English Deism Research Articles

Tarihsel ve Çağdaş Yönleriyle Heterodoks Dinî Bir Kimlik Olarak Deizm

Deism from the beginning has positioned itself as a heterodox religious identity contrary to orthodoxy. In this regard, it is the review of established classical theological presuppositions regarding the following headings: conception of God; God-world relationship; religion-science relationship; ethical considerations regarding the problem of evil, etc. In these contexts, deism could be seen as a sort of religious self-criticism. As arose in British philosophical-theological circles, deism sounds to have resisted some conventional Christian presuppositions as put forward by E. Herbert of Cherbury, the father of English deism, in the forthcoming articles: “There is a supreme God. This sovereign deity should be worshipped. Virtue arises from the piety created by this worship. As the man is filled with wickedness, he needs repentance, which means communication with this sovereign Being. There is reward or punishment in the life to come.” In the course of time, different kinds of deisms turned up, ranging from accepting God as a sublime creator alone and rejecting revelation, i.e., institutional religion, to those accepting religion on the condition that it should be compatible with reason. Samuel Clarke mentions the arguments of different kinds of deists and skillfully criticizes them. Historical and contemporary deism have the following in common: “The compromise between truth of revelation and truth of reason; saving knowledge versus saving faith; rejection of institutional structures; glorification of reason and human nature; ethical rationality.” With this doctrinal backdrop, hot debates on deism in Turkey have recently gotten new dimensions. Figures showing the rise of deism in recent years under an Islamist political rule makes the case all the more thought-provoking. The visibility of religion in the public sphere has increased, and the rate of religiosity would also be expected to increase. However, the result is quite the opposite. There is a widespread and remarkable secularization in conservative circles. After they got the political power and economic welfare, which enabled them to attain worldly glory, they have gradually left religious glory behind and glorified profanity. In this case, deism seems to take the form of secularized orthodoxy. Deists in Turkey, rather than rejecting revealed religion they want it to be compatible with reason, to demythologize it from supernatural narratives, and to find a way of getting rid of fanatical elements in the religion. They want to replace religious institutional authority with the authority of reason, which rests itself on innate ideas and a priori truths. They claim ethical rationality, which means ethical truths are accessible through reasoning. My study tackles some statistical data specifically signifying why youngsters tend to claim to be deists. Some surveys among high school students have been included in the study and due evaluations have been made. It seems sectarian identities, radical voices, authoritative religious language, blockades to freedom of speech, a dichotomy between religious and scientific facts in the curricula and mythological religious language are among the reasons counted by the youngster to reject conventional religion and embrace deism. The mainstream theological tradition of Islam is quite familiar with deistic claims. The discussions on deism will finally bring the enlightened minds together with the reasonable religious line.

The Image of Paganism in the Age of Reason: From Idolatry towards a Secular Concept of Polytheism

This article argues that the concept of “paganism,” though originally theological in nature, came to be used in the Enlightenment and its secular thought as a term for non-Abrahamic religions. Discussions on paganism were conducted in an environment where concerns about religious plurality had become central. As such, these discussions, and their subject—paganism, also served as a means to find solutions for concerns about religious plurality. This article will focus on three components of the discussion on paganism: (i) the origin of idolatry, (ii) the nature of gods, and (iii) the nature of pagan worship. This article argues that purportedly secular concerns regarding paganism expressed by Deist and Enlightenment scholars were in fact rooted in Christian theology. This article is divided into four sections. The first section gives a general account of relevant discussions taking place in the seventeenth century. The second section discusses the father of English deism, Herbert of Cherbury, and his notion of paganism. The third section discusses Herbert’s successors. The fourth section discusses David Hume and his work on paganism. The article argues that internal theological concerns in the seventeenth and eighteenth century gave rise to a specific conceptual language used in thinking about and discussing paganism. This language was later adopted by contemporary Pagans in the twentieth and twenty first century. As such, the article argues, in any study of the phenomenon referred to as “paganism” the present framework inevitably leads one to theological questions and answers. As a result, while the discussion on paganism continues to be a theological one, the phenomenon being studied remains inaccessible.

