from the site: Religion and Ethics Loving the Enemy: Christianity and the Enlightenment
Dominic Erdozain ABC Religion and Ethics 16 May 2016 _Dominic Erdozain_ (https://twitter.com/domerdozain) is a research fellow at King's College, London, and the author of _The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx_ (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-soul-of-doubt-9780199844616?cc=au&lang=en&;) . Christians are taught to despise the Enlightenment. It is hard to find a theologian with a good word for this era of rational presumption, glistening certitude and powdered wiggery. The Enlightenment is the sin of the modern, the chimera of crass autonomy. Popular writers have been no kinder. Enter the world of knockdown apologetics and suspicion turns to contempt. "The Great Secular Enlightenment," growls one authority, is what gave us Richard Dawkins. The picture is sharpened by a secular literature that celebrates the Enlightenment as a brave emancipation from theological tutelage: a defiant obituary for an expired God. The consensus is powerful but mistaken. The real Enlightenment was as religious as anything that came before it - a time of spiritual awakening as well as criticism and doubt. Indeed, faith and doubt were two sides of the same coin. To enter the Enlightenment by means of its authors, not its curators, is to be knocked sideways. From Baruch Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, to Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in the shadow of the French Revolution, the Enlightenment radiated an energy and an aggression that bears little resemblance to the later stereotype of self-puffing intellectualism. Nor was the quarrel purely ethical. The "supreme, sacred self-confidence" that Thomas Carlyle identified in the Quaker, George Fox, was constantly apparent in thinkers we have been taught to regard as secular. Like the poised, jail-ready Fox, many of the era's A-list insurgents ascribed their ferocity of will to a certain knowledge of God. Spinoza was the supreme example. Baruch Spinoza: a metaphysics of mercy Ejected from the Jewish community in 1656 for heresies unknown, Spinoza lived and moved in philosophical circles that included a group of radical Protestants, known as "Collegiants." Identifying "reason" with the "inner light" of conscience, the Collegiants forged a spiritual rationalism that remained evangelical, conversionist and fiercely Christological. The true Christ was known within. When a group of English Quakers descended on Amsterdam, they identified the Collegiants as kindred spirits and they seem to have enlisted Spinoza to translate two of their tracts, written for the conversion of the Jews. The mysterious figure, "Cast out" of the synagogue "because he owneth no other teacher but the light," has been painstakingly identified as Spinoza, who also seems to have collaborated with Samuel Fisher, a Quaker scholar, in developing his biblical criticism. Indeed, it was Fisher who commissioned the _translations_ (http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/12333860?q&versionId=14558054) . Like Fisher, and with many of the same examples, Spinoza urged that the "letter" of Scripture was nothing without the "spirit" - just as the "outward" ministries of religion were nothing without an energizing, "inward" knowledge of God. This was the meaning of enlightenment - a concept that found a proof text in an endlessly quoted verse from John's gospel, where the "light" of Christ is described as "enlighten[ing] everyone who comes into the world." In the semi-autobiographical _Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-being_ (https://archive.org/details/spinozasshorttre00spinuoft) , Spinoza describes the liberating power of spiritual illumination. It is, he urges, the highest form of knowledge, providing strength and security from the destructive "passions" of "sadness," "despair" and "fear." Defending his right as a philosopher "to speak of our Love of God," Spinoza describes the effect of divine communion on a troubled soul: "When we become aware of these effects, we can truly say that we have been born again." This love of God, he explains, is as different from ordinary love "as the incorporeal is from the corporeal, the spirit from the flesh." "This," he continues, "may the more rightly and truly be called Rebirth, because, as we shall show, an eternal and immutable constancy comes only from this Love and Union." Spinoza has been called many things: an atheist, a pantheist, "the Moses of modern freethinkers and materialists." But his challenge to a theology of terror and scorching transcendence was rooted in spiritual experience. And it was his belief in the universal availability of such experience that sustained his immanentist worldview. His vision of a God at work in every fibre of nature was anchored not to science, but to an abiding conviction that God "cares for all." It was a metaphysics of mercy. Spinoza's shimmering retort to those who claimed that God performs special providences was that God "is supremely just and merciful." Spinoza did not deny the possibility of miracles, but he denied that God suspends his own laws for a chosen few. The single idea that offended him, in Jewish and Christian thought, was the notion of a partial, exclusive deity, parcelling out favours to an elect. It was this "superstition" - elevated to a science by the Dutch Reformed Church - that he set