Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  The important point, held Locke, was that, when the dead arose at the last trump, the person would be judged. While necessary in this mortal life, the body was incidental. For enlightened thinkers like Locke, the quintessence of the person was the mind; for a prelate, by contrast, concerned with the meting out of eternal rewards and punishments, the flesh could not be omitted from the equation. Stillingfleet spied in Locke's elevation of ‘ideas’ over ‘substance’ the slippery slope to scepticism; he was not alone.

  Likewise, while Locke endorsed the resurrection of the dead, he did not hold that personal immortality hinged upon the soul's immateriality. It had been an orthodox Christian–Platonist belief, lately bolstered by Cartesianism, that consciousness entailed immateriality. For Locke, however, it was not for man to dogmatize: Why might not the Maker endow suitably complex matter with the property of thinking? He reassured those fearful that linking thought to matter was tantamount to denying the soul that immortality itself would not thereby be imperilled: whether the soul be immaterial or not did not affect the likelihood of resurrection.69

  Another controversy which embroiled Locke, and later grew more intense, centred on Arianism, that is, denial of Christ's divinity. Perhaps because he studiously held his tongue on the Trinity, Locke was accused of supporting heresy, for instance by John Edwards in Socinianism Unmasked (1696),70 and thereafter it proved easy for Arians, insistent that neither reason nor the Bible gave any support to Trinitarianism, to imply that they had the great philosopher's endorsement71 – indeed, some historians hold that Locke's deepest impact on enlightened thought lay in the encouragement his silence tacitly gave to Socinianism.72 It certainly became a common accusation against Latitudinarians that they were crypto-Arians, or worse – Tillotson being thus accused of a Hobbism which reduced ‘God to matter and religion to nature’: ‘His politics are Leviathan, and his religion is latitudinarian… He is owned by the atheistical wits of all England as their true primate and apostle.’73 The free inquiry which toleration permitted – that is, allowing people to differ – inexorably spelt the spread of heterodoxy.

  Toleration thus finally drew the persecutor's fangs. Locke had taught that the only safe church was a voluntary society denied the power of the sword; for the enlightened, this disarming of the priesthood was a decisive step towards exposing religion, like everything else, to the rays of reason and the salutary power of criticism.

  Conflicts over toleration and points of doctrine were inflamed and sustained by an anti-clericalism bent upon clipping the wings of sacerdotalism. From the 1660s, Locke himself was chiding the ‘crafty men’ who had fuelled the Civil War with ‘coals from the altar’, and the ‘sharp-sighted’ Popish mystagogues sworn to ruling consciences.74 ‘Priestcraft’ was a term coined at the time of the Exclusion Crisis:

  In pious times, e'r priestcraft did begin,

  Before polygamy was made a sin.75

  opened John Dryden's Absolom and Achitophel (1681). John Toland then made that slight his trademark, seeing priestcraft as a plot in which ‘the bulk of mankind, are retain'd in their Mistakes by their Priests’, and greeting the new century with a pointed epigram:

  Religion's safe, with priestcraft is the war,

  All friends to priestcraft, foes of mankind are.76

  Anti-clericalism was also the stalking horse of such ‘True Whigs’ as Anthony Collins, Robert Molesworth, Walter Moyle, Henry Neville, James Tyrrell and other members of the ‘Grecian Tavern set’, committed to crushing ‘monkish’ tyranny.77 Further whipped up by John Trenchard's and Thomas Gordon's The Independent Whig (1720–21) (see chapter 8), clergy-bashing culminated in Richard Baron's compilation The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (1768). Quoting the philosophes alongside the English Deists and dictating ‘everlasting reasons for opposing all priests’, Baron pledged to ‘emancipate the minds of men, and to free them from those chains in which they have been long held to the great disgrace both of reason and Christianity’.78 Such calumnies made the bellicose Bishop Warburton apoplectic: how dare scurrilous free-thinkers picture the clergy as ‘debauched, avaricious, proud, vindictive, ambitious, deceitful, irreligious and incorrigible’?79

  While the anti-clerical tempest eventually abated, partly because ecclesiastics actually became less visible and vocal as pillars of power, clergy-baiting remained a trump card in enlightened rhetoric. Tom Paine lambasted priestcraft, alias persecution; ‘Mr Malthus,’ remarked the inveterate Jeremy Bentham, ‘belongs to that profession to which acknowledgement of error is rendered impossible’,80 while his disciples, Francis Place and James Mill, proved feisty priest-haters.81 ‘Tyranny & cruelty,’ the peasant poet John Clare confided to his journal in 1824, ‘appear to be the inseparable companions of Religious Power & the aphorism is not far from truth that says: “All priest are the same.” ’82 Religion was evidently too important to entrust to the clergy.

