Deism

British Deists widely and intensively read European authors such as Spinoza, Balthasar Bekker, Descartes, Gassendi, Pierre Bayle, Faustus Socinius, and Bruno. European Deists of the next generation in turn bought clandestine French translations of British Deistic works that circulated among European texts in the underground book trade. Many of those trade networks originated in the liberal and tolerant Dutch Republic, a refuge for freethinkers that, along with Britain, forged the early Enlightenment. Journals like De Haegse Mercurius (1697–1698) defended Toland's Deism in the late seventeenth century; French-language presses, safe from the French censors, spread Newtonian science and theology to readers all over Europe; and later in the century Masonic lodges and other voluntary organizations disseminated Deistic thinking throughout civil society. The epitome of Dutch (radical) Deism was the Traité des trois imposteurs (1719; The Treatise of the Three Impostors), authored, in the international language of the time, most likely by the lawyer Jan Vroese. On the basis of textual criticism, inquiry into first causes inspired by scientific thinking, and attention to cultural variety across the globe, the Traité made the case that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were ordinary men who exploited common ignorance in order to legitimate their prophecies: "Christianity like all other Religions is no more than a crudely woven imposture, whose success & progress would astonish even its inventors if they came back to the world" (quoted in Jacob, 2001, p. 109).

Less iconoclastically, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), the agent and nonpareil of the Anglomania that swept Europe in the 1730s and 1740s, virtually propagandized moderate British Deism as he strove to find the laws governing nature as well as God, the unity behind cultural variety, the right balance between enthusiasm and unbelief, and the compelling evidence that a God existed who could terrify the high and mighty. Deism via Voltaire in turn spread as far as Poland by way of the poetry of the satirist Bishop Ignacy Krasicki and the libertine Stanislaw Trembecki. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783) assimilated British Deism in their Encyclopédie (1751–1772) and made an impression—about more than just Deism—on Russia's Catherine II. Even Rousseau's idiosyncratic and deeply influential deification of nature is unthinkable without Lockean Deism, notwithstanding Rousseau's cynicism about what society does to nature in the long term.

More radical French Deism also had influences more diverse than Newton and Locke. Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722) came slowly to a Deistic position mainly by way of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). The Marquis d'Argens (1703–1771) drew from Spinoza, as did the Huguenot champion of religious toleration, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). The shadowy, anti-Voltairean Themisuel de Saint-Hyacinthe (1684–1746) read Spinoza but lived in religious exile in the Dutch Republic amid Anglophiles such as Albert-Henri de Sallengre, a Dutch citizen of Huguenot origins with English connections through whom Saint-Hyacinthe would have come to know both British Deism and science. It is inaccurate to label the idiosyncratic Spinoza a "Deist" according to contemporary conceptions of the word. The same holds true for the atheist-atomists Epicurus and his Roman mouthpiece Lucretius. But Spinozist and Epicurean writings nevertheless simmered along with British Deism in a stew of heterodox ideas that European free-thinkers consumed with various appetites that were themselves determined by a complex mix of personality, cultural dispositions, and social and political conditions.

Deistic ideas also pervaded the German Enlightenment. The Prussian "philosopher-king" Frederick II may have ultimately been a disappointment to Voltaire, but he nonetheless facilitated the spread of heterodox religious thinking by making the Berlin Academy of Sciences an entrepôt for French, British, and Dutch thought as well as the homegrown Deistic ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754). What Kant would later call onto-, cosmo-, and physicotheology were all indebted to the writings of Deists, even if later "neologians"—rational theologians who upheld the possibility of truth in revelation—deliberately distanced themselves from radical Deism. But that should not obscure the fact that later eighteenth-century theologians such as Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791) were as unrelenting in their textual criticism of the Bible as Woolston and others had been decades earlier.

In the more radical tradition, Hermann Samuel Reimarus's posthumously published Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (1774–1777; Apology or Defense of the Rational Worshipers of God) dispelled revelation as unreliable, miracles and mystery as fictional, and the New Testament as fraudulent. But like the British Deists by whom he was influenced, he also made as strong a case against atheism. Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), who among other things published Reimarus's Apologie, took the small step from Deism to religious toleration in his dramatic poem Nathan der Weise (1779; Nathan the Wise), which gave equal treatment to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But the case was made more forcefully by the inspiration for Lessing's Nathan, the German-Jewish freethinker Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), who, instead of arguing for the dissolution of the distinctions among the Mosaic religions, made the case that all were equal but still meaningful and should be accommodated by an enlightened state. Meanwhile, the primacy of reason over revelation was underscored by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant started out maintaining the neologian position on revelation, but in later life he argued that the Bible should be judged rather than judge, that churches had value only insofar as their ends accorded with a rationally derived course for human progress, and that claims to have experienced divine revelation could never be admitted by reasonable people.