I. INTRODUCTION#
They were very good at self-advertisement, this small band of passionate social activists, battling propagandists, and clever wordsmiths: the philosophes (French for philosophers). So effective was their campaign to promote their own day as an “Age of Lights” or an “Age of Reason” that many of their contemporaries and later generations of historians identified the eighteenth century by those very terms. An expression coined in the nineteenth century calls it the “Age of Enlightenment.”
One common perception of eighteenth-century Europe suggests that philosophes such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Edward Gibbon, and David Hume — all of whom were antagonistic to orthodox Christianity — came to dominate high intellectual culture. Many Europeans would no longer accept the teachings of the Christian churches. Moreover, some Christians would only accept these teachings on condition that they were conformable to the imperial dictates of reason.
For the philosophe, reason should shape them all: Reason is immutable, having remained the same through all ages; it is a faculty shared by all humankind. Reason would dispel the oppressive darkness of superstition, ignorance, metaphysical speculation, fanaticism, and intolerance allegedly engendered by the Christian faith.
Humankind would benefit enormously from this new era of “reason,” no longer encumbered by the doctrines of sin and redemption through Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. Religious wars would cease; toleration and respect for the rights of others would grace personal relations; and civility, reasonableness, and urbanity would characterize polite society at large. Happiness and material well-being would also increase due to advances in science, medicine, and technology.
Their prime years of intellectual dominance did not always overlap:
England, 1680–1750–1789
United Provinces, 1680–1789
France, 1680–1715–1789
Italy, 1740–1789
Poland, 1740–1820
Portugal, 1750–1777
Northern Germany, 1680–1748–1794
Certain Enlightenments such as the one in France were more recognizably known for promoting hostility to the Christian faith, while others such as in Scotland offered intellectual components that Christians assimilated rather easily into their religious beliefs.
Even “national enlightenments” did not always shelter uniformity of belief among their partisans. Acrid battles sometimes broke out between various enlightened parties. Several streams of Enlightenment thought might course through one city or province and leave another region relatively untouched.
The bitter conflicts between Catholic Jesuits and Jansenists in France, the successful preaching missions of John Wesley (1703–91) and George Whitefield (1714–70) in England, the ministries of Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) and Whitefield in the “Great Awakening” of the American British colonies, and the Moravian influence of Herrnhut in Germany also attest to a residual and powerful Christian presence in the eighteenth century.
In the 1760s Voltaire himself acknowledged that the Siècle des lumières might not ultimately triumph over and replace another age, what he disdainfully called the “Age of Superstition.”
II. THE “AGES OF LIGHTS” OR “AGE OF REASON”: ORIGINS#
Intellectual historians have offered a number of instructive interpretations concerning the origins of the so-called Enlightenment, including the general revolt against Christianity by several of its celebrated representatives.
According to Paul Hazard, Western culture, especially in France, essentially severed its intellectual ties to Christianity in 1715 with the death of Louis XV. Hazard described this momentous cultural shift as nothing less than a revolution: “One day, the French people, almost to a man, were thinking like [Jacques Bénigne] Bossuet. The day after, they were thinking like Voltaire. No ordinary swing of the pendulum, that. It was a revolution.”
A. An “Enlightenment” Prelude: 1680-1715#
It remains true that a series of critical challenges to orthodox Christian beliefs did emerge in the period 1680–1715. A number of the scholars whom Hazard targets as subverting the Christian faith viewed themselves as Christians, even if they were less dogmatic about certain orthodox doctrines than their contemporaries. They never envisioned that their scholarship would be ransacked by the philosophes for anti-Christian purposes.
In fact, Voltaire, a leading philosophe along with the encyclopedists d’Alembert and Diderot, claimed that their own “philosophic” perspectives were based directly on the thought of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the latter two doing much of their publishing in the period from 1680 to 1715.
Many other scholars, whether Christian or non-Christian, appreciated Bacon’s “experimental philosophy” with its inductive approach to gathering knowledge. In the 1660s the English poet and critic John Dryden praised the forceful blow that Bacon and other natural philosophers had delivered against the Stagirite Aristotle’s reigning influence among many scholars and natural philosophers.
Newton and Locke followed in Bacon’s wake and allegedly finished the task of vanquishing the rationalistic systems builders Aristotle and Descartes. Indeed, some contemporaries thought that Newton and Locke, with their inductive approach, had ushered in genuinely new ways of viewing the world.
A new age of intellectual discovery seemed to be dawning. It witnessed a stunning advance in the global information available to scholars. Between 1630 and 1680 this information was multiplied by a great factor of five, but from 1680 to 1780 it was multiplied by another staggering factor of ten. This flood of information daunted scholars who had dared hope they could retain a total grasp of all there was to know. In one sense the so-called Enlightenment was an age of adjustment to an information revolution.
B. Isaac Newton: Christianity Compatible with Nature’s “Laws”#
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was an assiduous student of the Bible, particularly fascinated by biblical prophecy (especially the books of Daniel and Revelation) and biblical chronology. Newton also wrote about one million words devoted to alchemy. He secretly tried to discover the “philosopher’s stone.”
Newton became fascinated by the “wisdom” of the Ancients. He apparently viewed his research as an attempt to revive and amplify the “ancient wisdom” (prisca sapientia) of the pre-Socratic Ionian Greeks, Pythagoreans, and Egyptian thinkers (the Hermetic tradition). He believed that certain Ancients had a pure understanding of philosophy, theology, and cosmology that in time had been corrupted.
