Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

35

Enemies of the Cross and the Qur

ʾ

an – the End of the Soul

In 1842, George Eliot, the English novelist, stopped going to church. Her doubts over Christianity had begun early but she had been deeply influenced by David Friedrich Strauss’s book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, which as we have seen was published in Germany in the middle 1830s and which she had rendered into English. In her rather tortured translation, Strauss had concluded ‘There is little of which we can say for certain that it took place, and of all to which the faith of the Church especially attaches itself, the miraculous and supernatural matter in the facts and destinies of Jesus, it is far more certain that it did not take place.’¹ In much the same way, when Tennyson read Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1836 he was troubled, as so many were, by Lyell’s interpretation of the fossil evidence, that ‘the inhabitants of the globe, like all other parts of it, are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes, but whole species’.²

The sad, slow, but inexorable loss of faith in the nineteenth century by so many people, prominent or otherwise, has been explored by the writer A. N. Wilson. His survey of Eliot, Tennyson, Hardy, Carlyle, Swinburne, James Anthony Froude, Arthur Clough, Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Samuel Butler, John Ruskin and Edmund Gosse confirms what others have said, that the loss of faith, the ‘death of God’, was not only an intellectual change but an emotional conversion as well. Specific books and arguments made a difference but there was also a change in the general climate of opinion, the cumulative unsettling effect of one thing, then another, often quite different.³ When Francis Galton, Darwin’s step-cousin, circulated a questionnaire to 189 Fellows of the Royal Society in 1874, inquiring after their religious affiliation, he was surprised by the answers he received. Seventy per cent described themselves as members of the established churches and while some said that they had no religious affiliation, many others were Nonconformist of one stripe or another – Wesleyan, Catholic, or some other form of organised Church. Asked in the same questionnaire if their religious upbringing had in any way had a deterrent effect on their careers in science, nearly 90 per cent replied ‘None at all.’⁴ Among those who, as late as 1874, still believed in a deity may be included Michael Faraday, John Herschel, James Joule, James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). Wilson shows that there were almost as many reasons as there were people for the loss of faith, where it occurred. Some were much more convinced than others that God was dead, while ‘some managed to be both anti-God and anti-science at the same time’.⁵

Unlike the intellectual battles fought over unbelief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the nineteenth there were many more issues that the faithful had to deal with, over and above the doubts raised about the literal truth of the Bible, say, or the implausibility of the miracles. Wilson locates the change of atmosphere as beginning in the late eighteenth century. The atheism of the French philosophes of the Enlightenment was one factor but in Britain, he says, there were two books which did more than any other to undermine faith. These were Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in three instalments between 1776 and 1788, and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, three years after his death. Gibbon offered no important metaphysical or theological arguments, says Wilson.⁶ Instead, ‘Gibbon was (is) destructive of faith . . . in his blithe revelation, on page after page, of the sheer contemptibility, not only of the Christian heroes, but of their “highest” ideals. It is not merely in the repeated and hilarious identification of individual Christian wickedness that Gibbon reaches his target. Rather it is in his whole attitude, which resolutely refuses to be impressed by the Christian contribution to “civilisation”.’⁷ It was Gibbon’s constant contrast between ‘the evident wisdom’ of pre-Christian cultures and the superstitious and irrational anachronisms and barbarisms of the early Christians that had such an effect on readers.⁸

Hume’s critique of ‘mind’ and order in the universe was discussed in an earlier chapter (see here), as was Kant’s argument that such concepts as God, Soul and Immortality can never be proved.⁹ If these matters might be characterised as ‘deep background’ to the general loss of faith, there were other factors specific to the nineteenth century. The historian Owen Chadwick divided these into ‘the social’ and ‘the intellectual’. Among them he includes liberalism, Marx, anticlericalism and the ‘working class mentality’.

Liberalism, says Chadwick, dominated the nineteenth century.¹⁰ But it was a protean word, he admits, one that in origin simply meant free, free from restraint. In the later Reformation it came to mean too free, licentious or anarchic. This is how men such as John Henry Newman understood it, in the mid-1800s. But liberalism, like it or not, owed much to Christianity. In dividing Europe by religion, the Reformation invited – eventually – a toleration, but Christianity at one level had always sought for a religion of the heart, rather than the mere celebration of rites, a reverence for individual conscience which, in the end, and fatally, says Chadwick, weakened the desire for sheer conformity. ‘Christian conscience was [thus] the force which began to make Europe “secular”; that is, to allow many religions or no religion in a state.’¹¹

What had begun in the liberty of toleration turned into the love of liberty for its own sake, liberty as a right (this, it will be remembered, was John Locke’s contribution, and was one of the ostensible reasons for the French Revolution). And this was not really achieved, in the leading countries of western Europe, until the years between 1860 and 1890.¹² It owed a lot, Chadwick says, to John Stuart Mill, who published his essay On Liberty in the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 1859. Mill’s investigation of liberty, however, involved what he saw as a new problem. Much influenced by Comte, he was less bothered by the liberties that might be threatened by a tyrannical state, for that was an old and familiar problem. Instead, he was more concerned, in new democracies, with the tyranny of the majority over the individual or the minority, with intellectual coercion. He could see all around him that ‘the people’ were coming to power, and he anticipated that those ‘people’, too often the mob of past ages, would deny others the right to a difference of opinion.¹³ He thus set about defining the new liberty. ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.’¹⁴ This was more important than it looked because it implied that a free man ‘has the right to be persuaded and convinced’, which is just as important an implication of democracy as ‘one man, one vote’. And it was this which linked liberalism and secularisation. Mill’s essay was the first argument for the full implications of the secular state. The total lack of passion in the text was the way Mill set an example as to how affairs are to be conducted.¹⁵

