3 - Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion

Summary

Franklin did not overcome his inclination to disputation easily. But his turn to usefulness and a new classification of knowledge constituted a change in his state of mind. While prone to argument throughout his twenties, he had become aware of this inclination and resolved to redirect it toward the habit of philosophical inquiry. Rejecting the doctrine of his Dissertation, which denied any distinction between virtue and vice, he turned to an investigation of the virtuous life. Franklin's conversion from atheism to belief is the theme of the “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion” (1728), a carefully worded creed stating his “First Principles” of faith and morals, which he recommends to his readers in the Autobiography.

Whereas Christian theologians, in order to teach man's duties to God, combined a priori propositions of an infinite, supernatural Creator with the categorical definition of human beings as born with original sin and free will, Franklin confessed that he could not comprehend the God of Christian theology. Rejecting the a priori arguments of the theologians, he concluded that the first cause of the universe (infinite God) pays no attention to man, and he posited an array of divinities on a scale of being. He taught general providence (the order of the natural world) and the particular providence of lesser gods who participate in its governance. Deciding it might be useful, he worshipped and prayed, guided by poetic laudations, to these lesser gods who governed the world in the hope that he would be rewarded.

But Franklin, man of the Enlightenment, did not really pray to a pantheon of gods. Rather, as Walters and Anderson argue, Franklin's gods are ideals, or character models. In the “Articles,” Franklin rejected revealed religion and replaced it with a polytheistic teaching of ethical forms, which served as a natural guide for human happiness. Man participates in nature by his instincts and reason. The gods are competing images of the human good, born of human desires, subject to rational analysis, and accompanied by religious duties. Franklin performs his duty to the gods, his “Acts of Religion,” by a sentiment of gratitude and virtuous behavior, or using his reason in the consideration of the good.