Alexander Geddes was the most wayward, unorthodox, iconoclastic, and intellectually adventurous priest to emerge from the British Catholic community in the eighteenth century. He pressed to the limits the boundaries of the Catholic Enlightenment and, in so doing, embraced French revolutionary politics, German hermeneutics, and English Romanticism. An inspiration to Blake and Coleridge, a member of the circle of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rational Dissenters, and a poet whose verses have been conflated with those of Robert Burns, Geddes, though a child of a remote fastness of the Jacobite Highlands, inserted himself into the mainstream of British intellectual life. We shall here encounter him first as a biblical critic, next as an anticlerical proponent of ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, and finally as a Foxite Whig and enemy of Edmund Burke.
It is within the historiography of British Catholicism that Geddes has been most persistently reconnoitred, and here his reputation has waned and waxed with the tectonic shifts in Catholicism since the start of the nineteenth century. Driven from Scotland by one bishop, he was anathematized in England by another. Condemned by contemporaries as an infidel, he was, until the aggiornamento of the 1960s, odious to Catholic historians. When he died in 1802 the obituarist in the Gentleman's Magazine pronounced that the Catholic party ‘held him in deserved detestation’: the hand of Providence had struck down this ‘libertine’ who was in league ‘with the author of all evil’.Footnote 1 John Milner, the most virulent of Geddes's enemies, pronounced him a ‘disedifying priest’, who ‘surrendered the cause of the Catholics to the Protestants’, and ‘lived and died like an infidel’.Footnote 2 For Bernard Ward in 1911 he was a ‘heterodox, bad priest’.Footnote 3
This interdict has now been lifted, the infidel become an angel of light. For Bernard Aspinwall in 1977 the ‘much maligned’ Geddes turns out to have been an apostle for the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, ‘a thoroughly modern churchman’, ecumenical, social democratic, an advocate of the vernacular liturgy. On the eve of the ascendancy of ultramontanism, Geddes had been ‘the last laugh of a humane … faith’.Footnote 4 For Sebastian Bullough, Geddes was a herald of modern ecclesiastical ‘collegiality’.Footnote 5 Preaching in Edinburgh's Catholic cathedral in 1986, Fergus Kerr pronounced Geddes a suffering pioneer of ecumenism and modern biblical understanding, a man of ‘absolute loyalty as a Catholic’.Footnote 6 Geddes, in short, is now the beneficiary of the reaction against Second Spring historiography.Footnote 7
But this is to requisition him for contemporary liberal Catholicism and to detach him from the eighteenth century. It is to tame him and draw him back from the extremity, and verbal violence, of his positions. Geddes took no hostages. Volatile, doctrinaire, and obsessive, he took Catholic positions to conclusions that appalled his colleagues. The Catholic community wanted a vernacular Bible in accessible English: Geddes embarked on one, but ended by deconstructing the text and doubting its divine inspiration. The Catholic laity sought ecclesiastical independence from the hierarchy: Geddes savaged the papacy and levelled the episcopate. The Catholics hoped for civil emancipation: Geddes turned republican and applauded the French Revolution.
It was John Milner, the heavy artillery of the episcopal party and harbinger of Second Spring Catholicism, who went for the jugular with stunning brutality. In his letters to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1794 we can detect the stirring of the English counterpart of that constellation of sentiments which soon Barruel, Chateaubriand, and De Maistre would stamp upon nineteenth-century Catholicism. Milner took hold of Geddes and, armed with Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution, damned to oblivion both Geddes and the Enlightenment. As surely as the Enlightenment led to Robespierre's guillotine, so Geddes's writings led to perdition. Geddes's Bible was ‘a jumble of theology and free-thinking’; Geddes's talk of church reform, like that of the French revolutionary clergy, ended in abjuring Christianity; Geddes was in love with a bloody revolution that martyred Catholic priests and nuns; he would have the Thames, like the Seine, run with blood; he rejected the inspiration of scripture, the authority of ecclesiastical superiors, the allegiance due to civil powers, the respect owed to hereditary nobility. Geddes's lifework was, in sum, a confection of atheism and anarchism.Footnote 8
The charge that atheism meant anarchism – that theological, ecclesiastical, and political heterodoxy were intertwined – would lie at the heart of nineteenth-century conservatism. But Milner was right to detect this elision in Geddes, for Geddes himself saw his commitments as part of a coherent whole. His biblical hermeneutics cannot be detached from his anticlericalism and republicanism.
I
Long before embarking on his suspect edition of the Bible, Geddes fell out with his ecclesiastical superiors. In 1781 he was driven from Scotland by Bishop George Hay for having consorted with Protestants. The two men quarrelled with rancorous bitterness, Geddes denouncing Hay's ‘paroxysm of prelatic frenzy’.Footnote 9 Mercifully for Geddes's balance of mind, he never lost the friendship of his patient cousin, Hay's coadjutor, Bishop John Geddes, though Alexander denounced John's ‘cowardice’ for not seeking Hay's deposition for misconduct of the Scottish mission, while John, by 1794, thought Alexander ‘quite wild’.Footnote 10
Exile to England was the making of Geddes, for it is doubtful if the small and closed Scottish Catholic community, still recovering from the trauma of the destruction of Jacobitism, could have germinated the intellectual passions which now enveloped Geddes's mind. The Edinburgh Review marvelled that so liberal and emancipated a mind could emerge from the ‘monkish hovel’ of the Catholic seminary at Scalan in the Highlands.Footnote 11 Geddes went to London on the wings of sudden acclaim, for his edition of Horace had won him a doctorate from Aberdeen University, a unique honour for a Catholic priest. Geddes, already acquainted with the Scottish literati, William Robertson, Thomas Reid, and James Beattie, now came to know Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. His scholarly achievements were manifold, not least an account of Scottish dialect, published in the Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries, which provides modern dialectologists with vital clues to eighteenth-century pronunciation. Though Geddes became a Londoner, he did not subscribe to the prevailing linguistic cultural cringe of the Scottish elite: he protested against Scots ‘servilely aping the English’ and applauded robust Scots monosyllables as superior to effete Continental polysyllables.Footnote 12
Throughout his life Geddes published verse and left more unpublished. This has led to his being singled out alongside Robert Burns as among the best Scots poets of his time: an edition of his poetry is needed.Footnote 13 So close were the two men's poetic and political tempers that a sharp controversy blew up in the 1990s as to which man wrote a series of anonymous verses published in the Morning Chronicle in the 1790s. Two ‘lost poems’ attributed to Burns have now been shown to be Geddes's. Undaunted, the ‘lost Burns’ camp has regrouped by proclaiming that the discovery of Geddes's poesy is a major plank in the case for the vibrancy of a Scottish national and radical political culture at the close of the eighteenth century.Footnote 14
When Geddes arrived in London he did the fashionable round of the embassy chapels, preaching at the Imperial chapel to ‘great applause’.Footnote 15 But he soon abandoned priestly duties and devoted the remaining twenty years of his life to scholarship, journalism, polemic, and sarcasm. Gaunt, negligently dressed, and lank haired, Geddes was ascetic in habit, but immoderate in speech. After long hours of scholarly work, a torrent of witty and acerbic conversation would be unleashed at the dinner table. Affability and irony easily gave way to coruscating harangue, a tendency, an admirer conceded, ‘not perfectly consistent with … polished manners’.Footnote 16 But iconoclasm was much in demand, and Geddes believed that ‘ridicule has always been considered as the satellite of reason’.Footnote 17 Savagely satirical verse in the ‘macaronic’ style poured from his pen. London he loved. He consorted in coffee houses and took tea in the drawing rooms of intellectual ladies. He gossiped about what the prince of Wales's mistress, the Catholic Mrs Fitzherbert, stood to gain when ‘her paramour comes to the crown’.Footnote 18 It was a far cry from ministering to the impoverished tenantry of Banffshire.
