A History Of God Part 7

Descartes was always careful to submit to the rulings of the Roman Catholic Church and saw himself as an orthodox Christian. He saw no contradiction between faith and reason. In his treatise Discourse on Method, he argued that there was a system that would enable humanity to reach all truth. Nothing lay beyond its grasp. All that was necessary -in any discipline - was to apply the method and it would then be possible to piece together a reliable body of knowledge that would disperse all confusion and ignorance. Mystery had become muddle and the G.o.d whom previous rationalists had been careful to separate from all other phenomena had now been contained within a human system of thought. Mysticism had not really had time to take root in Europe before the dogmatic convulsions of the Reformation. Thus the type of spirituality that thrives upon mystery and mythology and is, as s name implies, deeply connected with them was strange to many Christians in the West. Even in Descartes's church, mystics were rare and often suspect. The G.o.d of the mystics, whose existence depended upon religious experience, was quite alien to a man like Descartes for whom contemplation meant purely cerebral activity.

The English physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who also reduced G.o.d to his own mechanical system, was equally anxious to rid Christianity of mystery. His starting point was mechanics not mathematics because a scientist had to learn to draw a circle accurately before he could master geometry. Unlike Descartes, who had proved the existence of the self, G.o.d and the natural world in that order, Newton began with an attempt to explain the physical universe, with G.o.d as an essential part of the system. In Newton's physics, nature was entirely pa.s.sive: G.o.d the sole source of activity. Thus, as in Aristotle, G.o.d was simply a continuation of the natural, physical order. In his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia (The Principles of Natural Philosophy) (1687), Newton wanted to describe the relations between the various celestial and terrestrial bodies in mathematical terms in such a way as to create a coherent and comprehensive system. The notion of gravitational force, which Newton introduced, drew the component parts of his system together. The notion of gravity offended some scientists, who accused Newton of reverting to Aristotle's idea of the attractive powers of matter. Such a view was incompatible with the Protestant idea of the absolute sovereignty of G.o.d. Newton denied this: a sovereign G.o.d was central to his whole system, for without such a divine Mechanick it would not exist.

Unlike Pascal and Descartes, when Newton contemplated the universe he was convinced that he had proof of G.o.d's existence. Why had the internal gravity of the celestial bodies not pulled them all together into one huge spherical ma.s.s? Because they had been carefully disposed throughout infinite s.p.a.ce with sufficient distance between them to prevent this. As he explained to his friend Richard Bentley, Dean of St Paul's, this would have been impossible without an intelligent divine Overseer: 'I do not think it explicable by mere natural causes but am forced to ascribe it to ye counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent.'" A month later he wrote to Bentley again: 'Gravity may put ye planets into motion but without ye divine power it could never put them into such a Circulating motion as they have about ye Sun, and therefore, for this as well as other reasons, I am compelled to ascribe ye frame of this Systeme to an intelligent Agent.' {12} If, for example, the earth revolved on its axis at only one hundred miles per hour instead one thousand miles per hour, night would be ten times longer and the world would be too cold to sustain life; during the long day, the heat would shrivel all the vegetation. The Being which had contrived all this so perfectly had to be a supremely intelligent Mechanick.

Besides being intelligent, this Agent had to be powerful enough to manage these great ma.s.ses. Newton concluded that the primal force which had set the infinite and intricate system in motion was dominatio (dominion) which alone accounted for the universe and made G.o.d divine. Edward Poc.o.c.ke, the first professor of Arabic at Oxford, had told Newton that the Latin deus derived from the Arabic du (Lord). Dominion, therefore, was G.o.d's essential attribute rather than the perfection which had been the starting point for Descartes's discussion of G.o.d. In the 'General Scholium' which concludes the Principia, Newton deduced all G.o.d's traditional attributes from his intelligence and power: This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being ... He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done ... We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfection; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a G.o.d without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.' {13} {13} Newton does not mention the Bible: we know G.o.d only by contemplating the world. Hitherto the doctrine of the creation had expressed a spiritual truth: it had entered both Judaism and Christianity late and had always been somewhat problematic. Now the lew science had moved the creation to centre stage and made a literal and mechanical understanding of the doctrine crucial to the conception of G.o.d. When people deny the existence of G.o.d today they are often rejecting the G.o.d of Newton, the origin and Sustainer of the universe whom scientists can no longer accommodate.

Newton himself had to resort to some startling solutions to find room for G.o.d in his system, which had of its very nature to be comprehensive. If s.p.a.ce was unchangeable and infinite - two cardinal features of the system - where did G.o.d fit in? Was not s.p.a.ce itself somehow divine, possessing as it did the attributes of eternity and infinity? Was it a second divine ent.i.ty, which had existed beside G.o.d from before the beginning of time? Newton had always been concerned about this problem. In the early essay De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum, he had returned to the old Platonic doctrine of emanation. Since G.o.d is infinite, he must exist everywhere. s.p.a.ce is an effect of G.o.d's existence, emanating eternally from the divine omnipresence. It was not created by him in an act of will but existed as a necessary consequence or extension of his ubiquitous being. In the same way, because G.o.d himself is eternal, he emanates time. We can, therefore, say that G.o.d const.i.tutes that s.p.a.ce and time in which we live and move and have our being. Matter, on the other hand, was created by G.o.d on the day of creation by a voluntary act. One could perhaps say that he had decided to endow some parts of s.p.a.ce with shape, density, perceptibility and mobility. It was possible to stand by the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing because G.o.d had brought forth material substance from empty s.p.a.ce: he had produced matter out of the void.

