HEATHEN RELIGION AND PRIEST-CRAFT?

Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648) and his De Religione Gentilium (published posthumously by Isaac Vossius at Amsterdam in 1663) are of particular importance in the development of this deistical history of religion. A second Latin edition of this work was published in 1700, and an English translation made by William Lewis in 1705. The Ancient Religion of the Gentiles (1705) and the later Dialogue between a Tutor and His Pupil (1768) firmly identify Herbert's relationship with deism. Herbert's Ancient Religion of the Gentiles was premised upon the epistemological assertions of his two earlier works De Veritate (Paris, 1624) and De Religione Laici (1645). In both these works Herbert had evolved and expanded his idea of five fundamental and common notions which contained the natural premises of religion. These were the perception of a supreme God, the existence of rewards and punishments in a future estate, the injunction to worship God by virtuous action, and the importance of repentance. In the Antient Religion Herbert set out to examine the complicity of pagan religion with this universal scheme.

The crucial premise of the Ancient Religion was Herbert's conception of a 'just' deity. A just God could take no pleasure in 'the eternal reprobation of those to whom he never afforded any means of salvation'. Thus even though  the pagans had no specific divine revelation, 'universal divine providence' implied that they must have had some natural access to true religion. Traditional Christian thought had treated all heathen religion as an epitome of diabolical superstition, idolatry and irreligion. Herbert, with a typical Erasmian optimism, argued that all non-Judaeo-Christian societies had some form of true religious worship because human nature had an innate tendency to worship the supreme deity without the commodious aid of revelation. Although admitting that paganism had become corrupt Herbert wondered whether 'amongst those heaps of Ethical Superstitions, a thread of truth might be found'. By historical investigation he set out to examine the origins of religion. This was ultimately to be located in the yearning of man's noble mind to find a state of eternal repose, 'for God inspiring all men with a desire of an eternal and more happy state, he tacitly discovered himself, who is eternal life, and perfectly happy'. This natural recognition of the deity was translated into an adoration of the stars which in their constancy and order resembled the permanence of the supreme god. This 'Deus Optimus Maximus' was identified with the Christian God. From this minimalistic premise Herbert displayed the multiplicity of pagan adoration of the stars, planets and lesser deities. In order to defend the merits of heathen religion Herbert presented the distinction between cultus symbolicus and cultus proprius borrowed from Gerard Vossius' magisterial De Origine ac Progressu Idololatriae (Amsterdam, 1641) a work which provided the Ancient Religion with a vital and comprehensive source account of heathen religious worship. Herbert explained the distinction between a proper and symbolic worship: 'Proper worship is, the adoration of the Supreme God, the Sun, the Moon, Heaven, or the whole world, particularly and respectively in themselves: Symbolical, is the worshiping the Supreme God in the Sun, Heaven, or World.' Proper worship was due to God alone. Symbolical worship which epitomized the heathen practice was acceptable because au fond it was a pious adoration of the true God. For example, Herbert pointed out that pagan worship of the sun was valuable because it terminated in the proper worship of God: the sun was appreciated as 'that noble emblem of the Supreme God'.

Herbert's appraisal of the history of pagan religion did not simply consist  of straightforward commendation. In Chapter 16, 'A censure of the religion of the Heathens and the occasion of it', he expanded on a theme that runs throughout the whole work: that superstition and idolatry had often corrupted true worship due to the ambitious manipulations of the priesthood. Religious ceremony was necessary only to 'lay a more strict obligation on men, to do that which they were obliged before to do voluntarily'. The priesthood rather than corroborate these natural instincts did 'debilitate and enervate these truths'. The 'crafty priests' created a plurality of divinities, ceremonies and mysteries to further their own power. By creating specious theologies and systems of sacrifice, expiation and penance, the priesthood established a monopoly over religion. By deceitful tricks and forgery of revelation the heathen priest imposed an implicit faith upon the laity to seduce them from true worship to a false sacerdotal alternative. The natural inclination to repentance was changed into a collection of 'dark rites and ceremonies' calculated to elevate the authority of the priest. Ceremony and ritual was thus the product of priest-craft. The originally pure symbolic worship was corrupted by the figments of clerical imagination. The implications of this historical argument were unorthodox. Herbert argued that religion in its original and un-corrupt form was both a natural and moral action which could be conducted without the mediating caste of an hierocratic order between man and God. Although religious ceremony could be employed to facilitate this natural worship the most rational and true form was to be found in a 'pure mind and a Holy life'. The sound parts of heathen religion, their 'virtue, faith, hope and love', should be commended by all Christians, for 'the Ancients agree with us, who allow no means of salvation can benefit or advantage us without the mind, virtue, piety and faith'. This description of the origins and decline of heathen religion, and the radical implications of this model, were adapted and adopted by many later infidel writers but primarily by Charles Blount (1654-93), a professed disciple.

