Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform (review)

The second part of a two-volume set, this continues the reevaluation of English deism begun by Mr. Hudson in The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment (also 2009). The ambitious books complement the work of Justin Champion, providing a new interpretation of seventeenth-and (here) eighteenth-century deist texts "in the context of Protestant Enlightenment in England, and in terms of the wider constraints of Early Enlightenment." The contextualization of deism is based on an amalgamation of J. G. A. Pocock's and Jonathan Israel's discussions of Enlightenment thought: the movement is seen as both pluralist (in terms of a complex development from Early to High Enlightenment) and structurally unified, a distinction that is also important for Mr. Hudson's interpretation of deism, the "long-term structural changes" of which are the real subject of the two books.

Fundamental to Enlightenment and Modernity is its author's awareness of the deist writers' multiple personae and their strategies to give a variety of meanings to a variety of audiences. It is one of the great strengths of the book that it reveals the tension between the popular slogan of "free-thinking" ("The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence" as Anthony Collins puts it in his Discourse of Free-Thinking) and the self-censorship as well as strategies of evasion numerous Deists were practicing. On the basis of his painstakingly researched analyses of individual writers—for example Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and Thomas Chubb—Mr. Hudson concludes that their opposition to Christianity was less radical than most scholars think: "none of them had a crisis of faith of the sort regularly encountered in England in the nineteenth century." As part of Protestant Enlightenment, these men were not free from religious prejudice.

It was the polymorphous character of the deist writers—in part a necessity in times when publishing heterodox views could still make a social outcast of the author—which, as early as 1706, led Samuel Clarke to assert in his Boyle-lecture A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion "That there is now no consistent Scheme of Deism in the World." Shaftesbury (who, along with Bolingbroke, is excluded by Mr. Hudson from the deist camp, albeit for the wrong reasons) is quoted as similarly wondering in the early 1700s, "What is that which at present they call Deism." Considering that we now look back on a long tradition of thought, not to mention scholarship, on deism and that, for example, the rigid sense it had for Sir Leslie Stephens has been well and truly shaken in the publications of recent years, we can hardly deny that a revisionist approach to the subject is more than justified. However, Mr. Hudson's findings do little to alleviate any anxiety about a workable definition, and deliberately so. We learn that the deists were "constellationally related writers whose historical significance depends on contextually related publications," a description that, at first sight, begs the question. But this is exactly Mr. Hudson's point: he explicitly does not attempt to pick out a religious identity where there is none, but tries to demonstrate that there are "multiple deisms," that those writers who are usually called deists functioned in different ways as "catalysts of Enlightenment."

What might sound like a muddled mass of heterogeneous ideas does, however, eventually display a familiar pattern. The list of authors investigated in Enlightenment and Modernity is conventional, as is the list of characteristics meant to identify them as deists: they are shown to be biased against Scripture, unequivocal in their criticism of supernatural revelation, champions both of different brands of rationalism and of natural religion. It is here that the reader begins to question whether such an interpretation of deism really is "revisionist," because similar classifications have in...