Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées)

PLATONISM AT THE ORIGINS OF MODERNITY

ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDÉES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

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PLATONISM AT THE ORIGINS OF MODERNITY Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy Edited by

Douglas Hedley • Sarah Hutton

Board of Directors: Founding Editors: Paul Dibon† and Richard H. Popkin† Director: Sarah Hutton (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) Associate Directors: J.E. Force (University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA); C. Laursen (University of California, Riverside, USA) Editorial Board: M. Allen (Los Angeles); J.-R. Armogathe (Paris); J. Henry (Edinburgh); J.D. North (Oxford); M. Mulsow (New Brunswick); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht)

Platonism at the Origins of Modernity Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy

Edited by

Douglas Hedley and

Sarah Hutton

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4020-6406-7 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-6407-4 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

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Contents

List of Contributors .....................................................................................vii 1.

Introduction ......................................................................................... Sarah Hutton

2.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464): Platonism at the Dawn of Modernity .................................................................... Dermot Moran

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3.

At Variance: Marsilio Ficino, Platonism and Heresy .......................... Michael J.B. Allen

4.

Going Naked into the Shrine: Herbert, Plotinus and the Constructive Metaphor .......................................................... Stephen R.L.Clark

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Comenius, Light Metaphysics and Educational Reform (Translated by Alexandra Wörn and David Leech)............................. Jan Rohls

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Robert Fludd’s Kabbalistic Cosmos (Translated by Geoff Dumbreck and Douglas Hedley) ...................... Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann

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Reconciling Theory and Fact: The Problem of ‘Other Faiths’ in Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists ................................... David Pailin

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5.

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vi 8.

Contents Trinity, Community and Love: Cudworth’s Platonism and the Idea of God ........................................................ Leslie Armour

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Chaos and Order in Cudworth’s Thought ......................................... Jean-Louis Breteau

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Cudworth, Prior and Passmore on the Autonomy of Ethics ......................................................................... Robin Attfield

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Substituting Aristotle: Platonic Themes in Dutch Cartesianism..................................................................................... Han van Ruler

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Soul, Body and World: Plato’s Timaeus and Descartes’ Meditations....................................................................................... Catherine Wilson

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11.

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Locke, Plato and Platonism .............................................................. G.A.J. Rogers

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Reflections on Locke’s Platonism...................................................... Victor Nuovo

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The Platonism at the Core of Leibniz’s Philosophy .......................... Christia Mercer

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Leibniz and Berkeley: Platonic Metaphysics and ‘The Mechanical Philosophy’..................................................... Stuart Brown

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Which Platonism for Which Modernity? A Note on Shaftesbury’s Socratic Sea-Cards ................................................. Laurent Jaffro

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Platonism, Aesthetics and the Sublime at the Origins of Modernity.............................................................. Douglas Hedley

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Index of Names ........................................................................................

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17.

18.

List of Contributors

Michael J.B. Allen is a distinguished professor of English and Renaissance Studies at UCLA and currently the President of the Renaissance Society of America. He is an authority on the work of Marsilio Ficino. Leslie Armour is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Research Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican University College, Ottawa and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of books on metaphysics, epistemology, logic and the history of philosophy. He also works on problems in the philosophy of history and the social sciences and is editor of the International Journal of Social Economics. Robin Attfield is a Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. Besides works on environmental philosophy, including The Ethics of Environmental Concern (1983 and 1992) and Environmental Ethics (2003), he has published on ethics and the philosophy of religion. His writings on history of philosophy include God and The Secular (1978 and 1993) and articles on Bacon, Baxter, Bekker, Berkeley, Clarke, Collins, Hume, Leibniz and Rousseau. Jean-Louis Breteau is Professor of English Literature at the University of Toulouse. He has published extensively on the Cambridge Platonists, especially on Cudworth of whose Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality and Treatise of Freewill he made the first French translation (1995). He edited Millénarisme et utopie dans les pays anglo-saxons (1998) and Protestantism and Authority (2005). Stuart Brown was formerly Professor of Philosophy and is now Emeritus Professor at the Open University. He has written extensively on early modern philosophy, particularly on Leibniz.

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List of Contributors

Stephen R.L. Clark is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His most recent book is G.K.Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward (2006), and he is at present working on the spiritual exercises, and ethical theory, of Plotinus. Douglas Hedley is Fellow and Tutor of Clare College, Cambridge and University Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University. His publications include, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (2000) and Living Forms of the Imagination (2007). Sarah Hutton holds a chair at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her publications include, Anne Conway. A Woman Philosopher (2004) and Newton and Newtoniansm, co-edited with James E. Force (2004). She has edited Ralph Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1996). She is Director of the series International Archives of the History of Ideas. Laurent Jaffro is Professor of philosophy at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France. His publications include Ethique de la communication et art d’écrire. Shaftesbury et les lumières anglaises (1998), Le sens moral. Une histoire de la philosophie morale de Locke à Kant (2000), John Toland: La Constitution primitive de l’église chrétienne. The Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church (2003). Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of the Philosophy Department, Columbia University, the North American Editor of the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, author of Leibniz’s Metaphysics: its Origins and Development (2001), and series editor of Oxford Historical Concepts (Oxford University Press). Dermot Moran holds the Chair of Philosophy at University College Dublin and is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His books include The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), and Edmund Husserl. Founder of Phenomenology (2005). He has edited The Phenomenology Reader, co-edited with Tim Mooney (2002), Phenomenology. Critical Concepts in Philosophy, co-edited with Lester E. Embree (2004), and The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy (2007). Victor Nuovo is Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Middlebury College, Vermont, and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. He is an editor of the Clarendon Locke. His critical edition of Locke’s Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity, a volume in that series, will shortly appear. John Rogers is the founder editor of The British Journal for the History of Philosophy and, after Nottingham and Oxford has spent his academic career at the University of Keele. His Locke’s Enlightenment was published in 1998. With the late Peter Nidditch he edited for the Clarendon Edition of John Locke,

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Drafts of the ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, and, with the late Karl Schuhmann, he edited Hobbes’s Leviathan (2003). Jan Rohls is Professor of Systematic and Philosophical Theology at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich. He has written extensively on the history of philosophy and theology. His publications include Theologie und Metaphysik (1987) and Geschichte der Ethik (1999). Han (J.A.) van Ruler heads the NWO project ‘From Erasmus to Spinoza’ at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is general editor of Texts and Sources in Intellectual History. His publications include The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change (1995); The Dictionary of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Dutch Philosophers, co-edited with Wiep van Bunge (2003), and Arnold Geulincx, Ethics, with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, co-edited with Martin Wilson (2006). Wilhelm Schmidt Biggemann is Professor of Geschichte der Philosophie und der Geisteswissenschaften at the Freie Universität Berlin. He directs the Interdisciplinary Centre ‘Mittelalter, Renaissance, Frühe Neuzeit and the Research Group (DFG) ‘Topik und Tradition’. His interests include the History of Scholarship, Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Religion, History of Christian Kabbala. His publications include Topica universalis (1983), Philosophia perennis (1998, English 2004), Philosophie der Gegenaufklärung (2004), Apokalypse und Philologie (2007). Catherine Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Andrew Heiskell Research Scholar at City University New York. Her main publications include Leibniz’s Metaphysics (l989), The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (1995), Descartes’s Meditations: an Introduction. (2003), Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory (2004).

CHAPTER 1

Sarah Hutton

Introduction

This volume is about continuity in the history of philosophy. Its subject is the philosophical legacy of post-medieval Platonism. The particular continuity on which it focuses is the period usually seen as the watershed dividing modern philosophy from its predecessors. Most histories of modern philosophy treat the seventeenth century—the age of Descartes, Hobbes and Locke—as the period from which modern philosophy takes its rise.1 And in most accounts of the rise of modern philosophy, Platonism is not normally considered part of the picture. Yet this is something of a paradox. For in many respects Platonism seems to have shaped so much of European philosophy—as A.N. Whitehead famously, if provocatively, quipped, most of Western philosophy may be seen as a set of footnotes to Plato.2 Nevertheless, Platonism is not normally regarded as contributing to the emergence of modern philosophy. Indeed, Platonism and modernity are not even viewed as compatible. It is a foundational premise of this collection that these perceptions are more apparent than real, and that they may be explained to a large extent historiographically. The essays here presented explore the vitality of the Platonic tradition in its early modern manifestations, and its impact on major philosophers of the period.

PLATONISM IN HISTORY The omission of Platonism from the received picture of the history of modern philosophy admits of several interconnected explanations. First of all, to make a general point, the historiography of philosophy is in many respects shaped 1 e.g., Roger Scruton, ‘The Rationalist and Kant’, in Anthony C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy. A Guide Through the Subject (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 440–483. 2 Whitehead, Process and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 39. Whitehead added the qualification that what he had in mind was not Plato’s ‘systematic scheme’, so much as ‘the wealth of general ideas scattered through them [his writings]’, ibid.

1 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 1–8. © 2008 Springer.

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retrospectively by the interests of the present. So, for example, the modern emphasis on epistemology accounts in good measure for twentieth-century interest in the history of scepticism. By contrast, the Philosophy of Religion takes second place (if at all) in modern histories of philosophy. Present interests also tend to reflect the narrower disciplinary boundaries of today, rather than the broader subject domains of the early modern period. We are also selective of some areas at the expense of others—for example, political philosophy rather than natural philosophy. A case in point is Hobbes, current interest in whom focuses overwhelmingly on his political rather than natural philosophy. As the example of Hobbes shows, disciplinary focus informs modern perspectives: it is historians of political thought who have set the agenda in latterday Hobbes studies.3 And this is no less true of Platonism: philosophers of religion, for example, are more cognisant of the Platonic legacy (as it happens it is to a seventeenth-century Platonist, Ralph Cudworth, that anglophone philosophy owes the term),4 while historians of Renaissance philosophy have done more than historians of modern philosophy to examine early modern Platonism.5 Another problem faced by historians of philosophy is that the nature of the Platonic legacy makes it a difficult to subject for historical investigation. The diffuse and varied character of the Platonic tradition means that is not easily distilled into straightforward systematic accounts of philosophical development. Whitehead’s quip aside, the Platonic legacy itself is rich, varied and often elusive. It is therefore vulnerable to the charge that Platonism in its historical manifestations it is too amorphous to be meaningful in any philosophical sense. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that analytical approaches the history of philosophy are poorly equipped to deal with long-term philosophical transformation and adaptation. A good many of the difficulties relating to the history of Platonism lie in its origins: the elusiveness of Platonism can be traced back to its original format as dialogue, rather than dogma. Plato’s dialogues themselves are a rather disparate collection in respect of both subject matter and style. Plato never speaks in his own voice, but through the voice of Socrates and other personae. To this may be added the problem that there is no obvious order of the original dialogues. Nor are we in possession of Plato’s complete output. Given this diversity, it is paradoxical that so often in its history, Plato’s philosophy is treated as a dogmatic philosophy. From the beginning, Platonism developed not by restatement and

3

Notably through the work of Quentin Skinner and also Noel Malcolm. Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), Preface, p. xiii. 5 For example, Brian Copenhaver’s Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Michael Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984). The first Latin translation of the complete dialogues of Plato was by Marsilio Ficino, printed in Florence 1484; reprinted in 1517). Another authoritative and widely used translation was that by Jean de Serres (Serranus) in collaboration with Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus) in 1578. The first edition of the original Greek text was printed by Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1513). 4

1 Introduction

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commentary, but by selection and accretion. Those inspired by Plato form as intrinsic a part of Platonism as Plato himself—these are the so-called Neo-Platonists (a divisive latter-day term which implies discontinuity between Plato and his later followers to the disadvantage of the latter).6 In the process of its long course of development, Platonism has gathered a long tradition of interpreters, whose contributions have been enriched by other philosophical strands—for example Stoicism, which is an important element in the philosophy of Plotinus. To this it must be added that so much of the impact of Platonism is indirect. The Platonism of many thinkers, especially in medieval times, was more often than not implicit, rather than conscious borrowing. It derived not from the Platonic corpus (most of which was unknown at that time), but indirectly through Philo, and theologians like Augustine and Origen. The combined effect of these factors is that the legacy of Platonism is rich, varied and extensive, but eludes the scope of focused enquiry. A further factor complicating assessments of Platonism in the modern era, is polarisation in the historiography itself. Historians of modern philosophy—at least in the anglophone world—readily adopt a model which counterposes ancient and modern. Drawing on a division, which the early modern philosophers themselves invoked, they employ an ‘ancientmodern distinction’ as a principle for organising the history of philosophy.7 Modernity in philosophy is thereby defined in terms of rupture with tradition. For most philosophers today the history of philosophy begins with Cartesianism. This genealogy of modernity is reinforced by canonical practice in the teaching of philosophy, where the syllabus generally starts with Descartes, or makes a leap from classical times to Descartes. As a clear product of the ancient world, Platonism has been left, unproblematically, beyond the pale of modernity. Another result of the polarisation of ancient from modern is that the vast hinterland of Renaissance philosophy has been left to historians. (Classiscists, it must be said, do not normally take an interest in the later forms of Platonism either—for the obvious reason that the Platonism of the Renaissance is a very different animal from the Plato of antiquity). The apparently sharp divide between Renaissance and modern philosophy is clear in the historiography of each. The history of Renaissance Platonism is in many respects a textual enterprise, supplemented by doxography. The history of modern philosophy, by contrast, is dominated by system analysis, where agenda for the philosophical interest is often set by modern concerns. The challenge is to bring these two approaches together.

6

See Jacob Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae (1742). Tom Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tension Between New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 7

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Sarah Hutton EARLY MODERN HISTORY

In the Platonism of post-classical times, the outstanding period is the Renaissance. For it was then that the great process of the recovery, editing and translation of the works of Plato in Western Europe was undertaken.8 As Michael Allen put it, the restoration of the Platonic corpus was ‘a distinctly Renaissance achievement’.9 It was in the fifteenth century that the complete dialogues of Plato were recovered in the original Greek. The major work of translating them was first undertaken by Marsilio Ficino, who also supplied commentaries. Of course Plato was not the only philosopher of antiquity recovered in this period: Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, were all recovered, edited and translated into Latin, the lingua franca of the age. Some were also translated into the vernacular. This means, of course, that Platonism itself and the interpretations to which it was subjected were new in this period. In spite of the claims for the importance of other philosophical ‘isms’ (particularly Aristotelianism and Scepticism), in the Renaissance Platonism becomes a significant component in European thought of the Renaissance, as never before. When we follow the historical trajectory into the succeeding century, the key century in the story of philosophical modernity, Platonism drops from view in the historical accounts of seventeenth-century philosophy. To give a recent example: in the seventeenth-century volume of Cambridge History of Philosophy, Platonism figures as part of the intellectual background of the period. It is as if philosophy comes of age in that century, shedding the classical props supplied by the humanists of the Renaissance. One explanation that might be advanced to account for this absence, is that the new availability of the source texts of Plato and Platonists did not bear fruit in terms of educational programmes. University philosophy in the Renaissance remained, with a few exceptions, staunchly Aristotelian.10 Where Platonism flourished it was largely outside the universities in the more secular spaces of courts and extramural academies. However, the absence of Platonist texts from university curricula is insufficient grounds for arguing that its impact on seventeenth-century philosophers was negligible. After all, most of those regarded as modern, practised outside the universities, and repudiated academic learning. So, far from denoting that it was merely the preserve of

8 Prior to the Renaissance, Plato was known only through Calcidius’s incomplete Latin translation of the Timaeus. Marsilio Ficino, published the first Latin translation of the complete dialogues of Plato in Florence in 1484 (reprinted in 1517). The first edition of the original Greek text was printed by Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1513). It was Jean de Serres (Serranus) translation (made in collaboration with Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus) in 1578 which established the referencing conventions still in use today. Ficino also translated the Enneads of Plotinus (published in 1492). See James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1990) and Brian Copenhaver, Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 9 Michael Allen, ‘Platonism’, in Richard H. Popkin (ed.), The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 303. 10 Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), idem, Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum, 1984).

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humanistic scholarship, the vernacular mode and extramural context of Renaissance Platonism are two important respects in which it anticipates developments associated with the ‘new’ philosophies of the seventeenth century. The most famous names in seventeenth-century philosophy were, after all, philosophical laymen, who can even be called amateurs—including among their number, a physician (Locke), a soldier (Descartes) and a lens-grinder (Spinoza). Furthermore, in its more popular forms, Renaissance Platonism anticipates another salient feature of ‘modern’ philosophy, namely its linguistic preferences—the use of the vernacular as the language of philosophical discourse. The absence of Platonism from the early history of modern philosophy is more convincingly explained by the fact that the focus of histories of seventeenthcentury philosophy is very much on the iconoclasts: the philosophers who repudiated their philosophical heritage, and struck out on new paths—Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke and Spinoza. The exception in this regard is, of course, Leibniz, though even he, till recently was seen as a modern battling against the forces of tradition. Historians of seventeenth-century philosophy have been too ready to take the philosophical iconoclasts at their word, and to accept their ‘clean slate’ view of how to do philosophy. We should, however, be wary of accepting the statements of impatient moderns like Bacon and Descartes at face value. Their continuities with their predecessors often turn out to be more deeply rooted than their repudiation of them suggests—as is evident from Étienne Gilson’s studies of Descartes’ debt to medieval philosophy, and Graham Rees’s current work on Francis Bacon.11 Important recent work on Leibniz, is now demonstrating that his interest in ancient philosophy, especially Platonism,12 is integral to his philosophical development. Nevertheless, those seventeenth-century philosophers who advanced their Platonism alongside new developments tend to be regarded as eclectics, reluctant to abandon the old even as they acknowledged the new: the supreme example is the sometime master of Clare College, Ralph Cudworth. Yet, Cudworth’s valuing of both ancient and modern philosophy was not borne of misplaced eclecticism. As John Passmore long ago pointed out, Cudworth was alive to continuities, and sceptical about claims to novelty in contemporary philosophy: [H]e was impressed by the recurrence of certain patterns of philosophical controversy … he was not impressed by the claim of his contemporaries that they had shaken themselves free from tradition in order to embark upon and enterprise quire novel … in an age which insisted above all upon originality, he insisted upon the importance of tradition.13 It is with just those continuities that this volume is concerned. 11 See Francis Bacon, in Graham Rees (ed. with introduction), Philosophical Studies c.1611–c.1619 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) (Oxford Francis Bacon Project, vol.6). 12 See, for example, Stuart Brown (ed.), The Young Leibniz (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997); Christia Mercer, Lebniz’s Metaphysics. Its Origin and Development (New York: Cambridge University Press). 13 J.A. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth. An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 13.

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Sarah Hutton THE PRESENT COLLECTION

A single volume cannot do full justice to the scope and diversity of the theme, ‘Platonism at the Origins of Modernity’. A rewriting of the history of Platonism is well beyond the scope of this collection. Its aims are altogether more modest. The essays printed here have been chosen to represent significant aspects of early modern Platonism, offering an overview of the range and breadth of Platonic philosophy in the early modern period, in the context of a broad definition of modernity. The chronological range of the papers selected for inclusion in the volume covers the fortuna of Platonism from the Renaissance to the early enlightenment, with the main focus on the seventeenth century. Together they challenge negative views of the contribution of Platonism to modern philosophy in a variety of obvious ways: by examining both the philosophers of the Platonic tradition, as well as the influence of Platonism on some of the canonical figures of seventeenth-century philosophy, and touching on some of the themes where Platonism of the period anticipates later philosophy (philosophy of mind, theories of imagination). The arrangement of the essays is more or less chronological, covering moments in the fortuna of Platonism from the Renaissance to the early enlightenment, with the main focus on the seventeenth century. The opening papers discuss the two most important champions of the Platonism at the beginning of the early modern period: Nicholas of Cusa and Marsilio Ficino, both of them notable representatives of the Christian Platonic tradition. As Dermot Moran explains, Cusanus is in many ways a transitional a figure, a humanist scholar who has been credited with anticipating modernity on account of his interest in mathematics and astronomy, and his conception of the infinite. But, as Moran argues, Cusanus even here remains faithful to the Platonic tradition and his primary interest was theological. Marsilio Ficino is a key figure in the history of early modern Platonism: in addition to his important work as translator of the entire Platonic corpus, he undertook to recommend Platonic philosophy to his contemporaries by effecting an accommodation between Platonism with Christianity. Michael Allen’s paper deals with the sensitive issues arising from this, in particular the ways in which Ficino’s readings savoured of unorthodoxy, if not heresy. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury is often regarded as a proto-modern, on account of his influence on later modern philosophers. Stephen Clark’s discussion of theurgic metaphor opens up a dimension of Herbert’s thinking with roots in the classical past, especially Plotinus, but directly linked to his handling of the very epistemological issues on which his reputation for modernity depends. The reform of education was a preoccupation of self-proclaimed moderns of the seventeenth century, like Francis Bacon, whose ideas were taken up by the pansophist, Jan Amos Comenius. In his discussion of Comenius’s educational philosophy, Jan Rohls demonstrates Platonic strands of his thinking: his use of Platonic light metaphysics, and the epistemological principles he adopted. Another figure who shared the pansophist’s ideal of universal knowledge was Robert Fludd, discussed by Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggeman, who argues that Fludd’s Utriusque

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Cosmi Historia was conceived as mirror of universal causes (causarum universalium speculum) and shows how Fludd endeavoured to reconstruct a philosophia perennis or ancient wisdom with kabbalism at its core. David Pailin’s paper on attitudes to other faiths, discusses the most prominent English Platonic philosophers, Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists. Three papers are devoted to the central figure of Cambridge Platonism, Ralph Cudworth: the religious aspect of his philosophy is explored in Leslie Armour’s discussion of Cudworth’s understanding of the Trinity, which, he argues is integrally connected with his conception of love—the Trinity being the first manifestation of love, and toleration another. Jean Louis Breteau’s discussion of Cudworth’s antithetical ideas of chaos and order, demonstrates Cudworth’s philosophical method of balancing of ancient and modern, by which he acknowledged both the advantages and limitations Cartesianism. Robin Attfield’s paper is modern in its orientation. He vindicates Cudworth’s conception of the autonomy of ethics against A.N. Prior’s charge that Cudworth’s arguments are no better than G.E. Moore’s handling of comparable arguments for the autonomy of ethics. In the first of a group of papers on the response to Platonism by the first of the ‘modern’ philosophers, Catherine Wilson revisits the question of Descartes’ Platonism. Her discussion of the Meditations and the Timaeus concludes that Descartes did indeed draw from the Platonic tradition (for example his appeals to innate ideas and his conception of immortality) in order to provide the mechanical philosophy with a morally and theologically acceptable aspect. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two texts is essentially paradoxical, since each directs the contemplative soul in opposite directions, the one heavenwards via the earthly contemplations, the other in the reverse direction. Jan van Ruler’s paper deals with the reception of Cartesianism, in the Netherlands, in particular the Platonising interpretations of Descartes by Florentius Schuyl and Arnold Geulincx, the latter of which bear some comparison with Spinoza. Among modern philosophers Locke is, perhaps, an unlikely figure for inclusion in a volume on Platonism, since his sense-based epistemology is normally regarded as sufficient proof of his antiPlatonism. Nevertheless, as both John Rogers and Victor Nuovo recognise, this does not exclude the possibility that he may have been influenced by Platonism. John Rogers explores this question circumstantially, through what is known of Locke’s reading and contemporary contacts, particularly Benjamin Whichcote, concluding cautiously that the common ground between them was broadly a matter of theological temper. Victor Nuovo presses the question of Locke’s engagement with Platonism more precisely, focusing especially on Locke’s manuscript writings, to argue that Platonic themes are present in the fabric of Locke’s philosophy, and that aspects of his thought, such as his thinking on immortality of the soul, can be shown to fit a Platonic scheme. By contrast with Locke, Leibniz is a key figure in assessments of early modern Platonism, whose affinities with Platonism are widely recognised. In the first of the two papers on Leibniz, Christia Mercer focuses on the Platonist roots of Leibniz’s epistemology at the core of Leibniz’s thought. Stuart Brown discusses Leibniz and Berkeley, arguing that, despite their differences, they shared a number of Platonic assumptions. In

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particular, both adopted strategies for reconciling a Platonic metaphysics with the mechanical philosophy. Laurent Jaffro’s discussion of Shaftesbury offers a qualification to the standard view of Shaftesbury as a Platonist. Basing his discussion on Shaftesbury’s little-known manuscript, Design of a Socratic History, he argues that Shaftesbury’s Platonism was less a matter of doctrine, than of style and poetics. The interrogative framing of Jaffro’s title, ‘Which Platonism for what modernity?’ serves as a suitably open-ended epigraph for the volume, whose subject is characterised by numerous variations and reinterpretations. The concluding paper by Douglas Hedley, points up continuities of the Platonic legacy beyond the early enlightenment in theories of the imagination which bore fruit among the leading figures of the Romantic Movement—Coleridge and Wordsworth. By showing the contexts in which Platonism was discussed, read and understood, the purposes it served and the uses to which it was put, this collection testifies to the variety, continuity and vitality of Platonic tradition in philosophy throughout the early modern period. This volume would not have been possible without the generous support of a number of organisations. First among these, the British Society for the History of Philosophy, which sponsored a conference on the topic, from among the papers of which the present collection originated. Thanks are also due to Clare College, Cambridge, for hosting the original conference, to the Cambridge Centre for Research in Arts Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity and to Middlesex University for their support. The substantial contribution by international scholars was possible thanks to the generosity of the Service Scientifique et Culturel of the French Embassy, London and of the Mind Association of Great Britain.

CHAPTER 2

Dermot Moran

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464): Platonism at the Dawn of Modernity

THE AMBIGUOUS FIGURE OF NICHOLAS OF CUSA: LAST MEDIEVAL OR FIRST MODERN? Although Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464),1 or ‘Cusanus’, is still largely ignored in English-language histories of medieval philosophy,2 this papal diplomat, eventually cardinal, eclectic, humanist scholar and ardent Neoplatonist was one of the greatest intellects of the fifteenth century. Primarily because of his dialectical

1 Nicolas Krebs was born in 1401 in Kues, a town on the Moselle river in Germany. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg (1416–1417) and then Padua (1417–1423), where, registered for law, he spent 6 years studying mathematics, astronomy and physics. There he became friendly with his future sponsor Julian Cesarini (1398–1444) and with the mathematician and astronomer Paul Tuscanelli (1397–1482). Upon graduation in 1423, he went to Rome and then, in 1425, enrolled in the University of Cologne to study philosophy and theology prior to his ordination as a priest (c.1430). The dominant tradition of Cologne came from Albertus Magnus and Heymericus de Campo, also known as Heimericus van den Welde (1395–1460), with whom Cusanus probably studied in 1425–1426. Subsequently Nicholas became active in Church politics, attended the Council of Basel, and in 1437 went on a mission to Constantinople in an attempt to reconcile the Greek and Roman churches. From 1438 to 1448 he was papal envoy to Germany. His first published work De docta ignorantia (hereafter ‘DDI’) appeared in 1440. He became Cardinal in 1446 and bishop of Brixen in 1450. He died in 1464. See Jasper Hopkins, ‘Nicholas of Cusa’, in Joseph R. Strayer (ed.), Dictionary of the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), vol. 9, pp. 122–125. Citations from Cusanus’ De docta ignorantia will be from Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, ed. E. Hoffmann and R. Klibansky (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1932), English translation by Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance. A Translation and Appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia, (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press. 2nd ed., 1985). 2 For instance, there are but half a dozen scant references to him, and those chiefly to his political writings, in Anthony Kenny, Norman Kretzmann and Jan Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 1982).

9 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 9–29. © 2008 Springer.

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reflections on the nature of the infinite, including speculations about the nature of the cosmos, he has been called the ‘gatekeeper’ of the modern age.3 This towering and ambiguous thinker was not an isolated intellectual, indeed, he engaged in vigorous debates especially on matters to do with reconciliation between various Church groupings and even rival faiths (Christianity and Islam). Furthermore, although in some respects he clearly follows on from Meister Eckhart (and Thierry of Chartres), and subsequently influenced Giordano Bruno, Copernicus (who also studied at the University of Padua), and, albeit tangentially, René Descartes, he has no clearly identifiable intellectual precursor or successor. In many respects, Cusanus is a typical Renaissance Humanist scholar with a keen interest in mathematics, cosmology and astronomy (his astronomical instruments are still preserved in the library at Kues). Indeed, in 1469, about 5 years after Cusanus’ death, his former secretary Giovanni Andrea de’ Bussi (1417–1475) published a eulogy wherein he called Cusanus the most learned of men and noted that he was interested in the recently invented art of printing. It makes sense to link him to Gutenberg (1399–1468), an exact contemporary. Indeed, it has been suggested that Cusanus was responsible for introducing printing to Italy from Germany.4 Furthermore, through Cardinal Orsini, Cusanus’ name became familiar to the Italian Humanists, and his name appears in correspondence between Poggio Bracciolini and Guarino Veronese (1426– 1427).5 Marsilio Ficino similarly alludes (albeit only once) to ‘some speculations of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa’ (quoddam speculationes Nicolai Cusii Cardinalis) in a letter of 1489 to Martinus Urianus. Pico Della Mirandola, too, was aware of Cusanus and expressed a wish to visit the latter’s library at Cues.6 Nicholas of Cusa may also be viewed as a figure of the Northern German Renaissance, associated with Cologne, where the impact of Meister Eckhart still lingered, and with Heidelberg, then a centre of nominalism and conciliarism under the rectorship of Marsilious of Inghen. In fact, he moved between this Northern world and Renaissance Italy, familiar with both intellectual terrains. Influential twentieth-century European scholars, notably Ernst Cassirer,7 Alexandre Koyré, Hans-Georg Gadamer, 8 Hans Blumenberg, 9 Werner 3 R. Haubst, ‘Nikolaus von Kues—‘Pfoertner der neuen Zeit’, Kleine Schriften der CusanusGesellschaft 12 (1988), p. 6. 4 See, ‘Cusanus’ Contemporaries. II. Giovanni Andrea Bussi (1417–1475)’, in American Cusanus Society Newsletter vol. X. no. 1 (June 1993), pp. 9–11. 5 See Edmond Vansteenberghe, Le Cardinal Nicolas de Cues (Paris, 1920; reprinted Frankfurt: Minerva Verlag, 1963), Chap. 2. This letter is translated in Phyllis W.G. Gordon’s Two Renaissances Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggio Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Cusa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 115–116. 6 See Gain, Pico (Florence, 1937), p. 36 n.1. 7 E. Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuen Zeit (Berlin, 1922), vol I, pp. 32–61. 8 H.-G. Gadamer, ‘Nikolaus von Kues in modernen Denken’, in Nicolo Cusano agli inizi del mondo moderno (Florence: Sanzoni, 1970), pp. 39–48. 9 H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

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Beierwaltes,10 Karsten Harries11 and Louis Dupré,12 have lauded Cusanus as, in one way or another, a harbinger of modernity. His alleged ‘modernity’ is attested by his interest in mathematics and relative motion, and specifically his conception of space and the cosmos. In fact, in this last regard, Cusanus was an adherent neither of the Ptolemaic nor (in advance) of the Copernican heliocentric theory, rather he had ‘decentred’ the universe and thus prepared the way for the infinite space of Newton and modern physics. In his ground-breaking study, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe the noted Galileo scholar, Alexandre Koyré, credits Cusanus, ‘the last great philosopher of the dying Middle Ages’, with being the first to break with the medieval conception of the cosmos as a finite, closed, hierarchical world,13 and records that the Cusan was recognised as such by leading figures on the cusp of the modern age, such as Kepler, Bruno and Descartes. Koyré’s claim is that Cusanus anticipated Copernicus and modern science by conceiving of the universe as infinite. Indeed, it was precisely in this regard that Descartes took note of Cusanus. In his well-known letter of 6 June 1647 to Père Chanut, Descartes refers to Queen Christina of Sweden’s comments on the supposed size of the universe. Descartes writes: In the first place I recollect that the Cardinal of Cusa and many other doctors have supposed the world to be infinite without ever being censured by the Church; on the contrary, to represent God’s works as very great is thought to be a way of doing him honour. And my opinion is not so difficult to accept as theirs, because I do not say that the world is infinite but only that it is indefinite. There is quite a notable difference between the two: for we cannot say that something is infinite without a reason to prove this such as we can give only in the case of God; but we can say that a thing is indefinite simply if we have no reason to prove that the thing has bounds.14 Descartes argues that the conception of matter as extension does not convey the idea of boundaries. Since matter cannot even be conceived as having bounds, he designates it as ‘indefinite’: But I cannot deny on that account that there may be some reasons which are known to God though incomprehensible to me; that is why I do not say outright that it is infinite. (AT V 52; CSMK 320) 10

W. Beierwaltes, Identität und Differenz (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980). K. Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 12 L. Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 13 A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), p. 6. 14 Descartes, Letter to Chanut, 6 June 1647, cited in Descartes, in Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (eds), Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1964–1974), vol. V (1996), p. 52 (hereafter AT followed by the volume and page number). The letter is translated in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch and Anthony Kenny (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3. The Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 319–320 (hereafter: CSMK). 11

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Descartes represents Cusanus as already maintaining that the universe is infinite. While it is certainly true that Cusanus opposed the standard medieval view of the universe as a hierarchy of spheres enclosed within one another (since hierarchical ascent and descent is always limited to the finite), Koyré has shown that Cusanus did not hold that the universe was actually infinite, but rather maintains that it was ‘indeterminate’ (interminatum), lacking precision and hence definition. Indeed it is indeterminate for the good Platonic reason that it is full of mutability and cannot be the object of precise knowledge—‘For otherness (alteritas) is identical with mutability’ (mutabilitas, DDI I.7.18). The universe is, in Cusanus’ strange terminology, ‘contractedly infinite’ (DDI II.4.113). It does not have a fixed circumference (DDI II.11.156). God, on the other hand, is ‘negatively infinite’. It is important to emphasise, then, that Cusanus is interested in the infinite not so much as a characteristic of the physical universe (since it has that character derivatively or as a result of contraction), but precisely as a negative theological attribute of the transcendent God that presents paradoxes and conundrums for finite minds. For Cusanus’ interest in the infinity of the divine is always matched by his stress on the finitude and limitation of the human and created orders and their irrevocable distance from the divine (the universe is ‘infinitely lower’ than God as maximum, DDI II.4.114). It is Cusanus’ emphasis on the restricted finitude of human knowledge as well as its insatiable desire for knowing (DDI III.12.259) that has led inevitably to comparisons with Kant. In fact, however, it is far more accurate to see Cusanus as following the Pauline and Augustinian tradition that sees all human reasoning as limited, or as Cusanus would put it ‘conjectural’, that is, perspectival. Cusanus holds, for instance, that sight gives things from one side and under a certain aspect (De coniecturis I Ch. 11) and such perspectivalism brings a certain limitation and ‘otherness’ (alteritas) to our knowledge. The challenge, for Cusanus, is how to overcome this ‘otherness’ in order for the mind to achieve unity with its object, so that the mind can be receptive to the object as such. In theological terms, of course, such an epistemic goal has to be seen in the context of the overall theological aim of Christian Platonists to become one with the infinite One, or, as Cusanus puts it in his dedicatory letter to Cardinal Cesarini, that ‘intellect may raise itself to that Simplicity where contradictories coincide (DDI III para. 264). This unification is achieved not by promethean overcoming of the human but precisely by a dynamic, dialectic meditation on the essential finitude of the human.

CUSANUS AS SCEPTIC: LEARNED IGNORANCE AS SACRED IGNORANCE It is important to bear in mind that Cusanus’ immediate successors generally treated him not so much as a Humanist reformer but rather as a sceptic who emphasised the limitation and failure of human knowledge of God and of the world. Indeed Cusanus’ very conception of docta ignorantia (‘learned ignorance’), which, according to his own words is an ‘instruction in ignorance’ (doctrina ignorantiae, DDI II.1.91), ‘unites all methods by which it is possible to approach

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the truth’, may be interpreted in a sceptical manner. According to Hans Blumenberg’s interpretation, Cusanus’ real contribution is his recognition that it is precisely the self-restriction of knowledge that leads to epistemic advance. Blumenberg writes: It is a constitutive element of the modern age that it expands through restriction, achieves progressions through critical reduction: Renunciation of the principle of teleology discloses for the first time the full efficacy of the application of the causal category to nature; the elimination of the question of substance, and its replacement by the universal application of quantity, makes mathematical natural science possible; and renunciation of the phantom of the requirement of absolute accuracy made possible an exactitude that can set itself tolerances for its inaccuracy. The knowledge of the modern age was decisively rendered possible by a knowledge of what we cannot know.15 Blumenberg sees Cusanus as belonging with the moderns here since knowledge of one’s ignorance, or a certain self-circumscription of one’s epistemic claims until they are attested by vigorous method, is a central element in the modern idea of science.16 For Cusanus, philosophy is a kind of methodological or cultivated ignorance, even a ‘sacred ignorance’ (sacra ignorantia, DDI II.2.98). His starting point is self-aware ignorance: ‘the more he knows that he is unknowing, the more learned he will be’ (DDI I.1.4). He frequently makes use of the notion (from Plato and Aristotle) of philosophy beginning with curiosity, wonder or amazement (admiratio).17 Indeed, Cusanus declares, in sympathy with Socrates, that in a certain sense ‘to know is to be ignorant’ (scire est ignorare, Idiota. De mente I.2; see also DDI I.1.4), and he advances the radical—ultimately Platonic—claim that exact knowledge is an impossible goal: ‘precise truth inapprehensible’ (DDI I.2.8). Desiring to know what we do not know leads us to learned ignorance (DDI I.1.4). Clearly, following on from Dionysius and Augustine, Cusanus is actually promoting a kind of not-knowing which is the highest form of wisdom, but it is easy to understand why a more secular age could read him as a sceptic. According to the ninth-century Christian Neoplatonist John Scottus Eriugena (familiar to Cusanus), for instance, God ‘is better known by not knowing, his ignorance is true wisdom’ (qui melius nesciendo scitur, cuius ignorantia vera est sapientia, Periphyseon I.510b), where Eriugena is invoking a phrase found in St. Augustine’s De ordine XVI.44, ‘God is better known by not knowing’ (Deus qui melius scitur nesciendo).18 Cusanus’ docta ignorantia is quite deliberately attempts to continue this tradition (and indeed to read it back to Plato and Pythagoras). In fact, in his 15

H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 500. Ibid., p. 499. 17 See Cusanus, Idiota. De mente. 1.1, p. 41. For the claim that philosophy begins in wonder, see Plato, Theaetetus 155d and Aristotle, Metaphysics 1,2,982b. See also Cusanus, De coniecturis 2, 11. 18 See St. Augustine, De ordine, in R. Jolivet (ed.), Oeuvres de saint Augustin. Première série. Opuscules vol. IV. Dialogues philosophiques (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948), p. 438. 16

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Apologia doctae ignorantiae,19 Cusanus credits Augustine with the very phrase ‘learned ignorance’: But Aurelius Augustine—expounding the word of Paul in Romans 8 (‘We do not know what to ask for’)—declared, after other things, how it is that we have learned ignorance: ‘We know that what we seek exists; but we do not know what kind of thing it is. We have this ‘learned ignorance,’ so to speak, through the Spirit, who helps our infirmity.’ And after a few [other statements]: ‘Since Paul says that the Spirit implores with unutterable groanings, he indicates that the unknown thing is both unknown and not altogether unknown. For if it were altogether unknown, it would not be sought with groaning.’ Augustine [said] these things. (Apologia 13) The background to this learned ignorance is of course St. Paul and his supposed follower Dionysius the Areopagite, but inevitably comparisons have been made with Descartes’ own methodological procedure of doubting. But, while historians of modern philosophy are more or less united in the view that Descartes revolutionised philosophy with his turn to the cogito, thereby inaugurating the epistemological turn of modern philosophy, Cusanus’ equally original speculations on the finitude and limitation of human knowledge represent a no less important strand, even if it became, in the words of one commentator, ‘the road not taken’. Cusanus remains, therefore, a transitional figure between the Italian and Northern Renaissance, between the old and new theologies, and, more generally, between the medieval and modern worldviews. While his dialectical treatment of theological issues is highly original, his intent was surely quite traditional. Even the historian of ideas Hans Blumenberg concedes that Cusanus is—paradoxically, given the novelties in his writing—endeavouring to maintain the continuance of the medieval Christian worldview, attempting to hold together in one great system God, the universe and humankind,20 while at the same time challenging what he regarded as the naïve rationalism of Scholasticism by exaggerating the transcendence of the divine. Cusanus’ primary aim was to maintain the unity of philosophy and theology. In the remainder of this paper I plan to explore not Cusanus’ alleged anticipations of modern science and philosophy,21 but rather on his exemplification of the Christian Platonic tradition in which he was steeped, and which he approached in a strikingly original manner. I shall focus on Cusanus’ first and

19 See Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Debate with John Wenck. A Translation and Appraisal of De Ignota Litteratura and Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1984), esp. pp. 97–118. Hereafter Apologia followed by the paragraph number and the page number of the Hopkins translation. 20 H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 484. 21 For a discussion of Cusanus’ relation to modern philosophy, see Dermot Moran, ‘Cusanus and Modern Philosophy’, in James Hankins (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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best known work his De docta ignorantia (1440), often seen as his most important philosophical contribution.22 As Cusanus’ docta ignorantia occasioned a clash at the time, towards the end of this paper I shall examine briefly Cusanus’ controversy with the tradition of school Aristotelianism, exemplified in his day by the theologian Johannes Wenck, who wrote a rebuttal of Cusanus’ work to which Cusanus himself replied. The Platonist Cusanus was often quite dismissive of the Neo-Aristotelian pedantry of his day (see for instance his criticism of the Peripatetics on the nature of the forms at DDI II.9.147).23 His Heidelberg opponent John Wenck acknowledges this when he writes of Cusanus: ‘this man cares little for the sayings of Aristotle’ (Ignota, 22; Hopkins, p. 23). In his own Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1449), Cusanus himself expresses regret that ‘the Aristotelian sect’ now prevails (Apologia 6).24 The exchanges between Cusanus and Wenck have generated some interesting critical commentary. For Hans Blumenberg the debate manifests the tensions inherent in the medieval world. For him, Cusanus is proposing an essentially new procedure, proceeding through ignorance and ‘conjecture’, whereas Wenck takes a more traditional stance that cannot see how progress in knowledge can be made precisely through lack of understanding! My aim will be more modest: to discuss this clash with Aristotelianism as a way of highlighting the distinctive nature of Cusanus’ Platonism. I will suggest here that Cusanus’ supposed new procedure is actually a very original application of the traditional via negativa. If it led to the selflimitation and self-circumscription of the modern epistemological subject then this is a direct consequence of a certain Platonic negative dialectic. But first, I want to say a word about Cusanus’ formation as a philosopher and a Platonist.

CUSANUS AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION Cusanus’ busy life as a diplomat and in religious administration meant that he was first and foremost a dilettante in mathematics, philosophy and the sciences (he had an interest in optics and mechanics). Apart from his year at the University 22 The title docta ignorantia is ambiguous. It can mean a cultivated ignorance, i.e. one which has to be learned, or a learnèd or wise ignorance, one which bestows wisdom or learnedness. Both interpretations have been defended by scholars, and indeed both meanings are present in the English words ‘learned’ and ‘learnèd’. Cusanus claimed that the ‘learned ignorance’ of the title was discovered by him in a ‘Road to Damascus’ type experience, while travelling at sea between Constantinople and Venice sometime between 27 November 1437 and 8 February 1438. From then until his death in 1464, the explication of the doctrine of ‘learned ignorance’ in ever new ways became Cusanus’ central philosophical endeavour. 23 The late Scholasticism of Cusanus’ day was already deeply imbued with Nominalism, which he had encountered possibly at Deventer (where he may have schooled) and certainly at Heidelberg. 24 At times Cusanus can be somewhat disparaging about the Stagirite, suggesting that Aristotle sought to show his greatness by refuting others (DDI I.11.32). On the other hand, he regards Aristotle as ‘very profound’ (DDI I.1.4) and says he was right to say that the entire world divides up into substance and accident (DDI 1.18.53). Cusanus’ syncretism led him to read all the great minds as in essential agreement with one another and the truth despite apparent differences.

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of Cologne, he was mostly self-taught in philosophy, yet he had a deep familiarity and sympathy with the Platonic tradition, from the actual dialogues of Plato (certain of which he possessed), through Proclus and Dionysius, right down to Robert Grosseteste and Meister Eckhart. He wants to harness the great scientific and artistic discoveries of his day, from the mathematics of infinite quantities to the discovery of perspective in painting, to express the ancient wisdom to be found in the Platonic tradition concerning the transcendence and incomprehensibility of the divine One. Cusanus was exceedingly well informed, and often at first hand, on the Platonic tradition. He was an eager collector of manuscripts, eventually owning about 300, including many works by Platonists and their Christian followers. He owned Bruni’s translations of Plato’s Phaedo, Crito, Apology and Seventh Letter, as well as translations of the Republic, Laws, Phaedrus and Parmenides. He possessed manuscripts by Origen, Gregory Nazianzus, Basil, Augustine, Ambrose, Albertus Magnus, the Liber de causis, Avicenna’s metaphysics, as well as Calcidius’ Commentary on the Timaeus, Moerbeke’s translation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology, and Proclus’ Commentary on the Parmenides as well as Grosseteste’s translations of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and Celestial Hierarchy. Unusually for the time, he had copies of part of Eriugena’s Periphyseon. He possessed a copy of Petrus Balbus’ translation of the Platonic Theology. He also owned several works by Eckhart including his Genesis commentary and Commentary on the Book of Wisdom (annotated by Cusanus himself). He was one of the first scholars to be able to set these works into a distinct tradition and therefore to systematise the Platonic tradition up to the Renaissance. By temperament Cusanus is always Platonist and even Pythagorean. He speaks of the ‘divine Plato’ (DDI I.17.48; Apologia 10).25 Pythagoras is ‘the first philosopher both in name and in fact’ (DDI I.11.32). The Platonists spoke ‘sensibly’ about the Forms (DDI II.9.148); the Parmenides opened a ‘way to God’. His reasoning is especially close to that of Proclus in arguing from contradictions to the inexpressibility of the One, a position which he found encapsulated in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius (‘the greatest of the theologians’, De li non aliud 14). Cusanus speaks of ‘our’ Dionysius the Areopagite (De beryllo 12),26 the ‘disciple of the Apostle Paul’ (De beryllo 11), ‘that greatest seeker of divine things’ (maximus ille divinorum scrutator, DDI I.16.43), ‘who assigned God many names’ (De beryllo 46). Indeed, Cusanus cites Dionysius liberally from his earliest to his last works (e.g. De li non aliud), although, somewhat puzzlingly, he later said that he had not yet read Dionysius (Apologia 12) at the time of

25 For a full list of Cusanus’ Platonic references, see Markus L. Fuehrer, ‘Cusanus Platonicus. References to the Term Platonici in Nicholas of Cusa,’ in Stephen Gersh and Maarten Hoenen (eds), The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages (New York and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 345–370. 26 See F. Edward Cranz, ‘Nicolaus of Cusa and Dionysius Areopagita’, and ‘Cusanus’ Use of Pseudo-Dionysius,’ in F. Edward Cranz, Nicholas of Cusa and the Renaissance, Thomas M. Izbicki and Gerald Christianson (eds) (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2000), pp. 109–136 and 137–148.

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writing De docta ignorantia (1440).27 Cusanus regularly characterises his own Platonism as stemming from Dionysius and behind him from Plato. He also draws on Dionysius’ commentators, including his Latin translators, especially Eriugena (who he calls ‘Johannes Scotigena’),28 Albertus Magnus’ Commentary on the Divine Names,29 Robert Grosseteste (whose translations of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and Celestial Hierarchy he owned in manuscript), Thomas Gallus and Meister Eckhart. Cusanus reads Dionysius as a Christian practitioner of dialectic in the tradition stemming from Plato’s Parmenides.30 He quotes Proclus’ Commentary on Parmenides31 to the effect that Plato denied that predications can be made of the first principle, just as Dionysius prefers negative to affirmative theology (De beryllo 12). Cusanus writes: ‘The great Dionysius imitates Plato’ (De beryllo 27) and in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1449): ‘The divine Dionysius imitated Plato to such an extent that he is quite frequently found to have cited Plato’s words in series’.32 Of course, as a deeply orthodox Catholic, Cusanus is fully aware that certain doctrines of classical Platonism (the doctrine of the world-soul, discussed at DDI II.9.149, of fate, of the eternity of the world, and so on) are in conflict

27 Yet Dionyius is cited several times in the De docta ignorantia and in the Apologia. Cusanus, in fact, refers to Dionyius twice in his De concordantia Catholica of 1433, but these references might have been drawn from other sources. 28 See Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Eriugena und Cusanus’, in Eriugena. Grundzüge seines Denkens (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), pp. 266–312. Besides Eriugena’s translations of Dionysius, Cusanus, at the very least, was familiar with Periphyseon Book I, a manuscript of which (British Museum Codex Additivus 11035) he owned and annotated. He was also familiar with the Clavis physicae of Honorius Augustodunensis (Paris Bib. Nat. cod. lat. 6734), essentially a compendium of Eriugenian excerpts, as well as the homily Vox spiritualis (at that time listed under the name of Origen but now attributed to Eriugena). 29 Albertus Magnus, Super Dionysium de divinis nominibus, Opera Omnia, vols 36 and 37 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1972), cited in Cusanus, De Beryllo, 17. 30 Paradoxically, Cusanus anticipates the great Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla, who eventually unmasked the pseudyonymous nature of the Dionysian corpus, with his independent recognition of the close doctrinal proximity between Proclus and Dionysius. For Cusanus, however, it was simply that Proclus and Dionysius were both sages who belonged to the same tradition and knew the higher truth. 31 See Proclus, In Platonis Parmenidem, VI 1074, ed. and trans. V. Cousin, Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. Glenn Morrow and John Dillon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 427: ‘So then it is more proper to reveal the incomprehensible and indefinable cause which is the One through negations’ (Cousin 1074). 32 Wenck’s De ignota litteratura (‘On Ignorant Learning’ or ‘On Unknown Learning’) was first edited by E. Vansteenberghe in 1912 in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters using text from the Mainz municipal library, Codex 190 (another one since discovered at Trier Municipal Library, Codex 228/1467). Jasper Hopkins has made new edition based on the two manuscripts, both date from middle of fifteenth century and are independent of each other. See Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Debate with John Wenck. A Translation and Appraisal of De ignota litteratura and Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1984), esp. pp. 97–118. Hereafter Apologia followed by the paragraph number and the page number of the Hopkins translation. The reference here is Apologia, 10, Hopkins, p. 49.

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with Christianity and he takes issue with the platonici on many of these points. For instance, he criticises Plato for assuming that creation arises from divine necessity rather than from divine freewill (De beryllo 38). On the other hand, he offers an interpretation of the world-soul that makes it identical with God. The Platonic tradition in his larger sense is always explicitly presented as his own heritage and its primary importance is theological in that it recognises that God is an infinite transcendent One.

EXPRESSING THE INFINITY OF THE DIVINE As I have been stressing, Nicholas’ philosophical project consists primarily of a series of attempts to do justice to the infinity of the divine and to bring human beings to recognise that their lack of certain knowledge about the universe is not a contingent failing but embedded in the uncertain and inexact nature of creation itself. This is done through an exploitation of various aporiai and paradoxes that arise in attempting to express the infinite superabundance of the divine One in the determinate and finite language of the created order. Cusanus’ tactic is to invent different conceits or hypotheses as vehicles for conceiving in metaphorical fashion this infinite and transcendent God, who is above all human comprehension. Throughout his writings, Cusanus offers interesting and novel conceptions of the infinite God. In one sense, he is following the old theological tradition, found especially in Dionysius’ Divine Names, of seeking appropriate names for God. In his De docta ignorantia, for instance, God is characterised as the ‘Absolute Maximum’ and ‘infinite unity’ (unitas infinita, DDI I.5.14). Elsewhere, Cusanus will explore other characterisations of God as ‘the same’ (idem), ‘itness’ (iditas, DDI I.9.25) or as ‘not other’ (non aliud). In De possest, for instance, Cusanus will combine two verbal forms, ‘to be able’ or ‘can be’ (posse) and ‘is’ (est), to show that God is actually all that is possible. In other words, God is the actualisation of all possibilities. In De apice theoriae 28, God is understood as the ‘power of powers’ (fortitudo fortium et virtus virtutum). In De venatione sapientiae, Cusanus says that God is ‘prior to the difference between act and potency’ (ante differentiam actus et potentiae). These designations for the divine are supposed to both illumine and to perplex. Through the joint actions of insight and perplexity, the contemplator arrives at ‘wise ignorance’ concerning God. For Cusanus, the infinity of God is a first truth that is even taught by ‘sacred ignorance’ or negative theology: ‘Now according to the theology of negation, there is not found in God anything other than infinity’ (DDI I. 26.88).33 The ‘theology of negation’, to which Cusanus here refers, is the tradition of the Christian followers of Proclus, chiefly Dionysius the Areopagite and his commentators, including Johannes Scottus Eriugena. Cusanus maintains that affirmative theology, although a necessary starting point, contains the danger that it will 33 Cusanus’ treatment of ‘infinity’, as a chief attribute of the divine, is akin to Eriugena’s belief that ‘nothing’ (nihilum), as a name for God, is sanctioned by Scripture.

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reduce God to a creature, and hence lead to idolatry (DDI I.26.86). Negative theology emphasises the divine transcendence. God is ‘beyond being’, ‘beyond essence’ and God is even, for John Scottus Eriugena for instance, ‘nothingness’ (nihilum, Periphyseon Book III.685a) and the ‘negation of essence’ (negatio essentiae, Periphyseon I.462b). Eriugena writes: For when it is said: ‘It is superessential’, this can be understood by me as nothing other but a negation of essence (Nam cum dicitur: Superessentialis est, nil aliud mihi datur intelligi quam negatio essentiae, Periphyseon I.462b). God, for Eriugena, is ‘not this nor that nor anything’ (nec hoc nec illud nec ullum ille est, Periphyseon I.510c); a formula that will be developed also by Eckhart. Cusanus’ own formulations are close to those of Eckhart and Eriugena. God is ‘beyond all affirmation and negation’ (DDI I.4.12) and is ‘not this rather than that’ (DDI III.2.193): For God, who is this Maximum, ‘is not this thing and is not any other thing. He is not here and is not there’, as the same Dionysius says regarding the divine names; for just as He is all things, so He is not any of all the things. (DDI I.16.43) Cusanus’ commitment to this negative theological tradition is even more informed and broader in that he can reach beyond the specifically Christian authors to embrace, for instance, the Muslim Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) and the Jewish negative theologian Maimonides (DDI I.16.42; I.26.87), whose Guide of the Perplexed he knows and whom he portrays as agreeing with Pseudo-Dionysius in this respect.34 In his Apologia doctae ignorantiae, Cusanus cites Avicenna as also teaching that God cannot properly be considered as Singular: But since there cannot be otherness with respect to the Kingdom of God, in which there is a simplicity and peace that transcends all the senses, there is not [in God] singularity in the sense in which our adversary conceives it. Rather, [there is singularity] in the sense in which Avicenna (in his Metaphysics [in the section] on confirming the prophet) speaks about the singularity of God. Here he admonishes against speaking to the people about this singularity because it would lead them astray rather than instruct them. For singularity—in the sense in which he enjoins that it be kept concealed—is Singularity of singularities. And thus God is called unsingularly Singular—just as [He is also called] infinite End, limitless Limit, and indistinct Distinction. For whoever directs his mind’s eye toward the Absolute Singularity of all singulars sees clearly enough that Absolute Universality coincides with Absolute Singularity—just 34 For an excellent discussion of Maimonides’ conception of the divine as transcendent, see Kenneth Seeskin, ‘Metaphysics and Its Transcendence’, in Kenneth Seeskin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), pp. 82–104. Seeskin writes of Maimonides’ negative theology: ‘It follows that “closeness” to God is not a matter of bridging the gap between heaven and earth but of coming to grips with the fact that the gap is infinite and will never be bridged’, p. 91.

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Cusanus is, therefore, by far the most knowledgeable writer of his day on the extent of the negative theological tradition, and he can draw not only on Christian, Islamic and Jewish sources, but also can reach back into pagan classical philosophy to identify the negative theological tradition in Pythagoras, Plato and Proclus. Emphasis on the infinity and transcendence of the divine goes hand in hand with an emphasis on the divine unity and lack of plurality of parts. The Christian Platonists conceived of God more or less in the manner in which Plotinus conceives of the One (developed from the concepts of the One in the hypotheses of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides). Thus God as the ‘One’ is above being, beyond the good, beyond the realm of intellect or the intellectual light, dwelling in an inaccessible darkness, unknowable and unfathomable. Of course, contact with the later Neoplatonic tradition of Proclus complicates this picture, making the One even more transcendent, remote and unnameable. The ninth-century Irish Neoplatonist Johannes Scottus Eriugena, for instance, speaks of the ‘divine superessentiality’ (divina superessentialitas, Periphyseon III.634b), or—quoting Dionysius Divine Names I 1–2 (Patrologia Graeca III 588b–c)—of the ‘superessential and hidden divinity’ (superessentialis et occulta divinitas, Periphyseon I.510b). In Book One of the Periphyseon Eriugena comments on the meaning of superessentialis: Nutritor; Did we not say that, strictly speaking, the ineffable nature (ineffabilis natura) can be signified by no verb, by no noun, and by no other audible sound, by no signified thing? And to this you agreed. For it is not properly but metaphorically (Non enim proprie sed translatiue) that it is called Essence, Truth, Wisdom and other names of this sort. Rather it is called superessential (superessentialis), more than truth, more than wisdom. (Periphyseon I.460c–461a) Cusanus too wants to emphasise the transcendence and ineffability of the divine being. He refers in De docta ignorantia to God as the ‘Maximum’ (a term adapted from his reading of Anselm) that is both ‘incomprehensibly understandable and unnameably nameable’ (DDI 1.5.13). Cusanus is an interesting reader of Anselm’s Proslogion, and gives a specific interpretation of his definition of God as ‘that than which nothing greater is possible’ (quo nihil maius esse potest, DDI I.2.5).35 This connection with Anselm is underscored in the Apologia where Cusanus remarks: 35 On the negative theological aspects of Anselm’s formulation of the definition of God, see Dermot Moran, ‘Neoplatonic and Negative Theological Elements in Anselm’s Argument for the Existence of God in Proslogion,’ in Jean-Marc Narbonne et Alfons Reckermann (eds), Pensées de l’un dans l’Histoire de la Philosophie. Études en Hommage au Professor Werner Beierwaltes, Collection Zêtêsis (Paris/Montréal: Vrin/Presses de l’Université Laval, 2004), pp. 198–229.

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For no one was ever so foolish as to maintain that God, who forms all things, is anything other than that than which a greater cannot be conceived. (Apologia 8) The Maximum is, quoting St. Paul, ‘beyond every name’ (DDI I.5.17). It is ‘incommunicable, unintermixable, incontractible to this or that’ (DDI III.1.182). It is, according to the De docta ignorantia, that than which there cannot be a greater (DDI I.4.11) and ‘all that which can be’ and in that sense it coincides with its opposite: the ‘Minimum’: Therefore, Maximum Equality, which is neither other than nor different from anything, surpasses all understanding. Hence, since the absolutely Maximum is all that which can be (omne id quod esse potest), it is altogether actual. And just as there cannot be a greater, so for the same reason there cannot be a lesser, since it is all that which can be. But the Minimum is that than which there cannot be a lesser. And since the Maximum is also such, it is evident that the Minimum coincides with the Maximum. (DDI I.4.11) Cusanus builds on Anselm’s intuition that God necessarily exists, that God is a necessary being; God is ‘absolute necessity’ (DDI I.22.69). But, following the Nominalists and Ockham, he also accepts the view that God is absolutely powerful and is not restricted by anything and hence is the sum of all possibilities. Indeed, Cusanus’ specific originality consists in his use of Nominalist claims about God’s infinite and unlimited power combined with the Scholastic claim that God is pure esse, ‘pure actuality’, actus purus, ‘maximal actual being’ (maxima actualis entitas, DDI I.23.70) and the ‘being of things’ (entitas rerum, DDI I.8.22) or ‘being of all being’ (entitas omnis esse DDI I.23.73) to make the claim that God is the infinite actualisation of all possibilities, est actu omne id quod possibile est (DDI I.5.14). For Cusanus, following Anselm, God is maximal being; he is actually everything that is possible or that He can possibly be. Cusanus, however, begins with Augustinian and Thomistic formulations of God as the ‘being of being’ (DDI I.23.73) and the ‘form of forms’ (forma formarum, DDI I.23.70), but then he goes on in Eriugenian and Eckhartian fashion to deny that God is ‘this or that’ and to say that God is not to be considered a being or a substance but is, following Dionysius ‘more than substance’ (DDI I.18.52). THE APPROPRIATENESS OF MATHEMATICAL SYMBOLISM FOR THEOLOGY The infinite God cannot be comprehended by finite minds and hence must be approached symbolically, per symbola (DDI I.11.32) or, metaphorically, transferre (DDI I.12.33). Of course, this tradition is deeply Neoplatonic and plays a large role in Dionysius’ attempts to talk about God, but Cusanus’ particular bent is to invoke the latest scientific findings, and especially to apply mathematical insights (the very traits that have attracted the ‘modernist’ reading). Part of Cusanus’ Platonic heritage consists, of course, in a special appreciation of the role of mathematics in explicating both the nature of the universe and also the nature of the infinite

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divinity. God creates the world using number, weight and measure, according to the Bible (Wisdom 11:21) and Cusanus confirms that in creating the world God used the whole quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, DDI II.13.175). Cusanus’ strategy, then, is to take certain finite mathematical relations and proportions and, using a special kind of transformation (transferre), to think of them ‘infinitely’ (DDI I.12.33). As a result Cusanus’ dialogues are full of discussions of mathematical figures and theorems. Following St. Augustine, whom he cites in this regard, he has a general fascination with number symbolism, and endorses Pythagoras’ claim that ‘all things are constituted and understood through the power of numbers’ (DDI I.1.3) and that unity is also triune (DDI I.7.18). God created the universe according to number; number is the ‘prime exemplar of the things to be created’ (DDI I.11.32). Number is responsible for the proportio and harmony between things (DDI I.5.13). Number encompasses all things related proportionally. Indeed, all inquiry moves according to proportion and relation, but there is no proportion between finite and infinite (DDI 1.1.3). Number belongs not only to quantity but to all things that can agree or differ substantially or accidentally. There would be no distinctness between things were it not for number - even between two equal things, one will be a duplicate of the first (this thought echoes Proclus). Furthermore, every actual number is finite and hence no number can be the maximum. Otherness is always ‘subsequent to oneness’ (DDI I.7.18). Between two things there will at least be ‘otherness’ (DDI I.7.19). The number two is both ‘separation and a cause of separation’ (DDI I.7.20). Moreover, he is convinced that mathematical objects are finite nevertheless they are the most appropriate symbols to convey to us the infinity of the divine. He is primarily using mathematics as a metaphorical way of representing theological truths. Number is an apt way of symbolising what goes on beyond the sensory realm. It is precisely a symbol that allows us to think the infinite and the transcendent. In part, the justification for making any relation between the created order and the infinite divine is already to be found in Scripture and especially in St. Paul (especially Romans I:20 and First Corinthians 13:12). As Cusanus writes in De docta ignorantia: All our wisest and most divine teachers agree that visible things are truly images of invisible things and that from created things the Creator can be knowably seen as in a mirror and a symbolism. (DDI I.11.30) Cusanus goes on to claim that: For all things have a certain comparative relation to one another, [a relation which is], nonetheless, hidden from us and incomprehensible to us … (DDI I.11.30) Cusanus is here attesting to the quite traditional medieval notion of a certain proportio between created and creator, between above and below, between exemplar and image. This of course is going to be balanced dialectically by the claim that

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between finite and infinite there exists no proportion; ‘the infinite escapes all comparative relation’ (DDI I.2.3). Cusanus justifies the use of mathematical images in typically Platonist terms. The sensible world is too full of mutability: ‘all perceptible things are in a state of continual instability because of the material possibility abounding in them’ (DDI I.11.31). But mathematical objects are free of sensibility to a greater extent (Cusanus concedes they are not completely free of sensibility because they still need to be imagined by the mind) and are true objects of the intellect. More importantly mathematical notions are stable and unchanging: ‘Therefore, in mathematicals the wise wisely sought illustrations of things that were to be searched out by the intellect’ (DDI I.11.31). In the De docta ignorantia, finite mathematical symbols have to be transformed somehow into their infinite analogues if they are to become useful for grasping something of the divine nature. But here mathematics already somehow contains this possibility within itself. Although every quantity is finite and limited, it can be conceived as greater than it is, and indeed it can be envisaged as infinite. Thus the mathematician can conceive not just of a straight line but of a straight line that proceeds infinitely. Thus the essence of a finite line is actually an infinite line: ‘every finite line has its being from the infinite line’ (DDI II.5.119). Cusanus can quote authorities to support his analogies. Anselm had compared God (‘the maximum truth’) to rectitude (rectitudo), and Cusanus proposes to think of rectitudo symbolically as a straight line. Others have considered God as a ‘triangle consisting of three equal right angles’ (DDI 1.12.34)—here Nicholas is thinking of his former teacher Heymericus de Campo (author of Tractatus de sigillo aeternitatis). Others have seen God as an infinite circle or indeed an infinite sphere.36 The point for Cusanus is that there is a very venerable and respectable tradition that utilises mathematical images ‘in a transferred way’ (transferre) to express the infinity of the divine. This ‘transferral involves a quasi-mathematical extension of the concept or figure until it reaches infinite or ‘maximal’ proportions and this has to be done not incrementally by adding finite amounts but in one intellectual leap to the infinite. At this point, Cusanus wants us to recognise intellectually, that taken to the infinite, an infinite line, triangle, circle and sphere will all coincide (DDI I.13.35). The distinct essence of each mathematical figure blends with that of the others. All essences therefore coincide in the divine; in God all things are God. Thus ‘by means of mathematical example’ (exemplo mathematico, I.24.74) the infinite divine being can be comprehended in what Cusanus claims is a ‘learned ignorance’.

36 Karsten Harries has discussed in detail Cusanus’ use of the image of God as an infinite sphere whose centre is nowhere and where circumference is everywhere in his ‘The Infinite Sphere: Comments on the History of a Metaphor’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 13.1 (1975), 5–15. The history of this image is charted in Dieter Mahnke, Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt (Halle: Niemeyer, 1937). For further discussion of Cusanus’ approach to the universe as a springboard for the inception of modernity, see also K. Harries, ‘Perspective and the Infinity of the Universe’, in his Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 22–41.

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Dermot Moran THE COINCIDENCE OF CONTRADICTORIES

Echoing Dionysius and Eriugena, Cusanus describes God as ‘beyond all opposition’, ‘free of all opposition’ (DDI I.4.12), ‘beyond all affirmation and negation’ (DDI I.4.12), and, in a formula found in Dionysius (Divine Names V.10) and also in Eriugena’s Periphyseon, as ‘the opposite of opposites’ (Apologia, p. 52). God reconciles all oppositions and indeed in beyond all oppositions.37 In Cusanus’ De coniecturis II.i, God is described as beyond the coincidence of contradictories.38 Cusanus also says that God as the Maximum, although it may be thought of as ‘being’, is not opposed to ‘non-being’ (DDI I.6.16). Similarly, the minimum in the number series is one, which is said to coincide with the Maximum (DDI I.5.13). In his Apologia, Cusanus becomes more explicit regarding the manner in which the human intellect can deal with opposites in a manner rather different from human reason. Reason proceeds, in typical Platonic manner, by inference and opposition. Reason (ratio) relies on proportion. Intellect, on the other hand, can transcend opposition. Cusanus writes in his Apologia: Therefore, in the domain of reason (ratio) the extremes are separate; for example, with regard to a circle’s definition (viz., that the lines from the center to the circumference be equal): the center [of a circle] cannot coincide with the circumference. But in the domain of the intellect (intellectus)—which has seen that number is enfolded in oneness, that a line is enfolded in a point, that a circle is enfolded in a center—the coincidence of oneness and plurality, of point and line, of center and circle is attained by mental sight apart from inference (as you were able to read about in the books De Coniecturis, where I also asserted that God is beyond the coincidence of contradictories, since He is the Opposition of opposites, according to Dionysius). (Apologia 15)

MAXIMUM ABSOLUTUM As we have seen, in De docta ignorantia, Cusanus characterises God as ‘infinite oneness’ (unitas infinita, I.13.14), ‘absolute Maximum’ (maximum absolutum) and as ‘all that which can be’ (omne id quod esse potest, DDI I.4.11). God is actually everything which is possible (DDI I.13.14); ‘it also is whatever there can at all possibly be’ (quae solum illud est id, quod esse potest omni potentia, DDI II.1.97). The Maximum is said to be ‘incomprehensibly understandable and unnameably 37 Generally speaking, Cusanus does not distinguish between what he terms ‘opposites’ (e.g. black, white) and ‘contradictories’ (black/not-black). Thus ‘square’ and ‘circular’ are for Cusanus both opposites and contradictories, since being one excludes being the other. 38 Jasper Hopkins, in his Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance. A Translation and Appraisal of De docta ignorantia, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985), p. 6, points out that Cusanus does not actually say in the text of DDI that God is the ‘coincidence of opposites’ (coincidentia oppositorum), although, in his dedicatory letter, he does speak of God as that ‘where contradictions coincide’ (ubi contradictoria coincidunt).

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nameable’ (DDI I.5.13). This maximum is pure ‘equality’ and contains nothing greater or less. As pure equality it is before all difference. God is oneness (unitas), and as such is both ‘union’ (conexio) and the ‘cause of union’ (DDI I.7.20). As we have seen, Cusanus begins with the thought of God as an infinite, ungenerated one, a one from which all other unities derive, just as ‘one’ is the beginning of all numbers (DDI I.5.14) and yet not itself a number.39 Oneness cannot be a number because all numbers admit of greater and less, but oneness does not admit of greater or less. Oneness is both the minimum and also the maximum and end of all number. Cusanus makes use of the idea found in Dionysius and Eriugena that God is the beginning, middle and end of all things. In Platonic and indeed Augustinian fashion, Cusanus divides the world into the realm of true being (or maximal being) and the realm of not-being or contracted being (DDI 1.6.16). God is truth and being and all else belongs to mutability and instability: ‘All perceptible things are in a state of continual instability because of the material possibility abiding in them’ (DDI I.11.31). Cusanus writes a great deal about the complexity of the created universe but it is also presented as something created and hence ontologically dependent and unstable. It has what Cusanus will call a ‘contracted’ character. Yet, paradoxically, the otherness of that which is not the One does not come from the One itself (which lacks all otherness) but somehow comes from otherness itself.

THE NEOPLATONIC CONCEPT OF OTHERNESS (ALTERITAS) AND CUSANUS’ CONCEPT OF CONTRACTION (CONTRACTIO) As a Neoplatonist, Cusanus begins with the One, but immediately goes on to postulate the category of the ‘other’ or ‘otherness’ (alteritas), which is always understood as the sign of multiplicity and ‘mutability’ (mutabilitas, DDI I.7.18). All things that are not absolutely one must in some sense be other than the one. The other, moreover, is always construed as temporal and not eternal, as changing rather than as stable. Just as one is union and the cause of union, the next number, two, is the cause of separation and division. Cusanus writes: Likewise, the number two (binarius) is both separation (divisio) and the cause of separation; for two is the first separation. … But separation and otherness are by nature concomitant. Hence union is eternal (just as in oneness), since it is prior to otherness. (DDI I.7.20) The reasoning is Platonic—and close to many formulations found in the Parmenides. For instance, in Parmenides 141d it is attested that the One has nothing to do with time; and similarly, at Parmenides 139c, that the one excludes 39 Cusanus follows the tradition of Aristotle, Metaphysics X, 1, 1052b24 ff and Boethius, De Institutione Mathematica 1, 3 in not treating one as a number yet seeing it as the beginning and origin of the number series (De Institutione Mathematica 1, 23). For both, number is a collection or plurality of unities; whereas unity is somehow above number since it does not participate in plurality.

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all difference (even its difference from the other). The One cannot participate in otherness and hence, as Cusanus will explicate, it is better to refer to God as ‘not other’ (non aliud) as he argues in his De li non aliud. Otherness, on the other hand, is always self-dispersing and hence limiting itself (by the very fact that two things must be other than each other, both must be finite). As Cusanus attests: ‘Between two things there must at least be otherness’ (DDI I.7.19). The pluralities of things descend from the deity as ‘infinite oneness’ (DDI I.5.14) and cannot exist independently of it. They have dependent being, ‘being-from’ (abesse, DDI II.2.98), not ‘being’ (esse). Their being is always a dependent being. Hence, on Cusanus’ view, everything after the One is created by the One. Cusanus, in De docta ignorantia Book Two, argues that, while all created things are modelled on the absolute Maximum, the Maximum by itself does not impart diminished being but that created things gain these attributes of corruptibility not from any positive cause but from failing to be the Maximum: Similarly with things: since they cannot be the Maximum, it happens that they are diminished, other, distinct, and the like—none of which [characteristics] has a cause. Therefore a created thing has from God the fact that it is one, distinct, and united to the universe; and the more it is one, the more like unto God it is. However, it does not have from God (nor from any positive cause but [only] contingently) the fact that its oneness exists in plurality, its distinctness in confusion, and its union in discord. (DDI II.2.99) This is a version of an argument also used by Eriugena to argue that God’s will is to create an infinite universe that is like him in every respect. Somehow creation itself acts to restrict itself and become ‘unlike’. But this constriction or departure from oneness is not a positive act of the divine will. It is somehow an intrusion of ‘otherness’ or of contingency itself, which is treated as without cause. It is a limitation introduced by the very nature of possibility itself (wherever possibility is opposed to actuality, possibility is somehow limited). Thus ‘contraction of actuality is the result of contingency’ (DDI II.8.139).

THE ARISTOTELIAN RESPONSE: JOHANNES WENCK VON HERRENBERG (C.1390–1460) Cusanus’ Platonist approach to theology did not go unchallenged in his day. Another German theologian, Johannes Wenck, a graduate of Paris and Heidelberg (and even Rector of the University of Heidelberg on three separate occasions: 1435, 1444 and 1451) was a defender of Thomism and Aristotelianism against Eckhart and the Beghards.40 Wenck’s riposte to Cusanus is entitled 40 Wenck had a considerable philosophical output. His writings include: Parva logicalia (before 1426), De imagine et similitudine contra eghardicos (1430); Das Buchlein von der Seele (1436), ed. G. Steer (Munich; Fink, 1967), Commentary on Boethius’ de Hebdomadibus, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima III, Commentary on the Liber de causis, and a commentary of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy (1455).

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De ignota litteratura (Concerning Ignorant Learning or On Unknown Learning).41 Wenck attacked Cusanus as a pantheist and heretic. For him, Cusanus’ learned ignorance actually leads to the stubborn ignorance of heresy: ‘For the teachings of the Waldensians, Eckartians and Wycliffians have long shown from what spirit this learned ignorance proceeds’ (De ignota 21). Overall, Wenck is suspicious that Cusanus has strayed into pantheism.42 Wenck is entirely unhappy with the unguarded way Cusanus utilises the traditional ontological categories inherited from Thomist, Scotist and Ockhamist thought, on the one hand, and the negative theological tradition (Proclus, Dionysius), on the other, to allow God to be thought about in new ways. God is the ‘being of things (entitas rerum), the ‘form of being’ (forma essendi), a formulation which Johannes Wenck criticises as belonging to the Beghard heresy. Wenck writes in a restrained, formal and pedantic manner in contrast to Cusanus’ exuberance. He identifies Cusanus’ main theses one by one and draws corollaries from them, and proceeds to identify formal weaknesses of reasoning, contradictions as well as theological errors. Wenck is a Neo-Aristotelian Thomist and his aim is to defend scientific knowledge and proper method and in this respect, the method of philosophy is rational inquiry carried out in a comparative manner using proportion (proportio). Indeed, he believes Cusanus has been led into error by ‘meagreness in instruction in logic’ (De ignota litteratura 24). In reasoning and learning, according to Wenck, we move from what is certain to what is uncertain and compare one to the other. Wenck favours progress in knowledge through incremental gain. He writes: Thus, each thing to be sought, pursued, or investigated comes to be judged and known from a proportional, or a comparative, reduction of what is uncertain, unknown, or unapprehended (which is being inquired about) to something taken to be certain, known, manifest, and apprehended, so that it becomes known and is manifested. Hence, the beginning (inchoatio sive inceptio aut initium) of a rational inference is from what is known; and the end and goal is the manifesting of what is unknown. (De ignota litteratura 22)

41 Wenck’s De ignota litteratura is found in Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Debate with John Wenck. A Translation and Appraisal of De Ignota litteratura and Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae Nicholas of Cusa, op. cit. Wenck’s title, like Cusanus’ docta ignorantia, is deliberately ambiguous: ignotus means ‘unknown, obscure’ and litteratura means ‘a work composed of letters’. Wenck himself refers to Psalm 70: 15–16, where David says he does not know learning but will enter into the power of the Lord, and Isaiah 29:11–12, where it is said a sealed book will be given to one who does not know letters. The title may also refer to the unknown learning of Christ which was offered to the Corinthians. The Cusanus scholar Rudolf Haubst maintains motive for Wenck’s attack on Cusanus is not based on a personal quarrel dating from the Council of Basel, as Cusanus contends in his Apologia, but rather is based on Wenck’s concern to establish orthodoxy, see Rudolf Haubst, Studien zu Nikolaus von Kues und Johannes Wenck, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 38 (1955), p. 113. Following on from Cusanus’ Apologia, Wenck then wrote a further reply De facie scolae doctae ignorantiae (c.1449–1455), and there is a reference to this work in the Vatican Library, but no manuscript has been found. 42 For a discussion of Cusanus’ alleged pantheism, see Dermot Moran, ‘Pantheism in Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 44.1 (Winter 1990), 131–152.

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In relation to Cusanus’ emphasis on the infinity of the desire for knowledge, Wenck concedes that Cusanus too has a zeal for knowing (emulatio sive zelus sciendi), but argues that his desire is not according to knowledge (De ignota litteratura 23). Desire for knowledge must be proportionate to the kind of knowledge that may in fact be gained. For Cusanus, ‘knowing is non-knowing’ (scire est ignorare) and his professed aim is to embrace incomprehensible things incomprehensibly’ (Ignota 20). According to Cusanus, God as infinite and escapes all proportion, hence our ignorance aims to leave behind all sensible things. But, for Wenck, on the other hand, God is known only his effects in creation and through analogy. Wenck is opposed to Cusanus’ claim that all finite knowledge is essentially imprecise. Intellectual movement ceases to be movement if it has no point against which to measure itself in terms of its progress towards its goal. He, hence, accuses Cusanus of destroying the scientific process itself. Wenck offers an Aristotelian account of knowledge based on the experiences of the senses, whereby all knowing requires mediation in terms of a phantasm or image. Wenck quotes Aristotle’s De Anima Book III, 2 425b19-26: ‘the image is to the intellect what colour is to sight’ (hoc sit phantasma ad intellectum quod color est ad visum). Without colour activating sight, the eye cannot see anything. The human mind always knows through the image or similitude. Accordingly Holy Scripture has taught us through symbolisms that which is divinely inspired and revealed—also doing so conformably to the usual manner of our natural conception (De ignota litteratura 21). Wenck here invokes a standard principle articulated in Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae V.4, according to which everything which is received is received according to the mode of the recipient. In other words, knowledge is always relative to the abilities of the knower and the disclosiveness of the known. There is always a proportion between knower and known. How then can Cusanus abandon this position and attain an ‘incomprehensible’ apprehension of God? Surely this is not any kind of knowledge; it is simply error. In traditional Aristotelian fashion, Wenck thinks that Cusanus’ reasoning repeatedly violates the principle of non-contradiction. He claims that if there is no opposition or contradiction then Cusanus cannot be refuted since refutation depends on stating the contradictory. Similarly, it would mean that in God there would be no inconsistency between a proposition and its negation. This would also destroy the ‘basic principle of our knowledge’ (semen omnis doctrinae)—that it is impossible to be and not to be the same thing—idem esse et non esse impossibile (from Aristotle Metaphysics IV, 4, 1006b19 ff). Wenck’s text is helpful for putting Cusanus’ Platonic speculations into the context of late medieval School theology. In contrast to Wenck’s Aristotelian caution, Cusanus’ riposte is to sketch for Wenck the tradition of Platonist negative theology and to self-consciously attach himself to this Platonic tradition. Many of Cusanus’ speculations will continue to inform modern philosophy (for instance Descartes’ discussions of the nature of the divine infinity) in a subterranean manner. But in reading Cusanus we sense an intellect at home in the speculative dialectical tradition of Plato’s Parmenides, Proclus and Dionysius. The Christian

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Platonist tradition in Northern Europe had a tremendous advocate in Cusanus just as Ficino was transforming Platonism for the Italian Renaissance.

CONCLUSION As we have seen Nicholas of Cusa is a transitional figure in a time of great intellectual ferment and eclecticism. While his thought is extremely complex, its focus is clear: his entire interest is theological in the traditional manner of seeking appropriate names for the divine and meditating on the manner in which humans can transcend their own finitude in order to come into some kind of unity with the deity. His aim is always to show the limitations on merely human knowledge, and to instruct us in our ignorance. This is the ‘instruction of ignorance’ (doctrina ignorantiae, DDI II Prol. 90). Cusanus is stressing the finitude of the human mind and the ultimate failure of the promethean project of absolute scientific knowledge. But in all his formulations he remains remarkably faithful to the Platonic tradition that he shows as developing in a unified way from Plato through Dionysius and Eriugena to Eckhart and himself. Cusanus furthermore is willing to defend this Platonic tradition against the Neo-Scholastic challenge.

CHAPTER 3

Michael J.B. Allen

At Variance: Marsilio Ficino, Platonism and Heresy

Heresy in Greek antiquity meant a choice, or what is chosen, particularly a tenet. But heresy takes many forms. When orthodoxy is not yet established, an heretical opinion may still represent a proto-orthodox or a not yet heterodox option. When orthodoxy is too well established, another point of view can become branded as heretical even if it is in fact a speculative possibility, an adumbrated option with regard to an issue that still invites, and may even deserve, further examination. Upholders in the first category may be ‘material’ but not yet ‘formal’ heretics, since they are innocent choosers. Many of the great heresies are of course Christological and revolve around the definition, in Greek initially and later in Latin as well, of such terms as being, substance, nature, person and so forth. The central heresies of Renaissance Neoplatonism were sandwiched uneasily between the past orthodoxies of Scholasticism and the coming orthodoxies of the Reformation, and its child, the Counter Reformation. In its entirety this Neoplatonism appeared reconcilable with orthodoxy to only a few, even though it received the support and indeed advocacy of such important champions of orthodoxy as Cardinals Cusanus and Bessarion and the approval, at least in part, of Augustinians.1 By the many, however, it was constantly eschewed or viewed with suspicion given Plato’s treatment of the community of goods and wives, of homosexuality, of reincarnation, of cyclical time, and so on. From later antiquity, moreover, the metaphysical framework that articulated the primacy of the One and the descent or emanation of being into corporeal becoming,

1 See Dennis F. Lackner, ‘The Camaldolese Academy: Ambrogio Traversari, Marsilio Ficino and the Christian Platonic Tradition’, in Michael Allen and Valery Rees, with Martin Davies (eds), Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 15–44; Anthony Levi, ‘Ficino, Augustine and the Pagans’, ibid., pp. 99–114.

31 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 31–44. © 2008 Springer.

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material extension and, ultimately, non-being had been interpreted, because of its series of subordinations of the lower to the higher, at least potentially, as an Arian system. Marsilio Ficino, the most eminent of the Renaissance Platonists, had to exercise all his subtlety to argue that two passages at least in Plato’s Letters, one in the second letter at 312E, the other in the sixth at 323D, were interpretable as Trinitarian in content, and only then in the elliptical and enigmatic manner of a prophet—necessarily so, since the full Trinitarian revelation was bestowed on mankind only by Christ.2 Ficino felt entitled, that is, to read back into Plato meanings which Plato had not fully articulated himself but only seen ‘through a glass darkly’ in the famous metaphor of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians 13:12. Besides the Trinitarian, other heresies haunt Renaissance Neoplatonism. Most notably there is the Pelagian heresy with its insistence, central indeed to the tradition of the sage and the philosopher, the holy men of the academy, the lyceum and the stoa, that one’s own moral effort can lead to mental clarity and thence to illumination; can lead, that is, to the flight of the charioteer of the soul, in the imagery of the famous mythical hymn of the Phaedrus, to the very rim of the intellectual heaven, thence to gaze from afar at the pure intelligibles, the Ideas in their collective splendour as the Truth. Though ancient Neoplatonism, beginning with Plotinus’ successor, Iamblichus, had reintroduced the notion of mediation, of soteriology, of the importance of prayer and theurgy, of ritual and of inner emptying,3 the true hero of Plotinus himself, the founder of Neoplatonism, is the empowered philosopher, the self-liberating mystic who embarks on the ultimate flight of the alone to the alone, in the memorable phrasing of the sixth Ennead’s conclusion. The positions taken by Renaissance Neoplatonists with regard to heresy are in fact complex and manifold, and predictably they depend upon whom one focuses. Take the controversial Byzantine theologian, George Gemistos Plethon, who was one of the Byzantine emperor’s chief advisors and who made a great impression on the Florentines during the ecumenical council of Ferrara/Florence in 1438–1443, the abortive attempt to reconcile the Roman and Greek churches. He was probably a Neoplatonising monist but he was accused by rabid enemies of being a polytheist, and a crypto-Moslem (hardly compatible positions);4 and he did compose and perform some remarkable hymns to the sun and light and to abstractions in imitation of the ancient Neoplatonic hymns by Proclus, Synesius 2 See my ‘Ficino’s Theory of the Five Substances and the Neoplatonists’ Parmenides’, Journal of Medieval & Renaissance Studies 12 (1982), 19–44, now in Plato’s Third Eye: Studies in Marsilio Ficino’s Metaphysics and Its Sources (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995) as No. IX. 3 Christopher Celenza, ‘Late Antiquity and Florentine Platonism: the “Post-Plotinian” Ficino’, in Allen and Rees, Marsilio Ficino, pp. 71–98. 4 C.M. Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes (Oxford: OUP, 1986); Milton Anastos, ‘Pletho’s Calendar and Liturgy and Pletho and Islam’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 4 (1948), pp. 183–305; and John Monfasani, ‘Platonic Paganism in the Fifteenth Century’, in his Byzantine Scholars in Renaissance Italy: Cardinal Bessarion and Other Emigrés (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995) as No. X, with further references.

