Abstract
Although A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul must surely count as one of John Locke’s major works, albeit unfinished, it has not received the attention it deserves. Locke’s motives and authorial intentions remain unclear. Little consideration has been given to how this late work relates to his earlier theological writings, in particular to The Reasonableness of Christianity, so it should come as no surprise that the question of how Locke’s thoughts about St Paul might play out in his overall intellectual programme has been largely ignored.
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- 1.
Essay IV. xix. 4 (698).
- 2.
The Clarendon edition of A Paraphrase and Notes includes supplemental documents and an introduction and notes. Unfortunately, the printed text of this edition is not formatted in a way that is advantageous to the reader. Readers of Locke’s text will therefore want to consult also the edition available electronically in Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO). This is the text published in vol. 3 of the 1714 edition of Locke’s works. Its layout conforms to Locke’s wishes. In it the text of St Paul’s letters (in the AV) is set side by side with Locke’s paraphrase. The notes are directly beneath, so that the reader may take in all three parts together.
- 3.
The expressions quoted are biblical: Job 12: 25 and Hebrews 12: 23. Locke does not explicitly cite them, but seems to be quoting from memory.
- 4.
The Christian Virtuoso, Part I The Works of Robert Boyle, 281–366.
- 5.
See OED, ‘virtuoso’, §1. Also, Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 13–25 and passim.
- 6.
The Christian Virtuoso, The Works of Robert Boyle xi. 283–88, also 304–305, 313. See also, Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, ed. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 200, 535.
- 7.
Boyle rejected the idea that nature as a whole operates as a system; it was this ‘vulgar’ concept of nature, espoused by Neo-Stoics and Spinozists that he believed led to atheism. He conceived of nature as the work of God, and laws of nature as notional things that express the will of a superior will. See A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686), The Works of Robert Boyle, x. 457. For an illuminating account of Boyle’s theory of the regularity of natural operations and the divine role in establishing and maintaining them, see Peter Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (London: Routledge, 2000) 158–86. To my knowledge, Locke nowhere explicitly endorses this voluntarist idea of laws of nature. However, it follows from other remarks about the nature of law: that there can be no law that is not a command, and that the capacity of obeying a law or following a rule belongs only to rational beings and not to mere matter. See Essay, II. xxviii. 8, 12 (352, 256).
- 8.
The Christian Virtuoso, see fn. 6.
- 9.
Without a doubt, Locke must be included among seventeenth-century English Virtuosi, even if, on his own self-characterization, he was a minor one, a mere under-labourer (Essay, Epistle to the Reader [10]). He came under Boyle’s tutelage during the 1660s. We know that during this period Locke assisted Boyle in his natural philosophical work and that he remained a lifelong friend and colleague of Boyle’s. Boyle considered him worthy of the title. The preface to Boyle’s Memoirs for the Natural History of Humane Blood (1684) is addressed to Locke: ‘the very ingenious and learned Doctor JL’ (see The Correspondence, i. 279; Works of Robert Boyle, x, p. xii; see also M. A. Stewart, ‘Locke’s professional contacts with Robert Boyle’, The Locke Newsletter, xii. 19–44). Locke was elected to the Royal Society of London in November 1688. He was a physician, and engaged in extensive medical research. (See Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke, Physician and Philosopher, London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963, Chap. 1, and passim.) Locke edited Boyle’s posthumous General History of the Air, which contained meteorological data that he himself had gathered (London, 1692, Works of Robert Boyle, xii). It would have been expected in seventeenth century England that any virtuoso and member of the Royal Society also be a Christian. But to be a Christian virtuoso in the sense that Boyle intended required more than being a nominal Christian. The question of who was and who was not an authentic Christian virtuoso must be decided on a case-by-case basis.
- 10.
An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles by consulting St. Paul himself, Paraphrase and Notes, 113; WR, 63. Appendix I of Paraphrase and Notes ii. 664–67 contains transcripts of early drafts of this text and a brief account of Locke’s plans for publication of his paraphrases of St Paul.
- 11.
Apropos to St Paul’s adaptability of style, the following entry is inscribed in Locke’s interleaved English Bible (Locke 16.25, LL 309), 784. Locke cites no source. It is verbatim from a work of the English Jesuit John Vincent Cane, Fiat Lux (n.p., 1662), 14. The entry was made c1663, for Locke’s unpublished disputation, ‘Infallibility’ is a response to Cane’s arguments for papal authority and was written about this time. What is noteworthy is that the text anticipates Locke’s account of St Paul’s style. ‘St Paul in this Epistle [Romans] turns him self this way & that way as occasion offers, which of all other his letters as it hath most in it of Solidity soe hath it least of Method in the context. The reason is because it was intended to allay some heats & fewds that were risen at Rome among the converted Jews & Gentiles there, who began after their conversion to uppraid & disable one another with their former unworthynesse: The converted Jew esteeming himself the better man, because his nation was gods chosen from the begining, out of which the Messias came, & the Jews were in a continuall Succession, both before their conversion to Christianity, & after it still gods servants. The converted Gentile on the other side maintaind, that he had not withstanding the darknesse of his condition soe worthily behaved him self even by the meare light of reason, that god was pleasd of his love he therefor bore him to call him to the light of the Gospell, to serve the Lord of Glory whome the Jews had crucified. St Paul to end this quarrell turns him self to & fro, first on this side then on the other as occasion presented its self; & findeing the parties resolute in a question hard to decide as it was stated, & both soe deeply ingagd that they could not easily be reconcild, that he might the better part them he knockes them both downe, & he dissipates all pretenses of their owne worthinesse, to the end they might both of them have recourse to gods mercy which was equally shewd to both, & have peace among them selves. the good workes that St Paul debases, were those done before conversion to Christianity.’
