This had already been apparent in the Advancement of Learning (1605), written by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counselor to King James I of England. Bacon insisted that all truth, even the most sacred doctrines of religion, must be subjected to the stringent critical methods of empirical science. If they contradicted proven facts and the evidence of our senses, they must be cast aside. None of the great insights of the past could be permitted to impede our creation of a glorious new future for humanity. The inventions of science would end human misery, Bacon believed, and inaugurate here on earth the millennial kingdom foretold by the prophets. In Bacon’s writings we sense the excitement of the new age. So confident was he, that he could see no conflict between the Bible and science, and, years before the condemnation of Galileo, he demanded complete intellectual liberty for the men of science, whose work was far too important for the human race to be obstructed by simpleminded clergymen. The Advancement of Learning amounted to a declaration of independence on the part of scientific rationalism, which sought emancipation from myth and declared that it alone could give human beings access to truth.
It was an important moment, marking the beginning of science as we know it in the modern West. Hitherto, scientific and rational exploration had always been conducted within a comprehensive mythology which had explained the meaning of these discoveries. The prevailing myth had always controlled these researches and put a brake on their application, as the limitations of conservative society demanded. But by the seventeenth century, European scientists were beginning to liberate themselves from these old constraints. There was no need for them any longer, since the factors that had held agrarian societies back were gradually being overcome. Bacon insisted that science alone was true. His view of science was, admittedly, very different from our own. For Bacon, scientific method consisted chiefly in gathering facts; he did not appreciate the importance of guesswork and hypothesis in scientific research. But Bacon’s definition of truth would be extremely influential, especially in the English-speaking countries. He believed that the only information upon which we could safely rely came from our five senses; anything else was pure fantasy. Philosophy, metaphysics, theology, art, imagination, mysticism, and mythology were all dismissed as irrelevant and superstitious because they could not be verified empirically.
People who subscribed to this wholly rational way of life but who wanted to be religious would have to find new ways of thinking about God and spirituality. We see the death of the mythical approach in the philosophy of the French scientist René Descartes (1596–1650), who was able to speak only in logoi, in rational language. His was a lonely vision. For Descartes, the universe was a lifeless machine, the physical world inert and dead. It could give us no information about the divine. The single living thing in the cosmos was the human mind, which could find certainty merely by turning in upon itself. We could not even be sure that anything besides our own doubts and thoughts existed. Descartes was a devout Catholic; he wanted to satisfy himself about God’s existence, but refused to go back to the primordial, imaginary past of myth and cult. Nor could he rely on the insights of prophets and holy texts. A man of the new age, he would not accept received ideas; the scientist must make his mind a tabula rasa. The sole truth was that supplied by mathematics or by such lapidary propositions as “What’s done cannot be undone,” which was irrefutably correct. Since the way back was closed, Descartes could only inch his way painfully forward.
One evening, sitting beside a wood stove, Descartes evolved the maxim Cogito, ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” This, he believed, was self-evident. The one thing of which we could be certain was our mind’s experience of doubt. But this revealed the limitation of the human mind, and the very notion of “limitation” would make no sense if we did not have a prior conception of “perfection.” A perfection that did not exist, however, would be a contradiction in terms. Ergo, the Ultimate Perfection—God—must be a reality.
(#litres_trial_promo) This so-called proof is unlikely to satisfy a modern unbeliever, and it shows the impotence of pure reason when faced with such issues. Rational thought is indispensable for our effective functioning in the world. It is at its best when directed toward a pragmatic goal or when, like Descartes, we withdraw from the mundane to consider something as objectively as possible. But when we ask why the world exists (if it does!) or whether life has meaning, reason can make little headway, and the object of our thought itself can become strange to us. Descartes beside his stove, in his cold, empty world, locked into his own uncertainty, and uttering a “proof” which is little more than a mental conundrum, embodies the spiritual dilemma of modern humanity.
Thus, at a time when science and unfettered rationality were forging brilliantly ahead, life was becoming meaningless for an increasing number of people, who, for the first time in human history, were having to live without mythology. The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) believed that there was a God, but for all practical purposes, God might just as well not exist. Like Luther, Hobbes saw the physical world as empty of the divine. God, Hobbes believed, had revealed himself at the dawn of human history and would do so again at its End. But until that time we had to get on without him, waiting, as it were, in the dark.
(#litres_trial_promo) For the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), an intensely religious man, the emptiness and the “eternal silence” of the infinite universe opened up by modern science inspired pure dread:
When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.
