Introduction
Professor N.T. Wright of St.
Andrews University has delivered a series of lectures at the University of
Aberdeen's King's College Conference Centre. These are the
2018 Gifford Lectures:
The Gifford Lectures are an annual series of lectures which were
established by the will of Adam Lord Gifford (died 1887). They were established
to "promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense
of the term — in other words, the knowledge
of God." A Gifford lectures
appointment is one of the most prestigious honors in Scottish academia.
Natural
theology…is a type of theology that provides arguments for the
existence of God based on reason and ordinary experience of nature. This
distinguishes it from revealed theology, which is based on scripture and/or
religious experiences, and also from transcendental theology, which is based on
a priori reasoning.
The educator and historian
Jacques Barzun described the Gifford
Lectures as virtuoso performances and "the highest honor
in a philosopher's career."
Wright’s first lecture in his
series, entitled “The Fallen Shrine: Lisbon 1755 and the Triumph of
Epicureanism,” offers his introduction – including a broad sweep of
what he intends to cover throughout his eight-part series. The
entire series is entitled “Discerning the Dawn: History, Eschatology and New
Creation.” As with all of my work based on videos, I will do my best
to capture the statements.
You want my
advice? If your time is limited, watch the lecture; don’t read this
post. This is a long post (2500 words), the length only reflecting
my view of the value of many of the statements made by Wright in this hour-long
lecture.
In this lecture, he examines
the period of the Enlightenment and the rebirth of Epicureanism – including its
path through and with Deism. He examines this event through both the
French and American Revolutions, through the emergence of reason-without-God as
a god.
He offers an important caveat
regarding a study of history and philosophy: he does not assume that once an
insight is offered, it is universally embraced – in other words, events such as
“the Enlightenment” aren’t events at all; those who we now label as early
Enlightenment thinkers didn’t think of themselves this way at the time and
weren’t viewed this way by their peers. They were just thinkers.
The Lisbon Earthquake
Wright offers Joseph Addison’s
“The Spacious Firmament on High,” written in
1712:
What
though, in solemn Silence, all
Move
round the dark terrestrial Ball?
What
tho’ nor real Voice nor Sound
Amid
their radiant Orbs be found?
In
Reason’s Ear they all rejoice,
And
utter forth a glorious Voice,
For
ever singing, as they shine,
The
Hand that made us is Divine.
Wright offers that this is
natural theology at its best: the natural world sings of its creator, and human
reason (also from the creator) can hear that song. “Such ideas were
widespread.” The Christianity of the early eighteenth century was a
post-millennial Christianity – man was making a steady progress toward
perfection on earth, with Christ returning after this golden age of 1000
years.
Then came the earthquake of
Lisbon on All Saints Day in 1755. Along with subsequent fires and
tsunamis, this 8.5 – 9.0 magnitude quake virtually destroyed Lisbon, and the
death toll is estimated at up to 100,000.
The earthquake had struck on an important
religious holiday and had destroyed almost every important church in the city,
causing anxiety and confusion amongst the citizens of a staunch and devout
Roman Catholic country.
The event was widely discussed
and dwelt upon by European Enlightenment philosophers… The earthquake and its
fallout strongly influenced the intelligentsia of the European Age of
Enlightenment.
Returning to Wright: “The
fallen shrine of Lisbon symbolizes the collapse of optimistic natural
theology.”
This Time it’s Different
But earthquakes and the like
had been known to Jews and Christians long before this; yet, the reaction this
time was much different. Wright explores why this might be
so: “perhaps [earthquakes, etc.] only became a problem when Christianity took a
Deist form….”
People, in other words, already
had socio-political reasons for wanting traditional Christianity to be untrue,
and now they had epistemological tools to help. The Lisbon
earthquake then was seized upon by those who – for whatever reason – wanted to
reject Europe’s Catholicism and Protestantism alike.
There were Voltaire’s sarcastic
comments about God and Lisbon, ‘will you now say that this terrible event will
merely illustrate the iron laws that chain the will of God.’
These comments expressed what
many others were thinking, and when the dust had settled the Deism which Butler
had opposed had been replaced with a similar and sharper worldview – a revival
of the ancient philosophy of Epicureanism.
Christianity, Deism, and Epicureanism
While people would – and still
do – confuse Deism with Christianity, no such confusion was possible with
Epicureanism.
Epicureanism is
a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of the ancient Greek
philosopher Epicurus, founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomic
materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a
general attack on superstition and divine intervention.
