Rational religion and toleration: Ralph Cudworth and other Platonists

Abstract

Cambridge Platonists agreed with the idea of a universal religion which had been advocated by the Platonists of Florence and which, after the Italian Renaissance, extended in many other European countries. My attempt was to show how this concept of universal religion, used by Ficino to defend a view opposed to the irreligious modes of thought in the philosophy of his time, became quite influential in Cudworth's defence of a religious view of life as well. Moreover, I wanted to explain in what way Ficino's insistence to prove that religion is founded on natural reason is to be found also with Cudworth, equally hostile to the irreligious philosophy of his age, when he tried to prove that rational religion and toleration are the only ways to resist Hobbes's materialist relativism and what he saw as the consequent disintegration of the traditional (that is the theological) bases of moral thought and to support the widely shared conviction among the Cambridge Platonists that the fundamental characteristics of human mind were always and everywhere the same. Thus, sharing in the "intellectual system of the universe", since they are endowed with reason, which has indeed universal validity, humans may establish, according to Cudworth, the so-called "immutable morality" on the basis of their participation to the realm of the intelligible. Furthermore, in promoting tolerance, Cudworth used the same rational order of the universe, which made it intelligible and accessible to human intellect, not to the senses. He used the "argument from design" where Locke would later use the "argument from ignorance" - our inability to settle a knowledge claim. Then, it seemed essential to me to determine what was the need for tolerance in Cudworth's system, where differences were reduced to universal principles and the rational order of the universe was perceived through those principles which were the "candle of the Lord" set up in the soul of every man that had not wilfully extinguished it. Here the Platonic and Neo-platonic influences were to be discerned from the Cartesian ones in Cudworth's work and the impact of Ficino and the Platonic school of Florence were again relevant. Another important Cambridge Platonist quoted for comparison was Henry More.