On 23 February 1771, a letter appeared in the St James's Chronicle concerning the death, a few months before, of the archdeacon of London:
‘What may be the reason,’ said a Gentleman the other day, ‘that the demise of Dr. Jortin, the first scholar of his country, and perhaps of his age, has been so little noticed? Why are we stunned with the eulogies of a Secker, and a Whitefield? And why is even a Sterne busted and bronzed, while the remains of a man, to whom Dr. Browne's colossus was less than a pigmy, are consigned to the dust with as little noise and ceremony, as if the crowner's quest-law had found him felo de se?’Footnote 1
The urgency of that question is, of necessity, not now what it then was, but its resolution has considerable interpretative implications for an understanding of the scholarly and religious culture of eighteenth-century England. In the figure of John Jortin (1698–1770), the deep interpenetration of learning and scholarship with ideals of civil and religious liberty, which animated much public debate, can be identified and analysed. The Republic of Letters, of which Jortin was a distinguished citizen, continued to influence the politics of church and state throughout his lifetime.
The provenance of the letter in the St James's Chronicle is itself revealing. Thomas Hollis, bibliophile and sponsor of the eighteenth-century Commonwealth revival of which the late Caroline Robbins remains the major modern chronicler, had inspired like-minded writers, both lay and clerical, to write to London newspapers on matters of civil and religious liberty in the 1760s.Footnote 2 Hollis and his clerical allies, Anglican and dissenting, had launched an assault on the ecclesiastical politics of Thomas Secker, the orthodox archbishop of Canterbury, interpellated by them as an ally of Bute and other leaders of what they considered to be the tory reaction initiated by the accession of George III.Footnote 3 The animus against Secker betrayed in the letter can be immediately placed. Similarly, George Whitefield's ‘Enthusiasm’ as a leader of the evangelical revival placed him directly at odds with the self-consciously reasonable Christianity which Hollis and his allies, both within and outside the Church of England, promoted. Laurence Sterne and John Browne were posthumously reproved because of their generally positive relationships with William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester and would-be tyrant of English letters. Sterne's decision not to include Warburton as the tutor to Tristram Shandy, thereby reversing an earlier plan, had considerably blunted his satire, at least according to Hollis and his clerical coadjutors; John ‘Estimate’ Browne had described Warburton as a ‘colossus’ in the book that made his name, An estimate of the manners and principles of the times (1757), though Warburton subsequently distanced himself from his protégé.Footnote 4 (In an inversion of taste that Hollis and his associates would have excoriated had it been perpetrated by one of their orthodox antagonists, the author of the letter cruelly invoked the painful memory of Browne's suicide in 1766, an act committed when not of sound mind.)
Jortin's scholarship was well above the rather low standard set by his admirer in this reference to Browne, as can be appreciated from his striking observation concerning the laws against heretics that had animated the Theodosian Code:
It is the duty of the Historian to give an impartial and just account of such cruel proceedings, that people may be taught to love their liberties, civil and religious, and to beware of those who would strip them of these blessings, and also, ut qui insontes damnaverunt, ipsi causam dicant omnibus saeculis [so that those who condemned the innocent might plead their cause throughout the ages].Footnote 5
Jortin had chosen to close his rebuke with a silent adaptation of Seneca's de Providentia, thereby invoking a text by a heathen philosopher – much respected by him – obliged to commit suicide at the behest of a persecuting emperor, and he did so in order to condemn those Christians who had, in their turn, condemned and persecuted the heathens.Footnote 6 This is a telling moment in Jortin's Remarks on ecclesiastical history, the work which proved his signal importance as a scholarly champion of civil and religious liberty.
Why was Jortin accorded such eminence, and what are the implications of his cultural authority for an understanding of the complex interplay between scholarship and religion at work in eighteenth-century England? The foundation of any response to these questions is the observation that Jortin mounted a lifelong defence of civil and religious liberty as an historian, just as he consistently and powerfully did as a preacher.Footnote 7 In order to make full sense of the nature of Jortin's contemporary reputation, the present article will explore a series of overlapping themes: Jortin's style of churchmanship, and his role as a mediator between anti-dogmatic Anglicanism and rational dissent; his conception of liberty, civil and religious, as primarily enunciated in his ecclesiastical history; his status as a product of the Huguenot Refuge, and his standing in the Republic of Letters in which Huguenots had played a prominent part; his pioneering role in the evolution of English literary criticism; and, finally, consideration of his subsequent reception will clarify how it was that he went from being a figure of great contemporary (and near-contemporary) authority to one all but forgotten in modern scholarship, and why it is that he needs to be reconsidered.
I
Although, perhaps because, he was one of the most learned of the eighteenth-century clergy, Jortin did not secure great preferment in the Church of England. Born in 1698, he was the son of a Huguenot refugee who had prospered in William III's civil service; his Huguenot inheritance subsequently played a prominent part in Jortin's sense of Christian liberty. Educated at Charterhouse and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1721, Jortin secured the college living of Swavesey in Cambridgeshire in 1726, whence, after marrying in 1728, he began a career in several London parishes, eventually gaining a prebendal stall at St Paul's immediately prior to being appointed archdeacon of London in 1764: no fewer than three of his four published archidiaconal charges extolled the ‘use and importance of ecclesiastical history’ to the clergy. Jortin himself had stopped reading aloud the Athanasian Creed, the basis of Trinitarian orthodoxy, in the 1730s, and had declared in the provocative preface to the Remarks that ‘To compel any one to swear that he will never alter his opinions about Controversial Divinity, is a grievous imposition.’Footnote 8 Inevitably, this led to charges of promoting and fomenting heresy being levelled against him.
