Cambridge Platonism

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Cambridge Platonism is the modern name for a loose circle of divines who taught at Cambridge in the middle decades of the seventeenth century and who turned to Plato and the Neoplatonists to argue, against two opposing pressures of their age, that reason and religion were one thing. Benjamin Whichcote, often counted the group’s father, taught at Emmanuel College alongside Ralph Cudworth and John Smith; Henry More worked across the way at Christ’s. They formed no school in the institutional sense — they left no shared manifesto, and the label was fixed on them later — but a recognisable temper runs through their writing.

What they were up against gives the movement its shape. On one side stood the hard Calvinism in which they had been raised, with its decree of election and its picture of a will wholly corrupted; on the other, the new mechanical philosophy, and above all the materialism the group read in Hobbes, which threatened to dissolve mind, freedom, and God into matter in motion. Against the first they set human reason as a faculty that could know the good and choose it. Against the second they set spirit as something irreducibly real. Whichcote’s favourite text was a verse from Proverbs — “the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord” — which the group took to mean that reason in the soul is itself a divine light, not a rival to revelation but its instrument.

Their constructive philosophy was Platonic in substance. Moral and mathematical truths are eternal and unmade, grounded in the divine mind rather than in God’s bare will or in human convention; the soul is immortal and akin to the divine; the cosmos is shot through with a governing intelligence. Cudworth’s vast True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) set out to refute atheism by tracing this conviction through ancient thought, and posited “plastic natures,” subordinate active principles by which God works in the world without constant intervention. More gave the divine an actual extension in space and corresponded with Descartes before breaking from him. Anne Conway, More’s pupil and friend, pressed the intuition furthest, into a monism of spirit whose Principles the library holds.

In their own century the group was associated with latitude and toleration — a willingness to hold the essentials of faith lightly enough to leave room for reason and conscience — and they are often read as forerunners of the later Latitudinarians. Scholarship has more recently resisted treating them as a single doctrine, stressing how much divided More’s enthusiasms from Cudworth’s caution. What they shared was less a system than a refusal: that the soul might be only matter, and that faith might require the surrender of the mind. Their reading of antiquity ran on into the eighteenth century and, through later admirers, into the long afterlife of the perennial philosophy — one more recovery of the same school the term Neoplatonism names.

→ In the library: Conway — The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1692)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Nous · The One · Emanation