Epicureanism does not deny the
existence of the gods, rather it denies their involvement in the world.
According to Epicureanism, the gods do not interfere with human lives or the
rest of the universe in any way.
Returning to Wright, “After
1755, Epicureanism had come to stay.” Whatever the gods are or
aren’t, whatever they do or not do, “religion is a human invention designed to
keep the masses docile.” All we have is atoms moving randomly,
bumping into each other and producing…whatever they will produce.
That’s all there is to
life. And when we die, we die. So there is, in both
senses, nothing to be afraid of. From Epicurus himself, through
Lucretius’s poem, and to Machiavelli, Thomas Jefferson, and many more
since. Epicurus was the great enlightener of antiquity, a view
echoed by Karl Marx.
Modern life is constructed on
these foundations.
Deism was widespread in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries throughout Britain and elsewhere, and
offered an easy transition to full-on Epicureanism.
What is the
connection? They share the view of the gulf between God, or the
gods, and the world we live in. The Deists believe in a Supreme
Being, a watchmaker who made the machine and keeps it well-oiled and
ticking.
For the Epicurean, the God, or
gods, had nothing to do with making the world and have nothing to do with its
maintenance – nor is the world a well-oiled rational machine, since it makes
itself and all in it by atoms randomly bumping into each other.
Hence, there is no problem of
evil in Epicureanism – the world is what it is; the gods therefore don’t care
about how we behave, and we won’t be judged. Prayer, devotion, and
holiness will have no effect on the Epicurean god(s); the lack of an afterlife
combined with no view on evil results in…evil, appropriate for today’s
nobility.
Epicureanism and the
Enlightenment
The term “Enlightenment” was
first coined by the English in the nineteenth century, often in mocking those
“shallow continental intellectuals.” Yet, the roots of the
Enlightenment must be traced to that same little island, beginning in the
sixteenth century: Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume.
By the early nineteenth
century, William Blake was shaking his fist, not only at the movement’s French
leaders (“mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau”), but also at their underlying
Epicureanism.
There is a book being published
tomorrow by Steven Pinker called The Enlightenment is Succeeding,
or words to that effect. This mythology lives on.
I might add: succeeding at
what? This Enlightenment did not immediately overwhelm all western
thought, and there were other great thinkers who continued their work outside
of this theology. “But there was a tide coming.”
Atheism is the end of the
Epicurean road. And they supposed it based on [air quotes in video]
“science.” Superstition has reigned, but now came the light. A
new world, free from interference, free from fear of divine
condemnation. Now that we found how the world works, we will do
things our own way.
Wright cites a poem by William
Ernest Henley, Invictus, with its most well-known line: “I am the
master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” Twenty years later,
the University of St. Andrews awarded Henley a Doctor of
Divinity. Let that sink in, and ask: where was liberty lost?
A Future Without God
Wright presents “Five Straws in
a Strong Wind”; signals pointing toward the future without
God. First, the Revolutions in America and France: “Both France and
America, in their very different ways, wanted to get God off of the public
stage.”
In France, the Goddess of Reason found a home at the
Notre Dame Cathedral (this “Goddess” was the brainchild of Pierre Gaspard
Chaumette, a leader of the Revolution and chief architect of the Reign of
Terror; he was later beheaded); getting rid of princes and getting rid of God
were two radical ways of saying the same thing. Robespierre
attempted to mediate, with a form of Deism; he was soon after beheaded. “Epicureanism,
and not Deism, was the new orthodoxy.”
Wright cites Thomas Jefferson,
“I too am an Epicurian,” (with full context here). Most of the founding fathers
were Deists, although “consistency in theology was not their strongest
suit.” The Deistic separation of God and the world was to be
mirrored in the strict separation of church and state.
Thomas
Jefferson, for his part, quoted Virgil, “Novus ordo seclorum - a
New order of the ages.
This, appearing on the reverse
side of the Great Seal of the United States in 1782 and on the back of the
one-dollar bill since 1935. Consider the events of 1935 and place
these in the context of an Enlightenment continuum. Perhaps just one more
revolution.
Second, the rise of
pre-Darwinian evolutionism.
Note the ‘ism.’ This
isn’t just a theory about biology; this is a worldview in which evolution necessarily took
place without divine guidance. Some people have called this
naturalism, but that is inadequate. It is Epicureanism.
That which was being studied
and that which was being invented would do its own thing without God’s
interference. “Put the question of God on one side, and science will
flourish.”