Geddes's lifelong project to produce a new version of the Bible demanded every resource of his invincible willpower.Footnote 19 He first looked at biblical manuscripts in Paris in the 1760s, and conceived his great project in 1774. When he was fifty, in 1786, he published a Prospectus, chiefly discussing the principles of proper vernacular translation, oddly ‘unappalled’, as the Edinburgh Review put it, by the magnitude of his task.Footnote 20 In 1790 his list of subscribers brought together Bishop John Geddes, Principal Gordon of the Scots College in Paris, the Catholic lay leader George Maxwell of Munches, the former Prime Minister Lord North, the leaders of ‘Rational Dissent’ Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and Theophilus Lindsey, the American episcopalian Jonathan Boucher, a clutch of Anglican bishops, and the prince of Wales.Footnote 21
In Marylebone, for hours every day, for twenty years, ‘labouring like a galley slave’, and bound by ‘typographical fetters’, he pored over polyglots and teased out variora, distracted only by gardening and carpentry.Footnote 22 Every available version of scripture had to be examined, every vowel and comma compared. His linguistic command was formidable: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, and Dutch. He thought the world owed him a living for his great task: this child of tenant farmers had no private means. His scholarship had already got him into debt in his early days in the Scottish mission; he desperately needed enlightened patrons. From Lord Linton's library at Traquair he had quickly fled after an unpriestly passion, and his lasting salvation was his annual stipend from the Catholic peer Lord Petre of Thorndon in Essex, ‘my guide, my guard, my first and dearest boast … his fostering hand, my studies that sustained’.Footnote 23 Even so, he prayed for £500 that he might collate every Greek manuscript of the Bible in the libraries of Europe.Footnote 24
Geddes's stock of resentments grew, amounting to paranoia. There were, he believed, backbiters spying on him in coffee houses, who whispered that Price had turned him into an Arian, or Priestley into a Socinian, who charged that he ‘had the intolerable presumption to correct the Holy Ghost’. Two bishops had personally congratulated him on his Prospectus, so why did they now condemn him?Footnote 25 His project was banned by the Vicars Apostolic in 1792 and in the following year Bishop John Douglass suspended him from priestly orders. Protestants were no less alarmed. Undaunted, in 1794 Geddes penned his own eulogy: he imagined the ‘goddess Fame’ announcing that, for as long as the Bible is read, a ‘garland shall adorn thy head’, and he dreamed that St Jerome returned with a scourge to drive away his critics.Footnote 26 His benighted ecclesiastical superiors, so it seemed to him, slighted the greatest scholarly mission imaginable: to produce the definitive edition of mankind's definitive book. Of course Geddes was naive: as a reviewer remarked of so audacious an enterprise, ‘could he hope to glide down the stream of reputation unmolested?’Footnote 27 He was hubristic, too, about the scale of the project: he died with only two of eight volumes completed.Footnote 28 Like many an editor, his apparatus got the better of him. A scholar who could devote eleven pages of commentary to verse 1 of the Bible was never likely to finish.
Geddes's initial ambition had been modest and unexceptionable: to translate the Bible into modern English. Contrary to Protestant mythology, British Catholics had not been denied access to the vernacular scripture. As in Protestant homes, so in Geddes's Banffshire parents' home, an English Bible was ‘the principal book of their scanty library’, and he knew it by heart by the age of ten.Footnote 29 But the Catholic Douai version was outdated, and burdened with anti-Protestant annotation. Bishop Richard Challoner had revised it only somewhat, so Geddes embarked on a new revision. He quickly became dissatisfied, for Douai was based on Jerome's Latin Vulgate and not on the Hebrew and Greek originals.Footnote 30 So he set out about producing an iceberg: a polished translation for ordinary readers visible above the waterline of vast textual research lying below.
The original scheme remained the intended fruit of the new scholarly underpinning, and the etiquette of vernacular translation continued to preoccupy him. He thought the maxim that translators must be ‘faithful’ to the text needed some refinement. Paraphrase was to be eschewed, but so also slavish literalness. One should be faithful to sentences rather than words. He admired the Protestant Authorized Version (the King James Bible), but thought it defective in principle. For example, it was inconsistent: the same Hebrew or Greek word was translated in several different ways (though it is hard to see that avoiding this would not amount to inflexible literalness). Protestant conservatism in adhering unswervingly to the Authorized Version amused him.
It cannot be said that contemporaries applauded Geddes's translation. In avoiding archaism, he instead produced anachronism. The effect was to bring Hebrew tribesmen into Hanoverian drawing rooms. ‘Candlestick’ became ‘chandelier’, ‘fine linen’ became ‘muslin’. Where the ancient Jews had purveyed unscientific fables, Geddes set out to correct them. Thus in place of ‘unicorn’ he put ‘rhinocerus’.Footnote 31 His replacement of the unfamiliar with the familiar had the theological effect of rendering the prophetic mundane. In place of ‘Shiloh’ he put ‘peaceful prosperity’.Footnote 32 The Edinburgh Review said that Geddes's translation mingled ‘grammatical methodism’ with ‘colloquial vulgarism’.Footnote 33
The creation of a definitive edition of the Bible was a graveyard of reputations. The orthodox readily allowed that there were ambiguities in translating the sacred texts into the vernacular. But the broaching of deeper levels of hermeneutic difficulty quickly aroused suspicion. The comparison of different manuscripts revealed thousands of variora: plainly the ancient copyists had made mistakes. Only by painstaking collation and redaction analysis could the urtext be established. It was the plethora of variora that panicked conservatives. It is said that when Archbishop Ussher, in the seventeenth century, discovered that there were thousands of variora, he abandoned the idea of a variorum edition because it would undermine the faith of simple Christians. In Edinburgh in the early 1790s Bishop Hay put a stop to another Bible project by John Geddes and Gallus Robertson when they had accumulated 400 variations between Matthew and Romans by comparing the Vulgate with the Greek.Footnote 34
Worse still, ancient written Hebrew was ‘unpointed’: it lacked diacritical marks indicating vowel sounds. This meant that frequently there was ambiguity about which word was intended. This ambiguity was obscured by historic reliance on the later ‘pointed’ Masoretic text. Geddes admired C. F. Houbigant's 1753 unpointed edition. He insisted it was necessary to go behind the Masoretic text to the Samaritan. Establishing the text entailed minute philological exploration of the significance of Hebrew words, and it sometimes involved speculative judgements about intended meanings.
