Justified True Belief

(●) Newton’s friend and England’s leading philosopher for a quarter of a century, who argued that the whole chain of the world hangs on a being who cannot not exist. + In the spring of 1727 Isaac Newton died, and the Mastership of the Mint fell vacant. It was worth between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred pounds a year at a time when a country curate lived on fifty, and the court offered it to a London rector named Samuel Clarke. He turned it down. It was, he said, too secular a post for a clergyman. His friend William Whiston, who had urged the refusal, thought the gesture would do more good among unbelievers than any sermon Clarke could preach. That is the man. He was the best-known English philosopher between John Locke and George Berkeley, the one Newton trusted to put the Opticks into Latin for Europe, and the one Leibniz chose to argue with when he wanted to attack the Newtonian picture of God and the world. His Boyle Lectures of 1704 and 1705 became the standard English case for the existence of God, and for the next hundred years anyone who wanted to deny that case, Hume and Kant included, had to go through Clarke to do it. He also did one thing that ruined his career and that Christians have argued about ever since. In 1712 he sat down with a Greek New Testament, collected every text that bears on the doctrine of the Trinity, all 1,251 of them, and published his own account of what they add up to. What he concluded was that the Father alone is self-existent and that the Son receives everything he has from the Father. Convocation came after him for it, the clergy’s own parliament, which sat in two houses with the bishops in one and the ordinary parish and cathedral clergy in the other, and it was the ordinary clergy who pressed hardest. He never became a bishop.

(●) 1675 AD: Born in Norwich, an alderman’s son in a cathedral city. + Samuel Clarke was born at Norwich on 11 October 1675. His father Edward was an alderman of the city and sat for it in William III’s last parliament, which meant the household had money, books, and a habit of public argument. The boy went to the Norwich free school and then, in 1691, to Caius College, Cambridge. He was quick enough that the university gave him a nickname. They called him the lad of Caius. In 1695, for the public disputation every candidate had to survive before taking his degree, he chose to defend a principle out of Newton, which in Cambridge at that moment was a small act of daring: Newton’s Principia had been in print eight years, and the physics actually being taught was still Descartes’.

(●) 1697 AD: Before he was twenty-two he translated a textbook by a Cartesian and filled the footnotes with Newton. + His tutor, John Ellis, wanted a fresh Latin version of Jacques Rohault’s Traité de physique, the standard Cambridge physics course. Rohault was a Cartesian, which is only to say a follower of Descartes, and Descartes explained the heavens by saying that space is packed solid with matter swirling in vortices, great whirlpools that carry the planets round like leaves in a millrace. Newton had shown that the planets move by gravitation across empty space, and that Descartes’ whirlpools could not produce the orbits anyone actually observed. Clarke could have written a book attacking Rohault. Instead he did something cleverer. He translated Rohault faithfully, and then hung notes under the text, drawn from Newton, that quietly took the text apart from beneath. A student who bought the book for the curriculum got the new physics whether he wanted it or not. The translation appeared in 1697, went to a fourth edition by 1718, and Hoadly says it was still the Cambridge textbook in 1730, more than forty years after the Principia. Clarke’s younger brother John put out an English version in 1723. In 1697, in a Norwich coffee-house, he fell into conversation with William Whiston about Newton. Whiston was chaplain to Bishop Moore of Norwich and was so struck by the young man that he introduced him to the bishop. When Whiston moved on in 1698, Clarke took the chaplaincy and kept it for nearly twelve years, with the run of Moore’s famous library and time to read himself into divinity.

(●) 1704 AD: Two years of lectures in St Paul’s made his name, and after Locke died he was reckoned the leading metaphysician in England. + Robert Boyle, the chemist, had left money in his will for an annual course of eight sermons in a London church defending the Christian faith against unbelievers. Clarke was chosen for 1704 and again for 1705, sixteen sermons in all, preached in the cathedral church of St Paul’s. The first course became A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God; the second, A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation. His named opponents were Hobbes, Spinoza, and the English deists, the writers who held that reason alone gives us all the religion we need and that revealed religion is superstition on top. The timing did the rest. Locke died in 1704, and for the next twenty-five years Clarke was generally reckoned the leading metaphysician in the country. That is a technical word worth stopping on: metaphysics is the study of what has to be true of reality itself, as opposed to what we happen to find in it, so a metaphysician asks not what the stars are made of but what it takes for anything at all to exist. Clarke’s answer to that question, worked out across twelve numbered propositions, is what the next century argued with.

