Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730

By Wolfram Schmidgen

Unnerved by the upheavals of the seventeenth century, English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe came to accept that disorder, rather than order, was the natural state of things. They were drawn to voluntarism, a theology that emphasized a willful creator and denied that nature embodied truth and beauty. Voluntarism, Wolfram Schmidgen contends, provided both theological framework and aesthetic license. In Infinite Variety, he reconstructs this voluntarist tradition of literary invention.

Once one accepted that creation was willful and order arbitrary, Schmidgen argues, existing hierarchies of kind lost their normative value. Literary invention could be radicalized as a result. Acknowledging that the will drives creation, such writers as Blackmore and Locke inverted the rules of composition and let energy dominate structure, matter create form, and parts be valued over the whole. In literary, religious, and philosophical works, voluntarism authorized the move beyond the natural toward the deformed, the infinite, and the counterfactual.

In reclaiming ontology as an explanatory context for literary invention, Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of an aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite. It is a book that articulates how religious belief shaped modern literary practices, including novelistic realism, and one that will be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about the relationship between literature, religion, and philosophy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812299908

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Infinite Variety

INFINITE VARIETY

Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Wolfram Schmidgen

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schmidgen, Wolfram, author.

Title: Infinite variety : literary invention, theology, and the disorder of kinds, 1688–1730 / Wolfram Schmidgen.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021003509 | ISBN 9780812253290 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | Literary form—History—18th century. | Order (Philosophy) in literature. | Voluntarism—History—18th century. | Religion and literature—England—History—18th century. | England—Intellectual life—History—18th century.

Classification: LCC PR445 .S36 2021 | DDC 820.9/005—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003509

Für Henning,

Bruderherz und akademischer Mitstreiter

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. Toward a Voluntarist Aesthetic

Chapter 2. Glorious Arbitrariness: Science, Religion, and the Imagination of Infinite Variety

Chapter 3. Energy and Structure: Remaking the Given in Blackmore and Pope

Chapter 4. Embarrassed Invention: Stillingfleet, Locke, and the Style of Voluntarism

Chapter 5. The Constructive Swift: Between the Hope and Fear of Decomposition

Chapter 6. The Providence of Gathering and Scattering: Dynamic Variety in Defoe

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Infinite Variety offers an intellectual history of literary invention in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that the religious, political, and scientific revolutions of the preceding half century changed the way writers thought about the relationship between order and invention. Jointly, these revolutions helped foster the sense of a disorder of kinds that challenged the hierarchies that had seemed to organize nature and society. This sense converged around the mushrooming of new religious kinds in the seventeenth century (Quakers, Seekers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Deists, Socinians, etc.); the emergence of political parties in the 1680s and 1690s (Whig, Tory, Country, Low Church, High Church); the booming discovery of new animals and plants from distant and not-so-distant locations; and the demonstration by scientists that new kinds could be created experimentally.

For many observers, these developments suggested that social and natural kinds might be irreducibly various, their creation arbitrary, and their hierarchies contingent. Human and divine invention appeared boundless. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, many thinkers began to ask some nervous questions. Were the kinds and the hierarchies we have placed them in real entities in the world or merely human projections? Could kinds really be defined by durable essences? Was form still the cause of matter’s organization or could matter make its own forms? What happens if an infinite variety of distinctions cannot be reconciled to the structural requirements of unity? Faced with such uncertainties, many concluded that order was not the natural state of things. Order did not inhere in things. Instead, it was imposed from the outside on social and natural movements whose inconstant energies could not be arrested. Disorder was natural and order a construction.

