Britain, often seen as the most secular country in Europe, has suddenly become obsessed by religion: all the talk is of veils, crosses and faith schools. It seems like a throwback to an earlier age, when the great arguments shaking society were about the nature of the Trinity or whether Dissenters should be allowed to hold positions in public life.
Perhaps the 20th century, preoccupied by human politics, nationalism and social organisation, was the aberration. Maybe it is the case that man’s most enduring obsession is with religion and the nature of the deity. If so, Jeremy Campbell’s scholarly account of society’s various perceptions of God since the Renaissance will prove a thought-provoking guide to the great controversies of the past.
Campbell begins with a world still locked in scholasticism, where religious thought and practice were mediated by an elite – social as well as intellectual – of scholars and rulers. Theirs was a world where popular religion was dominated by emotion, superstition and comforting elements of ritual, artistic tableaux, pilgrimages to shrines, the veneration of saints and an almost pantheistic obsession with the Virgin Mary, her mother and various angels thought to be useful mediators between God and humans. Campbell’s engaging writing is drily sardonic on this vexed questions of angels. He calls them ambivalent beings who hover between fact and fiction, between official sanction and wary prevarication. Is an angel humanoid or deiform? “A reader can be excused for wondering whether angels are stand-ins for the Read Thing, of the Real Thing itself, incognito, dressed up in some sort of camouflage.”
He moves on to the more vexed issue of the Trinity, and the rancorous philosophical arguments over “one substance”, the fudge formula adopted at the Council of Nicea in 325 to get over the split between those who thought of God as a single entity and those who wanted to admit Jesus and the Holy Spirit as co-equals. By the Middle Ages, the ever more complex theological formulations had become far removed from daily Christian practice. This verged on pure superstition, and an obsession with relics, with local competition to boast the best collection. There were two heads of John the Baptist in circulation, three crowns of thorns, though only one of Jesus’s baby teeth. The elector of Saxony, Luther’s protector, had a fabulous hoard, including the complete cadaver of a sinless child murdered by Herod and residue of soot from the fiery furnace, while Philip II of Spain put together a collection of 7,422 relics of saints, among them 144 heads intact and 306 arms and legs.
The main issue for most medievals, and one that reappeared with a vengeance in Puritan thinking after the Reformation, was God’s omnipotence. The early conception of God was of a being so immensely powerful and distant that he was almost unapproachable and unknowable – and so was his will. Thinkers were perplexed to the point of fury with the logical conundra: could an all-powerful God do something which was impossible, for example? And as the emphasis on God’s power rose, so the importance of Jesus seemed less.
With the Puritans came a new austerity. They purged medieval religion of its non-biblical elements, but this only brought uglier superstitions to the surface. Witchcraft and the occult flourished. People became morbidly anxious, preoccupied by damnation. Hobbesian fear was everywhere. Calvin, that unbending Swiss misanthrope, formulated ideas of predestination, which seemed to make mankind’s case even more hopeless. There were, naturally, reactions – attempts to make God more cuddly and more sympathetic. But then came Newton, and that threw everything into turmoil.
The irony of Newton and his time’s headlong rush to scientific inquiry was that he and men such as Robert Boyle thought that science would make stronger the case for religion by demonstrating order in the world and the rational functioning of a God who ordained the cosmos and the model for an orderly nation. Newton himself was a fervent, though mainstream Church of England, believer. He disliked the excesses of “enthusiasm”. But his discoveries were used by the opponents of organised relgion virtually to airbrush God out of the picture. They wanted to know whether God intervened capriciously, or only when things went wrong. And if so, how? Newton’s effect was inevitably to undermine the authority of the clergy by simplifying religion and cutting out the inexplicable.
The bulk of Campbell’s fascinating and erudite account deals with the consequences of this intrusion into religion of science and learning, one that he believes detrimental to both. There were moves to simplify the divine, assertions that people could not be religious any more, attempts to secularise the sacred and domesticate divine providence. The idea of Progress took hold, and, as Campbell remarks, “God was recruited as an executor of human social improvement.” Ironically, however, there has come a backlash: people want a religion that remains mystical. The attempt to show God as soberly rational marginalise religion so that, as Campbell says, in time it becomes vapid. And he ends with the paradoxes, diversions and questions of modern theologians such as Karl Barth, Kiekegaard, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and writers and thinkers such as Dorothy Sayers, Philip Lee and Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury.
This is an extraordinarily erudite book – sometimes too dense, too replete with citations from, among scores of others, Cicero, Descartes, Donne, Tertullian, Milton, Galileo, Bertrand Russell, Einstein and exponents of quantum physics. It deals largely with Christian conceptions of the divine, with little reference to Islam (though more on ancient Judaic law). It is coolly related and catholic in breadth. And though Campbell mourns the current loss of religious doctrine, his book is an invaluable background for theist and atheist alike in explaining much of the current controversy over religion and competing political demands of faith. ■
