CHRISTIANITY AND ENLIGHTENMENT: AN HISTORICAL SURVEY l

SHERIDANGILLEY

The casual student of western culture thinks of the eighteenth century as an ‘Age of Enlightenment’ when the traditions of the past were increasingly exposed to the light of the critical reason. This new ascendency of rational thought has been most often presented as a revolt against religion, and more specifically against Roman Catholicism; and at the heart of the ‘rationalist’ revolt was a small group of thinkers, mostly French or French-speaking - Voltaire, Diderot, and the contributors to the great Encyclopbdie, zealous opponents of Christianity and of its bigotry, intolerance and superstition. Believers in the goodness of human nature, and in the benevolence of the natural order as human reason had come to understand it, they repudiated Christian notions of the evil and fall of man and of his world. Champions of natural science and of moral and material progress through increasing know- ledge, they thought that humanity might be perfected by its own unaided efforts, and by a devout diversion of the mind from the things of God to man himself. In the cruder kind of intellectual history, they were made responsible for the French Revolution; for their ethic that the good exists to make men happy, inspired a new kind of earth-bound aspiration to create a better, happier world.

This picture of the eighteenth century is, however, arguably a product of the ideological conflicts of the following century’. The French Revolution divided the European mind between optimistic radicals who favoured the enlighten- ment and its supposed revolutionary consequences. and pessimist conservatives who thought the rejection of religion a proof of the fall of man. A famous French historian has described the political and religious ‘revolt against the eighteenth century’3 in England; but nowhere was this reaction stronger than in France, where the nineteenth century Church sponsored an ‘anti-enhghten- ment’ sanctioned by frequent apparitions of the Virgin Mary. It was after 1790 that a great new gulf was fixed between the popular political movements of the left and reactionary religion; in England, the notion of the war of science and religion entered popular consciousness as late as the 1860’s, after Darwin, and Pius IX’s condemnation of ‘liberalism, progress and modem civilization’. It was the nineteenth century battle of ideologies which determined the view of the eighteenth century as a vital stage in the emancipation of mankind from its feudal and superstitious follies; and in its Victorian Marxist form, the version of a bourgeois enlightenment is recorded in the text books and reference books of the officially Communist third of humanity’. This view may involve little enough enthusiasm for the middle classness of the movement. and sees enlight- enment ideas more as effects than as fundamental causes. Yet this is the same old secular enlightenment, again depicted as a necessary step in the coming to maturity of social man, in his rejection of the illusions of his childhood.

I03

104 Sheridan Gilley

Modern scholarship has removed the crudities from this picture, both alter- ing the outline and refining the detail. It is now generally acknowledged that the enlightenment appeal to reason was hedged round with every qualification, not least by distrust of an abstract rationalism unbridled by experiment, obser- vation and the experience of every day. The principal enlightenment thinkers were by no means simple-minded believers in the goodness of man or of nature, or in the inevitability of progress; indeed they could be more abject or defiant cosmic pessimists than the Christians around them. If they invoked reason they did not despise imagination. and if the enlightenment is understood to include Rousseau and his disciples. then it includes the imaginative riches which rationalism is condemned for overlooking or disapproving;. The result has been to make the idea of enlightenment richer but less easy to define: any simple definition would exclude some major enlightenment thinkers. As for the French Revolution, this was not the work of a few intellectuals, but of the plethora of causes, economic and political, of the destruction of a social order, which can never be covered by a formula”. The French enlightenment’s leaders were not revolutionaries; some were apolitical, others were apologists for enlightenment absolutism. or benign Utopians whom it is unjust to damn for the later revolutionary programme. The relations between the enlightenment and revolution are a matter of controversy, and are more complex than anything imagined by the ideologues who have rushed to praise or to blame them’.

What then of the point that the enlightenment was irreligious, indeed that it can be defined in terms of a revolt against religion?a Certainly in France there was a fashionable reaction against Christianity, especially among an intellec- tual elite: but even the Deism of the French enlightenment can be considered a religion, if not a religious movement. with its background in the God- intoxicated pantheism of Spinoza, and of heresies claiming to be Christians. Still more striking is the modem demonstration of Rousseau’s flawed genius as a religious thinker, and of his influence on the later Catholic revival’“. But as radicals, Voltaire and Rousseau are untypical of movements outside France”, while the atheist materialism of d’Holbachi2 is a French phenomenon appear- ing only in the restricted spheres of a French-style court culture. The famous Hume anecdote about the lack of atheists in EnglandI points to the largely Christian character of English enlightenmentiJ, and the unrepresentative nature of the scepticism of the Francophile Gibbon, or of Hume himself. whom his fellow Britons insisted on regarding as a mere historian, not a philosopheri5.

So in England, Scotland. Germany, Holland and English North America. ‘enlightenment’ found a home within the Christian churches. It is a pardonable exaggeration to claim that the reasonableness of Christianity was ‘the solitary thesis’ of English theology for nearly a century16; yet after a Deist controversy lasting 50 years, between 1690 and 1740, English opinion accepted that the Deists had been fairly answered by orthodox theologians appealing to both revelation and reason: Butler and Berkeley. Sherlock and Warburton. Water- land and William Law. The Church of England after 1750 had about it an air of dangerous complacency, saving its thunders for the horrors of an irrationalist religious enthusiasm. A Church whose leading lay theologian was Locke and which would give preferment to Watson and Hoadly was not refusing to be

Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey 105

‘enlightened’. Even heresy declined to go to extremes, and Unitarianism was a home for Christian semi-Deists, and for the mystical materialism of Hartley and Joseph Priestley . I7 In Scotland, the Moderate party had by 1760 won their ascendency over the Kirk. under the leadership of the Reverend William Robertson, a rationalist historian of European reputation. A clear cold moralism reigned in once Puritan pulpits, and a sometime Moderator faithfully taught his students a Calvinism which he enjoined them not to preachln. As Professor May has shown. the ‘moderate English’ and ‘didactic Scottish’ strands in the American enlightenment survived the destruction of the ‘radical enlightenment’ by Protestant revivalism lg.There was a tremendous effort in Germany to reinterpret Christianity according to enlightenment nom&O. while the ‘most original trait’ of the enlightenment in Prussia was that ‘unlike France, the whole machinery of church and state is designed to further it’21. There was a Protestant enlightenment in Holland, among the heirs of Menno Simons and Arminiu9’, and in the very capital of Calvinism, d’Alembert embarrassed the Genevan clergy with his compliment on their Socinian tendencies=.

It is easy to condemn the formalism, respectively, emotional aridity and over-intellectuality of much of this eighteenth century ‘rational’ Christianity and its neglect of the Bible for a natural theologyz4; but at its best produced a distinctly attractive devotionalism in which faith and reason, revelation and natural religion. head and heart, sense and sensibility, were held in balance according to the classical conceptions of order, proportion and harmonyz5. Like Christian governments. Christian pastors were happy to accept the prac- tical ‘enlightened’ stress on whatever made for human happiness. Thus the principal Protestant established churches of the era show these marks of enlightenment: an indifference to sectarian ecclesiology, a respect for secular learning and science, an increasing tolerance. an undogmatic moralism, a zeal for the practical good works of education and charity, a tendency to ignore all but the few essential doctrines of the faith. The English Latitudinarian, the Scottish Moderate. the devout German disciple of Christian Wolff or Lessing, also claimed his share of enlightenment, which from his viewpoint must be regarded not as a revolt against religion, but as a creative if ambiguous phase in the history of Christianity itself.

