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We saw above how atheism, from its classical philosophical roots, developed new strands of thinking in the wake of medieval and Renaissance Europe’s growing fascination with self-acting mechanical devices and the new scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But by the second half of the eighteenth century further circumstances were providing fertile soil for potential atheistic thinking: most notably, the increasing economic and social complexity of European society, with an expanding class of educated, comfortably off, and relatively leisured people. And then there was the growth of a large industrial workforce by 1850, with the rise of working-class political and self-help movements.
We are often led to think of the “Romantic” movement of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries as positive and life-enhancing, with its emphasis on freedom, beauty, compassion, and liberation. We tend to think of Jane Austen, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Burns, Keats, and the Brontë sisters, of polite country-house society, passionate young ladies, and maybe daffodils. Vicarages and cathedral cities play a prominent role in much of the literature of the age, while its greatest visual artists, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, depicted the English landscape – containing a good few churches – in a way that is most familiar to many people today from reproductions on biscuit-tin lids and table-mats. Real “Old England”, in fact. A time of peace, prosperity, and social goodwill to all men. An age, alas, soon to be blighted by railway trains, coal mines, and On the Origin of Species!
Yet also part of Romanticism was the ditching of traditional standards, along with a love of being outrageous and shocking: a sort of trial run for the 1960s, including a cult of youth. And one of the things that some Romantics rebelled against was traditional Christianity. A few of them, moreover, could well be considered the true founding fathers of “spoilt brat”, “me” culture. Shelley and Byron immediately spring to mind in this respect: elite young men, with private money behind them and no real need to seek paid employment, they had all the time in the world to articulate lofty disdain. And while Shelley may have laughed at the Sermon on the Mount, and derided the idea of the meek inheriting the earth, some openly fawned on the ideals of the French Revolution and even idolized the military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Generally speaking, however, they preferred to do this from the “safe” side of the English Channel – where their outrageous ideas wouldn’t get them arrested, where they were free to publish their books, and where stable banks and prosperous agriculture ensured that their private incomes were paid on time. Occasionally, though, they fled to the Continent to escape escalating debts at home.
I emphasize, however, that by no means all the great creative spirits of the “Romantic Age” were of this type. William Blake – my own personal favourite – was a working artist, engraver, and illustrator whose eccentric yet inspired Christianity suffused most of what he wrote and drew. Yes, radical Blake rightly attacked the social injustices of his day, but he also had transcendent visions of angels and saw England as the New Jerusalem:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?
And John Constable was a man of modest background whose spirit remained embedded in the traditions, folk ways, and visual beauty of his native Suffolk.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was the Romantic who most clearly declared his contempt for Christianity, although without putting his name on the title page! The Necessity of Atheism, by Shelley and his friend T. J. Hogg, caused uproar when published in Worthing in 1811. At the time Shelley, the son of a landowner and MP, Sir Timothy Shelley, was an undergraduate student at University College, Oxford, inspired by various currents of deistic and radical thinking, while enjoying an annual allowance of £200 (in itself an income that would have maintained a modest middle-class family in comfort for a year) from Dad. In short, he dismissed Christianity as lacking evidence, and while he was not saying anything that was especially novel in freethinking circles (for as we have seen, atheism was no less “old hat” in 1811 than it is today), it was the circumstances of his statement that put the cat among the pigeons.
While their tract did not carry its authors’ names – Shelley and Hogg – they did send copies to all the bishops and the heads of every college in Oxford University. And let us not forget that in 1811 Oxford and Cambridge were, legally and constitutionally, Anglican Christian universities, and to “matriculate”, or enter the academic community, Shelley and Hogg would have been obliged to swear an oath of assent to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.
In short, their Atheism pamphlet was a clear act of challenge and provocation. An undergraduate act of bravado that went wrong and got them both expelled, and which so outraged the good churchman Sir Timothy that he wrote “Impious” across his own copy of young Percy’s pamphlet. Yet it shows how widespread atheistic or “advanced” deistic ideas were by 1811 for them to have been so warmly trumpeted by a rich, clever nineteen-year-old. Even in an official Anglican institution such as Oxford University, radical ideas were clearly accessible and being openly discussed, though not necessarily advocated with such stridency, or so publicly, as by Shelley and Hogg. After all, the natural religious writings and other aspects of the philosophy of Oxford’s John Locke were normal undergraduate reading, and David Hume’s own sceptical writings of eighty years before would have been on the shelves of the Bodleian and many college libraries – not to mention the works of Toland, Tindal, and others.