Like many Christian virtuosi, the Cambridge professor believed that natural philosophy (science) and biblical revelation did not contradict each other, especially if one used a hermeneutical principle of accommodation in interpreting Scripture. In fact, Newton announced explicitly in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), in which the “law of gravity” or attraction is described, that one of his purposes was to defend the existence of God.
A number of scientists and theologians such as Cambridge professor Richard Bentley used Newton’s thought to defend God’s existence in the Boyle Lectures series (1692–1732), named after the distinguished Christian natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Newton’s thought informed many of the lecturers as they defended natural theology and special revelation against the likes of Hobbes and other materialists and deists.
Moreover, in England as well as in the United Provinces and Germany, Christian apologists wrote theologico-physico books. They argued that nature not only reveals in its largest configuration God’s design, but that the very intricacy of plants and the bodies of the smallest animals and insects display his designing craftsmanship as well. Therefore, Newton’s work boosted the value of the “design argument” for God’s existence in the thinking of many Christian apologists.
Striking a contrary note, English deists — with Voltaire soon to follow suit — claimed that Newton’s thought bolstered their own anti-Christian and rational beliefs. They acknowledged that God does exist, the design argument seemingly providing irrefutable evidence to that effect. But their God was not the God of theism who providentially intervenes in this world. Rather, he was like a master watchmaker who made the world like a watch only to leave it to run on its own, following the laws of nature. And if nature’s laws are inviolable, then the miracles that Christians cite in arguing for Christ’s deity did not take place.
The meaning of Newton’s legacy became something over which to battle.
Scientists debated his sophisticated theories with various “Newtonianisms,” or admixtures of Newton’s thought, emerging in consequence.
By contrast, a number of Christians and the philosophes disputed the meaning of Newton’s scientific thought as it pertains to matters religious.
Newton’s empirical method, in which he described the natural world through inductive investigation backed by mathematical calculations, became a normative approach for many scientists, some of whom argued that no true knowledge of the world had existed until the great Newton began to describe the law of attraction.
C. Richard Simon and Biblical Criticism#
What if the Bible, a form of special revelation from God, were discovered to be fallible? Why should a “natural philosopher” or scientist feel constrained any longer to determine whether his scientific findings are in line with biblical teaching? The Oratorian priest Richard Simon’s biblical criticism seemed to place into jeopardy this very doctrine, the infallibility of Holy Scripture.
Born in Dieppe, France, Simon (1638–1712) was trained by the Jesuits at Rouen before he became the librarian at the house of the Oratorian order in Paris on Rue Saint Honoré. The young Simon quickly became one of the leading biblical scholars in Paris. He proposed that students of the New Testament could understand it better if they were familiar with the institutions, ceremonies, and customs of the Jews. After all, the first Christians were Jews, and their customs and ceremonies constituted one of the essential backgrounds for the New Testament.
In the mid-1670s Simon had secretly become involved with Jean Claude and Pierre Allix, the Huguenot pastors of Charenton (outside Paris), who had wanted him to help them create a new version of the Bible with notes to replace the Geneva Bible commonly used by the Reformed churches of France. The Protestant pastors also hoped that the new version would compete with a very popular Catholic Bible in the making by the Jansenist Le Maître de Sacy. Heartily disliking the Jansenists, Simon agreed to help the Protestants, but for an appropriate fee.
The Charenton Bible project, as it became known, fell apart when Swiss theologians who were cooperating with their French Huguenot colleagues in its funding and creation discovered that the French pastors had covertly enlisted Simon, a “Papist,” to do their translating and commenting work for them and that they were going to buy his translation with notes outright.
In 1678 Simon published what became his most controversial study, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (A Critical History of the Old Testament), in which he developed the famous “public scribes” hypothesis.
In part he was responding to an earlier assertion made by Baruch Spinoza in Tractatus Theologico-politicus (1670) that Moses could not have written all the Pentateuch, given the account of Moses’ own death, references to Moses in the third-person singular, and the like (issues that had been raised by the Jewish author Aben Ezra centuries earlier).
For his part, Simon proposed that so-called “public scribes” kept the archives of the republic of Israel. Guided by the Holy Spirit, these public scribes emended the writings of Moses, adding references in which the great leader was spoken of as “he,” the third-person singular pronoun. In this way Simon indicated that Moses was indeed the principal author of the Pentateuch, but that unknown public scribes had also contributed segments to its creation.
After reading a small portion of Simon’s Histoire critique, Bossuet, the bishop of Meaux and tutor for the king’s son, urged the government of Louis XIV to condemn the volume. In 1678 the licking flames of a governmental bonfire destroyed nearly all of the 1,300 books in the first edition. Members of the Oratorian house in Paris expelled Simon from the order the same year.
Simon has sometimes been hailed as the “father of biblical criticism.”
He claimed that he was the first scholar to apply the French word critique to the study of the Bible.
He also indicated, quite immodestly, that he was the first scholar to understand how the Bible should be translated and commented on.
Simon indicated that he was going to take another approach, assuming the stance of “perfect neutrality” — that is, he would translate and comment with no partisanship for a particular Christian theology. The Hebrew and Greek words of Scripture alone would determine how he would translate.
Earlier commentators had attempted to justify the doctrinal stances of their own churches in their works.
