The Fringes of Belief

English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660-1760

Sarah Ellenzweig

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780804769792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Fringes of Belief is the first literary study of freethinking and religious skepticism in the English Enlightenment. Ellenzweig aims to redress this scholarly lacuna, arguing that a literature of English freethinking has been overlooked because it unexpectedly supported aspects of institutional religion. Analyzing works by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, she foregrounds a strand of the English freethinking tradition that was suspicious of revealed religion yet often strongly opposed to the open denigration of Anglican Christianity and its laws. By exposing the contradictory and volatile status of categories like belief and doubt this book participates in the larger argument in Enlightenment studies—as well as in current scholarship on the condition of modernity more generally—-that religion is not so simply left behind in the shift from the pre-modern to the modern world.

PART ONE

Libertine Precursors

CHAPTER ONE

Rochester, Blount, and the Faith of Unbelief

But he often confessed, that whether the business of Religion was true or not, he thought those who had the perswasions of it, and lived so that they had quiet in their Consciences, and believed God governed in his Providence, and had the hope of an endless blessedness in another State, the happiest men in the World: And said, He would give all that he was Master of, to be under those Perswasions, and to have the Supports and Joys that must needs flow from them.

—Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester (1680)

This study begins with a figure few would consider as a defender of Christianity and institutional religion. Rochester spent his short life as one of the most notorious infidels of his day, a deathbed conversion to Christianity notwithstanding. Critics have been divided on how serious an intellect Rochester was—how much and what he actually read. Most, however, have agreed that whatever thinking he did was decidedly heterodox, and that his freethinking poem, “A Satyre against Reason and Mankind,” generally thought to have been composed before June 1674, supplies the evidence. And yet many readers have sensed that despite surface appearances to the contrary, Rochester’s poetry is deeply preoccupied with and ambivalent about matters of faith. James Turner has astutely noted, for example, that libertinism in Rochester’s poetry is frequently “transcended or undermined by some distinctly nonlibertine attitude.” ¹ Certainly, most recent studies of Rochester’s erotic poetry agree, as Jonathan Kramnick suggests, that “sexuality turns into a drawn out mistake.”² Indeed, the poems most noted for their explicit content—“A Ramble in St. James’s Park” and “The Imperfect Enjoyment” among others—more often than not demonstrate the failure of sex to provide pleasure or fulfillment. As has been noted, moreover, many of these same poems articulate a longing for love that is only partially ironic or satirically mawkish.³ If Rochester is not a libertine in quite the ways we have assumed, it is likely the case, as I will argue in this chapter, that he is also not a freethinker as that identity has previously been understood. My concern in these pages will thus be to arrive at some provisional conclusions about the variable content of Rochester’s infidelity and to ask how it changes our sense not only of Rochester’s attitude toward religion but also of the character of English freethinking more generally.

Resolving the dilemma of Rochester’s attitude toward Christian faith requires at the outset that we further examine both the occasion that produced Rochester’s “Satyre” and his wider intellectual sympathies. Gillian Manning has contended that the poem participated in an explosion of animated debate about unbelief in the 1670s. Rochester was “one of the chief spokesmen for the unbelievers in their quarrel with the orthodox, and . . . his best-known poem featured prominently in the controversy.”⁴ Manning’s detailed placement of the “Satyre” in its contemporary milieu marks an important turn in scholarship on the poem, for while previous examinations of the poem’s heterodoxy have explored its debts to Montaigne and ancient skepticism, Hobbes, and the Epicurean tradition, when pursued, the specific nature of these debts has been only cursorily linked to religion.⁵ A proper understanding of Rochester’s freethinking, however, requires that we not bracket the range of philosophical texts and traditions to which the “Satyre” alludes from what appear to be its more topical concerns. Making sense of the problem of belief in the poem demands recognition of the interplay between Restoration heterodoxy and the heterodoxy of the philosophical tradition.

