Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism

Reconceiving the Philosophy of Religion

Louise Hickman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317228516
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism identifies an ethically and politically engaged philosophy of religion in eighteenth century Rational Dissent, particularly in the work of Richard Price (1723-1791), and in the radical thought of Mary Wollstonecraft. It traces their ethico-political account of reason, natural theology and human freedom back to seventeenth century Cambridge Platonism and thereby shows how popular histories of the philosophy of religion in modernity have been over-determined both by analytic philosophy of religion and by its critics. The eighteenth century has typically been portrayed as an age of reason, defined as a project of rationalism, liberalism and increasing secularisation, leading inevitably to nihilism and the collapse of modernity. Within this narrative, the Rational Dissenters have been accused of being the culmination of eighteenth-century rationalism in Britain, epitomising the philosophy of modernity. This book challenges this reading of history by highlighting the importance of teleology, deiformity, the immutability of goodness and the divinity of reason within the tradition of Rational Dissent, and it demonstrates that the philosophy and ethics of both Price and Wollstonecraft are profoundly theological. Price's philosophy of political liberty, and Wollstonecraft's feminism, both grounded in a Platonic conception of freedom, are perfectionist and radical rather than liberal. This has important implications for understanding the political nature of eighteenth-century philosophical theology: these thinkers represent not so much a shaking off of religion by secular rationality but a challenge to religious and political hegemony. By distinguishing Price and Wollstonecraft from other forms of rationalism including deism and Socinianism, this book takes issue with the popular division of eighteenth-century philosophy into rationalistic and empirical strands and, through considering the legacy of Cambridge Platonism, draws attention to an alternative philosophy of religion that lies between both empiricism and discursive inference.

1 Enlightenments, the philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy

Most analytic philosophers of religion pay scant attention to the history of their discipline, although many see some level of continuity between their own aims and those of their predecessors, even if the methods need drastically revamping. Richard Swinburne, for example, describes a rapid expansion of a new publicly acceptable atheism in the eighteenth century, which made it an imperative to justify the core claims of religious belief. Swinburne locates himself firmly in the tradition of inductive arguments for God’s existence, which flourished in the eighteenth century and, as he sees it, reached their peak in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). The subsequent abandonment of natural theology after Hume and Kant had their say was, in his view, a mistake. What he sees as part of the long and glorious past of using the ‘best available secular criteria to clarify and justify religious claims’ should, he thinks, have a long and industrious future.¹

Other notable contemporary thinkers who link their philosophies of religion to the eighteenth century include William Rowe who notes an influence from the methods of Samuel Clarke and William Wainwright whose thought has been shaped by Jonathan Edwards.² There are many others. Wainwright is representative in seeing himself as engaged in the task of using analytic techniques to recover insights of earlier thinkers in order to apply them to contemporary problems. The assumption that there is continuity between the aims and objectives of eighteenth-century and contemporary philosophy of religion is widely shared – both by those who would promote natural theology and those who would reject it.

The eighteenth century is particularly significant. It is commonly accepted that the philosophy of religion in its current form originated with the criticisms levelled at religion during the European Enlightenment.³ This is of critical importance because the historical precedent gives analytic philosophy of religion a substantive part of its legitimacy. The justification of belief against the atheist unbeliever is confirmed as the primary purpose of the discipline and religious claims are consolidated as propositions of fact to be judged objectively through the methods of science. This particular reading of history interprets the natural theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as primarily reactive, emerging in opposition to a growing atheism. Natural theology is then interpreted as the attempt to claim that a proof of theism can be achieved through reason or empirical evidence independently of any faith conviction, thereby achieving a significant degree of certainty.

Furthermore, the same reading of history is adopted by philosophy of religion’s keenest theologically minded despisers. The aims and objectives of the philosophy of religion have been scorned for being part of a ‘soulless, aggressive, nonchalant and nihilistic’ materialism, worse than just redundant but violent and damaging, not only in their effects but also in their very nature as a product of secularism.⁴ A product, that is, that took shape with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Disdained for being inherently nihilistic in the way it buys into the secular episteme, the ideology of abstraction is regarded by some Christian theologians as a ‘post-Christian paganism,’ a ‘refusal’ of Christianity and an anti-Christian invention.⁵ On this view, anti-philosophy and the end of metaphysics is a ‘supreme opportunity’ for religion, giving it a chance to break free from the ideals – seen as false idols – that underpin the modern philosophy of religion.

