A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson
15. Though the bibliographers claim to have traced the authorship in
1649 words | Chapter 220
most cases, such works were in the first instance generally published
anonymously, [1038] as were those of Voltaire, d'Holbach, and the
leading freethinkers; and the clerical policy of suppression had
the result of leaving them generally unanswered, save in anonymous
writings, when they nevertheless got into private circulation. It was
generally impolitic that an official answer should appear to a book
which was officially held not to exist; so that the orthodox defence
was long confined mainly to the classic performances of Pascal,
Bossuet, Huet, Fénelon, and some outsiders such as the Protestant
Abbadie, who settled first in Berlin and later in London. The polemic
of every one of the writers named is a work of ability; even that of
Abbadie (Traité de la Vérité de la religion chrétienne, 1684), though
now little known, was in its day much esteemed. [1039] In the age of
Louis XIV those classic answers to unbelief were by believers held
to be conclusive; and thus far the French defence was certainly more
thorough and philosophical than the English. But French freethought,
which in Herbert's day had given the lead to English, now drew new
energy from the English growth; and the general arguments of the
old apologists did not explicitly meet the new attack. Their books
having been written to meet the mostly unpublished objections of
previous generations, the Church through its chosen policy had the
air of utter inability to confute the newer propaganda, though some
apologetic treatises of fair power did appear, in particular those
of the Abbé Bergier. [1040] By the avowal of a Christian historian,
"So low had the talents of the once illustrious Church of France fallen
that in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Christianity
itself was assailed, not one champion of note appeared in its ranks;
and when the convocation of the clergy, in 1770, published their
famous anathema against the dangers of unbelief, and offered rewards
for the best essays in defence of the Christian faith, the productions
called forth were so despicable that they sensibly injured the cause
of religion." [1041]
The freethinking attack, in fact, had now become overwhelming. After
the suppression of the Jesuit Order (1764) [1042] the press grew
practically more and more free; and when, after the accession of Pope
Clement XIV (1769), the freethinking books circulated with less and
less restraint, Bergier extended his attack on deism, and deists and
clerics joined in answering the atheistic Système de la Nature of
d'Holbach. But by this time the deistic books were legion, and the
political battle over the taxation of Church property had become
the more pressing problem, especially seeing that the mass of the
people remained conforming. The manifesto of the clergy in 1770 was
accompanied by an address to the king "On the evil results of liberty
of thought and printing," following up a previous appeal by the pope;
[1043] and in consideration of the donation by the clergy of sixteen
million livres the Government recommended the Parlement of Paris
to proceed against impious books. There seems accordingly to have
been some hindrance to publication for a year or two; but in 1772
appeared the Bon Sens of d'Holbach and Diderot; and there was no
further serious check, the Jesuits being disbanded by the pope in 1773.
The English view that French orthodoxy made a "bad" defence
to the freethinking attack as compared with what was done in
England (Sir J. F. Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, 2nd. ser. p. 281;
Alison, as cited above) proceeds on some misconception of the
circumstances, which, as has been shown, were substantially
different in the two countries. Could the English clergy have
resorted to official suppression of deistic literature, they
too would doubtless have done so. Swift and Berkeley bitterly
desired to. But the view that the English defence was relatively
"good," and that Butler's in particular was decisive, is also,
as we have seen, fallacious. In Sir Leslie Stephen's analysis,
as apart from his preamble, the orthodox defence is exhibited as
generally weak, and often absurd. Nothing could be more futile
than the three "Pastoral Letters" published by the Bishop of
London (1728, 1730, 1731) as counterblasts to the freethinking
books of this period. In France the defence began sooner, and
was more profound and even more methodical. Pascal at least went
deeper, and Bossuet (in his Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle)
more widely, into certain inward and outward problems of the
controversy than did any of the English apologists; Huet produced,
in his Demonstratio Evangelica, one of the most methodical of all
the defensive treatises of the time; Abbadie, as before noted,
gave great satisfaction, and certainly grappled zealously with
Hobbes and Spinoza; Allix, though no great dialectician, gave a
lead to English apologetics against the deists (above, p. 97),
and was even adapted by Paley; and Fénelon, though his Traité de
l'Existence et des Attributs de Dieu (1712) and Lettres sur la
Religion (1716) are not very powerful processes of reasoning,
contributed through his reproduced conversations (1710) with
Ramsay a set of arguments at least as plausible as anything on
the English side, and, what is more notable, marked by an amenity
which almost no English apologist attained.