Simon acknowledged that St. Augustine had pursued a program of lower criticism — that is, the attempt to correct scribal errors in the copies of Scripture with the goal of restoring as much as possible the “lost originals,” or the infallible original text of Scripture.
In the Histoire critique, Simon moved quickly beyond Augustine’s position and defined criticism in another fashion. By arguing that unknown writers — the public scribes — wrote portions of the Old Testament, Simon helped shift the study of the Bible from what we often call “lower criticism” to “higher criticism.”
Moreover, Simon claimed that the scribes only chose certain sample histories from the many that existed in Israel’s archives to put in Holy Scripture. These histories, packaged in abbreviated renditions, and sometimes not placed in correct chronological order, were selected due to their didactic value in instructing the people. Given the way the Bible was put together, Simon concluded that Scripture should not be viewed as presenting an infallible chronological history, setting forth the full history of Israel.
Protestants and Roman Catholics who had assumed that the Bible offered an infallible historical chronology were outraged by a number of Simon’s claims.
According to Simon, Roman Catholics need not draw skeptical implications from his approach to Scripture, because they could look to the Roman Catholic Church and to her Tradition to guarantee a proper understanding of “unclear” Scriptural passages created by the equivocal meanings of certain Hebrew or Greek words.
Protestants, by contrast, did not have any sure means with which to restore the “lost originals” of Scripture or to know which translations or interpretations most closely approximated the Bible’s “original” texts.
Simon also spelled out his proposals in a number of other huge tomes. From 1678 until his death in 1712, the priest fought numerous battles attempting to defend his own orthodoxy. Among his most prominent critics were the Catholic bishop Bossuet and the Protestants Bentley and Edward Stillingfleet.
Between the years 1685 and 1687, the Arminian man of letters Jean Leclerc dueled with Simon in one of the most closely watched struggles of the age over the Bible’s authority.
Leclerc charged that little or no evidence supported the existence of public scribes in Israel’s history in the way Simon described them.
He claimed that an unknown person after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity had been the ultimate compiler of portions of the Old Testament.
He claimed that the only inspired portions of the Bible were Jesus’ own words and a few other statements made by prophets, and that the Bible only had to be historically accurate for it to serve as a worthy basis for the Christian faith.
Simon was enraged by Leclerc’s attack.
Both Simon and Leclerc denied the infallibility of the Bible, and they did so in French, whereas Latin had traditionally been employed for theological debate in order to shelter laypeople from theological controversies. Following their battle closely, Locke, Newton, Bayle, and a host of other leading intellectuals throughout Europe were challenged to rethink their commitment to this doctrine.
For their part, many orthodox English, French, German, and Dutch theologians of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries portrayed Simon and Leclerc as dangerous heretics, placing them in the ranks of the feared arch-heretics Hobbes and Spinoza.
But by the mid-eighteenth century, German theologians such as Johann S. Semler and Johann David Michaelis no longer excoriated Simon and Leclerc. Instead, they hailed Simon as the “father of biblical criticism” and a precursor to the kinds of biblical critical studies (“higher criticism”) they themselves were beginning to pursue, especially after 1750.
D. John Locke and a “New” View of Human Nature#
The much admired John Locke (1632–1704) did not lack for talent. He did serious work as a physician, an educator, an economist, a politician, a theologian, and of course as a philosopher.
Locke was born into a Puritan home at Somerset village, England. He was schooled at Christ College, Oxford, where he heard John Owen, the school’s dean, preach regularly. Although a Puritan, Owen was a defender of religious toleration. Locke studied theology, philosophy, and medicine.
Although praising Descartes for having delivered him “from the unintelligible way of talking of the philosophy in use in the schools in his time,” Locke reacted strongly to his concept of innate ideas and the assumption that a rationalistic deductive approach based in mathematics is the best way to gain knowledge.
After a teaching stint at Oxford, in 1666 Locke met Lord Ashley, who the next year asked Locke to become his personal physician. In 1668 Locke performed an operation on Lord Ashley which probably saved his life.
During a stay in France from 1675 to 1679, Locke apparently worked on his Two Treatises on Government. He returned to England, only to flee again to the United Provinces in 1683, where he lived while hiding his identity under the false name “Dr. van der Linden.” Locke also appreciated the work of Newton, Boyle, and Huygenius (Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens) in science and of Richard Simon in biblical criticism. Boyle’s The Origins of Forms and Qualities (1666) informed much of his thinking about primary and secondary qualities.
After the Glorious Revolution of 1689, in which James II was replaced by the Protestant William of Orange, Locke returned to England.
In 1690 he published his Second Treatise on Government, in which he continued his attack on Sir Robert Filmer’s divine right views of kingship.
In the same year, Locke also set forth his own “sensationalist” approach to epistemology in The Essay on Human Understanding, a work highly esteemed and meditated on by the philosophes. As Bacon and Newton created an experimental philosophy (science) for the study of nature, Locke attempted to create an experimental science for the study of the mind.
In that work Locke proposed that his goals were
“To inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human understanding”
to determine “the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion and assent.”
He attacked Descartes’s principle of innate ideas and the distinction between a priori knowledge and empirical belief. He proposed that all our ideas, whether simple or compound, come from experience. In turn, our knowledge comes from our ideas, direct products of the external world, or from our reflection on the ideas we have received from the external world. God guarantees that our ideas of the external world correspond to the world as it is.
Locke’s epistemology, in which the premise of innate ideas was denied, seemed to imply not only that Descartes was in error but that the orthodox Christian view of man was deeply flawed as well.
