Continued Reflections on the Enlightenment

Awaiting the Encyclical 

Well, back to our critical look at the Enlightenment, perhaps timely as we await the much anticipated encyclical on the environment, Laudato Sii and we see how various Catholics regard the relationship between science and Christian faith.  Actually, I initially had a picture of Caitlyn Jenner posted on this entry for reasons that will become clear towards the end of the posting, but I think Francis' upcoming Encyclical might be even more controversial, at least for those who are trying to live in the pre-modern world.  

As I wrote in the previous entry, the Enlightenment has certainly irrevocably shaped the way we think in Western culture and there is much good for that.  While the medieval universities of Catholic Europe were noted for their freedom of scientific inquiry and philosophical debate, in the sixteenth century religion increasingly tried to impose an intellectual stranglehold over European culture.   It was no accident that this was also a time of political absolutism with the rise of nation states and absolute monarchies throughout much of Europe.  The Protestant Reformations and the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the 17^th and 18^th centuries resisted that absolutism in matters both political and intellectual but in some ways, we shall see, there was an attempt by Enlightenment thinkers to impose a monolithic intellectual framework on Western culture that was as tyrannical and exclusionary as the absolutism as that against which the philosophes were rebelling.

I grew up, as I mentioned in the previous posting, in a thoroughly Catholic environment and yet in one that also idolized Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette.  As I have grown older and studied more—and remember, I am a historian by training, but an Europeanist—I am having some second thoughts about the philosophical basis of our Republic.  Don’t get me wrong.  The cause for independence was a just one and the idea of a Republic remains a good one.  But I think there are some serious bugs that were programmed into the American myth that we need to reexamine and perhaps change the future course of our society by a few degrees. 

The Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) is a pivotal figure in the Enlightenment and in the development of our national culture.  Locke was a physician and so had a scientific training.  He was a member of the Royal Society and worked with Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, and the polymath, Robert Hooke. Religiously he was Low Church and politically he was a Whig (one of the first) and opposed to Royal prerogatives.  He supported the cause of William and Mary against James II not only out of distrust of James’ Catholicism but because he was opposed to the sort of absolutism represented by the senior branch of the Stuart line.  Locke was, in addition to his being a medical man,  a philosopher and was especially concerned about the philosophy of government.  Locke believed that life, liberty, and property are natural rights to which all are entitled.  He also believed that the human person was by nature reasonable and tolerant and that our rational nature would lead us to make moral decisions.  This confidence in the goodness of human nature is reflective of a certain Pelagianism that overlooks the effects of original sin in the human person and it would influence later philosophes and help produce the un-self-reflective moral naïveté of a Jefferson and Franklin.  Although Locke had begun as an orthodox Christian, he soon devolved into Unitarian rationalism that rejected the philosophical conundrum of a Trinitarian deity and the consequent dependent doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. 

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher who very much concentrated on economics.  Smith had a passion for the idea of liberty and saw the essential importance of the human person have the liberty needed to acquire wealth.  He recognized the self-interest that motivates the human person and believed that rational self-interest is the foundation of economic prosperity.  While his insights about self-interest reflect the Calvinist environment in which he had grown up, Smith does not see it as sinful but rather as the foundation for strong political and economic good.  Margaret Thatcher carried a copy of Smith’s Wealth of Nations in her purse throughout her political career. Adam Smith had long before left his Calvinist Roots in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland for belief in an impersonal Deity, impervious to our prayers and inattentive to our moral failings, but he was not, strictly speaking, either a Deist or an atheist.

David Hume, another Scots humanist and an intimate of Adam Smith’s, was an atheist however.  Hume and Smith were both convinced that moral behavior was entirely a matter of sentiment without any objective anchoring.  For most Enlightenment thinkers truth did not exist as an absolute, or—for those for whom it did—it existed only as an abstract concept and never in the particulars of human choices.  There was always this radical subjectivity in the realm of the right and the wrong.  Hume saw Catholicism as superstition and most Protestantism as having devolved into nothing more than enthusiasm.  Religion itself, he believed, was rooted in a dread of the unknown.  This would lead later generations of thinkers to see religion, or even faith, merely as a neurotic projection. 

