Viewed historically, none of the world’s major religious traditions is a monolith. The Cambridge Platonists were not so much philosophers as Christians who sought new ways to avoid the destructive sectarianism that became especially common in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. They stand out as sincerely religious figures for whom religion ought to put ethics first, rather than questions of doctrinal purity. The world needs more of those.

We are still walking through J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, which seeks to characterize the full complexity of 17th- and 18th-century moral philosophy in the European tradition, and in so doing to explain the background of Kant’s innovations in ethics. In particular, it documents the existence of alternatives to the widespread medieval and early modern tendency to reduce morality to a matter of obedience to divinely sanctioned law.

Beyond the scope of Schneewind’s argument, it is also important to note that none of the Greek philosophers sees morality as reducible to obedience. It is commonly claimed that Christianity is ethically superior to Greek philosophy, but historically it is just wrong to claim that only Christianity introduced criteria of love and forgiveness. If we look seriously at what is usually translated as the cardinal virtue of “friendship” in Aristotle, it is first and foremost a kind of non-possessive love. A readiness to forgive is one of the principal characteristics of Aristotle’s other cardinal virtue of magnanimity. Aristotle’s generous, non-exclusive outlook also recognizes yet other other cardinal virtues in free and open deliberation, unbiased practical judgment, and a kind of generous fairness or equity (epieikeia) that looks beyond the letter of the law. There are multiple summits. Rather than claiming that Christianity is by definition morally superior to such a philosophical outlook, the apologetic claim ought rather to be that it is capable of reaching the same heights.

“Thomasius’s rejection of servility in our relation to God is a late articulation in Germany of an attitude that found full voice earlier in England. ‘A right knowledge of God, John Smith wrote in the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘would beget a freedom and liberty of soul within us, and not servility’. ‘Reverence God in thyself’, Benjamin Whichcote exhorted his readers, ‘for God is more in the mind of man, than in any part of this world besides’. Ralph Cudworth quoted Athanasius in order to assert that ‘God was therefore incarnated and made man, that he might deify us’. From the 1640s on, these three formed part of a group engaged in a radical rethinking of Protestantism” (p. 194).

“Like many others who contributed to the development of thought about morality, these thinkers were responding to religious controversies that were tearing their society apart. Sectarian Calvinism was swamping out the Thomism that Hooker had thought foundational for a national church…. Could one appeal to reason and decency to hold society together? Many held that such a view smacked of Pelagianism in modern dress. The appeal to reason was dangerously like Arminianism in its denial of arbitrary prevenient grace; it also resembled the anti-Trinitarian doctrines of Socinianism. Could one insist on natural law without suggesting that one was either a papist or a Hobbesian? Everyone who had opinions seemed to be absorbed in questions of doctrinal purity. Finding biblical texts to prove one was right, denouncing those who did not accept exactly the correct formulation of saving truth, taking political action to exclude those in error from membership in one’s church — these matters seemed to be overwhelmingly important. The disagreements that they occasioned and exacerbated threatened not only to destroy the possibility of a common faith among English Protestants. They were a threat to maintaining any common social and political life” (pp. 194-195).

We have already seen this concern to avoid conflict over religion in Schneewind’s coverage of the natural law tradition. It is important to see why even intensely religious thinkers were motivated to defend what we may think of as secular values. They could see very concretely the evils of rampant sectarianism.

“Whichcote, Smith, More, and Cudworth were deeply embroiled in these local battles. Unlike many of their opponents, however, they developed a stance and a philosophy that in important ways transcended the particularities of the quarrels of the times. Commonly called the Cambridge Platonists, the group’s central members were divines who spent much of their lives as academics at Cambridge. The originators of the movement were not philosophers but preachers and reformers. Though they developed a complex and coherent outlook, they did not wish to present it in the kind of systematic form that philosophers often strive for. They worked out their views in terms of Scripture, and argued, as did most of those whom they addressed, by interpreting biblical texts. Such theory as they presented was offered largely to show the implications of their new way of reading texts. Their Platonism was much mediated by Plotinus and the Greek fathers of the church. Using Plato to provide help for a new Christian exegesis was an incidental, not a central, aim. The most coherent philosophical account of the group’s outlook seems indeed quite Platonic, or neoplatonic. But Ralph Cudworth’s Plato, an all but overt Christian who had learned about God’s revelation to the Jews from the Egyptians, is not exactly the Plato of modern scholarship. The extent of genuine Platonism in the group matters far less than its attempt to put Christianity in a new light” (p. 195).

