Charles Dickens and Enlightenment Thought
Driving back to school I was listening to this opening paragraph from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and it stuck in my mind, as it seemed to show, not only an insight for paradox, but a keen and perceptive understanding of the nature of the French Revolution and its adversaries.
IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
From Book 1, Chapter 1, “The Period.“
Reading Edmund Burke gives one an appreciation of the evils of the French Revolution. He writes in his Reflections on the Revolution in France,
“The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the revolution, and do now wish, to derive all that we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.” [36]
“From the Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our [English] constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity . . .” [39]
“A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors . . . The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the same course and order.” [39]
“You [the French] had all these advantages in your antient [sic] states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything begun anew.” [41-42]
Instead of rebelling against the established order, the French ought to have recognized:
“. . . the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality, which it can never remove . . .” [43]
Following the vain ideas of the philosophes got them into trouble:
“By following these false lights, France has bought undisguised calamaties at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings. France has bought poverty by crime! France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interests; but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness, some rites or other of religion.” [44]
It had been the practice of the modern philosophers to cast out all that had come before, if it smacked at all of tradition, and to attempt the construction of a new and idea state based only upon the dictates of Enlightenment reason. Burke was no friend of this fervor. “Belief and incredulity” here stand opposed, as do Light and Darkness. When Dickens wrote of “some authorities” insisting that “it be received . . . in the superlative degree of comparison only, I suspect he meant those apologists for Enlightenment ways of thinking, vigorously opposed even up to the beginning of the twentieth century by traditionalist holdouts such as G.K. Chesterton.
Eric Voegelin comments on the idea of radical human progress the philosophes seemed to possess.
Self-salvation through knowledge has its own magic, and this magic is not harmless. The structure of the order of being will not change because one finds it defective and runs away from it. The attempt at world destruction will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder in society. The Gnostic’s flight from a truly dreadful, confusing, and oppressive state of the world is understandable. But the order of the ancient world was renewed by that movement that strove through loving action to revive the practice of the “serious play” (to use Plato’s expression)—that is, by Christianity.
The answer to oppression, in other words, is not to destroy the old order and attempt the engineering of a completely new and different one in its stead, but to return to the roots of Christianity and revive them. This is what happened in America and England during the Great Awakening. Rather than seeking after the spiritual, however, the French (justifiably) saw the Church as the seat of their problems, and attempted to do away with it altogether. They did not realize that the corrupt Christianity of French Catholicism was very different from the true Christianity which brings freedom to men and to nations.
This post is dedicated to “The Pickwick Society,” for their appreciation of Dickens.
