Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman. Jaargang 26

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Teylers Lecture on Radical Enlightenment^*
Jonathan I. Israel

Arguably the most decisive revolution in European thought and culture since the Christianization of the West in the fourth century A.D. was that which reshaped European civilization during the ‘Early Enlightenment’ - roughly the last third of the seventeenth century and first third of the eighteenth. Admittedly, other vast cultural and spiritual upheavals have also profoundly influenced the evolution of western civilization, including the dissemination of Greek science, medicine and philosophy through the Arabic-speaking world (including most of Jewry and part of Christendom) from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, the Aristotelian-scholastic philosophical revolution of the thirteenth century, the Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, High Enlightenment (circa 1740-1800), and the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism and the nation state. Yet there are many and convincing grounds for arguing that all these were surpassed in scope and consequences by the Early Enlightenment which in contrast to the rest, transformed culture and society at every level, irrevocably changing western civilization from being predominantly traditional, hierarchical, theological, and rooted in rural society, to being cosmopolitan, essentially urban in orientation, and predominantly secular, commercial-industrial and ‘scientific’ in substance. In short Early Enlightenment, far more than any other great cultural revolution in history, marks the essential shift from ‘pre-modern’ to ‘modern’.

The intellectual tensions, contradictions and dilemmas of the age, unprecedented in scope and intensity since the wars between the philosophy schools of Greek antiquity, inspired the astounding philosophical strivings of the post-Cartesian era - the writings of Hobbes, Pascal, Spinoza, Malebranche, Arnauld, Bayle, Le Clerc, Fontenelle, and many others, a spiritual and intellectual upheaval which continued and in turn, by the 1730s and 1740s had produced the works of Montesquieu, Vico, and the early Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and Rousseau. All these saw themselves as seeking answers to the new and overwhelming intellectual challenges facing European culture and society in the new and ideologically fraught post-Cartesian, post-Hobbesian secular era.

The spiritual predicament with which they grappled was indeed exceedingly complex. Paul Hazard who, in the 1930s, was the first historian fully to grasp and convey the decisive significance of the intellectual upheaval at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth for the wider cultural and spiritual history of the western world, already unequivocally interpreted this, the greatest of changes in Europe's history, as a transformation from a world based on theological dogma to one shaped by natural law, from one anchored in authority to one rooted in individual emancipation, freedom, and responsibility, and finally, from one governed by social rank and hierarchy to one increasingly inspired by sentiments and ideologies of equality.

The mental leap entailed, for everyone, including the illiterate peasantry, an unprecedented, painful transition to which most individuals were not easily reconciled: ‘La majorité des Français’, as Hazard expresses the point, ‘pensait comme Bossuet: tout d'un coup, les Français pensent comme Voltaire: c'est une révolution’.^1. Indeed, it was. But while the transition involved a vast and dramatic reordering of ideas and society, and even in France was far more sporadic and partial than Hazard's dictum suggests, the edifice of tradition, religion and authority was challenged in reality not by one but by two different and rival enlighten-

* Adapted version of Israel's lecture held at Teylers Museum Haarlem 27 April 2002 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman.

1. P. Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne 1680-1715, Paris 1935, preface.

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ments which almost at once began to fight each other. On the one hand there was the moderate mainstream, anxious to reconcile the new with elements of the past, the Enlightenment supported by some governments and the more liberal wings of the main churches. On the other hand was the Radical Enlightenment, more absolute in its espousal of the ‘esprit philosophique’ and unwilling to compromise with the claims of tradition, religion and established authority in any respect. This was the clandestine Enlightenment universally banned by governments and condemned by all churches.

Furthermore, the West's great intellectual revolution was by no means confined to France nor, in its early stages, was it chiefly powered by French ideas. If Fontenelle and Boulainvilliers were among the earliest and most effective representatives of ‘enlightened’ philosophy and critique in the French-speaking world, their thought and writings were not only steeped in Spinozism, and other Dutch, Dutch Huguenot and Dutch Sephardic radical influences such as the thought of Bayle, Van Dale, Bekker, and Orobio de Castro, but in addition for a long time driven underground or severely impeded by the weight of Bourbon royal authority and censorship, aristocratie hierarchy, and ecclesiastical power.

