In diametrical opposition to the myth that the Middle Ages were dark and repressive is the myth that with the “Enlightenment”, so called, came an age of light, freedom, self-expression, justice, and modernity. And central to this liberation was the naming and shaming of traditional Christianity, and especially – no prizes for guessing correctly – the Roman Catholic Church. And while maybe not quite as bad as the “Papists”, the Church of England, with its rich bishops sitting in the House of Lords and well-beneficed clergy who trampled on “the people”, did not follow far behind. More laudable were the “Dissenters”, who stood proudly free from the big, oppressive denominations – Baptists, Congregationalists, some Presbyterians, and Methodists – but especially approved were the hard-working, un-superstitious, peaceful Quakers, and the rationally minded Unitarians.
Separating the Enlightenment from the Dark Ages was the “Renaissance”, the great reawakening of the Western mind from its 1,000-year-long medieval slumber. And what a star-studded era this Renaissance was, complete with giants such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Sir Francis Drake, and Shakespeare! It was also during this reawakening (the term “Renaissance” was first used in its present-day sense by the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burkhardt in 1860) that real art was rediscovered, from its lost Greek prototypes, as well as science.
Of course I am not undermining for a moment the genius of the Italian and wider Renaissance of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its brilliance is beyond dispute. But what I am challenging is its perceived surgical separation from what had gone before. And there are, moreover, two features of this Renaissance movement which sit incongruously with the imagined “liberation from the Middle Ages” ideal of the age. First, much of the patronage of the Italian Renaissance in particular came not from anti-medieval proto-secularists but from popes, cardinals, bishops, and devoutly Catholic lay patrons. You only need to visit Rome or Florence to have that plain fact hammered home. And secondly, we often forget that the “Renaissance” was deeply Christian and theological at heart, in spite of its fondness for playing with Greco-Roman pagan motifs. And that north European phenomenon which we call the Protestant Reformation, with Luther, Calvin, and Queen Elizabeth I, and then the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, were just as much an integral part of that same age as were the secular Mona Lisa, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Claudio Monteverdi’s sensuous madrigals. And as far as science goes, those inspired evangelical Catholics, the Jesuits, not only made significant scientific discoveries, but taught the new sciences in places as far-flung as Peru and China.
On a more careful historical inspection, therefore, the nice, clean break which popular mythology would have us believe took place between the end of the Dark Ages and the Renaissance turns out to be non-existent. And how does this Renaissance lay the foundations for a supposed “Age of Reason” or “Enlightenment”? The answer is simple: it does not. Just as the notion of “the Renaissance” as a historical category really made its appearance in the mid nineteenth century, so “the Enlightenment” likewise transpires to be the creation of scholars with their own cultural and usually anti-Christian axes to grind. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, ascribes the word “Enlightenment” as specifically describing the aims and methods of the eighteenth-century philosophers to J. H. Stirling in his Secret of Hegel (1865), page xxvii: “Deism, Atheism, Pantheism and all manner of isms due to Enlightenment”, and “Shallow Enlightenment, supported on such semi-information, on such weak personal vanity”.
In short, therefore, the terms “Middle Ages”, “Renaissance”, and “Enlightenment”, along with “English”, and “Industrial” and “Scientific” “Revolution”, have very little to do with the perceptions of the real people who lived in the periods to which they are applied, but are post-factumhistorians’ categories, imposed by the present upon the past. (Designations including the suffix “Revolution”, while of established usage for dramatic political events, when applied to intellectual changes were generally the invention of twentieth-century Marxist historians, for such scholars tended to interpret history as a series of clashes and turnabouts in which the radical, modern, and “freethinking” ideas overrode the more traditional and Christian to supposedly bring about “progress”.)
The “Enlightenment” age is generally thought to run from around 1650 to 1800: from the time when “science” began to replace “superstition” as a yardstick of authority. Yet when one analyses this subsequently crowned “Age of Reason”, one finds that the popularly perceived progressive versus backward, scientific versus superstitious, and libertarian versus enslaved categories dissolve away, as grand theory is corroded by the potent acid of plain historical fact. Let us start by looking at science and religion within the period, and in particular, the bogey of Roman Catholicism.
