DEISM

DEISM. A form of religious nonconformity upholding the view that human beings can know the truths of theology by rational methods, deism excludes any appeal to supernatural or revealed experience. Although some scholars have found anticipations of deism in various Greek and Roman schools of philosophy, deist ideas strictly speaking originated in early modern Europe. Coined as a term of derision in a Calvinist tract published in 1564, deist lost its pejorative sense over the course of the seventeenth century and was embraced by a wide range of thinkers before and during the Enlightenment. At the same time, deism encountered severe criticism both from defenders of conventional faith and from more skeptical and rigorously rational schools of thought.

The prehistory of deism is perhaps best encapsulated in the writings of the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C.E.–43 B.C.E.). In various philosophical dialogues, including De natura deorum and De legibus, Cicero emphasized that divinity and its works can be known through the application of reason and, indeed, that reason itself constitutes the true divine spark or seed within humanity. Drawing heavily on an eclectic Romanized stoicism, Cicero articulated a coherent account of a rational religion, leading at least some scholars to proclaim him the "father of deism." Moreover, because Cicero's writings (including De natura deorum) enjoyed a large audience in later antiquity as well as medieval and Renaissance Europe, they may have inspired some thinkers associated with a more self-consciously constructed school of deist thought during early modern times.

The origins of deism properly speaking, especially in England, cannot be separated from a range of other nonconformist movements during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Unitarianism, anticlericalism, Erastianism, Arminianism, and Socinianism. Generally speaking, the early thinkers associated with deism were engaged in a broad revolt against authority. Among the leading figures—who did not, however, consistently identify themselves as deists—were Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), Charles Blount (1654–1693), and John Toland (1670–1722), all of whom were at the forefront of European religious nonconformity and freethinking. In their wake came a number of lesser deists whose commitments to the doctrine varied widely. The deists shared in the British trend toward nonconformism by challenging central premises of enforced unity of belief, by doubting the rational demonstrability of major tenets of Christian theology, by asserting the distortion and perversion of religious faith by clerics and ecclesiastical institutions, and by establishing the complicity between church authorities and secular rulers in maintaining religious conformity in the interests of the powerful.

Deists starting with Lord Herbert had argued for a set of natural and universal principles common to all religions; to the extent that any system of belief embodied these tenets, it had a presumptive claim to validity. They praised expressions of religiosity that reflected those elements consonant with natural human worship of divinity. The common principles (laid down in Lord Herbert's 1624 treatise De Veritate) embraced acceptance of a single supreme God; insistence upon the worship of that God, achieved in particular by virtuous and pious deeds; expectation of remorse and contrition for one's sins; and acknowledgment of both temporal and extra-temporal divine dispensation of rewards and penalties. Such precepts are universally accessible by human reason, rendering revelation of secondary or derivative significance. Consequently, deists also subscribed to the principle that human nature was the same and inalterable throughout the world.

One of the favorite themes of the seventeenth-century deists was the postulation of a sort of urreligion, a primitive piety that had been erased by the introduction of formal religious worship. In his De Religione Gentilium (1663; Religion of the Gentiles), Herbert declared that before religious rites, ceremonies, scripture, and so on were created, the worship of God occurred in an entirely rational manner. For Herbert and his successors, religion as practiced by contemporary human beings, burdened with unnecessary accretions, departed greatly from original, natural belief. Superstition and idolatry, complex systems of guilt and its expiation, and the creation of a professional priesthood all marked religion's distance from true reverence for the divine.

Thus, deism did not merely defend the authority of human reason in religious matters, but it also proposed a brief against the system of power that conventionally supported institutionalized religion. Two important claims made by the deist case against religion should be highlighted: that priests manipulate superstition and ritual to implant a fear of God in human beings, and that the authority of churches rests upon a spurious claim that priests are uniquely competent to interpose themselves between human beings and divinity and to dictate to people (against their natural inclination and reason) how they shall live. Deists thereby equate religion with the creation of human misery, conflict, and immorality.

The British deists explained the course of institutional religion (modern as well as ancient) in terms of "priestcraft," that is, the erection and dissemination of false ideas, practices, and superstitions in order to enhance the interests of priests themselves. Blount asserted that theological doctrines were propagated in the most mysterious and obscure manner not because truths about divinity were complex, but in order to confuse and therefore control the laity. Toland went so far as to say that the distinction between religions resulted from the machinations of priests, designed to serve their baser worldly ambitions. Much of the substance of deistic anticlericalism was directed toward debunking the trappings of priestly superiority that cloaked less esteemed motives.

In the place of organized and ritualized religious practices, the deists recommended natural worship, best performed by sound moral action. Herbert and Toland both maintained that the means of salvation might be sought in the rational practice of virtue, piety, and faithfulness. Subsequent deists regarded this position as a defense of the purity of "heathen vertue" as distinct from the idolatry of more recent times. In the deist view, heathens were perhaps less encumbered by the cheats of religion than latter-day Christians—and certainly no more so. Hence, the practice of natural worship might be guided more by "heathen vertue" than by the more recent teachings of Christian (or Islamic or Judaic) religion.

