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Orthodox Religion vs. The Enlightenment

By Marco den Ouden

October 25, 2021

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Margaret Jacob is a noted historian of science and scholar of the Enlightenment. She has written extensively on Isaac Newton and the development of Western scientific thought. Her most recent book is The Secular Enlightenment (2019).

Jacob takes an interesting approach to the subject, looking at how Enlightenment ideas affected the educated classes throughout Europe, how they changed the mores and outlook of the people. She doesn’t just look at the famous figures of the Enlightenment, but digs into many of the lesser lights, the people working in the background to spread the ideas that became the foundation of Western Civilization as we know it.

What was the Enlightenment? Many people think of it in political terms with its opposition to monarchism and absolutism. But Jacob makes the case that it was much more than that. The Enlightenment was also a cultural phenomenon arising out of the scientific and political thought of the seventeenth century. It was a revolution in the way we think about the world. It was a movement that took us from religious dogmatism to a secular view of things. As Jacob points out in the opening paragraph:

The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement of ideas and practices that made the secular world its point of departure. It did not necessarily deny the meaning or emotional hold of religion, but it gradually shifted attention away from religious questions towards secular ones. By seeking answers in secular terms—even to many religious questions—it vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference. (p. 1)

Although the Western world had been moving towards secularism since the Reformation, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 “the Enlightenment built on this process and made it into an international intellectual cause.”

To be sure, religion was not completely cast aside. In fact, religion maintains a strong following to this day. But, Jacob argues, “life lived without constant reference to God became increasingly commonplace” leading to “an explosion of innovative thinking about society, government, and the economy.” (p. 1–2)

In attaching to the world, many people lost interest, or belief, in hell. Its proprietor, the devil, still haunted popular beliefs but was no longer invoked on a daily basis by the literate and the educated. (p. 2)

Jacob sets out in the rest of the book to chronicle these changes and some of the players effecting them. It is a fascinating read.

She starts out with three chapters on some of the key ideas in play. The first covers a change in the frames of reference for educated people—a shift from transcendental to physical space. “Celestial and terrestrial space were reconfigured.” (p. 6)

Imperialism expanded the bounds of spatial knowledge. From the 1650s through to the end of the eighteenth century, “travel literature, complete with engravings, told of new peoples in the Americas and Africa about whom the Bible and ancient writings had been entirely silent.”

Imperialism expanded the bounds of spatial knowledge. And a new phenomenon arose—travel literature. From the 1650s through to the end of the eighteenth century, “travel literature, complete with engravings, told of new peoples in the Americas and Africa about whom the Bible and ancient writings had been entirely silent.” (p. 10)

One of the revolutionary works of the day was Bernard Picart and Jean Frederick Bernard’s Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1724–43) (Ceremonies and Religious Customs of All the Peoples of the World). Jacob, in fact, with two co-authors, wrote a whole book on it called The Book That Changed Europe (2010). What the book did was offer an even-handed treatment of the varieties of religious experience around the world. In so doing, it subtly challenged the idea that Christianity, or indeed any religion, had a claim to truth. It was “the first attempt to relativize all religions.” (p. 13)

And, of course, the Copernican revolution challenged the celestial sphere as well. Newtonian science “ordered the heavens and made them knowable.”

Interestingly, Jacob discusses the emergence of Addison and Steele’s The Spectator on the London literary scene in 1711. It launched a new type of journalism where the reporter was a “spectator” of the world. Its métier was as “gossiper, raconteur, and man-about-town.” The style caught on and spread throughout Europe, notably in Holland and Naples to the point where “Italian bookshops, cafés, and even hat shops bristled with anti-clerical and anti-doctrinal gossip. The Inquisition barely kept up with the irreverent banter to be found in such public spaces.” (p. 18)

Besides the challenge to religious notions of space, Enlightenment thinking challenged ecclesiastical notions of time.

