Though it seems unnecessarily (and indeed problematically) restricted in terms of scope and reach, Sarah Ellenzweig's The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760, is a triumph of cogency and critical intelligence. Fringes of Belief extends the ongoing revision of the Enlightenment's alleged secularism by examining the tradition of freethinking in English literature of the Restoration and eighteenth century, “a body of writing that has been overlooked,” it is argued, “because it unexpectedly supported aspects of institutional religion” (2). Through case studies of Rochester, Behn, Swift, and Pope, Ellenzweig unearths two seemingly contradictory impulses in these writers, at once to demystify the truths of revealed religion as “pious frauds” and at the same time to uphold the necessity of outward conformity to those frauds as a matter of civil policy.

This “twofold philosophy” was characteristically the prerogative of an Anglican cultural and intellectual elite, who were themselves inclined toward a nonprovidential worldview and yet loath to disparage Christianity and its laws out of respect for religion's “matchless capacity to serve the interests of a stable, sovereign state” (3). According to Ellenzweig, then, the “true freethinker wisely hides his private doubts, striving not to disabuse the credulous of religion's cheats and impostures” (7). The origins of this particular freethinking outlook Ellenzweig traces to Socrates, Cicero, and Seneca: hence the “ancient heresy” of her title.

Ellenzweig's first chapter subtly but importantly modifies received opinions of Rochester's religion by placing his apparent heterodoxy in the context of English deism. Against Christopher Hill and others, who would see the deism of the later seventeenth century as the heir to antinomian radicalism, Ellenzweig insists on the fundamentally reactionary, anti-enthusiastic origins of Restoration deism. This revised deistic context allows us to appreciate how Rochester, in a poem like “A Satyr against Reason and Mankind,” can savage prelatical corruption and theological arrogance, while conceding the social and psychological utility of a humble faith in “Mysterious Truths.”

Chapter 2 begins by exploring Aphra Behn's ambivalent attitude toward the twinned phenomena of freethinking and libertinism in works like The Rover and Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. Here the utopian promise of a rejection of Christian sexual morality is repeatedly undercut by the suggestion that “libertinism, however attractive in its freethinking philosophy, only reproduces the exploitation of women” (58). Turning attention to Behn's translations of Bernard de Fontenelle's freethinking natural histories, Ellenzweig shows how Behn moves beyond this impasse by applying the “two-fold philosophy” of the ancients, attenuating an implicit critique of Christian doctrine with an explicit capitulation to its authority; for Behn, “Traditional institutions … may well be ‘contrived to satisfy the Ignorant’ … but more often than not, we find that observing their ceremonies is more convenient than the alternative” (79).

Chapters 3 and 4 are both devoted to Jonathan Swift and his notorious satire of the spirit, A Tale of a Tub. In chapter 3, Swift is walked up to the brink of wholly deriding the transcendent claims of revealed religion as so much supernatural bunkum. By deftly explicating the intertextual relations between Swift's “sartorist” allegory of the Reformation and the opening of Hobbes's Leviathan, Ellenzweig concludes that religion can be seen in both to be “figured as ‘artificially fabricated’ and ‘external’” (98). And yet Ellenzweig's Swift “remained profoundly committed to safeguarding religion's place in the social and political institutions of eighteenth-century England” (84), a position defended in chapter 4 by boldly reconfiguring Swift's understanding of religion as “a tale of a tub.” Ellenzweig's reading of A Tale forces us to consider how Swift's send-up of the transcendence of spirit also admits a not wholly ironic respect for the public efficacy of religion's “pleasant and useful delusions” (117); Swift is accordingly rendered as the advocate for “a beliefless orthodoxy … that forms the distinctive core of the literature of English freethinking and its contradictory radical conservatism” (131).

In her concluding chapter, the author takes the measure of Alexander Pope's “natural religion” in An Essay on Man. The linchpin of the poem for Ellenzweig is Pope's antiprovidential refrain, “Whatever is, is right,” a stance that urges man to accept the self-evident truth that “the universe is not organized around [his] happiness and fulfillment” (139) and to live in modest hope that God will provide for him in a life to come. Insofar as the pious frauds of revealed religion serve virtuous ends, they are to be countenanced; where they do not, in Ellenzweig's view Pope suggests they “should be exploded” (141). But if in this Pope goes beyond the “beliefless orthodoxy” of Swift's freethinking, there nevertheless remains an archconservatism in Pope's doctrine of “Whatever is, is right” (as well as in Pope's enduring commitment to his Catholic identity—if not to the Catholic faith per se—an aspect of his career and biography not adequately considered here). Ellenzweig thus sees the Essay on Man as a bridge to the more radical Enlightenment tradition of freethought on the Continent, in particular, the philosophy of Pope's great admirer, Voltaire.

At few points is the exposition less than compelling, and yet the book's architectonics are somewhat puzzling. Of its six chapters, one is given over to an introduction, two more to “precursors,” and another to the “afterlife” of English freethinking. Only a third of the book, in that case, is actually devoted to the “life” of the phenomenon; moreover, that “life” seems to consist exclusively of Jonathan Swift. This underlines the obvious limitation of the project, its narrowness of scope: heft may not be a virtue in and of itself, but at 152 pages (not including notes), this is a slight volume, especially for a book that claims to be filling a significant scholarly lacuna. The authors featured are familiar and the textual compass of the chapters extremely restrictive; one wishes for more coverage and for more surprises. Especially hard to understand is the absence of any sustained discussion of Dryden. Like Swift an Anglican Tory (until Dryden became in 1685 a Catholic Tory) who maintained the civic and political necessity of religion, the poet of “Religio Laici” and The Hind and the Panther was—also like Swift—persistently suspected of spiritual imposture and, indeed, radical unbelief. Finally, while it may not always take place under the rubric of freethinking, one wants also to ask if it is really the case that scholars have heretofore neglected to consider the contradictory push-pull in Augustan authors between conservatism and heterodoxy. The Fringes of Belief is a pleasure to read, but one is left wanting more.