Enlightenment and
religion
Mark Knights
Secular or religious Enlightenment?
• Historiographical debate:
• Carl Becker (The Heavenly City of Eighteenth-Century
Philosophers 1932) asserted Enlightenment was akin to
medieval Christianity
• Argued for a predominately-Christian outlook in the
foundations of the Enlightenment
• Enlightenment merely substituted a new deity for the
existing deity, and thus should be more correctly
considered an example of medieval philosophy, not
modern
• eighteenth century philosophers “demolished the
Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with
more up-to-date materials”.
Modern Paganism
• This provoked a counter-blast that
emphasised the secular, atheistic and
even pagan (Peter Gay, Enlightenment…
The Rise of Modern Paganism 1967):
• Replacement of myth and superstition
by reason that had characterised
antiquity
• But also ‘modern pagans’ because they
sought to go further: ‘What made the
pagans modern and gave them hope for
the future was that they could use
science to control their classicism by
establishing the superiority of their own,
second age of criticism over the first’.
Jonathan Israel and Spinoza as the key
influence
• divides Enlightenment thinkers into two
categories, radical and moderate
• each respond to the philosophy of
Benedict Spinoza (1632-77):
• Rejected Jewish theology and expelled
from Jewish community in Amsterdam
– ruled out teleology, miracles, providence,
revelation, and the immortality of the soul
– Denied moral principles have divine
origins
– rejected ecclesiastical authority
– denied that social hierarchy, noble
privilege, and monarchical power are
ordained by God
– robustly supported freedom of thought
and political egalitarianism
– This was path to modernity
• Moderates were reformers but reacted vs
the radicalism of this
Religious Enlightenment
• Attempts to argue that the religion was in part an engine of
Enlightenment
• Knud Haakonson, Enlightenment and Religion (1996)
• John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth Century
France (1998-9): church challenged by ‘not only educated
laymen, but also the more intelligent churchmen’ (Abbé
Nollet and Abbé Spallanzi, condoms and frogs, 1785)
• Sheehan, American Historical Review (2003)
• Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe 17501830 (2003)
• S J Barnett, Enlightenment and Religion (2003)
• Simon Grote, review essay in Journal of History of Ideas
2014)
An interesting historiographical debate
• Goes to the heart of what the Enlightenment was and
whether we can find anything coherent about it (can
you have multiple Enlightenments?)
• And to the link between Enlightenment and modernity:
Modern resonances – the rise of religious
fundamentalism
• and how change occurs
• Shows the power of arguments in history
• And defining categories: what is ‘religion’? Faith,
theology, institutions. How do you measure it? Peter
Harrison, 'Religion' and the religions in the English
Enlightenment (1990) argues Enlightenment ‘invented’
modern concept/science of religion
The case for new attitudes to religion
• Extension of inquiry across all
boundaries – application to
science, authority and religion
• Reason and scepticism; attack on
superstition (Voltaire –
‘Superstition sets the whole
world in flames; philosophy
quenches them’) - and miracles
• Disenchantment;
• Laws of nature, empiricism:
mechanical universe; Julien
Offray de La Mettrie (1748),
L’homme machine [Man a
machine]
• Deism, freethinking and atheism
Toleration
• Locke
• Voltaire and the Calas
affair, 1762: victim of
a biased trial as a
Protestant in Catholic
France. Alleged to
have murdered his son
to prevent him
converting to
catholicism. Tortured
and executed (on a
wheel), despite
evidence of suicide.
Calas became a symbol
of religious intolerance
Voltaire used the case to blast the Church for
its intolerant and fanatical views in his 1763
work Treatise on Tolerance
Toulouse
Deist…"It is perfectly
evident to my mind
that there exists a
necessary, eternal,
supreme, and
intelligent being. This is
no matter of faith, but
of reason."
Champion of Newtonian science: Éléments de la
Philosophie de Newton (1738) and expanded in
1745
Reconsidering the place of the Jews
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)
• German dramatist
• Close friends with Moses
Mendelssohn from 1754, Jewish
philosopher who published Jerusalem
(1783) as forcible plea for freedom of
conscience, including Jews
• Lessing wrote Nathan the Wise
(1779): wise Jewish merchant, the
enlightened sultan and knight templar
bridge gaps between Judaism, Islam
and Christianity. Its major themes are
friendship, tolerance, relativism of
God, a rejection of miracles and a
need for communication.
The attack on religious institutions
• Attack on counter-reformation
institutions: Jesuits (est. 1540)
disbanded, 1755-64 in France
and its empire; 1759 Portugal;
Austria 1767; Spanish Empire
1767-8
• The narrative of Enlightenment
as a step to modernity in its
diminution of religion:
– separation of church and state
– critiques of the spiritual and
political prerogatives of the clergy
and religious institutions, leading
to the loss of its power
– Separation of church and state
French revolution (1789)
• abolished Catholic church
– 1790 church lands confiscated
– 1790 National Assembly stripped clergy of special rights (became state
employees)
– 1792 legalisation of divorce
– 1792 physical attacks on clergy
– 1793 de-Christianisation process
• celebration of the goddess "Reason" in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10
November 1793.
