Matthew Kadane. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Editor: Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Volume 2. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005.
Deism holds more meanings than one word should be asked to bear. Generally, to the point of almost being meaningless, it refers to the notion that reason plays an important role in determining religious knowledge. By this definition the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, Cicero, Lucretius, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad all qualify to varying degrees as Deists. With more historical precision the term embraces the religious philosophy of the Enlightenment. But there is a wide range of meanings here too. To religious traditionalists, Deists were effectively atheists. To atheists and materialists, Deism represented a half-realized understanding of the universe. For those who would not have balked had the word been applied to them—hardly anyone in the eighteenth century self-identifies as a “Deist”—it signified belief in a God who could be known by naturally given reason rather than solely by revelation.
But even among this last group the word contained many antinomies. Some Deists upheld the authority of the church; others aggressively criticized customary religious thought and practice. Some used reason to develop more rigorous methods of biblical criticism; others argued that rather than texts, reason in nature offers the proper route to religious truth. Almost all Deists denied God’s providence; but a few retained the vestiges of providentialism by virtue of their reasoned belief that God maintained an active, judging presence in the universe. Deism held positive meaning both for moderate Enlightenment figures and those who belong more properly in what the historian Margaret Jacob twenty years ago called the “Radical Enlightenment”; it held negative meanings for traditionalists as well as nonbelievers. The object of this entry will therefore be to explain this word’s various meanings more fully by looking closely at how and in whose hands those meanings changed over time.
Early History
The word déiste carried a negative valence in its first appearance in the Lausanne reformer Pierre Viret’s (1511-1571) Instruction chrestienne (1564). Viret recognized a difference between Deism and atheism, if only in seeing the latter as the superlative of the former, but by déiste he was likely referring to a group of Lyonnaise anti-Trinitarians rather than those who would later be identified by their rejection of Christian revelation. The word’s emergence in the mid-sixteenth century was, whatever its precise referent, not accidental. Much like early modern skepticism, Deistic ideas were fueled by four major changes associated with the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the ongoing recovery of works from antiquity; European encounters with non-European cultures; the confessional conflicts, both conceptual and material, that followed the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; and the spread of experimental science. All had the effect of destabilizing certainties and encouraging some men and women to recover fundamental truths from doubt. And all contributed to the context in which cultural conservatives hurled “Deist” as a term of abuse in their various attempts to confute heterodox ideas and restore unsettled epistemological foundations.
The effects of these four destabilizing changes shaped the earliest expression of arguments that prefigure Enlightenment Deism, which were published in De veritate (1624) by the English ambassador to France, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). Herbert argued that “common notions” would ultimately lead men and women of any religious upbringing to worship God piously, avoid sin, and intuit divine justice. Reason given to us by nature, in other words, could rescue belief from skepticism. The argument seemed flimsy to René Descartes (1596-1650) and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), much as in a later form it would strike Hume as entirely empty. But the notion that we all have the capacity to understand religious truth regardless of culture and tradition became a compelling central assumption of later Deists.
British Deism
The high point of Deism began in Britain in the wake of the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. The conflicts of the 1640s and the republican experiment of the 1650s opened up a social and cultural space in which the nature of government, God, gender, and virtually every other worthwhile topic under the sun were called into question. Countless tracts printed after church and state censorship collapsed in the early 1640s assailed religious authority and gave primacy over religion to reason. When this period of kingless rule ended in 1660 with the return of Charles II (1630-1685), the religious experimentalism and enthusiasm of the 1640s and 1650s came to be associated by many with social and political instability. But Deistic ideas were nevertheless out of the bag. The splintering that would later be evident within the ranks of Deistic thinkers reflects this ambivalence about the midcentury crisis and its larger meaning. On the one hand, moderate Deists, who borrowed conservatively from the various radicalisms of the 1640s and 1650s, sought to maintain a balance between reason and religion in order to make religion less intense, more sociable, and more conducive to social and political stability. On the other hand, radical Deists with more undiluted intellectual links to the midcentury’s most extreme ideas—atheism and materialism—were less bothered by the religious consequences of the rigorous application of reason to revelation.
