376Chapter 20
Corsica has found that a population of 220,000 people
sustained sixty-five monasteries. The situation was dra-
matically different in England, where a population of
5.8 million people, 90 percent of whom were nominally
Anglican, sustained eleven thousand clergymen in the
Church of England—less than 0.2 percent of the
population.
Within these variations, all of Europe lived in a
deeply Christian culture. Churches provided most of
the social services that existed for the poor, crippled,
aged, orphaned, released prisoners, and reformed pros-
titutes. Hospitals and schools were run by the church,
not by the state. Schools provide perhaps the best illus-
tration of the Christian character of European civiliza-
tion. Few people received a formal education in the
eighteenth century—most of the population in all
countries remained illiterate—but the majority of the
schools that existed were run by churches. The Presby-
terian Church ran most of the schools in Scotland, the
Anglican Church the majority of the schools in Eng-
land, the Lutheran Church dominated Scandinavian ed-
ucation, and the Orthodox Church conducted most of
the schools in Russia. In many Catholic countries—
including Spain, Portugal, Poland, and most of the Ital-
ian states—the church totally controlled teaching. Reli-
gion formed a large part of the educational curriculum.
The need to be literate to read the Bible was frequently
the decisive reason in creating new schools, especially
in Protestant faiths that stressed Bible reading.
Religion remained central to both high culture and
popular culture, but Christian themes no longer domi-
nated painting and sculpture, and literature had entered
a thoroughly secular age; European culture reflected an
“age of reason” more than an “age of faith.” Still, the arts
of the eighteenth century relied heavily upon religion.
Goethe’s Faust(1773), one of the masterpieces of Ger-
man literature, is a Christian tragedy of lost faith and
damnation. The dominant buildings of the age were
royal palaces and stately homes, yet many of the struc-
tures that characterized baroque and rococo architec-
ture were churches, such as the lavish Karlskirche in
Vienna (see illustration 20.4). Composers may have fa-
vored secular subjects for the flourishing opera of the
eighteenth century, but many of the masterpieces of
baroque music originated in Christianity, such as Marc-
Antoine Charpentier’s powerful Te Deum.Johann Sebas-
tian Bach long earned his living as cantor and organist
at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where he composed a
huge array of music on Christian themes, such as his
Mass in B minor.And perhaps no music composed in the
eighteenth century is more famous than Handel’s
Messiah.
Christianity similarly remained central to popular
culture and the rhythms of daily life. The sound of
church bells marked the time of day for most Euro-
peans, and a church clock was often the only timekeep-
ing that the poor knew until late in the eighteenth
century. Sunday remained the day of rest—often the
only day of rest—for shopkeepers, laborers, and peas-
ants alike. The only vacation most people knew came
from religious holidays and festivals, and the calendar
of the Old Regime was filled with such days. In addi-
tion to the universal holidays of the Christian calendar,
such as Christmas and Easter, every region, village, and
occupation added the celebration of patron saints.
Most governments maintained a state religion, re-
warding its members and limiting the rights of non-
members. In Denmark and Sweden, non-Lutherans
could not teach, hold public office, or conduct religious
services. In Britain, a series of laws called the Test Acts
excluded non-Anglicans from military command, sit-
ting in parliament, or attending Oxford or Cambridge
universities. Catholics could not live in London, nor
Protestants in Paris, in 1750. Restrictions were stricter
in regions where the Inquisition retained power. More
than seven hundred Spaniards condemned by the In-
quisition were burnt at the stake between 1700 and
1746; the last burning for heresy in Spain came in- The Inquisition exerted a greater force on Euro-
pean culture by regulating behavior. A trial before the
Inquisition in 1777 listed some of the behavior that true
Christians must cease: (1) eating meat on Friday;
(2) crossing one’s legs during a church service; (3) be-
lieving that the Earth revolved around the Sun; (4) not
believing in acts of the faith, such as ringing church
bells during a storm to beg God to stop it; (5) owning
prohibited books, listed on the church’s Index of for-
bidden books; (6) corresponding with non-Catholics;
and (7) disputing the idea that only Catholics could go
to Heaven. No Protestant equivalent of the Inquisition
existed, but that did not make Protestant lands models
of toleration. Denmark forbade Catholic priests from
entering the country under threat of the death penalty.
The Enlightenment and Its Origins
The eighteenth century is one of the most famous peri-
ods in the history of European thought. Historians of-
ten call that century the Age of Enlightenment (or the
Age of Reason) because eighteenth-century writers
smugly considered their epoch more enlightened than
earlier eras. It was an age that cherished universities,