I. INTRODUCTION#
During the Age of Lights, the Bourbon kings of France starred as marquee actors with top billing. Bejeweled and cloaked in finery, they strutted pompously across the European political stage. Their France was much admired and imitated. Their France was also much feared and hated.
Until his death in 1715, the “Sun King” Louis XIV could keep Europe on razor edge by threatening and launching repeated wars against his neighbors. This bellicose king spoke presumptuously about a “French Europe.” Later, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert — all significant French writers in the Republic of Letters—preached forms of “enlightened” thought and decried the Christian religion.
The French, of course, were not the only actors on the European scene during the Age of Lights. We now turn to these other Europeans and their religious beliefs.
II. “GERMANY” AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE#
During the years 1680–1789, “Germany” did not formally exist as a unified state. Rather, it represented a patchwork quilt of 343 kingdoms, electorates, principalities, duchies, bishoprics, archbishoprics, free cities, and other political entities.
“Germany” made up a sizable part of a larger realm known as the Holy Roman Empire that consisted of a welter of 1,800 territories including Poland, the Hapsburg Empire–Austrian Netherlands (1714–97), Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, the Kingdom of Hungary, Serbia (1718–39), Transylvania, Italy (Tuscany, 1737–1801; Naples, 1714–34; Parma, 1737–48), and other areas.
A Council of Electors, ranging from seven to nine members depending on the time frame, chose the Holy Roman Emperor.
The king of Bohemia
The archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne
The duke of Saxony
The margrave of Brandenburg
The duke of Bavaria
The duke of Brunswick-Hanover (1692)
The count palatine of the Rhine
They selected Austrians as emperors for this period: Leopold I (1658–1705), Joseph I (1705–11), Charles VI (1711–40), Charles VII (1742–45), Francis I (1745–65), and Joseph II (1765–90).
The Holy Roman Emperor’s actual ability to raise armies and collect imperial taxes through the Imperial Diet and to make laws through Imperial Courts was sometimes hobbled by the fact that many of the political bodies belonging to the empire enjoyed “sovereignty”, that is, sets of liberties and rights. During the years 1803–6, the Holy Roman Empire finally expired under Napoleon.
With the accession of the unstable Bourbon king Philip V to the throne of Spain in 1700, the power of the Spanish Hapsburgs was greatly diminished. By contrast, the Austrian branch of the Hapsburg family, Roman Catholic and promoters of a baroque culture, dominated the political life of the Holy Roman Empire.
In the 1740s, however, Frederick the Great, the King of Brandenburg-Prussia from the Hohenzollern family (Calvinist since 1613), effectively challenged Austrian Hapsburg power. At the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession, Frederick’s well-trained troops successfully attacked the armies of the Austrian Hapsburgs and seized Silesia (1740–42).
Thereafter many politicians looked to Brandenburg-Prussia as a more dominant continental European power than the Hapsburg court in Austria. They admired the efficiency of the Prussian governmental administration and the military prowess of Frederick II and his armies.
In German lands, the leading kingdoms were Brandenburg-Prussia, Saxony, the Rhineland Palatinate, Hanover, and Bavaria. The predominant religion of these kingdoms often mirrored the beliefs of their prince or king. Bavaria remained staunchly Roman Catholic, the church controlling 56 percent of the land. A distinctive “Catholic Aufklärung” did emerge among those clerics who wanted to reform educational institutions and the worship practices of their parishioners.
After 1773 Benedikt Stattler led the Catholic Aufklärung movement at the University of Ingolstadt. In 1776 Adam Weishaupt, a fierce opponent of the Jesuits and also associated with the University of Ingolstadt, founded a shadowy Masonic-like group, the Bavarian Order of Illuminati. Suspected of harboring anti-Christian sentiments, the order was banned by the elector of Bavaria in 1784. In the territory of the elector of the archbishop of Mainz, the theological faculties of Würtzberg and Bamberg also supported a Catholic Aufklärung.
A. Brandenburg-Prussia#
In northern Germany the kings of Brandenburg-Prussia were in principle Calvinists with pietistic leanings. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the population remained largely orthodox Lutheran or Pietist. Its established church was Lutheran, with Reformed Christians and Jews in distinct minorities.
The future king of England, George I, came from the electorate of Hanover, a realm of 600,000–700,000.
The emergence of Brandenburg-Prussia as a great military power in the eighteenth century impressed contemporaries. The kingdom’s army (83,000 by the 1730s) ranked fourth in size among European powers, even though its landmass ranked tenth and its population thirteenth. Its kings promoted disciplined lifestyles like those of the Pietists as a model for Prussian nobles (the Junkers), bureaucrats, and military leaders.
Frederick III with a very militaristic mind-set ruled Brandenburg from 1688 to 1713. In 1701 he made himself King of Prussia. Reformed in theology, he encouraged French Huguenots who had escaped from Louis XIV’s persecution to settle in his kingdom.
In 1694 he founded the University of Halle as a Lutheran university. He welcomed Pietists like Jakob Spener and Hermann Francke.
In 1698 Francke began teaching theology at the University of Halle. Frederick III also made the University of Konigsberg another Pietist center.
B. The Pietists: Bible Study, Reform, and World Missions#
In Pious Desires (1675), Jakob Spener, the founder of German Pietism, anchored his program for the reform of the church in the faithful appropriation of Scripture. He advocated daily private Bible reading and meditation and the reading of Scripture in small groups.
Spener urged that pastoral training schools should not be sites for students brawling and tippling but be known as “workshops of the Holy Spirit.” Nor should seminary professors seek glory by writing books of showy erudition, but rather provide students examples of Christian humility. Spener also emphasized the priesthood of believers. Ministers should seek help from laypersons to ease their own pastoral burdens.
At the University of Halle, Hermann Francke (1663–1727) insisted that divinity school students study Scripture in the Hebrew and Greek. His own thinking about hermeneutics was influenced by Johann Conrad Dennhauer (1603–66) as mediated through Spener. Francke indicated that the exegete needed to have experienced true conversion and daily spiritual renewal.
In 1702 Francke founded the Collegium Orientale Theologicum. Advanced students could learn Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopian, Chaldean, Syriac and “Rabbinisch.” Professor and hymnist Johann Jacob Rambach (1693–1735) from Giessen provided one of the standard “Pietist” studies of hermeneutics in his Institutiones hermeneuticae sacrae (1724; eight editions).
Like Spener, the Pietist scholar Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752) of the duchy of Württemberg, believed the church’s reliance upon Scripture determined its spiritual well-being. He offered a careful analysis of the New Testament’s textual variants in his Gnomen novi testamentum. John Mill had claimed there were some 30,000 variants for the New Testament. By establishing the textual genealogical traditions of many variants, Bengel was able to reduce this number by four-fifths. He also employed the textual critical principle, “the harder reading is better than the easy”.
Bengel emphasized the authority of the original autographs. Much like Francke, Bengel believed the interpreter of Scripture should be a Christian.
With the financial support of Baron von Canstein, Francke established an orphanage in Halle (1695). He created schools and businesses including a printing house where orphans and others could learn a trade. By 1700, Francke’s various institutions had garnered the support of Frederick III (I), who valued their contribution in fostering Christian discipline among his students, the Prussian populace, and his soldiers. For his part, Francke intended to make Halle a center for Christian reform and world missions.
On one occasion, Frederick IV (1671–1730), the King of Denmark, gave a direct order to his chaplain: “Find me missionaries.” In turn, the chaplain asked Francke for help. Francke proposed two students from the University of Halle to be the missionaries. The famous Danish-Halle Mission was launched.
On November 29, 1705, Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau set sail for Tranquebar, India, a city whose residents numbered 250 Europeans and 25,000 Tamils. Not until July 1706 did the two missionaries arrive at their destination. To their dismay they discovered that the “abominably wicked Life of Christians here” constituted a large barrier to their evangelistic efforts. Many Hindus believed that Christians were “the vilest and most Corrupted people under the sun.” Ziegenbalg translated the Bible into the Tamil language. He also set up a “charity school” and a “College of Missionaries” before he died in 1719 at age thirty-six.
