A Politician, Bishop, and Dissenter Walk into a Coffeehouse
The year is 1713. A Politician, Bishop, and Dissenting Minister walk into Button’s, a trendy hangout of luminaries and celebrities like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and even a dashing “Gentleman Highwayman” named James MacLaine. As they take a seat and begin to sip their coffee, the Politician picks up a periodical and passes it around to the table: it’s the latest issue of the Guardian, which has just published a glowing review of London’s latest hit play Cato. The play, having premiered earlier that spring, dramatized Cato’s suicide after his final heroic stand against Caesar’s army at Utica. The Bishop nods in approval before turning to his companions:
Bishop: I gave myself the pleasure of seeing Cato acted, & heartily wish all Discourses from the Pulpit were as instructive & edifying, as pathetick & affecting, as that which the Audience was then entertain’d with from the Stage.
[the Dissenter’s face reddens in outrage]
Politician: But was Cato virtuous enough to go to heaven, even though he took his own life?
Dissenter: Those moral vertues and Heroic Acts and Endowments of some of the Pagan Princes and Philosophers, are as St. Austin calls them, but glittering Sins; For they who have not Faith in Christ to turn their Vertue into Grace, Unbelief turns their Vertue into Sin.
[the Bishop springs to his feet and pounds his fist emphatically. Coffee sloshes onto the table]
Bishop: it is very probable that God, out of his wonderful Goodness and Mercy, may apply the Merits of Christ’s Death and Passion to such Persons who never have had the Means nor Opportunity to believe in him.
Though the scenario here is invented, the sentiments were more than real in the spring of 1713 when Joseph Addison’s Cato took London by storm. Cato was the cultural event of the early 1700s, if not of the whole century—the equivalent of Hamilton for us today. When it premiered, John Gay wrote, “Cato affords universal discourse, and is received with universal applause.” And universal the praise really was, from the streets of London to the battlefields of the American colonies decades later. “Orange wenches and fruit-women in the park,” poet Alexander Pope described in a letter to a friend, “offer the books at the side of the coaches, and the prologue and epilogue are cried about the streets by common hawkers.” Later, Addison’s drama would play a crucial role in the American Revolution. Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or give me death!” was apparently inspired by a line from its second act and George Washington staged a production at Valley Forge to rally his troops.
Yet, in spite of its importance as one of the most staged plays of the eighteenth century, it has been all but forgotten today. If it’s remembered, it’s as a political play, the century’s source for some of the most quotable lines about the value of liberty and civic virtue, a key text in the American founding and political history of the United States. And that’s not to say that its popularity cannot be attributed at least in part to its politics. Though Addison himself was a Whig, it seems he was able to accomplish what we might today consider to be the politically impossible: finding common ground for opposed political parties. At its first performance, Alexander Pope recounted the wild enthusiasm from Whigs and Tories alike: “The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other.” So, although the play’s messages about liberty had potentially struck a bipartisan chord, it is also the case that, as John Loftis wrote in The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (1963), the “political meaning of Cato was and is still an enigma.”
Part of the mystery of the play’s popularity, I believe, can be explained by looking to the play again, past that obvious kinship between our current political world and its eighteenth-century English origins, to a far less familiar source—one that is easy for us to overlook today because it does not appear, at least on the surface, to correspond with any of our current issues or debates.
Addison’s play dramatizes a debate about the moral status of Cato the Younger that was already well under way. The debate, the broad strokes of which I myself have dramatized at the beginning of this post, centered around the concept, believed to be from Augustine, of the peccata splendida. Most commonly translated now as “splendid vices,” writers in the eighteenth-century translated the phrase as “splendid sins,” “glittering vices,” “shining sins,” “glittering sins,” “varnished sins,” “gilded sins,” and even “painted corruptions” and “glittering Abominations.” For a believer in the idea of peccata splendida, “classical morality” is little more than a contradiction. Adherents to the concept tended to come from the Calvinist tradition: because of the fall and original sin, man is inherently depraved, not capable of doing anything virtuous without God’s grace. Good works without faith, as one writer put it, are “empty moralities, raised on no other Foundation, than the scanty Goodness of the natural Man.” Thus, no matter how virtuous and heroic the ancient pagans may have appeared, because they remain unconverted, unaware of their sins, and without divine revelation, their own efforts and the limits of what they know through natural religion cannot lead them to salvation.
There were two main positions among orthodox Christians during this period: those who accepted the Augustinian position and a more moderate stance that can broadly be called the “latitudinarian” position. This later group still believed that revealed religion and God’s grace are essential, but their theology offered more theological “latitude”: reason and nature could bring someone born before Christ pretty close to Christian truth, enough for them to know how to act virtuously. Further, they took the “pre-Augustinian, Erasmian, and Arminian view that man’s will is free, that God’s grace is given to all, and that man can work with or against it as he chooses.” Certainly, the virtuous pagans of the classical world were at a spiritual disadvantage for having been born before Christian revelation, a fact which, many sermons from the period point out, modern English Christians would do well to remember so that they wouldn’t squander or take their Christian inheritance for granted. Indeed, it was a common rhetorical motif in latitudinarian sermons to shame apostates and the spiritually apathetic with the example of virtuous ancients like Cato and Socrates who had managed to outstrip them in holiness even without the benefit of Christianity.
Obviously, this idea of the splendid vices had been around a long time (we might also think of Dante placing the virtuous pagans in the first circle of Hell, also called Limbo, in The Divine Comedy), so what made the debate suddenly so important again in the early eighteenth century? A large part of it had to do with the threat of atheism: the rise of freethinking, skepticism, and deism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While, as Isabel Rivers has discussed in her two-volume study Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, there were no avowed atheists (blasphemy and heresy was legally punishable), there were a growing number of figures who adopted a subversive mode of thinking in which the truth of an idea could not be accepted except on the basis of reason. If Christianity were true, the logic went, then people need not fear such a method of inquiry.
Freethinkers, a term given to those who were especially interested in the rational basis of Christianity and began to look afresh at the relationship between religion and ethics, asked questions like: “Is there a viable religion of nature separate from revealed religion? Is the foundation for morals to be found in human nature or beyond it, in reason, the affections, moral sense, sentiment, the will of God, the nature of things, or some combination of these things? . . . Is the separation of ethics from religion advantageous or damaging to the latter? Is an atheist morality possible?” And often, in pursuit of the answers to these questions, they would turn to classical philosophy: Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, Socrates, and Cato either reasoned well enough on their own or acted plenty virtuously without needing Christianity. The ethical models of the ancient world, therefore, posed a new risk for Christians: either they had to be rejected altogether (the Augustinian/Calvinist camp) or they had to be appropriated for the Christian cause (as in the latitudinarian position).
This post is not the place to offer an in-depth of how this debate plays out in Cato (the appropriate place, in fact, is my current dissertation chapter), so suffice it to say that Cato was controversial because it adopted the latitudinarian view: beloved by some for its sympathetic portrayal of a great man who shows that reason can bring you within reach of Christian truth and reviled by others who saw it as an endorsement of suicide and stoic pride.
An anonymous seventeenth-century depiction of the interior of an English coffeehouse.
Walk into any coffee shop today and you are unlikely to overhear a conversation resembling the one I began with in this post. While Cato’s role in the founding of the United States is a recognizable genealogy and its dialogue about personal freedom still feels at home in our political discourse today, without these less familiar religious debates—is there a rational basis for Christianity? Is it possible to be a good person without believing in God?—we would not be living in the world as we currently know it.