Of far more powerful and enduring impact than Shelley’s 1811 Atheism squib was positivism. Drawing upon deistic and atheistic traditions going back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the perceived infallibility of the scientific method, and fuelled by the radical (and often violent) anti-Roman-Catholicism of the French Revolution, positivism was given its classic original formulation by Auguste Comte, who in turn built upon the earlier writings of Henri de Saint-Simon. Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy volumes, published between 1830 and 1842, saw objective truth as purely scientific in its basis. And as one of the major influences upon all subsequent secular thinking, Comte effectively founded what we now often call scientism – or the worship of science and the scientific method as an infallible guide to absolute truth in itself. Matter and motion were at the bottom of everything, and religion and other non-physical activities belonged to earlier and more primitive stages of human development. Truth, however, had to be positive, and amenable to physical testing by the experimental method and mathematical analysis.
As a natural system-builder, Comte interpreted human history in three great phases. Firstly there was the theological, in which human beings believed in fanciful spiritual beings. Secondly, came the metaphysical, in which philosophers studied great abstract systems of ideas: rather like castles in the air. Then thirdly, in the modern age, came the positive, or scientific. Each epoch transcended the limitations of what went before. Comte was, needless to say, deeply influenced by the extraordinary speed with which science had developed over the previous couple of centuries, and it came to be seen in radical circles as the liberator from theological and metaphysical darkness, and positive progress became the touchstone of the human condition. Science, reason, and universal laws based upon physics became the articles of the positivist creed.
Comte’s positivism would spawn a whole series of movements in the nineteenth century. One of these would be a new religion of humanity: man, the measure of all things, would become the key principle of ethics, morality, idealism, and social policy. There would even be a new positivist religion, with a priesthood of cognoscenti who would teach the principles of physical truth and the morality of being nice to people, to the hoi polloi. Naturally, this new religion, and the positivist temples through which it was hopefully to be relayed to the masses, would wholly supersede the superstition and ignorance of the Christian churches, which would die away under the weight of their own pointless mumbo-jumbo, as people would begin to see reason.
A more enduring offshoot of positivism was sociology, or the study of humanity by purely scientific, quantitative methods: were not people and human society themselves governed by great laws, and could we not restructure and improve society by applying the great principles of science to changing the human condition for the better? From religious darkness to positivist light, in fact. Many of the late nineteenth-century founders of sociology, such as Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, were influenced in their thinking by Comte’s ideas, even if they did not accept them in their entirety. Positivism, in short, was all set to become the control freak’s paradise, as a self-selecting elite of “superior” intellectuals earnestly went about their business of making the world what they saw as a better place, with the common folk following like sheep obediently behind.
Comte’s ideas, while nowhere near as widespread as they were in France, did have their followers among the British intelligentsia. And for those who couldn’t read French, Harriet Martineau translated him into English in 1853, and others such as George Lewes, John Stuart Mill, and Frederic Harrison were actively presenting his ideas to English-language readers by 1865. Comte also had something of a following among the American intelligentsia well before the Civil War, as the Anglo-American physician–chemist–astronomer Darwinian “Christianophobe”, Prof. John William Draper of New York, became his prophet on the East coast. Indeed, the arguments of the atheistic philosophers mentioned so disapprovingly in Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women (1868–9), chapter 34 (entitled “Friend”), seem to have been along German metaphysical or positivistic lines.