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and others. Or take Giovanni Pico della Mirandola who made his egotistical entrée into the intellectual world by inviting all comers to papal Rome to challenge his defence of 900 theses in the manner of a Parisian university debate (though it was usual in Paris to defend just one or two propositions). Included in these 900 were 13 propositions which a committee appointed by the Roman Curia found questionable and some as heterodox. Pico, headstrong, brilliant and aristocratic, rushed to a defence of these 13 propositions which the committee then condemned as unquestionably heretical. They included items that dealt with the real presence in the Mass and the magic of sacramental transformation, with the questions of whether Christ really descended into hell and whether we can truly worship the Cross, and with the role for a Christian, and specifically in Christology, of Cabala.5 Or take as a third and final example the strange prophetic figure Giovanni ‘Mercurio’ da Correggio, a Platonic-Hermetist, who rode on a white ass through the streets of Rome on Palm Sunday 1484, the year of a grand conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter. Clothed in a blood-stained linen mantle and with a crown of thorns topped by a silver disc in the shape of the crescent moon, and accompanied by crowds of people bearing palm branches, he made his way first to St. John’s in the Lateran and then via the Campo dei Fiori to the high altar amazingly of St. Peter’s itself, urging repentance before the coming millennium, while striking a skull in a basket with a reedstaff, and proclaiming that he was the Angel of Wisdom, Pimander, the divine being who appears to the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice great Mercury, at the beginning of the Corpus Hermeticum.6 The Florentine Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), however, is a particularly interesting case since he was charged late in his immensely productive scholarly and philosophical career by detractors in the Curia with resurrecting the world of the pagans, their mysteries, magic and demonology, and this despite the fact that he was a priest, a venerable canon of Florence’s cathedral, and at one point a Medicean candidate for the bishopric of Cortona. For Ficino spent his 5 See Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tsade, the Closed Mem, and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel’, in Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (eds), Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 25–76. For Pico in general, see now Leonardo Quaquarelli and M.V. Dougherty, Piciana: Bibliografia del XIX e XX secolo (Florence: Olschki, 2007). 6 Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Marsilio Ficino e Lodovico Lazzarelli: Contributo alla diffuzione delle idee ermetiche nel Rinascimento’, now in his Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, vol. I (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1956), pp. 221–247; ‘Ancora per Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio’, ibid., pp. 249–257; and ‘Lodovico Lazzarelli e Giovanni da Correggio, due ermetici del Quattrocento e il manuscritto II. D. 4 della Biblioteca comunale degli Ardenti di Viterbo’, now in his Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, vol. III (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1993), pp. 207–225; also David B. Ruderman, ‘Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio’s Appearance in Italy as Seen Through the Eyes of an Italian Jew’, Renaissance Quarterly, 28 (1975), 309–22; and Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), with further references. In the Renaissance the first fourteen treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum were known collectively, following Ficino, as the Pimander.

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whole Neoplatonising life on the very borders of heterodoxy, even though his work strikes us at first glance as massively Christian and as being in the direct line of the great Scholastics and their summae.7 His magnum opus, the Platonic Theology (first published in 1482), is just such a summa, albeit a summa platonica; and it invokes at every turn medieval premises and argumentation, quaestiones and quodlibeta.8 Yet, its very title also invokes the magisterial work of the fifth-century Proclus, who, though an enemy of the Christians and the last of the pagan Neoplatonists, shaped in many fundamental ways, ironically so perhaps, the later Augustinian tradition. Even Ficino’s subtitle for the Platonic Theology, ‘on the immortality of the soul’, is not without its Janus faces since it looks to the title of an early treatise of Augustine and simultaneously to that of a treatise (Enneads 4.7) by Plotinus—Plotinus who was in Ficino’s eyes almost, or in all but name, a Church Father.9 For all his pastoral and educational reaching out, Ficino was locked, however, into the elitism intrinsic to the notion that knowledge, a secret and difficult knowledge, a gnosis, is the key to enlightenment and therefore to salvation. But the path to gnosis, though perfected by Christ, had a distant origin, and Ficino was one of the first Renaissance authors to champion the notion of a secret, esoteric, and perennial wisdom (as Agostino Steuco would later call it) that preceded and prepared the way for Christianity as the climactic Platonic revelation. As such it paralleled the Mosaic wisdom transmitted to the Hebrews by the Pentateuch, by the secrets of the Mosaic oral tradition later inscribed in the books of the Cabala, and by the revelations of Moses’ successors, the psalmists and the prophets.10 For symbolic and numerological reasons Ficino propounded the idea that Plato was the sixth in a succession of gentile sages, six being the sum of its integers and the product of its factors and thus, according to the arithmological tradition, the perfect number.11 It was also the number of Jupiter, of the days of biblical creation, of the links in Homer’s golden chain from which hangs the pendant world (which the Neoplatonists interpreted allegorically), and of the six primary ontological categories in the Sophist (essence, being, identity, alterity, rest 7 For a lucid introduction to Ficino’s non-Scholastic embrace of pagan wisdom, see James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1990), pp. 280–287; idem, ‘Marsilio Ficino as a Critic of Scholasticism’, Vivens Homo 5 (1994), 325–333, reprinted in his collection Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, Volume II: Platonism (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2004), pp. 459–470. 8 See the introduction to the new six-volume I Tatti edition and translation by James Hankins and myself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–2006)—all Platonic Theology references are to this edition. 9 See H. D. Saffrey, ‘Florence, 1492: The Reappearance of Plotinus’, Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996), 488–508; and my Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation (Florence: Olschki, 1998), pp. 90–92. 10 Ibid., pp. 1–49. In the following sections, I am drawing upon my Ficino entry in Wouter J. Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 360–367. 11 Allen, Synoptic Art, pp. 25–26.

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and motion). Indeed, the hexad was such an authoritative category for charting the gentile succession of sages that Ficino had to adjust its members, since he had many more sages than slots available for them; but eventually he decided on Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras and Plato. This is remarkable on several counts. It insists on the primacy of Zoroaster as effectively the first Platonist avant le mot, with a number of implications as we shall see. It omits such important figures as Socrates, Timaeus, Parmenides and Empedocles whose dicta Ficino often quoted as Platonic; it also omits the sibyls whose authority he accepted and in whose company he included Diotima, Socrates’ teacher in the metaphysics of love.12 And in the Neoplatonic manner, it underscores Plato’s Pythagorean wisdom, a wisdom embodied in the aurea dicta and symbola which Ficino found in Iamblichus’s Life of Pythagoras. Let us turn, however, to Orpheus whom Ficino knew from the many fragments quoted in Plato’s works and in the works of his commentators, and from the 87 Orphic Hymns now thought to be products of later antiquity but that he and his contemporaries believed authentic. From early on, when he first translated them, he treated these Hymns as sacred but dangerous texts.13 Certainly they testified to Orpheus being the David of the gentiles, and his hymns, their pagan psalms; and they invoked the attributes of the deities they addressed in an aretology, a listing of virtues, hiding under a polytheistic rind a monotheistic core (a much revered prefatory palinode explained away the polytheism). But they also appeared to invoke demonic powers; and Ficino was careful to circulate only a few fragments in his Latin translation to his close friend, Martinus Uranius.14 Orpheus himself, though Plato’s Symposium 179D condemns him as faint-hearted for his refusal to die for Eurydice (etymologised as ‘breadth of [the] judgment’), had been the master of incantation, the paradigmatic magus who bent the natural world to his will and whose music derived from the fundamental harmonies of the cosmos. Ficino was himself flatteringly addressed by various poet-friends as another Orpheus, and the figure of Orpheus was painted on an ‘Orphic’ lyre he played in his Platonic hymn recitals—apparently to great effect, since onlookers describe him as musically entranced and entrancing. At the onset of his career as a Medicean teacher and sage he seems indeed to have presided over a kind of neo-Orphic revival.15 Orphic incantation became the key to his conception of Platonic or Platonizing poetry and, in general, of musical images and models, and the affective bearer, the perfect medium effectively of philosophy, of worship and of trance. Nonetheless Orpheus was subordinate to the two most ancient of the sages: first to Hermes Trismegistus, whose Pimander (Corpus Hermeticum) Ficino 12

Ibid., 24 ff. Ibid., pp. 98–100. 14 See my ‘Summoning Plotinus: Ficino, Smoke, and the Strangled Chickens’, in Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Reconsidering the Renaissance: Papers from the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1992), pp. 63–88 at 73–74, now in Plato’s Third Eye as No. XIV. 15 Ibid., pp. 82–86. 13

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continually cited and whose Asclepius he knew from the Latin translation attributed to Apuleius, as well as from hostile notices in Augustine and more sympathetic ones in Lactantius. However, while Hermes’ personal authority remained intact, Ficino retained a guarded approach to Egypt’s religious tradition. This may have been partly because Egypt appears in the Bible as the land of exile even though Moses could have taught or been taught by the Egyptian priests (and here determining whether Hermes was coeval with Moses or succeeded him was critical, though Ficino never entertained a later view that Hermes preceded Moses!). Egypt was also known, however, for its zoomorphic deities and pagan rites, and Hermes had devised a sacred, hieroglyphic alphabet utilizing animals, birds and plants to convey his wisdom.16 The strange little myth of Theuth and Ammon in Plato’s Phaedrus 274B ff may have played a decisive role here; for it portrays Ammon (Jupiter) rebuking Theuth (identified with Hermes) for inventing writing and thereby opening up the possibility of debasing or profaning teachings that should only be transmitted orally, in the fullness of time, by a master who has properly prepared his disciples for their reception and comprehension. An apotropaic story also attributed to Pythagoras, it created a dilemma for a committed interpreter such as Ficino, who was faced with voluminous texts of, and commentaries on, a wisdom that from the outset he felt impelled to explain to everyone and yet considered sacred, and thus needing protection from the eyes of the vulgar. It set private, esoteric teaching steadfastly against public exposition, and so went to the very heart of his commitment to educating and converting the elite, the ingeniosi of Florence.17 Prior even to Hermes, however, was Zoroaster. Ficino must have derived this notion in the first instance from Pletho. But he was also following the odd sympathetic references to Zoroaster in Plato’s works, notably in the First Alcibiades 121E ff, and in the works of such Platonising thinkers as Plutarch. He was responding too to the authority of the Chaldaean Oracles, a late antique compilation, which he and others deemed authentically Zoroastrian and whose derivative and eclectic Middle Platonism was therefore assumed to be the original Platonism.18 For Ficino, however, Zoroaster’s primacy was pre-eminently something that highlighted the centrality of the Epiphany and the Magi.19 The three wise Chaldaeans who had come from the East, following a star, were the followers of Zoroaster, whose very name in Greek has the word ‘star’ in it, and who was supposedly the founder of both astronomy/astrology and the magic associated with it. Thus they symbolised the coming of the ancient wisdom to the cradle

16

Allen, Synoptic Art, pp. 26–31, 35. Ibid., pp. 17–24. 18 For the status and history the Chaldaean Oracles for Ficino and his contemporaries, see Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘The Pseudo-Zoroastrian Oracles in the Renaissance’, Studies in the Renaissance 4 (1957), 7–30; also his ‘Hermetica Philosophica’ and ‘Oracula Chaldaica’ in Paul Oskar Kristeller, Cataloguus Translationum et Commentariorum, vol. 1, (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1960), pp. 137–151, 157–164. 19 Allen, Synoptic Art, pp. 31–41. 17

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of a new philosopher-king-magus: the new Zoroaster. Moreover, having set out from the very land from which Abraham had first departed, they symbolised the reunion of the two ancient branches of wisdom, the Hebrew and the Zoroastrian, stemming from Noah’s sons (since the Ark had come to rest allegedly in a province of Persia—and Persia, Chaldaea and Babylon were often confused). Insofar as Zoroaster was also, in Ficino’s view,20 the discoverer of writing, since he used the stars and constellations, and not animals, birds, and plants, as the ‘letters’ of his sacred alphabet, he was, in a way, the sage who had transcribed the wisdom of the stars and had brought the stars into men’s language, indeed had taught men to write with the stars. Hence, the Magi were primarily astronomer–astrologers and practitioners of a star-based magic, whose knowledge of the heavens had enabled them to follow a star, or rather for Ficino a comet,21 and to find the Christ child in order to worship him as the Lord of the stars and constellations, the Zoroastrian sage, the supreme Platonic guardian in Bethlehem.22 Thus, to Plato’s Pythagorean, Orphic and Hermetic predecessors, we should add Zoroaster as the original priscus theologus, the founder of the ancient gentile wisdom that Ficino himself was dedicated to reconciling with the theology of Abraham as perfected in Christ. The history of gnosis after Plato was also subject to revision by Ficino, since he believed that the Proclus-inspired writings nowadays attributed to the Pseudo-Dionysius of the late fifth century had been composed by the Dionysius mentioned in Acts 17:34 as an Athenian converted by St. Paul’s preaching on the Areopagus, in other words by a thinker of the first century.23 Since one of the Dionysian treatises is a masterpiece of a negative theology inspired by the second part of Plato’s Parmenides as interpreted by Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus and Proclus, this had the effect of transferring the fully fledged late Neoplatonism of Proclus back to the time immediately following the Ascension. Suddenly the opening of St. John’s Gospel, the epistles of St. Paul, and the Pseudo-Areopagitian treatises all coalesced to form an impressive body of Christian–Platonic writing, a body that indeed signified the perfection of the Platonic wisdom in the Christian revelation, though it was articulated anachronistically in terms of Proclan metaphysics and its host of distinctions and subdivisions.24 Given the centrality of the via negativa, moreover, it had the effect of foregrounding Platonic dialectics as a mystical rather than a logical instrument, and thus of transforming the old Socratic scepticism or agnosticism into a kind of super- or supra-gnosis.25

20

In his Philebus Commentary 1.29 Allen (ed.), p. 271. See his sermon on the Stella Magorum in his Opera Omnia (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1576) pp. 489–491. 22 Allen, Synoptic Art, pp. 37–38. 23 For an introduction to the situation in fifteenth-century Italy, see John Monfasani, ‘Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in Mid-Quattrocento Rome’, now in his Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), as No. X. 24 Allen, Synoptic Art, pp. 67–72. 25 Ibid., pp. 187–190. 21

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This pivotal pre-dating of the Pseudo-Dionysius in turn impacted Ficino’s perspective on the centuries we now assign to the Middle Platonists, and led him to embrace the notion that the Ammonius Saccas who was Plotinus’ teacher had been a Christian Platonist, and that the Origen whom Porphyry mentions as Plotinus’ fellow disciple was the Christian heresiarch, author of the De principiis and Contra Celsum.26 Consequently, Plotinus emerges as a Christianised Platonist, if not as a Christian. This was all-defining given the centrality of the Enneads in Ficino’s own understanding of Plato, and his belief that Plotinus was Plato’s beloved intellectual son ‘in whom’—thus Ficino imagines Plato using the very words used by God according to the Gospels—‘I am well pleased’.27 Ficino’s supreme scholarly achievement indeed was to render the 54 treatises of Plotinus into Latin, and to devote his interpretational life to arguing that Plotinian and Christian metaphysics were almost one and the same: that Plotinus had written a summa platonica just as Aquinas would later write a summa theologica. Moreover, succumbing to a temptation common to many historians and interpreters, Ficino read most of Proclus’ subtle distinctions back into Plotinus too, and thence into Plato, the Hermetica, the Orphic Hymns and the Oracula Chaldaica, thus creating an ancient Platonic, but in effect an heretical Proclan, theology that had begun with Zoroaster but had been perfected in the works of Plato, of the Christian Dionysius, and the crypto-Christian Plotinus. Finally, since so much of Proclus’s metaphysics had become incorporated into medieval theology by way of the Pseudo-Areopagitian writings—and, indeed, had become embedded in the Augustinian mystical traditions of the Middle Ages—Ficino was able to argue with conviction that the time was ripe for a Christian–Platonic revival that would unite wisdom and faith, philosophy and revelation, as they had once been united in the golden age,28 the pre-Noachian time of Enoch himself who had walked with God. Interestingly, this whole fabric is built on some fundamental mistakes in attribution and dating; but they were mistakes that the vast majority of Ficino’s learned contemporaries also shared. Accordingly, Ficino was able first to present a Neoplatonic view of the history of philosophy and of Christianity, and then to propel that history back into the remotest past, into the time recorded in Genesis itself. Ficino was also familiar with a number of medical, pharmacological and medical-astrological texts, some of them of Arabic provenance, that formed part of his intellectual training as a doctor—a role he never abandoned, since he regarded himself, in the Socratic sense, as a doctor of souls, a medicus even to the Medici. Many of these were pregnant with heresies. His adventurous De vita libri tres of 1489 in particular provoked a Curial investigation, though it was called off. It is a treatise in three books on regimen, diet, abstinence, salves, beneficent powders and sprays, aromas, psychosomatic exercises, meditation and mood-elevation

26

Ibid., pp. 68–74. In the closing exhortation of his preface to his Plotinus Commentary, Opera, p. 1548.1. 28 Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 289–291. 27

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techniques and astrological and demonological attuning.29 The third book, however, entitled De vita coelitus comparanda (‘On bringing one’s life into harmony with the heavens’), is a rich and complex exploration of scholarly melancholy, holistic medicine, psychiatry and demonology. It makes continual reference to zodiacal and planetary influences, to stellar oppositions and conjunctions, to astrological election, to the theory of universal sympathies and to synastry, the assumption that particular people who are born under the same planet, under the same astral configurations and under the same higher demons, are therefore star twins. Additionally, Ficino treats of the therapeutic powers of talismans and amulets when properly made and inscribed; but he is careful to draw both upon scholastic notions of acquired form and the hylomorphic structuring of corporeal and (contra Aquinas) incorporeal entities,30 and upon the Galenic and subsequently medieval notions of the vital, vegetable and animal spirits that can be refined, like sugar, into the pure spirit. The spirit’s health is the goal of all the various interlocking therapies, since the body will be well, that is, perfectly tempered, if the spiritus is well. But this is a troubling because ambivalent concept: (a) because it attempts to mediate between the intelligible and sensible worlds as the ultimate copula, and (b) because it has a rich set of occult and magical associations.31 Ficino sees this spirit both as an image of the soul (like the meteor’s tail) and as an envelope, vehicle or aethereal quasi-soul quasi-body linking soul to body, or rather animating body or corporealizing soul. It functions as the soul’s chariot, first as the ‘body’ in which we endure the cleansing purgatorial fires, and then as the ‘glorified body’ of the resurrection and of entry into paradise. Ficino believed that Zoroaster had been referring to this spirit or pneuma in such Chaldaean oracles as no. 104, which exhorts us not to add depth (that is, three-dimensional corporeality) to what is plane (that is, to the planar twodimensional spirit); and no. 158, which asserts that even the pneuma (idolum) will be with us ‘in the region of utmost clarity’,32 with the implication for Ficino that Zoroaster is affirming the resurrection of the glorified body.33 Governing the amulets, talismans, salves and drugs, and the aethereal spirit alike are the astrological powers and influences, ever-changing in their dance; and governing these in turn are the musical consonances and harmonies that rule the

29 It has been well edited and translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1989). 30 Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino’, Renaissance Quarterly 37 (1984), 523–554. o 31 See the various papers in Marta Fattori and Massimo Bianchi (eds), Spiritus: IV Colloquio internazionale del lessico intellettuale europeo (Roma, 7–9 gennaio 1983) (Rome, 1984). 32 Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Iamblichus, Synesius and the Chaldaean Oracles in Marsilio Ficino’s De vita libri tres: Hermetic Magic or Neoplatonic Magic’, in James Hankins, John Monfasani, and Frederick Purnell Jr. (ed.), Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1987), pp. 441–455. 33 See my ‘Marsilio Ficino, Levitation, and the Ascent to Capricorn’, in Bruno Pinchard and Pierre Servet (eds), Education, Transmission, Rénovation à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2006), pp. 223–240 and especially pp. 232–236.

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universe. Plato had described these in the Timaeus, in a famous passage at 35B ff. (cf. 43D ff.) on the two quaternaries of 1–2–4–8 and 1–3–9–27 (traditionally seen as a Greek lambda) used by his Demiurge to create the mathematical-musical structure of the World-Soul, both Demiurge and World-Soul being difficult to integrate as concepts into Christian creationism. This Soul itself, in Ficino’s speculative view, animated a World-Spirit that mediated between it and the World-Body; and to this World-Spirit our own spirit was originally attuned, or rather tuned literally to the point of vibrating with it like a violin string. An integral part of the healer’s training therefore consisted in learning to understand a complex pneumatology with reference both to the cosmos (the great man, according to the famous Macrobian phrase), and to the human being, the little world. Indeed, rather than being a soul chained to or entombed in a body, according to the hallowed Platonic and Christian images, man is to be identified here with his spirit in this non-Pauline, quasi-physical or medical sense: a spirit imaged as a talismanic inscription, an airy powder, an attar of roses, a musical chord, a diffused light, a planetary ray even, and subject to the influences of salves, songs, spells, incantations and prayers. Ficino often responds to this world of ‘spiritual’ therapies in fact not as a realm of insidious evil or of base matter but as a bountiful pharmacopoeia of lenitives and cures, a musical, a magical concordia discors. Other ancient or medieval texts Ficino studied carefully treat of aspects of arithmosophy and arithmology (Theon of Smyrna), oneirology (Synesius), angelology and demonology (Porphyry, Proclus and Psellus), and the occult (Iamblichus), all of which raise heretical issues or call at least upon ambiguous terms and metaphors. Iamblichus in particular was an authority whom Ficino encountered at the onset of his Platonic studies; and among his first attempts at translating philosophical Greek were the four Iamblichian treatises that constitute a kind of Pythagorean handbook, dealing with Pythagoras’ life and with various mathematical and numerological issues. The De Mysteriis probably served as his basic introduction to occult lore and to the notion of theurgy, of god-making, that is, converting oneself and others—even wood, clay and stone statues—into gods.34 While he identified the highest order or chorus of demons in ancient theology with the angels of Christianity, he also inherited a hierarchy of lower orders of demons who were principally beneficent spirits caring for the earth. Said by Hesiod to be 30,000 in number, they were divided into as many legions as there are stars in the night sky and with as many individual demons again in each legion, and were ruled by the 12 princes in the 12 zodiacal signs.35 By virtue of their intermediate nature between the gods and men, they dwelt in the intermediate zone of the air, particularly of the upper or fiery region of air often identified with the aether; and their mandate embraced the airy realm of sleep and the production of omens, oracles and portentous dreams. Essentially airy 34 35

Celenza, ‘Late Antiquity’, pp. 77–80, 94–97. Ficino, Platonic Theology 4.1.15.

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beings, though they could be found throughout elemental creation, the good demons were called by the ancients ‘genii’, writes Ficino, because ‘they were the tireless leaders of men’s ingeniousness’, being ‘agile in their motion, perspicacious in their sense, and endowed with a marvellous knowledge of things’.36 They were apportioned and linked to the seven Ptolemaic planets, and assigned the guardianship and ministration of lunar, venerean, mercurial, solar, martian, jovian and saturnian entities (collective or individual) such as kingdoms, institutions, homes, places, people, animals, plants, and stones. The Jews, for instance, along with melancholics, were supposedly saturnian; all scribes, keen-scented dogs and the city of Hermopolis were mercurial; Socrates, lions and cockerels were solar; and so on. Their airy nature meant they were particularly sensitive to aromas, mists, fumes and smokes. Thus the fumigation instructions accompanying many of the Orphic Hymns, quite apart from having other invocatory dimensions, would make the chanting of such hymns attractive to the class of demons attending the deity who was the subject of the hymn, since they could materialise, if only momentarily, in the wafts of burning aromatics ascending from the thuribels, hearths, altars or lamps used for igniting fumigants. A solar demon for instance would be drawn to the eighth Hymn to Helios, which was sung to the smoke of incense and manna; and a jovian demon would be drawn to the nineteenth Hymn to Zeus the Thunderer sung to the smoke of styrax (while some of the hymns have identical fumigant instructions, the majority prescribe ‘aromatics’ generally, and some lack any instructions at all).37 However, as creatures essentially of light, the beneficent demons were most drawn to, and acted as, mediums of, light: light scintillating from the faceting of gems and crystals, reflecting from pools and mirrors (natural or man made), refracting through lenses, beaming from lamps and lanterns, haloing clouds and in shimmering mirages. Indeed the entire realm of optics was theirs, and necessarily so, given that Ficino thought of light as in some ways the spirit, or as linked to the spirit, of the natural world, its source being in the sun but its essence radiating through the length and breadth of the cosmos as life itself, as visible animation. In the Platonic Theology 8.13.1, citing the followers of both Orpheus and Heraclitus, Ficino actually calls light ‘visible soul’ and soul ‘invisible light’. Hence, the importance for him of Zoroastrian and Hermetic light worship or of light in worship; and the haunting significances too of the reference to God in St. James’ Epistle 1:17 as ‘the father of lights’ and of the noonday setting with the stridulating cicadas of Plato’s Phaedrus. These harmonising insects Ficino identified with demons, in the particular sense now of men who had entered, after philosophising for the requisite three millennia, a quasi-immaterial, lightfilled, demonic condition, being ruled entirely by their intelligences and about to repossess their glorified spirit–star bodies as their envelopes or vehicles.38 36

Ibid., 16.7.17–18, 18.10.3. Allen, ‘Summoning Plotinus’ passim. 38 In his Phaedrus Commentary summa 35 Allen (ed.), pp. 192–197. 37

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All light demons, whether erstwhile philosophers or planetary spirits, were benevolent, intellectual, even musical presences, higher pneuma-borne souls whom we will ultimately accompany in the universal cavalcade Jupiter leads across the intellectual heaven, thence to gaze from afar at the intelligible beings, the Ideas in their collectivity as both the unfolding or radiance of Beauty, and the enfolding or incandescence of Truth.39 This demonological world is not confined, furthermore, to aromatic, musical or intellectual invocation in hymns or prayers at such threshold times as dawn, noonday, and dusk. For Ficino was also fascinated by ancient idolum theory. On the one hand, he could look to the materialist view, articulated most memorably by Lucretius that effluvia or material images, idola, emanated from all objects, and were seen most obviously in mirrors (hence, the Aristotelian story that mirrors bled in the presence of menstruating women).40 On the other hand, he could look to the enigmatic references in Plotinus, Proclus, the Orphica and the Chaldaean Oracles, to the idolum as the densest and most visible form of the spiritual body, to its being in some respects the shadow self or the other residual self. Plotinus’ references to Homer’s account of the shade, the idolum, of Hercules in the Enneads 1.1.12 and 4.3.27 were especially notable since they pointed to his readers’ own demonic duality, their condition not so much as souls tied to bodies, but as higher souls tied to lower secondary souls, that is to say, to images or reflections of themselves. Life was seen now as the Platonic mirror, however distorting, to which Socrates alludes in the Republic 596DE when he speaks of the sophistical or ‘easy way’ in which the created world might be reproduced catoptrically: You could do it most quickly if you should choose to take a mirror and carry it about everywhere. You will speedily produce the sun and all the things in the sky, the earth and yourself and the other animals. Following Plotinus, Ficino interpreted this as an enigmatic reference to the World Body as it reflects the idolum of the World Soul, an idolum that is in turn identified with the twice-born Dionysus, lord of ecstasy and dance. Optics, accordingly, and its accompanying plane geometry, and especially—given the section 53C–55C in the Timaeus—the geometry of right triangles and the Pythagorean theorem that determines the squares and square-roots, the ‘powers’ of their sides, became the key to understanding the nature of our reflected, catoptric demi-lives as Dionysian images tied to images, to idola and effluvia. It also became the key to understanding the demons and, by implication, our own ascending, philosophical, Apollonian selves, as beings who can pass like Alice through the terpsichorean illusions of the mirror plane into the world of intellectual, of uranian light. 39

Ibid., Chapter 11. See his Sophist Commentary summa 46 Allen (ed.), pp. 270–277; also his De amore 7.4 Marcel (ed.), p. 247 and his notes from the twelfth treatise of Proclus’ Republic Commentary (Opera, pp. 941–942), with a reference to Aristotle’s On Dreams 2.459b27 ff. 40

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In such an ascent, man will again become the Hermetic and Orphic ‘spark’, the ‘colleague’ of a star that we once were, before our precipitation from Cancer, the Moon’s constellation and ‘the gate of mortals’, down through the nest of planetary spheres.41 As man ascends again towards Capricorn, Saturn’s constellation and ‘the gate of the gods’, he assumes the demonic, stellar, luminous body that is eternally his, and that Zoroaster had assumed when he devised an astral ‘alphabet’. For man, so Ficino writes in a generic letter to the human race, is an earthly star enveloped in a cloud, while a star is a heavenly man.42 Ficino was voyaging through the straits of unorthodoxy out into the open seas of the ancient Gnostic heresies, including Manicheanism, which had been attacked by various Church Fathers, pre-eminently Augustine, and interestingly by Plotinus before him, Ficino’s greatest Platonic authority next to Plato himself. That such esoteric and magical speculations did not land him in serious trouble is a measure both of his personal diplomacy (testifying to his commitment to accommodation) and of the authority and weight of his other philosophical and theological works. A century later Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for notions that were no more revolutionary. Ficino bequeaths us both the venerable Christian emblem of man as viator and such pagan emblems of him as a cicada, an Orpheus with his lyre strung to the planetary modes, a Hermetic talisman or seal, a Zoroastrian magus, a spark struck from the flint of dionysian matter, a starry charioteer in a biga or quadriga. For his audacious attempt to reconcile Platonism with Christianity in the event went far beyond Platonism: it became a life-long ecumenical quest to introduce into orthodoxy an encyclopedic range of unorthodox spiritual, magical, and occult beliefs keyed to the theme of the soul’s ascent from the cave of illusion, and keyed too to what was always a fundamentally Plotinian search for the ‘flower’ in the mind, the oneness that is for him the object of intellectual and of spiritual ascent. This meditative ideal, a strange blend of Plotinian and Proclan metaphysics and Iamblichan daemonism, has now been completely lost to Christianity and one might well argue that Ficino’s whole Platonic endeavour was heretical. Its goals after all were to become a sage not a saint, a magus not a worshipper, a choiring angel not a sinner praying for forgiveness; and accordingly to achieve the ascent from human depth into daemonic and spiritual planarity, a corporeal levitation even from the void of darkness into the purity, into the mystical ‘glory’ of light.43 For Ficino, predictably, one of its most important consequences was to draw our attention to Christ’s Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, as recounted by Matthew 17.1–9 and Mark 9.2–9, as the supreme Platonic moment in the Christian New Testament.44 For his transfiguration on that ‘high mountain’, when ‘his face

41 Ficino, Platonic Theology 18.5.2, citing Macrobius, In Somnium Scipionis 1.12.1–2 (ed. Willis); also his letter to Lorenzo in the tenth book of his Letters (Opera, p. 917.1). See Allen, ‘Marsilio Ficino, Levitation’, pp. 224, 227 and 239. 42 Ficino, Opera, p. 659. 43 Ficino, Platonic Theology 13.4.15 analyzed in Allen, ‘Marsilio Ficino, Levitation’, pp. 232–236. 44 Allen, ‘Marsilio Ficino, Levitation’, pp. 239–230.

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did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light’ and when Moses and Elias appeared with him, offers us the hope of our own transfiguration, of our eventual return via saturnian Capricorn, the sign of contemplation, into the world, not just of the stars, but of light itself, whence originally we descended into the ever darkening, sublunar realms of generation and the elements. By that very token, however, Ficino also bears witness both to dimensions of the Christian experience quite other than those that are currently fashionable or even imaginable,45 and to the insistent call of an intellect-based philosophy that we must live in order to understand and understand in order to believe, and not, as in Anselm’s famous dictum, the reverse.

45 For an interesting but very different view, see James Hankins, ‘Religion and the Modernity of Renaissance Humanism’, in Angelo Mazzocco (ed.), Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 137–153.

CHAPTER 4

Stephen R.L. Clark

Going Naked into the Shrine: Herbert, Plotinus and the Constructive Metaphor

INTRODUCTION This paper forms part of a current project in which my friend Panayiota Vassilopoulou and I are studying Plotinus’ use of myth and metaphor. Our thesis is that this is not primarily descriptive, but rather constructive—or, as Gregory Shaw has put it, theurgic.1 John Dillon had made a similar suggestion, commenting on Plotinus, Enneads V.8.9 1: Here we are being called upon to use our imagination creatively, to attain to a purely intellectual conception. It is worthwhile, perhaps, to try to perform the exercise as Plotinus prescribes. I have attempted it repeatedly, and the sticking point is always the instruction, once one has conjured up the universe (as a luminous, diaphanous globe, with all its parts distinct and functioning), then to think away the spatiality [‘aphelon ton onkon labe’]—and not just by shrinking it! It is in fact an excellent spiritual exercise. Calling upon God here is no empty formality. If it is done effectively, it has a quasi-theurgic result: ‘He may come, bringing his own cosmos, with all the gods that dwell in it—He who is the one God, and all the gods, where each is all, blending into a unity, distinct in powers, but all one god, in virtue of that divine power of many facets.’ In other words, if you perform the exercise correctly, you will achieve

1 Gregory Shaw, ‘Eros and Arithmos: Pythagorean Theurgy in Iamblichus and Plotinus’, Ancient Philosophy, 19 (1999), pp. 121–143. My current project is greatly assisted by the Leverhulme Trust.

45 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 45–61. © 2008 Springer.

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Our project is to enquire into the grounds for thinking this is true, and so to comprehend the Plotinian tradition better. What exactly ‘theurgy’ (‘working with or on God’, by contrast with ‘theology’ or talking about God) meant to late antique philosophers is itself contentious, and the analogy is best treated cautiously. I shall not be dealing directly with that issue here. As a first step, we can say that the metaphors are to be regarded as ‘spiritual exercises’ of a kind more usually associated with other traditions of human thought than that of Greek Philosophy. To understand them better it is necessary to learn how Plotinus could reasonably have expected them to be practised by his contemporaries, and also how they have affected later creative thought. We may be supported in this undertaking by the memory of Edward Herbert’s (1583–1648) rebuke to two related errors: There has always existed at every period an incongruous and perverse class of professors who expounded with equal zeal and confidence both these doctrines at the same time; that we can know everything and that we can know nothing. The latter group says that truth lies hidden in a well, that we know one thing only, namely that we know nothing; and utters a hundred idle paradoxes of the same character, with the hope of acquiring a reputation for profundity. The former party, on the other hand, maintain with remarkable daring that the principles of the Universe can be deduced from the principles of thought, in spite of the fact that these refer only to us. They proclaim, with unaccountable disregard for the truth, that there is nothing which is not open to their understanding.3 We may not be able to work out all the truth, but need not despair of finding some things out.

2 John Dillon, ‘Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination’, in J.P. Mackey (ed.), Religious Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), pp. 55–64, reprinted in John Dillon’s, The Golden Chain (Aldershot: Variorum Press, 1990), §24, pp. 58–67. 3 Edward Herbert, Earl of Cherbury, De veritate, trans. M.H. Carré (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1937; 1st published 1624), p. 76. Whether Herbert himself had read Plotinus is not my concern: it is highly probable that he had (though there are no copies of the Enneads in the library of works in Greek and Latin he bequeathed to Jesus College Oxford: C.J. Fordyce and T.M. Knox, The Library of Jesus College, Oxford, with an Appendix on the Books Bequeathed Thereto by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1937), reprinted from the proceedings and papers of the Oxford Bibliographical Society vol. V, pt II—(a point kindly confirmed for me by the Jesus College Librarian, Sarah Cobbold). But the metaphors he uses, and the doctrines he expounds, are common currency. The important question is: what did they mean? Herbert’s debt to Renaissance Platonism is explored by R.D. Bedford, The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 87–129. It is worth adding that Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus do feature in the library.

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NAKEDNESS: THE METAPHOR In this paper I wish to concentrate on one particular metaphorical instruction which has had a long history, namely the ‘gymnosophistical’, and compare its use in Enlightenment thought with its Platonist origins. Consider Herbert: Those who would enter the shrine of truth must leave their trinkets, in other words their opinions, at the entrance, or as one might say in the cloakroom. They will find that everything is open or revealed to perception as long as they do not approach it with prejudice.4 And John Colet (1466–1519): Would anyone see truth? Then he must wholly strip and lay bare himself, laying aside all the thoughts of his mind … by which he deemed that he had learnt something.5 So also Theologia Germanica (late fourteenth century; first printed 1513): ‘who wishes to cast a glance into eternity must be quite pure, and wholly stripped and bare of all images’.6 And Meister Eckhart: ‘into the Naked Godhead none may get unless himself be Naked’.7 Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) also offered an interpretation of the metaphor: The God-seeing man … can always enter, naked and unencumbered with images, into the inmost part of his spirit. There he finds revealed an Eternal Light. … It [his spirit] is undifferentiated and without distinction, and therefore it feels nothing but the unity.8 The association of nakedness and the sacred goes back at least to Philo of Alexandria’s (fl. 40) allegory whereby the high priest must strip off the soul’s

4 Herbert, De veritate, p. 72. ‘Trinkets’ echoes an ancient pun: ‘to take off one’s ornaments (kosmos) is to take off the world (kosmos)’, so J.Z. Smith observes in ‘Garments of Shame’, History of Religions, 5 (1966), pp. 217–238; cited by Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (New York: Burns & Oates: Tunbridge Wells, 1989), p. 35. 5 Leland Miles, John Colet and the Platonic Tradition (London: Allen & Unwin 1961), p. 128, citing Lectures on Romans, p. 45. Miles judges the metaphor Ficinian, but gives no exact reference. Colet further associates this stripping with a spiritual circumcision: Miles ibid., p. 129, citing Exposition of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, p. 80. See Gillian Clark, ‘In the Foreskin of their Flesh’ in A. Hopkins and M. Wyke (eds), Roman Bodies (Rome: British School of Rome, 2005), pp. 43–54. 6 Miles, Carnal Knowing, p. 141. 7 Ibid., after Rufus Jones, The Flowering of Mysticism and the Friends of God in the 14th Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 77. The slogan echoes Jerome’s injunction ‘nudus nudum Jesum sequi’: Epistle 52.5, cited by Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing, p. 63. 8 Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage; The Book of the Supreme Truth; The Sparkling Stone, trans. C.A. Winschenk (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1916), pp. 185 f: cited by W.T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (Macmillan: London 1961), p. 94 (who, quite misleadingly, identifies that inner reality with ‘the pure self or ego’).

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tunic of opinion and imagery to enter the Holy of Holies, and ‘enter naked with no coloured borders or sound of bells, to pour out as a libation the blood of the soul and to offer as incense the whole mind to God our Saviour and Benefactor’.9 So also Plotinus (204–270): The attainment [of the good] is for those who go up to that higher world and are converted and strip off what we put on in our descent; (just as for those who go up to the celebrations of sacred rites there are purifications and strippings off of the clothes they wore before, and going up naked) until passing in the ascent all that is alien to the God, one sees with one’s self alone.10 Porphyry varied the destination: ‘Let us go stripped, without tunics, to the stadium, to compete in the Olympics of the soul. Stripping off is the starting point, without which the contest will not happen’.11 Stripping off for effortful action is a metaphor that may make sense—except of course that contemplation does not require that sort of effort, or straining after effect. The shrine metaphor, on the other hand, picks up the soul’s passivity before the unadorned truth—except that it is difficult at first to see how stripping might help the priest see clearly, and what needs to be stripped might more obviously be the object. The Naked Truth is more often distinguished from the Elaborated Lie, but in these passages it is the Lover that is naked. Some look to see the sweet Outlines And beauteous Forms that Love does wear. Some look to find out patches, paint, Bracelets & Stays and Powder’d Hair.12 Perhaps it is the Lover that is to be assessed? The people of the age of Cronos, in The Statesman, were not naked because they were destitute, but because they

9 Philo, Legum allegoria 2.56, Philo, with an English translation, ed. F.H. Colson and G.H. Whittaker, 10 vols (Loeb Classical Library) (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929–1962), I (1929), p. 259; idem, after Leviticus 16.1 ff. Philo, Legum allegoria 3.15, identifies the garments that cloak to logikon with opinion, fantasy and other parts of the irrational soul (see below). See also Philo, De gigantibus 12.53–4 (ed. cit., II, 471–3), ‘only those who have put off all the things of creation and the innermost veil and covering of mere opinion’ can enter the invisible regions. 10 Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A.H. Armstrong, 7 vols (London: Heinemann, 1978–1988), I.6 [1].7; see also Proclus, The Elements of Theology, ed. and trans. E.R. Dodds (2nd edn Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1963), pp. 182–183: Proposition 209: ‘[The soul] ascends by putting off all those faculties tending to temporal process with which it was invested in its descent, and becoming clean and bare (kathara kai gumne) of all such faculties as serve the uses of the process’. 11 Porphyry, On Abstinence op.cit.: p. 43 (Book I, para.31). This metaphor was literally enacted when Christians were sent naked into the arena: so the martyr Febronia (in Diocletian’s reign) accepted what was meant to be humiliation, saying, ‘What athlete entering the contest at Olympia engages in battle wrapped up in all his clothes? … Should I not meet torture with a naked body, until I have vanquished your father Satan?’ (cited by Miles, Carnal Knowing, p. 58). 12 William Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’, in G. Keynes (ed.), Complete Writings (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 447.

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had nothing that they needed to conceal. Consider also Plato’s story of Glaucus, picked up by George Berkeley in Siris:13 to see the soul we must knock off its encrustations. That is how we shall be judged by Minos (who is also naked): stripped of the misleading evidence of health, or wealth, or bodily beauty.14 In that earlier age, or in that other realm, no one has any need of such disguises. ‘The nakedness of Dionysus’, so Kofman paraphrases Nietzsche, ‘does not symbolize the very presence of Being in its truth, but the innocence of a life which has nothing to reproach itself for, which is strong enough not to be ashamed of its perspective and its evaluations, beautiful enough to accept and love itself without having to put on a mask’.15 Alternatively—and this may be closer to the Neo-Platonic usage—the people of Kronos’ age were ‘naked’ because they belong to the incorporeal realm, separate from this one not as an earlier aeon, but as a different world.16 But the passages of Philo, Plotinus, Colet and Herbert that I am addressing do not explicitly involve a judgement on the soul, nor even a recommendation to strip shame away, but rather advice to the soul on how to ‘see’ its Beloved. One answer may be that the naked may not see more clearly, but will certainly feel more accurately. The priest goes up into darkness, and needs all his skin as a sensorium: maybe Plotinus’ and others’ continued use of ‘sight’ as the crucial sense is inadvertent. We are instead to imagine that beauty is to be known, as it were, through touch, and being touched. As Henry points out, Plotinus does use ‘expressions which are more appropriate to the sense of touch than to the sense of vision’.17 Even the other—and to us more natural—association with nakedness may be intended: certainly Plotinus does occasionally speak, like other mystics, with distinctly erotic overtones. ‘The lover here below also has beauty in this

13 George Berkeley, Siris, 313–314: Collected Works, 9 vols, ed. A.A. Luce & T.E. Jessop (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1948) V, 145, citing Proclus’ Commentary on Alcibiades I, after Plato’s Republic 10.611c; see also Plotinus, Enneads I.1.12. 14 Plato, Gorgias 523c ff, after Empedocles fr.126DK. See J.M. Rist, Plotinus: the Road to Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 188–198. See also Philo, De providentia fr.2, 35: ed. cit., IX, 483. It may also not be wholly irrelevant that the boys and girls of Magnesia must dance together naked, ‘provided sufficient modesty and restraint are displayed by all concerned’ (Plato, Laws 6.772). 15 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. D. Large (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 96, after F. Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 295. 16 John Dillon, ‘The NeoPlatonic Exegesis of the Politicus Myth’, in C. Rowe (ed.), Reading the Statesman (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag 1995), observes that Proclus makes this symbolic use of the nakedness motif in his comments on the Statesman (Platonic Theology 5.7–8). 17 P. Henry, ‘The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought’ (1962), in Plotinus – The Enneads, trans. S. MacKenna (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. lxviii: see especially Enneads VI.9.8. See also George Wald, Self-Intellection and Identity in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 146–148, after Enneads V.3.10, 39–44.

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way, not by receiving it, but by lying with it’.18 John Donne amusingly reverses the motif in one of his erotic poems: Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be To taste whole joyes!19 But maybe the erotic charge should be put aside for now (though in so doing, I also put aside important questions about the different valencies of nakedness for male and female).20 The object after all is to escape from our corporeal entanglements: Our country from which we came is There, our Father is There. How shall we travel to it, where is our way of escape? We cannot get there on foot; for our feet only carry us everywhere in this world, from one country to another. You must not get ready a carriage, either, or a boat. Let all these things go, and do not look. Shut your eyes, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.21 It is easy to suppose that this ‘other way of seeing’, seeing ‘with the mind’s eye’, involves something like a visual imagination, but maybe ‘another way of seeing’ is what blind men use, and is ‘sight’ only in an extended sense (as, after all, is true in any case). What is seen is ‘over there’. What is touched is here. The other odd feature of the metaphor about sacred nakedness is that it seems to have no literal foundation. I have not, at any rate, been able to find any reference to the custom in pagan circles, nor yet in Hebraic.22 Philo’s explication of Leviticus is especially strange, in that the Levitical Code requires the High Priest to go clothed into the Holy of Holies, even if the clothes are special ones, to be donned only for the occasion. And Philo himself elsewhere uses exactly this requirement as a metaphor or symbol: the high priest puts on, symbolically, the

18 Plotinus, Enneads VI.5.10. The point is further explored by Zeke Mazur, ‘Having Sex with the One: Erotic Mysticism in Plotinus and the Problem of Metaphor’, in S.R.L. Clark and P. Vassilopoulou (eds), Epistemology in Late Antiquity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 19 John Donne, ‘Elegy 19: to his Mistress Going to Bed’, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. J. Hayward (London: Nonesuch Press, 1929), p. 97. 20 Historically, as Margaret Miles shows in Carnal Knowledge, naked men are typically stripped for action, and naked women to be enjoyed or else, perversely, humiliated. How this might affect a genuinely female approach to truth is a question for another day. 21 Plotinus, Enneads I.6 [1].8. It is worth noting that a ‘mystic’, originally, is one who closes her eyes, so as to win the chance of opening ‘the mind’s eye’ on a greater reality. Mustes and epoptes (‘one who sees’) are a linked pair. See Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 25. Montiglio goes on to offer the tentative suggestion that, ‘muesis is not only a silencing of mouth or eyes, but also a learning of a special way of speaking, listening and seeing’ (ibid., p. 32). 22 The tradition of modern witchcraft, wicca, does include naked rituals. See Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic and Witchcraft in Present-Day England (Blackwell: Oxford, 1988), but this is rather an effect of the current metaphors than their origin; see also Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

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world, and carries that into the Presence.23 It is more usual (and probably more Biblical in spirit)24 for Philo to identify nakedness as something to be regretted: for example, Noah’s nakedness when he has drunk wine.25 A naked mind is one without perception, or without virtue,26 and Philo expressly condemns those who ignore the literal significance of the Law: [A]s though they were living alone by themselves in a wilderness, or as though they had become disembodied souls, and knew neither city nor village nor household nor any company of human beings at all, overlooking all that the mass of men regard, they explore reality in its naked absoluteness.27 No one familiar with Philo expects consistency, but it does seem odd that he should simply contradict the text that he purports to allegorise. Perhaps he chose here to suggest that the Priest should go naked, and that the bells and coloured borders required by the text were unnecessary or offensive luxuries? Or perhaps there was a variant, Alexandrian ritual? Or perhaps—most probably—he merely chose to misinterpret the injunction that the high priest should take the clothes off again, and wash, before donning his ordinary clothes and leaving the sanctuary.28 The situation is no clearer on the Greek side. There are rites in which one stripped before undergoing a transformation: but these seem to involve werewolves,29 which could hardly appeal to either Philo or Plotinus! Rist suggests that Plotinus might have the rites of Isis in mind, but gives no actual reference.30 Witt agrees, bringing a mosaic from Antioch in evidence that initiates went naked into the shrine (but the scene is allegorical—and badly damaged).31 Both Jews and Christians practised naked baptism, signifying that the ‘old man with his deeds’ 23 Philo, Life of Moses 2.117 f, 133 f; see also Special Laws 1.97. It is perhaps significant that Plotinus makes no use of this metaphor, of being clothed, as it were, in incorruption (I Corinthians 15.53 f; see also II Corinthians 5.4), or in a new white raiment (Revelation 3.5). 24 See Michael L. Satlow, ‘Jewish Constructions of Nakedness in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 117 (1997), 429–454: male nakedness is especially deplored in the presence of the sacred. 25 Philo, Legum allegoria, 2.60 (I, 261), after Genesis 9.20–3. Philo was not alone in finding nakedness ambiguous: in the Christian West nakedness has variously signified purity, new birth, vulnerability and carnal appetite: see Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing, p. 35. 26 Philo, Legum allegoria, 3.16; 3.18 (I, 333, 337), after Genesis 3.9 ff. 27 ‘ten aletheian gumnen’: Philo, De migratione Abrahami 16, 89–90 (IV, 183); see H.A. Wolfson Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948) p. 67. 28 Philo also speaks of Moses’ ‘naked philosophy’ (Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit 43, IX, 35): one possessed by love of the divine has become a god amongst men. 29 Pliny, Natural History 8.81, cf. Augustine City of God 18.17, and another werewolf in Petronius, Satyricon 3.21, 24. I owe these references to Richard Buxton. 30 Rist, Plotinus, p. 191. W. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 39, points out that white linen is the usual costume for an Egyptianised sanctuary. 31 R.E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 161–162. Witt also suggests that Plotinus ‘could hardly have failed to know’ that Isis was commonly herself called ‘the only one’ (ibid., p. 307, n. 46), and that this makes Isis equivalent to the One Itself. This speculation is not convincing.

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was stripped away, and the proselyte newborn,32 but this is not the rite that either Philo or Plotinus mentions. Most likely, the ritual that Plotinus relies upon is the one briefly invented by Philo.

STRIPPING AWAY OPINIONS So a literal reading of the metaphor raises at least two questions. Why should it be easier to see when naked? What sort of ritual did Philo, Plotinus, Jan van Ruysbroeck and Herbert have in mind? I have suggested that nakedness may indeed make another kind of perception easier. And maybe Philo and the rest imagined a literal rite into existence because it fitted what they wanted to be the case. Maybe they didn’t literally think the Priest went naked, but used that phrase exaggeratedly to cover the sort of cleansing and re-clothing rituals that were actually recommended in Leviticus or in pagan rites: the Priest was purified, not nude, but ascribing nakedness fit better the conclusion, that we must leave our bodily opinions and affections far behind.33 This may not be wholly possible till death (or even after): till then we must merely imagine that release. So Descartes: A mind newly united to an infant’s body is wholly occupied in perceiving or feeling the ideas of pain, pleasure, heat, cold and other similar ideas which arise from its union and intermingling with the body. Nonetheless it has in itself the ideas of God, itself and all such truths as are called self-evident in the same way as adult humans have when they are not attending to them; it does not acquire these ideas later on, as it grows older. I have no doubt that if it were taken out of the prison of the body it would find them within itself.34 Or as Herbert put it: ‘here it behoves us to have a little patience for a while until we are freed of our body and the world’.35 But there is a problem here as well.

32

Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing, pp. 24–26. The notion also occurs in the Hindu tradition, as in Taittiriya Upanisad 2.2–5. My thanks to Jonardon Ganeri for this and other Indian references. 34 René Descartes, Philosophical Letters ed. A. Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 111: letter to Hyperaspistes. 35 Herbert, De veritate, p. 104. See also Edward Herbert, De religione laici, ed. and trans. Harold R. Hutcheson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 109: ‘until all oppressive and unquiet passions or humors are discarded, until the very elements are at last banished, the Wayfarer may conclude that a further life, and indeed a further slough (which he would cast off immediately after death), lie ahead, and that, as long as something still remains to be got rid of, the human soul has not been sufficiently liberated, or brought to its proper discernment’. The Hindu tradition agrees with Plato that even this death may not conclude the problem. According to the Bhagavad-gita 2.22, ‘as a man casting off worn-out garments takes other new ones, so the dweller in the body casting off worn-out bodies takes others that are new’. 33

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It is not merely difficult, as Pyrrho said, to strip off human nature.36 It may well seem counterproductive. It is true, as Berkeley said: In our nonage while our minds are empty and unoccupied many notions easily find admittance, and as they grow with us and become familiar to our understandings we continue a fondness for them. … But we would do well to consider that other men have imbibed early notions, that they as well as we have a country, friends, and persons whom they esteem. These are pleas which may be made for any opinion, and are consequently good pleas for none.37 But without those implanted opinions, and without our bodily affections and modes of perception, what shall we ever hope to find out for ourselves? If we really attempted to put aside all ‘prejudice’, all opinions taken upon trust, we should find ourselves entirely destitute. The more we think, the more difficult shall we find it to conceive how mere man, grown up in the vulgar habits of life, and weighed down by sensuality, should ever be able to arrive at science without some tradition or teaching, which might either sow the seeds of knowledge, or call forth and excite those latent seeds that were originally sown in the soul.38 Even if a few brilliant intelligences could cope with believing all and only what they themselves have ‘proved’, that cannot be the normal condition of humanity. Why should we suppose that all our opinions, affections and perceptions are false? And if they were, how could we hope to correct them? And why should we suppose that a purely intellectual approach will discover Truth? What is it like to leave aside our bodies or our individual souls? What shall we know if we have no senses, and no particular location or boundary? Herbert himself acknowledged the importance of ‘common notions’: ‘Reason is the process of applying common notions as far as it can, and has nothing beyond them to which it can appeal. Common Notions, therefore, are principles which it is not legitimate to dispute’.39 ‘Anyone who prefers persistently and stubbornly to reject these principles might as well stop his ears, shut his eyes and strip himself of all humanity’.40 So if we are not to strip off all humanity, but rather hang on to such ‘common notions’, it may be presumed that we should not after all go naked into the shrine. Maybe we should only leave off our ‘trinkets’, and retain our clothes. According to Plotinus, ‘a general opinion affirms that what is one and the same

36 ‘ekdunai ton anthropon’: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 9.66, in A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley (eds), The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 1C. 37 Berkeley, Sermon on Religious Zeal (1709–1712): Works, VII, 20. See my ‘Berkeley on Religion’ in Kenneth P. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 369–404. 38 Berkeley, Siris, §339: Works, V, 154. 39 Herbert, De veritate, p. 120. 40 Ibid., p. 131 (my italics).

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in number is everywhere present as a whole, when all men are naturally and spontaneously moved to speak of the god who is in each one of us one and the same’.41 That is certainly not a notion to be abandoned. Herbert’s summary of those notions is as follows:42 (a) Truth exists: the sole purpose of this proposition is to assert the existence of truth against imbeciles and sceptics. (b) This truth is as eternal or as ancient as things themselves. (c) This truth is everywhere … (and) approaches so nearly the quality of infinity that it may be said to surpass existence itself. (d) This truth reveals itself. (e) There are as many truths as there are differences of things. (f) The differences of things are recognised in virtue of our innate powers or faculties … We must postulate a truth of intellect, which alone is able to decide in virtue of its inborn capacity or its common notions whether our subjective faculties have exercised their perceptions well or ill. (g) There is a truth of all these truths …. When the intellect perceives that it has clear understanding, it recurs to fundamental truth. There are six characters, he says, that identify these common notions: they are prior, independent, universally agreed (‘putting aside persons who are out of their minds or mentally incapable’), certain, necessary, and recognised at once ‘provided that the meaning of the facts or words is grasped’.43 Whether everyone would in fact agree either to the characters or to the notions that he identifies may be disputed, but the notion is not unfamiliar. I have some affection myself for Chesterton’s version of the unprovable axioms of human life:44 (a) Every sane man believes that the world around him and the people in it are real, and not his own delusion or dream. No man starts burning London in the belief that his servant will soon wake him for breakfast. But that I, at any given moment, am not in a dream, is unproved and unprovable.45 That anything exists except myself is unproved and unprovable. (b) All sane men believe that this world not only exists, but matters. Every man believes there is a sort of obligation on us to interest ourselves in this vision or panorama of life. He would think a man wrong who said, ‘I did not ask for this farce and it bores me. I am aware that an old lady is being murdered

41 Plotinus, Enneads VI.5.1. Armstrong comments that this is ‘one of Plotinus’ rare appeals to the common experience of mankind’ (ed. cit., V,326 n). 42 Ibid., 83 ff. He offered a different, and more openly theological, set of five articles in A Dialogue between a Tutor and Pupil (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1993; reprint of 1768 edition), p. 7. The Dialogue probably dates from 1704. 43 Ibid., p. 139. 44 Daily News, June 22, 1907: a reference I owe to Martin Ward (http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs0mpw/ martin/). 45 Actually, I often am in a dream: according to Aurelius (see below), almost always. But that is not to contradict Chesterton’s central point.

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downstairs, but I am going to sleep’. That there is any such duty to improve the things we did not make is a thing unproved and unprovable. (c) All sane men believe that there is such a thing as a self, or ego, which is continuous. There is no inch of my brain matter the same as it was 10 years ago. But if I have saved a man in battle 10 years ago, I am proud; if I have run away, I am ashamed. That there is such a paramount ‘I’ is unproved and unprovable. But it is more than unproved and unprovable; it is definitely disputed by many metaphysicians. (d) Lastly, most sane men believe, and all sane men in practice assume, that they have a power of choice and responsibility for action. These may be things that we come to know or believe, but we do not learn them from experience. As Leibniz has it: ‘the actual knowledge of them is not innate. What is innate is what might be called the potential knowledge of them, as the veins of the marble outline a shape which is in the marble before they are uncovered by the sculptor’:46 an image several times repeated.47 That image is also Plotinus’s: by stripping away the superfluous stuff, we reveal the indwelling statue.48 In one of his poems Herbert offers an ingenious gloss: As Statuaries having fram’d in Clay An hollow Image, afterwards convey The molten mettle through each several way; But when it once unto its place hath past, And th’inward Statua perfectly is cast, Do throw away the outward Clay at last, So when that form the Heav’ns at first decreed Is finished within, Souls do not need Their Bodies more, but would from them be freed. For who still cover’d with their earth would ly? Who would not shake their fetters off, and fly, And be, at least, next to, a Deity? However then you be most lovely here, Yet when you from all Elements are clear, You far more pure and glorious shall appear.49

46 G.W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 86 (1.1.24). 47 It seems to be widely forgotten that this was ever anyone’s view of sculpture: Rom Harré, Personal Being (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 88, describes a Kwakiutl theory to the same effect as unlike ‘our’ idea: but the Philokalia, ed. G.E.H. Palmer, P. Sherrard, and K. Ware (London: Faber, 1979) have it, and ps-Dionysius Writings of ps-Dionysius, trans. C.E. Holt (New York: Paulist Press, 1971), p. 194. 48 Plotinus, Enneads I.6 [1].9. 49 ‘The Idea’ (1639), in The Poems English & Latin of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. G.C. Moore Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), pp. 77 f. The infusion of form into the place prepared for it is perhaps not all that distant from Plotinus’s imagery, even if it suggests a greater influence, for good, of the body on the soul.

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So perhaps there is less difference than we might suppose between Herbert’s partial strip and Colet’s total. The common notions on which Herbert or Chesterton bid us rely are the very things that constitute our noetic intelligence, the point of contact that we all share with truth. Putting aside our personal opinions and perspectives is to unveil a shared understanding. Herbert’s account differs from Plotinus’ in this, that his understanding is propositional and Plotinus’ is not (but that is another story). The point here is that it is the world we intelligise that is the same for and in each of us: the worlds we merely sense are various, and we are various in sensing them. Consider another feature of Herbert’s epistemology: Are you not aware that you are so sublime and exalted a being that you can attain all things which you truly know even though they are heavenly or eternal? I think it is the height of stupidity not to perceive that you can penetrate into every corner of the world, that you are not confined to the range of your observation of the skies when you examine the motions of the heavens.50 Malebranche had used as an argument against imputing secondary qualities to the things themselves that if they were in the objects, our souls would reach out to the heavens (‘it seems to me beyond question that our souls do not occupy a space so vast as that between us and the fixed stars … thus, it is unreasonable to think that our souls are in the heavens when they see stars there’).51 But perhaps it is not unreasonable to think that our intellects are there (or rather, the one intellect). And coming to realise that identity is another journey that does not need a carriage or a boat: When you have left the womb of the lower world, will you not attain to what you formerly conceived as ideal? On this journey you will first encounter the blue which is commonly supposed to be the ceiling of heaven; but this is ignorance. For in reality it consists of the most refined region of the air which appears to be this colour owing to its distance, as experts in optics tell us. When you have passed through this tract you will discover the stars to have been created not merely to sparkle but to be new worlds. And at last, to prolong the account no further, the infinite itself will unfold.52 That progress upwards can also be conceived as a successive stripping away of the garments donned in an earlier descent from heaven through the planetary spheres or the four elements.53

50

Herbert, De veritate, p. 327; see also Enneads V.1.1. N. Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 1.14.1, p. 67; see also 217. 52 Herbert, De veritate, p. 329. 53 Proclus, The Elements of Theology, p. 307, n. 1, on Proposition 209; see also Rist, Plotinus, pp. 190–191. See also Plotinus, Enneads IV.3.15. 51

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The more it presses onward towards the heights the more it will forget, unless perhaps all its life, even here below, has been such that its memories are only of higher things; since here below it is best to be detached from human concerns, and so necessarily from human memories.54 Or as Herbert put it: ‘it may be that we shall break forth into our own country, agile, perfect and divine, throwing off our past states with our body, like cast–off skins.’55 Till then, ‘the body or flesh serves as a veil for the secret parts of the sensitive soul, but man, who is naked in all else, is borne towards everything that the understanding comprehends or faith can grasp’.56 Remember that our ordinary lives are a dream and a delirium, from which we hope to wake.57

THE LITERAL, THE METAPHORICAL AND THE ANAGOGICAL So we shall not really see, so Plato and Herbert tell us, till we are dead: what moral has this for us while we yet live? Rist suggests that when Proclus speaks of stripping away our garments ‘and the advance of the naked soul’ he is speaking ‘literally’ of the physical accretions picked up in the soul’s original descent into the corporeal, while Plotinus ‘speaks metaphorically and analogically’.58 This may be so, just as it may be that the Aztecs, being a literal-minded people, misread the spiritual metaphors of the Maya.59 ‘A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise!’ But there may also be some ambiguity in the very notion of a metaphor or an analogy. Is it enough to translate the remarks of Philo, Plotinus or Herbert from their fanciful and ornamented language into explicit ethical or religious dictat? ‘Put aside all personal prejudices and corporeal desires: keep your attention fixed upon eternal and unchanging realities.’ No doubt that instruction too embodies metaphors, however moribund: can such things be literally ‘put aside’? What glue is appropriate to fix attention? But the essence of the instruction can—perhaps—be equally conveyed in these less fanciful and ornamented terms. Or perhaps it cannot. And perhaps Rist’s abrupt distinction between the literal and metaphorical is faulty, as though the only way for a description to be anything but ornamental is for it to have a distinct, physical referent. A broken

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Plotinus, Enneads IV.3.32, 13–15. Herbert, De veritate, p. 326. 56 Ibid., p. 328 (my italics). 57 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.17.1: this world is a dream and a delirium. Philo, Legum allegoria 3.71 (ed.cit., I, 457) agrees that Mind itself turns out to be a dream—the unfaithful mind, that is. ‘Discursive thought’, according to Herbert (De veritate, p. 234), ‘recklessly attempts by its own power to destroy and repudiate all the Common Notions. … This is the source of a vast number of contradictions, absurdities and follies’. 58 Rist, Plotinus, p. 191. 59 Laurette Séjourné, Burning Water: Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico (London: Thames & Hudson, 1957); see also my The Mysteries of Religion (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986). 55

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and contrite heart is not ‘literally’ in need of surgical intervention, but it is also not a merely ornamental image. To experience contrition is to ache.60 It is the phenomenal heart that breaks, the originally experienced reality from which we abstract or create the image of a merely corporeal organ. A broken heart is not a metaphor, drawn from observations of a defective organ, but an actual experience.61 Correspondingly, I suggest, instructions to strip to enter the shrine are not strictly metaphorical: priests did not strip, but the would-be initiate must. And just as the journey to our fatherland is ‘not a journey for the feet’, so stripping is not the removal of corporeal garments. To strip is to learn what truly is our own.62 The metaphor as it is used by Philo, Proclus, Herbert and the rest is readily interpreted as the familiar Platonic demand that we (our souls or our intellect) should shed its ‘bodily garment’ (that is to say, its body). ‘The self of each of us is not anger or fear or desire, just as it is not bits of flesh or fluids either, but is that with which we reason and understand.’63 That may be how Plotinus also sometimes speaks. But his considered doctrine is actually quite different: the soul is not in the body even in a metaphorical sense. ‘None of the ways of a thing’s being in anything which are currently spoken of fits the relationship of the soul to the body’.64 Rather, the body is in the soul, as a net is in the sea,65 and what we make of our corporeal selves is a matter of preferred attention. The advice is to ‘look inward’, identify the garments, emotional baggage, ‘trinkets’ and put them aside ‘in imagination’. ‘[Our] business, if [we] are to be beautiful again, is to wash and clean [ourselves] and so again be what [we were] before’.66 In one way, this is no more than any adult has long learned to do. We ‘put aside’ such issues as can only interfere with the performance of a present duty. We may even ‘imagine’ their being placed in a container, or folded neatly away, so as to make space for a more focused attention. If we were not to do so, if we continued to be thinking and feeling about all the potential claims on that attention all the time, we should never accomplish anything. ‘Multi-tasking’ is of course a fashionable nostrum nowadays: women, it is said, have always had to have an ear to the multiple requirements of an everyday household, and all of us may be similarly occupied. Heads of Department, at any rate, cannot afford entirely to forget about student progress cases, essay marking, staff promotion, research bids and book-ordering policy even when they really want to be preparing tomorrow’s lecture or doing their own research! And that research in turn 60 See J.H. Van den Berg, The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry (Springfield, ILL: C.C. Thomas, 1955). 61 John Crowley, Love and Sleep (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), p. 496. 62 And also what others are: ‘Truly, My Satan, thou are but a Dunce/ And dost not know the Garment from the Man./ Every Harlot was a Virgin once, / Nor can’st thou ever change Kate into Nan’ (William Blake ‘To the Accuser who is God of this World’ in The Gates of Paradise (1818): Complete Works, p. 771. 63 Plutarch, De Facie Lunae 945a. 64 Plotinus, Enneads IV.3.21, 4–6. 65 Ibid., IV.3.9. 66 After Plotinus, Enneads I.6.5, 47–48.

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cannot always be exactly focused: perhaps a multitude of partly remembered texts and topics gradually coalesce (as may be happening here). We should not always, and we cannot always, be doing One Thing Only. On the contrary, the intellect exists in looking towards an unimaginable One, and so being filled with a complexity whose unity is visible only in the light of that unseen.67 If the One, the Good, holds beauty (the beauty that is intelligible reality) before it as a bulwark or a veil,68 it is equally the case that the intellect is clothed in that bright raiment as it looks towards the One. But if that cloak or clothing is, in its way, appropriate, it remains the case that even multi-taskers do not literally do everything at once, nor attend to everything. And multitasking is not always what is needed. Maybe there has been too much emphasis, historically, on the fully focused mind—a mind that only those who have no household duties could even imagine—but there will still be times when focusing, or washing or stripping, is required. There is also a perverse image of the multitasker’s life: one madly divided between equally pressing needs and longings, without any sense of a coherent outcome. There was an old sailor my grandfather knew Who had so many things that he wanted to do That, whenever he thought it was time to begin, He couldn’t because of the state he was in.69 The sailor, to be sure, was a failed multitasker: He thought of his hut … and he thought of his boat, And his hat and his breeks, and his chickens and goat, And his hooks (for his food) and the spring (for his thirst) … But he never could think which he ought to do first. But it is still, even for multitaskers, worth remembering ‘the one thing needful’ rather than the ‘many things’.70 Stripping off in imagination, or stripping off the imagined baggage, may be no more than the necessary focus on some one significant task. But the object in Plotinus and in Herbert is to go up into the shrine—and where shall we find that? How shall we enter the inner sanctuary, passing even the choir of the virtues, and the temple images?71 ‘What we sense in the depths of our mind is the pure act of conformity. … In this investigation I wish the coarse physical structure of the faculties stripped off and broken away in order that the divine intellectual types

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Plotinus, Enneads III.8.8, 31–32. Ibid., I.6.9, 34–39. Compare Isa Upanisad 15: ‘The face of truth is covered with a golden dish. Uncover it, O Pusan, for me, a man faithful to the truth’. 69 A.A. Milne, Now We Are Six (London: Methuen, 1927), p. 36. 70 See Luke 10.41 f. 71 Plotinus, Enneads, VI.9.11; see also V.1.6. This image too is either a Plotinian invention or one borrowed from the Hebraic tradition. 68

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may appear in all their purity’.72 Is there after all some proper way of ‘stripping off humanity’? ‘This is the intention of the command given in the mysteries here below not to disclose to the uninitiated; since that Good is not disclosable, it prohibits the disclosure of the divine to another who has not also himself had the good fortune to see’.73 Even the initiate, most of the time, will see no more than images, and herself be clothed in virtue, and the world. According to Herbert, ‘when we have thrown off our earthly chains, a new and more amenable matter, consisting of new elements, will be supplied, so that we shall appear clothed throughout in heavenly glory’.74 During our ascent, Plotinus hints or jests, we shall be stars (as indeed we—in our higher identity—already are).75 But it seems likely that he envisages a final stripping. If One is to be apprehended it can only (if at all) be by the One. ‘There was not even any reason or thought, and he himself was not there, if we must even say this; but he was as if carried away or possessed by a god, in a quiet solitude and a state of calm, altogether at rest and having become a kind of rest.’ What comes away from that interior temple carries an image of conversing ‘not with a statue or image, but with the Divine itself’.76 It is at this point, perhaps, that my earlier remark that it is more often the Truth that we imagine naked, rather than the one who sees that Truth, can be turned round. To ‘see’ the naked Truth one must be naked, since none but that Truth can see.77 Nor is its ‘seeing’ any sort of intellection, but the final absence of distracting thought. There is an echo here of Buddhist meditative practice. One stage involves a focus on some significant object, allowing all extraneous thought and feeling to fall away. The next requires the elimination of that object, without losing focus:78 At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been; but I cannot say where.79 And how far is this Plotinian account true also to Herbert’s writings? Herbert himself, of course, did not live like a Plotinian philosopher. By his own account 72

Herbert, De veritate, p. 159. Plotinus, Enneads VI.9 [9].11. 74 Herbert, De veritate, p. 172. 75 See Plotinus, Enneads IV.3.17 for our souls’ descent into the stars, and IV.4.5 for the ascent. 76 Plotinus, Enneads VI.9 [9].11. 77 Ibid., I.6.9, 30–3: ‘no eye ever saw the sun without becoming sun-like’. 78 Consider the Ox-Herding Paintings in D.T. Suzuki (ed.), Manual of Zen Buddhism, (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 127–146. 79 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 9. The first line is often misquoted as ‘the still centre of the turning world’. 73

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he was a gallant and ambitious gentleman, eager to live by his own conception of chivalric duty, and persuaded that a year is long enough to study Philosophy (‘and six moneths for Logick for I am Confident a man may have quickly more than hee needes of those two arts’).80 He chose to publish De Veritate only after a celestial sign of God’s approval (in 1624), and after his recall from France was occupied entirely (so it seems) in seeking—fruitlessly—to recover royal favour, until the civil war (when he went over to the side of Parliament). Almost we could say that Herbert was the man that Plotinus might have been: for Plotinus too chose to follow an Emperor to war, fell out of favour with the court and died less comfortably than he lived. Herbert mostly managed—so he says—to avoid the perils of appetite (except when his wife refused to come to France with him),81 but certainly not those of ‘honour’ (since he was always seeking occasion for a duel).82 Plotinus, it seems, achieved a higher goal—perhaps because he did not suppose that he must die to do so. But though Herbert did not live like a philosopher, it may be that he sometimes wrote like one, and carried the recipe of spiritual nakedness on into the future.

80 Edward Herbert, Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. J.M. Shuttleworth (Oxford University Press: London, 1976), p. 20. 81 Ibid., p. 101. 82 ‘There is a moral conscience, which is honour, as well as a spiritual conscience’, he says: Herbert, De veritate, p. 187.

CHAPTER 5

Jan Rohls

Comenius, Light Metaphysics and Educational Reform Translated by Alexandra Wörn and David Leech

The importance of Comenius for the debates over educational reform dating from the 1630s onwards is now coming to light, thanks not least to our better understanding of the history of the foundation of the Royal Society. That Francis Bacon played a significant role in these debates needs no emphasis. Bacon, like Comenius, set his programme of reform within a theological framework, but this remained on a modest scale, unlike in the case of the latter, who took his inspiration both from the Rosicrucian idea of a universal reform of humanity and from the encyclopaedic pretensions of his teacher Alsted. Comenius’ theological framework is that of a Platonically derived light metaphysics. Thus, in the middle of the seventeenth century Comenius effects a fusion of Platonic light metaphysics with educational reform.

FORERUNNERS OF PHILOSOPHY Despite having already composed a slim work with the title of Prima philosophia at the beginning of his Lissian Exile, Comenius’ own philosophical system developed only gradually, in ever-new programmatic drafts. In the second half of the 1630s, he sketched out his Platonically inspired Pansophia in various different texts as a philosophico-theological reform programme. The incentive came from his contact and friendship with a circle of English scholars: the Scottish theologian John Dury, Samuel Hartlib from Elbing, and his young friend Joachim Hübner. The leading figure was Hartlib, who had set himself the aim of realising Bacon’s plan for an instauratio magna of science in a puritanically modified form, involving a renewal not only of science, but also of society as a 63 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 63–74. © 2008 Springer.

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whole through a Collegium of eminent European scholars on English soil.1 In order to give this utopian programme of reform a thorough philosophical basis, Hartlib turned to Comenius, who sent him in 1637 his Conatuum Comenianorum praeludia, published by Hartlib that same year in London without Comenius’ knowledge and to his great annoyance. This work—which makes his subsequent annoyance understandable—led within the brotherhood to the accusation that he conflated divine with human wisdom, and even led to formal proceedings against him.2 The following year Comenius composed his theological apologia, the Conatuum pansophicorum Dilucidatio, which won the brotherhood around to his Pansophic approach. In 1639, Comenius published in London a revised version of the sketch he had earlier sent to Hartlib, the Pansophia prodomus, together with the Dilucidatio. In order that his apologia—written originally for the brotherhood—could be made more intelligible to a broader learned audience, he wrote finally between 1639 and 1641 the Pansophiae diatyposis, which, however, was only published in London in 1643. In 1644 in Leiden the Pansophia prodomus ran into its third edition. Thus the first phase in the elaboration of Comenius’ Pansophic approach was completed. Comenius relates the Prodomus to his Janua linguarum by justifying the former work through his desire to make a door to things, or a gate to wisdom, which would aid the studious youth, after they have learnt to distinguish things outwardly with the help of the door to languages, to become accustomed to seeing the inwardness of things and grasping what each thing is in its essence.3 Indeed, the scope of investigation should be extended to everything that is necessary for knowledge, action, faith and hope, and thus result in encyclopaedic knowledge or Pansophia. In his ambition Comenius presupposes humanity’s commitment to the quest for wisdom that was leading, especially in the seventeenth century, to a hitherto unparalleled flourishing of knowledge. Comenius sees this progress of knowledge as leading into a luminous Golden Age that lies at the end rather than at the beginning of history. To reach this goal, the door to the things themselves must be opened, not merely the door to the languages which denote them; only by this means can a universal knowledge of things, and thus a complete, all-inclusive, fully coherent wisdom—Comenius’ Pansophia—be achieved.4 Only when the human soul has attained this comprehensive wisdom will it become what it was created to be, namely, an image of the omniscient God.

1 H. Trevor-Roper, Religion, Reformation und sozialer Umbruch (Frankfurt am Main/Berlin/Wien: Propyläen Verlag, 1970), pp. 53–93; Charles Webster, Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); G. H. Turnbull, Dury and Comenius (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947). 2 J. Kvacala (ed.), Die pädagogische Reform des Comenius in Deutschland bis zum Ausgange des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols (Berlin: Hofman, 1903), vol. 1, pp. 139 f. 3 J.A. Comenius, Vorspiele. Prodomus Pansophiae. Vorläufer der Pansophie, ed. and trans. H. Hornstein (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1997), pp. 24f. 4 Ibid., p. 20.

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Thus Comenius embedded the modern striving for scientific knowledge within a theological framework. He believed, however, that the scientific study of his own time was far removed from the wisdom he envisaged, since it was not organised in such a way that it led the student by a straight path to the eternal goal of all study, which is God. Comenius thus set himself the task of putting an end to the morbid condition of contemporary science. In his search for a suitable remedy he was guided by the conviction that the cause for this condition, aside from obscurities in linguistic expression, lay above all in the fragmentation of the sciences and in the inappropriateness of methods to their objects. Firstly, concerning the fragmentation of the sciences the hitherto published encyclopaedic works, contrary to their own claims, by no means exhausted all (potential) objects of research; nor did they start from particular universally valid principals in order to connect the different areas of knowledge together. Rather, the special sciences had their own principles, by recourse to which they could each justify their own dogmas. Comenius saw the conflicts which arose between different philosophical positions as being ultimately grounded in their not beginning from universally valid principles. A knowledge of these principles, however, seemed to him only possible if all the possible sources of knowledge—namely, sense perception, human reason, and divine revelation—were considered on equal terms. Secondly, concerning method, Comenius urged that it must always be appropriate to the object or objects under investigation. The methodical procedure of Pansophia should correspond to the order of things; for Comenius, this meant that one progressed from cause to effect. Implicit in this methodological position is that Pansophia leads to the knowledge of God as the first cause. However, what was the book of Pansophia to look like, which was to replace earlier encyclopaedias? Comenius takes his first orientation from the familiar image of the living tree with its roots, trunk, branches and fruit. Like the tree, Pansophia also has to be self-coherent, able to bring forth life and bear fruit, if it is to give a picture of the whole of reality. The Pansophic education should firstly be comprehensive, secondly, clear and accurate and thirdly, true and certain. In order to acquire such knowledge, an assessment of all human attributes and all existing accounts representing knowledge about the natural world, including the Bible as God’s commentary on His creation, is required. A comparison of these different accounts with the things they refer to is necessary, plus their total reordering.5 Comenius envisages a treasury of wisdom which the whole of humanity will possess, so that all nations and groups in all times will participate in it.6 The central part of the Prodomus is dedicated to the presentation of Pansophia in the form of eighteen basic principles. He starts from the thesis that human knowledge has three parts: knowledge of God, nature and art. From these three things a perfect, i.e. complete, true and well-ordered knowledge is to be sought. Knowledge

5 6

Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 88.

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is true when we know a thing as it really is, and we know a thing as it is, when we know how it comes from its idea (idea or ratio). Thus it is clear that Pansophia bears the imprint of Platonism. According to Pansophia, every thing receives its being from an idea, which is characterised as what gives a thing its essence, through which a thing is what it is. Thus, everything that is, originates from an idea, and this is true in the three realms of God, nature and art equally; however, the ideas in these three realms of knowledge are not separate from but rather hierarchically ordered to one another: ‘art borrows the ideas of her works from nature, nature’s ideas from God, and God’s ideas from Himself’.7 God imitates nobody apart from Himself; He neither can, nor wills to, since in His eternity He has nothing outside of Himself, and can only will the best. Therefore, God, when He creates the world, creates His own image, so that the creation might be in perfect accord with its Creator. And since all things participate in the ideas of the divine spirit, they participate also in themselves and accord with each other. Thus, the ideas of things in these different realms are only distinguished from one another in their degree of being, since they exist either in God as in an archetype (archetypos), or in nature as in a matrix (ectypos) or in art as in a copy (antitypos). As God exhibits harmony in Himself, so is harmony in nature an image of the divine one, and harmony in art in turn an image of natural harmony. As a result, the ideas of things are to be abstracted by induction from the things, i.e. from natural things with the help of revealed Scripture, since art receives its ideas derivatively from nature and God is in Himself unfathomable. After enumerating his guidelines, Comenius briefly discusses the Pansophic method. He makes a lucid, systematic compartmentalisation of knowledge a requirement, as well as clear definitions and rules, by which everything becomes subject to the criteria of clarity, certainty and universal truth. Pansophia should contain those axioms imprinted in the soul by God which the human understanding immediately recognises as true, not such as need to be proven through preceding premises. Therefore, in Pansophia propositions are to be deduced from other propositions, and resting as they do on true premisses, they are true. Since in Pansophia everything is proven through reason, no recourse to authorities is needed.8 Comenius sides with Augustinian Platonism when he defines Christianity as true philosophy and, thereby, justifies his Pansophic project as a Christian one. For it is the aim of a theologically grounded Pansophia to show human beings how to find their way from the visible to the invisible and to the eternal.

THE WAY OF LIGHT Comenius’ Pansophiae Prodomus was at first published and reviewed in England, and it was Hartlib and his circle who persuaded him in 1642 to come to introduce his programme of reform before the English parliament. Hartlib himself harboured 7 8

Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., pp. 121 ff.

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the hope that through Comenius his Pansophic Collegium and his socio-political plans of reform would receive support from the Puritan Long Parliament, though all such plans were finally shattered with the outbreak of the English Civil War. However, although Comenius left England again in 1642, he had meanwhile presented a new programme in which he had elaborated his Pansophic approach in the Prodomus. This work entitled Via lucis was, however, only finally published by Comenius in 1668 in very changed political circumstances. The starting assumption in his original concept was that of the idea of the world as a school, in which the human being is sent by God in order to discover Him in His works. Thus, the purpose of the divinely created world is only to serve humanity as a sort of anticipation of eternity, while in the latter place the human being will have unmediated knowledge of God. The visible world is—according to Paul and Christian Platonism—a mirror of God’s everlasting power, wisdom and goodness. The visible world is understood as a subordinate school to which we are sent before we proceed on to the heavenly academy. In this school God is still the teacher, but He teaches us with the help of books rather than in an unmediated way. Here, with the mention of books, Comenius recalls a familiar metaphor that is already to be found in Alsted. He distinguishes between the visible world, human beings and Scripture.9 These three ‘books’ are written by God Himself, and in them everything humans need to know is clearly unfolded. The first book is the visible world, and its letters are the things which comprise this world. The second book is the human being, distinguished by his Godlikeness, which Comenius roots in the rational soul. Like Cusanus, Comenius represents spirit (mens) as the measure (mensura) of all things, since it measures all things according to its innate concepts. Since the human spirit is in the image of God, it grasps God better through its own self than through the external world. From its inborn desire for wisdom, immortality, power and goodness the human spirit can deduce that God is omniscient, eternal, omnipotent and perfect. The inner book of the spirit, or of conscience, is thus ordered in importance above the external book of the visible world, yet it itself requires further supplementation from Holy Scripture, through which God teaches us the true sense and purpose of the world. Although, however, God has provided interpreters for these three books, humankind has nevertheless seriously strayed from what God had in mind for the school of the world. Humanity is far from being on the straight path of an education whose ultimate goal is God. On the contrary, the world has transformed itself from a school of wisdom into a place of foolishness, marked by general Scepticism, Atheism and Epicureanism. Yet God in the course of time has applied various new means in order to reform the world back into a school of wisdom and put the human being back on the right path of education. He has not simply preserved the three books for human beings in their unchanged state, but has allowed an ever-growing understanding of them. The visible world in the seventeenth century was better understood than

9 J.A. Comenius, Der Weg des Lichtes, Via Lucis, trans. U. Voigt (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1997), pp. 24 f.

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by former generations, from the inborn universal ideas of the human spirit more and more new thoughts were being brought forth, and Holy Scripture was felt to be revealing more and more mysteries. Humanity, therefore, needed only to be brought to the right way of reading the books provided by God in order to arrive at an understanding of Him. The universal remedy, which Comenius sees as necessary for the removal of darkness, must, in his view, be something similar to light. He thus turns back again to the Platonic tradition, in particular, Plato’s Metaphor of the Sun (Republic VII). Just as the sun maintains, moves and illuminates everything, so the light of wisdom has to illuminate the human mind and disclose the truth and goodness in all things. The light of wisdom firstly makes visible the essence of things in order that knowledge may result from it, whereas ignorance of things results from darkness. As in Platonic forms of idealism, Comenius distinguishes here between eternal, external and inner light. The eternal light is the light in which God Himself dwells and in which he knows Himself and the ideas of all things. Contrary to this, the external light is the light we perceive with our senses and with which God illuminates the amphitheatre of our corporeal world. Finally, the inner light is the light which illuminates the human mind, i.e. its understanding, will and disposition. In his treatise Comenius is principally concerned with the light of the understanding, which is analogous to external light, since he is interested in investigating that light which banishes spiritual darkness. He begins with an analysis of the formal structure of visible light, in order to disclose the structure of the light of the understanding. Light flows out from a subject through a medium onto its object; light source, transparent medium and non-transparent object must thus be distinguished. Consequently, the nature of light is in its flowing onto objects and thereby serving to unite the manifold, scattered objects for sense perception. A corresponding process is at work with the light of the understanding, i.e. in acquiring knowledge of things. Knowledge has its starting point from things, which enter the mind through the external senses. The mind or understanding distributes the light by duplicating knowledge through judgements of the understanding and simultaneously uniting the objects of knowledge. The things or objects in question are derived from the three books, i.e. the books of the visible world, the human mind and Holy Scripture, which mutually complete one another and thus constitute a comprehensive, true source of light.10 Comenius presents a picture of an all-embracing knowledge arising out of the three above-mentioned books, in which everything stands in a specific relationship to everything else and is therefore true. That means, however, that one can only have knowledge of the truth if one places all knowledge in relationship to the Holy Scripture. Yet Comenius sees the difficulty of making human beings accustomed to the light of truth, since they have lived so long in a condition of spiritual darkness. He makes reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, but with the difference that the ideas, from which all knowledge

10

Ibid., pp. 66 ff.

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comes, are transformed by Comenius into three light sources, and it is from these three together that a great light radiates. In order not to be blinded by the light, the human being living in darkness has to be led back to it gradually.11 Comenius, however, is not satisfied just to compare truth with light and knowledge of truth with the making visible of things. Moreover, he sees a parallel between the history of humanity’s knowledge of truth and the evening rays of sunshine piercing through the clouds on a dreary day; since the Fall at first benighted human knowledge, yet the post-lapsarian history of humanity is by no means a history of decline, but rather one of successive progress in knowledge. This progression manifests itself in seven steps, of which the seventh was only then being achieved. At the beginning stands Adam’s unmediated contemplation of things. This was supplemented after the creation of Eve by reciprocal linguistic communication and after the multiplication of humankind through public meetings. After the Great Flood there followed the invention of writing as a means of handing on noteworthy knowledge to posterity, and later still the foundation of public schools. Since, however, the transcription of books was a time-consuming business and the few books that existed where only available to a small circle of people, printing was providentially discovered, through which not only the Holy Scripture, but also ancient authors were once again brought to light. In this way humanity acquired the light of ancient wisdom and by this means inspired to make new inventions. As in the case of printing, navigation and the subsequent discovery of new continents, these also fostered communication amongst human beings and further increased knowledge. Comenius brings the discovery of new continents through sea exploration expressly into connection with Christ’s command to spread the good news, which implies that before the end of the world the gospel message will be carried to all corners of the earth. Modern discoveries and the invention of printing, therefore, point to a rebirth, or palingenesis, of the world. Thus, Comenius interprets navigation and printing as lights that go ahead of and anticipate the one great universal light. This level of illumination is the most comprehensive one conceivable for this world, and hence, also the last; it will unite all previous levels and is universal, since all (pantes) can then know all (panta) in all ways possible (pantos).12 This last level is what Comenius calls Pansophia, or complete knowledge. This knowledge is of the eternal, as well as the temporal, the spiritual as well as the corporeal, heavenly and earthly things, theological and philosophical. Since nature has the same Author as Scripture, knowledge of nature serves knowledge of God; Scripture and nature illuminate one another. In order to gain and to spread this Pansophic knowledge, universal books, universal schools, a universal college of scholars and a universal language are needed.13 By these four means the light of reason is to be spread over the whole extent of human understanding.

