Max Weber understood how democracy in the seventeenth century was tied to Calvinist individualism and the rejection of external forms. Thomas Hobbes hated the consequences of puritan rule and argued that politics needed to accept the principle of the mask in order to create social order. The lawyer William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix portrayed theatre as the root of all evils in the royalist regime, but he himself proved a masterly performer in working to undermine the regime. The most radical democratic thinking came from the ‘Levellers’ who harked back to the Garden of Eden and natural human innocence. Shakespeare interrogated the ambivalent myth of Eden in Henry VI Part Two, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. The Putney debates constitute the main focus of this chapter. Common soldiers with Leveller views argued with their generals about constitutional principles. Close analysis of the debate reveals the complications that followed from claims to sincerity, couched as insistence that because God had spoken to them speakers were following their consciences, avoiding rhetoric or hypocrisy. The religious context in fact allowed a high level of democratic exchange.

This chapter provides essential historical and theological background for the emergence of Cambridge Platonism. It traces the fortunes of the Calvinist or Reformed (or less accurately ‘Puritan’) theological community in England, of which the Cambridge Platonists were members, through the civil wars and Interregnum, with a particular focus on controversy about predestination. It presents the major outlines of the Reformed doctrines of double predestination, election and reprobation, along with the rise of anti-Calvinist currents of thought like Arminianism and Laudianism, with a view to exploring the ways in which these theological disputes contributed to political tensions that gave rise to the civil wars. Finally, it explores the central role played by the Cambridge Platonists’ colleges of Emmanuel and Christ’s in the training of Reformed preachers and the dissemination of Reformed doctrine, with particular attention paid to Reformed attitudes to the study of philosophy and pagan thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle.

A central tenet of Reformed theology was the doctrine of justification by imputed righteousness: the faithful are not saved on account of their own righteousness, but purely by the gracious decision of God to ‘impute’ or ‘account’ the perfect righteousness of his Son unto them. While this doctrine was a popular target for broader anti-Calvinist criticism, this chapter demonstrates that Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith challenged the Reformed doctrine by producing an explicitly Platonic account of justification on which believers are rendered acceptable to God by deification (i.e. by direct, internal conformity to and participation in the nature of God). This model of justification is distinctive, even against the wider background of English anti-Calvinism, and provides one of the strongest indications of the close philosophical alignment of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith. As the present chapter will demonstrate, to their Calvinist critics such as Anthony Tuckney, it was the Cambridge Platonists’ views about justification that constituted their most egregious departure from Reformed doctrine and that most clearly unmasked the ‘Platonic’ character of their thought.

For many anti-Calvinists, including the Cambridge Platonists, the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination entailed unacceptable conclusions about the character of God. Inspired by the fractious political climate, seventeenth-century English anti-Calvinists frequently accused the Calvinists of making God into an ‘arbitrary tyrant’, one who imposed his arbitrary will upon a hapless creation, unbound by any principles of justice or goodness. After considering the political and theological background from which this anti-tyrannical discourse emerges, this chapter examines the ways in which, in their attacks on the doctrine of double predestination, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith all appeal to an explicitly Platonic notion of God’s unwavering intention to communicate his goodness to creatures as far as they are able to receive it.

This chapter considers whether and in what way Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith can be called ‘Platonists’. Was Platonism a part of the story they told about themselves, or that their contemporaries told about them, or is it simply an anachronistic label invented by modern scholarship? I argue that ‘Platonism’ was a live intellectual category in the Cambridge Platonists’ seventeenth-century philosophical and theological context and denoted a particular set of doctrinal positions which were associated with ancient Platonism, such as the primacy of God’s goodness over his will. The chapter also investigates evidence of a surge of interest in ancient and Renaissance Platonism at Cambridge in the latter half of the 1630s, centred at Emmanuel College, which included John Sadler, Peter Sterry and Laurence Sarson and also coincides with Henry More’s discovery of Platonism, and Cudworth’s early Platonic letters to John Stoughton. It is argued that these developments provide important context for the origins of Cambridge Platonism, and illuminate the ways in which Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s intellectual development was shaped by engagement with Platonic texts and ideas.

