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, entered Emmanuel College in 1626 and became a Fellow in 1633; Ralph Cudworth followed him into the same college, took his degree in the mid-1630s, and in 1654 crossed to become Master of Christ’s. John Smith, Whichcote’s pupil, was at Emmanuel from 1636 and died young, of consumption, in 1652, leaving discourses that others published. Henry More spent his whole adult life across the way at Christ’s, where the circle found its second home. They formed no school in the institutional sense — they left no shared manifesto, the label was fixed on them by later readers, and on several questions they disagreed sharply. But a recognizable temper runs through their writing, and it is best understood by the two things it set itself against.

A double resistance

The first pressure came from inside the house. Emmanuel had been founded in 1584 as a seminary for the godly, a nursery of English Calvinism, and the men who became the Cambridge Platonists were raised in its theology of the decree: that before the world began God elected some souls to salvation and passed the rest by; that the human will, after the Fall, is so corrupted that it cannot turn toward the good of itself; that what is right is right because God has willed it so. This is the theology codified at Geneva and Dort, the foil against which the whole movement defined itself — the system of John Calvin and his English heirs, in which the will is bound and the moral order rests on naked divine command. Against it the Cambridge men set the rational soul as a faculty that can know the good and move toward it; against double predestination they pressed the universality of the inner light. Whichcote’s favorite text, a verse from the Book of Proverbs, became the group’s emblem: the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. The phrase carried a whole anthropology. Reason in the soul is itself a divine illumination, kindled from above and burning in the human breast — not a rival to revelation but its instrument, the lamp by which what is revealed is read. To extinguish that candle in the name of a sovereign and arbitrary will was, for them, to misdescribe both God and the creature made in his image.

The second pressure was newer and, in its way, more dangerous. The decades of their maturity were the decades in which the mechanical philosophy remade the study of nature: the world as matter in motion, governed by figure, size, and local impulse, with no need for souls, forms, or sympathies to explain its workings. From the mechanical philosophy the group read off a threat to mind itself. If everything real is body, then thought is body, freedom is an illusion of complicated matter, and God — if he survives at all — is pushed to the edge of a clockwork that would run the same without him. They located the sharpest form of this menace in Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1651) made the soul corporeal, derived right from power, and grounded morality in covenant rather than in any eternal nature of things. They saw a milder but related danger in the new French philosophy of René Descartes. More had been among Descartes’s early English admirers and corresponded with him in 1648–49; he then broke from him, judging that a cosmos of dead extension, however carefully a thinking substance was bolted on beside it, left the world godless in all but name and gave the materialist most of what he wanted. Against this whole tendency the Cambridge Platonists set spirit as something irreducibly real — not a ghost smuggled into the machine, but a principle as fundamental as body and prior to it.

The constructive doctrine

What they built on these two refusals was Platonic in substance and drawn, through Renaissance intermediaries, from the late-antique Neoplatonism of Plotinus and his successors. They read their Plato in part through Marsilio Ficino, whose Latin Plotinus and Latin Hermetica sat on their shelves, so that their Platonism arrives already carrying the long inheritance the term Neoplatonism names — the doctrine of an intelligible order above the sensible, of a divine Mind in which the eternal patterns subsist, of the One from which all things proceed by emanation. What they made of that inheritance was their own.

Three convictions stand at the center. The first concerns the eternal truths. Moral and mathematical truths are not made; they are unmade and unmakeable, grounded in the divine intellect itself rather than in God’s bare will or in human convention. That a triangle’s angles sum as they do, that gratitude is owed to a benefactor, that cruelty for its own sake is evil — these hold with a necessity God does not invent and cannot revoke, because they are the very structure of his understanding. Here the group recovered, against the voluntarism they had inherited, the position Plato had given Socrates in the Euthyphro: the holy is not holy because it is loved by the gods; it is loved because it is holy. Cudworth pressed this furthest in his posthumously printed Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, an argument that morality has a real object independent of any legislator’s decree, divine or human — a direct refusal of Hobbes and of Calvinist command-ethics in a single stroke.

The second conviction concerns the soul. It is immortal and akin to the divine, not a function of organized matter but a substance of another order, capable of knowing eternal things because it is itself eternal in kind. Smith’s Select Discourses turned this into a method: the knowledge of God is reached less by syllogism than by inward purification, the soul made godlike coming to see what the unpurified eye cannot. More devoted whole treatises — The Immortality of the Soul among them — to arguing that the soul’s independence of the body can be shown, and that the alternative, a soul that dies with its brain, is neither demanded by the evidence nor bearable in its consequences.

The third conviction concerns the cosmos as a whole: it is shot through with a governing intelligence, never merely the inert matter the mechanists described. Here the group’s two leading minds reached for parallel devices. Cudworth, in his vast The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) — a work that set out to refute atheism by tracing the conviction of one supreme God through the whole of ancient thought — posited what he called plastic natures: subordinate, unconscious, incorporeal formative powers through which God shapes matter without himself attending to every gnat and leaf. Plastic nature acts for an end, regularly and as if by art, yet without awareness; it spared Cudworth both a dead mechanical world and a God reduced to a perpetual craftsman. More reached for a near-equivalent he named the Spirit of Nature, an incorporeal sub-rational agent that mediates God’s action on body and accounts for what he held mechanism could not — cohesion, gravity, the rising of water against its weight. More went further still and gave spirit an actual extension in space, holding that to be real is to be extended and that incorporeal substance, too, has its own kind of dimension, penetrable where body is not. This last move drew him into a long quarrel with the Cartesians, for whom extension belonged to body alone.

