1. Introduction: What was Latitudinarianism?

1.1 “The meaning of this mystical name”: Preliminaries

William Chillingworth died in turbulent times. Fighting for the royalist cause, he was captured by parliamentary troops in December 1643. And when, after a long illness, he perished in the following month at the age of forty-two, England was on the verge of chaos. The first Civil War was raging with changing fortunes for the contending parties, wreaking havoc on the land and forcing the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria to venture a desperate escape to her native country, France. Meanwhile, Archbishop William Laud was languishing in the Tower, waiting to be executed; by contrast, Thomas Hobbes had preferred the relative security of exile in France, brooding over sketches that were to become his Leviathan. Chillingworth’s biography provides a dense summary of the con- temporary chaos as it reflects an entire nation’s quest for a stable religious and political identity. In 1628, Chillingworth, who was to become one of Protest- antism’s staunchest defenders against the Catholic “threat,” converted to Roman Catholicism, only to return to the Church of England in 1634. On his deathbed, he is said to have expressed sympathy for the goals of the parliamentary cause while condemning the means the Roundheads employed.1 Chillingworth’s untimely death was enthusiastically welcomed by his opponents. The Presbyterian Francis Cheynell, Rector of Petworth, having failed to convince the dying man of the spuriousness of his religious views in the preceding months, covered Chilling- worth’s remains with a copy of the deceased’s Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (1638). This ostensible anecdote2 speaks volumes about the deep- seated religious controversies in a country torn by two devastating Civil Wars, not the least important cause of which were theological issues. However, Chillingworth’s legacy was immune to these ill-natured assaults. Eighteen years after the theologian’s burial, a short treatise for the first time introduced into print a term which was to cause a great stir in English intellectual history. The tract’s title was A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men, written by one S. P., generally recognized as Simon Patrick, then about to become Rector of St Paul’s, Covent Garden. Its design was to throw some light on “the meaning of this mystical name”3 contained in the title.

1 See Stefan Weyer, Die Cambridge Platonists: Religion und Freiheit in England im 17. Jahr- hundert (Frankfurt, Berlin, New York, 1993), p. 24. 2 Reiterated by W. M. Spellman in The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660-1700 (Athens, Georgia, and London, 1993), p. 22. See Robert Todd Carroll, The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, 1635-1699 (The Hague, 1975), p. 5; and Weyer, Die Cambridge Platonists, p. 24. 3 Simon Patrick, A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men (1662), Introduction by T. A. Birrell (Los Angeles, 1963), p. 3. There is no conclusive evidence that Simon Patrick was the

15 1.2 The Origins: The Great Tew Circle and Cambridge Platonism

In order to explain the emergence of these “latitude-men,” scholars have fre- quently turned their attention to Oxfordshire. The late 1630s were a time when the conflict between the liberal Continental theology known as “Arminianism” and the Puritan-Calvinist “establishment orthodoxy,”4 dominant in the Church of England since the late sixteenth century, had reached its peak.5 The Synod of Dort, an assembly of Dutch Protestant clergy in the years 1618-19, defined Calvinist orthodoxy and at the same time identified the putative theological errors of Arminianism, which, however, began to disseminate among English in- tellectuals during the 1620s.6 The impact of Arminianism is evidenced by the rise anonymous “S. P.” and thus author of the pamphlet. John Spurr belongs to the skeptical faction (see “‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” HJ, 31 [1988], 70). Good reasons for accepting Patrick’s authorship are brought forth by Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688-1791 (Oxford, 1986), p. 29, and in T. A. Birrell’s Introduction to his edition of the Brief Account (pp. i- ii). For a useful outline of Patrick’s biography, see J. van den Berg, “Between Platonism and Enlightenment: Simon Patrick (1625-1707) and his Place in the Latitudinarian Movement,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, 68 (1988), 164-68. 4 Nicholas Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London, 1973), p. 120. 5 The senses in which these controversial terms are used here need to be clarified. Tyacke has pointed out how difficult it is to define (English) “Puritanism” adequately, especially as it embraces several aspects of Calvinism (see “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” pp. 121-22). In his excellent study of Puritanism, Spurr “works with a definition of puritanism as that which puritans saw in each other. It recognizes that the term ‘puritan’ was dynamic, changing in response to the world around it and applying to several denominations; but it also claims that the term denotes a cluster of ideas, attitudes and habits, all built upon the experience of justification, election and regeneration, and this in turn differentiates puritans from other groups such as conformists or the Quakers” (English Puritanism, 1603-1689 [Houndmills, London, New York, 1998], pp. 7-8). Another important point is the Puritans’ “attitude to the authority of the Bible as a religious model” (Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” p. 121; see also B. R. White, “The Twilight of Puritanism in the Years before and after 1688,” From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, eds Ole Peter Grell, Jonthan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke [Oxford, 1991], p. 307). Tyacke defines “Arminianism” not merely as the system of the Dutch thinker Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), but as a European phenomenon that “denotes a coherent body of anti-Calvinist religious thought,” being moreover “part of a more widespread philosophical scepticism, engendered by way of reaction to the dogmatic certainties of the sixteenth-century Reformation” (Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640 [Oxford, 1990 (1987)], p. 245). Elsewhere, he states that “the essence of Arminianism was a belief in God’s universal grace and the freewill of all men to obtain salvation” (“Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” p. 119). For a concise account of the formation of Arminius’ thought, see Carl Bangs, “Arminius and the Reformation,” CH, 30 (1961), 155-70. Calvinism is perhaps the least controversial of these terms and is usually defined by reference to its doctrine of predestination (see Spurr, English Puritanism, p. 220; and Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” p. 119). 6 The Synod of Dort passed five doctrines: first, the sinner’s total depravity; second, the un- conditional election of those chosen by God; third, Christ’s atonement is limited to the elect; fourth, divine grace is irresistible; and fifth, the elect persevere in grace (see Spurr, English

16 of Laudianism, a development made possible by the religious politics of James II and Charles I.7 However, the religious allegiances of the English were by no means clearly defined. At this crucial point in English history, Lucius Cary, Earl of Falkland, entertained leading intellectuals of the time at his manor at Great Tew, Chilling- worth among them. At irregular intervals, Falkland was joined by illustrious thinkers such as Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, Henry Hammond, Thomas Hobbes, Abraham Cowley, or Sir Kenelm Digby.8 In their religion, most of these men were attracted to the new “Arminian humanism,” which was thought to offer desirable alternatives to the rigid Calvinism still prevalent among a large number of the clergy and episcopacy.9 Politically, they were essentially conservative and supporters of the Crown.10 It would be a simplification to claim that the ideas bred by all these men were responsible for the emergence of Latitudinarianism, the views of the Great Tew members often differing substantially. A case in point is Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants, the most controversial text to emanate from the group, which has to be regarded as a key text in the development of Latitudinarianism. Indeed, Chillingworth was one of the instigators of a move- ment that was to have an enormous impact within the Anglican Church.11 At the same time, in the person of Thomas Hobbes the circle provided the Latitudin- arians with one of their most formidable opponents. During what was perhaps the darkest period of English history, the 1640s, a handful of eminent scholars emerged at Emmanuel and Christ’s College, Cambridge, whose ideas later on earned them the name of “Cambridge Platon- ists.” These scholars, Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, and Ralph Cudworth, all

Puritanism, p. 221). Tyacke claims that the Arminians’ participation at the Synod was a “farce” since they were immediately accused of heterodoxy, then dismissed, and finally condemned “in absentia” (Anti-Calvinists, p. 95). For the growing acceptance of Arminian principles in England during the 1620s, see Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” p. 119. 7 For James’s changing religious allegiances, guided by raison d’état, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 41, 88, and 104. For Charles’s unwavering anti-Calvinism, see pp. 49, 105, and 114. 8 For the members of the Great Tew Circle, see J. C. Hayward, “New Directions in Studies of the Falkland Circle,” The Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 19. 9 See Thomas H. Robinson, “Lord Clarendon’s Moral Thought,” HLQ, 43 (1980), 37. 10 See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, London, New York, 1981 [1979]), p. 110. 11 See Carroll, Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion, pp. 6 and 12. See also Robinson, “Lord Clarendon’s Moral Thought,” p. 43. M. I. J. Griffin also identifies Chillingworth and the circle at Great Tew as the key to Latitudinarian thought (see Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England [Leiden, New York, Köln, 1992], pp. 89-91). See also Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, pp. 21-22; and Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, 1983), p. 80.

17 fellows of Emmanuel College, and Henry More, fellow of Christ’s,12 were educated in the 1630s and began their publishing careers during the Civil Wars. The experience of militant religious discord inevitably shaped their theology.13 The Cambridge Platonists, and especially Cudworth and More, attracted con- siderable critical attention during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those who apply the generalizing label “scholars” to the group, however, reflect the widespread tendency to regard Cambridge Platonism as a coherent philosophical school, an interpretation that has been challenged in recent years.14 The bound- aries between philosophy and theology are not clearly drawn in these thinkers,15 always excepting Whichcote, who was first and foremost a theologian and a

12 I agree with C. A. Patrides (who includes extracts from their texts in his The Cambridge Platonists, ed. C. A. Patrides [London, 1969]) and Weyer (see Die Cambridge Platonists, p. 9) in accepting only these four thinkers as Cambridge Platonists “proper.” William Cecil de Pauley adds Jeremy Taylor, Nathaniel Culverwell, George Rust, Richard Cumberland (with qualifications) and Edward Stillingfleet (The Candle of the Lord: Studies in the Cambridge Platonists [New York, 1970 (1937)]). G. P. H. Pawson includes Culverwell (The Cambridge Platonists and their Place in Religious Thought [New York, 1974 (1926)]), while Frederick J. Powicke regards Culverwell and Peter Sterry as members of the group (The Cambridge Platonists: A Study [Hildesheim and New York, 1970 (1926)]). Gerald R. Cragg notes the affinities of John Norris, Joseph Glanvill, Sterry, and Cumberland with the group (see his introdution to The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Gerald R. Cragg [Oxford, 1968]). The case against Culverwell as a Platonist is most forcefully made by Robert A. Greene and Hugh McCallum in their Introduction to Culverwell’s Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature. Greene and McCallum exclude Whichcote (Nathaniel Culver- well, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, eds Robert A. Greene and Hugh McCallum [Toronto and Buffalo, 1971]), p. xlviii), as does C. A. Staudenbaur (“Platonism, Theosophy, and Immaterialism: Recent Views of the Cambridge Platonists,” JHI, 35 [1974], 160). For problems of group membership and characterization in general, see A. Rupert Hall, Henry More: Magic, Religion and Experiment (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Oxford, 1990), pp. 58-62. See also Weyer, Die Cambridge Platonists, pp. 9-10. 13 See Meyrick H. Carré, “Ralph Cudworth,” PQ, 32 (1953), 343. See also Aharon Lichtenstein, Henry More: The Rational Theology of a Cambridge Platonist (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962), p. 22: “The Cambridge Platonists stand at a turning point – perhaps the turning point – of English religious life.” Spellman conscientiously works out that Latitudinarian thought in general can only be understood in its totality if we “do full justice to the unique context in which the movement originated.” In addition, we should take into account “the very special challenges facing the Restoration Church after a half century of bitter religious quarrels and flagging spiritual confidence in the face of alternative, and to many, more philosophical and thus real, avenues to truth” (The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, p. 3). 14 See Serge Hutin, Henry More: Essai sur les doctrines théosophiques chez les Platoniciens de Cambridge (Hildesheim, 1966), pp. 15-16; and Hall, Magic, Religion and Experiment, p. 60. Hall, probably accurately, ascribes the origins of this tendency to Ernst Cassirer’s pioneering study Die platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge (Leipzig and Berlin, 1932), translated into English in 1953. See also Weyer, Die Cambridge Platonists, pp. 9-10. 15 Hall rightly asserts that “the Cambridge Platonists ... were not mathematical philosophers of any kind, rather they were above all divines” (Magic, Religion and Experiment, p. 57). However, it is important to emphasize the eminently philosophical character of More’s, Smith’s, and Cudworth’s theologies, constituting as it does the major difference between these men and the Latitudinarians.

