Cambridge Platonists

The Cambridge Platonists were a group of philosophers at Cambridge University, England in the middle of the 17th century (between 1633 and 1688).

Programme

The Cambridge Platonists were reacting to two pressures. On the one hand, the narrow dogmatism of the Puritan divines, with their anti-rationalist (if not anti-intellectual) demands, were, they felt, immoral and incorrect. They also felt that the Puritan/Calvinist insistence upon individual revelation left God uninvolved with the majority of mankind. At the same time, they were reacting against the narrowly materialist writings of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes. They felt that the latter, while properly rationalist, were denying the idealistic nature of the universe. To the Cambridge Platonists, religion and reason were always in harmony, and reality was comprised not of sensation, but of "intelligible forms" that exist behind perception. Universal, ideal forms (a la Plato) inform matter, and the senses are unreliable guides to reality.

As divines and in matters of polity, the Cambridge Platonists argued for moderation. They believed that reason is the proper judge of all disagreements, and so they advocated dialogue between the Puritans and the High Churchmen. They had a somewhat mystical understanding of reason, believing that reason is not merely the sense-making facility of the mind, but, instead, "the candle of the Lord" - an echo of the divine within the human soul and an imprint of God within man. Thus, they believed that reason could lead beyond the sensory, because it is semi-divine. Reason was, for them, of God, and thus capable of nearing God. Therefore, they believed that reason could allow for judging the private revelations of Puritan theology and the proper investigation of the rituals and liturgy of the Established Church. For this reason, they were called latitudinarians.

Ralph Cudworth

Ralph Cudworth (1617–June 26, 1688) was an English philosopher, the leader of the Cambridge Platonists.

Born at Aller, Somerset, he was educated at Cambridge University and became a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1645, he became master of Clare Hall and professor of Hebrew. In 1654, he transferred to Christ's College, Cambridge, and was master there until his death. His great work, entitled The True Intellectual System of the Universe, was published in 1678. He was a leading opponent of Thomas Hobbes.

He was the son of Dr Ralph Cudworth (d. 1624), rector of Aller, formerly fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His father died in 1624, and his mother then married the Rev. Dr Stoughton, who gave the boy a good home education. Cudworth was sent to his father's college, was elected fellow in 1639, and became a successful tutor. In 1642 he published A Discourse concerning the true Notion of the Lord's Supper, and a tract entitled The Union of Christ and the Church. In 1645 he was appointed master of Clare Hall and the same year was elected Regius professor of Hebrew. He was now recognized as a leader among the remarkable group known as the Cambridge Platonists. The whole party were more or less in sympathy with the Commonwealth, and Cudworth was consulted by John Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary to the council of state, in regard to university and government appointments.

His sermons, such as that preached before the House of Commons, on March 31 1647, advocate principles of religious toleration and charity. In 1650 he was presented to the college living of North Cadbury, Somerset. From the diary of his friend John Worthington we learn that Cudworth was nearly compelled, through poverty, to leave the university, but in 1654 he was elected master of Christ's College, whereupon he married. In 1662 he was presented to the rectory of Ashwell, Herts. In 1665 he almost quarrelled with his fellow-Platonist, Henry More, because the latter had written an ethical work which Cudworth feared would interfere with his own long-contemplated treatise on the same subject. To avoid clashing, More brought out his book, the Enchiridion ethicum, in Latin; Cudworth's never appeared.

In 1678 he published The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated (imprimatur dated 1671). No more was published, perhaps because of the theological clamour raised against this first part. Cudworth was installed prebendary of Gloucester in 1678. He died on the 26th of June 1688, and was buried in the chapel of Christ's. His only surviving child, Damaris, a devout and talented woman, became the second wife of Sir Francis Masha. The Lady Masham was distinguished as the friend of John Locke and exchange letters with Gottfried Leibniz. Much of Cudworth's work still remains in manuscript; A Treatise concerning eternal and immutable Morality was published in 1731; and A Treatise of Freewill, edited by John Allen, in 1838; both are connected with the design of his magnum opus, the Intellectual System.

