An Age of Revolution: The Eighteenth Century
1
THE DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF ATHEISM
THE REMARKABLE RISE and subsequent decline of atheism is framed by two pivotal events, separated by precisely two hundred years: the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and that of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Two brutal physical structures, each of which served as a symbol of a worldview, were destroyed, to popular acclaim. These dramatic events crystallized massive changes in perceptions in Western culture. They frame a fascinating period in Western history, in which atheism ceased to be the slightly weird outlook of those on the fringes of polite society in the West and became instead its dominant cultural voice. The fall of the Bastille became a symbol of the viability and creativity of a godless world, just as the fall of the Berlin Wall later symbolized a growing recognition of the uninhabitability of such a place. They mark neither the beginning nor the end of atheism, simply providing the historian with convenient boundary posts for a discussion of its growth, flowering, and gradual decay.
The Bastille was a grim medieval fortress in the east of Paris, which served as a state prison for the kings of France. In the popular mind it was associated with the violence, oppression, and torture employed by the French monarchy in the final years of the ancien régime. Its thick walls and high towers projected the power, permanence, and security of the old system. The Bastille was a tangible assertion of the futility of any attempt to alter things. Like the laws of the Medes and Persians, the social structure of France was set in stone and could not be changed. The events of July 1789 destroyed that myth of unchangeability. More than an ancient fortress was overthrown on that day; the harsh despotism that it had come to represent was exposed as weak and vulnerable, equally capable of rout and destruction.
On July 14, 1789, an armed mob of about one thousand men and women marched against its heavy gates. The Marquis de Launy, governor of the fortress, was confident that he could defend it with his garrison of more than one hundred heavily armed men. After all, the walls were ten feet thick and one hundred feet high. He was proved wrong; within hours, the fortress had fallen and de Launy had been lynched by the angry mob. Pieces of masonry were taken home as souvenirs of an event that had demonstrated beyond doubt the power of the people to overthrow the old order. Two days later, the National Assembly ordered the Bastille to be razed to the ground.
What the French Revolution began, the Russian Revolution continued. Soviet political and military expansion after the Second World War led to the imposition of a new order upon much of Eastern Europe and became the inspiration of Communist parties throughout Western Europe. The divided city of Berlin was a key site of the ideological conflict between East and West. Just after midnight on August 13, 1961, the East German government deployed twenty-five thousand militiamen and Vopos (“people’s police”) to seal the border between East and West Berlin. Barbed-wire fences were hastily erected, to be replaced by a more permanent brick wall, heavily fortified with electrified wire and machine guns. Although presented as a measure designed to defend the East from fascist invasion, the real purpose of the wall was to prevent the destabilization of the East German regime by massive emigration to the West. Within a few years, the wall had permanently divided Berlin into two cities. Its minefields, electrified fences, and automatic machine gun emplacements had become physical symbols of a deeper intellectual malaise—the bunker mentality into which the Marxist states of Eastern Europe had fallen, and their total lack of credibility to their own people. A self-styled liberator was now seen as an oppressor.
By 1989, it was evident that Marxism was locked into a state of decline throughout Eastern Europe. Enthusiasm and credibility had long since been eroded; what remained were purely physical constraints, now themselves at the point of tottering to the ground. A graffito boldly inscribed on the western side of the Berlin Wall declared that “every wall must fall sometime.” On September 11, Hungary began to permit visiting East Germans to exit to the West through neighboring Austria. Pressure for reform in East Germany became irresistible. On November 9, the East Berlin authorities resigned themselves to the inevitable and threw open the crossing points to the West. Pieces of the wall were soon on sale for twenty deutsche marks, souvenirs of a hated past which could not be allowed to be forgotten.
Parts of that wall still remain intact. The machine guns and minefields are gone. Their crumbling structures are now overgrown with weeds, a potent symbol of the transience of the appeal of human ideas. Yet it is impossible to view the remains of the wall without being reminded of a not-so-distant past, and the glories of a revolution that seems to have spent its power.