Besides the challenge to religious notions of space, Enlightenment thinking challenged ecclesiastical notions of time. Secular ideas on time challenged the religious view that the earth was a mere 6000 years old, having been popped into existence by the deity. Watches and clocks started becoming commonplace as new secular ideas on time arose. Punctuality became important.

The third chapter tells us how life in the eighteenth century became increasingly secular. Jacob goes into some detail on some of the personalities and influencers of the day. These spread throughout the continent as well as the British Isles. One of the hotbeds of freethought and heretical thinking was Holland.

France, still very Catholic, “was one of the most heavily censored states in Western Europe.” (p. 89) And so, the liberal low countries became a center of publishing. “We can identify a dozen French-speaking men and at least one woman who took maximum advantage of the freedom accorded Dutch publishers.” (p. 91) They took their “battle against French absolutism into an international arena.”

Pierre Bayle’s famous Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) was published in Rotterdam. Bayle not only mocked Louis XIV but also promoted the ideas of Spinoza “to suggest even atheists could be good people.” Bayle’s work later inspired Diderot and d’Alembert with their Encyclopedie (1751).

Two of the exiled Frenchmen, Charles Levier and Rousset de Missy, published what Jacob refers to as “the most outrageous text of the entire century” (p. 92), Le Traité des trois imposteurs, which “labeled Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed as the imposters and equated God with nature.” This book outraged even the Dutch authorities who seized every copy that could be found. Only two survive today. Nevertheless, the book was widely republished despite the attempts at suppression.

Despite that incident, Dutch liberality was such that “by 1700 about half the books published in Continental Europe came from the Dutch Republic.” (p. 94)

Jacob includes an intriguing account of a book merchant, the Widow Stockdorff, who specialized in “heretical, irreligious, and scandalous books” (p. 106) including pornography.

Her book bag, as well as her shopping list, when confiscated by the authorities, offer a rare window into the universe of forbidden books. (p. 106)

The widow “assembled just about every forbidden book known at the time.” Out of these banned books “came the metaphysical foundations of the human and natural sciences.”

The widow’s role in the traffic earned her two years in the Bastille, where she left behind a dossier of letters—some in her native German—that pry open a world that was trying very hard not to be seen into by the police.” (p. 106)

Jacob discusses some of these banned works, including Thérèse Philosophe, a work both pornographic and philosophical, as well as a French translation of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill.

Also among the books she sought and peddled was Le Philosophe. Published anonymously, it was “the first work ever to describe the new style of philosophizing.” (p. 107) Jacob writes that the philosophe of the book argues “that God does not exist, and in his place, one should put ‘civil society … the only deity he will recognize on earth.'” (p. 108) The book led to the practice of calling the Enlightenment’s major figures philosophes.

The book, she continues, “signaled an international cosmopolitanism, as well as an active engagement with change in the political order.” The anonymity of the writer reflected the fact that atheism was still “on the fringe, at the margin of acceptable opinion.”

Besides clandestine publishing, Enlightenment ideas—free thought, an opposition to absolutism, promotion of democratic ideals, individual rights, and an opposition to censorship—were widely discussed in literary clubs and organizations. Throughout the book Jacob discusses these groups, most notably the Freemasons. Masonic lodges sprang up throughout Europe and included such luminaries as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Helvetius and Benjamin Franklin.

Freemasonry began in Britain during the first two decades of the century. By the 1720s, if not before, it had made its way onto Continental Europe and shortly thereafter to the American colonies. Nowhere more so than in France, the masonic lodges grew in importance and provided an outlet for progressive thought and an alternative to organized religion. (p. 121)

The Catholic Church, of course, “condemned the lodges and forbade Catholics from joining them.”(p. 122) This did not prevent the number of Masonic lodges in France from doubling in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The lodges were liminal spaces where men and some women—although their membership was always controversial—could learn to deliver orations, vote, contribute to charitable causes, and meet relative strangers in an atmosphere that was solemn and at least before dinner, dignified. (p. 122)

Most importantly, “on either side of the Channel and in the American colonies, men of different religions could live, if only a few hours a week, in harmony and toleration.” (p. 123)

Unfortunately, some alleged that the lodges and “the secularism of the Enlightenment … caused the French Revolution.” (p. 121) There had been a “conspiracy to bring down the monarchy and the Catholic Church.”

