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Acts of God, Acts of Men: Providence in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England and France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Françoise Deconinck-Brossard
Françoise Deconinck-Brossard*
Affiliation:
Université de Paris X
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Extract

A Headline in the Daily Telegraph once read: ‘Vicar is “act of God” victim’. The article explained:

A vicar has become a victim of an ‘act of God’ after a thunderbolt wrecked his car during a storm. Dennis Ackroyd, vicar of St Luke’s … in Cleckheaton, near Bradford … now faces problems claiming compensation from his insurance company.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 41: Signs, Wonders, Miracles Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church , 2005 , pp. 356 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005

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References

1 The Daily Telegraph, 21 July 1997,10.

2 OED online, s.v. ‘force majeure’ (consulted on 20 December 2003).

3 Alexandra Walsham has elaborately surveyed the concept in Providence in Early Modem England (Oxford, 1999).

4 ‘Still in the dark’, The Economist, 30 August 2003, 53.

5 George W. Bush revived the tradition when he proclaimed 1 May 2003 as a ‘national day of prayer’ in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom: see http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/04/200304.30–22.html (consulted on 29 May 2005).

6 Letsome, Sampson, The Preacher’s Assistant, in two parts. Part I. A series of the texts of all the sermons and discourses preached upon, and published since the Restoration to the present time (London, 1753)Google Scholar. See my online article, ‘The Preacher’s Helper: a Computerised Version of Letsome’s Preacher’s Assistant’, Erfurt Electronic Studies in English, 1999: http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/eese.html (consulted on 29 May 2005).

7 John Cooke, The Preacher’s Assistant, after the manner of Mr. Letsome. Containing a series of the texts of sermons and discourses published either singly, or in volumes, by divines of the Church of England and by the dissenting clergy since the Restoration to the present time. Specifying also the authors alphabetically arranged under each text-with the size, date, occasion, and subject-matter of each sermon or discourse (Oxford, 1783). A hard copy of the computerized version of John Cook’s catalogue by the late Professor Spaulding is on deposit with the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

8 T. D. Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake (London, 1955), 155; see also, for instance, Louis A. Landa’s allusion to ‘numberless sermons’ at the time of the great London plague of 1665, in ‘Religion, Science, and Medicine in A Journal of the Plague Year, reprinted in Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (London, 1722; New York, 1992), 284.

9 Plague, fire, distemper of the cattle, pestilence, storm, wind, conflagration, frost, inundation, earthquake, and calamities in general.

10 Deut. 28, 21; 32, 23, Lev. 26, 25: see Albert Camus, Théâtre Récits Nouvelles, ed. Jean Grenier and Roger Quilliot (Paris, 1962), 1947. Not unsurprisingly, the first quotation was used as an introductory quotation to a fast-day sermon against the plague by William Lupton, recorded in Letsome with a publication date of 1729.

11 In a sermon corpus of approximately one million words assembled for the purposes of private research, I have found 341 occurrences of providence(s), as against only 113 miracle(s), 105 sign(s), and 130 wonder(s).

12 For instance, Letsome listed only one sermon dealing with ‘signs’, two on ‘wonder and fear’, eight on ‘miracles’, and twenty-four on ‘providence’.

13 Linguists now generally agree on the distinction between countable nouns that may be used with an indefinite article or a number and have a plural, and uncountable nouns that cannot be used with an indefinite article or a number and have no plural: see the inside front cover of Macmillan English Dictionary for Advaned Learners (London, 2002).

14 OED online, s.v. ‘Providence’, 5b (consulted on 20 December 2003).

15 Gentleman’s Magazine 25 (1755), 225.

16 Gentleman’s Magazine 26 (1756), 69.

17 See in this volume Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Miracles within Catastrophes: Some Examples from Early Modern Germany’, 323–34.

18 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle IV: ‘Why drew Marseilles’ good bishop purer breath,/ When nature sicken’d, and each gale was death?’

19 ‘Belsunce, pasteur vénérable,/Sauvait son peuple périssant’, 11. 101–2 in Ode sur le fanatisme (1736): see Voltaire électronique. Full-Text Database (1998), P 16417.

