Chapter Six The Enlightenment
In the area of political reform, the results of the Reformation are impressive. One can think of Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (1859)—with Paris given over to the goddess of Reason, and London with all its inconsistencies—as having a Reformation base.
The change in England in 1688 could be and was bloodless. We must not discount the earlier civil wars, but the decisive change in England in 1688 was bloodless—so much so that among historians it is called the “Bloodless Revolution.” At that time William III of Orange and Mary became monarchs, and it was made clear that Parliament was not a junior partner but an equal partner with the crown. This arrangement brought about the deliberate control of the monarchy within specific legal bounds.
The French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778), often called “father of the Enlightenment,” was greatly influenced by the results of this bloodless revolution in England during his time of exile there (1726–1729). The impact of the Bloodless Revolution and the ensuing freedom of public expression is shown in Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733). He wrote, “The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of Kings by resisting them, and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established . . . that wise government where the prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrained from committing evil . . . and where the people share in the government without confusion.”
While Voltaire is sometimes overflattering about English conditions, he may be excused because of the terrible contrast in France. There were indeed vast areas in France which needed righting, but when the French Revolution tried to reproduce the English conditions without the Reformation base but rather on Voltaire’s humanist Enlightenment base, the result was a bloodbath and a rapid breakdown into the authoritarian rule of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821).
The utopian dream of the Enlightenment can be summed up by five words: reason, nature, happiness, progress, and liberty. It was thoroughly secular in its thinking. The humanistic elements which had risen during the Renaissance came to flood tide in the Enlightenment. Here was man starting from himself absolutely. And if the humanistic elements of the Renaissance stand in sharp contrast to the Reformation, the Enlightenment was in total antithesis to it. The two stood for and were based upon absolutely different things in an absolute way, and they produced absolutely different results.
To the Enlightenment thinkers, man and society were perfectible. And the French romantically held to this view even in the midst of the Reign of Terror. Voltaire sketched out four epochs of history, of which his own was the apex. Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), a mathematician, who was one of the philosophers of Voltaire’s circle and who was the author of Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793–1794), could talk of nine stages of progress as he hid in a garret in Paris while hiding from the Terror! While hiding for his very life from Robespierre’s secret police, he wrote: “We have witnessed the development of a new doctrine which is to deliver the final blow to the already tottering structure of prejudice. It is the idea of the limitless perfectibility of the human species. . . .” Later he managed to escape from Paris, was recognized, arrested, and imprisoned, dying in custody while awaiting his turn at the guillotine.
If these men had a religion, it was deism. The deists believed in a God who had created the world but who had no contact with it now, and who had not revealed truth to men. If there was a God, He was silent. And Voltaire demanded no speech from Him—save when, after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, Voltaire illogically complained of His nonintervention. The men of the French Enlightenment had no base but their own finiteness. They looked across the Channel to a Reformation England, tried to build without the Christian base, and ended with a massacre and Napoleon as authoritarian ruler.
In June 1789, the first phase of the liberal bourgeois plan of the French Revolution was at its height. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) depicted this in his painting The Oath of the Tennis Court (see ). Here the members of the National Assembly swore to establish a constitution. Their base, consciously, was purely a humanist theory of rights. On August 26, 1789, they issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It sounded fine, but it had nothing to rest upon. In the Declaration of the Rights of Man what was called “the Supreme Being” equaled “the sovereignty of the nation”—that is, the general will of the people. Not only was there a contrast to England’s Bloodless Revolution, but a sharp contrast with what resulted in the United States from the Declaration of Independence which was made thirteen years earlier. One had the Reformation base, the other did not.
Plate 38 Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Tennis Court, 1791, The Louvre, Paris, France. “. . . purely a humanist theory of rights.”
It took two years for the National Constituent Assembly to draft a constitution (1789–1791). Within a year it was a dead letter. By that time what is often known as the Second French Revolution was in motion, leading to a bloodbath that ended with the revolutionary leaders themselves being killed.
