Abstract
Deism became an all-important movement in England in the latter part of the 17th century. But it was not a movement in the normal sense; it was not a church, or even an organized collection of people. In fact, it is not certain whether there were more than a handful of deists in England, France, or The Netherlands at the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. However, the views attributed to them, and which were expressed by Charles Blount, by the author (or authors) of the Turkish Spy, and by the few followers of Spinoza, played a most important role in providing a basis for religious and political toleration in England, the British American colonies, and, later, in Revolutionary France.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See C. J. Betts, Early Deism in France. From the so-called ‘déistes’ of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire’s “Lettres philosophiques” (1734) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), chaps. 1–6.
Uriel da Costa, Exemplar Humanae Vitae, in Die Schriften des Uriel Da Costa, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Amsterdam: Biblioteca Spinozana, 1922), Tom. II.
Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676). His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987).
See also Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time. The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Paul Sellin has termed Vossius’ Poetical Institutions “the Last of the Renaissance Monsters” and complained about how little attention is paid to Vossius’ critical or philosophical works by historians of ideas. See Sellin’s paper, “The Last of the Renaissance Monsters; the Poetical Institutions of Gerardus Joannis Vossius, and some Observations on English Criticism,” in his Anglo-Dutch Cross Currents in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, May 10, 1975, by Paul R. Sellin and Stephen B. Baxter (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1976), p. 7.
Gerardus J. Vossius, De Philosophorum Sectis Libri II (The Hague, 1658.)
Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans. Seventeenth Century Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 81.
C. S. M. Rademacher, Gerardus Joannes Vossius (Zwolle: Wej Tjeenk Willink, 1967), pp. 238–41.
See the title page and dedication of Vossius’s De theologia gentili et physiologia Christiana; sive de origine ac progressu idololatriae ad veterum gesta, ac rerum naturam, reductae; deque naturae mirandis, quibus homo adducitur ad Deum (Amsterdami, 1641.)
Richard S. Westfall, “Isaac Newton’s Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae,” in Warren Wagar, The Secular Mind: Essays Presented to Franklin L. Baumer (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984), p. 22.
See Samuel Bochart, Geographia sacrae (Cadomi, 1646)
John Seiden, De Diis Syriis Syntagmata (London, 1617.)
Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, pp. 97 and 145–6.
See Rademacher, The Life and Work of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981), pp. 308–10. See also Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, pp. 145–6 and 195.
See the statements by Gerard and Dionysius Vossius, quoted in Rademacher’s work in Dutch, Gerardus Joannes Vossius, pp. 212–13, and in Rademacher’s work in English, The Life and Work of Gerardus Joannes Vossius, pp. 264–65; See also Aaron L. Katchen, Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), chap. iii.
See Yahuda MSS 16 and 17.
John Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 258.
Richard S. Westfall, “Isaac Newton’s Theologiae Gentilis,” pp. 15–34.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 22. The evidence which Westfall offers for his claim that Vossius is just another old fashioned Christian apologist is two chapters from De theologia gentili (Lib.I, chaps. 41–42) where Vossius states that this is what he is doing. The chapters may well have been a cover-up because Vossius had been under attack for his liberal views since before the Synod of Dordrecht in 1619 and because he was constantly being criticized, along with his friend, Hugo Grotius, for Arminian views.
Westfall, “Isaac Newton’s Theologiae gentilis” pp. 23–31.
This is what seems to be involved in the appeal they both make to pagans to accept simple religious truths. See Popkin, “The Crisis of Polytheism and the Answers of Vossius, Cudworth, and Newton,” supra.
Newton, Yahuda MS 41, f. 7. Vossius and Cudworth held roughly the same view, though perhaps in different ways. The frame of nature provided the knowledge of divinity if one did not have awareness or knowledge of revealed truth.
See Steven S. Schwartzchild’s article, s.v. “Noachide Laws,” in the Encylopedia Judaica, 16 vols. (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972), 12:1189–90. According to Maimonides, the righteous man of the gentile nations has a share in the world to come, even though he is a not a Jew, if he keeps the Noachide Laws, which include a rejection of idolatry and a natural morality. This is a traditional Jewish view and appears in a modern dress in Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem where the principles of religion and morals — knowledge of the existence of God, of the immortality of the soul, and of future rewards and punishments — are available to any enlightened person using his or her natural reason. Living according to such knowledge suffices. In 1660, the Quaker, Samuel Fisher, advances the thesis that knowledge of God’s Word is accessible to those who lived before there was any written Word, and to those who have no access to the written Word, if they have the Spirit within them.
See Rademacher’s intellectual biography of Vossius for the details of how he was hounded by the Dutch Calvinist clergy because of his liberal Arminian views.
He received his posts of Master of Clare College and then Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, under the Puritans and Cromwell. The latter appointed him to the commission to decide whether or not to readmit the Jews into England and he was so appointed because he was a known Millenarian at the time. During the Restoration, Cudworth was the first to signify his loyalty to Charles II (in an official document now in the Cambridge University Library.) He was subsequently appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew.
