SEVEN

Studying “God’s

Contrivances”

The study of theology and the growth of the mind

The joint appeal to the “two books,” nature and Scripture, is a recurrent theme of early modern thought. The variety of ways in which the theme is used is paralleled by a variety of ways in which the relation between natural philosophy and theology is understood, going from thorough overlap, through formulas of cooperation, to complete separation.¹ While an explication of this range of solutions lies beyond the scope of this book, the relevance of the “two books” theme to the regimen of the mind topic is of direct interest to it. Relevance here does not rest on the issue of compatibility, that is, on questions about the possibility of transfer of information or of explanatory frameworks from one “book” to the other. Such concerns are indeed important to seventeenth-century natural philosophical thought, as when, for instance, Boyle attempts to understand the phenomenon of resurrection with the conceptual tools of mechanical philosophy.² More relevant for the purposes of this book is rather a conception of the work of studying or “reading,” which highlights the activity of the reader of the two books: the reader’s task, the aims of reading, and the processes through which the good reader is expected to go. Such an emphasis on types of readers and on reading as an exercise for the mind plays an important role in Boyle’s and Locke’s approach to the “two books” theme. This approach also involves an identification of points of intersection between natural philosophy, natural theology, and revealed theology within an integrative view about “God’s contrivances,” which trace the domain of study, and the domain of the regimen, for the Christian philosopher. The concern of this final chapter will be with the cultivating value Boyle and Locke attached to the study of theology and of “God’s contrivances” (seen as interdisciplinary objects at the crossroads of philosophy and theology), as well as to their biblical hermeneutical directions.

In his Excellency of Theology Boyle devotes a section to the “advantages” of the study of theology, which he presents as so many motives for engaging in it. The advantages in question have to do one way or another with the “enlargement” and “elevation” of the human faculties. Three of them deserve special notice. In the first place, theology offers the noblest object of contemplation. As such, it is an adumbration of man’s “blessedness in Heaven,” since the happiness of man consists in the “exercise of his noblest Faculties on the noblest Objects,” and the beatific vision will be precisely an act of (active) contemplation of the divine face, coupled with supreme “joyous Affections.”³ In the second place, the study of theology conduces to an improvement of the contemplator’s piety and virtue. Boyle makes the point that the foundation of that improvement is the disposition to admire, love, trust, and resign oneself to the will of the Creator, which is also the fruit, he believed, of well-conducted inquiry into nature. Moreover, that disposition is called a “bettering of the mind” that has to be recognized as both a moral and an intellectual improvement, contrary, Boyle says, to the common opinion that takes it as a uniquely moral matter.⁴ Finally, the highest advantage has to do with the promise of the “Everlasting fruition of Divine Objects” in the afterlife, when our knowledge and desires here will be fulfilled and transfigured, and the “Eye will be Enlighten’d.”⁵

We have seen that for Boyle the experimental study of nature, in its relation to natural theology, was itself conducive to such improvements, both cognitive and affective: the virtues of docility and modesty made room for and combined with the religious virtues, to the “growth” of the human mind. The study of theology, understood as the study of the revealed word of God (by the side of the divine attributes, which are also expressed in his book of creatures), is said to further that work. The way theology acts upon the mind is of the same order, though in an intensified degree, as the way the book of nature does. It, too, enlarges the understanding and the affective capacities of man, and it, too, cultivates moral and intellectual virtues. It is, therefore, not a completely different undertaking but truly furthers the same work the study of God’s natural works performs.

Locke expresses similar sentiments when he writes in the Conduct about the “comprehensive” nature of theology in relation to other sciences. What makes theology a science “above all the rest” seems to be not only its superior subject matter but the function and use of all knowledge that comes with its study: theology is to be understood as “the Comprehension of all other Knowledge directed to its true end; i.e. the Honour and Veneration of the Creator, and the Happiness of Mankind.”⁶ There are similar reflections in the Essay, where he writes that the “knowledge and veneration” of the Creator are “the chief end of all our Thoughts, and the proper business of all Understandings.”⁷ Theology, then, is a matrix of all human knowledge owing to the fact that it establishes the true end of knowledge, as well as the direction of the proper conduct of the understanding. The praise and veneration of the Creator are indeed the encompassing telos of the pursuit of knowledge, of the good use of our minds, and of the care of our souls. In this respect, the study of theology reinforces and furthers for Locke, as for Boyle, the natural religious orientation of the study of nature. We have imperfect ideas of substances, and our faculties are not capable of penetrating the essences of natural things, yet, Locke writes in the Essay, we are sufficiently equipped to see, understand, and admire the divine workmanship and to conduct our minds and lives in a rightful way.⁸

The Conduct passage describing the study of theology is part of a section headed “universality,” the counterpart of Locke’s sections on “partiality” (of judgment and of studies), which is one of the instances of the weaknesses and mismanagements of the mind. It appears thus that Locke considers the study of theology to be one of the remedies for what he calls narrow, partial minds and a privileged route toward the formation of a truly comprehensive, or “universal,” mind. Such a mind would also be one devoted to the pursuit of truth for the love of it. The Conduct passage continues: “This is that Science which would truly enlarge Men’s Minds, were it study’d . . . every where with that Freedom, love of Truth and Charity which it teaches, and were it not made, contrary to its Nature, the occasion of Strife, Faction, Malignity, and narrow Impositions.”⁹ Theology, then, is a science defined not only by its object but also by the orientation it imprints on all human thinking: it crowns the other sciences not only as a most sublime inquiry but also as a horizon implicit in each and every one of them. It can do that because it not only requires but actually teaches one freedom, love of truth, and charity.

