Anti-Atheism and Intellectual Change in England, c. 1650–1720: Between Ancients and Moderns

The role of anti-atheism in the transformation of early modern intellectual culture is set in the overlapping contexts of the enduring influence of the classics and their appropriation from Humanism to Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the emergence of ‘modern’ philosophy, on the other. The prevalent view that anti-atheism was averse to Enlightenment has often resulted in downplaying the contribution that English apologists made to intellectual change. However, this chapter suggests that anti-atheist discourse emerged from the engagement with modern philosophy and determined a process of re-appropriation and re-adaptation of the classics to the expectations of a profoundly Christian society. It examines how those especially among the Anglican apologist authors who engaged with Descartes and Spinoza, did so by tracing genealogies of modern strands of atheism back to the classical philosophical systems of the Stoics and Epicureans, thus eventually re-appropriating the latter as precursors of the crisis of modernity.