This aspect of Schneewind’s emphasis will be mine here as well.

“Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83) originated the movement. In sermons and personal teaching he insisted on two conclusions: that morality is the heart of religion, and that reason and religion are the same thing. ‘There are but two things in religion’, Whichcote writes, ‘Morals and Institutions: Morals may be known, by the Reason of the thing; morals are owned as soon as spoken, and they are nineteen parts in twenty, of all religion’ ” (p. 196).

It is important to recognize that this was not part of a minimalist, common-denominator view of religion, like that promoted by deism. Positive embrace of poetically rich specific religious heritage need not be accompanied by insistence that the virtuous pagan and others who do not share the same heritage of symbolic identification are automatically consigned to hell.

“[Whichcote] is no Deist. Unlike Lord Herbert of Cherbury, he aims to preserve the essentials of Christianity. Where Herbert had given conscience the primary role as a test of true revelation, Whichcote gave morality a place no one since Pelagius had dared to give it. His radical claim is that ‘the Moral part of religion does sanctify the soul; and is Final both to what is instrumental and instituted’. Morality suffices to win salvation and must be the controlling factor in the arrangements we make about both worship and church governance; and morality is to be known by reason, rather than by appeal to authority, including biblical authority” (ibid, internal citations omitted here and throughout).

Religious beliefs offer additional motivation and sustenance for us to act ethically ourselves, not additional requirements by which to judge others.

“The one part of religion in twenty that comes by institution — by God’s positive will revealed in scripture — has, Whichcote holds, merely instrumental value…. But the moral part of religion ‘is necessary in itself’, containing requirements dictated directly by reason. The requirements of morality are not due to God’s will; any sane person would want to abide by them even if God granted a dispensation from them. It is only if we live in accordance with these necessary moral laws that we will be truly happy. ‘Morality’, Whichcote says, ‘is not a means to anything but to happiness; everything else is a means to morality’…. Like Cudworth and Smith, Whichcote cites scripture to authorize his claim that we can be deified by making ourselves virtuous” (p. 197).

“The central thesis is that we are each able to know, by thinking for ourselves, how we are to live and behave, and that we each have ‘power to execute and perform’ according to this knowledge. Because Whichcote is strongly opposed to voluntarism, he insists that there is something to be known at the base of morality. ‘Moral laws are laws of themselves’, he tells us, ‘without sanction by will; and the necessity of them arises from the things themselves. God made us to know both him and his creation, and so made the mind with sound faculties. If we use them properly we are in accord with ourselves; to refuse to seek truth and to refuse to think for oneself are equally to be at odds with oneself. The important truths are readily accessible to us, moreover, and are neither recondite nor difficult” (ibid).

This is the principle of self-governance that we have already seen in the neo-Stoics.

“When we are immoral, we act against our own principles and contradict our own reason. We therefore need no external tribunal to tell us we have acted wrongly. ‘The unrighteous are condemned by themselves before they are condemned by God.’ Being self-condemned is what is really meant by being in hell; being self-consistent and filled with ‘humility, modesty, righteousness, temperance, reverence of deity and the like’ is what is meant by being in heaven. Heaven and hell are not places; they are states of mind…. To be saved, and so deified, simply means to live in accordance with what we ourselves see to be right” (p. 198).

“Like Lord Herbert, Whichcote argues in several sermons that because God holds us all equally accountable, he must have made saving knowledge available to all alike…. In Whichcote’s thought, then, moral knowledge [is] more widely accessible than knowledge either of the natural world or of revelation…. That inner governance which is both morality and religion must lead to virtuous action, or it is nothing” (p. 199). ” ‘The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most voices, are false measures of truth’ ” (p. 199n).

Hear hear.

