Turgot's had said, in a deprecatory sentence that serves to mark the
spirit of the time; 'to compile a long list of the evils which it has
inflicted, without doing the same for the blessings which it has
bestowed.'[35] Conversely we may well think it unphilosophical and
unconvincing to enumerate all the blessings without any of the evils; to
tell us how the Christian doctrine enlarged the human spirit, without
observing what narrowing limitations it imposed; to dwell on all the
mitigating influences with which the Christian churches have been
associated, while forgetting all the ferocities which they have
inspired. The history of European belief offers a double record since
the decay of polytheism, and if for a certain number of centuries this
record shows the civilisation of men's instincts by Christianity, it
reveals to us in the centuries subsequent, the reverse process of the
civilisation of Christianity by men's instincts. Turgot's piece treats
half the subject as if it were the whole. He extends down to the middle
of the eighteenth century a number of propositions and implied
inferences, which are only true up to the beginning of the fourteenth.
[Footnote 35: _Esprit des Lois_, bk. xxiv. ch. ii.]
Even within this limitation there are many questions that no student of
Turgot's capacity would now overlook, yet of which he and the most
reasonable spirits of his age took no cognisance. The men of neither
side in the eighteenth century knew what the history of opinion meant.
All alike concerned themselves with its truth or falsehood, with what
they counted to be its abstract fitness or unfitness. A perfect method
places a man where he can command one point of view as well as the
other, and can discern not only how far an idea is true and convenient,
but also how, whether true and convenient or otherwise, it came into its
place in men's minds. We ought to be able to separate in thought the
question of the grounds and evidence for a given dogma being true, from
the distinct and purely historic question of the social and intellectual
conditions which made men accept it for true.
Where, however, there was any question of the two religions whose
document and standards are professedly drawn from the Bible, there the
Frenchmen of that time assumed not a historic attitude, but one
exclusively dogmatic. Everybody was so anxious to prove, that he had
neither freedom nor humour to observe. The controversy as to the exact
measure of the supernatural force in Judaism and its Christian
development was so overwhelmingly absorbing, as to leave without light
or explanation the wide and independent region of their place as simply
natural forces. It may be said, and perhaps it is true, that people
never allow the latter side of the inquiry to become prominent in their
minds until they have settled the former, and settled it in one way:
they must be indifferent to the details of the natural operations of a
religion, until they are convinced that there are none of any other
kind. Be this as it may, we have to record the facts. And it is
difficult to imagine a Frenchman of the era of the Encyclopaedia asking
himself the sort of questions which now present themselves to the
student in such abundance. For instance, has one effect of Christianity
been to exalt a regard for the Sympathetic over the AEsthetic side of
action and character? And if so, to what elements in the forms of
Christian teaching and practice is this due? And is such a transfer of
the highest place from the beauty to the lovableness of conduct to be
accounted a gain, when contrasted with the relative position of the two
sides among the Greeks and Romans?
Again, we have to draw a distinction between the Christian idea and the
outward Christian organisation, and between the consequences to human
nature and society which flowed from the first, and the advantages which
may be traced to the second. There was on the one hand a doctrine,
stirring dormant spiritual instincts, and satisfying active spiritual
needs; on the other an external institution, preserving, interpreting,
developing, and applying the doctrine. Each of the two has its own
origin, its own history, its own destiny in the memories of the race. We
may attempt to estimate the functions of the one, without pronouncing on
the exact value of the other. If the idea was the direct gift of heaven,
the policy was due to the sagacity and mother-wit of the great
ecclesiastical statesmen. If the doctrine was a supernatural boon, at
least the forms in which it came gradually to overspread Europe were to
be explained on rational and natural grounds. And if historical
investigation of these forms and their influences should prove that they
are the recognisable roots of most of the benign growths which are
vaguely styled results of Christianity, then such a conclusion would
seriously attenuate the merits of the supernatural Christian doctrine in
favour of the human Christian policy.
If there had been in the Christian idea the mysterious self-sowing
quality so constantly claimed for it, how came it that in the Eastern
part of the Empire it was as powerless for spiritual or moral
regeneration as it was for political health and vitality, while in the
Western part it became the organ of the most important of all the past
transformations of the civilised world? Is not the difference to be
explained by the difference in the surrounding medium, and what is the
effect of such an explanation upon the supernatural claims of the
Christian idea? Does such an explanation reduce that idea to the rank of
one of the historic forces, which arise and operate and expand
themselves in accordance with strictly natural conditions? The
Christianity of the East was probably as degraded a form of belief, as
lowering for human character, and as mischievous to social wellbeing, as
has ever been held by civilised peoples. Yet the East, strangely enough,
was the great home and nursery of all that is most distinctive in the
constituent ideas of the Christian faith. Why, in meditating on
Christianity, are we to shut our eyes to the depravation that overtook
it when placed amid unfavourable social conditions, and to confine our
gaze to the brighter qualities which it developed in the healthier
atmosphere of the West?
