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But then we must look for the intentions of nature in things which retain their nature, and not in things which are corrupted. And therefore we must study the man who is in the most perfect state both of body and soul, for in him we shall see the true relation of the two; although in bad or corrupted natures the body will often appear to rule over the soul, because they are in an evil and unnatural

condition. Aristotle, Politics, 1254b

It is impossible to make a man who was born blind conceive that he does not see; impossible to make him desire sight and regret its absence. Wherefore we should take no assurance from the fact that our soul is content and satisfied with the senses we have, seeing that it has no means of feeling its malady and imperfection therein, if any there be.¹ Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond For man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences. For creation was not by the curse made altogether and for ever a rebel, but in virtue of that charter,

‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ it is now by various labours (not certainly by disputations or idle magical ceremonies, but by various labours) at length and in some measure subdued to the supplying of man with bread; that is, to the uses of human life.

Bacon, Novum Organum ii, §52

The importance of self-knowledge to the philosophical quest had been asserted from the very inception of philosophy. The ancient maxim ‘Know thyself ’ had adorned the temple at Delphi, and knowledge of one’s own ignorance was the foundation of Socratic teaching.² In the early modern

1 Montaigne, Essays, pp. 444f.

2 Plato, Apology 20e–21d. See also Xenophon, Memorabilia iv.ii.24–9; Aristotle, Rhetoric ii.xxi.1395a;

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations i.xxii.52; Plutarch, Adversus Colotem, 1118c.

period, however, the quest for self-knowledge took on a new complexion as the newly revived Augustinian anthropology led to wide-ranging discus-sions about the defects of the human mind and the limitations of knowledge that flowed from them. Augustine himself commended the Delphic injunc-tion, but observed that the ancients had utterly failed in their attempts to grasp the essence of human nature. Although some of the more acute pagan authorities had understood that the mind, distracted by the senses and the material realm, had literally forgotten itself, none had known that this con-dition was the result of the Fall.³ In the sixteenth century, John Calvin thought it necessary to remind his readers of Augustine’s criticism. True knowledge of ourselves consists in two things: ‘first in considering what we were given at creation’, and second, ‘our miserable condition after Adam’s fall’.⁴The philosophers had been right to recommend self-knowledge, but had confused ‘two very diverse states of man’. Their explorations of human nature had amounted to ‘seeking in a ruin for a building, and in scattered fragments for a well-knit structure’.⁵ Their endeavours demonstrated that without the revealed knowledge of sacred history, man ‘is puffed up with insane confidence in his own mental powers, and can never be induced to recognize their slenderness’.⁶Luther had articulated the same view, noting that reason ‘knows nothing about the wretchedness of depraved nature’.⁷ The pagan philosophers, and those who uncritically adopted their methods, were regarded as having been blissfully unaware of the fact that their blithe confidence in the operations of the mind was completely unwarranted.

It is hardly surprising, in light of these criticisms of classical anthropol-ogy, that the early modern period witnessed renewed attempts to establish a truly ‘Christian’ understanding of human nature. With the revival of interest in biblical narratives, particularly in early modern England, it was inevitable that Adam would become a central figure in all those intellectual domains in which anthropology was thought to be important – theology, moral psychology, educational and political theory and, not least, natural philosophy.

3 Augustine, The Trinity, x.ii. Cf. Bonaventure: ‘If you would know yourself perfectly . . . ponder what you were, are, should have been, and can be: what you were by nature, what you now are through sin, what you should have been through effort, and what you still can be through grace.’ Mystical opuscula, Works i, 214.

4 Calvin, Institutes., ii.i.1 (McNeill i, 242). Cf. Commentary on Genesis 1:26, Calvin’s Commentaries i,

5 94.Ibid., i.xv.7 (McNeill i, 194, 196). Cf. Commentary on Jeremiah 6:10, Calvin’s Commentaries ix, 329f.

6 Ibid., ii.vii.6 (i, 355).

7 Luther, Lectures on Genesis 1–5, LW i, 166; Luther, Sermons iii, 231.

s e l f - k n ow l e d g e a n d t h e s c i e n c e s

The importance of arriving at a correct view of human nature and the need to pay close attention to the history of Adam were persistent themes in seventeenth-century theological writings. Anglican divine Thomas Jackson (1578–1640), in spite of his rejection of elements of Calvinism, argued that a ‘true estimate or experimental evaluation’ of the work of Christ required first and foremost ‘a Right Understanding of the Primeval State of Adam’.

