Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (131 page)

JUDAISM, SCEPTICISM AND DEISM (1492-1700)

Doubt is fundamental to religion. One human being sees holiness in someone, something, somewhere: where is the proof for others? The Old Testament is shot through with doubt, although in its stories doubters often feel God's wrath, as when Adam and Eve doubted the reasons which God gave for not eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Jesus Christ could be kinder to doubters - for instance, to his own disciple Thomas, who doubted the Resurrection until Christ challenged him to touch and be sure. And human beings have commonly liked a good laugh at what they hold most dear. But a distinctive feature of modern Western culture, and through it any Christianity exposed to the spread of Western culture, has come to be an inclination to doubt any proposition from the religious past, and to reject the assumption that there is a special privilege for one sort of religious truth. How may we account for this extraordinary development?

The greatest question mark set against Reformation and Counter-Reformation Christianity was posed by the continuing existence of Judaism, a separate and much disadvantaged religion within the bounds of Christendom. The 1490s had brought the greatest single disaster for the Jewish people since the destruction of Jerusalem back in 70 CE, their official expulsion from the Iberian peninsula and the creation of a 'Sephardic' diaspora (see pp. 585-91). The Portuguese were never as single-minded as the Spaniards either in expulsions or in efforts to achieve proper conversions, although after a serious '
converso
' rebellion, the Portuguese monarchy did set up its own imitation of the Spanish Inquisition in 1536. In consequence, a cosmopolitan crypto-Jewish community developed, adopting Portuguese customs and language while travelling, and settling in western Europe wherever it seemed safe. Portuguese Sephardic Jews prospered, usually through trade, but also through practising that usefully marginal profession medicine and sometimes teaching in the less rigidly exclusive or more unwary universities and colleges - the municipal College de Guyenne in the great French port of Bordeaux proved particularly significant in mid-century.
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The Portuguese monarchy, always on the lookout for ways of stretching its straitened resources, could see the usefulness of this talented and mobile community, and it was inclined to look the other way if some seemed less than whole-hearted in their Christianity - much to the displeasure of its own Inquisition.

As the Reformation developed, Jews viewed it with sarcastic interest, not unreasonably seeing these bitter intra-Christian disputes as evidence of God's anger with the persecutors of the Jewish people.
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They soon found that their fortunes were as varied in Protestant as in Catholic lands, but their long experience of surviving amid Christian prejudice soon alerted them to where the danger was least. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, traditionally multicultural and from 1573 committed to a considerable degree of religious toleration (see pp. 643-4), there was a great flourishing of Jewish society, whose language Yiddish, effectively a dialect of German, marked its closeness to the German elites of eastern European urban communities. In central Europe, Prague proved a cultural melting pot for various strands of European Jewry of Iberian, eastern and Ottoman origins - thanks more to the Habsburgs than to their Bohemian subjects, whose celebrated enthusiasm for religious liberty did not extend that far.
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Above all, there was the port city of Amsterdam in the Reformed Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands. As Amsterdam rose to commercial greatness after the War of Independence from the Spaniards, it became a major haven for Judaism, especially the Sephardic community looking for a new secure home to replace the lost glories of Iberia. The tolerance maintained by the 'regents' of the Netherlands in general and Amsterdam in particular (against the wishes of most of their Reformed clergy) allowed some remarkable cross-fertilization. In Amsterdam, most cosmopolitan of urban settings, stately synagogues were by the late seventeenth century a tourist attraction and an object of astonishment all over Europe - they looked remarkably like the most splendid of the Protestant churches being rebuilt at the same time by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. Around them developed a Jewish culture which acted as a solvent on the certainties which the Reformation and Counter-Reformation sought to establish.

The events of the 1490s in Spain and Portugal left a deep mark on sixteenth-century Christian upheavals. We have seen the result: a peculiarly intolerant official form of Iberian Christianity obsessed with conformity to a Catholic norm, alongside a different type of Christian religious expression with a rich and varied future. The excitements released by the destruction of Muslim and Jewish civilization in Spain fed into Spanish Christian mysticism: not only elements like the Carmelite spirituality of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross which managed to hang on inside the official Church, but also the amorphous movement labelled
alumbrado
(see pp. 590-91.) From Spain, via the mystical theologian Juan de Valdes, the
alumbrado
style of Christianity influenced the
Spirituale
movement in Italy, which produced such unexpected outcrops as Ignatius Loyola's Society of Jesus. When the
Spirituali
were dispersed in the 1540s, Italians spread all over Protestant Europe in their own diaspora (see pp. 662-4). Many proved remarkably independent-minded once released to think for themselves, especially on the Trinity - again, Spanish crypto-Judaism was an influence here - and the result was the 'Socinianism' of eastern Europe (see pp. 642-3). Catholic Spain, through the unlikely agency of John Calvin, produced the classic martyr for radical religion, Michael Servetus, whose project for reconstructing Christianity was inspired by his consciousness of what had happened to religion in his Iberian homeland. All these stirrings were challenges to Christian orthodoxy, and now they met new forces of doubt among the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam.
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At the time, doubt was generally given the blanket label atheism, just as a whole variety of sexual practices of which society pretended to disapprove were given the blanket label sodomy.
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Specific examples of doubt are generally hidden from us throughout the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, since it was suicidal for anyone to proclaim doubt or unbelief, and the kindly instinct of priests and pastors was no doubt normally to still doubts in their flocks rather than risk their parishioners' lives by exposing them. Educated and powerful people in the sixteenth century of course did speak seriously of doubt, but rather like medieval discussion of toleration, such talk had to be understood as theory only, if it was to be considered respectable. The best way (as with sodomy) was to shelter behind interest in Classical literature. The scrupulously dispassionate Latin poet Lucretius and the Greek satirist of philosophy and religion Lucian were widely read, while the sceptic Sextus Empiricus was rediscovered in the sixteenth century, giving his name to 'empiricism'.

