TOWARDS AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF NATURAL THEOLOGY

RUSSELL RE MANNING CENTRE FOR HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, MEDICINE AND TECHNOLOGY, RESEARCH SEMINAR 12 DECEMBER 2011 What is natural theology? In what follows today I want to investigate this disarmingly simple question and propose something of a tentative answer. In the first section, I want to consider the preliminary question of how best to go about identifying natural theology, that is to say I am concerned with the methodological question of how best to approach such a quest. In short, my proposal is that we have to be very wary of latching onto analytic or conceptual definitions of natural theology, which too frequently raise more questions than they answer and serve only to a fixed and inflexible framework on a dynamic and highly differentiated tradition of thought, or better perhaps 'way of thinking.' Instead I propose that the nature (as it were) of natural theology is best approached via the route of intellectual history rather than analytic or conceptual definition. In my second section, I will consider the background to a particularly significant chapter in the history of natural theology, namely seventeenthcentury England.
SECTION I - DEFINING NATURAL THEOLOGY

You might well be thinking at this point why am I making such a fuss about defining natural theology? Surely, we all know what natural theology is; indeed every theology undergraduate knows what natural theology is. James Barr, for example in his fine 1993 book based on his Gifford Lectures, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, doesn't hang around. Rather than worrying about the intellectual history of natural theology he simply gets straight on and defines it (on page 1):
Traditionally, natural theology has commonly meant something like this: that by nature, that is, just by being human beings, men and women have a certain degree of knowledge of God and awareness of him, or at least a capacity

for such awareness; and this knowledge or awareness exists anterior to the special revelation of God.'1

Barr is clearly referring to the long-established tradition of defining natural theology against so-called 'revealed theology'. This approach is typically developed in terms (already indicated by Barr's title) of the contrast between the 'two books': nature, the book of God's works, is the subject of natural theology whilst the book of God's words Scripture is the subject of revealed theology. The two, the implication seems to be, are different disciplines with different source material, and, it seems, an autonomy one from the other; they may or may not come to similar conclusions, they may, or may not, be given equal standing and the one may be anterior to the other, but we must never in Francis Bacon's words, 'unwisely mingle or confound these two learnings together.' After all, 'what has Athens to do with Jerusalem'?2 Significantly however, Bacon's estimate of the 'difference between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books preserved for us by tradition' marked a radical departure from the established practice of hermeneutical theology for which, as Foucault puts it, 'the truth of all these marks whether they are woven into nature itself or whether they exist in lines on parchments or in libraries is everywhere the same: coeval with the institution of God.'3 An important consequence of the Baconian 'sharp distinction' between the knowledge yielded by the interpretation of the two books is that it becomes possible to define natural theology against revealed theology in such a way that the two are presented as separate and autonomous disciplines, which then stand in some sort of relation one to the other be that complementary or antagonistic. For reasons which I don't have time to go into today (and anyway am not sure I have really fathomed [importance of role of hermeneutics see Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (2001)]), this natural/revealed contrast has firmly established itself as the essential starting point for an understanding of the character of natural theology. It is, however, not a helpful point of departure. By contrast, an historical approach to defining natural theology suggests instead that

1
2 3

James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 1.

Tertullian, Heretics 7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences 2nd edn. (Routledge, 2001).

natural theology is best defined not as a body of knowledge distinct from the systematic reflection upon revelation but an attitude or way of thinking about the divine. In this sense, what marks natural theology out from other forms of theology (other attitudes to or ways of thinking about God) is not so much the source of its knowledge of the divine but rather the manner of the thinking and a sense of what the point of that reflection is. To make hopefully a little more sense of this suggestion, let me turn, for a moment to in Werner Jaeger's words, 'the origin of natural theology and the Greeks.'4 As he puts it:
'the speculations of the pre-Socratics about the Divine displayed a decided singleness of character in their intellectual form, despite their diversity of aspects and the multiplicity of their points of departure. Their immediate goal was the knowledge of nature or of Being. The problem of the origin of all things was so comprehensive and went so far beyond all traditional beliefs and opinions that any answer to it had to involve some new insight into the true nature of these higher powers which the myths revered as the gods. In the allcreative primal ground of becoming, no matter how much this idea was further particularised, philosophical thought had always discovered the very essence of everything that could be called divine. All the individual features and forms of the gods with which the mythological consciousness had occupied itself became dissolved in it, and a new conception of deity began to take shape.'5

