The promise of liberty is intoxicating. Certainly the founding generation of Americans found it so, and many saw the future writ large there. “This ball of liberty,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1795, is “now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light & liberty go together.” Not that sensible folk believed the ascent would be easy. Indeed, the struggle upward would, by its very nature, engender resistance from every kind of entrenched authority. But the promise of liberty was so great that the utmost sacrifices were warranted. Jefferson himself justified the spilling of innocent blood during the French Revolution “when the liberty of the whole earth” depended on it. For the next 200 years, a Jeffersonian faith in liberty informed the policies of the Western powers as they conquered tribal peoples, resisted fascist aggression, and combated the spread of communism. By 1991, the tribes were conquered, the fascists were vanquished, and the communists driven to capitalism. Then it all went wrong.
The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture
Cambridge University Press
370 pages
$125.00
An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914
OUP USA
344 pages
$74.44
After enduring all the distasteful sacrifices required to free the world of ignorance and oppression, the West has learned that the New World Order is no utopia, and must now wonder if it is actually the dead-end of the Renaissance dream. Building on the patrimony of the Enlightenment, each country crafted its own utopia, where man was the measure and representative government, individualism, and freedom of conscience were the materials. England, France, the United States, and a host of other countries embraced some version of this early new order, and eventually exported it around the world. The distinctive national characteristics of each polity sometimes obscured what was a fundamentally similar goal: to undermine the authority of kings, oligarchies, and churches in order to gain freedom from oppression, restriction, and, ultimately, obligations of any kind. No matter how incongruous the confluence of history and film, when Braveheart‘s William Wallace cries “FREEDOM,” we all get it.
It is too early to say how well our freedom-loving rational humanism will fare in the future. But it is not too late to look back at some signs we missed, and to recognize that those who have valued authority, so feared by lovers of liberty, have actually played a significant role in the creation of modern liberal societies. Both books here under consideration examine the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the dominant ethos of liberalism in England and France in the 19th century; explore the misunderstandings created by the “tropes and symbols” of Catholics, Protestants, liberals, and republicans; and suggest a considerable affinity between religious values and national identities. By the turn of the 20th century, these two books suggest, “painful epiphanies” inherent in Catholic doctrine were already indicating that all was not well in the world of freedom.
In The Old Enemies, Michael Wheeler demonstrates that England’s endemic debate was far from a simple contest between Protestants and Catholics. After 300 years of repression in the wake of Henry VIII’s separation from Rome, the Catholic cause had been revived in 1829 by legislation permitting adherents to sit in Parliament, a measure which struck at an established Church already besieged by modern science and scholarship, the vitality of the dissenting churches, and criticisms from within. But it was difficult to say what Anglicans believed, for the church tolerated an eclectic array of Catholic and Protestant elements of doctrine and worship. When it came to attitudes about Rome, there was as much division as there possibly could be. Evangelical Anglicans (low church) abhorred the “cloudy errors of Popery,” while High Church Tractarians craved the mysteries of the faith and not infrequently converted to Rome. Wheeler’s own bias perfectly illustrates the confusion, when he names himself among those “Catholic” Anglicans who do not like being called “Protestants.” For “the sake of concision,” he uses the term “Protestant” to mean “all Anglicans and Protestant Dissenters taken together,” but this necessary convention undermines one’s ability to clearly appreciate the crucial question that divided Victorian churchmen: “upon what authority does the church proclaim truth?”
Wheeler begins by detailing the debate surrounding Pope Pius IX’s restoration of the hierarchy of Catholic bishoprics in England in November 1850—to Protestants, the “Papal Aggression.” It is a necessary starting point, as it marked the high point of anti-Catholicism in 19th-century England, and drove even the exceedingly tolerant Whigs to introduce punitive legislation. Wheeler then divides his study into three parts, each covering an important aspect of the literary discourse between Protestants and Catholics. In part 1, “Bloody Histories,” he examines Protestant and Catholic portrayals of the origin of churches, the Reformation, the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and the Gordon Riots. In part 2, “Creeds and Crises,” Wheeler analyzes Protestant-Catholic debates during times of crisis for the Church of England: Catholic Emancipation in 1829, when Roman Catholics were admitted to Parliament; publication of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), in which he powerfully defends his departure from the Anglican communion on grounds of the “Apostolicity” of the Catholic Church; and the Gorham Case (1847-50), which saw lay members of the Privy Council reverse the decision of the ecclesiastical court on the doctrinal soundness of a clergyman. In each of these cases, the traditional authority of the established church was undermined, and in each Catholic commentators had plenty to say about it. Finally, in part 3, “Cultural Spaces,” Wheeler examines the impact of Roman Catholicism on English culture, especially between 1850 and 1880, with a nod toward Catholic sensibility in the Decadent movement of the 1890s.