Judging by the way ordinary people spoke and behaved, Chadwick observes that it was during the years 1860–1880 that English society, at least, became ‘secular’.¹⁶ One can see this, he says, from the memoirs and novels of the time, which report the reading habits and conversations of the average individual, and show the increased willingness of devout men, say, to form friendships with men who were not devout, ‘to honour them for their sincerity instead of condemning them for their lack of faith’.¹⁷ It can be seen too in the role played by the new mass-circulation press.¹⁸ The press in fact played a number of roles, one of which was to enflame, to impassion, to polarise the battle of ideas and in so doing turn many citizens – for the first time – into political beings (because they were now informed). This too was a secularising influence, replacing religion with politics as the main intellectual preoccupation of ordinary people. The new profession of journalist became established at much the same time as teachers became distinct from the clergy.¹⁹

As literacy expanded, and journalism responded, ideas about liberty went through another twist. Individual liberty, in an economic sense, or applied to conscience or opinion, was discovered to be not the same as true political or psychological liberty. Through the newspapers, people became more than ever aware that industrial development, left to itself, only increased the divide between rich and poor. ‘A doctrine which ended in the slums of great cities could hardly contain all truth.’²⁰ This brought about a profound change in liberal minds – indeed, it began to change the very meaning of liberalism itself, and Chadwick says it marked the beginning of what we may call collectivist thinking, when people began to argue more and more for government interference as the way to improve the general welfare.²¹ ‘Liberty was henceforth seen more in terms of the society than of the individual; less as freedom from restriction than as a quality of responsible social living in which all men had a chance to share.’²²

This new way of thinking made Marxism more attractive, including his fundamental tenet, that religion was untrue, which became another factor in secularisation.²³ Marx’s explanation for the continued popularity of religion was of course that it was a symptom of sickness in social life. ‘It enables the patient to bear what otherwise would be unbearable . . .’²⁴ Religion was necessary to capitalist society, he said, to keep the masses in their place: by offering them something in the next life, they would more easily accept their lot in this one.²⁵ Christianity – most religions – accept the existing divisions in society, ‘comfort’ the dispossessed that their misfortune is the just punishment for their sin, or else a trial, the response to which is ennobling or uplifting. Marxism became important not only because of events in the nineteenth century – the Paris Commune, the impact of the Commune upon the International, the German socialists, the growth of a revolutionary party in Russia – which appeared to confirm that what it said was true, but because it too offered a version of the afterlife: revolution, following which justice and bliss would be restored to the world. In offering a secular afterlife, Chadwick argues, Marxism produced an unintended spin-off: socialism and atheism became linked, and religion was politicised.

But Marx was not alone, not by any means. In his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, Engels reported ‘almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc. . . .’²⁶ Outright atheists were never very common but, in the middle 1850s, across Britain, the first ‘Secular Societies’ were founded. Paradoxically, there was a puritan streak in these groups, many of which were linked with the temperance movement. This appears to have peaked around 1883–1885, one reason being that atheists were given the right to sit in Parliament.²⁷

Another general factor in creating a more secular world was urbanisation itself. Statistics from Germany and France show a fall in church attendance down the decades, with the greater falls occurring in the larger towns, and a parallel fall in ordinations.²⁸ This may have been nothing more than an organisational failure on the part of organised religion but it was important – for it revealed an inability of the churches to adapt themselves quickly enough to the towns. ‘The population of Paris rose by nearly 100 per cent between 1861 and 1905, the number of parishes by about 33 per cent, the number of priests by about 30 per cent.’²⁹

The view that we now have about the Enlightenment, that it was ‘a good thing’, a step forward, a necessary stage in the evolution of the modern world, was not the nineteenth-century view.³⁰ For the Victorians it was the age which ended in the guillotine and the Terror. Thomas Carlyle was just one who thought that Voltaire and his deism were ‘contemptible’. For him, Napoleon was the last great man and Carlyle was proud that his own father had ‘never been visited by doubt’.³¹ Throughout the Napoleonic period and well on into Queen Victoria’s reign, ‘Men thought the Enlightenment a corpse, a cul-de-sac of ideas, a destructive age overthrowing the intellectual as well as the physical landmarks by which human society may live as a civilised body.’³²

Opinions didn’t begin to change until the 1870s. In fact, the very first time that the English word Enlightenment was used to mean Aufklärung dates from 1865, in a book on Hegel by J. H. Stirling. But even here the word is pejorative – and it did not gain a fully favourable meaning until 1889, in Edward Caird’s study of Kant, where there is the first use of the phrase, the ‘Age of Enlightenment’.³³ But the man who really rescued the Enlightenment and its secular values from the negative territory to which they had been consigned, was John Morley, a journalist for the Fortnightly Review. It was Morley (who was also an MP) who felt that the British reaction to the excesses of 1789 had been generalised to the philosophes, and that the romantics’ passion for the inner life had combined in what he called a form of philistinism to obscure the real achievements of the eighteenth century. He was stimulated to act, in a series of articles, because he saw about him the church trying to stifle positive science.³⁴

There was a parallel change in France. That country had had its equivalent of Carlyle in Joseph de Maistre, who wrote: ‘To admire Voltaire is the sign of a corrupt heart, and if anybody is drawn to his works, then be very sure that God does not love such an one.’³⁵ Napoleon, whose attitude to the church was erratic, nonetheless is said to have ordered his ranks of tame writers to attack Voltaire.

