View of John Knox that Princes and the People themselves have a Right and Duty to Depose an Unjust Monarch Preventing the Establishment of True Religion

In his view of the relationship between the king and his subjects, Calvin allowed that unjust rulers could be deposed by the inferior magistrates, but stressed the subject’s duty to obey established authority, even when it was corrupt. John Knox, however, believed that the aristocracy and the estates also had their authority granted by God, and so had the right and duty to defend the innocent, punish criminals and establish proper religion. If the monarch refused to allow religion to be reformed, and the true faith to be established, then it was the duty of the aristocracy and the estates to depose them. If the aristocracy and estates refused to do this, then it was the duty of the people themselves to reform the church, a view he addressed directly to the people themselves in his Letter to the Commonalty. This view, that the people themselves had the right and duty to rebel against their social superiors when they were unjust and prevented the proper establishment of true religion, was immensely radical in an age when government and politics was viewed as the exclusive activity of princes and aristocrats, to whom the masses of ordinary people should be loyal and obey, but who were otherwise excluded from government and their political participation was viewed with suspicion and distrust.

View of Goodman that Kings Owed their Power to the People, and so can Depose Unjust Monarchs

Knox was not alone in his views, however. The English Calvinist, Christopher Goodman, stated in his book, How Superior Powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects; wherein they may lawfully by God’s word be disobeyed and resisted, published in Geneva in 1558 that kings owed their power and their authority to their acceptance as kings by their people, and that ordinarily they should be respected. Like Knox, he also believed that the aristocracy was ordained by God to defend their nation’s true religion, laws and prosperity and to act to limit and restrain the king’s power. Kings were also God’s subjects, and like everyone else they were obliged to work to the best of their ability in their vocation. If they abused their position, they could be deposed and punished. This was not just the duty of the aristocracy, but also of ordinary people, who are required to reform the church if the king and aristocracy refuse to do so.

View of Ponet that God Established Government for Human Welfare, but Form of the Government Left to Humanity to Decide

Another Protestant exile from the reign of Mary Tudor in England, John Ponet, also believed in and expounded the right of the subjects themselves to overthrow an oppressive monarch. Ponet had been bishop of Rochester and Winchester during the Reign of Edward VI before he sought refuge in Strasbourg after Mary’s accession, publishing his treatise on government, A Shorte Treatise of Politicke Power in 1556. Unlike Mariana and Buchanan, for example, who believed that government arose out of humanity’s natural inclination for company and co-operation, or the need for protection from aggression when in the primeval phase of human existence, Ponet believed that humanity was too corrupt to govern itself through reason. He attributed the belief that it was possible to the ancient pagans, and considered that history demonstrated that they had been wrong. Ponet believed that human actions should be guided by divine law, which is the law of nature. However, humans did not obey law unless coerced, and so God had created political power for humanity’s benefit, granting humanity the power to legislate for itself and enforce such legislation with appropriate punishment, including execution. God did not, however, specify which form of government humans were to adopt. That was left to humanity itself. God did not grant authority to only one individual, but to the community, as a co-operative association based on the reciprocal need of each individual for every other. It was the community that maintained justice and general welfare.

View that Best Form of Government Mixed Government of Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy, and that Power of Monarch Limited by Constitution and God’s Law

Ponet did not believe that any people could sensibly give unlimited power to a prince, and so considered the best form of government to be a mixed constitution where sovereignty was shared between the prince and a parliamentary assembly. England, France and Germany were all ruled by this form of government. Even those monarchs who ruled without a parliamentary assembly were subject to constitutional limits to their authority. They were bound by God’s law, and so could only legislate on relatively unimportant matters. Furthermore, Ponet urged that people should not automatically accept legislation that was merely human in origin. Laws must be considered and obeyed on their own merits, and not because of the authority of the people who had passed them. While people owed kings their love and loyalty, their first loyalty was to God, then their country and only afterwards to the monarch. He regarded princes as merely members of the commonwealth, which could exist without them. He stated that princes were liable unjustly to seize their subject’s property as their own, alter the coinage and raise taxes, political conduct that Ponet declared to be mere brigandage. They did not hold of themselves their kingdom, but simply had it in stewardship. Under the law of nature, people had the right to depose and execute oppressive rulers and tyrants, and so the community had the ability to withdraw the authority it had granted to the prince. While this should be done by the community as a whole, private assassination was justified in some circumstances.

Demands for Religious Toleration for Roman Catholics and Protestants by Edwin Sandys in England

Apart from the ability of the subject or citizen to take part in the process of making political decision, one of the great pillars of modern democracy is freedom of conscience. While both Roman Catholics and Protestants in the Sixteenth century generally wished to suppress each others’ religions through force, there was also a profound desire amongst many Christians for unity and toleration in Christendom. Edwin Sandys, a son of the Archbishop of York and pupil of Richard Hooker, in his A Relation of the State of Religion, criticised the intolerance of both Roman Catholics and Protestants. Both Roman Catholics and Protestants were Christians, and shared the same fundamental beliefs and doctrines that were the essence of Christianity. The doctrinal points that divided them could never be decided for certain. Thus, he felt, that Roman Catholics and Protestants should respect each other, and that the unity of Christendom could be restored through the establishment of a European church based on the Christian doctrines held by both Roman Catholic and Protestant. This was to be done either by a general council, which would impose its authority on the Pope and other participants in the controversy, or by the princes, though he did not feel that they could be trusted to put this into action. In order to put an end to religious disunity and conflict, Sandys wished to prohibit the claims to superiority by the various sects and faiths in Christendom. Instead of persecuting the various Christian sects, governments should instead force them to respect each other. He did not, however, believe that anti-Christian opinions should be tolerated, and so did not advocate modern concepts of secular democracy.

Demands for Toleration of Roman Catholics and Protestants in France by Politiques

The Politiques in France had expressed similar views rather earlier. They were mostly Roman Catholics, but also some Protestants, who regarded with horror the devastation, caused by the Wars of Religion, and felt that the only way to save France from further carnage and destruction was through negotiation and peace with the Huguenots. A 1574 pamphlet described the suffering inflicted on all classes in France by the War, and called for the Huguenots to join a states-general to bring about peace and save France from further destruction. Other pamphlets noted the moral damage the wars had caused, and the way they had discredited Christianity as a whole. The Huguenot writer La Noue declared that the wars had created a million libertines and Epicureans, while other writers stated that religious persecution had not suppressed heresy, but created only atheists. They argued strongly that the only way for states to survive and prosper was by tolerating two religions, and that the state should be above any specific religion. They also strongly argued that the existence of two religions in a country did not necessarily produce civil conflict or disunity, a point of view shared by Henry of Navarre himself. The Politiques were extremely sceptical about the claims of the Churches to possess the sole religious truth, but believed strongly that Roman Catholics and Protestants shared the same, basic, fundamental points of Christian doctrine. Thus the toleration of both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism did not threaten the Christian nature of civil society, which was based on the fundamental Christian principles held in common by both Roman Catholic and Protestant. In 1590 the pamphlet Le Pacifique attempted to demonstrate the agreement between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism on fundamental doctrinal points in the form of a dialogue between a Roman Catholic and Protestant, who discover that the share the same basic Christian beliefs.

Demands for Religious Toleration by Sebastien Castillion

Similar views on toleration were held and strongly argued by the humanist Sebastien Castellion and Giacomo Contio, or Acontius. In his De Haereticis an sint persequandi of 1542-5, possibly written with a little assistance from Lelio Sozini, who held Unitarian views, and Martin Borrhee, and his Contra libellum Calvini, written in response to Calvin’s participation in the execution of Michael Servetus for heresy in Geneva, De Arte Dubitandi, the Four Dialogues of 1578, and the Conseil a la France desolee of 1562, Castellion argued for religious toleration. In the De Haereticis he attempted to support his arguments by quotations from some of the early Church Fathers and contemporary theologians and religious authorities such as Luther, Erasmus and Calvin himself. He considered that because there were points of doctrine that could not be decided for certain, all that could be required of people is that they attempt to understand the Word of God and follow it according to their conscience. Castellion felt that Christianity consisted in the knowledge that Christ was the Son of God and that his teachings were divine. He did not believe that religion lay in either ceremonies or beliefs that people could not understand, and firmly stated that Scripture did not support the persecution of those of different religious opinions. One defended religion not by killing for it, but by suffering death. He did, however, believe that the government had the right to punish those who denied the resurrection, the immortality of the soul and the authority of the government, though they should not be executed.

Demands for Complete Freedom of Conscience by Acontius

Acontius was a military engineer who had been employed by Pescara in Milan and Queen Elizabeth in England. In his Strategematum Satanae of 1565 he argued that most people formed their beliefs without the guidance of either reason or God, simply accepting tradition or the opinions of the mass of people around them. They are intolerant of others, partly because they cannot bear to accept that their beliefs may be wrong. He argued that religious controversy and wars were Satan’s way of causing trouble and destruction on Earth. He believed that there were a few basic beliefs necessary for salvation, but that most of Christian doctrine was simply speculation without any real value. He argued that only those doctrines that affected human conduct on Earth had any value. Magistrates had no power to punish heresy, not just because they had no power themselves to do so, but also because there was so much difference in opinion between the Churches on what was heretical that they too had little authority to make such decisions. He believed that there should be absolute freedom of religion, and that people came to the truth through doubt and free inquiry and discussion. For Acontius, those who undoubtedly possessed extremely heretical doctrines should be punished merely with excommunication, which should be a source of regret rather than anger and hatred.

Contribution of Christian Humanists to Education and their Stress on Tolerance and Dialogue rather than Conflict

Another fundamental pillar of democracy is the belief in the value of education, and that a just society and good government must be based on informed, educated opinion. In this area too the Christian humanists of the 16^th century made a profound contribution. Erasmus believed that humans could be assisted to become good as they possessed free will, though this free will itself had to be aided in its turn by God’s grace. The human will could be directed towards goodness through religious devotion and learning. For Erasmus, if princes were educated according to humanist principles, the result would be a good society where princes ruled justly and, following Christ, established peace instead of war. As a result, he and other humanists, such as John Colet in England, established schools and academies. Their influence on the aristocracy was profound. Although their political ideas of a just society was Utopian, their idea of an educated aristocracy informed by humanist culture nearly became reality, so that after the mid-sixteenth century even minor members of the nobility had libraries showing a wide variety of interests. 26 Moreover, Erasmus and his followers, although entirely orthodox Roman Catholics, stressed the importance of dialogue, toleration and the importance of settling matters peacefully, rather than resorting to force. Their stress on God’s love for humanity, rather than His judgement of their actions, influenced Reginald Pole, Contarini, Castellion and the Socinians, and his advocacy of a tolerant Christianity was immensely popular in Spain, especially amongst the Conversos, whose ancestors had converted to Christianity from Judaism to avoid expulsion and persecution. 27

Conclusion:

Both View that Power of the Monarch Absolute and that Royal Power Limited by the Constitution and Sovereignty of the People existed in Sixteenth Century

Thus, although much of the political theory of the sixteenth century stressed the absolute power of the monarch and the duty of their subjects to obey them, there were also other political views, held and defended by both Roman Catholics and Protestants across Europe, that stressed instead the constitutional limits on monarchical power, the importance and role in government of representative assemblies and right and even duty of subjects to resist and depose unjust rulers. Political theorists, theologians and philosophers in England, Scotland, France, Geneva and Switzerland considered that governments had been established for the benefit of their peoples, not the rulers’, that societies and governments were based on contracts and covenants between their members, rulers and the Almighty, and that monarchs owed their power not to any personal virtue, but because the community delegated it to them. The power of the monarch was limited by the law of God and natural law. Princes and parliaments acted as constitutional checks to monarchs to prevent oppression, and who were also representatives of the community and so had a duty to protect their ancient rights. If kings exceeded the bounds of their authority or failed to establish true religion, they could be overthrown by the aristocracy and other leading governmental officials and institutions, or even by private citizens. These views were based on medieval political theory, contemporary interpretation of Scripture and the necessity amongst Roman Catholics and Protestants wishing to defend their religion and defeat and destroy their opponents of finding theoretical support for their resistance to persecution, oppression or the authorities’ failure to maintain the true faith.

Sixteenth Century also Period of Demonds for Religious Toleration, and Improvements in Education

Alongside these demands for political freedom were criticisms of both Roman Catholics and Protestants for their intolerance, and demands for an end to religious persecution and freedom of conscience amongst a very few individual political theorists. Furthermore, the Christian humanist belief that the human will could be formed and directed towards goodness through education led to the foundation of schools and libraries, and an attitude of tolerance and dialogue rather than violent coercion.

Influence of Demands for Constitutional Limits to Monarchy and Participation in Government of People and Representative Assemblies and Religious Toleration Limited in 16th Century, but had strong Influence in 17th Century England

The impact of these ideas was limited, however. Although princes in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere granted toleration to various Christian denominations and sects, this did not necessarily prevent them from acquiring increasing power over their tenants’ lives and properties, so that during the 16^th century serfdom increased. In western Europe, in France, Germany and Spain political power became increasingly centralised in the monarch and representative institutions, such as the estates, declined in importance, eventually to produce the absolutist monarchies of the 18^th century. Nevertheless, these doctrines continued to have an effect. The Vindiciae, although largely abandoned by the Huguenots shortly after its publication, influenced contemporary Dutch political ideas and considerably influenced English political theories in the 17^th century. 28 Castellion’s demands for religious toleration influenced the radical theologian, Dirck Volckentzoon Coornhert. In turn, he influenced Arminius, who otherwise strongly opposed and argued against his theology. Arminius’ religious views strongly influenced British theology and political theories in the 17^th century, during the British Civil War/ War of the Three Kingdoms. In England although it was not noticed at the time, claims such as Thomas Smith’s that it was parliament that really represented every individual in the country pointed towards the Civil War in the next century. 29 Thus, while Europe generally became more authoritarian following the sixteenth century, nevertheless the political theories stressing the constitutional limits on monarchical governments and the role of representative assemblies influenced the Netherlands and Britain, creating the ideas for greater religious and political freedom that were to appear in the 17^th century and which found practical expression in the British Civil War/ War of the Three Kingdoms and the development of modern, political theories like John Locke’s.

