Science and Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Literature

Focus on Tartuffe
An Essay on Man
Candide

“Philosophers . . . turned their attention to defining the possibilities and limitations of the human position in the material universe. . . . The fullness and complexity of the perceived physical world testified, as many wrote, to the sublime rationality of a divine plan. The Planner, however, did not necessarily supervise the day-to-day operations of His arrangements; He might rather, as a popular analogy had it, resemble the watchmaker who winds the watch and leaves it running” (p. 296).

“To make Tartuffe a specifically religious hypocrite is an act of inventive daring
. . . . Although one may easily accept Molière’s defense of his intentions (not to mock faith but to attack its misuse), it is not hard to see why the play might trouble religious authorities. Molière suggests how readily religious faith lends itself to misuse, how high-sounding pieties allow men and women to evade self-examination and immediate responsibilities” (p. 304).

OVERVIEW: THE WATCHMAKER’S WORLD

The intricate workings of the sort of watch that came to symbolize divine intelligence, produced in England around 1750.

The religious wars that tore Europe apart in the centuries after the rise of Protestantism coexisted with—and were partially aimed at—an unprecedented wave of scientific discoveries that transformed peoples’ understanding of the natural world. Many of the great innovators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like Blaise Pascal (1623-62) and René Descartes (1596-1650) in France, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) in Germany, and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in England, were both mathematicians and philosophers who sought after intellectual and spiritual order. In this quest for order, most of them embraced a famous simile invoked by the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who declared his intention “to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork” (as quoted by Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers [New York: Random House, 1983], p. 71).
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Leibniz explaining the universe.

If the universe is a machine, of course, its operations may proceed automatically, distanced from divine attention or moral considerations. In 1710, as if to counter this possibility, Leibniz published his only extended work of philosophy, Essays in Theodicy. Derived from two Greek words: theo, god, and dike, order, rightness, a theodicy aims to affirm divine justice despite the prevalence of evil in the world. To vindicate God’s ways, Leibniz expounds the position known as philosophical optimism. In an appendix to his book, Leibniz encapsulates the heart of his argument:

God resolved to create a world, but he was bound by his goodness at the same time to choose such a world as should contain the greatest possible order, regularity, virtue, happiness. (As quoted by David Blumenfeld, “Perfection and Happiness,” The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley [Cambridge, England: CUP, 1995], p. 404.)

In framing their arguments, thinkers like Pascal, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz avoided a divorce between God and His world; for them, reason and faith were compatible. Yet their work led to a growing tension between religion and science. During their lifetimes, which saw so many triumphs attributable to human reason, sectarian passions receded and secularism came to the fore. The literature of the age, however, trained as skeptical an eye on the triumphs of reason as it did on the claims of theology. Closely examining the sincerity of human tolerance, the durability of new systems of order, and the motivations of those who constructed them, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, discerning a gap between reason and faith, held both up to question.
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An illustration of the crucial scene in Tartuffe: Orgon finally confronts the evidence.
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MOLIÈRE AND THE LIMITS OF EMPIRICISM

