Introduction

This chapter introduces the key themes and questions to be explored in the work. In particular, it discusses the tendency of much recent scholarship on early-modern philosophy to emphasize the importance of two late Hellenistic philosophical traditions: the Stoic and the Epicurean. It indicates that three important British writers—John Locke, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume—deliberately and explicitly aligned their approaches with Cicero, as the representative of an alternative philosophical tradition: academic scepticism. This, they argued, offered the conceptual resources more satisfactorily to address a question that contemporaries recognized to be particularly pressing: the relationship between moral theology and moral philosophy. It further yielded highly distinctive narratives of the historical relationship between classical moral philosophy and the Christian moral theology which had appropriated and displaced it. These narratives were in turn challenged by Shaftesbury and Mandeville, who placed themselves (respectively) within the Stoic and Epicurean traditions.

At the Limits of Christian Humanism

Even as he has attracted little attention from historians, the writings of the determinedly heterodox Anglican clergyman Conyers Middleton incited a remarkable amount of critical response in mid-century Britain. Hume, for example, clearly read Middleton closely. Even more so than Locke, Middleton declared his admiration for Cicero’s moral philosophy. Middleton nonetheless alerts us to an alternative tradition of thinking about Cicero as an academic sceptic: that developed within Christian humanism, most notably by irenic figures such as Erasmus and William Chillingworth. On this reading, Ciceronian academic scepticism and Christian piety were complementary and mutually reinforcing: if the former recognized the limits of reason, then the Christian gospels provided what reason alone could not. Middleton’s biography of Cicero represents the most concerted, comprehensive attempt to present Cicero as an academic sceptic; and Cicero was a similarly presiding presence in Middleton’s deeply controversial theological writings.

The Place of Cicero in Locke’s Moral Theology

Locke’s published and unpublished works disclose a marked contempt for classical moral philosophy, with one signal exception: Cicero. This chapter reconstructs Locke’s interpretation of Cicero, to explain why he was held to be an exception to Locke’s more general disdain for ancient ethical theories. This approach also illuminates our understanding of the relationship between Locke’s moral theory, political philosophy, writings of Christian apologetic, and theory of toleration. It suggests that Locke’s moral philosophy is decidedly more complex, and richer, than is often recognized: pregnant with naturalistic impulses that were nonetheless subordinated to a grounding of morality in the authority, will, and command of a divine legislator. These aspects of Locke’s moral theory proved to be immensely stimulating to later British philosophers such as Hume, even if they sought systematically to decouple moral philosophy from Christian theology.

Epilogue

Hume’s naturalistic moral philosophy and rejection of moral theology represented a challenge to which his Scottish contemporaries sought to respond. Almost all did so with reference to Cicero—whom they sought to re-appropriate for a broadly Stoic ethical tradition which was held to be amenable to a polite Presbyterian Christianity. Drawing together the discussions in the foregoing chapters, the Epilogue illustrates how Locke, Middleton, and Hume were central provocateurs in a full-blown Ciceronian controversy in eighteenth-century Britain. Edward Gibbon was well-read in this debate and contributed to it in his earliest publications; but the later volumes of the Decline and Fall indicate a movement away from an interest in late Hellenistic philosophies—including the Ciceronian—as living traditions which might provide answers to pressing contemporary questions. By the early nineteenth century, indeed, this earlier debate over Cicero’s ‘real’ philosophical commitments had come to seem strange indeed.

From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy

Hume gave more attention, and wrote more extensively, on the relationship between moral theology and moral philosophy than on any other issue. In doing so, he made clear the importance of Cicero—when interpreted as an academic sceptic—to the explanations he formulated. Hume quite explicitly identified his own variant of sceptical philosophy with Cicero’s, and argued that it alone was consistent with the empirical methodology upon which the ‘science of man’ had to be constructed. In contrast to Locke—with whose moral theory he engaged more closely than scholars have recognized—Hume argued that Cicero justified a complete conceptual separation between the realms of morality and religion. This informed Hume’s narrative of the history of philosophy, which identified the pathological human tendency to demand certainty and to avoid doubt as the greatest cause of error and disruptive of the ties which held people together in civil societies.

Mandeville and the Construction of Morality

Once considered primarily as a satirist, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the importance and originality of Bernard Mandeville’s moral philosophy and theory of sociability—and its influence on later philosophers including Rousseau, Hume, and Adam Smith. Mandeville’s close engagement with Epicurean writings, ancient and modern, is clear; less recognized is the extent to which he drew upon them to develop a naturalistic moral theory which could respond directly to Shaftesbury’s Stoic moral philosophy (and, less directly, to Locke’s Christian moral theology). In such a theory, God’s design, will, and sanctions played no meaningful role; but this did not preclude Mandeville from offering his own, strikingly original narrative of the intertwined histories of moral philosophy and moral theology. As had Locke, Mandeville drew particular attention to the individual’s craving for esteem and its importance in their habituation, in society, into norms of moral conduct to which they subsequently feel beholden.

Shaftesbury’s Science of Happiness

This chapter focuses on Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. It recovers the interpretative importance of Shaftesbury’s profound classicism—in particular, his admiration for the ancient Stoic moral philosophers—for an understanding of his philosophical objectives, and it challenges the general tendency of recent scholarship to marginalize or ignore the substantive content of that philosophy. It argues that Shaftesbury’s classicism finds its most important context, and his vindication of Stoicism and contempt for the moral teachings of Christianity its contemporary significance, in Locke’s distinctive treatment of classical moral philosophy. Precisely because scholars have paid scant attention to the latter, they have failed to comprehend the novelty and importance of the former. Shaftesbury’s admiration for Stoicism also informed his highly distinctive narrative of the history of philosophy, which emphasized how Christianity had misappropriated ancient moral philosophy for its own (worldly) purposes.