The Spiritual Quest Against Religion

well good evening everybody welcome to the fifth of these lectures on the emotional history of atheism and unbelief in the Western tradition in the last lecture we saw that while the religious establishments of the 16th and 17th centuries were panicking about the mostly imaginary atheism of a moral Machiavellian Libertines a quite different form of unbelief was actually bubbling up under their noses an unbelief of anxiety assaulting earnest Christians or those who wanted to be honest Christians from within it may not have been what either they or we expected to find when they thought about unbelief but it makes a certain amount of sense this was a period when nobody was going to drift into atheism by mistake all the forces of social convention pushed the other way people who had no interest in religion might find themselves neglecting it but they wouldn't take a stand against it they might be bad Christians but they would hardly rise to being anti-christian only those who cared enough to believe also cared enough to doubt most of the people whom we met in the last lecture who suffered from this kind of doubt clastic you'll remember as a temptation they tried to overcome it they tried to return as best they could to their form of faith but in religion has indeed and everything else you can never really go back and if doubt was a temptation that meant that it couldn't simply be ignored any Christian preacher will tell you that the devil can only tempt you if God permits him to do so and if God allows it then he does it for a reason so temptation even the temptation to doubt whether there is a God isn't just a mean attack to be repulsed it's a trial by combat it's a training arena and if you if you come out victorious then you come out stronger so it's to be feared but it's also when it comes an opportunity to be grasped last time we began with this much quoted Biblical verse lord I believe help my unbelief which of course implies that faith and doubt aren't alternatives they're companions they're inevitably intertwined if your faith isn't troubled by doubt then on this reading what you have isn't faith at all it's vanity and smug self-satisfaction if you don't feel vertigo when you look down all that shows is that you're still at the bottom of the pit this was an observed fact it's a widely acknowledged truism that the more earnest and more intense your faith was the more likely you were to be troubled by doubt there's plenty of testimony for this but it was also a theological axiom it works in theory as well as in practice as Elizabethan England's greatest theologian William Perkins but it true faith being imperfect is always accompanied by doubting and so it must be for everything in the human realm this isn't exactly a good thing but the preachers are clear that God permits this for a reason as one shrewd Minister reassured his readers nothing is so certain as that which is certain after doubt shaking settles and roots doubt on this view is an ordeal that tempers and purifies those who pass through it and so you shouldn't flee from it instead you should set your feet spit on your hands and grapple with it like Jacob wrestling with God in the book of Genesis a much depicted scene in 17th century art work what I want to do with you this evening is to look at some of those wrestling matches and at some of their consequences matches in which the combatants fought on with grim determination found themselves forced into painful contortions and also discovered reserves of strength that they hadn't known they had and many of them managed like Jacob in the story to fight their enemy to a standstill but also like him they sometimes sustained wounds in the process and found that the encounter changed them this is a story which takes us back to the early days of the Reformation when alongside the relatively well ordered carefully controlled reforms that Martin Luther and John Calvin and the other big-name Protestant theologians were putting in place there was also a Wilder fringe the people whom Luther called fanatics whom historians nowadays lumped together rather unhelpfully as the radical Reformation this group are actually extremely varied they contain apocalyptic revolutionaries utopian communitarians and all points in between but I want to draw your attention to one strand of this radicalism those who called themselves spiritualists a word that's confusingly nowadays referred it used to refer to those who hold séances to speak to the dead I'm not talking about spiritualists in that sense the two leading figures here are a pair of German preachers Sebastian Frank and Casper's Frankfurt they disagreed on a lot we we don't know for sure that the two of them ever actually met they certainly seem to have reached their views independently of each other which i think makes them the more interesting both of these men started out as defenders of Martin Luther's Reformation but they quickly came to believe that Luther's purge of superstition and corruption didn't go far enough Luther was very critical of outward piety he said that that's just an invitation to ah cracy but he continued to insist that churches and liturgies and sacraments and all other sorts of Christian practices or to continue making as it seemed to Frank in particular only superficial changes to these Frank and Frank felt came to believe that true religion should be a matter of the heart and only of the heart in Frank's case what pushed him over the edge was the cacophony of different sects and preachers competing for attention in