ALEXANDER GEDDES AT THE LIMITS OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737-1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he become a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the 'Rational Dissenters'. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Make and Coleridge. Second, he embraced 'ecclesiastical democracy', denouncing papal and episcopal anthority and proclaiming British Catholics to be 'Protesting Catholic Dissenters'. third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthosiasin hazardmis. Ceddes zoos an extreme exponent of the Catholic E'nh,'ghtenment, yet eqnall h)a, representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism?, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.