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.
âGilbert 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 wasâhow much and what he actually read. Most, however, have agreed that whatever thinking he did was decidedly heterodox, and that his freethinking poem, âA Satyre against Reason and Mankind,â 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, Rochesterâs poetry is deeply preoccupied with and ambivalent about matters of faith. James Turner has astutely noted, for example, that libertinism in Rochesterâs poetry is frequently âtranscended or undermined by some distinctly nonlibertine attitude.â 1 Certainly, most recent studies of Rochesterâs erotic poetry agree, as Jonathan Kramnick suggests, that âsexuality turns into a drawn out mistake.â2 Indeed, the poems most noted for their explicit contentââA Ramble in St. Jamesâs Parkâ and âThe Imperfect Enjoymentâ among othersâmore 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 Rochesterâs infidelity and to ask how it changes our sense not only of Rochesterâs attitude toward religion but also of the character of English freethinking more generally.
Resolving the dilemma of Rochesterâs attitude toward Christian faith requires at the outset that we further examine both the occasion that produced Rochesterâs âSatyreâ 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 âone of the chief spokesmen for the unbelievers in their quarrel with the orthodox, and . . . his best-known poem featured prominently in the controversy.â4 Manningâs detailed placement of the âSatyreâ in its contemporary milieu marks an important turn in scholarship on the poem, for while previous examinations of the poemâs 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 Rochesterâs freethinking, however, requires that we not bracket the range of philosophical texts and traditions to which the âSatyreâ 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 pleasâd to wear;
Iâde be a Dog, a Monky, or a Bear.
Or any thing but that vain Animal
Who is so proud of being Rational.6
(1â7)
The proposition, it would seem, is logically unacceptable: if the speaker could exercise the defining attributes of manâhis rationality and free willâto 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 âa statement or tenet contrary to received opinion or belief; . . . sometimes with unfavourable connotation, as being discordant with what is held to be established truth.â Hobbes used the word in this sense, observing that âa judicious reader knows that a paradox is an opinion not yet generally received.â On this account, Trotter observes, âRochester thought his poem paradoxical . . . in the sense that it defied the doxa (or accepted wisdom) of the age.â Edward Stillingfleetâs response to Rochesterâs âSatyre,â in âA Sermon Preachâd before the King, Feb. 24. 1674/5,â makes this latter connotation clear: âIt 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.â7
Most accounts of the poemâs immediate context have noted that by the time the âSatyreâ was written, the application of reason to religion had become the new Anglican doxa.8 Stillingfleetâs remarks thus bring us to another paradox relevant to the content of the poemâs freethinking: the peculiar switching of sides that forms the history of ârational religion.â 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 weaponâreasonâagainst 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 Rochesterâs âSatyre,â Stillingfleet expresses the culmination of this predicament thus: âAnd 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.â11 In this rendering, the unbelieversâ 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, freethinkingâs 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 âReason, Reason, Reason, their only Trinity.â In response to such objections, Joseph Glanvill asked his fustier brethren to âconsider . . . what ends of Religion, or Sobriety, such vehement defamations of our faculties could serve? And what Ends of a Party they did?â Like it or not, Glanvill concluded, âthe enemies of Reason most usually serve the ends of the Infidel, and the Atheist.â Henry Hallywell similarly railed against the âstupidityâ of âsome who . . . make the choicest of [Religionâs] 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.â13 According to the new moderate orthodoxy, then, to rail against reasonâs part in religion would only play into the hands of the unbelievers.
An âAddition,â or in some editions âEpilogueâ (lines 174â225), to the main text of Rochesterâs âSatyreâ 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 lifeâs a proof he does believe
Mysterious Truthâs, which no man can conceive.
If upon Earth there dwell such God-like men,
Iâle here Recant my Paradox to them;
Adore those Shrines of Virtue, homage pay,
And with the rabble World, their Laws obey.
(191â93; 216â23)
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 âGod-likeâ churchman represents an impossible ideal, the speakerâs offer to âRecant [his] Paradoxâ 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 Hobbesâs sense of the word. Richard Bentley, whose Boyle Lectures against atheism defined Anglican orthodoxy for the Restoration and early eighteenth century, had proclaimed that âEven Revelation itself is not shy nor unwilling to ascribe its own first Credit and fundamental Authority to the test and testimony of Reason.â16 The âSatyreâ âs clerical adversarius, who enters the poem in line 46 to rebuke the speaker for ârail[ing] at Reason and Mankindâ (58), argues similarly that reason enables man to âDive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce / The flaming limits of the Universeâ (68â69). The pious churchmanâs modest reverence presents a striking contrast to the arrogant enthusiasm of the clerical adversarius, who insolently âThink[s] heeâs the Image of the Infiniteâ (77). The contrary suggestion of the âAdditionâ that true piety requires belief in âMysterious Truthâs, which no man can conceive,â thus continues to set the freethinking speaker apart from the reasonable religion that forms the object of the poemâs attack throughout. The speaker can defend faith and still oppose the orthodoxy of the time.17
I
My argument about Rochesterâs 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 Rochesterâs âSatyreâ speaks for the diversity of irreligion in the period, it is nonetheless necessary to specify Rochesterâs 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 âthe legend of gloomy Puritans who hated pleasure dies hardâ; 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 rakeâs heterodoxy twenty years later.19 Hillâs 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 Rochesterâs verse understands all traces of belief as decidedly antinomian. According to James Turner, Rochesterâs conversion, for example, is closer to the subversive spirituality characteristic of radical Protestants than it is to âconventional piety.â Rochester, both Turner and Hill remind us, was described by a contemporary as an âEnthusiast in Wit.â21 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 âEnthusiastical or Fanatical Atheists . . . (how abhorrent soever they may otherwise seem to be from Enthusiasm and Revelations).â What is more, both infidels and...