Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Reason alone could deliver man from his spellbound condition and restore the true, simple, natural religion of the ‘antient Egyptians, Persians, and Romans’ who had ‘no sacred Images or Statues, no peculiar Places or costly Fashions of Worship’, but simply worshipped God and pursued virtue.109

  If Toland was the most insidious of the Deists, the one packing the most powerful punch was Anthony Collins.110 His line was simplicity itself: ‘As it is every Man's natural right and duty to think, and judge for himself in matters of opinion; so he should be allow'd freely to profess his opinions.’ There was one proviso made by this Cambridge-educated gentleman lawyer, living on his Essex estate: that ‘those opinions do not tend to the disturbance of society’.111

  Collins was a personal friend of Locke's.112 In a long letter to the elderly philosopher he attacked John Norris's An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (1701–4) for its Platonism, derided syllogistic logic, denied Descartes' belief that animals lacked consciousness and defended the possibility of thinking matter. Unsurprisingly, Locke was delighted by this swingeing attack on his critics and endorsement of his Essay.113

  Like Toland, Collins loved pitting orthodoxy against orthodoxy and mischievously recruited Tillotson to his cause, taking up arms against Samuel Clarke in defence of Locke on the soul.114 His Priestcraft in Perfection (1709) denied the Church's right to dictate ceremonies, and anti-clericalism crackles in his writings – the ‘laity are the calves and sheep of the priests’.115 Collins's clergy-baiting continued with his notorious Discourse of Free-thinking (1713),116 a devastating exposition of the ‘vile arts’ and feuds among the divines, coupled with a defence of reason against authority which deified Socrates as a ‘very great freethinker’.117

  A pointer for later Deism lay in Collins's attack on the credit of Scripture. Drawing on Le Clerc, Simon and other modern Bible scholars, his Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) exposed the shakiness of the old proof of divine inspiration from the fulfilment of prophecy, demonstrating that it all hung – or rather fell – on forced readings. In his attempt to prove the literal realization of prophecies, the Cambridge theologian William Whiston had had to top and tail them in a quite arbitrary and ludicrous manner!118 Soon prophecy would prove rational Christianity's Achilles’ heel.

  Deists professed to be purifying the faith. The more radical among them, however, did not merely challenge the abuses of the churches and the theologians’ fibs; they developed historical, psychological and political critiques of received religion as such, if often masking their attacks through assaults on pagan absurdities, Catholic frauds or Anglican errors. Religion per se was pure, honouring God and teaching virtue; why then had it always gone bad?

  In England this radical critique, initiated by Hobbes (see chapter 3),119 was extended by Charles Blount, an enigmatic figure whose prose proceeded by disclaimer and denial. His Great is Diana of the Ephesians, subtitled On the Original of Idolatry (1680), was typical of the Deist ‘parallel theology’ strategy: exposure of the absurdities of heathen fables invited the cognoscenti to read the nonsense of Christianity between the lines. How, for example, could the story of the Fall, with its talking snake, etc., be taken literally?120 Blount provoked fierce responses, notably Charles Leslie's Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1698), which vindicated the Bible as pure matter of fact.121

  By the 1710s, a more devastating critique was gaining ground, a critique of historical religion itself, seen through the lenses of power politics and psychopathology. Natural religion, the argument ran, had originally embraced monotheism, though that had to be encoded in secret hieroglyphic and symbolic languages so as to protect it from the vulgar.122 That original purity had been squandered, however, and religion had become polarized in every society, with a pure version for the élite and a debased one for hoi polloi. How so? In framing their explanations, the English Deists drew on an armoury of resources: Bayle's exposés of priestly imposture; Dutchman Balthasar Bekker's De Betoverde Weereld (1691–3), translated into English in 1695 as The World Bewitch'd (a book which in effect denied the reality of the Devil); Bernard Fontenelle's exposure of oracles; and assorted medical pathologies of demoniacs.123

  Religion came in two sorts, held John Trenchard in his Natural History of Superstition (1709): true and false. Belief in a benevolent Creator and in the gospel of love was the marrow of truth. All other manifestations were false, and it was upon these that his investigation of the blight of superstition focused, surveying cults and creeds worldwide and through time. Long before Hume and the philosophes, Trenchard posed the key questions of religious psychology. Why were people so superstitious? Why did they cook up bizarre cults and perform unnatural acts in God's name? How could they be duped by priestly machinations? What led soi-disant prophets to credit their own hallucinations and others to believe them?