Third, there was the “radical
economic theory of Adam Smith,” with The Wealth of Nations,
published in 1776:
Arguing of the existence of an
invisible hand – motivated by self-interest – that would guide the flow of
money without intervention to bring about social improvement. …The
clock would work by itself.
Fourth, Gibbon’s Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire:
Arguing, inter alia,
that an other-worldly and squabbling Christianity had helped to sow the seeds
of imperial decline.
Fifth, and “right in the middle
of all this,” there came what is to be called “The Quest for the Historical
Jesus”:
Hermann Samuel Reimarus
believed, as a Deist, in a good and wise deity who had to be discovered by
unaided reason, since the Old-Testament was misleading nonsense, and the New
Testament was a self-serving fabrication. Jesus was, in fact, a
failed would-be revolutionary, who died a failure and whose body was hidden by
his followers.
Summing it up:
Heaven and earth remain opaque
to one another. All these things go together: politics without God,
science without God, economics without God, history without God, and, finally,
Jesus without God. Their godfather, if that isn’t exactly the wrong
term, was David Hume. By 1800 the shrine had fallen, and a brave,
new, independent world had been born.
Nicolas de Condorcet said what
many had been thinking: “the human race had been set free at last from its
shackles and was now advancing with a firm and true step along the path of
truth, virtue, and happiness.
Progress Without God
This new world embodied the
idea of progress – and the technological and industrial progress cannot be
denied. But how could this “inevitable” progress exist with
Epicureanism; after all, the atoms will collide however they like.
Wright further offers Hegel and
ultimately Karl Marx. Progress would happen and would happen
automatically. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was widely
assumed in Britain and Germany at least, that the Kingdom of God was at hand. Wright
isn’t so sure:
The idea that science and
technology are making the world better is ambiguous: industrial pollution, atom
bombs, gas chambers, tell a different story. But the ideology of
progress ignores these counter-examples.
It is worth considering the risks
of technology to humanity without God. Actually, it is considered
daily, but the “solution” offered is government regulation, government
negotiation, government treaties.
By the end of the nineteenth
century, we find the following combination of philosophical and cultural
beliefs: Epicureanism, with God out of the picture; second, the scientific
theories about evolution give credence, however unjustifiably, to a belief in
progress – whether through steady advance or revolution: Hegel or Marx; this coincided
with, third, actual political movements – and this toxic combination is with us
still.
And beginning with the
twentieth century, the West committed suicide – a suicide
induced by events transpiring even four centuries earlier.
Wright offers several who have
sounded the warning alarms – some of whom, it seems to me, were also fruit from
the same Godless tree: Rousseau, Dickens, Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Theodore
Adorno. “Postmodernism itself directly challenges this narrative of
progress.”
In other words, this “toxic
combination” brought forth its own Hegelian dialectic – as if the debate can be
had without God as part of the discussion. Many of these challengers
may have been right to challenge; however, without re-introducing what was
missing, their challenges were, perhaps, no better than that which was being
challenged. Nietzsche, I would say, certainly understood the
ramifications of God being dead.
Our Situation Today
Wright offers that the
conversation today is at best confused. While many enjoy the fruits
of modern western technology (“I prefer a modern dentist to a pre-modern or
post-modern dentist”), this should not suggest that western culture is also
equally desirable.
No wonder we are in such a
tangle, with multi-culturalism and post-modernism identity
politics. Our philosophical basis gives us neither a clear
understanding of what’s happened nor the tools to cope. These are
the puzzles we face after the fall of the shrines.
Christian leaders are not helping. When faced with the
challenge of steering through this Epicurean world, instead of turning to the
Bible, they turn to Plato – not noticing that in doing so the Bible is
unwillingly and inappropriately being dragged along behind.
Wright sees two implications in this: first, Western Christianity has
largely abandoned the biblical hope of new creation and bodily
resurrection. Second, holding a Platonic spirituality within an
Epicurean metaphysic is an open invitation to Gnosticism.
Conclusion
There are one or two points
with which I might disagree with Wright; there are perhaps a half-dozen points
that make me uncomfortable – albeit far less so than I would have been had I
listened to this perhaps five years ago; there are a dozen or more points that
shed light on what was lost via the Enlightenment.
There are many parts of the Enlightenment that I
embrace. The question is: what was lost? Herein,
Wright makes clear his view of that which was lost – the Christian God. The
more I consider this issue of moving toward liberty, the more I conclude that
such views are correct.
