A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

It has been said with broad truth that whereas Greece, with her dialectic discipline, exhorted men to make their beliefs agree with one another, and the Christian Church ordered them to make their beliefs agree with her dogma, the modern spirit demands that beliefs should agree with facts. Such a spirit first promoted and then was immensely promoted by the study of natural science. Even in the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, physicians were proverbially given to irreligion; and the study of physics was still more conducive to religious doubt than that of physic. In England the naturalistic spirit, as we may term it, was notably popularized by Bacon in the course of the seventeenth century, but the effectual growth of Protestant fanaticism began in his day, and had to run its course before much energy was available for scientific research; though both Gilbert the electrician and Harvey the discoverer of the circulation of the blood belonged to Bacon’s generation. Only a small number of superior minds were capable of the scientific attitude. But even before the Restoration educated Englishmen were weary enough of strife to begin the gatherings which afterwards became the Royal Society, devoted strictly to scientific inquiry, with a positive veto on all theological discussion.

To their scientific studies they had a powerful lead from France, where Descartes had virtually begun a new era in philosophy by his Discourse on Method (1637), a work which professed allegiance to the Church but reversed all the Church’s methods; and where Gassendi, a truer if a less influential physicist than Descartes, controverted the spiritualistic positions of the latter in a singularly modern spirit of rationalism. By this time, too, had begun to appear the impotence of the Church against the ubiquitousness of modern heresy. She contrived to strike where she should have spared, and to spare where she ought in consistency to have struck. Galileo was probably, as he professed to be, an orthodox Catholic in his main theological beliefs, yet he was persecuted by the Inquisition; and though the story of his “Still it moves” is a fable, he was forced to recant under threat of torture. Descartes, who protested his loyalty to the Church, was at least a new support to theism; but because his teachings were adopted in France by the Jansenists, the quasi-Protestant enemies of the Jesuits within the Catholic Church, they were ecclesiastically prohibited, and his supporters in the Church and the university were persecuted; while the prudent Gassendi, who at times reasons like an atheist, contrived without protestation to keep on good terms with the Church, of which he was actually a Canon. He had taken orders solely for the sake of an income; and he was never disturbed, though he wrote a vindication of Epicurus, one of the most nearly atheistical of the leading Greek philosophers.

Nowhere is the new impulse to science more clearly seen than in papal and Spanish-ruled Italy. There, as Bacon complained was the case nearly everywhere throughout Europe, most scientific professors were poorly paid, while the learned professions were well endowed; yet at the close of the sixteenth century there did not exist a single distinguished Greek scholar in the peninsula; and while this may have been due to papal policy, the unfostered study of the natural sciences went forward on all sides. Narrowly watched by the Church, the students nevertheless propagated new science throughout north-western Europe. Unhappily, as we have seen, the theological spirit still hampered its evolution, but the study persisted.

From the middle of the seventeenth century onwards it is clear that physical science by its very method and character undermined theology. Here there were possible rational proof and intelligent agreement, instead of the eternal sterility of theological debate on irrational propositions. In France, Holland, and England, the followers of Descartes, even when agreeing on a fundamentally wrong theory of cosmic physics, made for rationalism by their discipline as well as by what was accurate in their detailed science; the influence of the English Royal Society was recognizably anti-clerical; and from Gassendi onwards the whole scientific movement told decisively against superstition, so that the belief in witchcraft was discredited within a generation from the time of its worst intensity. Glanvil, who in England professed a scientific skepticism, on Cartesian lines, defended the superstition as Bodin had done in France, and was supported not only by the theologians but by such a pious man of science as the chemist Boyle, who was equally skeptical in his own proper sphere; yet they could not restore credulity among the thinking minds. More august beliefs were shaken in turn. Boyle in his latter years set himself anxiously to defend Christianity; and Newton was moved to exert himself even in the cause of theism, which was newly undermined. But Newton himself was a Unitarian; his distinguished contemporary the astronomer Halley was reputed a thorough unbeliever; and Newton’s own philosophy, which proceeded on Gassendi as well as on the devout Kepler, was denounced by some, including the German Leibnitz, as tending to atheism. Leibnitz in turn stood wearily aloof from the Church in his own country. No personal bias or prejudice could cancel the fundamental dissidence between exact science and “revealed” dogma.