20 Théâtre Récits Nouvelles, 1215–1350. A new, definitive edition is forthcoming.

21 Translation by Robin Buss (London, 2001; repr. 2002), 73; Théâtre Récits Nouvelles, 1294: ‘Mes frères, vous êtes dans le malheur, mes frères, vous l’avez mérité’.

22 Mandement de Monseigneur L’illustrissime et reverendissime Evêque de Marseille (22 October 1720), 4: ‘N’en doutons pas, Mes très-chers Freres, c’est par le debordement de nos crimes que nous avons merités cette effusion des Vases de la colere & de la fureur de Dieu’.

23 Sarocchi, Jean, ‘Paneloux, pour et contre, contre et pour’, Cahiers de Malagar XBI automne 1999: Il y a 50 ans La Peste de Camus (Saim-Maixant, 2000), 101–3 Google Scholar.

24 Sarocchi quotes Thellier de Poncheville’s sermon, preached in Oran on 27 June 1940: ‘Paneloux, pour et contre’, 122–3.

25 Ibid.

26 Sherlock, Thomas, A Letter from the Lord Bishop of London To the Clergy and People of London and Westminster; On Occasion of the Late Earthquakes (London, 1750), 7–8 Google Scholar.

27 ‘Les P.P. de Loratoire de La Ciotat profitent de ce malheur pour debiter publiquement que cest moy qui ay atiré la peste a Marseille par mes persecutions aleur egard’, in ‘Copie [ms] d’une lettre de M. L’Evêque de Marseille le 4 ybre [oct?] 1720 a M. Larcheveque D’arles’. The champion of orthodoxy had recently had three thousand copies of a book written by the jansenist father Quesnel burnt: see Ch. Carrière, M. Courdurié and F. Rebuffat, Marseille ville morte: la peste de 1720 (Marseilles, [1968]), 35 and 201–2, and Marcel Bernos, ‘Face à la «peste janséniste»: Monseigneur de Belsunce et le Sacré-Cœur’, Marseille 120 (1980), 33–5.

28 Carrière, Charles and Courdurié, Marcel, ‘Un Document nouveau sur la peste de Marseille’, Provence historique 33. 131(1983), 103–8 Google Scholar.

29 Goury, Michel, ‘L’Épave présumée du Grand Saint Antoine’, Provence historique 47. 189(1997), 449–67, 452Google Scholar

30 The Plague, 115; Théâtre Récits Nouvelles, 1340: ‘Je suis content de le savoir meilleur que son prêche’.

31 Thomas Hunter, National Wickedness the Cause of National Misery: A Sermon Preach’d at the Parish Church of Weverham in Cheshire on Friday, the Sixth of February. Being the Day Appointed, by Proclamation, to be Kept as a General Fast and Humiliation, on Account of the Late Dreadful Earthquakes, in Portugal, etc. (Liverpool, 1756).

32 T. Richards, National Repentance Urged from the Prospect of National Judgments: a Sermon, Preached at the Parish Churches of All Saints, in Northampton, On Friday the 6th of February, 1756... (S.p, 1756).

33 William Nowell, A Sermon Preached at the Parish Church of Wolsingham, in the Bishoprick of Durham, On the 6th of February, 1756, Being the Day Appointed by his Majesty for a General Fast, on Account of the Dreadful Earthquake at Lisbon, Nov. 1.1755 (Newcastle, 1756), 6.

34 [Morgan Powell], The Hand of the Lord upon the Cattle. A Sermon Occasioned by the Distemper among the Cattle. Very Proper to he Read and Considered by all Persons, who have been, or may he Sufferers thereby (London, 1747), 25.

35 A popular representation of Saint Roch is to be found in Sylvain Gagnière, ‘Les Saints invoqués en temps de peste et de choléra dans le Comtat et ses abords’, Cahiers de pratique médico-chirurgicale II.6 (1937), 259–74, fig. 4 opposite p. 263. A moving prayer to Saint Roch was drawn by the notary Jean-François Bouyon when he and his fellow-aldermen spent some time in voluntary confinement in the town-hall of La Valette at the time of the plague epidemic: see Gilbert Buti, ‘La Peste à La Valette en 1721: Livre jaune et grand témoin’, Provence historique 47 (1997), 513–34, 527.

