Religion
Having converted to Roman Catholicism early in life and returned to the austere Calvinism of his native Geneva as part of his period of moral reform, Rousseau maintained a profession of that religious philosophy and of John Calvin as a modern lawgiver throughout the remainder of his life. His views on religion presented in his works of philosophy, however, may strike some as discordant with the doctrines of both Catholicism and Calvinism.
At the time, however, Rousseau's strong endorsement of religious toleration, as expounded by the Savoyard vicar in Émile, was interpreted as advocating indifferentism, a heresy, and led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. His assertion in the Social Contract that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens may have been another reason for Rousseau's condemnation in Geneva.
Unlike many of the more radical Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau affirmed the necessity of religion. But he repudiated the doctrine of original sin, which plays so large a part in Calvinism (in Émile, Rousseau writes "there is no original perversity in the human heart").
In the 18th century, many deists viewed God merely as an abstract and impersonal creator of the universe, which they likened to a giant machine. Rousseau's deism differed from the usual kind in its intense emotionality. He saw the presence of God in his creation, including mankind, which, apart from the harmful influence of society, is good, because God is good. Rousseau's attribution of a spiritual value to the beauty of nature anticipates the attitudes of 19th-century Romanticism towards nature and religion.
Rousseau was upset that his deistic views were so forcefully condemned, while those of the more atheistic philosophes were ignored. He defended himself against critics of his religious views in his "Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris in which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force."
Read more about this topic: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“I read ... an article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children to be skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)