This is, however, a point hardly recognized by those church historians and theologians for whom the eighteenth century was the lost era of Christian history: ‘a time when love was cold’ wrote Newmar+.Confessional scholarship likes to dwell on the religious revivals of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. and the Augustan Church’s failure to produce a thinker with the appeal of Luther or Pascal has led to the neglect of enlightenment devotion and theologyzY. Historians of ideas are especially tidy-minded and there is an easy passage from the Deists to Hume to Kant. which neatly consigns the orthodox to the dustbin of history. Despite the brilliant writing about church and party politics and the transition to an enlightenment world in the age of Queen Anne, by Geoffrey Holmes2R and G.V. Bennett2g there is no decent modem monograph on English Deism, in spite of its great influence on France and Germany, while despite some recent interest30, philsophers rather than theo- logians debate the merits of Butler and Berkley31. The general impression of

104 Sheridan Gilfey

Christian mediocrity is rather confirmed by R.R. Palmer’s Catholics and Unbelievers in Eigh~eenfh-Cents France, which indicates the intellectual competence of French Catholicism, but not its brilliance ororiginality32. ‘in the case of Germany’, writes John Kent of books in English, ‘A.L. Drummond’s Gennun Profestanrism since Luther (1951) has stood almost alone, and so we are nearly as ignorant as were our grandfathers about Pietism, the German enlightenment and the relationship between eighteenth century Church and State in Gerrnany.‘33 This position has improved a little in the decade since Kent wrote34, but the English have hardly bothered much about not knowing Germany, for in England, Evangelicals and Tractarians agreed that their movements were protests against eniightenment religio+. and as a conse- quence of nineteenth century Biblical criticism, they had a special suspicion of German theology. Not that they were all that enamoured of the Georgian Church of England, which High Churchmen and Low Churchmen thought doubtfully Christian, and denounced for its secularity, torpor, materialism, greed, pluralism, simony, nepotism and general worldliness. More recently the pastoral and administrative efficiency of the Hanoverian Church has been partially vindicated by Norman Sykes and his pupiW, but I find the indispen- sibie modem books about religious thought in the era - by R.N. Strombe@’ and Gerald Crage - lacking in the salt and wit of their materials. They do not inspire me to devote my energies to enlightenment theology, but I would like to be convinced that the dullness is undeserved.

Yet the se&a&t and anti-Christian understanding of the enlightenment is by no means dead among scholars. One version appears in the works of Paul Hazard3!+; another informs the achievements of two of the most eminent scholars of the eighteenth century, Tbeodore Besterman and Peter Gay. The polymath bibliographer Bestennan is the author of a score of monographs, essays and lectures on Voltaire, the editor of his 107 volume correspondence and the inspiration of modem Voltaire scholarship as the founder of the series Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, which has now passed its 180th volumeqo. They stand on the library shelves with the intimidating mien of older libraries of the Fathers and the Schoolmen, and while much of this scholarship is not directly on Voltaire or is homage to his undoubted greatness as a writer, it is rather out of proportion to his achievement as a religious thinker and a philo~pber, and raises the issue of whether it distorts the eighteenth century to treat it as a personal extension of Voltaire 4i. Certainly Besterman’s idolatry of Voltaire has meant his perpetuation into the present of Voltaire’s campaign to crush the infamy, and there is something less than adult in his riposte to Rene Pomeau’s massive demonstration that Voltaire did have a religion*‘.

Just as impressive and tendentious is Peter Gay’s reinterpretation of the enlightenment as ‘a volatile mixture of classicism, impiety, and science’““, in which science is the new element in the revival of classical learning, and altogether they make possible the ‘recovery of nerve’ of modem secular thought, after the long mystical imprisonment of the Christian centuries. I have already drawn on Gay’s excellent apology for the sophistication and inteflec- tual variety of the enlightenment, but his two volume synthesis of the best in eighteenth century thought and his attendant dialogue and essays are frank polemic for his own conception of what made the enlightenment worthwhile -

Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey 107

not the representative beliefs of eighteenth century intellectuals, but of the radical philosophical extreme. Gay’s hero is David HumeM, ‘the complete modem pagan’45 and it is not difficult to see the apologetic purpose in the ‘sex appeal’* of Gay’s book titles - ‘paganism’, ‘science’, ‘freedom’ and ‘humanity’. Gay is therefore a most sophisticated and attractive exponent of a less than satisfactory kind of intellectual history: and many of his shortcomings stem from his dislike of religion. The paradox is that it may overdo the rehgious obsessions of enlightenment to call it anti-Christianity. A.J.P. Taylor re- marked that Gay’s enlightenment can ‘only interest those who are still worried about Christianity’47. An idea is not defeated when it still has to be refuted by scholars writing in the twentieth century.

It is also odd that Gay should both acknowledge and forget that the enlight- enment took place in a culture which was in its externals and its ingrained habits of mind, deeply, conventionally Christian. He admits that his favourite anti- Christian historians owed their scholarship if not their viewpoint to Christian scholars, but lapsed Christians preserved Christian thought forms in the very act of lapsing from Christianityq”. So Augustan conceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ were held in common by believers and unbelievers; and even d’Holbach’s material nature barely conceals its secularised deity. The very vices of Christianity survived in that Rousseauist enthusiasm for state-imposed civic virtue which recent history has made appear so sinister, and in the en- lightenment idealism which, Gay notwithstanding, dechristianised France, in the name of reason or nature or patriotism, or Robespierre’s Supreme Bei@‘. There is then in Gay a two-fold error, in the notions that ideas have a virtue irrespective of the moral quality of the persons who profess them, and that a great historic movement can be defined in terms of the people one happens to approve. The result is to make enlightenment studies a parody of the Christian confessional history in which right opinions matter more than right behaviour. So Gay ignores the ‘humanity’ of the Christian charities,= while John Howard fails to figure in his discussion of ‘enlightenment’ prison reform, perhaps because Howard was a Calvinist: but if prison reform was an aspect of enlightenment, shouldn’t it include Howard’s Calvinism as well?51 Not for Gay, who like Voltaire himself writes for the glory of his monastery; and we need to get away from his histories of the great Enlightenment Church.

