Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the language of religion and ethics in England 1660-1780, volume II Shaftesbury to Hume

This second volume of Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, which completes Isabel Rivers' commanding survey of British moral and religious thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Volume I appeared in 1991), was well worth the wait. In a sense, Rivers' topic is hardly uncharted territory, but her study, the fruit of nearly three decades of research, is fresh and revealing in its focus on language, that is, on literary form, audience, rhetorical device, and style. This attention to language is justified in part by the fact that the thinkers with whom Rivers is concerned were themselves keenly aware of their own use of language and the role it played in their capacity to communicate with audiences from varying social strata and of widely different religious persuasions--the Earl of Shaftesbury, for instance, embedded treatises of moral philosophy within witty essays in an attempt to engage an audience of freethinking young men and draw them away from Hobbesianism; David Hume dissected his "dead-born" Treatise in order to revive it as the popular Enquiries. Rivers' focus on language, as well as her familiarity with even minor figures and her command of the details of debates of the period, also allows her to correct modern misinterpretations, although these corrections are offered in an understated way. Rivers comments in her introduction that she has learned from the thinkers she has studied that debating with competing views does "not on the whole advance the pursuit of truth" (5); but a clearer delineation of her departure from accepted interpretations would have strengthened the argumentative structure of the book and thus its usefulness to some readers.

Volume I, Whichcote to Wesley, traced the way the latitudinarian championing of human reason and free will tended to undermine traditional Calvinist accounts of the passive reception of grace. Rivers there explored the way in which agreement on the inseparability of religion and ethics coexisted with deep tensions between a Scriptural moral language which spoke of "holiness" and the "heart," and a philosophical language, indebted to classical moralists, of "virtue" and "reason." In the present volume, Rivers focuses on debates over the relative contributions that reason and sentiment make to ethics (as opposed to religion), and traces the emergence of claims that morality could be understood and pursued in complete isolation from religion.

The central figure of this volume is Shaftesbury, whose importance Rivers believes has been underestimated and whom she treats as a key to understanding the interaction between ethics and religion in eighteenth-century Britain. As a backdrop for assessing Shaftesbury's role in the detachment of ethics from religion, Rivers begins with an examination of the anti-Christian freethinkers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (John Toland, Matthew Tindal, Anthony Collins, and Shaftesbury himself). She is interested here in probing whether these thinkers were in fact supporters of natural religion, as they maintained, or whether they were actually anti-religious (not just anti-Christian) thinkers who prudentially concealed their views through the use of irony and equivocation. Her preference for the term "freethinker" over "deist" points to her sympathies for the latter position, but her discussion is nuanced and attends to significant differences among the thinkers treated; Toland's brand of pantheism seems reducible to natural and moral philosophy, while Shaftesbury is sincere in insisting that though the moral sense is prior to any notion of God, belief in a good designing principle of the universe is important to the trust in harmony that undergirds morality.

Rivers goes on to explore the ironies of Shaftesbury's adoption by Scottish thinkers for purposes of Christian moral apologetics. Francis Hutcheson, for instance, appropriated Shaftesbury's tentative account of the moral sense and built on Shaftesbury's views on natural sociability in order to combat Hobbesian and Lockean accounts of morality as self-interested. English thinkers, in contrast, tended to be more suspicious of Shaftesbury's unconventional religiosity, and regarded the moral sense as a reduction of duty to instinct. Price argued that human nature, and thus human instincts, including instincts toward benevolence or sociability, are constituted arbitrarily by God, but that moral principles are independent and unchanging. Butler emerges in Rivers' discussion as Shaftesbury's most acute commentator, drawing on Shaftesbury's stress on natural affection while emphasizing the central role of reflection or conscience and breaking down the opposition between sense and reason that most contemporaries took for granted.

Rivers' discussion of Hume shows that the English critics of Shaftesbury were right to be suspicious of a Christianized Shaftesbury, for Hume showed how Shaftesburian moral ideas could be developed quite apart from any religious assumptions. For Hume, a morality based in human sentiments, passions and affections was manifestly concerned only with this life and only with finite beings. Rivers explores the challenge posed not solely by Hume's radical ideas, but also by his status as a "virtuous sceptic," surveying the divergent responses expressed by moderates and evangelicals within the Church of Scotland. She suggests that current discussions of Hume's religious views are somewhat naïve; contemporaries of Hume, familiar with the irony and concealment strategies of earlier freethinkers, had no difficulty seeing that Hume was a skeptic at least, and for all practical purposes an atheist, despite the fact that the deist Cleanthes is officially declared the winner over skeptic Philo in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

English thinkers, unlike the Scots, by and large continued to be hostile to Shaftesbury and loyal to Locke's ethics of divine commands into the late eighteenth century. In her final chapter, Rivers traces how Joseph Butler displaced Locke as moralist par excellence at the end of the eighteenth century, and thus how Shaftesbury's influence found its way into English thought at last. The Shaftesburian tradition had been denounced for the irreligious tendencies of its emphasis on natural goodness, but critics of Lockean ethics now saw Locke as undermining religion by portraying God as an arbitrary ruler and human beings as selfish and mercenary. Although Reason, Grace, and Sentiment explores the detachment of ethics from religion, Rivers notes as a "delightful" concluding twist that Shaftesbury's influence, via Butler, would in the nineteenth century once again be used in defense of Christianity.

Rivers offers little by way of a conclusion, which, given the intricacy of her discussion, would have been helpful. Particularly valuable would have been more attention to the relationship between the two volumes; Rivers says little about the fact that the emphasis on affections typical of dissenters discussed in the first volume migrates to freethinkers in the second volume, for instance, or about the fact that seventeenth-century latitudinarians tended to reject a view of God as arbitrary lawgiver, whereas eighteenth-century latitudinarians embraced Locke's voluntarism. As J. B. Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy (1998) has shown, controversies over voluntarism lay at the heart of the separation of religion and ethics that Rivers traces in her project. Nevertheless, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment is an authoritative contribution to our understanding of the complexity of religious and moral discourse in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British thought, and will undoubtedly become a standard work. Its rare combination of learnedness and accessibility will be prized by scholars and students alike.