Wheeler’s great achievement is in reconstructing the nuanced rhetoric on both sides of the Catholic debate, drawing from the religious and secular press, pamphlets and novels, and works of theology, history, and autobiography. Here the arcane contributions of Renn Dickson Hampden and William Waterworth rightfully take their place beside the more enduring but sometimes less representative works of Newman and Matthew Arnold. Wheeler’s presentation of the richness and complexity of the debate suggests what is as true today as it was then, that controversy over religion and its place in culture is likely to be loaded with ironies. The literary history of popular Protestant novelist William Ainsworth’s The Tower of London (1840) and Guy Fawkes (1840) provides a case in point. Through close readings, Wheeler demonstrates that, although Ainsworth’s “antagonism towards Catholics was particularly strong,” he turned for both information and approach to Catholic historian John Lingard’s History of England (1819-30), a book rejected by two Catholic publishers and widely recognized for its “fairness.” Ainsworth, like many others who found Catholicism suspect, nevertheless wished to be fairer than extremists on both sides of the debate. The “one doctrine” that he tried to “enforce throughout” was “TOLERATION,” and this was made possible by his reading of an eminent Catholic historian.
The actual threat posed by the Catholic Church was not easy to name, but the perception of danger to the established church was enhanced by its inability to develop a cohesive response to the rising tide of liberalism. The clear position of the Roman Catholic Church—that there should be no reconciliation with “progress, liberalism and modern civilization”—stood as a reproach to Anglican tolerance and a beacon for sensitive High Churchmen who lamented the lack of holiness in their own church. In matters of church and state, British governments continued to chip away at the special prerogatives of the Church of England. In matters of theology and doctrine, the attempt to incorporate high, low, and broad attitudes in one communion was simply an evasion—as the Gorham controversy proved.
The cultural prejudice of Anglicans might have held at bay the appeal of Catholic mystery, but prejudice alone was no match for the combined and profoundly unsettling questions raised in a hundred ways by homegrown scientists, historians, broad churchmen, nonconformists, Tractarians, skeptics, and Catholics. To the degree that attacks on the validity of the authority of the Church of England were carefully wrought, they were bound to demand more cogent responses on the part of thoughtful defenders, who labored to locate the spiritual foundation of the Church of England. But not all critics were equally threatening. Challenges from scientists, philosophers, and historians could be damaging but were usually indirect and cumulative. Skepticism in one form or another was widespread, but it was highly personal, and did not require one to refrain from nominal Anglicanism. Dissenters were usually content to withdraw into their own congregations and schools, allowing the Establishment to creak on.
The response of High Church Tractarians to Anglican flaccidity, however, did threaten to alter the relation of church and state, by forcing the Church of England to face its fundamental weakness—the lack of spiritual authority. As Newman wrote to Rev. E. J. Phipps in 1848:
Consider the vast difference between believing in a living authority, unerring because divine, in matters of doctrine, and believing none; between believing what an external authority defines, and believing what we ourselves happen to define as contained in Scripture and the Fathers, where no two individuals define quite the same set of doctrines.
Even after 1851, those who cared about the Church of England were haunted by the presence of Catholic converts such as John Henry Newman and Henry Manning, more Anglican ghosts than Papist spies, and thus more fearsome.
