9 The Rise of Modern Paganism?

Religion
and the Enlightenment

The greatest number still believe that the Enlightenment is concerned

with almost nothing but religion. (Johann Pezzl)

When all prejudice and superstition has been banished, the question
arises: Now what? What is the truth which the Enlightenment has
disseminated in place of these prejudices and superstitions?
(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel)

I knew a real theologian once ... He knew the Brahmins, the

Chaldeans ... the Syrians, the Egyptians, as well as he knew the Jews;
he was familiar with the various readings of the Bible ... The more he
grew truly learned, the more he distrusted everything he knew. As long
as he lived, he was forbearing; and at his death, he confessed he had
1
squandered his life uselessly. (Voltaire)

As we have seen, ‘Enlightenment’ is a term which has been de fined in

many different ways both by contemporaries and by later historians. But
nowhere is the divergence between contemporary and later definitions
wider than in the area of religion. Until recently, few historians would
have echoed Johann Pezzl’ s contemporary judgement on the centrality of
religious issues to the Enlightenment. Indeed, in the nineteenth century,
many conservative historians saw the Enlightenment as a time character-
ised by deliberate efforts to undermine religious belief and organisa-
tions. Some went so far as to link anti-religious attitudes fostered by
the Enlightenment with the outbreak of the French Revolution itself
in 1789 (see Chapter 10). This is a view taken also by many modern
historians. It is Peter Gay who significantly subtitles one volume of his
synthetic study of the Enlightenment as the ‘ rise of modern paganism’.
Similarly, Keith Thomas has seen the eighteenth century as a time of
‘disenchantment of the world’, meaning the collapse of a way of seeing

1
Johann Pezzl, Marokkanische Briefe (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1784), 174–5; G. W. F.
Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes , ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952), 397.
English version, The Phenomenology of Mind , trans. J. B. Baillie (New York and
Evanston, IL, 1967), 576; Voltaire,Philosophical Dictionary (1764), article ‘Theologian’ .

123

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124 The Enlightenment

the world as full of magical or spiritual powers and forces organising a

mysterious cosmos. Thomas argues that this change in religious values
had very important consequences. From being seen as a power moving
outside and beyond the created world, God, he argues, ‘ was confined to
working through natural causes’ and ‘ obeyed natural laws accessible to
2
human study’. While Thomas is certainly not arguing that the Enlight-
enment saw an end of religious belief, he is arguing for a radical shift
in religious conceptions from the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Nor is this perception of the Enlightenment as a time of the decline of
supernatural, ‘mysterious ’ religion con fined to English-speaking histor-
ians. Michel Vovelle has also seen a slow decline in religious belief
in the south of France, which he somewhat dramatically describes as
‘ dechristianisation ’, for which he finds evidence in the declining use of
religious phrases in wills, and declining numbers of bequests with reli-
gious objectives. In spite of the controversy his work has attracted, mainly
due to his choice of sources, it has seemed nevertheless attractive to many
because it seems to point to a connection between declining religious
belief pre-1789 and the attempts made, during the French Revolution,
both to stamp out Christian belief in France and to produce new forms of
3
‘ rational’ or ‘natural’ religion.
Gay, Vovelle and Thomas have thus all produced work arguing that
the Enlightenment saw either an absolute decline in religious belief or a
radical shift in its meaning and context. Nor is this a new view of the
Enlightenment. Genealogy for this view is provided not merely by the
conservative historians who considered the relationship between Enlight-
enment and revolution in the previous century. It is also supported by the
contemporary analysis of the impact of the Enlightenment on religion
by the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770 – 1831), many of
whose arguments on this point are also adopted by Horkheimer and
4
Adorno’ s Dialectic of Enlightenment in the twentieth century. Hegel’s
analysis pinpoints religious issues as indicative of fundamental shifts
in Enlightenment thought. For Hegel, the Enlightenment, especially in
France, was an inherently religious movement, where the philosophes
‘ carried out the Lutheran Reformation in a different form’. For him,
both Reformation and Enlightenment were contributions to the same

2
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and
Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1983), 640, 659.
3 e
Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIII siècle: les attitudes
devant la mort d ’ après les clauses des testaments (Paris, 1973).
4
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1972).