(●) 1709 AD: Queen Anne gave her chaplain St James’s, Westminster, one of the great pulpits of London. + Bishop Moore got him the rectory of St Benet’s, Paul’s Wharf, and introduced him to Queen Anne, who made him one of her chaplains in ordinary, meaning one of the regular chaplains of the royal household rather than a visiting preacher invited now and then. In 1709 she gave him St James’s, Westminster, a fashionable parish where he preached for the rest of his life. Two scenes from these years are worth keeping. The first is his doctorate at Cambridge, where the candidate had to defend a thesis in public against the regius professor of divinity, the senior divinity chair in the university and a royal appointment. The whole performance was called an act, and it was held in front of whoever cared to come and listen. Clarke’s thesis was that no article of the Christian faith is opposed to right reason. When it was over, the professor, Henry James, was supposed to close with the customary formula probe te exercui, "I have given you a good workout." Clarke’s early biographers record that James changed it to probe me exercuisti: "you have given me one." An old Dr Yarborough, rector of Tewin in Hertfordshire, who had heard the dispute, said long afterwards that at seventy-seven he would ride to Cambridge again to hear such another act. The second is a payment. In 1706 Clarke translated Newton’s Opticks into Latin, which was still the language every educated European could read, and so sent the book across the Continent. Newton gave him five hundred pounds, a hundred for each of his five children then living. The two men stayed close until Newton’s death, and Voltaire, who met Clarke in England in 1726, remembered chiefly the care and reverence with which he spoke the name of God.

(●) 1712 AD: He published a book on the Trinity, and Convocation came after him for it. + The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity opens with something no one could object to: a collection of every passage in the New Testament that bears on the subject, numbered one to 1,251, running from the Gospels to the last of them at Revelation 1:9-10, each with a short note. Then comes Part Two, fifty-five propositions setting out what Clarke thought the collection proved, and Part Three, an examination of the prayers and creeds of the Book of Common Prayer against it. The fifth proposition is the one that caused the trouble: the Father alone is self-existent, underived, unoriginated, independent. Arius was a fourth-century Alexandrian priest who taught that the Son is the first and greatest of God’s creatures, made out of nothing, so that there was once when he was not. The Council of Nicaea condemned him in 325. Clarke was promptly accused of Arianism, and he denied it: he held that the Son was begotten from eternity and never made out of nothing. What he did hold is that the Son is God in a derived and second sense, a doctrine usually called subordinationism, and that is what the church objected to. Convocation, the clergy’s own assembly, took it up. It sat in two houses, the bishops above and the ordinary clergy below, and it was the Lower House that moved first. On 2 June 1714 it complained of the book to the bishops and the next day sent up an extract of the offending passages. Clarke replied on 2 July and explained himself further on 5 July, declaring that he believed the Son eternally begotten by the eternal incomprehensible power and will of the Father, and adding that he had no present intention of writing another book on the subject. The bishops entered his paper in their acts and resolved to go no further. On 7 July the Lower House voted that the paper contained no recantation whatever and that the inquiry should not have been dropped. Nothing more was done, and nothing more was offered him either. Whiston says Clarke refused for the rest of his life any promotion that would have required him to subscribe the Articles again. Subscribing meant signing the Thirty-nine Articles, the Church of England’s summary of its doctrine, which a clergyman had to sign afresh every time he took a new post, so a man who would not sign had shut the door on every promotion there was. Whiston adds that Clarke afterwards called the declaration he had given the bishops a foolish thing.