- 12.
See Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 143.
- 13.
See Luke 4: 16–21.
- 14.
In Conduct, 171–72, Locke advises that everyone is obliged to look after their progress towards a future life, and, therefore, to think about religion. He adds that they have sufficient time for this if they make the right use of the leisure provided them on the Sabbath and other religious holidays. He cites the remarkable achievement of biblical understanding of Huguenot peasantry.
- 15.
Essay, Epistle to the Reader, (6).
- 16.
The meaning of a text has, on this account, several locations: it is in the mind of the author as he writes; it is in the text, where the attentive reader finds it, and, finally, it takes its place in the mind of the reader. But on this account, reading must be a complex activity of attentiveness, or enforced passivity, and retrieval of the author’s meaning or intention, which is a critical activity. I have found very suggestive Richard Wollheim’s idea of interpretation as ‘seeing-in’. He applies it to works of visual art, but it is I think applicable to literature also, and, at least in the seventeenth century, to works of nature, that is, in anything that may be regarded as a product of art. See Wollheim’s Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 43–100; also, Wollheim, ‘Criticism as Retrieval’, in Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 185–204.
- 17.
Paraphrase and Notes, 115–16; WR, 66.
- 18.
Paraphrase and Notes, 176.
- 19.
Reasonableness, 40–41; WR, 115–16.
- 20.
Locke introduces the question of Messianic secrecy on p. 59 of the first edition of the Reasonableness and proceeds to answer it in a long historical discourse that continues through p. 188, whose total number of pages is 304; in Reasonableness, 40–108; WR, 115–66.
- 21.
A useful contemporary description of this project and its extent is given by Samuel Torshell in A Designe about Disposing the Bible into an Harmony (London: John Bellamy, 1647), 10: ‘The Designe is to lay the whole Story together, in a continued connexion, the Books or parts of Books, and all the severall parcels disposed and placed in their proper order, as the continuance and Chronicall method of the Scripture-history requires, so that no sentence nor word in the whole Bible be omitted, nor any thing repeated, or any word inserted, but what is altogether necessary for Transition. So as some whole chapters or pieces, be put into other places, yea great parts of some Books, and some whole Books to be woven into the body of an other Book.’
- 22.
A Chronicle of the Times and Order of the Texts of the Old Testament (London, 1647) and A Harmony, Chronicle and Order of the New Testament (London, 1650); both works are collected and paginated separately the first volume of The Works of the Reverend and Learned John Lightfoot, DD, 2 vols (London: Robert Scot, Thomas Basset, Richard Chiswell, Thomas Wright, 1684). Locke owned this edition and many other editions of Lightfoot’s works. Lightfoot is the most frequently author commonplaced in Locke’s interleaved Bible and Testaments. For Lightfoot’s works in Locke’s library, see LL, 1742–1752a. In his harmony of the New Testament, Lightfoot makes clear that restoring the parts of Scripture to their proper time and place and ‘genuine order’ is not something done out of disrespect for the Holy Spirit. The dislocations of Scripture, rightly considered, reveal ‘the Majesty of his [the Holy Spirit’s] style and divine Wisdom’; a chronological restoration is supposed also to provide the reader with the advantage of recognizing the divine wisdom of the dislocations. Like other philological notation, it does not replace the text but facilitates the interpretation of it.
- 23.
Locke’s interleaved copy of Toinard’s Harmonia is in the Bodleian Library, Locke 18.1 (LL 2934). Toinard presented it to Locke on 12 December 1678; see MS Locke f. 3, p. 108.
- 24.
See Reasonableness, 83; WR, 147. Locke reads Matthew 26: 63–66 and Luke 22: 66–71 as the same event; Toinard treats them as separate events.
- 25.
The reader will recall that Locke defines freedom as the power to perform an action or abstain from it according as one chooses. On this account of free agency, every free action is voluntary, but not all voluntary actions are free. See Essay II. xxi. 10–12 (238–40). My conjecture is that Locke believed that all the agents in the gospel history acted freely, that is, could have acted otherwise had they chosen. This would make messianic events contingent, which may seem odd. However there is a long tradition supporting this.
- 26.
The expression is borrowed from Leo Strauss who applied it not without justification to Hobbes and Locke. A cautious man of affairs is one who recognizes that veiled or indirect expressions are warranted in some circumstances in order to achieve his purpose. Locke’s Jesus acts in this way, of course, wisely as a serpent but innocent as a dove. See Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 206 and passim.
