Joseph Butler

English religious leader and philosopher

• Born: May 18, 1692
• Birthplace: Wantage, Berkshire, England
• Died: June 16, 1752
• Place of death: Bath, Somerset, England

Butler was a moral philosopher who sought to demonstrate, by painting a comprehensive picture of human nature acceptable to common sense, that uprightness and benevolence were more congenial than exclusive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own interests. Also, as a Christian advocate, he defended natural and revealed theology against Deism and skepticism. His work asked, Why be moral? Why be religious? Which morality? and Which religion?

Early Life

Joseph Butler was born at the market town of Wantage, the birthplace also of King Alfred. He was the eighth and youngest child of a prosperous retired draper, whose family was rising in status. Butler began his education at the town’s grammar school under the tutelage of its master, the Reverend Philip Barton. The school’s name was later changed to King Alfred’s School. Butler’s family was Presbyterian, and with a view to his entering the ministry Butler was subsequently sent to a dissenting academy—one of a number of private institutions that offered dissenters from the established church the equivalent of a university education. This academy was run by Samuel Jones, first at Gloucester and later at Tewkesbury.

There are no exact dates for Butler’s earlier education, but he seems to have remained at Jones’s academy until early in 1715. While at this academy Butler became dissatisfied with the principles of Presbyterianism, which led him later to join the Anglican Church. Among his fellow pupils were a number who subsequently became distinguished men, including several who, like Butler himself, came to be reconciled to the Church of England. The most notable, and the closest friend of Butler, was Thomas Secker, who later was appointed archbishop of Canterbury.

Toward the end of his time at Tewkesbury, Butler entered into his celebrated correspondence with Samuel Clarke, best known for A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705), who was the most eminent philosophical theologian of his time. The peaceable and respectful tone of Butler’s philosophical critique of Clarke’s proofs of the unity and omnipresence of God, combined with the intellectual rigor with which Butler pursued it, impressed Clarke. The correspondence, initially anonymous on Butler’s part, extended over four years and was published by Clarke in later editions of A Demonstration.

Life’s Work

On March 17, 1715, despite his abandonment of Presbyterianism, and with his father’s financial support, Joseph Butler was entered as a commoner at Oriel College, Oxford, intending to prepare for holy orders in the Church of England. At Oxford, Butler formed a close friendship with another student, Edward Talbot, the second son of William Talbot, bishop of Salisbury, and later of Durham. Edward Talbot died as a young man in 1720, but the Talbot family continued to be Butler’s firm friends, and it was their patronage that facilitated his early ecclesiastical career.

Butler became dissatisfied with what he deemed as the pedantic technicalities of his philosophical and theological studies at Oxford and thought of going to Cambridge. Nevertheless, he stayed in Oxford, took his first degree on October 11, 1718, and soon was ordained deacon, then priest, by the bishop of Salisbury. On the recommendation of Clarke and Talbot, he was appointed preacher at the Rolls Chapel. The stipend was small, but his family continued to assist him. In 1722, William Talbot, bishop of Durham, made him rector of Haughton le Skerne and transferred him, in 1725, to the wealthy rectory of Stanhope. In 1726, Butler published Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, in which he pleaded the cause of moral virtue. The second edition of Fifteen Sermons, with an important new preface, was published in 1729, and a revised and enlarged edition, Fifteen Sermons to Which Are Added Six Sermons Preached on Public Occasions, was published in 1765.

Butler lived at his Stanhope rectory in complete retirement from the worlds of learning and of fashion for the next seven years. His extreme isolation led a contemporary clergy to describe him as not dead but buried. Apart from the duties of a parish priest, his principal occupation during those years seems to have been the writing of The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736). The book counters objections to natural theology and Christian theology by Deists and skeptics. In this work, Butler uses a method of drawing probabilities from analogies. It was The Analogy of Religion, rather than Fifteen Sermons, that made Butler’s reputation for the next hundred years or so following its publication.

