A discourse concerning ridicule and irony in writing (1729) — Themes and Context

Collins was animated by his many debates. Indeed, "he sought the storms." Otherwise he would not, could not, have participated in these many verbal contests. Throughout them all, his basic strategy--that of provocation--was determined by the very real fact that he had many more enemies than allies, among them, for instance, such formidable antagonists as Swift and Richard Bentley.[10] To survive he had to acquire a tough resilience, a skill in fending off attacks or turning them to his own advantage. Nevertheless, he remained a ready target all his life. Understandably so: his radicalism was stubborn and his opinions predictable. Such firmness may of course indicate his aversion to trimming. Or it may reveal a lack of intellectual growth; what he believed as a young man, he perpetuated as a mature adult. Whether our answer is drawn from either possibility or, more realistically, from both, the fact remains that he never camouflaged the two principles by which he lived and fought:

1. That universal liberty be established in respect to opinions and practises not prejudicial to the peace and welfare of society: by which establishment, truth must needs have the advantages over _error_ and _falsehood_, the _law_ of _God_ over the _will_ of _man_, and _true Christianity tolerated_; private _judgment_ would be really exercised; and men would be allowed to have suffered to follow their consciences, over which God only is supreme:...

2. Secondly, that nothing but the _law of nature_, (the observance whereof is absolutely necessary to society) and what can be built thereon, should be enforced by the civil sanctions of the magistrate:...[11]

There is very little in this statement to offend modern readers. Yet the orthodox in Collins's own time had reason to be angry with him: his arguments were inflammatory and his rhetoric was devious, cheeky, and effective. Those contesting him underscored his negativism, imaging him as a destroyer of Christianity eager "to proselyte men, from the Christian to no religion at all."[12] Certainly it is true that he aimed to disprove a Christian revelation which he judged fraudulent and conspiratorial. In place of ecclesiastical authority he offered the rule of conscience. For orthodoxy he substituted "a Religion antecedent to Revelation, which is necessary to be known in order to _ascertain Revelation_; and by that Religion [he meant] _Natural Religion_, which is presupposed to Revelation, and is a Test by which Reveal'd Religion is to be tried, is a Bottom on which it must stand, and is a Rule to understand it by."[13] Categorical in tone, the statement frustrated the Anglican clergy by its very slipperiness; its generalities left little opportunity for decisive rebuttal. It provided no definition of natural religion beyond the predication of a body of unnamed moral law which is rational and original, the archetype of what is valid in the world's religions.

His dismissal of revelation and his reduction of Christianity to what he called its "natural" and hence incontrovertible basis carried with it a corollary, that of man's absolute right to religious enquiry and profession. Here he became specific, borrowing from Lockean empiricism his conditions of intellectual assent. "Evidence," he said, "ought to be the sole ground of Assent, and Examination is the way to arrive at Evidence; and therefore rather than I wou'd have Examination, Arguing and Objecting laid aside, I wou'd chuse to say, That no Opinions whatever can be dangerous to a Man that impartially examines into the Truth of Things."[14] The church leadership saw in this statement and others like it not an epistemological premise but a deliberate subterfuge, an insidious blind to vindicate his attacks upon an organized priesthood. We can recognize now that his opponents oversimplified his intention, that they blackened it to make his villainy at once definitive and vulnerable. At the same time we must admit that he often equated the ideas of repression and clerical authority, even as he coupled those of freedom and the guide of private conscience.

The Anglican church was infuriated by these correlations, angered as much by their manner of expression as by their substance. For the faithful were frequently thrown off balance by a strategy of ironical indirection. Sometimes this took the form of omission or the presentation of an argument in so fragmentary or slanted a fashion that Collins's "Enemies" could debate neither his implications nor his conclusions. At other times he used this artful circumlocution to create his favorite mask, that of the pious Christian devoted to scripture or of the moralist perplexed by the divisions among the orthodox clergy. Finally, his rhetoric was shaped by deistic predecessors who used sarcasm and satire to mock the gravity of church authority. So much was their wit a trademark that as early as 1702 one commentator had noted, "when you expect an argument, they make a jest."[15] Collins himself resorted to this practice with both instinctive skill and deliberate contrivance.

