I

John Locke opens his essay on The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) with a striking claim. Since it is “obvious,” he writes, that the Christian “Doctrine of Redemption, and consequently of the Gospel, is founded upon the Supposition of Adam’s Fall,” it follows that, in order to understand “what we are restored to by Jesus Christ, we must first consider what the Scripture shows we lost by Adam.”Footnote ¹ The orthodox answer to this question had been supplied by Augustine's doctrine of original sin, according to which all of humanity fell with Adam; our spirit is depraved as a result, and we are incapable of meriting election by obeying the law. Rather, we depend utterly on God's grace, which comes irresistibly to those he has predestined for salvation by means of faith in the Atonement. “This and nothing else,” Augustine canonically argued, “is the predestination of the saints, namely, the foreknowledge and the preparation of God's favors, by which those who are delivered are most certainly delivered.”Footnote ² If we ask “why God delivers this person rather than that one,” the response is simply, “How incomprehensible are his judgments, and how unsearchable his ways.”Footnote ³ But Locke makes clear that he cannot accept this Augustinian doctrine. It is, he insists, “little consistent with the Justice or Goodness of the Great and Infinite God” to suppose that “all Adam’s Posterity” could have been “doomed to Eternal Infinite Punishment for the transgression of Adam, whom Millions had never heard of, and no one had authorized to transact for him, or be his Representative.”Footnote ⁴

Locke thus grounds his momentous rejection of the doctrine of original sin in a claim about the theory of representation. A representative, on this account, is one who is “authorized” by some group of people to “transact” in their name. To ask whether Adam legitimately represented the human race when he fell is therefore simply to ask whether humanity ever authorized Adam to act as their agent. And because the answer to this question is unambiguously negative, Locke concludes that Adam acted solely in his own right and, consequently, that his sin cannot have been attributed by a just God to anyone else—let alone to the entire human race. Locke's terminology in this passage clearly reflects an encounter with the well-known discussion of “Persons, Authors, and things Personated” in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). A “Representer, or Representative,” Hobbes tells us, is a person whose “words or actions” are “Owned by those whom they represent.”Footnote ⁵ In such a case, “the Person is the Actor; and he that owneth the words and actions, is the AUTHOR,” as a result of which the representative may be said to act “by Authority.”Footnote ⁶ If we take this theory seriously, we will conclude that “when the Actor maketh a Covenant by Authority, he bindeth thereby the Author, no lesse than if he had made it himself; and no lesse subjecteth him to all the consequences of the same.”Footnote ⁷ But the converse holds equally well: if the Actor has not been authorized to transact in the name of another person, he acts only for himself. “For no man is obliged by a Covenant, whereof he is not Author; nor consequently by a Covenant made against, or beside the Authority he gave.”Footnote ⁸

We have recently been reminded of the highly polemical character of Hobbes's intervention.Footnote ⁹ The political and military contest between king and Parliament in the 1640s had turned substantially on a debate about the proper understanding of representation. Parliamentarian writers argued that a legitimate representative must be a good representation, or image, of those represented. Representation, on this view, is a matter of degree: A is more representative of B the more he resembles, or constitutes a good image of, B. Accordingly, this view insisted that an assembly reflecting the complex composition of the “body of the people” could be said to represent them better than a single monarch—and that such an assembly might represent the entire body of the people even if many citizens did not elect members to it. The theory thus conveniently established two vital propositions: that the king could not compete with Parliament for the title of “representative of the people,” and that the House of Commons could be the representative of the whole people, despite the fact that nine-tenths of the English population did not elect members to Parliament. But if the king was not the representative of the people, it followed that the existence and exercise of his various prerogative powers (particularly the “negative voice”) would place Englishmen in a state of servile dependence upon an arbitrary and alien will—that is, in the condition of slavery.

Royalists countered this Parliamentarian onslaught by deploying a rival theory of representation, according to which it is authorization, not resemblance (or “representativeness”), that is both necessary and sufficient to establish the legitimacy of a representative. If any authorized agent can be said to speak or act in the name of the people just as well as any other, then plainly a king, no less than a popular assembly, is capable of “representing” his people—from which it follows that the people can be said to be “sovereign” under the rule of a monarch who wields prerogative powers. Representation, on this account, is not a comparative concept, or a matter of degree. It is either wholly present or wholly absent, depending solely on whether the one claiming to act for another has in fact been authorized by that person to do so. Hobbes's discussion of “personation” in chapter 16 of Leviathan plainly aimed to systematize and develop this Royalist line of argument.

I wish to suggest that this debate over political representation in the 1640s was deeply intertwined with a theological debate over the Fall. The “signification” or “resemblance” theory of representation adopted by Parliamentarians began life as Calvinist apologetics. It was first formulated to make the case that Adam could justly be regarded as the representative of humanity, despite the fact that humanity had never authorized him to act in their name. He had been appointed by God to act as trustee for the human race, and had then covenanted with God on humanity's behalf. God's appointment of Adam to this office was, in turn, just and equitable, because Adam and his descendants shared an image and nature. Adam was thus an adequate “representation” of his descendants, each of whom was “in” him “virtually” or “interpretively.” He was the “sign” and humanity was the “signified.” In virtue of their shared image, Adam and humanity likewise possessed shared interests, from which it followed that the former could be expected to act in accordance with the (eventual) will of the latter. The Royalist rejoinder began life instead as a Pelagian response to this Calvinist orthodoxy. Arminian and Laudian theologians developed the authorization theory to explain why Adam could not have represented his descendants, despite their shared image, and, accordingly, why a just God could not have held humanity at large responsible for Adam's sin. At stake in this confrontation were central articles of Christian faith—the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the doctrine of grace—along with the millennial hope of a theodicy.