Christian Friedrich Schwartz (1726–98) also served with distinction as a missionary in India. Johann Steinmetz (1680–1762) ministered in Teschen, Silesia, Moravia, and Bohemia. Others took the gospel to the Russia of Peter the Great, who wanted his governmental officials to benefit from their linguistic skills. The missionaries also addressed the physical and spiritual needs of captured Swedish troops who, when they were allowed to return to Sweden, facilitated Pietist missions in their homeland.
All told, some sixty students went forth from the University of Halle as missionaries.
From the press of the Canstein Bible Institute (founded in 1710) in Halle came more than 80,000 copies of the entire Bible and more than 100,000 New Testaments and a repertory of Christian literature in the first years of its existence.
In 1713 Frederick William I (1688–1740) became king. He was devoted to the building up of his military. At the same time, he was greatly influenced by Pietism.
He subsidized the distribution of thousands of Bibles in Prussian schools “so that the Word of God will be made known to all my subjects.”
He designated Francke as the rector of the University of Halle.
At the time of Francke’s death (1727), 2,000 students attended his schools in Halle that had 175 teachers. Francke’s orphanage served as a model for Griffith Jones’s schools in Wales and George Whitefield’s orphanage in Savannah, Georgia.
In 1723 King Frederick William I supported the campaign of Pietist Johann Joachim Lange and other faculty members at the University of Halle to have Christian Wolff, a rationalist philosopher, removed from his teaching post at the university. Wolff had been a friend and partisan of the brilliant mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the author of Theodicy (1710).
- Leibniz had posited an ontology in which “monads,” supposedly immaterial and simple entities, make up matter.
Critics claimed that Leibniz ruled out God’s intervention in the world and human freedom by proposing the apparently “deterministic” thesis that “this is the best of all possible worlds.”
- Wolff, in his On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese (1721), had raised theological suspicions about himself by arguing that belief in God is not a prerequisite for moral reasoning.
Wolff underscored the value of natural religion in an attempt to demonstrate a harmony between reason and revelation.
- At the same time, Wolff believed in the divine inspiration of Scripture, cited it frequently as an authority in his works, and professed his belief that Christian truths could not be ultimately overthrown by reason.
In 1729 Frederick William I mandated that all students who hoped to teach theology in Brandenburg-Prussia should attend the University of Halle for two years, thereby affording Pietists with a measure of leverage over the careers of the clergy of Prussia.
In 1736 the king also banned the sale of the Wertheimer Bibel of Johann Lorenz Schmidt, claiming that it “disputes the chief foundations of the Christian religion.” In 1737, on the behest of Frederick William I and others, the Holy Roman Emperor ordered Schmidt’s arrest and condemned the sale of the Wertheimer Bibel throughout the empire under penalty of fines.
Radical Pietists#
Jakob Bohme#
The mystical theology of Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) as well as the Quietism of Miguel de Molinos (1628–97), Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80), and Madame Guyon helped shape the thinking of a number of “radical Pietists” (and John Wesley).
A cobbler by trade, Böhme was not satisfied with having simply an “opinion” about who God is. Rather, he personally sought to encounter “the living Word, through which the heart experiences certainty” and gains “insight into the great mystery.” The Christian is a “new being in Christ in whom love has found its home.”
For Böhme, the person who experiences the mystery of God’s being has a much more intimate understanding of the Christian life than does the “school” or scholastic theologian. Böhme’s reflections promoted universalism.
Gottfried Arnold#
Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), a student of Jakob Spener, emphasized the transformative power of the Christian’s “new birth.” He indicated that a “perfect servant of Christ possesses nothing but Christ, and if he does possess anything other than Christ, he is not perfect.”
In his Impartial History of the Church and Heretics (1699–1700), he treated members of some medieval sects and “free churches,” Anabaptists, and Mennonites in a more favorable manner than the orthodox did. A number of orthodox Lutherans were infuriated by Arnold’s stinging criticism.
A radical Pietist such as Johann Christian Edelmann eventually became a partisan of the German Aufklärung. By contrast, in the last years of his life, Arnold became more appreciative of confessional Lutheran theology.
Johann Lorenz Mosheim#
Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1694–1755) attempted to write church history in a more objective fashion than his predecessors, including Arnold. Mosheim’s well-respected Institutes of Ecclesiastical History (four volumes) earned for him the title the “father of church history.”
The Moravians#
Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf#
Jakob Spener served as a sponsor at the baptism of Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760). The young Zinzendorf read widely, including works from Catholic writers such as Fénelon and Madame Guyon and Huguenots such as Pierre Bayle. He embraced Pietist convictions during his studies at Francke’s school in Halle. He became especially committed to the value of prayer. Thereafter he gained an appreciation of “orthodox” Lutheran theology.
In 1722, when members of the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of the Brethren), a movement from Moravia and Bohemia, needed a place of refuge from persecution, Zinzendorf graciously allowed them to settle on his estate at Berthelsdorf. They built a village called Herrnhut, “the Lord’s watch,” on Zinzendorf’s property. In the summer of 1727, Zinzendorf and a number of others covenanted to pray for the community. At a Communion service on August 13, a powerful work of the Holy Spirit surged through the congregation.
The Unity of the Brethren traced their spiritual lineage back to the followers of John Hus.
In the same year Zinzendorf, who wanted to keep the Moravians within the Lutheran church, became their leader. He viewed them as soldiers of Christ and encouraged some to become missionaries.
In 1736 a Moravian missionary named Friedrich Martin arrived on the Dutch island of Saint George in the Caribbean Islands with a desire to minister to blacks. Martin married Rebecca (Protten), a former slave. She helped establish the first African Protestant church in the New World. Despite determined opposition from sugar planters, she brought the gospel to hundreds of slaves as she faithfully pursued an itinerant evangelistic ministry. Rebecca’s “revival” contributed to the creation of “Black Christianity in the Atlantic World”.
During fierce storms, John Wesley was very impressed by the resolute calm of Moravians on board the ship he and brother Charles took to Georgia. Peter Boehler, a Moravian missionary, helped John Wesley to reflect on the nature of Christian assurance before his conversion on May 24, 1738.
In June 1738 John Wesley traveled to Germany, where he met Count Zinzendorf and visited Herrnhut and spoke with the Moravian leader Christian David, a carpenter. They discussed whether justification and the “new birth” were one and the same. In 1740 Wesley broke with the Moravians but continued to admire their Christian witness, charity, humility, and evangelistic zeal.
Earlier, in 1727, Zinzendorf had urged Herrnhutters to exhibit “brotherly union” and “to remain in a constant bond of love with all children of God.” In 1732 he claimed religion “must be a matter which is able to be grasped through experience alone without any concepts. If this were not so, a deaf or a blind or a mentally deficient man or a child could not have the religion necessary for salvation.” At the same time, he argued that “Revelation is indispensably necessary in human experience.”
A number of Moravians got caught up in less than wholesome lifestyles.
Zinzendorf for a time became overly fascinated with the blood and wounds of Christ and recommended actual childlike behavior as a precondition for entering the kingdom of Christ.
His particular presentation of the marital relationship as a description of the believer’s relationship with Christ gave some critics pause.
The Pietist Johan Bengel criticized Zinzendorf’s biblical translation work.
Friedrich Christoph Oetinger accused him of completely giving up on the “Halle method of reasoning.”
Nonetheless, evangelicals of the eighteenth century such as Wesley generally appreciated the Moravians.
C. German Christians and the Aufklärung#
Scholars have found agreement elusive regarding the date of the inception of the German Aufklärung.
In the late 1680s, Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), sometimes hailed as the “father of the German Enlightenment,” reiterated themes often considered “enlightened.”
A jurist and educator, he argued that the state should guarantee individual rights and sought to separate natural law from theology.
He repudiated the use of torture and fought against religious persecution.
A Christian believer, Thomasius helped found the University of Halle and taught there. He appreciated the theology of the Pietist Spener. He did not believe the use of reason for the social good necessitated the abandonment of revealed religion.
By contrast, some of his contemporaries, writers of a subversive underground radical literature, called for intellectual liberties and attacked the Christian faith. Still other contemporaries of the 1690s became noted for their “literary sociability” and writing of poems and novels.
