Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

1. The Supernatural is Dead

April, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the western Alps, in the old market town of Morzines, another war was raging, this one pitting the locals against the legions of Hell. 

The regional authorities, confronted with an outbreak of townspeople writhing in convulsions, entering trances, shrieking in weird tongues, and suffering from other diabolical whatnot, had begged the central government for help, writing: 

“To conclude, we will say: That our impression is that all this is supernatural, in cause and in effects; according to the rules of sound logic, and according to everything that theology, ecclesiastical history, and the Gospel teach and tell us, we declare it our considered opinion that this is truly demonic possession.”

Dr. Augustin Constans, Inspector General of the Insane Department (inspecteur général du service des aliénés) was dispatched from Paris to investigate. The Doctor later reported,

“Arriving in Morzines on April 26, I found the entire population in a state of depression difficult to describe; everyone was deep in morbid gloom, living in constant fear of finding themselves or their loved ones consumed by devils.”

Dr. Constans’ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order. Undoubtedly aware of this precedent, Dr. Constans rounded up the possessed and subjected them to: …an examination. From which, all of his new patients emerged non-tortured and unburnt.  

Dr. Constans, in keeping with the latest Parisian fashions, was a man of science who rejected all accounts of the supernatural as sickness, hallucination, or counterfeit. He believed in neither witches, demons, nor demonic possession. He refused to even entertain the supernatural as a possibility, and his close-minded conclusion as to the odd goings-on in town: an epidemic of hysterical demonopathy.

But what about the regional authorities and their “sound logic”? They had asked for an exorcist and got an egghead. In today’s parlance, the regional authorities and the good doctor had competing established priors. They saw the same phenomena, e.g., a villager doing acrobatic somersaults while spontaneously bleeding and blaspheming the Lord, and each thereby confirmed their radically different preexisting beliefs. It’s obviously the devil versus it’s clearly a delusion. The battle over how to interpret such phenomena was yet another war, one that had been going on for centuries by the time Dr. Constans finally reached this almost inaccessible valley, the final holdout of the old beliefs. This peculiar incident in the little town of Morzines, encapsulates 1500 years in the psychological history of Europe, and marks one of the final skirmishes in a long, strange campaign: the rise of the spirit of rationalism.

2. Enter Lecky 

Today, there's a blue plaque at 38 Onslow Gardens, Chelsea, London, which reads “W.E.H. Lecky, 1838 - 1903, Historian and Essayist, lived and died here”. For additional details, we may rely on Elisabeth van Dedem Lecky’s straightforwardly titled A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky By His Wife. 

Lecky was born in Ireland in 1838 to a distinguished family of scholars and government officials. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, where “in addition to the ordinary university course, he went through that appointed for divinity students…He confesses to have been perhaps culpably indifferent to college ambitions and competitions, and he threw himself with intense eagerness into a long course of private reading, chiefly relating to the formation and history of opinions.” 

He graduated in 1859. Having inherited the family’s lands by this time, he was under no obligation to work, and, as he later wrote, “For four or five very happy years after I left college I lived in almost complete solitude and in pure thought.” He traveled all over Europe, holing up in libraries, and reading obscure tomes, e.g., “I have been gathering together a large and rare library of old Latin and French books on witchcraft…I am waiting with great impatience for a treatise on the Devil by Psellus, a Byzantine author of the eleventh century, having got which, I mean to go to a little village in the mountains [the Pyrenees] till I have mastered it.” Already a thinker, but in dread of being considered an idler, Lecky decided to become an author.  

His thoughts began to center “on the laws of the rise and fall of speculative opinions.” Writing a friend in March, 1862, he says, “It is quite impossible to study theology to any good purpose if you do not at the same time study history…I am convinced that scarcely anything throws so much light on theology as a subject which, though I think one of the most curious in the whole scope of literature, is amongst the least attended to - the history of witchcraft.” By November, 1862, he reports, “I am hard at work, and have been for a long time, on an enormous book.”

The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (the “History of Rationalism” hereafter) was published in January 1865 in two volumes: Part I and Part II, (the links are to revised editions). The book was an immediate success. Friedrich Nietzsche, for one, read it closely in the German translation.  

Lecky became an established member of the London literary world, and married Elisabeth van Dedem in 1871. The newlyweds settled in London in the house to which the blue plaque is now affixed. Ms. Lecky’s Memoir details both the happy life they spent together and her husband’s subsequent adventures as an author, man of letters, and member of parliament. Lecky died, in his library, in 1903. 

3. The History of Rationalism

The History of Rationalism is an essay on the decay of medievalism and the emergence of rationalism. No precise definitions are attempted. Medievalism refers to that collection of Christian beliefs and theological dogmas that explained all aspects of reality and had dominated Europe for 1500 years since first emerging triumphant from the declining Roman Empire. 

