On Elad Carmel: “Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670-1740” (2)
Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq
Professor of British Civilisation, Director of the Master's in Economic and Legal Translation, Université Paris Nanterre (UPN).
Let me begin by saying how greatly honoured I am to take part in the colloquium on Anticlerical Legacies. The Deistic reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670-1740, along with Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel and Felix E. Waldmann. It is a privilege, both scholarly and personal. I met Elad Carmel some fifteen years ago at Senate House for the launch of Noel Malcom’s long awaited Clarendon Edition of Leviathan (Oxford, Clarendon, 2012) by Hobbes scholars. We stayed in remote contact, but Elad Carmel’s invitation at the seminar Hobbes@Paris, hosted by Luc Foisneau, Sylvia Giocanti, Eric Marquer and Jeronimo Rilla, then at the conference “Hobbes in dialogue(s)” in November 2024, gave us the occasion to resume the conversation on Hobbes and other shared interests, and gave us a sense of the bonds within the community of Hobbes’s scholars.
In the early decades of the eighteenth century Hobbes was, according to Elad Carmel, “the admired villain, almost a symbol that must be attacked as it served the interest of the writer” (p.86) So why claim the authority of the “Monster of Malmesbury” to underpin criticism of the Church and its doctrine? This is the question addressed by Elad Carmel in his ambitious study.
The book is an important contribution to late seventeenth and eighteenth-century intellectual history, reception studies, as well as Hobbes’s scholarship. The study of Hobbes’s reception has long been reduced to its caricatural and polemical dimension, addressed with nuance by Diderot in his Encyclopédie article “Hobbisme.” Some twenty years ago, landmark studies were devoted to Hobbes’s theologico-political stance and its contemporary reception, notably by Jeffrey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (2005) and Jon Parkin, Taming Leviathan (2007), and more recently by Laurens Van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass’s in their edited volume (Hobbes on Politics & Religion, 2018) to which the author contributed a chapter. The author also pays his debt to Noel Malcom, Patricia Springborg and the late Justin Champion in his Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken. The Church of England and its enemies 1660-1730 (1992) who provided insights into the philosophical continuity between Hobbes and English deists - the equation of God with nature, a materialist epistemology and atomist ontology, and anticlericalism. However, there was a need for an updated examination of the relation between Hobbes’s specific brand of anticlericalism and the manifestations of English deism in the decades following Hobbes’s death.
Beyond deepening our knowledge of Hobbes’s reception, one of the author’s avowed historiographical goals is to challenge Jonathan Israel’s narrative of the “radical Enlightenment” and to reconnect Hobbes’s legacy with eighteenth-century radical thinking. Israel discarded Hobbes as a major influence on eighteenth-century deists and freethinkers, as his “anti-libertarian politics, High-Church connections and support for rigorous political and intellectual censorship” (p.5) seemed out of step with the opposition to “structure of authority and tradition, ecclesiastical power, and existing social hierarchy, as well as divine-right monarchy” which, to him, defines philosophical radicalism. The author defends the contrary thesis that Hobbes and English deists’ “efforts to rewrite a history of religion and of the church, to expose clerical corruption and to offer a programme of civil religion rid of priestcraft were at the very core of the project of early Whiggism and early Enlightenment.” (p.93) Carmel adopts a chronological approach which allows him to inscribe the debates within their political context and follow closely the emergence, transformations and permanence of the deist discourse. I will concentrate on the first two chapters.
“Nothing but Natural Religion”
The first chapter deals with early debates on human reason, natural religion and religious toleration (pp. 24-67) and examines the mutations from “the anti-scriptural man of the 1670s” to “the deist of the 1690s,” by casting light on a generation of authors, Charles Blount, Robert Howard and Boevey whose writings have recently been recovered by Mark Knights. The author emphasises that deism stemmed from the critical analysis of the Scriptures and ecclesiastical histories published in the second half of the seventeenth century. Among these authors, Blount stands out as the most prolific in articulating the key principles of late seventeenth-century deism.
In his manuscript and printed works, Blount (1654-1693), a Whig and a member of the Green Ribbon Club in the late 1670s, endorsed the philosopher’s religious, as well as political views on protection and obedience. From The Last Sayings, or Dying Legacy of Mr. Hobbs (1680) to Oracles of reason (1693), Blount paid homage to Hobbes. In the latter text, he used Hobbes’ reflection on the authorship of the Pentateuch in defence of Thomas Burnet’s Archeologicae philosophicae sive Doctrina Antiqua de Rerum Originibus (1692) to show that Burnet was not the first author to question Moses’s authorship. Through this example, the author convincingly shows that Blount relied on Hobbes – and Spinoza – thesis about the Bible’s authorship and developed it into a defence of freedom of inquiry and expression: received knowledge could be systematically scrutinized, even when it came to sacred matters. According to the author, “the most notorious deistic tract of the early 1690s” infuriated Anglicans, and prompted the so-called Boyle Lectures intended “for proving the Christian Religion against Infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans.”
