Introduction
The term “enthusiasm” was introduced in England at the turn of the seventeenth century.Footnote 1 It denotes individuals’ or groups’ claims of direct divine revelation,Footnote 2 as manifested in a variety of religious movements that emerged following a wave of spiritual revival that swept across Europe and spread beyond the Atlantic.Footnote 3 Enthusiasm penetrated all aspects of devotion, including sermons, spiritual biographies, and conversion narratives,Footnote 4 eventually becoming a major distinctive feature across strands of Christianity in the English-speaking world, and in the wider European context. The reception, influence, and significance of enthusiasm for seventeenth-century (and later) theology has already received scholarly attention.Footnote 5 Here I consider the significance of enthusiasm for seventeenth–century natural philosophy, in particular epistemology. Elsewhere I have explored the link between enthusiasm and epistemology in the context of the eighteenth-century revival.Footnote 6 Here I examine the epistemological relevance of enthusiasm in the seventeenth-century English context, where enthusiastic claims of direct revelation faced natural philosophical and theological critiques that reflected specific intellectual and historical conditions, as well as evolving theories about the locus of authority for knowledge.
A. Intellectual Context in Seventeenth-Century England: Enthusiasm between Theology and Natural Philosophy
Beyond its significance for Christianity, enthusiasm intersected broader intellectual disputes on the nature, scope, and conditions of knowledge. The early modern philosophical discourse was dominated by epistemological anxiety over the possibility of knowledge, and over the role of the senses as a means to its attainment. Descartes had held that sense-based experience cannot yield certainty and, in an attempt to avoid skepticism, had rejected sense perception and preconized the pursuit of knowledge through reason alone.Footnote 7 His account, however, is not free from inconsistencies,Footnote 8 testifying to the central role of the senses and the difficulty of accounting for the complexity of knowledge through their dismissal.Footnote 9
Reacting to Cartesian rationalism, empirical thinkers held instead that the senses are essential for the acquisition of knowledge and that individual experience is the only epistemic authority.Footnote 10 The rehabilitation of the senses that characterizes the early modern philosophical discourse had a counterpoint in the spiritual domain. Luther had preconized a bibliocentric stance, whereby the only authority in matters of faith was Scripture—sola scriptura, sola fide. Faith was insensible: revelation was text.Footnote 11 Evangelicals held fast to the principle of sola scriptura Footnote 12 but coupled it with a distinctly experiential character.Footnote 13 A central trait of evangelical spirituality was the emphasis on individual experience of direct revelation, itself grounded in the Augustinian theology of direct revelation, whereby God’s spiritual light allowed believers to develop spiritual “sight.”Footnote 14 Accordingly, a pervasive rhetorical form in evangelicalism was the language of sensory awakening, based on the association of spiritual states with bodily manifestations, such as visions, fits, trances, and other corporeal signs.Footnote 15 With its emphasis on sensory experience, enthusiasm fed into the ongoing epistemological debate within natural philosophy between rationalism and empiricism.Footnote 16 Here I examine the compatibility between natural philosophy and religion as it manifests itself in critiques of enthusiasm. In other words, I consider enthusiasm for its relevance to natural philosophy, as well as to theology.
B. Historical Context in Seventeenth-Century England: Enthusiasm between Theology and Politics
Religion was a highly charged issue in seventeenth-century England. The emergence of enthusiasm fueled theological clashes between radicalism, skepticism, and atheism.Footnote 17 Enthusiasts—as well as atheists and heretics—were accused of having exacerbated the political turmoil that had ultimately resulted in the Civil War.Footnote 18 The critique of enthusiasm emerged from and is rooted in this specific historical context and reflects the crisis of authority that both state and church were facing.Footnote 19 Aversion to enthusiasm expressed a broader cultural shift away from belligerence and toward restraint, in a struggle to achieve political and social stability.Footnote 20 The revolt against enthusiasm has been regarded as the immediate cause of the change of temper that led to the neoclassical Restoration style, in which “imagination was tempered and emotion diminished.”Footnote 21
Beyond intersecting the cultural shift of the post-Civil War context, the seventeenth-century reception of and controversy surrounding enthusiasm must be understood within the broader contemporary debate on the relation of knowledge to faith. In England, the critique of enthusiasm was closely connected with the so-called Learned Ministry controversy, a debate concerning the education that religious ministers should be required to have before they were allowed to preach.Footnote 22 John Milton held that ministers’ training should not include university education, as spiritual knowledge is best obtained through direct illumination through Scripture.Footnote 23 His opposition to the state maintenance of the clergy was motivated precisely by this belief in direct revelation, which exemplifies how, far from remaining confined to a matter of private devotion, religious persuasion—including that of the enthusiastic variety—affected the public sphere and had direct repercussions on politics. The debate on enthusiasm should be understood in this context.
C. Historiographical Context for the Present Study: Embedding and Intervention within the Broader Debate
An established scholarly consensus views reformed Christianity as having facilitated—rather than opposed—the rise of modern science.Footnote 24 Influences have been noted in both directions, with theology justifying scientific practices, and natural philosophy shaping theological developments. For example, ties have been observed between the Latitudinarian revolt against enthusiasm and the emergence of the new scientific ideology that led to the establishment of the Royal Society.Footnote 25 Michael Heyd has pointed out the necessity of considering the multifaceted nature of enthusiasm as a phenomenon involving not only theological but also social, political, and cultural issuesFootnote 26—as illustrated by the semantic shift of the term “enthusiasm” from a religious (whether it be positive or pejorative) to a political connotationFootnote 27— hence requiring “theological, social, psychological and even medical” analysis.Footnote 28 The present study situates itself within this long line of reflection that has sought to dismantle a crude divide between seventeenth-century religion and other domains of cultural discourse, in particular natural philosophy.
Although the theological scholarship on enthusiasm is vast, the relevance of enthusiasm to the understanding of the historical compatibility between natural philosophy and religion is under-explored: enthusiasm is hardly mentioned in the pre-existing literature on this topic. Likewise, although a simplistic division between empiricists and rationalists has already been challenged,Footnote 29 the relevance of enthusiasm to that debate remains uncharted. Here I explore this relevance and challenge a simplistic divide between seventeenth-century science and theology, suggesting instead that the two camps shared epistemic commitments. First, I consider how a cluster of natural philosophers, mostly early Fellows of the Royal Society, attempted to articulate a defense of empiricism while also opposing religious enthusiasm, and how similar lines of argument against enthusiasm were deployed within the contemporary group of theologians known as Cambridge Platonists. Second, I give voice to enthusiasts themselves, by discussing textual examples in light of the previously examined epistemological debate within natural philosophy and rational theology.
