Abstract :
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 became 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 Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ ecclesiastical democracy ’, denouncing papal and
episcopal authority 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
enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was
representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated
in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.
