Religion, Magic, and the Origins of Science in Early Modern England by John Henry

Author:John Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351219280
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

II

The Spirit of Nature was the salient feature of Henry More’s natural philosophy, an immaterial, universal hylarchic principle which was invoked as a moving, ordering, and animating principle in all physical phenomena – it was ‘the vicarious power of God upon this great automaton, the world.’ This concept, which seems to derive from neoplatonic notions of an anima mundi, appeared in More’s earliest writings – his philosophical poems of the 1640s – and was successively elaborated until it achieved its mature statement in The Immortality of the Soul of 1659.9 More made no significant changes to his concept of the Spirit of Nature from then until his death in 1687. However, while his ideas caused no concern to leading natural philosophers throughout the 1660s, after the reiteration of his concept in the Divine Dialogues of 1668 and the Enchiridion metaphysicum of 1671, natural philosophers suddenly felt the need to repudiate it.10 The reveille was first sounded by the Somerset virtuoso, John Beale, in a letter to Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society (1671):

Sr Did not I tell yu, wt was to be expected from Dr H.M. His confidence is as strong as Enthusiasme; & yet yu see what he does. As if he had a minde to drawe a suspicion, or (at least) to rayse ye style of Infamy agst ye RS & candid Experiment, as to be so Magicall as to call in ye ayde of Spirits & Angels. If Honble Mr Boyles health will bear it, He owes him a chastisement…11

Significantly, Beale links More’s ‘Magicall’ use of ‘Spirits and Angels’ to an overweening confidence ‘as strong as Enthusiasm’. Beale’s imputation of ‘enthusiasm’ to the author of Enthusiasmus triumphatus, Henry More, may at first seem like nothing more than an attempt at facetious irony, but Beale was not the only one to see this tendency in More.12 From the Restoration to More’s death (and even beyond), a number of leading theologians objected to More’s dogmatic insistence upon various more or less idiosyncratic doctrines of theology and to his enthusiastic zeal. A close reading of More’s works reveals that all the doctrines opposed by these critics were present in his earliest writings but that after the Restoration More became increasingly forceful and dogmatic in his pronouncement of these doctrines.

More’s dogmatism and his emphasis on the power of reason to arrive at certain truth was, in fact, a major source of disquiet for many of his contemporaries. Dogmatism was associated not only with enthusiastic sects (as Beale’s statement shows) but also with Roman Catholicism and even with the atheism of rationalist materialism. The inevitable result of dogmatic rationalism, for many seventeenth-century Englishmen, was disagreement among the faithful and disruption in the Church. As Walter Charleton put it:

the unconstant, variable and seductive imposture of Reason, hath been the only unhappy Cause, to which Religion doth owe all those wide, irreconcileable and numerous rents and schismes.13

Samuel Parker believed ‘opinionative Zeal’ to be as dangerous as ‘Enthusiastick Fanaticisme’ and that the ‘Impudent humour of talking confidently of things uncertain’ in religion was bound to lead to heresy and schism.

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