Shaftesbury Reconsidered: Stoic Ethics and the Unreasonableness of Christianity

Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, is a complex figure in the intellectual history of eighteenth-century Britain. He can easily appear as an anachronism, contemptuous or ignorant of the advances in learning underway in the age in which he lived. In the original index to the second edition of his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1714), ‘Metaphysicks’ is followed by ‘necessary Knowledge of nothing knowable or known’. Under ‘Philosophers’ are the entries ‘See CLOWN’, and ‘Moral Philosophers of a modern sort, more ignorant and corrupt than the mere Vulgar’. One seeks an entry for ‘Newton, Isaac’ in vain; and whilst Bacon had the honour of being cited by Shaftesbury—once—it was only to establish that he had been fortunate to have ‘escap’d being call’d an ATHEIST’ by his contemporaries, an oversight Shaftesbury was eager to remedy. Rather than trouble himself with the productions of a modern age whose philosophy he considered to be ‘rotten’, Shaftesbury unabashedly proclaimed his preference for the Stoic moralists of classical antiquity. In his General Dictionary (1739), Thomas Birch noted that Shaftesbury ‘carried always with him’ the ‘moral works of Xenophon, Horace, the Commentaries and Enchridion of Epictetus as published by Arrian, and Marcus Antoninus’