Yet Herman remarkably succeeds, by linking the brilliance of the Scottish Enlightenment with the technical genius of Scotland’s 19th Century inventors, by ignoring somewhat parallel developments elsewhere in Europe, and by showing how strongly Scottish modernity influenced North America and other parts of the British Empire.
His book begins with the familiar script of church authorities condemning a freethinker to death, and some of his descriptions of early Calvinists as fundamentalist ayatollahs show a lack of theological background. Quickly though, Herman shows how much the hanging of Thomas Aikenhead was driven by the earlier persecution of his judges, men who had withstood or hidden out during the late 17th Century oppressions by Catholic and/or English royals. And, though he does not spend enough time on John Knox’s theology to see its anti-fundamentalist elements, or spend any time on the Scots and Westminster Confessions, he shows some of Knox’s truly frightening power in pulpit and political alliances.
This brief review does not seek to evaluate all of Herman’s summary analyses of Scottish philosophers and his comparative judgments of their historical influence. Nor can I evaluate his history of science and technology. But I want to celebrate his surprisingly unsentimental re-revisionism of the onetime commonplaces, that Scots were the schoolmasters of Europe and that after the Union, they swarmed down on England. I also want to underline creative union of Christian and Enlightenment thinking that thought and talked up not a storm, but a rainbow of harmony over church and state in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the 18th and 19th centuries. Lastly, I hope to suggest that key characteristics of Presbyterianism can be seen in the spirit Herman identifies as Scottish, even in America today.
There are three basic movements in Herman’s historical argument.
One is that the moderate Presbyterian ministers, themselves touched by Aikenhead’s effective martyrdom, were full partners and often parents of the more skeptical Enlightenment thinkers like Hume. The mixture of reason, common sense realism, and religious feeling in Thomas Reid and Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith and other believing Presbyterian professors kept those elements together in their two cultural centers (and Herman gives Glasgow its sometimes underrated due in relation to Edinburgh).
Secondly, this intellectual coherence in the capitals reflected and built upon the dramatically transforming effect of church-based literacy throughout Scotland. Not only did Scotland have four universities compared to England’s two (and the one of the Protestant Ascendancy in Dublin), but the demographics and costs made higher education possible for more people of modest backgrounds in Scotland. Their curricula were also more practically oriented. Only at one point does Herman slight the brutal poverty of Scotland, in his short allusions to the Highland clearances through which the lairds drove the crofters to emigrate so they could raise sheep on their lands. Otherwise he is clear that Scotland was a desperately poor country lifting itself up by its “book-straps,” and never entirely succeeding.
As the Methodists did later with the English working class, fighting alcohol for the sake of family life, the Presbyterians did two generations earlier, insisting on a public morality with the social content of public welfare. Scotland’s massive advances in educational and cultural attainments were not the work of individualist philosophy or Smith’s ironically named “invisible hand” (intended to describe market activity alone). These gains were due to the very visible hands of parish schoolteachers and ministers open to ideas in books. Herman notes the self-discipline and conscientious independence of mind instilled in the Scottish designers, inventors, explorers, scientists and engineers. I would add also naturalists, like John Muir, escapee from the Kirk, defender of wilderness from the industrialization he knew well.
The third major argument or theme in Herman’s book is that Scotland benefited by losing its sovereignty to England. Pride and sentiment aside, Herman notes how some Scots went so far in assimilation as to call themselves North Britons and to make a Mecca of London. The origins of what has been a very cooperative arrangement between Scotland and England are not fully explained by Herman, as its acceptance was based more on Knox’s Protestant strategy than his Lowland context, in my view. The early leaders of the Kirk, in fact, looked to England and English (or at least, broad Scots) to cement Protestantism when many of the nobility were still Catholic. Herman is right to show how Scottish precedents influenced the English Revolution, and Locke’s democratic philosophy. Herman does not look at the Long Parliament’s relationship with the English Presbyterians who, with a few Kirk men, developed the Westminster Confession to be part of the true union of Scotland and England within a truly Reformed church. To have the Lord’s sovereignty so elevated would make national sovereignty and even linguistic difference much less important.
It is the Presbyterian view of the world and the Presbyterian identity of Scots people that makes the basic paradox of Herman’s book work. Without romanticizing genetics or ethnicity, you have a small national group carry a denationalizing energy; without mandatory rituals or privileges, you have a tradition of self-and-social improvement make a distinctive impact. Is there a cultural kenosis or self-emptying in this Scottish running of everything British but their own country? And is this industrious lack of pretension not a clear moral correlative to Presbyterian ethical faith?