There are, then, two explanations for Jortin's lack of progress beyond the archdeaconry of London, and they are, first, what many in the church might well have perceived to be his unsoundness on dogma, and, secondly, his own notable lack of interest in preferment-hunting. As he characteristically phrased his principled indifference to clerical careerism, ‘Habits, titles, and dignities, are visible signs of invisible merits.’Footnote 9 Similarly, one cannot but detect something of the autobiographical in what the then ageing Jortin said of Damasus, who had secured the bishopric of Rome through dubious means: ‘He was made Bishop when he was sixty years old; a time of life in which a man who had a grain of philosophy, not to say of Christianity, would be extremely indifferent about preferments and promotions, and not think of purchasing them in such a manner.’ Such a critical attitude extended to a belief in the decline of ecclesiastical mores, economically conveyed in his praise for a learned and exemplary eleventh-century bishop of Worms: ‘the Inventory of his worldly goods and chattels consisted of a hair-shirt, an iron chain which served him for a belt, and in money three deniers. Times are altered, and with them the Inventories of Bishops.’Footnote 10
Satirical asperities of the sort in which Jortin specialized were not likely to win him many favours, still less the rewards of preferment. He did, however, acknowledge the interest in his career of Archbishop Herring, a classic court whig divine, who, Jortin declared, ‘had piety without superstition, and moderation without meanness, an open and liberal way of thinking, and a constant attachment to the cause of sober and rational liberty, both civil and religious’.Footnote 11 How, then, might one identify Jortin's style of churchmanship, and how did this influence both his career and the nature and reception of his writings? In answering this question, one has to consider the power of a claim made by a notable classical scholar and whig spokesman, Samuel Parr, who separated him firmly from ‘latitudinarianism’.Footnote 12 He had reason to do so. Although a great admirer of Archbishop Tillotson, whom he defended against imputations of Socinianism, and reared in the Cambridge in which latitudinarianism had held sway, Jortin belonged to a younger generation, and he marks the movement away from latitudinarianism towards a yet more liberal anti-dogmatism that would continue both within the Church of England and also outside it, as secession from the church was made by numbers of young, predominantly Cambridge-educated, clergy.Footnote 13 Indeed, Jortin was held to be the pivotal figure within these developments by one of the leading secessionists from the Church of England, John Disney.
Disney published his Memoirs of the life and writings of John Jortin, D. D. in 1792, shortly after he had been installed as minister to the Unitarian Chapel in Essex Street in London, which had been founded by another secessionist, Theophilus Lindsey. In reading these memoirs, it is vital to consider an earlier work by Disney in the same genre, his Memoirs of the life and writings of Arthur Ashley Sykes, DD (1785). Both works seek to place a history of what he called liberal-mindedness in religion, and both celebrated their subjects as defenders of civil and religious liberty, but their commitments were fatally qualified, in Disney's estimation, by equivocation and compromise. Consideration of the reasons why this was so sheds lights on divisions within would-be reforming parties in the eighteenth-century Church of England, and explains how scholarship played its part in amplifying those divisions.
Disney, in the spirit of the author of the letter to the St James's Chronicle, made much of the rumours that attempts had been contemplated by church authorities in the 1750s to censure Jortin for defending heresy and calumniating orthodoxy in his controversial preface to the first volume of the Remarks; Jortin's ecclesiastical history had begun to appear at a moment when the balance of church parties was under considerable pressure as the duke of Newcastle attempted to maintain the whig order in church and state that had been painfully negotiated by Walpole and his theological lieutenant, Edmund Gibson, bishop of London.Footnote 14 In this respect, Jortin was accorded praise by Disney, but he was also criticized by him for representing a middle way that secessionists from the Church of England came to consider unsustainable; for Disney, Jortin represented what Martin Fitzpatrick has described as ‘latitudinarianism at the parting of the ways’.Footnote 15
According to Disney, who had moved from Socinianism to fully fledged confessional Unitarianism, Sykes and Jortin had been at fault because of their Arianism. As Arians, they were committed to a belief in the divinity and pre-existence of Christ, doctrines inimitable to the Unitarian creed. Theirs was a ‘heresy’ – defined by Disney as simply denoting thinking and teaching differently from the precepts enforced by the orthodox – typical of the liberal-minded in early eighteenth-century Cambridge; in this respect, Disney was a pioneer historian of Christian rationalism, but he was far from being a disinterested one. Whereas he insisted that, had Sykes lived into the 1770s and beyond, he would have changed his mind on such points of controversial divinity, no such allowance was made for Jortin, whose distance from Unitarian teaching Disney was keen to emphasize.Footnote 16 Sykes and Jortin had failed to demand an end to clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, although both men had shown scruples concerning several of the doctrines so subscribed; in this, they failed to attain the ends of the anti-subscription campaigners of the 1770s, one of whose leaders, Edmund Law, bishop of Carlisle and master of Peterhouse, owed his early success at Cambridge to Jortin's sponsorship. Admired though Jortin was by Law, and such allied worthies as Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff, and Francis Blackburne, archdeacon of Cleveland, he failed, according to Disney, to demonstrate their courage and far-sightedness on the anti-subscription issue, which effectively defined the movement of anti-dogmatic Anglicanism into a proto- or fully Unitarian position.Footnote 17 Allying Jortin with William Paley, a man widely perceived by his contemporaries as a backslider on the issue, Disney forcefully affirmed his contention: ‘There cannot be more decisive reasons for the removal of all subscription, than the apologies of Jortin and Paley for the present prescribed formularies.’Footnote 18