The hermeneutic difficulties went deeper still. Even the urtext seemed to lack coherence. Johann Eichhorn in Germany and Jean Astruc in France had already suggested that the book of Genesis was a compilation of two earlier independent sources: the ‘documentary hypothesis’. Geddes thought the sources for Genesis were even more heterogeneous than that, a redaction of several inconsistent sources: the ‘fragment hypothesis’. This notion was developed in turn by J. S. Vater, who translated Geddes's Critical remarks on the Hebrew scripture into German: hence the ‘Geddes–Vater’ hypothesis.Footnote 35 Geddes was a voracious reader of the new German ‘higher criticism’, and he bewailed the fact that ‘sacred criticism’ and ‘sacred philology’ were all the rage in Germany but shunned in Britain. He doubted the conventional view that Moses had written the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Genesis, he deduced, could not have been written before the time of David, probably at Jerusalem in the reign of Solomon. The probable author was Ezra.Footnote 36 This alone was enough to damn Geddes. The Ezra hypothesis had become the leitmotif of scriptural freethinkers ever since it was first mooted by the ‘atheists’ Hobbes and Spinoza.Footnote 37 The last person to be hanged for heresy in Britain, Thomas Aikenhead at Glasgow in 1697, had, inter alia, asserted the Ezra hypothesis.Footnote 38
Geddes's greatest claim to originality – though chiefly in propagating Eichhorn's ideas in Britain – lay in a method that marks a watershed between Enlightenment and modern criticism. This was the rejection of naturalism in favour of a mythological reading of the Genesis narratives. Eighteenth-century natural theology deployed vast ingenuity in proposing scientific explanations for the miracles and wonders of the Old Testament. How far Geddes broke with naturalism is unclear.Footnote 39 He still, in Casaubonish style, devoted energy to naturalistic explanations for supposedly miraculous occurrences. Enlightenment theology abounds with scientific accounts of the Flood and the parting of the Red Sea, and in that spirit Geddes tried to explain the tidal peculiarities of the Suez region. Of Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt, he wrote that ‘she was probably struck by lightning, and crusted over with nitre’.Footnote 40 But where the natural theologians explained the seven days of Creation in terms of ancient calendar conventions, and provided a course in geography to establish the location of the Garden of Eden, Geddes pronounced the Creation narrative a ‘mythos’. The trees of paradise signify the virtues; Adam and Eve symbolize the intellectual and sensual aspects of human character.Footnote 41 He thus decisively shifted the temper of biblical understanding from science to poetry. The mythological hypothesis detached the Bible from natural philosophy and forged a new connection with literature. The Pentateuch was, it seemed, the effort of a scholar-editor at the court of King Solomon who aimed to bring order into a patchwork of bardic cosmogonies, still perhaps partly orally transmitted, a compilation, in Geddes's words, of ‘popular traditions, old songs and public registers’.Footnote 42
It was in making known in Britain the work of German higher criticism and in his mythological theory that Geddes had his most significant impact, for Anglican scholarship had been conspicuously slow to absorb these developments. ‘In Germany’, Geddes remarked, ‘almost every man of learning is an Orientalist’, and they ‘vie with one another which shall do most towards restoring the scriptures’.Footnote 43 He had an unexpectedly fruitful influence upon Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who argued for the bardic and mythopoeic character of the Pentateuch. Geddes knew Coleridge in the 1790s: he gave him a letter of introduction to Heinrich Paulus in Germany, and they probably met at the Chapter coffee house.Footnote 44 Geddes probably also knew William Blake, and here the influence is particularly striking. In 1794 Blake published his Book of Urizen (to be followed later by the Book of Ahania and Book of Los). Urizen has the format of the English Bible, laid out in columns, with numbered verses. The surviving copies are all, deliberately, at variance with one another; there are two chapter fours; and its narratives of origins are mutually contradictory. Urizen is a parody of the Book of Genesis and mimics its textual instability. It is the first English poetic reflection of German higher criticism and Geddes was its conduit. His annotations are echoed by Blake; even the name ‘Urizen’ may derive from Geddes's commentary on the Greek meaning of ‘horizon’, a boundary. Urizen is the god of boundaries, the god of tyrannizing priests and moralists who requisition folkloric tales and transform them into oppressive legal codes. In Blake's hands, Geddes's proof that the Bible is mythic poetry lent strength to a critique of priestcraft.Footnote 45
To suggest that scripture was in need of textual reconstruction implied that there was corruption or impurity in divine revelation. Geddes was rightly accused of treating the Bible like any other ancient and problematic text. The restoring of classical texts was, he said, the glory of the age of rational humanism inaugurated by Erasmus. In recovering the texts of Virgil, Horace, and Cicero to their original integrity ‘no human pains have been spared; libraries have been ransacked, manuscripts collated, parallel places compared, history, geography, criticism alternately called into assistance’. That had been the achievement of the Renaissance: the transcendent scholarly task of modern times was the application of the same techniques to the Bible.Footnote 46 As textual scholars, the medievals had failed: they built a rubbish heap of glosses and paraphrases without attending to the text itself.
Inevitably, Geddes was accused of doubting divine inspiration. He certainly rejected the principle that every iota of scripture was irrefragable. God did not guarantee the punctuation. At first, in 1786, he distinguished between the divine authenticity of the original source and the fallibility of its transmission through time. The task was thus ‘restoring the scriptures to their primitive purity’.Footnote 47 But later, by 1797, when confronting the worst excesses of Jehovah's vengeance as recorded in the Old Testament, he wavered as to the original source. The command to massacre the Canaanite males while sparing the female virgins affronted him sufficiently to deny that this could have been God's command: the Bible puts into God's mouth what He could never have uttered.Footnote 48 At this point, Enlightenment ethics got the better of Geddes. He remarked that what he admired in the Bible was what he admired in Plato, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius; it was offensive to suppose the Bible contradicted natural virtue.Footnote 49 He concluded that ‘we have no intrinsic evidence of inspiration’ in the Old Testament chroniclers, and that ‘it is impossible not to discover in them the evident marks of human fallibility’. The chroniclers were no less fallible as scientists than as moralists: like Homer, they were ‘continually blending real facts with fanciful mythology, ascribing natural events to supernatural causes’.Footnote 50 Geddes ended by sounding deistical. He would, he said, be ‘guided by philosophy, through each pretended mystery’; ‘the gospel of Jesus Christ is my religious code’ but ‘that gospel I would not make my law, if Reason, pure Reason, were not my prompter and preceptress’.Footnote 51
Geddes believed that anthropology and archaeology held vital keys to biblical understanding. He tended to presume that the contemporary Near East preserved biblical society in aspic, Bedouin chiefs being latter day Hebrew patriarchs. In the 1760s Johann David Michaelis proposed an expedition to the Near East to examine local customs and languages, and Carsten Niebuhr took up the challenge. Anthropological understanding of nomadic pastoralists was held to be a means to access the ancient Hebrew mind.Footnote 52 There is a marked tendency in Geddes to identify biblical cultures as fundamentally ‘Oriental’. We ‘need not literally believe’ the ‘incredible number of prodigies’ found in scripture, which ‘a slight acquaintance with the genius of the eastern nations … will readily … explain’.Footnote 53 This anthropological distancing allowed him to extract a congenial essence from the dross of Asiatic barbarism that he found in the biblical narrative. He repeatedly referred to ‘Asiatic fanaticism’ and ‘Asiatic formality’ as synonymous with Pharisaic legalism. He also thought the early Christian Fathers nearly useless, because corrupted by ‘Afric barbarity’.Footnote 54
More striking still was Geddes's application to biblical society of the theory of stages of human development enunciated by Adam Smith and other Scottish social theorists. The ancient Hebrews belonged to the nomadic pastoral phase of human civilization. They were a ‘gross’ people.Footnote 55 This insight paved the way for an historicist understanding of scripture. God revealed himself to humanity progressively, in ways appropriate to the understandings and cultures of particular times. Down the ages, human understanding of the deity became more spiritualized; the ancient Hebrews were gross ‘anthropomorphites’. The Old Testament morphology of Jehovah ‘must be considered a metaphorical imagery, adapted to the ideas of a stupid, carnal people’, and the Eden myth was ‘adapted to the shallow intellects of a rude and barbarous nation’.Footnote 56 Geddes was here close to the anthropologies of Lessing and Herder.