One thing that rapidly emerges from the evidence is that Roman Catholics were not only fully active in the scientific advances of the day, but many of science’s leading practitioners were in holy orders. The popes, for instance, from 1582 had maintained a full-scale, state-of-the-art astronomical observatory within the Vatican City itself. Father Christopher Clavius and several other Jesuit priest-astronomers worked there, and became pioneers of telescopic astronomy after 1610. This observatory produced front-rank published research right through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the nineteenth century Father Angelo Secchi, SJ, became one of the founders of the new science of the spectroscopic chemical analysis of the sun and stars. In the twentieth century, the observatory moved out of the Holy City, due to increasing atmospheric pollution, to the Papal Summer Residence at Castel Gandolfo a few miles away (which I have visited), although the Vatican’s main research observatory today is located under the pristine skies of the Arizona desert. Over four centuries this observatory has produced world-class science, and simply took the “Enlightenment” in its stride.
In addition to devout Catholic scientists, ordained and lay, in a variety of disciplines ranging from natural history and medicine to astronomy, physics, and geology (the Danish-born Nils Steno, anatomist, physiologist, and pioneer of fossil geology, died a cardinal in 1686), the “Enlightenment” period produced legions of sincere Christian scientists who were Protestants, some surprisingly ecumenical. One finds them in Leiden, Berlin, Geneva, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and all over Scotland. And perhaps nowhere does one encounter more Protestant Christians in science than in the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London, for from its foundation in 1660 until well into the Victorian age not merely sincerely religious, but even ordained, scientists – including some bishops and even Roman Catholics – abounded in the Society. Some held top official positions in the science establishment, such as the Astronomers Royal and Directors of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. And with the exception of the layman Edmond Halley, who held office as Astronomer Royal at Greenwich between 1720 and 1742, all four of the other men who directed the Royal Observatory between 1675 and 1811 were Anglican priests. Likewise, the professors of astronomy and experimental philosophy (physics) at Oxford and Cambridge during the “Age of Reason” were invariably Anglican clergymen, while in Scotland many ministers of the Presbyterian Kirk were actively involved in academic science. And the “parson naturalists”, or Anglican and other Christian-denomination clergymen who were noted authorities on botany, zoology, and meteorology, were everywhere. The Revd Gilbert White was a renowned example, and his Natural History of Selborne (1789) remains a classic, while the Revd Stephen Hales, Minister of Teddington, was not only an FRS and Royal Society Copley Medallist – the “Nobel Prize” of the age – but undertook, and published, fundamental research in gas chemistry, chemical statistics, and experimental physiology. Hales was, among other things, the first scientist to demonstrate experimentally the cardiac systolic blood pressure. The Oxford Doctor of Medicine who successfully treated King George III for mental illness in 1788–9, moreover, was the Reverend Dr Francis Willis, who held jointly both clerical and medical qualifications. And the next time you take an aspirin-related medicine, just remember the Revd Edmund Stone, of Wadham College, Oxford, whose researches into the “fever-breaking”, or anti-pyretic, properties of willow bark, first tried out upon his Oxfordshire parishioners, were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1763. Indeed, parson-doctors were a common feature on the British “Enlightenment” landscape, for the physical cure of body and the spiritual cure of soul were seen as inextricably connected.
Devout laymen were even thicker on the ground. Dr Thomas Willis in the 1660s (no relation to the Revd Dr Francis Willis) laid the foundation for our modern understanding of the functioning of the brain, yet saw no incongruity between his neurophysiological researches and his deep High Church Anglican faith, as we will see in Chapter 8. And even 160 years later, between 1810 and 1860, the Oxford physician and professor of chemistry, Dr Charles Daubeny, was a devout Christian and a regular attender of his college (Magdalen) chapel.