All these methods, though underhanded, he silently justified on the assumption that he was dealing with a conspiracy of priests: hence, he professed that he had to fight fraud and deception with their like, and that such craftiness, suitable "to his particular genius and temper," was "serviceable to his cause." For these reasons even William Warburton, who had vainly struggled to be judicious, described him as "a Writer, whose dexterity in the arts of Controversy was so remarkably contrasted by his abilities in reasoning and literature, as to be ever putting one in mind of what travellers tell us of the genius of the proper Indians, who, although the veriest bunglers in all the fine arts of manual operation, yet excel everybody in slight of hand and the delusive feats of activity."[16] Whatever may be said of Collins and his achievement, one fact remains constant. He was a brilliant and persistent trickster whose cunning in the techniques of polemic often silenced an opponent with every substantive right to win the debate.

He seized any opportunity to expose the diversity of ethical and theological opinion which set one Anglican divine against another, "to observe"--as Jenkin put it--"how the gladiators in dispute murder the cause between them, while they so fiercely cut and wound one another." For Collins such observation was more than oratorical artifice; it was one of the dogmas of his near-nihilism. He commented once to Des Maizeaux upon the flurry of critics who replied to his statement of necessitarianism in the _Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty_:

I was extreamly pleasd with BP Hoadley, ... as it was upon the true and only point worth disputing with ye Preists, viz whether we the laity are the Calves and Sheep of the Preist. And I am not less pleasd to see them manage this controversy with ye same vile arts against one another, as they always use towards the laity. It must open the eyes of a few and convince them, that the Preists mean nothing but wealth and power, and have not the least ... of those qualitys for wch the superstitious world admires them.[17]

He applied this principle of divisive attack in _A Discourse of Free-Thinking_. There in fifty-three pages he transparently ridiculed contradictions which hedged three areas of fundamental religious belief: _"The Nature and Attributes of the Eternal Being or God, ... the Authority of Scriptures, and ... the Sense of Scripture."_ In accordance with one of his favorite tricks--the massing of eminent authority--his exposition rings with hallowed Anglican names: South, Bull, Taylor, Wallis, Carlton, Davenant, Edwards, More, Tillotson, Fowler, Sherlock, Stillingfleet, Sacheverell, Beveridge, Grabe, Hickes, Lesley.[18] What united these men, he insinuated, was not a Christian commitment but a talent to disagree with one another and even to repudiate themselves--as in the case of Stillingfleet. In effect, the entire _Discourse_ bubbles with a carelessly suppressed snicker.

The clergy could not readily reply to this kind of incriminating exposure or deny its reality. They therefore overreacted to other judgments that Collins made, particularly to his attacks upon Christian revelation. These they denigrated as misleading, guileful, sinister, contrived, deceitful, insidious, shuffling, covert, subversive. What they objected to was, first, the way in which he reduced the demonstration of Christian revelation to only the "puzzling and perplexing" argument from prophecy, the casual ease with which he ignored or dismissed those other "clear" proofs derived from the miracles of Jesus and the resurrection itself.[19] But even more the orthodox resented the masked point of view from which Collins presented his disbelief.

For example, the _Grounds and Reasons_ is the deist's first extended attack upon revelation. Ostensibly it is, as we have seen, an answer to Whiston's _Essay Towards Restoring the True Text of the Old Testament; and for Vindicating the Citations Made Thence in the New Testament_ (1722). In it the mathematician argued that the Hebraic prophecies relating to the messiah had been literally fulfilled in Jesus. But this truth, he admitted, had been obscured "in the latter Ages," only because of those "Difficulties" which "have [almost wholly] arisen from the Corruptions, the unbelieving _Jews_ introduc'd into the Hebrew and Greek copies of the Old Testament, [soon after] the Beginning of the Second Century." These conspiratorial corruptions he single-handedly planned to remove, returning the Old Testament to a state of textual purity with emendations drawn from sources as varied as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Psalms, the Antiquities of Josephus, the Chaldee Paraphrases, the books of Philo. His pragmatic purpose was to nullify the biblical criticism of historical minded scholars as reputable as Grotius, to render useless the allegorical interpretation of messianic prophecies. That is, he saw in the latter a "pernicious" absence of fact, a "weak and enthusiastical" whimsy, unchristian adjustments to the exigencies of the moment.[20]