Here lay, Geddes hoped, the secret of a new defence of Christianity. Once we grasp that the Bible was ‘written in a rude age, by rude and unpolished writers, in a poor uncultivated language’; once we strip away the absurdities attributable to ‘the genius of the eastern nations’, and recover the ‘pure spiritual religion of Jesus’ from its tawdry and ‘exotic’ ornament; once we look for the pure ethics, the wise legislation, the rustic simplicity, and the sublime poetry, then modern men of science and philosophy will no longer be deterred from biblical Christianity.Footnote 57 Geddes always insisted that he was putting the defence of Christianity on a new plane. If we were to give up the hopeless task of defending the ‘absolute and plenary inspiration’ of scripture, we might, on new critical principles, destroy the formidable weapons of the enemies of Christianity, who ridicule revelation to extinction. Geddes's Bible would defeat the ‘the wit of Voltaire, the scurrility of Boulanger, the declamations of Diderot, … the sarcasms of Paine’.Footnote 58 If hermeneutically daring, Geddes regarded himself as theologically orthodox, and, indeed, he took the Trinitarian side against his friend Priestley's doubting of the divinity of Christ.Footnote 59
II
We turn next to ecclesiology. Geddes was violently anti-episcopal and anti-papal. When a pastoral letter of the Vicars Apostolic condemned him in 1789, he called it ‘one of the most flagrant instances of clerical despotism that has been launched since the revival of letters and philosophy’, and he described Bishop James Talbot as ‘strutting about, like a little pontifex’.Footnote 60 Yet despite the virulence of his personal animus, Geddes was not untypical of ‘Cisalpine’ Catholicism. As Lord Petre's client, he was spokesman for the English Catholic Committee, which in 1792 reconstituted itself as the Cisalpine Club. He articulated the ecclesiology of the leading Catholic gentry, writing alongside Joseph Berington, John Throckmorton, and Charles Butler. An anonymous letter to the Gentleman's Magazine pronounced that ‘if the present age has produced a bigoted pope, bigoted apostolic vicars, and bigoted priests, it has also produced a Geddes, a Berington … a Throckmorton; thanks be to Providence, which sends no … poison without some antidote’.Footnote 61
Geddes played a role in smoothing the path of William Pitt's Catholic Relief Act of 1791, which finally permitted Catholics to worship openly. When the ministry raised the conventional objection that Catholics were suspect citizens because the papacy claimed the right to depose heretical monarchs, Geddes drew up a memorandum refuting the doctrine of the deposing power. Though this had a ‘wonderful effect’, the cautious government sought, and received, reassurances from half-a-dozen Catholic universities on the Continent.Footnote 62 Learned and liberal Catholicism put to sleep the ‘papal deposing power’ that had haunted Protestant imaginations for centuries.
The intramural quarrel of the Catholic gentry with their Vicars Apostolic during the early 1790s brought them to the brink of schism. It began with a dispute over the terms of a new oath of allegiance attached to the Relief Bill, and continued with contention over the appointment of the Vicar Apostolic for London when Bishop Talbot died in 1790. The Committee's version of the oath seemed too concessive to the Protestant civil power and described the Catholics as ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’, implying fellowship with Protestant Dissenters. As to the second issue, the Committee asserted that the bishop should be elected by the clergy and laity, and not imposed by Rome.
Catholic historians' accounts of the latter controversy have tended to treat this as a momentary and domestic episode, and have overlooked the fact that it was a British variant of a European-wide phenomenon.Footnote 63 Recent understanding of the Catholic Enlightenment has increased the visibility of its radical ecclesiologies, which upheld the claims of national churches and secular governments against the papacy and the religious orders, especially the Jesuits. There is a bewildering variety of terms for this phenomenon: ‘jurisdictionalism’ is generic, ‘Gallicanism’ names the French version, ‘Richerism’ derives from Edmond Richer's De ecclesiastica et politica potestate (1611), ‘Febronianism’ takes its name from Johann Nikolaus Hontheim's pseudonymous De statu ecclesiae (1763), and ‘Josephism’ labels the reforms of the Emperor Joseph II in Austria, who decimated the monasteries and granted religious toleration. These movements had medieval roots in conciliarism, which had asserted the authority of church councils, and hence of local bishops and clergy, against the papacy. The nearest modern term is ‘collegialism’, but this is misleading, because it does not involve the Erastian emphasis on national, civil jurisdictions. To these expressions we must add ‘Jansenism’, for that heresy had largely ceased to have the Augustinian theological character of its seventeenth-century roots, and had, especially in France, become a loose name for lay and clerical resistance to impositions by the hierarchy. The papal condemnation of the Jansenists in the bull Unigenitus (1713) was decisive in provoking anti-papal jurisdictionalism. If the European Catholic Enlightenment took its point of departure in reaction against Unigenitus, it achieved its culminations in the Synod of Pistoia in 1787 (presided over by Bishop Scipio Ricci and the emperor's brother Leopold) and in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy proclaimed by the French Revolution in 1790.Footnote 64
It tends to be assumed that British Catholics were exempt from Continental jurisdictionalism. A small missionary community within a Protestant state, lacking a substantial lay elite and without a settled national hierarchy, was admittedly poor soil for full-blown Josephism. But ‘Cisalpinism’ was the British variant, and Geddes, as its spokesman, explicitly applauded what he saw on the Continent. His position was characteristic of the French: he was no Jansenist in doctrine, but he rejected the anti-Jansenist oath because it was an ‘indefinite, unqualified’ imposition.Footnote 65 In the opening page of his attack on Bishop Talbot in 1790 he applauded the Synod of Pistoia. He thought the Vicars Apostolic's dependence on the papacy a ‘spiritual vassalage, which your brethren on the Continent begin to be ashamed of … The good bishop of Pistoia … has set the example, even in Italy.’Footnote 66 An English priest said of a Geddes tract that ‘a more frantic declamation against the Holy See has not been sent forth in these times from Vienna or Pistoia’.Footnote 67 In 1794 Geddes remarked that British Catholics should follow the Emperor Joseph, who refused to hold the pope's stirrup.Footnote 68 Earlier, in 1784, he wrote, ‘I cannot … but approve of all that Joseph has hitherto done’, and he believed that Pope Pius VI's meeting with the emperor amounted to a papal endorsement of the emperor's ‘ecclesiastical reformations’. Even in Italy, he added, the suppression of the mendicant orders is expected, and in France the Benedictines tremble. These remarks were made amid railing against the ‘episcopal despotism’ and prelatic ‘tyranny’ of Bishop Hay in Scotland.Footnote 69 In 1800 Geddes reprinted the famous anti-papal Gallican decrees of 1682, which, alongside the reaction against Unigenitus, defined ecclesiastical politics in Catholic Europe until the French Revolution.Footnote 70
Geddes was thoroughly familiar with the writings of the Gallican ecclesiologists of the previous two centuries: Richer, Pithou, De Marca, Fleury, Dupin, Bossuet, Launoy, Lenglet.Footnote 71 He advised his friend John Reid, a priest in the Highlands, to read Richer's treatise on ecclesiastical polity.Footnote 72 British Catholicism, Geddes pronounced, subsisted ‘under the shelter of Gallican liberties [and] Gallican maxims’, without which it would have turned Bellarminian and Parsonian – a reference to the Counter-Reformation papalist Cardinal Robert Bellarmine and the English missionary zealot of the Gunpowder Plot era, Robert Parsons. Like all jurisdictionalists, Geddes relished the suppression of the Jesuit order, decreed by civil rulers in Portugal, France, and Austria, and ultimately by the pope himself. ‘Their secret and intriguing policy, their peculiar esprit de corp; and above all their servile obsequiousness and devotion to the see of Rome, deserved the fate which they ultimately met with.’ Civil governments might, he believed, abolish whatever religious orders they pleased.Footnote 73 Geddes was also familiar with the conciliarist tradition. He asserted its fundamental doctrine that the church was the congregation of the faithful, and that indefectability lies in ‘the collective body of Christians’ and not in the papacy.Footnote 74
The primacy of the Roman Bishop misunderstood is the original sperm, which produced the spawn of doctrines, not only hostile to every civil government, but eversive [sic] of primitive Christianity; by changing the kingdom of Christ into an absolute autocracy, and concentrating in one person the rights of a whole community.