out to destroy. His authority for such a conviction, besides his own spiritual experience, was the biblical concept of a "new covenant," offered to all. It was, he maintained, "unthinkable that it has been promised only to pious Jews." Spinoza summarized his stance with defiant, ponderous repetition: "Paul concludes that God is the God of all nations, that is, God is equally well-disposed to all, and all men are equally under law and sin, and that is why God sent his Christ to all nations, to free all men equally from the servitude of the law." Indeed, he adds: "Paul teaches exactly what we want to affirm." But more than Paul, and the frequently quoted John, Spinoza came back to Christ as the model of inward, intuitive knowledge: the wisdom that was available to all but acquired by so few. He cited the Sermon on the Mount as an essay in the superiority of inward truth to leaden precept. Christ sometimes spoke the old language of obligation and duty, Spinoza admitted, but his aim was to transcend it. He was no lecturer or princely "legislator." For it was "less external actions that he sought to correct than people's minds." Christ was, Spinoza urged, "the supreme philosopher." Spinoza situated the contrast between philosophy and rule-bound religion in the shift from Mosaic "law" to Christian freedom. As he urged in a passage that captures the mystical tenor of this early Enlightenment: "For the love of God is not obedience but a virtue necessarily present in someone who rightly knows God ... [For] divine commandments seem to us like decrees or enactments only so long as we are ignorant of their cause. Once we know this, they immediately cease to be edicts and we accept them as eternal truths, not as decrees, that is, obedience immediately turns into love which arises from true knowledge as inevitably as light emanates from the sun." Spinoza, the Collegiants and the English Quakers together demonstrate that the fiercest solvent of religious authority was spiritual experience. The trump card against theologies of fear, terror and selective redemption was a theology of love. And the source of all heresies was the Bible itself - above all the New Testament's piercing contrast between "the spirit" and "the flesh." Churches were vulnerable when they could be identified with the latter - above all through violence, persecution and various forms of coercion. The critique of established religion was not that it was spiritual, in a newly secular age: the problem was that it was seen as secular, a "cover" for politics. The idea outlived Spinoza. Pierre Bayle: a theological escape from theology If the tendency of Spinoza's world was to blend intellect and soul, reason and the inner light, the eighteenth-century impulse was to divide. Here, the mood was sceptical rather than constructive, and the "enchanted castles" of a Descartes or a Spinoza were suddenly as suspect as orthodoxy itself. In criticism and practical philosophy, the burden of proof passed to conscience. "Metaphysics," as Voltaire insisted, had to be reduced "to morality." Yet to explore this morality is once again to confront an intensity of Christian conviction. Pierre Bayle, an exile from religious persecution, set the tone with a caustic takedown of Augustine, and the Augustinian doctrine of coercion, in his Philosophical Commentary of 1695. If "philosophy," for Spinoza, sometimes amounted to an erudite mysticism, here it surfaced as a Bible study, a thunderous Protestant sermon wresting Scripture from the hands of an errant priest. The full title of Bayle's smouldering text was, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23: "Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full." Bayle used nearly 900 pages to make his point, but it was a very simple one: to use the words of Jesus to justify violence against heretics is "blasphemy." The verdict was clear. But if Augustine's scampering sophistry proved anything, it was that the untamed intellect was a dangerous guide to the mind of God. A deeper, more stable criterion was needed. Bayle found it in the irrefragable voice of conscience: "a distinct and spritely Light which enlightens all Men the moment they open the Eyes of their Attention." Even if an authority as esteemed as Augustine urges that a biblical verse exhorts violence, Bayle urged: "we shall see by the bright shining of this interior Truth, which speaks to our Spirits without the Sound of Words ... that the pretended Scripture of this Casuist is only a bilious Vapor from his own Temperament and Constitution." Much as Bayle loved his Bible, he wearied of argument and exegesis. From now on, all interpretations were to be referred to this "natural conception of equity which illumines every man that comes into the world." This was John 1:9, the proof text of the early Enlightenment, threatening to eclipse its source. The natural light, then, was never very natural. It was loaded with Christian assumptions. For his own part, Bayle never denied that he was a Christian: an exiled Huguenot who defended a career of blistering criticism as the birth right of a "good Protestant." Accused, with dreary regularity, of a mischievous and covert atheism, Bayle sharply distinguished his faith in Christ from his battered respect for the churches. His aim was to acquit "our Religion at the expence of its Professors." "I die a Christian philosopher," he wrote to his pastor, hours before his death, "convinced