Like Descartes, Newton had no time for mystery, which he equated with ignorance and superst.i.tion. He was anxious to purge Christianity of the miraculous, even if that brought him into conflict with such crucial doctrines as the divinity of Christ. During the 16705 he began a serious theological study of the doctrine of the Trinity and came to the conclusion that it had been foisted on the Church by Athanasius in a specious bid for pagan converts. Arius had been right: Jesus Christ had certainly not been G.o.d and those pa.s.sages of the New Testament that were used to 'prove' the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation were spurious. Athanasius and his colleagues had forged them and added them to the canon of scripture, thus appealing to the base, primitive fantasies of the ma.s.ses: 'Tis the temper of the hot and superst.i.tious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, & for that reason to like best what they understand least.' {14} To expunge this mumbo-jumbo from the Christian faith became something of an obsession for Newton. In the early i68os, shortly before publis.h.i.+ng the Principia, Newton began work on a treatise which he called The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology. This argued that Noah had founded the primordial religion - a Gentile theology - which had been free of superst.i.tion and had advocated a rational wors.h.i.+p of one G.o.d. The only commandments were love of G.o.d and love of neighbour. Men were commanded to contemplate Nature, the only temple of the great G.o.d. Later generations had corrupted this pure religion, with tales of miracles and marvels. Some had fallen back into idolatry and superst.i.tion. Yet G.o.d had sent a succession of prophets to put them back on course. Pythagoras had learned about this religion and brought it to the West. Jesus had been one of these prophets sent to call mankind back to the truth but his pure religion had been corrupted by Athanasius and his cohorts. The book of Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism - 'this strange religion of ye West', 'the cult of three equal G.o.ds' - as the abomination of desolation. {15} Western Christians had always found the Trinity a difficult doctrine and their new rationalism would make the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment anxious to discard it. Newton had clearly no understanding of the role of mystery in the religious life. The Greeks had used the Trinity as a means of holding the mind in a state of wonder and as a reminder that human intellect could never understand the nature of G.o.d. For a scientist like Newton, however, it was very difficult to cultivate such an att.i.tude. In science people were learning that they had to be ready to sc.r.a.p the past and start again from first principles in order to find the truth. Religion, however, like art often consists of a dialogue with the past in order to find a perspective from which to view the present. Tradition provides a jumping-off Point which enables men and women to engage with the perennial questions about the ultimate meaning of life. Religion and art, therefore, do not work like science.

During the eighteenth century, however, Christians began to apply the new scientific methods to the Christian faith and came up with the same solutions as Newton. In England, radical theologians like Matthew Tindal and John Toland were anxious to go back to basics, purge Christianity of its mysteries and establish a true rational religion. In Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), Toland argued that mystery simply led to 'tyranny and superst.i.tion'.' {16} It was offensive to imagine that G.o.d was incapable of expressing himself clearly. Religion had to be reasonable. In Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), Tindal tried, like Newton, to recreate the primordial religion and purge it of later accretions. Rationality was the touchstone of all true religion: 'There's a religion of nature and reason written in the hearts of every one of us from the first creation, by which all mankind must judge of the truth of any inst.i.tutional religion whatever.' {17} Consequently revelation was unnecessary because the truth could be found by our own rational inquiries; mysteries like the Trinity and the Incarnation had a perfectly reasonable explanation and should not be used to keep the simple faithful in thrall to superst.i.tion and an inst.i.tutional church.

As these radical ideas spread to the continent, a new breed of historians began to examine church history objectively. Thus in 1699 Gottfried Arnold published his nonpartisan History of the Churches from the Beginning of the New Testament to 1688, arguing that what was currently regarded as orthodox could not be traced back to the primitive church. Johann Lorenz Von Mosheim (1694-1755) deliberately separated history from theology in his magisterial Inst.i.tutions of Ecclesiastical History (1726) and recorded the development of doctrine without arguing for their veracity. Other historians like Georg Walch, Giovanni But and Henry Noris examined the history of difficult doctrinal controversies, such as Arianism, the Filioque dispute, and the various Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. It was disturbing for many of the faithful to see that fundamental dogmas about the nature of G.o.d and Christ had developed over the centuries and were not present in the New Testament: did that mean that they were false? Others went even further and applied this new objectivity to the New Testament itself.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) actually attempted a critical biography of Jesus himself: the question of the humanity of Christ was no longer a mystical or doctrinal matter but was being subjected to the scientific scrutiny of the Age of Reason. Once this had happened, the modern period of scepticism was well and truly launched. Reimarus argued that Jesus had simply wanted to found a G.o.dly state and when his messianic mission had failed he had died in despair. He pointed out that in the Gospels Jesus never claimed that he had come to atone for the sins of mankind. That idea, which had become central to Western Christendom, could only be traced back to St Paul, the true founder of Christianity. We should not revere Jesus as G.o.d, therefore, but as the teacher of a 'remarkable, simple, exalted and practical religion'. {18} These objective studies depended upon a literal understanding of scripture and ignored the symbolic or metaphorical nature of the faith. One might object that this kind of criticism was as irrelevant as it might be to art or poetry. But once the scientific spirit had become normative for many people, it was difficult for them to read the Gospels in any other way. Western Christians were now committed to a literal understanding of their faith and had taken an irrevocable step back from myth: a story was either factually true or it was a delusion. Questions about the origin of religion were more important to Christians than, say, to Buddhists because their monotheistic tradition had always claimed that G.o.d was revealed in historical events. If Christians were to preserve their integrity in the scientific age, therefore, these questions had to be addressed. Some Christians, who held more conventional beliefs than Tindal or Reimarus, were beginning to question the traditional Western understanding of G.o.d. In his tract Wittenburg's Innocence of a Double Murder (1681), the Lutheran John Friedmann Mayer wrote that the traditional doctrine of the atonement, as outlined by Anselm, which depicted G.o.d demanding the death of his own Son, presented an inadequate conception of the divine. He was 'the righteous G.o.d, the angered G.o.d' and 'the embittered G.o.d', whose demands for strict retribution filled so many Christians with fear and taught them to recoil from their own sinfulness'. {19} More and more Christians were embarra.s.sed by the cruelty of so much Christian history, which had conducted fearful crusades, inquisitions and persecutions in the name of this just G.o.d. Coercing people to believe in orthodox doctrines seemed particularly appalling to an age increasingly enamoured of liberty and freedom of conscience. The bloodbath unleashed by the Reformation and its aftermath seemed the final straw.

Reason seemed the answer. Yet could a G.o.d drained of the mystery that had for centuries made him an effective religious value in other traditions appeal to the more imaginative and intuitive Christians? The Puritan poet John Milton (1608-74) was particularly disturbed by the Church's record of intolerance. A true man of his age, he had attempted, in his unpublished treatise On Christian Doctrine, to reform the Reformation and to work out a religious creed for himself that did not rely upon the beliefs and Judgements of others. He was also doubtful about such traditional doctrines as the Trinity. Yet it is significant that the true hero of his masterpiece Paradise Lost is Satan rather than the G.o.d whose actions he intended to justify to man. Satan has many of the qualities of the new men of Europe: he defies authority, pits himself against the unknown and in his intrepid journeys from h.e.l.l, through Chaos to the newly-created earth, he becomes the first explorer. Milton's G.o.d, however, seems to bring out the inherent absurdity of Western literalism. Without the mystical understanding of the Trinity, the position of the Son is highly ambiguous in the poem. It is by no means clear whether he is a second divine being or a creature similar to, though of higher status than, the angels. At all events, he and the Father are two entirely separate beings who have to engage in lengthy conversations of deep tedium to find out each other's intentions, even though the Son is the acknowledged Word and Wisdom of the Father.

