Figures of Jesus from Locke to the Enlightenment

Abstract

At the end of the seventeenth century parallel reflections by Locke and Toland were reappraising the historical dimension of the figure of Jesus, which in the Baroque period was identified with the Sovereign, the Christ-King. In so doing they introduced a new type of reflection which, encompassing a wide range of positions, would span the whole of the eighteenth century. The reflection on Jesus as Messiah and on the Christian faith as a belief in the Messianic nature of Jesus marked Locke’s later works and seems to us to confirm and complete a Lockean anthropology in which the Fall brought death into human life, making it more fragile, but without destroying its rational nature and the capacity for autopoiesis that derives from this nature.