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Reason and logos were improving the lot of men and women in the modern world in a myriad practical ways, but they were not competent to deal with those ultimate questions that human beings seem forced, by their very nature, to ask and which, hitherto, had been the preserve of mythos. As a result, despair and alienation, as described by Pascal, have been a part of the modern experience.
But not for everybody. John Locke (1632–1704), who was one of the first to initiate the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, had none of Pascal’s existential angst. His faith in life and human reason was serene and confident. He had no doubts about God’s existence, even though, strictly speaking, he was aware that proving the reality of a deity that lay beyond our sense experience did not pass Bacon’s empirical test. Locke’s religion, relying entirely on reason, was similar to the deism espoused by some of the Jewish Marranos. He was fully convinced that the natural world gave ample evidence for a Creator and that if reason were allowed to shine forth freely, everybody would discover the truth for himself. False and superstitious ideas had only crept into the world because priests had used cruel and tyrannical methods, such as the Inquisition, to force the people to accept their orthodoxy. For the sake of true religion, therefore, the state must tolerate all manner of beliefs, and must concern itself solely with the practical administration and government of the community. Church and state must be separate, and neither must interfere in the business of the other. This was the Age of Reason, and for the first time in human history, Locke believed, men and women would be free, and, therefore, able to perceive the truth.
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This benign vision set the tone for the Enlightenment and the inspiring ideal of the modern, secular, tolerant state. The French and German Enlightenment philosophers also subscribed to the rational religion of deism, and saw the old mythical, revealed religions as outmoded. Since reason was the sole criterion of truth, the older faiths, based on a fictitious notion of “revelation,” had simply been naive versions of this natural religion and should be rejected. Faith had to be rational, argued the radical British theologian Matthew Tindal (1655–1733) and the Irish Roman-Catholic-turned-deist John Toland (1670–1722). Our natural reason was the only reliable way to arrive at sacred truth, and Christianity must be purged of the mysterious, the supernatural, and the miraculous. Revelation was unnecessary because it was quite possible for any human being to arrive at the truth by means of his or her unaided reasoning powers.
(#litres_trial_promo) As Newton had pointed out, reflection on the design of the physical universe provided irrefutable evidence for a Creator and First Cause. On the continent, the German historian Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) argued that Jesus had never claimed to be divine, and that his ambitions had been entirely political. Jesus should simply be revered as a great teacher, the founder of a “remarkable, simple, exalted and practical religion.”
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The old truths of mythos were now being interpreted as though they were logoi, an entirely new development that was, eventually, doomed to disappoint.
For at the same time as these theologians, philosophers, and historians proclaimed the supremacy of reason, the German rationalist Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) undercut the entire Enlightenment project. On the one hand, Kant issued yet another of the early modern declarations of independence. People must have the courage to throw off their dependence upon teachers, churches, and authorities and seek the truth for themselves. “Enlightenment is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage,” he wrote. “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his own understanding, without direction from another.”
(#litres_trial_promo) But on the other hand, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant argued that it was impossible to be certain that the order we think we discern in nature bore any relation at all to external reality. This “order” was simply the creation of our own minds; even the so-called scientific laws of Newton probably tell us more about human psychology than about the cosmos. When the mind receives information about the physical world outside itself through the senses, it has to reorganize this data according to its own internal structures in order to make any sense of it. Kant was wholly confident of the mind’s capacity to devise a viable rational vision for itself, but by showing that it was really impossible for human beings to escape from their own psychology, he also made it clear that there was no such thing as absolute truth. All our ideas were essentially subjective and interpretive. Where Descartes had seen the human mind as the sole, lonely denizen of a dead universe, Kant severed the link between humanity and the world altogether and shut us up within our own heads.
(#litres_trial_promo) At the same time as he had liberated humanity from tutelage, he had enclosed it in a new prison. As so often, modernity took with one hand what it gave with the other. Reason was enlightening and emancipating, but it could also estrange men and women from the world they were learning to control so effectively.
If there was no absolute truth, what became of God? Unlike the other deists, Kant believed that it was impossible to prove God’s existence, since the deity was beyond the reach of the senses and, therefore, inaccessible to the human mind.
