British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century by Hutton Sarah;

Author:Hutton, Sarah; [Hutton, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Apologetics

The defence of religion is at the heart of the philosophy of the Cambridge Platonists. As Henry More put it, in the Preface to his A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (1662), ‘My Design…is not to Theologize in Philosophy, but to draw an Exoterick Fence or exteriour Fortification about Theologie’.21 In what Cudworth called an ‘age so philosophical’, they believed it essential to show their command of philosophy, in order to convince sceptically inclined libertines. Their religious apologetic is founded on a profound sense of the compatibility of reason and faith. Reason is the precondition of faith, and revelation subordinate to it in the sense that the purpose of revelation is to assist reason. But they were not religious rationalists in the Deist sense. Nor did they accept the traditional opposition between reason and passion. The reason which they prized was not discursive or instrumental reason (the ‘dry agonistical reasoning’ of the schools as Cudworth called it), but recta ratio or right reason (‘reason accompanied by hearty conviction’ as Henry More put it). The highest form of reason is affective reason, infused by love. This more exalted view of reason closed the gap between reason and faith. The rational man, Whichcote claimed, is ‘next to God’, while John Smith’s Select Discourses traces an epistemological ascent to knowledge of God through reason via an ascending hierarchy of four grades of cognition: the lowest combines sense with reason; in the second reason is conjoined with innate notions; the third is disembodied, self-reflective reason; and finally we reach divine love. Their high valuation of reason underlies their high estimation of virtuous pagans, even above fellow Christians. Smith claimed that, ‘The Greek Philosopher could tell [that]…without virtue and real goodness God is but a name, a dry and empty notion’.22 Whichcote went so far as to claim that, ‘The Good nature of a Heathen is more Godlike than the furious Zeal of a Christian’, and Cudworth was persuaded that, for all its errors, paganism contained glimmerings of truth.23

In their philosophical defence of religion they sought to use arguments of the kind that any rational atheist would accept (they shared the view of their time that atheists were rational!). It was with rational atheists in mind that Henry More adopted an axiomatic method in his Immortality of the Soul and his Enchiridion ethicum. The main substance of Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe is an extensive demonstration of the existence of God from the evidence of classical antiquity. By surveying ancient philosophy he sought to show the naturality of the idea of God, and the compatibility of true philosophy and theism. The resulting taxonomy of ancient philosophy classified the different philosophical schools according to how the philosophy of each correlates with theism or atheism. For Cudworth, atheism is explained as a failure in philosophical reason. Cudworth regarded Christianity as a philosophical religion and he regarded his own philosophy as a ‘philosophy of religion’ (in fact he was the first to use the term).

Such was

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