A German such as Karl F. Bahrdt (1741–92) claimed to be “enlightened” and linked Aufklärung with militant unbelief. Other “enlightened” Germans generally self-identified as one kind of Christian or another. They believed that to be “enlightened” signaled a willingness to exploit the new knowledge gained from science to improve societal life in various realms—whether medicine, education, technology, or farming.
During the 1740s, “Germany” did witness an increase in published attacks on the Christian faith.
In 1741 a German translation of Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation appeared and provided a number of German intellectuals with their first access to deistic thought.
The ideas of heterodox thinkers such as Johann Christian Edelmann (1698–1767), author of Unschuldige Wahrheiten, were gaining a following.
But more than anything, the crowning of Frederick the Great as the King of Prussia appeared to signal a new era of openness to “enlightened” views. As a young man Frederick disdained military life and became enamored with the literature of the French Siècle des lumières. He had a very serious falling out with his father, who on one occasion began to strangle him. After Frederick attempted to flee to England, his father had him imprisoned. Frederick was court-martialed and sentenced to death.
Eventually Frederick emerged from his father’s disgrace. He fought with distinction in the War of the Polish Succession. Upon becoming king in 1740, he turned his resplendent court of Sans Souci into a haven for French philosophes like Voltaire and Maupertuis who competed for his favor. In time his capital, Berlin (population 55,000 in 1700 and 150,000 in 1800) became a center of the Aufklärung, boasting leading publishers such as Freidrich Nicolai, distinguished journals such as Berlinishe Monatsschrift, and discussion groups (some secret such as the Mittwochsgesellschaft).
In 1740 Frederick lifted the ban on the controversial philosopher Christian Wolff, who returned to teach at the University of Halle.
In this new intellectual environment, a coterie of German theologians, while critical of deism, attempted to adapt Christianity to new currents of thought.
- Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten (1706–57), professor of theology at Halle, constructed a “transitional” theology (Theologie des Ubergänges).
This joined elements of historic Protestant orthodoxy with Wolff’s concerns about the harmony between reason and revelation and with a circumspect use of the “new” biblical criticism.
- Likewise, a number of professors, school teachers, scientists, pastors, and book dealers appreciated an “enlightened” use of the sciences and advances in technology for their utilitarian value in improving society.
These Aufklärers saw no incompatibility between this kind of enlightenment and their Christian beliefs. At the same time, they were worried about other forms of Enlightenment thought that might subvert the Christian faith and the loyalties of the people to the state.
Immanuel Kant’s famous essay Was ist Aufklärung? (What Is Enlightenment?) represented only one of the more important essay responses to this question, albeit a marked departure from the more “moderate” views of Aufklärung advocated by certain Neologians.
D. The Neologians#
A group of theologians known as the Neologians (1740–90) specifically attempted to accommodate Christian theology to Wolff’s emphasis on reason’s rights and the findings of the new science and biblical criticism. They included Johann Joachim Spalding (1714–1804), Wilhelm Abraham Teller (1734–1804), and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), who became open critics of the doctrine of the verbal inspiration and infallibility of the Bible.
For them, the truths of reason were supported by revelation. They viewed personal “edification” as the goal of the Christian’s life. They thought that an “edified” believer would be a tolerant and moral person and a useful member of society.
In 1737 the University of Göttingen was founded with the goal of preparing students for professions supported by the state. By the 1770s, the university’s distinguished faculty had become notable advocates of Neologian theology and defenders of the state.
The thought of Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) captures well the shifting contours of German theology during the middle decades of the eighteenth century.
In 1739 Michaelis, a Pietist student at the University of Halle, had defended the inspiration of the Masoretic pointing of the Hebrew text.
By contrast, in 1765 the same Michaelis, now a prominent philologist at the University of Göttingen, hailed the controversial priest Richard Simon as the “father of newer criticism” of the Bible he himself practiced.
Michaelis pinpointed the year 1750 as the date the new biblical criticism began to take hold among certain academics.
E. Johann Salomo Semler: The Founder of German Higher Criticism#
In 1751 Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91) began teaching at the University of Halle and contributed to these developments. Semler was a prized student of Baumgarten and his successor. From Baumgarten’s death in 1757 until 1779, Semler was probably the most influential German theologian. He called for the “free” investigation of the Bible, an inquiry not tethered by the presuppositions of “scholastic” orthodoxy about Scripture’s canon and infallibility. He claimed he had no sympathy for Socinians or Naturalists.
Semler proposed important distinctions between “religion” and “theology” and between the “Word of God” (the great moral instruction for all peoples as well as aspects of the gospel) and “Holy Scripture.” About this latter distinction, Semler wrote, “Holy Scripture and Word of God must certainly be differentiated because we know the difference.
To the Holy Scripture, as this historical, relative term came to be used among the Jews, belong, Ruth, Esther, [Ezra,] Song of Songs etc.
But to the Word of God, which makes all men in all times wise unto salvation, [to the divine instruction for all men,] not all of these books called holy belong.”
Semler thought biblical criticism revealed that parts of Holy Scripture are not the Word of God. He wrestled with the canonicity of 1 John 5:7. He realized that most of his contemporaries — whether Reformed, Pietist, or orthodox Lutheran — did not share his perspective.
He resorted to a doctrine of accommodation (a non-Augustinian version) to explain further his distinction between Scripture and the Word of God.
The biblical authors accommodated their writings to the faulty views of their contemporaries (especially the Jews) about the world.
Sifting out the authentic Word of God from the mythological, local, fallible, and noninspired dross in Scripture (a belief in demons, heaven, and hell, for example), caused by this accommodation, is the task of the wise Bible student.
Once elements of an authentic canon within a canon have been identified, then a number of “orthodox” doctrines based on Scripture and not on the Word of God will stand in need of reformulation.
Semler claimed that his work was faithful to the teachings of Martin Luther. In fact, it appeared deeply indebted to Wolff and earlier English (William Whiston), Dutch, and French biblical scholars. Semler translated a few of Richard Simon’s works into German.
The reception of Semler’s writings was quite mixed. Some scholars believed he had constructed a valuable theological position that upheld essential Christian beliefs while presenting a more accurate account of the way the Bible is related to the Word of God. A number wrote works in which they promoted the Socinian definition of accommodation to justify their own forms of biblical criticism.
At the same time, several critics pounced on Semler’s writings.
The orthodox Lutheran Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–86), the “head” (Haupt) pastor of the Lutheran Church of St. Catherine in Hamburg and sharp critic of Carl F. Bahrdt’s New Testament translation, attacked Semler’s views of canon and abandonment of the infallibility of Scripture.
From another perspective, Gottfried Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), famous author of Nathan the Wise and bitter opponent of Goeze, scored Semler for upholding an inconsistent theological stance.
In 1779 Semler had sharply criticized Lessing’s publication of the Fragments of an Unnamed (Author) (1774, 1777) without naming the author, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). Lessing, at the time a librarian, had claimed he found these documents, portions of Reimarus’s Apology or Defense of the Rational Worshippers of God, in the Herzog August Bibliothek of Wolfenbüttel.
Reimarus had been a teacher of oriental languages at the Hamburg Gymnasium Johaneum, attended a Lutheran church, and was not publicly known for entertaining heretical beliefs. In the published fragments, Reimarus attacked the truthfulness of Scripture and had advocated that reason and not revelation is the source of our religious knowledge (natural religion). He proposed that Christ did not view himself as the Messiah but that the apostles had invented the idea of a “suffering spiritual redeemer of the human race.” Moreover, the disciples had stolen Christ’s body to give their story more credibility.
Just before he died in 1791, Semler indicated that he had felt obliged in the name of truth to propose his contested views of Scripture and the Christian religion. At the same time, he lamented his perception that so few young Germans seemed to want to study theology.
F. Johann Philipp Gabler and Biblical Theology#
Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826) taught at the University of Altdorf. He helped initiate the study of biblical theology in his 1787 inaugural lecture, “An Oration on the Proper Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific Objectives of Each”. Gabler hoped to provide a methodology that would guide those who “aspired to a solid understanding of divine matters” and “to obtain a firm and certain hope of salvation.”
