John Locke: the Philosopher As Christian

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi John Locke OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi John Locke The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso Victor Nuovo CLARENDON PRESS ∙ OXFORD OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6D P, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Victor Nuovo 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937467 ISBN 978–0–19–880055–2 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi To Betty ‘Not for a year, But ever and a day’ OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Part I. The Christian Virtuoso and His Atheist Shadow 1. Francis Bacon and the Origins of Christian Virtuosity 9 2. Robert Boyle, Christian Virtuoso 35 3. Epicurus, Lucretius, and the Crisis of Atheism 59 Part II. The Philosophy of a Christian Virtuoso 4. The Origin of Locke’s Essay 89 5. The Philosophy of a Christian Virtuoso i: The New Countenance of Logic 121 6. The Philosophy of a Christian Virtuoso ii: Physics 150 7. The Philosophy of a Christian Virtuoso iii: Ethics 182 8. The Theology of a Christian Virtuoso 214 Conclusion 247 Bibliography 253 Index 261 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi Acknowledgments The idea for this book first occurred to me about two decades ago as I was trying to imagine how the same author could have written An Essay concerning Human Understanding and The Reasonableness of Christianity not by mere circumstance but by design, or how these works could be united in a single intellectual program. Not long after that I discovered Robert Boyle’s The Christian Virtuoso, and the idea received a name and grew into a theme, which has been developed in this book. But the book would not have been written without a great deal of help. It was my good fortune to meet Michael Ayers, who enlisted me to be an editor of The Clarendon Locke. This appointment gave me access to all the Locke manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. It also brought me into contact with the General Editors of the series, M. A. Stewart and John Milton, who taught me much not only about the art of critical editing, but also about John Locke and his contexts. It brought me new friends, scholars who came to be a constant and reliable source of wisdom and knowledge: Peter Anstey, Bruce Eichinger, Eric Eve, Mark Goldie, Sarah Hutton, Antonia LoLordo, John Price, John Rogers, Paul Schuurman, Luisa Simonetti, Tim Stanton, Christopher Star, John Stephens†, Jonathan Walmsley, John Walsh, Maurice Wiles†, and Richard Yeo. Two institutions provided me with a place to work. Middlebury College assigned me a study in its library where I go to think and write, where I can collect books and papers, and occasionally also my thoughts. Harris Manchester College has done much the same during my many trips to Oxford. It has been my home away from home. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation granted me an Emeritus Fellowship, which financed these trips. Peter Momtchiloff also deserves special mention. As philosophy editor of Oxford University Press, he has been constant in his encouragement, patient, and always ready with good advice. I am grateful also to two anonymous readers who provided useful comments and criticism, which guided me in making final revisions. One of my readers provided me with a splendid summary of the whole work that enabled me to clarify my original intentions—a nice piece of evidence of the objectivity of thinking. I am grateful also to Kim Richardson for sensitive and scrupulous copyediting. Finally, I owe more than I can say to my wife, the honorable Betty Nuovo, who for over three score years has been my dearest friend, my confidant, and my inspiration. She willed this work to be, and so it is properly dedicated to her. For any who do not recognize them, the words in my dedication are lyrics from a venerable Gershwin song. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi Abbreviations Conduct John Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding Correspondence The Correspondence of John Locke Drafts I Drafts for the Essay concerning Human Understanding and Other Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 DRN Lucretius, De rerum natura DSCBP Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophy Education John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education Essay John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding LL The Library of John Locke OED Oxford English Dictionary OFB Oxford Francis Bacon A Paraphrase and Notes John Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul The Reasonableness John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity SEH James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Heath, eds, The Works of Francis Bacon Toleration John Locke, Epistola de tolerantia Two Treatises John Locke, Two Treatises of Government Vindications John Locke, Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity WR John Locke, Writings on Religion OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi Introduction What follows is an essay on the interpretation of the thought of John Locke. My purpose is to show how Locke’s philosophical work is clarified and explained when it is considered as the production of a Christian virtuoso, which is to say, of a seventeenth- century English experimental natural philosopher, an empiricist and naturalist, who also professed Christianity of a sort that was infused with moral seriousness and with Platonic otherworldliness overlaid with Christian supernaturalism, and so was persuaded that the material and temporal world is irremediably imperfect and cannot satisfy the desire of the person to achieve moral or cognitive perfection in this life. Christian virtuosi were confident that their dual profession of Christianity and natural philosophy was not only coherent but also that its main parts, notwithstanding their opposite tendencies, could be made integral, complementary, and mutually sustaining. They endeavored to justify this confidence in their writings. The vocation of a Christian virtuoso was not Locke’s invention. Therefore, its antecedents must first be identified and its idea clarified before it can be effectively applied. The circumstances of its origin must be described, its ancestry discovered, its main proponents identified, their motives explained, and the problematic nature of Christian virtuosity exposed, together with the challenges of uniting its principal parts and integrating them in a single body of thought. This is what I have tried to do in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, which comprise the first part of this book. Its results are employed in the second part as hermeneutical guides for interpreting Locke’s writings, which is the main purpose of this book. My main endeavor throughout has been to discover Locke’s thought in his writings. In this regard, my method does not involve attending to selected extracts which appear pertinent to philosophical themes that may have been of concern to early modern philosophers and which may also be of interest to contemporary ones. Rather I approach them as whole works which become reliable expressions of an author’s thought only when studied in their proper contexts, taking into account, as much as possible, their origin and development. Among Locke’s antecedents in Christian virtuosity was his mentor, friend, and occasional collaborator Robert Boyle, who coined the expression ‘Christian virtuoso’, and who labored to clarify its idea and to justify its practice, and who endeavored to live it and doubtless encouraged others in his circle to do the same, leading them by his OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/24/2017, SPi 2 introduction example.1 Francis Bacon preceded him. He was regarded, justly I believe, as the honorary patron of seventeenth-century virtuosi and of the Royal Society of London, whose mission was the improvement of natural knowledge. He too was a professing and prac- ticing Christian, and, as I hope to show, anticipated in practice the very idea of Christian virtuosity. It was Bacon who insisted that the renewal of all learning must build upon a well-founded natural philosophy pursued from a purely naturalistic standpoint, and who, in this connection, established the cardinal rule of virtuosity,2 that one must not mix theology with natural philosophy, naturalism with supernaturalism, or confuse natural causes with supernatural ones, and that in the search for the natural causes of things, one must employ only empirical methods.

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