Enlightenment Religion
As captivated as American Christianity is by Platonism and its offspring, Gnosticism, Enlightenment religion as it came into existence and as it thrives today proverbially says to Plato, “Hold my beer.” Below is an excerpt from Margaret C. Jacobs’ book The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents. The text below is found from pages 15-19.
In the midst of an international political crisis that Protestants defined as a struggle against arbitrary authority, science presented new standards for arriving at the truth. Newton’s science relied on experiment, trial and error, and the belief that mathematical regularity and laws ruled the universe. Science stood for philosophical elegance—the elimination of any abstract notion for which no physical reality seemed to exist. In the 1630s, the French natural philosopher Rene Descartes argued that the planets were carried about by swirling vortices—a fine aether that permitted constant pressure to effect motion and order. A generation later, Newton could find no mathematical basis for the aether, and he dismissed this theory as “hypothesis.” Newton’s system became synonymous with the empirical and the practical, and with a refusal to fashion inelegant philosophical systems that never offered experimental proof. He was seen as the detractor of airy systems, the slayer of the arbitrary and the fanciful. Most important, he discovered that movements of the planets could be expressed as a universal mathematical formula.
Science allowed alternatives to be imagined in everything from politics to religion. Lawlike behavior in the heavens suggested that human inventions such as governments also could be run by laws and procedures. The moment was propitious. As a result of the Revolution of 1688-89, laws were radically altered in the human realm. Locke offered a new set of principles for the construction of a human, not a divinely ordained, government. Scientists like his friend Newton proved by mathematical calculation that the universe is governed by laws knowable through human inquiry. Their followers reasoned that if humans could discover the law of universal gravitation, surely they could govern themselves by the light of reason and by constitutional government, in effect by a Newtonian system of government.
Although neither Locke nor Newton believed in the Trinity, each man was, in his own way, a devout Christian (Jacobs’ words, not mine!). By contrast, other intrepid, cantankerous spirits took up the new science and argued in favor of a “rational” religion, one that was free from the mysteries and miracles originally contained in the Bible to bring simple people into the Christian fold. The clergy, these people argued, should explicate with awe the workings of the law-bound heavens and stop scheming with absolutist princes to enhance their aura. Even the pious began to subscribe to what was called physico-theology, an attempt inspired by science to explain God’s providence by reference to his work in nature and not primarily through his biblical Word. By 1700, physico-theology was tame in comparison to deism, a rational religion stripped down to a belief only in God. Then came pantheism, a term invented in 1705 by the freethinker and radical Whig John Toland to describe the belief that God and nature are one and the same.
The new cultural movement toward the light also changed the nature of Christian belief and worship. New, more cerebral and liberal forms of Protestantism emerged. Unitarianism is perhaps the most famous example, and it continues to attract adherents in England and the United States. The ceremonial life of Unitarian churches is kept to a minimum, and simplified doctrines center on the belief in one God, not the Trinity, and on the right of each individual to fashion his or her own understanding of the spiritual life. Many English Protestants left the Anglican or Presbyterian fold to form Unitarian churches.
The Church of England itself split into two camps: one liberal, or Low Church, and more interested in preaching and social ethics; the other conservative, or High Church, and steeped in ceremony and tradition. Each camp possessed a political analogue: Whigs tended to be Low Church, and Tories tended to be High Church.
Similar fissures opened among Dutch and German Protestants, with liberals in both places seen to favor magistrates over princes. Groups such as the Quakers in England, who had always spurned traditional religious authority, and the Mennonites in the Netherlands continued to attract adherents. They became prominent as advocates for science and a moderate form of the Enlightenement. Earlier than most other organized confessional groups, the Quakers started a campaign against slavery. Soon most of the leaders of the Enlightenment joined them in promoting that cause.
None of these more socially focused or rationally constructed forms of Protestant worship went uncontested. At first Unitarians were persecuted, as toleration in England did not apply to any Protestant who did not believe in the Trinity. Both Newton and Locke kept their anti-Trinitarianism to themselves. The Anglican clergyman Samuel Clarke also took the safe course and remained a private Unitarian…
Throughout western Europe, many other Protestants and their clergy opted to stay in their original churches but quietly retired concepts such as mortal sin, purgatory, hell, and angels. Even in the birthplace of Calvinism, Geneva, a less doctrinal, more worldly version of Protestant worship emerged after 1700. Belief in original sin and predestination came to be seen as paralyzing. A new breed of clergymen depicted human beings as capable of self-reform and inherently good. The young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract, grew up in Geneva hearing such liberal sermonizing.
Not all the changes occurred in Protestant Europe. In Catholic France, for example, as the clergy became more zealous, the laity grew detached from ceremonies, men refused to become priests, and births out of wedlock increased.
Gradually, high educated Protestants and Catholics thought more about God’s work as revealed by science than about his biblical Word. As never before, science captured the imagination, particularly in Protestant Europe. Possessing natural knowledge could be interpreted as an expression of piety. The religiosity of the educated began to seem distant from the public displays, processions, and bell ringing of an earlier age and from the ornate Catholicism practiced at the time in southern Europe and transmitted in Latin America by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Religion in general was becoming more private than public, more individual than collective, and thoughts rather than ornate ceremonies began to define the believer. New forms of social interaction offered alternatives to the social life of the church and may have appealed particularly to the less pious. One indication of this lessening of public piety was that by the second half of the eighteenth century, fewer families in both Catholic and Protestant Europe left money to the church in their last wills and testaments.
The deists were among the more outrageous antagonists against religion. They repudiated the churches and their devotion to the divinely inspired Bible…Instead, they looked only to the scientific light shed on nature to explain beauty, order, and design. The deists saw God as infinite but remote, the being who had made the world and then absentmindedly left it to shift for itself. A French dictionary published in 1690 defined a deist as a person who saw no point in any particular religion; he recognized only a God. In the decades after the publication of Newton’s Principia, deists took up scientific laws and used them to proclaim nature’s ability to govern itself. An outrageous work like Treatise of the Three Impostors grew out of such thinking. It held that Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad had been mere impostors and that nature alone should be worshiped.