(●) 1715 AD: A princess carried his letters to Leibniz, and five rounds of it settled nothing. + After Queen Anne died, Clarke became a fixture at the court of Caroline, Princess of Wales and later queen, who kept a weekly hour for philosophy and liked to have clever men in the room arguing. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician who had quarrelled with Newton over which of them invented the calculus, wrote to Caroline in November 1715 with a complaint: natural religion was decaying in England, Locke doubted the soul’s immortality, and the Newtonians made God a poor workman who has to wind up his watch from time to time and even clean and mend it. Caroline handed the letter to Clarke, and the two men wrote five papers each, with her carrying them between. They argued about whether space and time are real things in their own right or only relations among bodies, and about whether God ever acts on the world after creation. Then they argued about what Leibniz called a sufficient reason, by which he meant a reason why a thing went this way and not the other way, and he held that nothing whatever happens without one. Clarke granted the principle in words and then read it his own way: where two courses are exactly alike, the sufficient reason is often no more than the mere will of God, and the choosing of a free agent is itself reason enough for the choice. Leibniz answered that a choice made for no reason whatever is a fiction nobody has ever met with, and the later rounds turn on whether freedom of any real sort survives his principle. Leibniz died in November 1716 with Clarke’s fifth reply unanswered, and Clarke published the whole exchange in 1717 in English and French on facing pages. It is one of the great philosophical documents of the century, and it is still the text students read when they want to see the case for absolute space and the case against it put by the two men who understood the stakes best.

(●) 1727 AD: He refused the richest post he was ever offered, and died two years later on a Sunday errand. + When Newton died the court offered Clarke the Mastership of the Mint. Whiston records the household conversation: he and Clarke’s friend Thomas Emlyn both argued against taking it, on the ground that it was money he did not need and work that would ruin his ministry, and Whiston added that a public refusal would show unbelievers he was in earnest. Whiston is careful to record something else too, that Mrs Clarke, who had seven children and every reason to want the salary, never once pressed him and left him free to decide. After no small consideration he refused it absolutely. He did accept something afterwards: Newton’s successor at the Mint, John Conduitt, paid a thousand pounds to free a place among the king’s waiters for one of his sons, who could not otherwise have been provided for, and Whiston, who reports it, thought no sober person would hold that against him. On Sunday 11 May 1729 he went out in the morning to preach before the judges at Serjeants’ Inn and was seized with a pain in his side so violent that he could not preach and had to be carried home. He thought himself better by the afternoon and refused to be bled, which was the standard treatment of the age for almost anything, a vein opened and a quantity of blood drawn off, and against which he had a strong prejudice. The pain came back at two the next morning; a physician bled him twice, and by the end of the week both the doctor and the patient believed the danger past. On the Saturday morning the pain moved from his side to his head, took away his senses, and did not give them back. He died between seven and eight that evening, 17 May 1729, aged fifty-three. Benjamin Hoadly, who had known him since Cambridge and wrote the memoir prefixed to his sermons, said that what he wanted from posterity was to be remembered as the friend of Dr Clarke.

What He Taught

(T1) Something exists that cannot not exist, or nothing would exist at all. + Picture a chain hanging in the air. Every link is heavy, and nothing you can see is holding it up, and yet there it hangs. Ask what supports it and you are told that the bottom link hangs on the second, and the second on the third, and so on without end. Clarke thought that answer was no answer. A chain of ten links falls unless something able to bear the weight stops it; a chain of twenty needs something stronger; and a chain of infinite links needs something able to hold up an infinite weight. Lengthening the chain does not remove the question, it only moves the question out of sight. Clarke liked the picture well enough that later editions of the Demonstration carry it at length in a note, quoted from William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated. Now put causes in place of links. Everything you have ever met is what philosophers call contingent, which simply means it did not have to exist: you, this year, the sun. Each such thing owes its existence to something else, and up to here nobody Clarke was arguing with would object. His move, and it is the move that made his version of the argument famous, is to stop asking about the individual links and ask about the whole chain. Take the entire series of dependent things, however long, even infinitely long, and ask where the reason for that series lies. There are only two places it could be, outside the series or inside it. It cannot be outside, because everything there is has already been gathered into the series by the way it was defined. And it cannot be inside, because every member of it was supposed to be dependent, and where no part is necessary the whole cannot be necessary either. That leaves the series existing with no cause and no reason of any kind, which is to say caused by nothing at all. Stretching it over infinite time does not help. A contradiction is not repaired by giving it more room. Something, then, must exist whose existence is not borrowed: a being that exists of itself, necessarily, so that supposing it not to exist is a flat contradiction. Clarke calls this the self-existent being, and the rest of the Demonstration is an attempt to show, step by step, that such a being must be eternal, infinite, one, intelligent, free, all-powerful, wise, and good. He is candid about the seams. The proof that the first cause must be intelligent, he says plainly, is not easily had a priori, meaning by pure reasoning ahead of any evidence, and has to be argued instead from what the world is actually like: from the order of it, from the ends things serve, and from the plain fact that we ourselves think, and that thinking cannot have come out of what has no thought in it.

