Current readers are most familiar with the earl of Rochester's bawdy verse, but the poem his age knew best, “A Satyre against Reason and Mankind” (1674), is perhaps the least lewd of Rochester's canon. Recent scholarship has been almost exclusively concerned, in one form or another, with the poet's libertinism, namely, his explicit, often obscene depictions of sexual behavior. However, although studies of Restoration England generally understand libertinism to signify promiscuous or free sexuality, in the period the term also denoted a challenge to orthodox religion.Footnote 1 Rochester's example provides a case in point: attentive, to be sure, to his infamous carryings-on with wine, women, and boys, the poet's own generation was even more focused on the religious “freethinking” from which the former behavior was perceived as inextricable.Footnote 2 This freethinking is most apparent and most fully articulated in the “Satyre,” a poem that circulated in clandestine manuscript until its first broadside edition of 1679. To many contemporaries, irreligion developed as a necessary defense of sinful living; the Anglican divine John Tillotson observed that “Men of dissolute lives cry down Religion, because they would not be under the restraints of it.”Footnote 3 This is not to say that all sexual libertines were religious libertines and vice versa. Yet the history of sexuality in the early modern period is more entwined with the history of religion than critics have hitherto allowed. This essay will attempt to restore the balance through an exploration of unbelief in Rochester's most widely read poem. Footnote 4

It is not news that Rochester spent his short life as an unbeliever, a notorious deathbed conversion to Christianity notwithstanding. Critics have been divided on how serious an intellect Rochester was—how much and what he actually read. Most, however, have agreed that whatever thinking he did was decidedly heterodox, and that the “Satyre” supplies the evidence. Gillian Manning has contended that the poem participated in an explosion of animated debate about unbelief in the 1670s. Rochester was “one of the chief spokesmen for the unbelievers in their quarrel with the orthodox, and … his best-known poem featured prominently in the controversy.”Footnote 5 Manning's detailed placement of the “Satyre” in its contemporary milieu marks an important turn in scholarship on the poem. For while previous examinations of the poem's heterodoxy have explored the debts of the “Satyre” to Montaigne and the Pyrrhonist skeptics, Hobbes, and the Epicurean tradition, the specific nature of these debts has been only cursorily linked to religion.Footnote 6

But there remains an unsettled tension in Rochester criticism and, I will argue, in the history of freethinking generally. Readers have long sensed that despite surface appearances to the contrary, Rochester's poetry is deeply preoccupied with matters of faith. James Turner has astutely noted that although libertinism is frequently “transcended or undermined by some distinctly nonlibertine attitude, … there seems to be no consensus on what defines these countervailing features.”Footnote 7 My concern in the following pages will be to arrive at some provisional conclusions about the content of these “countervailing features” and how they might change our sense of Rochester's belief. Rochester may well have had more faith than we thought and still have been a freethinker in the period's sense of the term.Footnote 8 Resolving this dilemma requires that we further examine both the occasion of the production of the “Satyre” and Rochester's wider intellectual sympathies. The poem has yet to be adequately situated in each of its contexts—topical and philosophical—simultaneously, a shortcoming this essay will attempt to remedy.

The concept of an infidel faith may appear paradoxical, but paradoxes are the point of the “Satyre” in more ways than one. Consider the poem's oft-cited opening lines:

The proposition, it would seem, is logically unacceptable: if the speaker could exercise the defining attributes of man—his rationality and free will—to choose his species, he would essentially decide against rationality and free will. For to elect to be a beast rather than a man is to relinquish these specially human attributes. To use reason to oppose reason is the paradox upon which the poem seems to hinge. Thus much has become a critical commonplace.

But as both David Trotter and Dustin Griffin have pointed out, “paradox” had another usage in the seventeenth century, one not so familiar to modern readers. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “paradox” also meant “a statement or tenet contrary to received opinion or belief; … sometimes with unfavourable connotation, as being discordant with what is held to be established truth.” Hobbes used the word in this sense, observing that “a judicious reader knows that a paradox is an opinion not yet generally received.” On this account, Trotter observes, “Rochester thought his poem paradoxical … in the sense that it defied the doxa (or accepted wisdom) of the age.” Edward Stillingfleet's response to Rochester's “Satyre” in “A Sermon Preach’d before the King, Feb. 24. 1674/5,” makes this latter signification clear: “it is [a] pitty such had not their wish, to have been Beasts rather than men, … that they might have been less capable of doing mischief among mankind; by representing all the excellencies of humane nature, which are Reason, and Vertue, and Religion, but as more grave and solemn fopperies.”Footnote 10