Like the rest of Northern Europe, the Low Countries experienced a wide variety of religious reform movements in the sixteenth century: humanism, Anabaptism, Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism and Catholic reform. In many respects, with its urban and rural diversity, the Netherlands could be seen as a microcosm of Reformation Europe as a whole. What made the case of the Low Countries distinct, however, was the political context: religious rebellion took place against the backdrop of the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Religious dissent grew inextricably entangled with political opposition to the centralising efforts of the Habsburg dynasty. This state of affairs led to the two key features of the Reformation in the Low Countries that distinguished from the rest of Europe: (1) an unusually harsh degree of official prosecution of Protestant heresy, and (2) the creation, by century’s end, of two distinct states, the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, because of the wars that Reformation at least partially instigated. Thus, while the ideas and qualities of the various reform movements in the Netherlands differed little from the rest of Europe, their outcome proved quite distinctive.

The distortions of Augustinian and Calvinist approaches to natural theology are noted, and the different approach of Eastern Orthodoxy is examined, especially in relation to the notion of noetic perception in the approach of Gregory of Nyssa and to its application to the contemplation of nature as understood by Maximus the Confessor. More purely ‘philosophical’ considerations are also examined, especially in relation to the ‘weight’ that is assigned to competing arguments. In this context, the concept of noetic perception is applied to the notion of ‘baptized reason’. It is suggested that in relation to the praeambula fidei approach of Thomas Aquinas, even scholastic versions of natural theology may need revision because of nuances in that work that are often unrecognized.

This historical chapter explains the origins of the ICRC in Geneva immediately before and after 1863 and the organization’s very early activities. It goes into some detail about the two key founding fathers, Henry Dunant and Gustave Moynier. The focus on two key persons gives flesh and blood to early developments for both the ICRC and the global Red Cross network that the ICRC initiated and helped structure. Religious origins are contrasted with secular evolution. Amateurism is contrasted with a quest for professionalization. Flexible decision-making is noted. Also mentioned are Genevan Exceptionalism and Swiss nationalism. This chapter allows a vivid contrast between the early ICRC and the organization it has become in contemporary times.

This chapter focuses on Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good (1710), in which Mather makes a series of proposals for how Christians might advance the gospel cause and exercise social benevolence. For this purpose, Mather creatively amalgamated different variants of the genre. First published anonymously in 1710 but quickly associated with Mather’s name, Bonifacius has often been considered an aesthetically and intellectually inferior predecessor of the American essay tradition, rather than its first full instantiation. Even so, the work enjoyed great popularity in the United States and Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin praised Bonifacius and acknowledged its importance in his early formation. This chapter investigates that connection and explores the relation between the sermon and the essay, dwelling on significant passages from Bonifacius and tracking its influence on a number of later philosophical and spiritual traditions.

This chapter concerns the place of predestination in Andrewes’ own style of divinity. On the one hand, because of the organising role of predestinarian error in Andrewes’ sense of puritanism and of the importance of puritanism as the defining other against which Andrewes constructed his own position, predestination was in some sense central to Andrewes’ thought. But on the other, since presumption was precisely what was wrong with the puritan attitude to predestination, a topic which the puritans thought they could subjugate to their own rationalist cross-questioning, this was an area in which Andrewes affected an extreme reticence. Nevertheless, what looks like an explicitly Arminian account of theology of grace can be teased out of his sermons and assigned a central role in his overall theology, which stressed the collaboration between the grace of God and human effort, the will of God and that of fallen humanity, enabled by Christ’s sacrifice and the ameliorating effects of sacramental grace to help people collaborate actively in their own salvation.

The Introduction is in three parts. The first introduces the object of study and the sources and methodology used to study it and puts the topic in its historiographical context. The second locates it in terms of the religio-political developments of the period between the 1590s and the 1620s. The third addresses the immediate political and polemical circumstances in which Laudianism rose to prominence and then power in the mid- to late 1620s, and then identifies the 1630 edition of Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons as the movement’s key foundational text or mission statement.

This chapter looks at fellow-travelling Calvinist conformists, that is to say persons who had always espoused a Calvinist or reformed view of predestination, who, on certain issues and in certain modes, could sound like any moderate puritan, but who, on the issue of conformity, took a firmly anti-puritan line, and consequently on certain other issues could sound just like card-carrying Laudians. It does so through the analysis and comparison of the careers of two such men, Robert Sanderson and Humphrey Sydenham, whose views on the theology of grace, conformity and puritanism, and indeed on some of the signature values of Laudianism, are analysed and compared.

