Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

George Eliot, as we have seen, was influenced in her beliefs by David Strauss’s book on The Life of Jesus, but she was not entirely typical. A more common reaction was that of the Swiss, whose threatened riots caused Strauss to be released from his professorship before he had even started. Most of the books of the nineteenth century that we now regard as important in bringing about a decline in religious belief did not usually act directly on the vast mass of people. The general public did not read Lyell, Strauss or Darwin. What they did read, however, were a number of popularisers – Karl Vogt on Darwin, Jakob Moleschott on Strauss, Ludwig Büchner on the new physics and the new cell biology. These men were read because they were willing to go a good deal further than Darwin, say, or Lyell. The Origin of Species or the Principles of Geology did not, in and of themselves, attack religion. The

implication was there, but it was the popularisers who interpreted these books and spelled out these implications for a wider readership. ‘Religion is a commoner interest of most of the human race than is physics or biology. The great public,’ says Owen Chadwick, ‘was far more interested in science-versus-religion than in science.’ It was these popularisers who alerted the Victorian middle classes to the idea that alternative explanations for the way the world was were now available. They did not immediately say that all religion was wrong but they did cast serious doubt on the accuracy, veracity and plausibility of the Bible.⁴⁰

The greatest of the popularisers was Ernst Haeckel, a German who in 1862 published The Natural History of Creation. This, a very readable polemic in favour of Darwin, just three years after the Origin

and spelling out its implications, went through nine editions by the end of the century and was translated into twelve languages. Die Welträtsel, translated into English in 1900 as The Riddle of the Universe, and which explained the new cosmology, sold 100,000 copies in German and as many in English.⁴¹ Haeckel was far more widely read than Darwin, and became for a time equally famous – people flocked to hear him talk.

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The other populariser, who did for Strauss what Haeckel did for Darwin, and became just as famous in the process, was Ernest Renan. Originally destined for the priesthood, he lost his faith and put his new conviction into several books, of which the Life of Jesus (1863) was by far the most influential.⁴³ Though he said different things at different times, it seems that it was the study of history that destroyed Renan’s faith, and his book on Jesus had the same effect on others.⁴⁴

The book had the influence it did, partly because of its exquisite French, but also because it treated Jesus as a historical figure, denied his supernatural acts, presented in a clear manner the scholarship which threw doubts over his divinity, and yet showed him in a sympathetic light, as the ‘pinnacle of humanity’, whose genius and moral teaching changed the world. It seems that Renan’s evident sympathy towards Jesus made the shortcomings he highlighted more palatable. At the same time, he dismantled the need for churches, creeds, sacraments and dogmas. Like Comte, Renan thought positivism could be the basis for a new faith.⁴⁵ He underlined that Jesus was a moral leader, a great man, but not in any way divine – organised religion, as it existed in the nineteenth century, had nothing to do with him. This was a form of religion, an ethical humanism, that many people educated in the new universities could accept. His approach was at times – well, unusual. ‘Divinity has its intermittent lapses; one cannot be Son of God through a lifetime without a break.’ This was a little like a return to the Greek idea of gods as part heroic, part human. Renan’s book appealed for the same reason that deism appealed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – it helped people lose their belief in supernatural entities without losing their belief entirely. Most people could not go from belief to unbelief in one step. Renan’s Life was the most famous title published in French in the nineteenth century and it created a sensation in England too.

What impressed many people, over and above the sympathetic picture which Renan provided, was what he revealed about the shaky foundations of Christianity, so far as its basic documentation was concerned. For example, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt read Strauss’s life of Jesus and realised that the history of the New Testament ‘could not bear the weight which faith sought to place on it’, and many people underwent a similar reaction.⁴⁶