The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  But without discipline, the “religion of the heart” could easily degenerate into sentimentality and even hysteria. We have seen that Eckhart, the author of the Cloud, and Denys the Carthusian had all been concerned about a religiosity that confused affective states with the divine presence. The Enlightenment tendency to polarize heart and head could mean that a faith that was not capable of intelligent self-appraisal degenerated into emotional indulgence. This became clear during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening that erupted in the American colony of Connecticut in 1734. The sudden deaths of two young people in the community of Northampton plunged the town into a frenzied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. Within six months, three hundred people had experienced “ born-again” conversions, their spiritual lives alternating between soaring highs and devastating lows when they fell prey to intense guilt and depression. When the revival burned itself out, one man committed suicide, convinced that the loss of ecstatic joy must mean that he was predestined to hell. In premodern spirituality, rituals such as the Eleusinian mysteries had been skillfully crafted to lead people through emotional extremity to the other side. But in Northampton, the new American cult of liberty meant that there was no such supervision, that everything was spontaneous and free, and that people were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions in a way that for some proved fatal.

  There was a paradox in the Enlightenment.27 Philosophers insisted that individuals must reason for themselves, and yet they were only permitted to think in accordance with the scientific method. Other more intuitive ways of arriving at different kinds of truth were now belittled in a manner that would prove highly problematic for religion. Again, revolutionary leaders in France and America preached the doctrine of untrammeled liberty with immense passion and enthusiasm, but their doctrine of nature was rigorously mechanical: the motion and organization of every single component of the universe was completely determined by the interaction of its particles and the iron rule of nature’s law. In England, Newton’s cosmology would be used to endorse a social system in which the “lower” orders were governed by the “higher,” while in France, Louis XIV, the Sun King, presided over a court in which his courtiers revolved obsequiously around him, each in his allotted orbit. Central to this political vision and Newtonian science was the doctrine of the passivity of matter, which needed to be activated and controlled by a higher power. People who challenged this orthodoxy were associated with radical movements and often found themselves in bad odor with the establishment.28

  In rather the same way as Spinoza, John Toland believed that God was identical with nature and that matter was, therefore, not inert but vital and dynamic: he died in abject poverty. Locke thought it possible that some material substances might be able to “think” and perform rational procedures. He had a radical past: because he was involved in the turbulence preceding the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he had been forced to flee to Holland, where he lived in exile for six years as “Mr. van der Linden.” The Presbyterian minister and chemist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who remained an outsider all his life—educated in Daventry instead of Oxford and exercising his ministry in the provinces—argued that Newtonian theory was not in fact dependent upon the inertia of matter. When he spoke in support of the French Revolution in 1789, a Birmingham mob burned his house to the ground and he migrated to America.

  Others questioned the idea that there was only one method of arriving at truth. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, argued that the historical method was as reliable as the scientific but rested on a different intellectual foundation.29 The study of rhetoric showed that it was just as important to know who a philosopher was addressing and to understand the context of his discourse as to master its content. Mathematics was crucial to the new science; it claimed to yield clear and distinct results that could be applied to all fields of study. But mathematics, Vico argued, was essentially a game that had been devised and controlled by human beings. If you applied the mathematical method to material that was separate from the human intellect—to cosmology, for instance—there was not the same “fit.” Because nature operated independently of us, we could not understand it as intimately as something that we had created ourselves. But we could know history in this way, because our civilizations were human artifacts. So why did modern philosophers expend all their energies on “the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, he alone knows?”30

  The study of history depended on what Pascal had called the “heart.” Instead of logical, deductive thought, Vico pointed out, the historian had to use his imagination (fantasia) and enter empathically into the world of the past. When a historian studied the past, he had to turn within, recollect the phases of his own development, and thus sympathetically reconstruct the stages of the evolution of a particular culture. By examining its metaphors and imagery, he discovered the preconceptions that drew a society together, “a judgment without reflection, universally felt by an entire group, an entire people, a whole nation.”31 By this process of introspection, the historian was able to grasp an internal, integrating principle that enabled him to appreciate the uniqueness of each civilization. Truths were not absolute; what was true in one culture was not so for another; symbols that worked for one people would not speak to others. We understand the rich variety of human nature only when we learn to enter imaginatively and compassionately into the context in which a proposition or doctrine is developed.