Blount is a much vilified and underestimated theorist. Rather than lay emphasis upon his plagiarism, his poor style and unoriginality, it would be more fruitful to consider his work as crucial polemics in the formation and dissemination of Enlightenment perceptions of religion. Throughout the entire corpus of his published works, from the Anima Mundi (1679) to the Oracles of Reason (1693), Blount intentionally publicized the widest variety of unorthodox thinkers ranging from ancient texts (men like Cicero, Seneca and Tacitus), through the Renaissance (Vanini, Cardan and Pomponazzi), to the atheistical moderns (Hobbes and Spinoza). It is thus as a publicist rather than a plagiarist that Blount should be appreciated, and in this guise as a wellspring of the Enlightenment. Blount's transmission of Herbert's thought was crucial to this enterprise.

Blount's indebtedness to Herbert is in tandem both easy to recognize and difficult to assess. He openly acknowledged his admiration for Herbert's notions. In his Religio Laici (1683), an adapted and partially translated version of Herbert's De Religione Laici (1645), Blount noted that he 'often made use of, and grounded the chief of my discourse upon his five Catholic or Universal principles'. Certainly in his 'Summary Account of the Deists Religion' and 'Of Natural Religion', both short essays in the Oracles of Reason (1693), Blount openly referred to Herbert's five notions, the historical universality of natural religion, and the proscription of images, sacrifices and priestly mediators from the practice of true religion, which was identified with morality and the rule of right reason rather than priestly mystery. Blount stressed the anticlerical tenor of Herbert's work. In Religio Laici (1683), following Herbert's third notion that, 'virtue, goodness, and piety, accompanied with faith in, and love to God, are the best ways of worshiping him' Blount rejected all 'rites, mysteries and sacras'. Supplementary testimony to Blount's borrowings from Herbert has been traditionally adduced in the suggestion that a Herbert manuscript (which was published in Herbert's name as A Dialogue between a Tutor and His Pupil in 1768) was used by Blount in his footnoted edition of Philostratus' Life of Apollonius Tyaneus (1680). Pierre Bayle was the first to make the claim in his entry on Apollonius in the General and Historical Dictionary, and this assertion has become a scholarly commonplace. H. R. Hutcheson in his edition of Herbert's De Religione Laici has been the most forceful and recent proponent of this thesis. It is apparent from Hutcheson's language that he held a certain distaste for both Blount's character and his work. He commented that 'Blount has received altogether too much credit from the historians of deism'. On the charges of plagiarism he noted that such charges 'acquire a definiteness which is at first startling and soon monotonous'. Blount's 'thefts' from Herbert are established with both 'certainty and boredom'. This portrayal is opposite to that presented in the Biographia Britannicae which insisted that Blount was a man of 'wit, learning, and zeal'. Although Hutcheson allows for the possibility that Blount may have been the author of the Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil (1768), he is firmly convinced by a textual comparison of Blount's Life of Apollonius (1680) and the Oracles of Reason (1693) with the Dialogue not only that Blount borrowed from this source, but that the dialogue was the fruit of Herbert's pen.

There is no direct material evidence to suggest a definitive attribution of the authorship of the Dialogue to either Blount or Herbert. It is certain that the work was constructed within a Herbertian framework of the five common notions of natural religion. The Tutor and the Pupil set out to discuss the varying status of different revelations in terms of a distinction between the 'serious part' of religion depending on 'notions written in our Souls' and 'the religious manners, forms, and rites … depending … on tradition, apparition, pretended revelation, mysteries and the like, which grew up in latter times, and for the most part were but the inventions of priests'. The text echoes Herbert's insistence that, 'before religion (i.e.) rites, ceremonies, pretended revelations and the like were invented, there was no worship of God but in a rational way'. The prescriptive model was the ancient unsacerdotal pattern. The Dialogue is certainly indebted to Herbert's Ancient Religion: apart from general argument there are passages directly transcribed from the earlier work, for example the discussion of the priestly manipulation of repentance. Even with the acknowledgement that the Dialogue was composed with Herbert's Ancient Religion as a source, and accepting that there are some direct (although scattered and disordered) textual links between Blount's work and the dialogue, my suggestion is that there are textual references and arguments in the later work which simply were not available to Herbert. These references can be attributed to Blount's eclectic anticlericalism.

The structure of the Dialogue is between a Tutor and a Pupil. The former is more learned and restrained (Blount's characterization of Herbert's thought), while the latter is hot-headed and vehement in his indictment of the priesthood, almost always presenting the most extreme anticlerical implications of the Tutor's theses (Blount's self-characterization). The general theme of the work is an extended history of how the five common notions of natural religion became corrupted by priest-craft. For each topic under consideration a wide variety of illustration is mustered: this eclecticism smacks rather of Blount's digressive style than the more ponderous prose of Herbert. Unlike Herbert's Ancient Religion the hostility of the Dialogue against the clerical order is extended from a purely pagan context into an explicit condemnation of the 'modern priests'. The dialogue also contains a considerable body of biblical criticism that was simply unavailable to Herbert. For example, the discussion of the Mosaic account of the Creation, which the Dialogue argued that the Judaic legislator had recounted from ancient tradition. More importantly the dialogue notes that Moses' writings were destroyed during the Babylonian captivity and that the Pentateuch had been re-transcribed from memory by the prophet Esdras. This hermeneutic claim had been first made by Isaac La Peyrère and Spinoza in publications after Herbert's death.