The paragons of moderate Deistic arguments were the Enlightenment’s two discursive founders: Isaac Newton (1642-1727), born the year civil war broke out, and John Locke (1632-1704), the intellectual product of the nexus of puritan selfhood, parliamentary government, and experimental science. Newton ascribed supreme importance to his investigations into natural phenomena because they brought him closer to the God who set the universe in motion; how active God was in his creation would continue to be a divisive issue for Newtonians. Locke captured in the title of his The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) his basic idea that rational interpretations of our perceptions can lead to the fundamental truths expressed in the Bible. Those same changes we noted with respect to skepticism were also at work here. Both men embraced experimental science and had a stake in securing the stability of the nation after the revolutions of 1688 to 1691, which, like the conflict four decades earlier, also stemmed from religious divisions. And if the influence of ancient ideas was showing early signs of waning, Locke was intensely interested in cultural variation, which led him to seek basic truths about the human mind that held in varied cultural conditions.
Almost as soon as Newton and Locke defined their moderate brand of Deism, radicals began to apply reason to religion more strenuously. A “Deist controversy” in printed tracts and sermonic literature erupted with the publication of Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) by the Irish-born Protestant convert and likely son of a Catholic priest, John Toland (1670-1722). His work appeared not accidentally a year after censorship became a nonissue after the lapsing of the Licensing Act of 1695. Toland drew from radical thinkers such as Spinoza, Gerrard Winstanley, Epicurus, and Giordano Bruno (none of whom should be classified as a Deist), but he was also the logically extreme product of Newton and Locke. Newton and Locke had argued that by reason we come to a closer understanding of the fundamental truths of Christianity; Toland deduced that if a religion’s reasonableness could not be established, one had license to explore better—more reasonable—religious or even nonreligious options.
More than anyone, Toland gave Deism a deconstructive edge. He questioned the authenticity of the New Testament and argued that the Jews were originally Egyptians, while also controverting Britain’s legally institutionalized anti-Semitism. Toland himself became, by his own neologism, a “pantheist,” but his ideas were picked up by others who shared his Whig politics, animosity for priestcraft, and gifts for persuasive writing. Another son of a cleric, Matthew Tindal, undercut biblical authority when he wrote that “it’s an odd jumble to prove the truth of a book by the truth of the doctrines it contains, and at the same time conclude those doctrines to be true because contained in that book” (p. 49). William Wollaston used Lockean logic to solve the conundrum of whether or not God can create a mountain he cannot destroy—”God cannot be unjust or unreasonable in any one instance”—while another Lockean, Anthony Collins (1676-1729), reasoned that Christianity was a mere sect, a self-fulfilling Old Testament prophecy that the passage of time gave global prominence (Wollaston, p. 205). Even the pious skeptic Thomas Woolston claimed in the spirit of radical Deism that the supposed miracles of Jesus were, if actually anything other than pure fiction, the products of wizardry rather than divinity.
These authors and utterances did not go unchecked or un-challenged. The moderate Deists who more closely followed Newton’s and Locke’s intentions, particularly the late-Stuart “latitudinarians” Richard Bentley (1662-1742), Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761), John Tillotson (1630-1694), and Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), upheld religious belief through a combination of rationality (directed against religious enthusiasm more than the Bible), faith, and reliance on textual authority. High-and low-church traditionalists alike more critically saw Deism as one of many heterodox ideas that threatened the fundamental meaning of the church, if not religion itself, while from a very different point of view the diehard skeptic David Hume (1711-1776) viewed it as a “license of fancy and hypothesis” in a realm of philosophical thinking he thought should be devoid of religious belief (1779, 94).
Around the time the minister John Leland (1691-1766) published his four-volume Principal Deistical Writers that Have Appeared in England in the Last and Present Century (1754-1756), an antagonistic work that nevertheless largely determined the canon of Deists, the controversy had cooled—but not before Deism “cross-examined religion naturalistically, socially and psychologically” (Porter, p. 122). “If Mankind had never Sinn’d, Reason would always have been obeyed, there would have been no Struggle for Dominion, and Brutal Power would not have prevail’d,” wrote the protofeminist Mary Astell (1666-1731), longing for the world’s return to a more reasonable state (Astell, p. 97). Edmund Burke may have rhetorically asked, Who reads Toland, Tindal, Collins, and so on? But William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated (1724) sold 10,000 copies while radicalizing the already Deistic religious outlook of the printer who set the type for its third edition, Benjamin Franklin. Equally important, Deism became, via Newton, Locke, and their followers, the de facto religion of science, which encouraged the rationalization of religion among scientific practitioners in the British Isles, North America, and Europe’s learned academies.