Gabler believed that by relying on practical reason he could identify the universal “pure” truths of biblical theology that were “historical in origin.” By contrast, dogmatic theology had “a didactic character, teaching what each theologian philosophizes rationally about divine things” according to his “ability or of the time, age, place, sect, school, and other factors.”
In agreement with his professor at Göttingen University, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), Gabler believed that Scripture could contain “myths” that stemmed from primitive cultures. An expert in ancient classics, Heyne proposed that mythus (myth) was a common characteristic of primitive cultures during the childhood of mankind.
Through the careful use of reason, the biblical scholar could allegedly sift out what constitutes the flawed, error-pocked human knowledge in Scripture from its pure universal truths and end up with the stuff of biblical theology. Gabler contended that the exegete needs to understand how “myths” functioned in Scripture.
The “myths” were not purposeful deceits.
Instead, like other Ancients, the biblical writers and other figures really believed them and took ordinary events and converted them into miracles.
But these miracles recorded in certain “mythic” portions of Scripture should be explained by natural causes.
The biblical exegete had an obligation to separate these “myths” of human derivation from revealed materials in Scripture.
It is possible that the Socinian doctrine of accommodation informed Gabler’s proposal. Interestingly enough, between the years 1763 and 1817, at least thirty-one studies appeared in German that emphasized a doctrine of biblical accommodation (often with a Socinian orientation).
G. Frederick William II and the Censorship Edict#
Upon the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, his nephew Frederick William II became the King of Prussia. Given counsel by Johann Christoph von Wöllner, the new king tried to rein in a growing body of heterodox literature.
The Renewed Censorship Edict of December 1788 obligated authors who wrote books about God, morality, and the state to submit them to a government commission of censors for approval. Von Wöllner indicated that many Protestant clergy had given new life to “the miserable, long-refuted errors of the Socinians, deists, naturalists, and other sectarians.”
A number of Lutheran pastors resigned their posts in protest
Nicolai, the publisher, moved his operations out of Berlin
The government feared that radical expressions of the Aufklärung simultaneously subverted the Christian faith and loyalties to the state.
In March 1758, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), an intriguing and brilliant “counter Enlightenment” intellectual, was converted to Christ after engaging in a dissolute lifestyle in England. In 1784 he condemned both Kant’s definition of Aufklärung and emphasis upon reason. Hamann claimed that Kant had a “Gnostic hatred of the material and a mystical love for form.” Hamann believed that faith and reason are compatible and that nature itself is a kind of revelation alongside that of Scripture.
III. SCANDINAVIA#
Famine, disease, and warfare took a dreadful toll on the Swedish provinces of Estonia and Livonia at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Apparently 60 percent of the population died in the famine of 1695–97.
The brutal hardships associated with the Great Northern War (1700–1721) followed thereafter. The times were desperate.
The Lutheran clergy in Scandinavia created a devotional literature with the purpose of giving Christian hope and comfort. The pastors also called upon their people to pray and to repent.
Besides northern Germany, the regions of Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland constituted strongholds for Lutheranism. Citizens were obliged to take oaths to the Lutheran state church. In 1687 the Dane Hector Masius, a divine right kingship advocate, claimed that Lutheranism alone could bolster public order. In 1693 the Swedish monarch proposed that he gave account to God alone. Sweden controlled Finland, areas around Saint Petersburg, Russia, Estonia and Livonia, Pomerania, Wismar, and Bremen Verden.
On June 28, 1709, during the Great Northern War, Swedish King Charles XII (1682–1718) suffered a devastating military defeat at Poltava by the armies of Peter the Great. In consequence, not only did Sweden lose its Baltic territories except for Finland, but also the monarchy lost its absolutist pretentions. The so-called “Age of Liberty” (1719–72) followed.
Four Estates of the Diet gained power, displacing the authority of the absolute monarchy.
Educational reformers attempted to give a utilitarian and “rational” thrust to Swedish education.
They sometimes battled with the Lutheran clergy, who wanted to retain a significant theological component in the educational curriculum of Sweden’s youth.
Captured Swedish soldiers confined in Russian prisons after their country’s defeat in the Great Northern War returned home in 1722–24. Many had experienced a spiritual conversion under the influence of Pietist missionaries sent from Halle by Francke to minister to them. Newly converted soldiers sometimes became advocates of Pietism in Sweden. Moravians also attempted to promote revivals. In the Conventicle Act of 1726 the government tried to frustrate the advance of Pietists and any advocates of heterodoxy.
After a power grab of 1772, Gustavus III (1746–92) nullified an earlier Constitution of 1720 that had restrained the reach of royal power. He imposed a new Constitution of 1772 designed to reinforce Lutheranism as the basis of government. Nonetheless, in 1781 a measure of toleration came to Sweden, although Catholicism remained an outlawed faith. Some Lutheran clergy viewed Pietists as theologically suspect.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) emerged as one of Sweden’s more controversial religious thinkers. From 1743 to 1745, Swedenborg, who had established a reputation as a brilliant engineer and metallurgist, became convinced that through dreams (in which he retained consciousness of this world) and conversations with angels, God had given him understanding of the world of the spirit as it really is. With this knowledge, he sought to explain the “internal sense” of the Bible, or its true meaning. He believed members of the “New Church,” made up of his disciples scattered throughout various Christian churches, would spread his doctrines. In 1787 some of his followers established the New Jerusalem Church in London.
Pietism’s influence also extended to Lutheran Denmark-Norway and Finland. As noted earlier, in 1706 the Danish king Frederick IV (1671–1730) solicited the Pietist Francke to provide German missionaries for the Danish mission in India. At the same time, orthodox Lutheranism in Denmark grew stronger, owing in part to the emigration of more Germans into the kingdom. In 1715 the Danish government backed a mission to the Sami, the Laplanders of northern Norway. Paavo Ruotsalainen (1777–1852) encouraged the “awakened” in Finland.
IV. THE UNITED PROVINCES#
From 1609, the year the northern Dutch provinces won a de facto liberation from Spain, until the invasion of Louis XIV’s armies during the Dutch War (1672–78), the United Provinces experienced its “Golden Age” and enjoyed an “embarrassment of riches”, due in part to its lucrative international trade. The seven United Provinces constituted the Dutch Republic, with authority residing in the Estates-General, to which each province sent representatives.
Amsterdam thrived as a commercial and cultural center.
It boasted a remarkable semi-concentric system of canals, dating from the mid-seventeenth century.
Its population grew from 100,000 in 1600 to 221,000 in 1795.
As painted in 1686 by Willem van de Velde, Amsterdam’s busy port remained crowded with ships.
Its docks were the site of a cavernous warehouse of the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1602). From its earliest days, this trading company supported Reformed missionary work at posts in the Malay Archipelago, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. In July 1625, Dutch traders established New Amsterdam (later known as New York City).
The United Provinces constituted an intellectual and religious crossroads for Europe through its universities, publishing houses and journals, and churches. Young Protestant students from lands such as Germany, Finland, and France flocked to the United Provinces to study at the University of Leiden (1575) and other notable schools such as the University of Franeker.
The initial central task of the theology faculty at the University of Leiden was “the unfolding of the Holy Scriptures.” Among Leiden’s professors was “the glory of the university,” Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609). His expertise in the classics and biblical textual criticism made him one of the premier scholars of Europe. Other scholars included Jacob Arminius (1550–1609), Francis Gomarus (1563–1641), Simon Episcopius (1583–1643), and Johannes Coccejus (1603–69).
The seventeenth century constituted the Dutch “Golden Age” of art. Thousands of Dutch painters created literally millions of paintings with themes ranging from battles and landscapes to churches, everyday life scenes, and portraits. Among the more famous master painters were:
Rembrandt (1606–69; “The Night Watch”; “Isaac and Rebecca”)
Frans Hal (1582/1583–1666; “The Merry Drinker”)
Johannes Vermeer (1632–73; “The Kitchen Maid”)
Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/1629–82; “View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields”)
By the eighteenth century, contemporaries sensed that the quality of Dutch art was diminishing.