18 preacher16 and the most clearly defined Latitudinarian among the Cambridge Platonists. Moreover, these men were academics teaching at Cambridge. Their numerous publications reveal great diversity of interests, and as a result the term is no more than a “label of convenience.”17 Of course, there are certain tendencies all of these men have in common. Theologically, they sympathyized with the liberal views advocated by the Arminian Hugo Grotius, the leading members of Great Tew, and, during the 1650s, by Jeremy Taylor.18 What united the Cam- bridge Platonists in the first place was their hostility towards the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which they thought took to impair the inherently good and just character of the Deity.19 The transition from Cambridge Platonism to Latitudinarianism is not easy to spot. The extent to which the two groups are intertwined, and in which points their views differ, is still a matter of contention. For some, Cambridge Platonism moved “by almost imperceptible degrees into Restoration latitudin- arianism;” for others their “relationship was indeed one of filiation;” and still others claim that they were simply “two generations of latitude-men.”20 All these accounts are agreed in that the Latitudinarians were influenced by the Cambridge Platonists, the latter being the intellectual teachers of the former.21 Yet a closer

16 See Staudenbaur, “Recent Views of the Cambridge Platonists,” p. 60. 17 See Sarah Hutton, “Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the Cambridge Platonists,” British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment: Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. Stuart Brown (London and New York, 1996), V, 23. 18 See Joseph Glanvill, “Anti-Fanatical Religion and Free Philosophy: In a Continuation of the New Atlantis,” Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, with a New Introduction by Richard H. Popkin (New York and London, 1970), pp. 6-7. The essays contained in this volume are paginated individually. 19 See Weyer, Die Cambridge Platonists, p. 10. See also John Passmore, Ralph Cudworth: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1951), p. 11: “It was against Calvinism ... that Cudworth was first led to assert the eternity and immutability of morality.” Cudworth pursued this subject in his B. D. thesis of 1644. Similarly, More was appalled by the doctrine’s import early in his career (see Lichtenstein, The Rational Theology of a Cambridge Platonist, p. 4). For Whichcote’s rejection of predestination, see Hutin, Essai sur les doctrines théosophiques chez les Platoniciens de Cambridge, p. 24. Smith’s attitude towards Calvinism is elucidated in Paul Miles Davenport, Moral Divinity with a Tincture of Christ? An Interpretation of the Theology of Benjamin Whichcote, Founder of Cambridge Platonism (Nijmegen, 1972), p. 59. 20 See Jackson I. Cope, “‘The Cupri-Cosmits’: Glanvill on Latitudinarian Anti-Enthusiasm,” HLQ, 17 (1954), 272; Norman Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660-1768 (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 145-46; and Isabel Rivers, “The Religion of Reason: The Latitude-Men,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780, 2 vols (Cambridge, New York, Sydney, 1991 and 2000), I, 28. With regard to the relationship between Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians, Griffin correctly points out that “we can easily differentiate the two groups, but the fact remains that to seventeenth-century Englishmen they were both ‘Latitudinarians’” (Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, p. 11). 21 Spellman speaks of “intellectual forbears” (The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, p. 2). Irène Simon notes that “Tillotson and Stillingfleet were at Cambridge when Cudworth and

19 study of Cambridge Platonism and Latitudinarianism reveals substantial dis- parities between the groups. With the exception of Whichcote, the Cambridge men were academics. They taught at Cambridge, and the favoured form of pre- senting their ideas were tracts in the philosophy of religion. Such treatises were not read by a multitude of Englishmen, but were accessible only to English and Continental academic societies. On the other hand, the Latitudinarians seldomly ventured into the field of abstract philosophy. Instead, they published uncounted sermons and devotional tracts, reaching a larger and less learned audience with different expectations. There is, then, a difference of temper between Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians. While the Cambridge Platonists were eminently philosophical and metaphysical, frequently mystical, too, the Latitudinarians were sober, pragmatic, and less “ethereal.”22 One should be careful, however, not to use such characterizations evaluatively, for, as will be seen, there were other reasons for the Latitudinarians than mere intellectual inferiority to develop this seemingly frugal theology. Whichcote is the missing link between the Cambridge men and those divines called “Latitudinarians” after the Restoration, being a transitional figure epitomizing the gradual development of, and concentration on, distinctively “Latitudinarian” ideas.23

1.3 “The greatest latitude of goodwill”: The Emergence of Latitudinarianism

It is important to keep in mind that it was the Cambridge Platonists who were called “Latitude-Men” in the first place. G. B., Patrick’s correspondent in the epistolary Brief Account, notes that the Latitude-men “had their rise at Cam- bridge,”24 and Patrick’s treatise itself was published at a time when the men who are nowadays called Latitudinarians had as yet published little or nothing.25

Whichcote taught and preached there” (“Anglican Rationalism in the Seventeenth Century,” Three Restoration Divines: Barrow, South, Tillotson, ed. Irène Simon, 3 vols [Paris, 1967-76], I, 78). Glanvill was also at Cambridge during the 1650s. The only Latitudinarian who was not educated in Cambridge but in Oxford was John Wilkins. 22 I agree with Rupp, for whom the “two groups overlap, but are to be distinguished ... While most Cambridge Platonists were latitudinarian in temper, many even of the first Latitudinarians (Tillotson and Patrick for example) were not Platonists” (Religion in England, p. 30). See W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of Its Literary Aspects (New York, 1962 [1932]), p. 277. Spellman rightly states that the Latitudinarians lacked the “spiritual commitment” discernible in the Cambridge thinkers (The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, p. 2). 23 See Spurr, “‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” p. 73. 24 Brief Account, p. 3. 25 For the association of Latitudinarianism with Cambridge, see John Gascoigne, “Politics, Pa- tronage and Newtonianism: The Cambridge Example,” HJ, 27 (1984), 4-7; and Marjorie H. Nicolson, “Christ’s College and the Latitude-Men,” MP, 27 (1929), 35-53.

20 Significantly, the term was a seventeenth-century invention, in use from the outset of the movement in the 1650s, and not a phrase coined retrospectively at a scholar’s desk. Educated contemporaries would know the term and would be aware of it as a term of opprobrium,28 signifying hypocrisy and political oppor- tunism as well as Arminian heterodoxy and civil disobedience.29 The Restoration became a crucial turning point for Latitudinarianism. In its aftermath, the charge of opportunism waged at the Latitudinarians referred to their unconditional acceptance of the Act of Uniformity (1662), which established the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 as the authoritative doctrinal statements of the Church of England.30 Besides, Latitudinarianism be- came a more urban phenomenon, moving from Cambridge to the pulpits of Lon- don, most significantly St Lawrence Jewry and Lincoln’s Inn.31 This moving away from the secluded atmosphere of Cambridge entailed deeper immersion in the affairs of everyday social and political life.32 Predictably, a pejorative epithet designed to vilify “Latitudinarian” views would only be repulsive to those who ostensibly held them. More, after being

28 Rivers claims that label was not used by the Latitudinarians’ contemporaries (“The Religion of Reason,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 28), but there is evidence that the term was circulating. 29 See Spurr, “‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” p. 63; Weyer, Die Cambridge Platonists, p. 137; Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, pp. 8-9; and Frans de Bruyn, “Latitudinarianism and Its Importance as a Precursor of Sensibility,” JEGP, 80 (1981), 351-52. For a general account of the hostility against the Latitudinarians, see Gascoigne, “Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism,” pp. 4-7. 30 According to Patrick, the Latitude-men “were always looked upon with an evil eye by the successive usurping powers, and the general out-cry was, that the whole University was over-run with Arminianisme, and was full of men of a Prelatical Spirit, that had apostatized to the Onions and Garlic of Egypt, because they were generally ordained by Bishops” (Brief Account, p. 5). Spellman notes that the term was “primarily used during the early years of the Restoration as a reproach against clergymen and university dons who had conformed to the Interregnum government while simultaneously embracing Arminian theological opinions” (The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, pp. 12-13). Spurr interprets the term as “a nonconformist slander against the conformist clergy” (“‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” pp. 76-77). 31 Tillotson, Wilkins, Barrow, and Whichcote were vicars and guest lecturers at St Lawrence Jewry between 1661 and 1683 (with an interruption of seven years during which Whichcote preached at Guildhall Chapel after the flames of the Great Fire of 1666 had devoured the Jewry; see Rivers, “The Religion of Reason,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 31). 32 See Shapiro, “Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, 40 (1968), 32. Wilkins and Tillotson were connected by an intimate tie, Tillotson being Wilkins’s son-in-law (see p. 33). Most of the Latitudinarians also shared an interest in scientific developments (see p. 31; and Rivers, “The Religion of Reason,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 31-32). Another indicator of the close network between Latitudinarians is Tillotson’s editorship of Wilkins’s Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (1675) and Barrow’s Works (1680) (see Rivers, “The Religion of Reason,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 40; and Simon, “Tillotson’s Barrow,” English Studies, 45 [1964], 193-211 and 273-88). For Thomas Firmin’s circle in Lombard Street during the 1670s, frequently visited by several Latitudinarians, see Spellman, “Locke and the Latitudinarian Perspective on Original Sin,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 42 (1988), 218.