Unlike other Enlightenment figures of whom we have so far written, Baruch Spinoza did not grow up in a Christian—Protestant or Catholic—home, but an orthodox Jewish one in Amsterdam to which his ancestors had fled when the Jews were exiled from Spain in 1492.  Nonetheless, like many of his Christian counterparts, he early parted ways with the doctrinal demands of his religion and by the age of 23 had been expelled from his synagogue.  Philosophically Spinoza was a materialist.  Spinoza saw a mechanistic universe by which nothing proceeds by chance but which is rigidly determined by the laws of nature.  Human ethics, on the other hand, are highly subjective and nothing is either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil but finds its moral worth in the particular context.  Though Spinoza’s work is open to various nuances, most regard him as being a pantheist, that is as holding that the material universe and God are one and the same.  Thus Spinoza’s universe is unbendingly regulated according to its own laws.  Moreover there is a fundamental unity to all that exists.  Only the realm of the material has an objective reality; there is nothing that transcends concrete material existence. 

A final philosopher at whom I would like to look for this posting is Joseph Priestly (1733-1804).  Here we come back to a philosopher who was rooted in the sciences as well as theology and political theory.  As a scientist he had isolated oxygen in its gaseous state. He also invented soda water and, like Benjamin Franklin, experimented with and wrote on electricity.  Coming from a non-Conformist (Protestant but not Church of England) background himself, Priestly developed a strong political argument for religious freedom for every individual stating that the State should stay away from limiting the individual conscience.  Religiously Priestly moved, like many others, from orthodox belief in the Trinity to the more rational Unitarianism.  He was a strong supporter of the French Revolution even as it moved to the excesses of the Terror and the Directory.   He argued with Edmund Burke about the role of religion in society, arguing that religion should play no part in civic life but be limited solely to one’s personal life.  By 1794 his political and religious views had made him so unpopular in England that he and his family moved to the new American Republic, settling in Pennsylvania.

I think we can see the fatal cracks in the Enlightenment beginning to show.  A healthy spirit of inquiry is gradually being replaced by a cynicism towards any received tradition.  There is no attempt to integrate new discoveries with established knowledge, but only to reject out of hand that which does not fit the new world view.  Whereas in the physical sciences  there is an observable objectivity to which the newly discovered must measure and against which the old ideas can be judged, for many of the philosophes of the Enlightenment raw subjectivity was often the only measure required for their philosophical abstractions. And if in the world of Counter-Reformation absolutism, theological rigidity held learning bound, now cold rationalism, or subjectivity masquerading as rationalism, exercised that same stranglehold.   

I am not sure that we do not see some of the same uncritical thinking today.  For many neo-trad Catholics Pope Francis’ concern about the environment is the result of his having drunk the pseudo-scientific Kool-Aid of the political left when in fact like so many krazies they themselves ignore the vast body of scientific evidence that threatens their pre-existent world-view where the industrialized nations by right exploit the developing societies.  But such stupidity is not the only fault today.  Even for main-line Catholics there is a hesitancy to look at the scientific questions needed to better understand the complex issues of gender identity, embryonic and fetal development, same-sex attraction, and other questions that have an intense social urgency.  On the other hand, we see main-line Protestant churches blithely overthrowing established moralities solely on subjective argument and without serious theological reflection, and we see our larger secularized society totally adrift and at the mercy of fast-changing public opinions when it comes to complicated issues regarding human life and dignity.  “Right” and “wrong” are mere social constructs and any sort of ethical cohesion in society is coming apart at the seams.  And the average citizen gets his political and moral compass from sound-bites that do not require any deep critical reflection. 

We have a huge amount of work to do in our society to build a future in a rapidly evolving world.  The information explosion has opened up what seems to be an infinite amount of information that needs to be examined, reflected on, and integrated into a consistent socio-political philosophy that can give us a common ground to build a society in which the common good is the guiding principle and the rights and dignity of all and of each can be established and protected.  This requires the scientific exploration of the Enlightenment but it also requires a philosophical discipline that was for the most part lacking and which has left us in 21^st century America in a house built on sand.  

James Madison, the Constitution, and "A Christian Nation?"

James Madison, Architect of the American
Constitution

The next of our founding fathers we want to look at in regards to whether or not the United States is by design of our Founding Fathers a Christian Nation, or a Judeo-Christian nation, is James Madison, the principal architect of the United States Constitution.  Madison, like Washington, was an Anglican/Episcopalian.  (Anglican until the Bishop of London renounced jurisdiction over the American Church upon English recognition of American independence in 1783 with the consequent result that American Anglicans were now an autonomous religious body and came to be known as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.)  Madison was not particularly devout and seems to have worn his Christian faith somewhat casually although his wife, the famously extroverted Dolly, converted from the Quaker faith in which she had been raised to the Episcopal Church.  Dolly, like many of the wives of the founders of the Republic, was more religious than her husband.  Madison’s religious beliefs are particularly important given his role in the Constitution of the United States.    