To make their outlook clear, the French changed the calendar and called 1792 the “year one,” and destroyed many of the things of the past, even suggesting the destruction of the cathedral at Chartres. They proclaimed the goddess of Reason in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and in other churches in France, including Chartres. In Paris, the goddess was personified by an actress, Demoiselle Candeille, carried shoulder-high into the cathedral by men dressed in Roman costumes.
Like the humanists of the Renaissance, the men of the Enlightenment pushed aside the Christian base and heritage and looked back to the old pre-Christian times. In Voltaire’s home in Ferney the picture he hung (in such a way on the wall at the foot of his bed that it was the first thing he saw each day) was a painting of the goddess Diana with a small new crescent moon on her head and a very large one under her feet. She is reaching down to help men.
How quickly all the humanist ideals came to grief! In September 1792 began the massacre in which some thirteen hundred prisoners were killed (see ). Before it was all over, the government and its agents killed forty thousand people, many of them peasants. Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), the revolutionary leader, was himself executed in July 1794. This destruction came not from outside the system; it was produced by the system. As in the later Russian Revolution, the revolutionaries on their humanist base had only two options—anarchy or repression.
Plate 39 An engraving symbolic of the terror of the guillotine, 1796, Bibliotheque Nationale de France. “The government and its agents killed forty thousand people, many of them peasants.”
The parallels between the course of the French Revolution and the later Russian Revolution, both resting on the same base, are striking. Sometimes the French Revolution is likened to what occurred in the United States at a slightly earlier date. This is incorrect. While there were some historic crosscurrents between the United States and France, the similarities are in the Bloodless Revolution in England and the Revolution in the United States. In sharp contrast to both of these are the likenesses in the French Revolution and the later Russian Revolution. A factor in the parallel between the French Revolution and the Russian is that by 1799 Napoleon had arrived as the elite to govern France—as later Lenin, also as the elite, took over the rule of Russia.
Mention of the later Russian Revolution evokes the observation that a quite different dynamic was involved in the political fortunes of those parts of Europe structurally influenced by the restoration of biblical Christianity in the sixteenth century as compared to those not so influenced. In crude geopolitical terms, there is a contrast between the north of Europe and the south and east. Allowing for local influences, it would seem that the inspiration for most revolutionary changes in the south of Europe was a copy, but often in contorted form, of the freedoms gained from the Reformation in the north. In Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) gleaned his ideals from the north of Europe and had to carry them into the peninsula by force. In Spain, where the Inquisition continued into the eighteenth century, persecution and lack of freedom lasted in one form or another up to our own day.
And what the Reformation produced—by native growth as in England or by borrowing as in Italy—is all in gigantic contrast to what Communist countries continue to produce. Marxist-Leninist Communists have a great liability in arguing their case because so far in no place have the Communists gained and continued in power, building on their materialistic base, without repressive policies. And they have not only stifled political freedom but freedom in every area of life, including the arts. To mention only early examples in the field of music, Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) left Russia in order to have liberty while Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) chose to stay, only to meet with constant repression.
It should not be forgotten that the Leninists, the Bolsheviks, did not make the break for freedom in Russia. That came with the “February Revolution” of 1917. Prince Georgi Lvov (1861–1925) became prime minister of the provisional government and was succeeded by Aleksandr Kerensky (1881–1970) in July. Kerensky was a social reformer but not a Leninist. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) did not even return to Russia until after the victory of the February Revolution. Lenin returned from Switzerland in April, Trotsky from New York in May. Stalin returned from Siberia in March. In October 1917 they took over a revolution that had been made by others, and from the beginning under Lenin they built a regime of repression.
Solzhenitsyn says in Communism: A Legacy of Terror (1975),
I repeat, this was March 1918—only four months after the October Revolution—all the representatives of the Petrograd factories were cursing the Communists, who had deceived them in all their promises. What is more, not only had they abandoned Petrograd’s cold and hunger, themselves having fled from Petrograd to Moscow, but had given orders to machine gun the crowds of workers in the courtyards of the factories who were demanding the election of independent factory committees.