This book sets out to tell the remarkable story of the rise and fall of modern atheism. Like a tidal wave crashing against the shoreline, atheism surged over the West, sweeping away its rivals, before itself gradually receding. Over a period of two centuries, atheism emerged from the shadows to conquer and captivate the imagination of an era. The reversal of the fortunes of this movement is a remarkable development in European history. While a rumor of godlessness hovered uneasily over the world of late antiquity, modern atheism possesses an intellectual pedigree and cultural sophistication that set it far apart from the modest and tentative experiments of the classical period. In its golden age, atheism emerged as an increasingly sophisticated, powerful, and influential “empire of the mind.” In its modern forms, it is unquestionably one of the greatest achievements of the human intellect, capable of capturing the imagination of generations. Like all such movements, it has its saints and charlatans, its visionaries and nutcases, some of whom will feature prominently in these pages. To tell the full story of this intellectual revolution lies beyond the scope of this work, which can only hint at the massive upheavals in Western society and patterns of thought, and sketch the outlines of some of those who shook the foundations of traditional Western culture.
It is impossible to tell the full story of this highly creative and turbulent phase in Western history in a few hundred pages. What can, however, reasonably be attempted is a series of “snapshots”—explorations of specific themes and moments that cast light on the broader patterns of ideas in its history. Like an archaeologist cutting a trench across a major historical site, this work offers a series of thematic cross sections of the high noon of atheism.
Although modern atheism rose to prominence in the eighteenth century, its origins can be traced back to the dawn of Western civilization itself. Our story therefore begins in the mists of early Greek history, when a blind poet is believed to have told the epic tale of the Trojan War and its aftermath—and in doing so, began to undermine belief in the great gods of Olympus.
THE CRITICS OF THE GODS: CLASSICAL GREEK ATHEISM
The discovery of the site of ancient Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in 1870 has passed into folklore as one of the greatest archaeological achievements of the nineteenth century. In his memoirs, Schliemann recalled how, as a young child, he was taken on his father’s knee and told the tales of the Greek heroes. Above all, he found himself fascinated by the story, swathed in the distant mists of history, of the forbidden love between Helen, wife of the king of Sparta, and Paris, son of Priam of Troy, and how Helen’s abduction resulted in a war that destroyed a civilization. Homer’s great story of the Trojan War, according to Schliemann, awoke him from his slumbers, and aroused a passion to search for archaeological confirmation of the existence of Troy and the other great civilizations of this distant age of heroes. He went into business to make his fortune so he could fund his passion to find out the truth about Troy, and confirm his original insights into its location. Armed with his knowledge of the ancient world, gained through painstaking reading of the classics, he found the original site of Troy in northwestern Turkey, and uncovered its fabulous treasures.
A close reading of Schliemann’s journals makes it clear that this is largely romantic nonsense. Schliemann’s discoveries were achieved largely by hijacking the work of the English archaeologist Frank Calvert. Yet however tainted its scholarship, Schliemann’s work points to the deep popular fascination with the ancient world that has been such an integral aspect of Western culture. Homer’s great epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, traditionally assigned to the ninth century B.C., tell the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath in such a compelling way that they have become part of the inherited tradition of the Western imagination. They are also of fundamental importance to our theme. For Homer’s gods are corrupt, vain, and self-serving—exactly the kind of human invention that a later age would find childish and embarrassing.
Homer’s unflattering account of the petty squabbles on Mount Olympus and their malignant impact on human history is best seen in the Iliad. This epic—whose name literally means “a poem about Ilion” (an ancient name for Troy)—celebrates the achievements of the Greek and Trojan heroes of this golden age, such as Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, and Paris. The poem gives a highly dramatic account of some episodes in the war, involving the complex interplay of human heroes and the gods of Olympus. Although both the Iliad and the Odyssey make an appeal to the intervention of the gods to explain the events of human history, this tendency is especially marked in the Iliad. These heroes are often depicted as glory-seeking individualists, merciless and brutal by modern standards, whose moral code is dominated by the need for public demonstration of their bravery and honor.