Indeed, as we shall see, it is not merely that the theological debate over theodicy and original sin gave rise to a set of concepts and arguments that would later be deployed by other theorists in the political context. Rather, the theological and political debates about representation were, to a remarkable degree, two fronts in a single war. The Parliamentarian writers who formulated the “imaging” theory of representation were themselves Calvinists dedicated to the defense of Augustinian orthodoxy against Pelagianism and “Popery,” whereas the Royalist polemicists who defended the “authorization” theory were overwhelmingly Laudian and Arminian opponents of Calvinism. When Locke insisted in 1695 that Adam could not have represented the human race, he was aligning himself self-consciously with a Pelagian/Royalist tradition of thought that placed consent and “authorization” at the center of both the civic and religious enterprises.

II

The earliest Christian accounts of the Fall make no use of the concept of representation, for the simple reason that they accept the organic, familial notion of personality that is found in the Hebrew Bible itself. Abraham, on this view, just is his family; they are essentially the same person, from which it follows that his descendants can be rewarded for his virtues and punished for his vices.Footnote ¹⁰ It is this collective concept of personality that underlies the famous claim in the Decalogue that God “visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations” (Exodus 20:5), and likewise explains why Adam's offspring might be said to have fallen with him. If we assume that Adam and his descendants are the same person, we need not grapple with the question of why the sins of one person (Adam) are visited upon a set of wholly distinct persons (his descendants) who never sinned. When the Epistles assure us that “all sinned” in Adam (Romans 5:12), they are not speaking metaphorically. Adam, on this account, simply was humanity.

This familial, collective understanding of personality was already a subject of controversy in the later biblical books. It is, for example, clearly the target of Ezekiel's celebrated insistence that each individual should only suffer for his own personal sins: “What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: ‘The parents eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge’? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel . . . The one who sins is the one who will die” (Ezekiel 18:1–4).Footnote ¹¹ But the collective understanding remained powerfully present among the church fathers. When Augustine turns to the subject of the Fall in The City of God, his intellectual allegiances are straightforwardly on display:

For Augustine, the Pauline claim that we all sinned in Adam must be understood to mean that “we all were that one man.” Our subsequent individuation—“the particular form in which we were to live as individuals” that was eventually “created and distributed to us”—was an incidental development that did not vitiate our organic unity in Adam.

This collective understanding of human personality remained central to orthodox accounts of the Fall until well into the sixteenth century. Indeed, Calvin himself endorsed it unreservedly (although this is a subject on which there has been a good deal of scholarly confusionFootnote ¹³). “The whole human race,” he writes in the Institutes, “was lost in the person of Adam.”Footnote ¹⁴ “We must, therefore, hold it for certain, that Adam was not merely a progenitor of human nature, but, as it were, a root, and that, accordingly, by his corruption, the whole human race was deservedly vitiated.”Footnote ¹⁵ Here again, Adam was our “root” (radix) and we were therefore “radically” present in him when he fell. But for Calvin's disciples, both continental and English, this collective understanding of personality began to seem untenable. Adam and humanity, they increasingly felt obliged to concede, were not the same person. Rather, what now had to be explained was why we could have fallen with Adam despite our undeniable separateness.Footnote ¹⁶ And it was the concept of representation that gave them their explanation. God, they claimed, had appointed Adam the representative of the human race and entered into a covenant (foedus) with him, according to which humanity would be rewarded with immortality if they remained obedient to his law and punished with death and damnation if they proved rebellious.Footnote ¹⁷

As William Perkins canonically put the argument in the Golden Chaine (1600), “all his posteritie sinned” in Adam because “Adam was not then a priuate man, but represented all mankind.”Footnote ¹⁸

Perkins thus invoked the concept of representation to address what struck him as a dangerously powerful objection to the doctrine of original sin. If the familial, collective account of personality and responsibility is to be accepted, then surely we must be just as responsible for the sins of Cain, and all of our other ancestors, as we are for the sins of Adam. But that looks absurd—we don't ordinarily hold people accountable for the crimes of their grandfathers. Perkins's answer is straightforward: we are accountable for Adam's sin, and not Cain's, because only the former was a “public person” designated by God to represent us. Adam therefore spoke and acted for us in the same way that “in a Parliament whatsoeuer is done by the burgesse of the shiere, is done by euery person in the shiere.”

Perkins's argument in this respect was immediately taken up by a range of Calvinist divines. “We must know,” announced Thomas Tuke in 1609,

John Yates offered both the organic argument and the representation argument in Gods Arraignement of Hypocrites (1615). On the one hand, “he was our father, & we his heires; he was the root of all mankind, and we were in his loynes: the manner is by imputation of the transgression, and so consequently of blame, guilt, and punishment.”Footnote ²¹ But, anxious to reassure those who might be skeptical of this claim about collective personality, he adds that Adam “couenanted with God for vs, as well as for himself.”Footnote ²² Paul Baynes, Perkins's Puritan successor as minister in the Church of St Andrew the Great in Cambridge, likewise insisted in 1618 that “a publique person standing for him and his, doth agree to Adam, as a thing appropriated to him.”Footnote ²³ In this regard, Adam was crucially a “Type of Christ,” who was likewise a “public person” representing humanity on the cross: “as the Subiects of England, Scotland, Ireland, are in our King vnited, and all made one body politicke, so it is with the members of Christ in heauen and earth.”Footnote ²⁴

