In a previous article defending Enlightenment liberalism and its individualistic conception of a universal natural law, I explained that there was an illiberal dimension of the older Scholastic conception of natural law, which was founded on the ancient Greek philosophy of Aristotle and later Christianized by Thomas Aquinas. Scholastic natural law was further transformed in the century preceding John Locke’s famous Second Treatise on Government, the locus classicus of Enlightenment liberalism that was first published in 1689. So what exactly were the intellectual developments that led to Locke’s revolutionary individualistic transformation of natural law ethics?
In the legal portion of his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas argued that the purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue and thus must forbid the more grievous vices that detract from the common good of society. In another part of the Summa, Aquinas contended that the sort of temporal goods of individuals that are normally protected by private property rights, etc. (which generally reflects the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor) might harm the common good if that individual becomes an obstacle to the eternal salvation of others. Such arguments for the coercive repression of heretics provided a doctrinal basis for the Inquisition and later for the censorship of heretical works.
In spite of this, Scholasticism remained a vitally important to the emergence of liberal political theory even as challenges to Scholasticism arose, as Murray Rothbard stressed in An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought:
The deadly assault on scholasticism came from two contrasting but allied camps. One was the rising groups of Protestants without, and crypto-Calvinists within, the Church who denounced it for its alleged decadence and moral laxity. Protestantism, after all, was in large part a drive to cast off the sophisticated trappings and the refined doctrine of the Church, and to go back to the alleged simplicity and moral purity of early Christianity. . . .
The second camp of enemies of scholasticism was the rising group of secularists and rationalists, men who might be Catholics or Protestants in their private lives but who mainly wanted to get rid of such alleged excrescences on modern life as the political application of religious principles or the prohibition of usury.
Given the anti-individualistic aspects of Scholasticism, however, it is more accurate to say that not everything about the Protestant and secularist assault on Scholasticism was anti-liberty, though there was an important kernel of truth in Scholastic natural law theory that had to be retained.
On the Protestant side, John Calvin interpreted scripture as a series of covenants made directly between God and his people. Popular control of institutions specializing in different spheres of activity imply that both church and state should be independent of each other and self-governing through elected representatives. In the Calvinist version of the Protestant Two Kingdoms doctrine, elected church elders could admonish, suspend, or excommunicate deviants and define religious offenses, but a godly state was responsible for actually trying and punishing heretics and blasphemers.
The massacre of thousands of French Calvinists in August of 1572 due to court intrigues stimulated a great deal of anti-royalist Calvinist literature over the following decade affirming such notions of popular sovereignty and of the right of the people to violently overthrow ungodly kings (expanding upon Calvin’s teaching that obedience to God takes priority over obedience to kings). Rothbard acknowledged this “monarchomach” literature and its subsequent importance, though not connecting it specifically to the original theologies of Protestantism’s founders.
Moreover, Rothbard neglected the crucial fact that Europe around this time was tearing itself apart with terrible religious wars and persecutions. Established sects insisted that their kingdoms stamp out their rivals. Under the emerging monarchical absolutism, this implied that the faith of the monarch and those of his or her successor (which weren’t necessarily the same) became literally a matter of life and death for anyone who had a strong commitment to their own faith. Conflicts were further escalated as religious allegiances became entangled with other contentious social and ethnic divisions.
The death tolls and prolonged nature of these intra-Christian wars is utterly appalling. The French Wars of Religion started in 1562 and lasted for a little over 36 years, leaving several million dead. The Dutch War for Independence began in the late 1560s and lasted for 80 years, leaving several hundreds of thousands dead. In Germany, the Thirty Years War started in 1618 and left five to eight million dead. In the British Isles, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (including the English Civil War) started in 1639 and lasted 14 years, leaving a quarter million dead in Great Britain and many hundreds of thousands dead in Ireland.
One consequence of these wars was a growing realization that state-enforced heresy laws were more effective at triggering endless bloodshed than at stamping out dissent. Protestant rebels in the Netherlands wisely overcame their internal sectarian discord and offered an olive branch to non-Protestants by incorporating a provision in their 1579 Union of Utrecht that “. . .that every particular person shall remain free in his religion, and that no one will be pursued or investigated because of his religion.” While this didn’t end their conflict with the Catholic Habsburg monarch, the Dutch rebel state did set an important precedent that internal religious peace could be achieved by leaving individuals free to follow their own consciences.
