In 1759, more than a century after Tuckney’s first letter to Whichcote, Adam Smith published his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In the final part of that work, titled ‘Of systems of moral philosophy’, he provided a taxonomy of different moral systems, dividing them up according to their different theories of virtue. In the course of this taxonomy, he supplied a brief description of a moral system that ‘makes virtue consist in benevolence’ and which in antiquity was held by philosophers who ‘pretended to follow chiefly the opinions of Plato and Pythagoras’ and were therefore ‘commonly known by the name of the later Platonists’.Footnote ¹ According to this Platonic moral system, Smith wrote:

In Christian antiquity, this system was taken up by ‘many ancient fathers of the Christian church’, but Smith sees its modern Christian expression as exemplified by three Cambridge philosophers of the previous century:

Although Benjamin Whichcote is not named here, we have seen that Whichcote too, no less than Cudworth, More or John Smith, thought that virtue consisted in ‘some resemblance or participation of the divine perfections’ and being ‘filled with the same principle of benevolence of love’ that informed God’s own actions.

Although penned in 1759, Adam Smith’s brief account of the moral philosophy of the Cambridge Platonists arrives at essentially the same view that I have defended in the preceding chapters, namely, that Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith were proponents of a Christian Platonism, centred around a metaphysics of participation. To conclude, then, let us revisit some of the challenges often posed to this picture of Cambridge Platonism. Were Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith really ‘Platonists’ at all, and if so, in what sense? Are there good reasons to view them as constituting a school or movement distinct from the broader network of anti-Calvinist theologians of civil war England?

The Platonism of the Cambridge Platonists

The preceding chapters have shown that although Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith were far from the only anti-Calvinists in England in the seventeenth century, or even the only ‘Platonists’, they were connected to one another by a philosophical framework that set them quite apart from even their most sympathetic and like-minded contemporaries.

It is this philosophical framework that constitutes Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s shared ‘Platonism’. The framework consists of several core intuitions about God and his relation to the created world: the priority of reason over will, an epistemology and metaphysics of participation, and an insistence on God’s communicative intent. Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith drew on these core intuitions, often with explicit reference to the Platonic texts in which they found them most eloquently and rigorously defended, perhaps as a result of their shared membership in a small but influential Platonic interest group at Cambridge in the late 1630s, one that included the ‘publicly professed Platonists’ John Sadler and Peter Sterry, and perhaps others such as Laurence Sarson and Nathaniel Culverwell.Footnote ⁴ Not all the members of this group took their interest in Platonism in an anti-Calvinist direction; Sterry, for instance, remained a confirmed Calvinist (albeit an unorthodox one, with universalist leanings), while Sadler and Sarson’s views about double predestination can only be guessed at.Footnote ⁵ Culverwell developed an account of reason as a participation in God’s intellect which resembles the Cambridge Platonists’ in some ways, but ultimately remained a committed Calvinist, holding that the decree of reprobation was a high and mysterious expression of God’s rational goodness.Footnote ⁶ For Calvinists like Sterry and Culverwell, Platonism provided resources for affirming Reformed doctrine. In Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith, however, this exposure to the texts of Plotinus, Proclus, Origen and Marsilio Ficino gave philosophical form to anti-Calvinist convictions they likely already held. The picture of God they found in the ancient Platonists and church fathers provided them with the vocabulary and philosophical framework they needed to mount a learned attack on the Calvinist theology of their Reformed colleagues. These distinctive anti-Calvinist positions, defended in a Platonic key, mean that Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith share a Platonism far more uniform than any that would also include Sterry and Culverwell.

While they certainly saw other English anti-Calvinists – whether fellow Puritans like John Goodwin and Charles Hotham, or high churchmen like Jeremy Taylor and Henry Hammond – as valuable allies, the Cambridge Platonists’ anti-Calvinism was unique. As we saw in Chapter 7, for instance, one searches in vain among their fellow English anti-Calvinists for any rejection of imputed righteousness as absolute as that we find in Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith alike. Indeed, as their contemporary Richard Baxter seems to have noticed, the Cambridge group’s views about justification align them more with Andreas Osiander than any of their fellow English Protestants.Footnote ⁷ Even Cudworth’s own daughter, Lady Damaris Masham, who shared her father’s anti-Calvinism, seems to have rejected his radically un-Protestant view of justification, and adopted a forensic doctrine of imputed righteousness much like Taylor and Hammond’s.Footnote ⁸ As we have seen, the Cambridge Platonists’ distinctive views on justification emerge from the larger framework of their Platonic metaphysics of participation, which many of their most ardent admirers failed to adopt. And even though only Henry More explicitly embraced the Platonist label, all four Cambridge Platonists drew heavily on a core set of Platonic themes – the priority of God’s nature over his will, a conception human reason as participation in the divine intellect, human virtue as deification, and an insistence on God’s communicative intent – to mount their critique of Calvinism. The result is that the Cambridge Platonists stand out quite distinctly, not only as a group of Cambridge anti-Calvinists very closely connected by time and place but as defenders of a unique anti-Calvinism informed by Platonic metaphysics.