Newman, the most English of Catholics, and one of England’s great intellects, is the key to understanding why anti-Catholicism declined so significantly after mid-century. In his writings, whether historical, fictional, or theological, he relied on facts, which were dear to Englishmen. As he studied the early church fathers in the late 1830s, the facts led him to doubt the “tenableness of Anglicanism” and to conclude that “rationalism was the great evil of the day.” Miracles are treated as much like facts as it is possible to treat them, and he uses facts to make the reader receptive to the miraculous. As he writes in his novel Callista (1856), the heart is “commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description.” Even in his reception of Catholic dogma, Newman could be counted on to deal fairly with the issues at hand. Where Pope Pius IX and Cardinal Manning confirmed by their acceptance of the definition of Papal Infallibility in 1870 that they “failed to meet the challenges of the intellectual revolution of the mid-nineteenth century,” Newman’s reservations set him apart for many liberals who otherwise disagreed with him. Matthew Arnold thought him “characteristically English” in his “moderation” and in his “recognition of the claims of the critical spirit.” “I can truly say,” Arnold wrote to Newman, “that no praise gives me so much pleasure as to be told (which sometimes happens) that a thing I have said reminds people, either in manner or matter, of you.” Though both critics had much to say about the deficiencies of the Church of England, Newman’s carried more weight with churchmen, because it was an argument from faith.
J. P. Daughton’s An Empire Divided explores the role of another church under siege—the Catholic Church of France. Instead of dealing with the internal debate between Catholics and republicans, however, he takes as his ground the process of the extension of French influence in three important colonies between1880 and 1914. He begins with a summary of the development of the French missionary enterprise from the 17th century, establishing its long commitment to spiritual, rather than cultural, evangelization. French missions suffered under Napoleon, but began to revive in the postwar era. With a weak papacy providing little money or guidance, a number of French lay organizations, most notably the Oeuvre de la propagation de la foi, were founded, leading to a rapid expansion of missionary activity. By the mid-19th century, membership in the organization exceeded one million; between 1887 and 1912, it raised between three and four million francs every year in France alone; by 1900, it could claim more than 50,000 French missionary priests and workers, comprising two thirds of all Catholic Europeans in the field. And this represented only the largest of many French organizations promoting traditional Christian evangelism.
A central claim of Daughton’s work is that a tendency to conflate French religious and secular purposes has led to an “overly uniform” perception of “French power and colonial relations.” The difficulties of spreading French influence and maintaining French power, he argues, led to widespread disagreements during the Third Republic, not just between Catholic missionaries and secular administrations, but also among royalist and republican politicians at home. Catholic missionaries were often viewed as a threat to the republican experiment in secularization, but, as Leon Gambetta argued, they were essential in supporting the French “Catholic clientele” around the world. Anti-clerical republicans were not above using a long Catholic missionary presence to demonstrate the state’s inherited stake in Indochina. Because no single party in France “claimed a policy of expansion for its own,” support for the civilizing role of France abroad waxed and waned, as did the political usefulness of supporting Catholic missionaries in their “humanitarian” work of educating native peoples and providing care for orphans and lepers. Thus, “fervently anticlerical” critics condemned the “clerical spirit” at the Quai d’Orsay, at the very time that missionaries found the French foreign office complicit in the secularization of the empire. Daughton systematically examines, for the first time in many cases, a wide range of missionary publications that show an unwavering commitment to the task of transforming pagan souls through faith. In this respect the missionaries were almost completely indifferent to “European politics and imperialism.”
Nevertheless, propagation of the faith traveled together with the extension of French political influence. It is this uneasy and often unwelcome relationship between the two that Daughton considers in great detail, surveying the French imperial and religious presence in Indochina, Tahiti and the Marquesas, and Madagascar. By examining specific cases in each of these areas, he is able to demonstrate that a bewildering array of circumstances, methods, and results led to multivalent policies in both church and state. In the central highlands of Annam, for instance, Resident Charles Lemire accused French missionaries of complicity in the fantastic pretensions of Charles-David de Mayréna, “a ne’er do-well adventurer and explorer” who proclaimed himself “king” of the Sedang. In the fallout of accusations, it became clear that church workers in the highland Mission des sauvages preferred to live as far from the hand of the French government as possible, in order to better enjoy “the calm of the apostolic life.” This did not mean, however, that the missionaries were unwilling to exploit the affair to promote their mission; or that the French government was unwilling to use the missionaries as “tools for spreading French influence.” As Daughton makes abundantly clear, though religious missionaries and republican colonizers sometimes moved together, they were not “simple partners.”
