DEISM

Until the 19th century the terms "deism" and "theism," one with a Latin root (deus) and the other with a Greek root (θεóς), were used interchangeably. Since that

time, however, the custom has been to use the words in a mutually exclusive sense. A number of quite divergent theological and philosophical positions are now indicated by the term "deism," but they resemble one another in that all reject one or more of the traditional Christian theses concerning the relationship that exists between God and the universe.

Kinds of Deism. One form of deism holds that God created this universe, either ex nihilo or from a preexisting "chaos"; that all things in the universe, including man, are directed by divine providence; and that there is a life-after-death in which God will reward the good and punish the wicked. Divine revelation is rejected, however, and it is maintained that man must depend upon his reason alone to give him some knowledge of the existence and nature of God and of man's moral duties.

A second form of deism differs from the first only by asserting that there is no future life, that man is rewarded or punished in this life. A third and more radical form claims that divine providence does not extend to the moral actions of man, but only to nature. It asserts that whatever happiness or sorrow man experiences before his final annihilation in death has no relation to divine judgments; virtue is its own reward.

The most extreme form of deism retains from Christianity only the notions that an intelligent and powerful God brought this world into being, though by imposing order on preexisting matter, and that He devised the natural laws according to which the universe functions; however, this God does not intervene at all in the functioning of the universe. There are no exceptions to natural laws; there are no miracles; and God is not concerned at all with the individual human being. Nevertheless, man's own happiness requires that he recognize and admire the Creator and that he deal justly with his fellow men. But experience led certain deists, notably voltaire, to maintain that such a view of the universe is suitable only for the well educated. Ordinary men, if they are to be kept in order, must be told that an eternity of damnation awaits them if they do not conform to the traditional standards of truth and honesty.

Besides this division of deism into types characterized by the degree to which Christian doctrine is rejected, deists can be classified according to the general trend of their writings. Deism that concentrates on attacking Christianity (the historicity of Scripture, the possibility of miracles, the efficacy of the Sacraments, etc.) is termed "critical," while deism that concerns itself principally with attaining to a knowledge of the existence and nature of God and to an understanding of natural morality is called "constructive." In many deistic writings, of course, there are both "critical" and "constructive" elements. In general, the arguments of critical deists would be thought naïve today, for they are directed against a fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture, an uncritical taste for the miraculous and quite a mechanical view of the Sacraments. That is, they are opposed to a caricature of Christianity, though Christians who resembled the caricature were all too numerous, among both the laity and the clergy, when such deism was developing.

Historical origins. A number of important factors contributed to the rise of deism in the 17th century. The Protestant view that Scripture interpreted in isolation from ecclesiastical tradition is the ultimate guide to faith had by this time presented Englishmen with innumerable scriptural problems that seemed incapable of reasonable solution. It appeared that men of a critical turn of mind could no longer accept the notion that God had truly revealed Himself in the Old and New Testaments. These books, it seemed, were simply compilations of ancient literary works bearing the scientific inaccuracies, cultural oddities, and sapient insights characteristic of other classical writings. The conclusion drawn was that man must depend upon himself, his experience and reason, to attain to a knowledge of God. The popularity of the doctrine of John Locke, that ideas are not prenatally impressed upon the mind by God (a repudiation of Descartes's widely accepted innatism), but have their origin in sense experience, served to weaken further the notion of any special bond existing between God and human knowledge.

Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the strongest element contributing to the development of deistic thought was the rise of the new sciences. Discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries made it imperative for Europeans to change their basic ideas of the universe; and since traditional theology had made extensive use of the old thought patterns, theological revisions were needed. However, it was extremely difficult for most theologians to separate the many layers of centuries-old scientific accretions from the deposit of faith. The result was that large numbers of intellectuals were needlessly presented with the necessity of repudiating either the new sciences or the old religion.

This was particularly the case where theology and physics had become intertwined. The old Christianized Aristotelian physics had supposed a certain relationship of the universe to God that was completely overthrown by the physics of Galileo and Newton. According to the Aristotelian conception, celestial bodies traveling about the earth in perfect circles were directly dependent upon a First Unmoved Mover to conserve them in motion. Gradually, through the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, the view became prevalent that two forces, gravitational attraction and inertia, were adequate to account for their movement and its mathematical regularity. Thus it was no longer necessary to posit the existence of God on this account. Although Newton thought divine intervention was still periodically necessary to set things aright after planets had strayed slightly from their orbits, later calculations showed that more refined laws of mechanics could account for the seeming perturbations, without God's special causality. It became, in fact, common to assert that a perfect workman, as God was taken to be, would produce a world machine so perfectly balanced that no adjustments need ever be made. All of this encouraged the form of deism that assigned to God only the role of original architect and initial mover; it seemed that traditional notions of divine providence could not be reconciled with a universe whose actions were all determined by physical laws.

Travel and non-Christian cultures. A less important factor contributing to the development of deism was the impact of the many written accounts of travels to hitherto unknown lands. Explorers and travelers had come upon peoples who had had no contact with Christianity, but who seemed nonetheless to have highly developed systems of morality and admirable religious principles. The deists argued from this that human reason was sufficient to establish religion and morality; man did not need God's revelation of a "divine positive law." Moreover, some deists asserted, recently discovered non-Christian cultures often exhibited a morality superior to that practiced in Christian Europe. It must be noted, however, that much of this travel literature contained gross exaggerations and exhibited none of the cautious scholarship characteristic of present-day anthropology.