The ground had been thus very fully covered by the defence in
France before the main battle in England began; and when a new
French campaign commenced with Voltaire, the defence against
that incomparable attack, so far as the system allowed of any,
was probably as good as it could have been made in England, save
insofar as the Protestants gave up modern miracles, while most of
the Catholics claimed them for their Church. Counterblasts such
as the essay of Linguet, Le Fanatisme des Philosophes (1764),
were but general indictments of rationalism; and other apologetic
treatises, as we saw, handled only the most prominent books on
the other side. It should be noted, too, that as late as 1764
the police made it almost impossible to obtain in Paris works
of Voltaire recently printed in Holland (Grimm, vii, 123, 133,
434). But, as Paley admitted with reference to Gibbon ("Who can
refute a sneer?"), the new attack was in any case very hard to
meet. A sneer is not hard to refute when it is unfounded, inasmuch
as it implies a proposition, which can be rebutted or turned by
another sneer. The Anglican Church had been well enough pleased by
the polemic sneers of Swift and Berkeley; but the other side had
the heavier guns, and of the mass of defences produced in England
nothing remains save in the neat compilation of Paley. Alison's
whole avowal might equally well apply to anything produced in
England as against Voltaire. The skeptical line of argument for
faith had been already employed by Huet and Pascal and Fénelon,
with visibly small success; Berkeley had achieved nothing with
it as against English deism; and Butler had no such effect in his
day in England as to induce French Catholics to use him. (He does
not appear to have been translated into French till 1821.)
An Oratorian priest, again, translated the anti-deistic essays
of President Forbes; and the Pensées Theologiques relatives aux
erreurs du temps of Père Jamin (1768; 4e édit. 1773) were thought
worthy of being translated into German, poor as they were. With
their empty affirmation of authority they suggest so much blank
cartridge, which could avail nothing with thinking men; and here
doubtless the English defence makes a better impression. But,
on the other hand, Voltaire circulated widely in England, and was
no better answered there than in France. His attack was, in truth,
at many points peculiarly baffling, were it only by its inimitable
wit. The English replies to Spinoza, again, were as entirely
inefficient or deficient as the French; the only intelligent
English answers to Hume on Miracles (the replies on other issues
were of no account) made use of the French investigations of the
Jansenist miracles; and the replies to Gibbon were in general
ignominious failures.
Finally, though the deeper reasonings of Diderot were over the
heads alike of the French and the English clergy, the Système
de la Nature of d'Holbach was met skilfully enough at many
points by G. J. Holland (1772), who, though not a Frenchman,
wrote excellent French, and supplied for French readers a
very respectable rejoinder; [1044] whereas in England there was
practically none. In this case, of course, the defence was deistic;
as was that of Voltaire, who criticized d'Holbach as Bolingbroke
attacked Spinoza and Hobbes. But the Examen du Matérialisme of the
Abbé Bergier (1771), who was a member of the Academy of Sciences,
was at least as good as anything that could then have been done in
the Church of England; and the same may be said of his reply to
Fréret's (really Burigny's) Examen. It is certainly poor enough;
but Bishop Watson used some of its arguments for his reply to
Paine. Broadly speaking, as we have said, much more of French
than of English intelligence had been turned to the dispute
in the third quarter of the century. In England, political and
industrial discussion relieved the pressure on creed; in France,
before the Revolution, the whole habit of absolutism tended to
restrict discussion to questions of creed; and the attack would
in any case have had the best of it, because it embodied all
the critical forces hitherto available. The controversy thus
went much further than the pre-Humian issues raised in England;
and the English orthodoxy of the end of the century was, in
comparison, intellectually as weak as politically and socially it
was strong. In France, from the first, the greater intellectual
freedom in social intercourse, exemplified in the readiness of
women to declare themselves freethinkers (cp. Jamin, as cited,
ch. xix, § 1), would have made the task of the apologists harder
even had they been more competent.
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