The failure of reason informs all of Molière’s plays, which always contain a figure who preaches reason only to be marginalized. Rather than focus on the rational exemplar, the raisonneur, Molière’s comedies bore in on the pretensions, intellectual and otherwise, of his more ridiculous characters, who make confused allusions to the philosophical writings of thinkers like Pascal and Descartes. One frequent butt of his jokes is a pompous or befuddled physician who embodies the kind of rigid, old-fashioned thinking that the new age was overturning. In Comedy in Context: Essays on Molière, H. Gaston Hall remarks “that the medicine Molière knew throughout his life was more authoritarian than empirical [and] could be formalistic, even ritualistic, to the detriment of a patient’s health” (University Press of Mississippi, 1984, p. 104). Berald, the raisonneur of Le Malade imaginaire, cites the hypocrisy of doctors who exploit their patients by prescribing regimens in whose efficacy they did not believe and actually recommends to the titular hypochondriac (his brother-in-law) that he study Molière’s plays to understand this phenomenon (III.3). In Tartuffe, Molière directly confronts the conflict between faith and reason by transferring his socially acceptable criticism of unexamined ritual as practiced by corrupt doctors to a man who unscrupulously preaches religion for his own profit. Early on, Cleante (whose role parallels that of Berald) accuses Orgon (his brother-in-law) of being blind (I.5.61); his preconceived notions about Tartuffe’s piety keep him from seeing what is right in front of him. Only when Elmire goads him into an experiment that proves Tartuffe’s desire to seduce her does Orgon see the truth that he has refused to acknowledge. The table scene provides empirical evidence of Tartuffe’s vices and thus demonstrates that the scientific method works. Yet reason cannot rescue Orgon and his family from Tartuffe’s evil web. Similarly, Molière’s insistence that he was not condemning religion in creating the character of Tartuffe did not convince the Church. Hypocrisy and corruption infect science and religion alike in Molière’s uncompromising comedy. To save the Pernelles, only the power of the Sun King, who, like God, “sees into our inmost hearts” (V.7.47) and thus dispenses “high Heaven’s justice” (61) will do. However ironically Molière intends this, Tartuffe suggests that God still needs to take an active role in the universe.

The grand orrery, an eighteenth-century planetarium that explains the structure of the solar system, designed by Thomas Wright in 1733, in the collection of the Science Museum in South Kensington, London.
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THE NEWTONIAN MOMENT

The Founding of the Royal Society: Induction and the Experimental Method

Across the English Channel, “the Invisible or Philosophical College,” a group of men whose disparate interests would be designated today as astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and the like, began to meet informally. This was the germ of the Royal Society of London, granted a charter by Charles I in 1642. A cross between a gentlemen’s club and a modern think tank, the Royal Society underwrote not merely the individual genius of many of these men but the methods through which they pursued their interests. To prove their ideas, the members designed and conducted experiments, following a method popularized by the English essayist Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626); among the Royal Society’s innovations was the office of Curator of Experiments. A modern definition of science assumes the indispensability of experimentation: before one can be sure of an intuition about the way the world works, one must test a hypothesis purporting to explain the phenomenon and then show that its results can be replicated. Among the presidents of the Royal Society was Isaac Newton, who prided himself on testing his theories empirically. Yet he described the universe in mathematical terms so little understood by his contemporaries that many criticized his work because it did not seem susceptible of experimental proof. As new scientific instruments were invented, however, the accuracy of Newton’s formulas became increasingly clear. The disjunction between experimentation and theory is only one of many contradictions in the character of Newton himself, whose mental life is almost an emblem of the complex relation between science and religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This is William Blake’s famous depiction of Isaac Newton as a noble but limited figure, brilliantly laying out a diagrammatic understanding of the universe while remaining pathetically indifferent to the grandeur of creation.
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Newton and the Mechanical Universe

The Habit of Modeling

A lonely child whose father died before he was born, left in his grandmother’s care when his mother married a second time, the young Isaac Newton amused himself by making mechanical models of tools and instruments like windmills and sundials. Although he seemed at first to be more manually than intellectually dexterous, from his earliest years he cultivated an essentially empirical method for understanding how things worked. Sent away from home to attend grammar school, he boarded in the home of an apothecary and became fascinated with the properties of the various chemicals that his host mixed in practicing his profession. When he finished school, his mother, widowed a second time, wished him to farm the family lands but grudgingly allowed him to study at Cambridge University. There he was transformed and soon went on to transform human knowledge.

Isaac Newton. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). London, Jussu Societatis Regiae ac Typis J. Streater, 1687.
From the Library of Congress, Rare Book & Special Collections Division (123)
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Elucidating the Machine

In the summer of 1661, at the relatively late age of nineteen, Isaac Newton entered Trinity College. There, he read everything that he could find about mathematics, which was not yet a standard subject in the undergraduate curriculum. He stayed up late to watch the passage of comets and study the skies; he bought a prism and discovered the secrets of color and light, taking the experimental method to a horrifying extreme by inserting a needle between his eye socket and his eye ball to test his theories about how light is perceived. Virtually self-taught, in a series of notebooks he recorded an astonishing array of new ideas, touching on the nature of light and movement. Then, in what have been called his anni mirabiles (wonder years), 1665-66, working at home because an outbreak of plague had closed the university down, Newton made the great discoveries that he was to refine in later years. When The Royal Society finally published—in Latin—Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in 1687, human understanding of the world changed.

Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Sir Isaac Newton (1702), in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery of Great Britain, from a site devoted to Medical and Science Photography maintained by RMIT University.
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Controversies and Contradictions: Newton as Theologian

Why did so lengthy a period pass between Newton’s initial discoveries and his publication of the Principia Mathematica (in 1687) and the Opticks, in 1704? Part of the reason lies in Newton’s intractable personality, part in his surprising interest in theology. Far from believing that his mathematical calculations demonstrating how the universe behaved challenged the revealed truth of religion, Newton saw no gap between the two modes of thought. His early introduction to chemicals seems also to have introduced him to alchemical theories. During the 1670s, like many of the Renaissance philosophers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Newton immersed himself in theology and the Bible. He spent time seeking to reconstruct the plan of Solomon’s Temple, and kept revising Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John in the hope of unraveling the divine plan. Deeply committed to his abstruse studies, which led him to a heretical anti-Trinitarian position known as Arianism, in 1675, he sought and was granted permission to hold a Cambridge fellowship without having to take holy orders, as was generally required. In that same year, he first attended a meeting of the Royal Society.

A portrait of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.
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Personal Antagonisms: Leibniz vs. Newton

Although Newton became president of the Royal Society in the early 1700s, his relationship with several members of that club had been acrimonious, as was his rivalry with the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz. Each man appears to have discovered calculus independently, but because Newton delayed publication of his findings for so long, Leibniz believed that he deserved credit for primacy. The unpleasantness between them is not the only instance of Newton’s troubled relationships with his peers; he suffered what we would probably call a nervous breakdown in 1692-93 and was prey to paranoid anxieties for much of his life. He never married and found little lasting satisfaction in his quest for new knowledge, as this poignant statement suggests:

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been
only a boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean
of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (As quoted by Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times [New York: The Free Press-Macmillan, 1984], p. 574.)

As the catalogue to the New York Public Library exhibit on The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture explains, “This frontispiece to Voltaire’s Elemens de la philosophie de Neuton (Amsterdam, 1738), a celebrated popularization of Newton’s science, shows the author’s lover and collaborator, Mme du Chatelet, reflecting the light of truth, emanating from Newton, onto the inspired Voltaire.”
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A Symbol of Knowledge

Despite his petty quarrels with men of great learning and distinction, despite the difficulty that even well educated readers had in comprehending the Principia once published, despite resistance to acknowledging the magnitude of his intellectual accomplishment on the part of French adherents of Descartes and German adherents of Leibniz, Newton became a widely accepted symbol of the triumph of human reason. Artists and writers made his image and his name a sign of universal order. When Newton died, Alexander Pope wrote a famous epitaph that is now inscribed in the room where Newton was born:

Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.

This brilliant couplet encapsulates the Enlightenment’s ambivalence about the realms of religion and science: it appeals to God as the ultimate creator, but attributes the explication of God’s mysteries to a human being. God the watchmaker presides and delegates. God’s first words in Genesis are “Let there be light”; but it took Newton to explain light in his Opticks.

A pen-and-ink drawing by the Countess of Burlington of Alexander Pope playing cards, showing his deformity. Readers of The Rape of the Lock will recognize the centrality of cards in the social life of the privileged in the early eighteenth century.
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English literary responses to the Newtonian Moment

Pope and Science

Twenty years after Leibniz published his Theodicy, Alexander Pope popularized philosophical optimism in what is probably the most influential poem of the eighteenth century. An Essay on Man, published in 1733, was immediately translated into more than twenty languages, including not only all the standard European languages but also Icelandic, Turkish, and Welsh. Although he suffered all his life from physical deformity and illness, Pope did not see his personal condition as evidence of divine inattention. Rather, he fostered belief in the goodness of God’s plan. An Essay on Man cautions human beings against generalizing from their limited perspectives to condemn a system that, he argues, must of necessity include pain and evil. Pope explicitly refers to Newton in Epistle II of An Essay on Man, subtitled “Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Himself as an Individual,” shifting the argument launched in Epistle I, “Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to the Universe.” Arguing throughout the poem against intellectual presumption, Pope ridicules the brilliant achievements of seventeenth-century mathematicians and astronomers:

Go, wond’rous creature! Mount where Science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old Time, and regulate the Sun . . . .
Go, teach eternal Wisdom how to rule—
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!
(19-22, 29-30)

In the next stanza, however, he acknowledges—while still deprecating—
the extraordinary genius of Sir Isaac Newton:

Superior beings, when of late they saw
A mortal Man unfold all Nature’s law,
Admir’d such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And shewed a NEWTON as we show an Ape.
(31-34)

From a site maintained for a children’s literature course by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, an illustration from The Newtonian System of Philosophy, written and published in 1761 by John Newbery, the bookseller whose name is remembered in the prize given for the best children’s book of the year. The purported author of this children’s text is one Tom Telescope, shown here explaining the Newtonian laws of motion. The ultimate source is the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, Bloomington.
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A New Concept of Science

Pope’s use of the word “science” deserves comment. Up until the eighteenth century, science, from the past participle of the Latin verb scire, to know, meant knowledge in general. The term for the activity that Newton engaged in, and the one that he and his contemporaries used, was natural philosophy, which goes back to Aristotle at least. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1725 as the date for the first recorded appearance of science to mean “a branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrable truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought under general laws and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth within its own domain.” In the original version of Pope’s mock-epic, The Dunciad, published in 1728, the word still denotes a body of knowledge. In this poem, Pope defames Lewis Theobald, who had criticized Pope’s edition of Shakespeare. “Tibbald,” as Pope spells the name, presides over a universe of dunces and urges his followers to reclaim the realm of intellect, “where each Science lifts its modern Type, / Hist’ry her Pot, Divinity his Pipe (III.191-92). Neither history nor divinity would be classified as a science in our contemporary discourse.

‘Tis yours, a Bacon or a Locke to blame,
A Newton’s Genius, or a Seraph’s flame:
But O! with one, immortal One dispense,
The source of Newton’s Light, of Bacon’s Sense!
Content, each Emanation of his fires
That beams on earth, each Virtue he inspires,
Each Art he prompts, each Charm he can create,
What-e’er he gives, are giv’n for You to hate.
Persist, by all divine in Man un-aw’d,
But learn, ye Dunces! Not to scorn your GOD.
The Dunciad Variorium, Book III, ll. 213-22, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963)

Here, Pope again cites Newton as a vessel of divine power, while the corrupt imbecility of the dunces is drawn from “the great Anarch” (339), the ruler of Chaos and Old Night. These forces predated the creation of the world and to them the benighted modern world that Pope decries returns. The original Dunciad concludes with the triumph of Dulness, as “universal Darkness covers all” (356). In Newton’s realm of light, however, science—verifiable and mathematically based—was about to triumph.

From a French edition of Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1838, with J. J. Granville’s illustrations, this scene comes from the beginning of Part 3, Chapter 2, of Swift’s book.
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Jonathan Swift and the Flying Island of Laputa

Swift and Pope shared their contempt for the false gods of eighteenth-century English culture; if Pope is ambivalent about the new science, however, Swift seems unequivocally to oppose it. He travesties the Royal Society in Part III of Gulliver’s Travels, as in Gulliver’s description of the race of the Laputans:

Their outward garments were adorned with the figures of suns, moons, and stars,
interwoven with those of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords, and many more instruments of music, unknown to us in Europe. . . . It seems,
the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they
neither can speak, or attend to the discourses of others . . . .

So disengaged are these geniuses from the real world, notes Gulliver, that their houses are all crooked and they live in terror of cosmic disasters that keeps them from enjoying normal life. The cosmic disasters that he catalogues include “a brush from the tail of the last comet,” a reference to Halley’s comet. Edmund Halley (1656-1742), who calculated the orbit of this most famous comet, based his work on Newton’s theory of gravitation and was one of Newton’s supporters (he supervised the printing of Newton’s Principia for the Royal Society).

