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XI Religious and Political Sophistry David Owen Ewan tells us that Marx maintained "quite correctly that Communism is not of German but of British and French origin." (Social Romanticism in France, p. 55). But even if this logical outcome of Liberalism flourished in France, we should not forger that it was planted there by French idealists who imported it from England. Voltaire and Montesquieu both contracted the infection in England between the years 1726 and 1730, and forthwith spread it among their own countrymen. It was doubtless with reference to this fact that Joubert, commenting on the political philosophy of modern Europe, exclaimed, "C'est de l'Angleterre que sont parties comme des brouillards les idées métaphysiques et politiques qui ont tout obscurci." (Pensées: Du Caractère des Nations, LXXVIII, Ed. 1842: "From England there have spread like fogs the metaphysical and political ideas that have covered everything in darkness."). Stendhal more angrily declared England to be "La source unique de la plus intolérable partie des malheurs de l'Europe. (Pages D'Italie, Oct–Nov. 1818: "The one and only source of the most insufferable misfortunes of Europe.") There was undoubtedly much culpable superficiality in the enthusiasm felt and expressed by Voltaire and Montesquieu for the Liberalism of England's political institutions in the third decade of the eighteenth century — a superficiality admitted by Montesquieu (See Livre XI, Chap. VI, of his L'Esprit des Lois.) and accounted for in Voltaire's case by the events preceding his journey to England. It will be remembered that towards the end of the year 1725, he had a serious quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan, in which many insults were exchanged, and one night, as Voltaire was leaving the Duc de Sully's where he had dined, he was pounced upon by some ruffians hired by the Chevalier and severely bastinadoed. His subsequent de-
It is however, strange that neither of these cultivated French visitors to England saw in the early basic assumptions of English Liberalism any menace to order and sound government, For Hobbes, some eighty years before Voltaire set foot on England, had already denounced as "poisonous and seditious" the belief that the mob was a competent tribunal to which every question however abstruse could be submitted. He said it constituted "a disease of the commonwealth", for "a man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing, and as the judgment so also the conscience may be erroneous . . . in such diversity as there is of private consciences the commonwealth must needs be distracted." (Leviathan, Chap. XXIX). Cromwell himself, four years earlier had exclaimed on seeing Lilburne's demand for Universal Suffrage (Argument of the People, 1647): "The consequences of this rule tend to anarchy, must end in anarchy. For where is there any bound or limit set if you take away this [limit] that men that have no interest but the interest of breathing shall have no voice in elections?" (Words pronounced at an Army Council on October 29th 1647. See The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Ed. by S. C. Lomas, 1904. Vol. III). Even more remarkable were the reactions of the two leading religious Reformers themselves to the practical consequences of their doctrines. For both Calvin and Luther recoiled in horror when they saw their Liberal innovations in the religious sphere translated into the world of politics. Confronted by the truculent effrontery of the German masses who had interpreted his purely anti clerical campaign as an incitement to them to rebel against their civil rulers, he not only recanted, but with apparent inconsistency and excessive harshness also denied the light of the People to offer armed resistance under his banner to the State. In his furious pamphlet, Wider die Zäuberischen und Mörderischen Rotten der Bauern (Contra The Peasant Bands of Robbers and Murderers, 1525), he practically abjured all that he had previously contended on the liberty of con-
Calvin was driven to the same doctrinal inconsistency; but with less tragic consequences. Nevertheless, for a Reformer such as he was, to maintain, as Rousseau was later to do, that Aristocracy is the best form of government and that "in popular government is the strongest tendency to sedition and anarchy", indicates the extent to which in those early days of Liberal speculation the innovators were already shrinking from the consequences of their own principles, which, as soon became apparent, could not easily be regarded as irrelevant to politics. All honour to these two religious Reformers for recognising the flaws in their reasoning when once it was applied outside the narrow limits of its original purpose. But when we find Calvin on the one hand, predicting anarchy as the fatal outcome of Democracy, and on the other, Luther declaring that "To the business of government appertain not common illiterate people, or servants, but champions, understanding, wise and courageous men who are to be trusted" (Table Talk, DCCLXIII): we may well wonder how these doughty pioneers of free thought and opinion, with their emphasis on every individual man's right to his own judgment in matters of theology, could have persuaded themselves that whilst Liberalism in religion is wholly commendable, it is to be deprecated in politics. Did they really imagine that religion was less sacred, less precious than secular government? Yet it was from such shallow innovators who thus inadvertently betrayed their faint regard for the Faith they pretended to revere that, as we have seen, English political Liberalism derived. This is not to suggest that the Church against which they campaigned was faultless. Nor is it an argument in defence of
This popular inference, like the original Movement of Emancipation, may have been hasty, superficial, and characteristic of the "snap" judgments for which crowds have always been notorious. But, given the circumstances, it was only to be expected even from the supposed "intellectuals" among the mob. For to this day the kind of people who flatter themselves that they are qualified to lead their fellow men are too often, as Julien Benda has so ably shown, betrayers rather than saviours of their generation. |
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