These realizations led a number of influential writers to acknowledge that the belief in a principled order of kinds secured by essential differences was misplaced. Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and others came to believe that reasonable principles derived from the nature of things did not drive invention. The will did, a truth that had become especially clear in the remarkable proliferation of new religious kinds in midcentury England. But even as this truth unnerved some of these writers, it made them contemplate a tantalizing prospect. Perhaps, they considered, literary invention could also proceed willfully, without too much regard for established principles and structures, whether they resided in nature or tradition. Responding to this possibility with fear, boldness, and hesitation, these writers began to contrive compositional strategies that created pleasures and modes of being that lay beyond the order of kinds. I call these strategies constructive decompositions. They rearranged the hierarchies that subtended the order of kinds. The superiority of whole over part, structure over energy, form over matter ceased to be the measure by which these writers shaped and judged their texts, from poems and letters to novels.

The intellectual backbone of constructive decomposition was voluntarism, a theological orientation with roots in medieval culture that emphasized the sovereignty of the will. Voluntarism played a significant role in seventeenth-century moral and natural philosophy, in such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke, Walter Charleton, and Robert Boyle. For voluntarists, the absolute sovereignty of the divine will was the reason why order did not inhere in nature. God was too distant, powerful, and vast to bestow his perfections on the little planet humans called earth. Being and goodness did not coincide. Voluntarists believed that the world’s creatures, their relationships, and their actions were neither good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly. They became so only through the sovereign imposition of structures and laws. All order was arbitrary and, because it was not inscribed into things themselves, lacked finality. Order was provisional, revisable, including the order of kinds.

This basic orientation to the world had several effects on literary invention, as the following chapters will try to show. I mention two important ones here. Voluntarists believed that God’s will was incapable of being restrained by principles or rules and that the act of creation was therefore free. This meant that there was no compelling reason why the world was the way it was. Because creation was free, everything that God created could have been created entirely differently. Horses could have had six legs, wolves horns. Planets might have traveled at different speeds. No universal value or eternal truth resided in the way things were, be it in nature or society. In this way, voluntarist beliefs loosened the normative hold of the given. The practitioners of constructive decomposition did the same, as we will see.

The second effect is related to this first one. Because they believed that order was arbitrary and did not reside in the nature of things, voluntarists expanded the value of the imagination and the scope of human invention. The speculation about other worlds and other modes of being, for example, was not idle. It illustrated God’s free will, and it could illuminate truths that lay beyond the stunted perception of human beings. Counterfactual thinking and imaginative experiment gained theological and cognitive standing under voluntarist premises. Nothing has to be the way it is also meant that human beings can freely construct the forms that shape their lives. The skeptical acknowledgment of the infinite variety of human forms gained currency in the seventeenth century. For the voluntarists that interest me in this book, this acknowledgment did not lead to a blind embrace of established custom and tradition. No matter how threatening the explosion of religious and political differences in the seventeenth century seemed to Hobbes, Blackmore, or Swift, they accepted the plasticity of being and relied on it to imagine transformative possibilities. This second effect adds the constructive dimension to decomposition.

As these two effects may have already suggested, constructive decompositions are indifferent to distinctions of literary kind. My study aims for a different arena of invention than the one identified by genre critics. These critics have long argued that the declining authority of traditional kinds fuels literary invention. Alistair Fowler observes, for example, that the general tendency of literature has been to move away from ritually determined forms and syntagmatically prescribed genres, and toward looser and more flexible conventions, toward more implicit and assimilated generic indicators.¹ Over the long run of literary history, in other words, we can see an increasing modulation, mobility, mixture, and proliferation of genres, which are transformed into various modes, subgenres, and countergenres. Many genre critics believe that the development of looser and more flexible generic conventions quickens in the early modern period and expands after that.² Fowler notes that this increase in generic experimentation has led some scholars to suggest that the kinds have undergone so many variations and historical changes as to be indeterminate. But this suggestion he firmly rejects: The kinds, however elusive, objectively exist.³ They may have no essences, as Fowler concedes, but the kinds’ mixed and mutable life is nonetheless governed by literary laws that help explain literary invention.⁴

