Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXV

The young John
Henry Newman

 The “Father of the Oxford Movement” was really John Keble who preached the famous sermon “National Apostasy” on July 14, 1833 in the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Oxford, but the main driver behind the movement—and the best known of its proponents—was John Henry Newman.  Indeed it was Newman who made the claim—which has stuck—that it was Keble’s sermon that gave birth to the movement. 

Newman had not always been a member of the High Church party and, in fact, was for the first thirty years of his life tied to the Low Church or Evangelical Party.  The oldest of six children of a prosperous London Banker he was sent to George Nicholas’ Great Ealing School where the faculty included Louis-Philip Bourbon (future King of France), and George Huxley (father of Thomas Henry Huxley, the English Biologist and advocate of Darwinism).  Fellow alumni included Thomas Huxley and W.S. Gilbert.)  The school was something of a hotbed of Evangelicalism and the Classics Master, Walter Mayers, loaned the young student books on Calvinism.  To be fair, Newman also read the religious skeptics at this point—Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine, and Hume.  And more significant for his later career, he became immersed in the romantic novels of Walter Scott.  The skeptics had little influence on him other than to give him a life-long horror of Enlightenment liberalism, but Calvinism pierced his soul immediately.  Scott was only a seed that would later bloom as Newman moved away from Evangelicalism into High Church theology—but that is still a way off. 

The particular type of Calvinism to which Newman was exposed was, in the day, referred to as “Clapham Sect” Calvinism.  It was a movement within the Church of England that was classically Calvinist with its emphasis on double pre-destination and justification by faith alone but, perhaps somewhat incongruously, it was tied to social progressivism with opposition to slavery and the slave trade as well as to concern for England’s underclass.  Newman went on to Oxford, Trinity College, where his desire to succeed produced an anxiety that led him to flub his exams—graduating with only third honors.  Nevertheless, he was elected a Fellow of Oriel College the following year. A colleague at Oriel was Edward Bouverie Pusey who was to play a significant role in the Oxford movement as well.  In 1824 Newman was ordained deacon in the Church of England and ordained priest the following year. At Oxford he met Hurrell Froude, another young priest of the Church of England.  Froude and Newman developed a particularly intimate friendship which, while there is no evidence of sexual intimacy, would fall today at least under the theme of “bromance.” 

Our modern word, “homosexual” only appears in the last third of the 19^th century.  The word is a hybrid of the Greek (‘ομοσ, “same”) and the Latin (sexus, “sex” or “gender.”).  The creation of a word to describe same-sex attraction permitted people to organize their thoughts in a new way: understanding the difference between a person normally attracted to members of the opposite sex having sexual relations with a member of their same sex and a person whose sexual attraction was normally towards a person of their own sex.  In other words, the creation of the word “homosexual” helped people understand that sexual attraction to members of the opposite sex is not universal and same-sex attraction needs to be considered on its own terms rather than as an aberration form some imagined heterosexual norm.  Of course, this century and a half later, there are still some—notably in the backwoods of Kentucky—who just don’t get it, but I don’t want to wander down that path right now.  For the moment we will concentrate on John Henry Newman who, like his contemporaries, did not have the tools to understand the deeper levels of the human psyche but who were able to choose to conform the moral norms of both religion and society in that day. Newman and Froude could not have understood the probable complexities of their relationship but they did have clear sense of moral right and wrong and there is no evidence of them crossing the moral boundaries of the day. 

Froude was, tragically, ill with tuberculosis and Newman had accompanied him and his father on a tour of the Mediterranean in 1833 returning only just in time to hear the famous sermon that changed the course of the Church of England. 

In the latter 1820’s and 1830’s Newman’s own theology had gradually been evolving as his scholarship led him into reading the Fathers of the Church.  He came to see the weaknesses of Calvinism, in particular in its ecclesiology.  Calvin saw the Church as an invisible association of those pre-destined to salvation rather than the visible and concrete communion of the Baptized.  This overly spiritualized notion of Church made the Church irrelevant to salvation as, since it was known only to God who were in and who were out, the Church was of no human use.  Everything that mattered lay simply in the relationship of the individual soul to God—had God chosen that person for salvation or for damnation.  In Calvin’s scheme Church, sacraments, piety, prayer—all is quite irrelevant to the final outcome and Newman came to recognize that Calvinism offered him only that blind alley. 