According to its detractors, the progress of deism was also to be seen within the ranks of the Anglican establishment, starting with John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury from 1691 to 1694, and Gilbert Burnet, a member of the Royal Society and bishop of Salisbury from 1689 to 1715. In 1695, after Tillotson’s death, Charles Leslie attacked them, along with Blount and Robert Howard, author of a History of Religion (1694), accusing the whole bunch of “naturalising religion”. In a polemical vein, Leslie complained “they now cry there is nothing but Natural religion. All that is called Revealed, is at most but Gods compliance with Superstition of the vulgar, and what does that concern Men of Wit and Senses? Since Religion has no deeper a Root, what Reverence, what Veneration is due to it?” (quoted p.52). Tillotson in particular was accused of putting civil peace before religion. As the author argues in the introduction, Leslie had a point: “Hobbes naturalised religion in a way that undermined, explicitly or implicitly, traditional faith in miracles and prophecies.” (p.7) Here again, it appears that Hobbes’s deist followers radicalised his position by arguing that wherever there was a conflict between natural reason and revelation, the former should take precedence over the latter. In “the war against priestcraft”, what was at stake was ultimately the source of authority in the commonwealth and therefore “who held the truth or who held the authority to interpret it” (p.7). This was the point made by Robert Howard in his Twofold Vindication (1696). By defending Tillotson and Burnet, Howard first and foremost aimed at defending Hobbes against charges of heresy, such as the accusation of Socinianism. He also embarked on a discussion of labels of great interest to us as he uncovers their ideological implications. Just as Hobbes had done in the English Leviathan with the “pseudo-concept of tyranny,”1 Howard showed that the term “Hobbism” was used as a political weapon, except that in this particular instance, the term was used by the Tories, not against them. Howard also usefully sought to disentangle the notions of deism and atheism.
The last case study included in this chapter is that of James Boevey (1622-1696), a merchant and lawyer of Dutch descent whose writings about practical philosophy were praised by John Aubrey and Sir Kenelm Digby. As the author points out, the circulation of his texts in manuscript versions gave him leeway to voice deist views in four tracts. They are noteworthy for their theorisation of natural laws in line with the author of Leviathan, and for framing deists as benevolent people “who do good by Impulse of their Natural religion, honesty and good conscience” (quoted p.56). Also remarkable are his comment on the Hobbesian conception of God as a corporeal spirit and, like Henry Stubbe, his interest in other religions, notably in the life of Muhammad.
“To question the unquestionable”
The second chapter deals with the Deist controversy and its aftermath from 1696 to 1710 (pp. 68-110) and demonstrates that in the last decade of the seventeenth century, deism had gained such momentum that it “ignited serious controversy and anxiety in England.” (p.68) The author shows, after Jeffrey Collins, that deism was not only linked to Hobbism, but also to Locke’s theses expounded in An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). His rejection of innate ideas was then equated with a rejection of the natural foundation of moral obligation and as an implicit acceptance of materialism. One passage in particular seemed to consider the hypothesis of a thinking matter as acceptable, albeit not verifiable (An Essay, p. 270). Such tenets provided a starting point for Toland, Tindal and Collins, who were personally connected to Locke.
The most emblematic deist work of the period is undoubtedly Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) by John Toland (1670-1722), published following the lapse of the licensing act in 1695, and before the new blasphemy act of 1698 was passed. The Irishman did not claim the term “deist” for himself; however, he acknowledged his debt to Hobbes’s anticlericalism and defended his biblical criticism and materialism which he viewed as “powerful tools for subsequent philosophers who dared to question the unquestionable.” (p.77) He claimed the protection of a chain of authors – Copernicus, Galileo, Mersenne, Gassendi and Descartes - whose writings contradicted the Scriptures when dealing with physics or mathematics. He even seemed to extend his materialism and plenism to show there was no such thing as vacuum. In 1704, were published his Letters to Serena (Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, queen of Prussia), in which he dealt with “the origins and force of prejudices”, “the history of the immortality of the soul among the Heathens”, “the origins of idolatry, and Reasons of Heathenism,” and in the 4th letter defended Spinoza’s philosophy against “a gentleman in Holland”. Leibniz, who had met Toland at the Hanoverian court in Berlin in 1700s and engaged with his work, saw him as a Hobbesian materialist and plenist. His main objection to the idea of an active matter was that there must be a first cause: “we ought to look for the origin of action, perception, and order underneath matter, that is underneath that which is purely passive and indifferent to movement.” (quoted p.82) In fact, very immodestly, Toland considered his theory as an improvement of Spinoza’s pantheism insofar as the latter provided no explanation for motion, and an addition to Newton’s system, which spurred the response of the Newtonian Samuel Clarke in the Boyle lectures of 1704-05.
