All students learning logic in seventeenth-century England would have imbibed the definition of man as animal rationale (rational animal).Footnote 1 While the definition was used to explain differentia from genus, it fit in with scholastic orthodoxy's position that man's possession of a rational soul is the principal means of establishing the difference between humans and animals. The distinction was a staple of the anthropocentric Christian worldview.Footnote 2 This article explores a related development that took place in England during the middle decades of the seventeenth century: within a variety of writings with religious themes and across the continuum of Protestant thought, man was frequently reinterpreted as best classified not as animal rationale but as animal religiosum (religious animal). The following is not an examination of when and how English Christians started thinking about man as a creature able to be religious but rather an investigation of the moment when theologians felt the need to explicitly define man as a religious animal. While the understanding of man as a religious creature was widely available to early modern theologians through a variety of patristic, classical, and contemporary sources, it is striking that the specific definitions animal religiosum and animal capax religionis (animal capable of religion) became prominent from around 1650 onward. Initially, the definition was used by writers as part of doctrinal polemics. The definition of man as animal religiosum was deployed in the 1660s and 1670s by numerous scholars attempting to understand the implications of animal rationality.
The aim of this article is to chart the usages of this redefinition of man, analyze the reasons why the definition emerged and the different roles it played for different people in different contexts, and offer some suggestions for why it fell into comparative disuse by the beginning of the eighteenth century. It proceeds not by focusing on specific genres of writing, but by exploring usages of animal religiosum, divinum animal (divine animal), animal capax religionis, “religious animal,” and “religious creature” identified during the period. In exploring the explicit redefinition of man as animal religiosum and animal capax religionis in mid-seventeenth-century England, the following refines the previous discussions of the topic in two ways: by reinserting the theological element to the conversation and by correcting misinterpretations which connected the redefinition to “Cambridge Platonism” and “Latitudinarianism.”
It might, at first, appear that one potentially productive way to think about why seventeenth-century English religious writers started defining man as animal religiosum (as opposed to animal rationale) would be to examine the debate over animal rationality. Much research has shown how the purported ability of animals to reason raised serious moral and theological concerns about their relative status to humans as well as the troubling possibility that animals might have immortal souls.Footnote 3 This scholarship has been supplemented by work exploring the satirical purpose to which theriophily could be applied—such as by the Earl of Rochester in his A Satyr Against Mankind (1675).Footnote 4 Yet this extensive discussion on seventeenth-century English understandings of human-animal relations often downplays the importance of disputes between theologians.Footnote 5 The analysis below will make the case, firstly, that it is a mistake to view the reclassification of man as animal religiosum as solely resulting from a desire to protect the anthropocentric great chain of being in the face of some unnerving arguments about the reasoning capabilities of animals. The definition of man as a religious animal did not have to relate to concerns about the anthropocentric world order and often instead played a role in theological disputes about the relationship between religion, reason, and human nature. By reinserting the theological element in this discussion, this article has new things to say about the sudden popularity of defining man explicitly as animal religiosum.
Secondly, in the process, it also aims to correct an earlier misinterpretation of the definition of animal religiosum as being bound up with the much-disputed categories of “Cambridge Platonism” and “Latitudinarianism.” Man as animal religiosum has regularly been discussed in scholarship on the “Cambridge Platonists.”Footnote 6 The most sustained treatments of the topic advance the thesis that the leading “latitude-men,” such as Benjamin Whichcote and John Smith through to the third Earl of Shaftesbury, redefined man as animal religiosum and animal capax religionis as part of their campaign to demonstrate the alignment of true religion and reason.Footnote 7 The two categories—“Cambridge Platonism” and “Latitudinarianism”—have come under serious challenge in recent decades. It has been conclusively shown that the appeal to reason was not limited to those defined as “latitude-men,” nor did they privilege reason over inspiration, works over doctrine, or ecumenical inclusiveness over confessional conflict in the manner set out in earlier influential Anglican scholarship on the period.Footnote 8 Similarly, it has been argued that what binds these philosophers and theologians together is less a sense of shared intellectual interests and a common philosophical language, and more pedagogical relationships, friendship, patronage, and marriage.Footnote 9 While many of those sometimes classified as “latitude-men” do appear in the analysis below, it is striking that man was being defined as animal religiosum by writers across the continuum of Protestant thought in seventeenth-century England, from puritans and Nonconformists to various shades of non-“latitudinarian” Anglicanism.
A third proposition offered here, which breaks new ground, is that there are two distinct periods in the discussion of man as animal religiosum. This categorization of human nature appeared in mid-seventeenth-century England, usually (though not always) in the writings of theologians who were battling over the correct characterization of man's relationship with God. By the late 1660s, the definition of man as a religious animal increasingly formed part of debates about the relative standing of man and beast. Of particular importance here are the writings of close friends and neighbors Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676), the famous common law judge and philosopher, and the Nonconformist minister Richard Baxter (1615–1691). In contrast to the more theological discussions of the mid-century, Hale and Baxter attempted to resubstantiate the difference between man and beast in response to recent writings about the reasoning abilities of animals. Both were concerned about Cartesian and Gassendian mechanistic theories of animal nature, but their attempts to reassert the distance between man and animals were prompted by two treatises by the French physician and lay religious writer Marin Cureau de la Chambre (1594–1669). Noticeable here was their strategic willingness to adopt the animal religiosum definition while at the same time rejecting arguments in favor of animal reasoning. The discussion below suggests a modification is needed to the influential view that “the Restoration Englishman,” not just the “Cambridge Platonists” and “Latitudinarians,” took inordinate pride in being “rational” by also showing the impact of the potential reasoning capabilities of animals. In many cases, reason was not enough to be proud about.Footnote 10
The specific distinction of man as animal religiosum or animal capax religionis had largely disappeared in English theology by the early eighteenth century. A detailed account of why is beyond our purview here, though some tentative suggestions are offered about how the categorization fell out of use in the pulpit and in the works of philosophers and divines: scholastic reasoning fell out of fashion and the focus of apologetics moved from atheists to “deists.” This article, in sum, is a contribution to our understanding of those significant debates over the difference between men and beasts and the relationship between religion and human nature in seventeenth-century English theology. It charts the rise and speculates on the fall of a distinct categorization of human nature and suggests, at least initially, the overriding concern was not only with new attitudes or experiences of animals themselves but also with theological disputes. Only later in the century did shots across the bow of the anthropocentric worldview lead to recalibrations by some theologians of just why humans were special.
The apparent parochialism of focusing on religious texts published in seventeenth-century England is justified on the grounds that, while absences are impossible to prove, the appearance of discussion of man as animal religiosum, animal capax religionis, animal religieux, animale religioso, and so on in texts produced on the Continent seems very limited. This is especially striking when compared to English uses. One can find scattered instances of man being defined as an animal religieux in French-language texts. For example, in the first volume of his work of Christian humanism which dealt with understanding the relationship between sacred and profane culture, La méthode d'étudier et d'enseigner chrétiennement et solidement les historiens profanes (2 volumes, 1693), Oratorian Louis Thomassin emphasized man's inherent religiosity as a means of explaining the otherwise apparently inexplicable religious practices of the pagans. In doing so, he aimed at rebuking arguments, associated with Pierre-Daniel Huet, which suggested the similar natural origins in reason of pagan and Christian belief.Footnote 11 Before realizing the heretical dangers inherent in Huet's position, Thomassin himself had set out similar arguments in his earlier discussion of man as a rational, religious creature in La méthode d'étudier et d'enseigner chrétiennement les lettres humaines (1681).Footnote 12 Yet it seems Thomassin's explicit definition of man as religious animal as opposed to a rational one is a rare case.Footnote 13 More importantly for our purposes, it seems that few seventeenth-century Continental authors utilized the definitions of animal religiosum or animal capax religionis. The development discussed below seems to be peculiarly English and, as we shall see, peculiarly short-lived.
I. Whichcote, Smith, and the Initial Appearance of Man as Animal Religiosum
In terms of their sources, English-language attempts to find the essential difference in man as the uniquely religious animal should be understood with reference to two contexts: patristic apologetics and Continental Reformed thought. Writing in 1656, John Evelyn noted the significance of Lactantius's definition of man as animal religiosum in the current debate over the religious propensities of human nature.Footnote 14 Discussion of the inherent religiosity of human nature was available to all due to its prominent status within the widely utilized classics of patristics, Lactantius's Divinarum institutionum (bk. 3, col. 9–10) and De ira Dei (col. 7).Footnote 15 The Father's discussion itself was in dialogue with another widely cited one about the uniquely religious nature of humans: Cicero's De legibus (1.8.24).Footnote 16 And it was to Cicero, rather than Lactantius, that many of the authors below aligned themselves. Cicero's discussions of man as divinum animal in De finibus (2.41) were regularly cited in anatomical works surveying the various summaries of human nature, though this definition of man did not appear in the religious writings surveyed here.Footnote 17 Lactantius's and Cicero's texts were well-known sources and were frequently cited in English publications from the 1640s onward.
The second sources of discussion were those emerging out of Reformed and Anti-Reformed debate on the Continent. Calvin had emphasized that it was only worship of God that rendered “men superior to brutes.” Without worship, men were not only on the same level as beasts but “in many respects far more miserable.”Footnote 18 While the Reformed tradition following Calvin would not inherit his rejection of reason, English Calvinists tended to repeat this means of differentiating man from beast. Followers of Arminius, similarly, would have been aware that he had averred that man was principally a religious, not rational, animal in his “Fifth Oration” (1606).Footnote 19 Simon Episcopius claimed during the Synod of Dort in 1618 that religion, more than reason, was the distinguishing characteristic of man.Footnote 20 This could be contrasted with the strong Socinian separation of religion and human nature which positioned man as a species with no natural framing toward religion besides a reasoning faculty that could interpret scripture.Footnote 21 Another influential discussion was Herbert of Cherbury's De veritate (1624) which concluded that “religion is the ultimate difference in man” on the basis of the universal appearance of the worship of God.Footnote 22
Despite Evelyn's summary to the contrary, none of these sources actually used the specific definitions of man as animal religiosum or animal capax religionis. One exception was Tommaso Companella's summary in Atheismus triumphatus (1631) of Lactantius's discussion in Divine Institutes defining man as animal rationale religiosum; however, none of the authors discussed in the following mentioned Companella.Footnote 23 The first important discussions appeared in England, most likely in the preaching of Benjamin Whichcote and John Smith. The Cambridge preacher Whichcote (1609–1683) defined man as animal religiosum as part of his outlining of a doctrine of theosis in his posthumously published Theophorymena dogmata (1685), also known as the Select Notions. These discussions would have been well known to Whichcote's students at Cambridge in the mid-seventeenth century where he was a highly respected and influential figure.Footnote 24 Rejecting Plato's definition of man as animal rationale given the evident “sagacity [in] inferior creatures,” Whichcote differentiated humans because “man alone . . . can take cognizance of God” and thus stood “higher by the head and shoulders” from brute creation.Footnote 25 The “essential formality” of man, Whichcote argued, is the “proper motion of the understanding . . . God-ward.”Footnote 26 Whichcote's discussion of animal sagacity here was not used to level man and beast—“for comparatively, [man's] understanding is the best of the creation”—but to make the point that the perfection of man's nature was “repose with God” (Deo assidere).Footnote 27 Not reason per se, but reason directed to God distinguished man from the rest of creation.Footnote 28 Whichcote thus asserted that it was not appropriate to “define a man animal rationale . . . but animal religiosum, a religious creature.”Footnote 29
Whichcote's discussion has regularly been cited as characteristic of his anti-atheist apologetics and his optimistic stance on the reliability of reason in religious matters, in opposition to the Reformed doctrine of the depravity of human nature.Footnote 30 Often in the story of “Cambridge Platonism,” such discussion has de-theologized Whichcote's understanding of reason and posited him as using reason in a secularized way akin to Cartesian rationalism. What is noticeable about Whichcote's discussion here, however, is that his emphasis is primarily on explaining theosis. He is explaining the Christian vocation understood as the participation in the life of reason, through which one learns to be human.
Moreover, Whichcote's specific definitional phrasing was not present in the known patristic and classical sources. The most commonly referred to passages of Cicero and Lactantius, for example, do not use the definition.Footnote 31 Indeed, Lactantius's own definition of man was animal intelligens et rationis capax (an intelligent animal and capable of reason).Footnote 32 Arguably, the move here was more than the simple regurgitation of a definition of man taken from readily available texts; it was an act of definition establishment at a moment when the understanding of human nature's relationship with God and reason was being disputed in a major way. This rhetorical move is worthy of note: man as animal religiosum served Whichcote's wider purposes of demonstrating the deiformity of common human nature through the participation in divine reason against the Reformed doctrines of depravity and predestination and against the religious enthusiasm of the age. Moreover, it seems plausible, given his well-attested influence on his students, that Whichcote's discussion of man as animal religiosum helped initiate the spread of the use of the definition.
The Select Notions was published two years after Whichcote's death by “Philanthropus,” who positioned himself as Whichcote's former “pupil and particular friend.”Footnote 33 Subsequent editors of Whichcote's religious writings—the third Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley Cooper and the mid-eighteenth-century clergyman Samuel Salter—were doubtful about the extent to which the Select Notions reflected his mature thought or, indeed, whether the work was purely Whichcote's own.Footnote 34 Whichcote did not repeat the definition of man as animal religiosum in other posthumously published writings, though he set out a similar position about the positive relationship between religion, reason, and human nature. In his Aphorisms (published in 1753), Whichcote maintained that nothing was “more specific to man than the capacity of religion, and sense of God.” Without any mention of the possible rationality of animals, he aphorized that religion was “connatural to the frame of man” because it was “agreeable to his reason” and was as “natural for a man” as it was for a “beast to be guided by his senses and instinct.”Footnote 35 Similar discussion can be found in his Select Sermons (1698).Footnote 36
The redefinition of man as a specifically religious creature was pursued by Whichcote's former pupil John Smith (1618–1652), but in the more cautious form animal capax religionis. Smith's religious thought was characterized by his emphasis on practical divinity, an ecumenical stance on doctrine, and his belief in the positive relationship between reason and faith.Footnote 37 His sermons were originally preached at the chapel of Queen's College Cambridge in the late 1640s and early 1650s and were published posthumously as the Select Discourses (1660).Footnote 38 The ninth of these, entitled “Of the Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion,” focused on the nobility of true religion and contained Smith's discussion on the correct definition of man.Footnote 39 His redefinition of man as animal capax religionis, a similar act of definition creation as Whichcote's animal religiosum, was a modification of Porphyry's definition of man as a “rational animal, capable of intellect, and science.”Footnote 40 Similarly, Smith's definition was repeated by subsequent authors, though it was not as prevalent as Whichcote's use of animal religiosum. Smith's former student Isaac Barrow agreed with his lecturer that man was a “creature capable of religion” because there appears an “instinct and capacity innate to man, (and, indeed, to him alone)” to want to be “readily acquainted” with his divine parent.Footnote 41 Likewise, Edward Fowler, bishop of Gloucester, and the theologian Herezkiah Burton paraphrased Smith's account.Footnote 42 And, as we will see below, another influential “latitude-man,” George Rust, also shared this definition of man with Smith.
As with Whichcote, Smith's focus here was explaining the proper religious “way of life” intended for humans.Footnote 43 Smith's position differs, obviously, from the ontologically fixed nature of the definition of animal religiosum; Smith informs his audience that they merely have the potential to be religious, but that this requires both effort and divine grace. To fulfill his “own dignity and glory” as a deiform creature, the “good man endeavors to walk by eternal and unchangeable rules of reason.” The human soul when “straightened within the narrow prison of sensual and corporeal delights” is corrupted and limited. By contrast, the individual soul that adopts the “proper motion of religion . . . upwards to its first original [that is, God] . . . lives at the height of his own being.” And here is where Smith deemed the definitions of animal rationale and animal capax religionis as being of equal importance on the grounds that man's religious nature was intimately bound up with his rational nature.Footnote 44 Smith cited the opinions of Plutarch and Cicero, not Lactantius, to shore up his view that the “formal difference of man” could be found in the capacity of human beings to converse with God using their reason.Footnote 45 These two sources acted as proof that reason was “enabling and fitting [for] man to converse with God by knowing him and loving him” and it was this that was the “character most unquestionably differencing man from brute creatures.”Footnote 46
Smith's discussion appeared in a devotional work intended to aid young men in understanding their relationship with their God. His definition of man as animal capax religionis was part of an argument that reason and religion went together. Smith developed his position less in opposition to recent writings about animal reasoning than against stoic philosophy and Reformed thought.Footnote 47 The stoic belief that reason could achieve terrestrial happiness through its control of the passions was predicated on a view of human nature's rational self-sufficiency that turned the individual away from God and made an idol of himself. The true source of human felicity involved the progression of human nature's religious capabilities toward their eventual perfection: reunion with God. The stoics negated the spiritual aspect of human nature and downplayed the real life of religion required of a deiform creature such as man. Smith also rejected the Reformed doctrines of the total depravity of human nature and the power and majesty of God. The perfection of human nature was the return to God, though Grace-assisted, which involved fulfilling the religious propensities of the species. Man had the capacity to be religious through the appropriate use of reason.
Another author writing in the mid-seventeenth century who described man as animal religiosum was George Rust (d. 1670), the subsequent bishop of Dromore, in his posthumously published Discourse of the Use of Reason in Matters of Religion (1683). The work was written while Rust was at Cambridge and its contents were variously directed against enthusiasts, “deists,” and Socinians. Less concerned with the doctrine of theosis like Whichcote and Smith, Rust's principal focus was the epistemology of belief. His discussion of man as a religious animal came within an explanation of the role of reason in assent to religious beliefs. A positive relationship existed between right reason and religion because “faith consists in assent; the assent follows the judgement, but no judgement can be made of a thing that is not at all known or understood.”Footnote 48 Rust's citation pointed the reader to Herbert's De veritate, though his position was a clear restatement of the Arminian position on the mechanics of belief: faith involved an act of assent by the faculty of the intellect, in opposition to the Reformed position that faith was the result of God's granting of grace.Footnote 49
The distinction of man as animal capax religionis came within Rust's discussion of the corruption of reason. He argued that an individual's reason could be “blinded by lusts,” leading them to become an “animal man” whose reasons were guided only by sensual appetite. The faculty of “right reason,” by contrast, was able to discern divine law. According to Rust, then, the “principal difference between mankind and brutes” was not reason per se, then, but man's “being capable of religion”—an animal capax religionis. Religion and reason went together when reason was directed in its appropriate fashion as a God-given spark that allowed for apprehension of the divine law. Rust believed that religion was the “most natural and the sole propriety of man” and could not be “contradictory to his own faculties.” To Rust, arguing otherwise was to claim that “God intended to perplex the humane intellect with inexplicable subtleties” and make people “put off human nature that we may become religious.”Footnote 50
In each of the three cases discussed so far, the overriding concern was not that of dealing with anxieties relating to purported threats to the species boundary between man and beast. The redefinition of man as a religious creature by Whichcote, Smith, and Rust were theological explorations of man's relationship with his maker. Reason, thereby, was identified with faith; the truly religious, good individual lived in the manner befitting his nature as a human.Footnote 51 Given the role that man as animal religiosum has usually played in existing scholarship on the “latitude-men” such as Whichcote, Smith, and Rust, it also has to be argued that the willingness to redefine the human species as a religious rather than rational animal was maintained by a wide variety of figures within English religious writing during the second half of the seventeenth century.Footnote 52 Proponents of other variants of Anglicanism appealed to the categorization, as was the case with the mystic and Oxford divine John Pordage (1607–1681) in his posthumously published Theologia Mystica (1683) or another Oxford divine, the Arminian controversialist Thomas Pierce (1622–1691).
To Pordage, a visionary who conversed with angels, our “reason, or faith, intellect, intelligible ideas and eternal verities” would never “conduct us to enter into paradise” unless they were bound together with “our affections.” The “old definition animal rationale” could not contain the full potential of man's spiritual being, and hence Pordage wished to “define him . . . rather by religiosum” or “animal divinum.”Footnote 53 Noticeably, Pordage viewed this definition as new. Pierce preached before the king in 1679 on the spread of irreligiosity and atheism due to the “multitudes of deceivers” in Restoration England. Pierce's targets were the “disciples of the book which is called Leviathan” and its author, and his usage of man as animal religiosum was principally an argument of anti-atheist apologetic. Thomas Hobbes's materialist understanding of human nature in Leviathan (1651) dispensed with the notion of immaterial spirits.Footnote 54 One way to rebuke this argument was for Pierce to maintain that “the perfectest definition of man as man” was “animal religiosum, which still includes rationale.” The whole framing of human nature was suited to religious belief and worship, and as such, to believe in the religious doctrine of the existence of immaterial spirits was to be human. Hobbes and his supporters, therefore, were “monsters.”Footnote 55 These examples are evidence of the wide usage of the precise definition of man as animal religiosum.
The definition of man as the uniquely religious species was, equally, appealed to by the Reformed. They tended to maintain that man had innate knowledge of a deity, though this knowledge was faint and often hidden beneath the general depravity of human nature. Moreover, while man's natural religious propensities allowed for belief in God, faith only truly followed upon an act of redemptive grace granted by God. The scattered discussions among Reformed writers during the 1640s and 1650s tended to accept the possibility of semblances of animal rationality, but strongly averred that only humans were religious creatures. The former Parliamentarian soldier and subsequent lay writer on religious topics Edward Leigh, in his Treatise of Religion (1656), held that religion alone “distinguishes a man from a beast” given that many animals have a “shadow of reason, but religion is peculiar to man.”Footnote 56 Leigh's Treatise of Religion was dedicated to Archbishop Ussher, whose own Body of Divinity (1645) maintained that “beasts have some sparkles or resemblance of reason, but none of religion.”Footnote 57 The Presbyterian Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, John Arrowsmith, maintained in his Armilla Catechetica (1659) that the definition of man as a “creature addicted to religion” was a more appropriate categorization than “man [as] a living creature endued with reason” given the universality of religion, comparative to the use of reason.Footnote 58 He did so as part of an argument to demonstrate that, given this universality of belief among the world's religions, true religion was not known by “natural reason” but through access to “divine and supernatural revelation.”Footnote 59
Similarly, the definition of man as animal religiosum was utilized by numerous prominent Presbyterian ministers during the Restoration. Richard Baxter held, in his The True and Only Way of Concord of All the Christian Churches (1680), that “man is naturally animal religiosum, made to serve God in order to [achieve] future happiness.”Footnote 60 As we shall see in the next section, Baxter was one of the most frequent discussants of the redefinition of man as animal religiosum in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Often this appeared as an anti-atheist proposition. The popular preacher Stephen Charnock, in his two-volume Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God (1682), concurred that the definition of “animal religiosum” was a reasonable inference from the universal consent in the existence of God. Religion was so bound up with reason that “a man cannot be accounted rational, unless he own an object of religion.”Footnote 61 In the first volume of his The Living Temple (1675), John Howe used as a proof for the truth of religion the fact that so many people have “accounted [religion] the most constituent, and most distinguishing thing in human nature” rather than reason.Footnote 62 It was more absurd to admit the existence of an “irreligious man” than a “rational beast.” The thrust of Howe's usage was an anti-atheist point: those who deny a deity abandon “their own humanity; . . . by saying there is no God, [they] should proclaim themselves no men.”Footnote 63
We find discussion of man as animal religiosum just as frequently in mid-to-late seventeenth-century Reformed theology as we do in the writings of the “latitude-men” or other anti-Reformed religious writers. While Whichcote, Smith, and Rust used their discussions to assert the positive relationship between reason and religion, the focus of the Reformed writers discussed above was primarily to use the definition as an argument in anti-atheist apologetic. This should indicate the various rhetorical uses to which the definition could be put, and certainly warn against any interpretations that limit its associations to those of the “latitude-men.”
So far, this article has been concerned with indicating how man as animal religiosum was used by both the Reformed and Anti-Reformed.Footnote 64 Following its appearance in the 1650s, the definition quickly became a popular tool to make a number of interrelated arguments. The first, as has been established, was the use of the definition of man as a religious animal in anti-atheist apologetics, usually used in conjunction with the proof for the existence of God from the consensus gentium. The universal consent of humankind in the existence of God demonstrated that the ultimate difference between humans and animals was religion.Footnote 65 Conversely, if humans were uniquely religious animals, those who were not religious were less than human.Footnote 66 A second common use of the categorization of animal religiosum appeared in works of devotion and practical divinity intended to encourage and chide the individual into pious belief and worship. The pious life was the good life, befitting to human nature; the sensual life was one of distraction and dissatisfaction, fitting only for beasts.Footnote 67 A comparable example could be found in Mark Hildesley's discussion of the tradition of layman's faiths in Religio Jurisprudentis (1685) in which the lawyer Hildesley, ostensibly writing for his son, explained that “animal religiosum” was a “more proper definition of a man than animal rationale” because “1. [Religion] belongs unto all men. 2. It belongs only unto mankind. 3. It belongs at all times unto man. 4. It belongs necessarily to men; but sociability or rationality possibly do to others besides man.”Footnote 68 The third prominent use was the deployment of animal religiosum in arguments about how man's essential religious nature led to specific requirements for church-state relations. Because man was essentially a religious creature, civil society was formed, in part, for the purpose of organized religious worship. National religious institutions maintained by the government were necessary for the happiness and perfection of human nature.Footnote 69
II. Man as Animal Religiosum amidst Other Reasoning Animals
Definitions of man as animal religiosum and animal capax religionis frequently appeared in the immediate decades after the Cambridge preaching careers of Whichcote and Smith. Most of these took animal rationality as a proven phenomenon needing incorporation into the understanding of human nature. A new emphasis, however, appeared in discussion from the 1660s onward: the need to rebut arguments about animal rationality that were seen to challenge the anthropocentric worldview.Footnote 70 The issue had achieved a newfound prominence. One pamphleteer in the 1690s wrote that recent attempts to collapse the “essential difference between man and other animals [struck] at the whole of religion, and render[ed] that unnecessary, and man contemptible.”Footnote 71 To argue that animals could reason raised the possibility that man might be the same as the rest of creation and that animals too might have rational, immortal souls. Contrastingly, a disputant in a debate over the Cartesian beast-machine hypothesis published in the Athenian Mercury in 1693 stressed that there were no heretical consequences to arguing that “brutes have immaterial souls and are rational thinking creatures.” Man, unlike the brutes, was created in the image of God and hence “by the prerogative of his nature” was a being “capable of religion.”Footnote 72 An alternative explanation was the beast-machine thesis associated with Descartes. The view that animals were automata devoid of soul or reason raised associations with the Epicurean hypothesis—seen to have been given unnerving plausibility by Hobbes's Leviathan—of a mechanical universe that brought into question all notions of immateriality. A third alternative, and the one adopted by Matthew Hale, was some form of nuanced modification of the Aristotelian tripartite soul to allow for evidence of animal rationality while retaining human reasoning superiority. From the 1660s onward, there is more clear evidence of theologians and philosophers believing they needed to offer a coherent position on the status of man vis-à-vis beast.
A useful bridging case here is that of John Wilkins (1614–1672). Appointed bishop of Chester a few months earlier, Wilkins preached before Charles II in February 1669 on the topic of man's essential nature.Footnote 73 He told his audience that the definition of man could be “rendered as well by the difference of religiosum as rationale.” Religion was the essence, duty, and happiness of man. Given the clear evidence of “degrees of ratiocination” among “many brute creations,” it was necessary to emphasize that what defined man was not “reason in general” but reason “as it is determined to actions of religion.”Footnote 74 While Wilkins's discussion utilized the same religiosum definition as his close friend Whichcote,Footnote 75 he stressed the need to reassert the anthropocentric worldview by using the definition to underline where man comes in the “rank of creatures.”Footnote 76 This became even clearer in the expanded discussion, which incorporated the 1669 sermon, in Wilkins's posthumously published Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (1675). The definition of man as animal religiosum was used against “such persons as are sceptical in [the] first principles” of morals and religion—the first mention of skepticism in discussions of man as animal religiosum thus far. Skeptics doubted the religious principles of truth and falsehood, good and evil, and yet, Wilkins averred, it was these beliefs in which “a rational being does consist.”Footnote 77 A work of anti-atheistic natural theology, Wilkins's Principles and Duties was written “in opposition to that humour of skepticism and infidelity, which hath of so late abounded in the world.”Footnote 78 We can also find a similarly more pronounced concern with distinguishing between man and animal in Henry Hallywell's annotations, probably written in 1682–1683, to his aforementioned translation of George Rust's Discourse on Truth.Footnote 79
Two of the lengthiest explorations in later seventeenth-century religious writing that incorporated the definition of man as animal religiosum discussed in more depth the possibility and meaning of animal reasoning. These are found in the works of Sir Matthew Hale and Richard Baxter. Hale discusses the appropriate definition of man in his celebrated work of natural theology The Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677).Footnote 80 He had strong personal links with at least two of the figures discussed above, Whichcote and Wilkins, as well as Baxter.Footnote 81 Hale probably had his friends Whichcote and Wilkins in mind when he claimed that the view that man could accurately be defined as animal religiosum had been put forward recently by “some latter persons” and “some thinking men.” Responding to the growing prominence of writings about animal rationality, Hale rejected any levelling of animal and human rationality on the grounds that the “reason in the brutes” was the “image and analogical representation of that true reason that is in man.”Footnote 82 Apparently Hale believed that rational behavior in animals was just the “image,” the simulacrum, of real human reason. Animals could not reason in terms of universals and incorporeal things in the way that humans could—and hence, as Hale put it in his manuscript treatise “A Discourse of Religion” (circa early 1670s), animals did not show “any signs thereof” of religious belief and worship.Footnote 83 The “specifical difference” between human nature and the rest of creation for Hale, thus, was not reason but the “propension to religion.”Footnote 84
The concern for Hale—in Primitive Origination especially, but in his other devotional writings too—was to reaffirm that God had made man as a religious, rational animal to “serve and glorify his maker [more] than other visible creatures.”Footnote 85 This was a necessary move following the spread of philosophical writings which undermined man's superior status to the beasts. Hale thus reasserted an Aristotelian take on the soul, but with an added emphasis on the key role that man's innate religious propensities had on framing religious belief and worship. Man's “intellective faculty” placed him above brute creation. The key point here was not that humans had reason but that “lodged in the intellectual and rational nature” of man's soul were numerous internal aids, communes notitiae (common notions), and enabling religious belief. Man's innate religious notions meant he should be defined as animal religiosum, “arising from the energy of those infinitae notitiae relating to God.”Footnote 86 Hale downplayed the comparison between human and animal reasoning and reasserted a broadly Aristotelian understanding of the soul. In the process, he switched the emphasis away from reason per se and toward the innate moral and religious propensities of the intellective faculty.
In his Dying Thoughts (1683), Richard Baxter developed his earlier claim that “those men seem to be in the right who . . . make animal religiosum to be more of his description than animal rationale.”Footnote 87 A close friend and intellectual interlocutor of Hale, his neighbor in the village of Acton, Middlesex from 1667, Baxter's position was similar to that set out in Hale's Primitive Origination. The Dying Thoughts were written by Baxter to provide himself with comforting thoughts on his putatively imminent earthly demise. One constant theme was the place of man within the rank of creatures possessing an immaterial soul that meant man was “differenced formally from all inferior substances.”Footnote 88 Like Hale, Baxter held that animals demonstrated “analogical reason” which, though it was an inferior form of reason, still meant that man could not be defined unproblematically as animal rationale. Rather, like Hale, Baxter argued that humans are formally different from animals because their reason is “exercised about things of a higher nature, than the concerns of temporal life.”Footnote 89 The end of humans was to obey and worship God; those who do not do this “live not as a man, but as a brute.”Footnote 90 They could not “think of God” like man. Unlike Hale, Baxter stated himself persuaded, in his Dying Thoughts at least, by the writings of recent French “skeptics” that animals had the ability to reason. These writings had shown that the real categorization of man as a “higher species” should be predicated on man not being the possessor of reason but by “having his nobler reason for higher ends.”Footnote 91 And it was these arguments that were behind Baxter's modification of his understanding of human nature from animal rationale to animal religiosum.
III. Debate Over the Reasoning Abilities of Animals
The discussions of Baxter, Hale, Hallywell, and Wilkins written during the Restoration are characterized by a greater concern for responding to recent arguments about the reasoning abilities of animals than those written in the 1650s. While Hale and Baxter acknowledged the extensive body of ancient writings that leveled man and beast's reasoning abilities, they both discussed the recent works of the French physician and lay religious writer Marin Cureau de la Chambre (1594–1669) as being of particular significance.Footnote 92 Cureau penned a particularly influential thesis that tweaked the Aristotelian understanding of the soul in which he argued both for the existence of limited reasoning capabilities in animals and for the unique ability of man's reason to develop knowledge about higher things.
The position of late Aristotelianism at the beginning of the seventeenth century remained the view that the human soul had a tripartite nature, being made up of three sets of differing faculties. The human soul had: vegetative faculties (of nutrition and reproduction) which it shared with the animals and plants, sensitive faculties (such as memory, movement, and perception) which were shared with other animals, and finally, the human soul was unique in its possession of intellective faculties (such as the capacity to reason about both corporeal and incorporeal objects of knowledge and to exercise will). Such an explanation provided a coherent and still persuasive anthropocentric worldview. The Aristotelian position on the existence of animal souls was directly challenged by the beast-machine thesis of René Descartes.Footnote 93 He denied that animals had souls or reasoning ability, rejecting such arguments as unwarrantable acts of anthropomorphism. Descartes positioned his denial of animal souls as an argument against atheists who wished to level man with the “flies and ants.”Footnote 94
The precise nature of animal souls and animal faculties were a cause of common concern for Hale and Baxter. They had corresponded, among other things, over Baxter's manuscript treatise “Of the Nature and Immortality of Human Souls” (circa 1669–1672).Footnote 95 Toward the end of composing this treatise, Baxter read and responded to Thomas Willis's De anima brutorum (1672) which offered a Gassendian theory of the corporeality of animals’ sensitive souls. While Willis had argued for the existence of an incorporeal rational soul, Baxter and Hale shared the concern that Gassendi and Willis's position, like that of Descartes, offered a corporeal explanation of sensitive souls which was potentially a slippery slope to enabling the materialization of human rational souls. This was especially the case given that the sensitive souls of brutes were, as Baxter put it in a letter to Hale written in the early 1670s, “so neere kin to ye Rationall, as to have Analogicall Reason”—a position which Willis held himself, too.Footnote 96 The best foundation for defending species difference, Baxter claimed, was that the human soul alone had natural propensities to achieve deiform perfection impossible in the sublunary world—that is, as Baxter put it in a number of other works, that man was animal religiosum.
While Baxter and Hale were concerned by the new theories of animal and human souls being offered, their shift from animal rationale to animal religiosum was encouraged primarily by the issue of animal rationality, a sub-argument within the larger issue of the nature of animal souls. Indeed, it is striking how willingly the writers assessed above accepted the position that animals could reason. Perhaps illustrative of their greater concern over the meaning of animal reasoning, Baxter, Hale, and Wilkins all cited considerably more authorities than the writers from the 1640s and 1650s discussed above. Hale, for example, referred to the ancients Porphyry, Plutarch, and Sextus Empiricus and the sixteenth-century Venetian Platonist Francesco Patrizi as all arguing that “reasonableness [was] not the specifical difference of human nature.”Footnote 97 The most commonly cited ancient source was Plutarch's That Beasts Make Use of Reason in which Gryllus argued that reason was a facet of animal nature. It is also possible that men like Wilkins, Hale, and Baxter were responding to the humility-encouraging writings of theriophiles like Montaigne and Pierre Charron, though they were not mentioned by name.Footnote 98
The most important works, for Hale and Baxter at least, were those of Cureau. The French physician was a figure of considerable contemporary standing within the Courts of Louis XIII and XIV, was possibly one of the founding members of the Académie des Sciences, and was well-known for his theories of animal rationality.Footnote 99 Cureau's first take on animal reason was a lengthy appendix entitled “Quelle est la Connoissance des Bestes” attached to the 1645 second edition of his Les caractères des passions (1640).Footnote 100 This started a dispute with a more obscure physician, Pierre Chanet, over the cognitive abilities of animals. Chanet had originally attacked Pierre Charron's views on animal rationality in his Considerations sur las sagesse de Charron (1643). Following Cureau's 1645 appendix, Chanet penned a repost entitled De l'instinct et de la connoissance des animaux (1646). To Chanet, animal actions should be understood in terms of a providentially framed instinct, not reason. Moreover, Cureau had destroyed the doctrine of man's immortal soul by removing the essential difference between man and beast. Stung by this accusation, Cureau penned Traité de la connaissance des animaux (1648).
Cureau was a well-intentioned Christian who defended the view that animals could reason as a necessary step in developing an accurate understanding of the natural world and thereby providing a “more solid foundation” for man's dignity.Footnote 101 As part of this, Cureau rejected “one of the most ancient maxims of philosophy, that defines man as a rational animal.”Footnote 102 While it was clear that both man and beast had reason, their cognitive abilities differed so tremendously that he did not conclude that there were any inconveniences to believing that beasts reasoned.Footnote 103 This position involved the innovative reworking of Aristotelianism: Cureau attributed to the animal sensitive soul certain basic reasoning capacities that would normally be the preserve of the human rational soul.Footnote 104 He suggested that animals could undertake acts of reason by their faculty of imagination.Footnote 105 These acts were limited to specific corporeal objects. Alternatively, Cureau believed that humans could undertake acts of reason by their faculty of understanding. The understanding, unlike the imagination, has the power to “form general notions.”Footnote 106 He therefore argued that man could not be defined by reason per se but, specifically, by possessing the “faculty of reasoning universally,” given that the “faculty of reasoning simply” was shared with the beasts. Moreover, because of its ability to make universal notions, the faculty of the understanding should be understood as “spiritual.” The conclusion was simple: “Reason is not the specifick difference of Man, but such a species of Reason, to wit universal Reason.”Footnote 107 Man's higher reasoning marked “the spirituality and immortality of his soul.”Footnote 108
Both Hale and Baxter were thoroughly familiar with Cureau's work. It is not clear whether they were using the French original or, more likely, the English translation of Cureau's Traité, entitled A Discourse of the Knowledg of Beasts, published in 1657. The translation was printed by Thomas Newcomb, who had published translations of Cureau's other works as well as the first English translation of Descartes's A Discourse on Method in 1649. Newcomb added a lengthy prefacing essay that summarized Cureau's arguments and defended their Christian orthodoxy. Both Hale and Baxter, by contrast, took a more guarded position. To Hale, the “ingenious and learned” Cureau was the leading figure among all writers, ancient and modern, of the view that animals had a “reasoning faculty or power.”Footnote 109 Hale discussed Cureau's Traité within a chapter aiming to demonstrate the “excellency of human nature in general.”Footnote 110 He summarized “two extreme opinions” on animal nature. The first was the Cartesian view that animals are “no more but barely mechanisms or artificial ensigns [and] all their various motions but the meer modifications of matter.”Footnote 111 Cureau was the leading proponent of the second, opposing view that denied that “reason to be the specifical or constitution difference of the human nature.” Hale observed that Cureau had distinguished between the “ratio imaginativa” of brutes, which “keeps still in particulars, and within the verge of particular propositions and conclusions,” and the “ratio intellectualis” of humans, which “hath to do with universals.”Footnote 112
Characteristic of the exploratory and expansive nature of the Primitive Origination generally, Hale's own attempt to explain the sagacity of brutes was not consistent. He variously described the ability of birds to build nests and nurture their eggs “with the most exquisite reason and congruity” as both evidence that animals had “instrumental reason” and that animals had inbuilt instincts to undertake such action.Footnote 113 In language like Cureau's, Hale also accepted that animals have “imaginative reason,” but stressed that this was a “low, obscure and imperfect shadow” compared to man's reason.Footnote 114 Yet his discussion ended with a strongly negative assessment of the existence of animal reason. Hale argued that the “impulses of sense, memory, and instinct” covered all the “sagacities of brutes” and there was no need to appeal to “true ratiocination or discursive reason.” He criticized Cureau as one of those “witty men” who had “chymically extracted an artificial logick” out of the sagacity of brutish actions. Whereas Cureau offered examples of the sort of syllogisms a horse's imagination could undertake when deciding to eat grass, Hale thought it far more plausible that the horse ate the grass instinctively.Footnote 115
In the face of Cureau's arguments, Hale offered his own reworking of Aristotelianism. He listed eleven objects that fell under the perception of the faculty of the intellective (or intellect), a faculty which was solely possessed by humans. One key batch of mental objects animals did not have but humans did were “notions of a deity, and the results thereupon, namely, religion.”Footnote 116 Hale's understanding of the development of religious belief led to an illuminating comparison between animal and human nature. The rational soul of humans was full of connatural principles which, when functioning once an individual had reached maturity, led to the development of certain notions. The “rational instincts” in the soul that led to religious belief were comparable, Hale maintained, to the “animal instincts of brutes.” Put differently, humans believed in God as instinctively as the spider knew how to weave a web or a bird knew how to build a nest.Footnote 117
Baxter discussed Cureau repeatedly across his voluminous oeuvre, sometimes positively and sometimes critically, depending on the aim of the particular work in which the discussion appeared.Footnote 118 In apologetic works intended to prove the truth of Christianity, such as Reasons for the Christian Religion (1667) and More Reasons for the Christian Religion (1672), Baxter positioned Cureau as a well-known skeptic of comparable threat to foundational Christian doctrines as Pierre Gassendi and Thomas Hobbes. In these works, he simplified Cureau's position as extolling that brutes were rational, and thereby removed the distinction between the animal and human soul.Footnote 119 In more philosophically exploratory works, and particularly his Dying Thoughts, Baxter expressed his agreement with Cureau's arguments, praising the convincing way that he “raises the reason of man” by stressing, despite the appearances of comparable reason among animals, that only man among the creatures had an “intellectual faculty” which tended to divine things. He would have found similar arguments in chapter six of Willis's De anima brutorum. The redefinition of man as animal religiosum, for Baxter, was a way of circumventing having to provide an answer to the vexed question of explaining those actions of animals that appeared to involve “some kind of reasoning.”Footnote 120 The point was that humans were deiform creatures, animals were not—regardless of whether they could reason. Certainly the views of Baxter and Hale were more responsive to the issue of the precise characterization of how animal and human reason differed than those of the 1650s, and the source of their concern here seems to have been Cureau. Their engagements exemplified how discussion of man as animal religiosum often took place in a different context in the Restoration than that during the Civil War and Interregnum.
IV. The Disappearance of the Definition in Theological Writings
The specific reclassification of man as animal religiosum was a new development, a rhetorical shift in the argument over the relationship between human nature and religion. It took place between 1650 and the end of the seventeenth century among numerous English religious polemicists, theologians, and philosophers. The discussions of the 1650s noticed by John Evelyn tended to take place within the framework of doctrinal debate. Involvement in these discussions was not limited to the well-studied “latitude-men,” but rather most sections of English Protestantism participated. The discussions of the 1660s to the 1680s were more frequently, though not always, concerned with the consequences of the anthropocentric worldview which posited the possible reasoning abilities of animals. While contributions to a larger debate about animal rationality that included Descartes and Gassendi, these texts took as their main source the lesser-known Cureau. In both cases, this reexamination of the precise quality of the uniqueness of man had less to do with Descartes's beast-machine thesis and its strong separation of rational man in possession of an immortal soul and the automata of nature than current scholarship suggests.
Scattered instances can be found of man being explicitly defined as animal religiosum and animal capax religionis by a miscellany of writers in the early eighteenth century.Footnote 121 The most commonplace locations to find discussion about explicitly defining man as animal religiosum were in magazines, newspapers, and periodicals.Footnote 122 The definition's usage, however, ceased to be commonly appealed to in theological works exploring the relationship between religion and human nature. This article will end with a few tentative suggestions as to why this might have occurred.
The definition of man as animal religiosum or animal capax religionis might have fallen out of common usage in the early eighteenth century due to two consequences resulting from the widespread influence of John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). Firstly, as the Essay became a textbook, theologians emerging out of the universities in the early eighteenth century would have been taught, per its lessons, to focus on the operations of the mind more than on formal argumentative structures. This resulted in a move away from repeated use of definitions such as homo est animal rationale and, by extension, homo est animal religiosum.Footnote 123 This is confirmed by the decline of usages of animal rationale as much as animal religiosum from the early eighteenth century onward.Footnote 124 Certainly the language of finding the differentia between the species of man and beast, given that they shared the same genus of animal, and the attempt to find the distinguishing feature of man was less common as school reasoning fell out of fashion. Instead, many university students would have learned from book two of the Essay to be skeptical about the possibility of identifying the “real essence, or substantial form, of man.” Secondly, the stringent critique offered in book one of Locke's Essay had also seriously challenged belief in religious innatism, either in the form of innate religious ideas or innate religious predispositions, which was often bound up with the definitions of man as animal religiosum or animal capax religionis.Footnote 125 The Lockean understanding of religious belief as framed by exogenous factors made apologetic appeals about the universal religious characteristics of human nature less plausible.
Alongside Lockean innovations, anti-atheist apologetics had changed dramatically as new natural theological arguments set the appeals of religious innatism, universal consent, and man as animal religiosum aside. The two key forms were the abstract a priori reasoning exemplified in Samuel Clarke's two sets of Boyle Lectures (1704–1705, 1705–1706) and the physico-theology, exemplified by John Ray or William Derham, that celebrated the abundant evidence of providential design in the natural world. In neither strand, and in the extensive sermon literature that utilized these approaches, was Christian apologetics seen as being strengthened by an additional appeal to man as animal religiosum.
There is also a strong sense that the principal focus of apologetics had changed. The definition animal religiosum might have been useful as one of the many arrows launched against post-Hobbesian “atheism” in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. It became less useful as an apologetic argument, however, as the prominent challenges to orthodox belief changed at the turn of the eighteenth century. The threat was less the putative atheists and skeptics of the 1670s, who would be viewed as doubting the relationship between religion, reason, and human nature, but the “deists” and freethinkers of the 1690s onward—figures who were held to believe in God, but not necessarily the God of scripture. Regardless of the coherence of “deism” as a category, it is certainly the case that freethinkers such as John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal were viewed as claiming that only those religious beliefs understandable by reason could be true.Footnote 126 This epistemology of belief had problematic implications for theologians wishing to maintain the definition of man as animal religiosum.Footnote 127 A key example of this is Collins's characteristically mischievous discussion of the definition of man as religious animal in his An Essay concerning the Use of Reason (1707).Footnote 128 Collins used the commonplace and uncontroversial categorization to argue that calling for belief in religious truths “above reason” required man to go against his essential nature. The “very proper . . . distinction between men and brutes” was that “there are no signs of religion observable among brutes.” He went on to note that much orthodox religion “consists in the belief of propositions either repugnant to one another, or to propositions which we perceive to be true.” From here Collins provocatively concluded that assent to these propositions involved putting off “human nature” and hence it was problematic to argue that “religion can be said to be natural to man, when it is supposed to be contradictory to the perceptions of our faculties.”Footnote 129 The unstated but clear meaning of this passage was that, given that man was a religious animal, something must be wrong about doctrines that were impossible for man to believe. The “deist” subordination of revealed religion to the standard of reason led to the growing preponderance of arguments that emphasized not the relationship between reason and religion but the inadequacy of natural reason and the importance of revelation and the transmission of tradition. This position also grew in prominence during the related dispute, prompted in part by Locke's Essay, over the origins of the knowledge of natural and divine law between the 1690s and 1710s.Footnote 130
In the early eighteenth century, it was far less common to find an English religious writer confidently defining man as animal religiosum than it had been for any time since the 1650s. A redefinition of human nature that had emerged during the theological disputes of that decade, and then modified in the face of the greater prominence of debate over the significance of animal rationality in the Restoration, no longer seemed as apologetically apt in the face of “deism” and disputes over the origins of natural law. While eighteenth-century English philosophers and theologians might still talk about humans as religious creatures, they had abandoned the scholastic language of man as animal religiosum and animal capax religionis. The phrasing might appear again occasionally toward the end of the eighteenth century, such as in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), though the scattered nature of such usages contrasts markedly with the concentration of use in the mid- to late seventeenth century.
