Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T06:04:56.125Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Daniel Walker Howe
Daniel Walker Howe
Affiliation:
professor of history inthe University of California, Los Angeles, California.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1875 the distinguished Unitarian minister and local historian Henry Wilder Foote preached a eulogy for his late colleague, the Reverend James Walker, philosopher and former president of Harvard University. It was an appropriate occasion to characterize the achievement of the antebellum generation of Harvard Unitarian leaders that Walker represented. “They were much more than mere denominationalists or founders of a sect,” Foote declared. “The whole tone of their teaching was profoundly positive in its moral and religious quality. Trained at our American Cambridge, they were really the legitimate heirs of that noble group of men nurtured at the Cambridge of England–the Latitude Men, as they were called–who blended culture and piety and rational thought in their teaching.” Building upon Foote's perceptive characterization, this article will explore the significance of the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists for the Harvard Unitarians of the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing it may illuminate other forms of New England religious thought that also drew upon Platonic or Neoplatonic sources, including Edwardseanism, Hopkinsianism, and the progressive orthodoxy of Horace Bushnell. In particular, I hope to shed light on the relationship between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 470 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Foote, Henry Wilder, The Wisdom from Above. Sermon Occasioned by the Death of James Walker (Boston, 1875), p. 13.Google Scholar

2. There are many books treating the Cambridge Platonists; among the most useful are Colie, Rosalie, Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge, 1957);Google ScholarRoberts, James D., From Puritanism to Platonism in Seventeenth Century England (The Hague, 1968);CrossRefGoogle ScholarCragg, Gerald R., From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (1950; reprint, Cambridge, 1966);Google Scholar and Powicke, Frederick J., The Cambridge Platonists (Cambridge, Mass., 1926).Google Scholar

3. Whichcote, Benjamin, aphorism no. 40, quoted in Powicke, Cambridge Platonists, p. 23.Google Scholar

4. Norris, John, An Account of Reason and Faith, 13th ed. (London, 1728);Google Scholar reprinted in Cragg, Gerald R., ed., The Cambridge Platonists (New York, 1968), p. 153Google Scholar (hereafter cited as CP).

5. Stewart, J. A. and Levy, G. R., eds., The Myths of Plato (Carbondale, Ill., 1960), pp. 442–443Google Scholar, makes the connection between Plato's Phaedrus and the Cambridge Platonists.

6. The best general introductions to Plotinus are Inge, William Ralph, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 2 vols. (New York, 1918);Google Scholar and Brehier, Emile, The Philosophy of Plotinus (Chicago, 1958).Google Scholar Inge translates Nous as “Spirit”; Brehier as “Intelligence.”

7. On the Ramism of Jacobus Arminius, see Colie, , Light and Enlightenment, p. 51.Google Scholar

8. See SirStephen, Leslie and SirLee, Sidney, The Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (Oxford, 1921–1964)Google Scholar, s.v. Cudworth.

9. Most recently and fully by Fiering, Norman, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard (Chapel Hill, 1981);Google Scholar see also Gohdes, Clarence, “Aspects of Idealism in Early New England,” Philosophical Review 39 (1930): 537–555;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Morison, Samuel Eliot, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 1: 260–261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. The widespread theory that Plato borrowed from Mosaic sources invoked a hypothetical document called the “Prisca Theologica.”

