God and the Rights of Men - by Michelle Carlisle

 “The substitution of the word nature instead of a more intelligible phrase, the first cause, or simply God, is a mere play on words” (Wollstonecraft, Revs 1789).

     Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, is most famous for her inaugural advocacy of women’s rights.  The majority of Wollstonecraftian literature, however, doesn’t exclusively involve women (Sapiro, 1).  Throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the political aspect of Wollstonecraft’s writing was either minimized to only highlight her feminism or overlooked altogether.  Fortunately, recent scholarship has given more credit to Mary Wollstonecraft as a political philosopher.  Researchers such as Lyndall Gordon, Barbara Taylor, Virginia Sapiro, Natalie Taylor and Eileen Botting have recognized Wollstonecraft as an intellectual concerned with a broad assortment of issues.  We are now more apt to realize how, throughout her works, Wollstonecraft boldly confronts a vast array of political issues that characterized the late 18th and early 19th century.

     Even in light of this renewed appreciation as a political theorist, our understanding of Mary Wollstonecraft’s philosophy may still be falling short.  It doesn’t require much deliberation to notice the frequency with which Wollstonecraft refers to God in her writing.  In our “religiously liberated” modern western society, we have a tendency to secularize everything.  As a result, some of the religiosity of great thinkers from the past becomes lost.  Subsequently, we may overlook the fact that Mary Wollstonecraft was a profoundly spiritual writer.   Most of her ideas about politics and society directly involved the relationship of mankind to the Creator.   In fact, Wollstonecraft’s entire philosophy on human rights is profoundly grounded in theology.  Her very concept of why humans should have any rights at all necessarily stems from belief in God as the creator of humanity.

     Wollstonecraft’s most notable reflections on the issue of human rights are articulated in her political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Men.  It was written in 1790, two years before her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).  Both of these pieces enclose powerful ideas on concepts like the status of citizenship, arbitrary hierarchies of power, the nature of tyranny, and the universal quality of virtue.  Historically, however, A Vindication of the Rights of Men has been underappreciated and under-credited, largely because of the long-reaching impact of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The Rights of Men is Wollstonecraft’s part in a fascinating series of commentaries on the French Revolution.  It was her first overtly political text, and it moved her from “obscurity into fame” (Waters, 124).  It was written as a rejoinder to the moral debate about the French Revolution between political philosophers Edmund Burke and Dr. Richard Price, and all three texts are profoundly grounded in Christian theology.

     Several scholars, such as Taylor and Sapiro, have noticed the strong presence of religion in Wollstonecraft’s works.  In her book A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992), Sapiro gives specific attention to Wollstonecraft’s conception of God:  “The place to begin is where Wollstonecraft herself did:  with the First Cause, God, or Nature” (43).  She explains that Wollstonecraft’s theological beliefs provided the basis for her political and social theories, and goes on to explore her personal religious beliefs and life experiences.  Barbara Taylor similarly explores Wollstonecraft’s religious convictions in her book, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003).  She devotes an entire chapter, entitled “For the Love of God,” to the role of Wollstonecraft’s religion in her feminism (95).  Both Sapiro and Taylor’s research, however, focus on Wollstonecraft’s personal life and religiosity.  While individual life experiences and evolving religious convictions may sculpt a writer’s political views, the applicability and the relevance of a writer’s political theories most certainly does not hinge on the reception or public interpretation of their personal life.  The purpose of this essay is not to explore Mary Wollstonecraft’s personal beliefs about God.  Instead, this essay contends to illustrate how Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men presents a theory on human rights that is inexorably based in Christian theology.  Against the backdrop of Burke’s conventional religiosity and Price’s fervent spirituality, The Rights of Men illustrates how central concepts like reason, justice, virtue, and equality all logically and necessarily stem from belief in a Creator.  In emphasizing the theological foundations of this work’s argument for human rights, this paper contributes to the growing literature on Mary Wollstonecraft’s religiosity and vindicates her role as a political theorist whose theologized commitments helped shape the development of modern human rights theory.

The Historical Framework:  Burke and Price

     In order to more fully understand Wollstonecraft’s text theologically, it is necessary and desirable to begin by examining the theology of the documents that stirred her to write in the first place.  The Rights of Men is written as a public letter in response to Edmund Burke’s famous criticism of the French Revolution.  Burke published his pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in 1970.  It was relatively early in the Revolution:  the Bastille had been stormed and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had been published the previous year.  Before writing the Reflections, Burke had already enjoyed a long career as a statesman of the Whig party.  He was known for his advocacy and support of the American Revolution, so his condemnation of the French Revolution, especially so early into the conflict, was particularly compelling.  Wollstonecraft was the first to counter his conservative ideas, penning her response less than a month after Burke’s work was published (124, Waters).

