The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Others felt the same sense of freedom. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, to which Newton submitted his Principia, had been moving down the same path since its foundation in 1660. Its members, which included churchmen as well as scientists like Robert Boyle, discoverer of the famous comet, embraced the Principia’s message with enthusiasm. Newton became an overnight hero and an icon of his age, as described by Alexander Pope in the epitaph for his tomb in Westminster Abbey:

  Nature and Nature’s laws lay

  hid in night:

  God said, “Let Newton be!”

  and all was Light.

  Newton’s drawing of a comet. Where is God? He is in between.

  However, while Newton was putting the final touches on his Principia Mathematica, a crisis was brewing. There was a growing political force across the English Channel, a force that was as fearsomely modern as its roots were ancient. Some in England feared it. Others wanted to emulate it. Either way, the notion of a cosmic order built on the will of God was about to show a very different, more sinister face.

  “Sire, it is time.”

  It was seven-fifteen in the morning. The man who uttered these words stood in the dim light of a single candle, which, like the flame in a church altar, burned in the king’s bedchamber all night—as it did every night. He was the first valet of the king’s bedchamber. His elegant clothes and hair were still slightly rumpled from sleeping at the foot of the king’s bed, as the valet did every night. Behind him, servants lit a fire and opened the window shutters onto the gray morning, as a dull red glow rose over the gardens of Versailles.

  The middle-aged, muscular but pudgy man rolled over in his bed. He sat patiently as servants removed his nightshirt and put on a richer, more ornate nightshirt. The door opened quietly and an elderly man and woman entered. The man was the king’s doctor, who silently examined his patient as the servants rubbed the royal legs and arms back to life. The woman was Perette Dufour, the king’s former wet nurse, who remained the first female to greet him every morning for more than half a century. Dufour had been the only person who could bear the pain of suckling the greedy royal infant, who by the time he was two years old had chewed off the nipples of all his other wet nurses.14

  Dufour planted a kiss on her former charge as he sat upright and nodded to the valet. The bed curtains were still drawn. However, Louis-Dieudonné de Bourbon, King of the French and the Fourteenth of that name, was ready to receive visitors. The Sun King was about to shine.

  The first to enter were the king’s brother, the princes of the blood, the grand chamberlain, the four first gentlemen of the king’s bedchamber, the grand master and masters of the king’s robes, the four first valets of the royal bedchamber, and the first valet of the wardrobe. The chamberlain pulled aside the bed curtain to reveal, as if in a theater, the king in bed. Servants poured spirits of wine into a silver ewer so that Louis could wash his hands and then cross himself with holy water from another basin presented every morning by either the grand chamberlain or the first gentleman.15

  Then one or the other presented Louis with his prayer book. The page was marked for the Office of the Holy Spirit. There were no clergymen present for the king’s grand levée, and none who attended ex officio for the second or petite levée in another half hour, when the four secretaries of the dressing room, the two lectors of the chamber, the two majordomos and wardens of the royal plate, along with distinguished visitors, ambassadors, and other members of the French nobility, were allowed to see him be dressed and watch him choose his wig for the day.

  The clergy were not excluded from the rest of the Sun King’s daily routine. Louis regularly had a prayer service and then Mass later that morning, like clockwork, at ten o’clock.16 The object of this daily ritual, however, was not the worship of God, but the worship of the king: a king who, in 1687, saw himself as omnipotent as any Roman emperor and sacrosanct as any pope.

  For “all men are the image of God,” one of Louis XIV’s propagandists wrote, “but His true portrait is in the person of the sovereign; his authority represents His power; his majesty His éclat; his goodness His charity; his rigor His justice.”17

  The Sun King ruled a heliocentric universe as absolutely as the actual sun dominated Copernicus’s and Galileo’s solar system. He ran his kingdom with the mechanical clockwork precision of Descartes’s cosmos. Like a caricature of Newton’s God, he “governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done.” Every morning Louis rose like the sun, in a bedroom at the center of his magnificent palace at Versailles, which after twenty years was still under construction (one of the last rooms to be built, ironically, was the royal chapel). On every side for a quarter of a mile ran gardens with five thousand statues and five hundred elaborate fountains, while more than ten thousand servants, courtiers, and royal officials kept the palace in constant motion.

  Then as now, Versailles overawed every visitor with its grandeur. Then as now, tourists were allowed to wander the grounds, gape at the statues and fountains, and even watch their king eat his dinner in public. As servants bore the gold and silver platters overflowing with meats and vegetables through the palace, every person was expected to bow and murmur reverently, “The food of the king.” Then, surrounded by his family and dozens of courtiers, Louis XIV would consume four plates of soup, an entire pheasant, and a brace of partridge, followed by large slices of mutton and ham with garlic and gravy and a tray of hard-boiled eggs—all washed down with flagons of champagne.18

  What the visitors were seeing was more than a prodigious appetite in action. They were witnessing how the richest and most populous kingdom in Europe had been made to revolve around a single man, in a ritual of obedience as solemn as the Last Supper. They were also watching the poverty of politics in 1600s’ Europe.

