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Providence, Predestination and Progress: or, did the Enlightenment Fail?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

J. C. D. Clark
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Early in 2002, the earth experienced a near-miss: an asteroid passed within a whisker (in astronomical terms) of the planet. Had it struck, it would have done so with a force six hundred times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. No observer saw it coming, and it was tracked only after it had passed; yet this event produced little surprise. We already knew that the secure foundations of modernism had moved beneath our feet: the idea of continental drift; then pollution; then global climate change; then epidemic disease, AIDS; now the realization that life on this planet is regularly challenged, and at longer periods catastrophically transformed, by the impact of extraterrestrial objects. Asteroids are rational in the sense that they obey mechanical laws well understood since Newton; yet their intrusion into our world says nothing of human or divine reason, and seems to re-assert the old doctrine: chance rules all.

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Research Article
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Albion , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Winter 2003 , pp. 559 - 589
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Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 2004

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References

1 This essay began as an address to a conference entitled “Ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century” held by the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies in September 2002; for comments I am grateful to the audience, and to David Bergeron, Richard Eversole, Richard Hardin, and John Walsh.

2 It is taken as axiomatic in this article that “the Enlightenment” is a polemical term devised in the nineteenth century to place interpretations on what had happened in the eighteenth: the term did not therefore correspond to any clearly-demarcated eighteenth-century phenomena, and could be made to mean whatever its nineteenth- and twentieth-century users wished. Its use here attends to, without endorsing, the meanings conventionally ascribed to the term in recent discourse.

3 Porter, Roy, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000), p. 13 Google Scholar. This essay is intended as a tribute to my late colleague, and an attempt to honor his memory by continuing our debate.

4 “mainstream [religious] observance became divested of supernatural and spiritual elements…. The new hopefulness was often predicated upon claims to lay bare the springs of human nature…”; Hume thought he could show by observation “the constant and universal principles of human nature”; “Prayers and pieties continued, but in the ubiquitous worldly atmosphere devout habits of trusting to Providence were challenged by a new eagerness to practice self-help and take charge where possible”; “The sick no longer needed to abandon themselves to their fate: knowledge and skill would save lives”; “The programmatic shift from Christian Providentialism to more secular, scientific world views…”: Porter, , Enlightenment, pp. 128, 161, 177, 206, 211, 229 Google Scholar.

5 Baker, Keith Michael and Reill, Peter Harms, eds., What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford, 2001)Google Scholar. For other sorts of qualifications to the use of the term, see for example Black, Jeremy, Eighteenth-Century Europe (2nd ed.; London, 1999), pp. 246-62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 “the problem lay in ensuring that private fulfilment did not subvert public orderliness”: Porter, , Enlightenment, p. 18 Google Scholar.

7 Porter's argument that “Probabilistic thinking to some extent replaced Providence” (ibid., p. 149 and elsewhere) is evidenced only by reference to modern work on mathematical probability; Porter did not balance it against evidence on Providence. Although historians of mathematics still incline to a “triumphalist” view, for a more nuanced account see, for example, Shapiro, Barbara J., Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983)Google Scholar. Shapiro argues that the empirical and the probable rose together in seventeenth-century England, so strengthening the claims of Providence.

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10 For a similar and widespread willingness to read social and political meanings into natural phenomena, see Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971 Google Scholar; Harmondsworth, 1973), treating such ideas as “primitive survivals” (pp. 105, 125); Wilson, Dudley, Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (London, 1993)Google Scholar; Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katharine, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Jankovic, Vladimir, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather (Chicago, 2001)Google Scholar and idem, “The Politics of Sky Battles in Early Hanoverian Britain,” Journal of British Studies 41 (2002): 429-59; Burns, William E., An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, politics and providence in England 1657–1727 (Manchester, 2002)Google Scholar. It will be argued here that although this “culture of wonders” declined in the early eighteenth century, providential discourse as a whole did not, and is not to be understood (cf. Thomas, , Religion, p. 129 Google Scholar) as a survival, inconsistent with other intellectual disciplines.

11 “The heavens when they be pleased may turn the wheel/Of Fortune round, when we that are dejected/May be again raised to our former height” (Act 1, scene 2).

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13 The Entertainment perform 'd at the Theatre-Royal in Dorset-Garden, at Drawing the Lottery call'd the Wheel of Fortune: Being the Speeches addrest to the Spectators, as Prologues and Epilogues (London, 1698), pp. 1–2 Google Scholar. This contrasts with Porter's argument that “The staging of public lotteries-their philosophy of luck seemingly at odds with Providentialism—symbolizes this more secular bent” associated with the management of risk; “the taming of chance” was “the denial or distancing of the transcendental”: Enlightenment, pp. 208-09.

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16 Fielding, Henry, Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder. Containing, Above thirty Cases, in which this dreadful Crime has been brought to Light, in the most extraordinary and miraculous Manner; collected from various authors, antient and modern (London, 1752)Google Scholar; cf. A Warning Piece against the Crime of Murder: or, an Account of many Extraordinary and most Providential Discoveries of Secret Murders. From whence it will appear. That, however secretly they are committed, Providence will interpose, and bring them to Light and Punishment (London [1750])Google Scholar.

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25 Young, Thomas, Monumental Pillars: or, A Collection of Remarkable Instances of the Judgment, Providence, and Grace of God (London, 1818)Google Scholar.

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33 [Bowden, John], The Explosion: or. An Alarming Providential Check to Immorality (Chester, 1773)Google Scholar.

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40 Cohen, “Isaac Newton's Principia,” points out that Newton's views on God became publicly apparent only with the Queries published in the second (Latin) edition of the Opticks (1706) and the General Scholium written in 1712-13 for the second edition of the Principia (1713), but that they were present from Newton's earliest drafts.

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42 Bentley, Richard, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism….In eight sermons (London, 1693)Google Scholar; Guerlac, Henry and Jacob, M. C., “Bentley, Newton and Providence (The Boyle Lectures Once More),” Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969): 307-18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacob, Margaret C., The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689-1720 (Hassocks, 1976), ch. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “The Boyle Lectures and the Social Meaning of Newtonianism.”

43 Quoted in Harrison, Peter, “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 537 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, an article which documents similar later arguments in William Whiston and Samuel Clarke.

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64 Burns, R. M., The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

65 Laws of nature had formerly been chiefly a philosophical construct, understood no longer as immanent principles in nature but by analogy with the commands of an omnipotent Deity. See Oakley, Francis, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: the Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature,” Church History 30 (1960): 433-57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Milton, John R., “The origin and development of the concept of the ‘laws of nature’,” European Journal of Sociology 22 (1981): 173-95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrison, , “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature” (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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89 Hobbes, Thomas, Of Liberty and Necessitie (London, 1654)Google Scholar; Bramhall, John, A Defence of True Liberty from Antecedent and Extrinsecall Necessity, being an answer to a late book of Mr Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, intituled, “A Treatise of Liberty and Necessity” (London, 1655)Google Scholar; Hobbes, Thomas, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (London, 1656)Google Scholar; Bramhall, John, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last animadversions in the case concerning liberty, and universal necessity (London, 1658)Google Scholar.

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102 Girolamo Zanchi (1516–90), a Calvinist theologian.

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