For Jackson, this brought with it a right understanding of human nature, itself a prerequisite for proper knowledge of God: ‘We must learn to know our selves before we can attain unto the true or perfect knowledge of God . . . And this true knowledge of our selves hath a double Aspect, the one unto the Estate from which the other unto the Estate into which we are fallen.’⁸ Plato’s reservations about empirical knowledge were right, but for the wrong reasons. Our ignorance proceeds not from our embodiment, but from Adam’s sin.⁹Robert Ferguson (d. 1714), who is perhaps better known for his lengthy career as a Whig conspirator than as a theological author, expressed reservations about the sanguine marriage of reason and religion promoted by some Fellows of the Royal Society. Applying Calvin’s distinction between

‘two states of man’ to his inquiry into the nature of the intellect, he pointed out that reason ‘may be considered either as it ought to be, and originally was; or as it exists subjectively in us, weakned, darkned and tainted by the Fall’. The distinction was crucial because ‘the rational Faculty as it exists in us since the ingress of sin, differs much from what it was in its primitive Creation’.¹⁰In fact most members of that august body held positions that were not too remote from Ferguson’s own. Robert Boyle, in his capacity as an amateur theologian, offered this list of theological fundamentals: ‘a man must know much of the nature of spirits in general, and even of the father of them God himself; of the intellect, will, &. of the soul of man; of the state of Adam in paradise, and after his fall; of the influence of his fall upon his posterity . . .’¹¹Theological writers of various persuasions were similarly conscious of the different ways in which Adam’s loss was formulated in different confessions. Jackson noted that the Catholic position, endorsed at Trent, was that original sin was ‘no more than a meer Privation of Original Justice’. This differed from his view, according to which original sin had

8 Thomas Jackson, An Exact Collection of the Works of Doctor Jackson (London, 1654), title page, p. 3002.

9 ‘That Oblivion then or obstupefaction wherein our soules as Plato dreames, are miserably drencht by their delapse into these bodily sinks of corruption, wee may more truly derive from that pollution which we naturally draw from our first Parents.’ Originall of Unbeliefe, p. 90.

10Robert Ferguson, The Interest of Reason in Religion (London, 1675), p. 19.

11 Boyle, High Veneration, Works v, 144.

made a much deeper wound in human nature.¹² The unknown author of Anthropologie Abstracted (1655), a work devoted to an examination of human nature, concurred with Jackson’s judgement, insisting that ‘the Soul in supernaturalibus est deprivata, in naturalibus depravata’.¹³Puritan Divine Richard Baxter (1615–91), in his Two Disputations on Original Sin (1675), also alluded to ‘that opinion wherein the Papists differ from our Divines;

viz. that Grace was supernatural to Adam; and original sin being nothing but the privation of that Grace or Rectitude’.¹⁴Some measure of the gravity of these issues can be ascertained from the scale of the controversies which they were capable of generating. When in 1655 Jeremy Taylor, author of numerous popular religious works, published Unum Necessarium – a work which essentially denied that original sin is inherited – he unleashed a storm of controversy. Rebuttals flowed from the pens of fellow Anglicans and Puritans alike.¹⁵ The scale of the controversy not only showed that Taylor was outside the bounds of the broadly Augustinian views of the vast majority of his contemporaries, but also serves to underscore the contemporary importance of these questions about human nature and the state of Adam in his innocence.

Taylor, however, was far from denying the significance of the Fall and in this respect shared the broad perspective of the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries. Even those groups with a relatively strong view of the integrity of reason took the doctrine of the Fall quite seriously. The so-called Cambridge Platonists, usually taken to include Benjamin Which-cote (1609–83), Henry More (1614–87), Ralph Cudworth (1617–89), Peter Sterry (1613–72), John Smith (1618–52), and Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–51), are noted for their generally high estimate of the competence of reason.¹⁶ Benjamin Whichcote, generally considered to be the progenitor of the group, opposed what he regarded as the exaggerated pessimism of the

12Jackson, Works, p. 3004. See also John Davenant, Determinationes Quaestionum Quarundam Theo-logicarum (Cambridge, 1634), p. 77; Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652), ed. R. Greene and H. MacCallum (Indianapolis, 2001), p. 123.

13 Anon., Anthropologie Abstracted: or the Idea of Humane Nature (London, 1655), p. 43.

14Richard Baxter, Two Disputations on Original Sin (London, 1675), p. 242; cf. pp. 67, 75; The Judgment of Non-Conformists, of the Interest of Reason, in Matters of Religion (London, 1676), pp. 8–10.