“John Smith (1618-52) … agrees that morality concerns one’s inner condition, not only law-abiding external action, that heaven and hell are states of mind, that sanctification and justification must go hand in hand, that the laws of morality do not arise from God’s arbitrary will, and that we participate in God’s mind…. Even ignorant men feel an instinctive yearning toward union with God…. If we can only bring ourselves to act better, we will know more. This is what Smith means by saying that we learn more about God through action than through speculation. Truth and goodness ‘grow both from the same root and live in one another’ ” (p. 199-200).

“It is just obvious that though we should love ourselves, we should love other people and God even more. We can increasingly transform our desires to fit that insight. The search for our own perfection is, in Smith’s eyes, an effort to increase the extent to which we act out of love for others” (p. 200).

If our own “perfection” consists in acting out of love for others, the end goal must encompass a good deal more than our individual perfection.

“Smith’s opposition to voluntarism and his belief that God is essentially a loving being push him in the direction of a consequentialist view of morality. Although it would be absurd to think of God obeying anyone else, he is ‘not Ex Lex and without all law’…. God follows his reason, and so he takes the goodness of things as a reason to bring them about. God’s aim must be to bring goodness into being in the world; and the law of nature that he has inscribed within our souls tells us to do the same…. Not only is the law inscribed in us a law of goodness. It is one which we need not be made to follow by threats. A law of that kind — the kind Grotius and Hobbes took as central — can exact only external observance” (pp. 200-201).

“Henry More (1614-87) was the one member of the Whichcote group to publish a systematic work on moral philosophy during the seventeenth century. The Encheiridion Ethicum of 1666 … is in some respects eclectic and a little eccentric. It nonetheless spells out the consequences of the views of Whichcote and Smith when those are given a philosophical form. More does not take up all the ideas they raise — he rejects voluntarism, for instance, but without elaborating on the rejection or arguing for it…. Yet its main thesis is quite straightforward, and plainly in line with the Cambridge emphasis on love and reason as together forming the center both of morality and of our relations with God” (p. 202).

What more could we need in order to be ethical, besides love and reason?

” ‘In morality we are as sure as in mathematics’, Whichcote pronounces, and More produces some twenty-three ‘moral axioms or noemas’, which, he says, in a phrase recalling Whichcote, are ‘agreed to as soon as heard’. The noemas are self-evident and can serve the purpose in moral reasoning that ‘first undeniable axioms’ do in mathematics. More introduces them because they will make morality plain and compelling even to those unfortunately lacking in what he calls the ‘boniform facultty’, a brief account of which opens his treatise” (pp. 202-203).

I have a few doubts about this part. More’s noemas, summarized below by Schneewind, all in all seem pretty reasonable, but I regard appeals to self-evident principles as a weakness, even in mathematics. (Martin-Löf’s constructive type theory manages to do without.) Some things are so evident that they are hard to explain; but that does not make them self-evident. On the other hand, this is a rather technical point. Somewhat more seriously, while we may feel something close to certainty about the abstract principles themselves, all practical applications involve interpretation at the point where universals are applied to particulars, and such interpretation is in principle always open to further development. But again on the other hand, in practice what is almost self-evident is hard to distinguish from what “is” self-evident.

“What exactly that faculty is remains somewhat of a mystery even at the end of the book. But it is at least a love of the highest good as well as an insight into it; it leads us to do good as well as to desire it for ourselves; it makes us ‘pant after God’; and it is the supreme faculty in our minds or souls, through which we resemble God, ‘who is goodness it self’ ” (p. 203).

It is undeniable that the whole human being (often, at least) has a kind of overall sense for what is good in various situations. Calling it a faculty seems a bit reified.