Gay’s partialities confirm the point that the enlightenment is only an aspect of eighteenth century literature and life, which were too multifarious to be covered by a phrase. It is difficult to discover ‘enlightenment’ in such charac- teristically English Christian pessimist authors as Swift and Johnson, who were less Augustan than Augustinian52. ‘ Enlightenment’ illlumines still less outside literature: a cruel reviewer christened Gay ‘Gutenberg man’%, for largely ignoring the non-literary culture in which Christian influence was strong. The religious music of Bach and Handel, the ‘Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’= of the great churches of the late Baroque and rococco and neo-classical revival, ever-glorious ‘dance-floors of God’%, all ablaze with light and even enlightenmenE6, these also figured in the eighteenth century vision of the world - but Gay’s world is that of the small and now familiar, largely French intellectual circle. Beyond this pale lie all the second-rate writers and many first-rate ones, the peasant masses and popular culture. the European

108 Sheridan Gilley

colonies outside English North America, also Spain and Portugal and Scandi- navia, all Mitteleuropa outside the courts of kings, indeed most of the people and area of Europe.

How enlightening then is the enlightenment, for understanding the great majority of Europeans who were traditionalist believers unaffected by the intellectual currents of their time? There is an awful temptation to ecclesiastical historians in the triumphalist Catholic rhapsody that concludes Daniel-Rops’ history of the Church in the eighteenth century”‘. The reader passes from the beggar saint Benedict Labre and the countless minor cults of France to a rapid survey, as if from the dome of St. Peter’s, of the Catholic bastions of Italy, Spain and the Austrian empire, reaching a climax with the evangelistic efforts of St. Leonard of Port Maurice, St. Paul of the Cross and St. Alphonso Ligouri. Daniel-Rops conveys the power and strength of the mass religious conformity of a princely neo-feudal Christianity which was never stronger in much of Europe than in the eighteenth century: a kind of Catholic Eden before the fall. But he seems to grant Gay’s case, for there is no ray of enlightenment in his realm of faith, no link between new reason and old religion.

Even without the enlightenment. however, the notion of a people’s Catholic- ism, untainted by religious doubt, can no longer be maintained, simply because the new respectability of the study of popular religion has transformed our understanding of what it was j”. This new understanding is partly a consequence of the type of total history pioneered by Lucien Febvress and the Annafes schoo160, which seeks to reconstruct the complex interaction of every aspect of the human past, economic, social and cultural. as well as intellectual, usually within the limits of a town or region over the span of one or two centuries”‘. Febvre saw reformation and counter reformation not only as the profound insight of a few theologians (whose importance he was the last to deny), but also as the collective spiritual mentality of a whole social and political ordeal’. Thus there has been a flowering of local studies which look beyond an elitist high culture to states of mind on which it hardly intruded=. In the religious sphere in France, this form of scholarship owes much to the Christian sociology founded by Gabriel le Bras, with its passion for counting every kind of public religious act and object, from attendance at Mass to the number of purgatorial altars dedicated to the Virgin Mary in Provence”. The subject has its silly side, and often fails to penetrate beyond behaviour to motive, but the results have been a revelation, penetrating below the surface of religious practice before 1789, to distinguish areas strong in faith from those of mere external con- formity. So the evangelistic activities of the eighteenth century religious orders indicate, that they aroused enthusiasm in the very districts in France in which the Church was to remain strong throughout the following century: and that they failed in exactly the areas in which the nineteenth century Church was to fail. Just as striking is the variation from place to place in the concentration of pious confraternities, or the rate of recruitment to the priesthood.

Pushed back to the middle ages, such study has shown tremendous long term regional variations in pious fervour, as well as long term continuities within regions in the ardour of popular religion =. There is a long history, predating the eighteenth century, to popular indifference or hostility to Christian moral teaching and religious rites, bound up with surviving pagan and superstitious

Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey 109

practice and resentment of Church tax and tithe. Christianity was also weak- ened by great exploitive monasteries, popular heresies, habitual clerical absenteeism, illiteracy, corruption and general pastoral neglect, which all throw doubt on that ‘myth of the Christian Middle Ages’, that medieval people were really Christia@. True, there is evidence of irreligion which is more specifically eighteenth century: a soaring urban illegitimacy rate, a fall in religious observance in the cities and in a few country areas, the decline in the male religious orders and in religious publishing, the ineffectiveness of protests against the opening of drinking shops during service hours, and the spread of effective contraception . g7 All this points to de-Christianisation; but its roots are pre-eighteenth century. and in any deeper, and more spiritual sense, much of France had never been Christian. There had always been a tremendous varia- tion in the depths of faith and devotion which the imposing structures of the counter reformation had all but hidden, and which the revolution was to reveal. These variations often had only a casual connexion with the vogue of enlighten- ment ideas. and the pastoral and political failures of eighteenth century church establishments at a popular level, not the philosophes, explain modem French indifference to religion.

So too. it is for social historians to explain why parts of modem France stayed Christian. It has been argued that much of eighteenth century France under- went a rechristianisation. partly inspired by the baroque revivalism of the missionary preachers, but also by a clerical campaign to simplify, purify, and depaganise popular religion. There are many strands in this endeavour: the educational activities of poor schools and religious orders, the catechisms and vernacular translations of the liturgy designed to help lay folk understand their faith, the Jansenist attack on relics and image worship, the Catholic presby- terian and richerist assertion of the dignity and equality of the secular priest- hood, and the effort to improve the Church’s pastoral effectiveness by making better-educated priests. It was only in the eighteenth century that the Tridentine reform of seminary education bore fruit in a competent parochial clergy, capable of improving the intellectual, moral and religious standards of their people; and these new clergy were not indifferent to the fashionable intellectual currents of their age. Orthodox if independent-minded clerics flocked to become Free-masons, despite two papal condemnations; while many clergymen were to demonstrate first rank secular abilities after laicisation. The ministries of both the Constitutional and non-juring churches also showed remarkable qualities in exile or under persecution, and so Jean Delumeau argues that after 1750, French religion improved in quality even if it diminished in quantity: there was an erosion of religious practice among the casual conformist majority, but a better informed and educated priesthood had confirmed substantial minorities in the faith, fitting it to survive the revolutior+.

The creation of an informed and pastorally effective priesthood - in which even Voltaire had a ‘grudging’ interest@‘- is one strand of the Roman Catholic enlightenment, a paradoxical notion 20 years ago’O, which is a scholarly commonplace today. There is an obvious historic importance to the ‘state Catholicism’, of the attempts by the prince archbishops of Germany, by Joseph II in Austria and the Marquis de Pombal in Portugal, to secure autonomy from

