Spirituality and Reason

The seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation achieved its most significant victory in absolutist France. Its first notable spiritual figure was Francis of Sales (1567-1622), Bishop of Geneva, who with Jane Frances de Chantal (1572-1641) founded the Visitation Orderfor teaching girls, and who infused lay piety with a new sweetness of spirit in his Introduction to the Devout Life.

Yet like Protestantism, Roman Catholicism suffered a fundamental theological division over the roles to be assigned to divine grace and human freedom.

Catholicism was also weakened by the discrediting of its own mystical tradition, through the fall into disgrace of Miguel de Mo linos (c. 1640-97), a Spaniard who achieved a large spiritual following in Rome itself, and whose ‘Quietist’ teaching on the highest passive states of prayer appears to have dispensed with the need for conventional moral effort as well as conventional devotion. A similar dispute in France over the value of mystical religion between Bossuet and Frangois Fenelon (1651-1715), Arch­bishop of Cambrai, marked the end of the golden age of French piety, at the very time that, on the Protestant side, a more affective pietism in the hands of the pastor Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) was challenging a dry and lifeless High Lutheran orthodoxy with a new lay movement of‘heart’ relig­ion.

One body of Bohemian refugees from Catholic rule was transformed into a new international missionary movement by their Moravian bishop, the visionary enthusiast Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700-60). His Moravians stressed the need for a heartfelt conversion to faith in Christ in the emotional assurance that he had died to redeem the sinner from his sin. Zinzendorf saw the Moravians, as they spread to all the Protestant-ruled states of the Old and New Worlds, as a light to enlighten the churches on the true inner meaning of the gospel. The Moravians’ most illustrious convert was a Church of England clergyman, John Wesley (1703-91), who with his hymn-writer brother Charles (1707-88) combined revivalist preaching with the organisation of converts into disciplined ‘Methodist’ societies. At his death they had more than a hundred thousand members.

Wesley’s work was the never finished one of Chris­tianising Europe: its revivalist parallel in the Catholic countries was the equally emotive evangelism of the Passionist order, established in 1725 by Paul of the Cross (1694—1775), and of the Redemptorist order, founded in 1732 by the most influential of the Roman Church’s modern moral theologians, Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787). In central Europe, the century from 1650 was also one of Christian reconstruction.

Austrian Catholicism entered on its most trium­phant phase as the borders of Christendom moved east and south out of Hungary in the wake of the retreating Turk, whose defeat was celebrated in the architectural glories of a century of building new pilgrimage and abbey churches.

Protestant creativity achieved its loftiest cultural expressions in the Christocentric art of the Dutch Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69), and the religious music of J.S. Bach (1685-1750) and G.F. Handel (1685-1759), whose Lutheran masses and English oratorios are as untroubled as the south German baroque by the new political and intellectual challenges to Christianity from within.

These arose from those Christians who after 1600 tried to define a common Christianity above the warfare of the churches, Eke the Dutch jurist and theologian Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). Holland was largely free of religious persecution, and gave a refuge to the Bohemian bishop and Utopian educationist J.

The rationalist systems ofG. W. Leibniz (1646-1716) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754) constituted the equally orthodox first phase of the Protestant Aufklärung (Enlightenment) in Germany. The ‘reform Catholicism’ of Ludovico Muratori (1672-1750) was protected by the learned Pope Benedict XIV (1675-1758) in Italy; while in France, the self-confident rationalism of the Catholic Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was put to good philosophical use by both Catholics and Protestants, like the Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715).

But in France, there was also an undercurrent of scepticism and materialism deriving partly from classical philosophy and partly from the Catholic essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-92); and, despite state censorship, Locke’s philosophy and English Deism combined with the anti-clerical and free-thinking libertine element in the native Gallic tradition to turn the playwright and novelist Franfois-Marie Arouet, under his literary pseudonym Voltaire (1694-1778), into one of the wittiest and most devastating opponents of Christianity. Voltaire’s crusade to ‘crush the infamy’ of religious intolerance and superstition had its most celebrated victory in his vindication of the name of Jean Calas, a Protestant falsely tortured and executed in 1762 for killing his son. Voltaire claimed to be a theist. A less cerebral, more devout and sentimental Deism was propounded by the proto-romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—78), who was to influence the romantic Catholicism of writers like the Vicomte F.R. de Chateaubriand (1768-1848). But a yet more radical literary circle of material­ists and atheists formed in Paris after 1750 around the brilliant and industrious novelist, Denis Diderot (1713-84), whose editing of the multi-volume Encyclopedic deployed a vast new body of knowledge, some ofit technical and scientific, against all religion in general and Catholicism in particular.

Voltaire and Diderot exerted an enormous influence on the court circles dominated by French culture, as in the Prussia of Fred­erick the Great (1712-86) and the Russia of Catherine the Great (1729-96). There was also a more radical German critique of Christianity after 1750 in the writings of G.E. Lessing (1729-81), who edited the Wolfenbüttel Fragments of H.S. Reimarus (1694—1768), who with greater learning than his English Deist predecessors opened up the modern era of destructive Biblical Criti­cism. Still more fundamental was the attack on traditional metaphysics by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724—1804), who answered Hume’s scepticism by deriving religious knowledge not from rational cognition but from the moral imperatives of conscience. Kant was an influence on the ethical and ideafist pantheist systems of J.G. Fichte (1762-1814) and F.W.J. von Schel­ling (1775-1854). Another response to scepticism was developed by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who defended religion as a subjective sense of dependence on God, in an emotive and affective conception of Christianity drawing on German pietism and romanticism.

There were, therefore, two different legacies from the Enlightenment: a movement of ideas opposed to Christianity, and the hope of renewing the tradition with the aid of modem science and criticism. The anti-Christian Enlightenment was only dominant in France: elsewhere in both Protestant and Catholic states, it is easier to discern a current of eighteenth-century educated opinion towards a simplified, less dogmatic and more tolerant Christianity, appealing to a practical and prudential moralism and shading into Freemasonic Deism or illuminism. There were, however, signs that the centre would not hold, and that reason was parting company from imagination, and head from heart, as the extra-ecclesiastical religious fringes tended to Socinian rationalism or irrationalist pietism. The later anti-rationalist mysticism of the Nonjuring divine William Law (1686-1761), who had influenced John Wesley, was inspired by the spiritualist teaching of the German Lutheran cobblerjakob Boehme (1575-1624). Still stranger were the angelogical revelations and speculations of the scientist visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish bishop’s son with an inter­national discipleship crystallised into the New Jerusalem Church by his Methodist followers in 1787. The anti-rationalist extreme was touched by the English poet-painter William Blake (1757-1827), whose private antinomian mythology made the most powerful if inverted use of Christian symbols and ideas. The other, rationalist extreme was represented by the gifted Socinian metaphysician divine Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), the most important early English influence on Rousseau. A new Socinian ‘Unitarian’ Church arose after 1770 from the ministries of Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808) and the scientist Joseph Priestley (1733-1804).

Such ‘enlightened religion’ posed the modern Chris­tian dilemma, whether to modify traditional belief in the light of new attitudes and knowledge, and so risk the sacrifice of the essentials of the faith; or whether to reject any such accommodation and so risk identification with intellectual and sometimes political conservatism. As yet, however, this was a choice for the few, and it is difficult to relate elitist or minority movements of ideas to popular irreligion or active de-Christianisation. It has been argued that the failure of the English state to enforce churchgoing after 1690 led to a decline in ordinary religious practice, and it was the Church of England after 1750 which first failed utterly in its pastoral duty to the new urban proletariat created by the Industrial Revolution. Yet in France, there was also a decline in moral and religious discipline in some eighteenth-century cities; and in areas of rural de-Christianisation, especially in central and southern France, the tavern or Sunday labour exercised a greater attraction than the parish church. Yet the evangelistic activities of Louis Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716) in the Vendee, and the wandering career of the pilgrim-beggar Benedict Joseph Labre (1748-83), point to the vitality of the movement of Chris- tianisation; and it is in France that a modern set of sociological methods has penetrated furthest below the imposing facades of semi-uniform religious practice under the ancien regime, to distinguish the regions of lukewarm piety from those marked by a sometimes novel fervour, in patterns which became more pronounced when the State ceased to enforce church attend­ance after 1790.

There was also an increase before 1790 in aristocratic domination of the French and English churches, which contained the danger of discrediting religion by over-identifying it with a privileged social order. In Protestant Prussia, England and Scandinavia, the clergy were by 1750 primarily servants of the State, and in the second half of the eighteenth century, absolutist Catholic reforming administrations also asserted their authority over the Church to restrict the power of Rome and of Rome’s special servant, the Society ofjesus. The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764 and from Spain in 1767. Though they were protected by Pope Clement XIII (1693—1769), his successor Clement XIV (1705-74) gave way to the demands of the Catholic powers by suppressing the Society in 1773. It owed its survival primarily to the non-Catholic protection of Frederick in Prussia and Catherine in Russia, and was not restored by Rome until 1814. The popes were also buffeted by attacks from the great German Archbishop-Electors, and of their priest pamphleteer Johann von Hontheim (1701-90), who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Feb- ronius’. The Febronian demand for a greater local Catholic autonomy was given practical expression by the Emperor Joseph II (1741-90), who expro­priated monastic property in order to finance new parishes and bishoprics and so extend and improve the pastoral ministrations of the secular clergy. This Catholic reforming preference of the active to the contemplative life recurred in the amalgam of Jansenist, Josephist and Gallican proposals adopted by the Synod of Pistoia in 1786 under the aegis of Scipione de’ Ricci (1741-1810), Bishop of Pistoia-Prato, and his patron Joseph H’s brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1747-92).