God and Government in an 'Age of Reason'

David Nicholls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781138868144
• eBook ISBN: 9781134982271
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this companion volume to Deity and Domination, David Nicholls broadens his examination of the relationship between religion and politics. Focusing on the images and concepts of God and the state predominant in eighteenth-century discourse, he shows how these were interrelated and reflect the language of the wider cultural contexts.

Nicholls argues that the way a community pictures God will inevitably reflect (and also affect) its general understanding of authority, whether it be in state, in family or in other social institutions. Much language about God, for example, has a primarily political reference: in psalms, hymns and sermons God is called king, judge, lord, ruler and to him are ascribed might, majesty, dominion, power and sovereignty. But if political rhetoric is frequently incorporated into religious discourse, the reverse is also true: many key concepts of modern political theory are secularised theological concepts. In his consideration of this important and neglected relationship Nicholls sheds new light on religion and politics in the eighteenth century.

1

INTRODUCTION

‘I have often wondered’, mused Professor Leonard Hodgson in his remarkable series of lectures on The Doctrine of the Trinity, ‘whether the political experience of the Jews in exile did not influence their theological development more than is commonly recognised’.¹ He went on to point out that the parallel between the idea of the Babylonian monarch, as autocratic and remote, and the idea of Jehovah in later Jewish theology ‘is remarkably close’ .² Unfortunately he resumed the course of his lectures untroubled by this disturbing reflection and made little attempt to relate the development of Trinitarian doctrine to the political context in which it developed. His political ‘innocence’ has characterised the work of most Anglican theologians of the past century.

Much of the language used about God in the history of religion (Christian and non-Christian) has, in fact, been political in its primary reference. Terms such as might, majesty, dominion and power are ascribed to God, who is said to rule the universe, as a monarch; or in the eighteenth century to ‘govern’ or ‘manage’ the cosmos as a complex machine. In the first part of this triptych, I examined the relationship between religion and politics by focusing on the analogy between divine and civil government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analogy has not always been explicitly drawn, particularly in more recent times. As Boyd Hilton has remarked, ‘Links between economic and theological thought mostly took place below the surface of consciousness, and usually have to be adduced, with caution, from linguistic parallels’.³ Here I shall conduct a similar enquiry into the images and concepts used of God and the state in the period from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Reform Bill of 1832, beginning with certain British writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who examined the relationship between economic thinking and Christian theology.

I have continued the method of my earlier book Deity and Domination by working ‘backwards’. I have, in general, begun with the more recent movements, going on to look at the earlier, showing some of the roots of the former in the latter. I would not wish to argue that this is invariably the best way to deal with the past, or to deny that it has certain disadvantages. If, however, it be argued that we cannot properly expound later movements without having first expounded the earlier, then modern history would never be written. Where would we begin?

Most writers who deal with the relationship between religion and politics are concerned either with the role that religious movements actually do play in national and world politics, or with ethical questions about the role that Christians or adherents of other faiths should play in the politics of their respective contexts. The link between doctrine and political policy is usually ethics. Doctrine prescribes ethical values and principles, which in turn determine how believers ought to behave in politics. The structure is deductive. It assumes that doctrine is given in some holy book, or in a sacred tradition, and develops (if it does develop at all) in a kind of religious vacuum. Yet doctrine is never simply given. Even those who believe in divine revelation (as Christians do) must recognise that revelation, as a communication between God and humanity, is not only given but received; it involves a two-way relationship.

The reception and recording of revelation is, and cannot help being, in categories, concepts and images that are socially conditioned. These ‘earthly vessels’ within which revelation is imparted and grasped carry with them many connotations. They often have a primary reference in spheres of human experience other than religion: the natural world (God as rock), social relationships (God as father), and political experience (God as king). These images inevitably carry with them connotations and memories from their use in their primary, secular, field of discourse. Our political experience and commitments affect our apprehension of doctrine. The deductive model is thus unsatisfactory, as there is an interplay between doctrine and human experience, in particular (from the standpoint of this work) political experience.