of and filled with God's goodness and mercy." The escape from theology was again theological. Bayle's doctrine of conscience, and his contempt for intellectual pretension, set the mood for an eighteenth-century Enlightenment that was as tough on philosophical speculation as theological dogma. The standard account of the period as a binge of epistemological arrogance misses the point that this is what the Enlightenment was against. As Peter Gay has written: "the Enlightenment was not an Age of Reason but a Revolt against Rationalism." It was earthy, practical and positively impatient of the shallow faith in reason with which it has somehow been associated. Bayle's vintage putdown was as serviceable for Voltaire and Hume as it was for his beleaguered, Protestant self: "Reason is like a runner who doesn't know that the race is over." Voltaire: the mercy of God Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant were all, in their ways, heirs of Bayle's revolt of conscience against creed and overreached intellect. Of the three, only Kant, with his omnivorous "moral law within" qualifies remotely as a post-religious thinker. Kant's moral law has no need for God - although Kant was pretty sure that God needed it. Prayer, under the stern eye of "practical reason," was a "fetish" and a "grovelling delusion." Grace was for weaklings. Religious "enthusiasm" was the "moral death of the reason without which there can be no religion." A painful terminus. Yet to read the Enlightenment as a penitent grind to Kant's glassy pinnacle is to secularize it prematurely. The extraordinary thing about a philosopher as angry and destructive as Voltaire is the utter refusal to renounce faith in God and true religion while raging against a failed orthodoxy. And while Voltaire, like Rousseau, is in many ways a textbook advocate of conscience and natural law against the artifice of creed, he could not escape the power of specifically Christian concepts of mercy and forgiveness - a creed of his own. So not only was Voltaire's plea for natural religion, as _Carl Becker_ (http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300101508/heavenly-city-eighteenth-century-philos ophers) has argued, a refurbished Christianity of law and duty: a "scepticism" that retains so much "knowledge." His positive philosophy goes far beyond the mandates of conscience to a sustained plea for a theology of forgiveness. It is here that I found the rituals of disdain for Enlightenment thought so ill judged. A figure who has entered posterity as a trivializing enemy of faith was a profound and constructive critic. A window into Voltaire's critique of conscience and his quest for a religion of mercy may be found in his troubled relationship with Rousseau. For Voltaire, it was the spectacle of a raging moralist, writing bestsellers on the education of the young, while cheerfully abandoning his own children on the steps of a Paris orphanage, that threw the question of "conscience" into frightening relief. Rousseau's "heart," Voltaire complained, could justify him in anything. Guided by the "inner voice" of conscience, a man could do as he pleased. From the murderous and adulterous David, in the Old Testament, to any number of latter-day tyrants, Voltaire lamented, history was strewn with icy campaigners who had learned to manage the accusing conscience to expert degree. "There is a natural law," he declared rather plaintively in his _Philosophical Dictionary_ (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-pocket-philosophical-dictionary-9780199553631?cc=au&lang=en&;) , "but it is still more natural to many people to forget it." The sin of religious "fanaticism" was to subordinate conscience to the "passions" - under the dangerous delusion that my desire represents God's will. The problem with religion - even in its more acceptable formulations - is that it too often flattered, rather than stirred, the slumbering conscience. The moralizing philosopher defined his task in self-consciously homiletic terms: "it is judicious to endeavor to awaken conscience both in mantua-makers and in monarchs." Indeed, "it is necessary to preach better than modern preachers usually do, who seldom talk effectively to either." Enlightenment was again strangely evangelical. Natural law is always better than "superstition" and "fanaticism," Voltaire maintains, especially when such theology teaches people to despise the ordinary virtues as "splendid sins." But natural law cannot break the spell of violence and vengeance. From his epic poem on the "clement King," Henry IV, to his South American drama, Alzire (1736), to his final, crowning defence of a just and merciful God, The Sage and the Atheist (1775), Voltaire preached the message that conscience is not enough. A gospel of duty and reciprocity will always return to violence. Revenge and recrimination, Voltaire urged with Newtonian certainty, issue from human injury like water falling from a height. The genius of an all-forgiving Alvarez, in Alzire, or a Quaker, such as William Penn, was the ability to break the logic with a policy of mercy. When the conquering Henry put the divine principle into practice, pardoning and even feeding his enemies in Le Henriade, Voltaire described it as the offer of "grace" to "these rebels." The defeated soldiers were "rendered to life" by Henry's "kind commands." A historical pattern of hatred was broken by forgiveness. The rebuke to a theology of