Nineteenth-Century British Secularism

Science, Religion and Literature

Michael Rectenwald

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137463890
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

Nineteenth-Century British Secularism offers a new paradigm for understanding secularization in the nineteenth century. It addresses the crisis in the secularization thesis by foregrounding a nineteenth-century development called 'Secularism' – the particular movement and creed founded by George Jacob Holyoake from 1851 to 1852. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism rethinks and reevaluates the significance of Holyoake's Secularism, regarding it as a historic moment of modernity and granting it centrality as both a herald and exemplar for a new understanding of modern secularity. In addition to Secularism proper, the book treats several other moments of secular emergence in the nineteenth century, including Thomas Carlyle's 'natural supernaturalism', Richard Carlile's anti-theist science advocacy, Charles Lyell's uniformity principle in geology, Francis Newman's naturalized religion or 'primitive Christianity', and George Eliot's secularism and post-secularism.

1

Carlyle and Carlile: Late Romantic Skepticism and Early Radical Freethought

As I have suggested, mid-century Secularism as founded by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851–1852 was a post-Enlightenment development, both an extension of Enlightenment rationality, and a response to its failed promises for extending reason across the public and private spheres to the exclusion of religious belief and practice. In order to comprehend this development, I begin by examining some salient post-Enlightenment discourse and activity in early nineteenth-century Britain. This chapter counter-poses two exemplary, late Romantic-age and seemingly antithetical successors to the Enlightenment legacy. One epitomizes the late Romantic response to what Romantics deemed an overweening faith in Enlightenment rationality, as expressed in terms of scientific materialism, Political Economy, and a Utilitarian ethical ‘calculus’. The other represents the extension of Enlightenment promises to the ‘popular Enlightenment’ and the expression given it in the artisanal freethought movement, a movement that would eventually lead, circuitously, to Secularism proper. Respectively, the two figures – the ‘Victorian sage’ and cultural critic Thomas Carlyle and the Romantic-age, plebeian, Paineite radical, Richard Carlile – will serve to represent these currents. While apparently diametrically opposed, the standpoints of Carlyle and Carlile demonstrate a range of secular possibilities in the period.

The choice of Carlyle and Carlile may seem to be based arbitrarily on their homonymic surnames, but together, these two contemporaneous figures work well to frame the outer edges of the secular as I define it. I regard the secular not as the outcome of progressive religious decline – per the standard secularization thesis – although this sense of the secular is discussed throughout this book. Rather, I understand the secular as an element within secularity, an overarching or background condition, a new ‘naïve framework’ of modernity that embraces belief and unbelief, the secular and the religious, as well as the irresolution and challenges posed by the conjunction of these elements.¹ According to Charles Taylor, secularity is a ‘modern imaginary’ that, by the nineteenth century, involved all subjects in a new set of dilemmas and choices, which constitute what I am calling an optative condition. The development of secularity precedes the period under consideration, but by the nineteenth century, secularity develops into what Taylor refers to as a ‘nova’, as its contours become spectacular by virtue of the diversity that it permits. As Taylor notes:

the salient feature of the modern cosmic imaginary is not that it fostered materialism, or enabled people to return as it were to religion, though it has done both these things. But the most important fact about it which is relevant to our enquiry here is that it has opened a space in which people can wander between and around all these options without having to land clearly and definitively in any one.²

Between them, Carlile and Carlyle represent a range of this wandering in the early nineteenth century – from religious faith, to skepticism, to materialism, to ‘natural supernaturalism’, to ‘rational Christianity’. The metaphysical belief commitments that they present are also connected to ‘worldly’ convictions. Furthermore, both of these figures construe their choices as conditioned and constrained by the contexts that make them possible. Despite or perhaps because of their significant differences, Carlyle and Carlile illustrate the outlines of secularity that I am engaging here and throughout. Their views also illustrate theories of secularization itself – both the standard secularization thesis, as well as revised versions of secularization.

