Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Unlike the intellectual battles fought over unbelief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the nineteenth there were many more issues that the faithful had to deal with, over and above the doubts raised about the literal truth of the Bible, say, or the implausibility of the miracles. Wilson locates the change of atmosphere as beginning in the late eighteenth century. The atheism of the French philosophes of the Enlightenment was one factor but in Britain, he says, there were two books which did more than any other to undermine faith. These were Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in three instalments between 1776 and 1788, and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, three years after his death. Gibbon offered no important metaphysical or theological arguments, says Wilson.6 Instead, ‘Gibbon was (is) destructive of faith…in his blithe revelation, on page after page, of the sheer contemptibility, not only of the Christian heroes, but of their “highest” ideals. It is not merely in the repeated and hilarious identification of individual Christian wickedness that Gibbon reaches his target. Rather it is in his whole attitude, which resolutely refuses to be impressed by the Christian contribution to “civilisation”.’7 It was Gibbon’s constant contrast between ‘the evident wisdom’ of pre-Christian cultures and the superstitious and irrational anachronisms and barbarisms of the early Christians that had such an effect on readers.8

  Hume’s critique of ‘mind’ and order in the universe was discussed in an earlier chapter (see above, pages 538–539), as was Kant’s argument that such concepts as God, Soul and Immortality can never be proved.9 If these matters might be characterised as ‘deep background’ to the general loss of faith, there were other factors specific to the nineteenth century. The historian Owen Chadwick divided these into ‘the social’ and ‘the intellectual’. Among them he includes liberalism, Marx, anticlericalism and the ‘working class mentality’.

  Liberalism, says Chadwick, dominated the nineteenth century.10 But it was a protean word, he admits, one that in origin simply meant free, free from restraint. In the later Reformation it came to mean too free, licentious or anarchic. This is how men such as John Henry Newman understood it, in the mid-1800s. But liberalism, like it or not, owed much to Christianity. Individing Europeby religion, the Reformation invited–eventually–a toleration, but Christianity at one level had always sought for a religion of the heart, rather than the mere celebration of rites, a reverence for individual conscience which, in the end, and fatally, says Chadwick, weakened the desire for sheer conformity. ‘Christian conscience was [thus] the force which began to make Europe “secular”; that is, to allow many religions or no religion in a state.’11

  What had begun in the liberty of toleration turned into the love of liberty for its own sake, liberty as a right (this, it will be remembered, was John Locke’s contribution, and was one of the ostensible reasons for the French Revolution). And this was not really achieved, in the leading countries of western Europe, until the years between 1860 and1890.12 It owed a lot, Chadwick says, to John Stuart Mill, who published his essay On Liberty in the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 1859. Mill’s investigation of liberty, however, involved what he saw as a new problem. Much influenced by Comte, he was less bothered by the liberties that might be threatened by a tyrannical state, for that was an old and familiar problem. Instead, he was more concerned, in new democracies, with the tyranny of the majority over the individual or the minority, with intellectual coercion. He could see all around him that ‘the people’ were coming to power, and he anticipated that those ‘people’, too often the mob of past ages, would deny others the right to a difference of opinion.13 He thus set about defining the new liberty. ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.’14 This was more important than it looked because it implied that a free man ‘has the right to be persuaded and convinced’, which is just as important an implication of democracy as ‘one man, one vote’. And it was this which linked liberalism and secularisation. Mill’s essay was the first argument for the full implications of the secular state. The total lack of passion in the text was the way Mill set an example as to how affairs are to be conducted.15

  Judging by the way ordinary people spoke and behaved, Chadwick observes that it was during the years 1860–1880 that English society, at least, became ‘secular’.16 One can see this, he says, from the memoirs and novels of the time, which report the reading habits and conversations of the average individual, and show the increased willingness of devout men, say, to form friendships with men who were not devout, ‘to honour them for their sincerity instead of condemning them for their lack of faith’.17 It can be seen too in the role played by the new mass-circulation press.18 The press in fact played a number of roles, one of which was to enflame, to impassion, to polarise the battle of ideas and in so doing turn many citizens–for the first time–into political beings (because they were now informed). This too was a secularising influence, replacing religion with politics as the main intellectual preoccupation of ordinary people. The new profession of journalist became established at much the same time as teachers became distinct from the clergy.19