Jortin had died in 1770, two years before he might have had to declare himself in the cause against clerical subscription, in initiating which a notably polemical piece of church history, Blackburne's The confessional (1767), had played a large part.Footnote 19 Socinianism modulated into Unitarianism in the 1770s and 1780s, and refugees from Anglican orthodoxy formed the nucleus of nascent Unitarianism, shored up by such stalwarts of enlightened dissent as Joseph Priestley, whose theological writings were frequently and approvingly cited by Disney. Priestley himself drew on the authority of Jortin's Remarks in his own rather more doctrinally inflammatory writings, especially often in A history of the corruptions of Christianity (1782).Footnote 20 Jortin's history had provided an anti-dogmatic solvent which allowed Priestley to attempt to undermine dogmatic orthodoxy as a whole. Eighteenth-century Arianism, which had attracted the likes of Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke, and which was carried forward by the likes of Sykes and Jortin, had no such long-term impact, and its late adherents tended to be found within rational dissent, as represented by the likes of Richard Price, rather more than within the Church of England.Footnote 21 In Disney's estimation, Arianism was both doctrinally dubious and equivocal in its ecclesiology; hence his occasional disapprobation of Jortin. But Disney praised Jortin more frequently in the Memoirs, and this praise centred principally on his defence of intellectual liberty and on his scholarly achievements, particularly as a historian of Christianity. In this, Disney was at one with the critical notices of Jortin's Remarks and allied writings which appeared in the predominantly dissenting Monthly Review, in which, whilst his learning, candour, and moderation were repeatedly praised, it was observed that his published views were difficult to reconcile with the official teaching of the Church of England: something of Disney's reserve about Jortin's churchmanship is discernible in these otherwise largely admiring notices.Footnote 22
It is difficult to separate Jortin's defence of liberty from his Remarks, as the theme of liberty, civil and religious, is constantly dominant throughout them. Jortin's churchmanship can be discerned more readily in his writings than in his career, in that his doctrinal commitments had had the effect of severely limiting that career. What, then, did Jortin understand by liberty, and why was it fundamental to his conception of ecclesiastical history as a subject of scholarly research? To some degree, as Disney had observed, it was related to what one might perceive as Jortin's moderate adoption of something very like Arianism. One can infer, throughout the Remarks, a subtle favouring of Arianism, whatever Jortin might have said about the necessity for disinterestedness in the writing of ecclesiastical history. This might well have been not only because it formed what its most recent historian, Maurice Wiles, called the ‘archetypal heresy’, but also because Jortin undoubtedly found many aspects of it appealing. Arians, after all, were less disposed to saint-worship than were the orthodox; they had less interest in miracles; and they were more likely to be married than were their orthodox opponents: Jortin, who treated post-first-century miracles with suspicion, particularly loathed Roman Catholic teaching on clerical celibacy.Footnote 23 However this might be, the Arians were equally condemned when they turned persecutors of the orthodox Athanasians, as Jortin regretted that ‘Few controversies have been carried out with less temper and with less prudence than this.’ Consequently, he praised the pragmatism of the seventh-century Lombard king Rotharius who, although himself an Arian, saw to it that each of the cities in his kingdom had two bishops, the one Arian, the other Athanasian. Not that all monarchs would prove so wise in Jortin's estimate, whose own attitudes to too close a fusion of church and king in late antiquity can be ascertained in his deliberately provocative description of the orthodox emperor Constans as ‘a High-Church man’.Footnote 24
The necessary conjunction of civil and religious liberty identified at such junctures as that personified by Rotharius was at the core of Jortin's ecclesiastical history; in this sense, it was more than a purely ecclesiastical history, intersecting throughout with a civil history of late antique and medieval Europe. Where Disney and his allies had seen the need to undo the magistrate's role in what they denounced as an entirely imagined alliance between church and state – here revolting against what they thought the inherently erastian and compromisingly expedient teaching of William Warburton on the matter – Jortin had been concerned to tease out its nuances, its paradoxes, and even its occasional strengths, in his history.Footnote 25 His Remarks took the form of an elaborate and extended commentary on the sources for an understanding of post-Apostolic Christianity, ending on the eve of the Reformation; the opening three volumes initially appeared between 1751 and 1754. This was a crucial moment in the evolution of ecclesiastical history, as it also witnessed the apologetically troubling attack on post-apostolic miracles made by Conyers Middleton, Jortin's older Cambridge contemporary, in his A free inquiry into the miraculous powers (1749).Footnote 26 The final two volumes of the Remarks appeared three years before the first volume of Edward Gibbon's History of the decline and fall of the Roman empire demonstrated how ecclesiastical history could be effectively deployed to undermine those very Christian foundations which Jortin had done so much to defend.Footnote 27
In reading Jortin's work in the hitherto neglected genre of eighteenth-century ecclesiastical history composed in England, it is well to remember what Arnaldo Momigliano observed of all such explorations, from whatever period: ‘Any ecclesiastical historian who believes in Christianity is bound also to be a theologian.’Footnote 28 Sceptical though Jortin was of what he characterized as speculative divinity, he was of necessity a theologian, and his style of theology affected what he otherwise presented as genuinely disinterested ecclesiastical history. In this, he was closer to the ideals of Johann Lorenz Mosheim, the eminent Lutheran historian, who greatly admired him, than he was to the many French ecclesiastical historians on whom he himself drew. Jortin was participating in a European conversation about ecclesiastical history, one in which the English contribution has been severely underestimated by later historians.Footnote 29
Jortin had an ideal of the disinterested historian, one whose standards he often tried to reach, but his prejudices inevitably informed his practice. A number of these are unmistakable. A consistent advocate of liberty, Jortin loathed all philosophical or theological systems, of whatever kind, that disparaged human freedom of agency. Allied to this defence of individual liberty was his principled commitment to an ecclesiastical settlement that promoted liberty of conscience, which he identified particularly with the Church of England, and which he contrasted with the Church of Rome, as it flourished from the age of Constantine to that of Louis XIV. Similarly, he was critical of Calvinist ultras, who denied both freedom of the will and the right of others to dissent from their intellectually repressive doctrines. Toleration was to be extended not only to supposed heretics, but also to other religious groups who had suffered at the hands of Catholic orthodoxy, not least Jews.Footnote 30 The practice of ecclesiastical history was to be intentionally tolerant in perspective and objective, and he judged its practitioners, past and present, accordingly.