Then came Jules Michelet, the historian. In the early 1840s, together with a group of friends – Victor Hugo and Lamartine among them – Michelet attacked the Church head-on. Catholicism was unforgivably narrow, he said, celibacy was an ‘unnatural’ vice, confession was an abuse of privacy, the Jesuits were devious manipulators. These broadsides were delivered in a series of intemperate lectures at the Collège de France and, unlike elsewhere, the focus of his offensive was not science but ethics. Ironical, of course, since Voltaire had been fanatically opposed to the fanaticism he himself sparked. Michelet bombarded the churches ‘in the name of justice and freedom’, and it was as a result of these sorties that Voltaire became the focus of a vicious war of ideas in France.³⁶ For example, on Louis Napoleon’s accession in 1851 libraries everywhere were compelled to remove the volumes of Voltaire and Rousseau from their shelves. To give another example, an otherwise respected scholar, editing Voltaire’s papers, warned his readers that Voltaire had ‘caused’ 1789 and the Terror of 1793.³⁷ Matters came to a head in 1885, when rumours began to circulate in Paris that the remains of both Voltaire and Rousseau were not in the Panthéon, where they should have been, as the resting place of the illustrious.³⁸ It was alleged that, in 1814, a group of royalists, unable to stomach these remains in a sacred spot, had removed the bones in the dead of night and disposed of them on waste land. The rumours were not based on anything other than circumstantial evidence but they were so widely believed, and so outraged Voltaire’s supporters, that in 1897 a government committee was appointed to investigate. The investigation went so far as to have the tombs reopened and the remains examined. They were declared to be those of Voltaire and Rousseau.³⁹ People realised at last that this dispute had gone far enough and the bones were reinterred where they belonged. Following this all-round embarrassing episode, attitudes about the Enlightenment began to change, more or less to the view that we have now.

George Eliot, as we have seen, was influenced in her beliefs by David Strauss’s book on The Life of Jesus, but she was not entirely typical. A more common reaction was that of the Swiss, whose threatened riots caused Strauss to be released from his professorship before he had even started. Most of the books of the nineteenth century that we now regard as important in bringing about a decline in religious belief did not usually act directly on the vast mass of people. The general public did not read Lyell, Strauss or Darwin. What they did read, however, were a number of popularisers – Karl Vogt on Darwin, Jakob Moleschott on Strauss, Ludwig Büchner on the new physics and the new cell biology. These men were read because they were willing to go a good deal further than Darwin, say, or Lyell. The Origin of Species or the Principles of Geology did not, in and of themselves, attack religion. The implication was there, but it was the popularisers who interpreted these books and spelled out these implications for a wider readership. ‘Religion is a commoner interest of most of the human race than is physics or biology. The great public,’ says Owen Chadwick, ‘was far more interested in science-versus-religion than in science.’ It was these popularisers who alerted the Victorian middle classes to the idea that alternative explanations for the way the world was were now available. They did not immediately say that all religion was wrong but they did cast serious doubt on the accuracy, veracity and plausibility of the Bible.⁴⁰

The greatest of the popularisers was Ernst Haeckel, a German who in 1862 published The Natural History of Creation. This, a very readable polemic in favour of Darwin, just three years after the Origin and spelling out its implications, went through nine editions by the end of the century and was translated into twelve languages. Die Welträtsel, translated into English in 1900 as The Riddle of the Universe, and which explained the new cosmology, sold 100,000 copies in German and as many in English.⁴¹ Haeckel was far more widely read than Darwin, and became for a time equally famous – people flocked to hear him talk.⁴²

The other populariser, who did for Strauss what Haeckel did for Darwin, and became just as famous in the process, was Ernest Renan. Originally destined for the priesthood, he lost his faith and put his new conviction into several books, of which the Life of Jesus (1863) was by far the most influential.⁴³ Though he said different things at different times, it seems that it was the study of history that destroyed Renan’s faith, and his book on Jesus had the same effect on others.⁴⁴ The book had the influence it did, partly because of its exquisite French, but also because it treated Jesus as a historical figure, denied his supernatural acts, presented in a clear manner the scholarship which threw doubts over his divinity, and yet showed him in a sympathetic light, as the ‘pinnacle of humanity’, whose genius and moral teaching changed the world. It seems that Renan’s evident sympathy towards Jesus made the shortcomings he highlighted more palatable. At the same time, he dismantled the need for churches, creeds, sacraments and dogmas. Like Comte, Renan thought positivism could be the basis for a new faith.⁴⁵ He underlined that Jesus was a moral leader, a great man, but not in any way divine – organised religion, as it existed in the nineteenth century, had nothing to do with him. This was a form of religion, an ethical humanism, that many people educated in the new universities could accept. His approach was at times – well, unusual. ‘Divinity has its intermittent lapses; one cannot be Son of God through a lifetime without a break.’ This was a little like a return to the Greek idea of gods as part heroic, part human. Renan’s book appealed for the same reason that deism appealed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – it helped people lose their belief in supernatural entities without losing their belief entirely. Most people could not go from belief to unbelief in one step. Renan’s Life was the most famous title published in French in the nineteenth century and it created a sensation in England too.