Deism in Europe
British Deists widely and intensively read European authors such as Spinoza, Balthasar Bekker, Descartes, Gassendi, Pierre Bayle, Faustus Socinius, and Bruno. European Deists of the next generation in turn bought clandestine French translations of British Deistic works that circulated among European texts in the underground book trade. Many of those trade networks originated in the liberal and tolerant Dutch Republic, a refuge for freethinkers that, along with Britain, forged the early Enlightenment. Journals like De Haegse Mercurius (1697-1698) defended Toland’s Deism in the late seventeenth century; French-language presses, safe from the French censors, spread Newtonian science and theology to readers all over Europe; and later in the century Masonic lodges and other voluntary organizations disseminated Deistic thinking throughout civil society. The epitome of Dutch (radical) Deism was the Traité des trois imposteurs (1719; The Treatise of the Three Impostors), authored, in the international language of the time, most likely by the lawyer Jan Vroese. On the basis of textual criticism, inquiry into first causes inspired by scientific thinking, and attention to cultural variety across the globe, the Traité made the case that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were ordinary men who exploited common ignorance in order to legitimate their prophecies: “Christianity like all other Religions is no more than a crudely woven imposture, whose success & progress would astonish even its inventors if they came back to the world” (quoted in Jacob, 2001, p. 109).
Less iconoclastically, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778), the agent and nonpareil of the Anglomania that swept Europe in the 1730s and 1740s, virtually propagandized moderate British Deism as he strove to find the laws governing nature as well as God, the unity behind cultural variety, the right balance between enthusiasm and unbelief, and the compelling evidence that a God existed who could terrify the high and mighty. Deism via Voltaire in turn spread as far as Poland by way of the poetry of the satirist Bishop Ignacy Krasicki and the libertine Stanislaw Trembecki. Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717-1783) assimilated British Deism in their Encyclopédie (1751-1772) and made an impression—about more than just Deism—on Russia’s Catherine II. Even Rousseau’s idiosyncratic and deeply influential deification of nature is unthinkable without Lockean Deism, notwithstanding Rousseau’s cynicism about what society does to nature in the long term.
More radical French Deism also had influences more diverse than Newton and Locke. Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) came slowly to a Deistic position mainly by way of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). The Marquis d’Argens (1703-1771) drew from Spinoza, as did the Huguenot champion of religious toleration, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706). The shadowy, anti-Voltairean Themisuel de Saint-Hyacinthe (1684-1746) read Spinoza but lived in religious exile in the Dutch Republic amid Anglophiles such as Albert-Henri de Sallengre, a Dutch citizen of Huguenot origins with English connections through whom Saint-Hyacinthe would have come to know both British Deism and science. It is inaccurate to label the idiosyncratic Spinoza a “Deist” according to contemporary conceptions of the word. The same holds true for the atheist-atomists Epicurus and his Roman mouthpiece Lucretius. But Spinozist and Epicurean writings nevertheless simmered along with British Deism in a stew of heterodox ideas that European free-thinkers consumed with various appetites that were themselves determined by a complex mix of personality, cultural dispositions, and social and political conditions.
Deistic ideas also pervaded the German Enlightenment. The Prussian “philosopher-king” Frederick II may have ultimately been a disappointment to Voltaire, but he nonetheless facilitated the spread of heterodox religious thinking by making the Berlin Academy of Sciences an entrepôt for French, British, and Dutch thought as well as the homegrown Deistic ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754). What Kant would later call onto-, cosmo-, and physicotheology were all indebted to the writings of Deists, even if later “neologians”—rational theologians who upheld the possibility of truth in revelation—deliberately distanced themselves from radical Deism. But that should not obscure the fact that later eighteenth-century theologians such as Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791) were as unrelenting in their textual criticism of the Bible as Woolston and others had been decades earlier.
