Flesh in the Age of Reason (54 page)

Hartley’s astute analysis of thinking about death and the hereafter seems to raise the same complexities. Using a psychological approach once again, he demonstrated how our understanding of death and futurity proceeds from mental processes, shaped by pleasure and pain associations. ‘The frequent recurrency of these fears and anxieties’ of death, he reflected, ‘must embitter all guilty pleasures, and even the more innocent trifling amusements;… And thus men live in bondage all their lives through the fear of death; more so than they are aware of themselves… and still much more so than they own and express to others.’ Recognition of the certainty of death causes uncertainty and fear. Thrust below the consciousness threshold, such fear then embitters pleasures.

So what
is
in store for man after death? By the ‘light of Nature’ alone, Hartley held that some sort of future existence is ‘probable’, citing the analogy of a dormant seed. The biblical Christian in
Hartley entertained no doubts about the afterlife and, as a liberal Arminian, he looked to a final universal salvation as a ‘fundamental doctrine’. His heroes – Newton, Locke and Clarke – all discounted the possibility of eternal punishment of the damned: interminable hellfire did not square for Hartley with the proofs manifest throughout Creation of Divine beneficence.

Respecting the future destiny of the soul (never separate from its material embodiment), Hartley – not surprisingly, given his materialism – leant towards a mode of mortalism, of a kind common since the mid-seventeenth century. ‘
It seems probable, that the Soul will remain in a State of Inactivity, though perhaps not of Insensibility, from Death to the Resurrection
,’ he suggested:

That the soul is reduced to a state of inactivity by the deposition of the gross body, may be conjectured from its entire dependence upon the gross body for its powers and faculties…

And, upon the whole, we may guess, that though the soul may not be in an insensible state, yet it will be in a passive one, somewhat resembling a dream; and not exert any great activity till the resurrection, being perhaps roused to this by the fire of the conflagration…

– a nice homely touch.

At the final reckoning, the soul would be reanimated by God. Hartley also suggested a spiritualization of matter after death – what he called an ‘annihilation’; this would be a continuation of the psychological development in life from a self purely selfish to one which became progressively more benevolent, even altruistic and spiritual. The pious Hartley was emphatically no believer in the traditional heaven with trumpeting angels – that was for him a psychologically primitive way of conceptualizing the glory of God, strictly for the young or unenlightened.

Hartley vindicated the rather shocking and unsettling materialism pervading his system by arguing that it confirmed two truths. First, it chimed with the universality of divine law and causality. Just as matter in motion in the natural world was the basic postulate of Newtonian philosophy, so in the human and psychological realm,
the material cornerstone of cause and effect eliminated the arbitrary and accidental. All this was the best refutation of infidelity – what would truly have given joy to advocates of atheism would have been a random universe of chance and contingency. Second, it was materialism which enabled man to adjust to the realities of this mundane world – it gave proof of God’s benign intentions and laid bare the mechanism through which God would ensure happiness itself.

Because he died fairly soon after the publication of the
Observations on Man
, Hartley never developed his views further and, in the short run, his book had a limited impact. It was subsequently popularized by Joseph Priestley as
Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas; with Essays relating to the Subject of it
(1775), although the physiology was omitted on the grounds that it was speculative and controversial. Priestley’s edition, being more easily available, encouraged the separation of Hartleyan associationism psychology from his physiology of vibrations, and so fostered the later image of Hartley as a psychologist. The psychology was subsequently widely taken up by such utilitarian educators as James Mill, who prized his associationism but dismissed his theology. In this descent through philosophical radicals, Hartley’s tenets provided the framework for the associationist heritage in psychology, in particular learning theory. He had launched a compelling vision of the self as a dynamic, interactive development of the human powers, the flesh bodying forth consciousness and consciousness turning the being from something low and self-regarding into a higher entity. Within God’s providential plan, man thus made himself: self or personality was not a given but a potential, something which in every way developed.