Clarke started by refuting “the most celebrated Patron of Atheism in our time” (quoted p.82), i.e. Spinoza, then Hobbes’s ideas on matter and operations of the mind as necessary effects of motion, and finally Toland’s key concept of an active matter. What was unpalatable to Clarke was their disenchanted vision of a world devoid of all transcendence where the soul was reduced to a material substance (“the world and its beauty, order, and well-being had to be caused by an intelligent being with liberty and choice”, p.82). He went on to establish a typology of deists: the worst kind were those who acknowledged the existence of a God, but actually denied him; then came “those who believed in God and His Providence, but naturally rather than morally”; “those who do recognise the moral aspects of God’s government, but do not believe in the immortality of the soul,” and finally “those who have all the right notions (…) But despite these beliefs, they claim that everything is discoverable by reason alone and therefore reject divine revelation” (p.83). Thus, Clarke created “a continuum, starting with the outright materialist Spinoza, through Hobbes and Toland, to the deists,” the common denominator between them being that “they all posed the same threat of describing a materialistic godless world.” (p.84)
Sometimes deism was criticised by former deists themselves, who acknowledged their past errors. This was the case of Charles Gildon, a Catholic turned deist who helped Blount publish his Oracles of reason, before converting to Anglicanism. His Deist’s Manual (1705) is a nuanced critique of Hobbes’s state of nature and natural law, revealing the ambivalence of many of his critics towards Hobbes.
One of the strongest responses to anti-deist arguments came some twenty years later from the Anglican fellow of All Souls College converted to Catholicism, then returned to the Church of England, who became a virulent critic of the Anglican clergy: Matthew Tindal (1657-1733). His Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel, a republication of the Religion of Nature (1730) reads as a synthesis and discussion of several decades of deist arguments. Throughout his essays, notably The Rights of the Christian Church asserted (1706) described by one of his adversaries as a “Commonplace-Book of Atheists and Deists”, he built a coherent political theory drawing on Grotius’s natural law theory, Hobbesian and Lockean social contracts, Locke’s religious toleration and Milton’s freedom of the press. In such a perspective, government was authorised by popular consent, and the power of the sovereign stopped at the realm of private conscience. Carmel convincingly shows, after Jeffrey Collins and Alex Barber, lines of ruptures and continuity between Hobbes and Tindal: while they profoundly agreed on the impossibility of having two rival powers, the civil and ecclesiastical, within the commonwealth, unless it should be in danger of dissolution, and on the supremacy of the sovereign power over the church, Tindal departed from Hobbes on one significant point, his vindication of freedom of the press. Carmel suggests this position may have derived from a prudential concern to take distance from the philosopher in the face of charges of Hobbism (by Samuel Parker for instance).
“They knew not how to answer him but by first misrepresenting him” (quoted p.96)
The author then focuses on the Collins-Clarke correspondence in 1707-1708. This controversy followed Collins’s intervention in defence of Henry Dodwell’s “explosive” theses about the mortality of the soul, where Collins took very similar positions to Toland on active matter (p.94). In the so-called “Collins-Clarke correspondence,” he reworked the arguments already developed in the Boyle lectures, notably the attack on Hobbes’s materialism developed in chapter 25 of Concerning Body (De Corpore). Clarke lamented Hobbes’s impact on his followers who displayed the same propensity to self-sufficiency in developing their own theories about the materiality of the soul. At this point, the author produces “an extremely significant piece of evidence,” a letter by Collins to William Simpson, Baron of the Court of Exchequer, thanking him for checking references in Hobbes’s works and passing on the letter to Clarke. He also inveighed against Clarke whom he accused of distorting Hobbes, after consulting the text himself. To Elad Carmel, this defence of Hobbes against “gross” errors, even made in private reveals some deists’ sound knowledge of his works and those of his adversaries. Moreover, it reads as an acute analysis of Hobbes’s reception and his opponents’ strategy to confront his subversive ideas.