The Dialogue contains extensive reference to the historical pattern of Islam: it appears that the text borrows directly from Henry Stubbe's manuscript account of Mahomet when discussing the politic proscription of eating swine's flesh in order to prevent leprosy. Once again this argument would have been unavailable to Herbert (Stubbe's text was written c. 1671) while we know that Blount copied passages of the manuscript to send to Rochester which were also published in the Oracles of Reason. There is yet further evidence that the bulk of the Dialogue was composed after Herbert's death. The Dialogue contains extensive discussion of pagan oracles which could most likely have been drawn from Bernard Fontenelle's History of Oracles (1688). The text echoes precisely Fontenelle's argument which suggested the persistence of oracles three hundred years after Christ, and that the Primitive Church Fathers employed 'officious lies' and oracular prophecy to facilitate the reception of Christ among the pagans. The last piece of evidence against Herbert's authorship is the references to the gentile origins of the Jewish dispensation contained in the Dialogue. In the Ancient Religion Herbert had dismissed the issue. He wrote, 'nor will it be much material, if according to ancient writers, they had many of their religious rites from the Egyptians'. The Dialogue is replete with references asserting the Egyptian origins of the Mosaic law. Abraham and Moses had learned their religious <146> opinions in Egypt. Christ himself had traveled to the East in search of knowledge. The general point was that the Mosaic institution was raised upon gentile and Egyptian foundations. From this premise the author insisted that Judaic obligations continued in force during the early years of Christianity, and that many 'modern Christians' held ceremonial practices in common with the ancient Jews and Egyptians. Although there may have been classical sources from which Herbert might have derived such arguments it seems that Blount is the more likely candidate for the authorship of these passages. The evidence is circumstantial but twofold. The argument of the Dialogue is a condensed version of the grand thesis proposed by John Spencer in his De Legibus Hebraeorum (1685): no one before this work had presented such a convincing case for the Egyptian origins of Jewish ritual. Blount certainly read this work, and himself discussed the issue in print. In a letter to 'Major A' printed in the Oracles of Reason Blount presented Moses as a man learned in Egyptian religion and philosophy. Tutored in Eastern arcana, 'Moses and the Jews took diverse of their customs from the Egyptians; as for instance, their circumcision'. Again following Spencer (and perhaps John Aubrey) Blount asserted that the 'ancient Jews, and Modern Christians, have many rites and ceremonies common with the Gentiles'.

This evidence redresses the authorship of the Dialogue in favour of Blount. The Dialogue is still testimony to Blount's indebtedness to Herbert's work: but it betrays also Blount's radicalization of Herbert's originally eirenic intentions. Blount extended Herbert's original thesis on the value of heathenism into a full-blooded indictment of established religion. This radical anticlericalism was evident in Blount's own works Anima Mundi (1679) and Great is Diana (1680). The premise of both these works was that true religion consisted of rational unpriestly worship and that theological and ceremonial superstructures were usually unnecessary and frequently corrupt. In Anima Mundi; or an historical Narration of the Opinion of the Ancients concerning Mans Soul after this life (1679) Blount conducted an historical examination of the generation and function of the idea of the soul's immortality. Blount rather feebly denied that his work held any implications for Christian doctrine. The idea of a future state was a natural inclination, 'implanted in everyman's heart'. From this innate premise many doctrines had been created by philosophers and priests. Some argued that the soul was separate from the body, others that they were in necessary unity. Some suggested upon death the soul returned to the soul of the world, others that it perished with the body. Blount insisted that many, both priests and legislators, had played upon this belief and man's natural fear of the unknown to create systems of fable to keep the vulgar in social order. For example the Islamic idea of paradise had been constructed to induce the Arabs to the new religion. Blount's polemical purpose became more evident when he dealt with Seneca and Pomponazzi who had denied any future state but still proposed a life of virtue. Such men maintained the existence of a supreme God, and a belief in providence in earthly affairs if not in an afterlife. Men could lead religious lives without a belief in the immortal soul, although in many cases such a doctrine even if not true could induce men to religious virtue. The same point was reiterated in a letter published in the Oracles of Reason 'To Strephon concerning the Immortal Soul'. The letter was an extended commentary upon Blount's favourite Senecan dictum 'Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil'. Blount argued here in favour of the death of the soul citing both classical authors like Pliny and scriptural passages. The idea of an immortal soul could only be defended in heuristic terms: some men could follow the pattern of true religion unaided, most needed to be encouraged. Following Plato and Averroes, Blount justified the opinion as a necessary fiction, from the 'absolute necessity and convenience that it should be so'.

