As a coherent ontological system, Christianity is a mess. Fortunately for the faithful, theologians from Augustine to David Bentley Hart have found pathways to keep Christians from encountering the mess, so that it becomes apparent only when some troublemaker probes an enigma. For example, is it possible for an omnipotent Deity to cede power? If yes, the imperfect world we live in cannot be God’s creation; if no, God lacks free will and hence is not omnipotent. Schmidgen boldly enters this jungle wielding the theological machete of “voluntarism” as an explanation for an emerging tolerance of exploration, variety, and difference, an “aesthetic of infinite variety [that] defines itself against the order of kinds.” That this is a new phenomenon in the period under examination, 1688–1730, rather than a continuation of Western thought from its beginnings (mirrored in Shakespeare’s summation of Egypt’s most beautiful woman as containing “infinite variety”), is the case he argues. The discussion of voluntarism among the theologians, philosophers, and (proto)scientists of the period is splendid. There is, unfortunately, less to admire in the application of his thesis to literature.Certainly, his fundamental position that writers like Locke, Defoe, and Swift were all engaged in “the defense of spirit against atheist reduction” is indisputable. Schmidgen endorses the priority of ontology over epistemology in the period, a counterargument to the view that the rise of the novel was enabled by increasing secularization. In doing so he joins a healthy number of scholars intent on returning theology to discussions of the period; he is familiar with some of this work although his finding it only “in the last ten years” reveals some deficiency—I would date the recovery of “spiritual authority” as “central in the development of eighteenth-century literature” at least to the 1970s, that is, five decades ago.Voluntarism is defined thus: God created the world arbitrarily and “therefore, order does not inhere in nature.” This being so, order is a human invention, although God, voluntarily, can also impose order. Locke’s “no innate ideas” plays a large part in this separation between goodness and being: “structure, form, and kind are ontologically secondary, either emergent or arbitrarily willed. . . . Human beings cannot know the nature of things; they can only construct it. Innate ideas and a priori knowledge do not exist.” How or why this differs from the unknowable God of the Hebraic tradition surviving surely into the eighteenth century is not sufficiently examined. Historically, these are the difficulties that motivated the Church fathers from Augustine onward. When the problem reached Locke, he carved out exceptions to his “no innate ideas,” most important, the idea of ultimate justice (truth). Schmidgen cannot solve the problem: the imagination is now free, but he also respects “the fact that the voluntarist denaturalization of values rests on the absolute sovereignty of God.” As Augustine and others recognized, this is a sentence that devours itself, beginning with “fact” and ending with “absolute,” both words indicating the existence of an innate idea of truth that is otherwise being denied. The voluntarist God is the challenge to monotheism that brought about the fourth-century invention of a triune God, not because of an urge to polytheism, but precisely because the paradox of determinism and free will could not be unraveled without it—or with it, but that is another story. To enter the theological scene in the 1680s without some historical glances toward origins, including scriptural commentaries, is to shape the intellectual material being discussed without accounting for, among other things, the imagination that created the Cyclops, that created the “decompositional” works of a Rabelais or Cervantes (recognized only very late in the book), or, to return to Shakespeare, the visions of Midsummer Night’s Dream or Caliban.In fairness to Schmidgen, his initial theoretical discussion is rich, suggestive, and informative, so much so that it invites ceaseless counterargument, where almost every contemporary assertion is shortly answered by someone else. His best chapter, in fact, centers on precisely this sort of exchange between Locke and Stillingfleet. To Schmidgen’s credit he seems to have read an enormous number of these exchanges (but oddly, not the writings of John Norris of Bemerton, the first cleric and philosopher to attack the Essay in the name of spirit [An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, 1701–1704]). The discussion of Samuel Clarke is particularly useful for eighteenth-century scholars, Clarke being perhaps the archetypical voluntarist. Still, Leibniz’s “impatience” with his indulgence in counterfactuals is more relevant to the twenty-first century: “The vulgar Philosophy . . . easily admits all sorts of Fictions: Mine is more strict.” “Counterfactuals” becomes the mantra by which Schmidgen invokes all that is imaginative and adventuresome in the emerging literature he associates with voluntarism. Surely, however, the counterfactual world, which Locke knew could be justified by his stance against “innate ideas,” is the reason he devoted time and effort in Essay to allow for an immaterial soul facing an ultimate true judgment at death. A counterfactual world must encounter, at some time or another, a factual world, perhaps the reason why, toward the end of his introductory discussion, Schmidgen admits to the irony that voluntarism, while attempting to justify established religion, weakened it. The oxymoron introduced apologetically by Schmidgen, “real counterfactuals” (via Locke), does not help the situation, nor can I grasp any difference between the “counterfactuals” of Bosch in the Middle Ages and Swift’s flying island, although the argument here suggests they do differ: “Voluntarism makes the counterfactual collaborate with the factual, constructing being.”The ensuing chapters on Pope and Blackmore, Swift, and Defoe attempt to justify the importance of voluntarism to literature. They begin with a questionable assertion that perhaps colors all further discussion: “human beings do not possess innate ideas, are excluded from divine knowledge, and are thrown into a contingent world of puzzling particulars.” Accepting the first clause and the third as possibly accurate, the middle clause surely is not, at least not for those Christians both writing and reading eighteenth-century literature. Indeed, the thesis of this study necessitates, I believe, ignoring that seventeenth-century author, John Milton, who most fully wrestled with voluntarism (he appears only briefly as a Whiggish model for Blackmore’s Christian sublime). Equally to the point: while it is admitted that Pope and his allies were “possessed of deeper literary talents” than Blackmore, too much attention is given to a poet who, setting aside Pope’s hostility, is mediocre at best. And how does one define “deeper” and “talents” in a world without absolutes? Setting aside that quibble, what does Blackmore mean by God’s capacity to bestow “More Bounty, more Perfection” on mankind, or what poetic skill is exhibited here: “While from unjuicy Limbs without a Root / New Buds devis’d, and leafy Branches shoot.” As a Scriblerian reviewer, observing the increasing disappearance of Pope (despite the forthcoming Oxford edition) in undergraduate (and graduate) classrooms, I admit to wishing that scholarly monographs would return our attention to the best that has been thought and written rather than trying to bring Blackmore’s Creation back into existence.There is little in the readings of Swift to suggest that Schmidgen’s elaborate thesis can produce any substantially different Swift than we already have. That Swift’s satire has a constructive as well as destructive side is hardly new territory; that our disgust with Corinna should (and does for intelligent readers) turn into disgust with ourselves for being disgusted with her, seems a commonplace. And when Schmidgen suggests that Roger Lund’s comment on the “baffling dichotomy between surface and depth that governs much of A Tale of a Tub” is not baffling, we surely wish he had set about wielding his machete in the jungle of Tale of a Tub, rather than directing most attention to the rather English garden of Gulliver’s Travels.This is certainly a better book than my review might suggest. Better books push reviewers into a combative dialogue with their authors, force them to underscore line after line page after page, make substantial commentary in the margin, and ultimately realize they need to write a book in answer rather than a review. That being beyond my capacity, I instead suggest another book for Schmidgen to write testing his approach from 1730 to at least 1768, the date of Sterne’s death. How voluntarism and the counterfactual emerge in Clarissa or Tristram Shandy is certainly his next challenge. I am sure I will enjoy that volume even more than I enjoyed doing combat with Infinite Variety.