The conspiracy charge stuck, and it became a steady element in far right-wing thinking well into the twentieth century. It had no basis in fact, but conspiracy theorists are seldom bothered by facts. (p. 121)

Jacob has separate chapters looking at the secular Enlightenment in France, Scotland, Berlin and Vienna, and Naples and Milan. The Scottish Enlightenment is of particular interest because the free-wheeling circulation of forbidden and banned books that thrived in Holland and Europe did not take hold in Scotland. Its cities were smaller than the European cities and hence apostasy was more difficult to conceal. It was harder to remain anonymous.

Such was the temper of the times following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that “neither Scot presbyterians nor episcopalians wanted toleration.” (p. 127)

While the Revolution of 1688–89 in England resulted in religious toleration for all orthodox protestants, the Scots marched to a different tune. (p. 127)

Jacob tells the story of one Thomas Aikenhead, a Scottish student, who at the age of twenty, was the last person to be hanged for blasphemy in Scotland in 1697. The Enlightenment in Scotland had “hesitant beginnings.”

Nevertheless, Scotland was home to five universities. Despite the repression of the authorities, “there were home-grown philosophes who took up the new science of Boyle and Newton and whose views were labeled heretical and dangerous.” (p. 129) Newtonian science made inroads in the universities. By the mid 1700s, Adam Smith, “as a professor at Glasgow, played a central role in the leading private philosophical society in the capital, the Select Society, with over fifty members.” Although they avoided discussing religion and Jacobitism (the view that the Glorious Revolution should be undone and the Stuart monarchy reinstated), “the society became a place where intellectual curiosity and debating skills could develop and mature.”

Decades later, Smith and another Select Society member, David Hume, would become world renowned. Fifty years passed from the execution of Aikenhead until the Select Society in 1751 “joined debates on largely secular topics that included the status of women, the role of militias in the well-governed state, divorce by mutual consent, the corn laws, the usefulness of dueling, and not least, the desirability of removing ‘the repenting stool’ from its central place in Presbyterian church meetings.” (p. 131)

This latter was a “public shaming” of “particularly wayward” members of the flock which “the Select had come to see as insulting and unnecessary.” (p. 132)

Jacob spends many pages discussing the Select Society and the influence of Adam Smith and David Hume as well as others.

I will not go into the discussions in the German or Italian cities except to note that despite Johann Herder’s reputation as a critic of the Enlightenment and the philosophes, he was, in fact, very much a part of the Enlightenment. He was a freemason and shared many of their views. “Herder’s embrace of a cosmopolitan and utopian order is another example of masonic language being employed to investigate the ideal of civil society.” But Herder did not believe in revolution, believing change must come from within the individual. She quotes Herder:

Every living force is active and continues active. Thus … it progresses and perfects itself according to the inner laws of wisdom and goodness, which are urged upon it and are inherent in it. (God, Some Conversations 190)

Jacob concludes with a chapter on the 1790s, the decade of upheaval and the French Revolution. This dampened the effect of the Enlightenment, but did not kill it. Enlightenment values continue today—a belief in individual rights, freedom of speech and the press, religious freedom and toleration. In a short epilogue she notes that “where enlightened principles survived the repression of the 1790s and beyond, democracy had a greater chance of emerging.” (p. 263) Unlike in Germany and Italy, “both fascism and Nazism were little fertilized on Dutch soil.”

In Eastern Europe, the secular Enlightenment continues to cast a light into the twenty-first century but battles against a resurgent xenophobia and a virulent nationalism, with fascist undertones. The survival of liberal democracy in places where enlightened thought had been weak remains a challenge. (p. 263)

The Secular Enlightenment is a fascinating book about the history of ideas and the effect of ideas on our political and social life.
 
 
 

This book review was first published on The Jolly Libertarian blog as “Book Review: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob.”
 
 

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