Those who read Locke in this fashion believed that the English philosopher had overthrown the Christian doctrine of original sin with its needlessly pessimistic teachings about our sinful nature.
By contrast, for many partisans of the Enlightenment, Locke had rehabilitated human nature and given hope that we humans can progress morally and be more successful in our pursuit of happiness.
Did not Christians affirm that man has a sinful nature at birth? Locke’s stance appeared to suggest by contrast that we are morally neutral at birth and that our natures are shaped ultimately by our experience and environment. We are not bound to sin due to a sinful nature inherited from Adam.
Locke viewed himself as a Protestant Christian, and like many of his English Protestant contemporaries, he was worried about the advances of Roman Catholicism in England and on the Continent.
Locke’s view that Christianity is reasonable contradicted one of the standard assumptions of deists and later philosophes that the Christian faith could not withstand reason’s scrutiny. At the same time, the actual content of his reasonable Christianity included relatively few fundamental beliefs when compared to the principal creeds of Christendom. To be saved, we only need to believe that Christ is the Messiah and obey his teachings. In his paraphrases of St. Paul’s epistles, Locke indicated that God will punish those who do not obey Christ’s law.
In 1695 Locke summed up his religious convictions in The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures, the title of the book underscoring the central role reason played in his formulation of Christianity. Several orthodox critics complained that Locke had denied basic doctrines of the Christian faith, including the substitutionary atonement of Christ and orthodox anthropology. It was especially troubling that Locke would not affirm in a categorical way that he believed in the Trinity.
Whatever might have been the apparent incongruities and contradictions in Locke’s religious beliefs, the great philosopher gave a boost to a reasonable, tolerant form of Protestant Christianity — one especially well-suited to an Age of Reason. Locke appeared short on a list of doctrinal essentials Christians needed to affirm. And he indicated that some of the teachings of Scripture are “above reason” but not “contrary to reason.”
In approaching death, Locke wondered if a book he had written on miracles “may be of use to the Christian religion” and affirmed his belief in the resurrection of the just. On October 28, 1704, the great John Locke passed away.
E. Pierre Bayle: Christianity and Skepticism#
The Huguenot Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a prodigious intellect, was another writer whose works the philosophes ransacked for arguments.
Born into the home of a Reformed pastor in southern France, Bayle studied for the ministry at the Reformed Academy of Sedan. By the early 1680s it was clear to many Huguenots that Louis XIV was determined to extirpate the Reformed faith from France. In 1681 Bayle left France, seeking exile in Rotterdam, the United Provinces.
During 1684–87 Bayle served as the influential editor of the journal News of the Republic of Letters. Bayle’s book reviews in the journal provided him with an arbiter’s role in assessing the literary, historical, and theological works that circulated in this international and non-confessional community of scholars.
In Pensées sur la Comète de 1680, Bayle seemed to separate morality from religion by attacking the authority of tradition and indicating atheists could create a moral society.
In Commentaire philosophique (1686), he argued for freedom of conscience in matters religious.
When in 1685 his Huguenot brother died in a prison in France, Bayle apparently experienced a spiritual crisis. He wrestled with the problem of evil and became an even more ardent apologist for religious toleration.
Bayle’s most important work is the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697). Four thick volumes in folio, it contains hundreds of articles, a number of which, if read a certain way, seem to subvert the Christian faith. In one article Bayle argued against the widely held belief that atheists are incapable of forming a moral society.
The Dictionary represents a work of incredible brilliance. Its author had the mental acumen to cross-reference articles in volumes not yet written. It became one of the most popular sets of the eighteenth century, found in numerous personal libraries throughout Europe. The Dictionary also became a model of sorts for the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d’Alembert.
Bayle’s Dictionary, with its labyrinth of cross-referenced notes tightly packed under various article headings, afforded the philosophes an arsenal of arguments to use against the Christian faith and especially against the Roman Catholic Church. The philosophes thought that Bayle had provided them with a marvelous strategy for sowing skeptical thought without risk:
State a thesis that on its own is orthodox but whose import becomes heterodox when cross-referenced to and juxtaposed beside another thesis.
The philosophes acknowledged that Newton, Simon, Locke, and Bayle portrayed themselves as Christians. But this awareness did not hinder the philosophes from drawing out anti-Christian entailments from the thought of each scholar.
III. THE “ENLIGHTENMENT”: THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHES#
A number of the most celebrated philosophes of the eighteenth century were raised in a French culture, residing either in the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Geneva.
They ranged from deists such as Voltaire and Rousseau to atheists such as Diderot, Baron d’Holbach, and La Mettrie.
They included both monarchists such as Voltaire and Baron de Montesquieu and republicans such as Rousseau.
Until the publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), so fearful were the philosophes of doing jail time that they often disseminated their writings of a seditious character in the form of handwritten manuscripts passed hand to hand. Readers had to infer from their utopian stories and exotic tales what the hidden criticism of these institutions might have been.
But in the second half of the eighteenth century, the philosophes came out from the shadows and strutted across center stage in French society. They published their works openly. By this time, they had friends in high places, such as Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who would protect their interests and could sometimes even help them to obtain privileges for their books from the king’s Bureau of the Library.
A. Baron de Montesquieu#
Whereas Newton had attempted to discover the laws of nature, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), a powerful politician and noble de robe from Bordeaux, tried to discern the “laws” that govern human relations.
