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W E H Lecky: Rationalism in Europe
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W E H Lecky
Rationalism in Europe
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Contents Updated: Wednesday, 20 February, 2008
W E H Lecky
In January, 1865, when he had not yet attained his twenty-seventh birthday, Lecky established himself in the front rank of authors by the publication of his History of the Rise and Inf1uece of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. Two years before, in 1863, he had published an essay on The Declining Sense of the Miraculous, and this formed the first two chapters of the later work. The book is a remarkable combination of history and philosophy, displaying wide reading and power of thought and generalisation. Its central idea is the development of reason and the decay of superstition as a power in western society. This evolution is traced not only in religion, but also in politics and industry. While long, the book is written in a lucid and polished style which is sometimes truly eloquent, and contributes to the history of the human mind and of human society.
A Declining Sense of the Miraculous
Anyone intelligent today receives an account of a contemporary miracle, with a derisive incredulity. It was not always so. Three hundred years ago, a miraculous account was universally accepted as perfectly credible, probable and ordinary. The clergy, legislators of every country, judges of the keenest acumen, had no doubts about the sin of witchcraft, its prevalence and the necessity for punishing it with the utmost severity. Hardly a voice was raised in question. One judge boasted that he had himself sent witches to the stake at the rate of fifty a year. Torquemada and Luther were equally emphatic and equally ruthless. More than two centuries later, Wesley protested that to deny witchcraft was to deny the bible.
To-day, no one educated believes in miracles and the supernatural. Their incredulity dispenses with evidence, because no amount of evidence will outweigh their predisposition to disbelief. They will repudiate the honesty of the witness, or take it as certain that he has somehow been deceived, but the change has not been brought about by the accumulation of fresh evidence. The evidence for the supernatural has always been the same, but we have learnt, as our ancestors had not, to look upon it as virtually valueless. Psychologically, if we regard witchcraft as per se probable, the supporting evidence seems overwhelming. If we regard it as per se extremely improbable, the evidence fades to insignificance. In the ancient and in the medieval world, the miraculous—the persistently recurrent intervention or supernatural agencies in the natural course of events—was almost universally accepted as indisputable.
The predisposition to seek or to assume a supernatural explanation of any event which seems out of the common fades as the natural causes of such events become by degrees generally obvious. The supernatural is primarily sought for to account for that which is at first sight not to be naturally accounted for. The progress of science from the sixteenth century onwards accounted naturally for so much that had been regarded as supernatural, that the presumption in favour of natural explanations became the common presumption, and the predisposition to supernaturalism no longer entered into everyday life.
Witchcraft
Magic is human commerce with supernatural agencies. Witchcraft and sorcery are the commerce between human agents and the malignant supernatural agencies of which they are in effect the instruments. The ancient world did not dwell upon positively malignant agencies. The magician who held commerce with the supernatural was not particularly associated with malignity, and only occasionally and in slight degree acquired the character of the medieval sorcerer or witch. Witchcraft developed with the development of the idea of the Devil and his subordinate fiends—the powers ex hypothesi malignant enemies of God and man. When everyone believed that Satan and his satellites were, in the most literal sense of the words, constantly going about “seeking whom they might devour”, evidence of these operations was accepted without demur—and likewise, evidence against their suspected human agents. The Middle Ages took the truth of witchcraft for granted. The Church affirmed it, and when the Reformation came, the appeal to the bible endorsed it.
The belief in witchcraft grew with the victories of the church over paganism, then heresy. The terrorism of the orthodox doctrine exercised an enormous influence on the popular imagination. Exclusive salvation for baptized Christians was coupled with eternal torture in the literal flames of hell for the infinitely larger number of humanity. And to this was joined the terror of the hosts of evil spirits always seeking to draw the unwary into the way of destruction. All the gods and goddesses of all the pantheons in whom heretics and pagans placed their trust were absorbed into the demonic battalions. Possession by devils and the casting out of devils were readily believed to be everyday facts. The secret perpetuation of old pagan customs which had not been adapted by the Church had been treated as commerce with the powers of evil.
But it was not till the unrest of the twelfth century began to give birth to new heresies that the Church gave way to a new spirit of persecution, and there was evolved in the popular mind a sort of panic which turned not so much against heresiarchs as against the Arch Enemy’s suspected human agents, the so-called witches, which reached its climax in the two centuries immediately preceding and following the Reformation. It was only the habit of accepting natural explanations of phenomena which grew up in the seventeenth century that deprived supernaturalism, and therefore witchcraft, of its standing ground—the habit of preferring, as the more probable, a supernatural to a natural but not immediately obvious explanation.