He continues to affirm that 'if we ask upon what this new evaluation is based, we find that the real motive for so radical a change in the form of the godhead lies in the idea of the All (to olon, to pan).'6 As a result, nothing finite or limited has 'any right to the title of divinity': a thought which in turn leads to the first searchings of natural theology. Natural theology, then, in this original sense is not simply 'talk about the gods' but the struggle to say anything at all fitting to the true nature of the divine. Crucially, however, this struggle did not take the form of an abstraction away from finite things but instead that of an engagement with nature; it is, Jaeger declares, a 'fact that whenever the Greeks experienced the Divine, they always had their eyes on reality.'7 Physics, metaphysics, and theology belong unavoidably together and it is precisely this holistic,
4

Werner Jaeger begins the 1947 published version of his 1936 Gifford lectures, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947) with the claim that the book might well have this alternative title. 5 Jaeger (1947), 172. 6 Jaeger (1947), 173. 7 Jaeger (1947), 173.

inclusive, synthetic attitude that is characteristic of that approach of natural theology that Jaeger describes as 'a specific creation of the Greek mind':
'Theology is a mental attitude which is characteristically Greek, and has something to do with the great importance which the Greek thinkers attribute to the logos, for the word theologia means the approach to God or the gods (theoi) by means of the logos. To the Greeks God became a problem.'8

This problem of God raised by the pre-Socratic concern for the absolute lies behind the classic distinction between three types of theology: mythical, physical, and civil. Augustine reports this distinction, which he attributes to the first century BC Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro, although it is clear that this is a distinction that Varro himself derives from a well-established Greek tradition.9 Augustine cites Varro's description:
'They call one kind of theology fabulous (mythicon), and this is chiefly used by poets; another natural (physicon), and this is used chiefly by philosophers; another civil (civile), and this is what the people in the various countries use.... As to the first of the three I mentioned, there are in it many inventions that are inconsistent with the dignity and the true nature of the Immortals. Such are the tales that one god was born from a head, another from a thigh, another from drops of blood, that gods have been thieves, and adulterers, and have been slaves of men. In a word, herein is attributed to the gods everything which might be attributed not only to mankind, but to the most degraded of mankind.... The second is that on which the philosophers have left us many books, wherein they discuss the origin, dwelling-place, nature, and character of the gods: whether they came into being in time or have existed from all eternity: whether they are derived from fire, as Heraclitus believes, or from numbers, as Pythagoras holds, or from atoms, as Epicurus supposes; and so on with other theories, the discussion of which is more easily tolerated within the walls of a lecture-room than out of doors in public....

8 9

Jaeger (1947), 4. Augustine, City of God, VI.5.

The third sort is that which it is the duty of citizens in states, and especially of those who are priests, to know and to put into practice. From this we learn what gods are to receive public worship and from whom; what sacrifices and what other rites are to be performed and by whom.... The first sort of theology is best adapted to the theatre (ad theatrum), the second to the world (ad mundum), the third to the state (ad urbem).'10

Augustine censures Varro for succumbing to the pressures of a social conformity in his endorsement of civil theology in spite of his obvious (to Augustine at least) inclination towards the natural; for his own part, Augustine himself is unequivocal:
'Some gods are natural, others established by men; and concerning those who have been so established, the literature of the poets gives one account, and that of the priest another both of which are, nevertheless, so friendly the one to the other, through fellowship in falsehood, that they are both pleasing to the demons, to whom the doctrine of the truth is hostile.... So then, neither by the fabulous not by the civil theology does any one obtain eternal life. [For the one sows base things concerning the gods by feigning them, the other reaps by cherishing them; the one scatters lies, the other gathers them together; the one pursues divine things with false crimes, the other incorporates among divine things the plays which are made up of these crimes; the one sounds abroad in human songs impious fictions concerning the gods, the other consecrates these for the festivities of the gods themselves; the one sings the misdeeds and crimes of the gods, the other loves them; the one gives forth or feigns, the other either attests the true or delights in the false.] Both are base; both are damnable.'11

To put the contrast in a slightly different (and less polemical) way, we might identify the three different types of theology described by Varro as indicating three alternative attitudes towards the task of theology. The point of mythical theology is to tell stories of the gods; it has an educational function in preserving the narratives of a particular religion tradition. What is important to note here is that in spite of the creative and imaginative character of this poetic theology, its primary purpose is to re-tell or re10 11