As for rationalism, Lecky explains:

“My object in the present work has been to trace the history of the spirit of Rationalism: by which I understand not any class of definite doctrines or criticisms, but rather a certain cast of thought, or bias of reasoning, which has during the last three centuries gained a marked ascendancy in Europe...[Rationalism] leads men...to subordinate dogmatic theology to the dictates of reason and conscience…It predisposes men...to attribute all kinds of phenomena to natural rather than miraculous causes. [It] diminishes the influence of fear as the motive of duty [and] establishes the supremacy of conscience…Most remarkable of all is the decay of persecution [i.e., witches and heretics are no longer being slaughtered.]

He notes as a general axiom that:

“The number of persons who have a rational basis for their belief is probably infinitesimal.”

(Nietzsche underlined this sentence and wrote “Ja!” in the margin). 

He then develops his general thesis that rationalism did not triumph by the force of logic because people are not logical. Most people think just like they eat, i.e., with whatever utensils they grew up with. The general intellectual beliefs of a given society are therefore not shaped by detailed arguments or other intellectual causes, but are modified by a host of social, political, and industrial influences.

Using the history of witchcraft as his first test case, Lecky observes that everybody believed in witchcraft until they didn’t:

“A disbelief in ghosts and witches was one of the most prominent characteristics of skepticism in the seventeenth century. At first it was nearly confined to men who were avowedly freethinkers, but gradually it spread over a wider circle, and included almost all the educated…This progress, however, was not effected by any active propagandism. It is not identified with any great book or with any famous writer. It was not the triumph of one series of arguments over another. On the contrary, no facts are more clearly established in the literature of witchcraft than that the movement was mainly silent, unargumentative, and insensible; that men came gradually to disbelieve in witchcraft, because they came gradually to look upon it as absurd.”

His conclusion:

“The follies of the past, when they were adopted by the wisest men, are well worthy of study; and, in the case before us, they furnish, I think, an invaluable clue to the laws of intellectual development. It is often and truly said, that past ages were pre-eminently credulous, as compared with our own; yet the difference is not so much in the amount of the credulity, as in the direction which it takes. Men are always prepared to accept, on very slight evidence, what they believe to be exceedingly probable. Their measure of probability ultimately determines the details of their creed, and it is itself perpetually changing under the influence of civilization.”

The book is an extended essay on the application of this thesis to explain the how and why of the decline of the belief in witchcraft, the decline in the belief in miracles, and the decline of religious persecution, and the social, political, and industrial influences that created the decline. In a somewhat rambling concluding chapter, he examines the interplay of rationalism and the rise of modern economies. 

4. Disclaimer

This is not an objective review because there’s no way I’m going to badmouth this book. I have heard haters say: It’s too loooong!!! I consider this a bonus since every page contains something interesting. It’s written in that dense 19th century prose!!! I’ll grant you it was written in the 19th century. The footnotes are in untranslated Latin!!! Google Translate has really come along. Anything else? No? Okay, I’ll tell you why the book is great:

The scholarship: Lecky cites to and discusses over 750 books, from Agobard to Zosimus. When you enter a library full of old books, is your first instinct to go see what is actually on the shelves? Then this might be the book for you. It’s a bibilographical masterpiece.

Fascinating facts: The book is the literary equivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities. The details of the persecution of witches and heretics are not exactly fun to contemplate, but the book also discusses, e.g., the extremely odd beliefs of the early theologians, the gruesomeness of Spanish art, the regulation of French prostitutes, the consequences of coffee coming to Europe, why sadists make the best surgeons, the origin of the xenodochium, the physical location of hell, and so much else. Look at the old-fashioned super comprehensive chapter headings and you’ll see what I mean.

The cast of characters: The famous names are all here, but so are countless others, from the lesser known to the downright obscure. Some are appealing, e.g., John Scotus Erigena, Cornelius Agrippa, and John Wier, free-thinkers who were all ahead of their time; some are revolting, e.g., Hippolytus de Marsiliis, who claims to have invented the torture of sleep deprivation; and some are inspiring, e.g., Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, the great opponent of capital punishment.

The theme: Finally, the book denounces the persecution of people for their beliefs, celebrates toleration and free inquiry, and both recounts and contributes to “the ceaseless struggle against the empire of prejudice.” What’s not to like?

5. Just Do It

So, why listen to me when the book is just a click away. Don’t even scroll up. Here’s Chapter 1, on the decline of the belief in witchcraft. I think you’ll realize pretty quickly whether this book is your cup of tea or not. Thanks for reading.