The New Penguin History of the World (164 page)

The restraint exercised on European rulers by the consciousness of any tie other than that of a common resistance to revolution had, of course, long since collapsed together with the idea of Christendom. Nineteenth-century religion was in international relations at most a palliative or mitigation of conflict, a minor and indirect force, reinforcing humanitarianism and pacifism fed from other sources. Christianity had proved as feeble a check to violence as would the hopes of socialists that the workers of the world would refuse to fight one another in the interests of their masters. Whether this was a result of a general loss of power by organized churches is not clear. Certainly much misgiving was felt by 1900 about their declining force in regulating behaviour. This was not because a new religion of traditional form challenged the old Christian churches. There had been, rather, a continuing development of trends observable in the eighteenth century and much more marked since the French Revolution. Almost all the Christian communions seemed more and more touched by the blight
of one or other of the characteristic intellectual and social advances of the age. Nor did they seem able to exploit new devices – the late nineteenth-century appearance of mass-circulation newspapers, for instance – which might have helped them. Indeed, some of them, above all the Roman Catholic Church, positively distrusted such developments.

Though they all felt a hostile current, the Roman Catholic Church was the most obvious victim, the papacy having especially suffered both in its prestige and power. It had openly proclaimed its hostility to progress, rationality and liberalism in statements which became part of the dogmas of the Church. Politically, Rome had begun to suffer from the whittling away of the Temporal Power in the 1790s, when the French revolutionary armies brought revolutionary principles and territorial change to Italy and invasion of the papal territories. Often, later infringements of the papacy’s rights were to be justified in terms of the master ideas of the age: democracy, liberalism, nationalism. Finally, in 1870, the last territory of the old papal states still outside the Vatican itself was taken by the new kingdom of Italy and the papacy became almost entirely a purely spiritual and ecclesiastical authority. This was the end of an era of temporal authority stretching back to Merovingian times and some felt it to be an inglorious one for an institution long the centre of European civilization and history.

In fact, it was to prove a blessing. Nevertheless, at the time the spoliation confirmed both the hostility to the forces of the century which the papacy had already expressed and the derision in which it was held by many progressive thinkers. Feeling on both sides reached new heights when in 1870 it became a part of the dogma of the Church that the pope, when he spoke
ex cathedra
on faith and morals, did so with infallible authority. There followed two decades in which anti-clericalism and priest-baiting were more important in the politics of Germany, France, Italy and Spain than ever before. National sentiment could be mobilized against the Church in most Roman Catholic countries other than Poland. Governments took advantage of anti-papal prejudice to advance their own legal powers over the Church, but they were also increasingly pushing into areas where the Church had previously been paramount – above all, elementary and secondary education.

Persecution bred intransigence. In conflict, it emerged that whatever view might be taken on the abstract status of the teachings of the Roman Church, it could still draw on vast loyalty among the faithful. Moreover, these were still being recruited by conversion in the mission field overseas and would soon be added to in still greater numbers by demographic trends. Though organized religion might not make much progress anywhere among the new city-dwellers of Europe, untouched by inadequate ecclesiastical
machinery and paganized by the slow stain of the secular culture in which they were immersed, it was far from dying, let alone dead, as a political and social force. Indeed, the liberation of the papacy from its temporal role made it easier for Roman Catholics to feel uncompromised loyalty towards it.

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the most demanding of the Christian denominations in its claims on believers and was in the forefront of the battle of religion with the age, but the claims of revelation and the authority of priest and clergyman were everywhere questioned. This was one of the most striking features of the nineteenth century, all the more so because so many Europeans and Americans still retained simple and literal beliefs in the dogmas of their churches and the story contained in the Bible. They felt great anxiety when such beliefs were threatened, yet this was happening increasingly and in all countries. Traditional belief was at first obviously threatened only among an intellectual élite which often consciously held ideas drawn from Enlightenment sources: ‘Voltairean’ was a favourite nineteenth-century adjective to indicate anti-religious and sceptical views. As the nineteenth century proceeded, such ideas were reinforced by two other intellectual currents, both also at first a concern of élites, but increasingly with a wider effect in an age of growing mass literacy and cheap printing.

One new intellectual challenge came from biblical scholars, the most important of them German, who from the 1840s onwards not only demolished many assumptions about the value of the Bible as historical evidence, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, brought about something of a psychological change in the whole attitude to the scriptural text. In essence this change made it possible henceforth simply to regard the Bible as an historic text like any other, to be approached critically. An immensely successful (and scandal-provoking)
Life of Jesus
, published in 1863 by a French scholar, Ernest Renan, brought such an attitude before a wider public than ever before. The book which had been the central text of European civilization since its emergence in the Dark Ages was never to recover its position.

A second source of ideas damaging to traditional Christian faith – and therefore to the morality, politics and economics for so long anchored in Christian assumptions – was natural science. Enlightenment attacks on internal and logical inconsistency in the teaching of the Church became much more alarming when science began to produce empirical evidence that things said in the Bible (and therefore based on the same authority as everything else in it) plainly did not fit observable fact. The starting-point was geology; ideas which had been about since the end of the eighteenth
century were given a much wider public in the 1830s by the publication of
Principles of Geology
by a Scottish scientist, Charles Lyell. This book explained landscape and geological structure in terms of forces still at work, that is, not as the result of a single act of creation, but of wind, rain and so on. Moreover, Lyell pointed out that if this were correct, then the presence of fossils of different forms of life in different geological strata implied that the creation of new animals had been repeated in each geological age. If this were so, the biblical account of creation was clearly in difficulties. That biblical chronology was simply untrue in relation to man was increasingly suggested by discoveries of stone tools in British caves along with the fossilized bones of extinct animals. The argument that man was much older than the biblical account allowed may perhaps be regarded as officially conceded when, in 1859, British learned societies heard and published papers establishing ‘that in a period of antiquity remote beyond any of which we have hitherto found traces’, men had lived in Palaeolithic societies in the Somme valley.