In Great is Diana of the Ephesians (1680) Blount expanded his historical investigation into a general consideration of the origins and causes of idolatry, in particular of religious sacrifices. While acknowledging that the only true form of sacrifice was 'sit pura mente colendus: a pure undefiled spirit' Blount narrated the priestly corruption of this original. Relying upon an euhemeristic interpretation Blount argued that worship and sacrifice stemmed from the adoration of dead heroes and princes. Ninus had worshiped Nimrod as 'Bel' or 'Belus', that is God. The initial innocent veneration for a prince and his posterity developed with the collaboration of the civil and spiritual estates into a fabricated theology. As these theologies expanded so did the power and authority of the priesthood. Blount commented, 

'the original of sacrifices, seems to be as ancient as religion itself; for no sooner had man found out there was a God, but a priest step up and said, that this God had taught them in what manner he should be worshiped'. 

The priesthood, exploiting the innate insecurity and fear of humanity, constructed a suitable system of superstition to enthrall the vulgar. By ritual and prayer, setting these ceremonies in dark thick groves, the spirit of devotion was naturalized into the people.

Blount's history of religion was, as we have seen, ultimately indebted to Herbert's arguments: this indebtedness was not slavish. Through Blount's reworking of Herbert's research the history of pagan religion became a far more radical tool directed against the Christian priesthood. While the tenor of Herbert's Ancient Religion was to defend the possibility of heathen virtue, and only by implication to indict the priesthood, Blount's work is directed specifically at the corruptions of the seventeenth-century Christian priests. Blount's intention was not only to defend the merits of pagan virtue but to recommend the pattern of virtue as a replacement for idolatry. This same radical redefinition of religion was displayed in the work of John Toland.

Toland's most important contribution was his Letters to Serena (1704) where he discussed both the origins of idolatry, and the history of the soul's immortality. Toland was indebted to both Herbert and Blount: but this was not mere plagiarism. Although Toland borrowed phrases, examples, and illustrations from the two earlier thinkers his writings have an eloquence and erudition that is entirely original. While in Blount's work it is often difficult to discern the author's own beliefs in the deliberate morass of different and conflicting positions presented, in Toland's work his opinion is unequivocally clear.

In the 'History of the Souls Immortality among the Heathens' Toland made explicit Blount's theme of treating the soul as 'an opinion' that 'had a beginning at a certain time, or from a certain author'. Toland gave a brief resume of the history of Greek materialism. Following Aristotle, he argued that the Greeks originally did not believe in any 'principle or actuating spirit in the Universe itself … but explained all the phænomena of nature by matter and local motion, levity and gravity, or the like'. For Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes the universe was infinite and matter eternal. It was Anaxagoras who was the first philosopher among the Greeks to determine the separate idea of 'mind' which was the 'mover and disposer of matter'. From this premise Phercydes and his disciple Pythagoras argued for the immortality of human souls, a doctrine which was greedily embraced by Plato and his followers. Toland followed this unorthodoxy with an even more irreligious claim: Anaxagoras 'borrow'd' his invention from earlier Egyptian tradition. Citing Macrobius and Diodorus Siculus, Toland argued that ancient Egypt was the 'mother of all sciences'. Denying the traditional thesis that all Egyptian learning was gained from the Patriarch Abraham, Toland insisted that the doctrine originated in the theologies of Persian magi and Egyptian priests. It was from this source that Moses gained his knowledge, and similar resonances could be found in ancient British druidical tradition.

The Egyptians had framed their opinions from funeral rites and 'their historical method of preserving the memory of deserving persons'. Following Diodorus Siculus, Toland displayed the euhemeristic account of religion: from the commemoration of the dead the idea of an afterlife, the Elysian fields and the reward of good and punishment of evil was evolved. The originally pure system of commemoration was perverted into a corrupt theology by priestly manipulation of man's natural desire 'to continue their existence beyond the grave'. Such notions soon became part of 'all men's education'. Wise legislators had recognized the value of the doctrine as a means of social discipline, as Timus Locrus noted, 'we keep the minds of men in order by false reasons, if they will not be governed by true ones'. As Blount did, so too did Toland accept the immortality of the soul as a 'beneficial or convenient' device. Citing both Seneca and Pliny (as Blount had done) Toland argued that tales of hell and an afterlife might only be 'senseless tales and empty words', but if used correctly were valuable.

In the 'Origin of Idolatry' Toland, as Blount and Herbert had done, turned to a more general account of superstition and the corruption of religion. This letter followed Herbert's Antient Religion in many details, although this was combined with material from the classical writers on religion such as Cicero's De Natura Deorum, Plutarch on superstition, and Diodorus Siculus' histories. Unlike Herbert, Toland directed his criticism at all priests, both ancient and modern. He applauded the euhemeristic explanation of the origins of religion, and accepted Herbert's symbolical interpretation of the ancient theologies but reserved the full force of his venom to indict the corrupt priesthood who had perverted this practice into useless superstition. While legislators attempted to restrain the barbarities of the populace, the priest duped their reason to establish a spiritual tyranny which became the foundation for civil tyranny. The modern example of the papacy and the idea of a de jure divino monarchy was testimony to the continuity of 'ancient and modern Heathenism'. The Christian priesthood followed the same corrupt practices of antiquity: for example the 'new idolatry of the Christians', the worship of saints, was grounded upon the same principles as the heathen worship of the dead.

Underlying this polemic was the distinction between the injunctions of the law of nature and 'all positive institutions', and a model of historical change in which an originally pristine theology is corrupted, and then renovated by politic and learned legislators. As with the earlier thinkers true worship was identified with the practice of virtue and the rule of right reason and found in the historical example of the prisca theologia of Egyptian religion. As Toland explained: 'The most ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Romans, the first Patriarchs of the Hebrews with several other Nations and sects, had no sacred images or Statues, no peculiar places or costly fashions of worship; the plain easiness of their religion being the most agreeable to the simplicity of the divine nature.' Toland's interest in the works of Giordano Bruno, proponent of the Egyptian prisca theologia, is particularly interesting.

It has been an historical commonplace that John Toland was deeply involved in the propagation, translation and circulation of many subversive manuscripts. One of his most accomplished clandestine achievements was the dissemination of an account of the life and works of Giordano Bruno, the late-sixteenth century magus, philosopher and religious reformer. In 1698 Toland purchased a number of Bruno's works from the library of Francis Bernard: bound with copies of De La Causa, Principo et Uno, and Le Cena de la Cenari was a copy of Bruno's Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (London, 1584). It is commonly accepted that Toland circulated covert manuscript works on Bruno's life and thought, both in England and on the Continent, such as the Life of Bruno, a translation of Bruno's Asse and Bruno's Sermon.

I wish to focus upon Toland's dealings with the Spaccio in particular. Toland certainly possessed a copy of this work. This same copy may have been presented to the Electress Sophia of Hanover.[68] Toland was publicly associated with the publication of the translated edition in 1713. The authorship of this translation is obscure: the British Museum catalog attributes the translation to one William Morehead, 'half brother of John Toland'. Margaret Jacob supports this suggestion, and argues that the translation was originally undertaken for the private use of the Freethinker and colleague of Toland, Anthony Collins.[70] Toland has been accused of stealing this manuscript from Collin's library. With our knowledge of Toland's penchant for purloining manuscripts, and his mischievous ability to claim other people's original scholarship for his own, it might seem likely that Morehead was indeed the translator. I should like to present evidence that may redress the balance in Toland's favor: it certainly suggests his deep involvement in the publication of the Spaccio. The evidence is an undated letter 'To Mr ***'. The work was probably written between 1705 and 1708, and was printed in both posthumous collections of Toland's work and correspondence. Despite its availability the piece, rather curiously, has gone unnoticed. The opening sentence of the letter is the telling point in favor of Toland's role as translator. Toland argued that the piece that has so excited 'Dr Morelli' was no contrivance of his own, but that he was the 'Master' of it. This has two implications: first that Toland does acknowledge edge his role in the production of the work, but that he does not attempt to claim it as an original composition. Secondly we can deduce that Dr Morelli thought the work was typical of Toland's work, so much so that he had accused him of deliberate fabrication. Although this evidence is somewhat speculative, I suggest that in combination with the rest of the letter it does point to Toland's authorship. The letter clearly indicates Toland's interest and knowledge of the genesis and composition of the Spaccio.

The bulk of the letter is a precis and synopsis of Bruno's original work. This condensed version could be the substance of the short dissertation that Toland sent to his colleagues on the Continent, such as Georg Leibnitz. He wrote to the latter: 'I confess something more particular ought to have been said concerning the Spaccio, which of a printed work, is I believe the rarest in the world but on the other hand it is not a secret to be communicated to everybody.' The dissertation Toland sent to Leibnitz contained a 'most circumstantial account of the Book itself, and secondly a specimen of it, containing three articles out of forty eight'. It seems likely that this letter to Leibnitz was accompanied by a version of Toland's description of the Spaccio.

Toland's letter is a succinct description of the content and importance of Bruno's Spaccio. The work is presented as an extended dissertation upon the corruption of ancient religion, and of the need to reform it to the prescriptions of the 'intelligible, useful, necessary, and unalterable Law of Nature'. Bruno's work is presented as an injunction to replace vice with virtue, by reforming the symbolic meanings of astral worship. One obvious question which must be addressed is how far this description of the Spaccio is accurate. Bruno's work was written as part of a quest for moral reformation. In place of vice, imposture and crime, truth, prudence and order must be established. In the third dialogue Bruno explored the shape of true religious worship, defending unpopular Egyptian ritual as prescriptive. The Egyptians ascended to a true worship of God 'through nature'; they worshiped 'Divinity' in natural objects, rather than the objects themselves as divine. Bruno insisted that modern theology was a corruption of this pantheistic original. Throughout the Spaccio there is one persistent and simple theme: that religion must be employed to further morality and the temperant injunctions of nature. Bruno gestures to the legislator tradition of Numa, who employed religion to civilize the barbarian Romans. The corruptions of modern theology must be replaced by 'Industry, military training, and military art, through which the Peace and authority of the Fatherland may be maintained, barbarians be fought, beaten and converted to civilized life and human society, and inhuman, porcine, savage and bestial cults, religions, sacrifices, and laws be annihilated'. Modern theology was nothing but 'useless and pernicious fable' which ought to be replaced by 'righteous simplicity and the moral Fable'. Bruno in the Spaccio presented a version of the Egyptian prisca theologia as his prescription for a civil theology.

Margaret Jacob has been the most recent commentator on Bruno's influence on Toland. She argues that 'Bruno's thought remains the main source for the development of Toland's philosophy'. While not wishing to underestimate the value and integrity of Jacob's work, I suggest this is an overstated claim. For example, Jacob argues that Bruno is the major influence upon Toland's most cogent work, Letters to Serena (1704); Toland himself ascribed the central influence and inspiration to Cicero's De Legibus. The general tenor of Jacob's argument is that Bruno provided Toland with his conceptions of natural philosophy. The Spaccio informed Toland's notions of the constant motion of matter, the world and the infinite universe. Bruno is characterized as giving Toland a natural philosophy suited to the development of his pantheism.[85] My objection to this thesis is that Jacob has confined her assessment of Bruno's influence on Toland to too narrow an area in only exploring issues of natural philosophy. The religious context, I suggest,is a far more illuminating concern to illustrate Bruno's value to Toland.

Toland's central claim for the value of the Spaccio is that it is a superb device for exploding the machinery of priestcraft and superstition. He wrote: 'In one continu'd thread and contexture it contains the whole doctrine of the sphere, the learning and history of the antient Superstition, the confutation of modern imposture, and a compleat system of Ethicks.' Toland noted that many had misinterpreted the purpose of Bruno's work: the Spaccio was not a singular assault upon the papacy, for the triumphant beast was not analogous to the notion of the pope as antichrist. He explained:

Au lieu que par la bête il entend toute religion revelée en general, de quelque nature qu'elle sôit et de quelque maniere que se foit qu'elle triomphe dans le monde. Sôit la religion Päienne, sôit la judaique, ou la chretienne, il les attaque, les tourne en ridicule, et les rejette egalement sans aucune cérémonie et sans exception.

In Toland's perspective, Bruno was considered first and foremost as an advocate of anticlericalism, he assaulted the malformed consequences of hierocratic and corrupted religion.

The classical allusions, the councils of gods and astral reformation all had great appeal for Toland given his favourable disposition towards the civil theologies of antiquity. Bruno was cited because of his approval of the moral value of heathen religion over the vice of modern superstition: 

'Mais ce qui lui fait le plus de peine, c'est que leurs successeurs sont mille fois pires, les anciens heros etant infiniment preferable aux saints modernes, et la nouvelle superstition bien moins supportable que l'ancienne.' 

Toland applauded Bruno's scheme for astral reformation because he believed it was a valuable method of inculcating morality in the masses. It was in effect a popular theology. In this manner the Spaccio was understood in terms of Toland's espousal of the distinction between esoteric and exoteric philosophy. The Spaccio was the result of 'private conferences' where everything was discussed 'freely and without a veil, being secure from the censures or mistakes of the prophane vulgar'. Toland chose to appreciate Bruno, not simply as Jacob's natural philosopher, but more importantly as a civil theologian. Toland's interest in Giordano Bruno's Spaccio, and approval of a pre-Judaeo-Christian pattern of religious worship, illustrates the radical attempt to undermine the historical traditions of orthodox religion.

The strategy of Herbert, Blount and Toland was to indict contemporary religion by presenting histories of heathenism. To have launched a direct polemical assault upon sacred history would have been a foolhardy attempt. John Spencer (1630-93), Dean of Ely and Master of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in his De Legibus Hebraeorum (1685) made just this challenge against the Mosaic dispensation, although carefully disguised under a weighty volume of erudition and innovative scholarship. Spencer was foremost an Hebraist of distinction. In 1669 he published at Cambridge his Dissertatio de Urim et Thummim which argued that Jewish methods of prophecy were derived from earlier Egyptian auguries. This simple theme, of the continuity of Egyptian and Jewish ceremony, was to form the backbone of his massive later work. De Legibus Hebraeorum has been justly applauded as the founding text in the study of comparative religions: its theses were still academically acceptable to early twentieth-century scholarship. It consisted of three parts: the first two books gave the rational, moral and ethical grounds for Moses' ceremonial and sacrificial prescriptions. In general Moses established such ritual to ward the Jewish nation from the idolatrous practices of such peoples as the Zabians. 

