The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought

Chapter 5: God in Locke’s Philosophy

• Chapter 5 • God in Locke’s Philosophy   To write about the role of God in Locke’s philosophy is to confront a daunting hermeneutical challenge. In what Locke says about God and God’s role in human existence, there are contradictions, ambiguities, obscurities, and gaps. The question the interpreter has to face is what accounts for these flaws in Locke’s mode of presentation and how to deal with them in one’s interpretation. No one holds that they are due to incompetence on Locke’s part, though of course Locke was no more immune to error than other writers are. (As for the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke says, in the “Epistle to the Reader,” that it was written in “disconnected” snatches over a long period of time and never thoroughly revised—a method of composition that, as we all know, is guaranteed to create problems of consistency and continuity.) There is a school of thought, of which Leo Strauss was the twentieth-century pater familias, which holds that the flaws in Locke’s mode of presentation are due to the fact that he was an esoteric writer who played it safe by concealing his true thoughts on religious, moral, and political matters from all but the most discerning (though why Locke would assume that only the sympathetic would be discerning is not explained). My own view is that it is not Locke’s way of writing that accounts for the flaws but his peculiar way of articulating his 112 philosophical thought, and that this way of articulating his thought is manifested not just in his writings on religious, moral, and political matters but in all his writings, including those where there was no need to play it safe. In fact, Locke was astonishingly daring in his writing . He rubbed lots of people the wrong way and when challenged seldom backed down. In none of my previous writings on Locke did I engage the esotericist alternative to my own line of interpretation. I explained my own way of accounting for, and dealing with, the flaws in Locke’s mode of presentation and proceeded in my own interpretations to employ that way of dealing with the flaws. In ignoring the esotericist line of interpretation , I was doing what most of my fellow philosophers have done. The esotericist line of interpretation has its home not in philosophy departments but in political theory departments. On this occasion, I propose taking the esotericist line seriously. There have been esoteric writers; and if there is persuasive evidence that Locke was one of those, it behooves those of us who write about Locke to take that evidence seriously. It is especially important that we do so when considering the role of God in Locke’s philosophy, for it is at this point that the two lines of interpretation clash most sharply. I propose the following sequence. First, I will sketch out the principles and motivations of the esotericist line of interpretation. Then, after indicating my own line of interpretation, I will employ that line of interpretation in describing Locke’s project of a rational theology and the role of God in his thought. Last, I will engage the arguments of the esotericists for the conclusion that my own, more or less traditional , understanding of the role of God in Locke’s philosophy is radically mistaken, and I will look at what they propose instead. I Rather than making a survey of the esotericist writers, I propose working with the latest and most thorough esotericist interpretation, one that, by its frequent citation of other writers, presents itself as incorporating the best of preceding esotericist interpretations. I have in mind God in Locke’s Philosophy • 113 part 3 of Thomas L. Pangle’s The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke.1 In the conclusion of his discussion, Pangle summarizes his strategy for interpreting Locke in the following words: As nearly as possible, [I] have tried to read [Locke’s texts] as Locke himself indicates he intends them to be read by his most careful and sympathetic or philosophic readers. This has required in the first place a constant and careful attention to the many strange things Locke says about the proper way in which a politic writer expresses himself in order to avoid persecution, achieve the greatest influence, and educate the few truly openminded and...