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ABSTRACT
From Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers to recent work on religion in the Enlightenment, it has been argued that the Enlightenment has significant religious elements, and that in many ways it represents a secularization of Christian values. This article argues that while, broadly speaking, the Christian view of the world is dualistic, the Enlightenment developed a pluralistic outlook in which values such as humanity and toleration took on a new force, and that between ages of confessionalism and nationalism, Enlightenment thought was distinguished by a more comprehensive and inclusive ideal of humanity. The article begins by looking at differences between theologically grounded religions and deism, then turns to recent historiography on the role of religion in the Enlightenment. It goes on to examine d’Alembert’s article on Geneva in the Encyclopédie and eighteenth-century attitudes towards Jews to see how they reflect contemporary views on religion and Enlightenment, and more specifically, on toleration and humanity in a view of the world that had moved beyond the dualisms of chosen and not-so-chosen, saved and not-so-saved. It is also suggested that Becker’s point in his Heavenly City is as much the difference between the loss of values reflected in the subjectivism and nihilism of his time and the assertions of objective truths in both Christian and the Enlightenment outlooks, as it is the hitherto neglected similarities between Christianity and the Enlightenment.
Notes
1 For early and eminent treatments of the relation of religion to the Enlightenment, see Becker, Heavenly City, and Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers. For more recent works on this theme, see note 9.
2 While both deism and theism deviated fundamentally from dogmatic religions, they are not the same. Theism retained the idea of divine Providence in the framework of natural religion; deism excluded it. Thus Toussaint, author of the neglected Enlightenment classic Des Moeurs (1748), was a theist, while Voltaire, who rejected the notion of Providence, but advocated a form of natural religion, was a deist.
3 Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity, 34–35.
4 It is sometimes said that Judaism does not have a theology, but only a ‘mitzvatology,’ which is to say a classification and elaboration of mitzvot, or commandments, without a ‘science’ of the divine. The emphasis is on what one does, not on what one believes or says. Be that as it may, the lack of established authority of the rabbinate in the years of statelessness gave Judaism the appearance of relative moderation and toleration in handling religious issues. The establishment of the rabbinate as part of the state authorities in Israel and the existence of parties making political use of religion appear to be reversing this trend.
5 From a modern perspective natural religion and deism are not very exciting, but they are undemanding and easy to live with. They are also central to Enlightenment historiography. Cassirer observed in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment that “Deism begins as a strictly intellectualist system; its aim is to banish mysteries, miracles, and secrets from religion and to expose religion to the light of reason” (171–72). Hazard makes deism the subject of the third book of his European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and Wade devotes the sixth chapter of his investigation of the origins of Enlightenment thought to deism in The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment. Manuel’s The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods is a judicious treatment of Enlightenment approaches to religion, and Byrne offers a cogent account of deism in his Religion and the Enlightenment, as does Cragg in his older but still valuable study, The Church and the Age of Reason, 157–62. Two more recent considerations of deism in the Enlightenment are Porter, Creation of the Modern World, 111–22, and Rasmussen, The Pragmatic Enlightenment, 166–89. For the problem of defining deism, see Lund, ed., The Margins of Orthodoxy.
6 In addition to the Manuel and Wade books cited above, see Kamen, The Rise of Toleration; Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration; and Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment.
7 On popular culture and religion during this period, see Goubert, The Ancien Régime, 261–69; Plongeron, La Religion populaire, 99–128; Mandrou, De La Culture populaire; Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe; Mitchell, “The World between the Literate and Oral Traditions,” 33–67; Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France; Payne, “Elite versus Popular Mentality”; Spierenburg, The Broken Spell, chap. 3; Garnot, Le Peuple au siècle des Lumières, 59–63; Chatellier, Religion of the Poor; and McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-century France, vol. 2, chaps. 22–30.
8 Emerson, “Peter Gay and the Heavenly City,” 391.
9 Plongeron, Théologie et politique au siècle des lumières; Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire; Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion; Aston, Religion and Revolution in France; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion; Mckenna and Albertan-Coppola, eds., “Christianisme et Lumières”; Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, xii; Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” 283–301; Lehner and Printy, eds., Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe; Burson, Rise and Fall of the Theological Enlightenment, and his Culture of Enlightening; Curran, Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment; Burson and Lehner, eds., Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe; Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment; Bulman and Ingram, eds., God in the Enlightenment; Palmer, “Less Radical Enlightenment,” 197–222; Van Kley, Reform Catholicism; Tremblay, ed., Les Lumières catholiques et le roman français.
