Strange Bedfellows: More Enlightenment Thinkers

I am a great fan of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin series of novels (The movie Master and Commander being a mash-up of several) and if your read the novels attentively you notice that the real hero of the series is not the somewhat dense and amoral navel commander Jack Aubrey, but his devoutly Catholic surgeon and side-kick and intensely intimate best friend, Stephen Maturin. (At times the relationship seems to be latently—or maybe even discreetly—homosexual.)  Stephen Maturin is not only a brilliant surgeon but also a secret British agent, an ardent republican determined to bring down Napoleon.  Several times in the 21½ novels Maturin expresses his contempt for “that scoundrel Rousseau.”  He is referring to Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of the leading philosophes of the Enlightenment. 

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.  

God's Anger; our Anger

In my most recent posting, I mentioned the pseudo-revelations given to Melanie Calvet, one of the seers of the reported vision of Our Lady at LaSalette in France on September 19, 1846.  I mentioned that the local bishop, Philibert de Bruillard, did a careful investigation of the children and their story and in 1851, after submitting the details of the vision to a commission of distinguished theologians, announced that the children’s stories were most likely true and permitted a cult to Our Lady of La Salette.  Later that same year, Pope Pius IX approved of devotion to Our Lady of LaSalette.  The revelations reported at that time by Melanie Calvet and her fellow seer, Maximin Giraud, are well within the realm of orthodoxy.  The problem is that Melanie seems to have been a very troubled individual and as the years passed she kept adding to the “revelations.”  These additions not only were not approved by Church authorities, but in fact ended up being condemned by  the Holy See.  The condemnations were not without some self-interest on the part of Church authorities as they tended to be increasingly anti-clerical and undermine the authority of the hierarchy. But they also tended to reflect the anti-Semitic and monarchist views of the French political right wing of the late 19^th century.  Nevertheless, they have enjoyed a certain popularity in certain Catholic circles and especially since the Second Vatican Council have been used to “prove” the “disastrous” course the Church has taken with the Council’s program of reform and renewal in the Church. 

It might be interesting to take a bit of a retrospective on the reform of the Church over the last fifty years, but for this posting what I want to consider is the question: why does the apocalyptic view of history which is represented by Calvet’s revelations have such a hold over certain Catholics?

What do I mean by “apocalyptic view of history”?  There is a theme that emerges in Calvet’s alleged revelations that God is angry with the world for its abandonment to sin and, were it not for the Blessed Virgin Mary holding back his divine wrath, would destroy the world.  This theme is by no means limited to Calvet but has been extremely popular in many circles through the 20^th century and still surfaces among certain factions and to advance certain agenda—particularly those of a rigid and unexamined moralist cast that sees not only the world but often the Church in apostasy.  This later idea that the Church is in apostasy is the basis of the sede-vacantist claim that popes since the Second Vatican Council are not legitimate and this claim of the Church falling into apostasy, or the threat of it falling into apostasy, has found a new audience in those alarmed by the direction of the Church under Pope Francis.  I have, in my previous posting, referred to one blog that consistently refers to Melanie Calvet’s ramblings to attack the papacy of Pope Francis.

How can the problem of the Divine Wrath be stated in a way consistent with sound Catholic theology?  Again, I am a historian and not a theologian but the danger in this sort of apocalyptic view of history is the denial of the efficacy of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice.  This view of God, ready and anxious to inflict punishment on the world for its sinfulness, implies that the redeeming sacrifice of Christ at Calvary has not, in fact, been sufficient atonement for human sinfulness and that God’s patience is thus worn out again and he is about to wreak retribution on the world for unatoned sins. On the other hand, we need to take off the rose colored glasses of our post-modern world and acknowledge the serious moral crisis our world is in. 

When I say that our world is in serious moral crisis I am not limiting this to the effects of the sexual revolution as do most of those who are fascinated by the idea of an impending divine punishment.  I do believe, however, that we must reestablish for ourselves a sound standard of private moral behavior.  I do not think this is a simple task.  There are serious moral issues that need to be looked at today and given a thorough moral re-evaluation.  The breakdown of the family threatens the fabric of society itself.  We need to look and see why marriage is no longer a stable institution.  We need to look and examine the consequences of raising children outside the family structure.  What are the consequences of divorce for the raising of children?  Why is commitment seemingly beyond the capacity of so many in our society?  We need to look at contraception and evaluate its effects on the family and on the larger levels of society.  We need to ask ourselves if contraception has broken the link between sexual intimacy and marriage, thus removing commitment from the equation of intimacy.  We need to ask serious questions about whether pre-marital sexual relations trivialize sexual intimacy in such ways that it has negative consequences for the ability of people to seriously bond.  We need to look and see if children can be healthily raised in families by same-sex couples.  We need to look scientifically at same-sex attraction and let our moral understanding of same-sex relationships be shaped by scientific facts beyond cultural prejudices.  These are not simple questions with simplistic answers and they need serious re-thinking from scientific, philosophic, theological and sociological perspectives. But private morality is only one aspect of today’s moral crisis.  We need to look at the pervasiveness of violence in our society—in our entertainment, in the entertainment of our children, in music, film, video games, literature.  We need to look at how our culture addicts so many to anger and its manifestations.  We need to address corporate greed, the disparity of wealth, and the systemization of a permanent under-class.  We need to look at the collapse of political discourse and the factionalization of our society along socio-political lines.  We need to look at the morality of capital punishment, the prison system, and mania for litigation in our society.  We need to look and see why our medical expenses have gotten out of control and put good medical care beyond the ability of the poor and the elderly.  We need to look and see how our economic system is responsible for so much suffering in developing countries.  We need to take responsibility for racism which still thrives in our society.  We need to look at why women do not have equal pay for equal work or why they still have to suffer harassment in corporate and academic life.  We need to look at violence against women and children—and sometimes men. We need to look and see why higher education is not possible for talented young people who do not have the financial resources.  We need to see why child labor is still a common practice in much of our world.  We need to seriously address the issue of human trafficking. 

I could, of course, go on.  But suffice it to say that there is much reason for God to be angry with us if it were compatible for the Divine Nature to be angry in the same way that we are angry.  But in fact, Christ has redeemed the world. God does not wish to destroy the world, but that it be saved—that is, that the redemption paid for by Christ on the Cross be appropriated by each and every human person in a choice to live justly and in charity towards all.  But the image of an angry God is a popular one in certain circles because it justifies the anger of those who believe in an angry God.  Rousseau claimed that “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.” Our theology can, if carefully examined, tell us much about our anthropology.  For those who are ruled by anger, nothing is as validating as an angry God.  On the other hand, if God is merciful, we must be merciful.  If God is reconciling, then we must be people who forgive.  If God is compassionate than we must be compassionate.  All of that can be extremely threatening if I am not willing to let go of my anger, if I do not wish to be merciful; if I do not want to let go of my grudges and forgive; if I am unwilling to pay the price that being compassionate will demand.  Unfortunately our theology does not shape our anthropology but we permit our anthropology to shape our theology.  Now, that is something that God could get angry about.  If it were his nature to be angry.