What impressed many people, over and above the sympathetic picture which Renan provided, was what he revealed about the shaky foundations of Christianity, so far as its basic documentation was concerned. For example, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt read Strauss’s life of Jesus and realised that the history of the New Testament ‘could not bear the weight which faith sought to place on it’, and many people underwent a similar reaction.⁴⁶

One other new element which made the secularisation debate in the nineteenth century different from that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved the revised notion of ‘dogma’. Originally, dogma meant an affirmation of beliefs, or doctrines – in other words, it had a positive flavour. But that gradually changed so that, by the age of the Enlightenment, to be dogmatic was to be ‘unenlightened and closed to alternative interpretations of the truth’.⁴⁷ This was an important transformation because although the Catholic hierarchy was by no means inexperienced at combating heretical dogmas, the very notion of dogma was itself now under attack. The successful methods of the positive sciences offered an alternative and were increasingly used as tools for attacking the church. One organisation that sounds fanciful now but which was typical of the time was the Society for Mutual Autopsy. This was a group (of anthropologists mainly) who were so concerned to prove that there was no soul that they all bequeathed their bodies to the society, so that they could be dissected and examined, to kill off ideas of where the soul might be located. They held dinners where the food was served on prehistoric pottery or in the cavities of human and, in one case, giraffe skulls, to emphasise that there was nothing special about human remains, that they were no different from animal remains. As Jennifer Michael Hecht points out, in her book on the end of the soul, one anthropologist wrote ‘We have attested many systems in order to maintain morality and the fundamentals of law. To tell the truth, these attempts were nothing but illusions . . . The conscience is nothing but a particular aspect of instinct, and instinct is nothing but an hereditary habit . . . Without the existence of a distinct soul, without immortality, and without the threat of an afterlife, there are no longer any sanctions.’⁴⁸

In these circumstances, the reactions of the Catholic establishment were, more often than not, grudging. This, in itself, became an issue, a factor in the growth of anticlericalism, which was another aspect of secularisation, at least for a vociferous minority. In Britain, says Chadwick, it surfaced for the first time in a Saturday Review leader in May 1864, criticising the wilful inability of the Curia in Rome to concede the advances of modern science, in particular Galileo’s discoveries and insights, by then hundreds of years old. In this way, clericalism came to be synonymous with obscurantism and administrative stonewalling and was broadened beyond the Roman Catholic Church to all churches and their opposition to modern thinking, including political thinking.⁴⁹ Among educated Catholics everywhere there was some regret at the Vatican’s anti-modern stance but in Italy there was an additional problem.

In 1848, the year of revolution across Europe, the Italians mounted their war of liberation against Austria. This put Pope Pius IX in an unwinnable position. With whom would the Vatican side? Both Italy and Austria were sons of the church. At the end of April that year Pius announced that ‘as supreme pastor’ he could not declare war on any fellow Catholics. For many Italian nationalists this was too much and they turned against the Vatican. It was the first time anticlericalism had appeared in Italy.

In France anticlericalism played havoc with the established church. Over and above the attacks on church authority – Strauss, Darwin, Renan, Haeckel – in France, Catholic clericals were systematically expelled from institutes of higher education, meaning that as time passed the church had a weaker and weaker grip on the minds of the young.⁵⁰ The French Church was paying the price for the fact that, in the eighteenth century, the country’s bishops had been drawn overwhelmingly from the aristocracy. Decimated by the Revolution, the French church changed its complexion so much that the pope was forced to anathematise the entire Gallican hierarchy, refusing to consecrate any new bishops. The French church was thus cut off from Rome for a time though this did little to reduce anticlerical feeling, since for many ordinary people Rome was now even further away than ever.⁵¹

A further complicating twist was the attempts in France to reconcile the church with the aims of the Revolution. These were led by Félicité de Lamennais, a priest but a man with a strong commitment to secular educational institutions. He founded a daily periodical, L’Avenir, which advocated religious liberty, educational liberty, liberty of the press, liberty of association, universal suffrage, and decentralisation. This was very modern, too modern. L’Avenir’s policies proved so controversial that, after several times when publication was suspended, the pope went so far as to issue an encyclical, Mirari vos, condemning this particular periodical.⁵² Lamennais responded two years later by releasing Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer) in which he denounced capitalism on religious grounds and called for the working classes to rise up and demand ‘their God-given rights’. This provoked another encyclical, Singulari nos, which criticised Paroles d’un croyant as ‘small in size but immense in perversity’, and said it was spreading false ideas that were ‘inducing to anarchy [and] contrary to the Word of God’. Gregory ended by demanding that Catholics everywhere submit to ‘due authority’. But this too backfired, in a sense, because it appeared not long before the revolution of 1848, which revived republicanism among French Catholics, and for the first time significant numbers of the Church hierarchy appeared to be sympathetic to revolution.⁵³

Pius was originally a liberal (he was elected at fifty-five, a comparatively young age for a pope). But he was as changed by the events of 1848 as the rest of his fellow Italians. ‘Now cured of all liberalism’, Pius gave a triumvirate of cardinals a free hand to restore absolute government in Rome.⁵⁴ However, since this attempt was accompanied by a general loss of traditional authority across the broader political landscape (e.g., Italy’s war of independence against Austria, the unification of Germany) this only provoked new waves of anticlericalism. In 1857, in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert portrayed a people who were anticlerical most of the time, even though their children were baptised and they continued to receive the last rites from a priest.⁵⁵ In France, indifference to religion was growing among ordinary people, just as Engels had noted a decade earlier in England.