Theology for Locke, as for Boyle, is a practical science. The purpose of its study is not to devise speculative definitions but to discover the true guide to a life lived in conformity with God’s will. To follow revealed truth is, in a biblical phrase on which Locke dwelled in his Paraphrase and Notes upon St. Paul’s Epistles (1705–7), to be “renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Ephesians 4:23). The Scriptures, Boyle wrote in Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661), not only form the best guide to life but are themselves operative on pious hearts.¹⁰

The notions of the operative nature of theological studies and of the comparable effect theological and natural studies have on the human mind throw some light on the two philosophers’ attitude to the relation between reason and revelation. In Locke’s case, the growing tendency in his thought in the 1690s seems to have been to place increasing weight on the limits of reason and the superiority of revelation. The key point here is that there are truths that natural reason cannot discover by itself (either because of its contingent weakness or because of its inherent limitations). But in itself this point does not entail any radical rupture between reason and revelation if what is at stake is not the source of truth but rather the way various types of truths contribute to the progress of the understanding. In this respect, Locke’s belief that natural reason is not destroyed but actually enlarged by revelation remains constant from the Essay to the Paraphrase.

In the Essay, he writes that reason is “assisted and improved” by information culled from Scripture, that the “supernatural Light . . . does not extinguish that which is natural,” and that “Revelation is natural Reason enlarged.”¹¹ The context of these statements is the critique of enthusiasm (and its implicit claim that illumination annihilates reason). Locke resumed this topic in the Paraphrase, where he reflected on the relation between natural and supernatural light in more general terms, beyond the contextual religious polemic around enthusiasm. The injunction in Galatians 5:16, “Walk in the Spirit,” is rendered by Locke as “conduct your selves by the light that is in your minds.” In his notes, he explains that “spirit” may be understood as “the inward man” or the “law of the mind,” which is to say, “that part of a man which is endowed with light from god to know and see what is righteous, just, and good.”¹² The “light” here does not presuppose any rupture between natural light, the light afforded by the revealed word, and the supernatural light of grace; it rather bridges these three notions. Locke cross-references these passages to those on the “renewing of the mind” in Ephesians 4:23 and Romans 12:2. He paraphrases the latter (“but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God”) in such a way as to emphasize the work of reason informed by revelation: “But be ye transformd in the renewing of your mind that you may upon examination find out, what is the good, the acceptable and perfect will of god” (emphasis mine).¹³ The renewing of the mind, then, presupposes the natural reason’s work of examination applied to divine truths—here not in the sense of attesting them as coming from God (which was prominent in his attack on enthusiasm), but in the sense of making an effort to understand, of the same type he recommended in his Conduct. The assistance of God’s Spirit is indeed supremely operative in the renewing of the mind (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:16 or Ephesians 3:16), but Locke did not think that either revealed truth or grace annulled reason and its powers; on the contrary, he believed they worked toward its growth.

In this respect, Locke’s views are close to Boyle’s notion of “experience” in the enlarged sense—one that covered both natural and supernatural truths—and of its paideic effect on the growth of reason. In addition, Boyle also intimated that the supernatural aid of grace extends rather than extinguishes the work of the understanding. In his Excellency of Theology, he tells us what it is for reason to be not only “improv’d by Philosophy” but also “elevated by Revelations” in the study of the Scriptures: the holy writings will occasion “free Ratiocinations,” will open onto a discovery of hints, and will also offer “assistances of God’s Spirit, which he is still ready to vouchsafe to them that duly seek them.”¹⁴ Ratiocination, discovery of hints, and assistance from the Spirit (which continues and rewards the work of reasoning and openness to hints) are mutually enabling ways of “clearing the eyes” of the understanding.¹⁵

Thus understood, the topic of the relation between reason and revelation may also throw light on Boyle’s and Locke’s views on the relation between knowledge in this life and the next. In the essay “Of Study,” Locke wrote: “The knowledge we acquire in this world I am apt to think extends not beyond the limits of this life. The beatific vision of the other life needs not the help of this dim twilight.”¹⁶ But in the same place he also said:

It is a duty we owe to God as the fountain and author of all truth, who is truth itself, and ’tis a duty also we owe our own selves if we will deal candidly and sincerely with our own souls, to have our minds constantly disposed to entertain and receive truth wheresoever we meet with it.¹⁷

Whatever our epistemic acquisitions in this life, they are dust from the perspective of the other world. But at the same time, not only is the pursuit of truth not amiss here, in this life, but it is our duty to engage in it: if man neglects his reason, he “transgresses against his own Light” and fails in a duty he owes both himself and his Creator.¹⁸ The epistemic content acquired here, Locke suggests, has less value for our future fate than the practice of cultivating the mind’s powers. In the Christian Virtuoso, part 2, Boyle also surmises that the pursuit of knowledge in this life will probably prove beneficial in the next despite the possibility that God may alter the very structure of things. The crux of this supposition is the reference to the enlargement of the capacities of the mind that the search for truth is able to perform, if undertaken as a task to use the gift of reason well. Such a rightly oriented effort might well be rewarded with both increased knowledge and improved faculties in the afterlife.¹⁹ For both these philosophers, the cure and training of one’s soul are ultimately an endeavor placed in the horizon of the world to come.

Worlds and angels

Worlds, systems, and the realm of experience

As far as knowledge in this life is concerned, Boyle argued in a number of texts for a relation of “congruity” or “symmetry” between truths discovered by natural (philosophical) light and truths learned from revelation. In the sequels to the Christian Virtuoso, he compared the two types of knowledge to the two parts of a key, complementing each other in the study of “divine things,” and spoke of the “graft” of theology upon “human learning.”²⁰ In the Excellency of Theology he proposed that there is a “Great and Universal System of God’s Contrivances” that is the one object of man’s pursuit of truth, be it via the revealed or the natural books of God. The corpuscularian theory of matter and the theological doctrine of man’s redemption, Boyle says, are equally parts (and only parts) of what would ideally amount to a “universal hypothesis” relative to the one system of divine “contrivances,” expressive of the divine “Nature, Counsels, and Works” and discoverable by the “Light of Nature, improv’d by the Information of the Scriptures”—which is to say, by reason working with the full scope of “experience.”²¹ Several fundamental matters illustrate, for Boyle, the symmetry of the two types of knowledge: the creation of the world (which underlies his natural philosophical ontology), the creation of man (which informs his account of the natural theological duty of the student of nature), and the redemption of man (which spells out for him the relation between creature and Creator that guides a Christian’s life).²² Another domain illustrative of the same symmetry is constituted by the types of “worlds” and “systems” that are expressive of the divine attributes of power and wisdom, as members of the divine “contrivances.” Here Boyle and Locke are again in accord.

