Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T10:43:41.607Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Darwin’s Church*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Paul White
Paul White*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

From the war of nature, from famine and death … endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

(Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species)

Much has been made of the roots of Darwinian theory in the work of Thomas Malthus, who argued for the inevitability of strife, suffering and death following on the scarcity of resources and the tendency of populations to multiply without limit. It has been noted that a Malthusian pessimism about human nature re-emerged in the 1830s, darkening the political discussions surrounding the welfare of the poor, and informing the legislation of the Poor Laws in those crucial years in which Darwin formulated his natural selection theory. Historians have also focussed on the harshness of the social Darwinism that was taken up by theorists later in the century, in contrast to the more optimistic, Lamarckian evolution of Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin and others. Yet in the closing passage of Origin of Species, Darwin extended his famous metaphor of the entangled bank, offering a form of redemption through struggle toward higher forms of life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 333 - 352
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Elizabeth Smith for research on Darwin’s involvement in the parish church of Downe, and to the ground-breaking scholarship of James Moore on Darwin and religion.

References

1 Malthus, Thomas, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1789)Google Scholar. On Darwin’s reading of Malthus, see Young, Robert, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge, 1985), 23–55 Google Scholar. On the revival of Malthus in the 1830s, see Desmond, Adrian and Moore, James, Darwin (London, 1991), 153–54, 196–97, 264–68 Google ScholarPubMed; Waterman, A. M. C., Revolution, Economics, and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798—1833 (Cambridge, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Bowler, Peter, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Theories of Evolution in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore, MD, 1983)Google Scholar; Paul, Diane B., ‘Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics’, in Hodge, J. and Radick, G., eds, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge, 2003), 214–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 On the redemptive strain in Darwin’s theory, see Richards, Robert, ‘Darwin on Mind, Morals and Emotions’, in Hodge, and Radick, , eds, Cambridge Companion, 92–115.Google Scholar

4 See, e.g., Darwin, Charles, Autobiography: With Original Omissions Restored (London, 1958), 122 Google Scholar. The time spent on each of his publications was tallied in his journal: Beer, Gavin de, ‘Darwin’s Journal’, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series 2 (1959), 1–21.Google Scholar

5 Brooke, John Hedley, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; idem, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Edinburgh, 2000)Google Scholar; Dixon, Thomas, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, James, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Browne, Janet, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (London, 2002), 10—13 Google Scholar; Secord, James, ‘Darwin and the Breeders: A Social History’, in Kohn, David, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 519—42 Google Scholar; White, Paul, ‘Correspondence as a Medium of Reception and Appropriation’, in Glick, T. and Engels, E.-M., eds, The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 2 vols (London, 2008), 1: 54–65.Google Scholar

7 Letter from Charles Kingsley, 18 November 1859, in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. Burkhardt, F., Smith, S. et al., 17 vols so far (Cambridge, 1985-), 7: 379. Volumes 1—14 are available online at <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>.Google Scholar

8 Beatty, John and Hale, Piers, ‘Water Babies: An Evolutionary Fairy Tale’, Endeavour 32 (2008), 141–46.Google ScholarPubMed

9 On liberal Anglican theology and the Broad Church movement, see Norman, E. R., The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Reardon, B. M. G., Liberal Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar; Sanders, Charles, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, NC, 1942)Google Scholar. On accommodation with Darwinism, see, in this volume, Sheils, William, ‘Nature and Modernity: J. C. Atkinson and Rural Ministry in England, c. 1850–1900’, 366–95.Google Scholar

10 Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species, 2nd edn (London, 1860), 481.Google Scholar

11 The changes to Darwin’s text can be traced in The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text, ed. Peckham, Morse (Philadelphia, PA, 1959).Google Scholar

12 Letter from Charles Lyell, 15 June 1860 (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 8: 255).

13 Gray, Asa, Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology: A Free Examination of Darwin’s Treatise On the Origin of Species and of Its American Reviewers (London, 1861).Google ScholarPubMed

14 Letter to Asa Gray, 17 September [1861] (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 9: 266).

15 Letter to Asa Gray, 11 December [1861] (ibid. 9: 368).

16 Letter from Mary Boole, 13 December 1866 (ibid. 14: 423–24). For biographical details on Boole, see Ogilvie, M. and Harvey, J., eds, The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, 2 vols (London, 2000), 1: 158–59.Google Scholar

17 Letter to Mary Boole, 14 December 1866 (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 14: 425–26).

18 Letter from Francis Boott, 29 February 1860 (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 8: 113).

19 Letter from Francis Boott, 26 December 1862 (ibid. 10: 627).

20 See, for example, the discussion of the cult of Comtism and the religion of humanity in Dixon, Thomas, The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Royle, Edward, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester, 1974)Google Scholar; idem, Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain 1866–1915 (Manchester, 1980).Google Scholar

21 Letter from Thomas Huxley, 20 July 1868 (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 16: 634–35).

22 Galton, Francis, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (London, 1874).Google Scholar

23 Letter 12041, to John Fordyce, 7 May 1879 (Darwin Correspondence Project, <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2000).

