Catalogue Entry: OTHE00051

Chapter 6: Civil theology

Author: Justin Champion

Source: The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730 (1992).

[Normalized Text] [Diplomatic Text]

[1] Hearne, Remarks and Collections, II, 94. One work which has gestured towards the connection between hostility towards the Church of England, and political radicalism is F. Venturi's excellent Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), 1-70; also his Italy and the Enlightenment (1972), chapter 3, 'Radicati's Exile in England and Holland', 63-103; M. A. Goldie, 'The Civil Religion of James Harrington' in A. Pagden (ed.), Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987).

[2] The canonical texts are Z. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, 1945); C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthsmen (Harvard, 1959), and (ed.), Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge, 1969); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), chapters 9-10, and his 'Introduction' to The Works of Harrington (Cambridge, 1977). See also B. Worden, 'Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution' in A. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (eds.), History and Imagination (1981): here, importantly, Worden does address the relationship between religion and politics in Republican thought during the Interregnum (see especially 193-5). As Worden notes (at 195): 'A fuller study of the classical republicans would dwell on the limits, as well as on the extent, of their rationalism.' This book, in dealing with the Republicanism of the late seventeenth century intends to do just this. The most recent discussion is J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-1677 (Cambridge, 1988).

[3] Toland, State-Anatomy (1717), 10; Toland (ed.), Oceana of James Harrington and His Other Works, cited as The Works of Harrington (1700), Preface, vii. See also Toland, Vindicius <172> Liberius (1702), 128; 'I declare by the word commonwealth no pure democracy, nor any particular form of government, but an independent community where the commonweal or good of all indifferently is design'd and pursu'd, let the form be what it will.' Note, in State-Anatomy Toland rejected the title of 'democratick Commonwealthsman' which he identified with 'licentiousness': Toland insisted he upheld 'liberty' and a 'government of laws enacted for the common good of all the people', 12-14. Toland, Anglia Libera, 92; Toland, The Art of Governing by Parties, 31; and Robert Molesworth's translation of Francis Hotman's French treatise Francogallia (1721). See Toland's Comments (Collections, II, 339) on the biased reception of his editions of Harrington and Milton: 'This was reckon'd a public service, but rewarded only with the public applauses of such as approv'd the undertaking; while the other side had the most specious pretext imaginable to represent me, what yet in their sense I was not, a most violent republican.' Note, in general Toland's motivation was not simply political - as his biographer wrote in the 'Abstract of the Life of John Toland' in Toland's Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning (1820), 42, that it was his purpose, 'to render civil government consistent with the inalienable rights of mankind; and to reduce Christianity to that pure, simple, and unpompous system, which Christ and his Apostles established'.

[4] The term 'secularists' was not coined until the 1840s: see OED entry. Robbins described the 'Republicans' as 'anticlerical and freethinking', Two Republican Tracts, 49. J. G. A. Pocock comments: 'It is part of the intellectual transformation of the age that Toland the anticlerical and quasi-Republican was also Toland the Deist and secularist, systematic foe of the Christian prophetic structure on which typology and apocalyptic depended. The connections between deism, republicanism, and millenarianism at the beginning of the eighteenth century are complex and await unravelling' (Works of Harrington, 143).

[5] The crucial issue in contention here is the interpretation of religious belief. Modern writers have tended to draw a conceptual distinction between what they would term theology and ideology; 'Ideologies' deal exclusively with secular activities, while theology remains cloistered in multi-various private languages. Religion may have been defused in modern Western society as a coherent and dynamic force, but this is no excuse for treating it as such an anaemic quantity in past societies. Our conception of religious belief today is determined by the notion of subjectivity; religious belief is a form of private self-expression, at worst a mere hobby. Religion for the early modern period was not a question of 'belief', with its implications in modern usage as something peculiar to the individual. Religion was not an isolated opinion about the corporality of Christ, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, or the nature of ordination; it was a culturally dominant language, a co-ordinating matrix in which ideas about social reality were conceived and debated. See F. Jameson, 'Religion and Ideology' in F. Barker et al. (eds.), 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century (Essex, 1981).