“Noema I tells us that the good is that which is ‘grateful, pleasant, and congruous’ to any living being. In III and IV we learn that some beings are superior to others, and that goods may differ in quality, in quantity, or both. These noemas also underlie sincerity, the virtue by which the mind is wholly devoted to the pursuit of the best and brought to pursue the greatest good with the greatest zeal. Noema V instructs us to choose the good, preferring not simply the greater to the smaller but the more excellent to the less. The seventh noema recognizes an asymmetry of good and evil: it is better to miss a considerable good than to suffer a comparable evil. Noema IX suggests that there might be a trade-off between a lesser good of more ‘weight and duration’ than a superior good of less extent. Noemas X and XI tell us that, allowing for probabilities, pursuit of good and avoidance of evil should not be affected by the times at which they occur. These plainly show the rationale of prudence; and noema XII gives the ‘demonstration’ of that virtue, saying that a calm mind undisturbed by the passions judges better than a mind roiled by desires. Noema XIII, finally, requires that we purse the greater good with the greater zeal” (pp. 203-204).

What is perhaps most noteworthy in this enumeration is the passing mention of sincerity. A bit further below, Schneewind characterizes More’s ethical stance, as he previously did that of Cumberland, as consequentialist (that action is good which brings about good). This invokes one of the two major dimensions relevant to ethical assessment: consequences. The other, invoked by the mention of sincerity, consists in our intentions, good will, and acting in good faith.

“Noema XIV, grounding justice, is simply More’s version of the golden rule: if you want someone to do good to you, you are bound to do the same good for him in similar circumstances. In XVI we are told to return good, not evil, for good. Noemas XVII-XIX say that it is good for people to have the means to live well, and that the more who have the means, the better. Moreover it it is better for one person to be prevented from living luxuriously than for many to be in want. There are two noemas concerned with obedience: we are to obey the magistrate ‘in things indifferent’ and to obey God rather than men. Finally, we are to give people what is due to them, without troubling them”; but we should recognize that people can forfeit their rights by bad behavior” (p. 204).

This all seems unobjectionable, if a bit pedantic. But I expect I would find the views of More’s opponents truly horrendous.

“More has no sense that there is any tension among these axioms; he seeks no reduction of their number; and he believes in addition that being fully virtuous will make us perfectly happy. He plainly thinks that morality is wholly a matter of the pursuit of good, and that there can be no ultimate conflict or disharmony among the parts of that search” (ibid).

I don’t see tension either. But in attempting to specify universal principles of good at this level of detail, it is inevitable that not all of the principles will be of the same kind. Moreover, this being the case aggravates the worry that it is hard to know whether the enumeration is complete.

” ‘Therefore it is necessary … first to inquire and find out, what is the mode and standard of this right reason?’…. The principle, perhaps not surprisingly, turns out to be the boniform faculty, which is now equated with an intellectual love of all good. Because this is the divine in us, ‘it ought in preference to be the rule and standard of all the rest … this most simple and divine sense and feeling in the boniform faculty of the soul, is that rule or boundary, whereby reason is examin’d and approves her self’. It is a single and simple idea, ‘but all the shapes and modes of virtue and well doing’ come from it — including justice, temperance, and fortitude. If your boniform faculty is operating, you need not appeal to the noemas, which cover the same ground” (pp. 204-205).

We have encountered the Stoic criterion of right reason numerous times recently. Here More raises the good question of its “mode and standard”, though he answers it rather quickly. But his answer is not vacuous, even if it does raise further questions.

While the “intellectual love of all good” sounds a bit like Spinoza, Spinoza’s library and correspondence, which have been well studied, contain no reference to any of the Cambridge Platonists. Like many of their contemporaries, More and Cudworth in fact denounced the conclusions of Spinoza. But a century later, Herder would synthesize what became the influential Romantic view of Spinoza by integrating Cudworth’s notion of “plastic natures”, mentioned again below.

“More thus presents a fully consequentialist ethic. He is quite willing to speak of laws of nature, even giving a rather Grotian account of the rights involved in them. But he plainly intends the laws to be explained in terms of their tendency to produce good. Divine reason, he says, has dictated to us ‘such laws as tend, in their own nature, to the happiness of all mankind’. And we find in the supreme rule derived from, or constituted by, the boniform faculty, a principle that everyone can use to make moral decisions. Considering the value of things other than virtue, More dismisses subtle wit and strong memory as unimportant as long as we are filled with love of neighbor and goodwill to mankind. ‘For the good and perfect man is not so much actuated by a list of precepts gotten without book, as by living inwardly and printing in his mind a single and sincere sense of things.’ We are to pursue in singleness of mind that which is the best. And the rules for doing this are plain enough for everyone to use” (p. 205).

