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Explore the impact of rationalism, Cartesianism, and Enlightenment on Christianity, as well as the importance of Pietism and spiritualist movements in the context of secularization in Western history.
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The Challenge of Secularization, Part I, The Rise of the Enlightenmentand the Pietist Movements, Especially the Quakers and Methodists History 236, Second half of March, 1st part of April, 2008
Secularization • “The word for the test [of Christianity] which the world has presented in the past three centuries is secularization. The term in this sense is diffuse and imprecise—therefore it gains in usefulness. For it is employed to imply that Christianity is no longer the motivating or impulsive center of Western life; that the religious question is consciously or unconsciously pushed from the center of human concerns; that the institutional forms of Christianity undergo revision at the hands of the ‘world.’”
Rationalism, 1 • “Rationalism, an attitude that reached its apex in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was characterized by its interest in the world and by its confidence in the powers of reason.” • Growing interest in world of nature in Europe since the thirteenth century.
Rationalism, 2 • Aristotelian philosophy, reintroduced by St. Thomas Aquinas, stressed the importance of sense perception. • Observation of nature could lead to true and significant knowledge. • Renaissance, with emphasis on the appreciation of the beauty of the human body and of the world, a further expression of this interest.
Rationalism, 2 • Parallel to this was a growing confidence in the powers of reason. • By applying reason, nature and its laws could be discovered and understood. • Galileo a good example. Believed in scientific observation as the determining factor in establishing reality and truth. • René Descartes another leader in this “revolution” of thinking that undermined the authority of the church.
René Descartes, 1 • Cogito ergo sum. Or, I think therefore I am. • Native of France, devout Catholic, spent most of his active intellectual life in the Netherlands.
René Descartes, 2 • “To his thinking, only that is really knowledge which the mind fully understands…and the beginning of all knowledge is doubt, and no real progress can be made until a basis, or point of departure, can be found which cannot be doubted; and that Descartes found, with Augustine, in his own existence as a thinking being.” Hence, “I think therefore I am.”
René Descartes, 3 • Furthermore, Descartes put great faith in mathematical reasoning. Only accept what can be rationally proven. • Interestingly, Descartes proved the existence of God. “He found in his mind the idea of a ‘more perfect being,’ and since his mind could not produce such an idea, which was above itself, it must have been placed there by God. Therefore, Descartes second conclusion was that God exists.” • Many theologians and churchmen challenged Cartesianism (named after his Latin name of Cartesius).
René Descartes, 4 • Universal doubt did not seem a good foundation for Christian doctrine and faith! • Other Cartesian thoughts on the relationship of mind and matter (or soul and body), for example, produced much controversy. How do they relate? Read pp. 188 of text for differing interpretations. • What is important for us is that Cartesianism helped lead to the growing rationalism and secularism of the era, even though Descartes thought of himself as a good Christian.
Other Currents • Other currents, in other countries, were also moving. • Empiricism and John Locke in England • Deism • French philosophes—Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Jean Jacques Rousseau for example. • Immanuel Kant.
The Positive Side of the Secularization of Society • Ironically, as Martin Marty in his History of Christianity, notes, as secularization proceeded and the church was extricated from civil life (the strong bond between church and state broken), what was “often directed against the churches was, however, a favor in disguise; for the extrication left them free again to assert their potentialities for holiness, less involved in dynastic intrigues, monarchical politics, and the petty play for power.”
The Enlightenment and Pietism • These two movements marked the move toward secularization. • The Enlightenment was a powerful intellectual current that undermined Christian particularism. It emphasized “natural” religion as opposed to particular revelation, or revealed truth, in Scripture for example. • The Enlightenment emphasized toleration. The French Revolution intensely anti-clerical, and a good example of Enlightenment philosophies put into practice.
The Enlightenment and Pietism, 2 • Pietism was a reaction to orthodoxy and the Enlightenment , as well as an escape from modernity. • It stressed personal devotion and an inner mystical communion with God. Some described as spiritualists and others as pietists.
