Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (review)

Mortimer’s book is concerned with the impact of Socinian theology on seventeenth-century England, especially during the 1640s and 1650s. Mortimer’s introduction, which offers a useful discussion of Socinianism, and the following chapter, which examines the challenge that the ideas of Faustus Socinus and his acolytes posed to European Christianity, demonstrate the distinctiveness of Mortimer’s approach to her subject. Whereas other scholars often treat Socinianism only as an anti-Trinitarian heresy, Mortimer presents Socinianism as a theology that posed important questions about the relationship between nature, religion, and free will. In contrast to Skinner and Tuck, who argued that theories of natural rights had essentially secular roots, Mortimer contends that Socinianism provided an important theological foundation to the language of natural law.¹ Socinians separated natural law from religion in order to “preserve space for individual moral responsibility and human freedom” (10): Christianity was not ingrained in human nature but a religion that men chose of their own volition.

Particularly important for such Royalist writers in the 1640s as Dudley Digges and Henry Hammond, who were eager to counter Parliamentarian resistance theories grounded on the natural right of selfdefense, was the way in which Socinians saw these rights as being abrogated, or at least severely limited, in Christian societies. In this regard, Mortimer brings to the discussion some surprising “Socinians,” not just such notorious civil-war–era anti-Trinitarians as John Biddle and Paul Best (discussed in Chapter 6) but also such renowned Anglican divines as Hammond and Jeremy Taylor. Mortimer demonstrates that, for Hammond in particular, a selective reading of Socinian works, especially those of Socinus’ follower Johannes Volkelius, helped to challenge the Long Parliament’s war against the king and its later attack upon the Church of England. Using Socinian sources, Hammond argued that the church and its bishops comprised a Christian institution that could not be fundamentally altered by the civil magistrate, allowing him to counter Erastian arguments from both Royalists and Parliamentarians during the late 1640s for the abandonment of episcopacy.

Mortimer’s approach to Socinianism derives from a traditional history-of-ideas perspective, well-grounded in the historical context. Although the scholarship on display is impressive, her approach poses a significant problem, at least as it applies to a phenomenon like Socinianism. The fact that this theology was, from its very beginning, deeply controversial—attacked as heretical by both Protestant and Catholic writers—poses two difficulties for Mortimer’s methodology: First, because those who may have been influenced by Socinian ideas were at pains to deny it (Mortimer quotes Hammond himself denouncing Socinians as “men to whom the late Divinity of these evil times [the 1640s] oweth so extremely much” [135]), Mortimer cannot easily demonstrate the direct influence of Socinian ideas, as opposed to describing positions that appear analogous to Socinian ones. Second, because the label “Socinian” was employed, as Mortimer acknowledges, as a “polemical weapon” (208), it was fixed on a variety of individuals—some of them, such as Hammond, who had read Socinian works, and others, such as the Puritan minister Anthony Wotton, who had not.

Mortimer’s work might have been strengthened had she had explored these polemical strategies further, as Ann Hughes recently did in Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (New York, 2004) with regard to accusations of heresy in the 1640s. As Mortimer demonstrates, in the 1630s, Socinianism became a useful discursive tool for churchmen to deploy, fostering Lutheran and Calvinist cooperation by creating a heretical threat that they could unite to oppose. An exploration of similar strategies in later chapters might have enriched Mortimer’s discussion of Socinianism overall. This criticism aside, Mortimer’s study remains a valuable work, shedding light on an underexplored theology and demonstrating its importance to seventeenth-century English political and religious discourse.