One of the most enduring elements in English Deism is its relationship to the revelation of Scripture from a moral point of view. As G. Gawlick put it, ‘The history of English deism is, to some extent, the history of successive efforts to settle the mutual relation between ethics and revealed religion.’Footnote 1 Biblical figures were not held in as high esteem as previously. In the words of G. R. Cragg, ‘Moses, Abraham, and David were guilty of faults which no eighteenth-century gentleman would commit.’Footnote 2 The English Deists, this loose band of brothers, shared a sometimes harsh critique of the Bible and its miracles and ethical concepts. This is not the place to discuss the issue in more depth, since it is well known and amply described in the literature on Deism.Footnote 3 Rather, the purpose of this paper is to trace the influence of English Deists in Germany, and more specifically the controversy around one of them, Thomas Morgan, once minister of a dissenting congregation in Marlborough, Wiltshire, who afterwards studied medicine and in the latter part of his life wrote Deist works in Bristol and London.
The moral philosopher, his most important work, appeared anonymously in February 1737.Footnote 4 It caused much comment, first reactions appearing in the same year in books and journals, in England and abroad. Morgan's name was widely known by the end of 1737, as is witnessed in the Bibliothèque Britannique and the Bibliothèque Raisonné. Footnote 5 His work is undoubtedly the chief landmark of Deist criticism on the Old Testament. Morgan's remedy for a revival of Christianity had already been stated in an anonymous pamphlet published by him in London in 1734: Christianity revived, and Judaism subverted. There he writes: ‘We ought to thank God … for being delivered from the vassalage and darkness of Judaism, as from Paganism itself.’Footnote 6 In the same vein The moral philosopher vehemently criticises all kinds of stories in the Old Testament. ‘I am a Christian upon the foot of the New Testament’, he says, although he also criticises the Apocalypse of John as part of ‘the Jewish Gospel’.Footnote 7 The subtitle of The moral philosopher is telling: the contrast between a Christian Deist and a Christian Jew. It is not without reason that Morgan has been styled a modern Marcion.Footnote 8 As such he gained a place in the history of antisemitism.Footnote 9 For him the faith of Abraham was an irrational enthusiastic belief, and Genesis xxii a fictitious account. The law of Moses was a mere piece of carnal, worldly policy and political economy. The prophets were fortune-tellers, or at most spiritual politicians. The miracles said to have been wrought by those prophets were private deeds, done in a corner, and before none but friends and staunch believers who would be sure not to downplay the miracle, if they did not invent the story. And so Morgan continues with critical observations on the Scriptures. Another point of interest is his thesis about ‘the standing controversy between St Paul and the Apostles and teachers of the circumcision’.Footnote 10 Peter and John, and their Judaizing party, stand in opposition to St Paul.Footnote 11 Paul is the great free-thinker of his age, the bold and brave defender of reason against authority. Peter and Paul preached different Gospels.Footnote 12 Morgan is thus to some extent a forerunner of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), the father of the Tübingen critical school, who argued for two parties in the early Church, the Petrine (Judaizing) and the Pauline and their effect on the development of the New Testament.Footnote 13
A great deal is now known about the distribution and reception of English books in eighteenth-century Germany. Bernhard Fabian has produced a fine study of their influence there. The eighteenth century was the English century in German cultural history.Footnote 14 Gotthard Victor Lechler (1811–88), author of the classic Geschichte des englischen Deismus, noted in detail the translations of English Deist and anti-Deist books in Germany during that period.Footnote 15 None the less it must be noted that it was not so easy to get English books in Germany at that time. In the Leipzig journal Neue Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen there are regular complaints about the rarity and expense of English volumes.Footnote 16 So it was highly significant that German theologians could read the works of