This chapter provides some definitions and clarifications with regard to the religious formations of Deism, prominently relevant to Paine’s tract, and the overlapping formation of Unitarianism, relevant in the context of the early Antebellum. Particular focus is placed on the constructions of these religious systems that Paine and Emerson undertake in their respective tracts. First, and to resume a thread taken up in the historical overview of the Early Republic, one can state that the religious systems of Deism and natural religion gained popularity in America as early as during the colonial period. Citing such important theological figures as Cotton Mather and John Wesley in their indebtedness to Deist thought (Aldridge,
“Natural Religion” 837), A. Owen Aldridge states that “American ministers followed the reasoning of Anglican divines who argued, on the basis of the life sciences as well as on Isaac Newton’s astronomical discoveries, that nature offers unimpeachable proofs of the existence of God” (ibid. 836). In spite of this trend, many historians and Paine biographers note that Deism was largely limited to “select groups of the literate upper classes” (Claeys 178) and its tracts to a very “educated readership” (Meltzer 147). As Winthrop S. Hudson puts it contextualizing Paine’s impact on the religious landscape of the Early Republic, “Deist sentiment was not new in America, but hitherto it had been confined to an aristocratic elite who frowned upon widespread dissemination of their views” allegedly convinced that traditional forms of religious expression were beneficial to social cohesion and stability (127). This formerly limited platform enjoyed by Deism also contributed to the violent reception of Paine’s tract, as its anti-clerical messages were now surpassing these limitations, being directed at and received by “a mass audience” and formulated in a “vivid, aggressive, antichurch tone” (Meltzer 147).
The affinity between Deism and political opposition, one that has existed since the inception of the former, should be kept in mind. While Aldridge does not go as far as saying that Deism predisposes its adherents to formulate ideas that run contrary to prevalent power relations and political realities in any one society of the time in question, he does note that the differentiation between Deists in the religious sense and oppositional thinkers in the political sense has at times been a hazy one in 17th- and 18th-century England (Aldridge, “Natural Religion“ 836); as he puts it, a “seldom articulated distinction is between deists, who wished to proclaim a particular form of religion, and freethinkers, who envisioned the liberty of writing and publishing without censorship” (ibid.). As Roger L.
Emerson notes in his analysis of the status of radical Puritans in 17th-century England as trailblazers for Deism, such “heresies” were associated with the menace of political destabilization by contemporary apologists; therefore, “[l]iberty of conscience demanded by free spirits and free thinkers alike was continually deplored” by prominent apologists, according to whom “[r]eligious and political heresy here joined hands: neither worked for the greater glory of God and both should be sternly repressed” (390). Herbert M Morais marks this affinity between Deism and democratization in America in particular, which he connects to the very particular construction of the godhead in its apparent difference to that of Christianity, stating that “God was no longer represented as an arbitrary monarch, but as a constituted president, whose duty it was to administer the laws of the natural world for the glory and good fortune of an emancipated people” (437).
Defining Deism as a set of coherent theses regarding a metaphysical reality can pose a problem. As Aldridge points out echoing Robert E. Sullivan, the “term deism is so elusive that it should be taken merely as a label of convenience rather than a reference to a precise system of thought” (Aldridge, “Natural Religion” 836). The same difficulty of definition is understood to apply to the related term of natural religion, which is often treated as a synonym of the term Deism. In fact, investigations into the development of Deist thought seem to be habitually prefaced upon the difficulty of defining the term with satisfactory conceptual sharpness: Diego Lucci opens his inquiry into Deist deconstructions of Biblical texts with the same reference to Sullivan’s statement of deism’s elusiveness as Aldridge (17) and C. J. Betts’s survey of deism in 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century France begins with the caveat that “[t]here is no adequate brief definition of the substance of deism” (3). Betts thus states that rather than “a religion in the usual sense,” it was “the result of the individual’s unaided reflections on God and man” (ibid.). A survey of both British and French early Deists as well as of the “deluge of apologetic literature” which they provoked (72) allows William Laine Craig to identify “the divided thinking concerning the immortality of the soul, the denial of God’s providence, the appeal to one God transcending all the claims of particular religions”
as well as “the denial of Christ’s deity” as common features among the heterogeneous attitudes expressed by deism’s different adherents (78). Similarly, and in line with Betts, Aldridge terms deism “a real system of truths available to all by the use of unaided reason”
(Aldridge, “Natural Religion” 836). This brief explanation offered also by Peter Byrne in Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion indeed manages to do justice to those aspects of
Deism commonly recognized as its chief characteristics, most prominently its inclusive character that asserts itself in an environment of institutional independence and operates on the basis of a material, sensory, and scientific perception of the world. Craig associates the rise of deism in Britain historically with the emergence of “the movement of modern free thought, which, as a part of its rejection of all forms of authoritarianism and traditionalism, assailed the Christian religion in favor of a religion of nature” (72). Aldridge offers an increase in specificity by differentiating two strands in the belief systems of Deism and natural religion, stating that these two “exist in two forms, that which professes to discover God through the signs of order and contrivance in the physical universe and that which professes to discover God through the moral nature of man” (Aldridge, “Natural Religion”
836). While this differentiation offers some additional tools to analyze both Paine and Emerson, being especially useful for the understanding of the latter author, it is the first element of Aldridge’s differentiated view on these systems of religion that will be of major importance throughout the analysis offered in this thesis.