In one sense, De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws) is a sophisticated early work of sociology. In the huge volume, Montesquieu musters factors such as “climate, religion, laws, maxims of government, the example of things past, habits, manners” to explain what the “general spirit” of a society is and how the society functions.
The work is studded with many fascinating correlations. Montesquieu, for example, asserted that monarchies thrived better in Catholic lands, whereas republics generally fared better in Protestant lands.
He proffered compelling reasons that the separation of powers is necessary in a government. If the executive branch of government also controls the legislative and judicial branches, then the people will have no protection against an executive who makes tyrannical laws and enforces them with his own police.
He did not think that his calm and rational explanation of the “laws” governing human relations needed Christian warrant to give them persuasive force.
Montesquieu was well aware of the fact that he could not identify all the factors that drive human relations. Nor could he explain satisfactorily how personal freedom can survive, faced by the overwhelming influence of blind “laws.” His approach possessed a materialistic and secular orientation, and his God appeared somewhat impersonal.
B. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Civilization versus Nature#
Voltaire#
The witty, irrepressible, and often sacrilegious Voltaire was the most famous of the philosophes. A remarkable letter writer, poet, dramatist, historian, and social commentator, Voltaire stood out as one of most prolific writers of his age. If there were a shepherd of the “little flock” of philosophes, it was the virulent, wily, and anti-Christian Voltaire.
Born in November 1694, François-Marie Arouet attended the Jesuit college Louis-Le Grand (1704–10), where he encountered teachers with deistic leanings. As an adolescent, he became troubled by the problem of evil. By 1716 he was already engaged in doing biblical criticism. The next year he was incarcerated in the Bastille for one of his writings. In 1718, in full reaction against his father, young Arouet changed his name to Voltaire.
After a second stay in the Bastille, Voltaire traveled to England in 1725. He was quite taken by England, where “the people think freely and nobly” and “Reason is free.” The English even practiced religious tolerance, something unknown in France. The stay in England, plus a growing familiarity with the writings of the great English scholars Newton and Locke, gave Voltaire ample ammunition for writing a book that is sometimes described as the first bomb thrown at the institutions of the Ancien régime (“Old Order”). It was published in England as The English Letters in 1733 and in France as the Lettres philosophiques the next year.
In this work Voltaire elevated English society before the French people as an attractive alternative model of what a society could be. He extolled the likes of the Englishmen Locke and Newton and attacked the metaphysics of his fellow countrymen Nicholas Malebranche and Descartes.
In addition, Voltaire dared criticize Blaise Pascal, the “sublime misanthrope,” whose view of man the philosophe believed had to be overthrown. Voltaire also attacked Pascal’s wager argument. He viewed Pascal as a formidable Christian opponent. One of the very last books Voltaire published was titled Remarks on Pascal.
From 1744 to 1747 Voltaire resided at the court of Louis XV at Versailles, where he happened to irritate the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Fleeing the court, Voltaire traveled throughout Europe and spent time with his mistress, Madame du Chatelet, a brilliant coworker and mathematician (d. 1749) and at the court of Frederick II, a visit (1750–53) that ended unhappily when the king favored another philosophe, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, over Voltaire.
By late 1754, as a fatigued European traveler, Voltaire arrived in Geneva, where he hoped to woo the Reformed Christians to his form of deism. He believed he had found potential disciples in Jacob Vernes and Jacob Vernet, two of Geneva’s principal pastors, but he was to be sorely disappointed, not only by the actions of these Reformed pastors, but also by the arguments of another of Geneva’s own, the remarkably gifted and troubled writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau#
Rousseau was born in 1712 into a Protestant home in Geneva. His mother was the daughter of a pastor. Rousseau recounts his life in graphic detail in Confessions, an autobiography that reads like a well-crafted, tell-all novel.
As an adolescent of sixteen, Rousseau was locked out of Geneva’s city walls one late afternoon when the city gates closed. Fearing a beating from his employer, he fled south first to Confignan in Savoy, where a priest told him to go to Annecy to meet a woman named Madame de Warens, a convert to Catholicism. After meeting the young Rousseau, Madame de Warens sent him on his way even farther south to Turin, Italy, where on April 12, 1728, he too converted to Roman Catholicism. Thereafter Rousseau lived off and on with Madame de Warens, whom he affectionately called “Maman.”
In 1742 Rousseau made his way to Paris, thinking that he could win fame through a new system of notations for music. Prone to exploit women sexually, such as Thérèse Le Vasseur, who became the mother of his children, Rousseau also counted on contacts with influential women to help insinuate himself into high society. In Paris he met a number of the philosophes.
In 1743 Rousseau served as an assistant for the French ambassador to Venice. After a falling out with the ambassador, a petulant Rousseau returned to Paris. He was also fearful that he had contracted a disease from one of his encounters with women of ill-repute in Venice.
In 1749 Rousseau had an experience that would change the direction of his life and in one sense redirect the intellectual history of France in the eighteenth century. He decided to visit his friend Diderot, one of the editors of the Encyclopédie, who was jailed in Vincennes, a prison not far from Paris. Diderot had written a piece that earned for him this brief prison stay.
At the prison Diderot encouraged Rousseau to give his “ideas wings and compete for the prize.” In a prize-winning essay, “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts,” in 1750, Rousseau argued that humans are born good since they come from the hands of God; it is their encounter with civilization that corrupts them and steals away their primitive happiness. In consequence, the closer we can emulate the state of nature, the happier we will be.