21 dubbed a “Latitudinarian” by one of his Continental correspondents, ironically comments on the name:

I am not a Latitudinarian in any sense other than that I harbour the greatest latitude of goodwill towards all men whatever, and do so with a kindly disposition of mind, not only towards our own Reformed, but also towards Pontificals, Jews, Turks, and even pagans. Nonetheless I attack and censure the errors of them all, and not without a certain briskness of mind and discourse, so that stirred from their slumbers they might at last open their eyes and acknowledge the truth.33

There are three major contemporary accounts of the rise of Latitudin- arianism, all published between 1662 and 1676: Patrick’s Brief Account,34 Edward Fowler’s Principles and Practices of Certain Moderate Divines of the Church of England (1670), and Joseph Glanvill’s “Anti-Fanatical Religion and Free Philosophy” (1676). Sometimes Gilbert Burnet’s A Modest and Free Con-ference betwixt a Conformist and a Nonconformist (1669) and his History of his Own Time (published posthumously in 1723 and 1734) are added.35 While Patrick’s

33 The quotation is from an unpublished letter of More’s to Knorr von Rosenroth, quoted in Alan Gabbey, “Cudworth, More and the Mechanical Analogy,” Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640-1700, eds Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), p. 112. The letter was written about 1671. See also The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642-1684, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Revised Edition with an Introduction and New Material, ed. Sarah Hutton (Oxford, 1992), p. 220. In one of Isaac Barrow’s manuscripts the habit of pejorative labelling is chastised in general: “A considerable cause of our divisions hath been the broaching scandalous names, and employing them to blast the reputation of worthy men, bespattering and aspersing them with insinuations, &c, engines devised by spiteful, and applied by simple people. Latitudinarians, Rationalists, and I know not what other names, intended for reproach, although importing better signification than those dull detractors can (it seems) discern” (“Relating to the Dissenters,” The Theological Works of Isaac Barrow, D. D., ed. Alexander Napier, 9 vols [Cambridge, 1859], IX, 584). 34 Richard Kroll emphasizes the difficulties involved in interpreting the Brief Account, its “pe- culiarly negative status as evidence,” and maintains that “the reliability of A Brief Account is heavily qualified by the tract’s polemical motives” (“Introduction,” Philosophy, Science, and Re- ligion in England, eds Kroll, Ashcraft, and Zagorin, pp. 1-2). 35 See Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, p. 33. One might argue that a devotional tract of Patrick’s, The Parable of the Pilgrim (1664), having yet attracted little critical attention, ought to be granted the status of a Latitudinarian apology as well. This treatise could well be subtitled Latitudinarianism a Safe Way to Salvation. In its course, the pilgrim Theophilus, uncertain about the proper way to Jerusalem, finds a reliable guide to salvation whose characterization clearly identifies him as a Latitudinarian. The pilgrim’s spiritual teacher is depicted as “generally decry’d by all parties, as no friend to Truth, because he is no great stickler about the Questions that have vexed our unhappy dayes. Some say that he is indifferent and lukewarm in Religion. Others will have the world believe, that he is only indued with a great measure of Moral Prudence, but hath nothing of the Spirit in him. And there are some who do not stick to brand him with the mark of Heresie, though ... the only reason is, because they imagine he

22 Brief Account refers to the Cambridge Platonists as “Latitude-men,” all later texts imply the group-membership of theologians such as Stillingfleet and Wilkins, Tillotson and Barrow. The number of Latitudinarian apologies is indicative of the growing importance of the term in the contemporary debate. All these accounts take the view that Latitudinarianism was shaped by the religious dogmatism virulent during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum, and that divines who opposed “that hide-bound, strait-lac’d spirit that did then prevail ... were called Latitude- men.”36 Thus, “Latitudinarianism,” more than anything else, was rooted in the res- istance against any domineering religious spirit of the time. The fact that Lati- tudinarians refused to become allied with any specific religious group within the Church of England earned them the reputation of being theological levellers. At the same time, the new label signifies that they were regarded as a faction in its own right, either within or without the Church of England. The Latitudinarians had clear ideas of what was necessary to be a (loyal) member of the Church of England. In order to refute the charge of nourishing heterodox views, they wisely emphasized their own orthodoxy.37 In doing so, they made the best of the notorious vagueness of “orthodoxy” in the Church of Eng- land, whose standards “have always been sufficiently imprecise to permit sub- scription of the Articles of Religion by men who entertained a wide variety of opinions.”38 Had the term already been in use, Patrick, Fowler, and Glanvill might have equated Latitudinarianism with what for them was the proper notion of “Anglicanism.”39 Patrick, for example, is careful to work out that the Latitude- Men were by no means opposed to orthodox Anglican doctrine. They all “make solemn profession of their Orthodox faith,” he claims, and there was not “any Article of Doctrine held forth by the Church, which they can justly be accused to depart from, unlesse absolute reprobation be one, which they do not think them- selves bound to believe.”40 Patrick emphasizes that the Latitudinarians’ attitude doth believe whatsoever he doth not fiercely oppose” (The Parable of the Pilgrim: Written to a Friend [London, 1667 (1664)], pp. 15-16; see also pp. 13-14). Patrick’s entire work of the 1660s seems to be devoted to an explication and vindication of the Latitudinarians’ position against their various enemies. 36 Patrick, Brief Account, p. 5. 37 See Glanvill, “Anti-Fanatical Religion,” Essays on Several Important Subjects, p. 16. See also Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, pp. 36-37. 38 Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, p. 46. See G. A. J. Rogers, “Locke and the Latitude-Men: Ignorance as a Ground of Toleration,” Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, eds Kroll, Ashcraft, and Zagorin, p. 241: “Glanvill, whilst appearing to side so often with the liberal view, uses a liberal argument to justify the imposition of an orthodoxy, but an orthodoxy which might itself change in the light of discussion and debate.” 39 See Melvyn New, “Sterne and Swift: Sermons and Satire,” MLQ, 30 (1969), 200: “The purpose of these divines was not the repudiation of orthodoxy, but its re-establishment after the interregnum.” 40 Brief Account, p. 9. Patrick characterizes the Latitude-men as heartily embracing the Church of England’s liturgy, doctrine, government, and ceremonies (see pp. 5-9). See also Phillip Harth,

23 towards orthodoxy was eminently reasonable. There had never been a phase in ecclesiastical history, he continues, “where that which is most ancient doth not prove the most rational, and the most rational the ancientest; for there is an eternal consanguinity between all verity.”41 The Latitudinarian watchwords of “ortho- doxy,” then, were reason and truth (or, in Glanvill’s terms, “verity”), and their focus was on a proper understanding of tradition, not on tradition’s reform. If this does not seem as precise as it might have been, one has to keep in mind that, indeed, Latitudinarianism was “essentially amorphous”42 in character, marred by a tendency to avoid formulating clear positions on doctrinal matters. Paradoxically, although religious “truth” was what they appealed to they refused to define those positions they regarded as “truths” unequivocally. The explanation is easy: having rebelled against “straitlaced” narrowness, the Latitudinarians were loath to fall prey to a mode of thinking they had broken away from. For John Norris, for instance, “it plainly appears that Religion does not consist in an indivisible point, but has a Latitude, and is capable of more or less.”43 This notion had already been employed by Whichcote, among others, who claims that “among christians at liberty, there was, in matters of indifferent nature, a very great latitude.”44 Glanvill makes a similar point: “Though the way be not broad in respect of Practice, or sensual Indulgence; yet it hath a Latitude in respect of Judgement, and Circumstantial Opinion.”45 There is, however, no self-reflective tendency in the term’s usage. Rather, the term “latitude” is here applied to two different traditions: first, the notion of adiaphora, and second, the distinction between private opinion and public behaviour. The notion of adiaphora sub- divides religious doctrine into indifferents and fundamentals.46 While the latter

Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago and London, 1968), p. 155. Compare Spellman’s view that “Patrick’s identification of the moderate church movement with mid-century Cambridge University” cannot account for the Latitudinarians’ “struggle to position themselves as the legitimate heirs of an orthodox Anglican tradition” (The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, p. 12). 41 Brief Account, pp. 10-11. See Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, p. 12. 42 Rivers, “The Religion of Reason,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 27. 43 John Norris, “A Discourse Concerning Heroic Piety, Wherein Its Notion is Stated and Its Practice Recommended,” A Collection of Miscellanies (1687) (New York and London, 1978), p. 282. Norris sympathized with the Latitudinarians but was not a Latitudinarian himself. 44 Benjamin Whichcote, “The Mediation of Christ, the Grand Institution of God,” The Works (1751), 4 vols (New York and London, 1977), II, 325. 45 Glanvill, “Of Catholick Charity,” Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains (1681) (New York, 1979), p. 125. See Glanvill, “Lux Orientalis,” Two Choice and Useful Treatises (1682) (New York and London, 1978), Preface, sig. B1 r-v. 46 William Gibson shows that the concept of adiaphora is implicit in Benjamin Hoadly’s sermon “On Christian Moderation” (1703) and claims that it “had been developed by Latitudinarians in the seventeenth century” (Benjamin Hoadly: The Enlightenment Prelate, 1676-1761 [Cambridge, 2004], pp. 62-63). Unfortunately, Gibson does not substantiate this assumption. Similarly, Victor Nuovo claims that “a latitudinarian as opposed to an orthodox policy, advocated tolerance of

24 require unconditional subscription, a latitude of thought is granted by the Lati- tudinarians in indifferent mattes, that is, matters that do not bear upon fundamentals of the faith.47 The distinction is found in numerous Latitudinarian tracts, which em- ployed the concept of adiaphora in the service of moderation.48 If there were only a “few, plain, Fundamentals of Faith,”49 a limited set of principles to be ad-hered to by all Christians, that is, the potential for doctrinal logomachy would diminish.50 Considering the great number of religious factions in seventeenth- century England, co-existing in a climate in which “Agreement in Opinions is neither necessary, nor possible,”51 this recourse to adiaphora was a pragmatic, and somewhat desperate, move in order to provide a strategy to strengthen the Anglican community. The notion had been endorsed by Richard Hooker in his monumental Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593-97), and it was one of the topics discussed at the York House Conference held on 11 and 17 February 1626 at Buckingham’s residence, York House in the Strand, which saw the results of the Synod of Dort negotiated between Arminian and Calvinist factions.52 doctrinal differences so long as they did not bear on fundamentals” (“Introduction,” John Locke and Christianity: Contemporary Responses to ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity’, ed. Victor Nuovo [Bristol, 1997], p. xxi). Samuel Clarke provides a useful summary of the Latitudinarian position concerning the difference between fundamentals and indifferents: “About [fundamentals] there can be no controversy; In these there can be no Ignorance, no not among Persons of the meanest Capacity.” Indifferents are of less importance, for “men may differ concerning them with Peace and Charity” (“Of the Fundamentals of Religion,” The Works of Samuel Clarke, D. D. [1738], 4 vols [New York and London, 1978], II, 182). See also Whichcote, “That Those Who are Truly Religious Will be Delivered from All Dangerous Errors about Religion,” Works, II, 1. 47 More expressed this view in his An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness of 1661 (see Rogers, “The Other-Worldly Philosophers and the Real World: The Cambridge Platonists, Theology and Politics,” The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion, eds G. A. J. Rogers, J. M. Vienne, and Y. C. Zarka [Dordrecht, Boston, London, 1997], p. 12). See also Simon Patrick, A Continuation of the Friendly Debate (London, 1669), p. 249: “I judge no man in things indifferent; as you are wont to do.” The Continuation retains the dialogical structure of the Friendly Debate between a Conformist and a Non-Conformist (1669), and Patrick has the Conformist (expressing his own views) accuse the Non-Conformist of uncharitableness. 48 See Glanvill, “Anti-Fanatical Religion,” Essays on Several Important Subjects, pp. 25-26: “The principles which are necessary to Salvation are very few, and very plain, and generally acknowledg’d among Christians … For if the things in which Men differ, be not Religion, be not Faith, and Fundamental ... Peace and Unity would possess the spirits of Men.” 49 Glanvill, “Of Catholick Charity,” Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains, p. 111. 50 According to Tillotson, the vast majority of religious disputes “do not concern the essentials of Christianity, and therefore they are no argument that Christianity is not true, because they bring no suspicion of doubt and uncertainty upon the fundamentals of Christianity, which all agree in, though they differ in other things” (“The Prejudices against Christianity Consider’d,” The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, 2 vols [London, 1728], II, 413). 51 Glanvill, “Of Catholick Charity,” Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains, p. 125. 52 See Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 165-80. For the debate about fundamentals at the Synod, see p. 173.