Yet the world of established kinds, no matter how ingeniously mixed, does not contain the sphere of invention that I hope to access. This sphere was opened by a crisis that rendered the reality of kinds doubtful and made their arbitrariness palpable. The confidence that the kinds exist objectively was shaken in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This development certainly contributed to the increased freedom with which existing literary kinds could be combined. But while I occasionally address such combinations, my main focus in the following chapters will be literary experiments that spring more immediately from the disorder of kinds. While this disorder encouraged increased mixture, it also led to compositional experiments that took place independently of generic distinctions. Indeed, those experiments that were indebted to voluntarist thought pushed against the order of kinds to suggest possibilities of being that lay beyond existing hierarchies and distinctions, beyond what is given and probable. In such attempts an aesthetic of infinite variety defines itself against the order of kinds.

Arbitrariness of the given, freedom of invention: voluntarists did not receive these truths with unqualified joy. Their reluctant acceptance was forced by the historical realities of the seventeenth century and often flanked by blunt calls for the imposition of order from above. The use of these truths in literary composition could be attended by shame and trepidation as well as excitement. Voluntarism enabled, in fact, the combination of contrary impulses. It insisted on a vital and continuous relationship between a primary level of indeterminacy and freedom and a secondary level of structure and law. This relationship allowed many voluntarist thinkers to be simultaneously radical and authoritarian. Armed with two disparate yet interdependent ontological levels, the same writer could celebrate irreducible variety as an expression of freedom and insist on the dire necessity of curbing it, imagine utopian possibility one moment and fear the will’s arbitrary power at another. This is the complicated terrain from which the acts of invention in this book emerge. Nor do the complications end here.

The defenders of the Anglican establishment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, we shall see, contributed to such emergence. Voluntarism’s double-edged ontology rendered it useful to Anglicans who were worried—increasingly so in the late seventeenth century—about heterodoxy and so-called atheism. Atheist is the label often used by defenders of established religion to tarnish heterodox thinkers and religious kinds (Deists, Socinians, Freethinkers, Arians, and so on). Such atheists as Charles Blount, John Toland, and William Coward took advantage of the materialist and empiricist doctrines that the new science had sought to Christianize and used them to question the nature of the soul, the trinity, and the incarnation. Their strategy was one of materialist and rationalist reduction. At a time when Jesus’s status as the redeemer hinged on the ambiguity of his species (divine and human), when the mystery of the trinity rested on the simultaneous sameness and difference of its three persons (father, son, and holy spirit), when the soul was seen as a spiritual entity incomprehensibly wedded to the body, arguments that reduced these complex unities to matter or a merely natural identity raised serious political alarms.⁵

Those who defended the status quo after 1688 against the atheist challenges often wound up contending for a more complicated, irreducible, and even incomprehensible world animated by spiritual and material forces.⁶ They spoke up for the powers of mystery and spirit, but their advocacy was not necessarily politically retrograde or anti-enlightenment. Rejecting the heterodox idea that the world was an object of purely rational comprehension, many defenders of Christianity (including some new scientists) mobilized voluntarist beliefs. They denied that order inhered in nature, elevated divine sovereignty, promoted the idea of an arbitrary creation, and authorized the imagination of modes of being that exceeded the actual, the probable, the perceivable. It is this authorization—provoked by the atheist challenge and facilitated by the disorder of kinds—that assisted the literary inventions of such writers as Defoe, Locke, and Swift. An enlightened literary culture, I suggest, is involved with the defense of spirit against atheist reduction.⁷

These introductory remarks will have begun to indicate that the category infinite variety has a specific meaning in this book. It designates a view of the world in which invention is, in principle, open. Already existing laws, structures, and beings do not impose a reliable limit on what is possible or a useful limit on what is imaginable. The sentiment that the world is infinitely various was frequently invoked in the period I study, but in many cases such invocation was metaphorical. The world was infinitely various, that is, only to human eyes. God could see through appearances to a deeper level where the principles and rules resided that created the surface effects. Human beings could intuit or perhaps even work toward understanding this deeper level. When infinite variety was understood in this way, it was not an ontological fact but an epistemological effect. It was invoked when human beings marveled at the extent of the world’s variety while maintaining the belief that it was a principled variety, a variety that could be reconciled, in the end, with an ideal order. The world was not literally or ultimately infinitely various. It just could seem that way to us.

