1 - A Christian Science

Summary

The scepticism of the period from roughly 1645 to 1680 prompted philosophers’ attempts to rethink theology and moral and civil philosophy in their search for ideas concerning the common and the public good. Ralph Cudworth’s effort to overcome the challenges posed by fragmentation in religion and politics and to develop a philosophy helpful in uniting society, but not at the expense of liberty, demonstrate that Neoplatonism was an important force during that period. In a sceptical era, John Selden contributed to particularism in natural law. A discussion of Sir Robert Filmer’s life and key political ideas together with the principles of political economy he espoused follows. Given the disintegration of moral theology in that period, the commercialization of societal ties seems to have been unstoppable. Against the Macphersonian critique of possessive individualism, the chapter puts forward the opening argument that both Hobbes and Locke sought to tame the harsh society characterized by the use of credit they saw before them and that they chose to do so by means of political philosophy and natural law.

1.1 Deism, Neoplatonism and the Light of Reason

Someone like Robert Boyle would emphasize that the Christian world is premised upon the action and presence of God through grace, light and, indeed, mystery in the very divine contrivance of the material world, that is, the ‘argument of design’.¹ Hence, in late seventeenth-century England, orthodox Christian thought did not entail an anxious effort to relate the particular to the universal but an industrious effort to obtain a glimpse of the unknown. In a review for the publisher of J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment, Donald Weinstein remarked that the account in it of ‘medieval thought was unduly Augustinian’.² I want to further qualify Weinstein’s statement on what Pocock described as a definition of Christianity in the opening chapters of his masterpiece, which, in his view, accordingly shaped the sixteenth-century understanding of politics.³ Pocock’s narrative on the painful efforts of scholastic Christians to refer knowledge of particular and contingent historical events to categories unbounded by time and space was certainly representative of some strands of Christian theology. Nevertheless, Pocock’s recurrent distinction between a divine eternal order and the contingent – in effect, a dual world entailing history and transcendence – was characteristic of Neoplatonic thought rather than of Christian thought more generally. Pocock went so far as to argue that the story of Florentine political thought was the history of its ‘striking but partial emancipation’ of that mould of thought.⁴ He was certainly right to highlight the existence of this type of dualist thinking, for Neoplatonism had a great impact on aspects of Christian and, in particular, Arabic philosophy from at least the Middle Ages onwards.⁵ The question now, of course, is: What does it matter? Why is it relevant, in a study of seventeenth-century English natural law, to distinguish between Christian theology generally and a particular Neoplatonic strand of Christian theology? This book argues that that distinction changes everything. First, the premise of my analysis is that the original Christian thought transcends dualities. Moreover, the struggles of several natural philosophers dealt with in the chapters that follow – in particular Robert Boyle and John Locke – to grasp the essence and unity of a Christian cosmology offer an important proof of my claim. In the words of John Dunn, Locke’s voluntarism and rationalism were ‘yoked by violence together’ – through the force of faith more than by philosophical persuasion.⁶ It is of the utmost importance, however, to witness Locke’s certainty that dualism was not workable.⁷

I propose to seek an insight into the perspectives of modern natural lawyers by studying these struggles to unify thought in a philosophy of natural law – including its subsequent transformations – as framed by the influence of Neoplatonic thought, rather than in the light of Ockhamite nominalist traditions or the voluntarist traditions often employed during the twentieth century.⁸ Several of the English philosophers discussed in this book sought to overcome the dualist conception of the world they had inherited directly from Descartes and indirectly from Proclus and Avicenna. Deism – the establishment of religion on the basis of nature not revelation – was one of the outcomes of Neoplatonism.⁹ In his examination of ‘Descartes’s Proof of a God from the Idea of a Necessary Existence’, John Locke rejected the theological deficiency of Deism:

The idea of the Theists’ eternal Being is, that it is a knowing immaterial substance, that made and still keeps all the beings of the universe in that order in which they are preserved. The idea of Atheists’ eternal Being is senseless matter. The question between them then is, which of these really is that eternal Being that has always been. Now I say, whoever will use the idea of necessary existence to prove a God, i.e. an immaterial eternal knowing spirit, will have no more to say for it from the idea of necessary existence, than an Atheist has for his eternal, all-doing, senseless matter.¹⁰

This passage evidences Locke’s dissatisfaction with the dualist or Neoplatonic implications of the theory, since, for the devout philosopher, very little could be said about a Neoplatonic God. But after the publication of An Essay, according to John W. Yolton’s review and M. A. Stewart’s analysis of Edward Stillingfleet’s critique, charges that Locke was a Deist multiplied, albeit not altogether justly, since he believed in Revelation.¹¹ Deism, it is true, developed out of the changing conceptions of nature in theology and philosophy, which is one of the main themes of this book, but it was also the product of a personal choice of faith. With the adoption of Neoplatonic thought in late thirteenth-century theology and in some strands of fifteenth-century humanist philosophy, materialism crept up. In Neoplatonism, the intellectual and the material world are markedly distinguished. That very dualism would become the foundation of mechanistic philosophy. However, during the English Scientific Revolution, importantly in Boyle’s case, as we will see, the suspicion began to arise that dualist philosophies were preventing knowledge.

