ABSTRACT
Intellectual and cultural historians have begun to reconsider the relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy as dynamic and symbiotic rather than static and oppositional. Prompted by J.G.A. Pocock’s observation that ‘orthodoxy generates its own scepticism, and scepticism has its own relations with orthodoxy’, several of the essays in a recent collection on heterodox writing of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries explore the ways in which ‘a defence of orthodox belief planted the seeds of its own undoing’.1 The self-defeating tendencies of Anglican polemic at the beginning of the eighteenth century are highlighted in Joseph M. Levine’s argument that the use of historical and philological scholarship to repel deist attacks on the authenticity of Biblical texts also validated a comparative method by which the universalist claims of revealed religion could be denied. However Levine provides no examples of how Anglican Biblical scholarship was actually put to heterodox use, and so leaves himself open to the risk of simply repeating fears amongst contemporary elites about the irreligious consequences of the popular dissemination of knowledge.2 After all, the exaltation of reason by the Cambridge Neoplatonists and ‘Latitudinarian’ divines was designed to combat the sectarian enthusiasm that emerged during the English revolution, but the High Church critics of the Latitudinarians repeatedly accused them of providing a nurturing soil for deist and other heterodox principles, both in their principles of natural religion and in the policy of comprehending nonconformity which they derived from those principles: ‘by an Universall Latitude, Comprehension, and Indifference to every Sect and Party, but that of the True Establish’d Church, they run into the common Herd, and
are Deists, Socinians, Quakers, Anabaptists, or Independents; Turks or Jews upon occasion, [and] take all to be equally Orthodox, as it suits best with their Interest.’3
