An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature

Foreword

xi foreword Emmanuel College and the Cambridge Platonists Nathaniel Culverwell died at the age of thirty-one in 1651. He had spent eighteen years of his brief life as a student and fellow of Emmanuel College , Cambridge, “that zealous house,” as John Evelyn called it. Emmanuel had been established as a Puritan foundation in 1584, and by midcentury its Calvinist ethos had led to its flourishing as the second-largest college in the university. Its influence peaked during the political disruptions of the mid-1640s, when over half the fellows in the university, Emmanuel excepted, were ejected by Parliament for their failure to subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant, and eleven heads of colleges were removed from their positions. Seven of their replacements came from Emmanuel . It was during these same years, however, that the Presbyterian Calvinism that had characterized Emmanuel and led to its prominence was beginning to erode, challenged by the new ideas in the preaching and writing of three of Culverwell’s contemporaries at the college: Benjamin Whichcote , Ralph Cudworth, and John Smith. Culverwell spent ten, twelve, and eight years, respectively, with them at Emmanuel, and he served as fellow with Whichcote and Cudworth in the early 1640s. Thus he matured intellectually in the collegial company of three of the four major members of that loose federation, the so-called Cambridge Platonists. Henry More of Christ’s College was the fourth. There is no evidence to confirm that Whichcote tutored Culverwell, although their common reliance on scholastic sources and the privileged xii foreword position in their writings of the biblical verse “The understanding of a man is the candle of the Lord,” from Proverbs 20:27, may suggest that possibility . Culverwell is no longer considered a Cambridge Platonist, but his views are strongly linked to Whichcote’s, and he clearly shared with the Platonists their new emphasis on the central importance of reason in religious thinking. In any event, he directly experienced this transition in emphasis and intellectual focus at Emmanuel, and his writings reflect it. His first sermons, or commonplaces, in the early 1640s focus on typical Calvinist themes: the necessity of assurance, the nature of justification, man’s dependence upon God’s free grace. These give way in the later Discourse of the Light of Nature to an overriding concern with the emerging and more secular preoccupations of midcentury: the dangers in the ideas of radical sects and enthusiasts, the legitimate and necessary place of reason in religion , the natural law debate. Culverwell delivered the lectures that constitute his Discourse in the college chapel during the academic year 1645–46. They were published posthumously in 1652 by William Dillingham, who dedicated them to the then master, Anthony Tuckney, and the fellows of the college. In his preface to the work, Dillingham asserts that it was written “on the one hand to vindicate the use of Reason in matters of Religion from the aspersions and prejudices of some weaker ones in those times” [3], a remark which indicates that the Discourse is in part a topical treatise with roots in the furious controversies of its day. The removal of licensing control over printing in 1641 resulted in a surge of religious and political tracts and manifestoes, succinctly described and condemned in the title of a contemporary pamphlet as Hell Broke Loose. On August 9, 1644, the Westminster Assembly sent a message to the House of Lords, complaining of the “great Growth and Increase of Anabaptists and Antinomians and other sects”; and in the year in which Culverwell wrote and delivered his Discourse, Thomas Edwards was composing his Gangraena (1646), the most famous and thorough of the English catalogues of heresy. It is no surprise, then, to find Culverwell deploring “those black and prodigious Errors, that cover and bespot the face of these times” [125] in the midst of the English civil war, including those on both ends of the spectrum of religious argument. At one extreme, there was the “blunder- foreword xiii ing Antinomian” who transformed the traditional Calvinist assertion of man’s utter depravity into the conviction that redemption of the elect by God’s free grace released them from conventional moral obligations and justified scandalously licentious behavior. At the opposite pole, Culverwell criticizes the Arminianism that “pleads for it self under the specious notion of God’s love to mankinde” [14], a reference to Samuel Hoard’s God’s Love to...