Most accounts of the poem's immediate context have noted that by the time the “Satyre” was written, the application of reason to religion had become the new Anglican doxa.Footnote 11 Stillingfleet's remarks thus bring us to yet another paradox relevant to the content of the poem's freethinking: the peculiar switching of sides that forms the history of “rational religion.” As Manning explains, the typical unbeliever was seen to reject Christianity on the grounds that it lacked rational proofs. Moderate theologians therefore attempted to meet the enemy on his ground by wielding his own weapon—reason—against him.Footnote 12 However, the more the orthodox produced rational defenses of Christianity against the doubts of the infidels, the more the infidels rejected reason itself as merely another instance of doctrinal humbug.Footnote 13 Referring to Rochester's “Satyre,” Stillingfleet expresses the culmination of this predicament thus: “And because it is impossible to defend their extravagant courses by Reason, the only way left for them is to make Satyrical Invectives against Reason; as though it were the most uncertain, foolish and (I had almost said) unreasonable thing in the World.”Footnote 14 In this rendering, the unbelievers’ heterodoxy turns out to lie more in their dismissal than in their glorification of the powers of reason. Not men of reason after all, they are rather irrational and gratuitous scoffers.

Late seventeenth-century religious controversy is hereby characterized by a series of unexpected reversals. On one side, moderate or latitudinarian Anglicanism embraced reason, historically associated with the tactics of the unbelievers, while on the other, the infidels abandoned what was now the tool of the church.Footnote 15 Yet a related reversal, meanwhile, has been left out of this analysis. Though initially accused of marshaling reason to the destruction of belief, freethinking's distrust of reason came oddly to resemble an increasingly outmoded fringe of Anglicanism. Indeed, by the 1670s it was largely high-church traditionalists who remained dubious about the place of reason in religion. One unyielding divine protested that his more moderate fellows made “Reason, Reason, Reason, their only Trinity.” In response to such objections, Joseph Glanvill asked his fustier brethren to “consider … what ends of Religion, or Sobriety, such vehement defamations of our faculties could serve? And what Ends of a Party they did?” Like it or not, Glanvill concluded, “the enemies of Reason most usually serve the ends of the Infidel, and the Atheist.” Henry Hallywell similarly railed against the “stupidity” of “some who … make the choicest of [Religion’s] Articles so incomprehensible as to be elevated above Reason. … Then which certainly nothing can … give greater Ground to the bold Cavils and Pretensions of … disguised Atheists.”Footnote 16 According to the new moderate orthodoxy, then, to continue to rail against reason's part in religion would only play into the hands of the unbelievers.

An “addition,” or in some editions “epilogue” (lines 174 ff.), to the main text of Rochester's “Satyre” illustrates this unusual convergence of doubt and traditional belief, revealing a distinct nostalgia for something akin to a purer, reason-free faith:Footnote 17

On one level, readers have been correct not to take the freethinking speaker at his word here.Footnote 18 Certainly his intent is still satiric: since the “God-like” churchman represents an impossible ideal, the speaker's offer to “Recant [his] Paradox” is disingenuous and aims merely another jibe at Christian belief. But in another sense, the poem allows Rochester to have it both ways, to recant potentially and remain paradoxical in Hobbes's sense of the word. Richard Bentley, whose Boyle Lectures against atheism defined Anglican orthodoxy for the Restoration and early eighteenth century, proclaimed that “Even Revelation itself is not shy nor unwilling to ascribe its own first Credit and fundamental Authority to the test and testimony of Reason.”Footnote 19 The poem's clerical adversarius, who enters the “Satyre” in line 46 to rebuke the speaker for “rail[ing] at Reason and Mankind” (line 58), argues similarly that reason enables man to “Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce / The flaming limits of the Universe” (lines 68–69). The contrary suggestion of the “Addition” that true piety requires belief in “Mysterious Truth’s, which no man can conceive” thus continues to set the freethinking speaker apart from the reasonable religion that forms the object of the poem's attack throughout. The speaker can embrace faith and still oppose the orthodoxy of the time.Footnote 20

My argument about Rochester's belief, to which I will return in the concluding pages of the essay, first requires a more thorough examination of the nature of his unbelief. For as I will demonstrate, the two are more linked than has previously been recognized. Seventeenth-century irreligion, as Manning attests, was a slippery entity, referring to a continuum of heterodoxy ranging from agnosticism, to evil living, to frank disbelief in God.Footnote 21 While Manning is correct to suggest that Rochester's “Satyre” speaks for the diversity of heterodoxy in the period, it is nonetheless necessary to specify his place along the above continuum more particularly. I will pursue this aim through a reassessment of recent approaches to late seventeenth-century religious radicalism. The first approach I consider, characteristic of the research of Christopher Hill, has been to understand the freethinking of the 1670s as a continuation, in modified form, of the radical sectarianism of the interregnum. Hill thus sees a link between the sexual and religious libertinism of the Ranters, for example, and that of the Restoration rakes. Hill shrewdly points out that “the legend of gloomy Puritans who hated pleasure dies hard”; the Ranters not only glorified sex and sinful behavior as evidence of grace but also denied the immortality of the soul and looked forward to the skeptical antiscripturism that became the distinctive mark of the rake's heterodoxy twenty years later.Footnote 22 This analysis is persuasive on several counts: not only does it provide a useful reminder of the irreligious tendencies of the “enthusiastic” sects, it also brings into focus that crucial and largely neglected aspect of the rakes, namely, their furtive religious inclinations.Footnote 23