As with any realist philosophy, the defining feature of Neoplatonism is that knowledge starts with a particular thing or individual – in it the material world is often understood in atomic terms. In turn, what differentiates materialist epistemology of Neoplatonism from other forms of realism is its scepticism, obscurity of reason or of will (a ‘blind will’), the existence of an extramental giver of forms for human understanding, denial of innate principles or – however the idea is expressed – of the absence of an active unity of body and spirit, will and reason. The theological expression of that dualism is that God is not involved in the actual speculative and practical reasoning of human beings. Thus, Christian sceptics neglect the scriptural doctrine that the kingdom of God is within us.¹² The interpretation of that verse has been varied in the tradition: from Origen’s Christological understanding of the autobasileia, by which Christ is himself the Kingdom, to the mystical reading that views the Kingdom as a place located in the interiority of human beings, and the ecclesiastical that more diffusedly sees the relationship of Christ and the human beings building the Church.¹³ At any rate, all of them express the real presence of the divine in the materiality of the world, even within human beings’ bodies. Famously, Aristotle expressed a pre-Christian version of that scriptural doctrine in De anima, defining a divine element in the human mind and, since his view was convergent with Scripture, Christian theologians – particularly Albert the Great and later Thomas Aquinas – followed suit.¹⁴ Briefly, these thinkers had described the peculiar manner in which human beings perceive and live in the world, grasping, together with God, the divine in the world and in themselves: created in the image of God as such; by means of the general principles of natural law through the divine light; or through God living within themselves and helping them to act well – that is, the Kingdom that Luke mentioned in his Gospel.¹⁵ How scepticism shattered these epistemological and ontological principles and the evolving understanding of the light of reason in seventeenth-century England are discussed later in Chapter 5.

In the philosophical vacuum created during the long Reformation, Thomas Hobbes is usually considered the first English natural lawyer to have offered a convincing frame of thought that suited the sceptical temper of the period.¹⁶ Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), it is true, was also constantly referred to in England, but there were other interesting native experiments. Eminent Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More (1614–1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) attempted to establish the Neoplatonist tradition in England in the midst of the crisis in epistemology that led to British empiricism. In the context of empiricism, knowledge would be inferred from the accumulation of empirical data, and ideas about natural law and morality would be transformed through novel mechanistic and naturalist principles. By contrast, Cudworth’s key principle concerned the elementary capacity to ascertain the divine order of the world and how this ability preserved responsibility and human freedom. By his own account, Cudworth wrote his main work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), to confute prevalent ideas of necessity and to reinstate liberty to the centre of debate concerning moral philosophy. His was a discourse about liberty, ‘against the fatal necessity of all actions’.¹⁷

Cudworth derived the force of his ideas also from Neoplatonic sources and built on Cartesian dualism – exactly the dualism that, as we will see in this study, Boyle and Locke were trying to defeat in order to develop a new theory of knowledge. Furthermore, Cudworth’s Neoplatonic defence of religion against atheism was heterodox and often received with misgivings.¹⁸ In his recent study of Cudworth as a critic of Hobbes’s radical voluntarism, Stewart Duncan shows how, in another text on morality, Cudworth – interestingly, for a Cambridge Platonist – viewed things in matter and things in morality as possessing a similar type of constituency, a sort of ‘nature’ that was common to such qualities as, for example, ‘whiteness’, ‘evilness’ or ‘goodness’.¹⁹ Cudworth’s point was to assert that things are what they are (material or moral) not by divine, arbitrary institution, but by nature.²⁰ Remarkably, Cudworth almost reified the conception of ‘nature’ and thus adopted a position opposite to that of Hobbes, and indeed Boyle. Against voluntarists’ wild arbitrariness, both in their conception of morality and in their view of human society, Cudworth described natural order as the outcome of a just and rational God. Civil society and civil sovereignty were also expressions of that natural order. The political absolutism lurking in the sceptical and voluntarist position led him to emphasize an almost ontological public good and public conscience. With regard to Hobbes, Cudworth condemned in his main published work the atheist politics and ethics of the new natural lawyers:

Here therefore these atheistic politicians, as they first of all slander human nature, and make a villain of it; so do they, in the next place, reproach justice and civil sovereignty also, making it to be nothing but an ignoble and bastardly brat of fear; or else a lesser evil, submitted to merely out of necessity, for the avoiding of a greater evil, that of war with every one, by reason of men’s natural imbecility.²¹

It was a vain endeavour, Cudworth thought, to attempt to craft justice artificially when there was none by nature. The passage from art to force and unrestrained power would be unavoidable in that situation.²² Artificial sovereignty of ‘bodies politic’ was an impossibility. Instead, there must be ‘some natural bond or vinculum’ that held groups of subjects together and led them to obey the lawful commands of sovereigns. In turn, sovereigns sought to secure the welfare of their subjects through their commands. Thus, the natural bond could not be other than ‘natural justice’; hence, there existed ‘something of a common and public, of a cementing and conglutinating nature, in all rational beings’. Its origins were from ‘the Deity’, whose own right and authority was also founded in justice. Thus, civil sovereignty was nothing other than ‘a certain participation’ in that justice. Therefore, sovereignty was neither artificial, nor natural, neither regal nor popular, but ‘hath a stamp of Divinity upon it’.²³ The error, Cudworth argued, was that atheists acknowledged ‘nothing in nature of a public or common good, nothing of duty or obligation’. Instead, atheists made private apetite the only measure of good and transformed justice into ‘utility’. Public conscience on the part of atheists was a contradiction in terms, for they argued that ‘Conscience is Private Judgment of Good and Evil’. When they invoked conscience, they were only asserting rebellion, violence and fanaticism.²⁴ Cudworth’s own view was that ‘conscience also is, in itself, not of a private and partial, but of a public and common nature’. One ought to put first divine laws, justice and the common good (‘the good of the whole’) when they clashed with ‘our own selfish good, and private utility’. This statement constitutes the core of what Cudworth saw as the only means to unite society and the body politic.²⁵ However, Cudworth also thought that individuals made a judgment in conscience for themselves ‘a public conscience being nonsense and ridiculous’. In that sense, they could err. And yet, the rule by which such judgments in conscience were made was not ‘private’. Instead, divine laws and justice and the revealed will of God – ‘things more public than the civil laws’ – made one responsible for one’s judgment.²⁶ Simply put, publicness involved responsibility, also in terms of natural justice. Liberty, and not necessity, was the rule of human actions. Cudworth was adamant in his philosophical project as to the existence of the capacity to ascertain the common good among subjects, in the form of a kind of ‘conglutinating nature’, and the capacity to know the morality that a just God had determined.²⁷