Moreover, Newman and Froude—both fellows at Oriel—took a new approach to their role as tutors, offering spiritual guidance as well as intellectual vision to the young men entrusted to them.  This did not go over well with the liberal establishment in the University where Enlightenment secularism still held sway.  As Newman’s views grew more and more “High Church,” the Evangelical wing grew equally alarmed with his influence. 

As stated in a previous posting, Keble’s sermon “National Apostasy” triggered a series of tracts outlining and defending the High Church position.  Newman was most assiduous in his contribution to the Tracts For The Times, writing almost a third of the 90 Tracts.  Newman wrote the final “Tract 90” in which he asserted that there was nothing in the 39 Articles of the Church of England that could not legitimately be interpreted in a manner consistent with the Catholic Faith.  This was too much and the outcry caused the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Bagot, to insist on there being no further tracts published.  Bagot was actually sympathetic to the High Church party and ordered Newman and the other “Tractarians” to desist in order to protect them from being disciplined by the Church and even possibly by the Government as the Church was Established by Law as the State Church and the government, from the newly ascended Queen, Victoria down to her ministers, were quite avidly Protestant in their Churchmanship.

In all this it must be remembered that Newman’s role at Oxford was not primarily academic but priestly.  He held the vicarship of Saint Mary the Virgin, the University Church, which was a benefice in the gift of Oriel College.  In addition to the Tracts, Newman’s Sunday afternoon sermons were exceedingly popular with the undergraduates and his influence over the spiritual life of the University was quite marked.   This alarmed the Evangelical Faction and Newman was increasingly isolated from the Academic side of the University. 

In all this Newman was no ritualist.  His focus was always on the theological principals and he was no liturgical innovator but stuck quite close to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the official rites of the Church of England. While many others of the High Church party were rapidly introducing Catholic practices into their Anglican parishes: Eucharistic Vestments, candles and crucifixes on the altar, incense, processions, statues and even counterfeiting the rubrics of the Roman Mass upon the Anglican Holy Communion, Newman was sticking to his surplice and hood and a reverent but plain liturgy.  He would later write Edward Pusey about this stage in his spiritual journey.

The utmost delicacy was observed on all hands in giving me advice: only one warning remains on my mind, and it came from Dr. Griffiths, the late Vicar-Apostolic of the London district. He warned me against books of devotion of the Italian school, which were just at that time coming into England; and when I asked him what books he recommended as safe guides, he bade me get the works of Bishop Hay. By this I did not understand that he was jealous of all Italian books, or made himself responsible for all that Dr. Hay happens to have said; but I took him to caution me against a character and tone of religion, excellent in its place, not suited for England.

Newman never did embrace the Italian version of Catholicism which would appeal to so many of the Tractarians, both those who remained in the Church of England and those who “swam the Tiber” to become Catholics.  The faith into which he was evolving and the faith to which he would cling as a Catholic was the old English recusant Catholicism, understated and discreet without the bells and whistles so cherished by Mediterranean Catholics. 

As Newman’s influence declined in official Anglican circles (it was only growing among the High Church Party) he retired to a row of cottages in the dependent parish of Saint Mary, Littlemore—an Oxford suburb which was part of  his parish of Saint Mary the Virgin.  He was joined here by several friends who were each growing less comfortable with the Church of England and its Protestant history.  The other men at Littlemore were John Dobree Dalgairns, Ambrose Saint John, Frederick Oakeley, William Lockhart, and James Christie.  Like the Wesleys and the first Methodists, they adopted a sort of schema for piety with certain times for fasting, for Holy Communion, for various prayers.  Unlike the Wesleys and the Methodists, they were then suspected of being a “monastery.”  And in fact to some extent they were trying to adopt a common life though more on the model of Saint Augustine’s Rule for clergy than Benedict’s for monks. 