Rousseau’s advocacy of a return to nature won him a rather large following in Paris, but it also provoked a series of refutations and alienated him from the encyclopedists and Voltaire.
Earlier in his writing career, Voltaire had written Le mondain (The Man of the World, 1736), in which he reveled in the joys of luxury and identified the progress of humankind with the advance of civilization.
Now Rousseau seemed to be working directly at cross-purposes, raising suspicions about the value of the arts and sciences.
When Rousseau asked Voltaire for an assessment of his essay, the philosophe responded with more than a touch of sarcasm. Rousseau was grievously wounded by Voltaire’s jocular but hurtful reply. Mindful of certain criticisms, Rousseau let his readers know that he had no intention of torching libraries.
In a second essay, “On the Origins of Inequality” (1755), Rousseau once again argued that primitive humans had originally been innocent and happy in a state of nature. Then along came the person, the true founder of society, who ruined everything: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murder; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch.…”
Rousseau explained the origins of evil within society through imaginative historical reconstructions of this kind. Despite professing great respect for the Bible, Rousseau was quite ready to neglect what the book of Genesis taught about the creation of Adam and Eve and the Fall.
In 1754 Rousseau successfully applied for citizenship in Geneva, converting to Protestantism in the process. During a stay in Paris, Rousseau learned that Geneva was soon to have a new neighbor, living just outside the city — none other than Voltaire. In despair, Rousseau decided not to return to the city.
In one sense Rousseau became the arch-heretic of the “philosophic” movement and a herald of Romanticism.
Whereas Voltaire had great confidence in reason’s powers, Rousseau proposed that besides reason we should rely on our “interior sentiments,” or conscience. Our conscience will guide us infallibly in our moral decision.
Whereas Voltaire believed that plays and the theater were valuable, Rousseau argued in his letter to d’Alembert on the spectacles that they corrupted audiences who were drawn into an artificial immoral world, far removed from what is natural and good.
Whereas Voltaire denied that God intervenes providentially in the world, Rousseau argued that in fact God does intervene.
Voltaire’s stories#
In 1757 Diderot and d’Alembert published volume 7 of their Encylopédie, which contained entries for the letter “G.” D’Alembert had written the article on “Genève” (Geneva). Relying on information that he had apparently received from Voltaire, he described the Reformed pastors of Geneva as “perfect Socinians,” the followers of the natural religion of John Locke. Pastors Vernes and Vernet reacted in horror at this characterization of their beliefs. They turned in anger on Voltaire, whom they assumed had furnished d’Alembert with this perspective on the Genevan clergy.
In genuine disgust, Voltaire decided to leave Geneva and moved across the border to Ferney in France. The philosophe now believed that even the more liberal followers of the Christian religion would not forsake their faith commitments when pressed, and he regarded them as hypocrites.
The vexing relations with Vernes and Vernet apparently contributed to Voltaire’s mounting hostility toward Christianity, particularly as represented by the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1759 Voltaire launched his most virulent war cry: “Ecrasez l’Infâme” (“Crush the infamous thing” — that is, Christianity). His anti-Christian writings were voluminous, ranging from An Important Study by Lord Bolingbroke, or The Fall of Fanaticism (1736) to The Philosophical Dictionary (614 articles; 1764).
Voltaire mocked the orthodox understanding of the incarnation, that Christ was God in the flesh.
He professed being offended by the claim that Christ had to shed his blood to bring about the redemption of sinners.
He railed at the Roman Catholic Church for its intolerance, particularly toward French Protestants
He scoffed at the Doctors of the Church for their battles over theological inanities.
While professing respect for Jesus Christ and “our holy Christian faith,” he let it be known in satirical and jocular prose and poetry that he was no Christian.
At the same time, Voltaire was no great optimist about the human condition. In his masterpiece Candide, the philosophe struck out at Gottfried Leibnitz’s proposition that this is the best of all possible worlds and at Rousseau’s naïvete that nature is beneficent.
In 1762 the Calas case grabbed his attention and provided him with an opportunity to act. Jean Calas, a Huguenot from Toulouse, France, was put to death on the wheel for having allegedly murdered his son Marc-Antoine the year before.
The motive for the crime was purportedly this: Marc-Antoine had wanted to convert to Roman Catholicism. He needed to do so in order to gain a certificate that would permit him to become a lawyer. To avoid this abjuration, the father and family members conspired to murder the errant son by hanging him.
Once convinced that Jean Calas and other family members were innocent of the crime, Voltaire launched a three-year campaign to exculpate the Calas family name. In 1765 his efforts were finally rewarded when a higher court reversed the decision of the Parlement of Toulouse. Voltaire’s reputation as a righter of wrongs grew dramatically throughout Europe.
In 1763 Voltaire published the Traité sur la tolerance (Treaty on Toleration). His generous actions on behalf of the Calas family and other Protestants seemed to demonstrate that la philosophie, anti-Christian though it was, had practical value.
When Voltaire came to Paris in 1778 to see his play Irène mounted on the stage of the Comédie française, he was cheered by crowds in the streets as the “Calas-man,” the person who had saved the Calas family’s good name.
Though not a Christian, Voltaire did profess to believe in God. In fact, his professions of worship of this God were on occasion quite lyrical. But the nature of his exact beliefs have been much debated, some scholars arguing that he was a deist, others a theist, and some even a mystic. The confusion is caused in part by the fact that Voltaire on occasion used the words deist and theist interchangeably.