It is an over-simplification, but not grossly distorting, to say that the same year brought many of these questions to a head by an approach along a different line – the biological – when an English scientist, Charles Darwin, published in 1859 one of the seminal books of modern civilization, called, for short,
The Origin of Species
. Much in it he owed, without acknowledgement, to others. Its publication came at a moment and in a country where it was especially likely to cause a stir; the public was, in a sense, ready for it. The issue of the rightfulness of the traditional dominance of religion (for example, in education) was in the air. The word ‘evolution’ was by then already familiar, though Darwin tried to avoid using it and did not let it appear in
The Origin of Species
until its fifth edition, ten years after the first. Nevertheless, his book was the greatest single statement of the evolutionary hypothesis – namely, that living things were what they were because their forms had undergone long evolution from simpler ones. This, of course, included man, as he made explicit in another book,
The Descent of Man
, in 1871. Different views were held about how this evolution had occurred. Darwin, impressed by Malthus’s vision of the murderous competition of mankind for food, took the view that the qualities which made success likely in hostile environments ensured the ‘natural selection’ of those creatures embodying them: this was a view to be vulgarized (and terribly misrepresented) by the use as a slogan of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. But, important though many aspects of his work were to be in inspiring fresh thought, here it is important rather to see that Darwin dealt a blow against the biblical account of creation (as well as against the assumption of the unique status of human beings) that had
wider publicity than any earlier one. In combination with biblical criticism and geology, his book made it impossible for any conscientious and thoughtful person to accept – as was still possible in 1800 – the Bible as literally true.

The undermining of the authority of scripture remains the most obvious single way in which science affected formulated beliefs. Yet just as important, if not more so, was a new, vague but growing prestige which science was coming to have among a public more broadly based than ever before. This was because of its new status as the supreme instrument for the manipulation of nature, which was seen as increasingly powerless to resist. Here was the beginning of what was to grow into a mythology of science. Its essence lay in the fact that while the great achievements of seventeenth-century science had not often resulted in changes in the lives of ordinary men and women, those of the nineteenth century increasingly did. Men who understood not a word of what might be written by Joseph Lister, who established the need for (and technique of using) antiseptics in surgery, or by Michael Faraday, who more than any other man made possible the generation of electricity, knew none the less that the medicine of 1900 was different from that of their grandfathers and often saw electricity about them in their work and homes. By 1914, radio messages could be sent across the Atlantic, flying-machines which did not rely upon support by bags of gas of lower density than air were common, aspirins were easily available and an American manufacturer was selling the first cheap mass-produced automobile. The growing power and scope of science was by no means adequately represented by such facts, but material advance of this sort impressed the average man and led him to worship at a new shrine.

His awareness of science came through technology because for a long time this was almost the only way in which science had a positive impact on the lives of most people. Respect for it therefore usually grew in proportion to spectacular results in engineering or manufacture and even now, though science makes its impact in other ways, it still makes it very obviously through industrial processes. But though deeply entwined in this way with the dominant world civilization and so interwoven with society, the growth of science meant much more than just a growth of sheer power. In the years down to 1914 the foundations were laid for what would be evident in the second half of the twentieth century, a science which was as much as anything the mainspring of the dominant world culture. So rapid has been the advance to this state of affairs that science has already affected every part of human life while people are still trying to grapple with some of its most elementary philosophical implications.

The easiest observations of this change which can be made (and the
easiest to take as a starting-point) are those which display the status of science as a social and material phenomenon in its own right. From the moment when the first great advances in physics were made, in the seventeenth century, science was already a social fact. Institutions were then created in which men came together to study nature in a way which a later age could recognize as scientific, and scientists even then were sometimes employed by rulers to bring to bear their expertise on specific problems. It was noticeable, too, that in the useful arts – and they were more usually called arts than sciences – such as navigation or agriculture, experiment by those who were not themselves practising technicians could make valuable contributions. But a terminological point helps to set this age in perspective and establish its remoteness from the nineteenth century and after: at this time scientists were still called ‘natural philosophers’. The word ‘scientist’ was not invented until about a third of the way through the nineteenth century, when men felt that there was need to distinguish a rigorous experimental and observational investigation of nature from speculation on it by unchecked reason. Even then, though, there was little distinction in most men’s minds between the man who carried out such an investigation and the applied scientist or technologist who was the much more conspicuous representative of science in an age of engineering, mining and manufacturing on an unprecedented scale.

The nineteenth century was none the less the first in which science was taken for granted by educated men as a specialized field of study, whose investigators had professional standing. Its new status was marked by the much larger place given to science in education, both by the creation of new departments at existing universities, and by the setting up in some countries, notably France and Germany, of special scientific and technical institutions. Professional studies, too, incorporated larger scientific components. Such developments accelerated as the effects of science on social and economic life became increasingly obvious. The sum effect was to carry much further an already long-established trend. Since about 1700 there has been a steady and exponential increase in the world population of scientists: their numbers have doubled roughly every fifteen years (which explains the striking fact that ever since then there have always been, at any moment, more scientists alive than dead). For the nineteenth century, other measurements of the growth of science can be used (the establishment of astronomical observatories, for example) and these, too, provide exponential curves.