11

Ibid., pp. 92 f. Ibid., pp. 101 ff. 13 Ibid., pp. 122 ff. 12

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After his return from England Comenius writes to his Dutch patron Louis de Geer: I am presently composing a work with the title: To Humanity a Universal Consultation Concerning the Improvement of Human Affairs, especially to the Scholars in Europe. Pansophia will make up only the seventh part of this work.14 This means that by the mid-1640s Comenius had united his different scientific, pedagogical, religious and societal ideas about reform into a universal reform project. The planned work, De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica, remained a fragment, though Comenius did a good deal of further work on it, especially during his exile in Amsterdam. Via lucis was already a presentation in sketch form of this universal reform project, and the Consultatio is influenced throughout by the Via lucis’ central theme of a Platonic light metaphysics. The first part of the Consultatio, the Panegersia, first published in 1647 in Amsterdam, is a wake-up call to humanity for universal reform, in which Comenius also introduces the programme of his entire work. The first part is an investigation of the relationship between humans and things, over which humans, being in the image of God, should reign; between humans and other, fellow humans, with whom they should cultivate reasonable relations, and between humans and God, whose will they have to follow. What was before called Pansophia is from now on renamed Pantaxia, meaning a universal encyclopaedic knowledge of things. Its rudiments coincide with what Comenius already heralded as Janua rerum or Sapienitae porta in his Prodomus, as well as what he envisaged in his Via lucis. In fact Comenius had already begun elaborating his Janua rerum during his stay in London, although the work was printed only posthumously in 1681. However, a part of the Janua rerum had already appeared in print in Lissa in 1649, which was then presumably incorporated into the posthumous printed edition. The Preface to the Academies in Europe probably also originates from this period. Here too Comenius refers to the depressing situation of his contemporary war-torn Europe. Nonetheless, he envisaged scholars as making ready their own weapons, in order to overcome barbarity the more easily after the war had ended, even while politicians as well as theologians still battled against one another. Thus Comenius turns expressly to scholars—with which he means philosophers—in order to consult with them about the renewal of knowledge on the basis of a philosophical ground discipline. This ground discipline is the Aristotelian prima philosophia, or metaphysics. Just as the things themselves have specific underlying principles out of which they arise, so there must also be a fundamental discipline underlying human knowledge of these things.15 14

A. Patera (ed.), Jana Amosa Komenského Korrespondece (Prague, 1892), p. 97. J.A. Comenius, Pforte der Dinge. Janua rerum, introduced, translated and annotated by E. Schadel (Hamburg: F. Meiner), 1989, pp. 3 ff. 15

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According to Comenius, however, none of the existing metaphysics is adequate to the task of providing this philosophical ground discipline. On account of the contemporary critiques of metaphysics he also prefers to avoid any characterisation of the ground discipline which makes use of this concept and in its place he prefers to talk about the Gate to things.16 The metaphysics he envisages has clear Platonic features, since it contains the most general concepts, on which everything is ordered, the highest forms of relations and all the ideas or potentialities (rationes possibiles) of things. Since Comenius defines metaphysics in accordance with Aristotle as the science of beings qua beings, it has to distinguish itself from other sciences as having the highest degree of generality, so that its principles are equally valid for all the special sciences. This means that metaphysics must, in true Platonic form, be a science of ideas, and the human being acquires knowledge of the eternal ideas when he reflects on his own mind, which is in the image of God to the extent that like God it orders everything according to number, measurement and weight. The human being is thus bestowed with a God-given and hence innate inner light, giving him an a priori access to metaphysics. Through the a priori character of his metaphysics Comenius situates himself clearly within the Platonic tradition. Comenius’ consultation of the Bible as the third source of wisdom next to external nature and the human mind gives Pansophia its peculiar character. The Bible is, for Comenius, of central importance, because God reveals secrets to us in the Bible, which we can learn neither from the world nor from our own minds. All three of these books of God must be read completely, carefully and in an orderly fashion if one desires to acquire wisdom. Hence, scriptural knowledge should not be sacrificed in favour of knowledge got solely from the world or from the mind, nor should reason or sense perception be sacrificed solely in favour of the Bible. The correct order in which the three books should be read, however, implies that one should begin with the human mind, i.e. with oneself, and not with the visible external world. It is from within the tradition of Augustinian Platonism that Comenius speaks when he says that the inner light of the spirit is intimately close and present to all human beings, including those that are deprived of physical perception. The certainty of the knowledge which comes from the inner light of the spirit is greater than that which rests on sense perception. One must, therefore, distinguish three stages of wisdom: that wisdom common to all human beings which comes from the inner light of the spirit; the wisdom of the world to which philosophers and scientists have access; and lastly, the wisdom of the saints gained through Scripture. The metaphysics which Comenius sketches in his Janua rerum is founded entirely on the inner light of the spirit, although he justifies the existence of this light biblically from the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, where at John 1.9 it is revealed that God’s eternal Wisdom, Christ, enlightens every human being that comes into this world.

16

Ibid., p. 20.

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However, although Comenius and his project of Pansophia inspired by a Platonic light metaphysics was close to contemporary concepts of educational reform, there were important differences. This is particularly obvious in his dedication to the Royal Society to which in 1668 he had sent a printed version of his Via lucis published in Amsterdam that year. The Via lucis has the subtitle A reasonable investigation into what ways the spiritual light of souls, wisdom, can finally, in the evening of the world, be spread successfully over all human spirits and nations.17 The Platonic light symbolism is legitimated through three scriptural citations. The work is dedicated to the fellows of the Royal Society, whom Comenius addresses as the light spreaders of an enlightened age and as servants of light. In his dedication he firstly mentions the circumstances which led him in the 1630s to his Pansophical sketches and the composition of the Via lucis, so as to give a short description of the content of the work which he was presently addressing back to the country where it was originally conceived. He sketches the universal goal of an improvement in human affairs in every possible respect, and proposes paths to this goal. He sees the possibility of achieving this goal as grounded in the fact that the principles of knowledge, volition, and ability, i.e. the common concepts, motivations and capacities, are innate to all human beings since they are in the image of God. Starting from these universal innate principles Comenius is concerned with an improvement not only in education but also in religion and politics. Human beings need to be brought back to the way of the light, which corresponds to their godlikeness, from the way of darkness, which they have taken through the Fall. Comenius also finds this concern reflected in the Royal Society, which wishes to restore human wisdom and the domination of the human spirit over things. At the same time, however, a comparison between the programme of the London Society and his own Pansophia also shows some clear differences. In Comenius’ eyes the Royal Society limits itself unnecessarily to a comprehensive investigation of nature as it is given to sense perception. In doing so, the Society reduces the three divine books into one. Comenius, on the other hand, consistently defends his theory of the three books or schools. For him the whole world is a school of divine wisdom, which is superseded by an otherworldly, heavenly Academy. Thus one is to distinguish between the physical school of the perceptible world and the metaphysical school, which is concerned with the human spirit and its innate principles. These innate principles cannot be perceived by the senses, but only grasped by reason, which is the inner light of the spirit. Finally, the third school is the hyperphysical, in which God reveals his mysteries, i.e. that which was before the world was, and that which will be when the world is no longer, or which is now outside the world—about which we are only informed through the divinely inspired Bible, which can only rightly be interpreted through faith and the help of the Holy Spirit. In all three it is

17

Comenius (footnote 3355), p. 1 f.

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a matter of this-worldly divine schools, through which all human beings must pass, in order to achieve godlikeness. The Pansophic project, grounded in a Platonic light metaphysics and a theory of the three books of God, from which wisdom can be derived, was for Comenius inextricably linked with the eschatological hope of a complete fulfilment of human history. His Pansophia sets itself the task of communicating wisdom to all human beings, in order to turn them back to Christ, the eternal wisdom, and thus to create the condition for their passing from this world into eternal life. Only against this background is his critique of the Royal Society comprehensible. To bring about the 1000-year kingdom of eternal wisdom, according to Comenius, it is not sufficient to limit oneself to investigating the book of the visible world and ignore the human spirit as divine image as well as the Bible as revelation of divine mystery. Comenius feared, and not without justification, that the Royal Society, by limiting knowledge to the knowledge of nature, would abandon the effort to achieve a universal reform of society in the service of a conversion of the world to Christ. Indeed, the Royal Society was turning back ever more strongly to Bacon’s programme of Educational reform. The Pansophic Educational Programme of Comenius has been characterised as a synthesis of Bacon’s idea of knowledge with contemporary Rosicrucianism.18 Whilst the critique of prejudice and the high estimation of the human spirit of discovery and invention clearly bear Bacon’s stamp, Comenius’ universal model of world reform which sees all things as proceeding from and ultimately returning back to God is indebted to a Platonically hued Rosicrucianism. Thus Comenius holds to a broader concept of rationality than Bacon, and it is this broadened concept of reason and wisdom that Comenius defends, not only against the Royal Society, but also against Descartes. Descartes had already at the request of the Hartlib circle taken a critical stance in respect to the first Pansophic sketches of Comenius, only shortly before the publication of his Meditations.19 Descartes accuses Comenius of confusing philosophy and theology, reason and revelation, which he believed should be kept strictly apart. This separation of a purely reason-based philosophy from a purely revelation-based theology stands in direct opposition to the Pansophic programme of Comenius and his theory of the three books. Comenius was not only of the opinion that philosophy should not separate itself from theology, but he also believed a complete knowledge of nature was not possible without the aid of the Bible. He could not accept Descartes’ limitation of philosophy essentially to a reason-based philosophy of nature. Thus he was forced to see in the programme of the Royal Society, founded in 1662 by

18 U. Voigt, Das Geschichtsverständnis des Johann Amos Comenius in ‘Via Lucis’ als kreative Syntheseleistung (Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1996), 206 ff. 19 On Descartes and Comenius, see Jeroen van de Ven and Erik-Jan Bos, ‘Se Nihil Daturum – Descartes’s Unpublished Judgement of Comenius’s Pansophiae Prodromus (1639)’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12 (2004), 369–381, trans. John Cottingham, ‘Descartes’ subsequent verdict on the essays of Comenius’. Translation of unpublished letter of late 1639 or early 1640, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12 (2004), 382–384.

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Charles II, an illegitimate limitation of the Pansophic concept of knowledge as it was originally presented by him and the Hartlib circle. In the Royal Charter of 1663 the limitation of research within the Society to purely natural knowledge was already obvious from the title: ‘Royal Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge by Experiments’. The hyperphysical book of Holy Scripture and the Metaphysical book of the spirit were left out of the educational programme, and research was limited to the physical book of the world. When Comenius criticised this limitation of the task of the Society in his dedication to the Via lucis, the Royal Society reacted in a lukewarm manner with a letter of thanks from its then secretary Henry Oldenburg. The Pansophic concept of knowledge was dropped by the Royal Society, and this is nowhere more clear than in the fact that the Society quickly sold on the copy of the Via lucis which Comenius had gone to the trouble of sending them.

CHAPTER 6

Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann

Robert Fludd’s Kabbalistic Cosmos Translated by Geoff Dumbreck and Douglas Hedley

INTRODUCTION: KABBALAH AND POIESIS ‘In the beginning, God created heaven and earth’. ‘In the beginning was the Word’. ‘God spoke, and it was’. If any object raises the question of the relationship between science and poetry, then it is the created cosmos. Etymology indicates what was meant, even though the inherent meaning of the words is blurred in linguistic usage. The Greek poiein means ‘making’; in this sense, the product of poetry is something made, something produced through action. In its poetic process, the cosmos—the beautiful whole—is the product of action. This whole is not just beautiful on its own account; rather, it is beautiful as the result of a process which is understood as logical and poetic. Ultimately, it concerns creation through the Word. If the beauty of the world is poetic, then the creative word, which enables and realises this world, can be understood as an instance through which the beautiful appears. The canonical and privileged source, with the help of which the creative word can be understood, is the Bible. This is the textual presupposition of all Kabbalah, whether Jewish or Christian. The Bible is understood the primordially written, handed-down word of God. As such, the biblical texts (especially the Hebrew texts) can be seen as a formal medium, through which the secrets of creation may be understood. This speculative process of interpretation, which is uplifting and inspiring in the theological sense, occurs as follows: the form and multiple meanings of particular letters are understood as bearers of meaning. Three forms of exegesis are used: Gematria: the interpretation of letters as numbers. Temura: the combinations of letters. Notaricon: the interpretation of letters as symbols of words. 75 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 75–92. © 2008 Springer.

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The exegetical technique of Kabbalah aims at speculative theological and philosophical loci, which guarantee inspiration: (1) the process of becoming should be recognised. This process also involves the eternal self-production of the divine. (2) The divine name and its power should be explicated. This is also the domain in which the primordial divine predicates, the Sephiroth, are discussed. For the Christian Kabbalist, this implies the locus of the development of the Trinitarian nature of God. The divine creative plan should be recreated with the help of revelation and speculation. Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia (Fig. 1), which was printed in Oppenheim and Frankfurt between 1617 and 1623, in four volumes, is an encyclopaedic work constructed around the loci of the Christian Kabbalah. Robert Fludd (1574–1637), physician, astrologer, mathematician and philosopher of nature, was a follower of Paracelsus, and the most important English representative of the school of Nicholas of Cusa, the Christian Neo-Platonist, who combined Pythagoreanism and Kabbalah with one another.1 In his Historia, he developed a cosmology that interpreted the Mosaic history of creation in terms of natural philosophy. It considered the influence of the stars on world events (including instructions for practical horoscope), representing in detail the human arts and techniques of his day, and explaining their analogy to heavenly archetypes. The organisation of the work is not wholly unitary, and it is certainly unfinished. The speculative core of this lore of both worlds is the Christian Kabbalah, which is treated in the second part of the second volume. Its title is: Utriusque Cosmi historia II, 2: Tomi Secundi Tractatus secundus, Sectio prima: De Theosophico, Cabalistico et Physiologico utriusque mundi discursu, Frankfurt 1621.2 In this kabbalistic speculation, which unites the motives of the Christian kabbalistic literature of the sixteenth century, Fludd deals with the beginning of all being, the power of the name of God in the Tetragram, the idea of the divine plan for creation (as set out in Scripture), and the 10 divine primordial powers (Sephiroth), which determine the Cosmos and the first man, Adam.

1 On Robert Fludd, see Alan Debus, Robert Fludd and His Philosophical Key (London, 1979); William H. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Serge Hutin, Robert Fludd (1574–1637), Alchemiste et Philosophe Rosicrucien (Brussels, 1994); Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Kosmos und Kabbala. Robert Fludds Naturkonzeption’, in Thomas Leinkauf (ed.), Der Naturbegriff in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2005), pp. 213–235; idem, ‘Robert Fludds kabbalistischer Kosmos’ in Norbert Elsner and Werner Frick (eds), Scientia Poetica. Literatur und Naturwissenschaft (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 76–97. Also, idem, Philosophia Perennis. Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004). 2 In the following, this edition will be cited as Fludd, together with details of the page number(s).

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Fig. 1 Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Historia, Tomi Secundi Tractatus Secundus, Sectio Prima. (Frankfurt 1621, p. 181.)

THE GREAT WORLD SCHEME Fludd represents his processus universitatis in a great world scheme with the title Causarum universalium speculum. I do not know of any scheme of comparable metaphysical and speculative ambition.3 It shows the spiritual cosmos as a great circle of worlds, which is divided horizontally in the middle. The lower half is divided into three circular segments, of which the middle (approximately a quarter circle) is black. The two outer segments of the lower half of the circle become increasingly light, from the bottom upwards. 3 Fludd, p. 181 It is convenient to orientate the following description consistently to the subjoined picture. The Latin in the scheme is not always completely correct; it is silently corrected.

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The black part in the middle is characterised as ‘terra inanis et vacua’—that is, as ‘without form and void’—referring to Genesis 1:1: ‘the earth was without form and void’. This citation is given kabbalistic elucidation by the banner running beneath it, which is upside down: ‘ℵ Deus latens seu Aleph Tenebrosum’ (in English: ‘the hidden God or the dark Aleph’). This text alludes, through the story of creation, to the theology of the hidden, predicateless God. The Aleph is the Hebraic sign for the One; the Aleph Tenebrosum symbolises the dark, unknowable oneness of God. Fludd deals with this teaching in connection with the Kabbalah of the name of God. I will return to this in section III (‘The power of the Tetragram’). The outer spheres of the spiritual Cosmos appear in the segments beneath on the left and right: the ascent on the left, and the descent on the right. The scheme must therefore be read clockwise. These segments, which elucidate symbolic meaning though banners, already show three spheres; the inner area of the segment is not partitioned here. The outermost sphere, from which all action emanates, denotes the divine life, which constantly realises itself: ‘Deus Patens Aleph Lucidum, Sapientiae Diuinae actus’ (in English: ‘God, who opens the illuminating Aleph, the effect of divine wisdom’). The second sphere shows the numbers 1–9; the third sphere contains ‘Simplices Emanationis Archetypicarum gradus, ab Aleph potentiali’ (‘simple degrees of the emanation of archetypes, which stem from the power of the Aleph’). These degrees refer to the divine Tetragram, the letters of which are interpreted as the archetypes of creation. This revelation of the divine name develops from the oneness of the Aleph over the sphere of numbers. In the upper half of the world scheme, the three outer spheres remain, in addition, the representation of the inner divine life. However, as regards the outer segment of the right hand side of the bottom half of the circle (which shows the numbers declining from 10 to 2, declining into the ‘inanis et vacua’ and the hidden God), the scheme cannot show the decline of God in the same way as the coming into view (in the Aleph Lucidum) that is shown on the left hand side. The part of the right-hand lower segment that corresponds to the Aleph Lucidum is therefore left empty. Underneath the three outer divine spheres, the creation of the world and its decline is symbolised in a mere two banners. On the left: ‘Crepusculum Diei Creatonis – dawn of the day of creation’; on the right, ‘Solis occasus seu noctis et privationis initium – the setting of the sun, or the beginning of night and the privation’. The upper half of the Causarum universalium speculum shows the realm of continual divine becoming, which comes from hiddenness into the light, and then conceals itself again. This process must be understood as the irresistible emergence of the divine power, in which God brings himself to appearance: the appearance manifests itself simultaneously in light and life, then in numbers, then in the Tetragram. This process of the self-revelation of God, which manifests itself in the eternal creation of the world, is presented in the upper half of the cosmic scheme. The outer circle symbolises light and life as continual ascent and decline: ‘Ortus Solis vitam et gloriam dantis – the rise of the sun which imparts

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life and radiance’; ‘Incrementum – strengthening’; ‘Vigor – force’; ‘Decrementum – weakening’; ‘Diei finis, Vitae occasus – end of the day, decline of life’. The second sphere contains the decades rising from 10 to 100, and the centuries rising up to 1,000, and going into decline correspondingly. The third sphere contains the Tetragram—that is, the name of God. This is certainly not intended , but as a symbol of the as a pure presentation of the four holy letters creating God. The four letters of the Tetragram correspond to the three ‘mothers’ of the Hebrew alphabet (Aleph), (Mem), (Shin), (the closing Mem), which account for the four spheres. Section IV.1 goes into greater detail about the meaning of the ‘mothers’ of the Hebrew alphabet in terms of a theology of creation. The term ‘mothers’, and the symbolic assignment of the three letters (Aleph, Mem and Shin) as maternal letters, stems from the book Yetzirah, the book of creation, which interpreted the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as the die of the world (for the latter is moulded by the divine spirit). Fludd’s scheme shares with this text the claim that Mem can be written in two ways: as opening, at the beginning and in the middle of the word, and as closing (as the closing-Mem) at the end of the word. This allows the three ‘mothers’ to be allocated, using four different forms of letter, to the three letters of the Tetragram, the archetypes , of which the appears twice in the divine name. The relationship between the letters of the Tetragram and the ‘mothers’ is that of the procreation (according to the pre-modern conception) and information of matter that is understood as watery. At the same time, matter is misconstrued, from its etymology, as ‘motherly’. (Mem) is referred to as the letter of water in section IV.1. The father, the archetype, symbolised by the letters of the Tetragram, gives formative life, which is received by the mother, symbolised by the mothers of the Hebrew alphabet. The inscription that is to be found on the left hand side of the upper half of both these spheres states in its shared allocation: ‘Jod , Primus Archetypi pater agens et coiens cum matre Aleph ad Naturae humidae partum – Jod , the first father of the archetype, which works and sleeps with the mother to bring forth the dampness of nature’. The corresponding mother is the , which should not, however, be confused with the ‘Aleph Tenebrosum’ or ‘Aleph Lucidum’ (in this instance, the Hebrew numerical value for 1). The sphere that lies beneath signifies ‘ Prima Mater de Mem: seu Pane hoc est universa natura humida gravida – the first mother of the earth, or the whole (but also the god ‘Pan’), which is completely damp and heavy nature’. If one goes further into the upper sphere in a clockwise direction, one will see the representation of the second letter of the Tetragram, the : He Secundus pater archtypi effigiem dans naturae humidae in lucem productae spiritum – He, the second father of the archetype; as form he gives the spirit to the damp nature, which has been brought to the light.4

4

The printed text is possibly corrupt.

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The maternal , which is informed by this beneath:

He, is described in the sphere

Mem Secunda dicta Mem apertum seu initians seu aqua universalis in lucem edita – the second Mem (mother) is called the open beginning-Mem (in contrast to the closed ending-Mem), places the universal water in the light. The third letter of the Tetragram is the Waw: Vau Tertius pater agens in tertiam matrem Scin ad naturae humidae informationem – Waw, the third father, which affects the third mother, Shin, in order to inform damp (watery) nature. Beneath the Waw lies the Shin, the third mother, which must be informed: Shin Tertia mater procedens a spiritu igneo primae matris et humido seu agneo secundae (Matris) – Shin, the third mother, which goes out from the fiery spirit of the first mother, and from the fiery or related spirit of the second (mother). Finally, on the right hand side of the upper half, is the fourth letter of the Tetragram, the second He: Secundus pater, imprimens dispositionem finalem et corruptibilem in fine secundae matris – the second father, who imprints the final and perishing disposition on the second mother. The corresponding ‘mother’ is the second Mem, the closed-Mem, whose function is interpreted as follows: Mem Seu Matris secundae pars Posterior seu Mem clausum seu Natura humida omnia finiens – , or the second part of the second mother, or the closed Mem, or the damp nature which concludes everything. With the fourth circle, that of the mothers, we have left the pure, divinely spiritual area, and we are now dealing with the creation and materiality. Matter, symbolised through the ‘mothers’ means, at the same time, merely potentia passiva—no roughly sensual materiality. Since life was interpreted in Fludd’s time as an interplay of the given (masculine principle) and the received (feminine principle), the relation of God to the first matter corresponds to that of the informing active masculine principle to the informed passive feminine principle. Genesis 1:2 is interpreted in this sense: ‘The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’. In his world scheme, Fludd divided the material areas of creation into four areas, which are labelled on the left hand side of the upper and lower halves of the circle with the letters A, B, C and D. Area A contains the aforementioned spheres of the mothers, ten divine names and ten Sephiroth, which are the 10 divine primordial predicates. Area B contains two spheres with the names of angels. Area C shows the constellation, whose materiality is conceived as ethereal. Because the number ten is the ordering number of the world, ten spheres

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of power are constructed: the Primum Mobile, the constellation, and the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury and the Earth. Fludd then adds the elements—these additions have something of a constraining system. The lowest spheres, found in area D, are initially described as materiality in the palpable sense, which increases through the powers at work in the materiality: ‘Esse materiale, esse formale, nexus materiae cum forma’. That is the conventional Aristotelian conception of form and matter. This informed material is now abandoned to the powers of the sublunar world soul. Fludd counts the following powers: ‘Vis naturalis, Vis impulsive, Vis vitalis, Vis concupiscibilis, Vis phantastica, Vis vegetiva, Vis corruptibilis’. The elements appear first among these principles of materiality—their number also increases, under the constraints of the system from four to ten: ‘Aqua’ (water), ‘Ignis’ (fire), ‘Terra’ (earth), ‘aer inferior’ (the lower, earthly air, in contrast to the ‘aer ingens’ in the upper sphere). Next: ‘Ignis’ (fire—repeated), ‘Suprema Aeris R[egio] seu ingens Aer (the region of higher or stronger winds – meaning the power source of storms, Aeolus’ bag, for it was unknown at the time that storms are caused by the difference between higher and lower bands of air pressure). ‘Aqua dulcis’ (sweet water) is next, followed by ‘Aer flatuosus’ (ringing air) and ‘Mare Aqua spissa Mare’ (solidified water, by which is meant a transitional stage between water and land, following the Biblical creative command for the waters under the firmament to gather themselves together, and for dry land to come forth). The circle is concluded by the repeated name, Terra-Earth. The next sublunar sphere, the fourth in area D, classifies different forms, through which and in which natural life reveals itself, in the element of air and of breath: ‘Vitae pabulus’ (sustenance of life, meaning the air of life), ‘Vitae actus’, ‘Fumus terrestis’ (earth steam), ‘Vitae Vapor’ (life vapour), ‘Exhalatio calida’ (warm breath), ‘Exhalatio humida’ (damp breath), ‘Vitae vapor magis humida’ (even more damp life spirit), ‘Exhalatio mediocris’ (medium-damp breath), ‘Vapor densus’ (dense vapour), ‘Fumus spissus’ (dense steam). The fifth sphere in area D is that of the meteors: meteors are, for Fludd, unstable unions of elements and powers of the world soul: spiritus, anima, corpus are the parts of the soul, which contain the ‘spiritus eternus’ that shows itself in the meteors, in meteros of fire (igneum), in vitalised meteors (vivificum), in fertile meteors (spermaticum), in windy meteors (ventosum), in watery meteors (aquosum) and in earthly meteors (terrenus). The bottommost and innermost sphere of Fludd’s Causarum universalium Speculum is that of the three Paracelsian elements: ‘sal, sulphur and mercurius’ (salt, sulphur and mercury). These elements are initially listed singly, and are then combined so that the scheme of 10 is completed. The spheres of the divinely controlled creation are completed with the edifying observation: ‘Et haec omnia in compositionem perfectam’. Fludd characterises the lowest earthly area, in which one finds the three material grades of life of the minerals, the plants and the animals (‘mineralia, vegetabilia and animalia’), with pious optimism: ‘Terra gratia repleta et actu divina – the earth is fulfilled by the grace and work of God’.

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In summary: The great world scheme demonstrates the kabbalistic construction of Fludd’s cosmology. The core of his theosophy is displayed here: the original revelation of God in his name is the ground of the processus universitatis, which first fulfils itself with eschatology, when God is all in all. While the cosmos is gradually perfecting itself in the whole, life is conceived as an eternal circuit of a continual creation, which proceeds from heaven and fulfils itself on earth. Robert Fludd understood this scheme, so to speak, as the central symbol of his kabbalistic interpretation of the world; in this Causarum universalium Speculum, the elements that Fludd developed in the individual stages of his own argument become visible. The main kabbalistic locus, which encompasses the Tetragram, the Kabbalah of the words of creation, and the Sephiroth, does not coincide entirely with the symbolism of the world scheme, but it exemplifies it in its essential points, and makes its symbolism comprehensible.

THE POWER OF THE TETRAGRAM ‘IN THE BEGINNING’ Fludd takes over the methods of exegesis of the Kabbalah. The forms of the letters and their numerical values, as well as assonances and exchanges, are used as agencies of meaning. The goal of the interpretation is always anagogical (that is, edifying). The scripture should give information about the innermost secrets of the divine glory and the creation. For a Christian that means that the Kabbalah reveals the Trinity, as well as the innermost plan of the structure of the world. That is the point of such an esoteric interpretation of scripture—namely, that it further strengthens dogmatically certain doctrines by unlocking the secrets of scripture. Fludd’s starting point is the Trinitarian interpretation of the first word of the Bible (Bereshith): ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’. This ‘in the beginning’ is understood as the ascent of the divine name, in which God ever reveals himself. Fludd thus proceeds from an interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity as process. In his view, the Trinity is a continual process, which reveals three moments. The Tenebrosum symbolises the hidden God as undetermined unity, as (en sof).5 This Tenebrosum, which unites the contradictory predicates ens and non-ens (cf. )6 in itself, is borne out of the Aleph Lucidum, which corresponds to the Beth, the second letter of the alphabet. The process by which the lucidum emerges out of the Tenebrosum is understood as the continual divine becoming out of nothing. This process is symbolised through the letter (Iod), the first letter of the Tetragram YHWH. The form of the is interpreted as the initial movement from the unextended point upwards and to the side. 5 6

Fludd, p. 12 ff. Ibid., p. 23.

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At the same time, the relationship between the lucidum and Tenebrosum symbolises, for the Christian kabbalists, the eternal process of the initial separation of Father and Son. This second aspect is, at the same time, the actus of the divine wisdom, which becomes dimly visible with the first word of the Bible (Bereshith). In the (beth), the first letter of the Bereshith, there is also a reference to the (Beth) that forms the first letter of the word (Ben)—the Son who comes from the Father. Here, the Christian kabbalists retrieve a saying that was understood as hermetic wisdom: ‘Monas, monadem gignens in se reflectens ardorem—the oneness begets a oneness in which it mirrors its heat in itself’. The is, in this sense, the that becomes visible in the Son; the absolute one (which allows of no difference) is unrecognisable, because something can only become known if the difference between the discerner and the discerned remains. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE TETRAGRAM ACCORDING TO THE THEOLOGY OF CREATION The process of God is the development of the divine power. This process is evident in the cosmos: from the rise of the sun and the divine light, the light increases to its highest strength at midday and then weakens. The setting of the sun and night symbolises the decline of life and the return into the indeterminate, dark unity of the en sof. This movement is the absolutely original movement, and must be understood as the paradigmatic cyclical description of the cosmic eternal life. This becoming and decay is interpreted as a numerical increase from the nonnumerical unity of the Aleph Tenebrosum to one, then 10, then 100, up to the highest midday amount of power, 1,000; this power then declines towards the evening, until it resolves itself into the abyss of the en sof, to be transformed anew into the morning. The Christian kabbalist sees this process as hidden in the secret of the divine name; the numerical symbolic interpretation supports this. The is the real symbol of the divine unity. The numerical value of the Tetragram ( =10, =6, =5) comes to 26. Together with the , which equals 1, the divine unity (the Aleph Tenebrosum) totals 27. This is 33, the threefold potency (power) of the Trinity.7 At the same time, 27 is the sum of three nines; three nines in a row (999) gives the number with which the world is measured, since every heaven has nine divisions before it is raised to a higher potency. With the addition of the mystical one we reach 1,000, the number of the power of the heavens, the number of divine perfection.8 Thus, for the speculative pious Christian, the Tetragram reveals the inner life of the Trinity. Fludd sees this Trinity according to the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan creed of the Christian church, such that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and as breath. The Jod represents the father, and the father is of the light. The He is here the spirit and the breath; it means on the one hand the spirit of the father, and on the other the spirit of the son, who is symbolised through the Waw . So we can see the first and the second He of the Tetragram as the same sprit. The Waw also symbolises the son, according to the prologue 7 8

Ibid., p. 8 ff. Ibid., p. 15 f.

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of Saint John’s Gospel, as the effective word of creation, through which the first He is linked with the father. Fludd sees the Trinitarian structure of the Tetragram as directly connected with the account of creation of the book of Genesis. The Waw symbolises the word that forms the heaven and, at the same time, symbolises the waters above and below the firmament. This achievement of stability applies to the relationship between the empyrean and the firmament just as much as it applies to the relationship between the heaven above and the heaven below the sphere of the sun. Here Fludd cites Psalm 33.6 ‘verbo domini firmati sunt coeli’; and (quoting the royal prophet Solomon): ‘posuit tabernaculum suum in sole’. Thus, the sun is shown theologically as the symbolic star of the divine word, in which, according to the prologue of John’s Gospel, is the life and the light which shines in the darkness.9 The first He in the Tetragram is at the same time, interpreted in terms of theology of nature and creation, the symbol of the living water, which receives the power of Jod as life-giving spirit and imparts it to the world. The Jod, as the first letter of the Tetragram, symbolises the power of the divine beginning, and is, at the same time, the letter of the Messianic name of Jesus , whose power is again absorbed in the Waw.10 This already shows the similarity between the letters and . Out of the Jod and the He comes the life-giving FIAT,11 which corresponds to the Hebrew (iehi—let there be12). The He, in its role as the shaper of the divine power, is used in a double symbolism: firstly as the becoming-manifest of God for himself, and secondly as the mediator of the divine word to the outside, and into creation. Here the He is interpreted as the spirit of the world, as Metatron, the angel of divine reconciliation with the world. In this function it correlates to the number 49, the number of the Biblical jubilee year.13 This interpretation occurs according to gematria (the interpretation of the numerical value of the letters). The calculation is as follows: (10) multiplied with (5) makes 50; these are the 50 ways of divine wisdom. But the (Tenebrosum, the non-numerical one) is unrecognisable, and therefore one is subtracted, and only 49 of the 50 remain. This is the number of the ways that God has given us to reach knowledge of him, the number of the divine sophia (that is to say, the number of the angel Metatron). In the numerical symbolism we find the natural philosophical, cosmic reality of the Tetragram: (Jod) signifies the mundus aeternus, the world above the heavens, the empyrean. (He) symbolises the mens divina, the divine order of the world. (Waw) is the sign of the ‘sol coelestis seu natura stellarum’—that is, of the sun and the constellation. The also has the function of stabilising and mediating between the higher and lower worlds; the second is the virtus elementaris, the house of the ethereal and elemental world.14 The order of heaven is also 9

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 28. 11 Ibid., p. 19. 12 Ibid., p. 25, cf. Genesis 1, 6. 13 Fludd, p. 20, 22 ff. 14 Ibid., p. 28. 10

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YHWH), arranged according to the geocensymbolised in the Tetragram ( tric model. The (Jod) indicates the empyrean, the heaven beyond the constellation. This is the domain of divine glory, which the saints inhabit. It follows the firmament and the external planets, which are symbolised by the first (He) of the Tetragram. This domain is divided from the inner planets and the world of the four elements, which are indicated by the second (He), by the solar sphere, symbolised by the (Waw).

HEAVENLY HYLOMORPHISM: THE PRIMORDIAL INFORMATION OF THE ELEMENTS THE LETTERS OF THE TETRAGRAM AND THE ‘MOTHER’ OF THE HEBREW ALPHABET The Tetragram symbolises the entire power of existence. In it, the divine power mediates itself to the cosmos through the divine word. The Christian Kabbalah interprets this divine word Christologically, but since it is, at the same time, the word of creation, the magical creative word also plays a major part in the Jewish Kabbalah. The word was always represented in the Jewish tradition through the letters. Since the divine word was conceived before it was spoken, it must have a representation other than the expression in tone. This representation of the word prior to its expression was the Hebrew scripture. The latter is only secondarily the representation of the spoken word; its most important meaning lies in the fact that the treasure of primordial divine wisdom was represented in it in potentiality. Thus, the Hebrew alphabet was of foremost theological meaning. In the alphabet the mysterious meaning of the cosmos is shown as it was conceived before the creation.15 The cosmic potentiality of the alphabet is described by the Jewish kabbalistic book Yetzirah.16 It is the oldest book of the Jewish kabbalistic tradition, and sees the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as an archetypal pattern of creation. It divided the 22 letters into the following groups: three mothers seven doubles and 12 singles Fludd used the three ‘mothers’17 from this book, interpreting them in his hylomorphic speculative physics as the potentiae passivae of the three letters of the Tetragram that are the father. In this way, he was able to ground his physical doctrine of the elements, for according to the book Yetzirah (Chapter 3, Part 3), mean ‘air, water, fire’; the heavens are created out of fire, and the earth is made from water and the air oscillates between fire and water’. The ‘mothers’ correspond to the ‘fathers’ of the Tetragram: the Aleph corresponds to the Jod, the Mem to the He, and the Waw to the Shin, while the second He corresponds again to the Mem. The ‘mothers’ of the alphabet (which represent, at the same time, the first elements), take up the power of the ‘fathers’ of the Tetragram.18 Thus the elements (beginning, water, and fire) obtain divine life. 15

Ibid., pp. 30 ff: see here for the list of astrological meanings of the Hebrew alphabet. Cited at the very beginning: ibid., p. 2. 17 See Fludd, p. 2, where they are treated in detail. 18 Ibid., pp. 84–106, examines ‘de primariis naturae elementis’. 16

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ABYSS, BEGINNING AND UNITY

Above all, the has its own dynamic. In the explication of the divine name, where it symbolises the unity that the Tetragram now lacks (with its numerical value of 26, going up to 27, which = 33), it was already seen as undefined unity (as one and nothing, as pure potentiality).19 It is precisely this function that is taken up once again: here the , analogue of the ‘father’ from Fludd’s speculation about the Trinity, represents the hyle. According to the account of the first day of creation, the Earth (the lowest form of materiality) develops from this, through the fertilisation of the divine spirit and light: Tenebrosum is the nothing that coincides with the something;20 the Biblical ‘darkness above the abyss’ is interpreted as this coincidence. 2. Insofar as the Aleph Tenebrosum mirrors itself in itself,21 it produces itself as (Jod) in opposition to the abyss. That is, so to speak, the primordial division. Here the (Jod) obtains Christological quality as the self-mirroring of the father. (The ambivalence of the as the symbol of the father insofar as it is the beginning of the Tetragram, and as son insofar as it transforms the Aleph Tenebrosum into an Aleph Luminosum, is not assessed as a contradiction, but rather as an instance of the Tetragram’s inexhaustible abundance of meaning. 3. The next step corresponds to the divine name (Ehjeh = I am): this name is interpreted as the connection between the first two letters of the Tetragram and the Aleph Tenebrosum: the Aleph is the father, the Jod is the son, and He is the symbol of the Holy Spirit. This spirit of God is interpreted, following Genesis 1:2, as that which moves over the waters (that is, over the majim, which are symbolised by the Mem ). These waters are fertilised by the spirit—in other words, according to the theory of hylomorphism, they are informed. As a result, the waters obtain the function of the living, fertilised waters; Fludd quotes here the Tractate Poimandres from the Corpus Hermeticum, in which creation is described, through the Logos, as information of moisture and the watery or cloudy.22 4. This informed heavenly water also contains matter in potentia—for in the heavenly water, the Paracelsian elements (salt, sulphur and mercury) may be found. If all these subtle forms are distilled out of the water, then finally matter alone remains. This matter is waste, that which is left over when all the essential forms are sublimated and distilled—that is, when they are spiritualised. Thus, the remaining matter is the caput mortuum (the residue of the process of distillation), or the faex terrestis (the excrement of the world).23

1.

19 Cf. ibid., p. 14: “Quomodo Aleph parvum seu Tenebrosum in sua unitate mystice illud ineffabile nomen Tetragrammaton in se comprehendat; et per consequens, quod Aleph magnum et lucidum sit nihil aluid, quam ipse Jehova symbolice descriptus.” 20 Ibid., p. 82. 21 Ibid., p. 81. 22 Ibid., p. 81. 23 Ibid., p. 95.

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WATER: (MEM) With both its Mem ( , ) the word (majim—water) suggests the interpretation of the letter (Mem) as water. Fludd follows Genesis 1:2 in his interpretation of the first Mem or majim as the water above the firmament, and the second Mem as the water under the firmament, which gathered itself into the sea on the third day of creation (Genesis 1:9). The water develops out of the ‘nothing’ of the Tenebrosum, which is illuminated by this divine light. On Fludd’s account, the Tenebrosum was first formed into heavenly water, which has its place above the firmament in the empyrean. Yet the informing energy of the divine light exceeds the absorption capacity of the first water; the water under the firmament is informed by the light’s unused power. It follows that the ethereal water of the stellar world develops second, but here too the forming energy of the light is not exhausted. Thirdly, the earthly water is informed, which rains as pure water from heaven, and from which, fourthly, the earth precipitates.24 The relation of the ‘mothers’ (Aleph, Mem, Shin) to the three letters of the Tetragram (Iod, He, Waw) is not static, but must be grasped a process. It is the process of the life, which fulfils itself in the matter that is represented through the mothers (matres). This matter is animated and informed by the mysterious power of the letters of the Tetragram. This life-process is described concretely as a procedure of assimilation and digestion; a process of elements that forms, at the same time, the basic paradigm of Fludd’s alchemy. In the digestion process, the life spirits, which have animated matter as forms, are again sublimated by the body. Thus, the life spirits nourish the digesting body and bring it into its form. The processes of assimilation and digestion are, for Fludd, the elementary motions that constitute the life of matter. For Fludd, this process of accepting, administering and informing the spiritual form through the matter constitutes the life of the living cosmos. In the creation process, water comes from the nothing of the Aleph Tenebrosum, incorporating all fiery germs of life. In the course of this information procedure, which is described as an assimilation and digestion process, the uninformable part of matter becomes residue, expelled as excrement and ‘caput mortuum’. In ever-repeated starts, the previously expelled matter is again integrated into an information process, until the spiritual forms, the power of divine order, have been spiritualised at the end of the world, ‘and the spirit is all in all’ (1 Cor. 15:28). For Fludd, who uses here the ideas of the Corpus Hermeticum, water is the ‘omnium rerum existentium mater’;25 it is the element that contains that unease of the world which increases from ‘beneath’. Thus it is, as a particular climactic element, responsible for the wet meteors. Water is the element that mediates between heaven and earth. In the Biblical creation account, the waters above and beneath the firmament are differentiated. The water above the firmament 24 25

Ibid., pp. 110 and 112. Ibid., p. 96.

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is, for the Christian kabbalist Fludd, the spiritualised, sacramental water, with which one baptises in the power of the spirit. The water beneath the firmament is the element that is subject to a continual information process. So it fulfils, as the climactic element, the heaven under the solar sphere. In this notion, Fludd follows Aristotle’s Treatise on Meteorology. Fludd suggests that the water’s level of information decreases from planetary sphere to planetary sphere. The water’s informing process collapses ever more; the information resisting aspect of the matter contained within the water grows increasingly, the nearer the process is to the earthly sphere. So one can see how the instability of the natural movements from the firmament to the earth is continually growing. LIGHT AND FIRE: The Shin symbolises light. The Kabbalah of the (Shin) as light and fire depends, above all, on two words: (esch), fire, and (shemesh), sun. According to the creation account, light was first created late on the first day of creation. Then came the darkness ( Tenebrosum), and then water appeared (symbolised by the ), and the spirit of God moved above it. Finally, God spoke ‘let there be light’, and it was light ( ). The Kabbalah of (esch), fire, is immediately clear, because God is as one in fire: . Furthermore, the sun (shemesh) contains the kabbalistic information that in the middle of the light is the water—that is the damp core of visible light: thus the sun is no longer divine light, but rather the light under the firmament, which is already linked to the hyle of the water. The sun corresponds exactly in its structure to the word of creation (jehi, fiat—‘let there be’). The Shin, symbol of divine light, corresponds to the Jod, the symbol of divine power. The Mem, symbol of the informed water, corresponds to the He, the symbol of the Holy Spirit and the potentia passiva in the Tetragram. Fludd interprets the Shin ( ) as verbum divinum. In a divergence from the prologue of John’s Gospel, Fludd sees the creating word as the third person of the Trinity; it is, at the same time, ‘lux aeterna, sapienta sacrosancta, Messias seu virtus Tetragrammati’.26 This is an unclear doctrine of the Trinity, because the sophia (the divine wisdom, from which and in which the world was made) is interpreted Christologically here, and there is no clear distinction between the second and third persons of God. The Psalm 103–104:3, however, supports him in the case of ‘deus amictus lumine’,27 and the light of the divine face is at the same time, for Fludd, the fullness of all information about the word. The angels and the human soul participate in this light. Obviously the light is reduced in power from top to bottom, becoming, as it were, thinner: as ether the light is a fine, cloudy and moist garment, and therein lies the structure of the light of the heavens and the ethereal world. The clouds, which bind the waters in merely unstable way, finally darken the light, and the earth can bring forth sparks of light only as minerals, crystals and fine stones. 26 27

Ibid., p. 122. Ibid.

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But the light is in Christ and his power is also spiritual on earth. His living word penetrates water in a fiery manner: his power shows itself as the living fire of the divine word that arose Lazarus.28

THE TEN SEPHIROTH THE SEPHIROTH INTERPRETED AS HEAVENLY DIVINE, AND COSMOLOGICALLY The principles of the macrocosm, which reveal themselves in relation to the letters of the Tetragram, the ‘patres’ and the ‘matres’ of the Hebrew alphabet, have counterparts in the microcosm. Fludd deals with this material in the second portion of the last part of his history of both worlds: ‘De Principiis Microcosmi Archetypicis idealibus, seu primariis’.29 Fludd begins his treatment of the Sephiroth with a recapitulation of the numerical value of the Tetragram (which is + = 10 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 1 = 27); this 27 is interpreted as three nines, and thus as the arrangement of the three ‘nine-regions’ of the spirit world, soul world and bodily world. But there is also here, as always, the emphasis on unity—and so the Pythagorean ten is the ‘divina mensura et numeratio in mundi dimensione’.30 This measure is interpreted, following Psalm 103/104:2 (‘amictus lumine sicut vestimento’) as the light that is God’s garment. 31 Fludd leans heavily on Book III of Reuchlin’s De Arte Cabbalistica32 in interpreting this clothing (or covering) of God, at the same time, in terms of a philosophia perennis, as the cause of Greek polytheism, which, as Orpheus and Pythagoras testify, gave Jupiter priority as the symbolic representative of the One. For Fludd (as for Reuchlin), these 10 garments of God (which complete area A of the great world scheme) are the basis of the Pythagorean numerology. At the same time, they are the Sephiroth, and these stand in the following order: 1. Cheter (corona—crown) corresponds to the divine name (ehieh), which stands for ‘father’. Cheter is the heavenly source of the Sephiroth tree. and have the numerical values of 1 and 10. In this sense we can also see Cheter as the origin of the Sephiroth.33 2. Chochma (sapienta—wisdom) is described as the lex primitiva, but this sphira (the original divine predicate) represents, above all, the son. The allocation to the divine name (iah, numerical value 10 and 5) can be linked to the proposition that the wisdom of God is structured according to measure, number and weight. 28

Ibid., p. 125, cf. John 11:43. Ibid., pp. 129 ff. 30 Ibid., p. 132. 31 Fludd, 131 ff. 32 Cf. W. Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Johannes Reuchlin und die Anfänge der christlichen Kabbala’, in W. Schmidt-Biggemann (ed.), Christliche Kabbala (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003), pp. 9–48 (esp. pp. 40–48). 33 Fludd, 132 ff. 29

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3. Bina (prudentia—becoming clever) is linked to the holy spirit. The appropriate elohim; the Kabbalah of this name describes him as the divine name is divine ‘power over the waters’ (Gen 1:2). 34 Thus the stability of the heavenly water, which contains the eternal forms in itself, is described.35 These first three Sephiroth are empyrean; they are part of the heavens beyond the constellation. The remaining Sephiroth are interpreted as divine predicates and, at the same time, as predicates of the planets.36 They are the macrocosmic representatives of the primordial powers of God. 1. Chesed (piety) belongs to the divine name el (power). Fludd attributes this to Saturn (without mentioning that another attribution is possible, namely to Jupiter). Sabbath, the day of Saturn, is also the day of piety. 2. Gebura (power) is attributed by Fludd to the divine name Elohim, which (el hamajim), the power of water. Water is interpreted here as means the water under the constellation, as rebellio and resistentia, which is obtained from the divine power. Thus Jupiter is called ‘terribilis et timendus’.37 3. Tipheret (grace and beauty), is attributed to Mars and to the name Eloah, which is not interpreted further. 4. Neseth (sic for Netzach! triumph), is linked to Elohim Sabaoth, the ‘lord of the armies,’ and is attributed to the Sun. 5. Hod (honor and formositas) is also used for the divine name Elohim Sabaoth, the lord of the armies, and is linked to Venus. 6. Jesod (basis) is thought of as the divine name El chai , the God of life, and is identified with Mercury.38 7. Malchut, which is linked to the name Adonai, connects heaven and earth and is identified with the moon.39 Fludd extends the Jewish schema (see area B of the great world scheme): in his view, the Sephiroth (with the exception of Chether), mediated through Malchuth, are identified with the nine choirs of angels named in Denys the Areopagite’s Celestial Hierarchies and the list of angels in Agrippa of Netteshim’s De Occulta Philosophia. THE MICROCOSMIC REPRESENTATION OF THE SEPHIROTH: THE KABBALAH OF THE NAME ADAM The microcosmic interpretation of the Sephiroth must also be justified microcosmically; for only when it is clear for what reason the microcosm represents the macrocosmic structures do they show themselves to be meaningful for human 34 This is a variation of the text: in Genesis 1:2 it states “and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” 35 Fludd, p. 135. 36 Ibid., p. 136; Hermes Trismegistus Pim. 3 can also be quoted as evidence : “Dij astrorum ideis cum signis conspiciebantur: dinumeratae sunt stellae secundum eos, qui inhabitant illas, Deos. 37 This allocation is not found in the great Kabbalistic world scheme; it was obviously forgotten. 38 Such is Fludd’s description on p. 137; in the scheme one finds only the name . 39 Fludd, p. 141.

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beings.40 The main argument of the postulated analogy is the biblical axiom of the image of God in man. If the Sephiroth are predicates or garments of God, then the human being must correspond to them in some way. These correspondences are grounded in influence: through their influence the planets, in which the Sephiroth are represented, form human beings as qualities of the Sephiroth. So the Sephiroth are also types of human behaviour. This raises two questions: 1. Is the relationship between the divine predicates of the Sephiroth broken through the fall of Adam? If so, the Sephira Malchut (the lowest of the original divine predicates, in which God binds himself to the world) would break the continuity between the empyrean and upper ethereal cosmos, on the one hand, and the elementary lower reality on the other. Fludd insists, however, that Christ redeemed sins and renewed the connection to heaven.41 2. How are the Sephiroth present in the microcosm? Reuchlin had already answered this question in De arte Cabbalistica, stating that the capacities and concepts of the soul, in which human beings participate, are linked with the Sephiroth through the power of the planets. Fludd describes Reuchlin’s theses and alters them: in his opinion, the Sephiroth of man are: deus, mens, intellectus, ratio, Memoria, vis aestimativa, phantasia, sensus internus, sensus externus and voluntas.42 Fludd saw this parallelism of the microcosm and macrocosm as being supported through the idea of divine genesis. He supposed the following parallelism: the Aleph Tenebrosum corresponds to the Father, who draws everything into himself. The Aleph Lucidum (or the son) is a luminous seed, in which the divine person comes to existence. This process of origination has its analogy in the development of human existence. Fludd finds the evidence in the Kabbalah of the name of Adam. The processus universitatis, which Fludd sees (through the relationship between the Aleph Tenebrosum and the Aleph Lucidum) as continually beginning, and (symbolised through the Tetragram) as continually perfecting and expressing itself,43 has its representation in the microcosm. This is revealed in the name of Adam. Fludd assumes, understandably, that the lingua Adamica is taken from Elohim, as in the process of the creation: ‘from his mouth, esse and essentia have been obtained’.44 This essential language reveals itself in the name of Adam. Fludd is therefore convinced that Adam is made with heavenly earth that is formed from the Sephiroth. His body is formed out of (adom) red earth, and glowed (before the Fall) like a ruby.45 In the divine light, the microcosm rules over the animals, and therefore he is also (adon). That

40

This speculation is not presented in the great kabbalistic world scheme. Ibid., p. 141. 42 Ibid., p. 146. 43 Ibid., pp. 146 ff. 44 Ibid., p. 158. 45 Ibid., p. 161. 41

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is, in the name of Adam we find the following: Adam is composed out of , which Fludd interpreted here as lucidum (that is, as divine wisdom); the means the water, which is interpreted as matter, receiving motherhood for the male Godhead; these two letters stand on either side of the (daleth), which means door. , , are the matres of the creation. With Adam, the is placed in the position of the ; the (daleth) means the clay, the limus terrae from which Adam was made, and evokes the word dabak, (to adhere). At the same time, the (daleth) symbolises the prison of the soul, in which the light and fire are held captive.46 With the Fall, the body of Adam lost its luminosity and became animal. That made his body susceptible to illness in particular ways, which Fludd interprets universally as meteors—that is, as unstable connections of form and matter. Meteors are, expressed in the elements of matter, unstable connections of water with light or fire. After the Fall, the external bodily man is unstable like the meteors, hence, his susceptibility to illness. The divine lightness of humanity then reveals itself in the inner man alone, in which the spiritus dei manifests itself. (Flood cites the Corpus Hermeticum I:26 and Job 33:6). In opposition to bodily nature, the inner human being is not dependent on the fate of the stars, which Fludd has already described in his astrology (‘Genithlialogia’, a doctrine of the development of terrestrial relationships under the influence of the power of the stars). An indication of the inner man’s independence from the body is the fact that the inner man (which represents the tree of life, the word and the conscience) is androgynous,47 an idea that Fludd shared with the Platonic tradition. Fludd sees this kabbalistic cosmology as the innermost core of his spiritual physics and medicine. He presents an entire ordered cosmos, considering its waxing and waning, the divine power and its order in numbers, the mystery of the divine name, the primordial world that is hidden in the alphabet and finally the information of nature in its link with the divine spirit. It is an endeavour to consider together all theosophical, theological and philosophical speculations about theogeny and cosmogony. It is a book which demands and encourages speculative fantasy from the interpreter. Had Goethe known this book, then perhaps he could have shown his Faust straining, in the Causarum Universalium Speculum, as he ‘knows what constitutes the interior workings of the world’ (was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält).

46 47

Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 162.

CHAPTER 7

David Pailin

Reconciling Theory and Fact: The Problem of ‘Other Faiths’ in Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists

According to John Norris’s ‘Preface’ to his Account of Reason and Faith Controversies of Religion […] have been managed of late with that Intemperance of Passion and Indecency of Language, after such a Rude Bear-Garden way, so much more like Duelling or Prizing than Disputing, that the more good Natur’d and better Bred part of the World are grown almost Sick of them and Prejudic’d against them, not being able to see Men Cut and Slash and draw Blood from one another after such an inhuman manner only to vent their own Spleen, and make diversion for the savage and brutaliz’d Rabble, without some troublesom Resentments of Pity and Displacency.1 While, however, Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) might be considered to threaten its opponents by its weight of learning,2 and while Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism makes some use of weird reports,3 for the most part the writings of the diverse group of philosophical theologians 1 John Norris, An Account of Reason and Faith: In Relation to the Mysteries of Christianity, 13th edn (London: for Edmund Parker, 1728), sig. A3 recto. 2 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part; Wherein, all the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and Its Impossibility Demonstrated (London, 1678); although this contains only the first part of what was intended, it runs to 917 pages of text in folio with another 87 pages listing the contents. 3 Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism: Or, An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Mind of Man, Whether there be not a God, in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More vol. I. (London, 1662), refers, among other matters, to reports of ‘Coskinomancy’ (or divination) and charms (p. 89), ‘supernatural effects’ (pp. 93–95), bewitchings and sorcery (pp. 96–110), and happenings at meetings of witches (pp. 119–121). According to More, the Fellows of Queens’ College, Cambridge preach an annual ‘Anniversary Sermon’ at Huntingdon to keep fresh the memory of the discovery of witchcraft at Warbois (p. 96). I gather that this sermon is no longer preached.

93 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 93–111. © 2008 Springer.

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known as the Cambridge Platonists do not warrant such strong criticism. They are generally marked by a collected reasonableness arising from their authors’ confidence that authentic theistic belief is rationally justified, and that it can be seen to be such by all people of good sense. This confidence rests on two convictions. The first is that such belief is a basic characteristic of human being. Benjamin Whichcote, for instance, considers that since ‘Religion is the most natural thing to Man’s mind in the World’, it follows that ‘a man’ is not to be defined with Plato as ‘Animal rationale, i.e. a rational Creature’ but as ‘Animal religiosum, a religious Creature’.4 The other is the fundamental assurance that all people in their right mind can perceive the fundamental contents and truth of such belief. The group characteristically interpret Proverbs 20. 27, ‘The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord’, as, in Nathanael Culverwel’s words, ‘a brief commendation of Natural Light, of the Light of Reason’ which guides people into true understanding. Culverwel himself explicitly rejects the view that such understanding is obtained only when human understanding is ‘enlightened with supernatural knowledg’. Considering that this gloss arises from fear to give ‘natural light, and natural reason their due’, he maintains that out of the divine being: God hath breathed into all the sons of men Reasonable souls, which may serve, as so many Candles, to enlighten, and direct them in their searching out their Creator, in the discovering of other inferiour beings, and themselves also.5 Others are more cautious in their expectations. John Smith holds that as a result of the Fall ‘the inward virtue and rigour of Reason’ is now ‘much abated’. Consequently ‘those Principles of Divine Truth which were first engraven upon mans Heart with the finger of God are now … less clear and legible than at first’. To remedy the situation God also provides ‘Truths of Divine Revelation’ to help ‘the Minds of men’ find the way back to God.6 Nevertheless, whatever their views on the need for, or at least the desirability of, the aid of revelatory grace for a fully adequate grasp of authentic belief, the Cambridge Platonists typically entertain considerable confidence in the power of human reason to discover and establish basic religious beliefs about the reality of God and human duty.

4 Benjamin Whitchcote, Some Select Notions of that Learned and Reverend Divine[…] Benj. Whitchcot, D.D. Lately Deceased, Faithfully Collected from him by a Pupil and Particular Friend of his (London, 1685), pp. 85 f. It is interesting that Whichcote rejects the Platonic definition of human being on the grounds that ‘a very near representation’ of human rationality is found ‘in the sagacity of inferiour Creatures’. What distinguishes human beings is that their superior rationality brings them to ‘take cognizance of God’. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, had earlier put it that ‘religion is the ultimate difference in man’—De veritate, translated with an introduction by M.H. Carré (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith for the University of Bristol, 1937), p. 295. 5 Nathanael Culverwel, An Elegant, And Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature: With several other Treatises (London, 1661), p. 110 f; cf. pp. 11, 1 7–111. 6 John Smith, Select Discourses (London, 1660), p. 383.

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This confidence in reason raises a problem that Herbert of Cherbury recognises and attempts to resolve. Although Herbert predates7 and is not regarded as one of Cambridge Platonists,8 he shares their confidence in the power of reason to determine matters of religious belief and obligation. Holding that ‘God’s Church is all mankind’ and that ‘God makes no man whom hee gives not means to come to him’ for ‘eternall Happines’,9 and finding through experience that appeals to supposed authorities, whether biblical or ecclesiastical, are unsatisfactory, he wrote his De veritate to show ‘every sane and unprejudiced Reader’10 how to use reason to identify what is true. In the course of doing this he advances a doctrine of ‘common notions’ (notitiae communes). While these are innate in every person, having been implanted there by God,11 they are only latent until appropriate stimulation makes people aware of them. Once, however, they are raised to consciousness, they are recognised by all reasonable people to provide the normative principles for distinguishing what is true and good from what is false and bad. The common notions include five that concern religion. They are that (i) there is a God, (ii) God ought to be worshipped, (iii) the heart of religion lies in the connection of virtue with piety, (iv) evil is to be expiated by repentance, and (v) people face reward or punishment after this life.12 According to Herbert these common notions constitute the foundation of ‘the true Catholic or universal church’. This church, ‘which comprehends all places and all men … alone reveals Divine Universal Providence, or the wisdom of Nature’, and is the only source of salvation.13 Among the six characteristics of the common notions that Herbert gives in his general discussion of them are universality and certainty. The common notions are held to receive ‘universal consent’ and to be indisputable; anyone in their right mind who understands them and yet were to doubt them would ‘strip himself of his humanity’.14 Herbert repeats this claim when later he discusses the common notions of religion. He states, for example, that ‘the system of Notions, 7

Herbert of Cherbury died in 1648. In many ways, however, his works share the spirit and basic theses of the Cambridge Platonists—cf. G.A.J. Rogers, ‘Einleitung’ to the section on Platonism, in J.–P. Schobinger (ed.), Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: der Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. 3: England (Basel: Schwabe, 1988), vol. 3, part 1, pp. 213 f. 9 Letters to Sir Robert Harley, 1617–1618 in British Library, Add MS 70001. 10 Herbert of Cherbury, De veritate, p. 69—the titlepage of the third edition of 1645. This is also the wording of the dedication of the second edition of 1633 but the first edition (published in Paris in 1624) had been dedicated to ‘the whole human race’. It seems that Herbert may have come to realise that not everyone shows sound and unbiased judgement. 11 According to Herbert of Cherbury, the fact that they have been ‘inscribed within us’ by ‘Nature’ shows that ‘God has bestowed on us not only a representation of His form but also some portion of His divine wisdom’, ibid., p. 126; cf. p. 302. 12 Ibid., pp. 291–302. 13 Ibid., p. 303. 14 Ibid., 139 f.; cf. p. 135: the common notions ‘carry conviction with them’. The other characteristics of the common notions are priority, independence, necessity, and ‘the method of conformation’. 8

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so far at least as it concerns theology, has been clearly accepted at all times by every normal person, and does not require any further justification’.15 Locke, among others, was to challenge this claim. He holds that the claim of universality is ‘inconsistent with visible matter of fact, and daily observation’. Some people, even those of ‘Good Understanding in other matters’, treat as ‘sacred’ and unquestionable propositions that seem to others absurd; some people are totally committed to the truth of propositions that contradict what others hold with equal conviction.16 It is a problem of which Herbert was well aware when he advanced his ideas in the De veritate. Leaving aside the case of those ‘who are out of their minds or mentally incapable’,17 he allows that people may block common notions out of their minds18 or ‘insinuate’ errors and absurdities into those that express ‘sublime and essential truths’ of the sacred ‘cult of the Divine’.19 Even when some of the pagan deities are interpreted as ways of recognising aspects of the God’s reality, the ancients’ fables about the divine describe ‘an idol of the imagination’ that is properly considered ‘foolish’ and ‘evil’.20 Furthermore, just as Locke holds that true moral principles are ‘blotted out’ of the minds of many people ‘by depraved custom, and ill Education’,21 so Herbert suggests that many priests and ministers have constituted ‘a crafty and deceitful tribe’ that has ‘corrupted, defiled, and prostituted the pure name of Religion’ out of self-interest. He also suggests, however, that examination reveals that in many cases differences of belief and ritual are only apparent. They arise from the ways in which people in different parts of the world use different forms of expression.22 Although Herbert treats the problem posed to his doctrine of common notions by the religious beliefs and practices found in the world only briefly in De veritate, he deals with it at length in De religione gentilium23 and A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil.24 In these posthumously published works he seeks to show 15

Ibid., p. 291. John Locke, in P.H. Nidditch (ed.), An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book I, Chapter III, §§21 f (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 81. 17 Herbert of Cherbury, De veritate, p. 139; cf. p. 295. The problem with this exclusion is that those who adopt it may be led to class anyone who disagrees with what they consider to be a common notion as, ipso facto, either mad or mentally deficient. 18 Ibid., p. 126. 19 Ibid., p. 130; cf. 141 f. 20 Ibid., p. 293. 21 Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, I, III, §20, p. 80. 22 Herbert of Cherbury, De veritate, 294 f. 23 Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De religione gentilium, errorumque apud eos causis, ed. Isaac Vossius (Amsterdam, 1663); references are to Edward, Ld Herbert of Cherbury, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles, and Causes of their Errors Consider’d., trans. William Lewis (London: for John Nutt, 1705). 24 Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil (London: for W. Bathoe, 1768). In spite of some doubts, there seems good reason to accept the attribution of this work to Herbert of Cherbury as basically correct although it should be noted that there are some variations between the extant manuscripts and the printed version. These variations are discussed in Julia Griffin, ‘Studies in the Literary Life of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury’, unpublished D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford, 1993, Chapter VI. 16

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how the evidence of other religions, which he cites mainly from classical Greek and Roman authors,25 is consistent with his claim that the five common notions of religion are universally acknowledged, the former work dealing mainly with the first two of the common notions and the latter with the third and fourth.26 He employs four strategies to deal with the evidence of other faiths that seems to contradict his thesis. First, he occasionally judges certain beliefs to be simply mistaken. Some who put forward ‘Vain and Ridiculous Conceits’ about God have erred. For example, Aristotle’s view that ‘care of Singulars and Individuals’ was ‘beneath’ God is dismissed as ‘a great absurdity’ that ‘was more arrogant than became a modest Philosopher, and exceeded the Bounds of right Reason’.27 This explanation of the origin of beliefs that contradict true religion implies, however, that in these cases the supposedly indisputable common notions of religion have failed to exercise canonical control over what is held. It is therefore not surprising to find that it is a strategy that Herbert seems not to use very often in relation to fundamental beliefs. Secondly, he argues that not all uses of a word are univocal. Hence, only when references to ‘God’ in non-Christian literature include ‘the Attributes of … Most Supreme, Most Good, and Most Great’ are they to be interpreted as referring to ‘the same GOD and common Father with us’ that is affirmed in the common notions of religion. The other references are to be seen as relating to inferior beings and hence as irrelevant to judging claims about the universality of belief in God as ‘a Perfect, Immense, and Eternal Being’.28 Thirdly, Herbert maintains that other views about God and religious practice arise from ‘the Priests Explaining their Mysteries in different Countries, according to their own Interest and Humour, or to make them Intelligible to the People’.29 While the final part of the explanation may be deemed a heuristically acceptable insight into the contents of what Herbert calls ‘Ethnical Theology’, Herbert’s own emphasis in this respect is predominantly on the avaricious activity of the priesthood. He charges ‘Crafty Priests’ with introducing polytheism because they ‘judg’d it would conduce much to their Interest’ for people to have a number of 25 There are, however, occasional references to other faiths, including Islam (cf. Herbert of Cherbury, Antient Religion of the Gentiles, p. 68), and the religions of the Persians and Indians (cf. ibid., p. 263), of the Incas (cf. ibid., pp. 33, 86), of the Chinese (cf. Herbert of Cherbury, Dialogue, p. 40), and of the ancient Britons (cf. ibid., pp. 39, 42). 26 The Dialogue ends before the fifth common notion, post-mortem judgement, is addressed. 27 Herbert of Cherbury, Antient Religion of the Gentiles, 100 f. 28 Ibid., 2 f. Among the ‘Imperfect, Finite, and Transitory’ entities that are spoken of as gods or goddesses are stars, people who ‘had deserved well of Mankind’ and even ‘Fever, Fear, and Paleness’. A development of this strategy seeks to show how different religions are not as distinct as they may appear by equating the gods (and other figures) of different religions. For example, the Hebrew ‘El’ is identified with ‘the Saturn of the Phenicians’ or ‘Moloch’ (24 f); the Assyrian ‘Mylitta’, the Arabian ‘Alitta’ and the Persian ‘Metra’ with Venus (p. 216); and it is also claimed that ‘the Antient Bacchus was Noah, but sometimes he is Osiris’, and that the ‘Arabian Bacchus was the same as Moses’ (p. 222). These attempts to overcome differences by identification show much imagination but the results are often more ingenious than persuasive. 29 Ibid., p. 138.

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gods to worship, ‘especially after they had invented and dispersed a different way of Worship for each of them’.30 Elsewhere their ritual ‘Inventions’ are described as ‘not only impious and foolish, but very obscene, fetid and sordid’.31 As a result of the distortions and perversions produced by priestcraft, he admits that in many cases ‘the Sound, most Antient and Universal Parts of Religion’ have to be sifted ‘out of the vast heap of their Superstitious Rubbish’ that contaminates the just and rational parts of the faiths found in the world.32 Finally, and most of all, Herbert adopts a hermeneutical strategy to reconcile reports about other faiths with the claim to universality contained in his doctrine of the common notions of religion. Where this strategy is adopted, statements that apparently ascribe divinity to the sun, moon, stars, heroes and other beings are not condemned as ‘Superstitious’ and ‘Idolatrous’ but are interpreted as signifying ‘the mystical and occult Adoration of some unknown Deity’, or as ‘a Symbolical way of Worshipping the Supream God’.33 Worship of the sun, for example, is held not to have been directed to the sun in its own right but to the sun as symbolically representing certain of God’s attributes;34 in like manner it is suggested that the ‘stars were Worshipped in Honour of the Supream God’35 or in some subordinate manner as giving due respect to the visible evidence of God’s ‘chief Ministers’ and ‘Militia’.36 Although Herbert admits that worshippers have often not clearly appreciated the symbolic nature of the ostensive objects of their worship,37 he considers that by these means God has brought people to awareness of the divine,38 and that through these various guises worshippers have sought to apprehend the ultimate and thereby, in the end, to honour the true God.39 In spite of the errors and evils that he finds in the religions of the world, Herbert thus concludes, regarding the first of the common notions of religion, that ‘tho’ the Heathens did often dispute, concerning some Attributes or Properties of God … yet I am of the Opinion, that neither the Learned nor the Ignorant did ever question, that there always was, and now is, one Supream God’.40 Whether or not Herbert’s attempts to justify his claims about the common notions of religion deal convincingly with the evidence of what is actually 30

Ibid., p. 271. Ibid., p. 41. 32 Ibid., p. 292; cf. pp. 294–96, 353–58. (The pagination in Antient Religion of the Gentiles jumps from p. 336 to p. 353.) 33 Ibid., 384 f. 34 Cf. ibid., pp. 49, 110; cf. Herbert of Cherbury, Dialogue, p. 52 where he quotes ‘the old Greek verses’ that say that ‘Pluto, Proserpine, Ceres, Venus, Cupids, Tritons, Nercus, Tethys, Neptune, Mercury, Vulcan, Pan, Jupiter, Juno, Diana, Apollo, make all of them one God’. 35 Herbert of Cherbury, Antient Religion of the Gentiles, p. 87. 36 Ibid., pp. 9, 79; cf. Herbert, Dialogue, pp. 32 f. 37 Cf. Herbert of Cherbury, Antient Religion of the Gentiles, pp. 60, 185 f. 38 Cf. ibid., p. 8. 39 Cf. ibid., pp. 11, 87. 40 Ibid., p. 255. 31

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believed and practised throughout the world, it is clear that he was aware that there is a problem in reconciling those claims with the evidence of what actually happens. Were the Cambridge Platonists aware that a similar problem arises for their typical conviction that rational understanding is ‘the candle of the Lord’ in and for all people? And, if they were aware of the problem, how did they seek to justify their confidence in the ability of rational reflection to discern the proper character of religious beliefs about the reality of God and human duty when empirical evidence suggests that so many discordant things are held and done?41 Although the Cambridge Platonists did not produce works that focus specifically on this issue, their writings indicate that they were aware of the problem to some extent and made some responses to it.42 As has been noted, the Cambridge Platonists typically consider that all human beings are endowed with an intellect capable of guiding them in religious matters. Whichcote accordingly finds no problem in bringing the example of ‘Heathen Philosophers’ to the attention of ‘a Christian Congregation’. He does it ‘to provoke’ his Christian hearers ‘to an holy emulation of them, who only by the Principles of Nature, came to know’ that the true end of human beings lies in their relationship to God.43 In his ‘Discourse Concerning The true Way or Method of attaining to Divine Knowledge’ John Smith states that people have some ‘Innate notions of Divine Truth’44 and that ‘some Radical Principles of Knowledge … are so deeply sunk into the Souls of men, as that the Impression cannot easily be obliterated’.45 Culverwel similarly holds that God has perfected human being with ‘a Rational Nature’ by means of which all people may discover the ‘Law of Nature’ that God requires them to observe.46 He rejects, however, the Platonic view that this knowledge is implanted in people and discerned by intuition. It is, rather, something that people attain by using rational reflection

41 While, for instance, More speaks of the superiority of Christianity (cf. An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness, in The Theological Works of the most Pious and Learned Henry More, D.D. (London, 1708, p. 68)) and its success in spreading itself (cf. ibid., pp. 113, 235), he also is aware of Brerewood’s calculation that two-thirds of the world is pagan, a fifth Muslim and only a sixth Christian—and of the parts nominally Christian much are ‘tainted with … gross Hypocrisy’ and ‘open Prophaneness’ (ibid., p. 344). 42 The kind of knowledge of other faiths that was available to the Cambridge Platonists, besides that provided by their knowledge of the classics from ancient Greece and Rome, is illustrated by the surveys produced by Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Touching the diversity of Languages and Religions, through the Chief Parts of the World (London, 1614), Alexander Ross, Pansebeia: A View of All Religions in the World (London, 1653), and William Turner, The History of All Religions in the World: From the Creation down to this Present Time (London, 1695). 43 Whitchcote, Select Notions, p. 85. 44 Smith, Select Discourses, p. 6. 45 Ibid., p. 13. 46 Culverwel, Elegant and Learned Discourse, p. 156; cf. pp. 143 f, 163. On pp. 159 f he criticises the ‘Oriental Invention’ of ‘those Arabian Writers, Averroes, and Avicen’ (Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina) who deny that natural reason has its own power as ‘the Candle of the Lord’, and hold that people require the assistance of ‘an Angel to hold the Candle’ if they are to be enlightened.

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on their experiences: ‘the innate light’ that constitutes the true ‘Candle of the Lord ’ is not a set of ideas but ‘the power, and principle of knowing, and reasoning’.47 On the basis that people’s ability to understand each other shows that they fundamentally share a common intellect, Cudworth affirms that, truths, though they be in never so many several and distant minds apprehending them, yet they are not broken, multiplied, or diversified thereby, but they are one and the same individual truths in them all. So that it is but one truth and knowledge that is in all the understandings in the world.48 Accordingly he dismisses the ‘extravagant opinion’ that attempts ‘to deny that there was … any absolute certainty of truth and knowledge’ and to maintain that ‘knowledge was fantastical and relative only’.49 At the same time, he and the other Cambridge Platonists are aware that people have disagreed and still do disagree about what is true, sometimes on fundamental issues including those of religion and morality.50 While, for instance, Henry More holds that some things are ‘so palpably true’ that they are recognised to be such by all people in their right mind, whether they be good or evil, he also appreciates that people may be completely persuaded that something is true although it is false, ‘as well in things Natural as Religious’.51 How, then, are the differences of opinion that are found in the world to be explained? In attempting to answer this question the Cambridge Platonists adopt various strategies. One alleged source of error is education. People brought up in a certain culture may be unable to perceive the errors in what it inculcates.52 They may thus be persuaded to adopt views that are untrue because of what More calls ‘the Besottedness of Education’.53 This explanation, however, leaves unanswered the question of why the errors themselves arose in the first place. More also suggests that people come to accept what is false because of their personal 47 Ibid., p. 176; cf. pp. 124, 173–178. Ralph Cudworth also rejects the Platonic view of knowledge as ‘reminiscence’ although he does hold that some ideas must come from ‘the innate vigour and activity of the mind itself’—in A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 74, 83; cf. pp. 78, 150. 48 Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Morality, p. 131. 49 Ibid., p. 29; cf. pp. 44, 132. Cudworth is not one to whom post-modernists can appeal for support. 50 Cf. ibid., 10 f, 16 f, 22, 29. 51 Henry More, A Brief Discourse of the true Grounds of the Certainty of Faith in Points of Religion in Theological Works, 765 f. 52 Cf. [Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury], Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times ([London:] 1711), III, 104: ‘He who is now an Orthodox Christian wou’d […] have been infallibly a Musselman, or as errant a Heretick; had his Birth happen’d in another place’; cf. also III, 235. 53 More, Certainty of Faith, in Theological Works, p. 765. This explanation, however, was too radical for Richard Cumberland. He claimed that ‘man’s natural reason was not hereby extinguish’d’ but was sufficiently preserved for some ‘thoughtful men, tho’ educated under publick establishments of idolatry’, privately to ‘arrive at the knowledge’ of the reality of God even though publicly they continued to practise idolatry—Richard Cumberland, Sanchoniatho’s Phoenician History, with a Preface by S. Payne (London: by W.B. for R. Wilkin, 1720), p. 285.

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character—their ‘Complexion’ or ‘Passion’—and because of self-interest.54 They may also fail to perceive the truth because they are too lazy. In relation to the latter claim More presents a pedagogical interpretation of the evident ‘Obscurity and Abstruseness’ of Christianity. This, he suggests, is due to the divine intention to preserve it from ‘contempt’: by rendering it a genuine Mystery, God protects its ‘precious Truths’ from being easily apprehended by ‘the sensual and Careless’.55 Evil and error, however are the major reasons for false belief according to the Cambridge Platonists. While, as has been noted, John Smith affirms that some basic principles of religion and morality are deeply imprinted in people, he also considers that they may be ‘much darkned’ and, in a few cases, eradicated by ‘sensual baseness’.56 He puts it that ‘the reason why’ truth does not prevail in the world in spite of ‘all our acute reasons and subtile disputes’ is that ‘we so often disjoyn Truth and true Goodness’ whereas they only flourish as united in one root. Hence although those who are ‘defiled with any vice or lusts’ may, ‘like those in Plato’s deep pit… converse with Sounds and Shadows’, they will not encounter the Life and Substance of Truth …. Those filthy mists that arise from impure and terrene minds, like an Atmospheare, perpetually encompass them, that they cannot see that Sun of Divine Truth that shines about them, but never shines into any unpurged Souls.57 The best way to apprehend and understand ‘Divine Truth’ is by allowing it to ‘unfold itself in the purity of mens hearts and lives’ rather than by the ‘subtil Niceties’ of ‘curious Wits’.58 Those who wish to have their ‘Knowledge thrive’ must feed it ‘with Holiness’ of life.59 Furthermore, as Smith notes, it is not only Jesus who taught that ‘an Holy life’ is ‘the best and most compendious way to a right Belief’;60 it is also a point that was made by Zoroaster to his followers.61 Mistakes in reasoning are considered by the Cambridge Platonists to be the other major explanation of the errors found in the world’s religions. These mistakes may arise from straightforward failures to reason correctly, in some cases influenced by morally and religiously culpable states. According to Whichcote, for instance, a basic source of source of error is the state of separation from 54

More, Certainty of Faith, p. 765. Henry More, An Explanation, p. 2. More, considers that it is ‘a palpable piece of Hypocrisy’ for a person to seek ‘to excuse himself from the study of Piety, by complaining against the Intricacies and Difficulties of the Mystery thereof; whenas he never yet laid out upon it the tenth part of that pains and affection that he does upon the ordinary trivial things of this world’ (ibid.). 56 Smith, Select Discourses, p. 13. 57 Ibid., p. 4; cf. p. 438. 58 Ibid., p. 9. 59 Ibid., p. 4. 60 Ibid., p. 9. 61 Cf. ibid., p. 4: ‘When Zoroaster’s Scholars asked him what they should doe to get winged Souls, such as might soar aloft in the bright beams of Divine Truth, he bids them bathe themselves in the waters of Life: they asking what they were, he tells them, the four Cardinal Vertues, which are the four Rivers of Paradise’. 55

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God. He describes the ‘mind of Man’ that is ‘under a seclusion from God’ as being ‘like a Leaf fallen from a Tree … which retaineth neither Beauty nor Colour’ and soon ‘shrivels up to nothing’. The cost of its being detached from God is ‘corruption and degeneration’ in its understanding.62 As previously mentioned, John Smith similarly holds that where ‘men love their own filthy lusts’ and desire to ‘spare them’, they corrupt ‘the Common Notions of a Deity, strongly rooted in Mens Souls’. Having ‘unhallowed minds, that have no inward foundations of true Holiness’ and disturbed by guilt, they misinterpret the ‘strange, stupendious and terrifying Effects in Nature’, and pervert worship into ‘inhumane and Diabolicall sacrifices’.63 Error, however, may not be the result of moral and religious evil. It can be simply the result of purely intellectual mistakes. Appreciating that ‘Nature plainly aspires to concord and unity’ while fostering individual differences, Culverwel states that he has ‘never heard of a Nation apostatizing from Common Notions, from these first Principles’. Nevertheless he is also aware that the criterion of universal consent has only limited value as a way of identifying what is true. This is because in many cases the guidance of ‘this Natural Light’ is extinguished by the mistaken conclusions that are drawn from its basic precepts.64 Hence, ‘the blackest Errors sometimes … have some tincture of Reason in them’.65 The fact that reason makes mistakes is not, however, a justification for failing to use it: ‘because men have not so much of Reason as they should, will they therefore resolve to have none at all? Will you throw away your Gold, because it’s mix’d with dross?’ It should not be forgotten that it is reason that detects ‘the weakness of Reason’ and that ‘acknowledges the Word of God’.66 Reason may be limited and weak, but it is indispensable if understanding is to avoid chaos. Nevertheless, while the Cambridge Platonists consider that the corruption and weakness of rational understanding explain why so many erroneous ideas are entertained, they are basically confident that human reason has the power to perceive and establish basic truths about God and morality while, at the same time, regarding the self-acknowledged limits of reason as showing the need for revelation to augment and correct what reason is able to establish. The combination of this confidence in reason and awareness of its limitations influences how they view other faiths in three ways. First, it brings them to regard all people as intellectually capable of discerning the truths of what they often call ‘natural religion’.67 Secondly, it allows them to evaluate the contents 62

Whitchcote, Select Notions, 84 f. Smith, Select Discourses, pp. 31, 33. 64 Culverwel, Elegant and Learned Discourse, pp. 164–168. 65 Ibid., p.15. 66 Ibid., 14 f. 67 The term ‘natural religion’, however, is one that has many connotations—cf. David A. Pailin, ‘What is Natural Religion? Reflections on the confused and confusing story of what all people are supposed believe, or do believe, or did believe, or ought to believe, or would believe if they understood correctly’ in Arvind Sharma (ed.), The Sum of Our Choices: Essays in Honour of Eric J. Sharpe (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), pp. 85–119. 63

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of other faiths according to whether their adherents either have never been given or fail to acknowledge the revelation given by God. Thirdly, it means that where erroneous ideas about religion and morality are to be found they consider that it is appropriate and worthwhile to seek to counter them by rational argument. The first response is found in the Cambridge Platonists’s endorsement of natural religion.68 More finds that even the Apocalypse supports ‘the truth of Natural Religion’—which he identifies as ‘the belief of the Existence of a God, and of Spirits or Angels good and bad, and of a Blessed Immortality after this life’.69 In his Antidote against Atheism he outlines various arguments that indicate that ‘the acknowledgement of a God is as well to be said to be according to the light of Nature, as the knowledge of Geometry’. In considering objections to these arguments, More recognises that the fact that a belief has been universally entertained is by itself no guarantee that it is true: for instance, ‘the best of Astronomers & the profoundest of Philosophers’ now judge to be false the geocentric view of the world that was previously ‘universally received of all Nations’. The significance of this, however, is not to cast doubt on reason but, rather, to be seen as ‘the just victory of Reason over the generall prejudice of Sense’. In contrast to cosmological views and despite the absurdities of some forms of worship, there is no rationally significant challenge to ‘the judgment of Reason and naturall Sagacity’ that underwrites the ‘universall acknowledgement that there is a God’.70 In spite of appalling reports71 about how religion has been and is used to justify inflicting internal abominations and ‘external outrages’ on people, More still maintains that ‘the whole Species of Mankind’ is ‘indued with Reason and a power of finding out God’.72 It is a confidence typical of the other Cambridge Platonists. They find no problem with claims that authentic knowledge of God73 and appropriate modes of worship may be identified in all parts of the world, whatever the religious beliefs and practices that prevail there.74

68

Cudworth, True Intellectual System, p. 527 gives an account of ‘the Pagans’ natural theology’ by Prudentius. 69 Henry More, Apocalypsis Apocalypseos; Or The Revelation of St John the Divine unveiled (London, 1680), p. xvii. 70 More, An Antidote against Atheism, 30 f. in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London 1662), I. A Modest Enquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity: The First Part Containing A Careful and Impartial Delineation of the True Ideas of Antichristianism, in Theological Works, p. 404, More says that ‘the better Sort of the Heathen were not so ignorant of the Deity, but that they acknowledged the Unity of his Essence, his Omnipotency also, and his Omniscience’. 71 In An Explanation, pp. 54–64 More gives examples of the ‘Beastliness, Obscenity and execrable Cruelty’ p. 54, found in reports of religious practices from both the ancient world and more recent travellers. 72 More, Antidote against Atheism, pp. 83, 85 in A Collection, I. 73 Cudworth devotes considerable attention to Trinitarian ideas of the deity found in ancient authors—cf. True Intellectual System of the Universe, pp. 546–629. 74 Cf. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, p. 265: ‘the more Intelligent of the Ancient Pagans, notwithstanding that Multiplicity of Gods worshipped by them, did generally acknowledge One Supreme, Omnipotent, and Only Unmade Deity’; cf. also p. 286 (with reference to Zoroaster), p. 308 (with reference to the ancient Egyptians), pp. 402–406 (with reference to Plato), and p. 540.