Rejection of Enthusiasm: The Rationalist Argument
Counterpointing the previously evoked early modern thrust toward a rehabilitation of the senses as the foundation for knowledge, the seventeenth century witnessed a concomitant and opposite tendency to distrust sensory evidence. The senses— for example the eye and the act of seeing—came to be perceived as potentially deceitful.Footnote 30 The rationalist argument against enthusiasm is inscribed within this broader context of an epistemological crisis of the senses. In late seventeenth-century England, a group of natural philosophers and early Fellows of the Royal Society articulated a vigorous rejection of enthusiasm. John Locke, who dedicated an entire section of his Essay to enthusiasm,Footnote 31 rejected enthusiasm on the ground that it violates the fundamental principle of the understanding, whereby assent must be proportional to the evidence. In Locke’s view, enthusiasts’ claims of revelation lack the necessary support of reason: enthusiasm effectively “takes away both reason and revelation, and substitutes in the room of them the ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain.”Footnote 32 Far from being proof of the divine, enthusiasm arises “from the conceits of a warmed or overweening brain”Footnote 33 and leads to “odd opinions and extravagant actions”Footnote 34 based on no evidence other than the enthusiast’s own “strength of persuasions.”Footnote 35 Locke observes that, once enthusiasts discover the “ease and glory” of “immediate revelation, of illumination without search, and of certainty without proof and without examination,” they won’t revert: “reason is lost upon them.”Footnote 36 Unlike enthusiasts, Locke maintains, genuine “lovers of truth” do not entertain “any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.”Footnote 37 Since enthusiasts go “beyond this measure of assent,” he concludes, they are unconcerned with truth, but rather seek “some other bye-end.”Footnote 38 Based on the enthusiasts’ disregard for evidence,Footnote 39 reason,Footnote 40 and truth,Footnote 41 Locke’s position implies incompatibility between enthusiasm and natural philosophy’s reason- and evidence-based epistemic approach.
Similar concerns were articulated by Robert Boyle, who lamented, on the one hand, “the great and deplorable Growth of Irreligion, especially among those that aspired to paß for Wits, and several of them too for Philosophers”Footnote 42 and, on the other, the fact that “divers Learned Men … partly upon the Score of … ill-informed, Zeal [i.e., enthusiasm], had brought many Good Men to think, that Religion and Philosophy were incompatible; both Parties contributing to the Vulgar Error.”Footnote 43 Thus, Boyle viewed only religion in its non-enthusiastic (i.e., reason-based) nature as compatible with virtuosity (i.e., natural philosophy). Enthusiasm itself, he argued, not being reason-based, was not compatible either with virtuosity or with (reason-based) religion.
Although Locke first published his Essay in 1689, the chapter on enthusiasm first appeared in the fourth edition of the work, in 1700.Footnote 44 The period between the first and fourth edition (1689–1700) saw a rise of Deism and the steadily growing standing of reason in the face of dogmatic systems. As has been observed: “The closing years of the seventeenth century had no place for arrogance or dogmatism. Enthusiasm was suppressed and passion carefully controlled…. God remained discreetely [sic] in the background as a kind of honorary president of the universe that He had made.”Footnote 45 With his Essay, Locke played into this high standing of reason. By adding a chapter on enthusiasm, he “spoke to a generation ready to receive precisely what he was prepared to say He showed that religion, so often deflected from its proper course by irresponsible ‘enthusiasm’, was eminently reasonable.”Footnote 46 While religion was reasonable, and therefore compatible with natural philosophy, enthusiasm was neither.
Paralleling natural philosophical positions, rejection of enthusiasm on the ground of its unreasonableness also arose from within the theological milieu. Skepticism vis-à-vis enthusiasm had already been adumbrated in the work of the Cambridge Platonists,Footnote 47 who, like Locke and Boyle, emphasized the reasonable nature of religion,Footnote 48 insisting that “emotion and affection be in concert with reason,”Footnote 49 which they conceived of as “a safeguard against the excesses of the fanaticism of self-proclaimed prophets, or ‘enthusiasts.’ ”Footnote 50 In his “Discourse on Prophecy,”Footnote 51 Cambridge Platonist John Smith stated that the “true prophetical spirit seats itself as well in the rational as in the sensitive powers” and “never alienates the mind, but informs and enlightens it”; by contrast, “enthusiastical impostures” are based only on “imaginative powers and faculties inferior to reason.”Footnote 52 In his Antidote against Atheism, fellow Cambridge Platonist Henry More warned that
Atheism and Enthusiasm, though they seem so extremely opposite one to another, … in many things … very nearly agree For that temper that disposes a man to listen to the Magisterial Dictates of an over-bearing Fancy, more then to the calm and cautious insinuations of free Reason, is a subject that by turns does very easily lodge and give harbour to these mischievous Guests.Footnote 53
Hence, “those that have onely a fiery Enthusiastick acknowledgement of God … will as confidently represent to their fancy that there is no God … ; and then having lost the use of their more noble faculties of Reason and Understanding” be “as bold Atheists now, as they were before confident Enthusiasts.”Footnote 54
A few decades later, Theophilus Evans, echoing Locke, would define enthusiasm as a “horrid Doctrine”Footnote 55 and a “Scandal to Christianity.”Footnote 56 Characterizing the “Enthusiastick Brain” as being “heated” and unable to engage in rational argument,Footnote 57 Evans remarked that enthusiasts “go continually round this Circle” arguing that “It is a Revelation because it is a Revelation. — If it be demanded how they know such and such a Persuasion to be a Revelation from God, they will answer, By the light it brings with it, which shines in their Minds, and cannot resist.”Footnote 58 Faced with the “Pretence to extraordinary Revelation … no Arguments whatever prevail.”Footnote 59 Like Locke and Boyle, Evans would later warn that “Enthusiasm very often ends in Atheism: Fiery Zealots, such as imagine themselves the peculiar Favourites of Heaven, when they begin to cool … abandon all Thoughts of Religion, and plunge in all Manner of Vice and Immorality.”Footnote 60 A few years earlier, the Earl of Shaftesbury had compared the enthusiast to a pagan prophet, whose “Symptoms are as Heathenish as he can possibly pretend them to be Christian,”Footnote 61 thus highlighting the danger of enthusiasm for the enthusiasts themselves, as it might turn faith into its opposite: atheism. In other words, enthusiasm contains the seed for its own negation, as the most visible and intense manifestations of faith are also the ones that harbor its most insidious threat.
A closer look at Boyle’s argument for the compatibility between religious faith and natural philosophy reveals that such compatibility is based on an understanding of religion as reason-based (which implicitly excludes enthusiasm). Boyle claims to have chosen to be a Christian “upon mature Deliberation.”Footnote 62 He therefore casts his faith as rational choice. In a similar line, Locke maintains that all the essential elements of Christianity are compatible with reason.Footnote 63 Locke’s argument for the existence of God is itself based on reason: in order to prove that God exists, “the mind must apply itself to a regular deduction,”Footnote 64 which, from the certainty that humans exist,Footnote 65 makes it “as clear as demonstration can make it, that there must be an eternal Being.”Footnote 66 The choice of the term “demonstration” emphasizes the methodological rigor through which the evidence for the existence of God has been scrutinized and casts faith in terms of “mathematical Certainty.”Footnote 67 Accordingly, Locke insisted that any claim to revelation must be subjected to the test of reason before it is accepted and believed: “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.”Footnote 68 Hence, in the Lockean account, humanity reaches God through humanity, and religion through reason.Footnote 69 Similarly, the Cambridge Platonists held that “Religion is ‘reasonable,’ ”Footnote 70 that “the religious faculty is reason, which, though informed by the immediate presence of God, is still man’s reason.”Footnote 71 I will return to this point later. For now, suffice it to say that, as evidenced by the excerpts above, both natural philosophers and theologians rejected enthusiasm because of its perceived lack of grounding in reason. Nevertheless, while rejecting enthusiasm as unreasonable, Locke, Boyle, and the Cambridge Platonists (i.e., both natural philosophers and theologians) implied an understanding of (non-enthusiastic) religious faith as reasonable.