The Dutch Reformed Church affirmed the Belgic Confession of Faith of 1561. This statement addressed topics ranging from the Trinity, the work of Christ, and the sacraments to church and state relations. Although the Reformed Church was the “public” one permitted, the United Provinces became known for the coexistence (if not toleration) of diverse religious communities. Nonetheless, intense theological controversies were not foreign to ecclesiastical life. Two parties emerged in the Reformed Church:
The preciezen (“precise”) Calvinists who wanted the churches to possess binding doctrinal authority
The rekkelijken (“looser or moderate”) Calvinists who desired greater freedom of religious thought
Jakob Hermanszoon, later known as Arminius (1560–1609), attempted to refute the charges of Dirck Coornhert (1522–90) against the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. After studying Romans 7 and 9, Hermanszoon modified his beliefs and affirmed that God predestined all who believe in Christ.
As a professor of divinity at the University of Leiden (after 1603), Arminius engaged in a harsh dispute with fellow professor Francis Gomarus, a committed supralapsarian Calvinist and admirer of Calvin and Beza. Both Arminius and Gomarus affirmed a belief in justification by faith alone, but Gomarus suspected that Arminius had been influenced by the Roman Catholic Scholastic thought of Suarez and Molina and was in fact a “papist.” It was decided to consider their controversy at a synodal conference, but Arminius died in 1609.
The United Provinces often served as a haven for people seeking relief from persecution.
Amsterdam was the home of a Sephardic Jewish community.
French Huguenots of the Réfuge (50,000 to 70,000) intermarried with members of the Dutch populace.
An Anabaptist community flourished.
Religious dissidents such as Baruch Spinoza and the freethinker Anthony Collins, an exile from England, were not unduly hassled.
Masons such as Charles Le Vier, a member of the Knights of the Jubilee, could ply controversial ideas with relative impunity.
Many Europeans admired the Dutch Republic for its successful war of liberation from the Spanish, its government (which, even if oligarchical, was not despotic), its promotion of freedom and toleration, and its vital economy (slowed down in the eighteenth century).
Already by 1675, fifty-five printing presses were operational and over two hundred booksellers in Amsterdam helped prime the rich intellectual life of the Republic of Letters with a diverse reading fare.
In Rotterdam, a city of 53,000, Pierre Bayle established and served as editor of the journal News of the Republic of Letters (1684–87), one of the leading reviews of books.
Renier Leers, an influential printer of Rotterdam, published not only Bayle’s journal but also the works of Protestants and Catholics (Richard Simon, Malebranche).
During the eighteenth century the Dutch people generally continued to uphold their religious beliefs. The Dutch Republic was a confessional Reformed state, with Roman Catholics, Dissenters, and Jews generally considered religious outsiders. Revivals periodically coursed through villages. In 1749–50, emotion-laced revival meetings took place in Nijkerk under the ministry of Pastor Gerardus Kuypers. Other villages in the Netherlands and in neighboring Germany experienced similar revivals.
Until the 1770s, the Reformed Church played a dominant role in public life. Approximately 55–60 percent of the population was Reformed, 35 percent Roman Catholic, and 5–10 percent Dissenters and Jews.
A Dutch form of “enlightenment” did exist. Most of its partisans did not espouse a militant atheism, but rather sought to accommodate their Christian beliefs with a desire for educational reforms and religious toleration. They appreciated the new science and advances in technology.
Others such as Jean Frederic Bernard and Bernard Picart downplayed Christianity as the faith. In Ceremonies and Religious Customs of All the People of the World (Amsterdam, 1723–37), they proposed that all men, except for views of revelation, “agree on several things and have the same foundations.” These common beliefs included the teachings of Jesus before the “church” added its theological strictures and a general belief in the divine. Bernard and Picart apparently hoped to further the cause of a toleration of religious differences.
Earlier, in 1713, the Dutch Republic began to proclaim solemn, national days of prayer accompanied by fasting. Since the founding of the Republic, the Dutch, especially providentially minded ministers, had often linked their military or economic setbacks to their own sins and God’s judgment.
In 1765 the Dutch people were called on to pray for “the welfare of all Protestant churches in the whole world, and especially for those of these United Provinces, to the end that the labors of their ministers may bear more and more fruit, affirming Christian belief and spreading piety and justice, love and concord.”
During the Dutch Patriot Revolution (1786–87), Dutch “Patriots” challenged the authority of William V (1748–1806), the Stadtholder from the House of Orange who sought to make his position hereditary. In 1795, faced by the forces of the Patriots and the French, William V left the United Provinces for England. In 1798 the Patriots established the Batavian Republic.
V. THE REPUBLIC OF GENEVA#
In the early 1750s the Republic of Geneva became simultaneously the home of Voltaire and Rousseau (who was born in Calvin’s Geneva in 1712). Both men had a falling out with Jacob Vernes and Jacob Vernet, two prominent ministers of Geneva.
These two pastors pursued a “moderate” approach to theology. They proposed a reasonable and tolerant form of Christianity. Nonetheless, they claimed that d’Alembert’s article “Genève” (1757) in the Encyclopédie misrepresented them badly when it characterized them and other pastors of Geneva as “perfect Socinians” and the followers of the “natural religion of John Locke.”
Many Genevans remained faithful Christians despite these disputes. The temptations of wealth, however, stayed seductive. Vernet warned Genevans about their materialistic predilections.
He supported the Reformed consistory’s ban (1739) against the theater.
Much like Rousseau, Vernet identified the theater and actors with vice and immorality.
He also worried that the philosophes would use the theaters “as a school of totally pagan philosophy.”
That Voltaire and Rousseau believed Vernes and Vernet were susceptible to their ideas suggests that the pastors’ theology reflected tendencies far removed from Francis Turretin (1623–87) and other Reformed conservative theologians of Geneva who had earlier dominated the religious life of the city in the late seventeenth century.
Turretin, a professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva, had proposed that the city was a “theocracy, having God always for its ruler.” He recommended that the Geneva government should always defend “the culture of pure religion and the pious care of nurturing the church.” In his Institutio, Turretin argued that the Word of God “lays the foundation for a full assurance of faith … which suffices for expelling doubt and tranquilizing the conscience and generating the hope of salvation.”
Along with other Genevan theologians, Turretin also defended the Masoretic pointing of the Hebrew text, making this belief binding in the Helvetic Consensus Formula (1675). These pastors feared that if Hebrew vowels were left unpointed, the Hebrew words of the Old Testament would become even more susceptible to multiple interpretations. The professors also attempted to obligate pastoral students to repudiate the doctrine of “universal grace” championed by theologians in Saumur, France, and by the Genevan professor Louis Tronchin.
In 1706 Turretin’s son, Jean Alphonse Turretin (1671–1737), led a movement in the Genevan Company of Pastors to repudiate the Helvetic Consensus Formula.
He espoused a form of natural theology and emphasized reason’s right to determine religious truth.
He denied the supralapsarianism of his father, Francis.
He eschewed other doctrines such as the limited atonement.
By the 1720s, a number of contemporaries fretted about their perception that an openness to Arminianism and forms of heterodoxy existed in Geneva.
Jean Frédéric Ostervald (1663–1747) believed that both “incredulity” and “atheism” were beginning to spread, not just among the learned, but in “towns, among the vulgar and even among country clowns.” In 1702 he published a Catechism or Instruction in the Christian Religion.
He hoped his catechism would help remedy the ignorance of laypeople regarding the Christian faith and answer its detractors’ objections.
The theological orientation of Ostervald’s catechism was essentially Reformed.
At the same time, it highlighted the role of reason in defending the faith.
Moreover, it did not reference Calvin’s teaching about the pivotal role of the Holy Spirit in persuading Christians regarding Holy Scripture’s authority.
Ostervald’s catechism circulated widely among French-speaking Reformed Christians.
Due to French urging, a theater opened in Geneva in 1766. By the 1780s, Genevans permitted dancing and attended the theater in large numbers — practices the pastors of Calvin’s Geneva would not have countenanced.
In 1782 the French intervened in the patrician-bourgeoisie struggle of 1781–82. The French took the side of the patricians. The patricians then reduced the number of clergy in the city, reduced the number of sermons preached, and took greater control of appointments at the Genevan Academy.