Little of what Boulainvilliers wrote of a philosophical character was published until after his death in 1722. Fontenelle published but under not inconsiderable restrictions. The Histoire des Oracles (Paris 1686), Fontenelle's best known contribution to the new ideas, was, as the marquis d'Argens - one of the pre-1750 French radical philosophes most heavily influenced by Bayle and Spinoza - observed, an excellent book but he added, sardonically, ‘je ne doute pas que, s'il eût écrit en Hollande, ou en Angleterre, elle ne fût encore plus parfaite’.^2. But if the Early Enlightenment was not primarily French in inspiration, neither, I would argue, was its early inspiration essentially British. Indeed, it is surely wrong to tie the Enlightenment to any particular national tradition or developments.^3. It was after all essentially European in character and decidedly not the invention, or possession, of any one European nation however powerful and influential. Neither, assuredly, was it a means of advancing the international influence or ascendancy of any one nation.

Furthermore, it was precisely because France, Germany and Italy were suspended half way between the ideological extremities of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, and because there the Counter-Enlightenment loomed far more formidably than in Britain or the Netherlands, proving as powerful as the Enlightenment itself, that the most dramatic, creative and intense philosophical debate after around 1720, increasingly tended to shift to those countries and away from Holland and England where a balanced and comfortable compromise between old and new was achieved comparatively early. Hence, it was on the continent that the fiercest and ultimately most important ideological and intellectual battles between moderate mainstream Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment - as well as between Radical and moderate Enlightenment, came to be fought.

Meanwhile, Spinozistic radical ideas wholly opposed to established authority and traditional structures of thought, though everywhere comprehensively banned and vehemently condemned, spread on all sides, developing into a vast Europe-wide underground intellectual movement. By 1740, an intricate counter-culture had been created extending across the whole continent but centered chiefly in Holland, France, Germany, Italy and England. As one of d'Argens' fictional French noblemen remarks, in 1739, innumerable French noblemen had by this time been raised to feel only a confident disdain for traditional notions and a boundless contempt for the common herd of theologians and academics who, as he puts it, opposed the ideas of ‘Spinosa et Vanini’, feeling a particular ‘mépris profond pour tous les phi-

2. D'Argens, J.B. de Boyer, marquis, Mémoires secrets de la République des lettres, Amsterdam 1744, vol. 5, p. 185.

3. N. Hampson, The Enlightenment, Harmondsworth 1968, p. 36-39: M. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, London 1981, p. 22-49; M. Jacob, ‘Crisis of the European Mind Hazard Revisited’, in: P. Mack and M.C. Jacob (eds.), Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge 1987, p. 254-260; P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, Cambridge 1990, p. 176; R. Porter, The Enlightenment, St. Martin's Press 2000, p. 6-23.

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losophes qui leur étoient contraires’.^4.

Furthermore, while the inherently monarchist, socially conservative, moderate mainstream Enlightenment predominated everywhere and was the only part of the Enlightenment likely to receive support from governments - or at least some governments or some sections of government - as well as from the liberal wings of the churches, it was nevertheless, crucially, not from this hegemonic moderate mainstream, but the universally prohibited Radical Enlightenment that ‘modernity’, understood in terms of equality, republican democracy, freedom of the individual and comprehensive toleration, principally derives.

This means that much more attention needs to be focused by historians on the phenomenon of Radical Enlightenment as distinct national enlightenments which in recent decades have been far too much emphasized as a historical category, and also as distinct from ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ Enlightenment. It may be true that this is not at all how historians have tended to view the matter in recent decades when not only ‘national enlightenments’ and Christian Enlightenment, but also, increasingly, the notion that British ideas inspired the whole thing, have all been very much in fashion. But only by giving more emphasis to the democratic, anti-monarchical, anti-aristocratic and anti-Christian tendencies in the Enlightenment, and the role of pre-1720 Dutch and Dutch Huguenot Spinozism in its development, will crucial aspects of the rise of ‘modernity’ be understood.