The rejection of enthusiasm was multifaceted: besides the rationalist argument, there was an empirical one. Boyle argued that, although natural philosophy is founded on reason, reason is only half of its foundation, the other half being the senses: “the Philosophy which is most in request among the modern Virtuosi is built upon two foundations, Reason and [sensory] Experience.”Footnote 72 And although the enthusiastic experience included an internal, mental, imaginary element, enthusiasm was also a highly sensory and corporeal phenomenon. As discussed in the next section, this sensory connotation was a focal point upon which attacks on enthusiasm converged.
Rejection of Enthusiasm: The Empirical Argument
Christian reformers had feared sensory experience in religious devotion, as it elicited anxieties about idolatry and superstition. Emphasis on the sensory meant heightened value on the “particular,”Footnote 73 the “accidental” rather than on the “universal,” de facto inverting prior (e.g., Aristotelian) hierarchies of knowledge.Footnote 74 Theophilus Evans held that enthusiasts “wallow in Lust”Footnote 75 and “sink into utter Sensuality,” as “inward Experiences [are accompanied by] abundance of such canting Words and Phrases” and a “glorious Apparatus” whose purpose is to fulfill “the Lusts of the Flesh.”Footnote 76 The early modern attitude to enthusiasm’s sensuality was inflected by the coeval theological debate on the role of the senses in religious experience, which itself developed in part in response to Descartes’s work. This was particularly true of the Cambridge Platonists, who, while opposing the Cartesian mechanical worldview, played a major part in the dissemination of Cartesian ideas.Footnote 77 Henry More, Ralph Cudworth (to a lesser extentFootnote 78), and John Smith were all attracted to Cartesianism,Footnote 79 as it seemed to offer a philosophical foundation for their “battle against atheism.”Footnote 80 More, in particular, is considered “one of the first promoters of Cartesianism in England.”Footnote 81 In An Antidote against Atheism More looks upon Descartes “as a man … truly inspired in the knowledge of Nature”Footnote 82 and as someone “whose Mechanical wit” he could “never highly enough admire.”Footnote 83 This high regard toward Descartes led More to preconize the systematic and ubiquitous teaching of Cartesian thought throughout England’s educational establishments.Footnote 84 More’s fervor, however, was volatile: not long after hailing Descartes as a divinely inspired figure, More referred to him as a “daring monster, that struts thus confidently in this present degenerate age.”Footnote 85 Most of the extant correspondence between More and Descartes, spanning the years 1648–1649,Footnote 86 revolves around points of disagreement. More’s change of heart is also found in his correspondence with Boyle, in 1665.Footnote 87 In one letter in particular, More takes great pains to justify his own flattering presentation of Descartes (and his method) in the preface to Enchiridion Metaphysicum—at which Boyle had apparently taken offence—distancing himself from the Cartesian mechanistic outlook and pointing out its conduciveness to atheism.Footnote 88
The atheistic connotation of Descartes’s materialistic outlook is relevant to the early modern attitude to enthusiasm, because early modern critics of enthusiasm often focused on its material qualities precisely to deny its divine nature. A fervent advocate of the materialistic explanation of enthusiasm, Baruch Spinoza held that enthusiastic manifestations, to which he referred as “superstition,” are “the vaporous product of a sorrowful spirit,”Footnote 89 whose main trigger is fearFootnote 90 and whose material basis is an “affection of the most obnoxious kind.”Footnote 91 A direct reference to Spinoza’s work is contained in More’s letter to Boyle:
[I]t is not a week ago, since I saw a letter, that informed me, that Spinoza, a Jew first, after a Cartesian, and now an atheist, is supposed the author of Theologico-Politicus. I suppose, you may have seen the book. Wherefore what could I have done less, than declare my sense of the Cartesian philosophy, and vindicate myself from the imputation of so fond a blindness, as not to be aware of the dangers of that philosophy, if it be credited; and … to put it quite out of credit … by demonstrating the great weakness thereof, in its pretences of solving, though but the easiest and simplest phænomena, merely mechanically? which, I think, I have done irrefutably.Footnote 92
Hence, More explicitly casts his work in terms of a response to Spinoza’s. It is indeed Spinoza who set the stage for the debate on enthusiasm. Enthusiasts claimed to be recipients or witnesses of divine revelation and cited sensory evidence as proof. Spinoza was the first to study sensory evidence as proof of revelation, setting the parameters of the debate for the discussion of divine knowledge. Locke, Boyle, and the Cambridge Platonists, especially More and Cudworth, borrowed from (and attempted to refute) him.Footnote 93 In fact, More’s philosophy was openly hostile to Spinozism,Footnote 94 and both More and Cudworth were “implacable” in their opposition to Spinoza.Footnote 95 In his Tractatus, Spinoza takes a firm stance against enthusiastic manifestations of religious faith:
[T]hey who are most under the influence of superstitious feelings, … are the persons who, with vows and prayers and womanly tears, implore the Divine assistance, who call reason blind, and human wisdom vain … ! These are the men who credit the whisperings of fancy and their own puerile conceits, and call them divine promptings and responses, yea, who think that God … has given the idiotic and insane among themselves, or the birds of the air, the power of foretelling events by instinct or divine inspiration!Footnote 96
Several decades later, Evans echoed Spinoza in his remark that “it is highly presumptuous, nay, blasphemous it is, of those Sectaries amongst us … who pretend to immediate Inspirations.”Footnote 97
As the evidence discussed so far illustrates, attacks against enthusiasm came both from natural philosophers and from theologians, from rationalist and empiricist positions. Both natural philosophers and theologians rejected enthusiasm based on its lack of grounding in reason. Enthusiasm was also attacked on account of its experiential character, which in the eyes of theologians elicited anxiety about sensuality, while in those of natural philosophers did not qualify as proper evidence. Yet, as I suggest in the following section, these two discourses share more than it appears. The parallel critique of enthusiasm by natural philosophers and theologians suggests that the two camps shared epistemic commitments.
And, as also discussed earlier, seventeenth-century natural philosophers and theologians rejected religious enthusiasm (largely on the ground of its unreasonableness), but natural philosophy did not view itself as incompatible with (non-enthusiastic, proper, i.e., reasonable) religious faith. Taking this point further, I propose that the seventeenth-century understanding of enthusiasm as expressed by Locke, Boyle, and the Cambridge Platonists also implies that, in certain qualified ways, enthusiasm, too, was compatible with natural philosophy. In the following section I explore the possibility that the commentators who explicitly rejected enthusiasm as incompatible with natural philosophy implicitly admitted of the coexistence of natural philosophical and enthusiastic (just like natural philosophical and religious tout court) commitments. I then give voice to the enthusiasts themselves, presenting textual examples in light of the previously examined epistemological debate. Based on these texts’ emphasis on the experiential character of religious faith and devotion, I suggest that enthusiasm could itself be regarded as a form of empirical evidence, and that enthusiasts were in a position to mobilize arguments made against them.
Religious Faith as Compatible with Natural Philosophy
Despite criticism of religious enthusiasm, early modern natural philosophy did not view itself as incompatible with religious faith. On the contrary, faith and natural philosophy regarded themselves as mutually enhancing, natural philosophical training aiding religious understanding, and vice versa.
