An Order of Philosophers? Samuel Clarke’s Moral Theory and the Problem of Sacerdos in Enlightenment England¹

¹ I am grateful to Ian Stewart and Simon Kow for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper, as also to the participants in the seminar organized by Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter on ‘The persona of the philosopher in eighteenth‐century Europe’.

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Notes

¹ I am grateful to Ian Stewart and Simon Kow for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper, as also to the participants in the seminar organized by Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter on ‘The persona of the philosopher in eighteenth‐century Europe’.

² John Locke: Writings on Religion, edited by V. Nuovo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).

³ I. G. Stewart, ‘Isaac Barrow: Authorised Reason and Reasonable Authority of a Scholar‐priest’ (University of Cambridge, PhD dissertation, 1998), chs 3 and 4. My thanks to Dr Stewart for making his work available to me.

⁴ P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the Early English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), is particularly important; see also G. Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth‐century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); and J. Spurr, ‘“Rational Religion” in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (1988), 563–85.

⁵ See J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10–11.

⁶ See J. B. Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 59ff; see, e.g., S. Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, edited by J. Tully, translated by M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Preface: 7, 9.

⁷ Still helpful, but somewhat dated now, is H. R. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (London: Longmans, 1949).

⁸ Casaubon, The Question, to whom it belonged Anciently to Preach (London, 1663), 3–5; see also J. Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (London, 1646), 8; and the discussion in Stewart, ‘Isaac Barrow’, 126–7.

⁹ J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy’, in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, edited by R. D. Lund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 33–53.

¹⁰ I have relied here on E. Stump, Aquinas (London, 2003); A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988); R. McInerny, ‘Ethics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by E. Stump and N. Kretzmann (Cambridge, 1993), 193–213; and M. K. Jordan, ‘Theology and “Philosophy”’ in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, 232–51.

¹¹ Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, edited by R. A. Greene and H. MacCallum (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 11.

¹² Culverwell, Discourse, 184–98.

¹³ Sanderson, Lectures on Conscience and Human Law (1660), translated by C. Wordsworth (Lincoln: James Williamson, 1877), IV.36. Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae disquisitio philosophica (London, 1672) is an example of Anglican natural law theory pursued independently of theology.

¹⁷ Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, IV.ii.I.8, italics added; see also II.i.IV.9.

¹⁴ Sanderson, Lectures, IV.24–5.

¹⁵ Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, fourth edition (London, 1696), II.i.I.30–1.

¹⁶ Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, I.i.II.20; II.i.I.54, 59.

¹⁸ Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, xiv–xv.

¹⁹ Sanderson, Lectures, IV.19.

²⁰ Culverwell, Discourse, 30–3; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia.IIae.90.4; Plato, Laws, I, 645a.

²¹ Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, II.i.I.58, 59.

²² McAdoo, Structure, 140, 147; the terms of characterization are McAdoo’s.

²³ Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 279–375.

²⁴ The Whole Duty of Man, in The Works of the Author of the Whole Duty of Man, 2 vols (London, 1682), vol. 1, sig. A.

²⁵ Fowler, The Design of Christianity (London, 1671), 134–5; see also S. Patrick, Advice to a Friend (London, 1673).

²⁶ Fowler, Design, 11, 108–14, 213, 221–7, 262.

²⁷ Fowler, Design, 253–4.

²⁸ Burnet, A Discourse of the Pastoral Care (1692), 14th edition (London, 1821), 170–1.

²⁹ See Patrick, Advice, and Hearts Ease (London, 1671).

³⁰ Fowler, Design, 145–52.

³¹ See Spurr, Restoration Church, 279–375; and W. M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 112–31.

³² On appeal to self‐interestedness in latitudinarian sermons, see M. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), and the more cautious assessments in Spellman, Latitudinarians, 118–19, and Reedy, Bible, 125.

