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Many exiles, in their desperation to find sanctuary, headed for England, where – following the death of Henry VIII in 1547 – his young son, Edward VI, had come to be hailed by Protestants as a new Josiah.
In 1553, Edward died, to be succeeded by his elder sister Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Devoutly Catholic, it did not take her long to reconcile England with Rome.
In London, where more editions of his works were published than anywhere else, printers struggled to keep pace with demand. One enterprising editor had even commissioned a compilation of his greatest hits. Nor was it only in England that Calvin had become, almost overnight, a best-seller. The reverberations of his influence had reached as far afield as Scotland – a land freely acknowledged by its own nobility to lie ‘almost beyond the limits of the human race’.
Elizabeth’s Protestantism was of a distinctively wilful kind. Her taste for the trappings of popery – bishops, choirs, crucifixes – appalled the godly. The more that she dismissed their calls for further reform, the more they fretted whether the Church of England over which she presided as its first Supreme Governor could be reckoned truly Protestant at all.
Munitions, and iron, and the bills of exchange that funded the rival armies: all were monopolised by Dutch entrepreneurs.
Thirty years war
Crammed into its holds were a hundred passengers who, in the words of one of them, had made the gruelling two-month voyage across the Atlantic because ‘they knew they were pilgrims’5 – and of these ‘pilgrims’, half had set out from Leiden. These voyagers, though, were not Dutch, but English.
The Pilgrims did not doubt the scale of the challenge they faced. They perfectly appreciated that the new England which it was their ambition to found would, if they were not on their mettle, succumb no less readily to sin than the old. Yet it offered them a breathing space: a chance to consecrate themselves as a new Israel on virgin soil.
New england
Except that New England was not, as the desert around Sinai had been, a wilderness. Even in the earliest days of its settlement, there had been colonists who had no wish to live as Puritans.
When, during the course of their second winter, the Pilgrims found unregenerates celebrating Christmas Day by playing cricket, they promptly confiscated their bats. As the colonies grew, so too did the determination to keep in check the sinful nature of those who did not belong to the elect.
This was why, in China, the compilation and promulgation of calendars was a strict monopoly of state. Only by accurately keeping track of eclipses could an emperor hope to avert disaster. Over recent decades, however, the Ministry of Rites had made a succession of embarrassing mistakes. In 1592, its prediction of an eclipse had been out by an entire day. Reform had begun to seem essential.
In 1542, an inquisition modelled on the Spanish example had been established in Rome; in 1558, it had drawn up a lengthy index of prohibited books; a year later, ten thousand volumes had been publicly burnt in Venice.
Above all, though, he was a priest, a member of an order that, ever since its founding in 1540, had aspired to operate on a global scale. Like friars, those who joined the Society of Jesus swore themselves to poverty, chastity and obedience; but they swore as well a vow of obedience to the pope to undertake any mission that he might give them. Some Jesuits expressed their commitment to this by devoting their lives to teaching; others by risking martyrdom to redeem England from heresy;
Their mandate, when they travelled to lands beyond Europe, was – without ever offending against Christian teaching – to absorb as many of the customs as they could. In India they were to live as Indians, in China as Chinese. The policy had been pushed to notable extremes.
first, that Confucius had been illumined by the same divinely bestowed gift of reason that was evident in the writings of Aristotle; and second, that his teachings had been corrupted over the centuries by his followers. Only strip the accretions away, so Ricci had believed, and Confucians might be led to Christ. Confucian philosophy, in its fundamentals, was perfectly compatible with Christianity.
Palmeiro could reflect on various aspects of Chinese behaviour that had perturbed him: the haughtiness shown by mandarins towards the poor; their inability to grasp the distinction between church and state; their obscene number of wives. Most unsettlingly of all, though, Palmeiro could detect not the slightest trace of the worship of the One Creator God of Israel. The Chinese seemed to have no concept either of creation or of a god.
Exploring the unknown might sometimes entail taking a risk. Schreck, a man as fascinated by the workings of the human body as of the cosmos, did not confine himself to tracking stars; and on 11 May 1630, investigating a herb that was reported to induce sweating, he tested it out on himself. A few hours later he was dead.
