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Orthodoxy, Enlightenment and Religious Revival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

W. R. Ward
W. R. Ward*
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Extract

Everyone has his favourite squibs to illuminate the animosity of the devotees of the Christian application of modern knowledge towards the partisans of religious revival. R. B. Aspland, the unitarian, summed them all up succinctly in the early nineteenth century in his case against Wesleyanism. ‘Wine’, he declared, ‘is the beverage of the gentleman, spirits of the herd. So with religion’. Something of this edge had been there from the beginning, long before attitudes had been struck and the French Revolution had become a divider of spirits everywhere. Much of the fascination of the Turretini correspondence is provided by the conscious sense of intellectual superiority of the Swiss fathers of rational orthodoxy. ‘We are here much occupied with the scandalous affairs of Toggenburg’, writes Jean Gaspard Escher with an almost audible turn of the nose. ‘These are mountain people rather like Vaudois, Miquelets or Camisards’, and their murderous politics were of the Ulster variety. Neither the Toggenburgers, nor the Vaudois or Camisards were part of the history of religious revival, but they were very like Protestant minorities from Central Europe who were; the Salzburgers, for example. ‘The majority of these men’, writes Escher of the latter, ‘can neither read nor write; their fundamental doctrine is that worship is due to God alone and that salvation is by Jesus Christ. This doctrine fills them with a horror of popery: . . . they are ill-instructed in the other articles of religion. They know by heart some fine passages of scripture and some Lutheran hymns to which they hold’. Pastorally, if not confessionally, the mountain men were a different cup of tea from the practitioners of polite learning; but as late as 1800 it was possible to turn American methodists and baptists out in droves to vote for the deist Jefferson, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the fate of the revivalist and that of the men of enlightenment was more closely linked at an early stage than the text-book categories usually suggest.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 17: Religion and Humanism , 1981 , pp. 275 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1981

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References

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9 Lettres Turretini 2 p ni. It is entertaining to see the catholic enlightenment coming back to this point after catholics had wrought havoc for generations in the name of a strict confessionalism. A report made to Joseph II in 1771 after a tour of the old protestant territories of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, declared that ‘there is a great lack of education in all your majesty’s hereditary lands and in the real Christian and moral virtues; the mob lives in the greatest ignornace, the townsmen and many who regard themselves as pious souls are held in a really tasteless and superstitious piety, which brings religion to breakup and scorn, through the ignorant clergy, overstocked in these towns, who give occasion to petty devotions partly from self-interest, partly from their own stupidity.’ Aus der Zeit Maria Theresias. Tagebuch des Fürsten Johann Josef Khevenhüller-Metsch, 1742-1776, ed KhevenhüUer- Metsch, Rudolf Graf and Schlitter, Hans, 7 vols (Vienna 1907-25 7 p 381 Google Scholar. Cited below as KhevenhüUer Tagebuch.

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25 An interesting report on all this was subsequently prepared for Turretini, lettres Turretini 3 pp 375-82.

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