     Burke’s essay is written as a letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont, a young Frenchman who had visited the Burke family in 1785.  He had written to ask Burke for reassurance that “the French were worthy of the liberty that their Revolution was bringing them” (Canavan, 2).  After being spurred by Dr. Richard Price, a Dissenting minister who praised the Revolution, Burke responded to Depont in a highly rhetorical letter that was worded to address the entire British public.  Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France stands today as the most famous criticism of the French Revolution. It centers on the value of a stable society and focuses on the merit in tradition and class organization (Waters, 128).  Because the French Revolution was based upon a political ideology, “Burke found himself obliged for the first time to organize his own previous beliefs about God, man, and society into a coherent political countertheory” (Canavan, 3).

     One of Burke’s biggest motivations for writing against the Revolution in France was to prevent a similar uprising in Britain:  “Whenever our neighbor’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.  Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security” (92, Reflections).  He begins with a criticism of Dr. Price’s sermon, denouncing the inclusion of political agendas in religious sermons:  “No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.  The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties” (94, Reflections). 

     Additionally, Burke emphasized the concepts of heredity and inheritance as a natural and beneficial to a country’s wellbeing.  “We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and a house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.  This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it" (119, Reflections).  Burke upholds hierarchical political structure as natural, an entity above human reason and reflection.  He supports primogeniture, and transmission of wealth and property through the family line.  Burke praises the nature of inheritance, writing that “the institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the same course and order” (120).  In Burke’s romanticized view, he attributes nearly everything good, even God’s favor, to the long standing social traditions of English society.

     Burke’s concept of the rights of men stands in stark contrast with Dr. Price’s liberal, individualistic view:  “to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state… I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other” (150).  Burke views a hierarchical, class-oriented society as the only truly civil society.  Therefore, the only sensible concept of a man’s “rights” is defined by his social existence.  Any “metaphysic rights” or “primitive rights of men” undergo such a “variety of refractions and reflections,” that it becomes nonsensical to talk of them as if they continued, undisturbed, in their original direction.  Burke says that “the nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction” can serve as an accurate explanation of man’s primitive nature (153). 

     Burke points to the chaos in France as evidence for his theory.  According to Burke, “the basic political right is the right to be governed well, not the right to govern oneself” (Canavan, 13).  The way for men to achieve reason is to keep themselves “in subordination to and conformity with the law of God,” and this includes subordinating to the authority that God has placed in the social order (Canavan, 12).  He viewed the class stratification as something completely natural and respectable; according to Burke, the state system was created for the rational and moral end of serving its people, and it is ultimately ordained by God.  This leads to the conclusion that some members of society are simply destined to be in the lower class:  “when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice” (372).  Here, his theory of social justification is dependent upon a divine Creator, an eternal existence, and a heavenly retribution.

      Wollstonecraft’s impassioned and speedy reply to Burke’s Reflections is largely indebted to his targeting of Dr. Richard Price in the letter.  Dr. Price was the minister to a community of Rational Dissenters, or Unitarians as they became known (Taylor, 103).  Rational Dissent was a form of Protestant Nonconformity, and its supporters were mostly of the well-educated middle class.  Price was born in Wales in 1723, and gained fame as a supporter of both the American and French revolutions.  According to Barbara Taylor, Price’s Rational Dissent was based upon a “benign Supreme Being with a judicious regard for all His creatures and no taste for hellfire” (103).  Price’s view of the Creator’s benevolence led him to be a champion of individual rights and individual reason.  In his Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), the fiery political sermon to which Burke refers in the Reflections, Price states that “every man ought to be left to follow his conscience” because only then does he truly “act virtuously.”  Clearly, this stands in direct opposition to the Burkean view of virtue:  to Burke, virtue is attained by submission to divine reason, and therefore, submission to the existing civil authority.

In his sermon, Price compares the French Revolution to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, praising the spread of liberty and happiness all over the world. Price is most noteworthy for his encouragement of freedom of thought, political reform, natural rights and self-government.  Unlike Burke, who sees a practiced and stable civil government as most desirable to God, Price sees the divine perfection of society as attainable through social justice:  “our blessed Saviour… taught the obligation to love all mankind and recommended universal benevolence as (next to the love of God) our first duty… an instance of incomparable wisdom and goodness in His instructions” (Discourse, 12).  Whereas Burke champions a rational government as being in line with God’s will, Price views “the most important instance of the imperfect state” as “the inequality of our representation” (11).  Price says, “doctrines which imply that God made mankind to be oppressed and plundered… are no less a blasphemy against him, than an insult on common sense” (10).  Burke and Price arrive at opposite conclusions regarding the Revolution in France.  It’s worthy to note, however, that they both base their political arguments on their theological reflections – they look to God as the foundation for their theories.

