© Dr Alexander Moseley

PLATO, ARISTOTLE, CICERO, AUGUSTINE, AQUINAS, BOETHIUS, LOCKE

PLATO

Plato is one of the most influential and wide ranging philosophers to have arisen in the West, touching on most of philosophy’s elements. He lived between the turbulent years of 427 and 347 BC, and was born four years after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war (431-404), which wrecked havoc on the pan-Hellenic world, killing thousands and destroying many cities and of course diminishing the wealth, capital, and political power of its main antagonists.

His original name was Aristocles, but he earned the sobriquet Platon from the breadth of his shoulders. Plato’s family’s politcal connections are palpable: after his father’s death, his mother Perictione married Pyrilampes, a friend of the late Athenian ruler Pericles, who in turn was a good friend of the exiled Ionian philosopher, Anaxagoras, who died when Plato was one.

Plato began his literary career writing poetry, but soon rejected his works as too trite after he was introduced to Socrates, and so he turned his mind to philosophy.

Plato campaigned thrice with the Athenian army as a maturing man, but he never fully gave up the desire to affect politics, serving as a philosophical adviser to Dionysuis II of Syracuse and Hermias of Atarneus.

Plato travelled around the pan-Hellenic world and its outposts, visiting Egypt, and southern Italy, where he met the Orphic-Pythagoreans, who impressed him with the importance of mathematics in philosophical reasoning as well as their belief in the after-life.

Returning to Athens in 386, Plato founded the first university, the Academy, which was designed to promote philosophy in noblemen and statesmen.

Plato distilled the philosophy of his mentor, Socrates, into a series of dialogues in which Socrates debates with various colleagues and visitors to Athens; scholars argue that the early dialogues are a fair representation of Socrates' philosophy, but the later ones from Plato's maturing mind, belong more to Plato's ingenious development of the ramification of Socratic thought.

Aristotle

LIFE

Born the son of Nichomachus, a court physician to the Macedonian King, Amyntas III, Aristotle was well placed for an exceedingly good education, which he certainly took advantage of. He was born in Stagira, a Greek sea-port and colony in between the countries of Thrace, situated to the eastern side of Chalcidic peninsula, and Macedonia to its west.

Despite being hardly known beyond its borders, Macedonia suddenly becomes important during Aristotle’s lifetime. Its rise under Philip and its meteoric expansion into the east under Alexander left however a highly visible cultural and genetic imprint on the world. Macedonia’s inhabitants were warlike and became famed for and victorious because of their tightly disciplined phalanxes wielding long spears who would withstand ferocious attacks and flanked by cavarly – their discipline and courage were perfected by Philip and enabled his son Alexander to subdue people after people in his campaigns. Philip was the same age as Aristotle and the two probably knew each other through the Court in which Aristotle’s father served as physician.

Accordingly educated as a son of the Court Physician to the Macedonian King, following his father’s death, the 17 year old Aristotle was sent to Athens to further his knowledge by studying at Plato’s Academy. Aristotle spent two decades there, immersed in Plato’s thought, developing rhetorical skills in debates with the rival school of Isocrates. In 348/7, Plato died and his nephew, Speusippus took over the Academy; although it is thought that Aristotle would have been upset at not getting the post, commentators also point out that it is likely that as a foreigner in Athens, Aristotle would not have been eligible to take over the post. So Aristotle went travelling. It’s worth noting that anti-Macedonian feeling may have also prompted the philosopher’s travels – Philip had sacked the Greek city of Olynthus in 348 which caused consternation in Athens, a city that had been roused to be suspicious by Demosthenes’ famous speeches against Macedonian aggrandizement.

In this tumultuous atmosphere, our intrepid philosopher was invited by Hermias to Assos in northwestern Asia Minor to set up a small school to assist the spread of Greek ideas – something, ironically, Philip also wanted to do via Macedonian power – perhaps we can detect something of Aristotle’s influence on the Macedonian court here, as Hermias negotiated with Philip. At Assos Aristotle married his beloved Pythias and had a daughter. Three years later he moved to Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, where he further pursued his interest in biology. During his time here, against a backdrop of further political turmoil, Aristotle advanced his theory that all species exist for a purpose – this teleological principle (Aristotle’s ‘final cause’ that for which things are intended) influenced scientific thinking until the 19th Century. He worked for Theophrastus, a who had also studied under Plato, and who later was the beneficiary of Aristotle’s will, and a notable writer and philosopher in his own right.