Jortin used ecclesiastical history as the principal means to instantiate demonstrable grounds for liberty of conscience against what he saw as the twin evils of self-perpetuating, self-serving orthodoxy and persecution, its chosen instrument of domination. A positive sense of imperfection was central to his conception of Christianity as an established faith; it was, therefore, impossible to prevent diversity of opinion, ‘since this is the unavoidable result of human imperfection and human liberty, and is not to be removed, when we have more light, or less agency’. Agency was fundamental to Jortin's account of Christian liberty, as in his defence of the doctrine of free will, where it is defined against both Spinozism and fatalism, Christian or otherwise; and there was, naturally to his way of thinking, a clear link between morality and soteriology.Footnote 31 Erasmus's commitment to freedom of the will was one of the many attractive elements of his thought that Jortin celebrated in his two-volume Life of Erasmus (1758–60), as also was that which he perceived in the writings of his beloved Seneca. In this respect, he infinitely preferred Erasmus to Luther, whom he suspected of concurring too strongly with Augustine's rejection of freedom of the will. Erasmus and Seneca were, in a sense, projections of Jortin's sense of self, a reformer who was concerned to defend what is best in what exists, but who was not blind to the need for reform.Footnote 32 This was simply not enough for the likes of Disney, and too much for some of the orthodox.
The contest of Christian wills was, then, in every sense a necessary part of the dynamic of ecclesiastical history for Jortin, considered both in secular and in religious terms, and he regretted any attempts at limiting it, so that the frequently expressed desire for Christian unity implied, to him, a dangerous collusion with compulsion. In common with Locke, Jortin did not believe that men and women could be made to think with others, but only that they might be obliged to adopt the appearance of so doing: ‘and this is called Unity; which is somewhat like the behaviour of the Romans, as it is described by a brave country-man of ours in Tacitus – Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. [They make a desert, and call it peace].’Footnote 33 This allusion to Tacitus's Agricola combined two of Jortin's deepest commitments: his classicism and his critical patriotism.
His commitment to the doctrine of human agency had both religious and secular consequences, not least in the way it allows human beings to be honestly mistaken in and about the beliefs they hold. The literal secularity of time bears witness to a central fact that boldly informs Jortin's tolerant creed at every turn: ‘What men call Heresy, is often a local and a secular crime; for what is Heresy in one century, and in one country, is sound doctrine in another.’Footnote 34 As this implies, Jortin was determined to demarcate a division between the secular and the religious powers, and to fail to do so was, he thought, to patronize persecution and a monopoly of power. For him, men have two characters, the one as citizens, the other as Christians; the civil magistrate also bears two characters, that of ruler and that of Christian: considered together, citizens and civil magistrates constitute one society, which is both secular and religious in nature. From this assumption, Jortin deduced a clear prescription for the basis of a Christian society, a semi-idealized account of the Anglican culture in which he wrote, and which he conspicuously defended: public worship was to be established on Gospel principles, and terms of Communion were only to be those sanctioned by Christ and His Apostles; ministers were to be appointed with a sufficient maintenance, and tolerance was to be accorded to those ‘who approve not the religious establishment, if they be peaceable subjects, and maintain no immoralities’. The religious culture so described was the antithesis of that settled by Constantine and the great majority of his successors, although Jortin praised Constantine for reasonably removing the clergy from the possibility of holding the burdens of civil office.Footnote 35
Crucially, the Christianization of the Roman empire, as Jortin saw it, enacted a scenario of admittedly ambiguous toleration when the emperors were in charge, and of unambiguous persecution when the clergy were in control. Jortin was consistently ambivalent about Constantine, concluding that his good qualities ‘may perhaps outweigh the bad’. He despised Constantine's law that stripped one half of their estates from those who spoke ill of Christianity, which he saw as being worthier of an inquisitor than of a Christian prince. It was the collusion of emperors with priests that Jortin most deeply regretted: hence his nostalgia for a pre-Constantinian moment: ‘Better was the state of the church, in some respects, before the days of Constantine, when Clemens Alexandrinus, and other fathers, could maintain some fanatical errors and philosophical reveries, without being persecuted, excommunicated, and anathematized by their brethren.’Footnote 36 It was, however, an idyll, and the potential dynamic of power lay firmly with the self-consciously orthodox clergy, who obliged Christian emperors ‘to trample under foot justice, benevolence, charity and prudence, and totally to neglect the true interest of the public, that they might gratify the ceaseless importunity of the Persecutors’. Christian emperors forgot their impartial role as civil magistrates at their (and the public's) peril, as Jortin notably regretted that Justinian ‘spent his time in examining and deciding … Theological controversies, and instead of applying to affairs of state, amused himself with frivolous speculations concerning the Divine nature’.Footnote 37
Jortin consistently decried theocracy, but he was not an erastian. Instead, he idealized England's Anglican settlement, and concomitantly excoriated the Gallican Church. A defender of Oxford and Cambridge as liberal seminaries ‘which have been our best security against Ignorance, Superstition, and Infidelity’, Jortin noted that ‘Philosophy, Natural, Moral, and Theological, hath received great improvements in this and the last century, by the labours of the Learned, and particularly the Learned of this nation.’Footnote 38 Anglican prolepsis can be discerned in much that Jortin had to say about the history of Christianity in pre-Reformation England. Aelfric, ‘a learned English Ecclesiastic’ of the tenth century, recommended that all Christians should read the Scriptures in the vernacular, and was a critic of transubstantiation. There was praise for Bede, ‘an honour to our country’; for Alfred, ‘a Prince famous for his valour, piety and learning’; for Bishop Grosseteste, ‘a strenuous adversary to Popish usurpations’; for Matthew Paris; for Roger Bacon; and for William of Occam, whose writings ‘did great mischief to the Papal power’. Such visions of an Ecclesia Anglicana continued in Jortin's account of the Lollards, in which he pointed to the burning of one of their number as the first execution of an Englishman for his religion.Footnote 39
There were also Englishmen whom he condemned, although these are remarkably few in number. It is little surprise to find Jortin, an opponent of deism, dispatching the reputation of Lord Bolingbroke in a footnote; as a critic of erastianism, he dismissed what he called ‘Public Wisdom’ as leading to ‘the Gospel according to Mr. Hobbes’. His criticism of Archbishop Becket is tersely revealing, complete with its typically aphoristic closing observation which achieves even more economically what David Hume had sought to do in his anticlerical treatment of the matter in his History of England: ‘Thomas Becket was most justly canonised by the Pope, since he lost his life for maintaining Popish innovations and the tyrannical power which the Church, as they called it, usurped over the State. His blessed bones wrought numberless miracles, till Henry VIII demolished them.’Footnote 40 Hume and Jortin were at one on the character and influence of Becket, emphasizing the ‘superstitious’ reverence paid to his shrine in marking their own post-Reformation distance from the powers of the medieval papacy.Footnote 41 Lay and clerical prejudices allied in this distancing from Catholic England, and in this Jortin and Hume were in agreement with what the politician and historian George Lyttelton would argue in his influential study, The history of the life of King Henry II (1767–71).
The parallel with the pious Lyttelton would have pleased Jortin; that with Hume, rather less so.Footnote 42 Jortin desired a Christian culture, but one in which clergy and laity were agreed on the fundamentals of what constituted civil and religious liberty, and only from such a conjunction could his conception of what properly constituted Christianity flourish. If the English Enlightenment was, as J.G. A. Pocock has insisted, clerical and conservative, it was also lay and liberal, at least as manifested, paradoxically perhaps, by Jortin, a clerical scholar.Footnote 43 This can be strongly appreciated by reading his first archidiaconal charge to the clergy of London, delivered in 1764, in which he contrasted Protestant England with Catholic Europe:
But it cannot hence be unfairly inferred, that we abound more in Infidels than other Christian nations. It may be presumed that there are more in France and Italy than here. But in Popish countries they are obliged to be upon the reserve, as to the publication of books: there is no insulting the established Religion in that gross manner; and the authority of the Magistrate, enforced by pains and penalties, lays some restraint upon profane persons in those regions; whilst amongst us men may Curse God and prosper. So that the laboured works of our Infidels are the fruits of that liberty of the press which here prevails in matters relating to religion. To put rigid restraints upon it, seems to be no good remedy. In this world such is the course of things, that evil often ariseth out of good, and good out of evil. The freedom of writing, though it will unavoidably degenerate into licentiousness, hath produced many useful effects. Truth is not afraid of being examined or opposed; the books of Deists and Atheists have perverted few, except those who were already more than half-spoilt without their assistance; and they have occasioned many excellent treatises in behalf of Religion, and have also taught the defenders of the gospel to reject the rubbish which prejudice, ignorance and bigotry had super-added to the Christian religion, and whatsoever was not essential to it, to reduce it as nearly as possible to its primitive simplicity, to give up such interpretations of it as are indefensible, and to pay no blind veneration to Fathers and Councils, and Systems of Theology.Footnote 44
This under-noticed piece of writing contained what Jortin knew to be an original argument, namely that it was through their commitment to the study of the Scriptures that the early Christians, clerical and lay, came to preserve the learning and literature of the classical world, necessary auxiliaries as knowledge of the learned languages, grammar, and criticism were to religious education and practice. What followed was essentially a history of scholarship considered as a profoundly and explicitly Christian legacy, at the close of which he denounced the familiar inventory of deists and supposed atheists, from Lord Herbert of Cherbury to Hume, beloved of English divines. It is, in the deepest sense, pure pulpit eloquence:
To whom are we indebted for the knowledge of Antiquities, sacred and secular, for every thing that is called Philology, or the Literae Humaniores? To Christians. To whom for Grammars and Dictionaries of the learned languages? To Christians. To whom for Chronology, and the continuation of History through many centuries? To Christians. To whom for rational systems of Morality and of Natural Religion? To Christians. To whom for improvements in Natural Philosophy, and for the application of these discoveries to religious purposes? To Christians. To whom for Metaphysical researches carried as far as the subject will permit? To Christians. To whom for the moral rules to be observed by nations in war and peace? To Christians. To whom for Jurisprudence, and for political knowledge, and for settling the rights of subjects, both civil and religious, upon a proper foundation? To Christians. Not to Atheists or Deists, some of whom, as Hobbes in particular, have been known advocates for tyranny. To whom for the great work of the reformation? To Christians. Let me add; And very often to Christian Divines.Footnote 45
Self-serving though this rhetoric may sound, it was an act of intellectual authorization that was of enormous importance to a Christian scholar such as Jortin, who saw himself at war on two fronts: with enthusiasm, on the one hand, and infidelity, on the other, and of the two, infidelity was, he judged, by far the more perilous opponent.Footnote 46 The Republic of Letters was, for Jortin, a Christian Republic.
II
The Republic of Letters, a term of art for Jortin and his contemporaries, is much contested by modern historians.Footnote 47 What did it mean, exactly, for Jortin, and how did it affect his relations with other scholars? It is essential to appreciate that, for Jortin, the Republic, which had its saint and forerunner in Erasmus, was essentially the product of persecution, the indirect product of Louis XIV's expulsion of the Huguenots from France; in this he is not too far out of line with modern scholarship. In an important study of a leading scholar and Catholic priest, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), April G. Shelford has noted how Huet's otherwise unprejudiced relations with Huguenot scholars were complicated by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, though he kept up relations with Dutch scholars.Footnote 48 Similarly, as Anne Goldgar has demonstrated, it was a republic in which scholarly and religious dissent, of the sort that Jortin's variety of liberalism sought to mitigate, was rife; by the time he came to write, it was an altogether less inflammatory environment in which scholarship could bloom, but in order for it to do so, Jortin had, again and again, to see off the sort of Huguenot Calvinist ultras whose assaults on the tolerant worlds of Locke and Bayle John Marshall has recently restored to their place in the troubled evolution of early Enlightenment Europe.Footnote 49
As with religion, so with scholarship: liberal-mindedness would, Jortin insisted, result in civil peace, albeit one in which bickering necessarily and healthily persisted. The men whose voices had to be stilled were, in his account, predominantly Catholic, often Calvinist, and sometimes unbelieving. It is striking how often, in the course of the Remarks, Jortin lashes out at those French scholars who fell into any one of those categories. This is particularly evident in his treatment of Catholic ecclesiastical historians, as in his observation of the greatest of them all, Le Naine de Tillemont, that ‘when the Orthodox persecute the Heterodox, this pious Author winks hard, and can see no great harm in it’. (Here Tillemont differed greatly from Pierre Bayle, whose critique of Augustine's persecution of heretics was much more to Jortin's tolerant taste.)Footnote 50
Tillemont could never acknowledge his debts to Protestant authors, for all such were heretics in his eyes; as he grew older, he allegedly grew even more uncharitable, and his sentiments were those, Jortin noted, that encouraged the growth of atheism and deism in men grown disgusted by them. Whilst prepared always to accept Athanasian miracles, Tillemont always rejected Arian miracles. His accommodation of the historically dubious was, to the French, ‘Unction’; to the English – more revealingly – it was ‘Canting’.Footnote 51 Bossuet, the foremost Catholic apologist of the age, fared no better than Tillemont: he was criticized by Jortin for his assault on Grotius, and, despite protestations made on his behalf by Mosheim, he was not to be trusted ‘in points relating to heresy, orthodoxy, or Ecclesiastical Authority’.Footnote 52
Jortin's most considered remarks concerning a French ecclesiastical historian were reserved for the Abbé Fleury, translations of whose writings were lengthily inserted in the fifth and last volume of the Remarks. Above all, allowing for his Gallicanism, and for his occasionally eirenic asides, Fleury's writings were called in witness of ‘the utter impossibility of any re-union between us and the Papists, even upon the more moderate plan laid down by this Author, and by some others’.Footnote 53 Here is an explicit rejection of the attempted rapprochement between Anglicans and Gallicans that Archishop Wake, Fleury, and others had proposed during Jortin's schooldays and his early youth, a prospect that was not attractive to the descendant of the Huguenot Refuge, and even his attempted exculpation of Fleury's wrong-headedness cannot rise above Jortin's explicit and persistent anti-Catholicism, with its implicit inclusion of himself in a considered parallel between a Protestant and a Catholic ecclesiastical historian:
Strong indeed are the prejudices of education, and the attachment to a Church in which we were born and bred, and to the ministry to which we have devoted ourselves: and candid allowances ought ever to be made for them. Else it would seem impossible for a man of letters, a man versed in Ecclesiastical History and in the Scriptures, a man of probity and good sense, to admit the Pope's spiritual authority over the Christian world, the infallibility of Popes or councils, the celebration of the Eucharist in one kind, Transubstantiation, celibacy imposed upon the Monks, the Nuns, and the Clergy, the worship of Images and Reliques, the usefulness of Monasteries, the miracles attributed to Impostors, Fanatics, and Lunatics, and to a multitude of other things so contrary to Religion and to common sense.Footnote 54
Ecclesiastical history was, then, frequently an apologetic resource for Jortin, and it was a firmly and decidedly anti-Catholic one. His particular bête-noire was Cesare Baronius, the greatest of the post-Reformation Catholic historians, of whom he observed that ‘Some Churchmen are much fitter to draw up an Index Expurgatorius, or to preside at an Inquisition, than to write Ecclesiastical History.’Footnote 55 Specifically, Roman Catholic historians were routinely chastised by Jortin; not all of the ecclesiastical historians at work in the early church, however, had been automatically demoted in this way. Eusebius was a favourite, not least as he had ‘obtruded the least trash upon his readers’. The ‘Father of Ecclesiastical History’, Eusebius's chief virtue was his non-partisanship: although he was often claimed by Arians and Unitarians, ‘He seems to have been neither an Arian nor an Athanasian, but one who endeavoured to steer a middle course, yet inclining more to the Arians than to the Athanasians.’Footnote 56 Not for the first time, Jortin favourably elided an earlier ecclesiastical historian with himself.