This approach to the vestiges of faith in Rochester's verse understands all traces of belief as decidedly antinomian. According to James Turner, Rochester's conversion is closer to the subversive spirituality characteristic of radical Protestants than it is to “conventional piety.” Rochester, both Turner and Hill remind us, was described by a contemporary as an “Enthusiast in Wit.”Footnote 24 To the extent that any threat to civil and spiritual authority had the potential to raise the dreaded specter of enthusiasm, the freethinker of the Restoration can indeed be viewed as the inheritor of revolutionary religious radicalism. The extension of Civil War antinomianism into Restoration libertinism in this sense is consistent with contemporary usage. As John Pocock has shown, the polemic against enthusiasm in the late seventeenth century targeted not only the spiritual pretensions of the godly but also the materialism of the unbelievers; Ralph Cudworth described Hobbesian infidels like Rochester as “Enthusiastical or Fanatical Atheists … (how abhorrent soever they may otherwise seem to be from Enthusiasm and Revelations).” What is more, both infidels and enthusiasts were seen to undermine the role of reason in religion, if from divergent angles. While the infidels disparaged reason's supposed support for Christian doctrine as “uncertain, various, and fallacious,” the enthusiasts feared reason “would … cool the pleasant heats of kindled Imagination … and Inspiration.”Footnote 25 Though the two groups were thus opposite in spiritual leanings, the end result was seen to be the same.

These continuities, however, have a tendency to collapse several important distinctions. Turner himself notes that “the religious meanings of ‘libertinism,’ … actually refer to two quite distinct phenomena, the mocking denial of the truth and relevance of Scripture, and the intensification of spirituality among radical Protestants.”Footnote 26 The one repudiates inspiration altogether and the other magnifies it beyond allowable measures. The Ranters, in other words, though heretical believers, were inspired ones—men of grace and spirit—whereas the Restoration libertines, however ambivalently, were undeniably skeptical doubters. The link between the aristocratic freethinkers of the Restoration and the Civil War sects can also obscure the knotty problem of status. In an early essay, Hill stresses that the roots of Rochester's various excesses—religious, sexual, and political—must be sought in his position as an “alienated aristocrat.” Here Rochester is both a “courtier and friend of Charles II” and the writer of “savage republican verse,” his heterodoxy an expression of a complex and volatile “radical royalism.”Footnote 27 It is in this important sense that Rochester's freethinking is as much a reaction against the upheavals of the Civil Wars as it is a continuation of those radical tendencies, an insight that has a way of getting lost in Hill's delineation of Rochester's radical Ranter heritage. As Turner argues, Restoration libertines are not Levellers: “they believe in laws to govern ‘the rabble,’” and whatever religious heterodoxy they betray stems from the distinctly upper-class presumption that rules can be broken with impunity.Footnote 28 Rochester's irreligion, then, has a distinctly aristocratic, distinctly anti-enthusiastic component even as it threatens to reignite the extremism of the midcentury revolutionaries.

This insight has not been applied to the question of heterodoxy in the “Satyre.” As it turns out, the critique of enthusiasm plays a central role in the poem's attack on speculative reason, though its implications have been largely unexplored:

The “misguided follower” follows an “Ignis fatuus” or light that exists only in his own mind. Traveling a circular path of error, he climbs mountains that are actually “whimseys heapt in his own brain.” The unmistakable marker of enthusiasm in the late seventeenth century was precisely this self-referential tendency.Footnote 29 As the above lines have been read, the privileging of “Light of Nature” over reason's spurious inner light satirizes both the nonconformist claim to private inspiration and Cambridge Platonism's notion that reason is the candle of the lord.Footnote 30 Elaborating the relationship between these two targets, however, is critical to a proper understanding of Rochester's meaning. The Cambridge Platonists, significantly, were part of the latitudinarian movement in Restoration Anglicanism that privileged reason. Their enemies were materialists and unbelievers, like the speaker of the “Satyre,” as well as dissenting enthusiasts. Although the Cambridge divines promoted reason as the antidote to all forms of enthusiasm in religion, Rochester's speaker insinuates that their solution is merely another instance of the problem: the reason so lauded by the church party is indistinguishable from the enthusiasm it decries.Footnote 31