[6] G. P. Gooch and H. Laski, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, (Cambridge, 1954), 249, 'a markedly secular spirit may be noticed throughout his works'; C. Blitzer, An Immortal Commonwealth (Yale, 1970), 166, applauds 'the substantial correctness of Gooch's characterisations: His [Harrington's] interests, his convictions, and his habits of thought were all essentially secular. Surely the fact that these writings on religion are extensive can no more be taken as evidence of their author's alleged spirituality than can the fact that Hobbes devoted almost half of his Leviathan to the same subject'; J. Shklar, 'Ideology Hunting: The Case of James Harrington', American Political Science Review 53 (1959), 684. See also F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (1964), 204: 'The theme of this whole work has been the retreat from God in the realm of politics … a totally secular analysis of history and politics.'

[7] See Harrington, Works (1700), 58-9 on the notion of private and public religion. These phrases are cited in John Toland's State Anatomy (1717), 27-8 'for as the conviction of a mans private conscience, produces his private religion, so the conviction of the national conscience, or of the majority, must everywhere produce a National religion'. See also Toland, Vindicius Liberius (1702), 107-15 and Anglia Libera, 94; and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, 16-17, in Characteristicks. See also C. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (1972), chapter 10, 'James Harrington and the People', 189-303. Note page 298, where Hill points out that Harrington wished to combine toleration with a national Church establishment.

[8] Tindal, Rights of the Christian Church, 268, 275.

[9] Hobbes, Leviathan, 370. See also William Temple, 'Of Health and Long Life' in The Complete Works (2 volumes, 1720), I, 278: 'Now 'tis certain, that as nothing damps or depresses the spirits like great subjection or slavery, either of body or mind; so nothing nourishes, revives and fortifies them like great liberty.' For general discussions of de jure divino notions of kingship, see J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (New York, 1965), and Sommerville, Politics and Ideology.

[10] See Pian Piano in Pocock, Works of Harrington, 372. Note that M. Tindal, Rights of The Church, Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, and J. Toland, The Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church employ both Harrington's Erastian model of the primitive Church and his philological criticism. Harrington's works are scattered with ironic anticlerical remarks: see, for example, 'an ounce of wisdom is worth a pound of clergy', Pocock, Works (Oceana), 308-9, the same remark is in Pian Piano, 381. See also Pocock, Works, 382: 'shake the yoke of the priest' and 438, 530.

[11] J. G. A. Pocock does allude to the anticlerical tenor of these works. See Machiavellian Moment, 475-6 for a discussion of the links between Puritanism, Republicanism, and deism. My work intends to give this speculation a fuller treatment.

[12] Trenchard and Gordon, Independent Whig (1721), 321-2, citing Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 12.

[13] Trenchard and Gordon, Independent Whig, 84-6, 324, 333.

[14] These prefatory discourses were translated into French in 1794. The Independent Whig was also translated into French by the materialist Baron d'Holbach in 1767. Gordon's anticlericalism is also evident in his manuscript history of England, see BL Add. 20780. For a general discussion of Gordon, see J. M. Bullock, Thomas Gordon the Independent Whig (Aberdeen, 1918); J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property (Montreal, 1983), 7-42 has an interesting discussion of Gordon and Trenchard's work in relation to Tacitus, but eschews the anticlerical elements in their polemics. See also O. Ranum, 'D'Alembert, Tacitus, and the Political Sociology of Despotism', Transactions of the Fifth International Congress of the Enlightenment 2 (Oxford, 1981), and J. N. Shklar, 'Jean D'Alembert and the Rehabilitation of History', JHI 42 (1981).

[15] Gordon, The Works of Tacitus (4 volumes, 1737), I, 100, 104, 133, 178.

[16] Ibid., III, 6, 220. Note also that Harrington defined 'absolute monarchy' in religious terms: see Toland, Works of Harrington, 507.

[17] Toland, Anglia Libera, 95, 181-3. Note that Toland (Anglia Libera, 26) inverted the de jure divino rhetoric by insisting that popular approbation was 'the only divine right of all magistracy, for the voice of the people is the voice of God'.

[18] J. Toland, Art of Governing, 24. Note that this is to the CUL classmark Syn. 7.76.24.11

[19] Ibid., 19.

[20] Toland, State-Anatomy, II, 20.

[21] Dennis, Danger of Priestcraft, 16. On Dennis see the introduction to his Works (Baltimore, 1950); H. G. Paul, John Dennis, His Life and Criticism (New York, 1911); J. Wood Krutch, Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (New York, 1949).

[22] Dennis, Danger of Priestcraft, 16.

[23] Ibid., 17.

[24] Dennis, Priestcraft Distinguished, Preface, Sig. Av.

[25] Ibid., Sig. Ar.

[26] Ibid., 4, 5, 19, 23.

[27] R. Molesworth, Account of Denmark, 55, passim.

