The Enlightenment and Religion

barnett.cvr 16/10/03 4:36 pm Page 1 This book makes an important case for rethinking the relationship between the and Enlightenment The religion S. J. B A R N E T T Enlightenment and religion. It contributes to a new understanding of familiar material by treating it in an original and stimulating manner and will be valuable to both specialists and general readers. Jane Shaw, New College, Oxford The The Enlightenment and religion Enlightenment The myths of modernity offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in eighteenth-century Europe, and constitutes a radical challenge to and religion the accepted views in traditional Enlightenment studies. Focusing on Enlightenment Italy, France and England, it illustrates how the canonical view of eighteenth-century religious change has The myths of modernity in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption, in particular the idea that the thought of the enlightened led to modernity. For despite a lack of evidence, one of the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment studies has been the assertion that there was a vibrant deist movement that formed the ‘intellectual solvent’ of the eighteenth century. The central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the traditional birth-of- modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has become BARNETT entrenched. As a consequence more traditional forces for religious change have been given little or no attention. The book also raises hitherto neglected but fundamental methodological issues relating to the study of the eighteenth century and the ability of ‘interested’ contemporaries to mislead posterity. Given the current pervasive topicality of notions of modernity and postmodernity in academia, this book advances a very important discussion indeed, and will be essential reading for all students studying the period. S. J. Barnett is Subject Leader in History of Ideas, University of Kingston-Upon-Thames REPRODUCED ON THE COVER The sermon of St Paul Amid the Ruins Giovanni Paolo Panini (1695–1765) The State Hemitage Museum, St Petersburg The Enlightenment and religion The Enlightenment and religion The myths of modernity S. J. BARNETT Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © S. J. Barnett 2003 The right of S. J. Barnett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6740 5 hardback 0 7190 6741 3 paperback First published 2003 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow Contents Acknowledgements page vii Introduction: The Enlightenment and modernity 1 The rationale of this book 1 The structure of this book 7 1 The myth of Enlightenment deism 11 The myth of the deist movement 11 The deism myth and modern historians 22 The myth and the historical record 30 The myth and the construction of modernity 37 2 Historians, religion and the historical record 45 The origins of Enlightenment anticlericalism 45 John Toland, Pierre Bayle and the problem of influence 52 Enlightenment from within or without Christianity? 57 The elite and the written record 62 Scaremongering, public opinion and the construction of the deism scare 68 3 The English deist movement: a case study in the construction of a myth 81 Post-Restoration context 81 Deists and Dissent confused 87 John Toland and Christianity not Mysterious 94 Early modern politico-religious propagandists and modern historians 102 Dissent and Enlightenment 121 v Contents 4 France: the revolt of democratic Christianity and the rise of public opinion 130 Bourbons, Huguenots and Jansenists 131 The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques and Bourbon miscalculation 136 The revolt of the 1750s 144 Popular victory against the Jesuits and the call for toleration 150 The final decline of the absolutist dream 159 5 Italy: Roman ‘tyranny’ and radical Catholic opposition 168 Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment 168 Anti-curial polemic and its context 171 Regalism and Jansenism 177 The temporal imperative: Roman theology and politics fused 182 Radical Jansenism 1770s–1790s 189 6 The ‘public sphere’ and the hidden life of ideas 201 The hidden life of ideas 201 The ‘public sphere’ and the top-down model of intellectual change 204 Anachronism and toleration 215 Appendix: Indicative bibliography of Protestant thought on natural religion 222 Selected bibliography 225 Index 239 vi Acknowledgements I am indebted to my colleague John Ibbett for his suggestions on the best way to present my arguments and his close eye on the final copy. Similarly, I am grateful for the patience and scholarly assist- ance of Yukiko Sumi. vii The Enlightenment and modernity INTRODUCTION The Enlightenment and modernity The rationale of this book In historical studies and indeed most fields of the humanities, the terms modernity and Enlightenment are so frequently linked that either term almost automatically evokes the other. It has become an accepted commonplace, part of the historical canon, that modernity began in the Enlightenment. This begs the obvious but yet problem- atic question: what was the general character of the intellectual phenomenon we term the Enlightenment? Since the end of the 1960 and 1970s, Enlightenment studies has, albeit rather slowly and unevenly, moved from a rather narrow preoccupation with a few leading intellectuals, to an acceptance that the Enlightenment was in fact a much broader phenomenon. It is now increasingly recognized that the Enlightenment was as diverse in its protagonists as it was geographically and chronologi- cally disparate. Neither was there unity within the Enlightenment on perhaps the central plank of Enlightenment doctrine, the role of reason in the future of civilization. From the mid eighteenth century we see – especially in France and England in the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau and David Hume – a growing rejection of the simple panacea of reason in favour of the equal recognition of the role of the ‘passions’ in human conduct. This growing rejection of the rather restrictive notion of reason as the fundamental attribute of the human mind also coincided rather paradoxically with what historians have termed the High Enlightenment, but is more aptly known in literary studies as the Age of Sensibility. It is, therefore, not without difficulty that reliance on reason can be cited as an easy key to investigating the broad intellectual manifestation of the years c. 1690–1790 that we have termed the Enlightenment. 1 The Enlightenment and religion That Enlightenment protagonists were secular in their outlook has also been part of the Enlightenment studies canon. Until the 1970s the characterization of the Enlightenment was most usually that of reason against religion. Since then many academics have pre- ferred the formula reason versus the Church, recognizing that most of the enlightened still retained a belief in God, even if they were hostile to the Church. Belief in an original Creator was part of the deistic view held by some enlightened writers who thought that God had not intervened in worldly affairs since Creation, so rendering the Church’s claim to mediation between divinity and humanity fraudulent. For such thinkers, evidence for God and a rational or ‘natural religion’ lay in the qualities (especially reason and con- science) of an unchanging human nature and the frame of nature itself. The understanding that there was a deist movement (some- times termed freethinking movement) of some size in Europe has remained the orthodoxy in Enlightenment studies, yet there is no evidence to support this claim. Evidence for the existence of organ- ized deism has not so far been adduced, and evidence for the existence of individual deists indicates the existence of relatively few individuals spread across one hundred years of European history. It seems, then, that the revision of the character of religion in the Enlightenment was not as thoroughgoing as it might have been, and the traditional linkage of modernity and Enlightenment – in the form of the secularizing deist movement – has continued to be propagated by some and still acknowledged by others. It is not the intention of this book, however, to speculate on the origins of modernity, for, after all, why do the origins of modernity have to be predominantly intellectual? It is equally plausible to suggest other categories of explanation, including that of the broad impact of the Industrial Revolution, which certainly had long-term intellectual consequences when its many powerful protagonists sought to extol its virtues and minimize and justify its less attractive aspects. Outside of traditional Enlightenment studies there also exists strong support for the Enlightenment-modernity thesis in the form of the so-called postmodernity theory. Apparently (although very few seemed to notice it at the time), modernity gave way to postmodernity in the early 1970s. Without citing any more than the most vague evidence, postmodernists have repeatedly asserted that the secularizing, reason-orientated Enlightenment is the one and only origin of modernity. For postmodernists, modernity is damned 2 The Enlightenment and modernity because it supposedly placed unfounded reliance on reason as the arbiter of human conduct. Thus reason, Enlightenment and modernity become one.

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