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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
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Part II - Agents of Reform
- Wayne Hudson
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- 05 December 2014, pp 103-104
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6 - ‘Religion’ and Modernity
- from Part II - Agents of Reform
- Wayne Hudson
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Summary
Introduction
All these writers saw ‘Religion’ as a major problem for civilized societies, and as a paradigm case of what could go wrong in human affairs when human beings departed from the law of nature and embraced priestcraft and superstition. Many of them explored a naturalistic interpretation of ‘Religion’ which excluded arbitrary supernatural revelation, although not necessarily supernatural influences. In contrast to Hobbes, who argued that religion arose out of fear and ignorance, most of these writers posited a primitive natural religion, based on just notions of God and our duty. Many of them were indebted to the philosophy and critical sociology of religion which they found in a range of Roman Stoic writers (Seneca, Cato, Tacitus, Horace, Lucian), and, in particular, in Cicero's De divinitate and De natura deorum. This philosophy and critical sociology of religion, with its necessitarian theism and its sharp distinction between religion and superstition, gave them a perspective with which to read ecclesiastical history in terms of a sociology of error, a psychology of interest and a theory of the fall of humanity through religion. Blount, for example, wrote that:
The wickedness of Men's natures is such, that all Revolutions whatever both in Church and State, as well as all Mutations both in Doctrine and matters of faith … must be seconded by some private temporal Interest, and have some humane Prop to support them, or else all will not do.
The claim that humankind had been seduced from an original law or religion of nature by priests who pretended to revelations to get wealth and power went with hostile interpretations of external positive religion. Religion of this sort, they argued, was based on superstitious notions of deity and made humanity superstitious and cruel:
CONTENTS
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CONTENTS
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3 - Herbert of Cherbury
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Summary
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. 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.
Frontmatter
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5 - ‘Philosophy’ and Reform
- from Part II - Agents of Reform
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Introduction
In the eyes of nineteenth-century historians the writers known as the English deists were primarily important because they attempted to prove that Christianity was false. This was not a balanced interpretation of either their lives or their writings. These writers were not only religious controversialists. They had a very wide range of interests, and were agents of reform in many areas. They were able to work for reform because of the historically specific conditions of Protestant Enlightenment in England, and because of their constellational placements as related writers involved in controversies which attracted attention internationally. In many different areas, these writers signalled proposals for changes of understanding and practice which were taken up in other times and places by leading participants of the Enlightenments in Europe, America and even the Orthodox world. In this and the following chapter I explore their contributions to reform.
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These writers were not of one philosophy, and their estimation of ‘Philosophy’ varied. For most of them ‘Philosophy’ provided an alternative and more reliable source of guidance than revelation. Their sense of ‘Philosophy’ was wide, and carried the neo-Roman sense of the reform of superstition and the application of reason to the management of human affairs. Several of them (Blount, Toland, Collins, Tindal) were influenced by Spinoza, but it is not clear that any of them were Spinozists in an exact sense. None of these writers repeated Spinoza's views on prophecy, or subscribed to his claim that theology and philosophy were radically different in nature, and all of them took theological questions to be philosophical questions to a large extent.
3 - Two Clerical Critics
- from Part I - Problematizing Revealed Religion
- Wayne Hudson
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- 05 December 2014, pp 49-72
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Introduction
Thomas Woolston and Conyers Middleton were Cambridge divines accused in their lifetimes of being deists. In the existing literature neither writer has received adequate treatment. Woolston's substantive views have not been taken seriously, while Middleton has mutated into a forerunner of David Hume. No attempt has been made to consider them side by side. As a result, their common concern with Christian hermeneutics has largely been missed. Woolston and Middleton have been widely read as if they argued that Christianity was false. Both, however, were convinced that their fellow clergy subscribed to schemes of Christianity which could not survive informed criticism in the long run. Moreover, both had legitimate scholarly concerns about the significance of Patristic scholarship for the future of Christianity and presented their controversial views within the framework of Protestant Enlightenment.
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Thomas Woolston was a respected Cambridge Patristics scholar and divine who combined genuine religious insights with vast, if eccentric, classical learning, ruthless skills as an ecclesiastical debater and a Puritan hatred for ‘hireling Priests’. In the existing literature his thought has often been trivialized by interpreters who assume that he was insincere or insane. In this chapter, I read Woolston as a thinker wrestling with disbelief, that is, as someone who was preoccupied with the possibility that Christianity, as ordinarily understood, might be an imposture. As a Patristics scholar Woolston attempted to negotiate a path for himself in a world committed to a literal interpretation of Christianity which he considered false. He was a serious thinker, defending a mystical interpretation of Christianity which he claimed had prevailed in the ancient Church. Whether he eventually decided that this interpretation was fatally flawed we do not know, just as we do not know whether he had privately come to embrace a form of deism. What has been overlooked, however, is that his entire career hinged on a mystical theology of ridiculous events about which he was initially and possibly always serious.
2 - Christianity Challenged
- from Part I - Problematizing Revealed Religion
- Wayne Hudson
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Summary
Introduction
Following the English translation of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1689) and a stream of heterodox works in the 1670s and 1680s, Charles Blount's The Oracles of Reason (1693) seemed a portent of a period in which heterodoxy, including various forms of deism, would explode into print. However, no deist manifesto appeared. Instead, the radical strands of heterodoxy which Blount promoted were veiled from sight. In early eighteenth-century England in the factious conditions of Queen Anne's reign there were few spaces in which critics of Christianity could present their views, and this contextual constraint remained a factor into the 1740s. Critics of Christianity could talk in coffee houses or at meetings of the like-minded, but they could not publish their thoughts under their own names. Christianity was not something which could be attacked with safety. It had powerful support from Newton's physics and from the Royal Society, and was defended by clergy proficient in classical languages.