10 Ferrone, The Enlightenment, 102.
11 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, 208.
12 Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” 283.
13 Porter, Creation of the Modern World, 99.
14 Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” 289–90. On this issue, see also Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 95; and Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment, 8 and 16–17. In chapters 1–4 of his Rise and Fall of the Theological Enlightenment, Burson argues for a modernizing theological synthesis that was primarily the work of the Jesuits.
15 Kors, Atheism in France, Epicureans and Atheists in France, and Naturalism and Unbelief in France.
16 Montoya, “From Religious Virtues to Enlightenment Virtue,” 98 and 104.
17 Aston, Religion and Revolution, 91 and 88.
18 Van Kley, “Piety and Politics in the Century of Lights,” 120.
19 See Van Kley, “Varieties of Enlightened Experience,” 278–16, and Reform Catholicism, 46–57. It seems to me that the term “reform Catholicism” has the double advantage of bringing attention to the vast of range of views, beliefs and values within Christianity, not all of them tout à fait catholiques, and leaving open the possibility that Christian thinkers and writers were drawing on submerged currents in their own traditions, and were more adapting to, than adopting, Enlightenment views and values.
20 Curran, “Mettons toujours Londres,” 11 and 26, and Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment, 7 and 17–21.
21 Van Kley, “Varieties of Enlightened Experience,” 290 (emphasis added). He uses the same formulation in Reform Catholicism, 46.
22 Lehner, “The Many Faces of the Catholic Enlightenment,” 2–3.
23 Van Kley, “Varieties of Enlightened Experience,” 286.
24 Ibid., 305–7.
25 See Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, Letters 1–4, 1–22. In his article on toleration in his Dictionnaire philosophique, 406, written some 30 years after the passage just cited, Voltaire sympathetically compared the Quakers to the first Christians.
26 It should be noted, however, that René Pomeau, the leading authority on Voltaire’s religious views, after a judicious review of the question, states: “En fin de compte, l’infâme, c’est le christianisme.” Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire, 315.
27 Boss, “The Development of Social Religion,” 577–89.
28 This point is central to Pocock’s view of enlightenment in his magisterial Barbarism and Religion.
29 Encyclopédie, article ‘Humanité’.
30 Voltaire, Candide, chap. 19. Helvétius too saw and condemned the way sugar was produced on slave plantations. See Helvétius, De l’Esprit, discours I, chap. 3, note e.
31 Mercier, L’An 2440, 127 and 260.
32 Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers. Following Molina, the Jesuits recognized separate natural and supernatural spheres, ascribing to nature right reason and intelligibility, and a significant degree of autonomy (32–34). Palmer further points out that modernizing clerics preceded Rousseau in maintaining the natural goodness of man, and that both modernizing theologians and philosophes thought in terms of a similar concept of nature, and both began to think in terms of sentiment as well as reason (39 and 50–52). In substance Toussaint’s 1748 book, Des Moeurs, used the same concepts of nature and natural law as certain Jesuit theologians, but did so without making the requisite face-saving reservations.
33 Chartier, Julia, and Compère, L’Education en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, chap. 6, and Burson, The Rise and Fall of the Theological Enlightenment, 86–90.
34 Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 30–52.
35 Van Kley, “Jansenism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits,” 302–28; see also his earlier study, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France.
36 Van Kley, “Civic Humanism in Clerical Garb,” 79–80, and “Piety and Politics,” 115–17.
37 Van Kley, “Piety and Politics,” 107. See also his Religious Origins of the French Revolution, chaps., 4 and 5.
38 Curran, “Mettons toujours Londres,” 40–59. On this point, see also Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 32–39 and 72–73. Christianity has taken on many forms and experienced many transitions, having begun as a spontaneous movement appealing to the poorer sections of an oppressed people, becoming within a few centuries the official religion of the Roman Empire, and suffering significant setbacks with the barbarian invasions. By the later Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had developed a sophisticated bureaucracy, and was soon to face the challenge of the Protestant Reformation, though it had no lack of experience with heresies before and after this period. Members of various Christian churches could find within the histories and theologies of Christianity ideas and values of the most varied kinds.