The net result of this religious, scientific, and cultural ferment in Europe was that large numbers of educated men were inclined to reject traditional religious principles as guides to life; instead, they turned to the new sciences, to human reason, to the spirit of the enlightenment.

British Deists. In England the first important deistic work, the De Veritate, prout distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, Possibili, et a Falso, by Lord herbert of cherbury, was published in 1624. It won Cherbury the title of Father of Deism, and was followed in 1696 by John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious, or, a treatise shewing, That there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to Reason, nor above it: and that no Christian Doctrine can be properly call'd a Mystery. Toland attempted to demonstrate that true religion and natural morality are synonymous. Notions that transcend reason, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation and grace, ought to be set aside as superstitions. In 1713, Anthony Collins' Discourse of Free-Thinking, occasion'd by the rise and growth of a sect call'd Free-Thinkers called for a rejection of the Christian doctrines of divine judgment and future retribution. Collins asserted that men would be more truly moral if they were presented with a purely natural system of ethics. In 1724 Collins published, in his Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, an extensive criticism of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the miracles of the New.

Another attack on tradition was made by Matthew Tindal in his Christianity as old as the Creation: or, the Gospel a republication of the Religion of Nature (1730), which came to be called "the deists' Bible." As the title indicates, Tindal claimed that the Gospels, if interpreted correctly, taught only a natural religion, a natural ethics. His conclusion was:

Nothing can be requisite to discover true Christianity and to preserve it in its native purity free from all superstition, but after a strict scrutiny to admit nothing to belong to it except what our reason tells us is worthy of having God for its author. And if it be evident that we cannot discern whether any instituted religion contains everything worthy, and nothing unworthy, of a Divine original, except we can antecedently by our reason discern what is or is not worthy of having God for its author, it necessarily follows that natural and revealed religion can't differ, because what reason shows to be worthy of having God for its author must belong to natural religion, and whatever reason tells us is unworthy of having God for its author can never belong to the true revealed religion.

It would be difficult to state more clearly what is essential to all the various forms of deism.

Deism on the Continent. In France, early in the 18th century, a number of deistic works circulated clandestinely in manuscript form. One of them, first published about 1750, was the anonymous Pensées sur la religion dont on cherche de bonne foy l'éclaircissement, also known as Doutes sur la religion and Examen de la religion. The deism found in this work is principally of the critical type, with attacks on the historicity of Scripture and such doctrines as the Trinity, original sin and redemption. It maintained that true religion is founded on reason and on the "golden rule." A similar work, Analyse de la religion chrétienne, attributed to Dumarsais, was also passed about secretly during the same period. However, French deism attained its full growth only with the encyclopedists, notably Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

In France deism took on some characteristics that are not to be found to the same extent in the English variety; that is, French deism was bound up with an intense anti-clericalism and a strong opposition to the royal government. Moreover, in France the introduction of deistic thought led more quickly and more often to a full-fledged atheism, as exemplified in the later writings of Denis di derot, the principal author and the editor of the Encyclopédie ; in the Système de la Nature of holbach; and in L'homme machine of La Mettrie.

In Germany, the growth of deistic thought enjoyed the patronage of Frederick II, the "philosopher king," at whose court several of the French Encyclopedists lived for various periods of time. Gotthold Ephraim lessing popularized the deists' opposition to revealed dogma, particularly in his Nathan der Weise (1779) and Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780). Moses Mendelssohn, a lifelong friend of Lessing and the inspiration for Nathan der Weise, was influential in the Jewish "enlightenment," the haskalah. Reform Judaism stems in large part from Mendelssohn's work.

American Deists. While German deism had little or no effect on American thought in the 18th century, British and French enunciations of deistic ideas had echoes in writings of several Americans, notably in Reason, the only Oracle of Man, or a compenduous system of natural religion by Ethan Allen (1784), and The Age of Reason by Thomas paine (1794), the latter work unjustly called "the atheists' Bible." Many passages in the works of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson indicate that these men also were deists. For Americans the attraction toward deism was largely what it had been for their British and French predecessors, namely, that in the spirit of the Enlightenment it favored science and reason over revealed religion and faith. Also, it was simpler to maintain that whatever happens in this universe results exclusively from empirically verifiable physical and psychological laws than to be faced with the problem of how to reconcile these laws with the Christian doctrine of divine providence.

In America, moreover, still another factor favored the growth of deistic ideas. The widespread Calvinistic doctrine of predestination was scarcely compatible with the developing optimistic temper of the American people. One obvious alternative was the deistic system, which assured man that his efforts toward a better life would not be frustrated by any arbitrary divine decree of reprobation. However, in America, as in England and France, deism was never a position consciously assumed by the masses; its appeal was restricted in large part to those with some degree of scientific learning. Deism survives today principally as a theory in certain branches of freemasonry and as the point of view of some members of the Unitarian and Universalist Churches (see unitari ans; universalists).

See Also: theism; freethinkers; agnosticism.

Bibliography: c. l. becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven 1932). c. m. crist, The Dictionnaire philosophique portatif and the Early French Deists (Brooklyn 1934). p. hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing, tr., j. l. may (New Haven 1954). r. z. lauer, The Mind of Voltaire: A Study in His 'Constructive Deism' (Westminster, Md. 1961). f. r. manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass. 1954). h. m. morais, Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York 1960). r. r. palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (Princeton 1939).

[r. z. lauer]