  Shielded by. state toleration and with anti-clerical animosity rife, controversy raged as to what sort of religion modern man should espouse. Precisely which beliefs actually commanded sober assent? For Locke, as we have seen, Christianity, rightly understood, was rational. Others, self-styled or so-called Deists, granted that reason lighted the way to a knowledge of a Supreme Being and of man's duties – atheism was as blind as superstition – but further held that Christianity either added nothing at all to ‘natural religion’ or contained foolish and false elements, and hence must be purged, reinterpreted or rejected.

  Deists came in many colours. A soi-disant ‘Christian Deist’ and supporter of Locke's anti-innatism was the All Souls fellow William Wollaston, whose Religion of Nature Delineated (1724) sold an impressive 10,000 copies.83 Rather like Samuel Clarke, Wollaston held that religious truths were as plain as Euclid, clear to all who contemplated Creation. So why was there Revelation at all? It was all a ‘belt and braces’ operation, obligingly provided by the Deity for the unthinking vulgar, who were no better at religion than at geometry. ‘Double Truth’ theories of this kind were the Deists' stock in trade.

  A fellow All Souls champion of civil theology was Matthew Tindal, who opened his career by taking potshots at High-flyers.84 His later Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730) – it became the ‘Deists’ Bible' – asserted that ‘God, at all times, has given mankind sufficient means of knowing whatever he requires of them’. Those ‘means’ lay in rationality.85 Whereas reason was timeless and ubiquitous, the Bible had been but a late and local edition of truth – no one, surely, could think God would first have revealed His laws in that way?86

  Can it be supposed an infinitely good and gracious Being, which gives men notice, by their senses, what does good or hurt to their bodies, has had less regard for their immortal parts, and has not given them at all times, by the light of their understanding, sufficient means to discover what makes for the good of their souls?87

  To deny salvation to those denied the Bible would make God odious. Tindal instead commended a creed based exclusively on the Creation, that is, on universal reason; for ‘God's will is so clearly and fully manifested in the Book of Nature, that he who runs may read it’.88

  Like most Deists, Tindal assumed an original monotheism, a belief in the one true God, a pure and pristine natural religion revealed by the light of reason.89 How, then, had this clear and simple truth been pervented? It was all the clergy's fault:

  the pride, ambition, and covetousness of the priests… has been the cause… of the great corruption of religion.90

  Nor was the damage produced by the priestly lickspittles of civil despots confined to Catholics:

  Nay, have not the Protestant clergy been every jot as much, if not more zealous and industrious than the Popish, to enslave the people, and promote arbitrary power.91

  Denounced by his own college chaplain as ‘Spinoza revived’,92 Tindal plied other Deist lines. He mocked those who unthinkingly or disingenuously took Scripture as the truth merely because the Bi
ble said so – a circular argument. ‘It's an odd jumble,’ he bantered, ‘to prove the truth of a book by the truth of the doctrines it contains, and at the same time conclude those doctrines to be true because contained in that book.’93 He also picked at Scripture's loose threads. The only way to uphold its supposed infallibility, he declared, was, upon stumbling across contradictions, to twist and torture the meaning; for instance, confronted by glaring inconsistencies, apologists had often contended that God must have been talking down to the ignorant Jews. Tindal, however, would have none of these evasions, venturing instead some biblical criticism of his own.

  There were, of course, entrenched canons of scriptural interpretation, deriving from Renaissance philology: the erudition of Scaliger, Heinsius, Grotius, Casaubon and many other scholars was justly acclaimed,94 and giant strides were being made in textual criticism by the French Catholic Richard Simon. Stimulated in part by Pierre Bayle, however, heterodox views now issued from the English Deists, determined to expose those ‘absurdities’ planted by crafty priests.