those chaotic early days of the Reformation how do you know which one is the true Church of Christ that's the sort of crisis of doubt that lots of people had in the Reformation period but Frank arrived at a disconcerting solution most people just ended up picking one group or occasionally starting one of their own but Frank decided that there was in fact no longer any true church at all it had once existed to be sure but it had disappeared centuries ago when the last of Christ's original apostles had died and so he said that the outward Church of Christ went up into heaven and lies concealed in the spirit and in truth for fourteen hundred years now there has existed no gathered Church nor any sacrament instead he suggested the church today is a purely spiritual thing in which case all outward things and ceremonies have to be done away with and are not to be reinstituted nothing has been taken away from the child except its doll with which it's played long enough it's time for Christians to grow up the implications of this are dramatic all religious observance or to stop no baptisms no sacraments no ministers no preachers no churches no services Frank didn't even encourage his readers to meet informally to support and encourage each other he did remain convinced that the Bible is God's Word but he was increasingly reluctant to lean on its precise text he talked about it as the rind of Scripture the covering of letters he thought that the inner spirit was what truly mattered and that meant abandoning not just each particular Christian church but the notion of Christianity as a whole the Christian Creed's he disparaged as stale formulas what mattered was the inner journey to perfection a journey on which he insisted pagans and Muslims could join just as well as Christians could because after all everybody is inwardly instructed by God so let's be plain this isn't atheism but it could hardly have been more hostile to religion for Schrank felt doubt and uncertainty are even more central for him the crisis comes in 1526 when he decides that he can't be sure which is the correct way to celebrate the Eucharist the Holy Communion and he decides that it's better to stop it altogether than to risk blasphemy by getting it wrong he always talks about this still stand as he called it as a temporary suspension but it's one of those temporary suspensions that has no obvious means of bringing it to an end and pretty soon he extended the suspension to baptism as well on the same basis unlike Frank Frank felt does at least encourage his disciples to meet secretly for discussion and mutual encouragement but these are communities that celebrate no sacraments recognize no ministers enforce no orthodoxy nor practice anything that their contemporaries would recognize as religion historians of spiritualism actively debate to what extent the later generations of spiritualists were directly or indirectly inspired by these founders and that's interesting but I actually don't think it makes a great deal of difference what matters is that whether it's by direct influence or by independent and parallel development these sorts of ideas kept surfacing and resurfacing in particular they did so in the Netherlands I want you to notice here a Dutch group called the collegians who emerged in the 1620s as a set of freewheeling religious discussion groups who rejected having any fixed ministries or sharply-defined orthodoxies by the 1640s they had a presence in most Dutch cities in that decade the movements given a new lease of life by the philosopher linguistic scholar and religious adventurer Adam Burrell in his manifesto written in 1645 Bereal argued that when Christ's first apostles preached the truth of their message was undeniable because it was authorized by miracles and by the inward work of the Holy Spirit but now Bereal insisted we have no such evident divine authorization nothing no plain witness of God proves the message of any church to be true and therefore no church can ever be sure that it is truly preaching in accordance with God's will in which case he said any entity that still has the brass neck to claim that it is a true Christian Church despite lacking that certainty is built on lies such institutions he says are malignant societies where into the soul of a man fearing God ought not to enter but he's extremely vague about what these scrupulous objectors should do instead certainly the collegians whom he led feel more like moral and philosophical discussion groups than like anything we'd recognize as a church quite how this sort of spiritualism first first reached England is unclear it's in the 1590s that we hear about English radicals allegedly allegedly arguing that and Catholic baptism is invalid that might sound like a niggling point or a normal thing for a Protestant to say but it's not if Catholic baptism is not true Christian baptism then none of the first generation of Protestant reformers had been baptized at all and since everyone accepted that nobody can baptize somebody else unless they themselves have been baptized then this is something that no mere Reformation can put right on this view the chain has been broken the true Church of Christ has vanished from the world the same idea surfaces more explicitly with a man named Bartholomew Leggett who has the distinction of being the second last person to be executed for heresy in England in 1612 we don't have any contemporaneous images of him this is a later Quaker postcard celebrating him although he wasn't a Quaker and he wasn't as this says an Anabaptist and he wasn't burnt in 1611 