Charles Blount’s philosophy of religion

The author of the article presents a brief biography of the British deist Charles Blount (1654-1693) and a reconstruction of his ideas. The article documents that the English philosopher formulated the “author’s truths” of natural religion, which constitute a classic example of a deistic “creed”: 1) there exists One God; 2) He is to be worshipped; 3) virtue, goodness, and piety, accompanied with faith in and love to God, are the best ways of worshipping Him; 4) man should repent of his sins and turn to the way of virtue; 5) there is a reward after death. The heritage of the English religious philosopher is determined by comparing his philosophy with the one of the “father of deism” - Herbert of Cherbury. The correlation between the ideas of Blount and Thomas Hobbes is analyzed, as well as the assumption of historians about the influence of the latter on the former. The emphasis is placed on how the deists themselves, with Charles Blount here as a normative figure, assessed the phenomenon of deism. Before the advent of Blount’s treatises, deism and deists were evaluated from the outside, as, for example, did Pierre Viret (1511-1571) and John Dryden in the poem “ Religio Laici” (1682). The author of the article believes that without an internal understanding of deism itself, the study of this phenomenon is incomplete. The research sources are «Anima Mundi» (1679), «Great is Diana of the Ephesians» (1680), «Religio Laici» (1682), «Miracles, no violations of the laws of nature» (1683) and «Oracles of Reason» (1683).