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  • The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660-1760
  • Kenneth Sheppard
Ellenzweig, Sarah — The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660-1760. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

At a moment of intense debate over the nature of the Enlightenment, Sarah Ellenzweig's The Fringes of Belief comes as an added reminder of just how complex and contrapuntal intellectual history can be. By challenging the conventional secularization story that ties the advance of freethinking to the progress of radical and republican thought, Ellenzweig considers a string of literary figures, from Restoration to Augustan England, whose scepticism led them to make a series of conservative religious and political arguments. Focusing on John Wilmot, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, Ellenzweig emphasizes a shared debt to the freethinking rejection of Christian dogma that sharpened these authors' sense of the importance of traditional religion for the stability of political society. Despite an occasional oversimplification, this engaging study will be of interest to literary scholars, historians, and scholars of the Enlightenment more generally.

The first part of The Fringes of Belief moves beyond Rochester's and Behn's libertine critique of Christian sexual morality by exploring the significance of their more philosophical and theological reflections. In the "Satyre against Mankind" and "Addition," for example, Ellenzweig connects Rochester's identification of reason and enthusiasm as indistinguishable to his correspondence with the freethinker Charles Blount. Rochester's poetry embraces Blount's contention that traditional religion should be upheld prudently, rather than rationally. In criticizing the religious enthusiasm of the English civil war, Rochester and Blount were thus at one in lauding the political benefits of traditional religion as a pious fraud. Contextualizing Rochester in this way makes good historical sense, as several scholars have previously demonstrated. However, the contrast made between Anglican traditionalists and freethinkers, on the one hand, and rationalists like the Cambridge Platonists, on the other, is made too quickly. Aside [End Page 479] from a lack of much detailed support, this contrast remains inattentive to the role of reason within rationalist theology and the large swath of shared terrain between so-called religious "traditionalists" and "rationalists." In connecting Rochester to Behn, and both to freethinking, however, Ellenzweig is surely right to point out a mutual admiration of Epicurus and a shared unorthodox perspective on religion and nature. Through a study of Behn's translation of Fontenelle and her fictional work, including Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter, Ellenzweig reveals a significant debt to freethinking in Behn's conception of God, her understanding of nature, and her Spinozist interpretation of Scripture and miracles.

The second part of the book traces the influence of freethinking arguments through Swift and Pope to Voltaire and the French Enlightenment, beginning with Swift's criticism of religious enthusiasm and inspiration in the Tale of a Tub. Ellenzweig takes Swift's parody of the sartorialists and aeolists as naturalizing the causes of spiritual inspiration and divine essence indebted to the previous criticisms of Hobbes and Toland. The question becomes, then, whether or not Swift regarded Christianity itself as a tale of a tub, that is, a politically useful fraud. Turning to some of Swift's other work for support, Ellenzweig finds further evidence for this allegiance in the "Argument against Abolishing Christianity," "Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man," "Some Thoughts on Free-thinking," and the "Project for the Advancement of Religion." Likewise, when Pope's Essay on Man is read alongside letters exchanged between Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke, it becomes clear that Pope too owes a significant debt to English freethinking. Pope thought that natural religion contained all the truths of revealed religion and, in the Essay, questioned man's unique status within the Christian cosmos in heterodox terms. Ellenzweig also traces the controversy surrounding the Essay's appearance in French and Voltaire's reaction to it. While Voltaire had initially praised the Essay, he subsequently rejected its encomium "whatever is, is right" because it was inattentive to the conditions of evil and injustice. The political conservatism of English freethinking was, for Voltaire, incapable of providing the basis of a transformational Enlightenment project.

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