Faith and the Churches

Abstract

In December 1789 the Austrian chancellor Count Kaunitz told the French ambassador that it was not true to say that there was nothing new under the sun, as the impiety of some was unprecedented.² To the casual observer of today the eighteenth century may not appear a particularly religious age. The mocking scepticism of writers such as Voltaire or the doubts of intellectuals and scholars such as Hume are most often remembered. The abhorrence of ‘Enthusiasm’, in its superstitious, Methodist or any other guise, was strong in educated people committed to the middle way. Eighteenth-century urban building is generally visually not recalled for its chapels, any more than the painters of the period are remembered for religious works. Religious warfare is seen as largely something of the more distant past, whereas the eighteenth century is viewed as one of growing toleration and 1773 saw the dramatic dissolution of the Jesuits, the religious order that had played such a major role in the Catholic (Counter-) Reformation. The eighteenth century is seen as a period of enlightenment, and the Enlightenment as a secular movement. Faith, it is believed, was sustained by inbred conservatism or irrational religious enthusiasm.

He was very free with abuse on the archbishop of Lyon for taking away from the watermen their tutelar saint St Nicholas, and putting a stop to their processions. They had nobody, he said, now left to pray to. To be sure there was the bon dieu still, and after him he knew there was the Virgin Mary; but it was a very bad thing to take away the watermen’s own saint; and the archbishop would not have done it, if he had not been to get something by it. Then since the Jesuits were expelled, the poor went totally uneducated: nobody would take the pains to instruct them; the other religious orders ate and drank and did nothing.

(Account of a Rhône boatman, 1776)¹