In light of this, it seems reasonable to affirm what Anthony Tuckney and his Calvinist colleagues at Cambridge had already recognised by late 1651: that Benjamin Whichcote belonged to a group of Cambridge intellectuals whose shared fondness for ‘Plato and his scholars’ had inspired a distinctive ‘veine of doctrine’ that challenged the foundations of Reformed theology. Whoever else that group may have included, the texts of Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith provide a strong case for identifying them as chief representatives of the ‘learned and ingenious men’ who were thought in 1651 to be promoting what Tuckney condemned as a ‘Platonique faith’. In this sense at least, the label ‘Platonist’ is not an anachronistic invention of modern scholarship but an important feature of the way the Cambridge Platonists were received by their contemporaries.

We might go even further by noting that apart from their explicit use of Platonic sources, the particular set of philosophical positions the Cambridge Platonists defended against their Reformed opponents is Platonic in the more essentialist sense laid out recently by the leading scholar of Platonism, Lloyd Gerson. For Gerson, Platonism is a philosophical outlook that arises from a matrix of fundamental positions which he calls ‘Ur-Platonism’, consisting of five rejections: antimaterialism, antimechanism, antinominalism, antirelativism and antiscepticism.Footnote ⁹ According to Gerson, all incarnations of Platonism, including Plato’s own dialogues ‘can be usefully thought of as arising out of the matrix of [Ur-Platonism] … To be a Platonist is, minimally, to have a commitment to Ur-Platonism.’Footnote ¹⁰ Douglas Hedley has already pointed out that Cudworth’s philosophy is a Platonism of the sort defined by Gerson.Footnote ¹¹ But the same could arguably be said of the shared philosophical outlook we have traced through Whichcote, More and Smith.Footnote ¹² This is most obviously true with respect to the Cambridge Platonists’ joint commitment to what Gerson defines as Ur-Platonic antirelativism, that is, the insistence that ‘goodness is a property of being’ rather than a property determined by mental states.Footnote ¹³ In this way, the Cambridge Platonists can be usefully identified as Platonists insofar as they are defenders of a distinctive set of philosophical positions that unites Plato, the Neoplatonists and Florentine Platonists, along with others whose Platonism is more muted and rarely noted (including, controversially, Aristotle himself).Footnote ¹⁴

Continuities and Discontinuities

However, some important qualifications must be added to this picture of the Cambridge Platonists’ shared Platonic framework. Although my argument has obviously stressed the philosophical continuities that bind Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith together, there are still important ways in which they differed.

For one thing, Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith each have quite distinct relationships to the Platonic tradition itself. This is clearest in the contrast between Whichcote and More. As the title of his first published work, the Psychodia Platonica, illustrates, there is nothing subtle about Henry More’s reliance on ancient Platonism; he was (as we have seen repeatedly) a self-avowed Platonist and also a career philosopher whose ponderous works on metaphysics and ethics make frequent, explicit and eclectic use of all manner of Platonic texts, from Plato himself to the Neoplatonists and Renaissance Platonists. Whichcote, on the other hand, barely ever quotes Plato or Plotinus (then again, he rarely quotes anyone at all) and has left behind no works that were explicitly intended to be read as philosophy, leaving us to glean his philosophical views from his letters and sermons. Unlike More, Cudworth and Smith, Whichcote displayed little interest in erudite scholarship; we should take as genuine his confession to Tuckney: ‘I shame myself to tell you, how little I have been acquainted with books.’Footnote ¹⁵ But Whichcote did read the ancient philosophers and, as he admits to Tuckney, was influenced by them:

This is borne out by the fact that, as we have seen, Whichcote defends the same distinctively Platonic anti-Calvinism as his fellow Cambridge Platonists, occasionally even quoting the same Plotinian passages as they do. More, Cudworth and Smith, on the other hand, engaged in much wider and deeper Platonic reading, but they engaged and interpreted the Platonic texts available to them differently, each in their own distinct way.Footnote ¹⁷

