The Christian Platonist Cudworth on materialism and atheism - by D. Hedley

Cudworth was a Christian member of the Cambridge Platonsist's in the 17th C, The following is a portion of 'Gods and Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and his Ancient Theology" by Douglas Hedley, 

Cudworth on materialism and atheism

The Cambridge Platonists were the first Platonists to accept modern science. Cudworth notes of Ficino that he “lived before the restoration of this mechanical philosophy, and therefore understood it not” (A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, 37). The curious historiography is not an exercise in the study of history but a rather convoluted justification for the fusion of atomism and Platonism. Ancient philosophy is discussed because of the contemporary significance of atomism, and not least the philosophical deployment of the new science by Hobbes and Descartes. Cudworth discusses Gassendi (cf. TIS, I, 105) or Hobbes (ibid., I, 108–109) and explicitly refers to res extensa and “extended substance, body or matter in the philosophy of Descartes” (ibid., I, 117–118).

 Cudworth was building on Pierre Gassendi’s seminal work. Gassendi (1592–1652) was the key figure for the dissemination of Epicureanism in the 17^th century. Levitin writes: “The historiographical obsession with labelling Cudworth a Platonist has obscured the fact that the contemporary with whom he engaged most on the issue of matter theory was Gassendi” (Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 355). It is true that Cudworth draws upon Gassendi’s work but he is far from supporting the Frenchman. Philosophically, Cudworth is utterly opposed to Gassendi:

We may observe the Fraud and Juggling of Gassendus, who…extols and applauds Epicurus, as one who approached nearer to Christianity than the other Philosophers, in that he denied the World to be an animal; whereas according to the language and Notions of those times, to deny the Worlds animation, and to be an Atheist or to deny a God, was one and the same thing (TIS, II, 175).

One might note that Cudworth accuses Gassendi of “Fraud and Juggling” and that his atheism was cognate with his denial of the animating presence of the Divine in the world. Cudworth’s key hermeneutical principle is that “All great errours have ever been intermingled with some truth” (True Notion of the Lord’s supper, 1). 

The problem of ‘atheism’ is a defining question for the Cambridge Platonists as a group. Henry More published his Antidote Against Atheism in 1652. Smith’s Select Discourses, published posthumously in 1660, contains chapters on atheism or the soul’s immortality, where he attacks “the Epicurean herd”, presents the true metaphysical and contemplative man in whom the soul has already attained to communion with the Divine Nature (Smith, Select Discourses, 17). 

The splendid frontispiece of the 1678 first edition of  The True Intellectual System of the Universe constitutes a visual image of Cudworth’s thesis (the engraving is by R. White after a painting by Jan Batista Caespers). On one side we see the “Theists”, including Socrates, Pythagoras and Aristotle, contemplating or gesturing towards the heavens. There is a wreath with the word “Victory” inscribed upon a column behind them. On the other side are the wilting atheistic ancients, Anaximander, Strato and Epicurus, appearing somewhat dejected and gazing downward. Next to them we see crumbling wreath bearing the word “Confusion”. The presence of Pythagoras rather than Plato expresses what Gerson calls the Ur-Platonism thesis.

As we shall see later, much of the controversy depends upon the philosophical questions about the nature of mind and cause. One aspect of this is the acceptance of atomism or corpusculareanism. This is not an argument for claiming that the ‘Platonism’ is diluted or misattributed. The sundering of atomism from Democritean fatalistic atheism was a central aim of the True Intellectual System (cf. Clucas, ‘Poetic atomism in seventeenth-century England). Cudworth cites Posidonius, Sextus Empiricus and Strabo in attributing the doctrine of atomism to a Phoenician called Moschus and the first Greek atomist was Pythagoras. Democritus and Leucipus, however, took atomism as a materialistic theory. They “derive the original of all things in the universe from senseless atoms…so that there could not be any God…” (TIS, I, 33–34). 

Lloyd Gerson in his recent book From Plato to Platonism has argued that Plato’s own Platonism, so to speak, was produced out of a matrix he calls “Ur-Platonism” (Lloyd Gerson, From Plato to Platonism, 9–19). On Gerson’s account, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five robust refusals: the rejection of naturalism, nominalism, mechanism, materialism, relativism, and skepticism. Gerson plausibly and powerfully represents Plato’s Platonism as the endeavour to attempt to develop a coherent alternative to the various forms of skepticism, relativism, materialism, mechanism, nominalism and naturalism that flourished in Antiquity and which remerged with great force in the Renaissance and Early Modern period. 