Spiritualist Movements • Among the great leaders was George Fox, a seventeenth century Englishman who began life as a cobbler’s apprentice, and then began to search for the true “inner light” of Christianity, stripped of all the wordly elements of buildings, sacraments, sermons, creeds, ministers
George Fox and the Quakers • 1624-1691. Of humble origin, cobbler’s apprentice. Began seeking illumination from on high. Devoted himself to study of scripture. Learned it by heart. Sought a true understanding of God “in the spirit.”
George Fox and the Quakers, 2 • Discarded sermons, hymns, order of worship, sacraments, creeds, ministers all as “human hindrances” to freedom of the spirit, and he place the highest regard on the “inner light.” • An “inner light” is in all human beings. It is the “capability we all have to recognize and accept the presence of God.” • His preaching scorned by orthodox Christians, but he picked up many followers, eventually called “Friends,” or “Quakers” because they trembled with enthusiasm.
George Fox and the Quakers, 3 • In a Friends service of worship, silence prevailed until someone felt called to speak or pray out loud when the Spirit moved them. Women were equal with men. • Fox underscored the need for community and love. All decisions made unanimously to prevent discord. • Fox and his followers repeatedly jailed and beaten for their unorthodox practices, such as blasphemy, conspiring against the government, inciting to riot, refusing to pay tithes, and staunch pacifism, a characteristic still today of Quakers.
George Fox and the Quakers, 4 • Fox traveled widely, including two years in Caribbean and North America. • The most famous convert was William Penn. Father a famed Admiral. William well educated, became a Puritan as a youth, and finally, in 1667, a Quaker. That earned him a boot from his home by his father!
William Penn • Locked in the Tower of London for seven months. “…he sent word to the king that the Tower was the worst of arguments to convince him, since, no matter who is right, whoever uses force to seek religious assent is necessarily wrong.” Finally freed, with the help of his father. • Argued often and deeply for religious tolerance. Obtained a grant from Charles II to land in what is now Pennsylvania (debts owed to his father) where complete religious liberty would be practiced. Even proposed to buy the lands from the Indians! And his city was to be named in honor of fraternal love, “Philadelphia.” Much of the religious tolerance built into the U. S. Constitution descends from William Penn’s principles built into his colony.
Quakers and the Anti-Slave Movement • Library of Congress Exhibit • William Wilberforce and the Abolitionist Movement • But, before George Fox, before the Quakers, another abolitionist voice was heard….
Bartolome de lasCasas • Early on advocated the introduction of slaves to relieve the suffering of the Indians. But… • As Las Casas restudied the documents of the early period of discovery, as he pored over the reports of voyages by merchants and navigators in the service of Portugal and Spain--such as Christopher Columbus himself--to Guinea, to the Canary Islands, he began to perceive the nature of African slavery in its true dimensions. He denounced it in his Historia as he rewrote in the Dominican monastery of San Pablo in Seville at mid-century. • "The Portuguese," Las Casas wrote, "had made a career in much of the past of raiding Guinea and enslaving blacks, absolutely unjustly [emphasis added]. When they saw we [the Spanish sugar planters and sugar mill operators on the islands] had such a need of blacks and they sold for high prices, the Portuguese speeded up their slave raiding…They took slaves in every evil and wicked way they could. And blacks, when they saw the Portuguese so eager on the hunt for slaves, they themselves used unjust wars and other lawless means to steal and sell to the Portuguese." • "And we," Las Casas reflected, "are the cause of all the sins the one and the other commit, in addition to what we commit in buying them." • Parish and Sullivan, Bartolomé de las Casas, pp. 203-204, quotingfromHistoria de las Indias, lib. 3, caps. 102, 129).
Las Casas and Slavery • Slavery had been around since antiquity. • From the perspective of Judeo-Christian scripture slavery had been in existence since the age of the Old Testament. It is woven into the long story of the Hebrews and of their struggle to remain faithful to God. The very essence of the greatest Jewish experience in the Old Testament—their deliverance from Egypt as God’s chosen people—was predicated on their enslavement and persecution by the Egyptians. In the secular world of the ancients, slavery was accepted as normal by both Greeks and Romans, endorsed by both Plato and Aristotle for example. Christians, who inherited so much of their cultural baggage from both Hebrews and Romans, accepted Christianity as legal.
