Jacob Donald Chatterjee

Scholars have tended to interpret Thomas Nettleton's bestselling Virtue and Happiness (1729) as an Epicurean work. In contrast, I argue that this book was constructed partly from extensive paraphrases of the writings of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. It both reflected and shaped emerging tendencies in eighteenth-century English thought by propounding a distinctive new moral synthesis mid-way between Lockean hedonism and Shaftesbury's ethic of benevolence. Nettleton also adapted some traditions of Anglican devotional literature to make them compatible with Shaftesbury's emphasis on the pursuit of virtue for its own intrinsic excellence, creating an ethic centred around practical improvement on earth.

Scholars have tended to interpret Thomas Nettleton’s bestselling Virtue and Happiness (1729) as an Epicurean work. In contrast, I argue that the book was constructed partly from extensive paraphrases of the writings of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. It both reflected and shaped emerging tendencies in eighteenth-century English thought by propounding a distinctive new moral synthesis mid-way between Lockean hedonism and Shaftesbury’s ethic of benevolence. Nettleton also adapted the traditions of Anglican devotional literature to make it compatible with Shaftesbury’s emphasis on pursuit of virtue for its own intrinsic excellence, creating an ethic centred around practical improvement on earth.

This article examines a previously overlooked discourse entitled ‘A Quaker’s Sermon’, which was published in the September 1785 issue of the European Magazine, purportedly by Catharine Macaulay, the celebrated historian, philosopher, and republican writer. It provides some reasons in support of the European Magazine’s attribution of the discourse to Macaulay and explicates the work’s connections to her wider social thought. It also suggests that Macaulay might have published the discourse to engage in a rhetorical exercise that was prohibited by most eighteenth-century religious denominations other than the Quakers: writing a sermon as a woman.

This article examines a previously overlooked discourse entitled ‘A Quaker’s Sermon’, which was published in the September 1785 issue of the European Magazine, purportedly by Catharine Macaulay, the celebrated historian, philosopher, and republican writer. It provides some reasons in support of the European Magazine’s attribution of the discourse to Macaulay and explicates the work’s connections to her wider social thought. It also suggests that Macaulay might have published the discourse to engage in a rhetorical exercise that was prohibited by most eighteenth-century religious denominations other than the Quakers: writing a sermon as a woman.

The Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch émigré physician and an acerbic satirist, was one of the most controversial works of the eighteenth century. Numerous contemporaries condemned Mandeville for ostensibly arguing that vice is the driving force of modern commercial societies, virtue is an arbitrary invention, and happiness consists in worldly pleasures. This article challenges the historiographical consensus that Mandeville’s account of commercial society depended on his encounters with Epicurean moral and political thought. Instead, it contends that Mandeville deployed a distinctive blend of Augustinian and Hobbist ideas to argue against what he regarded as Epicurus’s unrealistic valorisation of virtue as the way to secure the delights of mental tranquillity. This critique of Epicurus supported a wider polemic against the “easie Divines” of the Church of England, who had appealed to Epicurean maxims to declaim on the pleasures of virtue. To defend this vision of egoistic human nature, Mandeville proposed conjectural histories of the origin of moral virtue, which inverted Lucretius’s depiction of contented primitive humanity in his Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura. The upshot of this reinterpretation is to highlight the creative tensions within the diverse intellectual traditions that constituted the wider neo-Epicurean Enlightenment.

The Ethices Compendium (1684) by Daniel Whitby, the Oxford-educated clergyman and scholar, was one of the most widely used ethics textbooks in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century North Atlantic world. Despite its popularity, modern scholars have not analysed the conceptual content of this work in any detail. This article contends that Whitby’s Ethices was one of the earliest ethics textbooks to promote Epicurean ideas about the reducibility of the highest good to pleasure and that contemporaries interpreted the work as adhering to Epicurus’s ethics. The Ethices also propounded an anti-Calvinist theology of Christ as a divine lawgiver and grace as co-operating with natural motivations. Whitby’s unconventional moral theology was informed by his intellectual milieu at Trinity College, Oxford, where both Epicurean and anti-Calvinist ideas were becoming increasingly influential. Whitby’s Ethices only became more innovative in later editions as he responded to surrounding moral and theological debates. For instance, he adapted the 1699 edition of the Ethices to make an Epicurean critique of John Norris and Mary Astell’s Neo-Platonist accounts of the love of God. The final section of this article surveys the reception of Whitby’s Ethices, suggesting that it was particularly popular amongst adherents of John Locke’s philosophy because it displayed moral ideas compatible with his ethics in a textbook format suited to university education.