  Vico seemed to sense that a gap had opened between science and the humanities that had not existed before.32 The scientific method taught the observer to be detached from what he was investigating, because it was essential to science that the result of an experiment be the same, whoever performed it. Objective truth aspires to be independent of historical context and is assumed to be the same in any period or culture. Such an approach tends to canonize the present, so that we project what we believe and find credible back onto the past or onto a civilization whose symbols and presuppositions might be different from our own. Vico referred to this uncritical assessment of alien societies and remote historical periods as the “conceit” of scholars or rulers: “It is another property of the human mind that wherever men can form no idea of distant or unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand.”33

  Vico had put his finger on an important point. The scientific method has dealt brilliantly with objects but is less cogent when applied to people or the arts. It is not competent to assess religion, which is inseparable from the complex human beings who practice it and, like the arts, cultivates a perception based on imagination and empathy. A scientist will first form a theory and then seek to prove it experimentally; religion works the other way around, and its insights come from practical experience. Where science is concerned with facts, religious truth is symbolic and its symbols will vary according to context; they will change as society changes, and the reason for these changes must be understood. Like the arts, religion is transformative. Where the scientist is supposed to remain detached from the object of his investigation, a religious person must be changed by the encounter with the symbols of his or her faith—in rather the same way as one’s outlook can be permanently transformed by the contemplation of a great painting.

  As the Enlightenment intensified, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), the Genevan philosopher, educationist, and essayist who had settled in Paris, came to many of the same conclusions as Vico. He did not share the philosophes’ optimistic vision of improvement. Science, he believed, was divisive, because very few people could participate in the scientific revolution and most were left behind. As a result, people were living in different intellectual worlds. Scientific rationalism, which cultivated a dispassionate objectivity, could obscure “the natural repugnance to see any sensitive being perish or suffer.”34 Knowledge, Rousseau believed, had become cerebral; instead we should listen to the “heart.” For Rousseau the “heart” w
as not equivalent to emotion; it referred to a receptive attitude of silent waiting—not unlike Greek hesychia—that was ready to listen to the instinctive impulses that precede our conscious words and thoughts. Instead of attending to reason alone, we should learn to hear this timid voice of nature as a corrective to the aggressive reasoning of those philosophers who sought to master the emotions and bring the more unruly elements of life under control.35

  In his novel Émile (1762), Rousseau tried to show how an individual could be educated in this attitude. The self-emptying of kenosis was a crucial part of his program. It was amour propre (“self-love”) that imprisoned the soul within itself and corrupted our reasoning powers with selfishness and arrogance. So before he attained the age of reason, a child should be taught not to dominate others; instead of receiving a purely theoretical education, he must cultivate the virtue of compassion by means of disciplined action. As a result of this training, when his reasoning powers finally developed, they would not be distorted by egotism. In the novel, Émile is able to persuade Sophie, who represents Wisdom, to marry him only when he is prepared to forgo his attachment to her: “The fear of losing everything will prevent you from possessing everything.”36 Rousseau had no time for Christianity, whose God, he felt, had become a mere projection of human desires. He was looking for the “God” that transcended the old doctrines, a deity that would be discovered by kenosis, compassion, and the humble contemplation of the majesty of the universe.

  Rousseau nurtured the revolutionary passion that would make the French Enlightenment more radical and political. This would not be the case in America. Unlike the French Revolution, the American War of Independence against Britain (1775–83) had no antireligious dimension. Its leaders—George Washington (1732–99), John Adams (1725–1826), Jefferson, and Franklin—experienced the revolution as a secular, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power. The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Jefferson, was a modernizing Enlightenment document based on Locke’s notion of human rights and appealing to the modern ideals of autonomy, independence, and equality in the name of the God of Nature. The vast majority of the colonists could not relate to the Deism of their leaders and developed a form of revolutionary Calvinism that enabled them to join the struggle.37 When their leaders spoke of liberty, they thought of Saint Paul’s freedom of the Sons of God;38 they recalled the heroic struggle of their Puritan forebears against tyrannical Anglicanism in old England; and some believed that as a result of the revolution, Jesus would shortly establish the Kingdom of God in America.39 This Christian ideology was a Calvinist version of Adams’s belief that the settlement of America was part of God’s plan for the enlightenment of the whole of humanity40 and the conviction of Thomas Paine (1737–1809) that “we have it in our power to begin the world again.”41 Unlike Europeans, Americans did not regard religion as oppressive but found it a liberating force that was enabling them to respond creatively to the challenge of modernity and come to the Enlightenment ideals in their own way.

  In France, however, religion was part of the ancien régime that needed to be swept away. There was even an incipient atheism that denied God’s existence. In 1729, Jean Meslier, an exemplary parish priest, died weary of life, leaving his few meager possessions to his parishioners. Among his papers, they discovered the manuscript of his Memoire in which he declared that Christianity was a hoax. He had never dared to say this openly during his lifetime, but now he had nothing to fear. Religion was simply a device to subdue the masses. The gospels were full of internal contradictions, and their texts were corrupt. The miracles, visions, and prophecies that were supposed to “prove” divine revelation were themselves incredible, and the doctrines of the church manifestly absurd. So too were the “proofs” of Descartes and Newton. Matter did not require a God to set it in motion; it was dynamic and moved by its own momentum, and its existence depended on nothing other than itself. Voltaire circulated the manuscript privately, though he doctored it in order to make Meslier a respectable Deist. But in the Memoire we find the germ of much of the atheistic critique of the future. It shows that the new fashion for proving the existence of God could easily backfire; it also shows a connection between the desire for social change and the theory of dynamic matter.