(Q) "An infinite succession therefore of merely dependent beings, without any original independent cause, is a series of beings that has neither necessity, nor cause, nor any reason or ground at all of its existence, either within itself or from without." + Source: A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, Proposition II (spelling, capitalization and punctuation modernized). The sentence Clarke built his reputation on. He grants for the sake of argument that the chain of causes runs back forever, and then asks what holds the chain.

(T2) Right and wrong are fixed in the nature of things, before anybody commands anything. + A judge takes money to decide a case for the man who paid him. Ask why that is wrong and there are two kinds of answer available. One says it is wrong because God forbade it, and if God had commanded it, it would have been right. The other says that there is something about a judge, and something about the person standing in front of him, and something about the relation between them, that makes impartiality fit and bribery unfit, in the way that a square peg is unfit for a round hole. Clarke took the second road, and he took it further than almost anyone before him. He starts with relations, by which he means the plain facts about how things stand to each other: that God is infinitely greater than a man, that I received my life and did not make it, that my neighbour can suffer as I can. These relations are simply there, as much as the things are. And out of them, he says, arises what he calls a fitness or unfitness in how different things are applied to one another. Applied is his word for treatment: how one thing is rightly handled given what the other thing is, the way the bribe is unfit for the judge because of what a judge is and what the man before him is. God is infinitely superior to men, and it is therefore fit that men should honour and obey him rather than spend their lives trying to dishonour him. That is not a rule laid on top of the facts. It is what the facts come to. Hence his favourite comparison, which is with mathematics. Two and three make five whether anyone likes it or not, and a man who insists otherwise has not broken a rule, he has misdescribed reality. Clarke thought the man who treats his neighbour as he would refuse to be treated is in exactly that position: he is trying to make things be what they are not and cannot be. The difference, he adds honestly, is that you cannot withhold your assent from a proved sum, whereas you can perfectly well refuse to act on a known duty, because the will is free where the understanding is not. Two consequences follow that Christians have found worth keeping. The first is that God’s own goodness is not arbitrary; the Creator who has absolute dominion over everything nonetheless makes this reason of things the unalterable rule of his own actions and does nothing by mere will. The second is that a conscience owes something to God even where no commandment has been heard, which is very close to what Paul says of the Gentiles, that the work of the law is written on their hearts (Romans 2:15). What Clarke is sometimes accused of, and what the next century pressed him on, is making duty look like a sum a clever man works out, when Scripture treats the knowledge of good and evil as something a proud man can suppress.

(Q) "And 'tis as absurd and blame-worthy, to mistake negligently plain right and wrong, that is, to understand the proportions of things in morality to be what they are not; or wilfully to act contrary to known justice and equity, that is, to will things to be what they are not and cannot be; as it would be absurd and ridiculous for a man in arithmetical matters, ignorantly to believe that twice two is not equal to four; or wilfully and obstinately to contend, against his own clear knowledge, that the whole is not equal to all its parts." + Source: A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, Proposition I (spelling and capitalization modernized). The founding text of what came to be called the intellectual school in English ethics, so named because it held that right and wrong are seen by the understanding, the way a proof is seen, rather than felt as a liking or a distaste. Clarke is not saying morality is like arithmetic in being cold. He is saying it is like arithmetic in being true before anyone votes on it.

