Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Another setting for once-unthinkable personal relations between scientists, and scholars in general, of different religions was the Renaissance and post-Renaissance university. In Italy, so many Protestants and Jews studied at the University of Padua that Pope Pius IV, who occupied the papal throne from 1559 to 1565, had issued a papal bull forbidding non-Catholics from receiving college degrees. La Serenissima, the Republic of Venice, which controlled Padua, foiled the pope by giving degree-granting power to an official appointed by the Venetian Senate. Harvey, after receiving his bachelor of arts degree from Caius College of Cambridge in 1597, became another in the distinguished group of European scholars who went to Padua to study medicine, philosophy, and even theology in the atmosphere of cosmopolitan freedom that had so offended several popes.*7 Harvey’s most notable predecessor at Padua in the history of medicine is the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, who in 1543 published his De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), the first accurate portrait of human anatomy. Galileo was also a member of the faculty, as professor of mathematics, during Harvey’s time at the university. But the major attraction for Harvey, it seems, was Girolamo Fabrizio, also known as Hieronymus Fabricius (1537–1619), an anatomist in the tradition of Vesalius.*8 Harvey would later tell Boyle that Fabricius’s research on chick embryos was a key factor influencing the British scientist’s historic discoveries about the true function of the heart, lungs, veins, and arteries in the circulation of blood. (Harvey had certainly never read Servetus’s passages about blood circulation in the suppressed book that was incorrectly thought to have perished in the flames that consumed its author.) Most of the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish scientists who had direct contact with one another during the seventeenth century neither converted to another religion nor went through a profound “born-again” conversion like Boyle. They were compartmentalizers—able to erect barriers between what they learned from their experiments and what their sacred scriptures preached. It is also reasonable to suspect that lapses into secularism—as exemplified by Huygens’s refusal, while he thought he was in extremis, to see a clergyman—were common not only among scientists but among the small but significant scientifically educated elite.

  Most pioneering researchers of the early Enlightenment would never have accepted the proposition that science and religion were inevitable enemies. But neither was it possible for a scientifically educated religious believer to adopt a seventeenth-century version of Stephen Jay Gould’s twentieth-century argument for science and religion as separate magisteria. For minds rooted in the age of faith, too many intellectual and emotional contortions were required to envision science and faith as polite but distant friends, careful not to step on each other’s toes by inquiring too closely into beliefs that could never be reconciled. In the early years of the Enlightenment, conversion and belief were becoming matters of choice rather than grace, as Boyle himself recognized when he wrote of the religious doubts that continued to plague him throughout his life. The doubts were not mortal—yet—but they were potent disturbers of the peace.

  * * *

  *1 A group of twelve men, including Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren, met and resolved to form an organization “for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning.” In the Royal Charter granted by King Charles II in 1663, the group is called “The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.”

  *2 His most famous equation, Boyle’s Law, states that for a given mass of gas, at a constant temperature, the pressure exerted on the gas times the volume is a constant (pV = C).

  *3 It is understandable that Boyle’s research on gases would have led him to envisage the possibility of vacuum-packed foods, which depend on removing oxygen before packaging to impede the growth of bacteria. In Boyle’s time, the industrial tools and procedures needed to actually produce vacuum-packed products did not exist. The history of vacuum packaging is tangled, with inventors of various generations on at least two continents claiming to have invented the machines and processes enabling extended, sanitary food preservation. The nineteenth-century American inventor Amanda Jones, who was awarded two patents for canning procedures, is often credited with founding the vacuum-canning industry in the United States—though her own all-female company, established in the early 1890s, was a commercial failure. Jones attributed the failure of the venture to her unwillingness to give up ownership and executive authority to men, which meant that men were unwilling to invest in the company.

  *4 This was so even though Leonardo’s observations were intended to prove the truth of a complete misconception—that the human organism is a microcosm of the macrocosm of earth. For a full and lively account of this episode in scientific history, see Stephen Jay Gould’s essay, “The Upwardly Mobile Fossils,” in Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (New York: Harmony Books, 1998).

  *5 The strange use (to modern readers) of “schoolmen” in this context referred to both medieval and contemporary Aristotelians, who believed the universe had always existed—a position that Boyle, who believed there was no universe before God created it, could never accept. That the divine Creator had always existed was (and is), of course, a tenet of orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

  *6 The orator Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–99), known as the Great Agnostic, summarized Paley’s argument in this fashion: “A man finds a watch and it is so wonderful that he concludes that it must have had a maker. He finds the maker and he is so much more wonderful than the watch that he says he must have had a maker. Then he finds God, the maker of the man, and he is so much more wonderful than the man that he could not have had a maker….According to Paley, there can be no design without a designer—but there can be a designer without design. The wonder of the watch suggested that the watchmaker suggested the creator, and the wonder of the creator demonstrated that he was not created—was uncaused and eternal.”

