deism

/dee"iz euhm/, n.

1. belief in the existence of a God on the evidence of reason and nature only, with rejection of supernatural revelation (distinguished from theism).

2. belief in a God who created the world but has since remained indifferent to it.

[1675-85; < F déisme < L de(us) god + F -isme -ISM]

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Belief in God based on reason rather than revelation or the teaching of any specific religion.

A form of natural religion, Deism originated in England in the early 17th century as a rejection of orthodox Christianity. Deists asserted that reason could find evidence of God in nature and that God had created the world and then left it to operate under the natural laws he had devised. The philosopher Edward Herbert (1583–1648) developed this view in On Truth (1624). By the late 18th century Deism was the dominant religious attitude among Europe's educated classes; it was accepted by many upper-class Americans of the same era, including the first three U.S. presidents.

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▪ religious philosophy

Introduction

      an unorthodox religious attitude that found expression among a group of English writers beginning with Edward Herbert (later 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (Herbert, Edward Herbert, 1st Baron)) in the first half of the 17th century and ending with Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in the middle of the 18th century. In general it refers to what can be called natural religion, the acceptance of a certain body of religious knowledge that is inborn in every person or that can be acquired by the use of reason, as opposed to knowledge acquired through either revelation or the teaching of any church.

Nature and scope

      Though an initial use of the term occurred in 16th-century France, the later appearance of the doctrine on the Continent was stimulated by the translation and adaptation of the English models. The high point of Deist thought occurred in England from about 1689 through 1742, during a period when, despite widespread counterattacks from the established Church of England, there was relative freedom of religious expression following upon the Glorious Revolution that ended the rule of James II and brought William and Mary to the throne. Deism took deep root in 18th-century Germany after it had ceased to be a vital subject of controversy in England.

      At times in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the word Deism was used theologically in contradistinction to theism, the belief in an immanent God who actively intervenes in the affairs of men. In this sense Deism was represented as the view of those who reduced the role of God to a mere act of creation in accordance with rational laws discoverable by man and held that, after the original act, God virtually withdrew and refrained from interfering in the processes of nature and the ways of man. So stark an interpretation of the relations of God and man, however, was accepted by very few Deists during the flowering of the doctrine, though their religious antagonists often attempted to force them into this difficult position. Historically, a distinction between theism and Deism has never had wide currency in European thought. As an example, when encyclopaedist Denis Diderot (Diderot, Denis), in France, translated into French the works of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, Baron Cooper of Pawlett, Baron Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles), one of the important English Deists, he often rendered “Deism” as théisme. The term is not in current usage as a metaphysical concept, and its significance is really limited to the 17th and 18th centuries.

The historical deists

The English Deists

      In 1754–56, when the Deist controversy had passed its peak, John Leland, an opponent, wrote a historical and critical compendium of Deist thought, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers that Have Appeared in England in the Last and Present Century; with Observations upon Them, and Some Account of the Answers that Have Been Published Against Them. This work, which began with Lord Herbert of Cherbury and moved through the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Charles Blount, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston (Woolston, Thomas), Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Chubb, and Viscount Bolingbroke, fixed the canon of who should be included among the Deist writers. In subsequent works Hobbes usually has been dropped from the list and John Toland (Toland, John) included, though he was closer to pantheism than most of the other Deists were. Herbert was not known as a Deist in his day, but Blount and the rest who figured in Leland's book would have accepted the term Deist as an appropriate designation for their religious position. Simultaneously, it became an adjective of opprobrium in the vocabulary of their opponents. Bishop Edward Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677) is an early example of the orthodox use of the epithet.

      In Lord Herbert's treatises five religious ideas were recognized as God-given and innate in the mind of man from the beginning of time: the belief in a supreme being, in the need for his worship, in the pursuit of a pious and virtuous life as the most desirable form of worship, in the need of repentance for sins, and in rewards and punishments in the next world. These fundamental religious beliefs, Herbert held, had been the possession of the first man, and they were basic to all the worthy positive institutionalized religions of later times. Thus, differences among sects and cults all over the world were usually benign, mere modifications of universally accepted truths; they were corruptions only when they led to barbarous practices such as the immolation of human victims and the slaughter of religious rivals.

