The idiosyncratic natural philosopher John Hutchinson (1674–1737) and his followers have traditionally been dismissed as ‘Counter-Enlightenment buffoons’ (p. 2) by historians influenced by Whig history. Now, thanks to David Ney's monograph, we finally have a comprehensive study of the Hutchinsonians’ ‘quest to save the Old Testament’ from the devolutionary philosophies of history upheld by most radical as well as mainstream Enlightenment thinkers. Ney's book aptly repositions Hutchinsonianism in the context of eighteenth-century culture, characterising Hutchinson and his epigones as ‘great opponents to Enlightenment rationalism’ (p. 21). Concentrating on Hutchinson and three of his later followers – the Church of England clergymen George Watson (1723–73), George Horne (1730–92) and William Jones of Nayland (1726–1800) – this intelligently written book reassesses the role and impact of the Hutchinsonians’ ‘scriptural emblematicism’ (p. 264) as a strategy to show that God's hand is at work in both nature and history.
Given that Hutchinson regarded the degradation of the Old Testament as a byproduct of the rise of Newtonianism, Ney focuses on the Newtonians’ biblical hermeneutics in the first two chapters of his book, which are devoted to Isaac Newton and his associate Samuel Clarke. Ney observes that, whereas Newton was a devout albeit heterodox biblical scholar, he held a negative view of history as a process of corruption of a primitive truth – a truth to which he intended to bind the Christian Scriptures. Newton, Clarke and other Newtonians tried to ground experiential knowledge in mathematics, which, unlike historical knowledge, is not liable to corruption. Accordingly, in their attempts to protect the Old Testament from ‘the devolutionary force of history’ (p. 22), they turned to numbers, thereby employing chronological science to prove that the Old Testament was the earliest and most reliable testimony of the natural-philosophical and monotheistic ur-religion. The Newtonians’ approach to Scripture, however, reduced the Old Testament to a tool utilised apologetically to defend the revelation of the New Testament. Furthermore, the Newtonians’ ‘privileging of mathematics as the ahistorical grounds upon which truth is established … was also a decisive element in the erosion of Old Testament authority in eighteenth-century England. Christians struggled to find reasons to hold on to the Old Testament once they concluded that it was not – as Newton maintained – a wellspring of mathematical certainties’ (p. 25).
John Hutchinson provided one of the most original responses to Newtonian physico-theology and biblical criticism, as Ney points out in the third chapter of his book. Hutchinson argued that the Old Testament, not Newton's Principia, was the source of natural-philosophical wisdom. In Moses's Principia (published in two parts in 1724 and 1727), Hutchinson indeed drew on Scripture to formulate a version of corpuscularianism revolving around the conviction that matter is inert and only God can move it by deploying corpuscles that take the form of fire, light and air. Moreover, Hutchinson described fire, light and air as emblems of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Thus, his corpuscularianism resulted from his notion and use of the Old Testament as both scientifically authoritative and necessary for the fulfillment of the Christian vocation. In order to obviate the difficulties inherent to the Newtonians’ attempts at demonstrating the accuracy of Old Testament chronology, Hutchinson rejected Newton's conversion of words into numbers. Under the influence of Renaissance emblematicism, he recast Hebrew words as hieroglyphics – that is, as images concealing the divine natural-philosophical truth revealed to Adam and subsequently transmitted to Moses. While Newton's physico-theology and biblical chronology were based on the conviction that numbers could unveil the providential meaning of the universe, Hutchinson's emblematicism relied on the belief that select Hebrew hieroglyphs could illuminate the scientific, moral and providential import of the Old Testament. Later, as Ney explains in the remaining three chapters of his book, Hutchinsonians such as Watson, Horne and Jones applied Hutchinson's hermeneutics not only to select Hebrew words, but to Scripture as a whole. Moreover, unlike Hutchinson, they acknowledged that Scripture words were historical, but they contended that this did not compromise the status of such words as emblems of divine light. Thus, these Hutchinsonians argued that God's Providence unfolded not only in the natural order and in biblical events, but also in many elements of human history and society, including, among others, the Church of England.
Today, it would be easy to criticise and even ridicule Hutchinson and his followers for their failure to recognise the importance of Newtonian natural philosophy and for their peculiar scientific and hermeneutical theories. However, Ney's reassessment of Hutchinson's and his epigones’ works shows that Hutchinsonianism was an important strand of Counter-Enlightenment thought for several reasons, which Ney's book enables us to appreciate. The Hutchinsonians indeed rejected the mainstream Enlightenment claim that the order of the world could be inferred from first principles. Moreover, they aimed to acquire a providential knowledge of both nature and history, but they were aware of human limitations. Therefore, they affirmed the empirical grounds of providential knowledge while subjecting such knowledge to Scripture. Finally, in their pursuit of providential knowledge, the Hutchinsonians judged the words of the Old Testament to be central to Christian life as it ought to be lived in (providentially ordered) history. For these reasons, the Hutchinsonians had a momentous influence, particularly among conservative clergymen of the Church of England, well into the nineteenth century and can well be regarded as the most important High Church forerunners of the Oxford Movement.
Briefly, Ney's book has the merit of having rediscovered and reassessed a traditionally neglected, albeit important, intellectual current of the eighteenth century, thereby calling into question ‘the “Whiggish” assumption that the history of Christianity in eighteenth-century England is the story of steady and inevitable decline’ (p. 20). This book, which is written in elegant but simple prose, is accessible not only to specialists in the intellectual and religious history of Enlightenment England, but also to an educated lay audience willing to acquire a more nuanced and accurate understanding of eighteenth-century English culture than that promoted by Whig historiography and its offshoots.