Over the years I have collected details of the names and researches of quite literally scores of devoutly Christian men of science, lay and ordained, who were active throughout the “Age of Reason”, and who saw no conflict whatsoever between their faith and their science. Indeed, quite the reverse; for many explicitly stated how they saw their science as complementing and enhancing their belief in a beneficent deity.
And I have even found a small but growing number of women, especially wives of clergymen, who had an active and intelligent interest in medicine, and often ran free – and very competent – medical services for the poor. Mrs Elizabeth Tillotson, wife of Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson FRS, in the late seventeenth century, was one such female medical practitioner. Her famous purgative ale was praised, and consumed in considerable quantities by the hypochondriacal Robert Hooke FRS, when visiting his archbishop friend in Lambeth Palace and elsewhere.
Now while there were ordained men of science engaged in the very front rank of scientific research, I am not claiming that all of them were “scientists” in the modern sense. Many ordained FRSs, rather, would have been enthusiastic scientific amateurs, and most notably, they would have been active friends of science. As such, they would have promoted scientific understanding, encouraged others to look at the stars, collected exotic creatures, maybe dissected cadavers, contrived useful inventions, conducted chemical researches, or run a free dispensary from the vicarage. But most of all, they would have seen their science and their Christian faith as melded inextricably together, and in no way in conflict. And all of this in sharp contradiction to the secular “Enlightenment” story of science needing to break free of Christianity, which we must knock firmly on the head and expose for the myth that it is.
But, you might ask, what about all those great men who strove to set humanity free from bondage and superstition during the “Age of Reason”, such as Voltaire, Rousseau, or Diderot? Who can deny the wit and brilliance of Voltaire, the seemingly deep humanity of Rousseau, and the visionary scholarship of Diderot and his Encyclopédie? But with the exception of the great scholarly enterprise of the Encyclopédie (1751–80), which would inspire Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71) and other works that aimed to marshal the whole of human knowledge for universal consultation, what did the predominantly French philosophes of the “Enlightenment” actually achieve? They certainly talked a great deal, corresponded, and published. They looked with hungry eyes at the free press with its openness to ideas in England, which the autocratic monarchs of their own countries in Europe, sometimes assisted by powerful Catholic bishops and ecclesiastical politicians, often did their best to control. For we must remember that the Roman Catholic Church was never a unified whole, and that French, Italian, German, and Spanish cardinals and their respective monarchs often politicked furiously against each other, and with pro- or anti-Vatican factions within the church. And the Jesuits were often in trouble with the “hierarchy”: intellectually radical, cleverly argumentative, and often on the side of the poor, as in Latin America, where the Jesuit missionaries sometimes championed the rights of the Indians against the new Spanish colonial landowners. For were not all people equal in Christ?
But it is probably Jean-Jacques Rousseau that most people have come to see as typifying the “Enlightenment”. Born in 1712 the son of a Protestant watchmaker in Geneva, he ran away, became a Roman Catholic, and thereafter a freethinker. Yet with the best will in the world, it is hard to think of him as other than an opportunist and a hypocrite. Starting out as a musician and composer in Paris, his charm and winning ways with aristocratic ladies seem to have obtained for him something of a livelihood. But it was his atheist friend Diderot who suggested that Rousseau should compete for the Dijon Prize Essay with a novel idea. Instead of following the usual line of going on about science and progress, Rousseau’s winning essay argued a “back to simple nature” approach. For simple folks were more “true” than sophisticates. Indeed, the idea propelled him into celebrity – and the company of even more aristocratic ladies. For was not man “born free, but everywhere in chains”, as kings, priests, and traditional Christian morality cramped our natural human goodness with its power-serving rules and regulations?
The shock waves of Rousseau’s thinking still reverberate in modern liberal society, where they have inspired all manner of movements, such as “the child is always right” educational psychology, and (mixed in with strands drawn from subsequent revolutionary philosophies) the middle-class student “drop out” culture of the 1960s, and even the anti-capitalist campsite protests of 2011.