just deserts is unmistakeable. Alzire was a drama dedicated to this single theme, a play that Voltaire claimed to have written "with a view of showing how far superior the spirit of true religion is to the light of nature." There is abundant evidence that he meant it. When "Freind," the Quaker hero of The Sage and the Atheist, persuaded a Native American to desist from punishing criminals by burning them alive, Voltaire described the triumph as greater than all the "miracles" performed by Jesuits in the New World. He often used untutored peoples to expose European vices but he worried about the impotence of a heart-centred natural law without the stimulus of mercy. And this was where Christian orthodoxy had failed. His rage against orthodoxy, while sometimes expressed as an attack on Christianity in the main, centred on a hyper-Augustinian theology that seemed to delight in a cosmic division between the saved and the damned. Schooled by Jesuits in a more affirmative theology of free will and forgiveness, Voltaire's religious criticism was above all an "anti-Jansenism." It surfaced, like Spinoza's, from the sectarianism it decried. And like Spinoza's protest against the egoism of an elect, Voltaire relentlessly urged the connection between theologies of exclusion and the politics of persecution. For Voltaire, even more than Spinoza, it was the cruel logic of predestination that carried the bacillus of fanaticism: the psychology of the playground pressed into the gold leaf of dogma. Augustine's frosty intuition that "Jesus Christ did not die for all men" was, he insisted, the very seed of France's troubles. Voltaire's response, even in his bravely "deistic" years, was a cobbled Christianity of his own. Voltaire scoured the Bible with a darting eye and an uneven fury. Joshua was a "monster" of tribal imagination, but Joseph, of the Genesis narrative, was a model of grace - "for a hero who pardons is more touching than one who avenges." When the Jewish religion transcended the narrow sight of the clan - as in the Book of Ruth - it was open to praise. And finally, the Christ who had been ridiculed in some of the clandestine writings came in for dramatic reappraisal. True "theists" - as Voltaire increasingly portrayed himself from the 1750s - do not mock a character as noble and penetrating as Christ's. No one exposed the treachery of priestcraft better than Jesus, and no one practiced forgiveness more consistently than this "man of peace." When the atheist, Baron d'Holbach, ridiculed the character of Christ in Christianity Unmasked, Voltaire protested in the margins of his own copy that "the morality of Jesus was not perverse." He reproached Holbach for "exaggerating the evils of Christianity." But in a softer moment, and a twinkling rhetorical manoeuvre, he admitted that the nuclear option of atheism was a legitimate response to a theology of gleeful vengeance. Augustine and Holbach were cousins. The God who could send children to hell for the monstrous crime of entering the world is, Voltaire acknowledges, hard to believe in - let alone love. But there was another deity: a "Father" God who "lets the sun shine on the evil and the good." A God who "sets bounds" to his "vengeance." Voltaire summarized his entire project in two trademark utterances of 1776: "The superstition that we must drive from the earth is that which, making a tyrant of God, invites men to become tyrants." And more simply: "I see the mercy of God where you would see only his power." Whatever this was, it was not secularization. Mary Wollstonecraft: divine equality Faith and doubt were not foreign bodies in the Enlightenment: they were beleaguered co-workers. One final example will have to suffice. Mary Wollstonecraft is justly celebrated as an icon of the radical Enlightenment and the leading progenitor of modern feminism. Less well known is the degree to which she launched her egalitarian missiles with the same spiritual poise, the same confidence in the mind of a holy God, as Spinoza, Bayle and Voltaire. As she declared in the opening pages of _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ (http://www.bartleby.com/144/) (1792): "I build my belief on the perfection of God." Indeed, she writes: "The only solid foundation for morality appears to be the character of the Supreme Being." Schooled among rational, Dissenting Protestants, Wollstonecraft ascribed her "wild wish" of equality, her "Utopian dreams," to a creator God - giving "thanks to that Being who impressed them on my soul, and gave me sufficient strength of mind to dare to exert my own reason." Taking issue not with Christianity so much as the imperious, "impious" theology that had sanctified the miseries of her sex, Wollstonecraft declared equality an "obvious truth" to an enlightened believer. The case was theological from first to last, sometimes expressed as a prayer: "Gracious Creator of the whole human race! hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace Thy wisdom in Thy works, and feel that Thou alone art by Thy nature exalted above her, for no better purpose ... [than] to submit to man, her equal ...? Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him - merely to adorn the earth - when her soul is capable of rising to Thee?" Wollstonecraft pictured the submissive female as a stunted worshipper, bowing to the wrong god. If women were to gain "that stability of character which is the firmest ground to rest our future hopes upon," they needed to "turn to the fountain of light, and not [be] forced to shape their course by the twinkling of a mere satellite." It was a withering analogy. God outranked twittering mortals - especially husbands. A female preacher explained a life of scandalous independence with the same, brutal clarity: "I chose to obey God rather than man." As _Barbara Taylor_ (http://www.cambridge.org/au/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1700-1830/cambridge-companion-mary-wollstonecraft) has written of Wollstonecraft's theological-rational milieu: "Pushed to the limit of their revisionary potential, teachings pertaining to the equality of souls and human likeness to God offered female believers a vision of sacralized selfhood sharply at odds with worldly subordination." Indeed, she continues: "This affirmation of women's capacity to apprehend and identify with the divine, expressed in nearly all female writings of the period, was so fundamental to women's sense of ethical worth, and so far-reaching in its egalitarian implications, that it can properly be described as one of the founding impulses of feminism." _Carl Becker_ (http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300101508/heavenly-city-eighteenth-century-philosophers) characterized his sermonizing philosophes as theologians in denial, but Wollstonecraft had nothing to deny - even if her surviving husband, William Godwin, found her pieties difficult to process. Human rights were divine commands. The notion of a secular Enlightenment would have confused Mary Wollstonecraft. Religion against religion Each of these thinkers deployed resources native to the Christian tradition against what they regarded as chronic corruptions. They set faith against faith, and religion against religion. Far from denying the existence of God, each was engaged in a process that might be termed a redistribution of grace. It was a sustained revolt against a bruising orthodoxy that seemed to conflate human and divine power. The enemy was not Christianity but a phenomenon _Jean Delumeau_ (http://www.amazon.com/Sin-Fear-Emergence-13Th-18th-Centuries/dp/0312035829) has termed "Augustinism" - a "type" of religion "that spoke more of the Passion of the Savior than of His Resurrection, more of sin than of pardon, of the Judge than of the Father, of Hell than of Paradise." And if, as Delumeau suggests, Augustinism sometimes amounted to a cocktail of "Manichaeism and fear," its critics cannot be shepherded under a scornful heading of "de-Christianization." The truth may be the other way round. Clearly, any of these ideas were susceptible to "non-theistic construal," as Charles Taylor might put it. One man's conscience can be another man's cliche. Polemics may be taken up second hand. But does the history of an idea matter? Apart from the small matter of being faithful to the past, a more authentic account of the Enlightenment may arrest some of the ritual hostilities of our religious/secular discourse. Such a history may dispel a narrow rendering of modernity as a slow march from faith to secularity, and all the fatalism it entails. Secularization is an unworthy expression for men and women who were electrified by a certain perception of God, however heterodox it may turn out to be. And given the role of such "heresy" in the rekindling of missionary energies, the folly of the concept becomes even larger. The Enlightenment, as _David Bebbington_ (http://www.amazon.com/Evangelicalism-Modern-Britain-History-1730s/dp/0415104645) has shown, was a seminal influence on the rise of evangelicalism and its experiential, sensed-based spirituality. Pierre Bayle - prophet of conscience - was not only the darling of the philosophes in the eighteenth century: he played a vital role in the _emergence of Continental Pietism_ (http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-02367-0.html) . Voltaire, meanwhile, added to his scattering of liberal advocates a number of orthodox admirers. He would have enjoyed the phrase with which a _nineteenth-century priest_ (http://www.amazon.com /Religion-Voltaire-René-Pomeau/dp/2707803316) appraised his radioactive ministry: "Dieu, par une ruse diabolique, envoya Voltaire combattre son Eglise pour le regenerer." Finally, Spinoza - "the most impious, the most infamous, and at the same time the most subtle Atheist that Hell has vomited on the earth" - made good on his enduring claim that love is criticism, and criticism is love. Among his _posthumous admirers_ (http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300048971/origins-modern-atheism) was the Russian philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev, who credited Spinoza with his return to the Christian faith he lost as a teenager. A towering and ecumenical intellect, and perhaps the _single greatest influence_ (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-teachings-of-modern-orthodox-christianity-on-law-politics-and-human-nature/9780231142649) on the Russian religious renaissance of the twentieth century, Soloviev gracefully eludes the set-piece humour of secularization. Ideas that savoured of blasphemy to a dualistic, Western mind were here taken as intended. Such examples may be multiplied. Together they confirm my view that modernity is a war of religious ideas, not a war on them. The secular other is a not-so-distant relative - possibly a friend. . -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