11. Fiering, , Moral Philosophy, pp. 64, 240.Google Scholar On Yale, see Morgan, Edmund S., The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles (New Haven, 1962), p. 65.Google Scholar

12. Fiering, Norman, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill, 1981);Google ScholarAnderson, Wallace, ed., The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Scientific and Philosophical Writings (New Haven, 1980).Google Scholar

13. Fiering, , Jonathan Edwards, pp. 40–45, 51–52, 341–345Google Scholar, and passim. The argument was underscored in Norman Fiering, “Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards's Metaphysics,” a paper delivered at the conference on Edwards at Wheaton College, Wheaton Illinois, 25 October 1984. See also McCracken, Charles, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford, 1983), pp. 329–340.Google Scholar

14. On Edwards's debt to the Cambridge Platonists, see Conkin, Paul, Puritans and Pragmatists (New York, 1968), pp. 40, 44–45;Google ScholarGohdes, , “Aspects of Idealism,” pp. 552–554;Google ScholarWatts, Emily Stipes, “Jonathan Edwards and the Cambridge Platonists” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois, 1963);Google Scholar and idem, “The Neoplatonic Basis of Jonathan Edwards's ‘True Virtue’,” Early American Literature 10(1975): 178–189.

15. Smith, John, “The Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion”; reprinted in CP, pp. 91–140;Google Scholar quotation, p. 132.

16. More, Henry, A Brief Discourse of the True Grounds of the Certainty of Faith in Points of Religion (translated from the Latin of the Enchyridion), in CP, pp. 140–150;Google ScholarCudworth, Ralph, “On Providence and God's Direction of Human Destiny,” in CP, p. 213.Google Scholar

17. Mayhew, Jonathan, Two Sermons on the Nature, Extent and Perfection of the Divine Goodness (Boston, 1763).Google Scholar

18. Mayhew, Jonathan, The Snare Broken (Boston, 1766), p. 35.Google Scholar

19. Gay, Ebenezer, Natural Religion as Distinguished from Revealed (Boston, 1759), p. 12.Google Scholar

20. See Howe, Daniel Walker, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).Google Scholar

21. Thomas Reid, the founder of the Scottish school, explains his purposes in the introduction to his Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), reprinted in his Works, ed. SirHamilton, William, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1863), 1: 97–104.Google Scholar

22. Reid, , Works, 1: 438;Google Scholar compare CP, pp. 295 (Cudworth), 300 (More), 330–331 (Smith), 410 (Whichcote).

23. Channing, William Ellery, The Perfect Life, ed. Channing, William Henry (Boston, 1901), p. 981.Google Scholar

24. CP, pp. 189 (More); 245–249 (Cudworth); 334 (Smith).

25. See Austin, Eugene, The Ethics of the Cambridge Platonists (Philadelphia, 1935), pp. 12–13;Google ScholarPassmore, J. A., Ralph Cudworth (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 9–12, 19–28;Google ScholarBoer, John De, The Theory of Knowledge of the Cambridge Platonists (Madras, India, 1931), esp. pp. 140–141, 148–149.Google Scholar

26. Peabody, Andrew Preston, The Connection Between Science and Religion (Boston, 1845), pp. 6, 14, 16, 29.Google Scholar

27. Peabody, Andrew Preston, The Immutable Right (Boston, 1858), pp. 3, 4, 5, 11, 20, 21, 24.Google Scholar

28. An interesting new study of the use of conscience as a tool of biblical criticism is Richard A. Grusin, “The Hermeneutics of the Heart: Interpretive Transcendentalism,” which I read in manuscript.

29. Channing, William Ellery, “The Moral Argument Against Calvinism” (1820), Works, 6 vols. (Boston, 1848), 1: 236–242;Google ScholarWalker, James, “Man's Competency to Know God” (1858), in Reason, Faith, and Duty: Sermons Preached Chiefly in the College Chapel (Boston, 1877), pp. 18–36.Google Scholar

30. Walker, , “Man's Competency,” p. 36.Google Scholar

31. See Howe, , The Unitarian Conscience, pp. 93–96.Google Scholar

32. Bellows, Henry W., Restatements of Christian Doctrine: In Twenty-Five Sermons (New York, 1860), pp. 93–94.Google Scholar

33. For example, CP, pp. 102–117 (Smith); 263–268 (More).

34. Dewey, Orville, Works, with a Biographical Sketch (Boston, 1893), p. 176;Google Scholar Whichcote, “Sermon on Philippians 4:8,” in CP, p. 68.

