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Systems of Religious and Spiritual
Belief
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Deism, as the word is customarily
employed, describes an unorthodox religious attitude that found expression among
a group of English writers beginning with Edward Herbert (later 1st Baron Herbert of
Cherbury) in the first half of the 17th century and ending with Henry
St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in the middle of the 18th century. In
general, however, it refers to what can be called natural religion, the
acceptance of a certain body of religious knowledge that is inborn in every
person or that can be acquired by the use of reason,
as opposed to knowledge acquired through either revelation or the teaching of any church. |
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Though an initial use of the term
occurred in 16th-century France, the later appearance of the doctrine on the
Continent was stimulated by the translation and adaptation of the English
models. The high point of Deist thought occurred in England from about 1689
through 1742, during a period when, despite widespread counterattacks from the
established Church of England, there was relative freedom of religious
expression following upon the Glorious Revolution that ended the rule of James
II and brought William and Mary to the throne. Deism took deep root in
18th-century Germany after it had ceased to be a vital subject of controversy in
England. |
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At times in the 19th and early 20th
centuries, the word Deism was used theologically in contradistinction to theism,
the belief in an immanent God who actively intervenes in the affairs of men. In
this sense Deism was represented as the view of those who reduced the role of
God to a mere act of creation in accordance with rational laws discoverable by
man and held that, after the original act, God virtually withdrew and refrained
from interfering in the processes of nature and the ways of man. So stark an
interpretation of the relations of God and man, however, was accepted by very
few Deists during the flowering of the doctrine, though their religious
antagonists often attempted to force them into this difficult position.
Historically, a distinction between theism and Deism has never had wide currency
in European thought. As an example, when encyclopaedist Denis
Diderot, in France, translated into French the works of Anthony
Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, one of the important English
Deists, he often rendered "Deism" as théisme. The term is not in current usage as a metaphysical
concept, and its significance is really limited to the 17th and 18th centuries. |
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In 1754-56, when the Deist controversy
had passed its peak, John Leland, an opponent, wrote a historical and critical
compendium of Deist thought, A View of the
Principal Deistical Writers that Have Appeared in England in the Last and
Present Century; with Observations upon Them, and Some Account of the Answers
that Have Been Published Against Them. This work, which began with Lord
Herbert of Cherbury and moved through the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes,
Charles Blount, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins, Thomas
Woolston, Matthew Tindal,
Thomas Morgan, Thomas Chubb, and Viscount Bolingbroke, fixed the canon of who
should be included among the Deist writers. In subsequent works Hobbes usually
has been dropped from the list and John
Toland included, though he was closer to pantheism than most of the other
Deists were. Herbert was not known as a Deist in his day, but Blount and the
rest who figured in Leland's book would have accepted the term Deist as an
appropriate designation for their religious position. Simultaneously, it became
an adjective of opprobrium in the vocabulary of their opponents. Bishop Edward
Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677)
is an early example of the orthodox use of the epithet. |
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In Lord Herbert's treatises five
religious ideas were recognized as God-given and innate in the mind of man from
the beginning of time: the belief in a supreme being, in the need for his worship,
in the pursuit of a pious and virtuous life as the most desirable form of
worship, in the need of repentance for sins, and in rewards and punishments in
the next world. These fundamental religious beliefs, Herbert held, had been the
possession of the first man, and they were basic to all the worthy positive
institutionalized religions of later times. Thus, differences among sects and
cults all over the world were usually benign, mere modifications of universally
accepted truths; they were corruptions only when they led to barbarous practices
such as the immolation of human victims and the slaughter of religious rivals. |
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In England at the turn of the 17th
century this general religious attitude assumed a more militant form,
particularly in the works of Toland, Shaftesbury, Tindal, Woolston, and Collins.
Though the Deists differed among themselves and there is no single work that can
be designated as the quintessential expression of Deism, they joined in
attacking both the existing orthodox church establishment and the wild
manifestations of the dissenters. The tone of these writers was often earthy and
pungent, but their Deist ideal was sober natural religion without the trappings
of Catholicism and the High Church in England and free from the passionate
excesses of Protestant fanatics. In Toland there is great emphasis on the
rational element in natural religion; in Shaftesbury more worth is ascribed to
the emotive quality of religious experience when it is directed into salutary
channels. All are agreed in denouncing every kind of religious intolerance
because the core of the various religions is identical. In general, there is a
negative evaluation of religious institutions and the priestly corps who direct
them. Simple primitive monotheism was practiced by early men without temples,
churches, and synagogues, and modern men could readily dispense with religious
pomp and ceremony. The more elaborate and exclusive the religious establishment,
the more it came under attack. A substantial portion of Deist literature was
devoted to the description of the noxious practices of all religions in all
times, and the similarities of pagan and Roman Catholic rites were emphasized. |
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The Deists who presented purely rationalist
proofs for the existence of God, usually variations on the argument
from the design or order of the universe, were able to derive support
from the vision of the lawful physical world that Sir
Isaac Newton had delineated. Indeed, in the 18th century, there was a
tendency to convert Newton into a matter-of-fact Deist--a transmutation that was
contrary to the spirit of both his philosophical and his theological writings. |
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When Deists were faced with the problem
of how man had lapsed from the pure principles of his first forebears into the
multiplicity of religious superstitions and crimes committed in the name of God,
they ventured a number of conjectures. They surmised that men had fallen into
error because of the inherent weakness of human nature; or they subscribed to
the idea that a conspiracy of priests had intentionally deceived men with a
"rout of ceremonials" in order to maintain power over them. |
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The role of Christianity
in the universal history of religion became problematic. For many religious
Deists the teachings of Christ were not essentially novel but were, in reality,
as old as creation, a republication of primitive monotheism. Religious leaders
had arisen among many peoples--Socrates, Buddha, Muhammad--and their
mission had been to effect a restoration of the simple religious faith of early
men. Some writers, while admitting the similarity of Christ's message to that of
other religious teachers, tended to preserve the unique position of Christianity
as a divine revelation. It was possible to believe even in prophetic revelation
and still remain a Deist, for revelation could be considered as a natural
historical occurrence consonant with the definition of the goodness of God. The
more extreme Deists, of course, could not countenance this degree of divine
intervention in the affairs of men. |
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Natural religion was sufficient and
certain; the tenets of all positive religions contained extraneous, even impure
elements. Deists accepted the moral teachings of the Bible
without any commitment to the historical reality of the reports of miracles.