For the writers I’ll be addressing, by contrast, variety could not be reconciled with an ideal order. These writers assumed that the world’s appearances did not result from a divine recipe calculated to generate harmony and beauty—the best of all possible worlds. To them, God’s act of creation was willful, without elaborate plans for a complete whole, and this meant that perfections and imperfections were both freely created by God. Infinite variety was not merely a human impression that could always be moderated by linking it back to the ideal calculations that guided God’s creation. Imperfections could not be redeemed by pointing to the overall harmony of the world. Infinite variety was therefore real. It designated the endlessness of human and divine possibility, the potential and plasticity of being, fearful and tempting at the same time. It defined the world as an ongoing, unfinished process.

Given these implications, it should not come as a surprise that a range of thinkers criticized the voluntarist tradition. Voluntarism was actively opposed by such figures as Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Thomas Burnet, Leibniz, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and his follower Francis Hutcheson. They rejected the idea that order was not natural and sought to locate it in things themselves, which they believed possessed inherent value—natural goodness and beauty. Variety for these thinkers was always limited, even when it was a defining feature of God’s creation. I will stay in touch with this lively opposition throughout these pages. To illuminate the links between theology and invention, I will put voluntarist writers in conversation with More, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Edward Stillingfleet, and Alexander Pope.

II

Infinite Variety, like my previous book, Exquisite Mixture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), has implications for the history of gender, sexuality, and disability. I have not made much of these implications in the past, but I would like to take a moment now to foreground them. Broadly speaking, Exquisite Mixture and Infinite Variety attempt intellectual histories of the changing relationship between form and matter in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The belief in form’s superiority as a spiritual or spirit-like cause was still widely accepted in seventeenth-century England, along with its male gender. This view of form had been entrenched over centuries by Plato, Aristotle, and their commentators. It found its most widely known expression in ideas of sexual generation. Even in more popular seventeenth-century guides to pregnancy, for example, the belief that the male sperm was the more active, spiritual agent whose task it was to shape discordant female matter into coherent beings remained dominant.⁸ The theory of epigenesis—the idea that the embryo develops progressively without a guiding force distinct from the actual process of generation—emerges in the seventeenth century, but only in the eighteenth century did it come to be more widely accepted.

Nonetheless, the hierarchy of spiritual male form and earthly female matter came under increasing pressure in the seventeenth century. Among the learned and new scientists, the revival of atomism under voluntarist auspices contributed significantly to this pressure because it permitted matter to generate form. At the same time, the emergence of new religious and political kinds demonstrated on a much more practical, social plane that new forms could emerge if matter pushed hard. For Swift, Defoe, Locke, and others, this was also the lesson of the political revolutions of the seventeenth century: political matter—the people—was capable of giving itself new forms to live by.⁹ Even as many argued that God maintained matter’s motions, it was now female matter that created male form, not the other way around.

Infinite Variety traces some of the literary consequences of this shift in the relationship between matter and form. It is not entirely clear how much the male writers I will be dealing with were conscious of the gendered implications of this shift (they certainly were of the political ones). But that does not change the fact that they contributed to an intellectual sea change that elevated female over male agency. In this sense, constructive decomposition is not a male mode of invention.