The Bolsheviks were only a small percentage of the Russian people and made up only one-fourth of the constituent assembly which had been elected in November. When the assembly met for the first time in January 1918, the Bolshevist troops dispersed it by force. That was the first and last free election in Russia. Before the Leninists took over in October, Lenin wrote a book called The Lessons of the Paris Commune. There he analyzed why the Paris Commune was defeated in 1871. His principal conclusion was that the Commune had not killed enough of its enemies. When Lenin came to power he acted according to this analysis and set up all the machinery for oppression.
Communists speak about “socialism” and “communism,” maintaining that socialism is only the temporary stage, with a utopian communism ahead. Over a half-century has passed and not only have they not achieved the goal of “communism” anywhere, they have not even come to a free socialism. The “temporary dictatorship of the proletariat” has proven, wherever the Communists have had power, to be in reality a dictatorship by a small elite—and not temporary but permanent. No place with a communistic base has produced freedom of the kind brought forth under the Reformation in northern Europe.
Communists have had to function on the basis of internal repression. We can think of the repression begun under Lenin, as well as the Stalin purges, the Berlin Wall built in 1961 to confine the people of East Germany by force, or the disappearance of freedom in China (see ). Externally they hold their “allies” by coercion—the clearest examples being the secret execution of thousands of Polish officers buried in Katya Forest as the Communist prepared to make Poland their “ally,” and the Russian tanks in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In Czechoslovakia the repression did not end with the tanks; later half a million followers of Alexander Dubček (1921–1992) were purged from the Communist party. In 1981 the Soviet Union used their surrogates in Poland to crush the freedom growing there.
Plate 40 The Berlin Wall. “. . . to confine the people of East Germany by force.” Photos by Mustafa Arshad.
Seeing the contrast between the Reformation countries and the Communist and southern European countries, we must not minimize the riches in government and society which came forth from the Reformation. Even in those places where the Reformation consensus was less consistent than it should have been on the basis of the biblical view, there were absolutes on which to combat injustice. Men like Shaftesbury, Wilberforce, and Wesley could say that the evils and injustices which they fought were absolutely wrong. And even if we must say with sorrow that all too often Christians were silent when they should have spoken out, especially in the areas of race and the compassionate use of accumulated wealth, the Christians who were silent were inconsistent with their position.
In contrast to this, humanism has no final way of saying certain things are right and other things are wrong. For a humanist, the final thing which exists—that is, the impersonal universe—is neutral and silent about right and wrong, cruelty and noncruelty. Humanism has no way to provide absolutes. Thus, as a consistent result of humanism’s position, humanism in private morals and political life is left with that which is arbitrary.
A good illustration is that at first in Russia, on the basis of Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) teaching in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, marriage was considered a part of capitalism (private prostitution, as he expressed it) and the family was thus minimized. Later, the state decreed a code of strict family laws. This was simply an “arbitrary absolute” imposed because it worked better. There is no base for right or wrong, and the arbitrary absolutes can be reversed for totally opposite ones at any time. For the Communists, laws always have a ground only in the changing historic situation brought about by the ongoing of history.
On the biblical basis, there are absolutes, and therefore we can say that certain things are right or wrong, including racial discrimination and social injustice. Consider Jesus standing in front of the tomb of Lazarus. The New Testament records that Jesus not only wept but was angry. The one who claimed to be God could be angry at the abnormality of death without being angry at Himself. To a Christian on the basis of what the Bible teaches, not only is death abnormal, so is the cruelty of man to man. These things did not exist as God made the world. A Christian can fight the abnormality which has resulted from man’s rebellion against God without fighting the final reality of what is—that is, without fighting God. Therefore, because God exists and there are absolutes, justice can be seen as absolutely good and not as merely expedient.
These matters are not just theoretical but eminently practical, as can be seen from the results produced in England and the United States in contrast to those produced in France at the time of the Enlightenment, and later in Russia.