The activities of these heroes are set against the backdrop of the constant intervention of the Olympian deities. This perpetual interference in the affairs of humanity reflects intense rivalry and bickering on the heights of Olympus itself, as the gods seek to advance the fortunes of their favorites on earth. The situation is made much more interesting through Homer’s assumption that the gods are as lascivious as their mortal counterparts, and have turbocharged sexual appetites that lead them to prowl the face of the earth, copulating with desirable mortals who cross their paths. As a result, many mortal heroes have divine parents who assist and protect them. Homer regularly depicts the gods as manipulating situations to the advantage of their favorites.
The classic tale of Zeus and Europa neatly illustrates the voracious sexual appetite of the immortals and its impact on their dealings with humanity. Europa was the beautiful daughter of Agenor, king of Phoenicia. Noticing her beauty, Zeus responded as only one with Olympian levels of testosterone in his veins might: he transformed himself into a sleek and handsome bull and approached Europa and her companions as they played by the seashore. Europa was unwise enough to mount the bull, who then swam to the island of Crete. Here, Zeus revealed his true identity, and added yet another notch to his bedpost. In due course, Europa gave birth to three sons—Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon. Each of these now had a claim to Zeus’s special favors and protection, further complicating the dynamics of divine intervention in earthly affairs.
Homer is particularly scathing concerning the ethics of female deities. This can be seen in the famous incident known as the Judgment of Paris. Athene, Hera, and Aphrodite are here depicted as taking part in a beauty contest on Mount Ida, judged by the Trojan prince Paris. After what appears to be an embarrassingly thorough examination of their charms, Paris awards the victor’s crown to Aphrodite. From that moment onward, Aphrodite is fiercely loyal to the Trojans. Having been so publicly humiliated by a prince of Troy, it is not surprising that Athene and Hera should set out to take revenge against the Trojans by intervening on behalf of the Greeks throughout the war.
For Homer, the gods are immortal humans, demonstrating and engaging in the same emotions, vices, and power games as their human counterparts. It soon turns out that immortalization just means the infinite extension of existence, not the infinite projection of moral qualities. There are no limits to what the gods can do, nor to how long they can do it for. Homer often refers to divine activities humorously, suggesting that they are not to be taken too seriously. Yet there is a deeper, perhaps more sinister, aspect to the Iliad, which is perhaps best seen from the famous scene in Book 1, in which Achilles considers whether or not to murder his rival Agamemnon. Achilles’ decision not to kill Agamemnon is portrayed as the outcome of a rather whimsical personal intervention by the goddess Athene. No human ethical norm or value appears to be implicated in his decision. Obedience to the gods seems to be the foundation of human morality. And for Homer, those gods are egocentric, jealous, and petty tyrants. Who could seriously base ethics on the personal vanity of such creatures?
Homer’s gods are human beings writ large, complete with vices and virtues. Far more than being morally superior to humanity, they are the immortal counterparts to human weakness. The only limits placed upon them are their specific spheres of activity—for example, Poseidon as the god of the sea, Ares as god of war, Hermes as divine messenger, and Aphrodite as the goddess of sexual desire. Each divinity is sovereign within an arc, a portion of the total circle of all things, beyond which it is powerless. Yet within that arc, the gods can act with complete impunity, subject to no external constraint or ultimate accountability. To be accountable is human; and the gods had long since liberated themselves from that tiresome limitation.
Homer’s sly insinuations concerning the pillow talk of Olympus shaped growing Greek concerns over the morality of their gods. Increasingly, the Olympian gods came to be seen as something of an embarrassment, an awkward reminder of a bygone age ruled by force. When Protagoras set out the laws that would govern the city-state of Thurioi in 444 B.C., he insisted on the public accountability of its citizens on the basis of mutually agreed values. They would not be like the gods of Olympus. Who could admire such corrupt divinities, or seriously want to imitate the lifestyles they modeled? Although ancient Greece would continue to honor its classic divinities for centuries to come, their moral and intellectual credibility had been fatally eroded.