It is, however, Milton's treatment of G.o.d's foreknowledge of events on earth that makes his deity incredible. Since of necessity G.o.d already knows that Adam and Eve will fall - even before Satan has reached the earth - he has to engage in some pretty specious justification of his actions before the event. He would have no pleasure in enforced obedience, he explains to the Son, and he had given Adam and Eve the ability to withstand Satan. Therefore they could not, G.o.d argues defensively, justly accuse Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate; As if Predestination over-rul'd Thir will, dispos'd by absolute Decree Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed Thir own revolt; not I: if I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on thir fault, Which had no less prov'd certain unforeknown ...I formed them free, and free they must remain, Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordaind Thir freedom; they themselves ordaind thir fall. {20} {20} Not only is it difficult to respect this shoddy thinking but G.o.d comes over as callous, self-righteous and entirely lacking in the compa.s.sion that his religion was supposed to inspire. Forcing G.o.d to speak and think like one of us in this way shows the inadequacies of such an anthropomorphic and personalistic conception of the divine. There are too many contradictions for such a G.o.d to be either coherent or worthy of veneration.

The literal understanding of such doctrines as the omniscience of G.o.d will not work. Not only is Milton's G.o.d cold and legalistic, he is also grossly incompetent. In the last two books of Paradise Lost, G.o.d sends the Archangel Michael to console Adam for his sin by showing him how his descendants will be redeemed. The whole course of salvation history is revealed to Adam in a series of tableaux, with a commentary by Michael: he sees the murder of Abel by Cain, the Flood and Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel, the call of Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law on Sinai. The inadequacy of the Torah, which oppressed G.o.d's unfortunate chosen people for centuries, is, Michael explains, a ploy to make them yearn for a more spiritual law. As this account of the future salvation of the world progresses - through the exploits of King David, the exile to Babylon, the birth of Christ and so forth - it occurs to the reader that there must have been an easier and more direct way to redeem mankind. The fact that this tortuous plan with its constant failures and false starts, is decreed in advance can only cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its Author. Milton's G.o.d can inspire little confidence. It must be significant that after Paradise Lost no other major English creative writer would attempt to describe the supernatural world. There would be no more Spencers or Miltons. Henceforth the supernatural and the spiritual would become the domain of more marginal writers, such as George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis. Yet a G.o.d who cannot appeal to the imagination is in trouble.

At the very end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve take their solitary way out of the Garden of Eden and into the world. In the West too, Christians were on the threshold of a more secular age, though they still adhered to belief in G.o.d. The new religion of reason would be known as Deism. It had no time for the imaginative disciplines of mysticism and mythology. It turned its back on the myth of revelation and on such traditional 'mysteries' as the Trinity, which had for so long held people in the thrall of superst.i.tion. Instead it declared allegiance to the impersonal 'Deus' which man could discover by his own efforts. Francois-Marie de Voltaire, the embodiment of the movement that would subsequently become known as the Enlightenment, defined this ideal religion in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). It would, above all, be as simple as possible.

Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? that which tended to make men just without making them absurd? that which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism? ... which taught only the wors.h.i.+p of one G.o.d, justice, tolerance and humanity? {21} {21} The churches only had themselves to blame for this defiance, since for centuries they had burdened the faithful with a crippling number of doctrines. The reaction was inevitable and could even be positive.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of G.o.d, however. They rejected the cruel G.o.d of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire. They rejected mysterious doctrines about him that were abhorrent to reason. But their belief in a Supreme Being remained intact. Voltaire built a chapel at Ferney with the inscription 'Deo Erexit Voltaire' inscribed on the lintel and went so far as to suggest that if G.o.d had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. In the Philosophical Dictionary, he had argued that faith in one G.o.d was more rational and natural to humanity than belief in numerous deities. Originally people living in isolated hamlets and communities had acknowledged that a single G.o.d had control of their destinies: polytheism was a later development. Science and rational philosophy both pointed to the existence of a Supreme Being: 'What conclusion can we draw from all this?' he asks at the end of his essay on 'Atheism' in the Dictionary. He replies: That atheism is a monstrous evil in those who govern; and also in learned men even if their lives are innocent, because from their studies they can affect diose who hold office; and that, even if it is not as baleful as fanaticism, it is nearly always fatal to virtue. Above all, let me add that there are fewer atheists today than there have ever been, since philosophers have perceived that there is no vegetative being without germ, no germ without design etc. {22} {22} Voltaire equated atheism with the superst.i.tion and fanaticism that the philosophers were so anxious to eradicate. His problem was not G.o.d but the doctrines about him which offended against the sacred standard of reason.

The Jews of Europe had also been affected by the new ideas. Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), a Dutch Jew of Spanish descent, had become discontented with the study of Torah and had joined a philosophical circle of Gentile freethinkers. He evolved ideas that were profoundly different from conventional Judaism and which had been influenced by scientific thinkers such as Descartes and the Christian scholastics. In 1656, at the age of twenty-four, he was formally cast out of the synagogue of Amsterdam. While the edict of excommunication was read out, the lights of the synagogue were gradually extinguished until the congregation was left in total darkness, experiencing for themselves the darkness of Spinoza's soul in a G.o.d-less world: Let him be accursed by day and accursed by night; accursed in his lying down and his rising up, in going out and in coming in. May the Lord never more pardon or acknowledge him! May the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn against this man henceforth, load him with all the curses written in the book of the law, and raze out his name from under the sky. {23} {23} Henceforth Spinoza belonged to none of the religious communities of Europe. As such, he was the prototype of the autonomous, secular idea that would become current in the West. In the early twentieth century, many people revered Spinoza as the hero of modernity, feeling an affinity with his symbolic exile, alienation and quest for secular salvation.

