Abstract
“Si on soumet tout à la raison, notre religion n’aura rien de mystérieux et de surnaturel; si on choque les principes de la raison, notre religion sera absurde et ridicule”.1 In this passage from his Pensées Pascal summarizes what is perhaps the most basic problem for the defender of the reasonableness of Christianity: the necessity of upholding beliefs which Reason is incapable of judging, while at the same time claiming that those beliefs are reasonable. Pascal does not state the problem in precisely these terms regarding the limits of Reason, yet it seems clear that the dilemma he is indicating involves the question of the relation of religious beliefs to the compass of Reason. He does not, however—at least in the passage cited—indicate that the problem is a question of either/or: either Reason and no Religion, or Religion and Irrationality. Rather, he seems to be simply stating what he perceives to be a simple matter of fact. If Reason is allowed to be the judge of all Religion, then all Religion must abandon any elements that are either contrary to reason or cannot be shown to be in accord with Reason. On the other hand, if Reason is not allowed to judge Religion at all, then Religion will be absurd and ridiculous. The solution to the dilemma, if there is one, would seem to lie in the discovery of some happy middle ground where Reason and the absurd might be reconciled, so that one might claim that regardless of the fact that one’s religion involved the belief in matters that were not capable of being judged as true or false, one’s religion was nevertheless reasonable.
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Notes
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, pensée 273, in Œuvres de Blaise Pascal, ed. Léon Brunschvicg, 14 vols. (1904; rpt. Vaduz: Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1965), XIII, p. 199.
The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures (1695), A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity from Mr. Edwards’ Reflections (1695), and Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1697).
See Henry G. Van Leeuwen’s study of this tradition, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought: 1630-1690 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).
Locke denied having any but the most casual acquaintance with Toland, and he rejected as slanderous the attempt to link Toland’s “Socinian” ideas with his own “orthodox Anglicanism.” On Locke’s claim to orthodoxy see his Letter to the Bishop of Worcester in the Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (1823: reprinted by Scientia Aalen, Germany, 1963), IV, p. 4. The term “Socinian,” as it was used in England during this period, did not refer to an organized or systematic Religion or Church (such churches did exist on the continent), but rather the term was used as an epithet for liberal theologians or anti-trinitarians. “Free-thinker” would be an apt synonym in most cases.
Locke’s letters to Stillingfleet comprise volume four of his Works.
Stillingfleet was by no means alone in this position. See Robert Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), especially ch. VII.
Thomas Birch, “Life of Mr. William Chillingworth,” in the Works of William Chillingworth, M.A., 10th ed. (London, 1762), p. iii.
Ibid.
See Van Leeuwen, Problem of Certainty, p. 17, n. 8.
The presbyterian, Mr. Cheynell, was with Chillingworth during the Anglican’s last days. His account of their acquaintance was entitled Chillingworth novissima, or the Sicknesse, Heresy, Death, and Buriall of William Chillingworth, (in his own Phrase) Clerk of Oxford, and in the conceit of his Fellow Souldiers the Queen’s Arch-Engineer and Grand Intelligencer. Set forth in a letter to his eminent and learned Friends; a Relation of his Apprehension at Arundell; a Discovery of his Errours in a brief Catechism; and a short Oration at the Burial of his heretical Book (London, 1644). The funeral oration is significant both for giving witness to Cheynell’s own bigotry and for indicating the kind of religious fervor dominant in Chillingworth’s time. Standing over the open grave, Cheynell sought to bury Chillingworth’s ideas with his body. “If they please to undertake the burial of his corpse, I shall undertake to bury his errors, which are published in this so much admired yet unworthy book: and happy would it be for the kingdom, if this book and all its fellows could be so buried. Get thee gone, thou cursed book, which has seduced so many precious souls ! Get thee gone, thou corrupt, rotten book ! Earth to earth, and dust to dust ! Get thee gone into the place of rottenness, that thou mayest rot with thy author, and see corruption.” Quoted by Edward Augustus George, Seventeenth Century Men of Latitude: Forerunners of the New Theology (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), pp. 59-60. Cf. Margaret L. Wiley, The Subtle Knot, Creative Scepticism in Seventeenth Century England (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1952), pp. 99-100.
Aubrey’s Brief Lives, edited from the original manuscripts and with an introduction by Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), p. 64. Cf. R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 67.
Aubrey’s Lives, p. 64.
John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, rpt. of 1823 ed. (Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966), in 2 vols., I, 94.
Chillingworth, true to his belief that if the king turns out to be a tyrant, the citizen may move, but may not oppose the king with violence (for as the Scripture says, “When they persecute you in one City, flee unto another”), fought with the cavaliers and died five months after being taken as a prisoner of war in August, 1643.