Scholars have commonly ascribed a connection between religious nonconformity in England and republican political conviction. To what extent the bond between the two is judged necessary or inextricable remains an open question. Some authors with openly deist sympathies also subscribed to Toryism and royalism. Hence, it may be the case that the connection between deism and republicanism was in fact looser than scholarship often claims.

Although England may perhaps be regarded as the cradle of deism, the writings and ideas of the early deists spread to the Continent and infected some of the leading figures of the early Enlightenment. While France, for instance, had its share of nonconforming thinkers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Pierre Charron, Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and Pierre Bayle among them—deism received perhaps its most visible and influential statement there from Voltaire (1694–1778). Both in France and during an exile to England, Voltaire encountered deist thinkers and began to propound their views. Voltaire himself used the term theist, but the nomenclature is inconsequential. He advocated a notion of natural religion based on reason, defending the existence of a single God but assailing priestcraft and ecclesiastical corruption.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who was profoundly influenced by Voltaire's important statement of deism, the Lettres philosophiques (1734; Philosophical letters), seems to have adapted deist views in his own Émile (1762). But Rousseau's version of deism was less rationalistic, and less politically charged, than Voltaire's. Rousseau postulated a divine goodness that degenerated in human hands when artificially represented through rites and ceremonies. He called on his readers to adopt a natural religion by finding God in their own hearts and imitating the pure justice that the deity instills in every member of humankind. Conscience, according to Rousseau, was the greatest teacher of religious truths and the most faithful way of honoring God.

During the reign of Frederick II the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786), the work of the British deists was imported into Germany through more widely circulated translations and editions. Several thinkers identified themselves with the deist cause, perhaps most prominently Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). His defense of deism, composed in 1754, was directed with equal force against the materialist and atheistic claims of the most extreme proponents of Enlightenment and against narrow interpretations of Christianity. Indeed, Reimarus's work embodied the intellectual problem of deism throughout Europe: the orthodox suspected that deists were secretly atheists, while the more extreme critics of deism regarded it to be insufficiently critical of religious superstition. Other German thinkers grazed on the edges of deism. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) did not fit the mold of a typical deist, but he and his friend Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) maintained views that echoed important deist themes. More significantly, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) advocated a vision of Christian deism, most notably in his work Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793; Religion within the limits of reason alone), that cannot be understood apart from the deist doctrines of earlier times. Kant's overriding project for the liberation of the human mind from "tutelage" through the exercise of reason coincides neatly with the deist cause.

The deists also enjoyed a substantial following in North America among some of the leading intellectual lights of the colonial and Revolutionary eras. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the cosmopolitan Thomas Paine all identified in writings or public pronouncements with key deistic doctrines. When he was just twentytwo years old, Franklin (1706–1790) composed a statement of "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion" (1728), which formed a virtual manifesto of deism and to which he apparently subscribed for the rest of his life. Likewise, Jefferson (1743–1826) created his own carefully expurgated version of the Bible out of snippets of the New Testament Gospels, his selections overtly informed by deistic beliefs. The quality of American deism was, however, far different from its European counterpart. The virulent attacks on priestcraft and clerical corruption so common among British and continental deists were largely absent from the American scene. Indeed, figures such as Washington and Jefferson were in public conventionally pious churchgoers even as they maintained unorthodox beliefs in private. Thus, American deism lacked overtones of anticlericalism. On the other hand, the imputed connection between republican political convictions and deist doctrines was sustained by the American wing of deism.

Ironically, evenasdeismwasspreading throughout continental Europe and North America in the later half of the eighteenth century, it was coming under serious scrutiny in its cradle, the British Isles. On one side, the form of religious enthusiasm preached by John Wesley (1703–1791) was directed explicitly against the rationalism of deistic thought. Wesley emphasized the personal, inward-dwelling, and supernatural aspects of religious experience that deism had consciously sought to expel. On the other side, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) ridiculed deistic teachings for their intellectual bankruptcy. Hume produced a series of tracts, culminating in the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), which demonstrated how skepticism was the inescapable consequence of subscribing to deism, given the fundamental unsoundness of its logical, epistemological, and metaphysical assumptions. In England, Hume's basic stance was seconded by authors such as George Berkeley and Joseph Butler.

Deism also received a challenge in France from the even more extreme camp of atheistic materialists who constituted a large share of the philosophes and their Enlightenment fellow travelers. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot, É tienne Bonnot de Condillac and Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and most others in the leading circles of the French Enlightenment found deism to be intellectually disreputable or simply disingenuous—a faint-hearted attempt to preserve the hope of salvation while dispensing with the more overtly superstitious or corrupt features of organized religion. Yet nowhere did deism completely die out. Edmund Burke's declaration of the passing of deism in 1790 was premature, as the school of thought enjoyed both intellectual support and a popular following (especially in America) well into the nineteenth century.

DEISM

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