The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment (Enlightenment World)

THE ENGLISH DEISTS STUDIES IN EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century Series Editor: Series Co-Editors:

Advisory Editor:

Michael T. Davis Jack Fruchtman, Jr Iain McCalman Paul Pickering Hideo Tanaka

Titles in this Series 1 Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment David Worrall 2 The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 Michael Scrivener 3 Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism Carol Bolton 4 Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds) 5 Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism Jacqueline Labbe (ed) 6 The Scottish People and the French Revolution Bob Harris Forthcoming Titles Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds) Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists Michelle Faubert The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century Jonathan Lamb Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835 Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark (eds)

John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon Steve Poole (ed.) William Wickham, Master Spy: The Secret War against the French Revolution Michael Durey Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform Wayne Hudson The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx William Christie Montesquieu and England: Enlightened Exchanges 1689–1755 Ursula Haskins Gonthier

www.pickeringchatto.com/enlightenmentworld

THE ENGLISH DEISTS STUDIES IN EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT

by Wayne Hudson

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2009

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2009 © Wayne Hudson 2009 british library cataloguing in publication data Hudson, Wayne The English deists: studies in early Enlightenment. – (The Enlightenment world) 1. Deism – Great Britain – History of doctrines – 18th century 2. Liberty – Religious aspects – Christianity 3. Enlightenment – Great Britain I. Title 211.5’0922’42 ISBN-13: 9781851966196 e-ISBN: 978 1 85196 584 7

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CONTENTS

1 Who Were the English Deists? 2 Genealogies of Deism 3 Herbert of Cherbury 4 Charles Blount and His Circle 5 Three Writers Conclusion

1 29 41 57 79 115

Appendix: Herbert’s Philosophical Poems Notes Works Cited Index

121 127 171 199

1 WHO WERE THE ENGLISH DEISTS?

Introduction This study reinterprets the significance of a group of important but neglected writers known as the English deists. It attempts to enhance the understanding of these writers by locating them in the context of unfamiliar forms of cultural life. If this is done, then it is possible to take a historically nuanced approach to their texts. To do justice to these writers and their texts, it is necessary to avoid monolithic patterns of interpretation which reduce them to resting points in a teleological history of secularization1 and to resist locating them within a framework of changing religious identities. Instead, there is a need to problematize the notion that these writers had single religious identities – that they were either Christians or deists, and to avoid confusing the label ‘deist’ with a single religious identity. For these writers had multiple, and not always separable identities, sometimes without the sharp distinctions between them that a contemporary reader might assume. Here this study supplements and extends the exemplary work of Justin Champion in The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (1992) and Republican Learning (2003) in ways which enrich and complicate our understanding of the Enlightenment.2 The writers known as the English deists need to be read in light of the different personae and social roles which they adopted, and with regard for the multiple audiences which they addressed. The fact that all these writers were involved with deism, and all of them took deism seriously, has led many historians to assume that they had single religious identities, explicable in terms of deism. This view, though superficially plausible, is problematic, and reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking. The fact that these writers took deism seriously does not mean that they accepted deism as a totalizing outlook, or that they advocated deism as a religion that could replace Christianity. It means that their performances in some social roles and personae had a radical edge that alarmed their contemporaries; even they lived in a period without a settled shared cosmology. –1–

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Charles Blount (1654–93), John Toland (1670–1722), Anthony Collins (1679–1729), Matthew Tindal (1656–1733), Thomas Woolston (1669–1733), Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), Thomas Chubb (1679–1747) and Peter Annet (1693–1769) are the writers known to historians as ‘the English deists’.3 They were not all English (Toland was Irish, Morgan was Welsh), nor were they ‘the deists in England’ (this class was larger), nor even the only writers called ‘deists’ in England in the eighteenth century. Locke, Clarke, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Wollaston, Dodwell, Bolingbroke, Hume, Tillard, Strutt and Dudgeon were also sometimes mentioned.4 In the view of eighteenth-century commentators, ‘the deists’ were writers who tended to undermine belief in revealed religion, while claiming to believe in natural religion. This was the parlance established by John Leland’s A View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1754–6),5 a language of polemic adopted by later nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians attempting to understand the ‘crisis of deism’ in ‘the age of reason’.6 This pattern of interpretation needs to be challenged, partly because there is substantial evidence that at least some forms of seventeenth-century deism were classical rather than Socinian or Protestant.7 In this first of two volumes I reread the achievements of Herbert of Cherbury, Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins and Matthew Tindal against the background of Renaissance deism, European free thought and the circulation of clandestine manuscripts. My emphasis falls on the social and political location of these writers, and the fact that they worked in contexts which were less modern in institutional terms than nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpreters tended to suppose. Specifically, these writers wrote before a modern civil society was firmly in place. The second volume of this work, Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform, focuses on the contributions made by the writers known as the English deists to the reform both of ideas and practices. In doing so, it offers new readings of the work of Thomas Woolston, Conyers Middleton, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Morgan and Peter Annet and argues that deism in England did not simply decline after 1730, as the existing historiography suggests, but took a more modern form, one less indebted to classical antiquity and the clandestine heterodoxy of the Renaissance. In this more moderate form, deism acquired a popular appeal it did not have outside elite circles until the 1730s. It also made new advances and contributed to the emergence of ideas, institutions and practices later associated with ‘modernity’.

‘Deist’ and ‘Deism’ The standard view that these writers were trying to undermine revealed religion while promoting natural religion8 does not take adequate account of the multiple social roles in which they were active, or the different audiences they addressed.

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It preserves the myth that these writers were deists in a totalizing sense, whereas the terms ‘deism’ and ‘deist’ can only be applied to them with caution, and in limited domains. Some historians have argued that deism is indefinable because those called deists had a range of different beliefs.9 Nonetheless, it is not possible to entirely undo how these writers were characterized in the eighteenth century because such characterizations provided the framework for debate. Hence, as in related cases such as ‘Socinian’ or ‘Rosicrucian’, it is useful to retain the labels ‘deism’ and ‘deist’, while remembering that these are vague terms of shifting import, and can encourage over-unified interpretations of particular texts. It is not certain that the writers dubbed ‘the English deists’ regarded themselves as deists. Blount used the term ‘deist’, but not of himself. Toland denied all his life that he was a deist. Collins used it only once in print, and then of others. Tindal never claimed in print to be a deist, although he outlined the stance of a ‘Christian deist’, a position also adopted by Morgan. Chubb admitted that he was trying to promote deism, but refused to call himself a deist in a sense exclusive of Christianity, while Woolston and Middleton claimed to be trying to defend Christianity against ‘the deists’. Only Annet claimed to be a deist in an unambiguous sense in print, and then only in a work published anonymously, the authorship of which is disputed. None of these writers declared their views in the open way many historians have assumed, and all of them engaged in practices of partial and non-disclosure. Such practices were common in their lifetimes, and were also adopted by convinced Christians such as John Locke (1632–1704). It is also essential to grasp that we do not know what particular individuals took deism to be, especially if what they wrote in print was dialectical, and they presented their views only in part, and with an eye to specific audiences. In the seventeenth century there were different deisms, and some of them were quite different from the vague belief in a deity and in natural religion which most historians have taken to be the essence of deism. Seventeenth-century deists could accept one or more classical conceptions of the Deus, and so be closer to outright naturalists or even atheists than historians have imagined. Further, there is evidence that tough-minded conceptions of this kind influenced some of the writers known as the English deists who, in some departments of their mind, were probably therefore further from traditional Christianity than historians have suggested.

‘English Deism’ The notion that there was something called ‘English deism’, promoted by the English agnostic Leslie Stephen in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), needs also to be called into question. Stephen devoted

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a third of his text to ‘English deism’, and subdivided his discussion schematically into ‘critical’ and ‘constructive’ deism.10 For Stephen, ‘English deism’ was a latitudinarian attitude to religion, which infected clergy and laity alike in eighteenth-century England. It was religious liberalism taken one step further, involving a combination of the rational theology of Hales, Chillingworth and Tillotson with ideas taken from Hobbes, Locke and Newton.11 For Stephen, English deism was a rationalist assertion of natural religion from inside the English Church. It was ‘English’, in that it derived from the religious liberalism that flourished in the England of the seventeenth century, not from any pre-existing body of heterodoxy.12 Here Stephen, and many historians after him, failed to distinguish between inter-Protestant surface meanings and the heterodox dimensions of these writers’ books. As a result, he assimilated their inter-Protestant surface arguments to deism, and then concluded, in over-influential words, that many Christians were saying the same things only in more old-fashioned language.13 Instead, it is necessary to relate these thinkers to both inter-Protestant surface arguments and to heterodoxy. Stephen’s approach, evoking a uniquely ‘English’ deism, was also geographically imprecise, in so far as the writing in question also had Welsh, Irish, Scottish, European and later Transatlantic contexts. It also encouraged localist interpretations of the origins and nature of deism in England.14 Many historians after Stephen have retained his model, but attempted to refine its interpretation. Gerard Reedy, for example, argues that English deism derived from Socinianism, not Anglican rationalism.15 Another distinguished interpreter, Robert Sullivan, treats deism as a convenient term to describe the revision of traditional Christian formulas which occupied so many English writers between the Civil War and the French Revolution. Sullivan makes deism identical with ‘freethinking’ or a ‘rational theology’, and sees its advocates as engaged in a theological conversation with Anglican rationalists, Socinians and Unitarians.16 These approaches, however, retain the myth of a mild English deism, and fail to discriminate between these writers and a wide range of rationalistic Protestants. In this study I reject this reading on the grounds that it confuses the Protestant levels of these writers’ texts with the interplay of less obvious meanings. It is misleading to speak of ‘English deism’ as merely an outgrowth of English liberal Protestant ideas, not only because some of the liberal Protestantism which influenced these writers was not English, but because some of the deism they encountered was of European origin.

The English Church To understand the writers known as the English deists it is also essential to revise the older image of a decadent eighteenth-century English Church. According to the older view, something like deism prevailed quite generally in eighteenth-

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century England and the writers known as the English deists were only the remainders of a rationalistic latitudinarian church. Recent scholarship, however, has established that this image of a worldly, lax and compromised eighteenthcentury English Church is in need of amendment.17 The older image derived, in part, from Victorian historians who were Tractarians, evangelicals or agnostics. These writers were biased, although for different reasons, against the English church. Leslie Stephen, W. H. Lecky, Mark Pattison, James Froude, John Overton and Charles Abbey were historians of this type. Recent scholarship suggests, however, that the eighteenth-century English Church was vibrant. High Churchmanship was strong, distinctions between the High and Low Church were blurred, and religious liberalism was far less general than the older books suggest. Consistent with this, many Whig bishops were High Church men, while Dissent was weaker than later in the nineteenth century. Similarly, contrary to the older view that deism, Arianism and Socinianism were part of Low Church spectrum infecting large parts of the educated classes, more recent evidence suggests that Christianity was taken for granted as a social fact until 1720, and in a confessional state dominated by Anglican, monarchical and aristocratic cultural forms18 even well-known infidels, such as Bolingbroke, were inclined to insist that they were Christians.19 Consistent with this, many of these writers were constrained by livelihood or social role to be Christians, and some of them (Toland, Collins, Tindal, Woolston, Middleton, Chubb) were obliged to maintain a level of involvement with the established Church.

Religious Rationalism The view that the writers known as the English deists were religious rationalists also needs to be handled carefully, especially if this view is taken to imply that their rationalism made them deists, or that their rationalism was of a single sort. As Frederick Beiser reminds us, the religious rationalism of the seventeenth century should not be read in terms of a teleology of secularism.20 If there were forms of rationalism which tended to eliminate revealed religion, they were not necessarily the rationalisms of the dominant culture. There were in fact several varieties of religious rationalism in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and these rationalisms were significantly different from one another. Not only was there no single rationalism of the type most books on the period assume, but the absence of a stable agreement about the nature of ‘reason’ and how it should be used on ‘religion’ was a crucial part of the context in which debates about reason and religion took place.21 One strand of religious rationalism looked back to Richard Hooker (1554– 1600). In his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1593) Hooker revived the scholastic tradition of Aquinas, and argued, against extreme Puritan biblicists,

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that reason and Scripture were equal sources of religious truth. Reason, he insisted, could know the eternal law of God without revelation, and was the rule by which the Bible had to be judged.22 There is little evidence, however, that this rationalism made anyone a deist, although it was compatible with the Catholicism from which it derived. Another strand of rationalism was associated with the works of the Cambridge Platonists,23 who drew both on patristic and scholastic sources, as well as on Renaissance Platonism. These thinkers accepted an intellectualist account of reason for which reason was a semi-theological intuitive power, not wholly separate from God. They held that ‘reason’ gave human beings access to the truth because it was, as John Whichcote famously put it, ‘the Work of God’.24 In addition, they advanced speculative philosophies of nature in opposition to the new mechanical philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes. Above all, they accepted a moral realism, according to which good and evil corresponded to differences found in the nature of things. All the Cambridge Platonists, however, were supernaturalists, and insisted on the need for grace. Similarly, although the Cambridge Platonists promoted conceptions of natural religion in an attempt to negotiate Christian religious particularisms and to provide a way to choose between competing revealed religions, their form of natural religion had strong theological connotations, and some of them went further and argued for a minimal universal theology. Joseph Glanvill, for example, distinguished between fundamental and assisting principles of religion, and argued that there were fundamental ‘notices of God’ imparted to all which were sufficient for salvation, but again this universal theology was grounded in divine activity and innatism.25 On the other hand, the Cambridge Platonists rejected Calvinism and inclined towards a necessitarian theism (God was a perfect necessary being who conformed his will to what was good in itself ) which could have unintended consequences, viz. the delimitation of the divine sovereignty and the exaltation of an immutable law of nature over claims based on an allegedly arbitrary divine will. A further strand of religious rationalism was associated with the Tew Circle, gathered around Lord Falkland. Those associated with this circle attempted to discover a basis for certainty in response to Catholicism on the one hand, and to Calvinism on the other. They claimed that human beings had a duty to examine all their beliefs according to reason, and only to believe that for which there was sufficient evidence. On this reinterpretation, someone was a Protestant by virtue of how they believed, not because of what they believed.26 This was arguably a dangerous principle but, although members of the Tew Circle were inclined to be hostile to ‘priestcraft’ and adopted a critical approach to ‘ecclesiastical History’ this did not lead them to reject Christianity, just as their knowledge of Socinian doctrines did not make them deists. For the most part, they did not follow the Socinian critique of traditional Christian doctrines, and all of them

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expected that a fair and impartial examination of the evidence would show that Christianity was true.27 Yet another strand of religious rationalism was associated with the group of divines called ‘latitudinarians’, several of whom preached in the wealthier London churches. They included Edward Stillingfleet, John Tillotson, Simon Patrick, Thomas Tenison and Gilbert Burnet. These men argued that Christianity was a rational moral religion, the truths of which were simple, few and plain, and that anyone who accepted natural religion had no reason to reject Christianity, which was established by reason, confirmed by natural philosophy, and proven by the evidence of miracles and prophecies. Some of the latitudinarians made rationalistic statements in the context of controversies with Catholics and Calvinists, which were then used against Christianity by its critics. The latitudinarians, however, were churchmen, not deists, and, although they held that there was room for ‘latitude’ about speculative points and institutional arrangements since no form of Church government was dictated by the nature of things or by revelation, they were not Socinians.28 On the contrary, the latitudinarians sought to free Anglicanism from accretions in doctrine and practice, while remaining within Christian orthodoxy, broadly conceived. They were largely free of the laxity associated with them in High Church polemic.29 The latitudinarians’ project was to articulate a reasonable version of Christianity in plain language, and they rejected complex metaphors and analogies as well as Calvinist doctrines such as predestination. On the other hand, several of the latitudinarians accepted high Christologies as deists certainly did not. It is misleading, on the whole, therefore, to suggest that the writers known as the English deists simply took the latitudinarians’ principles one step further. All the leading latitudinarians insisted on the need for revelation, displayed personal devotion to Jesus Christ, and fought for conformity to the established worship.30 If they accepted that reason could judge faith, they did not claim that faith could be arrived at without the help of the Gospel. They also marshalled natural science in the service of Christian apologetics. Indeed, many of them used Newton’s natural philosophy to establish the existence of God and providence. None of them doubted the existence of an omnipotent deity or supernatural intervention. They also took prophecies seriously, including millenarian ones, whereas many of the writers known as the English deists regarded the practice of prophecy as superstitious. English metaphysical theology, another type of religious rationalism, was different again. Following seventeenth-century interpretations of Thomas Aquinas and Suarez, this theology assumed an ontological continuity between God and human beings. It combined a scholastic realism with apologetic attempts to demonstrate specific religious truths. Henry More (1614–87), for example, provided detailed demonstrations of the existence of God, providence and immortality in

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his Antidote to Atheism (1653) and in his Immortality of the Soul (1659).31 Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) was even more ambitious, and in his The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) attempted to demonstrate not only an eternal and immutable morality, but that many controversial religious doctrines had been established on purely rational grounds in the past. An ontological natural religion could be generated from this ontological continuism, and this natural religion could then be set up against revealed religion, but this possibility was not a prime concern for thinkers arguing against ‘atheists’ and ‘Papists’. As in the case of atheism in France, intellectual moves which subsequently made possible arguments against Christianity were initially advanced by sincere Christians,32 whose own rationalism was moderated by Platonic and indeed Trinitarian conceptions of reason which implied that reason participated in the Logos.33 Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) was the outstanding representative of English metaphysical theology, but again his complex and nuanced views have been oversimplified in much of the literature. Clarke combined a priori reasoning with appeals to natural philosophy, specifically Newton, whose physics he read as confirming immaterialist views.34 He sought to demonstrate that something must have always existed, and to identify that something with a necessarily existing immaterial being. When proper attention was paid to the character of existence, it demonstrated, Clarke argued, the necessary self-existence of an eternal being, who was the intelligent, free and wise author of all else and also of our duties.35 These were rationalist claims, aimed at ‘atheists’ and ‘deists’, and at those, such as Hobbes, who claimed that reason could not identify God’s will. They were not in any individuated sense ‘deistic’. That these various rationalisms impacted upon the writers known as the English deists to differing extents is largely correct, and it is important to note how often arguments developed in the course of intra-Christian quarrels were able to be used later against Christianity itself.36 Nonetheless, while these writers were all inclined to rationalism, much of it of broadly Christian origin, they were not all rationalists of the same sort. Toland, Collins and Tindal were epistemological rationalists who drew heavily from Locke, especially in their theories of meaning. Tindal, Chubb and Morgan were committed to ontological realism, and used Clarke’s metaphysical theology to articulate versions of ‘Christian deism’. Toland, Collins and Middleton, in contrast, were fierce critics of Clarke’s metaphysical rationalism, and did not derive their heterodoxy from it. Many of these writers quoted the Cambridge Platonists with approval, but, unlike the Cambridge Platonists, they meant by ‘reason’ a set of instrumental capacities rather than a participation in the divine life, although Tindal sometimes gestured to the Cambridge position. Likewise, apart from Morgan, these writers did not follow the latitudinarians in attempting to reconcile Christianity with natural

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philosophy. On the contrary, most of them took Christianity as an external positive religion to be an assemblage of largely erroneous beliefs and practices. This suggests that it may be misleading to suggest that ‘Anglican rationalism’ was the primary source of deism. None of the Anglican rationalists doubted that God was a person, although some of them, including Samuel Clarke, doubted that he could be more than one, and no major figure associated with the Tew Circle, the Cambridge Platonists or the group of divines known as the latitudinarians abandoned Christian personalism. They all had a strong sense of God’s will, which even Samuel Clarke confessed was not bound by the principle of sufficient reason.37 The writers known as the English deists, in contrast, almost all rejected Athanasian Christianity, in so far as it treated God as a person to whom human beings had obligations. They denied that Jesus Christ was divine and the coequal second person of the Trinity. None of them, with the possible exception of Morgan, regarded personality as a primary metaphysical category, or adhered in their theologies to the Athanasian conception of redemption.38 On the other hand, most of these writers did adhere to a form of ontologism for which God and humanity belonged to a single order, a position associated with at least some forms of Scotism, and present to some extent in seventeenth-century Anglican rationalists such as Ralph Cudworth. What needs to be explained, however, is why these writers radicalized this ontologism for their own purposes, while other writers did not do so, and had no difficulty in combining a sincere Christian supernaturalism with philosophical ideas which could be turned against it.

Deism and the Natural Science Accounts which associate the ‘deism’ of these writers with developments in the natural sciences should also be treated with caution.39 Much of the existing literature promotes anachronistic conceptions of how science, politics and secularization were related in this period, as if natural science and Whig politics were allied revolutionary forces tending to promote secularization. In the early eighteenth century, however, philosophy, science, religion and politics were still under-differentiated, and scientists moved easily between mysticism, natural religion and natural philosophy. The division between the secular and the spiritual arguably had not yet emerged in its modern form. There was little developed sense of secularity, and the clergy often saw no decisive difference between religious and political matters.40 Historians who associate the natural sciences with secularization have often implied that there were structural connections between the sciences and religious unorthodoxy. Indeed, they have claimed that the physicist Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the philosopher John Locke and the theologian Samuel Clarke were scientific intellectuals inclined to Arianism, or even deism. It is a

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mistake, however, to believe that these thinkers’ theological opinions can be read off their scientific interests. Newton, Locke and Clarke were divided among themselves, and were more orthodox than the older literature suggests. All three were opposed to deism, and denied that it derived from their principles. The case of Isaac Newton, which has been exhaustively studied, is particularly revealing.41 Newton’s theology and science were not deistic, but premised on the ‘Lord God of Dominion’, even if, like many writers labelled ‘deists’, he envisaged a primitive Christianity free of priestcraft.42 Locke and Clarke were also opposed to any notion of a God who did not actively sustain the world. It seems clear from recent scholarship that Locke was a convinced Christian, indeed a believer in a world of spirits.43 Clarke’s philosophical theology is more controversial, but again he was more orthodox than nineteenth-century readers believed. Clarke held that God was entirely sovereign and was not obliged to conform his will to reason and nature. He also advocated Platonic notions of participation in the divine mind rather than a God ontologically separate from the universe.44 It is true that Clarke’s principles brought him into conflict with forms of Athanasian orthodoxy. His necessarily existing being was not easy to identify with the Trinity, and Clarke himself tended to Arianism on both metaphysical and exegetical grounds. He also placed a strong emphasis on natural religion, which revelation republished ‘with Incentives to obey’,45 maintaining that ‘A constant and sincere observance of all the Laws of Reason and Obligations of Natural Religion, will unavoidably lead a Man to Christianity’.46 This Pelagian emphasis allowed some enemies of ‘Revealed Religion’ a leeway he did not intend, especially after the establishment of the Boyle lectures when his metaphysical theology, with its combination of a priori arguments and natural science, became central to Christian apologetics in England.47 But there is no evidence that Clarke’s commitment to the sciences made him less Christian. Similarly, there was no monolithic Newtonian–Lockean–latitudinarian alliance in England of the type sometimes alleged, just as there were no automatic links between Newtonians, Whigs and Dissenters.48 Consistent with this, developments in the natural sciences played only a limited role in motivating individuals to become deists in early eighteenth-century England, although scientific thought became less closely allied with Christianity as the century progressed. On the other hand, most leading scientists were Christians, while the writers known as the English deists themselves took different sides in scientific controversies.49

Deism and Natural Religion Just as the links drawn between science and deism have been oversimplified, so in much of the existing literature the discussion of the relationship between natural religion and deism has been rather general, mainly because inadequate

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attention has been paid to the technical character of different approaches to natural religion.50 Thus historians have generally alleged that the writers known as the English deists claimed that natural religion was a sufficient guide in matters of religion. This claim, although not incorrect, has often been interpreted as if natural religion stood for a single and self-evident body of ideas. However, there was no one understanding of natural religion in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury England,51 and insufficient attention has been paid to the question of which natural religion these writers believed was sufficient and for what purpose, even though the significance of natural religion for the thought of a particular individual cannot be determined until this is clarified. In much of the existing literature natural religion is confused with natural theology, whereas natural religion and natural theology, although sometimes intertwined, were not identical in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Natural theology attempted to establish the existence of God, but not our duties, which were revealed. Some forms of natural religion, however, did imply that religion could be derived from reason or, more broadly, reason and nature. In some cases natural religion required a kind of natural theology, but often failed to establish the natural theological claims it required. There were also important differences between Christian natural religion, which often included immortality and providence, and the esoteric ‘religion of nature’ found in Renaissance thinkers such as Postel, Bodin and Vanini.52 Both were different from theistic science, of the kind found, for example, in Newtonian physics or in the physico-theologies of William Derham and John Ray. Again, these all differed from attempts to develop a theology of nature, especially one that could be used to reconstruct traditional religious doctrines.53 Granted that it may take time to sort out these matters, the main point is that there was no single cult of natural religion from which deism emerged, and no necessary causal relationship between emphasizing natural religion and heterodoxy. Rather, once more account is taken of diverse versions of natural religion, many of these writers can be read as disagreeing among themselves and with their opponents about which sort of natural religion was appropriate, in which context and subject to which constraints.54

Heterodoxy All these writers were involved to some extent in heterodoxy, where heterodoxy implies both opinions in conflict with established notions of orthodoxy and the circulation of ideas and manuscript materials which were more subversive of orthodoxy than anything which appeared in print. Nonetheless, heterodoxy was obviously an ambiguous phenomenon, and ideas and materials acceptable to specific groups of Christians were regarded as totally heterodox by others. This

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matters because a range of educated Protestants were often interested in ideas and materials which other Christians regarded as ‘atheism’, and there were also significant differences between England, Holland and other European countries in this respect. The association between the Enlightenment and heterodoxy was more complex than historians have often assumed,55 and it may not be possible to understand the Enlightenment in terms of what the Belgian Paul Hazard called a crisis of the European mind,56 let alone a crisis of belief. Many European thinkers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century did not experience such a crisis, even though they dabbled extensively in heterodox materials. In England, in particular, there was not in this period the sharp sense of Christian as opposed to non-Christian views which historians have often taken for granted, partly because of the diversity of Protestant opinion in Europe. High Church and Evangelical writers were wont to denounce their opponents as pagans and atheists, but they could not conceal the fact that there was no consensus about what Christians had to believe. The fact that all Protestants were deemed heretics by the Catholic Church encouraged a certain inter-Protestant toleration in England, as it did in Holland, and those who sought to silence those with whom they disagreed were widely charged with ‘persecution’.

Disbelief Among the many who dabbled in heterodoxy, the writers known as the English deists are conspicuous because they combined professions of Protestantism with sympathy for heterodoxy, implying both a willingness to hurt what their contemporaries understood by ‘Christianity’ and at least the possibility of personal disbelief. All the writers known as the English deists manifested disbelief, as opposed to the unbelief which tormented nineteenth-century English intellectuals. Neither the term ‘unbelief ’ nor the term ‘disbelief ’ is well defined in the existing literature. Granted that both need to be historicized and were different in different contexts and periods, disbelief is neglected as a historical category, despite the pioneering work of Alan Charles Kors on disbelief in France.57 Kors himself uses the word ‘disbelief ’ in an unclear sense and provides no precise definition of it. Similarly, the major book on unbelief in England, Susan Budd’s Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850–1960 (1977), does not recognize a distinction between unbelief and disbelief, even though both are encompassed within its scope. For the purposes of my argument, unbelief can be characterized, in general terms, as the inability to accept religious tenets. Disbelief, on the other hand, is the positive conviction that religious tenets are false, a stronger position. The distinction is important for my argument because it allows me to argue, in con-

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tradiction to teleological accounts of heterodoxy, that disbelief may have been common before unbelief was widespread among intellectuals. The point should not be pressed too far, but it serves to question the conventional idea that those who became heterodox fell into unbelief. Obviously a sharp distinction between disbelief and unbelief cannot always be drawn, and both could occur in the same person, or in different phases of the one person’s thought, just as actual lives reveal complex interactions between faith, unbelief and disbelief which resist simple summary. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize the role played by disbelief in England (and probably France and Holland as well) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When intellectuals began to break free of religious doctrines in these countries, they often arrived at disbelief, a condition in which they characterized religious doctrines and practices in negative terms, and reversed their earlier trust in particular doctrines and institutions. Unbelief was often a subsequent and more painful state, in which individuals sympathized with the religious beliefs they could no longer hold, and yearned for the inspiration and coherence religious beliefs had once provided. All the writers known as the English deists were involved with disbelief to a significant extent, even if their arithmetic at various times remains less certain. They stood out in eighteenth-century England because they entertained in print the possibility that Christianity was false. Further, all of them entertained the possibility that revealed religions were superstitious fables, frauds and impostures,58 just as all of them expressed an animus against ‘faith’ that went beyond mere doubt. ‘Faith’ here often meant uncritical belief in the superstitious claims of priests, not personal faith in Jesus Christ, a disposition which some of these writers treated with respect, provided it was not used to legitimate beliefs contrary to reason. This study suggests that all these writers experienced a particular cultural transition in the form of a reversal of trust in revealed religion, at least as the clergy interpreted it. As subsequent chapters will show, for some of them (Blount, Annet, Tindal) the evidence suggests that such a reversal of trust was final. In other cases (Woolston, Middleton) the process of reversal was arguably underway, while in the cases of writers such as Chubb and Morgan the reversal was localized, at least for some decades, to specific manifestations of what they took to be priestcraft and superstition.

Protestant Enlightenment, Radical Enlightenment, Early Enlightenment All these writers, with the partial exception of Herbert, can be associated with the Enlightenment, to which they made major contributions. Nonetheless, to grasp the temporality of their lives and the complex patterns of assertion and restraint found in their texts it is necessary to take due account of the

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political and social contexts in which they lived, the traditions of clandestine and scribal publication to which they may have had access, and the ‘eccentric’ locations of knowledge and culture with which they worked: locations which meant that extensive resources from classical Greek and Roman Enlightenment were available to them in literary texts, but also that much of the cultural capital surrounding them was in the hands of, or significantly influenced by, the Christian clergy. These writers were not living in secularized cultures, and their own careers and livelihoods often depended on clerical approval, or at least toleration. If these writers had really been the outright enemies of Christianity they were accused of being, they would have lost their jobs and ended, as two of them did, in prison. Further, without clerical toleration, it was difficult for them to access or remain in universities, to remain at the front of contemporary intellectual inquiry, and to take part in the major political and scientific controversies of the day. While these writers could and did seek other sources of information, especially in Europe, it is important to remember that it was the clergy who could lend the books, teach them foreign languages, discuss the finer details of philological and historical investigation, and comment upon contemporary advances in the sciences. It is true that more and more non-clerical forms of instruction and spaces for debate emerged as the decades passed, but those without vast personal wealth and high social standing were forced to seek patronage from churchmen, aristocrats and politicians. They were not free citizens of an international secular republic of letters, but writers dependent on Christian acceptance and toleration, without which it was difficult for them to pay their bills or buy books. To capture the ambiguities and stratagems which followed from this, I use Protestant Enlightenment, Radical Enlightenment and Early Enlightenment as convenient historical markers which can be applied for pragmatic purposes to a variety of particularistic contexts. All these writers lived and worked within the context of what J. G. A. Pocock has called ‘Protestant Enlightenment’.59 In this study the term ‘Protestant Enlightenment’ will be used in an institutional sense to refer to the emergence of less hegemonic forms of political and social organization in Protestant countries in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.60 On this interpretation, Protestant Enlightenment was a political settlement, achieved slowly and in stages, by means of which those of Protestant principles attempted to secure a range of liberties for themselves and their neighbours, and to defend ‘the Protestant cause’ against what they saw as aggressive ultramontane Catholicism. Actual regimes obviously conformed to such a description only in part and in different degrees, depending on the country and the decade. In England Protestant Enlightenment became a reality only in stages, and the writers known as the English deists contributed to it. To argue this is not to reduce ‘Enlightenment’

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to a form of Englishness, or to agree with those, such as Roy Porter, who argue that the Enlightenment started in England. It is to insist that these writers’ contributions to Enlightenment depended on English conditions,61 even though they may in some cases have been influenced by Dutch, French and German sources.62 In this study the term ‘Radical Enlightenment’ will be used to refer to the phenomenon that some intellectuals, publicists and pamphleteers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were interested in varieties of radical naturalism and monism. They were also often involved in the circulation of clandestine literature, and in cabals or quasi-Masonic brotherhoods of various kinds. Radical Enlightenment was associated in the seventeenth century with heterodox writers and poets and in the eighteenth century with coteries of refugees, journalists and publishers. In these circles religion based on positive doctrines and laws was often regarded with suspicion. Bruno, Spinoza and Des Périers were read, and the possibility that Moses, Jesus and Mahomet were impostors was discussed.63 Some of these thinkers were inclined to question both the established religion and the existing political regimes in Europe,64 although the extent of their radicalism in their public performances and political roles can be easily exaggerated. The fact that the writers known as the English deists operated within Protestant Enlightenment means that they could be involved with Radical Enlightenment to some extent as well, provided that they conducted themselves with due civility and decorum. That these writers were involved with Radical Enlightenment should not be used to attribute single religious identities to them. Quite the contrary, their involvement with Radical Enlightenment made them more multi-faced and multi-voiced and less committed to traditional opinions on major questions. It is misleading to assume that Protestant Enlightenment excluded Radical Enlightenment, or that large parts of Radical Enlightenment were not to some degree Protestant. It is also necessary to make allowance for classical Greek and Roman Enlightenment and for Hermeticism, which were important for several of these writers, although in different degrees. The cultural influences active in the works of these writers were plural, and not yet fully integrated in a single outlook. In the same way, these writers can be located within ‘Early Enlightenment’, understood as a marker for the period in which Enlightenment begins to emerge but in forms which are less explicit than those found in the ‘High Enlightenment’ associated with the period after 1740, when many European intellectuals rejected Christianity entirely.65 Early Enlightenment was ambiguous, tentative and multi-vocal. It tended to have multiple and sometimes contradictory allegiances. It was a new stage of emergent practical learning attempting to recognize and interpret itself. The use of this term does not, of course, imply a dialectical

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pattern of development or that Early Enlightenment was found everywhere or took the same form in every country. 66 Making these distinctions complicates the standard interpretations of these writers and avoids several of the dualisms which bedevil the historiography. In this study I take it for granted, as Pocock has long argued, that the Enlightenment was different in England, even as compared to Scotland and Ireland,67 and also differed from the anti-Christian Enlightenments found in France, Portugal and Spain. That the Enlightenment took different and indeed plural forms in different places does not mean, however, that it is meaningless to speak of a single Enlightenment, defined as an advance in practical learning found in practices of government, the organization of publicity, the management of political economy and the progress of the sciences. Enlightenment in this sense was trans-contextual, as case studies of the Russian, Ukrainian, Iberian, South American, Indian, Chinese and Japanese Enlightenments make clear. By the same logic, however, allowing a single Enlightenment as a broad characterization of advances in practical learning is not inconsistent with noting that multiple, and, in part, supervening, Enlightenments can often be found at a contextual level within particular countries. In the case of England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries an emphasis on the structuring importance of Protestant Enlightenment as an institutional settlement is not inconsistent with acknowledging the role of Radical Enlightenment, especially in the circles in which these writers moved, or to which they had access.68 On the contrary, Protestant Enlightenment as a structuring institutional settlement in England allowed Radical Enlightenment to be received and insinuated into theological debates in a Christianized form. All the writers known as the English deists lived in the horizon of emerging Protestant Enlightenment, and some of them (Blount, Toland, Collins, Tindal, Annet and possibly Woolston and Morgan as well) were also involved in Radical Enlightenment. In England Protestant Enlightenment was a successful political, economic and religious settlement which emerged after the Revolution of 1688, and then developed further despite local reversals. It had many levels, and included not only orthodox Christians, but the indifferent as well as freethinkers provided they did not flaunt their irreligion. In public, Protestant Enlightenment in England was an Enlightenment of reason, to which the clergy, lawyers and private scholars made massive intellectual and scholarly contributions. This Enlightenment operated in universities, cathedrals and Dissenting academies, as well as in law courts and parliaments. In private, Protestant Enlightenment in England was expressed in learned societies and debating clubs of several sorts, in coffee houses and in Masonic lodges, as well as after dinner in the houses of the wealthy or on their country estates. It included pious gatherings and political

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meetings, as well as, at the more radical end, closed meetings and correspondence under pseudonyms. The structure of Protestant Enlightenment in England allowed for very different publics and levels of disclosure.69 There were crucial differences between the privileged world of university scholars and the more shadowy world of political pamphleteers, journalists and tavern orators. Moreover, underground radical movements of ideas and clandestine materials sometimes existed side by side with enlightened clerical elites, with less tension between them than a modern reader might expect. This pattern of multiple social roles, and different levels of disclosure linked to them, characterizes the lives and the books of the writers known as the English deists. These writers were all Protestants, although the exact forms of Protestantism to which they were primarily indebted varied from Arminian (Herbert, Collins) to Remonstrant (Toland, Tindal) to radical Protestant and/or Puritan (Blount, Toland, Woolston, Chubb, Morgan and Annet). This is consistent with Frederick Beiser’s insistence that the thinkers of the early English Enlightenment were not ‘modern Pagans’, in Peter Gay’s suggestive phrase,70 but profoundly shaped by Protestant Christian thought,71 and also with a realistic interpretation of the various republics of letters which existed in England and in Europe in their lifetimes. On the other hand, it is also consistent with acknowledging that some of these writers were involved with classical Greek and Roman Enlightenment and even sought to revive classical philosophical opinions and to take classical political and literary achievements as models for certain purposes. Blount, Gildon, Toland and Middleton were all heavily influenced by classical Enlightenment of this type, and inclined to make unfavourable comparisons between classical culture and orthodox Christianity. In the same way, some of these writers (Herbert, Blount, Toland and to a more limited extent Annet) were interested in Hermeticism as a cultural strand which could be utilized and negotiated in private and to a lesser degree in print, but this does not imply that they were not involved with heterodoxy. Publishing in a Christian state in which Dissent was at best tolerated and often proscribed,72 all these writers claimed to be Protestants, and this was not merely ‘theological lying’.73 These writers wrote for diverse and multiple audiences, and for proximate as well as for underlying purposes. They had multiple identities, and could and did adopt different stances in different social roles.74 This has now been shown in detail for Toland,75 but the present study suggests that this may be true of these writers more generally. The writers known as the English deists were involved in politics as Protestants in contexts in which politics and religion were interwoven. The Restoration re-established a regime under which the Dissenters were an illegal minority and in subsequent decades the tensions between the established Church and the Dissenters were sometimes

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extreme. Matters were exacerbated when the Church of England fell into schism after Archbishop Sancroft and four hundred clergy refused to take the oath to William and Mary in 1688. Subsequent struggles between High and Low Church parties were bitter, just as the revival of militant absolutism in the 1690s produced both paranoia and apocalyptical expectations of imminent divine intervention among Protestants. In these circumstances, it mattered that someone was a firm Protestant and loyal to their country. Many were not concerned to agonize over the orthodoxy of those who met these tests, and suspected those who drummed up hysteria against Protestant writers of political motives, as was sometimes the case.76 Locating themselves within the wider political anticlericalism that developed as a result of the established Church’s ambivalent response to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the writers known as the English deists admixed political and religious concerns, just as they crossed boundaries between political and theological issues.

Constellational Writers The writers known as the English deists can be thought of as ‘constellational writers’ who influenced one another and had a cumulative impact, both greater than and different from the local concerns which led them to write particular books and pamphlets.77 As publicists, these writers intervened in a set of ongoing controversies on what contemporaries alleged was the same side, and this shaped much of their contemporary impact. Some of them were intimately connected, and drew on each other’s material (Blount, Gildon, Toland, Collins, Tindal). Others shared related but distinct trajectories (Chubb, Morgan, Annet). Still others (Woolston, Middleton) were related as partners in argument, drawing on materials that appeared to subvert the claims of orthodox and especially Athanasian Christianity.78 None of these writers claimed in print to be infidels. Instead, like the Huguenot refugees in Holland, with whom some of them had contact, they mixed Protestant and radical views freely with a pluralism which is initially unexpected because it implies that they did not choose single religious identities and extend them across all domains. Similarly, the way they presented themselves and deployed ideas and materials is best explained in terms of institutions, political conditions and discursive practices, not by reference to a single world view or philosophy to which they allegedly adhered. My argument here implies that the work of these writers cannot be reduced to a single banned philosophical movement of the kind posited by Jonathan Israel.79 Israel’s outstanding contribution to the study of the Enlightenment has expanded our understanding of it, and of the previously neglected Dutch dimension in particular. He has also rightly insisted on structural continuities across national contexts and problematized insular accounts of ‘English Enlight-

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enment’ in ways which have opened up whole new vistas of research. Israel’s account of the Enlightenment, however, tends to teleology and underplays the role of religious motivations in the emergence of modern politics, science and culture in Western European countries, whereas many Enlightenment figures retained some religious beliefs or were clerics, just as the Enlightenment had religious as well as irreligious origins.80 Further, Israel’s emphasis on the importance of philosophy for the Enlightenment is in need of clarification. By ‘philosophy’ Israel means a conception of life rather than a series of technical inquiries, and this is problematic, given his valorization of the importance of Spinoza. Israel is right to emphasize Spinoza’s importance, but in my view more attention needs to be given to different strands in Spinoza’s thought and to the different ways in which his ideas were taken up and utilized in different countries and contexts, often admixed with classical, Hermetic and radical Christian ideas. The pattern is twisted and complex, and even some of the Dutch thinkers to whom Israel draws attention (Lodewijk Meyer, Adriaan Koerbagh, van den Enden) may be able to be read in more institutionally nuanced terms.81 But reservations are inevitable given the scale of Israel’s achievement. In the case of the writers known as the English deists, the hypothesis of a single philosophical movement is misleading. These writers were not united by a single philosophy, Spinozist or otherwise, even though they all tended towards a more naturalist outlook. This does not mean that they were atomistic figures. On the contrary, all of these writers entertained the possibility that Christianity was false, which is not to say that they regarded the claim that it was false as a sufficient response to the institutional reality of Christianity in their lifetimes. All of them were read by their critics as secretly heterodox, and all of them were accused of rejecting Christianity because they had fallen into incorrect understandings of natural religion.82 Their actual views were complex, and we may never be able to determine exactly what they believed about certain topics. Their beliefs were what these writers often chose not to reveal, and their writings often offer less than a frank and full confession of their private views. Nonetheless, all these writers entertained the possibility that supernatural religion was false and helped to promote public spaces in which the credibility of Christianity, as the clergy interpreted it, was questioned. This was a major cultural achievement, and noted as such by contemporary observers in Europe, including Voltaire and Diderot. But they did not argue against Christianity explicitly, although most of them in private took a deep interest in materials that did. All these writers wrote under conditions of religious censorship and against the background of the circulation of scribal and clandestine manuscripts.83 Blount, Toland, Collins and Tindal had access to such manuscripts, and it is likely that Middleton, Morgan, Chubb and Annet did so as well. Some of these manuscripts included attacks on imposture, fraud and priestcraft. A number sug-

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gested the idea that all positive religions were political inventions to control and shape the masses, and/or questioned providence, immortality, miracles, creation ex nihilo, the book of Genesis, and the moral probity of Moses and other Old Testament characters. Some manuscripts placed Christianity in comparative contexts. Others drew attention to possible alternatives to the received accounts of the early Church. Many urged that true religion could be arrived at by reason, and was largely morality, and some manuscripts attacked the evidences commonly advanced to prove that Christianity was true. A range of these manuscripts identified God with Nature, argued that the world was eternal, and/or disseminated radical ideas about politics, education, ethics and sexuality.84 The circulation of such manuscripts needs to be understood in terms in the context of Protestant Enlightenment, which permitted the educated considerable liberty of thought and did not exclude Radical Enlightenment. The gentry, in particular, might think freely, and even drop out of Christianity, provided they did not communicate their sentiments to their social inferiors or cause public scandal.85 The clergy were more constrained, and were expected to exhibit a degree of belief, but in society generally the right to form one’s own judgement about the meaning and purport of the Scriptures was widely accepted, partly because the truth of Christianity was taken for granted. Freethinking about religious questions did not necessarily imply a separation from Protestantism, and the readers of these manuscripts were often prosperous Presbyterians or Huguenot refugees.86 The ambiguities of early Enlightenment also determined these writers’ choice of genre and their modes of publication. Hardly any of them wrote books setting out their private beliefs. Instead, they engaged with the Protestant discourses of the day, and made use of genres which were acceptable to the relevant audiences, whether theological tomes, short letters, political pamphlets or collections of literary pieces. We do not know a priori that these writers rejected Christianity as a revealed religion, especially since those who questioned the need for revealed religion were often not dogmatic, and recognized that it was difficult to determine the truth of such matters at this distance, given the passage of time and the extent of ecclesiastical fraud. Accordingly, the search for the truth could unite believers in external revelation and those who doubted it as fellow Protestants campaigning against ‘priestcraft’. Consistent with this, this study suggests that these writers did not write deistic books explicitly setting out deism, but Protestant books with subversive implications. Unlike other Protestant writers, however, these writers gave the impression that they meant more than they said. Writing multi-layered books and pamphlets, they took it for granted that some of their ideas were not suitable for every audience. Hence, they advanced Christian arguments directed to all readers, but also hinted at more radical possibilities which more philosophically

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minded readers might like to consider. Attempting to arrive at just notions of God before attempting to interpret the Scriptures, and exalting the sufficiency of natural religion were not inconsistent with Christianity, just as calling oneself a deist in private did not always imply one was not a practising member of the Church of England.

Unfamiliar Contextual Spaces The key to understanding the importance of these writers then is to locate them within contextual spaces which we do not initially recognize, spaces which imply that many of the conditions for the growth of modern secular thought were not present in England in the early eighteenth century. These writers hammered out doctrines about toleration, society and the public which were relatively new, and which in turn helped to create civil society and the public sphere in European countries.87 However, these institutions were not well established at the time. We should not assume that these writers operated in the context of a modern civil society with a defined public sphere. Rather, their contribution was, in part, to help bring such a society into being.88 There was a highly contested array of cultural, political and religious spaces in early modern England that was very demanding for thinkers to negotiate. Moreover, they could only do so by making choices as to political and religious comportment. On the other hand, the activities of these writers helped create the spaces they used. When these writers ridiculed the Scriptures they changed the structure of the republic of letters, and it was the novelty that writers might ridicule sacred subjects and texts in print which focused the attention of their contemporaries, who sometimes saw a certain advance for Protestantism in allowing them to say such things. In effect, these writers contributed to conceptual emergence and the growth of practical learning.89 In the conditions of their own day, social relations between persons of widely differing beliefs were possible, and the contemporary reader is sometimes surprised to find how easily devout Christians, hardened politicians and anti-clericals interacted and combined for specific purposes.90 In so far as toleration and civil society emerged through these interactions, it is important to notice that later immoveable partitions between believers and sceptics were often absent.91 What these writers attempted to be in various social roles and personae did not amount to a departure from or an alternative to Protestant Enlightenment as a settlement to be fought for and defended. These writers sought to promote the rational examination of accepted beliefs in many areas of public culture, but they were not dogmatic about what ‘freethinking’ would lead a fair-minded person to conclude. They were aware that Christian scholars and natural philosophers were likely to contribute more than a little to inquiries into the truth, and they

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sought the company of those who accepted rational methods of inquiry, whatever their beliefs. Apart from Annet, the issue for them was to achieve a rational liberty and toleration within the state, not to persuade the masses that Christianity was false. Hence, these writers often approached theological questions in a spirit of irony, which critics in the nineteenth century took for satire and sarcasm. Moreover, the irony to which they resorted was often multiple-valued rather than single-valued, and did not lend itself to one-sided resolutions. By providing the milieu of limited toleration inside which more radical ideas could circulate, Protestant Enlightenment made possible highly nuanced interactions between radical and the more orthodox forms of Protestant Christianity in early modern England. In a context in which there was less common religious and political culture than historians have assumed, these writers cultivate multiple personae in order to engage with the presuppositions of different audiences. They adopted ironic and veiled rhetorics in order to address different audiences simultaneously.

Multiple Comportments These writers had a range of comportments available to them, of which they made strategic use. A sincere Protestant might hold that natural religion was the substance of all true religion. They might also be a ‘freethinker’, in the sense of one inclined to submit all ‘traditionary religion’ to critical examination. Finally, they might be interested in ‘free inquiry’ into a range of philosophical questions, including the existence of God, the extent of providence, and the immortality of the soul. This does not mean that these writers were at liberty to publish their views in an unproblematic modern sense. Writing under the cover of Protestant principles in what was still an overwhelmingly Christian society, these writers were not free to speak plainly on religious questions, and they mixed free inquiry with innuendo. Richard Bentley, Samuel Clarke, William Whiston, Thomas Sherlock, Edward Gibson, Daniel Waterland, John Wesley and William Law all accused them of trickery and deception.92 In effect, the writers who accused the clergy of fraud and imposture themselves resorted to insinuation and subterfuge. Francis Gastrell saw this paradox as early as 1708: Deist: What think you of Hobbes, Spinoza, Blount, T—, T—, and many others now Living, who shall be Nameless, for a Reason I know. Sceptic: These are all professt Christians. Deist: How come you to think so? Sceptic: Because they plainly declare so in their Writings, as I can easily prove to you from abundance of Passages. Deist: Pugh, that’s nothing; they were obliged to such Pretences, because they liv’d under Christian Magistrates: this was done to save their Bacon; every Body understands their Meaning.

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Sceptic: Don’t they mean what they say then, in such full and express Words? Then they are Tricksters and Cheats, and are not to be believed in anything else they say: And I had thought, that a Deist who took upon him to Undeceive the people, had any Principle at all, it was that of Truth, and Sincerity.93

Gastrell’s hostile judgement was not entirely misguided, in that all these writers either practised reservation or engaged in a degree of concealment, or both. They did not publish their thoughts in a straightforward sense. Further, publication in print for them was different from the development of ideas, and many of their works brought to the attention of the public materials and arguments present much earlier in scribal or clandestine manuscripts,94 although some of these writers may have been aware of such manuscripts, and many of them wrote private texts and papers of one sort or another.95 Nor did they always write every page of the books that appeared under their names.96 It does not follow, however, that they did not intend the surface meanings of their texts. On the contrary, these writers may have intended both the surface and the implicit meanings of their texts.97 Of course, their writing practices opened them to charges of insincerity or even wickedness, and their contemporaries complained that they planted ambiguous passages, latencies and references to objections to Christianity in their texts, even though their primary arguments were Protestant ones. Sometimes the same passages could be read as illustrating the moderate claims of the text, and as alerting the more sceptical reader to the possibility of a much stronger interpretation.98 However, these writers did not generally argue from such material for a break with Christianity. Instead, they retreated to the claim that Christianity was capable of coinciding with true religion, provided it was sharply distinguished from priestcraft. Taking account of these writers’ various social roles as philosophers, theological writers, political pamphleteers, clergy, classical scholars, historians, lawyers, university dons and public officials helps explain the political and social activities in which these writers engaged as well as their intellectual friendships. Recapturing the social and intellectual tensions which defined their social roles does not involve playing down the importance of their radical religious ideas, or underestimating the importance which the Protestant thought of the seventeenth century had for them. But it makes it possible to place them in their historical contexts, without either assimilating them to their clerical friends (who, unlike them, wrote nothing tending to diminish Christianity) or trivializing their professions of Protestantism. Emphasizing that these writers were within Early Enlightenment draws attention to the undeveloped conditions for free publication and debate throughout Europe in their lifetimes. Placing them within Protestant Enlightenment in England leads to a more refined appreciation of the objectives which led them to write, and to a better grasp of the political and cultural regimes under which

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they lived. It is also consistent with a better appreciation of their contributions to European intellectual history. Much of the older historiography treated these writers as minor pamphleteers and individual religious malcontents,99 but again there is a need to lay aside nineteenth-century myth and denigration, and to pay more attention to the contexts in which they wrote.100 Even Peter Gay, who was more ideologically sympathetic, concentrated on their role as critics of Christianity.101 This study, in contrast, connects their intellectual importance and impact to the contexts which made it possible. Doing so can seem pedantic and to the modern reader implausible, since it is not difficult, given confirmed structural trajectories in intellectual history, that thinkers will eventually arrive at the positions predicted. Nonetheless, it is crucial to observe that they took time to do so, and individual thinkers often continued in ambiguity long after adopting assumptions which were fatal to more traditional views in politics and religion. These writers were not atheists or deists in an exclusive sense, but controversialists working with various publics for a range of purposes in a period in which ‘the public’ was being constructed.102 Consistent with this, all of these writers were more inclined to accept Christianity as an institutional reality than many historians suggest, partly because alternative institutions had not yet emerged, despite the promissory character of the cabals, philosophical societies and Masonic lodges with which many of them were involved. Here my interpretation emphasizes the actual state of institutions such as ‘parties’ and the press, and underlines the practices and forms of life in which these writers were situated rather than undeterminable debates about their inner thoughts. The same logic, however, means that these writers could be open to extremely radical currents of thought and cultural practice within restricted domains: that they could debate the merits of various forms of atheism, that they could dream of utopian social orders free from superstition and priests, that they could endorse and even practise naturalistic sexualities without rejecting the need for a Church to teach the masses their duty.