[28] Ibid., 74.

[29] See Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters, II, 290-303.

[30] Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters, II, 265. Religion under the rule of tyranny was the epitome of superstition, it was 'wild whimsies, delusive phantoms, and ridiculous dreams'. The human soul under such a system was degraded and defaced with 'slavish and unmanly fears; to render it a proper object of fraud, grimace, and imposition; and to make mankind the ready dupes of gloomy impostors, and the tame slaves of raging tyrants. For, servitude established in the mind is best established' (Cato's Letters, II, 291).

[31] Dennis, Vice and Luxury Publick Mischiefs, 78, 103. See also Harrington, A System of Politics: 'As not this language, nor that language, but some language; so not this religion, nor that religion, yet some religion is natural to every nation' (Pocock, Works of Harrington, 838).

[32] Toland, State-Anatomy, 21.

[33] Ibid., 22-3; see also Anglia Libera, 99. For Toland's credo see Collections, II, 302. See also Toland's definition of 'faith', 'which is the internal participation of the divine nature, irradiating the soul; and externally benefiting in beneficence, justice, sanctity, and those other virtues by which we resemble God, who is himself all goodness' (Nazarenus, v-vi).

[34] See Harrington, Pian Piano (1657), and Part II of The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658): for a discussion of this debate, see Pocock, 'Introduction', Works of Harrington, 67-90. See also Tindal's Rights, passim.

[35] Pocock, Works of Harrington, 519: 'And why is not ordination in the Church or Commonwealth of Christ as well a political thing as it was in the Churches or Commonwealths of the Jews or of the Heathens? Why is not the election of officers in the Church as well a political thing as election of officers in the State?'

[36]

Trenchard and Gordon, Independent Whig, xxix, 43, 45. The authors of The Independent Whig were vociferous in their Erastianism, citing Erastus at length:

that every state had the same authority of modelling their ecclesiastical as civil government; that the Gospel gave no preheminance, or authority to Christians over one another, but that everyman alike (who had suitable abilities) was qualified to execute all the duties and offices of their most Holy religion; and that it is a matter of prudence and convenience to appoint particular persons to officiate for the rest, with proper rewards and encouragements, which persons would be intitled to no more power than they themselves gave them. (Independent Whig, I, 91)

[37] Ibid., 105-6.

[38] Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, 79.

[39] It should be made clear that someone like Toland or Dennis believed in the truth of religion, and (to some extent) in the truth of Christianity, but that the criteria for truth were very different from orthodox descriptions of Christian truth. As argued in chapter 4, Toland's notion of true religion was broad enough to encompass Judaism, Islam and Christianity. One suspects that, for example, people like Toland and Stillingfleet used the words 'truth' and Christianity' in radically incommensurable ways. The issue over whether the radicals were 'atheistic' is to some extent an anachronism: for the Anglican hierarchy they most certainly were, while for the modern historian to attempt to assess the 'truth' value of past religious beliefs both methodologically naive and unacceptable. The task is to understand, not to indict or arbitrate.

[40] See E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (3 volumes, Oxford, 1930); H. S. Bennett, English Books and their Readership 1603-1640 (Cambridge, 1970), 133-4. The appeal of classical antiquity to the Republicans could be viewed as a further strand of the 1690s dispute between the ancients and the moderns, inspired by Fontenelle: see W. Temple, Essay Upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1692), who firmly applauds the lessons of ancient prudence: 'For political institutions, that tend to the preservation of Mankind, by civil governments; 'tis enough to mention those of Cyrus, Theseus, Licurgus, Solon, Zalencus, Charondas, Romulus, Numa Pompilius, besides the more ancient institutions of the Assyrian and Aegyptian governments and laws, wherein it may be observed such a reach of thought, such depth of wisdom, and such force of genius, as the presumption, and flattery itself of our age, will hardly pretend to parallel, by any of our modern institutions' (Complete Works, I, 302). Temple was so enamoured with the principles of ancient prudence that he even applauded non-Western models such as Chinese and Peruvian legislators who 'in practice … excell the very speculation of other men, and all those imaginary schemes of the European wit, the institutions of Xenophon, the Republick of Plato, the Utopias, or Oceanas of our modern writers' (see 'Of Heroick Virtue', Complete Works, I, 204-10); arguing against Temple, see W. Wotton, Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694); for a useful and witty summary of the dispute, see J. Swift, A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday between the Antient and Modern Books in St James Library (1704).