In 343, Aristotle was invited back to the Macedonian Court, where his father had practised, to teach King Philip’s young son, Alexander. Aristotle taught Alexander to be like an Achilles or Ajax, the archetypal Homeric warrior but also one immersed in philosophy. It’s difficult to assess the impact of any teacher on a student, and Aristotle does not mention Alexander's exploits, but differences are certainly apparent: against Aristotle’s teachings that the Greeks should dominate the barbarian Persians and not marry into them, Alexander took a more cosmopolitan view of the lands he conquered, dismissing Aristotle’s firm distinction between the civilised Hellenic world and the barbaric rest of the world – after all, Alexander travelled further afield, and to cement his cosmopolitan outlook, he took a Persian princess as his wife and demanded his generals to do the same. On the other hand, Aristotle constantly warns against factions in his Politics, and it is not stretching imagination too much to consider Alexander as actually following his master’s thinking in this regard by removing potential division through inter-cultural marriages of allegiance. Nonetheless, this famous meeting of minds only lasted for three years, before Aristotle retired to his home town in 339.

The following year saw the beginning of Macedonian hegemony over the Hellenic peoples: King Philip II confederated the Greek city states – and became its chairman, but wisely left Athens unmolested in order to better secure its allegiance: in these matters, some have conjectured that Philip may have relied on Aristotle’s advice. However, three years later, Philip was assassinated by his old friend Pausanias.

In 334, aged 50, Aristotle returned to Athens and opened up a new university by leasing the Lyceum and its Walk – the Peritpatos. Being a foreigner, he was unable to own property in Athens, for it had strict immigration controls. Under his directorship, the Lyceum’s curriculum was broad – whereas the Academy was interested in maths, the students at the Lyceum were charged with finding out about the world delving into a range of philosophical and scientific issues, covering biology, theology, metaphysics, botany, meteorology, ethics, astronomy, mathematics, etc. The university possessed a library and its fellows pursued their own research into scientific matters. Philosophically, this period of life was his most productive – it also coincided with Alexander’s defeat of the Persian Empire and his victories against far flung tribes right up to the Indus river and the Afghanistan mountains; yet, Alexander’s campaigns do not make an impression on Aristotle’s political thinking.

In 323 Alexander died releasing the Athenians from his strong and imperial Macedonian grasp: as anti-Macedonian feelings resurfaced in Athens, Aristotle, good friend of the Macedonian regent of Greece, Antipater, and being charged with asebeia made his exit again, not wishing the Athenians to make the mistake of sinning against philosophy a second time. He retired to his mother’s estates at Chalcis, where he died a year later at the age of 62 or 63.

Not all of Aristotle’s works have come down the ages, and at the time his Politics was surpassed by the popularity of Plato’s Republic. Aristotle was hardly read during the Roman era although his influence was present in the peripatetic teachings of the Lyceum’s descendants,and only began to seap back into Western thinking with Boethius’ Latin translations of Categories and Of Interpretation in the 6th Century AD. On the whole, Aristotle’s influence had migrated East into the hands of Arab and Jewish scholars and elements of Aristotle’s philosophy dribbled into the West through such thinkers as Avicenna (980-1037); but the bulk of his writings did not reappear in the West until the mid-13th Century when several scholars, including Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, and William of Moerbeke translated works from the Greek into Latin. From the 13th Century onwards, Aristotle’s influence waxed – his greatest proponent, St Thomas Aquinas, referring to him as The Philosopher. His popularity waned in the late Renaissance as his views of the universe were challenged by scientists, but his influence, especially from his political and ethical writings, was revived in the 19thC and the late 20thC.

CICERO

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC in Arpinum, Latium, and was killed on December 7th 43 in a political purge. His life coincides with one of the greatest political upheavals of all time, one that is in the same league as the English, American, French, and Russian Revolutions in political history: that is, the end of the Roman Republic.

An eclectic philosopher influenced in part by Stoicism and echoes of earlier Greek ideas as well as the Roman doctrine of stolid militant virtue, Cicero was much indebted to Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics in his political theory as well in Roman legal traditions and its institutions. He believed himself to be fulfilling the role of Plato’s philosopher king in his official capacities. Yet although thoroughly versed in Greek thought, it was always to the Romans and examples of their achievements he turned in his speeches to drive his arguments home to remind his people what they were losing in the fall of the Republic.

Cicero was professionally a lawyer but also a notable polymath who was a reputable philosopher, man of letters and poet in his own right. He gained his fame through successfully defending legal cases, and his ambitious presence on the Roman stage grew as he pushed oratory to its highest levels – skills that took him to the premier office in the land – consulship, which is background normally would have excluded him from. After Cicero we see few statesmen of his worth in the Roman Empire: great leaders and politicians, yes, but none of the calibre of Cicero.

Cicero’s works come down to us mainly in the form of speeches and letters that he wrote up for publication. He used his brilliant attacks in the courts of law and the Senate to propagate his skills and more importantly, his political opinions. Following his death, his writings became part of the main curriculum of the educated Roman’s lessons – he became the model of rhetorical skills: for Quintillian, the first holder of the “Chair in Latin Rhetoric” (AD70), he was the ‘Roman Demosthenes’ and the ‘Roman Plato’ – the great orator and philosopher.

As the Roman Empire dwindled, his influence is still seen in the writings of Saints Jerome and Augustine; from there through the Carolingian courts of the 9th Century, and thereon in to the medieval schools, his influence increasing in the 14th Century and with the rise of humanism; he was still commonly read throughout the Reformation period, and with the rise of vernacular literature his style remained a model for writers such as Balzac, Voltaire, Swift, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke; the French Revolutionaries deployed his style and Roman terms in their conflicts with one another; while in America, Jefferson was thoroughly Ciceronian, and Lincoln certainly studied the oratory for his Gettysburg address. Finally, we hear them most resoundingly in Churchill’s oratory in the Second World War. But the demise of the classics and of the study of Latin in the West has led to Cicero’s oratory being replaced by the empty ‘sound-bites’ of modern media.

AUGUSTINE

Aurelius Augustinus was born in at Tagaste in 354AD (in modern day Algeria) during a time when the Romans still ruled North Africa and he died in 430 in Hippo during a Vandal siege twenty years after Rome was sacked by Alaric.

Augustine lived in the emergence of a new era, in this case the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the emergence of feudal systems in its wake tied together by the increasingly universal Christian religion. As the great vision that was once Rome crumbled politically, its intellectual impact remained and new thinkers, wedding themselves to Christian theology, sought to replicate the secular city’s reach and political monopoly by raising in its stead the Roman Church: such was Augustine’s ambition: the manifesto of the City of God is that the Church transcend the City of Man – i.e., Rome.

In Augustine’s youth, Tagaste was a backwater Roman establishment with absentee Roman landlords. Intellectually, or rather we should say spiritually, Augustine’s own world was divided: his father was initially pagan, and his beloved mother a simplistic Christian; but theologically politically his world was in upheaval, although it is only with the hindsight of history that we can detect what seems to us the rapid descent of the Western Roman Empire which occurred over a century.

The capable Augustine was propelled from Tagaste by a family friend who covered his tuition at the local university in Maduara at the age of eleven. From Maduara he moved to Carthage to study rhetoric returning to be a teacher in Tagaste in 374. For most of his early adult years, Augustine was devoted to philosophy -Cicero's lost work the Hortensius awakened his mind, but, as with most thinkers, he retained echoes of the ideas that surrounded his youth – notably the popular dualist Manichean theology.

Nonetheless, he grew to become disillusioned with what he considered to be the overly simplistic theology of the Manicheans after having questioned a visiting famous Manichean, Faustus. The disenchanted Augustine moved to Rome in 384 leaving his beloved mother and his mistress of fifteen years and a child, Adeodatus. He turned his energies into becoming a professional scholar and orator and was offered a chair at Milan, teaching rhetoric for the Imperial court. There he fell under the influence of Bishop Ambrose, whose sermons set Augustine’s mind onto Christianity, and in 387 he was converted to Catholicism, being baptised by Ambrose himself. Returning to Africa, he eventually took over the bishopric of Hippo in 398, and during this time he wrote his great works, including the City of God, in which he criticises unorthodox Christian sects such as the Manicheans and the Donatists and in turn attempts the theological Christianisation of Graeco-Roman philosophy. In effect Augustine accomplished a welding of Christian beliefs with the Platonic philosophy and Roman law adding necessary intellectual weight to the incipient political foundations provided by Constantine’s earlier rule.

Augustine’s was an ambitious design for a theology whose focus is other-worldy, but one that he achieved handsomely and with a rare precision and detail to logic through a tome of letters and short treatises. In so doing also he formulated the foundations for the dominant Christian attitude to war, one that is very similar to Roman ideals requiring war to be justified.

In 430 Hippo was besieged by invading Vandals and Augustine died during the siege; they later plundered the city but thankfully left his library and the church intact.

Boethius

Born in 480, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was left an orphan at a young age but was taken up by the noble and pious Symmachus, whose daughter Boethius later married. In an age of brutality and uncertainty, Boethius gained a reputation as a learned man and he soon gained a post with the trusting King Theodoric; however, his enemies put it about that Boethius was plotting treachery and he was thrown into prison and later tortured and executed.