Notes

1. Koenigsberger and Mosse, Sixteenth Century, pp. 104-5.
2. Koenigsberger and Mosse, Sixteenth Century, pp. 105-6.
3. Allen, History of Political Thought, p. 331.
4. Allen, History of Political Thought, p. 268.

In a comment to an earlier post of mine, Jor, one of the great commentators to this blog, expressed the view that modern cops and politicians felt they had the same divine right to rule as medieval kings. I was sceptical of this, as although politicians and the police do consider that they have an automatic right to rule and enforce those rules, this is almost exclusively based on secular political theory, rather than theology. Nevertheless, the great architectural historian, Lewis Mumford, held a similar view that the state’s claim to power over its subjects and their property was based on the divine right of kings, and traced this conception of the state’s right to sovereignty to the very origins of kingship and civilisation itself in ancient mesopotamia.

In his classic book, The City in History, Mumford states that

‘Private property begins, not as Proudhon thought with robbery, but with the treatment of all common property as the private possession of the king, whose life and welfare were identified with that of the community. Property was an extension and enlargement of his own personality, as the unique representative of the collective whole. But once this claim was accepted, property could for the first time be alienated, that is, removed from the community by the individual gift of the king.

This conception of the royal possessions remained in its original form well past the time of Louis XIV. That Sun King, a little uneasy over the heavy taxes he desired to impose, called together the learned Doctors of Paris to decide if his exactions were morally justifiable. Their theology was equal to the occasion. They explained that the entire realm was his by divine right: hence in laying on these new taxes he was only taxing himself. This prerogative was passed on, undefiled, to the ’sovereign state’, which in emergencies falls back, without scruple, on ancient myth and magic.’ 1

Now while this was probably true of Louis XIV’s government, the situation was rather different for his successor, Louis XIV. His reign ended and the French Revolution broke out partly because of the monarchy’s inability to the raise the taxes it needed to run the country through the obstruction of the Parlement of Paris and other, regional parlements that ruled the new taxes unconstitutional, while the vast wealth of the nobility and church was unavailable as they were exempt from taxation. For example, when Louis XVI’s Controleur-General, Turgot, attempted to reform the French agricultural system according to Physiocratic ideas of free trade, the reforms were vehemently attacked by the Parlement of Paris. In his Six Edicts of 1776, Turgot attempted to free the internal grain trade, abolish the guilds and convert the corvee – the labour service performed by the rural peasantry – into a money tax paid by all landlords. The Parlement of Paris, the assembly of French lawyers which examined royal legislation to see if it was constitutional before it could be passed, rejected it as an intolerable attack on privilege. Their comments demanding its rejection denounced it as a ‘project produced by an inadmissible system of equality, whose first effect would be to confound all orders in the state by imposing on them the uniform burden of a land tax’. 2 Confronted with this opposition, Louis backed down and dismissed Turgot.

Mumford himself had a negative view of the social effects of the rise of civilisation. He viewed the development of the city and the settled state as a process by which the earliest, egalitarian communities, ruled by a council of elders and characterised by little difference in social roles and comparative wealth between its members, was destroyed and replaced by absolute states, characterised by a social stratefication that reduced many of their citizens to slavery, forced individuals into specialised social and economic roles, and ruled by military aristocracies. These early states were totalitarian and belligerent, with power eventually becoming centralised in the person of the king, and maintained by warfare against rival states. It’s a view of the origins of the state that, in looking back to a more egalitarian, democratic state before the rise of civilisation, has much in common with the contemporary distrust of civilisation as a whole and a very positive view of indigenous, tribal societies who are believed to be more noble and egalitarian than industrial, technological cultures. Given this awareness of the oppressive consequences of the development of the autocratic state in antiquity, it’s possibly not surprising that Mumford was similarly critical of the tendencies towards centralisation and authoritarianism in modern, industrial states.

It’s probably safe to say that most people would reject the idea that the aristocratic, centralised monarchies of the ancient world had anything in common with contemporary secular, democratic politics, beyond the fact that many of the problems and issues that occupied the early kings, such as their statements that they intended to support justice, maintain or create prosperity and defend their nation against invaders are the same issues that face just about every politician and statesman. However, Mumford’s comment here, like JOR’s, does pose the interesting problem of how much of the modern conception of the state is due not to the rational analysis of its nature and powers, but derived from the idea of the state as it was constructed in remote antiquity, and passed down since then as a fundamental assumption that is simply accepted as automatically true and rational, rather than analysed and debated. This is not to say that the state is necessarily oppressive or coercive, as even in antiquity there were debates about the nature of the state and how it could be organised to give the greatest freedom and justice. Nevertheless, modern politics after the horrors of the totalitarian regimes of left and right in the 20th century is acutely aware of how oppressive the power of the state can be in the hands of those determined to destroy its citizens’ freedom. An awareness of the authoritarian nature of some ancient states, and the process by which their citizens attempted to reform it and check the power of monarchies and oppressive governments, such as in democratic Athens or ancient Rome, clearly have important lessons for contemporary, democratic states, despite the immense differences in time, culture and the nature of the ancient civilisations.

Notes

1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1961), p. 129.

2. E.N. Williams, The Ancien Regime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States 1648-1789 (London, Penguin 1970), p. 239.

Tomorrow and Tuesday British MPs are to vote on research on human embryonic stem cells. It’s an intensely controversial area. On the one hand, the scientists involved in the research argue that the use of such cells from human embryos will lead to significant advances in understanding numerous diseases, such as Alzheimers. According to the British edition of The Week, which covers the reports of the press for the previous week a month or so ago, the government’s bill to permit such experimentation had the support of 200 charities. The bill has the staunch backing of premier Gordon Brown himself, who in an article in one of the broadsheet newspapers today declared that it had his total backing and repeated the arguments that it would lead to disease.

Others, particularly members of the opposition with strong religious convictions, are not so sure. One of the issues being debated is the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos, in which DNA from the nucleus of human cells will be implanted into those of animals to create chimeras that will be 99.9 per cent human. The debate will also include the creation of ’saviour siblings’, children deliberately created to be genetic or medical donors for older brothers or sisters suffering from disease, and the morality of creating children without fathers through artificial insemination. The veteran Conservative MP, Anne Widdecombe, who has very strong religious views, stated in an interview on the BBC Six O’clock news tonight that unlike adult and umbilical stem cell research, embryonic stem cell research had produced absolutely no results so far. However, as embryonic stem cell research is morally problematic, the scientists involved should show that it will produce the scientific advances they claim before such experimentation may be permitted. She is not alone. I’ve come across statements on some American Conservative newswebsites from businessmen running biotech companies, whose interests include stem cell research, that they are not involved with human embryonic stem cells not just because it conflicts with their Christian morals, but also for the entirely practical reason that such research so far has produced no results.

 Opponents of embryonic stem cell research, such as the Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, have argued that such research is immoral because it implicitly declares that some human beings have no intrinsic value and so may be treated or abused however society wishes. His comments were greeted with sneers from some particularly anti-religious members of the press, such as the Guardian’s and Observer’s journalist, Polly Toynbee. Toynbee dismissed Wright’s concerns as ‘religious’ and stated that it was irrational, because it gave DNA, a mere molecule, more rights than a human suffering from one of the diseases such research is supposed to cure. This is, however, to misunderstand Wright’s point. DNA is indeed a molecule, but through it scientists plan to create a human deliberately for the purposes of experimentation. The moral question is not about DNA – though they are one part of it – but about the status and creation of human, or partly human creatures for experimentation. And such grave concerns about the use and morality of genetic engineering is by no means confined to people of faith. In 1969 the biologists James Shapiro and Jonathan Beckwith isolated the first gene, belonging to bacteria allowing them to ingest milk sugars. The discovery made the first page of the New York Times, where it was hailed as the beginning of a new genetic age. Shapiro, however, was so horrified by the implications of his discovery that he announced his retirement from science and fled to Cuba to teach genetics. He quickly decided that he’d made the wrong career choice, however, and returned to America two years later, and has told journalists since that he would not repeat that episode. 1 Other scientists shared his concerns. In 1976 Irwin Chargaff, a biochemist at Columbia University, questioned the morality of genetic experimentation, writing ‘have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years, in order to satisfy the ambition and curiosity of a few scientists?’ 2 This was followed by a letter to Science by Philip Siekevitz, a biologist at Rockefeller university, expressing serious concerns about genetic research and its potential dangers, and urging scientists to restrain their curiosity:

‘Are we really that much farther along on the path to comprehensive knowledge that we can forget the overwhelming pride with which Dr. Frankenstein made his monster and the Rabbi of Prague made his Golem? Those who would answer ‘Yes’ I would accuse of harboring that sin which the Greeks held to be one of the greatest, that of overweening pride. Like the physicists before us, we have entered the realm of the Faustian bargain, and it behooves all of us biologists to think very carefully about the conditions of these agreements before we plunge ahead into the darkness.’ 3

His fears are not unfounded. The technique of cloning an organism by replacing the nucleus of a different, host cell, with that of animal to be cloned and then implanting the resulting cell in the womb was first suggested in 1938 by Hans Spermann in Germany. Amongst those interested in his theory were members of the Nazi regime, who saw it as another method of creating the master race at the heart of Hitler’s eugenics and racial theories. Fortunately his ideas were impracticable because the technology of the time simply wasn’t advanced enough. 4 Following the creation of Dolly the Sheep by cloning, President Bill Clinton under advice from a specially convened Federal bioethics commission in May 1997 attempted to ban human nuclear transfer cloning. This was rejected by Congress, which did, however, pass his bill to remove federal funding from – but not ban – human cloning for research purposes. The British government legalised human cloning for scientific research in January 2001, stipulating that such embryos should be used solely for research and not implanted in a womb. However, there is a loophole in the legislation in that implantation is relatively simple procedure that could be done in an hour, and such a process could be done quite legally in any country that had not adopted the same legislation as Britain. 5 One of the serious issues that constantly recurs during debates on cloning is the deliberate creation of clones as spare parts for existing humans, as in the recent SF film, The Island, or the SF book, Mortal Gods. In these fictional works, however, the clones used as unwilling donors for existing humans are functioning adults, rather than embryos. Nevertheless, the moral problem in using embryos as a source of spare parts for transplant remains.

Amongst those who have written on the moral problems presented by current genetic research are doctors and scientists of Christian faith. Dr. Patrick Dixon, a Christian pastor and medical doctor, has stated his reasons for unease about the use of human foetal tissue in transplant surgery. While he has no objections to the use of material from a stillborn or miscarried child, as the unfortunate baby is already dead and so the process is similar to the use of transplanted organs from an adult, he makes it clear that he is ‘very unhappy’ about the use of foetal tissue because it is produced through deliberately induced abortions. At the moment, existing legislation means that there must be no relationship between the clinic performing the abortion and those conducting the research. He has stated, however, that he is slightly less uneasy about experiments on fertilised eggs and small balls of cells up to the first week of life, partly because of the need to be consistent. Some forms of birth control now used are not contraceptives but effectively work by aborting the very early fertilised embryo, and so would have to be declared illegal if conception is considered as the beginning of human life. For example, the coil works to prevent pregnancy not through preventing conception, but by preventing the fertilised cell from adhering to the walls of the womb, thus in a strict sense producing a possible abortion. 6 He states, however, that he does not consider it right to deliberately fertilise human eggs for the purpose of experimentation, as this appears to him to trivialise the nature of life itself. 7 His views are shared by many other doctors and medical professionals of Christian faith. In 1990 the Christian Medical Fellowship, which has a membership of about 4,500 British doctors, submitted an article outlining its concerns and suggested ethical guidelines for research to the British Medical Association’s working party on genetic engineering. This made a number of valuable recommendations, including the following:

On the subject of possible exploitation of people for research purpose, it stated that ‘Christians are concerned that the individual, particularly if weak or disadvantaged in any way, is protected. Those who might be benefited by advances in genetic research are vulnerable to being persuaded to be ‘guinea pigs’ and exploited either commenercially or by prestige-seeking research workers.

The child needs protection and the status of the embryo and foetus must also be considered. Counselling should be provided by well-informed sympathetic clinicians, particularly clinical geneticists rather than by those whose commitment is primarily to research.’ 8 

On the status of the pre-implantation embryo, the Fellowship stated that

‘members of the CMF vary in their views as to the status of the fertilised ovum and pre-implantation embryo. Many believe that from teh time of fertilisation the ‘image of God’ is present, thus making the embryo a unique person who should be recognised and treated in all respects as a neighbour. They would therefore find all the following techniques unacceptable.

Others believe that although at the early stages the pre-implantation embryo is indisputably human, it has not yet the attributes of the ‘image of God’ and so may be implanted or discarded.

