Lecture 4 Lecture FourDeismThe Origins of Deism Although the search for the orgins of rational religion may lead one to an "infinite regress," one can argue that Deism had its origins in a renewed interest in the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This interest in the world was reflected in the art and science of the Renaissance, and evidenced itself in the work of Galileo (the telescope), Sir Isaac Newton and his book Principia (which assumed that the world is an ordered place where everything occurs by natural law). Speaking of Newton, Alexander Pope wrote, "Nature and Nature's law lay hid in night/God said, 'Let Newton be!'/ And all was light." Newton's view of nature as ordered realm reflecting the blueprint of its maker was taken up by others. Joseph Addison wrote: "The spacious firmament on high/ with all the blue ethereal sky/And spangled heavens, a shining frame, their great Original proclaim." Voltaire, the great philosopher of the Enlightenment wrote: "Last night, I was meditating, absorbed in the contemplation of nature. I was filled with wonder at its immensity, at the stars in their courses, at the mutual interaction of those countess orbs, one upon another, which people look upon unmoved. And I marveled still more at the Mind which governs the whole mighty scheme. A man must be blind I said to myself, not to be dazzled by such a spectacle, a fool not to acknowledge its Author, a madman not to adore him." Parallel to this interest in the natural order, was a growing confidence in the powers of reason. In medieval Christianity, reason had been the handmaid of theology. Its only task was to help order and to foster our understanding of God's revelation. This began to change with the Scholastics. While reason never challenged or contradicted revelation, it came to be more and more of an independent discipline with its own powers for discovering truths (even though it was still thought that all higher truths came from revelation). In comparison to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth was also a time of peace. The bloody religious wars that had swept Europe had come to an end, and the strong religious convictions that had helped ignite these bloodbaths were viewed with suspicion, a sentiment reflected in the literature of the period. Voltaire had his hero Candide pass from a village of the Avars, fired by the Bulgars, to a village of the Bulgars fired by the Avars. Both sights he found equally appalling. In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the Houyhnhnms, a race of horses, marvels when Gulliver tells them how humans fought over such questions as "whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh, and whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine." When the Houyhnhnms were not greatly disturbed, because the humans could do each other little damage since they lacked claws, Gulliver set about describing the weapons of carnage, and how he has seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once, and how dead bodies had come down in pieces from the clouds to the great diversion of spectators. Sir Isaac Newton was important for his introduction of the inductive method of reasoning which differed from the deductive approach of the church. His Principia Mathematica popularized his ideas. He was read by Voltaire, and influenced him and many others. People came to think that it was possible to think God's thoughts after him. Newton helped formulate a science of mechanics. He painted the universe is a vast and harmonious machine. This principle was in turn applied to religious and social life. Many came to believe that it was possible to find God through a natural religion, and to discover the moral laws of existence through reason, allowing the creation of a well ordered society was possible where people can live in harmony and prosperity.Deism The effort to find this natural religion came to be known as Deism. The focus naturally was on ethics. Deism first appeared in England in the seventeenth century in response to the theological controversies that divided Christians during the sixteenth century. Deism must be distinguished from theism and atheism. Atheists were scornful of deists saying that were not weak enough to be Christians, and not strong enough to be atheists. The Deists believed themselves to be Christians. Their God was not the personal God of the theists: a God who operated through history and concerned himself continually with the affairs of human beings. Rather their God was the Great Artificer of the Universe who with a thrust of his Almighty hand, had set rolling the myriad spheres, and left creation to its own devices. Rather than being intimately involved with the creation, this God had left humanity on its own to be guided in its affairs by reason, the "candle of the Lord." Deism was denoted by five major doctrines. 1) The existence of God 2) The obligation to worship God 3) the ethical requirements of such worship 4) the need for repentance 5) The need for reward and punishment both in this life and in the one to follow Deists tended to make light of the orthodox. Matthew Tyndal was one such critic. He wrote: "The Builder of this universe was wise;/The plan he shaped all worlds and/aeons by/was--heavens!