Newtonianism and the enthusiasm of Enlightenment

Abstract

The career of John Jackson (1686–1763), Arian theologian and controversialist, provides a key to unlocking the early reception and quick collapse of a Newtonian natural apologetic originally developed by Samuel Clarke. The importance of friendship and discipleship in eighteenth-century intellectual enquiry is emphasised, and the links between Newton and his followers are traced alongside those of a group of Cambridge Lockeans, led by Jackson’s direct contemporary Daniel Waterland, who proved instrumental in the initial dismantling of Clarke’s brand of Newtonian apologetic. The controversial context of this engagement is shown to have been largely provided by the religiously compromising rise of freethinking, and Tindal’s Christianity as old as the creation (1731) signalled the dangers to proponents of natural religion as an adjunct of Christian apologetic in such a heated atmosphere. Religious division of the sort that resulted paradoxically played into the hands of the freethinkers in the anticlerical atmosphere of the 1730s, and accusations were exchanged between Newtonians and Lockeans accordingly. The dynamic of England’s Enlightenment experience is, then, a complicated one, and, as the career and writings of Jackson and William Whiston demonstrate, it was one which absorbed as well as repudiated ‘enthusiasm’.