Spinoza has been regarded as an atheist but he did have a belief in a G.o.d, even though this was not the G.o.d of the Bible. Like the Faylasufs, he saw revealed religion as inferior to the scientific knowledge of G.o.d acquired by the philosopher. The nature of religious faith had been misunderstood, he argued in A Theologica-Political Treatise. It had become 'a mere compound of credulity and prejudices', a 'tissue of meaningless mysteries'. {24} He looked critically at biblical history. The Israelites had called any phenomenon that they could not understand 'G.o.d'. The prophets, for example, were said to have been inspired by G.o.d's Spirit simply because they were men of such exceptional intellect and holiness. But this kind of 'inspiration' was not confined to an elite but was available to everybody through natural reason: the rites and symbols of the faith could only help the ma.s.ses who were incapable of scientific, rational thought.

Like Descartes, Spinoza returned to the ontological proof for G.o.d's existence. The very idea of 'G.o.d' contains a validation of G.o.d's existence because a perfect being which did not exist would be a contradiction in terms. The existence of G.o.d was necessary because it alone provided the certainty and confidence necessary to make other deductions about reality. Our scientific understanding of the world shows us that it is governed by immutable laws. For Spinoza G.o.d is simply the principle of law, the sum of all the eternal laws in existence. G.o.d is a material being, identical with and equivalent to the order which governs the universe. Like Newton, Spinoza returned to the old philosophical idea of emanation. Because G.o.d is inherent and immanent in all things - material and spiritual - it can be defined as the law that orders their existence. To speak of G.o.d's activity in the world was simply a way of describing the mathematical and causal principles of existence. It was an absolute denial of transcendence.

It sounds a bleak doctrine but Spinoza's G.o.d inspired him with a truly mystical awe. As the aggregate of all the laws in existence, G.o.d was the highest perfection which welded everything into unity and harmony. When human beings contemplate the workings of their minds in the way that Descartes had enjoined, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite being of G.o.d at work within them. Like Plato, Spinoza believed that intuitive and spontaneous knowledge reveals the presence of G.o.d more than a laborious acquisition of facts. Our joy and happiness in knowledge is equivalent to the love of G.o.d, a deity which is not an eternal object of thought but the cause and principle of that thought, deeply one with every single human being. There is no need for revelation or divine law: this G.o.d is accessible to the whole of humanity and the only Torah is the eternal law of nature.

Spinoza brought the old metaphysics into line with the new science: his G.o.d was not the unknowable One of the Neoplatonists but closer to the absolute Being described by philosophers like Aquinas. But it was also close to the mystical G.o.d experienced by orthodox monotheists within themselves. Jews, Christians and philosophers tended to see Spinoza as an atheist: there was nothing personal about this G.o.d which was inseparable from the rest of reality. Indeed, Spinoza had only used the word 'G.o.d' for historical reasons: he agreed with atheists who claim that reality can not be divided into a part which is 'G.o.d' and a part which is not-G.o.d. If G.o.d cannot be separated from anything else, it is impossible to say that 'he' exists in any ordinary sense. What Spinoza was saying in effect was that there was no G.o.d that corresponded to the meaning we usually attach to that word. But mystics and philosophers had been making the same point for centuries. Some had said that there was 'Nothing' apart from the world we know. Were it not for the absence of the transcendent En Sof, Spinoza's pantheism would resemble Kabbalah and we could sense an affinity between radical mysticism and the newly-emergent atheism.

It was the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who opened the way for Jews to enter modern Europe, however, though at first he had no intention of constructing a specifically Jewish philosophy. He was interested in psychology and aesthetics as well as religion and his early works Phaedon and Morning Hours were simply written within the context of the broader German Enlightenment: they sought to establish the existence of G.o.d on rational grounds and did not consider the question from a Jewish perspective. In countries like France and Germany, the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment brought emanc.i.p.ation and enabled Jews to enter society. It was not difficult for these maskilim, as the enlightened Jews were called, to accept the religious philosophy of the German Enlightenment. Judaism had never had the same doctrinal obsession as Western Christianity. Its basic tenets were practically identical with the rational religion of the Enlightenment, which in Germany still accepted the notion of miracles and G.o.d's intervention in human affairs. In Morning Hours, Mendelssohn's philosophical G.o.d was very similar to the G.o.d of the Bible. It was a personal G.o.d, not a metaphysical abstraction. Human characteristics such as wisdom, goodness, justice, loving-kindness and intellect could in their most lofty sense all be applied to this Supreme Being.

But this makes Mendelssohn's G.o.d very much like us. His was a typical Enlightenment faith: cool, dispa.s.sionate and tending to ignore the paradox and ambiguity of religious experience. Mendelssohn saw life without G.o.d as meaningless but this was not a pa.s.sionate faith: he was quite content with the knowledge of G.o.d attainable by reason. G.o.d's goodness is the hinge on which his theology hangs. If human beings had to rely on revelation alone, Mendelssohn argued, this would be inconsistent with G.o.d's goodness because so many people had apparently been excluded from the divine plan. Hence his philosophy dispensed with the abstruse intellectual skills demanded by Falsafah - which were only possible for a few people - and relied more on common sense which was within everybody's grasp. There is a danger in such an approach, however, because it is all too easy to make such a G.o.d conform to our own prejudices and make them absolute.

When Phaedon had been published in 1767, its philosophic defence of the immortality of the soul was positively, if sometimes patronisingly, received in Gentile or Christian circles. A young Swiss pastor, Johann Caspar Lavater, wrote that the author was ripe for conversion to Christianity and challenged Mendelssohn to defend his Judaism in public. Mendelssohn was, then, drawn almost against his will into a rational defence of Judaism, even though he did not espouse such traditional beliefs as that of a chosen people or a promised land. He had to tread a fine line: he did not want to go the way of Spinoza nor bring down the wrath of the Christians upon his own people if his defence of Judaism proved too successful. Like other deists, he argued that revelation could only be accepted if its truths could be demonstrated by reason. The doctrine of the Trinity did not meet his criterion. Judaism was not a revealed religion but a revealed law. The Jewish conception of G.o.d was essentially identical to the natural religion that belonged to the whole of humanity and could be demonstrated by unaided reason. Mendelssohn relied on the old cosmological and ontological proofs, arguing that the function of the Law had been to help the Jews to cultivate a correct notion of G.o.d and to avoid idolatry. He ended with a plea for toleration. The universal religion of reason should lead to a respect for other ways of approaching G.o.d, including Judaism, which the churches of Europe had persecuted for centuries.