In addition to their different hermeneutical approaches to the Platonic tradition, there are also more substantive, philosophical disagreements dividing the Cambridge Platonists, particularly in their later careers. In most cases, however, it is easy to see how these differences arose from within their shared Platonic framework. To take but one telling example, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth held opposing views of God’s relation to time and space. In the late 1660s, to refute the atheistic charge that the notion of a transcendent and eternal God was logically incoherent, Henry More constructed a theory of ‘divine space’ and ‘divine time’ on which God could be described as having both spatial and temporal extension.Footnote ¹⁸ Cudworth, on the other hand, maintained a more traditional Neoplatonic conception of God as existing beyond time and space altogether, gently but firmly rejecting More’s views as unnecessary innovations.Footnote ¹⁹

While More and Cudworth’s later views on God’s relation to space and time are irreconcilable, they both arise from within the matrix of the shared Platonic framework of early Cambridge Platonism. On the one hand, More’s attempts to provide a rational, comprehensible account of how God relates to time and space are an extreme augmentation of the Platonic commitment to the God-likeness of human rationality, which we examined in Chapters 5 and 6. Just as the Cambridge Platonists insisted that our rational intuitions about what is good are participations in God and therefore provide real insight into divine goodness, More now insisted that our rational concepts of time and space must also correspond to real features of God’s mode of existence. Because human reason is a direct participation in divine reason, More contends, God’s mode of existence should be perfectly comprehensible to any clear-thinking human being:

In this way, while More’s views on divine space and eternity certainly represent a break with the Neoplatonic tradition, his anti-atheistic project is still robustly Platonic, flowing directly from the Cambridge Platonists’ shared emphasis on the close fit between divine and human reason.Footnote ²¹

On the other hand, though, Cudworth’s rejection of More’s views flows directly from the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology of participation. In Chapters 8 and 9, we saw that Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith alike chided those who made knowledge of God a matter of mere verbal description, insisting instead that God could only be known by direct spiritual contact through deification. In his apologetic writings, Cudworth applies this principle to the same atheistic objections that drove More to define God’s relation to space and time in comprehensible terms. Unlike More, Cudworth doubles down on God’s incomprehensibility, affirming the classical Neoplatonic position that God cannot be circumscribed by discursive notions, arguing that God’s incomprehensibility does not imply his non-existence: ‘the Deity is indeed Incomprehensible to our Finite and Imperfect Understandings, but not Inconceivable, and therefore there is no Ground at all for this Atheistick Pretence, to make it a Non-Entity’.Footnote ²² Just because God transcends our discursive categories does not mean that we cannot have real and reliable knowledge of him; it simply means that our knowledge of God will be knowledge of something vaster than our minds can contain. For Cudworth, God is:

The language here is reminiscent of the mystical, apophatic language he used more than thirty years earlier in his letters to his stepfather:

God, in other words, cannot be known by rational description, but only by spiritual communion. In this, Cudworth is simply restating the Cambridge Platonists’ shared commitment to a notion of reason that functions as a ‘spiritual sense’.

Thus, the raw materials for More and Cudworth’s opposing views on divine (in)comprehensibility are present in the Platonic framework they jointly developed in their formative years. There are other examples of substantive disagreements between the Cambridge Platonists, but in most cases, it is easy enough to see how those disagreements resulted from their branching out in different directions from a shared foundation.Footnote ²⁵ This is why I have described the ‘Platonism’ that unites Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith as a set of core philosophical ‘intuitions’ rather than clearly defined doctrines. While they all share these core intuitions – metaethical realism, divine communicative intent, participatory epistemology, and so on – they are fluid enough to leave room for considerable diversity.