(#litres_trial_promo) Faced with the ultimate, reason alone had nothing to say. The only comfort that Kant could offer was that it was, by the same token, impossible to disprove God’s existence either. Kant was himself a devout man, and did not regard his ideas as hostile to religion. They would, he thought, liberate faith from a wholly inappropriate reliance upon reason. He was utterly convinced, he wrote at the end of his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), of the moral law inscribed within each human being, which, like the grandeur of the heavens, filled him with awe and wonder. But the only rational grounds he could find for the deist God was the quite dubious argument that without such a Deity and the possibility of an afterlife, it was hard to see why we should act morally. This again, as a proof, is highly unsatisfactory.
(#litres_trial_promo) Kant’s God was simply an afterthought, tacked onto the human condition. Apart from innate conviction, there was no real reason why a rationalist should bother to believe. As a deist and a man of reason, Kant had no time for any of the traditional symbols or practices by means of which alone men and women of the past had evoked a sense of the sacred, independently of reason. Kant was deeply opposed to the idea of divine law, which, in his eyes, was a barbarous denial of human autonomy, and he could see no point in mysticism, prayer, or ritual.
(#litres_trial_promo) Without a cult, any notion of religion and the divine would become tenuous, unnecessary, and untenable.
Yet, paradoxically, the emergence of reason as the sole criterion of truth in the West coincided with an eruption of religious irrationality. The great Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which raged through many of the Protestant and Catholic countries of Europe and even made a brief appearance in the American colonies, showed that a cult of scientific rationalism cannot always hold darker forces at bay. Mysticism and mythology had taught men and women to deal with the world of the unconscious. It may not be accidental that at a time when religious faith was beginning to abandon this type of spirituality, the subconscious ran amok. The Witch Craze has been described as a collective fantasy, shared by men, women, and their inquisitors throughout Christendom. People believed that they had sexual intercourse with demons, and flew through the air at night to take part in satanic rituals and perverse orgies. Witches were thought to worship the Devil instead of God in a parody of the Mass—a reversal that could represent a widespread unconscious rebellion against traditional faith. God was beginning to seem so remote, alien, and demanding that for some he was becoming demonic: subconscious fears and desires were projected upon the imaginary figure of Satan, depicted as a monstrous version of humanity.
(#litres_trial_promo) Thousands of men and women convicted of witchcraft were either hanged or burned at the stake before the Craze burned itself out. The new scientific rationalism, which took no cognizance of these deeper levels of the mind, was powerless to control this hysterical outburst. A massive, fearful, and destructive un-reason has also been part of the modern experience.
These were frightening times for the people of the West on both sides of the Atlantic. The Reformation had been a fearful rupture, dividing Europe into viciously hostile camps. Protestants and Catholics had persecuted one another in England; there had been a civil war in France between Protestants and Catholics (1562–63), and a nationwide massacre of Protestants in 1572. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) had devastated Europe, drawing in one nation after another, a power struggle with a strong religious dimension which killed any hope of a reunited Europe. There was political unrest also. In 1642, England was convulsed by a civil war that resulted in the execution of King Charles I (1649) and the establishment of a republic under the Puritan Parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, its powers were curtailed by Parliament. More democratic institutions were painfully and bloodily emerging in the West. Even more catastrophic was the French Revolution of 1789, which was succeeded by a reign of terror and a military dictatorship, before order was restored under Napoleon. The French Revolution’s legacy to the modern world was Janus-faced: it promoted the benevolent Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but it also left a memory of malignant state terrorism, which has been equally influential. In the American colonies also, the Seven Years War (1756–63), in which Britain and France fought one another over their imperial possessions, raged down the eastern coast of America with fearful casualties. This led directly to the War of Independence (1775–83) and the creation of the first secular republic of the modern world. A more just and tolerant social order was coming to birth in the West, but this was only achieved after almost two centuries of violence.
In the turmoil, people turned to religion, and some found that in these new circumstances, old forms of faith no longer worked. Antinomian movements, similar to the later Shabbatean revolt in Judaism, attempted a break with the past and reached incoherently for something new. In seventeenth-century England, after the Civil War, Jacob Bauthumely and Lawrence Clarkson (1615–67) preached an incipient atheism. A separate, distant deity was an idolatry, Bauthumely argued in The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650); God had been incarnate in men other than Jesus and the divine existed in all things, even in sin. For Clarkson in The Single Eye, sin was simply a human fantasy, and evil a revelation of God. Abiezer Coppe (1619–72), a radical Baptist, would flagrantly break sexual taboos and curse in public. Soon, he believed, Christ, the “Mighty Leveller,” would return and sweep this present rotten and hypocritical order away.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was antinomianism also in the American colonies of New England. John Cotton (1585–1652), a popular Puritan preacher who arrived in Massachusetts in 1635, insisted that good works were pointless and a good life useless: God could save us without these man-made rules. His disciple Anne Hutchinson (1590–1643) claimed that she received personal revelations from God and felt no need to read her Bible or perform good works.