Manning suggests that such denunciations of the powers of reason were intended to frustrate the churchmen's celebration of the faculty's divine virtues.Footnote 32 While designs of the sort surely informed the unbelievers’ strategy, their distrust of reason's influence in matters of religion also has a legacy in precisely those figures Manning's analysis sets aside. Indeed, Montaigne and Hobbes, both long-acknowledged sources for the poem's critique of speculative reason, provide more pointed inspiration for its specific theological stance than has previously been granted.Footnote 33 The poem's suggestion that moderate churchmen become enthusiastic once reason eschews nature's guidance echoes Montaigne's similar concern in his Apology of Raymond Sebond (1580). Here too nature serves as the corrective to man's self-conceit in religion: “it is more honourable to be addressed to act, and tyed to worke orderly, by and through a naturall and unavoidable condition, and most approaching to Divinitie, than regularly to worke and act, by, and through a casuall and rash libertie; and it is safer to leave the reignes of our conduct unto nature, than unto ourselves. The vanitie of our presumption maketh us rather to be beholding, and as it were endebted unto our owne strength, for our sufficiency, than unto her liberalitie.” Reason, or “the vanitie of our presumption,” once again tends to be the culprit in theological error: our faith “doth not depend of us. … All our strength and arguments can never attaine to so supernaturall and divine a knowledge.”Footnote 34

Hobbes similarly blames the religious excesses of his day on the arrogance of “human ratiocination,” citing St. Paul's rule (Rom. 12:3): “That no man presume to understand above that which is meet to understand, but that he understand according to sobriety.” Once men “raise any doctrine to the understanding, concerning those things which are incomprehensible,” the logical outcome, Hobbes implies, is enthusiasm. Men's “owne Dreams” become “the Prophecy they mean to bee governed by, and the tumour of their own hearts … the Spirit of God.”Footnote 35 Though Hobbes and Montaigne wrote before reasonable religion had become the orthodoxy of the day—both targeting radical sectarianism rather than the establishment—Rochester suggests that his predecessors’ criticisms nonetheless apply to the current moment.

The rejection of reason in religion thus has a vital philosophical heritage and one that is markedly linked both to anti-enthusiasm and to freethinking.Footnote 36 For Hobbes, sectarianism inevitably accompanied men's reliance on individual reason to settle theological controversy. His De corpore politico thus advocated the following solution: Christianity should espouse a stripped-down creed, comprised only of those basic propositions necessary to salvation and theological principles that have been common to all of mankind throughout the ages. Once such fundamentals are in place, “then all other points, that are now controverted, and made distinction of sects, … must needs be such, as a man needeth not.”Footnote 37 This paring away of religious excess and error is characteristic of the Epicurean religion of nature or what the period called “deism.”Footnote 38 Formally launched in England by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), deism's anticlericalism, its denial of most revealed religion, and skepticism about the truth of Scripture made it a dangerously radical movement and an appropriate second context for Rochester's heterodoxy.

There have been several obstacles, however, to placing Rochester and his “Satyre” properly in this tradition.Footnote 39 For Hill, deism's roots are once again to be found in the radical thought of the interregnum.Footnote 40 Though indeed associated in contemporaries’ minds with its sister heresy, enthusiasm, deism in fact diverges from the latter in crucial ways. In its suspicion of revelation, most importantly, deism was at root an anti-enthusiastic initiative.Footnote 41 The freethinking writings of Charles Blount (1654–93), the second English deist after Lord Herbert, for example, explicitly attack “the Fanaticks and others who pleaded a Call from God to do the Work of the Devil, cutting off their Soveraigns Head.” Anglicans may have identified “enthusiasts” and “deists” as common enemies of Christian religion, but they also make clear that the one “pretends to immediate Inspiration,” while the other “pleads only for a Natural Religion in opposition to any Particular Mode or Way of Divine Revelation.”Footnote 42 Both the Ranters and the rakes rejected institutionalized revelation—the word of God as handed down in Scripture—but the Ranters set up private inspiration, the inner light, in its stead, an even worse error in the eyes of the rakes.

There is evidence, moreover, that by the 1670s, deism had become the more troubling of the two heterodoxies, especially among the court circles. The religious context of the “Satyre” reveals how contemporaries saw themselves faced with a new menace, different from that posed by the radicals of the revolutionary decades. If the former age was one of unlawful and excessive religious zeal, the present was seen as insufficiently spiritual, at least in any familiar sense. As Robert South admonished, “Religion is not now so much in danger of being divided, and torn piece-meal by Sects and Factions, as of being at once devour’d by Atheism.” And whereas the radicals of the 1640s sprouted from the lower social orders, the 1670s faced an unforeseen and largely novel threat: the heterodox aristocrat. The two united in the danger they posed to civil and ecclesiastical authority; divines such as Richard Allestree and Joseph Glanvill continually figured the libertine scoffer, the interregnum enthusiast, and even the papist as the latest unholy alliance threatening England's newfound stability. But it was a perverse coming together of opposites—“a complication of Enemies,” in one writer's words—more than a continuity of the same.Footnote 43

Was Rochester a deist? Blount seems to have thought he was, beginning a correspondence with him in 1679 about their shared commitment to freethinking. Notably, in the scandalously heterodox “Philological Notes” of his Two First Books of Philostratus (1680), Blount also echoes Montaigne's and Hobbes's reservations about reason, observing that “Nothing does more betray the Vanity of Philosophy, than the Insufficiency of man's Reason, which as St. Paul says, is foolishness before God.” To illustrate this point, Blount concludes “with so many lines as are to my purpose, out of a late ingenious Copy of verses written upon this Subject, by a Person of Honour.” The verses Blount cites comprise a medley of the reflections on reason from Rochester's “Satyre.”Footnote 44