Of course, not every thinker fitted neatly into the pigeonholes' ‘Radical Enlightenment’, to the left, moderate mainstream, to the right. Some aspects of thought were sufficiently detachable to enable some writers to combine features of both tendencies to produce a complex hybrid phenomenon that could be by turns both persecuted and applauded by established authority. Thus if Boulainvilliers was a Spinozist philosophically and an enemy of ecclesiastical authority, politically he was an anti-democrat and aspects of this thought could be used to imply racist tendencies. If Hume was radical philosophically he was an inveterate conservative politically. Even more striking is the case of Voltaire, whose in some respects hybrid status seems to be one of the chief factors behind his sensational success. For if his ardent espousal of Newton and of Locke, who rescued at least the ‘probability’ of the existence of the immaterial soul and of spirits, and found a method for efficiently segregating natural science and philosophy from the theological sphere while reasserting the intellectual justifiability, on the basis of faith, of belief in miracles,^5. aligned him philosophically firmly with the moderate mainstream in opposition to the Radical Enlightenment, he was of course simultaneously one of the chief and most abrasive critics and satirists of ecclesiastical authority, religious intolerance and superstitious credulity. Though firmly opposed to the radical ideas of Diderot, Helvetius and D'Holbach, his abrasive hostility to ecclesiastical authority undoubtedly marked him to some extent off from the main body of conservative and moderate Enlightenment.

During the most decisive and formative period of the European Enlightenment, that is down to 1720, insofar as the European Early Enlightenment can be said to have a geographical centre - and that was less obvious or clear-cut than is usually assumed - this nerve-centre was arguably neither Paris nor London but rather what was then still the busiest cross-roads of Europe's commerce, finance, publishing and shipping, a small region situated on the eastern flank of the North Sea, namely the urban network strung out between Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam in the northern Netherlands. The intellectual seeds which shaped what Hazard dubbed the age of the ‘la crise de la conscience européenne’, and which proved so crucial in the defining and shaping of ‘modernity’ - the system of values which in essence has characterized the Atlantic World from the Early Enlightenment to today, required if they were to flourish, a home base in

4. ibid, p. 5.

5. D. Garber, ‘Soul and Mind. Life and Thought in the 17th Century’, in: D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy. Cambridge 1998, vl. 1, p. 785-787; N. Jolley, Locke: His Philosophical Thought, Oxford 1999, p. 95-101, 169-170, 188.

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the midst of a largely hostile, alien and unsympathetic world, a haven of anti-monarchical, dissenting tendencies. In particular, what was required was a firm cultural and intellectual grounding for toleration, republicanism and freedom of the individual, where ecclesiastical authority and monarchical and aristocratic values had already been decisively curtailed and where, in addition, there was a well-established and powerful publishing industry orientating the international European reading public towards new publications and debates.

A key supplementary factor in giving the Dutch milieu its central role in the wider process was the emergence following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, of an extensive and culturally highly creative Huguenot - and to a lesser extent Jansenist and ex-Catholic^6. - French-speaking commercial, publishing and intellectual diaspora scattered across western Europe outside of France, with its cultural centre of gravity in the Netherlands. A large-scale exodus which stimulated, or helped stimulate, many of the major economic, technological and scholarly innovations of the period, the rise of the Huguenot intellectual diaspora went hand in hand with the emergence of a lively French-language press and set of periodicals straddling the whole Atlantic and northern European world, albeit with its centre in Amsterdam, the Hague and Rotterdam. This constituted, perhaps for the first time in human history, a large and influential public consciousness, or public, scholarly and scientific sphere effectively independent of any ruler, or state, and which could claim to speak, with some claim to impartiality, for the European ‘Republic of Letters’ as a whole.

