Introduction

Many historians have studied deism as if it were a single, specific and separable philosophical outlook, distinctive enough to confer a new religious identity on anyone who adopted it. In this chapter I historicize the term ‘deism’, without imposing a priori conceptions of deism on historical agents. I then use this more historically nuanced and pluralist account of the genealogy of deism as a background for reinterpreting the work of Herbert of Cherbury and Charles Blount in more pluralist terms.

Although generations of scholars have been interested in the movement of European thought from faith to Enlightenment, the terms of analysis remain vague and imprecise, and it is difficult to differentiate between atheism, heterodoxy, irreligion and infidelity in the early modern period, partly because the discussion crosses religious and linguistic divides. Thus in the early modern period the term ‘atheism’ covered anyone who seemed to make God's existence irrelevant, and it was widely asserted that there could be no sincere atheistic belief, although some were tempted by moral atheism in the hope that they would not be punished for their wicked lives. Lucien Febvre's celebrated claim that atheism was not even thinkable in the sixteenth century is now widely rejected, and new histories of atheism attempt to show a richer picture. Related difficulties have been documented for libertinism and scepticism.

The term ‘deism’ is subject to the same difficulties, but can be successfully deployed, providing attention is paid to different periods and contexts, and to the speaking positions, from which claims about ‘deists’ were made. In the existing literature the tendency to identify deism with a doctrine, and then to assume that all deists held it, has not been helpful. On the contrary, attempts to define deism as a doctrine have been notoriously unsuccessful, especially since deists could be found from Montevideo to St Petersburg. Many historians have assumed that deism is the doctrine that God does not intervene in the world.