Jews were less influenced by Mendelssohn than by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was published in the last decade of Mendelssohn's life. Kant had defined the Enlightenment as 'man's exodus from his self-imposed tutelage' or reliance upon external authority. {25} The only way to G.o.d lay through the autonomous realm of moral conscience, which he called 'practical reason'. He dismissed many of the trappings of religion, such as the dogmatic authority of the churches, prayer and ritual which all prevented human beings from relying on their own powers and encouraged them to depend upon Another. But he was not opposed to the idea of G.o.d per se. Like al-Ghazzali centuries earlier, he argued that the traditional arguments for the existence of G.o.d were useless Because our minds could only understand things that exist in s.p.a.ce or time and are not competent to consider realities that lie beyond this category. But he allowed that humanity had a natural tendency to transgress these limits and seek a principle of unity that will give us a vision of reality as a coherent whole. This was the idea of G.o.d. It was not possible to prove G.o.d's existence logically but neither was it possible to disprove it. The idea of G.o.d was essential to us: it represented the ideal limit that enabled us to achieve a comprehensive idea of the world.

For Kant, therefore, G.o.d was simply a convenience, which could be misused. The idea of a wise and omnipotent Creator could undermine scientific research and lead to a lazy reliance on a deus ex machina, a G.o.d who fills the gaps of our knowledge. It could also be a source of unnecessary mystification, which leads to acrimonious disputes such as those that have scarred the history of the churches. Kant would have denied that he was an atheist. His contemporaries described him as a devout man, who was profoundly aware of mankind's capacity for evil. This made the idea of G.o.d essential to him. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argued that in order to live a moral life, men and women needed a governor, who would reward virtue with happiness. In this perspective, G.o.d was simply tacked on to the ethical system as an afterthought. The centre of religion was no longer the mystery of G.o.d but man himself. G.o.d has become a strategy which enables us to function more efficiently and morally and is no longer the ground of all being. It would not be long before some would take his ideal of autonomy one step further and dispense with this somewhat tenuous G.o.d altogether. Kant had been one of the first people in the West to doubt the validity of the traditional proofs, showing that in fact they proved nothing. They would never appear quite so convincing again.

This seemed liberating to some Christians, however, who firmly believed that G.o.d had closed one path to faith only to open another. In A Plain Account of Genuine Christianity, John Wesley (1703-91) wrote: I have sometimes been almost inclined to believe that the wisdom of G.o.d has, in most later ages, permitted the external evidence for Christianity to be more or less clogged and enc.u.mbered for this very end, that men (of reflection especially) might not altogether rest there but be constrained to look into themselves also and attend to the light s.h.i.+ning in their hearts. {26} {26} A new type of piety developed alongside the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which is often called 'the religion of the heart'. Although it was centered in the heart rather than the head, it shared many of the same preoccupations as Deism. It urged men and women to abandon external proofs and authorities and discover the G.o.d who was within the heart and capacity of everybody. Like many of the deists, the disciples of the Wesley brothers or of the German Pietist Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (i 706-60) felt that they were shaking off the accretions of centuries and returning to the 'plain' and 'genuine' Christianity of Christ and the first Christians.

John Wesley had always been a fervent Christian. As a young Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he and his brother Charles had founded a society for undergraduates, known as the Holy Club. It was strong on method and discipline, so its members became known as Methodists. In 1735, John and Charles sailed to the colony of Georgia in America as missionaries but John returned disconsolate two years later, noting in his journal: 'I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who will convert me?' {27} During the voyage, the Wesleys had been much impressed by some missionaries of the Moravian sect which eschewed all doctrine and insisted that religion was simply an affair of the heart. In 1738 John underwent a conversion experience during a Moravian meeting in a chapel in Aldersgate Street, London, which convinced him that he had received a direct mission from G.o.d to preach this new kind of Christianity throughout England. Thenceforth he and his disciples toured the country, preaching to the working cla.s.ses and the peasantry in the markets and fields.

The experience of being 'born again' was crucial. It was 'absolutely necessary' to experience 'G.o.d continually breathing, as it were, upon the human soul', filling the Christian with 'a continual, thankful love to G.o.d' that was consciously felt and which made it 'natural and, in a manner, necessary, to love every child of G.o.d with kindness, gentleness and long suffering'. {28} Doctrines about G.o.d were useless and could be damaging. The psychological effect of Christ's words on the believer was the best proof of the truth of religion. As in Puritanism, an emotional experience of religion was the only proof of genuine faith and hence of salvation. But this mysticism-for-everybody could be dangerous. Mystics had always stressed the perils of the spiritual paths and warned against hysteria: peace and tranquillity were the signs of a true mysticism. This Born-Again Christianity could produce frenzied behaviour, as in the violent ecstasies of the Quakers and Shakers. It could also lead to despair: the poet William Cowper (1731-1800) went mad when he no longer felt saved, imagining that this lack of sensation was a sign that he was d.a.m.ned.

In the religion of the heart, doctrines about G.o.d were transposed into interior emotional states. Thus Count von Zinzendorf, the patron of several religious communities who lived on his estates in Saxony, argued like Wesley that 'faith was not in thoughts nor in the head, but in the heart, a light illuminated in the heart'. {29} Academics could go on 'chattering about the mystery of the Trinity' but the meaning of the doctrine was not the relations of the three Persons to one another but 'what they are to us'. {30} The Incarnation expressed the mystery of the new birth of an individual Christian, when Christ became 'the King of the heart'. This emotive type of spirituality had also surfaced in the Roman Catholic Church in the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which established itself in the face of much opposition from the Jesuits and the establishment, which were suspicious of its frequently mawkish sentimentality. It has survived to the present day: many Roman Catholic churches contain a statue of Christ baring his breast to display a bulbous heart surrounded by a nimbus of flames. It was the mode in which he had appeared to Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90) in her convent in Paray le-Monail, France. There is no resemblance between this Christ and the abrasive figure of the Gospels. In his whining self-pity, he shows the dangers of concentrating on the heart to the exclusion of the head. In 1682 Margaret Mary recalled that Jesus appeared to her at the beginning of Lent: covered all over with wounds and bruises. His adorable Blood was streaming over Him on every side: 'Will no one', He said in a sad and mournful tone, 'have pity on Me and compa.s.sionate Me, and take part in My sorrow, in the piteous state to which sinners reduce Me especially at this time.' {31} {31} A highly neurotic woman, who confessed to a loathing of the very idea of s.e.x, suffered from an eating disorder and indulged in unhealthy m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic acts to prove her 'love' for the Sacred Heart, Margaret Mary shows how a religion of the heart alone can go awry. Her Christ is often nothing more than a wish fulfilment, whose Sacred Heart compensates her for the love she had never experienced: 'You shall be for ever Its beloved disciple, the sport of Its good pleasure and the victim of Its wishes,' Jesus tells her. 'It shall be the sole delight of all your desires; It will repair and supply for your defects, and discharge your obligations for you.' {32} Concentrating solely on Jesus the man, such a piety is simply a projection which imprisons the Christian in a neurotic egotism.

