Revolution. All these men were nonconformist Bible believers.

But there were always strong intellectual currents as the peoples of Europe, particularly in Britain, and then in America, saw the well of humanist scholarship. This inspired opposition from the Christians. New Christian literature was opened up: esoteric writing from hermetic books, Neoplatonic writings and the Jewish Cabbala attracted the minds of those who saw another route by which the mystery of life could be apprehended.

It was optimistic. Newton, among others, spent as much time and energy on Cabbalistic and other esoteric lore as he did on the study of mathematics. It was an awesome rearguard spectacle: this attempt to dig out the rare minerals from the past, not lose them, but turn them into gold while at the same time staring at a
rational future head-on, both amazed and half blinded by what the sum and the sun of it promised.

The importance of the Jews and Judaism to all of this is great. Were there several routes to Enlightenment? The old Book of Books was their book first. Their scholars refined their minds on disputations on the Pentateuch and the prophets; their poets on the psalmists.

In 1492 the Jews suffered what has been described as their greatest single disaster since the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 when they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Settling in different countries, forging their own communities, some converting to Christianity for survival, others stubborn and magnificent in their fidelity, they were always a strong presence. This was most clearly seen in the work of Benedict de Spinoza, son of a Portuguese Jewish merchant in Amsterdam who, according to Diarmaid MacCulloch, had by the age of twenty-three ‘already questioned some of the basic principles of all Judaic religions: the prospect of immortality for human beings and the intervention of God in human affairs'. For this, in 1656, he was expelled from his synagogue in Amsterdam. But his ideas spread across Europe: he spoke for a new time. Sacred texts to him were ‘human artefacts', writes MacCulloch: ‘venerable religious institutions were “relics of man's ancient bondage”. The whole argument of the work was disposed to promote human freedom.'