Further, Turgot might have asked with much profit to the cause of
historic truth, and perhaps in more emancipated years he did ask,
whether economic circumstances have not had more to do with the
dissolution of slavery than Christian doctrines:--whether the rise of
rent from free tenants over the profits to be drawn from slave-labour by
the landowner, has not been a more powerful stimulant to emancipation,
than the moral maxim that we ought to love one another, or the Christian
proposition that we are all equals before the divine throne and co-heirs
of salvation:--whether a steady and permanent fall in the price of
slave-raised productions had not as much to do with the decay of slavery
in Europe, as the love of God or the doctrine of human brotherhood.[36]
That the influence of Christianity, so far as it went, and, so far as it
was a real power, tended both to abolish slavery, and, where it was too
feeble to press in this direction, at any rate tended to mitigate the
harshness of its usages, is hardly to be denied by any fair-minded
person. The true issue is what this influence amounted to. The orthodox
historian treats it as single and omnipotent. His heterodox brother--in
the eighteenth century they both usually belonged to one family--leaves
it out.
[Footnote 36: See on this subject Finlay's _Mediaeval Greece and
Trebizond_, p. 197; and also, on the other hand, p. 56.]
The crowded annals of human misology, as well as the more terrible
chronicle of the consequences when misology has impatiently betaken
itself to the cruel arm of flesh, show the decisive importance of the
precise way in which a great subject of debate is put. Now the whole
question of religion was in those days put with radical incompleteness,
and Turgot's dissertation was only in a harmony that might have been
expected with the prevailing error. The champions of authority, like the
leaders of the revolt, insisted on inquiring absolutely, not relatively;
on judging religion with reference to human nature in the abstract,
instead of with reference to the changing varieties of social
institution and circumstance. We ought to place ourselves where we can
see both lines of inquiry to be possible. We ought to place ourselves
where we can ask what the tendencies of Christian influence have been,
without mixing up with that question the further and distinct inquiry
what these tendencies are now, or are likely to be. The nineteenth
century has hitherto leaned to the historical and relative aspect of the
great controversy. The eighteenth was characteristically dogmatic, and
the destroyers of the faith were not any less dogmatic in their own way,
than those who professed to be its apologists.
* * * * *
Probably it was not long after the composition of this apologetic
thesis, before Turgot became alive to the precise position of a creed
which had come to demand apologetic theses. This was, indeed, one of the
marked and critical moments in the great transformation of religious
feeling and ecclesiastical order in Europe, of which our own age, four
generations later, is watching a very decisive, if not a final stage.
Turgot's demonstration of the beneficence of Christianity was delivered
in July 1750--almost the exact middle of the eighteenth century. The
death of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, ten years before, had given the
signal for the break-up of the European system. The iron army of Prussia
made its first stride out of the narrow northern borders, into the broad
arena of the West, and every new illustration of the fortitude and depth
and far-reaching power of Prussia has been a new blow to the old
Catholic organisation. The first act of this prodigious drama closed
while Turgot was a pupil at the Sorbonne. The court of France had
blundered into alliances against the retrograde and Catholic house of
Austria, while England, with equal blindness, had stumbled into
friendship with it. Before the opening of the second act or true
climax--that is, before the Seven Years' War began--interests and forces
became more naturally adjusted. France, Spain, and Austria, Bourbons and
Hapsburgs, the great pillars of the Church, were ranged against England
and Prussia, the half-conscious representatives of those industrial and
individualist principles which replaced, whether for a time or
permanently, the decaying system of aristocratic caste in temporal
things, and an ungrowing Catholicism in things spiritual. In 1750
ecclesiastical far-sightedness, court intrigue, and family ambitions,
were actively preparing the way for the Austrian alliance in the
mephitic air of Versailles. The issue at stake was the maintenance of
the supremacy of the Church, and the ancient Christian organisation of
France and of Europe.
We now know how this long battle has gone. The Jesuit Churchmen lost
their lead, and were thrown back out of the civil and political sphere.
