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ALEXANDER GEDDES AT THE LIMITS OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2010

MARK GOLDIE
MARK GOLDIE*
Affiliation:
Churchill College, Cambridge
*
Churchill College, Cambridge, CB3 0DSmag1010@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 61 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Gentleman's Magazine, 72 (1802), p. 279.

2 Quoted in Hugh Pope, ‘An unhappy biblical scholar’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 56 (1940), pp. 321–42, at p. 337.

3 Bernard Ward, The eve of Catholic emancipation (3 vols., London, 1911–12), i, p. 247. For further Victorian distaste see J. F. S. Gordon, Ecclesiastical chronicle for Scotland, iv (London, 1875), p. 60; F. C. Husenbeth, The life of the Rt Rev. John Milner (Dublin, 1862), pp. 127, 475.

4 Bernard Aspinwall, ‘The last laugh of a humane faith: Dr Alexander Geddes, 1737–1801’, New Blackfriars, 58 (1977), pp. 333–40, at pp. 333, 340.

5 Sebastian Bullough, ‘British interpreters: Dr Alexander Geddes’, Scripture Bulletin, 14 (1984), pp. 26–30, at p. 29.

6 Scottish Catholic Observer, 15 Aug. 1986. A conference on Geddes at Aberdeen in 2002 had as its co-sponsor the archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti.

7 The ‘Second Spring’ denotes the ultramontane revival of the Catholic Church in Victorian Britain, its propaganda hostile to what it saw as the lacklustre piety, theological dubiety, and ecclesiastical indiscipline of its Hanoverian predecessors.

8 Gentleman's Magazine, 64 (1794), pp. 230–3, 320–4.

9 AG to John Geddes, 17 Nov. 1782: BL 3/355/15. Hay discoursed at length on the evils of consorting with Protestants: Works (7 vols., London, 1872–3), ii, pp. 349–83.

10 AG to John Reid, 7 June 1784: BL 3/404/17; W. J. Anderson, ‘David Downie and the “friends of the people”’, IR, 16 (1965), pp. 165–79, at p. 171.

11 Edinburgh Review (1804), p. 377. See John Watts, Scalan: the forbidden college, 1716–1799 (East Linton, 1999).

12 AG, ‘Three Scottish poems, with a previous dissertation on the Scoto-Saxon dialect’, Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1 (1792), pp. 402–68, at p. 404. See Charles Jones, ‘Alexander Geddes: an eighteenth-century Scottish orthoepist and dialectologist’, Folia Linguistica Historica, 15 (1994), pp. 71–103; idem, A language oppressed: the pronunciation of the Scots language in the eighteenth century (Edinburgh, 1995).

13 Geddes is claimed as one of the few known authors of Jacobite songs; on what authority is not apparent. ‘Lewie Gordon’ (or ‘The charming Highlandman’), printed in The Scots Nightingale (2nd edn, 1779), is said to be his. (‘Though his back be at the wa! /Here's to him that's far awa!’) See T. F. Henderson, ‘Scottish popular poetry before Burns’, in A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds., The Cambridge history of English literature, ix (Cambridge, 1912), p. 372. A chapter was devoted to Geddes in David Irving, The lives of the Scottish poets (Edinburgh, 1804), but, thereafter, it did not suit Burns-besotted Scottish Presbyterians to own a Catholic poet.

14 Patrick Scott Hogg, Robert Burns: the lost poems (Glasgow, 1997); Gerard Carruthers, ‘Alexander Geddes and the Burns “lost poems” controversy’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 31 (1999), pp. 81–5; Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg, eds., The Canongate Burns (2 vols., Edinburgh, 2001), i, ciii–civ (Geddes ‘is at the top of the list of radical Scots to be retrieved from the abyss of the 1790s into which they vanished from the national memory’). The two ‘Burns’ poems for which Geddes manuscripts have been found are ‘Ode to the prince of Wales’ and ‘Ode for the birthday of Charles James Fox’. See also Gerard Carruthers, ‘Scattered remains: the literary career of Alexander Geddes’, in William Johnstone, ed., The Bible and the Enlightenment: a case study: Dr Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802 (London, 2004), pp. 35–43.

