Bishop Butler and the Virtue of Self-Love

Most Enlightenment intellectuals united around themes such as passion for science and scientific method (inductive reasoning), human wellbeing as the goal of philosophy, and religious tolerance. But nothing proved more nearly universal among them than their opposition to the Catholic Church, establishment Christianity, and clerics. And yet, Joseph Butler (1692-1652), Bishop of Durham, chaplain to King George II and religious advisor to Queen Caroline, and the most widely read and influential moral theologian of the 18th century, must be reckoned a leading luminary of the Enlightenment.