Structural Change Much of this study is devoted to particularistic analysis. Nonetheless, I do not deny the importance of structural transitions and constraints, even though I argue for caution in considering particular cases and contexts. There was a shift in the course of the seventeenth century from the medieval conceptions of theology, philosophy and science to conceptions which were arguably modern, even if the precise details in each case are complex and at times contested. It is often suggested that the universe came to be construed as homogenous, that the quest for a mathesis universalis or universal interpretative

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system led to a new prioritizing of precise and unequivocal language, that the quest for a unified system of knowledge swept away the medieval insistence on categorical distinctions between different branches of knowledge, and that the new science of the seventeenth century brought with it a new ideal of knowledge as construction. Accounts of this type often assert related changes in theology, as theology was reshaped by univocality and statements about God and his attributes were taken literally and without equivocation. For the same reason, interest in Anselm’s proof of the existence of God revived, and there were suggestion that our ideas, in so far as they were clear and distinct, were the same as God’s.103 In the same way, some accounts emphasize that the understanding of science changed in the seventeenth century in relation with the Protestant insistence on the literal interpretation of the Scriptures.104 Indeed, a lay theology written by layman for laymen emerged, in which philosophy, science and theology were not clearly distinguished.105 While these accounts may be too symmetrical and need to be amended in the light of micro-studies, they point to structural changes which made it harder to defend traditional Christianity. The emergence of a universe in which signs referred but things did not, the decline of Thomas Aquinas’s analogia entis, and the rise of univocity in some forms of philosophy and in some of the sciences relying on mechanized models of the universe, placed Christianity in an unexpectedly exposed position. Univocal science and theology opened the way for systems of nature which excluded a personal God, even if it took time for these systems to emerge, indebted as they often were to one-sided interpretations of the philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Newton. To this extent, allowing for complexities in particular cases and across national borders, there is some truth in the claim that the Enlightenment was partly the result of technical changes in philosophy and logic (Scotism, Terminism, nominalism) in the late medieval period. Further, these changes had major and unintended consequences with the rise of the modern natural sciences deploying the language of mathematics and aspiring to mechanical explanations. The fact that Aristotelianism continued to be important in Lutheran and Catholic countries does not detract from the fact that homogenizing conceptions of science, reductive explanations, and univocal approaches to semiosis played a part in the thought of a range of seventeenth-century thinkers who directly influenced the leaders of the Enlightenment in France, especially after 1740.

Catalysts of Enlightenment Despite its revisionist objectives, this study reasserts a high view of the significance of these writers for the Enlightenment. Accepting that Herbert’s position was exceptional and in some respects enigmatic, the writers known as the Eng-

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lish deists were important critics of traditional Christianity who influenced the development of philosophical and religious thought in France, Holland, Italy, Germany and other European countries. Moreover, their writings impacted not only in Europe, but in America. These writers were also advocates of significant political, social, legal and cultural reforms. As the Italian historian of the Enlightenment Franco Venturi suggested, they were of European significance precisely because they were able to give birth to radical alternatives from within the relative safety of Britain.106 All of these writers raised issues which subsequently passed over into High Enlightenment, but, as has been suggested, they did so in ways which reflect the prevailing conditions of authorship and publication. This means that multiplicities and ambiguities characterize their lives as well as their texts. They made significant contributions to the cause of reform in a wide range of areas,107 but they did so in the period of Early Enlightenment, contributing to processes of rational reflection and debate which would have massive, if often unintended, effects after their deaths. Seen from the perspective of the 1790s they were catalysts of Enlightenment, even if their stances were in their lifetimes necessarily more complex and discreet.

Conclusion This chapter has introduced some key distinctions for my argument. It has focused quite narrowly on England, and not addressed the problems raised by the Aufklärung in Germany, the features of Illuminismo in Italy, or the issue of the possible distinctiveness of Enlightenment in America, where active religious commitments played a major role. In Chapter 2 I introduce a less familiar interpretation of early modern deism in order to explain its background presence in the works of Toland, Collins and Tindal. My strategy is to contest the standard notion of a unified deism by exploring a plurality of different deisms, some of which were probably more radical than we have been led to expect. In Chapter 3 I reread Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury as a Renaissance philosopher with radical as well as irenical views. Herbert, I suggest, may be able to be linked with some forms of early modern deism and was probably aware of underground heterodoxy. In Chapter 4 I build on earlier chapters and read Charles Blount and his circle as involved with multiple deisms and a range of different types of heterodoxy. My reinterpretation suggests that Blount and his friends can be linked with classical theistic naturalism, including esoteric natural philosophy and pantheism, and that Blount and Gildon probably had an impact on Toland, Collins and Tindal. In Chapter 5 I read Toland, Collins and Tindal as three Protestant writers with various identities in their different social roles. I show that they were civil philosophers and republican political pamphleteers as well as critics of revealed religion. So far from having single identities as deists, they were

Who Were the English Deists?

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involved in multiple forms of deism and may have privately entertained radical philosophical ideas. These more nuanced readings imply that these writers were not publicists advancing their extreme views in civil society, but multilayered cultural performers whose activities helped to bring civil society into being. The Conclusion sums up the main arguments advanced in this volume and foreshadows the themes developed in the second volume, Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform.

2 GENEALOGIES OF DEISM

Introduction Many historians have studied deism as if it were a single, specific and separable philosophical outlook, distinctive enough to confer a new religious identity on anyone who adopted it. In this chapter I historicize the term ‘deism’, without imposing a priori conceptions of deism on historical agents. I then use this more historically nuanced and pluralist account of the genealogy of deism as a background for reinterpreting the work of Herbert of Cherbury and Charles Blount in more pluralist terms. * Although generations of scholars have been interested in the movement of European thought from faith to Enlightenment, the terms of analysis remain vague and imprecise, and it is difficult to differentiate between atheism,1 heterodoxy,2 irreligion3 and infidelity4 in the early modern period, partly because the discussion crosses religious and linguistic divides. Thus in the early modern period the term ‘atheism’ covered anyone who seemed to make God’s existence irrelevant, and it was widely asserted that there could be no sincere atheistic belief, although some were tempted by moral atheism in the hope that they would not be punished for their wicked lives. Lucien Febvre’s celebrated claim that atheism was not even thinkable in the sixteenth century is now widely rejected,5 and new histories of atheism attempt to show a richer picture.6 Related difficulties have been documented for libertinism7 and scepticism.8 The term ‘deism’ is subject to the same difficulties, but can be successfully deployed, providing attention is paid to different periods and contexts, and to the speaking positions, from which claims about ‘deists’ were made. In the existing literature the tendency to identify deism with a doctrine, and then to assume that all deists held it, has not been helpful. On the contrary, attempts to define deism as a doctrine have been notoriously unsuccessful, especially since deists could be found from Montevideo to St Petersburg. Many historians have assumed that deism is the doctrine that God does not intervene in the world.9 This doctrine, however, was only held by some deists. Further, some deists believed that – 29 –

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God could intervene in the world, and had in fact done so. Other historians have argued that deism is a special conception of the deity as an abstract First Cause,10 but many deists showed little interest in the nature of God. Many historians have argued that deism is the doctrine that the existence of God can be arrived at by reason alone,11 but this is an odd definition in light of the fact that this doctrine has been de fide for Catholics since the Council of Chalcedon in ad 451. Other historians have equated deism with the doctrine that natural religion is sufficient for salvation. Indeed, some European historians have seen this doctrine as the real essence of deism. Thus M. M. Rossi saw deism as a new moral idea in a world conditioned to believe that individuals could only be saved by believing in the right revealed religion. Rossi disputed the idea that deism was the denial of revelation, and distinguished between a weak form of deism which admitted revelation, and a strong form which denied it.12 Lechler drew a similar distinction between theological naturalists, who only denied the necessity of revelation, and philosophical naturalists, who denied its actuality.13 Similarly, Günther Gawlick argued that deism was the belief that men could be saved without adhering to a special revelation.14 Many deists, however, did not believe in either immortality or salvation, and some deists rejected all natural religion in favour of a celebration of the passions. Deists who only admitted a First Cause or Nature had no conception of natural religion in the Christian sense.15 Moreover, there were different versions of natural religion, and the claim that the existence of God, providence and immortality could be established by reason should not be confused with the claim that true religion must be governed by reason, a position compatible with denying providence and immortality. Some deists, as it happens, did not believe in a personal deity, providence or immortality, and so had little interest in ‘salvation’, just as some deists, influenced by Epicurus, probably did not derive morality from reason. Nor can deism be equated with the denial of revealed or supernatural religion, since those who denied revealed religion were of various sorts. These difficulties led some to drop the notion that deists are individuated by their beliefs. Instead, it is suggested, deists shared goals rather than beliefs, viz. eliminating superstition and priestcraft, intolerance and persecution, and exalting morality independent of revelation.16 This, however, is still much too generic to capture concrete movements of thought and opinion. To develop a better interpretation of deism, I propose to step back from generic single definitions and to revisit the rougher terrain of the historical record. The origins of at least some forms of deism can be found in classical Greek and Roman sources. Among the Greeks some philosophers claimed that it was possible to establish the existence of a Theoin by resort to philosophical arguments independent of religion, even if this divinity was understood differently by different schools. Similarly, the elements of a rational criticism of positive reli-

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gion were implicit in the fifth-century Greek Enlightenment critique of popular theology, cults and ceremonies,17 and in the contrast drawn by Homer, Hesiod and Plutarch between the superstitions of popular theology and worthy notions of the divinity. Subsequently Roman Stoics such as Seneca and Cicero developed these ideas further, and promoted a form of theistic naturalism for which the divinity could be located within the ontological order of nature. Cicero, in particular, endorsed the Stoic view of the Deus as a perfect, intelligent, self-sufficient necessary being who had no need of ‘sacrifices’, while identifying ‘true religion’ with following ‘right reason’.18 Some forms of European deism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were probably revivals of versions of the theistic naturalism found in classical sources.19 As in antiquity, this theistic naturalism was in tension with anthropomorphic forms of religion. From the Greeks to the Renaissance, attempts to combine a classical conception of a Deus of the universe with anthropomorphic forms of religion led to difficulties because the Deus might be too non-anthropomorphic and transcendent to intervene in the world, or too perfect to know of the existence of evil, or too rational to have made a universe in which human beings could not discover what was required of them. Theistic naturalism also threatened to exclude free will and personal immortality as ‘unphilosophical’ prejudices. At a structural level, it was not easy to combine Greek notions of an unchanging ontological order with historical faiths, based on testimony and tradition.20 The classical view of reality as an all-embracing necessitarian system was also difficult to reconcile with the Hebrew conception of Yahweh as a being whose will and personal purposes were realized in history. A number of philosophers attempted to bridge the gap. Thus the Jewish-Greek philosopher Philo (c. 15 bc–c. ad 50) famously posited both a transcendent God and an immanent Logos, and in later Christian writing God became both the Greek First Cause and the Hebrew ‘Lord of history’.21 But such compositions were inherently unsatisfactory. Consistent with these structural tensions, the reception of classical theistic naturalism in the Islamic world provided the background for rationalistic heretics such as al Razi (ad 850–923), who rejected the popular conceptions of revealed religion. Some freethinkers in the Islamic world solved the problem by opting for Greek ontological order, and concluding that positive anthropomorphic religions were false. Similarly, there were reports even in the Middle Ages that some asserted that Moses, Christ and Mahomet were impostors.22 Structural tensions between classical theistic naturalism and a God of revelation also resurfaced in medieval Islam in the controversy between Mu’tazilites, who attempted to accommodate the Koran to Greek naturalism and minimalized anthropomorphic conceptions of God, divine intervention, miracles and creation ex nihilo, and the Ash’arities, who upheld the primacy of revelation.23

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In Christian Europe the same structural tension appeared in the thirteenth-century conflict between the Averroist-influenced philosophy masters of Paris and their orthodox opponents who alleged that God created the world ex nihilo. Predictably, the Paris philosophy masters were accused of teaching that God was a remote First Cause who did not intervene in the world, that the world was an immanentist system ruled by necessity, and that human beings were mortal and without free will, at least as conclusions supported by reason that had to be taken seriously in philosophical as opposed to theological contexts. Granted that the views of individual figures were complex and contextually inflected, there were recurrent structural pressures. The claim that natural religion, or the religion arrived at by reason, was the true religion made recurrent appearances in the context of debates between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, even though some of those who claimed that natural religion was the only reliable guide in religion associated it with the astrological natural religion of the Arabs. These themes were also raised in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century reports of meetings in Baghdad and later Venice between representatives of the revealed religions. These structural tensions also reappeared during the Renaissance, when humanist scholars became aware that many pagan philosophers had developed rational accounts of deity and also complex ethical systems without the benefit of revelation. The Deus of the pagan philosophers, however, was not the God of the Old or the New Testaments. Instead, it seemed to be an exalted entity that maximally exemplified generic features of reality, and did not have emotion, or will; it also knew nothing of human beings. In the sixteenth century some ‘philosophers’ in the Italian academies24 concerned themselves with classical theistic naturalist views.25 The classical legacy was plural and included, inter alia: 1. a Peripatetic-Aristotelian position for which the deity was a necessary First Cause or pure act, with no knowledge of individual things or human affairs; 2. an Epicurean position which acknowledged a distant abstract deity who did not intervene in the world or concern himself with the affairs of individuals; 3. two Stoic positions: 1. a religious-moralist Stoic position which acknowledged a perfect benevolent deity and identified ‘true religion’ with virtue, a life lived in accordance with right reason, and the imitation of the deity’s attributes; and 2. a naturalist Stoic position which held that the world was governed by fate or fortune, and that human beings were mortal and should live within the limits of nature; 4. a Pythagorean position which held that the deity was ‘all in all’ and that human beings reincarnated; and

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5. a Stoic-Platonist position which acknowledged both a transcendent deity and an immanent world soul. Strangely, this pluralism has not been much related to deism in the existing literature, even though it undermines the myth of a monistic deism, and implies that philosophers who were deists might have different views, depending on whether they approximated to the Peripatetic, the religious Stoic, the non-religious Stoic, the Epicurean, the Pythagorean or the Platonizing Stoic positions. Some might only acknowledge a Deus, while others might be committed to a necessitarian form of theism for which God had to be perfect and must manifest this perfection in his dealings with the universe. Further, philosophers with different philosophical and theological views might agree that the nonanthropomorphic Deus of the universe was not to be confused with the popular theology of the masses, without agreeing on the nature of that Deus, just as they could argue that true religion could be arrived at by the use of reason. This pluralism helps to make sense of the various claims made about ‘deists’ during the Renaissance. The rumours in the sixteenth century that some at Padua were setting up ‘philosophy’ against ‘faith’ probably referred to Paduan medical naturalism, with its orientation to Aristotelian and Averroist doctrines.26 Pomponazzi (1462–1525), in particular, was accused of advancing theistic naturalism under the cover of Averroist double doctrines. He was also suspected of contending that morality was not dependent on revelation and that God did not intervene in the world or respond to prayers. Pomponazzi’s actual views were nuanced and technical, and scholars remain divided about what they were.27 Clearly he was not an Aristotelian. Nonetheless, in Tractatus de immortalitate animae (1516) Pomponazzi insisted that Aristotle taught the mortality of the soul.28 In De naturalium effectuum causis, sive de incantationibus (1520) he argued that miracles could be explained by natural causes, and in De fato (1523) he questioned free will and seemed to advocate a strict determinism. In his Apologia (1518) Pomponazzi treated the founders of religions, including Moses and Jesus, as legislators (leges) who deceived the people and did not care for truth. He conceded that prophecies and miracles took place, but he denied that they were supernatural interventions by the deity. Given that his naturalism was still not secular (he admitted that the intelligences produced wondrous events) and that he may not have rejected the claims of theology in their appropriate place, the structural tendency to advance naturalist views, at least in philosophy, was unmistakeable. Pomponazzi’s colleague, the Aristotelian philosopher Cremonini (1550–1631), was also rumoured to deny divine intervention and the immortality of the soul, although he accepted the existence of demons and believed in magic.29 Another form of early modern deism probably emerged in the context of Renaissance debates about medical philosophy. Those following these debates could

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find a form of theistic naturalism in the Roman medical authority Galen (ad 130–200). Galen advanced a rationalistic physical theology, evidenced by demonstration and proof, based on a Deus who did nothing in vain.30 He also set out a systematic critique of Christianity in so far as it was based on unproven ‘faith’, and so raised the issue of whether Christianity could be reasonably believed since it lacked ‘demonstration’.31 It is clear that classical theistic naturalism was discussed in the context of disputes between Hippocratic, Galenist and Averroist approaches to medicine. Da Monte, for example, strongly endorsed Averroes as an interpreter of Aristotle and insisted that the correct position in natural philosophy was an Aristotelianism uncontaminated by theological opinions.32 A revival of classical theistic naturalism can also be found in Renaissance naturalists such as the astrologer and physician Cardano (1501–76), who produced a scandalous horoscope of Christ, predicted the end of Christianity, and gave fifty-four reasons why the soul perished with the body, and in the philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). Both Cardano and Bruno implied that the existence of a Deus could be arrived at from nature which was not the God of popular religion and that events would conform to universal natural patterns.33 This theistic naturalism was compatible with accepting the need for a public religion and with forms of occultism and magic, and an additional element may have been needed for thinkers to challenge revealed religion as a public religious arrangement maintained by priests. An early modern deism emerged when the tendency to treat the Deus as part of the ontological order became associated with the critique of revealed religions as frauds and impostures. Explicit criticism of revealed religion, for which there was some precedent in classical antiquity, re-emerged in sixteenth-century Europe in the context of attempts to compare the three revealed religions, probably undertaken in Venice, renowned for its indifferentism and Levantine connections. Thus Henri Estienne reported around 1560 the existence of a group who held that it was possible to arrive at a good religion by combining the best features of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.34 Consistent with this, Jean Bodin (1530–96) in his Colloquium heptaplomeres (1593), composed in the last years of his life and published posthumously, had seven thinkers from Venice debate the credentials of revealed religion. These thinkers included a theistic naturalist who accepted God and universal morality, but rejected revelation.35 Theistic naturalists critical of revealed religion had clearly appeared by the end of the sixteenth century. The first reference to deists occurs in a letter the Lausanne reformer Jean Viret wrote for the second volume of his Instruction Chrestienne on 12 December 1563. It was made in the context of Calvinist criticism of atheism and libertinism. In Concerning Scandals Calvin attacked those proud men of learning, instructed in human sciences, who despised the Scripture for its simplicity,

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denied the divinity of Christ, and dismissed work such as the miracles of Moses as fables. According to him, these ‘libertines’ mocked the credulity of those who believed in doctrine that could not be proved by natural reason and were contemptuous of all religion, which they regarded as merely human invention. They also regarded immorality as a spectre to frighten children.36 Calvin included Rabelais and Des Périers among his ‘atheists’, but he also listed, amongst others, Etienne Dolet (1509–46), a classical scholar and Ciceronian burnt as a heretic in Paris in 1546.37 Viret also attacked libertines in 1565 and located them amongst those who had the most knowledge of human letters. He pointed out that some of them called themselves ‘deists’ to indicate that they believe in some kind of God, as if they had another deity than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The fact that some ‘libertines’ were thought to call themselves ‘deists’ helps to clarify Viret’s discussion in Instruction Chrestienne. According to Viret those who called themselves deists believed in a God who was the creator of heaven and earth, but did not accept Jesus Christ or his teachings. Some of them believed in God, immortality and rewards and punishments, but others rejected providence and immortality altogether.38 We do not know who these deists were, but they may have been classically-oriented humanists. In recent years it has been suggested that they were anti-Trinitarians or Socinians. Further, it has been argued that there were no sixteenth-century deists in an antiChristian sense, and that Viret’s remarks amount to no more than rumour.39 On the other hand, it is clear that there could have been deists in sixteenth-century Lyons, and that the theistic naturalism found in the works of Galen, Hippocrates and other classical medical authorities was discussed there as part of the reception of Arabian medical thought.40 It could also be a mistake to contrast classical theistic naturalism and radical Socinianism too sharply at the edges.41 In the early seventeenth century, in the context of the wars of religion, critiques of popular religion emerged setting up a non-anthropomorphic Deus against the cruel despot deity of the superstitious.42 The first deist manifesto, the poem known as Les quatrains du déiste, circulated in Paris before 1623. It contrasted the serenity of the deist, who followed ‘Nature’, with the superstitious terrors of ‘the Bigot’, who could never be certain that he believed in the right religion. Whereas the deist adored an absolutely perfect Supreme Being who could not be angry or affected by humans’ actions, the Bigot made God a vengeful executioner who damned human beings for wrong beliefs.43 The contrast was between a neo-Stoic naturalistic theism, for which the Deus had to be conceived in non-anthropomorphic terms as self sufficient and devoid of all passions, as ‘pure intelligence’ or ineffable essence and ‘devotion’, and the false religion of the priests, based on unworthy ideas of God and absurd doctrines such as belief in original sin and heaven and hell.44

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The state of contemporary discussion is illustrated by the Franciscan scientist and theologian Marin Mersenne’s 1,300-page reply to the Quatrains, entitled L’Impiété des déistes (1624). According to Mersenne, the deists were naturalists, influenced by the Italian philosophers of nature (Telesio, Cardano, Campanella, Bruno) as well as by classical and Hermetic sources. As naturalists, they looked to ‘philosophical’ sources rather than to revelation for ultimate truth, and associated God with ‘Nature’ or ‘the Soul of the World’.45 While rejecting all mysteries ‘above Reason’, they claimed that both the existence of God and man’s duty could be known from reason. However, since the law of nature was perfect, it followed that all laws of a later date had to be frauds. Against this background, the deists criticized Christianity and made objections to the Scriptures, some of which were indebted to the anti-Christian polemic extant from classical antiquity.46 Mersenne also noted the contradiction between the deists’ commitment to a classical Deus devoid of all passions and their residual use of the language of personal theism. He further argued that their philosophical naturalism conflicted with the new science, which required a God distinct from the universe who intervened in it.47 Mersenne’s text does not conclusively resolve the problem of who these deists were, despite suggestions that deists gathered around Robert Chalieu, references to the libertine poet Théophile de Viau and associations with the poet Cyrano de Bergerac who envisaged a pantheistic Deus who was ‘all in all’.48 Nor does it clarify Jean Silhoun’s report in the course of the 1620s that there were some who accepted a Creator, immortality and providence, and Christ as a moral teacher, but did not adhere to the positive doctrines of Christianity. Their position was evidently compatible with church attendance, and need for a ‘public cult’ was taken for granted, even if the ‘popular’ systems of Christianity were suitable only for the vulgar.49 Silhoun did not call these thinkers ‘deists’, and they probably occupied a liminal space between Christianity and heterodoxy. Even in the 1640s it remained difficult to identify actual deists.50 By 1648 the Huguenot scholar Jacques Abbadie was able to distinguish four different sorts: 1. Stoic believers in a world soul; 2. Epicureans who hold that God takes no interest in the world; 3. pagans who accept myths in which the good behaved immorally; and 4. proponents of natural religion who regard the rest of religion as fiction.51 Accusations that deists claimed that natural religion was a sufficient guide in matters of religion became more important as the century went on. Hence several sixteenth-century Christian thinkers were sometimes called deists. Thus Guillaume Postel (1510–81) was known as the ‘father of the deists’ because he was alleged to assert the sufficiency of reason in matters of religion and/or to argue for morality independent of religion, even though his aim was to demonstrate the truth of Catholicism and his thought included mystical and theosophical components.52 Likewise, Pierre Charron (1541–1603)

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was denounced as a deist because in De la sagesse (1601) he seemed to make morality independent of revelation and to imply that individuals did not need to believe in Christianity to be saved, even though he was neo-Stoic, and perhaps a fideist.53 Michel de Montaigne (1533–93) was also linked with deism in the context of his Apologie de Raimond Sebond (1575–6), although again he satirized Sebonde’s exaggerated estimation of natural religion and his actual views may have been Pyrrhonist and fideist.54 In England the situation was also confused. The first reference to deists occurred in Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). After dealing with ‘Atheists’ and ‘near-Atheists’ among his contemporaries, Burton went on to describe ‘our great Philosophers and Deists’ who esteemed no man a good scholar who was not an atheist and attributed everything to natural causes. They denied God in all his attributes, contending that there was neither heaven nor hell, resurrection of the dead, pain, happiness, or a world to come. For them religion was a fiction ‘opposite to Reason and Philosophy’. Burton’s deists may have been influenced by Paduan medical naturalism. They took ‘Philosophy’ as their guide, but probably differed according to whether they identified with Galenist, Averroist, Peripatetic or Epicurean views. Burton claimed that they posited an Anima Mundi that acted from the necessity of its nature. They were not religious Stoics, and their views had an international rather than a specifically English character. Burton wrote: Couzin-germans to these men are many of our great Philosophers and Deists, who, though they be more temperate in this life, give many good moral precepts, honest, upright, and sober in their conversation, yet in effect they are the same (accounting no man a good scholar that is not an atheist). they attribute all to natural causes … deny God as much as the rest, hold all Religion a fiction, opposite to Reason and Philosophy, though for fear of Magistrate, saith Vaninus, they durst not publicly profess it. Ask one of them what Religion he is, he scoffingly replies, a Philosopher, a Galenist, and Averrorist, and with Rabelais a Physician, a Peripatetic, an Epicure. In spiritual things God must demonstrate all to sense, leave a pawn with them, or else seek some other creditor.55

Once again no actual deists have been identified, and there is an implication that deists attributed all to natural causes. The association between ‘Galenists’ and ‘atheists’ continued later in the seventeenth century and can be found in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio medici (1642). The circle around Marlowe and Raleigh were accused of being ‘atheists’, but not of calling themselves deists.56 By the early seventeenth century there were different forms of deism, and Renaissance deism, based on theistic naturalism, may have existed alongside other traditions of thought, including Socinianism,57 especially since the term deist could mean anti-Trinitarian.58 The Socinians were anti-Trinitarians, and some of them may have adopted more extreme rationalistic positions. The six-

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teenth-century manuscript, Origo et fundamenta religionis christianae, attributed to the Polish Socinian Martin Seidel, discusses the nature of God, natural religion, original sin, prophecy in general and the prophecies of Daniel in particular. It also deals in a critical spirit with the reliability of the Gospels, miracles, the humanity of Jesus, the personality of St Paul, the doctrine of the Trinity and the reasons for the triumph of Christianity.59 This suggests that a range of radical views, many of them found in classical sources, were put forward by professed Christians.

Conclusion This pattern of diversity means that individual thinkers might draw on a range of deisms, just as they might be influenced by different forms of atheism, free thought, libertinism and scepticism. The uses they made of these repertoires depended on the contexts in which they operated, and on the personae available to them in different social roles. Whereas in Catholic countries deism was more clandestine and sometimes aggressively anti-Christian, in Protestant countries thinkers might interest themselves in various deisms without abandoning Christianity or their social and political identities as Protestants. In such countries public radicals were likely to be marginal figures or persons of lower social status without social roles which required them to be public Christians. In England, in particular, Protestants were allowed considerable liberty in interpreting the Gospel. No doubt socially eminent persons might come under considerable pressure if they were suspected of being Arians or Socinians, but what mattered was how they discharged their social roles, not what they thought in private. Thus individuals might pass in society as Protestants, while privately entertaining several forms of deism. They might advocate a Protestant civil theology, while holding philosophical views informed by contemporary debates about atheism and scepticism. They could do so because in the early modern period deism was not a totalizing outlook or a single identity. On this view, the emergence of heterodoxy in Europe was not the result of rationalism or scepticism as pure constellations of ideas. Instead, the use made of such constellations was crucially context- and domain-dependent. Hence devout Christians could advocate rationalism or scepticism in contexts in which this did not pose problems for Christianity, just as unorthodox thinkers could accumulate materials against Christianity or even theism without this having cultural consequences for the majority of their contemporaries. The revival of classical theistic naturalism did not by itself produce a shift away from Christianity, any more than scepticism by itself undermined belief in the historical claims of revealed religion and turned in stages into irreligion.60

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A more balanced analysis needs to allow both for structural pressures following from the adoption of certain premises and arguments, and for the specific political, social and cultural contexts in which those pressures were worked out by intellectuals living under particular institutional regimes which gave them some and not other social roles. In place of a teleology of secularization, it may be better to envisage the mobilization of repertoires which emerged much earlier by thinkers who needed them in situ. This, however, implies a revised understanding of deism, and of the use made of various kinds of deism by thinkers called ‘deists’, some of whom were probably closer to radical naturalism than the older books suggest. Instead of a single deism, it is better to imagine a variety of deisms influencing thinkers who themselves maintained a range of personae in different national and religious contexts. Once attempts to define deism as a single body of tenets and deists as persons with single religious identities defined by those tenets are abandoned, more ambiguous and plastic social negotiations open up. This was especially the case during the Early Enlightenment when European intellectuals became interested in a wide range of alternatives to traditional Christianity and radically heterodox ideas and discourses circulated in the form of scribal publications and clandestine manuscripts.

3 HERBERT OF CHERBURY

Introduction Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) has long been dubbed the ‘father of English deism’, even though his relation to deism, of several kinds, is complex and contested. Recent scholarship, however, has attempted to free him from any connection with heterodoxy, and he has often been characterized as no more than an irenically-minded ethical theist.1 In this chapter I argue for a stronger interpretation, but also one that has more complex layers. Herbert was a Renaissance philosopher with a range of personae at different levels. Although he was certainly not an Epicurean deist, it is likely that he was aware of diverse currents of contemporary European deism and free thought. In his lifetime Herbert was a major public figure and engaged in a range of contemporary debates. Like many of his contemporaries, he was also engaged with a variety of arcane philosophical and mystical concerns, but these were not at the forefront of the arguments he advanced to the learned world. * Born into a famous Welsh family, Herbert grew up in the 1590s and was educated at University College, Oxford. The brother of the poet George Herbert, the friend of Ben Jonson, John Selden and John Donne, he had excellent social and literary connections. After his father’s death, he became Deputy Lieutenant of Montgomeryshire. At James’s coronation he was made a Knight of the Bath. As a young man he travelled widely in Europe and fought in the religious wars. When he was made English Ambassador to the French court in 1619, Diodati introduced him to French philosophical circles and he became involved in the Huguenot problem. In 1624, however, he was recalled in disgrace. Herbert retained his social eminence, but his public career was over. His creditors had to petition James for payment of his debts, and he had to wait until the Duke of Buckingham could intercede with Charles I to receive his English title. He was called to the Council of War in 1640, but he was a lukewarm Royalist and – 41 –

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surrendered his castle to save his library. These vicissitudes of life enabled him to concentrate on his writings. Herbert was a Renaissance eclectic, immersed in Platonism and Stoicism, who combined theistic naturalist and liberal Protestant ideas. For social purposes, he was a Christian who corresponded with liberal Christians such as the Socinian Johannes Crell, Hugo Grotius and Tilenus and studied the thought of Johannes Volkelius.2 In so far as he remained a Christian in association, in residual sentiment, and for social and political purposes, it is correct to link him with English Arminianism,3 to identify him as the friend of Archbishop Laud and Marin Mersenne, and to relate his views to the religious liberalism of the Cambridge Platonists. It is also correct to emphasize that his closest friends (Sir Philip Sidney, Andrew Marvell, Robert Greville, Lord Brooke) were Erastian Protestants, many of whom shared both his bent for rational natural theology and his hostility to priestcraft. As a liberal Protestant Herbert was close to the Tew Circle, to which four of his closest friends (Ben Jonson, Charles Davenant, Thomas Carew, John Selden) belonged. In this context he subscribed to a minimalist Christology.4 He was also an advocate of religious peace, based on agreement about fundamental religious notions. Here the wars of religion were a crucial background, as were early theorists of toleration such as Sebastian Castello and Jacob Acontius.5 Nonetheless, although his views influenced both Grotius’s De jure belli et pacis (1628) and the Cambridge Platonists, Herbert was more than a peacemaker concerned to unite those of different beliefs in peace and concord. He was a Renaissance philosopher deploying a hierarchy of disclosures, and his social world, rather than any logic of pure ideas, provided the levels by which these disclosures were organized. In his lifetime Herbert was famous as the author of De veritate, generally taken to be the first English philosophical work, which he began after his return from the religious wars and published (probably privately) in Paris in 1624. De veritate was a difficult treatise written in barbarous Latin, which even Descartes, Grotius and Marin Mersenne found hard to interpret. In it Herbert set out an original account of the organization and active powers of the mind in the context of contemporary debates about scepticism. In a significant move that anticipated Kant, Herbert made universal faculties the key to human knowledge and to the world of human experience. He also made the case for intellectual intuition operating below the level of conscious awareness more than a century before Fichte and Schelling. According to Herbert, the mind possessed an intuition of its own internal faculties by which it perceived the divine existence, the attributes and wisdom of God, and the principles of value and the law of nature. This very strong claim marked him off from later British philosophers, above all Locke. Unlike Locke, Herbert was an intrinsically theological thinker for whom the workings of the mind were not explicable without reference to providence.

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He also deployed a heavily Platonic or neo-Platonic metaphysics which relied on analogy and correspondences. In context Herbert’s theory of knowledge was a via media between those who claimed that everything could be known in principle, and those who doubted that anything could be known with certainty.6 Truth, Herbert argued, was the conformation of an object with its appropriate faculties, and it could be secured, provided objects were presented to the mind under the appropriate conditions and human beings did not seek knowledge beyond the limits of their faculties.7 When a faculty and its objects conformed, the mind perceived this conforming and knowledge occurred, although this process was not necessarily a conscious one. But how did objects come into conformity with their faculties? Herbert’s answer was that there were as many faculties in the mind as differences in things; the same faculties had been imprinted on the soul of every normal person in all ages. Providentially, an active power in the mind, ‘natural instinct’, referred objects to their appropriate faculties and this operation of natural instinct was part of the system by which providence ordered the entire universe. Herbert believed then in a benevolent Deus, and he made universal divine providence central to his philosophical cosmology. He was also a cognitive universalist, for whom the same faculties were impressed on the souls of all.8 Herbert’s eclecticism made his system difficult to follow, and he fused this theory of natural instinct with the theory of the common notions, found in Cicero, and in the Stoic Antiochus.9 To do so, he assumed an innatism of faculties, not notions. Herbert defined ‘right reason’ as a just conformation of the faculties, including faculties such as hope, faith, joy and love which would later be associated with the emotions. He clearly understood ’right reason’ as the presence in the human being of the guidance of universal divine providence. So far from setting up a hegemony of discursive reason in the later eighteenth-century sense, Herbert insisted that discursive reason was the least reliable of the faculties. In addition to this philosophy of mind, Herbert also made a contribution to the contemporary philosophy of religion by setting out five celebrated, common notions concerning religion, which amounted to a transcendental natural theology. Herbert’s first common notion was that there was one supreme God. This God was blessed, the end to which all things moved, eternal, just, good and wise, universal and special providence. Herbert offered no proof that there was universal consent for these attributes. He also conceded that there was no universal consent for God’s infinity, omniscience or liberty, and tried to deduce these attributes from other common notions instead.10 The second common notion was this deity ought to be worshipped.11 Herbert’s position here was difficult to interpret because in practice there was no universal consent as to whether this deity should be worshipped alongside other gods or as to what form this worship should take. The third and fourth common notions were that the con-

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nection between virtue and piety was the most important part of all religion and that vice and crime were sinful and to be expiated by repentance.12 However once again in practice there was not universal consent for the primacy of moral considerations in religion nor for the idea that repentance was sufficient without the performance of a specific rite. With the fifth common notion, that there were rewards and punishments after this life,13 Herbert abandoned his claim to derive his ‘Catholic truths’ from universal consent altogether. He conceded that some denied that anything came after death, but dismissed this opinion on the grounds that it had no foundation in the faculties.14 The common notions, Herbert argued, were the valuable part of any religion, and any religion erred in so far as it departed from them. They were the true Catholic Church, and a set of norms by which traditional positive religions could be judged. Here Herbert was very much a Renaissance thinker working with an emerging sense of ‘religion’, which, like Ficino, he associated with universal capacities.15 At the same time his transcendental natural theology anticipated many of the themes of German idealism, including both Kant’s constructivism and Schliermacher’s notion of a religious a priori. Because of its ecumenical and anti-sceptical implications, Herbert’s natural theology, based on common notions, was of great interest to his contemporaries. Grotius and Tilenus supported the book, the Pope praised it, and the 1633 edition appeared with an imprimatur from Archbishop Laud.16 Marin Mersenne translated it into French, and certainly did not associate it with those who called themselves ‘deists’ in France. Herbert’s arguments were problematic, however, because he attempted to combine innatist and universal consent approaches to knowledge and so generated two different tests of truth.17 Thus Herbert identified the Stoic common notions using discursive thought, whereas natural instincts arose immediately in the presence of an object, without discursive thought. Herbert himself claimed that universal consent was the final test of truth, but he also insisted that his readers had only to consult their own faculties in order to discover eternal truths.18 Moreover, the common notions were not in fact always ‘common’ or universal, but only would be so if individuals did not prevent them from entering their minds. Hence, the tests of truth Herbert proposed were indecisive. To many of his contemporaries Herbert seemed to be proposing an ecumenical approach to the problem of conflicting religious beliefs, based on a short list of religious fundamentals on which all reasonable people could agree. This was not, and was not seen as, unorthodox.19 Herbert was in the universal theology tradition, and his views partly overlapped with aspects of the thought of the Tew Circle and the Cambridge Platonists. Like Herbert, the Cambridge Platonists developed Ficino’s notion of ‘religion’ as a universal propensity and proposed ‘natural religion’ as a way of managing Christian religious particularism and as

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a way of choosing between competing revealed religions.20 In context Herbert could also be read as arguing for an extension of Steucho’s universal theism based on a doctrine of natural instincts,21 or a theological innatism, based on common notions, of the kind Philipe de Mornay had attempted in his De la verité de la religion Chrestienne (1581). He could also be linked with the Socinian scholar Johannes Crell, who, likewise, outlined a theory of natural instincts in his De Deo ejusque attributis (1656). These comparisons, however, went to the context rather than to the upshot of Herbert’s project. In recasting the Stoic doctrine of ‘right reason’ in terms of a theory of faculties, Herbert was advocating a reductive form of rationalism, even though this radicalism was initially muted by the philosophy of mind in which it was couched. Moreover, his Stoic rationalism went beyond the claims of rationalist Christians, both in its anti-clericalism and in its theodic commitment to universal divine providence. Herbert was not the first to claim that the fundamental truths of religion could be arrived at by reason,22 but he was the first European thinker to publish works advising the layman to base his religion primarily on right reason rather than on revelations alleged to have been made to priests. Herbert did not claim that the common notions formed a complete religion by themselves, and he removed the term ‘natural religion’ from the draft of De veritate. Moreover, his theory of common notions implied that the common notions had first to be activated and his philosophy did not challenge the legitimate role of culturally powerful religious practices, provided the common notions remained the norm of religious truth.23 The Herbert of De veritate was a metaphysician and a natural theologian advocating a return to a primitive religious unity.24 He was seen as addressing philosophical issues of method and the existence of God, and to be arguing for a hierarchy of reliability, whereby the common notions were the most reliable guides to truth available to human beings. The book was valued by some of his leading contemporaries, including Comenius and members of the Hartlib circle, who took him to be making the common notions the foundation of logic. Descartes himself praised the common notions concerning religion. At Cambridge Herbert’s ideas were studied sympathetically by George Rust, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Nathaniell Culverwell and Ralph Cudworth. Nonetheless, Herbert’s philosophy of religion was potentially more radical than this suggests, partly because his natural theology was more extensive and more certain than the modest conclusions of Christian natural theology. It was also more Stoic than the irenically-motivated emphasis on natural religion in the works of some of the Cambridge Platonists.25 Moreover, it could be taken to imply a normative critique of all sacerdotal religion. The reductive implications of Herbert’s position in regard to clerical or sacerdotal religion were clearer in the expanded third edition of De veritate (1645), written at the end of his life,

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when he also published De causis errorum, De religione laici, Appendix ad sacerdotes and Poemata. In De religione laici Herbert set out what may have been the first formal account of a layman’s religion. This layman’s religion was based on the universal transcendental theology generated by the common notions. How, he asked, could the wayfarer, surrounded by the terrors of various and sundry militant churches, choose an adequate religion? In De religione laici Herbert attempted to persuade the layman to base his religion on the common notions or the ‘Catholic truths’, and not revelations alleged to have been made by priests. In Appendix ad sacerdotes he went even further, and used a series of questions addressed to ‘priests’ to argue that the Catholic truths had to be sufficient for the purpose for which they were given, that nothing could be added to them which made men more virtuous, and that all substantive additions to them were in fact harmful.26 Here again Herbert’s version of natural theology was much stronger than any form of Christian natural theology. Herbert’s epistemological reductionism bracketed the cognitive significance of Christian positivity, while preserving Christianity as socially useful theatre. Neither ‘the Church’ nor the Scriptures could claim the epistemological authority in matters of religion. On the other hand, it could be conceded that ‘the Church’ had the right to organize and arrange the forms and times of worship,27 to publish records of former times, and to inculcate the Catholic truths through preaching and historical narrations. Herbert had no objection to the common notions being presented dramatically in the form of historical narratives, provided that everything apart from the common notions was to be accepted ‘on the authority of the church’. Similarly, Herbert could allow the layman to accept ‘the Scriptures’ including the Decalogue, as a dramatic presentation of common notions because he confined the ‘Word of God’ in Scripture to the common notions. The Scriptures, apart from the common notions, however, were not a reliable or an uncorrupted source of truth. They contained things too obscure to be understood, such as the sayings of prophets who spoke ‘in a human manner’, as well as ‘secret allegorical allusions’, matters to be received or rejected ‘on the authority of the church’.28 He also drew on a considerable body of biblical criticism, some of which was probably available in scribal and clandestine manuscripts. Herbert tried to persuade ‘the layman’ not to base his religion on implicit faith, since he could not ever be certain that he believed in the right religion. He also argued that the layman could not assess the probability of a revelation based on implicit faith since there would never be enough time to evaluate the claims of different churches or to study all the revealed religions in the world. It followed that a better public rule than implicit faith was required to handle the diverse claims with which the layman was confronted. Herbert also set out a critique of revelation, indebted to classical sources.29 This critique emphasized: 1. the

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doubtful conditions under which revelations were alleged to have occurred; 2. the possibility that such revelations were alleged to have occurred; 3. the possibility that such revelations were hallucinations or the work of evil spirits; 4. the dependence of such revelations on the testimony of single witnesses; 5. the absurd or morally dubious nature of what was alleged to have been revealed; and 6. the lack of guarantee that such revelations had been properly recorded. Herbert did not apply this critique directly to the Christian revelation. Instead, he concentrated his attack on revelations alleged to have been made to priests. No such revelation could be accepted, he insisted, unless it was first proven that a revelation had been given to the priest; that this revelation was given by the Supreme Being, speaking in his own voice; that this revelation had been properly written down and conveyed in its full and correct form, and that this revelation so closely concerned later ages that it had to be accepted as an article of faith.30 Herbert’s transcendental critique of positive religion implied that it was impossible for what human beings needed to know in matters of religion to depend on revelations which could only be accepted on ‘implicit faith’. Here Herbert expressed an ancient Stoic insight in systematic epistemological form.31 He also undermined the epistemological authority of revelation as a means of information by arguing that no one except the person receiving it had the faculties by which to judge whether it was true.32 This was a powerful argument against any theology based on revelation that did not offer a new revelation to each believer to the effect that an earlier revelation had occurred. Herbert himself, however, drew a more radical conclusion. It was simply not consistent with the character of the deity that matters of such moment be left uncertain. In emphasizing the need for faculties to judge revelation, Herbert was applying his general definition of truth to religion. In doing so, he anticipated the crisis later associated with Locke’s ‘Ideism’ by excluding from truth whatever could not be directly judged by the mind’s faculties. He was careful, however, not to state his position too explicitly, and although his views amounted to a devastating epistemological critique of revelation as a means of information, he did not say that revelations to others, especially revelations to priests, could not be accepted, but he made it unlikely that they would be, once appropriate orders of questions were in place. Again, this did not place him outside the circle of faith, but it meant that he had a system that demoted particular faiths to the status of supplicants to be judged by each individual, using their own faculties. Herbert died in 1648. On his deathbed, Archbishop Ussher refused him the sacrament because of his sceptical attitude. His The Life and Reign of King Henry the Eighth appeared posthumously in 1649. In it, Herbert rehabilitated Henry as one of the most active princes of his age and showed the admiration for strong civil leaders characteristic of many who feared the influence of ‘priests’ in politics. The book, which remained the standard biography for many years, also

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had another dimension because, characteristically, Herbert inserted a fictitious speech in it summarizing his common notions concerning religion.33 Clearly then Herbert had several personae and could be a trickster in some of them.34 To this extent, questions about Herbert’s religious opinions need to be related to the different personae and social roles available to him as a philosopher, diplomat, historian and poet.35 Herbert’s stature as a philosophic historian of religion was confirmed when Isaac Vossius, Gerard Vossius’s freethinking son, published his study of ancient religion, De religione gentilium, posthumously in 1663, some thirty-nine years after De veritate. In this work Herbert mobilized Gerard Vossius’s researches on ancient religion but drew very different conclusions. Unlike Vossius, who took pagan religion to be a corruption of the religion of the Hebrews, Herbert insisted that ancient religion was consistent with universal divine providence and that the ancients had possessed correct ideas on all the essential points of religion because their religions were based on the common notions. At the centre of Herbert’s argument was the conviction that a just deity could not take pleasure in punishing eternally those he did not give the means of salvation.36 To demonstrate his thesis, Herbert assembled an enormous amount of information about religious doctrines and practices in the ancient world. He also broke with the standard view, found in Vossius’s De origine ac progressu idololatriae (1641), that ancient religion had been based on an idolatrous cult of the stars. Instead, under Varro’s influence, Herbert argued that this cult had been purely symbolic and that ‘the gods’ of the pagans were merely the sequence of God’s faculties and powers.37 Ancient religion, he argued, although based on astral religion as Gerard Vossius claimed, was not idolatrous or superstitious, but dramatic in Varro’s sense. Indeed, Herbert dealt sympathetically with ancient star religion, and argued that the stars could be regarded as a manifestation of God’s law and as prophecies.38 Herbert’s re-evaluation of pagan religion made an important contribution to the birth of comparative religion by finding concealed rationality in pagan ideas and practices, and by offering a natural history of the development of religious ideas and institutions. De religione gentilium also contained, however, a subversive theory of the history of religion, according to which humanity had been seduced from an earlier purer religion, when they later put their faith in revelations alleged to have been made to priests. Although human beings had gradually arrived at the noble worship of the supreme God by their own efforts, a false system of clerical religion, based on idolatry and sacrifice, had been subsequently introduced by priests because it brought them wealth and power.39 To alert the layman to the sociology of mystification operative in clerical religion, Herbert republished his list of conditions which such a revelation had to meet. He also sneered at the sacerdotal order who pretended to be privy to the secret judgements of God, and attacked priests in a way that implied that he was

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referring to modern priests as well.40 Further, De religione gentilium contained indications that Herbert had radical ideas he chose not to disclose, including ideas about Jesus’s original Gospel and the early history of Christianity.41 After the publication of De religione gentilium, Herbert came to be seen in Europe as a dangerous heterodox thinker, especially by Lutheran theologians. His assertion of the sufficiency of reason in religion was attacked by Christopher Francke in Dissertatio de religione naturali (1666) and by Peter Musaeus in Contra Eduoardum Herbertum (1667) Gerhard Titius stressed the need for supernatural revelation against any kind of natural religion in Disputatio theologica de insufficientia religionis mere naturalis (1667), as if Herbert had set up for natural religion in opposition to revelation. In 1675 Johannus Musaeus, Professor of Theology at the University of Jena, dealt with him in his Examen Cherburianismi (1675) and Georgius Seerup defended the supernatural origin of the law of Moses in De legis Mosaicae divina origine et auctoritate diatribe (1678). Similarly, the Lutheran theologian Heidanus included a refutation of Herbert’s ideas in his De origine erroris libri octo (1678). By 1690 Herbert was ranked by Christian Kortholt, Professor of Theology at the University of Kiel, alongside Hobbes and Spinoza as one of the three great impostors,42 but he was not seen in this way in England, where his work was read as innatist rational theology, linked to the Cambridge Platonists and to Arminianism. Indeed, Herbert was not denounced as a deist in a negative sense in English until the Scottish theologian Thomas Halyburton attacked him in 1714.43

Herbert and Deism Despite the efforts of some scholars to separate Herbert from deism,44 the evidence suggests that Herbert was aware of various forms of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century deism, once this is not confused with the coffee-house deism of the eighteenth century, or confined to Epicurean deism, towards which Herbert was probably hostile. Herbert was aware of the revival of classical theistic naturalism in the context of Renaissance medical debates. He heard Cremonini lecture at Padua in 1615, when he also seems to have met the Paduan medical theological philosopher Fortunato Liceti, with whom he corresponded at length.45 Through Cremonini he became acquainted with the works of Vanini (1585–1619), and so with a pantheistic naturalistic theism for which God had largely retired from the world (Amphitheatrum aeternae prouidentiae diuinomagicum, 1615). He was also aware of the ideas of Bruno and owned a copy of De l’infinito universo e mondi (1584).46 In addition, he possessed works by the leading Italian naturalist thinkers Pomponazzi, Telesio, Patrizzi and Cardano. Herbert was also probably aware of the subterranean discussions attacked at length by Marin Mersenne in his reply to Les quatrains du déiste. He was in Paris

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when the poem was circulating and was also friendly with the patrons of the libertine poet Théophile de Viau (1590–1626).47 There are also resemblances between Herbert’s religious views and the views Jean Silhoun attributed to those in France who confessed that God was the author of the universe.48 Nonetheless, there is no decisive proof that Herbert was a deist, and the terms deist and deism do not appear in his works. Herbert’s religious outlook was as individual as his poetry, and should not be prematurely reduced to a generic concept of deism. Herbert derived his benevolent view of the Deus from studying the different conceptions that the classical philosophers had held of the deity, and he emphasized that they had taught true notions of God and sound moral philosophy. He was also probably influenced by the naturalism of the Renaissance eclectic Jean Bodin (1529/30–96). Whatever his personal synthesis of conflicting trends, Bodin promoted discussion of the view that natural religion arrived at by reason was sufficient for salvation, even if Toralba’s views in his Colloquium heptaplomeres (1593) were not necessarily his own.49 He also envisaged a revelation provided by ‘the Book of Nature’, and an esoteric form of natural religion derived from it, which implied that men needed no church (universae naturae theatrum, 1596). Although Bodin’s own eclectic views remain difficult to interpret (he had a complex magical outlook, and may have even been a Judaiser who believed in prophecy),50 Herbert explored many of Bodin’s themes from his own distinctive standpoint. Like Bodin, he believed in an infinitely perfect supreme being, a Deus Optimus Maximus who was both transcendental and immanent. Herbert’s Deus was a first cause, prior to the universe it created, and immanent as universal divine providence pervading all things.51 Herbert, however, also spoke of the Deus in personalist terms as the father and common parent who cared for humanity’s welfare and responded to requests. He wrote prayers himself and also advanced a form of panentheism which excluded any notion of a deity distant from the world:52 Everything we can imagine exists in the infinite, and everything beyond this. God is beyond all things, and alone independent of all. He transcends transcendence, and fills, informs, and encompasses the infinite itself in the vastness of His unity.53

In the same way, Herbert’s hostility to sacerdotal religion had both classical Stoic and Christian sources. Herbert translated the passage from the Stoic poet Silanus asserting that false religion was based on ignorance of the true nature of the Deus.54 He also borrowed from the greatest mind of republican Rome, Terentius Varro, the view that ‘true religion’ had prevailed for a long time before priests pretended to revelations as authority for introducing idolatry, external worship and superstitious notions of God.55 But the idea of a golden age before ‘religion’ had been invented, when just notions of God and our duty had prevailed, could also be found in Catholic and Protestant authors.56 Thus Herbert read

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and admired the Catholic theologian and philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), sought his views on De veritate, and may have been influenced by his universal theology.57 It is probably a mistake to attempt to sort out this eclecticism. Herbert had many faces in the Renaissance manner, and he did not pursue his arguments to eighteenth-century lengths. His religious outlook was eclectic and open to different interpretations, and he used this to his advantage. Under a general cover of Protestantism, he leant towards Roman Stoic rather than Augustinian or Athanasian Christian conceptions of religion. Herbert accepted the Ciceronian doctrine that true religion consisted primarily in a good and virtuous life.58 He also rejected any idea of original sin and believed in a compassionate God and in the goodness of human beings. Further, he held that God would judge human beings according to what it was reasonable for them to believe. For Herbert true religion consisted in moral conduct, not doctrines. Unlike the Tew Circle, to which he may have been indirectly connected, Herbert used this moralism to confine the role of any ‘historical faith’. The overall thrust of his religious thought was towards naturalism. Nonetheless, Herbert’s naturalism was an eclectic mixture of Stoic, Paracelsian and theosophical ideas, and his emphasis on the role of universal divine providence distinguished him from contemporary French or Italian naturalists, just as his rationalism, based on common faculties, separated him from sceptical libertines such as La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé and Guy Patin.