VI. THE AUSTRIAN HAPSBURGS#
On February 28, 1670, Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor and a devout Roman Catholic, ordered all Jews to leave Austrian lands. By 1683, when the Turks were defeated at the city’s walls by Leopold I and others, Vienna was largely Catholic.
Its population grew thereafter from 100,000 in 1700 to 175,000 in 1754 to 200,000 in 1783. Its stately character was enhanced by the construction of the Schwarzenberg Palace and the Schönberg Palace, its culture enlivened by the music of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The Holy Roman Emperors Joseph I and Charles VI continued to support the missionary efforts of Jesuits to convert Protestants. The Jesuits helped create a baroque Catholic culture in Austria and Bohemia with the construction of magnificent churches both in cities and in the countryside.
The architecture of these lavishly decorated churches evidenced few straight lines and was designed to focus attention on the eucharistic host placed on a central high altar so that parishioners might adore and venerate it.
Protestants near Salzburg attempted to hold onto their faith. In 1731–32 these same Protestants were forced to emigrate from Salzburg, some 20,000 receiving help from Protestant East Prussia to move to its more hospitable lands.
The Austrian Hapsburg emperors, though Catholic, did not accept the papacy’s right to intervene in Austria’s religious or political life. They believed that their empire was universal and that they had defended Catholicism well.
Upon the death of her father, Charles VI, on October 20, 1740, Maria Theresa took the titles of Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Bohemia, and Queen of Hungary. In 1745 her husband, Francis Stephen, became the Holy Roman Emperor under the name Francis I (1745–65). Disturbed by Frederick II’s seizure of Silesia, Maria Theresa attempted to reform the military and governmental structures of Austria in a rational fashion. She became the proponent of what some have called “Enlightened Absolutism.” At the same time, she was quite ready to apply repressive measures against minorities.
Maria Theresa was a devout Catholic influenced by counselors favorable to Jansenism. With the advice of her chancellor, Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg, she tried to establish a national Catholic Church in which the pope had authority only in spiritual matters. Along with her son, Joseph II (1741–90), Maria Theresa was also influenced by the thinking of Joseph Eybel, who argued that church authority does not ultimately belong to the pope but to “a general council, consisting of bishops from all of Christendom, [that] represents the complete Church of God.”
Owing to the fact that a general council receives authority directly from God, it could even depose a pope. In 1764 Pope Clement XIII condemned this German variant of Gallicanism known as Febronianism.
Maria Theresa did not allow Protestants to sell their property or leave her lands.
She required those who refused to convert to Catholicism to emigrate to Transylvania, where Protestantism was permitted.
Nor did Maria Theresa intercede to save the Jesuits when their society was on the brink of dissolution.
She did allow some two thousand Protestants to live in Vienna, but she forced the city’s Jews to live in a ghetto.
Joseph II, a less devout Catholic believer than his mother, ruled with her as coregent after 1765 until her death in 1780. Upon the death of Maria Theresa, Joseph II promulgated Edicts of Toleration in 1781 that allowed greater freedoms for non-Catholics (Protestants and Jews). He promulgated hundreds of edicts at a very rapid clip in promoting “Josephism,” a “reform” program of church and state.
It emphasized the cure of souls as opposed to baroque forms of spirituality.
It reinforced the state’s authority at the expense of the papacy’s right to intervene in spiritual affairs.
Bishops were obliged to make an oath of loyalty to the state.
The government had to give its approval before papal bulls could be published.
Joseph II also proceeded to confiscate properties of 738 monasteries (out of 2,047), displacing 27,000 monks and nuns (out of 65,000) and using the monies from the properties to build new Catholic churches. Nevertheless, the warm reception a crowd of 100,000 gave to Pope Pius VI in 1782 — when he came to Vienna to entreat Joseph II as emperor to change policies toward the papacy —suggests that a good number of the Austrian laity retained a first loyalty to the pope despite their government’s policies.
VII. “ITALY” AND THE PAPACY#
In the eighteenth century “Italy” did not yet exist as a unified nation. Rather, “Italy” consisted:
In the north of the Duchy of Savoy, Duchy of Milan, Republic of Venice, Duchy of Parma, Duchy of Modena, Republic of Genoa, Republic of Lucca, and Grand Duchy of Tuscany
In the center as the Papal States
In the south the Kingdom of Naples and the islands of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Corsica (until it became part of France), and the Kingdom of Sicily among other political entities.
Nor did complete linguistic unity exist. Not all “Italians” spoke Tuscan. The population of the Italian peninsula grew from 11.5 to 15.5 million in the first half of the century. In 1763–64 a particularly severe famine struck Florence, Rome, and Naples.
Austria constituted a dominant outsider power, especially for a number of the northern Italian states.
Tuscany evidenced a kind of Austrian “Josephism” and a flourishing Jansenist party.
Jansenists were also influential in Genoa and Milan.
By contrast, the Bourbon family ruled Naples, and Savoy ruled Sardinia.
Sometimes city-states changed hands. (The Kingdom of Sicily went to Austria in 1720 and to Charles of Bourbon in 1735.)
Some Italians attempted to promote “enlightened” views and to eliminate what they perceived as repressive features of the general culture. They included:
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, who proposed in his New Science (1725) to study “the common nature of nations in the light of divine providence” with a view to discovering “the origins of divine and human institutions”
Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–74), a “pious wife” and anatomist from Bologna who gained a more accurate knowledge of male and female anatomy
Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), author of On Crimes and Punishments, who called for the end of torture and the substitution of long imprisonments for the death penalty
Girolamo Tartarotti (1706–61), who defended impoverished women falsely accused of witchcraft
and Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), librarian at Modena, who published sources of Italian history (AD 500 to 1500) and early Christian sources including the “Muratorian Canon” of the New Testament
Others called for more rigorous, traditional forms of Christian devotion. In 1720 St. Paul of the Cross founded the order of Passionists, and in 1732 Alphonsus Liguori created the order of the Most Holy Redeemer.
The absolutist powers of the eighteenth century had uneasy if not outright hostile relations with the papacy.
The French church vaunted its Gallicanism.
The Austrian church presented itself as Catholic, autonomous, and national.
England had an Anglican state-church.
Prussia was ruled by Calvinist kings; even Frederick II claimed that he fought for the Protestant cause.
The French kings, the Austrian emperors, the English kings, and the Prussian kings often showed little respect for the papacy’s claims to universal religious authority, let alone temporal authority.
The Papal States were periodically invaded by foreign powers that departed only after they had extorted handsome ransoms to do so. The popes were repeatedly forced to make concessions that exposed the papacy’s overall weakness in temporal affairs during the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, Italy and the city of Rome attracted and beckoned large numbers of pilgrims, students, and artists from all over Europe.
Several popes supported educational institutions and encouraged the general advance of scholarship. The generous patronage of the papacy added to Rome’s artistic riches in painting, sculpture, music, and monuments.
In 1709 Emperor Joseph I invaded the Papal States and forced the pope Clement XI to withdraw his support for Philip V, the French candidate for the throne of Spain. Pressured by Louis XIV, in 1713 the pope issued the bull Unigenitus dei Filius, which profusely fueled antagonisms in the Jesuit-Jansenist controversy. Moreover, he took a stand against the Jesuits in the Chinese Rites Controversy.
During the reigns of Pope Innocent XIII (1721–24), Benedict XIII (1724–30), and Clement XII (1730–40), the papacy continued to have relatively little success in thwarting the aggressive foreign policies and blandishments of the absolutist states.
Benedict XIV (1740–58), a gifted and urbane scholar, made concessions to the leading powers. At the same time, he condemned Freemasonry and the works of several philosophes. He also defended the authority of the bull Unigenitus.
Clement XIII (1758–69) found himself beset by the Marquis de Pombal, the Minister of Portugal, and other absolutist ministers who tried to pressure him to dissolve the Society of Jesus. He refused. When Clement excommunicated the Duke of Parma, who had attempted to take over the ecclesiastical affairs of his city-state, French troops retaliated by seizing a number of papal lands.