Nevertheless, there must be atime at which such attributes and status are attained. All members agree that once they are attained, that individual is of infinite value. All agree too that the relationships between husband and wife, parent adn child are of central importance both for the well-being of the individual and for the whole of society. We believe that children are entrusted to their parents to be nurturned and brought to maturity as individuals in their own right.’ 9

Despite their differences of opinion on the status of pre-implantation embryos, the Fellowship condemned cloning and the creation of chimeras through the fusion of human and animal sex cells that proceed to bastocyst and beyond. The Fellowship declared that these techniques were ‘unacceptable since we believe that humans, made in the image of God, are distinct from the animals and should remain so. Each individual is unique and that distinctiveness is important both to that person and to society. It is true that identical twins occur naturally and that each is a person in his or her own right, but some twins do have difficulties establishing their own identity.’ 10 In the submission’s conclusion, the Fellowship stated that they believed that ‘doctors should acts as stewards, helping mankind to make the most of its potential and prepared to correct abnormalities, but not as dictators, manipulating all for selfish ends.

Inevitably there is a difference of opinion as to where these roles begin and end. Some feel that work on early embryos is unacceptably interfering adn that the risk of disaster outweighs the potential benefits. Others believe that cautious exploration is the right way forward. All Christian Medical Fellowship members agree that we are responsible now to our patients and their families, but ultimately responsible to our Creator for the decisions we make today.’ 11

The debate over the morality of human embryo research and relating fields such as cloning and genetic engineering is not simply one of religious faith in conflict with science, as those concerned with the ethical implications of such research include practising scientists and medical doctors, both religious and secular. Moreover, the ethical concerns expressed by religious non-scientists are entirely genuine problems, which need to be addressed. The great American bioethicist and Biblical commentator, Dr. Leon R. Kass, discussing cloning, declared that it provided ‘the occasion as well as the urgent necessity of deciding whether we shall be slaves of unregulated progres and ultimately its artifacts or whether we shall remain free human beings to guide our technique towards the enhancement of human dignity. 12 Kass himself has strong views against cloning following his reading of a column about it by Joshua Lederberg in the Washington Post in September 1967, which he viewed as showing a lack of understanding on its implications. As a result, he was invited by the Princeton University theologian Paul Ramsey to discuss it and related ethical issues, and so becoming more involved with theologians and philosophers. 13 As a biochemist, like the members of the Christian Medical Fellowship in Britain, Kass is certainly very well aware of the science supporting such research. Nevertheless, in his view the only serious answer to the immense moral problems posed by cloning and related issues may be the complete abandonment of such research, despite the opportunities it offers for scientific advance. Kass has quoted his colleague, Paul Ramsey, on this issue, stating

‘Raise the ethical questions with a serious and not a frivolous conscience. A man of frivolous conscience announces that there are ethical quandaries ahead that we must urgently consider before the future catches up with us. By this he often means that we need to devise a new ethics that will provide the rationalization for doing in the future what men are bound to do because of the new actions and interventions science will have made possible. In contrast, a man of serious conscience means to say in raising urgent ethical questions that there may be some things that men should never do. The good things that men do can be made complete only by the things that they refused to do.’ 14

My own view is that Anne Widdecombe is exactly right about human embryonic research, and particularly about the dubious morality of the creation of the human-animal hybrids to be used. As it appears that such stem cell research has produced few results, and because of the immense moral problems it presents, it should therefore be discontinued. Everyone wants cures to be found for disease, including, and perhaps particularly, such devasting illnesses as Alzheimers that gradually destroys the minds of its victims. However, some of these cures come at too high a cost morally, particularly when other areas of research, like adult and umbilical stem cells, offer much better prospects of results.  

Notes

1. G. Kolata, Clone: The Road to Dolly the Sheep and the Path Ahead (London, Penguin 1997), p. 91.

2. Kolata,  Clone, p. 95.

3. Kolate, Clone, p. 95.

4. H. Brennan, Death: The Great Mystery of Life (Bridgnorth, Eye Books 2005), pp. 120-1.

5. Brennan, Death, p. 128.

6. Dr. P. Dixon, The Genetic Revolution (Eastbourne, Kingsway Publications 1993), pp. 179-180.

7. Dixon, Genetic Revolution, p. 180.

8. ‘Christian Medical Fellowship Submission to British Medical Association on Genetic Engineering’, from Journal of the Christian Medical Fellowship, January 1990, pp. 18-22, in Dixon, Genetic Revolution, pp. 193-4.

9. ‘Christian Medical Fellowship Submission to British Medical Association on Genetic Engineering’, from Journal of the Christian Medical Fellowship, January 1990, pp. 18-22, in Dixon, Genetic Revolution, p. 195.

10. ‘Christian Medical Fellowship Submission to British Medical Association on Genetic Engineering’, from Journal of the Christian Medical Fellowship, January 1990, pp. 18-22, in Dixon, Genetic Revolution, p. 198.

11.’Christian Medical Fellowship Submission to British Medical Association on Genetic Engineering’, from Journal of the Christian Medical Fellowship, January 1990, pp. 18-22, in Dixon, Genetic Revolution, p. 199.

12. Kolata, Clone, p. 15.

13. Kolata, Clone, pp. 76-77.

14. Kolata, Clone, p. 15.

The 18^th century French philosophes are rightly respected for the key role they played in the development of the Enlightenment. They were ardent in their desire to spread knowledge, education, toleration and humane values. Diderot, the editor of the great Encyclopedia that was such a major influence in spreading not just the practical knowledge of contemporary arts and sciences, but also the ideals of the Enlightenment itself, wrote to Voltaire in 1762 declaring that their motto was ‘no quarter for the superstitious, for the fanatical, for the ignorant, for the foolish, for the wicked and for the tyrants’.1 Attacking the ignorance, corruption, injustice and fanaticism of contemporary society, the Philosophes were ‘informed, warm-hearted, tolerant, and humane; they fought obscurantism, bigotry, prejudice, and injustice. They believed that the world could be made a better place to live in, and that the sum of human happiness could be increased. They favoured equality before the law, humane punishments, the career open to the talents, proportional taxation, universal education.’ 2

 French Philosophes Not Political Radicals

The Philosophes weren’t democrats, however. Despite their implacable hostility to injustice and oppression, they did not advocate revolution or any major alterations to the structure of French government and society itself. While Voltaire and Montesquieu were ardent admirers of Britain, they did not advocate that British institutions should be imported into France. Indeed, the Philosophes were staunch supporters of the monarchy. The article on Political Economy in Diderot’s Encyclopedia declared that it was only the monarchy that had ‘discovered the real means of enabling us to enjoy all the possible happiness and liberty and all the advantages which man in society can enjoy on the earth.’ 3 There was considerable disagreement amongst the Philosophes on the best form of government and society. Voltaire denounced all privileged groups, like the parlements, clergy and aristocracy, for obstructing attempts at reform by a benevolent monarchy. Montesquieu, on the other hand, favoured reinforcing their power against the tyrannical power of the monarchy. Some of their ideas were also self-contradictory. Historians and philosophers examining Rousseau’s rhetoric have found arguments supporting both socialism and private property, democracy and authoritarianism, Puritanism and hedonism. ‘The Enlightenment was many-sided. It did not advocate any one doctrine – and certainly not the doctrines of democracy or rebellion.’ 4

 French Roman Catholicism as the Source of Political Discontent and Democratic Ideals

Instead, historians have pointed to the clergy and the parlements for promoting radical discontent with the French monarchy. Early in the 18^th century, Archbishop Fenelon was particularly critical in his denunciation of the suffering inflicted on the French people by Louis XIV’s government. In his Lettre au Roi, written in Cambrai after Fenelon had retired from court politics, he bitterly attacked Louis’ massive accumulation of power at the expense of his subjects. Addressed to the king himself, Fenelon wrote

 ‘For about thirty years your principal ministers have shaken and overthrown all the former maxims of the State in order to heap up to its height your authority, which had become their because it was in their hands. They have talked no longer about the State or about laws, they have talked only of the King and his good pleasure … you have destroyed half the real power inside your State in order to make and defend vain conquests outside. Instead of drawing money from these poor people, you should give them alms and nourish them. The whole of France is nothing more than a great poorhouse, desolated and provisionless.’ 5

 The French Lower Clergy and Ideals of Spiritual Equality

Furthermore, despite Voltaire’s denunciation of religion, and particularly Christianity for promoting intolerance and oppression, one of the main sources for the growth of democratic ideals in France was the lower French clergy. The 60,000 or so vicaires and cures, who comprised the main body of the 18^th century French Roman Catholic clergy were largely members of the middle classes, in contrast to the upper clergy who were exclusively composed of members of the aristocracy. The lower clergy resented the idleness and wealth of their ecclesiastical superiors, who consumed most of the tithes while they subsisted on a tiny stipend. 6 These clergy tended to support richerisme in their view of the location of spiritual authority in the Church, considering that God had not given this authority exclusively to the Pope or the bishops, but equally to all members of the clergy. 7 They were also largely Gallican in their attitude to the power of the papacy. While Ultramontane Roman Catholics, such as the Jesuits, viewed the papacy as possessing sole authority in the Church, The Gallicans, on the other hand, viewed the church as a kind of constitutional monarchy in which councils were superior to the papacy. 8 The local church played a major role in village life. It was the place where the villagers stored their timber and grain, and made their business deals. It also played a strong political role. The priest informed his congregation of government regulations through reading them out as part of his sermon, and the church was also the location for the election of the local tax-collectors. 9 Given the close connection between the French lower clergy and their congregation, it isn’t surprising that the lower clergy’s ideas of equality within the ecclesiastical hierarchy encouraged the development of democratic ideas in wider, secular society. ‘And if the clergy believed in democracy in the Church, it is not surprising that their flocks favoured equality in the state.’ 10

 Influence of American Revolution and John Locke’s Christian Ideas of Society on French Revolution

Lastly, one of the most powerful direct influences on the outbreak of the French Revolution was that American Revolution. By sending French troops to assist the Americans against the British crown, Louis XVI had demonstrated that armed resistance to the monarchy could be patriotic, rather than an act of treason. The American Revolution also provided a direct model for the French, by demonstrating that it was possible for a nation’s people to create a completely new form of government through a constituent assembly composed of elected delegates. It was a model for those who wished to completely recreate French government and society, rejecting both divine-right monarchy and the traditional opposing institutions of the French state. 11 The democratic ideas of the American Revolution were also strongly informed by Christian religious views of the nature of human society. John Locke was a major influence on the development of the American constitution, and the resounding statement of the Declaration of Independence that people are endowed by the Creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and have the right to alter or abolish any government that destroys these rights, encapsulates the ideas of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. 12 Although Locke was a Socinian, rather than an orthodox, Trinitarian Christian, nevertheless his ideas of the law of nature have been criticised by contemporary poltical theorists as being derived from orthodox Christian doctrine. 13

Influence of the American Great Awakening in the Development of American Democracy

Historians have also pointed to the profound influence played by the 18^th century evangelical revival – the Great Awakening – in the development of American democratic ideals. The Great Awakening saw lower and middle class Americans turn away from what they viewed as the corrupt, aristocratic established churches to create new churches and religious forms of their own, based not on the idea that spiritual authority was invested and conveyed through hierarchies, but was available to each believer through the experience of God’s saving grace. Leading evangelical preachers, such as George Whitefield, troubled the established leaders of New England society because

‘they spread the message that God did not operate through the elite corps of learned clergy and their aristocratic allies. Rather, God worked through the inner light given to every man and woman regardless of their station in life, with lack of education or even slave status posing now barrier to achieving grace through the conversion experience. Whitefield challenged traditional source of authority, called upon people to become the instruments of their own salvation, and implicitly attacked the prevailing upper-class notion that the uneducated masses had no minds of their own.’ 14 The result of this more democratically orientated religious revival was that ordinary, working-class Americans created religious institutions of their own to satisfy their religious needs that were not being met by the established churches. One such working-class religious leader was Samuel Morris, a self-educated bricklayer who stopped attending Anglican worship and instead held religious meetings in a small ‘reading house’ that he built himself on his own property. This soon expanded into a network of similar reading houses established across the western counties of Virginia. Elsewhere in western Virginia, ordinary people held their unlicensed meetings in barns and riverbanks, with the result that authority was collectively relocated in the mass of the common people. 15 The Great Awakening thus provided a powerful model for the later American revolutionaries, as it created a mass movement that challenged upper class assumptions about social order and the duty of the lower classes to obey their social superiors. Its members broke away from the established church they regarded as corrupt to build new churches of their own, often without license. They demanded and achieved religious toleration, destroyed attempts to unite church and state, and by fracturing the existing churches threatened the social order. When the ministers of the traditional churches urged their congregations to ‘obey them that have rule over you’, following the commands of St. Paul, those inspired by the Great Awakening claimed the freedom, in the view of historians such as Patrician Bonomi, ‘to question and judge all and refuse subjection to every proper judicature’, thus creating a ‘pertinent and usable model’ for the later Revolutionaries. 16

Conclusion: Democratic Ideals of American and French Revolutions Created by American and English Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholic French Lower Clergy, not French Philosophes

Thus, despite their strong opposition to the forces of intellectual and social oppression in France, the philosophes of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire were certainly not democrats. The democratic ideals that created the American and French Revolutions instead were based strongly on religious notions of equality amongst the French Roman Catholic lower clergy and English and American Protestant revivalism. In France this more democratic attitude amongst the clergy did not lead to the intellectual and religious toleration prised and championed by the Philosophes. The 17^th century saw the vicious persecution of French Protestants and their eventual expulsion from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Nevertheless, it was the ideals of spiritual equality developed by the French lower clergy and American working- and middle-class evangelical revivalists that created the democratic ideals that eventually produced the American and French Revolutions, and so created the models for later democracies around the world.

