THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRIEST-CRAFT

The radical critique examined the progress and decline of heathen religion, describing the dynamic of this process as the result of priestly manipulation. This critique was essentially historical: but it was supplemented by an analysis of the 'origins' of religion not in a temporal sense, but in terms of human psychology. These explications were phrased in sociological and epistemological terms. The importance of this analysis was that the writers made generalized statements about the nature of society, human psychology and the generation of belief systems. Although ostensibly the commentaries were passed upon historical structures they clearly had relevance for contemporary society, and were a reflection upon similar manifestations in that culture.

An anonymous and enigmatic text Averroeana (1695), containing the medical opinions of Averroes and the religious opinions of Pythagoras, epitomizes the analysis of the radical critique, 'tradition and vain customs rule over most nations; and men are so highly graduated in them, that most of them will not only kill others for not observing their customs, and believing in their prophets; but they will die themselves, rather than leave an evil custom to embrace a good one'. Thomas Hobbes in chapter 12 'Of Religion' in Leviathan argued that fear, the essential psychological engine of human motivation, was the root of religious belief. Man's prying desire for knowledge of the future and 'anxiety of the time to come, was the foundation of religion. This facet of existence led to a fear of the power of invisible things. These fears and beliefs could be generated and manipulated by men in authority (usually priests and kings) for their own interests. This stoic psychology was the premise of the radical critique of established religion. Spinoza laid similar emphasis upon fear as part of the human condition and an explanatory cause in the origin of superstition and political authority.

John Trenchard in his Natural History of Superstition (1709) gave the Hobbist theme extended treatment. He wrote that 'there is something innate in our constitution made us easily to be susceptible of wrong impressions, subject to panick fears, and prone to Superstition and Error, and therefore it is incumbent upon us, first of all to examine into the frame and constitution of our own bodies, and search into the causes of our passions and infirmities'. Trenchard continued, echoing Hobbes:

I take this wholly to proceed from our ignorance of causes, and yet curiosity to know them, it being impossible for any man to go {so} far to divest himself of concern for his own happiness, as not to endeavor to promote it, and consequently to avoid what he thinks may hurt him; and since there must be causes in nature for everything that does or will happen, either here or hereafter, it is hard to avoid solicitude till we think we know them.

The origin of causes is mostly hidden from our view, thus there are three alternatives that face man: to abandon the inquiry; to substitute for the true causes ideas of our own, 'Such … as our own imaginations or prejudices suggest to us', or to rely on other people whom we think more competent. All three alternatives offer grave problems. Man could not exist happily without such inquiry and was thus forced into the arms either of his own imagination or someone else's. To rely on one's own senses and imagination within a context of their infallibility could often result in religious enthusiasm. The alternative posed the problems of fraudulent manipulation by the clergy.

Premised on the idea that people have to arrive at some conceptual scheme in order to understand their existence and the telos of their lives, the radical critique made the connection between 'interest' and 'opinion' resulting in the idea of 'prejudice'. The production of an individual's ideas, beliefs or opinions was determined socially. The executive in this social determination of ideas was attributed to the clergy. One of the most lucid texts in articulating this proposition was John Toland's 'The Origin and Force of Prejudices' in Letters to Serena(1704).

Toland's central point, citing Cicero's De Legibus, was that 'Neither parents … or Nurse, or Schoolmaster, or Poet, or Playhouse depraves our senses nor can the Consent of the Multitude mislead them; But all sorts of traps are laid to seduce our understandings … by those whom I just now mentioned, who when they receive us tender and ignorant, infect and bend us as they please.' The determination and molding of an individual's ideas commenced as soon as he entered the world, if not before, 'the foundation of our prejudices is very strongly laid before we are born' i.e. in the womb. Trenchard had also commented that 'the Frights and longings of Women with Child stamp images and impressions, of the things feared or desired, on the faetus's, which last long after they are born, and sometimes as long as they exist'. The influence of priest-craft was present at birth, 'we no sooner see the light, but the grand cheat begins to delude us from every quarter. The very midwife hands us into the world with superstitious ceremonies.' Childhood sees the nurse weaning the understanding on to a diet of superstition. These fables were originally affected to 'keep children under government': the effects continued into adulthood. They 'lay a large foundation for future Credulity, insensibly acquiring a disposition for hearing things rare and wonderful, to imagine we believe what we only dread or desire, to think that we are but puzzled that we are convicted, and to swallow what we cannot comprehend'. This process was continued throughout school and university, 'the most fertile nursery of prejudices'. Prejudice is then reinforced by whatever activity the individual undertakes, 'hence not only every profession, but also every rank of men, have their particular language, which is thought by others to contain very extraordinary matters, much above the common capacity or comprehension'.