When the philosophe was approaching death, he seemed to moderate his attitude toward Christianity. He hoped to receive a proper burial as only Christians could receive, others having their bodies thrown into a refuse heap with vagrants. Perhaps this desire explains Voltaire’s confession to a priest two days later. There was no mention of Christ in this confession.
On May 30 Voltaire, the most famous philosophe and long-standing enemy of the Christian faith, died. During the French Revolution, his bodily remains were taken to Paris and placed in the Pantheon.
Rousseau’s stories#
As for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, after his break with Voltaire he proceeded to have a falling out with a number of other philosophes, including Diderot and later David Hume.
In 1761 Rousseau published La Nouvelle Héloïse, a heartrending novel in which Julie the heroine and St. Preux discuss religious sentiments at length.
The next year Rousseau published Emile, an educational guide indicating how a young boy, Emile, and a young girl, Sophie, should be raised. Rousseau wanted them to be nurtured according to the principles of nature and to be sheltered from the nefarious effects of civilization. Little matter that Rousseau himself had abandoned his own children to an orphanage.
Rousseau professed great respect for Jesus Christ: “If the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God.” Yet, in many regards his ultimate authority was not Christ, but himself, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Theologically, Rousseau was an outright Pelagian.
In 1762 Rousseau published The Social Contract, a work in which he unpacked a compact theory of government and described his concept of a “general will.” According to Rousseau, people cannot really be free unless they are free to make their own laws within the context of the general will.
Rousseau’s writings exercised a profound influence on the thinking of a number of radical leaders of the French Revolution, including Maximilien Robespierre.
Rousseau also argued that any society should have a “civil religion” to help bind its populace together. The tenets of this civil religion were fourfold:
God exists and rewards good deeds
God punishes evil deeds
there should be tolerance for all religions
a natural religion underlies all religions
Like Voltaire and a number of other philosophes, Rousseau had a difficult time envisaging a society in which the “people” are not restrained by the fear that God would punish their evil deeds.
The publication of The Social Contract and Emile caused an uproar and provoked warrants for Rousseau’s arrest and orders for the public burning of these books. Rousseau believed his list of enemies had dramatically expanded. In 1768 he named his enemies, including among others the philosophes and especially Voltaire.
In general, Rousseau’s last years were unhappy ones.
He felt alone, betrayed by his former philosophic friends.
He sensed that he was being tracked by foes both imaginary and real.
On July 2, he died, with Thérèse Le Vasseur at his side. Like Voltaire, his earthly remains were transferred to the Pantheon during the French Revolution.
Upon hearing of Voltaire’s death on May 30, 1778, he commented, “My existence was linked to his; now that he is dead, I shall not be long in following him.” Rousseau was right.
Rousseau’s views of conscience greatly influenced Immanuel Kant’s conception of a “categorical imperative” and Robespierre’s view of the nature of society’s “general will.” In the nineteenth century, thinkers from diverse political persuasions, including Marxists, cited him as an authority.
C. Denis Diderot and the Philosophic Atheists#
Denis Diderot (1713–84), erstwhile friend of Rousseau, was quite simply an intellectual genius. His fields of expertise ranged from art criticism to philosophy of science, chemistry, and various forms of technology.
Born in Langres, France, Diderot was trained by the Jesuits. On August 22, 1726, he was tonsured and became an abbé. He may have experienced a falling out with the Jesuits before he left Langres for Paris in 1728 or 1729 to gain further education. Whatever the reason, Diderot as a young man turned against the Christian faith.
In 1747 he was denounced to the police in Paris as “a very dangerous man who speaks of the holy mysteries of our religion with contempt.” In that same year he began work in serious fashion on the Encyclopédie.
As editor of the Encyclopédie, Diderot kept at his Herculean task despite huge obstacles. They included:
Energy-sapping troubles with his publisher, Le Bréton
The departure of his coeditor, d’Alembert
The suppression of the privilege (1759) to print the Encylopédie due to ecclesiastical pressure exercised on the government
The rigors of preparing tomes in an “underground” shop without knowing if they would ever see the light of day.
Finally Diderot was able to resume publication of the Encyclopédie in 1765, with the release of the remaining volumes occurring in 1772.
In sum, the seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of drawings and millions of words represent one of the great publishing achievements of the eighteenth century.
More than 220 writers — including priests, pastors, theologians, philosophes, and scientists, ranging from obscure hacks to noted luminaries such as Voltaire and Rousseau — contributed thousands of articles to this massive set of volumes. Diderot wrote scores of articles himself, but his associate, the Protestant Chevalier de Jaucourt (1704–80), actually penned 4,700,000 words in 17,050 articles, or 28 percent of the articles of the Encyclopédie.
In the Discours Preliminaire (Preliminary Discourse), d’Alembert set forth the two principal goals of the Encyclopédie:
To show the order and relationships that exist in fields of human knowledge
To propose the general principles upon which each science and each art, liberal or mechanical, are based.
The Encyclopédie provided readers with information on the latest technology and scientific advances. Scores of drawings illustrated technological advances and illuminated the social life and shops of workers.
Diderot was also quite explicit about another one of his intentions for the Encyclopédie: to change the way people think. He wanted readers to adopt the major premises of la philosophie. Following Bayle’s lead, Diderot adopted the tactic of having things written in cross-reference notes that were compatible with orthodox Christian teaching but became heterodox or subversive by their entailments or when placed side by side with other statements.