  Seeking the ‘causes of our Passions and Infirmities’, Trenchard located in human nature the reasons why the mind, for all its glories, had been betrayed into superstition.124 There was ‘something innate in our Constitutions’ – a psycho-physiological analogue of original sin – which bred susceptibility to delusions. Man sought to avoid pain. Obsessed with death and hence with fears of pain and punishment in a hereafter, he felt driven to identify potential persecutors.125 But the causes of things were hidden and, in his anxieties, he embraced either flights of fancy or the tales of seers in inventing pagan gods and all the accompanying baggage of divination, catalogued by Trenchard in a passage adapted from Bekker:

  To these Weaknesses and our own, and Frauds of others, we owe the Heathen Gods and Goddesses, Oracles and Prophets, Nimphs and Satyrs, Fawns and Tritons, Furies and Demons, most of the Stories of Conjurers and Witches, Spirits and Apparitions, Fairies and Hobgoblins, the Doctrine of Prognosticks, the numerous ways of Divination, viz. Oniromancy, Sidero-mancy, Tephranomancy, Botonomancy, Crommyomancy, Cleromancy, Aeromancy, Onomatomancy, Arithomancy, Geomancy, Alectryomancy, Cephalomancy, Axinomancy, Coscinomancy, Hydromancy, Onycho-mancy, Dactylomancy, Christallomancy, Cataptromancy, Gastromancy, Lecanomancy, Alphitomancy, Chiromancy, Orneomancy, and Necromancy, Horoscopy, Astrology and Augury, Metoposcopy and Palmistry, the fear of Eclipses, Comets, Meteors, Earthquakes, Inundations, and any uncommon Appearances and so forth.126

  Abandoning themselves to exalted rituals, primitive people ‘saw’ visions and experienced the supernatural. Lifting from Bayle a hypothesis to explain such ‘tripping’, Trenchard posited that bodily stimuli produced phantom images which then failed to be falsified by facts ‘when the Organs of Sense… are shut and locked up’ – which might occur during sleep, in delirium, madness, sickness or shock, cases when the internal phantoms ‘reign without any Rival’.127

  This appropriation of Locke's empiricist epistemology explained how ‘inner light’ visionaries became cut off from the outward senses, the only true ‘conduits of knowledge’. Hallucinations thereby became confused with reality, as the victims transmogrified their ‘Clouds and Foggs’ into ‘Deities’, some seeing ‘beatifick visions’, others ‘Divels with instruments of Fear and Horrour’ – a victim might think he was a bottle, a corpse, a god, or who knows what. ‘Many instances of this kind’, glossed Trenchard, are ‘to be seen in Bedlam’.128

  Drawing thus on the literature of lunacy, Trenchard reduced religious visions to psycho-physiological stimuli. Fasting or flagellation induced delirious psychic states, while those famed for abnormal piety were invariably melancholic hermits, their revelations mere symptoms of disease.129 Initially spewed forth by a lone fanatic, such phantasms might then spread rapidly in a religious epidemic explained by the mechanical philosophy: ‘Everything in Nature is in constant Motion, and perpetually emitting Effluviums and minute Particles of its Substance, which operate upon, and strike other Bodies.’130 Not witchcraft but medical science would thus account for children falling into fits in the presence of old hags and other supposed manifestations of the black art.