Witchcraft is the expression of a general acceptance of the miraculous when regarded as the work of malign or diabolic agencies. Belief in it faded, as the readiness of belief in the miraculous generally faded, with the growing sense that natural phenomena, however unexpected, are always attributable to natural causes. The field of the inexplicable being reduced till inexplicable phenomena could only be looked upon as highly abnormal, instead of perfectly normal, the inexplicable phenomena were themselves called in question, till they were reduced to those of the type which the Church held to be essential evidences of her tenets. Protestantism, on controversial rather than rationalistic grounds, rejected the miracles which were cited in support of Rome, while adhering to bible miracles, though it is difficult to escape the fact that the nature of the evidence in both cases is essentially the same. The reconciliation with rationalism has to be found in the view that Divine interposition in human affairs is not inherently improbable, since it is not to be regarded as a contravention of natural laws but as in accord with that Law of which natural laws form a part, the law under which we daily and hourly see Will exercising control over Matter, directing it to its own ends.
Rationalistic Developments
The earliest stage of religions is presumed to be that of fetishism, the worship of portions of matter animate or inanimate. At the next stage the idea of divinity is separated from matter, but man conceives the divine spirits anthropomorphica11y, assigns to them human qualities, and pictures them to himself and others in human likeness. When the virtue of the deity is attributed, in the spirit of fetishism, to the image, we have idolatry.
Art develops in relation to religious ideas. The earliest Christian art, in the catacombs, has no suggestion of idolatry. The Deity is presented only, and then rarely, in the person of Christ. In the early medieval stage, the demand for a feminine as well as a masculine conception of the deity introduces the presentation of the Virgin—but not yet of God the Father, and the fetishist treatment of particular images comes into being—in spite of the Iconoclasts in the Eastern Church and of the denunciations of S Agobard of Lyons in the ninth century. Mahomedanism stands alone in its refusal to countenance idolatry in practice as well as in theory. In the medieval Church, the worship of relics and of particular images was in effect encouraged.
The art which is the pursuit of beauty developed in Ancient Greece and, in Renaissance Italy when it ceased in fact if not in form to have religion for its motive. The Gothic architecture which had been the most perfect expression of the sense of beauty permeated by the most profound religious sentiment was displaced by that of which S Peter’s is the supreme type, devoid altogether of religious sentiment, as were Michelangelo’s “religious” frescoes and statues. The secularisation of art marked the new rationalising spirit which severed it altogether from fetishism and from anthropomorphism. For in the earliest stages, religion had treated beauty, sensuous beauty, as a dangerous snare of the Devil, and the more definitely beauty became the object pursued, the more definitely were the ways of art and of religion parted.
The general movement of rationalism has been most profoundly influenced by the progress of physical science. The doctrine of the inspiration of the bible might be applied to its allegorical interpretation, a process which was indeed carried to amazing lengths, but it was also applied to the complete repression of a11 scientific enquiry which could be contravened by any phrase in the bible as the ultimate indisputable authority, so that to believe, for instance, in the existence of the antipodes, was tantamount to heresy. No scientific facts outside the range of the ancient Hebrew writers could be true. Whatever they took for granted must be true. A postulate that was in itself a prohibition upon the progress of science, which in medieval times was possible only under Islam.
Superior knowledge excited only terror and suspicion. If it was shown in speculation it was heresy, if in the study of nature it was sorcery. The magnificent work of Roger Bacon brought upon him only imprisonment and persecution. The astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, fo11owed at the close of the seventeenth century by Newton and Descartes, destroyed the old conception of Man as the centre of the universe. The Church could no longer prohibit the progress of the scientific spirit, and the work was completed by the advance of chemistry and, in the nineteenth century, of geology, the first emphasising the natural as against the supernatural explanation of phenomena and the second the infinite age of the universe to which biblical chronology assigned an existence of six thousand years.
The new attitude reacted upon biblical criticism, forcing it to bring the interpretation of scripture into conformity with the affirmations of science, as a subject regarding which the knowledge of the Hebrews was not inspired but merely represented the assumptions current in their time, the actual record of events being natura11y coloured by those assumptions.
A corresponding change arises in the field of moral development. Right and wrong are absolute and unchanging, but the realization of right and wrong in particular departments is a matter of growth. The attitude towards veracity takes on new aspects with the advance of civilization. The sentiment of humanity in one age tolerates with no sort of reprobation what a later age has learnt to condemn without qualification. The religious doctrines or dogmas which clash with the developed moral perceptions are driven from the field, even as those which clash with developed scientific knowledge. Hitherto Christianity has survived because every advance has been taken as revealing more completely the moral perfection of its ideal, prosecuted in the teaching and in the person of its Founder.