Price and Wollstonecraft vs. Burke:  Reason and Law

     Richard Price’s doctrines influenced Mary Wollstonecraft years before she became a political writer.  Price was the presiding spirit at the time of Wollstonecraft’s arrival at Newington Green, where she established a school with her sister Eliza in 1784 (Gordon, 40).  Wollstonecraft attended his politically charged sermons, based, at the time, mostly on the American Revolution.  Historian Barbara Taylor wrote that, during her time at Newington Green, Wollstonecraft came to “admire his personal and political integrity” (103).

The Rational Dissent that Price championed helped shape the theological foundation behind Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men.   Her conception of God in the Rights of Men draws many parallels with Price’s doctrine, especially when concerning human rights.  After all, her essay is a validation of the ideology behind the French Revolution – essentially a defense of Price in opposition to Burke’s conservative criticism.  Both Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men directly reference Price’s 1789 sermon, Discourse on the Love of our Country.  In this series of political commentary, two camps form:  Price and Wollstonecraft, cherishing individual reason, and Burke, esteeming established traditions. 

     In their writings, Burke and Wollstonecraft actually make similar statements about the nature of God’s will and human reason:  they both believe that God’s will is in perfect harmony with rationality.  Burke, however, sees reason as the direct result of submission to God’s law (120, Reflections), whereas Wollstonecraft believes that “the more man discovers of the nature of his mind and body, the more clearly he is convinced, that to act according to the dictates of reason is to conform to the law of God” (54, VM).  For Burke, following God’s law is what will lead a human to rational thought and behavior, but for Wollstonecraft, reason is an internal and independent concept, a blessing from God given to each person individually.  Price reflects a similar confidence in individual reason: he believes that “no earthly power has authority over our private judgment, and no restriction on conscience is ever legitimate” (Taylor, 105).  Wollstonecraft and Price view “universal reason” as natural and primal: “God’s gift to all, the sign of His presence within” (Taylor, 105). 

     Price and Wollstonecraft’s views on reason also depart from Burke’s dramatically when considering whether or not God’s law is reflected in the prevailing law of the land.  Burke emphasizes civil authority and hierarchy as ordained by God in his Reflections.  In the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft refutes this view.  She argues that an unquestioning submission to worldly authority will lead men to forfeit their ability to reason; if all of our actions are determined by “arbitrary authority and dark traditions… our reason [will remain] dormant” (18).  Price’s discourse highlights a similar problem with the concept of civil law as necessarily part of God’s law:  “The tendency of every government is to despotism…whenever people cease to reason about their rights and to be awake to encroachments, they are in danger of being enslaved and their servants will soon become their masters” (8, Discourse).  Both Wollstonecraft and Price see submission to the state as “blind” (105, VM) and “arbitrary” (18), and often an immoral, dividing force in society; they believed that it was “time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners,” to bring all humanity under God’s law” (Taylor, 107).   In making a distinction between God’s law, reason, and the prevailing laws of society, Wollstonecraft emphasizes God’s benevolence – a salient characteristic of Rational Dissent.  In the rational line of thought, according to Wollstonecraft and Price, a perfectly good God wouldn’t desire an oppressive government for his children.

Social Justice as God’s Will

     In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke emphasizes the rationality in submission to divine and worldly authority alike:

We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility.  Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty, and, by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence” (100).

      In her response to Burke, Wollstonecraft makes it clear that she does not worship God simply because He is all-powerful, but because he is the omni-benevolent culmination of rationality: “My heart is human, beats quick with human sympathies – and I FEAR God... I fear that sublime power, whose motive for creating me must have been wise and good; and I submit to the moral laws which my reason deduces from this view of my dependence on him. – It is not his power that I fear – it is not to an arbitrary will, but to an unerring reason I submit” (34,VM).  As Barbara Taylor explains, Wollstonecraft worshipped God for His “divine perfections which human virtues mimic” (107).  From such statements, it is clear to see that Wollstonecraft’s conception of virtue stems from her belief in God, with virtue made attainable through a divinely-established human ability for reason.   In this, Wollstonecraft shares “Unitarianism’s emphasis on private reasoned judgment as the foundation of true religion” (Taylor, 104).  Both Price and Wollstonecraft, from their “private reasoned judgment,” see social justice – the driving ideology of the French Revolution – as attainable and desirable to God.  For Wollstonecraft, virtue is found in working to eliminate “unnatural inequalities in systems of property, politics, and gender” (Waters, 129).  As she articulates in the Rights of Men, “Liberty is the mother of virtue” (7).