  In France as in England, people outside the establishment were becoming critical of the orthodox Enlightenment belief in the inertia of matter. In 1706, Jean Pigeon (1654–1739), a self-educated military man with a flair for mechanical physics, had presented Louis XIV with a model of the Copernican system that he had made himself.42 But he found that the experience of constructing his own universe, as it were, took all the wonder out of creation; God suddenly seemed little more than a craftsman like himself. He also came to believe that matter was not passive after all. Pigeon’s son-in-law Andre-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (1716–64) continued to preach the gospel of dynamic matter and a downsized God to large audiences until he was forced to flee to Holland. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51) had also taken refuge in the Netherlands, where he published Man, a Machine (1747) which ridiculed Cartesian physics and argued that intelligence was inherent in the material structure of organisms. For La Mettrie, God was simply an irrelevance.43 He included the record of a conversation with a fellow skeptic, who yearned for the destruction of religion.

  No more theological wars, no more soldiers of religion— such terrible soldiers! Nature infected with sacred poison would repair its rights and purity. Deaf to all other voices, tranquil mortals will follow only the spontaneous dictates of their own being, the only commands which can never be despised with impunity, and which alone can lead us to happiness through the pleasant paths of virtue.44

  People were sick of the intolerant behavior of the churches. But few were prepared to break with religion entirely. La Mettrie himself was careful to distance himself from the opinions of the “wretch” he quoted.

  But in 1749, the novelist Denis Diderot (1713–84) was imprisoned in Vincennes for writing an atheistic tract. As a young man, he had been intensely religious and even considered becoming a Jesuit. When his adolescent ardor faded, Diderot threw in his lot with the philosophes and studied biology, physiology, and medicine, but he had not yet given up on religion. In his Pensées philosophiques, like any good Deist, he sought rational evidence from Descartes and Newton to combat atheism, and was increasingly drawn to microscopic biology, which claimed to find evidence for the existence of God in the minutiae of nature. But he was not wholly convinced. Diderot passionately believed that even our most cherished beliefs must be subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny, and started to attend the lectures of Pigeon’s circle, where he learned of some disturbing new experiments. In 1741, the Swiss zoologist Abraham Trembley discovered that a hydra could regenerate itself if cut in two. In 1745, John Turberville Needham, a Catholic priest, found that minute creatures generated spontaneously in putrefying gravy and that a whole world of infinitesimally small organisms inhabited a single drop of water, coming into being and passing away only to be replaced by others within the span of a few minutes. Perhaps, Diderot could not help reflecting, the whole cosmos was like that drop of water, endlessly creating and re-creating itself without the intervention of a Creator.

  In 1749, Diderot published A Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, the treatise that put him in prison, which took the form of a fictional dialogue between Nicolas Sanderson, the blind Cambridge mathematician, and Gervase Holmes, an Anglican minister who represented Newtonian orthodoxy.45 Sanderson is on his deathbed and can find no consolation in Newton’s proof for God’s existence, because he cannot see any of the marvels that so impressed Holmes. Sanderson has been forced to rely on ideas that could be tested mathematically, and this has led him into an outright denial of God’s existence. At the very beginning of time, Sanderson believes, there had been no trace of God—only swirling particles in an empty void. The evolution of our world was probably a good deal more arbitrary and messier than the tidy, purposive process de
scribed by Newton. Here, remarkably, Diderot makes Sanderson envisage a process of brutal natural selection. The “design” we see in the universe is simply due to the survival of the fittest. Only those animals survived “whose mechanism was not defective in any important particular and who were able to support themselves,”46 while those born without heads, feet, or intestines perished. But such aberrations still occur. “Look at me, Mr Holmes,” Sanderson cries. “I have no eyes. What have we done, you and I, to God, that one of us has this organ—while the other has not?”47 It is no good relying on God to find a solution to such insoluble problems: “My good friend, Mr Holmes,” Sanderson concludes, “confess your ignorance.”48

  When Voltaire wrote a letter of reproach to him in prison, Diderot replied that these were not his own opinions. “I believe in God,” he wrote, “but I live very well with the atheists.” Actually, however, it made very little difference to him whether God existed or not. God had become a sublime but useless truth. “It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley but to believe or not to believe in God is not important at all.”49 After his release, Diderot was invited to edit Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) but completely transformed it, making the Encyclopédie a major weapon in his campaign to enlighten society. All the major philosophes contributed, and even though Diderot was constantly threatened with exile or prison, he managed to produce the final volume in 1765.

  One of his editors was Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), who presided over a salon in the Rue Royale that had the reputation of being a hotbed of atheism, even though only three of the regular members actually denied God’s existence. In 1770, d’Holbach, with Diderot’s help, published The System of Nature, which brought together the discussions of the salonistes. D’Holbach was passionately antitheistic and wanted to replace religion with science. There was no final cause, no higher truth, and no grand design. Nature had generated itself and preserved itself in motion, performing all the tasks traditionally attributed to God.