Persecution
The moral sentiment upon which the religion of ancient Greece and Rome centred was the sense, the pride, of virtue, claiming merit for itself. That of Christianity was the sense of sin, the absence of merit in the creature—“we are all unprofitable servants”—resting, in medieval Christianity, upon the doctrine of the Fall of Adam and the birth into sin of all his descendants, the consequent necessity for the Atonement, and the exclusion from salvation of all who had not been released from the transmitted guilt of Adam by membership of the Church. The doctrine of exclusive salvation is directly responsible for the theory of persecution for religious opinions, because the right opinion was held to be necessary to salvation, insomuch that the unbaptized infant was doomed to an eternity of agony on account of Adam’s sin five or six thousand years before its birth. Luther and Calvin were as emphatic on the subject as Rome. The great pagans were damned beside the unbaptized infants.
Zwingli and Socinus in the Reformation era were alone in asserting conscience, not dogmatic belief, as the arbiter, the pioneers of the rationalism which transferred to reason the functions which had been assumed by authority. It was between the time of Bacon and Locke that Chillingworth, for the first time in England, taught the absolute innocence of honest error, and that the writ De Heretico Comburendo was expunged from the Statute Book.
It is a common error to suppose that opinion cannot be greatly repressed or even entirely suppressed by penal measures. Where opinion has survived and proved victorious over severe persecution, the fact has generally been due to other issues which were involved, and religious persecution has often been in effect successfu! Most often, persecution has been defeated by a change in the atmosphere of thought which has weakened and finally ended the persecution itself. Nor, in many cases, have the persecuted refrained from persecution when the power has passed into their hands.
The doctrine of exclusive salvation inevitably brings about persecution in order that souls may be saved though bodies perish through the repression of false doctrine. The earliest Christian persecutors found their warrant in the Levitical code which treated idolatry not as an error but as a crime. Arians and Catholics persecuted pagans and each other with equal zeal, and the doctrine of persecution received its most emphatic impulse from S Augustine. In his eyes, heresy was the greatest of crimes. The ascetic doctrine of contempt and more than contempt for the body hardened men’s hearts to physical suffering. The authority claimed for the Church was in many respects applied as a humanising and civilizing influence, but uncompromisingly it crushed all freedom of thought and of enquiry and was ultimately responsible for inflicting an enormous amount of bloodshed and suffering in the name of religion.
Though Protestantism was based on the assertion of the right and duty of exercising private judgement, it was nevertheless for long permeated with the same conception of the guilt of error and the same doctrine of exclusive salvation which were in fact inconsistent with its underlying principle, of which toleration was the necessary corollary, but it was only in the course of two centuries that the underlying principle prevailed over the established habit of thought.
In France, the scepticism of Montaigne as a man of the world, of Descartes as a philosopher, and of Bayle as a scholar, had the greatest influence, in the three several fields which they touched, in developing this rationalist attitude, and most of all it was the scepticism of Voltaire, when the way had been thus prepared, that exposed the fundamental irrationalism of persecution.
In England the idea of toleration was not derived from the sceptics. The most powerful indictment of intolerance was the Areopagitica of the Puritan Milton, and the spirit of toleration breathes in the Liberty of Prophesying by Jeremy Taylor, while it was bound up with the teaching of Chillingworth and the latitudinarian school in the Anglican Church, severely as they were condemned by other schools—a tribute to the greater flexibility then of Protestantism.
The Secularization of Politics
In this branch of our subject, we shall observe first how theological interests, at one time dominant, ceased to be a main object of political combinations, and, secondly, how the basis of authority became secularised. Two moral influences have chiefly controlled the history of mankind, patriotism and religion. In the ancient world, patriotism was supreme, religion but secondary, except in the case of biblical Hebrews, among whom the two were the same. With the establishment of Christianity, religious fervour displaced patriotic fervour, and the Church dominated politics, most conspicuously in the crusading era, which was also the era of the great Popes.
Christendom battled whole-heartedly against Islam, and the Church could enforce the Truce of God. But with the improving organization of the civil governments and the weakening of ecclesiastical prestige, the business of administration passed out of the hands of the Churchmen, the governments ceased to fear the Church, and the new wars of religion which arose wIth the Reformation, unlike the Crusades, were diverted, complicated and dominated by political and national aspirations. After the Thirty Years War, religious differences could never again be the primary factor in political combinations.
The development of political feeling and the political habit of thought compels the severance of politics from theology. In the Middle Ages, politics were dominated by theology. When this was the case, religion taught emphatically that while it might be right to disobey, it was mortal sin to resist and rebel against constituted authority. Rebellion was justified only when it was in obedience to the Church, as a higher authority than the temporal monarch, acting in the protection of morals and the repression of heresy. But the Church in its own contest with the temporal power, as well as notionally in Christian teaching, was antagonistic to secular tyranny, and sympathetic towards the oppressed.