the English Deists. Christoph Matthäus Pfaff (1686–1760), Lutheran theologian and since 1720 chancellor of the University of Tübingen in Württemberg, observed as extraordinary the fact that his colleague, the church historian and librarian Michael Lilienthal (1686–1750) of Königsberg in East Prussia, had so many English Deist books.Footnote 17 There are more examples of the distribution of Deist books and pamphlets. In Basle, Johann Ludwig Frey (1682–1759) founded a theological institute in 1747, using a legacy from his deceased colleague Johannes Grynaeus (1705–44). It contained many English Deist and anti-Deist books.Footnote 18 In general first reactions on the continent to the English Deist controversies, and especially to the work of Thomas MorganFootnote 19, were negative.Footnote 20
There has always been debate about the popularity of Deist views. Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), first editor of the DNB, argued that ‘the deist writings are but shabby and shrivelled little octavos, generally anonymous … Against them … appeared all that was intellectually venerable in England’.Footnote 21 He quotes the famous dictum of the politician Edmund Burke (1729–97) in his Reflections on the revolution in France in 1790: ‘Who borne within the last forty years has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever reads him through?’Footnote 22 This judgement is still in vogue: Peter Gay writes that ‘Today their reputation is not high: they lie unread and are in fact for the most part unreadable’.Footnote 23 On the other side of the debate Deism is considered as ‘the beginning of modernity in English theology’,Footnote 24 and ‘the first full-fledged attack on the traditional Judaeo-Christian notion of revelation’.Footnote 25 The critical impact of the Deist attack was to be felt all over the Christian Church in Europe and continues to this day for the authority of the Bible was indeed undermined by the observations of the Deists. In the words of the poet William Blake (1757–1827) in his Jerusalem, canto 52: ‘All the destruction in Christian Europe has arisen from deism’.Footnote 26 Similarly, there are conflicting ideas on the popularity of Morgan's views. Leslie Stephen stated that he was never much noticed,Footnote 27 but Roland Stromberg argued that he reached a wide audience.Footnote 28 In this article, in which reactions to The moral philosopher on the continent, and specifically in Germany, are considered, it will be argued that the latter conclusion is the correct one.
In the eighteenth century journals were the vehicle that stimulated the broadening of knowledge. The total print run of some of them was not small. So the Dutch Bibliothèque Britannique, ou Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans de la Grande-Bretagne, published from 1733 until 1747, had a print run of 1,500 copies, while that of the Bibliothèque Raisonnée, published between 1728 and 1753, varied between 800 and 1,200 copies.Footnote 29 The first continental reaction to The moral philosopher appeared in the first quarter of 1737 in the Bibliothèque Britannique.Footnote 30 One of the first German reactions appeared in Weimar in 1739 in the Acta Historico-Ecclesiastica, oder Gesammelte Nachrichten von den Neuesten Kirchen-Geschichten, a journal edited by Wilhelm Ernst Bartholomaei (d.1753), court chaplain in the duchy of Weimar.Footnote 31 A more critical discussion appeared in Leipzig in 1739 in the Frühaufgelesene Früchte der theologischen Sammlung, a journal edited by Valentin Ernst Löscher (1673–1749), superintendent in Dresden, the Saxon capital. There the book is characterised as the master work of a naturalist, and really dangerous.Footnote 32 There is very negative discussion in the Leipzig journal Nova Acta Eruditorum in 1741. There The moral philosopher is called ‘scelerati hominis liber’ and it is proposed that the book should be burned.Footnote 33 In the next year another Leipzig journal, Fortgesetzte Sammlung von Alten und Neuen Theologischen Sachen, notes the trouble the book has caused.Footnote 34 These are only some of the learned journals in which The moral philosopher was discussed and criticised. Johann Anton Trinius (1722–84), pastor in Braunrode and Walbeck (Mansfeld) and author of the Freydenker=Lexikon, also mentions the Leipziger zuverlässige Nachrichten, and other periodicals.Footnote 35