Religio Laici V. Religio Laici: Dryden, Blount, and the Origin of English Deism

This essay reopens the case of two identically titled works that appeared within twelve months of each other, a preface and poem by John Dryden (1682) and a philosophical treatise by Charles Blount (1683). It argues that the latter was written before the former and not by Blount but by the founder of modern deism, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. It further argues that both Blount and Dryden were aware of Herbert’s English manuscript of Religio Laici before 1682. Dryden wrote his Religio Laici in a hurry to preempt the deists’ Religio Laici; Blount then used Dryden’s poem to avoid censorship, masking the first English manifesto of deism as an adulatory letter to Dryden. This argument solves several long-standing problems in the interpretation of Dryden’s poem and in the historiography of early English deism.

Hutcheson on Natural Religion

Recent scholars have examined the important role of English Deism in the formation of a modern naturalistic approach to the study of human religiosity. Despite the volume of important studies of various aspects of his thought, the role of Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) in this development has been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to show how Hutcheson develops his own account of the origins of religion, consonant with his more well-known theories in aesthetics and moral philosophy, that diverges sharply from the then-prevailing Deist views. Hutcheson pioneers a psychological account of religion that anticipates the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars in important ways. At the same time, Hutcheson incorporates his account of the origins of religion into an overall vision of human flourishing.

The Disputed Root of Salvation in Eighteenth‐century English Deism: Thomas Chubb and Thomas Morgan Debate the Impact of the Fall

Very often, little‐known debates in intellectual history offer an opportunity to shed light on much larger issues. In this article I examine one such episode which took place during 1726 and 1727 w...

English Deism and Germany: The Thomas Morgan controversy

The work of the English Deist Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), a Marcion in his time, received much negative criticism in England and abroad, especially in Germany. His views aroused comments in books, dissertations and journals. Only in the first half of the twentieth century was he to be praised by theologians such as Adolf von Harnack and Emanuel Hirsch, who likewise disparaged the Old Testament.

Lockean Essences, Political Posturing, and John Toland’s Reading of Isaac Newton’s Principia

This article exposes the theological, political and epistemological foundations for the early natural philosophy of the deist John Toland (1670-1722). Toland is best known for Christianity not Mysterious (1696), which borrowed much from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Specifically, Toland employed the distinction between nominal and real essences to claim that God provided humanity the capacity to know only the nominal essences of the created world. This belief informed Toland’s philosophy of nature, which he first advanced in Letters to Serena (1704). There, he argued that all parts of the universe were in motion. Additionally, motion was part of the definition of matter and was, therefore, an aspect of its nominal essence. No further knowledge of the Creation was possible because the cause of motion was an unknowable real essence. Lockean and theological commitments explain Toland’s peculiar reading of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which has long attracted interest from historians of science. A theological motivation for Toland’s worldview sheds new light on the underlying assumptions of his natural philosophy and on English deism more generally. It suggests that deists did have theological convictions and that these must figure prominently in any study.

