5
In the previous chapter I confronted two of the most deeply entrenched myths that are still wheeled out with monotonous regularity to demonstrate the “backwardness” of Christianity and the “progressiveness” of so-called “Enlightenment” values. But what I shall do now is look at some of the less well-known intellectual developments that have also been seen as striking blows at the roots of Christianity.
Christ spoke to many audiences and individuals in the Gospels, including simple working folk, Jewish academics and liturgical lawyers, Roman officials, self-righteous rich men, tax collectors, lunatics, prostitutes, and thieves. And if one is not aware of the context and the circumstances of the person to whom he speaks on a given occasion, one could end up being confused, for, in most of his encounters with people, Jesus tailors his teaching to the understanding and actions of those to whom it is directed, rather than enforcing inflexible rules.
One body of teachings which had become something of a problem by the nineteenth century was that relating to eternal damnation. Was damnation for ever, or for a finite period? And was it not unfair for sins committed in time to be punished in eternity? For in many places in the Gospels, as well as in St Paul’s letters, the message comes across loud and clear that if you repent and turn to God, you will be saved, no matter how vile your former sins. Yet how does this sit with the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16? Here Jesus is approached by a self-satisfied, wealthy man requesting spiritual advice, and Jesus tells him a parable of a rich man who in life cared nothing for the welfare of Lazarus the beggar, but after death found himself incapable of repentance because he was now in hell, and no good intentions would get him out. So is Jesus saying that if you die unrepentant you will burn for evermore, irrespective of how much the scorching flames make you cry out for mercy, or how you may long for temporary release in order to warn easy-living relatives?
It did, after all, seem so very harsh, and to many Victorians in particular it was a matter for much soul-searching. When Charles Darwin’s generous and genial freethinking father, Dr Robert, died in 1848, powerful surviving strands from his old Christian upbringing, and, no doubt, the sincere Christian faith of his wife Emma, caused Charles agonies of depression and spiritual malaise, in spite of the fact that he had largely abandoned formal Christian belief by that time. Could the good Doctor be damned eternally for his honest and peaceable beliefs, and could Charles find a similar fate awaiting himself when the time came? The terrors of hell, it seemed, could still haunt those who no longer believed in it!
But why was eternal damnation more troublesome to the Victorians than to medieval people? There is no simple answer, although I would suggest that much came from the sheer starkness of a Protestant death: especially if your faith – or former faith – contained more than a trace of Puritan hellfire, which was not uncommon for many English people. For a Roman Catholic, however, be he or she medieval or Victorian, prospects after death could be much kinder. Instead of a sudden Protestant switch from deathbed to awesome reckoning before the potentially stern and searching Judge, the newly passed-over Catholic soul had more options available. There was First Judgment, in which your sins were weighed, and a sentence of purgation was prescribed in Purgatory – unless you were a manifest saint, in which case your soul passed directly to heaven to sit at God’s right hand.
And while Purgatory was not at all meant to be a pleasant place – for here the ordinary mortal burnt off, as it were, his or her earthly sins – it was not the end. After Purgatory the soul faced the Last Judgment, which would take place at the end of time. Only then would you go to heaven or hell, depending in part on how you had weathered Purgatory. If your sins had been properly and repentantly “shriven” or cleansed away, then you could find felicity with God and the saints, in eternal bliss. Indeed, not unlike the way in which an earthly prison sentence could hopefully lead a former criminal to repentance, reform, and a new life upon release.
And the Catholic Church possessed an array of spiritual instruments whereby Purgatory’s pains could be ameliorated. Gifts to the poor during life, or pilgrimage, for example, could soften impending punishment for the sinner, while the prayers of the living for the souls of the departed could help ease the sufferings of those in Purgatory. And also in the hope of warding off an uncomfortable Purgatory, rich men and women might fund schools, hospitals, almshouses for the poor, or Oxford and Cambridge colleges, to give free social and medical care, accommodation, or education to generations yet unborn. And in return, the beneficiaries would say daily prayers for their benefactors’ souls across the years or centuries to come. (Most Oxbridge colleges still say “Founder’s Prayers”, centuries after their founder’s death, and 500 years after the Protestant Reformation officially outlawed prayers for the dead.) In this way, a rich benefactor could look forward to being spiritually cleansed after death, so that at the last he or she might enter the full glories of heaven. (A beautiful practice in my view, linking the living and the dead, benefactor and beneficiary, past, present, and future, the world and heaven.)
But to a Protestant, none of this comfort was available, for the sixteenth-century Reformers had reinterpreted or dismissed those biblical passages of Judas Maccabaeus in 2 Maccabees in the Old Testament Apocrypha, and in Matthew and St Paul to the Corinthians in the New, which seemed to speak of a cleansing taking place between death and Final Judgment. Instead, so the Protestant theologians argued (at least, until the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic Tractarians), the dead went straight to an eternal heaven if they were lucky, or else to an eternal and unameliorated hell directly following their last earthly breath. And this seemed especially cruel if all you had done wrong was think honest, sceptical thoughts, while at the same time being kind and generous to others, as old Dr Darwin had always been.
Yet even after the Reformation had dismissed Purgatory and intercession for the dead as a “Popish superstition”, the ancient Christian tradition of founding almshouses, colleges, and hospitals continued. In part, of course, it was the acting out of gospel teaching that it was the duty of those who had much to give to those who had little, added to which the founding of educational charities in particular served as a useful mechanism through which the teachings of the Reformers could be securely handed on to the brightest of the next generation to establish and institutionalize Protestantism.
Coming from a separate direction, however, I would suggest that new and predominantly Protestant thinking about law and personal freedom also played a significant part in understanding humanity’s spiritual destiny. Since Reformation times, Protestant jurists and legal thinkers had discussed the problem of how far a good Protestant had a right or even a duty to rebel against a Catholic monarch. Then in the 1640s and 1650s, as the world was “turned upside down” in the English Civil War and its aftermath, all manner of radical social ideas began to emerge – all of which were based on biblical texts, teachings, or examples. As we are all the children of Adam and Eve, and all in need of redemption from sin, are not all human beings equal? This equality is in many ways implicit in the writings and recorded speeches of the radical Protestant Levellers, “Free-Born” John Lilburne and Richard Overton and others in the 1640s, and would find a more philosophical expression in the second of John Locke’s Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690). Were not humans intended by God to actively seek godly happiness and social justice in this world? Indeed, as in so many currents of thinking, it was in the Middle Ages that radical Christian egalitarianism had found early expression in England, when, in the 1370s, the itinerant priest and political preacher John Ball popularized the jingle “When Adam dalf [delved] and Eve span, Who was then a gentilman?”
Of course, on the one hand it is easy to see how this kind of thinking stimulated many new currents of ideas by 1800. It could, for instance, when robbed of its Christian spiritual dimension, be adapted to justify the secular “Rights of Man” movements of the eighteenth century. And there again, in its Christian context, it could inspire and inflame the movement to abolish slavery. For justice could be seen as possessing a human, worldly, and political, as well as a spiritual, dimension.
So when one adds this largely secular approach to justice and fairness to the growing power of the science and technology of the age, plus anti-spiritual, future-oriented physical philosophies such as positivism, one begins to see why eternal damnation came to repel so many well-meaning people. And one sees how that repulsion could help to drive one away not only from thoughts of hell, but from Christianity itself, as the old ghost of eternal damnation still haunted increasingly secular minds like that of Charles Darwin, in times of crisis or bereavement. And it still does today.