Sarah Mortimer accomplishes two historiographical goals in her ambitious monograph. Firstly, she puts at the centre the ripple effects which the Socinian denial of Christ's divinity – and the corresponding emphasis on the human ability to decipher nature and improve human rational capacity for creating a morally-improved polis – created in the political and theological milieu of mid seventeenth-century England. Secondly, she advances the historiography of anti-trinitarianism and Socinianism, which, with the tour de force publication of H. J. McLachlan's Socinianism in seventeenth-century England in 1951, reached both its apotheosis and – appropriately – its apparent last word. Mortimer correctly argues that Socinianism was perceived to be a major subversive force in the discourse of ‘religion, freedom and human nature’ (p. 2) both on the continent and in England. By privileging the human ability to cooperate with divine grace so that true exercise of human freedom in matters of religion and politics can improve the human condition and nature, Mortimer avers, the Socinian threat was seen to have a fundamentally deleterious effect in all facets of civil and ecclesiastical life in England. The most intriguing aspect of this contested relationship, viz., Socinians and their polemical interlocutors, was how this further reinforced and reified the existing ecclesial and theological divides, while producing hybrids of Puritan biblicists of John Biddle's type. Mortimer subtly pushes beyond Nicholas Tyacke's formidable thesis, articulated most clearly in his Anti-Calvinists, in that with Biddle and other anti-Trinitarians with obvious Puritan hermeneutical and liturgical sensibilities, the line of division went beyond mere Laudians vs. Puritans who were Calvinistic in their Christological convictions and soteriological commitments.
In chapter i Mortimer presents the extent of the Socinian challenge to Protestantism. The triumvirate of Socinian leaders – Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), Johann Crell (1590–1633) and Jonasz Schlichting (1592–1661) – had brought the putatively centrifugal tendencies of Protestantism to a new height, at least as the Catholic critics of Protestant Christianity in general and Socinianism in particular never tired of pointing out. Chapter ii shows the extent to which Dutch and continental theological polemics spilled over into English affairs, albeit with modified vectors. Of particular interest is the so-called Walker-Wotton affair, which Peter Lake has written of in his Boxmaker's revenge. Mortimer adds to the analysis offered by Lake and deftly explores the connection between Sibrandus Lubbertus’ anti-Socinian perspectives which gained ascendancy in the anti-Remonstrant campaign in the United Provinces and Walker's appropriation of such ideas. Six more chapters follow as Mortimer takes the readers from the Great Tew circles to the Interregnum controversies over the Trinity, centred around – though not limited to – John Biddle, and the polemical responses generated by a number of Catholic and Puritan interlocutors, the most notable among whom was John Owen.
The three major strengths of Mortimer's book are, first, her judicious filling of the lacuna in early modern political theory with the contribution made by Socinians’ natural law tradition, and their recasting of the Christian theory of resistance to obviate the Calvinist Parliamentarian threat. Second, her wide-ranging sources incorporated to broaden the narrative of English politico-theological contexts to include the continental sources and figures. Third, in weaving together political discourse and theological disputes, Mortimer displays, pace Quentin Skinner, the crucial importance of taking theological ideas seriously in the way political culture functioned in early modern England. Furthermore, Mortimer convincingly demonstrates that Socinians can be seen as an earlier manifestation of the ‘republic of letters’ avant la lettre, and as such they need to be taken as more integral participants in the changing contours of religious polemic and political culture.
According to Mortimer, Christ's death was interpreted by the Socinians as an exemplar of a life of obedience to the will of God, thus bereft of any merit as a substitutionary sacrifice. As such, then, Christ's ontological superior status vis-à-vis humanity was one of degree, not of kind. Consequently, their ethical system was inherently individualistic, not Christocentric, and indelibly eudaimonistic, not Calvinistically pessimistic. This key doctrinal discovery – or recovery, as the Socinians would assiduously point back to the pre-Nicene period of primitive Christianity – inexorably led to a major reconfiguration in theological anthropology, especially with regard to human perfectibility and epistemic (im)proper functioning, which Mortimer does well to highlight in chapter vi. How this putative recovery of a pre-Nicene version of true Christianity pushed the political and theological envelope during the Civil War and the Interregnum period is sketched adeptly in chapters vii and viii, thereby rounding up a rather compact yet synthetic portraiture of the significant role played by Socinian ideological vectors. The crucial avenue of argument for many Socinians, though certainly not all, was that neither natural revelation nor scriptural revelation taught anything of the Trinity. Concerning the former, moreover, since God never left any vestiges of the Trinity (known as vestigia trinitatis in patristic theologies), God's judgement of humanity had to be based on God as One supreme law-giver simpliciter, never as the three Persons of the Trinity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Mortimer discusses this aspect of the tension between natural theology and revealed religion in section ii of chapter vii, especially as she shows the contribution of Francis Rous, Joshua Sprigge and Jeremiah Burrough's tracts of toleration and liberty of conscience, The ancient bounds, or liberty of conscience, tenderly stated (1645) and Irenicum (1646). It would have been helpful if Mortimer could have followed the trajectory of this theological tension, especially as it resurfaces later on in the writings, both of John Locke and, more significantly, Stephen Nye's Discourse on natural religion (1696).
Mortimer's fascinating and compelling narrative is not without its problems, however. For one, it occurred to me that perhaps Mortimer was at times over-attributing the significant impact of Socinianism in the politics of religion in mid seventeenth-century England, especially since one of her key figures, Henry Hammond, never tired of affirming the Trinity and asseverated his belief in the Augustinian doctrine of original sin and the corresponding human predicament (although he would not go all the way of the high Calvinism of John Owen and Francis Cheynell), none of which the Socinians ever gave credence to (inter alia, especially chapter v). Thus the crucial unresolved question is: was Hammond really as crypto-Socinian as Mortimer makes him out to be? Was he not a Grotian? Due to Grotius’ eventual denial of Christ's work of satisfaction, he was charged to have turned Socinian toward the end of his life. Interesting here is that Hammond was a sworn defender of the reputation of Grotius as an intellectual nonpareil with impeccably orthodox credentials. One of the constantly present polemical tropes was that of a slippery slope argument: you move ever so slightly from orthodoxy – let's say, Calvinism – then you inexorably and irretrievably slide down to Arminianism, Socinianism and eventually atheism. According to Mortimer, Hammond's response to Parliamentarian Calvinist resistance theory had a more subterranean Socinian valence than hitherto acknowledged in contemporary historiography. That might well have been, but it is not clear from the texts themselves, although from the polemical invectives hurled in the direction of Chillingworth, Hammond and Grotius by the inveterate polemicist Francis Cheynell, it seems that the foregoing three comprised the unholy trifecta of Socinianising figures. Again, Cheynell's hysteria notwithstanding, I wish Mortimer could have demonstrated more convincingly from the texts under discussion. That was the other desideratum: on a few occasions, rather than offering close reading and exegesis of the texts in discussion, Mortimer simply summarises vast numbers of folio pages.
All these quibbles notwithstanding, Sarah Mortimer has produced a first-rate interdisciplinary work of history, touching upon the interrelated fields of political theory, historical theology, and intellectual history. Regardless of whether one agrees with the interpretive trajectory and exegesis of texts proffered by Mortimer, one cannot do without interacting with this key text, which I suspect will remain the case for years to come.
