Edward Stillingfleet (
April
17,
1635 –
March
27,
1699) was a British
theologian and scholar. Considered an outstanding
preacher as well as a strong polemical writer defending
Anglicanism, Stillingfleet was known as "the
beauty of holiness" for his good looks in the pulpit, and was
called by
John Hough "the ablest
man of his time".
Life
He was
born in Cranborne
, Dorset
.
He went at
the age of thirteen to St John's College, Cambridge
, where he graduated B.A. in 1652.
He became
vicar of Sutton,
Bedfordshire
in 1657.
In 1665,
after he had made his name as a writer, he became vicar at St Andrew,
Holborn
. He preached at St Margaret,
Westminster
on 10 October 1666, the 'day of humiliation and
fasting' after the Great Fire of London
, with such an attendance that there was standing
room only. Samuel Pepys recorded
that he couldn't get in to hear the sermon, eating a meal of
herrings in a pub instead.
He then
held many preferments, including a
Royal Chaplaincy, and the Deanery of St Paul's (1678), the latter
involving him in work connected with the building of the new
St Paul's
Cathedral
. He became
Bishop of Worcester in 1689.
He was a
frequent speaker in the House of Lords
, and had considerable influence as a
churchman.
He supported
Richard Bentley, who
lived in his household as a tutor for a number of years, from
shortly after his graduation in 1693. Bentley would later be his
chaplain and biographer, and describe him as "one of the most
universal scholars that ever lived".
In 1691,
at his request, Queen Mary wrote
to the magistrates of Middlesex
, asking for stronger enforcement of the laws
against vice. This was an early move in
the campaign of the
Society for the
Reformation of Manners.
At his
death Stillingfleet left a library of some 10,000 printed books,
which were purchased by Narcissus
Marsh and today are part of Marsh's Library
in Dublin, Ireland. His manuscript
collection was purchased by
Robert
Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer (1661-1724), and
passed with the Harleian Manuscripts to the British Museum in 1753
as one of the foundation collections.
Patronage, politics and views
Stillingfleet had to wait many years for a bishopric, a fact linked
to his disfavour at Court in the 1680s. He never, though, lacked
for well-connected patrons. The first was
Sir Roger Burgoyne, a barrister and MP in
the
Long Parliament, in whose gift
was Sutton, his living; followed by Francis Pierrepont, a
Parliamentarian colonel and younger brother of
Henry Pierrepont,
1st Marquess of Dorchester (a Royalist) and
William Pierrepont (like Francis a
Parliamentarian). These both offered him tutoring positions.
He was
also supported by Harbottle
Grimstone, who as Master of the
Rolls gave him a preaching position in the Rolls Chapel
.
The transition at the Restoration was certainly problematic.
Earl of
Southampton presented Stillingfleet to St Andrew, Holborn.
Humphrey Henchman,
Bishop of London, employed him to write a
vindication of
William Laud's answer to
John Percy (
alias Fisher).
According to Jon Parkin,
Stillingfleet was a leader within the Church of England of the
"
latitudinarians", the group of
Anglicans thus defined pejoratively. Latitudinarism as doctrine was
considered to have grown from the teaching of the
Cambridge Platonists, but in practical
terms conditions at the Restoration did not favour it. Quite a
number of its Cambridge adherents left an unpromising career in
religion for the law, or had to rely for patronage on those who had
done so.
Stillingfleet was most closely associated, in his attitudes, with
such as
Isaac Barrow,
Robert South and
John
Tillotson. They agreed, for example, on a literal
interpretation to Biblical
exegesis,
discarding
allegorical readings. With
Tillotson he favoured the so-called Erastian view, that the ruler
had great powers over the Church, from the days of 1660; after the
Glorious Revolution they became
Low Church moderates. With
Gilbert Burnet,
Benjamin Hoadly,
Simon Patrick,
William Powell and
William Whiston, he held some
High Church views also.
With
Thomas Tenison, Stillingfleet
and Tillotson preached on behalf of reason and
natural religion. They were broadly
Arminian rather than
Calvinist, took the stock of core beliefs to be a
small set of fundamentals, and in Stillingfleet's case supported
reconciliation with
Presbyterians.