Geddes admired the Council of Constance of 1415, which had deposed three popes, and applauded the ‘irrefragible arguments against papal despotism’ voiced by Jean Gerson, the principal ideologue at Constance, and by the French and Scottish conciliarists writing around the turn of the sixteenth century, Jacques Almain, Pierre d'Ailly, and John Mair.Footnote 75
The Gallican tradition was in general strongly episcopalian: it asserted the autonomous rights of local bishops against the Roman papacy, ecclesiastical aristocracy against papal monarchy. In one mood, this was also the position of the Cisalpines. The English Catholics had, since the early seventeenth century, asked for bishops-in-ordinary, rather than bishops-in-partibus: the former had some autonomy, the latter were under the immediate jurisdiction of Rome. In 1783 the Catholic Committee repeated this demand, declaring that it was an indignity to be subservient to the papal Propaganda Fidei. Geddes argued that in the early church all bishops had been equal in rank and that the papacy had no jure divino primacy. He recommended the Anglican Isaac Barrow's Treatise of the Roman supremacy (1680); and denounced Bellarmine's defence of the papacy. He argued that French and Spanish bishops at the sixteenth-century Council of Trent had sought a formal declaration of the divine right of episcopacy but had been thwarted by the ultramontane party.Footnote 76
However, in another mood, the Cisalpines, like some of the radical conciliarists after Constance, were as anti-episcopal or anticlerical as they were anti-papal, and inclined to a Catholic presbyterianism or even congregationalism. Geddes pronounced that bishops should merely be overseers and superintendents, ‘divested of earthly pomp and antichristian grandeur’. He complained that genial whist-playing priests were turned by a mitre into tyrannic princes of the church.Footnote 77 He advised the Catholic Committee that the London clergy had the right (contra Rome) to elect their bishop, but should (contra the clergy) do so with the advice and consent of the laity. He applauded Throckmorton's ‘masterly’ tract which demonstrated that whatever power the clergy had to elect bishops, ‘the same belonged to the whole people’.Footnote 78 He denounced Bishop Douglass, appointed Vicar Apostolic of London by Rome in 1790, as intruded ‘by a foreign power’ in contempt of the people's choice. As early as 1775 Geddes had, in a Scottish dispute over the management of mission funds, held the view that the choosing of administrators was ‘inherent in the body diffusive’ and not personally in the Vicar Apostolic.Footnote 79 It is scarcely surprising that John Milner accused the Cisalpines of ‘ecclesiastical democracy’.Footnote 80 The congregationalist element in Cisalpinism reflected the sociological fact of gentry power: the English Catholic community was seigneurial, subsisting through the patronage of, and in the households of, lay gentry. It is striking that one commentator considered that the bishops' attack on Geddes amounted to a personal affront to his patron Lord Petre.Footnote 81
The Gallican and Josephist traditions were Erastian. They gave to the civil power authority over episcopal appointments and over the ordering of the externals of the church. The English Cisalpines were ambiguous about the role of the state. As a penalized minority in an Anglican state, they were apt to borrow their mentality from Protestant Dissenters, condemning church establishments and state interference in the lives of religious minorities. Hence they could be heard voicing the Lockean doctrine that a church was a voluntary association unconnected with civil magistracy. Geddes frequently wrote like a Protestant Dissenter. Established churches are but ‘favourite sects’, which became servile flatterers of the state. ‘Why at all join state and church?’ he asked. The state has no need of religious tests or tithes.Footnote 82 Only bigots, he urged, could object to the term ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’, for Catholics were a species of Dissenter: the bishops condemned the term in 1790.Footnote 83
Yet, in an age of church establishments, it could seem equally natural that even a minority religion should allow some measure of ecclesiastical authority to the civil power. The Jacobite Old Pretender, ‘King James III’, had exercised the right of episcopal appointment for the English Catholics until his death in 1766. After the demise of Jacobitism, it was not obvious that a Protestant monarch should be wholly excluded from influence. Almost until the eve of Catholic emancipation in 1829 some Catholics argued that the British crown should have a power of veto over episcopal appointments. It was tempting to argue that even a minority Catholic Church could in some sense claim to be a national church. Geddes looked forward to a time when British Catholics ‘will form a small, but still a national church, independent of Rome, or any other foreign power’. He preferred to style himself a British Catholic rather than a Roman Catholic. With Vienna and Pistoia in mind, he noted that Continental churches were reformed ‘under the protection of the civil power’.Footnote 84
Geddes's ecclesiology did not only borrow from Continental contemporaries. A variant of Gallicanism had been embedded in English Catholicism for two centuries. Adverting to James I and VI's reign and the Gunpowder Plot furore, Geddes took the side of the Appellants against the Jesuits in their quarrel over the oath of allegiance to the Protestant civil power. He took the side of the Catholic monarchist Robert Barclay against Bellarmine, of Thomas Preston against the Jesuit Robert Parsons.Footnote 85 He constantly contrasted the ‘Court’ and ‘Church’ of Rome, a distinction which had long been fashionable among Catholics seeking to appease the English state: the Catholic Church was not to be equated with the politics and pretensions of an Italian court. Geddes ‘never thought that the maxims of the Roman court and Catholic faith were synonymous terms’.Footnote 86 Thus he drew a distinction between what was ‘Catholic’ and what ‘papist’. All that was reprehensible in Catholic history he marked off as popish, perverse excrescences sullying the pure essence. Yes, there had been domineering popes, dissolute monks, and libertine clergy: but Catholic writers, from Gerson to Francesco Guicciardini to Paulo Sarpi, had fully exposed that sorry record. There had been ‘idle pilgrimages, the base traffic in indulgences, the propagation of lying legends, feigned miracles, apocryphal revelations’, and ferocious inquisitions. Every modern Catholic ‘must blush’ at the despotic monarchy of the medieval papacy. Geddes thought pilgrimages were ‘useless, obsolete things’; ‘beads, rosaries, medals, agnus deis, scapulars, etc’ were but ‘pious play-things, for old women and children’. Abolish them by all means.Footnote 87 It was the popish, and not the Catholic, religion which had burnt Protestants under Queen Mary, had sought to depose Queen Elizabeth, and had inspired the Spanish Armada and the conspiracies of the Jesuits.Footnote 88 Medieval philosophy was a scandal too. Geddes castigated scholastic metaphysics, ‘that wretched system of scholastic dogmatism’, ‘a science that teacheth how to confound reason’, that still clogged Catholic education, and which he had spent twenty years ‘trying to unlearn’. ‘I believe there is no such thing as metaphysical knowledge’: the natural senses and scriptural revelation alone guide us.Footnote 89
