The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760 by Sarah Ellenzweig

Abstract

105 writers importantly contributes to our understanding of the Enlightenment’s emergence. Their writings on toleration and the ways in which they were connected make a good start. This book lacks, however, a clear picture of the complexities of toleration— the subject of Part III. Mr. Marshall does not deliver the promised analysis. Instead their ideas are reviewed as onedimensional expressions of a more general ‘‘tolerationist’’ viewpoint. Despite the same simple tune, Locke and Bayle present diverse perspectives. For example , Locke’s arguments for promoting toleration of Protestant dissenters initially appeared in 1667 as beneficial to commerce; they reappear in the Letter, surrounded by a theological introduction , which makes the radical proposal that toleration is the chief mark, the ruling virtue, of the Christian Church. Yet it is a limited toleration that Locke proposes . Atheists are excluded from it; so too are those whose religions are headed by the ruler of a sovereign state. These limitations are political, not theological. The sort of toleration Locke proposes, moreover, aims at concord among Christians and conversion of unbelievers . In the Second and Third Letters concerning Toleration (and an unfinished Fourth), Locke clearly is not advocating religious pluralism. In his Philosophical Commentary, Bayle proposes a simple philosophical method. Toleration is purely rational: he argues that the words of Jesus cited in his title (Luke 14.23) must not be interpreted literally by a magistrate on the grounds that literal scriptural interpretations to justify a wrongful act must be rejected. In this instance , the wrongful act would be to deny the right of an individual to practice religion as conscience dictates. In civil society, natural rights trump revelation (among which is a right to obey the dictates of conscience). Yet Bayle’s toleration is limited, since he denies that atheists can properly appeal to conscience ; that would appeal to a transcendent authority whose existence they refuse to accept. Mr. Marshall’s narrative in Part III fails to bring out that the progress of modern society toward openness and universal toleration was not direct or inevitable, but crooked. Readers should also consult the more satisfactory treatment of Bayle and Locke on toleration by Jonathan Israel: Enlightenment Contested (Oxford, 2006), pp. 135–163. Victor Nuovo Middlebury College SARAH ELLENZWEIG. The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy , and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760. Stanford: Stanford, 2008. Pp. xii ⫹ 240. $60. At the heart of this study is a proposed paradox: aristocratic English freethinkers who doubted the veracity of Scripture and revealed religion nevertheless found both necessary for an ordered society. Such freethinkers, the study contends, concealed their genteel unbelief through literary devices such as irony or ambiguity, even as they expounded a civil religion they deemed necessary for the masses. This twofold philosophy had precedents, Ms. Ellenzweig argues, in classical writers, who similarly viewed religion as a necessary fiction. The study probes the alliance between such skeptical unbelief and political conservatism. Through that alliance , religion was adapted to suit the needs of the modern state. The list of freethinkers under consideration— Rochester, Behn, Swift, and Pope— 106 suggests the study’s problematic use of the term ‘‘freethinker.’’ Almost immediately, readers will confront the deficits of treating eighteenth -century religious experience as if it simply mirrored modern religious experience. Concepts such as ‘‘freethinker ,’’ ‘‘skeptic,’’ and ‘‘deist’’ are discussed largely in the abstract, divorced from the polarizing force of religious and political controversy that often used these terms, not to advance unbelief, but to demonize opponents. The philosophical skepticism used by Catholic apologists to argue for the need for humility and clerical guidance in the face of complex religious and philosophical questions was intentionally equated with and thus reduced to theological skepticism or unbelief by Protestant polemicists , who hoped to discredit such lines of inquiry. For their part, Catholics repeatedly reduced the Anglican and radical Protestant emphasis on reason to Socinianism and later to deism. In actuality , confessional currents often bled into one another, but the rhetoric of controversy drew sharp distinctions between confessional identities. Creating a credible taxonomy of confessional belief requires a willingness to contrast the fixed boundaries of polemical debate with the far more porous boundaries of religious experience. The literary devices Ms. Ellenzweig...