Herbert’s Esotericism Like many of his contemporaries, Herbert practised forms of dissimulation, both to conceal the extent of his religious radicalism and to shield his esoteric philosophy from the vulgar. In the existing literature Herbert’s esotericism has been neglected, even though it may cast light on the problem of his involvement with Renaissance deism. Herbert immersed in Hermetic and Rosicrucian ideas. He possessed books on magic, medicine and occult philosophy, including Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia,59 and he spoke of nature labouring to free the soul from matter. He also referred to earth spirits and to witches, and made a detailed naturalistic study of astrology, augury and divination. The extent of Herbert’s esotericism is clear from two hitherto untranslated Latin poems. These poems suggest that Herbert envisaged an esoteric cosmology, probably derived from neo-Platonist, Pythagorean and Rosicrucian sources, in which the soul expanded into the macrocosm at death and made a journey through the stars.60 Herbert set out some of the details of his cosmology in the poem A Philosophical Disquisition on Human Life, which he recommended to his descendants and gave a central place in his autobiography. Other details were

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clarified in the poem On the Heavenly Life. According to Herbert human beings became like gods when they left the body, and there was nothing to which they could not attain.61 The mens originated in the heavens, mixed with matter at birth, while at death it was clothed in an ethereal body by the plastica virtus and returned to the heavens. If the mens then elected to go beyond the ether, it could climb to the seats of the gods and make itself divine in the heavens. It would then be possible for it to look on the dead, glorious in their own light, to intervene in developments on earth, to gaze at ‘old heroes’ whom faith made gods, and to come to know the arcane reasoning of God. The earthly life was only a prelude to the human being’s real existence, and the human being passed through an eternal cycle of seminal, embryonic, earthly and heavenly lives. There was nothing in this esotericism that was necessarily incompatible with Renaissance deism, but it alerts the contemporary reader to the fact that deism might not exhaust an individual’s views on religious and philosophical matters. On the contrary, a thinker might hold a range of opinions which he did not produce on all social occasions. Such a thinker might express different views of the same matter, immortality, for example, at different levels of disclosure, and they might hold one view as a philosopher, another as a social Christian and a third as a theosophist. This organization of intellectual life around cultural and social spaces will also be crucial when we turn to manifestations of deism in England in the later seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century.

The Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil The problem of Herbert’s radicalism is further complicated by the posthumous text known as A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil (1768). Following the publication of Herbert’s unfinished Autobiography by Horace Walpole in 1764, a further Herbert text appeared based on a manuscript surviving in multiple copies (but not in Herbert’s handwriting).62 This work was attributed to Herbert, despite the fact that the family admitted no knowledge of it. For the next century and a half Herbert’s authorship was not questioned. Then in 1947 Herbert’s biographer, R. M. Rossi, rejected the Dialogue on stylistic grounds and because it was too anti-Christian to be consistent with Herbert’s mild form of deism. Rossi’s judgement was followed by other scholars, despite the fact that H. R. Hutcheson accepted the Dialogue the very year Rossi rejected it.63 A more recent work on Herbert also accepts the Dialogue, even though the author seeks, like Rossi, to minimize Herbert’s radicalism.64 A possible view may be that the Dialogue is Herbertiana, even though the present text has been extensively tampered with.65 Thus the Dialogue is full of Herbert’s idiosyncratic phraseology and touches on his favourite subjects. It also contains a reference to De religione gentilium and a translation of the same passage from Silius Italicus found in

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Herbert’s collected poems. Moreover, in several cases apparently doubtful passages can be found in Herbert’s other works. Further, the Dialogue refers only to books in Herbert’s library, and, in the case of Contra Celsum, to which it is heavily indebted, to Herbert’s edition. On the other hand, the present text appears to be corrupt and reworked by another hand, perhaps Charles Blount, who, like his brother Thomas Pope Blount, was a confirmed plagiarist. This would explain the radical tone, the reference to ‘modern priests’, and the fact that the Dialogue contains material from La Peyrère, passages apparently taken from a manuscript written by Henry Stubbe after Herbert’s death, and possible echoes of Fontenelle’s History of Oracles (1688),66 all sources appropriated by Blount. It is more difficult to determine how far the radicalism of the Dialogue can be attributed to Herbert, as opposed to a later plagiarist such as Blount. The author of the Dialogue attempts to persuade the reader not to base their religion on ‘faith’ in any revelation alleged to have been made to priests. To this extent, it is compatible with Herbert’s own philosophical and indeed epistemological concerns as well as with his knowledge of anti-Christian polemic in classical antiquity.67 In addition, however, the Dialogue contains an armoury of latencies which could be deployed against Christianity, including: 1. that there were more forgeries among the primitive Christians than at any other time in history, and that six hundred books ‘under the names of Christ and his apostles’ were in circulation;68 2. that some of the primitive Christians had rejected what later became orthodox Christianity, that the Ebonites had continued to observe the law of Moses and rejected Paul as an imposter;69 3. that the Church Fathers has been credulous and superstitious, so that there was need to treat what came from them with caution;70 4. that the ‘Christian’ emperor Constantine had been a bad character, whereas Julian the Apostate has been virtuous;71 5. that the doctrines of original sin and hell were absurd, and that the doctrine of the Trinity was unintelligible;72 6. that there was a parallel between Christ and Mahomet, and that the Koran could be substituted for the Bible in Christian arguments;73 7. that the Creation stories in Genesis were fables, and that Moses did not claim that they were revealed to him by God;74 8. that Adam was not the first man, that other people had older chronologies that the Jews, and that the world had existed for hundreds of years before Moses;75 9. that the Jews were not the sole promoters of monotheism, that ‘Elohim’ was plural and really referred to demons and air spirits; that their religion was not

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unique but resembled those of their neighbours in many respects, except for some things more suited to their country and nation than any other;76 10. that the Old Testament was full of crudely anthropomorphic descriptions of the deity, and contained many things ‘unworthy of God’, ‘absurd’, and ‘against humanity’;77 11. that the Jewish priests, like the pagan priests, pretended that God spoke to them in dreams, and gave out oracles and practised necromancy;78 12. that the Levitical law or law of Moses was based on paganism, allowed concubinage, divorce, polygamy, slavery and human sacrifice, and may have been supported by tricks and magic since Moses and Aaron were ‘learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians’.79 13. that human sacrifice was common in the Old Testament as a way of placating the Jewish God, and that Jeptha sacrificed his daughters and Ahaz his son;80 14. that ‘holy men’ of the Old Testament were wicked and vicious: that Samuel was a ruthless politician, and David was a murderer and an adulterer; that the Old Testament prophets were unreliable since ‘God sent a lying prophet to Ahab’;81 15. that the books of the Pentateuch were untrustworthy, and that the original books were all lost, and that all that remained was Ezra’s edition made during the Babylonian captivity;82 16. that the meaning of Hebrew words were hopelessly uncertain;83 17. that the ancients had despised the Jews more than any other people;84 18. that Jesus had spent all but three years of his life in Egypt, where he may have learnt magical tricks;85 19. that the only education Jesus received was as a carpenter;86 20. that there was a parallel between Jesus and the pagan miracle worker Apollonius Tyanus;87 21. that the ‘resurrection’ of Lazarus had been a prearranged trick and that Christians were inconsistent to believe it when they rejected Apollonius’s resurrections as frauds;88 22. that Jesus did not say that he was giving his life for mankind, that he seemed unwilling to die, and to have lost his faith in God;89 23. that there were reports that the apostles were ignorant men and notorious bad characters;90 24. that Peter and Paul professed different creeds, that Mark was a disciple of Paul, while Matthew and Luke were disciples of Peter;91 25. that Paul was a perjurer and a liar, who pretended that he had been raised to the third heaven, and that some of his doctrines may have Zoroastrian origin;92 and

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26. that the primitive Christians had no temples; that they continued to observe Jewish sacrifices and made Christianity ‘Judaism’; and that their ‘love feasts’ were immoral orgies.93 In the context of Herbert’s epistemological concerns these insinuations could be construed as scholarly difficulties which educated Christians had to take into account. His argument was not that Christianity was false, but that the young would be wise to base their religion on ‘common reason’ rather than on positive traditions. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that Herbert himself took such ‘difficulties’ to count more strongly against positive revelation than he deigned to declare. Thus although some of the latencies in the Dialogue could have been added later by another hand, some of them were certainly consistent with subterranean aspects of Herbert’s own thought. A number of the latencies in the Dialogue can be found in Origen’s Contra Celsum. Herbert’s copy of Contra Celsum has survived, and shows that he annotated Celsus’s objections to Christianity in detail.94 Further, Herbert may have possessed manuscripts setting out material of the kind found in the Dialogue. A few fragments (possibly of manuscripts) of this type have survived, including an erotic treatment of the Annunciation, a piece attacking the evil characters of leading figures in the Old Testament, such as David, Solomon and Ahab, a piece on the life of Christ, and a piece attacking priests as thieves who say they are from God.95 Some of these fragments resemble latencies that can be found in the Dialogue. Moreover, another manuscript, definitely by Herbert, De religio laici, written in his own hand but not published until 1933, contains comparable material, albeit in more restrained form. In this manuscript Herbert conceded that he was doubtful of revelation, prophecies and miracles, and argued that prophecies could not be accepted unless they were exact pictures, and that no doctrine could ever be accepted on the authority of miracles because they could be explained naturalistically, or could have been worked by fraud.96 He also referred to the parallel between Christ and Apollonius Tyanus and to other subversive materials.97 This suggests that Herbert may have been a secretive writer, constrained from a full disclosure of his views, who was working on themes with the potential to explode the credibility of revealed religion.

Conclusion Herbert was a Renaissance eclectic working in the context of political Protestantism, who combined classical theistic naturalism with Platonist and liberal Protestant views. Within these constraints, he argued for the sufficiency of natural theology, and promoted a critical attitude to revealed religion. His philosophical thought was more ambiguous, qualified and technical than eighteenth-century readings of him as a deist suggest, and difficult to extract from his

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idiosyncratic Latin. Herbert was an Ancient as well as a Modern, and his Platonism complicates the apparent thrust of many of his views. We do not know exactly what he thought about every issue, and it is impossible to reduce his views in his various personae and social roles to deism. Herbert was in dialogue with a range of contemporaries, some of whom shared his Erastian, vitalist and esoteric sympathies. On the other hand, it is a mistake to emphasize Herbert’s Protestantism or his liberal Platonist sympathies to the point where he constituted no threat to orthodox Christianity. Herbert was not only an original philosopher of mind, an irenical religious thinker, a major historian and a Renaissance magus. He was a dangerous critic of sacerdotal religion, even if this fact was occluded to some extent in his lifetime. He was not a thinker of the Early Enlightenment, but his own engagement with classical Greek and Roman Enlightenment allied to his awareness of underground heterodoxy allowed him to develop a range of positions about philosophical, theological and historical matters which became more important in a world attempting to base itself on reason and nature than they were in his lifetime.

4 CHARLES BLOUNT AND HIS CIRCLE

Introduction Although Herbert developed a brace of arguments which could be used to challenge Christianity as a sacerdotal religion, these resources were not deployed until the heterodox publicist Charles Blount drew upon them in his attempts to cast doubt on revealed religion. Blount’s contribution here deserves more recognition than it has received. Long ridiculed in Anglophone scholarship, Blount has recently received more attention from historians.1 Nonetheless, his active reshaping of Herbert’s legacy remains neglected, just as the extent of his involvement in European free thought and his influence on later writers are only gradually coming to light. Above all, Blount’s interventions are still obscured by totalizing conceptions of deism, and the problem of the ways in which his involvement with multiple deisms related to his various social roles has not been adequately addressed. In this chapter I attempt to provide a more complicated reading of Blount’s career as a background to the work of writers such as Toland, Collins and Tindal. This chapter suggests that the standard practice of beginning the study of the eighteenth-century English deists with Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious may be misguided, and that a range of positions influenced by forms of deism were well developed before Toland. Some of these positions were classical and/or associated with esoteric materialism and vitalist philosophies of nature. Others were more inter-Protestant, as if the sufficiency of natural religion was the central deist claim, a view acceptable to some strands of liberal Protestant opinion. In the context of Protestant Enlightenment, the same individual might draw on several of these positions without much concern for their coherence. They might also argue against belief in revealed religion in some contexts, but insist that they were sincere Christians in others. Read in this way, Blount provides a credible link to Toland, Collins and Tindal. Like them, he was involved with multiple deisms, and the heterodoxy he promoted was not the mild extension of religious liberalism which older historians associated with ‘English deism’, but in large – 57 –

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part classical, international and European, albeit mixed with radical Protestantism. * The development of religious heterodoxy between Herbert and Blount is still under-researched, and it is uncertain to what degree this heterodoxy took the form of deism. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the understanding of deism changed in England during these years, and that contemporaries were aware of more than one sort of deism. Under the Commonwealth (1653–60) Richard Overton, Richard Wildman and William Walwyn combined anti-clericalism and religious rationalism with naturalism, and some of the radical Puritans held that ‘right reason’ taught the law of nature to all.2 Pantheistic materialism of a distinctly mystical and vitalistic variety also emerged, including claims that God could be identified with nature. While these developments sometimes had classical elements, they were not identical with the classical theistic naturalism that had emerged during the Renaissance in Italy and France. Nor was criticism of revealed religion under the Commonwealth necessarily linked to deism. There were occasional references to those who made objections to the Scriptures, but they were not reported to claim to be ‘deists’. Significantly, the ‘Theist’ in Lawrence Clarkson’s A Dispute between an Atheist and a Christian (1646) was a Fleming, not an Englishman, and in 1656 Thomas Pope Blount, Charles Blount’s brother, entered the word ‘Deist’ in his Glossiographia of ‘difficult Words’ under ‘Anti-Trinitarian’,3 suggesting that the association of deism with Socinian rationalism was still current. After the Restoration there were rumours that some ‘atheists’ now called themselves ‘deists’,4 but the exact sense of the charge was ambiguous because ‘deist’ could mean ‘theist’.5 Nonetheless, a stronger meaning, associated with receptions of the philosophies of Lucretius and Epicurus,6 became increasingly familiar, as the word ‘deist’ became associated with libertine circles attached to Charles II’s court: ‘We have a new generation among us … called Deists, which is nothing but a new court word for Atheists’.7 St Evremond and his friends, however, were nominal theists, however licentious their conduct.8 Another type of deist apparently argued in favour of natural religion arrived at by reason and against the Scriptures. The Catholic apologist John Serjeant, for example, introduced his readers to a deist who held that reason was humanity’s guide in religion, while arguing that many Scriptural personalities were bad characters and that the apostles could have set up as the leaders of a new sect from bad motives.9 By the end of the 1670s references to ‘theists’ or ‘deists’ were more common, but these references were often polemical.10 Contemporaries were inclined to regard claims by ‘deists’ that they followed natural religion as spurious. ‘What Theist was ever known to live according to the Principles of natural Religion?’ William Hughes asked in 1679.11 Finally, some deists apparently rejected Christian natu-

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ral religion and William Assheton replied to a deist in 1685 who denied both providence and immortality.12 At the same time, the evidence suggests that rationalistic developments in Christian apologetics provided deists with canons of method which could be deployed in due course against Christianity. In the 1670s the need to use reason in religion was emphasized by many Anglican divines, including John Wilkins and Joseph Glanvill, although they did not suggest that reason was sufficient without revelation.13 Then, in the course of the 1670s an unidentified writer wrote to several of the leading comprehensionists, drawing attention to Herbert’s religious ideas and making objections to the Scriptures. When he wrote to Richard Baxter, Baxter read De veritate for the first time and added a discussion of it to his More Reasons for the Christian Religion and no Reason against it.14 Similarly, in 1677 Edward Stillingfleet replied in A Letter to a Deist to an unidentified correspondent who claimed to base his religion on a list of loosely worded articles resembling Herbert’s Catholic truths, while making objections to the Scriptures. Although Stillingfleet’s deist admitted that the New Testament contained better ethical precepts than any other book, he referred to an armoury of objections to the Scriptures, including the insinuation that it had been easier to pass off frauds before the invention of printing, the great number of the frauds among the primitive Christians, the inconsistencies between the Gospels, the non-fulfilment of prophecies, the fact that many personalities in the Scriptures were bad characters, and the possibility that the apostles reported miracles and set up as the leaders of ‘a new Sect’ from bad motives.15 Further evidence that there were deists who argued for the sufficiency of natural religion was provided by John Dryden in Religio laici (1683). Dryden’s deist claimed that there were certain ‘Principles of natural Worship’ which men could arrive at by reason, and which were sufficient for salvation, adding that no supernatural worship can be true because a general law had to be given to all.16 His deist summarized these principles in seven articles, and, like Stillingfleet’s deist, included among them an obligation to praise and pray.17 Dryden rejected this ‘Systeme of Deism’, and criticized those ‘modern Philosophers’ and ‘philosophizing Divines’ who exalted ‘the Principles of natural Worship’. The deist, he maintained, had confused the universality of natural law with the infrequency of natural religion, which derived from revelation. Dryden denied that there were any ‘Principles of natural Worship’, that repentance was sufficient for salvation, and that any revelation of the rules of supernatural worship had to be made to all. He conceded that ideas of natural religion were found among many peoples, but insisted that these were the remnants of an original revelation. He also admitted that those who were without the Gospel could be saved if they kept the law of nature, but only because God extended to them the merits of Christ.18

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Dryden further insisted that reason was unable to discover the five Catholic articles and that there was no clear idea of one God or of worship of one God among the ancient Greeks. For Dryden, the revelation to Noah was the real origin of natural religion, of which the principles of natural worship were only the faint remnants. Hence Dryden argued that: … our Modern Philosophers, nay and some of our Philosophizing Divines have too much exalted the faculties of our Souls, when they have maintain’d that by their force, mankind has been able to find out that there is one Supream Agent or Intellectual Being which we call God: that Praise and Prayer are his due Worship; and the rest of those deducements, which I am confident are the remote effects of Revelation, and unattainable by our Discourse, I mean as simply consider’d, and without the benefit of Divine Illumination. So that we have not lifted up our selves to God, by the weak Pinions of our Reason, but he has been pleas’d to descend to us.19

Apart from this discussion, little attention was paid to the subversive implications of Herbert’s religious ideas. On the other hand, leading Cambridge Platonists, including Henry More, found merit in some of his technical philosophical doctrines. Nathaniel Culverwell, for example, used his common notions for his own version of natural light as well as his notion of conscience,20 while Ralph Cudworth reworked his notion of a plastica virtus in The Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). Similarly, Richard Burthogge dealt with his theory of truth, including his theory of inner sense, in A Discourse of Reason and Truth (1678). Likewise, George Rust emphasized his theory of the faculties and deployed his theory of natural instinct in his Discourse on the Uses of Reason in Matters of Religion (1683) written before 1655 in part against ‘deists’ (in the sense of theists who gave God an arbitrary power over morality and nature), but Herbert’s name was not connected with deism. Instead, literary productions appeared, propagating heterodox views under the cover of classical scholarship and Protestantism. * The first Englishman to be identified by his contemporaries as a deist was the leading Restoration publicist of clandestine materials, Charles Blount (1654– 93). Blount’s work was characterized by admixtures of classicism, eclectic free thought and political Protestantism. A gentleman, a wit and a libertine who published bawdy ballads,21 Blount was a classical scholar who translated Lucian and Petronius Arbiter, and a political pamphleteer. He came from a well-known country family, the Blounts of Tittenhanger, and had a family estate at Blount Hall in Staffordshire. His father, Sir Henry Blount, was the author of six comedies, a satire and a travel book on Islam, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. His brother, Sir Thomas Pope Blount, was a classical scholar and critic, and Commissioner of Accounts for the House of Commons. Blount was married to Sir Timothy Tyrrell’s daughter, and very well connected. The friend of Dryden,

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Aphra Behn and the Irish playwright Sir Robert Howard, he moved in theatrical circles and was in contact with philosophers and scientists. He also had links with Protestant churchmen and, according to Charles Leslie, admittedly a biased source, was ‘very intimate’ with Archbishop Tillotson, and only discussed religious questions with clergy he recommended.22 This suggests that Blount was a socially acceptable figure with a range of different intellectual and cultural networks. Consistent with his location within Protestant Enlightenment, Blount always claimed in print to be a Christian, even though he was sceptical of revelation and suspected the religion of the clergy of being a combination of political convenience and imposture. As a Protestant, he argued that reason alone should be humanity’s guide in religion and also promoted the claim that a form of natural religion established by reason was sufficient for salvation. Blount’s role as a classical republican is important here, and may explain, in part, why he was tolerated. As an Old Whig and a Commonwealthman, Blount looked back to the great Republican legislators of antiquity, Solon, Numa and Lycurgus. He also advocated a social epistemology, based on each individual’s right to judge all questions for themselves and to communicate their views to others. ‘I am the King of me’ he boasted.23 To propagate these ideas, like Toland later, he reworked Milton’s Areopagitica as A Just Vindication of Learning (1679). He also helped to bring about the end of the licensing system in England by writing William and Mary Conquerors (1693), a pamphlet setting out the eccentric views of the official licensor, which, when it was published, exposed the arbitrariness of the system. Blount was also active in promoting a range of Whig causes and had Dutch connections. He was a prominent member of the Green Ribbon Club and in the 1670s he worked with the first Earl of Shaftesbury and the Duke of Buckingham for the exclusion of the Duke of York. Hence in a pamphlet entitled An Appeal from the Country to the City (under the pseudonym ‘Junius Brutus’), he warned of the massacre which would follow the accession of a Catholic king, and called on the mob to rise for Monmouth if Charles II was assassinated.24 Violently anti-Catholic, Blount campaigned for toleration and accused Danby’s supporters of voting for popery.25 In William’s reign he worked, like Toland and Tindal later, to break the power of the Jacobite clergy and petitioned the Speaker of the House of Commons to punish those who had surrendered their charters. In all of these activities Blount was a Protestant responding both to the excesses of the Commonwealth and to the continuing threat of Stuart absolutism.26 Blount had different social roles as a heterodox publicist and as a cultural critic, and in these roles he was regarded with more suspicion. He was interested in multiple deisms and a range of European heterodoxy and may have inherited theistic naturalism from his father, Sir Henry Blount (1602–82), whom Charles

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Gildon called the ‘Socrates of his Age’ for his opposition to its hypocrisies and sophisms.27 Sir Henry was a friend of Thomas Hobbes, and seems to have frequented freethinking circles in the London coffee houses. He was learned in classical theistic naturalism, and associated the Deus with the Theion, Divinum Aliquid, or ‘Soul of the World’, which was the source of all the activity that animated its body. Sir Henry also accepted the Renaissance theory of imposture and researched the political uses of positive religions in his book on Islam.28 Charles continued his father’s interest in theistic naturalism and, like him, was obsessed with imposture. He cited the leading Italian naturalists Pompanazzi, Cardano, Campanella, Vanini and Bruno,29 was familiar with the Renaissance theory that Moses, Jesus and Mahomet were impostors,30 and was also versed in the Italian medical debates, including the deistic interpretation of Averroes.31 Moreover, like Toland later, he was fascinated by the idea that classical philosophers had privately held pantheistic and materialist views, and may have entertained materialist views himself, although, as in his father’s case, these views probably had pantheist and esoteric dimensions. He was close to Hobbes and also drew on the refined scepticism of Pierre Bayle (1642–1706). Blount may also have had contacts with French freethinking circles. He seems to have been for a time a Pyrrhonist follower of Montaigne, and he also made strategic use in his writings of La Peyrère’s Men before Adam (1656). But he was more deeply indebted to French freethinkers such as Guy Patin, La Mothe Le Vayer, and Gabriel Naudé.32 It is also likely that he was aware of developments in French deism. There were references in France in the 1660s to an Epicurean God who did not intervene in the world, and also occasional discussions of deism between 1670 and 1690, although no self-professed deist has been identified.33 Translations of Lucretius and Sextus Empricus and the reports of travellers seem to have encouraged a critical scepticism towards the claims of all three revealed religions, while the claim that God did not intervene in the world was associated with both Epicureanism and with Cartesian mechanism. Against this background, there were reports of far away lands where human beings lived at peace with nature without temples, cults or priests. These ideas were taken up in England, where Fontenelle was sometimes read as a deist for whom the nature of God could not be known. Fontenelle’s interest in natural religion, his attacks on the Fathers, and his interest in utopian societies all had parallels in the writings of Blount and his friends.34 Blount also sympathized with the utopian ideas found in French deistic voyages such as Denis Vairasse’s Histoire des Séverambes (1679) and La Hontan’s Voyage au Canada (1703). In addition, Blount probably had Dutch Protestant friends, versed in the controversies surrounding Spinoza. He also probably knew Marrano Uriel Acosta’s Exemplar vitae humanae, which set out a system of naturalistic deism, and the arguments against Christianity assembled by leading Jewish scholars in

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Holland.35 It is also possible that he drew directly on the philosophical deism for which God was the ‘universe’ or ‘matter’ or the ‘Soul of the World’ which flourished in the United Provinces in the 1670s.36 Indeed, Blount may have been influenced by a range of Dutch thinkers who identified God with the universe and promoted a religion of reason while denying miracles and immortality.37 There is less evidence that he was aware of the growing criticism of organized religion in Germany.38 There is also some evidence that Blount’s radicalism was shaped by the heterodox Protestantism of the Independent Henry Stubbe (1632–76). Blount may have drawn on Stubbe’s religious ideas, his practice of codal writing, and his vitalistic materialism.39 He had his An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism and may have shared Stubbe’s interest in Islam.40 The friend of Hobbes and Harrington, Stubbe was a radical Galenist and a republican philosopher who proposed an alternative to Harrington’s model of a republic. He also developed a controversial reinterpretation of both Christianity and Islam, according to which Christ had restored natural religion, but Christianity subsequently degenerated into paganism until natural religion was restored by Mahomet. Hence Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in their true forms, were essentially the same, and Mahomet had revived the religion of Christ and the apostles in the form of the Noachic precepts.41 As a republican Stubbe took Mahomet to be a political legislator, in the tradition of Lycurgus, Numa and Solon, who used ‘policy’, in the form of a pretence to revelation, in order to set up a rational civil religion. He also tended towards a naturalism for which the soul was a mixture of bodily qualities and held that miracles were natural, not supernatural events. He may have rejected the argument from design, the supernatural origin of the Bible, supernatural intervention in the world, particular providence, the immortality of the soul, and the divinity of Christ.42 There is also some suggestion that he argued that God was immanent in a spiritualized nature and that there was nothing beyond the process of history.43 Here it is important to allow for the possibility that Stubbe was an Ancient as well as a Modern, and to resist modernizing and secularizing interpretations of his outlook. On the other hand, the case of Stubbe suggests that some forms of radical Protestantism and some forms of deism may have overlapped and in the 1660s there was reference to a sect who pretended to Christianity while identifying God with the universe.44 Decades later, John Beale described the deists of the 1680s as ‘Stubbeans’.45 Blount was a more eclectic and tentative thinker than his rhetoric often suggested, and like other Early Enlightenment thinkers had not always decided what his final views were and tended instead to explore a diversity of options. Consistent with this, he promoted discussion of various forms of classical theistic naturalism among a circle who themselves adopted diverse classical views,

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including Epicurean and Pythagorean doctrines. At the end of his life Blount seems to have professed a form of classical theistic naturalism, guaranteed by common notions, without arriving at a self-consistent system. According to his friend Charles Gildon: he kept all profane Notions of God at a distance, and prefer’d those writ by the finger of the Almighty Creator in the minds of all mankind, to the Obscure, unintelligible, and impious Doctrines, devis’d by men to serve some turn or particular faction or Nation.46

At a more speculative level, Blount probably identified God with the Soul of an eternal universe, not with a watchmaker Deity who ‘brewed up the World’ ‘like a Cook’.47 He also showed some interest in the doctrine that human beings should imitate the attributes of the perfect Supreme Being.48 Paradoxically, he flirted as well with the claim that God was too sublime to have personal dealings with human beings or for human beings to comprehend, although elsewhere he declared his belief in prayer and providence.49 In addition, Blount sought to familiarize his contemporaries with a wealth of objections to the Scriptures and circulated texts designed to alert them to arguments that natural religion could be sufficient without revelation. His deism lacked a stable content and went along with a diversity of heterodox and sceptical themes, although the classical component was often striking. Blount’s classical republican politics, his free thought and his Protestantism often overlapped, and he may have been the leader of a cabal or lodge of some kind. According to Charles Leslie, he set himself at the head of the deists, and they all ‘copied after him’.50 There were also reports that the deists were holding meetings and had texts in Blount’s Oracles of Reason.51 There are also suggestions that he was involved in Sir Robert Howard’s cabal52 and was a member of a cabal of Commonwealthmen meeting at Ludgate Hill.53 He may have been a Mason. Whatever the truth about these difficult matters, Blount never publicized his private views about philosophical and theological questions in an unambiguous form. Instead, in his persona as a literary figure from the late 1670s onwards he published a series of anonymous trick publications designed to promote a questioning attitude towards conventional beliefs about both natural and revealed religion. These publications may have been the work of several hands, and evidenced eclectic free thought rather than a coherent outlook. In The Last Sayings, or, Dying Legacy of Mr. Thomas Hobbs of Malmesbury (1679) Blount pressed passages from Hobbes into the service of a strident deism and made Hobbes declare that God was Almighty Matter and that the best prophet was the best guesser.54 Blount corresponded with Hobbes in 1678, saw his Treatise on Heresy in manuscript, and sent him a manuscript by his father entitled ‘Anima mundi’.55 He also included in his letter subversive historical material

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on the Arians designed to show that Church councils were as untrustworthy as the Fathers,56 largely taken from Stubbe’s An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism. Blount’s copybook confirms that he studied Hobbes’s ideas carefully and drew theistic conclusions from them.57 Blount also employed Hobbes’s critical attitude to the Scriptures and to miracles, and quoted Leviathan with approval in some of his writings. Nonetheless, Hobbes was only one of his masks. During the 1670s Blount sought to deploy classical resources which could be used to challenge and ridicule conventional Christianity, including the Roman disbelief he found in Lucretius, Seneca and Pliny. In 1679 he cast doubt on the immortality of the soul in Anima mundi, allegedly published at Amsterdam and dated 1678,58 a work which circulated long before it was published. In Anima mundi Blount purported to provide a historical narration of the opinions of the heathens concerning man’s soul after this life, while in fact republishing the main pagan arguments against immortality.59 He drew attention to the fact that many of the ancients had believed that God was ‘all in all’ and moved the universe from within as its spiritual part.60 At the same time he filled the text with cynicisms from Lucretius, Campanella and Montaigne, hinting that immortality was a political myth and that man was only an animal.61 Blount’s contemporaries realized that the work was a hoax aimed at questioning the immortality of the soul, and it was publicly burnt on the orders of the Bishop of London. Significantly, Blount never advanced a strong argument for immortality. He was also appalled by the superstitious fear of hell torments promoted by the clergy.62 In 1680 Blount began to publish texts setting out arguments against revealed religion found in the works of Herbert of Cherbury. He began by publishing a treatise on the corruption of true religion through priestcraft entitled Great is Diana of the Ephesians, ‘or the Original of Idolatory, and the Political Institution of Sacrifices’. In this work he republished Herbert’s material on the origins of sacrifices, the diffusion from Egypt and the fall of man through priestcraft in an expanded form and insisted that before organized religion had emerged philosophers had taught a rational worship of God and been great examples themselves of virtue and piety.63 On the surface Blount argued for the need to use ‘reason’ to judge religious questions of all kinds,64 but, in a style that was to characterize later works as well, he filled the text with latencies, including the claim that the law of Moses allowed human sacrifice, the charge that Christ concealed his meaning in parables, and the pagan parallels to Jesus’s life.65 Next, Blount brought out a translation of The First Two Books of Philostratus, Concerning the Life of Apollonius Tyaneus, based on a manuscript by Herbert, insinuating that Jesus had been an ancient miracle worker,66 with ‘Illuminations’ commenting on the text in which he ridiculed stories of miraculous happenings and drew attention to the parallels between Jesus’s ‘miracles’ and those attrib-

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uted to the pagan magician. This work also included text apparently plagiarized from Herbert’s Dialogue. Although he pretended not to intend any parallel between Apollonius and Christ, he filled the Illuminations with materials from Vanini, Campanella, Machiavelli and Pompanazzi which could be given a sceptical, materialist or irreligious sense. Apart from its surface argument, the text contained latencies suggesting that all pretences to miracles or revelation were tricks and frauds, that prophecies were indeterminate, and that the Fathers had believed that God was corporeal. There were also references to the parallel with the Koran, and attacks on the characters of David and Solomon.67 This suggests that Blount may have been drawing on scribal publications or clandestine manuscripts in which such latencies appeared.68 Blount, however, went far beyond Herbert. Herbert had been critical of arguments from ‘wonders’ on epistemological grounds since no one except those who witnessed them could be certain they had occurred. Blount, however, attacked miracles on ontological grounds, drawing on the traditions of Roman disbelief and on the recent writings of Hobbes and Spinoza. Unlike Herbert, but like Spinoza, he argued for an immanentist conception of nature which excluded miracles a priori. Indeed, he seemed to put on Spinoza, as once he had put on Hobbes, and in 1682 in an anonymous pamphlet entitled Miracles No Violations of the Laws of Nature, he brought together passages from Hobbes and Thomas Burnet with the first English translation of sections of Spinoza’s Treatise Partly Theological. In this work Blount applied what Spinoza said of substance to actual bodies, and used Hobbes to recast Spinoza’s maxims. Hence Spinoza’s infinity of divine attributes came to mean that the laws of nature were infinite and there could be no events that were not subject to causal laws.69 Once again Blount seemed to discount supernatural intervention and to conceive of God as ruling nature from within, rather than as having to intervene to override his own laws.70 He was also clearly indebted to Spinoza’s biblical criticism. In due course Thomas Browne replied in a pamphlet accusing the author of ‘atheism’ and ‘deism’.71 It seems likely that Blount was taken with Spinoza at this stage, and he may have translated Spinoza’s Tractatus in 1689. However, he did not take up the details of Spinoza’s system, and, unlike Spinoza, or, for that matter, Hobbes, he never held that theology and philosophy were intrinsically separate domains. Blount was interested in other forms of deism as well, and during the 1680s he sought to bring deism in the sense of a system based on natural religion to the attention of his contemporaries. In 1683 he replied to Dryden’s arguments in Religio laici written in a Letter to John Dryden Esq.72 This letter drew, with only minimal acknowledgement, from Herbert’s unpublished manuscript, Religio laici, from his book, De religione laici, and from the Dialogue, which Blount had obtained by 1680.73 The result was a dramatic rewriting in another tonality. Blount revived Herbert’s attempt to persuade the layman to base his

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religion on the ‘Catholic truths’ engraved on the hearts of all, and summarized these truths in seven articles.74 His interest in the common notions, however, centred on their value as a source of religious truth independent of revealed religion rather than on their role in a general philosophy of truth. In addition, he published an epistemological critique of revelation, also probably taken from Herbert. Blount’s Letter avoided Dryden’s main objection to deism – that no ‘Principles of natural Worship’ could be arrived at by reason alone – because Herbert made ‘Worship’ consist in a good life, not in specific religious duties such as prayer and praise. Blount did not suggest, however, that deism in his sense was an alternative to Christianity. On the contrary, he emphasized that other doctrines could be added to the ‘Foundation’ of the Catholic articles and insisted that he himself would not be ‘outside the pale of the Church’.75 Blount’s republication of Herbert’s ideas in the 1680s only had a limited impact, partly because the philosophical basis for Herbert’s common notions was contested after Locke misinterpreted his theory as a form of innatism in the second draft of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the 1670s.76 * While waging this propaganda war in print, Blount was also using a range of clandestine devices in order to promote a variety of sceptical and heterodox views among cultivated circles. He and his friends exchanged papers and clandestine manuscripts, and may have met together to discuss philosophical and theological questions. The range of his activities became clear after his death when with the collapse of the licensing system in 1693 a collection of letters were published under the provocative title Oracles of Reason. This anthology seemed designed to ridicule conventional Christian beliefs, including the Fall, creation ex nihilo, original sin and immortality. It began with a table of contents containing assertions such as ‘the World is eternal’ or ‘the Soul is Matter’, that reason is the best guide in all things, and that human beings have the right to think for themselves on all questions and to communicate their thoughts to others. The implication was that Protestants should consider a range of controversial positions, not that every reader should adopt them. The Oracles began with a letter from Blount to Gildon designed to undermine the credibility of the Old Testament. It accompanied a translation of chapters 7 and 8 of Thomas Burnet’s Archaeologiae philosophicae (1692) and his appendix on the religion of the Brahmins, which had appeared earlier in 1693 in Latin. In these works Thomas Burnet, the Master of Charterhouse, had used Spinoza’s approach to biblical interpretation to attack literal interpretations of the Mosaic accounts of the Creation and the Fall. Burnet’s own position was highly sophisticated, and he was, at most, an unorthodox Protestant, influenced by Origen and Cambridge Platonism, with millenarian views. Blount, however,

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made him seem a friend of free thought. While pretending to be trying to defend Burnet from charges of heterodoxy, he used Burnet’s material to cast doubt on the overall reliability of Genesis and the Old Testament. In doing so he caused further scandal and damaged Burnet’s career. As a biblical critic, Blount’s aim was to raise doubts about the reliability of the Scriptures, a project for which he gained considerable help from Christian biblical scholars such as Richard Simon in France and Sir Thomas Browne in England.77 He republished Browne’s list of ‘Scripture Difficulties’ as well as latencies taken, without acknowledgement, from the Socinian scholar La Peyrère, including the assertion that Adam was not the first man. In another letter addressed to ‘Major A’, Blount translated Tacitus’ unflattering comments on the Jews and republished the sneer that they had been thrown out of Egypt because they had scabies.78 Much of this was taken directly (without acknowledgement) from Sir Robert Howard’s The History of Religion as Managed by Priestcraft (1694). It also seems likely that Blount knew Isaac Vossius during his years in England and that he learnt from this ‘father of biblical criticism’ in England.79 Once again Blount made maximal use of the resources available to him and marshalled Gerard Vossius’s research on polytheism and pre-Adamitism to dethrone the privileged status of Judaism and Christianity. By the 1680s Blount was using studies in comparative religion and, in particular, material from China and Siam, to reinterpret the world’s different religions in naturalistic terms. In 1678 he discussed his political theory of religious revolutions with the Epicurean libertine, court poet and dramatist John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, who rejected immortality and providence.80 Subsequently he sent Rochester a letter setting out an extraordinary counter-history of primitive Christianity. This manuscript was a plagiarized version of Stubbe’s unpublished ‘An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometonism’. According to this letter, the expectation of a Messiah only arose after the Babylonian captivity when the Jews interpreted the Scriptures cabbalistically. When the Roman occupation of Judea appeared to confirm cabbalistic interpretations of the promise that the sceptre would not pass from Judea until the Messiah came, political interest led the Jews to expect a temporal Messiah, who would overthrow the Romans and restore the fifth monarchy. However, when Jesus of Nazareth failed to fulfil this role, the Jews had him killed. After Jesus’s resurrection, however, the disciples ‘saved all’ by claiming that he would be the needed temporal Messiah at his Second Coming. In short, the manuscript suggested that the early Christians had been millenarians who expected the end of the world and the setting up of the fifth monarchy.81 This was a strand in critical Protestant thinking associated with John Selden, but in Blount it was no longer clear that critical Protestantism stopped short of denying revelation.82 Another letter showed that Blount also exchanged doubts with Rochester about immortality. Although he claimed to believe in Herbert’s ‘Catholic arti-

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cles’, Blount privately flirted with the ideas of French freethinkers like Naudé who claimed that the doctrine was a political invention adopted as a useful way of controlling the masses. On 6 February 1679 Rochester sent Blount his translation of part of Seneca’s Troades entitled ‘After Death Nothing’, with the implication that God took no interest in human affairs and that human beings were free to follow their passions. Blount replied by sending Rochester an anthology of modern and classical attitudes to immortality. Although he purported to accept arguments in favour of immortality, and the need to maintain the belief for social purposes,83 he also republished the main classical arguments against the doctrine, as well as insinuations from Montaigne, Cardano and Pomponazzi. Blount also attempted to interest Rochester in cosmological speculations, and on 8 February 1679 he sent him his father’s Latin treatise on the soul, in which Sir Henry argued that ‘There is God in things; he is all things and does all things’. For Sir Henry spirit and matter were the soul and body of an eternal universe, and involved with each other in a continual process of condensation and rarefaction.84 As the translation below shows, the text deserves more attention than it has received, and may mean that esoteric theistic naturalism was being advocated in England in the 1670s: Spirit does not reside in us in a constant form, but is born in us afresh into us in a constant renewal, much like a flame but flickering through more rapidly since the substance is more refined. Each day we are created out of those entities, they pass through into us; we die and are reborn daily, nor are we the same today as we were yesterday; and though we don’t feel each entity as it passes through us, nevertheless we eventually realize it has passed through. There is no passage of things into us except by way of nourishment. All nourishment, in respect of what is to be nourished is similar but to a weak degree. As we feed bodily, body is what nourishes grows into body in us, and so too with spirit. Yet just as the one does not develop in proportion to the food and drink we take in, nor does the other in proportion to the spirit, unless they are thoroughly dominated by us; otherwise these things infused upon us may even not nourish us at all, but be detrimental if they are too potent, destroy us if they are not like us; and that proportionately more or less in either case. It seems credible that, in proportion as the spirit of the body is dominant in them some men should be able to absorb better the spirit in those things which nourish them, others body. And for that reason, among drunkards (of various sorts) some are rendered less befuddled than others, some end up with more sickly and bloated body than others; yet for the most part it is the case that an excess of drink destructs the intellect more than an excess of food; because drink is more spiritual than food, the body of those who eat a lot is more weighted down, since as things are more substantial, so they burden us more. The wise mind consists of a (clear) dry light; the healthy body is duly dry and pervious; for this reason we should strive to dry it out: and this may be done by due measure of exercise and fresh air for those who are fit for it, being suitable things,

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The English Deists but with too little perspicacity we mark most things merely as hot or cold, moist or dry; the source of energy is not in such qualities; there is something infinitely more divine and more essential in things. On this the hinge of the matter turns and it is known only by experience and in operation in its effect. There is God in things; he is all things, and does all things; in the union of these two elements, a creature has its origin, and is in turn sundered by the dissolution of that union; when on the one hand all things are in perpetual motion from one conjunction to another, and on the other the body and spirit of the universe are eternal, but are incessantly entering upon new conjunctions; for that reason we creatures are momentary manifestations of the eternal God, creatures whom the Fates manifest only (so long) on this earth, but allow to stay no longer, much like the painted figures on theatre curtains. We are the handwork of God, with our parents as his instruments; and dour actions are the works of God, with us as his instruments, but we the instruments act through our own choice; indeed that choice itself is guided one way or another through appropriate conjunctions, and, indeed, through specific ideas suggested to us. By a process of condensation and rarefaction the corporeal parts of the world are made spirit, and the spiritual parts are made corporeal; thus all things are constantly transmuted back and forth. Now Jove has light, now Pluto has light, Jove darkness; as Hippocrates has it, when the Macrocosm withdraws from the world, the Microcosm degenerates and when the world withdraws from the Microcosm, the latter dries up.85

Blount, however, did not endorse these views. Instead, he commented that he distrusted attempts, whether ancient or modern, to explain the source of action in the universe in terms of visible properties: [These] – are only such twilight conjectures as our human Reason (whereof we yet so vainly boast) can furnish us with: this Θεὶον, or Divinum Aliquid, (as Hyppocrates terms it) is that which does all things; but our capacity not being able to discern it, makes us fasten either upon elementary qualities, as Hyppocrates and Galen do or upon Geometrical Proportions, as our modern Descartes doth; so that (indeed) all Philosophy, excepting Scepticism is little more than Dotage.86

In Sir Henry’s text the link with the work of Hippocrates, Galen and medical debates was evident, and seemed to be associated with the pantheistic claim that God was all in all, which may have been the secret doctrine of some deists. Consistent with this, in another letter Blount translated a passage from the Pythagorean philosopher, Ocellus Lucanus (in whom Herbert was also interested), in which Ocellus argued that the world was eternal and could not corrupt or decay. On the surface the letter was an elaborate attack on Genesis, but at a deeper level it revealed that Blount rejected creation ex nihilo, and, like his father, flirted with a neo-Stoic cosmology according to which matter constantly circulated in an eternal universe.87 Other letters underlined the use which the members of Blount’s circle made of classical philosophy. Apart from a letter by Blount to ‘Mr. Ph’ giving an

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account of the practice of augury (taken from Herbert’s Dialogue) and a letter from ‘A. N. Rogers’ of Chichester to ‘Mr. Savage’ setting out the pagan doctrines of fate and fortune, there were several letters promoting Epicurean deism, including a letter by R. N. Richardson to an Epicurean named Harvey Wilwood, emphasizing that Epicurus had taught that pleasure should be tempered by reason, and a letter by ‘Rob Yaxley’ to a relative recommending Epicurus’s teachings on beneficence and gratitude.88 The Oracles also contained several letters by Blount’s friend and lieutenant, the playwright and literary critic Charles Gildon (1665–1724), who seems to have professed a version of deism indebted to Stoic sources. Gildon too contributed to Early Enlightenment without revealing anything like a single overall philosophy and the little we know of his heterodox views again suggests that he was engaged with a whole range of questions. Like Charles Davenant (1656– 1714), Gildon was among the wits who met at Wills coffee house, and was well known in literary and theatrical circles. Although he reverted to orthodox views after Blount’s suicide,89 possibly in an attempt to consolidate his career as a literary critic and playwright, Gildon was a significant publisher of heterodox materials in his own right and planted latencies referring to materials which challenged Christianity in some of his literary works. As early as 1692 he published The Deists’ Plea: Natural Religion was easy first and plain, Tales made it Mystery, Offerings made it Gain: Sacrifices and Shows were at length prepar’d. The Priests ate Roast-meat, and the People Star’d.90

He also published Robert Boyle’s Answer arguing that natural religion did not teach men how to perform their duty.91 Some of Gildon’s material was found in the deistic text The Turkish Spy, which claimed to be translated from French, but could have been written in England. Gildon’s readers were also confronted with a letter by ‘Rabbi Ezra’, translated letters by the French deistic traveller La Hontan, a letter arguing that the soul was a more subtle form of matter, and letters favouring liberal sexuality and a rehabilitation of the passions.92 This suggests that developments in France and Holland were followed closely in England. Gildon was promoting ideas in the 1690s for which Toland and Collins subsequently became famous. Years before Collins, Gildon used Locke’s ‘Ideism’ to attack Richard Bentley’s immaterialist theology. As a materialist who believed that the soul was an accident or operation of matter, Gildon denied that the mind could form ‘an Idea’ of an immaterial soul, and argued that if thinking established immortality, then animals would be immortal.93 Gildon also criticized Bentley’s attempt to prove the existence of God, suggesting that the idea of God was either innate or immediately entered the mind.94 Similarly, like Blount,

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and possibly before Toland, Gildon tried to refute the Christian claim that it was necessary to accept some ‘Mysteries above Reason’ by showing that eternity and succession in God (which many of the clergy cited as an example of such a mystery) could be reconciled, if succession was not regarded as an imperfection but as necessary for the idea of eternity.95 Gildon’s deism seems to have been optimistic and largely Stoic in inspiration. He referred to ‘Nature, or the supreme Cause of all Things men called God’, and insisted that the ‘Omnipotent Cause’ had given human beings ‘Instinct’ to provide for their needs and, specifically, reason as their sovereign rule: Nature, or that Sacred and Supream CAUSE of all Things, which we term GOD, has furnished his Creatures with such Guides as may best conduct them to the several Ends of their Beings. To the Birds, Beasts and other Animals, which we generally hold inferior to Mankind, he gave INSTINCT, as sufficient to direct them to all that is necessary for them. We may well therefore excuse them, if by that Guide they go not beyond a present Care of their Subsistence and Continuation, all which reaches not beyond the Body; because we can discover no other End of their Being (except what humane Luxury has found out in their Destruction,) but to support that being by Food, and to Preserve it by Propagation; and to this, Instinct is sufficient. But in Man we (at least) discover a farther and noble End. Nature therefore must have given him another and a more sufficient Guide; … But the Omnipotent CAUSE, that had so well furnished Bruits, left not the Mind of Man without its Director in this Maze and Lottery of Things; he gave it Reason, as its sovereign Rule and Touchstone to examine them by, and to fit our Choice to our double Advantage of Body and Mind. Reason is the Light, that brings Day to those Things, that will contribute to, or oppose our Happiness; without which we should in vain grope in the Dark; and we should owe entirely to Chance what we obtain’d.96

Gildon drew the consequences that reason had to be sufficient to inform human beings of what they needed for their happiness: ’Tis true, Reason is not sufficient to bring us to a perfect Knowledge of all Things, but ’tis able to furnish us with enough to make us happy, and that is as much as we need care for. There is no necessity of our Skill in the inmost Nature of Things, but there is (since we are ordain’d to an eternity of Continuance) that we should know how to make Eternity Happy, since its Being so depends on our selves; and since such a Knowledge is absolutely necessary, I can discover nothing that can give it us, but our sovereign Guide, Reason.97

Any dualism between ‘Reason’ and ‘Nature’ was excluded: REASON, therefore being the Supream and Primitive Director of every Man, to infringe its Liberty of directing, is to invade the common Charter of Nature, and every Man’s Right and Property; so that those that do so, are justly to be look’d on as the Enemies of Humane-kind. But how that Character agrees with the Fiery Glory of the Zealots for Religion, I cannot comprehend, unless they can demonstrate, That Religion and Nature are directly Opposites.98

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Gildon also referred to Bruno’s doctrine of infinite worlds, to the idea that God could be material, and to the Pythagorean ethereal fire running through matter. This suggests that deism and pantheism were related before Toland, and were associated in the context of both classical thought and Renaissance naturalism. Further, like Blount, Gildon filled his texts with latencies questioning Christianity, including references to the sexual activity of the angels, the miracles in the Temple of Aesculapius, the uncertainty of the canon of the New Testament, and the pagan parallels to the life of Christ.99 This suggests that an armoury of objections to Christianity were discussed in private in deist circles in the 1690s. Only two of the letters in the Oracles, however, set out explicit systems of deism. A letter addressed to Sir Thomas Sydenham, the famous physician, revealed that Blount was circulating a manuscript entitled ‘A Summary Account of the Deists Religion’.100 Blount did not claim to be the author of the Summary, which may have been a compilation by several hands, and he did not clarify when it was written. He referred to it as ‘the Deists’ arguments’ and said that reason could be taken ‘on either side’, and that deism would produce better results if ‘sowed with Christianity’.101 The deists of the Summary were ‘perfect Theists’. They acknowledged one infinite, perfect and everlasting Supreme Being, in whom everything adorable and imitable was to be found. They were moralists, who believed that virtue was the essence of all true religion. Their worship consisted in believing magnificently of God’s goodness, in imitating his perfections, and in living well.102 The Deists attacked image worship, the idea that eternal rites or opinions could propitiate God, and the idea of a mediator, and insisted that only repentance, assimilation to the divine attributes and a sincere attempt to find out his will could render anyone acceptable to God.103 The Summary was followed by a series of notes, summarizing the precedents in classical philosophy for the deists’ outlook. These notes implied that the deists were interested in the secret doctrines of the Pythagoreans, doubted immortality, and rejected any familiar relationship to God.104 They conformed, in other words, to the pattern of classical and Renaissance deism, not to some mild ‘English deism’ which was an outgrowth of liberal Protestantism. The Oracles also contained an exposition of ‘the Systeme of Deism’ which Dryden had attacked in Religio laici, in the form of a letter entitled ‘Of Natural Religion, as opposed to Divine Revelation’ by ‘A.W.’105 This system of deism was based on Herbert’s list of Catholic truths, to which A.W. added a positive duty to pray and praise:106 Natural Religion is the Belief we have of an eternal intellectual Being, and of the Duty which we owe him, manifested to us by our Reason, without Revelation or positive Law: The chief Heads whereof seem contain’d in these few Particulars. That there is one infinite eternal God, Creator of all Things.