The poem begins with a critique of reason that became the defining feature of Restoration infidelity:

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man)
A spirit free to choose for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleas’d to wear;
I’de be a Dog, a Monky, or a Bear.
Or any thing but that vain Animal
Who is so proud of being Rational.⁶

(1–7)

The proposition, it would seem, is logically unacceptable: if the speaker could exercise the defining attributes of man—his rationality and free will—to choose his species, he would essentially decide against rationality and free will, for to elect to be a beast rather than a man is to relinquish these specially human attributes. To use reason to oppose reason is the famous paradox upon which the poem seems to hinge. This much has become a critical commonplace. But as both David Trotter and Dustin Griffin have pointed out, paradox had another usage in the seventeenth century, one not so familiar to modern readers. According to the OED, paradox also meant “a statement or tenet contrary to received opinion or belief; . . . sometimes with unfavourable connotation, as being discordant with what is held to be established truth.” Hobbes used the word in this sense, observing that “a judicious reader knows that a paradox is an opinion not yet generally received.” On this account, Trotter observes, “Rochester thought his poem paradoxical . . . in the sense that it defied the doxa (or accepted wisdom) of the age.” Edward Stillingfleet’s response to Rochester’s “Satyre,” in “A Sermon Preach’d before the King, Feb. 24. 1674/5,” makes this latter connotation clear: “It is [a] pitty such had not their wish, to have been Beasts rather than men, . . . that they might have been less capable of doing mischief among mankind; by representing all the excellencies of humane nature, which are Reason, and Vertue, and Religion, but as more grave and solemn fopperies.”⁷

Most accounts of the poem’s immediate context have noted that by the time the “Satyre” was written, the application of reason to religion had become the new Anglican doxa.⁸ Stillingfleet’s remarks thus bring us to another paradox relevant to the content of the poem’s freethinking: the peculiar switching of sides that forms the history of “rational religion.” As Manning explains, the typical unbeliever was seen to reject Christianity on the grounds that it lacked rational proofs. Moderate theologians therefore attempted to meet the enemy on his own ground by wielding his own weapon—reason—against him.⁹ However, the more the orthodox produced rational defenses of Christianity against the doubts of the infidels, the more the infidels rejected reason itself as merely another instance of doctrinal humbug.¹⁰ Referring to Rochester’s “Satyre,” Stillingfleet expresses the culmination of this predicament thus: “And because it is impossible to defend their extravagant courses by Reason, the only way left for them is to make Satyrical Invectives against Reason ; as though it were the most uncertain, foolish and (I had almost said) unreasonable thing in the World.”¹¹ In this rendering, the unbelievers’ heterodoxy turns out to lie more in their dismissal than in their glorification of the powers of reason.

Late seventeenth-century religious controversy is characterized by a series of unexpected reversals. On one side, moderate or latitudinarian Anglicanism embraced reason, historically associated with the tactics of the unbelievers, while on the other, the infidels abandoned what was now the tool of the church.¹² A related reversal has been left out of this analysis, however. Though initially accused of marshaling reason to the destruction of belief, freethinking’s distrust of reason came oddly to resemble an increasingly outmoded fringe of Anglicanism. Indeed, by the 1670s it was largely High Church traditionalists who remained dubious about the place of reason in religion. One unyielding divine protested that his more moderate fellows made “Reason, Reason, Reason, their only Trinity.” In response to such objections, Joseph Glanvill asked his fustier brethren to “consider . . . what ends of Religion, or Sobriety, such vehement defamations of our faculties could serve? And what Ends of a Party they did?” Like it or not, Glanvill concluded, “the enemies of Reason most usually serve the ends of the Infidel, and the Atheist.” Henry Hallywell similarly railed against the “stupidity” of “some who . . . make the choicest of [Religion’s] Articles so incomprehensible as to be elevated above Reason . . . : Then which certainly nothing can . . . give greater Ground to the bold Cavils and Pretensions of . . . disguised Atheists.”¹³ According to the new moderate orthodoxy, then, to rail against reason’s part in religion would only play into the hands of the unbelievers.

An “Addition,” or in some editions “Epilogue” (lines 174–225), to the main text of Rochester’s “Satyre” illustrates this unusual convergence of doubt and traditional belief, revealing a distinct nostalgia for something akin to an outmoded, reason-free faith:¹⁴

Is there a Churchman, who on God relies,
Whose life his Faith and Doctrine justifies;
Not one blown up with vain Prelatick pride,

But a meek humble Man of honest sense,
Who Preaching peace does practice Continence;
Whose pious life’s a proof he does believe
Mysterious Truth’s, which no man can conceive.
If upon Earth there dwell such God-like men,
I’le here Recant my Paradox to them;
Adore those Shrines of Virtue, homage pay,
And with the rabble World, their Laws obey.