Cudworth’s position overlaps neatly with Gerson’s approach. Through Hobbes’s radical nominalism and mechanistic determinism, Cudworth could harness anew the ancient arguments employed by Platonists against Stoic materialism and Epicurean reductionism and the skepticism of Sextus, not the least the problems linked to mind and causality. This is the age of Hobbes and Spinoza, and the de facto atheism of these critics of traditional theism. Plato in the tenth book of the Laws presents mechanistic materialism, what we would call reductive materialism, as the source of atheism. Plato’s counterargument is that the harmony and order, i.e. techne of the universe cannot be the product of accident, tyche, and requires a governing mind. This is the position that Aristotle presents in book twelve of his Metaphysics, as do all Platonists afterwards, not least Plotinus and Proclus. Only a top down metaphysics, in that sense a theological metaphysics can explain a genuinely intelligible universe.

The subtitle of The True Intellectual System is significant: Wherein, all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted: and its impossibility demonstrated. The true intellectual system is concerned with the question of the existence of God, in which Cudworth endeavours to show that monotheism is natural to mankind, yet the confusion of atheism can be traced to very ancient sources. One of the quotations is from Book 10 of the Laws 887d: 

φέρε δή, πῶς ἄν τις μὴ θυμῷ λέγοι περὶ θεῶν ὡς εἰσίν; ἀνάγκη γὰρ δὴ χαλεπῶς φέρειν καὶ μισεῖν ἐκείνους οἳ τούτων ἡμῖν αἴτιοι τῶν λόγων γεγένηνται καὶ γίγνονται 

Well now, how is it possible, without getting angry, to argue for the existence of gods? Clearly, one necessarily gets cross and annoyed with these people who put us to the trouble and continue to put us to the trouble of producing these explanations (The Laws, 414).

One might perhaps sense some of Cudworth’s own frustration at the length of his own endeavour to defeat atheism, a target he depicts in dramatic terms as “a certain strange kind of monster, with four heads, that are all of them perpetually biting, tearing, and devouring one another” (TIS, I, 143). The emergence of powerful critiques of theism in Hobbes and Spinoza and the development of Neo-Stoicism and Neo-Epicureanism drove Cudworth to the opinion that Plato was right that the metaphysics of atheism needs to be challenged. Cudworth viewed the essential debate in the mid to late 17^th century as an instance of Plato’s perennial conflict of the Gods (friends of forms) and the Giants (materialists) in the Sophist 246a–c:

Wherefore the same Plato tells us, that there had been always, as well, as then there was, a perpetual war and controversy in the world, and, as he calls it, a kind of gigantomachy betwixt these two parties or sects of men; the one, that held that there was no other substance in the world besides body; the other, that asserted incorporeal substance (ibid., I, 35).

Cudworth views all forms of atheism as emerging out of “pneumatophobia” or “a fear of spirit and a near superstitious reverence for matter as the only numen” (ibid., I, 200. See Kroll, The Material Word). The motivating idea of the entire True Intellectual System of the Universe is whether matter should be understood as derived from mind or the other way around. The atheist position, and here Cudworth is agreeing with Plato’s diagnosis of the atheist in book 10 of the Laws, is that “all animality, sense and consciousness, is a secondary, derivative and accidental thing, generable and corruptible, arising out of particular concretions of matter organized and dissolved together with them” (ibid., I, 202–203). The debate about atheism and theism is inextricably linked to the problem of the “stubborn necessity of matter” (ibid., II, 594) and the claim that “the divine Mind and Wisdom hath so printed its seal or signature upon the matter of the whole corporeal world, as that fortune and chance could never possibly have counterfeited the same” (ibid., I, 602). 

Materialism seemed in part vindicated if nature could be explained in exclusively physical properties of location, shape and size without recourse to immaterial or spiritual causality. The radical Cartesian sundering of spirit and extension seemed to threaten the intelligibility and presence of the Divine. The existence of spirit on the Cartesian model, and indeed the supreme spiritual Divine substance, was thereby shut off from the physical world. 

Cudworth observes: “They make a kind of dead and wooden world, as it were a carved statue, that hath nothing vital nor magical at all in it. Whereas to those, who are considerative, it will plainly appear, that there is a mixture of life or plastic nature, together with mechanism, which runs through the whole corporeal universe” (ibid., I, 221). The physical world is likened to a physical artefact, wholly distinct from its source and maker, or without any transcendent informing principle. Henry More is cited with a reference to his Enchiridion Metaphysicum as an expert defender of the thesis that “all the effects of nature come to pass by material and mechanical necessity, or the mere fortuitous motion of matter, without any guidance or direction, is a thing no less irrational that it is impious and atheistical” (ibid., I, 220). 

