Ideas

by Peter Watson

  In these circumstances, the reactions of the Catholic establishment were, more often than not, grudging. This, in itself, became an issue, a factor in the growth of anticlericalism, which was another aspect of secularisation, at least for a vociferous minority. In Britain, says Chadwick, it surfaced for the first time in a Saturday Review leader in May 1864, criticising the wilful inability of the Curia in Rome to concede the advances of modern science, in particular Galileo’s discoveries and insights, by then hundreds of years old. In this way, clericalism came to be synonymous with obscurantism and administrative stonewalling and was broadened beyond the Roman Catholic Church to all churches and their opposition to modern thinking, including political thinking.49 Among educated Catholics everywhere there was some regret at the Vatican’s anti-modern stance but in Italy there was an additional problem.

  In 1848, the year of revolution across Europe, the Italians mounted their war of liberation against Austria. This put Pope Pius IX in an unwinnable position. With whom would the Vatican side? Both Italy and Austria were sons of the church. At the end of April that year Pius announced that ‘as supreme pastor’ he could not declare war on any fellow Catholics. For many Italian nationalists this was too much and they turned against the Vatican. It was the first time anticlericalism had appeared in Italy.

  In France anticlericalism played havoc with the established church. Over and above the attacks on church authority–Strauss, Darwin, Renan, Haeckel–in France, Catholic clericals were systematically expelled from institutes of higher education, meaning that as time passed the church had a weaker and weaker grip on the minds of the young.50 The French church was paying the price for the fact that, in the eighteenth century, the country’s bishops had been drawn overwhelmingly from the aristocracy. Decimated by the Revolution, the French church changed its complexion so much that the pope was forced to anathematise the entire Gallican hierarchy, refusing to consecrate any new bishops. The French church was thus cut off from Rome for a time though this did little to reduce anticlerical feeling, since for many ordinary people Rome was now even further away than ever.51

  A further complicating twist was the attempts in France to reconcile the church with the aims of the Revolution. These were led by Félicité de Lamennais, a priest but a man with a strong commitment to secular educational institutions. He founded a daily periodical, L’Avenir, which advocated religious liberty, educational liberty, liberty of the press, liberty of association, universal suffrage, and decentralisation. This was very modern, too modern. L’Avenir’s policies proved so controversial that, after several times when publication was suspended, the pope went so far as to issue an encyclical, Mirari vos, condemning this particular periodical.52 Lamennais responded two years later by releasing Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer) in which he denounced capitalism on religious grounds and called for the working classes to rise up and demand ‘their God-given rights’. This provoked another encyclical, Singulari nos, which criticised Paroles d’un croyant as ‘small in size but immense in perversity’, and said it was spreading false ideas that were ‘inducing to anarchy [and] contrary to the Word of God’. Gregory ended by demanding that Catholics everywhere submit to ‘due authority’. But this too backfired, in a sense, because it appeared not long before the revolution of 1848, which revived republicanism among French Catholics, and for the first time significant numbers of the church hierarchy appeared to be sympathetic to revolution.53

  Pius was originally a liberal (he was elected at fifty-five, a comparatively young age for a pope). But he was as changed by the events of 1848 as the rest of his fellow Italians. ‘Now cured of all liberalism’, Pius gave a triumvirate of cardinals a free hand to restore absolute government in Rome.54 However, since this attempt was accompanied by a general loss of traditional authority across the broader political landscape (e.g., Italy’s war of independence against Austria, the unification of Germany) this only provoked new waves of anticlericalism. In 1857, in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert portrayed a people who were anticlerical most of the time, even though their children were baptised and they continued to receive the last rites from a priest.55 In France, indifference to religion was growing among ordinary people, just as Engels had noted a decade earlier in England.

  Anticlericalism in France came to a head in the last decades of the century over the secularisation of the schools. For the Vatican, to lose the schools meant the final blow to its influence.56 This is why a number of Catholic universities were established across Europe in the mid-1870s–it was an attempt by the church to recover some of its losses. But this only created a new battleground: priests and schoolteachers were now pitched against one another.

  The teachers won. They were led by the Third Republic’s new minister of education, Jules Ferry. Ferry was convinced, as Auguste Comte was convinced before him, that the theological and metaphysical eras were a thing of the past and that the positive sciences would be the basis of the new order. ‘My goal,’ Ferry declared, ‘is to organise society without God and without a king,’ and to this end he expelled more than 100,000 religious teachers from their posts.57

