Europe: A History (121 page)

The horror of the age occurred in 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and all of France’s Huguenots were driven into exile (see below). But in general the pace of persecution was slackening. In many countries the laws of non-toleration were observed in the breach. Wherever nonconformists had survived, they now came into the open. In England a new label was coined— Latitudinarianism—to describe the strong body of opinion which favoured toleration for all Protestants. The Congregationalists or ‘Independents’ surfaced in 1662, initially on condition that their chapels were located at least five miles from any parish church. Following the remarkable career of George Fox (1624–91), the Society of Friends or ‘Quakers’ suffered numerous martyrdoms until gaining the right to worship, like other dissenters, from the Toleration Act of 1689. The General Body of Dissenters—Independents, Presbyterians, and Baptists—was organized in London in 1727. The Moravian Church re-emerged in Holland, in England, and in the experimental community of Herrnhut (1722) in Saxony. Eighteenth-century manners, as opposed to many eighteenth-century laws, favoured toleration. The climate was right for deists, for dissenters, even for religious jokers. ‘They say’, wrote Voltaire, ‘that God is always on the side of the big battalions.’
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Various religious counter-currents appeared, in reaction to the growing inertia of the established Churches. In the Catholic world the Quietism of Miguel de Molinos (c.1640–97) caused real disquiet. Its founder, who taught that sin can only be avoided in a state of complete spiritual passivity, died in prison in Rome; and his book, the
Spiritual Guide
(1675), was condemned by the Jesuits as heretical. In the Lutheran world, the Pietism of P. J. Spener (1635–1705) caused similar ructions. Its founder, who proclaimed the universal priesthood of the faithful, instituted the practice of devotional circles for Bible-reading; and his book,
Pia Desideria
(1675), became the keystone of a long-lasting movement. The University of Halle was its centre.

In the Anglican world, the Methodism of John Wesley (1703–91) threatened to tear the Church of England apart. Wesley had created a spiritual Method for his ‘Holy Club’ of students at Oxford, and had visited Herrnhut. His lifetime of evangelism, touring the remotest parts of the British Isles, fired the neglected masses with enthusiasm. His rejection of episcopacy, however, was bound to cause a
schism, and the first Methodist Conference assembled in London in 1785. His brother Charles Wesley (1707–88) was an Anglican hymn-writer of genius, whose magnificent cadences well expressed the changing tone of the times.

Methodism took particularly powerful root in Wales, where it is widely believed to have inspired not just a religious but a national revival.
³
The first Welsh Methodist Association, which met in January 1743, preceded the first equivalent meeting in England. Its Calvinistic theology was to lead in a direction more akin to Presbyterianism. At the same time, the Circulating Schools organized by the Revd Griffith Jones, Rector of Llanddowror; the magnificent Welsh hymns of William Williams (1717–91), ‘Williams Pant y Celyn’; and an elevated preaching tradition started by Daniel Rowland (1713–90) of Llangeitho, the ‘Jerusalem of Wales’, forged the instruments which would ensure the survival of Welsh language and culture into modern times. No one who has heard a Welsh choir soaring in full harmony to the strains of
Llanfair, Cwm Rhondda
, or
Blaenwern
can fail to appreciate what national pride and spiritual uplift mean. Needless to say, the
hwyl
or fervour of the Welsh Methodists was diametrically opposed to the temper of the Enlightenment, which by then was the dominant trend in the leading intellectual circles of Europe.

In the Jewish world, the Hasidism of Baal Shem Tov (1700–60), the
Besht
of Miedzybóż in Podolia, undermined the Polish rabbis much as Wesley was undermining the Anglican bishops. The
Hasidim
or ‘Pious Ones’ rejected the desiccated formalism of the synagogues, and set themselves apart in clannish communities ruled by hereditary
zaddiks
or ‘holy men’. They were very distant in space and culture from Christian Methodism, but were close in temper. They rigorously adhered to orthodox Judaic laws of dress and diet, but, once again, the movement was marked by the fervour of the masses, by joyful music, by the revival of spirituality.

Equally prominent was a decided shift in Europe’s social manners. People reacted against the strictures of the preceding age not so much by changing the laws as by ignoring the norms of taste and conduct which the religious authorities had once been able to impose. In sharp contrast to the Calvinist and Jesuit puritanism which still predominated c.1660, the following century saw both a sharp rise in artistic sensitivity and a sharp decline in moral restraints. The ‘Age of Elegance’ went hand in hand with an age of easy scruples. On the one hand the upper classes and their imitators took to the arts of graceful living as never before: luxury and refinement were seen everywhere in their dress, their palaces, their furniture, their music, their collections. At the same time, in all classes, there was a marked relaxation of social, and especially sexual, mores. With time, sexual licence became not just tolerated but ostentatious. After the long interval of the Reformations, everyone was free, if they wanted, to behave once again with abandon. For those whose health and pockets could afford it, excess in dressing, carousing, gourmandizing, and philandering was routine. People took pride in the perruque and the puffed petticoat, in the landscaped park, in painted porcelain and the powdered pudendum. This was the social climate which no doubt helped promote the religious revivals. But it also enlarged the margin of intellectual tolerance which the
philosophes
Of the Enlightenment were able to exploit.
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The Enlightenment
, according to Kant, was the period in the development of European civilization when ‘Mankind grew out of its self-inflicted immaturity’. More simply, one might say that Europeans reached ‘the age of discretion’. The metaphor is a powerful one, with medieval Christendom seen as the parent and Europe’s secular culture as a growing child conceived in the Renaissance. Childhood had been encumbered by the baggage of parental and religious tradition and by family quarrels. The key attainment came with ‘the autonomy of reason’, the ability to think and act for oneself. But the child continued to possess a number of strong family traits.

