The Religious Enlightenment

"I find Adrienne Lamourette, the last of the six he deals with, in some ways the most interesting because on the whole we tend to think of the Enlightenment as being anti-Catholic. I think Sorkin is absolutely right to say that we haven’t gone far enough in demonstrating that the religious Enlightenment was not just Protestant but also Catholic and Jewish. Going back to my theme of Five Books that cover all the major dimensions of the Enlightenment, this is really the first one to look at the transformation in religious thought and practice and of thinking about religion’s role in politics, philosophy and society. In that respect it’s a very interesting and important book and a very useful survey. No one else before Sorkin makes this claim, but I think he’s right. He shows that all the religions produce a very strong Enlightened tendency. At the same time he also demonstrates that there was a great deal of resistance to these changes within the churches, whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish. There are one or two other figures like Lamourette in the French Revolution. Henri Grégoire is perhaps the most famous, Claude Fauchet is another, very important, example. This is a Catholic theologian, a churchman, who is very serious about his religion and about his Catholicism, but in most respects fits into what I call the Radical Enlightenment because he totally rejects the political and social status quo. He accepts the democratic and universal human rights goals of the Revolution. He insists that, whatever the Pope might say (and it’s a big problem for them that the Pope of course condemned universal human rights and the French Revolution and most books of philosophy — but they thought he had made a mistake and that it would be rectified somehow at a later stage) the French Revolution was right and that philosophy and religion have to be married together and that the outcome will be democracy. The Church itself needs drastic reform — Lamourette accepted that — and if it lost its property, so much the better, because the Church shouldn’t be a big landowner. So he’s very radical in lots of ways. Sorkin is right about that, through he doesn’t given enough emphasis to the fact that this kind of position didn’t work, either intellectually — that there were really serious problems in reconciling the Catholic stance with this radical viewpoint — or on a personal level. Fauchet and Lamourette had big problems with all these atheists and deists and, in the end, got so angry with them that they had to split away and became very isolated in the last months of their lives. Both were guillotined by the Montagnards later in the Revolution. The Church and the Papacy would not accept what they were doing and rejected it, so that they became isolated theologically as well as in all those other respects. So ultimately, although I think it’s an enormously interesting aspect of the Enlightenment, it was an unviable, unworkable direction. Catholicism couldn’t be combined with the Radical Enlightenment, at least not for any length of time on a viable basis. But it was conceivable, and it was attempted by these interesting individuals. That is true of Rousseau; I’m not sure about Montesquieu, actually, or Hume. I’m not sure there’s much sign of belief in Montesquieu. Yes, they did. And there’s an even better reason for linking Voltaire with the moderate Enlightenment which was that he thought that even if people like him didn’t need religion, most people did. It’s this idea that religion is indispensable for the majority of society. No, I think I see a difference between Spinoza and Voltaire. Both of them believe that most people can’t be enlightened and that you’ve got to find some way of coping with this fact. But Voltaire wants to preserve the privileges and powers of kings, aristocrats and the Church over most people. He sees the enlightened as a kind of emancipated group at the fringes of society. I see Spinoza as much more subversive than that. He’s really trying to emasculate religious authority in politics and democratize politics and society. It’s true that he’s very suspicious of the masses, but he wants to weaken the hold of the churches over the masses and neutralize it. That’s why he introduces his civil religion. It’s not a very strong argument which is a big problem for Spinoza. But it does seem to me a different strategy from Voltaire. No, I think Spinoza would have preferred them not to have had their religion, but he couldn’t see that as a practical possibility. So since you can’t remove religious fanaticism from people, let’s weaken religious authority as much as we can. Voltaire wanted to ridicule superstition and intolerance and injustice in politics, but I don’t think he’s attacking religous authority in the same comprehensive way, and especially not in his last years when he’s worried about the growth of atheism. And he certainly isn’t praising democracy as Spinoza is. But coming back to Sorkin, I do think it’s a very important book because it brings out the importance of the religious Enlightenment. It also shows that we need to get away from a certain style of writing about 18th century French thought. Do you know Darrin McMahon’s book on the Counter-Enlightenment, where more or less anything that’s Catholic gets shoved into the Counter-Enlightenment? I think that book is fundamentally wrong. It confuses Catholic Enlightenment with Counter-Enlightenment and lumps them together. There certainly is a Catholic Counter-Enlightenment but it needs to be distinguished very sharply from this Catholic Enlightenment. In that respect Sorkin is a much better guide"