A striking feature of Geddes's litany of abjuration of popery is his insistence that papal infallibility was among the tares in the wheatfield. He thought that the progressive enlightenment of Catholicism entailed the withering away of this principle. Where others relied on a sharp distinction between papal temporal and spiritual claims, renouncing the one while upholding the other, for Geddes the two were thoroughly connected. If the pope was infallible, he thought, it must follow that he could dispense with oaths, including oaths of allegiance.Footnote 90 To reject papal temporal pretensions was to reject infallibility. ‘Those Catholics, then, who believe the pope to be infallible, may be readily suspected of believing his deposing and dispensing powers.’ Perhaps this was because Bellarmine had built his temporal power of deposing princes upon the spiritual supremacy, and Bellarmine remained the largest obstacle; it was Bellarmine who came to Protestant minds when they denounced papal pretensions. Speaking of a hostile Catholic colleague, Geddes professed himself amazed that ‘towards the close of the eighteenth century’ he could defend ‘the infallibility of the Roman See, like a true disciple of Bellarmine’.Footnote 91 He pronounced that ‘papal infallibility is as absurd in itself, as it is pernicious in its consequences; the spurious child of arrogance and ignorance, fostered by credulity and matured by servile adulation’. For Geddes, the pope was at most the first pastor of the church in honour and dignity, and he noted that the Protestants James I and VI, Grotius, and Leibniz had recognized as much. He believed that in his own time the papacy's ‘usurped empire’ was falling away and was ‘now almost totally annihilated’. Catholicism was liberating itself from the papacy's ‘spiritual subjugation of the western world’.Footnote 92 In hindsight, there is irony in Geddes's position: he thought himself a spearhead for the future, yet at the moment he was making these pronouncements Chateaubriand was beginning to shape the dramatic refurbishment of the ideal of papal supremacy that would dominate the nineteenth century.
For Geddes, the Catholic Church should not be immune from the progressive development of humanity that seemed manifest in the enlightened age. ‘What, pray, have we of the eighteenth century to do with the ignorance of the ninth, the superstition of the twelfth, or the fanaticism of the sixteenth?’Footnote 93 Catholicism was not static in its self-understanding, but capable of progressive evolution and intellectual maturation. Sometimes he talked the language of reformation, of recurring to the pure ‘primitive’ model of the early church, a trope of Protestants but also common currency among Catholic Reformers in the Erasmian tradition. But more often he adopted an historicist progressivism. He was impatient with the ‘barbarism’ of primitive ages. When a Protestant remarked that a returning Apostle would be horrified at the sight of modern worship, Geddes blithely concluded that that would be no surprise: the moderns worship in modern ways, primitive peoples in primitive ways. The Apostle, he remarked, would be just as puzzled by proceedings in the Methodist chapel in Tottenham Court Road as by High Mass in St Peter's.Footnote 94 The ‘primitive’ church was ‘Asiatic’ and its barbarisms offered no model for Enlightened Christianity.
Geddes rejoiced that he lived ‘in a more enlightened and less superstitious age’ and that ‘a considerable revolution’ in the minds of Catholics had occurred in modern times. There had been ‘a kind of secret reformation’ in Catholicism over the previous three centuries, perhaps especially in France and England. Indeed the Catholics of Britain laughed at the superstitions they found in other nations. The ‘cloud of superstition, which gathered during the ages of ignorance … has been continually dissipating’, so that now the church could bask in ‘the gentle sunshine of a rational philosophy’.Footnote 95 In both Catholic and Protestant realms, ‘the still small voice of reason begins at length to be heard, and rational religion will, I trust, in the end, triumph equally over fanaticism and superstition’.Footnote 96 Across Europe, many idle festivals had been removed from the calendar, and ‘frugal industry’ had taken their place: Geddes here echoed Protestant deprecation of the unproductive religious holidays which allegedly rendered Catholic countries economically stagnant. The task of reform was not complete: the liturgy must be put into the vernacular, clerical celibacy must be abolished, and the religious orders curtailed.Footnote 97
Geddes was as ready to castigate Protestants as to apologize for (reformed) Catholics. Like a good Humean, he thought religion should find a middle way between superstition and enthusiasm. He accepted that Catholicism, a ‘ceremonious’ religion that appeals to the senses, was apt to veer toward superstition, but no more than Protestantism was apt to slide perniciously toward fanaticism.Footnote 98 British Protestants could not hold up their heads in an enlightened age until they conceded full religious toleration to Catholics and Dissenters. Geddes's distaste for the haughty complacency of the Anglican establishment was augmented by his hatred of Scottish Presbyterian bigotry which had been so visible in the Edinburgh anti-Catholic riots of 1779. Tracts like The Dumfries catechism and the Appeal from the Protestant Association were riddled with ‘fanaticism and malevolence’.Footnote 99 When Geddes crossed the Tweed into England he was glad to be ‘out of reach of Presbyterian zealotism’.Footnote 100 Not that England was immune. As he surveyed the Gordon Riots of 1780, London's most violent mayhem of the century and directed against Catholics, it was plausible to think that it was in Protestant Britain not Catholic Europe that ‘the expiring gasps of fanaticism’ were most readily to be found.Footnote 101 While Catholic monarchs granted toleration and clipped the wings of inquisitions it was possible to reproach Protestant Britain for dragging its feet; even Spain was fast becoming one of the ‘most enlightened and liberal nations in Europe’.Footnote 102 When a British Protestant published a tract against toleration, Geddes talked of ‘a disgusting illiberality of sentiment unworthy of this enlightened and tolerant age’.Footnote 103 The spirit of enlightenment was not the monopoly of Protestants.
III
Toward the close of the eighteenth century the demand for emancipation turned British Catholics into Whigs. But Geddes became more than a Whig: he turned Jacobin. This was rare among British Catholics, but not unique. Within a generation some had made the transition from Jacobite to Jacobin.Footnote 104 In 1792, when the pastoral letter of the Vicars Apostolic condemned Geddes's Bible alongside Throckmorton's and Berington's ecclesiastical democracy, one Catholic commentator expressed himself pleased that such ‘diabolical … republican and levelling principles’ had been proscribed.Footnote 105 Biblical criticism and ecclesiastical collegialism were now tarred with the brush of republican anarchism. By this time, Edmund Burke's powerfully insinuative colligation of speculative theology with republican politics, his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), was seeping into national consciousness. Yet Geddes could scarcely complain that it was a false aspersion to connect his biblical scholarship with republicanism, for his republicanism was absolutely explicit in the 1792 preface to the first volume of his Bible. He turned the Hebrew commonwealth into a republic and Moses into a Jacobin. ‘The scheme of government which Moses presents to them [the Jews], is a pure republic … Although he [Moses] makes no formal declaration of the Rights of Man, all his decrees relative to property and personal safety are evidently founded on that principle.’ The Israelites were equal citizens, with everyone entitled to hold the highest offices, ‘all magistrates [were] chosen by the people’. Property rights were secured, but land was shared fairly, and poverty was relieved by public authority. Later, monarchy was established among the Israelites only because, in their folly, they asked God for a king, and God, in his wrath, granted one.Footnote 106 Critics directly linked Geddes's Bible with Tom Paine's Age of reason (1794). Hermeneutics was subversive, an association which retarded for a generation the reception of German higher criticism.Footnote 107
Geddes applauded the French Revolution. The new French constitution of 1790 was ‘one of the greatest efforts of political genius’.Footnote 108 His ode, Carmen saeculare (1790), was read to the French National Assembly. Here he rejoiced at the liberation of the French from their ‘Egyptian servitude’, and pronounced the Revolution to be a warning to all tyrants. The peoples of Europe should ‘at the patriot altar swear, /Eternal war with tyranny’.