 Notes

 1. E.N. Williams, The Ancien Regime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States 1648-1789 (London, Penguin Books 1970), p. 227.

2. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 227. 

3. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 231.

4. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 231.

5. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 195.

6. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 224.

7. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 194.

8. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 184.

9. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 170.

10. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 224.

11. Williams, Ancien Regime, p. 240.

12. N. Warburton, Philosophy: The Classics, Second Edition (London, Routledge 2001), p. 91.

13. Warburton, Philosophy: The Classics, p. 97.

14. G.B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (London, Jonathan Cape 2006), pp. 8-9.

15. Nash, Unknown American Revolution, p. 10.

16. P. Bonomi, cited in Nash, Unknown American Revolution, p. 12.   

Robert has offered a further criticism of my posts describing the official persecution of the churches in the Soviet Union as part of the Communist campaign to eradicate religion and promote religion. I’ll post each part of his critique in italics, and my comments will follow afterwards.

Robert: (1) Conflation of atheism with anti-religiosity. Recall that atheism is merely the disbelief in the existence of god(s). Such disbelief does not necessary entail active opposition or hostility to religion, any more than theism necessarily entails active opposition or hostility to secularism. This is readily observable in many instances across history and in contemporary times. This error is repeatedly made throughout your posts, wherein you cite a litany of anti-religious Marxist credos or statements, and then glibly brand them “atheist critiques”. While atheism can form a basis for anti-religious views, it is by no means the sole basis. Moreover, the road goes the other way; anti-religious critiques can form a basis for the atheist belief, as appears to have been the case for Feuerbach. Finally, one can be critical of religion and still retain some form of god-belief, as the deists showed. Thus, we can see that your central claim “communism is an atheist philosophy in the sense that it rejects and attacks religious belief” makes as much sense as the statement “communism is a deist philosophy in the sense that it rejects and attacks religious belief”, or “Christianity is a theist philosophy in the sense it rejects and attacks secularism.” All are equally vapid and do not follow.

This is predicated on an anachronistic distinction between atheism and anti-theism. This distinction only dates from the 1970s. It also seems to be stating that Marxist critiques of religion cannot be proper atheist critiques, because they come from a Marxist perspective. Yet the Marxist attacks on religion are nevertheless atheist attacks on religion and the belief in God. The only difference is that they are articulated from a Marxist perspective. Furthermore the simple description of Communism as an atheist philosophy is nevertheless true. It is indeed an atheist philosophy in that it explicitly denies the existence of God. The rejection of the existence of God is integral to Marxism. It is not like other political philosophies, such as Conservatism, Liberalism or Socialism, that in themselves say nothing about the existence of God, leaving that to their adherents’ own consciences. Marxism explicitly rejects the belief in God. No matter how vapid it is, nevertheless the description of Marxism as an atheist philosophy is accurate.

2) No link established between atheism and the major tenets of communism. Previously I asked what in atheism accounts for belief in the historical dialectic, class struggle, the evil of private property, etc. Your response to this is again to refer to the influence of Feuerbach on Marx, citing the former’s critique of religion. The influence may be there, even as its strength remains murky, but the link between Feuerbach’s views and Marx’s critique of capitalism is very tenuous, to say the least. You cite Marx’s adoption of Feuerbach’s concept of the gattungswesen, but fail to mention a critical distinction. For Feuerbach, it was the idea of God that alienated, while for Marx, it was capitalism that alienated. For Marx, religion is the result of man’s conditions, not their source, something which he criticized Feuerbach for failing to realize. “Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.” (Theses on Feuerbach, VII). The basis of Marx’s critique of capitalism does not come from Feuerbach, but a variety of other sources, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Louis Blanc, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. It was through them that he developed the theory of “surplus value,” the notion of private property as the basis for much social ill, egalitarian distribution, etc. The latter, Proudhon, who famously declared that “property is theft,” is of particular interest due to his background in theology. “My real masters,” he once wrote, “those who have caused fertile ideas to spring up in my mind, are three in number: first, the Bible; next, Adam Smith; and last, Hegel.”

Your conclusion that “atheism clearly is a major, though not the sole element, in Marx’s critique of capitalism” is unfounded. The failure to even identify these other influences (some even with Christian roots)—much less discuss them—is, I think, emblematic of your theory’s tendentiousness.

No, I stated quite clearly in my original post that Marx had gone beyond Feuerbach’s critique of religion. Now Marx had become an atheist through reading Epicurus, Democritus and adopting Feuerbach’s Neo-Hegelian approach to the critique of religion. Thus, atheism was influential in shaping Marx’s personal view of religion and social relationships. The fact that Marx later revised his view of the origin and role of religion within social relationships does not change the fact that Marx still denied the existence of God, and still considered religion to be contrary to the workers’ interest and its extinction as something to be looked forward to.

One of the aspects of Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled, which has been particularly controversial is the film’s examination of the connection between Darwinism and the Holocaust.  Of course the film as a whole has attracted bitter criticism for its critical stance towards the scientific establishment’s absolute rejection of any criticism of the theory of Natural Selection, and its persecution of those scientists who claim that the theory is wrong. However, Stein and the movie’s producers have been particularly attacked for stating the link between Darwinism and the Holocaust. The film’s many critics have declared that Nazism was not based on Darwin’s theories, and that evolutionary scientists today absolutely condemn biological racism and the genocide perpetrated by the Third Reich.

Evolutionary Theory and the Development of Fascist Racial Ideology

Now historians of fascism have pointed to the strong influence Natural Selection had on the development of Fascist ideology. The historian Roger Eatwell has noted that

‘Arguably the most important nineteenth-century scientific development in its impact on political ideology was Darwinism. Charles Darwin published The Origins of Species in 1859. Others quickly realized that some of the key ideas, especially “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection,” could be adapted for political ends-though there were diagrements over what the implications were. In one version, Darwinism seemed to point to the need for minimal state intervention in order to allow free competition. In another, Darwinism was taken as highlighting the need for the state to take on the role fo selection to ensure survival-especially in the battle with the less developed but virile and martial races. The strong appeal of the latter position needs understanding against a more general background of scientific-racial-thought. In particular, further impetus toward statist-racism came in the form of eugenics, which was pioneered by leading scientists such as the German Ernst Haeckel. The eugenicists were worried about the way that moral laws prevented the working of natural selection, for example in taboos on euthansia. A critical theme of theirs was the need to regenerate national or European racial stock.’ 1

Social Darwinist views similarly developed in Britain, where ‘the development of the understanding of the principle of heredity and the laws of genetics led to frighteningly utopian ideas of scientific breeding and pure racial types achieved through eugenic experiments.’ 2 The principle of survival of the fittest, when applied to humanity, was interpreted to mean that the most technologically advanced groups and races were the fittest, and thus superior to other ethnic groups. 3 In fact it’s moot how much of the scientific racism and eugenic policies of the Nazis goes back to Darwin himself. The British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, attempted to support his racist views using quotations from Darwin, Huxley and contemporary evolutionary scientists. 4 However, Darwinism was not the only theory of evolution to influence British scientific racist theorising. Neo-Lamarckian biologists, such as Benjamin Kidd, had proposed a theory of ’social heredity’ in which human groups or races could inherit characteristics acquired through learning. This was later used by Fascists to suggest that changes in the leadership of the state would produce rapid changes in society over a short period. In fact, Lamarckianism was disproved by Galton’s Stirp theory and Weissmann’s experiments, which seemed to show that there was no link between reproductive cells and those of the rest of the body. Racial characteristics were not acquired, but were the products of genetic inheritance. 19th and early 20th century scientific racists also viewed racial mixing as an unsuitable ‘outcrossing’, which would weaken the parent gene pool. Most Fascists, however, ignored the fact that evolutionary theory and Mendelian genetics did not imply this conclusion.

The difference between the Darwinian and Lamarckian views of evolution held by the various British Fascist groups did not result in the mutual contradiction of their respective racist ideas, but merely a difference in emphasis, though expressed in vehement ideological debates over whether culture created race, or whether race determined culture. 5 Lamarckianism, however, had anti-racist implications through its suggestion that races could acquire new values and psychological perspectives through learning and culture. In fact, however, 19th century racial theorists declared that such Lamarckian evolution only operated within the more advanced races, as those who were considered inferior were declared to have come to the end of their evolution and were no longer able to respond to environmental challenges. 6

As for Mosley, before the Second World War his racial theories were Neo-Lamarckian in origin, deriving his views on race from the heroic vitalism of Thomas Carlyle, Nietzsche, Spengler and Wagner, and particularly George Bernard Shaw’s critique of Darwinism in Back to the Methuselah, which stated that humanity had the mind and will power to evolve to a higher type, rather than being simply the product of Natural Selection. However, Shaw considered that the creation of this superior humanity would partly be the product of eugenic breeding. 7

In Germany Social Darwinism was promoted in the 19th and early 20th centuries through Ernst Haeckel’s pantheistic Monistenbund or Monist League. Haeckel’s view of evolution differed so radically from Darwin’s that it effectively replaced Darwinism. 8 In particular, it was Haeckel’s follower, Wilhelm Ostwald, who became president of the Monistic League in 1911, who founded a ‘Monistic Cloister’ devoted to advocating Social Darwinist policies in economics, eugenics and euthanasia. 9 Hitler himself seems to have taken his views of a racial struggle between aryans and their racial inferiors from racist, Neo-pagan magazines such as Lanz Von liebenfels’ Ostara, which he had read as a destitute drifter in Vienna. As early as 1930 August M. Knoll of the university of Vienna ridiculed the Nazis in front of his students by pointing out the similarity of the Fuhrer’s ideas and those of the notorious Neo-pagan magazine. 10 Hitler does not cite Darwin in either Mein Kampf or his Table Talk. Undoubtedly he picked up his ideas on evolution second or third-hand. Nevertheless, the conception of evolution as the struggle between the fittest, conceived as the most brutal or predatory, was a strong component of Hitler’s entire world-view. ‘The earth continues to go round, whether it’s the man who kills the tiger or the tiger who eats the man. The stronger asserts his will, it’s the law of nature. The world doesn’t change; its laws are eternal.’ 11 Unfortunately, just because Hitler took his view of race and the ’survival of the fittest’ from low, fringe magazines does not mean that the ideas themselves were at all disreputable. They weren’t. Although race was debated at the popular level in cafes throughout Europe, and racial ideas publicised in cheap pamphlets in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, the belief that race was ‘the key to the achievement recorded in a nation’s history’ was general. 12 Such racist theorising extended throughout society, from the lower to the ruling classes. The British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, stated that ‘no man will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key to history.’ 13 There was little that was new in the Nazis’ racial and eugenics policies. In 1895 Ernst Hasse, supporting the 1891demands of the Pan-German League, had advocated the deportation of Jews and Slavs and the annexation of Poland, Ruthenia, Serbia, Belgium, Romania and the Baltic States with the statement ‘We want territory even if it belongs to aliens, so that we may fashion the future according to our own needs’. 14 It was the Nazi demands for lebensraum in all but name. As for the Nazi eugenics programme, every aspect of it ‘had been anticipated by the spokesmen of various schools of social Darwinism; and even though they had not demanded the extermination of whole nationalities, their ideas were in line with the inhuman projects which showed such a basic contempt for human life.’ 15 Tragically and horrifically, radical racialism and eugenics was not simply the province of a few marginal, fringe ideologues, but was was acceptable and influenced a considerable part of the European and American political and scientific establishment. Now Darwin certainly was not responsible for scientific racism. That was the product of racial theorists such as Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau in France and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who became Wagner’s son-in-law, in Germany. 16 However, Darwin certainly considered that there were racial differences, and his theory of evolution offered further scientific justification for already existing theories that viewed human progress as the product of struggle.

Fascism as Partial Product of 18th Century Enlightenment Political Theory

Obviously much of the criticism of Stein’s suggestion in Expelled that there was a direct link between Darwin’s ideas and the Holocaust comes from supporters of Darwinism who believe that this misrepresents and maligns both Darwin’s theory and Darwin himself, if not the whole of contemporary biology, following Theodosius Dobzhansky’s comment that ‘nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution’. Yet the suggested link between Darwinism and the Holocaust goes beyond questioning the morality of a specific scientific theory, but by implication renders the assumed relationship between rational knowledge and morality itself extremely questionable. Since Plato it’s been assumed that rational knowledge and the usse of reason in understanding the world leads to moral progress. During the Enlightenment, rational knowledge and the search for truth through reason became associated with the sciences, and it was through science that ignorance, superstition and barbarism could be combatted.