While the Reformation, by the appeal to private judgement, encouraged the challenging of authority in politics as well as in theology, the most emphatic apologists of tyrannicide were among the Jesuits. But in countries where the Churchmen found their own interests bound up with the monarchy—as in Catholic France and Protestant England—the Church ranged itself on the side of Divine Right, while, where a protestantism that had its rise among the people gained sway it was inevitably also a political protestantism, democratic in character, tending to claim the ultimate authority not for the crown but for the people, and finding the sanction of a limited monarchy in the fiction of a social contract.
In England, the creators of political liberty as well as of religious toleration were not the religious free-thinkers—Hobbes, Bolingbroke, Hume, were all very positively on the side of the crown—but mainly the Puritans, English or Scotch, or men of a definitely religious cast of mind, concluding with Locke. Both came out of or were fostered by Protestantism. In Catholic France, we have seen that the champions of religious toleration against persecution were the sceptics, because the rigid insistence upon dogma sanctioned persecution in the Catholic country, whereas the diversities of Protestantism, resting on the tenets of private judgement, could not be ultimately reconciled with persecution. French protestantism did, in fact, produce such works as Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, which asserted the elective basis of monarchy.
But on the continent generally, it was from the classics that the apostles of liberty drew their inspiration, a source scarcely reconcilable either with Puritanism or with Catholicism, being wholly dissociated from religion. And the development of the doctrines of liberty may be directly traced to the formation of a middle class by the increase of wealth, to the spreading of knowledge through the printing-press as well as its advance, to the weapons which deprived the privileged classes of their military superiority, and, finally, to the development of the science of political economy.
The Industrial History of Rationalism
The ancient civilizations were anti-industrial, resting upon the practice of slavery, and consequently emphasising the indignity of labour. A certain humanitarianism which developed in the early Empire, and the conquests of barbarians among whom slavery had never developed, did something towards reducing its worst aspects, but in Christendom, by slow degrees, it had theoretically gone by the thirteenth century, though serfdom, a different form of it in practice, survived. The Church fostered the spirit of charity, the spirit of self-sacrifice and a sense of Christian equality, and actual manual labour derived a novel dignity from the practices of the monks themselves. But it was the impulse to seek at once wealth by commerce and political liberty, in the larger towns, that created industrial organization, and here industrialism and clericalism parted company, though at the outset they seemed likely to work in concert.
For industrialism and commerce required to hire money, and the Church forbade usury, the receiving of any consideration for the loan of money. For long the Jews, outside the pale of the Church’s prohibition, were the only moneylenders, till the commercial towns of Lombardy and Germany took their place—for the simple reason that to borrow was necessary, and to lend without an equivalent for the usage was not business. Yet the Church continued to denounce the practice as in the nature of robbery and as condemned by authority.
Commerce again was incompatible with the barriers which the Church interposed between the faithful and the heretics or infidels, since it required association and mutual confidence. It learnt to ignore these barriers, and the first to profit thereby were the Jews. Industrial development suffered its most severe checks in Spain from the intolerance which expelled Jews and Moors and in France from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Commerce, in short, could not be reconciled with the theological spirit.
The Hanseatic League gave a solid force to commerce. It was glorified by Venice and Florence. At the same time the revival of classical learning was renewing the long lost influence of pre-Christian ideas, the pursuit of natural science and of speculative notions among the Moors, repressed by the Church in Europe, was nevertheless penetrating the finer intellects. On the one side this effected the revival of that most potent agency of art, the drama, which the Church had long practically crushed out of existence. A desire for intellectual amusements challenged the more barbarous forms of sport, and these things were a direct product of increasing material wealth. The brief favour they won from such a Pope as Leo was countered by the Popes of the Reformation era and their successors, and by Puritanism, and while religion denounced the actor, the leaders of rationalism defended his art.
Catholic Spain in the sixteenth century might have captured and held without dispute the industrial and commercial supremacy of the world. She flung it away by her religious intolerance, her preference for gold-mines above industry and her restrictions upon commerce, and it passed to the protestant Dutch and English, whose religious zeal did not conflict with their business instincts, nor did religion affect the commercial issues, except in this instance.
The development of the science of political economy in the eighteenth century drove out of the field the almost universal doctrine of the past that manufacture is a branch of industry inferior to and less honourable than agriculture. It made the acquisition of wealth a direct incentive to effort. By the development of commerce it increased intercommunication, and above all it disproved the old belief that one country can prosper commercially only at the expense of another, demonstrating that the prosperity of each is to the advantage of all. The opposite habit of mind is so deeply ingrained that men, even while they acknowledge the truth of the axiom, will act in the directly contrary spirit, just as Protestants continued to persecute. But similarly the right habit of mind will become general, establishing the sense that a war of rivalry is to no one’s advantage, the conqueror suffering more than he can possibly gain. Though the day be distant, enlightened self interest, the strongest of motives with large masses of men, will also be the strongest of motives towards peace.