His closing lines, pronouncing that the Seine now flowed more freely than the Thames, seemed full of menace against the British establishment.Footnote 109 Geddes expressed his admiration for Paine and made ample use of the clarion cry of the ‘Rights of Man’.Footnote 110 After Paine was prosecuted for sedition in 1792, he urged that ‘argument, or irony, would have been better employed against Paine, than persecution and penalties’.Footnote 111 He argued that the ‘rights of man’ should be extended to the emancipation of the blacks of Africa: ‘nature, humanity, and religion’ demand it. This he did in a satiric poem entitled An apology for slavery. ‘British interest, British luxury, British state expediency, have neither eyes to see, nor ears to hear, their despair or their lamentations.’Footnote 112
It is hard to say what kind of a republican Geddes was: he never reflected deeply on politics. In a momentary utopian vision depicting a tribe of noble savages, he reveals a debt to Rousseau: the women breastfeed and reject wet-nursing; the children wander naked in summer and live a camp life in the open air, Spartan fashion.Footnote 113 Geddes hated the fact that in Britain ‘republican’ was a dirty word. By contrast, to speak against republicanism was or is, he said, a crime in Athens, Sparta, Rome, the Netherlands, and the United States. In concessive mood, he deployed a classical and moderating definition: a republic is a regime that serves the public interest and the common good, so that the word properly refers to any virtuous government, whatever its form. To equate it with democracy is a solecism. Venice, Holland, and the cantons of Switzerland were republics but not democracies. England, with its balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy was truly a republic. Even so, Geddes slithered between this conventional doctrine of the mixed polity and a more radically democratic position, for he also pronounced that ‘our government is fundamentally democratic; that is, it derives its existence and power from the free choice of the people’. He wrote of ‘the laws, that is the people’. Like his friends in the Society for Constitutional Information, he called for ‘a more equal representation of the people in the national legislature’.Footnote 114 The same ambivalence infected Geddes's attitude to aristocracies. Like others in British radical circles, he was an enemy of ‘Old Corruption’, and he habitually used ‘aristocrat’ as a term of abuse. Of France he wrote, ‘See Pow'r Aristocratic breathless lie!’Footnote 115 He thought an hereditary nobility an ‘absurd institution’, and the arrogance of the aristocrat excited his ‘disgust’. When he reviewed a tract against duelling, by his cousin Bishop Geddes, he remarked that the practice was ‘a remainder of that aristocratic leaven, which has long corrupted … manners’.Footnote 116 But he explained that he was not against nobility as such, for ‘virtue’ makes the truest nobility, and he hoped for an ‘elective senate’.Footnote 117 ‘Henceforth learn to know, that nought on earth, /But worth and virtue, makes nobility.’Footnote 118
Geddes remained resolutely Jacobin long after most enthusiasts for the Revolution had reneged: after the Terror, the mass exodus of French Catholic priests to England, the British declaration of war upon France, Burke's brilliant capture of British sentiment, and the sedition trials pressed by Prime Minister William Pitt. Geddes's friends begged him to cease publishing on the subject.Footnote 119 He had, he complained, been denounced as ‘a republican, a democrat, a reformist, a liberty of the press-man, a Painist, a Leveller’.Footnote 120 As the 1790s wore on, he despaired at the ‘high tide of fictitious loyalty’ that overwhelmed even the Foxite Whigs. He spat venom against the scribblers for king and church, the self-appointed ‘loyal and orthodox’, who vied with each other ‘to sound the praises of celestial Pitt’.Footnote 121 In 1795 he still proclaimed the brotherhood of man:
In 1798 Geddes reflected on the dramatic change in the climate of opinion. He reminded his readers that the Revolution was at first ‘almost universally applauded’, and that the phrase ‘the rights of man, resounded from shore to shore’. He recalled the phalanx of distinguished authors who had written in the Revolution's defence: Price, Priestley, Mackintosh, Wyvill, and Wollstonecraft.Footnote 123
Geddes knew Burke personally. Like other Catholic leaders he had met him in the 1780s in the course of politicking for Catholic emancipation. He now thought Burke a Judas: the friend of liberty had turned upon the French people's great act of self-emancipation. Like some modern commentators, Geddes could not make coherent the earlier liberal Burke and the later conservative Burke. He thought Burke's Reflections ‘completely ruined his reputation as a friend to freedom’. The book was full of ‘glorious bombast’, it was a ‘splendid nothing’, and ‘one of the most flimsy, unphilosophical productions of the age’.Footnote 124 When Burke died in 1797, Geddes penned an epitaph:
Geddes also railed against other betrayers: Pitt, and Henry Dundas, the despot of Scotland.Footnote 126 Pitt had once ‘boldly cry'd corruption down /And bawl'd for a Reform’; he had lifted the penal laws from Catholics and had ‘seem'd an angel bright’. Now he could only ‘bawl for king and for church’, and pledge the nation's gold to Europe's crowns, ‘to evr'y rogue that fills a throne’. Burke and Pitt led a ‘holy league … to save the sacred rights of kings’.Footnote 127 Geddes ridiculed Burke's froth about the violation of the honour of the queen of France, and parodied the debased Burkean rants that issued from high church pulpits. He imagined a clergyman praying, ‘Soul of Burke, animate my dull clay with thine electric fire.’ Combining the animus of a Dissenter commenting on the evils of the church establishment with that of a Painite on the evils of aristocracy, Geddes scorned the Anglican clergyman's path to preferment in Burkean and Pittite times:
Let me suppose my first patron to be a newly-made peer – I sometimes say grace at his table and praise his politics, his venison, and his wine – he repays me with a prebend – I then write a pithy pamphlet against Socinian Dissenters; or a bold defence of ministerial measures; the first vacant bishopric is my reward – I deliver a pastoral charge against French infidels, and English heretics; I am instantly translated to a better see.
Nor did Geddes much care for the tone of growing Anglican sympathy for Catholics. Bishop Samuel Horsley, who had been instrumental in securing the Catholic Relief Act in 1791, congratulated Catholics for their commendable attachment to civil authority and hatred of the French Revolution.Footnote 128 Geddes wanted no high church tory promotion of Catholicism.