• Established cult of reason and the supreme being 1794
• 1801 Concordat stopped the process but still brought church under state
Inscription on church at Ivry –la-Bataille.
The counter-narrative: Religious
Enlightenment
• Building on the Reformation’s attack
on superstition and ignorance
• Vs tendency to take France as the
model of Enlightenment: anticlerical,
atheistic
• revealed truths not inconsistent with
truths discovered by human reason –
there could be a ‘reasonable religion’
or ‘enlightened religion’: John Locke
for Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn
• Religion embraced modernity
Religion and science/knowledge were
compatible
• Isaac Newton
• Encyclopédie – often critical of catholic church
but many contributors and readers were religious
– Holbach but also Abbé Claude Yvon
• 20% of provincial Academicians in France were
clerics
• Christian Thomasius (1655–1738), professor of
law and philosophy at Halle, among the founding
luminaries of the German Enlightenment – not
the champion of secularism he used to be
characterised as
Catholic Enlightenment?
• Jean Mabillon – late C17th monk, founder of
paleography. ‘All truth is of God and by consequence
one must love it. All truth can carry us to God’.
• Critique of Louis XIV by Archbishop Francois Fenelon
(1651-1715) – Lettre à Louis XIV; The Adventures of
Telemachus, the son of Ulysses.
• Joseph Eybel, late C18th leading exponent of reform
Catholicism in the Austrian lands and architect of
Emperor Joseph II’s religious reforms late in the
century
• Disbanding of Jesuits was result of pressure from
Catholic regimes and from reform movement
(Jansenism) within catholicism
Religion as an enduring force
• Religion and religious institutions continued to be
important, playing a major role in politics, culture
and everyday life.
• The Bible remained a key text
• Enduring belief in miracles
• End of witchcraft executions (1682 England, 1727
Scotland, 1745 France, 1775 Germany, 1782
Switzerland, 1783 Poland, 1811 Russia). is not
evidence of sudden change of religious culture –
persistence of supernatural
• Ancien régime still closely tied church and state
‘Enlightenment’ victories as religious
ones
• Abolition of slavery, GB 1807.
• William Wilberforce: ‘God Almighty has
set before me two great objects, the
suppression of the Slave Trade and
Reformation of Morals’
• Quaker opposition – 9 of 12 founding
members of the 1787 Society for
effecting the Abolition of the Slave
Trade were Quakers
• Anglican Thomas Clarkson rode
35,000m: “We cannot suppose
therefore that God has made an order
of beings, with such mental qualities
and powers, for the sole purpose of
being used as beasts, or instruments of
labour.” 1786
Josiah Wdgewood’s design
for medallion – he was a
Unitarian
Enlightenment as a battle between
religious forces
• Joseph Priestley
• Rational dissenter (unitarian),
scientist, civil liberties, seen as
supporter of French revolution
• Opposed by ‘Church and King’ mob
that destroyed his house in
Birmingham 1791
• Enemies of the Enlightenment
(2001), historian Darrin McMahon
extends the Counter-Enlightenment
both back to pre-Revolutionary
France and down to the level of
'Grub Street’ – defence of ‘religion’
and established order
Or religion fuelled the counterEnlightenment
• Giambattista Vico, Naples, early C18th
philosopher, rhetorician, historian –
critic of stress on rationalism
• Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre: postrevolutionary argument that monarchy
was a sacred institution; Pope should
have ultimate authority in temporal
matters; rationalist rejection of
Christianity had led to Terror
• Authoritarian: any attempt to justify
government on rational grounds will
only lead to unresolvable arguments
about the legitimacy and expediency
of any existing government, and that
this, in turn, will lead to violence and
chaos
Secular or religious Enlightenment?
• Answer to initial question: both! Secular and
religious Enlightenment – tensions existed within
it (and even within a single philosophe eg
Voltaire’s doubts 1755)
• Enlightenment was not a unified movement
• Indeed, contestation over religion was key:
debates over toleration, over the relationship
between church and state, over the supernatural,
over the freedom to publish heterodox views all
contributed to Enlightenment values
• Does that make the term ‘Enlightenment’
problematic?!
Reading on the Religious
Enlightenment
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David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from
London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de
Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
Ulrich Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740–1803 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
Thomas Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and
the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 2006).
Jonathan Sheehan, ‘‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A
Review Essay,’’ American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1061–80
Simon Grote Review-Essay: Religion and Enlightenment Journal of the History of
Ideas, Volume 75, Number 1, January 2014, pp. 137-160 (Article)
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment,’’ in The European
Witch Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Trevor-Roper (New
York: Harper, 1968), 193–236
S J Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion (2003)