In 1773 Clement XIII’s successor, Clement XIV (1769–74), finally yielded to the threats of the Catholic powers and dissolved the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
Nor did the well-being of the papacy improve during the French Revolution. Pius VI (1775–99) felt obliged to condemn the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” (1789) and the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” (1790). The pope’s actions reinforced significant divisions in the French populace between:
Some “counter-revolutionaries” who wanted to remain faithful to Catholicism
Radical revolutionaries like Robespierre who sought to rid France of vestiges of the Christian religion
The Age of Lights, therefore, witnessed serious challenges to the papacy’s temporal and spiritual authority.
VIII. THE IBERIAN PENINSULA: SPAIN AND PORTUGAL#
A. Spain#
From 1640 to 1713, the decline of the Spanish Empire continued generally unabated. Through warfare or revolt, Spain lost Portugal (1640), the United Provinces, various city-states in Italy, Artois, Franche-Comté, and other areas. However, the economic and social prospects of Roman Catholic Spain generally turned around in the eighteenth century, despite the loss of her silver fleets struck by hurricanes as they sailed back from Mexico and South America (1715; 1733) and despite setbacks during the Seven Years War (1756–63).
Its population, largely peasant, increased from 6 million in 1700 to 11 million in 1800 and the amount of land under Spanish control in the Americas doubled between the years 1740 and 1790.
In 1700 Philip V (1683–1746), a Bourbon grandson of Louis XIV, became king of Spain. A bitter dispute ensued as various powers contested the legitimacy of his claims to the Spanish throne. The dispute helped precipitate the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). With a Bourbon king in power, elements of French culture spread in Spain, French classicism replacing baroque culture by the 1720s. Philip V was followed by Fernando VI (1746–58) and Carlos III (1759–88).
In 1753 the Spanish government approved a concordat that set forth the doctrine of regalism with its central premise that the state’s authority is superior to that of the church. Buttressed by this regalist premise, the orthodox Catholic Carlos III attempted to initiate supposed “enlightened reforms” of Spain’s religious life:
the expulsion of the Jesuits who professed a first loyalty to the pope and not to the king
the selective use of the Inquisition’s authority
the control over an abusive church tax, the excusado
the creation of new seminaries
The impact of these “enlightened reforms” on Spain remained quite “moderate,” however, owing in part to a fairly common Spanish trait, misoneismo, a strong dislike of new things. Moreover, the church’s clergy (2.5 percent of the population in 1768) continued to direct many educational institutions and works of charity. The church retained great power, and its landed wealth was very substantial.
“New Spain,” or Mexico, possessed a population ranging between 4 and 4.5 million people. The Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico City tended to be theologically conservative. Until their expulsion, Jesuits controlled the education in “New Spain” and greatly influenced the privileged classes of Peninsulares (Spanish-born people) and Criollas (persons of Spanish blood born in New Spain).
Religious art flourished in the eighteenth century in Spain. Among her great painters were Jacinto-Miguel Meléndez (1679–1734), Domingo Martinez (1689–1750), and Bernardo German Llorente (1680–1759), who produced significant works focused on religious themes.
B. Portugal#
The first half of the eighteenth century constituted a “golden” cultural age for Catholic Portugal. The country’s well-being depended in large measure on successful trade in sugar and slaves with its colonies and on receiving military protection from England—a long-standing ally. The Portuguese had signed the Treaty of 1654 with the English, linking the two nations in commercial relations. The Portuguese had also gained the upper hand against the Dutch in Brazil.
In the 1690s, mines in Brazil belonging to the Portuguese began to produce large quantities of gold. The monarchy of King John V (1689–1750) and a small group of elites profited handsomely from this gold. They in turn fostered an arts and building program. The royal palace boasted a world-class music library and collection of paintings.
Vast regions of Portugal remained economically undeveloped and backward. Likewise, an unfavorable trade imbalance emerged with the English. England exported woolens to Portugal and imported wine from Portugal. Portuguese gold sometimes ended up in English coffers. Between the years 1728 and 1732 John V broke off diplomatic relations with the papacy when it refused to grant a patriarchate to Portugal.
On November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day, the horrific Lisbon earthquake struck, followed by flooding and an outbreak of fire. The earthquake constituted one of the great natural catastrophes of the eighteenth century.
Between 10,000 and 20,000 people (some estimates ranged up to 100,000) lost their lives out of a population of 275,000.
Many buildings were completely destroyed.
Huge waves from the Tagus River rushed into parts of the city.
Sebastian Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis de Pombal, a tough-minded minister of King Joseph I, gave direction to the remarkable reconstruction of Lisbon.
He viewed Jesuits and certain members of the nobility as resolute opponents to his economic and social reform measures.
He accused the Jesuits of complicity in a failed assassination attempt against Joseph I (September 3, 1758).
On September 1, 1759, he put Jesuits on ships bound for Italy, thereby expelling them from Portugal. He also confiscated their huge landholdings in Brazil.
Pombal curtailed the use of the Inquisition as a tool of religious oppression and gave both Jews and blacks certain freedoms. Ironically enough, Portugal continued to engage in the slave trade and to exploit Brazil and Angola, its colonies.
Upon the accession of Queen Maria I in 1777, conservative religious forces sought to undo aspects of Pombal’s work.
IX. CHRISTIANS IN OTTOMAN TURKISH LANDS#
After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks conquered the Balkans except for Dalmatia and Montenegro.
They controlled what was formerly the Byzantine Empire and Armenia.
They forced the patriarchs of Constantinople to obey their dictates.
In Ottoman-controlled lands, young Christian boys were often required to convert to the Muslim faith and to serve in the military and in government posts. Christians and Jews were allowed considerable autonomy in running their own communities, or millets.
Nonetheless, in his Additions to Curious Research concerning the Diversity of Languages and Religions of Edward Brerewood (manuscript c. 1676), the Catholic priest Richard Simon described the Greek Orthodox dependent on the patriarchate of Constantinople as living under “pitiful” conditions. He listed among contemporary “Oriental Christians” the following people groups:
Greeks
Melchites (Syrian Arabs)
Chaldeans
Nestorians
Jacobites
Maronites
Copts
Armenians
Iberians
Georgians
Mingrelians
Albanians
Moscovites
Circassians
He indicated that the liturgies of these “Oriental Christians” were quite similar in basic substance and in prayers invoking the Holy Spirit.
“Orthodox” Slavs living under Ottoman rule especially resented Phanariots, or privileged Greeks, who worked for the Turkish sultans. Phanariots often enjoyed access to key governmental positions. They frequently tried to force Greek culture upon Slavic peoples. For a time (1557–1766), the Serbian Orthodox Church did gain independence from the patriarchate of Constantinople.
The governments of France, England, United Provinces, and other Western countries sometimes seemed unmoved by the sorry plight of Eastern Christians. Instead, these governments were anxious to maintain diplomats and chaplains at the Porte, or Constantinople, and vied with each other for favorable trade treaties with the Turks.
X. THE PATRIARCHATE OF MOSCOW, THE UNIATE CHURCH, AND CYRIL LUCARIS#
In 1589 the patriarchate of Moscow and All Russia (1589–1721) was established when the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremias II, designated Bishop Job (d. 1607) as the first patriarch of Moscow. The patriarchate of Moscow thereby joined the much older patriarchates of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople.
In 1595, four bishops and the metropolitan in Kiev, Ukraine, created what became known as the Uniate Church (eastern Catholic churches).
They submitted to the authority of the pope and embraced Catholic doctrine.
At the same time, they continued to observe the Byzantine liturgy and reserved the right of their priests to marry.
For three centuries, Uniate Christians became the subjects of fierce persecution. Cossacks in Ukraine and Poland proved to be determined enemies. In Austria, the Uniate Church did prosper.
Orthodox theologians rejected the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. When Cyril Lucaris, (1572–1637), a Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, published a confession (1629) with eighteen chapters that appeared Calvinist in orientation, he provoked a firestorm of theological controversy and elicited fierce opposition from Orthodox theologians.
The Ottoman Sultan Murad IV arranged for Cyril Lucaris, whom he viewed as a political and theological troublemaker, to be murdered by his elite guards, the Janissaries (June 27, 1638). Cyril’s body was unceremoniously dumped off a ship into the waters below.