We are clearly far from the cool rationalism of the Enlightenment, yet there was a connection between the religion of the heart, at its best, and Deism. Kant, for example, had been brought up in Konigsburg as a Pietist, the Lutheran sect in which Zinzendorf also had his roots. Kant's proposals for a religion within the bounds of unaided reason is akin to the Pietist insistence on a religion 'laid down in the very const.i.tution of the soul' {33} rather than in a revelation enshrined in the doctrines of an authoritarian church. When he became known for his radical view of religion, Kant is said to have rea.s.sured his Pietist servant by telling him that he had only 'destroyed dogma to make room for faith'. {34} John Wesley was fascinated by the Enlightenment and was especially sympathetic to the ideal of liberty. He was interested in science and technology, dabbled in electrical experiments and shared the optimism of the Enlightenment about human nature and the possibility of progress.

The American scholar Albert C. Outler points out that the new religion of the heart and the rationalism of the Enlightenment were both anti-establishment and both mistrusted external authority; both ranged themselves with the moderns against the ancients and both shared a hatred of inhumanity and an enthusiasm for philanthropy. Indeed, it seems that a radical piety actually paved the way for the ideals of the Enlightenment to take root among Jews as well as Christians. There is a remarkable similarity in some of these extreme movements. Many of these sects seemed to respond to the immense changes of the period by violating religious taboos. Some appeared blasphemous; some were dubbed atheists while others had leaders who actually claimed to be incarnations of G.o.d. Many of these sects were Messianic in tone and proclaimed the imminent arrival of a wholly new world.

There had been an outbreak of apocalyptic excitement in England under the Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell, especially after the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The Puritan authorities had found it difficult to control the religious fervour that erupted in the army and among the ordinary people, many of whom believed that the Day of the Lord was at hand. G.o.d would pour his Spirit on all his people, as promised in the Bible, and establish his Kingdom definitively in England. Cromwell himself seems to have entertained similar hopes, as had those Puritans who had settled in New England during the 16205. In 1649 Gerard Winstanley had founded his community of 'Diggers' near Cobham in Surrey, determined to restore mankind to its original state when Adam had tilled the Garden of Eden: in this new society, private property, cla.s.s distinction and human authority would wither away. The first Quakers - George Fox and James Naylor and their disciples - preached that all men and women could approach G.o.d directly. There was an Inner Light within each individual and once it had been discovered and nurtured, everybody, irrespective of cla.s.s or status, could achieve salvation here on earth. Fox himself preached pacifism, non-violence and a radical egalitarianism for his Society of Friends. Hope for liberty, equality and fraternity had surfaced in England some 140 years before the people of Paris stormed the Bastille.

The most extreme examples of this new religious spirit had much in common with the late medieval heretics known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit. As the British historian Norman Cohn explains in The Pursuit of the Millennium, Revolutionary Milknnariam and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, the Brethren were accused by their enemies of pantheism. They 'did not hesitate to say: "G.o.d is all that is", "G.o.d is in every stone and in each limb of the human body as surely as in the Eucharistic bread". "Every created thing is divine".' {35} It was a reinterpretation of Plotinus's vision. The eternal essence of all things, which had emanated from the One, was divine. Everything that existed yearned to return to its Divine Source and would eventually be re-absorbed into G.o.d: even the three Persons of the Trinity would finally be submerged into the primal Unity. Salvation was achieved by the recognition of one's own divine nature here on earth. A treatise by one of the Brethren, found in a hermit's cell near the Rhine, explained: 'The divine essence is my essence and my essence is the divine essence.' The Brethren repeatedly a.s.serted: 'Every rational creature is in its nature blessed.' {36} It was not a philosophical creed so much as a pa.s.sionate longing to transcend the limits of humanity. As the Bishop of Strasbourg said, the Brethren 'say they are G.o.d by nature, without any distinction. They believe that all divine perfections are in them, that they are eternal and in eternity'. {37} Cohn argues that extremist Christian sects in Cromwell's England, such as the Quakers, the Levellers and the Ranters, were a revival of the fourteenth-century heresy of the Free Spirit. It was not a conscious revival, of course, but these seventeenth-century enthusiasts had independently arrived at a pantheistic vision which it is hard not to see as a popular version of the philosophical pantheism that would shortly be expounded by Spinoza. Winstanley probably did not believe in a transcendent G.o.d at all, though he - like the other radicals - was reluctant to formulate his faith in conceptual terms. None of these revolutionary sects really believed that they owed their salvation to the atonement wrought by the historical Jesus. The Christ who mattered to them was a presence diffused through the members of the community which was virtually indistinguishable from the Holy Spirit. All agreed that prophecy was still the prime means of approaching G.o.d and that direct inspiration by the Spirit was superior to the teaching of the established religions. Fox taught his Quakers to wait upon G.o.d in a silence that was reminiscent of Greek hesychasm or the via negativa of the medieval philosophers.

The old idea of a Trinitarian G.o.d was disintegrating: this immanent divine presence could not be divided into three persons. Its hallmark was Oneness, reflected in the unity and egalitarianism of the various communities. Like the Brethren, some of the Ranters thought of themselves as divine: some claimed to be Christ or a new incarnation of G.o.d. As Messiahs, they preached a revolutionary doctrine and a new world order. Thus in his Polemical tract Gangraena or a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectarians of this time (1640), their Presbyterian critic Thomas Edwards summarised the beliefs of the Ranters: Every creature in the first estate of creation was G.o.d, and every creature is G.o.d, every creature that hath life and breath being an efflux from G.o.d, and shall return unto G.o.d again, be swallowed up in him as a drop is in the ocean ... A man baptised with the Holy Ghost knows all things even as G.o.d knows all things, which point is a deep mystery ... That if a man by the spirit knows himself to be in a state of grace, though he did commit murther or drunkennesses, G.o.d did see no sin in him ... All the earth is the Saints, and there ought to be a community of goods, and the Saints should share in the lands and Estates of Gentlemen and such men. {38} {38} Like Spinoza, the Ranters were accused of atheism. They deliberately broke Christian taboos in their libertarian creed and blasphemously claimed that there was no distinction between G.o.d and man. Not everybody was capable of the scientific abstraction of Kant or Spinoza but in the self-exaltation of the Ranters or the Inner Light of the Quakers it is possible to see an aspiration that was similar to that expressed a century later by the French revolutionaries who enthroned the G.o.ddess of Reason in the Pantheon.

Several of the Ranters claimed to be the Messiah, a reincarnation of G.o.d, who was to establish the new Kingdom. The accounts that we have of their lives suggest mental disorder in some cases but they still seem to have attracted a following, obviously addressing a spiritual and social need in the England of their time. Thus William Franklin, a respectable householder, became mentally ill in 1646 after his family had been smitten by plague. He horrified his fellow-Christians by declaring himself to be G.o.d and Christ but later recanted and begged pardon. He seemed in full possession of his faculties but he still left his wife and began to sleep with other women, leading an apparently disreputable, mendicant life. One of these women, Mary Cadbury, began to see visions and hear voices, prophesying a new social order which would abolish all cla.s.s distinctions. She embraced Franklin as her Lord and Christ. They seem to have attracted a number of disciples but in 1650 were arrested, whipped and imprisoned in Bridewell. At about the same time, one John Robbins was also revered as G.o.d: he claimed to be G.o.d the Father and believed that his wife would shortly give birth to the Saviour of the world.

Some historians deny that men like Robbins and Franklin were Ranters, noting that we only hear about their activities from their enemies, who may have distorted their beliefs for polemical reasons. But some texts by notable Ranters like Jacob Bauthumely, Richard Coppin and Laurence Clarkson have survived which show the same complex of ideas: they also preached a revolutionary social creed. In his treatise The Light and Dark Sides of G.o.d (1650), Bauthumely speaks of G.o.d in terms that recall the Sufi belief that G.o.d was the Eye, Ear and Hand of the man who turns to him: 'O G.o.d, what shall I say thou art?' he asks. 'For if I say I see thee, it is nothing but thy seeing of thy selfe; for there is nothing in me capable of seeing thee but thy selfe: If I say I know thee, that is no other but the knowledge of thy selfe.' {39} Like the rationalists, Bauthumely rejects the doctrine of the Trinity and, again like a Sufi, qualifies his belief in the divinity of Christ by saying that while he was divine, G.o.d could not become manifest in only one man: 'He as really and substantially dwells in the flesh of other men and Creatures, as well as in the man Christ.' {40} The wors.h.i.+p of a distinct, localised G.o.d is a form of idolatry; Heaven is not a place but the spiritual presence of Christ. The biblical idea of G.o.d, Bauthumely believed, was inadequate: sin is not an action but a condition, a falling short of our divine nature. Yet mysteriously, G.o.d was present in sin, which was simply 'the dark side of G.o.d, a mere privation of light'. {41} Bauthumely was denounced an atheist by his enemies but his book is not far in spirit from Fox, Wesley and Zinzenburg, though it is expressed far more crudely. Like the later Pietists and Methodists, he was trying to internalise a G.o.d who had become distant and inhumanly objective and to transpose traditional doctrine into religious experience. He also shared the rejection of authority and essentially optimistic view of humanity shared later by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and those who subscribed to a religion of the heart.

Bauthumely was flirting with the deeply exciting and subversive doctrine of the holiness of sin. If G.o.d was everything, sin was nothing - an a.s.sertion that Ranters like Laurence Clarkson and Alastair Coppe also tried to demonstrate by flagrantly violating the current s.e.xual code or by swearing and blaspheming in public. Coppe was particularly famous for drunkenness and smoking. Once he had become a Ranter, he had indulged what was obviously a long-suppressed craving to curse and swear. We hear of him cursing for a whole hour in the pulpit of a London church and swearing at the hostess of a tavern so fearfully that she trembled for hours afterwards. This could have been a reaction to the repressive Puritan ethic, with its unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind. Fox and his Quakers insisted that sin was by no means inevitable. He certainly did not encourage his Friends to sin and hated the licentiousness of the Ranters, but he was trying to preach a more optimistic anthropology and restore the balance. In his tract A Single Eye, Laurence Clarkson argued that since G.o.d had made all things good, 'sin' only existed in men's imagination. G.o.d himself had claimed in the Bible that he would make the darkness light. Monotheists had always found it difficult to accommodate the reality of sin, though mystics had tried to discover a more holistic vision. Julian of Norwich had believed that sin was 'behovely' and somehow necessary. Kabbalists had suggested that sin was mysteriously rooted in G.o.d. The extreme libertarianism of Ranters like Coppe and Clarkson can be seen as a rough and ready attempt to shake off an oppressive Christianity which had terrorised the faithful with its doctrine of an angry, vengeful G.o.d. Rationalists and 'enlightened' Christians were also trying to shake off the fetters of a religion, which had presented G.o.d as a cruel authority figure, and discover a milder deity.

Social historians have noted that Western Christianity is unique among the world-religions for its violent alternations of periods of repression and permissiveness. They have also noted that the repressive phases usually coincide with a religious revival. The more relaxed moral climate of the Enlightenment would be succeeded in many parts of the West by the repressions of the Victorian period, which was accompanied by an upsurge of a more fundamentalist religiosity. In our own day, we have witnessed the permissive society of the 1960s giving way to the more puritan ethic of the 19805, which has also coincided with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the West. This is a complex phenomenon, which doubtless has no single cause. It is, however, tempting to connect this with the idea of G.o.d which Westerners have found problematic. The theologians and mystics of the Middle Ages may have preached a G.o.d of love but the fearful Dooms over the cathedral doors depicting the tortures of the d.a.m.ned told another story. The sense of G.o.d has often been characterised by darkness and struggle in the West, as we have seen. Ranters like Clarkson and Coppe were flouting Christian taboos and proclaiming the holiness of sin at the same time as the witchcraft craze was raging in various countries of Europe. The radical Christians of Cromwell's England were also rebelling against a G.o.d and a religion which was too demanding and frightening.