  The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury advanced similar views, extolling, in his Soliloquy (1710), ‘study of Human Affection’ (we would call it psychology) as the demarcator of true from false faith: ‘By this Science Religion itself is judged, Spirits are search'd, Prophecys prov'd, Miracles distinguish'd.’131 Sickened by the slavish religio-politics of High-flyers and Non-jurors, the Whig aristocrat proceeded to psychologize religious transports in his influential Letter concerning Enthusiasm (1711). Having watched the antics of the Pentecostal ‘French prophets’ speaking in tongues in London, Shaftesbury, like Trenchard, ridiculed enthusiasts of all stripes – Catholics, Jews, Puritans, Huguenots, persecutors and inquisitors.132 Men had projected their bile on to their gods: ‘For then it is we see wrath, and fury, and revenge, and terrors in the Deity: when we are full of disturbances and fears within.’133 His accounts of sacred contagion matched Trenchard's: ‘The fury flies from face to face; and the disease is no sooner seen than caught. And thus is Religion also Pannick.’134 But while the splenetic fantasized savage and jealous deities, the great-souled man would never attribute vengefulness to his Maker. And so Deists like Shaftesbury, for whom Christianity was properly a religion of humanity, looked to psychopathology to explain the grotesque eruptions of apocalyptic mayhem, hellfire and damnation which had disgraced the faith.

  Deism thus cross-examined religion naturalistically, socially and psychologically. Unlike the noble creed of the wise, what had prevailed in the churches were the wild-eyed terrors of the stupid, stoked and exploited by cynical priests. It fell to David Hume to complete the enlightened psychopathologization of religion.

  Espousing the Royal Society's Baconian motto ‘nullius in verba’, enlightened minds put their money on matters of fact, rules of evidence and scientific method. Rational Protestants like Locke reasoned that Christianity deserved credence precisely because the Bible narratives constituted authenticated historical truth, while scriptural scholars amassed testimonies of miracles and evidence for the fulfilment of prophecy. Biblical authority thus hinged not on blind faith but hard evidence, substantiated, like verified history at large, by dependable eyewitness accounts.

  Collins's Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion and similar works started chipping away at the credibility of prophecies and miracles. The sceptic's task was made easier, since Protestant polemics had already tactically narrowed the pool of miracles: those performed by Christ and the Apostles were valid, whereas subsequent ones were scorned as mere Popish impostures or popular marvels for which the data were faked or flimsy. The ‘age of miracles’ had long since ceased: once the Gospel had been preached, why should God need further recourse to marvellous means?

  The disputability of the distinction between miracles for which the evidence was copper-bottomed and those for which it was flimsy begged questions from principled critics and opportunist scoffers alike – and all the more so as ‘miracles’ were still happening in front of people's very eyes, even in urbane Cartesian Paris.

  On 1 May 1727, François de Paris, a revered Jansenist deacon, had died and was buried in the parish cemetery of Saint-Médard. Mourners flocked to his grave and ‘miraculous’ healings of apparently incurable diseases – tumours, blindness, deafness – were posthumously wrought by this holy man. Was it not odd – unscientific, impious, even – for Protestants to deny so peremptorily ‘miracles’ like these, for which there seemed abundant contemporary testimony, while upholding those alleged to have occurred thousands of years earlier among the primitive Jews of Palestine?135

  A major challenge to the convenient Protestant ‘end of the age of miracles’ formula came from Conyers Middleton, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A divine and classical scholar of sceptical temper, Middleton enjoyed likening Catholic ceremonies and superstitions to heathen polytheism: all that incense recalled Virgil's description of the temple of Venus, and worshippers still knelt before images in converted pagan temples whose demigods had been replaced by saints. Paganism, implied his Letter from Rome (1729), was thus a dress rehearsal for Catholicism.