As mentioned above, Schneewind has previously noted a consequentialist turn in Cumberland. But in Cumberland, it is natural law that anchors and gives shape to our love of the good, whereas in More, the validity of law is derived from our sense of the good. Law is no longer a voluntaristic fiat ex nihilo.

“Love is thus the source of law. The law is the expression of the boniform faculty, which is what is divine within us. By living in accordance with it, we ourselves approach divinity. That is what Plato taught when he spoke of virtue as a thing divine, ‘and how much ally’d, and resembling unto God himself’ ” (ibid).

“That [Cudworth’s] orientation is the same as Whichcote’s and Smith’s is clear from a notable sermon preached by invitation to the House of Commons in 1647. The moral quality of our lives — ‘willing or not willing as we ought to do’ — matters more than anything else. Those who turn themselves away from self-centered love to love the good in all things, as God loves, will find heaven within and thus need nothing more. They will be moved by a law of love which leaves them free in obeying it because in this obedience, even though they are under ‘the most constraining and indispensable necessity’, there is no ‘narrowness and servility’. They are a law unto themselves. Doctrinal differences are unimportant; following the commandment to love is the sole way to know more about God. And our chief task is to perfect not our intellects but our wills or hearts” (p. 206).

Will is now a definite intent that can be explained, rather than a faculty serving as a supernatural unexplained explainer, as it is for the voluntarists.

“Like his Cambridge colleagues Cudworth thinks that when we come to know God better through reforming our will and loves and lives, we are coming to know God’s mind directly. The aim of his True Intellectual System is to spell out a metaphysics that explains how this is possible” (ibid).

Here will has the unobjectionable sense of a definite intent, rather than an unexplained super-power that disrupts and hijacks our ability to reason about the good.

“He is opposed also to the occasionalist element in Cartesianism — the thought that God and God alone sustains the world and its apparent activity, by exercising his power at every moment to keep things existing and working in accordance with his plans” (ibid).

Occasionalism usually arises as a consequence of theological voluntarism, so to oppose the latter is also implicitly to oppose the former.

“Yet we are not forced to say that God does everything. Nature is not divinity itself, but there are what Cudworth calls ‘plastic natures’ that affect natural things, acting without consciousness but as if intelligently. They serve as God’s under-ministers to do the job of maintaining order. Animal reproduction and the ‘mellification’ of bees are examples of this. Plastic natures are at work as much in the macrocosm of the universe as in the microcosm, ‘which makes all things thus to conspire every where, and agree together into one harmony’ ” (ibid).

In effect, Cudworth’s plastic natures act as natural agents of providence. Cudworth is highly aware of the fact that Descartes’s mechanistic view of nature allows no place for any such agents. Meanwhile previous Christian accounts of providence had implicitly assumed an overtly supernatural direct control of, or intervention in, natural events by God. By this innovation, Cudworth charts a course between Scylla and Charybdis. Cudworth has little use for Aristotle, but his plastic natures take over the role of what for Aristotle is “internal” teleology embedded in the workings of nature.

Following the old scholastic pattern that was also adopted by the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino, More and Cudworth both explicitly attack the unity of the material intellect in Averroes. More wrote an elaborate poem “Antimonopsychia” that uses Plotinus to refute the “monopsychism” that various writers misattributed to Averroes. But Cudworth also uses Platonic ideas in God’s mind in a way that unwittingly resembles Averroes’s use of the “treasury” of forms in the material intellect to underwrite and explain the human intellect’s capability for objective understanding of essences.

“Cudworth’s Platonizing theory is that unless we were in direct contact with God’s ideas no one could think or speak in ways that could be understood by anyone else…. But when all created minds contemplate the very same ideas or truths in God’s mind, ‘they do all of them but as it were listen to one and the same original voice of the eternal wisdom that is never silent’ ” (p. 207).

“What, then, do we learn about morality when by living in love we manage to suppress the passions and desires that muddy our thoughts and obtrude between our minds an God’s? ” (ibid).

