The English Deists

Studies in Early Enlightenment

Wayne Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317316329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Interprets the works of an important group of writers known as 'the English deists'. This title argues that this interpretation reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking. It contextualizes these writers within the early Enlightenment, which was multivocal, plural and in search of self definition.

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.

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. 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 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 eighteenthcentury 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 eighteenth-century 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, 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• 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
• Appendix: Herbert's Philosophical Poems
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index