In the Appendix to the first part of the Christian Virtuoso Boyle draws a distinction between a “creaturian theology,” which fails to take into account “immaterial substances and abstracted beings, especially God himself and his divine perfections,” and true natural theology, which includes them in its scope.²³ The need to take immaterial things into account in the contemplation of God’s works is an important strand of thought in the Christian Virtuoso, part 2. They include not only the rational soul but the various types of intelligences whose existence is indicated by the Bible. They are not only nobler objects than the corporeal but need to be approached by a different route than by mechanical philosophy. Take, for instance, Boyle proposes, the human mind: the “metaphorical [i.e., non-corporeal] motions” it displays must be of a much more impressive variety than the “modifications” of matter, which are uniquely due to local motion.²⁴ But we still know so little of it, and in general, the whole “pneumatical world, or system, if I may so call it” is so foreign to us that, if we begin to look at it, “we enter into a new world indeed, that much better deserves that title, than did America, when it was first discovered by Columbus.”²⁵

A true natural theology, then, makes use of the whole sphere of “experience.” Part of that experience is the “theological,” or “supernatural,” which includes Bible testimonies, as well as testimonies of direct communications from God or the spirits. Boyle’s picture of the world is such that it accommodates this enlarged notion of experience. He speculates in a number of places on the number of “worlds” (corporeal and spiritual) that we must take the created world to contain. In the Christian Virtuoso, part 2, he proposes “three worlds or grand communities”: the “spiritual” (angels, devils, separate human minds, e.g., “the spirits of just men made perfect”), the “corporeal” (visible bodies), and the “dioptrical” (corporeal creatures invisible to the naked eye, “telescopical and microscopical”).²⁶ In the Excellency of Theology, in illustrating the “general Theory of things” idea, he counted “four grand Communities of Creatures”: the corporeal, the “Race of Mankind” (intellectual beings “vitally associated” with organic bodies), the demons, and the good angels.²⁷

An even more extended reflection on the sense of “world” in its relation to the divine attributes can be found in Boyle’s Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God (1685). The text is intended as a rebuke against those divines who “dogmatize” about God’s “Nature and Perfections,” which should be recognized for the “Abstruse Subjects” they are. There may be divine attributes we are ignorant of, such as might be displayed in the creation of other worlds.²⁸ On the other hand, we have an imperfect grasp of the attributes we do know of, most notably “power” and “wisdom.” As far as the latter is concerned, for instance, there may well be other corporeal worlds, systems framed differently from ours, and thus displaying different phenomena, abiding by different laws of local motion, and so exhibiting different dimensions of divine wisdom.²⁹ But God’s wisdom is even more glorious in framing the “worlds” of the invisible and immaterial creatures. First, both good and bad angels, by the side of the soul of man, are “intellectual beings” displaying innumerable “motions” of thought, will, and moral states that require a more exquisite wisdom than the corporeal mechanisms. Second, their respective worlds or communities are themselves complex structures that need to be wisely managed. In the third place, the spirits’ ministrations to the functioning of the other created worlds (“the great Aggregate of all the Creatures of God”) need themselves to be wisely administered.³⁰

Further, even if they are no longer a question of “worlds,” the big events in sacred history are actually instances of well-contrived “structures” that are equal participants in the universal system by the side of the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. The Day of Judgment, for instance, will reveal the wise weaving of historical providence, where private ends are finally shown to serve the divine ends and accomplish “a Plot worthy of God” or “this whole amazing Opera, that has been acting upon the face of the Earth, from the beginning to the end of Time.”³¹ The tending to the “millions of engines” of this “Opera” is such as to make the human task of managing the complicated structure of the famous Strasbourg Clock a risible affair. Another example is the very “Oeconomy of Man’s Salvation,” perhaps the supreme manifestation of God’s “manifold wisdom”: not only myriad points of sacred history and of the natures of man and Creator need to be reconciled in that event, but also all of God’s attributes, some of them seemingly contradictory, such as “his inflexible Justice” and “his exuberant Mercy.” This work of wisdom is most aptly compared to the divine solution to a divine problem, far exceeding in complexity the most difficult mathematical problems.³²

Boyle’s conjectures upon the “worlds” and “systems” of the divine contrivances are one fruit of his extended notion of “experience” (physical and theological) and of the conception of the education of reason through experience thus understood. The realm of experience, for Boyle, is the realm of philosophy and theology combined. Moreover, that realm not only defines an (interdisciplinary) object of study but also traces the territory of an inner discipline for the student. In comparing the “creaturian theology” with the true natural theology, he says they are distinguished not only by their objects but also by their aims: the former is concerned with systems of definitions, while the latter is founded on the obligation to love and obey God.³³ For Boyle the growth of reason is a growth in understanding and rational affections alike. The systems of divine contrivances are expressions of divine wisdom, in which an incomprehensible multitude and variety of things are brought together and made to combine in subtle relations and concatenations to work for the final fulfillment of a divine purpose. In their study, the human mind, if rightly disposed and capable of the virtue of “docility,” may respond with rational (if partial) understanding and rational wonder at once.

The existence of a spiritual world by the side of the material in the great frame of the created universe, speaking thus of the manifold wisdom of God, is also a recurrent conjecture in Locke’s thought, as is the related reflection on the disciplinary status of the study of these other worlds. Locke is thus engaged, as was Boyle, in tracing the disciplinary map serving the type of study worthy of a Christian philosopher.