Thus, in the view of the Enlightenment philosophes, ‘a logically connected structure of rules, laws, generalisations, susceptible of demonstration or, at least in practice, of a high degree of confirmation (and, where required, of application appropriate to differing circumstances) could, at least in principle, be constructed, and could replace the chaotic amalgam of ignorance, laziness, guesswork, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy, and above all, what Helvetius called ‘interested error”, which enabled the cunning and the strong to dominate and exploit the stupid, ignorant and weak, and had throughout human history been largely responsible for the vices, follies, and miseries of mankind. Only knowledge, that is, the growth of the sciences, could rescue mankind from these largely self-induced evils.’ 17 However, this assumption that science leads to freedom, wisdom and moral progress, in short, enlightenment in the fullest sense of the word, becomes extremely problematic with the connection between the genocidal tyranny of the Nazi regime and the basis of their policies in evolutionary biology. After all, in their brutality, intolerance, militarism and absolute rejection of democracy in favour of a fanatical personal cult of the leader, the Nazis represent the complete opposite of Enlightenment values and civilisation. Indeed, some historians have suggested that Fascism ‘was a negation of the Enlightenment, part of a counterrevolution that rejected the basic assumptions of “modernity”.’ 18 For historians such as Ernst Nolte, Fascism was not part of the great political projects of Liberalism and Marxism, and so could only be explained as the product of the reactionary traditions following, and attempting to counteract, the French Revolution. 19 Yet in many respects Fascism was also a product of Enlightenment political theories. The idea of politics as an activist campaign against evil, in which the individual should surrender to the general will, is found in Rousseau. 20 Similarly, the French Revolution in its attempts to establish who possessed legitimate power, created the distinction within democracy, considered as popular sovereignty, between those who were held to be the true, proper possessors of political power and their opponents, who should be excluded from it, even exterminated. Thus, one French revolutionary declared that only those of his species were truly human. The aristocracy weren’t members of his species, and so he shot them. 21 Thus the French Fascist, Robert Brasillach, enthusiastically remarked on how little the French Revolution had to do with individual liberty and international peace, declaring that with the Revolution ‘a lost bell rang out beginning a long night of turmoil sleeplessness. Everywhere peoples could be heard singing, each in in their own way, “Nation, Awake! Arise!”.’22 Similarly, the concern of Enlightenment political theorists, such as Rousseau, with an inner freedom corresponding to modern notions of self-realization, and the identification of the citizen’s real self with the general will, produced a collectivist ideal of freedom that did not necessarily correspond to any constitutional state. Indeed, Rousseau considered that true freedom might involve absolute submission to a sole legislator, who was the only person able to express the general will of the people, a concept almost identical to the Fascist notion that true freedom consisted in the absolute submission of the people to their leader. The scholar J. Hallowell, remarking on the similarity between Rousseau’s and the Fascist idea of the leader expressing the people’s general will, stated that in that sense Fascism had not murdered Liberalism, but that Liberalism had committed suicide. 23 Fascism characteristically viewed life as struggle. Mussolini, in his The Doctrine of Fascism, declared that Fascist ethics viewed life as ‘duty, ascent, conquest’, an attitude not very different from Kant’s statement in The Dispute of the Faculties that ‘the being endowed with freedom is not content to enjoy a pleasant life.’ 24 Thus, although Hitler and the other leading Nazis propounded an ideology of struggle using the terminology of Social Darwinism, it was not based in the details of Darwinism but in Haeckel’s use of Darwinian theory to express Kant’s ethics of activism. 25 Even the view of warfare as inherently beneficial to be actively pursued for itself by the state was not entirely unique to Fascism. Turgot, in his 1750 On the Successive Advances of the Human Mind stated that ‘it is only through turmoil and destruction that nations expand and civilisations and governments are in the long run perfected.’ 26 Long before Fascism, and its concept of violence as a central part of political life arose, the Enlightenment political theorists had created a new, activist style of politics that established a strong connection between freedom, virtue and terror. In the view of some scholars, this activist tradition in modern politics generally, beyond the Fascist fringe, makes the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime entirely explicable.  ‘Once this is appreciated, it is not very difficult to understand such aspects of twentieth-century activism as the organized destruction of the Jews by Nazism. Destruction and fanaticism, after all, had become morally respectable parts of the western tradition as soon as the new activist style had won general acceptance.’ 27 Fascism is therefore a paradox that it is both a product of the Enlightenment and a reaction to it. 28 Thus, however immoral the Nazi regime was, and how much it appears to conflict with the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment, nevertheless it was also a product of particular Enlightenment political attitudes and claimed the same basis in science, no matter how spurious this appeared in practice.

Opposition to Scientific Racism through Cultural Relativism of Franz Boas

The scientific racism and eugenics policies promoted by the Nazis in Germany, and by other organisations and scientists across Europe and America was challenged by a number of other, leading scientists and scholars. One of the foremost opponents of scientific racism was Franz Boas, who became Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. A German Jew, he condemned such the racist interpretation of history and eugenics as ‘irremediably dangerous’, vehemently opposed anti-semitism and the Nazi regime in Germany, aiding refugees from their tyranny in New York. His work, The Mind of Primitive Man, aided the civil rights campaign in America by stating that Black Americans would be just as capable of performing their duties as citizens as Whites if they were given the opportunities to do so. It’s been stated that Boas did more than anyone else in the 20th century to combat racism. 29

Boas based his rejection of ideas of racial superiority on cultural diversity and relativism. He declared that ‘culture is … the result of innumberalbe interacting factors and there is no evidence that the differences between human races, particularly not between the members of the white race have any directive influence upon the course of development of culture.’ 30 Boas considered that each culture should be viewed as an entity in its own right, as the product of its own history. All cultures were produced and formed by history, and each culture, or indeed custom, could only be understood only through attempting to construct their cultural history. 31

Similarity between Anthropological Views of Boas and 18th Century Views of History, Nationality and Culture by Vico

Boas’ view that each culture is unique and can only be understood on its own terms, through its own history is very similar to those of the 18th century philosophers Giambattista Vico and Gottfried Herder. Reacting against Cartesian rationalism and the rejection of Humanism in favour of mathematics and science, Vico instead argued in his La Scienza Nuova of 1725 that mathematics was not a system of laws that governed reality, but merely a set of rules that allowed one to analyse and predict the behaviour of objects in space. 32 However, the applicability of mathematics to the study of nature was limited, as while mathematics was the product of the human mind, nature was not, and so the conclusions offered by natural science were necessarily less sure. The only sure knowledge could be of what humanity had made itself. Thus Vico advocated history as offering a surer knowledge than that of the natural sciences. 33 While contemporary philosophers believed that there was a timeless criteria for assessing art and culture, Vico claimed that each stage of human civilisation produced its own art, based on its own particular aesthetic ideas. The artistic expressions of these cultures were neither better nor worse than those which preceeded or followed them, but had to be judged on their own criteria.  34 Unlike Boas, Vico was not a cultural relativist. He did not advocate a historical relativism, but was trying to create a science that was true, because it rested on the principles by which culture and language, and hence knowledge itself, were historically produced. 35 In his own time, Vico was an obscure writer in his own time, and discussion of his ideas has, with the exception of Jules Michelet and Benedetto Croce, largely began in the 1960s. Contemporary philosophers and historians are interested in Vico because he provided a precedent for the view that the knowledge of humanity was different from that of nature, historical relativism and that it is possible to know with certainty what it is to be human regardless of the findings of modern science because of people’s common humanity. 36

Herder’s View of the Plurality of societies in Human Cultural History also Similar to Boas and Vico 

This belief that human cultures were unique and should be judged on their own terms was shared by Herder, who became general superintendent in of the Lutheran clergy in the German state of Saxe-Weimar in 1776. In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit – ‘Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity’, published between 1784 and 1791, he articulated a similar view of the uniqueness of individual human cultures. Contemporary French philosophes such as Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach and Voltaire believed that there was only a single, universal civilisation, of which one culture, then another, constituted its greatest expression in a particular epoch, and judged all cultures, previous and contemporary, by a single set of criteria which were held to have universal validity. Herder, on the other hand, considered that all civilisations had their own schwerpunkt – their own centres of gravity – and it was only through an appreciation of each culture’s individual centre of gravity that their character and value could be understood. Societies produced their arts, customs, religion, ethical codes, and indeed their entire national life through an integrated communal life developed through immemorial tradition. 37 There was not one, single human civilisation, but a plurality of civilisations, and the need to belong to a particular community through common language, history, feeling, habit and tradition was a human need as basic as eating or drinking. 38 For Herder there was nothing more barbarous than the destruction of another’s cultural heritage, and condemned the Romans for destroying the cultures of the peoples they conquered, and, despite his position as a Lutheran clergyman, the Church for forcibly baptising the Balts and British missionaries for spreading Christianity in India and elsewhere in Asia, where it was an alien element, whose imposition, and the social systems and forms of education also introduced by the British would destroy and distort their natural cultural development. 39 An early pioneer of folklore, he was interested in mythology as the expression of the way in which a particular people viewed nature. A people could only be not through politics or conquest, but through their language and shared symbols, the inward consciousness and outward culture that united a people. He was therefore strongly interested in folklore, including myths, fairy tales and folk songs. 40 He considered the mechanical model of human society, influenced by the natural sciences, produced by the French philosophes dangerous simplistic. In Herder’s view, these considered society as the product of mechanical, causal factors or the arbitrary desires of individual monarchs, legislators and military generals. However, the forces that affected and informed cultures and their history differed from society to society and age to age and so were impossible to reduce to simple formulas. 41People could only be creative and prosper in their native countries. While the unconscious, spontaneous influence of one culture on another was acceptable, conscious imitation of other cultures and countries led only to artificiality, and lower standards in life and art. 42 Herder was not a nationalist, and saw all the cultures of humanity as flourishing peacefully together. 43 Nevertheless, he inspired cultural nationalism in the subject nations of the Austro-Hungarian, Turkish and Russian empires, and political nationalism in Austria and Germany although he deeply detested it. 44 Some historians have found the origins of the Nazi idea of the German people’s unique mystical identity in Herder’s conception of the unique history and characteristics of each nation and ethnic group. 45 Herder’s vision of humanity and society was far more pluralistic. As a Lutheran pastor, he believed that God acted in history, as humanity was also part of nature, which was God’s creation. Humanity thus, to Herder, in their ‘wildest extravagances and passions must obey laws, not less beautiful and excellent than those, by which all the celestial bodies move.’ God implanted into humanity the quest for its own fulfilment, and humanity’s purpose was the achievement of their full humanity. Although the main theme of his book was the origins of European society in ancient Greece and the beginning of the modern age in the Renaissance, he viewed the progress of human culture as the product of different peoples and their values. 46 He was certainly not an advocated of the domination and destruction of one nation or culture by another.

Conclusion: Scientific Racism Attacked and Partly Refuted through Non-Mechanistic, Pluralist Views of Humanity Articulated by Boas, Vico and Herder

Now Rousseau, Kant and Turgot clearly weren’t Fascists. Rousseau and Kant were ardent opponents of despotism, with Rousseau in particular a key figure in the development of modern liberal political theory. Nevertheless, the revolutionary, activist style of politics created by the French Revolution and its attempt to apply Rousseau’s theory of the general will to an entire nation of millions, rather than the individual Swiss cantons on whose direct democracy Rousseau based his theories, were developed in an authoritarian direction during the 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the emergence of European Fascism. These movements drew upon Darwinism, as well as Lamarckianism and Vitalism, to support their intolerant views of race and nation. These evolutionary views, however, were interpreted according to the pre-existing view of the world, developed from the authoritarian interpretations political activism after the French Revolution, stressing struggle and the existence of an authentic nation or political class threatened by a terrible, oppressive and subversive outgroup.

The scientific racism and eugenics theories partly developed from the application of evolutionary theory to humanity was challenged and eventually refuted partly through a pluralistic view of humanity, which was developed in opposition to the Enlightenment view that there were universal rules that could be applied to humanity as whole, through which the qualities of nations and peoples could be objectively judged and valued. Now there are indeed severe problems with the cultural relativism propounded by Boas, and to a much lesser extent by Vico and Herder. There are objective moral values, which, it can be argued, transcend race and culture, so that tyranny and brutality is the same no matter which culture or ethnic group perpetrates it. Unfortunately, cultural relativism can also lead to the justification of attitudes, customs and regimes amongst particular ethnic groups which would be strongly condemned as oppressive and immoral in western society. Herder’s concept of Volk as the source of culture and civilisation was also developed by nationalistic cultural theorists to produce the vehemently racist idea of German ethnicist stressed by the Nazis, despite Herder’s own strongly anti-racist views. Nevertheless, the deeply immoral eugenics policies and the scientific racism that supported much of it was refuted not just on scientific grounds, but through counter-Enlightenment views that stress human cultural complexity and pluralism, rather than a simply mechanical reduction of the human sciences modelled on those of the natural world.  

 Notes

1. R. Eastwell, Fascism: A History (London, Pimlico 2003), pp. 8-9.

2. R. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford, Basil Blackwell 1987), pp. 16-7.

3. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p. 17.

4. See O. Mosley, Mosley – Right or Wrong? (London, Lion Books 1963), pp. 117-124.

5. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p. 17.

6. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 17-8.

7. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 17-19.

8. R. Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (London, Fontana Press 1996), pp.47-8.

9. Noll, The Jung Cult, p. 50.

10. N. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology (London, I.B. Tauris 1992), p. 194.

11. H. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table-Talk: Hitler’s Conversations recorded by Martin Bormann (Oxford, OUP 1988), p. 38.

12. ’Race’, in J. Taylor and W. Shaw, A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London, Grafton Books 1987), p. 283.

13. Cited in P. Vansittart, Voices 1870-1914 (New York, Franklin Watts 1985), p. 81.

14. Vansittart, Voices, p. XV.  

15. J.C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich (London, Penguin Books 1970), n. 4, p. 500.

16. J. Noakes and G. Pridham, ‘Introduction’, in J. Noakes and G. Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919-1945 – 1: The Rise to Power 1919-1934 (Exeter, Exeter Studies in History 1983), p. 3.