A. Natural Philosophical Training as Desirable for Religious Understanding
One logical consequence of Boyle’s emphasis on “intelligent and unprejudiced consideration” as the channel through which one derives certainty about the existence of God is that natural philosophy is not only compatible with religious faith but is also desirable for its attainment, as the natural philosopher is a skilled observer and is therefore optimally equipped to detect details revealing divine imprint in nature’s design. While holding that every sensible person should be convinced of the existence of God by simple observation of evidence of beauty and order,Footnote 98 Boyle argued that capturing subtler indications of the existence of God required the attentive eye of naturalists. Being a natural philosopher (i.e., having undergone training in skillful observation) was therefore not only compatible with but was a desideratum—if not a requirement—for faith:
For the Works of God are so worthy of their Author, that … [they] … are not to be discovered by the perfunctory looks of … Unskilful Beholders; but Require … the most attentive and prying Inspection of inquisitive and well-instructed Considerers. And sometimes in one Creature, there may be … admirable things, that escape a vulgar Eye, and yet may be clearly discern’d by That of a true Naturalist; who brings with him, besides a more than common Curiosity and Attention, a competent knowledge of Anatomy, Opticks, Cosmography, Mechanicks, and Chymistry the clearer Light a Man has, the more he may discover of … [God’s Works’] Unobvious Exquisiteness.Footnote 99
Likewise, Boyle argued that “A Virtuoso, that by manifold and curious Experiments searches deep into the Nature of things, has great and peculiar Advantages, to discover and observe the excellent Fabrick of the World ; and to take notice in its particular Parts as lie hid from those Beholders that are not both Attentive and Skilful.”Footnote 100 Natural philosophers’ “Inquisitiveness, and Course of Studies” make them “both Willing and Fit to search out and discover Deep and Unobvious Truths”Footnote 101 that would escape uneducated observers. Furthermore, their “Accustomance of endeavouring to give Clear Explications of the Phenomena of Nature, and discover the weakness of those Solutions that Superficial Wits are wont to make and acquiesce in” resulted in “a great and ingenuous Modesty of Mind.”Footnote 102 By virtue of this modesty, or “Docility,”Footnote 103 of mind, “a Virtuoso has some Helps, that other Men, generally speaking, have not, to make him judiciously approve the Arguments for the Truth of the Christian Religion,”Footnote 104 as “he, that is accustomed to prize Truths of an inferior kind [i.e., those discovered through physical and mechanical experiments] … will be much more dispos’d to value Divine Truths.”Footnote 105
Taken together, these excerpts articulate Boyle’s argument that the natural philosopher—the virtuoso—as a result of his training in reasoning and skillful observation, has two advantages upon the uneducated observer: the virtuoso is both better equipped to evaluate arguments and sensory evidence for or against them and better predisposed to divine revelation. This dual quality draws a solid connection between religious faith and natural philosophy based on sensory experience, as the natural philosopher’s higher predisposition to revelation rests upon a superior ability to detect signs of the divine within the natural world, which in turn results from the natural philosopher’s training in careful observation and consideration of sensory (e.g., visual) evidence. Boyle’s repeated recourse to vision-related terms (e.g., “perfunctory looks,” “Unskilful Beholders,” “attentive and prying Inspection,” “vulgar Eye,” “Visible Works”) further reinforces the sensory connotation of religious faith, stressing the natural philosopher’s advantage in detecting, assessing, and acknowledging it.
B. Religious Devotion as Desirable for Natural Philosophical Training
Natural philosophers were receptive to theological ideas. Boyle argued that an experimental natural philosopher (a virtuoso), who was committed to the empirical method, could also be a sincere practicing Christian. In his Christian Virtuoso, he refuses to be defined solely by his work as a natural philosopher, at the expense of his work as a theologian.Footnote 106 Likewise, Boyle argued that his Christian faith was not incompatible with his commitment to empiricism: “I have a great Reverence for Experience, in comparison of Authority,”Footnote 107 but “to embrace Christianity, I do not think I need to recede from the value and kindness I have for Experimental Philosophy.”Footnote 108 Hence, in Boyle’s view, “there is no Inconsistence between a Man’s being an Industrious Virtuoso, and a Good Christian.”Footnote 109 Part of Boyle’s stance involves intellectual humility in response to wider epistemic concerns. Thomas Hobbes, for example, had held that nothing can be known about the physical world, as any knowledge of it is vitiated by the unreliability of the human senses.Footnote 110 The sensorium was regarded as deceptive: the early modern emphasis on knowledge as derived from sensory (observable) experience coexisted with a suspicion of knowledge derived from sensory experience, the senses being irremediably fallible.Footnote 111 In line with his praise of intellectual humility, Boyle recognized the limits of the empirical approach that distinguished natural philosophy, and he preconized openness to spiritual ideas that do not involve sensory evidence: “there will not be wanting some Ingenious Men, that expected … that I should never write but as a Naturalist, because they themselves esteem nothing, save the Laws and Phenomena of Nature, to be Subjects worthy of a Philosophical Pen: As if, because Rational Spirits are Invisible and Immaterial Beings, all Disquisitions about them must be airy and uncertain Speculations, and, like their Objects, devoid of Solidity and Usefulneß.”Footnote 112
In Boyle’s view, Christianity and virtuosity—by virtue of their shared reliance on the senses—were not only compatible but also mutually supportive, as faith encouraged “docility” toward experiences of all sorts, and natural philosophy confirmed the existence of God.Footnote 113 Boyle proposed the intelligent design argument for the existence of God, arguing that “a Machine so Immense, so Beautiful, so well contriv’d … as the World, cannot have been the effect of mere Chance,”Footnote 114 and that “the Vastness, Beauty, and Regular Motions, of the heavenly Bodies; the excellent Structure of Animals and Plants; … this vast, beautiful, orderly, … admirable System of things, that we call the World, was fram’d by an Author supremely Powerful, Wise, and Good, can scarce be deny’d by an intelligent and unprejudic’d Considerer.”Footnote 115 Boyle even wishes to persuade others into faith—“it will be no small Satisfaction to me, if, though I cannot Convert the resolvedly Irreligious, I shall at least furnish those that are not so, with Preservatives against them, and hinder their Impiety from being Contagious”Footnote 116—observing that his argument should be all the more effective to convince philosophers critical of religion because he himself is “a Layman, and … Cultivator of Experimental Philosophy.”Footnote 117
Therefore, in the late seventeenth-century English context, enthusiasm was rejected both by natural philosophers and by theologians, and this rejection involved rationalist and empirical arguments. Despite their diversity, responses to and rejection of enthusiasm shared certain epistemic commitments across the theological-philosophical and rationalist-empiricist divides. Theologians’ systems of belief were to a certain extent compatible with natural philosophical and early scientific principles, while natural philosophers were receptive to certain theological commitments. In rejecting enthusiasm, both natural philosophers and theologians emphasized the value of reason and empirical evidence as the foundation for both knowledge and faith. The combination of Christianity tempered by experimental training in natural philosophy forges a stronger capacity for deploying the senses and assessing the extent to which they can be trusted. Crucially, it also enables one to transcend them, and, under the right conditions, turn to alternative—supernatural— epistemic channels: “our Virtuouso will examine with more Strictness and Skill, than Ordinary Men are able to, Miracles, Prophecies, or other Proofs, said to be Supernatural, that are alleg’d to Evince a Reveal’d Religion; yet if the certain and genuine Characters of Truth appear in it, He will be more thorowly Convinc’d of it than a less Skilful Man.”Footnote 118 In fact, Boyle values training in experimental philosophy beyond the remit of empirical observation of natural phenomena (for the purpose of becoming a good experimental philosopher). Training in experimental philosophy also helps to develop sensibility for supernatural manifestations (e.g., miracles), that is, to become a good Christian: “Experimental Philosophy does also Dispose the Minds of its Cultivaters to receive due Impressions from such Proofs, as Miracles do, as well as other Topicks, afford the Christian Religion.”Footnote 119
C. Boyle and Locke Admit of the Epistemic Legitimacy of Revelation
