The dark side of the Enlightenment
Raymond Carr
FOR THE GLORY OF GOD: HOW MONOTHEISM LED TO REFORMATIONS, SCIENCE, WITCH-HUNTS AND THE END OF SLAVERY by Rodney Stark Princeton University Press,124.95, pp. 488, ISBN 0691114366 Christianity, together with Islam and Judaism, is one of the
great monotheist religions. Monotheism, for Professor Stark, 'may well have been the most significant innovation in history — having embraced monotheism the inherent duty to missionise these three faiths has changed the world'.
But monotheisms are not monolithic; they breed sects galore, each worshipping the same God but in mutually hostile camps. People differ in the intensity of the religious demands. When the Church of Power (i.e., the established religion) fails to satisfy the demands for an intense faith, 'high-tension believers' reject the Church of Power and become heretics. Once they constitute a threat to the Church of Power as an institution, they are persecuted. The Cathars, the 13th-century ascetics described by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his best-selling Montaillou (1978), were dangerous because they were a mass movement capturing followers of all classes in Languedoc. Moreover, their intense interior faith led them to dispense with the sacraments of the Catholic Church as the instrument of salvation. The pious man, like the mystic, could find his own way to God. So thought Hus in Bohemia, Wyclif and the Lollards in 15th-century England, and later Luther in Germany.
To Victor Hugo, the Protestant Reformation was a unique event freeing Europe from three centuries of Catholic tyranny. To Stark 'the chain of events culminating in the 16th-century Reformation (i.e. of Luther and above all of the great organisation man, Calvin) began more than 1,000 years before in the monastic movements for church reform'. But these laudable efforts did not succeed. The 16thcentury church was corrupt. Stark almost delights in describing the lax morals of Renaissance popes. Luther attacked a particularly gross corruption: the sale of indulgences as the sale of salvation for cash. Starting within the church as a reformer, he went on to found his own Protestant church outside it, the destiny of all successful heresies. The problem remains as to why Protestantism spread throughout Europe while the earlier sects had been suppressed or gone underground. Was it that where princes already controlled the church and its wealth, as in Catholic Spain, there was no temptation to back the Reformation as did Henry VIII? He had been given by the Pope the title of 'Defender of the [Catholic] Faith', which our Queen still bears and which embarrasses her son as head of the Protestant Church of England.
Much of this would be accepted by most historians. Stark's assertion that there is no essential conflict between religion and science entails an attack on those who, since the 18th-century Enlightenment, have maintained that such a conflict exists. For Stark science itself arose uniquely, and nowhere else, in the Catholic universities of Europe where scholastics felt it their duty to comprehend God's handiwork, achieving results as remarkable, Stark maintains, as those of Copernicus. The 'propaganda ploy' of Protestants and above all of atheists and covert atheists of the Enlightenment was to claim credit for the achievements of the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Nonsense. Stark asserts the great scientists were Christians, even if Newton was an exceedingly eccentric one. Of course he must admit that the Catholic Church in the 19th century mounted a frontal attack on science as materialism, but that does not entail a conflict between science and religion as such.
The real battle came with what Stark calls the Darwinist Crusade. He starts out denying that evolution is good science. What about the gaps in the fossil record? How does one explain the evolution of the eye and the feather, etc., etc.?
All this is swept under the carpet by atheist evolutionists. For them the conflict is self-evident. Richard Dawkins, the present-day crusader par excellence, writes, 'It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is ignorant, stupid or insane; For Stark it is the men of the Enlightenment who were stupid and ignorant. They invented historical myths to discredit the Catholic Church. For Gibbon, the Dark Ages were a time of barbarism and ignorance. For Stark. the Dark Ages, by inventing or adopting the stirrup and proper harness, revolutionised husbandry and war. 'Enlightened' atheists have distorted the record to obscure the role of the Catholic Church in the abolition of slavery, which it had consistently castigated as sin. Marxists are rightly dismissed as talking rubbish when they argue that abolition was in the interests of bourgeois capitalism. It was a moral crusade that only a religion with moral foundations could mount. It was the Protestant sects — Quakers and Wesleyans and above all the Anglican evangelicals — who led the crusade; the historian Macaulay's father was their workhorse. Catholics condemned slavery as such and defended the American Indians as moral beings, but their role in ending black plantation slavery came late in the day.
Stark is aware that his book must expect hostile reviews and his publisher welcomes the attention it will receive as a polemical bombshell. Darwinists apart, his demonised enemies are the intellectuals of the Enlightenment and their heirs. Isaiah Berlin was well aware of the shortcomings of the philosophes but nevertheless recognised their contribution to the creation of a liberal, tolerant society. Stark dislikes such liberals. Erasmus, 'the darling of academic liberals', is 'vague to the point of insincerity'; he was the 'first commercial writer', gaining large royalties from his 'ribald puns and jokes' at the expense of Catholic priests. The French sociologist, Emile Durkheim is, for Stark, a last enemy. For Durkheim religious rituals sanctify social norms and strengthen solidarity, a notion Stark exposes as false in his long chapter on witchcraft. What matters for Stark's anti-intellectual crusade is not ritual but one's image of God.
Christianity in the West is not threatened by Darwinists or the heirs of Voltaire and Gibbon. In a sense they keep the show on the road. It is the increasing growth of an amoral consumer society that, in offering satisfactions in this world, dispenses with the supernatural world of God. That America, the greatest consumer society of the West, is the most religious is one of the paradoxes of our time. Was Durkheim right after all?
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