Collins fought not to destroy Whiston's position, which was all too easily destructible, but to undermine the structure, the very "grounds and reasons" with which orthodoxy supported the mysteries of its faith. To do so, he spun a gigantic web of irony controlled by a persona whose complex purpose was concealed by a mien of hyper-righteousness. Here then was one motivated by a fair-mindedness which allowed him to defend his opponent's right of scriptural exegesis even while disagreeing with its approach and its conclusions. Here too was a conservative Christian different from Whiston "and many other great divines; who seem to pay little deference to the books of the New Testament, the text whereof they are perpetually mending in their sermons, commentaries, and writings, to serve purposes; who pretend _we should have more of the true text by being less tenacious of the printed one_, and in consequence thereof, presume to correct by critical _emendations_, serve _capital places_ in the _sacred writers_; and who ... do virtually set aside the authority of the scripture, and place those compositions in its stead." Finally, here was one who, obedient to the spirit of God's revealed word, rejected the fallacy that messianic prophecy had been fulfilled in Christ in any "literal, obvious and primary sense."[21]

But though the persona could not accept Whiston's program, he was not a mere negativist. With growing excitement he argued for allegorical interpretation. At this point the reader discerns that he has been duped, that nowhere has there been a denial of Whiston's charge that the reading of messianic prophecy in a typical or allegorical or secondary sense is "weak and enthusiastical." On the contrary, the reader finds only the damning innuendo that the two methods--the allegorical and the literal--differ from one another not in kind but in degree of absurdity. After being protected for a long time by all the twists and turns of his creator's irony, the persona finally reveals himself for what he is, a man totally insolent and totally without remorse. Never for one moment did he wish to defend the scheme of allegorical prophecy but to attack it. His argument, stripped of its convolutions and pseudo-piety, moves inexorably to a single, negative conclusion. "Christianity pretends to derive itself from Judaism. JESUS appeals to the religious books of the Jews as prophesying of his Mission. None of these Prophecies can be understood of him but in a _typical allegoric_ sense. Now that sense is absurd, and contrary to all scholastic rules of interpretation. Christianity, therefore, not being really predicted in the Jewish Writings, is consequently false."[22]

Collins continued his attack upon Christian revelation in the _Scheme_. In the two years which separated this work from the earlier _Grounds and Reasons_, there occurred no change in the author's argument. What does occur, however, is a perceptive if snide elaboration upon the mask. This is in many ways the same persona who barely suppressed his guffaws in the earlier work. Now he is given an added dimension; he is made more decisively rational than his predecessor and therefore more insightful in his knowledge of rhetorical method. As a disciple of certain Protestant polemicists and particularly of Grotius, whose "integrity," "honor," and biblical criticism he supports, he is the empirical-minded Christian who knows exactly why the literalists have failed to persuade the free-thinkers or even to have damaged their arguments. "For if you begin with Infidels by denying to them, what is evident and agreeable to common sense, I think there can be no reasonable hopes of converting or convincing them."[23] The irony is abrasive simply because it unanswerably singles out the great rhetorical failure of orthodoxy, its inability to argue from a set of principles as acceptable to the deists as to themselves.

Many of the clergy chafed against Collins's manipulation of this tongue-in-cheek persona. They resented his irreverent wit which projected, for example, the image of an Anglican God who "talks to all mankind from corners" and who shows his back parts to Moses. They were irritated by his jesting parables, as in "The Case of Free-Seeing," and by the impertinence of labelling Archbishop Tillotson as the man "whom all _English Free-Thinkers_ own as their Head."[24]

But most of all they gagged upon Collins's use of satire in religious controversy. As we have already seen, there were complex reasons for his choice of technique. He was a naturally witty man who, sometimes out of fear and sometimes out of malice, expressed himself best through circuitous irony. In 1724, when he himself considered his oratorical practice, he argued that his matter determined his style, that the targets of his belittling wit were the "saint-errants." We can only imagine the exasperation of Collins's Anglican enemies when they found their orthodoxy thus slyly lumped with the eccentricities of Samuel Butler's "true blew" Presbyterians. It would be hard to live down the associations of those facetious lines which made the Augustan divines, like their unwelcome forebear Hudibras, members

Of that stubborn Crew Of Errant Saints, whom all men grant To be the true Church Militant.

Those dignified Anglican exteriors were further punctured by Collins's irreverent attack upon their cry of religious uniformity, a cry which was "ridiculous, romantick, and impossible to succeed." He saw himself, in short, as an emancipated Butler or even Cervantes; and like his famous predecessors he too would laugh quite out of countenance the fool and the hypocrite, the pretender and the enthusiast, the knave and the persecuter, all those who would create a god in their own sour and puny image.