but in 1612 but apart from that I'm sure it's accurate Leggett like shrank felt held that all sacraments and Christian ministry should be suspended unless or until God directly intervenes to renew it he thought that the church had been fatally corrupted by centuries of enslavement to the papacy and it could only be refounded by God's direct initiative new baptism he said there cannot be till there come new apostles new apostles there can't be who are not endowed from above with miracles now if you had to guess the next line you would assume that he was going to proclaim his own sect's miracles or indeed anoint himself as a new apostle but he says something altogether more surprising there are no miracles yes some people claim to have visions but they're only idol dreams and so he says there is consequently no true baptism in the earth nor any one true visible Christian not even himself our source tells us that the people to whom he said this were nonplussed by it one asked to pray with him and he refused he said to do so would should imply that you and I were in communion or Christian Fellowship but before that miraculous ministry shall come there can be no such fellowship and therefore no such prayer another asked if he could join legate's church only to be told how silly you speak I have all this while taught you that there is no church so again he's not an atheist but if he has found religious reasons to abandon religious practice of any kind well what's the difference and it's not just about outward show Edith even if such spiritualists really did expect that at some point new apostles would appear a God who allows his church to dissolve into utter depravity and leaves his people with nothing at all for centuries on end is pretty ineffectual praying to him hardly seems worthwhile according to one report Leggett didn't pray to Christ for seven years before his death he appears to have believed that God exists but is almost entirely absent from the world that there's no immediate prospect of that changing and that humanity has no choice under these circumstances but to simply carry on we don't really know whether the mood of this stark vision was bleak or whether it was liberated but while it wasn't atheism in the strict modern sense of the word we can see why contemporaries might have called it that now again we do not know whether this movement died with him when he was executed in 1612 what we have in his successors are echo rather than definite lines of descent but it's certainly true that some of the ideas which surfaced in London in the 1620s and 30s sound oddly familiar for example an informant who gave a detailed report on clandestine radical groups in 1638 before the Archbishop of Canterbury's court said that one sect whom he called the familis --ts of the mount altogether denied prayer the resurrection of the body or any heaven or hell but what's in this life heaven they say is when they do laugh and are merry and hell when they're in sorrow and pain and at last they do believe that all things do come by nature it's almost becoming normal for spiritualists to feel that ordinary Christian prayer in actually asking God for things or Orthodox doctrines about life after death are simply too gross to carnal for the elevated purity of their vision the wrestlers with doubt whom I was talking about last time were dogged ly resisting temptations to question the Bible to doubt immortality to deny God these spiritualists are embracing those same questions and doubts and they believed that by doing this they weren't rejecting God's truth they were pursuing it and leaving behind the grass carnality zuv a childish faith so fun for them this is not unbelief this is belief raised to a new height and if reaching that height meant abandoning doctrines and practices which had been touchstones of Christian orthodoxy for centuries well then their boldness in doing that only demonstrates the depth of their faith and their commitment and if the unenlightened worldlings around them call them atheists for it well so what since the time of Christ people like but such people have always persecuted the truth even so we are still talking about a fringe phenomenon a few eccentrics and groups of misfits around the edges of societies in england as much as everywhere else until the summer of 1641 the authority of King Charles the first government collapsed setting in motion the process that would lead to civil war to the Kings execution and to 11 year for 11 years to an English Republic at no point during the 1640s and 50s did England have a government with both the power and the will to impose religious conformity on the population and the result was an exuberant flowering of religious variety without precedent in in the Reformation era and really in in European Christian history old radicals were joined by new adventurers at the edges of Orthodoxy and they found themselves converging on ideas and practices that look very much like unbelief and doing so on a scale that had never been seen before most of the zealous reformers whom the burgeoning revolution brought to power wanted to replace the Church of England's establishment with a new church and with new ministers but plenty of radicals thought that this was a trick essentially the same old clerical lies and tyranny in new clothes as John Milton famously put it new presbyter is but old priest writ large the logical conclusion of that was to reject the whole idea of a distinct ministerial cast altogether violent denunciations of Ministers became almost routine for example a troupe of parliamentary