China in the Radical Enlightenment Context of the English Battle of the Books

Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment revives a significant intellectual connection between the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius (1618–1689) and the English statesman and essayist Sir William Temple (1628–1699). Their connection had several strands but centered on a shared, even credulous, enthusiasm for China, which Jesuit missionaries were introducing to Europe's intellectual class with accelerating detail and sophistication from the mid-seventeenth century on. Vossius was at the vanguard of those turning the reports from China into challenges to a range of orthodox positions, and Temple followed and in a sense outdistanced Vossius by arguing that the Chinese had realized utopia "without temples, idols, or priests." This essay shows that a group of self-consciously Newtonian Anglicans made the heterodoxy being advanced with evidence from China a central reason for initiating the battle with Temple, and that, regardless of the war's other, perhaps safer, fields, charges of religious heterodoxy remained near the center of the Newtonians' understanding of the Ancients v. Moderns Controversy, even beyond Jonathan Swift's satiric send-up.