(T3) Reason reaches God and duty, and then leaves a man unable to obey. + Here is where Clarke turns and faces the people he had been arming. The deists of his day were happy to agree with everything so far: there is a God, there are eternal moral truths, reason can find both. Their conclusion was that revelation is therefore unnecessary, a set of miracle stories bolted onto a religion that stands perfectly well without them. Clarke spent the second half of his Boyle Lectures arguing that this gets the human situation exactly backwards. His case is historical rather than theoretical, and that is its strength. The philosophers did reach real conclusions, and the best of them, Socrates and Plato and Cicero, reached remarkable ones. What they did not do was change anybody. Their teaching stayed in the schools; it never reached the general practice of the world; and it left even its authors uncertain on the points that matter most, whether God forgives, on what terms, and what becomes of us afterwards. Human nature, Clarke says, was in a universally degenerate estate, and argument is not a cure for that. He then does something rather generous. Instead of asserting the failure, he lets the pagans say it. He quotes a passage he calls one of the most remarkable in all of Plato, and one he had never met with in anybody else’s book, from the dialogue known as the Second Alcibiades, in which Socrates tells a young man that they must wait patiently until someone comes who can teach them how they ought to behave toward God and toward men. The young man asks who that will be, and when, and Socrates answers that it is one who has a concern for him, and that the darkness will have to be lifted from his soul first, the way Minerva in Homer’s Iliad takes the mist from the eyes of Diomedes so that he can tell god from man on the battlefield, before anyone can give him the means of telling good from evil. Clarke adds a footnote most apologists would have left out: it is very difficult, he says, to suppose that Socrates meant himself, but the passage still shows what the most thoughtful pagans felt about their need of some extraordinary instruction. So the argument runs the other way from the deists’. Natural religion is true, and its truth is exactly what makes the case for revelation, because a man who can see what he owes God and cannot pay it is in need of something more than better reasoning. And if a revelation was needed, Clarke argues, then the Christian one is the only candidate in the field, and it carries the marks any genuine revelation would be expected to carry.

(Q) "There was plainly wanting a divine revelation, to recover mankind out of their universally degenerate estate, into a state suitable to the original excellency of their nature." + Source: A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, Proposition VII (spelling and capitalization modernized). "Wanting" here means lacking, as in a wanted part rather than a wanted man. The proposition immediately following adds that no other religion in the world has any tolerable claim to be such a revelation, so that if Christianity is not true, God has said nothing to anyone.

(T4) The world is not a clock left running; God holds it up at every moment. + Leibniz opened the quarrel with a joke that stings. On the Newtonian account, he said, God has to wind up his watch from time to time or it would stop, and even to clean it and mend it now and then; a watchmaker who keeps being called back to his own work is a poor watchmaker, and a God who has to adjust the solar system is a worse one. The dig had a real target. Newton had suggested that the planets’ mutual tugs would accumulate over ages and need correcting. Clarke’s answer goes underneath the joke rather than at it. A human workman, he says, is judged by how long his machine runs untouched, and rightly so, because the forces that drive it are not his. He did not make weight, and he did not make the springiness of a spring; he found them and arranged them. The whole of his skill is in the arranging. God is not in that position. He is the author of the moving powers themselves and their continual preserver, so the world is not a thing that could keep going without him in the way a clock keeps going without its maker. On those terms, saying that nothing happens without God’s continual government is not a slur on his workmanship. It is the point of it. And Clarke sees where the other picture leads. A universe that runs on its own from the first moment is a universe in which God, however loudly he is praised as a supreme intelligence somewhere above it all, has nothing left to do. Call that deism if you like, but Clarke calls it materialism and fate, matter grinding on by sheer necessity, with a religious vocabulary attached, and he notes that once a philosopher can narrate the whole history of things without any interposition of providence, the sceptic will happily walk the same road one step further back and dispense with the beginning too. This is also where he defends the Newtonian doctrine that space and time are real and absolute rather than mere relations among bodies. Clarke connects it directly to God: infinite space is not a thing God made but a consequence of his being everywhere, which is why Newton had ventured the strange phrase that space is as it were God’s sensorium, his place of perceiving. Leibniz seized on the phrase, and Clarke spent much of the correspondence explaining that it was offered as a comparison and not as a claim that God has a sense organ.