39 Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” 284 and 286; and Van Kley, “Piety and Politics,” 121.
40 Dorn, in Carl Becker’s Heavenly City Revisited, 59.
41 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 357.
42 On Newton’s place in eighteenth-century thought, see, e.g., Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 2, chaps. 3 and 4; Porter, Creation of the Modern World, chap. 6; Beer, ed., Newton and the Enlightenment; Feingold, The Newtonian Moment; Buchwald and Feingold, Newton and the Origins of Civilization; and Ilfe, Priest of Nature.
43 Newton’s data did not permit him to postulate a perfectly regular and self-sustaining system, so he had recourse to the hypothesis of periodic divine intervention to keep the solar system functioning smoothly, something that he took as an indication of divine benevolence. It took roughly a hundred years for sufficiently accurate data to be gathered that allowed Laplace’s famous comment that he had no need of the hypothesis of divine intervention to explain the working of the solar system.
44 Byrne, Religion and the Enlightenment, 29.
45 Lloyd has called a chapter in her study of the Enlightenment “In Celebration of Not Knowing: Voltaire’s Voices.”
46 Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration, 9.
47 Lehman, The Catholic Enlightenment, 48–53. Garrioch also sees an emphasis on conscience, and hence on individual responsibility, in Catholicism from the Council of Trent. Garrioch, The Huguenots of Paris and the Coming of Religious Freedom, 218–20.
48 Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration, chap. 4.
49 Locke, Letter on Toleration, 17–19. Porter calls Locke “The high priest of toleration” in The Creation of the Modern World, 106. The basic work on this aspect of Locke’s thought is Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture.
50 Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 33–37 and 53–54; 94–95; 153–56 and 234.
51 Pope, “Epitaph on Isaac Newton.”
52 Nietzsche writes of his idealized warriors released into nature: “There they enjoy freedom from every social constraint, in the wilderness they compensate for the tension which is caused by being closed in and fenced in by the peace of the community for so long, they return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters, who perhaps go away having committed a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and torture, in a mood of bravado and spiritual equilibrium as though they had simply played a student’s prank, convinced that poets will now have something to sing about and celebrate for quite some time.” Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, essay 1, part 2, 23.
53 The text of d’Alembert’s article is from Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopedia: Selections, 122–39.
54 On this article and the controversy it engendered, see Grimsley, Jean D’Alembert, 52–69; Lough, The ‘Encyclopédie’, 23, 160 and 221–23; Wilson, Diderot, 280–90; Chaussinand-Nogaret, D’Alembert, 141–56; and McNutt, The Clergy of Geneva, 154–71.
55 Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, vol. 3, 438.
56 D’Alembert, “Geneva,” 137, n. 17. Hereafter page numbers are cited in the text.
57 Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 15.
58 Wilson, Diderot, 281; Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, vol. 3, 458. Grimm’s term étourderie, suggests inattention.
59 Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 82–83. McNutt notes that d’Alembert was himself surprised that his statement had offended the clergy of the city so seriously. McNutt, The Clergy of Geneva, 162.
60 The Pentateuch, as Voltaire and others have observed, lacks a notion of the afterlife, which appears to have been acquired by Judaism either during the Babylonian captivity or during the Hellenistic period. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, the Deity of the Pentateuch is monumentally transcendental.
61 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chaps. 1 and 2. Spinoza distinguishes between real and imaginary prophecy (15), and having determined that only Jesus was a channel of ‘true’ prophecy, concludes that “the power of prophecy implies not a peculiarly powerful mind, but a peculiarly vivid imagination” (19). Imagination is of this world and not much valued by Cartesians.
62 D'Alembert seems here to be following Montesquieu who maintained that republics were feasible only in small states. See Montesquieu, the Spirit of the Laws, bk. 8, chap. 16.
63 Rousseau devoted the first section of his short book on d’Alembert’s article on Geneva to the question of religion. His main reservation was that d’Alembert had likely abused the confidence of his clerical informants about their alleged, but unavowable, Socinianism. With respect to the values of reason, toleration and humanity that characterized the practice of religion in Geneva, Rousseau was in complete agreement with d’Alembert. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater, 9–15. Voltaire agreed with both. Chaussinand-Nogaret, D’Alembert, 145.
