Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History

Chapter 19: Alexander Geddes (1737–1802)

19 R Alexander Geddes ( 17 3 7 –18 0 2 ) Biblical Criticism, Ecclesiastical Democracy, and Jacobinism MARk GoLDIE Alexander Geddes pressed the Catholic Enlightenment to its limits, and beyond. He appalled conservative contemporaries in three domains : scriptural, ecclesiastical, and political. yet although he took his positions to extremes, he reflected several characteristic strands of late eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century. From the wider culture he absorbed German hermeneutics, French Gallicanism and Jacobinism, English Protestant “Rational Dissent,” and European literary Romanticism. He was arguably the most wayward, unorthodox , iconoclastic, and intellectually daring priest to emerge from the British Catholic community of his time. Virulent and doctrinaire, Geddes broke the boundaries. the Catholic community sought a vernacular Bible: he embarked on one, but ended by deconstructing the text and doubting its divine inspiration. the Catholic laity sought 411 412 Mark Goldie ecclesiastical autonomy from the hierarchy: Geddes savaged the papacy and leveled the episcopate. Catholics aimed for civil emancipation : Geddes turned republican. Geddes was a native of Scotland, but one who established his reputation—and notoriety—in England. Born on 4 September 1737 in Rathven, Aberdeenshire, he was the son of tenant farmers and belonged to Scotland’s small and fearful Catholic community. After elementary schooling, he trained for the priesthood at the clandestine seminary of Scalan before migrating to the Scots College in Paris in 1751, where as a student of the Sorbonne he excelled in ancient languages . Returning to Scotland in 1764, he became chaplain at traquair House, Peebleshire, but was sacked in 1768 for falling in love and for crossing the authority of his bishop, George Hay (1729–1811). From 1769 to 1781, he was priest at Auchinhalrig in Aberdeenshire. Remarkably for a Catholic, he was awarded the degree of LLD by Aberdeen University, for his Select Satires of Horace. However, his attendance at a Protestant act of worship cost him his cure, and he escaped his antagonist Bishop Hay by withdrawing to England, where he secured the patronage of a leading liberal Catholic layman, Robert Lord Petre of thorndon (1741–1801), Essex, and settled in London. He took with him the wary friendship of his cousin, Bishop John Geddes (1735–1799), Hay’s colleague. Geddes abandoned priestly duties and turned to scholarship, interspersed with journalism, polemic, and feuding. He pursued his ambition to produce a new translation of the Bible for British Catholics (a Prospectus appeared in 1786), soon superseded by an impossibly ambitious (and never completed) plan for a full variorum edition of the old testament, for which he had support from the Anglican scholars Robert Lowth (1710–1787) and Benjamin kennicott (1718–1783). this in turn led to increasingly skeptical exegeses, grounded in accenting the moral over the literal truth of biblical mythologies. Shortly after publication of the first volume of his Holy Bible (1792), Geddes was condemned by the Vicars Apostolic and suspended from the priesthood . His biblical work influenced William Blake (1757–1827) and Samuel taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). Geddes was himself a poet, whose anonymous work has been confused with that of Robert Burns Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) 413 and has recently been celebrated as evidence of the vibrancy of Scottish national and radical literary culture. He applied his philological expertise to the Scots poetic tradition, his analysis being published by the Edinburgh Society of Antiquaries in a paper still used by dialectologists (Geddes 1792b). In Petre’s circle, Geddes became a leading voice of the “Cisalpine” movement, which sought for Catholics within the Protestant British state both civil emancipation and ecclesiastical emancipation from the papacy. He and his colleagues declared British Catholics to be “Protesting Catholic Dissenters.” In politics, he was a radical Whig and espoused such causes as antislavery, civil liberties for Dissenters, and the American and French revolutions, pursuing his republicanism long after Edmund Burke rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. He belonged to the network of “Rational Dissenters,” gathered around the publisher Joseph Johnson (1738–1809), for whom (alongside the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft [1759–1797]) he wrote extensively in the Analytical Review. Punishing days at his desk were rewarded with beguiling literary dinner parties laced with iconoclasm, satire, and gossip. Geddes was coruscating and made enemies, but the animus was not only personal, for his themes were emblematic of the values and fragilities of the Catholic Enlightenment. We shall examine in turn scriptural scholarship, ecclesiology, and secular politics. Biblical...