Ricketson and Wilson trace Deism, particularly the kind professed to by Paine, by choosing as their point of departure the Newtonian “discovery of the law of gravity” (85), which lead to a proliferation of interest in the postulation of “simple and general Newtonian Laws that would reveal the secrets of the universe in areas other than the physical sciences”
(ibid.). To these other areas Ricketson and Wilson count economics, represented by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations of 1776, Rousseau’s political science, and finally Deism in the ambit of religion (ibid.). As they formulate it, the “application of scientific thought produced Deism, which was based upon the simple hypothesis that God created the universe, hurled it into space, and allowed it to operate according to the laws of nature. This concept became known as the Watchmaker God: A Newtonian Law of religion” (ibid.). At the same time, they note Paine’s indebtedness to Enlightenment philosophers, most notably John Locke for his insistence on the importance of experience (87), René Descartes for his emphasis on the general and unrestrained applicability of the principle of deduction (86), but also to those thinkers who had made the transition “beyond Deism to materialism” by 1789, radically questioning the conceptual requirement of the divine as such (ibid.). This historical observation should call to mind that while clerical and political reaction to The Age of Reason often cast Paine as a revolutionary and radical intent on harming the faith, he by no means
espoused the most radical evaluation of religion relative to science, as he retained the emphatic belief in a deity.
Gladly, neither Paine nor Emerson leave their readers with the necessity to consult the myriad of often contradictory contemporary sources on Deism to be able to accurately reconstruct their metaphysical worldviews from texts like The Age of Reason and Nature;
clearly, these texts were at least to some extent intended to be read as professions of distinct belief systems. This intention is so strongly assumed to have motivated the writing of Paine’s tract that The Age of Reason is commonly cited as one major source of reference for the (re-)construction of Deist thought in the late 18th century – Kerry S. Walters refers to this tract as “probably the best-known treatise in the history of American deism”(209). And this status applies to the said tract in spite of its clear positioning as a profession of what does not constitute its authors faith; as Paine himself puts it after stating the belief in one deity and an afterlife to constitute the main tenets of his metaphysical assumptions: “But lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them” (Paine 666). Such declarations notwithstanding, the tract contains plenty of passages that give rather precise indications of Paine’s conception of the deity and the ethico-moral implications for human behavior growing out of it. Equally, Emerson’s Nature is referred to as the first “manifesto of Transcendentalism” (Marx 12).
In The Age of Reason, Paine provides a comprehensive insight into his own belief system and the Deist elements therein contained. An important aspect of Paine’s metaphysical system of belief is the postulation that it is to be arrived upon by the application of logical thought processes and deduction. In this feature Paine detects a main deviation of his metaphysical system of belief from that of the Christian religion. He states it in the following manner:
It is only by the exercise of reason, that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding any thing; and, in this case, it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible, to a horse as to a man. […] (Paine 688)
On the basis of the contributions of David C. Hoffman, Paine’s situation in a discourse stemming from physico-theology must be noted. The Age of Reason, as Hoffman explains,
betrays marked similarities to the subject matter and style of this “apologetic movement”
whose main tenet was that “the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God could be deduced form the order of Creation” (284) and that therefore “the existence and attributes of God might be inferred through systematic observation of the natural world” (Connell 2, 3); physico-theology is thus the derivative of “Newtonian ideology” grows visible (ibid.).
Paine’s insistence on the “idea that reason is a gift from God, given so that humans might come to God” as exhibited in this passage, Hoffman interprets as the vestige of a physico-theological influence on Paine (295). Interestingly, this proto-Deist discourse also found employment in some Puritan sermons in colonial America: A conception of “nature-as-encyclopedia” figured prominently in the sermons of Cotton Mather and other influential Puritans (Jeske 591) and was facilitated by both, the speedy proliferation of scientific knowledge in the 17th century, and Mather’s own enthusiasm for scientific inquiry, which induced his familiarization with important scientific tracts circulated at that time (ibid. 585).
Rather than engendering a radically new discursive tradition, Paine can be understood to have utilized well-established strategies, albeit to other than apologetic ends.