Alongside reviews in the journals was the vehement criticism voiced by specific theologians. Lilienthal had a copy of The moral philosopher and works of its first English opponents.Footnote 36 One of Morgan's strongest critics was the theologian Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten (1706–57), since 1730 assistant and since 1734 professor at Halle and among the most important figures in the transition from Pietism to rationalism in Germany. Since his arrival the faculty of theology at Halle, once the centre of Pietistic learning, had moved in another, more rationalistic, direction, already anticipated by men like the philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Wolff was the first to write philosophical textbooks in German rather than Latin and the titles of at least eight of his books start with ‘Vernünfftige Gedancken von’ (‘reasonable thoughts of’). Paul Hazard has called him the intellectual leader of Germany,Footnote 37 and W. H. Bruford termed him the father of the Aufklärung in Germany.Footnote 38 His disciples were to be found in nearly every branch of the humanities. It was later mockingly said by one German professor that everyone cured, wrote poetry, preached and catechised in the manner of Wolff.Footnote 39 Similarly his pupil Baumgarten fought his theological enemies with rational arguments. He was a very popular teacher who sometimes attracted more than 300 students, as his antagonist Joachim Lange (1670–1744), the last of the Pietist theologians in Halle, testified.Footnote 40 At least two of Baumgarten's own pupils in Halle defended a thesis against Morgan: Maximilianus Hoppert from Nuremberg with an ‘Examen variarum opinionum de regno posterorum Abrahami in Aegypto’ in 1744, and Christian Ernst von Windheim (1722–66), professor in Erlangen from 1750, with a ‘Disputatio de Paullo [sic] gentium apostolo, contra Thomam Morganum’ in 1745.Footnote 41
Baumgarten published countless critical notes against Morgan in the second edition of the second part of the Uebersetzung der Algemeinen Welthistorie, published in Halle in 1746. He surveys the conflict in England about Morgan in April 1750 in the fifth part of his Nachrichten von einer hallischen Bibliothek. There he vehemently criticises Morgan whom he describes as one of those who lie as brazenly as they speak evil.Footnote 42 In 1754–5 Baumgarten gave lectures on the history of religious controversies, in which Morgan is referred to several times; these were published after his death by his pupil Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91).Footnote 43 Christoph Pfaff, chancellor in Giessen (Hesse) from 1756, in his latter years dictated Academische Reden über den Entwurff der Theologiae Anti-Deisticae, da die Einwürffe der unglaubigen Geister wider die Christliche Offenbahrung entwickelt warden,Footnote 44 while Michael Lilienthal's son, the apologist Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1711–82), who also worked in Königsberg, published his momentous Die gute Sache der göttlichen Offenbarung wider die Feinde derselben erwiesen und gerettet in 16 volumes during the years 1750–82, with critical notes on the work of Morgan. But there was also gossip and misunderstanding. The Hanoverian preacher and traveller Georg Wilhelm Alberti (1723–58), writing letters about the religious situation in Britain, tells us in 1752 that he heard talk from former neighbours of Morgan in Cheapside of his reckless, wretched and scandalous life.Footnote 45 Trinius reported in 1759 the rarity of The moral philosopher even in England,Footnote 46 and noted the many theses and vindications against Morgan's work published in Germany.Footnote 47 One of the most succinct of these is the Historiae controversiarum a Thoma Morgano excitatarum, published in Leipzig in 1745 by Christian Gottlieb Jöcher (1694–1758), subsequently famous as a biographer. Jöcher reviews almost all the contemporary pamphlets and books and journals in English, German and Latin, arguing that Morgan is a dangerous figure.Footnote 48 Johann Friedrich Jacobi (1712–91), preacher at the Kreuzkirche in Hanover, defended the innocence of Joseph the patriarch against Morgan in 1747,Footnote 49 and Johann Jacob Quandt (1686–1772), court chaplain in Königsberg, did the same in 1749.Footnote 50 In 1754 Johann Dietrich Winckler (1711–84), superintendent in Hildesheim, defended the prophet Samuel against Morgan,Footnote 51 and in 1755 Johann Jacob Plitt (1727–73) defended a thesis in Göttingen in which he upheld the glory of God against the calumnies of Morgan and others.Footnote 52