A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was published posthumously in 1731.²⁸ His grandson Francis Cudworth Masham (1686–1731) – the son of Damaris (Cudworth) Masham (1658–1708), Cudworth’s daughter – to whom John Locke had left practically half his estate, found it among his grandfather’s papers and made it available for publication.²⁹ The gist of its moral philosophy is that morality was within human minds and was not the command of the sovereign.³⁰ Neither the Sovereign God nor the political sovereign generated a duty to obey. Moral and political obligation arose not from a command, but from ‘the Intellectual Nature of him that is commanded’. If there were no intellectual natures – presumably he meant human beings and angels – there would be no morality.³¹ Cudworth envisaged metaphysics as the Neoplatonic ‘scale of beings’, with an archetype and different degrees of imitation in the ectype ideas – that is, ‘an imprint or copy of an archetype’.³² He rejected Descartes’ argument that natures could not be eternal because (as Descartes reasoned) God would then depend on them and not the other way around. Furthermore, Cudworth asserted that the only genuine philosophy was the ancient atomistic philosophy with a Neoplatonic twist:

Wherefore the proper and genuine Result of this old Atomical Philosophy, which is the Triumph of Reason over Sense, is nothing else but this, that Sense alone is not the Criterion or Judge of what does Really and Absolutely exist without us, but that there is a Higher and Superior intellectual Faculty in us that judges of our Sense, which discovers what is Fallacious and Fantastical in them, and pronounces what Absolutely is and is not.³³

Cudworth considered human intellect a vital force that framed conceptions of things wherever it found something that could be understood. The human intellect worked analogically to what he termed ‘the Spermatick or Plastick Power’ of Stoic and Augustinian inspiration, which generated forms in all animals ‘framing an Eye here and an Ear there’.³⁴ He put forward two principles in relation to the question of knowledge of morality relevant here. First, that the human mind has the capacity to order the world around us, also in moral terms. Second, his adoption of an epistemology that definitively broke with the classical understanding of the light of reason. We shall see in Chapter 5 the many doubts that existed in the minds of natural lawyers and theologians of the day concerning the existence of a divine light of nature with the capacity to discriminate between good and evil. The numerous arguments they put forward as to the obscurity and weakness of this approach suffice to demonstrate the uncertainties and even despair surrounding the continuing validity of the classical natural law notion of the light of nature and sometimes even of conscience in the 17th English political context.³⁵ Locke was not impervious to that feeling.³⁶ Together with the rise of scepticism in Europe, the peculiar religious controversies of the time were certainly factors that contributed to confusion as to the idea of the world being illuminated from within by human beings’ light. Conceptions of individual moral agency were thus entangled with notions of religious and political independence and enthusiasm. It is instructive to read that the philosopher Damaris Masham discovered in the work of John Smith, another Cambridge Platonist, the possibility of a higher principle than reason, which reason could activate. She defended that idea in her correspondence with Locke, albeit that the latter dismissed it as a species of ‘enthusiasm’.³⁷ As late as 1701, John Edwards (1637–1716), the Cambridge divine, championed an apology for article 18 of the 39 articles of the Anglican Church, the articles dealing with the ‘accursing’ of those who thought that by the law of their sect and the light of nature could be saved. He criticized Locke’s Deism in the same chapter, on the ground that Locke had – in Edwards’ view – denied natural conscience.³⁸ Clearly, Edwards approved neither of the affirmation of the independent light of reason of the enthusiasts, which ought to be contained, nor of the denial of natural light in moral action, which obscured what was traditionally described as the voice of God in human beings. In the mostly ignored Natural History of Superstition (1709), by the Deist John Trenchard, ‘the inward light’ was equated to a hallucinatory experience.³⁹ The opposite attitude was displayed by the Catholic Church at the time. In 1726 it canonized the mystic John of the Cross (1542–1591) who popularized a type of rational mysticism through his works. He frequently described how God would at will communicate directly with the intellect of human beings in grace, and that was what the classic theologians had termed fruition or enjoyment: that is, to see God already in this world.⁴⁰

Cudworth’s neat adoption of Neoplatonist dualism sets itself against that classic notion of the light of reason. His Neoplatonism might be described as a type of moderate scepticism. What human intellect discovered was (ectypal) ideas modelled after the divine archetype. In other words, there was no light of nature, but human intellect contained the just moral and metaphysical order instituted eternally by God. Cudworth’s influential work on consciousness has gained increasing attention.⁴¹ He understood consciousness, at a higher intellectual level, as a ‘return to oneself’. Udo Thiel writes that he was not employing a classical notion of conscience in terms of a ‘perception or knowledge of something that one shares with someone else’.⁴² Like other Neoplatonists before him, and, indeed, strictly following Pocock’s model, described above, in which particularity is located in universality, Cudworth understood the judgment of conscience as the natural recognition of a metaphysical just order with which one ought to compare one’s moral or political decisions. In Hobbes’s radical sceptic epistemology, which Cudworth sought to neutralize, good and evil were moral categories that a human being could not discern naturally. Instead, whether useful or not, pleasant or painful would be the substitutes for the morality inside type of thinking. As triggers of knowledge, the ‘pleasant’ or ‘painful’ nature of sensations became building blocks for the new naturalist natural law. The complexity of John Locke’s work, dealt with in Chapters 8 to 12, evidences that he took seriously Cudworth’s critique of hedonistic morality and its corrosive consequences for the social order.

