At the Limits of Christian Humanism

Even as he has attracted little attention from historians, the writings of the determinedly heterodox Anglican clergyman Conyers Middleton incited a remarkable amount of critical response in mid-century Britain. Hume, for example, clearly read Middleton closely. Even more so than Locke, Middleton declared his admiration for Cicero’s moral philosophy. Middleton nonetheless alerts us to an alternative tradition of thinking about Cicero as an academic sceptic: that developed within Christian humanism, most notably by irenic figures such as Erasmus and William Chillingworth. On this reading, Ciceronian academic scepticism and Christian piety were complementary and mutually reinforcing: if the former recognized the limits of reason, then the Christian gospels provided what reason alone could not. Middleton’s biography of Cicero represents the most concerted, comprehensive attempt to present Cicero as an academic sceptic; and Cicero was a similarly presiding presence in Middleton’s deeply controversial theological writings.