In 1733, Lord Chancellor Talbot, the elder brother of Butler’s friend Edward, drew Butler from his reclusion by making him his chaplain. Butler’s earlier friend, Secker, was now a chaplain to the king. Through him Butler was brought into contact with Queen Caroline, who in 1736 appointed Butler her Clerk of the Closet. In his royal service, Butler had to attend the regular gatherings of men of wit and learning, which the queen was fond of assembling. In his short service to the queen, Butler won her respect and liking to such a degree that she spoke of him on her deathbed on November 20, 1737, and desired that he should be given preferment. Preferment came in the following year, but in the somewhat disappointing shape of the bishopric of Bristol, the poorest see in England. Early in 1740, not long after his disdainful acceptance of the Bristol bishopric, Butler was presented to the deanery of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. As dean of St. Paul’s he was able to combine his duties at the cathedral with the attendances at court and in Parliament.

There are very few details about Butler’s life in his last twelve years, apart from the official record of his appointments. He published no substantial work after The Analogy of Religion. In 1746, he was made Clerk of the Closet to the king, but there is no evidence that this appointment brought him into the same intimacy with King George II as he had enjoyed with the late queen. The offer of the bishopric of Durham, with which Butler’s name is most often associated, came in 1750; it came under such ungrateful conditions that Butler came very close to declining the offer.

Ties at Bristol and in Parliament prevented Butler from establishing himself at Durham until June of 1751. His new dioceses was the occasion of Butler’s last published work, the A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Durham (1751), which offers interesting insights into the conditions of the church in the eighteenth century. Butler’s health soon broke down, and on medical advice he traveled, first to Clifton and then to Bath. On June 16, 1752, after weeks of severe fever, digestive disorder, and unconsciousness, he died at Bath. Butler was buried in Bristol Cathedral on June 16, 1752.

Significance

Joseph Butler did not publish extensively, and in the published corpus he did not present a full-fledged philosophical system. Although there are historical disputes as to whether Butler was widely read during his own lifetime, undoubtedly by the late eighteenth century Butler’s work was widely studied in Scottish universities, and from the early nineteenth century at Oxford, Cambridge, and many colleges in the United States. Butler’s impact on the American intellectual arena may be attributed to a strong Scottish influence. Butler’s work impressed luminaries such as David Hume and John Wesley, and prominent figures such as Thomas Reid and Adam Smith considered themselves Butlerians.

Butler was a great favorite of the Tractarians in the nineteenth century, but the association with them may have conspired against his ultimate influence in England, especially since Cardinal John Newman attributed his own conversion to the Roman Church in 1845 to his study of Butler. The English Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among the first to urge the study of Butler’s Fifteen Sermons and to disparage The Analogy of Religion, yet the decline of interest in the latter during the late nineteenth century has not been satisfactorily explained. At its zenith, Butler’s influence cut across Protestant denominational lines and party differences in the Church of England, but serious interest in The Analogy of Religion is now concentrated among certain Anglican writers. Generally, Butler is considered one of the very finest English ethicists, and, despite the waning of his reputation, he was for a long time considered to be a great philosophical theologian. He is seen as an icon of a highly intellectualized, even rarefied, theology.

Bibliography

Brown, David. The Divine Trinity. London: Duckworth, 1984. Brown’s work relates the relevance of Butler’s religious views to modern controversies concerning Deism and incarnational Christology.

Cunliffe, Christopher, ed. Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought: Tercentenary Essays. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992. This collection addresses the significance and contribution of Butler’s ideas and arguments to contemporary philosophical concerns and theological issues.

Darwall, Stephen. The British Moralists and the Internal “Ought,”1640-1740. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Darwall offers a detailed analytical perspective on Butler’s moral theory in relation to other significant ethical theories of that era.

Duncan-Jones, Austin. Butler’s Moral Philosophy. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1952. A comprehensive examination of Butler’s ethical doctrines.

Gladstone, William Ewart, ed. The Works of Bishop Butler. New York: Continuum, 1997. A collection of Butler’s major writings and correspondence, including Gladstone’s own Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler, first published in 1896.

Mossner, Ernest Campbell. Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason. New York: Macmillan, 1936. Mossner presents a dissenting view on the originality of Butler’s argumentation in philosophical theology, and in particular against Deism, and generally on his influence on the subsequent generations of Christian theologians.

Penelhum, Terence. Butler. New York: Routledge, 1999. An in-depth analysis and discussion of some of Butler’s philosophical and theological positions.