Both those on the defence and those on the attack adopted the same reading of history. The philosophy of religion is understood as a child of the Enlightenment using secular scientific ways of arguing for the purpose of justifying belief. What underpins this narrative is a particular understanding of Enlightenment, either as one project of secularisation or as a movement that contains a secular materialistic programme from which the philosophy of religion in its current form appeared. Determining what this Enlightenment might have been in the past becomes, therefore, essential for imagining the nature of philosophy of religion in the future.

Enlightenments and their projects: how enlightenment has been defined

The first use of the term ‘Enlightenment’ is usually attributed to Kant and tends to refer to Western European thought from 1688 to the French Revolution in 1789, and it is typically seen to advance a commitment to human reason as an objective source of knowledge, a faith in the empiricism of the new science and a rejection of religious tradition, scholasticism, faith-based religious claims and the social-political establishment. It often tends to be viewed as an anti-theological, secular movement that gives rise to a distinctly a-theological conception of reason substantially different from what came before.

This understanding of it and of the philosophy of religion to which it is believed to give rise has much to do with Peter Gay’s long-dominant construal of the Enlightenment as a singular ‘project’ in the shape of a unified trend towards a secular world view. His The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1967) depicted the Enlightenment as a largely uniform anti-Christian movement, and this portrayal had a long-lasting impact for decades afterwards.⁶ Gay’s Enlightenment was distinctly French: an age in which the anti-clerical philosophes overthrew the ecclesiastical establishment, culminating in the French Revolution. On this reading, the Enlightenment is a tradition of thought characterised by reason’s usurping of religion and overcoming of a revelation usually conceived of as a- or anti-rational.

Despite its now widespread rejection by historians of philosophy, the ‘one-project’ account has been formative for theological conceptions of how the Enlightenment should be understood. Colin Gunton’s suggestion that ‘the Enlightenment’s programme’ is one that seeks ‘to replace God with the individual as the source of all authority’⁷ is typical. Alister McGrath tells us that the movement called ‘The Enlightenment’ asserted the omnipotence of human reason, with the result that ‘ethics since the Enlightenment has sought to distance itself from theology.’⁸ This understanding of an inherently secular Enlightenment implicitly sets up some sort of antipathy between reason and faith, with substantial ramifications for how the relationship between theology and philosophy is conceived.

The one-project account has been promoted recently for the purpose of extolling secular reason over and above the theological. For Anthony Pagden, the Enlightenment was a movement that marginalised theology in opening up the potential for scientific knowledge, undermining the claim to one source of knowledge or one source of authority. Pagden’s ultimate goal is to promote this particular vision of the project by advancing Baron d’Holbach’s assertion that it is up to every enlightened being to ‘attack at their source the prejudices of which the human race has been so long the victim.’⁹ Theology should be ousted. The only possible just society, he believes, is a secular one. The interpretation of the Enlightenment as one project, therefore, has proved useful both for those wishing to expunge rational thought of all religion and for those wishing to promote more theological ways of thinking conceived of as anti-rational. It also does much to encourage the assumption that if the philosophy of religion originated during the European Enlightenment, it must be a discipline at odds with theology or at least one that utilises a very different secular method.

This view of the Enlightenment has been subject to a considerable amount of criticism in recent years with the result that a much deeper appreciation for the theological underpinnings of Enlightenment thought has emerged. It has become preferable to speak of several ‘enlightenments’ rather than one and the clear-cut distinction between a secular Enlightenment and pre-modern religion has been challenged.¹⁰ Jonathan Israel has recently done much to argue that it was theological debate that lay at the centre of the early Enlightenment, and it was not anti-religious in nature.¹¹ In addition to his work, a number of other important historical narratives have reflected greater sensitivity towards the theological roots of Enlightenment thought, most notably Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) and Michael Buckley’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism (1987). Buckley acknowledges the strongest intellectual forces at this time were not those rejecting belief but those promoting a new form of faith.¹²