The new born-again Christianity that was beginning to appear in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was frequently unhealthy and characterised by violent and sometimes dangerous emotions and reversals. We can see this in the wave of religious fervour known as the Great Awakening that swept New England during the 17305. It had been inspired by the evangelical preaching of George Whitfield, a disciple and colleague of the Wesleys, and the h.e.l.l-fire sermons of the Yale graduate Jonathan Edwards (1703-58). Edwards describes this Awakening in his essay 'A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of G.o.d in Northampton, Connecticut'. He describes his paris.h.i.+oners there as nothing out of the ordinary: they were sober, orderly and good but lacking in religious fervour. They were no better or worse than men and women in any of the other colonies. But in 1734 two young people died shockingly sudden deaths and this (backed up, it would appear, by some fearful words by Edwards himself) plunged the town into a frenzy of religious fervour. People could talk of nothing but religion; they stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible.

In about six months, there had been about three hundred born-again conversions from all cla.s.ses of society: sometimes there would be as many as five a week. Edwards saw this craze as the direct work of G.o.d himself: he meant this quite literally, it was not a mere pious facon de parler. As he repeatedly said, 'G.o.d seemed to have gone out of his usual way' of behaving in New England and was moving the people in a marvellous and miraculous manner. It has to be said, however, that the Holy Spirit sometimes manifested himself in some rather hysterical symptoms. Sometimes, Edwards tells us, they were quite 'broken' by the fear of G.o.d and 'sunk into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of G.o.d'. This would be succeeded by an equally extreme elation, when they felt suddenly saved. They used 'to break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping. Sometimes they have not been able to forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration'. {42} We are clearly far from the calm control that mystics in all the major religious traditions have believed to be the hallmark of true enlightenment.

These intensely emotional reversals have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America. It was a new birth, attended by violent convulsions of pain and effort, a new version of the Western struggle with G.o.d. The Awakening spread like a contagion to surrounding towns and villages, just as it would a century later when New York state would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so habitually scorched by the flames of religious fervour. While in this exalted state, Edwards noted that his converts felt that the whole world was delightful. They could not tear themselves away from their Bibles and even forgot to eat. Not surprisingly, perhaps, their emotion died down and about two years later Edwards noted that 'it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of G.o.d was gradually withdrawing from us'. Again, he was not speaking metaphorically: Edwards was a true Western literalist in religious matters. He was convinced that the Awakening had been a direct revelation of G.o.d in their midst, the tangible activity of the Holy Spirit as on the first Pentecost. When G.o.d had withdrawn, as abruptly as he had come, his place was - again, quite literally - taken by Satan. Exaltation was succeeded by suicidal despair. First one poor soul killed himself by cutting his throat and: 'After this mult.i.tudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, to do as this person had done.

Many had it urged upon them as if somebody had spoken to them, "Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!"' Two people went mad with 'strange, enthusiastic delusions'. {43} There were no more conversions but the people who survived the experience were calmer and more joyful than they had been before the Awakening, or so Edwards would have us believe. The G.o.d of Jonathan Edwards and his converts, who revealed himself in such abnormality and distress, was clearly just as frightening and arbitrary in his dealings with his people as ever. The violent swings of emotion, the manic elation and profound despair, show that many of the less privileged people of America found it difficult to keep their balance when they had dealings with 'G.o.d'. It also shows a conviction that we find also in the scientific religion of Newton that G.o.d is directly responsible for everything that happens in the world, however bizarre.

It is difficult to a.s.sociate this fervid and irrational religiosity with the measured calm of the Founding Fathers. Edwards had many opponents who were extremely critical of the Awakening. G.o.d would only express himself rationally, the liberals claimed, not in violent eruptions into human affairs. But in Religion and the American Mind; From the Great Awakening to the Revolution, Alan Heimart argues that the new birth of the Awakening was an evangelical version of the Enlightenment ideal of the pursuit of happiness: it represented an 'existential liberation from a world in which "everything awakens powerful apprehension"'. {44} The Awakening occurred in the poorer colonies, where people had little expectation of happiness in this world, despite the hopes of the sophisticated Enlightenment. The experience of being born again, Edwards had argued, resulted in a feeling of joy and a perception of beauty that was quite different from any natural sensation. In the Awakening, therefore, a G.o.d-experience had made the Enlightenment of the New World available to more than a few successful people in the colonies. We should also recall that the philosophical Enlightenment was also experienced as a quasi-religious liberation. The terms edaims.e.m.e.nt and Aufklarung have definite religious connotations. The G.o.d of Jonathan Edwards also contributed to the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1775. In the eyes of the revivalists, Britain had lost the new light that had shone so brightly during the Puritan Revolution and now seemed decadent and regressive. It was Edwards and his colleagues who led Americans of the lower cla.s.ses to take the first steps towards revolution. Messianism was essential to Edwards's religion: human effort would hasten the coming of G.o.d's Kingdom, which was attainable and imminent in the New World.

The Awakening itself (despite its tragic finale) made people believe that the process of Redemption described in the Bible had already begun. G.o.d was firmly committed to the project. Edwards gave the doctrine of the Trinity a political interpretation: the Son was 'the deity generated by G.o.d's understanding' and thus the blueprint of the New Commonwealth; the Spirit, 'the deity subsisting in act', was the force which would accomplish this masterplan in time. {45} In the New World of America, G.o.d would thus be able to contemplate his own perfections on earth. The society would express the 'excellencies' of G.o.d himself. The New England would be a 'city on the hill', a light unto the Gentiles 's.h.i.+ning with a reflection of the glory of Jehovah risen upon it, which shall be attractive and ravis.h.i.+ng to all'. {46} The G.o.d of Jonathan Edwards, therefore, would be incarnated in the Commonwealth: Christ was seen as embodied in a good society.

Other Calvinists were in the van of progress: they introduced chemistry into the curriculum in America and Timothy Dwight, Edwards's grandson, saw scientific knowledge as a prelude to the final perfection of humanity. Their G.o.d did not necessarily mean obscurantism, as the American liberals sometimes imagined. The Calvinists disliked Newton's cosmology, which left G.o.d with little to do once he had got things started. As we have seen, they preferred a G.o.d who was literally active in the world: their doctrine of predestination showed that in their view G.o.d was actually responsible for everything that happened here below, for good or ill. This meant that science could only reveal the G.o.d who could be discerned in all the activities of his creatures - natural, civil, physical and spiritual - even in those activities which seemed fortuitous. In some respects, the Calvinists were more adventurous in their thinking than the Liberals who opposed their revivalism and preferred simple faith to the 'speculative, perplexing notions' that disturbed them in the preaching of revivalists like Whitfield and Edwards. Alan Heimart argues that the origins of anti-intellectualism in American society might not