This great mind was the essential conduit for Aristotle's logic, without which the thinkers, scientists and architects of the medieval ages would have been at a severe disadvantage. He was a strict Christian, but his Christianity does not play much of a role in his philosophical works, dividing, as the medieval mind was to, the arenas of natural and supernatural knowledge. He translated Aristotle, wrote on maths and music, commented on Cicero and Porphyry, and, while facing execution, wrote his famous Consolation of Philosophy.

In The Consolation, Philosophy comes as a woman and consoles Boethius, reminding him of the transitoriness of earthly values and the supremacy of the mind and especially of God's Intelligence and Eternity. We can only hope the consolatory thoughts of putting his life into perspective helped him through the beatings. The book is exceedingly powerful both in logic and in style, and unsurprisingly, its influence was great: a bestseller centuries after his death. Translated by Alfred the Great into Anglo-Saxon, into Old German by Teutonicus, enjoyed by Chaucer and Dante, The Consolation proves to be one of the most important texts and hence philosophical influences on the medieval era. It remains, however, rather under read today - which is a shame, for there is much in this very mature piece to provoke and to console the modern mind.

© Dr Alexander Moseley 2003

PS: My copy is the appropriately beautiful Folio Society edition of 1998, which I can highly recommend.

Thomas Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 to the Count Landulf of Aquino in a castle near Naples. He received his early education at the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, a frontier fortress between the Papal States and the Holy Roman Empire of Frederick II. The monks were expelled from the abbey in 1239 as the Emperor believed they had become too supportive of the Pope and the young Thomas Aquinas, upon returning home from his school, was sent to the University of Naples. The university had been founded by the Holy Roman Emperor to produce his willing civil service clever at defending his political interests. There Thomas studied grammar, logic, maths, rhetoric and astronomy, but most importantly, he was introduced to Aristotle, whom Aquinas later refers to as The Philosopher.

In 1244, Thomas shocked his family by joining the new Dominican order, an order that was perceived to be for the socially inferior mendicant monks who insisted on beggary and alms but who also offered a life of study and evangelism. Although his father had died by this point, his brothers decided to restore family honour – honour being of great value of the medieval aristocracy – and kidnap Thomas. They held him in the family castle in Monte San Giovanni for a year – but he did not recant his new allegiance. While penning his first two treatises on logic and fallacies, his brothers attempted to get Thomas laid; however, the frightened young man shooed off his potential seductress with a poker: not the only time a poker has come in useful for bent philosophers – Wittgenstein is said to have branded one at Popper in a debate in 1946. Released from captivity in 1245, a relieved, virginal, and increasingly corpulent Thomas made his way to the University of Paris – the university to be at in the 13thC. (He became so fat that the dining room table had to have a semi-circle cut out of it to enable him to reach the food).

In 1248 his tutor Albert the Great and Thomas left Paris to assist the newly established Dominican faculty at Cologne. Thomas stayed four years before returning to Paris where, encouraged by Albert’s belief in Thomas’s abilities, the university permitted him to take his bachelor degree and, in 1256, received his licentia docendi – his licence to teach. That year he began teaching theology. In 1259 he was appointed theological adviser to the papal Curia (humanist); he returned to Italy to spend two years at Anagi and then four years at Orvieto before proceeding to Santa Sabina convent in Rome; in November 1268 he was sent to Paris and became involved in doctrinal argument when the works of the Arabian, Aristotelian commentator Averroës, were circulating. Averroës had claimed that truth could be contradictory – that reason and faith could clash. This was not well received by his Islamic or Christian compatriots, but the thesis gained a popular following at Paris. Thomas sought to explain that faith proceeds where reason cannot go any further, an argument that initially did not win him much support but which was to become part of the Church's orthodoxy in later centuries.

In 1272 Thomas moved to Naples to establish a Dominican house at the request of Charles of Anjou. Theological argument had moved away from Averroës to Thomas’s rationalism which sought to rework Christian thinking and to shift it away from its Augustinian basis. Bonaventure entered into a friendly dispute with Thomas in a discussion that cut to the core of Christianity. To some thinkers, reality was just the backdrop for man’s spiritual adventure – its nature was accidental to that quest and hence irrelevant; Thomas disagreed, positing man as existing at the junction of the real and spiritual, deploying Aristotelian concepts to defend his view: the soul is the form of the body – form makes a thing be what it is meant to be; form and matter out of which a thing is made are the two causes that constitute any entity: body is matter, soul is form. Platonists retorted that Thomas was not defending the transcendence of the soul, for he followed Aristotle in integrating the two in a specific individual, and hence did not permit the survival of the soul after death.

Thomas died in 1274 and three years later the Parisian masters of Christian thought condemned a series of 219 propositions, a dozen of which were Thomas’s. The Dominican order however recognised Thomism as its official doctrine in 1278. In effect, the overture to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had taken place and the Church authorities were keen that mysticism should reign over rationalism; but eventually Thomas’s insights and productive mind were recognised by the Church – he was canonised in 1323, officially named doctor of the church in 1567, and hailed as a defender of Christian orthodoxy in the 19th Century.

Today he is read mainly by theologians, although secular ethicists have ventured into his massive Summa Theologica for thoughts on various problems from sex to war. His was certainly a productive mind – of the order of Saint Augustine, but what is evident is that the philosopher was often ready to defer to the Church: a faithful thinker indeed.

John Locke

John Locke was born in 1632 in a cottage in the village of Wrington, near the great port of Bristol, Somerset, and was raised at Pensford a few miles to the west. The second Stuart King of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland had been on the throne for seven years – the ill-fated Charles I, whose reign was to lead to a brutal Civil War dividing the British along religious and political lines and which ended in his execution in 1649. This historical context is vital to be aware of, for the tensions and violence of the era permeate the atmosphere in which Locke matured and wrote his political writings.

The essential divisions that operated in the Civil Wars may be thought of as splitting Puritan or Independent religious proponents and supporters of the rights of Parliament (generally lumped into ‘Parliamentarians’) from adherents to the Anglican Church, closet Catholics, and supporters of the Royal Establishment (generally referred to as ‘Royalists’). Locke’s parents were low gentry Puritans (tanners and clothiers), and his father, an attorney to the local Justices of the Peace, went to war on the Parliamentarian side in the cavalry. The local city of Bristol was a Royalist stronghold during the wars but fell to the Parliamentarians in 1645, and in 1647, a good acquaintance of Locke’s father, officer and Member of Parliament for the West Country, Alexander Popham, secured young Master Locke a place at Westminster School in London in the first example of patronage that was to assist Locke’s career.

According to Dunn, Locke’s family instilled him good values of independence and self-discipline, which he retained throughout his life, but the move to London opened up Locke’s mind and took him far from his parochial Puritan upbringing. Westminster School was run by the formidable Dr Richard Busby, a Royalist, who was apparently fond of beating the boys. Young Locke was there the same time as the poet and future apologist for Charles II, John Dryden (1644-54) and was at school at the time of Charles I’s execution on the scaffolding erected in front of the nearby Banqueting House (Jan. 1649). The execution caused a sympathetic reaction to the Royalist cause to foment during the next decade – and a posthumously published pamphlet, allegedly written by Charles (Eikon Basilike) encouraged the raising of his status from traitor (in the eyes of the High Court that tried him) to one of martyr.

Oxford

In 1652 the twenty year old Locke moved onto Oxford’s Christ Church. Oxford enjoyed an influx of scientific inquiry and humanism – Roger Bacon, John Wycliffe, Erasmus and Sir Thomas More all had their influence on the colleges. The present head of Christ Church was John Owen (1616-83), a Puritan proponent of toleration and independence for Protestant sects and an earlier supporter and follower of Cromwell. (Owen travelled with Cromwell into Scotland and Ireland). Avoiding a career in theology and despising the dry Scholastic studies (although the techniques and knowledge were of great use to his mind), Locke concentrated his studies on medical science at Oxford and later held teaching and diplomatic positions until meeting up with Lord Ashley Cooper in 1666 (later Earl of Shaftesbury). The position of a don was apparently Locke’s ambition and love and would have loved to live his whole life at Oxford (Laslett, ‘Introduction’) – but events altered this path and he was illegally ejected on political grounds from his position in 1684.

Thus Locke’s politically formative years were governed by the rise of Puritan dissenters and Parliamentarians, the outbreak of Civil War when he was ten, the fall of Bristol when he was 13, the execution of Charles I when he was 17 and the formation and government of a Republic until he was 28. The Republic was a strange political beast, taking over the powers that the Tudors, James I and Charles I had arrogated in a country wracked by war and whose checks on executive and legislative power were thereby diminished, it is unsurprising that the country swiftly descended into a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell’s rule. The ascendancy of the military was unique in English history – there had existed many implicit checks and balances against tyranny in the past including civil war and even assassination, but all notions of traditions were swept aside by the Puritan leaders in the name of God’s Englishmen, men of a peculiarly nationalistic Calvinistic predestination belief. Fear and superstitious bigotry flourished in such an environment; the ruling Calvinist Puritans persecuted Catholics, then turned their attention to what they deemed ‘pagan’ (i.e., too Catholic for Puritan tastes) Christian festivals such as Easter and Christmas, which were banned. The Republic became a pariah state – European (notably the French) monarchs sought to assist Charles II regain his throne and declared all English ships to be fair game – i.e., outlawed.

