Atheism Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...Generation ; and Toland, John .] Berman, David . History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell . London, 1988. A book that finds atheism where the author of this article often would not, and so a book that provides an important alternative view of the problem of the history of atheism. Buckley, Michael J. , S. J. At the Origins of Modern Atheism . New Haven, Conn., 1987. A rich and deep theological and philosophical contextualization of the origins of Enlightenment (and other) atheism. Deprun, Jean , Roland Desné , and Albert Soboul . Jean...
Atheism Reference library
Martin E. Marty
The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment
...great.” He had no names to name. Positively, the almost invisible presence of atheism made it possible for more moderate and public doctrines like those of deism to escape the worst criticism. Negatively, the attacks on it left a legacy of abhorrence of atheism, which for the next two centuries has been exploitable by the enforcers of orthodoxy in church and state. Organizations devoted to propagating atheism have been few and small, but what is sometimes called “practical atheism,” in which citizens act the same way whether or not God exists has found a home...
Natural Philosophy (Science) Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
... 1795 . However, Coleridge began to think that Newton's followers encouraged a mechanical philosophy that explained too much by secondary causes, leaving God as an indolent First Cause. He concluded that the concept of lifeless matter separated from God was a large step towards atheism; and secondly, that Priestley's alternative of active matter was a form of pantheism. Thus after about 1800 Coleridge sought a natural philosophy that escaped the atomistic and mechanical conceptions of the natural world. This search took him into German Naturphilosophie and...
Religion Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
...frank unbelief made their way quietly in higher intellectual circles. The most eminent eighteenth-century instance was the highly influential—and much controverted—philosopher David *Hume , but such views survived the French Revolution to surface in the scepticism or outright atheism of philosophers like Jeremy *Bentham and James *Mill , or of poets like Lord *Byron and Percy *Shelley . Anti-clerical views also made considerable headway in an awakening popular opinion, drawing on old resentments of clerical presumption and on a new awareness of abuses...
Clandestine Literature
Jean Meslier
Natural Religion
Jacques-André Naigeon
Naigeon, Jacques-André (1738–1810) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...a major materialist and atheistic voice of the late Enlightenment. [See also Atheism ; Diderot, Denis ; Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry d '; Materialism ; and Panckoucke, Charles Joseph .] Brummer, R. Studien zur französischen Aufklärungsliteratur im Anschluss an J. A. Naigeon . Breslau, 1932. The first serious scholarly effort to sort out Naigeon's contributions to the literature and thought of the Enlightenment. Kors, Alan Charles . The Atheism of d'Holbach and Naigeon. In Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment , edited by Michael Hunter and ...
Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry d' (1723–1789) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...N.J., 1976. The author's study of Holbach's world, salon, and thought, and of d'Holbach's place in the Enlightenment and the Old Regime. Kors, Alan Charles . The Atheism of d'Holbach and Naigeon. In Michael Hunter and David Wooton , eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment , pp. 273–300. Oxford, 1992. The author's study of the sources of d'Holbach's thought, the nature of his atheism, and the debates in which he participated. Naville, Pierre . Paul Thiry d'Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au XVIII ème siècle. New ed., rev. and aug....
Hemsterhuis, François (1721–1790) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...knowledge, beauty is unity in diversity, but in the case of artistic genius, especially that of the poet, this unity is a divine gift instead of something obtained by a laborious survey of different empirical data. According to Lettre sur l'athéisme ( Letter on Atheism , 1787 ), although atheism can be understood as a reaction to a theology that pictures God as an “absurd monster,” it is, in fact, the result of intellect overestimating its capacities. Hemsterhuis had little influence in the Netherlands and, in spite of the fact that he wrote in French, in...
Lamy, François (1636–1711) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...New Atheism Overturned, or a Refutation of Spinoza's System , 1696 ), which was published ten years later with some difficulty, despite encouragement from Bossuet and the approval of Fénelon. The later Réfutation des erreurs de Benoît de Spinoza par M. de Fénelon[…]par le P. Lami et M. le comte de Boullainvilliers ( Refutation of the Errors of Baruch de Spinoza by Fénelon, Lamy, and Boullainvilliers , 1731 ), a partial reworking of the subject, constitutes one of the major attempts at refuting the philosopher who seemed to be the model of “atheism.” Lamy...
Bergier, Nicolas-Sylvestre (1718–1790) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...career, however, Bergier deserves attention for two other reasons. Confronted by the massive and critical output of Enlightenment authors from the years 1740 to 1780 , he vigorously defended Catholicism in the face of Deism, secular accounts of the evolution of religion and atheism, officially subsidized by the Assembly of the Clergy. His position was of note, both formally and substantively. Arriving in Paris in 1769 , he frequented the same salons as the atheists Denis Diderot and the baron d'Holbach and he sought to refute their views in his Examen...
Collins, Anthony (1676–1729) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...not with necessity but only with compulsion. His best known defense of freethinking is A Discourse of Free-Thinking ( 1713 ), which provoked numerous replies representing freethinking as a pretense to justify an antecedent commitment to moral libertinism, skepticism, and atheism. If the foundations of religion were certain, how otherwise could Collins question them? However, Collins, whose character afforded little to reproach, was no general skeptic, since he accepted the perceived agreement of ideas as a criterion for assent. The weakness of existing...
Hardouin, Jean (1646–1729) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...for his papers to be published after his death. Hardouin had been severely discouraged from proselytizing among young Jesuits, but he nonetheless acquired some followers, who espoused his exaltation of oral tradition and his equation of Cartesianism and Jansenism with atheism. The most important was Isaac-Joseph Berruyer , whose scandalous and hugely successful Histoire du peuple de Dieu ( History of the People of God ) is (as critics at the time were quick to note) much indebted to Hardouin. Even when disagreeing utterly with Hardouin,...
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743–1819) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...Lessing would declare himself for a personal God, and for freedom, thereby rejoining common sense. However reliable Jacobi's report, the equation he had drawn—“consistent philosophy = Spinozism = pantheism = fatalism = atheism”—caused an uproar. By identifying philosophy with Spinozism (then widely regarded as synonymous with atheism), and, by associating Spinoza with Lessing, Jacobi had challenged the validity of Lessing's and Mendelssohn's typical Enlightenment belief that reason can save the essential truths of religion and morality. The equation was...
Clarke, Samuel (1675–1729) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...based on conduct in this life, it is reinforced by Christian revelation supported in turn by its conformity with reason as well as the evidence of miracles and prophecy. Since not only God's existence is certain, but the truth of Christianity, the only choice is between atheism, which he claimed to have refuted, and Christianity. Deists, who rejected revelation and relied solely on natural religion, were in effect disguised atheists, although Clarke himself was accused of opening the way for them by relying so heavily on natural religion. Clarke's...
Natural Religion Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...Derham ( 1657–1735 ) contributed—that they made atheism, not otherwise a question, into one. His quip was echoed through the eighteenth century by figures as diverse as Henry Dodwell the younger (d. 1784 ), who cited the lectures to show the ineffectiveness of natural religion and to demonstrate that salvation has nothing to do with argument; or Benjamin Franklin ( 1706–1790 ), who confessed his exposure to them had the opposite of the intended effect, making him a skeptic, though not an atheist. Atheism, however, was a common and facile accusation. The...
Jaquelot, Isaac (1647–1708) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...which, through the complex processes of change and transmission, later came to characterize the Enlightenment. [See also Apologetics ; Bayle, Pierre ; Calvinism ; Cartesianism ; Deism ; Natural Religion ; Rationalism ; and Revealed Religion .] Kors, Alan Charles . Atheism in France 1650–1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief . Princeton, N.J., 1990. A stimulating and original overview of the intellectual debates of the time. Mckenna, Antony . De Pascal à Voltaire: Le rôle des “Pensées” de Pascal dans l'histoire des idées entre 1670 et 1734 ....
Conti, Antonio (1677–1749) Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...of Condillac . His own approach was characterized by what he termed a “judicious Pyrrhonism”—that is, a stance that called for thorough critical inquiry into all knowledge. For traditionalists, this imperiled some tenets of religion, and for his freethinking he was accused of atheism before the Inquisition in Venice in 1735 , but he was absolved through the intervention of influential friends. Conti's interests also extended to poetry, drama, and aesthetic theory. He translated Pope's Rape of the Lock , Racine's Athalie , and poems by Greek and Latin...