64 Gay, “Voltaire’s Anti-Semitism,” 97–108.
65 Hertzberg, French Enlightenment and the Jews, 313. Hertzberg seems to underrate the importance of nationalism and racism in subsequent forms of anti-Semitism.
66 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 357.
67 Ibid., 367.
68 Becker maintained that the philosophes had a considerable but unacknowledged debt to Christian philosophy (The Heavenly City, 31). He asserted that beneficence and humanity “express in secular terms the Christian ideal of service” (39), and saw the secularization of Christian values in the substitution of posterity for heaven (149), and in the making of what he calls a “religion of humanity” (122, 129, 139 and 154–55). Becker also referred to the philosophes as “crusaders … for the religion of humanity” (122), and to the later stages of the French Revolution as “a religious crusade” (155). While Becker took pleasure in showing continuities from Aquinas to Voltaire, it seems that what most troubled him was the loss of values and relativism of his own time. Medieval philosophers and Enlightenment philosophes shared broad assumptions about the nature and order of the world, but from the later nineteenth century fact replaced meaning and science took the place of philosophy (20– 22). The center no longer held because there was no center. “The fact is,” Becker wrote, “that we have no first premise” (16). Arguably Becker’s point is that the break between the medieval Christian and eighteenth-century secular thought was less comprehensive than the discontinuity between those ordered and principled worlds and one that was neither. Both Aquinas and Voltaire accepted terms such as ‘Nature,’ ‘Reason’ and ‘Truth’ as valid and necessary. Writing from a postmodernist perspective, Rorty thinks that we would be better off without them (“The Continuity between the Enlightenment and ‘Postmodernism’,” 20).
69 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 57–58, 60–61, 68, 73–74 and 78–79.
70 Nirenberg points out that Hellenistic schools made use of tables of opposites in preparing arguments. Ibid., 57.
71 Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, Letter 6, 29. He makes a similar claim in his Traité sur la tolérance, chap. 5, 55.
72 The toleration and pluralism of the Enlightenment owed much to skepticism. It is not so much love of our fellowman that requires that we leave him undisturbed in matters of conscience and faith, but an awareness that we do not have the absolute knowledge that might justify interference in these areas. Appealing to uncertainty as a reason for toleration was not original with the Enlightenment. Castellio, for example, insisted on the obscurity of some passages of Scripture to deny the legitimacy of coercion where they were concerned (Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration, 117 and 126). Montaigne thought that “After all it is rating one’s conjectures at a very high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them” (Essays, vol. 2, bk. 3, chap. 11, 505). Perhaps most influentially, Locke used the argument from uncertainty in his Letter Concerning Toleration, then made it central to the epistemology of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (bk. 4, chap. 3). His narrowing of the limits of certain knowledge was followed by almost all thinkers associated with the Enlightenment. Humanity, on the other hand, provides a positive base for acceptance of difference.
73 On this question, see Schlereth, Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought; and Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World.
74 Rousseau, Letter to M. d’Alembert, 17, in which he also refers to the Athenians as “men who are totally dissimilar to us” (19).
75 See particularly Rousseau’s statement in Emile in which he recognizes the impossibility of an oppressed people frankly expressing its beliefs. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, 249–50. Rousseau also admired Moses and placed him with the great legislators of classical antiquity. See his “Fragments politiques” and Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, 499 and 956. Other Enlightenment thinkers, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, in places expressed sympathy for the Jews, but elsewhere made derogatory comments about them. As far as I know Rousseau made no such comments.
76 See, e.g., Hertzberg, French Enlightenment and the Jews, 280–308; Gay, “Voltaire’s Anti-Semitism”; Manuel, The Broken Staff, 193–201; Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, chap. 12; Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 46–53. Both Manuel and Schechter use the term ‘obsession’ to describe Voltaire’s attitude to the Jews. See also Schwarzbach, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” 27–91; and Chisick, “Ethics and History in Voltaire’s Attitudes,” 577–600.