But where Rousseau’s spectacular hypocrisy and self-conceit were perhaps best seen was in his views on child-rearing and the simple life. His massively influential educational treatise Émile (1762) advocated no school or formal education for children, but just letting the little innocents be natural in the woods and fields, for this was the logical development of the anti-high-civilization stance that had won him celebrity. And to complete his new celebrity image, the harpsichord-playing, countess-seducing Rousseau now took what might be called a “trophy” peasant mistress, Thérèse le Vasseur, with whom he had five children. Yet far from being lovingly brought up as sons and daughters of nature, nurtured in some carefree cottage in the woods, all of them were promptly dumped in orphanages, so as not to impede their father’s career as an anti-establishment, anti-clerical, freedom-loving son of nature! We will meet Jean-Jacques again in Chapter 13.
I write much about Rousseau because the myths he generated about freedom and nature went a long way towards colouring our modern-day picture of “Enlightenment”. They were also influential, after 1789, in framing French Revolutionary ideals of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”. But when the traditional bonds of French society broke down under the impact of revolution, what rapidly replaced them was not Romantic idealism and universal beneficence, but savagery, fanatical ideological intolerance, and then military dictatorship.
Yet if you look at humanitarian culture during the “Enlightenment” age, you do see genuine progress. The only problem is, as far as the standard “Age of Reason” line runs, it happened not in a secular, but in a deeply Christian, context. And it happened in the British Isles, not in France.
Take, for example, the issue of slavery, which was a trade of enormous economic importance in the eighteenth century, as black people were shipped out by the million from the Congo region of Africa to Portuguese Brazil and the British and French Caribbean. Yet the first to condemn that trade were Christian Quakers. By the 1760s a movement had begun to grow in England – encompassing Anglicans and Methodists as well as Quakers – that would lead to William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson getting the trade outlawed in 1807. Yet in the midst of the windy libertarian rhetoric of the French Revolutionary and early Napoleonic period, Wilberforce was unable to get the “Enlightenment” French Assembly to outlaw the trade in their own vessels. Indeed, in 1791, when French-owned slaves in Haiti, hearing of revolution back in France, rose in bloody rebellion against their owners and declared their own freedom, the French government sent shiploads of soldiers to put the revolt down by force – and failed. Conversely, what Wilberforce and the British Christian evangelicals did was to legally buy land in West African Sierra Leone, and found Freetown, a new settlement to which liberated slaves could be repatriated and live on equal legal terms with white people.
And was not the Methodist movement of John and Charles Wesley in eighteenth-century England a force for liberty? Methodism encouraged ordinary folk to study and propagate the gospel, empowering miners and milkmaids. It has been suggested that Methodism was one of the major reasons why French Revolutionary ideas never took much hold in England, for it gave a self-respect, courage, and campaigning Christian spirit to believers. And by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, in Nelson’s time, Methodists, Anglicans, and other evangelicals formed an influential body of opinion within the armed forces – both men and officers. Sir Charles Middleton, Admiral Lord Barham, whose global naval strategy made possible Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805, was a powerful Anglican evangelical voice in Parliament, a friend of Wilberforce, and a passionate slave trade abolitionist.
And on into the early nineteenth century, all of the great movements of social reform – from prison reform to factory reform, from the abolition of child and female labour in coal mines to movements to punish cruelty to animals – came not out of “the Rights of Man” rhetoric, but out of a Christian conscience.
So let us lay aside the myth that the “Enlightenment” somehow liberated humanity from ignorance and oppression. Great scientific discoveries continued to be made by Catholic and Protestant Christians across Europe, and the great humanitarian movements, all of which helped make the world a truly better and more just place in practical terms, were largely triggered by the Christian conscience and not by “Enlightenment” idealism.
What the “Enlightenment” really was, however, was a great elite talking-shop in which gentlemen in brocade coats and ladies in rich silks, it was said, “talked about freedom and the Rights of Man once the servants had gone to bed”!