Visions of Sodom by H. G. Cocks

Author:H. G. Cocks [Cocks, H. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Religion, Christianity, Social Science, LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies
ISBN: 9780226438665
Google: 15UtDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-03-29T16:14:46+00:00

The Nature of Lust and Vice

Many attacks on freethinking and its “atheistical” tendencies assumed that such beliefs had been adopted not out of intellectual conviction but from a desire to liberate the passions from moral and religious strictures. In that sense, debauchees were held to be “practical” rather than intellectually convinced “speculative” atheists. The views of Edmund Gibson and other reformers of manners epitomised the still-powerful seventeenth-century notion that atheism, infidelity or even popery might be adopted in order to satisfy lust and worldly interest. Though it owes a great deal to those assumptions, Latitudinarian moral theology represents a subtle but important shift away from this world view, and therefore a major break with previous interpretations of morality. Moreover, because of its immense popularity, Restoration moral teaching became one of the most influential ways of thinking about vice, lust, and morals over the next hundred or so years. The Anglican tradition of pastoral writing represented by John Tillotson, John Wilkins, Isaac Barrow, Gilbert Burnet, and other Latitudinarian divines, as well as earlier churchmen such as Richard Allestree and Jeremy Taylor, presented sin as in conflict with a human nature that tended toward reason and religion. If that was the case, then lust and vice took hold of the soul by clouding the mind and leading us away from nature. The result could be the indulgence of further excesses up to and including homoerotic acts.

For John Tillotson, William III’s second archbishop of Canterbury, it was lust and worldly interests that first caused atheism or skepticism by corrupting our nature, and not the other way round. Latitudinarians like Tillotson argued that belief in God was implicit in human reason and nature. Since faith and a moral life were both natural and reasonable, it had to be the “strength of men’s lusts, and the power of vicious inclinations,” that “do sway their minds, and set a byas upon their understandings towards Atheism.”26 Tillotson and others recognized in the traditional way that vice and lust originated in man’s Fall, but they also conceived of these sins as the unnatural extension of natural appetites, something that could occur if God’s assistance in reigning in the passions was rejected. In that sense, sin also inhered in the passion itself, the excess of which alienated the individual from God and therefore from what was asserted to be his or her nature. Lust in that view was not only the result of original sin, popery, idolatry, doctrinal difference, or irreligion. Given that, it became immensely important to command the passions and to reject the progressive incursions of sin. Anglican moral theology contained a twin conception of vice that followed from these assumptions: first, that in all its forms it had a gradual and degenerative quality, and, second, that it resulted from decisions taken by the individual sinner acting under the influence of his or her fallen nature that habituated them to wickedness. It was that which distorted our moral decisions. “For,” Tillotson said, “when men once indulge themselves

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