A different set of circumstances existed in French Polynesia. Here there were no pressing strategic issues at stake, and few Polynesians left to be converted. But morality on the European model was lax, and there had been a precipitant decline in population. With teaching as the main requirement, missionary sisters were thought fit for the work. Unfortunately for republican colonial administrators, the Congrégation des Sacrés Coeurs (Picpuciens) who were chosen to inculcate civilized character into the lagging Christians “made no apology for their overtly political stances on issues.” Whereas the missions in Vietnam gradually, if reluctantly, accepted “love of France” as a more or less worthy goal to promote among the heathen, the teaching sisters of the Marquesas disdained “all things republican.” They maintained the exclusive demeanor of a chosen people, which exacerbated the contempt that radical republicans reserved for people of faith. An 1895 editorial for the organization’s journal, Annales des Sacrés-Coeurs, was unambiguous and unapologetic: “The Catholic Church is the city of God on Earth, the immortal Spouse of Christ; we say that he who attacks it is perverse, he who hinders its liberty is a persecutor.” Clearly the liberty of the Picpuciens was not the same as that of republicans like Victor Hugo, who had argued that every step on the road toward progress had been made in spite of the Catholic Church.
Madagascar in the 1890s presented yet another variation of church-state relations. Like Vietnam, it was coveted for its strategic location during a period of high diplomatic tension with Britain. But whereas French missionaries had been in Indochina since the 17th century, and in the Pacific from the 1830s, they did not become significantly involved in Madagascar until the 1860s, by which time the Congregationalist London Missionary Society had been busy for forty years. Here, Daughton explains, “Christianity emerged as a key organizational factor” in local politics, but the influence went both ways; “Malagasy Christianity,” as one historian points out, was essentially regarded as a “ritual form” of government. When French forces finally invaded the island and made it a colony (1895-96), they were presented with a choice of evils regarding the missions. They could close them, which seemed impossible. They could support the Jesuits, who had been there for thirty years but who were mistrusted for having too much influence over the indigenous population and too much interest in politics. Or they could encourage the work of the London Missionary Society and other European Protestants, who counted hundreds of thousands of adherents, but who as aliens were likely to undermine the teaching of republican virtues.
This conundrum was exploited by the French Protestants, who sent missionaries in 1896 to “facilitate the continuation” of the work of their English co-religionists. From the missionary perspective, the Société des missions évangéliques de Paris could build upon the good work of foreign Protestants under the guise of helping the newly installed colonial regime in its campaign of “pacification,” meanwhile foiling the Jesuits. In France, Protestant liberals argued in support of an informal union of republicans and Protestants. John Viénot, who penned the influential Madagascar et le Protestantisme fran&ccedit;ais (1897), appealed to all that was dear to republican civilizers. With the “unassailable” proclamation of “liberty of conscience” during the French Revolution, he reminded his republican masters, “came the absolute neutrality of the State in religious matters”; in terms of civilizing Madagascar, France was best served by the “Protestant principle,” which allowed for “free expansion” and was “an element of civilization of the first order.”
From a purely ideological point of view, Viénot’s argument was hard to refute. Governments, however, are typically swayed more by interest than principle. Although Protestants seemed to be on the side of republicans when they defended the free expansion of liberty, the French government recognized that “the same rhetoric was potentially subversive” among a highly politicized indigenous population. “In the competitive atmosphere of the early twentieth century,” Daughton observes, “undermining French Catholics while protecting British Protestants was politically impossible and practically unfeasible.” Despite all the high republican, anti-clerical rhetoric, most French administrators and military leaders recognized that being Catholic was still a “defining feature of the French national identity.”