Boyle explicitly includes prophecy and inspiration among the acceptable sources of experience. He distinguishes “Immediate and Vicarious Experience,” the former being “Personal Experience, which a man acquires immediately by himself, and accrews to him by his own Sensations”; the latter including “Historical Experience,”Footnote 120 which instead relies on mediation of external “Relation or Testimony,” and “Theological Experience,” which relies either on immediate “Divine Revelation” (as in the case of Moses) or on mediated “Intervention” through “Angels, Prophets, Apostles, or Inspir’d Persons.”Footnote 121 Hence, Boyle accepts revelation as a possible way to gain knowledge, albeit under certain circumstances and in certain types of individuals—for example, those who are unaccustomed or untrained to receive knowledge through natural philosophical discourse, and instead respond well to less abstract and more embodied engagement. He uses the metaphor of a drug for truth: truth is best accessed, that is, individuals are more easily convinced of it, when it is presented in the form that the individual prefers (e.g., philosophers prefer rational argument and observation, implying others may prefer sensation), in the same way that individuals are more easily convinced to take a medicine when it is presented in the form that they prefer (pill, powder, syrup). He also uses the metaphor of contagious disease for atheism and the metaphor of addiction for those experimental philosophers who do not accept divine matters as worthy of investigation.Footnote 122 Boyle also adapts the style of this work, making frequent use of “Arguments and Illustrations … Hypotheses, and Observations,” to his target audience, that is, the “New Philosophers … [or] … Modern Virtuosi,” whose gratification “is a good Step towards the Persuading of them”: “For ’t is easie to observe, that some Men are more accessible to Truth … when it is presented to them in One Dreß, than when it appears in Another: As we daily see, that some Persons will be more easily prevailed with to take a Medicine … if it is exhibited in that Form and Consistence, that is best lik’d by the Patients.”Footnote 123 “For some Men … are so taken up by their Secular Affairs, and their Sensual Pleasures [i.e., atheists and libertines], that they neither have Disposition, nor will have Leisure, to discover those Truths, that require both an Attentive and Penetrating Mind.”Footnote 124
Locke, too, admits of revelation in exceptional cases of assurance beyond reason, provided reason is at least consulted: “I do not mean that we must consult reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be made out by natural principles, and if it cannot, that then we may reject it: but consult it we must, and by it examine whether it be a revelation from God or no: and if reason finds it to be revealed from God, reason then declares for it as much as for any other truth, and makes it one of her dictates.”Footnote 125
Although Locke and Boyle openly excluded enthusiasm from their arguments for compatibility between faith and natural philosophy, they implicitly allowed for its inclusion. Boyle suggests this possibility when considering that the natural philosopher, thanks to his training, is able to recognize the testimony of inspired individuals as a source of (supernatural) truth, and that divine inspiration is at times the only way one can access that (supernatural) truth: as a consequence of experimental philosophical training, the Virtuoso tends to “repose a great deal of Truth in the Testimony of Inspir’d Persons” in matters “that relate to Objects of a Supernatural Order … since divers of those things are not knowable without Revelation.”Footnote 126 I am not suggesting that the early modern understanding of enthusiasm was identical with the early modern understanding of divine inspiration: enthusiasts were regarded as lacking cognizance of what they were saying (e.g., because possessed by the Devil, or affected by natural disorders), whereas divine prophets (e.g., in the Old Testament) were viewed as having a clear rational understanding of their own speech (albeit they may not have had a complete understanding of the future event signified).Footnote 127 In this sense, Boyle’s “Inspir’d Persons” denotes the latter group. Nevertheless, by holding faith compatible with natural philosophy and natural philosophy desirable for faith, and by acknowledging revelation as legitimate epistemic source on account of its sensory, experiential basis, Locke and Boyle implicitly admit of the coexistence of natural philosophical and enthusiastic commitments, precisely based on their shared grounding in a sensory, experiential basis. With its coupling of internal spiritual phenomena with externally visible sensory manifestations, enthusiasm could be regarded as a form of empirical evidence. Hence, if natural philosophers and theologians explicitly rejected enthusiasm, by acknowledging that revelation had an empirical basis, they implicitly made allowance for it, also offering enthusiasts themselves the possibility to defend their own revelation upon that same empirical basis.
In the following section I explore this possibility. I shall show how empirical (natural philosophical) concepts and language appear within textual sources produced and referenced by enthusiasts. I will then present evidence for close interrelation and mutual intellectual exchange between theologians and natural philosophers, which indicates that the conditions were in place for the possibility of the circulation of ideas—including notions originating within empirical philosophy—across the boundaries of intellectual disciplines and religious denominations.
Empirical Concepts and Language within Textual Sources Produced and Referenced by Enthusiasts
It has been observed that one of the early references to the enthusiasts in England mentions them together with the “empirickes,” that is, those who reject learning and expert authorities. The reference is found in Thomas Adam’s sermon “The Sinners Passing-Bell, or Phisicke from Heaven,” published in London in 1614.Footnote 128 Adams, a preacher from Bedfordshire, draws an analogy between doctors of “physicke” and doctors of the soul—“Let the naturall Phisitian apply his ministring, the spirituall his Ministerie”Footnote 129—and speaks of sin in medical terms, repeatedly referring to it as a disease, illness, carrying symptoms, and requiring medical diagnosis and intervention: “The sicknesse of this World is growne so lethargicall, that his recouery is almost despaired: and therefore his Phisitians, finding by infallible symptoms that his consumption is not curable, leaue him to the malignancie of his disease” as well as “many sicke of the generall disease of Sin.”Footnote 130 Throughout Adams’s sermon, the lexical proximity to empirical science is evident from recurring references to sin as disease and to the minister as a doctor charged by God to administer treatment, which in this case is preaching the word of God:
Oh that to performe the cure were no more difficult then to describe the Maladie, or prescribe the remedie. I haue endeuoured the latter: the other to God; who can both kill and giue life: who is yet pleased, by his word, to worke our recouery; and to make me one (vnworthy) instrument, to administer his Phisicke. Now as the most accurate Phisitians, … I haue presumed … to publish this (phisicall or rather) metaphysicall Treatise: for as the Sicknesse is spirituall, so the cure must be supernaturall.Footnote 131
The sermon’s recurring topos is that “The Phisitians are the Ministers. The Sicke are the Sinners.”Footnote 132 The perceived affinity between medics and preachers, scientists and theologians is further reiterated in the following passages: “Phisicke and Diuinitie are Professions of a neere affinitie: both intending the cure and recouerie one of our bodies, the other and better of our soules”; “The Lord created the Physitian, so hath he ordained the Minister. The Lord hath put into him the knowledge of Nature, into this the knowledge of grace.”Footnote 133 And again: “The good Minister, after a sort is a Physitian”; “God is in many places a Phisitian”Footnote 134; “And his Ministers are his deputies vnder him, bringing in their lips the sauing Medicines, that God hath giuen them.”Footnote 135 Hence, Adams’s argument falls squarely within the lexical field of medicine, reaching the apotheosis when Christ himself is cast as physician: “If any be blinde, Hee is the Oculist: if any be lame, He sets the Bones: if any be wounded, Hee is the Chirurgion: if any be sicke, Hee is the Phisitian”;Footnote 136 and “Sicke wee are, yet consult not the Oracles of Heauen for our welfare, nor sollicite the helpe of our great Phisitian Christ.”Footnote 137
Michael Heyd has observed that the analogy between medicine (as medical cure) and theology (as spiritual cure) implied the further analogy between the enthusiasts as uneducated preachers and the “empirics and quack doctors,” and, therefore, attacks to enthusiasm, be they from natural philosophers or from theologians, may be collectively regarded as “the reaction of the traditional professional groups to their critics and challengers from below,” which in turn identifies “an important social locus of the critique of enthusiasm in the various professional groups, whether ministers, physicians or scientists.”Footnote 138 Adams’s sermon seems to subvert the professional categories to which it refers, as, after appropriating the medical terminology (phisitian) and applying it to the theological domain, he refers disparagingly to the original: “the best Phisicke is to take no Phisicke: … our new Phisicke is worse then our old sicknesse.”Footnote 139 Crucially, he refers disparagingly to the “Empirickes,” whom, he claims, “endanger not more bodies, then ideotish Priests soules,”Footnote 140 as they take advantage of the “credulous”: “Some are vvandering Empirickes, that vvhen they come to minister, spend all the time in a cracking ostentation of their Cures, or demonstration of their skill in Pictures and Tables, neuer approuing it to their credulous Patients: These are bragging Phisitians.”Footnote 141 The enthusiastic rhetoric deployed by Adams closely resembles the anti-enthusiastic rhetoric from the natural philosophical discourse: by condemning the supposed exploitation of the irrational emotion of credulous believers, Adams directs against empiricists exactly the same reproach that the empiricists directed against enthusiastic preachers.