17. I. Berlin, ed. H. Hardy, Against the Current: Essay in the History of Ideas (Oxford, OUP 1981), pp. 163-4.

18. Eatwell, Fascism, p. 5.

19. N. Sullivan, Fascism, (London, J.M. Dent and Sons 1983), p. 13.  

20. Sullivan, Fascism, p. 43.

21. Sullivan, Fascism, p. 49.

22. Sullivan, Fascism, p. 48.

23. Sullivan, Fascism, p. 64.  

24. Sullivan, Fascism, p. 65.

25. Sullivan, Fascism, p. 66.

26. Sullivan, Fascism, p. 71.

27. Sullivan, Fascism, p. 68.

28. Eatwell, Fascism, p. 5.

29. C. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred: Anthropology and the Study of Religions (London, Cassell 1996), pp. 70-2.

30. F. Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York, the Free Press 1963), p. 71, cited in Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 71.

31. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 70.

32. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 94.

33. Berlin, Against the Current, pp. 94-5.

34. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 103.  

35. R. Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences (London, Fontana Press 1997), p. 342.

36. Smith, Human Sciences, p. 345.

37. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 11.

38. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 12.

39. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 11.

40. Smith, Human Sciences, p. 348.

41. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 12.

42. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 13.

43. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 11.

44. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 12.

45. Smith, Human Sciences, p. 350.  

46. Smith, Human Sciences, p. 351.

In my earlier blog posts on the persecution of Christianity in Soviet Russia, I discussed the origins of the Communist attacks on religion and people of faith in the atheism and materialism that formed an integral part of Marxism itself. This seems odd, even profoundly mistaken to many people given the apparent lack of connection between the Communist political programme and the defining tenet of atheism that there is no God or gods. However, metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality have throughout history informed the nature and essential political and social institutions of cultures and civilisations around the world. Before the secularisation of society beginning in the 18th century, religion to a greater or lesser extent provided the basis for the justification of political and social institutions. By denying the existence of God and the value of religion, atheism challenged the metaphysical basis of society, and demanded its radical restructuring according to secular political ideologies. Rather than simply being about the non-existence of God, 18th century religious scepticism was necessarily part of a wider debate about the nature of society itself.  

Atheism in Marxism and Early 19th century Russian Radicalism

Marx was strongly influenced in his critique of contemporary 19th century society by the Humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose theory that God was merely a projection of humanity’s own alienated nature caused Marx to consider that all social criticism began with religious criticism, and to state that ‘the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness’. 1 As a result, the Soviet state attacked and persecuted religion and promoted atheism in an attempt to create an atheist, Communist state. However, the connection between atheism and militant political radicalism predated the emergence of Marxism in Russia, dating back to the 18th century philosophes in France and the radical, violent opposition to the French ancien regime and contemporary European civilisation. French positivism, utopian socialism and some German Left-Hegelian ideas entered Russia in the 1840s. The literary circle around M.V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky, before its dissolution by the Tsar’s secret police, actively promoted the ideas of the French utopian socialist Fourier, for example. 2 Deeply concerned by the backward state of Russian society, and particularly serfdom, and the political oppression of Tsarist autocracy, Russian radicals such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Dmitry Pisarev turned for solutions to their country’s political and social problems to atheism, materialism and western science. 3 This generation of dedicated revolutionaries was later depicted and epitomised by the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev in the character of Bazarov in his novel, Fathers and Children. In it, Turgenev attempted to describe the confrontation between the old generation of Russian liberals and traditional civilisation with the younger generation of Russian radicals and their harsh positivism, which had no use for anything that could not be established rationally.  In the novel, Bazarov is a dedicated materialist and revolutionary. A self-described Nihilist, he attacks and rejects anything that cannot be established by rational, empirical science, including literature, philosophy, the beauty of art and nature, tradition, authority, religion, intuition, and all uncriticised assumptions, whether of conservatives, liberals, populists or socialists. 4 Bazarov recommends to his friends contemporary popular explositions of materialism, such as Buchner’s Kraft und Stoff. 5 As part of his personal project to establish science as the only true knowledge, Bazarov dissects frogs. 6 The book was immediately controversial amongst the Russian left, with some feeling that Turgenev had betrayed them by portraying them as Bazarov. Others strongly supported Turgenev. The radical literary critic, Pisarev, declared that he identified with Bazarov, and that the character showed that true progress would not come from tradition, but through active, self-emancipated, independent people like Bazarov who were free from romanticism and religion. 7 Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the Russian Herald, the review in which Fathers and Children originally appeared, presented his own perspective on the character in an unsigned review in his magazine. Bazarov, Katkov felt, was not interested in scientific truth, otherwise he would not promote cheap materialist tracts, which were nothing but materialist propaganda. Similarly, Bazarov dissected frogs not because of any genuine interest in science, but simply as a method of rejecting civilised and traditional values. Indeed, Bazarov and the other Nihilists were not true scientists genuinely interested in research, but political propagandists offering radical slogans and diatribes in place of hard, scientific fact. 8 Bazarov has been described as the first Bolshevik, despite the fact the character was as critical of socialism as of the other ideologies he considered to be unscientific. 9 Despite his critical stance towards socialism, Bazarov nevertheless shared the later Soviet regime’s claim to represent atheism and science in his revolutionary views.

Religious Scepticism and 18th Century Revolutionary Ideology

Bazarov’s violent rejection of existing culture was shared by some of the radical atheists of the 18th century. Sylvain Marechal, in his Dictionnaire des athees, demanded the destruction of Christian civilisation, declaring that

‘the utter destruction of a long-standing and imposing error, which affects everything in existence, which distorts everything, virtue itself included, which is a pitfall for the weak, a lever for the strong, and a barrier to genius – the utter destruction of such a gigantic error would chyange the face of the world.’ 10 This attack on Christianity culminated in the attempted suppression of Christianity in favour of the Cult of Pure Reason in revolutionary France, and the demands of Hebertists for the absolute suppression of religious belief as a whole. Marechal himself was a Communist, who, during the French Revolution wrote a Manifesto of the Equals to promote his radical political views. 11

In fact hostility to Christianity and organised religion in French revolutionary ideology extended far beyond Communists like Marechal. Philosophers and political theorists such as Helvetius and Rousseau criticised Christianity not just for being false in their view, but also for being unscientific and preaching a destructive morality in conflict with the loyalty required by the state. One could not be both a citizen and a Christian, according to Rousseau, because of this conflict in loyalties. For Helvetius, the conflict between religion and the state would only disappear if the ministers of the legislative body had both temporal and spiritual powers. 12 Rousseau was not an atheist, and looked back to the ancient Greek city states for the type of civic religion he felt would produce morality and virtue, while Helvetius believed this could be produced simply by social legislation and institutions. 13

Just as 18th century atheism viewed humanity as a machine, rather than an ensouled individual, as in LaMettrie’s book L’Homme Machine, so contemporary radical philosophers also viewed society in mechanistic terms. In his 1755 political treatise, Code de la Nature, Morelly declared that society was a marvellous automatic machine’. 14 Based on the same materialist determinism that influenced Baron d’Holbach and Helvetius’ 1758 De l’Esprit, the radical philosophers of the French revolution believed that they had found the basic rationality that would allow the laws of justice to be formed with the same accuracy and certainty as the natural sciences.  They therefore believed in a kind of cosmic pragmatism, in which it would be possible to create a state in which only those acting against the natural order, the foolish and wicked, would fail to be virtuous. 15 The result was the inflexible, doctrinaire attitudes of the French revolutionaries that resulted in the massacre of hundred of thousands in order to create a new, perfect, revolutionary state and society founded on immutable, rational principles. The failure of these ideologies to recognise the reality of human nature as fundamentally flawed, and their consequent impracticality, was recognised by some of the revolutionaries themselves. Salle, a liberal member of the Gironde, in 1792 wrote in alarm to Dubois-Crance, remarking that ‘the principles in their metaphysical abstractness and in the form in which they are being constantly analysed in this society – no government can be founded on them; a principle cannot be rigorously applied to political association, for the simple reason that a principle admits of no imperfection; and, whatever you may do, men are imperfect.’ 16 Morelly’s book was the first discussion of Communism as an achievable political reality, rather than a utopia, and inspired Gracchus Babeuf’s own attempts to establish it in the 1795 Conspiracy of Equals. 17 Over a century later, the establishment of the Soviet Union as a Marxist state following the Russian Revolution was a continuation of the radical 18th century project to create a perfect state on atheist, materialist principles, an experiment that similarly collapsed through its inability to conform to the realities of human nature rather than abstract political theory.

Conclusion: Marxist Atheism a Continuation of 18th Century Religious Scepticism in Radical Politics

Thus French revolutionary ideology included religious scepticism as part of its radical critique of existing society, and demanded the abolition of Christianity and its replacement by a civil religion as part of its political programme. This is not surprising, considering the quasi-theocratic nature of contemporary European states, where there was no separation of church and state in the modern sense. In 19th century Germany Hegelian philosophy was an official part of the educational system, used to justify the Prussian monarchy, while in the Russian Empire the authority of the tsar was supported by the Orthodox Church. Thus revolutionary ideologies attempted to attack the philosophical and religious basis of the feudal and autocratic regimes they criticised and rejected. However, these ideologies went far beyond advocating the separation of church and state or the toleration of different faiths in religiously neutral state, but advocated instead the abolition of religion, either revealed or as a whole, as part of a complete reorganisation of society. Thus the hostility of the Soviet authorities to religion and their attempts to destroy it were due not just to Marx, but were also part of a long tradition of politically radical atheism dating from the 18th century. In their attempts to create a perfect society based on fundamental materialist principles, the atheism of the 18th century French revolutionaries and their successors in Soviet Communism formed part of a general attempt to create a society based on the absence of revealed religion. For these revolutionaries, atheism was about far more than rejecting the existence of God, but was a metaphysical attitude that affected all aspects of society and political theory. 

 Notes

1. K. Marx, ‘Religion as Opium: Man Makes Religion’ in Paul Helm, ed., Faith and Reason (Oxford, OUP 1999), p. 229.

 2. Victor Terras, A History of Russian Literature (New Haven, Yale University Press 1991), p. 172.

3. Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1978), p. 19.

4. Berlin, ed. Hardy and Kelly, Russian Thinkers, p. 277.  

5. Berlin, ed. Hardy and Kelly, Russian Thinkers, p. 279.

6. Berlin, ed. Hardy and Kelly, Russian Thinkers, p. 284.

7. Berlin, ed. Hardy and Kelly, Russian Thinkers, p. 282.

8. Berlin, ed., Hardy and Kelly, Russian Thinkers, p. 284.

9. Berlin, ed. Hardy and Kelly, Russian Thinkers, p. 279.

10. Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1954), p. 141.

11. J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy: Political Theory and Practice during the French Revolution and Beyond (Harmondworth, Penguin Books 1952), pp. 186-7.

12. Talmon, Totalitarian Democracy, p. 22.

13. Talmon, Totalitarian Democracy, p. 23.

14. Talmon, Totalitarian Democracy, p. 17.

15. Talmon, Totalitarian Democracy, p. 18.

16. Talmon, Totalitarian Democracy, pp. 20-1.  

17. Talmon, Totalitarian Democracy, pp. 17-18.

My first blog post discussing the persecution of the churches in the Soviet Union has been criticised by Robert, who writes:

‘In order to make your case, I think you need to demonstrate that people of faith would be excluded from persecution, if the regime was agnostic. This is a tall order, and you only assert it, but don’t demonstrate why.

You’ve labeled communism as an atheist philosophy, which has a very strange ring to it. What in atheism accounts for the historical dialectic, class struggle, the state as a tool of the capitalists, the evil of private property, to name but a few of the main pillars of Marxism?

Quite obviously, nothing. You wrote that, “Marx…was strongly influenced in the development of his philosophical and political system by the Humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach.” “Strongly” overplays the influence, and you ignore many others. Kant? Hegel? The French socialists, like Louis Blanc?

You wish to establish some sort of atheist-religious dichotomy within Communism that’s simply not there. The philosophy is far broader than that.’

No, Communism was still very much an atheist philosophy that attacked religion as an entity in itself, rather than for reasons of practical politics, such as the political or economic power of specific religious organisations such as, for example, the Russian Orthodox Church. And while Communism did not just attack religion, but also all other competing philosophies and political parties and organizations, nevertheless the attack on religion was an integral part of the Marxist critique of feudal and capitalist exploitation, and not just part of a general intolerance.

Atheism as Integral Aspect of Communism

Actually, I’m not trying to set up an atheist-religious dichotomy within Communism at all. Far from it – Communism was intrinsically atheist, and defined itself very much as an atheist movement. My point is that Soviet Communism persecuted Christians, as well as other peoples of faith, because of their Marxism. In fact I stated very clearly that Marxism was intrinsically atheist. Hence the attack on religion that went far beyond mere political expediency, defined purely as the pursuance of immediately secular goals. Remember, Marx declared that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ and stated that the Christian Church was a ‘false consciousness’ and beyond redemption in that it reinforced the alienation and oppression of the workers’. 1 Lenin, the architect of the Soviet state whose ideas were extensively codified after his death into official, Communist dogma, was vehemently anti-religious. He declared that ‘Every defence or justification of the idea of God, even the most refined, the best intentioned, is a jusification of reaction.’ 2 The Soviet Communist party established its ‘Anti-Religious Commission’ in 1922 during Lenin’s presidency in order to promote atheism. 3 The Communists’ anti-religious propaganda campaign was unofficially directed by Trotsky, under Lenin’s authority, with Lenin taking a great interest in it. 4 The Communist Party was, however, at this stage cautious about attacking religion too violently as it considered that insulting the feelings of religious believers would be counterproductive. 5 Nevertheless, the campaign went far beyond the publication of atheist literature and the organisation of lectures promoting atheism. Trotsky viewed the campaign of expropriation of church property undertaken in the 1920s as a tactic for undermining the ideological, as well as the social power of the Russian Orthodox Church in a ’short, sharp shock’ that would discredit the Church and encourage the Russian people to convert to atheism. 6 Thus Marxism, and Soviet Communism viewed atheism as an intrinsic part of its ideology. The campaign against religion and to promote atheism was therefore a natural product of Communist ideology. It was not something that the Communists happened to do, as part of a general campaign against non-Marxists. Furthermore, the attack on religion was initially partly restrained from fears that it would alienate people from official, Marxist atheism, rather than encourage conversion.