(#litres_trial_promo) These rebels were, perhaps, trying to express their inchoate sense that old restraints no longer applied in the new world, where life was changing so fundamentally. In a period of constant innovation, it was inevitable that some would strike out for religious and ethical independence and innovation too.
Others tried to express the ideals of the new age in a religious way. George Fox (1624–91), founder of the Society of Friends, preached an enlightenment that was not dissimilar to that later described by Kant. His Quakers should seek a light within their own hearts; Fox taught them to “make use of their own understanding, without direction from another.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Religion must, he believed, in this age of science, be “experimental,” verified not by an authoritative institution but by personal experience.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Society of Friends espoused the new democratic ideal: all human beings were equal. Quakers should not doff their hats to anybody. Unlearned men and women need not defer to clerics with university degrees, but must make their own views known. Similarly, John Wesley (1703–91) attempted to apply scientific method and system to spirituality. His “Methodists” followed a strict regimen of prayer, Bible-reading, fasting, and philanthropy. Like Kant, Wesley welcomed the emancipation of faith from reason, and declared that religion was not a doctrine in the head but a light in the heart. It could even be a blessing that the rational and historical evidence for Christianity had become “clogged and encumbered” in recent years. This would free men and women, forcing them “to look into themselves and attend to the light shining in their hearts.”
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Christians were becoming divided: some followed the philosophes and tried to demystify and rationalize their faith; others jettisoned reason altogether. This was a worrying development that was especially marked in the American colonies. One of the repercussions of this split would be the development of fundamentalism in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early years, most of the colonists, except the Puritan New Englanders, had been indifferent toward religion; it seemed as though the colonies were becoming almost entirely secularized by the end of the seventeenth century.
(#litres_trial_promo) But during the early eighteenth century, the Protestant denominations revived, and Christian life became more formal in the new world than in the old. Even such dissenting sects as the Quakers, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians, which had all originally rejected ecclesiastical authority and insisted on the right to follow their own leadings, set up Assemblies in Philadelphia that kept a sharp eye on the local communities, supervised the clergy, vetted the preachers, and snuffed out heresy. All three denominations flourished as a result of this coercive but modernizing centralization, and numbers increased dramatically. At the same time, the Church of England was established in Maryland, and elegant churches transformed the skylines of New York City, Boston, and Charleston.
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But while on the one hand there was a move for greater control and discipline, there was also a vehement, grassroots reaction against this rationalized restraint. Conservative religion had always seen mythology and reason as complementary; each would be the poorer without the other. This had also been the case in religious matters, where reason was often allowed to play an important, if subsidiary, role. But the new tendency to sideline or even to jettison reason in some of the new Protestant movements (a development that can be traced back to Luther) led to a disturbing irrationality. The Quakers were so called because, in the early days, they would often express their religious transports so vehemently: they were known to tremble, howl, and yell, making—an observer noted—the dogs bark, the cattle run madly about, and the pigs scream.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Puritans, radical Calvinists who had started by opposing what they deemed the “popery” of the Church of England, also had an extreme, tumultuous spirituality. Their “born-again” conversions were often traumatic; many experienced an agony of guilt, fear, and paralyzing doubt before the breakthrough, when they sank blissfully into the arms of God. Their conversion gave them great energy and enabled them to play leading roles in early modernity. They were good capitalists and often good scientists. But sometimes the effects of grace wore off and Puritans suffered a relapse, falling into chronic depressive states and in a few cases even committing suicide.
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Conservative religion had not usually been hysterical in this way. Its rituals and cult had been designed to attune people to reality. Bacchanalian cults and frenzied ecstasy had certainly occurred but had involved the few rather than the majority. Mysticism was not for the masses. At its best, it was a one-to-one process, in which the adept was carefully supervised to make sure that he or she did not fall into unhealthy psychic states. The descent into the unconscious was an enterprise demanding great skill, intelligence, and discipline. When expert guidance was not available, the results could be deplorable. The crazed and neurotic behavior of some of the medieval Christian saints, which was often due to inadequate spiritual direction, showed the dangers of an undisciplined cultivation of alternate states of mind. The reforms of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross had been designed precisely to correct such abuses. When mystical journeys were undertaken en masse, they could degenerate into crowd hysteria, the nihilism of the Sabbatarians, or the mental imbalance of some of the Puritans.
