"See Mystery to Mathematics fly!": Pope's Dunciad and the Critique of Religious Rationalism

Abstract

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANGLICAN THEOLOGY HAS TENDED to be dismissed (or praised) as rationalistic, a series of proofs that would culminate at the end of the century in William Paley's Evidences and his Natural Theology.1 This rationalism is often predicated on the gradual acceptance by the educated elite of Newtonian cosmology and Lockean epistemology, a process that was resisted only by the most resolute anti-rationalists, with such diverse figures as George Berkeley, William Law, and John Wesley forming the