35. Francis, Convers, Grace, as Connected with Salvation: A Sermon Preached at the Installation of Rev.Rufus A. Johnson, in Grafton (Boston, 1833), pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

36. Dewey, , Works, p. 3.Google Scholar

37. Delivered in 1834 and printed that year as a tract by the American Unitarian Association, it may also be found in Reason, , Faith, and Duty, pp. 37–61.Google Scholar

38. The Cambridge Platonists themselves were capable of mixing a teleological argument from the human faculties with an ontological argument from the idea of perfection in a similar way. See More, Henry, An Antidote Against Atheism (1652), in CP, pp. 163–193;Google Scholar and Cudworth, Ralph, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), in CP, pp. 194–203.Google Scholar

39. On the connection with James, see Myers, Gerald E., William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, 1986), pp. 461–462, 473.Google Scholar

40. Channing, , Perfect Life, p. 931.Google Scholar

41. William Henry Channing, “Title and Character of This Book,” in Ibid., pp. 928–929.

42. For example, Patterson, Robert L. in The Philosophy of William Ellery Channing (New York, 1952), pp. 63–65.Google Scholar

43. See, for example, Bellows, Henry W., Religious Education, from Within and from Above (Boston, 1857).Google Scholar

44. Livermore, Abiel Abbot, Union With God and Man (Boston, 1848), pp. 3, 8.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., pp. 12, 13–16.

46. Dewey, , Works, pp. 28–35;Google Scholar quotations from pp. 29 and 31. Elsewhere, Dewey declared that “all true moral beauty is a part of religion”; ”On the Identity of Religion with Goodness and with the Good Life,” Works, p. 151.

47. Frothingham, Octavius B., Transcendentalism in New England (1876; reprint, New York, 1959), p. 110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. Miller, Perry, “From Edwards to Emerson,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 184–203;Google Scholar quotation from p. 196.

49. Emerson did have a New Light clerical family tradition to which he was exposed through his aunt Mary Moody Emerson. That formidable lady of letters bridged the two worlds of evangelical and liberal pietism. See Phillis Blum Cole, “From the Edwardses to the Emersons: Four Generations of Evangelical Family Culture,” which I read in manuscript.

50. Inge, W. R., The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought (New York, 1926)Google Scholar, and Muirhead, John H., The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (New York, 1931);Google Scholar are still very helpful.

51. See Buell, Lawrence, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), pp. 23–54.Google Scholar

52. Hedge, Frederick Henry, Ways of the Spirit (Boston, 1878), p. 140.Google Scholar

53. For Emerson's strong attraction to Plotinus, see Brodwin, Stanley, “Emerson's Version of Plotinus: The Flight to Beauty,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974); 465–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54. “Journal Y” (1845), in Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. Gilman, William H. et al. , 16 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960–1982), 9: 265.Google Scholar On Emerson's use of Cudworth, including the reservations he held about him, see also Hopkins, Vivian C., “Emerson and Cudworth: Plastic Nature and Transcendental Art,” American Literature 23 (1951): 80–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. See Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston, 1955), pp. 3–4, 135–138.Google Scholar

56. The debate was triggered by Emerson's “Divinity School Address” (1838). See Miller, Perry, ed., The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), pp. 157–246;Google Scholar and Hutchison, William R., The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (New Haven, 1959), pp. 52–97.Google Scholar

57. Parker, Theodore, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” (1841), in Wright, Conrad, ed., Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing, Emerson, Parker (Boston, 1961), pp. 113–149.Google Scholar

58. Clarke, James Freeman, Self-Culture: Physical, Intellectual, Moral, and Spiritual (Boston, 1880);Google ScholarSears, Edmund H., Foregleams and Foreshadows of Immortality (Philadelphia, 1873)Google Scholar; idem, The Fourth Gospel the Heart of Christ (Boston, 1872).