Pierre du Moulin offered precisely the same argument from analogy in The Anatomy of Arminianisme (1620):

And like Perkins before him, du Moulin makes use of the notion of representation to address the reductio that we are legally and morally accountable for the sins of all of our progenitors:

“Surely,” du Moulin continues, “I think that it cannot be said that Ezechias or Iosias, who were the posterity of Dauid, did in Dauid murther Vrias.” Indeed, “Adam while hee liued committed many sinnes, yet I thinke that onely that first sinne of Adam was imputed to his posterity, because onely by this sinne he violated that couenant which was made with him, as with the author of mankind.”Footnote ²⁷

As this tradition of thought gathered pace, its expositors grew increasingly eager to characterize the office of a representative more systematically and to distinguish it from other, apparently similar, juridical roles. Thus Thomas Goodwin, writing in Christ Set Forth (1642), offers a meticulous, highly technical, definition of a “common person”:

But Goodwin was equally keen to prevent a particular kind of misunderstanding. A “common person,” or representative, is to be sharply distinguished from a mere “surety”—a point of some importance in this theological discourse, where Christ was routinely said to have acted as a surety for mankind.Footnote ²⁹ “A Surety,” Goodwin explains,

It is therefore crucial to understand that “Adam was not a Surety for all Man-kind, he undertook not for them, in the sense fore-mentioned; but he was a Common person representing all Man-kind; So as what he should do, was to be accounted as if they had done it.”Footnote ³¹ Adam was “herein a lively type of our Lord Christ,” who was likewise a “common publique person,” rather than a mere surety.Footnote ³² The Larger Catechism of the Westminster Assembly codified this set of assertions in 1648, declaring that “the covenant being made with Adam as a public person, not for himself only, but for his posterity, all mankind descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him in that first transgression.”Footnote ³³

But Calvinist theorists confronted a challenge at this stage of the argument. God, they agreed, had appointed Adam as a representative of the human race and had then entered into a covenant with humanity through him. But why exactly was it just for God to do this? What was it about Adam that gave him a justifiable claim to represent his progeny in the sweeping fashion presupposed by the first covenant? A small number of divines were prepared simply to accept God's appointment of Adam as an arbitrary exercise of sovereign power. For Anthony Burgess, “Adam’s will may be said to be our will two ways.” First, “by way of delegation, as if we had chosen him to be our common parent, and had translated our wills over to him, as amongst men, it is usual in arbitrations, and then they are said to will, that which their Arbitrator hath done, though it may be they dislike it.”Footnote ³⁴ But, clearly, “in this sense, Adam’s will is not our will, for we had no actual being or existence in him.” Fortunately, however, there is another option: “Adam's will may be said to be ours interpretatively, God appointing him to be the universal principle of mankind; what he did is interpreted, as if we had done it, and the equity of making Adam’s will ours, ariseth from the instituting will and Covenant of God, that would have it so.”Footnote ³⁵ Burgess adds later that “neither was it requisite that God should expect Adam’s consent, or ours to this agreement, seeing God is the absolute Sovereign and Lord of all”Footnote ³⁶—or “supream Lord over all Mankind.”Footnote ³⁷ Thomas Brooks agreed, writing in A Golden Key to Open Hidden Treasures (1675), “And so was Adam a common person, and that by an act of God's Sovereignty; appointing him, in making a covenant with him so to be, and he did represent all Man-kind.”Footnote ³⁸

But most Calvinists were unwilling to leave matters here. They were not voluntarists, after all, and so did not believe that God's will was itself the measure of just and unjust.Footnote ³⁹ Rather, they accepted that God, being perfect, would unerringly conform his conduct to an objectively valid natural law. His designation of Adam as representative of humanity therefore must have been just and legitimate. Some explained the justice of the divine appointment by stressing its “equity.” God, on this account, would have credited the human race with Adam's obedience, had the latter resisted temptation, so it was only fair that He should have attributed Adam's fall to his descendants as well. As in any partnership, partners should stand ready to bear the losses if they hope to share in the gains. As John Polhill put the case,

Burgess canvassed this view as well, explaining that

Fair enough, one might reply, but the mere fact that the terms of a partnership are equitable does not suffice to show that persons may be designated partners without their consent. The question remains: why was God acting in accordance with the principles of justice when he designated Adam our partner in this fashion? As a first step toward an answer, a number of theorists began to emphasize that Adam and humanity shared a set of interests. Adam could, for this reason, be supposed to act as his descendants would have chosen to act. Gabriel Towerson, for example, insisted that the law “must be supposed to have been given to Adam, as that too not only in his private, but publick capacity, and as he may be thought to have been the representative of all Mankind.”Footnote ⁴² “By the publick capacity of Adam,” Towerson goes on to explain,

Since it was in Adam's own interest to act as a good steward and “trustee” of humanity's patrimony, it was just and proper for God to assign him that office.

