Diego Lucci

Ante-Nicene authority and the Trinity in seventeenth-century England

ABSTRACT This article investigates the growth and decline of the use of the ante-Nicene Fathers in relation to Trinitarian issues in seventeenth-century Anglican apologetics. Anglican apologists referred to the writings of the ante-Nicene Fathers as the earliest and most reliable testimonies of Christianity contra what they perceived as Popish, Puritan, and Socinian corruptions of the true religion. On the other hand, Catholic, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian polemicists stigmatized the incompatibility of the ante-Nicenes’ writings with the Trinitarian dogma formulated at Nicaea and elaborated by the post-Nicene Fathers. In response, several Church of England divines attempted to defend their engagement with the ante-Nicene Fathers from the criticisms of Catholic, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian polemicists, which exposed their use of the ante-Nicenes in Trinitarian matters to the charge of priestcraft. The historical narratives employed by Anglican apologists ultimately proved ineffective, and even provided various heterodox thinkers, such as John Toland, with additional arguments against the Trinitarian dogma.

The Catholic Enlightenment: the forgotten history of a global movement

The last two decades have witnessed a rediscovery and reassessment of the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion in historiography on the Age of Enlightenment. Along with J. G. A. Poco...

Deism, freethinking and toleration in Enlightenment England

ABSTRACT Focusing on John Toland, Anthony Collins and Matthew Tindal, this article argues that the English deists’ tolerationist ideas played a significant role in their religious thinking, which consisted of their ‘religious thoughts’ and their ‘thoughts about religion’. As regards their ‘religious thoughts’, those deists regarded rationality as the highest state of human existence, because only the proper use of reason could lead humanity to true morality, happiness and (at least in Tindal’s case) eternal salvation. Thus, they considered toleration, entailing freedom of conscience, thought and expression, as a necessary means to enable humankind to pursue ‘true religion’, namely rationality. As to their ‘thoughts about religion’, they appropriated and rethought the foundational sources and tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition (and, in Toland’s case, of Islam as well) for a twofold purpose: they attempted to debunk the divine right system of power, which opposed toleration and was widely considered to be based on Christian texts and principles; moreover, they aimed at assimilating the original versions of the three major Abrahamic religions, which in their opinion taught morality and toleration, into their own deistic worldviews, which they tried to prove truer and historically more reliable than the positive religions of their time.

God does not act arbitrarily, or interpose unnecessarily:” providential deism and the denial of miracles in Wollaston, Tindal, Chubb, and Morgan”

The philosophical debate on miracles in Enlightenment England shows the composite and evolutionary character of the English Enlightenment and, more generally, of the Enlightenments relation to rel...

Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning

Occasionalism: Causation Among the Cartesians, in particular about the vast conceptual ground Nadler covers. The quality of Nadler’s scholarship is commendable. Not only does Nadler’s familiarity with early modern scholarship recommend his work; so too does his methodology which deftly balances the nuance required of a historian of philosophy with the demands of philosophical argumentation that are required of a philosopher. Students and scholars alike would benefit from reading Nadler’s compendium for the insights it offers into our discipline. This is to distract from the obvious point which is that Occasionalism: Causation Among the Cartesians is an important and excellent resource for those interested in causation in the early modern period.

An Eighteenth-Century Skeptical Attack on Rational Theology and Positive Religion: ‘Christianity Not Founded on Argument’ by Henry Dodwell the Younger

In the early 1740s, one book caused turmoil and debate among the English cultural elites of the time. Entitled Christianity Not Founded on Argument, it was attributed to Henry Dodwell the Younger (1706–1784). This book went through four editions between 1741 and 1746, and the controversy that followed its publication involved some of the major figures of English religious thought in the mid-eighteenth century. Dodwell purposely led a skeptical attack on any sort of rational theology, including deistic doctrines of natural religion, which identified ‘true’ religion with the outcomes of unprejudiced, rational inquiry, and Boylean and Newtonian physico-theologies, which aimed at proving God’s existence and the veracity of Christian revelation by combining physico-mathematical rationality with traditional theological concepts. In fact, Dodwell called attention to the limits and inadequacies of human reason and, hence, to the impossibility of achieving religious truth by either reflecting on human nature and morality (as most deists used to do) or investigating the physical world (as several freethinkers, most prominently the deist and pantheist John Toland, and such physico-theologians as Boyle, Newton and their followers did). On the other hand, Dodwell did not openly reject Christianity and, instead, he claimed to be a defender of fideism. However, his observations on the Scriptures, religious education and the de jure divino (divine right) institutions of the Church and the Christian state were extremely ambiguous. For this reason, his book received a variety of reactions in the more than twenty replies that followed its publication. Some commentators, particularly Methodists, considered Dodwell to be in earnest when advancing the thesis that only grace, not reason, can inspire true faith. Others, including the Methodist leader John Wesley and the Nonconformist theologian Philip Doddridge, regarded him as an enemy not only of rational theology, but also of Christian revelation and any sort of religious institution. The fact that Christianity Not Founded on Argument was the only book attributed to Dodwell, and the fact that its author did not intervene directly in the debate with defenses