Augustine, City of God, VI.5. Augustine, City of God, VI.6.

narrate an established or given set of stories. This is theology as repetition. By contrast, the purpose of civil theology is resolutely practical; its aim is to maintain the pax deorum and to ensure that the institutions of the state reflect their divine origins. Civil theology is political and moral theology; it is as Hobbes put it 'not philosophy but law.' As such it is important to note that the primary concern of such a theology is with the secular and its primary purpose is to regulate human affairs in accordance with an established religious tradition. Against both these intentions the aim of natural theology the theology of the philosophers is rather in a sense simply to be concerned about God. This concern, or worry, about God is, in an important respect, gratuitous. Natural theology is concerned about God for its own sake simply because the attempt to think about God compels and invites free and unconstrained reflection. God is an irresistible problem for thought. At the same time, of course, this sense of natural theology is in Varro's terms best adapted to the world; God is of concern because the thought of God is unavoidable to the philosopher seeking to make sense of his world and his place in it. Such a natural theology is the culmination of the philosophical engagement with reality, an engagement that transcends reductive naturalism in the ventured hope that, in the words of the Cambridge Platonist John Smith, the whole of this visible universe be whispering out the notions of a Deity. Yet, as Smith continues, we cannot understand it without some interpreter within,'12 namely human reason, or logos that disclosive power that gives confidence that these speculations whilst always risked and never finally accomplished are nonetheless not in vain, but rather transformative and even in some sense redemptive. And yet, we should be wary of an over-hasty conclusion that this is pure human reason, unaided and autonomous. As a further speculation here, I want to suggest that a fourth type may usefully be added to this tripartite scheme of mythic, natural and civil theology. For want of a better term, I shall call this type 'faithful theology' (pisticon?) [amongst the alternatives 'fideistic' comes with too much pejorative baggage attached, which I do not intend, and 'pistic' just sounds too silly!] By this type of theology, I want to indicate what might be called the theology of the believers; it is, to follow Varro's formula, best adapted to the church (ad ecclesia). This theology is above all dogmatic or creedal; its aim is to explicate the contents of a religious tradition. In contrast to the mythical type of theology, this is not simply a repetition but an exegetical attitude best encapsulated in Anselm's famous
12

John Smith, Of the Existence and Nature of God reference from Louise Hickman

'motto' of 'faith seeking understanding.' Of course, this type of theology is often described precisely as 'natural theology' from Anselm's aim in the Proslogion 'to prove in a single argument the existence of God, and whatsoever we believe of God' (Preface) to Anselm's admission that the proposition 'God exists' 'is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us' (ST I.2.1) to name the two most obvious examples. However, the key distinction that I want to make between this type of theology -faithful theology- and that which I am designating as natural theology (in my stricter sense) is in the goal of the respective approaches. Faithful theology takes as its starting point a certain definition of God and aims through its analysis to remain true to its initial assertion; natural theology by contrast has no dogmatic starting point from which to begin and which serves to constrain (or perhaps better contain) its reflections, instead on this view natural theology is better characterised as the search for a definition of God, a quest which it knows can never and will never be fulfilled. NB: this designation would include the systematic theologies of Tillich and Schleiermacher, as much as the self-designated dogmatic theology of Barth, although both Tillich and Schleiermacher do at times more closely approach natural theology (in my sense) than Barth ever does. The key point, is that these theologies are, from the outset undertaken from within what Tillich calls the theological circle; on the basis of a commitment to a certain ecclesiology, rather than a commitment to revealed as opposed to natural sources of their theology. Another way of putting this, deliberately echoing Heidegger, is to characterise this approach as a positive theology, where the positum that what is given for theology is not primarily revelation, but faith (without of course denying the centrality of revelation to any form of theology). As Heidegger puts it:
theology itself is founded primarily by faith, even though its statements and procedures of proof formally derive from free operations of reason.13

This is, of course, not to deny the philosophical sophistication or rigour of Anselm or Aquinas (or of their successors in what is increasingly calling itself analytical theology) far from it. However, it is to suggest that this approach entails a significantly different estimation of the character and role of philosophy for theology. At

13

Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology and Theology in John D. Caputo (ed.), The Religious (Blackwell, 2002), p. 57.