     In the first years of the American Republic we were governed by The Articles of Confederation, a constitution that conceived of the nation as a loose affiliation of autonomous states pledged to collaboration rather than as a single nation with a sovereign government.  The system outlined by the Articles did not work.  It was ineffectual in dealing with issues such as the immense debt incurred by the American Revolution as well as matters of foreign policy.  Collaboration under the Articles depended on the mutual trust among the States but the divisions that would eventually lead to Civil War some eighty years later were already beginning to fester, imperiling the unity of the new nation.  It was clear to many, though not to all, that a stronger federal government had to be designed.  A convention was called to refashion the Articles of Confederation but once in session and without explicit authorization from the Continental Congress that convoked such an assembly, the convention decided to scrap the Articles and replace it with an entirely new Constitution.  Given that so many of the heroes of the Revolution were members of that Convention—Washington, Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, among others (Jefferson and Adams were abroad on Diplomatic Missions) the members of the Constitutional Convention got away with their bait-and-switch coup and our present Constitution was the result.  It was not an easy struggle.   There were those among the great founders who were appalled that so much had been taken from the sovereignty of the several states and given over to the national government.  Moreover, they not only saw the danger to the States, but saw the rights of individual imperiled by the failure of the new Constitution to explicitly guarantee them.  It was agreed that as soon as the Constitution was approved it would be necessary to amend it with a “Bill of Rights” that would make explicit the rights that were taken as due the individual under the English Common Law tradition dating back to Magna Carta. 

     Madison did not single-handedly write the Constitution.  No one person wrote it.  He did not even serve the role to the Constitution that Jefferson had for the Declaration of Independence.  The Constitution was produced by incessant argument and debate over each point but no individual was as active in that discussion and debate process as was James Madison.  In the four months of the convention (May-September 1787) Madison spoke over 200 times.  He clearly articulated a plan for government and when it was necessary to come to compromise, as it was time after time on point after point, it was Madison who guided the way out of each impasse.    

      When the Constitution was finally ratified it was Madison who then took up the cause for a Bill of Rights.  It was not at first a popular cause among the leaders of the new government although it certainly was a matter of concern in several of the States and among the citizenry at large.  Congress and the Executive branch were busy trying to get the Constitution itself to work and were reluctant to begin amending it.  Nevertheless Madison was able to guide the passage of the first ten amendments which we now call the Bill of Rights.  He did not get everything he wanted.  For example, Madison wanted an amendment that would assert the sovereignty of the national government over that of the individual States—an amendment that some historians believe would have prevented the Civil War, or at least robbed secession of any constitutional legitimacy.  (It would have interesting consequences for several of today’s issues as well.)  Nevertheless, the Bill of Rights was eventually passed and quickly ratified by the states. 

      The first amendment guarantees: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

      The phrase that interests us in this question of our being a Christian nation is the idea that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibition the free exercise thereof.  It is clear from the text that not only is no one Church to be established—or proscribed—but religion itself is neither to be established nor proscribed. 

      Madison was a protégé of Thomas Jefferson and while he may or may not have subscribed to Jefferson’s deist philosophy, he clearly subscribed to Jefferson’s political philosophy articulated in Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.  Madison had worked with Baptist preacher, Elijah Craig (after whom the designer Bourbon is named), in making sure that there would be constitutional guarantee for religious liberty.  Craig had served time in jail for preaching without a license in the days when the Anglican Church was established by law in Virginia and non-Anglicans were forbidden to preach or hold services.  While an Episcopalian himself (his cousin, also James Madison, was the first Episcopal Bishop of Virginia) Madison clearly wanted to make sure that the no religion was set up to have a claim of precedence over others in either Virginia or the new Republic.  It would be inconsistent with his record to say that the “Father of the Constitution” saw the United States as a Christian Nation in the sense that Christianity (or any other religion) had a pride of place among various systems of belief or thought recognized by law or governmental courtesy in the American Republic whom he had done more than any other individual to shape.