The Cambridge Platonists seem generally to adopt the Stoic and neo-Stoic view that human passions both can and need to be radically suppressed so that they do not impede our reason, rather than the more moderate Aristotelian view that desire and reason can come to form an integrated whole in the human being. They identify Plato’s eros with the caritas that Augustine sharply distinguishes from cupiditas.

“A central part of the answer … is that there are special moral ideas in God’s mind that guide him in his creativity and which ought to guide us. Voluntarism is, consequently, false.”

“Cudworth is quite willing to accept God’s omnipotence, but he denies what he accuses Descartes of thinking, that it alone entails voluntarism. It is not limiting God’s power to say that he can do only what is not self-contradictory. God’s wisdom is as much a part of God as his will, so if the latter is limited by the former, God is still not controlled by anything external to himself” (pp. 207-208).

“To make a more positive case, Cudworth brings in some considerations about essences and concepts. Like Suarez, he holds that essences are immutable. One might change the name one attached to the essence, but doing so would not touch the essence. Now it is essences that make things what they are; and if essences cannot conceivably be changed, then even God cannot change them. So God cannot by will alone make something that is essentially good into something that is not essentially good. God can either make something exist or refrain from doing so; but if that thing is by its nature good, then God in creating it is necessarily creating a good thing. And God cannot make something good without endowing it with the essence of goodness. Will alone, therefore, Cudworth concludes, cannot be what makes good things good” (p. 208).

“In chapter XLVI of Leviathan Hobbes used his theories of language and knowledge to attack the kind of theory of meaning to which Cudworth is here appealing…. Cudworth plainly knew Hobbes’s view and saw the threat it posed to his own Platonism. He adverts parenthetically to the possibility that moral terms might be ‘meer names without significance, or names for nothing else but willed and commanded’ ” (ibid).

“Against materialism Cudworth erects a theory of plastic natures, based on the view that the evidences of design in nature would not have come about from matter alone, and on the rejection of occasionalism. In defending the irreducibility of moral concepts, his purpose is to defeat voluntarism, whether Hobbesian or Cartesian. To do so he moves to arguments about essences and meanings that are quite general, and not tied specifically to morality as such. His other Cambridge colleagues did not use arguments of this kind. But Cudworth was plainly not satisfied with the kind of view that underlies Smith’s and More’s rejection of voluntarism…. The upshot of this view, as I pointed out in the case of More and of Cumberland after him, is a proto-utilitarian ethic, a consequentialist view that tells us that God necessarily loves good generally and acts to bring about as much as he can, and that we ought to do likewise” (p. 209).

“John Smith spells out a further consequence, as I noted earlier. Punishment cannot be retributive; it must be either determent or reformative. Cudworth raises an objection to this conclusion, an objection we do not really expect…. Consequentialism must be rejected because it forces us to the wholly unacceptable conclusion that God could not reasonably carry out retributive justice. But if consequentialism cannot be accepted, then the argument from God’s goodness will not give a satisfactory reason for rejecting voluntarism. Cudworth seems to think he is forced by his moral concerns into arguments about meaning and metaphysics” (pp. 209-210).

Even the proto-deist Herbert of Cherbury had included reward and punishment in an afterlife in his minimalist program. Cudworth clearly recognizes Smith’s point that punishment or retribution cannot be a good in itself. As Schneewind points out, this result in an impasse for Cudworth, who also clearly wants to hold onto a traditional Christian view of supernatural reward and punishment.

“It is as if he would like to attribute to God two moral attributes, goodness and justice, yet hesitates to do so…. His view of eternal punishment suggests that he believes that divine retribution does not do good in the way that beneficience does. Hence justice and love might conflict. But not only is such conflict theoretically inadmissible in Cudworth’s harmonious universe. The question is politically loaded. The Puritans emphasized an Old Testament deity of justice and vengeance. If Cudworth were to give justice priority in God’s moral nature, he would seem to have gone over to their side. But insisting on the priority of love, as he generally does, leads him into serious difficulties explaining eternal punishment. Perhaps silence seemed the best way out” (p. 210).

I will devote a separate post to Cambridge Platonist views on free will.