The term “atheist” now came into use. Far from meaning “one who denies the existence of supernatural beings,” the Greek term atheistos meant something like “one who denies the traditional religion of the Athenian establishment.” To deny the existence of the gods was seen as a punishable offense in Greek society, as the indictment and enforced suicide of Socrates (469–399 B.C.) makes clear. Classic Athens was far from being the center of free thinking that later writers like to make it. It was protective of its deities, believing that these enshrined its ideals. For Melitus, one of Socrates’ accusers, the “atheist” philosopher had corrupted the city’s youth by encouraging them not to believe in the city’s gods. Yet Socrates was no atheist in the modern sense of the term.
One of the ironies of history is that the first Christians were also widely accused of being “atheists” by their pagan critics—not because they denied the existence of a god but because they challenged the validity of the pagan religious system of the late classical world, especially the cult of the Roman emperor, who increasingly came to be worshiped as a god. As the Christian apologist Justin Martyr pointed out to his Greek critics in the second century, Christians such as himself “were even called ‘atheists’—which we are in relation to what you consider gods, but are most certainly not in relation to the Most True God.” The Christian refusal to observe the state religious conventions marked them out as troublemakers and potential revolutionaries—something that the Roman authorities were not prepared to tolerate.
The imperial cult was so strong in the major cities of the eastern Roman Empire that it was inevitable that some form of confrontation would take place between the secular authorities and Christian “atheists.” One of the most frequently cited pieces of evidence here is the letter of Pliny the Younger to Trajan, dating from about 112. In this letter, Pliny the Younger comments on the growing number of Christians who refused to worship the image of the Roman emperor. Although Pliny reports that he found nothing more sinister than “a depraved and extravagant superstition,” it is clear from his letter that Christianity was suspect on account of its refusal to worship the emperor, which suggested that it was bent on overthrowing the existing social order. While the major persecution of Christians instigated at Rome under Nero does not seem to have had any direct link with the imperial cult, this became increasingly significant in the following century. “Atheism” was understood to designate a refusal to worship the official divinities of the Roman Empire—and hence potential sedition.
Yet atheism failed to have the impact on the late classical world that some feared and others secretly longed for. Roman writers such as Lucretius (c. 94–c. 50 B.C.) argued that religion merely evoked terror—as, for example, in the case of Agamemnon, whose fear of the goddess Artemis led him needlessly to sacrifice his only daughter. Atheism, Lucretius declared, eliminates such terror, and allows us to focus on the natural forces and processes at work around us. These ideas had relatively little impact on their own era. They would, however, find a new and highly receptive audience centuries later. Perhaps the world was not yet ready for the announcement of the death of the gods. Yet that day would come—with a vengeance.
THE TRANSITION TO THE MODERN ERA
Our story now crosses the centuries of history from the classical era to Western Europe in the seventeenth century. By this stage, belief in God had become a deeply embedded aspect of Western European culture, with the institution of the church widely seen as a stabilizing influence on the region. The great Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century brought about massive religious change. Yet belief in God was unaffected by these demands for reform. Whatever disagreements existed between Catholics and Protestants, they were united in their fundamental belief in God. As we shall see, there are some reasons for suggesting that the rise of Protestantism may have laid the foundations for the later emergence of atheism. But this important development lay some centuries in the future.
Yet the seeds of a renewed interest in atheism had been sown. The power, influence, and wealth of the church became seen as an increasingly scandalous matter, which required urgent action. There were many who believed that the power of the church needed to be curbed, and possibly even broken. It had become an agent of oppression and exploitation. However important it may have been in holding Europe together and securing an often frail peace during the chaos of the Dark Ages, the church was now holding back social, intellectual, and political progress. The institution of the church gave legitimation to an older order that was increasingly seen as incapable of coping with the pressures and concerns of a new era in the history of humanity. How could humanity be liberated from the bondage of the past, which seemed to be both perpetuated and legitimated by the church?
There were two options for dealing with this situation. The first was that adopted in the early sixteenth century by Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther (1483–1546) in northeastern Germany, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) in Zurich, and John Calvin (1509–64) in Geneva. These writers argued that the church needed to rediscover its original vision—to set aside its claims to wealth, power, status, and influence, and return to the more modest and authentic models of the New Testament. The remarkable success of that movement is due to many factors, and one of them is the sense of liberation and empowerment that it brought to the emerging middle classes of Western Europe, who at last had found their champion. The story of that Reformation is fascinating in its own right, but it is not the story we shall be telling in this volume.
