Anti-atheism in early modern England 1580--1720.

摘要

This dissertation examines the pervasive, influential, but hitherto neglected discourse of anti-atheism in England from 1580 to 1720. As an expression of increased anxieties generated in the wake of the Reformation and the Renaissance, anti-atheism in early modern England formed a distinct genre of religious apologetics utilizing the classical rhetorical technique of confutation. Tracing the rise of anti-atheist anxiety between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, by analyzing the form and the content of the confutation of atheism, this study demonstrates the prevalence of patterned assumptions and arguments about who an atheist was and what an atheist was supposed to believe; analyzes the major arguments against such an atheist; and examines the changes and challenges to this apologetic discourse across the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century. This dissertation considers how two classical philosophies revived in the Renaissance, Epicureanism and Platonism, and the persistent Reformation concern over religious apostasy, were each employed, modified, and contested within the form and content of anti-atheist discourse. This study concludes by exploring how a series of thinkers between 1680 and 1720, including Charles Blount, John Locke, Pierre Bayle, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Bernard Mandeville, questioned aspects of the prevailing negative depiction of atheists as immoral, irrational hedonists who inverted personal, social, and political order, or criticized the mode of confutation as an inappropriate rhetorical technique for the defence of the Christian religion.