Deism What Is
Deism What Is
Deism What Is
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(Latin Deus, God).
The term used to denote certain doctrines apparent in a tendency of thought and
criticism that manifested itself principally in England towards the latter end of the
seventeenth century. The doctrines and tendency of deism were, however, by no
means entirely confined to England, nor to the seventy years or so during which most
of the deistical productions were given to the world; for a similar spirit of criticism
aimed at the nature and content of traditional religious beliefs, and the substitution for
them of a rationalistic naturalism has frequently appeared in the course
of religious thought. Thus there have been French and German deists as well as
English; while Pagan, Jewish, or Moslem deists might be found as well as Christian.
The deistical tendency passed through several more or less clearly defined phases. All
the forces possible were mustered against its advance. Parliaments took cognizance of
it. Some of the productions of the deists were publicly burnt. The bishops and clergy of
the Establishment were strenuous in resisting it. For every pamphlet or book that a
deist wrote, several "answers" were at once put before the public as antidotes. Bishops
addressed pastoral letters to their dioceses warning the faithful of the danger.
Woolston's "Moderator" provoked no less than five such pastorals from
the Bishop of London. All that was ecclesiastically official and respectable was ranged in
opposition to the movement, and the deists were held up to general detestation in the
strongest terms. When the critical principles and freethought spirit filtered down to the
middle classes and the masses, when such men as Woolston and Chubb put pen to
paper, a perfect storm of counter-criticism arose. As a matter of fact, not a
few educated and cultured men were really upon the side of a broad toleration in
matters of religion. The "wit and ridicule" by which the Earl of Shaftesbury would have
all tested meant, as Brown rightly notes, no more than urbanity and good nature. But
Shaftesbury himself would by no means allow that he was a deist, except in the sense
in which the term is interchangeable with theist; and Herbert of Cherbury, by far the
most cultured representative of the movement, is noted as having been the most
moderate and the least opposed of them all to the teachings of Christianity.
One phase through which deism may be said to have passed was that of a critical
examination of the first principles of religion. It asserted its right to perfect tolerance on
the part of all men. Freethought was the right of the individual; it was, indeed, but one
step in advance of the received principle of private judgment. Such representatives of
deism as Toland and Collins may be taken as typical of this stage. So far, while critical
and insisting on its rights to complete toleration, it need not be, though as a matter of
fact it undoubtedly was, hostile to religion.
A second phase was that in which it criticized the moral or ethical part of religious
teaching. The Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, has much to urge against
the doctrine of doctrine of future rewards and punishments as the sanction of the moral
law. Such an attitude is obviously incompatible with the accepted teaching of the
Churches. Upon this follows a critical examination of the writings of the Old and New
Testaments, with a particular regard to the verification of prophecy and to
the miraculous incidents therein recorded. Antony Collins performed the first part of
this task, while Woolston gave his attention principally to the latter, applying to
Scriptural records the principles put forward by Blount in his notes to the "Apollonius
Tyanæus". Lastly, there was the stage in which natural religion as such was directly
opposed to revealed religion. Tindal, in his "Christianity as old as the Creation",
reduces, or attempts to reduce, revelation to reason, making the Christian statement of
revelational truths either superfluous, in that it is contained in reason itself, or
positively harmful, in that it goes beyond or contradicts reason.
It is thus clear that, in the main, deism is no more than an application of critical
principles to religion. But in its positive aspect it is something more, for it offers as a
substitute for revealed truth that body of truths which can be built up by the unaided
efforts of natural reason. The term deism, however, has come in the course of time to
have a more specific meaning. It is taken to signify a peculiar
metaphysical doctrine supposed to have been maintained by all the deists. They are
thus grouped together roughly as members of a quasi-philosophical school, the chief
and distinguishing tenet of which is the relationship asserted to obtain between the
universe and God. God, in this somewhat inferential and constructive thesis, is held to
be the first cause of the world, and to be a personal God.
The verbal distinction between the two, which are originally convertible terms--deism,
of Latin origin, being a translation of the Greek theism--seems to have been introduced
into English literature by the deists themselves, in order to avoid the denomination of
naturalists by which they were commonly known. As naturalism was the epithet
generally given to the teaching of the followers of the Spinozistic philosophy, as well as
to the so-called atheists, deism seemed to its professors at once to furnish a disavowal
of principles and doctrines which they repudiated, and to mark off their own position
clearly from that of the theists. The word seems however, to have been first employed
in France and Italy about the middle of the sixteenth century, for it occurs in the epistle
dedicatory prefixed to the second volume of Viret's "Instruction Chrétienne" (1563),
where the reforming divine speaks of some persons who had called themselves by a
new name--deists. It was principally upon account of their methods of investigation and
their criticism of the traditional Protestant religious teaching that they had also come to
to be called rationalists, opposing, as has been pointed out, the findings of unaided
reason to the truths held on faith as having come from God through external revelation.
Whether it was by ignoring this altogether, or by attempting actively to refute it and
prove its worthlessness, rationalism was the obvious term of their procedure. And it
was also, in very much the same manner, by their claiming the freedom to discuss on
these lines the doctrines set forth in the Bible and taught by the Churches, that they
earned for themselves the no less commonly given title of "freethinkers."
There are notable distinctions and divergences among the English deists as to the whole
content of truth given by reason. The most important of these distinctions is
undoubtedly that by which they are classed as "mortal" and "immortal" deists; for,
while many conceded the philosophical doctrine of a future life, the rejection of future
rewards and punishments carried with it for some the denial of the immortality of
the human soul. The five articles laid down by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, however, with
their expansion into six (and the addition of a seventh) by Charles Blount, may be
taken--and especially the former--as the formal professions of deism. They contain the
following doctrines:
Blount, while he enlarged slightly upon each of these doctrines, broke one up into two
and added a seventh in which he teaches that God governs the world by His
providence.
This can hardly be accepted as a doctrine common to the deists; while, as has been
said, future rewards and punishments were not allowed by them all. In general they
rejected the miraculous element in Scripture and ecclesiastical tradition. They would not
admit that there was any one "peculiar people", such as the Jews or the Christians,
singled out for the reception of a truth-message, or chosen to be the recipients of any
special grace or supernatural gift of God. They denied the doctrine of the Trinity and
altogether refused to admit any mediatorial character in the person of Jesus
Christ. The atonement, the doctrine of the "imputed righteousness" of Christ--especially
popular with orthodoxy at the time--shared the fate of all Christological doctrines at
their hands. And above all things and upon every occasion--but with at least one
notable exception--they raised their voices against ecclesiastical authority. They never
tired of inveighing against priestcraft in every shape or form, find they went so far as to
assert that revealed religion was an imposture, an invention of the priestly caste to
subdue, and so the more easily govern and exploit, the ignorant.