Our story concerns those who believed that the only way to liberate humanity from its bondage to the past was to launch an attack on the institution that was the ultimate cause of this oppression—the church. That attack was launched on many fronts, including demands for limits to be set to the power of the church, for regional devolution of its authority, and for a complete ending of military adventurism. Francis I, king of France, for example, curtailed the authority of the pope in France by the simple expedient of defeating the papal armies in battle in 1517. Henry VIII, taking advantage of England’s geographical remoteness from Italy, managed to substitute his own authority for that of the pope in the 1530s without the need for military action.
Not everyone had the capacity to defeat the church on the battlefield, or in the political arena. An increasingly important alternative strategy now emerged—attacking the ideas on which the church was based. For an increasingly numerous and articulate group within Western culture, the best way to reduce the excessive influence of the church was to undermine the credibility of its teachings. While some saw the attraction of atheism as lying in what it proposed, most saw its appeal in its ability to weaken, perhaps even destroy, the institution of the church. Paradoxically, the historical origins of modern atheism lie primarily in an extended criticism of the power and status of the church, rather than in any asserted attractions of a godless world.
Yet as exploration of this option proceeded, atheism began to develop a philosophical and cultural sophistication that marks it out as one of the enduring monuments of the modern period. Many of the atheist ideas first developed in the classical period found a new life in the golden age that now opened up. A challenge to the fundamental religious ideas of Christianity was now about more than the exercise of intellectual freedom; it represented a highly significant and credible threat to the status quo, opening the door to revolution and transformation—in short, to the dawn of the modern period.
So where do we begin? How can we tell this fascinating story to best effect? The most obvious place to begin our exploration is the eighteenth century, widely recognized as the most creative period of atheist experimentation and reflection, which laid the intellectual foundations for the transformation of Western culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
AN AGE OF REVOLUTION: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century is widely regarded by historians as one of the most dynamic and exciting periods in history. It was an age of optimism, with the whiff of revolution in the air. By the end of the century, the ancient doctrine that the present was doomed to repeat the errors of the past lay in tatters. It seemed that a brave new world lay ahead, unfettered by the bonds of tradition. A rising generation could hope to enjoy a degree of freedom denied to their parents and grandparents. But they could only do so by eliminating what stood in their path. There was little doubt on the part of potential revolutionaries as to what the greatest obstacle to human progress was.
The church was seen as the enemy of progress, lending a spurious divine authority to the traditions of the past and the corrupt monarchies that depended on them for what little credibility they possessed. Perceptions of the extent of this problem varied across Europe and beyond, with France witnessing perhaps the most concerted and certainly the most influential critique of both the power of the church and the ideas on which it was ultimately based. In North America, atheism was not taken seriously as a means of social transformation. The solution there lay in radical reform of the relation of church and state—a reordering in which many see the foundations of America’s rise to become the most influential Christian nation on earth. Our story, however, begins in Britain, destined to be one of the great laboratories for testing the ideas of the new worldview.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, most British intellectuals had lost their patience with institutional religion. The English Civil War (1642–49), which had seen the temporary overthrow of the monarchy and the execution of Charles I, was widely viewed as the outcome of a very un-English religious extremism. Memories of the Puritan Commonwealth (1649–60)—the nearest thing to a theocracy England had ever seen—were bitter. There was particular resentment that it had forbidden plum pudding, one of England’s relatively few culinary triumphs. One of the many merits of Charles II, who was restored in 1660, was that he was totally out of sympathy with the radical Protestantism of the Puritans, thus guaranteeing that there would be no further government-imposed religious prohibitions. Christmas was once more celebrated as a public festival (with plum pudding).
