CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS

The Cambridge Platonists were a group of seventeenth-century thinkers, associated with Cambridge University, who drew on the neoplatonic tradition and contemporary philosophical developments in order to combat voluntarism, materialism, and determinism, and promote a tolerant and inclusive understanding of Christianity.

The core members of this school were active from the late 1630s through the 1680s, and were associated either with Emmanuel or Christ colleges. The central thinkers in the movement were Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), Henry More (1614–1687), John Smith (1618–1652), and Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), their founding figure. Other close associates at Cambridge included Peter Sterry (1613–1672), John Worthington (1618–1680), George Rust (1626–1670), and Nathanael Culverwell (1618–1651). Beyond Cambridge, thinkers with connections to the school include John Norris (1657–1711), Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680), and Anne Conway (1631–1679). Leading latitudinarian divines, including Simon Patrick (1626–1707), John Tillotson (1630–1694), Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), and Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699), can also be considered disciples of the Cambridge Platonists.

Although the movement was centered in Emmanuel College, long a stronghold for Calvinistic Puritanism, it constituted a repudiation of what the Cambridge Platonists took to be a central feature of Calvinist thought, its voluntaristic understanding of morality as a creation of the divine will. Against this voluntarism, which the Cambridge Platonists perceived as offering an unacceptable account of God as arbitrary tyrant, they argued for a form of moral realism. Good and evil are "eternal and immutable"; moral distinctions are ontologically real and unchanging. Influenced by Renaissance neoplatonism (and thus interpreting Plato through the lens of Plotinus and later Christian Platonism), the Cambridge Platonists conceived of God as the Good, the form of forms. The goodness that God wills is an expression of God's own nature. Thus, while what is good is not good by virtue of being willed by God, eternal moral distinctions also do not serve as constraints on God's will.

The Cambridge Platonists declared themselves opposed to any separation of the realms of reason and faith, of the rational and the spiritual. By this they meant most fundamentally to assert that God's ways are fair, and in this sense reasonable. Rejecting the doctrine of predestination, they insisted that God's decrees are not arbitrary or unfathomable but are objectively just. The Cambridge Platonists were staunch defenders both of freedom of the will and freedom of conscience. If God is just in holding us responsible for our actions, then these actions must be up to us and freely chosen. Furthermore, faith is reasonable, and reason must be persuaded; it cannot be forced. On matters that reason cannot determine, the Cambridge Platonists advocated tolerance of a diversity of opinion. They worked for a policy of broad comprehension in the Church of England, minimizing core doctrines and emphasizing moral truths. Their theology thus resembles that of the Dutch Arminians, although arrived at independently.

Reason served for the Cambridge Platonists, as for so much of Renaissance neoplatonism, as a substantial link between the human and divine natures. Whichcote often wrote of reason as the "candle of the Lord." Discounting the impact of the Fall on human nature, the Cambridge Platonists were optimistic about the capacity of human persons to know God and eternal moral truths through reason. Human knowledge of various moral goods is a participation in God's own self-knowledge. Although there is a mystical aspect to the Cambridge Platonists' assertion that God is present within human persons through reason, they were critical of claims to private communications from God, which they condemned as "enthusiasm." Despite their emphasis on access to divine truth through reason, the Cambridge Platonists did not seek to undermine the authority of revealed truths. They did, though, tend to blur the boundaries between reason and revelation. So, for instance, they entertained the possibility that Plato's wisdom derived from Moses or other ancient Hebrews, and thus that pagan wisdom was indebted to revelation. But they also argued that pagan anticipations of revealed doctrines, including the trinity, might have derived from the powers of reason, God within.

If Puritan theology was the target against which the Cambridge Platonist movement took shape, the Platonists (particularly Cudworth and More) soon took on new foes, notably Thomas Hobbes. Like the Calvinists, Hobbes was a voluntarist, who made morality dependent on will. That for Hobbes morality was dependent on the will of the human sovereign rather than the will of God rendered his thought no less problematic in their eyes. Hobbes was also attacked for his materialism, which the Cambridge Platonists regarded as a dangerous form of atheism.

Initially, the Cambridge Platonists perceived René Descartes as a valuable ally against both materialism and the old scholastic Aristotelianism. The Cambridge Platonists were among the first English thinkers to read Descartes, and More carried on an extensive correspondence with him. Like Descartes, the Cambridge Platonists were dualists and they regarded a dualism of spirit and matter as indispensable for their defense of the spiritual realm against materialistic reduction. (More's friend and pupil Anne Conway, author of Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy [1692], parted ways with the Cambridge Platonists on this point, moving in the direction of a metaphysical monism).

The Cambridge Platonists came to think, though, that Descartes carried mechanistic explanations of the natural world too far. Arguing that matter is essentially passive and incapable of accounting for complex and orderly natural phenomena, they argued for a spiritual presence mediating between God and the physical universe. More termed this a Spirit of Nature or Hylarchic Principle, whereas Cudworth spoke of Plastic Nature. The eagerness to demonstrate the reality of immaterial substance reinforced in More and Glanvill a belief in witchcraft and a fascination with purported spiritual phenomena. Once seen as evidence of their credulity and backwardness, this feature of their thought is now understood as a further reflection of their support for the new experimental science. The Cambridge Platonists were familiar not only with the work of Hobbes, Descartes, and Benedict Spinoza, but also with Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and the Royal Society.

Whichcote's sermons were published by Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. John Locke, Richard Price, and Thomas Reid were also indebted to the Cambridge Platonists, particularly Cudworth. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz read both Cudworth and More, and Pierre Bayle critiqued Cudworth's Plastic Nature. Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold all admired the Cambridge Platonists. The lasting significance of the Cambridge Platonists resides in their success in carrying forward the insights of the tradition of Christian Platonism through a creative rapprochement with the philosophical revolution underway during their time. Within the heavily empiricist cast of English philosophy, they introduced a distinctive form of idealism.

See also Cudworth, Ralph; Culverwel, Nathanael; More, Henry; Whichcote, Benjamin.

Bibliography

Beiser, Frederick C. "Cambridge Platonism." In The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Hutton, Sarah. "The Cambridge Platonists." In A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002.

Patrides, C. A., ed. The Cambridge Platonists. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1970.

Rogers, G. A. J., J. M. Vienne, and Y. C. Zarka, eds. The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.

Jennifer A. Herdt (2005)