The crystallization of counter-enlightenment and philosophe identities: theological controversy and catholic enlightenment in pre-revolutionary France

Church History, Dec, 2008 by Jeffrey D. Burson

RECENT works of modern French history have found it fashionable, when focusing on the eighteenth century from across the jagged shoals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, to reductively treat Francophone national identity as the dialogical interaction of two related "imagined communities." (1) On the one hand, as scholars such as Joseph Byrnes have unconvincingly argued, French national identity after the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras has been shaped by the more secular "Cult of the Nation," (2) nourished by the Revolutionary ethos of liberte, egalite, and fraternite; on the other hand, there is the identity of France as Europe's first, most Catholic people. (3) Such stark contrasts between opposing identities, which were in fact self-consciously nourished and cultivated by nineteenth-century writers, are overdrawn, and yet the increasingly dialogical character of French national identity in the centuries after the Revolution remains relevant to the subject of eighteenth-century historiography, for the definition of French national identity or identities is intricately intertwined with the unfolding of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment identities that arose in various nuanced forms from the intellectual and religious history of France. Recently, provocative and timely work by Jonathan Israel, Dale Van Kley, and Darrin McMahon has taken up different aspects of these broader questions concerning why and when these competing visions may have sprung from the soil of eighteenth-century France. A remaining historiographical curiosity lingers as many historians of the French Revolution are quick to ascribe this dichotomy chiefly to the years after 1791 when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Oath of Allegiance made allegiance to the Revolutionary government more complicated for less Gallican, more ultramontane priests. On the other hand, historians of the French Enlightenment continue to focus on the inherently secular, scientific, and anticlerical nature of the siecle de lumieres as though the Church were inevitably opposed to Enlightenment innovations after mid-century, preferring and harshly defending (as Jonathan Israel has recently and voluminously argued) a comfortable and cautious acceptance of Lockeanism and Newtonianism as the only forms of Enlightenment discourse considered acceptable and capable of synthesis with Catholic orthodoxy. (4) Differing historical perspectives on the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion remain central to the identity of participants in the French Enlightenment at various points throughout the eighteenth century and after, and such questions continue to inform the definition of what it means to be "French" today. As such, the historical processes of Enlightenment identity formation continue to require examination; such processes--one of many lietmotifs within the complex and invaluable conversations opened by the works of Israel, McMahon, and Van Kley--will be the subject of this article. For scholars remain far from a consensus on just what it meant to be Catholic and Enlightened together in the century preceding the French Revolution.

I. RADICAL, MODERATE, AND COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT: TOWARD A NEW INTERPRETATION OF THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Continuing self-consciously in the tradition of Peter Gay, Jonathan Israel's most recent tome, Enlightenment Contested, analyzes the Enlightenment from a broader European and Atlantic World perspective, seeing within it a fundamental duality between the so-called "Moderate Mainstream" and the "Radical Enlightenment." Israel's work (which is actually more nuanced than his self-proclaimed dichotomies would suggest) enthusiastically proclaims the essentially conservative nature of the moderate Enlightenment, which he sees as essentially dualistic and willing to countenance an epistemological role for both reason and tradition, empiricism and rationalism, natural religion and revealed religion. Under the rubric of the "moderate mainstream," Israel casts a wide and often highly questionable net across the Continent and the Atlantic World, insisting that "Cartesian dualism, Lockean empiricism, Leibnizian monads, Malebranche's occasionalism, Bishop Huet's fideism, the London Boyle Lectures, Newtonian physico-theology, Thomasian eclecticism, German and Swedish Wolffianism" were "all methodologies of compromise" fundamentally at odds with the "Radical Enlightenment," which Israel sees as fundamentally Spinozist and the harbinger of modernity. (5) The Radical Enlightenment, Israel contends, had no truck with revelation or philosophical dualism because of its essentially revolutionary, essentially anticlerical faith that philosophy was socially transformative because of Baruch Spinoza's idea that natural law, God's law, natural reason, and the universe itself were of one substance. This Radical Enlightenment, Israel then asserts, became dominant in France during the 1740s because the moderate mainstream "simply proved unable clearly and cogently to win the intellectual battle" in successive controversies spanning the decades of the 1730s-1760s in France. (6) However, though Israel's work is brilliant and destined to be a standard work of eighteenth-century intellectual historiography, his methodology does not adequately account for the dialogical evolution of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in France, and it is imbued with overconfidence in the inevitable modernity embodied by the victorious Radical Enlightenment. As this article demonstrates (in some respects elaborating on a much lengthier book-length manuscript on the topic that I am currently finalizing) (7), the victory of Radical Enlightenment in France was not inevitable, but had much to do with the philosophical and institutional peculiarities of the manner in which Enlightenment thought was adopted by Catholic theologians in France. Though often hostile to Spinoza, philosophically inclined apologists, university theologians, and Jesuits, whom Israel might brand as moderate or even Counter-Enlightenment figures, were not exclusively Lockean and Newtonian in their natural philosophy but often Lockean and Malebranchian in their psychological and theological approaches as well. Many writers who would later be retrospectively branded as "radical," "Spinozist," or "Counter-Enlightenment" by their critics were in their own day passionately convinced that the body of revelation was, in toto, empirically verifiable--whether their arguments seem convincing to present-day historians or later critics is not precisely the point, if we are to avoid a whiggish interpretation of the French Enlightenment.