But here again, the argument seemed to need something more. The laws of trusteeship, after all, were well known, and they plainly did not allow the crimes of trustees to be attributed to beneficiaries.Footnote ⁴⁴ Adam was not merely a trustee, but a representative whose actions were to count as the actions of his progeny. Why was it legitimate for him to have been assigned this office? To answer this further question, Calvinist divines turned to a discourse of representation that they had inherited chiefly from the Protestant theology of the sacraments and from biblical typology. To “represent” something, in this discourse, was to make an image or “representation” of that thing. As George Lawson put the crucial point, “something in relation to another thing, whereof it is an Image or likenesse . . . is represented by it. For the form of an image, or likenesse as such is to represent some other thing.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The Eucharist, rightly understood, functions “by Representation, because it's a Sign and Figure of [Christ's] Body . . . The reason of this expression, is the similitude and agreement between the sign and the thing signifyed.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Christ, he adds in an important turn of phrase, is therefore “here Virtually, and Really present” by representation.Footnote ⁴⁷

Perkins had likewise written fifty years earlier that “figures” represent in just the same way that words “signifie,” and he had offered precisely the same example: in “the Lords Supper, as in euery sacrament, there is a relation or analogie betweene the outward signes and the things signified. The action of the minister giuing the bread and wine to the hands of particular communicants, representeth Gods action in giuing Christ with his benefits to the same particular communicants.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Or as he put the same argument in the form of a catechism, “Q. What is a Sacrament? A. A signe to represent, a seale to confirme, an instrument to conuey Christ and all his benefits to them that doe beleeue in him. Q. Why must a Sacrament represent the mercies of God before our eies? A. Because we are dull to conceiue and to remember them.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Whatever is said about the representative character of the sacraments can, on this account, likewise be said about biblical “types” more broadly—each of which “was a figure and a shadow in foreshewing some representment of those things which should have a future existence under the new covenant.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus Lancelot Andrewes (writing in his most Calvinist register) could insist that “King David . . . is in Scriptures, not persona Regis onely, the person of a King; but persona Regum, a person representing all Kings to come after him; such specially, as with David, serve and worship GOD in truth. We doe safely therefore, what is said to him, applie to them all, since he is the type of them all.”Footnote ⁵¹ A type represents its antitype by virtue of resemblance or “signification.” In precisely this sense, Edward Reynolds argued that “as Christ was the substantiall and universall Mediator betweene God and Man: So Moses was to that people a representative, typicall, or national Mediator.”Footnote ⁵² Note that the word “representative” in this context appears as a synonym for “typicall.” John Owen employed the term identically when he wrote that

But if representation is understood in this fashion, the notion of “authorization” simply drops out. If, in Perkins's words, “the name of the thing signified is giuen to the signe, as vpon a stage he is called a king that represents the king,”Footnote ⁵⁴ then the question of whether Adam represented humanity cannot possibly turn on whether he was authorized by humanity to act in that role. After all, the actor upon the stage who “represents the king” has not been authorized by the king to speak and act in his name. He represents the king by “signification” and resemblance. To adjudicate the question whether Adam represented humanity in this sense, we must therefore ask whether he adequately “signified” or resembled humanity—whether he and his descendants shared an image, such that he could “appear” in their stead and “act their part.” Was Adam, in other words, an acceptable “representation” of his descendants?

Calvinists had no doubt that he was, and they could turn for support to the established Christian discourse of the Incarnation. Christ, in this tradition of thought, had taken on human form—the image of humanity—precisely so that he could “bear the person” of humanity as Adam had, thus undoing the consequences of the Fall for the elect. As Calvin himself had written, “our lord came forth a true man, adopted the person of Adam, and undertook in his stead to obey the Father.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Or as Patrick Gillespie put the claim, Christ “act[ed] our part, not in a scenick, but in a real manner; he came upon the stage to represent our person, and in our nature and Law-place he really acted our part.”Footnote ⁵⁶ He could only “act our part” because he was able to “represent” our person, precisely as Adam had. “In whatsoever state and condition Christ was,” Gillespie explains, “in that state and condition he doth sustain our persons, and is surrogate in our place and condition . . . when he was in a state of humiliation here, upon the earth, in that low condition, he did sustain the persons, and bear and represent the state and condition of his poor broken people.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Likewise, after the crucifixion,

His passion was therefore an “instance and parallel of Adams sustaining the condition of all men, and therein being a type of Christ.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Thomas Goodwin unpacked the comparison in even greater detail. “In their two severall conditions, qualifications, and states,” both Adam and Christ

Humanity was “virtually, and representatively” in both men, with the result that “as in Adam we were all virtually condemned, (In Adam all dye),” and yet, “we are not actually in our owne persons condemned, till we are borne of him; nor doe we personally dye, untill we lay downe our flesh: Even so is it in the matter of our Justification; it was done virtually in Christ, and afterwards when we beleeve, is actually passed in and upon our selves.”Footnote ⁶¹

Calvinist divines were at great pains to insist that Christ could not have represented humanity had he not taken on their image, just as Adam could not have represented his descendants had he not shared theirs. As Lawson explained in his Theo-Politica (1659),

Sharing the image of man was therefore a necessary condition of Christ's acting as a representative, “general Person.” It was not, of course, a sufficient condition: not everyone who shares A’s image is A’s representative. Only those “image-sharers” who are duly appointed or designated to speak and act in A’s name, and who voluntarily accept the office, may be said to bear his “Person” (note, however, that A’s consent is not necessary for this arrangement). But one cannot be a “representation” of A if one does not share his image.

Indeed, some Calvinists went so far as to argue that Adam and Christ were “representations” of humanity in an extraordinary sense. John Owen, for example, emphasized in his Vindiciae Evangelicae that the manner in which both Adam and Christ possessed “a likenesse of nature to all men” is to be understood in relation to the biblical claim that “Adam begat a Sonne in his own likenesse, Gen. 5. 1.”Footnote ⁶³ Glossing this verse, Owen writes that “an Image is either an Essentiall Image, or Accidentall. A Representation of a thing in the same substance with it, as a Sonne is the Image of his Father, or a Representation in some resemblance like that of a Picture.”Footnote ⁶⁴ A picture merely “resembles” its subject—that which it represents—while a son is the “representation” of his father “in the same substance.” The two share an “essential” image, rather than merely “accidental” features. Adam and Christ, on Owen's account, were able to represent humanity in this deepest of senses; they were “representations in the same substance.”