Not without reason did Hazard remark that at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, Bourbon, monarchical, Catholic France felt culturally besieged all the way round from Geneva to Dublin by a highly critical French-speaking heterodoxy which was at one and the same time religious, political and, above all, cultural in character.^7. The impact of the new structures gathered fresh momentum following the defeat of Louis XIV during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), after a forty- year armed struggle for hegemony in Europe, at the hands of the ‘Maritime Powers’ in alliance with Habsburg Austria supported behind the scenes by the Huguenot, Dissenter and Jewish diasporas. The demise of Louis XIV, and the coming to power in France of a liberal aristocratic Regency Council headed by Philippe d'Orleans, in 1715, accelerated the process of dissolution of the tightly regulated and structured ecclesiastical, spiritual, and intellectual system which French royal absolutism, guided by Bossuet and the French Catholic bishops, had striven but failed to establish and extend. During the crucial decades between 1672 and the mid eighteenth century, the intellectual foundations of the transition to ‘modernity’ were laid, a process driven - just as Bossuet and Louis XIV had feared - by the country's being opened up intellectually to a flood of ‘livres de Hollande’ and the fresh ideas about society, toleration and politics emanating from Holland and England. Hence the Orléans regency (1715-23) which governed France after Louis' death, as was recognized internationally at the time,^8. presided over a dramatically new and rejuvenated intellectual atmosphere and a steady, inexorable slackening of absolutism, censorship, and ecclesiastical authority.

Religious and intellectual freedom was indeed always well to the fore among the complex of impulses driving the European cultural restructuring emanating from the Dutch entrepôt. In his Funeral Oration upon the death of the famous Remonstrant preacher and fighter for toleration Philippus van Limborch (1633-1712), Jean Le Clerc (1657-1737), a Swiss Remonstrant refugee based in Amsterdam, and together with Spinoza, Bayle, Locke, Thomasius, Saurin, Basnage de Beauval, Aubert de Versé, Jaquelot, Noodt, and Barbeyrac, one of a whole phalanx of Early Enlightenment theorists of liberty of conscience,^9. characte-

6. P. Hazard, La crise de la conscience, p. 83-90; P. Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant las Révolution 1954, 2nd. edn, Paris 1982, p. 24-25, 81, 326, 408: Ch. Berkvens-Stevelinck, Prosper Marchand. La vie et loeuvre (1678-1756), Leiden 1987, p. 1-6; J.I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, Oxford 2001, p. 575-590.

7. P. Hazard, La crise de la conscience, p. 90.

8. See, for instance, N.H. Gundling, Vollständige Historie der Gelahrheit [...], Frankfurt and Leipzig 1734-1736, vol. 1, p. 159-160.

9. A. Barnes, Jean le Clerc (1657-1736) et la République des Lettres, Paris 1938, p. 98-99; H. Bots and M. Evers, ‘Jean Leclerc et la réunion des églises protestantes dans la Bibliotheque Ancienne et Moderne (1714-1727)’, in: Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 66 (1986), p. 55.

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rized the epic struggle for ‘mutual toleration’ as a fight for the ‘common liberty and repose of all Christians and of humankind’. Should its opposite - the ‘barbarous opinion of some fierce and imprudent divines, that dissenters in religion may and ought to be persecuted’ - triumph in Europe, as had momentarily seemed all too likely in the 1680s, warned Le Clerc, then ‘not only nation wou'd be oppressed by nation, citizens by citizens, and Christians by Christians, but all things would be confounded and overturn'd by rapines, murders, burnings, and a general devastation of towns and provinces.’ There would, he held, be neither quiet, safety nor a civilized life for mankind until the leaders of opinion succeeded ‘both by speaking and writing, universally to explode so pernicious a doctrine’ as religious intolerance and ensure ‘that it may, if possible, be wholly exterminated from the minds of men, and especially Christians, and for the future to be reputed the most abominable of heresys.’^10.

Yet, by and large, the message of religious toleration, especially in its more comprehensive formats, along with much of the rest of the brave ‘New World’ of the Dutch Republic from which it emanated was rejected not only by other Europeans but also by a good many Dutchmen. If what the Rotterdam regent, lover of philosophy, and patron of Pierre Bayle, Adriaen Paets (1631-86) called the individual's ‘inborn freedom’ to decide his view of things, and especially religion and questions of salvation, according to his own judgment, seemed thoroughly pernicious to most foreign visitors, so it did also to much of the Dutch public which preferred to think that ecclesiastical authority and censorship, and the curbing of religious dissent, needed reinforcing, not weakening. During the fierce theological and philosophical controversies which erupted in the Netherlands between the late 1660s and 1720, a large part of the public were clearly deeply angered and frustrated by the way that conventional certainties and age-old beliefs were being challenged and thrown into turmoil by freedom of opinion and debate. The majority wanted to shore up authority and commonly-held views.