³³ J. Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, 12 vols (London, 1742–4), vol. 6, Sermon CII, ‘Of the great duties of natural religion, with the ways and means of knowing them.’ My claim that the latitudinarians did not develop or explore practical rationality in any detail must be understood as a preliminary to more detailed investigation. See I. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, vol. 1, Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 77–88.

³⁵ Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, in John Locke: Writings on Religion, 196. On Locke’s thought on religion and ethics, see J. W. Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

³⁴ Fowler, Design, 137–42, 152–6. Fowler noted that the Christian idea of a heavenly reward was deemed to be presaged by Epictetus and by certain Platonists and Pythagoreans. For Fowler, however, this does not provide a point of contact between moral philosophy and moral theology but rather indicates that the ancient heathens had absorbed certain Hebrew ideas.

³⁶ C. Blount, Religio Laici (London, 1683), 28–9; J. Toland, Christianity not Mysterious (London, 1696), 26; see also the argument in B. de Spinoza, A Theologico‐political Treatise [1670], translated by R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 100; and the discussion in Reedy, The Bible and Reason, 20–45.

³⁷ Spinoza, Treatise, 57–68, 77–8.

³⁸ See Culverwell, Discourse, 53: ‘Reason as ‘tis now does not binde in its own name, but in the name of its supreme Lord and Sovereigne, by whom Reason lives, and moves, and has its being’; and Sanderson, Lectures, IV.5: ‘when therefore we ask, what that is which obliges the Conscience to do her duty? we intend principally to ask, Who is the Lord of the Conscience, that has a right to impose laws upon it, to which she is bound to conform?’ See also Pufendorf, Duty, I.3.10.

³⁹ Locke, Reasonableness, 195, 198.

⁴⁰ Cf. Stephen Darwall’s statement of a similar problematic involving a tension between autonomy and authority in late seventeenth‐century theories of ethical obligation: S. L. Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 110.

⁴¹ R. Cumberland, De legibus naturae. See the discussion of Cumberland’s theory of obligation in Darwall, British Moralists, 105–8. See also J. Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (Woodbridge: The Royal Historical Society, 1999).

⁴² See Spurr, ‘Rational Religion’; G. V. Bennett, ‘University, Society and Church 1688–1714’, in The History of the University of Oxford, edited by T. H. Aston, vol. V, The Eighteenth Century, edited by L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 359–400, esp. 360–2; G. V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 9–21; J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule, and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); and J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in L’Età dei Lumi: Studi Storici sul Settecento Europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, edited by R. Alejo et al. (Naples: Jovene, 1985), 535–7.

⁴³ This, in any case, would explain the apparent de‐emphasis of Thomist and Platonic notions of the good as superseding terrestrial goods and even virtue itself, but the subject bears more investigation.

⁴⁴ Clarke, Discourse on the Unalterable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation (1706), in The Works of Samuel Clarke (London, 1737), II, 608, 613–14. (Hereafter, references to the Discourse will be abbreviated as DUO.) The target for much of this discussion is Thomas Hobbes’s voluntarist claim that good and evil were only defined by positive institution.

⁴⁵ Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation (London, 1730), 387–8.

⁴⁶ Tindal, An Address to the Inhabitants of London and Westminster, second edition (London, 1730), 45–6.

⁴⁷ Clarke, DUO, 652–6.

⁴⁸ Clarke’s translation of The Republic, vi, 496d–e.

⁴⁹ DUO, 656–66.

⁵⁰ I am much indebted here to Conal Condren’s analysis of early modern philosophy as an office in ‘The Persona of the Philosopher and the Rhetorics of Office in Early‐Modern England’, in The Persona of the Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, edited by C. Condren, S. Gaukroger and I. Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 101–38, as also, more generally, to Stephen Gaukroger’s and Peter Harrison’s essays in the same volume: ‘The persona of the natural philosopher’, 26–51; and ‘The Natural Philosopher and the Virtues’, 327–69.

⁵¹ DUO, 658.

⁵² DUO, 659.