15 Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium (1655), ch. 6. Responses included John Ford, An Essay of Orig-inal Righteousness and Conveyed Sin (n.p., 1657); John Gaule, Sapientia Justificata (London, 1657);

Nathaniel Stephens, Vindiciae Fundamenti (London, 1658); Henry Jeanes, The Second Part of the Mixture of Scholasticall Divinity (Oxford, 1660); Burgesse, Doctrine of Originall Sin. For an excellent overview of the debates see Poole, Milton and the Fall, pp. 40–57.

16 Sarah Hutton, ‘The Cambridge Platonists’, in S. Nadler (ed.), A Companion to Early Modern Phi-losophy (Oxford, 2002), pp. 308–19; Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, pp. 28–60.

Puritan party, and insisted that the human mind bore within it a number of

‘truths of first inscription’ which could not be erased. These universal prin-ciples, manifested primarily as intuitions of basic moral truths, represented

‘the light of God’s creation’, and were ‘immutable and indispensable’.¹⁷ Henry More repeated the argument of Thomas Aquinas, that to deny the efficacy of fallen reason completely was to destroy human nature itself:

‘To take away Reason therefore, under what Fanatick pretense soever, is to disrobe the Priest and despoil him of his Breast-plate.’¹⁸Nathaniel Culver-well begins his Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652) with the biblical verse that became the unofficial motto of the group – ‘the understanding of man is the candle of the Lord’ (Prov. 20:27), and much of what follows is a commentary on the powers of reason. But none of this entailed a denial that reason was significantly wounded by the Fall. Henry More devoted a considerable portion of Conjectura Cabbalistica (1663) to an exegesis of the Genesis account of the Fall, and although his reading of it has a distinctively Platonic cast, it nonetheless concedes the gravity of the loss that accompanied the Fall. As a cosmic event, the Fall also played a crucial role in More’s theodicy.¹⁹ Culverwell’s Discourse can be read as an attempt to fulfil Bacon’s desire to clarify the scope of reason and faith.

Culverwell actually begins with a paraphrase of Bacon: ‘’Tis a thing very material and desirable, to give unto Reason the things that are Reasons, and unto Faith the things that are Faiths, to give Faith her full scope and latitude, and to give Reason also her just bounds and limits.’²⁰Culverwell immediately proceeds to the question of the Fall. ‘Far be it from me’, he says, ‘to extenuate that great and fatal overthrow, which the sons of men had in their first and original apostasie from their God, that under which the whole Creation sigh’s and groanes.’ As for reason, ‘this daughter of the morning is fallen from her primitive glory’ and ‘from her original vigour and perfection’; it ‘is weakened, and vitiated’, a ‘feeble and diminished light’.²¹ Culverwell’s point is that the sorry state in which reason now languishes is not a justification for abandoning it.

A second party whose members entertained a relatively high view of the capacities of reason was a group of moderate churchmen known as

17 Benjamin Whichcote, The Works of the Learned Benjamin Whichcote, D. D., 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1751), iii, 20f., 31.

18 Henry More, A Collection, pp. v–vi.

19 More, Conjectura Cabbalistica, pp. 46, 50f., 71. On More’s theodicy see Harrison ‘Religion’ and the Religions, p. 58.

20 Culverwell, Learned Discourse, p. 10. Cf. Bacon, Advancement, Works iii, 350.

21 Ibid., pp. 10, 12, 118.

the ‘Latitudinarians’.²²The names most closely associated with this group include those of John Tillotson (1630–94), Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99), Simon Patrick (1626–1707), and John Wilkins (1614–72). Yet in the writings of these thinkers the doctrine of the Fall is treated in a quite conventional fashion – if anything, even more so than in the Cambridge Platonists. The impact of sin on reason was also clearly acknowledged. John Wilkins, often regarded as one of the leading figures of the group, stated explicitly that Adam’s sin was both imputed and naturally communicated to his posterity.

Original sin consisted in a ‘depravation upon our natures’ that makes us

‘loathsome and abominable in God’s eyes’. We are now ‘corrupted vessels [that] pollute all the gifts that are poured into us’. Sin has completely altered us both outwardly and inwardly, infecting our understandings and memories. Indeed one mark of our fallen state is ‘our aptnesse to slight and undervalue the thought of this original corruption’.²³Simon Patrick agreed that ‘we were tainted in our first Father, who hath left a foul blot and stain upon our Nature: and we feel that weakness in our reason, that strength and violence in our passions’. He further confessed: ‘I loath and abhor my self, as unworthy to live and breath on the face of the earth.’²⁴ These are not the sentiments that one would associate with a minimalist position in relation to the consequences of original sin.