Other cultures might have been tempted to adopt atheism or a corporate agnosticism in response to the religious intolerance and bigotry of the Puritan Commonwealth. The English, however, decided to reinstate the Church of England instead, presumably believing that, to all intents and purposes, this amounted to more or less the same thing. Under Charles II, who reigned from 1660 to 1685, a decidedly docile form of Anglicanism emerged as the religion of the English establishment. The Church of England would be expected to be submissive to the expectations of the people, and keep its religious beliefs to itself, rather than impose them on others.
Charles II, however, proved far less religiously compliant than the English expected. On his deathbed in 1685, Charles confessed himself to be a Roman Catholic. This fueled a fresh religious controversy, which threatened a new civil war in England. The real difficulty was that Charles’s son James, Duke of York, had become a Roman Catholic in 1670. Having just managed to extricate themselves from the excesses of Protestantism, the English Parliament was in no mood to have to deal with its diametric opposite. In 1679, in a desperate attempt to avoid engulfing England in a new religious conflict, the House of Commons declared that the Duke of York was excluded from the succession to the throne. The House of Lords, however, promptly overthrew this act. Charles II was succeeded by his son, who, as James II, promptly and openly confessed his Roman Catholic faith. James’s decision to appoint his own choice of Roman Catholic favorites to prominent positions in the state, army, and universities prompted widespread concern and gave rise to furious rumors of a plot to convert England to Roman Catholicism. A new religious civil war seemed inevitable.
A characteristically English solution, however, lay to hand. James II’s daughter Mary had married William III, Prince of Orange, a firmly committed Protestant with a reputation for tolerance and generosity. A secret approach was made to William by seven leading Englishmen: if he were to invade England, he could count on their total support. Initially delayed by storms, William’s invasion fleet sailed for England in November 1688. After landing at Torbay in England’s West Country, William’s army marched on London, finally arriving in the capital late in December. By then, his steady progress had triggered widespread defections to his cause, along with riots and revolts against James’s authority. It was simply a matter of time before James’s cause was utterly lost. In January 1689 he left England for France. William and Mary were declared king and queen of England in February—but only after agreeing to sign a Bill of Rights that guaranteed free elections and freedom of speech. This was followed by the Act of Toleration later that year, which permitted those seeking religious alternatives to the Church of England (often referred to as Dissenters) to hold their views and religious worship within the law.
Never again did the English want to face such religious conflict. Was not the best way to prevent such crises to eliminate any notion that some specific form of religion was to be given preference, and instead to offer toleration to all and privilege to none? That, at least, was the argument set out in philosopher John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). In this work, Locke set out a compelling case for the freedom of conscience and religious expression, arguing that there are clear limits to social and political incursion into the realm of personal belief or nonbelief. While encouraging rational persuasion in matters of religion, Locke was implacably opposed to the use of force in such matters. Locke does not respond to concern over the social role of religion by espousing atheism, but by setting limits to the extent to which religion can be involved in public life—an important anticipation of the American constitutional separation of church and state.
Although the period witnessed some significant criticisms of the fundamental ideas of Christianity, the eighteenth century did not see a major erosion of faith. Indeed, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), often cited as a major influence on the rise of atheism, once commented that he had never actually met an atheist. This intriguing comment was not intended as a reflection on Hume’s limited social life or the peculiarities of his circle of acquaintances, but on the absence of individuals in England who were prepared to define themselves in this way at this time. Hume would certainly meet such individuals in the sophisticated salons of Enlightenment Paris, following his appointment as secretary to the British Embassy in 1764, which led to regular visits to Baron d’Holbach’s famous gatherings in the Rue Royale; in Britain, however, atheism was still seen as slightly eccentric and dangerously seditious at this time. The dramatic transition by which atheism came to be seen as the greatest achievement and proudest boast of the Enlightenment was still some decades away. But it would come, with a vengeance.
In part, the failure of atheism to gain wide support in Britain at this time reflected the quality of some Christian responses to Deist critiques of faith, most notably Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736). Butler showed that Deism itself rested on somewhat shaky philosophical foundations, and also set out an argument for the reliability of Christianity based on an appeal to probability, not certainty.