25 Nevertheless, the tone for the Latitudinarian interpretation of the concept was set by Chillingworth.53 Although he subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1638, Chillingworth did not regard them as universally binding.54 Refusing to provide a catechism of the fundamental doctrines of the Anglican Church, Chillingworth defined fundamentals as all those Christian beliefs bearing on the salvation of Men, maintaining that these are sufficiently elucidated in Scripture.55 This re- jection of coercion in matters of faith was rooted in the opposition to what was taken to be Catholic tyranny over Men’s consciences in general and the doctrine of papal infallibility in particular.56 The overall purpose of reducing Christianity to a few basic principles was to rule out the possibility of religious disputes about doctrinal issues. Its logical culmination was the formulation of the minimal creed, which posited as fundamental only that Jesus was the Messiah, a maxim which was thought to contain all the principal articles of faith. Although the most systematic exposition of this minimal creed is found in Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695),57 several Latitudinarians had preceded Locke.58 As Gilbert

53 H. R. McAdoo stresses the additional influence of liberal Swiss theologians on this point (see The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century [London, 1965] pp. 178-79). 54 See Henry G. van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, 1630-1690 (The Hague, 1963), p. 16. 55 See William Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (Oxford, 1638), pp. 41 and 134-35. See also Carroll, Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion, pp. 10-11. Glanvill offers the Primitive Church as a pattern of simplicity and emphasizes the necessary connection between fundamentals and Man’s “Eternal Interests” (see “Of Catholick Charity,” Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains, pp. 111 and 121; see also “Anti-Fanatical Religion,” Essays on Several Important Subjects, p. 25). Locke also defines fundamentals as “necessary to salvation” (The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures, with a New Introduction by Victor Nuovo [Bristol, 1997], p. 155). See Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, pp. 39-40; and Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, p. 21. However, there is one substantial point in which the Latitudinarians departed from Chillingworth’s teaching on adiaphora: they did not regard fundamentals as part of revealed religion but equated them with natural religion. For Chillingworth’s association of fundamentals with revealed maxims, see Religion of Protestants, pp. 16-17 and 134-35. For the shift in defining fundamentals in post- Restoration England, see Norris’s contention that religion has some universally acknowledged “fundamental and substantial Maxims ... which for their correspondence to our rational Natures are usually distinguish’d by the name of Natural Religion” (“The Christian Law Asserted and Vindicated: or, A General Apology for the Christian Religion, Both as to the Obligativeness and Reasonableness of the Institution,” A Collection of Miscellanies, p. 224). 56 The definitive Latitudinarian statement against infallibility was provided by Barrow in his Trea- tise on the Pope’s Supremacy (1680). 57 See Locke, Reasonableness of Christianity, pp. 17-19. Nuovo rightly states that “it is unlikely, if the fundamental article is taken seriously, that it would consist of this proposition and nothing more” (“Introduction,” John Locke and Christianity, p. xxiv). 58 That is, Barrow and Tillotson. See Barrow, “Of Justifying Faith” and “That Jesus is the True Messias,” Theological Works, ed. Napier, V, 121 and 492. See also Simon, “The Preacher,” Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge, New York, Sydney, 1990), p. 312. For Tillotson, see “The Excellency of the Christian Religion,” Works, I, 48.

26 Burnet pointed out in the Preface added to the third edition of A Discourse of the Pastoral Care (1692), the concept of adiaphora became one of the distinguishing features of the Low Church party with which the Latitudinarians came to be associated.59 Edward Fowler’s Latitudinarian apologia The Principles and Practices of Certain Moderate Divines of the Church of England assigns three reasons to the Latitudinarians’ taciturnity concerning fundamentals: first, the lucidity of Scrip- ture on this point; second, the different requirements of individuals for their sal- vation; and, finally, any Christian’s personal duty to understand and practise the commandments of the Bible.60 It was only later that the silence was broken. In the Preface to his massive True Intellectual Sytem of the Universe (1678), Cudworth enumerates three “Fundamentals or Essentials of True Religion” – the belief in (one) God and His Providence; faith in His goodness and, consequently, in the existence of an eternal and immutable morality; and the conviction that Man is endowed with a free will.61 Glanvill stipulated fundamentals to be “presupposed to the Duties of religion” and as “absolutely necessary to the doing of them.” The three fundamentals in his list are: first, the existence of God; second, that Man is from God; and, finally, the distinction between “Moral, Good, and Evil.”62 Eventually, Clarke was to define fundamentals as “the Principles of the Doctrine of Christ.” According to Clarke, these were four: faith in God, repentance, the “Doctrine of Baptisms and of laying on of hands,” and belief in the doctrine of

For the general tendency in Protestantism towards minimal creeds, see Gerard Reedy, “Inter- preting Tillotson,” HTR, 86 (1993), 91-92. 59 See A Discourse of the Pastoral Care (London, 1713 [1692]), Preface, sigs A5 r and A6 v. The concept of adiaphora informs the entire conception of Burnet’s Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles. It was Burnet’s conviction that diversity of opinion must not destroy communion (see An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England [London, 1700 (1699)], p. vii). See also Martin Greig, “The Reasonableness of Christianity? Gilbert Burnet and the Trinitarian Controversy of the 1690s,” JEH, 44 (1993), 637. According to Richard Nash, “the same impulse that led latitudinarians to favor Toleration and Comprehension of Dissenters led them to sanction differing – even opposing – interpretations of these Articles” (“Benevolent Readers: Burnet’s Exposition and Eighteenth-Century Interpretations of the Thirty-Nine Articles,” ECS, 25 [1992], 354). 60 See The Principles and Practices, of Certain Moderate Divines of the Church of England, Abu- sively Called Latitudinarians (London, 1671 [1670]), pp. 316-17. The supplement “Abusively Called Latitudinarians” was added to this second edition. See Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, pp. 40 and 130-31. 61 The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) (Stuttgart and Bad Canstatt, 1964), Preface, sig. A3 v. Cudworth identified the epistle to the Hebrews as the key text in defining the fun- damentals of the Christian religion, and so did John Smith (see “A Discourse Demonstrating the Immortality of the Soul,” Select Discourses [1660] [New York and London, 1978], p. 62). Smith is at variance with Cudworth as to the second and third fundamentals, which for him are the immortality of the soul and the role of Christ as mediator between God and Man (see John K. Ryan, “John Smith [1616-1652]: Platonist and Mystic,” New Scholasticism, 20 [1946], 6). 62 “The Agreement of Reason and Religion,” Essays on Several Important Subjects, pp. 3-4.

27 futurity.63 One way or another, it seems, the Latitudinarians regarded the fun- damentals of religion as concerned with morality.

1.4 “An image of clouts”: Contemporary Reactions to the Rise of Latitudinarianism

About the time of the Restoration, the reactions to the new religious bugbear of the English were particularly hostile, even if the Latitudinarians were as yet an enigma. After all, Patrick felt, there was much ado about nothing:

For though this name of Latitude-men be daily exagitated amongst us both in Taverns and Pulpits, and very tragical representations made of them, yet we know as little what it means, as you at Oxford do ... A Latitude-man therefore (according to the best definition that I can collect), is an image of clouts that men set up to encounter with for want of a real enemy; it is a convenient name to reproach a man that you owe a spight to; (’tis what you will, and you affix it upon whom you will) ’tis some thing will serve to talke of when all other discourse fails.64

However, if there was nothing to worry about, the question is why the clergymen dubbed “Latitude-Men” felt the need to defend themselves. Not understanding what exactly was laid to their charge, these moderate churchmen were constantly confronted with hostile slander. In 1663, More, then still at Cambridge, reports that

there are some have a very aking tooth against such as they would brand with the nickname of latitudemen. What they mean by the word I know not, but I am confident that they apply it to such persons, as it were the interest both of the King and of the Church if they were multiplyde into hundreds of thousands.65

From now on, the moderate divines had to live with the label. As More’s remark indicates, “although intended as a slur ‘latitudinarian’ was quickly reversed by its victims and worn proudly as a badge of their affiliation.”66 Of course, this does not mean that the hostility disappeared,67 but from the mid-1660s onwards,

63 See “Of the Fundamentals of Religion,” Works, II, 178-81. 64 Brief Account, pp. 4-5. 65 Quoted in Spurr, “‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” p. 63. Being called a “Lati- tudinarian” himself, More implies that as he regarded himself as a staunch Anglican there would be no harm in multiplying the numbers of such “Latitudinarians.” 66 Spurr, “‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” p. 64. 67 Harth argues that the “bitter ‘persecution’ of the Latitudinarians ... declined considerably after 1662, when the Presbyterians and Independents were excluded from the Church of England by the

28 Latitudinarianism was visibly on the rise. In 1669, Samuel Pepys relates that “Dr. Wilkins, my friend, the bishop of Chester ... is a mighty rising man, as being a Latitudinarian.”68 Nevertheless, in the following year, Fowler felt inclined to publish another defence of Latitudinarianism, the term still being depicted as a depreciatory label: “Have you not heard the Cholerick Gentlemen distinguish these persons, by a long Nick-name; which they have taught their tongues to pronounce as roundly, as if it were shorter than it is, by four or five syllables?”69 With Fowler, the contours of “Latitudinarianism” become clearer.70 He was the first to describe the Latitudinarians’ via media, a position that was “a middle one betwixt the Calvinists and Remonstrants.”71 The Latitudinarian out- look became associated with a spirit of compromise between extremes, between Calvinists and Arminians, between sectarianism and atheism, and between Puritanism and Catholicism, that is.72 The moderate divines were thus attempting to reconcile opposing views in order to put an end to the bitter theological debates of the time. A concise account of this tendency towards moderation can be found in Glanvill’s sermon on “Catholick Charity:”

Study the moderate pacifick ways, and principles, and run not in extremes: both Truth, and Love are in the middle; Extremes are dangerous. After all the swag- gering, and confidence of Disputers, there will be uncertainty in lesser matters: and when we travel in uncertain Roads, ’tis best to choose the Middle ... He that is extreme in his Principles, must needs be narrow in his Affections: whereas he that stands on the middle path, may extend the arms of his Charity to those on both sides:

Act of Uniformity” (Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, p. 156). The term “persecution” (although put in inverted commas by Harth) seems too strong in this context: the Latitudinarians were never persecuted for their religious views. 68 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1970- 83), IX, 485. 69 Principles and Practices, p. 9. 70 New states that Fowler was “the first to give substantial definition to Latitudinarianism” (The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Notes, ed. Melvyn New [Gainesville, 1996], p. 29). 71 See Principles and Practices, pp. 228-30. See also Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, p. 156; and John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols (Heidelberg, 1966 [1874]), II, 43: “This medium theology appeared to Fowler to present all the advantages of Calvinism, without any of the disadvantages of Arminianism.” The Dutch Arminians were also called “Remonstrants.” 72 Between Calvinists and Arminians, the Latitudinarians “preserved a belief in election while re- jecting the notion of reprobation. In terms of this compromise, all men are offered the possibility of that salvation of which some are assured by election” (Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, p. 156). For More, absolute reprobation was a “Black Doctrine” (see Basil Willey, The English Moralists [New York, 1964], p. 185). For their “modus vivendi between the extremes of sectarian controversy on the one hand and the dangers of atheism on the other,” see Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 1962), p. 80.