We do not know why he delayed publication of the work or what became of the rest of it. There are several large manuscripts by Cudworth in the British Library, but none relating to the True Intellectual System, Part II.
Westfall, “Isaac Newton’s Theologiae Gentilis,” p. 16. Newton was not responsible for the publication of the Chronology. See the account in Westfall, Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 805–15.28.
On Newton’s attempts to use astronomical observations to prove the antiquity of the Bible, see Frank E. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 67ff.
See Popkin, “Newton as a Bible Scholar,” infra.
There is an interesting unpublished paper by John Dury, the irenicist, in the Hartlib papers at Sheffield University, on whether it is right to worship Jesus even though he was only a man. Dury held that the answer was “yes,” even on the Arian supposition that he was only a man.
See the correspondence between Herbert and Vossius in Gerardi Joannis Vossii et clarorum virorum ad eum epistolae, collectore Paolo Colomesio (London 1690)
Mario Rossi,spi in La Vita, le opere, i tempi di Eduardo Herbert di Chirbury, 3 vols. (Firenze, 1947), Vol. III.
Vossius to Herbert, letter dated “Dec. 1644,” in Rossi, La Vita, 3:238.
See the title page.
Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 189 and 522, note 44.
Herbert’s debt to Vossius appears in Herbert’s De Religione Gentilium errorumque apud eos causis (Amsterdam, 1663.) In Günther Gawlick’s “Einleitung” to the facsimile reprint of the 1663 edition of this work (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1967), p. v, Gawlick states that Herbert’s main source of data about religions is “das grosse Werk des Humanisten Gerardus Joannis Vossius (1577–1649): De Theologia Gentili.”
This is the message of Herbert of Cherbury’s De Religione Gentilium, which was first published in English as The Ancient Religion of the Gentiles and Causes of their Errors Consider’d (London 1705.)
See Ernest Campbell Mossner’s article s.v. “Herbert of Cherbury,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 3:484–6.
See Ernest C. Mossner’s article s.v. “Deism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2:328.
Blount, Great is Diana of the Ephesians, or, The Original of Idolatry: Together with the Politick Institutions of the Gentile Sacrifices (London, 1695), p. 3.
Published in Blount, Oracles of Reason (no place, 1695), p. 100, as a letter “For Mr. Hobbs, to be left with Mr. Crook, a Bookseller, at the Sign of the Green Dragon without Temple-Bar, near St. Clement’s Church.”
Published in Blount, Oracles of Reason (no place, 1695), pp. 97–105.
This disclaimer is all-important in determining whether Hobbes was in some sense religious, or even pro-religious, or whether he was undermining all religion and was, as some of his contem poraries suggested, an atheist.
It was published under the title Miracles No Violations of the Laws of Nature in 1683.
It was published, without the name of any author, publisher, or printer, under the title A Treatise partly Theological, and partly Political, translated out of the Latin (London 1689.) It was reprinted in 1739 without any changes. A copy of the 1739 edition was in Benjamin Franklin’s library and may have been used as a reference work at the time of the discussions at the American Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia concerning the separation of church and the state and freedom of thought.
This work, consisting of sixteen pieces by Blount, Gildon, and others, was published in London in 1693 without the name of any printer and was republished in Blount’s Miscellaneous Works in 1695.
The same material appears in a part of Thomas Burnet’s Archaeologiae Philosophicae, which was only published in complete form, with all the relevant text, in 1723. In the article s.v. “Burnet, Thomas,” in the Dictionary of National Biography, it is claimed that Gildon took the material from Burnet. The first four sections of the Oracles of Reason, pp. 1–86, deal with Burnet’s materials about pre-Adamism. The first item is Blount’s defense of Burnet’s views.
This work appeared over and over again from the late 17th century through the 18th century. A list of editions is given in Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, by Giovanni P. Marana, ed. Arthur J. Weitzman (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 232; and C. J. Betts, Early Deism in France, chap. 7.
The Italian manuscript of the first sixty-three letters is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Italien 1006–1007. These have been published by G. Alamsi and D. A. Waner spi in Studi Secenteschi, in issues appearing between 1968 and 1973.
See the lists of editions in the catalogues of the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the National Union Catalogue. UCLA has a microfilm copy of a Russian edition of 1778.
Weitzman, Turkish Spy, p. 232. The 1801 edition is called the thirty-first edition!
See Betts, Early Deism in France, chap. 7, and Weitzman, Turkish Spy, in the bibliography; both discuss some possible authors.
Betts, Early Deism in France, chap. 7.
Turkish Spy, Vol.111, letter XIII, p. 253. (References are given to the London 1723 edition. Most editions have the same text and pagination.)
See the discussion about this in Popkin, La Peyrère, pp. 128–30.
See Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian, chaps, v-vi.
Turkish Spy, Vol. VI, letters III and IV, pp. 212–19. On this see Popkin, “A Gentile Attempt to Convert the Jews to Reformed Judaism”, in Israel and the Nations, Essays Presented in Honor of Shmuel Ettinger, ed. S. Almog, et al. (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel and the Zalmen Shazar Center of Jewish History, 1987), pp. XXV-XLV. As I point out there, Daniel Defoe, in the supplementary ninth volume of the Letters of a Turkish Spy, Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (London 1718), carried on this campaign.
