capable of a wider signification, and as coincident with esprit fort
and with libertin in the original and theological sense of the word.[1]
“Naturalists” was a name frequently used of such as recognized
no god but nature, of so-called Spinozists, atheists; but both in
England and Germany, in the 18th century, this word was more
commonly and aptly in use for those who founded their religion
on the lumen naturae alone. It was evidently in common use
in the latter half of the 16th century as it is used by De Mornay
in De la vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581) and by Montaigne.
The same men were not seldom assaulted under the name of
“theists”; the later distinction between “theist” and “deist,”
which stamped the latter word as excluding the belief in providence
or in the immanence of God, was apparently formulated
in the end of the 18th century by those rationalists who were
aggrieved at being identified with the naturalists. (See also
Theism.)
The chief names amongst the deists are those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), Charles Blount (1654–1693), Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), William Wollaston (1659–1724), Thomas Woolston (1669–1733), Junius Janus (commonly known as John) Toland (1670–1722), the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), Anthony Collins (1676–1729), Thomas Morgan (?–1743), and Thomas Chubb (1679–1747).[2] Peter Annet (1693–1769), and Henry Dodwell (the younger; d. 1784), who made his contribution to the controversy in 1742, are of less importance. Of the eleven first named, ten appear to have been born within twenty-five years of one another; and it is noteworthy that by far the greater part of the literary activity of the deists, as well as of their voluminous opponents, falls within the same half century.
The impulses that promoted a vein of thought cognate to deism were active both before and after the time of its greatest notoriety. But there are many reasons to show why, in the 17th century, men should have set themselves with a new zeal, in politics, law and theology, to follow the light of nature alone, and to cast aside the fetters of tradition and prescriptive right, of positive codes, and scholastic systems, and why in England especially there should, amongst numerous free-thinkers, have been not a few free writers. The significance of the Copernican system, as the total overthrow of the traditional conception of the universe, dawned on all educated men. In physics, Descartes had prepared the way for the final triumph of the mechanical explanation of the world in Newton’s system. In England the new philosophy had broken with time-honoured beliefs more completely than it had done even in France; Hobbes was more startling than Bacon. Locke’s philosophy, as well as his theology, served as a school for the deists. Men had become weary of Protestant scholasticism; religious wars had made peaceful thinkers seek to take the edge off dogmatical rancour; and the multiplicity of religious sects, coupled with the complete failure of various attempts at any substantial reconciliation, provoked distrust of the common basis on which all were founded. There was a school of distinctively latitudinarian thought in the Church of England; others not unnaturally thought it better to extend the realm of the adiaphora beyond the sphere of Protestant ritual or the details of systematic divinity. Arminianism had revived the rational side of theological method. Semi-Arians and Unitarians, though sufficiently distinguished from the free-thinkers by reverence for the letter of Scripture, might be held to encourage departure from the ancient landmarks. The scholarly labours of P. D. Huet, R. Simon, L. E. Dupin, and Jean Le Clerc (Clericus), of the orientalists John Lightfoot, John Spencer and Humphrey Prideaux, of John Mill, the collator of New Testament readings, and John Fell, furnished new materials for controversy; and the scope of Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus had naturally been much more fully apprehended than ever his Ethica could be. The success of the English revolution permitted men to turn from the active side of political and theological controversy to speculation and theory; and curiosity was more powerful than faith. Much new ferment was working. The toleration and the free press of England gave it scope. Deism was one of the results, and is an important link in the chain of thought from the Reformation to our own day.
Long before England was ripe to welcome deistic thought Lord Herbert of Cherbury earned the name “Father of Deism” by laying down the main line of that religious philosophy which in various forms continued ever after to be the backbone of deistic systems. He based his theology on a comprehensive, if insufficient, survey of the nature, foundation, limits and tests of human knowledge. And amongst the divinely implanted, original, indefeasible notitiae communes of the human mind, he found as foremost his five articles:—that there is one supreme God, that he is to be worshipped, that worship consists chiefly of virtue and piety, that we must repent of our sins and cease from them, and that there are rewards and punishments here and hereafter. Thus Herbert sought to do for the religion of nature what his friend Grotius was doing for natural law,—making a new application of the standard of Vincent of Lerins, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. It is important to notice that Herbert, as English ambassador at Paris, united in himself the currents of French and English thought, and also that his De Veritate, published in Latin and translated into French, did not appear in an English version.
Herbert had hardly attempted a systematic criticism of the Christian revelation either as a whole or in its details. Blount, a man of a very different spirit, did both, and in so doing may be regarded as having inaugurated the second main line of deistic procedure, that of historico-critical examination of the Old and New Testaments. Blount adopted and expanded Hobbes’s arguments against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and, mainly in the words of Burnet’s Archeologiae philosophicae, he asserts the total inconsistency of the Mosaic Hexaemeron with the Copernican theory of the heavens, dwelling with emphasis on the impossibility of admitting the view developed in Genesis, that the earth is the most important part of the universe. He assumes that the narrative was meant ethically, not physically, in order to eliminate false and polytheistic notions; and he draws attention to that double narrative in Genesis which was elsewhere to be so fruitfully handled. The examination of the miracles of Apollonius of Tyana, professedly founded on papers of Lord Herbert’s, is meant to suggest similar considerations with regard to the miracles of Christ. Naturalistic explanations of some of these are proposed, and a mythical theory is distinctly foreshadowed when Blount dwells on the inevitable tendency of men, especially long after the event, to discover miracles attendant on the birth and death of their heroes. Blount assaults the doctrine of a mediator as irreligious. He dwells much more pronouncedly than Herbert on the view, afterwards regarded as a special characteristic of all deists, that much or most error in religion has been invented or knowingly maintained by sagacious men for the easier maintenance of good government, or in the interests of themselves and their class. And when he heaps suspicion, not on Christian dogmas, but on beliefs of which the resemblance to Christian tenets is sufficiently patent, the real aim is so transparent that his method seems to partake rather of the nature of literary eccentricity than of polemical artifice; yet by this disingenuous indirectness he gave his argument that savour of duplicity which ever after clung to the popular conception of deism.
Shaftesbury, dealing with matters for the most part different from those usually handled by the deists, stands almost wholly out of their ranks. But he showed how loosely he held the views he did not go out of his way to attack, and made it plain how little weight the letter of Scripture had for himself; and, writing with much greater power than any of the deists, he was held to have done more than any one of them to forward the cause
- ↑ The right of the orthodox party to use this name was asserted by the publication in 1715 of a journal called The Freethinker, conducted by anti-deistic clergymen. The term libertin appears to have been used first as a hostile epithet of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a 13th-century sect which was accused not only of free-thought but also of licentious living.
- ↑ See the separate biographies of these writers. The three most significant names after Lord Herbert are those of Toland, Wollaston and Tindal.