15 AG to John Reid, 4 May 1679: BL 3/311/6.

16 John Mason Good, Memoirs of the life and writings of the Revd Alexander Geddes (London, 1803), pp. 300–1, 530. This is the fullest contemporary portrait, written by a Unitarian.

17 AG, Letter from the Rev. Alexander Geddes (1794), p. iii.

18 AG to John Reid, 18 Mar. 1786: BL 3/467/7.

19 For Geddes and biblical hermeneutics see T. K. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament criticism (London, 1893), ch. 1; Reginald C. Fuller, Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802: pioneer of biblical criticism (Sheffield, 1984); Johnstone, ed., Bible; William McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 5; John Rogerson, Old Testament criticism in the nineteenth century (London, 1984), ch. 1.

20 Edinburgh Review (1804), p. 382.

21 AG, Proposals for printing by subscription a new translation of the Holy Bible (1788), sig. a3v; AG, Dr Geddes's general answer (1790), pp. 6, 28ff.

22 AG to John Geddes, 14 Sept. 1782: BL 3/355/14; AG, Letter from Geddes, pp. 49–50.

23 Quoted in Good, Geddes, pp. 500–1, and M. D. Petre, The ninth Lord Petre (London, 1928), p. 55.

24 AG, Prospectus of a new translation of the Holy Bible (1786), p. 34.

25 AG, Letter from Geddes, p. 28; AG, Dr Geddes's address to the public (1793), pp. 10, 13.

26 AG, Letter from Geddes, pp. 11–12.

27 Monthly Review, 12 (1794), p. 322.

28 AG, The Holy Bible (2 vols., 1792–7). A further volume of commentary, Critical remarks on the Hebrew scriptures, followed in 1800.

29 AG, Geddes's general answer, p. 2. See W. J. Anderson, ‘Father Gallus Robertson's edition of the New Testament, 1792’, IR, 17 (1966), pp. 48–59.

30 AG, Prospectus; AG, Geddes's address, p. 3.

31 Anon., Monthly Review, 9 (1793), p. 305; Samuel Horsley, review in The British Critic, 4 (1794), pp. 1–12, 147–55.

32 AG, Bible, i, p. 93. This reading was objected to then and now: Anon., An address humbly presented to … Dr G****s (1791), p. 6; McKane, Christian Hebraists, p. 185.

33 Edinburgh Review (1804), p. 382.

34 Anderson, ‘Robertson's edition’, p. 57. Although, in the light of Geddes's quarrels with him, Hay appears benighted, for his own positive encounter with Enlightenment ideas see the articles cited below, n. 63.

35 Johann Severin Vater, Commentar uber den Pentateuch (3 vols., Halle, 1802–5). However, for recent doubt that Geddes specified a ‘fragment hypothesis’ see John Rogerson, ‘Was Geddes a fragmentist? In search of the “Geddes-Vater hypothesis”’, in Johnstone, ed., Bible, pp. 135–56.

36 AG, Bible, i, preface.

37 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 33; Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, chs. 7–8. See Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), ch. 12.

38 Michael Hunter, ‘Aikenhead the atheist’, in Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992).

39 See Rogerson's strictures upon Fuller: Old Testament criticism, p. 156.

40 AG, Bible, i, p. 31.

41 Ibid., i, p. viii. Feminism was not part of his repertoire.

42 Ibid., ii, p. iv. See E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the fall of Jerusalem: the mythological school in biblical criticism and secular literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 7, 25–8, 78.