This article outlines a new account of the reception of John Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1705–7) in the eighteenth-century Church of England. Although the Paraphrase is rarely discussed in studies of the influence of Locke’s writings, the work was widely used by later scholars and clergymen. The fierce early response to the Paraphrase’s apparently heterodox interpretations of St. Paul’s accounts of the Resurrection and the Trinity soon gave way to a more positive appreciation of the commentary’s merits. Even in these early years, some putatively orthodox divines had found much that was useful in the Paraphrase. After 1730, such positive readings of the Paraphrase became more prevalent. The growing status of Locke’s philosophy facilitated a re-reading of his religious writings. The Paraphrase was lauded in Biblical commentaries, educational writings, sermons, and systematic treatises. Scholars and clergymen frequently imbibed Locke’s hermeneutic principles; his judicious comments on St. Paul’s style and argumentative strategy; his anti-Calvinist exegesis; and the contextual knowledge he provided for understanding the epistles. The enduring influence of the Paraphrase also ensured that it was deployed in several significant theological debates around Deism and obligatory subscription to articles of faith.

This article demonstrates that numerous high church clergymen at Christ Church, Oxford, engaged positively with John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). They indicated their approval of his philosophy by securing copies of his writings for personal and college libraries, corresponding with him, teaching the Essay to students, and, most importantly, publishing several reworkings of his thought. The ways in which these Christ Church men reinterpreted the Essay, moreover, influenced how Locke’s moral theology was read later in the eighteenth century within French Huguenot circles, Cambridge, and the Dissenting academies. Uncovering these largely overlooked Lockean afterlives, therefore, not only reveals new intellectual and institutional contexts for the Essay’s reception but also shows that particular places of education reshaped the published debates around Locke’s thought.

This article presents a new understanding of how Anglican clergymen and writers remoulded common notions of the moral status of pleasure during the latter half of the seventeenth century. It addresses the current historiographical neglect of the philosophical content of ethical thought within the Church of England. For Anglican thinkers developed innovative moral arguments about the rational order of human satisfactions in order to direct the disruptive appetites towards good ends. This article illustrates the conceptual trajectory of this ethical discourse by comparing John Locke’s developing moral ideas with those of Robert South, Public Orator at Oxford after 1660, and Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford after 1686. For the course of Locke’s shifting ethical thought reflected a philosophical movement within an Anglican language of pleasure, from South’s moderate position – that pleasure was a significant good among other ends – to Parker’s radical stance – that goodness was reducible to that which was delightful.

The Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch émigré physician and acerbic satirist, provoked some of the fiercest debates of the eighteenth century by arguing that luxury and vice were the driving forces of modern commercial societies. However, studies of these polemical storms remain largely reliant on Frederick Benjamin Kaye’s incomplete appendix of contemporary references to Mandeville in the Clarendon Edition of the Fable (1924). To address this historiographical lacuna, this research note presents substantial new evidence on the Fable’s reception by listing and describing 182 overlooked eighteenth-century British responses to Mandeville.

This article presents a new understanding of how the context of Restoration debates around toleration, magisterial authority and political obligation impinged upon Locke’s mature thought. It proposes that prominent Anglican clergymen, by utilising Hobbist ideas in their arguments for religious conformity, transformed the debate around toleration. In particular, Samuel Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie’s potent mix of Hobbism, theological moralism and Scholastic natural law led to important nonconformists, such as Owen and Ferguson, reshaping their arguments in response. They were forced to make an argument upon first principles as to precisely why Parker’s naturalistic account of ecclesiastical authority was inadequate to justify their own particular view of religious institutions. Crucially, the specific features of Parker’s argument, led to John Humfrey, a largely overlooked figure, developing a set of ideas that preconfigured Locke’s later thought. This article then highlights Locke’s creative engagement with the ideas of his time, by charting the changes to Locke’s ecclesiology and view of natural law from 1667-1674, alongside the similar conceptual shifts made by Humfrey.

The study of John Locke’s theological thought has yet to be combined with emerging historical research, pioneered by Jean-Louis Quantin, into the apologetic uses of Christian antiquity in the Restoration Church of England. This article will address this historiographical lacuna by making two related arguments. First, I will contend that Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1705–1707) marked a definitive shift in his critique of the appeal to Christian antiquity. Prior to 1700, Locke had largely contested these references to the precedent of the early Christian Church by making a narrowly philosophical case against arguments from authority in general. However, the controversial reception of Locke’s theological writings in the 1690s, compelled him to develop historical and methodological arguments in the Paraphrase against the witness of Christian antiquity. Secondly, I will argue that Locke’s repudiation of the witness of Christian antiquity was the primary motivation for the diverse responses to the Paraphrase by early eighteenth-century Anglican writers, such as Robert Jenkin, Daniel Whitby, William Whiston, Winch Holdsworth and Catharine Cockburn.

This article presents some overlooked evidence on the reception of John Locke’s writings at Christ Church, Oxford. It is intended to supplement a new article in the History of Universities on the surprisingly positive response to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) at that bastion of late seventeenth-century high churchmanship. This evidence sheds new light on: the reception of Epicureanism at that college in the 1650s; Locke’s personal connections at Christ Church; book-holdings of Locke’s writings at the early eighteenth-century college; some unnoticed uses of Locke’s writings by members of Christ Church; the European and North American reception of one Christ Church Lockean; and, the changing trajectory of the later eighteenth-century reception of Locke at that college.