The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Thus, despite the most vigilant frontier precautions, banned books, books that had been formally condemned, books that were regarded as anathema, were, in fact, smuggled into France, and in the reign of Louis XIV himself. Travellers brought them hidden away in their baggage; they came in hugger-mugger, via some of the northern towns, or by way of the Channel ports, and so managed to get through to Paris. The guardians of orthodoxy raised an outcry, as may be imagined. The Mémoires of Trévoux, whose authors kept strict guard, make it clear that their vigilance was often eluded. “Excellent paper and print, first-rate illustrations, altogether a gem; almost always a Dutch marvel. A good exterior, but the goods inside are not always to be relied on. We get a lot of contraband from that country.”[6] And Bossuet: “Not long since, we received a book from Holland entitled, Critical History of the Principal Commentators on the New Testament. Its author was M. Simon, a priest. It is one of those books which have been refused the Church’s imprimatur and therefore cannot be printed here. It can only be circulated in a country where there are no restrictions, and among the enemies of the faith. However, despite all the precautions and vigilance of the authorities, such books do manage to worm their way in. They go the round, and pass from one reader to another. They are the more eagerly devoured because they are not easy to come by, because they are a rarity, because they excite curiosity, in a word, because they are forbidden.”[7]

  Holland was not the only country to bring out books hostile to Louis XIV and to Rome. Switzerland was another. In Germany and in England they abounded for, in the words of Richard Simon, the English are keen enquirers where religion is concerned. The position, then, was that France was beleaguered from Geneva to London by the forces of heresy. The part played by Holland, and particularly by the French Huguenots who had taken refuge there, was directed to ensuring to the utmost of their power that these revolutionary sentiments and ideas should get through to the very heart of France.

  The rift grew ever wider and wider. “How terrible was that voice divine which in the past century had echoed through the world crying, Hew away the rotten branches! England, breaking the sacred bond of unity, the only bond by which man’s wayward spirit is restrained from plunging to perdition, has yielded to the misleading promptings of her heart; part of the Netherlands, the whole of Germany, Denmark and Sweden are just so many branches which the avenging sword has sheared away and which cling no longer to the parent trunk.”[8] The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes did but add force and emphasis to that terrible injunction. It marked the renewal of an intellectual and moral alliance that was destined to endure even when the contending armies had laid aside their weapons and bound themselves to keep the peace in Europe. “To-day, it is, virtually, the North that is ranged against the South, the Teuton races challenging the Latin.”[9] Indeed, the forces of the Reformation, though seemingly routed in France, were stronger and more united than ever outside her borders. “Your so-called Reformation, so far as its foreign supporters are concerned, was never stronger or more united. All the Protestant peoples are now united in a single bloc. . . . Abroad, the Reformers are more powerful, more united, more arrogant and more menacing, than ever.”[10] The Reformers, or, to be more precise, the Calvinists, for Lutheranism was being pushed back “more and more into the farther north.”[11] It recoiled upon itself, content for its action to be circumscribed and local. It was not led on to conquest by a great expanding power; and, lacking in ambition, it was likewise lacking in adaptability. Calvinism, on the other hand, triumphed side by side with triumphant England. The two treatises that John Locke brought out in 1690 to sanction the advent to power of the leading representative of Calvinism in Europe, namely, William of Orange, were designed to serve as the up-to-date political code. Resplendent in the shining armour of recent victory, they are obviously inspired by the spirit of Geneva. The masters and the friends of John Locke in England, France and Holland were Calvinists; his ideas, his arguments are all the products of his Calvinistic studies, and, of course, he supports them with frequent quotations from the Bible. His refusal to promise unconditional obedience to authority is on a par with the resistance which the Calvinists of the sixteenth century offered to the bishops and princes, their oppressors. Calvinism, in this case, represents the right to freedom of conscience, transplanted from the religious into the political sphere. Even the fact that he was now taking service under the English Government does not compromise this right in his eyes, so lively is his recollection of the struggles that government went through to maintain it, so glaring the abuse of power which, in the name of the divine right of kings, Louis XIV had just committed.