By the side of the conception of the material world as a cosmic structure of relations, Locke also advances, as does Boyle, the idea that the universe is also a harmonious structure of both material and immaterial levels of being. Locke’s chain-of-being ontology, through which he represents to himself this structure, is presented as a most probable conjecture, introduced by “it is not impossible to conceive, nor repugnant to reason.”³⁴ The ground of this conjecture is the divine attributes of wisdom and power (whose discovery is the main act of natural religion, performed through the activity of the senses and of reason, as we learn from the Essays on the Law of Nature) and the consequent idea of the perfect harmony of the world:

And when we consider the infinite Power and Wisdom of the Maker, we have reason to think, that it is suitable to the magnificent Harmony of the Universe, and the great Design and infinite Goodness of the Architect, that the Species of Creatures should also, by gentle degrees, ascend upward from us toward his infinite Perfection, as we see they gradually descend from us downwards: Which if it be probable, we have reason then to be perswaded, that there are far more Species of Creatures above us, than there are beneath; we being in degrees of Perfection much more remote from the infinite Being of GOD, than we are from the lowest state of Being, and that which approaches nearest to nothing.³⁵

 

This is part of an argument about our classification of species of substances according to the “nominal essences” the mind makes, rather than to the real essences of the things themselves. Just as with corporeal substances, Locke continues, so with the immaterial species we may well surmise exist in the great world: in both cases, distinctions among species are made not as a reflection of their real essences (which we cannot know), but according to what we take to be concurrent observable characteristics of those species. The passage above ends therefore with: “And yet of all those distinct Species, for the reasons above-said, we have no clear distinct Ideas.” Nevertheless, the (probable) picture of the universe as a vast harmony of both material and immaterial existences is important to Locke, since it serves as the very framework for his account of the limitations of the human faculties and of the extent of human knowledge.

The great merit of John Yolton’s last book, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke, has been to make us alive to the perhaps surprising importance of the role of the angelic world in Locke’s thought, particularly in his Essay. As Yolton has shown, if the phrase “intellectual world” is often used by Locke to mean the world of human ideas (an epistemological sense), there are nevertheless a multitude of references in his writings to another “intellectual world,” the world of God, spirits, and angels (the ontological sense of the phrase).³⁶ This second sense is closely linked to his chain-of-being ontology, coupled with a natural theological description of the world as a “stupendous,” harmonious “fabrick” displaying God’s attributes of wisdom, power, and goodness.

But what kind of study is the study of the intellectual beings? In Some Thoughts concerning Education, Locke says that both reason and revelation teach us about them. Whether spirits are to be considered a part of metaphysics, as they usually are, or of natural philosophy understood as “the Knowledge of the Principles, Properties, and Operations of Things, as they are in themselves,” it does not really matter.³⁷ Yet, despite his lack of concern here as to the “science” the intellectual beings most properly belong to, in several of his other writings he wavered between ascribing them to natural philosophy or to theology. In his “division of the sciences” closing the Essay, he includes bodies, angels, spirits, and God himself in the province of natural philosophy defined as “the Knowledge of Things, as they are in their own proper Beings, their Constitutions, Properties, and Operations.”³⁸ On the other hand, in an earlier note on the typology of knowledge, he listed God and spirits under “Theology.”³⁹ In another such text, in which he reflects on the best way of dividing one’s reading notes among various “heads,” the (implicit) place of God and the angels seems to be distributed between what he calls “Adversaria Philosophica” (notes on “the several order and species of things”) and “Adversaria Historica” (notes on “the opinions or traditions to be found amongst men concerning God, creation, revelation, prophecies, miracles,” which are the stuff of both ecclesiastical and sacred history).⁴⁰ In a later notebook called “Adversaria Theologica 94,” compiled in 1694, i.e., after both the first edition of the Essay (1690) and the first edition of the Thoughts concerning Education (1693), he brings God, angels, man, and matter, as well as sacred history, under the head “theology.”⁴¹ Similarly, in the Conduct, we learn that the “noble Study” of theology comprises the “Knowledge of God and his Creatures, our Duty to him and our fellow Creatures, and a view of our present and future State.”⁴²

Inquiry into God’s “contrivances” (including the natural world, other worlds, material and immaterial, events in sacred history, God insofar as he can be known, and, as we will see below, the Scriptures) is thus a type of endeavor at the crossroads of natural philosophy, natural theology, and divinity. It can be understood as tracing the field of a distinct program of study, for the use of the Christian philosopher. The program defines a “discipline” in its own right, which traces not only a domain of knowledge pursuit and the general guidelines of a method of study (based on the combined work of experience and reason) but also the domain of a discipline of the self and of the mind’s progress in inquiry—a rational progress, but also a progress in rational affections. There is, in this respect, a relation between the representation of the angelic world and the Christian philosopher’s education that deserves special mention.

Angels

For Boyle, the chief model of knowledge pursuit in all the domains covered by his extended notion of “experience” is the model of search. This model is not only, as I argued in chapter 4, informed by the idea of the “growth” of knowledge and of mind, but also, I want to claim here, governed by an ideal searching posture, represented by the figure of the angels. There are repeated references to the angels’ searching and praising activity in Boyle’s writings. In High Veneration, for instance, he writes, in the section devoted to the “wise contrivance” of man’s redemption: “The Scripture tells us, that in the Oeconomy of Man’s Salvation, there is so much of the manifold Wisedom of God express’d, that the Angels themselves desire to pry into those mysteries.”⁴³ The pair manifold-wisdom-of-creation–searching-and-adoring-angels appears in other places as well, particularly in the Christian Virtuoso, part 2: “and though the blessed angels have, ever since the beginning of the world, been employed in contemplating, celebrating, and serving God, yet, far from being weary of those blessed employments, they discover still, in that boundless ocean of perfections, things fit to heighten, even their wonder and veneration.”⁴⁴

The angels figure here as involved in precisely the kind of activity that a Christian Virtuoso is called upon to perform: continued, humble search into God’s truths, recognition of divine wisdom and power, admiration and praise of the Creator. For Boyle, the angels function as a horizon of human perfection in keeping with the central role of “experience” in his thought, understood as the search into, and the learning from, creation. If for a number of philosophers and theologians, the model of perfection was represented by Adam before the Fall in virtue of his direct access to the essences of things, the more apt model for an experimental philosophy seems to be the angels’ continuous prying into God’s manifold wisdom.⁴⁵ Even if the angels may be thought to see more deeply than man can hope for in this life, they do not see all at once and thus are themselves perpetual learners.