--thy small nine and thirty articles." (The most effective way to attack is to make light of something, to hold it up to ridicule.) Thomas Paine scoffed that if the devil had taken Jesus up to the top of the mountain whence he could see all the kingdoms of the earth, he ought to have discovered America. Voltaire argued that Jesus was a Deist. Had he been alive, he would have rejected the church, which was corrupt and evil. Voltaire was an example of a prominent Deist. He was deeply interested in nature's God, yet, he scoffed at the miracles of Jesus. One of the miracles of Jesus, said Voltaire, was to turn water into wine at a wedding feast where the peasants were already drunk. He also made light of the story where a group of devils are compelled by Jesus to inhabit a herd of pigs, and cause them to jump in a lake and drown. Voltaire noted that this was supposed to take place in a country where pigs were not even raised. Such miracles, he believed, were contrary to the natural order which God has set in motion.Deism in The South Deism attracted the powerful. In Europe, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great (they all belonged to the great family) were deists. And it should not surprise us that many of the leading lights to the American Revolution such as Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington were as well. One of the consequences of the Great Awakening had been that religion had become more externalized. With the increased emphasis on the conversion experience, there was a tendency to wear one's religion on one's sleeve. This was a somewhat ironical development in that one of the goals of those who promoted the Revival was the internalizing of religious experience. Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington made use of the externalization of religion. They carefully cultivated the appearance of such a faith in order to claim leadership in the larger culture, and helped lead the righteous cause of overthrowing the crown. But they were themselves far from orthodox, and did not share the evangelical consensus that had united the rest of the country in the wake of the Awakening. Deists to a man, they cloaked themselves in evangelical garb for the public while entertaining heterodox view in private. (Of course, I might note, there are no modern parallels to this phenomenon.) That the principle leadership of the American colonies should harbor deist tendencies should not be surprising. Many of the priviledged in the South were taken with the Enlightenment, and some went so far as to name their children after Voltaire. Books by leading Deists in Europe--men such as Locke, Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins, and William Wollaston were popular in these quarters. These emerging deists came to believe that just as there are basic physical laws that can be discovered through human reason (here one sees the influence of Newton's Principia), so too one can discover basic religious principles the same way. Samuel Quincy, a Southern divine put it this way: "The Doctrines of Christianity are founded in Truth and Reason, and capable of being supported by clear and rational Arguments...Christianity is then a rational Religion, and those who deny that it can, or ought to be maintained upon rational Principles, do in Effect give it up. For is not Reason the only Faculty of the Soul that God has given us, to render us capable of Religion...". Because they believed these truths could be accessed by human reason, they tended to stess natural religion over revealed religion. Deists saw no need for a special revelation. Such a revelation was only for the ignorant. A learned person could seek God through reason. (See Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, p. 395) Not everyone went all the way to Deism. There also emerged a religious liberalism that took God's existence for granted. They believed that science and reason could reveal an "infinite Architect," and tended to accent the goodness of God. Such Puritan doctrines as election, they argued, were irreconcilable with a truly benevolent God. They emphasized human ability, rejected Original Sin, and insisted that God would never held one responsible for deeds one did not commit. Implicit in the Deism and Liberalism that took root in the Southern colonies was a rising Anthropology that reflected the new scientific studies of Newton and others. The fact that man could now read the thoughts of the Creator, suggested a heightened sense of the ability of human beings. This rising anthropology also suggested a lowered Christology. Many believed that God has in some way indwelled Jesus, who had been human, making him divine. This meant that the second person of the Trinity was not equal to that of God Almighty. In other words, they resurrected the Arian heresy. Others went still further. There is, they asserted, only one God. Jesus had not been divine, they contended, but was a human being like you and me. He was just a good man who had lived an exemplary life. And because he was human, and person living has within themselves the capacity to go and do likewise. In a real sense, the Declaration of Independence was a religious document. But the religion that infuses it is that of Deism. This is particularly clear in its asserting of inherent rights that can be intuited by human reason. Here is the religion of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on the human ability to shape