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 The Rise of Modern Paganism? 125

objective, that of human spiritual freedom: ‘What Luther had initiated in

the heart was freedom of spirit.’ Nonetheless, Hegel argued that the
Enlightenment had mistaken its path, in arguing that faith should be
assessed by rationality. Hegel is also concerned that attacks by philosophes
on the reality of spiritual experience also rely on the view that all real ideas
ultimately come only from sense experience. For Hegel this meant that
the Enlightenment, instead of completing its historical mission to com-
plete the Reformation, was in severe danger of destroying faith altogether.
In doing so, it would, according to Hegel, be destroying a crucial aspect of
man’s self-knowledge, its relation to the absolute and the spiritual:

Formerly, they had a heaven adorned with a vast wealth of thoughts and imagery.
The meaning of all that is hung on the thread of light by which it was linked to
that of heaven. Instead of dwelling in this world, presence, men looked beyond it,
following the thread to an other-worldly presence, so to speak. The eye of the
spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world; and it has
taken a long time before the lucidity which only heavenly beings used to have
could penetrate the dullness and confusion in which the sense of worldly things
was enveloped, and so make attention to the here and now as such, attention to
what has been called ‘experience ’, an interesting and valid enterprise. Now, we
seem to heed just the opposite: sense is so fast rooted in earthly things that it
requires just as much force to raise it. The Spirit shows itself so impoverished
that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mouthful of water, it seems to
5
crave for its refreshment only the bare feelings of the divine in general.

Furthermore, Hegel alleged that the Enlightenment failed to produce any

set of beliefs which could possibly replace religious faith. Enlightenment
had in fact, he thought, changed the grounds of debate about religion
away from questions of religious/theological truth , which obsessed the
Reformation era of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to become
equally obsessed with the utility of religion, in the sense of providing
social stability. Alternatively, according to Hegel, the Enlightenment
simply saw religion as an outcrop of other phenomena such as the laws
of nature, which were knowable by man. In any case, religion ceased to
have an independent status as relating to a world of faith only partially
knowable by man, and became totally assimilated to human needs and
human understanding. Once man became an end in himself, as Hegel
alleged he was in Enlightenment thought, once he lost religious aspir-
ation, then he became trapped in his own solipsism, unable to judge
himself aright, or to form non-utilitarian ties to other human beings.
Thus Hegel, like Kant, saw the Enlightenment as an uncompleted

5
Quotation from Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), 5.

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126 The Enlightenment

project for intellectual and spiritual freedom. But for Hegel, the
Enlightenment had betrayed itself, left unfulfilled its religious mission,
because of the nature of the image of man which it produced, which
emphasised human autonomy and self-sufficiency.
6

These views of the relationship between Enlightenment and religion

have been enormously in fluential. Nor was Hegel’s view of the religious
thought of the Enlightenment without considerable substance, especially in
the case of France. Religious movements such as Deism, especially strong
in Britain and France, denied that man could gain any knowledge of the
creator apart from the mere fact of ‘his’ existence. Writers such as Voltaire
alternately crusaded against all organised religion, or argued that religious
observance was only to be tolerated because of its utility in producing social
stability, not because its claims were actually true. Materialists such as
Julien de La Mettrie (1709 –51) argued in his L’homme machine of 1747 that
there was no such thing as a soul, and that all knowledge came ultimately
7
from sense impressions of the surrounding physical world. Men, the
Baron d ’Holbach argued in another notoriously materialist treatise, the
Système de la nature (1771), should abandon religion completely, to recon-
8
cile themselves with ‘nature’ . And again, economic thought in the
Enlightenment in the works of such men as Adam Smith did define
individuals as autonomous seekers of self-interest rather than of salvation.
However, our picture of the Enlightenment as ‘modern paganism’
starts to become considerably more complex once we abandon this focus
on the small group of determinedly anti-religious thinkers who are almost
con fined to the French Enlightenment. As we have already seen, thinkers
of the stature of Hegel saw the Enlightenment as a movement which
could not be understood except within religious categories, however one
assesses his claim that the Enlightenment had betrayed man ’ s religious
nature. In fact the Enlightenment produced a wide variety of responses to
organised religion, ranging all the way from violent Voltairean hostility to
religion, through to attempts to bolster orthodox belief by demonstrating
its rationality and accordance with natural law. The century can also be
seen as one of great religious creativity, even creating the characteristic
and new religious idea, that of toleration, which was possibly its most

6
This analysis is considerably indebted to Lewis Hinchman, Hegel’s Critique of the
Enlightenment (Gainesville, FL, 1984), chapter 5. See also H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘ The
Religious Origin of the Enlightenment’, in his Religion, Reformation and Social Change , 3rd
edn (London, 1984).
7
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’homme machine (Paris, 1747), ed. Paul Laurent Assoun
(Paris, 1981).
8
Paul-Henri Thomas d’Holbach, Système de la nature ou des lois du monde physique et du
monde moral (Paris, 1769).