John Toland, Christianity not Mysterious: Or, A Treatise Shewing That there is nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor above it: And that no Christian Doctrine can be properly call’d A Mystery (London, 1696.)
Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation: Or, The Gospel, A Republication of the Religion of Nature (London, 1730.)
Edward Stillingfleet, Letter to a Deist, in Answer to several Objections against the Truth and Authority of the Scriptures, (London, 1677.)
As to what the point of all the polemics against deism was, if there were only a couple of deists, see the provocative new work by David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London: Croom Helm, 1988.)
See Berman, History of Atheism, chaps. 1 and 2.
On Spinoza, Morelli, and Saint-Évremond, see R. H. Popkin, “Serendipity at the Clark: Spinoza and the Prince of Condé,” The Clark Newsletter No. 10 (Spring, 1986), pp. 4–7.
See E.C. Mossner’s article s.v. “Blount, Charles,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1:325.
Ibid.
See Mossner’s article s.v. “Toland, John,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8:141.
Mossner, article s.v. “Blount,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1:325.
On Bayle, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, Vol. I, Du Pays de Foix a la cité d’Erasme (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963)
On Bayle, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle Vol. II, Hétérodie et Rigorisme, (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964),Labrousse, Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.)
See also Richard H. Popkin, article s.v. “Bayle, Pierre,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1:257–62, and “Introduction,” in Pierre Bayle: Historical and Critical Dictionary Selections, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.)
Finally, see Harry M. Bracken, “Bayle Not a Sceptic?,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, No. 2 (April-June, 1964), pp. 169–80
On Bayle, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle “Toleration Theories: Bayle, Jurieu, Locke,” in Mind and Language (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983), chap. 5.Mossner, article s.v. “Deism,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2:334–5.
On Boulanger’s theory, published just before the French Revolution by Baron d’Holbach, see Paul Sadrin, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722–1759)
Paul Sadrin ou avant nous le déluge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.)
On this work, see Silvia Berti, “‘La Vie et L’Esprit de Spinosa’ (1719) e la prima traduzione francese dell ‘Ethica’,” in Rivista Storica Italiana XCVIII (1986), pp. 7–46.
See also Richard H. Popkin, “Spinoza and Les Trois Imposteurs,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Spinoza, Chicago, 1987, ed. E. M. Curley (forthcoming, E. J. Brill)
Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach and A. W. Fairbairn, “Sur les Rapports entre les éditions du’Traité des Trois Imposteurs’ et la tradition manuscrite de cet ouvrage,” in Nouvelles de la République des Lettres II (1988), pp. 111–36.
In his “Jews and Judaism as seen by the English Deists of the 18th Century,” [in Hebrew] in Zion XXIX (1964), pp. 182–207.
Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968.)
On this see E. Labrousse, Bayle; Popkin, article s.v “Bayle, Pierre,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965.)
Walter E. Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965.)
Popkin, “Introduction,” in Bayle: Historical and Critical Dictionary Selections.
See the “clarification” on atheism in the last volume of the Dictionnaire. Much of this is included in Popkin, Bayle: Historical and Critical Dictionary Selections, pp. 399–408.
The last note Bayle wrote just before his death said, “je meurs en Philosophe Chrétien, persuadé et pénétré des bontés et de la misericorde de Dieu et vous souhaite un bonheur parfaite.” On what this could have meant, see E. Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1985), pp. 269–71. See also Popkin’s suspicions in his “Introduction” to Bayle: Historical and Critical Dictionary Selections.
See Bayle’s article s.v. “David” in the Dictionnaire.
See Diderot’s various articles on the history of Judaism; Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs; and d’Holbach’s L’Esprit du Judaïsme. The last work is so bad that it is still being reprinted by anti-semitic societies in the Ukraine. Diderot modified his views in later life. See Leon Schwartz, Diderot and the Jews (Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981.)
See the article by Paul Edwards s.v. “Atheismusstreit,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1:189–92.
On this see Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.)
On Boudinot, see Richard H.Popkin, “The Age of Reason versus The Age of Revelation. Two Critics of Tom Paine: David Levi and Elias Boudinot,” in J. A. Leo Lemay, editor, Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment. Essays honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 158–70.
See Henri Grégoire, “Discours preliminaire,” in Histoire des sectes religieuses (Paris, 1814)
Tom. I; R. H. Popkin, “An Aspect of the Problem of Religious Freedom in the French and American Revolutions,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association: Freedom, Vol. L, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1976), pp. 146–61.
For a detailed account of Paine’s church of “Theophilantropie,” see Grégoire, Histoire, Tom. II.
This is the thesis throughout Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason.
See Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, spi Équisse d’un Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, ed. Alain Pons (Paris: Flammarion, 1988.)
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Popkin, R.H. (1990). Polytheism, Deism, and Newton. In: Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology. Archives Internationales D’Histoire Des Idées/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 129. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1944-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1944-0_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7368-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-1944-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive