NATURAL RELIGION AND THE HISTORY OF PRIEST-CRAFT

'Let us detest all priest-craft' was the rallying cry of the early English enlightenment. The achievement of the Republican Freethinkers was to separate the idea of 'true religion' from the sociological example of seventeenth-century Christianity. This enterprise was fundamental to the Enlightenment, but (as we shall see) although presented with the rhetoric of liberty of reason, it was conducted in the name of true religion. Such a claim was the premise for David Hume's Natural History of Religion (1758) and the more vociferous anticlericalism of Voltaire and d'Holbach. Echoing Paolo Rossi's work, The Dark Abyss of Time, which has disinterred the pre-history of Vico's New Science, this chapter will explore the texts that enabled Hume to write such a work. 

Contrary to popular belief Hume's Natural History of Religion was no innovative landmark in the history of the sociology of religion. The elements of this work (the tension between monotheism and polytheism, the corrosive influence of the priesthood, and the parallelism of pagan with Christian superstition) were all forged in the seventeenth century by such scholars and critics as Herbert of Cherbury, Charles Blount, John Toland and John Spencer. Rather than treating religious belief, ceremony and ritual as transcendent principles, these men cultivated an idea of religion as a social and historical institution, a tradition that could be traced back through Machiavelli to the classical analysis of Cicero in De Natura Deorum. 

In treating religion as a manifestation of social and political structures, as the product both of human psychology and priestly manipulation, the radicals were committed to an historical investigation of its causes and effects. With these historical inquiries such men as Blount and Toland developed their civil theologies as necessary adjuncts to their social and political prescriptions. These historical scrutinies drew upon a wide variety of polemic and scholarship. 

The most visible manifestation of this approach was inspired by an anticlerical tradition rooted in the ambivalent rhetoric of Reformation humanism and which can be most easily identified in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. The study of Hobbes has suffered from a tendency to secularize his thought. His theological unorthodoxy has been too often read as an indication of a distaste for all things religious (rather than all things popish) and proof of his modernity. Hobbes, the anticlerical deconstructor of priestly fraud, was a crucial instrument in the development of a radical history of religion that laid the foundation for the Enlightenment. 

The radicals were not inspired by the absolutist Hobbes of Books I and II of Leviathan (1651) but the anticlericalist of the little studied second half of the work. The Freethinkers anathematized Hobbist principles of absolute sovereignty, preferring a neo-Harringtonian analysis of political authority. Men such as Charles Blount, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon consistently applauded Hobbes' deconstruction of priestly fraud. In Books III and IV of Leviathan Hobbes had argued for a rigorous Erastianism. 

The clergy were subject to the jurisdiction of the civil sovereign and could claim no independent authority. In his notions of 'personation' and an unorthodox reading of the Trinity Hobbes devalued the social and political role of the clerical order. Repeatedly citing Christ's dictum that his kingdom is not of this world, Hobbes argued that the priesthood were only adept as promoters of morality. 

Throughout the second half of Leviathan Hobbes combined theological commentary, sacred hermeneutics and historical narrative to arraign the misdeeds of the 'unpleasing priests' who had usurped the authority of true religion for their own temporal ends. He narrated the tying of the three knots on Christian liberty and applauded the theological freedom of the Interregnum. 

While the second half of Leviathan  is an important anticlerical tract, its hostility towards the ghostly estate is muted by the sheer length and complexity of the arraignment. A far more accessible source for Hobbes' anticlerical tenets is his poetic history A True Ecclesiastical History from Moses to the Time of Martin Luther, originally published in Latin in 1688, and translated and prefaced by Thomas Rymer in 1722.

In this work Hobbes provided a simplified historical treatment of the decline of religion and the rise of priestcraft. Primitive Christianity is a simplistic and natural religion intent upon establishing morality rather than worldly advancement. Christ's yoke was easy and innocent of persecution. From this pristine original the priesthood with the corrupt apparatus of pagan philosophy and scholastic 'jargon' turned religion into a trade. False miracles, idolatry, ghosts and goblins created a priestly empire over the minds of the laity. The clergy 'deified their dreams'. 

In this manner the sacerdotal order set up an independent interest, creating a double kingdom upon which they forged a tyranny that extended to civil affairs. It was this triple analysis (of an original primitive natural religion, of priestly corruption and priestly tyranny) that was to form the backbone of the Freethinking impeachment of the Church.

One of the most articulate promoters of Freethought and religious toleration of the 1690s was Matthew Tindal of All Saints College, Oxford. In his Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706) he resisted the High Church claims of such men as Francis Atterbury and Charles Leslie. Tindal, following Harrington's analysis, considered the Church as a democratic society. The clergy could only have authority based on the consent of the members of this Church. Clerical authority was an exact analogue of civil authority, both being premised on the consent of society. The clergy could claim no sacerdos from the apostolic succession, but only a character based upon their perceived ability to effect honour to God, and good for mankind. As soon as these conditions were violated their legitimacy crumbled. Since the Church of England was the epitome of persecution and intolerance, Tindal needed to provide some account of when, why and how the ecclesiastical establishment had deviated from the legitimate mean.

Tindal, as Hobbes before him, turned to an historical investigation to illustrate the passage and causes of corruption. He pointed to the history of heathen religion and argued that the priestly creation of mystery and ceremony had resulted in a malformed conception of religion. The High Church Anglican clergy were the inheritors of this manipulative tradition. He wrote: 'Nothing would expose Priestcraft more, than an Historical account, how, and upon what motives the clergy vary'd in their notions and practices concerning thy Lord's Supper: at first, how they made it a mystery in the Heathenish sense of that word and for Heathenish reasons that they might have the same power as the priests of the idols had.'

While Hobbes and Tindal presented general historical argument as an indictment of priestly manipulation there was a vast corpus of knowledge, historical, anthropological and hermetical, which presented more specific assaults on clerical deviance and corrupt religion. Many of these learned investigations were conducted in terms of examinations of pre-Christian and heathen religions. Although many writers denied their researches intended any covert assault upon the true religion, hostile implications were often very apparent. By analogy an indictment of heathenism insinuated against the status of all religion. A popular vulgarization of this polemic, and one which will locate the parameters of this tradition, was Sir Robert Howard's A History of Religion (1694).