The Letter of Resolution Concerning Origen and the Chief of His Opinions, published anonymously in London in 1661, is the chief testimony of the renaissance of Origen in early modern Cambridge. Probably authored by George Rust, the later Bishop of Dromore in Ireland, it is the first defence of Origenism, and delineates a rational theology based upon the unshakable foundation of God’s first attribute, his goodness. Trespassing and falling away from God’s goodness, the souls forfeit their original ethereal bodies or (...) ‘vehicles’ and come to inhabit lesser ones made of air and earth. Making responsible use of their freedom, however, they may climb up the ontological ladder again. Rust’s rational theodicy with its stress on God’s universal goodness and the pre-existent soul’s free will is a key document of the Cambridge Platonists’ deeply Origenian philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Many scholars have drawn attention to the way that elements of Anne Conway’s system anticipate ideas found in Leibniz. This paper explores the relationship between Conway and Leibniz’s work with regard to time, space, and process. It argues – against existing scholarship – that Conway is not a proto-Leibnizian relationist about time or space, and in fact her views lie much closer to those of Henry More; yet Conway and Leibniz agree on the primacy of process. This exploration advances our (...) understanding of Conway’s system, and the intellectual relationships between Conway, More, and Leibniz. (shrink)

Animals – both tame and wild, as metaphors and as real presences – populate many of More’s works. In this essay, I show that, from the early Psychodia Platonica to the Divine Dialogues, animals are at the core of key metaphysical issues that reverberate on the levels of psychology and ethics. In particular I discuss three main aspects: the role of animals in More’s critique of atheism, both as safeguard for the body–soul interaction and as proofs of divine providence in (...) nature; the problem of evil in the universe, and how to justify the existence of ‘evil’ animals in particular; the differentiation between animals and humans, especially on the basis of their respective possibility of attaining happiness. In all three cases, I argue that More attempts to ‘tame’ the nature of animals, and yet that he is aware that ‘animality’ remains partly untamed. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature, development and influence of the first English account of absolute time, put forward in the mid-seventeenth century by the ‘Cambridge Platonist’ Henry More. Against claims in the literature that More does not have an account of time, this paper sets out More's evolving account and shows that it reveals the lasting influence of Plotinus. Further, this paper argues that More developed his views on time in response to his adoption of Descartes' vortex cosmology and cosmogony, (...) providing new evidence of More's wider project to absorb Cartesian natural philosophy into his Platonic metaphysics. Finally, this paper argues that More should be added to the list of sources that later English thinkers – including Newton and Samuel Clarke – drew on in constructing their absolute accounts of time. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall notes that for Cudworth the fundamental ethical motive is love, but that the Cambridge Platonist tells us little about love’s character, aim and object. In this article I examine Cudworth’s doctrine of ‘superintellectual instinct’ as a natural love for or inclination to the good as it takes shape in two of his unpublished freewill manuscripts. I show that in these manuscripts he assumes a threefold model of how this higher love as a natural or ‘created’ grace fits into (...) the overall moral life of a person, together with human free will and special grace. I argue that although Cudworth adopts an Origenist synergistic position on the question of the relationship between grace and free will, stating that special grace is a necessary condition of salvation conjointly with free will and creation grace, in reality he struggles to show the strict necessity of special grace. (shrink)