the risk of committing heresy, let me remind you of Bertrand Russell's gloriously allergic conclusion to the discussion of Aquinas in his History of Western Philosophy:
'There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an enquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers of either Greece or of modern times.'14

Russell is, of course, undoubtedly mistaken in his dismissive view of Aquinas' engagement with philosophy as a kind of 'pick and mix' exercise of opportunistic selfjustification, combined with smug dogmatic indifference. He is also I am sure all here would agree wrong in his denigration of Aquinas' philosophical acumen. But, he does have an important point: Aquinas' starting point is not that of the Platonic Socrates, who begins in awe and wonder knowing nothing and whose philosophical journey culminates in the achievement of a learned ignorance, it is rather that of a faithful believer, whose sacra doctrina aims to treat 'all things...under the aspect of God' (ST 1.1.7) and which itself is subalternated to God's own knowledge of himself. To return to my previous distinction: whereas natural theology is in search of God, striving towards a definition of God, faithful theology is the attempt to understand a God already in some sense known (and certainly known to himself), it aims to expound upon its received and adhered to definition of God. Bertrand Russell is correct in as much as it does seem clear that Aquinas and the Platonic Socrates do have different estimations of the scope and ambition of philosophy within theology; this difference is partly, I suggest explained by my distinction between 'faithful' and 'natural' theologies. If natural theology is the theology of the philosophers, a lot depends clearly on the understanding of philosophy involved. My suggestion is that it is helpful at this point to introduce a further distinction, namely what might be described as two alternative philosophical tendencies within natural theology: the Platonic and the Aristotelian. These approaches can be characterised as on the one hand contemplative and
14

Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (Routledge, 1946,1961), 453-4.

imaginative, apophatic and aesthetic (Platonic) and on the other empirical and argumentative, cataphatic and scientific (Aristotelian). Of course, these are broad-brush characterisations and would require a lot more detailed justification than I have time for here, but the general outlines of this distinction should be clear enough and is certainly one with some distinguished defenders I mention three, in chronological order: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Paul Tillich, and Pierre Hadot. In a famous passage from his Table Talk, dated to 1830, Coleridge declares:
'every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it is possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure that no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are two classes of men beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea.'

He continues, laying his cards clearly onto the table:

'Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated and, as it were looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.'15

Ploughing the same furrow, Paul Tillich suggested a distinction between what he calls 'two types [Wege] of the philosophy of religion' the ontological and the cosmological.16
'the first, the Platonist and idealist method, approaches the divine through immediate consciousness or awareness of the transcendent ontological ground. The second, the Aristotelian or Thomistic path, tends to use evidence of the cosmos as the basis for an inference to a Divine architect. Augustine's books IX and X of De Trinitate serve as an example of the first kind that considers God through the spirit, and the Five Ways of Aquinas, which considers God through the world, as an example of the second path.'17

15 16

See A. J. D. Porteous, 'Platonist or Aristotelian?' in The Classical Review 48:3 (1934), pp. 97-105; 97. Paul Tillich, 'Zwei Wege der Religionsphilosophie' in GW 14 vols. (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlags., 19591974), V (1964), pp. 122-137 and 'The Two Types of the Philosophy of Religion' in The Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 12-19. 17 Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 32.

In a similar vein Pierre Hadot in his wonderful book The Veil of Isis. An Essay on the History of an Idea of Nature, distinguishes between Promethean and Orphic 'attitudes' to the relations between humanity and nature. Hadot writes,
'I shall place the first attitude the one that wishes to discover the secrets of nature, or the secrets of God, by means of tricks and violence under the patronage of Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetos, who, according to Hesiod, stole the secret of fire from the gods in order to improve the life of mankind, and who, according to Aeschylus and Plato, brought man the benefits of technology and civilization....Promethan man demands the right of dominion over nature, and in the Christian era, the story of Genesis...confirmed him in his certainty of having rights over nature....I dedicate the other attitude towards nature to Orpheus...allud[ing] to the seductive power which, according to legend, singing and playing the lyre give Orpheus over living and nonliving beings. Orpheus thus penetrates the secrets of nature not through violence but through melody, rhythm, and harmony. Whereas the Promethean attitude is inspired by audacity, boundless curiosity, the will to power, and the search for utility, the Orphic attitude, by contrast, is inspired by respect in the face of mystery and disinterestedness.'18

