God, vision and power

Abstract

Enlightenment philosopher George Berkeley, Irish bishop of Cloyne (1695–1752) developed a theory of God's relation to the world both rooted in orthodox Western Theology and influential for European secular government. This article critically examines the notion of God in Berkeleian thought with special reference to its implications for his concrete recommendations and political projects in British government and empire building. To this end, it examines the application of early Christian ascetic techniques to enlightenment colonial government. Berkeley's thought exemplifies modernity's modelling of the governing autonomous self on a transcendent impassible God. His ethics represent a practice of cosmology, where the world is watched by the judging subject.

Notes

1. So Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (ed. and trans. John Erickson and Thomas Bird; New York: Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1974), 63.

2. e.g. Wayne Waxman, Kant and the Empiricists: Understanding Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Anthony Grayling, Berkeley: the Central Arguments (London: Duckworth, 1986); and the essays collected in Colin Turbayne, ed., Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982).

3. in John Milbank, The Word made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 97–105.

4. In Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (trans. Tom Conley; New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 147–205.

5. Cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault (ed. Arnold Ira Davidson; trans. Michael Chase; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995); de Certeau, The Writing of History, chapters 1 and 4.

6. We do have an earlier treatment in the form of notebooks: George Berkeley, “Philosophical Commentaries”, in The works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (ed. T. E. Jessop; The works of George Berkeley, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop; 9 vols.; vol. 1; London: Nelson, 1948), 1–139. For ease of reference to Berkeley's works, I have only used page numbers (which all refer to the Luce and Jessop edition) where there is no other specification available.

7. George Berkeley, “An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision”, in The works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (ed. Jessop), 171–239, LXXXVIII, italics original.

8. Berkeley, “Theory of Vision”, LI, LXXIX.

9. Berkeley, “Theory of Vision”, CXXXII.

10. Berkeley, “Theory of Vision”, CLIX.

11. For a comparison of Berkeley's linguistic cosmology with contemporary theories of language, cf. James Danaher, “Is Berkeley's World a Divine Language?” in Modern Theology 18.3 (2002): 361–73.

12. Berkeley, “Theory of Vision”, CXLVII.

13. Berkeley, “Theory of Vision”, CXLII.

14. For a desperate attempt to make this argument work with only negligible reference to God, see Waxman, Kant and the Empiricists, chapter 14.

15. Waxman objects that our pain must also be felt by God if the reference of our ideas is guaranteed by him in Waxman, Kant and the Empiricists, 399–400. God's perception (of extreme heat, for example) is however likened to our painless memory of unpleasantness in Berkeley, “Philosophical Commentaries”, A:675. Bettcher concurs with this solution: Talia Mae Bettcher, Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit: Consciousness, Ontology and the Elusive Subject (London: Continuum, 2007), 75f.

16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith; London: Macmillan, 1929), B 34.

17. Milbank, Word made Strange, 97–105. The arguments against matter, reiterated throughout Berkeley's corpus, are noticeably absent from much commentary (e.g. Waxman, Kant and the Empiricists). A refreshing exception is the excellent Bettcher, Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit, see especially chapter 2.

18. George Berkeley, “The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained: In answer to an anonymous Writer”, in The works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (ed. Jessop), 241–79, 251, section 2.

19. George Berkeley, “Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous”, in The works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (ed. Jessop), 147–263, II, 212.

20. see above, note 2.

21. Bettcher, Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit, 16–18.

22. Berkeley, “Philosophical Commentaries”, A:566.

23. George Berkeley, “A Treatise concerning The Principles of Human Knowledge,” in The works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (ed. Jessop; vol. 2; 1949), 1–113, 155.

24. Berkeley, “Theory of Vision Vindicated”, 251, section 2.

25. Berkeley, “Principles,” 156, emphasis original. Cf. also George Berkeley, Letters (The works of George Berkeley; ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop; 9 vols.; vol. 8; London: Nelson, 1956), VIII.

26. George Berkeley, “Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher”, in The works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (ed. Jessop; vol. 3; 1950), 1–335, I:7, a parallel also found in George Berkeley, “Passive Obedience, Or the Christian Doctrine of not resisting the Supreme Power, proved and vindicated upon the principles of the Law of Nature: In a Discourse delivered at the College Chapel”, in The works of George Berkeley (ed. Jessop; vol. 6; 1953), 1–46, 6, George Berkeley, “A Discourse addressed to Magistrates and Men in Authority: Occasioned by the Enormous Licence and Irreligion of the Times”, in The works of George Berkeley (ed. Jessop; vol. 6), 193–222, 202, and George Berkeley, “Sermons”, in The works of George Berkeley (ed. A. A. Luce; The works of George Berkeley, ed. Luce and Jessop; vol. 7; 1955), 1–138, X.131.

27. Berkeley, “Alciphron”.

28. Whilst many commentators shy away from Scholastic influences in modern philosophy, it has become more accepted in Berkeley scholarship, not least because of the important background material in the controversy of Berkeley's Provost, Peter Browne (1666–1735) concerning analogy in the knowledge of God. The fertility of this approach can be seen in Bettcher, Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit, ch. 4.

29. Berkeley, “Dialogues.”

30. Berkeley, “Alciphron”, I.1.

31. Berkeley, Letters, Letter 23.

32. George Berkeley, “A Letter to Sir John James: on the Roman Controversy”, in The works of George Berkeley (ed. Luce), 139–55, 151f.

33. George Berkeley, “A Proposal for the better Sulying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations and for Converting the Savage Americans, to Christianity”, in The works of George Berkeley (ed. Luce), 337–61, p353, italics original.

34. Graham Gould, The desert fathers on monastic community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

35. In Roy J. Deferrari, ed., Early Christian biographies; lives of: St. Cyprian, by Pontius; St. Ambrose, by Paulinus; St. Augustine, by Possidius; St. Anthony, by St. Athanasius; St. Paul the first hermit, St. Hilarion, and Malchus, by St. Jerome; St. Epiphanius, by Ennodius; with a sermon on the life of St. Honoratus, by St. Hilary (vol. 15 of Fathers of the Church, a new Translation; New York, 1952).

36. E.g. Stephen Darwall, “Berkeley's moral and political philosophy”, in The Cambridge companion to Berkeley (ed. Kenneth Winkler; Cambridge companions to philosophy; Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 311–38.

37. Cf. Berkeley, “Sermons”, Sermon X, 136.

38. Historian of Philosophy Pierre Hadot's studies of ancient and modern philosophy have taught us that the forms of life associated with philosophy prove surprisingly resilient to the shifts of the history of ideas - Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life.

39. Benedict, Regula, n.p. [cited 27 April 2007]. Online: http://www.intratext.com/X/LAT0011.HTM.

40. Benedicta Ward, ed., The sayings of the Desert Fathers: the alphabetical collection (London: Mowbrays, 1975), Anthony 38.

41. Cogitationes - Benedicta Ward, ed., The Desert Fathers: sayings of the early Christian monks: Translated from the Latin (Penguin classics; London: Penguin, 2003), V.13.

42. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the boundaries of mere reason and other writings (trans. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6.145.

43. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (trans. Graham Burchell; ed. Michel Senellart; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 179; and Derwas J. Chitty, The desert a city: an introduction to the study of Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism under the Christian Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), 70f and references there.

44. Berkeley, “Sermons”, Sermon X. 136.

45. Berkeley, “Alciphron”, IV.19–21.

46. Berkeley, ”Alciphron”, IV.20–23.

47. Berkeley, “Philosophical Commentaries”, A:782.

48. For this distinction, cf. Kenneth Winkler, “Berkeley and the doctrine of signs”, in The Cambridge companion to Berkeley (ed. Winkler), 125–65, 149; Wayne Waxman, Kant and the Empiricists, 311, and the discussion of its development in Bettcher, Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit, 102–104.

49. Berkeley, “Dialogues”, III, 232.

50. his pair of vision and post-death judgement - cf. Berkeley, “Alciphron,” I.7 and Berkeley, “Theory of Vision Vindicated”, section 6, 253f et passim.

51. Berkeley, Letters, Letters 155–58.

52. Joseph M. Hone and Mario M. Rossi, Bishop Berkeley: his life, writings, and philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1931), plate facing p. 134.

53. Berkeley, Letters, Letter 145.

54. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 127, emphasis original.

55. George Berkeley, “Essays in the Guardian”, in The works of George Berkeley (ed. Luce; vol. 7), 171–228, no. 70, p. 206.

56. Berkeley, “Passive Obedience”, 6, 16 and Berkeley, “Discourse to Magistrates,” 212.

57. George Berkeley, “Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries”, in The works of George Berkeley (ed. Jessop; vol. 5), 1–164, 107.

58. Berkeley, Letters, Letter 85.

59. The reference is to Foucault's analysis of prison practice in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridon; London: Penguin, 1991). Berkeley's visual cosmology and ethics may be thought to prepare the way for Bentham's visual techniques of discipline.

60. Berkeley, Letters, Letter 85. Cf. also 106, 144, 152.

61. Berkeley, “Proposal”, 356, italics original.

62. Berkeley, “Siris”, 248; Waxman, Kant and the Empiricists, 308f; Bettcher, Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit, ch. 5. It is for this reason that I cannot attribute the high Christian values of creation ex nihilo (as explained for example in Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwells, 2000), ch. 5) to Berkeley as does John Milbank, in The Word Made Strange.

63. Berkeley, “Proposal”, 357, italics original.

64. Berkeley, Letters, Letter 144.

65. Berkeley, “Theory of Vision”, 21, emphasis mine. Cf. also George Berkeley, “First Draft of the Introduction to the Principles”, in The works of George Berkeley (Jessop; vol. 2), 115–45, 21.

66. Berkeley, “First Draft”, 21.

67. Berkeley, “Passive Obedience”, 28.

68. Berkeley, “Principles”, introduction - 11f, 18-25 and Berkeley, “Alciphron”, 2.19.

69. Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There”, in The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), 126–250, ch. 6.

70. Berkeley, “Philosophical Commentaries”, B.162.

71. This coherence between God and the human mind is in keeping with the shift from a God/world cosmological divide to a body/mind one, mentioned in the introduction. Among the qualities attributed to the mind are immortality – Waxman, Kant and the Empiricists, 324 – and creation from nothing - Bettcher, Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit, 67f.

72. Peter Robert Lamont Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity”, The Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101. 92.

73. George Berkeley, “The Querist Containing Several Queries Proposed to the Consideration of the Public”, in The works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (ed. Jessop and Luce; vol. 6), 85–191, 48.

74. Berkeley, “Proposal”, 358.

75. Berkeley, “Alciphron”, III.10. My thanks to Helene Selvik Thomas, Philip Goodchild, Mark Thomas, and John Milbank for having read through earlier versions of this article. All remaining errors are my own.