The chapter ends on Toland’s shifting position onto Hobbes and radical treatment of the Scripture in Hodegus (1720), from endorsing the thesis of the corporality of God to that of angels, to conclude that for both authors, materialism and biblical criticism were actually “combined weapons deployed in an anticlerical war.” (p.100)
Discussion
Elad Carmel’s book must be commended for the richness of the material, the close textual and contextual analysis and the clarity of the demonstration. Here are a few points I would like to enhance or raise for the sake of discussion.
Elad Carmel’s contribution to reception studies
In terms of method, Carmel claims a Parkinian, as well as a Skinnerian approach. Parkinian in the sense that he is looking for explicit debts to Hobbes, or for sufficient contextual evidence to establish that freethinking or deist authors were using Hobbes’s theses to support their own. Skinnerian especially when it comes to labels – deism, freethinking, materialism, atheism, hobbism – interpreted as discursive interventions in specific political and historical contexts.
Over the past decades, studying the phenomenon of reception has emerged as a potent tool in intellectual history. By focusing on the reader/thinker interpreting and making use of another thinker, reception studies have considerably enriched our approach to the history of philosophy and intellectual history which no longer appear as one-way roads where a theoretician would exert an “influence” over subsequent generations. It allows us to hear the myriad of ongoing conversations of the past.
Anticlerical legacies is a brilliant illustration of such an approach. In the perspective of intellectual history, it gives prominence to minor or marginalized figures – Blount, Boevey, Howard, Gildon -- along better-known figures – Toland, Collins, or Tindal, who joined the chorus of dissonant voices claiming the right to a rational and systematic examination of the Church’s doctrine. It pays minute attention to the way labels - atheism, hobbism, deism - have been used to discredit an author and frame him as an adversary not only of Church, but of the Christian faith. In this respect, libertinism makes brief appearances in Skelton’s and Atterbury’s mouths as synonymous with “self-sufficiency” and deism, and we may have wanted to know a bit more about its use in seventeenth-century England. It seems to be far less frequent in England than in France at the same period. When used, did it have any foreign connotation? Can we consider deism and “hobbism” as the English equivalents of French libertinism?
We have here a masterly exposition of the burning issues of the day, the arguments mobilised and reused (such as Toland’s taking up again Hobbes’s demonstrating the corporality of angels and spirits), the rhetorical strategies deployed to challenge orthodoxy and the clergy’s authority, and the counter-attacks by its defenders. The book stands in stark contrast with what Collingwood described as ‘[t]he frivolous and superficial type of history which speaks of “influences” and “borrowings” and so forth and [...] never asks itself what there was in A that laid it open to B’s influence, or what there was in A which made it capable of borrowings from B’.2 Carmel engages with a reflection on the dialogical character of Hobbes’s deist reception, and with the nature of his philosophy which he identifies, after Jon Parkin, as “open-ended.” In his opinion, his treatment of religion - not opting for one specific ecclesiological model or another -- “allowed various readers to use it in their own ways” and made it possible “that different aspects of his thought were employed to support different ideological causes.” (p.12) This enables Carmel to establish an intellectual connection between the seventeenth-century philosopher and eighteenth-century freethinkers.
In this perspective, I would like to ask the author whether he thinks the phenomenon of reception can deepen our understanding not only of a culture, but of an author’s body of thought. In spite of the inevitable distortions due to specific agendas, whether scrutinizing what these thinkers grasped of Hobbes’s ideas and how they used his arguments tells us something about the perceived originality of Hobbes’s contribution to contemporary debates. Anticlerical Legacies seems to tell us that reading a philosopher through his reception is not reading backwards; it may enable us to approach the quintessence of his thought from another angle. With such caveats (identifying the biases), can reception constitute a litmus test of an author’s core thinking?