soldiers quartered in Warwickshire in the mid 15 40s were constant we're told in condemning the ministers of the region good Presbyterians as they were dissuading the people from going to church and claiming that they themselves the soldiers could preach better book stalls heaved with denunciations of the rituals practiced in vial stone churches and of the atheists and godless persons who still enslaved themselves to them so those who remain in the churches are being called atheists because they're adhering simply to the outward form of faith while those who withdraw themselves from religion are claiming to be the ones who are practicing true faith but attacking atheism by withdrawing from any kind of collective religious observance is to say the least a high-risk gambit or again most of these radicals favored some measure of religious toleration very much as an act of principle but the horrified traditionalists who said that toleration was a slippery slope to atheism had a point toleration meant abandoning the long cherished idea that religious unity was a glue necessary to hold society together because a tolerant society must of necessity be a plural one and so it must really be one where public life to some extent is neutral even secular and if that sounded a bit too theoretical the inescapable fact was that toleration eroded religion in practice as well as in theory in a free market of religious ideas after all customers get what they want books and sects denying the most basic Christian doctrines and practices started to appear so toleration began as a religious principle but it was also deliberately kicking away the props that had long kept most people's religions secure we saw last time that those who attempted to unbelief tended to be troubled by two doctrines in particular the immortality of the soul and the authority of the Bible and in the 1640s English radicals deliberately assaulted both of those doctrines in a notorious 1644 pamphlet called man's mortality the radical the future level of Richard Richard Overton branded immortality a hell hatched doctrine invented by the clergy in order to terrorize the simple into obedience he argued that the soul isn't a Christian concept at all but imported from pagan philosophy he ridiculed the idea of disembodied survival as a nonsense actually beneath the surface shock Overton's doctrines very close to traditional Christianity he believes very much in a bodily resurrection of the Day of Judgment but not everybody who followed on from him in denying the separate existence of the soul was so measured the claim that the soul of man is mortal as the soul of a beast and dies with the body is one that surfaces repeatedly during the years that follow sometimes with the promise of a future resurrection sometimes not there are others who suggested that only the soul will be raised and not the body and that turns resurrection into something inward and spiritual heaven and hell as we saw with one of those radical groups earlier become metaphors for happiness or misery people who took this line believed that they weren't abandoning traditional Christianity but instead they were revealing the profound inner truths that had always lain hidden within it if you pressed these people on what actually happens after death a subject which they claimed rather implausibly not to be very interested in they might maintain that every creature is God and shall return into God again and be swallowed up in him drop is in the ocean which again may not be a theism as such but it ain't Christianity either the literal authority the Bible doesn't do any better one radical who was confronted with awkward proof texts simply replied this is scripture to you but not to me how can you answer that the radicals picked up on long-standing niggles about textual variations problems of translation apparent minor contradictions these are problems which biblical scholars had known about and had been successfully containing for centuries and they turn them into real arguments against the Bible for the first time not because they're newly persuaded by these old chestnuts but because unlike their predecessors they need arguments against the Bible and so of course they find them they don't exactly reject it but they feel that they've outgrown it it's a tool of self-serving priests that they use to keep their people in play a group of soldiers in Surrey the ones who I quoted earlier as mocking churches and ministers in 1649 also declared that the Bible is abolished one of the one of this group pulled out a Bible in the pulpit showed it to the people said here is a book that you have in great veneration it is abolished it contains the beggarly rudiments milk for babe's again that sense the distinction between an infant faith in an adult one but now Christ is in glory among us and imparts a fuller measure of his spirit to his Saints than this can afford and therefore I'm commanded to burn it before your faces and so he set fire to the leaves of it some radicals distinguished between Scripture as history the dead outward letter recording what God had done in ages past and scripture as mystery the inner word written on the hearts of God's people here and now so this isn't atheist scoffing this is pursuit of a high mystery but the effect setting fire to Bibles lending credence to every burgeoning doubt about them is the same once you've begun cracking open the husks of traditional doctrines in order to reveal the inner spiritual riches how do you know when to stop Christianity is a historical faith it's centered around a