The Idea of Pleasure in Anglican Religious Culture, 1650-1733

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My thesis-The Idea of Pleasure in Anglican Religious Culture, 1650-1733-presents a new understanding of how orthodox Anglican clergymen and writers remoulded common notions of the moral status of pleasure between 1650 and 1733. For Anglican thinkers developed a series of innovative ethical arguments about the rational order of pleasure. In doing so, they sought to direct humanity's disruptive appetites towards good ends. By exalting the rational, religious pleasures of the earthly life, these clergymen aimed to demonstrate that the true interests of religious nonconformists, atheists, deists and sinners lay in godly ends and obedience to clerical and monarchical authority. The recovery of this moral language of pleasure addresses the current historiographical neglect of the philosophical content of Anglican moral philosophy, which is often treated as straightforwardly reducible to the various 'isms' of Thomism and Aristotelianism. Situating these significant ethical shifts within orthodox religious discourse in turn reveals what was at stake in the early eighteenth century debates around luxury and commerce. For these debates were not primarily about whether it was morally acceptable to pursue consumption for the sake of pleasure. Rather, they centred around whether there was a rational hierarchy of pleasures accessible to reason, which condemned luxury as antithetical to the true joys of both earthly and eternal life.The conceptual trajectory of this language of pleasure is illustrated by comparing John Locke's developing ethical ideas with those of Robert South, Public Orator of the University of Oxford after 1660, and Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford after 1686. During the Interregnum, Locke and South were involved in a common Anglican confrontation with the problem of the passions: the theory that moral error and social conflict derived from the passions disrupting the proper functioning of reason. A prominent Royalist explanation for the English Civil War was that it arose from the unruly passions of the Puritans. Consequently, in the 1650s, an older generation of Anglican writers had sought new ethical answers to this moral predicament, varying from a fully-fledged Epicureanism to a valorisation of the rational order of pleasure within an Aristotelian framework. After the Restoration, Locke and South participated in a wider Anglican response to humanity's hedonistic nature by prioritising arguments about the rational order of pleasure-a philosophical claim which often superseded non-hedonic notions of human motivation and goodness. After 1665, Locke, along with Parker, used these common assumptions to justify a radical conclusion: that goodness was reducible to pleasure, and that the obligation of natural law could largely be derived from God's power of imposing rewards and punishments. Thus, the course of Locke's shifting moral ideas reflected a philosophical movement within an Anglican moral language of pleasure, from South's moderate position to Parker's radical stance.The developing resonance of even the most reductionist aspects of this language of pleasure was reflected in the reception of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). For the moral doctrines of the Essay evoked positive responses from even such pillars of Anglican orthodoxy as Francis Gastrell, the high church Bishop of Chester. The increasing influence of these ethical ideas was further illustrated by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century debates around luxury. For both opponents and defenders of luxury often accepted that pleasant consumption was morally licit; they were divided over whether luxury interfered with more delightful pursuits. It was precisely this argument that underpinned Bishop George Berkeley's critique in Alciphron (1733) of Bernard Mandevillle's famous defence of luxury in the Fable of the Bees (1723).