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The promise of liberty is intoxicating. Certainly the founding generation of Americans found it so, and many saw the future writ large there. "This ball of liberty," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1795, is "now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light & liberty go together." Not that sensible folk believed the ascent would be easy. Indeed, the struggle upward would, by its very nature, engender resistance from every kind of entrenched authority. But the promise of liberty was so great that the utmost sacrifices were warranted. Jefferson himself justified the spilling of innocent blood during the French Revolution "when the liberty of the whole earth" depended on it. For the next 200 years, a Jeffersonian faith in liberty informed the policies of the Western powers as they conquered tribal peoples, resisted fascist aggression, and combated the spread of communism. By 1991, the tribes were conquered, the fascists were vanquished, and the communists driven to capitalism. Then it all went wrong.
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After enduring all the distasteful sacrifices required to free the world of ignorance and oppression, the West has learned that the New World Order is no utopia, and must now wonder if it is actually the dead-end of the Renaissance dream. Building on the patrimony of the Enlightenment, each country crafted its own utopia, where man was the measure and representative government, individualism, and freedom of conscience were the materials. England, France, the United States, and a host of other countries embraced some version of this early new order, and eventually exported it around the world. The distinctive national characteristics of each polity sometimes obscured what was a fundamentally similar goal: to undermine the authority of kings, oligarchies, and churches in order to gain freedom from oppression, restriction, and, ultimately, obligations of any kind. No matter how incongruous the confluence of history and film, when Braveheart's William Wallace cries "FREEDOM," we all get it.
It is too early to say how well our freedom-loving rational humanism will fare in the future. But it is not too late to look back at some signs we missed, and to recognize that those who have valued authority, so feared by lovers of liberty, have actually played a significant role in the creation of modern liberal societies. Both books here under consideration examine the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the dominant ethos of liberalism in England and France in the 19th century; explore the misunderstandings created by the "tropes and symbols" of Catholics, Protestants, liberals, and republicans; and suggest a considerable affinity between religious values and national identities. By the turn of the 20th century, these two books suggest, "painful epiphanies" inherent in Catholic doctrine were already indicating that all was not well in the world of freedom.
In The Old Enemies, Michael Wheeler demonstrates that England's endemic debate was far from a simple contest between Protestants and Catholics. After 300 years of repression in the wake of Henry VIII's separation from Rome, the Catholic cause had been revived in 1829 by legislation permitting adherents to sit in Parliament, a measure which struck at an established Church already besieged by modern science and scholarship, the vitality of the dissenting churches, and criticisms from within. But it was difficult to say what Anglicans believed, for the church tolerated an eclectic array of Catholic and Protestant elements of doctrine and worship. When it came to attitudes about Rome, there was as much division as there possibly could be. Evangelical Anglicans (low church) abhorred the "cloudy errors of Popery," while High Church Tractarians craved the mysteries of the faith and not infrequently converted to Rome. Wheeler's own bias perfectly illustrates the confusion, when he names himself among those "Catholic" Anglicans who do not like being called "Protestants." For "the sake of concision," he uses the term "Protestant" to mean "all Anglicans and Protestant Dissenters taken together," but this necessary convention undermines one's ability to clearly appreciate the crucial question that divided Victorian churchmen: "upon what authority does the church proclaim truth?"
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