Priestcraft

Well, a bit of looking pays off. One Justin Champion has written a study of priestcraft in early Enlightenment England, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge 1992), which is available in its entirety online at: http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/catalogue/viewcat.php?id=OTHE00029.

Chapter 5 begins with a paragraph that links the attacks on priestcraft with the development of “natural religion (which in turn links up with Peter Harrison’s book on the concept of “religion” in the English Enlightenment, also published by Cambridge). Champion writes:

“Let us detest all priestcraft’ 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 . . . .

“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 enquiries 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. ”

Note, also, how the attack on ritual is at the center of the development of modern notions of “religion.”