ABSTRACT
The language, values and conduct of the men and women of seventeenth-century Europe expressed an unquestioning belief in God. There still existed a coherent view of the world as the scene of a constant struggle between good and evil forces, as personified by God and the devil. The personal God, a loving but stern father, was the unseen but all-seeing witness of the acts and thoughts of every day. Kings were God’s lieutenants; indeed all authority was God-given. For king and peasant, kingdom or village, the idea of divine retribution had a sobering power. ‘Our nation was insolent and unruly,’ wrote Mme de Maintenon in 1710, after defeats in war and a harsh winter; ‘God wishes to punish it and enlighten it.’ From baptism to extreme unction, or whatever consoling rite a Protestant might practise, men lived under the sign of the cross. The afterlife was still portrayed in the traditional way. Though baroque artists came to pay more attention to the joys of heaven than to the pains of hell, both were still envisaged as physical states and were correspondingly vivid in the popular mind. Those who feared damnation feared unending physical torment. Grace and redemption may have been words of imprecise meaning to the ordinary Christian but they conveyed awesome possibilities. When theologians sought to define them and to catch their essence they were assured of a large audience. Theology was more than an intellectual game, profoundly affected though it was in methods and style by the current rationalism. There might well be political and worldly implications, as in the controversy between Jesuits and Jansenists, or that between relatively liberal Arminians and orthodox Calvinists. But the eager attention given to the issues suggests that they were a central concern of the educated world. With wider opportunities for education came not, at first, a greater detachment but a more earnest quest for the truth.