120 Sheridan Gifley

the papacy, culminating in France in the 1790’s in the creation of the Constitu- tional Church. in which the idea met decisive defeat. State Catholicism was a variant of ‘enlightened despotism’71, and of the eighteenth century determina- tion to use the Church to increase the industry and wordly well-being of the faithful. Thus in Portugal, royal censors imposed on the schools and univer- sities a safe textbook selection from the heretical philosophies of Christian Wolff. Thomasius, Locke and Genovesi, the canonical sciences and cate- chetical instruction purged of over-much reference to the papacy. All this was to the exclusion of the older curriculum of Jesuit-baroque theology and devotion: Pombal led Catholic Europe in suppressing the Society of Jesusn. The reformed Catholic hostility to the contemplative life as neither edifying nor useful was part of a stronger stress on the value of the secular priesthood: so Joseph II’s suppression of monasteries financed four new bishoprics, a dozen seminaries, and eight hundred new parishes. The same practical stress on the pastoral undergirded the Jansenist demand for a religion purified from both pagan and Christian superstition, and produced the Josephist-Jansenist re- forms of the Archduke Leopold in Tuscany: climaxing in bishop Scipione de’ Ricci’s synod of Pistoia and its unsuccessful revolt against the Roman obedience. In Italy at least, the relation of Jansenism to the liberal thought of the eighteenth century has become clear73. Josephist reform in Italy points to the vigour of that Italian enlightenment patronised by Benedict XIV and best exemplified by Muratori, which Franc0 Venturi, despite his hatred of ‘the great oppression of the Counter-reformation’” admits to have been overwhelmingly orthodox before 1760: so the Italian debate on the existence of witchcraft was one among loyal Roman Catholics 75. Venturi’s writing is open to the objection that his Italian enlightenment is whatever enlightens him, and the subject seems to have shared in the neglect of so much of Italian religious history. There is a comic-opera aspect to this Catholic reform: Joseph’s police regula- tions on the number of altar candles, Ricci withholding the Virgin Mary’s girdle from the faithful who sacked his cathedral in reprisa17R. Moreover it is difficult to feel even a ‘liberal’ enthusiasm for the Archduke Leopold’s strongarm bans on devout confratemities, wayside shrines, and the open-air recitation of the rosary. His aim, however, was to simplify the cult and thereby strengthen it, not to remove it altogether; a similar stress on ‘serious Catholic enlightenment’ appears after 1750 in the reforms of the curricula of the German Catholic monasteries and universities, the transformation of German moral theology by personalist ethics, and the eirenic German Catholic schemes of the 1780’s for reunion with the Protestants”. At the ecclesiastical history colloquium at Warsaw in 1978 there were papers on the ‘Catholic enlightenment’ in Holland, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Italy and Germany7S. The theme now has an international recognition, which bodes well for its future.

Roman Catholics were more resistant to ‘enlightened’ ideas than were Protestants, and were more repressive of dissidents, but it is in the Catholic enlightenment that can be seen most clearly the inadequacy of Gay’s kind of ideological history, for the very notion of ‘Catholic enlightenment’ has been sustained by the shift of historiographical interest from the individual and intellectual to the political and pastoral 7g. So Venturi puts the stress in his studies of the enlightenment on political and economic ideas, and roots it in the

Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey III

civic republican tradition still vigorous in 1700 in Italy, Holland, Switzerland, England and Germany, and it is in political and economic terms, that he makes some sense of an enlightenment in the Papal State9. Josephinism is to be traced not merely to theological sources but to the administrative initiatives of the Hapsburg bureaucracy beginning with Joseph I. This is to emphasise the continuity between Joseph II’s policies and those of his devout and able mother, that ‘apostolic hag’ Maria Theresa, whose legal and tax reforms were the firm foundation for the more flamboyant measures of her son. Indeed as Dr. Beales has shown, Joseph II’s education in religious matters owed little to French ‘enlightened’ thinkers”’ and nearly everything to reforming but ortho- dox Germans and Italians, with a practical political programme. Joseph’s ‘reform Catholicism’, therefore, was not the intellectual whim of a brilliant, autocratic and wayward individual, but the long term political consequence of a centralising reformist tendency developing over nearly a century82.

Such a complex collective conception as ‘reform Catholicism’ will contain opposing emphases, and the variety of the Catholic enlightenment is nowhere more obvious than in its paradoxes and contradictions. The role claimed by the state in state Catholic reform was exactly that erastian position which was to be rejected by nineteenth century Catholic liberals, in the name of a free church in a free state: the goal also of many anticlericals. Just as striking a reversal is the early nineteenth century liberal enthusiasm for ultramontanism: gallicanism was mortally wounded by the Revolution, though it was an unconscionable time in dying. As for the Jansenist contribution to Catholic reform, Jansenism was hellishly complex in itself, as was its relationship to enlightenment. Jansenists andphilosophes were often bedfellows, andphilosophes drew on the Jansenist critique of Jesuit Catholicism, but the two parties did ultimately subscribe to diametrically opposing philosophies. The Jansenist attack on popular Catholic tradition was often the reverse of populist, yet Jansenism became predominantly vulgar in every sense in the course of the eighteenth century, as it lost the intellectual and mystical distinction of its seventeenth century founders, and declined into a moral rigorism or an apocalyptic enthu- siasm of which the convulsionaries of St. Medard were the most notorious manifestations. Despite their own dissident character, Jansenists were generally opposed to the religious tolerance of ‘reform Catholicism’: a toler- ance which in turn went oddly with the exaltation of the power of the state imposing it. In another paradox, Professor W.R. Ward has derived the Jose- phist reforms of the secular priesthood, from a popish determination to dish the Protestant pietists of central Europew.

Contradictions of this kind were to reinforce the ultramontane conviction that the ‘Catholic enlightenment’ was an uncatholic aberration, whose evil consequences the French Revolution had only too clearly shown. Here again, the nineteenth century conservative reaction was to make an objective view of the complexity and confusions of eighteenth century religion impossible. Many Catholic scholars now feel, however, that ‘reform Catholicism’ can only be considered ‘uncatholic’ by the exclusive and exotic standards of nineteenth century ultramontanism H5. The second Vatican Council has brought a new enthusiasm to the subject, in acknowledging that the Church must respect its dissidents and doubters, and by removing the barriers between the Church and

112 Sheridan Gilley

the world for which the nineteenth century was responsible. Roman Catholics have also begun to recover a lost century of their history.

Just how our view of eighteenth century religion can be transformed by the new historical and sociological method has been demonstrated by John Bossy in his recent book, The Engli3h Catholic Community 1570-I85W. Dr. Bossy’s overall argument is a neat inversion of the conventional wisdom of English Catholic historians. Going back to the beginnings, he demonstrates that from the 1570’s the English Catholic community was recreated from the ruins of the old medieval order as a separate missionary church, a new child quite distinct from her medieval mother. Adopting the sociological rule of quantifying observable social behaviour, Dr. Bossy enunciates certain objective criteria for defining the ‘new’ post-medieval Catholics: attendance at mass, the rites of passage - baptism, marriage and burial - and (developing Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger) fidelity to a cycle of feasts and fasts, according to a traditional calendar. From a social historian’s point of view, these points of Catholic separation from the wider community define Catholics in technical terms as a dissenting sect like Baptists, Unitarians and Quakers.