24 Letter to Ernst Haeckel, 12 April [1867] (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 15: 219).

25 Letter from Leo Lesquereux, 14 December 1864 (ibid. 12: 463).

26 Letter to J. D. Hooker, 19 January [1865] (ibid. 13: 29).

27 On religious belief and practice in the Darwin and Wedgwood families, see Keynes, Randal, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (London, 2001).Google Scholar

28 Engel, Arthur, From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

29 Letter to Caroline Darwin, 25–26 April [1832] (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 1: 225).

30 Letter from E. A. Darwin, 18 August [1832] (ibid. 1: 258).

31 Letter to W. D. Fox, [9–12 August 1835] (ibid. 1: 460).

32 Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844, ed. Barrett, Paul et al. (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; letters from Emma Wedgwood, [21–22 November 1838], [23 January 1839], and [c. February 1839] (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 4: 122, 169, 173). See also Darwin’s retrospective account in Autobiography, 85–96, and Moore, James, ‘Of Love and Death:Why Darwin “Gave Up Christianity”’, in idem, ed., History, Humanity, and Evolution (Cambridge, 1989), 195–229.Google ScholarPubMed

33 See Keynes, Annie’s Box, 113–22, 222.

34 Moore, James, ‘Darwin of Down: The Evolutionist as Squarson-Naturalist’, in Kohn, D., ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 435–81.Google Scholar

35 Walters, S. M., Darwin’s Mentor:John Stevens Henslow (Cambridge, 2001).Google Scholar

36 Innes, J. B., Five Sermons Preached in Advent and on the Festival of the Holy Innocents, 1851 in the Parish Church of Downe, Kent (London, 1852), 3–4, 12–13, 62 Google Scholar; Darwin, Autobiography, 87.

37 Letter 7776, to J. B. Innes, 29 May [1871] (Darwin Correspondence Project, <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2009).

38 Letter 11768, from J. B. Innes, 1 December 1878 (Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2009).

39 Letter to J. B. Innes, 1 September [1863] (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 11:616).

40 Letter from S.J. O’H. Horsman, 2 June [1868] (ibid. 16: 556).

41 Letter to J. B. Innes, 15 June [1868] (ibid. 16: 581).

42 Letter to J. B. Innes, 1 December 1868 (ibid. 16: 871).

43 Letter to J. B. Innes, 10 December 1868 (ibid. 16: 888).

44 Letter from J. B. Innes, 18 December 1868 (ibid. 16: 901).

45 Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church, 2 vols, 3rd edn (London, 1971), 1: 207–13 Google Scholar; Knight, Frances, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge, 1995), 116–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 Letter to J. B. Innes, 1 December 1868 (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 16: 871).

47 Letter from J. B. Innes, 14 December 1868 (ibid. 16: 890).

48 Letter 9122, from Darwin to the Down School Board, [November-December 1873] (Darwin Correspondence Project, <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2009); Letter from G. S. Ffinden to Emma Darwin, 24 December 1873, cited in Moore,’Darwin of Down’, 471.

49 Letter from Emma Darwin to Innes, J. B., in Stecher, R. M., ‘The Darwin-Innes Letters: The Correspondence of an Evolutionist with his Vicar, 1848—1884’, Annals of Science 17 (1961), 201–58, at 239.Google Scholar

50 Letters from Ffinden to John Lubbock, 1875, cited in Moore,’Darwin of Down’, 471–72.

51 Ibid.

52 Knight, Nineteenth-Century Church, 70–74.

53 Moore,’Darwin of Down’, 473.

54 Letter 12879, to J. W. C. Fegan, [December 1880 – February 1881] (Darwin Correspondence Project, <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2009).

55 Moore,’Darwin of Down’, 473.

56 Farrar, R., The Life of Frederick Farrar (London, 1904), 109 Google Scholar. See the account of the burial in Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 664—77.

57 Stanley, A. P., Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey (London, 1868), 292.Google Scholar

58 Stanley, A. P., Dedication of Westminster Abbey: A Sermon (Oxford, 1866), 19–20.Google Scholar