Though Rochester's connections to Blount's circle have been briefly acknowledged, another obstacle to viewing the “Satyre” through the lens of Restoration deism has been the assumption that in its rejection of revealed religion, deism necessarily magnifies the role of reason.Footnote 45 This commonplace is indeed descriptive of Lord Herbert, who began his first deist manual, De Veritate (1624), with a censure of the Pyrrhonist tradition. However, as early as 1672, Richard Baxter had already identified a strain of deism more troubling and more radical than Herbert’s. Baxter comments that the motivating occasion for his polemic is “The sad case of many of my acquaintance, and the increase of Infidelity of late, especially among the debauched sensual Gallants, and the danger of England hereby.” Herbert, as it turns out, though “too low to us,” is “too high for the Atheistical Sensualists of this age.” In 1754, John Leland, the first historian of deism, likewise affirmed that “some of [our modern deists] have chosen rather to follow [Hobbes] than Lord Herbert in several of his principles.” Deism thus appeared in various incarnations, some more heretical than others. According to Leland, deists unite in a rejection of all revealed religion “as owing to imposture or enthusiasm,” but they are “far from being agreed in their notions of [natural religion.]”Footnote 46

A more accurate description of deism's attitude toward reason might look something like this: the truths of religion, to be sure, needed to be plainly demonstrable, but what was called for was not always rational arguments in their defense. As I have argued, for Hobbes and Montaigne, as well as for Rochester, reason had no place in faith. Next to Hobbes, the radical deist of the period most notorious for separating the realms of reason and theology was Spinoza. Like Hobbes, Spinoza seems to have found a receptive audience among the English nobility. Matthias Erbery, the first contemporary to respond to Spinoza's highly inflammatory Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), refers to “he who so long has found a place in the Libraries and Hands of very Learned Men,” and Stillingfleet similarly targets Spinoza's early readers as “such who pretend to Breeding and Civility.” Acquiring a relatively rare and most likely expensive clandestine copy of this infamous text was, of course, more easily accomplished by the nobility.Footnote 47

In his Tractatus, Spinoza declared that the setting apart of faith from philosophy “forms the most important part of the subject of this treatise.” An anonymous adaptation of the blasphemous chapter on miracles, commonly attributed to Blount, illustrates the use to which the argument was put by Rochester's circle.Footnote 48 Blount's text, entitled Miracles, No Violations of the Laws of Nature (1683), is largely a straightforward translation of Spinoza with extra emphasis given to man's ignorance. We call strange occurrences miracles, Blount argues, not only out of pious faith but also out of the impertinent presumption that every phenomenon in the universe must accord to our reason: if we do not understand something, then it must be a miracle. This particular attack on revealed religion accentuates our intellectual limitations more than it demands what rational proofs of divinity are possible. Recalling Rochester's substitution of the inner light of the Quakers and the Platonists for the “Light of Nature” (line 13), Blount's alternative explanation of what have been called “miracles” stresses that all phenomena proceed from natural causes. This proposition seems, on the one hand, to elevate reason or rationality above faith. Yet, on the other hand, Blount stresses that many of nature's processes remain outside the scope of human understanding: “humane Understanding is finite, and consequently incapable to know how far the Laws of Nature extend themselves. … I do not measure the Power of Nature by the unequal Line of humane Wit” (Miracles, p. [iv]). To say that nothing deviates from the laws of nature, then, is not necessarily to say that a phenomenon is knowable by reason. Rochester's other freethinking poem, “Upon Nothinge,” for example, replaces Christianity's divine order with a material world that is all chaos and accident: “When primitive nothinge somethinge straite begot, / Then all proceeded from the greate united what” (lines 5–6). The workings of nature, in other words, can be just as mysterious as the supposed supernatural.Footnote 49

In addition to its distrust of reason and revealed religion, deism's more radical incarnation was characterized by several flagrant heresies, including a denial of the soul's immortality and of God's providence and future judgment of men's actions. It is for these heresies particularly that this form of deism was so often renamed as atheism. In his inaugural Boyle Lecture of 1692, The Folly of Atheism, and (What Is Now Called) Deism, Richard Bentley explains that “to avoid the odious name of Atheists,” certain infidels “shelter and skreen themselves under a new one of Deists, which is not quite so obnoxious.”Footnote 50 For Bentley, certainly, “the Existence of God and his Government of the World do mutually suppose and imply one another.” A deity who is excluded “from governing the World by his Providence, or judging it by his Righteousness” thus cannot rightly be said to exist. This more blasphemous tendency seems to have been present from deism's inception. As Pierre Viret describes the first deists of the sixteenth century, “some among them have a kind of notion of the immortality of the soul; others agree with the Epicureans on that as well as on the Divine providence with regard to mankind: they think he doth not intermeddle with human affairs.”Footnote 51