29 It is indeed very natural to most, to run into extremes: and when men are faln Out with a Practice, or Opinion, they think they can never remove to too great a distance from it ... Every Truth is near an Errour; for it lies between two Falshoods ... So that the best way to avoid the Danger is to steer the middle Course; in which we may be sure there is Charity and Peace, and, very probably, Truth in their Company.73

Glanvill’s comments show that the Latitudinarian via media intended above all to avoid dogmatic statements.74 Paradoxically, these pacifist endeavours occasioned attacks from those factions the Latitudinarians were trying to reconcile. In fact, their all-embracing theology accounts for the very charges of amorphousness and opportunism they were confronted with. The classic definition of the Anglican via media concentrates on its pain- staking avoidance of “Puritan enthusiasm” and reprobatarianism on the one hand and “Catholic superstition” on the other.75 After the Restoration, the Latitudin- arians were in a position not unlike that of Hooker when he wrote the Lawes. The political and ecclesiastical chaos of the preceding decades was largely attri-buted to Puritan enthusiasm, whereas after the Restoration Catholic apologetics received increasing attention in Anglican polemics.76 In his sermon on the “Malignity of Popery,” Whichcote accuses the Catholics of imposing “upon our belief, things contrary to reason; self-inconsistent and incongruous.”77 Elsewhere, he aligns Catholics with atheists, and his verdict on the Puritan Anabaptists is not less severe.78 In the tradition of Hooker, reason was the weapon pointed at the enemy in order to reveal his theological heresies. This emphasis on reason became the major weapon in the campaign against post-Restoration enthusiasm.79 The Latitudinarian struggle against enthu-

73 Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains, p. 119. 74 See Chapter 2.1.1 below. 75 Ludwig Borinski describes the Anglican via media as follows: “Theologisch ist man gegen die Puritaner, die nur Gnade und Inspiration gelten lassen, und das nennt man „Schwärmerei“ (‘enthusiasm’). Politisch ist man gegen den Papst, dem man dazu die Verderbnis der Kirche durch Bilderdienst und abergläubische Praktiken vorwirft (‘superstition’)” (Der englische Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts [Frankfurt, 1968], p. 72). 76 See Cope, “Joseph Glanvill, Anglican Apologist: Old Ideas and New Style in the Restoration,” PMLA, 69 (1954), 224-25. 77 Works, I, 169. 78 See “Preached before the Honourable House of Commons, Feb 1673,” Works, I, 143. Maynard Mack points out that for Tillotson the line between the Pope and antichrist was a thin one (Alexander Pope: A Life [New Haven, London, New York, 1985], p. 9). For the Anabaptists, see Whichcote, “That Those Who are Truly Religious Will be Delivered from All Dangerous Errors about Religion,” Works, II, 7. 79 Cope speaks of a “strong current of Restoration revolt against the excesses of enthusiasm” (“Joseph Glanvill,” pp. 248-49). For excellent surveys of enthusiasm in the seventeenth century, see the work of Michael Heyd: “The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century: Towards an Integrative Approach,” JMH, 53 (1981), 258-80; and ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique

30 siasm stands for “the anxiety of almost an entire generation to distance itself from what was regarded as the irrationalism of the Puritan Revolution.”80 Remarkably, it was Hobbes, usually a favourite bogeyman of the times, whose equation of enthusiasm with madness became one of the commonplaces of Anglican po- lemics.81 More, for one, utilized this argument in his controversy with Thomas Vaughan.82 Another famous example in which Puritanism is identified with zealotry is of course Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704),83 which, in the climax of the “Digression on Madness,” draws liberally on earlier attacks against any form of religious irrationality, such as this one from Glanvill:

There are no conceits in Bedlam more wild and extravagant, than many about Religion, which have been believ’d firmly, and zealously promoted, and fiercely contented for, even to Blood and Desolation, by mighty Nations, and whole Empires ... in matters of Religion they are afraid to use their Reasons against those Follies which are taught to be Divine Dictates, above all humane Intellect, and not to be tryed or examined by it. Upon which accounts it hath been, that Mankind hath been more extravagantly mad in many Tenents about Religion, than in any thing else whatsoever: For in other things the use of Reason is permitted, but in Religion it hath been almost Universally denyed.84

Predictably, Locke had his share in this controversy, appending a chapter “On Enthusiasm” to the fourth edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, New York, Köln, 1995). 80 John Spurr, “‘Rational Religion’ in Restoration England,” JHI, 49 (1988), 564. The cause of this anxiety is to be found in the “Protestant reformation’s deep-rooted suspicion of human reason and its works” ever-present during the Interregnum: “Reason had been stigmatized as the ‘wisdom of the world,’ as ‘carnal reasoning’ and, most harmful of all, as the enemy of faith” (p. 564). 81 Hobbes speaks of “the insignificant speeches of madmen, supposed to be possessed with a divine spirit, which possession they called enthusiasm” (Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin [Oxford and New York, 1996], Part I, Chapter XII, § 19, p. 77). See George Williamson, “The Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm,” SP, 30 (1933), 582. 82 For the More-Vaughan controversy, to which More’s Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656) was the most significant contribution, see Frederick B. Burnham, “The More-Vaughan Controversy: The Revolt against Philosophical Enthusiasm,” JHI, 35 (1974), 33-49; and Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of ‘A Tale of a Tub’ (Chicago, 1961), Chapter 3. 83 It goes without saying that Swift was not a Latitudinarian. But Harth argues convincingly that his via media in the Tale stands in the tradition of the “Anglican Rationalists” (Harth’s term for both Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians, see Swift and Anglican Rationalism, passim). For Swift’s place in a long tradition of satire of Puritanism, see C. M. Webster, “Swift’s Tale of a Tub Compared with Earlier Satires of the Puritans,” PMLA, 47 (1932), 171-78; “Swift and Some Earlier Satirists of Puritan Enthusiasm,” PMLA, 48 (1933), 1141-53; and “The Satiric Background of the Attack on the Puritans in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub,” PMLA, 50 (1935), 210-23. 84 “Catholick Charity,” Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains, pp. 130-31. For Glanvill’s views on enthusiasm, see Cope, “‘The Cupri-Cosmits’,” pp. 270-71.

31 (1690). In his attempt to prove that reason alone can account for divine revelation, Locke depicts enthusiasm as the greatest obstacle: “Which laying by Reason would set up Revelation without it. Whereby in effect it takes away both Reason and Revelation, and substitutes in the room of it, the underground Fancies of a Man’s own Brain.”85 Locke’s attitude comes close to that of the Latitudinarians as summarized in one of Whichcote’s aphorisms: “Enthusiasm is the Confounder, both of Reason and Religion; therefore nothing is more necessary to the Interest of Religion, than the prevention of Enthusiasm.”86 Unsurprisingly, those branded as Puritan “zealots” by the Latitudinarians retaliated. It was the religious bestseller of the seventeenth century, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the first part of which was designed as a refutation of Latitudinarian principles, which set the tone for these counter- attacks.87 Bunyan, however, was less interested in the relationship between reason and revelation than in the problem of faith and works. This debate is, of course, as old as Christianity, but it flared up with particular violence in the seventeenth century.88 At stake are St Paul’s and St James’ accounts of the respective merits of faith and works in justification and thus in salvation.89 Bunyan’s exegesis

85 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1979 [1975]), Book IV, Chapter XIX, § 3, p. 698. Quotations are from this edition. 86 Quoted in New, “Benjamin Whichcote’s Aphorisms and the Importance of Latitudinarianism,” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 4 (1998), 93. 87 See Rivers, “Grace, Holiness, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Bunyan and Restoration Latitudin- arianism,” John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford, 1988), pp. 45-69. 88 The first to throw down the gauntlet in this scholarly war was Martin C. Battestin, who posits that the “rational divines stood staunchly with St. James against St. Paul” (The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of ‘Joseph Andrews’ [Middletown, Connecticut, 1959], p. 18). According to Rupp, Clarke “comes down heavily on the side of St James” (Religion in England, p. 251), too. These views are shared by Gerald R. Cragg, Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1964), p. 59. Later on, the issue saw Donald Greene (“Latitudinarianism and Sensibility: The Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’ Reconsidered,” MP, 75 [1977], 159-83; and “How ‘Degraded’ Was Eighteenth-Century Anglicanism?” ECS, 24 [1990], 93-108) at intellectual fisticuffs with Gregory F. Scholtz (“Anglicanism in the Age of Johnson: The Doctrine of Conditional Salvation,” ECS, 22 [1988-89], 182-207; “Reply to Donald Greene,” ECS, 24 [1990], 109-11; and “Sola Fide? Samuel Johnson and the Augustinian Doctrine of Salvation,” PQ, 72 [1993], 185-212). Chester Chapin figured as referee (“The Inseparability of Faith and Works in Eighteenth-Century Anglican Thought: Reflections on a Recent Debate,” Age of Johnson, 6 [1994], 283-319). For an interpretation of the Latitudinarian position, see Chapter 2.3.4 below. 89 See Romans 3:28: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law,” and James 2:24: “Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” For an excellent account of the debate from the Reformation onwards into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Alan C. Clifford, Atonement and Justification - English Evangelical Theology, 1640-1700: An Evaluation (Oxford, 1990), Chapters 12 and 13. Clifford shows that the exegetical solutions offered to solve the Paul-James “riddle” were manifold. The major mistake of many students of literature is to think in neat categories concerning the different doctrines of justification. They tend to imply that there were merely Antinomians, Pelagians, and a position in between. However, there is a great number of gradations, according to the emphasis put on terms