      In England at the turn of the 17th century this general religious attitude assumed a more militant form, particularly in the works of Toland, Shaftesbury, Tindal, Woolston, and Collins. Though the Deists differed among themselves and there is no single work that can be designated as the quintessential expression of Deism, they joined in attacking both the existing orthodox church establishment and the wild manifestations of the dissenters. The tone of these writers was often earthy and pungent, but their Deist ideal was sober natural religion without the trappings of Catholicism and the High Church in England and free from the passionate excesses of Protestant fanatics. In Toland there is great emphasis on the rational element in natural religion; in Shaftesbury more worth is ascribed to the emotive quality of religious experience when it is directed into salutary channels. All are agreed in denouncing every kind of religious intolerance because the core of the various religions is identical. In general, there is a negative evaluation of religious institutions and the priestly corps who direct them. Simple primitive monotheism was practiced by early men without temples, churches, and synagogues, and modern men could readily dispense with religious pomp and ceremony. The more elaborate and exclusive the religious establishment, the more it came under attack. A substantial portion of Deist literature was devoted to the description of the noxious practices of all religions in all times, and the similarities of pagan and Roman Catholic rites were emphasized.

      The Deists who presented purely rationalist (Rationalism) proofs for the existence of God, usually variations on the argument from the design or order of the universe (argument from design), were able to derive support from the vision of the lawful physical world that Sir Isaac Newton (Newton, Sir Isaac) had delineated. Indeed, in the 18th century, there was a tendency to convert Newton into a matter-of-fact Deist—a transmutation that was contrary to the spirit of both his philosophical and his theological writings.

      When Deists were faced with the problem of how man had lapsed from the pure principles of his first forebears into the multiplicity of religious superstitions and crimes committed in the name of God, they ventured a number of conjectures. They surmised that men had fallen into error because of the inherent weakness of human nature; or they subscribed to the idea that a conspiracy of priests had intentionally deceived men with a “rout of ceremonials” in order to maintain power over them.

      The role of Christianity in the universal history of religion became problematic. For many religious Deists the teachings of Christ were not essentially novel but were, in reality, as old as creation, a republication of primitive monotheism. Religious leaders had arisen among many peoples—Socrates, Buddha, Muḥammad—and their mission had been to effect a restoration of the simple religious faith of early men. Some writers, while admitting the similarity of Christ's message to that of other religious teachers, tended to preserve the unique position of Christianity as a divine revelation. It was possible to believe even in prophetic revelation and still remain a Deist, for revelation could be considered as a natural historical occurrence consonant with the definition of the goodness of God. The more extreme Deists, of course, could not countenance this degree of divine intervention in the affairs of men.

      Natural religion was sufficient and certain; the tenets of all positive religions contained extraneous, even impure elements. Deists accepted the moral teachings of the Bible without any commitment to the historical reality of the reports of miracles. Most Deist argumentation attacking the literal interpretation of Scripture as divine revelation leaned upon the findings of 17th-century biblical criticism. Woolston, who resorted to an allegorical interpretation of the whole of the New Testament, was an extremist even among the more audacious Deists. Tindal was perhaps the most moderate of the group. Toland was violent; his denial of all mystery in religion was supported by analogies among Christian, Judaic, and pagan esoteric religious practices, equally condemned as the machinations of priests.

      The Deists were particularly vehement against any manifestation of religious fanaticism and enthusiasm. In this respect Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) was probably the crucial document in propagating their ideas. Revolted by the Puritan fanatics of the previous century and by the wild hysteria of a group of French exiles prophesying in London in 1707, Shaftesbury denounced all forms of religious extravagance as perversions of true religion. These false prophets were directing religious emotions, benign in themselves, into the wrong channels. Any description of God that depicted his impending vengeance, vindictiveness, jealousy, and destructive cruelty was blasphemous. Because sound religion could find expression only among healthy men, the argument was common in Deist literature that the preaching of extreme asceticism, the practice of self-torture, and the violence of religious persecutions were all evidence of psychological illness and had nothing to do with authentic religious sentiment and conduct. The Deist God, ever gentle, loving, and benevolent, intended men to behave toward one another in the same kindly and tolerant fashion.