According to Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus the ritual of circumcision originated in ancient Egyptian tradition, 'Ideoque gentibus illis, ex antiqua traditione in usu est, ut circumcidant statim a purtu, pueros, ritu ab Aegyptii derivato'. It was in the assertions of Book III 'qua generalius agitur de ritibus et gentium moribus in legem translatis' that Spencer revealed his inherent unorthodoxy. Focusing upon the expansion of Semitic ritual after the original and minimal patriarchal prescription, Spencer argued that the priesthood had encouraged superstitious and idolatrous practice for their own ends. It was Moses' intention to lead the ignorant Israelites away from such corrupt ritual. Spencer argued that the Jewish people through continual correspondence with the idolatrous Gentiles by the process of acculturation had become accustomed to many of their religious habits. Moses accommodated these superstitious inclinations in the creation of his law. Spencer illustrated the correspondence and affinity between Egyptian and Jewish ritual, arguing that the superiority of Egyptian civilization made it unlikely that they should model their theologies upon the actions of the barbarous and itinerant Jews. Sacrifices, communion, temples, festivals, lustrations, priestly vest ments and tithes had all been borrowed from Egyptian sources. To justify this accommodation thesis Spencer displayed a variety of authorities including such ubiquitous classical authors as Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch, Church fathers like Eusebius and Josephus, but most importantly the Jewish writer Maimonides who in his More Nevechim (a section of the Guide to the Perplexed) advanced this very thesis. William Warburton pointed out that De Legibus Hebraeorum was 'no other than paraphrase and comment on' Maimonides' work.

Spencer's work received an hostile reception. The general opinion was succinctly summed up in the description of it as 'a very learned, but a very dangerous work'. While the first published assaults are to be found in Continental reviews, the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres (April 1686) was untypical in giving the work extensive and impartial applause, describing it as 'un magazin d'érudition sacrée et profane'. The review speculated that Spencer had composed the work to argue against the 'fanatiques' in England who refused to join the Anglican settlement, 'sous pretexte qu'elle mêle dans le service Divin plusieurs cérémonies d'invention humaine'. The subversive implications of Spencer's work which argued that the Mosaic law was devised for political reasons rather than divine inspiration was identified, and taken up in the more hostile treatment in the Bibliotheque Universelle. Here the reviews contradicted Spencer: the Mosaic dispensation was of divine origin calculated against all the corruptions of Egyptian idolatry. Any complicity between the rituals was because the idolaters had used the divine Judaic pattern for their own purposes. Jewish law was necessarily a divine original since it was a type or 'shadow' of Christianity. Spencer had been led into error by incorrect hermeneutical principle in relying too much on the corrupt authority of classical sources. As the review pointed out: to undermine the divinity of Moses was to threaten Christ himself.

These criticisms were reflected in the English reception of De Legibus Hebraeorum. John Edwards, in his Complete History or Survey of all the Dispensations and Methods of Religion(1699), refuted Spencer's argument with simple counter-assertion. The thesis that God had to comply with the errors of human nature and indulge the Jews in 'pagan folly' was contradictory. As Edwards explained: 'Is it to be credited that God forbade and abhorred the Gentile practices, and yet at the same time appointed his people several rites which the Gentile used, yea because they were Gentile rites, and practiced by the Idolatrous nations, as this author expressly asserts?' A more erudite, but still hostile, appreciation of Spencer's work was made by John Woodward (1665-1728), a correspondent of Edwards, in a manuscript work 'Of the Wisdom of the Ancient Egyptians' which was eventually published in Archaeologia (1777), but was in circulation in the early 1700s. Woodward noted with disgust the stir Spencer's work had created: 'No sooner did this work come out but it pleased and took mightily with some, in so much that it became a fashion to ridicule the Jews, slight the Mosaic oeconomy, and represent it as only molded after the pattern of the Gentiles.' While agreeing that Spencer's work was an epitome of learning, 'he has with infinite industry made a most accurate collation of the Jewish and Pagan constitutions' he denied that De Legibus Hebraeorum was little more use than an handbook because, 'when he comes to apply the collation he has made with all that pain and exactness, he falls into the greatest and most erroneous paradox that a man well could, and runs it quite through his whole undertaking. Because of this consent and affinity, he infers that the 'Jews had those parts of their laws and rites, in which the two nations agree, from the Egyptians'. Woodward denied that Moses was of the same politic lineage as Mahomet, Apollonius Tyaneus, and other 'politicians'. Spencer's thesis of the priority and superiority of Egyptian civilization was rebutted in a long and detailed description of the superstitious practices of these ancients which 'was undoubtedly the wildest and most fantastic that the sun ever saw'. While Moses had been born, bred and educated in Egypt this merely confirmed his revulsion for such a ridiculous worship: this aversion displayed itself in the Mosaic law calculated by God to revile the gentile pattern.