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The fact that the deity is called by many different names is not considered to contradict this but is interpreted by Cudworth, for example, as showing that ‘God’ is ‘Polyonymous’.75 Secondly, the Cambridge Platonists respond to other faiths by recognizing that the power of human reason is limited. Accordingly they not only acknowledge the need for divine aid if people are properly to appreciate the significance of what they have grasped76 but also, and in relation to their view of other faiths much more importantly, maintain the need for revelation to correct errors77 and to augment what reason cannot perceive by its own powers.78 Since, furthermore, they are convinced of the Christian belief that the normative revelation of the nature and will of God is that given through Jesus as the Christ and recorded in the Bible,79 the Cambridge Platonists are confident that they can judge other faiths as crucially inadequate, either because they do not know this revelation or because they fail to accept its decisive status. John Smith, for instance, declares that God, in gracious freedom, ‘hath provided the Truth of Divine Revelation’. In this revelation ‘God … is pleas’d to unbosom his Secrets, and most clearly to manifest the way into the Holiest of all, and bring to light life and immortality, and in these last ages to send his Son … to teach us his Will and declare his Mind to us’.80 Apart from the heterogenous body generally described as ‘the heathen’ or ‘paganism’, there are two non-Christian faiths, Judaism and Islam, of which the Cambridge Platonists are aware. Both claim to be founded upon divine revelation. How, then, do the Cambridge Platonists respond to what they know of these faiths? Judaism evokes a mixed response. On the one hand, as having been instituted by God and the recipient of divine revelation,81 albeit not the final one since it is the predecessor of Christianity,82 ancient Judaism (i.e. the faith with which the Hebrew Bible is concerned) is treated with respect. It is even maintained by some that its teachings are the source of all true philosophy. This view was 75

Ibid., p. 477; cf. pp. 449, 458, 490, 494, 528. Cf. Whitchcote, Select Notions, pp. 22–24; More, An Explanation in Theological Works, p. 3; Smith, Select Discourses, p. 384. Cudworth holds that since ‘the Vulgar’ had limited ability to grasp ‘Natural and Philosophical Theology’, political bodies set up their own ‘Civil’ theologies—True Intellectual System, p. 541. 77 John Maxwell adds a long introduction to his translation of Richard Cumberland’s Treatise of the Laws of Nature (London [1727]) in which he argues, as Christian apologists in this period commonly did, that ‘the mistaken Notions which the Heathens had of the Deity, and the Defects in their Morality’ show ‘the Usefulness of Revelation’—title page, cf. pp. i–clxviii. 78 More, Certainty of Faith, in Theological Works, p. 767 points out, however, that no alleged revelation can be authentic if it contradicts what is established about God and morality by ‘Reason rightly circumstantiated’; cf. ibid., 766 f. 79 Cf. More, Apocalypsis Apocalypseos, pp. xviif. 80 Smith, Select Discourses, p. 383. 81 Cf. More, An Explanation, p. 52. 82 Cf. ibidem: ‘the rich Discoveries of the Gospel’ are said to have been ‘shadowed out in the Mosaical Types’. 76

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radically asserted in the second half of the seventeenth century by Theophilus Gale, an author whose ideas on metaphysics and ethics are in many respects basically Platonic in content but who maintained a fundamentally revelatory of view of their origin. In The Court of the Gentiles he expounds at length the thesis that the origin of true philosophy lies in what God taught Adam, Abraham and Moses, the writings of Moses in particular providing ‘the main foundations of all that Philosophie, which first the Phenicians and Egyptians and from them the Grecians were masters of’.83 Although Gale, who lost his fellowship at Oxford at the Restoration and became an Independent pastor and teacher in London, is at best to be regarded as a marginal figure in discussions about the Cambridge Platonists,84 it should not be forgotten that his basic claim, namely that Pythagoras and Plato (among others) learnt from Moses, was also entertained by Cudworth and More. According the latter ‘Moses seems to have been aforehand, and prevented [sc. anticipated] the subtilest and abstrusest Inventions of the choicest Philosophers that ever appeared after him to this very day’ and ‘those two eximious Philosophers, Pythagoras and Plato … both had their Philosophy from Moses’.85 Culverwel, in comparison, has doubts about the significance and extent of such borrowing. While he accepts that ‘the whole generality of the Heathens went a gleaning in the Jewish fields’ and that Pythagoras and Plato ‘stole out of the very sheaves’, he holds that they did not acquire there the ‘first Principles’ and ‘Demonstrations’, for ‘God has made’ these ‘common’ to all people.86 The third Earl of Shaftesbury goes further. He reverses Gale’s thesis, suggesting instead that the Egyptians were the source of the Jews’ basic ideas. According to Shaftesbury, while Abraham was a ‘reverend Guest’ in their country, he ‘deriv’d Knowledge and Learning from the Egyptians’ in religious as well as in other matters.87 83

Theophilus Gale, The Court of the Gentiles, Part II (Oxford, 1670), p. 15; cf. pp. 8–15. The title page of The Court of the Gentiles states that one of its aims is to demonstrate ‘The Imperfections of Natures light, and mischief of Vain Philosophie’. Positively Gale asserts that ‘the wisest of the Heathens stole their choicest Notions and Contemplations, both Philologic and Philosophic, as wel Natural and Moral, as Divine, from the sacred Oracles’ of ‘the Scriptures and the Jewish Church’, ibid Part I, pp. [i–ii]. Accordingly when Gale gives an approving summary of Plato’s teachings about God, he concludes that these ‘greatly demonstrate his acquaintance with, and derivations from Judaick Traditions’, ibid., Part II, p. 356. 85 More, Conjectura cabbalistica. Or, A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the mind of Moses […] according to a Threefold Cabbala (London, 1662), p. 3, in A Collection, vol. II; cf. pp. 54, 84, 102. Among other evidence for this thesis, More quotes ‘Numenius the Platonist, who ingenuously confesseth ….what is Plato but Moses in Greek?’—p. 102; cf. p. 3; cf. also Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Morality, p. 38: Plato and Aristotle ‘had the good hap to be rightly and thoroughly instructed in this ancient Phoenician and Moschical or Mosaical philosophy’; and, for Pythagoras, Cudworth, True Intellectual System, p. 13. Cudworth also suggests that a trinitarian view of God may have come to ‘the Platonists, Pythagoreans, and other Pagan Theologers’ from the Hebrews, ibid., p. 548. 86 Culverwel, Elegant and Learned Discourse, p. 155; cf. pp.153–156, 192. On 167 f. he criticises the Jews for failing to share their knowledge with the world but notes that God ‘has not left’ humankind ‘to such unmerciful Guardians. He himself has taken care of them’ by providing them with the means to grasp ‘Nature’s Law’. 87 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, III, 53. 84

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Respect for the Jews of Jesus’s time or later did not, however, follow from respect for the Judaism of the Hebrew Bible.88 Cudworth criticises the Jews for refusing to recognise Christ in spite of the fact that his status was properly authenticated by miracles.89 More’s attitude to the Jews, however, is complex. He repeats widespread prejudice when, for instance, he states that Jesus’s contemporaries treated him as ‘some Magician and Impostour’ to whom they showed ‘hatred’ and ‘malicious cruelty’,90 but he qualifies his condemnation of the Jewish rejection of Jesus in a manner that is somewhat unusual at that time when he comments in parentheses ‘if we may call that Malice which the Love and Candour of Christ in the midst of his bitter sufferings named only Ignorance’. He also goes on to allow that once the Jewish leaders found that they were ‘in a desperate and obdurate condition’, they might well have preferred to ‘venture, as the saying is, over Shoes over Boots’ in their condemnation of Jesus rather than admit that they had made ‘so Hainous an Error’.91 Earlier in the same work More takes up the question of why the Jews are ‘yet unconverted’ to Christianity and suggests that the obscurity of the prophecies in the Bible may have led them to develop ‘a false Notion of him [sc. the Messiah] and of the Condition he was to appear in’.92 More himself, however, is not convinced that the obscurity is insuperable.93 His own view is that it is clear from the prophecies that the Messiah must already have come.94 Apart from such remarks, however, the Cambridge Platonists as a whole seem not to share the apologetic zeal for confuting and converting the Jews that is seen in works by such roughly contemporary authors as Isaac Barrow, Richard Kidder and Charles Leslie.95 This may have been because for the most part they did not have sufficient knowledge of contemporary Jews, let alone direct acquaintance with them, to make it seem important.96

88 Cf. ibid., I, 29 where Shaftesbury describes the Jews as being ‘naturally a very cloudy people’ who looked on religion ‘with a sullen Eye’; cf. also III, 55 f, 115 f. He does, however, recognise (I, 101) that the Bible records some illustrious examples of virtue. 89 Cf. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, pp. 707–709. 90 More, An Explanation, pp. 96 f; cf. ibid., 51 f. for criticism of Mosaic practices. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., p. 4. 93 Cf. ibid., 189 f. 94 Cf. ibid., p. 204. 95 Cf. Isaac Barrow, The Works, published by John Tillotson, Third edition (the first edition was 1683–1686), (London: James Round, Jacob Tonson and William Taylor, 1716), II, 157–167; Richard Kidder, A Demonstration of the Messias. In which the Truth of the Christian Religion is Proved, against all the Enemies thereof; But especially against the Jews, in Three Parts (London: for John Osborn and Thomas Longman, Richard Ford, Aaron Webb, and Samuel Billingsley, 1726). Richard Kidder includes in this volume his earlier A Demonstration of the Messias. In which the truth of the Christian Religion Is proved especially against The Jews (London: by J. Heptinstall, for B. Aylmer, 1684) and his Boyle Lectures for 1693 and 1694 that were first published in 1699 and 1700; Charles Leslie, A Short and Easie Method with the Jews. Wherein the Certainty of the Christian Religion Is demonstrated, Seventh edition (the first edition was 1699) (London: Geo. Strahan, 1727). 96 Cf. David A. Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth– and Eighteenth–century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 63. Symon Patrick,

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Cudworth, however, did have some, even if limited, knowledge of contemporary Jewish thought. He both wrote A Commentary on the Seventy Weeks of Daniel that was highly praised by More and also lists among his manuscripts a piece entitled ‘Of the Verity of the Christian Religion against the Jews’ (of which only a fragment seems to have survived). In the early 1650s a Jewish Rabbi then living in Amsterdam, Menasseh [or Manasseh] Ben Israel, asked Cromwell to allow Jews to settle in England. In 1655, following the end of hostilities between the English and the Dutch, Menasseh travelled to England to present his petition in person. Cudworth visited him and acquired from him a manuscript that presented Jewish objections to Christianity. Menasseh Ben Israel did not admit to being the author of this work but Richard Kidder, who later received the manuscript from Cudworth and refers to it in his Christian apologetics against Judaism, states that he had ‘some reason to believe it to be his [that is, Menasseh Ben Israel’s]; and more to think it to be esteemed as a master-piece at that time among the Jews’.97 Cudworth’s own position may have led others to expect him to be somewhat friendly towards contemporary Jews, or at least to consider it important to engage with them in rational debate about true faith. Consequently, however unfavourable to Judaism may have been his Christian apologetics, Oliver Cromwell probably did not expect him to be hostile to Menasseh Ben Israel’s petitition when he included him among the divines that, with a few merchants and lawyers, he summoned to Whitehall in December 1655 in order to advise him on how to respond to that petition. Cromwell attended the discussions in person and realised, after four sessions, not only that the merchants were basically opposed (for self-interested economic reasons) to allowing Jews to settle in England but also that the divines were generally unwilling to give support to Menasseh’s petition. Although the divines who were summoned may have been convinced in principle that reasonable arguments would show the Jews the error of their convictions and bring them to convert to Christianity and some may have shared a widespread millenarian belief that before the end of the age many Jews would be converted to Christianity and even, in the minds of the more extreme, would make Palestine the centre of a regenerated world, in practice they were by and large uncomfortable with the notion of allowing a rival

a latitudinarian theologian on the fringe of the Cambridge Platonists, wrote Jewish Hypocrisie, A Caveat to The Present Generation, Second edition (the first was 1660) (London: by W. R., for Francis Tyton, 1670). This, however, is not a direct attack on the Jewish faith but an attempt to use examples from history, both as recorded in the bible and since biblical times, to remind Christians that, for instance, forms of worship will not ‘drown the cry of injustice’ (p. 109) since ‘God is the avenger’ of the oppressed (p. 219), and, citing the case of the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, that God will not shield people from the consequences of their moral and political behaviour (cf. pp. 222–226). 97 Richard Kidder, A Demonstration of the Messias (1726), Part II, pp. ii–iii. Kidder’s work also contains footnotes showing him to have read Manasseh Ben Israel’s Conciliator, sive de convenientia locorum S. Scripturæ, quæ pugnare inter se videntur that had initially been published in Amsterdam in 1632—cf., for example, Part I, pp. 28, 56, 146; Part II, p. 26.

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religious group to become settled in the country, not least since it would apparently involve going against texts in the New Testament that condemned the Jews. Failing to get the clear guidance that he wanted, the Lord Protector brought the Whitehall Conference to an end. In the following year he unofficially allowed a few Jews to come into the country. The treatment of Islam is not extensive. Culverwel’s strongly hostile comments are typical for this period. He claims, for example, that in contrast to Christianity ‘the dull, and creeping Religion of Mahomet has nothing at all above Nature and Reason, though it may have many things against both’. The Prophet, whom he describes as ‘that stupid Impostour’, made known no supernatural Truth that required to be authenticated by miracles. Islam is said to have been spread by armed force, in contrast to Christianity whose teaching is described as being so ‘attractive’ that it is able to ‘enamour, and overpower the Understanding’.98 Portraying the Muslim view of heaven as ‘painted and feigned’, Culverwel asserts that its ‘carnal pleasures would prove a real Hell to an Angel, or glorified Saint’.99 Similar attacks on Islam are made by More. He characterises Mahomet as combining ‘Political Craft’ and ‘Pride, … Fraud and Guile’ with ‘Fanatical Madness, wild Mirth, insatiable Lust and Ambition, Poetical Raptures and Martial fury’. The story of the journey to Heaven is judged to be ‘a crafty Figment’ by which Mahomet sought to justify himself as ‘the greatest Prophet that ever yet appeared on Earth’ and as the founder of ‘a Third Sect’ alongside Judaism and Christianity. Muslim claims that Mahomet was a true Prophet are rebutted by citing reports showing him to have been cruel, insatiably Venereous and ignorant, and by holding that the reports of miracles performed by him lack rational credibility.100 At the same time More shows, as with his treatment of the Jews, a certain degree of secular appreciation of Mahomet. Recognising that the Prophet ‘laid the Foundation of that mighty Empire that all the World stands amazed at at this Day’, he sums him up as ‘a mere Political Enthusiast of a vafrous and versatil Wit, with a little smack of Cracktness and Lunacy’.101 Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a little later he mentions, apparently with approval, Hugo Grotius’s suggestion that the ‘Paraclete or Spirit of God’ has ‘assured’ the establishment of Islam throughout the world as well as that of Christendom. This is justified on the grounds that while ‘the Mahometans are

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Culverwel, An Elegant and Learned Discourse, 1145 f. Ibid., p. 1156. The latter remark suggests that Culverwel was puritanically limited in his enjoyments. 100 More, An Explanation, pp. 108–111. 101 Ibid., p. 109; cf. Enthusiasmus Triumphatus; Or A Brief Discourse of The Nature, Causes, Kinds,and Cure of Enthusiasm, p. 15, in Philosophical Writings, vol. I., More queries whether Mahomet ‘took himself to be a Prophet or no; for he seems to be rather a pleasant witty companion and shrewd Politician, than a mere Enthusiast; and so wise, as not to venture his credit or success upon mere conceits of his own, but he builds upon the weightiest principles of the Religion of the Jews and Christians’. 99

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not Christians but Pagans in too true a Sense, yet … much of the Letter of their Law is Moses and Christ’, they ‘profess One only God’, and they hold Jesus in high esteem.102 In spite of his ‘Ignorance, political Tricks’ and ‘fanatical Humours and Whimsies’, the Prophet ‘did not … utterly pervert and deprave the Mystery of the Gospel’. As a result Islam has been able to ‘hew down the more gross Heathenish Idolaters, chastise the disobedient and Hypocritical Christians,103 and ruine the external Dominion of the Devil in the World’. More then expresses the hope that ‘when the chief Scandals of Christendom are taken away, … the whole Turkish Empire may of a sudden become true Christians’.104 The third consequence of the Cambridge Platonists’ confidence in the power of human reason, whatever its limitations, is that they consider it appropriate to use reason to seek to correct wrong ideas about religion and morality. According to Culverwel, the universality of reason means that ‘the Heathen’ are ‘left without excuse’.105 Wickedness may dim reason’s light but it can never completely extinguish it.106 The fact that people sometimes make mistakes does not mean that reason cannot detect and rebut error.107 Where error is detected, it can and should be countered and corrected by rational argument. According to More this should be done ‘with Kindness and Compassion’, commending what ‘is laudable and Praise-worthy in either Judaism, Turcism or Paganism’ while at the same time making clear what is ‘mistaken’ in them and where their adherents ‘fall Short’.108 Cudworth states the position in this way: [I]t cannot be denied that men are oftentimes deceived and think they clearly comprehend what they do not. But it does not follow from hence, because

102 More, An Explanation, 114 f. The source of More’s claims about Muslim views of Christ (and of the associated claim that ‘the Turks have so venerable an Esteem of S. John’s Gospel, that they wear it next their Bodies as an Amulet when they go to war to keep them from Gun–shot’) is Johannes Andreas, Confusio Sectae Mahometanae—a work which had been translated into English by Joshua Notstock and published in London in 1652 as The Confusion of Muhamed’s Sect, Or, A Confutation of the Turkish Alcoran. 103 Cf. More, Apocalypsis Apocalypseos, p. 89 where he states that the ‘scourge of the Turks’ was a punishment for ‘the gross degeneracy of the Church’; cf. pp.80–89. 104 More, An Explanation, in Theological Works, p. 115. The depth of passion that could be aroused by disputes within Christendom is illustrated by More’s remark that ‘Mahometanism’ is to be preferred to the ‘vain and idle Enthusiasms’ of David George—A Brief Discourse of […] Enthusiasm, in Philosophical Writings, I, p. 16. (In 1556 David George had claimed that he was the real Messiah.) 105 Culverwel, Elegant and Learned Discourse, p. 15; cf. p. 164. 106 Cf. ibid., pp. 145, 157 f, 168 f. 107 Cf. ibid., 12 f. where Culverwel argues that reason is not to be condemned because some people (e.g. ‘Socinus, and his followers’) have claimed to use it to reach positions that are ‘injurious to the Gospel’. 108 More, An Explanation, in Theological Works, 343 f. More holds that this is to act in a way ‘more becoming the Spirit of the Gospel’ in contrast to what is ‘usually’ done—namely, ‘vilifying and reproaching all other Religions, in damning the very best and most conscientious Turks, Jews, and Pagans to the Pit of Hell, and then to double lock the Door upon them, or stand there with long Poles to beat them down again, if any of them should … endeavour to crawl out’ (ibid.).

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men sometimes think that they clearly comprehend what they do not, that therefore they can never be certain that they do clearly comprehend any thing. Which is just as if we should argue that because in our dreams we think we have clear sensations, we cannot therefore be ever sure, when we are awake, that we see things that really are. I shall conclude this discourse with that of Origen against Celsus, ‘Science and knowledge is the only firm thing in the world’, without a participation of which communicated to them from God, all creatures would be mere ludibria [playthings] and vanity.109 Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe and his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality show what may follow from holding this position, in the former work at forbidding length. They present arguments that are intended to rebut numerous ancient and modern views,110 both philosophical and theological, and to verify what Cudworth judges to be true. Whether or not sceptics, then or now, be convinced that Cudworth is justified in maintaining that it is ‘a ridiculous folly … in one that would be accounted a philosopher’ to write at length in order in order ‘to convince the world, that nothing’ is ‘absolutely, but only relatively and fantastically true’,111 and that his arguments have ‘quite Routed and Vanquished’ those presented in favour of atheism,112 it seems clear that Cudworth considered the way to refute error and to establish the truth is by rational analysis and argument. And, when he and the other Cambridge Platonists present their arguments, they presuppose that all people in their right minds will appreciate both this principle and its proper application. While, then, none of the Cambridge Platonists produced a volume dealing with the questions posed by other faiths, inspection of their writings indicates that they were aware of those questions to some extent and sought to respond to them. Their remarks illustrate some of the attitudes to other religions that are found at this time.113 The differences in their responses are also a reminder of the variety of views that is subsumed under the label of ‘Cambridge Platonism’—and not least in the significance of the description of them as ‘Platonist’. They all, however, would probably agree with Culverwel that although there are important

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Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Morality, pp. 142 f. Cudworth considers that in many ways modern (to him) authors repeat what had been put forward by ancient ones—cf. ibid., p. 38, 151. 111 Ibid., p. 44; cf. pp. 143 f. 112 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, p. 872; Cudworth thus claims to have satisfied his intention, announced on p. 177, to show that ‘Atheists are no such Conjurors, as … they would be thought to be; no such Gigantick men of Reason, nor Profound Philosophers, but that, notwithstanding all their Pretensions to Wit, their Atheism is really nothing else, but … a most Grievous Ignorance, Sottishness, and Stupidity of Mind in them’. 113 Cf. Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions, for a brief survey of these attitudes. 110

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truths of faith that are ‘always above Reason’, none are ‘against Reason’. Accordingly for both Christian believers and non-Christians: ‘Twill be honour enough for Reason to shew, that Faith do’s not oppose Reason; and this it may shew, it must shew this; for else oς ε˝σω, those, that are within the inclosure of the Church, will never rest satisfied; nor oς ε’′ ξω, Pagans, Mahometans, Jews, will never be convinc’d. God, indeed, may work upon them by immediate revelation; but man can only prevail upon them by Reason …114 It is a good principle; would that it were followed.

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CHAPTER 8

Leslie Armour

Trinity, Community and Love: Cudworth’s Platonism and the Idea of God

I want to argue that Ralph Cudworth’s analysis of the thesis that God is love, his account of the Trinity, and his notions of community and toleration in a broad church all go together. They cast light on the precise sense in which it is right to claim him as a Platonist and, more importantly, they provide clues to the possibility of a non-relativist pluralism.1 Cudworth’s basic view is that divinity is a principle which is ‘expressed’—the word he uses in British Library Additional Manuscript 4982—through us and above all through the three persons of the Trinity.2 The principle is single, and divine in essence. This essence is love. He says that God is love, ‘if by it be meant, eternal, self-originated, intellectual

1 I am grateful to Dr. William Mander for an extended discussion and for his notes and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 The language in which we should explain the relation between the divine principle and the three persons in Cudworth’s philosophy is arguable. Later in this paper there is a discussion of the relation of ideas to minds and a comparison of Cudworth and Sherlock. But ‘expression’ seems to me to fit best. Often Cudworth leaves the relation unexplained. In British Library Additional MS 4982 folio 20, however, he uses the word ‘expressed’ in talking about how the divine principle is related to human beings. The more usual Platonic ‘participation’ does not convey the dynamism which is appropriate. ‘Expression’, of course, suggests the language of Spinoza and Leibniz. See Proposition XI of Book I of Spinoza’s Ethics which reads ‘aeternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit’. The Latin verb in various forms occurs 46 times in the Ethics. Leibniz admired Cudworth and corresponded with his daughter Damaris (then Lady Masham). He wrote in December of 1703 in response to receipt of a copy of The True Intellectual System of the Universe of which he generally approved, but he added that he would like to include his notion of pre-established harmony. On May 4 1704 in response to another letter from Damaris, he wrote again and discussed his metaphysical principles of action. First letter, Leibniz, Philosophischen Schriften, ed. C.I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1887, reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962), III, 336–337; second letter pp. 338–343.

113 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 113–129. © 2008 Springer.

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Love, or essential and substantial goodness, that having an infinite, overflowing fullness and fecundity dispenses itself uninvidiously, according to the best wisdom, sweetly governs all, without any force or violence … and reconciles the whole world into harmony’. His final judgement is that ‘love in some rightly qualified sense, is God’.3 We should notice that while ‘God is love’ is a commonplace, Cudworth’s final formulation ‘love … is God’ is not. The reality is love and it cannot be exhausted in any of its particular expressions. The ‘rightly qualified sense’ must be understood, however. This love is the nature of substantial goodness and it is intellectual because it makes the world intelligible. But it is not merely intellectual like Spinoza’s. It includes true emotions which ‘sweetly govern’ and the gentle natural justice conveyed by ‘uninvidiously’. So, genuine love can tie individual beings together while preserving their independence. The divine principle is not to be understood as residing passively in some celestial garden of forms. It necessarily has expressions. It orders and organises things and it is the explanation for the ‘Plastick Nature’, the laws of nature which organise the universe. The divine love is expressed in and through us, of course, yet the divine principle has expressions which in a special way stand apart from nature but are expressed through it. Each such expression has its own essence, and must have, for the expressions are concrete actualities embodying the principle. It was this notion, I suppose, which landed Cudworth in most trouble with those who felt themselves chosen to defend orthodoxy. The fullest expressions of the principle are, above all, the persons of the Trinity. But they form a community in a very clear way, and we are all parts of that community. Indeed genuine human love is also an expression of the divine, and each such expression has its own essence. The differences between the persons of the Trinity and us is partly a matter of the way in which free will is and must be exercised. Just as our free will depends on Cudworth’s view on our limitations, so the powers of each member of the Trinity depend on the precise form of the expression. Thus Cudworth was suspected of both subordinationism and Tritheism, but he clearly thought himself tied to neither, and I shall argue that reason is on his side, even though it can hardly be said that his philosophy is a model many people would recognise as orthodox. There are some modest conundrums here. They can be unravelled, however, if one sees the issues within the context of Cudworth’s picture of the world. The True Intellectual System of the Universe is meant, of course, as a refutation of atheism and Cudworth says that the two chief forms of atheism are the ‘Atomick or Democritical’ and the ‘Hylozoick or Stratonical’.4 3 True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Royston, 1678) (henceforth TIS Royston), p. 123 (the page number is misprinted 117 in the three British Library copies); ed. John Harrison (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845) (henceforth Harrison), 3 vols, I, 179. (The Harrison edition has a rich index and also J.L. von Mosheim’s still-valuable notes.) 4 TIS, p. 144, Harrison, I, 214. There are also the Anaximandrian atheists and the wholehearted Plastic Nature atheists. These are not so important. The Anaximandrians are those who combine the notion that the infinite is the cause of all things with the notion that the infinite is material (TIS Royston, pp. 127–128, Harrison, I, pp. 187–189), but this combination is not so common. The Plastic Nature atheists

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The latter form of atheism is simple, mechanical materialism, a doctrine gaining strength throughout the seventeenth century under the influence of Thomas Hobbes. Cudworth’s objection to it is that it fails to offer an explanation at any level. It offers a chain of explanations which trail off into an infinity which is objectionable, not so much on the traditional ground that infinite series of causes are unintelligible as because it both requires that there should be an explanation for each instance of motion and fails to provide an explanation for motion itself. To explain that one billiard ball moves because another strikes it is to use motion to explain motion. But it is not in the nature of matter, as conceived by the mechanical materialists, to be in motion. If it were, no explanations of the kind they offer would be needed. The hylozoical atheists offer explanations which get round these difficulties by making everything alive. According to the hylozoists not everything is alive in the sense of forming a single living creature—that is another kind of atheism that Cudworth also rejects. But they blur the distinctions between animate and inanimate things. Cudworth senses a contradiction in this. No one thinks stones have free will, but if they were truly alive and not simply governed by another principle they would have a kind of organic unity that is the essence of Cudworth’s notion of free will. The hylozoists hold that matter is alive and that it is wholly governed by external laws. A central element in being alive is on Cudworth’s view—I think on anyone’s view—that to be alive is to have a certain unity which makes explanations depend significantly on the internal nature of the thing, and not wholly on its environment. Thus he says: I say there being so many wheels in this machine of our souls, unless they be all aptly knit and put together, so as to conspire into one, and unless there be some one thing presiding over them, intending itself more or less, directing, and ordering, and giving the fiat for action, it could not go forwards in motion, but there must be a confusion and distraction in it and we must needs be perpetually in puzzle.5 The suggestion here, that is, is that freedom requires a kind of organic unity. It is not just accident that we are put together in such a way that our nature requires a unifying—and free—force. To conclude, God Almighty could not make such a rational creature as this is, all whose joints, springs, and wheels of motion were necessarily tied together, which had no self-power, no hegemonic or ruling principle, nothing to knit and [unite] the multifarious parts of the machine into one.6

(TIS Royston, pp. 131–132, Harrison, I, 193–194) merely exaggerate. There is a place for the Plastic Nature, but it is not the whole universe. It is important for my purpose in this paper that Cudworth calls on Aristotle’s exemption from atheism for those who ‘make love the Supreme Deity’ because they make love an active principle and a cause of motion. Cudworth uses this to lead up to his own position about God (Royston, p. 121; Harrison, I, p. 179). 5 A Treatise of Freewill (hereafter FW), ed. John Allen (London: John Parker, 1838), pp. 60; ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (henceforth, EIM, Hutton), p. 194. 6 FW, p. 62; EIM, p. 195.

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Cudworth makes it perfectly clear that he is opposed to determinism in all the forms in which it implies that human beings do not have an open future. If the Cudworthian God exists, he has not already decided all our fates. But Cudworth is no indeterminist, either, if an indeterminist is someone who thinks that there are no explanations for human actions or that what happens to each and all of us is a matter of chance. He is very explicit. In the British Library Additional Manuscript 4982 he says he has now ‘shown the unsatisfactoriness of the vulgar doctrine of free will which makes the essence of it consist in nothing but indifference to act or not to act’.7 Cudworth believes that the human organism has a coordinating power that is capable of directing action in a way that expresses the character of its natural order. The right account of this theory is what we might call organic determinism, combined with the notion that the universe consists of a number of organisms embedded in a system, which permits a significant element of independence. When we talk about indeterminism and determinism we usually mean what is most properly called systematic determinism and indeterminism. A systematic determinist is one who believes that the events of the world form a system in which each event is precisely determined. A proper explanation for any element in the universe extends beyond that element so that nothing in the universe acts independently. A systematic indeterminist is someone who denies one or more of the propositions that constitute the systematic determinist claim. Thus, if one is an indeterminist about fundamental particles one believes that what happens to them on some occasions is a matter of chance, or, if one is a systematic indeterminist about the universe as a whole, one believes that it is a matter of chance that the universe exists at all. One might, of course, believe that some events are determined by the systems of which they are parts and that others are not, so that there will be many forms of systematic indeterminism. None of them, however, will yield what we mean by ‘freedom’ when we speak of free human actions. I am not ‘free’ if chance determines the outcome of each of my actions. Indeed I would be said to be bound by chance. Organic determinism, by contrast, is the notion that some or all elements of the universe are organised into systems in which the parts work together and produce results determined by the ends or aims of the organism. The whole universe might be such an organism and this is the doctrine that Cudworth condemns as atheistic hylozoism. The evidence, on the contrary, is that some organisms, notably human beings, are determined by their own characters and that their characters have a certain openness to choice. It is our character to be decision-making creatures and everyone knows the difference between deciding, acting on whim, being pushed and so on. Deciding involves a modicum of rational reflection. Since it is in their characters to have a capacity for reasoning, it is in the natures of human beings that they can be and sometimes are self-determining in the precise way in which reason produces decisions. This is a

7

British Library Additional MS 4982, fol. 76.

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difficult notion. Its further meaning will hopefully emerge as we go along. Our discussion of Cudworth’s Trinity will prove significant. Of course, one could be an organic indeterminist. One could believe that the universe is composed of one or several organisms whose parts work together and whose explanations lie within themselves but whose determining characters are fixed by chance or by some occult phenomenon which is unintelligible. The notion that what happens to people is determined by the zodiacal signs under which they are born or by some fate revealed by the random distribution of Tarot cards depends on organic indeterminism. Examples like this were, of course, well known to Cudworth, and all such theses would have been rejected by him. They would have been rejected for the same reason that he rejects accounts of natural laws which do not include reference to the ‘Plastick Nature’—namely that they end emptily. Why should a Leo be lucky in love today while a Pisces is miserable? It is merely fated by the stars or the cards. So Cudworth is evidently an organic determinist in a sense in which the idea of a self-determining organism is the essence of intelligible free will. There is a basic connection between Cudworth’s views on free will and his rejection of atheism. Indeed, he argues that Hobbes’ rejection of free will implies atheism.8 Essentially his argument against Hobbes is that systematic determinism leaves no room for the mind that moves upon the waters—everything is endlessly and completely governed by the other elements in the system. But chance indeterminism also makes impossible the workings of the sort of God that Cudworth envisages. There might be a God who decreed that all elements after time ‘t’, or all elements of form ‘x’ should be indeterminate. But once this had been decided, God would have abandoned responsibility for the elements in question. If it is their nature to be governed by chance, nothing can govern them otherwise. Chance may give them a limited life, but they cannot be redeemed from chance. Cudworth’s God, as we shall see, could also not simply obliterate them. At the least that would admit an error in policy. So Cudworth must stick to organic determinism and, if one is to be a Cudworthian theist and not a hylozoist, there must be a plurality of organisms. How, then, is the universe organised? Descartes believed that one must have a God who keeps the universe in being at every moment. Descartes’ God has to sustain even the laws of logic. Cudworth concurred in the opinion that this would not be ‘decorous’ for God. God must not do ‘all the meanest and triflingest things himself drudgingly’.9 What Cudworth most wanted to insist upon was that the universe is one of principle. Therefore things that are real must have an ‘inward principle’ of their own.10 In the same passage he calls attention to the evolution of the universe. Things have not always been as they are. There has been a long process. This does not sit well with the notion that God does

8

FW, pp. 66–76; EIM, pp. 197–200. TIS, p. 149; Harrison, I, 223. 10 TIS, Royston, p. 150; Harrison, ibid. 9

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everything alone. Deists, of whom Cudworth disapproved as well, supposed that God created the universe and then retreated into his own being. But this would suppose that between the divine principle and the universe there was no continuing connection—once again unintelligibility would result. For the Cudworthian loving God would then have a contradictory description. There is indeed a justification for the notion of Providence.11 This middle ground, so typical of Cudworth’s conclusions about many topics, demands the ‘Plastick Nature’. He thinks he can trace this idea back to Aristotle and even to Plato,12 but there is no doubt that the doctrine in The True Intellectual System is Cudworth’s own. What one might call the central ‘Plastick Nature’ is first unveiled as a result of the discussion which rejects what I will call theistic pan-particularism—the doctrine that every event is unique in being the result of a specific divine fiat—and deistic creationism which holds that God simply created the laws of nature and left the universe to its own devices.13 This central Plastic Nature is, first of all, the explanation for the laws of nature. These laws are designed precisely as a background field against which a rich panoply of organic entities can develop. It is thus a shaping force. It is not conscious. The right understanding of it is that it is an active formal cause. It is a form that informs things. In Cudworth’s view the laws of nature cannot just happen in the sense of being a chance manifestation ex nihilo. For then they would explain nothing. But they are not simply created to govern a matter that is independent of them. For then this matter would have had to be a special creation with its own explanations and in fact nothing would suffice to explain the existence of laws of nature. There is an unclarity which was exposed by Leibniz and others a little later than Cudworth: We now think matter is naturally in motion, for matter and energy are not separable. Does this invalidate Cudworth’s argument? I think not. Though Cudworth speaks of motion, his insistence is on explaining the laws of nature. There may be random motion, like that of the Brownian movement of molecules in gases. But it is circumscribed by an orderly nature, a system of natural laws within which organisms can function. It is this which has to be explained, and it would not help to say that matter naturally obeys the laws of thermodynamics any more than it helps if we explain opium by saying that it has dormative powers. The law-abiding nature which provides the background for organic freedom is intelligible, Cudworth thinks, and it bespeaks of intelligence. Cudworth is at pains to insist that the Plastic Nature is not what he calls an ‘occult’ cause.14 It is a manifestation of ‘mental causality’ in the world.15 I think he simply means that what we find in the laws of nature is the manifestation of intelligence.

11

Ibid. (both editions). TIS, Royston, p. 151; Harrison, I, 226–227. 13 TIS, Royston, pp. 150–151; Harrison, I, 222–226. 14 TIS, Royston, pp. 154–155; Harrison, I, 234–235. 15 TIS, Royston, p. 155; Harrison, I, 234. 12

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The world is intelligible, and it leads to a series of states of affairs which foster intelligence. Here Cudworth is using an argument that Locke took up later: The world is knowable and indeed contains knowledge, and this cannot be the result of something that has no element of intelligence in it. But he also wants to argue something like the anthropic principle. We are here and so the universe must have always contained the conditions which are necessary for our being here. It has to contain the conditions for organic determinism. The Plastic Nature displays itself in us and in other organisms. It stands between God and the world. But each of us is a microcosm of this universe. With one very major exception, we stand to our organisms as God stands to the universe. We act in and through our bodies. Cudworth’s God acts in and through the world using the rich possibilities of the Trinity. There is an important difference, however. God does not have free will in the sense that we do, for a perfect being does not reason out the choices. Such a being necessarily does what is good. The stamp of the good has been put on the Plastic Nature. We also do not will every one of our actions. Our hearts beat and our lungs breathe. They create a law-like background for our actions. It is important to notice that this scheme bypasses many of the traditional conundrums about free will. It would seem, for instance, that, if the will is free, there ought to be an addition to the energy supply of the world every time someone acts freely so that in, say, a city full of strong willed people (like Paris) the laws of physics would be distorted, and it would seem, as well, that free will would have to cut across and interrupt the usual physical explanations. But in Cudworth’s universe events are caused by the nature or forms of things. Indeed the Plastic Nature is Nature itself conceived as an active form. It acts according to the laws decreed by God—indeed, in the end it is those laws, conceived as active. In such a world, on Cudworth’s view it seems natural that whatever I decide to do happens unless something gets in its way. If I decide to raise my arm, my arm goes up unless there is something wrong: I may have bad muscles or nerves, or simply lack the strength to do the thing. So when I want to raise my arm and my arm does not go up, I go to my doctor who will find something abnormal if she knows her business well. But if I ask the doctor ‘why on earth, every time I decide to raise my arm, does my arm go up?’ I may be referred to a psychiatrist. I can’t will to flap my arms and fly. I lack that capacity by nature and arms are not wings. So my body gets in the way. But it is natural that what I decide to do happens if nothing does get in the way. One of the things necessary for arm raising is an ample supply of energy. So nothing new is added and no laws are added. Cudworth speaks of ‘freewill’. But he does not subscribe to what one might call the pool cue theory of the will, the theory to which I think Spinoza objected. That is, the will is not a thing that pushes other things around. Things simply act according to their natures. Besides beings like us and the universe as a whole, the Plastic Nature also appears in other organisms. Not all of these are conscious, and the Plastic Nature operates unconsciously in any case. There is always a certain problem

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about organic causality. When a leaf grows on a tree the cells that are going to be on the outside develop a sticky substance that eventually seals off the leaf. How does a cell know that it is on the outside? Leaves are of various sizes. It is not a just a matter of controlling the cell count. Genes provide a disposition to grow leaves and also a disposition not to go on growing forever. When cells develop and lack inhibition, disaster results as we all know. Cudworth says things have their own proper plastick natures. As he insists, there is nothing occult about such explanations.16 Mechanistic biology that works by push-pull causality is not dead—despite things like the leaf problem—but much science now works anyway by formal cause. Things are no longer supposed to bang into one another. Action at a distance is commonplace. Since Einstein, the notion that gravity is caused by the curvature of space, for instance, has been common. Cudworth did not anticipate Einstein, but it was into the kind of universe dominated by formal causes that he knew he must introduce his God. God is not wholly beyond the universe, a deistic absentee landlord. But God is not the Plastic Nature either. Basically God is the goodness that animates the Plastic Nature. Sarah Hutton has noted rightly that for Cudworth it is the goodness of God, not the will of God that animates the world.17 She has also noted that Cudworth insists that God is essentially the most perfect good.18 That good, I am sure, turns out to be love. But we should note that goodness and not will are what count. This is so because God is the formal cause of the world as well as because God does not have free will if that means that God might act out of character. Cudworth wrestled with the idea of God, and his views of the Trinity aroused animosity and proved difficult to understand. He was accused of making the second and third persons less powerful than the first person and at the other extreme, with being, along with William Sherlock, a Tritheist. As always, in The True Intellectual System, Cudworth begins historically. He traces the idea of the Trinity back to Philo Judaeus (Philo of Alexandria) and beyond, concluding that there are Platonic roots to such an idea, and conceding that Philo did indeed use some of these ideas to cast light on the Jewish religion in a way that gives his Judaism affinities to Christianity. But though Cudworth’s repeated references make clear that he would like to bring clear-thinking Jews, if

16 The problem of the leaf and the general problem of the explanation of natural laws as it is addressed by Cudworth are problems in hierarchy theory. For a modern account see Howard H. Pattee (ed.), Hierarchy Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1973). In a concluding chapter Pattee says there are many unsolved problems and ‘the most common and most concrete concept we associate with hierarchical organisation is the concept of discrete but interacting levels […]. Simon and Grobstein begin with the modified Chinese boxes model of collections within collections.’ But this is exactly Cudworth’s problem. This is not the place to debate the whole philosophy of biology. Suffice to say that Cudworth is not out of court. Cudworth was, if you like, a proto-idealist, for he believed in the dominance of mind in ultimate explanation. But he also insisted that nature had to be understood on its own terms. What he says is relevant to issues which turned Samuel Alexander and Alfred North Whitehead away from the idealism of the early twentieth century. 17 EIM, p. XXI. 18 Ibid., p. XXVII.

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not under the umbrella of his broad church, at least within its shadow, the ideas of Philo fall short.19 Indeed, as the Cudworthian history marches on, it becomes clear that no earlier thinker quite measures up to the truth. The long discussion of the ‘Platonick Trinity’ concludes with a solemn declaration that the various Platonist notions espoused in the past tend to end in one kind of subordinationism or another, and that this is to be rejected.20 This discussion makes clear that, whatever some of his critics thought, Cudworth had no intention whatever of becoming a subordinationist. He has an interesting explanation for this Platonic tendency: It is because Platonists believe in a fundamental principle of unity that they make two persons of the Trinity subordinate. They believe that ‘there is but one original of all things’.21 As a result, he says, the second and third persons of any Trinity must derive their being from the first. His subsequent complaint is that Platonists may think that ‘there might have been one solitary divine hypostasis’.22 The emphasis here should be on solitary. That is to say, if all reality is expressed in and through a single principle capable of being adequately expressed in a single entity, nothing else matters much, and the relation of God to the world will be like that posited by the deists of whom he disapproves. There is thus in Cudworth’s doctrine, at least in the True Intellectual System, a fundamental principle of plurality which plays an important role in all that follows. Cudworth’s final summary, then, is this: the essence of the ‘Godhead’, is ‘not singular, but Generical or Universal’. There is one essence which all three persons ‘agree in’. This makes them godly. But we must allow ‘each of the persons also to have their own Numerical Essence’.23 This last proposition was to lead to the charge of Tritheism, but the passage is tolerably clear on Platonist grounds, and Cudworth allows all along that he speaks as a ‘Christian Platonist’, albeit a reformed one. That is, divinity is a principle and it has more than one expression. The expressions have their own essences, but they are essences of expressions. There is only one essence of Godliness. Four hundred and seventy-four pages earlier (in the original edition) Cudworth had laid down the sense in which it is true that God is love and so revealed the principle on which he subsequently drew.

19 Philo first appears in TIS at Royston, p. 330; Harrison I, 558. Cudworth thinks Philo’s reference to a second God is the same notion as that of the ‘son of God’. But at Royston p. 552, Harrison II, 320, he notes that Philo refuses a ‘third God’ which is somehow the world, but may accept that there is a soul of the world. Philo emerges again at Royston, pp. 581–582; Harrison, II, 392, but this time under a cloud. Cudworth says that Philo is ‘offensive’ (more so than any other Pagan proto-Trinitarian) in that he speaks of the ‘Word of God’ as ‘a shadow of God’. And at Royston p. 585, Harrison II, 397 Cudworth says that Philo argues that the God who is ‘before the world’ is superior to anything reason can describe, a doctrine which Cudworth will not accept. On Cudworth and Judaism, see David Pailin’s paper in this volume. 20 TIS, Royston, pp. 581–592; Harrison, II, 391–409. 21 TIS, Royston, p. 586; Harrison, II, 399; the complaint is repeated again on p. 592 (Royston) and p. 409 (Harrison). 22 TIS, Royston, p. 588, Harrison, II, 401. 23 TIS, Royston, p. 597, Harrison, II, 419.

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Cudworth insists, finally, that any divergence from the Nicene and Athanasian creeds ‘is here utterly disclaimed and rejected by us’.24 That is to say, Cudworth refuses to divide the essence of the divinity or to confuse the persons with one another. There is a single essence expressed through the persons of the Trinity. Each expression, as an expression, has its own essence even though what is expressed through it has the same essence. So Cudworth can fairly be said to stick to his claim and to be neither subordinationist nor Tritheist. The divine love infuses the world and is expressed through the Incarnation and through the Holy Spirit as that spirit appears in the unfolding order of history. Cudworth certainly admits that there are differences in the expressions. Love requires a measure of separation, and further explanation is to be found only in Cudworth’s later writings, some of them unpublished, for we must remember that only the first part of the True Intellectual System was ever finished and the unpublished manuscripts deal with some of the intended subject matter even though these writings were never fully developed in the way demanded by the plan for the True Intellectual System. We learn in these writings much about how love is involved in freedom and with goodness. British Library Additional Manuscripts 4982 and 4983 are crucial for this purpose. These manuscripts deal with free will and with the basic notions of character and moral psychology. In Ms. 4982, folio 20, Cudworth says that ‘the faculty of free will is really nothing but a self-active power’. It orders us ‘to good’ and ‘toward keeping or recovering a dominion over our lower appetites and inclinations’. In Ms. 4983, Cudworth insists that there is a Spirit that is ‘God within us’25 and that this is associated with the love which is necessary for moral knowledge. 26 He cites with approval Plotinus, who saw God as a ‘boniform light’ which we find within, and speaks of the ‘divine’, but he keeps repeating that the basic principle is love. Indeed, he claims that we have a higher and a lower nature, the one based on ‘love and charity’, the other on our ‘animal instincts’. Love is at the top of this hierarchy. We are only truly free when our higher natures predominate. ‘A certain love’ (he means to distinguish it from lust and self-interest) is the ‘first principle’ of ‘free action’—‘not, of course, reason and understanding’.27 It not just, I think, that when the lower nature predominates we are not fully in control of ourselves. Rather it is that love by its nature cannot be constrained. You cannot make someone love you, even with all America’s missiles. It may seem curious that one cannot readily make oneself stop loving, either. Does this leave any actual freedom, even if we achieve the dominance of our higher

24

TIS, Royston, p. 620; Harrison, II, 458. BL, Add. MS 4983, fol. 84. The discussion really begins on folio 79. 26 Cudworth is actually here responding to Benjamin Whichcote who distrusted the passions. In Sermons of Dr. Whichcot (sic), posthumously published (Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1742) Whichcote said ‘lust, humour, will and passion “have dethroned reason’ ”, p. 95. Passion he said was ‘incendiary’. Whichcote thought that the passions may be useful in carrying out our projects. Cudworth insists that love must infuse the whole process. 27 BL, Add. MS 4983, fol. 84 (verso). 25

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natures? Cudworth would attribute this seeming paradox to the fact that love is, after all, divine and when one participates in divinity goodness is inevitable. But the point is that one gives one’s love freely and gladly and the difficulty in giving up love for someone is that goodness supervenes. People do break off love. But the goodness of love is a powerful deterrent and perhaps perfect love is unbreakable. It is this love which is the essence of the God spoken of in The True Intellectual System. The good at which the higher nature aims is a shared good, not self interest, and therefore only available through a community. In discovering our higher natures we find communities in just the sense that the Trinity is an ideal community which expresses that perfection through which God necessarily acts. Our imperfections are not those of our higher nature or real expressions of freedom. Cudworth bravely accepts the consequences of his theory. When we sin we are not free for we are acting on our lower natures. ‘Sinning doth in deed by accident proceed’.28 The story therefore is this: The Cudworthian universe needs a God, but a God of a particular sort. The universe is significantly, but not totally, self-running. The Plastic Nature provides a stable background. It also structures a world in which the determining forces are organic and not mechanically systematic. Organisms determine their own affairs, some through their formal character. But others have forms which open them to choice. The choice is not undetermined; rather the choices are those that character permits. That is why we hold a clergyman responsible if he preaches heresy, for it is the character of a seriously religious man to think and to make choices. But we do not hold him responsible in the same sense if he runs naked in the street, for that is out of character and must be caused by something else, a disease or a misfiring of the neurons in his brain. God does not interfere in every event. People must act from their characters and think out their own choices. Without the Plastic Nature, religious tolerance would be absurd, for everyone’s beliefs would be determined directly by grace. One would either have the correct beliefs or not without being able to do anything about it. But without the Plastic Nature one would not need to refer to God.29 For there would be no real choice and inquiring into the origins of one’s grace or the lack of it would be pointless. We have this freedom only because the determining forces of the universe are incomplete and so potentially rational beings like ourselves need to see beyond our imperfections. Our characters are not fixed and perfectly stable. Indeed, we have the divine spark of love and charity, but we are animals too. When we get things in the right order we are free.

28

BL, Add. MS 4982, fol. 20. Cudworth was attacked for making God unnecessary, but his argument was that, on the contrary, the Plastic Nature makes us understand how the goodness of God enables us to be free. He was ineptly defended by Jean Le Clerc who left himself open to the assaults of Pierre Bayle. There is a good account of this tangled affair in Susan Rosa’s ‘Ralph Cudworth in the République des Lettres: Plastic Nature and the Reputation of Pierre Bayle’, in Carla H. Hay and Syndy M. Conger (eds), Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1994, for the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies), pp. 147–159. 29

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The animal natures which our higher natures oppose have a tendency to follow Thomas Hobbes, always the ‘atheistical politician’,30 or to act like the damned souls with whom the Calvinists were so preoccupied. There is a potential muddle in this. There is the real freedom that comes from having one’s higher nature predominate; but are we free to decide which nature will predominate? Not perfectly, for we are imperfect. But our characters are composed of complex predicates—a or b or c. That is to say, they are open to choice. Unfortunately or not, our animal natures are strong; I suppose we are like a man in a high wind on the Brighton sea wall. If we make a mistake we may be blown into a puddle or finally lose our balance and fall into the railings or even over the edge. It is the wind of animal nature that explains sin, though we may hope that the sinner will get a firmer footing in future. So what kind of God do we need? One evidently Cudworthian answer is that what we need is a God who is manifest within us as love and is thus—since we are tied together by this divine love—one of the sources of community. Love leads us beyond ourselves and to the notion that perfection involves the completeness which can only come through cooperation with others. Such a perfection must manifest itself in the world through us but it is also capable of manifesting itself as a perfect model. Hence the Incarnation. The second person of the Trinity is not less perfect than the first but rather, as the orthodox doctrine suggests, its embodiment, God become fully human. But God is also manifest as the spirit in things, that is, as the emerging order of things—not as the Plastic Nature, a form which informs things, but as the spirit that is revealed as the meaning behind such things. This version puts together the sense in which Cudworth says God is love with his arguments against atheism, and it does so in an obviously Platonic way. But it does not do justice to what Cudworth obviously thinks of as the first person of the Trinity. Indeed it reminds us of Cudworth’s rejection of lines of thought that sound more Platonic than Christian. To avoid this, indeed, Cudworth insists on talking about persons. If one were to take this talk as seriously as possible, one would end with the thesis of William Sherlock31 who held that the Trinity consists of three infinite minds united in 30

Hobbes, as Passmore notes, is never referred to by name in TIS—Ralph Cudworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 11. Cudworth does name him in the Treatise on Freewill. Cudworth was much concerned about Hobbes, but, as Passmore says, we should not exaggerate his importance. Long before Hobbes, Cudworth was in hot pursuit of the Calvinists. 31 William Sherlock was a dean of St. Paul’s. See A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever-Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son of God (London: W. Rogers, 1691, over-against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet Street), second edition, 1694. Sherlock’s book set off a wave of controversy which may have peaked around 1695. In 1678 when Cudworth published TIS the British Library recorded no books whose titles suggest that they are primarily on the Trinity. There are none recorded until 1685, then not more than two or three a year until 1690 when there are seven, two of which are editions of Sherlock. In 1695, some 16 works wholly on the controversy were published, most referring to Sherlock. The number may have been exceeded by the 23 I was able to count in 1691, but 17 of those were separately published letters of John Wallis, who was professor of geometry at Oxford. The years between 1692 and 1699 produced from three or four to nine. Cudworth tended to figure, if at all, as someone who has some affinities to Sherlock.

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sharing one another’s consciousness. In The True Intellectual System, Cudworth seems to shy away from espousing this view, and so one would doubt that Sherlock was building on Cudworth. But in the Eternal and Immutable Morality, there are stronger indications. There he speaks of eternal wisdom and knowledge, and says that the principle of divinity requires an ‘infinite, omnipotent and eternal Mind’. He says that some believe that eternal ideas simply exist alone, but that this makes no sense without a mind. Indeed, it is impossible. The relation between the idea and its presence in a mind is essential. Now, of course, if the eternal idea is of the sort that requires a trinity for its presence, there will be a trinity. The relation that Cudworth speaks of is that of an essence to whatever it is the essence of. In the case of the essence of the principle of love, the principle requires the relations that one finds in the Trinity. Here Cudworth does use the word ‘substantial entity’, bringing him very close to Sherlock.32 Sherlock speaks of love, will, and knowledge. He says the important thing is that the persons of the Trinity ‘perfectly love one another’.33 It is this love which brings about the unity. Love he says is associated with perfect knowledge and common will. This very close union corresponds to McTaggart’s notion of love, though not I think so well to Cudworth’s. Sherlock argues, interestingly, that infinite minds must overlap and that it is only such minds that could form the Trinity as it has traditionally been conceived.34 The infinite minds could not really be separated, because to do so would limit their infinity. But I suppose that they could be conceived from different points of view. Sherlock says God must be considered as eternal truth and wisdom.35 Thus we could conceive the first person of the Trinity as conscious of the whole from the point of view of eternity. In the same way we could view the consciousness of the second person from a position in the world, and that of the third from the point of view of history. Each would nonetheless have the same content. Sherlock is clear that the second person of the Trinity is the expression of the first person in the world and that they are linked by knowledge while the third person is ‘the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation’.36 This view is like Cudworth’s except that the persons more obviously become full-bloodedly distinct entities. Thus Sherlock was inevitably charged with Tritheism.37 The charge was unfair because he insists that infinity implies ultimate inseparability. But he had himself partly to blame because he claimed in his defence that to insist that each of the persons of the Trinity ‘has no other substance but the unbegotten Substance of the Father is Sabellianism’ and that

32

EIM, Hutton, pp. 128–129 (Chapter IV, Sections 7–9). Sherlock, Vindication, p. 52. 34 Sherlock’s theory of infinite minds is very close to the one found in John Leslie’s Infinite Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 35 Sherlock, Vindication, p. 70. 36 Ibid., pp. 53–54. 37 See Robert South, Tritheism Charged Upon Dr. Sherlock’s New Notion of the Trinity (London: John Whitlock, 1695). On the title page South hides as ‘a divine of the Church of England’. 33

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‘this makes Father and Son but one person’.38 He does not mean substance in the Aristotelian sense or in the related senses of the scholastics, but only that there is something to be said about the persons of the Trinity in a concrete way, as, he says, ‘the Plowman’ knows, Jesus has a body. The Holy Ghost appears through the Biblical prophesies, and so on.39 Stephen Nye charges Cudworth with holding much of Sherlock’s view, though he thought Cudworth did not go quite so far.40 Cudworth does speak Sherlock’s language about substance, commonsensical enough, in talking about the necessary relation of minds to ideas in the passage I cited in the Eternal and Immutable Morality. But he was in general more circumspect in the True Intellectual System which was all his critics had to go on. Certainly he talks often of ‘hypostases’.41 But theologically the divine hypostases have been allowed to be plural without ‘dividing the substance’. Still, Cudworth was suspected of accepting a plurality of Gods. Cudworth’s fascination with Greek thought led people occasionally to think he had taken up polytheism. However, although he liked to see the divine in everyone (as any Platonist who is also a theist must) and therefore could easily accept that many divine attributes could be shared, there is no truth in the charge.42

38 A Modest Examination of the Authority and Reasons of the Late Decree of the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and Some Heads of Colleges and Halls Concerning the Heresy of Three Distinct Minds in the Holy and Ever-Blessed Trinity (London: W. Rogers, 1696), p. 37. On p. 46, the last page, he refers to the ‘common sense of mankind’ and says that every Plowman knows that ‘Three persons who are not three distinct minds and substances is not greater heresy than it is nonsense’. (The Sabellianism that Sherlock spoke of was, of course, the doctrine that the three ‘persons’ of the Trinity are mere ‘modes’ of one person.) 39 In support of this kind of reading one might note that Sherlock explicitly endorses the Athanasian Creed ‘Neither Confounding the Persons, not dividing the Substance’. (Vindication, p. 11). 40 Stephen Nye (the ascription is made by the British Library; there is no name on the title page) Considerations on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity by Dr. Wallis, Dr. Sherlock, Dr, S—th, Dr. Cudworth, and Mr. Hooker (London , 1693). S—th is Robert South. There is a fuller explication in a long letter Nye wrote to an unknown correspondent (BL Add. MS 4367 folio 99). Nye begins by associating much of Platonic Christianity with subordinationism and even unitarianism (though he does not use that word) but on the 6th page he raises the question of Tritheism and Cudworth’s doctrine, citing TIS, Royston, p. 599. In that passage Cudworth is actually criticising some Church Fathers for subordinationism. But Cudworth’s argument leads on for the next three pages and at Royston, p. 601, Cudworth speaks of the ‘love’ of the divine persons for one another and of ‘a kind of circulation of the Trinity’ as what might have been intended, and he defends the notion that there is only one essence of divinity. He then talks about the Tritheistic possibilities in all this, but clearly rejects them. Very likely, though, he did mean to take the notion of love seriously and to suppose just the kind of unity-in-diversity that love in its perfection might imply. Nye, another Cambridge man, is credited by DNB with inventing the term ‘unitarian’. 41 J.O. Urmson’s Greek Philosophical Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1990) and the Oxford English Dictionary assure us that ‘hypostasis’ and ‘substance’ (the Greek ousia) have the same meaning. 42 Cudworth’s first critic was John Warner, a Jesuit who appended a letter to Cudworth to his AntiHaman, probably published in Amsterdam, 1679. He attacked Cudworth for trafficking in Greek Gods. He signed himself only ‘W.E.’ and said he was ‘a Catholic student’ who wrote with permission of his superiors. There is a second edition (London: Henry Hills, 1688).

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Cudworth’s actual view is, I think, carefully framed to avoid heresy and yet it is still Platonic. It is not so straightforward as Sherlock’s, but it is still intelligible: God is to be understood as a principle with expressions. One of its expressions is that of the first person who is eternal, immutable, and perfect. Indeed, after the discussion of the Trinity, Cudworth returns to his definition and insists on ‘A perfect understanding nature, necessarily self-existent, and the cause of all things’.43 Thus a perfect being is without free will, for perfection admits of no choice. We may think of it, indeed, as one of Sherlock’s infinite minds. But it is filled with ideas of things at their most perfect, including, perhaps, ideas of each of us as we would be if we attained all the goodness within us. The second person expresses this perfection as complete at a moment of time: an infinite mind with all the content of the first person but focused from a moment in time. The third person is this mind expressed through the spirit of history. But love is an activity—and this is the aspect of the truth that may be obscured in the True Intellectual System in the form in which we have it—an unfinished document. The idea is clarified in Additional MS 4983, folio 84. Love is finally expressed through all of us in a developing community. There is no tyrant God who pushes things and people about. Love is its own judge. It is perhaps not so easy to explain just how such a God is the cause of the world. I do not think Cudworth ever denies that God is the efficient cause of the world, but his philosophy suggests ways in which in fact God is the formal cause of the world and this must be the primary notion. God gives form to the world because the truth about God is goodness and the world is organised to make it possible. The Plastic Nature, again, is a form which permits the world to develop toward goodness while providing a framework in which free will is possible. The most interesting aspect of Cudworth’s struggles, I shall argue, is his suggestion that, properly understood, the doctrine that God is love and love is God is literally true. God appears thus in and through us as love, once again giving form to our microcosmic world. God is triune in a way that makes love possible in the divine community. We are separated from one another but informed by love in a way that enables us to come together while preserving our distinctness and our individual ways of expressing this nature. The significance of this for the idea of community and the defence of a tolerant broad church is profound. Cudworth claimed that the important thing to realise is that the essence of the divine is a principle. We should admit some uncertainties about how this is to be read. Certainly the second and third persons of the Trinity are expressions of this principle. Whether the first person of the Trinity is also an expression or should be thought of as the principle itself is more difficult to decide. Cudworth liked symmetries and it seems most likely that he believed that the first person of the Trinity was the eternal, immutable expression of this principle. There is a fine line, as I said, between the divine as principle and the first person as the formal cause of the world. God gives the divine form to the world.

43

TIS, Royston, p. 633; Harrison, II, 508–509.

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But however one spells out this notion, there are three reasons for thinking that Cudworth was not a ‘subordinationist’. The first is that the expressions of the principle are not subordinate to, but necessary expressions of the principle, and the principle cannot be understood without them. The second is that reality, Cudworth suggests, is love itself, and in fact all the ‘persons’ including the first therefore are to be understood as the exemplary bearers of this principle. Even if the first person is the principle (which seems unlikely) the principle is still the same and necessary in all of them. The third reason is that the question of the relations between the persons takes on a form in which it is inappropriate to ask if one is subordinate to the other. For the relation is that of expressions of the same essence and the relation must also be one of love. But Cudworth was not a ‘Tritheist’. His insistence that each person has an essence raised eyebrows, but it is always clear that all persons of the Trinity and indeed all people are expressions of the same principle. I would like to think of him as quite close to William Sherlock in many ways, but even if he was, Sherlock was also no Tritheist. The Sherlockean infinite minds must overlap perfectly. In the end, what is important is the meaning and nature of the divine principle. Cudworth’s position is different from that of Henry More who straightforwardly adapted Plotinus’s Neoplatonism to his own ends and for whom the persons of the Trinity along with the world itself are to be understood as emanations among which there is a natural hierarchical order.44 The love of which Cudworth writes calls into question the possibility of a cosmic hierarchy as it is usually understood. The Trinity in fact becomes a model of a community of equals. One must be careful about such notions, and especially of lumping people together whose works centre on words like ‘love’. John Hoyles speaks somewhat scathingly of the ‘refinement of Platonism into a cult of Platonic loves’ which ‘occurred towards the end of the seventeenth century amongst a group of bluestockings’. He includes Cudworth’s daughter Damaris who certainly was no bluestocking. He also includes Mary Astell and Mary Chudleigh and calls all three of them admirers of John Norris. Damaris in fact attacked Norris vigorously45 and claimed that love is what gives us delight. Her father would not have denied this, for love is what ‘sweetly governs all’, but his daughter’s attacks on Norris have Locke in the background in a way that makes a difference. Mary Astell was not so dreamy or given to ‘cults’ as Hoyles thinks, and Norris himself had his own version of Malebranche’s views and deserves a better press than he sometimes gets. But Cudworth is original and his notion of love is the idea of whatever it is that unites people ‘uninvidiously’ into free, open, tolerant communities of equals. It is in one sense the denial of what is commonly taken for self-interest, for Cudworthian love always gives priority to the others who are the sources of one’s identity. Perfect love would surely always be symmetrical. But we are not, at least not yet, in the community of the Trinity. Cudworth’s is 44 There is a good account of More’s use of Plotinus in Serge Hutin, Henry More, essai sur les descriptions théosophiques chez les platoniciens de Cambridge, (Hildesheim: Olms, 1966), pp. 108–111. 45 See A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (London: Awnsham & John Churchill, 1696).

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really the doctrine that genuine self-interest is to be found through others because our nature as free beings can only be attained, as he says, through relations of love. It is, I think, a practical and down to earth view. The important implication of Cudworth’s argument is that love requires a variety of expressions. Theologically (and logically and perhaps temporally if Christian doctrine is true) love first finds expression in the Trinity, which manifests itself in a variety of ways that do not have simple or dogmatically predictable expressions in the world. This is the basis of a tolerance which does not slide into relativism because the principle of love is always dominant.46 We have to exercise free will, and we have a duty to act for the best. But our freedom is only really realised in love, and so the divine demands ‘sweetly govern’ us. There will always be a variety of interpretations of the divine nature and of responses to it. No one can claim perfection nor afford to show contempt for his neighbours’ honest attempts to come to grips with the truth. Thus the Cudworthian broad church is the best expression of the divine love. The tolerant state is part of its necessary expression. We do not live in a simple or altogether kindly universe, though. Error is in our natures, love is only possible between separate beings and we must struggle to come together. Our particularity is a cause of endless misunderstandings. But we are always enjoined against violence.

46 Conrad Le Despencer Noel, the founder of the Thaxted Movement, claims in Socialism and the Church Tradition (London: Clarion, 1909), pp. 7–8, that the Church Fathers had originally introduced the true idea of the Trinity as an antidote to political tyranny, holding out the idea of the Trinity as the notion of an ideal community. Indeed, such notions can be found in thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa, but Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, casts doubt on Noel’s reading and suggests that the Trinity was used in various ways on more than one side of political disputes in Constantinople, though he thinks Noel had a point worth noting and does not doubt that the Trinity can serve as a model for the idea of a community of equals—Williams, Arius (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987), pp. 13–14.

CHAPTER 9

Jean-Louis Breteau

Chaos and Order in Cudworth’s Thought

And though Epicurus thought to mend the matter, and make the Atheistic Hypothesis more tolerable, by introducing into it (contrary to the Tenour of his Principles) Liberty of Will in Men; yet this being not a Power over things Without us, but our selves only, could alter the case very little. Epicurus himself was in a Panick Fear, lest the frame of Heaven should sometime upon a sudden crack, and tumble about his Ears, and this Fortuitous Compilement of Atoms be dissolved into a Chaos: Tria talia Texta Una dies Dabit exitio; multosque per annos Sustentata ruet moles et Machina mundi.1

INTRODUCTION In these lines Ralph Cudworth derided one of the most famous ancient atheists with the obvious aim of also confuting their modern counterparts. These were the chief adversaries against whom he had started writing his magnum opus, first intending ‘onely a Discourse concerning Liberty and Necessity, or to speak more

1 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678; fac-sim. reprinted Stuttgart: Fromamm Verlag), pp. 663–664 (hereafter TIS); ed. J. Harrison, 3 vols (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845; reprinted with an introduction G.A.J. Rogers [Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995]) vol. II, p. 579 (hereafter Rogers). Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. and trans. W.H.D. Rouse (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 346–347 (5, ll. 94–96): ‘[this threefold nature, these three masses, Memmius, these three forms so different], these three textures so interwoven, one day shall consign to destruction the mighty and complex system of the universe, upheld through many years shall crash into ruins’.

131 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 131–145. © 2008 Springer.

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plainly, Against the Fatall Necessity of all Actions and Events’.2 Modern and ancient atheists alike frequently arguing that any religion or belief in the existence of a Supreme God or Being always originated from fear, Cudworth thought it particularly judicious to fight them on their own ground.3 Therefore, by accusing the likes of Epicurus and, one easily guesses, Thomas Hobbes, of fearing a sudden cracking of their skies and their subsequent dissolution into a chaos, he meant to wield against them their own weapons. Sure enough, the argument is primarily polemical, but it also sheds an interesting light upon a couple of antithetical concepts which I singled out as a possible topic for this paper. Of course, I readily acknowledge that a philosopher’s concern with chaos and order should hardly surprise anyone, but I also think that such a concern articulates many essential aspects of Cudworth’s thought and therefore that it is likely to help us to define the specific type of Platonism or Neoplatonism he was trying to elaborate. In the first place, a close perusal of Cudworth’s works and, in particular, of the long preface to the True Intellectual System, allows anyone to notice how careful he was to justify his philosophical method and in particular the connection between what his great French contemporary René Descartes called respectively the ‘order of reasons’ (‘ordre des raisons’) and the ‘order of matters’ (‘ordre des matières’). Secondly, the introductory quotation forcefully reminds us of his idiosyncratic approach to cosmology and ontology and, in that respect, of his somewhat bewildering, but enduring, adoption of atomism. Thirdly, as the same introductory statement suggests, Cudworth’s understanding of the couple ‘chaos/order’ also points to a major feature of his theology: namely his conception of power which has itself finally a patent bearing upon his account of man’s action.

THE ORDER OF THOUGHT At various places in his work, Cudworth expressed his dissatisfaction with the methods or lines of argument used by various thinkers, whether they be ancient or recent, in their philosophical treatises. One can easily provide two examples in the respective fields of ontology and theology. He naturally strongly disapproved of the stern rejection by all atheists (or thinkers considered by him as such), from some Presocratic thinkers down to Gassendi or Hobbes, of any demonstration tending to prove the existence of a second substance. Indeed, the author of

2

Cudworth, TIS, preface, p. i: Rogers (ed.), p. xxxiii. Cudworth, TIS, p. 664: in Rogers (ed.), vol. II, p. 579: ‘(saith Plutarch) The Atheistick Design in shaking off the Belief of a God, was to be without Fear; but by means hereof, they framed such a System of things to themselves, as under which, they could not have the least Hope, Faith or Confidence. Thus running from Fear, did they plunge themselves into Fear; for they who are without Hope, can never be free from Fear’. 3

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De corpore or Leviathan, for instance, notoriously considered that incorporeal substance was the unjustified association of two contradictory words, or in his own idiom, ‘names’.4 In Cudworth’s view, such an ontology betrayed the ‘weakness and childishness’ of its authors.5 To use the terms of a twentieth-century historian of philosophy, it consisted in a sort of ‘methodological materialism’.6 It resorted to a ‘grammatical’ approach, a ‘right ordering of names’, whose most perfect model was geometry, as Hobbes clearly explained in the same fourth chapter of Leviathan, which I have just alluded to.7 To answer the challenge of such a method, Cudworth, like Hobbes, showed much concern about the accuracy of his own definitions. True enough, his own brand of rationalism first admitted some measure of scepticism: for him the essence of any substance had something incomprehensible in it ‘It was a Truth, though abused by the Scepticks, that there is … something incomprehensible in the Essence of Lowest Substances’.8 And therefore, he continued on the same page of The True Intellectual System, ‘Truth is bigger than our Minds … we are rather Apprehenders than Comprehenders thereof ’. But we should not infer from this that we cannot ‘frame certain Ideas and Conceptions of whatsoever is in the Orb of Being, proportionate to their own Nature, and sufficient for their purpose’, or that, for instance, the philosopher is unable to demonstrate the existence of a second substance. In order to succeed in such an undertaking, one has only to avoid the snares laid by such formidable adversaries as Hobbes, again by using the same weapons. One must provide clear definitions, acknowledging for example that, ‘whatsoever is in the Universe, is either Substance or Accidents, and that the Accidents of any Substance, may be Generated and Corrupted without the Producing of any Real Entity out of Nothing, and Reducing into

4 Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. K.R. Minogue (London: Dent, 1973), p. 17 (Pt 1, ch. 4): ‘All other names, are but insignificant sounds; and those of two sorts. One, when they are new, and yet their meaning not explained by Definition; whereof there have been aboundance coyned by the Schoole-men, and pusled Philosophers. Another, when men make a name of two Names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent; as this name, an incorporeall body, or (which is all one) an incorporeall substance, and a great number more. 5 Cudworth, TIS, p. 650; in Rogers (ed.), Vol. II, p. 555. 6 Frederick T. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, 7 vols (1959, New York: Image Books, 1964), vol. 5, p. 15: ‘Hobbes’s philosophy, therefore, is materialistic in the sense that it takes no account of anything but bodies. And in so far as the exclusion of a God and of all spiritual reality is simply the result of a freely chosen definition, his materialism can be called methodological’. 7 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 15 (Pt 1, ch. 4): ‘Seeing then that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth, had need to remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly; or else he will find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twiggs; the more he struggles, the more belimed. And therefore in Geometry, (which is the onely Science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind,) men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call Definitions; and place them in the beginning of their reckoning’. 8 Cudworth, TIS, p. 639; in Rogers (ed.), Vol. II, p. 518.

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Nothing; for as much as the Substance remains entirely the same’.9 On this ground one realises that ontological mistakes, and principally the belief in the existence of one single substance derives from misunderstanding the nature of the accident, which is nothing else than the mode of the substance and consequently cannot be conceived separately from it.10 These preliminary definitions should be completed by two considerations. One should, in Cudworth’s view, pay attention to ‘that which gives to any Substance its Whole Being’ and to the necessary distinction to be operated between the terms ‘substance’ and ‘substantial thing’.11 Thus, in the page quoted above in which the incomprehensibility of Substances is argued, one finds the following statement: ‘For it is certain, that we cannot fully Comprehend our Selves, and that we have not such an Adequate and Comprehensive Knowledge of the Essence of any Substantial thing, as that we can perfectly Master and Conquer it’.12 We might say that ‘substance’ in the restricted sense of the term is what constitutes the reality of the world whereas ‘substantial thing’ would be what appears in that reality as a ‘subject’ in the Aristotelian sense of the word (upokeimenon
ποκεíµενον). Through the careful establishment of these definitions based upon Aristotelian concepts Cudworth obviously aimed at laying the grounds for a satisfactory (in his view, of course) demonstration of the existence of the second substance. His treatment of the idea of God, also considered in this volume by Leslie Armour, offers, I think, another characteristic example of Cudworth’s philosophical method and an interesting point of confrontation with Descartes’s approach in his Meditations. The definition he proposes at the beginning of the fourth chapter of his True Intellectual System bears an apparent likeness to Descartes’s own definition in the Third Meditation: Wherefore the true and genuine Idea of God in general, is this, A Perfect Conscious Understanding Being (or Mind) Existing of it self from Eternity, and the Cause of all other things.13 Par le nom de Dieu, j’entends une substance infinie, éternelle, immuable, indépendante, toute connaissante, toute-puissante, et par laquelle moi-même et toutes les choses qui sont (s’il est vrai qu’il y en ait qui existent) ont été créées et produites.14 9 Cudworth, TIS, pp. 759–760; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 113. Also see Cudworth, TIS, p. 862; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 439: ‘Indeed there is no other Entity, but Substance and its Modifications’. 10 Cudworth, TIS, p. 760; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 113: ‘One Ground of which mistake hath been, from mens not rightly considering what the Accidents of a Substance are, and that they are indeed Nothing but the Modes thereof. Now a Mode is such a thing, as cannot Possibly be conceived, without that whereof it is a Mode’. Also see Cudworth, TIS, p. 830; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 394: ‘No Mode can be Conceived without that whereof it is a Mode’. 11 Cudworth, TIS, p. 752; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 100. 12 Cudworth, TIS, pp. 638–639; in Rogers (ed.), vol. II, p. 518. 13 Cudworth, TIS, p. 195; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. 297. 14 René Descartes, Méditations, in Oeuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1964–1974) (hereafter AT), vol. IX, p. 36.

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And yet the similarity remains superficial. Cudworth could not share the ‘Cartesian Scepticism’,15 illustrated by the hypothesis of the Evil Demon echoed in the sentence contained within the brackets.16 He was more at ease with Descartes’s Anselmian ontological proof, but could not understand why the French philosopher postponed its examination until the Fifth Meditation. For him (like for Henry More), the idea of God, whether in its developed or ‘contracted’ definition necessarily included existence (which was obviously not yet the case in the passage from the Third Meditation which has just been quoted): ‘The True and proper Idea of God, in its Most Contracted Form is this, A Being Absolutely Perfect. For this is that alone, to which Necessary Existence is Essential’.17 And yet he was not blind to the difficulties raised by this famous proof. As a matter of fact, he devoted several pages of his True Intellectual System to a somewhat elaborate criticism of its validity. He first reminded his reader that, far from being struck by the Mathematical Evidence and Certainty which Descartes ‘pretended’ to see in it, ‘many’ could not ‘be made sensible of any Efficacy therein’ and ‘not a few’ condemned it ‘for a meer Sophism’.18 Anxious not ‘to lay stress in this Cause, upon any thing which is not every way Solid and Substantial’ he opted for an open-ended method: Wherefore, we shall here endeavour, to set down the Utmost that Possibly we can, both Against this Argument, and For it, Impartially and Candidly; and then when we have done, leave the Intelligent Readers, to make their own Judgement concerning the Same.19 Therefore, Cudworth submitted the ontological proof to a first piece of criticism which somehow anticipated Kant’s future reproach: if the idea of a perfect being necessarily includes its existence, he argued, there still might well be no actual being corresponding to this idea.20 But instead of developing an unbiased account of the opposite viewpoint, as he had first announced he would, he devoted five times as many pages to it, trying, as it were, to rid the ontological proof of all remnants of sophism, so that

15

Cudworth, TIS, pp. 716–717; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, pp. 30–33. Cudworth, TIS, p. 716; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 32. 17 Cudworth, TIS, p. 200; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. 307. For a similar argument, see Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism I, 8, 1; reprinted in C.A. Patrides (ed.), The Cambridge Platonists (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 227–228. 18 Cudworth, TIS, p. 721; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 38. 19 Cudworth, TIS, p. 721; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 38. J.L. Mosheim praised his note to this page the customary ‘great modesty and prudence’ of the ‘learned Doctor,’ adding: ‘For at the time in which he lived and wrote this, the most eminent of the learned men in Britain were violently opposed to each other respecting the force of this argument’. 20 Cudworth, TIS, p. 722; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 39: ‘From the Idea of a Perfect Being, including Necessary Existence in it, it follows undeniably, that If there be any Thing absolutely Perfect, it Must Exist Necessarily, and not Contingently, but it doth not follow, that there Must of Necessity Be Such a Perfect Being Existing’. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 505, A599/B627. 16

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it might, no longer appear to ordinary people as one of those ‘Thin and Subtle Cobwebs’21 which philosophers like to weave. He first analyzed the relationship between the various types of ideas and the existence of their objects. Whereas all other non-contradictory ideas were contingently related to it, the idea of God had a necessary relationship with it.22 Cudworth confessed that ‘it is not very Probable, that many Atheists will be convinced thereby, but that they will rather be ready to say, that this is no Probation at all of a Deity, but only an Affirmation of the thing in Dispute, and a meer Begging of the Question; that therefore God Is, because he Is, or Cannot But be’.23 As a result, he tried to alter the argument slightly by questioning the concept of ‘possibility’. Implying no contradiction, the idea of God is, he argued subsequently, ‘at least Possible’, or no way Impossible to have been’.24 But if God is possible and yet does not exist, he is only contingent, whereas his essence includes necessary existence. Therefore, God is either impossible (which cannot be true, since his idea is not contradictory), or possible and then he does exist. However, at this point, Cudworth still feared that his argument might well be questioned on account of its being too ‘subtle’, even ‘sophistical’, and consequently decided to ‘proceed to something which [was] yet more Plain and Downright’: Whatsoever we can frame an Idea of in our minds, implying no manner of Contradiction, this either Actually Is, or else If it be Not, it is Possible for it to Be. But if God be Not, He Is not Possible hereafter to Be, therefore He Is. The Reason and Necessity of the Minor is evident, because if God be not, and yet Possible hereafter to be, then would he not be an Eternal and Necessarily Existent Being, which is Contradictious to his Idea. And the Ground of the Major, upon which all the weight lies, hath been already declared, where we proved before, That If there were no God or Perfect Being, we could never have had any Conception or Idea of him in our Minds, because there can be no Positive Conception of an Absolute Nothing, that which is neither Actual nor Possible Existence. Here the Posture of the Argument is only inverted; Because we have an Idea of God, or a Perfect Being, implying no manner of Contradiction in it, therefore must it needs have some kind of Entity or other, either an Actual or Possible One; but God, if he be Not, is not Possible to Be, therefore He doth Actually Exist.25 Although he considered this particular ‘Argumentation’ as ‘firm and solid,’ Cudworth still acknowledged that it might ‘prove less Convictive of the Existence of a God to

21

Cudworth, TIS, p. 725; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 49. In other words, there are, in this respect, three sorts of ideas: (i) the ideas of things which are impossible because contradictory, (ii) the ideas of things which are possible because non-contradictory, but remaining contingent, (iii) the idea of God whose object cannot possibly not exist and which proves to be, simultaneously the sine qua non condition for the actualisation of possible things. 23 Cudworth, TIS, p. 724; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 41. 24 Cudworth, TIS, p. 724; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 49. 25 Cudworth, TIS, p. 725; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, pp. 49–50. 22

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the Generality: because whatever is Received, is Received according to the Capacity of the Recipient: and though a Demonstration be never so good in it self, yet it is more or less such to Particular Persons, according to their ability to comprehend it’.26 But, whereas he endeavoured right away to ‘Form yet a Plainer Demonstration, for a God from the Idea of him, including Necessary Existence in it’,27 he proposed in the lines that followed another sort of proof altogether, mostly founded on the ‘great principle’ of atomism, which will be considered later. If one tried to justify such a tentative revisitation of the Anselmian ontological proof, one could perhaps say that, although Cudworth entertained some doubts about its polemical efficiency, he was deeply convinced of the validity of the proposition which Descartes only affirmed at the end of his long methodological detour: the necessary link between God’s essence and existence was a ‘true and immutable nature’.28 In other words, it was the nature of the philosophical objects he was debating about which more or less obliged Cudworth to follow a method which his detractors often exposed, in particular this ‘Mixture of Philology throughout the whole’, which was supposed to ‘Sweeten and Allay the Severity of Philosophy’ in his long fourth chapter of the True Intellectual System. Just as John Bunyan confessed that he almost unwillingly ‘fell into an allegory’ when he wrote his Pilgrim’s Progress,29 Cudworth in his preface to his main work acknowledged that he had been ‘surprized in the Length thereof’,30 but that his method in Chapter 4 was justified by its content. In this Fourth Chapter, We were necessitated by the Matter it self, to run out into Philology and Antiquity; as also in the other Parts of the Book, we do often give an Account of the Doctrine of the Ancients: which however some Over-severe Philosophers, may look upon Fastidiously, or Undervalue and Depretiate; yet, as we conceived it often Necessary, so possibly may the Variety thereof not to be Ungratefull to others; and this Mixture of Philology throughout the Whole, Sweeten and Allay the Severity of Philosophy to them.31 Even the long ‘Digression’ about the ‘Plastick Nature’ was in his view an integral part of the whole demonstration.32 In the same way, although in his posthumous

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Cudworth, TIS, p. 725; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, pp. 51–52. Cudworth, TIS, pp. 725–726; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 53. 28 Descartes, Méditations, AT vol. IX, p. 54. 29 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N.H. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 1 (‘The Author’s Apology for his book’). 30 Cudworth, TIS, preface, pp. xii–xiii; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. xliv. 31 Cudworth, TIS, preface, p. iv; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. xxxvi. 32 ‘And now from what we have declared, it may plainly appear, that this Digression of ours, concerning an Artificial, Regular and Plastick Nature (Subordinate to the Deity) is no Wen, or Excrecency in the Body of this Book but a Natural and Necessary Member thereof’. (Cudworth, TIS, preface, p. x; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. xlii). The digression runs over some forty pages (Cudworth, TIS, pp. 146–181; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, pp. 217–274). It is fully reproduced in C.A. Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists, pp. 288–325. On this question see: ‘“La nature est un art”: Le vitalisme de Cudworth et de More’, in G.A.J. Rogers, M. Vienne and Y.C. Zarka (eds), The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context (Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic, 1997), pp. 145–157. 27

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work, A Treatise of Freewill,33 he apparently offered the most systematic and rigorous formulation of his thinking on liberty, in his unpublished manuscripts (especially in the well-known ‘Summary’ annexed to British Library Additional MSS 4981), he often pointed to the need to revise it on account of the difficulty of the subject itself.34 The lengthy and rather intricate comparison which was meant to illustrate the ‘admirable correspondence’ between the Christian and Platonic versions of the Trinity, 35 in which Cudworth tried to remain faithful both to the Christian ‘rule of faith’ and to what he viewed as genuine Platonism, certainly provides a good example of the mixture of ‘Philosophy’ and ‘Philology’ characterising Cudworth’s method in his main work, a method which he himself called ‘philosophy of religion’.36 I will only observe that passages like this may lead most modern readers to regret that Cudworth was not more of a ‘severe philosopher’ and less of a ‘philologist’. In the two posthumous works, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality and A Treatise of Freewill, he shows himself just as critical of the Hobbesian ‘ordering of thoughts’ and of the Cartesian method, but he fortunately sheds most of the erudite paraphernalia which he had compiled in his main work and presents his epistemological, moral, and even theological views in a much more straightforward and convincing manner. Still, if one attempted to defend what for many critics is a lost cause, one could perhaps suggest that, in answer the challenge of those champions of modernity who claimed to be breaking fresh ground, Cudworth, like Plato’s Socrates, developed a sort of dialogic method, thoroughly examining each argument and sometimes even going as far—we have just seen it—as to ask his reader to make his own personal judgment on the issue under discussion.

33

Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise of Freewill, ed. John Allen (London, 1838); a first posthumous work had been printed a hundred years earlier: in Edward Chandler, Bishop of Durham (ed.), A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (London, 1731). The two books have been reprinted, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, With a Treatise of Freewill, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 34 British Library, Additional MSS 4981 Summary, fol. 1; printed in Rogers, Vienne and Zarka (eds), Cambridge Platonists. p. 219. ‘Because this Business is in it Self very nice and the Doctrine of it hath much perplexed and confounded, therefore, we shall endeavour in this Chapter briefly to comprise and summarily to represent in one word what we have to say concerning the nature of Liberum Arbitrium’. 35 Cudworth, TIS, pp. 546–632; in Rogers (ed.), vol. II, pp. 311–486. On Cudworth and the Trinity, see Leslie Armour’s chapter in this volume Also, Jean–Louis Breteau, ‘Trinité et création: la lecture chrétienne du Timée par les platoniciens de Cambridge,’ Kairos, 16 (2000), 279–317, especially pp. 307–313 and Jean-Louis Breteau, ‘Origène était-il pour Cudworth le modèle du philosophe chrétien ?’ in ‘Mind Senior to the World’: Stoicismo e origenismo nella filosofia platonica del Seicento inglese, a cura di Marialuisa Baldi (Milano: Francoangeli, 1996), pp. 127–148; especially pp. 132–135. 36 Cudworth, TIS, preface, p. xiii; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. xliv.