  Middleton then moved on to miracles. His Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers Which are Supposed to Have Subsisted in the Christian Church from the Earliest Ages (1749) was ostensibly intended to demonstrate biblical miracles and query post-biblical miracle claims, but its sly insinuation was that the selfsame criticisms could be levelled at the New Testament events themselves. It was, in effect, all or nothing: Protestants could not have their cake and eat it.136

  Contemporaneously, David Hume – who felt scooped by Middleton on miracles137 – was developing a radical critique of religion in all its manifestations. His early ‘On Miracles’ (1748) took Tillotson's anti-transubstantiation argument to its logical, though unintended, conclusion. Alleged miracles contradicted all sense experience of the uniformity of nature. The irresistible conclusion must be that witnesses to such ‘miracles’ were deceived – or deceivers – rather than that cosmic order had been breached.138 ‘There is not to be found, in all history,’ he insisted,

  any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned goodness, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood, and at the same time attesting facts, performed in such a public manner and in so celebrated a part of the world as to render the detection unavoidable. All which circumstances are requisite to give us a full assurance of the testimony of men!139

  Conclusive stuff; but the reader was then backhandedly invited to take this sceptical finale for a vindication of piety. Since ‘our most holy religion is founded on Faith’, and since no other made such a play of it, Christianity was evidently the cream of the crop: ‘we may conclude that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one’.140

  In his ‘Natural History of Religion’ (1757), Hume trained his scepticism against the self-satisfied platitudes of the Deists, reasoning that their much-vaunted pristine monotheism or natural religion was but wish fulfilment. In reality, all religion had its origins in fear and ignorance, and the first faiths had been crude and polytheistic. Savages, after all, still were polytheistic, as were the masses (and, by implication, Roman Catholics, with their saint cults, and Trinitarians) in civilized nations. Polytheism, the first expression of the religious impulse, bred superstition, that opium of the people, and superstition spawned priests. Credited with supernatural powers, the magic man could placate the angry gods by sacrifices, incantations and rituals.141

  In time, the progress of the mind drew monotheism out of polytheism, clarity out of confusion. Monotheism, however, in its turn bred enthusiasm, defined in Johnson's Dictionary as ‘a vain belief of private revelation, a vain confidence of divine favour or communication’. In his exalted, self-deifying state, the enthusiast experienced transcendent raptures and soaring highs, credited to the presence of his god. ‘Every whimsy is consecrated,’ Hume stated, ‘human reason, and even morality are rejected as fallacious guides: And the fanatic madman delivers himself over, blindly, and without reserve, to… inspiration from above.’142 The zealot had little need for clerics, his was a priesthood of all believers – that was why enthusiasm was so politically explosive. As with the first Quakers, the enthusiast, under divine direction, became a social anarchist, a menace to law and order. The Puritans' success in the Civil War was due to enthusiasm: convinced theirs was a holy war, the saints never hesitated to attack Throne and Altar. Superstition, however, brought political perils of its own, for priests formed sinister interest groups, insinuating themselves into power or setting up as rival states within the state. Hume's strategic distinction between enthusiasm – fanatically intolerant but driving men to assert their liberties – and the
superstition which made men law-abiding through cowed objection – was to prove highly influential, notably in Gibbon's Decline and Fall.143

  Thus Hume sabotaged Christianity by advancing a naturalistic account of the religious impulse, while equally discrediting the Deist myth of prehistoric monotheism. So what was left of religion? ‘The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgement, appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject.’144 Was, then, the nature of things utterly inscrutable? That was the question which underlay his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, written around 1751 but published only after his death, in 1779. In that work, modelled on Cicero, philosophical inquiry further challenged the religious truth claims both of Christianity and of rationalism: there was no natural religion. Hume's unresolved three-way colloquy between the orthodox Demea, the rationalist believer Cleanthes and the sceptic Philo pointed to the conclusion that no religious hypothesis explained the order of Nature or the existence of evil. Attempts to deduce a just God or a meaning of life from the riddles of the universe were just a rope of sand:

  While we argue from the course of nature and infer a particular intelligent cause which first bestowed and still preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle which is still uncertain and useless. It is uncertain because the subject lies entirely beyond the reach of human experience. It is useless because… we can never on that basis establish any principles of conduct and behaviour.145

  There was no convincing theodicy: the Deist or ‘rational Christian’ just God was at best a ‘mere possibility and hypothesis’.