Lockhart was the first of the group to become a Catholic.  His conversion shook Newman who, about eight months later, preached his famous final sermon as an Anglican “The Parting of Friends” and resigned as Vicar of Saint Mary’s Oxford.  He continued living at Littlemore for two more years until his own conversion.   To be continued.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXIX

Gerald Valerian Wellesley,
canon of Durham Cathedral
and avid reader of the Times
of London 

Well, I have promised a number of faithful readers that I will get back to our series on the history of the Anglican Church—and so here we are, back in the last decade of the 17^th century with a deposed King and a deposed Archbishop of Canterbury and a Church facing a crisis, a crisis which it will not navigate without banging itself on a few rocks that will leave it battered and weakened and with lifeboats setting out on the seas of evangelicalism. 

In 1688 a coup d’etat replaced the Catholic King James II with his Protestant daughter Mary and even more Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.  Nine bishops, including Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, were deposed for refusing to wear allegiance to the new monarchs—they saw their support of the “Glorious Revolution” and the new co-monarchs (an oxymoron if there ever was one) William and Mary as being contrary to the oaths they took at their episcopal consecrations to be loyal to the King (in this case, James).  It was a bitter irony as they were being deprived of their sees for loyalty to a Catholic King when to a man the bishops were rabidly anti-Roman.  Anti-Roman, but not anti-Catholic in as that they were all High Churchmen who saw the Church of England as being a branch of that catholic (i.e.) universal Church along with the Greek and Roman Churches.  But deprived and deposed they were.  They are referred to as non-jurors as they would not swear (Latin: jurare) the oath of allegiance. 

Now Mary was very devout, but while Protestant, wasn’t much interested herself in matters of doctrine, but her husband, William, was a passionate Calvinist.  While Mary was the one with title to the Crown, William’s head was not graced with a “Crown Matrimonial,” i.e. he was no mere consort.  He was, by the grace and invitation of Parliament, co-regent.  In fact, given his domination of Mary and her willingness to leave politics to the husband whom God had set over her in authority (they were Protestants after all and thus unblinking subjects to the Word of God), William was the power figure in this equation.  William was no fan of the High Church movement (which he considered too close to the Catholic theology) represented by the Caroline Divines and consistently appointed Latitudinarians to the episcopal bench. 

High Churchmen represented a somewhat Catholic (though not Roman Catholic) school of thought that stressed the Prayer Book liturgy and sound patristic theology.  They encouraged—and practiced—a devout personal life with a piety rooted in the Prayer Book offices and many showed an interest in the continental mystics.  (The continental mystics tended, of course, to be Roman Catholics such as Francis de Sales, Archbishop Fenelon, Dom Augustine Baker, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection and others, especially French and Spanish spiritual writers.)

The Church of England had been drained of most of its Low Churchmen at the Restoration when they tended to go with the various dissenters: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and others.  Low Churchmen tended to look only to the Biblical text for theological guidance and were liturgical minimalists.  Their piety was more rooted in evangelical preaching than the Prayer Book offices and they looked askance on the mystical tradition as being among the worst abuses of superstitious Romanism.  But, as I said, their influence in the Church of England had been minimized with the definitive break of the Dissenters with the official Church in 1660. 

The Latitudinarians or Broad Churchmen were somewhere in the undefined middle of these two extremes.  The old couplet tells it all:

High and Crazy

Low and Lazy

Broad and Hazy

It is hard to pin down exactly what a Latitudinarian believes—or if they believe at all.  They usually are inclined to ignore the sort of details of dogmatic theology in which High Church advocates of the time found their entertainment, but they also differed from low Church people in tending to like the various forms of biblical criticism that stretch the text to make it mean whatever you wish it to.  When it comes to liturgy they follow the Prayer Book but without much enthusiasm, much less an imagination.  I always think of the Reverend and Honorable Gerald Valerian Wellesley, brother of the Duke of Wellington and a canon of Durham Cathedral who was said to take the Times into choir with him tucked under his surplice and read it while the choristers sang Morning Prayer.  Though coming towards the end of the period we are looking at, Wellesley’s morning reading is that sort of cavalier abandon that typifies the Latitudinarians.  It wasn’t rooted in an indifference to matters religious as much as it was symptomatic of a religious liberalism that downplayed personal faith for intellectual abstractions. 