43 AG to John Geddes, 25 Dec. 1783: BL 3/375/20.

44 Shaffer, Kubla Khan, pp. 7, 27–8, 78.

45 Jerome J. McGann, ‘The idea of an indeterminate text: Blake's Bible of hell and Dr Alexander Geddes’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), pp. 303–24, repr. in Social values and poetic acts (Cambridge, MA, 1988), ch. 8. See also John Mee, Dangerous enthusiasm: William Blake and the culture of radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992), ch. 4; Schock, Peter A., ‘The marriage of heaven and hell: Blake's myth of Satan and its cultural matrix’, English Literary History, 60 (1993), pp. 441–70Google Scholar. For AG's own use of biblical parody see W. J. Anderson, ‘The Book of Zaknim’, IR, 14 (1963), pp. 131–64.

46 AG, Prospectus, pp. 2–3; AG, Geddes's address, p. 5.

47 AG, Prospectus, p. 6; AG, Proposals, sig. a2r.

48 AG, Bible, ii, pp. ii–iii; AG, Critical remarks, pp. 423–4.

49 AG, Critical remarks, p. vi.

50 AG, Bible, ii, pp. v, xii.

51 Ibid., i, p. 17; AG, Critical remarks, p. vi.

52 Rogerson, Old Testament criticism, ch. 1; AG to John Geddes, 10 Apr. 1683: BL 3/375/12.

53 AG, Bible, ii, p. xiii.

54 AG, Letter from Geddes, pp. 11, 38; AG, Critical remarks, p. 170; AG to John Geddes, 11 Feb. 1683: BL 3/375/10.

55 AG, Bible, i, pp. xii–xiv.

56 Ibid., pp. xi–xii; AG, Critical remarks, pp. 25–6; cf. Fuller, Geddes, pp. 45–6.

57 AG, Bible, i, p. xiii; AG, Critical remarks, p. vii.

58 AG, Bible, ii, p. xii. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger was a philosophe and contributor to the Encyclopedie. For Geddes's support for Paine's politics, see section iv below.

59 AG, A letter to the Rev. Dr Priestley (1787).

60 AG to John Geddes, 13 Nov. 1789: BL 4/4/14; AG, An answer to the bishop of Comana's pastoral letter (1790), p. 1.

61 Gentleman's Magazine, 64 (1794), p. 132.

62 AG to John Reid, 27 Mar. 1789: BL 4/4/12.

63 For the English Catholic Enlightenment see Joseph Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine movement, 1780–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV, 1980); Eamon Duffy, ‘Joseph Berington and the English Catholic Cisalpine movement, 1772–1803’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1973); idem, ‘Ecclesiastical democracy detected’, Recusant History, 10 (1970), pp. 193–209, 309–31, 13 (1975), pp. 123–48; Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 (Woodbridge, 2009); Geoffrey Scott, Gothic rage undone: English monks and the age of Enlightenment (Bath, 1992); Brian Carter, ‘Controversy and conciliation in the English Catholic Enlightenment, 1790–1840’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 7 (1988), pp. 3–24. For the Scottish see Mark Goldie, ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 20–62; and idem, ‘Common sense philosophy and Catholic theology in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 302 (1992), pp. 281–320.

64 For a survey see Dale van Kley, ‘Piety and politics in the century of lights’, in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds., The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 119–45. On Josephism see Derek Beales, Joseph II (2 vols., Cambridge, 1987–2009).

65 AG to John Reid, 12 Sept. 1786: BL 3/468/3; cf. AG to James Grant, 19 Sept. 1770: BL 3/210/10; 7 and 27 Mar. 1771: BL 3/224/12, 14.

66 AG, Answer to the bishop, p. 1.

67 Quoted in Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical democracy’, p. 317.

68 Gentleman's Magazine, 64 (1794), p. 131. The allusion is to the humiliation of the emperor by the pope at Canossa in 1077.

69 AG to John Geddes, 27 Feb. 1784: BL 3/404/4; AG to John Reid, 7 June, 22 July, and 23 Sept. 1784: BL 3/404/17, 20; BL 3/405/3.