Stillingfleet and Tillotson
In 1674 they met with
Richard Baxter
and
Thomas Manton, in an attempt to
draft a reconciliation with the nonconformists.
They were largely sympathetic with the new science of their times.
Stillingfleet did draw the line at the materialist tendency in the
views of
Edmond Halley, whom he
examined with the help of Richard Bentley in 1691, when Halley
applied for the
Savilian
Chair of Astronomy.
Works
A keen controversialist, he wrote many treatises, with a general
but learned concern to defend Anglican orthodoxy.
Doctrine and the Church
His first book was
The Irenicum, (1659) advocating
compromise with the
Presbyterians;
following a Latitudinarian approach, he there shows the influence
of
John Selden and takes a close
interest in the
synagogue as a model of
church structure. The philosophical basis was
natural law and the
state of nature. The arguments of the
Irenicum were still live in the 1680s, when
Gilbert Rule produced a
Modest
Answer.
It was followed by
A Rational Account of the Grounds of
Protestant Religion (1664). It included an attack on
Catholicism, and
Edward Meredith replied on the Catholic
side.
"A Discourse concerning the Idolatry practised in the
Church of Rome (1671) formed part of a controversy with the
recusant Catholic,
Thomas Godden.
The Mischief of Separation, originally a sermon, was
followed up by
The Unreasonableness of Separation (1680).
These attacks on the separatists among non-conformists prompted a
large-scale response from dissenters, many of whom were
disappointed with the harsher line from an Anglican who had in the
past held out an olive branch. His opponents included
Richard Baxter and
John
Owen.
John Howe took the
line that "latitude" was not compatible with a "mean narrow"
approach. Stillingfleet was also criticised from the conforming
side, for coming too close to the arguments of
Thomas Hobbes.
An Answer to Some Papers (1686) attempted to deal with the
embarrassing publication of papers, allegedly written by the late
King,
Charles II, arguing that
one true church was that of Roman Catholicism. In the ensuing
controversy, he issued
A Vindication of the Answer to some Late
Papers (1687) attacking
John
Dryden, whom he called a "grim logician". Dryden retaliated,
and incorporated the "grim logician" phrase as self-description in
his poem
The Hind and the
Panther (1687), which alludes to Stillingfleet.
Philosophical controversy
A Letter to a Deist (1677) was the first prolonged attack
on
deism to appear in English. It also engaged
with the thought of
Baruch Spinoza,
in
Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus, though he was named only as a "late
author mightily in vogue".
In 1697, Stillingfleet issued
A Discourse in Vindication of the
Doctrine of the Trinity.
It had three intentions: repelling the
Unitarians, shoring up the unity of the orthodox
trinitarians, and doctrinal defence of the Trinity. Under the third
heading, Stillingfleet took on
John
Locke, and his
Essay on Human
Understanding.
Stillingfleet engaged in a debate through correspondence (later
published) with Locke. He argued in favor of
dualism, and claimed that
Locke's
Essay argued against dualism as he understood it.
He also considered that the
epistemology of the
Essay opened the
door to
Unitarianism. Locke himself had
taken an interest in Stillingfleet (with
James Tyrrell and
Sylvester Brounower) from 1681.
The controversy drew in the playwright
Catherine Cockburn, who wrote in defence
of Locke, but to the detriment of her career as author.
Antiquarian scholarship
Origines Sacrae (1663) began with a comprehensive analysis
of flaws in ancient historians, as a way of defending the account
in the
Book of Genesis. It
argued against the
Pre-Adamite theories
of
Isaac La Peyrère, and took
a very critical line with the older theories of ancient British
origins, and the writings of
Annius of
Viterbo.
Another work going back to the roots was
Origines Britannicae,
or Antiquities of the British Churches.
The
Discourse of the True Antiquity of London appeared in 1704
and was a work of high scholarship on Roman London
; it however ignored the new archaeological evidence
that was available but not yet in literary form.
Notes
Further reading
- Robert Todd Carroll, The Common-Sense Philosophy of
Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, 1635-1699 (1975)
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