Thomas Carlyle’s ‘natural supernaturalism’, from Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), has been taken by critics to represent a characteristic expression of Romantic secularization, placing ‘belief’ on a new naturalistic basis (albeit at the same time spiritualizing belief). On the other hand, Richard Carlile’s early freethinking career may be seen as uncannily epitomizing the rationalism and Utilitarianism that Thomas Carlyle lambasted repeatedly, especially in ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829) and ‘Characteristics’ (1831). In his radical periodical and pamphleteering career, Carlile advocated the immediate secularization of the social order in its various domains. With a faith in science as an unmediated means of access to the phenomenal world available for social and political change, Carlile’s scientism was a proto-positivism, embodying a progressive and teleological model of a declining religiosity. Whereas Carlyle represented the expression of the secular in religious terms (or vice versa), in his efforts to extirpate belief, Carlile advanced an emergent ‘hard naturalism’.³ On the other hand, Carlyle attempted to retain the higher purpose and meaning making potentiated by Christianity, while eliminating its doctrinal and miraculous basis (what he called its ‘Mythus’). Carlyle and Carlile thus adumbrate Secularism proper, as it would emerge by mid-century. They represent antipodal figures, who are nevertheless immersed in a new common secularity.

Generally, in the nineteenth century in Britain, the religious and secular choices and dilemmas availed have been thought to include, broadly considered, established and dissenting Christianity; an evangelicalism that spanned the two; Unitarianism and other forms of theism and deism; Romantic reconfigurations of Christianity; pantheism; atheism; and later, secularism, agnosticism, rationalism, spiritualism, theosophy, and others. However, until relatively recently, the historiography of the period has been dominated by the familiar ‘crisis of faith’ narrative, a narrative that runs parallel to and reinforces the standard secularization thesis. Emboldened by challenges to the standard secularization thesis in broader histories and sociological studies, historians studying the nineteenth century have begun to challenge this dominant motif. One salient work, Timothy Larsen’s Crisis of Doubt (2006), is especially relevant to this discussion.⁴ In a critical intervention into the histories of freethought, secularism, and religion, Larsen coins the phrase ‘crisis of doubt’ to cleverly destabilize this dominant narrative. Larsen argues that contrary to the assumption of religious decline that has been vastly overplayed in historiography of the nineteenth-century, thriving religious belief was actually the rule, not the exception. To counter a long-standing preponderance of ‘crisis of faith’ historicism, Larsen conveys a series of reconversion, ‘crisis of doubt’ case studies, suppressed or lesser-known accounts of erstwhile Secularists, who later reconverted to some form of Christianity. Based on an opening critique of a broad body of scholarship, in conjunction with his collection of short religious re-conversion biographies, Larsen aims to overthrow the dominant versions of faith, doubt, and secularization that he sees as having distorted our perspective.

Like other relatively recent studies, such as Alister E. McGrath’s Twilight of Atheism (2004), which disrupt the supposed inevitability of secular modernity, Larsen does well to point to the persistence and viability of religion in the period. He is also careful to acknowledge that the ‘crisis of faith’ really did happen for a number of subjects. However, in place of one stale and reductionist model, Larsen posits a competing hegemony, which leaves too little room for doubt, and makes faith rather too secure. Such a dichotomization, as either of these dueling and rather static, near all-or-nothing, faith or doubt paradigms suggest, belies the actual religious and secular diversity evident in the period. Likewise, rather than having to declare faith or doubt the ultimate victor, we might instead pay attention to the wide range of belief and unbelief commitments availed by nineteenth century circumstances.⁵ We should understand secularity not only as embracing the ‘crisis of faith’ and the ‘crisis of doubt’ paradigms, but also as accounting for an increasing plurality of belief modalities available along a spectrum between the antipodes of faith and doubt, which were rarely static or fixed positions in any case. Further, such metaphysical commitments necessarily intersected with other convictions, including economic, moral, political, scientific, social and spiritual positions. This chapter begins an exploration of the kinds of belief commitments that modern secularity availed.

Natural supernaturalism: the ‘desecularization’ of the secular

A liminal text residing on the border between Romantic and Victorian literature and sensibility, Sartor Resartus has been treated as an instance of Romantic secularization as well as a prototype of the Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ narrative. In his Natural Supernaturalism (1971), M. H. Abrams considered the peculiar literary production in terms of the former, arguing that Romanticism itself was ‘the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking’, and that the natural supernaturalism of Sartor Resartus, from which Abrams derived his title, represented the general tendency in the period ‘to naturalize the supernatural and to humanize the divine’.⁶ That is, for Abrams, the natural supernaturalism of Sartor Resartus was precisely the secularization of belief, the transformation of religious sentiment into a secular mode, a transformation triggered by the incursion of Enlightenment rationality, notably in the form of Utilitarianism and Political Economy.