Almost as obviously as form, variety was a gendered concept. Take Alexander Pope. Careful to restrain variety, he prominently associates this quality with women: Ladies, like variegated Tulips, show / ‘Tis to their Changes that their Charms they owe.¹⁰ Pope’s poetic skills, he makes clear, excel in the portrait of such variety, which requires some wand’ring touch, some reflected light, some flying stroke.¹¹ Still, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra sets a more instructive precedent for my study. For Cleopatra embodies an infinite variety so unrestrained that it transmutes defects into perfections, undoes the effects of age, and indefinitely renews unsteady male appetites.¹² As far back as 1832, Anna Jameson explained the representation of these powers in ways that resonate with my study. In Cleopatra, she wrote, Shakespeare was able to make the extremes of littleness produce an effect like grandeur—to make the excess of frailty produce an effect like power—to heap up together all that is most unsubstantial, frivolous, vain, contemptible, and variable, till the worthless be lost in the magnitude, and a sense of the sublime spring from the very elements of littleness.¹³ The formal logic Jameson captures—from the heaping up of various particulars to the sublime—is important to my argument about constructive decomposition. I find one expression of this logic in Sappho’s love poetry. As canonized in Longinus’s treatise on the sublime, Sappho’s mode of composition, I argue in Chapter 6, helps explain Defoe’s writing of infinite variety.¹⁴

The elevation of matter over form and the idea that order is not natural had another noteworthy consequence: these beliefs weakened the difference between deformity and form. Principled distinctions between the well-formed and the badly formed have no firm footing when there is no universal standard of form in nature, when the hierarchy of kinds is recognized as a human invention. If God’s creation did not realize an ideal order whose logic humans can discern, the difference between form and deformity can become strictly relative. For the writers I study, this difference is not secured by the nature of things; it is the result of human imposition and cultural variation. As a consequence, deformed beings cannot be treated as exceptions or wonders, as they had been for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From a voluntarist standpoint, deformities are not revealing or glaring flaws that have to be explained by appealing to nature’s playfulness, divine providence, the redemptive harmony of the whole, or women’s impressionability. They are simply part of the way nature works. And when creation is imperfect, as voluntarists believed, works of art are released, at least in principle, from the duty of imitating nature. They are authorized to go beyond what seems natural, beyond the limits of the given and the probable, toward the extraordinary. They may compete with nature. The integration of deformity into the way things are, then, not only legitimized a politics of deformity, as I argued in Exquisite Mixture.¹⁵ It also had important aesthetic effects.

I emphasize these effects because they seem to run counter to a narrative line that has often been favored by scholars of disability. The emergence of modern disability and its distinction between the normal and the abnormal is often tracked via a transition that occurred in the seventeenth century. Aided by empiricism and secularization, this transition happened when deformity ceased to be viewed as wonder or prodigy and came to be seen—less religiously and more scientifically—as error.¹⁶ The distinction between normal and abnormal was built on this shift. But as David M. Turner has pointed out, the idea that deformities are divine signs was not just resisted by science. It was also contested from within religious thought in the early eighteenth century. In part because they still reacted against the providentialist habits of the Civil War and interregnum periods, some religious commentators argued that the best response to human deformities was to consider them simply as part of God’s creation. The birth of four disabled children in a single family, John Dunton’s Spiritual Observator recommended in 1701, was best met by thank[ing] God who hath made the Difference.¹⁷ Though unfolding on a more broadly philosophical level, my argument shows that several defenders of the Anglican establishment also let go of the value differential between form and deformity and thus helped authorize an aesthetic of infinite variety.

The voluntarist acceptance of deformity in this period opened up aesthetic possibilities that did not contribute to the distinction between the normal and the abnormal, something that has been attributed, in particular, to the early realist novel.¹⁸ The one realist novel that I discuss at length, for example, creates ordinary, average, or probable realities only to realize the extraordinary, the improbable. Because voluntarists tend to see the deformed as an unremarkable part of the world God has created, they do not shun its artistic representation nor its contribution to literary form.