The angels are also present in Locke’s reflections on the nature, limits, and proper use of human knowledge. Their chief function for him is not to represent the searching posture but rather to help trace the chain-of-being territory of the degrees of accomplishment of the faculties of created beings. In a number of places, he thinks it probable that the angels and spirits are endowed with capacities far exceeding those of man and such as might actually make possible a scientific natural philosophy. Spirits are likely to be able to “penetrate into the Nature, and inmost Constitutions of Things,”⁴⁶ as well as into the constitution of man himself;⁴⁷ they would possess perfect reasoning capacities, since they would be able to have a full view of everything that relates to a question;⁴⁸ they would have perfect memories and a capacity to retain all their past knowledge in a present picture,⁴⁹ as well as a much “perfecter way of communicating their Thoughts” than we have;⁵⁰ and they are most probably “more steadily determined in their choice of Good.”⁵¹ The angels are thus, for Locke, a model of perfect science, virtue, and felicity, owing to their perfect or, at any rate, much more accomplished faculties than the human.

The topic of the capacities of the immaterial beings forms an important part of Locke’s anthropological thought. A common theme of his reflections on the intellectual world is the correct assessment and legitimate improvement of the human capacities. An awareness of the vastness and variety of beings in the great structure of the universe and a related understanding of the degrees of perfection and imperfection of the faculties distributed among its layers are, for Locke, a route toward a rightful evaluation and improvement of the human powers.

Thus, for instance, in the Essay he suggests that an acknowledgment of the intellectual world would help man rightly assess his own place in the universe and would heal him of pride. The suggestion is framed as an exercise for the imagination: “he that will not set himself proudly at the top of all things” will be able to compare man’s lack of apprehension of the faculties of the superior intelligent beings with a worm’s ignorance of the senses and understanding of man. Such an exercise can both cure pride and habituate the mind to a sense of the “Variety and Excellency” of the created fabric of the universe, suitable to the “Wisdom and Power of the Maker.”⁵² A comparable exercise for the imagination with mind-enlarging effects is proposed in another passage, relating to the supposition of perfect angelic memory. Locke suggests that reflection on what it would be like to have more capacious faculties may itself open the mind toward a consideration of the perfections to be found on the various layers of the hierarchical universe, and thus toward its “stupendous” harmony.⁵³ Similarly, in Some Thoughts concerning Education, the study of spirits is recommended as a first step in the natural philosophical education of the young gentleman. The reason is that reflection on the angelic world opens (“enlarges”) the mind to the great expanse of the universe (even if an exact knowledge of its structure, nature, and species is not to be had) and to the collaboration of material and immaterial causality in the phenomena of the world (even if their inner mechanisms cannot be fully penetrated). Such habitual reflection would cure the mind of narrowness and prejudice.⁵⁴

In yet another passage, in one of the planned additions to the Essay, Locke speaks more directly of emulation: his subject there is disputation, one of the practices he is most adamant in reproving. In keeping with the idea of the perfect capacities of the angels, Locke reasons: “Whoever thinks of the elevation of their knowledge above ours, cannot imagine it lies in a playing with words, but in the contemplation of things, and having true notions about them, a perception of their habitudes and relations one to another.” At least on this subject, Locke advances, relative to our ill use of words and our bad disputing habits, we might overcome our limitations and had better emulate the angels: “we should be ambitious to come, in this part, which is a great deal in our power, as near them as we can.”⁵⁵

Reading Scripture

The careful study of Scripture was an exercise in which both Boyle and Locke engaged throughout their lives. Their developed thoughts on the principles guiding scriptural reading are expressed in Boyle’s Style of the Holy Scriptures and Locke’s preface to the Paraphrase, but similar concerns are also present in Boyle’s early “Essay of the Holy Scriptures,”⁵⁶ in his Christian Virtuoso, part 2, or in Locke’s continual engagement with theological reading starting with the 1660s.⁵⁷ In what follows I would like to isolate the main hermeneutic guidelines Boyle and Locke proposed in these texts. For the present study, the interest of doing so is not primarily as a chapter in early modern biblical hermeneutics but rather as an exposition of their similar conceptions of the practice of scriptural reading, seen as a part of the general program of studying God’s “contrivances.” Their prescriptions in this sense are best seen as practical regimens for cultivating the mind’s powers, rather than strict rule-bound methodologies or hermeneutic doctrines. The ethical (ethos-building) component of these prescriptions is reinforced by their reflections on a typology of readers, which echo the two philosophers’ reflections on the typology of distempers of the mind and on the degrees of cure and cultivation.