Anticlericalism in France came to a head in the last decades of the century over the secularisation of the schools. For the Vatican, to lose the schools meant the final blow to its influence.⁵⁶ This is why a number of Catholic universities were established across Europe in the mid-1870s – it was an attempt by the church to recover some of its losses. But this only created a new battleground: priests and schoolteachers were now pitched against one another.

The teachers won. They were led by the Third Republic’s new minister of education, Jules Ferry. Ferry was convinced, as Auguste Comte was convinced before him, that the theological and metaphysical eras were a thing of the past and that the positive sciences would be the basis of the new order. ‘My goal’, Ferry declared, ‘is to organise society without God and without a king,’ and to this end he expelled more than 100,000 religious teachers from their posts.⁵⁷

The Vatican responded to this latest move by setting up Catholic Institutes in Paris, Lyons, Lille, Angers and Toulouse. Each boasted a theological faculty independent of state universities, whose task was to develop their own scholarship to combat what was happening in science and biblical historiography. Lester Kurtz sets out the Vatican thinking.⁵⁸ ‘First, it defined Catholic orthodoxy within the bounds of scholastic theology, thereby providing a systematic, logical response to the probing questions of modern scholarship. Second, it elaborated the doctrines of papal authority and of the magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church), claiming that the Church and its leadership alone had inherited authority in religious matters from the apostles of Jesus. Finally, it defined Catholic orthodoxy in terms of what it was not, by constructing an image of an heretical conspiracy among deviant insiders.’⁵⁹ The Church now gradually identified a new era of ‘heresy’, set out mainly in the conservative Catholic press (in particular the Jesuit publications, Civiltà cattolica in Rome and La Vérité in Paris). There was also a series of papal edicts (Syllabus of Erros, 1864; Aeterni Patris, 1879; Providentissimus Deus, 1893), followed by the condemnation of Americanism, Testem benevolentiae (1899), and, finally, a full-bloodied assault on modernism, Lamentabili (1907).

A fatal mistake in the Vatican’s approach, which ran through all these edicts and condemnations, was the church’s characterisation of its critics as a conspiratorial group, intent on undermining the hierarchy while pretending to be its friend.⁶⁰ This underestimated and at the same time patronised the opposition. The real enemy of the Vatican was the very nature of authority in the new intellectual climate. The papacy insisted throughout on its traditional authority, its historical, apostolic succession.⁶¹ These ideas were carried to their extreme in the doctrine of papal infallibility, which was declared for the first time by the First Vatican Council in 1870. Nineteenth-century Catholicism was similar in many ways to twelfth-century Catholicism, not least in the fact that it was dominated by two long pontificates, those of Pius IX (1846–1878) and his successor, Leo XIII (1878–1903). Amazingly, at a time when democracies and republics were being formed on all sides across the world, these two popes sought to resurrect monarchical theories of governance, both within and outside the church. In his encyclical Quanto conficiamur, Pius IX looked back as far as Unam sanctam, the papal bull issued by Boniface VIII in 1302 (see above, Chapter 16). In other words, he was seeking to resurrect the medieval notion of absolute papal supremacy. In Testem benevolentiae, his attack on Americanism, Leo XIII ruled out any hope of democracy for the Church, arguing that only absolute authority could safeguard against heresy.⁶²

In these circumstances, and with the papal states compromised by the Italian desire for independence and unification, anticlericalism deepened in Italy. This was one of the important background factors to Pope Pius IX’s apostolic letter which called for the First General Council of the Vatican.⁶³ Political turmoil meant that the council very nearly didn’t get off the ground. When it did, it faced the problem of re-establishing the hierarchy of the church and in attempting to do this it produced two famous statements. The first was this: ‘The Church of Christ is not a community of equals in which all the faithful have the same rights.’ Instead, some are given ‘the power from God . . . to sanctify, teach and govern’. And second, the most famous statement of all: ‘We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal Church, by the divine assistance promised him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals.’⁶⁴

And so the doctrine of papal infallibility became an article of faith for Catholics for the first time.⁶⁵ This was highly risky and had been resisted since at least the fourteenth century. The Vatican may have felt that, with the great travel and communications revolutions of the nineteenth century, it would be able to exert its authority more effectively than in the Middle Ages and this may explain why, in addition to papal infallibility, Leo XIII issued Aeterni Patris in 1879 in which he singled out St Thomas Aquinas to be the dominant guide in modern Catholic thought. This, like Pius’ edict Quanto conficiamur, involved a return to pre-Enlightenment, pre-Reformation, pre-Renaissance thinking of the Middle Ages. Scholastic theology was notable for being pre-scientific, for being a speculative exercise, inside people’s heads, an attempt to marry Christianity and other forms of thought, and noted for its cleverness rather than a truthfulness that could be widely agreed upon.⁶⁶ In effect, Catholic thought was again becoming a closed and self-referential circular system, mainly in the hands of Jesuit theologians. The most influential of these were grouped around Civiltà cattolica, a journal created in 1849 at the behest of the pope, as a response to the events of 1848.⁶⁷ These Thomists (of whom Gioachino Pecci, bishop of Perugia, later Leo XIII, was a leading figure) were implacably opposed to developments in modern thought. Modern ideas should be rejected, they insisted, ‘without exception’.