     Burke, in his Reflections, defends the social hierarchy as natural, necessary and divinely ordained.  The poor, he explains, will receive eternal contribution for their misfortune in this world.  Wollstonecraft refutes this concept as oversimplified, writing, “It is, sir, possible to render the poor happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in the next” (59, VM).  She tells Burke that his “respect for rank has swallowed up the common feelings of humanity” (16).  By honoring tradition over human dignity, Burke is asserting that “the property of the rich has greater value than the lives and livelihood of the poor” (Waters, 129).  Ignoring or overlooking oppression, in Wollstonecraft’s mind, is a sin:  “not only misery but immorality proceeds from this stretch of arbitrary authority” (15).  The state is not true authority, but rather a human institution with flaws and imperfections which the people are obligated to rectify.  To Wollstonecraft, God is the only true authority, and the source of reason.  Therefore, for Wollstonecraft, “reason and conscience are synonymous terms” (Sapiro, 53), and the attainment of virtue in society comes only in accordance with a divine compassion and morality.

     Moreover, Wollstonecraft believed that since all human beings are created by God, all are therefore endowed with certain natural rights.  Wollstonecraft calls for acknowledgement of man’s “native dignity” (14, VM):  “it is necessary empathetically to repeat, that there are rights which men inherit at their birth, as rational creatures, who were raised above brute creation…in receiving these, not from their forefathers but, from God, prescription can never undermine natural rights” (12, VM, emphasis added).  In this she mocks Burke’s admiration of human inheritance, showing its complete triviality in comparison with the grandeur of a divine inheritance.  While Burke refutes the idea of honoring “metaphysic rights” (34, Reflections), Wollstonecraft embraces them as inherent and based upon the fact that God blesses all men with a rational capacity.  In this, she calls for the unification of humanity:  “Let us then, as children of the same parent…reason together” (Taylor, 105).  Just as Price imparts in his Discourse, Wollstonecraft sees great rationality and much civil advantage in God’s instruction to love our neighbor.  As Price puts it,  “Our blessed Saviour… taught the obligation to love all mankind and recommended universal benevolence as (next to the love of God) our first duty” (12, Discourse).  Social reform, when aimed at delivering justice to humanity, becomes a movement in line with God’s perfect will.  As Wollstonecraft explains, “Human beings are given the ability to discern godly or natural principles, which means they have the possibility of fulfilling God’s will of goodness” (Taylor, 106).

Wollstonecraft’s Departure from Rational Dissent

     On a few occasions, Wollstonecraft calls upon religious imagery in her defense of the Revolution, much like Price in his fiery, jeremiad-like sermons.  When challenging Burke’s traditionalism and focus on the law, Wollstonecraft points to Christ himself, noting His life and role as a revolutionary.  She asks, “had you been a Jew – you would have joined in the cry, crucify him, crucify him?” (12, VM).  In this powerful comparison, Wollstonecraft challenges Burke’s Christian basis in supporting an “unthinking reverence for established practices, habits, and institutions” (Waters, 127).  Wollstonecraft embraces the Unitarian dissention of the established church, and takes a more liberal, less institutional view of Christianity.  To Wollstonecraft, “the distinction between religion and church is critical… The one is an aspect of natural virtue ultimately defined by God, the other is a human institution embedded in the “state of society” and, in the stages witnessed by human experience up to her era, defined by human corruption” (Sapiro, 45).  She seemed keenly aware of corruption in the church, asking Burke in the Rights of Men “Is it absolute blasphemy to doubt of the omnipotence of the law, or to suppose that religion might be more pure if there were fewer baits for hypocrites in the church? (64).