The blow dealt to Aristotle’s model of the universe, which for centuries had exercised a domineering authority over Christian cosmology, appeared mortal. How was the appearance of a moon pitted with craters to be reconciled with the philosopher’s understanding of it as unchanging, imperishable, incorruptible?
Galileo, a man as impatient for fame as he was derisive of anyone who presumed to obstruct him from obtaining it, failed to see this as an issue. His contempt for Aristotle, whom he ranked alongside all the most miserable things in life – ‘plague, urinals, debt’21 – was matched only by his impatience with the philosopher’s admirers: ‘the potbellied theologians who locate the limits of of human genius in his writings’.
Galileo’s telescope had enabled him to keep close track of the planet Venus. ‘Sometimes it is obscure, sometimes it is completely illuminated, sometimes it is illuminated either in the superior quarter or in the inferior quarter.’ Just in case the implication of this was not clear, Schreck had made sure to spell it out. ‘This proves that Venus is a satellite of the sun and travels around it.’23 Here, as the Jesuits readily accepted, was yet another body blow to the model of the cosmos that the Church had inherited from Aristotle.
Galileo had been put on trial as Catholic fortunes, amid the killing fields of Germany, appeared in desperate straits. A succession of dramatic victories won by the Lutheran king of Sweden in defence of his fellow heretics had brought him almost as far south as the Alps. Even though the Swedish king himself had been killed in battle in 1632, Catholic fortunes still hung very much in the balance.
In 1638, when John Milton, a young English Puritan, visited Italy, he made a point of visiting Florence. ‘There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought.’33 This, in the years to come, was how Protestants would consistently portray their Catholic opponents: as fanatics too bigoted to permit the study of the heavens.
1650, the date that both Columbus and Luther had believed would herald the end of days, instead saw Germany, after thirty years of war, restored to peace. The world had not come to an end. The Turk had been kept at bay; Christianity still endured. Certainly, much had been lost.
they believed that rank and wealth were evils; that all were by nature equal; that Christ’s work was to be ‘the Restorer and Repairer of man’s loss and fall’.5 Soldiers, though, could not be Diggers. Without rank there would be no discipline; and without discipline there would be no army. Godliness in England did not stand so secure that it could afford that.
Despite the passing in 1648 of a blasphemy ordinance that punished anti-trinitarianism with death, and a host of other heresies with imprisonment, it had proved impossible to enforce. The streets of London – which had witnessed an archbishop of Canterbury as well as a king being led to the block – seethed with contempt for the very notion of authority.
Baptists who, as the more radical of the first generation of Protestants had done, dismissed infant baptism as an offence against scripture; Quakers, who would shake and foam at the mouth with the intensity of their possession by the Spirit; Ranters, who believed that every human being was equally a part of God: all made a mockery of any notion of a single national church.
By terms of a series of treaties signed in the German territory of Westphalia, a ‘Christian, general and permanent peace’13 had been brought to the blood-manured lands of the Empire. The princes who signed it pledged themselves not to force their own religion on their subjects. Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists: all were granted the freedom to worship as they pleased.
Even papists, despite Cromwell’s loathing for their religion, were known to be guests at his table. In 1657, in a particularly startling gesture, he moved to ensure that the son of the founder of Maryland – a colony established in the New World specifically to provide a haven for English Catholics – should not be deprived of his rights to the province.
In 1655, a rabbi resident in Amsterdam arrived in London. Menasseh ben Israel had come with a request. Appealing directly to Cromwell, he begged that Jews be granted a legal right of residency in England. The ban imposed in 1290 had never been rescinded. There were plenty of Protestants who thought it never should be.
To Luther, the enduring insistence of the Jews that they were God’s Chosen People was a personal affront. ‘We foolish Gentiles, who were not God’s people, are now God’s people. That drives the Jews to distraction and stupidity.’18 If anyone had been driven to distraction, though, it was Luther.
Well read though Quakers might be in scripture, they, like other radicals, did not view it as the most direct source of truth. The most excitable among them – to the embarrassment of their leaders – were known on occasion to burn Bibles in public.
Two years after the death of Cromwell in 1658, the monarchy was restored – and the Church of England with it. An Act of Uniformity served to push Quakers and other religious dissenters to the margins.
