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William Warburton: the Middle Way of "Heroic Moderation"

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William Warburton: the Middle Way of WILLIAM WARBURTON: THE MIDDLE WAY OF "HEROIC MODERATION" DAVID SORKIN Madison, Wisconsin William Warburton (1698-1779), Bishop of Gloucester, is as forgotten today as he was famous in his lifetime. The reasons for this obscurity are not far to seek. Called "the dictator and tyrant of literature," the "haughty and overbearing Colossus" of English letters, and the "big - stick" of orthodoxy, his abrasive polemics he was given to sarcasm, - invective and abusive language have distracted scholars from examining the contents of his work.' In addition, the theological trend with which he is usually identified, Latitudinarianism, has con- ventionally and mistakenly been identified with deism. Only recently have scholars correctly begun to recognize it instead as a defense of revealed religion against deism.? This article attempts to restore ' I would like to thank my colleague Phil Harth for his helpful comments on this article. Abbreviations: AL: Alliancebetween Church and State; DL: Divine of AlosesDemolutrated; Works: The IVorksof the Right ReverendYVzlliam Warburton, D.D. 12 vols. (London, 1 8 1 1).The quotations in order are: Edward Gibbon quoted in A.W. Evans, r I arburtonand the iVarburtonz*ans.-A Study in someEighteenth-Century Controaersie.s (London. 1932) 1; Mark Pattison, "Life of Bishop Warburton," NationalReview (1863) 143 [reprinted in Henry Nettleship ed., Essays by lheLate Vlark Pattison2 vols. (O?cford, 1889)] ;Ernest C. Mossner, BishopButler and the Age of Reason(New York, 1936) 67- 8. Mark Pattison characterized his life as a "career of antagonism" and gave his intellectual contributions short shrift. See "Life of Bishop Warburton," in Henry Nettleship ed., Essays by tfie late ,Hark Pattison (Oxford, 1889). Leslie Stephen dis- missed Warburton as a ruffian of the intellectual world who was neither an origi- nal nor an important thinker. See Hutory of English Thoughtin the ]8th Century3rd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1902) 1:344-71. Evans, Warburtonand the Warburtonians,gives a useful overview of Warburton's life but is best on the controversies and person- alities. Most recently, B.W. Young has devoted a long chapter to Warburton but has concentrated on the controversies. See Religionand Enlightenmentin Eighteenth- CenturyEngland: TheologicalDebate fromLocke to Burke(Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) 167- 212. For a fairer assessment see Richard Hurd, "A Discourse by Way of General Preface: containing some Account of the Life, Writings and Character of the Author," Works l:l-127. Mossner ranked Warburton among the six most influential theolo- gians of the period (alongside Tillotson, Clarke, Sherlock, Law, and Butler). See BishopButler and the Age of Reason, 186. '-' The term "Latitudinarianism" started life as a pejorative and has largely remained 263 Warburton's reputation by focusing on his efforts to defend the faith. Warburton provided an important rearticulation of Protestant belief in two major works: The Alliance Betzveen Church and State (1737), an enduring defense of church-state relations grounded in natural law theory, and The Divine Legation of lLloses Demonstrated (volume one: 1738; volume two: 1741), an interpretation of Judaism and Christianity using the historical method. Drawing inspiration from Anglo-Dutch Arminianism and Gallicanism, Locke and Newton, Warburton endeav- ored to navigate a middle course between Roman Catholicism and enthusiasm, between the High Church party and deism. Warburton was a member of England's "conservative Enlighten- ment." From the late seventeenth century, clergy and clerisy prop- agated the Enlightenment with the aim of upholding the "constitution one. The phenomenon has been identified with corrosive deism and facile belief, and political opportunism or 'trimming.' These notions began to enter the schol- arship with Vlark Pattison's groundbrcaking, "Tcndcncies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750," in Essaysand Reviews9th ed. (London, 1861); and were can- onized when Leslie Stephen virtually identified Latitudinarianism with dcism in his History of English Thoughtin the 18th Century3rd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1902). The view was widely disseminated by the influential work of G.R. Cragg, From Puritanum to the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1966). Some recent scholarship has attempted a rehabilitation by drawing a clear distinction between Latitudinarianism and deism. See Donald Greene, "The Via Media in an Age of Revolution: Anglicanism in the 18th Century," in Peter Hughes & David Williams eds., The VariedPattern: Studies in the ]8th Century(Toronto, 1971) 297-320; Roger L. Emerson, "Latitudinarianism and the English Deists," in J.A. Leo Lemay ed., Deism,ivfasong lli the Enlightenment (Newark, 1987) 19-48; John Spurr, `` `Rational Religion' in Restoration England," Journal of theHistory of Ideas( 1 988)563-85 and, The RestorationChurch of England,1646- 1689 (New Haven, 1991); John Marshall, "The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-men, 1660-1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and 'Hobbism'," journal of EcclesiasticalHistory 36 (1985) 407-27; Martin Fitzpatrick, "Latitudinarianism at the parting of the ways: a suggestion," in John Walsh, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor eds., The Churchof England c. 1689-v. 1833; From Tolerationto Tractarianism(Cambridge, 1993) 209-27; W.M. Spellman, The Latitudinariansand the Church of England, 1660-1700 (Athens, 1993); and Gerard Reedy, "Socinians, John Toland and the Anglican Rationalists," Harvard TheologicalReview 70 (1977) 285-304 and, for scriptural exegesis, idem, The Bible and Reason Aqglicans: and Scripturein Late Seventeenth- CenturyErcgland (Philadelphia, 1985). The perpetuation of the Pattison-Stephen identification of Latitudinarianism with deism can be found in Martin IJ. Griffin, Latitudinarianismin the Seventeenth- CenturyChurch of England(Leiden, 1992); Isabel Rivers, Reason,Grace and Sentiment:A Study of the Languageof Religionand Ethics in England, 1660-1780 (New York, 1992); Irene Simon, 7threeRestoration Divines: Barrow, South, Tillotson.Selected Sermons 3 vols. (Paris, 1967-1976); and.Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful,Novel and Strange:Aesthetics and Heterodoxy(Baltimore, 1996). Margaret C. Jacob, TheNewtonians and the EnglishRevolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca, 1976), perhaps imputes too much coherence to Latitudinarianism in seeing it as an ideology. .
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