  As literacy expanded, and journalism responded, ideas about liberty went through another twist. Individual liberty, in an economic sense, or applied to conscience or opinion, was discovered to be not the same as true political or psychological liberty. Through the newspapers, people became more than ever aware that industrial development, left to itself, only increased the divide between rich and poor. ‘A doctrine which ended in the slums of great cities could hardly contain all truth.’20 This brought about a profound change in liberal minds–indeed, it began to change the very meaning of liberalism itself, and Chadwick says it marked the beginning of what we may call collectivist thinking, when people began to argue more and more for government interference as the way to improve the general welfare.21 ‘Liberty was henceforth seen more in terms of the society than of the individual; less as freedom from restriction than as a quality of responsible social living in which all men had a chance to share.’22

  This new way of thinking made Marxism more attractive, including his fundamental tenet, that religion was untrue, which became another factor in secularisation.23 Marx’s explanation for the continued popularity of religion was of course that it was a symptom of sickness in social life. ‘It enables the patient to bear what otherwise would be unbearable…’24 Religion was necessary to capitalist society, he said, to keep the masses in their place: by offering them something in the next life, they would more easily accept their lot in this one.25 Christianity–most religions–accept the existing divisions in society, ‘comfort’ the dispossessed that their misfortune is the just punishment for their sin, or else a trial, the response to which is ennobling or uplifting. Marxism became important not only because of events in the nineteenth century–the Paris Commune, the impact of the Commune upon the International, the German socialists, the growth of a revolutionary party in Russia–which appeared to confirm that what it said was true, but because it too offered a version of the afterlife: revolution, following which justice and bliss would be restored to the world. In offering a secular afterlife, Chadwick argues, Marxism produced an unintended spin-off: socialism and atheism became linked, and religion was politicised.

  But Marx was not alone, not by any means. In his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, Engels reported ‘almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc….’26 Outright atheists were never very common but, in th
e middle 1850s, across Britain, the first ‘Secular Societies’ were founded. Paradoxically, there was a puritan streak in these groups, many of which were linked with the temperance movement. This appears to have peaked around 1883–1885, one reason being that atheists were given the right to sit in Parliament.27

  Another general factor in creating a more secular world was urbanisation itself. Statistics from Germany and France show a fall in church attendance down the decades, with the greater falls occurring in the larger towns, and a parallel fall in ordinations.28 This may have been nothing more than an organisational failure on the part of organised religion but it was important–for it revealed an inability of the churches to adapt themselves quickly enough to the towns. ‘The population of Paris rose by nearly 100 per cent between 1861 and 1905, the number of parishes by about 33 per cent, the number of priests by about 30 per cent.’29

  The view that we now have about the Enlightenment, that it was ‘a good thing’, a step forward, a necessary stage in the evolution of the modern world, was not the nineteenth-century view.30 For the Victorians it was the age which ended in the guillotine and the Terror. Thomas Carlyle was just one who thought that Voltaire and his deism were ‘contemptible’. For him, Napoleon was the last great man and Carlyle was proud that his own father had ‘never been visited by doubt’.31 Throughout the Napoleonic period and well on into Queen Victoria’s reign, ‘Men thought the Enlightenment a corpse, a cul-desac of ideas, a destructive age overthrowing the intellectual as well as the physical landmarks by which human society may live as a civilised body.’32