Before that time, Hartley’s writings proved influential among liberal intellectuals in the second half of the century. He was notably the inspiration for Erasmus Darwin (see the next chapter). The Hartleyan notion of the physiology of association as the vehicle of habit, reflex and automatic action was the
sine qua non
for Darwin’s evolutionary tendency, that power in living beings to adapt to circumstances
and learn, in ways which over the generations brought specific change and maximized happiness.

Hartley was a turning-point. Within a framework of biblical piety, he made it possible to ditch the separate soul (mystifying and muddled) and think of the self as a simple, undivided unity, scientifically intelligible. The old ‘incorporated mind’ was discredited as a divided self, which Hartley was proposing to reunite. All the old objections as to how man possessed faculties that were far too sophisticated to be the product of brute matter were swept aside in Hartley’s conscientious and convincing demonstrations of how complex ideas, sophisticated behaviours and subtle moral attitudes could be acquired, by gradual processes of adaptation. Earlier Lockean notions that man was the child of experience and circumstance had been put on a sound material and scientific footing. A viable new model of man was available.

In considering changing thinking about what it was to be a ‘person’ (as defined by Hobbes, Locke and others), we have focused so far on humans, although, as noted, in their attempts to define man, writers have held up animals, machines or automata by way of contrast. For Descartes, a human was precisely unlike a beast, machine or automaton.

In many ways the most fundamental question surrounding the person was not, however, that of man but of the person of God. The God of Judaism was very sure of His Selfhood: ‘I am that I am.’ Christianity, of course, equally prided itself upon being founded upon monotheism, the unity of God – those who espoused polytheistic religions, like the Greeks and Romans, were derided for their trivial, frivolous, puerile deities. But from the early Fathers, orthodox Christianity was not monotheistic in the Hebrew, or Islamic, way, but Trinitarian. And if Catholicism, with its burgeoning cults of the Virgin, saints and martyrs, proved a particularly fertile seedbed for the proliferation of objects of veneration, then orthodox Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism, while shunning Mariolatry and saint-worship, proved no less staunchly Trinitarian. The Anglican Prayer
Book and liturgy were Trinitarian through and through, and most leading Puritans, too, upheld that doctrine, as did eighteenth-century Presbyterians.

The exact nature of the Triune God – that is, the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Ghost – was always surrounded in controversy. Many people advanced rational accounts (God was like a three-sided triangle, for example), while for others the glory of the doctrine was precisely that it was the mystery of mysteries, part and parcel of the other great sacramental secrets of the Church, above all the bread-turned-body of the Eucharist. Mysteries were a school of faith. (Unbelievers turned the
hoc est corpus meum
of the Eucharist into ‘hocus pocus’.)

Yet rational voices in philosophy and divinity raised stubborn and taxing questions about the nature of the Trinity – and above all the status of Christ. How did the Bible depict Jesus? Would He somehow be more exalted if adored as integral to a Triune Godhead, or as a unique Messiah and holy man?

John Locke maintained an audible silence on Trinitarian issues. All that was demanded of a Christian, he said, was to believe that the Bible was God’s truth and that Jesus was the Messiah. But it is not clear – and here Locke was perhaps idiosyncratic – whether he believed that the Messiah was divine like the Father. Not surprisingly, it was widely suspected, by friends and foes alike, that Locke was a closet Arian, that is, one who denied the consubstantiality of Christ with God the Father while upholding his divinity.