In any case it is important to recognise that social and political ethics should be seen not as the application of general principles to the particular case, because Christian moral judgment is made in the particular case. Principles are to be seen as abstractions from particular judgments. The judgment that I have acted wrongly in a particular case is prior to my belief that all similar actions are evil. ‘It is’, W.G.Ward maintained, ‘with indefinitely more keenness manifest to me that my past act was base, than those general propositions are true’ .⁴ Thus universal principles are secondary deductions based on judgments about the moral status of particular actions, and the logic of resolving ethical disputes should ultimately be downwards to the moral status of particular actions, rather than upwards to the validity of general principles. The adequacy of such principles must be tested by the moral status of the consequences they entail.⁵

God is frequently spoken of in non-political terms, sometimes in inanimate images (rock or fortress, for example) sometimes in social—though not directly political—language (father, shepherd, bride). Yet even these social terms have often acquired political connotations, due to their appropriation by civil rulers. Royalist writers of the seventeenth century insisted that the king was pater patriae,⁶ for ‘the whole world is nothing but a great state; a state no other than a great family, and a family is no other than a great body’ .⁷ King James 1 of England told Parliament in 1604 ‘I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife, I am the head and it is my body; I am the shepherd and it is my flock’.⁸ In a different era and another country, many rulers of Haiti have rejoiced in the title ‘Papa’, the most recent being ‘Papa Doc’, François Duvalier.⁹ In most periods of history, however, the directly political analogy has predominated.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

While monarchical images of God predominated in seventeenth-century England, there was a significant change in the eighteenth. As the Hanoverian kings began to play a less obvious role in government, real political power seemed to be wielded by their ministers and advisers. God, in turn, was increasingly portrayed as an administrator, or manager, of a system or machine, which generally runs according to pre-established laws. After 1688 the monarch did indeed retain important powers, but the exercise of prerogative was restricted. Laws came to be seen more as rational decisions of a legislature operating within a constitutional system than as arbitrary commands of an absolute sovereign.

Increasing stability

English history beginning in 1688 is characterised by a growing social and political stability. Although it is easy to overemphasise this, there is a striking contrast with the turbulent decades which preceded the Glorious Revolution. The English, as one writer put it, ‘were becoming used to the idea of reading about their domestic politics, rather than fighting about them.’¹⁰ As late as 1700, however, there was no certainty that stability would triumph.¹¹ There was in the early years, a fear of Jacobite counter-revolution, with an extensive system of spies reporting on suspicious groups; but by the middle of the eighteenth century a relative tranquillity pervaded the social and political life of the country. The New Whole Duty of Man, first published in 1747, contrasted the contemporary situation in the country with the ‘unhappy times of strife and confusion’ when the old Whole Duty was published, during the Commonwealth period.¹²

The British saw the government of church and state as taking place in the context of a constitution inherited from the distant past which gave some assurance of government according to law with a considerable measure of freedom for the subject. One writer lamented the decline of the old gothic halls and their replacement by the Italianate villas; he saw an analogy between the gothic halls and the gothic constitution: ‘Our old gothic constitution had a noble strength and simplicity in it, which was well enough represented by the bold arches, and the solid pillars of the edifices of those days.’¹³ Jacob Viner notes how this stability also characterised the economic institutions of the time:

An outstanding aspect of literate and articulate England for the century from 1660 to 1760 was its contentment with its existing economic institutions and its absence of desire for significant change…no single statute can be cited in this entire century as marking an important change in the economic institutions of England, whether by way of destruction, repair or innovation.¹⁴