Thus the rise of the English Catholic community was no mere medieval survival, but a parallel to the emergence of other non-Anglican dissenting bodies, which resembled the Catholics in their missionary character, noncon- forming spirit, and use of common clergy funds and of chapels with lay trustees. The high point of the popish tradition came in the eighteenth century, with the definition of a classic English spirituality by Gother and Challoner, and with the friendly contact established after 1780 between local Protestants and Catholics, even unto the adoption of the title ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’ by some Catholics in the 1790’s. A restrained devotionalism, often in the vernacular, moralistic preaching, chapels simpler and starker than those of many Anglicans, suspicion of foreign Catholic custom and of papal authority, lay rather than episcopal leadership, a belief in religious tolerance, Whiggish liberal political opinions, all made many Catholics feel quite at home in the world of rationalist dissent. Indeed a popish minority proclaimed a Christian ‘liberality’ which renounced the bitter polemics and persecutions of another age, while the first English Catholic scholar of his generation, John Lingard, even aspired to write an impartial English history. In the golden age of this ‘Catholic enlightenment’87, the Church recognised its proper dissenting role in the native religious tradition; but this all ended in the 1830’s and 1840’s with the rise of a new sectarian temper, and the influx of Irish peasants and Tractarians, and with the resurrection of the clerical medievalist dream of restoring a national Catholic church, and the reconstitution of episcopal monarchy over laity and clergy. The enlightened past was dismissed as half-Protestant and buried and (though Dr. Bossy is too polite to say so too rudely), modem Catholic historians have thereby failed to understand English Catholic history.

Dr. Bossy’s argument has not convinced all his readers. It mingles a valid if overforced historical judgement on the dissenting streak in English Catholic- ism -with a theological affirmation of its excellence, which has a with-it ring in the age of Vatican II. For all that it is the most witty, elegant and provocative study of modem Rome in England to have been written for half a century.

I have spoken of a Protestant and Catholic enlightenment - but in terms

Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey 113

which omit any reference to the largest unexplored theme in eighteenth century religion, the history of ‘enthusiasm’. The irrational was never far below the surface, and men who had ceased to believe in simple Christianity did not believe in nothing: they believed in anything. So Robert Damton has shown that the French enlightenment in the 1780’s fell victim to the craze for ‘mesmerism’, and in Paris and other large towns there was a flight from reason into the strange mystical worlds of freemasons, illuminists, theosophists, Martinists, Rosicrucians and SwedenborgiansXB. The age was not lacking in mystics and prophets, Mesmer and Cagliostro, L.C. de Saint-Martin and Swedenborg, William Law and William Blake, and the eclipse of rationalism by romanticism was the outcome of an h-rationalist century. For if the eight- eenth century was an age of reason, it was even more an age of enthusiasmss, with its German pietists and Moravians, its camisards and convulsionaries, with the Methodist and Evangelical revivals in England and the Great Awakening in America. It was above all in the eighteenth century that Protestant enthusiasts created the world missionary movement which in the nineteenth century was to make Protestantism a global religion for the first time in its historygu. Is the enlightenment enlightening here?

Just how the enlightenment can enlighten even the darkness of enthusiasm has been demonstrated by Roger Anstey’s book on the slave trade: Evangel- icals threw themselves into the anti-slavery campaign, he argues, because slavery violated an Evangelical conception of human freedom and happine@. This position is underlined by a recent work on Wesleyan theology by Bernard Semmel=. This is primarily concerned to restore to respectability the serious study of Methodist theology, and to show its political implications: most historians, he declares, have neglected Methodist thought as less intellectually alive than seventeenth century Puritanism. Theologically, Semmel sees Wesleyan Methodism as the heir to the Dutch and Laudian Arminianism of the seventeenth century, as the semi-Pelagian ‘culmination of a Protestant Counter- Reformation, a revolt against certain leading views of Luther and Calvin’s3. Wesley was reared a Laudian High Churchman, and iike the Arminians, who were to widen his own theological learning, Wesley defended reason, human responsibility, free will, and the doctrine that Christ died for all men, against Luther’s it-rationalism and the predestinarian Calvinists who declared that Christ died only for some. Against E.P. Thompson’s picture of the sinister irrational emotionalism of Methodism, as a reactionary movement, a protest against the enlightenment and reason, Semmel emphasises the rationalism of Wesley’s final synthesis of Arminian Evangelicalism, which gave high honour to human effort and good works, in controversy with a Calvinist Antinomian- ism which denied their value%. Thus in the semi-Pelagian Methodist theology, good works and human effort play a necessary part in the sanctification following conversion: moving Wesley to reject Augustine and praise Pelagius as to the best of his knowledge ‘both a wise and an holy man’g5, and to argue against both Calvinists and Moravians that the convert achieves an inherent righteousness in Christ, and not merely a righteousness which Christ imputes to him: a righteousness ‘in se. . . not simply in Christo’46.

This optimistic Catholic-minded assertion of the possibility of Christian Perfection was parallel if by no means identical to the enlightenment perfect-

114 Sheridan Giiley

ability of rational man, a perfectability which Wesley also asserted was possible t0 all: all men are equally fallen, all equally need regeneration and sanctifi- cation, and all are equally capable of perfection. And as the enlightenment favoured political reform, SO the political implications of Methodist egalitarianism were in the abstract at least revolutionary: upholding the threefold goals of the Parisian mobs- liberty, equality and fraternity, with the message of free will and universal salvation. Semmel points out that Wesley admired Locke, the father-founder of eighteenth century liberalism, and in Wesley’s attack on slavery as an infringement of ‘natural’ rights, he was a child of a liberal and rational centuryy7.

Here Semmel invokes the complexity of the Methodist synthesis, its ming- ling of the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modem’. Wesley’s loyalty to the Church of England postponed and softened the Methodist secession; even as a spiritual leader he was a reluctant rebel. There was the same tension in his Evangelical Arminian synthesis, a ‘compound of Reformation Enthusiasm and the rational optimism, in theological guise, of the Enlightenment’. Semmel concedes the anti-rationalist ‘traditional’ aspects of Methodism, its daily miracles and lurid demonology and ‘particular’ providences, mediating for masses of men ‘be- tween the ideals of the old society and those of the new’: here, too, Methodism bridged the gulf between the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, by retaining miracles while accepting rationalist science; as by balancing grace and Scriptural authority and human depravity, against good works, freedom and Christian Perfection. It is this ideological balance and tension in Methodism, which Semmel calls ‘the real ambiguities and contradictions at the very heart of the Revival and its doctrines’, that has made it so difficult for historians to see the truth: that the Revival was ‘both a spiritual Revolution of a progressive and liberal character’, and ‘a counter to revolutionary violence’, and it was by preventing violence that it ushered in liberty. It would be no paradox to Wesley that the French and Russian and Chinese Revolutions ignored the social and religious freedoms for which the Methodists strove, as for Wesley, revolution and liberty were ultimately incompatible. ‘Methodism’, writes Semmel, ‘preached reason, tolerance, and both civil and religious liberty, all essential to liberalism’, and so assisted England to become ‘a liberal and not a “total- itarian” democracy’, uniting in de Tocqueville’s phrase ‘the spirit of religion and the spirit offreedom’=.