32 subscribes to St Paul, being a monument of the belief in justification by faith alone.90 In the Pilgrim’s Progress, Latitudinarianism is represented by Mr Worldly-Wiseman, who prefers the less fatiguing way to the town Morality, leading Christian off the path laid out for him by Evangelist. But Wiseman’s counsel leads into desolation and misery, and Evangelist has to intervene in order to prove that “the just shall live by faith.”91 The allegorical message is obvious: a moral life alone is not meritorious.92 The gist of Bunyan’s argumentation is that the Latitudinarians made salvation an all too easy task, depending on a few good deeds opening the gates of heaven. Bunyan rejects the proposition that good works effectively promote temporal as well as everlasting happiness, a view he ascribes to the Latitudinarians. Instead, Bunyan endorses the Calvinist view that the road to salvation is “likely to bring suffering; the religious man will more often go in rags than in silver slippers.”93 The Latitudinarians fared only little better at the hands of the censorious Samuel Butler, whose derisive description of “A Latitudinarian” in his Characters renders the moderate churchman “but a Kind of modest Ranter.”94 In Butler’s view, a Latitudinarian makes his own standard mandatory for the Church of England. Moreover, he blurs the demands of the Act of Uniformity, and, as in Bunyan, he attempts to abate the rigour of the Anglican doctrine of salvation.95 such as “merit” or “justification.” Scholtz, for example, thinks that for Augustinians faith is “devoid of moral content ... a channel of grace merely” (“Reply to Donald Greene,” p. 110), whereas Clifford shows that, according to Augustine, “faith and good works have a combined role in the process of justification and the obtaining of salvation” (Atonement and Justification, p. 222). Greene simplifies Anglican doctrine when he says that “it is faith that saves; the possession of saving faith inevitably results in the performance of good works; the absence of good works is proof of the absence of saving faith; yet the mere fact of ‘good’ works, mechanically performed, is no proof of its presence” (“Latitudinarianism and Sensibility,” p. 167). Greene, though rejecting labels himself, adopts the narrow label “Augustinian” for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglicanism (expanding it to the literature of the period). But thinking in neatly opposed categories is not adequate, especially in the case of the Latitudinarians. The views within the Anglican Church were diverse and evade labelling under a single term. The Latitudinarians were trying to reconcile these views. 90 See Greene, “How ‘Degraded’ Was Eighteenth-Century Anglicanism?” p. 105. Spurr remarks that Bunyan regarded “those who chose to repudiate puritan soteriology ... guilty of betraying the protestant tradition within which they had been nurtured” (“‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” p. 76). 91 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford, 1984), p. 18. 92 Ignorance displays the same “confidence in works” (see Rivers, “Bunyan and Restoration Latitudinarianism,” pp. 64-67). 93 Rivers, “Bunyan and Restoration Latitudinarianism,” p. 69. For Bunyan, Christianity was not plain and easy, but rather a complicated state of affairs. See N. H. Keeble’s Introduction to the Pilgrim’s Progress, p. xxiii: “Bunyan read the Bible, not, like Archbishop Tillotson, as an eminently reasonable and lucid handbook of ethics, but as ‘some curious riddles of secrets.’” 94 Characters, ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland and London, 1970), p. 118. However, the Char- acters were printed as late as 1759. 95 See “A Latitudinarian,” Characters, pp. 118-19.

33 The first literary use of “Latitudinarianism” occurs in William Wycherley’s Plain Dealer of 1676. Like Bunyan and Butler before him, Wycherley focuses on the charge of religious opportunism. He has Manly say to Freeman: “Why, thou art a Latitudinarian in Friendship ... therefore hast no Friendship; for Ceremony, and great Professing, renders Friendship as much suspected, as it does Religion.”96 This echoes the usual repertoire, already refuted by Patrick and Fowler. Indeed, there seems to have been a consensus among critics of Latitudinarianism as to what their opponents stood for. The term became more and more invested with a stable meaning. In the 1680s, John Dryden joined the theological debate.97 His first poem to explore religious issues was Religio Laici of 1682,98 which was long taken to be an expression of Dryden’s fideism, but also has recourse to many Latitudin- arian tenets.99 The poem, while defending Anglicanism against Deist, Catholic, and Dissenting arguments, opts for the Latitudinarian via media (“waving each Extreme”)100 in multifarious ways, “urging the authority of Scripture, reason, and tradition harmoniously combined.”101 In doing so, Dryden recommends the Lati- tudinarian view of religion: “The things we must believe, are few, and plain.”102 and he likewise adopts Latitudinarian arguments in order to moderate theological extremes, ultimately aiming at desiccating the sources of political extremism.103 Dryden’s argument reflects the semantic shift in “Latitudinarianism” gradually taking place during the 1680s. The term took on a political significance as the Latitudinarians were now as notorious for their political latitude as they had once been for their religious opportunism, being “able conscientiously to accept and

96 The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford, 1979), pp. 384-85. This is not to say that Wycherley endorsed Manly’s view. 97 His contributions, together with his conversion to Catholicism in 1685, have puzzled critics ever since. 98 Donald R. Benson calls the poem “the most durable Protestant polemic of the age” (“Who ‘Bred’ Religio Laici?” JEGP, 65 [1966], 238). 99 The view that Dryden was a fideist goes back to Louis I. Bredvold’s The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor, 1934). The Anglicanism of Religio Laici has been convincingly empha- sized by Elias J. Chiasson, “Dryden’s Apparent Scepticism in Religio Laici,” HTR, 54 (1961), 207-21; Thomas H. Fujimura, “Dryden’s Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem,” PMLA, 76 (1961), 205-17; and in Harth’s Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, Chapter 5. 100 “Religio Laici,” The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London, New York, Toronto, 1962), l. 427, p. 293. 101 Benson, “Theology and Politics in Dryden’s Conversion,” SEL, 4 (1964), 401. 102 “Religio Laici,” Poems and Fables, ed. Kinsley, l. 432, p. 293. 103 Benson shows that Dryden’s intentions were political rather than religious. Dryden, fulfilling his duty as poet laureate, attempted “to destroy the religious foundation of political extremism” (“Theology and Politics in Dryden’s Conversion,” p. 396). See “Religio Laici,” Poems and Fables, ed. Kinsley, ll. 445-49, p. 293: “And, after hearing what our Church can say, / If still our Reason runs another way, / That private Reason ’tis more Just to curb, / Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb.”

34 support the Revolution under William III and loyally to serve both Mary and William, to the fury of their opponents.”104 This is of what Dryden accuses the Latitudinarians in The Hind and the Panther, published only five years after Religio Laici, during James II’s reign. Dryden’s intention in this poem was to reconcile Anglican and Catholic political interests, while theologically arguing in defence of Catholic doctrine. The third part of the poem, recommending a political alliance between the Church and the Crown against the Protestant Whigs and Dissenters, contains a venomous attack on Latitudinarian subversiveness.105 Dryden shows himself convinced that the Latitudinarians are dangerous for the national order:

Your sons of Latitude that court your grace, Though most resembling you in form and face, Are far the worst of your pretended race ... Their malice too a sore suspicion brings; For though they dare not bark, they snarl at kings.106

The laureate’s attack implied that Latitudinarianism had become a force to be reckoned with, endowed with a power to be ascribed to increasing Latitudinarian influence within the Church of England. In 1689, the publication of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration marked yet another climax in the reception of Latitudinarian thought in late seventeenth- century England. Locke insists that “no man by nature is bound unto any particular church or sect, but every one joins himself voluntarily to that society in which he believes he has found that profession and worship which is truly acceptable to God.” In such a pacifist view, toleration becomes “the chief char- acteristical mark of the true church.”107 Consequently, irenicism soon came to be regarded as a distinguishing feature of Latitudinarianism, as, for example, in Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696).108 This plea for toleration, and,

104 Rupp, Religion in England, p. 33. 105 Latitudinarianism and Whiggism (that is, anti-Royalism) were supposed to go hand in hand. 106 “The Hind and the Panther,” Poems and Fables, ed. Kinsley, Part III, ll. 160-72, p. 392. These lines bear out Benson’s observation that Dryden’s strategy in order to prove their subversiveness was to align the Latitudinarians with the Presbyterians. Dryden’s sudden scorn for the Latitudin- arians can partly be explained by reference to his controversy with the Latitudinarian contro- versialist Edward Stillingfleet (who was also involved in arguments with Locke and the Deists). For an account of Dryden’s treatment of the Latitudinarians in the Stillingfleet controversy and in The Hind and the Panther, see Benson, “Theology and Politics in Dryden’s Conversion,” pp. 403- 9. 107 ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration’ in Focus, eds John Horton and Susan Mendus (London and New York, 1991), pp. 20 and 14. 108 See John Marshall, “The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men 1660-1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and ‘Hobbism,’” JEH, 36 (1985), 407. According to Cope, “the ‘latitudinarian’ divines” were

35 by implication, for peace and stability, was largely a response to the religious persecutions before and during the Interregnum. This is why Whichcote would say:

Everie Christian must think and beleeve ... as hee findes cause ... I dare not blas- pheme free and noble spirits in religion, who search after truth with indifference and ingenuity: lest in so doing I should degenerate into a spirit of Persecution, in the reallitie of the thing; though in another guise: For a mistaken spirit conceit itt self to bee acted by the zeal of God.109

Religious persecution was widely regarded as an offshoot of enthusiasm. By contrast, the basis for toleration was natural law, implying that it extended to- wards all mankind. However, toleration had its limits for the Latitudinarians. As a political maxim, or “an axiom of good statesmanship,” it “must not be pushed to extremes; neither must it be infringed. Persecution is an affront to reason and good government.”110 Even toleration required moderation. Indeed, whenever the call for toleration was heard in any Latitudinarian text, several restrictions as to whom toleration should not extend were appended. Thus, Catholics, atheists, and those Dissenters who would not be convinced of the truths they were to believe had to feel the rigour of the law.111 The ostensible pertinence of Tillotson’s remarks on the antichristian practices of the “popish lot” was no doubt conducive to the

“credited with providing the central force in the movement toward toleration which came from within the Restoration Church of England” (“‘The Cupri-Cosmits’,” p. 270; see New, “Swift and Sterne,” p. 200). 109 Quoted in Patrides, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, p. 40. See Fuji- mura, “Dryden’s Religio Laici,” p. 217; and Ronald R. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1954), p. 5. 110 Cragg, Reason and Authority, pp. 198-99. For toleration as Natural Law, see also Patrides, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, p. 40. 111 Richard Ashcraft argues “that the latitudinarians did not always or necessarily appear to the dissenters as the tolerant moderate representatives of sweetness and light they have become through the laying on of hands of later historians.” Ashcraft sees in the Latitudinarians “the acceptable face of the persecution of religious dissent” (“Latitudinarianism and Toleration: His- torical Myth Versus Political History,” Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, eds Kroll, Ashcraft, and Zagorin, pp. 159 and 155). However, Ashcraft’s thesis is merely an extreme view. The traditional notion that the Latitudinarians were champions of toleration had been questioned long before. Compare Cope’s comment on “the firmly dogmatic confidence which was the para- doxical root of so many Anglican pleas for ‘toleration’ in the Restoration” (“Joseph Glanvill,” p. 238). Stromberg points out that the hopes of Protestant unity were based not only on toleration, but also on “a united front against Rome” (Religious Liberalism, p. 5). Spurr, prefiguring Ashcraft’s argument, rightly claims that these calls for toleration should not be taken in too broad a sense (see “‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” p. 75). Spurr downgrades the role of Latitudi- narianism in the movement towards toleration. The call for toleration, as he points out (pp. 77-78), was not unique in Latitudinarian thought.

