Jacob Donald Chatterjee

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.

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.