Liberty of conscience also became theologically important for certain Protestants sects, especially those that viewed one’s free will as playing a necessary role in one’s salvation. In a 1612 petition to aspiring absolutist King James I entitled A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity, the General Baptist Thomas Helwys boldly proclaimed to his power-lusting monarch (who promptly imprisoned Helwys for saying so):
For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews or whatsoever it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. This is made evident by our lord the king by the scriptures.
In 1644, as the English Civil War was raging, a truly remarkable quartet of writers—Henry Robinson, William Walwyn, Roger Williams, and John Milton—published essays demanding liberty of conscience and freedom of expression for all Christians, arguing that individual liberty and free discourse, not royal or papal dicta issued by corruptible human intermediaries, was the only way for a believer to attain both peace and truth from the scriptures. Such doctrines, along with demands for representative democracy, became a cornerstone of the libertarian Leveller movement a few years later, with Walwyn being one of its key leaders.
Sadly for the fortunes of English libertarianism, the army the Levellers were trying to win over to their cause was led by the Puritan fanatic Oliver Cromwell, not by a George Washington. After Cromwell suppressed the Levellers, his military dictatorship with its rigorous internal repression and its external aggression against Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Scotland institutionalized a fierce religious intolerance across Britain that ended only after his death and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy.
Under Cromwell’s tyranny, it was the turn of a different strata of society—a small band of former royalists at Oxford University with empiricist philosophical leanings—to turn against the fanaticism of their age. One of them, Walter Charleton, imported a Christianized form of Epicureanism from France in two books published in the mid-1650s, the Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana and Epicurus’s Morals. About a decade earlier, the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi had done for Epicurus what Thomas Aquinas had done for Aristotle, namely, to reformulate Epicurean physics, epistemology, and ethics in a manner that was acceptable to Christians. Gassendi had also ably defended his epistemological synthesis of reason and experience against rationalist doctrines in lengthy exchanges with René Descartes.
Charleton and Epicureanism were very well received by intellectuals of the Stuart restoration, with numerous translations of Epicurean works appearing and Epicurean themes featured in poetry and in theatrical works. They had no use for the anti-reason, anti-pleasure, intolerant fanaticism of the Cromwellians; to them Epicurus represented the polar opposite of Puritan theocratic doctrines.
Importantly for the development of Enlightenment liberalism, Locke is known to have corresponded with Charleton and interacted with the same Oxford circles. When the Stuarts began moving towards a restoration of both absolutism and Roman Catholicism, Locke’s circle and former republicans (organized as the Green Ribbon Club) converged into a new Whig movement and made a common cause against the pro-Stuart Tories. Failed plots against King Charles II drove Locke into exile, where he wrote a trio of works published shortly after his return and the triumph of the Whigs—A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding—that are the foundational documents of classical liberalism and of British empiricism.
Many who try to explain the origins of Locke’s philosophy, including Rothbard, are troubled by an apparent inconsistency between the Treatises and the Essay in terms of their ethical foundations. The Treatises speaks the traditional Aristotelian language of natural law and cites a Scholastic predecessor, while the Essay frames ethics in terms of man being motivated by pleasure and pain. How can we reconcile the two?
The solution to this puzzle relies on the fact that the Essay is largely derived from the work of Gassendi, and if one parses the text carefully, one discovers that Locke followed Gassendi in providing an anti-Aristotelian account of what natural law is, where an individual’s rationality and feelings must complement each other to arrive at a rational understanding of virtue for oneself. It is also noteworthy that Charleton’s Epicurus’s Morals offers an Epicurean analogue of social contract theory. What Locke did was to brilliantly combine the anti-authoritarian aspects of England’s various Christian and Leveller traditions with Gassendi’s neo-Epicureanism.
To be sure, by the early 1700s a reaction had set in against Epicureanism as moderate Whigs reconciled themselves to the Anglican religious establishment. Locke’s patron in the pre-exilic period, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, promoted a neo-Stoic “moral sense theory” that later became a staple of the Scottish Enlightenment. However, Locke himself remained the mainstay of the radical Whigs and of other individualist threads of the Enlightenment, transmitting a natural rights libertarianism to future generations.
Does any of this still matter more than three centuries later? With Americans debating the nature of their national identity and the meaning of freedom with the approach of the 250th anniversary of their Declaration of Independence (a document inspired primarily by Locke’s philosophy), we would do well to remember and appreciate the struggles against sectarian fanaticism and the philosophical contributions of Aristotle and Epicurus; these are the intellectual sources of what would later inform America’s founding principles.