Further illustrating this commingling of discourses, the rationalist philosophers’ argument against the experimental approach of empiricists as unsuited to gain knowledge is found in enthusiasts’ arguments against academic learning. For example, after Sydrach Simpson, master of Pembroke College, in a commencement sermon maintained the value of classical academic education for the training of a clergyman,Footnote 142 the Puritan William Dell, in his own sermon—The Stumbling-stone— preached at St. Mary’s, Cambridge, 20 April 1653, dismissed academic learning as valueless: “What need is there then of our Philosophy, and of our Arts and Sciences to the Ministry of the New Testament? … I Answer, No need at all, as to Christs Kingdom, and the Ministry of that: For it is one of the grossest errors that ever reigned under Antichrists Kingdom, to affirm that Universities are the fountain of the Minsters of the Gospel, which do only proceed out of Christs flock.”Footnote 143
To further complicate the issue, the empirical method itself was at times cast as enthusiastic, as empiricists (especially chemists and alchemists) claimed direct access to nature, just as enthusiasts to the divine.Footnote 144 Responses to enthusiasts’ claims from within the theological community likewise mobilized arguments from the natural philosophical debate. For example, Joseph Sedgwick’s response to Dell’s sermon, delivered a few days later at the same venue (Cambridge’s St. Mary’s), emphasized the deceitfulness and imposture of enthusiastic claims: “I seemed to apprehend a great nearness between the False-Teachers of old and this Spirit that now comes forth with the highest and most raised Pretences.”Footnote 145 With his diffidence toward political and academic institutions, and intrusion into civil politics in the name of religion, Dell too, like Adams, gives voice to the enthusiasts. According to Eric Walker, Dell was a “typical Enthusiast.”Footnote 146 Hence, Dell and Adams offer a window onto the ways in which the discourse surrounding enthusiasm manifested itself from the perspective of the enthusiasts themselves.
A. Empirical Evidence and Imagination
Through its claim of direct revelation, enthusiasm engaged with those same epistemic issues as imagination did. Spinoza, Boyle, Locke, and the Cambridge Platonists all insisted that, unlike natural knowledge, “which requires no sign, but by its own nature involves certainty,”Footnote 147 imagination is by nature uncertain and needs complementing, not only by reason (“in order that we may be sure of the things we conceive by imagination, it is necessary to supplement it by reasoning”),Footnote 148 but also—and crucially, for the present argument—by sensory evidence. Through the senses, imagination becomes knowledge, because sensory evidence functions as proof. This is clear in Spinoza’s claim that imagination “can never involve certainty; and this is the reason why the prophets were never certain of the revelation of God by the revelation itself, but always by some supplementary sign or condition.”Footnote 149 Spinoza details that, in Genesis, after hearing God’s promise to him, Abraham asks for a sign, not because he lacks faith in God, but that he might know it was indeed God who had made him the promise. The same applies to Gideon’s plea to God, in Judges, “ ‘Show me a sign that [I may know] thou talkest with me,’ ” and, similarly, God offers Moses a sign: “And this [shall be] a sign to thee, that I sent thee,” and “Hezekiah, who had long been aware that Isaiah was a prophet, nevertheless asks for a sign. These instances show that the prophets always looked for an [outward, visible or other sensory] sign as an assurance of the things that they prophesied from imagination; and this is the reason why Moses admonishes the people always to demand of the prophet a sign.”Footnote 150 As Cambridge Platonist John Smith pointed out, the “primitive fathers … detected the impostures of the Montanists, that pretended much to prophecy, but, indeed, were acquainted with nothing more of it than ecstacies or abruptions of mind.”Footnote 151 Analogously, Theophilus Evans noted that “God never sent Prophets but with the Power of Miracles to confirm them; and our Saviour has particularly told us, that false Prophets should come into the World, and that by their Fruits we shall know them.”Footnote 152 In line with the Cambridge Platonists, Locke observed that in the Bible “holy men of old, who had revelations from God, had something else besides that internal light of assurance in their own minds, to testify to them that it was from God. They were not left to their own persuasions alone … but had outward signs to convince them of the Author of those revelations.”Footnote 153 Moses, for example, was not persuaded of the divine origin of the message entrusted to him until he “saw the bush burn without being consumed, and heard a voice out of it,” and, likewise, Pharaoh did not authorize the exodus from Egypt until he saw Moses’s rod “turned into a serpent.”Footnote 154
In numerous other instances throughout Scripture, prophets were not satisfied with the “persuasion of their own minds,” but rather demanded proofs. These proofs, which often come under the form of miracles, serve not only to convince oneself of the divine nature of certain events experienced in first person but also provide tangible evidence to convince others.Footnote 155 Throughout history, Locke concludes, the “holy men” believed in God not merely based on inner persuasion, but based on sensory evidence.Footnote 156 My point is that enthusiasm might be regarded as embodying sensory evidence. As a highly personal, corporeally felt individual experience, enthusiasm effectively qualified (in the eyes of the enthusiasts) as sensory, empirical evidence. It is this understanding of itself as empirical evidence that, I suggest, from the enthusiasts’ perspective provided the common ground between enthusiasm and natural philosophy.