Critical discussion of Morgan in Germany also extended to discussion of his British opponents. The presbyterian preacher Benjamin Andrew Atkinson (d.1765) published in August 1737 The decay of practical religion lamented … with an appendix, containing a few remarks on a book lately published, intitled, The moral philosopher. Two years later, in 1739, this booklet was discussed in Das jetzt-lebende gelehrte Europa, oder Nachrichten von den vornehmsten Lebens-Umständen und Schrifften, jetztlebender europäischen Gelehrten, edited by Gabriel Wilhelm Götten (1708–81) in Braunschweig.Footnote 53
Even some of the apologetical works published in England against Morgan were translated into German. In June 1737 the Exeter nonconformist minister Joseph Hallett (1692–1744) published The immorality of The moral philosopher: being an answer to a book … intitled The moral philosopher. In 1739 John Chapman (1704–84), chaplain to John Potter, archbishop of Canterbury, published Eusebius, or the true Christian's defence, directed against a late book entitul'd ‘The moral philosopher’, a book which was criticised by William Warburton (1698–1779) as ‘it was written by order of the A.B.C. (i.e. the archbishop of Canterbury)’. And in April 1740 Moses Lowman (1680–1752), an independent minister in Clapham, published A dissertation on the civil government of the Hebrews, in which … the justice, wisdom and goodness of the Mosaical constitutions, are vindicated … from some … false representations of them in the moral philosopher. All these three books were translated into German by Johann Friedrich Esaias Steffens (1716–1802), pastor in Stade near Hamburg, and published in Hamburg between 1755 and 1761.Footnote 54 Further, John Leland (1691–1766), nonconformist minister at Eustace Row, Dublin, published in two parts in November 1738 and June 1740 The divine authority of the Old and New Testament asserted, against the unjust aspersions and false reasonings of a book entitled ‘The moral philosopher’. This was translated into German and published in Rostock and Wismar in 1756 by Andreas Gottlob Masch (1724–1807), court chaplain in Neustrelitz (Mecklenburg-Strelitz), as Von dem göttlichen Ansehen des Alten und Neuen Testaments, with a foreword by Baumgarten.Footnote 55 In February 1741 Samuel Chandler (1693–1766), nonconformist minister at the Old Jewry in the City of London published against the third volume of The moral philosopher his A vindication of the history of the Old Testament, in answer to the misrepresentations and calumnies of Thomas Morgan. Trinius testifies to the translation of this book into German.Footnote 56 Thus, of the fifteen English books and pamphlets known to have been written against The moral philosopher, at least five were translated into German.
More general works against Deism were translated too. In March 1749 the Irish divine Philip Skelton (1707–87) published in two parts his Ophiomaches, or Deism revealed, dealing with Morgan. This was translated by Konsistorialrath Matthäus Theodor Christoph Mittelstedt (1712–72) in the duchy of Braunschweig in 1756 as Die offenbahrte Deisterey oder unpartheyische Untersuchung der Angriffe und Einwendungen gegen das Christenthum,Footnote 57 and was the only translation of an English anti-Deist book to be found in Duke August's famous library at Wolfenbüttel.Footnote 58 The first part of Leland's A view of the principal deistical writers that have appeared in England during the last and present century, originally published in February 1754, was translated in 1755 by the conrector of the Old City school in Hanover, Heinrich Gottlieb Schmid, as Abriss der vornehmsten deistischen Schriften.Footnote 59
Deist controversies in Great Britain therefore became well known all over Germany. This is the more remarkable since this was a period of serious military conflict. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8) began in December 1740 when the Prussian army under Frederick the Great (1712–86) invaded Silesia. This was carried into Saxony in 1745 when Frederick captured Dresden. Nearly ten years later Frederick started the Seven Years War (1756–63), invading Saxony at the end of August 1756, and again taking Dresden in May 1757. Much of Germany, including Brandenburg, Eastern Prussia, Hanover, Pomerania, Silesia and Westphalia, became embroiled in this war, as were most European countries.