The main feature of this neo-Thomist thought was that it rejected any idea of evolution, of change. It looked back, beyond the twelfth century, to Aristotle, to the idea of timeless truth as affirmed by scholastic thought. After Aeterni Patris bishops were ordered to appoint as teachers and priests only men who had been instructed in ‘the wisdom of St Thomas’.⁶⁸ At every turn, their aim was to show that the new sciences, when in conflict with revealed doctrine, were in fact ‘erroneous’. This was ‘papal infallibility’ in action but, in addition, the doctrine of magisterium was also reintroduced and redefined. It was enforced by what Lester Kurtz says was the most far-reaching change – the attempt to make the Gregorian University, the most important university in the Catholic world, a major centre for Thomistic studies. Crucial appointments were made, to change the balance of power within the university, to ensure that it conformed to the new papal orthodoxy. The Curia was more concerned than ever with perpetuating old ideas, understood as still sufficient, rather than discovering new ones.⁶⁹

As if all this were not enough, in 1893 Leo issued Providentissimus Deus, which aimed to contain the new scholarship regarding the Bible. This edict argued, more than thirty years after Darwin, and nearly sixty years after Strauss and Lyell, that ‘a profitable understanding of sacred writings’ could not be achieved by way of the ‘earthly sciences’. Wisdom comes from above, reiterated the edict, and of course on these matters the pope was infallible. The papal document dismissed the charge that the Bible contained forgeries and falsehoods and pointed out that science was ‘so far from the final truth that they [the scientists] are perpetually modifying and supplementing it’.⁷⁰

Yet another way to stifle debate on biblical matters came in the form of a Biblical Commission, which Leo appointed in 1902. In an apostolic letter Vigilantiae, he announced that the commission would be made up of men of learning whose duty was to interpret the divine text in a manner ‘demanded by our times’ and that this interpretation would henceforth ‘be shielded not only from every breath of error, but also from every temerarious [reckless] opinion’.⁷¹ Leo’s final attempt to stem the tide was his apostolic letter Testem benevolentiae, which denounced ‘Americanism’ as heresy. This extraordinary move reflected the inherent conflict between democracy and monarchy and the views of some conservative Catholics in Europe, who thought that the American Catholic elite were guilty of undermining the Church through their support of ‘liberals, evolutionists . . . and by talking forever of liberty, of respect for the individual, of initiative, of natural virtues, of sympathy for our age’.⁷² In Testem benevolentiae, the pope declared his ‘affection’ for the American people but his main aim was to ‘point out certain things which are to be avoided and corrected’. He said that efforts to adapt Catholicism to the modern world were doomed to failure because ‘the Catholic faith is not a philosophical theory that human beings can elaborate, but a divine deposit that is to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared’. He likewise insisted on the fundamental difference between religious authority and political authority: the church’s authority came from God and could not be questioned, whereas political authority comes from the people.⁷³

The dilemma that faced the Vatican at the end of the nineteenth century, the century of Lyell, Darwin, Strauss, Comte, Marx, Spencer, Quetelet, Maxwell and so many others, was that a strategy to keep the still-faithful within the Church could never appeal to those who had already fled the fold – it could only ever be a holding action. In 1903, when Pius X ascended the papal throne, he did so believing that ‘the number of enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly’. He said he was convinced that only believers could be ‘on the side of order and have the power to restore calm in the midst of this upheaval’.⁷⁴ He therefore took it upon himself to continue Leo’s fight against modernism, and with renewed vigour. In Lamentabili, his decree of 1907, he condemned sixty-five specific propositions of modernism, including the biblical criticisms, and reasserted the doctrine of the principle of the mystery of faith. Yet more books were placed on the Index and candidates for higher orders were obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, in a form of words which required their rejection of modernist ideas. Lamentabili reasserted the role of dogma one more time, in the famous phrase: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’⁷⁵

Faithful Catholics across the world were grateful for the Vatican’s closely reasoned arguments and its firm stance. By 1907, fundamental discoveries in the sciences were coming quick and fast – the electron, the quantum, the unconscious and, most of all, perhaps, the gene, which explained how Darwin’s natural selection could take place. It was good to have a rock in a turbulent world. Beyond the Catholic Church, however, few people were listening. While the Vatican wrestled with its own modernist crisis, the wider movement in the arts, also known as modernism, marked the final arrival of the post-romantic/post-industrial revolution/post-French Revolution and post-American Civil War sensibility. As Nietzsche had foreseen, the death of God would unleash new forces. ‘Christianity resolved to find that the world was bad and ugly,’ wrote this son of a pastor, ‘and has made it bad and ugly.’ He thought nationalism would be one new force and he was right. But other forces also filled the vacuum that was being created. One of these was Marxist socialism, with its own version of an afterlife, and a second was an allegedly scientific psychology with its own, up-dated version of the soul – Freudianism.

We saw in Chapter 29, on the Oriental renaissance, that the Muslim world’s relationship with the West was chequered, to say the least, a mixture of arrogance that there was little Islam could learn from Europe, later tempered as European achievements filtered across the religious divide. But the gap only really began to close with the retreat of the Ottoman empire, based in Turkey, which culminated in the Crimean War of the 1850s. This proved crucial because that war was the first real alliance in history between Christian and Islamic forces, when Turkey joined together with France and Britain against Russia. As a result of this closer-than-usual co-operation, Muslims discovered that there was a huge amount they could learn and benefit from Europe, not just about weapons and fighting, and medicine, which had always attracted them, but in other walks of life too.