Although the homogenous account of Enlightenment has been considerably revised, there are still assumptions embedded in the revisionist histories about the anti-theological nature of the more radical forms of reason and faith that emerged out of the Enlightenment. Buckley himself depicts an account of faith that sees it undergoing a metamorphosis because of its flirtation with the methods of science and the search for abstract objective rationality. For Buckley, what makes religious thought enlightened is that it is fundamentally opposed to the theology of pre-modernity. This is the same reasoning that lies behind Alasdair MacIntyre’s use of the term ‘Enlightenment project.’ For MacIntyre, the originators of Enlightenment thought may have been deeply theological, but the result was a secularised reason sharply at odds with previous theological ways of thinking. MacIntyre has it that ethics became concerned with the project of justifying morality: a project that before was totally inconceivable and unnecessary. In summary, ‘the thinkers of the Enlightenment set out to replace what they took to be discredited traditional and superstitious forms of morality by a kind of secular morality that would be entitled to secure the assent of any rational person.’¹³

There is a suggestion here, as with many other recent interpretations, that the Enlightenment took what was essentially a wrong turn, resulting in a form of rationality that ended up justifying conservatism. Although this account of Enlightenment acknowledges its religious character, especially in its early days, it still promotes a narrative in which – in the words of Eagleton – faith is opposed to reason. This is illustrated, he thinks, through the actions of the ‘zealots of reason’ who aim to reconcile religion with a new, secular form of rationality.¹⁴ These more complex accounts still assume a fundamental incompatibility between the values of the Enlightenment and those of religious faith. The new ‘rational religion’ that arose with the Enlightenment becomes something inherently inimical to faith. There is much more nuance in these histories than in the work of Gay, but Enlightenment is still viewed as something largely homogenous, characterised by the refutation of religious belief.

On these readings, belief comes to be seen at the time of Enlightenment as either something irrational or as something private, resulting in a focus on propositional beliefs, the privatisation of religion and the ‘intellectualisation’ of thought.¹⁵ What is believed to unite the scientists and philosophers of Enlightenment is their conviction that the laws determining physical and human nature are ‘few, simple, clear, and verifiable by discursive reason and science.’¹⁶ The dominant view in recent intellectual history is thus that by the mid to late eighteenth century, theology and philosophy had ‘gone the way of Enlightenment rationalism,’ the main feature of which has been defined by Isaiah Berlin as the application of science to human affairs.¹⁷ Philosophy is, in this view, converted into a natural science, thus leaving it innately secular and fundamentally opposed to theological thinking. As Israel sees it, trends towards secularisation, tolerance, equality, democracy, individual freedom and liberty of expression were powerfully impelled by a ‘philosophy’ that rejected transcendent values and had no need of theology.¹⁸

This history presents the theologians of the eighteenth century as facing a difficult choice. One response to the predicament of the new rationalism was to take the road that showed religious belief is reasonable; hence, the philosophy of religion (as a distinct discipline) emerged during the Enlightenment.¹⁹ Another was the refusal of modernity and its values, which presented itself in the traditions of fideism and the rejection of natural theology. This emerges today in both anti-philosophical postmodern approaches and in fundamentalisms. Theologians who favour the refusal of modernity have drawn justification from this history for their anti-philosophical and anti-liberal standpoints. If the Enlightenment is read as a commitment to the fully universal, the clearly comprehensible and the exhaustibly justifiable, it becomes easier to dismiss it as leaving us with nothing but emptiness as it tries to fill the gulf ‘with modes of purely human self-assertion.’²⁰

Nihilism has thus come to be seen as the inevitable legacy of modernity. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Enlightenments, the philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy
• 2 Godliness and Godlikeness: deiform reason and the honest mind
• 3 State cozenage and political fictions: reason, revelation and the politics of conformity
• 4 The ethical cosmos: natural theology, epistemic humility and the immutability of goodness
• 5 Casting out Hagar and her children: deiformity, liberty and politics
• 6 ‘Wrought in each flower, inscrib’d on ev’ry tree’: Wollstonecraft, reason and the contemplation of divinised nature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index