(191–93; 216–23)

On one level, readers have been correct not to take the freethinking speaker at his word here.¹⁵ Certainly his intent is still satiric: since the “God-like” churchman represents an impossible ideal, the speaker’s offer to “Recant [his] Paradox” is disingenuous and merely aims another jibe at Christian belief. But in another sense, the poem allows Rochester to have it both ways, to recant potentially and remain paradoxical in Hobbes’s sense of the word. Richard Bentley, whose Boyle Lectures against atheism defined Anglican orthodoxy for the Restoration and early eighteenth century, had proclaimed that “Even Revelation itself is not shy nor unwilling to ascribe its own first Credit and fundamental Authority to the test and testimony of Reason.”¹⁶ The “Satyre” ’s clerical adversarius, who enters the poem in line 46 to rebuke the speaker for “rail[ing] at Reason and Mankind” (58), argues similarly that reason enables man to “Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce / The flaming limits of the Universe” (68–69). The pious churchman’s modest reverence presents a striking contrast to the arrogant enthusiasm of the clerical adversarius, who insolently “Think[s] hee’s the Image of the Infinite” (77). The contrary suggestion of the “Addition” that true piety requires belief in “Mysterious Truth’s, which no man can conceive,” thus continues to set the freethinking speaker apart from the reasonable religion that forms the object of the poem’s attack throughout. The speaker can defend faith and still oppose the orthodoxy of the time.¹⁷

I

My argument about Rochester’s belief, to which I will return in the concluding pages of the chapter, first requires a more thorough examination of the nature of his unbelief, for as I will demonstrate, the two are more linked than has previously been recognized. Late seventeenth-century irreligion, as Manning attests, was a slippery entity, referring to a continuum of heterodoxy ranging from agnosticism to evil living to frank disbelief in God.¹⁸ While Manning is correct to suggest that Rochester’s “Satyre” speaks for the diversity of irreligion in the period, it is nonetheless necessary to specify Rochester’s place along the above continuum more particularly. I will pursue this aim through a reassessment of recent approaches to late seventeenth-century religious radicalism. The first approach I consider, characteristic of the research of Christopher Hill, has been to understand the freethinking of the 1670s as a continuation, in modified form, of the radical sectarianism of the Interregnum. Hill thus sees a link between the sexual and religious libertinism of the Ranters, for example, and that of the Restoration rakes. Hill shrewdly points out that “the legend of gloomy Puritans who hated pleasure dies hard”; the Ranters not only glorified sex and sinful behavior as evidence of grace but also denied the immortality of the soul and looked forward to the skeptical antiscripturism that became the distinctive mark of the rake’s heterodoxy twenty years later.¹⁹ Hill’s analysis is persuasive on several counts: not only does it provide a useful reminder of the irreligious tendencies of the enthusiastic sects; it also brings into focus that crucial and largely neglected aspect of the rakes, namely, their furtive religious inclinations.²⁰

This approach to the vestiges of faith in Rochester’s verse understands all traces of belief as decidedly antinomian. According to James Turner, Rochester’s conversion, for example, is closer to the subversive spirituality characteristic of radical Protestants than it is to “conventional piety.” Rochester, both Turner and Hill remind us, was described by a contemporary as an “Enthusiast in Wit.”²¹ To the extent that any threat to civil and spiritual authority had the potential to raise the dreaded specter of enthusiasm, the freethinker of the Restoration can indeed be viewed as the inheritor of revolutionary religious radicalism. The extension of Civil War antinomianism into Restoration libertinism in this sense is consistent with contemporary usage. As J. G. A. Pocock has shown, the polemic against enthusiasm in the late seventeenth century targeted not only the spiritual pretensions of the godly but also the materialism of the unbelievers; Ralph Cudworth described Hobbesian infidels like Rochester as “Enthusiastical or Fanatical Atheists . . . (how abhorrent soever they may otherwise seem to be from Enthusiasm and Revelations).” What is more, both infidels and...