The process of constructive decomposition makes the deformation of the formed, of the kind, and of the whole central to the compositional process. This process is deliberate, but it often issues from discomforting states of mind. Many of the acts of invention I focus on are shaped by feelings of disability, embarrassment, or incomprehension, by a sense of being overwhelmed or stumbling into something, of losing or letting go of control. As we will see in Chapter 4, even Locke—not usually known for losing control—suffers discursive incontinence in his debate with Stillingfleet before he exerts his will and makes something out of his embarrassing fall into matter. Constructive decomposition is not a strategy coolly adopted by masterful writers who pursue certain goals. Such a picture contradicts voluntarist assumptions about creativity. As Blackmore makes clear using the analogy of divine creation, God’s willful act was not smooth. It was punctuated by lapses of attention and fluctuating levels of energy.¹⁹ Willful creation means not having a detailed plan, wandering focus, imperfections. Translated into the human realm, such a process of invention involves the unsettling (and exhilarating) experience of trusting energy and matter with the generation of form. I have not written a book about invention and disability, but the scenes and modes of invention I am drawn to do not easily fit an ableist account of authorship centered on intention and control.

III

Infinite Variety is organized around authors and their inventions—the ways of writing they contrive as they navigate the changing relationship between form and matter, the disorder of kinds, and the place of spirit. While my book contributes to a history of invention, it does not follow chronological lines. Though separated by over twenty years, Blackmore’s Creation (1712) and Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–1734) occupy the same chapter. My analysis of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) precedes my chapter on Robinson Crusoe (1719). Instead of providing an account that develops chronologically, I compare ways of writing, in poetry and in prose, that were influenced by different theologies and ontologies.

While my main focus is voluntarism, a more basic consideration should not be forgotten. I have in mind the circumstance that competing systems—Hobbist, Spinozist, Leibnizian, Aristotelian, Epicurean—became widely known in seventeenth-century culture and were actively debated. One indicator of how crowded the field of world-makers was, and how contested the conceptual territory, is the often puzzling proximity between different world-systems, which can shade into each other or be misconstrued for one another with some ease. Sometimes this happens for polemical reasons, but even when that is the case, a genuine potential for proximity often plays the enabler. Such potential might be attributable to the explosion of religious and philosophical differences in the seventeenth century, when ancient and modern world-makers entered the print market en masse and revealed or implied a confounding range of models.

I hope to do at least some justice to this crowded field, in which different ontologies jostle against each other, overlap, and diverge. I seek to reconstruct a voluntarist logic of literary invention, but I do not wish to establish the primacy of any one particular model over another. Even voluntarist theology, because it mediates between two different levels, can sometimes look like it combines two discrete ontologies. The most important thing about the period I am investigating is not the prevalence or ascent of one world-system over another but the joint contribution of various systems to a threatening and tempting sense of a contingent world and a boundless invention. This sense possessed both defenders and critics of established religion, rabid materialists and high-flying spiritualists, and it helped counterfactual, aesthetic, and fictional realms make claims on a reality whose constructedness became palpable.

I privilege the life, the liveliness of ideas, which provide the main thread of my discussion. My argument does not seek to show how a text makes sense in the particular contexts of its production and consumption. I am more interested in finding out how wider currents of intellectual history can help us connect ways of writing that stretch across several genres. This interest has committed me to reconstructing a logic of invention. Though this logic is not without tensions or contradictions, I will neglect opportunities for critique. My main goal in the following chapters is to explain how this logic works. I do not present an overly idealized, homogeneous paradigm, but the gaps, dysfunctions, or struggles that belong to any intellectual framework take a back seat nonetheless. I am more devoted to assembling than taking apart. My own writing is significantly vested in description, summary, paraphrase, and synthesis. Analysis in the following pages is almost always undertaken in the interest of constituting a logic of literary invention.