The upshot and conclusion of all is, that [according to the Atomists] there is no such scale or ladder in nature as Theists and Metaphysicians suppose, no degrees of real perfection and entity one above another, as of life and sense above inanimate matter, of reason and understanding above sense; from whence it would be inferred, that the order of things in nature was in way of descent from higher and greater perfection, downward to lesser and lower, which is indeed to introduce a God (ibid., III, 341).

It is not philology but metaphysics and theology that provides the motor of Cudworth’s thought. He is intent on employing the riches of an ancient tradition in order to contribute to the debates of his own age. Philology is the ancilla theologiae and the aid to metaphysics. Other philosophers saw Cudworth as an expert guide. Locke endorsed the “Accurateness and Judgement” of Cudworth’s narrative of the “Opinions of the Greek Philosophers” (Hutton, ‘Some Thoughts concerning Ralph Cudworth’, 146). 

Hume’s Natural History of Religion is another example. In the case of Hume, history is employed in a manner diametrically opposed to Cudworth. As to the “theists of antiquity”, “polytheism is the original religion of mankind” (sentence?). Cudworth’s genealogy of religion is turned on its head. Rather than history supporting ‘orthodoxy’, history becomes an organ of critique. And it is buttressed by Hume’s naturalism: “What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?“ (Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, 50). It is hard to conceive of Hume not writing with Cudworth’s ‘system’ in mind, whether he is criticizing causation or received histories of monotheism. George Berkeley was a great admirer of the “learned Dr Cudworth”. He notes:

Proclus, in his Commentary on the Theology of Plato, observes there are two sorts of philosophers. The one placed Body first in the order of beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal; that Body most really or principally exists, and all other things in a secondary sense, and by virtue of that. Others, making all corporeal things to be dependent upon Soul or Mind, think this to exist in the first place and primary sense and the being of bodies to be altogether derived from and presuppose that of Mind (The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, V, 124). 

Berkeley may have been thinking of a passage like:

Mind [...] is a greater reality in nature, [...] the things, which belong to souls and minds, to rational beings as such, must not have less, but more reality in them, than the things in inanimate bodies. [...] it being impossible for a greater perfection to be produced from a lesser, [...] from whence things gradually descend downward, lower and lower, till they end in senseless matter“ (TIS, III, 434–435).

The issue for Cudworth is that of rational explanation of the universe, and a top down explanation that avoids the randomness of Epicurean and Neo-Epicurean theories of nature. 

Nature, transcendent Causality and Divine Will

Le Clerc noted that “Cudworth also correctly and excellently remarks that the being, whose property it is to make another being commence its existence, must not only be possessed of all the perfections which the being produced by it is supposed to enjoy; but must also have a power of action by which it can be the cause of something” (TIS, III, 133–134). The theism advocated in Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe is distinct from the ‘mechanic theism’ of Descartes. Cudworth is the inheritor and exponent of a form of Neoplatonic theism that could be called “mystical monotheism” (I am using the terminology of Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology). 

Plotinus, Scotus Eriugena and Eckhart would all constitute instances of the downplaying of creatio ex nihilo in favour of creatio ex Deo. The whole world is Deus explicatus (cf. TIS, I, p. 515). Cudworth’s discussion of the ‘Pagan Theists’ and ‘Theologers’ should include some consideration of the thorny problem of the metaphors of procession or influx or emanation. The much-used (but little understood) word ‘emanation’ does not correspond to any one Greek philosophical term but a group (some might say cloud) of metaphors in Plotinus and other Neoplatonists (usually of light, water or seeds). 

The roots of this language lie in the materialistic Stoic theory of the fiery breath that comes from and returns to the sun. Plotinus, however, always rejects the pantheistic implications of such Stoic language. It is the correspondence or analogy between the κόσμος νοητός and the κόσμος αἰσθητός that is crucial. It is important to bear in mind the distinction between the intelligible cosmos (κόσμος νοητός, kosmos noetos, sometimes νοητικός, noetikos, Latin mundus intelligibilis) and the physical cosmos (κόσμος αἰσθητός, kosmos aisthetos or in the Latin mundus sensibilis). This contrast between an intelligible world and the physical cosmos is of Platonic provenance, and was firmly established in Middle Platonism, drawing especially upon Plato’s Timaeus 27d-47e. 