No public attack on the credibility of Christianity as a revealed or positive religion was published in England until the 1720s when the Jacobites appeared to have been defeated. Even then this attack was in a form which was not inconsistent with civil Protestantism. Both Collins and Tindal ended their lives by publishing attacks on Christianity as a revealed religion, but neither of them renounced their claim to be Low Church Protestants. The two challenges to Christianity found in their late writings were different, however. Collins sought to destroy the argument for Christianity as a revealed religion from the evidence of prophecy.
4 - Charles Blount and His Circle
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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. 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 part classical, international and European, albeit mixed with radical Protestantism.
Conclusion
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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.
Works Cited
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Index
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- 05 December 2014, pp 217-225
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Appendix: Herbert's Philosophical Poems
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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 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.
The English Deists
- Studies in Early Enlightenment
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Hudson reinterprets the works of an important group of writers known as 'the English deists' including: Charles Blount (1654-1693), John Toland (1670-1722), Anthony Collins (1679-1729), Matthew Tindal (1656-1733), Thomas Woolston (1669-1733), Thomas Morgan (nd-1743), Thomas Chubb (1679-1747) and Peter Annet (1693-1769), as well as the 'father of English deism', Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). Historians tend to assume that these figures accepted deism as a totalising outlook. Hudson, however, argues that this interpretation reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking. Adopting a distinctive position with implications for contemporary debates about the Enlightenment, Hudson contextualizes these writers within the early Enlightenment, which was multivocal, plural and in search of self definition.
Part I - Problematizing Revealed Religion
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- 05 December 2014, pp 25-26
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Appendix: Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke
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- 05 December 2014, pp 151-154
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Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Henry, Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751) are sometimes included among the writers known as the English deists. It is probably better, however, to treat them as independent philosophers with their own substantive views and projects.
Many scholars have read Shaftesbury's writings to fit in with preconceived notions of ‘deism’. Shaftesbury's thought, however, is not well captured by this label. Even though he believed in a governing mind, there is little evidence that he ever thought of himself as a deist in an exclusive religious identity sense. At one stage he knew little about the ‘deism’ of those who called themselves deists, as a hitherto little noted passage reveals:
What is that which at present they call
Deism? The belief of a God? What God? A mind?
a real mind? universally presiding, acting?
present everywhere? … Is it this they understand? …
Be it so. It is well. But if it be anything less
than this … then let us hear what this idea is.
What Deism … What Deity? Of what is it they
talk to us? What nature? … Atoms and void.
A plain negative to Deity, fair and honest.
To Deism, still to pretence …
From whence then came this other pretence?
Who are these Deists? How assume this name?
By what title or pretence? …
What is this Deism they talk of? How does
it differ from mere Atheism? … Of what system then
are these Deists? Of Democritus and Epicurus they
are not. Peripatetics, Platonists, Pythagoreans,
Pyrrhonists. What?
Shaftesbury associated with Toland, Stephens and Molesworth in political campaigns in the 1690s. He admired Collins, distrusted Toland and was critical of Tindal. But this political association did not imply more than a limited philosophical convergence, mainly in the area of perfect theism and a secularizing deployment of Benjamin Whichcote's principles.
5 - Three Writers
- Wayne Hudson
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- Book:
- The English Deists
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 79-114
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- Chapter
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Summary
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. 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’. 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.
4 - The Diffusion of Disbelief
- from Part I - Problematizing Revealed Religion
- Wayne Hudson
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- Book:
- Enlightenment and Modernity
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 73-102
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
By the early 1730s Toland, Collins and Tindal were dead, and, according to the standard accounts, deism declined in England. However, these accounts may need to be qualified. Although doctors, lawyers, tavern philosophers, soldiers and young rakes were reported to make remarks critical of Christianity, there was never any deist social movement and it may be more accurate to think in terms of a diffusion of critical attitudes. The scale of controversy was reduced, but there were further erosions of Christianity's claims and a significant diffusion of disbelief in particular theological points to extensive audiences in England and America. There was no major deist thinker after Tindal, apart from Bolingbroke, whose philosophy was not much taken up, but there was a extensive impact on thinkers of the first rank, including Hume, Bentham and Kant, who shaped future intellectual developments. Further, while clandestinity seems to have declined, criticism of revealed religion became increasingly explicit between 1730 and 1760, and reached a wider and less educated public. Non-Christian perspectives on politics, law and morality were also more freely expressed. On the other hand, the radical Renaissance deism of the seventeenth century, based on a God who was Nature or the Soul of the World, played a reduced role and in the 1730s and early 1740s there were fewer charges that deists were atheists.
Although home-grown heterodoxy had surfaced in various London clubs, religion was still a public matter. Christianity was part of the common law of England, the established Church was, on some accounts, vibrant, and public manifestations of disbelief were repressed. Walpole's regime imposed tight controls on religious deviance and almost nothing openly advocating disbelief was allowed to appear in print. Theology was still an important part of intellectual life, and theological debates, which were widely followed, were surprisingly technical.