70 AG, A modest apology for the Roman Catholics (1800), appx, and p. 95.

71 AG, Modest apology, p. 100; Analytical Review (1791), pp. 431, 524.

72 AG to John Reid, 10 Nov. 1787: BL 3/495/13.

73 AG, Modest apology, pp. 217–18.

74 Ibid., pp. 55–65, quotation at p. 59. However, Geddes argued that some councils had authorized terrible things, and his judgement of the sense in which councils could claim infallibility remained indeterminate.

75 Ibid., pp. 95, 98, 126. For a survey see Francis Oakley, The conciliar tradition: constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (New York, 2003).

76 AG, Modest apology, pp. 77–85, 101–12.

77 AG, Geddes's address, p. 21; AG, Letter from Geddes, pp. 2–3.

78 AG to John Geddes, 15 Feb. 1791: BL 4/42/8; Analytical Review (1791), p. 431.

79 AG to George Hay, 27 Sept. 1775: BL 3/271/7.

80 AG, Letter from Geddes, p. 41.

81 Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical democracy’, p. 324.

82 AG, Ode to the Hon. Thomas Pelham (1795), pp. 7, 8, 9, 14; cf. AG, Letter from Geddes, p. 41.

83 AG, Answer to the bishop, pp. 26–7; Analytical Review (1791), p. 523.

84 AG, Letter from Geddes, pp. 32, 38; AG, Geddes's general answer, p. 8; AG, Letter to a Member of Parliament (1787), p. 29.

85 AG, Modest apology, p. 10.

86 Analytical Review (1791), p. 525.

87 AG, Modest apology, pp. 6–7, 93, 221–2.

88 AG, Answer to the bishop, pp. 5–6.

89 AG, Geddes's general answer, pp. 23–4; AG to John Geddes, 13 Nov. 1789: BL 4/4/14.

90 AG, Letter from Geddes, p. 9.

91 Analytical Review (1790), p. 502; (1791), p. 524.

92 AG, Modest apology, pp. 59, 76; AG, An apology for slavery (1792), p. 17.

93 AG, Modest apology, p. 5.

94 AG, Cursory remarks on a late fanatical publication (1783), p. 23.

95 AG, Modest Apology, pp. 8, 13–14; AG, Cursory Remarks, pp. 27–8.

96 AG to John Geddes, 18 Jan. 1790: BL 4/23/9.

97 AG, Modest apology, pp. 13–14, 193ff; cf. AG, A letter to the right reverend the bishop of London (1787), p. 26. On celibacy he cited Montesquieu's Spirit of the laws, xxiv.7.

98 AG, Cursory remarks, p. 22; cf. pp. 29–30.

99 AG, Modest apology, pp. 23–4.

100 AG to John Reid, 3 Apr. 1679: BL 3/311/5. On the failure of the Scottish Catholic Relief Bill in the face of Presbyterian opposition see Robert Kent Donovan, ‘Voices of distrust: the expression of anti-Catholic feeling in Scotland, 1778–1781’, IR, 30 (1979), pp. 62–76; Richard B. Sher, Church and university in the Scottish Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1985), ch. 7.

101 AG to John Reid, 24 June 1680: BL 3/327/5.

102 AG, Modest apology, pp. 142–4; AG, Cursory remarks, p. 6.

103 AG, Letter to a Member of Parliament, p. 21.

104 Geddes is not known to have recorded Jacobite sentiments, but presumably his Catholic youth was enveloped in Jacobitism. See above, n. 13.

105 Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical democracy’, pp. 323–4.

106 AG, Bible, i, pp. xiii–xv, ii, p. xiv.

107 George Benjoin, The integrity and excellence of Scripture … Thomas Paine and Dr Geddes compleatly refuted (Cambridge, 1797). See Stephen Prickett, Word and the Word: language, poetics, and biblical interpretation (Cambridge, 1986), p. 115.