The Intellectual System arose, so its author tells us, out of a discourse refuting "fatal necessity," or determinism. Enlarging his plan, he proposed to prove three matters: (a) the existence of God; (b) the naturalness of moral distinctions; and (c) the reality of human freedom. These three together make up the intellectual (as opposed to the physical) system of the universe; and they are opposed respectively by three false principles, atheism, religious fatalism which refers all moral distinctions to the will of God, and thirdly the fatalism of the ancient Stoics, who recognized God and yet identified Him with nature. The immense fragment dealing with atheism is all that was published by its author. Cudworth criticizes two main forms of materialistic atheism, the atomic, adopted by Democritus, Epicurus and Hobbes; and the hylozoic, attributed to Strato of Lampsacus, which explains everything by the supposition of an inward self-organizing life in matter. Atomic atheism is by far the more important, if only because Hobbes, the great antagonist whom Cudworth always has in view, is supposed to have held it. It arises out of the combination of two principles, neither of which is atheistic taken separately, i.e. atomism and corporealism, or the doctrine that nothing exists but body. The example of Stoicism, as Cudworth points out, shows that corporealism may be theistic.

Into the history of atomism Cudworth plunges with vast erudition. It is, in its purely physical application, a theory that he fully accepts; he holds that it was taught by Pythagoras, Empedocles, and in fact, nearly all the ancient philosophers, and was only perverted to atheism by Democritus. It was first invented, he believes, before the Trojan war, by a Sidonian thinker named Moschus or Mochus, who is identical with the Moses of the Old Testament. In dealing with atheism Cudworth's method is to marshal the atheistic arguments elaborately, so elaborately that Dryden remarked "he has raised such objections against the being of a God and Providence that many think he has not answered them"; then in his last chapter, which by itself is as long as an ordinary treatise, he confutes them with all the reasons that his reading could supply. A subordinate matter in the book that attracted much attention at the time is the conception of the "Plastic Medium," which is a mere revival of Plato's "World-Soul," and is meant to explain the existence and laws of nature without referring all to the direct operation of God. It occasioned a long-drawn controversy between Pierre Bayle and Le Clerc, the former maintaining, the latter denying, that the Plastic Medium is really favourable to atheism.

No modern reader can endure to toil through the Intellectual System; its only interest is the light it throws upon the state of religious thought after the Restoration, when, as Birch puts it, "irreligion began to lift up its head." It is immensely diffuse and pretentious, loaded with digressions, its argument buried under masses of fantastic, uncritical learning, the work of a vigorous but quite unoriginal mind. As Bolingbroke said, Cudworth "read too much to think enough, and admired too much to think freely." It is no calamity that natural procrastination, or the clamour caused by his candid treatment of atheism and by certain heretical tendencies detected by orthodox criticism in his view of the Trinity, made Cudworth leave the work unfinished.

A much more favourable judgment must be given upon the short Treatise on eternal and immutable Morality, which deserves to be read by those who are interested in the historical development of British moral philosophy. It is an answer to Hobbes's famous doctrine that moral distinctions are created by the state, an answer from the standpoint of Platonism. Just as knowledge contains a permanent intelligible element over and above the flux of sense-impressions, so there exist eternal and immutable ideas of morality. Cudworth's ideas, like Plato's, have "a constant and never-failing entity of their own," such as we see in geometrical figures; but, unlike Plato's, they exist in the mind of God, whence they are communicated to finite understandings. Hence "it is evident that wisdom, knowledge and understanding are eternal and self-subsistent things, superior to matter and all sensible beings, and independent upon them"; and so also are moral good and evil. At this point Cudworth stops; he does not attempt to give any list of Moral Ideas. It is, indeed, the cardinal weakness of this form of intuitionism that no satisfactory list can be given and that no moral principles have the "constant and never-failing entity," or the definiteness, of the concepts of geometry. Henry More, in his Enchiridion ethicum, attempts to enumerate the "noemata moralia"; but, so far from being self-evident, most of his moral axioms are open to serious controversy.

The Intellectual System was translated into Latin by JL Mosheim and furnished with notes and dissertations which were translated into English in J Harrison's edition (1845). Our chief biographical authority is T Birch's "Account," which appears in editions of the Works. There is a good chapter on Cudworth in J Tulloch's Rational Theology, vol. ii. Consult also P Janet's Essai sur le médiateur plastique (1860), WR Scott's Introduction to Cudworth's Treatise, and J Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii.