36 Correspondance de Mgr de Belsunce Evêque de Marseille Composée de Lettres et Documents en partie inédits, ed. Louis-Antoine de Porrentruy (Marseilles, 1911), 178.

37 ‘Oratio Gregorii ad plebem’, PL Database online, vol. 071 [consulted on 2 March 2004]; a French translation is available in Grégoire de Tours, Histoire des Francs, transl. Robert Latouche, 2 vols (Paris, 1995), 2: 256–9. I owe this reference to Kate Cooper.

38 Sherlock, A Letter from the Lord Bishop of London, 12.

39 Ordonnance de Monsieur le Grand-Vicaire, 6 August 1720 [n.p.]: ‘Le bonheur que nous avons de posseder dans nôtre Ville ses Saintes Reliques doit exciter nôtre confiance, & doit nous faire esperer, que nos prieres presentées à Dieu par un si bon Patron seront exaucées’.

40 François Peilhe, La Misere du tems representée par un vœu que la Ville d’Arles fit à Dieu au sujet de la Contagion l’an 1721 (s.p., s.d.). Cf. Jonah 3.

41 ‘Copie d’une lettre de M. L’Evêque de Marseille’: ‘Dieu qui me punit a été sourd a mes prieres, et peu touché de mes larmes ce St homme [P. Melley] est mort hier a midi, je suis persuadé de son bonheur mais ce coup mafflige et me deconcerte audelà deceque je puis vous le dire’.

42 [Powell], The Hand of the Lord upon the Cattle, 19.

43 Nowell, A Sermon Preached at the Parish Church of Wolsingham, 3.

44 Hunter, National Wickedness, 12.

45 Mandement de Monseigneur L’illustrissime et reverendissime Evèque de Marseille, 5: ‘nous avons le malheur de servir d’exemple à nos voisins & à toutes les Nations’.

46 Milner, John, Ruin Prevented by Repentance, Applied to Civil Societies: In Two Discourses Delivered at Peckham in Surrey. On the General Fast, February 6,1756. Occasioned by the Late Dreadful Earthquake at Lisbon, and the Apprehension of Nearer Threatning Calamities (London, 1756), 22.Google Scholar

47 The idea was satirized in an engraving published on 29 November 1755, ‘An Attempt to assign the Cause of the late most Dreadful Earthquake & Fiery Irruption at Lisbon Or Suppression of Superstition & Idolatry & Persecution for Conscience sake the most probable means of averting National Calamities’: Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, ed. Frederick George Stephens and M. Dorothy George, II vols (London, 1978), 3.2: no. 3329, 966–7; illustration in Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, fig. VIII opposite p. 150.

48 Seward, Thomas, The Late Dreadful Earthquakes no Proof of God’s Particular Wrath against the Portuguese: A Sermon Preached at Litchfield, on Sunday, December 7, 1755 (London, 1756), 18–19 Google Scholar.

49 Ronald J. Vander Molen explains that such an ‘ethic of success’, a substantial modification of the Calvinistic doctrine of providence, which has become ‘the basis of one very important element on the Weber-Tawney thesis’, was ‘inserted into Puritan thought’ by Thomas Beard’s ‘uncritical’ work The Theatre of God’s Judgments (1597): ‘Providence as Mystery, Providence as Revelation: Puritan and Anglican Modifications of John Calvin’s Doctrine of Providence’, ChH 47 (1978), 27–47, 45–6.

50 Epistle I, 1. 284.

51 Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (Oxford, 1969; 3rd edn, 1976), 366.

52 Ibid., 369.

53 Voltaire, ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne: ou examen de cet axiome: «tout est bien»‘, in Mélanges, Jacques van den Heuvel and Emmanuel Berl, eds (Paris, 1961), 304–9, 304: ‘Lisbonne, qui n’est plus, eut-elle plus de vices / Que Londres, que Paris, plongés dans les délices? / Lisbonne est abîmée, et l’on danse à Paris’.