We know, too, what effect these blows to the Catholic organisation have
had upon the activity of the Catholic idea. With the decline and
extermination of the predominance of Churchmen in civil affairs, there
began a tendency, which has since become deeper and stronger, in the
Church to withdraw herself and her sons from a sphere where she could no
longer be sovereign and queen. Religion, since the Revolution, isolates
the most devout Catholics from political action and political interests.
This great change, however, this return of the leaders of the Christian
society upon the original conceptions of the Christian faith, did not
come to pass in Turgot's time. He watched the struggle of the Church for
the maintenance of its temporal privilege and honour, and for the
continued protection by secular power of its spiritual supremacy. The
outcome of the struggle was later.
We may say, in fine, that if this first public composition of Turgot's
is extremely imperfect, it was better to exaggerate the services of
Christianity, alike as an internal faith and as a peculiar form of
social organisation, than to describe Gregory the Great and Innocent,
Hildebrand and Bernard, as artful and vulgar tyrants, and Aquinas and
Roger Bacon as the products of a purely barbarous, stationary, and dark
age. There is at first sight something surprising in the respect which
Turgot's ablest contemporaries paid to the contributions made to
progress by Greece and Rome, compared with their angry disparagement of
the dark ages. The reason of this contrast we soon discover to be that
the passions of present contests gave their own colour to men's
interpretation of the circumstances of the remote middle time, between
the Roman Empire and the commencement of the revolutionary period.
Turgot escaped these passions more completely than any man of his time
who was noble enough to be endowed with the capacity for passion. He
never forgot that it is as wise and just to confess the obligations of
mankind to the Catholic monotheism of the West, as it is shallow and
unjust in professors of Christianity to despise or hate the lower
theological systems which guide the humbler families of mankind.
Let us observe that only three years after this academic discourse in
praise of the religion of the time, Turgot was declaring that 'the
greatest of the services of Christianity to the world was that it had
both enlightened and propagated _natural religion_.'[37]
[Footnote 37: _Lettres sur la Tolerance_, II. vol. ii. 687.]
III.
Turgot's inquiry into the extent and quality of the debt of European
civilisation to Christianity was marked by a certain breadth and
largeness, in spite of the bonds of circumstance and subject--for who,
after all, can consider Christianity to any purpose, apart from other
conditions of general progress, or without free comparison with other
dogmatic systems? It is not surprising, then, to find the same valuable
gifts of vision coming into play with a thousand times greater liberty
and power, when the theme was widened so as to comprehend the successive
steps of the advancement of the human mind in all its aspects. The
Second and more famous of the two Discourses at the Sorbonne was read in
December 1750, and professes to treat the Successive Advances of the
Human Mind.[38] The opening lines are among the most pregnant, as they
were among the most original, in the history of literature, and reveal
in an outline, standing clear against the light, a thought which
revolutionised old methods of viewing and describing the course of human
affairs, and contained the germs of a new and most fruitful philosophy
of society.
[Footnote 38: Sur les progres successifs de l'esprit humain. _OEuv._
ii. 597-611.]
'The phenomena of nature, subjected as they are to constant laws, are
enclosed in a circle of revolutions that remain the same for ever. All
comes to life again, all perishes again; and in these successive
generations, by which vegetables and animals reproduce themselves, time
does no more than bring back at each moment the image of what it has
just dismissed.
'The succession of men, on the contrary, offers from age to age a
spectacle of continual variations. Reason, freedom, the passions, are
incessantly producing new events. _All epochs are fastened together by a
sequence of causes and effects, linking the condition of the world to
all the conditions that have gone before it._ The gradually multiplied
signs of speech and writing, giving men an instrument for making sure of
the continued possession of their ideas, as well as of imparting them to
others, have formed out of the knowledge of each individual a common
treasure, which generation transmits to generation, as an inheritance
constantly augmented by the discoveries of each age; and the human race,
observed from its first beginning, seems in the eyes of the philosopher
to be one vast whole, which, like each individual in it, has its infancy
and its growth.'