The κόσμος νοητικός is the eternal world of ideas, while the κόσμος αἰσθητός is the image of that in the changing physical world. In medieval philosophy the Book of Causes (Liber de causis), and the manifold commentaries written on it, employs the language of procession, influx or emanation. Cudworth wishes to sustain the vision of a universe originating in its transcendent Cause and suffused with the energy of that First Cause into the lower levels of Being as “radii Deitatis” and “rays of the Deity” (TIS, I, 515). “God expanded or unfolded, and when they call the creatures, as St. Jerome and others often do, radios Deitatis, ‘the rays of the Deity’ System (TIS, III, 80–81).

The Neoplatonic structure of Cudworth’s thought, as opposed to some more generic ‘Platonism’, can be seen in the stress upon the following four tenets of ‘emanative power to create’. These can be listed as:

1. Procession or causality is a movement from the greater to the lesser: 

In the things Generated from Eternity, or Produced by way of natural Emanation, there is no progress upwards, but all Downwards, and still a Gradual Descent into Greater Multiplicity…’ That which is Generated or Emaneth, immediately from the First and Highest Being, is not the very same thing with it, as if it were nothing but that Repeated again and Ingeminated; and as it is not same, so neither can it be Better than it. (Plotinus, Enneads, 5, Bk 3, chp 15). From whence it follows, that it must needs be Gradually subordinate and Inferiour to it (TIS, II, 391.).

Cudworth refers explicitly to Plotinus but equally he could have taken this from Proclus: “Accordingly every cause properly so called, inasmuch as it both is more perfect than that which proceeds from it (prop. 7) and itself furnishes the limits of its production, transcends the instruments, the elements, and in general all that is described as a by-cause” (Proclus, Elements of Theology, 73).

2. That which processes from its source is both like and unlike its originator. The Wisdom of God furnishes ‘its Stamps and Signatures every where throughout the World’ (TIS, III, 597) or ‘Nature is not the Divine Art Archetypal but Ectypal’ (ibid., I, 281). 

The natural order, for Cudworth, is reflecting its transcendent source, both distinct from its origin and yet participating in it.

3. The reflection in the effect of the cause is present since the effect is coterminous with the transcendent cause, just as the mirrored image depends upon the presence of its source. Cudworth says that “the Plastick life of Nature is but the mere Umbrage of Intellectuality, a faint and shadowy Imitation of Mind and Understanding; upon which it doth as Essentially depend, as the Shadow doth upon the Body, the Image in the Glass upon the Face, or the Echo upon the Original Voice” (ibid., I, 172).

4. The Source remains unreduced by its procession. The frequent misunderstanding of Neoplatonism as pantheism rests upon the failure to appreciate this point. Cudworth writes of God as the “fountain of love and goodness” (ibid., III, 463) and as “fountain of life and understanding” (ibid., III, 453). Yet the Divine is not abated by its procession. In part this is due to the doctrine of divine ideas. The mind of God contains all that is and can be and is the noetic paradigm of the physical cosmos: 

The Mind of God is nothing but the intelligible essences of things, or their natures as conceivable, and objects of the mind. [...] So that the true meaning of these eternal essences is indeed no other than this, that knowledge is eternal; or that there is an eternal mind that comprehendeth the intelligible natures and ideas of all things, whether actually existing or possible only, their necessary relations to one another, and all the immutable verities belonging to them. [...] that there is one eternal unmade Mind and perfect incorporeal Deity, a real and substantial Ghost or Spirit, which comprehending itself, and all the extent of its own power, the possibility of things, and their intelligible natures, together with an exemplar or platform of the whole world, produced the same accordingly’ (ibid., III, 401).

Proclus might seem like a philosophical apologist for Greek polytheism and an unlikely ally for Cudworth. Cudworth is not without some criticism of Proclus “who had some peculiar fancies and whimsies of his own, and was indeed a confounder of the Platonic Theology, and a mingler of much unintelligible stuff with it” (ibid., 510). Yet Cudworth’s use of Proclus as his ally has its justification. Proclus’s vision of intelligible deities, his ‘henadology’, constitutes a level of reality subordinate to the ineffable and unparticipated One. 

The seminal importance of Proclus for the works of Dionysius the Areopagite has long been recognized. Moreover, his influence upon Western theism was enormous through the Arabic paraphrase of his theology (with some elements from Plotinus) called the Book of Causes (Liber de causis), a text, based upon Proclus’s Elements of Theology, translated from Arabic into Latin in the twelfth century, and attributed to Aristotle. Hence a Neoplatonic text was viewed as the culmination of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Albert the Great commented upon it, as did Thomas Aquinas (on the subsequent history, see Calma [ed.], Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages: I. New Commentaries on Liber de causis). The metaphysics of the Book of Causes is a model of absolute causality. The transcendent cause is the archetype of the world and as infinite plenitude. There is a hierarchy of perfection and a gradual descent from the greater to the less. Moreover, the effect participates in the cause like the image in the archetype.