Herbert of Cherbury before Deism: The Early Reception of the De veritate

Perhaps more than any other seventeenth-century philosopher, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648) has become the creature of his posthumous reputation. Since the middle years of the eighteenth century he has been widely known as 'the father of English Deism'. Despite a recent scholarly effort to question the inevitable association between Herbert and the English deists - an association forged by Charles Blount's pillaging of his manuscripts thirty years after his death - it has proved a remarkably persistent view, and one that continues to inflect modern perceptions of Herbert's writings.1 In particular, the widespread assumption survives that Herbert's purposes were overwhelmingly theological rather than philosophical, and that Herbert intended his major work, the De veritate (On Truth) exclusively as a deliberate charter for deism and natural religion.2 Modern scholarship, in short, remains very largely in thrall to the eighteenth-century characterisation of Herbert as the fountainhead of the deistic movement in England. This paper, in contrast, develops recent reassessments of Herbert's relation to 'deism' by examining how early readers of the De veritate read and responded to it. It aims to get behind the posthumous reputation Herbert acquired after the emergence of the tendency known as 'deism', and to explain the range of responses that his work provoked.The deist characterisation of Herbert does not adequately represent the perceptions his contemporaries and immediate successors had of him. The suggestion one finds made that Herbert's early readers 'had no doubt' that his purposes were essentially religious rather than 'epistemological' by no means tells the full story.3 The eighteenth-century historians of deism who placed Herbert at the front of their books were developing an account of his writings that only arose from the 1670s onwards. Before then, Herbert's readers were excited, influenced, and often confused by his writings and their purposes. For in his lifetime, Herbert was not universally taken as an unequivocal enemy of Christianity - indeed, his most perceptive modern scholar, D. P. Walker, has already suggested that 'Herbert's reputation as an anti-Christian deist began only twenty years after his death'.4 Until 1645, the only published work Herbert's readers had to gauge his purposes was the De veritate, which was first printed in Paris in 1624. And even when early readers of this were suspicious of his intentions, as several were, they did not level at him the accusations of 'deism' and 'natural religion' that now sit so heavily upon him. Herbert's reluctance to mention Christ and his ingrained anti-clericalism were indeed suspected by some of those who knew him personally. But they only became widely known after accounts of his behaviour on his deathbed in 1648 began to circulate, and after the publication of his later writings: the De religione laici with its Appendix ad sacerdotes (1645) and the posthumous De religione gentilium (1663). Before then, Herbert's early readers principally understood his De veritate in terms of two principal contemporary intellectual preoccupations. The first of these was the search for philosophical concepts of 'method' and of an axiomatic foundation for logic. The second was the elaboration of metaphysical (that is to say, 'natural' or non-revealed) proofs of the existence of God. The responses of early readers of the De veritate, in short, were not as unequivocal as those of later readers and modern scholars have tended to be.IIt has been assumed that Herbert's writings were little read in England in the twenty-five years following his death - although that there was significant continental interest is well enough known.5 In fact, however, a good number of early readers of the De veritate can be found, in England as well as across Europe. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the book had a wide circulation, for both bibliographic and external evidence suggests that Herbert himself carefully controlled the distribution of the early manuscripts and printed copies of the book. …

J S Semler (1725-1791) se beskouing van geskiedenis, kerkgeskiedenis en heils-geskiedenis - 'n Verkenning

J S Semler's (1725-1791) view of history, church history and salvation history - An exploration. Johan Solomon Semler introduced a new understanding of Scripture through his view of history. This article tries to indicate that the scheme according to which he viewed history is one based on the distination between content and form. By means of this scheme, Semler endeavoured to reconcile faith and revelation with ideas from the Renaissance, Enlightenment and English Deism. Semler's premises were not just influenced by scholars like Leibnitz and Baumgarten, but his association with Pietism and Orthodoxy further contributed to the formation of his view of history. However, as a result of his premises, Semler surrendered church history and salvation history to the Enlightenment view of history. Church history and salvation history were consequently interpreted in terms of progress in the perfection of morality. Unaware of his own historical position, Semler subjected the contents of church history and salvation history to his own premises.

The Problematical Compromise: The Early Deism of Anthony Collins

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...

Heresy, The Social Order, and English Deism

Two recent essays dealing with Deism and the religious environment from which it emerged in England have done something to correct accounts which emphasize the philosophic, scientific, or latitudinarian background of English Deism. I refer to Gerald C. Brauer's “Puritan Mysticism and the Development of Liberalism,”Church History, Vol. XIX (September, 1950), and to George L. Mosse's “Puritan Radicalism and the Enlightenment,”Church History, Vol. XXIX (December, 1960). Both articles argue that there were current in 17th century Puritanism elements which could lead to Deism and which “helped to prepare the English scene for the arrival and triumph of liberalism” and Deism.

