Abstract
The Tale and Battel (1704) appeared at a time when Low Church Anglicans appropriated the discoveries and theories of Newtonian natural philosophy in their defences of Christianity. These ‘physico-theological’ writings were associated with, but not exclusive to, the lectures established through the will of Robert Boyle (1691). Designed to prove ‘the Christian Religion, against notorious Infidels’, these sermons reflect fears of an atheistical materialism promulgated by Thomas Hobbes and ‘libertine’ followers of Epicurus and Lucretius, whose systems explained the workings of the universe through matter and motion alone.1 The first Boyle lectures were delivered from the pulpit of St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1692 by Richard Bentley, then chaplain to the Bishop of Worcester (Edward Stillingfleet), and soon-to-be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Notes
Henry Guerlac and M. C. Jacob, ‘Bentley, Newton, and Providence: The Boyle Lectures Once More’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 30 (1969), 307–18 (pp. 312, 317–18). The classic account of the Boyle lectures is Jacob’s The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976).
‘Letter IV: To Mr. Bentley, at the Palace at Worcester, from Isaac Newton, Cambridge, February 11, 1693’, in The Works of Richard Bentley, ed. Alexander Dyce, 3 vols (London: MacPherson, 1836–38; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1971), III, 215. See John Henry, ‘“Pray Do Not Ascribe that Notion to Me”: God and Newton’s Gravity’, in The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time, eds James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), pp. 123–47,
and Rome Harré, ‘Knowledge’, in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, eds G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 11–54 (esp. pp. 25–27).
See John Gascoigne, ‘From Bentley to the Victorians: The Rise and Fall of British Newtonian Natural Theology’, Science in Context, 2 (1988), 219–56 (p. 223).
See esp. Ehrenpreis, I, 117, and Roger D. Lund, ‘Strange Complicities: Atheism and Conspiracy in A Tale of a Tub’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 13: 3 (November 1989), 34–58;
repr. in British Literature 1640–1789: A Critical Reader, ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 142–68.
Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of ‘A Tale of a Tub’ (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 23 and n., 145–46.
See John F. Tinkler, ‘The Splitting of Humanism: Bentley, Swift, and the English Battle of the Books’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (1988), 453–72,
and Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘“He Will Kill Me Over and Over Again”: Intellectual Contexts of the Battle of the Books’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (München: Fink, 2003), pp. 225–48 (pp. 245–46). 9. See Tale, p. xxxvi.
For A. H. De-Quehen, the ‘Micro-Coat’ of the sartorists parodies Bentley’s suggestion that men should look for the existence of God ‘within themselves’ (‘Lucretius and Swift’s Tale of a Tub’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 63 [1993/1994], 287–307 [pp. 307n44, 299]; Bentley, Works, III, 121). The Neoplatonic idea of ‘Man as a Microcosm or a Little World’, perhaps encountered via Henry More, seems a more obvious echo. See Conjectura Cabbalistica (London, 1653), facs. reprt in Henry More: Major Philosophical Works, ed. G. A. J. Rogers, 9 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), II, 53, and also 195. Irvin Ehrenpreis at one time claimed that ‘Bentley’s lectures made a tremendous stir, and they must have been known to Swift’, but his masterful three-volume biography does not acknowledge this prospect: see ‘Four of Swift’s Sources’, Modern Language Notes, 70 (1955), 95–100 (p. 99).
David Bywaters, ‘Anticlericism in Swift’s Tale of a Tub’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 36 (1996), 579–602 (p. 588);
Frank T. Boyle, Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 118–48.
See also Boyle, ‘New Science in the Composition of A Tale of a Tub’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real (München: Fink, 2008), pp. 175–84. Boyle’s case for connecting the Principia to the Tale has been criticized by Robert Phiddian (Review of Swift as Nemesis, in Modern Philology, 99 [2002], 437–39 [p. 438]). We know that Swift owned the second edition of the Principia (1713) (LRJS, II, 1314–15), and it is uncertain as to whether he possessed detailed knowledge of the work before then.
See esp. Mark McDayter, ‘The Haunting of St. James’s Library: Librarians, Literature, and The Battle of the Books’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 66 (2003), 1–26 (pp. 5–9).