From the 1880s, Catholic missions—which, as we have seen, had once jealously guarded their independence—gradually moved toward accommodation with the French state. They were no less interested in salvation, but they were more willing to link the reception of true Christianity to the adoption of the French character. In the conclusion to the massive, six-volume history Les Missions catholiques au XIXe siècle (1901-3), the influential literary critic Ferdinand Brunetiere laid out the emerging conception of a missionary movement that was “true to both republicanism and the sanctity of Catholicism.” French missionary organizations were “exclusively French projects … being marked by an expressly French character; French for being animated by an ardor for proselytism that one could compare to that of our great writers of all kinds; French for remaining, even abroad, centers of French culture and action.”
Daughton takes Matthew 12:25 as his epigraph: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” His intention, it seems, was to highlight the very real differences between French religious workers, who “sought to expand the frontiers of Catholicism and establish the Church’s hierarchy across the globe,” and devout secularists, for whom the missionary goal was nothing short of “an apocalyptic vision.” But the neat point, except perhaps from a narrowly theological point of view, doesn’t hold. The kingdom of God and the Republic of France weathered their own divisions, and by 1914 it was possible to observe both the “triumph of secular republicanism and a renaissance of Catholic spirituality.”
In two careful examinations of Catholicism under siege, Old Enemies and An Empire Divided provide further proof for the reflexive power of modern nationalism, a theme recently explored in Aviel Roshwald’s The Endurance of Nationalism (2006). What seemed to be contests over religious principles were settled with some satisfaction to all parties by finding common ground under the national umbrella. Whether the debate raged over the apostolic authority of the Church of England or the education of the Malagasy in Madagascar, the gap was not too great to span if the materials were made of a sturdy national sensibility. If moderation were the English ideal, then moderation could be employed by Newman to demonstrate that even a Catholic could be a thinking man. What could be more moderate, more engaging, more thoroughly liberal than his appeal in the Apologia?
Be large-minded enough to believe, that men may reason and feel very differently from yourselves; how is it that men fall, when left to themselves, into such various forms of religion, except that there are various types of mind among them, very distinct from each other?
It was not necessary for Newman to convince Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, or Charles Haddon Spurgeon of the Immaculate Conception, but simply to show himself a man who recognized “the claims of a critical spirit” in believing it for himself.
Not surprisingly, French Catholics followed a French track. Observing Europeans abroad, Brunetiere said that the Englishman takes his homeland with him, the German adapts to his circumstances, but the Frenchman “converts the indigene to the genius of our race … . [H]e endeavors to make him a ‘man,’ an equal, a ‘brother of his kind.'” The conflict between French Republicans and the Catholic Church over colonial policy was “an exercise in defining the values of the patrie … what it meant to be French.” In the end, Catholic missionaries weathered the anti-clerical storm by adopting the belief that patriotism and evangelism could go hand in hand. Moving into the 20th century, a once intractable conflict between secular republicans and devout Catholic missionaries was resolved with compromise on both sides—the former accepting the significance of the Catholic role in the mission civilisatrice, and the latter developing a new evangelizing “mantra”: “for God and patrie.” How and why that accommodation broke down in the following decades is a subject for another book.
Both of these studies also point to the adaptability and resilience of an unrepentant Catholic Church. As the Reformation opened a door for individual conscience in matters of faith, rival versions of Christian dogma proliferated, denominations flourished, and authority splintered: bishops, priests, pastors, teachers, preachers, ministers, and apostles multiplied by the thousands. All of the original Reformation branches have a long pedigree of division and accommodation to the values of the Enlightenment; newer denominations are beginning that journey. The Roman Catholic Church, like others, made its own tactical compromises but stood firm on the foundation of God’s dominion over earthly affairs. To many anti-Catholics, Pius IX’s condemnation of “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” in the Syllabus Errorum of 1864 was the equivalent of rejecting the steam engine or the steel mill, and surely marked the obsolescence of the Catholic Church. But from the vantage point of the 21st century, things look a bit different. No matter how one views the Petrine authority of the Roman Church, in retrospect many Christians today might wish their forebears had opposed a progress that celebrated the exploitation of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans; a liberalism that raised Plessy v. Ferguson to the highest law in the land; and a modern civilization that convinced itself that Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds in Iraq wanted freedom as much as Mel Gibson and William Wallace.
John Powell is associate professor of history at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is working on a study of William Gladstone in 1850.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
