Introduction

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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

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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

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

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.

ii Although the Socinians were notorious in their own time, they have been neglected by recent historians and their contribution to civil and moral philosophy has hitherto gone unnoticed. In so far as the Socinians have been studied, it has been in isolation, or at best in conjunction with other specifically religious movements. Yet any treatment of Socinianism must acknowledge the indispensable foundations for study created by the Unitarian scholarship of the first half of the twentieth century, for this scholarship provides a valuable guide to the personal and biographical history of the Socinians and early Unitarians. But the religious and political ideas of the Socinians received rather less effective treatment at the Unitarians’ hands, and this has had unfortunate consequences for later historians. The Socinians’ similarities with the Unitarians of modern times have been exaggerated; and the distinctive conception of religion held by the earlier Socinians has been played down. As a consequence, historians who view Socinianism through the lens of Unitarian scholarship have found it difficult to place this movement within the early modern

Introduction 5 world. As we shall see, it is only by returning to the writings of the Socinians themselves that we can gain a proper understanding of Socinian religion. In the decades before the Second World War, American Unitarians sought to recover their heritage and much of the pioneering work was done by Earl Morse Wilbur at the Pacific Unitarian School. After discov- ering that little was known of the early days of the Unitarian movement, he spent the early 1930s in European archives researching his religious fore- fathers. The result was the two-volume History of Unitarianism: the first part, Socinianism and its Antecedents, appeared in 1945, followed in 1952 by the second, subtitled Transylvania, England and America. These, based on research in Eastern European archives subsequently closed or destroyed, provided excellent narrative foundations for subsequent research. Another American Unitarian scholar, George Williams, continued this project in his Radical Reformation (1962) and through the texts he edited under the title Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers (1957). Both Wilbur and Williams presented an account of Socinianism and Unitarianism which, although based firmly on written evidence, highlighted the continuities within the movement. It was the tolerant, critical mindset of their spiritual ancestors which appealed to them, and which they brought out in their own writing. Indeed, Wilbur understood the Unitarian tradition to be marked by the ‘three principles of freedom, reason and tolerance’, a tradition which had culmi- nated in the rational, ethical religion which they themselves practised and preached. It was not a creedal religion, but one based – as Wilbur saw it – upon an openness to reason and to the development of the human spirit. Only in the nineteenth century, he argued, did Unitarianism mature, when it finally abandoned its thrall to Scripture in favour of free enquiry, with all 3 the doctrinal diversity which that would bring. In a slightly different vein, Williams was primarily concerned to argue that the Radical Reformation could be understood as a coherent movement with a theological core, but 4 for him as for Wilbur, this core was both liberal and reasonable. In England, Herbert John McLachlan, Unitarian minister and historian, also argued in his Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England (1951) that Socinianism should be seen as a spirit of enquiry rather than a dogmatic position. Yet McLachlan placed this Socinian spirit firmly within the Church of England, tracing it to William Chillingworth (1602–1644) and

3 The argument of the works is summarised in Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism vol. i, pp. 4–6 and vol. ii, pp. 486–7. The quotation is taken from page 5. 4 G. H. Williams and A. Mergel (eds.), Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers (London, 1957), pp. 19–38; G. H. Williams, Radical Reformation (London, 1962), pp. xxv–ix.

6 Reason and Religion in the English Revolution John Hales (1584–1656), and arguing for its embodiment at Great Tew, the house of Lord Falkland (1610–1643). Although he gave a brief summary of Socinus’ theology, McLachlan emphasised that none of these Englishmen held strictly Socinian positions on any major doctrine; instead they absorbed the Socinians’ emphasis on tolerance and the importance of a rational reading of the Scriptures if Christian unity were to be maintained. It was the irenic work of Jacob Acontius (1492–1566) rather than the exegetical theology of Socinus which captured the imagination of these Englishmen. For McLachlan it was only after the Civil Wars, when John Biddle (1615–1662) began to translate continental Socinian works, that there was any real engagement with Eastern European theology. This engagement was short-lived, and it was the Anglican clergyman Stephen Nye (1647–1719) who kept alive the flame of rational religion in the late seventeenth century; and as McLachlan pointed 5 out, he preferred to be described as a Christian rather than a Socinian. By the 1960s, then, Socinianism had been characterised by its indifference to doctrinal niceties, its liberalism and criticism. This reading was then adopted by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his articles on the religious origins of 6 the Enlightenment and the Great Tew Circle, as John Robertson has shown. Largely through these articles, Socinianism was brought into the historical mainstream, but there it occupied an anomalous position. For a creedless Socinianism was difficult to integrate into later work on early Stuart religious and political history, dominated as the field was by the clashing theologies of Calvinism and Arminianism. Revisionist readings of consensus prior to the civil wars have proved particularly difficult to sustain where religion is concerned. The dramatic effect of the aggressive, anti-Calvinist agenda propelled by William Laud and supported by Charles I was described by Nicholas Tyacke, who emphasised the role of disputes over predestination. Building on this, Peter Lake showed how Charles’ subjects read this as a descent into Arminianism and popery, and sought accordingly to prevent it. He has provided a wealth of detail establishing that seventeenth-century men and women viewed their world in polarised terms, and has stressed the part which this played in destabilising Charles’ regime. When combined with John Morrill’s account of the civil wars as a conflict driven by religion, the result has been to marginalise the Socinian spirit of Great Tew, and to suggest 7 its fragility in the face of religious and political realities.