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 The Rise of Modern Paganism? 127

important legacy to succeeding centuries. The Enlightenment saw not

only attempts to stabilise orthodox belief by demonstrating its accept-
ability to human reason, but also powerful religious movements, such
as English Methodism, the ‘ Great Awakening’ in the North American
colonies, the rise of the mystical sect known as Hassidism within Polish
Judaism, and the Pietist movement in the German states, which all
emphasised a personal and emotional faith. Religious controversy within
Christianity and Judaism also had a powerful reciprocal impact on the
development of historical scholarship in this period, involving a complete
reworking of thinking about the historical development of human society.
At the same time, Deism, the belief that little or nothing could be known
about the creator except the fact of his existence as a precondition for that
of the workings of the natural laws governing the cosmos, posed in an
acute form the relationship between science and religion. The century
was one of powerful multivariant religious debate and innovation, which
certainly cannot be encapsulated in Voltaire’s famous battle-cry of Ecra-
sez l’ infâme: wipe out the infamy of organised religion.
Let us turn first to that most characteristic Enlightenment idea: that of
the importance of religious toleration. Though some voices had been
raised, particularly in England and France, in the seventeenth century on
the side of toleration, it was to be the eighteenth century which saw the
determining debates and decisions on this issue. Indeed, in terms of
religion, the century of the Enlightenment can be seen as framed by
two important measures for toleration: in 1689 the English Parliament
passed the Toleration Act in Great Britain, which greatly decreased
(without altogether removing) legal penalties against those who did
not subscribe to the Church of England, especially Catholics and Dis-
senters. In 1787, the monarchy in France issued decrees allowing limited
toleration and some lessening of civil disabilities to Protestants. In
between these two decrees lay a long period of struggle and argument
over the issue.
Why should the issue of religious toleration have aroused such strong
passions, and such continuous debate in the Enlightenment? This
happened to a large extent because the Enlightenment was also heir to
the Reformation in a different sense from that understood by Hegel. It
was the heir not only to its potential legacy of intellectual freedom, but
also to the military and political con flicts which had been aroused by
Luther’s attempts to reform the Catholic Church in the sixteenth cen-
tury. From the sixteenth century until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,
states whose rulers were of opposing religious convictions had fought
each other, at least partly to impose their religious convictions on their
opponents. At the same time, as con flict broke out between states,

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128 The Enlightenment

religious dissent proliferated within states. Catholic states, such as

France, produced embattled Protestant minorities. Protestant states,

such as England, persecuted Catholics, and faced a proliferation of

mutually hostile Protestant sects within their own borders. Such internal

religious con flict was fertile ground for foreign intervention. In both the
Protestant and Catholic camps it was widely held that error had no rights,

and that those who held religious views which differed from those of the

reigning monarch were disloyal subjects whose very existence challenged

the unity and stability of state and society. To a large extent, the Enlight-

enment’s attempt to come to grips with the issue of toleration was also an

attempt to confront its immediate past and to in fluence future outcomes.

Enlightenment thinkers grappled with a past full of religious intolerance

with the same urgency that the late twentieth century grappled with the

issues raised by the Holocaust.

Some of this began to change when Westphalia brought to a close a

prolonged period of warfare in Europe, known as the Thirty Years’ War,

some of whose most important causes were to be found in hostility

between Catholic and Protestant states. The year 1648 saw the end of

war between states with the objective of enforcing religious allegiances.

Some rulers still were to attempt to impose religious uniformity within

their own borders, for, of course, the prolonged religious con flict before
1648 had not produced religious homogeneity within any state. But

the changed international situation meant that the confessions and the

dynasties were no longer so embattled over the religious issue. In the

eighteenth century, states were increasingly faced with real decisions

as to whether to continue to strive for confessional uniformity within

their own borders, or whether to tolerate religious diversity, and, if so,

to what extent. At the same time, a rising tide of opinion looked back

with revulsion at the devastation and chaos caused by religious con flict
between and within states in the past. Was con flict and instability too

high a price to pay for religious uniformity? Increasingly, it was also

pointed out that religious belief could not in any case be compelled.

Religious belief was increasingly seen as something that should not

dominate man like a foreign power, but freely arise from interior forces

such as conscience and reason. Thus attempts to impose uniformity by

force were nonsensical.

Nonetheless, in spite of this rising tide of opinion in favour of religi-

ous toleration, manifested for example in Voltaire’s 1763 Traîté de la

tolérance, it was not easy for many rulers to take decisive steps towards
legally implementing it. Religious toleration, which seems so obviously

acceptable to us, in fact raised many issues about the nature of state

and monarchy, which were not easy to resolve. The victory for religious

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 The Rise of Modern Paganism? 129

toleration was thus not immediate or speedy, as the gap of a century

between the Toleration Act in Britain and the Toleration Decrees in
France should remind us.
For many, toleration posed as many problems as it answered. How
could subjects of a faith different from that of the ruler or the established
church be seen as truly loyal? How could they take binding oaths?
How far would the extension of religious toleration change the nature
of state and monarchy? This was a particularly important question at a
time when the great majority of states were governed by monarchies
whose legitimacy stemmed at least in part from their claims to allegiance
to a particular church. To give only a few examples, the French monarch,
whose subjects included a sizeable number of Protestants, took a coron-
ation oath to extirpate heresy. The English monarch was secular head
of the Church of England. The King of Prussia was summus episcopus of
the Lutheran church. Thus, at stake in the struggle for state-supported
religious toleration was a transition from the idea of a monarchal state
as necessarily involving also a uniform community of believers, to the
idea of an impersonal state where religious loyalties could be separated
from loyalty to the state itself: in other words, the transition from a
distinctively ancien régime political order to one more typically modern.
This was not a particularly attractive option, for example, for a ruler like
Maria Theresa of Austria who saw her role as that of acting as a speci fic-
ally Catholic monarch and was willing to deport many thousands of her
Bohemian Protestant subjects in order to work still towards the creation
of a uniformly Catholic state.
This was an issue about which there were thus great variations of
viewpoint. Maria Theresa and her son and successor Joseph II, for
example, held strongly opposing views on the issue of toleration, views
which re flected different ideals about the nature of a modern polity,
and thus of the role of the ruler. Joseph wanted to be able to de fine his
subjects apart from their religious allegiance; Maria Theresa looked for a
polity which still had something to do with the ideal of a uni fied Chris-
tendom which the Reformation had broken down. Opposing each other
9
here were two different world views. Each possessed valid arguments;
neither of them was negligible.

9
Joseph II wrote to Maria Theresa in June 1777,‘with freedom of religion, one religion
will remain, that of guiding all citizens alike to the welfare of the state. Without this
approach we shall not save any greater number of souls, and we shall lose a great many
more useful and essential people.
’ A. von Arneth, Maria Theresa und Joseph II: Ihr
Correspondenz (2 vols., Vienna, 1864), II, 141
–2.

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130 The Enlightenment

Thinking about toleration thus did not have foregone conclusions.

While Maria Theresa (1717 – 80) and Joseph II (1741 – 90) struggled over
the issue, their contemporary Frederick II (1712 – 86) of Prussia, who
came to the throne in 1740, the same year as Maria Theresa, adopted a
quite different line. In spite of the fact that Frederick was summus episco-
pus within the majority Lutheran church in Prussia, he established pol-
icies of wide religious toleration within his kingdom, immediately on his
accession. Frederick defined his functions as holding the ring between
the many different religious groups in Prussia, to the extent of even
allotting state funds for the building of a new Catholic Cathedral in his
capital city, Berlin, in 1747. Heresy enquiries and public exposition of
theological controversy were forbidden. In 1750, a revised General Priv-
ilege and Regulation for the Jews in Prussia increased Jewish rights,
though not to the level of full toleration, though they were given the right
to be tried by their own laws, and given the possession of their own
schools, cemeteries and synagogues. Religious toleration was enforced in
the Prussian army. As Frederick – who was personally an unbeliever –

put it in a famous letter of June 1740: ‘All must be tolerated ... here
10
everyone must be allowed to choose his own road to salvation. ’

Why was Frederick’s reaction so different from that of Maria Theresa?

Can we find the answer to this simply in the political context of his
kingdom? His territories were certainly, from 1740 until at least the
mid-1760s, being continually expanded, not only by warfare but also
by a continuous process of exchange and negotiation aimed at bringing
together widely scattered territories in as united a territorial bloc as
possible. Frederick was also recruiting skilled labour from all over
Europe to aid the economic and industrial development of Prussia. To
enforce religious uniformity in all these circumstances would have been
very dif ficult.
But arguments for toleration based on its economic utility or political
convenience, strongly though they were made, are not enough to explain
differences in attitudes between rulers on this issue. The argument for
toleration on economic grounds seemed overwhelming to Joseph II, and
was undoubtedly accepted by Frederick the Great; it did not impress
Maria Theresa enough for her to cease large-scale state persecution of
Protestants residing in Bohemia and in Hungary. Nor is it other than mis-
leading to draw distinctions between Catholic and Protestant rulers on
this issue. If Maria Theresa persecuted non-Catholics, non-Protestants
certainly did not gain full equality of status and rights (though they were