Emotional excess became a feature of American religious life during the eighteenth century. It was especially evident in the First Great Awakening, which erupted in Northampton, Connecticut, in 1734 and was chronicled by the learned Calvinist minister Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Before the Awakening, Edwards explained, the people of Northampton had not been particularly religious, but in 1734 two young people died suddenly, and the shock (backed up by Edwards’s own emotive preaching) plunged the town into a frenzied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. People stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible. Within six months, three hundred people in the town had experienced a wrenching “born-again” conversion. They alternated between soaring highs and devastating lows; sometimes they were quite broken and “sank into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God.” At other times they would “break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping.”
(#litres_trial_promo) The revival was just burning itself out when George Whitefield (1714–70), an English Methodist preacher, toured the colonies and sparked a second wave. During his sermons, people fainted, wept, and shrieked; the churches shook with the cries of those who imagined themselves saved and the groans of the unfortunate who were convinced that they were damned. It was not only the simple and unlearned who were so affected. Whitefield had an ecstatic reception at Harvard and Yale, and finished his tour in 1740 with a mass rally where he preached to 30,000 people on Boston Common.
Edwards showed the dangers of this type of emotionalism in his account of the Awakening. When the revival died down in Northampton, one man was so cast down that he committed suicide, convinced that this loss of ecstatic joy could only mean that he was predestined to Hell. In other towns too, “multitudes … seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, as if somebody had spoken to them, ‘Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!’” Two people went mad with “strange enthusiastic delusions.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Edwards insisted that most people were calmer and more peaceful than before the Awakening, but his apologia shows how perilous it could be to imagine that religion is purely an affair of the heart. Once faith was conceived as irrational, and the inbuilt constraints of the best conservative spirituality were jettisoned, people could fall prey to all manner of delusions. The rituals of a cult were carefully designed to lead people through a trauma so that they came out healthily on the other side of it. This was clear in the rites of Lurianic Kabbalah, where the mystic was allowed to express his grief and abandonment but made to finish the vigil joyfully. Similarly, the popular Shii processions in honor of Husain gave people an outlet for their frustration and anger, but in a ritualized form: they did not usually run amok after the ceremony was over and vent their rage on the rich and powerful. But in Northampton, there was no stylized cult to help people through their rite of passage. Everything was spontaneous and undisciplined. People were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions and even to indulge them. For a few, this proved fatal.
Nevertheless, Edwards was convinced that the Awakening was the work of God. It revealed that a new age had dawned in America and would spread to the rest of the world. By means of such revivals, Edwards was convinced, Christians would establish God’s kingdom on earth; society would reflect the truth and justice of God himself. There was nothing politically radical about the Awakening. Edwards and Whitefield did not urge their audiences to rebel against British rule, campaign for democratic government, or demand an even distribution of wealth, but the experience did help to prepare the way for the American Revolution.
(#litres_trial_promo) The ecstatic experience left many Americans who would be quite unable to relate to the deist Enlightenment ideals of the revolutionary leaders, with the memory of a blissful state of freedom. The word “liberty” was used a great deal to describe the joy of conversion, and a liberation from the pain and sorrow of normal life. Whitefield and Edwards both encouraged their congregations to see their own ecstatic faith as superior to that of the elite, who had not been born again and regarded the frenzy with rationalist disdain. Many who remembered the hauteur of those clerics who condemned the revivals, were left with a strong distrust of institutional authority, which became part of the Christian experience of many American Calvinists. The Awakening had been the first mass movement in American history; it gave the people a heady experience of taking part in earth-shattering events that would, they believed, change the course of history.
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But the Awakening also split the Calvinist denominations of the colonies down the middle. People who became known as Old Lights, such as the Boston ministers Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66) and Charles Chauncy (1705–87), believed that Christianity should be a rational, enlightened faith, were appalled by the hysteria of the revivals, and distrusted their anti-intellectual bias.
(#litres_trial_promo) Old Lights tended to come from the more prosperous sectors of society, while the lower classes gravitated toward the emotional piety of the breakaway New Light churches. During the 1740s, over two hundred congregations left existing denominations and founded their own churches.
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1741, the Presbyterian New Lights broke away from the Presbyterian synod, establishing their own colleges for the training of ministers, notably Nassau Hall in Princeton, New Jersey. Later the split was healed, but in the interim the New Lights had acquired a separatist, institutional identity that would be crucial during the emergence of the fundamentalist movement in the late nineteenth century.