[41] Molesworth, An Account of Denmark, Preface, xxvi.

[42] Ibid., xx-xxv. See also Tindal, Rights, 84-5, 128, 268, 295-6, on the superiority of Greek education. See also Independent Whig, 'Of Education', 215-30; Toland, State-Anatomy, 'Of Universities and Pulpits', 69-70; and 'Letter Concerning the Roman Education' in Toland, Collections, II, 1-17.

[43] Toland, Cicero Illustratus (1712), a portion of which was translated and published in the preface to Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (1715), xii-xiii.

[44] Toland, Cicero Illustratus in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (1715), xviii.

[45] W. Moyle, Works (1727/Hammond, ed.) 17, 10-11, 33, 245.

[46] See W. Moyle, An Essay on the Lacedaemonian Government, (1698). Also Translations from Lucian for satires on the clergy, idolatry and ritual in 'Of Sacrifices', 'Dialogue with Hesiod' and 'A Dissertation upon the Age of the Philopatris, A Dialogue commonly attributed to Lucian'. See also Thomas Gordon's (d. 1750) important editions of Tacitus' Annals and Histories (1728-34) which were accompanied by valuable introductory discourses.

[47] For the most recent discussion of Ciceronianism, see R. Browning, The Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Louisiana, 1982). Browning suggests that Ciceronianism was a Court Whig development to counter the radical Catonic ideology of the <184> Republicans. My suggestion is that within a religious context there was already a radical usage of Cicero.

[48] Montesquieu, 'Discours sur Cicéron' in Œuvres completes (3 volumes, Paris, 1950), III, 15. Moyle, Works (1727/Hammond, ed.), 284.

[49] Toland, Collections, II, 492. Toland had also referred to John Locke as a modern Cicero, (Life of Milton (1761), 136).

[50] The same debate, and attempted assimilation, was continued between Samuel Clarke and the 'apostle' of deism, Matthew Tindal. Clarke insisted that Cicero, although confident of the existence of a natural religion, had pointed out the necessity of revelation. Tindal on the contrary held that Cicero's philosophy indicated the sufficiency of natural religion to lead men to perfection. The apotheosis of Cicero worship can be found in Conyers Middleton's History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (1741). The work was a popular success, having over 3,000 subscribers. Middleton, the Keeper of the University Library at Cambridge, argued that the role of history was to be both entertaining and instructive. Middleton's complaint was that too many of the Lives published concentrated upon military heroes, rather than the 'pacific and civil character'. His remedy was to supply the public with the Life of Cicero. The latter was virtue embodied; the De Officiis was an almost perfect moral system. Middleton cited Erasmus who considered that Cicero was inspired by the deity. Middleton, The Life of Cicero, I, Preface, xv-xvii and II, 560. For a further discussion of Cicero's influence see: M. E. Neilson, 'Cicero's De Officiis in Christian thought 300-1300' in Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature (Michigan, 1933); G. Gawlick, 'Cicero and the Enlightenment', 657-82 in SVEC 25 (1963); G. A. Burnett, 'The Reputation of Cicero among the English Deists 1660-1776' (unpublished Ph.D., California, 1947). Cicero's influence can be best appreciated from examining the Wing Catalogue. The editions of his works are countless. For example, Opera quae extant Omnia (1681); De Officiis (1648-95), eleven editions; Tully's Offices (1680), five editions. On Collins, see J. O'Higgins, Anthony Collins the Man and His Work (The Hague, 1970) at 35, which shows that <185> Collins had seventy-four entries in his library catalogue under Cicero which included three copies of De Divinatione and nine of De Natura Deorum.

[51] See C. D. Yonge (ed.), The Treatise of Marcus Tullius Cicero (1853) in De Natura Deorum, I, xlii.41. Hereafter all references to Cicero's works are contained in this volume, unless otherwise stated. For a general discussion of Roman religion and its relationship with the state see: A. Wardman, Religion and Statecraft among the Romans (1982); Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Baltimore, 1980); R. J. Goar, Cicero and the State Religion (Amsterdam, 1972); for more detailed discussions see: D. Grodynski, 'Superstitio' in REA 76 (1974), especially 40-3; G. Szemler, 'Religio, Priesthood, and Magistrates in the Roman Republic' in Numen 18 (1971), especially 121, 123, 126-7; T. A. Dorey (ed.), Cicero (1965), 135-214; Myrto Dragona-Monachou, The Stoic Arguments and the Providence of the Gods (Athens, 1976). See also J. Thrower, The Alternative Tradition: Religion and the Rejection of Religion in the Ancient World (The Hague, 1980), 203-31.