  Read with candour, Tindal claimed, many theological doctrines and biblical stories were silly, and cast the Creator in bad odour. The doctrine of exclusive salvation was monstrous: how could Jesus be the saviour of mankind, if virtuous pagans predeceasing him would find Heaven's gate bolted? And what of the contradictions between the universal goodness of the Divine Essence as revealed by the light of Nature, and Jehovah's often contemptible behaviour as recorded in the Scriptures, where, for example, natural order was violated to punish men for crimes they had not committed, as when Elijah caused three and a half years of drought? If God had in bygone days breached the laws of Nature to scourge the innocent, who could be sure He would not stoop so low again? Old Testament justice was bizarre indeed. How weird to find Elisha calling down the wrath of the Lord upon children for calling him bald! Exposed thus to the glare of reason, the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament, began to seem like a patchwork of problems.

  One solution was urged by Thomas Woolston, a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, whose thinking owed much to Anthony Collins.95 His Six Discourses (1727–30) observed that, taken literally, much of the Bible defied plain common sense or was quite unedifying -the lewd and cruel acts of King David, the impostures of that renegade Pharisee Paul, and the absurd tale of Balaam's ass. In cursing somebody's fig tree just to make a point, Jesus had violated the sanctity of private property (that is, had behaved as badly as a Stuart). How could evil spirits have been driven into the Gadarene swine? – everyone knew the Jews did not keep pigs. Nor could Jesus really have seen – at least, not without a miraculous telescope – all the kingdoms of the world from any conceivable mountain. Such narratives were plainly inane or impious.

  Healing miracles also posed a problem. Since it was unclear exactly which diseases Jesus had healed, how could it be affirmed that his cures were supernatural? ‘Faith and imagination’ were probably involved. In some – such as curing blindness with spittle – there was clearly no miracle: ‘our Surgeons, with their Ointments and Washings’ could achieve as much. Other, more dramatic, miracles Woolston simply denied: the raising of Lazarus was all ‘Fable and Forgery’. In his final discourse, he tackled the Resurrection, recycling the old argument that Christ's body had disappeared because zealots had absconded with it.96

  None of that mattered, however, because, following Origen, Woolston ruled that the biblical narratives were intended to be read not literally but rather spiritually: thus, the ass on which Christ had ridden into Jerusalem actually meant the Church. It is hard to tell whether he was sincere in such allegorizing (or rationalizing) or simply sending up the earnest scriptural literalism of an age which set inordinate store by ‘matter of fact’, ‘evidences’, ‘testimonies’ and ‘eye witness’.97 Opprobrium and legal penalties were heaped on Woolston's head, but what impressed Voltaire, at least, most were the huge sales his works enjoyed.

  Criticism was thus being levelled against religious hokum among others by respectable men of the cloth salaried by venerable institutions. Deism's support was wider, however: lawyers, country gentlemen and doctors aplenty cracked anti-clerical jokes, snickered at superstition and engaged in raillery and even sacrilege, as with Francis Dashwood's Hellfire Club with its satanic rites. Deism even had its petty bourgeois pundits in the provinces. A candlemaker by trade – how apt! – Thomas Chubb of Salisbury made it his business, in the name of purification, to pit true religion against the ‘corrupt doctrines’ of Christianity: the immaculate conception, the Trinity, the atonement and the plenary inspiration of Scripture.98 Junking such theological trash, Chubb defended rationality, praised benevolence as ‘a part of the human constitution’,99 ‘vindicated’ human nature and backed Locke on the eternal validity of natural law. While taking the philosopher to task on points of detail – the fiction of the state of nature was a feeble footing for man's rights to ‘life, liberty, and estate’ – he nevertheless fully endorsed Locke's championing of liberty of thought, that essential human attribute. ‘It hath pleased God to make man a free, accountable creature,’ he declared, ‘by planting in him an understanding… in the use of which he is capable of… judging… of the truth or falseness of things.’100 Prizing freedom, Chubb dismissed original sin, predestination and special providence as equally pernicious, since all taught a cruel fatality in which men's ‘actions are not… their own free choice’. While religion was ennobling, ritual was demeaning, and reason alone would dispel the dross and teach a virtuous life under God.