Christian Platonism and Modernity

Ultimately though, we should not let the ‘Platonist’ label overshadow the fact that the Cambridge Platonists were, before all else, Christian thinkers, dealing with Christian concerns. Their entire philosophy of religion rested on foundational beliefs that they took to be clear teachings of Scripture and Christian tradition: that God desires the salvation of all, that he is unswervingly committed to seeking the best for all his creatures, and that the only way to be saved is to become a ‘partaker of the divine nature’. The Platonic tradition was useful to them primarily as a means of articulating and defending these Christian truths, especially in the face of Calvinist voluntarism and later, atheism and determinism. Even then, while Platonism was the primary philosophical resource for their anti-Calvinism, they drew freely and deeply from other schools of thought too: as Sarah Hutton points out, if ‘Platonism’ is taken to imply ‘an exclusive adherence to the teachings of Plato’, then it is a poor fit for the Cambridge Platonists, who, ‘in the tradition of their Renaissance forebears, interpreted Plato alongside Plotinus, and drew on other ancient philosophies including Stoicism and Greek atomism and Aristotelianism’.Footnote ²⁶ In this light, Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith can be called Platonists only in the way that medieval thinkers such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas can be called Aristotelians: they used the philosophical resources provided by Platonism to counter what they took to be grotesque distortions of Christian faith.

At any rate, if Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith were indeed Christian Platonists in this sense, then it is as Christian Platonists that their philosophical legacy must be assessed. This is not necessarily good news for them, since their Platonism has been one of the most decisive factors in their marginalisation from the canon of Western philosophy. As noted in the introduction, in a world that was about to be irrevocably transformed by the Scientific Revolution – a world where experimental investigation would become the primary means of knowing and where nature was to be reconceived as a complex machine designed by a distant, watchmaker God – the Cambridge Platonists’ vision of knowledge as the activity of intellect purified from the bodily senses, and of a universe that emanated from and participated in God, could not help but seem antiquated and backward-looking. Thus, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (although a great admirer of the Cambridge Platonists on the whole) lamented their ‘ignorance of Natural Science’ and ‘corrupt mystical theurgical Pseudo-platonism’, while Ernst Cassirer would identify a ‘fundamental opposition’ between the Cambridge Platonists’ retiring, inward-looking mysticism and the inquisitive, empirical turn that gave rise to modern science.Footnote ²⁷ As it happens, the characterisation of the Cambridge Platonists as uninterested or even hostile to experimental philosophy is rather unfair, especially given that More, Cudworth and Smith all engaged positively and creatively with Cartesian experimental philosophy.Footnote ²⁸ Still, there is no denying it was their Platonism that led More and Cudworth to views about the natural world that the sciences would soon render somewhat embarrassing, such as their insistence that all physical motion must have an immaterial cause.Footnote ²⁹

On the other hand, though, the same Platonism might also furnish the Cambridge Platonists’ strongest claim to enduring relevance as philosophers of religion. Recent scholarship has revealed many of the weaknesses of the simplistic narrative according to which the emergence of modernity decisively rendered Platonism a philosophical dead-end. As Sarah Hutton put it in her introduction to a collection of essays on Platonism at the Origins of Modernity, the perceptions that ground that narrative ‘are more apparent than real’, reflecting historiographical prejudices more than historical realities.Footnote ³⁰ Platonism is a dynamic and flexible tradition with a remarkable tendency to re-emerge in unexpected ways to deal with new problems; even if its influence became muted in early modernity, it never passed entirely out of the arena of intellectual history.Footnote ³¹ As contemporaries and interlocutors of Descartes, Locke and Hobbes, the Cambridge Platonists can perhaps claim the distinction of being the first modern Christian Platonists, drawing creatively on an older Platonic tradition, but also immersed in the concerns and problems of a nascent modernity.

In fact, the central problem with which they grappled in their formative years – the challenge of voluntarism and the question of God’s relation to the moral order – became in some ways the quintessential problem for philosophy of religion in the modern era. The theological voluntarism that the Cambridge Platonists critiqued in their Reformed colleagues was intricately bound up with the emerging modern outlook: it is often argued that the method of experimental philosophy itself, and its accompanying ‘mechanical’ view of nature, emerged from a framework of theological voluntarism.Footnote ³² The questions and problems raised by voluntarism – questions about how God’s will obligates us, the justness of salvation and damnation and the relation of faith to reason – became central questions and problems of modern philosophy of religion. As proponents of a sophisticated Christian Platonism, the Cambridge Platonists were uniquely placed to keep alive philosophical approaches to these issues which Western philosophy would largely lose sight of in the coming generations. Their metaphysics of participation allowed them to conceive of God as obligating, informing and indwelling the human soul in ways that the mechanical worldview attached to the new philosophy all too easily overlooked by reconceiving God as a distant, demiurgic watchmaker and legislator. Much has changed in the interval between our time and the Cambridge Platonists’, but the recent revival of interest in their lives and writings suggests that much of what they had to say about God, reason and religion still resonates in our age, which, however technologically advanced, is no less rife with fanaticism, tyranny and violence than theirs.