This chapter sets up the problem of the relationship between Arminianism – defined as a set of propositions on the subject of predestination, at odds with Calvinist orthodoxy – and Laudianism as it has emerged in this book. Predestinarian error played a central role in the Laudian analysis of puritanism – it underlay a great deal of puritan presumption and hypocrisy, as well as their most divisive, indeed sectarian, impulses and behaviour. In addition, puritanism was the organising other of the Laudian project. All of which meant that predestination was a topic of great interest to the Laudians. But when it came to the positive case for Laudian reformation, to Laudianism as a style of piety and way of being Christian, the doctrine was far less central. Indeed, the topic tended to fall within the remit of those things best left unaddressed and certainly not subjected to the sort of assertion and counter-assertion that had recently threatened to plunge the Low Countries into chaos. However, the intensity of the Laudians’ repudiation of the puritans’ Calvinist predestinarianism more than implied the presence of a counter-orthodoxy and certainly called down accusations of Arminianism upon the Laudians’ heads.

Chapter 5 considers the theology and moral philosophy of the respected theologian and moral casuist, Robert Sanderson. The divine Sanderson despaired of the unfortunate consequences for practical morality of denying the responsibility and freedom of individuals. In its historical context his doubt amounted to finally rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Scholars consider Sanderson’s Several Cases of Conscience Discussed in Ten Lectures in the Divinity School at Oxford a main reference for Locke in the writing of the unpublished Two Tracts of Government and his foundational Essays on the Law of Nature. Sanderson’s work sets out a moral philosophy of free will reinforced by mechanical overtones of necessary causality in reasoning. The chapter briefly analyses this type of ‘mechanical conscience’ and shows how Sanderson was committed to a de facto theory of government.

In late medieval Europe, most people accepted the Catholic Church’s teachings, but a significant minority called for reforms. In the 1520s, reformers came to include Martin Luther, a professor of theology in Germany. Luther’s ideas turned into a movement, in part through the new technology of the printing press. He and other reformers worked with political authorities, and much of central Europe and Scandinavia broke with the Catholic Church and established independent Protestant Churches. In England, King Henry VIII’s desire for a male heir led him to establish a separate English Church. In the late 1530s, the Catholic Church began to respond more vigorously to Protestant challenges and began carrying out internal reforms, led by the papacy and new religious orders such as the Jesuits. At the same time, the ideas of John Calvin inspired a second wave of Protestant reform, in which order, piety, and discipline were viewed as marks of divine favor. Protestant and Catholic political authorities thought that their territories should have one official state Church, and sought to purge ideas, objects, and people considered religiously alien. The Reformation led to religious persecution, individual and group migration, and more than a century of religious war.

Grotius’ earlier theological controversies concerned the authority of secular rulers and the normative status of the undivided church, principles given fullest exposition in De Imperio Summarum Potestatum. Meletius reveals deeper disagreements with the prevailing Calvinism, insisting on the distinction of core doctrines from theological speculations. The atoning death of Christ, expounded in De Satisfactione Christi, was of central importance to him, and his apologetic interest flowered in De Veritate Christianae Religionis, an exercise in natural theology. The later writings centre on his Bible Commentary and his writings on Christian unity. They reveal some changes upon earlier views, but no accommodation to Catholic doctrinal norms. The polemics with Rivet sharpened his opposition to Calvinism as a dogmatic system with an inadequate conception of the Christian moral life. His status as a layman of no church establishment exposed him to appropriation in support of later agenda that were not his. But his influence was widespread in later Protestantism of many strands.

The first principles behind the developmental idea are linear time, interiority and staged structure. ‘Development’ is one particular historical way of conceptualizing the primary principle of change; in it, human time is an attempt at successful ‘recapitulation’ (a term that would reappear with modern developmental psychology’s founder, G. Stanley Hall) of Adam’s initial failure. In monotheism, time constructs interiority as permanence, ‘the mind’, in contrast with the temporary visitations of pagan or shamanic religion. Medieval psychology saw a proliferation of its ‘faculties’ (memory, imagination, judgement) and ‘operations’ (abstraction, attention, consciousness, logical reasoning, information-processing), which penetrated both the monastic and the humanist idea of the individual. Augustine’s ‘six ages’ of man gave the lifespan a fixed structure. Following the Reformation, change in the elect minority was seen either as instantaneous or as a stadial sequence: Jansenists and Calvinists on the one hand, Jesuits and Arminians on the other, disputed the function of human agency in relation to divine determinism.