The Lords and the Monarchy were abolished but the so-called Rump Parliament was vulnerable to military pressure. Cromwell defeated Royalist and Catholic forces in Ireland and Charles II’s army in Scotland, but the Rump Parliament’s ineffectualness led Cromwell to dissolve it and nominate a new Parliament in 1653, which he also quickly dissolved for its inability to resolve the same problems and attend to the reforms required. John Lambert penned the first British Constitution to give the Republic a form and the position of Lord Protector was created, which was passed to Cromwell; this acted to anger republicans for they saw it as another form of monarchy. Political divisions beset the Republic, which teetered into a dictatorship. Nonetheless, Cromwell was, in many respects, a highly capable ruler – rejecting the offered crown, and realising what a political vacuum the dissolution of the monarchy implied, he appointed good judges to ensure the rule of law, encouraged religious toleration, liberty of conscience and the immigration of Jews.

The immanent political difficulties led to the Republic’s swift demised following Cromwell’s death, and the ‘Long Parliament’ (whose Members were initially summoned by Charles I in 1640) was recalled by the most powerful military man around, General Monck. This Parliament dissolved itself in favour of a ‘Convention Parliament’ which soon sought out the exiled King Charles II (crowned in Scotland upon the death of his father) to bring peace and calm to the vulnerable state. The Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 was to produce one of the most prolific literary and artistic outbursts in English talents. The dour lid of strict Calvinism had been lifted off the land and Bacchus returned laden with the latest French fashions, wigs and wits. It was a time of intellectual as well as sensorial exploration – of the genius of Milton, Donne and Purcell, the unforgettable Rochester, the Royal Society, of the rebuilding of London following the Great Fire, of playwrights and architects galore. Truly a rambunctious period in England’s history.

In 1660, John Locke was aged twenty eight and a newly appointed tutor in Greek at Oxford. Oxford and Locke prudently rejoiced in the Restoration, “Our prayers are heard,” penned Locke – but so had he and his Oxford colleagues praised Cromwell’s rule, “You, mighty Prince!” (V). Like most of the country, Oxford bowed to the de facto establishment – but the growing political uncertainty that had followed Cromwell’s death found relief in the Restoration of Charles – the profligate and promiscuous Merry Monarch.

Locke’s Oxford appointment implied that he ought to take Holy Orders, but Locke refused and was later exceptionally granted an exception in 1666. As a tutor his interests were in science and knowledge and the underlying principles of human life; he penned his first two Tracts on Government and during this time met up with the scientist Robert Boyle (1627-91) and the medical scientist Thomas Sydenham (1624-89). He taught undergraduates for four years before going on a diplomatic mission to Brandenburg in 1665.

But in 1662 Charles II’s government had passed an Act of Uniformity, which Locke supported in his essays as being within the monarch’s rights. The Puritans had supported Charles’s restoration as the most peaceful alternative the country possessed; they had also been assured that there would be a broad toleration of ‘tender consciences’ as Charles saw the various independent branches of Protestantism flourishing in the Kingdom. However, the Act dashed Puritan hopes for toleration. The Act and ensuing pieces of legislation ejected two thousand Puritans from their churches, fined anyone over 16 attending ceremonies not conducted by the Book of Common Prayer, and forced ex-Puritan ministers to live at least five miles away from where they used to preach. An intolerant Act passed so soon after the dissolution of the Commonwealth caused concern – yet at this time Locke was more of the opinion that the magistrate (King) possessed the right to demand uniformity, with the caveat that in their consciences men may remain free (see notes on the Tracts on Government below).

In 1666, Locke returned to Oxford. The previous year a great plague had infested London (and Isaac Newton, whom Locke was to know later, had rushed back to Woolsthorpe to invent calculus), and in 1666 London burned in the Great Fire. At Oxford he chanced upon a man who was to change his life, of whom it has been said that without him there would have been no ‘Locke’. It is worth considering a few details of Ashley’s life.

Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621-83) was a wealthy and politically powerful patron to work for, and Ashley worked for whomever was in power – Royalists, Parliamentarians, the Protectorate, and the Restoration monarchy. He had initially sided with Charles I in the first Civil War, but changed sides to fight with the Parliamentarians having become displeased with the political and religious advice afforded the King. He supported Cromwell and was promoted well till he became dissatisfied with the increasingly military leaning of the Protectorate (1653-54). Following Cromwell’s death, in 1660 Ashley sat on the commission that invited Charles II to return to England, although he was not a thoroughly enthusiastic supported of the Restoration, it appeared to be the most prudential step for the country to take. From 1660-73 Ashley worked for Charles II, eventually rising to become Chancellor – and was promoted to an Earldom in 1672. Ashley supported religious toleration for dissenting Protestants and was a supporter of the Anglo-Dutch wars on mercantilist grounds (Dutch profit equates to English losses), but his anti-Catholic stance eventually led to his dismissal from government. There were fears that Charles II supported Catholicism – he was married to the Catholic daughter of the King of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza, although he had adhered to Protestantism while in exile in Catholic lands (he finally converted on his death bed). However, Charles’s brother was openly Catholic, and it was not known that Charles had a secret pact with the French and was paid a stipend from the French King to ensure his allegiance (and hence support England’s wars against France’s religious and trading enemy, Holland). But what brought matters to the fore and his ejection from government was Ashley’s participation in a plot to keep Charles II’s brother, James, an open Catholic, from marrying another Catholic.

In opposition, Shaftesbury formed ‘the Country Party’ to criticise the King’s government from which developed the first two political parties of modern times – the Whigs and the Tories. (The Whigs followed Shaftesbury and the Tories the Anglican establishment). However, in 1679, a spurious plot was uncovered to assassinate Charles II to instate his Catholic brother on the throne; this gave Shaftesbury’s political stance momentum and growth, for the country feared a return to Catholic Stuart rule and the conditions that had created the Civil Wars. In 1681, Shaftesbury marched to Parliament with a force of men, but the King’s dissolution of the Parliament left him suddenly vulnerable – he was imprisoned and charged with treason, a charge rejected by the jury. The poet laureate and Westminster graduate, John Dryden, penned a satirical attack on Shaftesbury at this time (Absalom and Achitophel) and a year later Shaftesbury fled to Holland and died in exile in 1683.

Returning to how all this affected Locke’s life, in 1666 Lord Ashley had happened to go to Oxford to see his doctor about a liver complaint. Locke was introduced to him and the two became good friends. Locke gained employment at the heart of Lord Ashley’s household in London following the Great Fire until 1675. In 1668 he oversaw a life-saving operation on his patron to remove liver cists. Politically, Locke wrote his first Essay on Toleration marking a shift away from his earlier establishment views (and more reflective of Lord Ashley’s) that the ruler may prescribe the form of religious service for the country. Debate raged following the Act of Uniformity (1662) and in Scotland, the Covenanters, who opposed any form of episcopalianism (hierarchical rule of bishops and archbishops) and uniformity suffered brutally. There were various uprisings: 1666, 1679, 1685, which had led to thousands of martyrs burning at the stake and being hanged. (Visitors to Edinburgh may see where they were burned in the Grass Market and visit a memorable commemorative grave in Greyfriar’s graveyard).

In 1668 Locke was elected to the Royal Society, and as his patron rose to become Chancellor for Charles II, Locke served the Lords Proprietors of Carolina (helping to draft a Constitution for the plantation), Secretary for Presentations (church livings), and Secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations. In 1675 Charles’ brother and heir to the throne James publicly converted to Christianity caused the expected crisis that left Lord Ashley – now Earl of Shaftesbury – ejected from office. From 1675-79, Locke travelled to France, returned to London in 1679-81 with his master to enjoy the heat of the Exclusion Crisis in which Shaftesbury and his supporters were seeking a Parliamentary Act to exclude James from taking the throne. James, Duke of York, was also a capable and efficient Lord High Admiral of the Fleet and had taken New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, having it renamed New ‘York’; he later fought in the Anglo-Dutch wars. Initially, James had the backing of the establishment – he was more serious and thus more appreciable to the Anglicans and he leaned towards toleration. However, his very Catholicism worried those of a puritan leaning.

In 1680, the late Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha was published at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. Filmer (1588-1653) had written his work supporting the divine right of Kings and their absolute power over the land in 1648. James I had supported the medieval notion that a ruler is divinely appointed (a theory designed to secure the monarch’s power in relation to the Church), but a few decades later it was given a theoretical framework by Filmer (and later by Bossuet (1627-1704) in France) – Locke was to reply with his Two Treatises, rejecting Filmer’s theory as ‘glib nonsense’.