Perhaps the Enlightenment is best understood, however, by reference to the darkness which this ‘light of reason’ was trying to illuminate. The darkness was provided, not by religion as such, which was taken by the
philosophes
to be filling a basic human need, but by all the unthinking, irrational, dogmatic attitudes with which European Christianity had become encrusted. These attitudes, including bigotry, intolerance, superstition, monkishness, and fanaticism, were summed up in the most pejorative word of the age, ‘enthusiasm’. The
Lumières
, as the French called the movement, were to be beamed on to a wide range of subjects: philosophy, science and natural religion, economics, politics, history, and education.

The particular intellectual habitat which fostered the growth of rationalism was not to be found everywhere. It required on the one hand the presence of both
Catholics and Protestants, whose rival dogmas set up a suitable clash of ideas, and on the other hand a measure of toleration within which a rational dialogue could be started. In the seventeenth century it was only found in three or four locations. Such conditions existed in Poland-Lithuania—where Jesuits mingled with Orthodox, Jews, and a number of radical sects. They existed to some extent in Switzerland, where an interchange of ideas was always possible between the Catholic and Protestant cantons. They existed in Scotland, and in England, where the broad Anglican tradition protected contrary points of view. But they existed above all in the Netherlands, where the native resources were supplemented by a long line of intellectual refugees, from J. J. Scaliger and René Descartes to Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Le Clerc, and Bayle. Leyden, the ‘Athens of Batavia’, Amsterdam, the ‘Cosmopolis’ of Europe, and The Hague were the main laboratories of the Enlightenment. Although Frenchmen were prominent from the start, and French was adopted as the
lingua franca
, France itself did not become the principal scene of activity until the mid-eighteenth century, when local conditions relaxed. Voltaire, one of the central figures, was forced to settle in Switzerland, or on the Swiss border.

The key concept—the
lumen naturale
or ‘natural light of reason’—has been traced to one of Melanchthon’s works,
De lege naturae
(1559), and via Melanchthon to Cicero and the Stoic philosophers. For this reason the translation of the text of the Stoics by Joost Lips (Lipsius, 1547–1606) at Leyden is seen as a landmark. Together with the fruits of the Scientific Revolution and the rational method of Descartes, it formed the core of an ideology which held centre-stage from the 1670s to the 1770s. It led to the conviction that reason could uncover the rules that underlay the apparent chaos of both the human and material world, and hence of natural religion, of natural morality, of natural law. In the arts, too, it led to the notion that strict rules and symmetrical patterns could alone give expression to the natural order with which all Beauty should be associated. Beauty was order; and order was beautiful. Here was the true spirit of Classicism.

The philosophy of the Enlightenment was primarily concerned with epistemology, that is, the theory of knowledge—or how we know what we know. Here, the basis for debate was supplied by three Britons: the Englishman John Locke (1632–1704), the Irishman Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), and the Scotsman David Hume (1711–76), sometime secretary of the British Embassy in Paris. As empiricists, they all accepted that the scientific method of observation and deduction should be applied to human affairs, and hence the precept of their contemporary, Alexander Pope:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
⁴

Locke’s famous
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) advanced the proposition that the human mind is blank at birth—a
tabula rasa
. All we know, therefore, is the fruit of experience, either through the senses, which process data from the external world, or through the faculty of reflection, which processes data
from the mind’s internal workings. Locke’s proposition was developed in France by the Abbé Condillac (1715–80), whose
Traité des Sensations
(1754) used the analogy of an inanimate statue brought to life by the acquisition of its senses, and by Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–51), whose thoroughgoing materialism in
L’Homme machine
(1748) denied the existence of the spiritual altogether. Bishop Berkeley went to the other extreme, arguing that only minds and mental events can exist. Hume, whose
Treatise of Human Nature
(1739–40) pursues a rational inquiry into understanding, passions, and morals, ends up by denying the possibility of rational belief. Eighteenth-century rationalism concluded after all that irrationality may not be entirely unreasonable.

In the realm of moral philosophy, several strands of religious and intellectual thought led towards the ultimate destination of utilitarianism. Rationalists tended to judge moral principles by their utility in improving man’s condition. The tendency is already present in Locke. Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), in some ways the most radical of the
philosophes
, advocated a hedonistic morality where virtue is that which causes the greatest pleasure. Later, happiness was viewed more as a communal than as an individual virtue. Social harmony became the goal, not just private well-being. In 1776 a young Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) formulated the guiding principle: ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’

The Enlightenment was not sympathetic to European Jewry. The Jews were regarded as a religious community, and their religion as unreasonable and obscurantist. Dryden, for one, did not spare the sarcasm:

‘The Jews, a headstrong, moody, murmuring race,
God’s pampered people, whom, debauched with ease,
No King could govern, nor no god could please.’
⁵

In time, certain Jewish leaders grew similarly critical of themselves. They longed to escape from the constrictions of traditional Judaism. The end result was the Jewish Enlightenment, the
Haskalah
, which sought to reform the Jewish community from within (see p. 843).

Scientific knowledge, in the meantime, made great strides. The central giant of the period was Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), President of the Royal Society, who published his
Principia
in 1687. His Laws of Motion and Gravity provided the basis of physics, and hence of the working of the universe, for over 200 years. He invented differential calculus, which he called ‘fluxions’. Appropriately enough for a father of the Enlightenment, he had conducted his first experiments in 1666 into the nature of Light, placing a glass prism behind a hole in the blind of his window in Trinity College, Cambridge: