The Problematical Compromise: The Early Deism of Anthony Collins

Abstract

The Problematical Compromise: The Early Deism of Anthony Collins ROBERT B. L UEHRS No doubt English deism was, to use Peter Gay’s felicitous description,1 the last compromise with religion which reasonable men, those who fully participated in the critical spirit of the Enlightenment, were prepared to make. It was a compromise well suited to the temper of the age. Intelligent men were intrigued by John Locke’s “historical plain method” of arriving at that clear knowledge which lay within human competency. They were also susceptible to a popularized Newtonianism, which pictured the universe as a vast, logically consistent machine, designed by the rational mind of God according to immutable physical laws and thus comprehensible to the rational mind of man. Sensible individuals had wearied of the social turmoil caused by excessive religious zeal and were ready for a measure of orderly toleration as well as dispassionate Latitudinarianism, a cerebral sort of Christi­ anity which, as Locke had proposed, had reduced its tenets to a handful of readily understandable precepts. Deism helped to shape this intellectual environment; it retained the basic humanitarian ethical standards of Christianity while purging the religion of disquieting miracles, revelation, and other 59 60 / ROBERT B. LUEHRS supernatural trappings. Yet, although the deist compromise seemed appropriate for the last few years of the seventeenth century and the first two or three decades of the eighteenth, the inherent stability of this compromise must be questioned. It was a difficult, serious matter to be a complete advocate of the rights of reason in a civilization whose character was still determined by the requirements of faith, and the deists were the first conscious pioneers of this position. The age may have been spiritually lax or generous in its eclecticism, but it was hardly religiously indif­ ferent. Deism was the product of a time which took religious questions in earnest, and one should not be misled by the deist penchant for irony and satire.2 Despite the disappearance of the Licensing Act in 1694, which opened the way to freedom of expression in even theological issues, limited only by libel laws, the deists had more to fear than being answered by country clergy trying to make names for themselves. John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious, that great deist tract against revealed religion, was attacked in the Lower House of Church Convocation in 1700 as atheistic, con­ demned by the Grand Jury in Middlesex, and ordered burned by the hangman in Ireland.3 The wildly eccentric Cambridge fellow Thomas Woolston so offended public taste with his discourses against Christ’s miracles that he was placed under confinement, where he died unable to pay the fine and unwilling to promise the silence which would have accomplished his release. Another deist martyr was Peter Annet, who in 1761, when he was seventy, was condemned for blasphemy, pilloried twice, and compelled to serve a month in prison before being paroled. To participate in the creation of the deist school of thought took intellectual courage.4 The early deists commonly claimed to be Christians merely trying to return the faith to its first principles; their opponents commonly accused them of atheism. In reality, neither was the case. The deist campaign against transcendence and their mortal assaults on the very foundations of Christianity certainly pre­ cluded their membership in that community. Still, they did not want to be unbelievers either, although they often discovered The Early Deism ofAnthony Collins I 61 relentless criticism to be an acid which tended to dissolve not only revealed religion but all religion and opened the door to agnosticism. They struggled with their own skepticism, but not always with the greatest success. Their insistence upon their own Christianity can be seen not as hypocrisy or a cynical shield or malicious humor but as a necessary self-deception, an identity required because the loss of it would open too many undesirable possibilities. These two faces of the deist compromise can be readily discerned in the literary career of Anthony Collins, one of the more illustrious of the spokesmen for deism and thus of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment itself. His efforts to accommodate religion with reason in an honest fashion produced a...