- 27.
Reasonableness, 81; WR, 145–46.
- 28.
Reasonableness, 91; WR, 153.
- 29.
Reasonableness, 89–91; WR, 152–53.
- 30.
John Locke, A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), WR, 222.
- 31.
A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, 310–11.
- 32.
Locke’s paraphrase of Ephesians 1: 3–4, 7–9, Paraphrase and Notes, ii. 615–16.
- 33.
On the meaning of the word ‘gospel’ see the Reasonableness, 90; WR, 129: ‘A word which in Saxon answers well the Greek εὐαγγέλιον and signifies, as that does, Good news. So that what the inspired Writers call the Gospel, is nothing but the good Tidings that the Messiah and his Kingdom was come’.
- 34.
Paraphrase and Notes, 483–86.
- 35.
Locke was of the opinion that under the new covenant a new law prevails, the law of faith. This law requires acceptance that Jesus is the Messiah. It also requires obedience to him, which entails a sincere endeavour to do all that he commands. What he commands is the moral law, which consists of the same precepts as the moral part of the Mosaic law and the law of nature, which is discoverable by the light of nature, all three being identical to ‘the eternal rule of right’. What is new about the law of faith is that it allows that a sincere endeavour to conform to the moral law will count as much as perfect obedience did under the old covenant or under the law of nature: it would qualify a person as righteous in the sight of God. See the Reasonableness, 13–22, 128–30; WR, 96–102, 181–83.
- 36.
Paraphrase and Notes, ii. 607f.
- 37.
Spinoza, Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus, trans. Samuel Shirley (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 196–204.
- 38.
Locke owned a copy of Spinoza’s Tractatus. Passages from the Tractatus are cited in Locke’s interleaved English Bible (Locke 16.25) pp. 7, 17, 230. These notes were probably transcribed sometime between 1672 and 1675. They are all citations of places in Chap. 1, ‘On Prophecy’. So one cannot be certain that Locke read the whole of Spinoza’s book.
- 39.
Paraphrase and Notes, i. 204.
- 40.
Paraphrase and Notes, ii. 554–556; see also editor’s notes, ii. 789.
- 41.
Essay II. xxi. 47–49 (263–65).
- 42.
The state that Locke has described here seems very much like the orthodox evangelical state of sanctification, which Locke surely must have recognized; see, for example, the Westminster Confession, 3rd edn (London, 1688), Chap. xiii, ‘Of Sanctification’. Locke owned a copy of this edition, which he must have purchased shortly after his return to England in 1689 (LL 140); there is an index of its contents, not given in the book itself, inscribed on a flyleaf in his hand.
- 43.
‘The Epistle to the Colossians seems to be writ the very same time, in the same run and warmth of thoughts, so that the very same Expressions yet fresh in his Mind, are repeated in many Places; the Form, Phrase, Matter and all the Parts quite through of these two Epistles, do so perfectly correspond, that one cannot be mistaken in thinking one of them very fit to give light to the other.’ Locke also concluded that Philippians was also written at the same time, during St Paul’s captivity in Rome, and that all three treat the same theme: ‘the great Design of the Gospel laid down as far surpassing the Law, both in Glory, Greatness, Comprehension, Grace and Bounty’. Paraphrase and Notes, ii. 610.
- 44.
Paraphrase and Notes, ii. 610, 616f.
- 45.
Locke’s manuscript remains show that he planned paraphrases and notes of Colossians and Philippians and Hebrews. See in locum, Locke’s polyglot New Testament, two volumes interleaved and bound in five (Locke 9: 103–107). For his analysis of Hebrews, see WR, 238–41. In the ‘Synopsis’ to Ephesians, he considers the appropriateness of a harmony of Ephesians, Colossians and Philippians, which he believed were all composed about the same time, when St Paul was a prisoner in Rome. Locke’s reflections on the meaning of Ephesians may be taken as his last thoughts on Christian theology and, especially, Christology.
- 46.
Paraphrase and Notes, 609.
- 47.
Compare Locke’s praise of the Messiah with a recent work in Christology, which is undisputably high: Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors, the Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially 170–204, which offers an exposition of Colossians 1: 15–20 and other pertinent texts that express the same themes considered above. Adams’ interpretation relies heavily on Scholastic metaphysics, which Locke eschewed, and she places great weight on the Chalcedon definition of the two natures of Christ. What is remarkable is that in spite of this, Adams affirms a very similar account of the being of the Messiah and the cosmic dimensions of his realm.
- 48.
Education, 245.
- 49.
John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); also John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
- 50.
The most detailed exposition and defence of this hypothesis is given in John Marshall, John Locke, Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
- 51.
Essay IV. xvii. 4 (670–78, esp. 672f).
- 52.
Reasonableness, 141–44, 150–59 WR, 191–92, 196–201.
- 53.
Tolerantia, 59.
- 54.
See WR, 245–56 for a table of theological places in the Essay.
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Nuovo, V. (2011). Locke on St Paul, Messianic Secrecy, and the Consummation of Faith. In: Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 203. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0274-5_5
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