77 Voltaire, Traité sur la tolerance, xxii, 137. Voltaire had earlier said in the same work that despite religious persecutions in Germany, England and Holland, “Jews, Catholics, Greek [Orthodox], Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Socinians, Mennonites, Moravians and so many others live as brothers in these countries and contribute equally to the good of society” (iv, 48). For other assertions of the fraternity of mankind, see iv, 52 and xxiii, 142.
78 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 355.
79 Similarly, Nirenberg refers to “D’Holbach’s call for a revolutionary emancipation from Judaism” (Anti-Judaism, 357), but may have misread the passage he cites. The call to eliminate prejudice and superstition is not intended as an invitation to revolutionary action, but rather a change in attitudes and opinions. Such changes are best effected by persuasion and education, which are non-violent.
80 One cannot deny that the eighteenth century was also a time of inhumanity with respect to the enslavement of Blacks and continuing dispossession of the first peoples of North and South America and Australia. While those with commercial interests in the slave trade and slavery, and those who stood to profit from the expropriation of first peoples’ lands sought to justify these practices, the main spokesmen of the Enlightenment, from Montesquieu to Diderot, Raynal, Condorcet and Rousseau, condemned them.
81 Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity, 258. Stuurman also points out that the Enlightenment produced four distinct discourses of inequality, 259–60 and 560.
82 Ferrone, The Enlightenment, 96 and 110. For Ferrone’s distinction between Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism, see 97–100.
83 Ibid., 96.
84 See Diderot’s brief but powerful article “Humanity” in the Encyclopédie.
85 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 350, 351.
86 Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews, 14; and Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs, chap. 16, 118.
87 Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 121.
88 Dohm, cited in Feiner, ibid., 121.
89 Mendelssohn, cited in Feiner, ibid., 125. Other historians who have noted the importance of the value of humanity in Dohm’s essay include Liberles, “Dohm’s Treatise on the Jews,” 39, and Sutcliffe, Judaism and the Enlightenment, 250.
90 Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 272.
91 Ferrone, Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, 3.
92 On this point, see Chisick, “On the Margins of the Enlightenment,” 127–44.
93 Joly, Dictionnaire de morale philosophique, vol. 1, 462–63.
94 Nirenberg’s concept of anti-Judaism is not to be confused with anti-Semitism. Nirenberg points out that the charge of Judaizing was often directed by one Christian against another. Augustine criticized Jerome for using the Hebrew version of the Hebrew Scriptures for his translation of the Bible (125–26); Luther accused Catholic apologists of Judaizing, and his Catholic opponents returned the compliment (260); Schopenhauer detected a “Jewish stench” rising from the writings of many of the followers of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel without regard to their ethnic or religious affiliation, but “because of the habits of philosophical thought” (410–11); and in Germany of the early twentieth century some academics and thinkers regarded certain more abstruse areas of mathematics as Jewish (451–52).
95 Insofar as the main Enlightenment approach to social and economic issues assumes a natural order best achieved by nonintervention, it posits greater simplicity in the structure and working of the world than traditional Jewish approaches.
96 See, e.g., d’Holbach’s L’Esprit du judaïsme. Holbach also republished Isaac d’Orobio’s Israël vengée. Voltaire did not write a book entirely devoted to the Jews, but he did spend considerable time studying the Hebrew Scriptures, wrote La Bible enfin expliquée and devoted several chapters of the Essai sur les moeurs to the Jews.
97 Affiches et annonces de Toulouse, 1781, 181. This was a widespread and popular form of philanthropy at the time, and the only unusual aspect of the story was the involvement of a formally unrecognized Jewish community.
98 Affiches et annonces de Toulouse, 1782, 158.
99 Journal de Paris, 1784, 529.
100 Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World, 8, 32 and 105–16.
101 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, vol. 1, 261. Voltaire knew his Bible, so he must have chosen to disregard the action of Pharaoh’s daughter, and the relations between David and Jonathan and between Ruth and Naomi, as well as other issues, in making this claim.
102 Becker, Heavenly City, 130 and 39, 47, 122, 129, 139 and 155–56.
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Harvey Chisick
Harvey Chisick is the author of a number of books and articles on the social and intellectual history of the eighteenth century. He taught in the Department of General History of the University of Haifa, and is currently retired. His main project at present is a book on beneficence in eighteenth-century France.