Justin Champion

The pillars of priestcraft shaken : The Church of England and its enemies, 1660-1730

First published in 1992, this book examines the intellectual confrontation between priest and Freethinker from 1660 to 1730, and the origins of the early phase of the Enlightenment in England. Through an analysis of the practice of historical writing in the period, Champion maintains that historical argument was a central component for displaying defences of true religion. Taking religion, and specifically defences of the Church of England after 1660, as central to the politics of the period, the first two chapters of the book explore the varieties of clericalist histories, arguing that there were rival emphases upon regnum or sacerdos as the font of true religion. The remainder of the book examines how radical Freethinkers like John Toland or the third Earl of Shaftesbury set about attacking the corrupt priestcraft of established religion, but also importantly promoted a reforming civil theology.

Religion's Safe, with Priestcraft is the War: Augustan Anticlericalism and the Legacy of the English Revolution, 1660-1720

Describing the widespread attacks upon belief in heaven and hell, Francis Osborne, in his Advice to a son (1656), underscored the political consequences of such theological heterodoxy: there would be ‘no less diminution to the reverence of the civil magistrate than the profit of the priesthood’. 1 This theme of the implicit relationships between religion and politics, and of ideas and power will be the premise of this discussion. In recent years the historiography of the English revolution and its consequences has suffered some considerable neglect: revisionists and counter-revisionists, inverting the whiggish prolepticism of the Marxist and liberal historians, have focused in ever more refinement on the narratives of high politics or the structural defects of Stuart monarchy. Unseen causality rather than determined consequence has been the motor of historical interpretation. A number of historians, by taking a wider view, have attempted to redress this by claiming in (different ways) the continuity of seventeenth century political and religious structures.

John Toland: The Politics of Pantheism

RésuméCet article traite de la sincérité de la foi chrétienne publique de John Toland (1670–1722) et la confronte à ses croyances privées peu orthodoxes: le public et le privé dans la pensée de Toland sont séparés depuis trop longtemps. L’une des conséquences de cette reconstruction des idées religieuses de Toland sera de suggérer que ses opinions religieuses (publiques ou privées) étaient intimement liées à un programme politique. La plupart des études historiques le concernant se sont penchées principalement sur les aspects critiques de son attaque contre les intrigues sacerdotales du «papisme protestant» mais très peu de recherches ont été engagées sur l’idée de Toland comme «réformateur chrétien». En explorant la définition précise que Toland donne du panthéisme et en la reliant à ses doctrines néostoïciennes sur la politique de la cité, le présent article propose une révision de la réflexion actuelle sur la signification de la vie publique de la foi chrétienne dans la polémique de la libre pensée.SummaryThis paper will try to address the question of the sincerity of John Toland’s public Christianity and relate it to his private and unorthodox beliefs: the public and the private in Toland’s thought have been bifurcated for too long. One result of this reconstruction of Toland’s religious ideas will be to suggest that his religious opinions (whether public or private) were intimately related to a political agenda. Much historical attention has focused upon the critical aspects of his assault upon the priestcraft of “protestant popery” but very little interest has been paid to the idea of Toland as a “Christian reformer”. By exploring Toland’s precise definition of pantheism and relating it to his neo-stoic doctrines of civic politics the paper hopes to revise current thinking about the significance of public Christianity in the freethinking polemic.ZusammenfassungIn diesem Artikel geht es darum, wie aufrichtig John Tolands öffentliches Bekenntnis zum christlichen Glauben war, das seinen durchaus unorthodoxen privaten überzeugungen gegenübergestellt wird. Die Frage, was im Denken von Toland öffentlich bzw. privat war, ist lange vernachlässigt worden. Aus der Rekonstruktion von Tolands religiösen Vorstellungen ergibt sich unter anderem, daß seine religiösen Überzeugungen — sowohl die für die Öffentlichkeit bestimmten als auch die privaten — eng mit einem politischen Programm zusammenhingen. Bisher haben sich die meisten einschlägigen historischen Untersuchungen mit den kritischen Aspekten seines Angriffs gegen das Priestertum des „protestantischen Papismus” beschäftigt, während es nur wenige Untersuchungen über Toland als „Reformator des Christentums” gibt. Im vorliegenden Artikel wird Tolands präzise Definition des Pantheismus untersucht und mit seinen neo-stoischen staatspolitischen Lehren in Verbindung gebracht. Dadurch soll die bisherige Ansicht von der Bedeutung des öffentlich praktizierten Christentums für die Polemik der Freidenker revidiert werden.