Viret's association of this more dangerous strain of deism with “the Epicureans” is important, for radical deism owes its most far-reaching inspiration to the Epicurean doctrine, laid out in Lucretius's De rerum natura, that the gods were indifferent to and untroubled by human needs, neither ruling nor caring to rule the world of man.Footnote 52 Lucretius was Rochester's favorite ancient. His translation of De rerum natura (lines 646–51) affirmed that,

This bald denial that the gods did anything in the universe was the fundamental starting-off point for the religion of nature and the rejection of revelation, divine providence, and rewards and punishments that formed deism's more heretical core. The “Satyre” is unabashedly contemptuous of clerics who, believing in “An Everlasting Soul” (line 61), presume to “Search Heaven and Hell, find out what's acted there, / And give the World true grounds of hope and feare” (lines 70–71). As Rochester put it to Gilbert Burnet in their conversations about religion, “God had none of those Affections of Love or Hatred, which breed perturbation in us”; such a divinity would not take the trouble to “reveal his Secrets to mankind.” Once divinity is thus out of the picture, the universe functions according to nature's necessary and immutable laws. Revealed religion is impossible for Lucretius because nature's “first great principle” is “That nothing ever by divine power comes from nothing.” We might call strange events miraculous when we cannot determine their cause, but the fact remains that “Things come into being without the aid of gods.” Footnote 53

In his essay “Of Custom,” Montaigne, himself following Lucretius, seems to have been the first modern to articulate the deist heresy for which Spinoza is more commonly known, that “Miracles are according to the ignorance wherein we are by nature, and not according to natures essence.” The theriophilia of Montaigne's Apology of Raymond Sebond, the source for the opening paradox of the “Satyre,” is itself rooted in the indifference of the Epicurean gods and linked to a rejection of miracles.Footnote 54 Citing Lucretius, Montaigne explains that he has stressed the equality between man and beasts “to maintaine the coherency and resemblance, that is in all humane things, and to bring us unto the generall throng. We are neither above nor under the rest: whatever is under the coape of heaven (saith the wise man) runneth one law, and followeth one fortune.”Footnote 55 It is man's vanity and presumption only, on this view, that “separateth himselfe from out the ranke of other creatures.” God awards man no “prerogative or essentiall preexcellencie” over beasts.Footnote 56 Belief in miracles assumes (falsely) just such a special prerogative from God as well as the notion that nature could deviate from her usual order. This connection between theriophilia and natural religion is a critical one, for it reveals that Rochester's speaker's desire to “be a Dog, a Monky, or a Bear” has more subversive implications than have hitherto been acknowledged: the theriophilia of the “Satyre,” in other words, launches a direct assault on revealed religion.

Montaigne praises beasts for better respecting nature's order than man, for containing themselves “within the compasse, which nature hath prescribed them.”Footnote 57 Rochester's speaker articulates a similar view in the “Satyre,” arguing that man is a “vain Animal” (line 6) precisely because he thinks himself above nature, erroneously preferring reason to “Instinct” (line 10) and “Sense” (lines 8, 100). These latter categories comprise the poem's notion of “right reason” (line 99), a distinctly heterodox glance at Christian humanism's identical term. According to the speaker's definition, “right” or “true Reason” (line 111) is a faculty shared by man and beast, a natural not a “supernatural Gift” (line 76). The error of the poem's adversarius is to insist alternatively (and wrongly from the poem's perspective) that God “drest” man's “fair frame in shining reason” in order “To dignify his Nature above Beast” (lines 64–65). As we know, the speaker would choose to be a beast if he could, not only because beasts lack speculative reason but also because they wisely follow “necessity” (line 131) and observe “Natures allowance to supply their want” (line 134).Footnote 58 Men, on the contrary, “betray” (line 130) one another “Not through Necessity, but Wantonness” (line 138).

Rochester's emphasis on necessity here is important, for the rejection of revealed religion and divine providence from Lucretius down to Spinoza depended upon the view that nature's workings are immutable. God cannot alter these workings (causing miraculous events) because he is not separate from them. Indeed, men's belief in miracles, Spinoza argued, stems from an incorrect differentiation between God and nature: “Thus they imagine that there are two powers quite distinct from each other, the power of God and the power of Nature, though the latter is determined in a definite way by God, or—as is the prevailing opinion nowadays—created by God.” When Spinoza insists, then, that “the universal laws of Nature are merely God's decrees,” what he means is that the two are in the strictest sense the same. The one is not the effect of the other's will, as conventionally assumed, but rather tantamount to it: “the power of Nature is the divine power and virtue.”Footnote 59