  *7 At the Council of Basel in 1434, the church had attempted to impose an absolute ban on granting degrees to Jews at any university, in what was still a monist Catholic Christendom. Not every church official considered this a wise decision. In 1555, Pope Julius III—just a few years before Pius IV’s unsuccessful bull—had actually ordered the University of Padua to allow a Jewish student to take an examination for his doctorate. Julius believed that allowing Jews access to Christian universities would foster religious conversions.

  *8 The adviser for Fabricius’s doctoral thesis was Gabriele Falloppio, for whom the Fallopian tubes, where fertilization takes place before the egg is transported to the uterus for implantation, are named.

  13

  PRELUDE: O MY AMERICA!

  EVEN AS THE OLD WORLD struggled toward a form of religious toleration that would take shape only after the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Europeans in religious wars, a new kind of society was emerging in the English and Dutch colonies of North America. In most American public schools and textbooks, students have always been taught that the United States was founded upon religion, because its first settlers were seeking freedom from religious persecution. This is an incomplete story, well suited to the purposes of those who wish to dismiss the importance of the separation of church and state in American history by writing secularism out of the first narratives told to children about their country. The desire for religious freedom was indeed the chief factor in immigration to the New World for some settlers, but it played little role for others.

  The Puritans and Pilgrims who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1620s were fleeing religious persecution in England, but their credo might well have been “freedom of conscience for me but not for thee.” Their hostility to any form of theological opposition led, only fifteen years after the first settlers landed at Plymouth Rock, to Roger Williams’s exile and the founding of the new colony of Rhode Island. It was Williams who later offered the Puritan dissident Anne Hutchinson her first shelter after she was tried and convicted of, among other offenses, encouraging women to preach and
teach. If the first Puritans had prevailed, the absolutist religious prejudices of the Old World could have become so firmly established here that the Christian-government fantasy of today’s religious right might have become a reality. But they did not have their way—even in areas of the new land where it looked, for a time, as if they might.

  Religious persecution had nothing at all to do with the establishment of the first permanent English colonial settlement, in 1607, at Jamestown in Virginia. The earliest settlers were profit-seeking adventurers who adhered to the reformed Church of England, under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, and were in search of New World resources (eventually settling on tobacco after a rough start) upon which they might build their own fortunes and the fortunes of the Crown. Most did not have the slightest quarrel with the established church across the sea.

  Later in the century—between the Virginia profit-seekers and the Massachusetts Puritans—a third religious way emerged with the establishment of the colony of Pennsylvania. In 1681, William Penn—convinced that the Quaker ideal of religious toleration could never be achieved in England—founded the colony with a charter from Charles II. After the public debacle of Penn’s trial in London for holding a Quaker meeting outdoors, the king was only too happy to get rid of this persistent religious pest. Penn’s First Frame of Government for Pennsylvania, adopted in April 1682, specified toleration for all religions, established freedom of the press, and prohibited military conscription. In the late seventeenth century, Pennsylvania’s combination of religious toleration with anti-militarism attracted European as well as English Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, all of whom had personally suffered religious persecution or lived with a constant, tension-producing awareness that religious violence might erupt again even if peace prevailed at the moment. The prohibition of military conscription was equally important. Nonconformist Protestant denominations, like the Quakers, Mennonites, and Amish, proclaimed pacifism as a tenet of their religion, but the absence of conscription also appealed to nonpacifist Lutherans and Catholics who, in Europe, had feared being drafted and having to fight wars that might bring them into conflict with their co-religionists. Penn’s haven of toleration, which provided not only de facto religious freedom (as in Amsterdam) but de jure recognition of all religions, was established during the period of the seventeenth century when Huguenot children were being torn from their homes by the soldiers of Louis XIV in France, when the Inquisition still functioned as vigorously as it could in Spain and Portugal (and in their New World colonies), when Anabaptists were being persecuted throughout Europe by Calvinists and Lutherans, and when nearly everyone on the continent had reason to fear if he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when a new monarch of a different religion assumed power.

  The major factor in the hospitality of the English colonies to numerous religions was the abundance of unsettled land. Even if an official church like the one in Massachusetts was as quick to cry “heresy” as it would have been in Europe, the consequences were not nearly as dire, because there was ample room for convicted heretics to move on and practice their religion in a more hospitable space. The Massachusetts Puritan John Cotton dismissed concern about the banishment of Williams from the Bay Colony on the ground that exile, in America, simply meant moving on to what might be a more agreeable place. “The Jurisdiction (whence a man is banished) is but small,” he said, “and the Countrey round about it, large and fruitful: where a man may make his choice of variety of more pleasant, and profitable seats, then [sic] he leaveth behinde him. In which respect, Banishment in this countrey, is not counted so much a confinement, as an enlargement.”1 One colony’s heresy was another’s dissent, and in some of the colonies, dissent itself was simply another form of religion.