Most Deist argumentation attacking the literal interpretation of Scripture as
divine revelation leaned upon the findings of 17th-century biblical criticism.
Woolston, who resorted to an allegorical interpretation of the whole of the New
Testament, was an extremist even among the more audacious Deists. Tindal was
perhaps the most moderate of the group. Toland was violent; his denial of all
mystery in religion was supported by analogies among Christian, Judaic, and
pagan esoteric religious practices, equally condemned as the machinations of
priests. |
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The Deists were particularly vehement
against any manifestation of religious fanaticism and enthusiasm. In this
respect Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning
Enthusiasm (1708) was probably the crucial document in propagating their
ideas. Revolted by the Puritan fanatics of the previous century and by the wild
hysteria of a group of French exiles prophesying in London in 1707, Shaftesbury
denounced all forms of religious extravagance as perversions of true religion.
These false prophets were directing religious emotions, benign in themselves,
into the wrong channels. Any description of God that depicted his impending
vengeance, vindictiveness, jealousy, and destructive cruelty was blasphemous.
Because sound religion could find expression only among healthy men, the
argument was common in Deist literature that the preaching of extreme asceticism,
the practice of self-torture, and the violence of religious persecutions were
all evidence of psychological illness and had nothing to do with authentic
religious sentiment and conduct. The Deist God, ever gentle, loving, and
benevolent, intended men to behave toward one another in the same kindly and
tolerant fashion. |
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Ideas of this general character were
voiced on the Continent at about the same period by such men as Pierre
Bayle, a French philosopher famous for his encyclopaedic dictionary, even
though he would have rejected the Deist identification. During the heyday of the
French Philosophes in the 18th
century, the more daring thinkers--Voltaire among them--gloried in the name
Deist and declared the kinship of their ideas with those of Rationalist English
ecclesiastics, such as Samuel Clarke, who would have repudiated the
relationship. The dividing line between Deism and atheism
among the Philosophes was often rather blurred, as is evidenced by Le
Rêve de d'Alembert (written 1769; "The Dream of
d'Alembert"), which describes a discussion between the two
"fathers" of the Encyclopédie:
the Deist Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and the atheist Diderot. Diderot had drawn
his inspiration from Shaftesbury, and thus in his early career he was committed
to a more emotional Deism. Later in life, however, he shifted to the atheist
materialist circle of the Baron d' Holbach. When Holbach paraphrased or
translated the English Deists, his purpose was frankly atheist; he emphasized
those portions of their works that attacked existing religious practices and
institutions, neglecting their devotion to natural religion and their adoration
of Christ. The Catholic Church in 18th-century France did not recognize fine
distinctions among heretics, and Deist and atheist works were burned in the same
bonfires. |
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English Deism was transmitted to Germany
primarily through translations of Shaftesbury, whose influence upon thought was
paramount. In a commentary on Shaftesbury
published in 1720, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, a Rationalist philosopher and mathematician, accepted the Deist
conception of God as an intelligent Creator but refused the contention that a
god who metes out punishments is evil. A sampling of other Deist writers was
available particularly through the German rendering of Leland's work in 1755 and
1756. H.S. Reimarus, author of
many philosophical works, maintained in his Apologie
oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes ("Defense
for the Rational Adorers of God") that the human mind by itself without
revelation was capable of reaching a perfect religion. Reimarus did not dare to
publish the book during his lifetime, but it was published in 1774-78 by Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, one of the great seminal minds in German literature.
According to Lessing, common man, uninstructed and unreflecting, will not reach
a perfect knowledge of natural religion; he will forget or ignore it. Thus, the
several positive religions can help men achieve more complete awareness of the
perfect religion than could ever be attained by any individual mind. Lessing's Nathan
der Weise(1779;
"Nathan the Sage") was noteworthy for the introduction of the Deist
spirit of religion into the drama; in the famous parable of the three rings, the
major monotheistic religions were presented as equally true in the eyes of God.
Although Lessing's rational Deism was the object of violent attack on the part
of Pietist writers and the more mystical thinkers, it influenced such men as Moses
Mendelssohn, a German Jewish philosopher who applied Deism to the Jewish
faith. Immanuel Kant, the most
important figure in 18th-century German philosophy, stressed the moral element
in natural religion; moral principles are not the result of any revelation but
originate from the very structure of man's reason. English Deists, however,
continued to influence German Deism. Witnesses attest that virtually the whole
officer corps of Frederick the Great was infected with Deism and that Collins
and Tindal were favourite reading in the army. |
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By the end of the 18th century, Deism
had become a dominant religious attitude among intellectual and upper class
Americans. Benjamin Franklin,
the great sage of the Colonies and then of the new republic, summarized in a
letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, a personal creed that almost
literally reproduced Herbert's five fundamental beliefs. The first three
presidents of the United States also held Deistic convictions, as is amply
evidenced in their correspondence. "The ten commandments and the sermon on
the mount contain my religion," John
Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1816. (F.E.M.) |
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