10
Quoted in H. W. Koch, A History of Prussia (London, 1978), 41.

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 The Rise of Modern Paganism? 131

usually less dramatically mistreated), in any majority Protestant state,

apart from the British North American colonies, which had no estab-
lished state church, and possibly in the Netherlands. Everywhere, Jews
laboured under more disadvantages than did their Christian neighbours
of any denomination. In fact, Frederick’ s view in Prussia that all sects
would be tolerated, as long as they made no special claims, was highly
unusual in the eighteenth century. It pointed the way in which Freder-
ick ’s monarchy showed a more rapid evolution away from traditional
models than any other, with the possible exception of the British. In
religious terms, this meant that Frederick explored, perhaps more thor-
oughly than any other ruler, the freedoms conferred by the ending of
interstate confessional warfare at the end of the seventeenth century.
The religious denominations themselves also had to explore this new
situation. After 1648, it was not only international con flict over religion
that began to die down; so did, though with some important exceptions,
internecine conflict between the sects. Over a hundred years of con flict
since Luther had demonstrated to many the impossibility of convincing
others of religious truths by appeals either to the authority of the
churches, or to revelation: supernatural knowledge of things spiritual
which could only be told to men by God through specially chosen human
channels such as the prophets. Many in all religious denominations
became anxious to construct a version of their faith which could be
apprehended by human reason, which would thus be accessible to all
men alike, and should thus convince without the need to resort to force.
It is no accident that in 1695, John Locke should publish a book entitled
The Reasonableness of Christianity.
Behind the push to construct a ‘ reasonable ’ Christianity lay the hid-
eous memory of sectarian strife, often accompanied by threat of social
revolution, which had been so prevalent in the seventeenth century.
There were continuous, sporadic outbursts of religious hostilities within
states, even in the eighteenth century itself. Protestants in Lithuania were
persecuted by their Polish rulers in the 1720s. Protestants in Hungary
and Bohemia were harried. There were renewed outbursts against Prot-
estants in France from the 1740s at least until the famous Calas and
Sirvin cases of the mid-1760s. The drive to construct a ‘reasonable ’

version of Christianity was fuelled by those outbursts as much as by the

11
memories of the preceding century.
But ‘reasonable Christianity ’ also brought along new problems of its
own. If Christianity was to be recast in a form which any rational person

11
D. Bien, The Calas Affair: Reason, Tolerance and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse
(Princeton, NJ, 1960).

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132 The Enlightenment

could accept, what happened to the status of the Bible, so full of the
irrational, and of the personal testimony of the prophets and apostles,
who had certainly not received the revelation of ‘ a new heaven and a new
earth ’ through rationality? What happened to apparently irrational occur-
rences, such as the miracles performed by Christ which overturned the
laws of nature? Thus a questioning of the status and authority of the Bible
was to be a major – if unintended – by-product of the attempt to establish
‘ reasonable ’ Christianity.
The attempt to downplay revelation in favour of reason also had other
consequences. Revelation was, by de finition, that which Christianity did
not share with other faiths. As the century progressed, and knowledge
of other religions grew, it was increasingly and unforgettably realised
that much of what had been seen as speci fic to the Christian religion
had in fact many analogues in other faiths. Legends of a great flood, for
example, appeared in many oriental cultures without historical links
12
to Judaism or Christianity. Increasing interest in other religions was
also to lead to the study of religion as a human creation, rather than a
revelation by the Divine of itself. This new focus is revealed, for example,
in David Hume’ s 1757 Natural History of Religion, and in the growing
interest throughout the century in what we would now call the field of
‘ comparative religion ’. Voltaire’ s theologian was not a unique figure in
the Enlightenment; nor was his increasing uncertainty surrounding the
status of Christian belief in relation to that of other religions unique.
If the new field of the study of comparative religion was unsettling,
science itself sent ambiguous messages into the religious thinking of the
Enlightenment. For centuries it had been customary to point to nature
and to cosmology as evidence of God ’s power and benevolence. The
earth had been created, it was argued, as a benevolently ordered habitat
for man, who had the right to control and exploit other created beings
13
in his own interest. Astronomical work in the sixteenth century by
Copernicus and Kepler, however, had demonstrated that far from being
the stable centre of the cosmos, planet earth revolved around a sun and
was itself only one of many planetary systems.
In 1687, Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) published his Mathematical Prin-
ciples of Natural Philosophy . In spite of its difficult mathematics, this work
had tremendous impact throughout the Enlightenment, as it seemed to

12
Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CT, 1977); P. J. Marshall,The
British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1970); G. R. Cragg,
Reason and Authority in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1964).
13
K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London, 1983).

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 The Rise of Modern Paganism? 133

provide a basis for answering the question of what sort of interest God
actually displayed in his creation. Did he intervene daily in the lives of his
chosen, as the Old Testament seemed to imply? Or was his interest far
more remote, or non-existent? Newton himself portrayed an ordered
cosmos subject to mathematical laws, not only originally set in motion
by its creator, but also requiring considerable intervention from him to
correct irregularities and supply energy. The cosmos, as Newton origin-
ally envisaged it, could be seen as a vast proof both of God ’s existence,
and of his continuing concern at least for his physical creation, if not in
the day-to-day doings of men.
Many of Newton ’s popularisers, whose work reached an audience far
larger than did Newton’ s original text, interpreted the Mathematical
Principles as showing God ’s distance from his creation. Newton ’ s work
thus was used in ways far removed from his original intentions, to
support those whom the century called Deists, who believed in God only
as the creator of the universe, a Being thus virtually equivalent to the
laws of nature itself. Such a God displayed no interest in the moral
14
choices of men, but existed only as a First Cause. Meanwhile, the Scots
historian and philosopher David Hume pointed out that the existence of
the order of nature, or of the laws of the cosmos, did not necessarily
betray anything about the nature of its creator, or indeed that there had
been a creator at all. However, this eminently logical conclusion was
accepted by relatively few people. While popularisations of Newton ’ s
work received a much larger audience throughout Europe and the Amer-
icas, and undoubtedly provided fruitful ammunition for doubters and
Deists, most eighteenth-century people still believed in the idea of the
earth and the cosmos as created by a benevolent God as a suitable habitat
for man. Paradoxically, as the century drew to a close, and well into
the next, a favourite argument for the existence of God, especially in
Protestant countries, continued to be the ‘order and contrivance’ of
nature. In this, as in much else, science sent contradictory messages into
Enlightenment religious development.
Nor was this confusion unique to this particular area of the religious
thought of the Enlightenment. Older, orthodox beliefs and Enlight-
enment speculation sat uneasily side by side in the minds of many.
Throughout the century, while philosophes preached the natural goodness
and perfectibility of man, orthodox theologians continued to emphasise
his innate sinfulness, due to the sin of Adam, and to thunder about the

14
P. Gay, Deism: An Anthology (Princeton, NJ, 1968).

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134 The Enlightenment

15
divine retribution which would surely follow sinners after death. The
problem raised here was a deeper one than that of maintaining clarity in
the mind of the average believer. It returned to a central tenet of the
Christian religion, the divine nature of Christ, and the necessity for his
sacri fice on the Cross to redeem man from the sinful condition into
which Adam ’ s disobedience had thrown him. If man was not in fact
innately sinful, what need to believe in Christ?
At the same time, belief in Christ ’ s divinity was coming under attack
from another quarter. Proof of his divinity was held to be the miracles
which Christ performed, and which were attested to in the Gospels. Such
miracles, such as the raising of Lazarus from the dead, or the changing of
water into wine at the wedding at Cana, or the very Resurrection itself, all
involved an overthrow of the laws of nature, those very laws of nature
which many in the Enlightenment were so eager totally to identify with
God. David Hume’ s 1748 Essay on Miracles, published six years after
Dublin audiences flocked to the first performance of Handel’s Messiah
which celebrated the miraculous birth and Resurrection of Christ, laid
much of the groundwork for subsequent controversy, together with
Voltaire ’s 1765 Questions sur les miracles. A Newtonian view of the laws
of nature brought into doubt the likelihood of miracles actually occur-
ring. Hume also pointed out that the ‘ evidence’ for the miracles of
Christ having occurred lay with the allegedly eyewitness accounts in the
Gospels, and that eyewitness accounts were often the least reliable of
all forms of evidence. How could the reliability of the Gospel witnesses
be assessed, he asked, if there are no contemporary analogues to the
events they relate? Certainly there was no contemporary analogue for the
most important miracle of all, the Resurrection. Hume also pointed out
that while human testimony might be a necessary part of establishing
the credibility of miracles (otherwise we would not even know of their
existence), human eyewitness testimony was not suf ficient to lend cred-
ibility to accounts of events that were contradicted both by the laws of
nature, and by present-day human experience.
Debates on the nature of historical knowledge and its relationship
to religion also entered the fray. German philosophes such as Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 81) and, most famously, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762 – 1814) pointed out that historical study could only show ‘ what

happened ’, not the ethical meaning or rational status of events. Because

of this, they argued, the historical data in the New Testament were

15
John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among
Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981); C. McDonnell
and B. Long, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT, 1988).

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 The Rise of Modern Paganism? 135

insufficient to establish its status as revelation. At the same time, histor-

ians in the eighteenth century increasingly abandoned the medieval and
Renaissance view of history as by de finition the story of the working
out of divine intentions in the ‘ theatre of the world ’ inhabited by sinful
humans. They came much closer to the view of history espoused by the
Neapolitan historian Giambattista Vico that history should be seen as the
story of man’ s own capacity for progress. Edward Gibbon (1737– 94),
for example, was to provide in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776, Chapter 15), a famous account of the rise of early Christianity as a
purely human organisation, whose development could be understood in
exactly the same terms as those of the Roman Empire itself.
Miracles thus became an increasing target for anti-religious thinkers
like d’ Holbach. The miracle stories were easily attacked as belonging to a
long line of priestly confidence tricks on an ignorant and credulous
people. For those in fluenced by the work of Newton, or who wished to
construct a ‘reasonable ’ religion, miracles were also a problem: why
should God have wished to disrupt his own natural and rational laws?
None of this made the status of central Christian beliefs any more secure
among those of the educated classes who were aware of these debates,
though they probably had little impact on the mass of ordinary believers,
particularly in Catholic countries; nor was it the intention of the philo-
sophes to destroy what they saw as the simple (and socially necessary) faith
of their social inferiors, by diffusing their own rational enquiries too far
down the social scale.
Nor was all Enlightenment questioning of religious teaching based on
simple logical enquiry. At times, events focussed minds on particular
issues which had always been problematical in Christian teaching.
One such ‘ focussing moment’ occurred in 1755, when an earthquake,
followed by a tidal wave, killed more than 10,000 people in the city of
Lisbon and reduced most of the city to ruins. How, asked Voltaire and
many others, could this event be reconciled with a conception of God as
a loving or omnipotent creator? How could God have permitted such a
misfortune to occur to so many people? The problem of the existence
of evil was hardly new in the eighteenth century. But what the Lisbon
earthquake did was to focus minds on the discrepancy between the
existence of evil and of unmerited misfortune, and the increasing opti-
mism taught by many Enlightenment thinkers. This ‘ optimism ’ had
become so prevalent that the philosopher Leibniz had coined the new
term ‘theodicy ’ , to describe the repeated attempts to ‘solve ’ the problem
of evil, or provide an explanation of its existence consistent with the
possibility of a ‘ reasonable ’ religion and of a benevolent and omnipo-
tent creator. By 1759, Voltaire, in his signi ficantly entitled Candide or

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136 The Enlightenment

Optimism , was able mercilessly to satirise Leibniz in his character of

16
Dr Pangloss, who believes that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds ’.
Such a change from optimism could only destabilise Christian belief
even further.
There were many different responses to these problems. One way out
was Deism, with its total hostility to revelation. Another was to reject
the attempt to make Christianity ‘ reasonable ’, and return to a view of
religion which emphasised faith, trust in revelation, and personal witness
to religious experience. In this way came much impetus for the new
‘ enthusiastic’ religious sects, such as Methodism, which broke away from
Anglicanism in England, and the religious revival known as the ‘ Great
Awakening’ in the North American British colonies. Much the same
original impulse lay behind the movement known as Pietism in North
17
Germany.
In looking at Pietism, we are looking at the way in which religious
issues could move far beyond the polite discussions of elites, and have
dramatic effects on society and government. Pietism was a movement of
religious revival which swept through the Protestant states of Germany in
the aftermath of the Thirty Years ’ War, which Pietists saw as a terrible
punishment for sin inflicted by God on Germany. Its founders empha-
sised an idea of personal religious experience far removed from contem-
porary attempts to create a ‘ reasonable Christianity’ . The early Pietists
were concerned to work within the Lutheran church for its reform. For
them, the struggles over religion since the early sixteenth century had
resulted in Lutheranism paying too much attention to the reform of the
church, and too little to the issue of how the church might reform the
world. While many German princes viewed the movement with hostility
because of its capacity to create religious disturbance in society, and to
upset their modus vivendi with the Lutheran church, the ruler of Prussia,
Frederick William I (1688 –1740), welcomed the movement with open
arms. The Prussian Elector saw how to use Pietism ’ s enthusiasm for the
reform of the world, which was channelled in Prussia into dedication to
serving the poor and serving the state. In Prussia at least, Pietism was not
merely a vehicle for ecstatic religious witness and the awaiting of the
Second Coming of Christ, but an active social and political force. Fred-
erick William used Pietism to drive a wedge into the formerly strong links
binding the Lutheran church in Prussia to the Estates, or representative

16
François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire,Candide ou l ’optimisme (Paris, 1759).
17
The following discussion of Pietism owes much to M. Fulbrooke,Piety and Politics:
Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Württemberg and Prussia (Cambridge,
1983).

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 The Rise of Modern Paganism? 137

bodies of the nobility, many of which were opposed to his plans for

centralisation and reform. The Elector handed over the control of edu-

cation and of other institutions formerly dominated by orthodox Luther-

ans to known Pietists. Pietism, as Fulbrooke has argued, thus became a

powerful force enhancing the power of the ruler over the social elites and

the Lutheran church, and providing a powerful impetus for cultural unity

in Prussia’s divided lands. The spread of Pietism’s ideas of service to

others and to the state was crucial to the conversion of the Prussian

nobility into a court-orientated service bureaucracy, without which Prus-

sian absolutism could not have emerged or functioned.

This also means that even for a new and active sect such as the Pietists,

the impact of their religious beliefs cannot be read off from their dogma

alone, but was altered by the social and political context in which they

operated. What was an ecstatic, emotional, socially disruptive sect in

Württemberg was an organised force in the service of the state in Prussia.

It is also important to note that in the Enlightenment almost all major

faiths developed internally generated reforming movements. Where

Lutheranism had Pietism, Catholicism had Jansenism, and Anglicanism

had Methodism. Just as King Frederick William used Pietism to further

his own reform plans, so did the Grand-Duke Peter Leopold of Tuscany

use the Jansenist faction to further his own plans for church reform,

despite the opposition of much of the Catholic hierarchy. In Austria

too, Jansenism was a powerful factor behind demands to reform. In spite

of the fact that in many of the states, such as France, Jansenism was

interpreted as a threat to monarchal powers, rather than its support, all

this shows, nonetheless, how aware were Enlightenment rulers of the

social function of religion. It is arguable that the success of Prussian

Pietism in the years before 1740 in bolstering the power of the ruler

was what made it possible for Frederick the Great to have enough power

to enforce his policy of tolerance after 1740.

Additional tensions were present in many Catholic states, where the

rulers’ allegiance to the church, and their reliance on its ritual to legitim-

fl
ise their authority as rulers, did not prevent renewed con ict between

monarchy and the church hierarchy. In the Austrian lands too, it was

strongly believed, especially by Joseph II, that control of education

should be transferred from the Catholic Church to the state; and that

the allegiance of his subjects to their duties could be better inculcated by

the teaching of a ‘rational’ Christianity. All sought for more independ-

ence from Rome and increasing control over religious observance and

church appointments in their own lands. The expulsion of the Jesuit

order, sworn to uphold Papal power, from all Catholic countries between

1759 and 1771 is only the most dramatic example of this tension.

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138 The Enlightenment

Spurred on too, especially in the Italian states and in Josephian Austria,

by economic advisors who believed that the land market was underdevel-
oped and agricultural productivity held back by the church ’s role as
predominant landlord, and that monastic orders were detaining many
potential recruits to the labour force and the army, many Catholic
monarchs, such as Joseph II and Charles III of Spain, launched attacks
on the church. The picture which emerges of religion in the Enlighten-
ment is thus complex. In terms of belief, traditional theology competed
with new religious sects such as Pietism, and more fundamentally with
religious enquiries such as Deism, which seemed bent on nothing so
much as removing religion from religious belief. Attempts to construct a
‘ reasonable ’ or ‘ rational’ Christianity caused as many problems as they
solved. Some historians have argued, and Hegel would probably have
agreed, that Deists and ‘reasonable ’ Christians alike ran the risk of
erecting human reason itself as the focus of a new religion, while social
movements such as the masonic lodges could easily be seen as the
outward sign of new, secular, substitute cults, and were so especially in
18
Catholic countries.
Religious change and debate also had profound consequences in the
political sphere. It is a truism that the central metaphor of political
thought in the seventeenth century was religious, whereas the eighteenth
century saw the slow breakdown of the idea that political and religious
communities must be co-terminous. This was the logic involved in the
debate on religious toleration which took place all over Europe, and
which involved those rulers and communities which supported it in a
conscious effort to change the basis of legitimate power. This is the major
reason why the implementation of freely debated ideas of religious toler-
ation, so obvious to us, took such a long time, and involved such hard
debate in the eighteenth century; for those rulers who implemented
toleration would have to base their legitimation on something other than
religious sanction. Debating toleration was thus ultimately debating the
nature of kingship itself (see Chapter 3). The issue was thus an intrinsic
part of what some historians have described as the ‘desacralisation ’ of
kingship in this period. In this sense, as in others, Hegel was surely right
to see Enlightenment as a continuation of the Reformation. Whether it
also thereby opened the gates to revolution is another matter, to be
discussed in Chapter 10.

18
See the argument of Carl Becker,The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
(New Haven, CT, 1932).