BY SPREADING THEIR blasphemous rumours on Top of the Pops in 1984, Depeche Mode incurred the wrath of The Sun newspaper and Britain’s self-appointed moral guardian, Mary Whitehouse. But if Martin Gore had published his verses in 1750, he would have found himself in far worse trouble — atheists were routinely locked up during the eighteenth century.
And yet many Enlightenment thinkers found that they were inexorably drawn to deny the existence of God. By looking to science for the answers religion had formerly provided, the Age of Reason had already relegated God to a less conspicuous role. Newton’s scientific view of the universe held that nature and the physical world operated by a kind of clockwork. The machine was vast and complex, but essentially logical, meaning that its secrets would, given time, be discovered and understood. But the very existence of this clockwork implied for Newton that there must have been, or still be a clockmaker — and this is where God fits into the scheme.
Gravity may put ye planets into motion but without ye divine power it could never put them into such a circulating motion as they have about ye Sun, and therefore for this as well as other reasons, I am compelled to ascribe ye frame of this systeme to an intelligent Agent.1
Newton’s ‘Rolls Royce’ universe dominated the Western imagination until long after his death, but for Scottish philosopher David Hume, writing in 1750, it wasn’t nearly good enough. Hume objected to Newton’s argument for God from design. If the universe is the work of a supremely intelligent overseer, he asked, then how does Newton account for the existence of evil? Does God make mistakes, or does he mean to see us suffer?2
Hume, as Karen Armstrong notes, chose to leave his refutations of Newton — which implied his atheism without ever stating it — unpublished, but Denis Diderot was not so cautious.3 The French Philosophe was imprisoned in 1749 for publishing ‘A Letter to the Blind for the Use of Those Who See’ — the strongest dose of atheism yet administered to his century. The letter presents an argument between a Newtonian called Mr Holmes and Nicholas Saunderson, a blind professor. ‘Diderot’, writes Armstrong, ‘makes Saunderson ask Holmes how the argument from design could be reconciled with such “monsters” and accidents as himself, who demonstrated anything but intelligent and benevolent planning.’4
They could lock Diderot up, but by this point, the horse had well and truly bolted. The rational enquiries of the Enlightenment philosophers had left humanity with a God who resembled the one in Depeche Mode’s song to an extraordinary degree — a deity who was incompetent at best, malicious at worst. Diderot, for one, declared that he could do without such a being, and many more would come to the same conclusion.
The romantics inherited this unlovable and useless God, which was a shame, because with an alienating industrial future rising in front of them, and the bitter disappointments of the Revolution still lingering behind, they could really have used a ‘loving father’ of the kind imagined by Schiller in his ‘Ode to Joy’. The great sense of crisis in romantic literature comes to a large extent from a feeling of having been shot by both sides — betrayed by the cult of reason on the one hand, and by a disappearing God on the other. Keats, in 1819, found himself in exactly this position, as his biographer Robert Gittings describes:
He did not believe…in the perfectibility of earthly life; indeed, perfect happiness in life, he saw, would make death intolerable… Yet the Christian idea that the common hardships of this world were only a miserable interlude before the blessed state of another struck him as ‘a little circumscribed, straightened notion’.5
Keats admired Voltaire. At a dinner with Wordsworth and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, he had raised his glass in the direction of Voltaire’s likeness and drunk his good health. For Keats, Voltaire’s determination to do away with the ‘pious frauds of religion’ made him a hero. Some time later, back at Haydon’s and standing before the same painting, he placed his hand over his heart, lowered his head and said of Voltaire, ‘There is the being I will bow to.’6
But while he admired Voltaire’s intellectual bravery, the thorough-going rationalism of the Philosophes did not square with Keats’s feeling for mystery — a quality he believed to be essential to poetry. ‘He could not be satisfied with a complete and negative scepticism,’ writes Robert Gittings in his biography of the poet. ‘Somewhere, he must find a faith.’7