specific set of events in Judea in the first century is that story just a symbol as well Jared when Stanley who's famous as the leader of the utopian communion as the diggers in Surrey in 1649 fifty wrote that Jesus Christ at a distance from thee will never save thee a Christ within is thy Savior Christ here has become the name for a universal spiritual principle not the distant historical figure of the preacher from Nazareth some said that they believed in Jesus in the same way they believed in Queen Elizabeth the first because chronicles make mention of her all the better to put their own revelations on a higher plane could this journey into a more rarefied and allegorized spiritualism and in actual atheism in our sense of the word well it comes close Jared when Stanley denied being an atheist but he also did his best to avoid using the word God he preferred to talk of reason with a capital R instead we do have reports of radicals claiming that there is no God or if there be a god the devil is a God it does rather look as if having pursued truth all the way up the mountain in the end some radicals found at the summit there of course most English men and women are horrified by all of this but not all of them panicked in 1646 this man Samuel Bolton prominent London preacher master of a Cambridge college published a guide to surviving in an age of abounding errors he suggested that the burgeoning sectarian chaos was a test from God a means for those who'd spend their lives blithely assuming that they were Christians to discover whether it was true and he cited Jesus's parable of the house that's built on sand that whose weaknesses are only revealed when the storm comes England he says is now living through just such a storm when a man sees abundance of opinions abroad he said one said this and other that sure it will make a man to put the question to himself upon what foundation do I stand what's my bottom and how can he have any rest until he's guiltily have gotten a better foundation to build on a foundation which none of these opinions can shake and unsettle there would be casualties he said to this process many fair buildings are not able to stand out the blast of trial and temptations because they our house is built on the sands the vain the hypocritical Christian whose faith has never had a secure foundation will find that the multitude of opinions does draw him away or else atheist him that he will be nothing such people will be revealed for the unbelievers that they have always truly been but for the true believer the sectarian cacophony he said has the opposite effect it will make such a man to inquire after the rock and endeavor to build their the multitude of opinions doth run a theater him pushed him upon the search and examination what is the truth of God these things do fire him out of his formality movie out of a a merely formal and conventional religion and he can have no rest until he come to some bottom to stand on so Christians shouldn't respond to this storm of confusion by hunkering down inside their inherited orthodoxies instead they should let the storm do its god-appointed work of washing away ill-founded notions and habits and that means that if cracks start to appear in your temple you shouldn't patch it up you should abandon it you should even tear it down and before you think about rebuilding your chief duty is to dig to work down through as many layers of shifting sand as you have to until your shovels finally ring on bedrock Bolton hoped to use this storm this epoch of confusion to turn lazy habitual Christians into earnest engaged but still Orthodox Christians but not everyone stuck to the script instead on a scale never before seen bands of earnest excavators began churning up the landscape of traditional religion many of them found their rocks and started to build again but soon others or indeed they themselves began to worry that this foundation too might be shaky er that it seemed and in the process the traditional ritual devotional even intellectual structures of the faith were systematically undermined or even deliberately demolished this was an age which loved categories and labels and so it gave a label to these people it called them seekers the name is a little bit misleading it refers not to a sect but to a mood in which sort of pretty standard Puritan dislike of ritual and superstition had turned into a hypersensitive allergy such that it was hard for any religious practice to be pure enough Psalm singing collective prayers sermons how could you be sure that these things are really God's will and if they're not then surely it's better to be safe than sorry again the most momentous issue was baptism plenty of these radicals concluded that baptism should be restricted to believing adult not administered indiscriminately to babies in 1644 a group of parliamentary soldiers in Huntington sure heard that a baby was about to be baptized in the parish church near their encampment they blocked the road and some of them were told got into the church pissed in the font went to a gentleman stable in the town took out a horse and brought it into the church and there baptized it it's not clear from the account whether this was a gratuitous desecration or whether they're trying to demonstrate that infant baptism was a grotesque parody of God's true ordinance and I don't think it matters the assault on long-standing Christian practice was equally severe either way but denouncing infant baptism is the easy part if you're reforming baptism how can you be sure that the new practice that you found is