Outside the central theological controversy there are further observations on Deism in the work of the poet and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81). The son of Johann Gottfried Lessing (1693–1770), Lutheran pastor in Kamenz (Saxony), one of the few German theologians to have English theological books in his library,Footnote 60 Lessing studed theology, classics and philosophy. During his years in Berlin Lessing wrote many reviews for learned journals such as the Kritischen Nachrichten aus dem Reiche der Gelehrsamkeit and the Vossischen Zeitung. In one of these he discusses in a positive manner the German translation of the first part of Leland's View. It seems clear that Lessing did not endorse the views of the English Deists whom he describes in most unfriendly terms.Footnote 61
Much more positive was Johann Christian Edelmann (1698–1767), a strange and remarkable soul. The son of a musician from Weissenfels, he studied theology in Jena and travelled throughout Germany and Austria. He was amongst the sharpest critics of the Bible. In his Moses mit aufgedeckten Angesichte, published in 1740, he discusses the nature of the Bible and declares it null and void. The dead letter must fall, and inspiration by the Holy Ghost is an absurdity. Never before had so critical a book appeared in the German language. Edelmann knew no English, so probably gained his knowledge of the English Deists from translations. He refers to Morgan only three times in his Sendschreiben an seine Freunden, written in 1749,Footnote 62 but nevertheless in 1755 J. J. Plitt was placing him in the same category as Morgan in his Göttingen thesis.Footnote 63
The work that made the most significant critical impact upon the German Church and upon German theology at that time was undoubtedly Hermann Samuel Reimarus' Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, partly published by Lessing from 1774 onwards as Wolfenbüttler Fragmente. Reimarus (1694–1768) lived a quiet life as professor of oriental languages in Hamburg. In his youth he had travelled in Holland and England, but his fame as a biblical critic was only established after his death by way of Lessing's edition of his work. A vehement controversy ensued. Not until 1972 was the complete manuscript published by G. Alexander, but it is now known that most of the work had been circulating perviously in manuscript versions.Footnote 64 In the past many authors have asserted that Reimarus used Morgan's criticisms.Footnote 65 However, Reimarus usually cites his English sources, in particular Toland, Collins and Warburton, and he never refers to Morgan.Footnote 66 It cannot, therefore, be proved beyond doubt that Reimarus used or even read the work of Morgan.
Otherwise the view of Morgan in Germany was overwhelmingly negative. In 1790 the orthodox theologian Johann August Nösselt (1734–1807), professor at Halle, was still noting Thomas Morgan's hostile attack on biblical history.Footnote 67 The church historian Gottlieb Jakob Planck (1751–1833), for nearly fifty years professor at Göttingen, observed in 1794 the growth of the Deist party up to that date and mentioned Morgan among the other Deists.Footnote 68 There is no trace of Morgan in the works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) whose cherished teacher Martin Knutzen (1713–51), was a colleague of Michael Lilienthal and knew a lot of English Deist literature, as is clear in his Philosophischer Beweis von der Wahrheit der christlichen Religion, published in 1740 and noted in Lilienthal's Bibliothec.Footnote 69 Although the value of the Old Testament for the great philosoper is likewise less than the New Testament, there is no indication of an indirect influence from Morgan.Footnote 70 As late as 1813 the pastor of the principal Lutheran church in Bremen, Heinrich Wilhelm Rotermund (1761–1848), called Morgan one of the worst mockers of religion:Footnote 71 more than a century after his death, Morgan is being called a wretched physician and a ‘philosophus furens’.Footnote 72
We may therefore conclude that Thomas Morgan's The moral philosopher had considerable impact upon theologians in Germany from its first publication. From Königsberg in the north-east to Tübingen in the south-west, everywhere are traces of reactions to his work. Mostly it was criticised from an apologetical point of view. It is clear that Deist positions were known in Germany by the enormous weight of critical discussion in learned journals and theological books and theses. Voigt has concluded that the presence of English Deism in Germany was enormous, but its impact ultimately small.Footnote 73 It seems almost impossible to develop the theme much further, but it is clear that Morgan reached a wide audience. And in due time that audience was made ready for the onslaught of rational theology in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth in Germany, with such theologians as Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741–92), Heinrich Eberhard Gottlieb Paulus (1761–1851), Julius August Ludwig Wegschneider (1771–1849) and Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider (1776–1848), to name only some of the professed rationalists in German theology.