This, then, was the Calvinist explanation of the Fall. Humanity fell with Adam because the latter was a “public” or “common” person who represented them, and Adam represented them because he was an adequate “representation” or “signification” of his descendants. He and they shared an “essential” image, as a result of which posterity was “virtually” or “interpretively” present in Adam. These polemicists deployed precisely the same language and arguments to explain their support for the Parliamentarian cause in the 1640s and 1650s. Henry Parker, a committed Calvinist who insisted that man was “depraved by the Fall of Adam”Footnote ⁶⁵ and straightforwardly endorsed the “similitude” account of representation in his 1641 attack on the Catholic veneration of relics and icons,Footnote ⁶⁶ declared in his political pamphlets that “the Parliament is indeed nothing else, but the very people it self artificially congregated, or reduced by an orderly election, and representation, into such a Senate, or proportionable body.” “Tis true, in my understanding,” he grants, “the Parliament differs many wayes from the rude bulk of the universality,”Footnote ⁶⁷ but the former is “so equally, and geometrically proportionable, and all the States doe so orderly contribute their due parts therein,” that “in power, in honour, in majestie, in commission, it ought not at all to be divided, or accounted different as to any legal purpose.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Parliament, on this view, is “vertually the whole kingdome it selfe.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, the similitude between people and Parliament is not merely accidental, but “essential”: “in the truth,” Parker observes, “the vvhole Kingdome is not so properly the Author as the essence it selfe of Parliaments.”Footnote ⁷⁰ “For the Parliament being the representative of the people becomes thereby their living soul, including the will and desires of all the people, as comprehending them all.”Footnote ⁷¹

It is important to recognize that Parker and his allies did not claim that a single person can never “represent” or “signify” a multitude. Such a conclusion would obviously have had the effect of undermining the entire Calvinist project, since it entails that only an assembly, and not Adam alone, could have represented humanity in falling. Parker argues instead that a “proportionable” assembly will always be a better representation of the people than a single man—so good, in fact, that it will infallibly act as the natural body of the people would have acted—and that, given a choice between the two, one should therefore always choose the former.Footnote ⁷² When no such choice is available, a single person can indeed adequately represent the people. In the early ages of the earth, Parker explains,

That is, “we cannot imagine that publique consent should be any where more vigorous or more orderly than it is in Parliament,” but when no orderly, “proportionable” assembly is on offer, a single person will do.

Parker can thus hold that “the King does not represent the people, but onely in such and such cases: viz. in pleas of a common nature betwixt Subject and Subject. Wherein he can have no particular ends; and at such or such times, viz. when there is not a more full and neer representation by the Parliament.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The King, in other words, can count as a “representation” of the people when “a more full or neer” one is unavailable. By the same reasoning, since there was clearly “not a more full and neer representation” of humanity available in the first days of Creation, a just God could have appointed Adam, who “signified” us, to bear our person. Once designated in this manner, Adam (like the House of Commons) became our representative, despite the fact that we ourselves never chose him for the role—for, as the Parliamentarian John Herle helpfully explained, “designation to a trust in anothers stead,” just as much as “the deputation of a man by way of election,” makes “him to represent that other.”Footnote ⁷⁵

III

Royalists of the 1640s answered this Parliamentarian challenge by rejecting the “virtual,” signification theory of representation in favor of a pure authorization account. Anyone authorized by the people to speak and act in their name must count as their representative, whatever the authorized party may look like—and no amount of “similitude” or resemblance in any way enhances the claim of an agent to represent a given author. Thus the fact (if it is one) that the House of Commons constitutes a better image of the people than the king becomes completely irrelevant. Both king and Commons were authorized by the people, and both therefore count as representatives. The popular authorization in question could not have come in either case by way of election, since, as Royalists delighted in pointing out, nine-tenths of the Englishmen “represented” in Parliament did not possess the franchise. And, of course, no one ever voted for the king. Rather, the people gave their tacit consent to the overall institutional scheme of which both king and Parliament were a part.

Thus, when Sir John Spelman sought to refute Parker's claim that Parliament alone was “virtually” the whole kingdom in 1643, he offered as evidence the language of a statute of Henry VIII:

For Spelman, the king as well as the Lords and Common represented the people for the simple reason that “all the people did at first submit themselves to their determination.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Henry Ferne likewise mocked Parker's insistence “that the two Houses upon the absence and refusall of the other part, are virtually the whole”: “This tearm virtually doth often stand him instead, for under that he can enlarge the power of the Houses to the extent of his fancie.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In fact, Ferne agrees with Spelman, the king is every bit as much the representative of the people, since “we are sure it is declared 25 H. 8.21. Your Royall Majesty, and Your Lords and Commons represent the whole Realm.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Dudley Digges was, if anything, even more emphatic on this point. The Commons claim the “virtue of Representation,” but “is not this cleerly the Kings case, who is entrusted certainly as highly as they?”Footnote ⁸⁰ To be sure, the Commons “represent the people to some purposes,” but so too does the king.Footnote ⁸¹ Both have been “entrusted” in precisely the same sense.