Thus, while it would be a gross exaggeration to state that there was unanimity on the nature and consequences of the Fall during this period, there was general agreement that questions relating to human nature and knowledge could not be addressed adequately without a consideration of this primeval event. Varying estimates of the severity of the Fall gave rise to different assessments of human capacities and strategies for knowledge acquisition. Jackson wrote that on the milder Catholic view of the Fall, supernatural grace ‘might have been, or rather, was lost, without any Real Wound unto our Nature; Or without any other Wound, then such as the Free-will or right use of Reason, or other Natural Parts . . . might instantly have cured’. For the author of Anthropology Abstracted, the Fall wrought ‘obscurity of the understanding; even in the businesse of her own

22Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (London, 1993); John Spurr,

‘Latitudinarianism and the Restoration Church’, The Historical Journal 31 (1988), 61–82; John Mar-shall, ‘John Locke and Latitudinarianism’, in R. Kroll, R. Ashcraft, and P. Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England: 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 253–82.

23 John Wilkins, A Discourse concerning the gift of Prayer (London, 1651), pp. 74–80.

24Simon Patrick, The Devout Christian (London, 1673), pp. 447, 449. It may be significant that both Wilkins and Patrick make these claims in the context of devotional literature. For the commitments of Stillingfleet and Tillotson to the doctrine see Marshall, ‘Locke and Latitudinarianism’, p. 270.

proper object (viz.) naturals and intelligibles’.²⁵ Not all who stressed the importance of understanding the full implications of the Fall were agreed on the severity of its impact. Writing towards the end of the seventeenth century, James Lowde, a critic of both Locke and Malebranche, concurred that knowledge of ourselves includes ‘the true Knowledge of our Original Perfections, and how far they are impair’d by the Fall, both what God made us at first in the state of Innocence, and what we have now made our selves by our Sins’. However, Lowde insisted that while ‘the Fall did very much weaken our Faculties; yet it did not wholly alter or invert the method of acquiring, or retaining Knowledge’.²⁶It is also significant that the Cambridge Platonists who retained a relatively high estimate of the powers of reason and who understood the Fall in terms of embodiment and attachment to material things gave primary place to reason rather than the senses in the attainment of knowledge. John Smith thus recommended that reason ‘retract and withdraw it self from all Bodily operation whensoever it will nakedly discern truth’.²⁷ Small wonder that the Platonists were so strongly drawn, initially at least, to the Cartesian account of knowledge.

Equally, they were opposed by Baconians such as Samuel Parker (1640–88), Fellow of the Royal Society and Bishop of Oxford, who was to dismiss the Platonic philosophy as an ‘ungrounded and Fanatick Fancy’.²⁸

These discussions were by no means restricted to those with solely theo-logical preoccupations. The issue of human nature in relation to the Fall played a foundational role in political and educational theory, in treatises devoted to moral psychology and, most important for our present pur-poses, in works devoted to natural philosophy and theories of knowledge.

Thomas Jackson himself noted the relevance of these considerations for political theory, pointing out that Adam had been granted dominion over all others by God and that this might seem to provide a biblical warrant for monarchical government. However, for Jackson, Adam’s fall – which came after the grant of divine dominion – needed to be taken into consid-eration, for in much the same way that Adam’s dominion over the beasts was considerably reduced after the Fall, so too his dominion over others.

In what was something of an understatement, Jackson conceded that there were ‘a great variety of opinions’ about ‘the Prerogatives or Praeeminences

25 Jackson, Works, p. 2004. Anon., Anthropologie Abstracted, p. 43.

26 James Lowde, A Discourse concerning the Nature of Man (London, 1694), pp. 5, 88.

27 John Smith, Select Discourses (London, 1660), p. 80. Cf. Henry More, An Antidote against Atheisme (London, 1653), pp. 19, 31–5; Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe and A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. John Harrison, 3 vols. (London, 1845), iii,

28 578.Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford, 1666), pp. 46, 2.

of the First Man over and above all others, which by Natural Descent have sprung from him’.²⁹Much political theorising during this period was domi-nated by conceptions of ‘the state of nature’, from which speculations about Adam’s original condition would seem to be directly relevant. Admittedly,

of the First Man over and above all others, which by Natural Descent have sprung from him’.²⁹Much political theorising during this period was domi-nated by conceptions of ‘the state of nature’, from which speculations about Adam’s original condition would seem to be directly relevant. Admittedly,