⁵³ See here Sermons LX and LXI, ‘Of the Catholic Church of Christ’, in Works, vol. 1, 369–87; Sermon CXIV, ‘In What the Kingdom of God Consists’, in Works, vol. 1, 723–8; and Sermons XXXIII and XXXIV, ‘Of the Kingdom of God’, in Works, vol. 1, 197–215.

⁵⁵ DUO, 657.

⁵⁶ DUO, 668.

⁶⁰ DUO, 671–2.

⁵⁷ See Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft.

⁵⁸ Clarke, DUO, 665–9, quoting Plato, The Republic, VI, 492e; cf. the translation by Grube and Reeve in Plato, The Republic, translated by G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992): ‘You should realize that if anyone is saved and becomes what he ought to be under our present constitutions, he has been saved – you may rightly say – by a divine dispensation.’

⁵⁹ DUO, 661.

⁶¹ Clarke, Sermon XXXVI, in Works, vol. 1, 223–30; see also Sermon LII, ‘Of the Belief which is Necessary to Baptism’, in Works, vol. 1, 320–31. On the idea of reasonableness as a virtue in the Restoration, see R. A. Greene, ‘Whichcote, Wilkins, “Ingenuity,” and the Reasonableness of Christianity’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 1, 42 (1981), 227–52.

⁶² See Clarke, Sermon LXXXIX, ‘Of the Power and Authority of Christ’, in Works, vol. 1, 558–64. This is a sermon on Matt. 18.18–20, the ‘Great Commission’. Importantly, Clarke’s sermon emphasizes that Christ’s power and authority was transferred to his disciples mainly in their function as teachers, whose teaching consisted of the truths necessary to moral perfection Clarke laid out at length in his homiletic work as a whole.

⁶³ DUO, 671.

⁶⁴ Tindal, Address, 44–5, 67. See also the discussion in Spurr, ‘Rational Religion’, 879–80.

⁶⁵ Clarke was much more tolerationist than Restoration divines who had insisted on the necessity of a coercive hierarchical structure of authority in correctly informing conscience (see n73 below, and M. Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, edited by O. P. Grell, J. Israel and N. Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 331–68.

⁶⁷ DUO, 637, 672.

⁶⁶ DUO, 657–66.

⁶⁸ DUO, 664.

⁷⁰ Waterland, Remarks upon Doctor Clarke‘s Exposition of the Church‐Catechism (London, 1730), 81.

⁶⁹ Clarke, Exposition of the Church Catechism (London, 1729), vol. 3, in Works, 312.

⁷¹ DUO, 674.

⁷² Waterland, The Nature, Obligation, and Efficacy of the Christian Sacraments Considered [1730], in The Works of the Rev. Daniel Waterland (Oxford, 1823), V, 443, 449, 460; see also the analysis of the controversy over the sacraments in J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 117–34.

⁷³ Waterland, Remarks upon Dr. Clarke‘s Exposition of the Church Catechism, in Works, vol. 5, 388.

⁷⁴ To his credit, then, when the deist William Woolston was imprisoned for blasphemy, Clarke attempted continuously to gain his release on the grounds that both the laws of England and the Christian religion required the exercise of tolerance and liberty of conscience. Clarke may have been sensitive to the issue as his own opinions on the person of Christ had been tried as heterodox. See Gasciogne, Cambridge, 137.

⁷⁵ Waterland, Works, vol. 8, 1–36; Clarke, DUO, 661.

⁷⁶ Gasciogne, Cambridge, 125.

⁷⁷ Sermon CIV ‘Against Persecution for Religion’, in Works, vol. 1, 659–65.

⁷⁸ See the parenthetical mention of submission to hierarchical order in Sermon XLVII ‘Of the Virtue of Charity’, in Works, vol. 1, 294.

⁷⁹ The idea of Clarke’s ‘redundant’ philosophical persona was suggested to me by Catherine Wilson.