The Shallow Eighteenth Century

Critical thinking, originality, creativity. According to Rita Felski, these qualities are the “holy grail” of higher education, “endlessly invoked in mission statements, graduation speeches, and conversations with deans.” And for good reason. Most of us who teach undergraduates have to hold tight to those rare, truly insightful essays if we are to keep afloat in the tide of identical, bland essays that threaten to pull us down into the dark depths of grading oblivion. Yet, when it comes to doing historical research, originality is not always better.

The survey course is the bread and butter of college and high school curricula. Intro to philosophy, art history: Renaissance to modern, U.S. history, 1492-1865, etc. etc. By definition, survey classes seek to be comprehensive and representative, to observe trends and articulate complex ideas in neat, epigrammatic formulae that students can draw on to sound educated and well-rounded at cocktail parties for the rest of their lives. It is also the case that surveys highlight the “greatest hits” of their respective fields—the biggest breakthroughs, the most profound ideas, the most influential figures. 

But, “important” is not always representative. Take my field of eighteenth-century studies. Most of us learn that this period is the Enlightenment or “Age of Reason.” Especially in classes with a focus on the history of ideas, we highlight thinkers like Hume, Descartes, Voltaire, Hobbes, and Rousseau. For example, here’s a photo of the lecture notes I took a couple of years ago when I was a teaching assistant for a survey American-literature course, the day we finished the seventeenth century and covered the eighteenth: 

Every undergraduate who attended lecture that day, paid attention, and diligently took notes (instead of doodling like I did) will now remember the eighteenth century as an age of deists, an epoch that focused “on the secular rather than the divine.” But the reality is that most people were not deists and most still thought a great deal about the divine. In truth, the figures of the eighteenth century who are best known to us today are some of the least representative, the greatest outsiders of their age. Hume and Rousseau became famous because they didn’t think like others did. Samuel Johnson had a rather pessimistic view of these black sheep. For him, Hume and the “freethinkers” of his age were only famous because of the novelty of their ideas: “Hume, and other skeptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence . . . if I could have allowed myself to gratify my vanity at the expence of truth, what fame might I have acquired.”

This is why, as a historian of eighteenth-century literature, I’ve begun looking for plagiarism or for clichés. The more people heard, read, thought, or said it, the better. To take a specific instance from my latest research, I’ve been tracing rhetorical tropes in eighteenth-century sermons, specifically in order to find out more about what eighteenth-century English Christians thought about the ancient Roman Stoic Cato the Younger. One motif I’ve come across again and again, in sermons published by country curates and archbishops alike, is the Senecan motif of the “eye of Cato.” In the earliest appearance of this motif that I’ve found, Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683), best known as one of the Cambridge Platonists and often considered as part of the first generation of latitudinarian theologians, references a saying of Seneca’s that “to set some great and worthy Person before a Man, if he would do worthily. Think saith one, of Cato.” If the Romans were sufficiently awed into better behavior by the example of a Cato, a mere man, “how much more then, the thinking of the Divine Majesty” would inspire a Christian into virtuous behavior.

We see this formula again in the sermons of John Tillotson, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1691-94. Whichcote was one of Tillotson’s formative influences, and Tillotson preached the sermon at Whichcote’s funeral. In several of his sermons, Tillotson quotes Seneca’s saying that there are some people so virtuous, like Cato or Laelius, “that even the most profligate and impudent sinners will endeavor to suppress their vices, and refrain from any thing that is notoriously bad, and uncomely, whilst such persons stand by them, and are in presence.” Tillotson was one of the most read and quoted English theologians of the eighteenth century, so it’s unsurprising that we see this motif pop up again and again preached in sermons published by a diverse array of ministers throughout the century. To name a few: George Benson (1699-1762), a Presbyterian minister; the celebrated Scottish minister John Witherspoon (1723-1794); the ejected minister Oliver Heywood (1630-1702); Lloyd Peirson (1704-1781), the curate of Roxwell in Essex; and James Duchal (d. 1761), A Scottish Presbyterian minister who held a post in Dublin. It even found its way into the 231st essay of Joseph Addison’s Spectator, the immensely popular periodical, demonstrating in small part the influence religious literature had on supposedly secular publications.

It’s worth pausing to comment on the lack of original thinking in these sermons: in today’s world, where plagiarism can end in a lawsuit or expulsion from a university, these sermons look deeply suspect. At best, they look lazy. And laziness may well have been part of why these sermons borrowed the way they did. But it’s also important to note that it was considered good practice in this period, especially for young churchmen, to study and imitate the sermons of great divines. Often, Anglican ministers would read other people’s sermons from the pulpit. For them, as for Johnson above, truth took precedence over originality. They were not interested in preaching something their congregations had never heard before. Instead, they wanted their flock to hear what they thought was true, what they believed it was important for them to learn.

Here is not the place to explain exactly what the proliferation of the “eye of Cato” motif can tell us about religious thought in eighteenth-century England. What I’ve hoped to gesture at is how, by attending to these patterns, a potentially very different landscape of eighteenth-century thought emerges than the familiar one dominated by the thought of Hume, Rousseau, and the philosophes. This is not to say that the one with these standard Enlightenment thinkers is wrong. It is just a partial vision.