5 H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1951), esp. pp. 54–89. 6 J. Robertson, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper on “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment”’, forthcoming in EHR in December 2009. 7 N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987); P. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds.), Conﬂict in Early Stuart

Introduction 7 Socinianism has played little part in any account of the 1640s, but the continuities between the spirit of Great Tew and the latitudinarian divines of the Restoration period has drawn comment. Anglican ministers found in Chillingworth’s magnum opus, the Religion of Protestants (1637), a plausible account of the relationship between reason and religious truth, combined with a call for moral conduct. After the Calvinist excesses of the 1640s, this ethical version of Christianity offered a more promising basis for preaching and for re-establishing the moral and institutional authority of the Church of England. Whereas McLachlan had deliberately sought to connect such sentiments to Socinianism, historians of the Restoration Church have been less willing to do this. Instead, they have tended to assume that the association between ‘reasonableness’ and Socinianism was a polemical construct of the Anglicans’ opponents, and largely dismissed these charges. The actual role which Socinian theology might have played 8 in shaping the thought of these clergy has rarely been discussed. Guided by the Unitarian account of Socinianism, historians have found it difficult to explain why this heterodox movement provoked such a dramatic reaction in the seventeenth century. Moreover, the intense engagement with Socinian writing that is evident in so many scholarly works of the period has largely been overlooked. Only in the cases of John Locke, John Milton and Isaac Newton has any attempt been made to address more closely the nature of their engagement with Socinianism. Here, however, the focus has tended to be on the private, doctrinal writings of these men rather than their more public works or their broader thought. John Marshall has shown that some of Locke’s thoughts about the Trinity might be connected to his reading of Socinian writing, although he has played down Locke’s doubts about this doctrine and it is with McLachlan’s Socinian spirit that he prefers 9 to identify the philosopher. The writing of Milton and Newton has been analysed for traces of Socinian influence, and both have been found to hold Arian rather than Socinian Christologies (that is, they held Christ to be pre- existent but not equal to God). Although Socinian works may have contrib- uted to their beliefs here, little can be said with certainty and Socinianism

England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 72–106; Cust and Hughes, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ’Orthodoxy’, ’Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001); J. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays (London, 1993), esp. p. 47. 8 This is true of J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (London, 1991), pp. 254–7; but cf. N. Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Theology of the Restoration Church’,inAspects of English Protestantism, c.1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 320–39. 9 J. Marshall, ‘Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism”, and Unitarianism’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford, 2000), pp. 111–82; cf. D. Wootton, ‘John Locke – Socinian or Natural Law Theorist?’, in J. Crimmins (ed.), Religion, Secularization and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill (London, 1989).

8 Reason and Religion in the English Revolution remains marginal to our interpretation of the intellectual contributions made 10 by these men. Only when we restore the civil and political dimension to Socinianism itself will we be able to understand fully the impact which Socinianism had upon the European intellectual scene. Complicit in this portrayal of Socinianism as a vague and largely apolitical movement have been historians of political thought, for they have tended to ignore Socinian writing. This is unfortunate because – as this book will demonstrate – Socinian ideas were central to one of the main strands of European thought in this period: the development of a language of natural law and, particularly, natural rights. In the late 1970s, Quentin Skinner portrayed the early modern concept of natural law as a non-confessional, and by implication non-theological, concept, taken up by Protestants, especially the French Huguenots, to market their resistance theories to as wide an audience as possible. To him, this interest in natural law was part of a broader story, in which early modern political philosophy emerged as a subject of its 11 own, independent of theology. More recently, Sachiko Kusukawa has shown that leading Lutheran writers placed ethics and civil philosophy firmly within the sphere of the Law, including the natural law, rather than the Gospel. In this way they opened up space for a discussion of civil and political issues which was independent of theology but quite compatible with the Christian message. This move enabled Protestants to act in the political sphere, to resist their rulers and to establish their own societies and to base their actions upon natural 12 and civil laws rather than the words of Christ. Again, this has suggested that early modern natural law arguments are quite distinct from theological spec- ulation – and that the Socinians can be safely confined to the latter arena. The most exciting challenge to the sixteenth-century concept of natural law came from a new and increasingly influential language of natural rights, as Richard Tuck has argued, but again the theological dimension has been largely ignored. For Tuck, rights had to be understood in contradistinction to laws; they could be assigned to individuals who then possessed ownership

10 Much of the recent Milton scholarship on this question is summarised in M. Lieb, ‘Milton and the Socinian Heresy’,inMilton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. M. Kelley, M. Lieb and J. Shawcross (Pittsburgh, 2003), pp. 234–283; Newton’s alleged similarities with Socinianism have been most energetically investigated by Steven Snobelen; see, for example, his ‘Isaac Newton, Socinianism and “the One Supreme God”’, in M. Mulsow and J. Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Leiden, 2005), pp. 241–98. 11 Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), vol. ii,pp.349–58; these claims form part of the conclusion. 12 S. Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge, 1995).