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THE ORDER OF THE WORLD In the quotations made earlier, Cudworth stated that ‘there can be no Positive Conception of an Absolute Nothing, that which is neither Actual nor Possible Existence’.37 As a Christian philosopher, he believed that God had created the world ex nihilo. He made this very clear in a fairly long commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, a commentary to which he annexed a few quotations from Enneads, especially III, 2, 1 and II, 9, 3, in which respectively Plotinus defined the relation of the Intellect (Nous) to the world and becoming (Genesis), concluding as follows: Where though the World be said never to have been Made, as to a Temporary beginning, yet in another sence, it is said to be always Made, as depending upon God perpetually, as the Emanative Cause thereof.38 Although he was thus obviously fascinated by Plotinus’s emanationist approach, he finally held to the ‘rule of faith’, arguing that the author of Timaeus could be doubtless counted among the creationists. But, as one can see, in his opinion the world could not have been created by the Christian God out of an ‘Absolute Nothing’. It had certainly already a possible existence in God’s mind before being actually created. In other words, ‘chaos’ could not be conceived as mere nothingness. Plato, Aristotle and others all referred to Hesiod’s or Orpheus’s mythologies in which ‘chaos’ existed prior to the Gods. A few paragraphs after engaging with the ontological proof, Cudworth remarked: [T]here hath been among the ancient Pagans, a certain kind of Religious Atheists, such as acknowledging Verbally a God or Soul of the World, presiding over the whole, supposed this notwithstanding to have first Emerged also, out of Sensless Matter, Night and Chaos; and therefore doubtless to be likewise Dissolvable into the same.39 Here he relied on Aristotle’s account in Metaphysics L 6 (xii, 6) and N 4 (xiv, 4) and approved his criticism of those ancient theo/cosmogonists who: intimated that the Heaven, Night, Chaos, and the Ocean … were Seniors to Jupiter, or in Order of Nature before him; they apprehending, that things did Ascend upward, from that which was most Imperfect, as Night and Chaos, to the more Perfect, and at length to Jupiter himself; the Mundane Soul, who governeth the whole world, as our Soul doth our Body’.40 37

Cudworth, TIS, p. 725; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 49. Cudworth, TIS, p. 252; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I , p. 411. Plotinus, Enneads, ed. and trans. A.H. Armstrong (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 232–235 (II, 9, 3) and Enneads (III, 2, 1). 39 Cudworth, TIS, p. 727; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, pp. 56–57. 40 Cudworth, TIS, p. 727; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 57. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books X–XIV, ed. and trans. H. Tredennick, (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 140–143 and 284–287 (1071 b, Bk XII, 6, 4–6; 1091 b, Bk XIV, 4, 4–6). 38

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In the middle of the book, he had already shown that most ancient thinkers before Plato, as well as Plato himself, had all echoed the ‘universally received tradition among the Pagans [i.e. whether they be ‘atheistic’ or ‘divine’ theogonists] … that the cosmogonia or generation of the world took its first beginning from a chaos’.41 But the main question was the interpretation that should be given to it. Significantly, in the very first pages of The True Intellectual System, commenting upon Thales’s views as reported by Cicero, Cudworth had already remarked that the inventor of the famous theorem, ‘being Phenician by extraction,’ had embraced the opinions of his countrymen, for whom there were two principles: water and the Divine Spirit moving upon the waters. The first was ‘a turbid and dark chaos,’ whereas the second implied ‘an understanding prolifical goodness, forming and hatching the world into this perfection; or else a plastic power, subordinate to it’.42 Zeno was also brought in to confirm that ‘Hesiod’s chaos was water,’ allowing Cudworth to conclude: that the material Heaven as well as earth was made out of Water, (according to the Judgment of the best Interpreters) is the genuine sense of Scripture, 2 Pet.iii.5. by which water some perhaps would understand, a Chaos of Atoms confusedly moved. But whether Thales were acquainted with the Atomical Physiology or no; it is plain that he asserted, besides the Soul’s Immortality, a Deity distinct from the Corporeal World.43 The double advantage of such an interpretation of ‘Chaos’ is that it establishes a link between Scripture (and this is a rare direct allusion to the Bible in Cudworth’s main work) and the history of atomism. Indeed, we know, Cudworth regarded atomism, or as he preferred to call it the ‘Atomical Physiology’ as the best hypothesis allowing to elucidate the nature of the first substance, ‘body’: The Atomical Physiology supposes that Body is nothing else but διañ στατóν añ ντ¨τυπον [diastaton antitupon], that is, Extended Bulk; and resolves therefore that nothing is to be attributed to it, but what is included in the Nature and Idea of it, viz. more or less Magnitude with Divisibility into Parts, Figure, and Position, together with Motion or Rest, but so as that no part of Body can ever Move it Self; but is alwaies moved by something else.44 This odd combination of atomism and Cartesian extension (which can be divided ad infinitum) has often been construed as a mark of inconsistency in his ontology. But, as the end of the quotation shows, and as I mentioned earlier, the ‘great principle’ stated as a ‘dogma’ by the ancient atomists, De nihilo Nihil, in Nihilum

41

Cudworth, TIS, p. 248; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, pp. 398–399. Cudworth, TIS, p. 21; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. 40. 43 Ibid. 44 Cudworth, TIS, p. 7; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. 11. 42

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Nil posse reverti; That Nothing can come from Nothing, nor go to Nothing,45 is ‘the most effectual Engin against Atheism that can be’,46 because it offers the best way of demonstrating the existence of a second substance. First of all, instead of proving the impossibility of a creation ex nihilo as atheists believe, it only suggests that the ‘Forms and Qualities of Bodies’ appearing to us in the outside world, ‘may well be conceived to be nothing but the Result of those simple Elements of Magnitude, Figure, Site and Motion, variously compounded together; in the same manner as Syllables and Words in great variety result from the different combinations and Conjunctions of few letters, or the simple Elements of Speech’.47 The generation or corruption of natural bodies, can therefore be represented as mere Anagrammatical Transpositions of matter.48 Secondly, ‘local motion’ to which atheists reduce all action necessarily requires: some Cogitative or Thinking Being, which not Acted upon by any thing without it, nor at all Locally Moved, but only Mentally; is the Immoveable Mover of the Heaven, or Vortices. So that Cogitation is in Order of Nature, before Local Motion, and Incorporeal before Corporeal Substance, the Former having a Natural Imperium upon the Latter.49 This affirmation of a ‘Self-Active Substance’, via a rephrasing of a well-known type of Aristotelian argument,50 had far-reaching consequences from various viewpoints: ontological, theological, epistemological and ethical. In spite of his qualified acceptance of the Florentine ‘prisca philosophia’ or ‘prisca theologia’,51 Cudworth could hardly take Plato on board as far as atomism and mechanism were concerned, although he noticed in passing that the author of Timaeus ‘did but play and toy sometimes a little with Atoms and Mechanism’,52 but he called upon his testimony, as well as upon Aristotle again, firstly to justify his hypothesis of a ‘Plastick Nature’ as a ‘Distinct thing from the Deity … a Subordinate Cause under the Reason and Wisdom of it’, which would avoid the alternative of

45 Cudworth, TIS, p. 12; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. 20. Persius, Satires, 3, l. 84 in Juvenal and Persius, in G.G. Ramsay (ed. and trans.), Satires (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 352. 46 Cudworth, TIS, p. 12; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. 20. 47 Cudworth, TIS, pp. 7–8 and 29–33; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, pp. 12 and 58–64. 48 Cudworth, TIS, p. 865; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 445. 49 Cudworth, TIS, p. 844; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 416. 50 Aristotle, Physics, ed. and trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 316–329 (256 a–257 a; viii, 4 & 5). 51 On this, see Jean-Louis Breteau, ‘Cudworth’s Reading of Ficino,’ in Forme del neoplatonismo. Dall’eredità ficiniana ai platonici di Cambridge, ed. Luisa Simonetti (forthcoming) and Jean-Louis Breteau, ‘Temps, histoire, mémoire et liberté chez les platoniciens de Cambridge,’ in Louis Roux (ed.), Le char ailé du temps (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2003), pp. 129–151. 52 Cudworth, TIS, p. 53; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, p. 93. Plato, Timaeus 53c–56c, in Plato, Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, ed. R.G. Bury (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 126–137.

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imagining that Atoms would so-to-speak organise themselves in order to evade chaos, or that the Deity would be concerned ‘in the Immediate Motion of every Atom of Matter throughout the Universe’,53 and secondly to affirm the seniority of Mind. In a quite significant page of his Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, he vehemently criticised those who so violently and distortedly pervert the natural Order and Dependency of Things in the Universe’ by supposing that all human knowledge does not derive immediately from its participation in God’s own knowledge, but is ‘only taken up at the Rebound or Second-hand from sensible and corporeal Things. Even if they pretended to believe in God’s existence, he again associated them, with: those antient Theologues that Aristotle speaks of, that fetched the Original of God and all Things out of Night, or the dark Chaos of Matter; that held there is no God at all, or that blind and Senseless Matter and Chance are the only Original of all Things.54 In such conditions, could a Christian thinker fear a return of the world to ‘chaos’ even if in a mere metaphorical sense ? Atheists or agnostics frequently object, ‘That Because it [the World] is so Ill-made, therefore it could not be made by a God’.55 Like the Neoplatonists, above all Plotinus, Cudworth claimed that one should never judge God’s work from a mere parochial viewpoint. In some ways, he ventured to say, even evils are mysteriously necessary. Like the ‘Dramatick Poem,’ the world, as Plotinus put it, ‘would neither be Compleat, nor Elegant and Delightful, were all those Worser Parts taken out of it’.56 Such an unqualified integration of evil into the harmony of the world might border on excessive and naive optimism. But, in my view, it rather aimed at denouncing the ‘idea of God’ rejected by the unbelievers who had raised the objection, but entertained by some ‘Modern Theists’—‘these Concluding the Perfection of the Deity, not at all to consist in Goodness, but in Power and Arbitrary Will only’.57

53

Cudworth, TIS, p. 151; in Rogers (ed.), vol. I, pp. 226–228. Cudworth, EIM, pp. 260–261 (ch. 4, § 14); in Hutton (ed.), pp. 132–133; Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. and trans. H. Tredennick, pp. 142–143 (1071 b 27; xii, 6, 6): ‘Yet if we accept the statements of the cosmologists who generate everything from Night, or the doctrine of the physicists that “all things were together”, we have the same impossibility ’. 55 Cudworth, TIS, p. 872; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 461. 56 Cudworth, TIS, p. 882; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 480; Plotinus, Enneads III, ed. and trans. A.H. Armstrong, pp. 80–81 (N.B. the terms actually used by Plotinus are: ‘ but the play is not a good one if one expels the inferior characters, because they too help to complete it’). See also Cudworth, TIS, p. 876; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 468: ‘but that the Divine Art and Skill, most of all appeareth, in Bonifying these Evils, and making them like Discords in Musick; to contribute to the Harmony of the Whole and the Good of Particular Persons’. 57 Cudworth, TIS, p. 872; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 461. 54

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POWER AND CHAOS As far as we can see, Cudworth laid this charge against many contemporary divines or philosophers. In the famous sermon preached before the House of Commons in 1647, while the Civil War was raging all over England, he assumed an almost lyrical tone to praise Divine Love: O Divine Love ! the sweet Harmony of Souls: the Musick of Angels ! The Joy of Gods own Heart, the very Darling of his Bosome ! the Sourse of true Happinesse ! the pure Quintessence of Heaven ! that which reconciles the jarring Principles of the World, and makes them all chime together ! That which melts mens Hearts into one another!58 All sorts of metaphors were produced throughout the sermon to illustrate this total trust in God. But let us especially observe that a few pages or minutes before the text just quoted, Cudworth equated ‘infinite Goodness’ with ‘infinite Power’, adding that ‘the Root of all Power, is Goodness’.59 As a matter of fact, this piece of pulpit oratory perfectly matched the two theses, written in Latin verses, he had defended at about the same period in order to obtain the degree of Bachelor of Divinity. Their respective titles, Dantur rationes Boni, et Mali aeternae et indispensabiles, Dantur substantiae incorporae, natura sua immortales, reveal the main drive of his thought: a downright denunciation of theological voluntarism. The contents are even more telling. For example, lines. 20 and 24 in the first poem declare respectively that ‘Olympus imposes to itself its own limits’ and that ‘Infinite power accepts the boundaries of Justice’.60 Lines 58–74 depict the disorder of the world which would result from any complacency of God towards evil.61 Those theses anticipated Cudworth’s lifelong struggle against all forms of determinism (or ‘fatalism’ to use his own terms) and in particular against the theological voluntarism which had marked his own Calvinistic training at Emmanuel College, but which had also resurfaced in the for him utterly scandalous Cartesian doctrine of the ‘creation of eternal truths’.62 In the pages of The True Intellectual System, of A Treatise Concerning and Immutable Morality

58 Cudworth, A Sermon Preached before the House of Commons. March 31, 1647 (I John ii. 3,4); reprinted in Patrides, Cambridge Platonists, pp. 90–127; the quotation is from p. 117. 59 Patrides, Cambridge Platonists, p. 107. 60 Cudworth, Dantur rationes Boni et Mali aeternae et indispensabiles substantiae natura sua immortales (Cambridge, 1651), l. 20: ‘Se regit, et fraenat, fines sibi ponit Olympus’. and l. 24: ‘Cancellos Justi capit Infinita Potestas’. 61 E.g. Dantur rationes, ll. 58–61: ‘Nec deforme Malum quâvis mutaverit arte / Aethiopes vultus specie candentis Honesti. / Finge Deum indulgere malis, obducere nubem / Fraudibus, et securâ involvere crimina nocte’. 62 Descartes, AT, vol. I, p. 145 (‘Lettre au Père Mersenne du 15 avril 1630’) and vol. 9, pp. 218–235 (Réponses aux sixièmes objections faites par des personnes très doctes contre les précédentes méditations).

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and of A Treatise of Freewill devoted to this question,63 he stigmatised the author of the Meditations ‘(though otherwise an Acute Philosopher)’ as being here Childish.64 He even imagined that he was not ‘any more earnest in this, than when he elsewhere goes about to defend the Doctrine of Transubstantiation by the Principles of his new Philosophy’.65 As some French historians of philosophy have suggested, Descartes might thereby have reacted against Suarez and other scholastics who unduly submitted God to the ‘metaphysical essence of representation’.66 Cudworth, as far as he was concerned, behaved as a staunch Platonist: he could not admit that ‘there is nulla ratio veri aut boni [no principle of truth or goodness] in nature antecedent to his [God’s] will’.67 Indeed, in such a case, God would be both good and wise by will, and not by nature; nothing but a blind being, ‘indifferent, and fortuitous will omnipotent. And all divine perfections are swallowed up into will’.68 Although the word ‘chaos’ does not surface here, the Platonic orientation of Cudworth’s thought is obvious. ‘Fortuitous will’ or ‘total indetermination’ radically contrast with the order of attributes which, according to him, prevails in God himself. ‘Goodness … measures and determines the Wisdom of God, as his Wisdom measures and determines his Will’.69 Strikingly, Cudworth declared at the end of the True Intellectual System that: it should be more desirable, to be under the Empire of Senseless Atoms, Fortuitously moved, then of a Will altogether Undetermined by Goodness, Justice, and Wisdom, armed with Omnipotence; because the Former could Harbour no Hurtful or Mischievous Designs, against any, as the Latter might.70 Besides, only the hierarchy of divine attributes could properly account for the creation of the world ‘[T]he reason why God made the World, was from his own Overflowing and Communicative Goodness, that there might be other Beings also Happy besides him, and enjoy themselves. Nor does this clash, with God’s making of the world, for his own Glory and Honour’.71 As a consequence, the adequate terminology to refer to God’s power is not the Cartesian ‘Causa Sui’, but ‘Compos Sui’, ‘master of himself’.72 Plato is opportunely quoted two pages further in the same manuscript as having presented God as ‘autexousion’.

63 Cudworth, TIS, pp. 646–647; in Rogers (ed.), vol. II , pp. 532–534; EIM, pp. 30–37; in Hutton (ed.), pp. 22–27; A Treatise of Freewill, pp. 48–50; in Hutton (ed.), pp. 187–188. 64 Cudworth, TIS, p. 646; in Rogers (ed.), vol. II , p. 533. 65 Cudworth, EIM, p. 30; Hutton (ed.), p. 24. 66 See Jean-Luc Marion, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 1981), p. 46. 67 Cudworth, A Treatise of Freewill, p. 49; in Hutton (ed.), p. 187. 68 Ibid. 69 Cudworth, EIM, p. 36; in Hutton (ed.), p. 26. 70 Cudworth, TIS, p. 873; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 462. 71 Cudworth, TIS, p. 886; in Rogers (ed.), vol. III, p. 486. 72 British Library, Additional MSS 4980, fol. 30.

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Likewise, in Cudworth’s view, man can only be considered as accountable for his actions if he enjoys real freedom. Not only must he not be hindered in his actions, as Hobbes subtly argued, while showing clearly at the same time that he was entirely determined by the interplay of his appetites and aversions. Not only must he be able to choose ‘indifferently’ between two apparent goods or courses of action. He must be capable of emulating, in his own limited way, God’s perfect liberty, i.e. perfect self-determination by rightly exerting the power he has over himself of selecting the ‘greatest good’, thus becoming in his turn truly ‘autexousion’. This is, Cudworth kept repeating in A Treatise of Freewill and in his manuscripts, ‘that which is called my Self in every man’.73 Without it, man would actually fall back into a personal chaos.74

CONCLUSION The twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens once wrote: ‘The law of chaos is the law of ideas, of improvisations and seasons of belief’, and this statement was chosen as an epigraph for the introduction to a book characteristically entitled Chaos and Order.75 Familiar with Hesiod’s poetry, Ralph Cudworth would certainly have found this pronouncement amazing. He would have responded with even more astonishment to the idea of a ‘science of chaos’ which has been one the marks of postmodernity for many years now, at least since James Gleick’s famous book, Chaos: Making a New Science, came out in 1987.76 The recurrent phrase ‘order of nature’ is, as we have seen, an undeniable mark of his Platonism in every field of his thought. And yet his approach to atomism and to the concept of power, I think, suggests that he suspected that ‘chaos’ remained even more than a mere dialectical antithesis to order or even more than the mere horizon of his system, and that, in some ways, the etymological definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a gaping void, yawning gulf, chasm, or abyss’, was not quite satisfactory. I would be tempted to say, with all due caution, that he was conscious of the necessity for a Platonist of modern times of ‘thinking [of] chaos’ not only as ‘anti-order’, but also as ‘not-order’.77 73 BL, Additional MSS 4981, Summary, fol. 3; reprint. in Rogers, Vienne and Zarka, (eds), Cambridge Platonists, p. 222; British Library, Additional MSS 4979, fol 6. 74 BL, Additional MSS 4980, fol. 1: ‘for if our thoughts and cogitations did spring along necessarily by themselves, according as the impulse of outward Objects did excite them and give them the first hint, … we should be distracted, confounded, puzzled and mixed things, having our Wills away to seek and wanting presence’. See also Cudworth, A Treatise of Freewill, p. 61; in Hutton (ed.), p. 194: ‘then could we never have any presence of mind, no ready attention to emergent occurrences or occasions’. 75 Wallace Stevens, ‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas’, quoted in N. Katherine Hayles, (ed.), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago and London; The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 1. 76 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987). 77 In Chaos and Order, p. 3, n. Katherine Hayles interestingly observed that by contrast with the ‘binary logic in the West … in the four-valued logic characteristic of Taoist thought, not-order is also a possibility, distinct from and valued differently than anti-order’.

CHAPTER 10

Robin Attfield

Cudworth, Prior and Passmore on the Autonomy of Ethics

INTRODUCTION According to Arthur N. Prior, certain arguments of Ralph Cudworth, in A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, concerning the autonomy of ethics, fare no better than corresponding later arguments of G.E. Moore on this subject. Prior further maintains that the one good argument of Cudworth in this connection concerns the non-derivability of ethical conclusions from non-ethical premises. Cudworth’s related criticisms of Thomas Hobbes are said by Prior to anticipate a later parallel critique of Hobbes on the part of John Passmore.1 Yet Cudworth does not write of the non-derivability of ethical conclusions from non-ethical premises (anachronistic notions all), and such arguments would in any case be of questionable validity, as I proceed to explain. Indeed a greater sensitivity to Cudworth’s concerns and context is needed for his true significance to be appreciated or, for that matter, for his stance to be subjected to relevant criticisms. While Cudworth’s upholding of the autonomy of ethical obligations from arbitrary commands (in reply to Thomas Hobbes and others) and his other contributions to ethics were philosophically important and historically influential, as I show in the coming section, I go on to argue that it is unnecessary to father on him Prior’s questionable argument, and that a different interpretation can be given of the relevant passages, one that is closer to Plato’s Euthyphro and one which may be less vulnerable than the arguments of Moore. While Cudworth rightly rejected the reducibility of goodness to commandedness, he need neither

1

Arthur N. Prior, Logic and the Basis of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 23.

147 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 147–158. © 2008 Springer.

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be represented as having divided qualities into those distinctively ethical and non-ethical, nor as having held that moral ‘oughts’ are either self-justifying or incapable of justification by reference to necessary truths, nor generally that ethical qualities are beyond justification. This approach is further shown to be relevant to Cudworth’s account of what was misguided in Hobbes’s understanding of ‘ought’. Hobbes can rightly be criticised for assimilating moral ‘oughts’ to prudential ‘oughts’, without endorsement of Passmore’s Kantian-like view (the view that Prior thinks Cudworth anticipated) that the former are to be understood as categorical.2 While Cudworth is not above criticism, his particular form of ethical Platonism should not be interpreted as if he were dimly foreshadowing ethicists of either one hundred or of over 200 years later. Passmore further argues that Cudworth’s belief in the immutability of morality cannot be reconciled with his attempt to include obligations to obey legitimate sovereigns as a sector or province of morality. In the final section below I argue that even if Cudworth’s attempt was unwise, it commits him neither to inconsistency nor to abandoning his belief that morality is eternal and immutable.

CUDWORTH’S CONTRIBUTION TO ETHICS After Henry More, Cudworth was the earliest philosophical critic of Hobbes, to whose materialism, religious scepticism, determinism and ethical positivism Cudworth was firmly opposed.3 Although Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae was published in 1672, 6 years before Cudworth’s polemically titled The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Cudworth’s work was ready for publication in 1671, and he had been writing it for many years previously;4 this was also a much more substantial work than the tracts published by More. (Cudworth’s critique of Hobbes is discussed in greater detail in a later section). Cudworth was in fact just as strongly opposed to the theological positivism of the Calvinists, many of whom held that it is God’s will alone that determines the goodness of actions. This opposition helps explain his emphasis on the eternal and immutable independence of morality from the commands of sovereigns, whether sublunary or divine (and thus central aspects of his Platonism). While Cudworth was in many ways a follower of Descartes, he deployed the widespread criticism that Descartes reasoned in a circle, and may even (as Passmore shows) have originated this criticism.5 At the same time he rejected

2 John Passmore, ‘The Moral Philosophy of Cudworth’, Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy (1942), p.173; Prior, Logic, p. 23. 3 Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 80–102. 4 John Passmore, Ralph Cudworth: An Interpretation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 3. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (hereafter TIS) was first published in 1678. 5 Passmore, ibid., p. 9.

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Descartes’ divine guarantees of clear and distinct ideas, and thus of truth,6 and relatedly his representation of all truths (moral truths included) as contingent and as dependent at that on the divine will. Among Cudworth’s more influential teachings was that of the unity of the person, as the subject of understanding and of will, combined with a rejection of the then fashionable faculty psychology. While what later became Cudworth’s Treatise on Free Will remained unpublished in his own century,7 his views on this matter became known to John Locke, who managed to echo Cudworth’s expression of them in Book II of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690.8 Cudworth further defended belief in human freedom against both predestination and mechanism, attributing to the human soul as ‘a weak staggering power’ (as one of his manuscripts puts it) to steer our ship to one port rather than another, a power also identified by Cudworth with respect for principle.9 To this new psychology, Cudworth added an account of the good life as an active life of disinterested love and creativity, themes that seem to have influenced (among others) Anthony Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury.10 Indeed, Passmore claims that ‘the ethics of the Platonists, and Cudworth’s especially, can be interpreted in terms wholly secular’,11 an attraction for Enlightenment theorists of more than one school. While Cudworth is widely recognised as a source of the ideas of later rationalist ethicists, and was acknowledged as such by Richard Price (who was writing well after Cudworth’s A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was published in 1731),12 his influence was at least as great on moral sense theorists such as Shaftesbury. As Passmore puts matters, ‘Shaftesbury is not an opponent of the Platonists but their disciple’.13 Indeed the only school of British Moralists uninfluenced by Cudworth seems to have been that of the Utilitarians. For most of the others, including those writing before his Treatise was published but having informal access to his ideas, Cudworth was a pivotal figure and his ethical Platonism a pivotal influence. PRIOR’S INTERPRETATION Prior seeks to give due credit to Ralph Cudworth as a pioneering writer on the autonomy of ethics who in some ways anticipated themes and arguments of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. One of these anticipations, noticed by Hastings 6

Ibid. As Passmore discloses in the light of a study of Cudworth’s manuscripts (pp. 107–113), A Treatise of Free Will was eventually published in 1838 by the Reverend John Allen, and must almost certainly have formed part of Cudworth’s unpublished (and partly lost) A Discourse of Liberty, the existence of which is attested in T. Birch’s preface (a short biography of Cudworth) to the second edition of TIS (1743). 8 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, XXI, 17–19; see Passmore, Ralph Cudworth, p. 93. 9 Passmore, Ralph Cudworth, pp. 58–60. 10 Ibid., pp. 70–78, 96–100. 11 Ibid., p. 88. 12 Ibid., pp. 103–105. 13 Ibid., p. 100. 7

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Rashdall, may have historical substance and have consisted in Cudworth’s maintaining that ‘good’ is indefinable. Indeed, we find in Cudworth a passage mirroring the epigraph of Principia Ethica borrowed from Joseph Butler, ‘Everything is what it is, and not another thing’,14 when Cudworth remarks, in the context of a discussion of goodness: ‘And since a thing cannot be made any thing by mere will without a being or nature, every thing must be necessarily and immutably determined by its own nature, and the nature of things be that which it is and nothing else’. Moore’s appeal to the distinctness of different concepts undeniably mirrors a like appeal in Cudworth. Prior goes on to claim that Cudworth also defended the indefinability of ‘good’ with the same bad argument as Moore, without ever quite specifying what this similarity consists in. One possibility is that Prior had in mind Moore’s argument from trivialisation, the one argument of Moore expounded in this chapter, loosely paraphrased by Prior as follows: ‘if obligatoriness is a character which may be significantly predicated of some person’s commands, then it cannot just mean being commanded by that person’.15 However, in Prior’s final chapter, this argument is regarded not as a bad one, but as a valuable one that Moore kept alive for the twentieth century, having borrowed it (with minimal acknowledgement) from predecessors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.16 This argument, I contend, fails to establish the indefinability either of ‘good’ or of ‘obligatory’, since it illicitly assumes this indefinability; for if it did not, then it could not assume that ‘obligatoriness’ can be significantly predicated of what is commanded, rather than predicated tautologically. But since Prior considered it a good argument, albeit mistakenly, the bad argument that he ascribes both to Cudworth and to Moore must take another form. Further evidence for the same conclusion lies in Prior’s recognition17 that Moore’s point in the trivialisation argument is not quite the same as Cudworth’s remarks about the natures of goodness and commandedness being different. The bad argument was more probably regarded by Prior as lying in Cudworth’s argument that relies on the assumption that the natures of goodness and commandedness are different, an assumption that could also, at a pinch, be ascribed to Moore, despite his claims to have demonstrated it by arguments such as the argument from trivialisation. For, according to Prior, who here rejects John Passmore’s defence of Cudworth, Cudworth’s appeal to the principles of identity and contradiction, exemplified in the passage quoted earlier, has no tendency to show that the morality of an act consists in qualities other than commandedness. This is because of a possibility that Cudworth mentions in a parenthesis and proceeds to disregard as ridiculous, the possibility that ‘moral good and evil, just and unjust, honest and dishonest’ are ‘mere names without any signification, 14 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968 (1903)), Epigraph. 15 Prior, Logic, p. 18. 16 Ibid., pp. 95–107. 17 Ibid., p. 18.

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or names for nothing else, but willed and commanded’.18 For (so argues Prior) ‘commandedness by God’ counts as a nature, and might in theory be the same nature as that referred to by ‘goodness’.19 Further evidence that Prior considers this a bad argument of Cudworth can be found in his final chapter, where he mentions Cudworth’s parenthesis as an anticipation of Moore, and at the same time criticises Cudworth again for not explaining why the possibility that goodness and commandedness are identical can be ruled out of consideration.20 Cudworth’s appeal to identity and contradiction has received a defence from Passmore, which is not found credible (nor even worthy of being made explicit) by Prior, who here goes along with Cudworth’s Victorian critic, John Tulloch. According to Passmore, Cudworth was drawing attention to an inconsistency on the part of his opponents, who had to hold that actions that were not moral could be made moral by being commanded, and thus that what lacked the nature of goodness could have that nature imposed by will or by command.21 To this, Prior responds that ‘if this is what Cudworth is really setting out to prove, his appeal to the principles of identity and contradiction does not take him a single step towards proving it’.22 However, Cudworth could reply (with Passmore) that actions lacking the nature of being moral must continue to lack it whether or not they are commanded, being what they are, and, as long as such they remain, being unable to be otherwise. Hence, the principles of identity and contradiction turn out to be relevant after all. Nevertheless, Prior claims to find in Cudworth a good argument,23 and one that is much more serviceable than anything in Moore.24 Prior sets out this argument as follows: ‘It is impossible to deduce an ethical conclusion from entirely nonethical premises. We cannot infer “We ought to do X” from, for example, “God commands us to do X”, unless this is supplemented by the ethical premise, “We ought to do what God commands”; and it is quite useless to offer instead of this some additional non-ethical premise such as “God commands us to obey his commands”’.25 Prior proceeds to argue that this is plainly Cudworth’s main contention in a passage about obligation and God’s commands which he proceeds to quote. However, Cudworth does not actually mention ethical conclusions or non-ethical premises, and might well have been puzzled if he had encountered this interpretation. He seems rather to have been explaining the difference between things commanded and what he calls ‘natural justice’, something that the rational or intellectual nature of any intellect will recognise.

18 Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. S. Hutton I.ii.2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (hereafter EIM), p. 16. 19 Prior, Logic, p. 16. 20 Ibid., p. 95. 21 Passmore, ‘The Moral Philosophy of Cudworth’, p. 172. 22 Prior, Logic, p. 15. 23 Ibid., p. 18. 24 Ibid., p. 24. 25 Ibid., pp. 18–19.

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Prior, however, finds a further basis for eliciting the non-deducibility argument from Cudworth’s Treatise on Morality in Cudworth’s critique of Hobbes. In response to the Hobbesian view that obeying God’s commands is good because they are commanded by God, Cudworth argues that the goodness of such obedience consists in ‘the right or authority of the commander, which is founded in natural justice and equity, and an antecedent obligation to obedience in the subjects’,26 and this critique is at least consistent with the non-deducibility argument. (I return in another section below to some criticisms of Cudworth’s critique of Hobbes on the part of Passmore.) Besides, Cudworth also replies (in True Intellectual System of the Universe) to Hobbes’s suggestion that all our obligations derive from the making of an agreement or contract, and from nothing else. Covenants are mere words without natural justice, he argued, ‘and therefore can they have no force to oblige’.27 Here Prior adds a comment, both on Cudworth’s argument and on a parallel one from Shaftesbury: We cannot, in short, infer ‘We ought to do X’ from ‘We have promised to do X’, unless we also grant the ethical proposition ‘We ought to keep promises’, and for this latter, no non-ethical substitutes, such as ‘We have promised to keep our promises’ will do.28 Once again, this response tallies with the view that Cudworth was suggesting that an antecedent ethical premise is needed before either commands or agreements can oblige.

CUDWORTH ON HOBBES Cudworth presents a further critique of Hobbes’s ‘laws of nature’. Hobbes was prepared to recognise that one such law obliges us to the keeping of agreements, a recognition that begins to look like endorsement of an antecedent obligation of the kind that Cudworth affirmed, but proceeds to claim that such laws are really ‘conclusions or theorems … concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of ourselves’, and are therefore just principles of prudence.29 To this, Cudworth responds that, if so, these are for Hobbes and his followers merely ‘the laws of their own timorous and cowardly complexion; for they, who have courage and generosity in them, … would never submit to such sneaking terms of equality and subjection, but venture for dominion; and resolve either to win the saddle or loose (sic) the horse’.30 This is where Prior finds in Cudworth an anticipation of John Passmore, who comments as follows on Hobbes’s laws of nature: ‘since the “laws of nature” as Hobbes understands them’ simply 26

Cudworth, EIM, I. ii. 3, p. 18. Cudworth, TIS, p. 894, cited by Prior, Logic, at p. 21. 28 Prior, Logic, p. 22. 29 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), Part I, ch. 15, p. 104. 30 Cudworth, TIS, p. 894, cited by Prior at Logic, p. 23. 27

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‘present the means that we will have to adopt if we are to live at peace’, they are ‘mandatory only on those who wish to do so. In Kantian language they are hypothetical, or at most assertorial, and not “categorical imperatives”’, despite Hobbes having (in Passmore’s view) wanted to make them morally binding. However, since Prior demonstrates in a later chapter that both moral and other principles that include the word ‘all’ or equivalent have to be analysed as hypothetical in any case, there is no need to ascribe Kant’s somewhat misleading language to Cudworth, who may or may not have regarded moral laws as unconditional. (For it would in theory have been open to him to adopt instead a line taken later by Philippa Foot in ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, namely that while Kant is right that moral ‘oughts’ are not contingent on an agent’s desires, they may still derive their obligatory quality from a certain kind of justification, and be themselves implicitly conditional on its availability, rather than being self-justifying).31 Cudworth can be construed as maintaining that Hobbesian laws fail to oblige through failing to appeal to (what he called) natural justice, and also fail to motivate, except on the basis of the somewhat implausible moral psychology of Hobbes. But this does not conclusively commit him to a Kantian or Passmorean critique of Hobbes, much less to the non-deducibility argument unearthed by Prior.

PRIOR’S DEFENCE OF THE NON-DEDUCIBILITY ARGUMENT Prior further defends the argument that he ascribes to Cudworth in a later passage that actually discloses more fully both its nature and its fallibility. This argument, he claims, is ‘both older and more common’ than Moore’s, easier to follow, and one that ‘compendiously refutes a greater variety of fallacies, including the one that Professor Moore refutes as a special case. For if it is impossible to deduce an ethical proposition from any entirely non-ethical premise or set of premises, then it is impossible to deduce one from a definition, since a definition, if it is properly to be called a proposition at all, is not one about obligations, but one about the meaning of words. (At the same time, definitions of ‘obligation’ and other moral terms look as if they are about obligations, and as if significant propositions might be deducible from them, and Professor Moore’s argument is often necessary as a supplementary measure to destroy this illusion)’.32 What Prior means by ‘Professor Moore’s argument’ here could well be the argument from trivialisation, better known nowadays as ‘the Open Question Argument’. But this argument leaves the naturalist with an option other than the possibility mentioned here by Prior of accepting his opponent’s principle and disagreeing

31 Philippa Foot, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, Philosophical Review, 81 (1972), 305–316. Foot’s recent retractation (at 60 f. of Natural Goodness, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) of a related suggestion made in the same earlier paper makes no difference to this possibility. 32 Prior, Logic, p. 24.

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about what is to count as an ethical premise. For the naturalist is free to contest the principle that it is impossible to deduce an ethical proposition from any entirely non-ethical premise or set of premises. This is because, while a definition of an ethical term will not comprise a suitable premise, a necessary truth grounded in a successful definition could comprise just this; and neither Moore nor Prior can deny that there could ever be such a successful definition ahead of deploying the argument they respectively present, on pain of begging the question. Thus one premise could be a necessary truth about traits that are good or acts that are obligatory, grounded in a successful definition of these terms. This, in conjunction with a factual premise about a particular trait or act having the characteristics specified would allow of the valid deduction that this trait was good or that this act was obligatory. The necessarily true premise would be both analytic and a priori, and would thus be quite distinct from ethical premises, with their supposedly synthetic, contingent and contestable nature. But, whether or not the nature of ethical premises can be reasoned from in this way, Prior in any case rules that both definitions and (implicitly) truths based on definitions alone do not count as ethical premises, as we have seen in the passage just quoted. This being so, Prior is in no position to claim that it is impossible to deduce ethical conclusions from non-ethical premises. Nor in the circumstances can Prior appeal to Moore’s argument to reinforce his crumbling position. For Moore’s argument equally assumes that no successful definition of an ethical term can be given. For if such a successful definition of (say) ‘good’ could be given, then the claim that things answering to this definition are good would be trivially true, and the question asking whether they are good would not be an open question. Thus both Prior’s and Moore’s arguments beg the question at issue.

CUDWORTH’S STANCE At this stage it becomes important to ask whether Cudworth is tarred with the same brush. He would be if Prior’s interpretation of his central argument were persuasive; but perhaps this was not after all what Cudworth was claiming. Relevant questions here include whether Cudworth’s arguments concern the whole range of ethical propositions, or only some, and whether or not he would agree with Prior that definitions of ethical terms, plus the necessary truths that can be derived from them, are non-ethical. The answer to the first question is probably ‘no’, since Cudworth was at least mainly concerned with obligation, justice and virtues such as honesty, rather than with conclusions about other virtues such as humility or (as will be seen below in the section on Passmore’s interpretation) with which actions are right and/or permissible without being obligatory. As for the second question, some amount depends on whether a tenet that Prior believes that Cudworth regarded as an ethical one, namely that promises ought to be kept, is actually a necessary truth, and derivable from the meaning of ‘promise’. If, like John Searle, one concludes that (granted a

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few qualifications) this is a necessary truth, and grounded in the meaning of ‘promise’, then this is, in Prior’s classification, a non-ethical proposition, and yet one to which Cudworth almost certainly subscribed, and from which he almost certainly took many particular obligations to be derivable. (I am not claiming that Cudworth himself had any view on whether this proposition was ethical or non-ethical. Even so, his deriving obligations from a proposition which Prior’s classification represents as a non-ethical one counts against his holding that ethical conclusions can never be derived from non-ethical premises alone, in Prior’s sense of that phrase). More positively, Cudworth was maintaining that conclusions about obligation and justice can never be made true by mere will or command, and cannot be derived from the mere fact of such willing or commanding, or from the mere fact of such words being spoken. He does not seem to have held that such conclusions cannot be derived at all, but does seem to hold that something that he called ‘natural justice’ always enters into their pedigree, and that this is enough to show that mere will is never enough alone. Natural justice seems to be another phrase for the nature of justice, or the character that just actions have. It is also, according to Cudworth, one of the objects of ‘the intellectual nature’, but only because intellectual nature is possessed by any mind capable of comprehending the nature of justice and similar natures. Indeed, Cudworth would seem to have a strong case for maintaining that the character of being just or being obligatory can hardly arise from acts of will or command alone, in the absence of legitimate authority. (Indeed further supporting evidence of this will emerge when an argument of his to be mentioned in the next section is taken into account). Cudworth certainly realises that there are cases (e.g. promises and positive laws) where the utterance of words seems to generate obligations. But he has replies to the objections that could be based on these cases. Where the proclamation of laws generates obligations, this depends on the antecedent fact of the lawgiver being legitimate, a notion that (he suggests) invokes natural justice, or ‘the natures of … just and unjust, really existing in the world’,33 or, as we might put matters, an antecedent premise about justice independent of the will or utterance of the lawgiver. (For some apparent problems generated by this stance, see the final section below.) And where obligations are generated by uttering a promise, they are generated because natural justice makes the fulfilment of promises obligatory, on condition of their being voluntarily entered into, despite such actions not having been obligatory otherwise; hence, the obligation turns not on the utterance but on natural justice. Yet in this matter, we might observe that natural justice could reasonably be construed as the principle that (in normal cases where the utterance was not intended as a jest or likely to be construed as a jest) promises ought to be fulfilled, and this, or a refinement of this, might in turn be a conceptual truth. Not only does Cudworth’s appeal to natural justice not seem to exclude propositions that Prior would regard as non-ethical as 33

EIM, I.ii.3, p. 19.

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sufficient to underpin conclusions about obligation; in this case it actually seems positively to involve such a non-ethical premise.

WHY CUDWORTH’S STANCE IS LESS VULNERABLE THAN MOORE’S, AND MAY BE DEFENSIBLE Cudworth’s claim that the mere fact of issuing a command is never sufficient alone to generate an obligation seems correct. Whether he demonstrated this is another matter; for his remarks about natural justice need interpreting, and his arguments are incomplete without such interpretations. Nevertheless he seems to avoid the claims of Moore and his successors that obligations are never generated by facts, since he seems not to rule out the kinds of conceptual truths concerning moral ‘oughts’ or moral rightness that might supply a bridge from facts to conclusions stating that someone has an obligation. His stance about promises is evidence that such conceptual truths are not rejected. This being so, he seems to have avoided the pitfall of begging the question against successful naturalist definitions of ‘good’ or of moral ‘oughts’ into which Moore so readily projected himself. Besides, Cudworth was able to argue against command theories that they imply (implausibly) that whatever the giver of commands might say would actually be right, atrocities included; and while command theorists might claim that at any rate God could not conceivably command anything immoral, Brad Hooker has pointed out that this claim can only be made if God is understood to be antecedently subject to moral constraints (whether by will or by nature), and that, if so, then it is the moral constraints rather than God’s commands that make what is commanded right.34 And all this suggests that Cudworth’s position is less vulnerable than Moore’s, partly because Moore begs questions that Cudworth does not beg. Besides, Cudworth’s arguments concerning command-theories could well be capable of being decisively clinched, through development of his contrast between mere facts about commands and premises about the legitimacy or authority or morality of some of those who issue commands, and through a clearer development of his claims about natural justice and its conceptual distinctness from commands and other expressions of will than was made explicit by Cudworth himself.

SOME FURTHER CRITICISMS FROM PASSMORE While this is not the occasion to seek to clinch Cudworth’s case, it can be defended here against some twentieth-century criticisms wielded by Passmore as objections to Cudworth’s replies to Hobbes, and as problems for Cudworth’s treatment of the relations of commands and natural justice. For Cudworth was 34

Brad Hooker, ‘Cudworth and Quinn’, Analysis, 61 (2001), 333–335.

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unwilling to accept that eternal and immutable morality authorises conscientious disobedience to the state, and thus vindicate Hobbes’s fears that if morality is not identical with a sovereign’s commands then society will be divided. Instead he saw fit to maintain that conscience (and thus eternal and immutable morality) obliges us to obey both God (because of his goodness) and, under God, the laws of earthly sovereigns as well (insofar as they have legitimate authority).35 But this, in Passmore’s view, generates difficulties for Cudworth, one of them involving an inconsistency. Take an act that is intrinsically indifferent, but which is commanded by a legitimate ruler. Cudworth wants to say that (in view of the immutability of morality) this act remains morally indifferent, despite being a law-abiding act. So, despite accepting that law-abiding acts are good, and that this is one of them, he denies that this act is good. But this denial involves him in an inconsistency.36 However, there would be nothing to prevent Cudworth making a distinction between two senses of ‘This act is good’. This sentence could be construed as meaning ‘This act is good as a legitimately authorised act’, and Cudworth could accept both this and its deducibility from the two premises just mentioned (suitably interpreted so as to refer to acts complying with the laws of legitimate authorities). At the same time he could accept that we, the subjects of the legitimate ruler, ought to perform it. He could also distinguish this sense of ‘This act is good’ from a quite different sense which the same sentence could carry, namely ‘This act is good by nature’, and could continue to reject the latter claim on the basis that the act remains intrinsically indifferent. Yet Passmore has another problem for Cudworth. For Passmore endorses Hobbes’s view that if all law-abiding acts are moral, then no other acts are moral or immoral, since any particular act could come to be forbidden or commanded by law. Thus if Cudworth accepts that all law-abiding acts are good, then his moral theory has no room left for any other kinds of good act, as the morality of law-abiding will comprise the whole of morality.37 Presumably Passmore’s own view was that the belief that all law-abiding acts are moral should in any case be rejected, and that these apparent implications could in this way be avoided. But are they implications at all? One way of resisting Passmore’s reasoning would be to point to moral acts like keeping promises made to friends which are neither legally required nor legally forbidden, and to claim that at any given time there will be numerous such acts, even if at some later time the same acts may happen to become legally required. If so, then law-abidingness would not swallow up the whole of morality, because until and unless this happens they are moral not because the law requires them but for the quite different reason that promises ought to be kept. But to this reply, Passmore could object that acts that are not legally forbidden are legally authorised, and that this commits Cudworth to regarding law-abiding 35

Cudworth, TIS, p. 514; Passmore, Ralph Cudworth, p. 45. Cudworth, EIM, I, ii, 4, pp. 19–21; Passmore, Ralph Cudworth, pp. 45–9. 37 Passmore, Ralph Cudworth, pp. 49f. 36

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acts as identical with moral acts, once he accepts that law-abiding acts are moral. But to this Cudworth could reply that even if morality obliges people to obey the laws of legitimate sovereigns, it obliges them to obey only what is commanded, and does not endorse as moral whatever the law does not forbid. Hence, a second distinction affecting the sentence, ‘All law-abiding acts are good’, needs to be observed. If this sentence is construed as, ‘All legally permissible acts are good’, it is false, and can be rejected by Cudworth (both on this ground and on the ground that he was not discussing what is permissible in the first place). If, however, it means ‘All acts of obedience to (legitimate) legal commands are morally acceptable’, then Cudworth can accept it, on the kind of basis on which the Socrates of the Crito resolved to obey the law of Athens. But this acceptance does not commit Cudworth to any implications about the rest of moral theory of the kind that Passmore alleges. One moral is that we do not need to choose between a Hobbesian identification of morality with the behests of the sovereign and an uncompromising adherence to eternal and immutable morality which at all times questions the commands of the state. However, if Cudworth had lived in the Athens of the Thirty Tyrants, or alternatively in the Third Reich, he might have been more willing, in the name of eternal and immutable morality, to disobey the state, as the same Socrates did when ordered to become party to the execution of an innocent citizen, and as, for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer did when participating in a plot to assassinate a modern tyrant. While Cudworth’s attempts to make law-abidingness a province of morality are not open to the problems devised by Passmore, he might have been wiser, as Passmore implies, not to have written such an ample blank cheque, even to legitimate authority.

CHAPTER 11

Han van Ruler

Substituting Aristotle: Platonic Themes in Dutch Cartesianism

For a book on physiology, Descartes’ Traité de l’Homme made an extraordinary impression on some of its readers. Nicholas Malebranche is reported to have suffered such mental and physical upheaval when he first read the book that he frequently had to put it aside.1 The Traité de l’Homme was first published by Claude Clerselier (1614–1684) in Paris in 1664 as L’Homme. Two years before, however, De l’Homme had seen the light in a Latin edition at Leiden. This work, De Homine, was edited by Florentius (Florent, or Florens) Schuyl (1619–1669), a professor of philosophy at the Illustrious School of ’s Hertogenbosch. Schuyl not only translated Descartes’ French into Latin, but also added some marvellous drawings. De Homine considerably advanced his academic career. In 1664, Schuyl changed his humble position at ’s Hertogenbosch for a prestigious chair in medicine at the University of Leiden. The publication of De Homine marked the end of a process of intellectual transformation that had started when, as a student at Utrecht University, Florens Schuyl had had to defend an Aristotelian position against the philosophy that he would later embrace. During his graduation ceremony on 3 July 1639, a fierce discussion took place between his promotor, professor Arnold Senguerd (1610–1668), and Descartes’ Utrecht correspondent Henricus Regius (1598–1679). The event would later be remembered as the first sign of the crisis that was welling up around Cartesianism and that would eventually lead to the philosophical war between Descartes and Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676). As the procedure required, Schuyl defended a series of theses at the occasion of his graduation. His subject was magnetism, which he explained in terms of

1 Yves Marie André and Augustin Marie Pierre Ingold (eds), La Vie du R.P. Malebranche, Prêtre de l’Oratoire, avec l’Histoire de ses Ouvrages (Paris: n.p., 1886; Genève: Slatkine, 1970), p. 12.

159 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 159–175. © 2008 Springer.

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an ‘occult quality’.2 At the end of his career, Schuyl took position at the other side of the philosophical spectrum. In an official speech on 8 February 1667, Leiden University’s dies natalis, Schuyl again discussed magnetism, but he now presented the subject as one in which scientific progress was most obvious, calling magnetism a ‘manifest’ instead of an ‘occult’ faculty. He also claimed that all the effects of magnetism could easily be demonstrated experimentally ‘in one or two hours’, and that the magnetic quality was not an innate quality of magnets, since it could, ‘without any trouble’, be reproduced in bodies of steel.3 Schuyl’s Cartesian stance as a university professor was thus the complete opposite of his Aristotelian position as a student. It exhibits all the dramatic features of a Kuhnian paradigm shift rather than a simple substitution of one scientific theory for another. Indeed, in 1667, the change from an Aristotelian to a dualist ontology linked up with a new, Platonic, reading of Cartesianism.

ANIMAL AUTOMATISM Monstrous ideas about animal sensitivity have given Descartes and his followers a bad reputation amongst animal rights activists.4 Such criticism seems particularly relevant to Florens Schuyl, who is known for having tested his ideas on living dogs.5 Schuyl, moreover, devoted a seemingly excessive part of his introduction to Descartes’ De Homine to a refutation of the idea of an ‘animal

2 When Schuyl was intimidated by someone who denied that magnetism could be explained in terms of an occult quality, Professor Senguerd felt forced to intervene, thereby inciting the professor of medicine and botany, Henricus Regius, to stand up in turn and question the supervising professor’s performance. Reports describing the event confirm that Regius’s conduct was generally considered inappropriate and that, in the end, the defendant answered all objections more than satifactorily. Schuyl thus obtained his degree, but the event must have made a deep impression on him in view of his later conversion to Cartesianism. Cf. Testimonium Academiae Ultrajectinae, et Narratio Historica quà defensae, quà exterminatae novae Philosophiae (Utrecht: Strickius, 1642), p. 14, translated in Theo Verbeek (ed.), La querelle d’Utrecht (Paris: Les impressions nouvelles, 1988), pp. 86–87. See also G.A. Lindeboom, Florentius Schuyl (1619–1669) en zijn betekenis voor het Cartesianisme in de geneeskunde (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 14–18. 3 Florentius Schuyl, De Veritate Scientiarum et Artium Academicarum. Qua, Demonstratâ Mentis & Dei Opt. Max. existentiâ, omnium Scientiarum & Artium certitudo ex evidenti Dei & nostri cognitione indubitatò deducitur (Leiden: Hogenacker, 1672), p. 22. The text of the lecture is reprinted with separate pagination in Lindeboom, Florentius Schuyl, pp. 125 ff. 4 According to Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: NY Review, 1975), p. 217 (London: Cape, 1990), p. 200, Descartes’ view on animal life was ‘[the] last, most bizarre, and, for animals, most painful outcome of Christian doctrines’. For a reaction to Singer, see Justin Leibner, ‘ “Cartesian” Linguistics?’, Philosophia, 18 (1988), 309–346 (pp. 312–314). For a general discussion of these and related issues, see Peter Harrison, ‘Descartes on Animals’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 42 (1992), 219–227. 5 Schuyl describes some of his own vivisections on dogs in Florentius Schuyl, Pro veteri medicina contra D. Le Vasseur (Leiden and Amsterdam: Gaasbeeckii, 1670), pp. 88–90. Cf. Gerrit A. Lindeboom, ‘Dog and Frog. Physiological experiments at Leiden during the seventeenth century’ in T.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer

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soul’.6 Like Descartes, he referred to Biblical passages in which the soul of animals is equated with their ‘blood’.7 Schuyl surpassed Descartes, however, and offered supplementary cause for anti-species-ist offence, by arguing that the mercy we are to show animals should not exceed the general benevolence we owe to all creation.8 Yet how Schuyl actually felt about his experiments we do not know. At a time when Harvey’s theory of blood circulation was still a matter of debate, vivisection had become a matter of course, not just in Leiden, but throughout the European continent. Whatever his appreciation of animal feeling, it is important to see that Schuyl’s denial of the idea of an animal soul was not intended as a philosophical excuse for cruelty against animals. Instead, the beast-machine motif combined a new biological interest into the autonomy of the nervous system with a profound theologico-philosophical interest in the exceptional status of the soul—two themes Descartes’ De Homine gave every reason to develop. De Homine describes physiological processes in such a way that, according to Schuyl, the book explains ‘all the functions of the human body that are normally attributed to vegetative and sensitive souls’.9 Yet Schuyl’s argument that animals have no wilful knowledge of their behaviour, highlights another, more specifically Cartesian, element to this mechanistic line of thought. Besides introducing the idea of the body as a marvellous machine, Descartes had also set out to prove that animal machines could function without mental or spiritual control—in other words, without decisions of the will contributing in any way to its motions. This comes out most sharply where De Homine discusses the idea

and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (eds), Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century. An Exchange of Learning (Leiden: Universitaire Pers, 1975), pp. 283–284. 6 Cf. Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York: Octagon, 19682), p. 247: ‘But the most significant thing of all about [Schuyl’s] preface is the fact that it is almost entirely devoted to a discussion of the animal machine, which is by no means the major doctrine of the Traité de l’homme to which it served as introduction’. 7 Florentius Schuyl, ‘Ad Lectorem’, in René Descartes, De Homine Figuris et Latinitate Donatus à Florentio Schuyl (Leiden, Moyardus & Leffen, 1662), pp. c2v–c3. In a letter to Froidmont, Descartes had argued that Holy Scripture relegates the soul of brutes to a purely material status at Leviticus 17. 14, ‘For [the blood of any beast or fowl that may be eaten] is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof […] the life of all flesh is the blood thereof’ and Deuteronomy 12. 23, ‘Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh’. Note that in the Latin translation, ‘life’ was referred to as anima, ‘soul’. Cf. Descartes to Plempius for Fromondus, 3 October 1637 in Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (eds), Œuvres de Descartes (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1897–1913; Paris: Vrin, 1964–1971; and Paris: Vrin, 1996) (hereafter AT) I, 414–15; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–1991) (hereafter CSM) III, 62. 8 Schuyl, ‘Ad Lectorem’, sig. c2v. 9 Schuyl, ‘Ad Lectorem’, sig. d4v.

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of involuntary reflexes. Interpreting the body’s sensory and motory functions in purely mechanical terms, Descartes first conceived of what has since become an accepted notion in biology, namely, that many of our movements occur through an exchange of information between sensory and motor nerves. The soul does not have to intervene. Indeed, this is the reason why, in Descartes, the notion of the soul is eliminated from the scientific description of bodily processes—an idea further developed in modern neurophysiology.10 The mind may steer the body, but there is no need for it to command the body in order for the latter to perform its natural operations. In his Preface to De Homine, Schuyl referred to the symptoms of epilepsy and other cases of convulsions that occur without the mind’s assent, or even with the mind disagreeing with them, such as the well-known example of bodies that continue to move after decapitation.11 These exceptional cases are meant to illustrate a general point, namely that any automaton made of nerves and muscles is capable of producing a great variety of movements and reactions without the mind’s consent. Claude Clerselier, the editor of the first French edition of Descartes’ book, was even more creative when it came to construing biological examples that proved the existence of involuntary reflexes. In order to illustrate that ‘even most of the things that occur in us, occur without the guidance of the Mind’, Clerselier referred to the instinctive routines of crying and sucking in newly born children and to the young child’s ability to walk. New-born children cannot walk at all, but when they do start to walk, their first steps depend on the right disposition of their limbs and nerves, and not on a mental decision. Moreover, says Clerselier, a baby child needs to be toilet-trained, whereas we see a corps returning to its original routine of defecating spontaneously. Even in grown ups, Clerselier argues, the urge to urinate does not depend on mental judgment. Innumerable other instances of unconscious behaviour prove the same point. Clerselier mentions walking the streets when we are thinking of different things altogether—we might add driving. Other automatisms he refers to are our tendencies to gesticulate without thinking and to prevent ourselves spontaneously from

10 The historical significance of Descartes’ scientific work continues to be obscured by popular bias against his metaphysical dualism. The ill-chosen title, for instance, of Antonio Damasio’s exposition on neurophysiology, Descartes’ Error (New York: Putnam, 1994), conceals the fact that this very book develops the type of research initiated by the Frenchman in his Traité de l’homme and Passions de l’Âme. Indeed, Descartes’ Traité de l’homme introduced a physiology without souls in much the same way as his Le monde introduced a physics without substantial forms. Cf. Han van Ruler (ed.), De uitgelezen Descartes (Tielt and Amsterdam: Lannoo-Boom, 1999), pp. 32–38. The Passions de l’Âme, meanwhile, broached the idea that there was a purely neurophysiological basis to the emotions. See also Harrison, ‘Descartes on Animals’, p. 227: ‘The beast-machine […] played a vital role in exorcising the natural world of those occult forces integral to the functioning of the Aristotelian cosmos. It is rather ironic that Desacrtes is castigated for having authored the doctrine of the ‘ghost in the machine’ when in fact he successfully banished ghosts from all machines except the human and in the process of doing so found a place for genuinely scientific explanation in nature’. 11 Schuyl, ‘Ad Lectorem’, sigg. b2–b2v.

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falling when we make a wrong step. Be honest, Clerselier insists, is it not so that we often pray as if we were parrots, automatically reciting the text? We may even lose the words if we start thinking about them consciously, in which case we may decide to go back a few lines, and restore the mechanical recital.12 The absence of the soul’s direction in types of behaviour not influenced by wilful control presupposed a whole new concept of biological functioning and made the issue of biological reflexes-versus-conscious thinking the most striking aspect of Descartes’ De l’Homme. Some physicians, like the Leuven professor and one-time acquaintance of Descartes, Vopiscus Fortunatus Plempius (1601–1671), were very sceptical of specific explanations in Cartesian physiology. Yet these were not as important as Descartes’ general strategy of removing the notions of the soul and the will from the science of living organisms. This explains why the question of the animal soul was of such importance. According to the Cartesian view, the active mind is absent in all cases in which humans and animals instinctively react to their surroundings or perform types of behaviour that are, either by nature or nurture, inscribed as patterns of habitual behaviour into their brains, including all cases in which animals and men react emotionally. Biology and ethics were thus grouped together around a new metaphysics of the soul, since the physiological subject-matter linked up with other than purely biological questions. If the soul was redundant in physiology, its purpose apparently lay elsewhere.

SCHUYL’S AUGUSTINIANISM The antithesis of forced conduct versus free activity mirrored the opposition of matter and mind. Only now could the soul be recognised for what it truly was: a unique essence, both spiritual and immortal. Arguing that man’s rational soul was wholly distinct from the body was a secure way of distinguishing animal operations from the operations of the soul. In his introduction to De Homine, Schuyl criticised the confused argumentation of Aristotelian philosophers with respect to the origin, the passing away and the operations of animal souls. He contrasted their standpoint to the clear, Cartesian, distinction between passive and brute matter on the one hand and mental cognition on the other.13 Non-intelligent life forms show such uniform types of behaviour that we would have to conclude that they excel over us, if it were not for the fact that we are so different from them. If beasts were to possess souls, their invariant behaviour would turn them into a better Image of God than man himself. But God has not provided them with souls. He has built the universal clockwork (totum … hujus Mundi horologium) in such a way that even the tulip, though it is void of all cognition, 12 Claude Clerselier, ‘Préface’ in René Descartes, L’Homme (Paris: Girard, 1664), reprinted in: Louis de la Forge, Thierry Gontier (ed.), L’Homme de René Descartes (Paris: Fayard, 1999), pp. 52–58. 13 Schuyl, ‘Ad Lectorem’, sigg. d2v–d3.

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automatically opens its flower to receive the morning sunlight, and closes again in the evening ‘in order that the nightly cold does not harm its seed’.14 The fact that invariant, mechanical types of behaviour could be clearly distinguished from rational conduct, gave Descartes’ naturalistic description of the body significant moral force. Religious aversion to the idea of man as no more than an animal could now be scientifically grounded. Schuyl quotes St. Basil, who had warned not to fall for the ‘jokery’ of those ‘arrogant philosophers’ who had shamelessly stated that our souls were of the same nature as those of dogs. The book of Genesis had not without reason linked earth to flesh, flesh to blood, and blood to the souls of the brutes.15 Another important source was St. Augustine, from whose De libero arbitrio Schuyl quotes the passage which says that all the activity of animal life consists in ‘pursuing the pleasures of the body, that is, going after the things that affect the body in a positive way, and fleeing incommodities, that is moving away from what is harmful’.16 Thus, Cartesian mechanism reaffirmed the Augustinian dualism between what is earthly and what is divine. Schuyl’s interest in St. Augustine was reinvigorated at Leiden University, where the works of the Church father already formed an interpretative background for reading Descartes. Abraham Heidanus (1597–1678), the leading Cartesian, had linked Cartesian philosophy to Augustinian theology as early as 1645 and had inspired others, such as the philosopher Arnold Geulincx, who had come from Louvain in 1658. Schuyl’s Augustinian reading of Descartes became public in his On the Truth of the Academic Arts and Sciences (mentioned above), the speech he made on 8 February 1667, when he resigned from a 1-year position as Rector Magnificus. Expressing his conviction that students would instinctively embrace what is offered to them if only it shone with the light of indubitable wisdom, Schuyl took the opportunity to present to the staff and students gathered in the auditorium the core argument of Descartes’ Meditations, whilst quoting only from St. Augustine. References to Descartes himself were still forbidden. Yet while the prohibition was obeyed, Schuyl’s pro-Cartesian lecture marks the strength of the faction now supporting the new philosophy.17

14

Ibid., sig. b4. Ibid., sig. c3v. 16 ‘Nam ut res ipsa loquitur & ipse Augustinus lib. 1. de Liber. Arb. cap. 8. appetere voluptates corporis, id est moveri ad illa, quibus corpus benè afficitur, & vitare molestias, id est, removeri à contrariis, ferinae vitae omnis actio est ’. Ibid., sig. cv. Compare St. Augustine, ‘iam vero adpetere voluptates corporis et vitare molestias ferinae vitae omnis actio est’: Aurelius Augustinus, De libero arbitrio I, 62, Sancti Aureli Augustini Opera, series 6, part 3 (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1956), p. 19. 17 By a resolution of the States of Holland of 1656, professors had been prohibited to discuss ‘Philosophemata drawn from the philosophy of Mr. Descartes’. The text of the resolution had been prepared by Abraham Heidanus—an anti-Scholastic theologian, follower of St. Augustine, and at the time the leading Leiden Cartesian—in cooperation with State Pensionary Johan de Witt, the most powerful man in the country and himself a mathematician and admirer of Descartes. Cf. J.A. Cramer, Abraham Heidanus en zijn Cartesianisme (Utrecht: Van Druten, 1889), pp. 65–75. It was, accordingly, meant to keep the peace rather than to put an end to Leiden education in Cartesianism. Still, Schuyl’s public acclaim for the Cartesian cause in an official speech—it was the University’s dies natalis—must have alarmed the anti-Cartesians in the audience. 15

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Schuyl boasted that he was the first to have found the coincidence between what he called ‘our case’ and Augustine’s intention in the Soliloquies to come to know both the soul and God with ‘a type of knowledge more perfect than that of geometry’.18 The shared topic—God and the soul—together with the shared view that one knows one’s esse on the basis of one’s acts of thinking, induced Schuyl to charitably add insertions into his quotations from the Church Father, presenting Augustine basically as a Cartesian avant la lettre, who, in his ‘meditations’, followed a ‘method’ aimed at ‘clear and distinct’ and ‘indubitable’ perception. Covering the subject matter of all six Meditations in turn, Schuyl at the same time sharpened Descartes’ argument for the God-given clarity and truth of rational insight and answered long standing criticisms by Dutch anti-Cartesians, such as Jacobus Revius (1586–1658), who had denounced the Cartesian notion of ‘idea’ and its applicability to an innate notion of God. He further fortified Cartesian philosophy with quotations from a variety of ancient and modern authorities such as Hippocrates, Cicero, Galen, John Calvin and Raymond Sebond. Following Heidanus, moreover, Schuyl literally quoted Descartes’ fourth Meditation, in which the unnamed, but ‘supreme’, philosopher (summus Philosophus) argued that there is no contradiction between God’s government and our freedom to see and accept what He brings forth as truths in our mind.19 Schuyl nevertheless added his own particular flavour to what he found in Descartes. Summing up the experiences our mind is capable of, he put aside those which remind us that the mind ‘is fixed to some heavy burden’, that is to say ‘to the organs of sensation’. This led him to present a very negative image of bodily imprisonment: This is that mortal body which we carry around, the origin of illnesses and pains and in a certain way the cause of death. From here also stem the lustful temptations and the whole crowd of passions and affections that, by bringing it into confusion, again and again exert an intolerable tyranny over the mind.20 The moral imagery here served to facilitate the acceptance of the new philosophy. According to Schuyl, the sharp Augustinian-Cartesian divide between the intellect and the imagination might function as a philosophical cure against the mistaken epistemologies of the Aristotelians and of moderns such as Gassendi. On account 18 Florentius Schuyl, De Veritate Scientiarum, pp. 6–7. Schuyl alludes to Soliloquies, Book 2, a works he refers to as ‘[Augustine’s] Meditations’, in order to draw a general parallel with Descartes’ Meditations, which also presents the two topics, ‘God and the soul’ as the primary subjects of philosophy. In his Index Augustino–Cartésien: Textes et Commentaire (Paris: Vrin, 2000), p. 22, Zbigniew Janowski refers to yet another passage in St. Augustine: De Ordine II, XVIII, 47, ‘Cujus [philosophiae] duplex quaestio est: una de anima, altera de Deo’. 19 De Veritate Scientiarum, p. 18: ‘Nec sanè, utor summi Philosophi verbis, divina gratia, nec naturalis cognitio unquam imminuunt libertatem, sed potiùs augent & corroborant. Neque enim opus est me in utramque partem ferri posse ut sim liber, sed contra quantò magis in unam propendeo, sive quia rationem veri & boni in ea evidenter intelligo, sive quia Deus intima cogitationis meae ita disponit, tantò liberius illam eligo’. Cf. AT VII, 57–58, CSM II, 40. For Heidanus, see my article ‘Reason Spurred by Faith. Abraham Heidanus and Dutch Philosophy’, in Wiep van Bunge (ed.), Traditions of Dutch Philosophy and Russia, Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland, 12 (2001), pp. 21–28. 20 Schuyl, De Veritate Scientiarum, p. 18.

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of the constant presence of the powers of sensation, these thinkers were all led to believe that ideas derive only from sensation. To Schuyl’s horror, Gassendi even claimed that one cannot even conceive of God otherwise than by thinking of Him as a ‘venerable old man’.21 Like his Leiden colleague, Arnold Geulincx, Schuyl emphasised the Cartesian idea of progressive epistemological stages in the growing human individual.22 Being wholly immersed in the satisfaction of bodily needs, the human mind initially experiences sensations not unlike the undeviating apperception of animals. But whereas empiricist epistemologies stuck to the image that there is nothing over and above the biological life, Cartesianism fully acknowledged the function of the mind to grasp ‘beyond the flesh’.23 Moral and religious rebirth could parallel Clerselier’s cruder examples of redirecting one’s natural and biological drives. Yet the experiences of the flesh might seem omnipresent and invincible. Chained to the life we share with lower life forms, the mind is filled with pains and emotional disturbances. Quid ergo? Schuyl asks: ‘What are we to do?’ Should we kill ourselves and free the mind from its incarceration? Far from it! The body is a supporting facility, a subsidium of which, by contrast, we should make good use. This line of Augustinian argumentation is found in Geulincx too: there is nothing wrong with sense experiences and natural inclinations as such, but they may hamper rational and moral development if they are not taken for what they are. Far from denying the reality and value of the senses, Geulincx and Schuyl argue that, by emphasising their biological function, Descartes had put them back in their proper place. In Schuyl’s intellectual universe, scientific optimism thus went hand in hand with epistemological and spiritual objectives. Set apart from the world of biological functioning, the mind unlocked an inner space of its own. Accurate investigation of the workings of our eyes, our ears, our nervous system and our brains, might contribute to a total ‘reformation of man’ if we learned from it no longer to let ourselves be governed by our senses, but to make use of them as soldiers and to develop them, together with our will, as ‘faithful satellites to a right mind’.24 21 Cf. Schuyl, De Veritate Scientiarum, 19 and Petrus Gassendus, Opera Omnia, 6 vols (Lyon: Anisson and Devenet, 1658), I, 93: ‘Porrò hac ratione etiam Deum, qui cadere sanè in Sensum non potest, concipere Mens solet sub idea visi alicuius senis venerabilis, quam ipsi velut accommodat; solet Angelorum sub idea visi formosi adolescentis, ac pari modo caetera’. According to Schuyl, the ancient Germanic tribes, of whom Tacitus had said that they refused to build temples for their unnamable divinities, were better philosophers than Gassendi. 22 According to Schuyl, empiricists mistake childhood cognitive development for the complete picture. Indeed, in the first years there is ‘hardly anything’ which raises our knowledge ‘over and above [that of] the beasts’. Cf. De Veritate Scientiarum, 19. Geulincx likewise criticised pre-Cartesian philosophies on account of their supposedly ‘juvenile’ epistemology. Cf. Arnold Geulincx, in J.P.N. Land (ed), Opera Philosophica, , 3 vols (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1891–1893); idem, in H.J. de Vleeschauwer (ed.), Sämtliche Schriften, 3 vols (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1965–1968) II, 203–204 and Opera III, 411–413. Geulincx’s analysis was based on Descartes’ own remarks on the ‘preconceived opinions of childhood’ in Principia Philosophiae I, 71, AT VIII, 35–36, CSM I, 218–219. 23 Schuyl, De Veritate Scientiarum, p. 18. 24 Ibid., p. 21.

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It is in this way that, during the 1660s, Leiden Cartesianism started to exhibit essentially Platonic traits. A growing interest in metaphysical and moral consequences of Cartesian philosophy could be noticed not only in the work of physicians and occasionalist philosophers, but—a host of metaphysical and epistemological complexities aside—also in Schuyl’s and Geulincx’ famous contemporary Spinoza. In Spinoza’s Ethics the Augustinian-Cartesian distinction between the imagination and the intellect, as well as the biological emphasis on the contrast between forced and wilful types of behaviour, would be reformulated in Stoic terms as a contrast between ‘slavery’ and ‘freedom’. And in Spinoza too, a clear-cut division of labour comes to the fore between the inner voice of reason and the outer influences occasioned by a body’s mechanical surroundings. Functioning as a true source of adequate reasoning, the human mind, whether in Schuyl, Geulincx or Spinoza, attained a state of impartiality to lower cognitive and emotional states. In all of these authors, the question of causal sequence is crucial. All depends, as Schuyl sums up the issue in Descartes’ own words, to distinguish what merely occurs ‘in man’ (in homine) from what is actually done ‘by him’ (per homine).25 Things one does oneself are limited to those which concern reason. The conclusion is of an ethical nature, yet the biological pattern remains. In Schuyl, as well as in Geulincx and Spinoza, the sharp and schematic division between the deliberate acts of the mind and the inevitable impressions and automatic reactions of the body parallel the division between active and passive states of human awareness. Descartes could be read in spiritually significant ways and not only Malebranche’s heart would have started beating faster on reading the Treatise on Man. In the context of distinguishing the mental from the physical, Schuyl even spoke of establishing within our minds ‘an eternal temple of sacred truth and sanctity’.26 Emphasising the importance of discerning the self and its natural freedom, and distinguishing intellectual faculties from the powers of the body and the imagination, Schuyl, Clerselier and Geulincx all exhibited the characteristic features of the attitude at once Platonic, Augustinian and Cartesian that Charles Taylor identified as the historical source of the Western notion of ‘radical reflexivity’. Taylor, however, is critical of some of the philosophical and religious alliances comprising the Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian tradition and more or less argues that we should keep Plato and St. Paul apart: The Pauline opposition of spirit and flesh is repeatedly being pulled out of its hinges and aligned with the Platonic derived opposition between the immaterial and the bodily. Augustine is one of the principle offenders in this respect, but lots of others have made similar elisions of their own, most 25

Schuyl, ‘Ad Lectorem’, sig. b2. Cf. Descartes to an unknown correspondent, March 1638, AT 32: ‘Et il n’y a rien du tout que les choses qui sont comprises par ce mot [‘pensée’], qu’on attribuë proprement à l’homme en langue de Philosophe: car pour les fonctions qui appartiennent au corps seul, on dit qu’elles se font dans l’homme, & non par l’homme’. 26 Schuyl, De Veritate Scientiarum, p. 16: ‘ut aeternam aedem sacrosanctae veritatis & sanctitatis in animis nostris erigimus’. III,

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notably Descartes and the whole band of rationalists and empiricists influenced by him.27 Our Dutch Cartesians clearly made the step lamented by Taylor. Distinguishing what is bodily from what is immaterial in a Cartesian fashion, identifying this position as the Augustinian view, and realising its spiritual significance, they defended a type of Cartesianism marked by a mixture of Platonic and New Testament imagery. But was Cartesianism itself seen as a form of Platonism? In contrast to the many allusions to St. Augustine, we do not find any positive references to Plato in Schuyl or Clerselier.28 The case for introducing references to Plato is obvious, not only because of the omnipresent Augustinian-Cartesian link, but also on account of the explicit rejection of Aristotelian epistemology and metaphysics, as well as the prevalence of specific themes such as the image of the mind as our innermost temple of truth and of its incarceration in matter. Linking Descartes’ teachings to those of St. Augustine, Schuyl, like other Dutch Cartesians, recognised that he formed part of an older tradition. Not surprisingly, it was for the professor of philosophy, Arnold Geulincx, to establish a further link between Plato and Descartes. THE INNER SELF Geulincx had read Plato. Right at the start of the first Treatise of his Ethics, he refers to Socrates’ intellectual love for Plato as an example of virtue developing into lust when Socrates, as Geulincx supposed he did, began to develop a ‘sweet affection’ for his pupil.29 Geulincx’ Ethics would be published posthumously in its complete form under the title Gnothi Seauton (Know Thyself) two years before Spinoza’s Ethics. The book at various points denounces classical philosophy in favour of what Geulincx regards as the Christian view. The ‘great Plato’, however, would be the first of the ancients for whom he would have made an exception.30 Platonic viewpoints, moreover, are basic to both Geulincx’ epistemology and his metaphysics. The ethical maxim of self-knowledge, itself explained in Cartesian terms as an awareness of the gulf between the inner mind and the continual flux of impressions from outside, only serves to strengthen the awareness of the voice within. Accordingly, the emphasis on the notion of ‘reason’ in Geulincx coincides with a call to sincerity in ethics. Almost two thirds of Van de Hooft-deuchden, the treatise on the virtues that would later form the first part of Geulincx’ Ethics, was dedicated to the idea of a redeeming humility towards God and a 27 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 220. 28 Schuyl in fact criticises Plato for having been one of those who claimed that ‘our species does not differ from the brutes’. Cf. Schuyl, ‘Ad Lectorem’, sig. a3v. 29 Geulincx, Opera, I, 12. 30 Cf. Geulincx, Opera III, 6–8. According to Geulincx, despite their frequent reference to the maxim ‘Know thyself’, heathen philosophers were continually seduced by self-love, not even Plato excepted. Nevertheless, in Van de Hooft-deuchden (Leiden: De Croy, 1667), Geulincx’ own Dutch translation of his first Treatise on Ethics, De virtute et primis ejus proprietatibus (Leiden: De Croy, 1665), Geulincx renders ‘Plato’ into ‘the great Plato’. Cf. Arnold Geulincx / Cornelis Verhoeven (ed.), Van de hoofddeugden: De eerste tuchtverhandeling (Baarn: Ambo, 1986), p. 64.

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readiness to follow reason. Geulincx expressly said it was impossible to explain what ‘reason’ is, ‘What Reason is one must not say—nay, one cannot even say. … I say that what Reason is, is sufficiently clear to all of us, for it is our identifying mark to be reasonable’.31 Reason teaches, notifies, prompts and inspires us—which is why we need diligence, an assiduous ‘attentiveness to reason’, in order not to miss what we might learn. Geulincxian ‘Reason’ thus reintroduced the Christian theme of the struggle between the inner and the outer man. Indeed, the cardinal virtue of diligence is, ‘a deep modesty of the heart, which draws it away from external things and turns it to its inner self, in order that, in every event, it may consult that divine Oracle of Reason’.32 Defining diligence as an inward turn of the mind, away from the deception of the senses to the essences of things ‘within us’, Geulincx returns to the Socratic type of knowledge found only through an inner search of the self. To be diligent is to pay attention to the inner voice, the fruit of which is ‘wisdom’.33 Prefiguring Dr. Faust’s conversation with Herr Wagner, Geulincx argued that no knowledge is ever drunk from lectures or books, if it does not spring from the soul itself: For, however much reason may penetrate our eyes and ears from outside through the voice of the wise or through the pen, she is only grasped on the inside and in the secrecy of the heart. Yes, whatever reasons are brought to us from outside (unless we ignore them and rather do something else), we immediately drag before the court of that innermost and lively reason that lives within us, and match it with her as with a touchstone, brushing it against her in order to know whether to accept or reject these external reasons.34 Geulincx was well aware of the Platonic characteristics of this type of inwardness. In his True Metaphysics he says that it was Plato who had seen that teachers only ‘furnish the occasion’ for our understanding. Those, says Geulincx, ‘whom we call our teachers are not really teachers’. For a teacher: is one who gives us knowledge; but men never give us knowledge, nor do they truly teach us (as Plato famously observes in the Meno), but by rousing us out of our state of inadvertence towards the innate ideas within us, which we have otherwise passed over without examining them, they cause us to consider the knowledge we already possess and to keep our mind fixed on that understanding which we already had, by drawing our attention to ideas and notions which are innate.35 31

Geulincx, Opera III, 14. Geulincx, Van de hoofddeugden, p. 76; cf. Geulincx, Opera III, 18. 33 Geulincx, Opera III, 19–20 / Van de hoofddeugden, p. 76. 34 Geulincx, Van de hoofddeugden, pp. 76–77. Cf. Geulincx, Opera III, 18. 35 Geulincx, Opera II, 285. Note that Geulincx’ account of the impossibility of learning from received information has a more typically physiological and occasionalist ring here than in the Ethics. Cf. Geulincx, Opera II, 285–286: ‘ita etiam inepto de se instrumento, qui magistri nostri inter homines dicuntur, occasionem praebent scientiae ac doctrinae nostrae. Utuntur nempe vocibus et scripturis, et similibus signis corporalibus, quae corpus quidem pulsare possunt sed ibidem necessario sistunt, nec vim habent ullam a natura sua, alterius subeundi in mentem, nisi ab illo [sc.Deo], qui vere doctor et magister noster in illam subleventur’. 32

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Presenting Socrates’ instruction of Meno’s servant as the archetypal expression of the Cartesio-Christian distinction between outward information and inward judgement, Geulincx put Plato at the heart of his philosophy.

FORMS AND MODES Yet Geulincx referred to Plato not only in the context of diligent reason and the inner self. He also accepted the Platonic distinction of being and becoming. The world and its parts, including human beings (in so far as they are considered not as minds but as beings in ‘the human condition’), belong to the world of motion and time, of presence and absence. This reflects Plato’s position: Plato too believed that motion, time and all that they involve, such as the World, and its parts, and us, even the human race, do not exist in the strictest sense: for nothing exists in the strictest sense unless it has all its parts at once, for what has its parts successively, in part does not exist.36 Geulincx added this remark in support of his claim that the existence of a thing comes only with ‘its ultimate constituent, and the fulfilling of its final complement’.37 His abstract digression into the nature of succession was not, however, meant to establish the view that the ‘being’ of things is arrived at through an evolution of successive stages of coming-into-being. Rather, it was meant to establish the idea that real being knows no succession. Geulincx denies that either motion or time may have existed ‘ab initio, let alone from eternity’.38 A thing is defined as existing ab initio when ‘it is not eternal, but is first in a succession, or does not presuppose anything in succession before it’.39 Motion and time, however, are dependent on Body, which constitutes the ‘presence’ of something that may subsequently be absent—thus initiating motion and time.40

36 Geulincx, Opera II, 179. Translation from Martin Wilson’s English edition: Arnold Geulincx, Metaphysics (Wisbech: Christoffel Press, 1999), p. 82. 37 Geulincx, Opera II, 179. Translation from Wilson, p. 82. Geulincx illustrates his point by referring to a journey (presumably from Leiden) to The Hague. The journey, says Geulincx, does not exist at first, not even when one has reached The Wood—that is, the Haagse Hout, the woodland and park right up to the present-day Central Station at The Hague. The journey, in other words, only exists, or has ‘come to being’, when completed. Cf. Geulincx, Opera II, 284; Wilson, pp. 83–84. 38 Geulincx, Opera II, 178. 39 Geulincx, Opera II, 283. Translation from Wilson, p. 82. Wilson translates esse ab initio as ‘inceptive’; motion and time are thus neither ‘inceptive, much less eternal’, idem, p. 81. 40 Note that, in his anti-Aristotelian metaphysics, Geulincx does not even accept the concept of ‘whole’ as a description for things as they are in themselves. Wholes and parts, like substances, accidents, relations, predicates and even a concept as ‘thing’ are nothing but phasmata of our intellect, projected onto the world and thereby fundamentally disfiguring it. Cf. Geulincx, Metaphysica ad mentem peripateticam, Opera II, 204 ff. and my discussion of its presumed Kantian content in Han van Ruler, ‘Different Clothing from Like Cloth: Metaphysical and Ethical Diversities in Dutch Cartesianism’, in Thomas M. Lennon (ed.), Cartesian Views: Papers Presented to Richard A. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 31–42 (pp. 36–39).

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As long as there is only presence, but no change, neither can there be any motion or time. Contrary to motion and time, however, ‘Body’ itself really is ab initio—and thus prior to time. This would seem to contradict the idea of creation if it were not for the fact that ‘the World, and its parts, and us, even the human race’ belong to the realm of motion and time, and thus not to ‘being’ in the strictest sense. Geulincx never finished his metaphysics and his sketchy text is not very clear on the precise metaphysical status of ‘Body’. Contrary to God, Body is not eternal, and ‘only God, or eternal things can properly and simply be said to exist’.41 At the same time, God is said to be unable to ‘annihilate’ anything, since everything ‘that He has given proceeds from Himself, and remains in Himself’42— which again would seem to rule out any genuine notion of creation. What is clear, however, is that Geulincx distinguished between Body-as-such and individual, particular bodies. Body is infinitely extended, and neither divisible nor mobile, whereas bodies have a certain definite measure, and are both divisible and mobile. The distinction between bodies and Body in the general sense comes out sharply where Geulincx discusses the parallelism between material and spiritual Beings and their modes. All material modes belong to the extended and evolving world of motion, duration, divisibility and the like. Geulincx distinguished these from what we might call ‘the absolute identity’ of ‘Body-as-such’. In the same way, our mental selves are distinguished from the eternal and infinite Mind, or ‘God’—a universal Mind, of which our minds are ‘modes’.43 The concept of Body-as-such—infinitely extended, but not infinite—is a strange intruder into the realm of the absolute. Yet whatever the exact metaphysical status of Body with regard to God, the text makes clear that, while carefully avoiding the reintroduction of a substance-accident terminology, Geulincx wanted to establish a metaphysical distinction between the permanent entities of Mind and Body on the one hand, and their ‘modal’ spatio-temporal manifestations on the other. It is, moreover, in order to establish this distinction that he refers to Plato, whose notion of being and becoming implied that ‘the World’ and everything in it are temporal things and belong to the modal realm, of which Plato had said that they are ‘partly existent and partly non-existent’.44 By differentiating timeless being from modal becoming, the dualistic entities of Mind and Matter could be distinguished from the mental and material modes that continually come into being and pass away. Geulincx thus added to the Cartesian distinction of mind and body what he saw as a Platonic emphasis on the distinction of identities and modes. In Spinoza, the latter distinction would become the more prominent one. Contrary to Geulincx, Spinoza was so bold as to include Body-as-such into his concept of eternal being. Yet even Spinoza’s subsequent monism preserves both Cartesian and Platonic types of dualism. 41

Geulincx, Opera II, 179. Translation from Wilson, p. 82. Geulincx, Opera II, 284. Translation from Wilson, p. 84. 43 Geulincx, Opera II, 273. Cf. Wilson, p. 63. 44 Geulincx, Opera II, 284. Cf. Wilson, p. 83. 42

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Not only did Spinoza remain faithful to the Cartesian idea that mind and matter are irreducible metaphysical categories, he also accepted the distinction between being as it is in itself and the ‘modes’ of finite duration—a distinction Spinoza presents in terms of an active substance of natura naturans on the one hand, and a natura naturata on the other, consisting of infinite series of successive modi. Geulincx’ Body-as-such was thus included into the essence of God, and the divine attributes of thought (Cogitatio) and extension (Extensio) were combined into a single substance that functioned as an absolute individual. By distinguishing this single ‘substance’ from its temporal ‘modes’, Spinoza only furthered the Platonic division between eternal and temporal being. The similarities between Geulincx’ and Spinoza’s analyses illustrate in what way the Cartesian onslaught on Aristotelian metaphysics initiated a new ontology. Geulincx’s and Spinoza’s point was not so much to identify substance and attribute, as to emphasise the gulf between the substance-attribute conglomerate and its modal effects. Ultimate ‘natures’ or ‘forms’ of existence, whether ‘Body’ or ‘Mind’ in Geulincx’s case, or, in Spinoza’s, ‘Substance’, are eo ipso distinguished from their modes. Given the disappearance of the Aristotelian ontology of individual natures, this shared strategy is no coincidence. Once substantial forms had been dismissed, the notion of individuality had lost its force within the natura naturata, so that post-Cartesian metaphysics had to search for an alternative notion of individuality and identity beyond the world of natural objects—a notion of individuality, moreover, that preserved all its traditional causal characteristics.45 Not surprisingly, the net result was identified by Geulincx as a basically Platonic solution.

INTUITION A similar development took place in epistemology. For both Geulincx and Spinoza, climbing higher and higher on the scales of human knowledge was part of a process of attaining wisdom. Accordingly, both philosophers offered an enumeration of different types of knowledge. In the context of his exposition of God as ‘a wise Father and creator’, Geulincx distinguished a variety of cognitive stages: sense perception; factual knowledge; knowledge by which we come to know things in terms of our own cognitive faculties; and, finally, wisdom (sapientia), which extends into the core of things, and makes us know things as they are in themselves.46 In accordance with Geulincx’ metaphysical axiom that ‘you do not do what you do not know how to do’ (quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis),47 true wisdom for us humans can only be had of what we have wrought 45 On Spinoza’s notion of Substance and its historical setting, see my article ‘Substantie en individu’, in Gunther Coppens (ed.), Spinoza en de scholastiek (Leuven and Leusden: Acco, 2003), pp. 103–114. 46 Geulincx, Opera II, 192–193. Cf. Wilson, pp. 105–107. 47 Geulincx, Opera II, 150. Cf. Wilson, p. 35.