And how, you may ask, do Comte and his followers differ from the human clockwork of Thomas Hobbes? In fact, the two have a lot in common, given the 200 years of new discoveries that separate them: both are quintessentially materialist, and both see humanity and society as driven by unchanging physical laws or principles. On the other hand, there are significant differences. For one thing, Hobbes was writing more by way of a deductive “thought experiment” driven by geometry and logic, and there is no evidence that, as in the case of Comte, he was trying to change the world and rewrite the human condition. Hobbes, moreover, was astonishingly “democratic” or egalitarian, as his “Leviathan” or supreme ruler got the job by the luck of the draw, and not by being especially superior to all the other clockwork humans. Hobbes also, while perhaps a deist, or a rather eccentric Christian, certainly seems to have believed in God – even the God who manifested himself in Scripture – whereas Comte sees no greater being than the elite human. And very importantly, I often wonder, reading the rolling prose of Leviathan, how seriously Hobbes really took himself. How far is he, the dinner-table performer, enjoying himself in advancing an outrageous argument that he knows will delight some, while causing apoplexies in others? There are places in Leviathan where you almost catch the mischievous twinkle in his eye. Comte, on the other hand, comes over as deadly serious in his new vision of what the world will inevitably become, as science and reason sweep the demons of blind faith away. I see one man as something of a wit, and the other as an ideologue.
But all the above is very intellectual, representing the thought of highly educated figures. On the other hand, the Romantic, or English Georgian, age had its share of popular mockery of religion, which totally destroys the received image of a docile and obedient “lower orders” cowed by an authoritarian Church of England. After the French Revolution, for example, the British authorities were rightly concerned with the propagation of both subversive political and religious literature in England. The French Revolutionaries manifestly failed to practise the “Liberté, Égalité, et Fraternité” that they preached, and were often savage to the Roman Catholic Church, murdering priests, monks, and devout laity, raping nuns, burning churches, and even smashing open the royal tombs in the St Denis Basilica to drag out and destroy the mummified remains of French kings. So the British government kept a watchful eye on “Jacobin Clubs” of Revolutionary sympathizers on this side of the English Channel, along with their generally anti-Christian secularist sentiments. Yet because blasphemous pictures lacked the legal specificity of blasphemous printed text – which often made it harder to punish the perpetrators – there came into being a small yet notorious genre of potentially blasphemous prints.
Of course, some prints, and their accompanying texts, were not theologically offensive as much as laughably naughty in the twentieth-century seaside postcard sense: well-fed bishops – invariably complete with lawn sleeves and mitres – snug in bed with pretty young women, or groups of obese parsons tucking into gargantuan dinners while poor beggars looked on through the window. (And yes, some parsons were greedy; yet the historical record shows that many good-living vicars, such as James Woodforde and Sydney Smith, also gave liberally to charity, acted in lieu of a local doctor, and were popular among their people.) One instance of such boisterous anti-clerical humour is G. A. Stevens’s and T. Colley’s rollickingly funny The Vicar and Moses, published in several versions after 1782. In these pictures, the inebriate parson and his boozing companion Moses, the parish clerk, roll along laughing merrily to conduct a funeral. But, so the accompanying text tells us, the Reverend Gentleman and his clerk are so slewed that the funeral becomes a shambles (shades, perhaps, of Thomas Hobbes’s own bibulous parson dad!).
Far more vicious, however, were the prints and texts of Richard Carlile, for which he sometimes served spells behind bars for blasphemy and subversion. His An Address to Men of Science: Calling upon them to… Vindicate the Truth from the Foul Grasp and Persecution of Religion (1821) is a title that, without benefit of a second glance, could well appear on a present-day bookstand as the work of any modern Christianophobe. And Carlile’s print and text The God of the Jews and Christians. The Great Jehovah (1825) – a visual parody of the descriptions of God in the Psalms, Revelation, and elsewhere in the Bible – is so grotesque in its blasphemy that I am sure many a modern-day atheist would feel embarrassed by it. It is reproduced in Vic Gatrell’s City of Laughter (2006), page 543.
So when we look at “Romantic” era literature, from Shelley to the early positivists, to the mocking prints and texts of Richard Carlile and his radical atheist friends, what do the modern-day atheists have to say that we have not heard centuries before? Deism, scepticism, secularism, science-worship, anti-religious mockery, and self-congratulatory self-electing intellectual elites were around long before the New Atheists decided to save us from our superstitious selves.