  The first century of colonization on the East Coast was characterized by constant pressure for religious freedom from a variety of immigrants, and conflicts were resolved or avoided—with some notable exceptions, like the Salem witch trials—through political negotiation and machinations rather than bloodshed. The story of Hutchinson’s theological rebellion, trial, and expulsion from Massachusetts is a singular case in point.

  Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591–1643) was born in Lincolnshire, England, into a heritage of religious individualism. Her father, Francis, a clergyman, went to prison three times for his unorthodox attitudes toward the Church of England. In 1578, John Aylmer, the bishop of London, ordered Marbury’s arrest after the latter charged that Elizabethan bishops were ordaining ignorant ministers who could barely read. “Though I fear not you, I fear the Lord,” Marbury told the Court of High Commission. When one of Aylmer’s colleagues exclaimed in horrified tones, “This fellow would have a preacher in every parish church!” Marbury replied that the Bible required this. Asked by Bishop Aylmer where the money would come from to educate such learned preachers, Marbury replied, “A man might cut a good large tong out of your hide, and it would not be missed.”2

  As this exchange makes clear, Anne’s astringent tongue and strong convictions were family as well as individual traits. In 1612, not long after her father’s death, she married William Hutchinson, a merchant from a prosperous family, and they eventually had fifteen children. Hutchinson’s maternal responsibilities did not, however, interfere with her growing commitment to the Puritan religion. She and her husband became close to Cotton, who immigrated to Massachusetts in 1633 because his teaching had been banned in England. In 1634, after Anne completed another pregnancy and gave birth, she and William followed Cotton to Massachusetts.

  Known as a skilled midwife, Anne found her experience in great demand in her new home. It seems likely that her well-attended theological discussions “for women only” grew out of her midwifery practice. At a time when everything was infused with religion, midwives had a spiritual as well as practical importance. In England, Catholic midwives had been suspected of secretly baptizing infants into the Roman church. After Protestantism was established as the state church, English midwives frequently had to take an oath affirming that no child they delivered would be baptized “by any Mass-Latine, service or other prayers than such as are appointed by the laws of the church of England.” Such an oath would not have been considered necessary in Massachusetts, where there were no Catholics in Hutchinson’s time.3 (This concern about baptism was not irrational for those who believed in the validity and permanence of infant christenings—regardless of the infant’s inability to consent or the parent’s wishes. In the nineteenth century, stealth baptisms of Jewish infants and small children by Catholic nurses—and even by other children—would be considered sufficient reason for authorities in the Papal States to remove “Catholic” children from their Jewish homes for instruction in the faith.)

  Hutchinson’s biblical discussions were eventually attended by men as well as women—another factor that brought her to the attention of the authorities. What threatened the Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts was not only the idea of a female preacher but Hutchinson’s belief in a personal relationship with God and in salvation by grace alone. (Opponents labeled such beliefs antinomian—literally, “anti-law.”) Although Hutchinson remained a Puritan by her own lights, her belief in the primacy of personal revelation was much closer to the Baptist faith and became characteristic of born-again Christians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the First and Second Great Awakenings in America. Moreover, Hutchinson’s views about war were closer to Quakerism than to Puritanism, and her fate may have been sealed by the opposition of some of her male supporters to the colonists’ armed conflict, beginning in 1637, with the Pequot Indians (many of whom were either killed or sold as slaves to other Indian tribes that had backed the winning English side).

  Hutchinson was brought to trial for her supposedly seditious preaching in the same year as the outbreak of the Pequot War. Governor John Winthrop presided over the trial in his “city on a hill,” and the full record of the proceedings (Calvinists, in America as well as in Europe, were meticu
lous record keepers) provides a fascinating insight into the real American religious past. The discourse at the trial was conducted at a high level, befitting a society that had made education a priority even while settlers were still struggling to make their land yield enough to feed their own families. As one historian puts it:

  Only six years after John Winthrop’s arrival in Salem harbor, the people of Massachusetts took from their own treasury the fund from which to found a university; so that while the tree-stumps were as yet scarcely weather-browned in their earliest harvest fields, and before the nightly howl of the wolf had ceased from the outskirts of their villages, they had made arrangements by which even in the wilderness their young men could at once enter upon the study of Aristotle and Thucydides, of Horace and Tacitus, and the Hebrew Bible….4

  But intellectualism and rationality are not identical, and the early Puritan brand of the former coexisted with numerous irrational and antirational beliefs—such as the convictions that witchcraft was both real and threatening, and that heresy and witchcraft were identical. Moreover, the study of the ancients, from Aristotle to the Hebrew Bible, was not for young women but for young men.

  Winthrop did not take long to get to the heart of the charges against Hutchinson—that she, a female, had dared to hold regular meetings in her home and had interpreted the Scriptures for a group that included both women and men. By what right, the governor asked, did Hutchinson “entertain” regular visitors for the purpose of theological discourse? Was she not breaking the commandment “Honor thy father and thy mother”? This question was based on the presumption that state and church authorities held the same moral and legal position in relation to citizens and congregants as a parent did to children.