R. J. Dingley, ‘Dr Bentley’s Centripetal Tendency’, Notes & Queries, 229 (n.s.31) (1984), 378–79, and Boyle, Swift as Nemesis, pp. 124–25. Richard N. Ramsey hints that Swift would have been aware of the impact of the Principia at the time of the Battel, but does not explore this possibility (‘Swift’s Strategy in The Battle of the Books’, Papers on Language and Literature, 20 [1984], 382–89 [p. 387]).
E. W. Gudger, ‘The Five Great Naturalists of the Sixteenth Century: Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Gesner and Aldrovandi: A Chapter in the History of Ichthyology’, Isis, 22 (1934), 21–40 (pp. 36–37).
See John M. Bullitt, Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire: A Study of Satiric Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 47.
The Principia, p. 820 (Book III, Proposition 17, Theorem 15). See Mercator, Institutionum Astronomicarum Libri Duo (London, 1676), pp. 286–87, cited in Derek T. Whiteside, ‘Newton’s Early Thoughts on Planetary Motion: A Fresh Look’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 2 (1964), pp. 117–137 (p. 131n48).
See Grant McColley, ‘The Theory of the Diurnal Rotation of the Earth’, Isis, 26 (1937), 392–402.
See James E. Force, ‘Providence and Newton’s Pantokrator: Natural Law, Miracles, and Newtonian Science’, in Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, eds Force and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2004), pp. 65–92 (pp. 69–70).
See David Kubrin, ‘Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos: Providence and the Mechanical Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 325–46 (p. 326n4).
On key types of argument in the Boyle lectures, see John J. Dahm, ‘Science and Apologetics in the Early Boyle Lectures’, Church History, 39 (1970), 172–86 (pp. 176–77, 180–81).
On the political character of this conflict, see Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 204–207.
See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; repr. 1994), Chap. XLV, pp. 443–44, and Tractatus theologico-politicus, in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, rev. edn, 2 vols (London: George Bell & Sons, 1903–1905), I, 120.
See Gerard Reedy, SJ, ‘A Preface to Anglican Rationalism’, in Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth, eds Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel and Stephen E. Karian (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), pp. 44–59 (p. 56),
and Thomas Franklin Mayo, ‘Epicurus in England (1650–1725)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, Texas, 1933), p. 200.
Michael V. DePorte, ‘Swift, God, and Power’, in Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies of Swift, eds Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 73–97 (p. 81).
See also DePorte, ‘Contemplating Collins: Freethinking in Swift’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Third Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (München: Fink, 1998), pp. 103–15.
See W. R. Albury, ‘Halley’s Ode on the Principia of Newton and the Epicurean Revival in England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), 24–43 (p. 38).
See Hermann J. Real and Heinz J. Vienken, ‘“I Knew and Could Distinguish those Two Heroes at First Sight”: Homer and Aristotle in Glubbdubdrib’, Notes & Queries, 231 (n.s.33) (1986), 51–53.
Jean Le Clerc, Bibliothèque Ancienne et Moderne, 15 (Paris, 1721), 441–45, repr. in Swift: The Critical Heritage, ed. Kathleen Williams (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 59, Atterbury to Bishop Jonathan Trelawney, 15 June 1704, in Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Atterbury, D. D., Bishop of Rochester, ed. Robert Folkestone Williams, 2 vols (London: W. H. Allen, 1869), I, 99, and King, Some Remarks upon the Tale of a Tub. In a Letter (London, 1704), repr. in The Original Works of William King, 3 vols (London, 1776), I, 215–16.
On the possible use of a persona in the ‘Apology’, see Frank H. Ellis, ‘No Apologies, Dr. Swift!’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 21: 3 (November 1997), 71–76,
and Judith C. Mueller, ‘Writing under Constraint: Swift’s “Apology” for A Tale of a Tub’, ELH, 60 (1993), 101–15.
Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation, 2nd edn (London, 1708), pp. 28–29, 31. See Frank T. Boyle, ‘Profane and Debauched Deist: Swift in the Contemporary Response to A Tale of a Tub’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1988), 25–38, and Swift as Nemesis, pp. 151–55. Clarke produced a Latin translation of the Opticks (Optice, 1706).
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Lynall, G. (2012). Newtonian Battels with Rising Stars and Wheeling Moons. In: Swift and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016966_4
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