As the analysis will show, the rejection of innate ideas did not imply the absence of moral psychology, which is also one of the findings of Lisa T. Sarasohn’s Gassendi’s Ethics.⁴³ Gassendi’s doctrine of pleasure and pain, for instance, functioned as an internally constituted moral psychology. He did not consider the classical laws of nature to be necessary in order to pursue what he thought an individual and a culture was ‘instinctually’ and rationally equipped for.⁴⁴ In her path-breaking study on the topic, Sorana Corneanu has described the specific solution adopted by the English virtuosi, the leading English figures in early modern science.⁴⁵ Cultivation of reason through science and industriousness would become, for them, one of the main tools for practising righteous moral actions. They adopted this stance on the strength of their insight that the European crisis of knowledge had massive implications for morality. Ian Harris has shown how, in relation to matters of religion, English natural lawyers of the new science opted for tolerance.⁴⁶ Their writings also evidence a process through which Cudworth’s ideas connecting private reason to public conscience are refined. In a moment of generalized awe towards Leviathan, Cudworth stood for a return to ideas concerning the existence recognizable by everyone of a public and common good. As mentioned above, strong echoes of this awareness may be found in the work of John Locke. The pragmatic expression that public good took in Locke’s work and politics, in terms of theorizing a natural law that would make England and her economy strong and care for everyone’s necessities, is the main topic of Chapters 11 and 12. At the same time, and notwithstanding an accurate perception of the dangers of individualism, the critiques of Hobbes’s project levelled by Cudworth and many others were not always fair, as they represented Hobbes as being less interested in the public good than he was in reality, as I will argue in Chapters 2 and 3.

1.2 Scepticism and Moral Righteousness

Creativity in scientific and monetary matters marked the era under discussion. However, moral and religious ideas framed the directions of the new imagination. As wealth for the nation seemed nearer at hand through economic growth, the new economic and scientific activities were experienced with increasing anxiety, and philosophers looking for the right way in which to carry out economic policies came up with ingenious scientific solutions. The hope was that the new ideas would be also morally acceptable. My view on the existence of a theological framework for the new thinking reflects the perspective that this period should be regarded as the long Reformation, rather than as marking the beginning of Enlightenment.⁴⁷ This stance is justified by the fact that religious themes permeated all the issues and every text discussed here during the entire period. Moreover, the elite of Reformers that Charles Webster popularized in the 1970s, dealt with in Chapter 4, aimed to reform science, economy and faith in one stroke.⁴⁸ By contrast, the next generation of authors, dating from roughly after the beginning of the Restoration (1660), shows a certain weariness with a cultural system that guaranteed the reproduction of controversies on religious grounds. On political principle they obviously desired a united but not uniform society. However, in order to understand the gist of Robert Boyle’s or John Locke’s scientific and economic projects, it is not necessary to pinpoint the ‘secularist’ ideas in them. In fact, their scientific and societal project would be meaningless if observed as a dechristianized enterprise. The fact that Locke, at least, fought ‘priestcraft’ did not make him secular.⁴⁹ The naiveté of devout Whiggery was therefore not behind their commitment to producing a robust moral discourse through the sciences, that is to say, in their contribution through their scientific work to guiding the lifelong Christian effort in the choice of ‘the proper object of Desire’.⁵⁰ It would have been a simple-minded view if they had thought, in acting out the role of scientist as priest (as they did), that real theologians and priests were redundant.⁵¹ However, while incontrovertible evidence on that point is inaccessible to us now, there are in fact, as discussed below, ample biographical and textual indications that this was not their standpoint and that instead they were soberly attentive to what priests and theologians had to say.⁵²

An alternative way to describe the history of natural law discussed in the chapters that follow would be to adopt the tradition of C. B. MacPherson, Leo Strauss and Neal Woods, by which I mean situating it in the history of Western materialism.⁵³ After all, Karl Marx did not borrow substantially from John Locke’s ideas on money for The Capital on a mere whim, while also giving them an Aristotelian philosophical twist about the ‘form of commodity’.⁵⁴ However, I hope to show that identifying the new thinking as the philosophers’ attempt to materialize Christianity offers a more accurate analysis of what happened in the second half of seventeenth-century England. In other words, their efforts were directed towards embedding Christian thinking in the business of prudential government, empirical science and the capitalist economy that was well under way in Europe by that time; so confident were they in the power of Christian faith to speed economic growth and contain greed and indignity. As the diasporic Huguenot Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744) had it in his uneven History and Critical Account of the Science of Morality (1728), the new philosophy sought to develop ethics and politics in a manner ‘better proportion’d and adapted to the Constitution of humane Affairs’. However, in the process of achieving this, certain Christian moral and religious ideas had to be sifted. In that text written as an ‘Introduction’ to the main text on natural law by Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), Barbeyrac noted on at least five occasions that putting money to interest was a licit activity.⁵⁵ The single-mindedness with which the traditional moral condemnation of usury was attacked over a century evidences that making the lending of money at interest socially acceptable was considered of paramount importance for European economic and political development. The particular scientific solution to the problem of usury that Locke devised is explored in Chapter 11 in the context of the period and of his larger philosophical project.