While the literary movement of English Deism in the eighteenth century was not ostensibly grounded on physical philosophy, being rather critical and logical, it always kept the new science in view; and the movement in France, as set up by the young Voltaire, connected itself from the first with the Newtonian philosophy, which there had to drive out the Cartesian, now become orthodox. In the hands of La Mettrie biological science pointed to even deeper heresy; and for such propagandists as Diderot and D’Holbach all science was an inspiration to a general rejection of religion. Even the pursuit of mathematics developed pronounced unbelievers, such as D’Alembert and Condorcet. When, finally, in the latter half of the century the scientific spirit flagged or stagnated in England, first by reason of the new growths of industry and the new imperial expansion, later by reason of reaction against the French Revolution, it was the French men of science, in particular the astronomers and mathematicians, as Laplace, Lagrange, Lalande, and Delambre, who carried on the profession of rationalism. In particular, Laplace’s great contribution, the nebular hypothesis, clinched on non-theistic grounds the whole development of modern astronomy; and the philosopher Kant, who on that point had in a measure anticipated him, never conformed to Christian orthodoxy even while glosing it in the effort to conserve theism.

All the later generalizations of science have told in the same way; and all have had to struggle for life against the instinctive hostility of the Christian Churches, Protestant and Catholic alike. Geology, after generations of outcry, made an end in the nineteenth century of the orthodox theory of cosmic creation; the evolution theory drove home the negation with a new constructive doctrine; and Darwinism, after a no less desperate contest, has upturned the very foundations of Christian ethics as well as dogma. As represented by Huxley, its chief polemist, it is definitely non-Christian and non-theistic. It does not countervail this essential tendency that a number of men of science in each generation profess to adhere to Christianity. The adherence is seldom thorough, and when it is, it is commonly recognized to stand for lack of culture on the historical and ethical sides of the issue. The result is that Protestant Christianity nearly everywhere capitulates outwardly to natural science, professing still to save its own more essential dogmas; while Catholicism forces upon its adherents either “scientific nescience” or a dissimulation fatal to zeal.

§ 2. Philosophy, Cosmic and Moral

It lies on the face of our sketch of the movement of physical science that it is subversive of Christian orthodoxy, though not of extra-Christian theism. But since Giordano Bruno all cosmic philosophy that keeps the tincture of religion has pointed to pantheism; and all moral philosophy since Descartes has been more or less fatally subversive of Christian dogma. In the great work of Spinoza (1671), who partly proceeded on Descartes and partly transcended him, we have a philosophy and an ethic that are reluctantly pronounced by respectful theists to be virtually atheistic; and no great philosophy since has reversed that impetus. The God of Kant and the God of Hegel are as non-Christian as the Absolute of Bradley.

Moral philosophy had begun to be non-theological in Montaigne’s day (1580); and his disciple, Charron, constructed in his Wisdom what is pronounced to be the first modern treatise on that footing. Less than a century later the English Cumberland, although a bishop of the Church, took a similarly rationalistic course in morals in his reply to Hobbes (1672), making no appeal to revelation, though of course making no attack on it; and the almost undisguised naturalism of Hobbes was thus tacitly countenanced in fundamentals from the clerical side, in the very act of repudiation. Shaftesbury, who became the most influential moralist of the first half of the eighteenth century, did but develop the naturalistic principle on avowedly theistic and non-Christian lines. Bishop Berkeley, who assailed both Spinoza and Shaftesbury, could justify his Christian beliefs only by arguing that skeptics themselves, in the study of mathematics, accepted many arbitrary propositions, and might as well accept the mystery of Jesus Christ. Even Locke, though he stood for a “reasonable” and non-dogmatic Christianity, was in effect an influence for deism in respect of his philosophy.