  Opinions didn’t begin to change until the 1870s. In fact, the very first time that the English word Enlightenment was used to mean Aufklärung dates from 1865, in a book on Hegel by J. H. Stirling. But even here the word is pejorative–and it did not gain a fully favourable meaning until 1889, in Edward Caird’s study of Kant, where there is the first use of the phrase, the ‘Age of Enlightenment’.33 But the man who really rescued the Enlightenment and its secular values from the negative territory to which they had been consigned, was John Morley, a journalist for the Fortnightly Review. It was Morley (who was also an MP) who felt that the British reaction to the excesses of 1789 had been generalised to the philosophes, and that the romantics’ passion for the inner life had combined in what he called a form of philistinism to obscure the real achievements of the eighteenth century. He was stimulated to act, in a series of articles, because he saw about him the church trying to stifle positive science.34

  There was a parallel change in France. That country had had its equivalent of Carlyle in Joseph de Maistre, who wrote: ‘To admire Voltaire is the sign of a corrupt heart, and if anybody is drawn to his works, then be very sure that God does not love such an one.’35 Napoleon, whose attitude to the church was erratic, nonetheless is said to have ordered his ranks of tame writers to attack Voltaire.

  Then came Jules Michelet, the historian. In the early 1840s, together with a group of friends–Victor Hugo and Lamartine among them–Michelet attacked the church head-on. Catholicism was unforgivably narrow, he said, celibacy was an ‘unnatural’ vice, confession was an abuse of privacy, the Jesuits were devious manipulators. These broadsides were delivered in a series of intemperate lectures at the Collège de France and, unlike elsewhere, the focus of his offensive was not science but ethics. Ironical, of course, since Voltaire had been fanatically opposed to the fanaticism he himself sparked. Michelet bombarded the churches ‘in the name of justice and freedom’, and it was as a result of these sorties that Voltaire became the focus of a vicious war of ideas in France.36 For example, on Louis Napoleon’s accession in 1851 libraries everywhere were compelled to remove the volumes of Voltaire and Rousseau from their shelves. To give another example, an otherwise respected scholar, editing Voltaire’s papers, warned his readers that Voltaire had ‘caused’ 1789 and the Terror of 1793.37 Matters came to a head in 1885, when rumours began to circulate in Paris that the remains of both Voltaire and Rousseau were not in the Panthéon, where they should have been, as the resting place of the illustrious.38 It was alleged that, in 1814, a group of royalists, unable to stomach these remains in a sacred spot, had removed the bones in the dead of night and disposed of them on waste land. The rumours were not based on anything other than circumstantial evidence but they were so widely believed, and so outraged Voltaire’s supporters, that in 1897 a government committee was appointed to investigate. The investigation went so far as to have the tombs reopened and the remains examined. They were declared to be those of Voltaire and Rousseau.39 People realised at last that this dispute had gone far enough and the bones were reinterred where they belonged. Following this all-round embarrassing episode, attitudes about the Enlightenment began to change, more or less to the view that we have now.

  George Eliot, as we have seen, was influenced in her beliefs by David Strauss’s book on The Life of Jesus, but she was not entirely typical. A more common reaction was that of the Swiss, whose threatened riots caused Strauss to be released from his professorship before he had even started. Most of the books of the nineteenth century that we now regard as important in bringing about a decline in religious belief did not usually act directly on the vast mass of people. The general public did not read Lyell, Strauss or Darwin. What they did read, however, were a number of popularisers–Karl Vogt on Darwin, Jakob Moleschott on Strauss, Ludwig Büchner on the new physics and the new cell biology. These men were read because they were willing to go a good deal further than Darwin, say, or Lyell. The Origin of Species or the Principles of Geology did not, in and of themselves, attack religion. The implication was there, but it was the popularisers who interpreted these books and spelled out these implications for a wider readership. ‘Religion is a commoner interest of most of the human race than is physics or biology. The great public,’ says Owen Chadwick, ‘was far more interested in science-versus-religion than in science.’ It was these popularisers who alerted the Victorian middle classes to the idea that alternative explanations for the way the world was were now available. They did not immediately say that all religion was wrong but they did cast serious doubt on the accuracy, veracity and plausibility of the Bible.40

