Gentle Skeptics?: American Catholic Encounters with Polygenism, Geology, and Evolutionary Theories from 1845 to 1875

Abstract

For many Christians, the middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed new scientific discoveries and theories which appeared to threaten their beliefs. American Protestant responses to these new discoveries and theories, particularly to evolution, have been well studied by historians.(1) In comparison, American Catholic responses have earned far less scrutiny.(2) Admittedly, American Catholics wrote comparatively little on science and produced no commentator of St. George Jackson Mivart's stature and influence within the scientific community.(3) American Catholics did, however, produce thoughtful, measured responses which revealed uniquely Catholic concerns in a distinctly American intellectual and social context.(4) In this article American Catholic responses to science from 1845 to 1859 will be explored first. Polygenism--not geology or evolutionary theories--emerged as the most significant issue. Polygenists denied that all humans were Adam's descendants, some arguing that the different races of man were actually distinct species.(5) Polygenism enjoyed significant support in ante-bellum America partly for its seemingly scientific legitimation of slavery.(6) Because of the significant support it enjoyed among some scientists in America (Louis Agassiz being its most esteemed proponent), and, most importantly, because it contradicted church teachings on original sin and redemption, polygenism was seen by American Catholics to be a far graver threat to their faith than geology or evolutionary theories.(7) To be sure, the latter in particular presented problems. Such theories contradicted the fierily of species as apparently advanced in Genesis; they (along with new theories in anthropology)(8) seemed to support the view that humans had progressed rather than degenerated since Creation, and they implied that humans were perhaps not made by God in His image but were merely developed beasts. Serious as these problems were, they nonetheless lacked the extreme perversity of polygenism's threat to the Faith.(9) France and Britain offer interesting cases for comparison. In the 1860's polygenism enjoyed strong support within France's scientific community, in part because French anti-clericals found it to be an effective weapon against church authority. French Catholics responded by ignoring evolutionary theories (naturalists in France tended to dismiss Darwinism as re-fried Lamarckism) and directed their efforts toward neutralizing the political and theological threats of polygenism to church authority.(10) In Britain, polygenism created few ripples since leading naturalists such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel-Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Richard Owen opposed it, and, of course, Darwin's ideas, if not Darwin personally, occupied center stage after 1859. These disparities among Catholic communities suggest that, while the historian might be justified in focusing upon responses to evolutionary matters among audiences in Britain, in America and elsewhere one should adopt a wider perspective. Otherwise, one runs the risk of overstating the importance of evolutionary theories and of overlooking topics of greater relevance to audiences in America, France, and other countries. The next focus of this article will be on Clarence Augustus Walworth (1820-1900), the sole American Catholic mediator between science and Catholicism. He sought both to convince Catholics that the pursuit of science honored God and to show non-Catholic Americans that the Church respected science and an individual's freedom to reason. Writing in 1863, he reconciled geology with Genesis and summarily dismissed evolution as being a false start in science. In marked contrast to this curt dismissal was his lengthy rebuttal of polygenism. He crafted his own theory of variation in nature not to disprove evolutionary theories but to prove all humans were descended from Adam and Eve. With its deeply disturbing denial of the universality of original sin, and in its disturbing use as an apology for slavery by confederate ethnologists,(11) polygenism proved far more baneful to Walworth than geology or evolutionary theories. …