In 1681, Locke’s patron, Shaftesbury, was charged with treason following ‘the Rye House Plot’ of an alleged attempt to kill Charles and James. The jury rejected the charge against Shaftesbury, but Tory political advances prompted Shaftesbury, in the absence of any hope of a Parliament sitting to provide support to his party, to flee to Holland where he died in 1683. Two of his colleagues opposing James’s succession, Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, were, however, executed, while a third, the Earl of Essex, committed suicide. Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (published posthumously in 1698) had argued for a right to revolt and his words were used against him during his trial; Russell had withdrawn from public life, but informers inculpated him in the Plot to assassinate Charles II.

The intolerant and charged atmosphere kept Locke abroad from 1683-89. In 1684 Locke lost his official position at Christ Church, and in 1685 Charles II died and his brother James ascended the throne. The ripples from the Rye House Plot continued to upset the initially stable and sober new regime, and after the failed Monmouth and Argyll rebellions to oust James in that year, the new monarch clamped down on those who sought to overthrow him. In the West Country, the local gentry had refused to give their support to the uprising to install the Duke of Monmouth (Charles II’s illegitimate son by Lucy Walter) who was Shaftesbury’s favourite for the throne. The rebels in the West Country were ferociously treated by the infamous Judge Jeffries following their defeat at Sedgemoor. Three hundred men were hanged, eight hundred deported to Barbados, and others were flogged, fined, or imprisoned. Monmouth, who had been exiled for his role in the earlier Rye House Plot, was beheaded. (Interestingly, James’s army was led by the rising star of John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough under Queen Anne’s reign, and ancestor to the famous Twentieth Century Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill).

James proceeded to hand out army posts to supporting Catholics; in November he followed his fateful father’s footsteps and dismissed Parliament. He also began alienating Anglicans at Court and advancing Catholics to his Privy Council. Nonetheless, he tolerantly presented a Declaration of Indulgences permitting Catholic and Non-Conformist freedom – the motives for which remain unclear; but the Queen’s pregnancy and the possibility of a Catholic succession led Protestant leaders to consult with James’ daughter’s husband (and cousin – both sharing Charles I as grandfather) William of Orange in Holland. William had been fighting the might of Catholic France with much gusto and success. Accordingly, as James became increasingly unstable and a boy (James) was born to his wife, William was invited over. Upon landing in South Devon and marching toward London many of James’s officers immediately switched sides and James fled to France. Soon both the English and Scots Parliaments declared the de facto abdication of James and the accession of William. James had lost all his military abilities and an attempt at recovering his throne via an invasion of hope of a sympathetic uprising in Ireland led to his defeat by William at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

These were certainly times of political commotion. In 1689, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published, along with, anonymously, his Two Treatises and a Letter Concerning Toleration. Amendments to the Two Treatises present it as work defending the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and William and Mary’s accession to the throne at the consent of the English people, although modern research has dated it back to 1679-81.

Locke returned to England and settled at the house of Damaris Masham, the daughter of Ralph Cudworth (1617-88), a Cambridge platonist, whose writings Locke had enjoyed. Cudworth was a non-conformist, who also rejected various elements of Puritanism such as Calvinist predestination theories; he also rejected Cartesian divine omnipotence and the Hobbesian of obedience to government; he argued for a moral order based on the worthiness (or baseness) of an act rather than a predestined plan. Lady Masham did much to popularise her father’s work and wrote her own Discourse Concerning the Love of God in 1696. Amidst friends and in a politically more convivial environment, Locke published works on economics, the Scriptures, toleration, and education. In 1695 he advised on the ending of press censorship, and was appointed a member of the Board of Trade (1696-1700). His Essay Concerning Human Understanding gathered pace – drawing controversy and support and earning a translation into French in 1700. Locke died with Lady Damaris reading the Psalms to him. His death, she wrote, “was like his life, truly pious, yet natural, easy and unaffected.” (Aaron)

Sources:

Aaron, Richard I. John Locke. Encyclopedia Britannica. CD-ROM, 2001.

Cox,RH. Locke on War and Peace OUP, Oxford, 1960
Dunn, John. John: A Very Short Introduction. OUP: Oxford, 2003.

Harris, Ian. The Mind of John Locke. CUP, 1994.
Laslett, Peter. “Introduction.” In Two Treatises of Government. CUP: Cambridge, 1997, pp.3-133

Moseley, Alexander. John Locke, Continuum Press, 2008.

© Dr Alexander Moseley

© Dr Alexander Moseley 2003