The Vehiculum Dei

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-159
Author(s):  
Madeleine Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
Henry More

Chapter 6 explores the influence of the scholarly community circulating Ragley Hall—most notably, Henry More, Anne Conway, and Francis Mercury van Helmont—on Quaker Christology. This group were influenced by Kabbalist ideas, and introduced the notion of a ‘middle substance’ into Quakers’ understanding of the ‘inward Christ’. This intellectual influence was immortalized in Robert Barclay’s Apology, and is most prominent in his account of the ‘vehiculum Dei’. While George Keith claimed to have given Barclay his ideas as expressed in the Apology, this chapter argues that Barclay was engaging with the Ragley Hall group directly during this period. That such an important contribution towards the Quakers’ understanding of Christ’s body was produced out of conversations regarding the most pressing philosophical issues of the day demonstrates strikingly how the development of Quaker theology was guided directly by wider intellectual trends of the seventeenth century

Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Central Belief

The Quakers were by far the most successful of the radical religious groups to emerge from the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century—and their survival into the present day was largely facilitated by the transformation of the movement during its first fifty years. What began as a loose network of charismatic travelling preachers was, by the start of the eighteenth century, a well-organized and international religious machine. This shift is usually explained in terms of a desire to avoid persecution, but Quakers, Christ and the Enlightenment argues instead for the importance of theological factors as the major impetus for change. In the first sustained account of the theological motivations guiding the development of seventeenth-century Quakerism, the volume explores the Quakers’ positive intellectual engagement with those outside the movement to offer a significant reassessment of the causal factors determining the development of early Quakerism. Tracing the Quakers’ engagement with such luminaries as Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, John Locke, and John Norris, the volume unveils the Quakers’ concerted attempts to bolster their theological reputation through the refinement of their central belief in the ‘inward Christ’, or ‘the Light within’. In doing so, the study challenges persistent stereotypes of early modern radicalism as anti-intellectual and ill-educated—and indeed, as defined either by ‘rationalist’ or ‘spiritualist’ excess. Rather, the theological concerns of the Quakers and their interlocutors point to a crisis of Christology weaving through the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, which has long been underestimated as significant fuel for the emerging Enlightenment

Henry More and William Petty: Revisiting an Early Modern Polemic

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihnea Dobre
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Epistolary Exchange

Abstract This paper explores an overlooked aspect of the brief but intense correspondence between William Petty and Henry More, making use of the Hartlib Papers Online. Traditionally, the brief epistolary exchange between More and Petty has been seen in the light of an opposition between Cartesian rationalism and Baconian empiricism. A look at the original manuscripts, however, shows that the opposition was not originally framed in those terms at all. This article draws attention to the actors’ original categories, and places this exchange in the evolving landscape of seventeenth-century natural philosophy.

Fulke Greville the Courtier

2018 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Irish
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fulke Greville ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
Earl Of Essex

This chapter argues that Fulke Greville’s long career of royal service, and many of the literary texts that he created, were shaped by two Elizabethan court luminaries: Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Through biographical and literary analysis, I trace the political and intellectual influence of both Sidney and Essex on Greville’s career at court, with special attention to how the Sidney/Essex circle’s famed interest in Senecan neostoicism and Tacitean historiography manifest in Greville’s life and works. Though Greville outlived his former patrons by decades, it is his experience with them in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign that moulded his courtly outlook in the seventeenth century.

Conway, Anne (c.1630–79)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Henry More

Anne Conway (née Finch) was the most important of the few English women who engaged in philosophy in the seventeenth century. Her reputation derives from one work published after her death, Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690), which proposes a Neoplatonic system of metaphysics featuring a monistic concept of created substance. The work entails a critique of the dualism of both Descartes and Henry More, as well as of the materialism (as she saw it) of Hobbes and Spinoza. In her concept of the monad and her emphasis on the benevolence of God, Conway’s system has some interesting affinities with that of Leibniz.

scholarly journals Reading travels in the culture of curiosity: Thévenot's collection of voyages

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Dew
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Geographical Knowledge ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Experimental Assembly

AbstractThis article explores the circulation and use of travel writings within the seventeenth-century "culture of curiosity", focusing on a figure at the heart of this milieu, Melchisédech Thévenot (? 1622–1692), and his edited Relations de divers voyages curieux (1663–1672). The Thévenot case reveals the importance of travel writing for the scholarly community in a period when the modern boundaries between disciplines were not yet formed, and when the nature of geographical knowledge was undergoing radical change. The collection, discussion and publication of the travel collection are shown to be part of the program of Thévenot's experimental "assembly" to investigate the "arts".

Norris, John (1657–1711)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Human Love ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
French And English ◽  
Necessary Truths ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Platonic Tradition

John Norris was a philosopher in the Platonic tradition of the seventeenth century. His philosophy combines elements from both the French and English aspects of that tradition: he was an admirer of Henry More and was the leading English disciple of Malebranche, whose philosophy he did much to popularize in England. A churchman by profession, much of his writing is concerned with the practical application of divinity. Central to Norris’ thought is his theory that the proper and immediate object of both human knowledge and human love is God, who is identified with truth. Thus necessary truths are known directly in God and, conversely, to know eternal and necessary truth is to know God.

‘But where shall my soul repose?’: Nonconformity, Science and the Geography of the Afterlife, c. 1660–1720

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 268-279
Author(s):  
Andrew Cambers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
Henry More

Life, the afterlife, and life beyond the Earth are matters of scientific inquiry as well as religious belief. As we might expect, in the wake of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the afterlife was subjected to new scrutiny. Such scrutiny, notably the demonology of Joseph Glanvill and Henry More, both fellows of the Royal Society, was undoubtedly scientific and serious, even if it has rarely been treated as such by scholars preferring to treat belief in witchcraft as a hangover from an earlier age. Far from being opposed, or necessarily pulling in opposite directions, the conjunction of science and religion in this era breathed new life into old problems and opened up new questions for debate. One such area, with a long history as a philosophical conundrum, was the possibility of life beyond Earth. It is this question, its place within religious cultures, and its relation to traditional ideas about the afterlife, that is the subject of this essay.

Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van (1614–98)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Brown
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
Henry More

Although he lived in the seventeenth century, van Helmont belongs more to late Renaissance than to modern intellectual culture. He was a larger-than-life figure who, in his prime, had an international reputation as an alchemist and a physician. His metaphysical interests came increasingly to the fore, however, and he became particularly associated with Kabbalistic doctrines. A friend of Locke and Henry More, he was also closely connected with Anne Conway and Leibniz, with whom he shared many intellectual affinities. It is these connections that make his philosophy – in particular, his theodicy and his monadology – of enduring interest.

The Anglican Apocalypse in Restoration England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
WARREN JOHNSTON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Henry More

Anglican exegesis in the later seventeenth century of Revelation's prophecies demonstrates that apocalyptic ideas continued to hold currency in England after the mid-century period with which they are most often associated, promoting the very civil and ecclesiastical authorities they had previously been used to oppose. Present in the writings of prominent Restoration scholars and churchmen like Henry More, Gryffith Williams and Gilbert Burnet, as well as lesser-known authors, Anglican apocalyptic interpretation dispels the traditionally-held opinion that such convictions lost their power and validity with the decline of radical fortunes, and confirms that apocalyptic thought was not simply a language of disaffection on the political and religious margins of society.

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