Henry More

Henry More.

Henry More (October 12 1614 – September 1, 1687) was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school.

He was born at Grantham. Both his parents were Calvinists but he himself "could never swallow that hard doctrine." In 1631 he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, at about the time John Milton was leaving it. He devoted himself to the study of philosophy, and for a time adopted a scepticism, from which he was turned by the study of the "Platonic writers." He was fascinated especially by Neoplatonism, and this fascination never left him. The Theologia germanica also exerted a permanent influence over him.

He took his BA in 1635, his MA in 1639, and immediately afterwards became a fellow of his college, turning down all other positions that were offered. He would not accept the mastership of his college, to which, it is understood, he would have been preferred in 1654, when Ralph Cudworth was appointed. In 1675, he finally accepted a prebend in Gloucester Cathedral, but only to resign it in favour of his friend Dr Edward Fowler, afterwards bishop of Gloucester.

More taught many notable pupils, but the most interesting was a young lady, a sister of Lord Finch, subsequently Earl of Nottingham, a well-known statesman of the Restoration. She later became Lady Conway, and at her country seat at Ragley in Warwickshire More would spend "a considerable part of his time." She and her husband both appreciated him, and amidst the woods of this retreat he wrote several of his books. The spiritual enthusiasm of Lady Conway was a considerable factor in some of More's speculations, even though she at length joined the Quakers. She became the friend not only of More and William Penn, but of Jan Baptist van Helmont and Valentine Greatrakes, mystical thaumaturgists of the 17th century. Ragley became a centre of devotion and spiritualism. The rationality which distinguishes More's earlier works is much less conspicuous in his later works. He was a prolific writer of verse and in prose, but his works are now little known, except the Divine Dialogues (1688), a treatise which condenses his general view of philosophy and religion.

Henry More represents the mystical and theosophic side of the Cambridge movement. The Neoplatonic extravagances which lay hidden in the school from the first came to a head in his writings. He was a spiritual genius and a significant figure in British philosophy, less robust and in some respects less learned than Cudworth, but more fertile in thought. He describes himself as gifted with a buoyant temper. His own thoughts were to him a never-ending source of pleasurable excitement. He was known for his humility and charity as well as for his piety. The last ten years of his life were uneventful. He was buried in the chapel of the college he loved.

Before his death More issued complete editions of his works, his Opera theologica in 1675, and his Opera philosophica in 1678. The chief authorities for his life are Ward's Life (1710); the prefatio generalissima prefixed to his Opera omnia (1679); and also a general account of the manner and scope of his writings in an Apology published in 1664. The collection of his Philosophical Poems (1647), in which he has "compared his chief speculations and experiences," should also be consulted. An elaborate analysis of his life and works is given in John Tulloch's Rational Theology, vol. ii. (1874); see also R Zimmermann, Henry More und die vierte Dimension des Raums (Vienna, 1881).

Representatives

Ralph Cudworth (1617 - 1688)
Nathaniel Culverwel (1619-1651)
Henry More (1614 - 1687)
John Smith (1618 - 1652)
Benjamin Whichcote (1609 - 1683)

References
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Cudworth's chief philosophical work was The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and the Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, which appeared posthumously in 1731.
Culverwel's chief work was Light of Nature (1652). Culverwel died young (probably at the age of 32). He had intended to write a multi-part work reconciling the Gospel with philosophical reason.
Henry More (1614 - 1687) wrote many works. As a Platonist, his important works were Manual of Ethics (1666), the Divine Dialogues (1668), and the Manual of Metaphysics (1671). While all of More's works enjoyed popularity, the Divine Dialogues were perhaps most influential.
John Smith, a student of Benjamin Whichcote, left no literary remains but was active in the discursive works of the other Platonists.
Benjamin Whichcote (1609 - 1683) was one of the leaders of the movement, but he was also an active pastor and academic who did not publish in his lifetime. His sermons were notable and caused controversies, and Whichcote wrote a great deal without publishing. In 1685, Some Select Notions of B. Whichcote was published due to demand. After that was Select Sermons (1689) (with a preface by Shaftesbury) and Several Discourses (1701). Finally, a collection of his sayings appeared as Moral and Religious Aphorisms in 1703.

External links

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry

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