correct some of those who sort out the new adult baptism found it emotionally intense and satisfying others found that it left them cold or that their newfound zeal quickly faded or they noticed that baptism didn't actually appear to transform people's moral character some such people concluded that adult baptism too did not as one said answer the cry of our hearts and they withdrew from these communities instead as one such man put it I gave myself up to a seeking state again these seekers will be familiar enough by now like Frank and Frank felt like the Dutch collegians like Bartholomew Leggett they rejected all sacraments or ministry or Church but not because these things are demonstrably wrong but because they hadn't yet found rights in ministry that were demonstrably right they were waiting for proof waiting for miracles to give witness to a new dispensation miracles that would be unmistakable not just rumors and if God hadn't yet seen fit to provide such a thing who were they to run on ahead of it and it's not just about as either a clothing from Wooster named Clement writer who's one of the first seekers to defend his views in print had to confront Orthodox critics who bombarded him with awkward biblical verses and it turned out that he had the same scruples about the Bible as he had about churches if a preacher tells him to obey the scriptures he said I must ask what scriptures the originals well we don't have the originals all we have are the copies of the copies a translation of them well which one there are lots of different ones they don't agree with each other texts whose interpretation is mysterious and dark he concluded there is no rock to be built on here the Bible cannot infallibly teach us anything at all his fear of being deceived by error has meant that as a pious duty he is refusing to embrace any truth the Kentish seeker marries springin who unfortunately looks like she's been imprisoned in him Arang shows us what what this religion of anxiety meant in practice during the 1640s she wrote I changed my ways often I ran from one notion to another not finding satisfaction or assurance that I should obtain what my soul desired I gave over all manner of exercises of religion in my family and in private it now seems to her to be just hypocrisy she was ashamed she said to be accounted religious and she grew to love anybody who claims to be and so at last i began to conclude that the lord and his truth was but was made known to none upon the earth there was nothing manifest since the apostles days that was true religion I knew nothing to be so certainly of God as I could shed my blood in defense of it it was braver indeed it was more truly pious to admit her utter ignorance of God than to worship some imaginary substitute and so she said I resolved in my heart that I would be without a religion until the Lord had manifestly taught me one she'd become a devout and expectant unbeliever the Seekers hopes are real they genuinely seem to have believed that the time would come when God would send a new dispensation the difficulty with this hope is not just that it becomes thinner the longer it's delayed but that it doesn't solve the problem of what you do in the meantime if the Seekers met together and it does seem that at least some of them did like the collegians they did so more as discussion groups than as congregations even on their own they abandoned most of their most or all of their former religious practices either doubting that they could ever do them right or trusting that they'd ascended above fleshly habits like prayer or reading your Bible as an act of faith they've renounced religion so what should they do how should they live this is the crucial question and the answer to it is momentous they transposed their religion into a moral key one woman told by a radical preacher that nothing of what she believed was certain asked what in that case she should do and the preacher replied if you live honestly and modestly you shall do well enough some suggested that instead of meeting for worship seekers should gather to read some good moral things like the works of Plutarch or Cicero as clement writer put it if all doctrine and authority was uncertain the only certainty left is god's law written in every human heart that's the only yardstick against which churches their doctrines and their gods might be measured the only way to truly follow God is to abandon dogma the price of doing that is to redefine following God as striving to adhere to a supposedly univer Universal moral law which may be magnificent but not religion it's also impossible apart from anything else while most 17th century people believed that a universal natural law existed they couldn't quite agree on its contents just what counts as immoral respectable England was swept in 1649 fifty by a panic about a group called the ranters who it was said abandoned any kind of sexual restraint they claimed that God had given them Liberty to do as they pleased and that marriage was just another human superstition a lot of this is Prarie and scurrilous nonsense but this much is true if you climb above all devotional practice all communal religious life all doctrinal fixed points even all moral conventions then no matter how sincere your principles are you are kind of exposed to maintain that sort of rarefied trans religious spirituality and to live your life in the unblinking invisible light of reason is not easy it's no surprise if those who set out up this mountain found that they struggled actually to make homes for themselves once they're up above the