Questions of the Trinity and hence the personhood of Christ were inseparable from the wider status of Christianity as a rational creed. Debates as to the primacy of faith over reason, or vice versa, had run throughout Church history. Should a true Christian exclaim, with the fideistic Sir Thomas Browne,
credo quia absurdum
(I believe because it is absurd)? One line spun by Deists and freethinkers, notably John Toland, was that Christianity was ‘not mysterious’; the cash value of that dictum was that any aspect of traditional teachings deemed enigmatic or irrational – for instance, the Trinity – was
ipso facto
spurious and to be discarded without further ado. Christian doctrine
had to pass the rationality test, and the Trinity manifestly did not: how could anything be one and three all at once? It was nonsense.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, critical Deists used the yardstick of reason to put in the dock all the miraculous and mysterious elements of Christianity, in particular those connected with wonders respecting the flesh. The point was either to pare Christianity down to its bare minimum (doctrinal cleansing) or to demonstrate that the faith was a tissue of fantasy through and through. Had demons genuinely possessed the Gadarene swine? Had Christ miraculously given sight to the blind and caused the lame to walk? Had He really raised Lazarus from the dead? And, most crucially, had Christ Himself truly risen from the dead? Or had His corpse been stolen from the tomb; or had He simply just fallen into a deep swoon – was His ‘resurrection’ a not uncommon case of a person awakening from coma? Drawing upon the teachings of medicine and natural science, freethinking critics supplied mechanical, material, rational, natural or commonsensical explanations for events which occurred to bodies in biblical times and in the early Church which were claimed to be miraculous – or they dismissed them all as pious frauds cooked up by priests to hoodwink the credulous. Rationalists and Protestants were equally hawk-eyed about modern Catholic ‘miracles’ involving bizarre happenings to the flesh – such as miracle-healing by saints, or virgins who fasted for years, eating only the host.

Not surprisingly, certain Protestant Dissenters were to the fore in movements of this kind that scrutinized orthodox Christian teachings. Forced by the established Church to become outsiders and to teach in rather hand-to-mouth higher education academies, it was natural that Nonconformists should look to the searchlight of reason and the standard of free debate: unlike the privileged, port-swilling dons of Oxbridge, they had no stake in the authority of ancient tradition. And none did so more staunchly, consistently and candidly throughout a long career than Joseph Priestley.

Born into a Yorkshire Presbyterian family, Priestley became a conspicuous autodidact in his teenage years and gradually diverged more and more from the orthodox Calvinism in which he had been
nurtured. Fearing in his youth that he would be doomed to go to hell because he had not experienced a ‘new birth’, he came to see those childhood teachings as ‘darkness’, imparting as they did a hateful vision of the Almighty; and he grew increasingly liberal in his divinity. In his early years as a Dissenting minister he adopted Arian beliefs. Later he parted still further from orthodoxy and became a full-blown Unitarian or Socinian – one who believed in the unity of God: while the Messiah and a supreme teacher, Jesus Christ was ‘a man like ourselves’ (though ‘a man approved by God’), human rather than part of the Godhead. Since Jesus was ‘as much a creature of God as a loaf of bread’, to worship him was ‘idolatrous’.

In a giant heap of learned, somewhat eccentric, and frequently tenaciously polemical tracts written over his long career – he died with a pen in his hand – Priestley strove to set Christology straight, on the basis of both the Bible and reason – or, perhaps more precisely, he documented in enormous detail the countless errors of others from the early Fathers to contemporary Anglican bishops. The key to his theology was his
History of the Corruptions of Christianity
(1782) and his
History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ
(1786), in which he argued that the Bible gave not the slightest scrap of support to the Trinity. Neither did reason – the three-in-one of the Trinity was frankly an insult to rationality. His strategy was to document how, largely out of pagan Greek metaphysics, the early Catholic Church had smuggled in this mysterious and, to Priestley, quite un-Christian and absurd doctrine, and all it entailed.

By way of further confirmation, he also aimed to demonstrate that the dogma of an immortal, immaterial separate soul likewise had no support from the Bible or from reason. The Old Testament Jews had not held such a doctrine. It was another illegitimate importation from Greek and ‘Oriental’ metaphysics (and the Eastern ‘method of allegorizing’) which similarly had no place within the scriptural Christianity that was the core of true Protestantism: it was a heathen stowaway, a cuckoo in the nest. Once the doctrines of the separate soul and the ‘Logos’ had been established, the way was paved for any number of illicit and incoherent theological fancies, including
transubstantiation, the ‘divinization’ of Christ and his worship, the atonement, and so forth. One invention invited another.