  The seventeenth century would be the great “century of genius” in science. It was the age of Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, and of course Newton. The political and social systems of Europe, however, seemed to have stalled out. Through his dark reading of Aristotle, Machiavelli had left behind a dilemma and a paradox.

  Self-governing societies seemed doomed to be free but unstable. Because they existed in time, and were therefore subject to the vicissitudes of change and to men’s passions, they would inevitably hit a wall.† Like ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence, they were doomed to fall into the hands of a despot in order to save society from mob rule. Freedom, in short, must eventually lead to unfreedom.

  If this was true, Europeans asked, then why not start with unfreedom and be done with it? The solution seemed to be ceding all authority to a single absolute sovereign, who consciously modeled his power and glory after the ancient Roman emperors and their Neoplatonist propagandists.

  What is usually called the Age of Absolutism in Europe in the 1600s was actually the age of Neoplatonist kingship. Louis XIV was not the only monarch who insisted that he was the living image of God, or that his authority must be as absolute and unquestioned as God’s sovereignty over His creation. The portraits of the others cram the palaces and art galleries of western Europe: Philip III and Philip IV of Spain, Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, Victor Amadeus of Savoy, James I and Charles I of England. They appear dressed in the trappings of imperial glory. They are shown surrounded by clouds of angels and admiring courtiers and blessed by the gods of classical antiquity.

  Like the Sun King, all of them turned their nation’s printing presses and church pulpits into royalist propaganda machines. What was then “the mainstream media” routinely pointed to the monarch as an essential link in the Great Chain of Being, the center of a divinely preordained and fixed order. A king was more than just a political leader. Heaven had placed him on the throne not only to be obeyed, but to be loved and revered.

  Louis XIV’s favorite clergyman, Bishop Bossuet, proclaimed that a good subject must love his king “like the air which he breathes, like the light that fills his eyes, as much as his own life, indeed as more than hi
s life.” It was a commonplace that God had placed kings at the head of kingdoms, in the same way that He placed fathers at the head of the family: as loving, beneficent images of His own authority, against which there was no appeal because none was necessary. “Oh God,” prayed another of Louis’s panegyrists, “conserve for us this prince You have given us through Your love of us.… Cover him with grace as he covers us with benefits.…”19

  Equestrian statue of Louis XIV, Versailles palace. For John Locke, the Sun King was at war with his own people.

  Aristotle and Plato would have dismissed this kind of obsequious language as unworthy of free men. By the seventeenth century, however, it had become commonplace. It was also a lie.

  Louis’s propaganda machine disguised the sordid reality of the Sun King’s reign. The “benefits” that flowed to his subjects left nearly one in ten a homeless beggar, and as historian Pierre Goubert has noted, infant mortality was running at 25 percent.20 Even as Louis worried over which wig to wear, the countryside where the majority of Frenchmen lived was, as the Venetian ambassador noted in 1660, “a sinkhole of indigence and misery.”

  Those who held government jobs or contracts, or attended the king at court, grew rich. The rest starved or saw their incomes steadily shrink away. France’s nobility were immune from taxation; those who could least afford taxes, the peasantry and small property holders in the towns, paid for everything from Europe’s largest army and navy to the fountains and statues at Versailles. And those who refused to adhere to the king’s formula of “one king, one kingdom, one faith,” like the Protestant Huguenots, were persecuted, beaten, and eventually driven into exile by the tens of thousands.

  In 1680, Europe’s other kingdoms were scarcely better off. Yet to crowned heads everywhere, Louis XIV’s absolutist ways seemed the last best hope for peace and stability. More than a century before, the Reformation had split Europe into two and even three warring religious camps, culminating in the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War. Civil wars, starvation, disease, and economic collapse had swept across the Continent, until the exhausted combatants made peace in 1648. Behind the trappings of loving authority and the reality of coercive power and chronic poverty, the message from Versailles was clear: Your only alternative is mob rule and apocalypse.

  There were some, however, who were determined to set some limits on that awesome sovereignty and power.

  Late one evening in August 1683, a man crouched in front of his fireplace with a pile of papers. As he fed pages into the fire, the flames would have lit up the rafters of the darkened room and the lean lines of his angular face. He was burning letters, memoranda, bills, published pamphlets, anything that might be incriminating. He knew he was being watched by spies. Although he had thrown them off his trail, at any moment he might be arrested for treason and join his co-conspirators in the Tower of London.

  News of the arrest of the Earl of Essex, Lord William Russell, and Algernon Sydney had reached him at his rooms at Christ Church College in Oxford. He had prudently left town for a friend’s house in rural Somerset. Shortly afterward, the bishop of Oxford and the university’s vice chancellor were ordered to search his chambers. They had burned a pile of his books in the courtyard, the last such public burning in England. Other agents of the king began a massive search for anyone matching the description of John Locke.

  Now Locke was destroying every trace of his associations and activities in the alleged plot against King Charles II—everything, that is, except a particular manuscript. He took it with him as he left Somerset for the coast. The remaining papers Locke sent to a friend: “What you dislike,” he wrote, “you may burn.” He also provided details on settling his debts and directions for selling his clothes, books, and furniture in Oxford, including two silver candlesticks and his “linens, flannel shirts, waistcoats, [and] stockings.” Locke also sent his friend a signed will, just in case the next stage of his plan went awry.21

  A few days later, Locke turned up at one of the Channel ports. Money changed hands, and Locke slipped onto a boat bound for Holland. On September 7, 1683, he was in Rotterdam and free.