A portrait of Voltaire in his lively prime, painted around 1735 by Quentin de La Tour.
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Voltaire and the Defense of Reason

The Enlightenment found one of its supreme proselytizers in the long-lived and prolific Voltaire. Although neither an original scientist nor a great poet, Voltaire was deeply engaged in the intellectual ferment of the eighteenth century, which he interpreted and popularized.

According to the Web site of the National Physical Laboratory of Great Britain, this tree is “derived from a graft taken from an old tree in Newton’s mother’s garden in Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire.”
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Expounding the Empirical Method

Much of Voltaire’s life was spent in exile from France, where he encountered censorship, snobbery, and intolerance. In 1726, having been sent to the Bastille because of a quarrel with a nobleman, Voltaire was allowed to leave prison for England, where he stayed for three years. There he learned English and increased his admiration for the literary genius of Pope and Swift, who befriended him, and for the inductive methods variously practiced by Newton and John Locke. Originally sent to a friend in France, his Lettres Philosophiques were published in 1732 and then were translated into English and published in 1733. In these letters, Voltaire reports on the life of reason among enlightened Englishmen. Voltaire had hoped to make the acquaintance of Isaac Newton, but he sought an appointment too late. Voltaire went instead to Newton’s funeral and subsequently interviewed his niece. In Letter XV, and then again in Elemens de la philosophie de Newton (1738), Voltaire told the story that schoolchildren have ever since associated with Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravity:

One day in the year 1666, Newton, having returned to the country and seeing
the fruits of a tree fall, fell, according to what his niece . . . has told me into
a deep meditation about the cause that thus attracts bodies in a line . . . .
(As quoted by Christianson, p. 78)

This fine example of empirical reasoning impressed Voltaire, who contrasted it with the deductive reasoning of Descartes; so well did Voltaire explain the nature of Newton’s work that his book was immediately translated into English.

A picture of the Lisbon earthquake at sea; compare the description of Candide’s experience in Chapter 5 of Voltaire’s philosophic fable.
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Questioning Orthodoxy and Optimism

For all his success as a cultural mediator, Voltaire preferred to think of himself as a playwright. In a tragedy, Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophete, taken from an episode in the life of Muhammad, Voltaire seems to be attacking all religion as superstition. In 1742, performances of Mahomet were canceled in Paris, and Voltaire wrote to his patron, Frederick of Prussia, complaining that as the hypocrites had persecuted Molière, the fanatics did him (see W. H. Barber, “Voltaire and Molière,” Molière: Stage and Study, eds. W. D. Howarth and Merlin Thomas [Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1973], p. 209). Voltaire’s most sustained critique of religious orthodoxy, however, arose in the aftermath of the dreadful Lisbon earthquake of 1755. In his Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon, Voltaire fixes on Pope, whose Essay on Man he had once so much admired, as the spokesman of philosophical optimism, which in his mind, the Lisbon catastrophe had forever disproved. Whatever is cannot be thought right if so many people can suffer. In Candide, written four years after the disaster, Voltaire has found a better scapegoat than Pope, choosing to lampoon Leibniz through his portrait of Pangloss. Although Voltaire oversimplified the claims of philosophical optimism in order to undermine them, the brilliance of his satire has permanently tainted Leibnizian efforts at theodicy. Moral behavior requires the possibility of free will, but every time a character is about to assert his belief in free will, the narrative silences him. The professional philosophers of Candide either discredit or trivialize it: “Pangloss asserted that he had always suffered horribly; but having once declared that everything was marvelously well, he continued to repeat the opinion and didn’t believe a word of it” (p. 579).

OVERVIEW: REASSERTING THE SPIRITUAL

As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the brutality to which the French Revolution was descending changed the subject. By the nineteenth century, science and technology dislodged natural philosophy. The schism between divine order and human invention that Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz had each avoided could no longer be denied. Thus William Blake deplores Newton’s “Particles of light” for promulgating a diminished view of the universe, and distances himself from the project of Enlightenment:

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, Mock on, ‘tis all in vain.
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
(Volume E, p. 788)