Toland described a vision of society permeated with webs of conflicting value systems. The overburdening directors of these systems of 'false' ideas were the clergy. Charles Blount in Religio Laici (1683) pinpointed the issue of the social formation of ideas. He wrote: 'We denominate good and evil only from our particular interest; so that perhaps our vertues may prove but false money, of no intrinsick value, although it bear the stamp of our approbation on it'. Men are guided by 'the primary appetite of nature' to establish their own well-being; the perception of this well-being is directed by 'judgement'. This faculty is a product of 'the temper of our brain, & our education' and thus beyond individual control. Blount commented on these factors, 'all which (it is manifest) are not in our own power, but proceeds from the temper of our parents, the diet, climate and customs of our country, with diversity of occurrents and conjunctures of the times'. In this way the patterns of ideas created by the priests for their own interest, in complicity with what Blount called 'this tribunal in the minds of men' (the security-seeking psychology of human nature) became traditions and customs.

The Freethinker's theory of knowledge restructured traditional sceptical epistemology into what could be termed political or cultural epistemology. Their scepticism was to concentrate on the notion of a 'commonsense philosophy'. They argued that this process of creating morally certain knowledge was fraught with the distorting idols of interest, prejudice and the burden of custom. This socially generated knowledge (redified into custom) was what the radicals attempted to undermine. Fontenelle acknowledged the difficulty of someone attempting to step out of the streams of custom 'for we have need of strength to resist a torrent, but we need not to follow it'. Trenchard commented upon the entrenched nature of beliefs that determined world views for 'when men have imbibed strong prejudices, which serve their present interest, or strike forcibly upon their hopes and fears, everything in nature shall be made to contribute to their system'. Blount was still more scathing over how the majority of people came to have opinions: 'Most men (like Carrier Horses) follow one another in a track, where if the fore-horse goes wrong, all the rest succeed him in his errour: not considering that he who comes behind, may take an advantage to avoid that pit, which those that went before are fallen into.' For Toland the majority of people were martyrs to habit, rather than any religious truth.

The manipulation of Scripture, according to the Freethinking critique, was one of the most effective promoters of priest-craft. The analysis focused upon two interrelated issues, about the type of knowledge proposed in the Bible, and to what purpose it was to be used. The second point was that the clergy, by abusing the sanctity of Scripture for their own interests, had falsely represented it. The Anglican accepted Scriptural accounts as 'true' representations of historical reality. The Bible was the oldest history in the world, recounting in specific, 'true' detail the exact chronology of the historical  creation and evolution of the world. Writing upon the Mosaic account of the creation Dr John Woodward commented that 'his historical relations are … exact; everywhere clear strong and simple'. Woodward's attitude was that if Moses' account was untrue physiologically 'we could with no reason or security have relied upon him in matters historical, moral, or religious … And all know how great a superstructure is raised upon his foundation which would assuredly have been in a very shaken and tottering condition, had his accounts of nature proved erroneous.'

The most relevant and influential statements made by opponents of the ecclesiastical establishment were Spinoza's Treatise Partly Theological (1689), in particular chapters 1-2 'Of Prophecy' and 'Of Prophets', and Thomas Burnet's Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1692). The Burnet tract originally written in Latin was in part translated into English in the year of its publication. The following year saw Charles Blount in his Oracles of Reason (1693) publish a defense of Burnet's work, coupled with the republication of the first two chapters of the 1692 English translation of the Archaeologiae. Spinoza and Burnet share the same premise. Spinoza argued that when God revealed knowledge to his prophets it was according to their capacities and imaginations. Prophets were individuals who 'had some particular extraordinary Virtue above other men, and were persons very eminent for their constant Piety'. The prophets had no internalized ability of prophesying. Spinoza separated philosophy and theology. Statements in Scripture did not have an epistemological truth value, they were hypothetical constructs to achieve the extension of the divine message. He insisted that God adapted revelations to the understandings and opinions of the prophets, and that in matters of theory (without bearing on charity or morality) the prophets could be, and in fact were, ignorant. It was with this analysis that Spinoza rejected the 'real' existence of miracles. The accounts of miraculous occurrences in the sacred history were not true physical accounts but designed to appeal to human imagination to inculcate divine doctrine and produce devotion. Thus the accounts were not 'so much to convince our reason, as to affect and possess our minds, and our Imaginations'. Scripture was a fiction calculated to induce men to morality. The value of Holy Writ was not so much the very words and phrases of Scripture, but the intended injunction to virtue.

