The puzzle of the English Enlightenment

Anticlericalism has long been integral to our idea of the Enlightenment. This used to encourage a heroic mythology of secularization, in which reason did battle with religion, free-thought with bigotry. Few historians today would endorse so Manichaean a picture, for European thought in the eighteenth century is now seen to have been characterized by an ameliorated Christianity rather than by a militant crusade to overthrow it. Yet even so, the attack on priestcraft, on clerical dogmatism and religious intolerance, remains stubbornly central to the story of Europe's passage from Reformation zeal to Enlightenment eirenicism.

The historical prominence of anticlericalism renders England's position puzzling. For it is commonly supposed that, in the words of a Times leader in 1984, England ‘has had no intellectually sanctioned tradition of anticlericalism since the Reformation’ – and a forteriori no Enlightenment. John Pocock, deploying one of his more colourful metaphors, has written that ‘to try to articulate the phrase “the English Enlightenment” is to encounter inhibition; an ox sits upon the tongue’. The English, it is held, by disposing of Laudian and Calvinist fanaticism in the Civil War, and popery and tyranny in the Glorious Revolution, were able to breathe easily the air of intellectual liberty. On this view, Anglicanism was too etiolated to be provocative. Consequently, there was ‘simply no infâme to be crushed’ and the voices of the intelligentsia lacked the antagonism inflamed by Continental Catholic clergies.

Despite this, there have been two attempts to give substance to the notion of an English Enlightenment. The first, expressed by Roy Porter, argues that because we have now come to see that it is mistaken to define the Enlightenment monolithically, as an atheistic or revolutionary assault on an ancien régime, it follows that England need not be bereft of an Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was not a crusade but a tone of voice, a sensibility. It preferred civility to enthusiasm, experience to metaphysics, the pursuit of happiness to the rule of the saints, the benevolent ethics of Jesus to the wrath of an unforgiving Father. And these goals ‘throve in England within piety’. Pocock has similarly attempted to shift the ox. The English Enlightenment is not less substantial, if harder to perceive, for being ‘conservative and in several ways clerical’, the property of ruling elites rather than of clandestine rebels, an ‘enlightenment sans philosophes’.