[52] Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I, xliii.41.

[53] Cicero, De Divinatione, I, iv.145.

[54] Ibid., I, xlvii.188.

[55] Ibid., II, xxviii-v.229-31.

[56] Ibid., II, xii.211.

[57] Toland, Works of Harrington (Oceana), 211. See also Toland, Serena, 117; M. Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (1731), iv.

[58] Toland, Works of Harrington (Oceana), 209.

[59] Cicero was not the only source for the history of classical civil religion: for example one of the most frequently cited works was Polybius' (206-124 BC) Histories. Editions of the work had been translated in 1634 by Edward Grimeston, and in 1698 by Henry Sheeres. The crucial passage, cited, for example, by Walter Moyle, Conyers Middleton and the Traité des trois imposteurs, discussed the role of religion in the Roman Republic. See Moyle in Robbins, Two Republican Tracts, 212; C. Middleton, Life, II, 552; Traité des trois imposteurs, BL Sloane 2039, folio 64r. It was popular civil theology that preserved the Roman Republic. Since the populace were 'fickle and full of ill managed passions; as likewise easie to be worked into heats and animosities', the legislators constructed 'specious dreads, and these sorts of fictions' to restrain them (Polybius, Histories translated H. Sheeres, 72-3; see F. W. Walbank Polybius (1972), 59).

[60] It is important to note that a manuscript copy of the first part of the Essay exists in the Shaftesbury Papers in the PRO: reference PRO/30/24/47/4. Fox-Bourne in his two-volume Life of Locke mistakenly attributed the work to Locke. H. R. Russell-Smith rightly argued that the work came from Moyle's pen. This still leaves unresolved the genesis and authorship of the particular manuscript in the Shaftesbury collection. It is apparent from examination of the text that the handwriting is not John Locke's. The connection between Locke and the manuscript is not entirely shattered as the handwriting is almost certainly that of Locke's amanuensis, Sylvanus Brownover. Many thanks to J. Marshall for identifying the latter's script.

[61] Moyle, Works (1727/Hammond, ed.), 'Some account of Mr Moyle and his writings', 28, and passim.

[62] See, in particular, his controversy with Humphrey Prideaux over the issue of the Thundering Legion in Works (1726/Sergeant, ed.), II, 1-390, and with Mr Naylor and William Whiston on the origin of Christian Churches in Works (1726/Sergeant, ed.), I 376-98.

[63] For example his dissertation upon the origins of the Philopatris in Works (1726/Sergeant, ed.), I, 285-364, An Essay on the Lacedaemonian Government in Works (1727/Hammond, ed.), 47-77, and various translations of Lucian in Works (1727/Hammond, ed.).

[64] See Robbins, Two Republican Tracts. This is the edition employed in general, although I have compared it with the first printed edition of 1726 and the manuscript referred to above.

[65] M. A. Goldie, 'The Civil Religion of James Harrington' has dealt with some of the religious dimensions of Harrington's work; he omits, however, any consideration of the influence of Oceana on later Harringtonians such as Toland and especially Moyle.

[66] Moyle, Works (1727/Hammond, ed.), 62.

[67] Robbins, Tracts, 216.

[68] Ibid., 215, 209-10.

[69] Ibid., 214: 'All innovations in the National worship, such as the adoption of new gods, and the institution of new forms and ceremonies in religion, were appointed by the authority of the Senate.'

[70] Ibid., 216.

[71] Ibid., 213.

[72] Ibid., 210-11.

[73] Ibid., 212.

[74] For a similar Harringtonian analysis, see Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, III, 42-60, of a 'landed hierarchy' swallowing the civil state in the ancient Egyptian and Hebrew states.

[75] Robbins, Tracts, 217.

[76] Ibid., 217-18.

[77] Ibid., 220-3.

[78] Montesquieu, Dissertation sur la politique des Romains dans la religion in Œuvres, III, 38; On Montesquieu, see R. Shackleton, Montesquieu (Oxford, 1960); L. Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Marx (1982); P. Kra, 'Religion in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes', SVEC 52 (1970); R. Oake, 'Montesquieu's Religious Ideas', JHI 14 (1953); G. L. Van Roosbroecke, Persian Letters before Montesquieu (1932).