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ourselves, for example ‘our consciousness of love, hate, affirmation, denial, and other internal acts, in as much as it is we who bring them into being’.48 In Spinoza, ‘intuitive knowledge’ is the highest form of cognition. But in Spinoza both the object and the nature of this type of knowledge are to a great extent left unexplored. Reading Geulincx can tell us more about Spinoza. We may redefine Geulincxian sapientia—i.e. a consciousness of the internal acts which we ourselves bring into being—in Spinozistic terms as an ‘adequate knowledge’ of internal states—a true insight, in other words, into the workings of our mental and emotional operations, as well as into our internal appraisal of incoming data from outside. This perfectly matches Spinoza’s own remarks in Ethics V, 36, which discusses the intellectual love of God as a type of knowledge in which God is ‘explained’ through ‘the essence of the human Mind’. When it is based on a true knowledge of one’s own experiences and the causal processes behind these, our ultimate insight in the nature of reality (or, in Spinozistic terms, in ‘God’s essence and existence’) is, according to Spinoza himself, much more ‘effective’ than the type of theoretical knowledge concerning the substance and its attributes that appears in Ethics, Book I.49 Grasping ‘God’s essence and existence’ through an adequate apprehension of our own experience, we see how we ourselves form part of nature. It is this type of knowledge that Spinoza calls ‘intuitive’ and it is clear from Ethics IV, Chapter IV, that such a knowledge of God, which leads to inner peace, is the prime object of Spinozistic intuition. In the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, Spinoza had formulated his notion of the highest good in slightly different terms as a ‘consciousness of the unity of the mind with the whole of nature’, especially when shared with others.50 This offers another striking example of the similarity between Spinoza’s notion of intuition and Geulincx’s account of sapientia. Discussing ‘wisdom’ in his lecture notes to the True Metaphysics, Geulincx stated that there is ‘no greater pleasure than when we begin to understand something about God, and with such clarity that we can even communicate it to others’.51 Geulincx and Spinoza thus claimed that the highest type of human knowledge consists in an emotionally charged intellectual experience linked to the question of discovering one’s relation to God. Both authors, moreover, associated higher cognitive functions with a special realm of divine insight that opened up not only a knowledge of the facts, but also a knowledge of the good.52 This alone would be reason enough to argue that there are Platonic elements to their respective epistemologies, and indeed, many a comparison between Plato and Spinoza

48

Geulincx, Opera II, 193. Translation from Wilson, p. 106. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics V, 36, scholium. 50 Spinoza, Tractatus de intellectus emendatione I, § 13. 51 Geulincx, Opera II, 292. Translation from Wilson, 107. 52 Cf. D.J. McCracken Thinking and Valuing: An Introduction, Partly Historical, to the Study of the Philosophy of Value (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 138, who in this context spoke of ‘the Cartesian conviction of the unity of worth and fact’. 49

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is based on precisely this point.53 Let us for the moment, however, limit ourselves to those aspects that Geulincx explicitly recognised as Platonic, and consider the epistemological nature, or rather the ‘technique’, of Geulincxian wisdom and Spinozistic intuition. How do such mental states come about? Spinoza explained intuition with a single mathematical example. If three numbers are known and one searches a fourth number that is proportionally related to the third as the second is to the first, a merchant will immediately remember the mnemomic trick he has learned from his forerunner and start multiplying the second and the third numbers, the result of which he divides by the first. A teacher may show to his pupils that the rule holds true in many cases and will therefore probably hold true in others. Mathematicians may even offer a proof deduced from a general law of Euclidian geometry (a : b = c : d, ergo d = bc : a). But the only way to know the truth oneself, Spinoza argues, is to see it, not on the basis of an accepted proposition, but intuitively—which, in mathematics, works only in the case of ‘very simple numbers’.54 There is a well-known Cartesian precedent to Spinoza’s explanation of intuition in purely mathematical terms. Indeed, Descartes’ prime motive for writing the Discours de la méthode had been to make his readership acquainted with the idea that the mathematical method was applicable in other scientific fields as well. Working step-by-step, one should keep track of elementary instants of clear and distinct intuition in all of the natural sciences. In Spinoza, the concept of ‘intuition’ is likewise no rationalistic substitute for empirical data, but a Cartesian type of Eureka!–experience borrowed from mathematics. In the Discours, Descartes recommended this method by contrasting it to the study of letters and to the idea of relying on the testimony of others. Spinoza’s notion of cognitive enlightenment was likewise inspired by an effort to contrast real insight to received testimony and learning, including mnemomical tricks, and imprinted rules and explanations. In the context of the mind’s intuitive connection to the whole of nature, such enlightenment has even been characterised as an implicit kind of knowledge.55

53 Of special importance in the present context would be the similarity between the epistemological stages identified by Spinoza and Plato’s ‘image of the line’, Republic, 509c–511e. Margaret Wilson has argued that the affinities between Spinoza’s categorisation and ‘Plato’s famous “divided line” categorization’ is ‘one of many respects in which Spinoza’s position seems more readily compared with ancient Greek philosophical notions than with Descartes’s views’. Cf. Margaret D. Wilson, ‘Spinoza’s theory of knowledge’ in Don Garrett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 137. In more general terms, Don Garrett in the same volume mentions Plato as one of many ancient influences: ‘From Plato, [Spinoza] accepts a conception of ethics as concerned with the conflict between reason and the passions, and the distinction between understanding the eternal, on the one hand, and sensing or imagining the merely durational, on the other’. Cf. Don Garrett, ‘Spinoza’s ethical theory’, in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, p. 305. As we have seen, however, all of these themes were in one way or another implied in Cartesian philosophy, so that it was rather the emergence of Cartesian issues traditionally associated with Platonism than an indebtedness to Plato as opposed to Descartes, that led contemporaries to a renewed acceptance of ‘Platonic’ ideas. As for Spinoza’s relation to Plato, see also below, note 58. 54 Spinoza, Ethics II, 40, scholium 2. Cf. Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, §§ 23–24. 55 Cf. Wolfgang Röd, ‘Spinozas Idee der scientia intuitiva und die spinozanische Wissenschaftskonzeption’, Zeitschrift füs philosophische Forschung, 31 (1977), 497–510, p. 507: ‘Wir wissen in intuitiver Weise vom Absoluten, weil wir notwendig im Absoluten sind bzw. das Absolute sich in uns

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The contrast Spinoza draws between intuited insight and received information brings us back to Geulincx’s view that a teacher’s ‘speeches and writings’ only ‘furnish the occasion’ for processes of learning.56 According to Geulincx, teachers in the last instance do not have any power to pass on into our minds any acknowledgement of truth. The use of ‘reason’ can only build upon ‘the innate ideas within us,’ and ‘the knowledge we already possess’—a Cartesian axiom Geulincx explicitly linked to Plato. Geulincx’ explanations of reason and diligence indicate to what extent not only Cartesian metaphysics, but also Cartesian epistemology, soon took on Platonic features. Where he added that young students should study mathematics in order to develop the type of diligence to reason required for the study of ethics, Plato again seems not to have been very far from his mind.57

CONCLUSION With the disappearance of the Aristotelian philosophy, specific questions of epistemology and metaphysics were given fresh interpretations. Although there appear to have been few outspoken Platonists in seventeenth-century Dutch philosophy, in Cartesian circles a Platonic way of thinking emerged that offered an alternative to Aristotelian ways of thinking. It was a likely alternative, since both Cartesianism and Spinozism in one way or another asserted the eminence of reason over sense and imagination. In Geulincx and Schuyl, Platonic ideas formed part of a deliberate Augustinian strategy. Geulincx, meanwhile, seems to have been the only one who acknowledged that some of his ideas matched Plato’s. Spinoza, by contrast, seems hardly to have known Plato at all.58 Yet interestingly enough it is with respect to the viewpoints Geulincx associated with Platonism that Spinoza’s ideas show a remarkable likeness to those of his Leiden contemporary.

manifestiert. Deshalb sind wir sozusagen immer schon in der Wahrheit, so daß das philosophische System lediglich die Explikation zu leisten hat, was wir implizit schon wissen’. 56 See above, note 34. 57 Geulincx, Opera III, 19. Cf. Van de hoofddeugden, pp. 77–78. 58 Spinoza only sporadically referred to Plato and associated Platonism with a crude realist theory of abstract ideas. Cf. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus , Chapter 13, in Carl Gebhardt (ed.), Spinoza Opera, 5 vols (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925–1938), III, 167–168; Spinoza’s letter to Hugo Boxel of 8 October 1674 (Gebhardt, IV, 261); and Short Treatise I, VI, § 7, where Spinoza criticises ‘many of Plato’s followers’ for having argued that ‘universal ideas’ are created by God. On the basis of his criticism of abstract ideas, Spinoza’s negative judgment of Platonism is sometimes taken over in the secondary literature. Genevieve Lloyd, e.g. claims that ‘[the] self-understanding that arises from intuitive knowledge involves awareness of the actual existence of [particular bodily] affections, rather than a Platonic ascent into the realm of universals’. Accordingly, ‘Spinoza’s essences are not Platonic universals’. Cf. Genevieve Lloyd, Spinoza and the Ethics (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 121–122. The implicit idea is that Spinoza had no interest in universal concepts drawn from an otherworldly source. Useful as this argument may be in the context of explaining Spinoza’s notion of intuitive knowledge, it is irrelevant to the question of establishing Platonic tenets in Spinoza.

CHAPTER 12

Catherine Wilson

Soul, Body and World: Plato’s Timaeus and Descartes’ Meditations

I Christian Platonism has been aptly described by James Hankins as ‘one of those sunken Atlantises of the mind between the old world of traditional Christian society and the new world of the Enlightenment’,1 and historians are agreed that philosophical appeals to innate ideas and moral truths, and discussions of love and friendship in the seventeenth century owed much to the renewed interest in Plato that had begun in the Renaissance. Broader claims have been made as well for a positive influence of Platonism on the newly mathematised physical sciences, but these, by contrast, have proved difficult or impossible to substantiate.2 Platonic and Neoplatonic concepts such as hierarchies of being, the world-soul, astral influences and the metaphysics of light, were antithetical to the new mechanical philosophy. The Cambridge Platonists, who set themselves against Descartes and Hobbes, emphasised the impotence of matter, even

1

James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 362. Edward W. Strong’s well-regarded study. Procedures and Metaphysics: A Study in the Philosophy of Mathematical-Physical Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936) challenged claims for a role for Platonic metaphysics in Galileo’s physics earlier advanced by Alexander Koyré and Edwin A. Burtt. The frontispiece of Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds), Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) states of corpuscularianism that ‘This direct ancestor of presentday physics drew largely, for its philosophical credentials, either on Platonism or on the atomism of Epicurus.’ The chapters of the history on the mathematicisation of physics by Michael Mahoney (see esp. I, 705) and on matter theory by Roger Ariew and Alan Gabbey (see esp. I, 426) do not, however, allege a role for Platonism in the articulation of the mechanical-corpsucularian philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi and Boyle. 2

177 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 177–191. © 2008 Springer.

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guided by divinely ordained laws of motion, to produce all the phenomena of the world. Leibniz, who developed one of the most ingeniously wrought systems of philosophy of the early modern period in order to correct what he saw as the errors and deficiencies of the mechanical philosophy, repeatedly emphasised his allegiance to Plato.3 In addition to these well-established and largely discredited claims for the presence of Platonic doctrines and concepts in seventeenth-century philosophy, there remain a number of vexed and still largely open questions concerning the reception and reworking of Platonic epistemology and philosophy of mind. Almost a century ago, Wilhelm Wundt argued that Platonic idealism when attached to Democritean materialism, had a certain force against Aristotelian philosophies of nature,4 and a version of this thesis has been interestingly presented and defended by Stephen Menn. In Descartes and Augustine, Menn suggested that Plato’s Timaeus, known to seventeenth-century readers through the Renaissance editions and commentaries of Ficino and Jean de Serres, had a certain methodological importance for the seventeenth-century study of nature.5 Menn invited the reader to see the author of the Meditations as a practitioner of a method, a discipline, that put into practice the Timaeus’ main teaching that the first and most necessary step towards attaining wisdom consists in turning away from the sensible world.6 Where Plato directs the initiate to turn his attention from objects of sense that are multiple, perishable, elusive and comparatively unworthy, towards the regularities of the heavens and the creative intelligence that fashioned the world animal, Augustine, following Plotinus, substitutes the oneness of God as the proper object of consideration. Descartes, Menn sug-

3 See Leibniz’s Preface to the Nouveaux Essais, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Akademie der Wissenschaften: Darmstadt and Berlin, 1923–), VI, 6: 68 ff. 4 Wilhelm Wundt, Sinnliche und ueber sinnliche Welt (Leipzig: Koerner, 1914), p. 161. 5 Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The first complete Latin translation of the Timaeus, by Marsilio Ficino, was printed in his translation of the complete dialogues (Florence, 1484; reprinted in 1517). Ficino’s commentary on the Timaeus was printed in 1497. Another authoritative and widely used translation was that by Jean de Serres (Serranus) in collaboration with Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus) in 1578. The first edition of the original Greek text was printed by Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1513). For a full bibliography of Plato editions and translations, see Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance. For the reception of Renaissance Platonism see Brian Copenhaver’s Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Prior to the Renaissance, Timaeus was known only through Calcidius’s incomplete Latin translation. Approximately one-third of the work had appeared in Iamblichus, and Diogenes Laertius summarises some of 33–69. Plutarch referred to the work in his Iside et Osiride, and Tractatus de Animae Procreatione ex Timaeo. Plotinus, whose Enneads were translated by Ficino in 1492, discusses the Timaeus, but not systematically. [My thanks to the Editors for helpful assistance with these references—CW] 6 Descartes’ goals, Menn says, were ‘roughly, to construct a complete scientific system, including a mechanical physics and ending in the practical disciplines, on the basis of an Augustinian metaphysics’. Menn, Descartes and Augustine, p. 15.

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gests, continues this line of thought. The unusual juxtaposition of the Platonic discipline of aversion as method with the affirmation of theodicy as doctrine unites the two texts. For the Timaeus contains a strong affirmation of the view that harmonised well with Scriptural teaching: God, looking at the world He had just created, saw that it was good. Descartes, on Menn’s interpretation, employed Platonic aversion not to establish foundations for natural science, but rather foundations for practical philosophy, for making men better, individually and collectively, or physically and psychologically.7 He argues that the traditional view according to which Descartes was aware of the popularity of Augustine in the Counter-Reformation, and therefore strategically adopted and adapted a few elements of Augustinian apparatus—chiefly the reference to a painful condition of doubt overcome by a correct apprehension of the divinity, and the cogito argument—is untenable. The adoption of Platonic concepts and attitudes by Descartes was genuinely doctrinal, Menn insists, not strategic, and it went well beyond the use of those figures. In favour of this hypothesis it might be observed that the Timaeus and the Meditations share a substantial amount of semantic space, especially where nouns are concerned: Animal Blood Body Brain Colours Death Demon Desire Disease Dream Flame

Idea Mind Motion Space Star Sleep Sun Triangle Truth Wax

Each work nevertheless arranges these concepts in a different intellectual pattern.8 How different they really are is the subject of this paper. While a reading of the Meditations against the background of the main themes of the Timaeus

7 Menn sees the emergence of a skeptical crisis in the late sixteenth century to which Descartes is responding. This crisis, he maintains, did not stem from despair over the possibility of obtaining reliable knowledge of nature and the heavens from inconsistent testimony, or even confusion over the plethora of systems, as is sometimes suggested. It concerned rather the gap between the growth of knowledge in the physical sciences and the increase in practical wisdom. See Descartes and Augustine, p. 15. 8 Compare the nouns of this guide to the life world with the significant nouns of modern treatises: Tiger, Water, Barn, Set, Number, Vat …’. (‘Brain’ and ‘Star’ persist, but ‘Blood’, ‘Wax’ and even ‘Dream’ have slipped out of the vocabulary of epistemology.)

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throws many Cartesian doctrines into sharp relief, Descartes is nevertheless best seen as a Democritean philosopher and as an exponent of what might be termed neo-Alexandrian experimental physiology.9 His sympathies did not attach to Platonic doctrine to the same extent as those of either Spinoza or Leibniz, both of whom appear to have given at least parts of the Timaeus a favourable reading. Descartes’ eye in the Meditations was always on its endpoint, his conclusion that human beings could have and ought to be permitted to have efficacious knowledge of corporeal nature.10 His conception of the relationship of physiology to ethical theory was unplatonic in the extreme. Nevertheless, the view originally advanced by Wundt to the effect that Platonism softened the impact of the revival of atomism in the seventeenth century is sound and deserves further exploration along the lines indicated by Menn.

II The Timaeus is a ‘cartographical’ work, for it maps the human body and the cosmos (as well as the lost continent of Atlantis), locating important features such as the heart, head, stomach, organs of generation, stars and planets, and explaining how their locations are related to their meanings. The world is ‘a visible living thing containing visible ones, perceptible god, image of the intelligible Living Thing, its grandness, goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled. Our one universe, indeed the only one of its kind, has come to be’ (Timaeus 92c).11 The world animal is composed of the four elements; but it has a ‘smooth round finish’, lacks limbs, senses and organs, and comprehends all shapes and living things (Timaeus 33). The human body has a head, made in imitation of the spherical universe, but with front and back, arms and legs, a face and sensory organs. Plato anatomises the skin, hair, blood, bones, sinews, brain and spinal marrow, as well as the stomach and the liver (Timaeus 71 b–c). There are said to be three souls.12 The mortal, concupiscent soul was placed by the creators between the midriff and the navel. ‘Here they tied this part of the soul down like a beast, a wild one, but one they could not avoid sustaining along with the others if a mortal race were ever to be’ (Timaeus 70e). The mortal soul responsible for courage, passion, and

9 On Alexandrian materialism, and especially the role accorded the nerves in animation, see Heinrich von Staden, ‘Hellenistic Theories of Body and Soul’, in John P. Wright and Paul Potter (eds), Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), pp. 79–116. 10 Henri Gouhier, La pensée réligieuse de Descartes, 2nd edn (Paris: Vrin, 1972), p. 258. This view was endorsed by Etienne Gilson; see Menn, Descartes and Augustine, p. 298. 11 References in the text are to Plato, Complete Works, ed. J. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). 12 See T.M. Robinson ‘The Defining Features of Mind-Body Dualism in the Writings of Plato’, in Wright and Potter (eds), Psyche and Soma, pp. 37–55.

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anger was placed in the thorax, closer to the head, the better to be ruled by it, and the immortal soul ‘resides in the top part of our bodies. It raises us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven … For it is from heaven, the place from which our souls were originally born, that the divine part suspends our head, i.e., our root, and so keeps our whole body erect’ (Timaeus 90b). The places of the souls indicate their significance and worthiness. Why, one might wonder, was the corpuscularian theory to which Descartes subscribed deemed ‘mad’ by Christian writers when advanced by Epicurus and Lucretius, when the bird-men, sunken cities, human souls attached to stars and other memoranda of the Timaeus—not to mention its own triangle-atoms— did not impugn the sanity of its author? The difference in reception may be explained not only by developments internal to the history of science, but by the acceptability of the ethical doctrines of Plato versus those of Epicurus in the eyes of Christian commentators. The dialogue lays out the ethical imperatives corresponding to the placement of these features. And the clarity of the ethical doctrines of the Timaeus is remarkable. One injunction is this: The motions that have an affinity to the divine part within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These, surely, are the ones which each of us should follow. We should redirect the revolutions in our heads that were thrown off course at our birth, by coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, and so bring into conformity with its objects our faculty of understanding, as it was in its original condition (Timaeus 90d). The heavenly bodies imitate the ‘perfect and intelligible Living Thing’ (Timaeus 39e), and we are to imitate them. The wise man, as noted, achieves immortality by turning away from desire and ambition and ‘following and learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe’. As Jowett summarises it: Man contemplating the heavens is to regulate his erring life according to them …. He is to partake of the repose of nature and of the order of nature …. The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed up in the single idea of ‘Law’.13

III To decide in what respects Descartes can or cannot be considered a Platonist, it will be useful to look more closely at four Platonic topics in the Meditations: the confused nature of sensory experience; the value accorded to super-sensibles and intellectual knowledge; the thesis of the beauty of the world and the theory of immortality.

13

Jowett, Dialogues, p. 702.

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One of the most memorable passages of the Timaeus reads as follows: We must agree that that which keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself enters into anything else anywhere, is one thing. It is invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all—and it is the role of the understanding to study it. The second thing is that which shares the other’s name and resembles it. This thing can be perceived by the senses, and it has been begotten. It is constantly borne along, now coming to be in a certain place, and then perishing out of it. It is apprehended by opinion, which involves sense perception. And the third type is space. … We look at it as in a dream when we say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place and occupying some space, and that that which doesn’t exist somewhere, whether on earth or in heaven, doesn’t exist at all (Timaeus 52). Three natures are distinguished in this passage: sensibles, intellectual things, and space. Note that Plato does not say that sensible objects are perceived dreamily. He does, however, say (in the older, slightly more perspicuous Jowett translation), ‘Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them’. He says that sensible things are images, modeled after another reality, which exist ‘ever as the fleeting shadow of some other’ (ibid., 52c). There was perhaps a tendency amongst later readers to collapse the three categories into two and to stir together the Timaeus’ (and Republic’s) doctrines of original and copy, truth and delusion, with the theme of flux. The result is the conclusion that there is something ‘dreamlike’ or phantasmagorical about the experience of ordinary objects; matter ‘always makes opposites appear’. Visible things are said by Plotinus to be ‘unreal, having at no point any similarity with [their] source and cause’:14 Matter is … veritable Not-Being, so that it is no more than the image and phantasm of Mass, a bare aspiration towards substantial existence … invisible, eluding all our effort to observe it, present where no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly presenting contraries in the things based on it; it is large and small, more and less, deficient and excessive, a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to withdraw.15 Plotinus cites for lack of understanding, ‘those who … on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify body with real being and find assurance of truth in the phantasms that reach us through the senses, those in a word who, like 14 Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 3rd ed., revised by B.S. Page (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), III, 6,7. 15 Ibid.

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dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping vision’.16 (Plotinus’ language is echoed by Leibniz: ‘Bodies in themselves are not self-states, but shadows which flow away. Corporeal things are but shadows which flow away, glimpses, shapes, truly dreams … But inexperienced men take the spiritual for a dream and what is tangible for the truth’).17 Descartes’ reflections on the ‘piece of wax’ in Meditation II seem initially to hearken back to the distinction between the elusive things that flow past the senses and the robust things that it is the aim of the understanding to grasp. The wax of experience is phantasmagorical; it can change its scent, shape, texture, colour, and sound; it is ‘a body which presented itself to me in these various forms a little while ago, but which now exhibits different ones’ (CSMK, II, 20, AT; VII, 30).18 An aversion to the phantasmagorical material world is suggested by the Meditator’s announcement ‘I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses’ (CSMK, II, 22; AT, VII: 34). By the end of Meditation VI, the Meditator has determined that sensory experience is inherently ‘confused’. Sensory experience implies the cooperation of soul and body in a manner we cannot really understand (CSMK, II, 56; AT, VII, 81). Further, it implies a mistaken attribution of qualities of colour, taste, scent, etc. that cannot inhere in corporeal things to them (CSMK, II, 56 ff.; AT, VII: 82 f.). Finally, at various places in the Meditations, passive sensory experience is implicitly contrasted with active and focused mental exercises of a mathematical or para-mathematical nature, such as demonstrating and inferring from definitions. Descartes was concerned in the Meditations to refute the Epicurean claim that we are animated by material soul-atoms and accordingly doomed to permanent extinction of our personalities, memories, and experiences after death, as well as the Aristotelian suggestion that the soul is an inseparable form of the living body. The first two Meditations are reminiscent of Augustine’s attack on the Epicureans in the City of God. They are the ‘philosophers who, with minds enslaved to the body, have formed the opinion that corporeal things are the first principles of nature’.19 Nevertheless, Descartes did allow corporeal things to be the first principles of nature. A piece of wax can be understood by ‘purely mental scrutiny’. By reflecting on what the wax can and cannot be, ‘clear and distinct knowledge’ of this stuff can be obtained. Descartes did not try to make

16

Ibid., III, 6,6. ‘On the True Theologia Mystica’, Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L.E. Loemker (2nd ed., Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), p. 368, orig. in Leibniz, Deutsche Schriften, ed. G.E. Guhrauer, 2 vols (Berlin, 1838–1840), I, 410. 18 English translation of Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991 (cited as CSMK) vol. II, with page and volume number to Descartes, Oeuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1964–1974) (cited as AT). 19 Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), Bk. VIII, Ch. 5, p. 319. 17

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a Platonic cut between material things-known-by-the-senses and immaterialthings-known-by-the-intellect, the latter having ontological priority and the study of them greater worth. Rather, he insisted that material things were ‘better known’ by the intellect than by the senses. Although he maintained that intellectual things, beginning with one’s own soul, were better known than corporeal things (CSMK, II, 20; AT, VII, 30 ff.), he did not draw the inference that it is better to know the better known things, or that knowledge of the worse known things had only a relative or propædeutic value. Descartes posited ‘extended substance’ under the flux of sensory qualities. This enabled him to defend mechanism, while escaping the objection that had been posed to the ancient atomists with monotonous regularity, namely, that no one had ever seen such hard, indivisible little bodies as they claimed to exist. The fact that no one had ever seen the corpuscles composing ‘extended substance’ was not an argument against the corpuscular theory of matter, in Descartes’ view, for his theory of perception entailed that individual corpuscles could not be seen. For physical reasons, the eye and brain could not form an image of such minute entities. Descartes can be compared in this respect with his more Platonic successor and critic who did assign immaterial things known by the intellect (‘monads’) ontological priority. Leibniz concluded that the infra-sensible world could not, after all, be a material world, and he accused Descartes of having cut his reasonings short in inferring that infra-sensible reality was material.20

INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE Is the material world really worth knowing, for Descartes, even if it is knowable? This might seem doubtful. Knowledge of God is said by Descartes in Meditation III, in a manner reminiscent of Augustine, to bring to us ‘the highest joy of which we are capable’. However, Descartes was clear that the discipline through which he was putting his readers was not meant to indicate to them a way of life based chiefly on meditation and so on aversion from experience. This is the substance of the Letter to Elizabeth of 28 June 1643: I believe that it is very necessary to have properly understood, once in a lifetime, the principles of metaphysics, since they are what give us the knowledge of God and of our soul. But I also think that it would be very harmful to occupy one’s intellect frequently in meditating upon them, since this would impede it from devoting itself to the functions of the imagination and the senses. I think the best thing is to content oneself with keeping in one’s memory and one’s belief the conclusions which one has once drawn from then, and then employ the rest of one’s study time to thoughts in which the intellect co-operates with the imagination and the senses (CSMK, III, 228; AT, III, 695).

20 Leibniz, ‘Critical Thoughts on the General Part of the Principles of Descartes’, Philosophical Papers, p. 409.

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Such cooperation between intellect, imagination and sense was not envisioned by Plato; at least, it did not constitute the best sort of life in his view. While the Symposium allowed ‘the sciences’ or ‘learning in general’ a rank above the knowledge of human laws and institutions, the best knowledge restricted the focus to ‘one single form of knowledge, i.e. of beauty’. According to the Republic, ‘sight tries’, after men emerge from the cave, ‘at last to look at the animals themselves, the stars themselves, and, in the end, the sun itself’, but it succeeds only in looking at ‘divine images in water and shadows of things’. The crafts, however (presumably the arithmetic and calculation, geometry, astronomy, harmonics and dialectic mentioned earlier at Republic 525–529), ‘awaken the best part of the soul and lead it upward to the study of the best among the things that are, just as, before, the clearest thing in the body was led to the brightest thing in the bodily and visible realm’ (Republic 530–532). According to Descartes, one cannot enter into the sciences as a pure empiricist, for such a person has no basis for trusting his epistemological faculties and no idea of the criterion of truth (CSMK, I, 182–3; AT, IX.2, 8–9). Yet, for Descartes, there is little to learn about God or the soul—undoubtedly the best things that are—as supersensible objects. God is infinitely powerful and good; the human mind has an array of capabilities when linked to a body, and it can (whether or not it ever does) exist separately from the body. This seems to be all one can really know about God and the soul. The best form of knowledge for Descartes appears to be messy and physiological, not pure and supersensible. The terminus of the Meditations, expounded at length in Meditation VI, recapitulating Parts IV and V of the Discourse, is the Meditator’s discovery that the body is causally connected with the physical world through its reticulation of sensory and motor nerves, and that animation, motion and feeling depend on these nerves. Our ability to represent even mathematical objects depends on our possession of a brain communicating with the mind. While Descartes seemed to reserve some forms of knowledge for a disembodied mind, the Meditations as a whole seem intended to reintroduce into natural philosophy an essentially Galenic, physiological conception of what it is to be an animated thing.

THE GOOD WORLD The goodness and beauty of the world are strongly asserted in the Timaeus: Now why did he who framed this whole universe of becoming frame it? Let us state the reason why: He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible. … The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over al that was visible—not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion—and brought it from a state of disorder to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder. … He wanted to produce a piece of work that would be as excellent and supreme as its nature would allow (Timaeus 29e–30c).

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‘Of all things that have come to be, our universe is the most beautiful’ (Timaeus 29a). The Timaeus takes the human body and its sensory equipment to have been constructed for a noble purpose. Vision enables us to see the sun, stars, and heavens. The heavenly bodies in turn have given us the concepts of time and number, ‘and from this source we have derived philosophy than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal men. God gave us sight that to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven and apply them to the courses of own intelligence which are akin to them’ (Timaeus 47b). Disease, death, inflammation, corruption, evil, madness and ignorance are nevertheless to be reckoned with (Timaeus 82–89). Without ascribing evil propensities to matter, or suggesting that defect and error have a purpose, Plato hints that the recalcitrance of matter to the imposition of form limits goodness, and that the fastening of a body to the immortal soul is the source of human ills (Timaeus 43a). But he does not try explicitly to reconcile the doctrine of the good world with observation. The notion that things are as good as they can be, ‘boundedly perfect’ under constraints, is a familiar theme of early modern philosophy.21 Modern philosophers by and large reject the notion that matter prevents things in general from being as good as they could be, even while retaining something of Plato’s ethical principle that material preoccupations prevent men from being as good as they could be. Thus Leibniz: Nor is it necessary to seek the origin of evil in matter. Those who believed that there was a chaos before God laid his hand upon it sought therein the source of disorder. It was an opinion which Plato introduced into his Timaeus. Aristotle found fault with him for that … because according to this doctrine, disorder would be original and natural, and order would have been introduced against nature. … Plato recognized in matter a certain maleficent soul or force, rebellious against God; it was an actual blemish, an obstacle to God’s plans … But matter is itself of God’s creation; it only furnishes a comparison and an example, and cannot be the very source of evil and of imperfection.22

21 Leibniz compares Shaftesbury’s Characteristics to his own Theodicy, giving a Platonic gloss to both: ‘The universe all of one piece, its beauty, its universal harmony, the disappearance of real evil, especially in relation to the whole, the unity of true substances, and the unity of the supreme substance of which all other things are merely emanations and imitations are here put in the most beautiful daylight’. ‘Remarks on the Three Volumes Entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times’, 1711–12, Die Philosophische Schriften von Leibniz, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, 7 vols (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), III, 423–431; Philosophical Papers, ed. Loemaker, p. 633. 22 Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. F.M. Huggard, ed. Austin Farrer (La Salle, Open Court, 1985), §379. ‘The source of evil’, according to Leibniz, ‘lies in the possible forms anterior to the acts of God’s will’ since ‘the possibility of things or forms’ is ‘that which alone God did not make, since he is not the author of his own understanding. Theodicy, §380–1.

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But was Descartes really convinced of the goodness of the world, and, if so, in what sense? His theodicial views concern the goodness of his mind for thinking and the goodness of his body for surviving, not the excellence of non-human nature. Leibniz noted perceptively that the salient feature of Cartesianism was its ethical neutrality, and he habitually contrasted Platonism with Cartesianism.23 God, to be sure, ‘lays his hand’ upon the initial chaos of the creation in Descartes’ system. The ‘chance’ of the atomists is insufficient, in his view, to bring stable structures and animal forms into existence. The laws of motion, however, are sufficient, and the system of the world consistently defended by Descartes from Le Monde to the Principles derives from Lucretius. Though we know that the world was created from the start ‘with all the perfections it now has’, Descartes ventures in the Principles, with the sun, moon, stars, and plants and with Adam and Eve ‘created as fully grown people’, If we want to understand the nature of plants or of men, it is much better to consider how they can gradually grow from seeds than to consider how they were created by God at the beginning of the world (CSMK, I, 256; AT, IX.2, 99). To the dismay of Gassendi, Descartes waved away all questions of divine purpose and intention in his Replies to the Objections posed to his Meditations: ‘I consider the customary search for final causes to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating the impenetrable purposes of God’ (CSMK, II, 39 AT, VII: 55). Not only is aversion in the Meditations a temporary experimental procedure, not a constant lifelong struggle, but the presentation of the good world is undermined by the aesthetic and moral neutrality of Cartesian created nature. Although Descartes firmly insisted that he had no reason to reproach God for his own or the world’s apparent imperfections and deficiencies, he did not, unlike some of his contemporaries, claim constantly to discover fresh beauties in the Creator’s handiwork. References to order, beauty and perfection typical of Platonic–Plotinian and even Augustinian discourse are almost entirely absent from Descartes’ essays and treatises; again, the contrast with Leibniz is telling. Another feature of the Platonic handprint, the ambivalence about beauty that is necessary for the method of aversion to have a point, is lacking in Descartes. Ambivalence is more properly ascribed to Malebranche, in whom the fascination with form, colour, and vitality war with an Augustinian austerity. As a moral philosopher, Descartes is not at all ambivalent about pleasure: it is good. According to Plato, the midriff-soul is moved by ‘pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil’, while pain deters us from the good (Timaeus 69c). Though both philosophers perceive an analogy between physical and moral disease-states,

23 Leibniz, Letter to Molanus on God and the Soul (1679), in Leibniz, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p. 242.

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Descartes treats the analogy less paradoxically. Pleasure, for Descartes, signals what is good for us and pain what is damaging (Meditation, VI, VII: 81). Pain cannot deter us from the good because it is good to be out of pain. Moral error appears to be an accidental by-product of our spontaneous attraction to the good, just as epistemological error is a by-product of our spontaneous attraction to the true (Meditation, IV, VII: 57–58). It is true that pleasure can deceive us as to the good, but this is not because pleasure and the good are fundamentally opposed, but because the good attracts us through pleasure.

IMMORTALITY Cosmological maps locate the region in which the human soul resides after death and its putative experiences there, and Plato gave considerable thought to its fate in the Phaedo (Phaedo 81ff.) and the Republic, as well as in the Timaeus. Donkeys, bees, ants and ghosts figured in his thinking. Light-minded persons, he decided, are reborn as birds; dull ones as quadrupeds and depraved ones as women (Timaeus 90e). According to Wolfson, Plato’s reincarnation talk must have been mere clothing, for ‘when Plato wanted to give to his purely philosophic notion of the indestructibility of the soul a religious tinge, he had to borrow from popular religion the theories of reward and punishment and the transmigration of souls, though these were hardly warranted by his own philosophy’.24 This opinion is controversial. However, as Wolfson points out, theories of immortality face the following dilemma. If they treat immortality as a reward for good conduct, they tend to become fabular and often foolishly so; for the form of life that succeeds the life that was previously led must reflect some features of it. If by contrast they treat immortality an intrinsic property of the human soul and posit a future state based on its more ineffable properties, they may enjoy greater rigour but miss a pedagogic opportunity. Plato tries elsewhere in the Timaeus to escape the dilemma by proposing an intrinsic connection between living the right kind of life and achieving immortality. If a man has been absorbed in his appetites or his ambitions and takes great pains to further them, all his thoughts are bound to become merely mortal. And so far as it is at all possible for a man to become thoroughly mortal, he cannot help but fully succeed in this, seeing that he has cultivated his mortality all along. On the other hand, if a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine … And to the extent that human nature can partake of immortality, he can in no way fail to achieve this (Timaeus 90bc).

24

Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), p. 350.

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Spinoza appears to have glossed this thought, though whether its source is Plato or a Platonist is unknown, as follows: The essence of the mind consists in knowledge. Therefore the greater the number of things the mind knows by the second and third kinds of knowledge, the greater is the part of it that survives … [He] whose body is capable of the greatest amount of activity is least assailed by emotions that are evil … Thus he has the capacity to arrange and order the affections of the body according to the intellectual order and consequently to bring it about that all the affections of the body are related to God … [T]herefore he has a mind whose greatest part is eternal. 25 Though Spinoza’s ‘third kind of knowledge’, and the manner in which it confers whatever sort of immortality is possible in Spinoza’s universe, is not well understood, the notion that immortality is earned and assured by intellectual enlightenment, to which it has an intrinsic and not merely accidental connection is surely Platonic. Descartes advances no such thesis. He chooses the second option: immortality is logically inevitable in human beings and does not need to be earned, though he is unable to say very much about the experiences to be had in that bodiless condition. His Meditations reveal to him nothing regarding earned or deserved immortality. He provides no corporeal images of immortality, and furnishes no special incentives for good conduct. Considering that one of his declared aims in the Preface to the Meditations was to show that the immortality of the soul could be defended on rational grounds, this omission is remarkable. Descartes did not even manage to convince his critics that he had shown that immortality was an essential attribute of a thinking thing, though he claimed to have done something worthwhile in showing that it is not an impossible attribute of a thinking thing. Menn points out that Descartes’ insistence on the incorporeal nature of the soul is at odds with the prevailing hylomorphic interpretation of soul-body relations. The consequences of his rejection of hylomorphism are severe, but they do not bring him any closer to the Platonic tradition. For a disembodied soul, there cannot even be an experiential world, if one supposes that Meditation VI subverts the initial hypothesis that a malevolent demon could make me experience a world even if I did not have a body. For a Cartesian, living things cannot exist in intelligible worlds, while, for Plato, these worlds are their destiny. Plotinus echoes Plato in insisting that: Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered around us; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled—the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life course mainly of the body—for

25 Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Props. 38–39, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982). Spinoza implies that conduct and intellectual attainments are the conditions of immortality, though it is hard to see where this fits in his metaphysics; see Wolfson, Philosophy of Spinoza, p. 350.

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in such a combination all is, in fact bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, …[rather than] fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted.26 The aspiration towards a higher realm appears to be missing in Descartes. Descartes finds that the total man is nothing more than ‘the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul’. This ‘trace’ is reserved for occasional volitions, ‘non-corporeal memory’, and thought without images. The total man is not dragged by the stars or fate, for Cartesian physics and metaphysics leave the concept of fate uninterpreted, and the stars in his system are mechanically incapable of any dragging action.

V Taking into account Descartes’ devotion to experimental philosophy, his belief that matter can be understood intellectually and has no evil properties, his sense that metaphysics is an exercise to be completed and then ignored, his antiprovidentialism, and his lack of interest in post-mortem retribution for our sins, it seems difficult to fault the older commentators who insisted that the soul of Descartes is not Platonic. The appeal to Augustine appears, as Gouhier said, incidental: It matters little that the cogito is found in one and in the other; it matters little that the two apologetics have recourse to the same procedures; it matters little that the two dialectics work themselves out beyond the bounds of the sensible world. Should their proceedings be rigorously parallel, should their expressions be identical, above all this there is a soul which these resemblances do not touch, and it is to this soul that a study like ours should lead.27 Menn’s study nevertheless reinforces the point emphasised by Wundt. An admixture of Platonism adorned the mechanical philosophy with moral-theological features that helped to redeem it from its association with atheism and that enabled to compete in the within the universities with scholastic-Aristotelian natural philosophy.28 Descartes’ borrowings from the Platonic tradition, which 26

Plotinus, Enneads II, 3,9. Henri Gouhier, Pensée réligieuse, p. 258. 28 Simon Patrick, the student of John Smith and Ralph Cudworth, urged students of divinity to abandon the lost cause of Aristotelianism and return to their ‘old loving Nurse the Platonick philosophy’, promising that ‘the Mechanics also will be faithful to her’. Quoted by R.H. Syfret, ‘Some Early Reactions to the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 7 (1950), 207–263, pp. 230–231. 27

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included his respect for divine goodness, his appeals to innate ideas, his dismay over the ‘confusion’ of sensory experience, and his conception of immortality as involving a release from the body, compensated for the apparent bleakness of the corpuscularian doctrine at the center of his philosophy. To a great extent—as Menn’s study confirms—Descartes’ appropriations owed more to the Plotinian tradition than to Plato himself, whose doctrines seemed strange and harsh to many of his readers. Even Leibniz was perturbed. Plato believed that souls had been in a happier state and many of the ancients … believed that for their sins they were confined in bodies as in a prison. They rendered thus a reason for our ills, and asserted their prejudice against human life; for there is no such thing as a beautiful prison. But … I make bold to say [quite apart from the faith in compensation in other lives] that taking all in all human life is in general tolerable.29 Where the Timaeus projects antecedently established values seemingly discovered by philosophical contemplation of the cosmos, the author of the Meditations and the Principles of Philosophy finds no ethical messages in its survey of the heavens and the human body. The extraction of ethical content is possible only in a mythic system, for the values extracted are simply recouped from preexisting emotions and aspirations. If Descartes hoped to extract wisdom from natural philosophy, the method of aversion, by contrast with experimental philosophy, was not well suited to that aim. Insofar as science is not a projection of aspirations and fears, it is not a source of wisdom. To the extent that it appears a source of wisdom, it must incorporate a considerable dose of myth. The presentation of the human circulatory system in the Discourse and the human nervous system in the Meditations might remind us of the cartography and hypercartography of the Timaeus, but they do not lead to similar insights. The Meditations might even be said to be an inverted image of the Timaeus. The hero of the Meditations finds himself back home in a flesh and blood body he has learned to admire and respect after a brief imaginary flight into a fantastic delusion of incorporeality, while the hero of the Timaeus escapes to his special personal star, having shed his material carapace after a trying sojourn on earth. Yet both works present paradoxes. The paradox of the Timaeus is that the beautiful and good world turns out to be a sign pointing unambiguously to another world, by the standards of which the first world turns out to be neither beautiful nor good. The paradox of the Meditations is that a mind is shown to have issued from a good God who made it extremely reliable, which mind then proceeds to discover that this God has no interest in human affairs.

29

Leibniz, Theodicy, § 260.

CHAPTER 13

G.A.J. Rogers

Locke, Plato and Platonism

INTRODUCTION What kind of footprint of the philosophy of Plato may be detected in John Locke? At first sight, and perhaps at last sight, the answer we expect is ‘Not much’. But it is worth spending a little time exploring that question before assuming that there is no influence, no manifestations of any kind of impact from the classical Greek thinker on the supposedly arch-empiricist and decidedly modern philosopher, Locke. Leibniz was one of the first who drew attention to the lack of Plato’s influence on Locke when in his Preface to the New Essays on Human Understanding he wrote: [A]lthough the author of the Essay says hundreds of fine things which I applaud, our systems are very different. His is closer to Aristotle and mine to Plato, although each of us parts company at many points from the teachings of both of these ancient writers.1 Before this, immediately on its publication, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding had been roundly attacked by many clerics and others for its rejection of innate ideas, rightly regarded as a central claim of Platonic philosophy and which threatened to place Locke irretrievably in the camp of the Hobbists, a fate which still forty years after the publication of Leviathan awaited those who ventured too far towards the philosophy of Epicurus. James Tyrrell wrote from Oxford in February 1690 about the reception of the Essay there: quoting the Latin

1 Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 47.

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tag pro captu Lectoris habent sua fata Libelli (books have their fates according to the reader’s capacity), and reporting that he found ‘the divines much scandalized that so sweet and easy a part of their sermons: as that of the Law written in the heart is rendered false and uselesse’2 by Locke’s argument. The book, it was said, had ten enemies for one friend,3 which of a philosophy book immediately suggests that it might have something new and important to say. If the direct impact of Plato on Locke looks perhaps unlikely, there were other ways in which Platonic themes might have entered his thinking and find a place in his writings. As we know, Neoplatonism in various forms was powerfully present in mid to late seventeenth-century England. If not Plato himself, perhaps these Neoplatonic dimensions of the contemporary scene may be detected in his philosophy. But this is to anticipate our story somewhat. We might be advised to begin by considering something of the way in which Plato was regarded by the educated intelligentsia in England in the period running up to the publication of Locke’s Essay. We might note, first of all, that those educated at the universities in Locke’s century could take for granted some knowledge of Plato’s philosophy in their audience. Thus at least one generation before Locke both Bacon and Hobbes, writing in the vernacular and therefore not necessarily for a learned audience in the early decades of the seventeenth century, assumed that their readers would be familiar with Plato’s thought and that it would require little if any explanation. Bacon, for example, denouncing the futile search for final causes in natural philosophy, takes a swipe at Plato whilst so doing: ‘it is manifest, that Plato in his opinion of Ideas, as one that had a wit of elevation situate as upon a Cliffe, did descry, that formes were the true objects of knowledge; but lost the reall fruite of his opinion by considering of formes, as absolutely abstracted from Matter, & not confined and determined by Matter: and so turning his opinion upon Theologie, wherewith all his Naturall Philosophy is infected’.4 And in similar style, at the end of Part II of Leviathan Hobbes writes: ‘I am at the point of believing this my labour, as uselesse, as the commonwealth of Plato; for he also is of opinion that it is impossible for the disorders of State, and change of Governments by Civill Warre, ever to be taken away, till Soveraigns be Philosophers’.5 Knowledge of Plato’s philosophy, certainly with regard to The Republic, often from knowledge of the Greek text, could be assumed amongst university and grammar school men in seventeenth-century England, and indeed, in Europe more widely. In the writings of Harrington, Filmer, Sydney, for example, we can find similar deployment of references to the Republic. And, of course, when we turn to the Cambridge philosophers of the mid-to-late century, collectively known as 2 Locke, The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–1989), IV, 11. 3 Locke, Correspondence, III, 793. 4 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. IV ed. Michael Kiernan, (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2000), pp. 83–84. 5 Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), p. 194.

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the Cambridge Platonists, the references rise exponentially. Even in much duller Oxford, as recent scholarship has shown, teaching and learning Greek, including Plato’s philosophy, was very much a part of the curriculum, even though the statutes did not formally require it.6 It is true that much of this scholarship was propagated in the interests of theology rather than philosophy, but that did not prevent the philosophical content of the Greek thinkers entering the intellectual world, even if the link with theology perhaps inhibited the production of scholarly editions of their work. Even with that qualification, however, there appears to have been only one Platonist active in Oxford in the early decades of the seventeenth century, Thomas Jackson, President of Corpus Christi College from 1630 until his death in 1640.7 There was certainly nothing that could be described as a movement there comparable to the scene in contemporary Cambridge. Given that Jackson was associated with the Arminians and owed his appointment at Corpus to the intervention of Archbishop Laud, it was always unlikely that his influence would extend into the Puritan Oxford that Locke entered in 1652. If we are to detect any direct Platonic influences on Locke then it would appear likely that we have to look to his reading rather than his tutors. Locke’s earliest extant philosophy, either in his notebooks or longer works, shows no discernible Platonic traits except in one regard. This relates primarily to what we would now call his scientific interests and his concern with iatrochemistry and medicine, concerns which from at least his graduation MA in 1658 onwards play an increasing large part in his life. It has been estimated that Locke read 167 medical books between 1658 and March 1667, about half his total reading for the period.8 Many of the works which he read were the product of that development in iatrochemistry that owed much to Neoplatonic ideas. What Neoplatonic philosophy meant as it was applied to the natural world is of course a large subject but it manifested itself in at least the following ways. Fundamental to many of the iatrochemists was a commitment to a Neoplatonic frame for their work. This included a belief in archetypes and a belief that knowledge of those archetypes was a key to knowledge of nature. These doctrines were in their turn linked with the doctrine of the macrocosm and the microcosm, itself not much emphasised by Plato, but to be found in the writings of the classical Neoplatonists. The Neoplatonic leanings of many investigators of the natural world from the fifteenth century onwards encouraged a particular view of the nature of scientific enquiry. Specifically, whilst the Neoplatonic outlook was by no means opposed to empirical investigation, such investigations were conducted from within a view

6 See, for example the account by Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’ in The History of the University of Oxford, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2000), vol. IV, The Seventeenth Century, ed. N. Tyacke, esp. pp. 256–269. 7 For Jackson and his critic see Sarah Hutton: ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelian’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), 635–652. 8 J. R. Milton: ‘Locke at Oxford’, in G.A.J. Rogers (ed.), Locke’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 35–36.

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of the world set in rigid categories in terms of which any empirical findings were construed. The rigidity of this framework was both a help and a hindrance to the development of natural philosophy but by the time we move towards the end of the seventeenth century it had become more of a liability than an aid. When, in mid-century, Locke was learning his chemistry and medicine, the influence of the Neoplatonic accounts of nature were still extremely powerful in both theory and practice and to distinguish thinkers into ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ is virtually impossible. To appreciate this we must remember that contemporary chemical theory had scarcely begun to achieve those great breakthroughs that marked other enquiries into nature. When Hobbes identified the new sciences that had been created in his day, he listed astronomy, mechanics, medicine and politics as the new sciences and their associated founders, Copernicus, Galileo, Harvey and less modestly, but no less accurately, himself.9 He does not include Paracelsus, the only possible candidate for an accolade as a pioneer in chemistry. And Hobbes was right not to include him, for whatever his power as a catalyst to those who began to move chemistry forward, amongst whom we must of course place Locke’s friend and co-researcher, Robert Boyle, ultimately Paracelsus took chemistry up an alley which so far at least has turned out to be blind, and its blindness was often apparent to those who pursued such chemical ambitions in the mid seventeenth century. Of course there were many other alchemists other than Paracelsus who were being read and studied throughout the seventeenth century, but, as with Robert Boyle, and I suspect Newton, the more mystical aspects of Neoplatonic chemistry were not nearly so important to most practitioners as the practical findings of the enquirers, through most of their lives. (Though, in the case of Boyle, he may have given a higher place to such aspects of alchemy in his later years).10 Locke was a keen student of iatrochemstry in late 1650s Oxford. He attended Peter Stahl’s classes in Boyle’s house in the High Street where he was described by Anthony Wood as being ‘prating and troublesome’.11 To achieve his mastery of chemistry, Locke acquired very many of the standard texts of the age. These included (and these are just a few of his whole library listings), Paracelsus’s Centum quindecim curationes experimentaque (1582), and Jan Baptista van Helmont’s Ortus medicinae (1652), which his notebooks show that he read at least twice. His copy is now in the in the Bodleian Library, with additions to the index by Locke. He owned Francis Mercury Baron van Helmont’s Paradoxical Discourses (1685), the same author’s A Cabbalistical Dialogue (1682) and Michael Maier’s De septum montibus planetarum (1651). Maier, according to the leading authority on Newton’s alchemy, Karen Figala, was the most important influence on Newton with regard to alchemy.12 Locke also owned Basil Valentine’s Tractatus chymico-philosophicus

9 Cf. The Epistle Dedicatory to De Corpore, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth, 12 vols, (London, 1839–1845) I, viii–ix. 10 Cf. Michael Hunter: ‘Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the Thought of Robert Boyle’, British Journal for the History of Science, 23 (1990), 387–410. 11 Anthony Wood, Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), I, 472. 12 Karin Figala, ‘Newton’s Alchemy’, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 370–386.

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(1679) and nine other of his works, Jean d’Espagnet’s Enarratio Methodica Trium Gebri Medicinarum (1678), Nicholas Le Febure’s A Complete Body of Chemistry (1664), Michael Sendivogius’s Novum Lumen Chymicum (1608) and the Theatrum Chimicum (1659–1661). This last named is a work of six volumes containing a very large collection of primary alchemical sources, nearly all of which contain the familiar Neoplatonic themes of the microcosm–macrocosm. A central claim of many Neoplatonists was a commitment to the doctrine of the great chain of being. Something of the flavour of its standing can be obtained by quoting the Platonic Leibniz on the topic. All the different classes of beings which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly their essential gradations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection. Thus men are linked with the animals, these with the plants and these with the fossils, which in turn merge with those bodies which our senses and our imagination represent to us as absolutely inanimate.13 For Leibniz the great chain of being follows logically from the principle of sufficient reason and the fact that God must of necessity maximise his power. For Locke no such ‘metaphysical’ proof would be accepted as conclusive. His position is made very clear in the Essay. That there should be more Species of intelligent Creatures above us, than there are of sensible and material below us, is probable to me from hence; That in all the visible corporeal World, we see no Chasms of Gaps. All quite down from us, the descent is by easy steps and a continued series of Things, that in each remove, differ very little one from the other.14 Locke then offers empirical evidence to support the claim. Whereas for Leibniz, the Platonist, who also accepted the great chain of being, it followed from his metaphysical principles that God’s creation must be maximised, and that God’s greatness required the creation of every monad possible. Locke the Aristotelian empiricist prefers to look and see if it is supported by the evidence.

THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS If there is little or no evidence that Locke gave attention to the texts of Plato, the same can be said of his engagement with the classical Neoplatonists or, with the exception of the chemical texts, their Renaissance counterparts. However, when we turn to his encounters with his Platonic contemporaries the picture becomes

13 A letter of Leibniz quoted in Arthur O. Lovejoy: The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), Harper Torchback Edition, 1960, pp. 144–145. 14 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) III. vi. 12, p. 446.

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more complicated. As we have noted, these were to be found for the most part not in Oxford but Cambridge (the only obvious exception is Joseph Glanvill). Further, Locke had become a committed empiricist as early as 1664, as we can discover by a close reading of his so-called Essays on the Laws of Nature. But, as we shall see, Locke’s empiricism is not of such a kind as to omit or reject all the elements that are taken to be part of a Platonic or Neoplatonic picture of the world. Locke’s empiricism does not make him a precursor of either Hume, Russell or A.J. Ayer. I would suggest that his position was more complicated and indeed richer, than those who classify him simply as a British empiricist take it to be. Locke’s contact with the Cambridge Platonists was hardly direct. The only one that he appears to have met was Benjamin Whichcote. There is no evidence about the others. The only time he visited Cambridge was at Newton’s invitation in May 1692, by which time Cudworth, More and Smith were all dead (Smith for 40 years). His most direct contact was through Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris, and it was that relationship, one of the most important in Locke’s life, that provided the stimulus for much of his intellectual engagement with the Cambridge group. We do not know when or where exactly Damaris Cudworth and Locke first met, but it was probably in London towards the end of 1681. Her home was then still in Cambridge where her father was Master of Christ’s College. Their friendship became a close one from a fairly early stage and one must wonder if Locke and she privately contemplated a closer relationship. But cautious old Locke— he was nearly 50 and she a mere 23 when they met—chose to remain a bachelor. Locke fled to Holland in 1683—not to escape Damaris but Charles II—and in 1685 she married Sir Francis Masham and moved to his home at Oates in High Laver, Essex. On Locke’s return from Holland in 1689 he first lived in London but from 1691 onwards he became a paying guest of the Masham’s for the remainder of his life. Damaris was reading the Psalms to him when he died in August 1704.15 It is scarcely surprising that very soon after their first meeting their mutual interest in philosophical matters (and perhaps amorous ones as well) led to Locke turning to two major works of the Cambridge Platonists. We find him on 18 February 1682 reading Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe, the only major book published in either Cudworth or Locke’s lifetime by the Master of Christ’s. We shall turn to Cudworth’s impact on Locke’s thinking shortly but first I would like to consider the other Cambridge Platonist whom he began to read at the same time, John Smith, for Smith’s Select Discourses, of which he owned the second, 1673 edition, was the subject of discussion in several of the letters he exchanged with Damaris at this time. His journals show that Locke had been thinking about the nature of knowledge in the previous summer, June 1681. On Sunday, June 26 1681 he gives an account 15 On Masham’s philosophy see, for example, Sarah Hutton, ‘Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham: between Platonism and Enlightenment’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, I (1963), 29–54; Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Ch. 5.

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of knowledge which is very similar to the one that was to appear in the Essay 8 years later. There are two sorts of knowledge, he tells us, ‘general and particular founded upon two different principles i.e. true Ideas and matter of fact or history. All generall knowledg is founded only upon true Ideas and soe far as we have these we are capeable of demonstration or certain knowedg’.16 The following February, he received a letter from her in which she discussed Smith’s account of ‘the True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge’ the first of Select Discourses. The letter reveals that at this stage at least Damaris Cudworth was quite prepared to defend Smith’s account of knowledge against Locke’s criticisms. Unfortunately, as most of Damaris’s papers were destroyed we do not have Locke’s letter to her, but it is possible with the help of her words and Locke’s journal entries to reconstruct something of what he had written. Damaris rejects some of Locke’s criticism of Smith’s division of knowledge. Locke’s criticism of Smith is one that was to become familiar from much of his later writings. Essentially it was the charge that Smith allowed in enthusiasm. What Locke meant by this he explained in a letter in the following April. Enthusiasm, he said is: A strong and firme perswasion of any proposition relateing to religion for which a man hath either noe or not sufficient proofs from reason but receives them as truths wrought in the minde extraordinarily by god him self and influences comeing immediately from him …, which can be noe evidence or ground of assurance at all nor can by any means be taken for Knowledge.17 And in the margin Locke added, ‘Enthusiasme is a fault in the minde opposite to brutish sensuality as far in the other extreme exceeding the just measures of reason as thoughts grovelling only in matter and things of sense come short of it’.18 Miss Cudworth had responded to Locke’s rejection of Smith’s account, a division into four kinds of knowledge, with the following: But whether that fourefold kind of Knowledge that he talks of be soe or not, methinks that that Division which you have made of Mankind seemes to be something too general, and there are a number of persons in the world (at least (I think) ought to be) which I find not included in any part of it. But I know not what you may call Vision nor how much you may attribute to the power of Reason, onely as I understand them it semes to mee that there may be something betweene these two things, there being (I think) such a Degree of Perfection to be attain’d to in this Life to which the Powers of meere Unassisted Reason will never Conduct a Man, not that I think more meanely of Reason I beleeve than you do, much less would lay aside the use of it as many do.19 16 ‘Excerpts from Journals’ in R.I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb (eds), An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 116. 17 Correspondence, II, 500. The source for this letter is Locke’s draft as it is in Aaron and Gibb and taken from Locke’s journal. 18 Ibid., fn. a. 19 Correspondence, II, 484–485.

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She invokes St. Paul, who she says often seems to appeal to such a higher principle and who would not be intelligible unless is read ‘an Enthusiast’. The debate between them is of course on a matter of great importance within theology. Smith is one of the most mystical of all the Cambridge Platonists in many regards. The kind of language he uses would sometimes, as Locke implies, have generated a very hostile response from Locke. Smith describes his fourth kind of person, ‘the true Metaphysical and Contemplative man’, as one who running and shooting up above his own Logical or self-rational life, pierceth into the Highest life: such a one, who by Universal Love and Holy affection abstracting himself from himself, endeavours the nearest Union with the Divine Essence that may be…as Plotinus speaks, knitting his own centre, if he hath any, to the divine Being. To such an one the Platonists are wont to attribute … a true divine wisdome.20 Smith’s mystical flights were not at all to Locke’s taste and it is interesting to see him control himself as he responds. The supposed four kinds of knowledge, he says, are not really four kinds of knowledge at all. They are, rather, ‘several degrees of the love of god and practise of vertue’.21 He goes on to explain why he thinks this. He grants that it is easy to imagine that a love and practice of virtue may lead to a greater knowledge of God and one’s duty: yet I cannot allow that it is a different sort of knowledg or any knowledg at all above his reason for what ever opinions or perswasions are in the minde without any foundation of reason… are not knowledg but Enthusiasm.22 Locke’s hostility to enthusiasm as an enemy of truth is well known. But it is important to see that this in no way separated him from the majority of the Cambridge Platonists, nor, ultimately from Damaris Masham, for she too was a Lockean in matters epistemological by the time she came to write her two books, A Discourse concerning the Love of God and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, published in 1696 and 1705.23 Locke’s opposition to Enthusiasm which he describes in the Essay as a conviction of ‘an immediate intercourse with the Deity and frequent communications from the divine Spirit’ is in part because it seems ‘a much easier way for Men to establish their Opinions … than the tedious and not always successful Labour of strict Reasoning’.24 His hostility lies deep in his whole philosophical position, deep we might say in his whole intellectual fabric. It would therefore be futile to attribute

20 Smith, Select Discourses, 2nd edn., p. 20. The second edition appears to be a straight reprint of the first, 1660 edition. 21 Aaron and Gibb, p. 124. 22 Ibid. 23 For her intellectual position and its development see Sarah Hutton, ‘Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, between Platonism and Enlightenment’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1 (1993), 29–54. 24 Locke, Essay, IV. xix. 5, pp. 698–699.

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it to some chance reading or verbal exchange. But his hostility was shared by members of the Cambridge group, albeit not by the long-dead John Smith. One of these was Benjamin Whichcote, often described as the father of the Cambridge school. In her letter to Jean Le Clerc on the life and character of Locke, written soon after Locke’s death, Lady Masham comments on Locke’s views on the importance of civility as a virtue. ‘It ought to be more pressed, and urged upon Men than it commonly is … he very much admired Sermons he heard from Dr Whichcote on this Subject, and which have been since printed’.25 Locke had often heard Whichcote preach in St. Lawrence Jury, in the city of London, which he regularly attended and where Whichcote became vicar in 1668. But the most directly relevant point to enthusiasm is that Whichcote, perhaps more comprehensively than any other thinker before Locke committed himself to the foundational nature of reason as the supreme intellectual virtue. The source of Whichote’s position lay in his early commitment to the liberal rationalist philosophy which he had absorbed as a young man. How much he was indeed a follower of Plato might be wondered. But His tutor, the puritan Anthony Tuckney, wrote to Whichcote complaining that whilst Whichcote was a Fellow of Emmanuel College: [Y]ou were cast into the companie of very learned and ingenious men; who, I fear, at least some of them, studdyed other authors more than the scriptures; And PLATO and his schollars above others … and to the detriment of theology] Reason hath too much given to itt, in the mysteries of Faith …. Mind and Understanding is all; Heart and Will little spoken of.26 The gap between the puritan, Tuckney and the latitudinarian, Whichcote, was clearly drawn. Whichcote is the least Platonic of the Cambridge group, perhaps because he is also the least philosophical, and he wrote no philosophical work. But, that apart, his intellectual attitudes were in many respects very close to the ones that Locke was to acquire and it is no surprise to find two volumes of his sermons in Locke’s final library. Nor is it any surprise to find his sermons amongst those praised by Locke as appropriate reading for moral instruction. Locke’s first suggestion to this end is Richard Alstree’s The Whole Duty of Man, but this is followed by: [If] you desire a larger View of the Parts of Morality, I know not where you will find them so well and distinctly explain’d, and so strongly inforc’d, as in the Practical Divines of the Church of England. The sermons of Dr Barrow, Archbishop Tillotson, and Dr Whichcote, are Masterpieces in this kind.27 25 To be most easily found in Jean S. Yolton, A Locke Miscellany (Bristol: Thoemmes Antiquarian Books, 1990), pp. 348–352, the exact reference is on p. 349. 26 Eight Letters of Dr Antony Tuckney and Dr Benjamin Whichcote, p. 38, printed in Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, ed. Samuel Salter, (London, 1753). 27 Locke, Correspondence, VI, 57. Locke’s letter is to Richard King in August 1703. The letter is quoted in the Testimonies at the front of Samuel Salter’s edition of Whichcote’s Moral and Religious Aphorisms of 1753.

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The most important intellectual link between Whichcote and Locke was their commitment to reason as the primary intellectual virtue. Whichcote made it clear in his sermons that, contrary to Puritan claims of direct inspiration, he saw reason as the most powerful source of religious knowledge. He saw reason and revelation as the two parts of religion and it was reason which had to monitor revelation to decide whether something is indeed a revelation: What doth God give his Commands to, or his Councels, but to the intelligent Agent, and the Reason of Man? So that Reason hath great place in Religion. For Reason is the Recipient of whatever God declares. And those things that are according to the Nature of God, the Reason of Man can discover.28 In Salter’s edition of Whichcote’s Moral and Religious Aphorisms the dominant theme is the central place of reason in God’s revelation. Such as: The Rule of Right is the Reason of Things; the Judgment of Right is, the Reason of our Minds, perceiving the Reason of things … to go against Reason is to go against God … Reason discovers, what is Natural; and Reason receives what is Supernatural … Reason is not a shallow thing: it is the first Participation from God: therefore he that observes Reason, observes God.29 When we turn to Locke’s account of the place of reason in religion we find virtually an identical position. Locke gave no sermons, or none that have come down to us, but in his account of reason in the Essay we find him allocating it this selfsame central position in religious enquiries. The word reason, he says, can mean a variety of things but his primary concern is with it as a faculty. To the question whether, on his empiricist epistemology, is there a need of reason, he answers, ‘Very much; both for the enlargement of our Knowledge, and regulating our Assent: For it hath to do, both in Knowledge and Opinion and is necessary and assisting to all our other intellectual Faculties, and indeed contains two of them, viz. Sagacity and Illation [inference]’.30 The central place of reason for Locke emerges perhaps most clearly in his account of its place in relation to faith and revelation. Like Whichcote he argues for the primacy of reason in determining what we may be justified in accepting as revelation. Thus, ‘no Proposition can be received for Divine Revelation, or obtain due to all such, if it be contradictory to our clear intuitive Knowledge’.31 However, where notions are not so clear and we have less than certainty ‘Revelation, where God has been pleased to give it, must carry against it, against the probable Conjectures of Reason’.32 But, finally, Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with the clear and self-evident Dictates of Reason, 28 ‘The Use of Reason in Matters of Religion’, in Select Sermons, Anthony Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1698), quoted from The Cambridge Platonists, ed. C.A. Patrides, (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 58–59. Whichcote’s editor, Shaftesbury had had Locke as his tutor and almost, he tells us, as a second father. 29 Whichcote in Patrides, Cambridge Platonists, pp. 326, 327, 331. 30 Locke, Essay, IV. xvii. 2, p. 668. 31 Ibid., IV. xviii. 5, p. 692. 32 Ibid., IV. xviii. 8, p. 694.

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has a Right to be urged, or assented to, as a Matter of Faith, wherein Reason hath nothing to do.33 None of the Cambridge Platonists, except possibly Smith, would have wanted to reject any of Locke’s argument. Another area in which Locke and Whichcote shared their positions was on ‘enthusiasm’. For Whichcote nothing was a greater intellectual sin than ‘false zeal’. ‘Enthusiasm’ he writes, ‘is the Confounder, both of Reason and Religion: therefore nothing is more necessary to the Interest of Religion, than the prevention of Enthusiasm’.34 I hope I have now said enough to show how close on several issues Whichcote and Locke were. Similar points can be made about his relationship to Henry More. Locke, More and Cudworth, all three were Fellows of the Royal Society, but there is no evidence that they met there. Locke owned several of More’s works, including his Philosophical Poems, given him by Damaris Masham. It was More’s commitment to the doctrine of innate ideas that most clearly separated him from Locke. And it is interesting that Lady Masham, in one of her letters to Locke, takes up just this issue in a way which was philosophically astute and linked it to More’s An Antidote against Atheism. Locke had sent her a copy of his Abregé of the Essay and evidently (the relevant letter no longer exists) invited her to show him the mistakes in his argument to which she had alluded. She demurs from that direct challenge, saying that she has reservations she would be happy to give orally but would prefer to draw on the arguments of others in her written communication. In particular she raises the question of innate ideas and wishes to know more about the difference between Locke ‘and some friends of Mine, [the Cambridge Platonists] about that Principle thing, of the Souls Haveing no Actual Knowledge; Being not sure the difference betweene You, is Really so great as it Seemes’.35 She here draws especially on More’s An Antidote against Atheism. She denies that one has to take the doctrine of innate ideas to imply that there is in the mind a set of ideas ‘flaring and shineing … like so many Torches … or writt there like Astronomical Characters in an Almanack; But onely an Active Sagacitie in the Soul Whereby something being Hinted to Her she runs out into a More cleare and large Conception’.36 In other words, Damaris Masham is offering what we would now call a dispositional analysis of innate ideas. (In this she anticpiates Noel Chomsky but I doubt if he knows that, even dispositionally!) On her view at this point in time we can talk of having an innate idea of something if it is available to the mind to be drawn on prior to our having obtained it by experience. In the Abregé Locke gives no argument for his rejection of innate ideas, reducing the whole first book to a paragraph, so it is not altogether surprising that his position does not appear well made to the daughter of Ralph Cudworth and the friend of Henry More. And although she

33

Ibid., IV. XVIII. 10, p. 696. Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, No. 349, p. 350. 35 Locke, Correspondence, III, 433. 36 Ibid. 34

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was later to change her mind in favour of Locke’s position, it is worth noting that her objection is one that still carries weight amongst Locke’s opponents. Henry More was, he said, very hostile to enthusiasm in matters of religion. In fact his enthusiasm to refute enthusiasm often becomes a kind of enthusiasm in itself (see especially his exchanges with Thomas Vaughan). And certainly his commitment to a Neoplatonic ontology and account of change was always going to be far too flimsily based in sound experiment and rigorous argument ever to attract Locke. Central to More’s philosophy, as to that of Ralph Cudworth, was an account of spirit as the only active agent in the universe. After God it was the second cause of all change in creation. But Locke, who was well aware of the literature on Neoplatonic accounts of force, never committed himself to the view that only spirits were truly active and that matter was essentially passive. Whatever he may have believed in private, all he was willing to say in public is contained in the following passage from the Essay: Power thus considered is twofold, viz. as able to make, or able to receive any change; The one may be called Active, and the other Passive Power. Whether Matter be not wholly destitute of active Power, as its Author GOD is truly above all passive Power, may be worth consideration.37 For him it was never more than an open hypothesis. He goes on to say that as he is only concerned at this juncture with discovering the origin of the idea of power and is not now concerned to pursue the topic now. All he does claim is that we get the clearest idea of active power from our ideas of God and spirits and a paradigm is a human action when we decide to move our body. This brings me to a very large divide between Locke and I think all of the Cambridge Platonists. It is that Locke consistently draws a line between what he holds can be demonstrated or otherwise proved, and conjecture. He always draws back from committing himself about matters that he holds are only speculative: hypotheses non fingo. In this I believe Newton for the most part followed him. Locke refuses to speculate about the causes of our ideas in the physical mechanisms of the brain or mind; he refuses to speculate on the nature of the mind or of matter, or on whether matter could acquire a power of thinking, or how the mind can cause our actions. As he said in Education, ‘the World be full of Systems’,38 and he was not in the position of having to choose between them. The Cambridge Platonists, however, nailed their colours to the mast more firmly. It is perhaps the difference between the under-labourer and the architect who aspires to build the true intellectual system of the universe. But Locke wished to refrain from building castles in the air. Finally, those last words naturally take us to consider Locke’s relationship with the most philosophically impressive of all the Cambridge Platonists, the father of Damaris, Ralph Cudworth himself. It is of interest that the only Cambridge 37

Essay, II. XXI. 2, p. 234. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. J.W. and J.S. Yolton, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 247. 38

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Platonist to receive clear-cut commendation from Locke in print is Cudworth.39 In Some Thoughts Concerning Education he cites Cudworth’s Intellectual System for its account of ancient philosophy: ‘wherein the very learned author hath with such Accurateness and Judgment collected and explained the Opinions of Greek Philosophers, that what Principles they built on, and what were the chief Hypotheses, that divided them, is better to be seen in him than anywhere else I know.’40 Whether this reference was included to please Lady Masham I do not know, but it is interesting that it does not appear in the original letter to Clarke from which the Some Thoughts Concerning Education grew, where neither Cudworth nor ancient philosophy is mentioned.41 Setting aside, as we must, Locke’s difference with Cudworth on innate ideas; forgetting, too, Locke’s reluctance to make a commitment to various hypotheses which Cudworth takes as integral to his philosophy, they have in common a remarkable number of positions. Some of this commonality derives from the fact that both are strongly influenced by Descartes. Both, for example, take over the Cartesian criterion for knowledge of clear and distinct ideas. Both also subscribe to a dualism of mind and matter, even though Locke notoriously ventured to suggest that God, if he so wished, could superadd to matter a power of thinking, a supposition not one of the Cambridge group could have contemplated. (The point is that there is no reason to think that Locke thought God had actually done any such thing.) They agreed that the most important intellectual attribute of human beings was their power of reason; both were committed to the possibility of an eternal morality embedded in the very fabric of God’s creation and which it was not beyond the power of human intellect to come to know. Both thought that the existence of God could be demonstrated by reason. They were both atomists of a sort. Locke was a conjectural atomist and his atomism was extraneous to his religious beliefs whereas Cudworth’s ‘Mosaic philosophy’ was a central plank of his theology. These brief remarks will perhaps be enough to suggest that Locke and the Cambridge Platonists are not nearly so far apart as standard histories of philosophy make them appear. Of course there are deep differences but many of the supposed differences arise from their contrasting pictures of what the task of the philosopher is. When the Cambridge Platonists wrote, the revolution in what that task is had not taken place. This is because it was Locke’s impact that brought it about.

39

Locke’s praise of Whichcote was in a private letter. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, p. 248. 41 Cf. Locke, Correspondence, II, 785. There is nothing about ancient philosophy in the original letter. 40

CHAPTER 14

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Reflections on Locke’s Platonism

Although, as my title signifies, what I am about to offer are only reflections and not a comprehensive exposition and argument,1 I hope to show by these thoughts that the topic, Locke’s Platonism, is neither incoherent nor empty, that in fact Platonic themes are woven into the fabric of Locke’s philosophy, most notably, I think, the basic Neoplatonic theme of procession and return, and that on account of this, it is not only proper to regard Locke as a sort of a Platonist, but pertinent to an understanding his place in the history of philosophy. There are, I think, benefits to be gained from this exercise also, among them, and this is primary, a better understanding of Locke and of his contexts. Beyond these, I suspect there may be some benefit to philosophy, but to show this is not part of my present purpose. Before proceeding, I would make one proviso: I am not suggesting that Locke thought of himself as a Platonist. He probably did not. But no one would deny that it is possible to be a sort of Platonist, and even to have Platonic intentions, without believing it about oneself, and there are moments in his writings, some of which will be noted below, when one can imagine Locke thinking of himself as a friend of Plato. My paper falls into two parts: in the first part, I shall sketch out a picture of Locke as Platonist. The dominant elements of this picture are derived from certain of his thoughts that are not on the face of it Platonic, that seem rather at first glance to be quite definitely opposed to it, but which when properly contextualised will, I trust, appear to fit quite suitably into a Platonic scheme.

1 I have borrowed the title from Dominic Scott, see Chapter 10, Section [4] of his book, Recollection and Experience, Plato’s Theory of Learning and its Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). I am grateful to Douglas Hedley for calling this book to my attention.

207 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 207–223. © 2008 Springer.

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The second part is devoted to a review of some of Locke’s encounters with contemporary Platonism, so far as this can be determined from his manuscripts, and to considerations of how Locke might have been influenced by them. Finally, assuming that my picture of Locke as Platonist is plausible, I consider briefly how this ought to affect the way we read him and in what respect we may regard him as a precursor of modernity. I I begin by considering two objections to my supposition, for, because these seem almost insurmountable, if I can succeed in showing that they are not only consistent with Locke’s being a sort of Platonist but cohere with it significantly, then, perhaps, I shall be safely on the way to my goal. These objections arise from Locke’s views about knowledge and the immortality of the soul. First, it may be argued that Locke’s denial of innate cognition and his theory of knowledge generally are sufficient to defeat any attribution of Platonism to Locke, for it reduces the human mind to a state of bare passivity lacking altogether in its inwardness any tendency towards a transcendent good.2 There are, however, precedents in the history of Platonism that may deflect the force of this argument, or, more to my purpose, may indeed reverse it. Consider Proclus, The Elements of Theology, Prop 211. It reads (in Dodd’s translation): Every particular soul, when it descends into temporal process, descends entire: there is not a part of it which remains above and a part which descends.3 There it is asserted that the individual soul, when it falls into existence falls completely, and that it processes from a state of intelligence to unintelligence, from a state of intuitive cognition into ignorance. Proclus’ point of view, so I am informed, represents a sort of religious turn in Platonism in late antiquity, whereby it was thought that particular souls required supernatural aid in order to be extricated from the dank dark state of corporeality.4

2 Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 144. Also, James Tully, ‘Governing Conduct: Locke on the reform of Thought and Behaviour’, in his An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 179–241; esp. 183 f. Dominic Scott contends that the doctrine of innatism against which Locke took aim in Book I of the Essay was of a Stoic sort prevalent among contemporary Latitudinarian churchmen and Cambridge Platonists. It was a doctrine to which Plato also would have objected; Scott Recollection and Experience, pp. 213–239. 3 Proclus, The Elements of Theology, translation, introduction and commentary by E.R. Dodds, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 185. 4 M.A. Stewart informs me that a position like this may already have been taken up by Plato, in Phaedo 75c–76d where Socrates leads Simmias to the conclusion that we are not born with innate cognition, but acquire it through recollection. However, at 75c, Socrates interprets recollection (anamnesis) as a reacquisition of knowledge, that is, learning it anew.

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If we set Locke’s theory of cognition in this conceptual context, his denial of innatism and his substance skepticism take on a different meaning from what is commonly assigned to them. What reason is there for doing this? There are, in fact, two. Locke came to believe that, both before and after our present condition, the state of human existence was what may be fairly characterised as Platonic. To be sure, he does not seem to have believed that human souls rise and fall individually, nor did he explicitly subscribe to the doctrine of pre-existence and the revolution of souls, although the origin of the soul remained for him a fascinating mystery, and he maintained an active interest in current theories of the pre-existence of the soul and its revolutions through successive terms of incarnation or incorporation. I shall have more to say about these topics in part II of this paper. His belief about the future state is clear and explicit. Consider, for example, his paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13. 12 (‘Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face’), Now we see but by reflection the dimn and as it were enigmatical representation of things: but then we shall see, things directly and as they are in themselves as a man sees another when they are face to face. Now I have but a superficial partial knowledg of things, but then I shall have an intuitive comprehensive knowledg of them, as I my self am known and lie open to the view of superior seraphick beings, not by the obscure and imperfect way of deductions and reasoning.5 His depiction of this future cognitive state embraces contemplation and intuition of real essences. The very same thought is expressed in Essay IV. xvii. 14 in connection with Locke’s account of intuitive cognition, which includes our knowledge of all self-evident maxims. In the Discovery of, and Assent to these Truths [viz. self-evident maxims], there is no Use of the discursive Faculty, no need of Reasoning, but they are known by a superior, and higher Degree of Evidence. And such, if I may guess at Things unknown, I am apt to think, that Angels have now, and the Spirits of just Men made perfect, shall have, in a future state, of Thousands of Things, which now, either wholly escape our Apprehensions, or, which, our shortsighted Reason having got some faint Glimpse of, we, in the Dark, grope after.6 The latter appears in the first edition of the Essay. Hence it was written at least a few years before 1690. Locke’s opinion about the prior state of our species, that is, before Adam’s Fall, seems to have settled in his mind some years later, sometime

5 Locke, A Paraphrase upon and Notes upon the Epistles of St Paul, ed. A.W. Wainwright, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) (hereafter cited as Wainwright), I, 238. 6 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) (hereafter cited as Nidditch), p. 683.

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after 1693. In a manuscript written in that year, in which there is a comparison of Adam’s state before and after the Fall, he writes that Adam was created mortal and that the sentence imposed on account of his disobedience was not the loss of actual immortality, but of the means of attaining it, which was put out of his reach when he was banished from paradise.7 Not long after this, he seems to have had a change of mind, and he concluded, in another manuscript, that Adam was created immortal; a state that is consequent upon bearing the image of God and of participating in the divine nature.8 This change of mind prepares the way for the great theme of The Reasonableness of Christianity, which describes human existence as a movement between two termini, embodied in Adam and Christ. According to this scheme, not the individual soul, but the whole race of humanity has descended into a state of mortal ignorance and remains there until it is regenerated and incorporated in Christ, the second Adam. Adam and Christ are hierarchs, in whom an entire progeny participates.9 At about the same time that this change of mind occurred, during the middle years of the last decade of the seventeenth century (namely, 1693–1697), Locke also appears to have reached a considered judgment concerning the mortality of the soul, or rather of the whole man, body, soul and spirit.10 Several places in his writings reflect this: first, in The Reasonableness of Christianity, when considering the consequences of Adam’s disobedience, he concludes from a reading of the biblical narrative that there was only one result of it for Adam and his posterity, namely death, by which, he goes on to say, he means the cessation of existence, ‘the losing of all actions of Life and Sense’.11 His manuscripts from this period confirm this. In one of them, he remarks that before his disobedience, Adam was immortal, and that the consequence of sin for all of his posterity is the cessation of existence.12 Other writings express the same opinion and carry it further. In them, Locke considers not only that the soul is mortal, but that it may be material also, although just what sort of matter he doesn’t say. This seems to be the direction taken in Adversaria Theologica 94, and it is also echoed in Locke’s reply to Edward Stillingfleet’s critical remarks on his remark in Essay IV. iii. 6 concerning

7 ‘Homo ante et post lapsum’, Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 28, fo. 113; John Locke, Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) (hereafter cited as WR), p. 231. 8 ‘Christianae religionis synopsis’, MS Locke c. 28, fols 213–14, WR. P. 242. 9 Labelling Adam a hierarch seems to contradict Locke’s attribution to Adam in the first Treatise and the Reasonableness of nothing more than a natural relation to his progeny. Yet, I think this is warranted, at least hypothetically, inasmuch as if Adam had remained obedient, then he would have been the first born of an immortal race, and in that respect a sacred head or principal of his progeny. See also MS Locke c. 27, fo. 101, transcribed by John Higgins-Biddle in John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) (hereafter cited as Higgins-Biddle), pp. 198–200. 10 In this connection, it would be more appropriate to characterise Locke as adhering to thnetopsychism rather than psychopannychism. I am indebted to Bryan Ball for bringing this to my attention in a personal communication. 11 Higgins-Biddle, p. 8. 12 MS Locke, c. 27, fo. 103; in Higgins-Biddle, p. 201. See also citation above in note 7.

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the possibility of thinking-matter, that is, the possibility that God could superadd the power of thinking to a material body. The place just referred to in the Adversaria is a collection of evidences, mostly from Scripture, gathered under two opposing heads: anima humana immaterialis and anima humana materialis. Not only is the evidence divided, but Locke’s mind seems to be divided as well; so much so that he has located the longest and most interesting entry in this collection on both sides of the divide. The source of his uncertainty is expressed in his opening remark that, in the New Testament, ψυχη´ signifies terrestrial human life and thought without reference to the nature of the substance within which these activities reside. What is clear is that a living being or σωµα ψυχικóν is dependent on material sustenance, and hence mortal; in contrast the state of existence of an individual who is redeemed, as revealed in Scripture, will be spiritual, σωµα πνευµατικóν, which is to say, ‘a sensible thinkeing being or body as has life & vigor durable in it self without need of any supplie from without & soe not liable to corruption’, in short, ‘a body incorruptible & immortal’. Locke’s uncertainty stems from the fact that both states are corporeal. Added to his perplexity is the plausible conjecture that a material body may be spiritualised, may become a thinking being, not, to be sure, by virtue of its materiality, but by the will and power of a being in whom the perfections of intellect and will and omnipotence preeminently reside. The hesitation about this thought when he first expressed it in Essay, IV. iii. 6, is gone when, subsequent to this conclusion, Locke defends it as a reasonable conjecture in his first reply to Stillingfleet. Now he quite confidently asserts that what makes a thing a spirit is that it possesses the power of thinking, whether the substance in which this power resides be solid or immaterial; and that in either case this power must come from above, for neither material nor immaterial substances have within themselves the power to generate a thinking faculty.13 This seems to assign a different sense to the expression ‘spiritual body’ from the one given in the Adversaria, but it can, I think, be shown that the two connect in an important way that removes any ambiguity. Essay IV. iii. 6, the thinking-matter passage, is worth re-examining in the light of what has just been remarked. This section of the Essay, it should be noted, falls into two parts: the first part, written for the first edition, remains largely unchanged; the second was added to the fourth edition. Thus, Locke wrote Essay IV. iii. 6 before 1689 and revisited it after he wrote the passage in ‘Adversaria Theologica’ and his reply to Stillingfleet. The theme of the chapter is the extent and limitation of human cognition. In this section, Locke remarks that just as our ideas come far short of comprehending the whole of being, so our knowledge does not reach even to the extent of our ideas; and he contrasts

13 Locke, A Letter to the Right Reverend Edward Ld Bishop of Worcester (London, 1697), p. 66: ‘the general Idea of substance being the same every where, the Modification of Thinking, or the Power of Thinking joined to it, makes it a Spirit, without considering what other Modifications it has’.

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our state with that of other created spirits who are ‘not tied down to the dull and narrow Information, [that] is to be received from some few, and not very acute ways of Perception, such as are our Senses’. To illustrate, he introduces the fancy of thinking matter. ‘We have the Ideas of Matter and Thinking’, but without revelation we shall never be able to know ‘whether any mere material Being thinks, or no’. Yet, because there seems to be no contradiction in the idea of a material body thinking and because it is within the power of God to superadd thinking to material bodies, just as he has added motive power to them, we cannot be certain or even sure that the soul is not material. In the 4th edition addition (1700), he reaffirms the possibility of thinking matter, but goes further, repeating the play of the mind in the Adversaria. Now it is described as the violent movement of a mind, back and forth between the hypothesis of the materiality and immateriality of the soul, where soul is understood as the substance or substratum in which a capability of thinking resides. This uncertainty is supposed to remind us of our downcast state and also of ‘the Happiness of superior Ranks of Spirits, who have a quicker and more penetrating Sight, as well as a larger field of knowledge’;14 a happiness or joy that derives from cognition (another Platonic theme). In contrast to any indecision about spirit’s substrate, is the assurance that this happiness is one that we shall enjoy in an incorruptible body, whether it be material or immaterial. In other places, Locke seems to arrive at a resolution of this indecision, in favour of immateriality. In Essay II. xxiii, 3–5, spiritual substance, defined as one that has the capacity of thought or reflection, is contrasted with body. In II. xxiii. 5, he writes, We have as clear a Notion of the Substance of Spirit, as we have of body; the one being supposed to be (without knowing what it is) the Substratum to those simple Ideas we have from without; and the other supposed (with a like ignorance of what it is) to be the Substratum to those Operations, which we experiment in our selves within. Yet two additions to the 4th edition (1700) of this chapter go beyond this agnosticism: II. xxiii. 15, where Locke added the qualifier ‘an immaterial’ to ‘Spirit’;15 and further down the page added the following: It is for want of reflection, that we are apt to think that our Senses shew us nothing but material things. Every act of sensation, when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both parts of nature, the Corporeal and Spiritual. for whilst I know, by seeing or hearing, etc. that there is some Corporeal Being without me, the Object of that sensation, I do more certainly know, that there is some Spiritual Being within me, that sees and hears. this I must be convinced cannot be the action of bare insensible matter; nor ever could be without an immaterial thinking Being.16 14

Essay, IV.iii.6, Nidditch, p. 543. Nidditch, p. 305, l. 19. From ‘Idea of Spirit ’ (eds 1–3) to ‘Idea of an immaterial Spirit’ (eds 4–5). 16 Ibid., p. 305, l. 24 – p. 306, l. 8. 15

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In an article published in 1918 on the philosophy of Proclus, A.E. Taylor, suggests that Locke’s adoption of the term ‘reflection’ was a deliberate move by him to combat the Platonism of Cudworth and More. Taylor relates the term ¸ reflection to the Neoplatonic process of επιστροϕη′ the conversion or turning of the soul, by an initial process of turning inward, and its redirection upwards to its source. I think that Taylor got it the wrong way round; which is not to say that Locke’s adoption of it shows him to be in league with the Cambridge Platonists, but that he was, on his own, thinking Platonist thoughts.17 What is especially noticeable about these changes or fixations of mind, whichever they were, is that Locke made them on the basis of Scripture and not upon mere reason, and, more narrowly, on his reading of St. Paul, who, along with Moses and Jesus Christ, was believed by Locke to have been a recipient of a complete revelation, that is, ‘the full doctrine of the Gospel’. This may explain why Locke did not attribute his Platonisms to the Platonic tradition or think of himself as a Platonist. Locke believed that the whole of the Christian religion had been infused into the mind of the apostle in a single moment of revelation and was the source of his preaching and writing; ‘he fully possess’d the entire Revelation he had receiv’d from God, had throughly digested it; all the Parts were formed together in his Mind into one well contracted harmonious Body.’ Locke is alluding to St. Paul’s remark in 2 Corinthians 12. 2–3, that he was ‘caught up into Paradise [or ‘third Heaven’] and there heard what is not in the power of man to utter’.18 In his Paraphrase and Notes on 2 Corinthians 3, he describes the preaching of the gospel and the reception of its ‘mystical and spiritual meaning’; contrasting it with the so-called old dispensation to Moses. Moses received the revelation complete and directly, which is why he was transfigured, his face shining with the glory of it, but he wore a veil, that is, he was offered divine truth in veiled and obscure discourse; but the preachers of the gospel preach openly and plainly and they and their discourse are transfigured, spiritualised; they become, as it were, mirrors reflecting the glory of Christ, whose brightness changes them ‘into his very image’. Thus, Locke believed, that divine truth was irradiated throughout the world ‘with a continued influx and renewing of glory’.19 I turn now to Locke’s Essay and consider some places in it that lend support to my hypothesis. Locke’s proof of the existence of God (Essay IV. x) surely supports it, most decisively, I think, in its method: the route to an irrefutable certainty is by an inward turn, and the mind’s ascent to God is by means of a principle of causality, characteristic of Neoplatonic systems whereby the mind ascends from a lesser to greater perfection in an endeavour to discover the reason and

17 A.E. Taylor, ‘The Philosophy of Proclus’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, NS, XVIII (London, 1918), pp. 600–635, p. 631. 18 Locke’s paraphrase: Wainwright, I, 307. See also Wainwright, I, 113; WR, p. 63. It should be noted that, according to Locke, only the bearers of revelation and not the receivers of it are transfigured. 19 Wainwright, I, 280 f.