Thomas Burnet, Master of Charterhouse, followed the Spinozist hermeneutic in his Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1692). Burnet concentrated upon the Mosaic account of the creation of the world and the narrative of Adam's fall. Burnet's central theme was that the Mosaic hexameron was not a true philosophical discourse upon the origin of the world (he considered that this had been effected in his Sacred Theory). Moses in his account had followed the 'popular system' in order to gain acceptance for his divine precepts. He wrote 'that it was not this Sacred author's design to represent the beginning of the world, exactly according to the physical truth; (which would have been no use to the common people who were incapable of being philosophers) but to expound the first originals of things after such a method, as might breed in the minds of men Piety, and a worshiping of the true God'. Moses' intention was not to explain the origin of the universe but to give an explanation adapted to the capacities of the people 'that he might the better help the imagination of the people, to comprehend the first original of things'.

Burnet executed a similar interpretation of Genesis suggesting that, as a physical account, it was fundamentally absurd. Moses' discourse was 'artificially figurative' in order to explain the degenerate nature of man 'as also the Paradisiac State of infant Nature'. The notion of the Garden of Eden was created 'because it was more suitable to the genius and understanding of the Vulgar, to conceive a pleasant Garden or a single field, than that the whole globe of the Earth should put on a new face and new nature, entirely different from what we now enjoy'. In a similar fashion the notion that Eve was created from Adam's spare rib has no physiological truth but was suggested by Moses 'to breed mutual love between sexes & also render efficacious his institution of marriage'. Man's expulsion from this symbolic paradise for the small crime of eating an apple was described by Moses 'only to the end he might procure the greater deference and authority to his own Laws'. Spinoza himself considered the history of the first man as a 'parable' rather than a 'plain and Simple narration'.

How did the Freethinkers' treatment of Revelation interlock with their critique of priestcraft? They argued that Scripture had been composed in terms of an exoteric philosophy or popular theology. This originally accessible knowledge had been veiled and masked by the corrupt influence of the priesthood into 'mystery'. The Freethinkers described the history of this division of knowledge into two social forms: the exoteric and esoteric in order to indict priestly manipulation. The most articulate and popular history of 'mystery' was John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696).

In this work he documented in detail the priestly construction of mystery into a self-interested theology. Scripture contained nothing mysterious in itself. True religion had been rendered enigmatic by the priesthood who encumbered pure religion with cabbalism and ritual. We must examine the abstract underpinnings of this popular polemic.

The Freethinkers argued that the clergy had made a claim to be the possessors of a hidden true knowledge when in fact they had erected a false system to promote their own self-interest. Charles Blount appealed to the patterns of pagan antiquity and wrote that in the 'First Ages … all things were full of Fables, Aenigmas, Parables, and Similies of all sorts, whereby they sought to teach and expound knowledge to the Vulgar'. Tales of fortune and mystery were created to 'Induce us to Virtue, piety, and Religion, [such] as the wonderful pleasures of the Elesian Fields'. John Toland in Letters to Serena (1704) appealed to the original of Pythagoras suggesting that the philosopher's notion of the transmigration of souls was in effect the veneer of his 'internal or secret Doctrine' of 'the eternal Revolution of Forms in matter'. Toland generalized, 'for most of the Philosophers … had two sorts of Doctrine, the one internal and the other external, or the one private and the other publick; the latter to be indifferently communicated to all the world, and the former only very cautiously to their best friends'. A work which may have been composed by Toland, Two Essays sent in a Letter from Oxford to a Nobleman in London (1695), probed the origins of such activity. Fiction was originally mixed with truth in Egypt; the 'mythological' works of Aesop, Homer, Hesiod or Orpheus had their generation in the 'Romantick vein' of communication prevalent in Egypt. These seeds of fiction, transplanted into Greece, found the soil very fertile and luxuriant. The Greeks 'addicted to Poetry and Invention, ran upon all figures, Fables and Parable'. The importation of ideas and methods had been facilitated by the fact that both Plato and Pythagoras had visited Egypt and received tuition from Eastern priests. Sacred authors complied with this 'Humour of Parables and fiction, the Holy Scripture being altogether Mysterious, Allegorical and Enigmatical; and our Saviour Himself gave his precepts under this veil'. The letter continues to decry how this division was put to the employ of self-interested monks and the clerical order.