There is no doubt that such an undertaking owes more to Arthur Love-joy than Quentin Skinner, two major figures who represent different versions of intellectual history. Lovejoy’s work came under attack in the 1960s, when Skinner and John Dunn, among others, advanced powerful critiques.²⁰ The core of their concern was that Lovejoy treated ideas as if they could get up and do battle by themselves, independently of the particular contexts in which authors thought and breathed.²¹

The eighteenth century, of course, licensed such treatment. The personification of abstract concepts, for instance, is one of the distinguishing traits of eighteenth-century poetry (or one of its cardinal sins, as some romantics thought). I am tempted to ask: what happens to Skinner’s view when it contemplates an age that enjoyed depicting ideas (or books) as things that lived, breathed, and battled? But even apart from such qualification through past practices, Skinner’s contention that ideas do not have a life of their own is no longer as intuitive as it was fifty years ago. One important reason for this is the growing recognition of non-human actors in the humanities and social sciences. Responding to this shift and others, such scholars as Darrin McMahon, John Tresch, Heather Keenleyside, and Peter de Bolla have begun to revisit Lovejoy’s work.²² Perhaps appropriately for an eighteenth century-ist, I am drawn in a similar direction, though I am not interested in an intellectual history that is devoted to some autonomous realm of intelligibility. I believe that ideas make available orientations to the world that writers draw on at particular historical moments to shape practices that respond to problems—in this case, modes of composition that respond constructively to the combined challenges of atheism and the disorder of kinds.²³

My first chapter describes in more detail what a voluntarist aesthetic looks like. By foregrounding ontology, the chapter revises our arguments about literary invention in the early eighteenth century, which have privileged epistemology as an explanatory context. This context, I show, belongs to modernization narratives that I wish to step away from. I do so by drawing on an existential hermeneutic that embraces the historiographic sin of presentism and by showing how voluntarists think about invention.

Chapter 2 argues for the utopian dimension of anti-atheist writing. It shows that Joseph Glanvill, Samuel Clarke, Richard Bentley, and others pushed back against claims for the necessity of the world’s structures by joining the scientiic uncertainty about the order of kinds to two intellectual currents: a voluntarist theology and a skeptical tradition long used to defending established belief by emphasizing the world’s infinite variety and incomprehensibility. To make vivid the world’s arbitrariness, these writers cultivated the counterfactual imagination and asked their listeners to imagine different modes and kinds of being. I will address the cognitive value of imagination in the voluntarist tradition by analyzing the famous debate between Clarke and Leibniz about the theological foundations of Newtonian science.

Chapter 3 shows how two poets responded to the disorder of kinds. Paying close attention to Richard Blackmore’s anti-atheist Creation (1712) and Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–1734), I show that both poets criticize the idea that the order of kinds expresses divine wisdom and defines the horizon of human activity and value. To push back against such deceptions, Pope features poetic strategies that approximate nature and society, animal and human, instinct and reason, matter and form. Guided by an immanent ontology with Deist overtones, Pope lets such proximity rouse a divinely sanctioned alternative order that slumbers beneath the deceptions of essential kinds.

Blackmore’s poetic strategies, by contrast, are not guided by assumptions of immanence. Although he doubts with Pope the reality of our distinctions of kinds, Blackmore has a different goal. Rather than finding a structural alternative to the order of kinds, Blackmore seeks to show that structure is ontologically secondary. Recognizing the kinship between the sublime and voluntarism, Blackmore pursues an aesthetic program that values works of art when they allow us to recognize the structures of the world as arbitrary and provisional. Such recognition can then make way for more elevated realizations about the freedom of the will, the plasticity of being, and its dependence on an involved deity. Instead of immanence, Blackmore’s poetics is built around transcendence, around the finally joyful recognition that energy and will are superior to structure.

Having addressed poetic possibilities associated with Deist and voluntarist theologies, I turn in Chapter 4 to forms of prose. The forms I consider took shape in a debate between a writer associated with Neoplatonism and one suspected of Socinianism and materialism. The public disagreement between Edward Stillingfleet, the leading apologist of the Church of England in the 1690s, and John Locke, the then controversial proponent of the new way of ideas, shows a different aspect of the intellectual contest between defenders of the established faith and atheism. If Chapter 2 focuses on the alliance between established religion and new science, this chapter shows a prominent Anglican battling one of the important representatives of the new science. The debate shows how a disagreement about the trinity and essences prompts the invention of a voluntarist style. It features an embarrassed and irritated Locke, who struggles to grasp