The intuition ran furthest of all in Anne Conway, More’s pupil and friend, who pressed past her teacher’s dualism of spirit and matter into a single living substance. In her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy — written in pencil in a small hand, lost in the original English, surviving in a Latin rendering and a later back-translation — body and spirit are not two kinds but two conditions of one vital stuff, differing as the dark end of a thing from its luminous end, with no dead matter anywhere in the creation. Every creature, down to dust, has life, motion, and perception; matter is only spirit grown coarse and capable of growing fine again. Conway built this monism in conscious opposition to Descartes, to Hobbes, and to Spinoza alike, drawing on the Lurianic Kabbalah she had studied in the Latin of Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata — to which More himself had contributed, while recoiling from its emanationism. Her one treatise, slight on the shelf, is the boldest metaphysics the circle produced, and through it her conception of living monads reached Leibniz, who once placed her between Plato and Democritus.

Reason, religion, and the latitude of the church

The phrase that gathers all this is the group’s own claim that reason and religion are one. They did not mean that faith reduces to demonstration. They meant that the same divine light shows in both, that conscience and intellect are organs of the one God, and that to fear reason in religion is to distrust the candle God himself has lit. From this followed their reputation, in their own century, for latitude — a willingness to hold the essentials of faith firmly while leaving the rest open, to value a sober and rational piety over the rigor of party, and to make room for conscience where the predestinarians and the enthusiasts alike would close it. They were charged with indifferentism for it, even with a cool deism; the charge missed the warmth of Whichcote’s preaching and Smith’s devotion, but it registered something real. In the next generation this temper hardened into a churchmanship, and the Cambridge Platonists are rightly read as forerunners of the Latitudinarians who shaped the Restoration and post-Revolution Church of England. Through Whichcote’s pupil the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who edited and prefaced his master’s sermons, the strain ran on into the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century.

Their relation to the older wisdom-traditions deserves a word, because it is easy to overstate. The group inherited the Renaissance picture of an ancient theology — a prisca theologia descending from Egyptian and pre-Socratic sages and converging on the truths of the Gospel. But they inherited it after Isaac Casaubon’s philology of 1614 had dated the Hermetic writings to the early Christian centuries, and they responded to that demolition rather than ignoring it. Cudworth conceded the late date of two or three Hermetic treatises while arguing that the bulk preserved a genuine older Egyptian theology of one hidden God — a careful, hedged defense, not a credulous one, marshaled to serve his argument that the idea of one supreme God is attested everywhere and from the first. Smith, characteristically, simply bypassed the disputed corpus and reached for Plotinus in the Greek instead. The Renaissance Hermetism of Ficino’s Florence is in their background; what stands in their foreground is Plato read through the Enneads, pressed into service against the two enemies of the age.

The texts and their study

The circle published unevenly, and much of what survives passed through other hands. Whichcote printed almost nothing in his lifetime; his Select Sermons (1698) were edited anonymously by Shaftesbury, and his Moral and Religious Aphorisms were drawn later from sermon notes. Smith published nothing at all; his Select Discourses (1660) were assembled after his death by John Worthington. Cudworth’s enormous True Intellectual System (1678) was issued as a first part whose continuations never appeared, and his moral and free-will treatises were printed only in the eighteenth century from manuscript. More, the most prolific, gathered his English works in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (1662) and his Latin in the Opera Omnia (1675–79). Conway’s Principles came out in Amsterdam in 1690, eleven years after her death, and in English in London in 1692. Most of this corpus is now freely readable in the keyed transcriptions of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, which releases its texts without restriction, and in the diplomatic editions of the Cambridge Platonism Sourcebook, the standard scholarly resource for the school. Cudworth’s System reached the Continent through Johann Lorenz von Mosheim’s annotated Latin recension (Jena, 1733; Leiden, 1773), whose critical footnotes carried it — and, paradoxically, helped dissolve its ancient-theology claims — into the histories of philosophy of Brucker, Tiedemann, and Tennemann.

Modern study of the school begins with John Tulloch’s Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., 1872), whose second volume remains a foundational survey, and with Frederick Powicke’s compact The Cambridge Platonists: A Study (1926). The interpretation that shaped the twentieth century is Ernst Cassirer’s Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge (1932), Englished in 1953, which set the circle within a continuous Platonic tradition reaching toward German idealism. More recent scholarship — gathered in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s treatment by Sarah Hutton and in her British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (2015) — has resisted reading them as a single doctrine, stressing how far More’s appetite for spirits, witnesses, and apparitions stood from Cudworth’s caution, and recovering Conway as a major philosopher in her own right rather than a footnote to her teacher. What scholarship agrees they shared was less a system than a posture: a refusal to grant either that the soul might be only matter or that faith might require the surrender of the mind.

That posture had a long afterlife. Their reading of antiquity ran on into the eighteenth century through Shaftesbury and the Latitudinarian divines; it reached the Romantics through Coleridge, who quarried Cudworth heavily; and the conviction at its core — that beneath the warring schools of antiquity one wisdom keeps recurring, the same eternal truths lit in mind after mind — became one of the durable shapes the perennial philosophy would take. The candle in Whichcote’s proverb was never meant to be a private possession. It was the same flame the group believed had burned in Plato and Plotinus, and the work they left was an argument that it could be made to burn again in an age of matter and motion, where reason had begun to look like a thing the world could do without.

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

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Plato · Henry More · Anne Conway · John Smith · Rene Descartes · John Calvin · Reason · Soul · Spirit · Prisca Theologia · Nous · The One · Emanation