Pantheism, or the doctrine that nature and God form one substance, was seen as an abominable heresy whose roots went back to Epicurus and Plato among the Greeks, and, of course, to Lucretius among the Romans.Footnote 60 The term “pantheist” was coined in 1705 by John Toland, perhaps the best known radical deist of the period. Although Toland's Pantheisticon (1720) was the first deist book explicitly to promote the doctrine of one substance, it is clear that the writers who influenced Rochester's “Satyre,” as well as the Restoration deists themselves, all had tendencies in that direction. Hobbes's Epicurean conviction that we can have no concept of a “Spirit Incorporeall” was generally taken by contemporaries to require that God too was material, thereby equating God and nature.Footnote 61 It was for this reason that Hobbism and Epicureanism generally were so frequently charged with a kind of Spinozistic pantheism.Footnote 62 In just such a characteristic merging of Hobbes and Spinoza, Bentley complained that the deists’ God was “no more than some eternal inanimate Matter, some universal Nature, and Soul of the World, void of all sense and cogitation, endued with none at all, much less with Infinite Wisdom and Goodness.” Bentley's description of deism's divinity may well have had Rochester in mind. For according to Gilbert Burnet, Rochester's “Notion of God was so low, that the Supreme Being seemed to be nothing but Nature.” Rochester had appallingly described God as “a vast Power that Wrought every thing by … necessity”; his God “had none of the Attributes of Goodness or Justice, we ascribe to the Deity.”Footnote 63 To contemporaries, this kind of pantheism was tantamount to atheism: to say that there is no God separate from the universe was to say that there is no God at all.

I have attempted to demonstrate thus far how the twin emphases of Rochester's “Satyre”—the denial of reason in religion and the equation of man and beast—set off a chain of mounting heresy, ranging from a rejection of revelation, to a refusal of a future state of rewards and punishments, to a pantheistic (hence atheistic) conception of the universe. A proper understanding of this heresy, however, requires that we not bracket the range of philosophical texts and traditions to which Rochester's “Satyre” alludes from what appear to be its more topical concerns. Indeed, as I have suggested, the poem's attack on reasonable religion is inseparable from its reliance on a hoary legacy of free thought. Though critics have affirmed the importance of Lucretius, Montaigne, and Hobbes to the poem's general endorsement of freethinking, they have not appreciated the coherence of the heretical vision produced through the calling up of such precursors. What is more, making sense of the problem of belief with which I began this essay demands a recognition of the interplay between Restoration heterodoxy and that of the philosophical tradition. Doubt and faith may not be so starkly opposed in the deist inheritance I am delineating.

For Montaigne, most familiarly, the logical response to extreme doubt was “to accept Christianity on faith alone.”Footnote 64 In order to believe, in other words, one need not know anything in particular; one can doubt and believe at the same time. This position, described in the skeptical tradition as “fideism,” held that faith is the only response to a world in which all is in doubt. Though in one sense traditional in its insistence that faith and reason are opposed, fideism was nonetheless seen to open the door to unbelief.Footnote 65 As Rochester's friend and fellow skeptic Charles Saint-Evremond remarked, it is possible to “truly love God without really believing in Him.”Footnote 66 Fideism was typically seen as an earlier heresy, and one associated more with Catholic France than with Protestant England, but Rochester's circle indicates that vestigial traces persisted in English deism.

Blount points out in a letter to Rochester that the fideist wisdom was taught by the best of the historical ancients. The “divinum aliquid [the divine something], as Hippocrates terms it, is that which does all things. But our capacity not being able to discern it, … all philosophy excepting scepticism is little more than dotage.” In his Anima mundi (1679), a consideration of the heathens’ often contradictory views concerning the soul's immortality and future state, Blount admits that this kind of skepticism, illustrated by Democritus's opinion that “Truth is hidden in a Well, that she may not be found by men,” is, on the one hand, “very inconsistent with the light of Christianity.”Footnote 67 And yet, on the other hand, the heathens prove exemplary in upholding a particular kind of faith.

Indeed, when Blount, in typical deist fashion, strips back the additions of priests and custom and locates an original purity in an ancient tradition, what he sees is a faith whose content is importantly agnostic: the heathens are faithful, but strictly speaking, they do not “believe” in a future state of rewards and punishments: “And as at their Entrance into this Life, God had not made them capable of knowing how he would here provide for them, and yet they found by Experience he did so; so they hoped it would fare with them in their Future condition, although in some new way whereof they had not yet any experimental knowledge.” The heathens do not believe in a future state because they would not deem to say one way or another; God reserves such knowledge to himself. This latter point is important because the deists, as one might expect, are critical of faith in its most conventional guise, condemning those who “follow one another in a Track … like so many Religious Parrots, who are taught to say they believe the Scriptures, but why or wherefore they know not.” The problem with faith of this sort is that it proceeds from a blind obedience to authority, from doctrinal pressures. As Spinoza taught on the contrary, as long as faith stemmed from piety, what doctrine one embraced was beside the point. Each man “may hold whatever opinions he pleases on any subjects whatsoever without imputation of evil.” The implications of such a view for any conventional notion of belief are devastating to say the least.Footnote 68