Revising Jonathan Israel’s radical Enlightenment paradigm
With Anticlerical Legacies, Carmel brings a significant corrective to Jonathan Israel’s paradigm of the radical Enlightenment, by reintegrating English deism within the picture. While Israel presented Spinoza as the key thinker who provided the intellectual apparatus to address political and religious issues, in Britain and on the continent, Carmel confirms the centrality of Hobbes’s heterodoxy in spurring sandblasting criticism of clerical authority and furbishing weapons to attack its teachings. Israel did concede that Hobbes was often cited alongside Spinoza among English deist circles, but, upholding a European vision of the radical Enlightenment, he argued that the Dutch philosopher was their true inspiration, as he was “far more consistently and cogently ‘necessitarian’ than the English thinker.”3 However, claiming that Charles Blount was Spinoza’s “English disciple”4 does not obliterate Hobbes’s significance for British deists, all the more so as Spinoza had become exposed to French and English philosophy, including Hobbes’s works, as early as 1650s when he received his first education at Franciscus Van den Enden’s school in Amsterdam.5 Spinoza remained in close contact with his English correspondents, notably Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, and with the scientific and philosophical debates in the British isles. Just as there’s no good reason to narrow down English deism to its insular inspiration and downplay the impact of Dutch philosophy in England, we should acknowledge the influence on deists were diverse. Of course, there are various ways in which Spinoza departed from Hobbes, notably his interpretation of natural law in politics, as he made it clear in his correspondence6. However, deists in Britain (Collins) and France (Diderot) did manage to sort out Hobbes’s political thought from the religious.7
Another way in which Carmel revises Jonathan Israel’s prism is his understanding of Spinoza’s deus sive natura which must have provided the foundation of Toland’s own “pantheism.” The recognition of Spinoza’s pantheism (Ethics, book I) and of the Spinoza-Toland filiation, in spite of Toland’s supposed refinement of Spinoza’s conception of an immanent God and the efficient cause of all things, is far from Israel’s identification of the Dutch thinker with materialism and atheism and brings him closer to Margaret Jacob’s and Justin Champion’s versions of the radical Enlightenment. On the basis of Carmel’s textual and contextual demonstration, it now seems difficult to isolate Spinoza as the only source of inspiration of the radical Enlightenment in the eighteenth-century.
The unexpected political ramifications of Hobbes’s deism
When it comes to our understanding of eighteenth-century debates, Carmel’s second claim is to trace a line between the anticlerical legacies of Hobbes and radical thinking. He remarks that Milton, Harrington, Locke and Spinoza were better candidates than Hobbes to lay the foundations of liberty of expression and civil religion, yet, Hobbes’ heterodox views and – radical – questioning of dogmas and independent ecclesiastical authority can rightly claim paternity of eighteenth-century deism and freethinking.
The case of Tindal is illuminating in this respect. Tindal used Hobbes’s prescriptions for exercising the free exercise of reason to defend liberty of the press, as well as liberty of conscience. Meanwhile, he made what can be rightly called a radical - and Spinozist - interpretation of natural law, by maintaining no right could be relinquished to the sovereign. Here Carmel suggests that such a stance may have been dictated by prudence rather than conviction. But Tindal’s reading of Hobbes may also pave the way to later deist treatises, of which Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794) is the most emblematic. It also reminds us of how deeply intertwined were liberty of conscience and freedom of speech. Strong evidence of that is the passing of the Blasphemy Act in 1698 (repealed in 1967) to which the author could have fruitfully devoted more space in chapter 2 and so help us grasp the political resonance of the deist controversies. The Act, conceived as a weapon against Socinianism, penalised any heterodox speech and anyone who questioned the divine authority of the Scriptures. Interestingly, Gilbert Burnet, previously mentioned and viewed as a latitudinarian by his enemies, defended the Act on the grounds that no one would be punished unless he was guilty of malicious intentions. In fact, Burnet was close to William III, and was well aware that controlling speech on religion against the background of the standing army dispute was a way of strengthening the authority of the King in post-1688 England.8 Carmel shows the deists addressed such fundamental questions as the compatibility of religious prescriptions and sovereign authority, and the claims of religion to supremacy. Hobbes’s anticlerical legacies were tools against “the political uses and abuses of religion” and “the dangers that the politics of religion posed to society” (p.185). As we grow to realize that, wherever we turn, religious claims to political power and the manipulation of human metaphysical anxieties are still rife, Elad Carmel’s book also proves to be an invaluable contribution to contemporary debates about civil religion devoid of any clerical interference.
1 Franck Lessay, Souveraineté et légitimité chez Hobbes (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), p. 199-206.
2 Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of history, with lectures 1926-1928, ed. Willem Johannis van der Dussen, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, p.128.
3 Jonathan I. Israel, The Radical Enlightenment, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 603.
4 Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion. The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750, Thames and Hudson, 1976, p. 99 cited in Israel, op. cit., p. 602.
5 Marc Bedjaï, “Franciscus Van Den Enden,” Studia spinozana, n°6, 1990 and PhD thesis “Métaphysique, éthique et politiques dans l’œuvre du docteur Franciscus Van den Enden, contribution à l’étude des sources de Benoît de Spinoza (1632-1677),” Université Paris I, Panthéon Sorbonne, 1990.
6 See Spinoza’s letter to Jarig Jelles of June 2, 1674, cited in Kriegel, Spinoza. L’Autre voie, Paris, Editions Le Cerf, p. 467.
7 Cited in Israel, p. 602.
8 Eloise Davies, “English Politics and the Blasphemy Act of 1698,” The English Historical Review, August 2020, Vol. 135, No. 575 (August 2020), pp. 804-835, p. 808.