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The English Deists That he governs the World by Providence. That ’tis our Duty to worship and obey him as our Creator and Governour. That our Worship consists in Prayer to him, and Praise of him. That our Obedience consists in the Rules of Right Reason, the Practice whereof is Moral Virtue. That we are to expect Rewards and Punishments hereafter, according to our Actions in this Life; which includes the Soul’s Immortality, and is proved by our admitting Providence. Seventhly, That when we err from the Rules of our Duty, we ought to Repent, and trust in God’s mercy for Pardon.107

It brought deism into line with the Christian conception of natural religion rather than with pagan moralism, although A.W. also insisted that living well was better than a set of sterile beliefs. Unlike the Summary, but like Herbert, A.W. stressed immortality and rewards and punishments after death, although, unlike Herbert, he abandoned the idea that there was universal consent for these articles. He admitted that he had suspended his belief in revelation, and implied that he rejected all ‘supernatural Religion’ since natural light could never lead to supernatural things.108 The exposition was followed by an argument against the need for a revealed religion which deployed scholastic logic, and could have been written earlier. This argument differed in tone from the Summary and could have been cobbled from a text by another author. It began by insisting that any rule necessary to future happiness must be known to all: That Rule which is necessary to our future Happiness, ought to be generally made known to all men. But no Rule of Revealed Religion was, or ever could be made known to all men. Therefore no Revealed Religion is necessary for future Happiness. The Major is thus prov’d: Our Future Happiness depends on our obeying, or endeavouring to fulfil the known Will of God. But that Rule that is not generally known, cannot be generally obey’d. Therefore that Rule which is not generally known, cannot be the Rule of our Happiness.109

It also insisted that natural religion was sufficient for happiness: Now if they infer, that therefore a Revealed Religion is necessary, because the Natural will not suffice, is to beg the Question, and to begin again the Dispute: for we hold that a Natural Religion will suffice for our Happiness; because it is the only general means proposed. And tho’ we affirm not that we can wholly live up to it: yet that a general expiation is discovered in the Natural Religion, viz. Penitence, and Resolution of Amendment that we acknowledge.110

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Once again the fact that no revealed religion could be proven to be true directed the mind to what was established by universal assent: Now all Reveal’d Religions are different from each other; and you cannot prove any one of them to be truer than the rest, before you can prove that one of them must be true; and if once known true, mankind would all agree in it; otherwise those marks of Truth in it were not visible, which are necessary to draw an universal assent.111

A.W. also replied to Sir Charles Wolseley’s answer to the deists. Wolseley had conceded that reason established that God was to be served, but he denied that it cast light on what God is or on the manner in which he exists. A.W. denied that revealed religion could be necessary for salvation or it would be known to all. He also suggested that the fact that human beings differed on the means of expiation of sin showed that the idea was uncertain. 112 The relatively minor place these two systems of deism occupied in the Oracles suggests that Blount and his circle were concerned with heterodoxy generally rather than with deism as a single unified outlook. Consistent with this, Blount’s contemporaries reacted to the wider issues raised in the Oracles, and not just to these systems of deism. Many claimed that the Oracles was the first book published in England which openly promoted ‘infidelity’, but it is more likely that Blount and his circle were Protestants who questioned all supernatural religion. This social location was largely lost in the numerous replies.113 Most of the clergy were not convinced that they believed in either God or natural religion. John Harris, for example, argued that they believed that God was ‘matter’ or the ‘Soul of the World’, that matter was in motion, and in necessity rather than free will, all classical pagan philosophical themes.114 Similarly, Henry Prideaux claimed that they were not true deists, and that the rejection of revelation did not itself make anyone a deist.115 Nonetheless, philosophically-informed disbelief in revealed religion had made an impact, at least in London. Indeed, Francis Gastrell wrote that: the peculiar distinguishing Character of this Age is a publick Denial of Religion, and all the Obligations of it, with an Endeavour to disprove the evidence brought for it, and to offer a more rational Scheme of Libertinism.116

William Nicholls complained that ‘infidelity’ had passed from the court to the Exchequer, and that the maxims of Hobbes and Spinoza were known even to the rabble.117 This was overstated, but Blount succeeded in getting the clergy to engage with him, and over the next twenty years his work prompted a series of Christian apologetical works designed to establish the truth of the historical claims made in the Gospels. These works included Charles Leslie’s A Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1698),118 in which Leslie set out ‘four marks’ which he claimed distinguished ‘Facts’ from ‘Rumours’.

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Despite his notoriety, Blount left no deist system, and there was a tension in his thought between his reliance on syllogistic arguments and his personal inclination to scepticism. After Blount’s death, Gildon brought out a collection of his Miscellaneous Works (1695), and he may have played a role in spreading radical political and religious ideas to Toland, Collins and Tindal. Toland referred to Blount only once (in 1695), and the other writers known as the English deists barely mentioned him. Nonetheless, Toland and Tindal followed his use of Milton in favour of a free press. They also drew upon his many trick publications, and both Toland and Collins made extensive use of material from Gildon. This suggests that there may have been some continuity of association, since both Toland and Collins were interested in classical theistic naturalism as well as in diverse forms of contemporary heterodoxy. In the England of the 1690s classical theistic naturalism, esoteric natural philosophy, republicanism and radical Protestantism sometimes overlapped. The nature of deism as an alleged theological error was clear enough, but attempts to discuss the views of individual figures were fraught with difficulties, especially because disbelief in revealed religion and priestcraft was not necessarily separate from Protestantism.119 Many contemporaries were concerned to denounce improper forms of theism which seemed to them to amount to atheism, especially the works of Hobbes and Spinoza.120 Both Hobbes and Spinoza could be regarded as ‘deists’ in the sense of improper theists, but they were not deists in more standard senses. Hobbes’s personal religious views are far from easy to ascertain, and there is some evidence that he moved from an early advocacy of rational religion to a more sceptical position, for which the nature of God was unfathomable (De Cive). His critics maintained that he rejected the supernatural and explained religion in materialist terms, but this did not necessarily make him heterodox, while his conservative political sympathies meant that he did not encourage public attacks on Christianity, which he conceded could be a serious civil religion. Some even argue that he may have had eschatological beliefs.121 Further, he wrote consistently of God in terms that emphasized the finite state of created beings and the exalted status of the Almighty, who was free to create the world when and how he pleased. Unlike many deists, he was not committed to a form of theism for which God was bound by the ontological order. Nor was he convinced that the bulk of humanity would ever take reason as their guide. Spinoza too was widely regarded as an improper theist, and seemed to many of his critics to be advancing a system based on a Deus without passions, to whom prayers could not be addressed. He seemed to exaggerate the role of reason in religion, to offer naturalistic interpretations of prophecies and miracles, and to cast doubt on the cognitive status of revelation, as if it inculcated morality rather than truth. Many feared that his philosophy promoted a naturalist conception of the universe which contradicted Christianity at fundamental

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points. Spinoza’s views, however, were metaphysically sophisticated and beyond popular summary, just as his biblical interpretation was more nuanced and subtle than modern readings tend to suggest.122 Spinoza’s system required a Deus with infinite modes who was the immanent cause of everything. He also had irenical concerns and, like Herbert, he set out a list of common notions concerning religion. Although he believed that philosophy was the path to truth, in the relatively liberal Dutch context the claim that truth was to be pursued by philosophy did not necessarily mean that theology, in so far as it dealt with questions of obedience and the moral life, was unimportant. Further, Spinoza gave Christ a role in religious history and was not necessarily hostile to a very spiritual interpretation of Christianity. At the end of the seventeenth century Christian observers might have been alarmed by the spread of deism, but they were not agreed on what deism was.

Conclusion In this chapter I have attempted to reframe Blount’s career and to provide a different background to the works of Toland, Collins and Tindal. I have implied that the practice of beginning the study of the English deists with Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious may be misguided, and that a range of positions influenced by forms of deism were developed before Toland. Some of these positions were classical, and/or associated with esoteric materialism and vitalist philosophies of nature. These positions were more radical than the forms of deism proposed in print for most of the eighteenth century and are not always easy to distinguish from forms of ‘speculative atheism’. Other forms of deism, however, were more inter-Protestant, as if the sufficiency of natural religion in a Christian sense was the key issue. The same individual might draw on several of these positions without much concern for their coherence. They might also argue against belief in revealed religion in some contexts, but insist that they were sincere Christians in others. Overall, Blount and his circle can be read as naturalists who, while they were aware of both Hobbes and Spinoza, were engaged with classical theistic naturalism. To this extent, they were Ancients as well as Moderns, and so open to Boyle’s critique of those who revived ancient philosophical naturalism instead of attending to the modern mechanical natural sciences which he and other Christians sought to advance. Blount himself attempted to combine classicism, multiple deisms, borrowings from free thought and political Protestantism. The crucial struggle in the 1680s, however, was to defeat a Catholic king and ensure a Protestant government, and this meant that the need to maintain a diversity of political and social alliances moderated the publication of unorthodox theological and philosophical ideas which themselves were in the process of development.

5 THREE WRITERS

Introduction In this chapter I construe Toland, Collins and Tindal as writers who promoted Early Enlightenment within the horizon of Protestant Enlightenment in England. I treat them together in order to bring out their parallel roles in helping to promote a civil society in England. In contrast to older interpretations, I argue that they may have intended the many levels of their texts, which reflect the multiple and under-formed republics of letters in which they were active. Against the tradition which reads them as deists writing works against Christianity, I read them as intra-Protestant thinkers for whom politics, religion and philosophy were to a significant degree civil concerns, and not primarily matters that hinged on personal opinions or ‘faith’. My aim is to emphasize the contextual significance of their writings, without underestimating the fact that these writers may well have had radical private views. On my reading, disbelief coloured their texts, but it was not the primary motivation for most of what they wrote. Instead, they produced Protestant texts with both surface and more radical meanings. * After Blount’s death, criticism of Christianity in England was largely confined to coffee-house conversations and to private discussions after the servants had withdrawn.1 With the Blasphemy Act (1698) in force and the Lower House of Convocation in arms about ‘the Church in Danger’, no explicit manifesto for deism was published for over a generation and prominent citizens were not free to reject Christianity in their public lives. Nonetheless, there were persistent rumours that a sect of ‘deists’ existed, and contemporary observers often alleged that ‘the deists’ were ‘atheists’.2 Consistent with seventeenth-century usage, Richard Bentley, for example, claimed that the deists held improper conceptions of God: There are some Infidels among us, that not only disbelieve the Christian Religion; but impugn the assertion of a Providence, of the immortality of the Soul, of a Universal Judgement to come, and of any Incorporeal Essence.3

– 79 –

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Bentley suggested that these people only sheltered behind ‘the new name of Deists’ to avoid being called ‘Atheists’. On this view, although deists claimed to believe in God, they did not believe in the God of Christianity, but in a First Cause who might also be described as Nature or the ‘Soul of the World’ or ‘matter’, and their deism was identical with the old philosophical paganism. Thus William Molyneaux in 1693 knew of a pack of philosophical ‘atheists’ who contended for the eternity of the world.4 This may have been a reference to Blount’s circle, or to some other group interested in classical philosophy. The reconverted Gildon also referred to ‘Hobbists’, whose system had ‘Atheism in speculation’ at its foundation, although he did not treat his friend Blount as one of them.5 There were also reports that the deists claimed to believe in natural religion, and again observers tended to comment that they did not believe in proper natural religion, but denied the immortality of the soul and eternal punishments, while contending for necessity. There was also a view that deism was not a purely indigenous development, an outgrowth of the rationalism of Anglican divines, but an outlook imported, at least in part, from Europe.6 To confuse matters further, a tension emerged between those, mainly High Church writers, who attacked ‘the deists’ as ‘atheists’, and Low Church writers, who treated them as honest reasoners whose convictions were correct as far as they went.7 Thus the Anglican Unitarian Reverend Stephen Nye described them in neo-Stoic terms as thinkers who believed in a God who ruled the world wisely and provided human beings with reason and natural notions to guide their conduct: the Deist … rejects hereupon only all positive and revealed Religion, and takes up with natural Religion, i.e. with the Belief of a God, whose Power and Wisdom he plainly sees in the Structure and Contrivance of the world, and the Dictates of reason, and our congenital and natural Notions concerning the moral and immoral, or good and evil.8

Nye, however, who could have been referring to Gildon, did not imply that the deists’ natural religion itself was a problem,9 partly because some Unitarians were promoting natural religion as a basis for unity between Christianity and Islam. There was also, however, an over-layer of political and religious concerns, and those close to ‘the deists’ often sympathized with their anti-clericalism. Hence the reverend William Stephens, a radical Whig, suggested that that they had turned against Christianity partly because of the bad behaviour of the clergy after the revolution of 1688: Now the oldest Deists of my Acquaintance having conceiv’d so great a prejudice against the Christian Faith, from the Behaviour of the Clergy, and having levened

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their Disciples therewith, it has fal’n out unhappily, that the late Revolution has by another way also confirmed them in this their Prejudice.10

On Stephens’s account, the deists were anti-clerical critics of Christianity who accepted natural but not revealed religion. By the early eighteenth century it was accepted that there were different sorts of deists, and Samuel Clarke in his Boyle Lectures of 1705 distinguished four.11 One sort accepted the being and providence of God, but denied that he took notice of the good and evil actions of human beings. A second sort believed in a supreme being and in providence, but restricted the providential power to every natural thing that is done in the world and took no notice of the good or evil actions of human beings. A third sort seemed to entertain ‘right Apprehensions’ of the attributes of God but had ‘a Prejudice against the Notion of the Immortality of Humane Souls’. A fourth sort of deist, which Clarke described as ‘the only True Deists’, had ‘just and right Notions of God’ and of humanity, but would only believe what is discoverable by the ‘Light of Nature’ alone, denying all revelation.12 Clarke did not suggest, however, that these deists lacked other identities, even though later historians lost sight of this fact, and tended to assume that these thinkers were deists in all their social roles and capacities. If, however, we hypothesize that most deists in England were Protestants in many of their social roles, then this casts considerable light on the ways in which Toland, Collins and Tindal took up and extended the heritage of Blount and Gildon. * Toland, Collins and Tindal were Protestants writers who worked together to promote political and religious change in a society dominated by a strong established Church, whose power they sought to restrict.13All were more indebted to the radical deisms of the seventeenth century than the older literature suggests, including the works of Blount and Gildon. Gildon’s edition of Blount’s works and Toland’s Two Essays appeared in the same year, and Toland may have known and worked with Gildon before writing Christianity Not Mysterious. He later republished the poem ‘The Deists Plea’, which Gildon had inserted in one of his collections.14 Collins may also have known Gildon, and he made use of some of Gildon’s material in his books. Tindal’s links to Blount and Gildon are less clear, although he followed Blount’s A Just Vindication of Learning in his own republication of Milton’s arguments and also republished material found in the Oracles of Reason. It is at least possible that there was a lodge or cabal through which some form of contact was made, although the evidence is scant, and it would probably be a mistake to over-interpret the theological opinions of those involved. Whatever the actual links, Toland, Collins and Tindal inherited a range of concerns from their predecessors, even though the older literature plays down the extent to which this was the case.

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Here again greater allowance needs to be made for the social complexity of Protestant Enlightenment in England. Toland, Collins and Tindal had multiple social roles, and it is a mistake to read their texts as if they only believed in their secret thoughts. In many contexts, it was not their private beliefs that mattered, but the challenges they made to the High Church party, to Athanasian orthodoxy and to Christianity as a positive religion. All three were able to make these challenges because they had standing as Protestants. As Protestants they were civil philosophers and theologians at a time when the separation between civil philosophy and theology was unclear. For this reason they were serious and not only ironic when they cited the scriptures and theological writers in their books and pamphlets. All of them claimed to be followers of Hales and Chillingworth, who believed that God would accept whoever made an honest and sincere examination of the Scriptures, whatever conclusions they reached. All three cited passages from authorities such as the Cambridge Platonists, the Tew Circle and the Latitudinarians as these passages legitimated their views. They particularly liked quoting John Whichcote to the effect that morality was nineteen parts of twenty of all religion, and also John Tillotson to the effect that religion, our happiness and our duty were the same thing, considered under different notions,15 even though their interpretation of such passages went beyond what those authors had intended. None of them, however, set up for deism as a public creed, and deism was not their response to the management of religion in a modern state. Toland, Collins and Tindal were all well aware of Socinian and Unitarian controversies and may have had some link with Samuel Crell as early as 1697.16 Nonetheless, while they used Socinian techniques for their own purposes, their radicalism was not primarily Socinian or Unitarian in character, even though they could adopt Socinian and Unitarian positions when it suited them. Toland, Collins and Tindal were much more radical than their Socinian and Unitarian contemporaries and were linked with Dutch freethinkers and with French refugee circles in which dangerous heterodox ideas were freely discussed. They were aware of a range of radical ideas and clandestine materials circulating in Holand and other parts of Europe.17 It is also possible that they were involved in some kind of club or lodge in the Netherlands.18 Many of their Dutch friends were Masons, or members of some kind of club, and there were reports that Toland set up a sect in Holland.19 The French freethinker and later Mason Rousset de Missy may have met Collins and Toland in The Hague in 1704, and, in due course, translated the Discourse of Freethinking into French as well as A Letter from an Arabian Physician (1706). Toland lived in The Hague from 1708 to 1710 and published two subversive pieces dedicated to Collins there. Similarly, after the storm over his Discourse of Freethinking broke, Collins travelled to Holland, where he had Dutch and French freethinking friends. Among the French free-

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thinkers, Saint Hyacinth (1648–1746) was in England in the 1720s and knew Toland’s editor Pierre Desmaizeaux, while Charles Levier was a trusted friend of Collins and may well have belonged to an occult order of some kind.20 Albert Henri de Sallengre (1694–1723), who was close to Spinoza and an editor of Marchand’s Journal Littéraire, stayed with Collins in 1718 and discussed philosophy with Toland and Desmaizeaux as well.21 Toland and Collins also probably knew Tyssot de Patot (1655–1738), a Huguenot philosopher, freethinker and Cartesian materialist who made objections to revelation and the Scriptures. Collins had his letters, and Toland sent his manuscripts to friends in The Hague in 1708, just as Tyssot knew Collins’s arguments against prophecy. Toland was also associated with leading figures in the empire such as Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736) and Baron Hohendorf, through whom he had access to clandestine manuscripts. The fact that these writers were involved with Radical Enlightenment should not be used, however, to attribute single religious identities to them. They were probably not followers of Spinoza in a strict sense, although they were certainly influenced by his theological works, his biblical criticism and probably by his ecclesiology as well.22 Collins had Spinoza’s Opera posthuma, Tindal was accused of following a Dutch anti-clerical ecclesiology wrongly attributed to Spinoza, and they were all indebted, in different degrees, to his biblical criticism.23 Further, it is possible that, like freethinking intellectuals in Germany, they read Spinoza in a homogenizing manner as if he, Bruno and Vanini were all espousing a similar materialist outlook for which God was Nature. Nonetheless, despite gesturing in Toland, they did not take up Spinoza’s more technical philosophical doctrines in a systematic manner.24 On the other hand, they were clearly interested in a variety of freethinkers who identified God with the laws of nature, held that the world was eternal, and argued that miracles were impossible. Privately, it is possible that they sympathized with claims that ‘God’ was ‘Nature’ or ‘Matter’ or ‘the Universe’, but in public contexts they worked within the religion of their country, as they believed philosophers had done in classical antiquity. It is also too strong to characterize these writers, without qualification, as followers of Hobbes and Locke. All of them were indebted to Hobbes’s biblical criticism and treatment of religion in Leviathan, just as they were sensitive to the extent to which his materialism posed a challenge to orthodox Christianity, but they did not adopt Hobbes’s views on a wide range of technical issues, with the partial exception of necessity, or accept his view that the state and the Church should coincide. Their debts to Locke are also complex. They were all were close to him politically, and drew out some of the implications of his views on epistemology, thinking matter and natural law. None of them, however, shared his particular form of Christianity, and they also departed from him in philosophical doctrine. Toland insisted that he proceeded on different principles to Locke,

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Collins rejected his friends’ views on metaphysics, while Tindal adulterated his borrowings from Locke with Hobbes and continental authors such as Samuel Pufendorf and Jean Barbeyrac. These writers were political and social reformers,25 even if they were not political and social radicals.26 They were active Whigs and linked with Roman republican circles.27 Sir Robert Molesworth was Toland’s best patron, and Tindal stayed with him on his estates. They may also have been Masons of some sort;28 at the very least they were linked socially. Collins knew Toland well, supported him financially, had him on his estates, and lent him books. The writers may also have lined up together against apologists for revealed religion. Tindal and Collins attended dinners together at Lady Caverly’s house and defended their views, just as in 1711 Clarke and Whiston met with Collins and Tindal and attempted (unsuccessfully) to convert them to belief in revealed religion.29 Such meetings were well within the limits of Protestant Enlightenment. As political and social reformers, these writers fought against the High Church party and sought to legitimate social experiments in the direction of greater liberty, including the right of persons such as themselves to entertain private views on religious questions.30 Consistent with this, for much of their careers Toland, Collins and Tindal attempted to win the Dissenters’ support on particular political and social issues, even though the latter were often critical of their unorthodox religious views. * John Toland (1670–1722) was an Irish polymath, a philosopher, a political pamphleteer, a linguist, a talented historian, a playwright and a poet, who acquired a European reputation as a dangerous atheist. After extended neglect, Toland has recently been given his due as a figure of European significance.31 Nonetheless, more emphasis needs to be placed on his status as a neo-Roman philosopher for whom reason and nature were the only reliable guides to truth. As a neo-Roman philosopher, Toland was intent upon a whole programme of political, social and cultural reform to be pursued from inside Protestant Enlightenment. Reading Toland in this light links up his many activities and allows his religious thought to be contextualized in useful ways which take account of both his utopian vision and his classical caution. Given this reading, there is no need to choose between his different social roles, as if the republican Toland who admired Henry Neville (1620–94) and ‘politick Religion’ was a different person from Toland the philosopher, Toland the political pamphleteer or Toland the member of the national Church. In all his roles Toland was concerned to promote enlightened attitudes and practices, although his comportment and degree of disclosure varied considerably in each, depending on the context and the audience. What stands out is the range of his achievement in charting the way to less positively Christian attitudes in many different areas.

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Born in Donegal, the young Toland converted to Protestantism and proved a brilliant student at the Glasgow College, gaining his Master of Arts from Edinburgh University in 1690. In Edinburgh he was rumoured to belong to secret societies and to practise Rosicrucian tricks.32 Toland may have combined Protestant principles, freethinking and esotericism before he came to London, and this constellations of concerns remained with him throughout his life. Toland was a man of ‘deistical’ Republican principles, and historians may have erred in trying to separate his classicism from his politics and his deism. A protégé of the Presbyterian leader and radical Whig William Stephens between 1690 and 1692 he subsequently tutored for Dissenting families in England, before being sent by the Heads of Agreement to Leiden to study for the ministry. At Leiden, Toland studied with Frederick Spanheim the Younger, Le Clerc33 and Van Dale, and acquired substantial historical critical skills. He was also involved with the Unitarian Benjamin Furley, who had a library of heterodox books. When he returned to Britain without completing his studies in August 1693, he bore letters from Le Clerc to Locke and passed as a young man of exceptional promise. In London, he worked for the Presbyterian leader Daniel Williams, defending his views on Scripture sufficiency in the Bibliothèque universelle. By 1695 he was active in Locke’s circle, and knew his friends John Freke and James Tyrrell. He also acted at times as his political agent. The young Toland was a historical critic, associated in Oxford with White Kennett, the Principal of St Edmund’s Hall, and the antiquarian John Aubrey.34 He was already researching the nature of ‘primitive Christianity’, compiling an Irish dictionary, and working on a critical history of the Celts. He was also linked with well-known Socinians, and he knew the Unitarian Anglican layman Thomas Firmin. Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) can be read against this background. Despite a vast literature asserting the contrary, it was probably not a manifesto for deism, but an outburst of Protestant rationalism.35 Appearing in 1696 in the context of a flood of Socinian and Unitarian pamphlets attacking ‘Systems of Divinity’ and calling for a return to the simplicity of the Gospel, like Arthur Bury’s The Naked Gospel (1690) and Daniel Williams’s The Gospel Truth (1692), it blamed ‘priests’ for corrupting Christianity and advocated a radical lay version of it instead. In Christianity Not Mysterious Toland argued that nothing in Christianity could be ‘mysterious’ or ‘above Reason’. In doing so, he rejected the standard Christian attempt to distinguish between doctrines ‘above’ and ‘contrary to Reason’,36 and held that all ‘Mysteries’ were unintelligible. Here Toland was arguing a philosophical thesis to which he added a historical claim. The philosophical thesis was a radicalization of Locke’s doctrine of ‘Ideas’. In The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) Locke presented his book as a work against the deists and may have been replying specifically to Blount. He attempted to mediate between the deists and anti-rationalist Christians by arguing that the

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only belief required of Christians in the New Testament was that Jesus was the Messiah and that this belief was reasonable, not ‘mysterious’.37 Toland was much less irenical. He was not averse to the notion of an unmysterious original Christianity, but he saw that Locke’s theory of knowledge could be deployed to exclude any belief in mysteries ‘above Reason’. Nonetheless, Toland was not an orthodox Lockean. On the contrary, he combined Locke with borrowings from Descartes, Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists, and, like Herbert, he accepted a substantive conception of reason based on common notions.38 His rationalism involved innatism, as Locke’s empiricism based on the senses did not. Locke had treated faith as rational assent based on evidence.39 Toland went beyond Locke in his approach to faith in making ‘clear and distinct Ideas’ the sole foundation of certainty, although he did not claim that it was necessary to completely understand beliefs accepted on faith. Assent should only be given, he argued, to propositions made up of clear and distinct ideas, which could be immediately perceived to agree or disagree.40 Propositions which did not consist of clear and distinct ideas or common notions were meaningless sounds like ‘Blicktri’.41 This was dangerous because it was far from clear that the main doctrines of traditional Christianity were propositions consisting of clear and distinct ideas. Indeed, Locke himself was alarmed by the identification of his views with Toland’s, and hastened to assure Bishop Stillingfleet that his principles were very different, since, unlike Toland, he did not confine certainty to the ‘evidence’ of clear and distinct ideas.42 This was correct. Toland’s narrow rationalism was eclectic and indebted to Calvinist hermeneutics, Ramist semantics and Dutch Cartesianism, and not only to English intellectual developments.43 Toland’s historical claim was that Christianity was originally intended to be a rational and intelligible religion, proved by the miracles, method and style of the New Testament.44 The Gospel, he claimed, was a system of pure morals, and provided the most illustrious examples of clear and perspicacious reasoning conceivable.45 To support this claim, which was in the spirit of Jean le Clerc and the Dutch Collegians, Toland republished (without acknowledgement) material from Sir Robert Howard’s The History of Religion (1694) asserting that a ‘Mystery’ originally meant something which was not clear until it was revealed, a text also used by Blount and Gildon.46 He then argued that the term was always used in the New Testament in this sense.47 Christianity became ‘mysterious’, Toland claimed, when Jews became Christians and continued to observe their Levitical laws, and when pagan philosophers and priests became Christians after the conversion of Constantine. As a result of such historically contingent developments, however, Christianity had degenerated into ‘Paganism’.48 These views were consistent with rationalist freethinking and with Toland’s links with Dutch scholars such as Le Clerc and Van Dale, who were trying to free Christianity from spu-

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rious mysteries. Indeed, Toland relied on the plausibility of this interpretation when he signed the second edition.49 Both Toland’s philosophical thesis and his historical claim were serious propositions, but he confused matters by dealing charily with revelation. A revelation could only be accepted, he argued, if an examination of its contents showed that it agreed with reason, and was possible and consistent. Revelation, he insisted, was not a necessitating motive of assent, but only a means of information. From this it followed that no doctrine could be believed because it was found in the Scriptures. Instead, it was necessary to prove that the Scriptures were revealed, and this could only be done by appealing to the truth of the doctrines they contained. This made reason the norm of revelation, and excluded ‘implicit faith’, a position strikingly close to that argued for by Herbert in his Latin works. Toland’s rationalism here was acceptable to some radical Protestants. Thus when the Duke of Buckingham argued in the 1690s that the best religion among Christians should be based entirely on reason and associated God with Nature, the Quaker leader William Penn defended him. Toland’s friendship with Penn is further evidence that an identification of true Christianity with natural religion was acceptable to some Protestant thinkers.50 At one level Toland was attacking the High Church party from a Low Church position and siding with Unitarians such as Arthur Bury and William Freke. Nonetheless, Toland’s argument reached wider, which was why the response to the book was so hostile.51 Unsurprisingly, many took Toland to be a Socinian extremist,52 and it is true that he was connected with Socinian and Unitarian circles in London. However, although Toland adopted Socinian stances for his own purposes, there is no proof that he was a Socinian. Moreover, he claimed to believe in a form of natural theology, as many Socinians did not. On the other hand, there were rumours that he was a deist.53 Most of Toland’s opponents were concerned with his epistemological challenge to orthodox Christianity. William Payne in The Mystery of the Christian Faith (1697) argued that the mysteries of Christianity could be meaningful, even though we could not form ideas of them.54 The author of ‘Reflexions Upon Mr. Toland’s Book’ observed that ‘clear and distinct Ideas’ were rare, and that ‘evidence’ in Toland’s sense established that something was possible, not that it was true.55 Thomas Becconsall argued that a law of nature could be arrived at from natural instinct and universal consent.56 Peter Browne insisted that men could apply ideas which referred to the natural world, analogically to God,57 while Thomas Beverley rejected all ‘balancing of Ideas’, and insisted that the ‘Mysteries of Christianity’ were above ‘carnal Reason’.58 In the outcome, Toland conceded that we could have ideas which were not adequate, and that the ordinary things of the world were all ‘mysterious’ in the sense that their essence or substance

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was unknowable. But the sensation around the book hinged on its implications rather than on the philosophical detail of his argument. Despite its Protestant character, Christianity Not Mysterious may have had a deist undertext. It is often forgotten that the book claimed to be a work trying to vindicate Christianity against the charges which had led so many to become deists,59 and a direct counter to the deist objection that Christianity was unacceptable because it was ‘mysterious’ and ‘above Reason’. Toland himself fuelled such rumours by holding forth in taverns. When the Jury of Middlesex presented Christianity Not Mysterious as a blasphemous tract, he retreated to Ireland, where he was denounced as the leader of a new sect.60 Robert South accused him of being ‘a Mahometan Christian’ who denied all the main doctrines of Christianity and Peter Browne claimed that the book was ‘the joynt Endeavours of a Secret Club’.61 There may have been some truth in this, especially since the promised second volume, proving that Christianity contained nothing mysterious or above reason and was a most reasonable religion, never appeared. When the Irish House of Commons ordered his book to be burnt and authorized his arrest, Toland returned to England where he found many of his fellow Protestants anxious to disassociate themselves from his ideas.62 Toland continued, however, to attempt to subvert clerical Christianity, and in Amyntor (1698) he again provoked the High Church clergy by raising doubts about the testimony of the Fathers and the authenticity of the Canon of the New Testament and so apostolic succession.63 Again there may have been a deist background and Charles Gildon had referred earlier to the doubts about the present Canon in his preface to the Oracles of Reason. Toland, however, changed an insinuation into an open challenge when he referred to as yet undetected ‘spurious books put out under the name of Christ and the “Apostles”’.64 Nonetheless, when Offspring Blackall accused him in a sermon before the House of Commons of insinuating that the Gospels were forgeries, he insisted that he had only been referring to apocryphal books, such as the Epistles to Barnabus, Polycarp and Ignatius, and to substantiate his claim he published the long catalogue of apocryphal books, many of which were indeed forged. Once again Toland drew on the best contemporary Dutch scholarship, but again there were hints of an animus which went beyond the purpose at hand. Thus he planted latencies in his text including the quotation from Faustus the Manichee attacking the apostles, the insinuation that the Fathers (from whom all the books of the New Testament were received) were grossly superstitious, and the claim that the Ebionites had denied the authenticity of books now received.65 He also referred to the conflict between Peter and Paul, and hinted that Paul had invented a ‘Gospel of his own’ and used fraud to get it accepted.66 This suggests that many of the standard deist arguments published in the early eighteenth century were already in circulation in the 1690s. There is also

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evidence that the case against the evidences for Christianity and the real history behind the New Testament were already being discussed.67 Subsequently, Stephen Nye and Samuel Clarke defended the New Testament Canon, and the Lower House of Convocation tried to prosecute Toland as an enemy of Christianity, although his critical scholarship was praised in Holland by leading scholars such as Le Clerc and Van Dalen.68 To protect himself, Toland brought out Vindicius liberius (1702), explaining that Christianity Not Mysterious had been a youthful indiscretion and promising to conform in future to the worship and doctrine of the Church of England.69 For the rest of his life he remained a nominal Anglican, prepared, if necessary, to receive the sacrament.70 So far from simply being a deist, however, Toland was active in multiple networks, and his religious stances varied with his social roles. As a Protestant writer, he advocated a rational Christian scheme and defended the Protestant cause, both in Britain and in Europe. A contemporary reader may be tempted to resolve the tension by deciding that he only pretended to be a Protestant, but this is not sensitive enough to the contexts in which he wrote. Toland always remained inside Protestantism, and claimed throughout his life to believe in ‘original Christianity’, free of all ‘Additions’, although he conceded that his religion consisted more in practice than belief. This was a claim he needed to make in order to promote his Low Church ecclesiology, which would have had no credibility if he were indeed a professed ‘infidel’. He also expressly denied that he was a deist, and suggested that it was a contradiction to believe in a God so malicious as not to reveal himself to mankind.71 As a religious pamphleteer Toland was a Low Church Christian72 who promoted a version of James Harrington’s civil theology as the best prescription for England in his lifetime.73 He supported a comprehensive national Erastian church, teaching mainly natural religion and based on a minimal civil theology designed to inculcate virtue and to promote worldly concerns. In early eighteenth-century England Toland attempted to unite Low Church Anglicans and Dissenters and to reform the Church of England along comprehensionist lines.74 He rejected any Catholic conception of ‘Church’ and circulated Low Church manuscripts, such as The Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church, denying that there was any formal concept of ‘the Church’ in the New Testament.75 He also attacked hierarchical notions of priesthood and insisted, on historical critical grounds, that the original Christian scheme had permitted a diversity of belief and practice. Further, like several Unitarian writers of the time, he argued that Protestants should return to the monotheism practised in turn by the ancient Hebrews, the Nazarenes and the Muslims. Sympathetic to the Ebionite party in the early Church, he saw natural religion as the common ground uniting Christianity and Islam and envisaged a multifaith London in which mosques, churches and synagogues would stand side by side. In the same generous spirit,

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he championed religious liberty, and campaigned for the repeal of the Test Act and the naturalization of the Jews.76 Low Church principles were also important for his role as a political activist. Toland was the most influential radical Whig pamphleteer in England.77 Like Blount, he was a great Commonwealthman, loyal to the ‘good old Cause’, and to the idea of a mixed constitution with strict laws. Rumoured to be a member of the Calves Head Club founded by Milton, he maintained that all authority derived from the people78 and frequented the Grecian Tavern, where Henry Neville held forth. As a republican,79 Toland was the friend of Roman Whigs such as Andrew Fletcher, Sir Robert Molesworth, Sir John Trenchard and Walter Moyle and carried on propaganda for the Commonwealthmen,80 while attempting to refute charges that they were enemies of monarchy. In effect, Toland created the eighteenth-century republican canon in English.81 He brought out an edition of Milton’s prose works with a biography representing Milton as a religious and political radical who belonged to no church or sect,82 published a drastically rewritten edition of the regicide Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs, suppressing his religious views and making Ludlow appear as a champion of his own Commonwealthman causes, as well as an edition of Harrington’s Oceana, with a biography casting Harrington in the role of the modern successor to ancient Republicans such as Moses, Solon, Numa, Confucius and Lycurgus.83 Like Harrington, Toland envisaged a complex psychology of politics linking body and soul to an array of institutions. In practical politics, he worked with Trenchard, Molesworth and Moyle against standing armies, and with Sir Robert Clayton and the third Earl of Shaftesbury for parliamentary reform. Toland’s politics were always tactical, but unified by rational philosophical principles. He was not an extreme radical, and although he favoured ‘democratical’ governments, all but a talented elite were to remain in the classes in which they were born, and charity schools were to be opposed as inconsistent with the needs of mercantilist economy.84 In the same spirit, he supported a property qualification for parliament and government by the landed gentry.85 He also advocated mercantilist economics, imperialist expansion and British rule in Ireland. Above all, Toland worked to modernize the national institutions. Where Blount made only strategic forays, Toland outlined an entire programme of social and political reform. He denounced packed parliaments and court corruption86 and argued for parliamentary reform, annual parliaments, and the abolition of a standing army.87 He also advocated the abolition of abuses such as the sale of commissions, the provision of employment for discharged soldiers and the setting up of a civilian militia.88 Government administration was to be reformed and rationalized, expenditure was to be reduced and all government contracts were to be advertised in the Gazette.89 Toland also argued for extensive reform of the legal system. The laws should be clear, and simple, with

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strictly enforced and well-defined penalties. Procedures were to be faster, and simpler, and the clergy were to be excluded from the judicial process.90 Education likewise was to be modernized. Chaplains were to be abolished and the young members of the upper class were to be entrusted instead to worldly tutors on the Roman model. They were also to be made to study useful subjects, constitutions and military matters.91 The universities were also to be reorganized. The Jacobites were to be driven out and the holy orders requirement was to be abolished. Regular lectures were to be given, discipline should be strict and there should be prizes for useful subjects.92 Toland was an outstanding political writer who worked with patrons at the centre of English political life. Holles employed him for a time, and Shaftesbury paid him an annual salary until he published his An Inquiry Concerning Virtue without permission. Harley, the Puritan politician and leader of the Country party, was his best master, and Toland wrote pamphlets defending his administration.93 In Anne’s reign he recommended Commonwealth ideas to the monarchy, opposed Atterbury and the High Church party, and advocated a comprehensive national Church. By the time he wrote Memorial of the State (1705) for Godolphin, Toland was attempting to disassociate the Whigs from Dissent. From 1710–14 his overwhelming concern was to assure the Protestant succession and he wrote pamphlets promoting the Hanoverian cause94 and campaigned against Sacheverell.95 Alarmed by Harley’s Tory realignments, he broke with him, and after the Septennial Act of 1716 he followed Robert Molesworth into opposition. Close to reform Whigs such as Stanthorpe and Sunderland, in The State Anatomy (1717) he analysed political conditions in England from a Commonwealthman standpoint. He attacked Walpole over the South Sea Bubble and described Trenchard’s and Gordon’s Independent Whig as an ‘incomparable’ paper.96 At the end of his life he was alienated from a Whig government that turned to the established Church for support. In his persona as a private philosophical thinker, Toland probably accepted some transformation of classical theistic naturalism. In print, he purported to believe in one all-perfect deity, whose parts all creatures are.97 In this sense, he dubbed himself Adeisidaemon, or one occupying a position between atheism and superstition. In addition, like Collins, he found an acceptable form of natural religion in Cicero’s distinction between pious adoration of God (religio) and ritual based on fear of the gods (devotio), and, like Cicero, he took belief in a necessary perfect deity to exclude superstitious faith in rites and ceremonies.98 However, deism, even in this classical sense, was only one of his concerns, and pertinent in only some of his identities and social roles. It was an undercurrent rather than the main purport of his writings.99 Like Blount and Gildon, Toland was steeped in European heterodoxy. He promoted Bruno’s Spaccio in Europe and worked with Prince Eugene of Savoy

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and Baron Hohendorf, whose library contained many clandestine books. His links with the book trade, especially with William Mears and Thomas Johnson, are well known. He was also friendly with various European freethinkers, including the Dutch pantheist Tyssot de Patot (1655–1738), whom he may have met in Holland in 1708.100 Moreover, he had a collection of clandestine manuscripts himself, including Bodin’s Colloquium heptaplomeres, Theophrastus redivivus (an anthology of ancient materials openly celebrating atheism),101 La Mothe le Vayer’s Cinq dialogues, a manuscript claiming that Christ had been trained as a magician in Egypt (to which Toland added a note that no one could fail to perceive its consequences), a piece entitled Superstition Unmasked, a piece on the St John Christians, and a piece arguing that there was no certainty about what Jesus himself said. In addition, his papers show that he corresponded with other sceptically-minded people, including a deist Samuel Reynolds and a Scottish freethinker, ‘Philocles’, who rejected immortality and doubted that infinity ended with God.102 Toland’s philosophical interests extended from cosmological topics to political and social reform. As a young man he had entered the controversy over Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681–9) and defended Burnet against the attacks of England’s leading geologist John Woodward.103 Even at this stage he seemed to side with Blount, who had wickedly agreed with Burnet that the book of Genesis provided descriptions, not scientific knowledge. In an anonymous work, Two Essays Sent in a Letter from Oxford (1695), Toland posited the operation of a plastic power containing the seeds of all the forms of matter in order to explain the presence of fossils. In addition, he advocated naturalistic explanations of miracles and rejected any supernatural intervention in ‘the machine that we call the Universe’.104 This suggests that he may already have been associated with a circle interested in esoteric materialism and Renaissance naturalism. Further, in Clito, or A Poem on the Force of Eloquence (1700), Toland indicated that he was working on an ‘Esotericks’ which included biology and physics, and promised to reveal not only whether God was the ‘Soul of the World’, but the source of life, the nature of the soul, which planets were inhabited and which were not, where magnetic forces came from, why the oceans ebbed and flowed, how shells started and how meteors were formed.105 Toland the neo-Roman philosopher mixed classical theistic naturalism, Renaissance Hermeticism, alchemy, occultism and pantheistic materialism, as if they were intrinsically connected. Toland’s ‘Pantheism’ needs to be seen in this eclectic context as an attempt to imagine the world differently with political and moral implications rather than as a finished or dogmatic metaphysical scheme. Toland may well have been indebted for his pantheism to Blount, and he adopted as his own the motto from Virgil, Jovis Omnia Plana, which Blount had used over sixteen years before. He

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took it for granted that rational accounts of the universe would be generated by ‘philosophers’, who would need, however, to be circumspect and to conform to the laws and religion of their country. In this spirit, he cited Cicero and other Roman authors and revived Stoic ethics, physics and cosmology as the basis for an alternative to Newton’s mechanical universe. In Socinianism Truly Stated (1705) his ‘Pantheists’ associated the notion of God as the omnipresent space prior to all distinction in which material and immaterial distinctions were intelligible, an account he derived from the Cambridge scholar Joseph Raphson. Later in Origines Judaicae (1709) he associated ‘Pantheists’ with Spinozists because they limited philosophical discussion to what could be observed, viz. bodies in motion.106Although the details of the Pantheists’ system were not publicly available until he published Pantheisticon: sive formula celebrandae sodalitatis Socraticae in 1720,107 Toland offered to explain to Leibniz the pantheistic notion of those who believe in no other eternal being than the universe as early as 1709.108 According to Toland the Pantheists had a Socratic Society modelled on the ancient societies of the learned, and were bigoted to no one opinion. Their para-liturgy mainly consisted of readings from classical authors such as Pythagoras, Ocellus Lucanus, Varro, Lucretius and Cicero, authors in whom Blount had also been interested.109 Like the classical philosophers, the Pantheists held double doctrines: an exoteric doctrine adjusted to the laws and customs of their country, and an esoteric doctrine for an inner circle of initiates. According to Toland they maintained that human beings should take ‘philosophy’ rather than ‘theology’ as their guide on all things, that all questions should be judged by reason, and that human beings should follow ‘ Nature’, be tranquil in mind, and seek happiness in this life. They were also hierophants of nature and their esoteric natural philosophy was neo-Pythagorean and Stoic in inspiration. This esoteric natural philosophy included the doctrine that God was the ethereal fire or subtle matter running through all things, and also the conception that the universe contained an infinite number of eternal seminal elements in perpetual revolution, both doctrines promoted earlier by Blount. The fact that Toland called these thinkers ‘Pantheists’ has led scholars to assume that pantheism differed from deism, but the assumption that a deist could not be a pantheist is anachronistic. Marin Mersenne claimed that some deists were identifying God with the ‘Soul of the World’ or the universe as early as 1623 and Blount and Gildon were classical theistic naturalists, at least at times. Further, Toland, Tindal and Collins were all accused of holding that God was the universe or matter by writers who referred to them as ‘deists’. Toland himself regarded pantheism as the secret doctrine which the learned of the ancient world taught to the initiated. Indeed, he was convinced that the priests of Egypt, the Pythagoreans, Solomon, Moses, Ecclessiastices and even the Dru-

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ids had all secretly held that God was the universe. This idea may have circulated in Masonic circles.110 Toland himself described God as the creative intelligence of the universe, and denied that intelligence was separate from matter.111 Indeed, he wrote: Finally, the Force and Energy of the Whole, the Creator and Ruler of All, and always tending to the best End, is GOD, whom you may call the Mind, if you please, and Soul of the Universe; and hence it is, that the Socratic Brethren, on a peculiar Term, as I said before, are called Pantheists.112

Toland’s Pantheists accepted some form of Stoic theodicy, and their religion consisted in being governed by the law of reason, and not by the lying and superstitious fictions of human beings, which were neither clear nor universal.113 This, however, did not imply that they did not conform to Christianity as the established religion of their country.114 Nor, although this is difficult for modern readers to understand, does it follow that Pantheists were non-Christians. On the contrary, some of them may have been Presbyterian Masons who accepted the rule of ‘right reason’ and a republican conception of liberty, however much they differed on a range of ecclesiastical questions.115 In an early eighteenth-century context individuals could adopt philosophical views of this kind without compromising their churchmanship. Similarly, Toland’s relationship to Christianity was that of a political and cultural critic, rather than an enemy as such. His aim was to discredit supernaturalist claims and to promote a more naturalist understanding of the Gospel, consistent with his republican civil theology. Under Spinoza’s influence, Toland sought natural explanations for narratives in the Scriptures that had traditionally been deemed miraculous. He did not argue against miracles in principle, but he deployed a hermeneutics that removed the problem. Thus, in a piece entitled Hodegus, which he circulated among the friends of Tyssot de Patot in Holland, he explained the miracle of the pillar of cloud and fire in the Old Testament (which many Christians cited to prove that the law of Moses was a theocracy) along naturalistic lines. So far from being evidence that the Israelites were under the direct government of God, this pillar of cloud and fire, Toland argued in the spirit of Spinoza, could be explained by Hebrew hyperbole: it was the signal fire which the Hebrews used to guide their main party, which appeared as ‘a pillar of cloud’ by day and ‘a fire’ by night.116 Similarly, ‘the Angel of the Lord’ (whom many Christians claimed was a preappearance of Christ) was only a messenger or else the keeper of the signal fire. Not one third of the ‘miracles’ recorded in the Old Testament were originally miraculous, Toland suggested, implying that some perhaps were. Here Toland’s exegesis probably drew on Dutch freethinkers such as Bekker and Koerbagh. 117

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More generally, Toland’s account of Christianity was based on specific borrowings from seventeenth-century Protestant thinkers such as John Selden, James Harrington and probably Henry Stubbe. On this account, Jesus had come to restore natural religion or the true religion when it had been corrupted by priestcraft, even though ‘heathenism’ had subsequently drowned the message of the Gospel. This was not an optimistic reading of the religious history of humanity, and it went with a pronounced hostility to creeds, the Church Fathers and Church councils. Nonetheless, it was within the range of Protestant opinion, and had parallels in the thought of Newton as well as in Le Clerc’s version of Collegian Protestantism. Further, although Toland’s Christianity became more nominal as he grew older, he retained his Protestant persona until the end of his life, while distinguishing, like others of the period, between his esoteric and his exoteric views. Both his private philosophical opinions and public positions accommodated to the religion of his country, however, were seriously intended in their respective domains.118 As a classically-educated historian, Toland was concerned to discover the ‘original’ of Christianity, or the real events behind the New Testament texts. Here he drew on the work of earlier writers and on clandestine manuscripts. Blount had a manuscript in his possession by Henry Stubbe giving ‘ a Political Human Account of the Subversion of Judaism, Foundation of Christianity and Origination of the Millenarianism’. This manuscript contained, in outline, a counter-history of the origins and early history of Christianity according to which: 1. the Jews had only begun to expect a Messiah after the Babylonian captivity when, under Babylonian influence, they adopted cabbalistical interpretations of the Scriptures; 2. the expectation of a Messiah intensified when the Romans occupied Judaea, fulfilling a cabbalistical interpretation of a scripture prophecy; 3. the Jews tried to force Jesus to become this temporal Messiah who would overthrow the Romans and restore the fifth monarchy and had him killed when he refused to do so; 4. after Jesus’s death the disciples reinterpreted the nature of his mission by putting out the ‘millenary invention’ that Jesus would return shortly and be this temporal Messiah; 5. the early Christians had been millenaries or a political sect among the Jews who, believing this invention, expected the imminent end of the world and the establishment of a political monarchy.119 With Toland, however, the interest in Christian origins, present in Herbert and Blount, led to remarkable results. Toland followed John Selden’s view that Jesus had come to overthrow all traditionary religion and to restore the law of nature. A version of this theory was already found in Blount. Toland, however, brought a vivid historical imagination to the theory. In a remarkable work of comparative religion, Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (1718) he argued that the original plan of Christianity provided for a Jewish

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Christianity for the Jews, who were to continue to observe the Law of Moses, while accepting Christ as their lawgiver and ‘attending’ to his Gospel, and a Gentile Christianity for the Gentiles, who were only to observe the Noachic precepts not the law of Moses.120 Jesus had come to restore the law of Moses when it was corrupt, Toland argued, and had never considered abolishing it. This undercut Athanasian orthodoxy and opened up new perspectives for further research.121 According to Toland the ‘original Christians’ had been the Ebionites or Nazarenes who kept to the law of Moses, including circumcision, regarded Jesus as the natural son of Mary and Joseph, and rejected St Paul as an impostor. This was provocative because the Nazarenes had been regarded as heretics for centuries. It also implied that traditional Christianity was based on a misunderstanding.122 Further, Toland stressed that the Nazarenes had rejected many books in the present canon and had claimed to have other books of their own. The original Gospel of Barnabus had been one of their books, he claimed, and had been accepted as of equal authority to the books now received for three centuries. Since Toland admitted that the Gospel he had discovered purporting to be the long lost Gospel of Barnabus was a Muslim forgery, it was difficult to see how he could argue from it to the contents of the original Gospel. Nonetheless, he did so, and claimed that his forged ‘Gospel’ provided the key to the problem of the quarrel between Peter and Paul, viz. the fact that Peter preached Jewish Christianity, while Paul preached Gentile Christianity, where these were radically different.123 Toland also argued that Islam was a form of Christianity, and that the Muslims had taken many of their ideas from the Nazarenes. On this account the ‘Christianity’ of the Muslims amounted to natural religion. Here Toland drew on several sources. The evidence suggests that he was part of a group of thinkers who attempted to promote a Unitarian civil religion. As part of this project, like his friend the Reverend Stephen Nye and the Jewish Christian group known as the Ebionites led by Edward Elwall, Toland was concerned to promote a more favourable interpretation of Islam.124 By the end of the seventeenth century ‘the deists’ were suspected of setting up Islam against Christianity. Sir Henry Blount had been an expert on Islam, Charles Blount had planned to write a life of Mahomet, and Toland himself was rumoured to be a ‘Mahometan Christian’, probably in the sense of a man who believed that ‘true Christianity’ was natural religion, a label also earlier applied to Henry Stubbe. Indeed, Toland argued that Islam, Judaism and Christianity were all republications of natural religion.125 Toland also referred to a projected naturalistic account of the law of Moses entitled Respublica Mosaica.126 In the seventeenth century the interpretation of the law of Moses had been an important political issue. For Selden the natural law was divinely revealed to the Jews in the seven Noachic precepts and the Jewish law itself had also been uniquely divinely ordained. Since, however, the

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Commonwealth of the Jews had been an absolute theocracy, in which there was no difference between the religious and the secular powers, Selden insisted that there was no basis for Catholic and High Church claims for an independent priesthood. Subsequently James Harrington followed Selden and insisted that there was no distinction between civil and religious authority under the Mosaic covenant, which had been the perfect example of a republic, and not a theocracy or an absolute monarchy, as Hobbes claimed. Toland took this pattern of interpretation a stage further. He had long been sympathetic to Judaism and had advocated the naturalization of the Jews. In Respublica Mosaica he advanced a favourable view of the law of Moses, arguing that Moses had been an ancient Republican legislator like Solon, Numa, Lycurgus and Zamolxis, and indeed the greatest legislator in history. So far from being a theocracy, the law of Moses had been a political and religious institution, and indeed the best system of government ever devised, superior, he claimed, to Harrington’s Oceana and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and a system that would have been ‘immortal’ if it had ever been fully implemented.127 Here it is possible that Toland was aware of underground German discussions which associated the philosophy of Moses with a materialist interpretation of Spinoza. Sympathy for the Jews did not imply sympathy for Christian claims about Jewish uniqueness, however, and in Origines Judaicae he used classical sources, including Diodourus Siculus, of whom Herbert had been so fond, to reject Daniel-Pierre Huet’s privileging of the Jewish past and to propose his own counter-history according to which the Jews had been a mixed race, partly of Egyptian descent. Once again he insinuated that Moses, following Strabo, had been ‘a Pantheist, or, in more recent language, a Spinozist’.128 Following Roman sources, Toland placed Moses in both the Hermetic tradition of Egyptian priestly wisdom and within the tradition of rational civic law.129 Rejecting the Jewish exceptionalism alleged by many Christian authors, he argued that the law of Moses had been a form of Persian divine kingship, and ‘Jehovah’ the Hebrew king, whom Moses and Joshua served as generals. Moses, who had been trained in the Egyptian priestly tradition of esoteric knowledge, was both a gifted political legislator and a pantheist whose philosophy was of Egyptian origin. He had been a typical ancient legislator, Toland explained, and had pretended to a revelation from God in order to win acceptance for his ‘Republic’ or system of laws, which so far from being designed to eliminate all traces of Egyptian idolatry, as the great Christian scholar John Spencer had argued, were human inventions. The implication was that pantheism had been widely maintained among the learned in the ancient world. In these writings Toland anticipated later developments in German historical criticism and opened the way for a historically-oriented political interpretation of the Old Testament.

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Toland died in poverty in 1722, without achieving the neo-Roman ‘philosophical’ transformation of society and culture he intended.130 His English contemporaries had only a moderate idea of his stature. A eulogy written soon afterwards described him as a ‘mighty Friend’ to nature’s laws, who sought to free men’s minds from mysteries and idle tales,131 but The Freeholders Journal commented that no man who wrote so voluminously ‘against Religion’ ever did so little mischief. This was less than just. Toland was an Enlightenment figure of European proportions and a crucial contributor to the evolution of Whig ideology. He was a significant philosopher in his own right, a civil philosopher and theologian of capacity, a skilful politician, and a gifted historical critic who used his many talents to subvert the cultural authority of Christianity.132 * Anthony Collins (1679–1729) was a wealthy country squire with one of the largest private libraries in England. Educated at Eton and at Kings College, Cambridge, he studied law at the Inner Temple, served as a Justice, and became Treasurer and Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Essex. The friend and executor of the ageing Locke, dubbed his philosophical heir,133 Collins possessed substantial philosophical ability, and was widely admired for his liberal views and virtuous character. Influenced in his youth by the anti-Calvinism of the Cambridge Platonists, especially Whichcote and Cudworth, Collins sympathized with rational and benevolent views. He was also an admirer of John Hales and William Chillingworth and well-read in the works of Tillotson and Grotius. Collins passed in society as a member of the Church of England who believed that God would accept whoever made an impartial examination of the Scriptures and accepted the Scriptures as a complete and perfect rule of faith. Whereas Toland was always a slightly disreputable figure dependent on the patronage of others, Collins was a model of rectitude and responsibility. Nonetheless, although he sent his servants to church, took an oath affirming his belief in the thirty-nine articles, and had a wide circle of Protestant friends, including Samuel Bold, Arthur Anthony Sykes and Shute Barrington, Collins’s private views may have been more radical. In the context of Protestant Enlightenment he did not see this as a problem because the ‘freethinking’ he championed included the right of each individual to arrive at whatever conclusions their reason led them to adopt, provided they did not threaten the security of the state. He was also blessed with an intellectual generosity lacking in some of his readers. Collins’s mentality, like Toland’s, was European and most of his vast library was in French.134 He was influenced by Pierre Bayle135 and was close to toughminded Protestant writers such as Jean Basnage, Prosper Marchand and Pierre Desmaizeaux. Further, he had links with Holland, and published some of his books there. Collins was also well-versed in European heterodoxy and had cop-

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ies of Garasse’s La doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits and the Letters of Tyssot de Patot, as well as a number of French deistic voyages. He also possessed the important Spinozist manuscript La vie et l’esprit de Spinoza par Lucas, and several Jewish manuscripts which could be used against Christianity, including three Spanish manuscripts: Monteira’s Providentia Divina con Israel, Orobio de Castro’s Prevenciones Divinas Contra las Vanas Ydolatrias de las Gentes and Trokio’s Fortificacion de la Fé.136 Further, he possessed large holdings of Renaissance naturalists such as Bruno, Cardano and Vanini. He had the resources to mount a major philosophical critique of Christianity. Instead, he chose to remain a social Protestant with a genuine affection for liberal Protestant ideas, while pressing the case against Christian ‘speculative Doctrines’ within educated circles. Collins was less imaginative than Toland, and less aprioristic than Tindal, and his ‘religion’ was largely benevolence. Influenced to some extent by Herbert’s Catholic truths, he may have believed in immortality and providence, at least at times, and had no objection to Christianity, provided it consisted in moral exhortation and historical illustrations of natural religion.137 Indeed, in a conscious echo of Herbert, he declared that the Catholic religion was to love God and one’s neighbour.138 In that sense he was able to assert that he accepted ‘original Christianity’ free of additions, and denied that he was hypocritical in belonging to the Church of England.139Apart from these general sentiments, Collins never revealed his private beliefs, although he admitted that he had ‘a Creed of his own’ which he would explain if there was genuine liberty of debate.140 As a philosopher, Collins began as a disciple of Locke, who described him as a Christian.141 He went on to have a formative influence on early eighteenthcentury debates about the soul, consciousness, personal identity and necessity, and the depth of his contributions to philosophy, political and social theory, and even historical thought need to be further explored.142 Here I emphasize how his philosophical development impacted on his approach to Christianity and his civic philosophy. Like Toland, Collins transformed Locke’s ‘Ideism’ into a reductionism that threatened the epistemological basis of revealed religion. Collins set out his radicalized ‘Ideism’ in An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason in Propositions, the Evidence of which Depends on Human Testimony (1707). Like Locke, he distinguished between propositions that were immediately evident, propositions which became evident through intermediate ideas, propositions whose evidence was only probable, and propositions the evidence of which depended on human testimony.143 Unlike Locke, but like Herbert, he called all those propositions that depended on human testimony for their evidence ‘faith’, and held that such propositions were to be judged solely by reason.144 According to Collins, men were to use reason to assess the credibility of the witnesses relating such propositions, and also the credibility of what was related, including whether the words used stood for existing ‘ideas’, or ‘ideas’ which the mind was

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capable of forming. Propositions depending on human testimony could only be accepted if they consisted of actual or possible ideas.145 This was difficult to reconcile with the doctrines of traditional Christianity. Like Toland, Collins rejected all ‘Mysteries above Reason’ as unintelligible. He also used Locke’s ‘Ideism’ to ‘explode’ the doctrine of the Trinity, taking his examples of unintelligible propositions from Francis Gastrell’s Some Considerations Concerning the Trinity (1696). Here Collins was indebted to Gildon, although this has been little noted. He repeated Gildon’s insistence on the need to use reason in interpreting the Scriptures, and carried on the attack on the antinomies alleged to prove that some things were ‘above Reason’, which Gildon had begun. Like Gildon, he dealt with the problem of succession in God, although he offered a different solution. He also tried to show that there was no inconsistency between divine prescience and liberty by denying that the human being possessed liberty in the sense of a power of self-determination. Collins’s Essay Concerning the Use of Reason revived fears that Locke’s ‘Ideism’ was destructive of Christianity. Collins followed Locke on meaning and truth. He accepted the subjectivist view that we cannot check our ideas against material things and that all our judgements are based on how things appear to us. For him perception was the only criterion of truth, and we should only give our assent to those things about which we have clear and distinct ideas,146 although an inadequate idea was no less distinct or true that an adequate idea as far as it went. This resulted in a narrowly rationalist epistemology. Reason was the faculty of mind which perceived the truth or falsehood, possibility or impossibility of a proposition. In Collins’s hands this principle became reductive because he took a literal view of meaning and was hostile to all obscurity and contradiction. Unlike Shaftesbury, he apparently had no worked out theory of the emotions, and no developed theory of the imagination or metaphor. As a result, he was inclined to reduce complex philosophical issues to what, in his view, made sense. Like Toland, Collins used a reductionist epistemology to restrict the claims of ‘faith’. A reductive epistemology had been implicit in Herbert’s doctrine that nothing which could not be the object of a faculty could be understood, while in Christianity Not Mysterious Toland had construed Locke’s ‘Ideism’ as an epistemology which excluded ‘Mysteries’. The implications for theology were severe, and Collins dismissed talk of the Trinity as the equivalent of referring to ‘Cousheda’. Predictably there was a strong response. Several High Churchmen took the Essay as further proof that a sect of deists was trying to subvert Christianity. William Carroll denounced the Essay in A Letter to … Benjamin Prat (1747) and John Witty in The Reasonableness of Assenting to the Mysteries of Christianity (1708) denied that assent had to be confined to assent to ‘ideas’. Gastrell also

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replied to Collins, observing that although he might still believe in the Scriptures, he was unlikely to do so in seven years’ time.147 Collins also used his philosophical principles to attack Samuel Clarke’s immaterialist natural theology. Whether Collins was sceptical about natural theology is unclear, although he may have shared Bayle’s scepticism in this respect.148 He was certainly hostile to Clarke’s version of it and claimed to find a contradiction in the conception of God Clarke relied on his Boyle lectures against ‘atheists’ and ‘deists’. To prove the existence of God, it was necessary, Collins argued, to have an idea of the creation of matter ex nihilo (a latency referring to Gildon’s claim that this was impossible) or an idea that showed that matter was not a selfexistent being. Collins then argued that it was not possible to have an idea of creation ex nihilo, and hinted that we therefore had no right to believe it. He also implied that since we could not understand how matter could have been created, it was better to regard it as eternal. Collins also argued that Clarke’s idea of God as an extended immaterial being was contradictory since extension was the distinguishing characteristic of matter.149 He did not explicitly challenge Clarke’s attempt to demonstrate that a necessary and immaterial being distinct from the universe had to exist, but he strongly implied that his demonstration did not succeed. Clarke’s arguments for the existence of God, however, only proved that there had to be some eternal being. Later commentators have accused Collins of raising implicit objections to any form of theism,150 but it is not clear that this was his intention. Rather as a ‘freethinker’, Collins was prepared to discuss all possibilities in an open and sceptical spirit. Collins may have claimed, however, to have a demonstration against the existence of God.151 Certainly he argued that human beings could have no ‘idea’ of an immaterial God. It is likely, however, that he meant that he had an argument against an external deity acting from outside on the universe, particularly since his friend Toland had exactly such an argument, based on the possibility of self-acting matter. It is also difficult to determine whether Collins was in fact a theist, and, if so, of what kind. Like Shaftesbury, he sometimes seemed to envisage an infinitely wise, good, eternal and perfect Supreme Being, whose attributes human beings could know and imitate. Consistent with this, like Shaftesbury, he claimed to believe that true religion consisted in just notions of deity and in living well, not in speculations, although he lacked Shaftesbury’s understanding of human psychology.152 It is possible, however, that he was more influenced by classical and Renaissance forms of naturalistic theism in private than this suggests, and that, like Blount and Gildon, he regarded the classical Stoic conception of God as a necessary perfect being inside the order of being as the most coherent hypothesis. Like Toland and Tindal, Collins wrote little about the Deus, although in an important pamphlet, A Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710), he attacked

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Archbishop King for following Peter Browne in making all human knowledge depend on ‘obscure Allegories’ because in ascribing non-literal attributes to God we could be talking of ‘Rabbas’.153 Here again his concern was with what made sense. Pierre Bayle had noticed contradictions in the divine attributes in his Historical and Cultural Dictionary which King had attempted to overcome in his De origine mali (1702). Collins replied to King, insisting that divine and human knowledge must be univocal, and seeming to accept a form of theodicy:154 Whereas Men will for ever esteem some Propositions to be sacred and true, and never suspect them of Falsehood; and that is the true reason why they are so confounded, and advance such contradictory Schemes about the Prescience, Wisdom, Justice, and other Attributes of God. But if they would impartially examine every thing (how sacred soever it may be to them before they examin’d) all things would then appear harmonious and consistent in the Intellectual System, as they do in the Mechanick System of the Universe.155

Collins’s personal view is difficult to gauge here. He may have meant that if there was a God, then he had to be a necessary being, of which human beings could have univocal knowledge. He may not have been convinced by such a theism himself, but he may well have held that other forms of theism were absurd. His published statements about theism, including his claim to believe that only God was an immaterial being, standardly exposed contradictions in attempts to defend it on immaterialist principles. In the same spirit, Collins undermined the immaterialist case for the immortality of the soul by arguing against Samuel Clarke in a lengthy and much reprinted controversy that matter could think.156 The issue remains an open one. There is some evidence that Collins flirted with Toland’s ‘Pantheism’, at least for a time, and was inclined to rethink theological questions in the light of necessity and materialism. It is also clear that Berkeley, Richard Bentley and Jonathan Swift all judged him to be an ‘atheist’,157 in the sense of one who advanced an improper sense of deity.

The Attacks on Priestcraft For Toland, Collins and Tindal and their friends, theological and political issues frequently overlapped, and their attacks on ‘Priestcraft’ were at least as political as theological.158 Collins accepted the extreme anti-clerical view that priests were motivated by self-interest to perpetuate frauds and were a grave danger to the state. Against this background, he attempted to discredit the High Church party’s claim that the Church was entitled to impose doctrines, a claim they supported by a clause in the thirty-nine articles. Following the critical historical scholarship of the Dutch Collegian Jean Le Clerc and his teacher Francis Hare at Cambridge, in Priestcraft in Perfection (1709), Collins argued that the clause in the thirty-nine articles giving the Church power to decree rites and ceremonies,

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and to settle matters of faith, was forged. He also used the issue to suggest that everything that came from the clergy’s hands was to be regarded with suspicion. The forgery of the clause, he claimed, showed how easily men could have been imposed on in dark and ignorant corners before the invention of printing. All ‘tradition’ was uncertain, whereas all men would come to ‘the true Religion’ if it was left to those reasons which occurred to all.159 Collins took these claims to amount to a social epistemological practice which could be used to modernize and reform European societies. This practice implied that individuals should be allowed to think freely on all manner of questions, even though in doing so they would arrive at different opinions. The ideal of this social epistemological practice brought together political associates with different theological views. By Anne’s reign there were rumours that a sect of ‘freethinkers’ who ridiculed revealed religion and claimed to be governed only by reason was meeting at the Grecian Tavern to discuss theological, philosophical and political subjects.160 Some reports stressed that they believed that God was the universe or matter and contended for mechanism, necessity and suicide.161 There were also reports that they were reviving Bruno’s ideas.162 Sometimes the members of the sect were said to be followers of Hobbes, Locke and Shaftesbury, to value Cicero more highly than the Bible, and to be about to bring out a Bible of their own.163 Allowing for overstatement, these rumours probably reflected meetings that actually took place. If so, not only Toland, Tindal and Collins but Barnham Goode, John Asgill, William Coward and William Stephens may have been members, which suggests that the ‘sect’ may have been a group of Protestants who sought to reduce the power of the clerical establishment over the national life.164 Collins wrote his famous A Discourse of Free Thinking Occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a Sect call’d Free-Thinkers (1713) against this background. The main argument of the book was a statement of Collins’s social epistemology, in the form of an assertion of a right of freethinking in response to the growing High Church party in parliament and its attempt to restore conformity. Every individual had the right to think for himself on all questions and to communicate their conclusions to others, Collins argued. He defined ‘freethinking’ as the use of the understanding to find out the meaning of propositions and the judging of them according to the strength or weakness of the evidence.165 According to Collins, freethinking had to be used if true opinions in religion were to be arrived at, especially since religious questions had been perplexed by the misconduct of priests.166 Moreover, freethinking, in the sense of impartial enquiry, was the ground of acceptance with God and indeed ‘the Whole Duty of Man’. Allowing a right to think freely was the only way to abolish ignorance and superstition. It would also have beneficial political and social effects and was the key to perfection in the arts and sciences.167 As long as human beings accepted

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others as their guides in understanding, they would be vulnerable to error and imposture. Instead, society should be so organized that each person had access to the knowledge and information necessary to develop an autonomous understanding in each area of life. Further, it was only by thinking freely that anyone could tell whether a particular revelation was true.168 Collins conceded that freethinking in religion could allow some to be atheists, but, like Bayle, he argued that atheism was less dangerous than superstition.169 Freethinking also had the advantage, Collins claimed, that it helped the lay person to escape from the tyranny of the clergy, who had no interest in leading them to true opinions. Indeed, the clergy were hopelessly divided on the nature and attributes of God, on the books to be held sacred, on the copies to be received, and how these copies were to be interpreted.170 Collins used this to insinuate that there was no agreement among Christians about any of the fundamentals of revealed religion, and that this was inevitable, granted the confused and uncertain nature of the Scriptures. To support his claim, he cited a passage from Bishop Taylor listing all the difficulties involved in their interpretation.171 Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking was one of the most influential works of political and social theory of the first half of the eighteenth century, and it is important to appreciate its significance in these terms, while noting that the book was riddled with ambiguities and could be read as subversive of revealed religion. At one level, the Discourse was a continuation of Gildon’s argument in the preface to the Oracles of Reason that individuals had the right to use their reason or to think freely about matters of religion, including the interpretation of the Scriptures. At this level there was nothing in Collins’s argument which a rationalistic Protestant could not accept, and the Discourse was an anti-clerical Protestant work contending for the right of each individual to think for themselves on all questions, and to communicate their ideas to others. At this level the book was consistent with earlier discussions of republican intellectual citizenship in Holland and an inter-Protestant text. At another level, however, the Discourse was full of latencies which could be read as innuendos and insinuations against orthodox or clerical Christianity. Thus Collins republished the argument, associated with deism in France, that ‘the Bigot, could never be certain that he believed in the right religion’.172 He also referred to the parallel between the Bible and the book by Sommonogodom, the Siamese God alleged to have been born of a virgin (an objection noted by Blount in the 1690s and cited by Toland in his early writings), and insinuated that the Fathers had superstitious beliefs such as that God had assumed the shape of a man.173 He also repeated the charge that ‘the Superstitious’ made God speak from corners and require things for which there was no evidence.174

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This use of double logic was also reflected in Collins’s examples of ‘freethinkers’. All his ancient ‘freethinkers’ could be read as advancing views with which seventeenth-century philosophical deists might agree. Hence, Collins praised Socrates for ridiculing the idea that God could get angry or repent or get a woman with child, Varro for exposing popular fables, the two Catos for disbelieving oracles, Seneca for denying immortality and teaching that God had need of servants, Minutius Felix for saying that Christians had no need of a church and that the true worship was to keep God in one’s heart, and Solomon for believing that man was mortal, and that the world was eternal.175 All of Collins’s examples of modern ‘freethinkers’, on the other hand, were Christians who emphasized the advantages of natural religion, and included Erasmus, Descartes, Herbert, Chillingworth, Lord Falkland, Selden, Hobbes, More, Whichcote, Milton, Locke and Tillotson.176 Nonetheless, ‘freethinking’ for Collins was not a metaphor for his private views, but a social epistemological practice which encompassed many different and conflicting private views. The double-logic character of Collins’s text helps to explain why the Discourse had such a mixed reception. Many critics saw the book as a manifesto for deism by a sect trying to subvert revealed religion. Thus Benjamin Ibbot argued that ‘the freethinkers’ were partial and prejudiced, and required evidence in religion which they did not require in other matters.177 William Whiston claimed that they were bigots who only searched the Scriptures for cavils.178 Benjamin Hoadley, who had been favourably impressed by Collins’s earlier works, said that the book was designed to promote atheism and infidelity.179 Swift described it as a complete body of ‘Atheology’, aimed at all religion.180 The most important response to Collins’s Discourse came from the distinguished classical scholar Richard Bentley, a prominent Newtonian, a close colleague of Samuel Clarke and the first Boyle lecturer. Bentley published his Remarks on Collins’s Discourse in 1713. He believed the book was produced by an organized circle of ‘Preachers of Atheism’ who had established ‘a Set of principles and Dogmata’,181 including: That the Soul is material and mortal, Christianity an imposture, the Scriptures a forgery, the Working of God superstition, Hell a fable, and Heaven a dream, our Life without providence, and our Death without hope like that of asses and Dogs, are parts of the glorious Gospel of these truly Idiot Evangelists. If your Freethinking does not centre in these Opinions, you shall be none of their Family.182

Bentley also alleged that these ‘atheists’ inserted ‘occult Meanings’ in their books. These charges were confirmed by Berkeley, who, on the basis of conversations at the Grecian Tavern and other coffee houses, reported that the freethinkers were ‘Fanatics’ who rejected all revealed religion, denied immortality and providence, and set up for necessity.183 These reactions occlude, however, the Protestant force of the book and the fact that the ‘freethinkers’ were advancing political theory

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which allowed some citizens to hold, at least by nineteenth-century standards, very radical religious and philosophical views without interference. As second volume of the current work will show, Collins eventually went further and challenged Christianity explicitly by attacking the evidence of prophecy which most of his contemporaries regarded as strong. Nonetheless, his last publications should not cast a shadow over his earlier works in which anti-Christian possibilities were implicit but not thrust forward. Contrary to readings which make him a thinly disguised philosophe, Collins died in 1729 in good repute. He appointed his close friends, Arthur Anthony Sykes and Samuel Bold, both clergymen, as his executors. His contemporaries remembered his virtue, and forgave his scepticism. They believed that he had written nothing which leading Christian writers had not answered. In Collins’s lifetime, the crucial issues were religious toleration and freedom of thought, and his friendships strongly suggest that this was his own emphasis at least in wider social circles. Collins’s main concern was to promote ‘freethinking’ in the sense of an impartial examination before the bar of reason. He made no attempt to impose his own views on others, and he assured Pierre Desmaizeaux that he had no system to defend.184 Atheist and mortalist views were insinuated in his Discourse on Freethinking, but there is no strong evidence that he adopted them. He remained, as Locke had found him in his youth, a lover of truth, albeit one more inclined to a general scepticism as he got older, at least in the sense, associated with Pierre Bayle, of a distrust in accepted opinions. All his publications were anonymous, and he did not reveal in them his private views about the nature of God and the universe. Like Leslie Stephen in the nineteenth century, it is possible that Collins believed in nothing.185 Certanly he used philosophical criticism and historical research to weaken the case for Christianity as a positive religion. Nonetheless, despite his radicalization of Locke’s ‘Ideism’ and his critique of immaterialist theology, his works made only a moderate impact in England, partly because the social conditions scarcely existed for moving away from Christianity as a public religion. His contributions to civil philosophy and political theory created new spaces for the negotiation of religious and philosophical differences. * The third of these writers, Matthew Tindal (1656/7–1733), was a wealthy Erastian lawyer, an influential political theorist, a civil philosopher and theologian,186 and a Whig pamphleteer. Tindal was concerned to promote rational approaches to the management of religion and morality in a Protestant state, and these contributions need to be emphasized, rather than the insoluble problem of his private beliefs, even though the latter flared up again and again in the

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background, and probably weakened his attempts to unify Protestants behind the Whig cause. Born at Bere-Ferris, near Plymouth, the son of John Tindal, a wealthy High Churchman and the Rector of Hinderwell, Tindal studied at Lincoln and Exeter Colleges, Oxford, where he was a pupil of the non-juror George Hickes. He was elected a Fellow of All Souls in 1678 and graduated Bachelor of Civil Law in 1679 and Doctor of Civil Law in 1685. In 1685 he was admitted to the Court of Arches and to Doctors’ Commons. Tindal became a Catholic in the reign of James II, but reverted to Anglicanism after the Revolution of 1688. In the 1690s he emerged as a Unitarian, a protégé of Thomas Firmin, and a friend of Locke who frequented the London coffee houses. In this setting he may well have been involved in some cabal. In any event his views became more radical, and in stages he became an outstanding critic of the powers which the High Church clergy claimed for themselves. Like Collins, Tindal advocated a rationalistic version of Locke’s ‘Ideism’ and used it as early as 1693–4 to ridicule John Wallis’s and Robert South’s Trinitarian schemes as meaningless.187 Subsequently, he dismissed ‘Tri-theism’ as nonsense, and argued for the Unitarian view that there was only one God.188 At this stage, Tindal claimed to be writing to refute ‘our modern Deists’,189 and maintained, like his Whig friend, the Reverend William Stephens, 190 that this could best be done by setting out a rational minimal Christianity. By 1696 he insisted that the original religion that God had given humanity was more certain than any religion based on tradition, and that no revelation could be attested to have come from God unless the fitness and expediency of every part could be clearly seen. There are suggestions that he admitted in conversation that he did not believe in revelation, and thought that all sensible people would settle in natural religion within a few years, but this was not his public persona and his exact theological views are uncertain.191 Like his friends Toland and Collins, Tindal adopted different comportments in his different social roles, and did not reveal his private opinions in print, or to every audience. It is crucial to emphasize that there was a serious theological dimension to Tindal’s thought right until the end of his life. As a theologian Tindal was inclined to universal theology of a rationalist sort. Here he was indebted to Herbert, whose common notions he claimed to accept, and to the Cambridge Platonists, especially Ralph Cudworth, from whom he derived his conception of God as a necessary being who could only act in accordance with the immutable principles of reason and nature. Tindal was more prone to transcendental reasoning than Toland or Collins, and this gave his work a majestic sweep. At the same time, his borrowings from Platonism allow him to sound theologically profound, even when he gave Platonist themes a more secular meaning. In his hands Platonic themes no longer implied the need for moral purification or diviniza-

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tion, but they still retained a grandeur. When Tindal insisted that the religion human beings arrived at by using their reason was more certain than any religion based on tradition there was an afterglow of Platonic rationalism in his work. As he matured, Tindal integrated Platonist themes with Stoic and Renaissance naturalism in an increasingly reductionist outlook, but he could always be read as within Erastian and even radical latitudinarian opinion, and it is no accident that he wanted to be buried next to his friend Gilbert Burnet. Tindal was a lawyer with a practice at Doctors Commons, the society for civil law advocates, who assured his financial future when he came to the aid of William’s administration by giving the Privy Council an opinion that those who had served as privateers under James could be hanged as pirates. As a reward, he was called to sit as a judge in the Court of Delegates, and allocated an annual salary of £200. Tindal had yet another identity as a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he became notorious for his hatred of the clergy, for his promiscuity,192 and as the head of a group of ‘Tindalites’. This group included Sedgwick Harrison, the Professor of Modern History, and Blencombe Fisher who sought to secularize the rules for holding fellowships.193 He was also linked with controversial figures such as Edmund Curll and Eustace Budgell. As a political pamphleteer, Tindal, like Blount and Toland, was a classical Republican and a Whig who wanted England to become a modern laicized state. In the 1690s he was a Commonwealthman, frequented the Grecian Tavern, and attended Republican cabals. Like Blount and Toland, he campaigned for freedom of the press and republished Milton’s arguments in pamphlets such as A Letter to a Member of Parliaments, Shewing, that a Restraint on the Press is Inconsistent with the Protestant Religion (1700) and Reasons against Restraining the Press (1706), even though he allowed the government a right of suppression once a work was published. He also joined in Sir John Trenchard and Walter Moyle’s campaign for the abolition of a standing army.194 Like Toland, he held that all ‘Dominion’ was from ‘the People’, and that ‘the People’ were under no obligation to obey representatives who ceased to act on the mandate given to them.195 He also campaigned with Toland and Collins for toleration and a general naturalization. Like Toland, he was friendly with Sir Robert Molesworth and stayed with him on his estates. In Anne’s reign he defended her ministry and vindicated the Septennial Act. He also worked to ensure the Protestant succession and tried to frighten the Dissenters into opposing James’s return.196 Under George I he found employment with Walpole, and gave him legal advice on how to drive the High Churchmen out of the universities, although he attacked his hero when his resignation threatened the government. When, however, ‘the People’ showed signs of favouring Jacobitism, Tindal became more conservative and advocated a standing army, strict press control, a tax on papists and recusants, and legislation to silence High Churchmen.

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In the lawyer’s manner, Tindal drew upon different sources as they served his purposes. In his political and legal theory he mobilized doctrines found in Hobbes, Locke and Grotius, and without too much regard for the nuances their ideas involved in their own texts. Although he was widely accused of being a Hobbist or a Lockean, he had an independent position of his own which was not always easy to grasp. Much more than Toland or Collins, Tindal emphasized what had to be the case a priori, given the nature of things, and he applied this a priori approach to legal theory, political theory and religion. In legal theory Tindal the civil lawyer emphasized the natural law, which he held was superior to all human laws, and a standard by which human institutions and laws could be judged.197 For Tindal natural law included our duties to God, to ourselves and to others. Human beings were under the law of nature in the state of nature; they were obliged to behave for their own good, and had a duty to love each other and to provide mutual assistance to one another. They were equal under the law of nature, and had continuing natural rights.198 The older Tindal even seems to have allowed an innatist basis for the law of nature.199 As a jurist, Tindal sought to modernize both the natural law and the ius gentium to make them serve the needs of mercantilist states. To do so, he took over parts of Hobbes’s theory of natural law, including his emphasis on self-preservation, although his use of the doctrine was significantly different.200 He also adopted some of Locke’s formulations, even though, unlike Locke, he made the protection of one’s life rather than the preservation of property the chief end of government.201 He also insisted that no law could take away a human being’s right to preserve themselves. As a political theorist Tindal wrote as a Low Church Christian and advocated a republican civil theology which radicalized arguments from Locke. Tindal blended these arguments with themes from the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, and the German civil philosopher Samuel Pufendorf, without preserving the thick contextual implications of these writers’ views. In 1697 in An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate and the Rights of Mankind, in Matters of Religion, an extension of Locke’s arguments for which he sought his approval, Tindal argued that all the powers of the magistrate were given to him by the people, who could not give a magistrate a power they lacked themselves. It followed, he argued, that the magistrate had no right to enforce religious teachings since the rights of individuals in a state of nature were limited to the defence of their lives and their properties. Moreover, no person could have authority over another in matters of religion or conscience. Nonetheless, Tindal conceded that the magistrate had a right to maintain belief in a Supreme Being, who rewarded and punished after death, and was entitled to punish those who disbelieved in God or divine providence, or were guilty of perjury or profanity. He also admitted that the magistrate had a right to set up a national Church to inculcate natural

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religion, but he denied that the magistrate had any right to compel individuals to belong to it. He also defended toleration and the right of Dissenters to worship as they pleased. He could do so because he adopted a view of the political and social uses of religion which suggested the chief part of religion was promoting the public good. 202 Tindal defined ‘Government’ as the ‘Care of other Peoples Safety; which consists in Protecting and securing them from being destroyed or oppressed by one another, as well as by Strangers; and re-dressing the Grievances of those that are injured, and preventing the like for the future, by punishing Offenders’. A government had to protect the people in order to be legitimate, and if it lost its ability to do so then obligations to it were dissolved and the people were returned to the natural liberty of the state of nature and were free to give consent to another government who could provide them with protection. Similarly, the legitimacy of any government depended on whether that government acted in the interest of a majority of citizens.203 A de jure government which ceased to act in the interest of a majority of citizens ceased to be legitimate, while a de facto government which acted in the interests of a majority of citizens became so. Tindal used these principles to justify William’s administration, but they were of wider purport. Indeed, the more Tindal explained his principles, the clearer it became that whatever made for the happiness of human beings was required by the law of nature. This doctrine allowed Tindal to use the language of the continental theorists such as Grotius, while accommodating natural law to expediency in a range of political contexts. Like Pufendorf in Germany, Tindal was concerned to liberate the natural law and legal doctrine from theological and confessional elements.204 Unlike Pufendorf, however, who remained a devout Lutheran prepared to support confessional arrangements, Tindal made little allowance for Christian concerns in any intellectual context. Tindal‘s de-Christianized legal doctrines gave the theory of natural law an explicitly utilitarian character, which it arguably already possessed to some extent in Nathaniel Culverwell and Richard Cumberland. Consistent with this, in Tindal’s hands the law of nations became a prescription for whatever was convenient or necessary for the happiness of states.205 Legal personality under international law was not based on the de jure right, but on the fact that sovereigns were able to make contracts on behalf of their states. It therefore lapsed if and when this ability was lost. Interpreted in this way, natural law became a ratification of currently effective power relationships. According to Tindal the supreme law of society was ‘the public Good’, and whatever was required by the public good was required by the law of nature: The ‘Consideration of Publick Good’ is ‘the Supreme Law by which both King and People ought to guide their Actions’, he declared.206 The ‘public Good’ should be identified, Tindal argued, with the interests of a majority of citizens, even though

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those interests might be selfish or egotistical. Here Tindal’s thought was closer to Mandeville’s realist outlook than to theodic social thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Collins or Chubb, although he may have made more of the natural sociality of human beings as he got older. The tensions in Tindal’s thought were never resolved. As a young man he belonged to a world of lawyers seeking to limit the power of the clergy and to reform the national Church. In the context of the Tory state crisis after 1688 he was a relentless enemy of any attempt to base Christianity on priestcraft, and in Anne’s reign he devoted himself to attacking the High Church party in an attempt to ensure the Protestant succession and to prevent Francis Atterbury and his followers from establishing a clericalist state. In his major work, The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706) ‘against Romish and other priests who claim an independent power over it’, Tindal displayed his vast learning in an attempt to destroy the theoretical bases of the claims of the High Church party. The Church, in the sense of the clergy, had no ‘independent Power’, Tindal argued, and he offered detailed legal arguments to show that Convocation had no power to legislate and that the Church of England was the perfect creature of the civil power.207 Here Tindal may have been influenced by Hobbes’s Leviathan, and he denounced the ‘transcendent Metaphysics’ produced by the clergy’s manipulation of Aristotelian jargon.208 He supported this stance with detailed anthropological, historical and juristic arguments, interpreting the Reformation in highly Erastian terms, and citing Selden and Grotius in support of his views. Tindal could also be read as a Low Churchman advocating a republican civil theology. He was a leading advocate of Remonstrant ecclesiology in England, who adapted the Dutch concept of churches as voluntary associations to a country with an established national Church.209 Like his friend Toland, he drew on and, where appropriate, radicalized, the latest Dutch New Testament exegesis and the ecclesiology of the Dutch Collegians. The Church, he claimed, was really ‘the Christian People’, and consisted of as many clubs and societies as Christians formed, each of which only possessed the powers their members delegated to them.210 Tindal’s civil theology, which has been trivialized in much of the literature as it was by his High Church critics in his lifetime, was exegetically well-based and logically coherent, and brought together a range of important theological, legal and political ideas, even though he married it with a strong Erastianism which may have derived in part from Harrington. Partly because these different strands in Tindal’s thought tended in different directions, the reaction to the Rights, which went to four editions, was divided. Some eighteen replies appeared. It needs to be emphasized that there was considerable Low Church support for Tindal’s views. Benjamin Hoadley in particular was impressed, partly because Tindal’s views, like his own, implied that that there was no need for a Church able to define doctrine. Many church-

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men, however, feared that Tindal’s views undermined any idea of an organized ministry. John Whitfield denied that a layman could administer the sacrament, and Daniel Williams reasserted the need for a trained clergy.211 High Churchmen went further and denounced the book as an attempt to subvert revealed religion. Swift denounced Tindal as an insincere freethinker,212 Leslie described the Rights as ‘a Whig Book’,213 William Caroll, the chaplain of All Souls, claimed that the Rights was based on Spinoza’s Rights of the Christian Clergy and part of an attempt ‘the deists’ or ‘Spinozerian atheists’ were making to subvert revealed religion.214 The longest reply, William Oldisworth’s A Dialogue between Timothy and Philalethes (1709) in four volumes, treated Tindal as an enemy of all religion, as did John Turner in A Vindication of the Rights and Privileges of the Christian Church (1707).215 Tindal’s Rights was probably a collective venture, as rumours at the time suggested,216 and was taken, in part, from Toland’s unpublished manuscript, ‘The Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church’. There was also a report that the Rights originally contained heterodox passages which were omitted from the published version. Even in its published form, it contained latencies such as the insinuation that it was necessary to distinguish between God’s role as the prince chosen by the Jews as their king and his behaviour as governor of the universe, an implicit defence of homosexuality, and the comparison between the modern clergy and the Druids. These passages may be evidence of joint authorship. Once again this suggests that there may have been a lodge or cabal of ‘freethinkers’ in the background to the book. Tindal replied to his critics insisting that he was a sincere Christian who believed that Christ was sent from God and that his authority was proved by miracles.217 As evidence, he cited Le Clerc’s review of the Rights in his Bibliothèque choisie as an outstanding Protestant work. The High Church party, however, was unconvinced, and the Jury of Middlesex presented the book and its author, publisher and printer. During the Sacheverell trial, Sacheverell’s lawyers cited the book as evidence for his claim that the Church was ‘in Danger’, and the House of Commons ordered the second edition to be burnt, together with Sacheverell’s sermon. Undeterred, Tindal continued to attack the High Church party in a series of pamphlets, and, when Convocation attacked the Rights in its Representation of the Present State of Religion (1711), he reasserted his alternative civil theology, claiming that the nation was becoming more enlightened as a result of ‘the spread of Freethinking’,218 which, like Collins, he took to be a social epistemological practice rather than a set of opinions. Like Toland and Collins, Tindal identified ‘freethinking’ with a genuinely modern social order based on self-active citizens, and he rejected clerical scruples about luxury and moral laxity.219 He defended impartial liberty and toleration as essential to a modern state, and advocated a nationalization act for religious refugees to benefit trade and

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commerce. To his enemies he seemed prepared to subordinate Christianity to the needs of the civil order, but he could also be read as proposing a civil theology for which the actual life of human beings in the world was central, not the concerns of priests. Tindal’s subsequent career is harder to map, partly because although he wrote numerous political pamphlets, he did not publish another major work until Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730).220 At one level Tindal’s intellectual development seems straightforward. Having adopted the principles of the Tew Circle as a young man, he radicalized them in stages to the point where they conflicted with any insistence on positive duties imposed by a revealed religion. Whereas Chillingworth had argued that the Bible, and the Bible alone, was the religion of Protestants,221 Tindal insisted that the Bible had to be interpreted according to reason and nature. Hence reason and nature, and not the Bible, had to be a Protestant’s guide, and the Scriptures themselves could not be the norm of Protestant belief. In the same way, Tindal appropriated Samuel Clarke’s account of natural religion, and then argued that that the law of nature had to be absolutely perfect, and that only what agreed with reason and nature could be accepted as coming from God. This deductive reasoning gave his thought the appearance of system, and in the 1720s it was still possible to take him to be a Protestant thinker whose enemies caricatured ideas they did not understand.

Conclusion In this chapter I have sought to show that Toland, Collins and Tindal pioneered Early Enlightenment within the horizon of Protestant Enlightenment in England. As Protestant writers, they had different aims at different levels of analysis, and these levels of analysis often correlated with different audiences or classes of readers. At one level, these writers sought to advance civil principles which could provide the basis for the management of religion in a modern state. Here their efforts were partly checked by the partnership Walpole pioneered with the established Church. At another level, they strove to alert their fellow citizens to various ‘mistakes’ which held them captive, and prevented the law of nature from having its intended effect. These writers were inclined to include belief in revealed religion among those ‘mistakes’, and to draw attention to arguments against it, but here their views were not widely accepted in England, although they were taken up in France and Holland. In private these writers explored philosophical ideas about human life which were not suitable for adoption by the masses. At this level they may been much more radical than nineteenth century interpreters of their work imagined. Unlike thinkers in the nineteenth-century, however, these writers felt little need to harmonize their views at one level with their views at another. Instead, they responded to their different audiences with

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different levels of disclosure. The radical views attributed to them were not the only positions they were advancing, and the more moderate claims which they made in their texts were taken seriously by many readers. Hence the term ‘Early Enlightenment’ captures quite well the way these three writers presented their contemporaries with a variety of possible stances, without implying that the strongest stance was the only one which should be taken seriously.

CONCLUSION

This volume has begun the work of reinterpreting the works of an important but neglected group of writers known as the English deists. Nineteenth-century scholars, working with a paradigm of belief and unbelief, often discussed the work of these writers in terms which they would not have recognized. This study, in contrast, has begun to read their achievements more contextually. It has questioned the assumption that these writers had single identities and suggested that they were aware of multiple deisms as well as other forms of heterodoxy and free thought. Consistent with this, the writers known as the English deists were not atheists or deists in an exclusive or final sense, but controversialists working with various publics for a range of purposes in a period in which ‘the public’ was being constructed. They maintained a range of personae in different social roles and when addressing different audiences. While allowing for the impact of underground materials and radical ideas circulating in Europe on these writers, it is important to underline the multiple negotiations which were incumbent on them in various social roles. Their social and political locations compelled these writers to advance their ideas with a degree of subterfuge, and they advanced radical ideas without developing them fully. Nor were these writers as free to pursue ‘free inquiries’ as they pretended. There were also problems, as Bentley, Berkeley and Wesley noted, about the way in which they combined free inquiry with prejudice. In so far as these writers were involved with disbelief, this involvement was transitional and produced in them partiality and animus rather than doubt. It was historically specific, and not self-evident to later generations, for whom the order of the crucial issues was different. In Early Enlightenment many readers could sympathize with these writers’ rejection of superstition and priestcraft, without concluding that Christianity should be given up. In this volume I have sought to dispose of a series of myths which impede our understanding of the works of these writers and the controversies to which they gave rise. I have argued for the existence of multiple deisms during the Renaissance and used this background to reread the achievements of Herbert of Cherbury and Charles Blount and his circle. Herbert was a Renaissance eclectic, – 115 –

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influenced by Platonism, Stoicism and Hermeticism. He was not a mild Arminian, but a stern critic of sacerdotal religion who was probably aware of various forms of deism. Moreover, he advanced but did not develop fully a brace of arguments which could be used to challenge Christianity. Nonetheless, his technical philosophical views, especially his theory of natural instinct, gave his thought a particular metaphysical colouring which separates him from later thinkers influenced by Locke. Charles Blount modified Herbert’s arguments and made use of some of his materials in his attempts to cast doubt on revealed religion. Blount and his circle were engaged with classical theistic naturalism as well as with contemporary challenges to Christian tradition which could be read into the works of Hobbes and Spinoza. To this extent, they were Ancients as well as Moderns. Blount himself attempted to combine classicism, multiple deisms, borrowings from free thought and political Protestantism. He promoted discussion of various forms of classical theistic naturalism among a circle who themselves adopted diverse classical views, including Epicurean and Pythagorean doctrines. The heterodoxy Blount promoted was not the mild extension of religious liberalism which older historians associated with ‘English deism’, but to a significant degree classical, international and European, albeit mixed with radical Protestantism. Read in this way, Blount and Gildon provide more of a link to Toland, Collins and Tindal than has usually been suggested. Here my argument implies that the standard practice of beginning the study of the eighteenth-century English deists with Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious may be unhelpful, and that a range of positions influenced by forms of deism were well developed before Toland. Some of these positions were classical and/or associated with esoteric materialism and vitalist philosophies of nature. Others were more inter-Protestant, as if the sufficiency of natural religion was the central deist claim, a view acceptable to some strands of liberal Protestant opinion. In the context of Early Enlightenment, the same individual might draw on several of these positions without much concern for their coherence. They might argue against belief in revealed religion in some contexts, but insist that they were sincere Christians in others. Given that these writers adopted subterfuges and engaged in multilevel ironies, we are confronted with ambiguous, dialectical texts. Toland, Collins and Tindal came to maturity in the late seventeenth century and were all close to Locke. It is important therefore not to exaggerate the extent to which they took up the attitudes and postures of the High Enlightenment in France. Toland, Collins and Tindal helped to promote a civil society in England. They were probably more indebted to the radical deisms of the seventeenth century, including the works of Blount and Gildon, than the older literature suggests, as well as to Renaissance heterodoxy and free thought generally. However,

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in a society dominated by a strong established Church whose power they sought to restrict, Toland, Collins and Tindal worked to promote political, religious and cultural change, where these were closely connected. I have argued that these writers may have intended the many levels of their texts, which reflect the multiple and under-formed republics of letters in which they were active. Against the tradition which reads them as deists writing against Christianity, I have read them as intra-Protestant thinkers, for whom politics, religion and philosophy were to a large degree civil concerns. Toland, Collins and Tindal had multiple social roles, and it is a mistake to read their texts as if they only believed in their secret thoughts. In many contexts, it was not their private beliefs that mattered, but the challenges they made to the High Church party, to Athanasian orthodoxy, and to Christianity as a positive religion. Toland is the clearest case of a thinker concerned to promote enlightened attitudes and practices, whose comportments and degree of disclosure varied, depending on the context and the audience. Toland may have accepted some transformation of classical theistic naturalism, but deism in this classical sense was only one of his concerns, and pertinent in only some of his identities and social roles. It was an undercurrent rather than the main purport of his writings.1 As a classically-educated historian, he pursued a range of critical inquiries designed to expose fables and myths. Like Blount and Gildon, he was steeped in European heterodoxy, esoteric materialism and Renaissance naturalism, and therefore a more transitional figure than he has sometimes been painted. Collins was more epistemologically oriented than Toland or Tindal, and very much concerned with what made sense. Like Blount, he was heavily influenced by scepticism and prone to distrust opinions accepted by the clergy. He was genuinely committed to ‘freethinking’ as a social epistemology, and inclined to tolerate a great diversity of views, including those held by rational Christians. All his writings were anonymous and he did not reveal in them his private views. Tindal was genuinely immersed both as a lawyer and as a civil philosopher and theologian in liberal Protestant thought. As a political theorist he wrote as a Low Church Christian and advocated a republican civil theology which radicalized arguments from Locke. He was also a leading advocate of Remonstrant ecclesiology in England, who adapted the Dutch concept of churches as voluntary associations to a country with an established national Church. While it is likely that his interest in underground heterodoxy and free thought was more extensive than this suggests, it is important to note that he did not challenge orthodox Christianity directly until the very last years of his life, and then in yet another ambiguous dialectical text. To many nineteenth-century readers, including Leslie Stephen, writers such as Blount, Toland, Tindal and Collins seemed to be arguing against Christianity on less than convincing grounds.2 This was unfair, and a misreading of their vari-

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ous and complex intentions. It also suggested, quite wrongly, that it was obvious what they really thought and why they were writing. This type of reading misses the open-ended, still developing character of Early Enlightenment. Although these writers were regularly immersed in debates about possible objections to Christianity, it is important to emphasize the restricted terms of argument of these debates, and the extent to which issues of religious government shaped many of their interventions. Until at least the 1720s, the main task was to attack ‘priestcraft’ and the High Church party and to argue for liberty of belief and opinion. In the second volume of this work, Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform, I explore how the English deists contributed substantially to the Enlightenment and to modernity. To do so, I emphasize the serious challenges Collins and Tindal posed to Christianity at the end of their lives. I also examine the work of two clerical critics, Thomas Woolston and Conyers Middleton, whose views have often not been understood. I then explore the different ways in which Thomas Morgan, Thomas Chubb and Peter Annet took up and transformed Tindal’s ‘Christian deism’. My discussion emphasizes how these writers operated differently and addressed different audiences from Blount, Toland, Collins and Tindal. I also argue that they probably had more impact because their thought was less dependent on classical Enlightenment and Renaissance deism. Finally, I discuss how all the writers known as the English deists promoted the rational examination of accepted beliefs in many different areas in ways which shaped the future. Taken together, these volumes offer a revisionist interpretation of the writers known as the English deists. They also seek to contribute to contemporary debates about the Enlightenment. My work implies that we need to pluralize our understanding of the Enlightenment to take account of different strands and phases as well as different national contexts. In effect, I explore a via media between those like J. G. A. Pocock who emphasize the existence of multiple Enlightenments, and those such as Jonathan Israel who contend for a single Enlightenment of intercontinental extent. Like Pocock, I argue for different Enlightenments, but like Israel I accept that there is a role for a structural notion of Enlightenment as an advance in practical learning. I also agree with Israel that there is an intrinsic connection between naturalism and the emergence of attitudes, practices and institutions later associated with ‘modernity’. Although I have reservations about Israel’s idea of a single philosophical movement inspired by Spinoza, I share his emphasis on underground radicalism and on trajectories which were in place well before better-known developments later in the eighteenth century. I also agree with him in emphasizing the immense importance of the changes of attitude and practice we call the Enlightenment for the emergence of the modern world. Early Enlightenment, however, was very different from

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High Enlightenment. It was more pluralist, exploratory and tentative. Once this is grasped, it is possible to do justice to both the nuances of particular contexts and to the long-term structural changes which distance us from the past. Read in this way, it is possible to appreciate why the writers known as the English deists were important agents of change, both in the worlds they inhabited and in the longer trajectories of political, social and cultural history.

APPENDIX: HERBERT’S PHILOSOPHICAL POEMS

Herbert can also be seen as a Renaissance magus. He spoke of nature labouring to free the soul from matter, referred to earth spirits and witches, and made naturalistic studies of astrology, augury and divination. He also possessed vast numbers of books on magic and occult philosophy. In addition, he envisaged a theosophical universe in which the soul expanded into the macrocosm at death and made a journey through the stars, he believed that men became ‘like gods’ when they left the body, and that there was nothing which they could not attain. The earthly life was only a prelude to man’s real existence, and man passed through an eternal cycle of seminal, embryonic, earthly and heavenly lives. The extent of Herbert’s esoterism can be seen from two hitherto untranslated Latin poems:

A Philosophical Disquisition on Human Life There was once the FIRST LIFE with generative seed, when Formative Power was eager to manage her gifts and to drench substance with enlivened juices and to compose well the marking signs by which here the human race is distinguished from every brute: to assign all functions to their classes: to set firm tracks for the state to come: to cultivate the implanted saplings of manifold life. But also (as she had foreknowledge of future fate) she restrained external form in wary seclusion, until conspiring Causes might be able to approach and it be allowed safely to bring forth all the fruit, all the time aware as she was that when perchance this fabric should totter declining, she could withdraw totally to her western abode, but that she could not perish in ruin under her own works: nay, while she remained thus and in order that she might survive entirely and understand the art and skill of composing body, she must at once, in the manner of the experienced Craftsman, use any material at all, then be – 121 –

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able to form substance, then another, until she might fill up all the numbers which Fate might bring here or the ascending order of things give. At length the SECOND [LIFE] grew in the maternal Field, when foaming breath assumed meagre Limbs and, stretched out, at the same time forged sense organs with marvellous fabric and secured no mean lodging for the mind, which, born first in the sky (heaven), soon thereafter might take its role and, mixing itself entirely with the dull body, might improve the idle mass and not set it as useless. Clearly the formative force would not have committed such great might to a constricted womb, where there was no use for that might; nor would it have shut up organs of sense in a dark cave where no objects are visible or foul things would be exposed; nor would it have allowed the mind to lie neglected in a dark prison, where it could perhaps never make itself known by any proofs, had not that force, as it was aware of a Life to come quickly, equipped us inside with all Advantages for us. The THIRD [LIFE] is now being acted, in which a huge stage is disclosed and the fete of Heaven is perceived and the Theatre of the Earth and the collective species and the varied form of things, and it happens that one moves around and wanders by one’s own motion, sees the laws and eternal compacts of the Universe and the stars, returning in their constant course; whence also it was right to look upon the Causes of life and its bond and to gain foreknowledge from afar of the highest Numen, while in wonderful fashion he moderates the varying motions of the world, and Father and Lord, Guardian and Founder the same, he is everywhere called God; What if now the FOURTH [LIFE] were not to follow? When, shaking off the squalor, the Mind now purer presses on, and augmented by varied teachings and flourishing in virtue, it directs its strength and breathes higher things, and a silent stimulus is fixed in the depth of the heart, that anyone here should wish to overcome his fleeting lot; and there is sought out a happier state by ambitious rites and offerings and religious cult, and there follows, aware of a better Fate, a new hope which clings to the Heavens, and floods the whole sky, and the Numen descends to blessed Love and there is given a ticket, not deceitful, to the life to come, and with God it was permitted to come to terms not with just one condition; that to me as it were a servant may be rendered due reward or that as son I may seek to enter upon my father’s goods, may the Numen be guarantor of my Faith; But if soon I cast off this life, which is nearer to the lands and not yet purged perhaps or liberated; and if at the same time I cast off the thin sail of air, which first carriage the mind was carried to the airs above, then (last I now require pristine joys, seeking again those which share in the accustomed flesh). Formative Power

Appendix: Herbert’s Philosophical Poems

dresses me entirely in an ethereal body, then the greater order of things is laid open before me, and delights arise other than I could easily perceive at the threshold of the heaven sky; at last would I now desire also to make use of my own proper right, not subject to fate itself, and also would I wish to be dressed in a heavenly body, by which I might be able to climb to the lofty seats of the gods, and in the very heavens widely to bear free suffrage, as if Divins; and at the same time that God nods assent to every prayer, God, whose grace stands forth not only for the lands, but for the heavens; what if now the FIFTH [LIFE] does not follow? And the SIXTH, and whatever finally every more blessed Hope and Love and Faith should demand of the Power itself ? Clearly not in vain is that Hope implanted in us, which so oérleaps all the limits and bounds of things, that it seeks the immeasurable, ever growing from kindling: and not in vain does have withdraw, which, begun on high, returns into the Power and, striking mutual terms (of trade), brings together the deepest compacts to perpetual life: but it is no empty Faith endowed with such strength, that it penetrates all the heavens and fixes itself in the very Power, until it is in possession of a share in the future Life: So, that there may perish after death Fear, Anger, Lust, and Thirst and Hunger, and then every duller sense which a young man enjoys in the manner of wild brutes, but which he casts off when he is released from this Body, at no time will there dismay us any faculty which maturer Age has at once produced and cultivated, and God recognises it, as it were a pupil of (a) pure Mind, and would wish it to be to be by his side, a companion for ever: What but that every LIFE as it follows should so bring on the following one in a perpetual order more quickly than the FIRST brought the SECOND and the Numen should survive, offering better things for prayers [or should be sufficient, offering things better than (our) prayers].

On the Heavenly Life, a Conjecture from the Same First Principles Having considered with my whole Genius, I congratulate myself, secure from fate while I am not cast down by any terrors or store my troubles silent in my heart, but I go through life happy in the midst of hardships, and, with misfortunes unwished for (which surround the lands on all sides), with ardent virtue seeking the way beyond the Ether, I have grasped the nearest prizes of the heavenly life, I reach for the farthest, depending upon divine Love, through which, as I overcome the sport of dark fate, I leave the barbarous members of the mad age, breathing

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out the airs below and breathing in those above, as I so entwine myself entirely in these blessed flames, that held up I may penetrate the ceilings of Heaven, and may observe far and wide the great elements of a new Universe, and may look upon souls I have known (now beautiful in their own light), and the choruses of those above and blessed Minds; with them would I long to mix fires and sacred bonds and in my turn to pass through into the joys which Heaven has given to all, either those implanted in us ourselves, or those which we will be allowed to ratify by a common vow: (would) that God, the while accumulating his rewards, may then augment our honour and illuminate it with his own love, and that Heavens may not fail Heavens or eternal ages fail life or new joys fail the ages, joys such as the whole o time may not diminish or the Infinite bound, and that the Nourishing Grace of the Numen, greater than these, may not fail, through which these joys may grow, varied in marvellous fashions, and any state may be overtaken by a happier still, and may we be provided with things for which it is not given to hope and may there survive only those things which the Divine Mind grasps; although these things are by far most perfect in themselves, through us at least they seem more enhanced, since halting souls, which Heaven provides at the beginning, hard work and our industry so sharpen up and finally add the polish through Learning and those customs, that they return beautiful and carry back their dowry to Heaven; when at the same time, using our judgement, we drive away those evils which either Heaven has not driven away or would do so some day, through us thus the great Glory of the Numen now becomes greater, our Glory also streams into the heavens, and whatever rewards are due to our virtue, as it were render the Numen itself more fortunate than usual. Whence at the same time more abundant Grace is rendered to us than even to the heavenly ones, whom the first age brought forward, since whatever state is more splendid for them all, this they have at the very start and by the great force of the Numen, which was granted to them to be Gods; but what Glory we now have, may it have so been acquired by pious virtue and our own efforts, that here the Numen will easily reply to every prayer. Thus when now our Mind would wish to look upon itself, the mind which, as it once shone through bodily chinks, could never perceive itself in any light on earth, at once the Numen so reveals itself, that in it (as in a mirror) it may now be permitted (for the Mind) to perceive itself entirely, and in the likeness of the Power to construct a beautiful form: Thus when Freedom is dear, it is proper to run through the pleasant among places, visible through innumerable Heavens, and to pluck everywhere the delights of any Place, and to offer in return fresh recompense

Appendix: Herbert’s Philosophical Poems

125

to them, or if any place here should please more than the rest, no more to turn away, but to set up a home: But it we decide from Heaven to come to the aid of the wretched everywhere, whom hard fate presses on earth, or to bear rewards for the brave and pious, the Numen grants us that we may use not prayers any more, but those laws by which his provident Grace remains constant equally for all, and that we may soon help the one group with aid, the other with reward. But if we decide there to gaze upon the old Heroes, whom ancient faith bore among the stars and famous deeds made gods, and altogether to hold them in reverence, when, those whom others here prepared on account of humble virtue for entry above, these men have conquered them once with brave enterprises, soon then may we distinguish faces, then the light there, and look on radiant brows. But if higher contemplation is fixed in the Mind, all the book cases of Heaven now lay thrown open for us, and it will delight us to know the arcane reasoning of God, and with what intent the Universe was founded long ago, and these things are subject to will, those to Fate, and almost all things fight, how God in a long order brought it about from these things that a machine destined to perish should remain fast. But if we now find delight in Heavenly Love, we are dissolved into flames, which lick and warm one another and, entwined in blessed fires, together we rise in an embrace and, joined in a firm bond, as a whole and in our parts we are mixed everywhere in turn, and the Fire of the Power kindles new fires. But if it be our pleasure to praise God, he himself praises us and the Chorus of the gods sings in unison and Heaven rings with sweet modulation and there stand before us public joys and everywhere are produced happy spectacles and the whole machine of Heaven becomes as if theatrical. But if the great force of the Numen has enfolded this mass of the Universe and has sculpted here from new forms furnished with different gifts and more able; soon also it will be permitted to renew our forms, so that our mind is more equipped with talents, and our will is enlarged to such a degree that it can now employ greater judgement at one time, and more readily and thickly, repeatedly and more perfect our joys may revive. If I make these conjectures, relying on a mortal Body, when I have cast off the body, What if I should not disclose greater things?1 Herbert’s esoterism has been little analysed. Herbert professed a ‘mysterious philosophy’, which he chose not to reveal to the vulgar. This philosophy was critical

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of explanation in terms of secondary causes and implied a qualitative cosmology in contrast to the new science of Descartes and Mersenne.2 He used many Renaissance conceits, including Ficino’s mens. In addition there was a plastic virtue working in all things which, as natural instinct, provided providential care in the universe. In addition, Herbert’s Latin poems, much more than the poems he wrote in English, reveal that he envisaged an esoteric naturalist cosmology, derived from neo-Platonist, Pythagorean and perhaps Rosicrucian sources. According to this cosmology the human being passed through four successive lives: the seminal, the embryonic, the earthly and the heavenly. Herbert revealed some of the details of this cosmology in the poem A Philosophical Disquisition on Human Life, which he recommended to his descendants and gave a central place in his autobiography. According to this cosmology the mens originated in the heavens, mixed with matter at birth, and then was clothed in an ethereal body by the plastica virtus at death and returned to the heavens. If the mens then elected to go beyond the ether, it could climb to the seats of the gods and make itself divine in the heavens. It would then be possible for it to look on the dead, glorious in their own light, to intervene in developments on earth, to gaze at ‘old heroes’ whom faith made gods, and to come to know the arcane reasoning of God.

NOTES

1 Who Were the English Deists? 1.

2.

3.

The tendency to read a process of secularization into these writers’ texts limits the usefulness of the work of Peter Gay and many other scholars. See P. Gay, Deism: An Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1968). Even erudite histories tend to give secularization teleological dimensions. See, for example, O. Chadwick, The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and C. J. Somerville The Secularization of Early Modern England from Religious Culture to Religious Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). For a useful discussion of recent literature, see J. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 1. Robertson argues for a single Enlightenment (1740s to 1790s) and emphasizes the convergence between Augustinian and Epicurean contexts of thinking about the nature of the human being and the possibility of society after 1680. He also underlines the importance of political economy rather than irreligion. This suggests that we need a term for the years 1640–1740, in which developments structurally related to the Enlightenment proper were present in vastly different political and social contexts, alongside intellectually serious forms of Christianity, Hermeticism and what is now called Radical Enlightenment. In this work I use the term ‘Early Enlightenment’ for this purpose, even though all these nomenclatures may need amendment in the longer term. Roger Emerson includes Shaftesbury, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Richard Baron, Henry Dodwell Jnr and Bolingbroke among the major deists, and Nicholas Amhurst, Henry Baker, Matthew Concaren, John Gilbert Cooper, Sir George Etheridge, Eliyah Fenton, Charles Gildon, Aaron Hill, Thomas Paget, Richard Savage, James Thomson and Lord Rochester as minor figures. But this confuses a list of structurally related writers whose interdependence was noted in the eighteenth century, and freethinkers generally. See R. L. Emerson, ‘English Deism, 1670–1755: An Enlightenment Challenge to Orthodoxy’ (PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1962), pp. 44–5. See also E. Sayous, Les Déistes anglais et le Christianisme principalement depuis Toland jusqu’a Chubb (1696–1738) (Paris: Fischbacher, 1882). – 127 –

128 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

Notes to pages 2–4 The cases of Locke, Clarke, Shaftsbury, Mandeville, Wollaston, Dodwell, Bolingbroke and Hume are dealt with in more recent studies and touched on in this text. I am uncertain about Tillard. Samuel Strutt was a materialist, influenced by Toland and Collins, and the author of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Physical Spring of Human Actions and the Immediate Cause of Thinking (1732). Tinker Duckett was a disciple of Strutt tried for atheism in 1739. See J. Leland, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers that have Appeared in England in the last and present Century, 3 vols (London, 1754–6). See P. Hazard, Le crise de la conscience européenne (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1935). For a discussion of this, see Chapter 2. See D. Lucci, Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-Century British Deists (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), which draws on the significant Italian historiography devoted to these writers. R. D. Lund argues that deism in the early eighteenth century had no determinate meaning. See R. D. Lund, The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). J. A. Herrick abandons theological definitions in favour of a rhetorical approach. He emphasizes that it may not be possible to discover the actual beliefs of these writers with certainty. See J. A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism 1680– 1750 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997). The fact that Herrick includes Ilive among the English deists (ch. 9), even though he was a gnostic, suggests that a rhetorical approach may not discriminate enough between different types of intellectuals using the same writing practices. L. Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (London: Smith, 1876), vol. 1, pp. 81ff. Stephen characterized ‘Constructive’ deism as the attempt to substitute for Christianity a pure body of abstract truths, reposing on metaphysical demonstration (p. 169). See R. L Stromberg’s classic study Religious Liberalism in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). See G. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason 1648–1789 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969). Cf. J. O’Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), p. 199. Stephen’s conception of English deism led him to give a wrong account of the controversies of the period. Thus he wrote that ‘On one side were arrayed all who professed and called themselves Christians; on the other, the despicable badditti stigmatized by their opponents as deists or atheists … The Christianity of many writers consisted simply in expressing deist opinions in the old-fashioned phraseology.’ See Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, p. 91. See F. C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken; and R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). See G. S. J. Reedy, ‘Socinians, John Toland, and the Anglican Rationalists’, Harvard Theological Review, 70 (1977), pp. 285–304. This interpretation conceals the degree to which writers used classical sources to think outside of Christianity. See Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy. More recently the term ‘British deism’ has become popular. Herrick, for example, attempts to map ‘Characteristics of British Deism’ (see The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists,

Notes to pages 4–6

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

129

ch. 2), but this has obvious limitations. See R. H. Popkin ‘The Deist Challenge’, in O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 195–215. This is argued at length in B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Revisionist accounts of the eighteenth-century Church have substantially qualified older interpretations of a lax worldly Church. See W. Gibson, The Church of England 1688– 1832 (London: Routledge, 2000). Gibson argues that many of the theological debates of the period did not undermine the consensus established in 1689, and that the breach between High and Low Churchmen has been exaggerated (pp. 242–3). This view is advanced by J. C. D. Clark in English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It may be too strong in some respects, but the notion that these writers were secularists should be resisted. On the other hand, Clark’s interpretation is clearly partial. Clark assumes that deism was a matter of belief and that it evolved into atheism, just as Arianism evolved into Socinianism. He combines this linear phasal interpretation with a proclivity to accept contemporary High Church slanders as correct. He also traces at least some varieties of heterodoxy back to Dissent, which may be too strong. See I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). See Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, pp. 1, 14–15. For older but still useful studies, see J. Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1874); H. R. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (London: Longmans, 1949) and The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century (London: Black, 1965). For excellent discussion, see Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, ch. 2. The Cambridge Platonists were a group of theological writers. The inner circle consisted of Henry More (1614–87), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), John Smith (1618–52) and Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), who was its leading figure. Their outer circle of associates within Cambridge comprised John Serman (d. 1666), John Worthington (1618–80), Peter Sterry (1613–72), George Rust (1626–70) and Nathaniel Culverwell (1618–51). There were also thinkers outside Cambridge who were closely connected with, and often shared the views of, the Cambridge Platonists: John Norris (1657–1711), Joseph Glanvill (1636–80) and Richard Burthogge (c. 1638–1704). The term ‘Cambridge Platonist’ is itself contested. See G. Rogers, J. Vienne and Y. Zarka (eds), The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1997). In Whichcote’s case, this rationalism went with moralism. Indeed, Whichcote taught that morality was the core of all true ‘Religion’. ‘There are but Two things in Religion; Morals and Institutions: Morals may be known, by the Reason of the Thing; Morals are owned, as soon as spoken; and they are nineteen parts in twenty, of all Religion’, he claimed. See Moral and Religious Aphorisms (1703; London: Mathews and Marrot, 1930), p. 586. Similarly, he declared that ‘There is nothing so intrinsically Rational, as Religion’ (ibid., p. 457). Whichcote himself may have been a Protestant scholastic as much as a Platonist.

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Notes to pages 6–8

25. J. Glanvill, ‘The Agreement of Reason and Religion’, in Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676), p. 17. Glanvill’s position was close to Herbert’s in some respects. 26. Many of the writers in Tew Circle were influenced by William Chillingworth (1602– 44). Chillingworth argued that Christians had a duty to believe the Scriptures to be God’s word. They also had a duty, to endeavour to find the true sense of the Scriptures, and to live according to them. He allowed that individuals might interpret them as their conscience dictated, whatever conclusions they reached. For Chillingworth this was not a dangerous maxim because God had inscribed common notions in the hearts of all. See W. Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (London, 1637). 27. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, ch. 3. 28. Socinians did not see themselves as heterodox but as the truly orthodox. They accepted the infallibility of the Bible, but insisted that every Christian was free to make their own judgements on religious matters. They denied the divinity of Christ, but accepted that he showed the way to salvation, even if he was not a literal saviour. They also rejected the Fathers, the councils of the Church, and formal creeds. On the Socinian view, reason and revelation had to agree, but they did not deny that there had been a revelation from God. On the links between the Latitudinarians and the Socinians, see C. Leslie, The Charge of Socinianism against Dr. Tillotson Considered (London, 1695), Appendix. For a useful discussion of Tillotson’s liberal views, see J. O’Higgins, ‘Archbishop Tillotson and the Religion of Nature’, Journal of Theological Studies, 24:1 (1973), pp. 123–42. 29. For a useful assessment, see R. L. Emerson ‘Latitudinarianism and the English Deists’, in J. A. L. Lemay (ed.), Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 19–48. 30. Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99), for example, argued for conformity in ‘A Discourse Concerning the Power of Excommunication in a Christian Church’, Irenicum (London, 1662), Appendix, and then in a sermon entitled The Mischief of Separation (London, 1680). For excellent discussion see I. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–2000). 31. See A. Lichtenstein, Henry More: The Rational Theology of a Cambridge Platonist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). For the Cambridge response to Spinoza, see S. Hutton, ‘Reason and Revelation in the Cambridge Platonists and Their Reception of Spinoza’, in K. Gründer and W. Schmidt-Biggemann (eds), Spinoza in der Frühzeit seiner religiösen Wirkung (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1984). 32. See A. C. Kors, Atheism in France 1650–1729, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), and ‘“A First Being, of Whom We have No Proof ”: The Preamble of Atheism in Early-Modern France’, in A. C. Kors and P. J. Korshin (eds), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France and Germany (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 17–68. Susan Budd makes a similar argument that unbelief in the nineteenth century emerged out of developments in Christian religious thought and not primarily out of developments in the natural sciences. See S. Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850–1960 (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 261. The parallels with German school metaphysics are complex, especially in the case of Christian Wolff, whose Christian rationalism was arguably continued by Kant in a more apparently secular form. See here Ian Hunter’s brilliant study,

Notes to pages 8–10

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

131

Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See E. Newey, ‘The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor’, Modern Theology, 18:1 (2002), pp. 1–26. The concept of laws of nature was still developing in this period and Samuel Clarke, in particular, tended to fuse Ciceronian notions of moral law with Newton’s scientific conception of a law of nature. See F. Oakley, ‘Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature’, Church History, 30 (1961), pp. 433–57. For Clarke, see J. P. Ferguson, Dr Samuel Clarke: An Eighteenth Century Heretic (Kineton: Roundwood Press, 1976); and Ezio Vailati’s introduction to S. Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See H. G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630–1690 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963). Ferguson, Dr Samuel Clarke. Clarke’s theological views were probably more orthodox than the older books suggest. Cf. C. Brown, Miracles and the Critical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984). See R. S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958). See R. Brown, Church and State in Modern Britain, 1700–1850 (London: Routledge, 1991); and Gibson, The Church of England. Newton’s religious views have received much attention, and it seems likely that he worked on them all his life. He combined a critical view of the Scriptures with mystical and eschatological concerns. He may have been an Arian and a mortalist. Some have read him as a proto-deist, but this is unlikely. See R. S. Westfall, ‘Isaac Newton’s Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae’, in W. Wagar (ed.), The Secular Mind: Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), pp. 15–34; and J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990). To be fair, there is some evidence that contemporaries held Newton partly responsible for various deistic trends. Thus the non-juror George Hickes blamed Newton’s philosophy for making so many Arians and Theists. See Hickes to Roger North, 23 May 1717, British Library, Add. MS 32551, f. 34. However, this association is better supported with reference to his biblical scholarship than to his physics. See J. E. Force, ‘Biblical Interpretation, Newton and English Deism’, in R. H. Popkin and A. Vanderjagt (eds), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 282–305; Force and Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology; and J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (eds), Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999). Force correctly notes that Newton defined God from his dominion rather than from his perfection, his nature or his existence. No English deist followed Newton in detail on this crucial point. See J. E. Force, ‘Samuel Clarke’s Four Categories of Deism, Isaac Newton, and the Bible’, in R. H. Popkin (ed.), Scepticism in the History of Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), pp. 53–74. Although Locke was not an Athanasian Christian, he subscribed to a Messianic Christology for which Jesus was the founder of an earthly kingdom which would succeed the

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44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

Notes to pages 10–11 kingdoms of this world. He believed that God had established a theocracy under the law of Moses and ruled it directly. Moreover, his Essay was a work of natural theology, and included a deductive proof for the existence of God and his creation of the world de novo. See V. Nuovo, ‘Locke’s Christology as a Key to Understanding his Philosophy’, in P. Anstey (ed.), The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 129–53; and J. W. Yolton, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke: Man, Person, and Spirit in the Essay (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Stephen treated Clarke as occupying a middle position between the orthodox and the deists and alleged that he adopted almost entirely ‘the deist method’. This is misleading. See Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, pp. 134–63. S. Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1705), pp. 157–74. Clarke’s friend Arthur Ashley Sykes similarly held that revelation only provided new motives for the fulfilment of natural duties. To conform to the law of nature, which reason could discover, was the whole duty of man and was ‘Religion’. See A. Sykes, The Principles and Connexion of Natural and Revealed Religion Distinctly Considered (London, 1740), p. 19. S. Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, 3rd edn, corrected (London, 1711), pp. 14–15. For the complete Boyle lectures, see S. Letsome and J. Nicholl, A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion: Being a Collection of the Sermons Preached at the Lectures founded by the Right Honourable Robert Boyle Esq from the year 1691 to the year 1732, 3 vols (London, 1739). Here it is important to qualify the interpretation proposed by Margaret Jacob in The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). For discussion of each writer’s relation to scientific controversies, see the second volume of this work, Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform. For a philosophical approach, see P. Byrne, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (London: Routledge, 1989). David Pailin finds eleven variants of natural religion, although these variants are often not analytically distinct. See D. A. Pailin, ‘Rational Religion in England from Herbert of Cherbury to William Paley’, in G. Sheridan and W. Sheils (eds), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 211–33. Similarly, Peter Harrison emphasizes that the terms ‘natural religion’ and ‘revealed religion’ did not gain currency until the latter half of the seventeenth century when divines began to promote natural religion as firm ground against atheism. See P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For classic examples of seventeenth-century texts, see John Wilkins, Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (London, 1675); Timothy Nourse, A Discourse of Natural and Revealed Religion (London, 1691); Henry Hallywell, A Defence of Revealed Religion (London, 1694); and Stephen Nye, A Discourse Concerning Natural and Revealed Religion (London, 1696). See also Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment. For Christian natural religion, see Richard Baxter, The Reasonableness of the Christian Religion (London, 1667). See I. G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 2000), p. 31.

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54. See, for example, the debates between Chubb and Morgan in my second volume, Enlightenment and Modernity. 55. Here I am indebted to the papers and discussion at The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy conference held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 14–16 March 2008. 56. See Hazard’s famous study Le Crise de la conscience européenne. 57. Kors, Atheism in France. 58. My argument here can be related to Alan Charles Kors’s interpretation of atheism in early modern France. Kors argues that what was crucial was not atheism, but the emergence of the possibility of atheism as a result of the work of Christian scholars. Later atheists embraced and syncretized such arguments towards a different end. In England, similarly, the works of Christian scholars sometimes open up the possibility of disbelief in revealed religion, although there is less evidence that Christian works promoted the possibility of disbelief in God. See Kors, ‘“A First Being, of Whom We have No Proof ”’. 59. Pocock’s exceptional contribution here is to emphasize the importance of the different Protestant Enlightenments of England, Scotland, Holland and the Pays de Vaud. See ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, in P. Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 91–111, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello, E. Contese and V. Piano (eds), L’età dei lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, 2 vols (Naples: Tovene, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 523–62, on pp. 553–4, ‘Religious Freedom and the Desacralisation of Politics: From the English Civil Wars to the Virginia Statute’, in M. D. Peterson and R. C. Vaughan (eds), The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 43–73, ‘Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions: The American and French Cases in British Perspective’, Government and Opposition, 24:1 (1989), pp. 81–105, ‘Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Revolution and Counter-Revolution: A Eurosceptical Enquiry’, History of Political Thought, 20 (1999), pp. 125–39; Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2005), ‘Gibbon and the History of Heresy’, in J. C. Laursen (ed.), Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Toleration (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 205–20. 60. Some may question how far it makes sense to speak of ‘Enlightenment’ in the context of early eighteenth-century England. In a wider context the term is probably inescapable, and can be defended provided it is deployed with discrimination. In the case of eighteenth-century England, ‘Enlightenment’ has specific and restricted ranges, as Aufklärung has for Germany and Illuminismo for Italy. 61. See R. Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 2000), esp. ch. 5: ‘Rationalising Religion’ and ch. 9: ‘Secularising’. 62. For evidence, see J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), part 1. 63. See M. C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), ch. 1. 64. Ibid. 65. Some historians modernize the complex intellectual positions characteristic of the period and give simplified versions of these positions political and social correlates. This is argu-

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66.

67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

Notes to pages 15–17 ably a weakness which qualifies the fine achievements of Margaret Jacob’s path-breaking books. Nonetheless, I am obviously deeply indebted to her imagination and scholarship. See ibid., The Newtonians and the English Revolution and The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981). The term Frühaufklärung has particular meanings in the German context which cannot be generalized more widely. For German developments, see M. Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Früaufklarung in Deutschland 1680–1720 (Hamburg: Fritz Meiner Verlag, 2002). Nonetheless Muslow also finds multiple and sometimes unranked perspectives in individual thinkers and resists reducing their achievements to a single grand narrative of secularization. He also emphasizes that in this period these multiple perspectives were not always ranked. See also his essay ‘Freethinking in Early EighteenthCentury Protestant Germany: Peter Friedrich Arpe and the Traité des trois Imposteurs’, in S. Berti, F. Charles-Daubert, and R. Popkin (eds), Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), pp. 193–239. For later German developments, see M. Mulsow, Monadenlehre, Hermetik und Deismus: Georg Schades geheime Aufklärungsgesellschaft, 1747–1760 (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1998). There were significant differences, of course, between conditions in Scotland and Ireland and those in Britain, and the flattering terms in which many historians describe the Enlightenment need to be qualified for women, criminals, the insane, slaves and other oppressed parts of the population. For the Scottish Enlightenment, see A. Brodie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a different view, see J. I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). For good recent studies of the relevant contexts, see C. Rose, England in the 1690s Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); J. Black, Eighteenth-Century Britain 1688–1783 (London: Palgrave, 2001); and P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973). See Gay, The Enlightenment. It is crucial to recognize, as the distinguished historian of German philosophy Frederick Beiser argues, that the intellectual culture in Britain before 1740 was Protestant Christian. See Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, pp. 1, 14–15. Beiser may at times underestimate the extent to which these writers used classical resources to displace Christian prejudices. See Clark, English Society. For the view that they were engaged in theological lying, see the writings of David Berman, especially ‘Deism, Immortality and the Art of Theological Lying’, in Lemay (ed.), Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment, pp. 61–78. For a sophisticated discussion of lying, see P. Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). A related emphasis on multiple identities and on the instability and provisional nature of religious beliefs is now advocated by experts on Renaissance heterodoxy. See J. J. Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. xii. For the difficult but crucial case of Sarpi, see D. Wootton, Paolo Sarpi between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983). See Champion, Republican Learning.

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76. For the view that contemporaries exaggerated the threat of deism and infidelity, often for political reasons, see S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 77. The notion of ‘constellations’ has been developed by the German philosopher Dieter Henrich to explain the outstanding creativity of German Idealism and extended to other contexts by his followers. See M. Stamm and M. Mulsow (eds), Konstellationsforschung Kritische Revue eines historiographischen Methodenprofils (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). My use of the term ’constellational’ here is indebted to Henrich, although I deploy the term more freely and adapt it to the very different English context. 78. An anti-Athanasian strand manifested in Arthur Bury’s The Naked Gospel (Oxford, 1690) and Stephen Nye’s Brief Notes on the Athanasian Creed (London, 1688), but this did not tend to subvert Christianity or even revelation. 79. Israel tends to reduce these writers to ‘neo-Spinozists’ who republished European ideas, but this interpretation underestimates their originality. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment, ch. 33. For Israel on the Enlightenment more generally, see his Enlightenment Contested. 80. H. R. Trevor Roper, ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967). For detailed studies, see D. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); and A. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 81. See W. van Bunge, et al., The Dictionary of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Dutch Philosophers, 2 vols (London: Thoemmes Press, 2003). 82. Chambers captured this balance in the entry in his Cyclopaedia: ‘The appellation Deist is more particularly given to such as are not altogether without religion, but reject all revelation as an imposition and believe no more than what natural light discovers them’. See E. Chambers in Cyclopaedia or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1728). 83. For the growing literature on the circulation of clandestine manuscripts, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, ch. 36: ‘The Clandestine Philosophical Manuscripts’. See also O. Bloch (ed.), Le matérialisme du XVIIIe siècle et la littérature clandestine (Paris: Librairie Philosophique, J. Vrin, 1982); O. Bloch and A. McKenna (eds), La lettre clandestineno 1 à 4, 1992–95 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999); G. Canziani (ed.), Filosophia e religioe nella letteratura clandestina secoli XVII e XVIII (Milano: Angeli, 1994); A. McKenna and A. Mothu (eds), La philosophie clandestine à l’age classique (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997); M. Benitez, La face cachée des lumières: recherches sur les manuscripts philosophiques clandestins de l’âge classique (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996). For substantive discussion, see G. Paganini, Les philosophies clandestines à l’âge classique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005). Further evidence is provided by the Prosper Marchand collection of manuscripts. See Marchand MSS, University of Leiden. More than 230 clandestine manuscripts were known in the eighteenth century. Among the most important were Theophrastus Redivivus (openly advocating atheism and radical naturalism, rejecting the supernatural, miracles and revealed religion and emphasizing that the ancient philosophers had denied immortality); Traité des trois imposteurs (attributed to Robert Challe and possibly written in 1711, printed at the Hague in 1719 and published in Holland as La vie et L’Esprit de Spinosa; Difficultés sur la Religion proposées au R. P. Malebranche, setting out a deist system as well as many criticisms of the Old and New Testaments); Espion

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84.

85. 86. 87.

88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

Notes to pages 17–22 du turc (probably by Jean-Paul Marana (1642–93)); L’Espion du Grand Seigneur (published in two volumes in 1684 and 1686, and then in full in 1692–4); Examen de la Religion, Les Meditationes de Lau (published in 1716, attacking Christianity and miracles, but accepting a perfect being); and L’Examen critique des Apologistes de la Religion Chrétienne (sometimes attributed to Saint Hyacinthe). See R. H. Vermij, ‘The English Deists and the Traité’, in Berti et al. (eds), Heterodoxy, Spinozism and Free Thought, pp. 241–54. Several of the writers known as the English deists saw some of these manuscripts. For relevant scholarship, see G. Canziani and G. Paganini (eds), Theophrastus redivivus, 2 vols (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1981). Canziani and Paganini (eds), Theophrastus redivivus. It is important to note differences between individual manuscripts, and not to assume that a reader who saw one manuscript had seen the others. See Brown, Church and State in Modern Britain; and Gibson, The Church of England. See Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment. Here Justin Champion’s work on the political activities of Toland, Collins and Tindal is outstanding. See Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken. Champion has also investigated how Toland worked with multiple publications, different audiences and variant strategies of reading. See J. A. I. Champion, ‘Enlightened Erudition and the Politics of Reading in John Toland’s Circle’, The Historical Journal, 49:1 (2006), pp. 111–41. See D. Castiglione and L. Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995). Some account must be taken of the degree to which what we attempt to study emerges for the first time during this period. For the emergence of concepts in history, see I. Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and A. Davidson, Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). For the historicity of ‘facts’, see M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The intellectual and social networks Charles Blount moved in illustrate this point in detail. See Chapter 4 below. Popkin intuited much of this when he argued that both deism and millenarianism contributed to the rise of toleration. See R. H. Popkin, ‘Skepticism about Religion and Millenarian Dogmatism: Two Sources of Toleration on the Seventeenth Century’, in J. C. Laursen and C. J. Nederman (eds), Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 232–50. In practice, disbelief, mystical enthusiasm and millenarianism were sometimes close to one another. For example, those who saw no need for a Church might be mystical illuminists as easily as sceptics, as the case of Michel de Molinos makes clear. See P. Dudon, Le Quiétiste espagnol Michel Molinos (1628–1696) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1921). Many contemporary observers complained that ‘the freethinkers’ wrote insinuations and used artful expressions capable of double meanings. See G. Berkeley, Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher (London, 1732), Dialogue 2.23; and P. Skelton, Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed, 2 vols (London, 1751). Waterland noted that the deists and freethinkers ‘understood the Policy of introducing new Doctrines gradually, and imperceptibly, under the Cover of the old Names: So they retained the Terms, but shifted the Ideas as they pleased’. See D. Waterland, Christianity Vindicated against Infidelity (London, 1732), p. 64.

Notes to pages 23–5

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93. F. Gastrell, The Principles of Deism Truly Represented (London, 1708), p. 47. 94. See Chapters 4 and 5. 95. The debts of these writers to clandestine sources, including the famous Traité des trois imposteurs, can sometimes now be documented. On the ‘three impostors’, see S. Berti, ‘“La Vie et l’Esprit de Spinoza” (1719) e la prima traduzione Francese dell’ “Ethica”’, Rivista storica italiana, 98:1 (1986), pp. 5–46, ‘At the Roots of Unbelief ’, History of Ideas, 56:4 (1995), pp. 555–75, and ‘The First Edition of the Traité des trois imposteurs, and its Debt to Spinoza’s Ethics’, in M. Hunter and D. Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 183–220. Cf. Vermij, ‘The English Deists and the Traité’. For pioneering work on the manuscripts of Prosper Marchand, which is also sensitive to possible Masonic dimensions, see Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment and Living the Enlightenment. 96. Collins, for example, may have helped with Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (London, 1730). Indeed, Hearne claimed that Collins helped Tindal write many of his works. See T. Hearne, Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885–1921), vol. 2, p. 244. 97. For a different view, see Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists, p. 66. 98. For eighteenth-century reading patterns, see I. Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), and I. Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth Century England: New Essays (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2001), especially B. W. Young, ‘Theological Books from ‘The Naked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith’, in Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in EighteenthCentury England, pp. 79–104. 99. See Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason. The importance of these writers was more clearly recognized in Europe, and many European scholars have argued for their centrality to the Enlightenment as a whole. They have shown less mastery of the British context, and German historians in particular have often failed to distinguish these writers from a wider circle of rationalistic thinkers. They have also tended to read British developments as anticipations of later developments in Germany. See, for example, G. V. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Gotta, 1841). In contrast, the Italian scholarship has often been better on the detail. See, for example, F. Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 100. Stephen acknowledged that they were central figures for any understanding of English thought in the eighteenth century, but still managed to treat these writers as intellectual inferiors. His treatment of Toland was symptomatic of his prejudices. From his earliest days Toland was a mere waif and stray, hanging loose upon society, retiring at intervals into the profoundest recesses of Grub Street, emerging again by fits to scandalize the whole respectable world, and then once more sinking back into tenfold obscurity. His career is made pathetic by his incessant efforts to clutch at various supports, which always gave way as he grasped them (History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, pp. 101–2), he wrote. Stephen also reduced Woolston, Chubb, Morgan and Annet to caricatures. 101. See Gay, Deism. 102. J. V. H Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 103. See A. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

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Notes to pages 25–9

104. See P. Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998). 105. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 3–4. 106. See Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, esp. ch. 2. 107. See my second volume, Enlightenment and Modernity.

2 Genealogies of Deism 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

For the notion of atheism in the early modern period, see W. Philipp, Das werden der Aufklärung in theologiegeschichtlicher Sicht (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957); and M. J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). The term ‘heterodoxy’ covers opinions contrary to ‘orthodoxy’, itself a mobile and socially constructed term. See J. G. A. Pocock ‘Within the Margins: The Definition of Orthodoxy’, in Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy, pp. 33–53. In the eighteenth-century context it picks out a wide variety of opinions. European freethinkers were often interested in heterodox materials of many different kinds because they contradicted orthodox Christianity, but these materials were not necessarily atheistic or deistic. For recent scholarship on the growth of irreligion in the Enlightenment, see Popkin and Vanderjagt (eds), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; Berti et al. (eds), Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought; and Berti ‘At the Roots of Unbelief ’, and ‘Unmasking the Truth: The Theme of Imposture in Early Modern European Culture 1660–1730’, in J. Force and D. Katz (eds), Everything Connects (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 21–36. Cf. W. van Bunge and W. Klever (eds), Disguised and Overt Spinozism Around 1700 (Leiden: Brill, 1996). The term ‘infidelity’ originally implied the absence of faith: an infidel was one who had no faith. However it was used fairly generally to characterize anyone who had ceased to believe in Christianity, or had become an enemy of it. Lucien Febvre, a pupil of Lévy-Bruhl, argued in Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais (Paris: Michel, 1942) that Rabelais was not an atheist. He emphasized the lack of mental equipment and mental tools with which to think of atheism in the sixteenth century and listed missing words and concepts. Other scholars have accepted his view that the sixteenth-century libertines were in some sense probably sincere Christians. Recent historians of atheism such as Marshall Berman and David Wootton have rejected this pattern of interpretation and claimed that it is possible to argue about the real positions such writers adopted. See D. Wootton, ‘Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Modern History, 60:4 (December 1988), pp. 695–730. Compare Silvia Berti’s judgement that many of the figures discussed were unbelievers and blasphemers but still Christians. See Berti ‘At the Roots of Unbelief ’ and ‘Unmasking the Truth’. For more recent studies of atheism, see D. Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Kors, Atheism in France, vol. 1; Hunter and Wooton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. It is widely argued that the origins of modern atheism are to be found both in late medieval nominalism, which eroded the distinction between the Creator and creatures, and in the modern scientific reduction of causality to efficient causality. See Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism. Buckley relates the origins of atheism to the Catholic theology of the early seventeenth century. He refers in particular to the Louvain Jesuit Lessius, a student

Notes to pages 29–30

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

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of Suarez, who in the context of the Thomistic revival substituted Thomas’s Summa for Peter Lombard’s Sentences and then paralleled Aquinas with his own rationes philosophicae, giving arguments designed to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. With Lessius, revelation was separated off as a matter of faith and more general theological claims became philosophical issues. In this way a natural theology emerged established from common sense and the particular sciences which was not part of metaphysics: a natural theology which did not include Christ. Buckley continues this analysis through the theologican and scientist Mersenne, who employed a logistic method to establish the existence of God from nature; the universal mathematics of Descartes; Malebranche’s occasionalism; and the apologetics of the British theologian Samuel Clarke, who took a logistic method of analysis and synthesis from Newton’s universal mechanics. See At the Origins of Modern Atheism, chs 1, 2, 3 and 6. Buckley suggests that atheism originated in the self-alienation of religion itself. Louis Dupré emphasizes the importance of nominalism, which led to the loss of any theology of form. See ‘On the Intellectual Sources of Modern Atheism’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 45:1 (1999), pp. 1–11. These interpretations imply that atheism arose when Christian theology and philosophy became too rationalistic and secular. They probably underestimate the importance of heterodoxy inspired by classical sources. Scholars are still divided over how radical the libertines in fact were. For an innovative reading, see T. Gregory, ‘“Libertinism érudit” in Seventeenth-Century France and Italy: The Critique of Ethics and Religion’, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, 6:3 (1998), pp. 323–49. The nature of scepticism is also contested. Popkin argues that between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century fideistic scepticism gradually turned into irreligion. But the terms of his argument are sometimes too wide. For scepticism in general, see J. Annas and J. Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For scepticism and the Enlightenment, see R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Gassendi to Descartes (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1968), The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego, CA: Austin Hill Press, 1980), ‘Fideism, Quietism, and Unbelief: Scepticism for and against Religion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in M. Hester (ed.), Faith, Reason and Scepticism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 121–54; Popkin (ed.), Scepticism in the History of Philosophy; R. H. Popkin, E. De Olaso and G. Tonelli (eds), Scepticism in the Enlightenment (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1997); ‘Introduction’, in Popkin and Vanderjagt (eds), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. See also D. Womersley (ed.), Religious Scepticism: Contemporary Responses to Gibbon (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997). See especially J. Orr, English Deism: Its Roots and Fruits (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1934), ch. 1. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in the Eighteenth Century. A. O. Aldridge, ‘Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 41:2 (1951), pp. 297–385, on p. 298; and A. Richardson, A Dictionary of Christian Theology (London: S.C.M., 1969), entry on ‘Deism’. M. M. Rossi, Alle fonti del deismo e del materialismo moderno (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1942). Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus.

140

Notes to pages 30–2

14. See G. Gawlick ‘Der Deismus als Grundzug der Religionsphilosophie der Aufklärung’ in Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) (Göttingen, Vandernoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 15–43, and ‘Deismus’, in J. Ritter (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 vols (Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1971–2007), vol. 2, pp. 44–7. 15. Radicati made the point that the so-called ‘atheists’ were ‘deists’ who admitted a first cause under a variety of different names such as God, Nature, Eternal Being and Matter. See A. Radicati, Twelve Discourses Concerning Religion and Government, 2nd edn (London, 1734), pp. 11–12. 16. See G. Gawlick, ‘Hume and the Deists: A Reconsideration’, in G. P. Morice (ed.), David Hume: Bicentenary Papers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977), pp. 128–38, on pp. 132–3. 17. For the Greek Enlightenment, see W. K. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 6 vols (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1969–81), vol. 3. 18. Cicero, De natura deorum, De divinatione. Cicero’s academic scepticism was important for some deists, especially before 1750. 19. Theistic naturalism could be found in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Poets, and Macrobius’s Commentary on Scipio’s Dream, amongst other sources. The Platonizing Stoic text De mundo offered a naturalistic cosmology, including a maximalist Deus located in the highest part of the universe. Other modern works also mediated classical materials. For example, Des Périers’s astrological allegory Cymbalum mundi contained discussion of both natural religion and Origen’s objections to Christianity, although the exact character of the work is disputed. See B. Des Périers, Cymbalum mundi, ed. P. Marchand (London, 1712). 20. Cf. W. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften Band 2: Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1929). 21. See H. A. Wolfson, Religious Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), ch. 1. For free thought in Islamic philosophy, see M. Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism: A Short Introduction (New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 29–37. 22. In a letter of 1239 Pope Gregory IX accused Frederick II of holding that Moses, Christ and Muhammad were ‘three impostors’. ‘Epistolae saeculi XIII … selectae’, in G. H. Pertz (ed.), Monumenta Germanica Historica (Berlin: Rodenberg, 1883), letter 750, p. 653. For comparisons between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, see S. I. M. Ibn Kammuna, Ibn Kammuna’s Examination of the Three Faiths: A Thirteenth Century Essay in the Comparative Study of Religion, trans. M. Perlman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971). 23. G. F. Hourani, Islamic Rationalism (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971); and M. Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 56 ff and ch. 7. 24. See R. Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943); Febvre, Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle; H. Busson, Les sources et le développement du Rationalisme dans la littérature française de la Renaissance (1533– 1601) (Paris: Vrin, 1922); and G. Spini, Ricerca dei libertini: la teoria dell’impostura delle religioni nel seicento italiano (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1983). This pattern of interpretation is now contested. See G. de Donville, Le libertin des origines à 1665: un produit des apologètes (Paris: Biblio 17, 1989). Donville rejects Pintard’s claims and argues that the concept of the libertine emerges from Counter-Reformation theologians and controver-

Notes to pages 32–4

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

141

sialists. However, it may be possible to accept that controversialists exaggerated, without denying the objective logic of thinkers who did not themselves adopt those positions. See N. G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Siraisi’s detailed discussion documents how classical and Averroist notions of ‘philosophy’ and the Deus were discussed in the context of Renaissance medical disputes, and also provides extensive bibliographical references to the relevant Latin texts. Siraisi brings out the links between Avicenna’s commentary and Peripatetic challenges to Christian teaching about the creation of the world and the immortality of the soul in a context far from free of astrological and occultist influences. See also T. Gregory ‘Aristotelismo e libertinismo’, in L. Olivieri, Aristotelismo veneto e scienza moderna (Padua: Antenore, 1983), pp. 280–95. Older accounts of the heterodoxy of Averroist-influenced scholars require qualification, although the new editions of Aristotle-Averroes at Venice and Lyon may have stimulated debates about theistic naturalism. For the diversity of Renaissance Aristotelianisms, see C. Schmitt, ‘Renaissance Averroism Studied through the Venetian Editions of Aristotle-Averroes’, Atti dei convegni lincei, 40 (1979), pp. 121–42, and Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Paduan philosophers such as Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo were aware that Aristotle’s philosophy conflicted with Christian faith. However, they were also familiar with a strict separation between what could be asserted in philosophy as opposed to theology. It should also be remembered that these thinkers were involved with occultism and astrology. For discussion of Pomponazzi’s views, see J. H. Randall, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua: Editore Antenore, 1961), ch. 3, B. Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Florence: Monnier, 1965), ch. 3, and M. L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance (Padua: Antenore, 1986). The debate about what Aristotle really taught about the soul was tortuous, and Nifo correctly emphasized the need to study the Greek commentators rather than Averroes. Nifo himself, however, maintained a modified Averroism (from Siger of Brabant and John of Jandun) according to which the intellect as the higher form of the body decayed at death, but, as the assisting form of the body, it was a single divine form for all human beings and immortal. Pomponazzi attacked these views in his lectures. For Cremonini, see L. Mabilleau, Étude historique sur la philosophie de la Renaissance en Italie (Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1881); M. A. Torre, Studi su Cesare Cremonini (Padua: Editore Antenore, 1968). Naudé, who studied at Padua, reported that Cremonini lacked all piety. On Galen, see O. Temkin, Galenism, Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973) and R. Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949). Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians. See Da Monte, Comm. Canon 1.1 (Venice, 1554). Da Monte argued that the principles of Hippocrates and Galen were to be accepted in philosophy, but not theology (p. 291). These problems went back to the medieval Arts faculty in Paris in which Masters of Arts discussed what was rational and probable in isolation from what had to be accepted in theology. Christian thinkers, however, placed faith above philosophy, as Averroes did not.

142

Notes to pages 34–6

33. For Cardano, see E. Kessler, Girolamo Cardano: Philosopher, Physician, Mathematician (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989); and Spini, Ricerca dei libertini. For Bruno, see M. Ciliberto, Giordano Bruno (Bari: Laterza, 1990). 34. See H. Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote (Geneva, 1566). 35. For Bodin’s views of natural religion and revelation, see A. Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and P. L. Rose, Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1980). 36. O. Fatio (ed.), Des scandales (Geneva: Droz, 1984), pp. 55, 65, 68, 101, 136, 138, 141– 3. 37. See L. Febvre, ‘Dolet, Propagator of the Gospel’, in P. Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 108–59. 38. The passage is reprinted in G. G. Gawlick’s Vorwort zum Neudruck von Gotthard V. Lechlers Geschichte des englischen Deismus (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), pp. viii–xi. The term ‘Déiste’ was also used in Henri Estienne’s Apologie pour Hérodote in 1566. 39. C. J. Betts, Early Deism in France: From the So-Called ‘Déistes’ of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques (1734) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984), p. 263. Betts suggests that deism was not independent of Christianity in the sixteenth century (p. 259). He takes Viret’s account to be exaggerated and argues that the Lyon deists were probably Polish Socinians, i.e. anti-Trinitarians. For the suggestion that Gregorius Paulus was the leader of the deists, see F. de Raemond, L’Histoire de la naissance, progrez et decadence de l’heresie (Paris, 1605), p. 324. There is now some evidence that there were those who called themselves deists in Lyon and also support for the anti-Trinitarian connection. See E. Feil, ‘Die Deisten als Gegner der Trinität: Zur ursprunglichen Bedeutung und speziellen Verwendung des Begriffs, “Deistae” für Sozinianer’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 33 (1990), pp. 115–24. 40. See B. P. Copenhauer, Symphorien Champier and the Reception of the Occultist Tradition in Renaissance France (New York: Mouton, 1979). 41. See the discussion of the Origio below. 42. It is not always clear how far ‘deist’ means theist in these contexts, especially since the emphasis falls on an exalted idea of deity. 43. The full text of the poem is published in A. Adam (ed.), Les libertins au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1964), pp. 88 ff. 44. Ibid., pp. 1–2, 34, 43, 41–2. 45. M. Mersenne, L’Impiété des deistes, athées, et libertins de ce temps, combattue, et renversée de point en point par raisons tirées de la philosophie et de la théologie (Paris, 1624), esp. pp. 181–4, 669–70. 46. See J. W. Harges, Against the Christians: The Development of Ancient Anti-Christine Polemic (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 47. Mersenne, L’Impiété des deists, pp. 34, 41–2. 48. For French deism in general, see C. J. Betts and J. S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London: Athlone Press, 1960). For Cyrano de Bergerac, see M. Cardoze, Cyrano de Bergerac: libertin libertaire (Paris: Archimbaud, 1994). For seventeenth century deism and Robert Challe in particular, see F. Deloffre, ‘Robert Challe, père du déisme françois’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 79 (1979), pp. 947–80, ‘Un système de religion naturelle: du déisme des Difficultés sur la religion au matérialisme du Militaire philosophe’, in Bloch (ed.), Le matérialisme du XVIIIe siècle, pp. 67–76, and Robert Challe, un destin, une oeuvre (Paris: SEDES, 1992).

Notes to pages 36–8

143

49. See H. Busson, La pensée religieuse française de Charron à Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 1933), pp. 92–3. 50. Nonetheless, Jansenist and Huguenot writers were quick with accusations. Thus Pascal attacked the Jesuits for an excessive emphasis on works and the notion that God bestowed sufficient grace on all, and Jurieu claimed that many deists in the Catholic Church argued that Christ was not divine. See B. Pascal, Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (Paris, 1670), no. 556. Cf. P. de Mornay, De la verité de la religion Chrestienne (Anvers, 1581); M. Amyraut Traité des religions contre ceux qui les indifférentes (Saumur, 1631); and P. Jurieu, Esprit de M. Arnauld, 2 vols (Deventer, 1684). 51. J. Abbadie, Traité de la verité de la religion, 2 vols (Rotterdam, 1684). There were, of course, writers associated with libertinism and free thought, but it is less clear that they called themselves deists. For an attempt to construe Abbadie’s apologetics for theism and rational religion as a source of deism in France, see R. Whelan, ‘From Christian Apologetics to Enlightened Deism: The Case of Jacques Abbadie (1656–1727)’, Modern Language Review, 87:1 ( January 1992), pp. 32–40. She relies on the Kors hypothesis rather than actual evidence. 52. G. Postel, Satisfisco … pro suo in arist. errat. (Paris, 1552); W. J. Bouwsma, Concordia Mundi: The Career and Thought of Guillaume Postel, 1510–1581 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); M. L. D. Kuntz, Guillaume Postel: Prophet of the Restitution of All Things, His Life and Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981). 53. P. Charron, De la sagesse, trois livres (Paris, 1604), and Of Wisdom, trans. S. Lennard (London, 1651); Busson, La pensée religieuse française de Charron à Pascal; M. Horowitz, ‘Pierre Charron’s View of the Source of Wisdom’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 9 (1971), pp. 443–57. 54. C. B. Brush, Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966); P. Villey, ‘L’Influence de Montaigne sur Charles Blount et sur les deistes Anglais’, Revue du seizième siècle, 1 (1913), pp. 190–219, 392–443. 55. R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), book 3, part 3, sec. 4. 56. See E. A. Strathmann, Sir Walter Raleigh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951). 57. The extent to which Socinians were rationalists is disputed. Many Socinians argued that reason had to be used to interpret the Scriptures, but the idea that religion should be arrived at by reason may have been more associated with Faustus Socinius’s grandson, Andrei Wiszowaty. 58. For erudite discussion, including consideration of catalogues of heretics, see G. Frank, ‘Zu den Anfängen des Deismus’, Theologie und Philosophie Vierteljahresschrift, 72:2 (1997), pp. 216–30. 59. For an analysis, see F. Socas, ‘L’Origio et fundamenta religionis christianae: l’auteur, le texte et les themes’, in McKenna and Mothu (eds), La philosophie clandestine à l’age classique, pp. 213–22. 60. Here I qualify the views advanced in Popkin and Vanderjagt (eds), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

144

Notes to pages 41–4

3 Herbert of Cherbury 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

For standard treatments of Herbert in English, see W. E. Sorley, ‘The Philosophy of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’, Mind, 3 (1894), pp. 491–508; B. Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London: Chatto & Windus, 1934), pp. 121–34, and ‘Lord Herbert of Cherbury: A Spiritual Quixote of the Seventeenth Century’, Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 27 (1942), pp. 22–9; Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De religione laici, trans. and ed. H. R. Hutcheson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944); H. R. Hutcheson, ‘Lord Herbert and the Deists’, Journal of Philosophy, 43 (1946), pp. 219–21. See also C. de Remusat, Lord Herbert de Cherbury: sa vie et ses oeuvres, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Academique, 1874); C. Güttler, Eduard Lord Herbert von Cherbury, ein kritischer Beitrag zur Geschichte des Psychologismus und der Religionsphilosophie (Munich: Beck, 1897); H. Scholz, Die Religionsphilosophie des Herbert von Cherbury (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1914); M. M. Rossi, La vita, le opere i tempi Eduardo Herbert di Chirbury, 3 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1947), and Alle fonti del deismo, pp. 1–29; R. D. Bedford, The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979); E. D. Hill, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1987); J. A.Butler, Lord Herbert of Chirbury 1582–1648: An Intellectual Biography (Lewiston, ME: Edward Mellen, 1990); and J. Lagrée, ‘Le Salut du laic’, Edward Herbert de Cherbury: texte étude et traduction du ‘De religione laïci’ (Paris: Vrin, 1989). Most interesting of all, see the excellent new entry for Herbert by David Pailin in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, gen. ed. E. Craig, 10 vols (London: Routledge, 1998), and his essay ‘Should Herbert of Cherbury be Regarded as a Deist?’, Journal of Theological Studies, 51:1 (2000), pp. 113–49. See J. Crell, De Deo ejusque attributis, in Opera Omnia (Amsterdam, 1656). For Herbert’s relationship to Crell, and a general discussion of Socinian influence, see Z. Ogonowski, Socynianizm a oswiecenie (Warsaw: Naukowe, 1966), ch. 8. See N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). The Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. S. L. Lee (London, 1886), p. 65. For the emergence of toleration in Europe, see P. Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). See Herbert Correspondence, ed. W. H. Smith (Cardiff : University of North Wales Press, 1963). Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De veritate (1645), trans. and ed. M. H. Carré (Bristol: Bristol University, 1937), p. 297. Ibid., pp. 78–9. Herbert was not the only Renaissance thinker to revive the common notions. They also played a role in the thought of Steucho and also in the theology of Philip Melanchthon. Herbert, De veritate, ed. Carré, pp. 291–2. Ibid., pp. 193 ff. Ibid., pp. 296, 298. Ibid., p. 400. Ibid., p. 30. See here Peter Harrison’s excellent study, ‘Religion’ and the Religions. Mersenne was enthusiastic and sent Herbert a list of common notions of his own. He also probably made the influential French translation of De veritate of 1629. Even when

Notes to pages 44–5

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

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it was later placed on the Index, Herbert was able to discuss it with the Pope’s emissary in London, in the context of an irenicism based on the recognition of Rome as the mother of all churches. For a good discussion, see R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Herbert before Deism: The Early Reception of the De Veritate’, Seventeenth Century, 16:2 (October 2001), pp. 217–38. Herbert was well briefed on the Christian natural theology tradition and had Franscisco Vicomercato’s De princpiis rerum naturalium (1598) in his library. Herbert, De veritate, ed. Carré, pp. 116–17, 121, 126. Herbert’s critics concentrated on his philosophical claims. Gassendi rejected his definition of truth, and also his theory of natural instincts, see P. Gassendi, Ad Librum D. Edoardi Herberti Angli, De veritate, Epistola, in Opera Omnia, 6 vols (Lyon, 1658), vol. 3, pp. 411–19. For Gassendi’s own scepticism, see S. Murr, ‘Gassendi’s Scepticism as a Religious Attitude’, in Popkin and Vanderjagt (eds) Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, pp. 12–30. Descartes found Herbert’s Latin unintelligible, but was more sympathetic to the French translation. See Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, ed. C. de Waard, 17 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1945–88), vol. 8, p. 551. Neither Gassendi nor Descartes seems to have been central to Herbert’s own projects. For subtle discussion, see Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions. The Cambridge Platonists rejected Calvinism and reemphasized the justice of God, but their emphasis on the universality of saving knowledge arguably subverted a strong distinction between the light of nature and revelation, which in any case were distinguished not by their content but by the way they came to human beings. Whichcote explicitly taught that there were ‘truths of first inscription’ grasped by reason that prepared the way of revelation. Culverwell and Cumberland both believed that religious principles were in some sense innate and Glanvill located the essence of religion in propositions of natural theology which were sufficient for salvation. He spoke of ‘inbred Fundamental Notices that God had implanted in souls’. See Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, pp. 43–5. Cudworth attempted to demonstrate that all people tended to believe naturally in one God and could achieve a natural knowledge of religious doctrines. Nathaniel Culverwell held that the light of nature shown in all the nations of the world and all religions derived from knowledge of the one true God. See A. Steucho, De perenni philosophia (Lyon, 1540), p. 200. The issue is complex because those who made strong claims for reason or natural light often had cosmological and magical beliefs which separate them from what later would be thought of as rationalism. Raimonde Sebunde, for example, had argued that men could arrive at all the truths about God necessary for salvation by natural light, and Guillaume Postel had claimed that reason was infallible, and could prove the fundamental truths of Christianity. See Sebunde, Theologia naturalis; Postel, Satisfisco, pp. 73–5; and de Raemond, L’Histoire de la naissance, progrez et decadence de l’heresie, p. 324. For the issue of whether Herbert proposed a form of natural religion, see R. A. Johnson, ‘Natural Religion, Common Notions, and the Study of Religions: Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648)’, Religion, 24 (1994), pp. 213–24. Johnson rightly draws attention to the technical meaning of Herbert’s Latin and the gap between his thought and thinkers in the 1680s, although I think he underplays Herbert’s underlying epistemological radicalism. See Serjeantson ‘Herbert before Deism’, p. 230.

146

Notes to pages 45–9

25. For discussion of the Cambridge Platonists and the Fathers, see D. W. Dockrill, ‘The Fathers and the Theology of the Cambridge Platonists’, Studia Patristica, 17 (1982), pp. 427–39 and ‘The Heritage of Patristic Platonism in Seventeenth Century English Philosophical Theology’, in Rogers et al. (eds), The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context, pp. 55–77. 26. See Appendix ad sacerdotes (published with De veritate in 1645), esp. questions II–VII. 27. Herbert, De veritate, ed. Carré, p. 304. 28. See Herbert, De religione laici, ed. Hutcheson, pp. 99, 101, 125. 29. Herbert was influenced by Seneca’s and Plutarch’s attacks on superstition, as well as by classical criticisms of revelations given to oracles and priests. 30. Herbert, De veritate, ed. Carré, pp. 309–10. 31. For possible neo-Stoic sources of Herbert’s anti-clericalism, see Rose, Bodin and the Great God of Nature. 32. Herbert, De veritate, ed. Carré, pp. 303–4. 33. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Reign of King Henry the Eighth (London, 1649), pp. 321–4. 34. This interpretation offers a possible context for Herbert’s famous claim to have received a divine revelation telling him to publish De veritate. 35. Herbert was also a distinguished historian and pioneered major forms of early modern historiography. His The Life and Reign of King Henry the Eighth became the standard biography and established Henry’s image as a heroic prince and successful statesman in the eyes of the later generations. For his Latin philosophical poems, see the Appendix to the current volume. 36. The Latin text was published at Amsterdam in 1663 and a second edition appeared in 1700. See Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles, trans. W. Lewis (London, 1705), chs 14 and 15. 37. Ibid., pp. 9, 22. 38. Ibid., pp. 79–80. See also D. P. Walker’s study The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972), ch. 5. Walker argues that Herbert was trying to revive the old star religion like Bruno and Campanella and wanted to build it on the common notions (p. 184). This seems unlikely. More and Cudworth promoted the notion of an ancient theology revealed by God to Moses, but this idea has no parallel in Herbert. 39. Herbert, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles, pp. 12–14 ff. 40. Ibid., pp. 386, 365 ff. 41. Here Herbert may have been influenced by his friend John Selden, who also had an account of original Christianity. Selden was an anti-clerical Protestant who denied that there was a sharp distinction between sacred and secular matters. He combined vast Hebraic scholarship and a simplification of Grotius to generate a plain version of natural law largely based on the Noachic precepts. See J. Selden, De jure naturali et gentium iuxta disciplinam ebraeorum, in Opera omnia, 3 vols (London, 1726), vol. 1, p. 89, The History of Tithes (London, 1617), pp. 1–2, and De diis Syriis (London, 1617). 42. C. Kortholt, De tribus impostoribus magnis liber (Kiel, 1680), p. 226. 43. Herbert was deemed a deist in a positive sense in Henry Prideaux’s A Letter to the Deists (London, 1696). For the construction of Herbert as a deist in a negative sense, see T. Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient and Revealed Necessary to Man’s Happiness in his Present State (Edinburgh, 1714). Halyburton dubbed Herbert the great patron of deism and devoted several chapters to his work.

Notes to pages 49–52

147

44. Bedford, The Defence of Truth; and Pailin, ‘Should Herbert of Cherbury be Regarded as a Deist?’. 45. ‘Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Books’, Oxford Bibliographical Society, Proceedings and Papers, 5 (1940), pp. 71 ff, on pp. 80, 87, 90, 92, 97, 105. 46. Vanini was a Neopolitan priest who set up an astrological natural religion in place of Christianity. He was burnt at the stake in 1619. See A. Nowicki, Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619) (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1968); and E. Namer, La vie et l’oeuvre de J. C.Vanini: prince des libertins, mort à Toulouse sur le bûcher en 1619 (Paris: Vrin, 1980). 47. It is less likely that Herbert was close to libertins érudits Gabriel Naudé and La Mothe Le Vayer, who were sceptics. For Naudé, see J. V. Rice, Gabriel Naudé, 1600–1653 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), ch. 1. La Mothe Le Vayer expressed his sceptical opinions on religion in some early Dialogues, which he published under a pseudonym with a false imprint and date. See F. de La Mothe Le Vayer, Deux dialogues sur la divinité et l’opiniatreté, ed. E. Tisserand (Paris: Editions Bossard, 1922), p. 20. 48. French usage may not have been the same as English. Silhoun did not call the people he referred to ‘deists’, and in France the term deist was often associated with Epicureans rather than with advocates of natural religion. See Pascal, Pensées, no. 556. Cf. P. de Mornay, A Work Concerning the Trueness of the Christian Religion against Atheists, Epicures, Paynims, Iewes, Mahumetists and Other Infidels (London, 1587); and Amyraut, Traité des religions. 49. Bodin’s authorship of this work is now disputed. 50. Bodin posited an omnipotent great God of Nature and seemed to regard Judaism as closer to true religion than any other positive religion. He apparently accepted prophecy and both natural and revealed religion. See J. Bodin, Universae naturae theatrum (Frankfurt, 1597), and Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. P. Mesnard (Paris, 1951); and R. H. Popkin, ‘The Dispersion of Bodin’s Dialogues in England, Holland, and Germany’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49:1 (1988), pp. 157–60. 51. Herbert, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles, trans. W. Lewis, pp. 255, 260–2. 52. See R. Warner, Epistolary Curiousities, Series the First (London, 1818), pp. 187–9. 53. Herbert, De veritate, ed. Carré, p. 247. 54. The Autobiography of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. Lee, p. 32. 55. Herbert found Varro’s ideas set out in St Augustine’s City of God, book IV, chs 9, 22, 27, 31, book V, ch. 31, book VI, chs 2–9, book VII, chs 6, 17, 18, 23, 24, 28. 56. These ideas were found in radical Protestant writers such as Herbert’s friend John Selden as well as in subterranean European sources. 57. T. Campanella, La città del sole: dialogo poetico (Frankfurt, 1623). Campanella advanced a version of the Arabic teaching that the Book of Nature was the Book of God and took natural religion to be the core of a Catholic universal theology. See T. Campanella, Philosophia, sensibus demonstrata (Naples, 1591); and G. Bock, Thomas Campanella Politisches Interesse und Philosophische Spekulation (Tübingen: Niemayer, 1974). 58. The Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. Lee, p. 32. 59. ‘Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Books’, esp. p. 91. 60. See Poemata, published with the third edition of De veritate in 1645. For Herbert’s doctrine of a succession of lives, see ‘De Vita Humana Philosophica Disquisitio’. For Herbert’s theosophical Heaven, see ‘De Vita Coelesti, ex Iisdem Principiis Conjectura’. Both are translated in the Appendix to this volume. 61. Herbert, De veritate, ed. Carré, pp. 297, 326–9.

148

Notes to pages 52–5

62. See ‘A Dialogue on Various Religions’, Add. MS 4366, British Library; MS 5296, National Library of Wales; ‘A Dialogue’, MS 10,840, and ‘A Dialogue’, Rawlinson C.95, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 63. Rossi argued against Herbert’s authorship, and suggested that the Dialogue could have been written by Anglesey, see Alle fonte del deismo, pp. 92–3, and La vita, le opere, i tempi di Edoardo Herbert di Chirbury, vol. 3, pp. 315–21, and Appendix XXV. Günter Gawlick follows Rossi, and makes no mention of the Dialogue in his edition of De veritate (1645; Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1966). See Herbert, De religione laici, ed. Hutcheson, pp. 45 ff. Unlike Rossi, Hutcheson argued that the Dialogue was unquestionably Herbert’s work. 64. Bedford, The Defence of Truth. 65. Günther Gawlick has made a case for the Herbertian character of the Dialogue, noting that the text refers only to works in Herbert’s library, including specifically the Heschel’s edition of Contra Celsum. See Gawlick’s introduction to his edition of De veritate. 66. For Fontenelle, see A. Niderst, Fontenelle à la recherche de lui-même 1657–1702 (Paris: Nizet, 1972), and Fontenelle: actes du colloque tenu à Rouen du 6 au 10 octobre 1987 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). 67. See Harges, Against the Christians. 68. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, A Dialogue between A Tutor and His Pupil (London, 1768), pp. 57, 90. 69. Ibid., pp. 247–8. 70. Ibid., p. 59. 71. Ibid., p. 155. 72. Ibid., pp. 21, 84. 73. Ibid., p. 142. 74. Ibid., pp. 93, 21–2. 75. Ibid., pp. 81, 15, 139. 76. Ibid., pp. 199, 206, 267, 67–80. 77. Ibid., pp. 88, 96. 78. Ibid., pp. 96, 144, 156, 70, 198, 146. 79. Ibid., p. 15. 80. Ibid., pp. 261, 234–5. 81. Ibid., pp. 86, 261, 87. 82. Ibid., p. 18. 83. Ibid., p. 20. 84. Ibid., p. 96. 85. Ibid., p. 8. 86. Ibid., p. 241. 87. Ibid., pp. 181–2. 88. Ibid., pp. 182, 169. 89. Ibid., pp. 240–1. 90. Ibid., pp. 189, 170. 91. Ibid., p. 247. 92. Ibid., pp. 62, 142, 67. 93. Ibid., pp. 271, 48. 94. Herbert’s copy is among the collection of his Greek and Latin books in the library of Jesus College, Oxford. For a catalogue of the Greek and Latin books in Herbert’s library, see ‘Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Books’, esp. p. 91. 95. See Rossi, Alle fonti del deismo, pp. 90–1, n. 212.

Notes to pages 55–8

149

96. H. G. Wright, ‘An Unpublished Manuscript by Lord Herbert of Cherbury entitled “Religio Laici”’, Modern Language Review, 28 (1933), pp. 295–307. The manuscript is MS 5295 E in the National Library of Wales. 97. Wright ‘An Unpublished Manuscript by Lord Herbert of Cherbury’, p. 300.

4 Charles Blount and His Circle 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

Blount has been neglected in the historiography. Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, p. 194, referred to him as ‘poor Blount’ who wrote ‘a meagre collection of tracts’, and this stereotype long went unchallenged. P. Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), recognized that he was a clandestine publicist, but argued that he was a follower of Hobbes and Montaigne, only incidentally interested in Herbert and not a deist (p. 92). Bonanate places him between libertinism and deism, but only notes the surface meaning of his works. See U. Bonanate, Charles Blount: libertinismo e deismo nel seicento inglese (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972), esp. chs 3 and 4. See also J. A. Redwood, ‘Charles Blount (1654–93): Deism, and English Free Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35:3 ( July–September 1974), pp. 490–8. Redwood treats Blount as a Hobbist (p. 493), and attributes letters by Gildon and other members of his circle to him (p. 496). Cf. Redwood’s Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660– 1750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). For a more recent German study, see K.-J. Walber, Charles Blount (1654–1693), Frühaufklärer: Leben und Werk (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988). Blount also figures in Justin Champion’s fine study, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, and in Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment. See A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (London: J. M. Dent, 1951), Introduction, pp. 55 ff., 92 ff.; C. Hill, ‘Freethinking and Libertinism: The Legacy of the English Revolution’, in Lund (ed.) The Margins of Orthodoxy, pp. 54–70, and Overton’s remarks in the Whitehall Debates of 1648, pp. 168–9. Without denying that there were strong naturalist tendencies as well as fierce criticism of the Scriptures and religious externals, it is important not to secularize thinkers such as Lawrence Clarkson as if they did not sincerely hold mystical and millennial beliefs. Cf. B. Reay and J. F. McGregor, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). T. Blount, Glossiographia (London, 1656). Thomas Blount’s entry suggests that deists were still associated with Socinians in the 1650s. There were many reports of a decline of morality and references to scoffers, raillers and wits who attacked religion. See R. South, Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 3 vols (London, 1692–8), vol 1, pp. 186–7. Hence as late as 1696 Prideaux could write ‘The Word, Deist, I take to signifie no more than One who believes in a God’, and ‘Deism the Religion of One that so believes’. See Prideaux, A Letter to the Deists, p. 7. See T. P. Mayo, Epicurus in England 1650–1725 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970). W. Outram, Twenty Sermons (London, 1682), sig. A5v. The Letters of Saint Evremond, ed. J. Hayward (London: Routledge, 1930). Many Epicureans, however, were not unorthodox or libertine. See R. Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

150 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

Notes to pages 58–62 J. Sergeant, Sure Footing in Christianity, or Rational Discourses on the Rule of Faith (London, 1665), p. 32; and G. Hughes, Sure Footing in Christianity Examined (London, 1668). See G. E. Aylmer, ‘Unbelief in Seventeenth Century England’, in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 22–46. W. Hughes, The Spirit of Prophecy (London, 1679), p. 224. W. Assheton, An Admonition to a Deist (London, 1685), p. 3. See Wilkins, Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion. This work was edited by Tillotson after Wilkins’s death. Cf. J. Spurr, ‘“Rational Religion” in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49:4 (1989), pp. 563–85. See ‘Animadversions on the Treatise De Veritate’, in R. Baxter, More Reasons for the Christian Religion and no Reason against it (London, 1672), pp. 79–172. See E. Stillingfleet, A Letter to a Deist (London, 1677), pp. 11–12. This work was written in 1675. J. Dryden, Religio laici (London, 1683), Preface. Ibid., ll. 43–61. Ibid., ll. 208–10. For detail, see Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought. Dryden’s ‘Systeme of Deisme’ reflected a knowledge of Herbert, but replaced his emphasis on natural law with deism as a system of worship and added a new article emphasizing prayer and praise. Dryden, Religio laici, Preface. See N. Culverwell, An Elegant Discourse of the Light of Nature (London, 1652), pp. 92– 6, 172. C. Blount, ‘Blount’s miscellanea MS’, Blount’s copy-book, 100Ab, Athenaeum, London. C. Leslie, A Short and Easie Method with the Deists (London, 1698), pp. xiii, 2, 7, and The Charge of Socinianism against Dr. Tillotson Considered. For a useful discussion of Tillotson’s liberal views, see O’Higgins, ‘Archbishop Tillotson and the Religion of Nature’. See Blount, ‘Blount’s miscellanea MS’, Athenaeum. See C. Blount, An Appeal from the Country to the City for the Preservation of his Majesties Person, Liberty, Property, and the Protestant Religion (London, 1679), p. 32. See also Sir Roger L’Estrange’s reply, An Answer to the Appeal from the Country to the City (London, 1679). See C. Blount, The Sale of Esau’s Birthright (London, 1679). See T. Harris, P. Seaward and M. Goldie, The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). See C. Gildon, ‘An Account of the Life and Death of the Author’, in The Miscellaneous Works of Charles Blount, ed. C. Gildon (London, 1695). H. Blount, A Voyage into the Levant: A Breife Relation of a Journey (London, 1636), esp. pp. 47–50. Fontenelle’s The Plurality of Worlds was translated in 1688 by Blount’s friend Aphra Behn (1640–89). Despite her Tory and Royalist sympathies, Behn was bitterly anti-clerical and opposed virtue to clerical ritualism. Her play Oroonoko (1688) is sometimes treated as a deistic text. Blount, ‘Blount’s miscellanea MS’, Athenaeum. C. Blount, Oracles of Reason (London, 1693), p. 125. For Blount on Averroes, see ibid., p. 185. For background, see Berti ‘At the Roots of Unbelief ’, and ‘Unmasking the Truth’. See Walber, Charles Blount.

Notes to pages 62–3

151

33. See Pascal, Pensées, no. 556; de Mornay, A Work Concerning the Trueness of the Christian Religion; and Amyraut, Traité des religions. 34. Fontenelle set out a system of natural religion in his Traité de la liberté de l’âme (1743) and gave an account of a society without priests or cult in his History of the Ajaoiens (1680). For discussion, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, ch. 32: ‘The Spinozistic Novel in French’. 35. Locke reviewed the book. See P. van Limborch, Theologia Christiana (Amsterdam 1686); R. H. Popkin, ‘Jewish Anti-Christian Arguments as a Source of Irreligion from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Hunter and Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, pp. 159–81; and R. H. Popkin and G. M. Weiner (eds), Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). See also A. M. Vas Dias, Uriel da Costa: Nieuwe Bijdragen tot diens Levensgesschiedenis (Leiden: Brill, 1936). 36. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment, part II: ‘The Rise of Philosophical Radicalism’. 37. For discussion of Lodewijk Meyer (1621–81), Franciscus van den Ende (1602–74), the Koerbagh brothers and Frederick von Leehof (1642–1713), see Israel, Radical Enlightenment. For Adriaan Koerbagh, see P. H. van Moerkerken, Adriaan Koerbagh (1633–1699): Een Strijder voor het Vrije Denken (Amsterdam, Van Oorschot, 1948); and H. Vandenbossche, Adriaan Koerbagh en Spinoza, Mededelingen van wege het Spinozahuis, 39 (Leiden: Brill, 1978). 38. See E. W. Tschirnhaus, Medicina Mentis (Amsterdam, 1687); and F. W. Stosch, Concordia rationis et fidei (Berlin, 1692). 39. This is argued at length in J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Other interpretations of Stubbe are possible, and his own attitudes may have changed in different decades. Stubbe was also important as a source of Hobbist political thought and for the republican sociological attack on doctors as priests republished by Toland. 40. See P. M. Holt, A Seventeenth-Century Defender of Islam: Henry Stubbe (1632–76) and His Book, Friends of Dr Williams Library, 26th lecture (London: Dr Williams’s Trust, 1972). 41. Stubbe may well have known Sir Henry Blount and had his book on Islam. 42. See J. Glanvill, A Further Discovery of Mr Stubbe in a Brief Reply to his Last Pamphlet against J. G. Glanvill (London, 1671). 43. Jacob treats him as one of the founders of English deism, but his interpretation may be too strong. See Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 72. 44. Boyle attacked the paganizing naturalism of a sect of men who professed Christianity but equated God with the universe. He wrote that ‘there is lately sprung up a sect of men, as well professing Christianity, as pretending to philosophy, who (if I be not misinformed of their doctrine) do very much symbolize with the antient Heathens, and talk much indeed of God, but mean such a one, as is not really distinct from the animated and intelligent universe; but is, on that account, very differing from the true God, that we Christians believe and worship’ (The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. T. Birch, 2nd edn, 6 vols (London, 1772), vol. 5, p. 183). According to Boyle, these men believed in God and in a divine order, but this divine order was immanent in nature. See R. Boyle, Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (London, 1686, written 1661–6); and J. J. Macintosh, ‘Robert Boyle on Epicurean Atheism’, in M. J. Osler (ed.), Atoms, Pneuma and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 197–220.

152

Notes to pages 63–6

45. Beale to Evelyn, 29 April 1681, in Evelyn MSS, letters 110–22, B, f. 146, Christ Church Library, Oxford; and Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 9. 46. The Miscellaneous Works of Charles Blount, ed. Gildon, p. 7. 47. C. Blount, Anima mundi: or, An Historical Narration of the Opinions of the Ancients concerning Man’s Soul after this Life: According to the Unenlightened Nature (Amsterdam, 1678; London, 1679), pp. 55–6. 48. Gildon, ‘An Account of the Life and Death of the Author’. 49. For Berman’s reading of Blount, Toland, Tindal and Collins as atheists, see ‘Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying’, p. 76. 50. Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with the Deists. 51. See The Correspondence of the Rev. Robert Wodrow, ed. T. McCrie, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1842–3). 52. J. Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London, 1872), p. 357. Toland knew Howard and drew on his writings. For Howard, see H. T. Oliver, Sir Robert Howard 1626–1698 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963). 53. The Correspondence of the Rev. Robert Wodrow. 54. Blount may also have produced another broadsheet entitled Memorial Sayings of Thomas Hobbes (1679). His authorship of both works is contested. The Last Sayings may not be by Blount since he quoted from it in his copybook. If so, the works may be by a friend from ‘the Club’ mentioned by John Aubrey. See J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down … Between the Years 1669–1696, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896), vol. 1, p. 356. 55. Blount, Anima mundi, p. 97. 56. See C. Blount, ‘Tracts on Religion’, Department of Printed Books, 873.b.3, British Library; and Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, pp. 84, 91. See also Blount, Oracles of Reason, pp. 104, 160 ff. 57. ‘Blount’s miscellanea MS’, Commonplace Book, p. 56, Athenaeum. Blount commented on Hobbes’s arguments: ‘Providence proved. God asserted. Atheism opposed. Ignorance human.’ These comments do not establish his own views, but they suggest that Blount did not derive his radical views from his reading of Hobbes, at least at this stage. 58. It was later published in London in two editions. 59. Blount, Anima mundi, pp. 26 ff., 89 ff., 99 ff., 104 ff. 60. Ibid., pp. 55–6. 61. Ibid., p. 45. 62. See D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1964); and P. C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 63. Blount, Great is Diana of the Ephesians (London, 1680), p. 3. 64. Ibid., pp. 10, 14, 25–6. 65. Ibid., p. 63. 66. Herbert referred to Apollonius in the Dialogue and in De religione laici, and probably prepared notes on Philostratus’s text. See B. de Beauval, Histoire des ouvrages des savans (1693), pp. 153–6; and the article on Herbert in P. Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (Rotterdam, 1697). Cf. Herbert, De religione laici, ed. Hutcheson, pp. 72–4. 67. C. Blount, The First Two Books of Philostratus, Concerning the Life of Apollonius Tyaneus (London, 1680), pp. 98, 99, 20. 68. These seem to have included the famous ‘three impostors’ manuscript in the Latin version. More generally, see H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England

Notes to pages 66–77

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

153

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Blount may also have seen the French version, the so-called Traité. This work drew on Spinoza, Hobbes and Vanini’s De arcanis to identify God and nature. It also used material from La Mothe le Vayer’s Vertu des payens (1641) to reopen issues raised in Origen’s Contra Celsum. Similarly, it used Charron and Naudé to promote claims about the political origins of religion. The Traité attacked anthropomorphic ideas of God and revealed religion. It was probably written by the Dutch diplomat Jan van Vroesen (1672–1715). See Vermij, ‘The English Deists and the Traité’, and J. A. I. Champion ‘Legislators, Impostors, and the Politic Origins of Religion: English Theories of “Imposture” from Stubbe to Toland’, in Berti et al. (eds), Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought, pp. 333–56. Blount drew attention to authors and arguments found in this text. Cf. Emerson, ‘English Deism 1670–1755’, pp. 69–70. C. Blount, Miracles No Violations of the Laws of Nature (London, 1683), p. 31. See T. Browne, Miracles: Works Above or Contrary to Nature: or, An Answer to a Late Translation out of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologioc-Politicus (London, 1683). Blount knew Dryden well. He had written a defence of his Conquest of Granada and later translated Lucian for him. See Mr Dryden Vindicated (London, 1673). See also Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, chs 3 and 4; and S. Budick, Dryden and the Abyss of Light (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), chs 5 and 6, and Appendices. Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary. C. Blount, Religio laici Written in a Letter to John Dryden Esq. (London, 1683), pp. 49–50. Ibid., ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’, ll. 46–61. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1689), pp. i, iii, 16. See G. S. J. Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late SeventeenthCentury England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Cf. A. Dupront, Pierre-Daniel Huet et l’exégèse comparatiste au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie E. Leroux, 1930). Blount, Oracles of Reason, pp. 128 ff. See D. S. Katz, ‘Isaac Vossius and the English Biblical Critics’, in Popkin and Vanderjagt (eds), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, pp. 142–84. Rochester was a libertine who posited a God only in the sense of a vast power who wrought everything by necessity. See G. Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester (London, 1693), p. 63. He also seems to have belittled the role of reason in religion. See S. Ellenzweig, ‘The Faith of Unbelief: Rochester’s “Satyre”, Deism, and Religious Freethinking in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 44:1 (2005), pp. 27–45. Blount, Oracles of Reason, pp. 164–5 ff. Blount may have also taken account of the Latin version of the three impostors text in this letter. See Champion ‘Legislators, Impostors, and the Politic Origins of Religion’. Blount, Oracles of Reason, p. 126. Ibid., pp. 160 ff., 164 ff., 117 ff., 126–7. Ibid., pp. 152–3. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., pp. 212 ff. Ibid., pp. 169 ff., 114 ff., 106 ff., 110 ff. Gildon was allegedly reconverted to Christianity by Charles Leslie’s A Short and Easie Method with the Deists.

154

Notes to pages 71–5

90. C. Gildon, Miscellaneous Poems (London, 1692), p. 27. 91. See J. W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). He held that reason could arrive at the truths of natural religion, but he denied that reason could judge the content of revelation. Boyle was also concerned to defend a mechanist philosophy of the sciences against the classical notions of God as the Soul of the World or plastic nature. 92. See C. Gildon, Post-Boy Robb’d of His Mail, 2 vols (London, 1692–3), vol. 1, pp. 91–3; vol. 2, pp. 214, 230, 232, 240, 252, 256, 286, 289, 469–72. The reference to the medieval biblical commentator Rabbi Abu Ezra (1092–1167) may indicate a Spinozist connection. 93. Blount, Oracles of Reason, pp. 187 ff. 94. Ibid., pp. 181 ff. 95. Ibid., pp. 193 ff. 96. Ibid., Preface. 97. Ibid., Preface. 98. Ibid., Preface. 99. Ibid., Preface, p. 192. 100. See Blount, ‘Tracts on Religion’, British Library. 101. Blount, Oracles of Reason, p. 87. 102. Ibid., pp. 88–96. 103. Ibid., p. 89. 104. Ibid., pp. 92–6. 105. Ibid., pp. 195–209. This letter also apparently circulated in manuscript. See Blount, ‘Tracts on Religion’, British Library. A.W.’s identity remains unknown and several possible identifications have been proposed. For an attempt to identify him with Dryden, see Budick, Dryden and the Abyss of Light, Appendix. David Berman has suggested that the work is by Blount himself, and noted that part of it appears in other works by him. See D. Berman, ‘A Disputed Deist Classic’, Library, 6th series, 7 (1985), pp. 58–9. Another possible candidate is Albert Warren, who wrote An Apology for the Discourse of Humane Reason (London, 1680). In any event, Lowde claimed to know ‘A.W.’, and to have often heard him talk. See J. Lowde, Moral Essays (London, 1699), p. 113. Cf. Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, pp. 91 ff. For the wider debate about the use of reason in religion extending from Martin Clifford to William Popple, see G. Tarantino, Martin Clifford 1624–1677: deismo e tolleranza nell’Inghiliterra della Restaurazione (Florence: Olschki Editore, 2000). 106. Lowde, Moral Essays, p. 197. 107. Ibid., pp. 195–6. 108. Ibid., pp. 195, 201, 204. 109. Ibid., p. 196. 110. Ibid., pp. 197–8. 111. Ibid., p. 199. 112. Ibid., p. 198. Sir Charles Wolseley replied to contemporary religious rationalism in The Unreasonableness of Atheism made Manifest (London, 1669) and The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief (London, 1672). Wolseley dealt with those who pretended to be ‘rational Men’, but also cast doubt on Christianity or at best gestured towards a theistic moralism. See the pamphlets by A.W. and Matthew Clifford, A Treatise of Human Reason (London, 1675). Cf. G. Rust, Discourse on the Use of Reason in Matters of Religion (London, 1683).

Notes to pages 75–7

155

113. For example, Josiah King noted that Blount believed that the world was eternal. See J. King, Mr. Blount’s Oracles of Reason Examined and Answered (Exeter, 1698), pp. 27–8. The most exhaustive reply was William Nicholls’s A Conference with a Theist, 4 vols (London, 1696–9). 114. J. Harris, The Atheistical Objection against the Being of a God and His Attributes Fairly Considered and Refuted (London, 1698), pp. 34, 51. Harris had already focused on the claim that human beings can have ‘no Idea’ of God in The Atheist’s Objection that we can have No Idea of God, Refuted (London, 1698) and Immorality and Pride the Great Causes of Atheism (London, 1698). 115. Prideaux, A Letter to the Deists, p. 157. Prideaux also made the link between republicanism and ‘atheism’ and alleged that ‘Republicans talked for Atheism in the coffee houses’, see The Letters of Humphrey Prideaux, ed. M. Thompson (London, 1875), p. 162. 116. F. Gastrell, The Certainty and Necessity of Religion in General (London, 1697). 117. William Nicholls declared ‘Now the Objections [to Christianity] which are urged in this Dialogue, are part of them taken from the Discourse of some Theistical [deistical] men I have casually conversed with; but are mostly taken out of a Book lately published, called Oracles of Reason, the first Book I ever saw which did openly avow Infidelity’. See A Conference with a Theist, vol. 1, p. vi. 118. Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, pp. xiii, 2, 7. 119. See S. J. Barnett, Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism (London: Macmillan, 1999). 120. See N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 2. 121. For Hobbes’s religious views, see A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes. 122. Debates about Spinoza’s religious views will never cease, partly because there is evidence to support philosophical, Judaizing and radical interpretations. See S. Pines, ‘Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Jewish Philosophical Tradition’, in I. Twersky and B. Septimus (eds), Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 499–521; Y. Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); R. Mason, The God of Spinoza: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); T. Verbeek, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, Exploring ‘the Will of God’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); R. H. Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth Century Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Berti et al. (eds), Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought; and J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (eds), The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays in Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time (Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1994). For an outstanding reading which is stimulating further research, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Israel’s reading of Spinoza and his friends, however, does not address the complexity of Spinoza’s philosophical ideas, including his doctrine of infinite modes and his philosophical theory of imagination. It also passes over the peculiarities of Dutch versions of republicanism. See R. Prokhovnik, Spinoza and Republicanism (London: Palgrave, 2004).

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Notes to pages 79–82

5 Three Writers 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Despite reports that republicans or ‘deists’ set up for ‘atheism’ in the coffee houses, disbelief was actively repressed and the freethinker Thomas Aikenhead was executed for anti-Trinitarian views in Scotland. See M. Hunter, ‘Aikenhead the Atheist: The Context and Consequences of Articulate Irreligion in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Hunter and Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, pp. 221–54. The seventeenth-century sense of ‘atheist’ was summed up by Francis Gastrell: ‘whoever holds such an Opinion which exempts him from all Obligation or duty to a Superior being, or cuts off the Expectation of Rewards and Punishments’. See Gastrell, The Certainty and Necessity of Religion in General, pp. vii, 251. R. Bentley, The Folly of Atheism and What is Now Called Deism (London, 1692), p. 6. Molyneaux to Locke, 18 April 1693, in The Works of John Locke Esq., 2nd edn, 3 vols (London, 1722), vol. 2, pp. 514–15. C. Gildon, The Deist’s Manual: or, A Rational Enquiry into the Christian Religion (London, 1705); Nicholls, A Conference With a Theist. See also King Mr. Blount’s Oracles of Reason Examined and Answered; J. Bradley, An Impartial View of the Truths of Christianity (London, 1699); Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, pp. xiii, 2, 7; Prideaux, A Letter to the Deists, esp. pp. 3, 157; The True Nature of Imposture Truly Represented in the Life of Mahomet (London, 1697); Harris, The Atheistical Objections against the Being of a God, pp. 34, 51; and Nicholls, A Conference with a Theist, vol. 1, p. vi. See the report of Convocation, T. Smith, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Growth of Infidelity (London, 1705), p. 3. John Edwards, for example, declared that ‘At this day Atheism itself is slyly called Deism by those who indeed are Atheists’. See J. Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism (London, 1695), p. 136. Similarly, Richard Bentley declared that ‘the deists’ understood God to be no more than some inanimate matter in his The Folly of Atheism. Quoted in Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, p. 106. Nye, A Discourse Concerning Natural and Revealed Religion. W. Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (London, 1696), pp. 10–11; and A. Horneck, ‘Introduction’, in B. Pictet, An Antidote Against a Careless Indifferency in Matters of Religion (London, 1694). For discussion, see J. E. Force, ‘Introduction’, in W. Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (1696), Augustan Reprint Society, no. 261 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. iii. See Force, ‘Samuel Clarke’s Four Categories of Deism’. S. Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: More Particularly in Answer to Mr. Hobbes, Spinoza, and their Followers (London, 1705), pp. 159, 164, 167, 169–70. Clark provides the classic argument for this view. His sympathies are so strongly with the English Church that he tends to accept the judgements of High Church writers such as Charles Leslie at face value. Clark treats deism as a distinct theological belief. On his account, deists were heterodox and often associated with licence. Further, their politics arose from their heterodoxy. Clark also exaggerates the ‘heterodoxy’ of the Dissenters. See Clark, English Society, especially ch. 4. See Gildon, Post-Boy Robb’d of His Mail. Stillingfleet declared that the principles of natural religion (the being of God, the immortality of the soul, providence, free will, and a future state of rewards and punishment)

Notes to pages 82–3

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

157

were ‘plain, easy and few’, even though they tended to become corrupted by polytheism, idolatry and speculative metaphysics, The Works of Dr Edward Stillingfleet, 6 vols (London, 1710), vol. 3, p. 382. John Wilkins, the Bishop of Chester, attempted to prove the reasonableness of the principles of natural religion in On the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion. He referred to ‘that recognition and science of the divine’ which every person ‘might know … by the correct principles of Reason, improved by Consideration and Experience’ (p. 3a). See Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund, pp. 85–93. More generally, see E. M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism, Socinianism and its Antecedents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947). Given these associations, Toland and Collins may well have seen Des Périers’s Cymbalum mundi, which Prosper Marchand edited in 1711 and which was translated into English in 1712. It is less clear how far Toland was indebted to German authors. A range of German freethinkers had some of his works, including Theodor Lau (1670– 1740), the author of Meditationes philosophicae de Deo, Mundo et Homine (c. 1717). Lau was a hermeticist for whom God and nature were the same. See also G. Arnold, Unpartheyische Kirchen und Ketzerhistorie, 4 vols (Frankfurt, 1699–1700); and Stosch, Concordia rationis et fidei. For excellent discussion of German trends, see Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund. There is evidence that heterodox Dutch and French works were held in at least some British private libraries. Stillingfleet’s private library included all Spinoza’s works, Meyer’s Philosophia, Kuyper’s Arcana atheismi revelata, Wittich’s Anti-Spinoza, Bredenburg’s Enervatio and Yvon’s L’impieté convainçue. See S. Hutton, ‘Edward Stillingfleet and Spinoza’, in van Bunge and Klever (eds), Disguised and Overt Spinozism, pp. 261–74. The paper Hermes of Rotterdam carried such a report in the 1720s. Margaret Jacob documents these fascinating connections, but probably over-interprets them at times. See Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 195. Collins to Levier, 1 October 1713, Marchand MSS, 5, 1. See Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, pp. 158–9. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 193. Toland and Collins were close to Pierre Desmaizeaux, who was probably a Mason linked to a lodge at the Rainbow Coffee House attended by French refugees. There were persistent rumours from the 1690s to the early 1720s that the ‘deists’ were followers of Spinoza. Thus, for example, William Wotton attacked Toland as a Spinozist in A Letter to Eusebia (London, 1704). Richard Blackmore also portrayed the ‘deists’ as followers of Spinoza and Hobbes in Creation: A Philosophical Poem (London, 1712). Similarly, John Howe attacked Spinoza in ‘the Epicurean Deism’ in The Living Temple (1702). William Carroll was convinced that Hobbes and Spinoza were the real inspiration of Locke and his followers. See W. Carroll, Atheism Discover’d (London, 1706). On the Spinozist connection, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment. There can be no doubt that Toland was influenced by Spinoza’s biblical criticism. However, Toland criticized Spinoza’s account of how matter came into motion and his treatment of infinity and space. He rejected any absolute space distinct from matter (Letters to Serena (London, 1704), pp. 182–3) and attempted to show that Spinoza’s whole system was ‘groundless’ because he took motion to be only local. Rosalyn Colie suggested that the Rights of the Christian Church was an adaptation of a Dutch Spinozist work, Lucii antistii constantis de jure ecclesiasticorum (1665), which may have been written by Lodewijk Meyer. See R. Colie, ‘Spinoza and the Early English

158

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

Notes to pages 83–4 Deists’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20:1 (1959), pp. 23–46, and ‘Spinoza in England 1665–1730’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107 (1963), pp. 183–219. For Spinoza on the Bible, see R. H. Popkin ‘Some New Light on the Roots of Spinoza’s Science of Bible Study’, in M. Grene and D. Nails (eds), Spinoza and the Sciences (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), pp. 171–88, and ‘Spinoza and Bible Scholarship’, in Force and Popkin (eds), The Books of Nature and Scripture, pp. 1–20. Toland seems to have been more sympathetic to Spinoza’s views some years later in Origines judaicae (London, 1709) and implied that ‘Spinozist’ was a modern term for ‘Pantheist’. Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. Margaret Jacob exaggerates the radicalism of these writers and seems to ignore the elevated social positions of Blount, Collins and Tindal. She overplays the connection between Newtonianism and Whig ideology and makes advocates of oligarchy into proto-revolutionaries. See Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment and Living the Enlightenment. For a corrective, see Clark, English Society. For English republicanism, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies’, in J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971), pp. 104–47; D. Wootton, ‘Introduction: The Republican Tradition: From Commonwealth to Common Sense’, in D. Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 1–41 and M. A. Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 209–31. It is not clear that it is useful to contrast Roman Whigs with more radical members of the Calves Head Club. Toland, for example, was connected with both the Calves Head Club, founded by Milton, and with Roman Whigs such as Andrew Fletcher, Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard and Walter Moyle. Collins is alleged to have given Locke a book on Free Masonry and was a friend of John Asgill (1659–1738), an anti-clerical materialist and allegedly the warden of a Masonic lodge. Toland was rumoured to belong to Rosicrucian lodges, had in his possession an alleged record of a meeting of the Knights of Jubilation, and almost certainly attended secret meetings of some kind with Collins. Tindal had contact with Rousset de Missy, a prominent Free Mason based in Holland. For the record of the meeting of the Knights of Jubilation, to which Toland was not a signatory, see Add. MS 4295, ff. 18–19, British Library. Although Margaret Jacobs’s work has been criticized in detail, she is right to stress that there may have been a link between some of these writers and Masonry. See Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment and Living the Enlightenment. Even Annet used the Masonic emblem of the all-seeing eye of reason. See W. Whiston, Mr Whiston’s Memoirs (London, 1749). In an exceptionally careful and well-crafted study, Champion argues that they wished to establish, following Harrington, a civil religion that would inculcate virtue and that they were profoundly religious, even though they held that all religions were man-made. He sees them as attempting to remodel a religion corrupted by priestcraft. See Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, pp. 234–6. Margaret Jacob, in contrast, sees these writers as radical republican Whigs, but this is overstated. See G. Berthold, John Toland und der Monismus der Gegenwart (Heidelberg, 1876); A. Lantoine, Un précurseur de la franc-maconnerie John Toland (1670–1722) (Paris: Nourry, 1927); F. H. Heinemann, Prologemena to a Toland Bibliography, Notes and

Notes to pages 84–6

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

159

Queries, 185 (1943), pp. 182–6, ‘John Toland and the Age of Reason’, Archiv für Philosophie, 4 (1950), pp. 35–66; and ‘Toland and the Newtonian Ideology’, Warburg Journal, 32 (1969), pp. 307–31; and, an important exception, Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, ch. 2. Toland’s religious identity remains controversial. Sullivan, in John Toland and the Deist Controversy, took Toland to be a Christian and interpreted deism as rational theology or a term to cover the revision of traditional Christian formulas, and so saw deists as converging with Anglicans, Socinians and Unitarians. Likewise, Reedy argued in ‘Socinians, John Toland, and the Anglican Rationalists’, p. 289, that his deism was rooted in a variation of Socinian thought. For a different reading, see R. R. Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career of John Toland (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). See also G. Carabelli, Tolandiana: materiali bibliografici per lo studio dell’opera e della fortuna di John Toland (1670–1722) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), A. Santucci (ed.), Filosofia e cultura nel settecento britannico, 1.: Fonti e connessioni continentali: John Toland e il deismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000); G. Brykman (ed.), ‘John Toland (1670–1722) et la crise de conscience européene’, Revue de synthèse, 2–3 (1995), and P. McGuinness, A. Harrison and R. Kearney (eds), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997). For an outstanding study which deserves much more attention than it has received, see Champion, Republican Learning. Champion demonstrates that Toland was not a marginal figure, but a politician in contact with elites shaping national politics, whose writings were embedded in the everyday conflicts of political life (p. 244). He emphasizes Toland’s role in republics of learning made up of books, libraries, friends and conversations and documents his different self-presentations to different audiences. H. F. Nicholl, ‘John Toland: Religion without Mystery’, Hermathena (Summer 1965), pp. 54–68, esp. p. 58. Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) was a Remonstrant theologian who insisted that the right use of reason led us to accept revelation. Le Clerc advocated critical methods, but his rationalism had a Platonic character. See M. I. Klauber, ‘Between Protestant Orthodoxy and Rationalism: Fundamental Articles in the Early Career of Jean Le Clerc’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), pp. 611–36. Significantly, in the early 1690s Toland worked with John Aubrey in Oxford on a range of historical inquiries, including the origin of the Druids. Aubrey was an anti-clerical rationalist who cited both Herbert and Cicero. Aubrey argued for a form of natural religion based on God’s works, but he was an occultist with extensive esoteric connections. See J. Aubrey, Lives of Eminent Men (London, 1813). This is not the standard reading. Frederick Beiser, for example, reads the book as Socinian, sincere and exoteric, and as taking the argument only one step further than Locke (The Sovereignty of Reason, pp. 248, 256). McGuinness et al. (eds), John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 16. J. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (London, 1695), pp. 1–2, 26–7. Margaret Jacob suggests that Locke had seen Toland’s manuscript before publication. See Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, pp. 214–15. John Freke seems to have sent Locke some of his drafts. See Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ch. 3, pp. 15–19; and J. W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), chs 2 and 5. Locke distinguished between propositions above reason and propositions contrary

160

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Notes to pages 86–7 to reason which were inconsistent with, or irreducible to, our clear and distinct ideas. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. iv, xvii, 23. Locke went some of the way in this direction when he argued that no proposition could be received as divine revelation if it was contradictory to our clear intuitive knowledge in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The danger in Locke’s views had not gone unnoticed. Stillingfleet was concerned by Locke’s fideism and modified his philosophy of religion after the appearance of Locke’s Essay and argued, against Hobbes and Locke, that faith was an intrinsic part of rationality. See S. Hutton, ‘Science, Philosophy, and Atheism: Edward Stillingfleet’s Defence of Religion’, in Popkin and Vanderjagt (eds), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, pp. 102–20. Moreover, the later Locke may have been an Arian and clearly favoured free inquiry in matters of religion. See Nuovo’s ‘Locke’s Christology as a Key to Understanding his Philosophy’. McGuinness et al. (eds), John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious, sect. 1, ch. 4. Ibid., p. 133. J. Locke, Letter to the ... Bishop of Worcester, in The Works of John Locke, 12th edn, 9 vols (London, 1824), vol. 4, p. 29. Locke’s relationship to deism has been much exaggerated, see S. G. Hefelbower, The Relation of John Locke to English Deism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1918); and, much more satisfactory, Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas. S. H. Daniel, ‘Toland’s Semantic Pantheism’, in McGuinness et al. (eds), John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious, pp. 303–12. Ibid. Ibid. See R. Howard, The History of Religion (London, 1694), pp. 22, 53 ff. McGuinness et al. (eds), John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious, pp. 96 ff. Ibid., pp. 158 ff., 168. This is partly supported by Toland’s subsequent An Apology for Mr. Toland (London, 1697). Indeed, Christianity Not Mysterious may have been financed in part by the Presbyterian Heads of Agreement. G. Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, A Short Discourse upon the Reasonableness of Men’s Having a Religion or Worship of God, in The Works of George Villiers, 2 vols (London, 1715), vol. 2, p. 202; and W. Penn, A Defence of the Duke of Buckingham against the Answer to his Book and the Reply to his Letter (London, 1685), pp. 5–6. For discussion of the reception, see Champion, Republican Learning. See J. Gailhard, The Blasphemous Socinian Heresie Disproved and Confuted (London, 1697), pp. 315–44. See R. Willis, The Occasional Paper, No. 3 (London, 1696); and O. Hill, A Rod for the Back of Fools (London, 1702). W. Payne, The Mystery of the Christian Faith and of the Blessed Trinity Vindicated (London, 1697), pp. 18–23, 33–4. ‘Reflexions upon Mr. Toland’s Book’, in Willis, The Occasional Paper. T. Becconsall, The Grounds and Foundation of Natural Religion, Discover’d (London, 1698), pp. 67–8. P. Browne, A Letter in Answer to a Book Entitled Christianity Not Mysterious (London, 1697), p. 31. T. Beverley, Christianity the Great Mystery (London, 1696), p. 13.