The issues at debate here were a crucible in which the Enlightenment idea of religion, as a natural foundation with a political superstructure, was forged. While orthodox Christians were content to consider Judaism as a type or precursor of Christianity, men of Spencer's and Toland's ilk (following Spinoza) took one step back from this tradition and treated Old Testament Judaism not as part of a faith but as a specific historical manifestation of 'religion' set in particular cultural and political circumstances. Woodward had complained that to undermine the Jewish religion was a direct threat to the Christian establishment. While Spencer had confined himself to a consideration of the historical transition from gentilism to Judaism, Bernard Fontenelle undertook to examine the translation from Judaism and paganism to Christianity. Bernard Fontenelle's The History of Oracles and the Cheats of Pagan Priests was translated into English in 1688 by Aphra Behn, friend of Charles Blount, Rochester and Buckingham. Fontenelle's work was a popularization of a Dutch work by the anabaptist A. Vandale, De Oraculis Ethicarum. He commented on his edition: 'In fine, I have new cast and modelled the whole work.' The work was answered two decades later in 1709 in An Answer to Mr De Fontenelle's History of Oracles 'By a priest of the Church of England' and prefaced by a letter of the non-juror George Hickes. Fontenelle's work (with wit, charm and style) refuted the Anglican position 'that the ancient Oracles were delivered by Daemons, and that they ceased wholly at the coming of Jesus Christ'. George Hickes argued that the silencing of the oracles was 'one of the most eminent Miracles that attended the propagation of Christianity'.

Fontenelle's work involved not only an analysis of the nature of the transition from heathen religion to Christian, but also scurrilous reflections upon the conduct of the early Church Fathers. Fontenelle suggested that the Christian polemicists had been willing to accept the existence of daemoniacal oracles because the argument was commodious to their supernatural conception of the deity. It was easier to posit a God more powerful supernaturally than the pagan daemons, than to attempt directly to undermine pagan beliefs. Fontenelle wrote:

So, that to gain a little upon the pagans, there was a necessity of yielding to them what they maintained with so much obstinacy, and to let them see, that tho' there might be something supernatural in the Oracles, yet there was no reason to say, that there was a true divinity concerned in them; and so Daemons were to be brought upon the stage. 

The crux of the debate was whether or not pagan religion was merely human imposture, or a supernaturally inspired form of irreligion. Fontenelle's position was that the oracles and ceremonial content of heathen religion were the product of priestly imposture. In this framework the historical demise of paganism and the rise of Christianity were not causatively and supernaturally linked. Oracles were the product of priestly artifice imposing on a credulous populace. The demise of this imposture was due to human action; i.e. the exposure of priest-craft and the extirpation of heathenism by the Christian emperors.

Fontenelle rebutted the orthodox claim that the oracles had ceased with the advent of Christ due to some supernatural/magical quality. He cataloged the persistence of oracles after the birth of Christ: Julian the Apostate was able to consult the oracle of Delphi about his Persian expedition. Fontenelle gave sociological or political explanations, rather than prophetic, for the decline of heathenism. Thus Fontenelle's apparently un-contentious research into the historical pattern of heathenism had distinctly subversive implications for the nature of the Christian religion. The author of the Answer dealt with the charge that the demise of oracles had been due to 'a method entirely Human and natural, and that nothing is to be found in it which ought to be attributed to the power of Christ'. According to the author Fontenelle had been less than fair when he asserted that the Christian tradition maintained that the demise of the oracles had occurred immediately at the birth of Christ. The Anglican position was that silence was rendered 'little by little, as he made himself known to Men, and as the world was enlightened by the bright Beams of the Gospel'.[106] The oracles were created and influenced by daemons. These daemons were banished by the supernatural legacy of Christ and invocation of his name. The very presence of Christians by some spiritual means 'bid the oracles to silence, and drove the devils out of them'. This quasi-magical power remained in the Christian Church: the miraculous story of Prudentius who, by his very presence, hindered Julian the Apostate's attempted daemoniacal sacrifice, was retold.

The author of the Answer suggested that this magical power was implicit within all Christians, 'this power always has and always will subsist in the Church; 'tis a mark whereby she is distinguished from all sects of Hereticks'. Fontenelle's portrayal of the Christian Church was essentially de-spiritualized, a body of doctrine rather than a corpus mysticum. All claims to supernatural power in Fontenelle's work were the achievements of imposture. The reply to his work was to insist upon a conception of the world as a battle between divine and impious supernatural forces, with the Christian Church as the bastion of religion.