  It was now, too, that the understanding entered into sometime since between capitalism and religion attained its formal status, its crowning glorification. England, as Holland’s successor, was now slowly but steadily capturing the world’s markets, and as England’s influence grew, so also did that of a religion which, so far from discouraging interest in the affairs of this world, in business, actively favoured it. For, as a contemporary pamphleteer points out, “There is a kind of natural unaptness in the Popish religion to business, whereas on the contrary among the Reformed, the greater their zeal, the greater their inclination to trade and industry, as holding idleness unlawful”.[12] Called upon to attend to his business, or rather to his duty, by an ineluctable decree from above, ordained to buy and sell, as others are to write and preach, practising those virtues which God and his business alike demanded of him, such as energy, conscientiousness, prudence, thrift, the merchant, whose position in European society was to become more and more considerable, hurries off, without the least sign of compunction, from his counting-house to his chapel, his head high, fully persuaded that he is doing his twofold duty, proudly convinced that he is making sure of a place both in this world and in the world to come. Calvinism comes into its own. That, at least in one respect, shows how the transference of power from South to North finally came about.

  However, it may readily be conceived that religious dissent, growing more orderly and disciplined as time went on, would sooner or later aspire to a unity of its own, to a code of belief which, while utterly opposed to Catholicism, would admit of no departure from itself, in other words, to the setting up of a Protestant orthodoxy.

  Such a desire, such an aim, is frequently discernible amid the turmoil and confusion of those years of strife. The danger of the whittling down process, the danger of crumbling bit by bit, was sufficiently obvious. There was no mistaking where this dividing and sub-dividing, this multiplication of sects within sects, would ultimately lead to if it went on. The final result would be a multitude of separate individuals all haggling and bickering among themselves. The great thing then was to close the ranks, to form a compact, united body, to share as one community in one common Credo. And why not? If they had been able to unite against the common foe, the Papists, why should they not unite again? Therefore, a confession of faith was drawn up outside which, it was declared, there could be no salvation. Work towards this end went on in England, but, perhaps, still more actively in Holland, where the arrival of Protestant divines from France gave rise to further preoccupations. An orthodox confession, that, and nothing less, was what was drawn up at Dordrecht and presented to the pastors for signature in April, 1686. To refuse to sign was to be expelled from the reformed church. The synods held in the succeeding years kept a vigilant eye on the maintenance of doctrine, summoned alleged schismatics to answer for themselves, passed sentence, excluded members from the Holy Table, suspended ministers from their functions. Their verdicts were hardly less drastic than those of the Roman Church. “The association, whose sovereign aim it is to safeguard the unity of belief among those of us who are called upon to preach the doctrine of Truth and the Gospel of Peace, having earnestly and devoutly considered the precautions it behoved them to take to secure the exclusion of all dangerous doctrine, have, after many prayers to God, and in conformity with our long established regulations, decided to de
clare no pastor eligible for admission to our body unless he shall have satisfied us that his views are in accordance with our confession of faith in general and with the decisions of the Synod of Dordrecht in particular, and declared his willingness to submit to all the requirements of our disciplinary code.”[13] Jurieu played the part of Grand Inquisitor. He denounced people, he haled them before the Court, he thundered anathema at them. Against those who defaulted in matters of conscience, he did not hesitate to invoke the secular arm, and to demand the imprisonment or dismissal of all who did not think as he did. “God preserve us”, wrote Bayle, whom Jurieu was arraigning before the magistrates at Amsterdam and whom he was trying to get dismissed from his post. “God preserve us from the Protestant Inquisition; another five or six years or so and it will have become so terrible that people will be longing to have the Roman one back again, as something to be thankful for.”[14]