  *

  In their different ways, figures like Wollaston and Chubb candidly meant to rescue religion from graceless zealots. Other critics of sacerdotal rigmaroles – Woolston was one – seem more devious. And if his game is hard to guess, what are we to make of that most corrosive critic of the churches, John Toland?101

  Born in Ireland in 1671 of Catholic parents – his father, it seems, was a priest – Toland converted to Protestantism in his youth. Sent to school by some ‘eminent dissenters’, he attended the university of Leiden, where he became familiar with Locke. He then went on to lead a bohemian life as a scholar, being protected at various times by Whigs and Deists like the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury – but also by the Tory Lord Harley. A wily controversialist, Toland loved stealing the clothes off the backs of such respectable figures as Tillotson and Locke, playing authority off against authority and covering his tracks with tongue-in-cheek disavowals. He seems to have stated his fundamental tenet, however, in his early masterpiece, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696): ‘reason is the only foundation of all certitude… there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason nor above it.’102 As he outlined his approach, he sowed, as ever, doubts in the process: ‘I prove first, that the true religion must necessarily be reasonable and intelligible. Next I show that these requisite conditions are found in Christianity.’103 In Christianity indeed, but not as the churches had ever interpreted it!

  Toland held, probably disingenuously, that true Christianity's superiority lay in making plain what was mysterious in other faiths. A return was needed to primitive simplicity, discarding the Trinity and other such mumbo-jumbo. Holding that ‘the Doctrines of the Gospel are not contrary to Reason’, he deemed that the belief that religion contains mysteries

  is the undoubted Source of all the Absurdities that ever were seriously vented among Christians. Without the Pretence of it, we should never hear of the Transubstantiation, and other ridiculous Fables of the Church of Rome; nor of any of the Eastern Ordures, almost all receiv'd into this Western Sink.104

  From such assertions the reader may infer that received faith was mostly bad faith.

  Christianity Not Mysterious created a great furore, being presented by the Grand Jury of Middlesex and ordered to be burnt by the Irish Parliament. Though Locke was not mentioned by name, contemporaries anxiously sensed in Toland's work Locke's teachings being drawn out to their logical conclusions. Prizing reason as the foundation of all certitude, like Locke, To
land held that reason alone could determine what was revealed, for in His wisdom God had made everything, Revelation included, answerable to it.105 But there agreement ended. Whereas Locke believed Christianity passed the reason test, Toland demanded that anything mysterious about Christianity must be discarded. While seemingly endorsing Locke's philosophy of truth, Christianity Not Mysterious thus proposed a significantly different tie between reason and revelation. Locke had maintained that whatever was delivered in an authenticated revelation must be accepted; Toland, by contrast, held that each particular of Scripture must be judged according to its conformity to ‘common Notions’: nothing that was ‘above reason’ passed muster. His requirement that religion be mystery-free thus threatened the status of the Bible as revealed truth.

  In all this, Toland was also trading in typical Deist fashion on distinctions between the credulous herd and ‘the rational and thinking part’, who could discover for themselves plain truths about God. To the wise, the ‘marvels’ of Scripture were all susceptible to down-to-earth explanations – the pillar of cloud and fire, for instance, was no miracle at all, but simply a signal contained in an iron pot hoisted on top of a pole.106 ‘We shall be in Safety,’ advised his Pantheisticon (1720), ‘if we separate ourselves from the Multitude; for the Multitude is a Proof of what is worst’107 – at best children to be humoured, at worst credulous fools, colluding with those sinister mystery-mongers who, from cradle to grave, had reduced life itself to lies:

  We no sooner see the Light, but the grand Cheat begins to delude us from every Quarter. The very Midwife hands us into the World with superstitious Ceremonys, and the good women assisting at the Labour have a thousand Spells to avert the Misfortune, or to produce the Happiness of the Infant; making several ridiculous Observations, to discover the Omen of his future State of Life. Nor is the Priest in some places behindhand with these Gossips, to initiate him betimes into his Service, by pronouncing certain Forms of Words as so many powerful Charms.108