Notes to pages 88–90 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

161

McGuinness et al. (eds), John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious. Toland, An Apology for Mr. Toland, p. 10. Browne, A Letter in Answer, p. 8. Nye denied that the Unitarians were deists in The Agreement of the Unitarians with the Catholick Church (London, 1697). Thomas Firmin broke with him and published An Account of Mr. Firmin’s Religion (London, 1698) to clarify his position, while Edmund Elys disassociated the Quakers from his views in A Letter to the Hon. Sir Robert Howard (London, 1696). Extended editions of this work appeared in 1736 and 1747. There was a considerable literature on the Canon, including a translation of L. E. Du Pin’s Table universelle des auteurs héretiques du XVI et XVII siècles, as A Complete History of the Canon and Writers of the Books of the Old and New Testaments, 2 vols (London, 1699–1700). Cf. W. Cave, Primitive Christianity (London, 1673); and W. Wake, The Genuine Epistles of the Apostolic Fathers (London, 1693). Amyntor, or A Defence of Milton’s Life (London, 1699), pp. 49 ff., 64, 80. Ibid., pp. 25, 31–2. Similarly, Blount and Gildon used Bruno against Christianity before Toland. See S. Nye, An Historical Account, and Defence, of the Canon of the New Testament (London, 1700); J. Richardson The Canon of the New Testament Vindicated (London, 1700); and S. Clarke, Some Reflections on that Part of a Book Called Amyntor, or, The Defence of Milton’s Life (London, 1699). Vindicius liberius (London, 1702), pp. 81, 106. See J. Toland, Miscellaneous Works of Mr John Toland, 2 vols (London, 1747), vol. 2, pp. 122–3. J. Toland, Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London, 1718), p. xiv. For Toland’s orthodox profession of faith, see Miscellaneous Works, vol. 2, pp. 303–4. For Harrington’s political and religious thought, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); M. A. Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 197–222; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Introduction’, in J. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and B. Worden, ‘James Harrington and The Commonwealth of Oceana 1656’, in Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society, pp. 82–110. J. Toland, The State Anatomy of Great Britain (London, 1717), pp. 27–8. A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, ed. P. Desmaizeaux, 2 vols (London, 1726), vol. 2, p. 146. J. Toland, Reasons for Naturalising the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1714). For discussions of Toland’s politics, see A. Seeber, John Toland als politischer Schriftsteller (Fribourg: Schranberg, 1933); C. Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), ch. 4; Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, ch. 9; and Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, ch. 2. Cf. C. Davenant, A True

162

78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

Notes to pages 90–1 Picture of a Modern Whig (London, 1701). For an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced account, see Champion, Republican Learning. Champion argues that Toland’s writings should be located in the context of a ‘crisis’ of English political culture after 1689 (p. 238). J. Toland, Anglia libera (London, 1701), and The Art of Governing by Parties (London, 1701). Champion, Republican Learning. See E. Ward, The Secret History of the Calves Head Club or the Republican Unmasqu’d (London, 1703); and J. Swift, T—l—nd’s Invitation to Dismal to Dine with the Calves Head Club (London, 1712). See Champion, Republican Learning. J. Toland, The Life of John Milton (London, 1698), p. 152. Milton himself arrived at unorthodox views such as mortalism and the notion that all things are ‘of God’ and created out of him, but he did so on the basis of scrupulous exegesis of the Scriptures. See G. N. Conklin, Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton (New York: Octagon Books, 1972). Once again Toland remade his subject for his own purposes. He concealed Harrington’s millenarianism and may have doctored The Mechanics of Nature, which he attributed to Harrington, setting out a hylozoic process philosophy for which nature was divine, and matter, spirit and soul were related. He also republished leading republican writers such as Sydney, Nedham and Neville. A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, ed. Desmaizeaux, vol. 2, p. 249. Toland, The Art of Governing by Parties, pp. 100, 165–6. J. Toland, The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments (London, 1695), pp. 3–5. J. Toland, The Militia Reformed (London, 1698). A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, ed. Desmaizeaux, vol. 2, p. 251. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 253. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 256. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 249. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 248. See J. Toland, The Memorial of the State of England (London, 1705), and his important attack on Harley, The Art of Restoring (London, 1714). Toland defended the Act of Succession in Anglia libera, and went with Lord Maclesfield to present the Act to the Electress. He also wrote Reasons for Addressing his Majesty to Invite into England the Electress Dowager and the Electral Prince of Hanover (London, 1703), and The Funeral Elegy and Character of the Late Princess Sophia (London, 1715), and translated The Elector’s Declaration … In Favour of His Protestant Subjects (London, 1707). See, for example, J. Toland, Mr. Toland’s Reflections on Dr. Sacheverell’s Sermon (London, 1710), and High Church Displayed (London, 1711). A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, ed. Desmaizeaux, vol. 2, p. 453. See also J. Toland, The Judgement of Dr. Prideaux Concerning the Murder of Julius Caesar … Maintained (London, 1721), A Defence of Our Present Happy Establishment and the Administration Vindicated (London, 1722), and Enquiry into the Causes of Our Present Disaffection (London, 1723). For Trenchard and Gordon as republican Whigs, see M. McMahon, The Radical Whigs, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon:

Notes to pages 91–3

163

Libertarian Loyalists to the New House of Hanover (New York: University Press of America, 1990). 97. J. Toland, Clito, or A Poem on the Force of Eloquence (London, 1700). 98. Cicero held that there was a true unchanging and everlasting law of universal application, which was in accord with nature. Here Cicero’s De natura deorum, De republica and De divinatione were the crucial texts. Toland prepared an edition of Cicero’s De legibus, book 2, and De divinitatione, and proposed to bring out an edition of his works. See Cicero, illustratus dissertatio philologico-critica (London, 1712). Likewise, Collins may have been largely responsible for the 1741 annotated edition of Cicero’s Treatise on the Nature of the Gods. 99. Champion emphasizes that Toland was concerned all his life with the reform of the Anglican Church and that his ‘public Christianity’ was more than a pretence. He criticizes those who set up a dualism between Toland’s public posturing and his private beliefs, pointing out that his ‘Pantheist’ identity was public, and had a reform of public opinion dimension. See J. A. I. Champion, ‘John Toland: The Politics of Pantheism’, Revue de synthèse, 116 (1995), pp. 259–80. 100. For Tyssot de Patot, see D. R. McKee, Symon Tyssot de Patot and the Seventeenth Century Background of Critical Deism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941); and A. Rosenberg, Tyssot de Patot and his Work, 1655–1738 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972). 101. For the range of atheistical and anti-Christian material available in this manuscript, see T. Gregory, Theophrastus redivivus: erudizione e ateismo nel seicento (Napoli: Morano, 1979). 102. Add. MS 4295, ff. 17–20, 66–9, British Library. Toland’s collection of manuscripts included: Life of Jordanus Bruno, Revelation No Rule, Piece of Ye Roman Education, History of the Canon, A Letter about Error, Revelation No Rule, The Cloud and Pillar, Toland’s Perigrinans, Translation of Bruno’s Assera Dialogues, The Creed not Apostolick, Specimen of Ye History of Ye Druids, Shafetsbury’s Letters, Part of Ye History of Ye Druids, Bruno Sermon. 103. At the end of the seventeenth century the Royal Society defended both general and special providence, although there were concerns about the plausibility of the Biblical account of creation and the flood. Thomas Burnet, the Master of Charterhouse, attempted to explain the Creation in mechanistic terms that did not involve miraculous divine intervention in his The Sacred Theory of the Earth (London, 1681). Burnet’s treatment of Genesis, which seemed to retreat from extraordinary providence to secondary causes, provoked an outcry. John Woodward, England’s leading geologist, attacked him in An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth (London, 1695), arguing that the state of the earth was only possible if God had intervened as the Scriptures claimed and construing the existence of fossils as evidence for the flood. 104. L.P., Two Essays Sent in a Letter from Oxford to a Nobleman in London (London, 1695). This work is now usually attributed to Toland. There is no absolute proof that Toland was the author, but it seems probable. 105. Toland, Clito, or A Poem on the Force of Eloquence. 106. See S. H. Daniel’s Toland entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 107. Pantheisticon also appeared in Holland in 1720 under the title Cosmopoli by Junius Edganesius.

164

Notes to pages 93–6

108. Toland originally associated Pantheism with Pan-theism i.e. with indifference in matters of speculation and with the recognition that human beings would always differ in their opinions. See Socinianism Truly Stated (London, 1705). Toland referred in his correspondence to the pantheistic opinion of those who believed in no other being but the universe, but he postponed openly identifying himself with this opinion prior to Pantheisticon or the Form of Celebrating the Socratic Society (1720), trans. W. Lewis (London, 1751). Toland himself claimed to be the leader of a sect and his biographer, Desmaizeaux, accepted that a Socratic Society existed and had branches throughout Europe. 109. It may be a mistake to overstate the links between Toland’s pantheism and Bruno. Toland famously acquired a copy of Bruno’s Lo spaccio della bestia trionfante in 1696, but he read his own views into Bruno’s text and took him to be attacking all religious systems. 110. See S. Piggot, The Druids (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p. 157; Add. MS 4295, ff. 18–19, British Library; J. S. Spink, ‘La diffusion des idées materialistes et anti-religieuses au début du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 44 (1937), pp. 248–55, on p. 248; and the anonymous The Grand Mystery of the Free Masons Discover’d (London, 1725). 111. J. Toland, Adeisidaemon sive Titus Livius a superstitione vindicatus … annexae sunt ejusdem Origines judaicae (The Hague, 1709), pp. 15–17. 112. Toland, Pantheisticon, pp. 17–18. Toland may have believed in God at the end of his life, but Champion argues that the term ‘deist’ does not capture his strategy or character (Republican Learning, p. 251). 113. Toland, Pantheisticon, p. 108. 114. J. Toland, ‘Clidophorus: or, Of the Esoteric and Exoteric Philosophy’, in Tetradymus (London, 1720). 115. Champion has reasserted the republican dimensions of the book. See his Republican Learning, p. 241. For early Presbyterian and possibly Masonic connections in Dublin, see P. McGuinness, ‘Tolerant Sectarian: The Peculiar Contradictions of John Toland’, Times Literary Supplement, 48789 (27 September 1996), pp. 14–15. 116. J. Toland, Hodegus, or the Pillar of Cloud and Fire (London, 1720). 117. For fascinating material on of the Dutch background, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment. 118. See his ‘Clidophorus’. This comportment was not necessarily unacceptable to liberal Protestants, especially if they held less orthodox views themselves. Newton, for example, professed both kinds of doctrines and there is evidence that Locke also distinguished between his public persona and his more private speculations. On Newton’s theology see R. H. Popkin, ‘Newton’s Biblical Theology and his Theological Physics’, in P. B. Scheurer and G. Debrock (eds), Newton’s Scientific and Philosophical Legacy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 81–97, and ‘Newton as a Bible Scholar’, in Force and Popkin (eds), Essays on the Context, Nature and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology, pp. 103–18. Seventeen-century intellectuals also sometimes engaged in secretive practices even in their diaries and commonplace books. R. Yeo, ‘A Philosopher and his Notebooks: John Locke (1632–1704) on Memory and Information’, Professorial Lecture, Griffith University, 2004. 119. Blount, Oracles of Reason. 120. J. Toland, Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London, 1718), pp. 44–65. Toland found this view of Christianity in an Irish manuscript of the four gospels. He also attempted to vindicate pre-Christian Celtic learning and implied that the antiquities of the British Isles were older than classical sources.

Notes to pages 96–8

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121. While he was in Holland in 1708 Toland found a ‘new Gospel’ which he believed to be the ancient Gospel of Barnabus. Toland believed that this ‘new Gospel’ cast important light on the original Christian scheme. Toland did not publish his account of this ‘new Gospel’ until 1718, although there were rumours from about 1712 that the deists claimed to have a Gospel of their own. Toland also wrote a shorter French version of Nazarenus which he presented to Prince Eugène of Savoy. In this version he was much less cautious and dropped his Christian persona. See J. A. I. Champion, ‘Introduction’, in J. Toland, Nazarerus (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1999). 122. There were parallels between Toland’s work on the Nazarenes and the work of Johann Georg Wachter (1675–1753). Wachter also wrote on the Essenes and the origins of Christianity (De primordiis Christianae religionis, elucidarius cabalisticus, origines juris naturalis (1703), see the version edited by W. Schröder (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995)). Like Toland, Wachter believed that the primitive Christians had professed a rationalist perennial philosophy. He defended Spinoza’s metaphysics as a modern version of the Jewish Kabbala. He may have written the anonymous tract Symbolum sapientiae recycling the Cymbalum mundi. 123. Toland was intimate with the individuals who produced the notorious Traité des trios imposteurs and there were many parallels between his work and its arguments. Nazarenus created a further storm of protest in England. For the main replies, see T. Mangey, Remarks on Nazarenus (London, 1718); J. Paterson, Anti-Nazarenus (London, 1718); T. Brett, Tradition Necessary to Explain and Interpret the Holy Scriptures (London, 1718). Toland insisted that he was a Christian and replied to Mangey insisting that he believed in the religion truly taught by Jesus and the apostles stripped of all fabulous or superstitious disguises, free from all human additions, mixtures and invention. For the European discussion of Toland’s ideas, see J. de La Faye, Defensio religionis … contra duas dissertationes J. Tolandi (n.p., 1709); E. L. Benoist, Mélange de remarques sur les deux dissertations de M. Toland (Delft, 1712); J. L. Mosheim, Vindiciae antiquae Christianorum disciplinae (Cologne, 1720), and his account of Toland’s life and writings, ‘De vita, fatis, et scriptis Joannis Tolandi commentatio’, prefaced to the second edition (Hamburg, 1722). 124. Joseph Morgan, an English Free Mason, wrote Mahometanism Fully Explained (London, 1725) and this work was published by Toland’s friend William Meares. Later he translated A Philosophical Dissertation on Death by Radicati. 125. Toland is sometimes identified as the author of Averreana (London, 1695), a collection of letters from an Arabic philosopher arguing that true religion was the same at all times and places, and A Letter from an Arabian Physician (London, 1706). It is striking that the association between deism and Arabic medicine was still current at the end of the seventeenth century. 126. See Toland, Origines judaicae, p. 64, and Nazarenus, pp. 164, and Appendix I, pp. 1 and 6. 127. Toland, Nazarenus, Appendix I, p. 2. 128. Ibid., Appendix I, pp. 109–114, 117. 129. For brilliant discussion, see A. Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 130. For a fuller treatment of Toland’s philosophical views and their relation to reform, see the second volume, Enlightenment and Modernity. 131. See A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, ed. Desmaizeaux, vol. 1. 132. See Champion, Republican Learning.

166

Notes to pages 98–101

133. Collins arranged for Locke’s letters to him to be published in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, ed. P. Desmaizeaux (London, 1720). 134. For an analysis of Collins’s library, see O’Higgins, Anthony Collins, ch. 2. 135. Bayle defended ‘natural light’, attacked Judaism for lacking adequate ethics and criticized the morality of Old Testament characters. On the other hand, he appeared to believe in a mysterious deity and to hold that no knowledge was certain. See D. Wootton, ‘Pierre Bayle, Libertine?’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), Studies in Seventeenth Century European Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 197–226; and Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment. 136. O’Higgins, Anthony Collins, pp. 37, 8. 137. Ibid., p. 29. 138. Ibid., pp. 20 ff., 91 ff. 139. Letter to B. Pictet, in Nouvelles Litteraires (24 April 1717), v. 270–1. 140. A. Collins, The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (The Hague, 1726; London, 1727), pp. 437–8. 141. For Locke’s friendship with Collins, see O’ Higgins, Anthony Collins, pp. 3–8. For correspondence between Locke and Collins, see Several Letters to Anthony Collins and Other Persons, in The Works of John Locke, 9th edn, 9 vols (London, 1794), vol. 9. 142. These matters are taken up in the second volume, Enlightenment and Modernity. 143. A. Collins, An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason in Propositions, the Evidence of which Depends on Human Testimony (London, 1707), pp. 3 ff. 144. Ibid., p. 6. 145. Ibid., pp. 31 ff. 146. Ibid., pp. 10, 7–8. 147. F. Gastrell, A Defence of Some Considerations Concerning the Trinity (London, 1707), p. 26. 148. See H. M. Bracken, ‘Bayle’s Attack on Natural Theology: The Case of Christian Pyrrhonism’, in Popkin, and Vanderjagt (eds), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, pp. 254–66. 149. Gastrell, A Defence of Some Considerations Concerning the Trinity, p. 26. 150. Berman finds a contradiction between the non-anthropomorphic Answer and the anthropomorphic Vindication, and reads the latter as an attack on the heart of natural religion. See D. Berman, ‘Anthony Collins and the Question of Atheism in the Early Part of the Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 75, sec. C (1975), pp. 85–102. 151. Philip Skelton reported being present when Collins claimed to have found a demonstration against the being of God, but the report was made long afterwards and is inconclusive. See Samuel Johnson: His Career and Writings, ed. H. Schneider and C. Schneider, 4 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), vol. 3, p. 191; and P. Skelton, A Letter to Mr. Jonathan Dickinson (London, 1747). 152. Shaftesbury accepted deism in the sense of belief in a governing mind. He also implied that Christianity could be placed on the same level as other religions and that the refined would be wiser to look to Plato and the Stoics for just and civilized notions of religion and morality. Nonetheless, he rejected the attempt to base religion on reason alone, and recognized that reverence for the Supreme Being was ‘also faith’. Shaftesbury associated with Toland, Stephens and Molesworth in political campaigns in the 1690s. He admired Collins, and was critical of Tindal, but there is no proof that he was sympathetic to their views on theological or philosophical questions. Shaftesbury had a highly sophisticated

Notes to pages 101–5

167

and more Platonic outlook of his own. See S. Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1965), pp. 47–8 ff., 262; and L. E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 153. A. Collins, A Vindication of the Divine Attributes (London, 1710), p. 25. 154. Ibid., p. 3. 155. Ibid., p. 38 156. For further discussion, see the second volume, Enlightenment and Modernity. 157. Berkeley attacked Collins as a proponent of modern atheism in various essays in the Guardian in 1713, in Alciphron, in his The Theory of Vision, or Visual Language, shewing the Immediate Presence and Providence of a Deity, Vindicated and Explained (London, 1733), and in Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries (London, 1744). 158. Cf. R. Molesworth, An Account of Denmark (London, 1694) 159. A. Collins, Priestcraft in Perfection (London, 1709), pp. 46–9. 160. Ward, The Secret History of the Calves Head Club; and J. Witty, The First Principles of Modern Deism Confuted (London, 1707), p. xvi. Toland, Collins and Tindal were all alleged to belong to a ‘club’, ‘sect’ or ‘college’ of some kind, but is often difficult to separate reports of a Whig club from claims that they belonged to a sect with heterodox philosophical views. 161. G. Hickes, ‘A Preliminary Discourse’, in W. Carroll, Spinoza Reviv’d (London, 1709). 162. J. H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley (London, 1830), p. 268; and Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vol. 3, p. 202, 7 August 1711. See also B. Ibbot, A Course of Sermons Preach’d … in the Year 1713 (London, 1727), pp. 40–54. 163. A. Evans, The Apparition: A Poem (London, 1710); and P. Hare, A Clergyman’s Thanks to Phileleutheurus (London, 1713). 164. Champion explores some of this milieu in The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken. 165. A. Collins, A Discourse of Freethinking, Occasion’d by the Rise and Growth of a Sect call’d Free-Thinkers (London, 1713), p. 5. 166. Ibid., pp. 56–99. 167. Ibid., p. 35. 168. Ibid., pp. 33, 40. 169. Ibid., pp. 101, 104 ff. 170. Ibid., pp. 47 ff. 171. Ibid., pp. 58–62. 172. Ibid., p. 39. 173. Ibid., pp. 52–3, 13 ff. 174. Ibid., p. 38. 175. Ibid., pp. 123 ff., pp. 134 ff., 135, 141 ff., 142 ff., 162 ff., 158 ff. 176. Ibid., p. 177. 177. Ibbot, A Course of Sermons, pp. 220, 242. 178. W. Whiston, Reflexions on an Anonymous Pamphlet (London, 1713), p. 4. 179. B. Hoadley, Queries Recommended to the Authors of a Late ‘Discourse’ (London, 1713), p. 28. 180. J. Swift, Mr. C—n’s Discourse of Freethinking Put into Plain English (London, 1713), Preface. 181. R. Bentley (Phileleutherus Lipsiensis), Remarks Upon a Late Discourse (London, 1713), p. 4. Bentley’s Remarks went through eight editions by 1743. 182. Ibid., p. 46.

168

Notes to pages 105–9

183. G. Berkeley, Essays in the Guardian, in Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols (London: T. Nelson, 1948–57), vol. 7, pp. 173 ff. 184. Collins to Desmaizaeux, 19 February 1717, in Add. MS 4282, f. 123, British Library. Cf. Determinism and Freewill: Anthony Collins’ A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty, ed. J. O’Higgins (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976). 185. According to Egmont, Collins said that he perceived himself the only man who believed nothing yet acted morally honest. See Egmont Papers, Add. MS 47199, British Library, quoted in S. S. Lalor, ‘Matthew Tindal’, in J. Yolton, J. V. Price and J. Stephens (eds), The Dictionary of Eighteenth Century British Philosophers, 2 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), p. 24. 186. See Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, p. 102; Gawlick, Vorwort zum Neudruck von Gotthard V. Lechlers Geschichte des englischen Deismus; and J. A. Kavcic, ‘English Deism and Natural Law: The Case of Matthew Tindal’ (PhD thesis, University of Victoria, 1997). Gawlick reads German neologian concerns back into Tindal and treats him as a defender of revelation. Kavcic’s thesis contains a valuable discussion of Tindal’s approach to natural law. See also Lalor, ‘Matthew Tindal’, and Matthew Tindal, Freethinker: An Eighteenth Century Assault on Religion (London: Continuum, 2006). Lalor follows David Berman in treating Tindal as a theological liar and probable atheist. His study is valuable, especially for its appendices and bibliography, even though he is not sensitive to the multiple publics for which Tindal wrote. 187. M. Tindal, A Letter to the Reverend the Clergy of Both Universities (London, 1694). 188. M. Tindal, Reflections on the XXVIII Propositions Touching the Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1695). 189. Tindal, A Letter to the Reverend the Clergy. 190. See Stephens, An Account of the Rise and Growth of Deism in England. 191. See Jonas Proast’s letter to George Hickes, in Hickes’s ‘A Preliminary Discourse’. Proast also apparently told Hickes that Tindal had said that there was no such thing as revelation. See F. Lee (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Mr John Kettlewell (London, 1718), pp. 50–2. 192. He was admonished for his ‘immorality’ by his college, and had several illegitimate children. See M. Burrows, Worthies of All Souls (London, 1874), p. 381; and Lord Egmont’s memoir, in Egmont Papers, Add. MS 47199, British Library, cited in D. Berman, ‘Matthew Tindal’, in G. Stein (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, 2 vols (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985). 193. High Church reaction can be gauged from the treatment of F. Littleton, Fellow of All Souls, who was refused his MA because it was known he favoured the Rights. See Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vol. 2, p. 94. 194. M. Tindal, A Letter to a Member of Parliament, Shewing, that a Restraint on the Press is Inconsistent with the Protestant Religion, and Dangerous to the Liberties of the Nation (London, 1698). 195. Toland, Anglia Libera, p. 170; M. Tindal, The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (London, 1706), pp. 7–8. 196. Tindal also wrote various anti-clerical pamphlets including New High Church Turned Old Presbyterian (London, 1709), Merciful Judgements of the High Church Triumphant (London, 1710) and A New Catechism with Dr. Hickes’s Thirty Nine Articles (London, 1710). 197. For Locke on natural law, see J. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature (1663), ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). Cf. Locke, Questions Concerning the Law of

Notes to pages 109–12

169

Nature, trans. and ed. R. Horwitz, J. S. Clay and D. Clay (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). For discussion, see R. Ashcraft (ed.), John Locke: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1991). 198. Here Tindal’s approach can be contrasted with that of Sir Edward Cooke, who famously saw the common law as a creation of artificial, and not natural reason. See C. Grey, ‘Reason, Authority and Imagination: The Jurisprudence of Sir Edward Cooke’, in Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, pp. 25–47, on p. 30. For a useful discussion of the role of natural law in Tindal’s thought, see Kavcic, ‘English Deism and Natural Law’. 199. The older Tindal cited Barbeyrac’s The Science of Morality, and claimed, like him, that the law of nature was written in the hearts of all. Skelton claimed that he was a mortalist who did not believe in natural immortality. See Skelton, Ophiomaches, vol. 1, pp. 167–71. 200. For Hobbes, see R. Tuck, ‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes’, in Phillipson and Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, pp. 120–38. 201. M. Tindal, An Essay Concerning Obedience to the Supreme Powers and the Duty of Subjects in All Revolutions (London, 1695), p. 95. 202. M. Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate and the Rights of Mankind, in Matters of Religion (London, 1697), pp. 173–4. 203. Tindal, An Essay Concerning Obedience to the Supreme Powers, pp. 54–5, 29–30, 36. 204. Pufendorf ’s natural law was a civil discipline oriented towards external conduct in civil life and based upon a plurality of instituted moral entities, not a single moral nature. He denied that there was a rational law binding on both God and man. Similarly, for Pufendorf natural good became morally significant when it was enjoined by law. Pufendorf ’s De officio hominis et civis was translated in 1691 by Andrew Tooke, Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, and was republished in 1698 and 1700 and augmented in 1716, then republished in 1735. Tooke changed the title to The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature and anglicized the text. The 1716 and 1738 editions further modified the text by including material from Jean Barbeyrac’s French translation, modifying Pufendorf ’s voluntarism by insisting that the magistrate had an obligation to protect the natural rights of citizens. See the introduction by Ian Hunter and David Saunders to S. Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, trans. A. Tooke (1691; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003). 205. See his Essay concerning the Laws of Nations and the Rights of Sovereigns (London, 1694). 206. Tindal, An Essay Concerning Obedience to the Supreme Powers, p. 17. 207. Tindal, The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, p. 33 ff. 208. Ibid., pp. 190–232. 209. Edmund Curll reported that Queen Anne made Tindal a present of £500 ‘for his services against Popery’. Curll, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Matthew Tindal, pp. 19–20. 210. Tindal, The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, pp. xxv–xxvi. 211. See J. Whitfeld, The Kingdom of Jesus Christ (London, 1708); and D. Williams The Ministerial Office (London, 1708). 212. J. Swift, Remarks upon a Book Entitled the Rights of the Christian Church (London, 1708), pp. 2 ff. 213. C. Leslie, The Second Part of the Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Clothing (London, 1707), pp. 3–4, 34, 60. 214. See Carroll, Spinoza Reviv’d, pp. 4–15.

170

Notes to pages 112–26

215. See also S. Hill, A Thorough Examination (London, 1708); C. Place, Adversia (London, 1709), and The Villainous Principles of the Rights (London, 1709); and. Evans, The Apparition, linking Tindal with Spinoza, Vanini and Blount. 216. Charles Leslie, for example, replied to the Rights in The Second Part of the Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Clothing ‘with my service to Dr. Tindal and Mr. Collins’. 217. M. Tindal, A Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church (London, 1707), and A Second Defence (London, 1708), pp. 3, 81. 218. M. Tindal, The Nation Vindicated (London, 1711), and The Rights of the Christian Church Adjusted (London, 1711). 219. Tindal, A Defence of our Happy Establishment, p. 19. 220. See J. S. Barrington, A Dissuasive from Jacobitism (London, 1713), and A Second Dissuasive (London, 1713). Unlike Toland, Tindal did not believe that Harley had been plotting to restore James, and defended him in Justice Done to the Late Ministry (London, 1715). Later he attacked Walpole when he seemed to defect from the Whig cause. See The Defection Consider’d (London, 1717). Walpole was defended in The Defection Detected (London, 1718) and George Sewell’s The Resigners Vindicated (London, 1718), alleging that Tindal had originally written his pamphlet against someone else, and then substituted his name when he refused to be blackmailed. Tindal replied in The Defection Further Considered (London, 1718) and Destruction the Certain Consequence of Division (London, 1718). A number of other minor political pamphlets have been attributed to Tindal, including Remarks on the Pretender’s Declaration, Four Discourses on Several Political Subjects, Revolution and Anti-Revolution Principles, A Vindication of the Septennial Act and Corah and Moses. See E. Curll, Memoirs of the Life and Works of Matthew Tindal L.L.D. (London, 1733), p. 82. For a full discussion of Christianity as Old as the Creation, see the second volume of the present work, Enlightenment and Modernity. 221. See R. O. Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

6 Conclusion 1. 2.

See note 103 to Chapter 5, above. See Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, ch. 4: ‘Critical Deism’.

Appendix 1.

2.

The Poems of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923). Herbert published these poems in De causis errorum and also included them in his autobiography, but they were omitted from the English edition of his poems in 1695. Herbert, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles, p. 218, and De veritate, ed. Carré, pp. 106, 125–7.

WORKS CITED

Manuscripts Christ Church Library, Oxford, Evelyn MSS.

Charles Blount Athenaeum, London, ‘Blount’s miscellanea MS’, 100Ab. British Library Add. MS 4221, ff. 126–36. Add. MS 25303, ff. 170, 171, 179. Sloane MSS, vol. 1446, f. 60. ‘Tracts on Religion’, Department of Printed Books, 873.b.3. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Firth MS, c. 16, ff. 130–4.

Herbert of Cherbury Bodleian Library, University of Oxford ‘A Dialogue’, Rawlinson C.95. ‘A Dialogue’, MS 10,840. A Dialogue on Religion, Add. MS 29770. ‘A Dialogue on Various Religions’, Add. MS 4366. Sloane MSS, 3952. Jesus College Library, Oxford, annotations to his copy of Contra Celsum. National Library of Wales MS 5295 E. MS 5296.

Anthony Collins British Library Add. MS 4254, ff. 10–11. Add. MS 4257, ff. 74–81. Add. MS 32096, ff. 76–101. Add. MS 32556, ff. 76–9. Collins to Desmaizeaux, 19 February 1717, Add. MS 4282. Egmont Papers, Add. MS 47199 University of Leiden, Marchand MSS.

– 171 –

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The English Deists

Matthew Tindal Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, ‘Proposals for Printing Two Volumes in Quarto, Intitl’d Introduction to Christianity as Old as the Creation’, vol. 2, Rawlinson MSS, 4 92. British Library Egerton MSS, vol. 2618, f. 229. George Hickes to Roger North, 23 May 1717, Add. MS 32551.

John Toland Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Rawlinson MSS, vol. 146, f. 147. British Library Add. MS 3768, f. 2. Add. MS 3970, f. 619. Add. MS 4295. Add. MS 7121, f. 61. ‘Papers, Letters and Miscellanies of John Toland’, Birch MSS, vol. 4465. National Library, Vienna, MS 10325.

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INDEX

Abbadie, Jacques, 36 Acosta, Uriel, Exemplar vitae humanae, 62 al Razi, 31 American Enlightenment, 26 Anglicanism see Church of England; Protestantism Annet, Peter, 2–3, 17 Anselm, 25 anthropomorphism, 31, 35 anti-clericalism Blount and, 65 church response to, 80–1 Collins and, 102–6 Herbert and, 45–7, 48–9 Tindal and, 111–12 Toland and, 88 under the Commonwealth, 58 see also Church of England Antiochus, 43 anti-Trinitarianism, 37–8, 100 see also Socinianism; Unitarianism Apollonius Tyanus, 55, 66 Arianism, 5, 65 Aristotelian philosophy, 33 Arminianism, 42 Asgill, John, 103 Assheton, William, 59 atheism, 29, 35, 37, 79–80, 104, 105 see also disbelief/infidelity Atterbury, Francis, 111 Aubrey, John, 85 Averroism, 32–3, 62 Baxter, Richard, 59 Bayle, Pierre, 62, 98, 102 Beale, John, 63 Becconsall, Thomas, 87

Beiser, Frederick, 17 Bentley, Richard, 71, 79–80 Remarks on Collins’s Discourse, 105 Beverley, Thomas, 87 biblical criticism, 20, 21 in Blount’s publications, 65–6, 67–8 in Gildon’s texts, 73 in Herbert’s Dialogue, 53–5 in Tindal’s texts, 112 in Toland’s texts, 88–9, 94–6 Origio et fundament a religionis christianea, 38 Blackall, Offspring, 88 Blasphemy Act (1698), 79 Blount, Charles biographical details, 60–1 possible membership of cabals, 64 influence of, 57–8, 81 philosophical radicalism, 62–4, 92 questioning immortality, 65 republication of Herbert’s works, 53, 65–7 revisionist reading of, 2–3, 17, 26, 116 works Anima mundi, 65 An Appeal from the Country to the City, 61 First Two Books of Philostratus (trans.), 65 Great is Diana of the Ephesians, 65 A Just Vindication of Learning, 61, 81 The Last Sayings, or, Dying Legacy of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, 64 Miracles No Violations of the Laws of Nature, 66 Miscellaneous Works, 76

– 199 –

200

The English Deists

Oracles of Reason (collected letters), 64–71, 104 Religio laici Written in a Letter to John Dryden Esq, 66–7 ‘Summary Account of the Deists Religion, A’, 73 William and Mary Conquerors, 61 Blount, Sir Henry, 60, 61–2 treatise on the soul, 69–70 Blount, Sir Thomas Pope, 58, 60 Bodin, Jean, 34, 50, 92 Bold, Samuel, 106 Boyle, Robert, 71 Browne, Peter, 87, 88, 102 Browne, Thomas, 66, 68 Religio medici, 37 Bruno, Giordano, 34, 73, 103 Buckingham, Duke of, 87 Budd, Susan Varieties of Unbelief, 12 Burnet, Thomas, 66 Archaeologiae philosophicae, 67 Sacred Theory of the Earth, 92 Burthogge, Richard, 60 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 37 Bury, Arthur, 85 cabals and sects, 64, 81, 82, 88, 103 Calvin, John, Concerning Scandals, 34–5 Cambridge Platonists, 6, 9, 42, 44–5, 60 Campanelle, Tommaso, 51 Cardano, Girolamo, 34 Carroll, William, 100, 112 ‘Catholic truths’, 44, 46, 59, 67, 73–4, 99 Chalieu, Robert, 36 Charron, Pierre, De La sagesse, 36–7 Chillingworth, William, 113 Christianity and structural change, 24–5 Chubb, Thomas, 2, 8–9, 17 Church of England early rumours of deism and, 79–80 influence of, 14 rationalism in, 4–9, 20, 59 response to anti-clericalism, 80–1 response to Oracles of Reason, 75 response to Tindal’s Rights, 112 Schism (1688), 18 see also anti-clericalism; Protestantism

Cicero, 31, 43, 51 Clarke, Samuel, 8, 9–10, 89, 113 Boyle Lectures (1705), 81 Clarkson, Lawrence, 58 Collins, Anthony philosophy, 8–9, 99–102 religious stance, 17, 99 revisionist reading of, 2–3, 26, 117 social connections and influences, 71, 76, 81–4, 98–9 social epistemology, 102–6 works Discourse of Freethinking, 82, 103–6 An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason, 99–100 Priestcraft in Perfection, 102–3 A Vindication of the Divine Attributes, 101–2 ‘constellational writers’, 18–21 Coward, William, 103 creation, 67–8, 101 Crell, Johannes, 45 Crell, Samuel, 82 Cremonini, Cesare, 33, 49 Cudworth, Ralph, 98, 107 The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 8, 60 Culverwell, Nathaniel, 60 Cyrano de Bergerace, 36 deism as multiple outlook, 1–3, 38–9, 76–7, 82, 115 ‘constellational’ nature, 18–21 concepts of as a doctrine, 29–30 as expounded in Oracles of Reason, 73–4 Clarke’s definitions, 81 Stephen’s ‘English deism’, 3–4 disbelief and, 12–13 heterodoxy and, 11–12 in its social context, 13–18 in relation to eighteenth-century Church, 4–5 religious censure and, 22–3, 79–80 influence of, 21–2, 25–7

Index

201

natural religion and, 10–11, 59–60, 73–4, 80, 113 natural science and, 9–10 origins of, 30–2 and early references to, 34–7, 58 Renaissance debates, 32–4 rationalism and, 5–9 ‘Deists’ Plea, The’, 71, 81 Descarte, René, 45 Desmaizeaux, Pierre, 106 Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil, A, 51–5 disbelief/infidelity, 12–13, 75 see also atheism Discourse of Freethinking, A (Collins), 82, 103–6 Dissent, 17–18 Dolet, Entienne, 35 Dryden, John, 66, 67 Religio laici, 59–60, 73

France, heterodox thought in, 12, 32, 44, 62, 69, 82–3 Francke, Christopher, 49 Freeholders Journal, The, 98 freethinking, 103–6 within the clergy, 20

Early Enlightenment, 15–16 Ebionites ( Jewish Christian group), 96 Ebionites/Nazarenes, 53, 88, 96 ecumenism, 44 Enlightenment deist writing as catalyst of, 25–6 heterodoxy and, 12 Protestant, Radical and Early, political and social contexts, 13–18 structural change, 24–5 Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform, 2 Epicureanism, 71 epistemological rationalism, 8 esotericism, 51–2, 92 Estienne, Henri, 34 European heterodoxy, 26, 31–9, 92, 98–9 see also individual place and personal names

Halyburton, Thomas, 49 happiness, 74 Harley, Robert, 91 Harrington, James, 89, 95 Harris, John, 75 Harrison, Sedgwick, 108 Hazard, Paul, 12 Hebrew conception of Yahweh, 31 Heidanus, Abraham, 49 Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, Lord biographical details, 41–2 Blount’s republications of works of, 65–7 ‘Catholic truths’, 44, 46, 59, 67, 73–4, 99 critique of positive religion, 45–7, 48–9 deism and, 49–51 esotericism, 51–2 five common notions, 43–4 revisionist reading of, 2, 26, 115–16 theory of knowledge, 42–4 works Appendix ad sacredotes, 46 A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil (attributed), 51–5, 66 The Life and Reign of King Henry the Eighth, 47–8 On Heavenly Life, 52

faculties, universal, 42–3 Falkland, Lord, 6–7 Fall, the, 67–8 Febvre, Lucien, 29 Firmin, Thomas, 107 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de, 62

Galen, 34 Gastrell, Francis, 22–3, 75, 100–1 Some Considerations Concerning the Trinity, 100 Gawlick, Günther, 30 Gay, Peter, 17, 24 German idealism, 44 Gildon, Charles, 17, 64, 80, 81, 88, 100 texts in Oracles of Reason, 71–3, 104 Glanvill, Joseph, 6, 59 Goode, Barnham, 103 Greek classic philosophy, 30–4 Grotius, Hugo, 44, 109

202

The English Deists

A Philosophical Disquisition on Human Life, 51 Les quatrains du deiste, 49–50 De religione gentilium, 48 De religione laici, 46, 55, 66 De veritate, 42, 45, 51, 59 see also Renaissance philosophical and religious thought heterodoxy, 11–12, 41 High Enlightenment, 15 Hoadley, Benjamin, 105, 111 Hobbes, Thomas, 62, 64–5, 76, 83–4, 109 Holland, heterodox thought in, 18–19, 62–3, 82–3, 111 Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie, 5–6 Howard, Sir Robert, 64 History of Religion as Managed by Priestcraft, 68, 86 Huet, Daniel-Pierre, 97 Hughes, William, 58 Ibbot, Benjamin, 105 Ideism, 85–6, 99–100, 107 immortality, 30, 31, 33, 44, 65, 68–9, 71–2 eternal punishment, 48 imposture, theory of, 62 intuition/perception, 42, 72, 100 irony, use of, in deist writing, 22 Islam, 31–2, 96 Israel, Jonathan, 18–19 Italian academies, sixteenth-century pluralism, 32–3 Judaism, 31, 53, 96–7 Kant, Immanuel, 42, 44 Kennett, White, 85 King, William, De origine mali, 102 knowledge, Herbert’s theory of, 42–4 Kors, Alan Charles, 12 Kortholt, Christian, 49 La Mothe le Vayer, Cinq dialogues, 92 latencies against Christianity see biblical criticism latitudinarianism, 7, 9 Laud, William, 44 Leceti, Fortunato, 49

Lechler, G. V., 30 Le Clerc, John, 85, 86, 112 legislators (leges), 33 Leland, John, A View of the Principal Deistic Writers, 2 Leslie, Charles, 61, 64, 112 A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, 75 Levier, Charles, 83 Locke, John, 3, 9–10, 47, 83–4, 109 doctrine of ‘Ideas’, 85–6, 99–100, 107 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 67 Reasonableness of Christianity, 85–6 Mersenne, Marin, 42, 44, 49–50, 93 L’Impiété des déists, 36 metaphysical theology, 7–8 Middleton, Conyers, 8–9, 17 miracles, 55, 65–6 Missy, Rousset de, 82 Molesworth, Sir Robert, 108 Molyneaux, William, 80 Montaigne, Michel de, 62 Apologie de Raimond Sebond, 37 More, Henry, 7–8, 60 Morgan, Thomas, 2, 8–9, 17 Mornay, Philipe de, 45 Mosaic law, 96–7 Musaeus, Johannes, 49 Musaeus, Peter, 49 mystery, 85–8 natural law, 109–11 natural religion, 2, 30, 59–60, 73–4, 80, 113 natural theology and, 10–11 see also theistic naturalism natural science, 9–10, 24–5 Nazarenes/Ebionites, 53, 96 necessitarian theism, 6 Newton, Isaac, 8, 9–10 Nicholls, William, 75 Nye, Stephen, 80, 89 Ocellus Lucanus, 70 ‘Of Natural Religion as Opposed to Revelation’, 73–4 Oldisworth, William, 112

Index ontological continuism, 7–8 Oracles of Reason, 64–71 contemporaneous reaction to, 75 Gildon’s texts in, 71–3, 104 systems of deism contained in, 73–4 Origio et fundament a religionis christianea, 38 Origne, Contra Celsum, 55 Paduan medical naturalism, 33–4, 49 pagan religions, 48–9 pantheism, 58, 69–70, 73, 92–4 see also universalism Patot, Tyssot de, 83, 92 Payne, William, The Mystery of the Christian Faith, 87 Penn, William, 87 perception/intuition, 42, 72, 100 Peyrère, Isaac La, 62, 68 Philo, 31 Platonism, 6, 43, 107–8 Pocock, J. G. A., 14 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 33 Postel, Guillaume, 36 Prideaux, Henry, 75 prophecy, 55, 68, 106 Protestant Enlightenment, 14–17, 21–2 biblical criticism and, 20 see also Protestantism Protestantism, 4, 12, 38, 42, 63, 68 deist publications and, 22–4, 82, 89 see also Church of England; Protestant Enlightenment providence, 30 Pufendorf, Samuel, 109, 110 Quatraines du déiste, Les, 35–6 Radical Enlightenment, 15, 16, 20 Raphson, Joseph, 93 rationalism, 5–9, 12–13 reason, 8, 43, 45, 58–60, 72–3 Collins’s thesis, 99–101 Toland’s thesis, 85–8 Reedy, Gerard, 4 ‘Reflexions Upon Mr. Toland’s Book’, 87 Reformation philosophy, 58 religious rationalism

203

Renaissance philosophical and religious thought, 32–5, 62 see also Herbert of Cherbury republicanism, 61, 63 Restoration philosophical and religious thought, 58–9 revelation, 45–7, 48–9, 59–60, 67, 74–5, 87, 107 ‘right reason’, 43, 45, 58 Romantic conceptions, 1 Rosicrucian ideas, 51 Rossi, M. M., 30, 52 Rust, George, 60 Sacheverell, Henry, 112 Saint Hyacinth, Themiseul de, 83 Sallengre, Albert Henri de, 83 science and social change, 24–5 sects and cabals, 64, 81, 82, 88, 103 secularism, 5 secularization, 9–10 Seerup, Georgius, 49 Seidal, Martin, 38 Selden, John, 95, 96–7 Serjeant, John, 58 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 91 Silanus, 50 Silhoun, Jean, 36, 50 Simon, Richard, 68 Socinianism, 4, 5, 35, 37–8, 82, 87 see also anti-Trinitarianism South, Robert, 88 Spanheim, Frederick the Younger, 85 Spinoza, Benedict de, 19, 76–7 Treatise Partly Theological, 66 Stephen, Leslie, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3–4 Stephens, William, 80, 85, 103, 107 Steucho, 45 Stillingfleet, Edward, 59, 86 Stoicism, 31, 47, 50 ‘right reason’, 43, 45, 58 Stubbe, Henry, 63 Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, 65, 68 ‘Political Human Account of the of the Subversion of Judaism’, 95

204

The English Deists

succession, 72 Sullivan, Robert, 4 Swift, Jonathan, 105 Sydenham, Sir Thomas, 73 Sykes, Arthur Anthony, 106 Tew Circle, 6–7, 9, 42, 51, 113 theistic naturalism, 31–5, 63–4, 69–70, 91 see also natural religion Tilenus, 44 Tillotson, John, 82 Tindal, Matthew as a political writer, 108–11 biographical details, 106–7, 108 philosophy, 8 civil theology, 111–13 universal theology, 107–8 religious stance, 17 revisionist reading of, 2–3, 117 social connections and influences, 76, 81–4 works Christianity as Old as the Creation, 113 Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate and the Rights of Mankind, 109 Letter to a Member of Parliaments, 108 Reasons against Restraining the Press, 108 The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, 111–12 Titius, Gerhard, 49 Toland, John as a political writer, 90–1 Mosaic law and, 96–7 as a Protestant Low Church writer, 89–90, 94–6 biblical criticism, 88–9, 94–6 biographical details, 85, 98 persecution, 88–9 pantheism, 92–4 philosophical interests, 92–3 philosophical thesis and historical claim, 85–8 revisionist reading of, 2–3, 17, 117 social connections and influences, 8, 76, 81–4, 91–2 works Amyntor, 88 Christianity Not Mysterious, 57, 77, 85–8

Clito, or A Poem on the Force of Eloquence, 92 Hodegus, 94 Memorial of the State, 91 Nazarenus, or Jewish, or Gentile, and Mohametan Christianity, 95–6 Origines Judaicea, 93, 97 Pantheisticon, 93 ‘The Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church’, 112 Republica Mosaica, 96–7 Socinianism Truly Stated, 93 The State Anatomy, 91 Two Essays, 81, 92 Vindicius liberius, 89 Toralba, 50 Tractarian Movement, 5 Turkish Spy, The, 71 Turner, John, 112 unbelief, 12–13 Unitarianism, 37–8, 80, 82, 87, 107 see also anti-Trinitarianism universalism, 42–6, 48, 69–70 see also pantheism utopian ideas, 62 Vanini, Guilio Cesare, 49 Varro, Terentius, 50 Venturi, Franco, 26 veritate, De, 42–5 third edition, 45–6 Viau, Théophile de, 36 Viret, Jean, 34–5 Vossius, Gerard, De origine ac progressu idolotriae, 48 Whichcote, John, 6, 82, 98 Whiston, William, 105 Whitfield, John, 112 Wilkins, John, 59 Williams, Daniel, 85, 112 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 68–9 Witty, John, 100 Wolseley, Sir Charles, 75 Woolston, Thomas, 2–3, 17 worship, 67