Las Casas and Slavery, 2 • People could fall into slavery from a number of reasons: the Church fathers and great scholastics such as St. Thomas Aquinas ascribed one reason to the consequences of sin; legitimate or just war could result in enemies or captives being enslaved; one could be born into slavery of slave parents. While slavery was on the decline from its wide prevalence in ancient times, it still existed in various forms in the fifteenth century when Portuguese mariners pushed the boundaries of exploration and trade down the African coast. The resultant fusion of Portuguese traders encountering African Muslims, many already enslaved by their own societies, produced the beginnings of the most nefarious trade in the history of man.
Las Casas and Slavery, 3 • Las Casas recorded the first Portuguese slaving expedition to Africa in 1444 in his History by using the chronicle kept by the Portuguese GómezEanes de Zurara. It is a story filled with cruelty and sadness. • it provoked great ire, disappointment, and chastisement as he contemplated the scenes described by Eanes. They included not only the capture of terrified innocents on the coast of Africa and their transport back to Portugal, but also the division of families, children stripped from parents, mothers clinging to their toddlers, husbands divided from wives, as the Portuguese divided up the spoils from this slaving voyage. Some could scarcely be pried apart, their faces wet with tears, crying aloud for succor, lashed by the overseers. As Eanes recalled in a callous phrase, "the partition took a lot of trouble."
Las Casas and Slavery, 4 • Eanes attempted to excuse this pitiful scene by emphasizing that, at least, the Africans were brought to Christianity in subsequent years. "He seems," Las Casas weighed in, "little less foolish than the Infante [Prince Henry the Navigator], unable to see that neither the Infante's good intentions [Henry refused to take possessions of his slaves, but allowed them to be taken by others, to preserve "his good conscience"], nor the good results that later followed [conversion], excused the sins of violence, the deaths, the damnation of those who perished without faith or sacrament, the enslavement of the survivors." • Las Casas continued, "nor did [good] intention or results make up for the monumental injustice. What love, affection, esteem, reverence, would they have, could they have for the faith, for Christian religion, so as to covert to it, those who wept as they did, who grieved, who raised their eyes, their hands to heaven, who saw themselves, against of the law of nature, against all human reason, stripped of their liberty, of their wives and children, of their homeland, of their peace?" Las Casas the humanist, the Thomist, the man who screened and measured the actions of Christians through Scripture and natural law, saw no mitigating circumstance that could assuage the monstrosity of the slave trade, a trade that persisted for more than four hundred years, profiting many and damning millions to a hell on earth.
Spanish attitudes Towards Slavery into the 17th Century • The argument that enslavement was the natural step to Christianity was dismissed contemptuously by another contemporary of Las Casas, Bartolomé de Albornoz, a Dominican who taught at one time at the University of Mexico. In his Arte de los contratos (1573) Albornoz questioned “the alleged justifications for slavery (war, conviction of a crime, purchase) ….Against those who were saying that enslaved blacks actually profited in the balance, since they received the Christian faith, he replies that according to the law of Jesus Christ the soul’s freedom may not be purchased with the body’s enslavement.” • It not was until late in the seventeenth century, more than a full hundred years after Las Casas’ death, that slavery as an institution began to be seriously questioned. In a text that Gustavo Gutiérrez labeled “the most extensive and spirited abolitionist call of the time,” a Capuchin friar named Francisco José Jaca de Aragón denounced slavery in 1681. • Jaca de Aragón had worked in Cartagena for a number of years. There he witnessed the entry of African slaves into that great colonial entrepôt, with its slave markets and the inhumanity of the institution exposed at full throttle as thousands of African slaves passed through each year. “In 1681 in Havana he [Aragón] wrote a lengthy memorial…which questions all the reasons given in favor of legal slavery [and] with good feeling Jaca protests against the subjugation of blacks to slavery and also against the yoke placed on the Indians.”
John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism • John Wesley from Inside the Methodist Church • John Wesley from Inside Wikipedia! • John Wesley on John Wesley • John Wesley in Savannah, Georgia • GO TO PPP ON “THE GREAT AWAKENING AND THE COMING OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION”