Persecution of Soviet People of Faith Different from Liberal Attacks on Church Power and Property in Mexico and Italy

As for the statement that people of faith would not have been persecuted if the Soviet regime had been agnostic, rather than atheist, it’s probable that if a non-atheist, socialist party had seized power in the Soviet Union, then indeed religious believers would not have been persecuted simply for being religious believers. During the 19th century, for example, secularising liberal governments in South America and Italy had attempted to restrict the economic, social and political power of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly regarding education. In Mexico from 1827 to the early 1850s under the regimes of Guerrero, Valentin Gomez Farias and Benito Juarez, legislation was passed restricting the power of the Church. These included legislation limiting the jurisdiction of the Church courts to the maintenane of internal discipline in the Church; the disentailment of Church lands, and a restriction on the fees the Church could charge for services such as burials and marriages. These pieces of anti-clerical legislation were incorporated into the Mexican constitution of 1857 and survived until 1917. 7 These policies created considerable opposition from the Church and Conservative politicians, resulting in their repeal by subsequent governments and even in a coup by the army officer, Anastasio Bustamente in 1829, in which Guerrero was overthrown and shot. 8 Nevertheless, despite the attacks on Church property and privilege enacted through this legislation, there was no persecution of Church or of religious believers themselves simply as the Roman Catholic Church and believers. The reformers simply wished to confine the Church’s role to the religious sphere, rather than the economic and political. Similarly, the forcible incorporation of the papal states by the founders of the Italian state during the Risorgimento created strong opposition to it by the Roman Catholic Church, who also viewed the Liberals as exploiters of the poor. The Church did not recognise Italy, and ordered that no Roman Catholic should vote in Italian elections, although this ban was partially lifted in 1899. 9 Despite the Church’s opposition, Italian Liberals did not persecute the Church and its members, although religious education was excluded from Italian secondary schools and religious, rather than civil marriages were no recognised by the state. 10 Now in both Mexico and Italy there were regimes and politicians alienatd from and passing legislation against the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, despite attacking the power of the Church in particular areas, there was no attack on the Church itself for simply being a religious institution. It can similarly be argued that if the Bolsheviks had been motivated primarily by immediate political concerns and with the political and economic power of particular religions in the Soviet Union, such as the Russian Orthodox Church, been genuinely indifferent to questions of religious faith as metaphysical beliefs, and thus agnostic in that sense, then their attack on these faiths would similarly have been confined to the political and economic spheres. Instead, the Soviet authorities attacked the religions and their members themselves, and not simply for the political and economic power they possessed as institutions and individuals.

Influence of Feuerbach’s Atheist Critique of Christianity and Feudalism on Marx’s Critique of Capitalism

Now Communism is an atheist philosophy in the sense that it rejects and attacks religious belief, and also because it based its criticism of capitalist society on the atheist critique of religion by Luwig Feuerbach. Marx himself considered that the criticism of religion was the beginning of the criticism of society. 11 Furthermore, Feuerbach’s atheist critique of Christian belief as the legitimisation of European feudalism, in his statement, for example, that the spirit of subjection arises from religious humility and passivity, is also a criticism of the political relationships in society. 12 Now as I said in the first blog post, Marx was influenced by Feuerbach’s Hegelian critique of Christianity, used his concept of the Gattungswesen – the species being – to critique contemporary capitalism society. I also stated that Marx moved beyond and rejected Feuerbach’s Humanism. Now Marx clearly was influenced by a number of different ideologies, such as Hegel and French Socialism. Nevertheless, Engels described Feuerbach’s Humanism as the mid-point between Hegel’s philosophy and his and Marx’s own conception. 13 Scholars have also stated that through its elevation into historical materialism Feuerbach’s critique of religion prepared the way for Marx’s own critique of ideology. 14 Thus, Feuerbach’s Humanism did indeed influence Marx in its statement that God was merely a projection generated by the alienated human psyche which legitimised oppressive forms of society such as feudalism. Marx went beyond Feuerbach in his development of dialectical materialism and adoption of socialism. Nevertheless, Marxism was influenced and informed by Feuerbach’s atheist critique of belief in God and its societal consequences. In that sense, Marxism is clearly an atheist philosophy as atheism clearly is a major, though not the sole element, in Marx’s critique of capitalism.

Lifting of Restrictions on Religion in USSR and Gorbachev’s Perestroika

Regarding Gorbachev and religion, yes, he did lift restrictions on religion in the USSR in his programme of democratising and restructuring Soviet sociey. In his book Perestroika, Gorbachev includes a number of admiring letters written to him to encourage his reforms, including one from a Lithuanian Roman Catholic stating that through his efforts, believers had something to learn from him and that they were praying for him and his family every Sunday from 9 am. to 1. pm. 15 Now I don’t doubt that Gorbachev was genuine in his attempt to create a humane, democratic form of Communism. However, for all his arguments that perestroika was based on Lenin’s ideas, much of Gorbachev’s programme of reforms contradicted previous Marxist-Leninist ideology. 16 Indeed, Gorbachev complained that not only were Lenin’s ideas being ignored, but that they had also been ‘canonized, idealized and turned into dogma’. 17 Gorbachev’s lifting of the restrictions on religion clearly contradicted the Soviet state’s policy to restrict religion which had been established for decades and which also claimed a basis in Lenin’s ideas. Moreover, Gorbachev’s programme of glasnost – ‘openness’ – his attempt to allow the free discussion of ideas allowed the official atheism of the Communist state to be challenged. A 1989 letter to the Soviet journal, Ogonyok, from someone who had just read the Gospels for the first time, praised them for ‘the austere power of their words, the eleganc of the finely tunedaphorisms, the subtle poetic quality of the images.’ The author stated that the book had reached him quite by accident, and he had read it purely out of literary curiosity. Nevertheless, after reading it the writer of the letter stated he became very angry and having been denied reading the Gospels. ‘What a treasure they had been hiding from me! Who decided, and on what basis, that this was bad for me-and why?!’ The writer continued by criticising the official atheism of the Soviet state and its attempt to impose this on its citizens. ‘A state that is separated from the church should also be separated from atheism. Isn’t spiritual totalitarianism more terrible than the political kind? In returning social fredoms, a democratic state has no right to continue to la claim to its citizens’ freedom of spiritual quests.’ 18 As with other areas in Gorbachev’s perestroika programme, there was opposition to the new toleration of religion in some parts of Soviet officialdom. In 1988 church attendance at the Preobrazhensky Cathedral was so great that in November the Council on Religious Affairs recommended that the Vvedensky church should be re-opened for worship. However, opposition by local council officials meant that the church was not re-opened until 15 members of the church association declared that they were going on a hunger strike and Ogonyok ran the story supporting the members of the church against the party bureaucracy. 19

Conclusion: Persecution of Churches and other Religions in USSR Product of Official Marxist Atheist Ideology

 Thus the Soviet persecution of Christianity and the other religions was indeed based in Marxism as an atheist philosophy, rather than on immediate political reasons. Unlike previous secularising regimes in Mexico and Italy, which were also alienated from and attempting to restrict the power of the Church, the Soviet Communists did not limit themselves to attacking the churches’ political and economic power, but also attacked them as part of a deeper attack on religion itself. This hostility to religion had its origins in Feuerbach’s Humanism, which attacked religion for its role in creating and preserving oppressive social relationships in wider European society, a critique which was influential in inspiring Marx’s own critique of religion and capitalism, and the development of his own ideas for its replacement based on contemporary French socialism. Finally, although Gorbachev attempted to lift the restrictions on religion as part of his attempt to reform and humanise Communism, this contradicted the offical policy of previous decades and led to criticism of the official atheist stance of Soviet ideology and education. While Marxism clearly does not comprise the whole of atheist attitudes and philosophies, it does nevertheless constitute an atheist ideology, and atheism in its turn provided Marxism with the philosophical basis for attacking religion as an integral part of its programme to destroy and supersede feudal and capitalist social relations.

Notes

1. David Chidester, Christianity: A Global History (London, Penguin Books 2001), p. 524.

2. V.I. Lenin, Religion (New York 1959), p. 93, and C. Lane, Christian Religon in the Sovie Union (London 1978), pp. 26-7, cited in Chidester, Christianity, p. 527.

3. Chidester, Christianity, p. 528.  

4. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1979), p. 495.

5. Chidester, Christianity, p. 528.

6. Chidester, Christianity, p. 527.  

7. Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America (Oxford, OUP 2004), pp. 431-3.

8. Bakewell, Latin America, p. 431.

9. ‘Christian Democracy’ in Philip V. Cannistraro, Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy (Westport, Greenwood Press 1982), pp. 117-8.

10. ‘Lateran Pacts’ in Cannistraro, Fascist Italy, p. 299.

11. ‘Marxism’, in John R. Hinnells, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Religions (London, Penuin Books 1984), p. 205.

12. ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, in Florian Vassen, Vormarz, (Stuttgart, Philipp Reclam jun. 1979), p. 84.

13. ‘Feuerbach’ in Vassen, ed., Vormarz, p. 84.

14. ‘Feuerbach, in Vassen, ed., Vormarz, p. 85.

15. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World (London, Collins 1987), p. 70.

16. For an example of the argument that Lenin was the ideological basis of perestroika, see ‘Turning to Lenin, an Ideological Source of Perestroika’ in Gorbachev, Perestroika, pp. 25-6.

17. Gorbachev, Perestroika, p. 45.

18. Sergei Zubatov, ‘Why Only Now? Why So Late?’, (1989), in Christopher Cerf and Marina Albee, eds., Voices of Glasnost: Letters from the Soviet People to Ogonyok Magazine, 1987-1990 (London, Kyle Cathie Ltd 1990), pp. 82-4.

19. I. Kholina, V. Tuvin, L. Zoltukina, M. Pilenkova, T. Alekseyeva and 3,000 others, ‘Freedom of Religion, But…’ (1989),in Cerf and Albee, eds., Voices of Glasnost, pp. 149-51.

Evolutionary theory and speculation on the transmutation of one species into another isn’t something that one associates with medieval thought. The Middle Ages were, after all, the age of faith when the world was interpreted according to the Bible and Aristotelian philosophy, both of which stressed the fixity of species. Now it is true that the modern conception of an evolving universe is a uniquely modern worldview, alien to the philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless there was an awareness of change in the varieties of plants and animals, which for some, entirely orthodox philosophers and theologians was developed into a theory of micrevolution in which new breeds of animals had evolved from an ancestral type.

Evolutionary ideas had been developed in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Anaximander considered that humans had first evolved from fish. 1 Empedocles similarly believed that the world moved through periods of cosmic separation and differention, and blending and merging similar to the cycles of ‘Big Bangs’ followed by ‘Big Crunches’ proposed by the Oscillating Universe model in modern cosmology. He suggested that in the early universe, the various parts of human and animal anatomy had appeared separately and, through a process of trial and error, had become attached to each other to produce the characteristic modern lifeforms. This process had also generated monsters, which had been unsuited to survive and so died out. 2 Some of these ideas were taken over by the Church Fathers in their interpretation of Genesis. Noting the apparently different accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2, St. Augustine drew on the Stoic doctrine of the Seminal Reasons to suggest that God had implanted in matter the latent germs of future organisms, that developed in due course. 3

In the 13th century Albertus Magnus also discussed the appearance of new species through evolution based on the discussions of the ancients, particularly Theophrastus. Albertus believed that the appearance of new species was demonstrated by the domestication of wild plants, and the appearance of wild varieties from formerly domesticated types. Some of these were not the development of new species as such, but merely the actualisation of potential attributes in an earlier variety, such as when rye increased in size over three times and became wheat. He also believed that some species were generated from the corruption of existing forms, such as when a felled oak or beech tree allowed aspens or poplars to spring up in their place. He also believed that new species could be created by grafting. 4  These early speculations on evolution and speciation continued in the next century with the work of Henry of Hesse, who discussed the appearance of new diseases and the new herbs that would be required to treat them. 5 These early discussions of evolution also influenced Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Leibniz and the 18th century evolutionists. 6

Along with the literal interpretation of Genesis, theologians and religious scholars have also interpreted it allegorically since Philo in the 1st century AD. These scholars include St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that Creation had been instantaneous, and that Genesis laid out the rational, but not temporal order of Creation:

‘If, however, we take these days to denote merely sequence in the natural order, as Augustine holds and not succession in time, there is nothing to prevent our saying … that the substantial formation of the firmament belongs to the second day.’ 7

Aquinas, like the other scholastics, believed that God also worked through secondary causes through the order He had given the cosmos. ‘the orderly teleology of nonconscious agents in the Universe entails the existence of an intelligent Orderer.’ 8 This notion of the universe as subject to and illustrating a divine order was a vital factor in the development of modern science in the 16th century, when scientists investigated the Book of Nature as a similar revelation to the Book of Scripture.

Thus, while the medieval philosophers and theologians did indeed believe in the fixity of types of species, some of them were interested in the possibility that new varieties could appear of existing types. Furthermore, the allegorical approach adopted by some ancient and medieval theologians meant that when Darwinism emerged in the 19th century many Christians were able to reconcile faith with evolution, whilst rejecting the atheistic implications of the theory.