At the very same moment, Royalist divines were also applying this set of arguments to the case of church councils. A representative, Henry Hammond announced, “hath its authority” from the agent it represents.Footnote ⁸² That is all there is to it. Yet “low church” councils dared to claim “infallibility” on the grounds that they constituted a perfect image of the church universal. They fancied themselves “the Compendium and quintessence of the Church, and the body representative thereof,” as Parliament was of the “whole Kingdome,” and therefore claimed “that the Councell is the Church in substance.”Footnote ⁸³ In truth, Hammond explains, the council is a “representation onely” and “nothing is the Church in substance, but the Church in its full extent, of which . . . the Church is onely the quintessence, which sure is not the same in substance with that whose quintessence it is, but onely the representation of it.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Laud himself had made an identical case as early as 1639:

If, as Laud argues, representation is simply a mechanism whereby some agent authorizes some other agent (individual or collective) to act in his name, then all of the complex metaphysics of image-sharing and consubstantiality must be rejected out of hand. A representative body is no more the “virtual whole” than a single, authorized magistrate is.

It is, I want to suggest, no accident that the Royalist writers and divines who deployed these arguments were all Arminian anti-Calvinists who rejected the Augustinian doctrine of original sin.Footnote ⁸⁶ Beginning in the early seventeenth century, Continental opponents of Calvinism had developed the authorization argument in order to deny that Adam could have represented the human race when he fell. Thus the Remonstrant Simon Episcopius reasoned in his Institutiones Theologicae (left unfinished at his death in 1643) that “it is impossible that the actual and personal sin of Adam could have been originally ours,” on the grounds that another's sin cannot be attributed to an agent “unless he contributes authority [imperium], or counsel, or consent, either tacit or express, or at the very least . . . knowledge of the crime or sin. And none of these could have any place in that sin.”Footnote ⁸⁷ As Josué de la Place (Placeus) likewise insisted in his well-known De imputatione primi peccati Adami, it cannot be said that Adam represented his posterity “by a legal pact” (foedus legalis).Footnote ⁸⁸ “Did he sin in our place? . . . Did we ever accept this by any act of our mind and will?”Footnote ⁸⁹ Turning to the English context, Samuel Hoard reached the same conclusion in Gods love to Mankind, Manifested, by Disproving his Absolute Decree (1633): our guilt for Adam's sin must be rejected out of hand on the grounds that “Adams sinne is the sinne of mans nature onely and no mans personall transgression, but Adams: it was neyther committed nor consented to, by any of his posterity in their own persons.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Such an “absolute decree is repugnant to Gods Iustice.”Footnote ⁹¹

This argument became hegemonic in Arminian circles in the 1640s and 1650s. “Why,” Henry Hammond asked in 1645, “should God inflict that punishment upon all mankinde, for (or upon occasion of) the sinne of that one man? though he used his talent so very ill, others of his posterity might have used it better, and why should they all be so prejudged, upon one mans miscarriage?”Footnote ⁹² Such a decree could not have been an expression of “distributive justice,” because humanity never authorized Adam to act in their name. Jeremy Taylor likewise reasoned in 1656 that “condemnation cannot pass upon a man for any sin but his own: therefore it did not pass upon man for Adam’s sin; because Adam’s sin, was Adam’s, not our own.”Footnote ⁹³ Calvinists may ground their doctrine of original sin in a “Covenant made between Almighty God and Adam, as relating to his posterity,” but Taylor finds

He then makes the central claim,

In other words, only “he that is author or the perswader, the minister or the helper, the approver or the follower, may derive the sins of others to himself, but then it is not their sins only, but our own too.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Humanity was not the “author” of Adam's sin, because Adam had never been authorized by humanity to covenant on its behalf.

What, then, of the Calvinist claim that our wills were in Adam “by interpretation” because he shared our image? On this point, Taylor is scathing:

“Why then,” Taylor wonders in conclusion,

This theological debate provided a crucial context for Hobbes's celebrated intervention in Leviathan.Footnote ⁹⁹ Hobbes was closely associated with the circle of Arminian Oxford divines who met regularly to discuss theology at Viscount Falkland's house at Great Tew in the 1630s, among them William Chillingworth, George Morely, Gilbert Sheldon, and Hammond himself.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He was also quite familiar with the writings of Perkins, Tuke, du Moulin, and other federal theologians.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It is therefore difficult to believe that, when he asserts in chapter 16 that a representative is merely an “actor” who has been authorized by another agent to “bear his person,” Hobbes is unaware that he is endorsing and systematically developing a position that is not only Royalist, but also deeply Arminian/Pelagian. And, indeed, important passages in this much-studied chapter take on a new resonance once they are seen as volleys in the battle over representation and the Fall. Thus Hobbes's claim that “no man is obliged by a Covenant, whereof he is not Author; nor consequently by a Covenant made against, or beside the Authority he gave” amounts to a straightforward rejection of the central claim of Calvinist covenant theology—namely that Adam could have entered into a covenant with God on humanity's behalf.Footnote ¹⁰² Hobbes likewise had an unambiguous answer for those who argued that Adam might have represented us as a “trustee” in virtue of sharing our image. It is true, he grants, that those who are not capable of acting in their own right may be “represented by Fiction,” and “Likewise Children, Fooles, and Mad-men that have no use of Reason, may be Personated by Guardians, or Curators.”Footnote ¹⁰³ But such non-agents “can be no Authors (during that time) of any action done by them, longer then (when they shall recover the use of Reason) they shall judge the same reasonable.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Even if Adam had been our trustee before we existed, we would not have counted as “authors” of his actions unless and until we endorsed them after we had developed our own agential powers. And, in any event, Hobbes tells us that non-agents of this kind “cannot be Personated, before there be some state of Civill Government”—that is, until “the Actors may have Authority to procure their maintenance, given them by those that are Owners, or Governours of those things.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ And Hobbes is clear that no such state existed when Adam fell.