Though Christian leaders regularly expressed their deep disapproval of such 'atheistic' writings, it was difficult to burn someone simply for reading a Classical author. Then gradually in the seventeenth century doubts melded into that systematic and self-confident confrontation with religious tradition which has become part of Western culture and has deeply affected the practice of Christianity itself. At least one impulse provoking this seismic shift had come - with poetic justice - from the Iberian Inquisitions, which demanded a profound and complete conversion from people, many of whom held a deep faith already. Among many possible outcomes of this shattering experience, one effect for some was to breed scepticism about all religious patterns.
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The same was true in the Netherlands, another region riven by an intense effort to eliminate one set of religious beliefs in favour of another: first Catholics persecuted Protestants and then victorious Protestants harried Catholics (see Plate 17).

Plenty of the Dutch, those whom the Reformed contemptuously called 'Libertines', were weary of all strident forms of religion by the end of the sixteenth century, and they remembered with pride the fact that the great Dutchman Erasmus had talked much of tolerance and thoughtfulness.
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They were joined in the 1620s by some of the most conscientious of Dutch Reformed clergy and people, the followers of Jacobus Arminius, expelled from the Church and further victimized as a result of the major Church synod at Dordt (Dordrecht) in 1618-19. This had been such an important event that it attracted delegates from overseas Reformed Churches like England. It was the nearest approximation that the Reformed Churches ever achieved to a general council, and although it produced a firm and lasting shape to Reformed orthodoxy, it did as much to alienate dissenters and force them to make decisions about their religious future outside the mainstream. Some, the 'Collegiants', produced their own brand of rational religion which dispensed with any need for clergy.
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When Sephardic Jews arrived in this argumentative land and regrouped in Amsterdam, they had many possible identities to adopt. Some who had been almost completely cut off from their old religion now painstakingly reconstructed their ancient belief with new devotion and orthodoxy. Others emerged from their experience still conscious of their heritage, but prepared to take very new directions. In the Netherlands they met Christians - Libertines, Arminians, Collegiants, Socinians quitting an increasingly inhospitable Poland - who were ready to do the same thing.
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At the centre of this fusion of ideas was Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza. Son of a Portuguese-Jewish merchant in Amsterdam, and so more or less ineligible for a normal university education, he quietly taught himself amid all the intellectual opportunities that the city had to offer - and in his teenage years, those included contact with the great mathematician and natural philosopher Rene Descartes.

In 1656, aged twenty-three, Spinoza was sensationally expelled from the Amsterdam Portuguese synagogue, accompanied by public curses. To incur such an extreme penalty, it is likely that he had already questioned some of the basic principles of all the great Semitic religions: the prospect of immortality for human beings and the intervention of God in human affairs.
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In Spinoza's remaining two decades of life, he produced two revolutionary treatises. The
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670), a prototype of which may have been the cause of his expulsion, demanded that the Bible be treated as critically as any other text, particularly in its description of miracles; sacred texts are human artefacts, venerable religious institutions 'relics of man's ancient bondage'. The whole argument of the work was designed to promote human freedom:

the supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honour, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man.
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Spinoza's
Ethics
(1677) saw God as undifferentiated from the force of nature or the state of the universe. Naturally such a God is neither good nor evil, but simply and universally God, unconstrained by any moral system which human beings might recognize or create. Calvin might have assented to the latter proposition, but emphatically not the former. There could be nothing further from the spirit of vast separation between Creator and created expressed in Calvin's 'double knowledge' of God and the human self (see p. 634) than Spinoza's proposition that 'the human mind, insofar as it perceives things truly, is part of the infinite intellect of God, and thus it is as inevitable that the clear and distinct ideas of the mind are true as that God's ideas are true'.
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Soon Spinoza was regarded as the standard-bearer for unbelief, even though pervading his carefully worded writings there is a clear notion of a divine spirit inhabiting the world, and a profound sense of wonder and reverence for mystery. It was too much for the authorities in the Dutch Republic: they banned the
Tractatus
in 1674, and more predictably the Roman Inquisition followed suit in 1679, after the work had widely circulated in French translation.

'Atheist' was an easily hurled term of abuse in Spinoza's day, generally pointed with gloomy relish at someone whose sordidly self-indulgent lifestyle satisfyingly demonstrated the results of denying conventional divinity. Spinoza inconsiderately upset such rhetorical symmetry by living in serene simplicity, his only vice a very Dutch addiction to tobacco, which along with the lens-grinding by which he made his frugal living probably brought his early death at forty-four. He lived with all the contemplative austerity of a St Jerome, but was cheerfully ready to discuss sermons of the day, or to receive a stream of philosopher-tourists.
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Within a few years of his death, Pierre Bayle, son of a French Huguenot pastor but in permanent exile in the Dutch Republic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, was openly saying the previously unsayable, the conclusion to which Spinoza's writings inexorably led: it was probable that 'a society of Atheists wou'd observe all Civil and Moral Dutys, as other Societys do, provided Crimes were severely punish'd, and Honor and Infamy annex'd to certain Points'. Bayle tartly observed that morality in Christian societies seemed as prone to fashion and local custom as in those of any other faith. This was a radical attack on any assumption that Christian ethics were necessarily a product of Christian doctrine. It is perhaps the most challenging proposition that the Enlightenment has presented to the Christian Church.
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