384Chapter 20hostility to science of the Austrian Catholic Church. Al-
chemists outnumbered chemists in Vienna in the early
eighteenth century.
The German Enlightenment produced a number of
notable figures. The century began with Gottfried von
Leibnitz, Newton’s equal as a mathematician and supe-
rior as a philosopher, presiding over the Berlin Acad-
emy. Leibnitz’s reputation suffered somewhat when
Voltaire’s Candideridiculed a sentence taken out of con-
text from his Théodicée(1710): “God created the best of
all possible worlds.” His philosophy, however, did
much to establish the scientific concept of natural law
in eighteenth-century thought. And Leibnitz came
closer than Voltaire to being the intellectual who mas-
tered all fields of thought, from the scientific to the
philosophic.
At the end of the century, the Aufklärungproduced
Germany’s greatest poet, Wolfgang von Goethe.
Goethe was at the center of a remarkable intellectual
circle in Weimar that marks the beginnings of modern
German literature; it included the poet and dramatist
Friedrich von Schiller and the philosopher Gottfried
von Herder. The dramatist Gotthold Lessing in Leipzig
and Berlin, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn in
Dessau and Berlin, Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, Jo-
hann Süssmilch (one of the founders of the science of
statistics) at Berlin, and the Bavarian Academy of Sci-
ences in Munich show that the German Enlightenment
spread widely across central Europe.
Other parts of Europe were centers of the Enlight-
enment. A Swedish Enlightenment, evident in northern
Europe, was known as the Gustavian Enlightenment be-
cause it was encouraged by King Gustavus III of Swe-
den. It centered upon the Swedish Royal Academy of
Sciences (1741), Linnaeus’s Botanical Gardens at Upp-
sala (1741), and the Swedish Academy at Stockholm
(1786). There was also a noteworthy Neapolitan En-
lightenment and a Scottish Enlightenment, which in-
cluded Adam Smith (one of the founders of capitalist
economics), David Hume (one of the greatest skeptics
of the age), and James Hutton (one of the founders of
modern geology). The prestige of the Enlightenment
was so great that historians in every country have la-
bored to show their national role in it, but for some
regions—such as Spain, Portugal, and eastern Eu-
rope—the local Enlightenment was limited. In Spain,
the hostility of the church limited the movement to a
minority of the governing class. The largest periodical
in Spain had a circulation of 630 copies, and a daring
aristocrat who spoke publicly of the importance of
reason was brought before the Inquisition on charges
of heresy.
The Enlightenment and Christianity
Wherever the Enlightenment stirred the educated
classes, it had important implications for European civi-
lization. This becomes especially clear when one views
the relationship between the Enlightenment and Chris-
tianity. Many of the philosophes bluntly attacked
Christian beliefs and institutions, challenging the
churches in ways that might have led them to the stake
in other eras. Hume, for example, applied skepticism to
Christianity: “[T]he Christian religion not only was at
first attended by miracles, but even at this day cannot
be believed by any reasonable person without one.”
Diderot called Christianity “the most prejudicial of all
the superstitions of the earth” (see document 20.3). Pri-
vately, he denounced the Judeo-Christian deity as “a
partial God who chooses or rejects, who loves or hates,
according to his caprice; in short, a tyrant who plays
with his creatures.”
Such ideas were not limited to one or two radical,
dechristianized writers. Tom Paine attacked the con-
cept of the Trinity (“The notion of a Trinity of Gods
has enfeebled the belief in one God.”) and the Bible
(“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the volup-
tuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions,
the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than
half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that
we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It
is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and
brutalize mankind.”). Voltaire’s Candideridiculed church-
men by depicting a friar who seduces women, monks
who consort with prostitutes, and priests who spread
venereal disease; other churchmen committed robbery,
torture, and murder. Edward Gibbon ended his monu-
mental, six-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
with the conclusion that Christianity was one of the
primary causes of the fall of Rome. He portrayed a
church filled with “the inevitable mixture of error and
corruption“ contained in all human institutions.
The most famous critic of Christianity during the
Enlightenment was Voltaire, the pen name of a French-
man named François-Marie Arouet. Voltaire, the frail
child of a Parisian legal official, received the finest clas-
sical education from the church, at the Jesuit collège
Louis-le-Grand. A priest who admired Voltaire’s
intelligence led him into a freethinking group whose
members did not hesitate to criticize or deride any in-
stitution. Voltaire threw himself into this sport and
wrote a poem satirizing the regent, the duke of Or-
leans. Under the arbitrary legal system of the Old