Yet Dutch toleration and individual freedom, however undesirable in the eyes of most Europeans, including most Dutchmen, had undeniably yielded enviable social and economic benefits. Most people may not have liked the pro-toleration arguments of Van Limborch, Le Clerc, Noodt and still less those of Aubert de Versé and Bayle. But toleration really did seem, in practice, to diminish and soothe age-old theological antagonisms. Dutch society may have been distressingly egalitarian in most European eyes but it was also, until well into the eighteenth century, unquestionably the most prosperous, highly literate and mechanized European society. A pro-toleration writer such as Noël Aubert de Versé (1645-1714), may have been a Socinian outcast, spreading a forbidden anti-Trinitarian theology detested by most Europeans, including most Dutchmen, but it was hard to dispute his claim, in his Traité de la Liberté de Conscience (1687), that Amsterdam, still then commercially the most flourishing and dynamic city in Europe, ‘doit sa splendeur et son opulence que toutes les nations admirent à cette chère liberté. Parce qu'il n'y a point de nation si étrange, ni de secte si extraordinaire qui n'y vive paisiblement pourvu qu'on soit gens de bien, sincères, fidèles et bons citoyens’.^11.

With pardonable exaggeration, the Irish Deist, John Toland (1670-1722) referred to Holland as he knew it at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in his Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (1714), as providing an ‘unlimited Liberty of Conscience’ and the best available path to social and economic success.^12. The irony was that Dutch liberty of conscience, and freedom generally, though usually considered excessive by foreigners, was in reality far from being ‘unlimited’. Several radical writers and publishers, including Adriaen Koerbagh (1632-1669), Aert Wolsgryn, Ericus Walten (1663-1697) and Henrik Wyermars ended up in prison - in three of these cases with draco-

10. John le Clerc, A funeral oration upon death of Mr. Philip Limborch [...] [tr. from the Latin], 1713, p. 12-13.

11. N. Aubert de Versé, Traité de la Liberté de Conscience (1687), 1998, p. 55.

12. J. Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews. London 1714, p. 46.

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nian sentences as punishment for their activities. Aubert de Versé had to publish his Traité on freedom of conscience clandestinely - with ‘Pierre Marteau’ and ‘Cologne’ falsely imprinted on the title-page - and after publishing it, found, late in 1687, that he had to emigrate to Hamburg to escape persecution by the Dutch French-speaking Reformed Church spurred on by Pierre Jurieu.^13.

After 1700, the Dutch Republic increasingly lost its dynamism and was rapidly outstripped as the leader of the anti-Bourbon coalition by Britain. Nevertheless, at the time of the European Peace Congress of Utrecht (1713), the loss of commercial dynamism sapping Dutch vitality was not yet obvious while, conversely, during the reign of the Queen Anne (1702-1713) England suffered something of an Anglican ecclesiastical back-lash, a partial and temporary cultural and theological reaction, both psychological and legal, against the freedoms secured during the reign of William III.^14. Thus, until around 1720, as far as anyone could tell, the United Provinces' prosperity and stability, as well as its toleration and freedoms, remained both still intact and unsurpassed. Furthermore, Dutch and Dutch-based Huguenot scholars, thinkers, scientists, and publishers continued to develop and build on the cultural innovations of the recent past, especially with regard to theories of toleration, text criticism, erudite journals, encyclopedias, academic medical training, vernacularization of scientific debate, and republican political theory. Broadly, then, it seems not inappropriate to see Dutch primacy in the field of ‘enlightenment’ as continuing down to around 1720.

13. F.R.J. Knetsch, Pierre Jurieu. Theoloog en politicus der refuge, Kampen 1967, p. 258-260; P.J. Morman, Noël Aubert de Versé, Lewiston NY 1987, p. 44.

14. N. Tyacke, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism” and the Legalizing of Dissent 1571-1719’, in: O. Grell et al. (eds.) From Persecution to Toleration, Oxford 1991, p. 41-49.