Boyle’s and Locke’s hermeneutic principles, it will be seen, are consonant with a hermeneutic tradition that has been illuminated in Kathy Eden’s work: a Christian humanist and patristic tradition of “charitable reading,” which appropriated the Roman rhetorical tradition of “equitable reading.” In this process of appropriation, the ethical principle of equity, together with the formal principle of oeconomia or accommodation, was transferred from legal thought to textual interpretation and further to biblical interpretation. What was thus defined was not so much a methodology as an interpretative praxis, meant to cultivate equity/ charity as dispositions in the reader of the text.⁵⁸ The equitable/charitable reader, on this account, looks to the coherence or “oeconomy” of the text. To that end, he will perform a contextual, accommodative reading, which places one particular passage in its immediate textual context (through a collatio locorum or comparison of places), in its historical and linguistic contexts, as well as in the context of the character or person of the writer—the kind of reading that gives preeminence to the whole over the parts. He will also accommodate the meaning of the words to the author’s meaning or intention (his voluntas).⁵⁹ With equity Christianized as charity, and voluntas as intentio or spiritus, equitable reading was refashioned as charitable or spiritual interpretation, which looks beyond the gramma to the pneuma, or in Augustine’s Latin translation, beyond the littera to the spiritus of the divine text. The intention, or spirit, of the divine text is above all the promotion of caritas—the “summa of all scriptural teaching.” Good reading will thus be guided by a “hermeneutics of charity,” which “defines a disposition towards the text rather than any doctrine, in that the discovery of caritas within the text not only finds support elsewhere—indeed, everywhere else—in the text but also qualifies the voluntas of the reader by qualifying his or her way of reading as equitable or, in Augustine’s terms, spiritual in that it searches out the voluntas of the writer.”⁶⁰

An equitable/charitable reading shapes an interpretative disposition that searches for illuminating contexts and for coherence, which may thus make sense of the whole, in light of the intention of the author. It is thus an “oeconomic” reading, whose aim is interpretative and ethical at once. The ethical dimension rests on the ethos-building effort of the reader whose practice of reading cultivates his own equity/charity. These principles are openly articulated in Boyle’s and Locke’s hermeneutic guidelines, which are governed by their insistence on the disposition of charity, which both makes possible and is furthered by the study of Scripture.⁶¹ A good summary of their position is Boyle’s picture of types of reading in the Christian Virtuoso, part 2:

And thus most readers, and even many learned men, peruse the scripture so slightly, and desultorily, that so transient and superficial a view makes them overlook in it, a multitude of excellent and instructive things, and leaves them great strangers to those mysterious harmonies, and symmetries, that, lying deep, are less obvious. Whereas a diligent and devout peruser, furnished with the original languages, and other useful parts of learning, by attentively and assiduously reading those excellent writings, and carefully comparing place with place, phrase with phrase, and, in short, adding one help of interpretation to another, may discover excellent and mysterious truths, that are wholly missed by vulgar readers.⁶²

The task of the “diligent and devout peruser” is described in more detail in his Style of Scriptures. Boyle organizes his text as a series of responses to objections against the scriptural text. The core of his hermeneutics lies in his refutations of the charges that Scripture is “obscure,” “immethodical,” and “incoherent.”

The charge of “obscurity,” Boyle says, is to a large extent due to the proliferation of glosses, which succeed in clouding rather than in illuminating the text.⁶³ But it is true that the text itself mixes obscurity with clarity. This observation makes room for the Protestant principle of letting Scripture “interpret itself,” i.e., let the clear passages illuminate the obscure ones, through a careful comparison of places. The collatio locorum, Boyle explains, not only defines the reader’s interpretative activity but is also allied to a disposition engendered by the recognition of obscurity: the observation should wake up his humility and act as an inducement to study further.⁶⁴ Boyle advocates an extensive practice of contextualization. To look rightly at one piece of text is to look at its position within the larger text, at the way it relates to a number of contexts, historical, cultural, or linguistic, as well as to the style and character of the author.⁶⁵ Those incapable of cultivating the patience and humility for doing so are “querulous readers,” who charge Scripture with obscurity or triviality simply because they “look upon their own abilities as the measure of all discourses.”⁶⁶ Continuous study, by means of an “attentive and repeated perusal,” may bring more to light, while signaling the areas that are still clouded. In turn, obscure passages make us read the rest more carefully and thus better discover the meaning of the whole. To reinforce the point, Boyle invokes the Aesopian fable of the sons who, eager to discover the treasure their father promised was buried in the garden, keep tilling the land until it becomes fertile and the vineyard growing on it proves to be the actual treasure.⁶⁷ The meaning to be unearthed is thus the meaning of the whole, and the route to it is through a “tilling” of the text that attempts to make local clarifications throw light on its global intent.

Global intent is at the core of Boyle’s response to the second charge, of lack of “method” or of “disjointed” method. A precise fault in reading is identified here again: the division in chapters and verses customary at the time⁶⁸ is a great impediment to understanding the way Scripture is actually more “discursive” than is believed. Additionally, as was the case with the first objection, another impediment is human vanity, which considers that everything is reducible to human measures. The book of nature and the book of grace share this peculiarity, Boyle says, that they cannot be “fetter’d to Humane Laws of Method.”⁶⁹ The objection is due to a failure to see where the “method” of the sacred text lies: rather than a matter of plain, linear “Order of the Sections,” it is inbuilt in “its being in Order to the Author’s End.”⁷⁰ Boyle exemplifies the point with the case of Saint Paul, whose epistles are so full of digressions they may well appear “immethodical” by usual standards: but we should rather see how all the apparently divergent strands actually tend toward the same end, an intent of the author that works as a subtle, if at first unapparent, organizing principle of the text. Boyle illustrates the idea by comparing Saint Paul’s digressive discourse with a meandering river that, although apparently diverging from its course, not only actually tends to its end point but also manages to fertilize the whole land it traverses on its way: so Saint Paul, directing “his Course to his Main Scope,” drives both meaning and reader to the destination by “meandering” through illuminating clarifications, enriching enlargements, and edifying answers to objections.⁷¹ “Method,” then, should be understood in its basic sense, as a via, a way to a destination point. The fertilizing river image intensifies and deepens the land-tilling metaphor: if understanding is a matter of expecting the whole to bear the fruit of meaning, the organizing principle of the whole needs to be recognized in the author’s intent. The work of the reader is crucial here: by curbing his laziness, his impatience, or his presumption, he engages in a process of deciphering that, as guided by the main hermeneutic principles of the whole and the intent, “cultivates” both text and mind.