Natural law thinking was also deeply enriched by a strand of moral theory influenced by medical notions. It is worth to consider the fact that medical notions seemed to be immune to scepticism and to lie beyond religion strife. Morality was shaped in particular during the seventeenth century by the utilitarian goals of health and the survival of the human body. The much read The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1577–1640), the librarian of Christ Church (Locke’s college), exemplifies a new type of medical literature. It is largely a medical text aimed at producing a species of curative reading, combining cases and learned description of a disease that at the time appeared to be reaching epidemic proportions, especially among men.⁵⁶ Strikingly, Mary Ann Lund remarks that despite all the medical analysis, Burton identified ‘want of charity’ as the root of all melancholy.⁵⁷ In considering the individual’s cure, in Anatomy, Burton prudently avoided both theological controversy and he also integrated theological doctrines. Setting aside Calvinist ideas of predestination and of the ‘captivity of the human will’, the text instead highlighted agency in terms of self-improvement and self-cure and hope in the mercy of God was stressed in cases of sinners’ despair.⁵⁸ On the other hand, ‘enthusiasm’ was after the mid-seventeenth century often medically classified as madness, and thus directly disqualified from religious validity.⁵⁹

Still, in a pre-Scientific Revolution moment, the well-known scholar John Selden (1584–1654), a savant, jurist, natural lawyer and author of rabbinical works, who held a sceptic position following Carneades, took the view that the guiding principle of the law of nature was an anti-universalist utility. Selden accordingly considered that even when lawyers, philosophers or doctors decided to take an approach based on utility their decisions were in fact very much influenced by local customs and tastes, rather than by objective (ex natura sui) attributes of medicines or foods. One found in the commonality of peoples not the ‘simplicity’ of natural law but the utility of here and now.⁶⁰ Selden’s prestige in England was immense, thus his utilitarian ideas were very influential.⁶¹ But the new science and theology both demanded universalism. Hence, Selden’s theory of natural law would soon be superseded and the solution to the scepticism of reason he proposed did not take root in the crude, though erudite form in which he presented it.⁶²

Still, there are at least four important matters that are shown through Selden’s study on moral reason or, as he repeatedly put it, his analysis of how to tell good from evil, honourable from dishonourable, licit from illicit, and whether that was at all possible. First, it is clear how urgent the need was at the time to find a solution to this issue of moral knowledge from the immense effort Selden put into seeking to do so. Second, his work undisputedly shows that utilitarian principles were already common among English scholars at the start of the Civil War.⁶³ Third, his analysis shows the manner in which metaphysical conceptions of order have evolved, and that a dualist cosmology was well established. This is clear from the fact that Selden did not understand Aquinas’s notion of the light of the agent intellect as the participation of human reason in God’s order. Instead of a light that is the divine Being, the English natural lawyer explained it as a light that ‘commands’.⁶⁴ Quentin Skinner has recently suggested the existence of a thread between vocabularies as to the health of the body of the state – present in particular in the work of Jean Bodin – and the abstract notion of a state that Hobbes made famous in Leviathan.⁶⁵ Thus medical notions were not unknown in political theory. However, Selden’s approach also made it clear that medicine was not yet a theoretical tool for natural lawyers, not at least for the most knowledgeable Englishman of the time.⁶⁶

My suggestion is also that the rise of the type of combination of Christian theology with medical morality as natural law studied in this book may be traced to the revival of Neoplatonism and the utilitarian moral philosophy that characterizes it. Moreover, as we will see in Chapter 9, it was a utilitarianism that, unlike Selden’s contextual approach, could be operated as guided by universal principles. Furthermore, moderni theologians, Neoplatonism and Orientalism were in vogue in old Oxford, the place of study of most of the protagonists that feature in this book. In Thomas Wood’s contemporary history of Oxonian scholars during the seventeenth century, we find that Thomas Lushington (1589–1661) wrote a treatise, unpublished but extensively circulated, entitled Theology of Proclus.⁶⁷ Sometimes suspected of being a Socinian, Lushington was a contemporary of Robert Sanderson. He coincided with Sanderson at Lincoln College and later became a fellow at Pembroke College. It is apparent from his use of sources that the latter was knowledgeable about the moderni Parisian theologians Duns Scotus (1266–1308) and Durand de Saint Pourçain (1275–1334).⁶⁸ The metaphysics of necessity introduced in Chapters 2 and 3 flourished in Europe and also in England with the revival of Orientalism. Bishop Laud’s encouragement of ‘Orientalist languages’ started in the 1630s by his sending John Greaves (1602–1652) to the East to bring him books; Greaves himself became an expert in the Persian language. The savant Henry Jacobs (1608–1652), who was fluent both in ‘Arabick’ and in Hebrew benefited also from Laud’s patronage with the renewal after a hundred years being inactive of the Socius Grammaticalis, or Reader in Philology to the Juniors in Merton College. Both linguists were collaborators of Selden that, as Thomas Wood noted, ‘Hugh Grotius’ praised as ‘the glory of the English Nation’.⁶⁹ Henry Stubbe (1632–1676), the radical polemicist and scholar, and good friend of both Hobbes and Locke, who wrote the Originall and Progress of Mahometanism (1672), fiercely defended in 1670 the contribution of ancient oriental philosophy to physics.⁷⁰ The object of his critique was a reduction of contemporary knowledge to the ‘fecundity of the Cartesian Principles’. It was, Stubbe considered, first the ‘Arabians’ that had used chemistry in an eminent manner to help medicine, and it was they who, through their ‘sectarian’ use of ancient philosophy, had ‘improved Chymical Pharmacy very much’. Finally, it had been ‘the Aristotelian’ Averroes, and ‘the Galenist’ Avicenna who had transmitted a divided science to Europe:

From these two great men amongst the Moors, as the knowledge of Physick and Philosophy, happened to be imparted to the barbarous Christians of the West, so was there a feud propagated betwixt the Philosophers and the Physicians.⁷¹

Since, for Stubbe, the ‘Mahometans’ were a ‘sect of Christians’, this praise was not necessarily understood as irreverent in relation to Christianism, however radical he himself would later become.⁷² Instead, with polemical intent – perhaps as a nod to Hobbes who was fighting some battles in that direction – he declared how grave and prejudicial to knowledge was the ignorance of thinking that science in Europe had started with Descartes, Gassendi and the Royal Society.⁷³