Whilst the topic of the place of theology in the thought of both Plato and Aristotle is clearly another massive one, let me just give a brief indication of how I propose the two tendencies identified above through Coleridge, Tillich and Hadot are related to their respective approaches to theology. Against the majority of modern and contemporary estimations of Plato's philosophical 'independence' from religion, which reflect more the prejudices and opinions of the commentators than of the subject of their interpretations, I suggest that Plato's philosophy cannot be thought of apart from his theology. Even this form of expression, however, is misleading: natural theology is not a part of philosophy for Plato it is what philosophy becomes in its highest and most exalted form. It is here that the crucial distinction between Plato's natural theology and that of his most famous pupil must be made. The central defining characteristic of the Aristotelian estimation of natural theology is as the culmination of philosophy in the sense of its being the highest (or first) part of philosophy. For this, Aristotelian model, natural theology is that part of philosophy that is concerned with the divine. For Plato, rather, philosophy culminates in natural theology in the sense that it realises its full
18

Pierre Hadot,The Veil of Isis. An Essay on the History of an Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 95-6.

character as human rational enquiry into the nature of humanity and the cosmos when it recognises that this endeavour is already theological. It is for this reason that it is possible to speak of the identity of natural theology and philosophy for Plato not in sense of a bringing together of two alternative (and potentially antagonistic disciplines) but rather as the acknowledgement of the fundamental interchangeability of theology and philosophy. The true philosopher is the lover of God. By contrast, as Aristotle develops his understanding of natural theology, particularly in the Metaphysics, it is clear that he regards philosophy as subsuming theology. For the Aristotelian natural theology, the stress on the principle of divine transcendence is redoubled, but with a curious domestication: the divine cannot be within the world -but- the divine is effectively thought of in terms of an external cause or unmoved mover as a thing alongside the world. It is here that we find the roots of the conception epitomised by Aquinas of philosophical natural theology as a handmaiden to sacra doctrina (or faithful theology) and the effective dissolution of what Tillich identifies as the Augustinian synthesis of the two absolutes of religion and metaphysics. With this suggestion, I hope to distinguish two 'types' of natural theology and to use the idea of the fluctuating fortunes of the Platonic and Aristotelian tendencies to account for both the variations in the manifestations of natural theology from ancient Greece to the present day and the fundamental coherence of those different varieties of natural theology in very different historical contexts. To anticipate for a moment my sweeping 'master-narrative' of the intellectual history of natural theology, my proposal is, in brief, that natural theology, as a way of thinking, has its origins in Greek philosophical thought and that from the basic conditions presented by the pre-Socratic cosmologisttheologians two distinctive tendencies emerge which are developed into two closely connected, and indeed frequently interweaving (often in the same theologian!), strands of natural theology. The first, the Platonic, is derived from Plato and brought to full expression in the neoPlatonic tradition, in both its pagan (Plotinus and Porphyry) and its Judeo-Christian (Philo, the Alexandrinian Fathers and Augustine) formulations. The second, the Aristotelian, is of course derived from Aristotle and then developed in combination with Stoic influences by the Roman natural historians Galen, Pliny and Cicero, and then, of course, later incorporated into a Christian context by Albert, Aquinas, and the later Scholastic tradition. To continue for a moment with these overly generalising comments, I propose the rise of a Renaissance Christian Humanism,

initially in Florence and then in England, can be characterised by a retrieval of Platonic forms of natural theology over and against the otherwise dominant Aristotelian Scholasticism. It is, I propose only by considering the early modern natural theology of the 'philosopher priests' such as Ray, Boyle and even Toland in the context of a revived theological Platonism, in both the Hermetic, mystical tradition of Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa, as well as the 'politer' forms of philosophical mysticism of the Cambridge Platonists, that a full assessment of the character of their natural theology can be given, and that it can be most clearly distinguished from previous and subsequent expressions. It is, indeed part of my wider thesis that the centrality of Platonism for natural theology in the modern period diminished significantly as the eighteenth century progressed, largely under the impact of an anti-metaphysical turn in philosophy leading to an uncomfortable for Platonic natural theology, that is combination of a strong philosophical agnosticism and an increasingly dominant empirical materialism, a position epitomised by David Hume. In this context, natural theology underwent a dramatic transformation, the full significance of which has not been properly appreciated. From the expansive and speculative philosophical theology of the latitudinarian natural theology, the eighteenth century saw the rise of the dogmatic, positivist and empirical natural theology of Hume's Cleanthes and William Paley. For the sake of completion, I would add that it is this Aristotelian natural theology (obsessively focused on the argument from design) that comes fatally into conflict with Darwinian evolutionary naturalism, whereas it is the remnants of the Platonic strand (importantly reinvigorated under the influence of German Idealism itself clearly a latter-day form of theological neoPlatonism) that is most able to accommodate the new science of evolution and indeed ironically to ensure the persistence of notions of teleology within evolutionary theory. The Aristotelian strand on the other hand tended more towards reactionary forms of non-scientific natural theology or, emboldened by the widespread early-twentieth-century critiques of all forms of metaphysical thinking, morphed into the rationalist forms of arguments for the existence of God that we know as natural theology within the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy of religion. As a final word, I propose that we remain confronted today with a choice between broadly Aristotelian and broadly Platonic styles of natural theology. On the one hand, the apologetic analytical natural theology of William Lane Craig et al alongwith the 'new vision' for natural theology of Alister McGrath are both

(predominantly at least) within the Aristotelian strand, whilst the anti-naturalistic proposals of the science-and-religion theologies of Jack Haught and Philip Clayton belong, along with the more recent work of cultural-theologians such as Douglas Hedley, David Brown, Mark Wynn and Mark C. Taylor, to the Platonic tendency. [5000ww]

Section II Natural Theology at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford, Cambridge, Deism)

The importance of the renaissance of theological Platonism for early modern scientific natural theology has not been sufficiently recognised. This is, of course, partly a direct result of the under-recognition of the significance of Platonism for modernity in general; a neglect that the unquestioning acceptance of the myth of the rise and fall of natural theology can only encourage. According to this inaccurate yet widespread myth, consistent with and indeed encouraged by what John Hedley Brooke has called 'the simplicity thesis' of the relations between science and religion, the rise of early modern natural theology (and its subsequent fall) can easily be accounted for as the result of a combination of the very real rootedness of modern science in Christian theology with the equally real inevitability of scientific autonomy. Summarised by Laplace's famous reply that he no longer has any need for the God hypothesis, the view of early modern natural theology as an inevitable yet time-limited stage in the development of an independent science retains a wide popular appeal, as testified by the success of Richard Dawkins' polemics against 'Enlightenment natural theology' and the ubiquity in undergraduate exam scripts of the metaphor of early modern natural theology as 'the adolescence of modern science' (the science it is suggested really is independent of its religious parent and yet for the time being at least remains content to stay within the safety of the parental home). On this view, early modern natural theology is nothing more than the half-way house between medieval intellectual theocracy and autonomous science. As has been made increasingly clear by recent research, however, the motivations and contents of the natural theology of this period are inseparable from the context of the

social and political concerns of this tumultuous era of Republic and Restoration, as well as the inevitable religious debates that such circumstances produced. Less attention, however, has been paid to the extent to which the varieties of early modern natural theology are indebted to a philosophical context within which a revived theological Platonism looms large. As Sarah Hutton notes, the neglect of the significance of Platonism for the seventeenth century amongst historians of philosophy is partly the result of an uncritical acceptance of the clamour of the iconoclastic 'moderns' themselves; a tendency that is reinforced in institutional and disciplinary specialisations. As she writes, according to the standard intellectual history of the seventeenth century,
'the key century in the story of modernity...Platonism drops from view....To give a recent example: in the seventeenth-century volume of the Cambridge History of Philosophy, Platonism figures as part of the intellectual background of the period. It is as if philosophy comes of age in that century shedding the classical props supplied by the humanists of the Renaissance....As a clear product of the ancient world, Platonism has been left, unproblematically, beyond the pale of modernity.'19

This exclusion of Platonism is particularly unfortunate as an appreciation of its role in the philosophical context of early modern natural theology is uniquely able to give the lie to the view of Enlightenment natural theology as simply the 'settlement' of Newtonian physics with a Christian theological supplement, or indeed as Christian theology repackaged in the language and logic and authority of the new natural philosophy. Instead as Stephen Gaukroger has argued (amongst a wealth of other things) in his recent book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685:
'The kind of momentum that lay behind the legitimatory consolidation of the natural philosophical enterprise from the seventeenth century onwards, a momentum that marked it out from every other scientific culture, was generated