108 AG to John Geddes, 18 Jan. 1790: BL 4/23/9.

109 AG, Carmen saeculare pro Gallica gente (1790), pp. 7, 8–9, 11.

110 AG, A sermon preached before the University of Cambridge (1791).

111 AG, Geddes's address, p. 17.

112 AG, Apology for slavery, echoing Montesquieu, Spirit of the laws, xv.5. See Fletcher, F. T. H., ‘Montesquieu's influence on anti-slavery opinion in England’, Journal of Negro History, 18 (1933), pp. 414–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 AG, A Norfolk tale (1794), pp. 39–43.

114 AG, Letter from Geddes, p. 10; AG, Geddes's address, pp. 12–17; AG, Ode to Pelham, p. 10.

115 AG, Carmen saeculare, p. 6.

116 Analytical Review (1791), p. 443; AG, Geddes's address, p. 18.

117 AG, Geddes's address, p. 18; AG, A New Year's gift to the good people of England (1798), p. 23.

118 AG, Carmen saeculare, p. 8.

119 Good, Geddes, pp. 316–19.

120 AG, Geddes's address, p. 12.

121 AG, Bardomachia (1800).

122 AG, Ode to Pelham, p. 6.

123 AG, New Year's gift, p. 14.

124 AG to John Geddes, 29 Nov. 1790 and 15 Feb. 1791: BL 4/23/10 and 4/42/8.

125 Scottish Catholic Archives, MS P-AG 5.

126 AG, New Year's gift, p. 28.

127 Scottish Catholic Archives, MS P-AG 5.

128 AG, New Year's gift, pp. 6–7, 18.

129 Ibid., pp. 15, 21, 29–31, 34.

130 Scottish Catholic Archives, MS P-AG 5. He praised Bonaparte in print in his Ode to Pelham.

131 AG, Geddes's address, pp. 17, 19–20.

132 Quoted in Good, Geddes, pp. 263–4.

133 Aspinwall, ‘Geddes’, p. 340.

134 AG, Apology for slavery, pp. 41–2, 47.

135 See Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: a liberal publisher (Iowa City, IA, 1979); Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, publishing, and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the cause of liberty (Basingstoke, 2003).

136 For AG's associations with Dissent see G. M. Ditchfield, ‘“Incompatible with the very name of Christian”: English Catholics and Unitarians in the age of Milner’, Recusant History, 25 (2000), pp. 52–73, at pp. 55–8. Half of the subscribers to his Bible were Dissenters. AG published an elegy to the Unitarian Gilbert Wakefield (1801).

137 National Library of Scotland, MS 10999, fo. 115: AG to Miss Howard, 24 Oct. 1800; Good, Geddes, pp. 300–1; Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler (2nd edn, 3 vols., London, 1869), i, p. 64.

138 Diary, ed. Crabb Robinson, i, p. 113.

139 Catalogued in Good, Geddes, pp. 192–4.

140 Analytical Review (1790), pp. 498–508; (1791), pp. 330–6, 431–8, 522–7, 550–6.

141 See Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott, eds., The correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731–1800) (Catholic Records Society, 2007).

142 Gentleman's Magazine, 64 (1794), pp. 232–3.

143 Scottish National Archives, GD237, Box 165, bdle 3; AG to A. Wilks, 26 Aug. 1792, quoted in Bernard Aspinwall, ‘Dr William Maxwell, 1760–1834, the Catholic radical’, New Blackfriars, 59 (1978), pp. 565–69, at p. 567n. On Downie and Maxwell see also Christine Johnson, ‘David Downie: a reappraisal’, IR, 31 (1980), pp. 87–94; Anderson, ‘Downie’, IR, 16 (1965), pp. 165–79; R. D. Thornton, William Maxwell to Robert Burns (Edinburgh, 1979).

144 Scottish Catholic Archives, MS SM 15/2/8; Gordon, Ecclesiastical chronicle, iv, pp. 338–9.