(Q) "The notion of the world's being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God, as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker, is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends (under pretence of making God a supra-mundane intelligence) to exclude providence and God's government in reality out of the world." + Source: A Collection of Papers, which passed between the late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke (1717), Clarke’s First Reply, section 4 (spelling and capitalization modernized). "Supra-mundane" means above and outside the world. Clarke’s charge is that a God promoted so far out of his creation that he never acts in it has been flattered into unemployment.

(T5) The Father alone is unbegotten and self-existent, and the Son receives everything from him. + Clarke came at the Trinity the way he came at physics, by going back to the sources and refusing to take the textbook on trust. His method in the Scripture-Doctrine was simply to gather every relevant text and let the pile speak. He noticed that when the New Testament says "the one God" or "the only God" without qualification, it almost always means the Father, and he built a doctrine on that observation. The result is a real Trinity of three distinct persons, not a single person wearing three masks, and Clarke insists on that against the ancient error called Sabellianism. The Son is not a creature made out of nothing and there was no time when he was not, which is what Arius had taught and what Clarke denied. But the Son’s being is derived: he has everything he has from the Father, by the Father’s power and will, and the Spirit derives likewise through the Son. The Father alone is God absolutely. The rest is derivative divinity. Clarke thought he was recovering the language of the New Testament and of the earliest Christian writers from the metaphysical apparatus of the later creeds, and he could point to texts that sound like him. Jesus himself says, "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself" (John 5:26), and the verb is granted. His critics answered him at length, and the church did not follow him. He did not leave it on paper either. Part Three of the book goes through the Book of Common Prayer looking for phrases he thought unscriptural, and in 1718 he changed the wording of the doxology sung after the psalms in his own church. A doxology is the short verse of praise to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit that closes the singing, which means the congregation met his doctrine in their own mouths before they ever met it in his book. The change brought a public letter of rebuke from John Robinson, Bishop of London, and a submission from Clarke. He also marked up his own prayer book with the alterations he would have made. His son gave that copy to the British Museum in 1768, and it is still there.

(Q) "The Father, (or First Person) alone, is self-existent, underived, unoriginated, independent; made of none, begotten of none, proceeding from none." + Source: The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), Part II, Proposition V (spelling and capitalization modernized). The last clause is borrowed on purpose. "Made of none, begotten of none, proceeding from none" is the Athanasian Creed’s description of the Father, and Clarke is pointedly declining to say what that creed says next about the Son.

(Q) "He must of necessity at last understand with his own understanding, and believe with his own, not another's faith. For (whatever has sometimes been absurdly pretended to the contrary) 'tis evidently as impossible in nature, that in these things any one person should submit himself to another, as that one man should see or taste, should live or breathe for another." + Source: The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), Introduction (spelling, capitalization and punctuation modernized). Clarke has just said that a man should take all the help he can get from living teachers and from ancient writers, but as help to see what Christ taught, not as a substitute for seeing it. The sentence is the best of him and the most dangerous thing in him, and the century after his death divided over which it mostly was.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) For a century his argument was the one you had to get past, and the young men who wrote to him included Joseph Butler. + In November 1713 Clarke received a letter from a stranger. "I suppose you will wonder at the present trouble from one who is a perfect stranger to you," it began, "though you are not so to him." The writer had read the Demonstration, admired it, and did not believe Proposition VI worked; he set out his objection in careful detail and asked for an answer. He was twenty-one years old, a student at a dissenting academy in Tewkesbury, and he kept his name off the letters. His name was Joseph Butler, and he would write the Analogy of Religion, the book that answered the deists better than anything else in the century. Clarke did not brush him off. He wrote back, five times, arguing the point out; then he printed the whole exchange in later editions of his own book, objections included, which is not what a man does who is chiefly interested in looking unanswerable. The correspondence is still bound with Butler’s works. That is the pattern of Clarke’s afterlife. Everyone had to go through him. David Hume put a compressed version of Clarke’s argument, the one about the whole series needing a cause, into the mouth of Demea, one of the three speakers in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and then had a second speaker, Cleanthes, attack it; Kant argued that any such proof smuggles in the claim that a supremely perfect being must exist, and so collapses into an argument he had already rejected. Not all of it was hostile. Thomas Reid, Richard Price and Andrew Baxter worked in Clarke’s line, and the argument from contingency that philosophers of religion run today, the one that asks why there is something rather than nothing and looks for a necessary being at the end of it, is recognisably his and Leibniz’s. Clarke also gave the Boyle Lectures the form they kept: a serious philosopher taking the strongest unbelief of the moment by name, which is what William Paley and Joseph Butler would do after him.