and order one's existence. Likewise, the idea of a compact between the governed and government is little more than a secular version of Calvinist Covenant theology. Southern Deists were also strikingly pro-American. As heirs to the original millenial vision of America as a city on a hill that would serve as a light to the nations, they took that inheritance and secularized it. Instead of holding--as did the Puritans--that God had raised up this nation to serve the model for a Christian society, they reinterpreted the vision such that America's mission was to bring a new democratic order to a world filled with monarchies. Lyman Beecher, writing in the 19th century, shared this reinterpreted vision vividly when he wrote, "If it had been the design of Heaven to establish a powerful nation in the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, where all the energies of man might find full scope and excitement, on purpose to show the world by one great successful experiment of what man is capable...where should such an experiment have been made but in this country...This light of such a hemisphere shall go up to Heaven, it will throw its beams beyond the waves; it will shine into the darkness there, and be comprehended,--it will awaken desire, and hope, and effort, and produce revolutions and overturnings until the world is free." Ezra Stiles, a New Englander, offered an even better expression of this new interpretation of the errand into the wilderness in 1760: "The right of conscience and private judgement is unalienable; and it is truly the interest of all mankind to unite themselves into one body for the liberty, free exercise, and unmolested enjoyment of this right...And being possessed of the precious jewel of religious liberty, a jewel of inestimable worth, let us prize it highly and esteem it too dear to be parted with on any terms lest we be again entangeled with that yoke of bondage which our fathers could not, would not, and God grant that we may never, submit to bear...Let the grand errand into America never be forgotten."Thomas Jefferson Jefferson was typical of Southern Deists. One of the leading American intellectuals, he shared a great fondness for Voltaire, and like other deists of his day, Jefferson loathed all forms of Christian orthodoxy. But he also recognized that the churches could be used in the struggle with England, and he sought to use them for this purpose. Dissenting groups from the left wing of Continental Reformation like the Mennonites, and left wing of Puritanism like the Baptists and Quakers were strong backers of religious freedom, an idea that is closely associated with Jefferson. These Christians believed in religious freedom as a fundamental theological principle, and suffered much for their position. But for Jefferson, religious freedom was grounded in the values of the Enlightenment. One exercised one's religion according to the dictates of one's conscience, that is to say, Jefferson accorded human reason a higher authority than revelation. That was not the only way that he downplayed revealed religion. Indeed, he was so bold as to edit his own version of the Bible. Jefferson believed that Jesus had been a great teacher with a superior ethic, who had been painted as something he wasn't by the church: a god. And so, he deleted anything in the Bible that had a supernatural component. Jefferson spoke of his effort to week the ethical from the supernatural as searching for "diamonds in a dung-hill." Not surprisingly, Jefferson accepted religion as an ethical guide, but had little faith in theology or dogma. That is not to suggest, however, that he wanted his religious views known. Far from it. He did not want his religious published for fear of the public reaction, and published such works as the "Jefferson Bible" postumously. Here again he refused to do anything that might undermine orthodox religion. That is because--while it was unreasonable, and unattractive to "right" thinking people, it did serve the postive social good of helping to insure morality among the masses. Deism would reach its high water mark in the years following the revolution. In the North there was a growing acceptance of Unitarianism and Universalism. Universalism, for instance, was based on a profound faith in the goodness of God, a central conviction in the Age of Reason. Defenders of revealed religion felt themselves hard pressed by advocates of rational religion. Of the nine congregational churches in Boston only one still adhered to orthodoxy at the beginning of nineteenth century. The same was true throughout New England. Deeply influenced by the Unitarianism of Harvard, enlightenment ideas spread rapidly. Eventually 100 churches in Massachusetts would eventually leave to become Unitarian. In the South, Thomas Jefferson was elated by these developments. As Sydney Ahlstrom notes, Jefferson "was unquestionably the most significant of the American rationalists, and his place in American religion is exceedingly important...because his philosophy of religion and his political theory form such a meaningful whole...". The growing acceptance of rational religion, and Jefferson's election to the Presidency seemed to suggest that Deism was in its ascendency. But even as Jefferson took his place in Washington, the pendulum of public opinion was about to swing in a different direction.    |
|