Within the past two or three decades, as the standard secularization thesis has been challenged, studies in Romanticism have also undertaken a decoupling of Romanticism and secularization. As Colin Jager has noted, the Romanticism as secularization thesis has been challenged by studies that show religious belief to have been more important for canonical writers than suggested by critics such as Abrams.⁷ This is clear in the cases of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as in Blake. The secularization thesis of Romanticism has also been contested by studies that point to a range of expression having little or no relation to secularization or religion. ‘As a result, one might look to non- or extra-canonical writers and materials, and thereby contest secularization by, as it were, changing the subject’. Or, one might examine secularism in terms of its ‘institutional dimensions’, the conditions that make secularism possible or necessary.⁸

Along similar lines, Frank M. Turner has suggested that the ‘crisis of faith’ narrative – largely based on intellectual encounters, while prominent in the Victorian period and certainly applicable to the lives and works of several literary and philosophical figures – is otherwise an inadequate explanation for the emergence of the secular in the nineteenth century. Turner argues that religious discourse and particularly a new religious pluralism was equally or perhaps more important than secular literature. With the diversification of belief in the early nineteenth century, more opportunities for falling out with one’s beliefs became possible, Turner suggests.⁹ This position corresponds with sociologist Peter Berger’s earlier claim that religious pluralism ‘ipso facto plunges religion into a crisis of credibility’.¹⁰ This claim seems to be borne out by the number of defections from evangelicalism, for example. Historians and literary scholars have generally ignored this role for religion. Further, Turner argues that ‘the widespread and widely accepted image of an existing religious faith … that falls victim to emerging new intellectual forces’ was born in the early nineteenth century and was largely owing to Sartor’s impact on subsequent writers and intellectuals.¹¹ Sartor forecasted a ‘crisis of faith’ made legendary by several prominent Victorian intellectuals. Indeed, famous Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ encounters – such as those of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Matthew Arnold, Francis W. Newman and others – may be read as variations on the Sartor theme, which itself mirrors an evangelical conversion.¹² While Turner may be correct in pointing to increasing religious diversity as a stimulus for secular conversions, his reading of Sartor is susceptible to the same tendency for which he criticizes historians. That is, much like Abrams, he reads Sartor as a straightforward secularization narrative wherein the secular merely displaces the religious. The religious has no real place in Turner’s reading of Sartor; it is merely overthrown.

Certainly Sartor is a secularization allegory of sorts. As Barry V. Qualls has shown, the allegory reflects Carlyle’s reworking of both the tradition of Christian pilgrimage, as popularized in Bunyan, and the Romantic secular rearticulations and re-locations of this tradition.¹³ Within this allegory, moreover, the emergence of the secular does represent a crisis. The secular, as if an invading force, takes up residency within an exclusively religious sphere against a newly outmoded religious belief. The secular also involves disenchantment. The ‘crisis of faith’ is conditioned on freedom, but a freedom constrained in the context of an incontestable rationalism that has disenchanted the world – or, as Taylor maintains, has followed from the world’s disenchantment.¹⁴ Natural supernaturalism finally represents the possibility of faith in the providence of a benign and ultimately divinized nature. Yet the declaration of this faith is made necessary by secularity itself. In Sartor, belief and enchantment are not merely displaced by the secular, but are rather reproduced by it. Similarly, Joshua Landy and Michael Saler argue that secularization has always been accompanied not only by disenchantment, but also re-enchantment:

Weber’s account [of secularization] was, however, incomplete. What he neglected to mention is that each time religion reluctantly withdrew from a particular area of experience, a new, thoroughly secular strategy for re-enchantment cheerfully emerged to fill the void. The astonishing profusion and variety of such strategies is itself enchanting. Between them, philosophers, artists, architects, poets, stage magicians, and ordinary citizens made it possible to enjoy many of the benefits previously offered by faith, without having to subscribe to a creed; the progressive disenchantment of the world was thus accompanied, from the start and continually, by its progressive re-enchantment.¹⁵

Generally, the necessity to de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Secularity or the Post-Secular Condition
• 1 Carlyle and Carlile: Late Romantic Skepticism and Early Radical Freethought
• 2 Principles of Geology: A Secular Fissure in Scientific Knowledge
• 3 Holyoake and Secularism: The Emergence of ‘Positive’ Freethought
• 4 Secularizing Science: Secularism and the Emergence of Scientific Naturalism
• 5 The Three Newmans: A Triumvirate of Secularity
• 6 George Eliot: The Secular Sublime, Post-Secularism, and ‘Secularization’
• Epilogue: Secularism as Modern Secularity
• Notes
• Index