The new attitude surfaced first in Turkey, where, for example, there was a movement known as Tanzimat, or ‘Reform’.⁷⁶ The country initiated a Supreme Council of Reform and was reorganised along French lines with the sharia being confined to family law alone. Tax farming was replaced by tax collection and the people became ‘subjects’. The key figure here was Namik Kemal (1840–1888), who edited a journal, Freedom, whose aim was freedom to pursue technological achievement, freedom of the press, the separation of powers, equality of all before the law and a reinterpretation of the Qurʾan so as to make it consistent with parliamentary democracy. The most important message that Namik Kemal had was that not everything is pre-determined by God. Ishak Efendi was appointed bashoca of the Imperial School for Military Engineering and in 1834 published his four-volume Mecmua-i Ulum-i Riyaziye, based on foreign sources, which introduced many of the modern sciences to the Muslim world. Twelve years later Kudsi Efendi produced his Asrar al-Malakut, which did its best to reconcile the Copernican system with Islam. In 1839 thirty-six students were selected from the military and engineering schools to study in Paris, London and Vienna and in 1845 a Temporary Council of Education began to consider the idea of ‘educating the public’. The first book of modern chemistry was published in Turkish in 1848 and the first title of modern biology in 1865. Factory-building, along Western lines, began in earnest in the 1860s. A civilian school of medicine was founded in Istanbul in 1867 and two years later registration began for the Darülfünân, or university. It opened for classes in 1874–1875, consisting of schools of letters, law and, instead of science, as originally intended, civil engineering (this latter was based on the French École des Ponts et Chaussées). The Encümen-i Danis (Learned Society), not dissimilar to the Académie Française, was conceived in 1851, a translation council was set up in 1866, the metric system adopted in 1869 and, when Pasteur discovered the rabies vaccine in 1885, the Turks sent a delegation of physicians to Paris to absorb the new information and to confer on the great man a Turkish decoration.⁷⁷

Overlapping with Namik Kemal in Iran was Malkom Khan (1844–1908), who had been educated in Paris, much influenced by Auguste Comte, and who wrote a Book of Reform, in which he advocated the separation of powers, a secular law and a Bill of Rights. He edited a newspaper Qanun or ‘Law’ in which he proposed two assemblies, a popular assembly and an assembly of the ulama or learned. Again overlapping with both of these was Khayr al-din al-Tunisi (1822–1890), a Tunisian who also studied in Paris, who made a survey of twenty-one European states and their political systems, much as Aristotle did in classical Greece. He argued that it was a mistake for Muslims to reject what others had achieved, simply because they weren’t Muslims, and he recommended the Islamic world should ‘steal the best’ of what Europe had to offer.⁷⁸

In all there were well over fifty major thinkers of the Islamic world who emerged at this time to campaign for the modernisation of Islam – people such as Qasim Amin of Egypt, Mahmud Tarzi of Afghanistan, Sayyid Khan of India, Achmad Dachlan of Java and Wang Jingshai of China. But the three most influential Islamic modernists, whose names deserve to be more widely known in the West, were: Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, of Iran (1838–1897), Muhammad Abduh, of Egypt (1849–1905), and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who was born in Lebanon but spent most of his adult life in Egypt.

Al-Afghani’s main message was that European success was basically due to two things, to its science and to its laws, and he said that these were derived from ancient Greece and India. ‘There is no end or limit to science,’ he said, ‘science rules the world.’ (This was in 1882.) ‘There was, is, and will be no ruler in the world but science.’ ‘The English have reached Afghanistan; the French have seized Tunisia. In reality, this usurpation, aggression and conquest have not come from the French or the English. Rather it is science that everywhere manifests its greatness and power.’ Al-Afghani wanted the whole Islamic position to be reconsidered. He argued that ‘mind is the motor of historical change’ and he said that Islam needed a Reformation. He pilloried the ulama or religious scholars of the day who read the old texts but didn’t know the causes of electricity, or the principles of the steam engine. How, he asked, could these people call themselves ‘sages’? He likened the ulama to a light with a narrow wick ‘that neither lights its surroundings nor gives light to others’. Al-Afghani studied in France and Russia and while he was in Paris he became friendly with Ernest Renan. Al-Afghani specifically said that the religious person was like an ox yoked to a plough, ‘yoked to the dogma whose slave he is’, and he must walk eternally in the furrow that has been traced for him in advance. He blamed Islam for the ending of Baghdad’s golden age, admitting that the theological schools stifled science, and he pleaded for a non-dogmatic philosophy that would encourage scientific inquiry.

Muhammad Abduh also studied in Paris, where he produced a famous journal called The Strongest Link, which agitated against imperialism but also called for religious reform.⁷⁹ Returning to Egypt he became a leading judge and served on the governing body of the al-Azhar mosque-college, one of the most influential bodies of learning in the Arab world. He campaigned for the education of girls and for secular laws, beyond the sharia. He was especially interested in law and politics. Here are some of the things he wrote: ‘Human knowledge is in effect a collection of rules about useful benefits, by which people organise the methods of work that lead to those benefits . . . laws are the basis of activities organised . . . to produce manifest benefits . . . the law of each nation corresponds to its level in understanding . . . It is not possible therefore to apply the law of one group of people to another group who surpass the first in level of understanding . . . order among the second group will be disturbed . . .’ Politics, he insisted on another occasion, should be determined by circumstances, not by doctrine. Abduh went on to make the case for legal reform in Egypt, for clear simple laws, avoiding what he called the ‘ambiguities’ of the Qurʾan. He referred Egypt to France after the Revolution, which he said went from an absolute monarchy, to a restricted monarchy, to a free republic. He wanted a civil law to govern most of life, agreed by all in a logical manner. In his legal system, there was no mention of the prophet, Islam, the mosque, or religion.

