ABSTRACT
A tract which explicitly condemned superstition, and in which superstition was characterized as the intrusion of the irrational into the true, natural, rational religion, the De Divinatione provided an understanding of superstition which could be turned against the clergy. Cicero's positioning of religio and superstitio in direct opposition to each other solidified a way of comprehending superstitio which was influential until well into the eighteenth century. After establishing the significant role played by the rhetoric of superstition in the heterodox discourse of the early Enlightenment, the efforts of John Toland, Anthony Collins and Matthew Tindal to associate De Divinatione with the fight against superstition, particularly by characterizing Cicero as an enemy of superstition and De Divinatione as his most explicit challenge to superstition, will be investigated. Anticlericalism was one of the defining topoi of heterodox writing within the English discourse of the Enlightenment.