Diderot did in fact advocate atheism, thinking deism an untenable halfway house between theism and atheism. In D’Alembert’s Dream (three related dialogues written in 1769), he wrestled with the question many an atheist has tried to answer: How can matter or something inanimate become a living being? An advocate of personal freedom, he also struggled to explain how this prized value could exist in a world made up only of matter. If our actions are determined by materialistic forces, in what meaningful sense do we enjoy personal freedom?
Diderot was not alone in espousing atheism.
Underground “radical” authors such as the priest Jean Meslier had made the case for atheism in subversive pieces passed from hand to hand.
La Mettrie, a physician, proposed in Man, a Machine (1747) that empirical research reveals we are machines made of matter without an immortal soul.
Other philosophes wanted to have nothing to do with him owing to his radical materialism and atheism.
For his part, Paul Heinrich Dietrich, the Baron d’Holbach, attacked religion in his Common Sense or Natural Ideas Opposed to Supernatural (1772) and in his more famous System of Nature (1770). Few contemporaries surpassed d’Holbach in his disdain for so-called “priestly religion.”
De l’Esprit (1758), an atheistic book by Helvétius, caused a serious stir and contributed directly to the temporary interruption of the publication of the Encyclopédie. Voltaire had little appreciation for atheistic books, although he came to the defense of Helvétius.
More commonly, like a number of other philosophes, Voltaire was concerned about what evil acts the “people” might commit if they lost their belief in a God who would punish them for bad deeds. This utilitarian concern to advocate God’s existence as a means to foster social control also militates against the simple identification of the Siècle des lumières with atheism.
All in all, members of the “little flock” of philosophes often had difficulty getting along with each other, given their personal animosities, egoisms, and different perspectives on certain topics.
They had abandoned the Christian Good Shepherd.
They also sometimes abandoned each other.
Nonetheless, the philosophes were very successful in selling the premise to some of their contemporaries and later historians that the eighteenth century was “enlightened,” or the Age of Reason.
D. The Siècle des Lumières and the French Revolution#
Before his death in 1778, Voltaire despaired that the philosophic movement in France was becoming obsolete. In 1776 Jakob Heinrich Meister, a philosophe, concurred. He attributed the retreat of the “philosophic” influence to a renewal of Roman Catholic devotion in Paris. Years later, others thought that the deaths of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot signaled the onset of the philosophic demise.
There were other signs, however, that the lumières had not been totally extinguished in France. A coterie of governmental officials known as the “Magistrats-Philosophes” continued to work with Rabaut Saint-Etienne for Protestant toleration, a prime philosophic cause. They faced strong opposition from many Roman Catholic clergymen, a principal exception being the Jansenists, who lent support to the Protestant cause. Eventually Louis XVI approved the Edict of Toleration (1787), thereby granting the Huguenots of France at least a number of civil rights.
Then again, the philosophe Jean Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, born fifty years after Voltaire, was still at work in 1789 promoting an “enlightened” agenda, extolling reason’s rights, and arguing for the “perfectibility” of man. Influenced by Hume’s reservations about the difficulty of establishing empirical truths, Condorcet acknowledged that the “laws” of the social sciences are not certain and only probable. Nonetheless, he believed that “the probability of all statements of experience can be expressed and evaluated mathematically within probability theory.” During the Terror of 1793–94 the French Revolution turned especially bloody. Condorcet was imprisoned and then executed.
The double irony surrounding his tragic death is the fact that many of the more radical revolutionaries like Robespierre prosecuted the Terror as a “rational” program to preserve the internal security of the nation and did so in the names of philosophie and reason. They looked back especially to Rousseau’s concept of the general will as providing a warrant for their attempt to exterminate opponents of the revolution.
In addition, Robespierre, the leader of the Convention, attempted to establish the “Cult of Reason” and later the “Cult of the Supreme Being” to replace Roman Catholicism in France. Now reason, so extolled by the philosophes, had taken on “salvific” value; the revolutionaries ordered that “reason” should be worshiped in “Temples of Reason” —former Christian churches.
By late 1793–94, however, Frenchmen in a majority of the departments of France were restive or in revolt against the revolutionaries in Paris. These partisans of the “Counter-Revolution” were often Catholics loyal to Rome.
They had been especially consternated by the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” which mandated that the clergy of France be elected.
They were also deeply offended that the revolutionaries of the Convention ordered “reason” worshiped and justified the Terror in the name of “public salvation,” “philosophy,” and “reason.”
Debate still ensues regarding the ways the ideologies associated with the Siècle des lumières may have contributed to both the origins and unfolding of the French Revolution. Moreover, an emerging consensus suggests that the role of “religion” must likewise be considered alongside philosophic or economic or social factors in any explanation of the revolution’s origins.
Voltaire and Rousseau, who had defended doctrines of tolerance, would have been appalled that some of their ideas were exploited to justify bloody and heinous acts during the French Revolution. In a similar fashion, intellectuals such as Newton, Simon, Bayle, and Locke, who were major actors in Paul Hazard’s “Crisis of the European Mind,” would have been appalled by the way the French philosophes Voltaire, Rousseau, and others had exploited their own writings.
Ideas are often reworked and exploited in ways not envisioned by their originators. This phenomenon was especially noticeable during the Age of Lights and the French Revolution, a time when the Christian faith was under considerable duress.