The suggestions of the first two answers are brought together and reinforced in the answer to the third objection, of “incoherence.” The main error here is due to the practice of reducing the Bible to a ready stock of “Sentences and Clauses,” i.e., to collections of sententiae or florilegia.⁷² This is the sure way to miss the coherence of the text and an easy way to using the biblical text for private ends. So is the practice of most divines, who do not look beyond the nuggets of text they have cut out of the body of Scripture, which they “Symphonize with their Tenets, not with their neighbouring Texts.” One should rather strive to interpret this or that difficult fragment by “symphonizing” it with the rest of the text, “and then, for our Opinions, rather to confirm them to the Sense of the Scripture, than wrest the Words of Scripture to Them.”⁷³ It is necessary, Boyle warns, that a good reader put together linguistic and historical context, the comparison of places, and the “speaker’s scope”: only with this interpretative apparatus mounted (in full honesty and humility) will the text start to appear in its “full dimensions,” as a “Systeme” of exquisite interrelations and divine purpose. Apparent incoherence will then be recognized for what it truly is: as yet undiscerned “symmetry,” or “wisest Oeconomy,” whose full scope will actually never reveal itself but be a perpetual object of study.⁷⁴ Reading with an eye to the meaning of the whole, the author’s end, and the economy of the text are the hermeneutic tools of the “Inquisitive and concern’d Peruser,” by contrast with the “Heedlesse vulgar Reader” for whom Scripture is an obscure, immethodical, incoherent text.⁷⁵ To become a good reader, one needs to start “cultivating” the text:⁷⁶ the reader will advance by degrees in his Scripture knowledge and will shed by degrees the “vulgarity” of his mind and soul.

Boyle sees the “two books” as complex structures expressive of divine “oeconomy”: by searching into the inbuilt correspondences and cross-references in the canonical writings, we “may discern upon the whole Matter, so admirable a Contexture and Disposition, as may manifest that Book to be the Work of the same Wisdom, that so Accurately compos’d the Book of Nature, and so Divinely contriv’d this vast Fabrick of the World.” In both books is manifested the same “Manifold Wisdom of God.”⁷⁷ Boyle’s good reader works with a conception of “text” and of “reading” that applies in similar terms to both books: nature and Scripture are similarly complex and harmonious “mechanisms” that need to be gradually and patiently unrolled if their “method” is to be grasped at all. The reading-as-unrolling process is, moreover, one that builds certain virtues in the reader: patience, humility, and gradual expansion of understanding come, in similar ways, with the reading of both of the divinely authored books.⁷⁸ The hermeneutic tools Boyle advocates do not, we have to note, amount to a precise method of interpretation. They seem rather to delineate a general program for a practice of reading that may be brought to fruition only by everyone’s effort, where fruition is indeed the fruition of meaning and of the moral/understanding capacities of the reader’s mind.

Locke is also committed to the Protestant principle of Scripture as a self-interpreting text and the only authority to be obeyed in theological matters. Self-interpreting, though, does not mean transparent.⁷⁹ Rather, Locke affirms the contextual principle of “oeconomic” reading: difficult passages should be read in their immediate as well as remote contexts and may thus be (at least partially) explained by relation to the meaning of the whole. This does not even mean steady progress toward ultimate complete clarification of meaning. That is most probably impossible to attain, and the purpose is to keep searching, rather than elucidate once and for all. This is the sense in which Locke reads 1 Corinthians 3:2 (“I have fed you with milk, and not with meat . . .”). Echoing the earlier 1 Corinthians 2:13, his paraphrase reads: “I could not apply my self to you as to spiritual men that could compare spiritual things with spiritual one part of scripture with an other and thereby understand the more advanced truths revealed by the spirit of god.”⁸⁰ Locke places “comparing one part of Scripture with another” by the side of “comparing spiritual things with spiritual”—the collatio locorum by the side of, or rather as a means to, a charitable, “oeconomic” reading which looks for the “spirit” over the letter, or for the voluntas over the scriptum.

He begins his essay by enumerating what he thinks are the most important difficulties in interpreting the Pauline texts. He divides them into “internal” and “external” difficulties. The former are due to the nature of epistolary writings, to the language of the New Testament (with its concatenation of Greek terms and Hebrew or Syriac idioms or turns of phrase), as well as to Saint Paul’s “Stile and Temper” (a “Man of quick Thought [and] warm Temper,” whose “Plenty and Vehemence” are responsible for the many threads of thought woven into his parenthetical and digressive discourse, and who often changes “the Personage he speaks in”). The latter point includes thus the “character” of the author in the contextual consideration of the text and also introduces the principle of reading for the unifying intent of the whole: Saint Paul’s discourse does have a “thread” or a “current” unifying the texture of his epistles.⁸¹

Locke dismisses the (enthusiastic) idea that Saint Paul must have been so transported when he wrote that his text became metaphorical beyond coherence. He does admit that the text is difficult, for the reasons enumerated above. Nevertheless his assumption is that the whole must be coherent, and the “thread of the discourse” is such that it can be followed. His reasoning is the following: Saint Paul’s office was to communicate the word of God to the people, so they can be instructed and convinced, and able to discuss and pass on the word. Moreover, he was no unfit vessel; therefore he “thoroughly digested” the Revelation, and thus it became “one well contracted harmonious Body” in his mind. There was a message, and the message was communicated. It follows that the message can be understood rationally and its light and evidence grasped by the mind (even if partially).⁸² Locke’s method of reading is in fact a general practical guideline informed by this (“oeconomic”) assumption: he simply recommends a repeated and continuous rereading of the text of each letter until its “Subject and Tendency,” or its “Views and Purposes,” in short Saint Paul’s “Drift and Design” in writing it, start to be grasped. The task of reading commanded by the whole/intent principles appears here again: it is through a “good general view” of structure and purpose (or structure-cum-purpose) that the “Drift and Aim” of the author may be discovered.⁸³

