Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51704-1 - Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism Sarah Mortimer Excerpt More information Introduction On the fertile banks of the river Czarna, in the south of the Polish Commonwealth, lay the town of Rakow. In the early seventeenth century it was a peaceful, idyllic town, filled with craftsmen and workshops and dominated by its flourishing Academy. Its atmosphere of learning and of harmony made such an impression on one visitor that he felt himself ‘transported into another world’. For, as he recalled, all its inhabitants were ‘calm and modest in behaviour, so that you might think them angels, 1 although they were spirited in debate and expert in language’. Yet Rakow was the centre of Socinianism, a theological position perceived as so danger- ous that it could only have been raked out of hell by men intent on blaspheming against God. It was denounced in lurid terms, by Protestants and Catholics alike, and outlawed in almost every country in 2 Europe. From Rakow, the Socinians produced a series of religious and political works which spread across Europe, capturing the attention of scholars, clerics and educated laymen. Few religious groups inspired such extreme reactions, or found such careful readers. The people of this quiet, well-ordered Polish town had a lasting impact in Europe and this book will explore the English reaction to their potent theology. It was widely agreed that the Socinians posed a serious challenge to European religion and society – and yet the nature of the challenge they presented has never been fully explored or explained. The fascination with Socinianism so evident in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has not been shared by modern historians. In so far as Socinianism has been studied at all, it has been from a strongly confessional point of view, by Unitarian historians anxious to understand – and often to reshape – their own theological tradition. But, as I hope to show in this book, Socinianism needs to be integrated into the broader political and religious landscape of 1 Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1946–1952), vol. i,p.361. 2 J. Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, transl. T. Westrow, 2 vols. (London, 1960), vol. i, pp. 421–3. 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51704-1 - Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism Sarah Mortimer Excerpt More information 2 Reason and Religion in the English Revolution the period, for only then can the real importance of Socinian ideas be understood. Scholars from every confessional and political background read and engaged with Socinian writing, developing their own thoughts and programmes in the process. Socinianism was a central part of early modern political and religious debates and, as we shall see, those debates can look very different when the Socinian dimension is restored to them. i At the centre of Socinian theology was a claim about religion, freedom and human nature; and it was this claim which both intrigued and appalled those who encountered Socinian ideas. Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), from whom the Socinians took their name, insisted that religion must be freely chosen if it were to be at all praiseworthy. In Socinus’ mind, moreover, there was a sharp distinction between those actions that were free and those which were natural, and if religion had to be freely chosen then it could not be natural to man in any sense. Human beings had no natural or innate conception of a deity, he argued; their knowledge of God came only from revelation, which they could then choose to accept or reject. In this way Socinus drove a wedge between religion and nature, a wedge which he believed was necessary if religion were to be both free and virtuous. His contemporaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, were horrified by such notions, convinced that human beings were necessarily religious creatures who could not simply opt into (or out of) a relationship with God. To them, religion was part of the universal human condition. The efforts of Socinus to preserve human freedom and to divorce religion from nature worked in two directions. Most strikingly, the Socinians began to develop an argument about individual freedom and responsibility which they cast in terms of legal rights. Socinus came from a legal background, while his later followers had all studied jurisprudence and law at university. They used a language of individual rights to discuss freedom, both human and divine, and they began to reject the mainstream language of natural law. According to the Socinians, Christianity could not be judged by the norms of the natural world or human civil society and, by the same token, it was wrong to assume that what made for a comfortable life here on Earth was necessarily pleasing to God. The Socinians’ arguments helped to separate Christian ethics from natural laws, cutting Christianity free from political power and from the institutions and norms of human social life. Arguing in this way, the Socinians set themselves against a broad tradition of natural law thinking, according to which God endorsed the principles of © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51704-1 - Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism Sarah Mortimer Excerpt More information Introduction 3 human social life. On the other hand, however, Socinus maintained that Christianity was known from a series of religious texts which had to be interpreted using the tools available to humans and part of the natural (non- religious) world. Although Socinus had eschewed all innate knowledge of God, he did think that men were possessed of a critical reasoning faculty which they must use to interpret revelation. Precisely because religion was alien to human nature, men and women had to make sense of it using human ideas and human principles. On these grounds Socinus rejected several orthodox doctrines, including the Trinity. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, it was the Socinians’ radical restatement of the relationship between civil and religious life which caught the attention of English readers. These were years of intense political and religious turmoil, when plans for change were made, defended and discussed in both theological and secular terms. No one identified him or herself as a Socinian, but the writings of this Polish group circulated quite widely and my focus will be upon the role which those writings played in England. To those men who sought to prise apart Christianity and natural law, or church and state, the Socinians provided useful intellectual resources, although the debt was rarely acknowledged. To those who saw human society as fundamentally religious, however, Socinianism was a terrifying heresy whose spectre could be conjured to frighten opponents. Even where the unity of church and state was accepted, Socinianism still caused con- sternation, for it undermined the Trinitarian basis of contemporary Christianity and provided resources for those who sought a broad toleration of religious opinions. This book will examine the ways in which Socinian writing forced Englishmen to reconsider the meaning of Christianity and the role of religion in human social life. And it will demonstrate how important these questions were in the political and religious debates which took place between around 1630 and 1660. In discussing the impact of Socinianism I have sought to bring together politics and religion, political ideas and theology. In seventeenth-century England it was impossible to discuss one without touching upon the other, and my exploration of Socinianism shows some of the many ways in which political and religious arguments went hand in hand. In the context of upheaval and instability which prevailed in the 1640s and 1650s, these arguments often proved important and influential – they can help to explain the course of events on the ground. Indeed, the central characters in this story are men, often clergymen, who were instrumental in shaping the religious and political agenda. By studying their response to – and use of – Socinian writing we can see more clearly the aims and ideals of these © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51704-1 - Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism Sarah Mortimer Excerpt More information 4 Reason and Religion in the English Revolution English writers and political actors. The conflicting agendas of the mid seventeenth century, and their successes and failures, become clearer and more comprehensible when we are sensitive to both their political and their religious elements. The focus of the book is on events in England but the story is necessarily European in scope. It has become commonly accepted that English history cannot be written in isolation from the history of Scotland or Ireland, but the important interconnections between England and continental Europe – especially the United Provinces – are rarely acknowledged. The book includes several brief ventures into the history of the Low Countries, for the English story could not be told without reference to Dutch events. People, books and ideas circulated widely in the seventeenth century, and Latin provided an important lingua franca for the educated men and women of Europe. The Socinians wrote in an elegant but fairly simple Latin, which made their theology accessible across the continent; it also meant that the reaction to Socinianism was international and often co-ordinated across state boundaries. Usually this co-operation was limited by confessional alliances and Protestants responded quite differently from Catholics to the Socinians. Here, my discussion of Catholic engagement with Socinianism is necessarily brief, for in this book I have concentrated on the Protestant world of which England was an important part.

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