tree line one of the most compelling accounts of seeker life comes from the charismatic former preacher Lawrence Claxton he tells how his itinerant life began to offer him worldly compensations he found that he could make a decent living preaching radical doctrines and handing round a collection hat he also found that his freewheeling doctrines of spiritual Liberty segwayed very nicely into arguments against conventional sexual morals and eventually he tells us the main point of his ministry became preying on his audiences pockets and on their chastity he told his followers in London that till you can lie with all women as with one woman and not judge it's sin you can do nothing but sin you have to demonstrate that you've outgrown these conventional moral norms and by this time he admitted he acting entirely cynically preaching whatever lies served his own end best and his own ends best and no longer believing any of it now this account is itself highly untrustworthy but the arc from idealism through opportunism to cynicism is I think plausible enough after all once you've abandoned all the constraints and structures of your old religion who's gonna stop you for a more highbrow but equally notorious example of the way that conventional morality could dissolve along with religious certainty consider the philosopher Thomas Hobbes who became so notorious in his own lifetime for unbelief that it was said he cannot walk the streets but the boys point at him saying there goes obvious probably wasn't exactly true he conformed outwardly to the Church of England for most of his life he may even have attended its worship traditional worship in the 1650s when it was illegal to do it but his reported claim that he likes to the religion of the Church of England best of all other and makes it sound more like an aesthetic choice than a confession of faith and it's distinctly muted in its enthusiasm whatever else if he accepted the church he certainly didn't like its priests when clergy pestered him on his sickbed he threw them out with threats to expose the deceits of their entire cast from ancient times to now and the fourth and final section of his great book Leviathan the bit that nobody reads that's titled the kingdom of darkness is essentially an extended howl of rage against the clergy it's that book which principally gave him his reputation for atheism especially the second half which is supposedly devoted to religion he became particularly notorious for his attack on the authority of the Bible but this isn't what it's not about disinterested biblical scholarship for all his convention outwardly conventional religion Hobbes is two-pronged attack both on the Bible and on the clergy has something C Kurush about it his persistent theme throughout the religious passages of the violin is that certain religious knowledge is impossible no human claim about God he said whether it's made by priests or made by the Bible is or ever can be proved beyond question even if it were to be authorized by miracles as so many seekers had said that wouldn't prove it beyond question churchmen individual believers may be free to believe such claims for themselves but they can't compel anybody else all they can do is as the first apostles did to persuade that sense of provisionality is used by seekers to argue that no religion is possible Hobbes gives the same argument a simple twist he'd spent the first half of his book arguing for the absolute sovereignty of secular governments he now claimed that since absolute religious truth is unknowable secular government's control ought to extend to religion - he doesn't argue it the time's owner almost looks like he does B he's not saying that secular governments have some secret religious knowledge simply that they are no more likely to be wrong about religion than anybody else and that nobody can prove that they're wrong and therefore since we submit to them in everything else we should submit them in religion too he's particularly hostile to any notion of separate religious authority all real religious authority should be vested in secular governments he says not because of some Divine Right of Kings but because the mere fact of being in power bestows on itself religious as well as political authority all other truths are provisional political power is all that's left I think what's truly shocking about Hobbes's view is not that he believes the religious truth is fundamentally I the seekers share that view with him it's the fact that that problem doesn't seem to trouble him he does seem to have believed that there is a God I think we have to dismiss an implausible amount of his writing as smokescreens otherwise he's simply not very interested in the question except insofar as he's suspicious of anybody claiming to act in God's name the deity whom he really Revere's is political power I think the reputation that he won for atheism from this is not unjust still I don't want to give the impression that the acid bath that the spiritualists had plunged religion into usually or inevitably led to abandonment of moral frameworks in this way quite the opposite the norm for these people was intense moral seriousness the the ranters are largely they're not entirely imaginary scare blown entirely out of proportion Hobbes is an isolated eccentric the most common route that seekers eventually took if we follow the the individuals through is that they became Quakers the Quakers of course being a sect which successfully institutionalized most of the Seekers qualms about churches and rights and hierarchy and were marked by their