Muhammad Rashid Rida attended a school in Lebanon which combined modern and religious education. He spoke several European languages and studied widely among the sciences.⁸⁰ He was close to Abduh and became his biographer. He too had his own journal, al-Manar (The Beacon), which disseminated ideas about reform until his death. Rida’s view was that social, political, civic and religious renewal was necessary and ongoing, so that societies could ‘ascend the paths of science and knowledge’. ‘Humans at all times need the old and the new,’ he said. He noted that while the British, French and Germans mostly preferred their own ways of doing things, and thinking, they were open to foreign influences as well. He admitted to being helped by, and liking, men who he deemed heretics. He sounds here a bit like Erasmus but he also recalls Owen Chadwick’s point, mentioned earlier, where he said that it was only from about 1860 that Europeans who regarded themselves as Christian could be friendly with non-believers. Most importantly, Rida said that the sharia has little or nothing to say about agriculture, industry and trade – ‘it is left to the experience of the people’. The state, he says, consists of precisely this – the sciences, arts and industries, financial, administrative and military systems. They are a collective duty in Islam and it is a sin to neglect them. The one rule to remember is ‘Necessity permits the impermissible.’

The collective achievement of modernism in the Islamic world consisted of the following elements. (1) Cultural revival. This was an attempt to revive Islamic arts and culture, mainly by referral to what had happened in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Here are a few examples: the practice of hagiography was changed and became much more like modern biography; there developed a tradition of travelogues in the Arab world, which openly marvelled at the prosperity of Europe and America – the gas lamps, the railways and the steamships. The first plays began to appear, in Lebanon in 1847, with an adaptation of a French drama; the first Urdu play was produced in India in 1853 and the first Turkish play was performed in 1859. A new periodical press appeared in the Arab world, with the development of the rotary press (as in Europe). Titles: Liberty, Warning, Interpreter. Algeria even had a reformist newspaper, The Critic. The critic al-Tahtawi wrote a book about Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, and about Western laws; Namik Kemal, in Turkey, translated Bacon, Condillac, Rousseau and Montesquieu. (2) Constitutionalism. Constitutionalism in this context meant government restricted by law, what we would today call the separation of powers, with elected parliaments rather than government by kings, sheikhs, or tribal leaders. The constitutionalists specifically took a decision to ignore the concept of paradise, and argued that what mattered was equality in this life, here on earth. Constitutionalist proposals were produced, or passed, in Egypt in 1866, in Tunisia in 1861, in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and 1908, in Iran in 1906 and again in 1909. In Afghanistan a modernist movement was suppressed in 1909.⁸¹ People even started to talk of ‘the constitutional countries’. (3) Science and education was the third aspect of modernism. There was a great worry about Darwin, because many Islamic scholars were persuaded by Herbert Spencer’s ideas on social Darwinism and they thought that Muslim societies were old-fashioned and would go under. They therefore urged the adoption of the Western sciences, in particular, which were to be taught in the new schools. There was a new school movement at this time, usul-I jaded, meaning ‘new principles’, which taught religious and secular subjects side-by-side but where the aim, quite clearly, was to replace traditional religious scholars with more modern ones. Sociology became popular among the Islamic modernists; they followed Comte in particular and his view that societies could be divided into three progressive stages: natural, social and political. Afghani took the view that man does not differ from the animals and could be studied like them, arguing that the fittest would survive. Like Marx and like Nietzsche, he thought that, in the end, life was about power. Abduh visited Herbert Spencer, whose book he translated. Most important of all, the modernists argued that laws came from human nature, from the study of the regularities of nature, that that was how God revealed himself, not through the Qurʾan. (4) As was happening in the West in the nineteenth century, with the deconstruction of the Bible (as we would say), so the text of the Qurʾan and hadith came under criticism. Rida was a relentless critic of the hadith, as a set of texts introduced by later figures which he felt was most to blame for keeping Islam back. So far as the Qurʾan itself was concerned, he argued that its text was only a guidance, not a command. Al-Saykh Tartawi Jawhari (1870–1940) made an exegesis of the Qurʾan in twenty-six volumes, based on modern science. (5) Women. The nineteenth century saw the promotion of girls’ schooling in several Islamic countries, if not everywhere. It saw women’s organisations in Bengal and in Russia. It saw an end to polygamy in India. It saw women’s suffrage in Azerbaijan in 1918 (before France in 1947, and Switzerland even later). In the Lebanon in 1896 and in Tunisia in 1920 there were campaigns for women to be given free access to the professions.

The reader may well ask what became of this modernist movement in the Islamic countries. The short answer is that it flourished until the First World War and then fragmented. Because it falls outside the time-frame of this book, a short summary of what happened between the First World War and the present is given in the notes.⁸²

Both Christianity and Islam came under sustained onslaught in the late nineteenth century. Who is to say, now, which faith resisted these attacks more successfully?