54 Ibid., 307: ‘De l’auteur de tout bien le mal est-il venu?’.

55 Ibid., 308: ‘La nature est muette, on l’interroge en vain’.

56 It is difficult to know whether it was read in contemporary English translations. André Michel Rousseau, ‘L’Angleterre et Voltaire (1718–1789). III’, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 147 (1976), 599–1085, quotes a translation of Voltaire’s poetical works in 1764 (pp. 980–1), and a French edition of the poem with a London imprint in 1756 (p. 1021).

57 SeeKendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 139 and Besterman, Voltaire, 365.

58 Gentleman’s Magazine 20 (1750), 184. The anecdote was satirized in an engraving published on 4 April 1750, ‘The Military Prophet: or a Flight from Providence. Address’d to the Foolish and Guilty, who Timidly Withdrew themselves on the Alarm of another Earthquake, April 1750’, Catalogue of Political Satires 3.1: no. 3076, 772–4, which also quotes Horace Walpole’s account of the panic; illustration in Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, fig. I facing p. 22.

59 See Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 139, and Besterman, Voltaire, 372.

60 Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 140–1, mentions ‘Ode XTV. Au soleil, sur les malheurs de la terre, depuis le désastre de Lisbonne, en 1755’ (1761), Œuvres de Ponce Denis (Écouchard) Le Brun, ed. Pierre-Louis Ginguené, 4 vols (Paris, 1811), 1: 185: ‘Fallait-il, Astre du Monde,/ Qu’à ces fatales horreurs,/ A ces Révoltes de l’Onde,/ L’Homme joignît ses Fureurs?’.

61 Gilbert, Robert, The Terms of National Happiness Stated and Recommended. A Sermon Delivered at Northampton, Feb. the 6th M.DCC.LVI. Appointed to be Observed, As a Day of General and Publick Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer (London, 1756), 20 Google Scholar.

62 Milner, Ruin Prevented by Repentance, 42.

63 Besterman, Voltaire, 366.

64 Ibid.

65 Sylvain Gagnière, for instance, reproduces a lithograph showing how the town of Nimes was protected from the cholera epidemic in 1834 by the intercession of the Virgin Mary and the souls of the Purgatory: ‘Les Saints invoqués en temps de peste et de choléra’, fig. 5 facing p. 268.

66 See for instance Paula R. Backscheider’s preface to Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, x: ‘In 1988 Cardinal Siri of Genoa called AIDS “a holy plague to punish sinners”’.

67 A letter from François Decormis to Pierre Saurin (who had left the city at the time of the epidemic), 29 January 1721: ‘Je suis bien d’avis que la misère et la mauvaise nourriture ont beaucoup contribué au fléau, et que le proverbe: après la famine la peste, est bien véritable. Il l’est aussi que c’est une guerre divine où Dieu appesantit sa main sur nous’, quoted in Charles de Ribbe, Deux Chrétiennes pendant la peste de 1720 d’après des documents originaux (Paris, 1874), 36 n. 2. An anthology of the correspondence was published by the same editor, L’ancien Barreau du Parlement de Provence ou Extraits d’une correspondance inédite échangée pendant la peste de 1720 entre François Decormis et Pierre Saurin, Avocats au même Parlement (Marseilles, 1861).

68 Quoted by Susan Sontag, ‘AIDS and its Metaphors’, in Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Backscheider, 250–8, 256. A search on the internet suggests that responses to the earthquake that devastated the ancient city of Bam, Iran, in December 2003 never hinted at a providential interpretation of the disaster, in spite of the geopolitical context.

69 Journal du Maitre d’hôtel de Mgr de Belsunce Durant la peste de Marseille 1720–1722, ed. D. Théophile Bérengier (Paris, 1878), 11–12, n. 3: ‘Accablés de malheurs, entourés de la peste, /Grand saint Roch, nous ne craignons rien, / Et rien ne nous sera funeste /Si vous estes notre soutien./ Secourez ce peuple chrétien /Et venez apaiser la colère céleste./ Mais n’amenez pas votre chien,/ Nous n’avons pas de pain de reste’.