  The Vatican responded to this latest move by setting up Catholic Institutes in Paris, Lyons, Lille, Angers and Toulouse. Each boasted a theological faculty independent of state universities, whose task was to develop their own scholarship to combat what was happening in science and biblical historiography. Lester Kurtz sets out the Vatican thinking.58 ‘First, it defined Catholic orthodoxy within the bounds of scholastic theology, thereby providing a systematic, logical response to the probing questions of modern scholarship. Second, it elaborated the doctrines of papal authority and of the magisterium (the teaching authority of the church), claiming that the church and its leadership alone had inherited authority in religious matters from the apostles of Jesus. Finally, it defined Catholic orthodoxy in terms of what it was not, by constructing an image of an heretical conspiracy among deviant insiders.’59 The church now gradually identified a new era of ‘heresy’, set out mainly in the conservative Catholic press (in particular the Jesuit publications, Civiltà cattolica in Rome and La Vérité in Paris). There was also a series of papal edicts (Syllabus of Erros, 1864; Aeterni Patris, 1879; Providentissimus Deus, 1893), followed by the condemnation of Americanism, Testem benevolentiae (1899), and, finally, a full-bloodied assault on modernism, Lamentabili (1907).

  A fatal mistake in the Vatican’s approach, which ran through all these edicts and condemnations, was the church’s characterisation of its critics as a conspiratorial group, intent on undermining the hierarchy while pretending to be its friend.60 This underestimated and at the same time patronised the opposition. The real enemy of the Vatican was the very nature of authority in the new intellectual climate. The papacy insisted throughout on its traditional authority, its historical, apostolic succession.61 These ideas were carried to their extreme in the doctrine of papal infallibility, which was declared for the first time by the First Vatican Council in 1870. Nineteenth-century Catholicism was similar in many ways to twelfth-century Catholicism, not least in the fact that it was dominated by two long pontificates, those of Pius IX (1846–1878) and his successor, Leo XIII (1878–1903). Amazingly, at a time when democracies and republics were being formed on all sides across the world, these two popes sought to resurrect monarchical theories of governance, both within and outside the church. In his encyclical Quanto conficiamur, Pius IX looked back as far as Unam sanctam, the papal bull issued by Boniface VIII in 1302 (see above, Chapter 16). In other words, he was seeking to resurrect the medieval notion of absolute papal supremacy. In Testem benevolentiae, his attack on Americanism, Leo XIII ruled out any hope of democracy for the church, arguing that only absolute authority could safeguard against heresy.62

  In these circumstances, and with the papal states compromised by the Italian desire for independence and unification, anticlericalism deepened in Italy. This was one of the important background factors to Pope Pius IX’s apostolic letter whic
h called for the First General Council of the Vatican.63 Political turmoil meant that the council very nearly didn’t get off the ground. When it did, it faced the problem of re-establishing the hierarchy of the church and in attempting to do this it produced two famous statements. The first was this: ‘The Church of Christ is not a community of equals in which all the faithful have the same rights.’ Instead, some are given ‘the power from God…to sanctify, teach and govern’. And second, the most famous statement of all: ‘We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal Church, by the divine assistance promised him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals.’64

  And so the doctrine of papal infallibility became an article of faith for Catholics for the first time.65 This was highly risky and had been resisted since at least the fourteenth century. The Vatican may have felt that, with the great travel and communications revolutions of the nineteenth century, it would be able to exert its authority more effectively than in the Middle Ages and this may explain why, in addition to papal infallibility, Leo XIII issued Aeterni Patris in 1879 in which he singled out St Thomas Aquinas to be the dominant guide in modern Catholic thought. This, like Pius’ edict Quanto conficiamur, involveda return to pre-Enlightenment, pre-Reformation, pre-Renaissance thinking of the Middle Ages. Scholastic theology was notable for being pre-scientific, for being a speculative exercise, inside people’s heads, an attempt to marry Christianity and other forms of thought, and noted for its cleverness rather than a truthfulness that could be widely agreed upon.66 In effect, Catholic thought was again becoming a closed and self-referential circular system, mainly in the hands of Jesuit theologians. The most influential of these were grouped around Civiltà cattolica, a journal created in 1849 at the behest of the pope, as a response to the events of 1848.67 These Thomists (of whom Gioachino Pecci, bishop of Perugia, later Leo XIII, was a leading figure) were implacably opposed to developments in modern thought. Modern ideas should be rejected, they insisted, ‘without exception’.

  The main feature of this neo-Thomist thought was that it rejected any idea of evolution, of change. It looked back, beyond the twelfth century, to Aristotle, to the idea of timeless truth as affirmed by scholastic thought. After Aeterni Patris bishops were ordered to appoint as teachers and priests only men who had been instructed in ‘the wisdom of St Thomas’.68 At every turn, their aim was to show that the new sciences, when in conflict with revealed doctrine, were in fact ‘erroneous’. This was ‘papal infallibility’ in action but, in addition, the doctrine of magisterium was also reintroduced and redefined. It was enforced by what Lester Kurtz says was the most far-reaching change–the attempt to make the Gregorian University, the most important university in the Catholic world, a major centre for Thomistic studies. Crucial appointments were made, to change the balance of power within the university, to ensure that it conformed to the new papal orthodoxy. The Curia was more concerned than ever with perpetuating old ideas, understood as still sufficient, rather than discovering new ones.69

  As if all this were not enough, in 1893 Leo issued Providentissimus Deus, which aimed to contain the new scholarship regarding the Bible. This edict argued, more than thirty years after Darwin, and nearly sixty years after Strauss and Lyell, that ‘a profitable understanding of sacred writings’ could not be achieved by way of the ‘earthly sciences’. Wisdom comes from above, reiterated the edict, and of course on these matters the pope was infallible. The papal document dismissed the charge that the Bible contained forgeries and falsehoods and pointed out that science was ‘so far from the final truth that they [the scientists] are perpetually modifying and supplementing it’.70

  Yet another way to stifle debate on biblical matters came in the form of a Biblical Commission, which Leoappointed in1902. Inanapostolic letter Vigilantiae, heannounced that the commission would be made up of men of learning whose duty was to interpret the divine text in a manner ‘demanded by our times’ and that this interpretation would henceforth ‘be shielded not only from every breath of error, but also from every temerarious [reckless] opinion’.71 Leo’s final attempt to stem the tide was his apostolic letter Testem benevolentiae, which denounced ‘Americanism’ as heresy. This extraordinary move reflected the inherent conflict between democracy and monarchy and the views of some conservative Catholics in Europe, who thought that the American Catholic elite were guilty of undermining the church through their support of ‘liberals, evolutionists…and by talking forever of liberty, of respect for the individual, of initiative, of natural virtues, of sympathy for our age’.72 In Testem benevolentiae, the pope declared his ‘affection’ for the American people but his main aim was to ‘point out certain things which are to be avoided and corrected’. He said that efforts to adapt Catholicism to the modern world were doomed to failure because ‘the Catholic faith is not a philosophical theory that human beings can elaborate, but a divine deposit that is to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared’. He likewise insisted on the fundamental difference between religious authority and political authority: the church’s authority came from God and could not be questioned, whereas political authority comes from the people.73

  The dilemma that faced the Vatican at the end of the nineteenth century, the century of Lyell, Darwin, Strauss, Comte, Marx, Spencer, Quetelet, Maxwell and so many others, was that a strategy to keep the still-faithful within the church could never appeal to those who had already fled the fold–it could only ever be a holding action. In 1903, when Pius X ascended the papal throne, he did so believing that ‘the number of enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly’. He said he was convinced that only believers could be ‘on the side of order and have the power to restore calm in the midst of this upheaval’.74 He therefore took it upon himself to continue Leo’s fight against modernism, and with renewed vigour. In Lamentabili, his decree of 1907, he condemned sixty-five specific propositions of modernism, including the biblical criticisms, and reasserted the doctrine of the principle of the mystery of faith. Yet more books were placed on the Index and candidates for higher orders were obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, in a form of words which required their rejection of modernist ideas. Lamentabili reasserted the role of dogma one more time, in the famous phrase: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’75

  Faithful Catholics across the world were grateful for the Vatican’s closely reasoned arguments and its firm stance. By 1907, fundamental discoveries in the sciences were coming quick and fast–the electron, the quantum, the unconscious and, most of all, perhaps, the gene, which explained how Darwin’s natural selection could take place. It was good to have a rock in a turbulent world. Beyond the Catholic church, however, few people were listening. While the Vatican wrestled with its own modernist crisis, the wider movement in the arts, also known as modernism, marked the final arrival of the post-romantic/post-industrial revolution/post-French Revolution and post-American Civil War sensibility. As Nietzsche had foreseen, the death of God would unleash new forces. ‘Christianity resolved to find that the world was bad and ugly,’ wrote this son of a pastor, ‘and has made it bad and ugly.’ He thought nationalism would be one new force and he was right. But other forces also filled the vacuum that was being created. One of these was Marxist socialism, with its own version of an afterlife, and a second was an allegedly scientific psychology with its own, up-dated version of the soul–Freudianism.

  We saw in Chapter 29, on the Oriental renaissance, that the Muslim world’s relationship with the West was chequered, to say the least, a mixture of arrogance that there was little Islam could learn from Europe, later tempered as European achievements fi
ltered across the religious divide. But the gap only really began to close with the retreat of the Ottoman empire, based in Turkey, which culminated in the Crimean War of the 1850s. This proved crucial because that war was the first real alliance in history between Christian and Islamic forces, when Turkey joined together with France and Britain against Russia. As a result of this closer-than-usual co-operation, Muslims discovered that there was a huge amount they could learn and benefit from Europe, not just about weapons and fighting, and medicine, which had always attracted them, but in other walks of life too.