36 frenzied shenanigans of the Popish Plot. Glanvill’s cautionary remark that “the way be not broad in respect of Practice, or sensual Indulgence”112 implies the limits of toleration. The Latitudinarians were walking a thin line, then, inasmuch as they held that private opinions needed to be indulged as long as they did not manifest themselves in action. In one’s own closet, everybody were free to think, but stepping out of doors their freedom to act was limited. Hobbes had already made this point in the Leviathan, and this affinity between Latitudinarian and Hobbist thought was noted by Nonconformists.113 Although the restriction of pub- lic action clearly aimed at curbing the influence of Nonconformist preachers re- garded as “enthusiasts,”114 the contradiction this position involved is plain to see: while the Latitudinarians opposed rigid religious institutions, they at the same time were a part of, and subscribed to, the articles of faith of an institution that proposed a theological system excluding those opposing the system. Driven to its logical conclusion, the contention that faith is a private matter makes all forms of church government redundant; there is no need for institutional co-ordination regulating the faith of individuals.115 Nevertheless, the Latitudinarians insisted on the need for religious toleration within the boundaries they were drawing in order to achieve their objectives. For example, Benjamin Hoadly, the most important Latitudinarian divine of the eighteenth century, posited:

If there be persons who will be persuaded by no arguments that a compliance with these terms is ... lawful, I confess it is my opinion that, whilst they are thus per- suaded, it is as much their duty to separate from us, as it is our duty to separate from the Church of Rome. For they as much as we are obliged not to do what they judge

112 “Of Catholick Charity,” Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains, p. 125. 113 See Ashcraft, “Latitudinarianism and Toleration,” p. 164. Marshall has pointed out “that Hobbes and the Latitudinarians shared a common need: to curb the unruly nature of ‘conscience’” (“The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men,” p. 409). 114 See Marshall, “The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-Men,” p. 425: “Like Hobbes, Tillotson abhorred the anarchy of private religious inspiration and its political consequences.” 115 Ashcraft succinctly summarizes the Nonconformist reservations against the Latitudinarian position: “We do not need the latitudinarians to preach that we have a liberty of conscience, dissenters declared, if all they mean by that phrase is that we have a freedom to believe whatever we want so long as we do not act upon such beliefs by preaching or publishing them, or by expressing them through church services, since no civil magistrate or ecclesiastical authority can command an indivdual’s consciousness” (“Latitudinarianism and Toleration,” p. 165). Glanvill seems to have been aware of the Latitudinarians’ intellectual acrobatics when “they modestly asserted the Liberty of Judgment, and bounded it with so much Caution, that no Prejudice could arise to Legal Establishments from that freedom” (“Anti-Fanatical Religion,” Essays on Several Important Subjects, p. 12).

37 to be unlawful; and they as much as we are obliged to assemble themselves together for the worship of God and the enjoyment of His ordinances.116

On their quest for the restoration of peace in English religious and poli- tical life, the Latitudinarians had to overcome many obstacles. But at the end of the seventeenth century, Latitudinarianism had managed the transition from re- jected faction to leading current within the Anglican Church.117 Latitudinarians held many of the most important posts, with Burnet becoming Bishop of Salisbury in 1689, Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, Patrick, Bishop of Chichester, and Tillotson accepting the Archbishopric of Canterbury in 1691. In 1699, Burnet published his Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles118 which, being mandatory reading in the process of ordination, became a major source for the dissemination of Latitudinarian ideas in the eighteenth century.119 The design of Burnet’s Exposition breathes the typical Latitudinarian temper:

Thus I have set down the different opinions in this point with that true indifference that I intend to observe on such other occasions, and which becomes one who under- takes to explain the doctrines of the church, and not his own ... In which one great and constant rule to be observed is, to represent men’s opinions candidly, and judge as favorably both of them and their opinions as may be: to bear with one another,

116 From Hoadly’s The Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England, quoted in Norman Sykes, “Benjamin Hoadly,” The Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers of the Augustan Age, ed. F. J. C. Hearnshaw (London, 1967), p. 125. 117 See Rivers, “The Religion of Reason,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 33: “In the reign of William III the latitudinarians became the most powerful group in the Church.” However, they were not the majority party (see Rivers, “The Religion of Reason,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 26). 118 For Greene, the Latitudinarians’ subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles proves their uncon- ditional Augustinianism (“How ‘Degraded’ Was Eighteenth-Century Anglicanism?” pp. 98-100). His point that the Thirty-Nine Articles were not reinterpreted or rejected in the eighteenth century and that “What these Articles say seems clear enough” (p. 100) is an astonishing one to be made by a philologist and represents the very doctrinal approach the Latitudinarians were attempting to avoid. Nash challenges Greene’s surprisingly naive thesis that the Articles were “unambiguously capable of only one interpretation” (“Benevolent Readers,” p. 354). Examining Burnet’s Expo- sition, Nash shows that “these articles were [emphasis added] reinterpreted in the Anglican Church in the eighteenth century” (p. 354), for example, by Clarke in his Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712). New has likewise alerted critics to the failure of “citing the Thirty-Nine Articles as if they were dogmas” (“Benjamin Whichcote’s Aphorisms,” p. 99). 119 See Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, p. 161. See also James Sutherland, “Robert South,” REL, 1 (1960), 5. However, the publication of the Exposition involved Burnet in serious trouble. Francis Atterbury, one of the most formidable adversaries of Latitudinarianism in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, seems to have shared Greene’s unequivocal interpretation of the Articles and therefore branded Burnet a heretic for the views expounded in the Exposition, aligning him with Deists and Socinians (see Martin Greig, “Heresy Hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the Convocation Controversy of 1701,” HJ, 37 [1994], 569 and 584).

38 and not to disturb the peace and union of the church, by insisting too much and too peremptorily upon matters of such doubtful disputation; but willingly to leave them to all that liberty, to which the church has left them, and which she still allows them.120

Thus, the spirit of Latitudinarianism, having become a leading force in the reli- gious and political life of England, was transported into the eighteenth century. Although tangled in a web of inconsistency, the Latitudinarian legacy epitomized the new irenic spirit within the Anglican Church in its plea for toleration in the service of peace.

1.5 Recent Views of Latitudinarianism

Lovejoy once quipped that those who write and talk about “Romanticism” usually have different ideas of what the concept signifies.121 While this observation may apply to numerous labels, it is of special relevance in the case of “Latitudin- arianism.” In fact, there are so many different “Latitudinarianisms” that the term has come to mean virtually nothing or everything, almost everyone feeling called upon to comment on the phenomenon having his own vision of “Latitudin- arianism.”122 The difficulty of coming to an agreement about the tendencies and principles within the group is aggravated by the confusion generated by scholars from different disciplines writing about it with differing aims. Theologians, for example, have been at pains either to praise the Latitudinarians’ achievement or to simply decry it as being responsible for the dark age of the Church of England.123

120 Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, p. 151. 121 See “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” English Romantic Poets: Essays in Criticism, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York and Oxford, 1960), pp. 3-24. The article was first published in 1924. 122 See Kroll, “Introduction,” p. 2. Kroll describes the scholarly discussions about Latitudi- narianism during a conference held at the Clark Library that gave birth to the anthology as follows: “What was interesting ... was the extent to which four days of often intense discussion yielded surprisingly little substantive or methodological agreement about the putative object of our pursuit. For this reason alone, the title of our volume purposefully omits reference to ‘latitudinarianism.’ But the essays that follow demand the more general grouping suggested by the present title.” For the problem of defining Latitudinarianism, see also Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, p. 1: “As seventeenth-century labels go, ‘Latitudinarianism’ is as broad and as proble- matic a term to define as ‘Puritanism.’” Sykes equally points towards the difficulty of providing a satisfactory definition: “The term ‘Latitudinarian’ indeed covered a wide diversity of opinion and outlook.” (From Sheldon to Secker, p. 146). As early as 1950, Cragg would maintain that “the boundaries of the group are ill-defined” (From Puritanism to the Age of Reason: A Study of Changes in Religious Thought within the Church of England, 1660 to 1700 [Cambridge, 1950], p. 63). 123 Horton Davies is especially scathing in his disapproval: “Here is an unequalled combination of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, and pelagianism, masquerading as Christianity. It was left to the

39 Historians, by contrast, have attempted to reveal the “movement’s” scientific,124 political,125 and philosophical significance. Eventually, a lively debate among lit- erary scholars, attempting to interpret aspects of Latitudinarian thought in order to prove its continuity in the works of single authors or even entire literary trends, resulted in, or rather degenerated into, a heated debate among laymen about its intricate theological implications.126 Interestingly, there is a conspicuous tendency to ignore developments in other disciplines.127 In addition, Latitudinarianism oc- cured at a time which proves problematic for the historian of ideas, a time, that is, when political and religious allegiances were unstable and intellectual develop- ments unusually rapid. Many of the concepts frequently discussed in connection with Latitudinarianism, such as “toleration” and “reason,” are equally ambivalent and elusive. To make matters even more complicated, there is also a disparity, even if a presumed one, between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latitudin- arianism.128 Finally, the selective and partly arbitrary character of scholarly reading is likely to distort judgements. Barrow’s theological output, for one, comprises nine copious volumes, and no less than 256 of Tillotson’s sermons have come down to us.129 Thus, the multiplicity of perspectives and different methodological approaches as well as the difficulty and scope of the subject have all contributed to the present confusion about what Latitudinarianism was or

Latitudinarians to conceive of a contradiction – Christianity without tears” (Worship and Theology in England [Princeton, 1961], IV, 56). Davies also laments “a grievous lack in the Latitudinarian divines: a due appreciation of the sacramental tradition” (p. 58). 124 Most notably Shapiro, Lotte Mulligan, Alexander and Margaret Jacob, and Michael Hunter. 125 See especially the work of John C. Gascoigne. See also F. G. James, “The Bishops in Politics, 1688-1714,” Conflict in Stuart England: Essays in Honour of Wallace Notestein, eds W. A. Aiken and B. D. Henning (London, 1960), pp. 227-57. 126 Among the “first-generation” scholars are Ronald S. Crane, James A. Work, and Battestin, who attempted to elucidate Latitudinarian elements in the sentimental movement and in Fielding’s novels, respectively. The second phase was instigated by two of Donald Greene’s articles, ques- tioning the propriety of Crane’s exposition of Latitudinarian thought, and successively Frans de Bruyn, Chester F. Chapin, Gregory F. Scholtz, Richard Nash, and John A. Vance entered the ring to participate in the debate. Rivers has dealt with Bunyan’s attitude towards Latitudinarianism, while David D. Brown, Benson, Fujimura, and Harth during the 1960s examined Dryden’s changing theological allegiances (see Chapter 1.4 above). Harth also provided a close study of Latitudinarianism, or rather “Anglican Rationalism,” in a monograph on Swift, while New revealed Latitudinarian tendencies in Sterne. 127 Especially theologians and historians seldomly refer to the work of philologists. The biblio- graphy of Spellman’s monograph on Latitudinarianism only includes Harth’s work, and the contri- butors to the anthology Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England are equally oblivious to the extensive debate among the literati. Ashcraft bewails “the long-standing divorcement between intellectual and political history” and argues that, unless this gulf is bridged, Latitudinarianism can never be understood adequately (“Latitudinarianism and Toleration,” p. 167). 128 See Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, p. 13. 129 For an attempt at revising the canon of Tillotson’s sermons, see Reedy, “Interpreting Tillotson,” pp. 85-86 and 96-101. Both the canon Reedy criticizes and his own suggestion comprise no more than six sermons.