The ‘spirit of religion’ and the ‘spirit of freedom’: could even Christian enthusiasts belong to the ‘party of humanity’ with the more liberal-minded of their Protestant and Catholic brethren? Let us hope that further study from the collective, political, and pastoral points of view will free the enlightenment from the straightjacketed understanding imposed upon it by constricting ideol- ogies, Christian and secular. The history of ideas is a pliant subject which any man may mould to his purpose: but mankind is always more confused about its intellectual choices than historians of ideas will allow. Even the chancy socio- logical constructions of Bossy and Semmel have the merit of destroying over- neat historical categories, and so force a fresh approach to the subject, and restore a sense of the complexity of quite humble people. Perhaps the very notion of ‘enlightenment’ will expire in the embrace of so many competing ideologies; but it can be no bad thing to get a clearer view of the agonising

Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey 115

ambiguities of history. John McManners has disputed Paul Hazard’s thesis that between 1680 and 1715, a crisis of conscience turned the European mind against its Christian inheritance =. A still wider vision might see the eighteenth century as a series of such crises, with the cause still in doubt until the French revolution had made the hard and fast distinctions which modern scholarship is dissolving. In the nineteenth century, both Christians and anticlericals found it difficult even to remember their forebears who had no easy choice, who could not do without religion or do with religion as it was. Secular and Deist enlightenment, Protestant enlightenment, Catholic enlightenment, even the enthusiasts’ enlightenment; the boundaries between them must become more fluid, if we are to reclaim the lost century of Christian history for the history of Christianity. That in turn demands a deeper Christian unde~tanding for the professed enemies of the Christian faith whose attack has enriched and purified it; for if we approach the eighteenth century with the widest sympathies, then the ‘party of humanity’ ceases to be a minor intellectual sect, and becomes the whole of humanity in history.

~ni~ersi~ of Durham Sheridan Gilley

NOTES

I.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

On the history of enlightenment scholarship, see M.S. Anderson, Hbwians and Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715-2789 (Oxford, 1979). This paper owes much to Anderson’s admirable survey, though it has di~~o~tingIy Iittie to say direct@ about religion. There is a useful discussion of the bibliography of eighteenth century church history by John Kent: .J. Danitlou, A.H. Couratin and John Kent, Historical Theology: The Pelican Guide to Modern Theology (London, 1969), 2, pp. 292-306. Also W.O. Chadwick, The History of the Church. A Select Bibliography (Helps for Students of H~to~, no. 66, Historical Association, London. 1973) pp. 43-48. For particular subjects, two general reference books are especially useful, The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church (J.D. Douglas editor: Exeter, 1974); and The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (EL. Cross editor; 2nd edition, 1974). the latter with excellent bibliographies. Anderson, pp. Z-38.66-74; cf. Owen Chadwick, ‘Voltaire in the Nineteenth Cen- tury’. The Sewn of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Gvaury (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 143-160. Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: a Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey (London. 3929). Anderson, pp. 102-103. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an Inteqvetation. 1. The Riseof Modem Paganifm (London, 1970): 2. The Science of Freedom (London. 1970); also The Party of ~urnaffi~: Studies in the French Enlightenment (London, 1964). On Christianity and the French revolution, see footnote 49. For a taste of the controversy see Norman Hampson, ‘Whatever Happened lo the Enlightenment?’ British Sobe? for Eighteenth-Century Studies Newsletter 12 (June. 1977). pp. 21-24: Robert Wokler, ‘The enlightenment and the revolution’, British

116 Sheridan Gilley

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

Societyfor Eighteenth-Century Studies Newsletter 13 (October, 1977). pp. 18-21. ‘If we were to look for a general characterization of the age of the Enlightenment. the traditional answer would be that its fundamental feature is obviously a critical and sceptical attitude toward religion. If we attempt to test this traditional view by concrete historical facts. we soon come to entertain the gravest doubts and reser- vations SO far as German and English thought of the Enlightenment is concerned. Yet French philosophy of the eighteenth century seems to confirm the traditional view all the more stubbornly.’ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy ofrhe Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951). p. 134. Cassirer’s profound respect for the German enlighten- ment’s synthesis of Protestantism and humanism leads to his conclusion that ‘controversy from now on is no longer concerned with particular religious dogmas and their interpretation, but with the nature of religious certainty’: so that the enlightenment’s problems were still ultimately religious. the object ‘being not the dissolution of religion but its “transcendental” justification and foundation’. Ira 0. Wade, The intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1971). Ronald Grimsley, Rousseau and the Religious Quest (Oxford, 1968). S.S.B. Taylor, ‘The enlightenment in Switzerland’. in Roy Porter (ed.) Enlighten- ment in its National Context (Cambridge, forthcoming). Professor Taylor argues that French heterodoxy made the Swiss enlightenment more self-consciously, de- fensively orthodox.

A.C. Kots, D’HolbachS Coterie: an Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton. 1976). E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford, 1970), p. 483. This brilliant bio- graphy is only the tip of the iceberg of the twentieth century cult of Hume, which flourishes most luxuriantly among the philosophers, and secondarily among the devotees of the Scottish enlightenment.

‘The simple fact is that Enlightenment goals - like criticism, sensibility, or faith

in progress - throve in England within piety’. Roy Porter, The Enlightenment in

England’, in Porter, op. cit. So the British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books calls him David Hume ‘the Historian’. See also footnotes 13.44. Mark Pattison, Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750’. Essays and Reviews (London, 1860; tenth edition 1862), p. 311. Apart from Pattison, three older studies retain their value: C.J. Abbey and J.H. Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century 2, volumes (London. 1878): Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 volumes (London, 2nd ed. 1881); J.H. Overton and F. Relton, The English Churchfrom the Accession of George I to the End of the Eighteenth Century (171~1800) (London. 1906). In the absence of a good more recent history of the eighteenth century Church, Geoffrey Best’s Temporal Pillars. Queen Anne’s Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commicrioners, and the Church of England (Cambridge, 1964). covers a wider

area than its title suggests. J.H.S. Burleigh, A Church History of Scotland (Oxford, 1960), pp. 2&308: J.M. Cameron, ‘The Church of Scotland in the Age of Reason’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LW, (Geneva, 1%7), pp. 19394951; A.L. Drummond and J. Bulloch, The Scottish Church 16884843: the Age of the Moderates (Edin-

burgh, 1973). Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976). Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century Its Background & History (London, 1972) pp. 34473; Sir Malcolm Knox. A Layman’s Quest (London, 196% pp. 33-102; Claude Welch, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Background’, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1972). pp. 22-55.

Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey 117

21. Henri Brunschwig (Frank Jellinek trans.) Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Chicago, 1974). p. 7; cf. p. 23: ‘The clergy are un- doubtedly the most valuable of all the Aufklarung’s auxiliaries.’

22. J. van den Berg. ‘Orthodoxy. Rationalism and the World in Eighteenth-Century Holland’. Derek Baker (ed.). Sanctity and Secular&: the Church and the World Studies in Church History 10 (Oxford 1973). pp. 173-192.

23. Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (London, 1969) pa 349; cf. J.S. Spink, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et GenPve (Paris, 1934); J. Marx, Charles Bonnet contre les lumieres, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 156, 157 (Geneva, 1976).

24. On the seventeenth century background to this. Christopher F. Allison. The Rise of Moralism: the Proclamation of the Gospelfrom Hooker to Baxter (London. 1966).