If Catholic authors fared predictably badly in Jortin's estimation, Calvinist ultras fared no better, not least as, having suffered persecution themselves, Jortin believed that they ought to have known better in their judgements of ecclesiastical history. He was censorious of Pierre Jurieu but also critical of the tolerant Bayle, for having been too tolerant as the proponent of an equable society of atheists, and Jortin often expressed a preference for Jean Le Clerc, although he was indebted on many occasions to entries in Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique.Footnote 57 His greatest criticism of a Huguenot author, however, was reserved for Jacques Basnage, whom he indicted for favouring the Athanasians over the Arians, in a way unbecoming ‘an impartial historian.’ Much more substantially, Jortin's paraphrase of Basnage's comments on Valentinian II's toleration of Arians, came complete with a strong condemnation of the attitudes thereby evinced: ‘So, because the Arians were permitted to meet together to worship God, the Church was in danger, and under cruel persecution! One would not expect such remarks from Refugees, and Protestant Historians. They are fitter for Bellarmine and Baronius.’ Basnage was found guilty of being unreflective in his criticisms of the heretical Euonomians, and his words were literally turned against him:
Basnage should have considered that the Jesuits and the other zealous papists treated him and the Calvinists, just as he was treating the Euonomians, and in the same sort of language would have said, concerning the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: Let us not here pass over … a Law of Louis the Great against the Calvinists, those most pestilent heretics, &c. Footnote 58
Such criticism of what Jortin considered as Huguenot inconsistency did not detract from the horrors that they had faced, and the image of the ‘dragonades’ who drilled against them occurs at several points in his accounts of the anti-heretical enthusiasm of the age of St Cyril, which clearly parallels that of Louis XIV in Jortin's estimation of the many troubling continuities that subsisted in ecclesiastical history, a parallel that was never far from Gibbon's thoughts.Footnote 59
There was a clear echo of the 1680s in Jortin's statement, replete with a direct allusion to a traditional country party/whig concern, that Cyril ‘kept a standing army of Dragoons, namely the AEgyptian Monks, and Alexandrian Ecclesiastics, who were always ready to fight his battles’. Jortin concluded that, ‘From those times to ours, two Auxiliaries have been very instrumental in converting people to Faith, namely, Pistoles, and Dragoons.’Footnote 60 Louis XIV's dragonades were thus but the latest in a consistent history of religious persecution, and it was particularly vital, in Jortin's opinion, for the French to learn to hate persecution. Referring feelingly to ‘our travels through the gloomy paths of Ecclesiastical History’, Jortin also tantalizingly alluded to another form of persecution in criticizing Tillemont's treatment of the women who followed the heretical Priscillianists: ‘What pity it is that Women do not write Ecclesiastical History, and take their revenge upon us!’Footnote 61
III
Altogether less gloomy for Jortin was study of classical and modern literature, and here he was, in many respects, a pioneer. He came of age as the Battle of the Books had begun to subside in England, and, for him, the best of classical and modern literature was worthy of critical parity. Jortin experienced neither the shock of the new, nor what Larry F. Norman has recently described, in a stimulating study of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, as the shock of the ancient.Footnote 62 Although he makes only the most fleeting of appearances in Kristine Louise Haugen's authoritative study of Richard Bentley, and then as a Milton scholar, Jortin flourished in the atmosphere of classical emendation, of which Bentley was the master, encouraged in early eighteenth-century Cambridge.Footnote 63 Indeed, he can be viewed as a bridge between Bentley's classicism and that of such later worthies as Samuel Parr, who was enthusiastic about Jortin's scholarship, as was the Oxford-educated essayist, Vicessimus Knox.Footnote 64 He was also a practitioner, producing Latin poetry of unusually high quality in his Lusus poetici (1722/48).Footnote 65 It was, however, his philology that was most respected by his contemporaries and immediate successors, and this he promoted in a manner typical of the Republic of Letters: he started a learned journal, which was immediately expanded, between 1732 and 1739, by Dutch scholars, who generously adverted to their indebtedness to English scholarship in initiating the series.Footnote 66 Jortin was a notable promoter of English literary criticism; his Remarks on Spenser's poems (1734) treated Spenser and Milton as English classical literature, and in this he was followed by three clerical fellow scholars, Zachary Pearce, bishop of Rochester, Thomas Newton, a future bishop of Bristol, and Thomas Warton, a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Newton essayed a quietly stated defence of Milton as a champion of civil and religious liberty, a difficult task in an Anglican culture which conventionally repudiated both the poet's republicanism and his religious independence; in this respect, Newton circumspectly took forward Jortin's historical and theological perspective into exactly the territory that would subsequently become Thomas Hollis's own.Footnote 67 Fashionable though it has long been to prefer a Scottish invention (and institutionalization) of English literary study in the eighteenth century, one must not discount its English proponents.Footnote 68