In consequence, Hobbes nowhere refers to Adam as a representative of the human race, and, given his numerous and extensive discussions of the Fall, the silence would have been deafening to his contemporaries (he likewise systematically avoided using the language of representation in his lengthy discussions of the sacramentsFootnote ¹⁰⁶). In chapter 35, for example, Hobbes writes that God

Adam is punished personally for his transgression, and his posterity are punished for their own “vices”—not for their ancestor's. Likewise, we read in chapter 38 that

Two points are worth stressing about this comment. First, Hobbes makes clear that he understands the depths of the controversy into which he is wading; hence his insistence that, his own view notwithstanding, he is prepared to accept the interpretation of his sovereign. Second, his argument here is radically Arminian, indeed almost Socinian. Adam, on this account, would have lived forever in Eden, had he not sinned, “for there was the Tree of life; whereof he was so long allowed to eat.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Once denied access to the tree, his existing mortal nature entailed that he would die, as would his posterity. Humanity was not depraved in spirit as a punishment for the sin of Adam.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Indeed, the Fall wrought no change in human nature at all.

Hobbes was equally emphatic that Christ himself could not, properly speaking, be regarded as a representative of mankind at the time of the crucifixion. To be sure, “Jesus Christ hath satisfied for the sins of all that beleeve in him; and therefore recovered to all beleevers, that ETERNALL LIFE, which was lost by the sin of Adam,”Footnote ¹¹¹ but, as Hobbes took pains to establish in chapter 16 (quoting Thomas Goodwin almost verbatim), there is a central difference between an “Author” who is represented by an “actor” and one “that owneth an Action, or Covenant of another conditionally; that is to say, he undertaketh to do it, if the other doth it not, at, or before a certain time.”Footnote ¹¹² “These Authors conditionall,” Hobbes explains, “are generally called SURETYES, in Latine Fidejussores, and Sponsores; and particularly for Debt, Prædes; and for Appearance before a Judge, or Magistrate, Vades.”Footnote ¹¹³ A “surety” who appears before a judge to settle a “debt” on another's behalf is not a “representative”—and, as we have seen, Christ was understood to be the archetypal surety. Indeed, the Latin term sponsor was invariably used to translate the crucial passage in the Septuagint in which Christ is described as “the surety [ἔγγυος] of a better covenant” (Hebrews 7:22), and Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century added, more specifically, that Christ had entered into a fideiussio on behalf of humanity—that is, a conditional suretyship, in which the debtor remains liable for his debt until the designated sponsor pays the creditor.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Hobbes's use of this vocabulary is quite deliberate.

Thus, while Jesus was a surety, he was not the “public person” of Calvinist theology, any more than Adam had been. “The King of any Countrey,” Hobbes clarifies, “is the Publique Person, or Representative of all his own Subjects,” and in the ancient “Kingdom of God” by covenant, this public person was “God the King of Israel,” not his son.Footnote ¹¹⁵ “It is manifest,” for Hobbes, “that our Saviour (as man) was not King of those that he Redeemed, before hee suffered death; that is, during that time hee conversed bodily on the Earth.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The incarnate Christ was never authorized by covenant to represent the faithful, from which it follows that he was not their representative at the time he mounted the cross. “The Kingdome of Christ is not to begin till the generall Resurrection,” at which point he will become sovereign representative “peculiarly of his own Elect, by vertue of the pact they make with him in their Baptisme.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ During his ministry, Christ was only the representative of “God the Father,” who had authorized him to bear his person “during his abode on earth,” in precisely the same sense that “Moses, and the High Priests, were Gods Representative in the Old Testament” and “the Holy Ghost, that is to say, the Apostles, and their successors . . . have Represented him ever since.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ In this sense—and only in this sense, as Hobbes notoriously argued—“God, who has been Represented (that is, Personated) thrice, may properly enough be said to be three Persons; though neither the word Person, nor Trinity be ascribed to him in the Bible.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Hobbes thus offered the most sophisticated and influential defense of the Arminian/anti-Calvinist theory of representation to appear in the seventeenth century, but he plainly did not do so because he wished to vindicate a set of Pelagian views about theodicy and the undiminished metaphysical freedom of human beings. On the contrary, he famously advocated a wholly deterministic picture of human agency that appalled his more Pelagian interlocutors. The solution to this apparent riddle is to point out that Hobbes, unlike virtually any of his interlocutors, was a voluntarist. The Calvinists and anti-Calvinists we have been discussing all agreed that God's actions must be judged with reference to a transcendent, objective principle of justice. If he is to punish us, it must be that we have sinned, because it is contrary to justice to punish someone who is not guilty of a transgression. The problem with the doctrine of original sin, from this point of view, is that it holds that God punished us for the sins of another person—and that as a consequence of this first sin, we are now unable to avoid committing sins of our own (for which we will then be punished). The Calvinist solution was to insist that Adam was our representative, and that our depravity was thus itself a just punishment for our own sin; the anti-Calvinist rejoinder was to assert that Adam was not our representative, and therefore that God, being just, could never have depraved our spirit as punishment for the Fall.

Hobbes, in contrast, holds that God's will is itself the only measure of just and unjust, and that, accordingly,

If God is perfectly within his rights to afflict us at will, even when no sin has been committed, there is simply no theological reason to insist that Adam was our representative (God could, without injustice, have decided to afflict us even if he had not been). As Hobbes puts the point in his response to Bishop Bramhall, “the power of God alone is sufficient Justification of any act he does . . . That which he does is made just by his doing it.”Footnote ¹²¹ Hobbes could therefore safely embrace the Arminian/Pelagian theory of representation for political purposes without fearing that any of his religious views would come undone as a result.