25. See A.R. Humphrey% The Augustan World: Life and Letters in Eighteenth-Century England (London. 1964). pp. 138-178. The best general surveys of the Christian intellectual setting are Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (London, 1940). and James C. Livingston. Modern Christian Thought From the Enlighten- ment to Vatican II (New York, 1971), pp. l-79. See also footnotes 16, 17,20.

26. J.H. Newman, Fifteen Sermons preached before The University of Oxford (London, 1871). p, 197.

27. Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the Problem of Evil (Madison. Wiscon- sin. 1975). surveys the eighteenth century preoccupation with theodicy, while William L. Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, 1975) pays tribute to Samuel Clarke’s Boyle lectures. ‘the most complete, forceful, and cogent presenta- tion of the Cosmological Argument we possess’ (p. 8). Cf. James Paterson Ferguson, An Eighteenth Century Heretic: Dr. Samuel Clarke (Kineton, 1976): W.H. Barber, ‘Voltaire and Samuel Clarke’. Voltaire and the English, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 179 (1979), 47-62.

28. Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, 1973); Religion and Party in fate Stuart England (Historical Association Pamphlets, general series, 86, London, 1975).

29. G.V. Bennett, Conflict in the Church’, Geoffrey Holmes (ed. j Britain qfier the Glorious Revolution 3689-1714 (London, 1969); The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688-1730: the Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford. 1975). Also J.P. Kenyon. Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689-1720 (Cam bridge. 1977).

30. A good introduction is J. O’Higgins. ‘Hume and the Deists: a Contrast in Religious Approaches’. Journal of Theological Studies 22 (1971). 479-501. On their wider influence. see Norman L. Torrey. Voltaire and the Engftih Deists (New Haven, 1930). John Redwood’s Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (Cambridge. Mass., 1976). should be used with caution.

31. But see E.C. Mossner. Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason (New York, 1936), also with a good introduction to Deism: Anders Jeffner (K. Bradfield trans.). Butler and Hume on Religion, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Studia Doctrinae Christianae Upsaliensia, 7, (Stockholm, 1966). J.R. Lucas, Butler’s Philosophy of Religion Vindicated (Durham Cathedral Lecture 1978): Edward A. Sillem. George Berkeley and the Proofs for the Existence of God (London. 1957). Berkeley’s theism is more normally treated as a subordinate part of his philosophy.

32. (2nd edition. New York. 1961). 33. Kent p. 292. 34. F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, 1973).

See also footnotes 20.21 and 83. 35. ‘It is especially since the High Church movement commenced that the theology of

the eighteenth century has become a byword. The genuine Anglican omits that

118 Sheridan Gilley

period from the history of the Church altogether.’ Pattison, p. 307. The ‘genuine Anglican’ usually made an exception for Butler.

36. Norman Sykes, Church and State in Engiand in the Eighteenth Century: the Birkbeck lectures. . . 1931-3 (Cambridge, 1934); From Sheldon to Seeker: Aspects of Engltsh Church History 1660-1768 (Cambridge, 1959). For Sykes’ biographies, and those of his pupils, and for a general estimate, see Kent, pp. 291,2%301.

37. Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1954). 38. The Church and the Age of Reason 1648-1789 (The Pelican History of the Church

Vol. 5, London, 1%2); Reasonand Authority in rhe Eighteenth Century (Cambridge. 1964).

39. Especially The European Mind 1480-1715 (J.L. May trans.) (London, 1953); and European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (J.L. May trans.) (London, 1954). Cf. footnote 99.

40. (Geneva 1955- ). 41. Cf. Anderson, p. 97. 42. Rem? Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire (Paris. 1956); Besterman, Voltaire, pp.

207-223. 43. Gay, The Enlightenment, 1, p. 8. 44. Nicholas Phillipson explains that Hume’s importance to the Scottish enlighten-

ment was more as ‘a civic moralist rather than as a religious sceptic’: ‘Hume as a Moralist: A Social Historian’s Perspective’, in S.C. Brown (ed.) Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Brighton, 1979). p. 156.

45. Gay, The Enlightenment, 1, pp. 401-419. 46. See James A. Leith, ‘Peter Gay’s Enlightenment’, Eighteenth Century Studies 5

(1971). 157-171, especially p. 171, for many of the remarks which follow. 47. Cited May, p. xvii. 48. The oft-critic&d classic statement of the argument that the enlightenment was a

secularized Christianity is Carl Becker’s The Heave&v City of the Eighteenth- Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932); cf. Anderson, pp. 9g97.

49. John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (London. 1%9). There is also ample reference to the numerous books and articles on Christianity and counterrevolution in Douglas Johnson (ed.) French Society and rhe Revolution (Cambridge. 1976). See especially the magnificent conclusion to Olwen H&ton’s contribution, pp. 161-166.

50. One possible comparison might invoke the distinction between the ‘humanity’ of philosophical and Catholic attitudes to poor relief. ‘In 1816 the mayor of Toulouse engineered his way out of a food riot by shrieking at the populace “voulez-vous la char&! des philosophes?” . . in practical terms the people’s lot was made more difficult by laisser-faire and the loss of Catholic relief. Olwen Hufton. The Enlighten- ment and its Influences’, The Historical Journal 20 (1977), 975.

5 1. R.A. Cooper, ‘Ideas and Their Execution: English Prison Reform’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1976), 73-93, argues the extent and limitations of Howard’s in- fluence. The division of opinion on say, the desirability of capital punishment cuts across distinctions between ‘philosophes’ and their critics.

52. But see Paul C. Davies, ‘Augustinianism, Authoritarianism, Anthropolatry’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 5 (1972), 45M.

53. Leith, p. 159. 54. T.S. Eliot, cited on St. Magnus the Martyr, John Betjeman, The City of London

Churches (London, 1%7), p. 22. 55. See Sacheverell Sitwell, Monks, Nuns and Monasteries (London, 1%5), p. 67. 56. On the German monasteries and the enlightenment, see footnote 77. 57. Hem-i Daniel-Rops (John Warrington trans.). The Church in the Eighteenth

Cenfuty (London, 1964). pp. 269-343.

Chr~ti~n~~ and EnI~ghtenment: An Historical Survey 119

58. See Marc Venard, ‘Popular Religion in the Eighteenth Century’, William J . Callahan and David Higgs (eds.) Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 19791, pp. 138-154.

59. Peter Burke (ed.), (K. Folca trans.) A New Kind of History from the Writings of Febvre (London, 1973).

60. Annales d’histoire economique et sociale (Paris, 1929- ), now Annales &rnomies So&u% Civiltiations.

61. Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: the Annales Paradigm (Cornell, 1976): Richard Cobb, ‘Nous des Annales,’ A Second Identity Essays on France and French History (Oxford, 1%9), pp. 76-83.

62. Burke, p. xiii. 63. English scholarship in this area lacks French statistical pretensions, but there are

two classic studies of French cathedral cities, John McManne~, French Ecclesi- astical Society under the Ancien R&me: a Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, l%l); Olwen H&ton, Bayem in the Late Eighteenth Century. A Social Study (Oxford, 1%7). See also C.C. Fairchild’s Poverty and Charity in Air- en-Provence, 1640-1789 (London, 1976).

