Knowledge, Duty, and Salvation

Abstract

The immediate occasion for Locke’s greatest work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), was a discussion amongst a small circle of friends over questions of morality and religion, those parts of knowledge, he tells the reader, ‘that Men are most concern’d to be clear in’. Before the group could proceed to investigate theological and moral questions, however, it was thought necessary to step back and see what our abilities were and how far they extended. Locke undertook to provide the requisite preliminaries, doubtless unaware that the overall task would engage him for the next 18 years. These early meetings probably took place sometime in 1670 or 1671 at Anthony Ashley Cooper’s London home, for by the close of 1671 Locke had completed two drafts of what would eventually emerge as the Essay. There are additional comments sprinkled throughout the published work which seem to indicate that Locke wished to address concerns about normative conduct and theology broadly defined, and it is worth keeping in mind that his inquiries began after he had broken with the Church of England’s position on the evil of toleration — and after the failed effort by the latitudinarians to achieve a comprehension in 1668. However short our knowledge may prove to be, all humans ‘have Light enough to lead them to a Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own Duties’ was how he phrased it at the opening of Book 1, while in the fourth Book he reminded his audience ‘that our proper Imployment lies in those Enquiries, and in that sort of Knowledge, which is most suited to our natural Capacities, and carries in it our greatest interest, i.e. the Condition of our eternal Estate’.