In France, on the other hand, Morgan had no traceable impact. Although Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–82), Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, argued in 1828 that Voltaire derived his critical objections from Morgan, among others, this is not correct.Footnote 74 None of Morgan's titles are to be found in Voltaire's library in St Petersburg.Footnote 75 Gavin de Beer suggested that Voltaire met Thomas Morgan during his stay in Britain in 1726, but that is highly improbable.Footnote 76 As Norman Torrey has made clear,Voltaire depended more on other Deists.Footnote 77
In the Netherlands, as in Germany, Morgan's influence can be traced via journals and the translations of his British opponents. In the Bibliothèque Britannique, published in the The HagueFootnote 78 and the Bibliothèque Raisonné, published in Amsterdam, much attention was given to The moral philosopher.Footnote 79 The works of Leland and Lowman were translated into Dutch: Leland's View and The divine authority were translated by Engelbert Nooteboom in 1765 and 1776–8 respectively,Footnote 80 while Daniel van Damme translated Lowman's Dissertation in 1768.Footnote 81 In 1779 J. A. C. van Einem was characterising The moral philosopher as the great storehouse for all later infidels.Footnote 82
Morgan was also known as far away as New England. John Adams (1735–1826), second president of the United States, wrote in his autobiography about his stay in Worcester, New England, in 1755 that ‘Here I found Morgan's Moral Philosopher, which I was informed had circulated with some freedom in that town, and that the principles of Deism had made considerable progress among persons in that and other towns in the country.’Footnote 83
Thus we can see how, through learned journals, but principally through the translations and the works of opponents, the ideas and opinions of the Deists reached the continent, especially Germany, in a very short space of time. As far as Morgan is concerned, positive commentary came only in the twentieth century, via men like Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) and Emanuel Hirsch (1888–1972). The first is famous for his rejection of the Old Testament in the conclusion of his Marcion: ‘to reject the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the church rightly rejected; to keep it in the sixteenth century was a fate which the reformation could not yet avoid; but to retain it after the nineteenth century as a canonical document in Protestantism results from a paralysis of religion and the church’. In this context he praises the work of Thomas Morgan.Footnote 84 E. Hirsch, church historian in Göttingen from 1921 and one of the leading ‘German Christians’, even calls it an injustice that Morgan is forgotten in the history of theology.Footnote 85 For Hirsch the Old Testament is simply the antithesis to Christianity, a position which has been characterised as ‘a half-way station on the road from Paul to Marcion’.Footnote 86 This brings us into dangerous proximity with antisemitic Nazism: Robert Ericksen even calls Hirsch a Nazi intellectual.Footnote 87 In any event Hirsch was dismissed from his university post after the Second World War.Footnote 88 Long before, in 1921, when the ‘Bund für Deutsche Kirche’ was established, one of its founders, Friedrich Karl Emil Anderson (1860–1940), pastor in Flensburg, and his colleagues were already recommending the elimination of the Old Testament.Footnote 89 Later, Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), one of Adolf Hitler's mentors, with his Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, published in 1930, rejected the Old Testament altogether.Footnote 90 In the heat of the events of 1933 Reinhold Krause (1893–1980), a member of the Bund, declared in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 13 November before an audience of more than 20,000 people the abandonment of the Old Testament with its tales of cattle merchants and pimps.Footnote 91
So there is a direct line from Morgan to one of the basic theological issues of the twentieth century. His critical view of the Old Testament gained momentum in a time when its consequences could not be foreseen. Now Morgan seems indeed forgotten. The subordinate position of the Old Testament in the theology of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) has been styled as ‘the nearest significant approach to Christian rejection of the Old Testament since Marcion’ in D. L. Baker's Sheffield thesis.Footnote 92 Those who have read The moral philosopher know that that opinion is not correct. The eighteenth-century enlightenment had serious consequences. As Arthur Herzberg has stated in relation to France, ‘Modern, secular, anti-Semitism was fashioned not as a reaction to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, but within the Enlightenment and Revolution themselves.’Footnote 93 This can also be said of much of the English Enlightenment. English Deism and specifically Thomas Morgan played their part in this European-wide process.