1.3 Hobbes and Locke versus Filmer on Political Economy

Heated debate arose in England over whether consent was natural or artificial in the formation of political societies – i.e. over how political obligation originates – once Aristotelianism was displaced from the centre of political discourse.⁷⁴ It is a well-known fact of intellectual history that Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes set the tone of the discussion, providing opposing solutions to the question, albeit with a similar preference for a strong sovereign power.⁷⁵ Filmer’s notorious but original theological argument of natural obligation founded on Adam’s hereditary kingdom was, of course, explosive after the end of the Civil Wars. The divine Edward Gee (1613–1660) was one of the main writers that engaged with Filmer’s early series of publications during the Commonwealth period. Gee discussed Filmer’s patriarchalism seriously in 1658, but ultimately dismissed it as ridiculous and absurd.⁷⁶ Gee had initially defended the parliamentary cause but opposed Independence, inciting to civil disobedience.⁷⁷ He later fell under suspicion of having participated in a conspiracy with Charles II and the Scots to a sufficient extent as to be imprisoned in 1651.⁷⁸ In 1658, England was for Gee a ‘Nation’ that was ‘naturally addicted to Lawes and Liberties’.⁷⁹ In Patriarcha (not yet published in the 1650s), Filmer had noted that ‘because the Scripture is not favourable to the liberty of the people therefore many fly to the authority of reason and to the authority of Aristotle’.⁸⁰ And so did Gee. He situated the basis of government ‘upon a bottom of conscience’, that is ‘the light of nature’ with its dual foundation of rightful law and being the expression of the will of God.⁸¹ However, as noted above, the light of nature and the flexibility and freedom that it entails had but a dim glow in seventeenth-century English theological thinking. Following the latest Protestant line, the jurist John Selden had but cemented that general scepticism. Sceptical thought was so pervasive in the middle of the century that everyone rejected Hobbes’s atheism, but the philosophical principles of necessity examined in this book were tacitly accepted as the new space for relevant discussion on politics, even by Filmer himself. Hence, decrying the atomization of monarchy denoted by the requirement of individual consent, Filmer considered that it was also materially impossible: ‘the truth is, that amongst all them that plead the necessity of the consent of the people, none of them hath ever touched upon these so necessary doctrines’.⁸² Evidently, there was little room for dialogue between Filmer’s empirical method and Hobbes’s philosophical abstraction.⁸³

Peter Laslett showed years ago that Sir Robert Filmer was not the retired reactionary that critiques have made of him. Rather, together with his very large family and circle of friends, he was present in London and Westminster and involved in most of the commercial, political and intellectual undertakings of the day, notably those concerning Virginia. In the next centuries practically all the families that enjoyed political influence in colonial America would be related to the Filmers.⁸⁴ Filmer’s materialist ideas on government were published in the influential ‘Observations Upon Aristotles Politiques Touching Forms of Government’.⁸⁵ His few published writings established ‘dominion and property’ as the basis of government, insisting on the latter repeatedly, rather than on the former, and making property the grounds and main principle of government and justice.⁸⁶ Gee, who distinguished between natural and moral power – the latter being ‘property or dominion’ either over inanimate things or understood as authority – had noted in his preface to The Divine Right and Original of the Civill Magistrate from God that dissensions about civil matters could be about ‘laws, property, liberty and magistratical prerogative’. However, it is illustrative of the temper of the times that he also concluded that by examining ‘the nature of the thing’ the most controvertible was that of ‘humane interest’, and only after a long discussion of issues of property did he mention the desire to rule.⁸⁷ Intriguingly, Gee commented on the 5th divine commandment (Honour your father and mother) in the Preface exclusively in terms of property.⁸⁸ Undoubtedly, private property was much more central to the notions of the common good at the time than had been the case during the Middle Ages.⁸⁹

The imperative to expand the economy held sway. The chapters that follow argue that seventeenth-century English political philosophers and natural lawyers attempted to tame, rather than foster the materialism of the period. Thus, Hobbes and Locke’s idea, it is contended, was to imbue politics with less pragmatic principles than those held by Filmer and others and to recover a basic normative sense of equality and freedom in the context of political obligation. In this regard, as suggested before, I have been persuaded by Annabel Brett’s naturalist exposition of Hobbes and by John Dunn and Timothy Stanton’s Neotestamentarian reading of John Locke, and not by other materialist interpretations.⁹⁰ However, there is a sense in which the MacPhersonian tradition of ‘possessive individualism’ captured an important element that is addressed in the work of Norman L. Jones, Craig Muldrew and Carl Wennerlind.⁹¹ The sociopolitical context in which modern English natural lawyers started to remake philosophy was marked by scepticism and permeated by an ideology of wealth-seeking through credit that makes itself felt in their writings, and shaped their understanding of natural law.

‘Observations’, Filmer’s last political tract, is a surprisingly rich commentary on Aristotelian political forms published in 1652, written either that or the previous year.⁹² Peter Laslett considered that Locke and other critiques of Filmer made extensive use of the piece.⁹³ A royalist who had survived the Civil Wars, Filmer presented his ideas on the relevance of property for the success of the Commonwealth as being in fact beneficial for all sides – it is astonishing how quickly he reacted to the political sea change that had taken place.⁹⁴ Therefore, in the 1650s Filmer operated as an ideologue of materialist politics and not as the manufactured persona of Whig and Tory opposition that he would become in the 1680s. Political obligation, Filmer argued, sprang from inherited property, which was inherited first from God. This tract on Aristotelian forms of government demonstrates that Filmer knew Aristotle as well, if not better, than he knew the Scripture – which is not to say, however, that he knew either of them well, as Locke’s exuberant critique in the First Treatise makes clear with regard to Biblical commentary.⁹⁵ The tract on Aristotle comprises first a short summary of scriptural principles that Filmer extracted from Patriarcha, together with its fundamental argument. He combined the theological doctrine of the dominion over the inferior creatures (Genesis 1.26–28) and enriched it with Aristotelian ideas of a house or an oikos, rejecting Aristotle’s distinction between the household and the polis.⁹⁶ In Patriarcha published only in 1680, Francisco Suárez was the main object of criticism due to his statement that Adam had ‘complete economical power’, though ‘only economical power, but not political’. For, affirmed the English royalist, ‘economical and political societies’ did not differ.⁹⁷ Filmer decided that what happened within Adam’s household was in fact the first political union, a set of natural family relationships involving economic relationships between masters, servants and slaves. The first household, Adam’s, was thus a kingdom, and any kingdom was an immense household. In Filmer’s work, and, also in ‘Observations’, however, the divine rights of kings took on a notoriously possessive hue:

Adam was the Father, King and Lord over his family: a son, a subject and a servant or a slave, were one and the same thing at first; the Father had power to dispose, or sell his children or servants; whence we find, that at the first reckoning up of goods in scripture, the manservant, and the maidservant are numbered among the possessions and substance of the owner, as other goods were.⁹⁸

What Filmer described in these terms in 1652 was not merely a set of ideas concerning the fictionalized origins of government but a portrayal of the present. That was the shocking reality of Barbados and other plantations, known by everyone who cared to find out, where, in shipments to the islands, servants and slaves appeared listed as commodities.⁹⁹ Filmer revealed it to his readership in artful narrative. But to reckon with what was happening in practice in the wilderness of the commercial relations, was in a Christian commonwealth, or for that matter, in any commonwealth, very different to a philosophical, let alone theological sanctioning of it. Machiavellian notions of self-preservation were common, but Filmer’s pragmatic ideas of inequality went against any minimal notion of natural law thinking.¹⁰⁰ However, as Peter Laslett and recently Anne Becker have argued, they realistically reflected a contemporary phenomenon, in the form of the rise of the patriarchal household experienced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which reached its climax with Jean Bodin’s, Five Books of the Republic (1576).¹⁰¹ In the extreme form proposed by Filmer, the ideology of patriarchalism justified social inequality, the subjection of women in the family, the domination by a rich minority of the majority, slavery – and, above all, the elevation of property as the institution around which all other legal and political principles must revolve. Filmer placed property with notions of hierarchy and absolutism as being divinely ordered. In Patriarcha, apparently written in the late 1630s, Filmer warned that popular government was the cause of all sorts of vices in society. In 1652, his central argument in ‘Observations upon Aristotle Politiques’ was that a popular commonwealth was irreligious, poor and disrupted by dissensions and controversy – worst of all, it would not last long. Therefore, in his view, the idea then ‘in fashion’ – that original power lay by nature with the people – put forward by ‘the modern politicians’ in the early 1650s - was self-defeating.¹⁰² The gist of Filmer’s argument as to the hopelessness of popular government was again centred on property:

Men that boast so much of natural freedom, are not willing to consider how contradictory and destructive the power of a major part is to the natural liberty of the whole people; the two grand favourites, liberty, and property (for which most men pretend to strive) are as contrary as fire to water and cannot stand together.¹⁰³

In the context of a nation in conflict and engaged in empire-building, Filmer’s standpoint concerning the impossibility of achieving wealth in a republic of free citizens was a provocation. The sharpness of the royalist Filmer was certainly dangerous at the dawn of a commercial empire. These frightful ideas about the disease of poverty attached to popular government and the origins of all government in the principles of property saw the light almost three decades before Patriarcha appeared in published in 1680. As mentioned before, they showed Filmer less a Machiavellian author than someone moved by the pragmatic spirit of the times and with vested interests in the continuation and expansion of the international economic and political system.¹⁰⁴ Perhaps given these motives, Filmer was effective in setting the tone of political discourse over the following decades. The political thinkers that came after Filmer had to respond to his very pragmatic approach. Moreover, his short but shrewd arguments were not easy to undo.¹⁰⁵ In his discussion of Hobbes’s thesis that political obligation arose from consent, Filmer almost succeeded in proving that popular government as conceived by his contemporaries had an undemocratic character, on the grounds that the majority ended up oppressing the minority, and that the consent of each and every person could never be obtained. It is difficult not to agree with Peter Laslett that the second Treatise on Government, and not only the First, was Locke’s response to the ideological line that held that popular government was synonymous with deprivation and dissent, as Filmer argued in ‘Observations’ more explicitly than in Patriarcha.¹⁰⁶ After the Civil Wars, Filmer had astutely noted Puritan beliefs as to care for the poor and horror of poverty, and accordingly pointed again to property, and not liberty, as the essence of any government.¹⁰⁷

1.4 The New Oeconomies: Household – State – Nature

Understandings of oeconomy in seventeenth-century England are presented in Chapters 9 and 10, from around the time that Filmer had rudimentarily integrated the household into the political notion of a kingdom. Filmer’s political principle suited English mid-seventeenth century socio-legal relations well. He was knowledgeable about the common law and the radical voluntarism evident in his conception of law and of customary law in Patriarcha was similar to Hobbes’s.¹⁰⁸ However, historiography on Filmer evidences that he was an embarrassment.¹⁰⁹ His thin philosophical reasoning, lack of system and obscure theology and his always suspect ideas on royalist absolutism, which became unpalatable after the Civil Wars, made him unsuited for representing anything close to a viable political philosophy. One would be inclined to think, moreover, that the type of patriarchalism Sir Robert Filmer became famous for, was rather the effect of postlapsarian history and not previous to it.¹¹⁰ Locke’s triumph was then his ability to develop a natural law theory that both responded to Filmer’s misgivings and, being founded on scientific principles, was compatible with the new oeconomy.¹¹¹ Fittingly, for one of the core initiators of the Scientific Revolution, the very earth would be for Robert Boyle the new oeconomy – a rational system in which science and empire in tandem were thought to assert the utility of knowledge. The English political philosopher par excellence, Thomas Hobbes, remained in spite of everything, uninterested in the new oeconomy and thus it is unsurprising that he was the less committed of the three philosophers to the production of theories with useful results. Philosophy was Hobbes’s great love, and despite his wit and his many friends, apparently the only one, as the solitude in the anthropological theory underlining De Cive intimates.¹¹²