Thus paradoxically evolution as an idea was partly the result of the Christian investigation of a rationally ordered creation, and the medieval discussion of the development of future varieties of existing types can appear very modern. This in itself can challenge the notion that medieval philosophy and theology was primitive and irrelevant to today. It can also lead one to wonder how far modern scientific views of evolution have actually progressed. Although biological knowledge has increased immeasurably since Albertus Magnus’ time, if ID theory is correct and macroevolution cannot be demonstrated, then science has progressed far less in explaining evolution since the Middle Ages than has been claimed. 

Notes

1. A.C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo: Science in the Middle Ages – Fifth to Thirteenth Centuries (London, Mercury Books 1959) p. 150; Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1987), pp. 72-74.

2. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, p. 150; Barnes, Early Greek philosophy, pp. 179-181.

3. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, p. 150; Gordon Leff, Medieval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1958) p. 43.

4. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, p. 150.

5. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, pp. 150-151.

6. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, p. 151.

7. Roger Forster and Paul Marston, Reason, Science and Faith (Crowborough, Monarch Books 1999), p. 214.

8. ‘Aquinas’ in Jennifer Speake, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy (London, Pan 1979), p. 19.

Following on from the article on Christianity and the ancient world, I thought I would examine the relationship between Christianity and slavery in the Middle Ages. For many non-Christians, the perception of the Middle Ages was a period of superstition and feudal oppression, when the great lords exploited their serfs, aided by the Church, which justified their subordination. The most blatant example of this image of the Middle Ages recently was in the Hollywood film, King Arthur of about four years ago. In one scene, Arthur is shown freeing the oppressed peasants on a Roman villa from oppression and physical torture by Roman Catholic priests.

Ecclesiastical Ownership of Slaves

Now there is clearly some truth in the charicature. The social structure of the Middle Ages was very hierarchical, with most of the population living in some kind of bondage, either as slaves or serfs – individuals with more rights than slaves, but still tied to their masters. Christian churches and the clergy often possessed slaves, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of them on a single ecclesiastical estate. 1 Pope Gregory I (590-604) barred slaves from marrying free Christians, while Gregory XI in the 14th century would sometimes order the enslavement of an opponent after excommunicating them. Christian theologians also used Biblical authority to support slavery as an institution. 2 Nevertheless, Christian theology also viewed slavery as unnatural and demanded slaves’ humane treatment. 3 It also sought to reform and abolish certain aspects of the slave trade, while some theologians even challenged the legitimacy of slavery altogether.

Church Opposition to Slavery and the Slave Trade

Serfdom and slavery certainly existed in ancient Celtic society. A set of four slave neck rings, dating from the 1st century BC, were recovered from Llyn Cerrig Bach in Anglesey in 1942/3. 4 Ancient Irish law recognised the existence of seven types of serf, including those who were unable to pay their honour price, enech, as free men and so sold themselves to a master. 5 Nevertheless, the founder of Christianity in Ireland, St. Patrick, had rejected all forms of slavery ‘apparently the first public person in history to adopt such a categorical stance’. 6 Indeed slavery was gradually suppressed in Europe from the fourth century AD to the High Middle Ages, when it was virtually unknown in northern Europe. 7 Some of this decline can be traced to the influence of Chistianity and the church’s intention of protecting Christians from enslavement. Canon Law prevented non-Christians in Europe from owning Christian slaves. 8 This prohibition was eventually extended to include Christians, so that although slaves were bought and sold as late as the 10th century, this was increasingly rare and expensive, partly through the Church’s prohibition on the enslavement of Christians. 9

Church Encouragement of Manumission

The Church also had strong moral objections to certain forms of slavery, and encouraged their manumission as a pious act. In Anglo-Saxon England, the Council of Chelsea of 816 stipulated that penal slaves should be freed on the death of a bishop, and secular lords also included provisions in their wills freeing their slaves. 10 The earliest known English manumission was by the Bishop Wilfred on his estate in Selsey c. 681-6. 11 As Wilfred’s overlord, king Ethelwealh, had given him the inhabitants as well as the land, Wilfrid freed the slaves there after he had baptised them. ’Among them [the inhabitants] were two hundred and fifty male and female slaves, all of whom he released from the slavery of Satan by baptism and by granting them their freedom released them fom the yoke of human slavery as well.’ 12 Most surviving Anglo-Saxon wills contain instructions for the manumission of slaves, and in total there are about 120 manumission documents for the period. 13 Sometimes this was in general terms, such as ‘and all my men are to be free, and each is to have his homestead and his cow and his corn for food’. 14 Other wills specifically name the individuals who were to be freed. Thus the Anglo-Saxon lady, Wynflaed, instructed that a number of her slaves should be specifically freed in her will of c.950.

‘And they are to free Wulfwaru, to follow whom she pleases; [and ...]ttryth also; and hey are to free Wulfflaed on condition that she follow Aethelflaed and Eadgifu … And thy are to free Gerburg and Miscin an Hi[...] and the daughter of Burhulf at Chinnock, and Aelfsige and his wife and his older daughter, and Ceolstan’s wife. And a Charlton they are to Pifus and Edwin [...] and [...]’s wife. An at Paccombe they are to free Eadhelm, and Man, and Johanna, and Sprow and his wife, and enefaet, and Gersand, and snell. And a Coleshill they are to free Aethelgyth, and Bic’s wife, and Aeffa, and Beda, and Gurhan’s wife; and they are to free Wulfwaru’s sister, Brihtsige’s wife, and [...] the wright, and Aelfwith’s daughter Wulfgyth. An if there be any pernally enslaved person besies these whom she enslaved, she trusts to herchildren that thy wil release them for her soul['s sake].’ 15

The law code promulgated in 695 of King Wihtraed of Kent stipulated that manumissions should be performed in church, though slaves were also manumitted at the crossroads in Devon and Camridgeshire. 16 Even there slaves were commonly manumitted in front of members of the clergy. ‘Eadgifu freed Wulfric at the cross-roads, three weks before midsummer, in the witness of Brihstan the priest and of Cynestan and of the cleric who wrote this.’ 17 Slaves could be freed at the tombs of saints, and most manumissions stated that they were performed for the good of the soul of the person granting the slave their freedom. 18 Manumissions were not only recorded in wills. They were also written in gospel books and service books, such as in the Welsh Lichfield Gospels, written before 840. This ‘gave sacred authority to and permanent, written public recognition of the act whil also acknowledging the manumittor’s charity.’ 19 Thus it’s true to say that the redemption of captives and the manumitting of slaves were Christian acts of mercy much encouraged by the Church.’ 20 In the words of the act of manumission for an eleventh century serf, ‘whoever, in the name of the holy and undivided Trinity, moved by charity, permits anyone of his servile dependents to rise from the yoke of servitude to the honour of liberty, may surely trust that in the Last Day, he himself will be endued with everlasting and celestial liberty.’ 21

Church Protection of Slaves and their Rights 

Slaves in Anglo-Saxon society, like the later serfs, possessed rights, which the Church actively protected. The Church was well aware of the hardship of the slave’s life. The Colloquy on the Professions, written by Aelfric, abbot of Cerne Abbas c. 987-1002 for the children in the monastic school, contains the lines on the work of the ploughman

‘Teacher: Oh! Oh! The labour must be great!

Ploughman: It is indeed great drudgery, because I am not free.’ 22

Stories of the saints included episodes where the saint intervened to prevent the harsh treatment of slaves. 23 In Roman Gaul during the later Roman Empire, aristocratic bishops such as St. Germanus of Auxerre travelled on missions to secure relief from oppressive taxes for peoples as far afield as Armorica (Brittany) and Britain. There were also revolts from the peasants themselves, such as that of the Bagaudae, against heavy imperial taxation and oppression by the authorities between 417 and 454. These revolts were eventually suppressed by the imperial army and, in the 440s, by the Visigoths. While they failed, bishops like St. Germanus succeeded. These bishops in turn Christianised the memory of the earlier peasant rebels, and turned them into something similar to Christian martyrs. 24 Bishop Wulfstan in his Sermon of the Wolf to the English stated that it was because people were being enslaved and the slaves deprived of their rights that had made God send the Vikings to raid and invade them. 25 He lamented that, amongst other crimes,

‘ poor men are wretchedly deceived and cruelly cheated and wholly innocent, sold out of this land far and wide into the possession of foreigners; and through cruel injustice children in the cradle are enslaved for petty theft widely throughout this nation; and the rights of freemen suppressed and the rights of thralls curtailed and the rights of charity neglected; and, to speak most briefly, God’s laws are hated and his commands despised. And therefore through the anger of God we all suffer frequent insults, let him acknowledge it who may; and this harm will become common, though one may not think so, to all this nation unless God will save us.’ 26

People Selling themselves into Slavery for Food 

One of the reasons some people became enslaved was because they had sold themselves in order to be fed during a famine. 27 Such people were freed on the deaths of their masters. Thus the late 10th century will of Geatfleda, a benefactress of Durham cathedral, states that she ‘has given freedom for the love of God and for the need of her soul: namely Ecceard teh smith and Aelfstan and his wife and all their offspring, born and unborn, and Arcil and Cole and Ecgferth [and] Ealdhun’s duaghter, and all those people whose heads shed took for their food in the evil days.’ 28

In England, slavery ended in the 12th century after the Norman Conquest. Norman control of the sea made it impossible for English people to be exported as slaves. 29 This was reinforced by the preaching of Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, who travelled regularly to Bristol, the main slave port in his see, to preach against the trade. In his Life of Saint Wulstan, the 12th century historian William of Malmesbury expressed absolute horror of the trade:

‘You might well groan to see the long rows of young men adn maidesn whose beauty and youth might move the pity of a savage, bound together with cords, and brought to market to be sold. It was a damnable sin, a piteous reproach, that men, worse than brute beasts, should sell into slavery their own lemans, nay, their own blood.’ 30 Eventually the saint’s preaching was so successful that not only did the people of Bristol abandon the trade and become ‘an example to all England’, but they blinded and drove one slave trader who entered the city. 31

Decline of Medieval Slavery

Eventually slavery declined in northern Europe, transformed into serfdom. While the serf was still unfree, they nevertheless enjoyed certain rights denied the slave. Nevertheless, the view contained in Christian theology that human inequality was a result of the Fall inspired radical Christian groups, such as the English Lollards, the followers of the theology of John Wyclif, to challenge feudalism itself. One Lollard verse ran

‘By Heaven’s high law all men are free,

but human law knows slavery.’ 32

Although Lollardy was eventually the suppressed, the medieval period had seen the development of Christian theological opposition to slavery based on the arguments of the ancient Greek and Roman theologians, an opposition that would be revived in the West in the campaign against Atlantic slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Notes

1. James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London, Longman 1995), p. 14; Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry (San Francisco, Encounter Books 2002), p. 29.

2. Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, p. 29.

3. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, p. 14.

4.Francis Pryor, Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans (London, HarperCollins 2003), p. 424.

5. Michael Richter, Medieval Ireland: The Enduring Tradition (Basingstoke, MacMillan 1988), p. 20.

6. Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, p. 26. 

7. Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, p. 29.

8. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, p. 16.

9. R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe – From Constantine to Saint Louis (London, Longman 1988), p. 188.

10. Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society (London, Penguin Books 1974), p. 112.

11. David A.C. Pelteret, ‘Manumission’, in Michael Lapdige, John Blair, Simon Keynes and Donald Scragg, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, Blackwell 2001), p. 301.

12. Leo Shirley-Price and R.E. Latham, Bede: A History of the English Church and People (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1968), p. 229.

13. Whitelock, English Society, p. 112; Pelteret, ‘Manumission’, in Lapidge, Blair and Scragg, eds., Anglo-Saxon England, p. 301.

14. Whitelock, English Society, p. 112.

15. ‘The Will of Wynflaed, c.950′ in Michael Swanton, trans., Anglo-Saxon Prose (London, J.M. Dent 1993), p. 53.

16. Pelteret, ‘Manumission’, in Lapidge, Blair and Scragg, eds., Anglo-Saxon England, p. 301.

17. Whitelock, English Society, p. 113.

18. Pelteret, ‘Manumission’, in Lapidge, Blair and Scragg, eds., Anglo-Saxon England, p. 302.

19. Pelteret, ‘Manumission’, in Lapidge, Blair and Scragg, eds., Anglo-Saxon England, p. 301.

20. Whitelock, English Society, p. 112.

21. R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, Century Hutchinson 1987), p. 103.

22. ‘Aelfric’s Colloquy’ in Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, p. 169; ‘A Colloquy’, in Kevin Crossley-Holland, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon World (Woodbridge, the Boydell Press 1982), p. 199.

23. Whitelock, English Society, p. 109.

24. Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation & Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford, OUP 1988), p. 37.

25. Whitelock, English Society, p. 109.

26. ‘The Sermon of the Wolf to the English’ in Crossley-Holland, Anglo-Saxon World, p. 266.

27. Whitelock, English Society, p. 112.

28. ‘A Manumission’, in Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World, p. 234.

29. David A.E. Pelteret, ‘Slavery’ in Lapidge, Blair and Scragg, eds., Anglo-Saxon England, p. 423.

30. J.H.F. Peile, William of Malmesbury’s Life of Saint Wulstan (Felinfach, Llanerch facsimile reprint of 1934 edition, 1996), p. 65.

31. Peile, Life of Saint Wulstan, p. 65.

32. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, p. 103.