Tulloch notes that sometimes the term “latitudinarian” was used synonymously with “Cambridge Platonist,” II, 6. A pamphlet in 1662 connected the “latitude-men” with the “new mechanical philosophy,” ibid., p. 22. Bishop Burnet described the latitudinarians as those that inter alia “loved the constitution of the Church, and the liturgy, and could well live under them; but they did not think it unlawful to live under another form.” History of my owne time, I, 339, cited in Tulloch, II, 34. Yet even in this restricted sense there is a great deal of ambiguity in the term. For Chillingworth, Hales, and Falkland, and for the Cambridge Platonists, the implication of having no necessary form of church constitution was that men should be free to worship as they saw fit. For Stillingfleet the implication was simply that until the civil law ruled otherwise men were free to worship as they saw fit. Hence, as we shall see, although Stillingfleet is aligned with the moderate liberals—the Chillingworthians and Cambridge Platonists—in his first published work, Irenicum (1658), he later seems to move away from the liberals to the more conservative position of defending uniformity, i.e. required membership in the Anglican Church. All his works after Irenicum, it must be noted, were written after the reestablishment of the Anglican Church as the National Church of England. (This will be discussed in further detail in the next chapter.)
Cf. Birch, “Life of Chillingworth,” pp. i-iii.
White was a friend of Thomas Hobbes. Together they were blamed by the House of Commons as being a probable cause of the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London of 1666. See Calendar of State Papers, 20 October 1966; cited in Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 62. White was the author of De mundo dialogi tres quibus materia, an attack on Galileo’s Dialogue Upon the Two Systems of the World. In an early draft of De Corpore, Hobbes gave a blow-by-blow refutation of White’s book. See Jean Jacquot, “Notes on an Unpublished Work of Thomas Hobbes,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, IX (1952), pp. 188-95. Other works by White include Religion and Reason Mutually Corresponding and Assisting Each Other (Paris, 1660); and Rushworth’s Dialogues or the Judgment of Common Sense in the Choyce of Religion (Paris, 1654).
It was possibly through Sir Kenelm Digby that Hobbes met Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), the Catholic whose circle of friends included some of the more important scientists of the day. See John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604-67 (London, 1852), p. 438; cited in Mintz, p. 9. Digby was considered one of the most illustrious thinkers of his day. See, for example, Pierre Bayle, art. “Rorarius,” rem. k, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, ed. P. Des Mazeaux, 5th ed., 4 vols. (Amsterdam: P. Brunei, 1740), IV, p. 84. Digby wrote treatises on bodies (1644) and on the soul (1644), and a Discourse Concerning Infallibility (Paris, 1652).
Thomas Birch, in the Works of William Chillingworth, p. iii.
Ibid., p. 359. (Note: after p. 360 in the 10th edition of Chillingworth’s Works—the edition cited here—pagination reverts to p. 353 and continues successively thereafter.)
Ibid., p. 10. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, iii; and, Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion, in six books, trans. John Clarke (Cambridge: J. Hall & Son, 1860), pp. 90-97.
Chillingworth, Works, p. 360.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 95.
Ibid., pp. 354-55.
Cf. Robert R. Orr, Reason and Authority: the Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 152.
Chillingworth, Works, pp. 292-93.
Ibid., p. 292.
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid., pp. 203-204.
Ibid., pp. 117-118.
The relationship of this view to the legal concept of “reasonable doubt” is discussed by Theodore Waldman, “The Origin of the Concept of ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas, XX (1959), pp. 299-316.
Bishop John Wilkins (1614-1668) was one of the founders of the Royal Society. His Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1765), along with John Tillotson’s (1630-1694) Rule of Faith (1666) and Stillingfleet’s Irenicum (1658), exhibit clearly the theological influence of Chillingworth. Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) was an early apologist for the Royal Society. His first published work, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), was followed by several books and essays in which he defended a theory of mitigated scepticism. John Locke (1632-1704), claiming that Bishop Stillingfleet had attacked his personal religious beliefs in the latter’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter (1697), offered as proof of his orthodoxy that his (Locke’s) religious views coincided with Chillingworth’s. See his Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, in the Works of John Locke, IV, p. 275. For a detailed account of Chillingworth’s influence in the seventeenth century in England see Van Leeuwen, Problem of Certainty in English Thought, See also, Orr, Reason and Authority: the Thought of William Chillingworth; Louis G. Locke, Tillotson: a Study in Seventeenth Century Literature (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1954); and Jackson I. Cope, Joseph Glanvill: Anglican Apologist (St. Louis: Washington University, 1956). For a detailed account of Glanvill’s scepticism, see Richard H. Popkin’s introduction to the reprint of the 1676 edition of Glanvill’s Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), pp. v-xxxiii.
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Carroll, R.T. (1975). Introduction. In: The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet 1635–1699. Archives Internationales D’Histoire Des IdÉes/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 77. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1598-1_1
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