Cherbury's study of heathen religion was founded on the premise of a popular/philosophical distinction. The theme of the work had been that the religious worship of the pagans had been 'symbolical'; the stars were fables of divinities, and ceremonies had been cultus symbolicus rather than cultus proprius. This was to say that the populace had been unable to conceive of true divinity so they had worshiped it indirectly; that when the stars were worshiped it was not for themselves but for them as a representation of the supreme being. Cherbury wrote that it was necessary 'always to observe that many things which we call Superstitions, were intended by them only to signify the mystical and occult Adoration of some unknown Deity; and others we esteem Idolatrous, were a Symbolical way of worshiping the Supream God'. Cherbury cited Varro, who determined that there were 'three kinds of theology'. 

The triple division was 'Mystical, Natural, and Civil'. The mystical part of theology was composed of poets' attributions of qualities of the immortal Gods; the second part was natural philosophy; the third was that which 'the citizens and Priests especially, ought to understand and perform; this contains what sacrifices are to be performed by everyone'. Cherbury asserted that this third sort of theology which ought to have been 'to the city' had become the 'Inventions of Priests'. The rites and ceremonies 'tended more to external Pageantry than the honor of the Supreme God, they debauched the Minds of men from the internal Worship of God, sometimes to a magnificent Pomp, and at others to mere empty Ceremonies, to the overthrow of True and Sound Religion'. In Archaeologiae Philosophicae Burnet employed an identical Varroistic analysis of the three-fold theology. 

To justify his treatment of Genesis he had asserted 'who if they will but with me consider the usage and Genius of the Primitive Ages, more especially among the Oriental nations (whose custom it was to deliver their decrees and doctrine by Symbols, Similitudes, and Parables) if they do not conceive with, will yet at least not be prejudiced against those who explain Ancient things after this manner'. As with Cherbury, Burnet cited Varro's analysis; he divided the 'antient Theology into three parts, the fabulous, Civil, and Philosophical. This last was useless to the common people; and the fabulous hurtful; therefore they instituted a middle sort … for the benefit of the common people, and advantage of human life'.

In 1720 John Toland published his Clidophorus, Or Of the Exoteric and Esoteric Philosophy; the subtitle indicates the intention of the work 'That is of the External and Internal Doctrine of the Ancients: The one open and Publick, accommodated to popular prejudices and the religions established by law; the other private and secret, wherein, to the few capable and discrete, was taught the real truth script of all disguises'. Toland discussed the notion of Isis in Egyptian theology, pointing out that while the vulgar conceived of a fabulous queen the natural meaning was concerned with 'the nature of all things', that is, the notion of the universe as God. The 'double manner of teaching' was employed throughout the oriental nations: the Ethiopians, Babylonians, Syrians and Persians who were instructed by Zoroaster. A similar tradition was continued with the Gaulish and British Druids. Toland cited Strabo, Parmenides, Pythagoras and the ubiquitous Varro to uphold his thesis that there must be variant forms of knowledge according to the capacities of those concerned. Toland, however, was more explicit in cataloging the result of this dual system of truth. While acknowledging that this system might have been useful when employed to legitimate ends 'whereby to keep in order the Silly part of mankind', Toland wished to maintain that it had ultimately proved detrimental. He wrote: 'but granting that Superstition had at any time proved beneficial to the public, yet at other times without number, and in things of incomparably greater importance, it will be found detrimental, destructive, and utterly pernicious; nor advantageous to any, excepting Priests or Princes, who dexterously turn it to their own interest.'

Toland described a dynamic where the priests in tandem with a tyrannous secular authority managed to create a 'mystery' to influence the populace for their own ends. Toland upheld the use of metaphor and symbol in explaining and discussing the divine nature and attributes, indeed in regard to the latter it was 'even absolutely necessary'. The clergy rejected any assault upon their usurped position and thus employed force to prevent that being told 'which shows the multitude to be ridiculous, or their guides Impostors'. Toland objected that what had originated as a pragmatic device of administration had been converted into a tool of interest by the clergy. It was now the philosophers who suffered at the hands of the priests for attempting to search after the truth. Toland's tract finished with an impassioned plea for the uninhibited exposition of the truth, with the irenic and subversive suggest  ion that the division of religions was the product of the priests and the ignorance of the people, while in reality 'all wise men are of the same religion'. One of the major facets of the distinction between the esoteric and esoteric philosophy was that the Freethinkers considered the practice legitimate if it was to effect the public good. If the process was to establish the rule of virtue then it was valid. 

This argument involved a redefinition of the nature of religion and its relationship with society. 

The Freethinkers, although they considered religion as a form of morality, did not treat it simply as a politic device. They attempted to reunite the heavenly and earthly cities.