By 1727 several of the orthodox felt that they could take no more of Collins's laughter, his sneering invectives against the clergy, or his designs to make religion "a Matter purely personal; and the Knowledge of it to be obtain'd by personal Consideration, _independently of any Guides, Teachers, or Authority_." In the forefront of this group was John Rogers, whose hostility to the deist was articulate and compulsive. At least it drove him into a position seemingly at odds with the spirit if not the law of English toleration. He urged, for example, that those like Collins be prosecuted in a civil court for a persuasion "which is manifestly subversive of all Order and Polity, and can no more consist with civil, than with religious, Society."[25]

Thereupon followed charge and countercharge. New gladiators, as different from each other as the nonconformist divine Samuel Chandler and the deist Thomas Chubb, entered the arena on behalf of Collins. For all the dogmatic volubility of Rogers, orthodoxy appeared beleaguered. The moderate clergy, who witnessed this exchange, became alarmed; they feared that in the melee the very heart of English toleration would be threatened by the contenders, all of whom spoke as its champion. Representative of such moderation was Nathanael Marshall, who wished if not to end the debate, then at least to contain its ardor. As canon of Windsor, he supported the condition of a state religion protected by the magistrate but he worried over the extent of the latter's prerogative and power. Certainly he was more liberal than Rogers in his willingness to entertain professions of religious diversity. Yet he straitjacketed his liberalism when he denied responsible men the right to attack laws, both civil and canonical, with "ludicrous Insult" or "with Buffoonery and Banter, Ridicule or Sarcastick Irony."[26]

Once again Collins met the challenge. In _A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony_ he devoted himself to undermining the moral, the intellectual, and practical foundations of that one restraint which Marshall would impose upon the conduct of any religious quarrel. He had little difficulty in achieving his objective. His adversary's stand was visibly vulnerable and for several reasons. It was too conscious of the tug-of-war between the deist and Rogers, too arbitrary in its choice of prohibition. It was, in truth, strained by a choice between offending the establishment and yet rejecting clerical extremism.[27] Moreover, Collins had this time an invisible partner, a superior thinker against whom he could test his own ideas and from whom he could borrow others. For the _Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony_ is largely a particularization, a crude but powerful reworking of Shaftesbury's _Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour_.

Supported by Shaftesbury's urbane generalization, Collins laughed openly at the egocentricity and blindness of Marshall's timid zealotry. Indeed, he wryly found his orthodox opponent guilty of the very crime with which he, as a subversive, was charged. It seemed to him, he said,

a most prodigious Banter upon [mankind], for Men to talk in general of the _Immorality_ of _Ridicule_ and _Irony_, and of _punishing_ Men for those Matters, when their own Practice is _universal Irony_ and _Ridicule_ of all those who go not with them, and _universal Applause_ and _Encouragement_ for such _Ridicule_ and _Irony_, and distinguishing by all the honourable ways imaginable such _drolling_ Authors for their Drollery; and when Punishment for _Drollery_ is never call'd for, but when _Drollery_ is used or employ'd against them!

Collins's technique continued its ironic ambiguity, reversal, and obliquity. Under a tone of seeming innocence and good will, he credited his adversaries with an enviable capacity for satiric argument. In comradely fashion, he found precedent for his own rhetorical practice through a variety of historical and biblical analogies. But even more important for a contemporary audience, he again resorted to the device of invoking the authority provided by some of the most respected names in the Anglican Establishment. The use of satire in religious topics, hence, was manifest in "the Writings of our most eminent Divines," especially those of Stillingfleet, "our greatest controversial Writer" (pp. 4-5).

With all the outrageous assurance of a self-invited guest, the deist had seated himself at the table of his vainly protesting Christian hosts (whom he insisted on identifying as brethren). "In a word," he said so as to obviate debate, "the Opinions and Practices of Men in all Matters, and especially in Matters of Religion, are generally so absurd and ridiculous that it is impossible for them not to be the Subjects of Ridicule" (p. 19). Thus adopting Juvenal's concept of satiric necessity ("difficile est saturam non scribere"), Collins here set forth the thesis and rationale of his enemy. There was a kind of impudent virtuosity in his "proofs," in his manner of drawing a large, impressive cluster of names into his ironic net and making all of them appear to be credible witnesses in his defense. Even Swift, amusingly compromised as "one of the greatest _Droles_ that ever appear'd upon the Stage of the World" (p. 39), was brought to the witness box as evidence of the privileged status to which satiric writing was entitled. Collins enforced erudition with cool intelligence so that contemptuous amusement is present on every page of his _Discourse_.