It is for this reason wholly unsurprising to find vocabulary that looks quite Hobbesian in a great many Arminian and Socinian texts of the late seventeenth century.Footnote ¹²² Thomas Pierce, writing in Divine Purity Defended (1659), demanded of the Calvinist/Augustinian “party,” “Is it not at least as just a thing, to decree the misery of the farr greatest part of mankinde for those personal Impieties which they do wilfully commit, as for the meer sin of Adam, which was committed by Adam before his posterity had a Being, much less a Will, and a Personality?”Footnote ¹²³ Those who are not “persons” cannot have their person “born” or “sustained” by another, and so cannot be represented. Locke's friend Philipp van Limborch used similar language when he sought to answer the Calvinist claim that “Adam was the Representative of all Mankind [repraesentavit totum genus humanum], which was then in his Loins.” “No man,” for Limborch, “can by any Action represent the Person of another, unless impower'd by him so to do: For in this case only whatsoever Offence the one commits, may be imputed to the other: but Adam was not impower'd with any such Authority by his Posterity.”Footnote ¹²⁴

Stephen Nye likewise may have been alluding to Hobbes in his A brief History of the Unitarians, called also Socinians (1687) when he insisted that Christ had been God's representative, not man's: “Christ may well be named Immanuel, taking it for God with us; as God was most plentifully with his People, by sending the Lord Christ to be his Ambassador and Representative, and our Redeemer. Several of the most learned Trinitarians acknowledg, that no more than this was intended by this Name.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Gilbert Burnet, writing in 1700, presented himself as an unapologetic opponent of Hobbesian voluntarism:

But in rejecting “the supposed Covenant with Adam as the Representative Head of Mankind,” Burnet was nonetheless endorsing an account of representation identical to Hobbes's own.Footnote ¹²⁷

IV

Let us end as we began, with Locke's claim at the outset of The Reasonableness of Christianity that, if we believe in a just God, we cannot suppose that “all Adam’s Posterity” could have been “doomed to Eternal Infinite Punishment for the transgression of Adam, whom Millions had never heard of, and no one had authorized to transact for him, or be his Representative.”Footnote ¹²⁸ I hope it is now clear that, in making this argument, Locke was associating himself with a long-standing Royalist and Arminian/Pelagian tradition of thought, according to which a representative is simply one who has been authorized by an actor to “bear his person”—not a “similitude” or image of the represented party. But Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government had appeared barely four years earlier, was also a committed defender of the Whig, Parliamentarian cause, which remained ideologically invested in the discourse of “virtual representation” throughout the long eighteenth century.Footnote ¹²⁹ His challenge, therefore, was to marry two positions that had grown up in comprehensive opposition to each other: (1) the notion that an assembly chosen by a small number of voters represents the people to a far greater degree than a single monarch ever could, and (2) the claim that Adam could not have represented the human race by virtue of sharing their image. The more Locke spoke the Pelagian language of representation, the more he threatened to undermine his own defense of parliaments; and the more he invested in the ideological defense of parliaments, the less stable his anti-Calvinism became.

This fact may well explain the notoriously muddled set of arguments about representation that we find in the Second Treatise. On the one hand, Locke straightforwardly agreed with his Parliamentarian predecessors that “there can be but one Supream Power, which is the Legislative, to which all the rest are and must be subordinate,” and he further affirmed their view that this power ought to be placed “in collective Bodies of Men, call them Senate, Parliament, or what you please”—and that only under such circumstances could “every single person” regard himself as “subject, equally with other the meanest Men, to those Laws, which he himself, as part of the Legislative had established.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Locke thus made it clear that subjects must be governed by laws promulgated by an assembly in order to count as self-governing, and he likewise tended to reserve the term “representative” for the members of such an assembly.Footnote ¹³¹

But at the same time, Locke states emphatically in chapter 10 that the people may “put the power of making Laws into the hands of a few select men . . . or else into the hands of one Man, and then it is a Monarchy” if they choose, and, a fortiori, “the Community may make compounded and mixed forms of Government, as they think good.”Footnote ¹³² These “mixed” forms may, in turn, legitimately assign the monarch a negative voice, along with the other sweeping prerogatives outlined in chapter 14 (“Of Prerogative”). Whatever the description of the instituted legislative power, the subject “authorizes the Society, or which is all one, the Legislative thereof to make laws for him as the publick good of the Society shall require.”Footnote ¹³³ Or again,

Here we recognizably find ourselves back in the conceptual world of the Royalist/Pelagian tradition, where authorization is a necessary and sufficient condition of representation. In such a world, “one man” or a “number of Men” can represent the people equally well.

The scholarly temptation has always been to try to find some way of reconciling these apparently contradictory claims, but that exercise has, I think, prevented us from appreciating the significance of the muddle itself. Locke, who had already in the First Treatise expressed his contempt for the view that Adam was the “Representative” of “all mankind” when he fell,Footnote ¹³⁵ could not wholeheartedly embrace the Parliamentarian language of resemblance and “signification” without imperiling his assault on the doctrine of original sin. He was driven, instead, to engage with a Royalist discourse that placed the concept of authorization at the very center of the human experience, in both politics and theology. What mattered, in this discourse, was not what people would have agreed to—or what others just like them may have agreed to—but, fundamentally and exclusively, what people themselves had in fact agreed to. We call the resulting tradition of thought “liberalism.”