40 might have been. However, there is also considerable merit in recent scholarship inasmuch as it has revealed that any attempt to summarize a complex of ideas as variegated as Latitudinarianism often leads to misleading results, especially if the “system” in question comprises a great variety of heterogeneous thinkers. This insight, however, must not lead us to overlook the existing similarities between Latitudinarian writers. It is a fact that, although scholarship about Latitudi- narianism seems to have become as enigmatic as the movement itself, the term is still used widely, and often with (too) great assurance. The last decades have seen numerous attempts to pin down the major characteristics of Latitudinarianism. Acknowledging the existence of a group that can be labelled “Latitudinarian,” these attempts vacillate between two extremes. On the one hand, there is a minimalist tendency, associating Latitudinarianism with a few general tenets, such as that for the “latitude-men religion is about two things, reason and morality.”130 Another commentator sees “Latitudinarianism as a natural culmination of the tendency within the Anglican Church toward moderation and sweet reasonableness.”131 A third, earlier, position tries to re- concile these two accounts: “We have found the three outstanding elements in latitudinarian thought to be a conviction of the reasonableness of religion, a sober acceptance of the principle of limited toleration, and a conviction that religion must not stand apart from morality.”132 The danger inherent in such narrow defi- nitions is obvious: a complex system of thought is being treated reductively. On the other hand, there are attempts at comprehensive and precise definitions. In a recent study of Clarke’s trinitarian thought, the author distinguishes between “orthodox” and “heterodox” Latitudinarians and identifies five focal points around which their thought is claimed to have revolved.133 Elsewhere, seven or eight positions are rather enigmatically thought to be typical of a Latitudinarian: “It is ... the combination, steady and almost without exception, of all these

130 Rivers, “Bunyan and Restoration Latitudinarianism,” p. 69. Rivers provides an extensive study of Latitudinarianism in her admirable book published a few years later, but her conclusion remains stable: “The central tenets of latitudinarian Christianity are the rational basis of religion and the happiness of the moral life” (“The Religion of Reason,” Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 87). 131 Fujimura, “Dryden’s Religio Laici,” p. 216. 132 Cope, Joseph Glanvill: Anglican Apologist (St. Louis, 1956), p. 85. 133 Thomas C. Pfizenmaier, The Trinitarian Theology of Dr. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729): Contexts, Sources, and Controversy (Leiden, New York, Köln, 1997), pp. 43-75; especially pp. 46 and 61. According to Pfizenmaier, the five foci are (1.) the relationship between faith and reason, (2.) the importance of moral virtue in religion, (3.) toleration, (4.) a bias against mystery, and (5.) a special perspective on the role of tradition in doctrinal formulation (see p. 61). Among orthodox Latitudinarians he sees Stillingfleet and Thomas Sherlock, while Hoadly and Locke are regarded as heterodox. The division was obviously inspired by Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, p. 46: “Orthodoxy was genuinely a hallmark of the norm and standard of seventeenth-century Latitudinarianism. But it was not, however, of the Latitudinarianism of the eighteenth century.”

41 characteristics taken together, that provides a basis by which the norms and stan- dard of seventeenth-century Latitudinarianism may be distinguished.”134 How- ever, conversely, these definitions involve the hazard of blurring the distinctions between Latitudinarianism and other groups within or without the Church of England. In response, yet another radical position, trying to profit from scholarly bewilderment, claims that “no specifically ‘latitudinarian’ party or outlook can be distinguished among the Restoration churchmen,”135 a view that seems plausible enough from the maze of divers interpretations. But then, if one accepts the implications of such skepticism, almost all labels would have to be abolished and the rage for chaos become dominant.136 Under the circumstances, a methodo- logical via media seems called for. It is neither necessary nor possible to circum- scribe Latitudinarianism exactly. What is possible is a description of general tendencies which were bundled up by the Latitudinarians, and which culminated in a distinctive theological spirit.137

134 Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, p. 43. Note, however, the cautionary interpolation “almost without exception.” The characteristics are (1.) orthodoxy, (2.) a reasonable religion, (3.) a common doctrine of justification, (4.) theological minimalism, (5.) the attitude towards church government and worship, (6.) the preeminence of personal morality, (7.) moderation in terms of points indifferent, and, conditionally, (8.) the adherence to the new philosophy (see p. 43). Thanks to Richard H. Popkin and Lila Freedman, Griffin’s important study, submitted as a doctoral dissertation in English history at Yale in 1962, was made available to students of the period. Griffin’s study covers a wide variety of Latitudi- narian thought, while Spellman’s monograph concentrates on the Latitudinarians’ interpretation of human nature as shaped by original sin and on their soteriology (see The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, pp. 4-5). 135 Spurr, “‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” p. 82. 136 Spurr’s contention that “‘Latitudinarianism’ will never be pinned down” is most certainly right (“‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” p. 82). However, to regard it as merely a “chi- mera” and to argue that “‘Latitudinarian’ was their opponents’ word” (p. 82) in order to demon- strate that there was no Latitudinarian movement is an evasion of the problem at hand. Referring once again to the example of Romanticism, we had to, if Spurr was right, reject the notion that there was something like a Romantic movement since Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, or Shelley did not call themselves “Romantics.” Moreover, in the case of Latitudinarianism the label was a contemporary coinage and was not invented retrospectively, as was “Romanticism.” Unfortu- nately, later scholars writing about Latitudinarianism did not bother to take up Spurr’s provocative and stimulating thesis. 137 Cragg ingeniously notes that Latitudinarianism “stood for a temper rather than a creed” (From Puritanism to the Age of Reason, p. 81).

42 1.6 “Sparing in their Speculations”: The Paradoxical and Moral Nature of Latitudinarianism

Shaftesbury coined the much-quoted phrase that “the most ingenious way of be- coming foolish is by a system.”138 This aphorism could have been inspired by the hostile statements against rigid religious systems the Earl would have encountered during his reading of Latitudinarian tracts and sermons, highlighting the potential for ambiguity of religious faith rather than putting forward any claims to define what constitutes truth and infallibility in matters of belief.139 The Latitudinarians had witnessed the detrimental consequences of persisting in theological systems. This is why they carefully avoided contributing yet another dogmatical agenda to the religious topsy-turvydom of seventeenth-century England. Latitudinarianism brought along a new interpretation of Anglicanism bred by contemporary re- ligious strife, and it reflects an attempt to reconcile, under the wings of the Church of England, opposing religious factions, each fighting for preeminence and the superiority of their own views. Such a mediating position explains the protean nature of “Latitudinarianism:” the movement was deliberately heterogeneous in order to create homogeneity. Often enough Latitudinarians were negotiating be- tween diametrically opposed groups such as Calvinists and Socinians. If one accepts paradox as being endemic to times of competing value systems,140 Latitudinarian views can be seen as the theological paradoxes of the post-Restoration period. Paradoxes abound in Latitudinarian texts, not so much as rhetorical exercises but rather as results of unsettling theological problems, and these paradoxes often verge on inconsistency. An ecclectic and mediating approach to theology frequently results in “incoherent” positions. When Latitudin- arians set out to explore a specific idea, this was in itself an attempt to undermine the universality of a religious system, as a rule of that of any system whatsoever. However, this position involves a paradox in itself: while Latitudinarians rejected systems, they continued to speak in favour of the divine system of the earth, or, in Cudworth’s terms, of the True Intellectual System of the Universe, the Anglican system of divinity, that is.

138 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” Char- acteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge, 2001 [1999]), p. 130. 139 Glanvill emphatically refutes the notion that religion is about “Systems of Opinion” (“Of Catholick Charity,” Some Discourses, Sermons and Remains, p. 117). In an important and inspiring article, New identifies the rejection of systems and dogmatical statements of religious truth as “the single most important contribution of latitudinarianism to modern thought” (“Ben- jamin Whichcote’s Aphorisms,” p. 98; see p. 92). 140 See Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, 1966), p. 33: “Quite clearly, paradoxes ... occur in any period or place where intellectual specu- lation goes on. They tend to constellate, however, in a period ... of intense intellectual activity, with many different ideas and systems in competition with one another.”

43 This coincidentia oppositorum was necessary in that Latitudinarians also saw the teleology of world history as salvational history, and this combination was inextricably linked with the question of moral norms. Thus, Latitudinarians emphasized the importance of moral norms in religion. Instead of speculation about doctrine, the moral constitution of the individual was therefore at the centre of Latitudinarian theology.141 In order to make England a better place, morally good people were required, not adepts in theological logomachics:

Their main Design was, to make Men good, not notional, and knowing; and there- fore, though they conceal’d no practical Verities that were proper and seasonable, yet they were sparing in their Speculations, except where they tended to the ne- cessary vindication of the Honour of God, or the directing the Lives of Men.142

Perhaps it is not even an exaggeration to say that “the Latitudinarians identified ‘orthodoxy’ with virtue.”143 In fact, it is possible to identify Latitudinarian moral theology as one of “the two great views of ethics in the Restoration period.”144 A system of such impact does not abruptly vanish to empty air; it is not surprising that its effects should reach well into the eighteenth century.145 The fact that the moral basis of Latitudinarianism has been universally recognized should not lead to the conclusion, however, that this aspect has been sufficiently investigated. This is by no means the case. As difficult as it may be to contribute substantially to the study of Latitudinarianism in general, the individual ingredients of its proponents’ thought have not been conscientiously inquired into. It is the purpose of the present study to focus on the Latitude-Mens’ moral theology and the continuity of its tenets in the literature of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

141 Battestin emphasizes the importance of sermons for eighteenth-century life and their didactic tendency (see “Historical Criticism and the Question of Contemporaneity,” Age of Johnson, 12 [2001], 370-71). 142 Glanvill, “Anti-Fanatical Religion,” Essays on Several Important Subjects, p. 15. 143 Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, p. 131. 144 Ernest Tuveson, “The Importance of Shaftesbury,” ELH, 20 (1953), 285. The other being of course that of Hobbes. 145 With regard to the Cambridge Platonists, Bredvold argues that they “represent an early and in- fluential phase of a long development of ethical theory” (The Natural History of Sensibility [Detroit, 1962], p. 10).

44