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cause of its existence. In Essay II. i, where Locke contends against the Cartesian dogma that the mind always thinks, the fancy concerning two souls sharing one body is reminiscent of the doctrine of vehicles, or at least of the portability of the person or narrative spirit (Essay II. i. 12); so also in his later chapter on personal identity, where it is argued that the duration of a particular consciousness or spirit does not depend upon the continuing duration of the substance in which it may for a time inhere (Essay II. xxvii). It is noteworthy that in Essay II. i, Locke uses the word ‘soul’ to describe the conscious self, whereas in II. xxvii he prefers the term ‘spirit’. In his evolving notion of free agency (Essay II. xxi. 48 f), Locke concludes that genuine freedom resides not in an arbitrary indifference of the will but in the determination of will and desire by Good, by what is best, which is eternal happiness and transfiguration into a superior state. In this connection, Locke’s general view of reality as consisting of God, spirits and bodies, or, with respect to merely rational beings, of God, spirits and mortals, is vaguely Platonic. Finally, the Epistle to the Reader in Locke’s great work is, I think, amenable to my hypothesis. Its subject is the human understanding ‘the most elevated Faculty of the Soul’ the knowledge of which gives us ‘more constant Delight’ than knowledge of any other thing. Thought is depicted as a great bird, to be sure, a hawk that looks down towards the earth for its prey, but whose feasts on truth bring joy and prepare it for the higher truth of revelation. For Locke’s hawk symbolises the mind of the Christian virtuoso, whose experimental researches on earth make the mind receptive to revelation from above.20 While it is undeniable that the Essay was undertaken to prepare the way for the new learning, it would be a mistake to suppose that a work of such length and complexity was written with only one end in view. Why not also, therefore, consider it as a preparation of the mind, through knowledge, for a return to its principal source? I have elsewhere argued that Locke’s Essay should be regarded as a work of natural theology. I shall not repeat that argument here, but only add to it that may be imagined as a natural theology in a Platonic mode. Let me summarise: Locke denied the immortality of the soul and innate cognition; he allowed that the soul might be material; against the Cartesians, he denied that thinking is an attribute of the soul, and that mind does not always think; he accepted a principle considered to be a hallmark of Neo-Platonism, that a cause is always greater, that is, higher in the chain of being, than its effect and that effects aspire, so to speak, to the greater perfection of their causes; he believed that spirit or consciousness is separable from its terrestrial vehicle and that by divine action it can be fitted with an incorruptible vehicle. Taken all together, these affirmations and denials cohere in a kind of religious Platonism, one that takes a radical view of the state of the soul after the Fall, radical not in an Augustinian or Calvinist sense, according to which the soul is corrupt both morally and epistemically, but radical because what should be eternal has become naturalised and mortal. The human spirit, notwithstanding its mortal 20

Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso. Part I, in Works (London: 1777), I, 508–540.

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frame, can still soar, although only in the sublunary zones of the cosmos until it is awakened from death to a transfigured state.21

II I turn now to consider Locke’s encounters with contemporary Platonism. I have just begun to explore these, so that what follows must be taken as a partial and preliminary report. Locke’s encounters with the Cambridge Platonists come to mind immediately, but this is a subject that is perhaps too large and complex to treat in this brief review. Moreover, I have the advantage of being able to refer my readers to John Rogers’ learned contribution to this collection.22 Instead, I shall focus on three of Locke’s less well-known encounters with contemporary Platonism. They are especially interesting, because they concern themes that were central to Locke’s theology. These encounters were mainly literary. We know about them from Locke’s commonplace books. To my knowledge, Locke’s commonplaces from authors imbued with Platonism all have to do with theological themes and, more strictly with biblical ones. They appear among his theological manuscripts and focus upon biblical interpretation. What this shows, I think, is that Platonism was for Locke what it was for many other Christian philosophers—a vehicle for understanding the so-called mysteries of biblical revelation. The first of the authors I shall take note of is Charles Hotham, sometime fellow of Peterhouse and friend of Henry More. His book An Introduction to the Teutonick Philosophy, first published in 1650, was read by Locke around 1660. The second author was Nathaniel Gibbon (or Gibbons) of St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford. Gibbon’s work circulated in manuscript together with a broadsheet on which was printed an outline of his theological scheme under the title A Scheme or body of Divinitie Real. Locke must to have come into possession of a copy of these materials around 1671. They were among the books and manuscripts that he entrusted to James Tyrrell for safe keeping in 1683, when he went into exile in Holland. After Locke’s return, Tyrrell asked to keep it longer so that he could have a copy made of it; there is no record that he ever returned it.23 Locke’s notes 21 Essay II. xxiii. 12, 13 (Nidditch, pp. 302–304) is instructive here. In it Locke justifies the limitations of our sensory and cognitive powers, once again contrasting it with that of angels as the ‘best for us in our present Condition’, that is, in our condition as earth bound rational beings, and as sufficient for the business of life, that is, for our ‘well-being in this part of the Universe, which we inhabit’ and for acquisition of that knowledge, of God and our Duty, that will ensure us a place in the world to come. 22 G.A.J. Rogers, ‘Locke, Plato and Platonism’, Chapter 13 of this volume. 23 James Tyrrell to Locke, 13 February 1692, in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. De Beer, 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–1989), vol. IV, letter 1464 (385 f.). Gibbon had three versions of his scheme privately printed: a broad sheet (1653); and two other undated pamphlets, Theology Real, and truly Scientific, n.p., n. d. (which he prepared for submission to Charles II and the Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of England, c.1680) and The Scheme or Diagram Adjusted for Future Use, n.p., n. d. Locke’s extracts while clearly from the same author and the same scheme, contain materials not in these documents, and therefore provide a valuable source for our knowledge of Gibbon.

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from Gibbon’s manuscript and broadsheet may be found in his interleaved Bible and in an early notebook.24 Both Hotham and Gibbon offered versions of Christian Neoplatonism. Locke’s third encounter with Platonism to be considered here is with a work by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth: Kabbalae Christianae Adumbratio. There is, among Locke’s manuscripts, a record of his critical comments and notes dating from about 1688.25 The expression ‘Teutonick Philosophy’ in the title of Hotham’s book refers to the mystical theology of Jacob Boehme. The book contains Hotham’s contribution to a disputation concerning the origin of the soul held at the University of Cambridge on 3 March 1646. The question at issue was whether each human soul is directly created and infused into its body at conception or both, or is passed on or traduced through human generation. In Locke’s interleaved English Bible, his Bentley Bible, there are three extracts from Hotham’s book inscribed as annotations on Zechariah 12. 1, Hebrews 7: 9 and 11. 9. They are among the earliest in Locke’s Bible and date from about 1660.26 The disputed question was to be decided on biblical grounds, which is to say, it was judged to be a mystery that could be learned about only through revelation. Hotham argued for traduction, while admitting that there were many places in Scripture that support creation. In the end he declares that both are true: traduction describes the process from a natural standpoint, that is, there seems to be in the generation of children no moment of supernatural intervention; direct creation properly refers to the supernatural origin of the soul and the theological explanation of it. However, by accepting that God created the soul, Hotham did not mean that God created from nothing each human soul, but rather that the spiritual powers of life, sense perception and wisdom are infused directly from conception into each new human being by infusion from a hierarchy of spirits operative since the creation of the world.27 In brief, Hotham’s position may be described as a sort of natural supernaturalism.

24 For a transcript of Locke’s notes on Gibbon see the appendix to my article, ‘Locke’s Christology as a key to understanding his philosophy’, in Peter Anstey, (ed.), The Philosophy of John Locke (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 149–151. Citations of Hotham may be found in Locke’s interleaved English Bible (Bodleian shelfmark—Locke 16.25; listed in John Harrison and Peter Laslett (eds.), The Library of John Locke, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), item 309. These consist of notes on places in the Bible: Zechariah 12.1, Hebrews 9. 9 and 11. 9. 25 In her book, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1999), Allison Coudert attributes authorship of the Adumbratio to Francis Mercury van Helmont, see pp. 109, 113, 201, 278. However, she gives no evidence for her judgment. On the other hand, we have Locke’s testimony for Knorr’s authorship in an inscription in Locke’s handwriting on the title page of his copy of the Adumbratio, ‘per Authore Christiano Knor van Rosenrod’; vol. II of Kabbala Denudata, Frankfurt, 1684. Locke’s copy is in the Bodleian Library, shelf mark Locke 9.8. 26 See Locke’s interleaved English Bible, Bodleian shelfmark—Locke 16.25 (Harrison and Laslett, Library of John Locke, item 309). 27 Hotham, An Introduction to the Teutonick Philosophy (London, 1650), 58 ff. This is an English translation of the latin Ad philosophiam teutonicam manductio (London, 1648). Both include a commendatory poem by the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, who addresses Hotham as ‘his worthily honoured and deare friend’ (‘amicum suum charissimum’).

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Midway through his discourse, Hotham takes up the question of creation out of nothing and launches into an account of this doctrine as envisioned by Jacob Boehme. On Boehme’s account, ‘creation out of nothing’ does not signify a punctual divine action, but a decisive moment in a cosmic drama. The nothing, from which God made the world, is not just nothing, but something that ought not to have been, the chaos that God enlivened with a great wind of spirit, by which the world came into being.28 The purpose of this divine action was to contain the rebellion of Lucifer and his angelic cohorts. This metaphysical account of the origin of all things from God, coupled with a tale of war in heaven was not the sort of thing that Locke would have skipped over when reading Hotham’s book. He was intellectually accustomed to viewing the origin and destiny of mankind against the background of such a cosmic drama that involved creation and fall, redemption and consummation, a drama that involved not just mankind living on earth, in a visible world, but one that encompassed a vast spiritual realm populated by celestial hierarchies. It is a plausible conjecture that Locke valued speculative schemes of this sort when they were clothed in Scripture just because they seemed to lift the veil that enshrouded biblical mysteries. And although Locke must have regarded them as in many respects fanciful, he returned to them, because these fancies were nourished by what were to him credible hints coming from Scripture itself, such as obscure remarks about angelic messengers, an invisible world above us, war in heaven, transfigurations, cosmic redemptive events and spiritualised bodies with which the redeemed would be equipped. In the course of his exposition, Hotham touches upon a question that, we have seen, greatly occupied Locke’s attention during the last decade of his life, namely, the mortality of the soul or spirit. In the creation of the first Adam, the terrestrial progenitor of the human race, Hotham remarks that the breath of life, infused in him at creation, was that threefold spirit of creation mentioned above (i.e. life, sense and intellect), which was thought to be transmitted through procreation to all of Adam’s posterity. However, Adam’s punishment for disobeying God’s command is a virtual death of the spirit, a deep sleep, ‘yea so deep asleep, that (he being in truth dead as to that spirit, and it as to him) it is in Scripture called death.’ This unconscious spirit is nonetheless transmitted to all of Adam’s posterity and ‘revived and reenlivened in that great mysterious work of the Regeneration’. Then, in this revived state, the spirit of man may once more look ‘into the magick glass of the Wisdom and the depth of the Deity’. It is not clear when this revival of the spirit shall occur, but further on Hotham seems to locate it at the resurrection.29

28 Genesis 1. 2. This idea of creation out of nothing was appropriated by F.W J. Schelling in his late philosophy. See Schelling, Of Human Freedom, ed. and trans. by James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court, 1936), 33 f. 29 Hotham, Teutonick Philosophy, 54 f, 62. Hotham’s account of the regeneration of the human spirit could be read in a Joachimist sense, according to which the work of regeneration would reach its completion in the final age of the world, and that this would be an age of new spiritual men. See Marjorie Reeves, in Stroud (ed.), Joachim of Fiore & the Prophetic Future, rev. 1999, especially Ch. 6.

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Nicholas Gibbon’s Scheme is a sum of Christian divinity cast in a Neoplatonic narrative of descent and return.30 It depicts the cosmic drama of creation, fall, redemption and consummation. According to this scheme, the being or essence of the one God is hidden in inaccessible light, yet there emanates from this ineffable ousia or substance three coequal and co-eternal hypostases or subsistences (essence is ‘subsistentiated’): the Creator, who is also the Father, the Word, who is also the Son, and the Spirit, who proceeds from both; each subsistence has its own activity or ‘energy’ (respectively creation, redemption and consummation in glory). Central to the redemption of the fallen world is the work of the messiah, or mediator, who is the incarnate Word, but whose human soul was fashioned subsequent to the Fall and united with the Word in heaven, where it remained until the fullness of time, when it was sent into the world, still united with the Word, but now incarnate in order to fulfill its divinely preordained duties. However, also according to this scheme, the creation of the visible world was not the first creation, nor was mankind the first intellectual race. Rather this creation was preceded by the creation of a ‘great orb of light’, the habitation of the first intellectual race of spirits, who having rebelled against God, were thrust into ‘a great orb of darkness’, out of which God also condensed the chaos, from which this visible world was made as a habitation of the second race of intellectual beings, which is mankind. The establishment of this visible buffer between heaven and hell can, I think, be made sense of, if one allows the possibility of a coherent union between Neoplatonic metaphysics and oriental mythology. The material stuff that makes this creation visible is the lowest level of divine descent, or, at least, the part of it that is redeemable. In its mere passivity, then, matter is capable of receiving those endowments, namely, the organic shaping, the infusion of life and sensation and thought that fit it for return. It is not fanciful, I think, to suppose that the back and forth movement of Locke’s judgments about the substance of our spiritual being was sustained by reflections of this sort. Locke recorded extracts from Gibbon’s manuscript into his Bentley Bible in 18 places. Most likely, these were made at about the same period of time if not at a single sitting. The flurry of notes suggests that Locke studied Gibbon’s text with heightened interest. Parts of Gibbon’s scheme, a broad sheet and some notes and a prospectus, were subsequently printed and circulated privately. Gibbon had his scheme printed for presentation to Charles II in the hope that it might provide a unifying theological outlook for the Church of England. In 1679, writing to his newly made friend, Nicholas Toinard, Locke reported from London that Robert Boyle had informed him of a new translation of the Kabbalah (‘l’ancien Cabala des Juifs’) into Latin and German, but that Boyle was unable to tell him the name of the translator. He promised Toinard that 30 John Marshall characterises the Gibbon citations (‘G’ passages) as anti-Trinitarian. This is quite simply false, as a reading of Locke’s notes, and of Gibbon’s printed texts should make clear to any impartial reader. See Marshall’s ‘Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism”, Unitarianism’ in M. A. Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 155 n. 83.

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when he was able to secure this information, perhaps from viewing a copy of the book itself, he would send him full bibliographical details. He also conveyed to Toinard Boyle’s promise that, if he were unable to purchase a copy of his own, Boyle would give Locke his copy to lend to Toinard. Boyle had been sent a copy, but it had been delayed in the London customs house.31 There was no doubt from all of this that Locke regarded the publication of translations of the Kabbalah as a great event in the commonwealth of learning. The book eagerly awaited was the first volume of Kabbala Denudata (The Kabbalah Unveiled), published in Salzburg in 1677. It consists of translations into Latin of extracts and whole works from the massive corpus of Kabbalistic writings, together with editorial notes, glossaries, diagrams illustrating the Kabbalistic scheme, and critical essays. The editor of this massive project was Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689) a scholar, poet and high official in the Court of Prince Christian August of Bavaria. He counted among his friends Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, who was a contributor to the volume, and Francis Mercury van Helmont, who assisted Knorr in his great work, and who was also well known to Locke.32 Knorr published a second volume of Kabbla Denudata in 1684. Adumbratio Kabbalae Christainae was included in this volume as an appendix. In a notebook he used to record bibliographical information Locke inscribed a full bibliographical description of this volume and of the Adumbratio, underneath which is written ‘I want’ (p. 114).33 Locke eventually acquired copies of both volumes and purchased another copy of the first volume, which he gave as a gift to his cousin Peter King.34 The Kabbalah is an esoteric tradition of Jewish biblical interpretation and reflection that originated in southern Europe, more particularly in Provence and Catalonia during the late Middle Ages.35 It is a theological, or more accurately theosophical reflection of biblical sacred history from creation to the final consummation, that interweaves biblical narrative, apocalyptic expectation and Neoplatonic metaphysics. Theosophy is, perhaps, a preferable term to describe

31 The Correspondence of John Locke, vol. II, letter, 475. This account of Locke’s encounter with the Kabbalah is adapted from my introduction to John Locke: Theological Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in peparation). 32 Gersham Scholem, Kabbalah, New York, 1987, pp. 416–419. This volume contains all of Scholem’s articles on the Kabbalah that were originally published in the Encyclopedia Judaica. I have relied very heavily on this volume and on two others for this part of my paper: Scholem’s Origins of the Kabbalah, trans. A. Arkush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), and Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). The Adumbratio is a dialogue between a Kabbalistic Rabbi and a Christian Philosopher. The Rabbi expresses a viewpoint that is closest to that of Isaac Luria. 33 MS Locke, f. 28, p. 114. 34 John Harrison and Peter Laslett (eds), The Library of John Locke, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), items 558 & 558a. 35 Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); see also Arthur Green, ‘The Zohar, Jewish Mysticism in Medieval Spain, in Lawrence Fine (ed.), Essential Papers on Kabbalah (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 28 and passim.

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the mode of thought embodied in the Kabbalah, because in its primary writings figurative narratives of episodes in the life of God take the place of the conceptual definition and logical argument characteristic of theological discourse, although this is not lacking in many of the secondary Kabbalistic writings, and it predominates in much of the material presented in Knorr’s two volumes. In this connection, it should also be noted that not in its origin but only in its development did the Kabbalah appropriate elements of Platonic metaphysics and psychology and that in this process these elements underwent profound modification. One of the most striking innovations in this respect is the account of the origin of evil in the Kabbalah and the moral psychology that is used to explain it. I shall have more to say about this below. A large portion of the narrative that fills the pages of Kabbalistic writings occurs between the first and second days of creation, between the separation of primordial light from primordial darkness and the ordering of the heaven and earth into a visible world fit to accommodate life. ‘According to the Kabbalah, in the beginning God, who is hidden in inaccessible light, and who fills all space, withdraws or contracts into himself, in order to make room for other beings. He causes an outflow of his being to enter the dark abyss that is left by his absence, which fashions itself into a being of light in the shape of a man, whose essence is constituted by ten attributes, namely, the Sephiroth’. They are, abstractly, (1) the supreme crown or rule, (2) wisdom, (3) understanding, (4) goodness or mercy, (5) strict justice, (6) beauty, (7) permanence, (8) glory, (9) stability and (10) royal authority.36 This first man, Adam Kadmon, whom Knorr identifies with the only begotten son of God, the first-born of creation, and the soul of the Messiah, is not a creature but the archetype of creation and the supreme instrument of divine revelation.37 Creation and revelation are the same according to this scheme. God creates by revealing himself, and reveals himself by creating. From this first beginning there occurs a continuous generation of worlds, luminous spheres and of spheres within spheres, each bearing the image of the first man and, therefore, bearing within themselves, albeit less resplendently, the 10 shining Sephiroth. Three worlds, in descending order or rank, are to be noted. The first is the archetypal world of mankind. It is a single supernal human body, Adam Protoplastes, the first human creature, who bears within himself the sum of all human souls.38 The next world consists of angelic beings, intelligences who persevere in goodness. The third consists of fallible angelic beings.39 In the course of this apparently limitless process of emanation, a catastrophe occurs. To explain how this happens, it is necessary to understand that the 10

36 There are slightly different versions of the Sephiroth in different places of the Kabbalah. This list it taken from the Adumbratio, 14 f. 37 Adumbratio, p. 8. 38 One of Knorr’s main theses in the Adumbratio is the preexistence of souls; see Chap. VII, 33 ff. 39 Adumbratio, p. 27.

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Sephiroth are arranged in three descending triads. The 10th stands alone beneath them: a feminine principle who is a beacon of the divine presence, the Shekinah. The outer members of each triad are opposites and, therefore, in tension. In the archetypal world, they hold together, as they do in worlds constituted of angels who persevere. But in the world of fallible angels, they do not. The second and third triads become separated from the upper one, and the remaining opposites separate. Strict justice separates from mercy, and the consequence is a hardening or materialising of the world. Thus, the materialisation of being is not just a metaphysical consequence of the inevitable distancing of beings from their source through emanation and descent, but a consequence of a moral attitude deriving from the separation of justice from mercy. The manifold spheres—recall that there is a replicating and compounding of spheres within each world—shatter, no longer being able to contain the divine light from above that flows through them; the residue of fragments or shards become dark spirits, malicious beings who now express a dark and dangerous, yet fascinating, luminosity. This is the first Fall. The second occurs as a consequence of a divine plan to restore the fallen beams of divine light through the instrumentality of mankind. But when Adam also sins, he becomes mortal and his progeny now individuated in a succession of generations, also become mortal. The first created world becomes visible, and the once immortal spirits become embodied, their higher spiritual parts darkened, but capable of moving from one life to another. Locke’s copy of the Adumbratio is one of the few volumes in his library that are heavily marked. In addition, there is a lengthy manuscript that gives unmistakable evidence that he read Knorr’s book with great care and thoroughness. Dubia circa philosophia orientalis contains Locke’s topical analysis of the contents of the Adumbratio prefaced with a number of critical comments, hence, the title ‘Critical thoughts about oriental philosophy’.40 The manuscript is undated. However, on fo. 79v of the manuscript, which gives an index of terms, Locke has inscribed 88, signifying the year 1688. That being so, it is noteworthy that many of the topics covered in Locke’s analysis of the Adumbratio are included in the topical list of Locke’s theological commonplace book, Adversaria Theologica 94. There we find listed topics such as the Fall of angelic beings, the preexistence and revolution of human souls, traduction, good and bad spirits and our duties towards them.41 While it would be folly to suggest that Locke embraced Knorr’s system of Christian Kabbalah, one cannot deny that intermittently over a period of 15 years, from 1679 until 1694, and surely thereafter, the Kabbalah engaged his interest. There are themes in Knorr’s Christian Kabbalah that are echoed in Locke’s Christian outlook: a strong messianism and anthropocentrism, and a realisation that strict justice is not an aspect of God to be elevated above others, but one that must be tempered if not transformed by mercy directed not just

40 MS Locke c. 27, fos. 75–80. Another manuscript that bears mentioning here is MS Locke c. 27, fos. 256–58, which contains extracts of a review of Kabbala Denudata. 41 WR, pp. 21–23.

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to the elect, but to the whole creation. Finally, it must not be overlooked that Locke’s earlier consideration of the Hotham’s Behmenist scheme and Gibbon’s neo-Platonic Christianity, which are so much akin to the Kabbalah, show an interest in such schemes throughout much of his mature intellectual life. The effect of this interest on Locke’s thought overall can be ascertained only after a careful review of Locke’s writing in the light of these themes.

III Assuming that my hypothesis about Locke’s Platonism has sufficient merit, it remains to ask what use might be made of it, beyond reconsidering Locke’s corpus in the light of it. In particular, how should we regard him, if at all, as a precursor of modernity? Surely, we should not regard Locke as a precursor to modernity, if what is meant by that expression is someone who would reduce our understanding of being to the conventions of secular rationalism, mechanism and materialism whose philosophical outlook is designed to bring about the disenchantment of the world, for these were not ends that Locke intended. Unlike Spinoza, whose naturalised neo-Platonism was both radical in its intent and in its consequences, Locke’s Platonism, although radical in certain respects noted above, was not so naturalised that it excluded a realm beyond nature. How is it, then, that many regard Locke as a precursor to modernity in just the sense I have denied? I suppose it is because they have misread him. How? There is a tendency, when considering Locke’s relation to the Enlightenment, to interpret him in the light of his critics, just because his critics have accused him of the very tendencies of heterodoxy, infidelity and atheism, which are supposed to have produced modernity. This is a historicist and positivist and formally, if not ideologically, whiggish view of Locke, which assigns his writings meaning only so far as they have contributed to some historical process whose end point is the modern age. I shall give one example of this, which I think sufficiently represents this type. It is especially illuminating, because it focuses on a theme, namely, the materiality of the soul, central to the argument of this paper. John Yolton’s Thinking Matter is a contribution to the history of eighteenthcentury materialism in Britain that has been justly praised for its learning and analytical clarity.42 The context in which he sets this history is a network of worries over heterodoxy and irreligion that were evoked by the new learning. Yolton observes, correctly, that Locke contributed to these worries through his writings about the origin of human knowledge, human nature, personal identity and substance skepticism, and suchlike others. The particular theme of Yolton’s book is taken from Locke’s suggestion about thinking matter, to which reference has

42 John Yolton, Thinking Matter. Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1883). John Tully’s ‘Governing Conduct’ (see above fn. 1) is another work to which this critique applies.

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already been made. Yolton’s account of it and its logic are clear and analytically correct. But he fails to give a satisfactory explanation of why Locke should have made such a suggestion at all, which one might think should be a proper starting place of his history. Instead, the suspicions and accusations of his detractors are made the dominant ideological motives that initiate this history and guide its outcome, and any consideration of what Locke might really have thought and, if this differed from what he was suspected of thinking, what influence these thoughts might have had on the history of materialism and on the development of modernity, is simply ignored. Since, according to Yolton, it was inevitable that Locke’s thinking should be regarded just as his detractors imagined it, and since the friends of crass materialism, who saw an opportunity to gain an endorsement for their viewpoint from the mouth of a great personage, were happy to concur, the question of how to cast Locke in the role of precursor of modernity seems a foregone conclusion. But, if Locke thought differently than his detractors supposed, if his thought was theologically and metaphysically richer than they imagined it, and the burden of all that has gone before in this paper has been to show that it was, then it is reasonable to ask whether Locke’s influence on modernity may not have had other effects that intellectual historians have failed to notice, and whether, to prepare to answer this question, it may be necessary to revise the concept of modernity currently employed. In brief, perhaps Locke’s real meaning has influenced the development of eighteenth-century British materialism and modern thought generally in ways not yet explored and less akin to secular rationalism. I shall end here, not because I have exhausted my subject, but because I have reached the limits of my thoughts. Either I am mistaken, and it would be better not to pursue the matter further; or I am at least on the right track, and there is much more work to be done. I hope that the latter is the case.

CHAPTER 15

Christia Mercer

The Platonism at the Core of Leibniz’s Philosophy

INTRODUCTION In 1714, Leibniz makes a striking pronouncement about the relation between the explicit claims of a philosopher and the underlying sources of those claims. He says that in order to understand the intellectual ‘discoveries’ of others, it is often necessary ‘to detect the source of their invention’.1 Historians of philosophy have missed much about Leibniz’s ‘discoveries’ because they have not identified the sources of his philosophical ‘inventions’. In Leibniz’s Metaphysics:its Origins and Development, I argue that in order to discern the subtle details of many of his views, we need to excavate their sources. To this end, I find it helpful to point to the humanist sources for what I call his metaphysics of method; to Aristotelian sources for his metaphysics of substance and to Platonist sources for his metaphysics of divinity. It was as a student in Leipzig that he learned about these three philosophical traditions. That is, the main professors in Leipzig—Johann Adam Scherzer and Jakob Thomasius—bequeathed to the young Leibniz a methodology of reconciliation and a thorough education in Aristotelianism and Platonism.2 Concerning Leibniz’s metaphysics of method, suffice it to say that he attempted to combine major ideas from a variety of philosophical traditions. We find evidence of this

1 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, 7 vols (Berlin: Weidemann Buchhandlung, 1875-1890; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1978) (hereafter G, followed by the relevant volume and page numbers), III 568. 2 See my Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), passim.

225 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 225–238. © 2008 Springer.

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conciliatory eclecticism in some of major texts. Consider, for example, this comment made about his philosophical system in 1703–1705, for John Locke: This system appears to unite Plato with Democritus, Aristotle with Descartes, the scholastics with the moderns, theology and morality with reason. It seems to take the best from all quarters and then goes further than anyone has done before. … I now see what Plato had in mind when he talked about matter as an imperfect and transitory being; what Aristotle meant by his ‘entelechy’…; how far the sceptics were right in decrying the senses. … Indeed, you will be surprised, Sir, at all I have to tell you, especially when you comprehend how much it elevates our knowledge of the greatness and perfection of God.3 Although Leibniz’s metaphysics of method has not been previously noted, his metaphysics of substance is quite well known. We find one of the more famous summaries of it in Discourse on Metaphysics 8, where Leibniz writes: ‘the nature of an individual substance is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to allow us to deduce from it all the predicates of the subject to which this notion is attributed’.4 Despite the attention given to this notion of substance, many questions have remained unanswered because historians of philosophy have not noticed that the ‘source’ of part of this ‘invention’ is thoroughly Platonist. For example, compare his claims about substance in Discourse on Metaphysics 8 to those in Discourse on Metaphysics 14: ‘it is very evident that created substances depend upon God, who preserves them and who even produces them continually by a kind of emanation, just as we produce our thoughts. Indeed God . . . produces them . . . in order to manifest his glory’.5 It is surely not immediately obvious how a created substance is supposed to be both an emanation of God and something that has a complete concept. In order to grasp Leibniz’s conception of the relation between God and created substance, that is, in order to understand his metaphysics of divinity, we need to discern the Platonism at the core of his philosophy. In order to discern that Platonism, we need to identify the Platonist doctrines which constitute the source of Leibniz’s invention.

SPECIFIC PLATONIST CONTEXT In a letter of 1706, Leibniz writes that: ‘as a boy . . . Plato and with him Plotinus appealed to me’.6 The young Leibniz developed this appreciation for Plato and Plotinus with the help of his professors in Leipzig, especially

3 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, (1923–). References to this work hereinafter are abbreviated to ‘A’ followed by the series, volume and page numbers. This citation from the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement is A VI vi 71–73. 4 A VI iv [B] 1540. 5 Ibid., 1550. 6 G III, 606.

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Scherzer7 and Thomasius.8 Scherzer was generally well educated in Platonism and familiar with Kabbalism, but Thomasius was unusually erudite. He refers to the whole range of ancient, medieval and Renaissance Platonists and moves easily between pagan and Christian authors. There are four doctrines, which I take to be ‘markers’ of Platonism, which Scherzer and Thomasius both accepted, and which I would like to summarise as succinctly as possible now. Leibniz came to accept each of these doctrines and, as a group, they constitute the philosophical inspiration for a major part of his metaphysics. Before turning to these doctrines, however, it will be helpful to acknowledge the assumption that underlies all of them, namely, the view that God is in everything and everything is in God. On this point, the great Renaissance Platonist, Marsilio Ficino offers a particularly vivid account. In a dialogue between God and the soul, Ficino has God explain, ‘I am both with you and within you. I am indeed with you, because I am in you; I am in you, because you are in me. If you were not in me you would not be in yourself, indeed, you would not be at all’. God continues: Behold, I say, do you not see? I fill heaven and earth, I penetrate and contain them. I fill and am not filled, for I am fullness itself. I penetrate and am not penetrated, for I am the power of penetration itself. I contain and am not contained, for I am containing itself. . . . Behold, do you not see? I pass into everything unmingled, so that I may surpass all; for I am excellence itself. I excel everything without being separate, so that I am also able to enter and permeate at the same time, to enter completely and to make one, being unity itself, through which all things are made and endure, and which all things seek.9 In brief, God exclaims: ‘in me are all things, out of me come all things and by me are all things sustained forever and everywhere’.10 As Ficino’s divine speech suggests, the Supreme Being is self-sufficient and exists independently of its creatures, the creatures depend fully and constantly on it. In this context, it is worth remembering that, for many Platonists, the Platonic Forms or Ideas were

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Scherzer’s works include: Trifolium Orientale, Leipzig: J. Bauer 1663; Collegii Anti-Sociniani, 3rd edn. (Leipzig and Frankfurt: N. Scipio, 1702); Vade Mecum sive Manuale Philosophicum Qvadripartitum (Leipzig, 1654). For more on Scherzer, see my Leibniz’s Metaphysics, passim. 8 Thomasius’ works include: Breviarium Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum, Leipzig, 1658; Schediasma Historicum (Leipzig, 1665); Physica, perpetuo dialogo (Leipzig: G. H. Frommann, 1670; 1705); Physica; Logica; Metaphysica, and Rhetorica, published together, (Leipzig, 1692); Dissertationes LXIII & varii argumenti magnam partem ad historiam philosophicam & ecclesiasticam pertinentes (Halle, 1693); Origines historiae philosophicae & ecclesiasticae (Halle, 1699); Exercitatio de Stoica Mundi Exustione (Leipzig: F. Lanckisius, 1676). The latter is especially interesting concerning his Platonism. 9 Ficino, Dialogus inter Deum et animam theologicus, Letter to Michele Mercati, in Marsilio Ficino, Lettere, epistolarum familiarium liber I, ed. Sebastiano Gentile (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1990), I, 4, 30–50. 10 Ibid.

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taken to be Ideas in the mind of God which the divine mind was supposed to conceive and then use as models for the things of the world. With this said, let’s turn to the first of our four Platonist doctrines. The Theory of Emanative Causation claims that, for a being A that is more perfect than a being B, A can emanate its attribute f-ness to B in such a way that neither A nor A’s f-ness is depleted in any way, while B has f-ness, though in a manner inferior to the way it exists in A. The emanative process is continual so that B will instantiate f-ness if and only if A emanates f-ness to it. The Supreme Being is in the creatures in the sense that it emanates its attributes to them; it remains transcendent from them because it neither loses anything in the emanative process nor gives them any part of itself. The crucial point to understand is that the attributes exist in the products in a manner inferior to the way in which they exist in the Divine. God has the form or Idea f perfectly; creature has it imperfectly. This brings us to our second doctrine—what I shall call the Creaturely Inferiority Complex. This asserts that every product of the supreme being contains all the attributes which constitute the divine essence though the product instantiates each of those attributes in a manner inferior to the way in which they exist in the supreme being. It is relevant to our discussion that the diversity among creatures or the multiplicity in the world follows from the fact that creatures will instantiate the divine attributes in different ways and to different degrees. My justice is different from the justice of Socrates, and no doubt is inferior to his. Our first two claims offer an account of the relation between the transcendent God or Supreme Being and each of its creatures. Our third treats the relation between God and the whole of creation. Early Platonists like Plotinus and Philo of Alexandria are very clear on this point. According to Plotinus, for example, the One emanates unity to every individual creature, but it also emanates unity to the whole of creation. The result of this unity among the parts of the world was supposed to be a cosmic sympathy. Philo of Alexandria is particularly elegant on this point. He explains: And being superior to, and being also external to the world that he has made, he nevertheless fills the whole world with himself; for, having by his own power extended it to its utmost limits, he has connected every portion with another portion according to the principles of harmony.11 For someone who believes that every creature is a manifestation of the divine essence, it would reasonably follow that there exists an order connecting each instantiation to every other. Our third doctrine is a summary of this basic point. The Relation of Sympathy, which can be more or less, claims that each created being corresponds to the activity and states of all the beings. The fourth Platonist doctrine relevant here is epistemological and concerns how a human being might come to glimpse God. I have already noted that God

11 Philo, On the Posterity of Cain, in The Works of Philo, trans. C.D. Yonge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), V, 14.

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is in the world in the sense that the divine Ideas or attributes are constantly emanated to creatures. But for many Platonists, these Ideas also exist in the human mind as potential objects of knowledge. Although philosophers differed about the precise role played by the senses in the acquisition of knowledge, most agreed that the process of coming to know the Ideas was one of removing oneself from the mutable world of the senses and discovering the immutable Ideas within. The acquisition of knowledge was considered an arduous, internal journey that required rigorous intellectual and moral discipline. The point of philosophy therefore was to raise oneself above the petty concerns of this world, to concentrate on the eternal truths, and eventually to acquire knowledge of the supreme being. As Ficino has God make the point in the dialogue with the soul, ‘In order to take hold of me, do not be drawn in many directions. I am unity itself. Stop movement, unify diversity, and you will surely reach me, who long ago reached you’.12 Notice the importance that Ficino places on the unity of God as an aid in the pursuit of truth. Philo is particularly explicit on this point. He warns: do not… employ yourselves in the investigation of the earth …, but rather seek to become acquainted with yourselves and your own nature, and do not prefer to dwell anywhere else, rather than in yourselves. For by contemplating the things which are to be seen in your own dwelling … you will … arrive at a correct knowledge of God and of his works. For you will perceive that there is a mind in you and in the universe.13 For our purposes, it is noteworthy that Philo takes there to be (at least) two necessary steps in the acquisition of wisdom: first, we must consider ‘this invisible chain of harmony and unity, which connects all those parts’ of the world; and then God must ‘cause the light of truth to shine’ so that our intellect can contemplate some of the Ideas.14 The goal of life therefore is to remove oneself as much as possible from the ties to the material world and to contemplate the eternal and immutable Ideas within. Because the mind is mutable and finite, it can never grasp the whole of its contents; with the help of God however it can grasp some part of it. The fourth doctrine here (which I term, Epistemological Assumption) claims (1) that the mind is the object of knowledge in the sense that it contains the eternal truths or Ideas; (2) that the mind, which is mutable and finite, will become aware of those objects only if it both turns away from the material world and is aided by the divine light; and (3) that it is the intellect or understanding that is capable of grasping those truths. Leibniz embraced all four of these Platonist doctrines. For example, in 1668–1669, just as the young man was developing the core features of his metaphysics, he offers his first general account of the relation between God and creatures, which

12

Ficino, Dialogus inter Deum et animam theologicus I, 4, 50–55. Philo, On the Migration of Abraham, in The Works of Philo, trans. C.D. Yonge, XXXIII, 185–186. 14 Ibid., XIV. 76. 13

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he says is similar to ‘Plato in the Timaeus about the world soul’, to ‘Aristotle in the Metaphysics and Physics about the agent Intellect’, to the Stoics and others. Like these other philosophers, he maintains that God is ‘diffused through everything’.15 As I argue elsewhere, some of Leibniz’s most well known doctrines—for example, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, the theory of expression, and the theory of pre-established harmony—grew out of his commitment to these four Platonist doctrines.16 In the remainder of this paper, I would like to go beyond my previously published work to offer a brief account of the Platonist epistemology at the core of Leibniz’s thought. I discuss Leibniz’s epistemology for two reasons. First, although scholars have long noted Leibniz’s innatism, there has not been a systematic study of what he considers to be the proper journey to the truth, nor does my book include a complete account.17 Second, as far as I know, scholars have not given proper attention to the Platonist roots of Leibniz’s epistemology. This oversight is striking, since Leibniz is explicit about his admiration for Platonism on topics concerning knowledge. For example, in Discourse on Metaphysics 26 and 27, he complains that Aristotle ‘maintains that there is nothing in our soul that does not come from the senses’. Unlike Aristotle, he continues, Plato, ‘goes deeper . . . Indeed, Plato taught that our soul expresses God, the universe, and all essences’.18

LEIBNIZ’S METAPHYSICS OF DIVINITY: PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY Since Leibniz’s epistemology is best seen within the philosophical context of pre-established harmony, let me review the Platonist sources of this, Leibniz’s most famous doctrine. Pre-established harmony is primarily an account of the interrelations among simple substances or monads, where the rough idea is that substances do not causally interact, but respond perfectly to the activities of each other. Each monad acts eternally according to its own complete concept, but it does so in a way that is perfectly parallel with every other substance. I wiggle my fingers; wiggling my fingers is part of what it is to be the individual I am. You see me wiggle my fingers because it is part of your complete concept to do so and because your individual concept and mine are perfectly parallel. 15 A VI i 511. For further textual evidence that Leibniz accepts the four Platonist doctrines, see my Leibniz’s Metaphysics, chs. 6–8. 16 For the full account of all these doctrines, see my Leibniz’s Metaphysics, esp. chs. 6, 10. 17 A recent introduction to Leibniz’s philosophy offers a concise and helpful account of his innatism. See Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 103–118. Notice however that Jolley, like so many scholars before him, does not offer a thorough-going account of Leibniz’s epistemology. Independently of my work, Maria Rosa Antognazza has developed an equally broad approach to Leibniz’s methodology. Her forthcoming biography of Leibniz promises to be of major importance. See Antognazza , Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). I am familiar with Antognazza’s approach to Leibniz’s thought based on recent conversations with her. 18 A VI iv [B] 1570–71.

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I have shown elsewhere how pre-established harmony grew out of Leibniz’s interpretation of the first three Platonist doctrines discussed above. In particular, the theory of pre-established harmony can be seen as a brilliant blending of sympathy and emanative harmony. For Leibniz, the relation between God and the world is emanative in the sense that God emanates the divine essence to every creature. The Creaturely Inferiority Complex requires that each substance be inferior to God and that substances will differ in the clarity of their expression or representation. We begin to see what Leibniz means when he describes the world as unity in diversity, unity in multiplicity. The world contains multiplicity because creatures express the divine essence in different ways. It is my view that Leibniz’s famous principle of the identity of indiscernibles (roughly, that despite appearances to the contrary, there are no two substances exactly alike) grew out of his desire to fill the world with as many distinct versions of the divine essence as possible. The world contains unity because the Supreme Being emanates its unity to each individual creature, and to the totality of creatures. The parallelism of pre-established harmony is merely an extension of the Platonist notion of sympathy: each substance, in its manifestation of the divine essence, is in perfect sympathy—for Leibniz, in perfect coordination—with every other. Pre-established harmony just is emanation and sympathy perfectly organised.19

LEIBNIZ’S METAPHYSICS OF DIVINITY: DIVINE KNOWLEDGE For anyone who accepts the Theory of Emanative Causation and the view that the Supreme Being emanates the divine nature to everything in the world, it would seem to be fairly easy to grasp God in the world. Plotinus nicely captures the underlying epistemological optimism of this conception of the world: For knowledge is a whole, and its parts are such that the whole remains and the parts derive from it. And the seed is a whole and the parts into which it naturally divides derive from it, and each part is a whole and the whole remains an undiminished whole. ... There [in the whole body of knowledge] all the parts are in a way actual at once; so each one which you wish to bring forward for use is ready; but in the part only that which is ready for use is actual; but it is given power by a kind of approach to the whole.20 Plotinus goes on to say that, every part of knowledge ‘contains also all the other parts potentially’ and therefore ‘the knower in knowing [one part] brings in all the others by a kind of sequence’.21

19 For a fuller discussion and for citations to a range of works of Leibniz, see Leibniz’s Metaphysics, esp. chs. 6, 8, 10. 20 Plotinus, Enneads, ed. and trans. A.H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) IV.9.5. 21 Ibid.

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Despite the epistemological benefits of the Theory of Emanative Causation, things are not quite as easy as they first appear. As the Epistemological Assumption suggests, the journey to the truth is an arduous one. The Hebrew and New Testaments often pose an obvious question, namely, how are human beings, who are so obviously finite and frail, supposed to grasp the infinite and supreme Creator? In Romans, Paul is perfectly clear about the problem. On the one hand, he writes, the seekers of truth ‘are without excuse’ in that what can be known about God has shown it [the truth] to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.22 On the other hand, admits Paul, they ‘became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened’ so that ‘claiming to be wise, they became fools’ (Romans 1.18–23). For many theists, despite divine immanence, God is beyond the grasp of human beings. As long as the human understanding is trapped in its earthly, corporeal prison, how can it possibly progress from its finitude and frailty to infinity and perfection? There are two questions that have not been fully addressed concerning Leibniz’s Platonist epistemology: what can we expect (at best) at the end of our earthly epistemological journey to God, and what is the means to that end? Given Leibniz’s notorious optimism about the rationality and goodness of the world, we would expect his answers to be optimistic. They are not, and that in itself is interesting. Let’s treat each of these questions in turn.

DIVINE KNOWLEDGE: THE END OF THE JOURNEY Throughout his long philosophical career, Leibniz shows an interest in the possibility of a beatific vision. In 1668, he began work on a large project entitled Catholic Demonstrations, which was to include a discussion of a long list of theological and philosophical topics. It is clear from the outline of the project, which he composed in 1668–1669, that he intended to discuss the beatific vision. In his Conspectus he writes: [T]he beatific vision or [seu] the intuition of God, face to face, is the contemplation of the universal Harmony of things because GOD or [seu] the Mind of the Universe is nothing other than the harmony of things, or [seu] the principle of beauty in them.23 According to Leibniz, the goal of human life is the recognition of harmony where that is the same thing as the intuition of God: when we ‘contemplate the universal Harmony of things’, we are face to face with the Divine. That is,

22 23

A VI i 499. Ibid.

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Leibniz agrees with his Platonist predecessors that God is the single emanative source of all things and that the ascent to God is the recognition of this ‘Mind’ in the world.24 Two closely related questions arise from this analysis: precisely what sort of knowledge does the vision afford, and who exactly has it? That is, we need to know more about what sort of epistemological state this is and how to achieve it. In some notes on natural law written in 1670–1671, Leibniz develops for the first time his views about harmony and he is perfectly clear that the discernment of this worldly harmony requires that we grasp ‘the infinity’ of God. In one of these notes (of 1671), he writes for example: ‘[N]o one is able to have real knowledge of a single thing, unless he is most wise, that is [seu], has real universal knowledge’.25 What Leibniz suggests here and elsewhere is that to have any real knowledge of a thing just is to have knowledge of all the divine attributes. Since to have knowledge of all the divine attributes is to have knowledge of everything, it is not far-fetched to claim that to have real knowledge of one thing is equivalent to having universal knowledge. On this account of knowledge, infinite knowledge would seem to be a necessary condition for real knowledge; given the finitude of the human mind, it would seem to follow that human beings can have no ‘real knowledge’ of God. The textual evidence for this radical epistemological conclusion comes from early texts. Is there reason to believe that Leibniz maintains this stance? Consider an essay entitled Von der wahren Theologia mystica, written in German, probably in the final years of the seventeenth century. In the first part of the essay, Leibniz summarises the emanative relation between God and creatures, and then acknowledges the epistemological difficulties that follow. He writes: Every perfection flows immediately from God. Only the inner light that God himself kindles in us has the power to give us a right knowledge of God. The divine perfections are concealed in all things, but very few know how to discover them there. Hence there are many who are learned without being illumined, because they believe not God or the light but only their earthly teachers or their external senses and so remain in the contemplation of imperfections.26 We find here the same tension discovered in the early texts. On the one hand, the divine attributes or perfections are in everything in the world, waiting to be ‘discovered’. On the other, they are very difficult to glimpse. In order to find these concealed objects of knowledge, we must escape the world of imperfections and contemplate God. But how? In Von der wahren Theologia mystica, Leibniz makes it clear that the key to his epistemology lies in his metaphysics. Although each created thing or ‘self-being’ is ‘of God [Selbswesen von Gott], … [e]very single self-sufficient thing

24

Ibid. Ibid., 484. 26 Ibid. 25

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[Selbststand], such as I or you, is a unified, indivisible, indestructible thing’.27 That is, each creature acquires its being from God and yet exists as a separate unified thing. Moreover, Leibniz is clear about the fact that creatures differ from one another in the clarity of their expression of the divine essence: ‘In each and every creature is everything, but with a certain degree of clarity [Kraft der Klarheit]’. In our separateness from God, it becomes difficult to recognise the divinity; in our connectedness to God, it becomes easy. Leibniz summarises the point: ‘God is the easiest and the hardest being to know’.28 In Von der wahren Theologia mystica, Leibniz offers clues both about how to attain this easy knowledge and about how to move from that sort to the ‘hardest’ thing to know. The means to ‘the essential truth’ or the divinity in creatures is ourselves. In order to glimpse God we must turn to our ‘spirit’ or soul and find God there as the ‘origin’ of our substance or ‘self-being’ (Selbstwesen). The first significant step in this epistemological process is to acquire knowledge of some of the attributes of God: ‘the knowledge of God is the beginning of wisdom, the divine attributes are the primary truths for the right order of knowledge’.29 Apparently, knowledge of the divine attributes is the ‘easy’ knowledge. But Leibniz also insists that this is just the first step to real knowledge. Ultimately, what we seek is ‘the essential light’ which is: the eternal Word of God, in which is all wisdom, all light, indeed the original of all beings and the origin of truths. Without the radiation of this light no ones achieves true faith, and without true faith no one attains blessedness.30 Leibniz dramatically summarises the convergence of his metaphysics and divine epistemology: in each mind, ‘there lies an infinity, a footprint or reflection of the omniscience and omnipresence of God’. Were we to acquire this ‘right knowledge of God’, we would thereby attain ‘all wisdom, all light, indeed the original of all beings and the origin of all truth’.31 We find the epistemological point of Von der wahren Theologia mystica essentially in agreement with the earlier texts: because God is contained in every created thing, to have real knowledge of anything is to know everything. It seems clear that human beings in their earthly existence will not attain true knowledge, wisdom, or the beatific vision. In the Philosopher’s Confession of 1672–1673, we find evidence of this epistemological conservatism. Only after death, is ‘the nearly perfect person’ capable of conceiving God in the right way. With this cognition, there is ‘an instantaneous metamorphosis’ so that ‘in a blink of the eye’ beatitude occurs.32

27

Leibniz, Deutsche Schriften, ed. G.E. Guhrauer, 2 vols (Berlin: 1838–40), I, 410–411. Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 A VI iii 135. 28

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Our epistemological prognosis does not look good. Although prior to death we seem to be able to acquire knowledge of some divine attributes, real knowledge seems to be beyond us. Because finite and frail human beings are incapable of acquiring infinite knowledge, it would seem to follow that they cannot achieve knowledge of God. Is there no way out of this trap?

DIVINE KNOWLEDGE: THE JOURNEY ITSELF Yes and no. Despite Leibniz’s well-known optimism about the goodness of the actual world, he was much more pessimistic than one might predict about the possibility of any thorough-going knowledge of the world’s divine source. He was inclined to think that human frailty was genuine and that it is therefore impossible to have ‘real knowledge’. But he was also prepared to offer some reason for hope. In the Philosopher’s Confession of 1672–1673, he makes a distinction that diminishes the severity of our trap: Even an accurate cognition [exacta cognitio] can increase, not by novelty of matter, but by novelty of reflection. If you have nine units accessible to you, then you have comprehended accurately the essence of the number nine. However, even if you were to have the material for all its properties, nevertheless you would not have its form or reflection [formam seu reflexionem]. For even if you do not observe that three times three . . . and a thousand other combinations are nine, you have nonetheless thought of the essence of the number nine. . . . I will give an example of a finite thing representing [praebentis] properties that are infinite without any comparison with external things. Here is a circle: if you know that all the lines from the center to the circumference are equal, in my opinion, you consider its essence sufficiently clearly. Still you have not comprehended in virtue of that innumerable theorems.33 We have here a distinction between the cognition of the essence of something and its complete cognition. The former consists of the (‘exact’) understanding of an essential property; the latter involves the cognition of all its properties. In an essay of December, 1675, Leibniz uses different terminology to describe the same distinction: we do not have any idea of a circle, such as there is in God, who thinks all things at the same time. . . . We think about a circle, we provide demonstrations about a circle, we recognize a circle: its essence is known to us — but only part by part. If we were to think of the whole essence of a circle at the same time, then we would have the idea of a circle.34 Leibniz’s point may be put as follows: to have complete knowledge of an essence E is to know all its properties. Since, according to Leibniz, every essence of

33 34

Ibid., pp. 139–140. Ibid., p. 463.

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the relevant sort has an infinity of properties, only God can have this sort of knowledge. But finite human beings are capable of having some knowledge of E: when we grasp some property of E, we thereby have knowledge of E, though only partial. By piecing together these and other clues, we attain the following: for any essence E, whether infinite or finite, there is a range of possible cognitions of it, from partial to complete, where a partial cognition of E is to grasp one of its properties and a complete cognition of E is to grasp every such property. Moreover, for any essence E, whether infinite or finite, it may be ‘represented’ or ‘expressed’ more or less clearly, although each property of E is a partial expression of it. The bad news is that no finite human being will be able to have a complete cognition of any infinite essence and therefore of any divine attribute. A passage from the De Summa Rerum papers offers some help. In April 1676, Leibniz explains: ‘Just as the number 3 is one thing, and 1, 1, 1 is another, for 3 is 1 + 1 + 1. To this extent the form of the number 3 is different from all its parts; in the same way [created] things differ from God, who is all things’.35 For any essence, say, 6, there is an infinity of expressions of it. For any one of these, say, 3 + 3, to grasp it is to grasp the essence of 6. By analogy, if I have a partial understanding of any property or attribute of God, then I have understood the essence of God. But not the whole essence. Whether I have a partial understanding of 3 + 3, or a partial understanding of justice, I have only remotely glimpsed the infinite complexity and glory of the divine nature. I have nonetheless glimpsed the divinity. The arithmetical analogy (which Leibniz uses throughout the De summa rerum papers) allows us to see how, despite our finitude and frailty, we are capable of grasping God. If I come to understand a property of justice, then I have a partial cognition of the essence of justice. Since justice is a divine attribute, it follows that I also have a partial cognition of God. Although there is a huge epistemological divide between a partial and complete understanding of justice, and an even greater one between a partial understanding of justice and a complete understanding of God, it is nonetheless true that to understand any Idea partially is to have a partial understanding of God and hence be on the path to a more complete knowledge. So, just as to understand a circle fully is to grasp every possible property or expression of its essence, to understand the Supreme Being fully is to grasp every attribute of it. It is a relief to discover that all knowledge is knowledge of God. But the meagerness of this partial knowledge leaves us pitifully remote from the beatific vision and the ‘real’ knowledge accompanying that vision. According to Leibniz, however, we should not despair about the finitude of our epistemological stance. There are at least two reasons for this. First, like Plotinus, Leibniz is committed to the underlying interconnectedness of knowledge so that to know one thing is potentially to know everything. Thus, to know the most meager properties of the divine essence places us squarely on the road to more complete knowledge.

35

Ibid., p. 512.

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Second, Leibniz suggests that slow but steady (epistemological) steps are morally appropriate. He writes in an essay probably of 1675: ‘It is a great boon to the human race that infinite things resist’ our finite understandings. Because of our limited understandings, we cannot so easily ‘crawl straight into the middle of the brambles’ where we would become lost. Rather, our finite understanding forces us to struggle morally in the appropriate way. The suggestion is that the development of happiness and the increase of knowledge are closely related, and that we need to learn to be happy in the right manner before we are prepared to acquire more knowledge. It is therefore a good thing that ‘the human race progresses towards improvement only gradually’. Moreover, despite our finite understanding and meager knowledge, ‘a certain happiness is already in our power’, and it is this happiness that deserves careful augmentation.36 In a related essay of 1676, entitled On the Happy Life, Leibniz offers us an account of a happy or tranquil life. To be tranquil, explains Leibniz, we must carefully follow ‘the dictates of reason’, assiduously avoid being led astray by ‘passions and appetites’, and content ourselves with the goods that we possess. In short, we will attain ‘tranquility of the Soul’ when we accustom ourselves to our lot in life and reflect on what we know.37 Tranquility and reflection will encourage greater happiness and more complete knowledge. In another text of 1678–1679, Leibniz suggests that this relation between knowledge and happiness is the lesson of Plato’s Phaedo: that is, through the pursuit of divine knowledge ‘lofty souls’ will attain true happiness in the afterlife.38

CONCLUSION Given Leibniz’s conciliatory methodology and his goal of combining the truths of Platonism with those of Aristotle, the core of his philosophy has not been the easiest to know. But once we put his texts in their proper Platonist context, we are able to discern the Platonism at the core of his philosophy and recognise the profoundly original use to which he put those rich and subtle traditions. That is, as Leibniz recommends in the letter with which I began this paper, by ‘detecting’ the ‘source’ of his ‘inventions’, we have been able to recognise the Platonism at its core. We have found that, at the very center of Leibniz’s philosophy, is the Platonist theory of emanation. Like Philo, Plotinus and many other Platonists, he takes the world to be a likeness of God. Like Plotinus, he believes that each ‘part’ of knowledge ‘contains also all the other parts potentially’. For Leibniz, in order to glimpse God, all we have to do is escape ‘the shadow world’ and have a

36

Ibid., pp. 428–429. Some of this material is contained in my ‘Leibniz on Knowledge and God’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 76(4), 531–550. 37 A VI iii 636. 38 See Sentiments De Socrate, A VI iv [B] 1386–1388.

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momentary insight in any area of knowledge. When we consider ‘the footprint’ of God in our minds and manage to grasp a property of an attribute of God, we have thereby grasped some part of God’s essence. All such knowledge is knowledge of God; each part of this knowledge is a first step toward universal knowledge and the beatific vision. It is this sense that ‘God is the easiest and the hardest being to know’.

CHAPTER 16

Stuart Brown

Leibniz and Berkeley: Platonic Metaphysics and ‘The Mechanical Philosophy’

INTRODUCTION My title contrasts two philosophers who have traditionally been regarded as very different. It also contrasts two philosophies that are, on the face of it, incompatible. These oppositions are not entirely without historical foundation, I believe, but they can lead to misconceptions and caricature.1 It is true that leading supporters of the mechanical philosophy attacked key elements of Renaissance Platonism such as the commitment to vitalism and natural magic. It is also true that leading Platonists, such as Henry More, were critics of the mechanical philosophy. And to those who think that the mechanical philosophy and Platonism are therefore incompatible, it might appear that the triumph of the one would mean the demise of the other. That was how it appeared, for instance, to Roland N. Stromberg, author of An Intellectual History of Modern Europe. ‘The mechanical picture of the world’, he wrote, ‘replaced an organic one’. And, for a representative of the organic picture of the world, he referred to what he called ‘a leading Florentine Platonist of the Renaissance’, whom he quoted as holding that ‘the whole body

1 Historians of philosophy will be familiar with the way Leibniz and Berkeley are traditionally placed in histories of philosophy in opposed philosophical camps (‘rationalists’ and ‘empiricists’, respectively). This is not the place to address these classifications directly, though it will be apparent from what I have to say about Berkeley’s Platonism (and what has been said elsewhere about his debts to Descartes and Malebranche) that talk of Berkeley’s ‘empiricism’ needs to be carefully qualified. In my Leibniz (Brighton: Harvester, 1984) I offered an alternative—though one I now think was overstated—to the common reading of Leibniz as a ‘rationalist’.

239 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 239–253. © 2008 Springer.

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of the world lives’.2 Platonism, he implied, embodied a way of thinking that was simply incompatible with the mechanical philosophy. But, as well as those who thought there was an inconsistency and took the mechanistic or the vitalistic side, there were also ‘compatibilists’, as they might be called, who interpreted commitment to the mechanical philosophy in such a way as to leave room for a Platonic metaphysics. One strategy for such a compatibilist was to argue that explanations in terms of minds or purposes were not appropriate in the natural sciences but belonged to the complementary and deeper science of metaphysics. I will argue in this paper that Leibniz and Berkeley adopted such a ‘compatibilist’ strategy. Though their strategies are broadly comparable they do diverge on important points. They disagreed fundamentally about abstract ideas and had very different philosophies of science. Nonetheless they agreed about some fundamentals in metaphysics that derive, as each recognised, from Platonism. The existence of some striking points of convergence between their philosophies is partly a consequence of this agreement and partly a consequence of their looking for similar ways out of similar problems. In the next four sections of the paper I discuss Leibniz and Berkeley separately as modern philosophers and as Platonists, making comparisons where appropriate. I then go on to identify some key points at which their metaphysics is Platonic in inspiration. I conclude with some remarks about their strategies for combining a Platonic metaphysics with an acceptance of the mechanical philosophy.

LEIBNIZ AS A MODERN PHILOSOPHER A number of philosophers of the seventeenth century—Descartes and his followers most famously—believed that philosophy had to be started again and done in an altogether new way. They rejected the practice of doing philosophy by negotiation with the writings of the great masters of the past. They believed that new knowledge could be attained in philosophy of which the ancients had no suspicion. ‘Modern philosophy’, as it came to be known, sought its basis in ideas that were at once more clear and more certain than those of traditional philosophy. The new philosophers were critical of the abstract ideas of the scholastics and of the kinds of explanation with which philosophers had traditionally been satisfied. They insisted on ‘intelligible’ explanations and supported the project of ‘the mechanical philosophy’ of explaining the world in terms of intelligible notions such as size, figure and motion. When Leibniz was a student in the 1660s, modern philosophy was just beginning to make some impact in German universities. He seems to have been particularly impressed by Bacon, Gassendi, Hobbes and Boyle. He knew about Descartes too, of course, but it was only later that he studied the philosophical writings of his great predecessor with any care. Descartes was known to the young Leibniz

2

Stromberg, An Intellectual History of Modern Europe (London: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 45.

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through popular expositions by authors such as Clauberg, whom he claimed was clearer and at all events easier to read.3 Leibniz, then, belonged to a second generation of modern philosophers. He both consciously identified himself with the new philosophy and reacted against some of its tendencies. He agreed, for instance, with its emphasis on clarity and, relatedly, with the search for purely mechanistic explanations in natural philosophy. In a letter of 1669, he names a large number of modern philosophers, including Descartes and the Cartesians, amongst whom he then mistakenly included Spinoza.4 He went on to declare: ‘I maintain the rule which is common to all these renovators of philosophy that only magnitude, figure and motion are to be used in explaining corporeal properties’.5 To the end of his life he was willing to be a champion of this rule against those who appeared to depart from its constraints.6 To him the Newtonian willingness to take gravitation as a primitive notion was just such a departure and a reversion indeed to the unintelligible ‘occult qualities’ of the Scholastics.7 Leibniz was also a modern critic of recent and contemporary Platonists who sought to explain nature in terms of some vital principle. Commenting on Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, he remarked: I fully agree that all the particular phenomena of nature can be explained mechanically if we explore them enough and that we cannot understand the causes of material things on any other basis … it is vain here to introduce the perceptions and appetites of an Archeus, operative ideas, substantial forms, and even minds.8

3 In a letter to Foucher in the 1670s he admitted how little he had read of Descartes and how he was content to read his disciples. The claim that ‘the disciple is clearer than the master’ was made in a letter to his teacher Thomasius of 1669. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923–), Series VI i, 163–194. References to this work hereinafter are to ‘A’ followed by the series, volume and page numbers. 4 Leibniz’s belief that Spinoza was a Cartesian was based on his then limited knowledge of Spinoza as the author of The Principles of Descartes’ Philosophy (1663) but corrected once he saw the Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). 5 G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker (2nd edn. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), p 94. References to this work hereinafter are to ‘L’ followed by the relevant page numbers. 6 See my ‘Leibniz: Modern, Scholastic, or Renaissance Philosopher?’ in Tom Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 224–230. 7 His curiously entitled paper ‘Anti-Barbarus Physicus’ written in the last years of his life, is a striking example of this line of attack against the Newtonians. This paper is to be found in Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, 7 vols (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–1890), VII, 337–344. (References to this work hereinafter are to ‘G’ followed by the relevant volume and page numbers.) An English translation of the paper is to be found in G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989, pp. 312–320. (References to this work hereinafter are to ‘AG’ followed by the relevant page numbers.) 8 On article 64, G IV 391: L 409.

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This line of criticism is one Leibniz repeated specifically against Henry More amongst others.9 It is not only unnecessary to explain natural phenomena in such extraneous terms—it is, according to Leibniz, inappropriate. He compared it with invoking a deus ex machina as he thought the occasionalists did in bringing in God to explain how the mind appeared to have an influence on the body and vice versa. From a theological perspective it would, he thought, be unworthy of God to be involved in such a way in maintaining the machinery of the universe. From a discipline perspective, it is, as we might put it, a kind of cheating. A philosophical problem should, he thought, have a philosophical solution.10 Leibniz was a physicist as well as a metaphysician. He criticised Cartesian mechanics and thought he had founded a new science of dynamics, in which the notion of force was central. Force, as Leibniz readily admitted, did not meet the modern requirement that the world is to be explained in terms of its intelligible properties, namely, size, figure and motion. He claimed, however, that force could be made intelligible in metaphysics.11 Unlike some of the more radical modern philosophers—notably the Cartesians—Leibniz was never tempted by the thought of philosophy as effectively a new subject discontinuous with its past. He himself had read a great deal of ancient philosophy as a young man—including Plato and Plotinus—and found much to admire. The reconciliation of ancient and modern philosophy is indeed a consistent theme throughout Leibniz’s 50 years of writing. He achieved this reconciliation by a broad strategy of seeking to establish separate spheres for the natural sciences and metaphysics and objecting equally to trespasses from either side. So, as we have seen, he objected to those Platonists and others who sought to bring minds into mechanics. Equally he objected to those moderns who extrapolated from the mechanical philosophy to metaphysics and concluded that the world was basically materialistic, deterministic and devoid of purpose. Metaphysics was a separate and deeper science. Though mechanics was, as we might say, an autonomous discipline in Leibniz’s view, he thought that the principles of mechanics themselves were based on higher principles that must ultimately be referred to metaphysics.12 Metaphysics moreover, underpins the view that the mechanical philosopher and the metaphysician properly function in separate spheres. For Nature has what Leibniz himself called, in a closely related metaphor, a ‘double kingdom’ (duplex regnum) of reason and necessity, each governed by its own laws, but each of which is in perfect harmony with the other. Within one kingdom everything happens according to the rules of mechanics and by efficient causes, as if souls did not exist and there were no purposes. Within the other kingdom everything happens according to the rules

9

For instance, in his Specimen dynamicum (L 441) and in his New Essays (A VI VI 72). See, for instance, G III 122, G IV 499 and G VII 340. 11 See his New System, paragraph 2. Hereinafter I use the symbol ‘§’ to refer to paragraph numbers of widely available works, where those paragraph numbers exist, rather than the page number of a specific edition. 12 See G IV 391: L 409. 10

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of the divine wisdom and in accordance with final causes—and even as if bodies did not exist. The second set of rules underwrites the first and ensures that the two kingdoms are in harmony. Thus nature is, for Leibniz, an ‘empire within an empire (imperium in imperio)’.13 This, in broad terms, was Leibniz’s strategy for combining his commitment to modern philosophy with his desire to retain or revive the best of Ancient philosophy. One qualification seems to be needed about the methodological rule relating to separate spheres. Because metaphysics is the deeper science, on Leibniz’s view, he was less opposed to bringing in final causes into the natural sciences than he was to those, like Spinoza, who excluded them from metaphysics. Leibniz accepted that physicists should search for explanations in terms of efficient causes and not settle for easy answers in terms of the divine wisdom. But he thought that a final cause perspective could be of heuristic value in the empirical sciences. He suggested, for instance, that Snell was helped to discover the laws of refraction quicker by making assumptions such as that light travels by the easiest route, an assumption that might in turn have been inspired by reflection on divine wisdom. That is not to say that Snell’s Law itself is teleological. Thus, it is consistent with respecting the autonomy of optics to argue, as Leibniz did, for the utility of final causes in physics.

BERKELEY AS A MODERN PHILOSOPHER Berkeley’s situation—belonging, as he did, to a third generation of modern philosophers—was in many ways quite different from that of Leibniz. When he was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, right at the beginning of the eighteenth century, his philosophical curriculum was a modern one and the main influences on him included modern philosophers of the previous generation such as Locke and Malebranche. He also happened to be a student during a remarkable flowering of modern Irish philosophy led by the likes of William Molyneux and Robert Molesworth, not to mention John Toland, whose critique of abstract metaphysics is closely related to that Berkeley himself later developed.14 Unlike Leibniz, Berkeley was not steeped in the history of philosophy and he was much more absorbed by modern problems, as exemplified by writings such as his New Theory of Vision. John Shadwell, one of Berkeley’s contemporaries as a student at Trinity College, Dublin, described the philosophy course there in 1703 as a farrago of conflicting hypotheses drawn from Aristotle, Descartes, Colbert, Epicurus, Gassendi, Malebranche and Locke. Plato is mentioned as one of the writers who were neglected.15 In Berkeley’s earliest writings there is no reference to Plato and 13

G IV 391: L 409. Toland’s critique of mathematicians who turn to metaphysics is in the last of his Letters to Serena. 15 Analecta hibernica (Dublin, 1931) ii 74. Referred to by David Berman in his George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 7. 14

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only a passing reference to the style of writing of his disciples (‘the Lofty and Platonic strain’16) which he found difficult to understand and which he did not intend to emulate. It is only later that Berkeley acknowledged an affinity between Plato’s thought and his own. The plainness of style the young Berkeley sought to cultivate was, for him, a philosophical virtue. It was a way of avoiding that surest recipe for error in philosophical matters, as he saw it—namely, abstract ideas. A certain opposition to abstraction had been a feature of modern philosophy. Leibniz had denied the existence of abstract entities and so embraced a form of nominalism. In a writing of 1670 he had linked modern philosophy with nominalism through the claim that ‘everything in the world can be explained without any reference to universals and real forms’.17 He went on to declare: ‘Nothing is truer in my opinion and nothing is more worthy of a philosopher of our time’. He believed, and continued to believe, that there are only particulars in the universe. Leibniz’s nominalism committed him to denying the existence of abstract entities and so he was at variance with ‘Platonism’ as it is understood nowadays. But he accepted the traditional Christian Platonist way out, locating the Ideas in the mind of God. His moderate nominalism allowed him therefore to admit abstract ideas, since they existed only in a mind and so were not entities in their own right. Berkeley’s nominalism, however, was more radical. The young Berkeley, at any rate, insisted that our ideas are all particular. For him, abstract ideas were a philosophical fiction and the source of much injurious metaphysics: most conspicuously, the abstract idea of ‘matter’ and the metaphysical doctrine of materialism that was predicated upon it. The topic of abstract ideas was the major issue between the two philosophers, on which they each thought the other seriously wrong. Berkeley read an article by Leibniz that had been published in the Acta eruditorum. It was the first part of his Specimen dynamicum. In his article Leibniz sought to introduce a new science of dynamics in which, or so he argued, the concept ‘force’ needed to be added to the concepts allowed within the mechanical philosophy. This was not a new concept, he insisted, but a return to the scholastic concept of a form or entelechy, only explained more clearly. Berkeley attacked this account of force in his essay De motu of 1821, concluding that ‘even the greatest men when they give way to abstractions are bound to pursue terms which have no certain significance and are mere shadows of scholastic things’. It was just one of many examples Berkeley thought could be given that ‘metaphysical abstractions have not in all quarters given place to mechanical science and experiment’.18 Leibniz, in short, was not modern enough for Berkeley.

16 ‘I abstain from all flourish and pomp of words & figures, using a great Plainness & simplicity of stile having found it difficult to understand those that use the lofty and Platonic or subtil & scholastic strain’. Notebooks 300, The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A.A. Luce & T.E. Jessop (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1948–1957), I, 37. 17 L 128: G IV 158. 18 De motu, § 9.

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Leibniz had died a few years before Berkeley made his critique of him in De motu. He had known of Berkeley, through reading the Irishman’s Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). He underlined various passages in his copy and summed up his reaction in a brief paragraph in the end pages. Leibniz began by noting that many things in the book are right and in accordance with his own way of thinking. In particular he noted that he and Berkeley agreed that ‘true substances are monads, that is, perceivers’, though Berkeley, in confining monads to spirits, did not in his opinion go far enough. He goes on to condemn Berkeley, moreover, for rejecting abstract ideas and restricting ideas to ‘mental pictures’—a mistake, as Leibniz saw it, that lay at the root of Berkeley’s other errors, e.g. his rejection of the division of extension to infinity.19 These are quite fundamental points of difference between Leibniz and the author of The Principles of Human Knowledge. I do not wish to play them down. Leibniz was right, however, to note that much in Berkeley’s book did accord with his own way of thinking. Despite their differences, there were a number of points of agreement between Leibniz and Berkeley in respect of metaphysics. Some of these points, such as their agreement that the fundamental entities of the universe are monads or mind-like things, reflect shared Platonic assumptions, as I will shortly try to bring out.

LEIBNIZ AS A MODERN PLATONIST Leibniz’s Platonism has been recognised by scholars for some time.20 Leibniz had been impressed by Plato as a student and rediscovered him during his stay in Paris, when he produced Latin abridgements of the Phaedo and the Theaetetus.21 At that time he was included in a small group of philosophically inclined intellectuals from Burgundy that included the Academic Skeptic Simon Foucher and the parliamentarian Jean-Baptiste Lantin. This group opposed the tendency of modern philosophers (and the Cartesians especially) to denigrate ancient philosophy and the group was committed, on the contrary, to its revival. Leibniz had high hopes that Foucher would produce selections from Plato and the sceptics of the Academy in French translation. He was especially keen to encourage selections from Plato, in whose writings, he believed, were to be 19

Leibniz’s comments were transcribed by Willy Kabitz in ‘Leibniz und Berkeley’ in Sitzungsberichte der König Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1932, p. 635. My own translation is in Leibniz (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), pp. 42–43 and p. 48. See also AG 307. 20 To give some historical spread, See A. Foucher de Careil’s introduction to his Nouvelles Lettres et Opuscules inédits de Leibniz, (Paris: Durand, 1857); J. Politella’s published Ph.D. thesis ‘Platonism, Aristotelianism and Cabbalism in the Philosophy Of Leibniz’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1938); and George Macdonald Ross, ‘Leibniz and Renaissance Neoplatonism’ in A. Heinekamp (ed.), Leibniz et la Renaissance, Studia Leibnitiana, Supplementa, 23 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983), pp. 125–134. 21 A IV iii 284–297 and 298–311. An alternate title is given for each of the dialogues: For the Phaedo it is De animi immortalitate.

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found ‘things … more beautiful and solid than is commonly thought’.22 But, as Foucher agreed, more was needed than a return to the ancients, who had in some ways been surpassed by the new philosophy. So the revival of ancient philosophy had to be, in Foucher’s phrase, ‘to the purpose’. Its relevance had to be made clear.23 There is what seems an illustration of this project in Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics. Leibniz intended to include in this work (which exists only in an incomplete draft) a translation of an extract from the Phaedo into French—the passage where, as he puts it in a note ‘Socrates ridicules Anaxagoras, who introduces a mind but makes no use of it’.24 Leibniz was not in the habit of inserting such passages and gave three particular reasons for the proposed extended quotation: it was in ‘marvellous agreement’ with his own thoughts; it ‘seems to be written against our excessively materialistic philosophers’; and such a passage was worth including in the hope of encouraging someone else ‘to share many other fine sound thoughts from the writings of the great man’.25 Leibniz did not dwell in the Discourse on what these ‘other fine sound thoughts’ of Plato were. But elsewhere he took the opportunity to list some of them. Writing in 1707 to a young man who was enthusiastic about both Plato and Leibniz’s own philosophy, he identified many points of agreement, including these: [T]he object of wisdom is the really real [ta ontos onta] or simple substances, which I call monads and which, once existing, endure always; the first ground of life [proto dektika tes zoes] that is, God and souls, and of the latter the most excellent ones, namely minds, which are produced by God as images of divinity.26 This passage does, in a very condensed way, allude to some of the respects in which Leibniz’s Platonism takes us to the heart of his own philosophy. He assumed, for instance, that the ultimate realities whose nature metaphysics is concerned to discover are true unities. These true unities persist always, unless it is God’s will to destroy them, since they are not naturally destructible. They are identified with substances or what Leibniz later called ‘monads’. He did not say why he called them ‘monads’ except to say that monas was a Greek word meaning ‘one’. But, as he was aware, the idea of a monad or a true unity had its roots in Pythagoras and Plato. In some writings dating from the

22

A II i 249: cf. AG 5. The excerpt from the Phaedo Leibniz planned to include in his Discourse on Metaphysics (§ 20) seems to be a good example of the kind of selection from Plato he was encouraging Foucher to make. He did not advance the Discourse beyond a draft state, but he included the excerpt from Plato in a French translation at the end of a paper attacking two sects of modern naturalists. (A VI IV 1386–1388) 24 Discourse on Metaphysics, § 20 (A VI iv 1562 f.). The Plato passage is from Phaedo, 96b–99c. 25 Discourse on Metaphysics, § 63. 26 G.G. Leibnitii … Opera Omnia, ed. Ludovici L. Dutens, 6 vols (Geneva, 1768, reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1975), II, 222. There is a translation at L 592 f. The letter is to M.G. Hansch. 23

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mid-1670s, Leibniz took the view that ‘minds’ in a curiously broad sense are vera entia, that they are sola una, that it is only because minds are attached to atoms that the atoms are indestructible.27 This line of thought is an extension of an argument for immortality that is to be found in Plato’s Phaedo.28 The argument is, very briefly, that the soul is indivisible and, since to destroy something is to break it down into parts, the soul cannot be destroyed, since it cannot be divided into parts. Leibniz sometimes, particularly in his ecumenical writings,29 made use of this line of reasoning as a straightforward proof of immortality, as did many other philosophers of his time, including (as we will see) Berkeley. For instance, in one of his ecumenical writings, Leibniz claimed that true philosophy demonstrates the immortality of the soul: Now our soul is a substance … and as the soul has no parts, it is not possible that it should be dissolved into several separate substances; therefore the soul is naturally immortal.30 But, as often, Leibniz’s position is more complex than it sometimes appears in his more exoteric writings. He did not in fact accept the Platonic argument as a demonstration of immortality, properly speaking, because anything worth calling immortality in his view presupposed continuing personal identity and therefore memory of one’s past.31 And he did not suppose that the reliability of one’s memory could be underwritten by an a priori argument. But the argument was by no means without value, in his estimation. Indeed it was, for him, a general argument for the natural indestructibility of all animals and, since all substances are living, according to Leibniz, it was an argument for the indestructibility of all (true) substances. They are what Leibniz equates with what he refers to as Plato’s ta ontos onta—entities that, once they exist, must exist always.32 Leibniz’s view was that human spirits, which are created in the image of God, are one of the higher forms of monad. This was another point on which he expressly thought of his views as in agreement with Plato. And although, unlike Plato, he did not conceive of created souls as ever existing in a disembodied form, it is the soul or soul-like component that, in virtue of its indivisibility, underwrites the indestructibility of the substance. Thus the Platonic argument, albeit in a modified form, drives a good deal of Leibniz’s metaphysics.

27

See A VI iii 510 and A VI iii 521. Phaedo 78b–80c. 29 For, instance, in his Examination of the Christian Religion or System of Theology (A VI iv 2451). 30 A VI iv 2451. 31 I have discussed this argument more fully elsewhere. See my ‘Soul, Body and Natural Immortality’, in Re-thinking Leibniz, Monist, 81 (1998), 575–577. 32 Leibniz admitted that he could not claim the authority of the ancients for his view that no animal is ever extinguished, only that some of the ancients came close to his view on this matter. For instance: ‘Plato believed that material things are in constant flux but that true substances persist; he seems to have had souls in mind’. (G VII 535) 28

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Leibniz was an opponent of philosophical sectarianism and would not have styled himself as a ‘Platonist’. Indeed nearly all his references to ‘Platonists’ (such as Plotinus and Ficino) are critical. At the same time Leibniz made a clear distinction between Plato himself and his followers. Plato’s own writings had the modern virtue of clarity but his thought became debased at the hands of his disciples: It is from [his writings] that [Plato] is to be known, not from Plotinus or Marsilio Ficino, who, in their constant efforts to say things that would be miraculous and mystical, corrupted that great man’s teachings … no philosopher had more correct opinions about incorporeal substances than Plato, so it is really sad that such sublime and correct doctrines have for so long lain entangled and buried in such rubbish.33 Leibniz was sometimes more conciliatory, as was generally his way with schools of philosophy, about the Neoplatonists. He was a particular admirer of Proclus, who was right, Leibniz thought, to try to put Plato’s thought into a more systematic form. Plato’s excessive use of metaphor was partly to blame, in Leibniz’s opinion, for the great distortion of his philosophy by the Neoplatonists. Though he imitated Plato’s dialogue style in his popular writings, Leibniz criticised Plato for not producing rigorous arguments in support of his claims. Writing to Nicholas Remond, a correspondent who admired Leibniz’s philosophy, he remarked: I find it natural that you have enjoyed some of my thoughts after having penetrated into Plato’s, an author who has meant much to me and who deserves to be systematized. I believe I can carry out the demonstration of truths which he has merely advanced.34 The late seventeenth century had a geometrical ideal for a scientific system—one Newton followed in his Principia and Leibniz in his own dynamics.35 It would be deductive and hierarchical, showing the logical connections between the various principles employed. This seems to have been what Leibniz sought in a modern Platonic metaphysics.

BERKELEY AS A MODERN PLATONIST Not much has been written about Berkeley’s Platonism. This is partly because he makes little reference to Plato in his earlier writings, which are those that philosophers most prize, and a lot of reference only in his last work, Siris, about which philosophical commentators tend to be rather dismissive. It might even be claimed that the young Berkeley, who was certainly a modern, was in no way a Platonist and that the author of Siris, though certainly a Platonist, was no modern. 33

G VII 147–149. L 654: G III 605. See also L 659: G III 637. 35 See for instance his Essay on Dynamics of 1692, in Pierre Costabel, Leibniz and Dynamics (London: Methuen, 1973). 34

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I doubt, however, whether either of these claims can be made good. What I think can be sustained is that the author of Siris is even more of a Platonist than the young Berkeley was and, in some respects, a less radical modern. One way in which he is even more of a Platonist is in his commitment to belief in a Great Chain of Being. But, though he became in that respect even more like Leibniz, I confine myself here to points where even the young Berkeley was, as I believe, something of a Platonist. I begin, however, with some remarks about the modern-ness of Berkeley’s Siris. One way in which Berkeley seems to have become a less radical modern in his last book is in relation to abstract ideas. Siris does not contain the iconoclastic passages against abstract ideas that are to be found in Berkeley’s earlier writings. The author of Siris even admits Platonic forms.36 Some commentators such as A.C. Fraser37 have, not surprisingly, seen a contrast between his earlier and his later views at this point. Others, such as Luce, have insisted that Berkeley’s objections to abstract ideas remained constant throughout his writings. Apparently in favour of Luce’s interpretation is Berkeley’s remark that Plato’s Ideas are to be understood as ‘the most real beings, intellectual and unchangeable’ and not ‘abstract ideas in the modern sense’. It does seem, from this rider that Berkeley thought he could both admit Plato’s Ideas and continue to reject ‘abstract ideas’ in the sense in which he formerly rejected them. If so then perhaps he never did endorse the radical nominalism with which I have characterised his early philosophy. At all events there seems to be an inconsistency between holding that there are only particular things and admitting that certain ‘abstract things’ are ‘the most real’.38 Even if Berkeley’s last work is understood as inconsistent with his earlier strictures on abstract ideas, however, it is still broadly modern in much the same way as his earlier writing. Siris has a lengthy discussion of the mechanical philosophy. As in De motu, Berkeley argued that the mechanical philosophy does not really explain the world and does not tell us the true causes of phenomena. For that we need to turn to metaphysics. Nowhere indeed does Berkeley seem more of a modern Platonist than in a passage from Siris: The Pythagoreans and Platonists had a notion of the true System of the World. They allowed of mechanical causes, but actuated by soul or mind … they understood physical causes in a right sense: they saw that a mind infinite in power, unextended, invisible, immortal, governed, connected and contained all things: they saw that there was no such thing as absolute space: that mind, soul, or spirit truly and really exists: that bodies exist only in a secondary and dependent sense.39

36

See § 335. Selections from Berkeley, 6th edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), p. 326 n. 2. 38 Siris, § 327. 39 Ibid., § 266. 37

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At these points Berkeley was as much a modern Platonist as Leibniz had been. Their common Platonism is indeed more extensive than I indicate here. More might be made, for instance, of their shared view that minds or spirits are made in the image of God. But I focus here on two fundamental assumptions about substance and causality.

LEIBNIZ AND BERKELEY: TWO PLATONIC ASSUMPTIONS According to Berkeley, as well as Leibniz, the true substances or ultimate beings in the universe must be true unities. Berkeley later acknowledged the Platonic source of this requirement: ‘According to the Platonic philosophy, ens and unum are the same’.40 Only spirits meet this requirement, according to Berkeley. ‘A Spirit’, he wrote in the Principles, ‘is one simple, undivided, active being’.41 Berkeley, like Leibniz, makes use of the same Platonic argument for saying that these fundamental entities, being indivisible, are ‘indissoluble by the force of nature’ and in that sense are ‘naturally immortal’.42 If he had reservations about the strength of the argument, as Descartes and Leibniz had, Berkeley did not mention them. It is the premise of the argument, however, that is of special interest in the present context. For there is an important sense in which Berkeley, like Leibniz, was a monadologist in that he believed the universe was made up of simple indivisible things. The author of Siris, indeed, was happy to talk of the spirit, insofar as it was a self, as a ‘monad’.43 But the point does not depend on his willingness to use the term. From Berkeley’s perspective, a Leibnizian monad was the kind of abstraction to which he was specially opposed. Leibniz, for his part, held that Berkeley did not go far enough, and should have included not only spirits but what he called ‘monads’. But Leibniz, though insisting there were infinitely many monads in addition to human souls, nonetheless conceded that we can only understand what they are by analogy with our own soul. This is, however, the very point at which Leibniz engages in the kind of abstraction that leads, according to Berkeley, to unintelligible metaphysics. Despite this striking point of opposition between them Leibniz and Berkeley are, nonetheless, philosophers of the same stamp in other ways. Berkeley, in his Siris, recognises a fundamental distinction between two kinds of philosopher: Proclus, in his Commentary on the Theology of Plato, observes that there are two sorts of philosophers. The one placed Body first in the order of beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal. . . . Others, making all corporeal things

40

Ibid., § 346. Berkeley, Principles, § 27. 42 Ibid., § 141. 43 Siris, § 346. 41

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to be dependent upon Soul or Mind, think this to exist in the first place and primary sense, and the being of Bodies to be altogether derived from and to presuppose the existence of the Mind.44 I think Leibniz, as well as Berkeley and Plato, can be said to have been this second sort of philosopher, provided that ‘souls’ or ‘minds’ are understood as he understood monads, beings with sense and appetite though not necessarily with self-consciousness or reason. But, if we were to ask further in exactly what way Leibniz and Berkeley each thought that ‘the being of Bodies’ was derived from and dependent on Minds or soul-like things, we would probably find that their views were more different than they might at first appear. I cannot, however, go into that complex topic here. I return (briefly) to what Leibniz and Berkeley agreed about. I have mentioned the assumption about true unities and the shared view that the ultimate substances are soul-like things. A second and consequential view of Leibniz45 and Berkeley is that these soul-like things are the only true causes. Leibniz argued quite directly that all and only substances were causes. So it follows for him that only soul-like things are causes. Berkeley’s argument was less direct. He defined a ‘spirit’ as an active substance, which implies causal agency. He argued separately that there are no other causes. He wrote in his early notebooks, for instance: ‘I say there are no Causes (properly speaking) but Spiritual, nothing active but Spirit’.46 Again, in Siris, he wrote: ‘We have no proof, either from experiment or reason, of any other agent or efficient cause than Mind or Spirit’.47 This tendency to emphasise the role of mind in causation is linked by both of them to Plato. Both thought, as Plato had, that it was necessary to suppose a Mind as the first cause of the universe. They were, moreover, both critical of those materialistic philosophers who accepted that there was a Mind that controlled all things but then made no use of the Mind in explaining the world. Leibniz, as we saw earlier, wished to make use of a passage from the Phaedo where Socrates pours scorn on Anaxagoras for being overly preoccupied with materialistic explanations. The nub of his argument, however, seems to be that human behaviour needs to be explained in terms of final causes and not, for instance, entirely in terms of physiology. Berkeley cited the same passage in Siris 260. Leibniz and Berkeley, I have been claiming, shared some cardinal metaphysical doctrines about substance and causality. Others who shared these views could not square them with acceptance of the mechanical philosophy. Leibniz and Berkeley, however, thought they could. They argued that the scope of the mechanical philosophy was limited and sought, by articulating that scope, to make its acceptance compatible with a metaphysics that was anti-materialistic

44

Ibid., § 263. Leibniz wrote that ‘actions belong to individual substances’ (Discourse on Metaphysics, § 8) and so ‘everything that acts is an individual substance’. (L 502). 46 Philosophical Commentaries, § 850. 47 Siris, § 154. 45

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and to which minds and purposes were integral. Thus they had both had strategies for combining a modern commitment to the new sciences with the retention of a separate and deeper role for metaphysics.