  But it was not there that the danger lay. The best that the England of William of Orange could do for the dissenters was, not to unite them, but simply to tolerate them. All she demanded of them was their political adherence; the conduct of their religious affairs she left to them. She outlawed Catholicism because it was answerable to Rome; she tolerated Nonconformity because it was answerable only to itself. As for Holland, well, Holland was now nothing more nor less than a swarming ant-heap of differing sects—those that had arisen in the earliest days of the Reformation, and those that had come into being as time went on, the first comers and the last, all were forgathered there within her borders, and all were engaged in an endless succession of pitched battles, Arminians and Gomarians, Cocceians, Voetians, Trinitarians, anti-Trinitarians . . . , each and every doctrinal view and shade of opinion about Grace, about the Scriptures, about the Rights of Conscience, about Toleration, and even about the Civil Power, were ranged one against another in angry dispute. The battle was unceasing, not only because the opposing parties were utterly sincere in their championship of what they believed to be the truth; not only because of the satisfaction they derived from carrying on a battle so well worth fighting, a battle which engendered light, even as the impact of two stones conjures a dazzling spark from a dull and lifeless mass; no, there was another reason, which lay in something, in a principle, that is inherent in the very soul of Protestantism.

  If Protestantism does in truth include among its various manifestations a revolt of the individual conscience against the intrusion of authority in matters of faith, then what right has such authority to claim jurisdiction over the conscience and its workings? Who shall presume to decide where orthodoxy ends and heterodoxy begins? To declare, in the name of Protestantism, that such and such an opinion about Free-will and Predestination is to be elevated to the status of a dogma; and, more than that, to hold that a civil magistrate is perfectly within his rights in exerting his authority to put down idolatry and to stem the spread of heresy: to say that one man is perfectly justified in forbidding another man, not only to teach, but even to believe, what his conscience tells him, is simply to fling logic to the winds.

  Hence the powerlessness of the synods to bring the various pastors and their respective flocks together and to unite them in one obedient and contented whole; to check the multiplication of sects; to pronounce the magic word which should cause the ever-enquiring mind to cease its quest. One term crops up with notable frequency in the theological discussions of the day, and that term is Socinianism. Socinianism, which in its original phase was a heresy inaugurated by Faustus Socinus, came into prominence in Poland about the end of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century. Expelled from Poland, the disciples and successors of Socinus poured into Prussia and France, but it was in Holland that they found their home of homes. In that country it was that the Congregation of the Frères Polonais was founded; there, in 1665, Wiszowaty, a grandson of Socinus, published his Religio rationalis, a book which the Socinians regarded as a sort of second bible. Four years later, Pastor Isaac d’Huisseau of Saumur brought out his book on the Reunion of Christendom; he proposed that the principles whereby Descartes had revolutionized philosophy should also be applied to religion; henceforth, nothing was to be believed that was not clearly set forth in the Scriptures; only the primary, universal truths inscribed therein, truths that squared with the dictates of reason, were to be retained. So Tradition went by the board, and so, to tell the truth, did the idea of a Church; God, the Bible, the individual conscience; that was the sum of it; no more and no less. The whole French reformed church began to argue about these matters. Penal measures, banishment itself, far from healing these divisions, did but the more exacerbate them. Papon, Isaac d’Huisseau’s son-in-law, having become infected with heresy, there followed a battle royal between Paponists and Anti-Paponists. Nowhere could a single synod succeed in stemming the tide of Socinianism.

  If there was any truth in what was alleged about the diminution of the sect, qua sect; if to the outward view it seemed to have contracted, that was only in its superficial aspect. Inwardly, its influence had greatly increased. Its ideas were seeping insensibly into men’s minds, leading them to substitute a rationalistic for a religious view of things. But what precisely do we mean by a Socinian?

