Deism

The English Deists

In 1754–56, when the Deist controversy had passed its peak, John Leland, an opponent, wrote a historical and critical compendium of Deist thought, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers that Have Appeared in England in the Last and Present Century; with Observations upon Them, and Some Account of the Answers that Have Been Published Against Them. This work, which began with Lord Herbert of Cherbury and moved through the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Charles Blount, the earl of Shaftesbury (Cooper), Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Chubb, and Viscount Bolingbroke, fixed the canon of who should be included among the Deist writers. In subsequent works, Hobbes usually has been dropped from the list and John Toland included, though he was closer to pantheism than most of the other Deists were. Herbert was not known as a Deist in his day, but Blount and the rest who figured in Leland’s book would have accepted the term Deist as an appropriate designation for their religious position. Simultaneously, it became an adjective of opprobrium in the vocabulary of their opponents. Bishop Edward Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist (1677) is an early example of the orthodox use of the epithet.

In Lord Herbert’s treatises five religious ideas were recognized as God-given and innate in the mind of man from the beginning of time: the belief in a supreme being, in the need for his worship, in the pursuit of a pious and virtuous life as the most desirable form of worship, in the need of repentance for sins, and in rewards and punishments in the next world. These fundamental religious beliefs, Herbert held, had been the possession of the first man, and they were basic to all the worthy positive institutionalized religions of later times. Thus, differences among sects and cults all over the world were usually benign, mere modifications of universally accepted truths; they were corruptions only when they led to barbarous practices such as the immolation of human victims and the slaughter of religious rivals.

In England at the turn of the 17th century this general religious attitude assumed a more militant form, particularly in the works of Toland, Shaftesbury, Tindal, Woolston, and Collins. Though the Deists differed among themselves and there is no single work that can be designated as the quintessential expression of Deism, they joined in attacking both the existing orthodox church establishment and the wild manifestations of the dissenters. The tone of these writers was often earthy and pungent, but their Deist ideal was sober natural religion without the trappings of Roman Catholicism and the High Church in England and free from the passionate excesses of Protestant fanatics. In Toland there is great emphasis on the rational element in natural religion; in Shaftesbury more worth is ascribed to the emotive quality of religious experience when it is directed into salutary channels. All are agreed in denouncing every kind of religious intolerance because the core of the various religions is identical. In general, there is a negative evaluation of religious institutions and the priestly corps who direct them. Simple primitive monotheism was practiced by early men without temples, churches, and synagogues, and modern men could readily dispense with religious pomp and ceremony. The more elaborate and exclusive the religious establishment, the more it came under attack. A substantial portion of Deist literature was devoted to the description of the noxious practices of all religions in all times, and the similarities of pagan and Roman Catholic rites were emphasized.

The Deists who presented purely rationalist proofs for the existence of God, usually variations on the argument from the design or order of the universe, were able to derive support from the vision of the lawful physical world that Sir Isaac Newton had delineated. Indeed, in the 18th century, there was a tendency to convert Newton into a matter-of-fact Deist—a transmutation that was contrary to the spirit of both his philosophical and his theological writings.

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When Deists were faced with the problem of how man had lapsed from the pure principles of his first forebears into the multiplicity of religious superstitions and crimes committed in the name of God, they ventured a number of conjectures. They surmised that men had fallen into error because of the inherent weakness of human nature; or they subscribed to the idea that a conspiracy of priests had intentionally deceived men with a “rout of ceremonials” in order to maintain power over them.

The role of Christianity in the universal history of religion became problematic. For many religious Deists the teachings of Jesus Christ were not essentially novel but were, in reality, as old as creation, a republication of primitive monotheism. Religious leaders had arisen among many peoples—Socrates, Buddha, Muhammad—and their mission had been to effect a restoration of the simple religious faith of early men. Some writers, while admitting the similarity of Jesus’ message to that of other religious teachers, tended to preserve the unique position of Christianity as a divine revelation. It was possible to believe even in prophetic revelation and still remain a Deist, for revelation could be considered as a natural historical occurrence consonant with the definition of the goodness of God. The more extreme Deists, of course, could not countenance this degree of divine intervention in the affairs of men.

Natural religion was sufficient and certain; the tenets of all positive religions contained extraneous, even impure elements. Deists accepted the moral teachings of the Bible without any commitment to the historical reality of the reports of miracles. Most Deist argumentation attacking the literal interpretation of Scripture as divine revelation leaned upon the findings of 17th-century biblical criticism. Woolston, who resorted to an allegorical interpretation of the whole of the New Testament, was an extremist even among the more audacious Deists. Tindal was perhaps the most moderate of the group. Toland was violent; his denial of all mystery in religion was supported by analogies among Christian, Judaic, and pagan esoteric religious practices, equally condemned as the machinations of priests.

The Deists were particularly vehement against any manifestation of religious fanaticism and enthusiasm. In this respect Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) was probably the crucial document in propagating their ideas. Revolted by the Puritan fanatics of the previous century and by the wild hysteria of a group of French exiles prophesying in London in 1707, Shaftesbury denounced all forms of religious extravagance as perversions of “true” religion. These false prophets were directing religious emotions, benign in themselves, into the wrong channels. Any description of God that depicted his impending vengeance, vindictiveness, jealousy, and destructive cruelty was blasphemous. Because sound religion could find expression only among healthy men, the argument was common in Deist literature that the preaching of extreme asceticism, the practice of self-torture, and the violence of religious persecutions were all evidence of psychological illness and had nothing to do with authentic religious sentiment and conduct. The Deist God, ever gentle, loving, and benevolent, intended men to behave toward one another in the same kindly and tolerant fashion.