One commentator on Spenser represents a major fracture in the Anglican community of scholarship in Jortin's lifetime. Richard Hurd, whose Letters on chivalry and romance (1762) did much to encourage study of Spenser, was also the author of a malignant pamphlet, On the delicacy of friendship (1755), whose entire purpose was to deride Jortin for presuming to dissent from William Warburton's typically perverse account of Greek and Roman teaching on the afterlife, which was central to the argument of his Divine legation of Moses demonstrated (1738–41). Jortin elegantly undermined Warburton's thesis in his essay ‘On the state of the dead, as described by Homer and Virgil’, the most celebrated of his Six dissertations (1755). For Warburton and his young disciple Hurd this was tantamount to a declaration of war, and yet another fault line in Anglican scholarly apologetic was thus allowed to emerge; hence the full power of the St James's Chronicle letter-writer's allusion to Warburton. It was a moment of which the young Edward Gibbon took advantage in his first English publication, Critical observations on the sixth book of the ‘Aeneid’, which appeared in 1770, the year of Jortin's death. Gibbon's critical indebtedness to Jortin's Remarks is palpable throughout the Decline and fall, and much can inferred from a suggestive parallel. In the second volume of the Remarks, Jortin refers to those ‘whose lives are not recorded in Ecclesiastical History; which, like all History, is for the most part a register of the vices, the follies, and the quarrels of those who made a figure and a noise in the world’.Footnote 69 Gibbon must have had this passage in mind when he famously declared of history that it was ‘indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’Footnote 70
Gibbon's approbation of Jortin is what made him, and continued to make him, suspect in the opinion of many Christian commentators, but also more attractive to more liberal-minded scholars. Joseph and Isaac Milner, Calvinist leaders of evangelical revival within the late eighteenth-century Church of England, conflated Pelagianism and Socinianism as a heresy concerning the freedom of the will, one which compromised Jortin's thinking, and that of his hero Erasmus, according to their influential account of ecclesiastical history, whilst the former evangelical John Henry Newman later dismissed him as being merely ‘flippant’.Footnote 71 Other writers were to prove altogether more positive about Jortin. As a testimony to the long reach of Jortin's style of Protestant apologetic, William Trollope brought out an edition of the Remarks in 1846, in the wake of the crisis within the Church of England precipitated by Newman's conversion to Rome. W. E. Gladstone, when considering relations between church and state, read Jortin with interest, as did the utilitarian historian George Grote, who was particularly interested in his relationship with European thought and scholarship.Footnote 72 The unbeliever Grote, himself a historian of European standing in the first half of the nineteenth century, understood that Jortin had benefited from an analogous reputation throughout the eighteenth century.
Grote's appreciation of Jortin is itself sufficient warranty to re-examine the latter's achievement, but there are other, more contemporary, reasons to do so. As in the eighteenth so in the twenty-first century, ecclesiastical and intellectual history should not be entirely distinct and separate activities: the former should not descend to apologetic, nor yet to the amorphous ‘religious turn’, and nor yet should the latter be contrived to inspire polemical secularism, as it often is. The present article is an attempt at exactly such a union of disciplinary focus. John Jortin is a figure eminently worthy of such interpretative justice and rediscovery, a scholar of great standing who used ecclesiastical history both to do justice to those who had themselves been condemned in the past, and also as a means of securing and reinforcing intellectual liberation in his own age. He celebrated the tolerant form of Christianity he associated with the Church of England as the best means of answering the intellectual criticisms of freethinkers, and its practice as the best moral response to open infidelity. The progressive dynamism behind this reciprocity of civil and religious liberty was the central lesson to be deduced from Jortin's Remarks on ecclesiastical history.
Though never quite as outspoken as Conyers Middleton, Jortin daringly rehabilitated past heresies as exercises of conscience and liberty of judgement, so much so, in fact, that John Disney thought that Jortin himself emerged as a heretic in the process.Footnote 73 As a religious believer who carried many of the tolerant values of the Huguenot diaspora into eighteenth-century England, and then revised and re-circulated them throughout Protestant Europe, Jortin usefully complicates current master narratives of Enlightenment.Footnote 74 The concept of a resolutely secular, predominantly atheistic Radical Enlightenment is in particular danger of becoming a cultural orthodoxy; the study of such figures as Jortin appropriately reminds scholars of the need for interpretatively constructive heterodoxy.Footnote 75
