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The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Daniel Walker Howe
Daniel Walker Howe
Affiliation:
professor of history inthe University of California, Los Angeles, California.
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Extract

In 1875 the distinguished Unitarian minister and local historian Henry Wilder Foote preached a eulogy for his late colleague, the Reverend James Walker, philosopher and former president of Harvard University. It was an appropriate occasion to characterize the achievement of the antebellum generation of Harvard Unitarian leaders that Walker represented. “They were much more than mere denominationalists or founders of a sect,” Foote declared. “The whole tone of their teaching was profoundly positive in its moral and religious quality. Trained at our American Cambridge, they were really the legitimate heirs of that noble group of men nurtured at the Cambridge of England–the Latitude Men, as they were called–who blended culture and piety and rational thought in their teaching.” Building upon Foote's perceptive characterization, this article will explore the significance of the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists for the Harvard Unitarians of the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing it may illuminate other forms of New England religious thought that also drew upon Platonic or Neoplatonic sources, including Edwardseanism, Hopkinsianism, and the progressive orthodoxy of Horace Bushnell. In particular, I hope to shed light on the relationship between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 470 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1988

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References

1. Foote, Henry Wilder, The Wisdom from Above. Sermon Occasioned by the Death of James Walker (Boston, 1875), p. 13.Google Scholar

2. There are many books treating the Cambridge Platonists; among the most useful are Colie, Rosalie, Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge, 1957);Google ScholarRoberts, James D., From Puritanism to Platonism in Seventeenth Century England (The Hague, 1968);CrossRefGoogle ScholarCragg, Gerald R., From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (1950; reprint, Cambridge, 1966);Google Scholar and Powicke, Frederick J., The Cambridge Platonists (Cambridge, Mass., 1926).Google Scholar

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6. The best general introductions to Plotinus are Inge, William Ralph, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 2 vols. (New York, 1918);Google Scholar and Brehier, Emile, The Philosophy of Plotinus (Chicago, 1958).Google Scholar Inge translates Nous as “Spirit”; Brehier as “Intelligence.”

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28. An interesting new study of the use of conscience as a tool of biblical criticism is Richard A. Grusin, “The Hermeneutics of the Heart: Interpretive Transcendentalism,” which I read in manuscript.

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