After leaving off the series on the Church of England about eight weeks or so ago, I did a series on the Enlightenment because if we are to understand the malaise of the Church of England in this period we need to understand that intellectual environment that pervaded European society at the end of the 17^th century and throughout most of the 18^th.  The Enlightenment’s contempt for the medieval period, a time which Enlightenment thinkers referred to as “The Dark Ages” (as if the sun had taken a thousand year hiatus), pushed philosophers and historians and even theologians into an intellectual corner where, if they wished to be thought at all critical in their scholarship, they distanced themselves from the sort of faith and piety characteristic of pre-Enlightenment societies.  It is not unlike the supercilious phony liberal intellectualism of today when people think they have to dismiss millennia of wisdom in favor of abstract and cerebral theories they can parrot without comprehending. 

This Enlightenment spirit infected the Church of England as its bishops and higher clergy were invariably members of the same clubs and traveled in the same social and intellectual circles as the various scientists and philosophers who were advancing the secularist thought of the time.  (This intellectual contamination affected Scandinavian Lutheranism and Continental Catholicism as well, particularly in France, but also to some extent in the Austria and its possessions, as well as Spain and Portugal, but nowhere nearly as much as it did in England.) It was typical of many clergy and not a few bishops to belong to a Masonic Lodge and thus inevitable for some of the theological freethinking of the Lodges to find their way into the Church.  Archbishop Tillotson, William’s nominee to succeed the deposed Sancroft at Canterbury, had to dispel rumors that he was a Unitarian, a not uncommon theological position among Enlightenment thinkers. 

While they were soft on doctrine and often somewhat broad minded on personal (i.e. sexual) morality, the Latitudinarians were inclined to an excessive emphasis on social mores.  They tended to espouse economic liberalism and Adam Smith ideas on Free Market Capitalism, but they regularly used the pulpit to call for reform of the Poor Law, educational reforms, and prison reform as well as hammering away at such social evils as slavery, alcoholism, prostitution, and child employment.  By and large, the 18^th century Church of England was a rather limpid thing whose appeal was primarily among the fashionable well-to-do’s and Whig part politicians.  It would produce two important reactions: one in the eighteenth century and the other—and at the other extreme of the ecclesial spectrum—in the nineteenth.  

The Enlightenment, Catholics, Jesuits, Freemasons, and Revolutionaries

Washington in his Masonic Apron

An important aspect of the Enlightenment that needs to be looked at before we can return to our series on the history of the Church of England is Freemasonry.  Freemasonry is a system of lodges to which men belong in fraternal organization for purposes of business and social alliance, charitable works, and political activity.  Historically it also had much to do with intellectual discussion and exchange of knowledge.

According to Masonic myth and legend, Freemasonry has an ancient history going back to the geometer Euclid, the construction of the monuments of ancient Egypt, the building of the temple of Solomon, the construction of the medieval cathedrals etc.  Historical data is far more mundane however.

The medieval craft system of guilds organized professionals by craft for the training of new members for that craft as well as for charitable outreach, pious devotion, the regulation of the craft and its business practices, and socialization.  One such guild was the stonemason’s guild.  In Britain the guild system survived the Reformation and, in fact, the professional classes which the guilds represented were overwhelmingly in favor of the new Protestantism.  Being of the professional classes and able to send their male progeny to universities, the guilds were composed of men of above average education who were very much alive to the scientific developments and philosophical/theological currents of the day.  In Tudor and Stuart England, guildhalls were often the scene of lively conversations and political intrigue.  They were as much gentlemen’s clubs as they were professional fraternities. 

