MIDDLETON, CONYERS
(1683–1750)

Conyers Middleton was an English historian and clergyman; he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1700. He took orders in the Church of England and became a fellow of his college, but he had to resign his fellowship at the time of his first marriage in 1710. He held various livings but never obtained any considerable preferment in the church. The course of Middleton's life unfortunately provides several grounds for questioning his integrity and ingenuousness.

Middleton's first major publication was A Letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity between Popery and Paganism (London, 1729). His theme was certainly not entirely original. It can, for instance, be traced to Part IV of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), and there is even some suspicion of plagiarism at the expense of a little-known French treatise, Conformité des cérémonies modernes avec les anciennes (Leiden, 1667). What was remarkable was the force and skill with which Middleton traced the relics of the worship of Vesta in the cult of the Virgin and deployed passages from the Christian Fathers that excoriated as heathen such practices as the erecting of votive tablets or the use of holy water.

Daniel Waterland, in his Scripture Vindicated (London, 1731–1732), had attacked the deist Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (London, 1730). In 1731 Middleton published an anonymous Letter to Waterland, in which he urged that it was unwise to insist on the literal truth of every sentence in the Bible, and in particular ridiculed bits of the book of Genesis. His authorship was discovered, and during the ensuing uproar the public orator of Cambridge was heard to cry for a book burning. Middleton next wrote a very profitable Life of Cicero ; in this instance the charge of plagiarism seems to have been borne out.

After writing an Introductory Discourse (1747), Middleton published A Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church from the Earliest Ages, through several successive Centuries (London, 1748). Coincidentally, David Hume's first Enquiry, containing the section "Of Miracles," which later became notorious, was published in the same year. Many years later, in My Own Life (London, 1777), Hume confessed his chagrin: "On my return from Italy, I had the mortification to find all England in a ferment, on account of Dr. Middleton's Free Enquiry, while my performance was entirely overlooked and neglected."

There was every reason to compare the two books, for the tendency of both was to undermine belief in the miraculous. But whereas Hume was raising methodological difficulties about the possibility of providing adequate historical proof of such occurrences, especially in a religious context, Middleton was concerned primarily with the historical evidence actually available. His argument was addressed in the first instance to those, including the great majority of educated Protestants, who believed both that the occurrence of miracles was a guarantee of religious truth and that the age of miracles was now past. This position was obviously precarious, for where precisely was the crucial dividing line to be drawn? Middleton directed his onslaught at this weak point. It was, as Leslie Stephen said, "incomparably the most effective of the whole deist controversy." Although Middleton himself never ventured to question the miracle stories of the New Testament, he attacked the credibility of similar accounts in the early Christian church. In a series of damaging quotations, he displayed the credulity of the Fathers, including some of the most respected, such as St. Augustine, and even cited passages in which others seem to have been deliberately approving pious frauds. The impact of Middleton's attack would have been smaller on a position that was less inherently precarious. Arguments of this kind would not have been effective, for instance, with Protestant "enthusiasts" such as the Wesleys or with the Roman Catholics, who insisted that the age of miracles was not past. As a historian, Middleton displayed the faults characteristic of his period, particularly the naive view that stories must be either wholly and straightforwardly true or else just lies. His importance lies in the contributions he made toward undermining the arbitrary barriers between secular and sacred history.

See also Augustine, St.; Hobbes, Thomas; Hume, David; Miracles; Tindal, Matthew.

Bibliography

Apart from the works of Middleton mentioned in the text, see Sir Leslie Stephen's article on Middleton in the Dictionary of National Biography (London and New York, 1909), Vol. XIII. pp. 343–348, as well as his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (3rd ed., New York: Putnam, 1902), Ch. 4.

Antony Flew (1967)