Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

One other new element which made the secularisation debate in the nineteenth century different from that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved the revised notion of ‘dogma’. Originally, dogma meant an affirmation of beliefs, or doctrines – in other words, it had a positive flavour. But that gradually changed so that, by the age of the Enlightenment, to be dogmatic was to be ‘unenlightened and closed to alternative interpretations of the truth’.

⁴⁷ This was an important transformation because although the Catholic hierarchy was by no means inexperienced at combating heretical dogmas, the very notion of dogma was itself now under attack. The successful methods of the positive sciences offered an alternative and were increasingly used as tools for attacking the church. One organisation that sounds fanciful now but which was typical of the time was the Society for Mutual Autopsy. This was a group (of anthropologists mainly) who were so concerned to prove that there was no soul that they all bequeathed their bodies to the society, so that they could be dissected and examined, to kill off ideas of where the soul might be located. They held dinners where the food was served on prehistoric pottery or in the cavities of human and, in one case, giraffe skulls, to emphasise that there was nothing special about human remains, that they were no different from animal remains. As Jennifer Michael Hecht points out, in her book on the end of the soul, one anthropologist wrote ‘We have attested many systems in order to maintain morality and the fundamentals of law. To tell the truth, these attempts were nothing but illusions . . . The conscience is nothing but a particular aspect of instinct, and instinct is nothing but an hereditary habit . . . Without the existence of a distinct soul, without immortality, and without the threat of an afterlife, there are no longer any sanctions.’⁴⁸

In these circumstances, the reactions of the Catholic establishment were, more often than not, grudging. This, in itself, became an issue, a factor in the growth of anticlericalism, which was another aspect of secularisation, at least for a vociferous minority. In Britain, says Chadwick, it surfaced for the first time in a Saturday Review leader in May 1864, criticising the wilful inability of the Curia in Rome to concede the advances of modern science, in particular Galileo’s discoveries and insights, by then hundreds of years old. In this way, clericalism came to be synonymous with obscurantism and administrative stonewalling and was broadened beyond the Roman Catholic Church to all churches and their opposition to modern thinking, including political thinking.

⁴⁹ Among educated Catholics everywhere there was some regret at the Vatican’s anti-modern stance but in Italy there was an additional problem.

In 1848, the year of revolution across Europe, the Italians mounted their war of liberation against Austria. This put Pope Pius IX in an unwinnable position. With whom would the Vatican side? Both Italy and Austria were sons of the church. At the end of April that year Pius announced that ‘as supreme pastor’ he could not declare war on any fellow Catholics. For many Italian nationalists this was too much and they turned against the Vatican. It was the first time anticlericalism had appeared in Italy.

In France anticlericalism played havoc with the established church. Over and above the attacks on church authority – Strauss, Darwin, Renan, Haeckel – in France, Catholic clericals were systematically expelled from institutes of higher education, meaning that as time passed the church had a weaker and weaker grip on the minds of the young.⁵⁰

The French Church was paying the price for the fact that, in the eighteenth century, the country’s bishops had been drawn overwhelmingly from the aristocracy. Decimated by the Revolution, the French church changed its complexion so much that the pope was forced to anathematise the entire Gallican hierarchy, refusing to consecrate any new bishops. The French church was thus cut off from Rome for a time though this did little to reduce anticlerical feeling, since for many ordinary people Rome was now even further away than ever.⁵¹