A stonemasons’ guild “lodge” in Edinburgh, Scotland –the Ancient Lodge of Edinburgh, Mary’s Chapel (so named because it met in Mary’s Chapel, Niddry’s Wind, Edinburgh) –was the first of these lodges that took in members who were not, in fact, stone masons.   The minutes of the lodge show that in 1634 Lord Alexander, Sir Anthony Alexander, and Sir Alexander Strachan were admitted to the lodge as “speculative” members (as differentiated from “operative” members who were actual stone masons).  Some claim that this lodge had been accepting these sort of honorary members since at least 1600.  It is notable that these recorded members are from the aristocracy as it shows both a desire to participate in the intellectual and charitable life of the lodge on the part of men whose own social class lacked this sort of cohesion, and a certain liberality of mind in these nobility being willing to participate in activities with men of wealth but without title. Incidentally, Sir Alexander Strachan, one of these speculative members, was closely connected to King Charles I, which certainly made his membership politically advantageous to the lodge, at least until the Civil War. 

It is difficult to say exactly why the Stone Mason’s guild became the nucleus of these new associations.  There could be a number of factors.  Stone Masons were a more mobile profession than most other guilds with masons moving around the country—indeed around Europe—wherever work was to be found and thus they had a stronger tradition of welcoming new members than the more settled guilds such as goldsmiths or furriers.  Also, because they worked for contract rather than owning their own business, they were not so much in competition with one another as members of those guilds whose businesses in the same town encouraged a certain rivalry and mistrust.  For whatever reason, through the seventeenth and certainly in the eighteenth century, there were fewer and fewer “operative” stonemasons and more and more “speculative” masons admitted to membership in English lodges.

And perhaps because masonry involved the sciences—mathematics, geometry, physics, and even a basic knowledge of geology and the different qualities of stone, the lodges drew men of scientific inquiry.  During the years of the English Civil War and the religious chaos that came with the breakdown of English religion into dozens of sects from the orthodox Presbyterians and Congregationalists to the far more outré groups such as the Quakers, and even more the Diggers, Ranters, and Fifth Monarchy Men, many of your more educated and professional men began to question Christian doctrines such as the Trinity which they perceived to be irrational.  We see by the end of the period the rise of Unitarianism and then the jump to Deism which posited belief in a Supreme Being but One who set the “clockwork” of the universe into an eternal motion and then abandoned it to itself. 

Freemasonry spread from England to France in the early eighteenth century, aided by both the partisans of the exiled Stuarts and the commercial and intellectual ties that developed with France despite the political tensions between the two countries.  The French Lodges tended to draw political liberals (as well as scientists and philosophes) and were in many ways the incubators for democratic ideas that would set in motion the French Revolution.  Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot were all Freemasons.  Freemasonry established itself among the American colonists as well and George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, John Hancock, Benedict Arnold, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and Elbridge Gerry were all Freemasons. 

In Europe Freemasonry became associated with opposition to the Catholic Church as part of the ancien regime.  The alliance of “Throne and Altar” which characterized pre-revolutionary France proved all but fatal to the Catholic Church.  While Freemasons are not associated with the Jacobins and the extremes of the Terror, the French lodges had long served as breeding grounds of democratic ideals.  The intellectual curiosity characteristic of Freemasonry also made the Masons question many Catholic beliefs and practices that represented the medieval world and had grown into an outdated ridiculousness by the Enlightenment.  The papal bulls of Clement XII and Benedict XIV proscribing membership in the Freemasons had never been ratified by the French Crown and consequently many French clergy belonged to the Freemasons.  Some lodges were exclusively clerical. 

Freemasons, who found the rigid intellectualism of the Jesuits to be opposed to their own spirit of intellectual inquiry, played critical roles in having the Jesuits expelled from Portugal (1759), France (1764), the Spanish Empire (1767) and Malta (1769) leading up to the suppression of the Order in 1773.  By no means,  however, should they be credited (or blamed) entirely for the downfall of the Society of Jesus as the Jesuits had entire coalitions of enemies working against them. 

In the nineteenth century, Italian Freemasons were very active in both the revolutions against the papacy in the Papal States and the move for Italian unification and the ending of temporal power for the Popes.  Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “George Washington of Italy” whose military genius was able to bring down the power of the various Italian princes—including the papacy—was a vehement Freemason.  All in all, the relationship between Freemasonry and Catholicism has not been a happy one.  

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.