Geddes condemned unreservedly the British war against France. It was fought lest ‘large cargoes of the rights of man’ be imported to Britain, lest ‘the principles of the French Revolution would have been freely discussed among ourselves’, lest the French and British constitutions were contrasted and ‘odious comparisons’ drawn. It was a war against ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. For the Anglican clergy it was a war to defend their ‘rites and rents’; a war for ‘keeping the people poor and miserable, in order to make them humble and tractable’ and ‘submissive to both prince and priest’; a war to ensure that we shall not hear ‘shoemakers and tailors talking about mending the constitution, a buckle-maker in Birmingham descanting on a bill of rights, or a journeyman barber bawling about reformation’.Footnote 129
Not even these sentiments plumb the depths of Geddes's alienation from British political orthodoxy, for in 1799 he penned a congratulatory ode to Napoleon Bonaparte on his safe return from his Egyptian campaign. Where Alexander and Caesar had fought to enslave mankind, brave Bonaparte fights to break the iron chains of tyranny, and restore mankind to its natural rights. Out of Egypt, emblem of despotic darkness, the light of a golden age of liberty dawned.Footnote 130
This ode was not published, and despite his Francophilia, Geddes was anxious to stress the Britishness of his radical credentials. He was, he claimed, ‘no Jacobin, nor Jacobite’. Although he had, like any Scottish Catholic of his generation, been brought up on ‘high-leavened Tory principles’, he was ‘an honest Whig from the age of twenty’. Above all, he was ‘a Foxite, an obstinate Foxite … as violent a Foxite … as any man in the kingdom’, for Charles James Fox was ‘one of the greatest, and wisest and best of men’.Footnote 131 He declared that, next to the names of ‘Christian’ and ‘Catholic’, ‘Foxite’ was the most glorious name he could bear.Footnote 132 Geddes had been present at the Foxites' meeting at the Crown and Anchor tavern which Burke savaged in the Reflections. He was a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, and present at discussion of the American revolutionary Joel Barlow's Address to the French National Convention.Footnote 133 Geddes's politics acquired the characteristic colours of this circle. He looked forward to ‘a free and equal representation of the people’, the reform of electoral corruption, the curtailment of the ‘civil list’ of sinecure officeholders, the reduction of aristocratic privilege, the abridgement of the disfiguring game laws, the opening of public office to all citizens without religious tests.Footnote 134
At the hub of the British radical circle was the publisher Joseph Johnson. To his house in St Paul's Churchyard came Price and Priestley, William Godwin, Joel Barlow, Tom Paine, Horne Tooke, Gilbert Wakefield, Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maria Edgeworth. Johnson published Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the rights of woman and Godwin's Enquiry into political justice, and though frightened off the first part of Paine's Rights of man, published the second.Footnote 135 Geddes knew this circle well, if not in equal measure. He was especially intimate with the radical Dissenters, visiting Priestley in Birmingham and praising his lectures on politics.Footnote 136 He relished the company of authoresses; he was close to Letitia Barbauld, poet and children's author, Elizabeth Hamilton, author of Letters on education, Mary Hays, author of the Appeal to the men of Great Britain in behalf of women, and Anne Plumptre, translator of Kotzebue's plays.Footnote 137 It was in these circles – which included such other leading Unitarians and Dissenters as John Disney, Gilbert Wakefield, Theophilus Lindsey, and Crabb Robinson (who remarked that Herder reminded him of Geddes)Footnote 138 – that Geddes encountered Coleridge and Blake.
Geddes's connection with Mary Wollstonecraft has not been remarked upon by her numerous biographers. In 1788 Johnson assembled a team of writers for his new journal, The Analytical Review. Like the Edinburgh Review a few years later, it specialized in extended critical essays on recent publications. Geddes and Wollstonecraft were the workhorses of the early issues, their (anonymous) contributions being so numerous that they must both practically have been in Johnson's full-time pay. Geddes contributed forty-seven articles between 1788 and 1793.Footnote 139 His were mostly on biblical hermeneutics and ecclesiastical history, hers on education and fiction.
Johnson's journal, with its meld of speculative theology and Dissenting social philosophy was an invigorating opportunity for Geddes to stamp his own preoccupations on the public mind. Even though Catholic intramural quarrels might not seem interesting to a Protestant readership, Johnson allowed Geddes to use the Analytical as a vehicle to wage Cisalpine warfare, a public advertising of Catholic quarrels which further embittered those differences. As well as Geddes's lengthy articles reviewing Catholic publications, Johnson also published a review of Geddes's own savage Letter to the Vicars Apostolic.Footnote 140 In fact, Johnson, a Dissenter, published many of the Catholic Committee's tracts. The episcopal party meanwhile took their pamphlets to James Peter Coghlan, the principal Catholic publisher of the time, whose bookshop was the haven of Milnerite gossip, and about which Geddes was characteristically splenetic. Coghlan's publishing business – his prayer books could be found in Catholic chapels from London to the Highlands – has yet to find its historian.Footnote 141
Johnson was jailed in 1798 and the Analytical succumbed to Burkean times. Geddes was fortunate not to be prosecuted for sedition. It was a fellow Catholic priest, the future bishop, Milner, who publicly said he ought to be, linking Geddes to a treasonable remnant of the ‘Convention of the Friends of the Peope’, a band of Edinburgh Catholic Jacobins: Geddes deserved, like them, to be transported to Botany Bay.Footnote 142 How far Geddes was involved with David Downie and William Maxwell, the two leading Jacobins among the Catholic laity, remains unclear. He probably influenced Downie, whom he certainly knew. In 1794 Downie was condemned to death for treason and transported to Australia. Maxwell, who was present at the guillotining of Louis XVI, was the target of Burke's notorious ‘daggers speech’ in the House of Commons in 1792. Geddes told a correspondent that Maxwell was ready to use bullets in England.Footnote 143
Among the Scottish Catholic clergy, Geddes was the sole Jacobin. Bishop Hay undoubtedly had his old bête noire in mind when he penned the most systematic expression of Burkean principles to be found among the British Catholic clergy. In 1793 he drafted a pastoral letter on ‘the duties which we owe to our civil superiors’. He bathed the British constitution in divine light, offered a hymn of gratitude to Britain's gracious sovereign for relieving Catholics of the penal laws, and ferociously attacked the French Revolution, whose roots he located in the despicable philosophy of ‘deists and atheists’. He denounced the godless materialism of Holbach's Système de la nature and the levelling anarchism of Rousseau's Discourse on the origin of inequality. He turned on the British Jacobins, for ‘there are some evil disposed people, even in these happy realms’ who would plunge Britain into the ‘abyss of misery’, whose ‘wild ideas of the rights of men, universal liberty, and equality’ stir up people to ‘rebellion and revolt’ against the duties which God has inculcated. Hay was pleased with his production: he asked that copies be sent to those in ‘high station, and particularly one as from me to Mr Burke’.Footnote 144
In Edinburgh Bishop Hay damned the Revolution and damned the British Jacobins. In London Bishop Talbot damned the Cisalpines and damned biblical criticism. In Geddes, the higher criticism of the Bible became for the time being irrevocably associated with republicanism and ecclesiastical democracy. As the tide of public sentiment turned during the 1790s, Geddes became increasingly isolated, his intellectual and political projects deemed sinister. He had taken the British Catholic Enlightenment to its limits and beyond, and he, and it, now met their nemesis. In the wake of Edmund Burke, a Protestant who contributed more to the remodelling of Catholicism than a Catholic might care to admit, Alexander Geddes could only belong with the damned. Certainly, Geddes, both philosophically and temperamentally, was an extremist, but he had done no more than to extrapolate, and pursue the reductio, of the intellectual tendencies of the European Catholic Enlightenment. His fate was tied up with that Enlightenment, the collapse of which now rapidly ensued.
