with the glories of the classical age, which inspired a cultural look backward (Ficino, Erasmus); the development of more complex theological systems by Scholastic thinkers in the universities, which led to a bolder distinction between faith and reason (Aquinas); and the scientific revolution, which generated new geographies of knowledge and new conceptions of the truth (Galileo, Newton).
Nondiscursive trends that played a significant role in this age were the increase in international trade and travel, the introduction of other cultures, the invention and proliferation of the printing press, and the development of new economic and political conditions (namely, monetary systems that increased the power of the bourgeoisie and led to the development of strong, centralized government). These circumstances not only inspired questions about the sanctity and usefulness of Roman Catholicism (these circumstances led to the Protestant Reformation) but also weakened the authority of the Christian revelation. Poignantly aware of the historical and cultural context, Grotius and Lord Herbert cleverly answered threats against Christianity by venerating it as the highest form of knowledge and (therefore) the greatest form of good. They deftly aided the transfer of the source of Christian power from the dominion of religious hierarchy (that is, the Catholic Church) to the rational basis of Christianity itself, the universal consensus it naturally generated, and the inner feelings it was based on and inspired. They contended that Christianity was authoritative and true not because clerics imposed it but because of the universal embrace stirred by its internally rational principles, which perfectly reflected the conditions and contexts that supported them.
Grotius and Lord Herbert quelled the dogmatic schisms of the theologians, defended Christianity against Islam and Judaism, and relied on the logic of modern science to establish that the Christian revelation was rationally certain. A major part of their intervention in religious discourse was the seminal importance they gave to the theme of the true. Both men claimed that Christianity was, indisputably, the true religion. They argued that its truth was derived from its universal standing as an inward instinct (not from the laws of science or the Biblical insight of clerics) imprinted by Divine Revelation (this ensured that it was not fully antagonistic to the Church). The true, in the work of both men, was inseparable from revelation and attached to the universal. Their quasi-Scholastic arguments cast a shadow that could not be ignored in subsequent discussions.
The Dutch-born Grotius articulated a conception of true religion in his best-known and groundbreaking work, De jure belli ac pacis (1625).31 A poem he composed in Dutch during his imprisonment in Loevenstein on the truth of the Christian religion (1620), however, might be more important in terms of the links between religion and the theme of the true. This poem, translated into Latin and transformed into a treatise on true religion after his escape, initially appeared in 1626 and took its final form in a 1640 fifth edition as “De veritate religionis christianae.”32 It venerated the idea of a universal religion and argued that the “plain consent of all nations” proved Christianity was the true religion. This universal true religion was inextricably bound to revelation (for “none of these things could be known without a revelation”) and served the ends of social harmony and political stability (for “truth was indissolubly linked with peace: where there was no peace there could be no truth”).33
Lord Herbert aimed for a method of discourse that could settle the bickering between various religious factions by appealing to the fundamental beliefs beneath their competing claims. To get to these foundational matters, Lord Herbert took the necessary step of making an inquiry into the epistemic status of the truth itself. In what is considered to be the first metaphysical work by an English philosopher, De veritate (1624, written in Latin), his longest and most important book, Herbert set out to “to examine truth itself” against those who merely asserted opinions (Scholastics, reformers, and skeptics).34 His investigation confirmed what was true was indeed universal, for “whatever is universally asserted is the truth”; further, it relied on a deity, “for what is universal cannot occur without the influence of the Universal Providence which disposes the movements of events.”35 All of this was derived from our a priori beliefs or “common notions” that our God-given natural instincts allowed us to apprehend.36
With only slight differences in style and emphasis, Grotius and Herbert located the theme of the true in the idea of revelation from God. Their focus on justificatory logic required that the true religion satisfy the standards of abstract philosophy. To defend Christianity on these grounds, they had to recast its ideas of revelation and divine grace as forms of knowledge. Establishing these foundations of Christianity as rational, revealed, and universal (and therefore true) provided Grotius a “good faith” to keep alive “the hope of peace” and Herbert a supreme religion that would “replace all others by including their basic tenets within itself, and by doing so would obviate the need for religious conflict.”37 Philosophic reason—always part mystical (supernatural) and part natural for Grotius and Lord Herbert—had delivered a coherent notion of the universal true religion that comported with our inner worlds and confirmed that human thought proceeded “from the efficiency of that reason impressed upon them, which reason is no other than what we call God.”38
Though Grotius and Lord Herbert tied Christianity more tightly to the idea of the true, the increasing obsession with the method of modern science and concomitant commitment to reason as autonomous and universal in the modern West was largely responsible for pushing philosophical discourse on religion even more deeply into the center of the matrix of scientific truth and knowledge. The illusory ideal of the modern subject as fully autonomous and on a quest for truth as rational certainty through coherence and logical consistency of argument was reflected in the modern conception of religion as a stable philosophical idea. Knowledge, on the logic of abstract thought, was justified purely by proper epistemological commitments. A feature of modern thought that sprung from this way of thinking is the idea that religion was a form of knowledge to be assessed for its validity on the standard of scientific reason. On the modern concept, the genus religion is a bundle of philosophically legitimate beliefs and justifiable practices about God and the world that simply arrived in different species. This theme is evident in a number of moments in discourse on religion, particularly its Enlightenment writings that eloquently treat the tension between philosophical reason and the natural grounds of religion. The work of Matthew Tindal and John Toland, for example, recruited aspects of this modern concept of religion and generally offered true religion as the perfectly rational, completely natural, and thoroughly universal form of Christianity.
The needs of the new self-regulating and self-determining modern subject, the extensive religious warfare and violent factionalism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the further weakening of ecclesiastical theology, and the discoveries of modern science inspired English Enlightenment figures to develop the theme of the true in relation to the natural and moral features of discourse on religion. John Locke’s argument for toleration reflected the Enlightenment quest for a universal ethic. Its effect was to press religious thinkers to deemphasize the concept of revelation, which had served as the central category for Grotius and Lord Herbert. Further, the logic of science and the demands of philosophical reason illuminated two insurmountable problems regarding the concept of revelation: it was neither rationally verifiable nor fully universal. Enlightenment thinkers, therefore, jettisoned the idea of revelation because, on the terms of their enterprise, it mitigated against the possibility that Christianity could be fully established as true.
Secondary literature on eighteenth-century discourse about religion generally contends that religious writings of the early Enlightenment were largely anti-Christian, anticlerical, and antiscriptural. They emphasize that religious discourse in the Enlightenment—counter to that of Grotius and Herbert—was obsessed with establishing scientific reason as foundational for religion, devoted to describing religion as fully natural, and invested in demonstrating the truth of religion from its reflection of nature.39 Though the major texts of this era were not monolithic, this is a fair interpretation of an important strand of Enlightenment writing about religion. The writings of Matthew Tindal and Thomas Morgan are exemplary in this regard: they remained circumscribed by the idea of the true