B. Enthusiasm, Empirical Evidence, and the Senses
Stereotypes characterize reformed Christianity as “asensual and intellectualised” in opposition to the “sensual backwardness” of Roman Catholicism.Footnote 157 Paradoxically, reformers’ opponents thought that the reformers’ faith was itself sensual, and that the typical Methodist “feels much and thinks little.”Footnote 158 Accusations of enthusiasm were directed even against those who held that innate knowledge was superior to sense perception.Footnote 159 Remarkably, the experimental method itself was at times viewed as a manifestation of enthusiasm, as both religious enthusiasts and early modern scientists claimed “access to divine secrets,”Footnote 160 be it through direct divine inspiration or through the study of nature. The mutual charges of sensuality and enthusiasm betray anxiety in the early modern attitude toward the senses and ambivalence toward the senses’ epistemic scope and significance. By displaying spiritual emotion as sensory, embodied manifestations, enthusiasm implied both reliance on the senses as (visible, manifested) proof of (invisible, private) spiritual events (hence, an evidence-based role), and unease about sensuality at large for its potential association with the neglect of reason and atheism. The spread of enthusiasm and the resistance that it elicited among theologians and natural philosophers articulated this anxiety and ambivalence toward the senses. Boyle’s view of atheists as blinded by “their Sensuality, and Lusts, and Passions”Footnote 161 goes even so far as to challenge the coupling of sensuality with faith, holding instead that religious individuals share with experimental philosophers the disposition to “value and delight in abstracted Truths,” that is, those truths that “do not … gratifie Mens Ambition, Sensuality, or other inferior Passions and Appetites.”Footnote 162 Paradoxically, Boyle also casts empirical evidence (on which natural philosophy is based) as that which gratifies the senses, and the empiricist natural philosopher as addicted to such gratification of the senses (i.e., to empirical evidence): “He that is addicted to Knowledge Experimental, is accustom’d both to Persue, Esteem, and Relish many Truths, that do not delight his Senses, or gratifie his Passions.”Footnote 163 Here, the natural philosopher is criticized for being addicted to the senses, a charge comparable to the one directed against the enthusiast. I would submit that, if the quest for sensory evidence, hailed by empiricism, turns (within the empiricist discourse itself) from the hallmark of a proper, evidence-based approach to knowledge to addiction to the senses—in essence, from epistemic asset to epistemic limitation (because it precludes openness to alternative sources of knowledge and access to truth, e.g., revelation)—then enthusiasm becomes implicitly acceptable, as its own sensory, experiential (albeit non-experimental) quality offers a contrasting form of empirical evidence that may grant access to epistemic channels and truths that lie beyond either rationalist or empiricist approaches.
My proposition that Boyle’s empirical argument implicitly lends itself to legitimating enthusiasm as an empirical epistemic source is also supported by the fact that, as discussed earlier, both natural philosophers and theologians rejected enthusiasm for its irrationality (unlike proper faith, which was instead regarded as “rational”), suggesting that, from both camps, the core charge in the critique of enthusiasm had to do with excessive sensuality and lack of reason—not with lack of an empirical foundation.
Hence, despite explicitly rejecting enthusiasm as incompatible with natural philosophy, natural philosophers implicitly admitted the coexistence of natural philosophical and enthusiastic commitments. While natural philosophy and (non-enthusiastic, proper, reasonable) religious faith shared a grounding in reason, natural philosophy and (unreasonable) enthusiasm shared a grounding in their experiential quality, that is, in sensory evidence from the individual experience. To be clear: I am not claiming that early modern natural philosophy relied solely on sensory experience, as might be felt privately by enthusiasts, as a source of empirical evidence; by natural philosophy’s standard, experience also ought to be publicly demonstrable and replicable before it can count as evidence. Rather, I am drawing a distinction between the way in which enthusiasm was explained by its (natural philosophers) critics and the way in which it was experienced by enthusiasts, and I am suggesting that sensory experience, as felt privately by enthusiasts, might have been interpreted by enthusiasts themselves as a source of empirical evidence. Consider the Cambridge Platonists on prophecy, ecstasy, and other forms of revelation: they effectively regarded these as alternative forms of sensory evidence—that is, not as transient states of religious exaltation, but rather as a durable trait involving a “concentration of affection, will, and understanding upon God.”Footnote 164 To their religious minds, the ecstatic condition involved the attainment of union with God, in which “the distinction between Natural and Revealed Religion seems to vanish in the result.”Footnote 165
The evidence discussed from enthusiasts’ own voices—where empirical (natural philosophical) concepts and language (e.g., “empiricks”) recur in textual sources produced and referenced by enthusiasts—suggests that arguments from natural philosophy, including the legitimation of experiential evidence outside natural philosophy’s standards (e.g., prophetic revelation), circulated in enthusiasts’ milieus, too, and could be deployed to legitimate enthusiasm. My suggestion is that natural philosophy (explicitly) and enthusiasm (implicitly) shared an evidence-based epistemic approach, and that the empirical rationale that natural philosophy had deployed against enthusiasm lent itself to being deployed in its vindication. In the following (final) section I test the plausibility of this proposition and show how close interrelation and mutual intellectual exchange between theologians and natural philosophers suggest that the conditions were in place for the circulation and uptake of empirical ideas beyond the empirical milieu, including by enthusiasts.
Intermingling of Theological and Natural Philosophical Commitments
Considerable osmosis existed between early modern debates in theology and in natural philosophy. Seventeenth-century natural philosophy had implications that went beyond its confines. For example, in England, attempts were made to show that atomism (the then dominant materialistic hypothesis) had theistic implications.Footnote 166 It has been observed that, in the tense religious climate of seventeenth-century England, where religious controversy had brought civil wars, the early Fellows of the Royal Society sought to position themselves on a middle ground between Hobbes, Spinoza, radicalism, and atheism, on the one hand, and religious enthusiasm, on the other.Footnote 167 In consideration of the intellectual osmosis and personal connections across the theological and natural philosophical domain, it is likely that religiously minded thinkers, including the enthusiasts among them, would have been familiar with natural philosophers’ empirical argument against enthusiasm, and it is conceivable that they might have seen its potential in legitimating the experiential quality of enthusiasm as a form of empirical evidence and forms of religious devotion as complementary to empirical (natural philosophical) training.
