Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was not French, but Swiss: a
Calvinst from Geneva. He was, perhaps
most famous for his novel Emile (aka On Education). Moving far from his Calvinist roots (Rousseau
would convert to Catholicism c 1728 and then convert back to Calvinism in 1754
though he was by no means a professing Christian, his conversions being more a
matter of political and social advantage) Rousseau believed in the inherent
goodness of the human individual. He
found the idea of original sin repugnant and believed that the human person in
the state of nature is blameless: the bon
sauvage, noble savage. (Sauvage in French, like the original
meaning of the English term “savage” does not connote barbarism but simply the
human person living wild and free in nature.) He blamed human corruption on the
growth of human society that separates the human person from the natural state.
He saw society as essential as persons must cooperate in order to survive but
he also saw it degenerating into competition from which springs a variety of human
evils. Rousseau, reflecting his Swiss
roots, was an ardent believer in republican government and direct democracy—the
participation of the largest possible number of citizenry in directly making
political decisions. His influence on American thought, especially Jefferson,
cannot be missed. As to religion, while
he remained an admirer (even in his Catholic years) of John Calvin for his
legislative career in Geneva, he was very post-orthodox in his theology. He was a Deist though, unlike most Deists who
saw God as impersonal and distant, Rousseau had a sort of natural mysticism
that made him profoundly aware of and sentimental towards the manifestations of
God in nature. Like other Enlightenment
figures he advanced the idea of the freedom of conscience and believed that
each person should be free to follow the religious beliefs and practices to
which he or she was drawn.
Voltaire (1694-1778) (born François-Marie
Arouet, was educated by the Jesuits at the College
Louis le Grand in Paris where he—like so many educated by the Jesuits, lost
his Catholic faith. He adopted the name
(nom de plume, nom de guerre) Voltaire
in his mid-twenties. It was an anagram of the Latin form of his name Arouet. He was an exceptionally witty man but as we
know from our friends among the Katholik Krazies, not everyone is blessed with
a sense of humor and his wit won him the enmity of one of its victims, the
Regent, Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. When
you piss of a Regent it never goes well for you, especially under the cherished
ancien regime, and Voltaire ended up
in the Bastille for eleven months. His
friends—of which he was always to have many—won his release on the promise he
would go to exile and he fled to the Netherlands. There he met a lovely young Huguenot (French
Protestant) Catherine Olympe Dunoyer and married her. He sneaked back into France under somewhat
false pretenses—and, as it was against the law for a Catholic (which he still
was, at least nominally) to be married to a Protestant, illegally. He enjoyed the friendship and patronage of
Madame de Pompadour, the king’s mistress and this helped him—sometimes—to avoid
the various penalties his opinions earned him.
Voltaire went after the Catholic Church and
its position of being the established religion in France. He firmly believed in the separation of
Church and State and freedom for the individual to practice the religion of his
choice—or no religion. He was a most
prodigious writer of plays, poems, novels, letters and essays as well as
scientific and historical works, all of which advanced his very avant-garde ideas. His brilliance at satire offended many in the
establishment and while he had numerous friends outside the court, at court he
had more than his share of enemies.
Voltaire rejected classic Christianity for a
vague belief in a creator. He did have
quite a bit of admiration for Hinduism, though how he became familiar with it
except through books, I can’t be sure. Sometimes
we develop an admiration for something not so much because we know it or
understand it, but because it is contrary to that which society has established for
us.
He was very skeptical of the Bible as he felt that God’s own
moral ambiguities—telling various Israelite leaders that they should kill this
person or annihilate that nation—only justified violence and oppression. Yet he was tremendously admiring of nuns,
especially those who served the sick and the poor as he saw a deep idealism in
them. He saw that Christianity was useful in as that it imposed a certain moral
code upon the common and uneducated people but he felt it had no place among
those who could think for themselves. He is quoted as having said: “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities.” But perhaps my
favorite quote of his is that on his deathbed, when asked by a priest to
renounce Satan, he said: “This is no
time to make new enemies.” Humorous to
the last. Hopefully God appreciates the
humor; otherwise we are all in deep trouble.
A somewhat less known figure of the Enlightenment was Denis
Diderot (1713-1784). He advocated
inoculation against smallpox and he compiled the Encyclopédie which is an anthology of Enlightenment
thought. Unlike most of the philosophes,
Diderot was not a Deist but an atheist.
His antagonism against religion may have been due in great part to the
death from exhaustion of his much beloved sister, a nun in a very austere
convent. My reason for including Diderot
is that he has my favorite quote of all the Enlightenment philosophes: “Man will never be free until the last king is
strangled with the guts of the last priest.”
I have it hanging in my office right alongside one of my other favorite
quotes from a far less distinguished source: si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Finally,
we need to backtrack a bit and deal with the Englishman Sir Issac Newton whom I
have somehow overlooked. Newton
(1642-1727), like my buddy Stephen Maturin, was a natural philosopher: i.e. a
scientist, and perhaps the most important scientist of all western
history. A great mathematician, it was
Newton who established once and for all that the sun, not the earth, is the
center of the solar system. In addition
to physics, mathematics, and astronomy, Newton did extensive work in
optics. Given his particular position at
Cambridge he was expected to be ordained in the Church of England but he
obtained a royal warrant excusing him from Holy Orders. He never gave a reason but it seems while
devout he was not orthodox in as that he did not subscribe to the Doctrine of
the Trinity. Like many in his day He saw
God as the Master Mathematician, the Creator of the Universe and Newton
attributed the unflinching order of things in the natural realm to the Divine
Mind.
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