Spinoza certainly did not approve of all the Christian virtues. Humility and repentance he dismissed as irrational; pity as ‘evil and unprofitable’.40 Nevertheless, his equation of Christ’s teachings with the universal laws of nature was a manoeuvre as audacious as it was brilliant. To Christians unenthused by the prospect
In 1688, taking ship, 150 of the Calvinists who had recently been expelled by royal command from France – ‘Huguenots’ – made for Cape Colony, a settlement founded by Dutch traders on the southernmost tip of Africa.
In Massachusetts, where a law passed in 1661 had prescribed that Quakers be tied to a cart and flogged, Puritans continued to uphold a uniformity of worship that, back in the mother country, Cromwell’s protectorate had served to doom for good.
William Penn, its founder, was a man of paradox. The son of one of Cromwell’s admirals, he was simultaneously a dandy with close links to the royal court, and a Quaker who had repeatedly suffered imprisonment for his beliefs.
The letter in which Voltaire was hailed as Antichrist had been written not by an opponent, but by an admirer: a philosopher and notorious free-thinker by the name of Denis Diderot. It was tribute that the great man received as his due.
Voltaire, as a young man, had spent time in England. There, he had seen for himself how faith, in the transformative potency of enlightenment, from aristocratic salons to the meeting halls of Quakers, had resulted in what appeared to him an enviable degree of tolerance. ‘If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.’
‘Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, that is the very foolish daughter of a wise and intelligent mother.’7 Voltaire’s dream of a brotherhood of man, even as it cast Christianity as something fractious, parochial, murderous, could not help but betray its Christian roots.
That October, a new calendar was introduced. Sundays were swept away. So too was the practice of dating years from the incarnation of Christ. Henceforward, in France, it was the proclamation of the Republic that would serve to divide the sweep of time.
By 1753, when the term ‘Middle Ages’ first appeared in English, Protestants had come to take for granted the existence of a distinct period of history: one that ran from the dying years of the Roman Empire to the Reformation.
This reflection was not altogether an original one: the thesis that Christianity had contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was popular among historically minded philosophes.
The plot of the novel – which related the adventures of two sisters, one virtuous, the other libertine – demonstrated this in obscene and relentless detail. Justine, ever trusting in the essential goodness of humanity, was repeatedly raped and brutalised; Juliette, ever contemptuous of any hint of virtue, whored and murdered her way to spectacular wealth. Their respective fortunes demonstrated the way of the world. God was a sham.
De sade
Sade’s refusal to submit to convention was complicated by the often violent character of his desires. Born in 1741, he had spent his sexual prime frustrated by laws that decreed that even prostitutes and beggars had a right not to be kidnapped, or whipped, or force-fed Spanish fly.
In 1793 – following his improbable election as president of a local committee in Paris – Sade had issued instructions to his fellow citizens that they should all paint slogans on their houses: ‘Unity, Indivisibility of the Republic, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.38 Sade himself, though, was no more a Jacobin than he was a priest.
The inferior class of man, so a philosophe in The New Justine coolly observed, ‘is simply the species that stands next above the chimpanzee on the ladder; and the distance separating them is, if anything, less than that between him and the individual belonging to the superior caste’.39 Yet
In 1794, prompted by rebellion in Saint-Domingue, a French-ruled island in the West Indies, and by the necessary logic of the Declaration of Rights, the revolutionary government had proclaimed slavery abolished throughout France’s colonies; eight years later, in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to prevent the blacks of Saint-Domingue from establishing their own republic, Napoleon reinstated it.
The passages in the Bible that appeared to sanction slavery remained. Plantation-owners – both in the West Indies and in the southern United States – did not hesitate to quote them.
1819, in the city of Baroda, some three hundred miles to the north. This, on paper, was the capital of an independent kingdom. Paper, though, in British India, invariably worked to the Company’s advantage.
Unsurprisingly, then – given that their own ancestors had been savages in forests at a time when India was already fabled for its wealth and sophistication – they were reluctant to dismiss ‘the Hindoo superstition’5 merely as superstition. Indeed, so one British officer declared, there was little need of Christianity ‘to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilised society
Three hundred years had passed since the onset of the Reformation, and in that time the word religion had come to take on shades of meaning that would have baffled a Christian in medieval England. How much more foreign, then, was it bound to seem to a Hindu. No word remotely approximating to it existed in any Indian language.