Natural philosophers and theologians mutually exchanged ideas and shared epistemic commitments across rationalist and empiricist positions. It has been observed that the Cambridge Platonists were “strikingly receptive” to aspects of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and science that were consistent with their “rational theology”Footnote 168 (although they were also hostile to materialistic philosophies that were inconsistent with itFootnote 169). For the Cambridge Platonists, “God was conceived of as the unity of love and knowledge,”Footnote 170 and on “ ‘Natural Religion’ … much light is thrown by philosophy, by the best thoughts of the best men.”Footnote 171 As has been noted, “far from being antithetical to developments in contemporary science, the Cambridge Platonists accommodated them.”Footnote 172 For example, in the Immortality of the Soul (1659), chiefly targeted against Hobbesian materialism,Footnote 173 More accepts the principles of mechanical philosophy. At the same time, in the same work, he develops the concept of a Spirit of Nature as a universal immaterial principle mediating between God and the world, supposedly accounting for those phenomena that cannot be explained by mechanical principles.Footnote 174
Religious ministers who sought to understand how the supernatural and natural worlds were related maintained contact with scientists and preached on new scientific ideas.Footnote 175 Locke, who, despite being born to Puritan parents, sought to avoid public involvement in religious matters by publishing his religious ideas anonymously,Footnote 176 was nevertheless a profound influence on John Wesley,Footnote 177 who learned to value and seek a direct experience of the divine from Locke’s empirical method.Footnote 178 In line with Locke, Wesley denied that the mind could possess innate ideas, holding that spiritual truths had to come from the senses, as expressed in his quintessentially enthusiastic statement “I felt my heart strangely warmed.”Footnote 179 Boyle too was involved in theological matters, and also sponsored the English translation of a popular French demonology.Footnote 180 More corresponded with Boyle.Footnote 181 Further highlighting the intermingling of religious and natural philosophical commitments, some of the Cambridge Platonists, including Cudworth and More, were also members of the Royal Society. Both Cudworth and More corresponded with Boyle.Footnote 182 Boyle also entertained indirect correspondence with Spinoza, and through the intermediation of German expatriate to England Henry Oldenburg,Footnote 183 he too associated with the Royal Society, where Oldenburg served as physical science secretary. In addition to the Royal Society, other intellectual circles included theologians and natural philosophers among their members. The Republic of LettersFootnote 184 and the Hartlib Circle, for example, included mathematicians, physicists, chemists, alchemists, medics, and—crucially—theologians.Footnote 185
To illustrate the influence of these circles, it has been maintained that the exchange between Boyle and Spinoza (via Oldenburg) is best understood in the context of the Hartlib Circle, rather than in light of the Royal Society.Footnote 186 Several members of the Hartlib Circle were also members of the Royal Society (e.g., Boyle and Oldenburg). The complexity, interrelation, and mutual influence of theological and natural philosophical domains within these intellectual circles is well known.Footnote 187 Members exchanged ideas and physical material ahead of publication. For example, in his correspondence with Spinoza (and Boyle), Oldenburg evoked and eventually sent a physical copy of Boyle’s soon-to-be-published book Certain Physiological Essays,Footnote 188 asking for comments on the scientific experiments that Boyle had reported in it.Footnote 189 Boyle’s “Mechanical Philosophy” offers a striking instance of this interdisciplinary exchange: it was not Boyle who introduced the term “Mechanical Philosophy” into the English language; neither was it a colleague among the natural philosophers. It was Cambridge Platonist Henry MoreFootnote 190— a theologian. In this climate of sharing and exchange, it seems likely that theologians, including enthusiasts, would have encountered new developments in natural philosophy and would have had the intellectual means to adjust scientific notions to enthusiastic concerns.
Conclusions
Much of the debate on enthusiasm can be regarded as revolving around the issue of epistemic authority, that is, the problem of which among multiple explanations, given certain events (e.g., enthusiastic manifestations), can lay claim to legitimate knowledge. Reflecting on the evidence discussed, it appears that seventeenth-century responses to enthusiasm revealed an overall closeness of theology to philosophy in their common approach to the examination of what Gerald Cragg called the “structures of belief.”Footnote 191 On the one hand, the debate on enthusiasm raised issues surrounding the epistemic value of sensory and empirical evidence, and their relation to scientific authority and its claim to knowledge production. This topic was itself beginning to enter a new phase of increasing recognition that scientific experimental knowledge, unlike deductive knowledge, could only be probabilistic, provisional, and revisable.Footnote 192 The gradual acknowledgment of probability as a legitimate form of knowledge shifted the parameters of the debate on the proper experimental means by which knowledge could be produced and evaluated and knowledge claims authenticated, and distinguished from other epistemological categories, such as “belief” and “opinion.”Footnote 193 The problem of authenticating enthusiasm (i.e., of authenticating religious experience) could be viewed as part of the larger issue of assessing the legitimacy of knowledge based on evidence, an approach that was proper to the scientific method that characterized contemporary empirical natural philosophy.
My aim here has been to examine the epistemological issues and implications raised by enthusiasm as it hit the ground in the midst of the seventeenth-century natural philosophical debate. Based on the evidence discussed, I suggest that enthusiasm was, in certain qualified ways, compatible with natural philosophy. This compatibility was neither based solely on religion and natural philosophy having distinct scopes nor on their having a common foundation in reason, since in both arguments the understanding of religion as “reasonable” excluded enthusiasm. The compatibility was instead based on enthusiasm and natural philosophy both being implicitly grounded in an evidence-based epistemic approach, in which trust in individual sensory experience coexisted with ambiguity toward the senses as an epistemic channel upon which one should count, but of which one should also be wary.Footnote 194 The early modern attitude toward enthusiasm reflected this complex epistemic relation to the sensory dimension of experience. In this sense, my position is consistent with views of the rejection of enthusiasm as part of a wider change in intellectual and literary temperament characterized by a tendency toward sobriety, emotional restraint, regulation of imagination, and emphasis on truth,Footnote 195 while also offering a more nuanced interpretation than previous ones (e.g., J. G. A. Pocock’s definition of enthusiasm as the Enlightenment’s “antiself”Footnote 196).
On the other hand, assessing the legitimacy of knowledge involved evaluating sensory evidence in light of reason. But, as Christopher Hill observed, the understanding of “reason” and “reasonableness” shifted in the early modern period, such that, by Locke’s time, reason “was no longer systematic logic, but the self-evident truths of common sense and experience.”Footnote 197 Reason and experience, far from being isolated and mutually adversary epistemic channels (as the juxtaposition of rationalist and empiricist stances might imply), effectively merged into a combined intellectual-sensory epistemic apparatus, reminiscent of the Baconian notion of imagination as messenger between sense and reason. As Cragg observed, early modern theologians (especially Latitudinarians) appealed to reason and empirical philosophy in their rejection of enthusiasm.Footnote 198 As Hill similarly remarked, theologians from the Cambridge School “set up reason against the inner light,” arguing that academic education was necessary to be able to interpret Scripture.Footnote 199
The opposition to enthusiasm therefore brought together theology and natural philosophy, with the result that, in Knox’s words, “good Christian people who do not relish an eccentric spirituality find themselves in unwelcome alliance with worldlings who do not relish spirituality at all.”Footnote 200 My argument that natural philosophers and theologians joined forces against enthusiasm is consistent with existing scholarship highlighting how English intellectuals in general (i.e., across disciplinary or religious allegiance) held enthusiasts responsible for the sectarian divisions that fueled the Civil War.Footnote 201 By suggesting that critiques of enthusiasm challenged the simplistic division between empiricists and rationalists, my argument aligns itself with previous literature,Footnote 202 while also departing from it in that it locates in the critique of enthusiasm a previously unexamined facet of that debate.
In the seventeenth-century intellectual climate of circulation of persons and ideas, the fact that resistance to enthusiasm came both from natural philosophers, including atheists, and from theologians reveals shared epistemic commitments across methodological and disciplinary (e.g., rationalist versus empiricist, or natural philosophical versus theological) divides, reflecting evolving concerns in the wider epistemological debate, rather than fixed, domain- or ideology-specific positions. The fact that both camps rejected enthusiasm for its irrationality suggests that the crux of the critique of enthusiasm lay in its lack of reason, and not of an empirical foundation. Enthusiasts, theologians, and natural philosophers shared a commitment to empirical evidence, although they diverged in the criteria for what counted as evidence. I have suggested that sensory experience, as felt privately by enthusiasts, could be and was interpreted by enthusiasts themselves as a source of empirical evidence. It is in this sense that natural philosophy’s argument against enthusiasm also served as the enthusiasts’ argument in defense of it.