Introduction 9 and discretion over them. In his Natural Rights Theories (1979) he argued that in the seventeenth century this individualist concept of rights re-surfaced, and it enabled its exponents to provide imaginative solutions to some of the conflicts around them, and particularly to conflicts over property and sover- 13 eignty. Some of these ideas were later developed in his Philosophy and Government,andfleshed out through his description of the ‘new humanism’ of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In this work, Tuck focused upon conformity rather than resistance, suggesting that in the early seventeenth century the prevalence of war and upheaval led men to see the political process as a kind of damage limitation exercise. This was a view of civil life which found the work of Tacitus, the detachment of the Stoics and the criticism of the Sceptics far more congenial than the active republicanism of Cicero. In order to secure basic agreement, certain individuals began to construct a minimalist doctrine of natural law, based upon the universally recognised (subjective) right of self-preservation – the only right able to withstand the arguments of the Sceptics. For Tuck, Thomas Hobbes (1588– 1679)wastheexponentpar excellence of this doctrine, but he also sought to show that Hobbes was building upon the work of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and John Selden (1584–1654). And he emphasised that all these men were chastened by religious conflict; in so far as they were interested in theology it was to diffuse its disruptive potential. Instead, it was to the ancients and to 14 modern natural philosophy that they looked for inspiration. Different geneses for the notion of natural rights have been suggested by Brian Tierney and Annabel Brett, but both have argued that a concept of subjective right, similar to that which Tuck found in Grotius, Selden and Hobbes, can be found in the juridical tradition. Tierney has pointed to the roots of this notion in the canon law of the twelfth century while Brett has also emphasised that this stemmed from a legal rather than a theological tradition. She has shown how the writers of the second Spanish scholastic, in the late sixteenth century, offered sophisticated 15 analyses of subjective iura. They have offered a fuller picture of the language of rights in the period, providing the context for the reception and development of the works of well-known philosophers like Hobbes and Grotius. But the theological roots of this language, especially those laid down in the Protestant world, have not been studied in any detail.

13 R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979). 14 R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), esp. pp. 190–201 and 346–8. 15 B. Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150– 1625 (Atlanta, 1997); A. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge, 1997).

10 Reason and Religion in the English Revolution The Socinians, like the philosophers and jurists described by Tuck and others, developed claims about the rights of individuals using legal language. Moreover, they did so in a way which quite explicitly challenged the vision of natural law to which most of their contemporaries subscribed. Yet they did so because they objected to that vision on theological grounds and because they wanted to advance a very diﬀerent theological agenda. They wanted to preserve space for individual moral responsibility and human freedom, con- cepts which they saw as essential to the Gospel message and which they feared had been lost or obscured during the Reformation. Their arguments were made in works which dealt with theological topics, like the satisfaction of Christ or the doctrine of predestination, but these arguments – as they well knew – had important implications for civil life. And, precisely for this reason, their works were widely read and discussed by jurists and civil philosophers as well as clergymen. Socinian ideas need, therefore, to be seen in the context of this broader early modern discussion about natural laws and natural rights, and about the ethics appropriate to an individual and to a society as a whole. This was a discussion with particular resonance in mid-seventeenth-century England and the fate of Socinian ideas is extremely revealing of the political, religious and intellectual developments at this time, as this book will show.

iii No adequate account exists at present of the Socinians’ ideas and for this reason I will begin by setting out a new interpretation of the Socinians’ thought. In Chapter 1 I outline the Socinians’ distinctive views on freedom, human nature, and the Gospel message. In the half-century after Socinus’ death, the thought of the community developed, and the civil and political implications of these changing ideas will be emphasised as well as their more narrowly religious significance. The Trinity will be discussed quite briefly, for this is a subject to which I shall return in more detail in Chapter 6. Once the intellectual basis to Socinianism has been outlined, it will be possible to show how their ideas engaged and affected English (and some Scottish) readers in the turbulent decades of the mid seventeenth century. Chapter 2 introduces the problem of Socinianism in England and suggests why interest in it was relatively muted until the 1630s. Having seen how destructive both Socinian ideas and charges of Socinianism were in the Netherlands during the 1610s, Englishmen were reluctant to discuss the Polish group at all. Only in the 1630s did some theologians begin to use it as a polemical weapon, hoping to defend their own brand of Reformed theology by presenting it as an antidote to Socinianism. These men were