This was not a mere casual reflection in Turgot's mind, taking a
solitary and separate position among those various and unordered ideas,
which spring up and go on existing without visible fruit in every active
intelligence. It was one of the systematic conceptions which shape and
rule many groups of facts, fixing a new and high place of their own for
them among the great divisions of knowledge. In a word, it belonged to
the rare order of truly creative ideas, and was the root or germ of a
whole body of vigorous and connected thought. This quality marks the
distinction, in respect of the treatment of history, between Turgot, and
both Bossuet and the great writers of history in France and England in
the eighteenth century. Many of the sayings to which we are referred for
the origin of the modern idea of history, such as Pascal's for instance,
are the fortuitous glimpses of men of genius into a vast sea, whose
extent they have not been led to suspect, and which only make a passing
and momentary mark. Bossuet's talk of universal history, which has been
so constantly praised, was fundamentally, and in substance, no more than
a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed
speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same
sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous
rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically into
the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His famous
Discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely
narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent
with the deity's fixed purpose to make one final and decisive revelation
to men. No one who looks upon the vast assemblage of stupendous human
circumstances, from the first origin of man upon the earth, as merely
the ordained antecedent of what, seen from the long procession of all
the ages, figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic
Church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence
and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but
whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he
did in a small and rhetorical way what Montesquieu and Voltaire
afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he
pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements
of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the
bare chronicler's road so far as to declare, for example, the general
principle, inadequate and over-stated as it is, that 'religion and civil
government are the two points on which human things revolve,'--even this
was a clear step in advance. The dismissal of the long series of
emperors from Augustus to Alexander Severus in two or three pages was to
show a ripe sense of large historic proportion. Again, Bossuet's
expressions of 'the concatenation of the universe,' of the
interdependence of the parts of so vast a whole, of there coming no
great change without having its causes in foregoing centuries, and of
the true object of history being to observe, in connection with each
epoch, those secret dispositions of events which prepared the way for
great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more
immediately brought them to pass[39]--all these phrases seem to point to
a true and philosophic survey. But they end in themselves, and lead
nowhither. The chain is an arbitrary and one-sided collection of facts.
The writer does not cautiously follow and feel after the successive
links, but forges and chooses and arrays them after a pattern of his
own, which was fixed independently of them. A scientific term or two is
not enough to disguise the purely theological essence of the treatise.
[Footnote 39: _Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle_, part iii. ch. ii.]
Montesquieu and Voltaire were both far enough removed from Bossuet's
point of view, and the _Spirit of Laws_ of the one, and the _Essay on
the Manners and Character of Nations_ of the other, mark a very
different way of considering history from the lofty and confident method
of the orthodox rhetorician. The _Spirit of Laws_ was published in 1748,
that is to say a couple of years before Turgot's Discourse at the
Sorbonne. Voltaire's _Essay on Manners_ did not come out until 1757, or
seven years later than the Discourse; but Voltaire himself has told us
that its composition dates from 1740, when he prepared this new
presentation of European history for the service of Madame du
Chatelet.[40] We may hence fairly consider the cardinal work of
Montesquieu, and the cardinal historical work of Voltaire, as virtually
belonging to the same time. And they possess a leading character in
common, which separates them both from Turgot, and places them
relatively to his idea in a secondary rank. In a word, Montesquieu and
Voltaire, if we have to search their most distinctive quality,
introduced into history systematically, and with full and decisive
effect, a broad generality of treatment. They grouped the facts of
history; and they did not group them locally or in accordance with mere
geographical or chronological division, but collected the facts in
social classes and orders from many countries and times. Their work was
a work of classification. It showed the possibility of arranging the
manifold and complex facts of society, and of the movements of
communities, under heads and with reference to definite general
conditions.
[Footnote 40: Preface to _Essai sur les Moeurs_, _OEuv._ xx.]
There is no need here to enter into any criticism of Montesquieu's great
work, how far the merits of its execution equalled the merit of its
design, how far his vicious confusion of the senses of the word 'law'
impaired the worth of his book, as a contribution to inductive or
comparative history. We have only to seek the difference between the
philosophic conception of Montesquieu and the philosophic conception of
Turgot. The latter may be considered a more liberal completion of the
former. Turgot not only sees the operation of law in the movements and
institutions of society, but he interprets this law in a positive and
scientific sense, as an ascertainable succession of social states, each
of them being the cause and effect of other social states. Turgot gives
its deserved prominence to the fertile idea of there being an ordered
movement of growth or advance among societies; in other words, of the
civilisation of any given portion of mankind having fixed conditions
analogous to those of a physical organism. Finally, he does not limit
his thought by fixing it upon the laws and constitutions only of
countries, but refers historical philosophy to its veritable and widest
object and concern, the steps and conditions of the progression of the
human mind.