It is little wonder that Blount's Anima mundi was decried as a heretical text. Yet, if we remember that the unbelievers and the Anglican traditionalists formed an unusual confederacy in their shared animus against reason in religion, Blount's veneration of the unassuming faith of the heathens also reveals a covertly conservative bias. His argument, indeed, rests on a fundamental opposition to modernity and progress: the further we stray from the men of the first ages, he implies, the more corruption accrues to religious belief and practice. Reason, moreover, provides a conspicuous example of this logic. The best of the heathens refrain from wrangling about theological questions, an activity that for Blount can only breed degradation and error. “Philosophy’s” promise of a surer knowledge, however, eventually led some to become “vain in their Imaginations,” specifically by “adventur[ing] to address their Doctrines to humane Reason.”Footnote 69 What becomes evident here is that reason is one of those vitiations of religion attributable to the progress of theology. Such a view is also evident in Rochester's “Satyre,” which denounces the reasoning divine who misguidedly “tr[ies] / To swim with bladders of Philosophy: / In hopes still to o’retake th’escaping Light” (lines 20–22, italics mine).

Blount's and Rochester's ancient bias in matters of theology offers support for Arthur Lovejoy's singular thesis that there is a parallel between deism and classicism. Progress for the former as for the latter is just a euphemism for “changes for the worse.” What is oldest is purest and therefore best. In Lovejoy's framing, however, deism points in two directions. While in some respects surprisingly conservative in its sympathies, deism also illustrates the way in which being an ancient in religion was dangerous business. Divinity, William Wotton pronounced in his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), was a modern accomplishment. Although “The Old Testament … has constantly been at hand; … yet it is very possible that Modern Divines … may be better Work-men than [the] Ancient Fathers.” As John Pocock has demonstrated, over the course of the eighteenth century, the Church of England learned that it “had good grounds for taking a modernist and not a traditionalist view of the history of philosophy.”Footnote 70 Rochester and Blount, among others, may well have offered the impetus for this shift. Their writings, indeed, provide evidence of the paradoxical way in which aspects of tradition, by the late seventeenth century, could become radical.

I hope in the preceding pages to have offered a more flexible framework within which to delineate Rochester's distinctive aristocratic heterodoxy. To place his freethinking in the context of English deism serves a multiple purpose. Not only does it provide a more accurate account of the content of Rochester's ideas about religion, it also affords a more nuanced view of the heterodox aristocrat's always uneasy relationship to a radical tradition. To the extent that the critique of enthusiasm is fueled by class anxiety, it is no coincidence that deism began as a largely aristocratic movement.Footnote 71 It is also little wonder that Hobbes's distinctive mixture of freethinking and authoritarian absolutism served as an appropriate inspiration.Footnote 72 In its anti-enthusiasm, in its nostalgia for a pure religion untainted by the corruptions of interest and politics, deism was radically conservative, a fitting home for an alienated aristocrat like Rochester.

In conclusion, I would like to propose that the possibility of a pure faith represented by the ideal churchman in the “Addition” to Rochester's “Satyre” is importantly not antinomian, or at least not in the sense that Hill and Turner suggest. The churchman's religiosity is “meek” and “humble” (line 216): once again, he who is truly pious believes in “Mysterious Truths, which no man can conceive” (line 219). This modest reverence in the face of mysteries forms a striking contrast to the arrogant enthusiasm of the speaker's adversarius, who insolently attempts to “pierce / The limits of the boundless Universe” (lines 84–85). To have faith, finally, as Rochester intuited, is “to be under those Perswasions”; whether or not those persuasions accord with orthodox doctrine is of minor significance. We arrive here at the suspension of disbelief emblematic of secular modernity.Footnote 73

Blount remarks in his Philostratus that “’Tis a thing of most Dangerous Consequence to oppose any Doctrine that is publickly receiv’d, how sottish soever it be.” Rochester's speaker retains his “Paradox” and welcomes the possibility of a simple faith precisely because he rejects the new orthodoxy of reason in religion, thereby refusing “to believe as the Church believes.” Reflecting on Rochester's own supposed conversion to faith at the end of his life, Blount suggests that a similar logic applies to the historical infidel. In the dying words of Pythagoras,

Like the heathens’, Blount implies, Rochester's faith is both humble and agnostic, exemplary in its hesitance to “affirm or deny any thing of the Souls future state.”Footnote 75 His conversion, if legitimate, should thus not be seen as “a victory over his former Opinions” but, rather, as continuous with them.

Rochester told Burnet that “he was sure Religion was either a meer Contrivance, or the most important thing that could be,” thereby largely supporting Blount's tribute to him.Footnote 76 By identifying the libertine position with two opposite extremes—skeptical unbelief and blind faith—Rochester ironically echoes the orthodox concern that those high-church divines whose traditionalism balked at rational defenses of Christianity fed into the hands of the atheists. This particular coming together of opposites is as central to situating the freethinking of Rochester's “Satyre” as Glanvill's feared alliance between the fanatics and the unbelievers. It has, moreover, long been a neglected aspect of the history of English deism.