In the more radical tradition, Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s posthumously published Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (1774-1777; Apology or Defense of the Rational Worshipers of God) dispelled revelation as unreliable, miracles and mystery as fictional, and the New Testament as fraudulent. But like the British Deists by whom he was influenced, he also made as strong a case against atheism. Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781), who among other things published Reimarus’s Apologie, took the small step from Deism to religious toleration in his dramatic poem Nathan der Weise (1779; Nathan the Wise), which gave equal treatment to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But the case was made more forcefully by the inspiration for Lessing’s Nathan, the German-Jewish freethinker Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), who, instead of arguing for the dissolution of the distinctions among the Mosaic religions, made the case that all were equal but still meaningful and should be accommodated by an enlightened state. Meanwhile, the primacy of reason over revelation was underscored by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant started out maintaining the neologian position on revelation, but in later life he argued that the Bible should be judged rather than judge, that churches had value only insofar as their ends accorded with a rationally derived course for human progress, and that claims to have experienced divine revelation could never be admitted by reasonable people.
The Legacy of Deism
What also makes Deism the unofficial religious philosophy of the Enlightenment is its expiration at the close of the eighteenth century as the French Revolution turned from the apparent culmination of Deism to reaction against heterodoxy. In fact the word and concept were already showing signs of waning among British and European elites by the time the century had reached its fourth quarter. Hume wrote unsparingly in his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) that belief cannot in any way be rationally defended. Even that stark judgment of the French materialists that matter in motion in a godless universe was a sufficient foundational principle for both science and morality became less repulsive to many philosophers and scientists.
We know less about Deism as a popularly held belief. Bookstore inventories and detailed wills reveal that Deistic ideas could penetrate all levels of European and North American society. There were no Deists churches—although Deism was briefly institutionalized in revolutionary France—and therefore we have no attendance sheets on which we can count rank-and-file adherents; but many of the ideas associated with Deism also made their way into popular forms of religious thought and practice. Eighteenth-century British dissenters academies—schools for non-Anglicans—encouraged the spread of heterodox ideas alongside critical thinking and prominently featured Newton and Locke in their curricula. John Jebb’s church in late-eighteenth-century London was Deist in all but name. Some religious denominations, such as Presbyterianism, became Unitarian under the pressures of, among other things, the biblical criticism pioneered by Deists. But Deism in Britain, North America, and Germany was also targeted as early as the mid-1700s on the popular level alongside other forms of intellectualized religion by much more numerous Methodists, traditionalist Anglicans, and Pietists, who stressed God’s active role in our earthly lives.
In America a prominent handful of elites in the later 1700s identified themselves as Deists. Benjamin Franklin proudly and publicly recollected reading the Boyle lectures as a youth, in which “the arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutation” (p. 63). Thomas Jefferson put Deism into practice when he took a cue from Tindal and wrote the separation of church and state into the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty (1786), which sounded an echo the next year in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. If the final lines of the Declaration of Independence invoke an un-Deistic “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” in that document’s more memorable opening paragraph get to the core—in a telling sequence—of a definition of Deism. But the late embrace of these ideas in America did not forestall their antagonistic reception. The British-born American patriot Thomas Paine was the target of deep animosity when in The Age of Reason (1794-1795) he trivialized the personal experience of divine revelation. As early nineteenth-century America witnessed a return to traditional Christianity, even onetime Deists like George Tucker of Virginia, in contrast to Jefferson, came to view religion as a form of social control that the state should subsidize.
Since Deism has no defining textual or customary point of reference, its legacy is as difficult to follow with precision as its meaning. Its most direct descendent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may be the scholarly study of religion, but here the parentage is mixed. F. Max Mueller (1823-1900) and E. B. Tylor (1832-1917), for example, both owe their scientization of religious studies to the rationalism of the atheistic Hume and Spinoza as much as to Newton and Locke. Its legacy is more widely dispersed in modern variants of all three Mosaic religions—Reformed Judaism, Unitarianism, and the Baha’i faith, for example—as well as in hybrid forms of intellectualized religiosity that borrow more consciously from Buddha and Confucius than from Tindal and Toland. One recent study has even connected Deism to the rise of Philippine nationalism by way of José Protasio Rizal’s Enlightenment education at the University of Madrid in the 1880s and later attacks on the Catholic Church.
Deism’s greatest legacy may be the principle of religious toleration written into the constitutions of the world’s democracies. A survey of the early-twenty-first-century political landscape might suggest a disjunction between constitutional theory and practice. But that makes these ideas and their legacy more interesting than they have been since before the beginning of the nineteenth century, as religious conflict and toleration have become as culturally significant as they were during the destructive confessional struggles that defined early modern Europe.