But this is no easy task, and in emphasizing the practical difficulty, Locke also signals the importance he places on the work of the reader over the establishment of methodized rules. Looking for the thread of the discourse requires “a very attentive Reader to observe, and so bring the disjointed Members together, as to make up the Connection, and see how the scatter’d Parts of the Discourse hang together in a coherent well-agreeing Sense, that makes it all of a Piece.” The “very attentive reader” will recognize the role of the digressions, most of the time devoted to reformulating and answering objections (this was indeed the point of Boyle’s land-fertilizing metaphor), and thus will identify Saint Paul’s “method” in the orientation of the whole multifarious discourse to the same “end.” In contrast, the “unwary, or over-hasty Reader” will rest in, and accuse the text of, uncertainty and incoherence.⁸⁴

The typology of readers, echoing Boyle’s, is an important part of Locke’s hermeneutic essay, although it is not mentioned in commentaries that dismiss his method as uninteresting.⁸⁵ His section devoted to the external difficulties in reading Saint Paul’s epistles identifies (in a manner similar to Boyle’s) a number of problems that are the combined effect of erroneous practices and flawed readerly dispositions. Thus, by the practice of dividing the epistles into chapters and verses, the text becomes so “chop’d and minc’d” that its real “thread and coherence” are sure to escape the reader. Moreover, this encourages the other bad practice, of taking verses for aphorisms, which not only obscures the coherence of the text but provides the perfect tools for those who use the bits of text thus disjointed in order to confirm their own particular “system.” Indeed, the greatest obstacle to understanding Scripture aright, in Locke’s view, is the common tendency to tailor the text to the measure of one’s own particular doctrine or interest and use it for defending one’s own views in disputation. These are “partial Readers,” readers of a “quicker and gayer Sight,” “forward and warm Disputants” who read into the text what they please.⁸⁶ Both dogmatic readers (who “confirm themselves in the Opinions and Tenets they have already”) and wavering readers (who let themselves be “distracted” with a hundred interpretations and “return from them with none at all”) are equally “partial” readers.⁸⁷ Note the continuity between this analysis of reading practices and the anatomy of the bad judging dispositions in the Conduct. Here as there, prejudice and preoccupation, hastiness, or else laziness and ill-disposition are responsible for falling short of the task of rightful inquiry. Those who resist the premise of coherence do it not out of epistemological scruples but rather out of a self-serving love for their own narrowness, since “it requires so much more Pains, Judgment and Application, to find the Coherence of obscure and abstruse Writings, and makes them so much the more unfit to serve Prejudice and Pre-occupation when found.”⁸⁸ The important point Locke makes here is that the attentive, humble exercise in trying to grasp the coherence and intent of the scriptural text could be in itself an exercise fit for curbing these bad, truth-failing, and mind-corrupting inclinations. The “earnest study” of Scripture is in itself capable of preserving us from the “infecting” errors stemming from “Sloth, Carelessness, Prejudice, Party, and a Reverence of Men.” To resist such weaknesses is to be able to “compare spiritual things with spiritual things.”⁸⁹

For both Boyle and Locke this is the type of reading that cures distempers and vanity. Coherence when found makes the text unfit to serve prejudice and preoccupation. To see the coherence is therefore to deny one’s own partial self and to “symphonize” one’s mind to the (divine) aim of the text. To cultivate the equity/charity of reading is to seek to transcend the partial human measures of truth and thus to cure the “vulgarity,” “narrowness,” or “partiality” of mind. This is not to say that the text will become crystal clear: obscurities will remain, the reading will not be able to completely elucidate the meaning, and it will by no means be infallible. The reading principles are meant neither as a system of theology nor as a formal hermeneutic doctrine, but rather as a guideline for a practice—one that Boyle and Locke undertook out of a concern with their own salvation, and that they invite their readers to engage in along with them.⁹⁰

The expectation that such a “charitable” reading of Scripture will be shared with their own readers points to a parallel between the social aspects of the discipline of judgment I noted in the previous chapters and the social aspects of the discipline of scriptural understanding. The rightful inquirer’s work on his own mind was an endeavor undertaken both in solitude and amid the community of friends. Similarly, the charitable reader’s education takes place both within his own self and within the community of Christian philosophers. In a short essay of 1688, “Pacifick Christians,” Locke advocated the value of “love and charity in the diversity of contrary opinions” and defined charity as “an effectual forbearance and good will, carrying men to communion, friendship and mutual assistance one of another, in outward as well as spiritual things” (cf. Co-lossians 3:12–14). In the reading of Scripture as in the government of judgment, as well as in the general management of our earthly lives, the charitable friends’ assistance, as opposed to the imposition of dogmatic assertors, works together with God’s assistance toward “the enlightening of our understanding and subduing our corruptions.”⁹¹ The community of Christian philosophers, Locke thinks, fosters both the care of the self and the care of others.

Nourished by an early modern tradition of thought about the philosophical and religious care of minds, Boyle and Locke forged the emblematic figure of the Christian philosopher, whose domain of study encompassed the whole array of God’s “contrivances” (Scripture included), and whose endeavor was aimed at the double pursuit of truth and of a fortified mind. The core feature of the life program embodied by this figure is captured by the notion of the pursuit itself—the learning process, the paideia. Accordingly, the value attached to the exercise of the capacities of the mind lies not primarily in the finding of truth but in the very search for it. Honest search is by itself mind-liberating and cultivating, and truth is a horizon of direction and growth rather than an object of possession. As early as 1661, Locke was already formulating this core principle: “For if it be our duty to search after truth, he certainly that has searched after it, though he has not found it, in some points has paid a more acceptable obedience to the will of his Maker, than he that has not searched at all, but professes to have found truth, when he has neither searched nor found it.”⁹² In a similar vein, Boyle spoke of the “benefits” that not so much the knowledge of as the search for “divine truths” affords the student of the two books: “the actual Attainment of that Knowledge is not always absolutely Necessary, but a hearty Endeavour after it may suffice to entitle Us to them.”⁹³