  According to Bossuet, the main plank in the Socinian platform is the assertion that we cannot be compelled to accept what is not clear to our understanding. Socinianismus, wrote Poiret, fidem et scripturam subjicit rationi. According to Pufendorf, the Socinians regard Christianity as nothing more than a system of moral philosophy. Jurieu got it into his head—it was sort of monomania with him—that he saw Socinianism everywhere; and perhaps after all he was not far wrong, so widespread and so unmistakable was the general lapse into rationalism. The Socinians, he cried, declare that it is a matter of indifference what religion a man holds. They reject the element of mystery. Yet a sense of mystery is the very essence of the religious spirit. But the most trenchant comment came from Richard Simon. Referring to d’Huisseau’s condemnation, he said, “The little herd, by treating the minister d’Huisseau with such conspicuous severity, hoped to intimidate the many other ministers who hold similar ideas. They confided their intentions to a number of ministers in the provinces, who signified their approval; and we may take it that, if they had not thus shown a firm hand, it would have been all over with Calvinism in France. The leading men of that sect would have openly proclaimed themselves Arminians, if not downright Socinians. As it is, they have contented themselves with being so inwardly, letting only their most intimate friends into their secret. It was because they were afraid of losing their posts that they acted as they did. They subscribe the Confession of Faith purely and simply for reasons of policy, holding, as they do, that Calvin and the other early Reformers left their work but half-done”.[15] A malicious and calumnious declaration that may be, but it shows, at any rate, that Richard Simon saw one thing clearly enough, and that was that the Reformation continued to reform itself.

  The Dutch pastors were at loggerheads with their brethren in Germany. The pastors who had made their way to London were at war with Socinianism. Efforts had been made to unite Calvinism and Lutheranism in a closer bond than that of their original kinship, so that both might subscribe to a common confession of faith; but these efforts proved abortive.

  It was, therefore, clearly open to the Catholics to argue that since they had quitted the Roman fold the Protestants had wandered into a trackless maze. And Bossuet scored heavily when, in 1688, he brought out his Histoire des Variations des Églises Protestantes, which purported to show that these churches had differed all along, that they differed still, and that to differ was the very essence of their being. Little by little, they fell in sunder until at last they came to dust. It was impossible to bring them together in the bond of unity, since each and every one of them had as good a claim to exist as any of the others. They proceeded, one and all, from that same principle of independent judgment which, criticizing now this, now that, was always demanding that something should be c
hanged. Hence the number of different confessions, so numerous, so multifarious, that the historian can do no more than barely enumerate them. That is why it is vain to attempt to reconcile groups whose very nature is one of perpetual and progressive disintegration.

  In reply to Bossuet it might be retorted that the Catholic Church, too, has varied. And that was precisely the line taken by Jacques Basnage, one of his many opponents. Or, again, it might be urged that the Protestant Church has never varied in regard to essentials. That was Gilbert Burnet’s argument. On some such lines as these you might argue, unless, of course, you preferred to regard his remarks, not as a reproach, but as something to be proud of, and unless you looked on private judgment as the privilege of a race not possessed of the truth by virtue of a supernatural revelation, but laboriously striving to disengage it, to construct it, piece by piece, by its own efforts;[16] and unless, while weighing the dangers of too much authority on the one hand, or too much liberty on the other, you decided, since dangers there must be, deliberately to choose the latter. Thus it is, and almost in those very words, that Jean Le Clerc in his Bibliothèque Choisie for the year 1705, presents the alternatives. How he is hemmed in on every side by atheists! Many books of which he makes mention in his paper are directed against them, proof positive that atheism is becoming an ever-increasing menace. In days gone by, men did not question, did not doubt, the truth of what their teachers imparted to them. They took it all on faith. But now, it is quite different; authority is respected no longer. Is the former state of things to be preferred, or is it not? Jean Le Clerc does not beat about the bush: unbelief is an evil, no doubt; but the disposition which encourages us to believe everything without examination is still more of an evil. It arises from mental stupidity and an indifference to truth. Better a country where there is much enlightenment and a certain number of unbelievers, than a nation of ignoramuses who believe everything that has hitherto passed for truth. Light is productive of virtue, even if there be some who use that light amiss; whereas the sole brood of ignorance are barbarism and vice.