Atheism did not become a significant force in British life in the eighteenth century. The foundations for its dawning might well have been laid, and its seeds sown; they had yet, however, to grow and flourish. The freedom of expression resulting from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 allowed frustration with the existing social order to be expressed (and hence contained) politically. Most Britons preferred to make fun of the established church rather than systematically undermine its leading ideas. One of the most successful works of clerical satire was Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, published over the period 1759–67. The work opens with probably the most famous coitus interruptus in English literature (relating how Tristram’s mother interrupts his father in the act of conception by asking whether he has remembered to wind the clock) and moves on to chronicle—though in a remarkably gracious manner—the failings and vices of the English clergy through the person of good-hearted rustic Parson Yorick.
The tradition continued during the Victorian period. While the clergy continue to be the butt of much good-natured humor (as in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester chronicles), many authors found the slightly daffy religious views of lay people much more amusing. Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece The Moonstone (1868) introduces us to Miss Drusilla Clack, a particularly fastidious devotee of a Protestant sect with a doubtless commendable concern to convert those around her. With this end in mind, Miss Clack carries about with her a small handbag laden with suitable religious tracts to foist on her relatives, such as her aunt, Lady Verinder. Collins takes great delight in telling his readers of an especially sophisticated tract entitled The Serpent at Home, designed “to show how the Evil One lies in wait for us in all the most apparently innocent actions of our daily lives.” Its chapters include detailed treatments of such topics as “Satan in the Hair Brush,” “Satan behind the Looking Glass,” and “Satan under the Tea Table.” But best of all—“one continuous burst of burning eloquence!”—is the chapter dealing with “Satan among the Sofa Cushions.”
The most significant factor in muting the impact of critiques of Christianity was the growth of Pietism in eighteenth-century Britain. Pietism was a Protestant religious movement originating in seventeenth-century Germany. Many German Protestants were appalled by the failure of the Lutheran church to connect up with the life experiences of ordinary Christians. Lutheran theology appeared to mimic the worst features of medieval scholasticism, indulging in theological debates about things that nobody cared about, one way or the other. Writers such as Philip Jacob Spener (1635–1705) stressed the importance of a personally selected faith—a faith that was vitally connected with the experience of the individual.
The movement was exported to Britain in the 1730s, particularly through the ministries of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of the movement generally known as Methodism. Again we find an emphasis placed on faith as an experience of the living God, who is known as a personal reality in the life of the believer. Pietism is essentially a privatized form of the Christian faith, which plays down its institutional aspects. For the Wesleys, it is the individual’s free decision to repent and admit Christ into the soul that secures the hope of salvation. The human heart is the ultimate “gateway to heaven,” in that the individual has the final decision as to whether she enters into the heavenly realms. The institution of the church plays no critical role in this process, however valuable it may subsequently be as a means of pastoral support and spiritual nourishment. The Church of England was unimpressed with these ideas, and did all it could to marginalize the Wesleys and their dangerous views.
Yet a movement that the established church regarded as a threat to its influence defused a potentially greater threat to its existence. Pietism made it possible to be critical of the established church as an institution, while still experiencing and valuing the faith it embodied. The rise of “experiential religion” in Britain during the eighteenth century did much to blunt the force of the criticism of religion that developed during this period. Pietism reestablished the connection between religion and the individual subjective consciousness, ensuring that it was experienced as a living reality. People were less likely to criticize a faith that meant something to them.
In other parts of Europe, the situation was rather different—as in the critically important case of France. Pietism was a development within Protestant Christianity that sought to reconnect head and heart through a “living faith.” France, however, was a Roman Catholic country, in which Pietism gained virtually no influence. Nor was there any Catholic equivalent of the movement, despite the attempts of Jansenists to promote their approach to personal religion. The success of the Jesuits in suppressing Jansenism in the late seventeenth century can be seen as laying the foundations for their own overthrow a century later, at the hands of the French Revolutionaries. The radical new ideas of the eighteenth century could flourish without any really significant opposition. The results, as we shall see, were dramatic—so dramatic, in fact, that they must be seen as marking the transition to the golden age of atheism.