LEIBNIZ AND BERKELEY: TWO COMPATIBILIST STRATEGIES. There are some similarities between the strategies adopted by the two philosophers for accommodating their Platonist metaphysics to the mechanical philosophy. They both agree, for instance, that the natural sciences do not tell us about the true ‘causes’ of things. For both of them this is linked with acceptance of Occasionalism in its negative aspect. Both agree that matter as conceived in mechanics does not contain within itself the power to initiate change. Leibniz, for instance, noted that, ‘certain of the Cartesians … think that things do not act, but … are occasions, not causes, and that things receive but do not bring about or produce anything’.48 And Berkeley noted that matter is defined in terms of certain properties, like solidity, bulk, figure and motion. But ‘solidity, bulk, figure, motion, and the like have no activity or efficacy in them, so as to be capable of producing any one effect in nature’.49 There is what might be called a ‘proto-Humean’ or ‘constant conjunction’ aspect to their accounts of what is ordinarily called causation. As Leibniz put it in his Primae veritates paper: ‘What we call “causes” are, in metaphysical rigour, merely concomitant requisites’.50 Of course, unlike Hume, Leibniz had a highly metaphysical account of true causality to complement his reductionist view of what is ordinarily called causation. And so did Berkeley: Cause is taken in different senses. A proper active efficient cause I conceive none but spirit; nor any action, strictly speaking, but where there is will. But this doth not hinder the allowing occasional causes … and more is not requisite in the best physics, i.e., the mechanical philosophy’.51 Occasionalism, in many respects, sits well with the mechanical philosophy and it is not surprising that it enjoyed a good deal of support and influence in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Leibniz and Berkeley were attracted to it. Though they both sought to distance themselves from the Malebranchean doctrine that God is the only true cause they agreed that God alone was the cause of our external perceptions. And they may each have owed some part of their compatibilist strategy to Malebranche. In particular they agree with Malebranche in excluding the investigation of true causes from the domain of physics. But, in other respects, their strategies are quite different because each has a very different philosophy of science. 48

‘On Nature Itself’, § 10. Principles, § 61. 50 A VI iv 1647. 51 Letter to Johnson, 25 November, 1729, cf. Principles, §§ 30–33, De motu, § 71. 49

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Berkeley’s philosophy of the empirical sciences is what would nowadays be called ‘instrumentalist’. Thus he allows the utility of using certain abstract terms in physics so long as it is not supposed that there is anything in the real world corresponding to them.52 This view of science is strongly linked in Berkeley’s mind not only with a certain scepticism but also with his view that it is for metaphysics to provide real explanations of the nature of things. He concludes De motu with a passage whose words he intended to be weighed: Only by meditation and reasoning can truly active causes be rescued from the surrounding darkness and be to some extent known. To deal with them is the business of first philosophy or metaphysics.53 The reference to the ‘surrounding darkness’ in this passage is, I believe, an allusion to Plato’s Cave.54 Leibniz, by contrast, thought there were real forces in nature corresponding to notions that appeared in the formulae used by the physicist. Unlike Berkeley, he thought that the natural sciences did explain phenomena. But, for Leibniz, the explanations of the natural sciences were incomplete, since it was necessary to make use of notions such as force that could not be made intelligible in accordance with the strictures of the mechanical philosophy. ‘Force’ needs to be understood, according to Leibniz, by analogy with sense and appetite and, for this reason, in terms similar to the concept we have of souls.55 But this takes us into metaphysics. Thus, though both Berkeley and Leibniz were modern Platonists with strategies for reconciling a Platonic metaphysics with an acceptance of the mechanical philosophy, their strategies were in the end very different. That such different strategies should have been found plausible by two such different philosophers I take to be evidence of the continuing vitality of Platonism in the early eighteenth century.

52

See Berkeley, De motu, § 28. Ibid., § 72. 54 Some confirmation of this is found in a parallel part of Berkeley’s Siris, where his ‘instrumentalism’ is expounded at some length and in similar terms, but where his acknowledgements of Plato and the Platonists are more explicit. See particularly Siris, § 263. 55 Leibniz, New System, § 3. 53

CHAPTER 17

Laurent Jaffro

Which Platonism for Which Modernity? A Note on Shaftesbury’s Socratic Sea-Cards

I will not speculate about Shaftesbury’s alleged Platonism in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Of course it cannot be denied that the philosophy of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) might sound Platonic, especially when it makes use of such topics as the scale of beauties in The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody.1 Besides, it is well known that Shaftesbury’s criticism of Hobbes drew heavily on the Cambridge Platonists; his first publication was a preface to Benjamin Whichcote’s Select Sermons in 1698, in which he restated the claims of moral realism against the mercenary spirit of Hobbesian ethics.2 However the so-called Platonism of Shaftesbury is mainly a reconstruction through which commentators claim to understand Shaftesbury better than he understood himself. For he used to view himself as a disciple of Socrates; in his opinion being a disciple of Socrates meant that he was not a Platonist but a Stoic, insofar as the Stoics drew the ultimate consequences of the Socratic idea of virtue as knowledge. In this paper, I put aside the controversial question of Shaftesbury’s own Platonism and I deal only with Shaftesbury’s own conception of Platonism, which is quite different. As for the issue of ‘modernity’, I will follow the same method. The concept of modernity is as old as modernity itself. The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns used to be one of Shaftesbury’s favourite topics of

1 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. L.E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 243 f. 2 Shaftesbury’s edition of Select Sermons is based on a transcript by the Unitarian Thomas Firmin. This material is kept in the Shaftesbury Papers, London, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), 30/24/24/16–17.

255 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 255–267. © 2008 Springer.

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conversation. It would be no exaggeration to say that the subject with which we concern ourselves at present was previously well handled by Shaftesbury himself. He faced our question: does modernity draw on Platonism? As I will suggest, his own answer might be put this way: modernity should, but it cannot. I focus on a very little known manuscript, the Design of a Socratic History. This 166 page autograph document is kept in the Public Record Office in London and is still unpublished.3 I begin with a brief description of the manuscript. After that, I will distinguish several acceptations of ‘Platonism’ according to Shaftesbury. Then I will finish with a glimpse of Shaftesbury’s views on Platonic dialogue in his published work, the Characteristics. My main point, contrary to a long prevailing interpretation, is that Shaftesbury was less interested in Plato’s doctrine than in his art of writing and poetics of philosophy.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE MANUSCRIPT The Design of a Socratic History is the draft of a book on Socrates which Shaftesbury never completed. The third Earl was dithering over several possible titles for his projected book: ‘Chartæ Socraticæ’ or ‘Sermones Socraticæ’ or, in English, ‘Socratic History’ or just ‘Socratics’. This refers to Horace’s famous phrases in his Art of Poetry—to which I will come back below. We should carefully distinguish between the titles of the projected book (to put it in English) Socratic Papers or Socratic Discourses, and the title of the project itself which was Design of a Socratic History. This distinction is important since the manuscript contains two very different kinds of materials: first, some materials which pertain directly to the projected book; second, many materials which refer to the writing of the book and consist of instructions, notes, ideas, which are essential to the design of the work, but which the work once completed would have dropped. In this project on which Shaftesbury had been working from 1703 to 1707, the purpose was to examine the ancient testimonies and especially to compare Plato’s Socrates to Xenophon’s (long before Johann Jakob Brucker)4 in order to 3 The manuscript (PRO, 30/24/27/14) has not received the attention that it deserves. Lawrence E. Klein devotes a few pages to discussing the Design of a Socratic History in his Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early 18th Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 107–111. Robert Voitle does not mention it in his biography, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University, 1984). I have dealt with the Shaftesburian portrait of Socrates in my essay, ‘Le Socrate de Shaftesbury. Comment raconter l’histoire de Socrate aux Modernes’, in Ettore Lojacono (ed.), La fortuna di Socrate in occidente (Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2004), pp. 66–90. The edition of the English text is scheduled in the standard edition of Shaftesbury’s writings, which is still in progress: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, in English with German Translation, W. Benda, G. Hemmerich, W. Lottes, et al. (eds) (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981–). 4 According to Louis-André Dorion, Brucker, in his Historia Critica Philosophiæ (1742–1744), was the first to proceed to a systematic comparison of Plato’s et Xenophon’s testimonies on Socrates. See L.-A. Dorion, ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Xenophon, Mémorables (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, CUF, 2000), pp. viii–ix.

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piece together the historical Socrates. The plan for such a task was very simple: a first part (or ‘book’) would deal with the historical Socrates; a second part would be devoted to the fabulous Socrates. As Shaftesbury puts it in the manuscript: Idea of this Collection of following Tracts. — The Reason of the Separation of this [second] Book from ye former. that History. this Apocrypha’. & only Certain Dialogues & Exercizes of Witt & learning differently and with more or less Truth from Friends, from Enemyes-Friends Xenophon Plato … — Enemyes Aristophanes Atheneus Lucian.5 The first part was supposed to contain a preface and a Life of Socrates, followed by translations of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Xenophon’s Apology, with notes and commentaries. The second part was expected to be a series of translations from Xenophon (Economics and Convivium), Aristophanes, Plato’s Convivium, Apology, Crito and Phædo, with introductions, commentaries and notes. Xenophon was regarded as the true historian of Socrates, while Plato was responsible for the fabrication of a legend.6 The translations from Plato and Xenophon are not even drafted in the manuscript. They were simply postponed and were never completed.7 The substance of the manuscript consists of introductions, discourses and notes, on the one hand, and on the other hand of developments which set out the ‘notion’ or the ‘idea’ of the work. This idea of the work draws on a topic which is a classic of Roman Stoicism:8 the name of Socrates will be forgotten and the Socratic light will vanish in a moment. Modernity is on the verge of complete oblivion. As Shaftesbury puts it, only a ‘noble genius’ could ‘lay hold of a small track of light from the Ancients’.9 According to the third Earl, modern conversation may well hint at Socrates, but only as a legendary figure: That when I have consider’d I have often thought it a thing very absurd & unaccountable to hear Antient Names quoted with great Authority when at the same time there was no manner of right understanding or Notion of those talkd of. and whereas a Man would be rediculouse [sic] who should in any grave concern bring instances of Cadmus or Orpheus; yet it is not in itself less absurd when Socrates or any such, being quoted; neither the person that 5 PRO, 30/24/27/14, p. 16 (Shaftesbury’s original pagination). My transcriptions are literal; misspellings and odd punctuation are kept. Further references to this manuscript (hereafter referred to as Socratics) are given after quotations in the text. 6 See Socratics, pp. 34–35: ‘Plato, for Fact, no farther to be relyed on than either prov’d in other Authors (therefore all those references necessary from the Apology & other Pieces to the Pieces of Xenoph [sic]) or otherwise when nothing either of ornamt. to his Dialogue Style, Philosophy or the Character of Socrates as a Hero and Divinely inspired comes on his way so that the thing is indifferent.’ 7 It is to be noted that the torch was in a way taken up by Shaftesbury’s younger brother, Maurice Ashley, who was to publish a translation from Xenophon, Cyropædia: or, The Institution of Cyrus (London, 1728). 8 See Marcus Aurelius, Meditations to Himself, VII, 19. 9 Socratics, p. 82.

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quotes nor any of the standers by yt hear, have any Notion who Socrates was & understand & conceive his Story as rediculouslly & fabulously as that of Cadmus or Orpheus.10 One might say that this is the same old story of the decay of liberal education. But Shaftesbury was not satisfied with deploring this decay; he tried to remedy the neglect of ancient philosophy in modern conversation. Therefore he decided to put Xenophon and Plato into English and to write some modern Memoirs of Socrates. Several times in the manuscript Shaftesbury mentions another version of the projected book, this one in Latin, which would have been aimed at scholars.11 But his priority was obviously to popularise in English the history of Socrates. This was an avant-garde project; for it is well known that there is a Platonic and Socratic revival during the eighteenth century, from the 1730s onwards, especially in dialogue-writing. Shaftesbury might be regarded as a forerunner of this revival.12 It should be noted that Shaftesbury’s use of ancient texts is always direct. He quotes occasionally Marsilio Ficino,13 Ralph Cudworth, Thomas Stanley and ‘Harry Stephens’ (Henry Estienne) for their philological skill as commentators, historians or editors, but he regards them more as competitors than as sources. The stylistic register at which Shaftesbury is aiming in his translations is that of the ease and fluency of fashionable conversation; this is why he thinks that he should prepare himself reading women’s writings, especially French. I quote his instructions to himself: To make a Collection of all sorts of Particles & elegant conjunctives & Connective expressions (so necessary to imitate the happy Chain & continued Tread of the Greek) from ye polite Women & also from them all those asseverations in ye stead of Oaths, τòν δι´α &c. especially remember in ye House of Lords.14 Not only to read those Luxuriant writers15 but even on ye account of Style some of ye politer Novells as Dutchess of Cleves or those best translated or wrote in English. and this cheifly [sic] for the Narration & way of translating

10

Ibid., p. 2. See for instance this passage (Socratics, p. 74, crossed out): ‘To remember at the End of ye Book (after Finis) an Advertisment (of ye Printer to ye Reader) that ye Translator’s design being only publick good of Learning if any Lover of this kind will transmitt any remark so as to give light to any passage it will be gratefull & in a Latin Edition design’d ye person’s name be with acknowledgmt mention’d’. 12 See Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment. Theology, Æsthetics, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 163–189. See also Kevin J.H. Berland, ‘Didactic, Catechetical, or Obstetricious: Socrates and 18th-Century Dialogue’, in K.L. Cope (ed.), Compendious Conversations: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dialogue (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 93–104. 13 Ficino’s preface to his Plato is quoted in Socratics, p. 34; I quote this passage below, p. 10. 14 Socratics, p. 52. 15 Here Shaftesbury has Dryden’s prefaces in mind. 11

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Ces Entretiens (in ye Convivium especially) in ye Commentaryes; wch have so much of that air & ye more can be given ye better. & for this reason too, to learn the use of sayd he, sayd she, answer’d he, replyed he, wch go so ill in English, & and are so hard to manage without falling into ye contemptible Style: on wch account ye Name of ye Partyes must (I beleive [sic]) be very often repeated, & other turns taken.16 Shaftesbury wanted to put the Memorabilia of Xenophon into an English version of the language of Madame de Lafayette. This brings me to a new question: which style suits a popularisation of the history of Socrates? The manner of writing which fits this project is the ‘simple style’. I borrow its definition from the Characteristics: The simple manner, which being the strictest imitation of nature, should of right be the completest in the distribution of its parts, and symmetry of its whole, is yet so far from making any ostentation of method that it conceals the artifice as much as possible, endeavouring only to express the effect of art under the appearance of the greatest ease and negligence.17 The simple style in philosophy must be opposed to the sublime and to the methodical style as well. Unlike the sublime, the simple manner sticks to ordinary conversation. Unlike the methodical, it does not make a show of its art and method. Plato is a good example of the sublime; the methodical (or didactical) style prevails in Aristotle; Xenophon is the embodiment of the simple or ‘natural’ manner of writing. The point is that this natural style is as artful as the methodical. The simple style looks like a conversation, but it should not be reduced to a conversational style insofar as it conceals its own deeper reasons and significations. It seems to be as superficial as ordinary (that is to say, courtly) conversation, but it is not the same superficiality. With the simple style, the surface opens to a concealed depth. This is the reason why this manner of writing is the best way to address at the same time two different categories of readers: first, the fashionable society; second, the true philosophers, namely those who know that Christianity is a tale. There are many remarks in the manuscript on Socrates in which it is clear that Shaftesbury was well aware that philosophy must have recourse to some rhetoric. This is obvious in the following passage: To review the Work & the translations. particularly so many severall times; in severall Considerations & under severall Ideas, as first with Respect to the Devout, the Polite the Scoffers & those yt Catch at any Redicule [sic]. The Learn’d (to whome certain necessary Historicall Relations it simply told will seem impertinent) and the Unlearn’d (to whome these are necessary).

16 17

Socratics, p. 108. Characteristics, ed. L.E. Klein, pp. 115–116.

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And in ye next place to review in the same manner Plato’s translation in ye Idea of Plato’s Style & Character viz. Sublime, & Xenophon’s in his viz. Simplicity. remembering this in particular of Xenoph. viz. his facetiousness & good Humour wch lyes in a manner conceal’d.18 Xenophon’s omnipresence and his evident primacy over Plato in the Design of a Socratic History should be construed as a supremacy of the simple style. Shaftesbury views Xenophon not only as the best source for writing the history of Socrates, but also as the best model for the very style of this writing. Does it mean that he depreciates Plato? Yes, in a way. But such a statement should be carefully qualified, as I will soon suggest. The simple style is intended to allow a multilevel (if I may say so) communication. It has the advantage of addressing several levels of reading through a single communication: Allways to remember the Gt Mysteryes wch must remain Misteryes [sic] & think not yt wee are writing to Philosophers & those Philosophers amongst ye rest who know Necessity the Nature of Evill — Providence particular & generall. for to whome must not these things of necessity remain a Mistery? — Therefore examine & judg of every Paragraph with respect to 3 sorts. (1) the Superstitiouse of ye finer sort. (2) the morallists of a looser kind & avers to Platonism &c. (3) and the Polite people not Schollars or Learnd but Lovers of Notion & Language.19 There are three categories of readers. The priority of Socratics was to address the third one (‘polite people, not scholars’). Even if the book would silently address the philosophers (those who know that providence is not a person and that there is no real evil in nature), it is not written for them. At the same time, the book should protect itself against the prejudices or the ‘superstitious of the finer sort’ who are not the orthodox censors nor Shaftesbury’s overt enemies, but his latitudinarian friends who stick to a liberal interpretation of Christianity. As for the ‘moralists of a looser kind’, they are those who were criticised by Christian Platonists. The first of these moralists is Hobbes. Here we have a definition of Platonism. In this general sense, Platonism is realism and especially moral realism which should be opposed both to the divine command theory and to conventionalist accounts or morality. Shaftesbury considers that the Ancients were, as he puts it, ‘happily knowing’ insofar as they were moral realists. I quote: ‘As the Antients excell us in Policy and Government, so in the knowledge of this sort (viz. Morralls [sic]) they were not less happily knowing.’ In the margin of the manuscript, Shaftesbury adds this significant note: ‘Take care of the objection, viz. the Morall of the Gospell.’

18 19

Socratics, p. 76. Ibid., p. 53.

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THREE PLATONISMS Now we are able to distinguish three different meanings of ‘Platonism’. 1. There is Platonism in the general sense, that is: (a) Moral realism and a cognitivist account of morality. In this sense ‘Platonism’ does not consider morality as subordinate to religion or politics. Morality is primarily a matter of knowledge, not of obedience. Hobbes is an antiPlatonist since he claims that moral properties are relative to conventions, whether human or divine. (b) Also, this sense of ‘Platonism’ may include a diffuse pantheism or at least a naturalism which is common to many schools in ancient philosophy. Shaftesbury is a Platonist in this general sense. But he is convinced that, because of Hobbist propaganda, modernity is at odds with Platonism in this sense. 2. We have Platonism as Plato’s doctrine, to be distinguished from Socrates’s views: ‘Plato is to be consider’d as writing for Socrates sometimes but often for himself and his own Notions of Education Maxims Philosophy &c.’ Another passage: Remember to make a kind of Comparison between Plato and Xenoph [sic]. Plato … so taken up with Sublime & Mystical things & in his Poetick raptures perpetually looses himself as to wt regards the Character of Socrates not only putting things in his Mouth utterly far from him: but making him sometimes an absolute Sceptick (whence the Claim of Sextus Empericus and ye Academicks … Sometimes a Sophist & Caviller. Sometimes a Poet & Vates in divine fury. doing things wholly out of his Character.20 According to Shaftesbury, Plato’s doctrine is close to Pythagoras’s. In particular, Shaftesbury distinguishes between a Socratic ‘practical’ core in Plato and what he calls ‘higher speculations’ or ‘metaphysical’ or even mystical concerns.21 But this mysticism does not obliterate Plato’s relevance for the history of ancient philosophy: That however the Stream be mixt yet there is a pleasure in Drawing from Plato as near the fountain head. so did other great Philosophers (not naming either Epict. Marcus or any of ye Stoicks) that were not Platonists & that perhaps dissented from him in the rest of his Philosophy & higher Speculations: but that own’d Socrates, & deriv’d from him as their Cheif.22 Concerning this second sense of Platonism, even though Shaftesbury claims that Plato’s interpretation of Socrates is distorted by Platonic doctrines, this should be carefully qualified. I will not give a detailed account of Shaftesbury’s reading of

20

Ibid., p. 35. Shaftesbury distinguishes ‘teaching Moralls’ from ‘philosophizing & reasoning’ (Socratics, p. 111). 22 Ibid., p. 78. 21

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Plato, but only one particular instance: the interpretation of the Socratic demon. According to the manuscript, Plato gives a character of divinity to Socrates’s demon and to Socrates himself: The aim of Plato to give a Character of Divinity to Socrates. … ye τò δαιµóνιον directly Θεó , by Plato himself. See Alcibiad. 1 pag. 443. L. 16 [First Alcibiades, 105b, 105e].23 But Plato does not completely yield to a mystical interpretation of the demon. He puts stress on the fact that the demon is a sign and more precisely an inhibiting signal within a political context. About Plato’s Apology, Shaftesbury has this shrewd remark: The τò δαιµóνιον [the demonic] is call’d τò το‹ Θεο‹ σηµεπ ον [the divine sign].24 & thus all along yt Idea wch even Plato gives is not of a Particular Dæmon or Genius, but a communication from God himself immediatly. & in the following lines he shews that he had not the Sign (to restrain him from his µεγαλογαρíα [fine talk]25, … and he renders a reason why he had not (in ye same manner as Xenophon …) so yt this is rationall & accountable even here wth Plato.26 Shaftesbury carefully separates the Platonic and Xenophontic accounts of Socrates’s demon from later reconstructions such as those of Plutarch or Apuleus. Plato resists in this particular case his own general inclination to mysticism: Remember as to ye Oracle of Delphos the Commendation of ye Oracle & Priests (upon the Hypothesis of Human Policy & nothing supernaturall) the assistance given to all the Wise men & Founders of Republicks … Now the oracle pronounc’d in Socrates favour may (upon this Hypothesis) have a double reason. First yt Socrates was really so good and wise & as such they had correspondance with him as with Lycurgus &c. & in ye next place that He being all along carefull to avoid ye Character of irreligion so universally at yt time imputed to ye Philosophers (as particularly Anaxagoras a little before Protagoras at that very time & in reallity to all ye Naturall Philos. & Sophists) to prevent this he was ever carefull of outward religion & therefore advic’d consulting of the Oracle Sacrafize &c. (on wch account he might have favour) & constantly taught this to his Disciples whence that constant Character of

23

Ibid., p. 66. Shaftesbury is referring to Plato’s Apology, 40b. 25 To understand what Shaftesbury has in mind here, we must refer to his comments on the title of Xenophon’s Apology: ‘The Title apt to cause mistake: προς τους δικαστας not Xenophon’s appeal or apology to them; but Socrates’s w ch is contain’d in it, & where his Speech to ye Judges is inserted: from w ch part it has the Name of Apology. tho really it be also an Apology from Xenophon himself who rectifyes other Apologyes & owning (as may be perceiv’d) the truth of Plato’s Apology as to the Main he writes this to prevent the Objection of Magnificent speaking the µεγαλογαρíα of Socrates so set out by Plato & others’ (Socratics, p. 8). 26 Socratics, p. 62. 24

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Piety yt runs through the Life & writings of Xenoph. that of Plato’s going farther by what he drew from Chaldea Egypt Pythagoras &c.27 Xenophon’s opinion therefore plain to be gather’d by the diligent Enquirer. Plato’s different. But both Xenophon & even Plato himself utterly contrary to a particular Dæmon distinct from the Great God of ye World. Now on this ground, one may introduce this discours with Xenophon’s opinion, & say all yt is necessary (& enough for ye Wise) under this shelter of Xenophon’s our cheif Author’s Opinion. afterwards wee may speak of Plato’s Opinion; & afterwards of the succeeding Platonists (who gave so exceedingly into those Notions) & then Apuleus (the Magician) Plutarch ye Dæmonist &c.28 3. The last sense of ‘Platonism’ is Plato’s achievement as a poet. Stylistic concerns and the art of writing are very important in Plato. Shaftesbury is obviously a disciple of Plato in this special sense, to which I will get back at the end of this paper.

A MELANCHOLY CONCEPTION OF MODERNITY Shaftesbury gave up his Socratic project in 1707. At that time he was preparing the publication of A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, which, in 1711, would be the opening essay of the Characteristics. He was then committed to political and religious controversies and less interested in philology. But we can find an echo of the Design of a Socratic History in the third essay of the Characteristics, Soliloquy or Advice to an Author, which was first published separately in 1710. In this essay, Shaftesbury considers reason as an inward discourse and applies this Stoic conception of reason to the formation of writers. He recommends modern writers to practice a preparatory discipline of the self, which consists of a secret dialogue with oneself. Since ‘our thoughts have generally such an obscure implicit language that it is the hardest thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly’, the apprentice writer ought to use a ‘vocal looking-glass’ in order to make explicit the evaluations that are silently embedded in ‘fancies’ or ‘imaginations’ and in the spontaneous use of language. The main aim of that ‘self-discoursing practice’ is to reduce our mental representations to what they actually consist of, or, to put it in Stoic terms, to transform our mental representations into cognitive or adequate representations. A representation is cognitive or adequate when, pured of any parasitic evaluation, it does not exceed that which it represents and makes us know the object and only the object. For instance, a cognitive representation of the death of a friend should not include the claim that death is an evil. Shaftesbury draws on that somewhat exotic view in order to suggest a new scheme for the education of writers. 27 28

Ibid., pp. 66–67. Ibid., p. 67.

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In Soliloquy or Advice to an Author, the communication of ideas and the writing of books are viewed as a particular case of what the Roman Stoics used to call duties or offices. According to the Stoics, all social duties and relations are to be prepared by a correct application of our judgment, a right appraisal of representations. This is why Shaftesbury advocates the practice of what he calls ‘home regimen’ or ‘self-discourse’ as the exact opposite of the modern art of essay-writing or autobiography which was embodied by Montaigne’s Essays. Modern writers publish their own readings and more generally their ethical training and the fashioning of their selves; they show to the public what they should keep for themselves. To put it briefly, in Soliloquy Shaftesbury sets out the method and theory of what he has practised in his marvellous private notebooks, the Ασκηµατα (Exercises),29 which follow the example of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. I deal now with that passage in Soliloquy in which Shaftesbury re-uses some materials from the manuscript of the Design of a Socratic History. The passage begins with an interpretation of Horace’s famous declaration in his De Arte Poetica: Scribendi recte, sapere est et principium et fons Rem tibi Socraticæ poterunt ostendere Chartæ. [Wisdom is the origin and source of good writing This matter the Socratic pages can teach you.] Which Shaftesbury paraphrases by saying: The skill and grace of writing is founded, as our wise poet tells us, in knowledge and good sense, and not barely in that knowledge which is to be learnt from common authors or the general conversation of the world, but from those particular rules of art, which philosophy alone exhibits.30 I insist on this point: the expression ‘Chartæ Socraticæ’, the ‘Socratic pages’ to which Shafesbury refers quoting Horace, was first intended to be not only the motto but the title of his projected book on Socrates. Here in his Soliloquy he gives one instance of those Chartæ Socraticæ: Plato’s dialogues, as if they were not any more suspected of being less faithful and reliable that Xenophon’s writings. Plato’s dialogues are the ‘mimes’ or, as Shaftesbury puts it, the ‘characterised discourses’, which writers should use as ‘mirrors’ or ‘exemplars’. They are the best model for a philosophical education, the ideal ‘sea-cards’ (here Shaftesbury is playing upon the word chartæ), that is to say the philosophical maps by which Horace was guided on the ocean of poetry: Thus much for antiquity and those rules of art, those philosophical sea-cards by which the adventurous geniuses of the times were wont to steer their course and govern their impetuous muse. These were the chartæ of our Roman master poet, 29 This two volume manuscript is also kept in the Public Record Office, 30/24/27/10; imperfect and partial edition by Benjamin Rand in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900). See my French annotated translation, Exercices (Paris: Aubier, 1993). 30 Characteristics, p. 87.

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and these the pieces of art, the mirrors, the exemplars he bids us place before our eyes. — Vos exemplaria Græca/Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna [‘You should handle Greek examples by night, you should handle them by day’].31 But this model is obsolete. Why? It is obsolete because a Platonic dialogue is a mime, which draws on the existing social forms and in particular on conversation. As such, a Platonic dialogue today would be a representation of modern manners, that is to say, of Christian ceremonies. This is a plain dilemma against that ancient manner of writing which we can neither well imitate nor translate, whatever pleasure or profit we may find in reading those originals. For what shall we do in such a circumstance? What if the fancy takes us and we resolve to try the experiment in modern subjects? See the consequence! — If we avoid ceremony, we are unnatural; if we use it, and appear as we naturally are, as we salute and meet and treat one another, we hate the sight. — What is this but ‘hating our own faces’?32 In short, the Platonic dialogues were a picture of simplicity. They were connected to a form of conversation and manners which modernity has lost and which English Whigs admire but fail to restore. The prevailing model in Europe is not the Greek republic, but the Christian monarchy with its formalities.33 In the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, Shaftesbury stands as a defender of the Ancients, but a melancholy one, whose motto is: the golden age is over. If the Moderns were capable of imitating the Ancients, they should do so because the Ancients provide the best models; but the Moderns are not even capable of such an imitation. This melancholy conception of modernity which is set out in Soliloquy should be viewed as a serious rectification of the initial Socratic project. If we pay attention to Shaftesbury’s teaching in Soliloquy, we should interpret the Chartæ Socraticæ as a model for a philosophical education. At the time of the writing of his Design of a Socratic History, Shaftesbury was considering that it was possible to frame such a model for the English cultivated readers and even for ladies. He was still convinced that he could adapt the ancient ‘Socratic pages’ to fit the needs of modern readers. He was determined to provide modernity with new English Chartæ Socraticæ. But he did not complete the project; and then in place of it he put the ancient model as worthy of being imitated and at the same time as de facto inimitable, as he makes it clear in his Soliloquy.

31

Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., pp. 91–92. 33 It is to be noted that Shaftesbury has recourse to dialogue-writing in The Moralists. A Philosophical Rhapsody (1709), but this dialogue between Philocles and Theocles is related by Philocles within a letter to Palemon, which creates a sort of alienation effect. Shaftesbury often insists on letter-writing as the modern genre par excellence. See Lawrence E. Klein, ‘The Theory and Practice of Letter-Writing in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’, in Giancarlo Carabelli and Paola Zanardi (ed.), Il gentleman filosofo. Nuovi saggi su Shaftesbury (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2003), pp. 127–141. 32

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This is why in Soliloquy Shaftesbury puts aside the question of the true history of Socrates and of the best sources for writing this history. He focuses on the poetics of the dialogue as a genre and he presents Plato as a poet.34 Now Platonic ‘fables’ are not considered any more as being apocryphal stories concerning Socrates, but are valued as artful representations of the ‘philosophical hero’. There was one passage in the manuscript of Socratics which pointed towards this new direction: What Idea to have of Plato, with what preparation come to read him. Dramatick Peices [sic] a Tragedy in the lofty Poetick Style & Fiction. How far regard to Truth in a Tragedy? the same in Plato, main Circumstances preserv’d in these pieces — in others that were no way historicall but meerly metaphisicall [sic] philosophicall Faults of Chronology. Plato ye Poet of Philosophers as Homer ye Philosopher of Poets. Panætius see Stanly.35 (Observe the Preface of Ficinus, to translate apart. Miscet frequenter gravissimo quodam Consilio utilia dulcibus… Furit enim interdum atque vagatur ut Vates etc.) Favourable signification of ye word Enthousiasme as to Diety. & in this Sense Plato a Noble Enthousiast.36 This last remark on the positive meaning of the word ‘enthusiasm’ (which at that time usually signifies ‘fanaticism’) is very important because it foreruns Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm which was to appear in 1708. Soliloquy sets out the idea of the inability of modernity to follow the ancient examples. This pessimistic conception leads Shaftesbury to develop a shrewd analysis of the structure of a Platonic dialogue: For here the author is annihilated, and the reader, being no way applied to, stands for nobody. The self-interesting parties both vanish at once. The scene presents itself as by chance and undesigned. You are not only left to judge coolly and with indifference of the sense delivered, but of the character, genius, elocution and manner of the persons who deliver it. These two are mere strangers, in whose favour you are no way engaged.37 In a letter, a treatise or an essay, there is a communication from the author to the reader. In the case of a dialogue, the communication from the author to the reader is suspended by the intervention of the conversation of literary

34 In Socratics (p. 50), commenting on Horace’s phrase, stipare Platona Menandro (‘packing Plato with Menander’, Satires, II, 3, 11), Shaftesbury writes: ‘Therefore again he shews yt nothing was more divine than Plato, or more usefull even to a Poet: wch place also may shew that Plato was reckon’d amongst the Poets.’ 35 Here Shaftesbury is referring to Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy. 36 Socratics, p. 34. 37 Characteristics, p. 90.

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characters. It is primarily a communication from one character to another. In this sense, the author remains behind the dialogue and is not represented by a particular character. This is the reason why Socrates cannot be Plato’s spokesman in the dialogues. Thus Shaftesbury’s interpretation of dialogue form as a means of concealment for the author rectifies his former reading of Plato on Socrates. Indeed Plato’s Socrates is not the historical Socrates, nor can he be reduced to Plato’s double: he is a fictional character. To summarise my argument, the reappraisal of Plato as a poet is a consequence of the depreciation of Plato as a philosopher. This is very clear in the manuscript when Shaftesbury sketches what could be his best defence of Plato: Those that would decry Plato, will object that he is…… [sic] & Enthousiastick. Fabulouse…… & full, of Prodigys, of…… treating things allegorically in Moralls that He is unsteady changeable tossing to & fro, transporting from one place into another & as it were into different regions & giving no time to rest or examine but filling the Mind with Visions Snatching it from one thing & hurrying it to another without any naturall transition. abrupt dissapointing. leaving off where there seems most need to pursue & falling into long (tho’ perhaps beautifull) Digressions without measure without bound in fury & in Transport — All this in some degree true. But then on the other side, wt Majesty! what Decorum! what Graces! wt…… … Homericall all this, truly poeticall & Pindarick … Thus also ye Objecters may say that He is puerile trifling, full of Sophistry, of Circumlocution, not concise in his Dialect & use of Logick…… But then on ye other side, what Politeness what demonstration of Humanity in Conversation, what Antidote to heat & Animosity wt Good Humour & Decent Mirth & Pleasantry throughout (opposite to Moroseness) what Pattern of Conversation? (as it were a Charm to soften rough Dispositions).38 To put it briefly, Plato’s testimony about Socrates is not faithful, but it is at least artful. To rehabilitate Plato, Shaftesbury puts the focus on what I have called the third sense of Platonism—the poetic writing of the dialogue—rather than on Platonic doctrines. Here that which might sound like a postmodernist attention avant la lettre to philosophical writing is actually the most classical awareness: That as Lucian said he us’d the Philosophicall Weapon Dialogue agt itself so Plato as to Poetry when in his Repub. he decryes it.39

38 39

Socratics, pp. 72–73. Ibid., p. 78. I thank David Leech for his help on an earlier draft of this paper.

CHAPTER 18

Douglas Hedley

Platonism, Aesthetics and the Sublime at the Origins of Modernity

In the shadow of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger envisaged modern philosophy as a baneful aberration derived from Plato’s momentous misconstrual of truth as veritas logica. Whatever the accuracy of his diagnosis, he rightly stressed an important continuity between Plato and the age of Descartes. The postmodern attack upon metaphysics is at heart a critique of Plato. While in Germany some of Heidegger’s pupils, most notably Gadamer, rejected or refined Heidegger’s relentless polemic against Plato, French Heideggerians such as Derrida pursued it, pleading against the procrustean limits of Plato’s legacy. Derrida’s argument for the primacy of writing over speech in his La pharmacie de Platon (1972) mirrors this general trajectory of the reversal of Platonism initiated by Nietzsche. The positivistic strand of twentieth-century philosophy, whether Viennese or Anglo-Saxon, was equally rancorous in its denunciations of Plato. Popper denounced Plato as the enemy of an ‘open society’ and advocate of a ‘closed society’ and the harbinger of the horrors of twentieth-century fascism and communism. Notwithstanding his collaboration with Whitehead and his admiration for Leibniz, Bertrand Russell’s seminal work on the theory of descriptions and method of logical construction in the first two decades of the twentieth century was fuelled by a fear of illicit Platonic hypostases. Of course, recent philosophy has included adherents of Platonism such as Bergson, Gadamer, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, but these have been counter-cultural forces. Behind the anti-Platonism of the twentieth century lies the explicit renewal of Platonism in the nineteenth century. Seminal nineteenth-century thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Cousin or Coleridge were expert and enthusiastic exponents of Platonism. Humboldt’s highly Platonic concept of ‘Bildung’ in the German

269 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 269–282. © 2008 Springer.

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University or Jowett’s Hellenised Oxford are instances of the pervasive impact of Platonic ideals upon the second half of the nineteenth century. Philosophers in the early twentieth century were often reacting against Platonic themes within nineteenth-century Idealism and Romanticism. Platonism still exerts its influence over contemporary culture, particularly through the persisting influence of Romanticism. Consider Charles Taylor’s work Sources of the Self (1989), in which he argues for the pervasive presence of Romanticism in contemporary self-consciousness. He is adamant about the ‘Romantic themes still alive in modernism, masked sometimes by the anti-Romantic stance of modernists.’1 Taylor remarks: I have been looking at modernism, its epiphanies and its counter-epiphanic thrusts, from a certain angle. I have seen them as changes wrought on the aspiration, which originates in the Romantic era, to recover contact with moral and spiritual forces through the exercise of the creative imagination. These sources may be divine, or in the world, or in the powers of the self. 2 The essays in this volume show that in considering the eighteenth-century Platonic legacy we should not forget the theological and poetical channels of Platonism. Poets such as Young and Akenside were a powerful channel of Platonic ideas to Coleridge and Wordsworth. Furthermore, the significance of the question of the status of Platonism for Church History meant that philosophers from Cudworth to Priestley discussed Platonism in the context of the validity or otherwise of the Christian appropriation of the Alexandrian Logos. Hence Gibbon’s quip that the Logos was ‘Taught in the School of Alexandria’ in 300 BC and ‘Revealed by the Apostle St. John in 97 AD’.3 The work of Galileo, Descartes and Newton and the establishment of the mechanical ontology of the New Science seemed to replace that web of myriad cognate Platonisms which had dominated the imaginations of antique/medieval/renaissance pagans, Jews, Christians and Muslims with a severely empirical and verifiable reality. The disenchantment and eventual abandonment of Plato’s legacy seemed the inevitable product of the victory of atomism and the expulsion of occult forces and sympathies. Many of the contributions of this volume analyse the inadequacies of such a simple picture. I wish to explore briefly one aspect of a Platonic influence upon the Romantics which still resonates within contemporary culture—the elevated Romantic view of the creative imagination. Unlike Heidegger’s denunciation of Plato’s deformation of knowledge into die Richtigkeit des Blickens (correctness of vision), Coleridge saw the ‘despotism of the eye’ as a specifically empiricist problem.4 1 Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 498. 2 Taylor, Sources, p. 490. 3 Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Contents. 4 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), I, p.107. See my Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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The paradox of scientific empiricism was its failure to do justice to experience on account of its experimental, scientific bias; whereas Plato’s avowal of music and mathematics was intended to attune the inquiring spirit to existence of an invisible noetic cosmos. Of course Plato famously banished the artists. Yet the paradox of the sublimity of Plato’s prose poetry was not lost on the Romantics.

THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION IN PLATONISM Aristotle famously chastises Plato as a philosopher for appealing to metaphors, and the Stagirite is clearly not a poet. Stephen Halliwell, in his magisterial The Aesthetics of Mimesis (2002) describes Plato’s view of art as that of a ‘romantic puritan’.5 This is an admirable expression of the uneasy tension in Plato between his severe ‘puritan’ critique of the arts and his own ‘romantic’ or poetic temperament. Plato himself wavers between the demand for knowledge conceived as articulate rational comprehension, which at least in principle can be taught (cf. Book seven of the Republic), and those aspects in the dialogues, especially the myths and the Seventh Letter, which suggest a view of knowledge as also eluding exhaustive definition. He is inclined to prefer the latter conception to the former. The locus classicus is the ‘heaven sent madness’ of the Phaedrus: But he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madman. (Phaedrus, 245a) One of the major tenets of Platonism is the conviction that there is a surplus of ultimate meaning that transcends any attempt to express it: the Good is ‘beyond being’. There is an element in Plato’s thought, in the Seventh Letter most famously, of the immediate insight or the intuitive vision upon which all ratiocination depends. And his myths evoke an experiential if not definitional knowledge. The classic expression is the image of the yearning of the winged soul in the Phaedrus 248–249, or the vision of love expounded by Diotima as recounted by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. These are those limits of reasoning where, in the occidental tradition, philosophy touches religion: Plato’s Good ‘beyond being’; and such inspired descendents of the Platonic sublime as Anselm on the id quo nihil maius cogitari potest or Kant on the sublime Würde of mankind. S.T. Coleridge was both a learned and innovative Platonist, acutely aware of medieval and modern forms of Platonism. His own view of the aesthetic imagination is very close to Theseus’s celebrated depiction of the poet in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream:

5 S. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, Ancient texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 26.

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Douglas Hedley The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. (Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. l. 100)

Shakespeare’s poet in a fine ‘frenzy’ is rooted in Plato’s Phaedrus. Wordsworth, too, is consciously drawing upon this tradition when he says in his Preface to Poems, 1815: [W]hat term is left to designate that faculty of which the Poet is ‘all compact;’ he whose eye glances from earth to heaven, whose spiritual attributes body forth what his pen is prompt in turning to shape; or what is left to characterise Fancy, as insinuating herself into the heart of objects with creative activity? – Imagination6 S.T. Coleridge, in his remarkable poem, Kubla Khan, published in 1816, picks up on this motif of poetic inspiration: For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of paradise. (Kubla Khan, 1.53–4) There is an ancient pedigree for this thought—even for the imagery of honey: For the poets tell us, I believe, that the songs they bring us are the sweets they cull from honey-dropping founts in certain gardens and glades of the Muses–like the bees, and winging the air as these do. And what they tell is true. For a poet is a light and winged and sacred thing, and is unable ever to indite until he has been inspired and put out of his senses, and his mind is no longer in him. (Ion, 534a–b) The Theseus passage is described by Jonathan Bate as ‘cardinal’ for the eighteenth century. Richard Hurd wrote that ‘in the poet’s world, all is marvellous and extraordinary’ and truth is perceived by the eye ‘when rolling in a fine frenzy’. Akenside in The Pleasures of Imagination presents the poet ‘with loveliest frenzy caught,/From earth to heaven he rolls his daring eye,/ From heaven to earth’.7 Yet Coleridge praised his old school master for teaching him that: Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because mores subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes.8 Coleridge was insistent that the secondary imagination ‘co-existing with the conscious will’9; the ideal poet diffuses ‘a tone and spirit of unity’10 and evinces 6

Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), p. 753. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 11. 8 Biographia Literaria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), I, p. 9. 9 Ibid., I, p. 304. 10 Ibid., p. 16. 7

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‘judgement ever awake and steady self possession’.11 The paradigm is Shakespeare himself, ‘no mere child of nature; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit’ but knowledge ‘habitual and intuitive wedded itself to his habitual feelings’. Coleridge, genuine Platonist, cannot rest with the familiar furor poeticus of eighteenth-century fashion but strives to strike a balance between the claims of rational judgement, intuition and inspiration.

ARISTOTLE AND PLOTINUS: ARS IMITATUR NATURAM? Aesthetics as a specific philosophical discipline is a very recent development in the history of thought. The term ‘aesthetics’ is a coinage of the eighteenthcentury German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. The very term seems to usher an age of subjectivism and expressivism, in contrast with the Classical and Medieval tradition of art as essentially representative: mimesis. Stephen Halliwell has eloquently attacked such a schematic view of the history of thinking about art and argues for ‘a significant degree of both historical and conceptual continuity’.12 He also warns against the misleading assumption any straightforward translation of mimesis as imitation, and to insist that mimesis in some of the key ancient thinkers often includes rather than excludes expression. Plato uses the language of mimesis in a large variety of philosophical contexts, not least in the Sun, Divided Line and Cave similes and in the creation myth of the Timaeus where ‘the world itself is a mimetic creation, wrought by a divine artist who, at one point in the Timaeus (55c6), is expressly visualized as a painter’. Hence the philosophers might be deemed for Plato ‘interpreters of a cosmic work of art’.13 Plato’s position on art is inherently ambivalent. One has both his critique of Homer and Hesiod and also his evident fondness for Pindar and the language of mysteries. Plato’s attack on the arts is based upon an epistemological argument concerning imitation, and a deep ethical anxiety regarding the unruly nature of passions. Artists are like Sophists in that they do not do adequate justice to the concerns of truth but take us two removes from reality and arouse disturbing and dangerous passions. Aristotle challenges this account: imitation (mimesis) is, he counters, quite normal and this is just how children learn. Over the question of the problematic passions aroused by the arts, Aristotle considers tragedy—the process of catharsis in tragedy is an instance of how an art form purifies the emotions and passions. Plotinus pursues Aristotle’s defence of art against Plato. Yet his approach is inspired by a thoroughly Platonic metaphysics. Rather than a distraction, art becomes an organ of philosophical knowledge. The artist creates on the basis of a vision of the forms, natura naturans rather than natura naturata, and his work represents this ideal noetic realm rather than 11

Ibid., II, p. 17. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, p. 8. 13 Ibid., p. 71. 12

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the empirical domain. The vision of the great poet, say, is the view of the world from the perspective of the inner eye. Plotinus argues that since artists possess beauty, they make up what is defective in things. For Pheidias too did not make his Zeus from any model perceived by the senses, but understood what Zeus would look like if he wanted to make himself visible. Plotinus thinks that ‘the material did not have this form, but it was in the man who had it in his mind even before it came into the stone; but it was in the craftsman, not in so far as he had hands and eyes, but because he had some share of art’.14 Plotinus is claiming that Pheidias employs his ‘active’ imagination in shaping his statues. Here is the probable source of Michaelangelo’s famous remark that he thought of his statue as buried in the marble. Coleridge insists that, ‘In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.’15 In another passage Coleridge writes that ‘the rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production’.16 These powers, that is to say, the Platonic ideas, are ‘mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time’17 and which must be conveyed symbolically.18 One might at this point consider Coleridge’s telling phrase ‘To admire on principle’. The etymology of the word admire is linked to the word ‘mirror’ via the Latin verb mirare (to look at): If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry! … you must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man.19 Coleridge uses the old Aristotelian principle that ars imitatur naturam (art imitates nature).20 His construal of this principle however is consistently Neoplatonic, with roots in Book ten of Plato’s Laws. That is to say, a copy tries to reduplicate nature (or natura naturata) whilst the imitation seeks the spirit of nature (natura naturans). A copy is a mere mimicry of the natural object, but an imitation is articulating the spiritual basis of nature in a manner unattainable by the mere copyist: the composition of the poem is among the imitative and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the SAME throughout the radically DIFFERENT, or of the different throughout a base radically the same.21 14

Plotinus, Ennead V. 8. 1. 16ff. Coleridge, Biographia, I, p. 85. 16 Ibid., II, p. 84. 17 Ibid., I, p. 97. 18 Ibid., I, p. 156. 19 Coleridge, On Poesy or Art in Miscellanies Aesthetic and Literary, ed T. Ashe (London: George Bell, 1885), p. 46. Cf. Coleridge, Collected Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 111, 4379. 20 Aristotle, Physics B, 2. St. Thomas, In Anal. Post. I. 1, 5. 21 Coleridge, Biographia, II, p. 72. 15

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The distinction between copy and imitation parallels the distinction between fancy and imagination. In both fancy and the copy the human mind remains subservient to the sensible world; in imagination and imitation the mind or artist is employing its prerogative to search the depths and a produce a living object by exploring the organising principles of natures: ideas. Hence ‘nature itself is to a religious observer the art of God’.22 Coleridge gives the same answer to the question about the status of art as Shakespeare. The poet is unlocking a realm which has been hidden by convention and everyday preoccupations. The poet, his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, glances from heaven to earth, into the natura naturans, and sees the world of nature as Divine art. Cudworth is cloquent on this Platonic theme: But now, in the room of this artificial book in volumes, let us substitute the book of nature, the whole visible and material universe, printed all over with the passive characters and impressions of divine wisdom and goodness, but legible only to an intellectual eye. For to the sense both of man and brute there appears nothing else in it but as in the other, so many inky scrawls, i.e. nothing but figures and colours. But the mind or intellect, which hath an inward and active participation of the same divine wisdom that made it, and being printed all over with the same archetypal seal, upon occasion of those sensible delineations represented to it, and taking notice of whatsoever is cognate to it, exerting its own inward activity from thence, will not have only a wonderful scene and large prospect of other thoughts laid open before it, and variety of knowledge, logical mathematical, metaphysical, moral displayed, but also clearly read the divine wisdom and goodness in every page of this great volume, as it were written in large and legible characters.23 Since the human mind ‘hath an inward and active participation of the same divine wisdom that made it’ it can interpret it with real insight. Stressing the innate power of the mind, Cudworth can write that ‘these things which we look upon as such real things without us, are not properly the modifications of bodies themselves, but several modifications, passions and affections of our own souls.’24 Edward Young in his Night Thoughts can put this idea as ‘And half create the wondrous world they see’.25 Wordsworth then writing of the sense sublime of ‘of something ‘far more deeply interfused’, can say Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, 22 Coleridge, ‘On Poesy or Art’, in Miscellanies Aesthetic and Literary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell, 1885), p. 44. 23 Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. S. Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 100. I am very grateful to Sarah Hutton for pointing to the Cudworth references. 24 Ibid., p. 149. 25 Young, Night Thoughts in The Complete Works, in Poetry and Prose of the Rev. Edward Young, ed. James Nichols (London: William Tegg, 1854) VI. 427. For the surprisingly powerful Platonic legacy in eighteenth-century English aesthetics, see Andrea Gatti, ‘Et in Britannia Plato’: Studi sull’ estetica del platonismo inglese (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria, 2001).

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Douglas Hedley And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear, -both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.26

ESEMPLASTIC POWER

′

In Biographia literaria, Coleridge defines a new word in English for the imagination, ‘“Esemplastic. The word is not in Johnson, nor have I met¸with it elsewhere.” Neither have I! I have constructed it myself from the Greek word εı V εn πλα´ττειn i.e. to shape into one; because, having to convey a new sense, I thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual import of the word, imagination’.27 Coleridge is employing the ancient categories of Plato’s Sophist (and Parmenides) identity and difference. He speaks of ‘the high spiritual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle, that all the parts of an organised whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts’.28 He also refers explicitly to Shakespeare’s ‘mind of Imagination’, or ‘power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others & by a sort of fusion to force many into one’.29 In the spirit of Plato’s Parmenides, and the Neoplatonic commentaries upon this locus classicus of speculation on the One and the Many, Coleridge exclaims in an early notebook: I would make a pilgrimage to the Deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make (me) understand how the one can be many! Eternal universal mystery! It is the co presence of Feeling and Life, limitless by their very essence, with Form, by its very essence limited – determinate – definite.30 It is clear, however, that Ralph Cudworth’s ‘plastic nature’ has influenced Coleridge’s terminology of the esemplastic force. Cudworth’s theory was aimed at those contemporary philosophers who ‘make the whole world to be nothing else but a mere heap of dust, fortuitously agitated ...’.31 The physical world is not properly understood as an aggregate of rubble but as mimetic: a ‘moving image 26 Wordsworth, ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour. 13th July 1798’, in Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), pp. 164–165. 27 Coleridge, Biographia, I, pp. 168–170. 28 Ibid., II, p. 72. 29 Coleridge, Collected Notebooks, III, 3290, Biographia, I, p. 85. 30 Coleridge, Collected Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), I, 1561. 31 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, ed. Harrison, 3 vols (London, 1845), I, p. 217.

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of eternity’—a world irradiated by translucent energy evident in the beauty and order of the cosmos as the immanent expression of a higher intelligible unity and hence symbolising it. The expression of the Divine mind in nature is gradual and evolving within, rather than the immediate stamp of the Divine from without. In a very early poem, before any contact with German Idealism, Coleridge writes: Life is a vision shadowy of Truth … Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o’er With untir’d gaze th’immeasurable fount Ebullient with creative Deity! And ye of plastic power, that interfus’d Roll thro’ the grosser and material mass In organizing surge.32 The use of ‘plastic’ in the sense of directive causality was quite common in the 1790s and derived largely from Cudworth. Cudworth was not particularly interested in aesthetics per se, but his influence upon the eighteenth century was seminal. Cudworth, while discussing musical resonances, observes: [T]here is yet a pulchritude of another kind, a more interior symmetry and harmony in the relations, proportions, aptitudes, and correspondencies of things to one another in the great mundane system, or vital machine of the universe, which is all musically and harmonically composed. For which cause the ancients made Pan, that is nature, play upon an harp.33 The Aeolian Harp was a pervasive image of the plastic power of imagination for the Romantics. Shaftesbury is a very important mediating figure since he explicitly links the language of plastic nature to the activity of the poet: Such a Poet is indeed a second Maker; a just PRMOTHEUS, under JOVE. Like that sovereign artist or universal plastic nature, he forms a whole, coherent and proportion’d in it-self, with due subjection and subordinacy of constituent parts.34 Yet Coleridge is also using the term ‘Esemplastic’ to imitate the German verb ‘einbilden’, and, in particular, Schelling’s use of the word to mean in-Eins-bilden (forming-into-one). The artist produces an art work in which the finite object constitutes an image (Bild) of the infinite. Schelling read Cudworth as a young theologian in the Tübingen Stift.35 Yet we should not think that here is a mere terminological influence. Cudworth’s ‘Life or Plastick Nature’ is the immanent and directive cause of organisation of individual beings, the teleological principle that ‘together with Mechanism, 32 Coleridge, ‘Religious Musings’, lines 414–425, in Coleridge Poems, ed. J. Beer (London, Dent, 1986), pp. 75–76. 33 Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, p. 99. 34 Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 4th edn (1728), I, p. 207. 35 M. Franz, Schellings Tübingen Platon-Studien (Göttingen: VanderHoeck & Ruprecht, 1966), pp. 22ff.

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which runs through the whole corporeal universe’. This concern with teleology in conjunction with mechanical explanation is clearly evident in Kant’s Third Critique, a work which exerted great influence upon the Post-Kantians like Schelling and Hegel. For Kant, nature must be judged teleologically and this requirement points to an ultimate reconciliation of nature and freedom. THE SUBLIME If the sense of the beauty of the cosmos has a Platonic lineage, so too is the mood of the awe which accompanies experiences of transcendence, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood ... In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.36 The Sublime was ostensibly an English discovery, both in the literal sense of English exploration of the Alps during the ‘Grand Tour’ and those mountains which filled their minds with ‘agreeable horror’, and the literary exploitation of Boileau’s translation of Longinus (1674). This tradition of John Dennis, Shaftesbury and Addison can be traced to the Cambridge Platonists, Thomas Burnet and his Theoria sacra telluris (1671).37 As a concept, the sublime, as the awe inspiring object of the imagination that is too great for comprehension, has a striking history. The text attributed to Longinus was not referred to in antiquity and there is no evidence that it was read until the Renaissance, and it was not until Boileau’s text of 1674 that it became a very popular work in Europe, especially evident in the aesthetics of Burke and Kant. But it also declined in significance through the wane of Romanticism. If Turner, Friedrich and Delacroix, in their depictions of storms and terrors and lonely spectators, were supremely sublime artists, Biedermeier was certainly not. The realism of the novels of Balzac, Dickens and Zola seem to represent a loss of the sublime which persisted into the following century alongside the loss of the Platonic mood of transcendence characteristic for so many of the Romantic artists.38

36 Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey,’ Complete Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 164. 37 Michael Jakob, Paesaggio e Letteratura (Geneva:Leo S. Olschki, 2005), pp. 116–119. 38 Whether postmodern retrievals of the sublime as in Lyotard represent a reversal of this general decline of the ‘sublime’ is far from clear.

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Longinus’s On the Sublime is a largely rhetorical text about the style and feeling of sublimity. The unknown author discusses the importance of grandeur or elevation in relation to the moral role of literature. While referring to Plato, he observes: . . . Nature has distinguished man, as a creature of no mean or ignoble quality. As if she were inviting us rather to some great gathering, she has called us into life, into the whole universe, there to be spectators of all that she has made and eager competitors for honour; and she has therefore from the first breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves. Thus within the scope of human enterprise there lie such powers of contemplation and thought that even the whole universe cannot satisfy them, but our ideas often pass beyond the limits that enring us.39 The idea of an elevation of the mind which transcends habitual human nature and indeed the physical cosmos is evidently Platonic, whether or not Longinus himself is a Middle Platonist. For all his apparent stern austerity as a moralist, Kant was sensitive to power of the concept of beauty. ‘Kant said that beauty was an analogon of good, Plato said it was the nearest clue’;40 το′ κα′λλoς means both the good and the fair. For the Platonic tradition, especially as mediated by Plotinus and Augustine, beauty is a means by which the mind can ascend to an all encompassing unity. The universe is Divine art—grounded in a transcendent order in which justice and love are fused. This has been a powerful motive for artists like Michelangelo. Beauty is truth for a later English poet, Keats, for whom ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth’.41 Kant thinks that beauty is the symbol of the morally good, ‘das schöne ist das Symbol des Sittlichen’.42 Kant specifically links the moral law with ‘sublimity’, a concept which emerges through the Platonism of British essayists such as Addison, Burke, or Gerard.43 When Kant takes up the idea of the sublime both in his early Observations on the feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1763) and in his seminal Critique of Judgement (1790), he evinces not just the fashionable language of the day but much of the Platonic strand underlying it: Now, in the immensity of nature and in the insufficiency of our faculties to take in a standard proportionate to the aesthetical estimation of the magnitude of its realm, we find our own limitation, although at the same time in our 39

Longinus, On the Sublime, XXXV, in Aristotle, The Poetics, Longinus on the Sublime, Demetrius on Style, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), p. 225. 40 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p. 339. 41 Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, in H.E. Rollins (ed.), Letters of John Keats (1958), vol. I, p. 184. 42 Kant, Critique of Judgement §59 trans. J.H. Bernard, (Hafner: New York, 1951), p. 198. 43 See Andrea Gatti, ‘Et in Britannia Plato’. Studi sull’estetica del platonismo inglese (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 2001).

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rational faculty we find a different, nonsensuous standard, which has that infinity itself under it as a unity, in comparison with which everything in nature is small, and thus in our mind we find a superiority to nature even in its immensity. And so also the irresistability of its might, while making us recognize our own (physical) impotence, considered as beings of nature, discloses to us a faculty of judging independently of and a superiority over nature, on which is based a kind of self-preservation entirely different from that which can be attacked and brought into danger by external nature. Thus humanity in our person remains unhumiliated, though the individual might have to submit to this dominion. In this way nature is not judged to be sublime in our aesthetical judgements in so far as it excites fear, but because it calls up that power in us (which is not nature) of regarding as small the things of life about which we are solicitous (goods, health, and life), and of regarding its might (to which we are no doubt subjected in respect of these things) as nevertheless without any dominion over us and our personality to which we must bow where our highest fundamental propositions, and their assertion or abandonment, are concerned.44 The Platonic sublime has its clear counterpart in Kant’s view that physical grandeur inspires a sense of the unique power of human beings as agents in the noumenal world, conforming to laws of pure reason. The sublime represents for Kant transcendence over those sensuous components that constitute mankind as a causally determined part of nature. In this sense, it belongs to a Platonically inspired theodicy. However weak the traditional arguments for Divine existence, Kant has no desire to shake off theism. And the sublime becomes a most apt expression of the elevation of the human spirit to the Divine, which pure practical reason cannot assume but emphatically implies. However much we may suffer as puny, physical creatures, rational spirits can raise themselves to an awareness of a higher vocation. At this point Kant is vehemently opposed to the radical French (or Dutch!) Enlightenment, which dissolved freedom into necessity and the soul into an exclusively material item within a world without providence. However coy his own metaphysical commitments may be, Kant’s dualism has stridently Platonic origins.

WORDSWORTH AND THE PLATONIC IDEA OF THE SUBLIME I wish to conclude with some thoughts about Wordsworth. Wordsworth certainly did not read Kant, but can apostrophise Duty as the ‘Stern Daughter of the Voice of God’, exclaiming in Kantian spirit: Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through Thee are fresh and strong.45 44 45

Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 28 trans. J.H. Bernard (Hafner: New York, 1951), p. 101. Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 386.

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Wordsworth was a not a student of philosophy but he had the advantage of Coleridge’s proximity. The Prelude is a poem which bears the indelible mark of their friendship and Coleridge’s influence upon his friend. The poem contains a number of experiences, ‘spots in time’ which confirmed Wordsworth in his vocation to become a poet. The culminating experience is one recalled from his student period when ascending Mount Snowdon. He wished to observe the sun rising but had a rather surprising experience instead. Walking through clouds, he is suddenly confronted with the moon. This constitutes one of the classic expressions of the experience of the sublime: A meditation rose in me that night Upon the lonely Mountain when the scene Had pass’d away, and it appear’d to me The perfect image of a mighty Mind, Of one that feeds upon infinity, That is exalted by an underpresence, The sense of God, or whatsoe’er is dim Or vast in its own being, above all One function of such mind had Nature there Exhibited by putting forth, and that With circumstance most awful and sublime.46 Yet The Prelude was only published in 1850. Even though it is now held to be Wordsworth’s masterpiece, it was largely unknown to the Romantics. Yet the Lyrical Ballads, starting with Coleridge’s tormented Ancient Mariner and finishing with Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, contained a great paean to: [. . .] a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.47 It is striking that a work which contained so much emphasis upon ordinary life should start and end with powerful archetypal poems of sublime experience. The mariner and his torments is an image, familiar to ancient Platonists, of the journey of the soul. Tintern Abbey, a popular ruin on the ‘sylvan Wye’ in that period, represents a holy place where the soul can be restored. As in a Caspar David Friedrich landscape, the symbolic is carefully lodged within a representation of a stark but sublime natural world.

46 47

Wordsworth, The Prelude, XIII, 66–76, ed. S. Gill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. 230–31. Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, in Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works, p. 163.

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Platonism at the Origins of Modernity has a deliberately paradoxical air. There was a continuous stream of Platonism for 2000 years which seemed broken by the advent of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. But, as the essays presented in this collection testify, Platonism is a Protean phenomenon. The Modern period fired both a renewal of Platonism as an alternative to the scholastic Aristotelianism dominant in the universities, and to mechanistic empiricism. Had natural philosophy, to paraphrase Keats somewhat, clipped the angel wings of the Platonic imagination and unwoven the rainbow? Pascal’s dread of ‘eternal silence of these infinite spheres’ reflected the traumatic experience of disenchantment inaugurated by the new science. Nietzsche envisaged Platonism and Christianity as providing a combined support for Western culture. The demise of both, as proclaimed by his madman, has left a profound vacuum. Theists like Descartes, Boyle and Gassendi were quite happy to yoke together the God of Christianity and the new mechanical science, but many Platonists were much more averse to implications of the scientific revolution, and sceptical of any easy rapprochement. The claim of the Lakeland poets to ‘see into the life of things’ by: an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, drew upon a tradition of thought stretching beyond seventeenth-century Cambridge to fifteenth-century Florence. The poet sees the realm of Being in the flux of Becoming: true poetry is the mimesis of reality and not of appearance. Perhaps the reinforcement of the achievements of Newtonian physics throughout the Eighteenth century encouraged a dimension of Platonism which has been one of its most potent legacies to contemporary consciousness, a doctrine latent in Plato and Neoplatonism, but only explicitly articulated in Renaissance and Romantic developments: the tenet of the special dignity of the creative imagination.48

48 Plato and Plotinus translations are taken from the Loeb Classical Library. I am very grateful to Sarah Hutton, Stephen Halliwell, Christoph Riedweg, Sylvana Chrysakopoulou, Chloë Cyrus Kent, Glenn Most, James Vigus and Geoff Dumbreck for various suggestions and advice.

Index of Names

Addison, Joseph, 278, 279 Akenside, Mark, 270, 272 Albertus Magnus, St., 16, 17 Alsted, Johann, 63 Alstree, Richard, 201 Ambrose, St., 16 Ammonius Saccas, 38 Apuleus, 262 Aristotle, 118, 139, 142, 271, 273 Astell, Mary, 128 Augustine, St., 13–14, 16, 22, 34, 164, 165, 168, 190, 279 Bacon, Francis, 63, 73, 194, 240 Balbus, Petrus, 16 Balzac, Honoré de, 278 Basil, 16, 164 Baumgarten, Alexander, 273 Ben-Israel, Menasseh, 107 Bergson, Henri, 269 Berkeley, George, 53, 239–253 Bessarion, Basilius, 31 Blumenberg, Hans, 10, 13, 14 Boehme, Jacob, 216–217 Boethius, 28 Boyle, Robert, 196, 218–219, 240, 282 Bruno, Giordano, 43 Bunyan, John, 137 Burke, Edmund, 278, 279 Burnett, Thomas, 278 Bussi, Giovanni Andrea, 10 Calcidius, 16 Calvin, John, 165

Campo, Heymericus de, 23 Chersterton, 54, 56 Chudleigh, Mary, 128 Cicero, 140, 165 Clerselier, Claude, 162–163, 167 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 270, 271–277 Colet, John, 47, 56 Comenius, John Amos 63–74 Copernicus, Nicholas, 11, 196 Corregio, Giovanni da, 33 Cromwell, Oliver, 107–108 Cudworth, Damaris, 128, 198–201, 203, 205 Cudworth, Ralph, 2, 5, 93, 100, 105, 106, 107, 109–110, 113–129, 131–145, 147–158, 203, 204, 205, 258, 275, 276–277 Culverwel, Nathanael, 94, 99, 102, 105, 108, 109, 110–111 Cumberland, Richard, 148 Cusa, Nicholas of, 9–29, 31, 67 Delacroix, Eugène, 278 Dennis, John, 278 Denys the Areopagite, 13, 14, 16–17, 18, 24, 25, 37–38, 90 Derrida, Jacques, 269 Descartes, René, 52, 73, 117, 132, 134–135, 137, 144, 159, 160–163, 164, 174, 177–191, 240–241, 250, 270, 282 Dickens, Charles, 278 Donne, John, 50 Dury, John, 63 Eriugena, John Scottus, 13, 16, 17, 18–21, 24, 25, 26

283

284

Index of Names

Espagnet, Jean d’, 197 Estienne, Henry, 258 Febure, Nicholas le, 197 Ficino, Marsilio, 3, 10, 31–44, 227, 229, 258 Fludd, Robert, 75Friedrich, Caspar David, 278, 281 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 269 Gale, Theophilus, 105 Galen, 165 Galileo Galilei, 196, 270 Gallus, Thomas, 17 Gassendi, Pierre, 166, 187, 240, 282 Geer, Louis de, 70 Gerard, Alexander, 279 Geulincx, Arnold, 164, 166, 167, 168–175 Gibbon, Edward, 270 Gibbon, Nicholas, 215–216, 218, 222 Glanville, Joseph, 198 Grosseteste, Robert, 16, 17 Grotius, Hugo, 108 Hartlib, Samuel, 63–64, 66–67 Harvey, William, 196 Hegel, G. W. F., 278 Heidanus, Abraham, 164 Heidegger, Martin, 269, 270 Helmont, Francis Mercury Baron van, 196, 219 Helmont, Jan Baptista van, 196 Herbert, Edward, 45–61, 93–111 Hermes Trismegistus, 35–36 Hippocrates, 165 Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 115, 117, 124, 133, 145, 147, 148, 153, 156–158, 177, 194, 196, 240, 255, 260, 261 Hotham, Charles, 215–217, 222 Hoyles, John, 128 Hübner, Joachim, 63 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 269–270 Iamblichus, 32, 40 Ibn-Sina, 16, 19 Jackson, Thomas, 195 Kant, Immanuel, 135, 271, 278, 279, 280 Keats, John, 279, 282 Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian, 216, 219–222 Koyré, Alexandre, 10–12 Laud, William, 195 Leibniz, G, 55, 118, 180, 183, 184, 186, 191, 193, 197, 225–238, 239–253 Locke, John, 96, 119, 193–205, 207–223, 226 Longinus, 279 Maier, Michael, 196 Maimonides, Moses, 19 Malebranche, Nicholas, 159, 252 Masham, Francis, 198 McTaggart, John, 125 Meister Eckhart, 16, 47 Menn, Stephen, 179, 189, 190–191

Moerbeke, William of, 16 Molesworth, Robert, 243 Molyneux, William, 243 Moore, G. E., 147, 149–151, 153–154, 156 More, Henry, 93, 100–101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 148, 203, 204, 219, 239 Moses, 213 Murdoch, Iris, 269 Nazianzus, Gregory, 16 Newton, Isaac, 196, 204, 270 Norris, John, 93, 128 Nye, Stephen, 126 Ockham, William of, 21 Origen, 16, 38 Orpheus, 35 Orsini, Cardinal, 10 Paracelsus, 196 Passmore, John, 147–153, 156–158 Paul, St., 14, 67, 167, 213, 232 Philo of Alexandria, 47–52, 57, 58, 120–121, 228, 229 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 10, 33 Plato, 2–3, 17, 18, 31–32, 49, 57, 68–69, 118, 139, 167, 173, 177–191, 193–205, 237, 246–248, 251, 261, 263, 266–267, 271, 276 Plempius, Vopiscus Fortunatus, 163 Plethon, George Gemistos, 32 Plotinus, 34, 42, 45–61, 122, 139, 142, 183, 191, 228, 231, 273, 279 Plutarch, 262 Porphyry, 48 Price, Richard, 149 Prior, Arthur, 147–158 Proclus, 16, 17, 22, 42, 57, 58, 208, 248 Pyrrho, 53 Pythagoras, 16, 22, 246, 261 Regius, Henricus, 159 Reuchlin, Johannes, 89 Revius, Jacobus, 165 Russell, Bertrand, 269 Ruysbroeck, Jan van, 47 Schelling, 278 Scherzer, Johann Adam, 225, 227 Schuyl, Florentius, 159–168 Sebond, Raymond, 165 Sendivogius, Michael, 197 Senguerd, Arnold, 159 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 105, 149, 152, 255–267, 277, 278 Shakespeare, William, 271–273, 276 Sherlock, William, 120, 124–125, 128 Smith, John, 94, 99, 101, 104, 198–200 Snellius, Willebrord, 243 Spinoza, Benedictus de, 167, 171–175, 180, 189, 222, 243

Index of Names Stanley, Thomas, 258 Stillingfleet, Edward, 210–211 Taylor, A. E., 213 Taylor, Charles, 167–168, 270 Thales, 140 Thomasius, Jakob, 225, 227 Toinard, Nicholas, 218–219 Toland, John, 243 Tulloch, John, 151 Turner, J. M. W., 278 Tyrrell, James, 193–194, 215 Valentine, Basil, 196

285

Voetius, Gisbertus, 159 Weil, Simone, 269 Wenck, Johannes, 15, 26–29 Whichcote, Benjamin, 94, 99, 101–102, 198, 201, 202–203, 255 Wordsworth, 270, 272, 280–282 Xenophon, 256–260, 263 Yolton, John, 222–223 Young, Edward, 270, 275 Zeno, 140 Zola, Emile, 278 Zoroaster, 36–39, 101

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G. Symcox: The Crisis of French Sea Power (1688–1697). From the Guerre d’Escadre to the Guerre de Course. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1645-4 R. MacGillivray: Restoration Historians and the English Civil War. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1678-0 A. Soman (ed.): The Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Reappraisals and Documents. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1652-7 R.E. Wanner: Claude Fleury (1640–1723) as an Educational Historiographer and Thinker. With an Introduction by W.W. Brickman. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1684-5 R.T. Carroll: The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet (1635– 1699). 1975 ISBN 90-247-1647-0 J. Macary: Masque et lumi`eres au 18e [siècle]. André-François Deslandes, Citoyen et philosophe (1689–1757). 1975 ISBN 90-247-1698-5 S.M. Mason: Montesquieu’s Idea of Justice. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1670-5 D.J.H. van Elden: Esprits fins et esprits géométriques dans les portraits de Saint-Simon. Contributions à l’étude du vocabulaire et du style. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1726-4 I. Primer (ed.): Mandeville Studies. New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733). 1975 ISBN 90-247-1686-1 C.G. Noreña: Studies in Spanish Renaissance Thought. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1727-2 G. Wilson: A Medievalist in the 18th Century. Le Grand d’Aussy and the Fabliaux ou Contes. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1782-5 J.-R. Armogathe: Theologia Cartesiana. L’explication physique de l’Eucharistie chez Descartes et Dom Robert Desgabets. 1977 ISBN 90-247-1869-4 Bérault Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny: Traité sur l’art de la guerre. Introduction et édition par ´ Elie de Comminges. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1871-6 S.L. Kaplan: Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV. 2 vols., 1976 Set ISBN 90-247-1873-2 M. Lienhard (ed.): The Origins and Characteristics of Anabaptism / Les débuts et les caract éristiques de l’Anabaptisme. With an Extensive Bibliography / Avec une bibliographie détaillée. 1977 ISBN 90-247-1896-1 R. Descartes: Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité. Traduction selon le lexique cartésien, et annotation conceptuelle par J.-L. Marion. Avec des notes mathématiques de P. Costabel. 1977 ISBN 90-247-1907-0 K. Hardesty: The ‘Supplément’ to the ‘Encyclopédie’. [Diderot et d’Alembert]. 1977 ISBN 90-247-1965-8 H.B. White: Antiquity Forgot. Essays on Shakespeare, [Francis] Bacon, and Rembrandt. 1978 ISBN 90-247-1971-2 P.B.M. Blaas: Continuity and Anachronism. Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930. 1978 ISBN 90-247-2063-X S.L. Kaplan (ed.): La Bagarre. Ferdinando Galiani’s (1728–1787) ‘Lost’ Parody. With an Introduction by the Editor. 1979 ISBN 90-247-2125-3 E. McNiven Hine: A Critical Study of [Étienne Bonnot de] Condillac’s [1714–1780]‘Traite´des Syst`emes’. 1979 ISBN 90-247-2120-2 M.R.G. Spiller: Concerning Natural Experimental Philosphy. Meric Casaubon [1599–1671] and the Royal Society. 1980 ISBN 90-247-2414-7 F. Duchesneau: La physiologie des Lumi`eres. Empirisme, mod`eles et théories. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2500-3

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M. Heyd: Between Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment. Jean-Robert Chouet [1642–1731] and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2508-9 James O’Higgins: Yves de Vallone [1666/7–1705]: The Making of an Esprit Fort. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2520-8 M.L. Kuntz: Guillaume Postel [1510–1581]. Prophet of the Restitution of All Things. His Life and Thought. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2523-2 A. Rosenberg: Nicolas Gueudeville and His Work (1652–172?). 1982 ISBN 90-247-2533-X S.L. Jaki: Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem [1861-1916]. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2897-5; Pb (1987) 90-247-3532-7 Anne Conway [1631–1679]: The Principles of the Most Ancient Modern Philosophy. Edited and with an Introduction by P. Loptson. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2671-9 E.C. Patterson: [Mrs.] Mary [Fairfax Greig] Sommerville [1780–1872] and the Cultivation of Science (1815–1840). 1983 ISBN 90-247-2823-1 C.J. Berry: Hume, Hegel and Human Nature. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2682-4 C.J. Betts: Early Deism in France. From the so-called ‘déistes’ of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire’s ‘Lettres philosophiques’ (1734). 1984 ISBN 90-247-2923-8 R. Gascoigne: Religion, Rationality and Community. Sacred and Secular in the Thought of Hegel and His Critics. 1985 ISBN 90-247-2992-0 S. Tweyman: Scepticism and Belief in Hume’s ‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’. 1986 ISBN 90-247-3090-2 G. Cerny: Theology, Politics and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization. Jacques Basnage [1653–1723] and the Baylean Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3150-X Spinoza’s Algebraic Calculation of the Rainbow & Calculation of Changes. Edited and Translated from Dutch, with an Introduction, Explanatory Notes and an Appendix by M.J. Petry. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3149-6 R.G. McRae: Philosophy and the Absolute. The Modes of Hegel’s Speculation. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3151-8 J.D. North and J.J. Roche (eds.): The Light of Nature. Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science presented to A.C. Crombie. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3165-8 C. Walton and P.J. Johnson (eds.): [Thomas] Hobbes’s ‘Science of Natural Justice’. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3226-3 B.W. Head: Ideology and Social Science. Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3228-X A.Th. Peperzak: Philosophy and Politics. A Commentary on the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 1987 ISBN Hb 90-247-3337-5; Pb ISBN 90-247-3338-3 S. Pines and Y. Yovel (eds.): Maimonides [1135-1204] and Philosophy. Papers Presented at the 6th Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter (May 1985). 1986 ISBN 90-247-3439-8 T.J. Saxby: The Quest for the New Jerusalem, Jean de Labadie [1610–1674] and the Labadists (1610–1744). 1987 ISBN 90-247-3485-1 C.E. Harline: Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3511-4 R.A.Watson and J.E. Force (eds.): The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy. Essays in Honor of Richard H. Popkin. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3584-X R.T. Bienvenu and M. Feingold (eds.): In the Presence of the Past. Essays in Honor of Frank Manuel. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1008-X

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J. van den Berg and E.G.E. van derWall (eds.): Jewish-Christian Relations in the 17th Century. Studies and Documents. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3617-X N. Waszek: The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of ‘Civil Society’. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3596-3 J. Walker (ed.): Thought and Faith in the Philosophy of Hegel. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1234-1 Henry More [1614–1687]: The Immortality of the Soul. Edited with Introduction and Notes by A. Jacob. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3512-2 P.B. Scheurer and G. Debrock (eds.): Newton’s Scientific and Philosophical Legacy. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3723-0 D.R. Kelley and R.H. Popkin (eds.): The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1259-7 R.M. Golden (ed.): The Huguenot Connection. The Edict of Nantes, Its Revocation, and Early French Migration to South Carolina. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3645-5 S. Lindroth: Les chemins du savoir en Su`ede. De la fondation de l’Université d’Upsal à Jacob Berzelius. Études et Portraits. Traduit du suédois, présenté et annoté par J.-F. Battail. Avec une introduction sur Sten Lindroth par G. Eriksson. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3579-3 S. Hutton (ed.): Henry More (1614–1687). Tercentenary Studies.With a Biography and Bibliography by R. Crocker. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0095-5 Y. Yovel (ed.): Kant’s Practical Philosophy Reconsidered. Papers Presented at the 7th Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter (December 1986). 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0405-5 J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin: Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0583-3 N. Capaldi and D.W. Livingston (eds.): Liberty in Hume’s ‘History of England’. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0650-3 W. Brand: Hume’s Theory of Moral Judgment. A Study in the Unity of A Treatise of Human Nature. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1415-8 C.E. Harline (ed.): The Rhyme and Reason of Politics in Early Modern Europe. Collected Essays of Herbert H. Rowen. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1527-8 N. Malebranche: Treatise on Ethics (1684). Translated and edited by C. Walton. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1763-7 B.C. Southgate: ‘Covetous of Truth’. The Life andWork of Thomas White (1593–1676). 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1926-5 G. Santinello, C.W.T. Blackwell and Ph. Weller (eds.): Models of the History of Philosophy. Vol. 1: From its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2200-2 M.J. Petry (ed.): Hegel and Newtonianism. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2202-9 Otto von Guericke: The New (so-called Magdeburg) Experiments [Experimenta Nova, Amsterdam 1672]. Translated and edited by M.G. Foley Ames. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2399-8 R.H. Popkin and G.M. Weiner (eds.): Jewish Christians and Cristian Jews. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2452-8 J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds.): The Books of Nature and Scripture. Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2467-6 P. Rattansi and A. Clericuzio (eds.): Alchemy and Chemistry in the 16th and 17th Centuries. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2573-7

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S. Jayne: Plato in Renaissance England. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3060-9 A.P. Coudert: Leibniz and the Kabbalah. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3114-1 M.H. Hoffheimer: Eduard Gans and the Hegelian Philosophy of Law. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3114-1 J.R.M. Neto: The Christianization of Pyrrhonism. Scepticism and Faith in Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Shestov. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3381-0 R.H. Popkin (ed.): Scepticism in the History of Philosophy. A Pan-American Dialogue. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3769-7 M. de Baar, M. Löwensteyn, M. Monteiro and A.A. Sneller (eds.): Choosing the Better Part. Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678). 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3799-9 M. Degenaar: Molyneux’s Problem. Three Centuries of Discussion on the Perception of Forms. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3934-7 S. Berti, F. Charles-Daubert and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe. Studies on the Traité des trois imposteurs. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4192-9 G.K. Browning (ed.): Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4480-4 G.A.J. Rogers, J.M. Vienne and Y.C. Zarka (eds.): The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context. Politics, Metaphysics and Religion. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4530-4 R.L. Williams: The Letters of Dominique Chaix, Botanist-Curé. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4615-7 R.H. Popkin, E. de Olaso and G. Tonelli (eds.): Scepticism in the Enlightenment. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4643-2 L. de la Forge. Translated and edited by D.M. Clarke: Treatise on the Human Mind (1664).1997 ISBN 0-7923-4778-1 S.P. Foster: Melancholy Duty. The Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4785-4 J. van der Zande and R.H. Popkin (eds.): The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800. Skepticism in Philosophy, Science, and Society. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4846-X P. Ferretti: A Russian Advocate of Peace: Vasilii Malinovskii (1765–1814). 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4846-6 M. Goldish: Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4996-2 A.P. Coudert, R.H. Popkin and G.M. Weiner (eds.): Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5223-8 B. Fridén: Rousseau’s Economic Philosophy. Beyond the Market of Innocents. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5270-X C.F. Fowler O.P.: Descartes on the Human Soul. Philosophy and the Demands of Christian Doctrine. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5473-7 J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Newton and Religion. Context, Nature and Influence. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5744-2 J.V. Andreae: Christianapolis. Introduced and translated by E.H. Thompson. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5745-0 A.P. Coudert, S. Hutton, R.H. Popkin and G.M. Weiner (eds.): Judaeo-Christian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century. A Celebration of the Library of Narcissus Marsh (1638– 1713). 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5789-2 T. Verbeek (ed.): Johannes Clauberg and Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5831-7

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A. Fix: Fallen Angels. Balthasar Bekker, Spirit Belief, and Confessionalism in the Seventeenth Century Dutch Republic. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5876-7 S. Brown (ed.): The Young Leibniz and his Philosophy (1646–76). 2000 ISBN 0-7923-5997-6 R. Ward: The Life of Henry More. Parts 1 and 2. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6097-4 Z. Janowski: Cartesian Theodicy. Descartes’ Quest for Certitude. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6127-X J.D. Popkin and R.H. Popkin (eds.): The Abbé Grégoire and his World. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6247-0 C.G. Caffentzis: Exciting the Industry of Mankind. George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6297-7 A. Clericuzio: Elements, Principles and Corpuscles. A Study of Atomisms and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6782-0 H. Hotson: Paradise Postponed. Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6787-1 M. Goldish and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume I. Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6850-9 K.A. Kottman (ed.): Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume II. Catholic Millenarianism: From Savonarola to the Abbé Grégoire. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6849-5 J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume III. The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6848-7 J.C. Laursen and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume IV. Continental Millenarians: Protestants, Catholics, Heretics. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6847-9 C. von Linné: Nemesis Divina. (edited and translated with explanatory notes by M.J. Petry). 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6820-7 M.A. Badía Cabrera: Hume’s Reflection on Religion. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7024-4 R.L. Williams: Botanophilia in Eighteenth-Century France. The Spirit of the Enlightenment. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6886-X R. Crocker (ed.): Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0047-2 E. Slowik: Cartesian Spacetime. Descartes’ Physics and the Relational Theory of Space and Motion. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0265-3 R.L. Williams: French Botany in the Enlightenment. The Ill-fated Voyages of La Pérouse and His Rescuers. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1109-1 A. Leshem: Newton on Mathematics and Spiritual Purity. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1151-2 G. Paganini (ed.): The Return of Scepticism. From Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1377-9 R. Crocker: Henry More, 1614–1687. A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1502-X T.J. Hochstrasser and P. Schröder (eds.): Early Modern Natural Law Theories. Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1569-0 F. Tomasoni: Modernity and the Final Aim of History. The Debate over Judaism from Kant to the Young Hegelians. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1594-1

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J.E. Force and S. Hutton (eds.): Newton and Newtonianism. New Studies. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1969-6 W. Schmidt-Biggemann: Philosophia perennis. Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-3066-5 R. Faggionato: A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia. The Masonic Circle of N.I. Novikov. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3486-5 L. Hill: The Passionate Society. The Social, Political and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3889-5 D. Offord: Journeys to a Graveyard. Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3908-5 S. Clucas (ed.): John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-4245-0 J.K. Jue: Heaven Upon Earth. Joseph Mede (1586-1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-4292-2 G. Wright: Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-4467-4 D. Hedley and S. Hutton (eds.): Platonism at the Origins of Modernity. Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy. 2008 ISBN 978-1-4020-6406-7

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