Many seventeenth-century English natural lawyers were natural scientists. They responded to the scepticism by having recourse to heterodox Neoplatonic sources in their search for robust philosophical foundations. However, they were also reacting to the demands imposed by economic growth in the country. The dangers posed to one’s soul and virtue by greedy desire for money and other material goods could be understood via an ethical approach that conceived of the light of reason acting in each human being. In the Summa theologiae as a whole, Aquinas developed possibly the best theology to that point concerning the way in which material goods had been created for human beings to help them on their way to God. At the same time, following the Aristotelian and a Christian millennial tradition, the Dominican warned against the dangers of becoming too attracted to them, thus losing sight of spiritual values. In that work, Aquinas managed to maintain the almost impossible equilibrium of loving and fearing the material world, not on the grounds of its evilness, but due to the postlapsarian weakness of human beings. Again, all the protagonists that feature in the chapters that follow worked in the shadow of Aquinas’s conviction that, somehow, some light of reason was able to illuminate moral behaviour. My argument operates in a manner akin to a reduced version of Alasdair MacIntyre’s thesis that the morality of virtues was displaced by fragmentation of concepts in the social history of modern philosophy.¹¹³ It seems that notions such as the light of nature or the agent intellect had disappeared or become almost completely blurred by the mid-seventeenth century.¹¹⁴ Moreover, the Neoplatonic dualism prevalent in metaphysics made attaining the light of reason practically impossible or, indeed, made it inaccessible. Natural lawyers were thus compelled to articulate a theory of knowledge attuned to the new natural philosophy. Chapters 4, 6 and 7 show that seventeenth-century English thinkers fascinated by the beauty and goodness of nature – in fact, its divine artistry – also naturalized economy. That is to say that they were the first to make a natural science – albeit not yet a virtuous one – of economics. This was done by employing concepts of natural sciences and medicine such as ‘system’ or ‘necessities’ and by disintegrating what they considered to be problematic aspects of moral theology in relation to economic growth.¹¹⁵ The natural economy, as we will see, was understood to satisfy both the necessities of individuals and of the nation. The domain of natural law enlarged.

Opinions as to the origins of theories of capitalism must not distract from the fact that Locke was a thinker who focused on the public sphere and that he was interested in articulating a theory of the state.¹¹⁶ Locke’s paradoxical concern with public interest and the novelty of his theory as to individual natural rights in relation to property is analysed in detail in Chapter 12. His distrust of merchants and traders as looking out only for their own private interest, and the naturalist and complex way in which his political theory is founded in relation to private property, makes any straightforward characterization of his work as being that of an early capitalist – or for that matter materialist – either unconvincing or based on the argument that our notions of capitalism have evolved in isolation from political theories dealing with the form of the modern state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pocock’s commentary (again!) on James Harrington’s Oceana (1656) helps to ascertain the importance of Harrington’s attempt – which was powerful, though ultimately unsuccessful – to reformulate the English constitution. In Pocock’s view, Harrington’s thinking was stuck in the feudal era. Harrington was so close to feudalism that he was unable to analyse it properly, and still described a Machiavellian state in which citizens were called upon to be soldiers. But what Harrington did in his spectacularly innovative ‘Preliminaries’ part in Oceana was to uncover the importance of the distributional aspect of land ownership to the political stability of a national constitution.¹¹⁷ Interestingly, he did that by means of a scientific method that incorporated traditional medical notions concerning balance in his theory of the new English State.¹¹⁸ It is not implausible to see Harrington’s Oceana as a good lesson for Locke. In positive terms, it showed what was important for a revolutionary politician. As James Tully writes, Locke’s natural right of property is designed to ground his idea that ‘the world belongs to all men in the same manner’.¹¹⁹ In a negative sense, the text was a warning against a conception in which – unlike that adhered to by the neighbouring Dutch – the economy of the state was thought of solely in terms of land ownership, overwhelmingly important though this was.¹²⁰ The techniques of money and commerce must become matters of state.¹²¹ In the spirit of a good civil servant and statesman, the philosopher must make compromises. Locke argued in his Two Treatises of Government that material equality was normative by natural law and material inequality was by consent accepted and good. Some 12 years earlier he had written that abundant cash money was needed to keep the wheels of the economy moving, the land rents paid, manufacturers working and internal trade functioning. Money was thus viewed as the lifeblood of the economy, and in a country that lacked mines, the acquisition money and bullion (gold and silver in bulk) depended on the balance of trade. Locke’s papers on money from the 1690s evidence continuation with these early ideas rather than change.¹²² Money is therefore the most exciting and disrupting element in John Locke’s philosophical project. Naturally endowed with an intrinsic value that was paradoxically consensual, money linked raison d’état and natural law and, as I will conclude, was the stumbling block in Locke’s attempt to transform Christian morality into an empirical science.

It is essential to add that my critique to the disruption of the morality of usury in Chapter 10 is not merely a topic for antiquarians. If anything, whether to charge interest for money lending or not will be a topic for the future. In the Conclusions, I will briefly discuss two arguments put forward by John Maynard Keynes that help to substantiate this idea. In a nutshell, Keynes thought that despite the fact that the love of money had triumphed in modern Europe, it remained to be ousted by future generations.