Deists in other countries

      Ideas of this general character were voiced on the Continent at about the same period by such men as Pierre Bayle (Bayle, Pierre), a French philosopher (philosophe) famous for his encyclopaedic dictionary, even though he would have rejected the Deist identification. During the heyday of the French Philosophes in the 18th century, the more daring thinkers—Voltaire among them—gloried in the name Deist and declared the kinship of their ideas with those of Rationalist English ecclesiastics, such as Samuel Clarke, who would have repudiated the relationship. The dividing line between Deism and atheism among the Philosophes was often rather blurred, as is evidenced by Le Rêve de d'Alembert (written 1769; “The Dream of d'Alembert”), which describes a discussion between the two “fathers” of the Encyclopédie: the Deist Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and the atheist Diderot. Diderot had drawn his inspiration from Shaftesbury, and thus in his early career he was committed to a more emotional Deism. Later in life, however, he shifted to the atheist materialist circle of the Baron d'Holbach. When Holbach (Holbach, Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d') paraphrased or translated the English Deists, his purpose was frankly atheist; he emphasized those portions of their works that attacked existing religious practices and institutions, neglecting their devotion to natural religion and their adoration of Christ. The Catholic Church in 18th-century France did not recognize fine distinctions among heretics, and Deist and atheist works were burned in the same bonfires.

      English Deism was transmitted to Germany primarily through translations of Shaftesbury, whose influence upon thought was paramount. In a commentary on Shaftesbury (Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, Baron Cooper of Pawlett, Baron Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles) published in 1720, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm), a Rationalist philosopher and mathematician, accepted the Deist conception of God as an intelligent Creator but refused the contention that a god who metes out punishments is evil. A sampling of other Deist writers was available particularly through the German rendering of Leland's work in 1755 and 1756. H.S. Reimarus (Reimarus, Hermann Samuel), author of many philosophical works, maintained in his Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (“Defense for the Rational Adorers of God”) that the human mind by itself without revelation was capable of reaching a perfect religion. Reimarus did not dare to publish the book during his lifetime, but it was published in 1774–78 by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim), one of the great seminal minds in German literature. According to Lessing, common man, uninstructed and unreflecting, will not reach a perfect knowledge of natural religion; he will forget or ignore it. Thus, the several positive religions can help men achieve more complete awareness of the perfect religion than could ever be attained by any individual mind. Lessing's Nathan der Weise (1779; “Nathan the Sage”) was noteworthy for the introduction of the Deist spirit of religion into the drama; in the famous parable of the three rings, the major monotheistic religions were presented as equally true in the eyes of God. Although Lessing's rational Deism was the object of violent attack on the part of Pietist writers and the more mystical thinkers, it influenced such men as Moses Mendelssohn (Mendelssohn, Moses), a German Jewish philosopher who applied Deism to the Jewish faith. Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel), the most important figure in 18th-century German philosophy, stressed the moral element in natural religion; moral principles are not the result of any revelation but originate from the very structure of man's reason. English Deists, however, continued to influence German Deism. Witnesses attest that virtually the whole officer corps of Frederick the Great was infected with Deism and that Collins and Tindal were favourite reading in the army.

      By the end of the 18th century, Deism had become a dominant religious attitude among intellectual and upper class Americans. Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin), the great sage of the Colonies and then of the new republic, summarized in a letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, a personal creed that almost literally reproduced Herbert's five fundamental beliefs. The first three presidents of the United States also held Deistic convictions, as is amply evidenced in their correspondence. “The ten commandments and the sermon on the mount contain my religion,” John Adams (Adams, John) wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1816.

Frank Edward Manuel

Additional Reading

John Leland, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers . . . , 3rd ed., 3 vol. (1754; also 1837 ed.), the first historical account of Deism; Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande, 4 vol. (1921–23), a complete history; Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932; Eng. trans., The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1951), a description of Deism and its philosophical background; Harold G. Nicolson, The Age of Reason (1960), on the nature of 18th-century Rationalism and its connection with Deism; James Collins, God in Modern Philosophy (1959), a full history of Deism, here called “theism,” from Nicolas of Cusa to contemporary theological theories; John Orr, English Deism: Its Roots and Its Fruits (1934); Gotthard V. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus (1841), the first full history after the end of Deism; Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate (1624; Eng. trans. by Meyrick H. Carre, On Truth, 1937), the first English translation of the reputedly “first” classic expression of Deism; Mario M. Rossi, La vita, le opere, i tempi di Edoardo Herbert di Chirbury, 3 vol. (1947), and Alle fonti del deismo e del materialismo moderno (1942), two works that describe Herbert's life and Deistic thought against the background of the history of Deism and the attitude of the church. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2nd ed. with suppl. (1947), the beginning of the Deist's self-criticism; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 3 pt. (1794–1811), the work most influential on the Deism of common people; John S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (1960), on French Deism; Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment (1966); Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793; Eng. trans., Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 1947), the classic work of the last stage of German Deism; G.W.F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. by Thomas M. Knox and Richard Kroner (1948), early writings to show Hegel's indebtedness to Deistic polemics.

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