intense and earnest moralism guided as they saw it not by the dead word of the Bible but by the inner light of Christ but I want to finish with a different slightly less expected representative of this moralistic tradition in spiritualism with the philosopher who did more than anyone else to create modern secular thought The Fountainhead of the Enlightenment the most brilliant the most notorious thinker of his age Baruch Spinoza Spinoza story might at first seem to be quite different from the ones that I've been telling he was a Dutch Jew who in 1655 when he was 22 began to challenge his own communities at war third oxys the following year he was expelled from the synagogue in Amsterdam those early clashes eventually bore fruit in his theological political treatise published in 1670 this is a devastating attack on the authority of the Bible on any notion of the supernatural on any attempts to override human reason and in particular on the authority of the clergy on any idea of theocracy that's a preoccupation that he shares with Hobbes although they don't agree about much much else Spinoza's claimed that nature is self moving and creates itself it's not exactly atheistic it's closer to pantheism but his reputation as the founding father of modern unbelief is I think well-deserved but notice what happened after he was excommunicated from the synagogue in 1656 he fell in with the most intellectually open religious community in Amsterdam Adham burials collegians and he did that at a moment of particular religious flux a pair of English Quaker missionaries had just arrived in Amsterdam and the collegians and the Quakers recognized one another as kindred spirits and the young Spinoza quickly became a part of this Miglia he collaborated with a Quaker missionary he translated a Quaker pamphlet into Hebrew was his first ever publication written in the vain hope of winning Jewish converts the Quaker missionary with which he worked later wrote a detailed critique of the Bible which anticipated closely anticipated many of Spinoza's arguments we don't know for sure who learned what from who but there's no doubt that the two men are intellectually very close another quake a missionary in 1658 wrote that Spinoza was very friendly to their cause and now the his friendship with the Quakers comes to an end because the Quakers and the collegians fell out with each other you know in the way of sects they were so similar to each other that their remaining differences were intolerable and Spinoza stuck with his collegiate friends one of them would translate Spinoza first original book into Dutch he remained personally close to a number of collegians for the rest of his life and when he moved out of Amsterdam in 1660 61 he chose as his rural refuge the village of Reince berg the heartland of the collegiate movement which had been founded there for decades earlier Spinoza let's be clear was never a Christian but he was a collegiate fellow traveler an affinity which would never have required him to contemplate anything so grossly carnal as a baptism his early critique of both Christianity and Judaism is very much of a peace with the seeker and collegiate and Quaker critique of religion the philosophical heft that he brought to the table was new but the moral force behind it wasn't a vital part of this is that despite his Jewish background maybe because of his Jewish background Spinoza had an extraordinarily popular view of Jesus whom he calls not so much the Prophet as the mouthpiece of God he doesn't just unproblematically use the title Christ for him that's not a small step for a Jew to take he also repeatedly emphasized that Jesus's teaching and moral vision are so far above any other persons that as he says the voice of Christ may be called the voice of God for all the withering skepticism He pours on most of the Bible he is happy to accept the Christian Gospels as being more or less accurate accounts with the substantial exception that he blanket projects any accounts of miracles in but here again his reasoning is driven more by theology by ethics than by any sort of quasi scientific skepticism the reason that he believed that nature can't be contravened is because the alternative is to assert that God has created nature so weak that he is repeatedly compelled to come afresh to her aid so the real problem with the notion of miracle is that it's theologically incoherent in fact he says because a miracle would be in contravention to God's nature and laws consequently belief in it would throw doubt upon everything and lead to atheism any collegiate or seeker might have said the same and so the most truly devastating critique of religion in the Western tradition wasn't coming from outside but from within this is friendly-fire this is a determination to save religion from itself driven as much by a compelling moral vision and critique as it was by any metaphysical concerns religion was going to be distilled over and over until nothing remained but pure spirit and if that pure spirit produced madness or blindness or even if it just boiled away into thin air leaving an empty vessel behind well maybe that is the price of fearlessly pursuing God's truth thank you you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 79,290

Rating: 4.8325052 out of 5

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, religion, divinity, Spiritual, alec ryrie, protestant, reformation, christianity, atheism, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes

Id: ElN1bgNLMyA

Length: 56min 34sec (3394 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019