  He would not return to England for another six years. By then his friends were dead, executed for their supposed complicity in the Rye House plot.‡ They had actually died for their part in the resistance to the growing tyranny in England and the spread of Louis XIV’s Neoplatonist message across the English Channel.

  Locke had traveled to France and Versailles. He had seen Louis XIV’s petite levée and watched the elaborate rituals of absolute kingship, of total rule by one man. Locke’s one goal in life was to make sure the same thing never happened in England. But whereas others tried to fight for freedom with guns or plots or revolutions, Locke would fight for it with ideas.

  His weapon at hand was the manuscript under his arm. “Absolute monarchy,” it read in part, “is inconsistent with Civil Society, and so can be no form of Civil Government at all.” His book revealed why governments must serve the interests of everyone, rather than one person; and why one-man rule was the perversion, not the perfection, of nature—particularly the nature so brilliantly illuminated by his friend Isaac Newton.

  It’s not surprising that Newton and Locke were close, even intimate friends. As a Newton biographer noted, “Each recognized in the other an intellectual peer.”22 Both were keenly interested in the new science (Newton actually gave Locke a special gift copy of the Principia, which is today in Cambridge’s Trinity College Library). Both were also keen readers of the Bible. Locke, in fact, told a biographer that he knew few men who equaled Newton in knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments.

  And both were working on the same problem from different ends. This was figuring out how human beings fit into an infinite universe—and how we can salvage our freedom from the forces of blind necessity, in either the physical or the political realms.

  The answer they found was the nature of nature itself, as the product of a Beneficent Creator. Like Newton, behind nature and reason Locke always recognized the person and voice of God.23 Newton’s Principia revealed that the physical universe was governed by certain laws of nature, “a constant and regular connection in the ordinary course of things.” That constancy reveals the will of an “all wise Agent,” as Locke later wrote, “who has made them to be, and to operate as they do.”24 Locke’s Two Treatises of Government revealed that the political universe is run the same way, through natural laws that guide men’s behavior in the same sure way that they guide the movement of the planets.

  In discussing this, Locke had found a kindred spirit in Aristotle. This was not the Aristotle of the schoolmen or the civic humanist of the Florentines, but the shrewd analyst of human nature in the Ethics.

  In Book V, Aristotle noted that some laws are common to all people, whether Persians and Greeks, Egyptians or Babylonians. All agree that murder and theft are wrong; all agree that our word is our bond and that contracts must be kept. The origin of these universal rules for conduct and justice can’t be written law, since all written law is based on them. So where did they come from? They come from our observation of nature, Aristotle said, and the experience of seeing what’s fair and what’s unfair in actual situations. From that experience, human beings extract a standard of justice that “has the same validity everywhere and does not depend on acceptance” by a particular people or government—but which is upheld by all of them and everywhere men institute fair and just laws.25

  However different in other respects, Greeks and Persians, Egyptians and Nubians, Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Muslims, all enshrine these principles of natural justice in their laws. However, Aristotle insisted, the source of that justice is always the same: observation of the underlying order of nature.

  Thomas Aquinas had noticed Aristotle’s point and extended it. In his usual tidy way, Aquinas decided to divide man’s encounter with the concept of law into a three-part hierarchy of importance.26 Aquinas was a theologian, not a lawyer, so he put the actual lega
l codes of peoples and nations, including Roman law, at the bottom, while putting divine law, or lex divina, such as the Ten Commandments, at the top.

  In between he put what he called the laws of nature, or lex naturalis. These included all the physical laws of nature (including motions of planets), moral principles like charity and self-preservation, and all those laws, including prohibitions against murder, incest, and theft, that all nations immediately see as just. Like divine law, this natural law reflects God’s will. But instead of learning His will directly through the Bible and revelation, we learn this natural aspect of His will through our reason. Wherever men use their reason, Aquinas concluded, we will see them respect the laws of nature; and wherever we see the practice of lex naturalis in human affairs, then we know we are dealing with rational beings like ourselves.27

  Then Aquinas was prepared to move on. But Aquinas also left an ambiguity for future generations to ponder. Lex naturalis could also be rendered as jus naturale; the Latin is unclear. Natural laws, in other words, could become “natural rights,” meaning a legal claim we derive from nature and hold as individuals. But what kind of claim? And a claim against whom?

  The answer the followers of Aquinas developed was that my natural rights are my claims against the community to protect and defend my person and those things essential to my well-being. These rights are mine by nature, “since all men are born free by nature,” as the Dominican Francisco Suárez wrote in the late 1500s.28 It was all too easy to see a close parallel between the way in which William of Ockham had borrowed from Aristotle’s Politics to talk about the community retaining its sovereignty over those who exercise power in its name, like a pope or prince, and the sovereign natural rights of the individual drawn from the Thomist reading of Aristotle’s Ethics.