  The greatest of the popularisers was Ernst Haeckel, a German who in 1862 published The Natural History of Creation. This, a very readable polemic in favour of Darwin, just three years after the Origin and spelling out its implications, went through nine editions by the end of the century and was translated into twelve languages. DieWelträtsel, translated into English in 1900 as The Riddle of the Universe, and which explained the new cosmology, sold 100,000 copies in German and as many in English.41 Haeckel was far more widely read than Darwin, and became for a time equally famous–people flocked to hear him talk.42

  The other populariser, who did for Strauss what Haeckel did for Darwin, and became just as famous in the process, was Ernest Renan. Originally destined for the priesthood, he lost his faith and put his new conviction into several books, of which the Life of Jesus (1863) was by far the most influential.43 Though he said different things at different times, it seems that it was the study of history that destroyed Renan’s faith, and his book on Jesus had the same effect on others.44 The book had the influence it did, partly because of its exquisite French, but also because it treated Jesus as a historical figure, denied his supernatural acts, presented in a clear manner the scholarship which threw doubts over his divinity, and yet showed him in a sympathetic light, as the ‘pinnacle of humanity’, whose genius and moral teaching changed the world. It seems that Renan’s evident sympathy towards Jesus made the shortcomings he highlighted more palatable. At the same time, he dismantled the need for churches, creeds, sacraments and dogmas. Like Comte, Renan thought positivism could be the basis for a new faith.45 He underlined that Jesus was a moral leader, a great man, but not in any way divine–organised religion, as it existed in the nineteenth century, had nothing to do with him. This was a form of religion, an ethical humanism, that many people ed
ucated in the new universities could accept. His approach was at times–well, unusual. ‘Divinity has its intermittent lapses; one cannot be Son of God through a lifetime without a break.’ This was a little like a return to the Greek idea of gods as part heroic, part human. Renan’s book appealed for the same reason that deism appealed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries–it helped people lose their belief in supernatural entities without losing their belief entirely. Most people could not go from belief to unbelief in one step. Renan’s Life was the most famous title published in French in the nineteenth century and it created a sensation in England too.

  What impressed many people, over and above the sympathetic picture which Renan provided, was what he revealed about the shaky foundations of Christianity, so far as its basic documentation was concerned. For example, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt read Strauss’s life of Jesus and realised that the history of the New Testament ‘could not bear the weight which faith sought to place on it’, and many people underwent a similar reaction.46

  One other new element which made the secularisation debate in the nineteenth century different from that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved the revised notion of ‘dogma’. Originally, dogma meant an affirmation of beliefs, or doctrines–in other words, it had a positive flavour. But that gradually changed so that, by the age of the Enlightenment, to be dogmatic was to be ‘unenlightened and closed to alternative interpretations of the truth’.47 This was an important transformation because although the Catholic hierarchy was by no means inexperienced at combating heretical dogmas, the very notion of dogma was itself now under attack. The successful methods of the positive sciences offered an alternative and were increasingly used as tools for attacking the church. One organisation that sounds fanciful now but which was typical of the time was the Society for Mutual Autopsy. This was a group (of anthropologists mainly) who were so concerned to prove that there was no soul that they all bequeathed their bodies to the society, so that they could be dissected and examined, to kill off ideas of where the soul might be located. They held dinners where the food was served on prehistoric pottery or in the cavities of human and, in one case, giraffe skulls, to emphasise that there was nothing special about human remains, that they were no different from animal remains. As Jennifer Michael Hecht points out, in her book on the end of the soul, one anthropologist wrote ‘We have attested many systems in order to maintain morality and the fundamentals of law. To tell the truth, these attempts were nothing but illusions…The conscience is nothing but a particular aspect of instinct, and instinct is nothing but an hereditary habit…Without the existence of a distinct soul, without immortality, and without the threat of an afterlife, there are no longer any sanctions.’48