In the context of the French Revolution the idea of a constitution also became central, as it did in the American colonies. God rules according to general laws which derive from ‘the constitution of the univers’; in a similar manner, earthly rule should be characterised by the same predictability and rationality. Some American writers denied indeed that the ramshackle collection of laws and customs according to which British government proceeded could properly be called a constitution at all. Late eighteenth-century France, by contrast, lacked the stability to which the British had become accustomed. This is reflected in the insistence by radical groups, like the Jacobins and some of the Paris sections, that although constitutional government was the ideal, it may be superseded by dictatorship in times of political crisis. A similar positivism emerged in the writings of those reactionaries who condemned the French Revolution and all its works. Maistre, Bonald and the so-called ‘Ultras’ developed a theory of sovereignty remarkably similar to that of Hobbes.¹⁵

Monarchical images of God by no means disappeared in the years following 1688; they continue especially in hymns, prayers and sermons. Issac Watts, who based many of his hymns on the Hebrew psalms, referred frequently to God as king, and wrote more revealingly of Christ (and elsewhere the Holy Spirit) as God’s ‘prime minister’, reflecting the crucial role played by Sir Robert Walpole at the time.¹⁶ Most of our eighteenth-century thinkers were, however, careful not to attack earthly monarchy as such. Deists, like John Toland, actually celebrated the Hanoverians as defenders of liberty and toleration. Some supporters of ‘free thought’ in religion, though, were denounced for ‘undermining monarchy on earth by denying that it existed in heaven’.¹⁷

Theology and trade

An increasing political stability provided a structure within which significant economic expansion could take place. An increasingly complex pattern of trade and commerce required a stable political and social context within which to develop. Trade, wrote Daniel Defoe in 1705, is ‘the life of the nation the soul of its felicity, the spring of its wealth, the support of its greatness, and the staff on which both king and people lean’ .¹⁸ Critics of Walpole, like Bolingbroke, Pope and Swift, attacked precisely this commercialisation of social life, which brought with it the domination of newly acquired wealth. ‘Growing prosperity in a wider economic context’, as J.H.Plumb, has observed, ‘was creating in so many towns a nucleus of rich men, deeply rooted locally but with nation-wide economic links’.¹⁹ This was accompanied by improved technology and a rapid growth in population. As a result of the Seven Years War (1756–63) Britain gained new colonies, giving a further boost to trade. Transport became more rapid and domestic life more comfortable. It was a time of great private initiative and enterprise. Fire services, madhouses and even prisons were privately owned and run for profit. ‘There was never from the earliest ages’, wrote Samuel Johnson, ‘a time in which trade so much engaged the attention of mankind’.²⁰ England was swiftly becoming a nation of shopkeepers. Even bishops asked: ‘Is not the creation of wants the likeliest way to produce industry in a people?’²¹ And deans demanded: ‘Whether the artificial wants of mankind… are not the great master-spring of the machine of commerce?’²² Of Josiah Tucker, dean of Bristol, it was said that religion was his trade, and trade was his religion.

The image used here by Dean Tucker is central and was taken up by Robert Malthus. The economic and social structure of the country was pictured as a machine, and it was the object of social theorists to discern the laws according to which it works—to perceive the order which undergirds the apparent confusion—just as Isaac Newton had discovered the rational system which underlies the overtly haphazard behaviour of the natural world. ‘Adam Smith’s efforts to discover the general laws of economics’, it has recently been argued, ‘were directly inspired and shaped by the example of Newton’s success in discovering the natural laws of motion.’²³ The social machine was an integrated system in which even what appears to be a defect may serve some useful purpose. It was, of course, Bernard Mandeville who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• By the same author
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 GOD AND THE MARKET
• 3 UNITARIAN RADICALS AND ORTHODOX ANGLICANS
• 4 REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AND CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT
• 5 DIVINE CONSTITUTIONALISM AND POLITICAL ORDER
• 6 DEISTS, DISSENTERS AND FREE THINKERS
• 7 LEIBNIZ AND THE NEWTONIANS
• 8 CONCLUSION
• 9 THEOLOGICAL POSTSCRIPT
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index