In this passage, Paine also elaborates on the words of his preface to The Age of Reason, which is addressed to the American people and in which he states that “[t]he most formidable weapon against errors of any kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall” (Paine, The Age 665). Form the status of a weapon, reason is now extolled to that of the only mental instrument by which conclusions regarding the existence and character of the divine can ever be formed. As said, Paine takes up a fundamentally Deist argument, which also resonates with physico-theology, as he “picks up the science-as-worship theme in order to oppose revealed religion with science” (Hoffman 299). This insistence on “reason” as the only enabling mechanism to “discover God” presents a significant departure from Christian presumptions on how knowledge of the divine can be achieved. Faith and revelation are usually the Christian mechanisms that allow approaching the divine and arriving at any conclusions upon the subject. As Edward Larkin points out in an analysis of passages in which Paine uses scientific thinking in order to challenge the Bible, Paine could rely on being well received by his readers on account of an increasing proliferation of scientific knowledge, as “in the context of the explosion of public science in the late eighteenth century Paine’s point would resonate with readers, most of whom would have been exposed in some form or another to itinerant lecturers who would perform
experiments to demonstrate the latest discoveries or simply to amuse and amaze” (138).
Since thus the methods of science, which according to Paine’s Deism allow for an immediate acquisition of knowledge about the godhead, are made available to increasingly broader audiences, Larkin goes on to state that “[b]y transforming religion into science Paine effects the ultimate democratization of religion, for now religion is not subject to the control of any sort of institutional hierarchy or state affiliation” (141).
Paine privileges the operation of the human mind in the endeavor to come closer to accurate statements regarding the qualities of the divine. “God,” according to Paine, operates on the basis of principles that the human mind can readily understand or deduce, not on principles that thwart or negate the human capacity for logical or scientific thought, which the noun “reason” seems to presuppose. To return to the quoted passage, one can observe that especially the verb “discover” establishes a connection to the natural sciences, as the discovery of phenomena, principles, and the like elements of the natural sphere form part of them. Here, Paine seems to suggest that God is comparable to such a principle of the natural world and can thus be deduced by scientific means, such as observation. This conception of the divine and its discoverability also implies an almost religious valorization of scientific methods, a stance George S. Hendry would criticize as the assumption of the
“omnicompetence of science” (95). Hence, in an almost facetious manner, Paine underlines his privileging of the intellectual capacity of the human mind by likening the human being bereft thereof, or individuals who do not make use thereof, to animals. It is this conviction of a deducible, logically inferable knowledge of and about the godhead that informs Paine’s exposition of his metaphysical beliefs.
The following passage, indicating two of Paine’s thus deduced conceptions of the deity, thus also uses several references to scientific methods of logical deduction:
The only idea man can affix to the name of God, is, that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And incomprehensibly difficult as it is for man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it, from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it. It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time. In like manner of reasoning, every thing
we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself. Every man is an evidence to himself, that he did not make himself; neither could his father make himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any tree, plant, or animal make itself: and it is the conviction arising from this evidence, that carries us on, as it were, by necessity, to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of which all things exist, and this first cause man calls God. (Paine, The Age 687, 688; emphasis in the original)
This passage reflects Paine’s agreement with two main tenets of Deism, namely firstly the conception of the godhead as the “first cause” and secondly its conception as the watchmaker. Both conceptions of the godhead Paine presents as the results of a logical thought process, in which the exclusion of other possibilities compels the author to arrive at the metaphysical conclusions he advertises in this instance. According to the first of the two conclusions, there is but one statement regarding the character of the divine that can be made with certainty, which is that it is the “first cause.” With this term, highlighted in the setting by the italics, Paine incorporates a central understanding of scientific deism into his definition of the divine, which he further explains with the aid of the apposition of “the cause of all things.” With this definition, Paine seems to subscribe to the Deist notion of God’s role being circumscribed by that a creator who called the material world into existence, but who does not intervene into the same or “avoids interacting with it” (Smart 8). In contrast to the Biblical or, more specifically, to the Protestant and particularly Puritan conceptions of the godhead, with whom a personal relationship can be enjoyed2 and who therefore can be expected to intervene into the material world in the form of miracles, the Deist conception, as mentioned, postulates a rather greater degree of distance to inform the relationship between the creator and the creation. In short, after having fulfilled the said causative function, the godhead is assumed not to have interacted with the material, created world. It is conspicuous, however, that Paine does not make this implication of the term “first cause” explicit, seemingly relying on the possibility that the Deist connotation
2 Particularly the Puritan focus on and collective, institutional examination of occurrences of “private encounter[s] with spiritual forces,” individual “experiences of conversion,” and “emotional encounters with saving faith” reported by individuals as a part of normative religious experience (cf. Albanese 117) come to mind one characteristic of this construction of the divine as participating in individual human lives.
implying the said distance between creator and created will be sufficient to communicate this particular facet of the Deist definition of the godhead. Instead of exploring its implications, Paine focuses on the justification of this definition. This justification consists of a thought experiment that Paine sketches in broad strokes and at whose end the probability
implying the said distance between creator and created will be sufficient to communicate this particular facet of the Deist definition of the godhead. Instead of exploring its implications, Paine focuses on the justification of this definition. This justification consists of a thought experiment that Paine sketches in broad strokes and at whose end the probability