"Culverwell's Discourse of the Light of Nature, composed in a period of religious and political unheaval, and delivered as lectures to Cambridge students in 1646, is an imaginative statement of the teachings of Christian humanism concerning the nature and limits of human reason and the related concepts of natural and divine law. Culverwell has much in common with the Cambridge Platonists, sharing with them a spiritual home at Emmanuel College; yet his thought is grounded in the scholasticism of Aquinas and (...) Suarez, and it is within this context that he explores the rich potential of the biblical metaphor from Proverbs which is his central text: 'The understanding of a man is the Candle of the Lord.' Heeding Bacon's call for an appraisal of the rôle of reason in religious matters, and drawing on the ideas of Grotius and Selden concerning natural law, Culverwell offers a critique of reason that attempts to preserve the attitudes of Calvinism and yet reveals a strong tendency to credit reason with more authority than that tradition allows. faith and reason, nature and grace, revealed truth and common notions, the priority of divine will or divine reason—these inherited dilemmas are examined with insight and flashes of poetic brilliance. The pattern that emerges reveals a suggestive parallel with Milton's intellectual development in the same period, illuminates the Whichcote-Tuckney controversy of 1651, and probably provided John Locke with an intellectual stimulus for his early Essays on the Law of Nature. Alter to the currents of his day (the Discourse, for example, is one of the first English writings to refer to Descartes), Culverwell offers an interesting approach to schools of thought in mid-century England, while his treatment of such stock themes of renaissance philosophy as Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, innate ideas, and the nature of the soul, shows the mental and rhetorical habits of the seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar. His significance as a thinker, however, lies in his ability to draw the varied elements of his study, ancient and modern, into an individual synthesis which has a distinctive form and style. The text has been carefully and faithfully transcribed by the editors, and translations of the Greek and Hebrew passages are supplied in square brackets. In a lengthy, explanatory introduction, the editors discuss the part played by the Discourse in the controversies of the day and the thinkers from whom Culverwell drew his material, thus shedding light on the evolution of English rationalism in the seventeenth century. Full documentation is supplied in the form of notes following the text, plus a section of textual notes listing all departures in this edition from the first edition of 1652. The annotation also established for the first time ull range of Culverwell's sources—classical, mediaeval, and renaissance—and enables the reader to appreciate his manner of citing authority and handling illustration. The Discourse makes fascinating reading. It will appeal especially to students of seventeenth-century theology, English, philosophy, and history; and it provides a background against which Locke's thought may be understood."-Publisher. (shrink)

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