English Deism and the Development of Romantic Mythological Syncretism

One of the characteristic features of English and of continental Romanticism was a widespread interest in the origins, nature, and meaning of the myths of the ancient world. Especially in England among classical scholars, antiquarians, and learned churchmen there was a zealous desire to resurrect divinities long forgotten and to find in them and their exploits a relevance for the modern age. One of the most characteristic and influential treatises on myth in the period was the Reverend Jacob Bryant's A New System, or, An Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774–76), an ambitious project whose purpose was “to rectify what time has impaired: to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament, and to display the truth in its native simplicity.” He hoped thereby to give a “new turn to antient history, and to place it upon a surer foundation.” By hypothesizing that the Noachian Deluge was the focal event in ancient history and by seeking to show that its symbolism explained or elucidated the bulk of universal mythology, Bryant was confident that he was not only doing a service to knowledge but also that he was strengthening the premises of Christian truth. On similar diluvian hypotheses Thomas Maurice's Indian Antiquities (1793–1800), Edward Davies' The Mythology and the Rites of the British Druids (1809), and George Stanley Faber's The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) attempted to achieve the same ends. Other notable researches in myth at the turn of the nineteenth century in England were those of Sir William Jones, the Orientalist, Sir William Drummond, the skeptic philosopher, and Richard Payne Knight, the art connoisseur. Well known also in learned circles was the more radically speculative mythologizing of such Frenchmen as Pierre Hugues (D'Hancarville), Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Charles François Dupuis.

The Relatian of John Locke to English Deism. S. G. Hefelbower

Previous articleNext article FreeBrief MentionThe Relatian of John Locke to English Deism. S. G. Hefelbower Gerald Birney SmithGerald Birney Smith Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 24, Number 2Apr., 1920 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/480130 Views: 21Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The American Journal of Theology (1897-1920), which is continued by The Journal of Religion (1921-present). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Relation of John Locke to English Deism.

The Relation of John Locke to English Deism.

NEW BOOKS

NEW BOOKS Get access The Relation of John Locke to English Deism. By S. G. HEFELBOWER, Professor of Philosophy in Washburn College, Topeka, Kansas. The University of Chicago Press. Pp. viii, 188. J. G. J. G. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4, 1919, Page 490, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XXVIII.4.490 Published: 01 January 1919

The Rise of Deism in Yale College

Deism in America, during the first half of the eighteenth century, was of the constructive, not the destructive, sort. Its earlier colonial representatives, like the father of English deism, argued from natural reason for the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the certainty of rewards and punishments, and the life to come. The system was at first hardly distinguished from theism; it was more akin to Butler's Analogy than to Hume's Enquiry; it took two generations to develop into the revolutionary systems of the doubting Thomases, Paine and Jefferson. Such deism was imbued with optimism and receptive of evidences of design; it was not as yet the thoroughgoing rationalism which would reduce religion to ethics, and revelation to a spiritual law in the natural world. Genetically, this deism arose in a partial reaction against high Calvinism; it taught the transcendence and benevolence of the Deity, but not the depravity of man or the determinism of his moral actions. American deism, in its inceptive stages, thus marked a change from a theology to a theodicy; from the assumptions of decrees inscrutable to the human mind, to an attempt to justify the ways of God to man. The movement began in a conservative way; its first defenders did not argue for natural religion in opposition to revealed, but for revealed religion as a necessary supplement to natural. This was especially noticeable in the two oldest New England colleges. At Harvard deism as a movement of enlightenment developed through opposition. This opposition was first exhibited in 1702 in Cotton Mather's controversial work, the Christian Philosopher. Veritable deistic principles were taught toward the middle of the century in the Dudleian lectures on natural religion. Academic attempts to stem the tide of rationalism were made elsewhere; in spite of them, the freshening currents