19

Sarah Hutton, 'Introduction' in Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity (Ashgate, 2007).

not by the intrinsic merits of its programme in celestial mechanics or matter theory but by a natural-theological imperative.'20

Gaukroger's argument here is that 'the nature of the natural-philosophical exercise was transformed and provided with a unique vindication and legitimacy' precisely by the philosophical-theological development of a resurgence of a Platonic solution of theology and natural philosophy that had been held apart within the predominantly Aristotelian Scholasticism. Far from a desperate attempt to hang onto the coat-tails of the upwardly mobile scientific revolution, early modern natural theology instead becomes acknowledged as effectively enabling the rise and confirming the authority of the scientific culture of modernity:
'The combination of revelation and natural philosophy the two books superimposed into a single volume, as it were produced a unique kind of enterprise, quite different from that of any other scientific culture, and one that was largely responsible for the subsequent peculiarity of the development of science in the West. This peculiarity rests in large part on the legitimatory aspirations that it takes on in the course of the seventeenth century.'21

Echoing Tillich's narrative of the collapse of the Augustinian Christian Platonic natural theology provoked by the introduction of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, Gaukroger identifies what he calls 'the Aristotelian Amalgam' characterised by Aquinas' 'attempt to keep separate foundations and sources for Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology, but, given this, to attempt then to reconcile them in the form of an Aristotelian/Christian amalgam.'22 According to this account, the Augustinian synthesis of natural philosophy, metaphysics and theology is undone: natural philosophy and theology are prized apart and re-related back to each other through the mediation of

20

Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. Science and the Making of Modernity 1210-1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 507. See also: 'a good part of the distinctive success at the level of legitimation and consolidation of the scientific enterprise in the early-modern West derives not from any separation of religion and natural philosophy, but rather from the fact that natural philosophy could be accommodated to projects in natural theology: what made natural philosophy attractive to so many in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the prospects it offered for the renewal of natural theology. Far from science breaking free of religion in the early-modern era, its consolidation depended crucially on religion being in the driving seat: Christianity took over natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, setting its agenda and projecting it forward in a way quite different from that of any other scientific culture, and in the end establishing it as something in part constructed in the image of religion.' 23. 21 Gaukroger (2007), 507. 22 Gaukroger (2007), 77.

metaphysics, which becomes an autonomous (and in an important sense evacuated) third between the two. 'In Aquinas, it is theology and natural philosophy that have their own distinctive contents. Metaphysics stands above them because it is an abstraction from them, and as an abstraction it enables us to discern the distinctive features of the two domains. Aquinas uses it as a way of connecting theology and natural philosophy, and the skill comes in trying to develop these two in their own directions while keeping them consonant with one another.'23 Significantly of course it was Aristotle's philosophy both his natural philosophy and his metaphysics that Aquinas made use of in this 'settlement', both because he had to, on account of the obvious points of incompatibility between Aristotelian philosophy and the highly platonised Christian theology he inherited, such as the eternity of the world and the immortality of the soul, and because he could, given Aristotle's philosophical preference for empiricism and his metaphysical tendency towards analytical abstraction. The settlement held and there are very good cultural-political reasons why it did until disrupted by the renaissance retrieval of Platonism (and it should be noted, varieties of Stoicism and Epicureanism) in Italy in the latter half of the fifteenth century that once again attempted to mesh natural philosophy, metaphysics and theology together. Clearly, now is not the time to tell this whole story, it is enough to note that the result of this destabilising of the Aristotelian amalgam was the emergence in early modernity of various forms of resurgent metaphysics that in their different ways broke through the barriers imposed on natural philosophy and theology by the Aquinian settlement that are clearly visible in the Renaissance humanists but also in the self-designated iconoclastic moderns, in particular Descartes and Spinoza. It is in this context that the first great flourishing of modern natural theology in the late-seventeenth and earlyeighteenth century must be seen. With Gaukroger, I want to suggest that it is this interpretative framework, or intellectual worldview, that plays an important part in facilitating the emergence and consolidation of early modern science as the dominant authority. This is importantly different from Mary Jacob's view of what she calls 'the Newtonian settlement', as well as Michael Buckley's influential account of the origins of modern atheism in the fatal rush of early modern natural theologians to embrace the developing scientific natural philosophy. Both rather see early modern natural theology as consequent upon the rise of early modern science and, effectively as intellectually
23