Just as the cosmos is a theophany of the transcendent Principle, so too the different religions are all reflections of a true monotheism. Yet this is different from what Assmann designates as “cosmotheism”, which Cudworth in fact critiques. Cudworth explicitly rejects the idea that matter is self-sufficient – this Stoic materialism is cognate with the foundational error of Stoicism that matter can generate mind without a transcendent intellect superior to the world. This is also linked to the monstrous error of determinism. As an Origenist (and Plotinian) Cudworth is radically opposed to Stoic determinism. Cudworth’s own adherence is to a radical dialectic of immanence and transcendence: a Platonic via media between radical transcendence and Stoic immanence. 

Hence the question is not merely the conflict between theism and atheism joined to the problem of mind. It is also about the kind of theism at stake. As Lutz Bergemann has recently argued, Cudworth’s metaphysics is a philosophy of power: God, as Plotinus insists, is δύναμις πάντων, the power and source of all/to all and yet not arbitrary power (Lutz Bergemann, System aus Transformation). Indeed Cudworth explicitly uses Plotinus’s magnificent treatise On the Freedom and the Will of the One. In this remarkably theistic treatise, the causal source of the physical cosmos is the immaterial abounding transcendent cause and is also presented through the image of the King (ὁ βασιλεὺς).

 In VI 8, 15 (cf. Leroux, Traité Sur la Liberté, 305), Plotinus writes: 

“It is this, then, and not something else, but what it ought to be; it did not happen to be like this, but had to be like this; but this ‘had to be’ is principle of all things that had to be.” 

Cudworth adds θεός (Theos) to the Greek. The passage reads: ”θεός ὅπερ ἐχρῆν εἶναι· οὐ τοίνυν οὕτω συνέβη, ἀλλ´ ἔδει οὕτως· τὸ δὲ «ἔδει» τοῦτο ἀρχὴ τῶν ὅσα ἔδει: 

God is essentially that, which ought to be; and he therefore did not happen to be such as he is: and this first ought to be the principle of all things whatsoever that ought to be” (TIS, III, 463) 

One might legitimately object to Cudworth’s resolute harnessing of Plotinus to the theistic camp, but Cudworth can draw upon a precedent in Ficino and others in identifying the supreme principle that is both transcendent and immanent in the cosmos with the Christian godhead (on Ficino’s momentous synthesis of Plotinian metaphysics and Christian theology, see Ficino, Marsilio. Platonic Theology). The supreme being is absolute freedom but this is not to be understood in a crude anthropomorphic manner: “God’s will is ruled by his justice, and not his justice ruled by his will; and therefore God himself cannot command what is in its own nature unjust” (TIS, III, 494. Cf. ibid., III, 512).

 Indeed, the mistake of the atheists is to confuse this anthropomorphism with the genuine concept of God: “In the next place, this wish of Atheists is altogether founded upon a mistaken notion of God Almighty too, [...] His will is not mere will, such as hath no other reason besides itself; but it is law, equity, and chancery” (ibid., III, 494). This is not the voluntaristic power of the ultra-Calvinistic deity but “the abounding fecund energy that is the μέτρον πάντων or measure of all that is both ‘measureless to man’ while the gauge and boundary of Being, (omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti, “Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight”, Wisdom, 11,21). (See W. Beierwaltes, 'Augustins Interpretation von Sapientia 11, 21'). 

While “some fanaticks of latter times have made God to be all in a gross sense, so as to take away all real distinction betwixt God and the creature, and indeed to allow no other being besides God” (TIS, I, 513), there is no diminishing of the cause in its procession into the physical cosmos. The Cause, while not exhausted or lessened by it procession, remains within its effect. Yet the paradigm of divine immanence, Cudworth insists, is “a very ticklish point and easily liable to mistake and abuse” (ibid., I, 515). 

While it is unlikely that Cudworth would have read Spinoza’s Ethics, with its strident Deus sive natura, it is most likely that he was apprised of its existence by Van Limborch and Cudworth quotes Spinoza in the True Intellectual System as ”that Late Theological Politician” (ibid., III, 4; cf. J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 152). Sections of Spinoza’s Ethics were in circulation in 1663 and a full draft by 1665 (cf. Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 225). Spinoza regards the notion of the will of the Divine as an evident absurdity.