Still later, the Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem (1672) specifically repudiated each point of Cyril’s confession. A number of Orthodox apologists argued the confession was a forgery. They claimed the patriarch’s other writings did not comport with its contents.
XI. THE EMERGENCE OF RUSSIA AS A EUROPEAN POWER#
After a so-called “Time of Troubles” (1598–1613), the tsars of the Romanov family dynasty began a lengthy rule of Muscovy-Russia from 1613 until 1917.
During the period from Peter the Great (1672–1725) through Empress Catherine II the Great (1729–96) Russia emerged as a worthy military competitor for the traditional Western powers—the French, the Spanish, the English, the Prussians, and the Austrian Hapsburgs.
Russia’s armies grew from 170,000 in 1690 to 330,000 in 1756.
Her navy more than doubled in size from the 1730s to the 1780s.
Russia gained vast lands at the expense of Sweden (the Great Northern War, 1700–1721), of Poland (the War of the Polish Succession, 1733–38; the First Partition of Poland, 1772; the Second Partition of Poland, 1793; the Third Partition of Poland, 1795), and of Turkey (the Russo-Turkish Wars of 1768–74 and 1787–92).
Russia’s conquests brought many non-Orthodox under her control, including Roman Catholics from Poland and Jews. Monarchs and diplomats became increasingly wary of Russia as an aggressor state that could overthrow carefully calibrated alliances designed to balance power in western Europe.
The impact of the reign of Peter the Great (1694–1725) on Russian society was profound. He took upon himself the daunting task of transforming the religious, political, and economic life of his essentially backward and rural country.
During a fifteen-month trip to Germany, the United Provinces, England, and Austria in 1697–98:
He gained greater knowledge about economics, farming, munitions, and shipbuilding.
He visited diverse educational institutions, hospitals, and factories.
He was received by monarchs as well as the members of the Royal Society in England.
When he had to return suddenly to Moscow to put down a takeover attempt by his sister, he reportedly proceeded to “cut off many heads with his own hand.”
Using forced labor, Peter the Great began to build the port city of Petersburg (1703) as a “window on the West.” In 1713 it became the capital of Russia. He ultimately defeated the armies of the Swedes, thereafter gaining more territory.
Opponents of Peter the Great were often impassioned. They included clerics from the Russian Orthodox Church as well as “Old Believers” or “Old Ritualists” who had a notable following in Little Russia and among Cossacks. Some Orthodox clerics believed that Peter engaged in blasphemous temerity by moving the imperial capital of Russia from Moscow — the “Third Rome” and center of Russian Orthodoxy — to Petersburg.
Old Believers were also enraged by what they thought were his irreligious, pragmatic actions. They had earlier entered into schism (Raskol) from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1650s due to their opposition to the anti-Slavic, Byzantine nature of Metropolitan Nikon’s revisions of the church’s liturgy. In 1682 Archpriest Avvakum Petrov, the leader of the Old Believers, was burned at the stake. Some of his followers who lived apart in their own religious communities engaged in tragic mass suicides.
Peter’s clerical opponents were especially agitated that he required both men and women to wear Western dress and forced boyars (Russian nobles) to shave (a Western custom) unless they paid a tax. Some Russian men believed they would not be permitted to enter heaven beardless. They were also offended by Peter the Great’s promotion of secular education (1714).
Peter professed to believe in the Christian faith. He venerated icons, could quote Scripture at length, could cite the Liturgy by heart, and sang on occasion in a church choir. Nonetheless, he evidenced little patience toward Patriarch Adrian of Moscow, who opposed his “Western” innovations.
When Patriarch Adrian died in 1700, Peter postponed the election of a new patriarch of Moscow and put Stefan Iasvorski into the role of protecting the vacant chair. This gambit dealt a staggering blow to the traditions and the hierarchical structure of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1716 Peter declared that he alone ruled Russia, thereby setting himself over the church.
In 1721 Peter approved Bishop Theophan Prokopovich’s “Ecclesiastical Regulation” for the Orthodox Church. This constitution established the “Spiritual College,” later called the Holy Governing Synod. The emperor was to choose its members, who were to swear the following oath:
“I acknowledge the Monarch of all-Russia, our Gracious Lord, to be the final Judge of this College.”
This body, led by the Procurator, a layman, was granted authority over the clergy and worked with the government on religious matters. It essentially served as a replacement institution for the patriarchy and gave Peter the Great authority over the Orthodox Church. When Peter died the next year, he left behind the Russian Empire.
The reigns of the Romanovs Catherine I (1725–27), Peter II (1727–30), Anna Ivanona (1730–40), Ivan VI (1740–41), Elizabeth I (1741–61), and Peter III (1762) were marked by intrigue and palace coups, by nobles gaining greater control over serfs, and by the founding of the University of Moscow (under Elizabeth).
Peter III had a very brief reign. He had married the German-born and Lutheran-raised Catherine II, who had recently converted to Orthodoxy. He disbanded the secret police and seemed to favor religious toleration. In 1762 he ruled that the gentry no longer had to serve the state. He disdained the Orthodox Church and was accused of favoring “Lutheranism.” A party headed by Grigori Orlov, a lover of Peter’s wife (then known as “Catherine the Great”), forced Peter to resign the throne and murdered him.
Catherine II then became the sole ruler. She continued to build on the expansionist policies of Peter the Great, adding 200,000 square miles to Russia. Her armies put down the rebellion of Emelian Pugachev’s Cossacks in 1773–75 and helped extend the borders of Russia, especially in the Crimea and in Poland-Lithuania, Belorussia, and western Ukraine. She centralized the government, which was run by civilian elites who had skills much like those of their counterparts in France and England.
In 1773 Catherine promoted a measure of religious toleration. She defended the rights of Jesuits to exist in Russia, despite the papacy’s dissolution of the Society of Jesus. Roman Catholics and Protestants enjoyed certain religious rights.
Catherine’s openness to “enlightened ideas” had definite limits.
She took over the lands of monasteries, turning them into state property.
She became hostile to the Masonic movement and feared the spread of subversive republican ideas propagated by partisans of the French Revolution.
She promulgated three decrees (1783, 1791, 1794) that forced Jews to settle within an area called “the Pale.”
This region stretched from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea. It encompassed present-day Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belorussia. Jewish settlers lived in the Pale under harsh conditions. Many were poverty-stricken.
Along with Prussian armies, Catherine the Great’s troops brutally put down the allegedly “Jacobin” Polish revolt of 1794, led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Moreover, Catherine did little to improve the plight of serfs during her reign.
As for the tsarina’s personal lifestyle, it was on occasion dissolute. Her lovers were many, including Prince Grigori Potemkin. For a time the politically astute Potemkin acted like her co-tsar. Catherine’s own religious beliefs were probably agnostic.
XII. CONCLUSION#
Eighteenth-century religious life on the Continent defies facile descriptions, so variegated were its diverse manifestations. Despite the anti-Christian campaign of the philosophes, in 1789 the peoples of most European countries remained broadly self-identified as “Christian.”
During the century, a number of Christian monarchs attempted to retain one church as the only legitimate one in their kingdom; others, whatever their motivations, tried to establish rights for Christian Dissenters, Jews, and “nonbelievers” — that is, anyone outside the state churches.
At the same time, what was probably a sizeable minority of Europeans remained aloof from the Christian churches. The Christian faith played relatively little role in the everyday decision making of these Europeans. Some indulged or believed in occult practices — witchcraft, black magic, the satanic, and sorcery.
During the Age of Lights, the capacity of the Christian religion to shape the general culture and customs of Europeans probably diminished, but certainly did not disappear.
The Bible was the most frequently published and most read book of the century.
Even some of those Europeans who viewed themselves as “enlightened” professed a desire to “purify” the Christian religion, not to overthrow the faith itself.
They sought to halt renewed religious warfare, promote religious toleration, and eradicate “superstition” and credulity.
As in the British Isles, many continental Christians believed they were acting as faithful stewards of the traditional teachings of their Christian churches. Even the sometimes haughty and bejeweled kings of France viewed themselves as “Most Christian” rulers.