(†) His fitness of things gave English moral philosophy a rational wing that has never quite closed. + Clarke founded what came to be called the intellectual school in ethics: the view that moral truths are discovered rather than invented, and that they hold with the same necessity as the truths of mathematics. William Wollaston took it up in The Religion of Nature Delineated, and Richard Price refined it in A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, where right and wrong become simple ideas that the understanding perceives directly. Through Price the line runs into the twentieth century and the moral realists who insist that "torturing children for fun is wrong" is a fact and not a preference. It also drew the best possible opposition, which is a compliment of sorts. Hume built his ethics out of the observation that reason alone never moved anybody to do anything, so that the origin of morals has to be looked for in feeling; the quarrel between Clarke and Hume on that point is still live. Later Christian writers have generally wanted both halves: they keep Clarke’s insistence that moral obligation is real, objective, and not a matter of taste, which is what gives the moral argument for God its footing, while adding what he underplayed, that knowing the good and doing it are two different things and that the second needs grace. His defence of the soul against Henry Dodwell belongs here too. Dodwell had argued that the soul is naturally mortal and receives immortality only through baptism at the hands of properly ordained clergy. Clarke answered that matter, being divisible and made of parts, cannot think, and that a thinking thing is therefore not a material thing and not the sort of thing that can be taken apart. Anthony Collins, the deist, came in on Dodwell’s side, and the exchange that followed ran for years and is still cited in the philosophy of mind.

(†) He made the Son a derived God, and the church would not follow him there. + Clarke deserves his critics at full strength, because his own primary sources make the charge, and the fairest statement of it was made in his lifetime by Daniel Waterland, whose A Vindication of Christ’s Divinity appeared in 1719 and who argued with him for a decade afterwards. The two men, it is said, remained personally on good terms. - The texts will not carry the load. Clarke’s method was to notice that the unqualified phrase "the one God" usually means the Father, and to conclude that supreme deity belongs to the Father alone. But John opens his Gospel by saying of the Word, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1), which is a statement about what the Word is rather than about where he came from. Thomas, meeting the risen Christ, says, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28), and Jesus accepts it. Paul writes, "For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2:9). Hebrews says of the Son, "He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature" (Hebrews 1:3). A counting exercise across 1,251 texts can bury sentences like these under sheer arithmetic, and Waterland’s complaint was that it did. - Derived deity is a third thing, and it does not hold. The Nicene question was never whether the Son is called God; Arius granted a kind of divinity too. It was whether he is God in the same sense as the Father, of one being with him. Clarke tried to stand between Arius and Nicaea: eternal, not made, but not self-existent either. His opponents pressed the obvious question, whether a being whose divinity is received is God in the full sense or not, and whether worship offered to such a being is worship or something less. Clarke never produced an answer that satisfied them, and the church has not found one since. - He altered what the congregation sang. Changing the doxology in his own church in 1718 was not a scholar’s footnote. It reached into the worship of people who had not read his book and could not weigh his propositions, and the Bishop of London was right to say so. Clarke submitted, which suggests he knew it. - The declaration cost him more than silence would have. Told to explain himself in 1714, he gave the bishops a form of words about eternal begetting that his friends read as a retreat and his enemies read as an evasion, and undertook to write no more on the subject. Whiston, who wanted him to be bolder, records that Clarke later called it a foolish thing. It is hard to disagree. None of this touches his argument for God, which stands or falls on its own, and Christians of every communion have gone on using it. But it is a straight case of a first-rate mind trusting his own reading against the settled judgment of the whole church and getting it wrong, and his own best sentence is the one that explains how it happened. A man must believe with his own faith and not another’s; and a man reading alone can still read wrong.