Gaukroger (2007), 80.

vacant; for Buckley early modern natural theology cedes all aboriginal theological authority to that of natural theology (and hence to physics). By contrast, my suggestion here is that it is the Aquinian demarcations that are ceded by the early modern natural theologians in favour not of a reduction of theology to natural theology to natural philosophy to physics (with the inevitable dire consequences for theology) but in favour of a metaphysical natural theology that draws to various degrees on a richly metaphysical natural philosophy. The problem of the decline of theological authority is thus not to be located here but rather in a shift that occurs through the eighteenth century in which metaphysics was once again constrained, not this time in favour of an alternative authority namely that of received religion (although for some this was the case) but in favour of an emphasis upon the epistemological turn of Descartes and Locke culminating in the antimetaphysical empiricism of Hume and the equally anti-metaphysical 'critical philosophy' of Kant. The position of Hume and Kant, long famed as the destroyers of natural theology, is thus reaffirmed but with an important twist. Hume and Kant represent the completion of the demolition of a particular strand of natural theology, the metaphysically rich, Platonically infused natural theology of the seventeenth century, in the place of which emerges an eighteenth-century scientific-physicalist natural theology that imitates the anti-metaphysical natural sciences that it comes to depend on. For this sort of natural theology as Hume himself portrays it in his Dialogues in the character of Cleanthes God is thought of in terms of a slightly exalted first efficient cause and the focus of attention come to rest firmly on the application supported by various scientific insights of arguments from design to prove the existence of God. What is ironic here is that it is Hume and Kant's rejection of the legitimacy of such philosophical arguments to the task of proving the existence of God that coincides precisely with the resurgence of such attempts. What is lost here then is not natural theology - this re-forms itself as attempts within the anti-metaphysical strictures of Hume and Kant to counter their sceptical or agnostic conclusions. What is lost though is the rich metaphysical/Platonically inspired 'awe-struck' natural theology of the late seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. So, for example, Paley, far from an anachronistic survival of an already moribund tradition, represents a strikingly up-todate engagement with Hume. Paley's 1802 Natural Theology is throughout an extended

reply to Hume's Philo. For Paley, the existence of God can in fact be established on the basis of the evidence of natural design; the hypothesis can be confirmed via empirical demonstration. It is interesting to note that on this view it is not the Humean-Kantian philosophical objections that fatally undermine this project of natural theology, indeed in an important sense it is their Copernican revolution in philosophy that enables and sustains such a natural theology even to recent times, witness for example the debate between Richard Swinburne and J. L. Mackie. Instead it is developments within the natural sciences themselves and in particular Darwinian theories of evolution by natural selection that sound the death knell for this style of anti-metaphysical scientific natural theology by providing an alternative and scientifically preferable explanation for the apparent phenomenon of design in the world. How different this 'Aristotelian' natural theology is from the three main styles of (Platonic) natural theology of the late seventeenth century the Oxford 'scientist priests' of 'the Invisible College' (and later the Royal Society), in particular John Wilkins, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; the Cambridge Platonists and 'men of latitude', in particular John Ray, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth; and the Deists or 'free-thinkers', in particular John Toland and Matthew Tindal. An unexpected grouping perhaps, but what I suggest all three styles of natural theology have in common is a rich constructive metaphysics and a confidence to ascend to 'lofty metaphysical heights' thanks to their synthetic conviction of a deep unity of reality (estranged but not separated from the transcendent God upon whom all that is is dependent) and to their 'high' view of reason as so much more than Hume's 'little agitation of the brain that we call thought.' What the Oxford natural philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists and the Deists have in common, I venture, is such a conviction in the differentiated oneness of all that is the universe in an intimate participation in the ultimate, as well as a confidence in the capacity of human reason (variously aided by scientific and aesthetic or imaginative endeavour) to lift the veil of mystery to make the awesome reality of the divine apparent to all whilst, of course, maintaining the distinctive transcendent alterity of that God. Of course, they also differ markedly as to the extent to which their natural theologies are explicitly Platonic and as to the means by which they go about realising them. They also differ significantly as to how much of their projects can be salvaged by their successor eighteenth-century natural theologies; a factor which plays an

important role in their recognition within the standard myth of the rise and fall of natural theology in modernity. [7300ww]