64. Gaby and M. Vovelle, Vision de la mort et de l’au-deli en Provence d’apris les autels des &mes du purgatoire (Paris, 1970). See John McManners’ review article, The History of Death’, The Times Literary Supplement, 14 December 1979, no. 4004, p. 11P.

65. Fernand Boulard, (M-J. Jackson trans.) An Introduction to Religious Sociology: Pioneer Work in France (London, 1960); cf. F. Boulard et J. Remy, Pmtique religieuse urbaine et regions culturelles (Paris, 1968).

66. Jean Dehrmeau, Le Catholicismeenwe Lutheret Voltaire (Paris, 1971): pp. 227-255. 67. Ibid., pp. 293-330. 68. Ibid., pp. 256292; cf. R. Mandrou, La France aux XV@ et XVZIl’e s&+&s (Paris,

1970), p. 168: ‘Le bas clerge, qui recoit d&s lors une v&itabIe formation theologique . . . assure aux fideles-contemporains des philosophes-une culture religieuse meil- leure qu’elle n’a jamais ete . . . Grace au bas clerge s&t&r, la vie reiigieuse des milieux populaires s’est affinee. D’autre part, ouvert . . . a la vie du sibcle, il peut connaltre autour de lui une lointaine image des combats de I’tpoque . . .’

69. William 1-i. Williams, ‘Voltaire and the Utility of the Lower Clergy’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LVIII (Geneva, 1%7), pp. 1869-1891. Bernard Plongeron, L.a vie quotidienne du clerge Francais au XVIIle sit!cle (Paris, 1974).

70. The standard Roman Catholic ecclesiastical history of the period, E. Preclin and E. Jarry, Leslunespoliti~uesetdocwi~lesaux~~~etXZI~~~s~c~fParis, 1948). volume 19 in A. Fhche and V. Martin (eds.) Histoire de l’iglise depuis les Origines jusqu’ a nos jours (Paris, 1946 ff.), is one of the least satisfactory in the series. The new work edited by Callahan and Higgs (see footnote 58) is an admirable survey of ecclesiastical structures, but leaves the problem of ‘Catholic enlightenment’ to one side.

71. See, however, the criticism of the phrase by Betty Behrens, ‘Enlightened Despotism’, The Htstorical Journal, XVIII (1975) pp. 401-408.

72. S.J. Miller, ‘A Portuguese Variety of Reform Catholicism in the Eighteenth Century’, Les Courants chretiens de I’Aufkliirung en Europe de la fin du XVII-e siecle jusque vers 1830, Section III, Commission intemationale d’histoire eeclt5siastique comparee, Congres & Varsovie 25VI-I VII 1978, pp. 17-19.

73. Robert Shackleton, ‘Jansenism and the Enlightement’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Centqv LVII (Geneva, 1%7), p. 1397. Cf. Peter Hersche, Der Spatjan- senismus in &erreich (Vienna. 1977).

74. Franc0 Venturi, (Susan Co& translator) Italy and the E~ighte~e~: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Centuq (London, 1972), p. 63.

75. Ibid., pp. W-133.

120 Sheridan Gilley

76. E.E.Y. Hales, Revolution and Papacy 17694346 (London. 1960) pp. 58-61. The unusual time-span of this work makes it valuable, as it brings out the continuity between the ‘absolutist’ and ‘revolutionary’ challenges to the Church.

77. Friedrich Heyer, (D.W.D. Shaw trans.) The Catholic Church from 1648 to 1870 (London, 1969). pp. 45-46, 88-93. There is an extensive bibliography in T.C.W. Blanning’s forthcoming essay, The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany’. in Roy Porter. op. cit.

78. See footnote 72. 79. See Anderson, pp. 40-63. 80. Venturi. pp. 225-264. On the vicissitudes of the eighteenth century papacy, see

Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages to 1799,40 volumes (London 1891-1953). volumes 33-40.

81. Derek Beales. ‘Writing a Life of Joseph II: The Problem of his Education’, Siographie und Geschichtwksenschaft Aufsiitz und Praxis biographischer Arbeit (1979), pp. 201-204. Cf. his correction to the more simple-minded views of an ‘enlightened’ Joseph II, in The False Joseph II’, The Historical Journal XVIII ( 1975) pp. 467-495.

82. Anderson, pp. 176-190. 83. John McManners, ‘Jansenism and Politics in the Eighteenth Century’, Derek Baker

(ed.) Church Society and Politics Studies in Church HistoT 12 (Oxford. 1975). pp. 253-273.

84. Some of Professor W.R. Ward’s condusions are set forth in two papers, The Relations of Enlightenment and Religious Revival in Central Europe and in the English-speaking World’, Derek Baker (ed.) Reform and Reformation England and the Continent c.1380-1750 (Oxford, 1980). pp. 281-365, ‘Power and Piety: the Origins of Religious Revival’, in 7’he Bulletin of the John Ryfands Library (forth- coming 1980).

85. See Derek Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See (London. 1978). 86. (London, 1975). 87. The phrase is not Bossy’s. but that of J.P. Chinnici. John Lingard and the English

Catholic Enlightenment (D.Phil., Oxford 1975). See also the following articles by Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected’, Recusant History 10 (January and October, 1970), pp. 193-209.309-331; ‘Doctor Douglass and Mister Berington - an Eighteenth Century Retraction’, The Downside Review 88 (July, 1970).

246-269. 88. Robert Damton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cam-

bridge, Mass., 1968). 89. R.A. Knox, Enthuskwn: a Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference

to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (Oxford, 1950). For a bibliography, see Kent, pp. 302-2%. to which should be added the rather uneven R.E. Davies and E.G. Rupp (eds.) A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain. 2 volumes (London, 1%5-1978), and the useful anthology, Albert C. Outler (ed.) John Wesley (New York, 1964).

90. Two religions ‘showed a particular aptitude for expansion in our period: Islam and sectarian Protestantism’, E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (New York, 1%2), p. 264. See Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (The Pelican History of the Church Vol. 6 London, 1%5), pp. 226-240 on the eighteenth century; p. 243 ff. from the French Revolution.

91. Roger Anstey, The Atfantic Sfave Trade and British Abolition 176&1810 (London, 1975), pp. 91-199, especially pp. 162-199. For a critique, see Eamon Duffy, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 29 (April, 1978), pp. 234-236.

92. Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (New York. 1973). 93. Ibid., p. 7.

Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey 221

94. E.P. Thompson, The Mukingofthe English Working Claw (London, 196S); Semmel, pp. 34.19.

95. Ibid., p. 85. %. Ibid., p. 99. 97. ‘Wesley and the Enlightenment’, ibid., pp. 87-96. 98. Ibid., pp. 197-198. 99. John McManners. ‘Paul Hazard and the “Crisis of the European Conscience” ‘, The

Proceedings of the Sydney University Arts Association, 2 (1%2) part 2,73-&i.