It may be presumptuous for an American, even one of partly Scottish, 20th century immigrant background, to make this argument. But Herman wonderfully lifts up the neglected John Witherspoon to show how the Presbyterian element in the Scottish works. Starting in Paisley as a pastor to those wool-weavers, Witherspoon championed the right of congregations to call their own ministers. That democratic spirituality influenced his satirical book on the genteel Moderates of Edinburgh and Glasgow, who could be both too culturally-accepting (latitudinarian) and influence-wielding in placing pastors. Herman suggests Witherspoon left mainly because Moderates ran the Scottish General Assembly (and he must skirt or kilt the various Kirk splits), but my reading of his call to head the College of New Jersey (Princeton, then both college and seminary together) is more positive. Witherspoon had in fact skewered the Moderates, including Francis Hutcheson, in his Ecclesiastical Characteristics, and had stood church trial for it, but he used the common sense philosophy and later Hutcheson himself in his Lectures on Moral Philosophy.
In America, however im-Moderate in Scotland, Witherspoon replicates the Christian Enlightenment of Scotland in America in his college’s curriculum, resists fundamentalism, and embraces the American Revolution, prompting key figures in England to call it a Presbyterian Rebellion. Herman is right to point to the influence of Witherspoon and so many of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians especially to legitimate the Revolution theologically, even revising our church form of government and version of the Westminster Confession to reflect the separation of church and state. At the same time, we must note, as Herman does, the many thousands of Scots loyalists to the Crown who fled to Canada only to run Montreal and Toronto onward toward modernity. But Witherspoon, through Madison and many others, helped give a Calvinist balance of powers to the structure of the Constitution even while accepting the common American calling to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is hard to summarize the character of lived-Presbyterianism today, even as one baptized, confirmed, and ordained (as well as married, divorced and parenting!) within it. Presbyterians always seek essentials (not fundamentals!); we de-mystify and hate idolatry; even bad (sensual) Presbyterians like Rabbie Burns are egalitarians for a’ that. Our sense of justice at least used to be more pronounced (or pronouncement-ed) than that of other faiths, and our legalistic shadow more tenacious, too. We are more canny than whimsical, and sometimes perhaps more keen to hold onto the washcloth than the baby when we throw out the bath water (that washcloth is technology, not just thrift!). Theologically, we Presbyterians are so often willing to give ourselves into ecumenical projects, to let others cling to particularities if we can structure the practical impact on society. Think of Robert McAfee Brown’s work, books of lucid, witty, justice-breathing theology, sometimes under the name of self-critical St. Hereticus, and then near the end, a Scottish faerie story, Dark the Night, Wild the Sea (1998).
Herman’s book ends with a bittersweet worry, now that the Stone of Scone has been returned and a sitting Scottish parliament has been restored. He fears those who would make Scotland a quaint backwater, celebrating dead customs rather than living prospects. He scorns those who imagine a Celtic past on the Irish model: Scots are only partly Celts and Picts, but also Norse and Danes, Angles and Saxons, and Scots are much closer to English than Gaelic. This is perhaps a Presbyterian predicament as well. Do we choose a bland ecumenical future, even in faith to Jesus Christ, or a popular praise worship- style future, even for success in this culture? Just as we did not romanticize Scotland, I pray we do not romanticize the United States, but we do need both distinctives and growth within this culture. And I believe we need the ethics that the ecumenical movement has always carried, especially with our contributions. But that’s another article. Herman’s book, ambitious, entertaining, erudite, is a question as well as an argument: Where does the modern world go now? The brilliant Catholic public intellectual, Garry Wills, argues that the Enlightenment is dead, at least in the United States. But was it ever only the Enlightenment here? And if it was more than that and Wills knows that it had much religious sentiment as well as reason, what critical role can an ethical Christianity play? Gary Dorrien, the new Reinhold Niebuhr professor at Union Seminary (N.Y.), suggests that resistance to imperial designs has become a new mark of the church. And perhaps here our essential Presbyterian ecclesiastical characteristics of independence and egalitarianism may help us, in faithfulness first to God, find our post-Enlightenment calling.
CHRISTIAN THOMSON IOSSO is pastor of the Scarborough (N.Y.) Church. He served on the General Assembly staff and taught college while obtaining his Ph.D. at Union Seminary (N.Y.)