     Yet, to reduce Wollstonecraft’s theology in the Rights of Men to a whole-hearted support of Unitarianism would be to serve a great injustice.  As Barbara Taylor writes, “Wollstonecraft’s relationship to Rational Dissent was not uncritical” (108).  In the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft confesses outright that Dr. Price’s reasoning is not entirely reliable:  “Dr. Price’s zeal may have carried him further than sound reason can justify… Dr. Price’s political opinions are Utopian reveries… the world is not yet sufficiently civilized to adopt such a sublime system of morality” (17, VM).  Wollstonecraft’s theology was not one of naiveté.  She made clear that her belief in a perfectly good God did not undermine the very real presence of evil in the world:  “That both physical and moral evil were not only forseen, but entered into the scheme of Providence, when this world was contemplated in the Divine mind, who can doubt” (55, VM).  But Wollstonecraft’s acknowledgement of inescapable wretchedness on earth doesn’t detract from her commitment to goodness for all in society.  In fact, evil in the world helps Wollstonecraft define the role of a “good man” (55):  “the business of the life of a good man should be, to separate light from darkness; to diffuse happiness, whilst he submits to unavoidable misery” (55, VM).  Though Wollstonecraft’s hope in social reform was less sanguine than Price’s, she never abandoned her confidence in “[loving] fellow creatures” (55, VM) as good and beneficial to humanity.

      Wollstonecraft’s theology also departs from Rational Dissent in its emphasis on love and emotion.  As Barbara Taylor writes, “That our access to God is through reason rather than mindless faith or overheated enthusiasm was certainly as central to her theology as Rational Dissent, but the idea of reason operative in her writings was not the rather chilly deductive faculty found in most Unitarian preachings – which she frequently criticized as ‘cold, instrumental’ reason – but a much more libidinised, imaginative drive toward the True and the Good” (Taylor, 108).  For Wollstonecraft, to know and follow God is not merely to “appreciate him, in the Unitarian fashion, but to adore Him” (Taylor, 107).  Taylor goes into depth in her analysis of how “the movement of love toward the divine re-appeared as a major theme in the Rights of Woman” (116), but she doesn’t really delve into how Wollstonecraft’s highly intimate concept of theology functions in the Rights of Men.  Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on a profound love for God as the basis for political equality is unquestionably present in the Rights of Men, as well:   “What else can render us resigned to live… but a profound reverence for the model of perfection, and the mysterious tie which arises from a love of goodness?  What can make us reverence ourselves, but a reverence for that Being, of whom we are a faint image?” (40, VM).  Wollstonecraft embraced an “equality based on religion” (Smith, 405), believing that “love and respect” were owed to all men by “virtue of being on of God’s creations” (Tomaseli, x).  In the Rights of Men, she centers her political theology on the concept of God’s love and the intrinsic value of all human beings.

Conclusion:  Wollstonecraft’s impact

      Wollstonecraft’s legacy as a political and theological writer was stunted after her death, largely because of her husband William Godwin’s scandalous Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798).  His reflections emphasized Wollstonecraft’s controversial personal life and her passionate, emotion-based view of God and nature.  Godwin, however, was a self-proclaimed atheist.  So, although Godwin played a most significant role in shaping the public view and memory of Wollstonecraft, his representation of her in the Memoirs “owed too much to Godwin’s own religious skepticism to be reliable” (Taylor, 96).  Also, Godwin wrote the Memoirs only a few months after Wollstonecraft’s death.  When he wrote, he was almost certainly still in mourning over the loss of his wife – a condition which undoubtedly affected his writing.

       Yet Mary Wollstonecraft’s political and theological theories, though undervalued for centuries, are quite worthy of analysis and attention today.  Wollstonecraft’s human rights theory as presented in A Vindication of the Rights of Men is part of an important political dialogue on the French Revolution that cannot be understood outside of a religious framework.  Wollstonecraft, Burke and Price all base their convictions on their views of God as the Creator.  In her work, Barbara Taylor points out Wollstonecraft’s credibility as a theologian:  she “translated and reviewed theological works in three languages, was conversant with the major theological debates of her period and … consistently argued that true religion was not a mere matter of enthusiastic sentiment but rather a ‘governing principle of conduct, drawn from self-knowledge, and rational opinion respecting the attributes of God’” (97).  Although Wollstonecraft’s “reputation is linked most securely to her concern about women” (Smith, 407), the whole of her career is, first and foremost, embroiled in religious thought.

It should be noted that analyzing Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men and extrapolating political and theological theories from it proved to be very challenging:  the document as a whole is very imaginative and at times, grammatically wordy and disorganized.  But while Wollstonecraft’s earliest philosophical writing may not be completely rhetorically succinct, her arguments about God and human rights are sound and powerful.  Though modern human rights theories tend to emphasize innate human dignity without a strong connection to God, Mary Wollstonecraft presents a theory on human rights that is inexorably connected to a Creator.  Her commitment to the “nature of man as a sovereign individual” (Canavan, 2) and her devotion to God as the source of truth and the aim of virtue resound through he last line of the Rights of Men:  “But neither open enmity nor hollow homage destroys the intrinsic value of those principles which rest on an eternal foundation, and revert for a standard to the immutable attributes of God” (64).

References

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Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.