Some Forms of Religious Liberty: Political Thinking, Ecclesiology and Religious Freedom in Early Modern England

What did it mean to be a free person in early modern England? Was this freedom a political, religious or moral state? The distinctive answers to this simple question were shaped by context and audience: Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s answer (in the 1540s) may have contradicted that of James II (in the 1680s); republican poet John Milton’s would have been different from that of eighteenth-century high church priest Francis Atterbury, and Thomas Hobbes’s response contradictory to that of Archbishop William Laud.1 One thing is unmistakable, however, and almost without exception: any answer would have not been able to avoid taking into consideration concepts of both civil and religious liberty. These accounts might have included defences of the freedom of the true Christian from oppression by the Antichrist, or the liberty of the ‘conscience’ from persecution by the ungodly, or demands to express a lively faith and true sanctification in acts of free Christian love. Sometimes these languages of religious freedom (exempted from interference by Roman Catholic, Protestant, or sectarian agencies) sat comfortably alongside articulations of civil liberties (the freedoms of citizens from illegal taxation or from prerogative interference in the rule of law). The history of the tensions between these sometimes converging and (more often) conflictual languages was driven by the evolving relationships between subject and state, between churchmen and laity, and between bishop and king over the allocation of correct jurisdictional forms of power and authority.

‘Socinianism Truly Stated’: John Toland, Jean Leclerc and the Eighteenth-Century Reception of Grotius’s De Veritate

This paper investigates the later seventeenth reception of Grotius De Veritate, contextualising the presentation of editions with the various theological attempts to identify and defend a ‘reasonable’ religion. In particular it focuses on the intellectual relationships between the projects for a ‘non-mysterious’ Christianity advanced by John Toland, and the more sincere ambitions of the most learned editor of Grotius in the eighteenth century, Jean Leclerc. The major themes context the theological arguments and reception to changing conceptions of the power and function of the established Church.

‘It hath framed the mindes of a thousand Gentlemen’: Some Recent Works on Leviathan

Writing in 1681, Henry Hallywell, friend of Cambridge Platonist Henry More, admirer of Cudworth, and editor of the works of George Rust, dismissed writers like Hobbes (whose hostility to ‘Immaterial Substances’ destroyed beliefs in the existence of devils, evil Spirits, ghosts, apparitions and witches) for corroding the authority of public religion. Deploying ridicule, ‘loud laughter or a supercilious look’, Hobbist wits dismissed the incorporeal world as ‘the delusions of a distempered Imagination, and owed all their Being and Reality to the dreams and fancies of melancholick persons’. To suggest that such beliefs existed only ‘in mens Brains and Imaginations, than anywhere else in the Universe’ was to cast contempt on the scriptures and ‘to make Religion a meer cheat and delusion’. As these three new books suggest in their different ways, Hobbes, of course, had attempted to suggest that the ‘kingdom of darkness’ was not only delusional, but was more significantly the political instrument of a corrupt church. The Cambridge companion to Leviathan edited by Patricia

Apocrypha Canon and Criticism from Samuel Fisher to John Toland, 1650-1718

Perusing the manuscript catalogue of Stillingfleet’s library held in Marsh’s library one thing becomes immediately apparent: that is the proliferation of Biblical material of all varieties. Whether in folio, octavo or otherwise Stillingfleet owned at least seventy-two variant editions of Scriptural texts. Among this collection he owned texts as varied in time and place of publication as the famous Complutensian edition, Brian Walton’s polyglot and more obscure versions such as the Anglo-Saxon translation published at Dordrecht in 1665 or the Bible in Irish (1690). As well as owning translations of the Bible in Hebrew, Chaldaic, Greek, French, Latin and many others, Stillingfleet also possessed a full compliment of commentaries and criticism from the early Church fathers to modern critics such as Father Simon, Jean LeClerc and John Locke. To say that Scripture and biblical studies formed the basis of Stillingfleet’s collection might not be an overstatement.1