[79] Montesquieu, Dissertation sur la politique des Romains dans la religion, 45. In his Reflections upon the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans, translated into English in 1734, the religious theme was again prominent. Montesquieu ascribed one of the major causes of Rome's decline to the corruption of the civil theology of the city. With the subversion of the ancient altars came the collapse of the Roman state. First Stoicism, then Christianity, undermined the coherence of the original establishment. The end of toleration and Justinian's attempt to establish a religious uniformity weakened the foundations of the state. Montesquieu argued that the Christian theology was incompatible with the requirements of virtue and justice. With the advance of monkish religion, the rage of disputation and <192> the hydra of controversy dissolved the unity of the state. This degenerate model was compared with the virtue of the Roman priesthood of the earlier empire; see Montesquieu, Reflections on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans, 95, 200, 221, 229, 237, 242-3, 247, 252.

[80] Note that Rousseau also made a distinction between private truth and public fable; he wrote in an early draft of the Social Contract: 'The social virtues of pure souls, which constitute the true cult that God desires from us, will never be those of the multitude. It will always believe in Gods as senseless as itself' (cited in N. Hampson, Will and Circumstance (1983), 34).

[81] The classic denigration of Toland is seen in L. Stephens, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 volumes, 1949). B. Worden in his Edmund Ludlow: A Voyce from the Watchtower (Camden Society, 1978) also treats Toland with distaste. More recent sympathetic studies have been executed by M. Jacob in her Radical Enlightenment, and by R. Sullivan in John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Harvard, 1982). The latter, in particular, is a detailed and useful work. Contemporaries, too, found it difficult to classify Toland's thought: see A. Boyer, The Political State of Great Britain, XXIII (1722), 340, 'as for religion … it is more easy to guess what he was not, than to tell what he was! 'Tis certain, he was neither Jew, nor Mahometan: but whether he was a Christian, a Deist, a Pantheist, an Hobbist, or a Spinozist, is the question?'

[82] See Toland, Collections, II, 325-6, on the 'divine volumes of Cicero', and Cicero as 'the most eminent philosopher, politician, and orator in the world'.

[83] See Toland, Pantheisticon (1751), citations from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, To the Reader, 43, 72; De Divinatione, To the Reader, 67, 71, 86-7; De Natura Deorum, 97-8; De Republica, 85; De Legibus, 102-8. Note (page 80) that prayers are offered to Socrates, Plato, Cato and Cicero. Other classical figures so honoured are Selomo, Thales, Anaximander, Xenophanes, Theano, Ocellus, Democratus, Parmenides, Dicaearchus, Confucius, Cleobulina, Pamphila and Hypatia. See also Toland, Adeisdaemon Sive Titus Livius a Superstitione Vindicatus … Annexae sunt ejusdem Origines Judicae (The Hague, 1709), passim. Note that Elisha Smith sent Thomas Hearne a manuscript copy of Toland's Adeisdaemon in 1707. See Hearne, Remarks and Collections, I, 319: note that Smith rather mistakenly thought Toland to be a 'man of Religion, & of ye faith of ye Church of Eng[lan]d'. Hearne was to complete and publish his own edition of Livy in 1708. See also Carabelli, Tolandiana, 140.

[84] Toland, Origines Judicae, 101-2.

[85] Note the potential ambivalence of the use and relevance of classical literature for scholarship and polemic. Thomas Hearne, the High Church academic who haunted Oxford, made similar proposals for a complete edition of Cicero's works. See Hearne, Remarks and Collections, II, 128-9, 186, 192, 207, 269-70.

[86] Toland, Pantheisticon, 57.

[87] This was for two reasons. First, the philosopher might be subject to the persecution of the populace if they were considered to be undermining their beliefs. Secondly, the philosopher ought not to devalue the persuasive potency of the public religion since this could become a source of civil instability.

[88] Toland, Pantheisticon, 65, 67-71.

[89] Ibid., iii, 65, 67, 72, 84, 86, 96-7.

[90] Ibid., 95, 102-6.

[91] Toland, Collections, II, 375. Worden, Edmund Ludlow, 40, argues that the Republicans of the 1690s were split into two camps, the Roman Whigs (centred on the Grecian Club and epitomized by Walter Moyle), and the Calves-head group. Toland is portrayed as straddling the two groups. It is apparent that Toland as a Ciceronian should be firmly placed in the Roman tendency, or perhaps that the distinction between Roman and Calves-head should be re-evaluated.

[92] Toland, Collections, II, 391.

[93] Toland, State-Anatomy, 71.

[94] G. Naudé, Political Considerations (1711), 156.

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