70 Gérard Fabre, Epidémies et contagions: l’imaginaire du mal en Occident (Paris, 1998), 137–43, and ‘La Peste en l’absence de Dieu?’, Archives de Sciences sociales des Religions 73 (1991), 141–58. However, Fabre’s weak point is that his corpus is very small indeed, with only 14 items.

71 See in this volume, Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’, 273–306.

72 On Jansenist miracles, see Robert Kreiser, B., Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, NJ, 1978), passim Google Scholar.

73 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: a Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780. Volume I: Whichcote to Wesley; Volume II: Shaftesbury to Hume (Cambridge, 1991, 2000), 2: 13.

74 The point had already been made by Burns, R. M., among others: The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanviile to David Hume (Lewisburg, PA, 1981)Google Scholar.

75 [William] Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London, 1722; 8th edn, 1759), 178–9 and 187–9.

76 Nowell, A Sermon Preached at the Parish Church of Wolsingham, 7.

77 There was much debate over the cause of the disease, until the bacillus responsible for the plague was identified in 1894.

78 Nowell, A Sermon Preached at the Parish Church of Wolsingham, 7.

79 Milner, Ruin Prevented by Repentance, 10.

80 Thomas Seward, canon of Lichfield, maintained that the crucifixion argued against the idea of temporal retribution: ‘If others Sufferings are greater than ours, shall we dare to tax them with greater Wickedness, when the only Sinless, the only Perfect Man that ever lived, suffered the most painful, the most afflictive, and the most ignominious death?’ in The Late Dreadful Earthquakes no Proof of God’s Particular Wrath against the Portuguese, 12.

81 Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (3rd edn, Oxford, 1975), Section X: ‘Of Miracles’, 109–31.

82 Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’, 273–306.

83 Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 2: 31–50; see also her article on ‘Responses to Hume on Religion by Anglicans and Dissenters’, JEH 52 (2001), 675–95, 676.

84 Hume, Enquiries, 109; Tillotson’s argument is quoted by Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, 1:71. See also Fred Wilson, The Logic of Probabilities in Hume’s Argument against Miracles’, Hume Studies 15 (1989), 255–75, 261.

85 An English translation of Candide was published in 1759: see Hywel Berwyn Evans, ‘A Provisional Bibliography of English Editions and Translations of Voltaire’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 8 (1959), 9–121, 51.

86 Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 135 at n. 1, quoting New Letters of David Hume, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford, 1954).

87 William Adams, An Essay on Mr Hume’s Essay on Miracles (Shrewsbury, 1752), 21. Subsequent editions were published with the title An Essay in Answer to Mr Hume’s Essay on Miracles (e.g. 2nd edn, London, 1754).

88 John Hey, Heads of Lectures in Divinity, Delivered in the University of Cambridge (3rd edn, Cambridge, 1794), ch. XV, § 18, p. 8.

89 The best biography of Doddridge is by Malcolm Deacon, Philip Doddridge of Northampton, 1702–51 (Northampton, 1980).

90 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, 1: 182, and ‘Responses to Hume’, 691, n. 91; eadem, The Defence of Truth through the Knowledge of Error Philip Doddridge’s Academy Lectures (London, 2003), 19–20.

91 See Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 159–62.

92 See John Wesley’s sermon 67 ‘On Divine Providence’, in The Works of John Wesley, Sermons II:34–70, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN, 1985), 535–50.

93 No. 9 in The Sermons of Charles Wesley: a Critical Edition, with Introduction and Notes, ed. Kenneth G. C. Newport (Oxford, 2001), 237–40; this sermon has sometimes been attributed to his brother John.

94 Ibid., 236.

95 Hunter, National Wickedness, 20.

96 Parnther, John, A Sermon, Preached in the Parish Churches of Wath and Pickhill (York, 1756), 14 Google Scholar.