Censuring Theteutonic Philosopher?

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Censuring the Teutonic Philosopher? Henry More’s Ambivalent Appraisal of Jacob Böhme

Douglas Hedley* University of Cambridge [email protected]

Abstract

This essay examines Henry More’s engagement with Jacob Böhme and compares the sympathetic critique of Böhme with More’s much more negative evaluation of Spinoza. More directs his criticism of Böhme at the similarities between Spinoza and Böhme: their materialism and confusion of God and world. The present essay suggests, however, that the perception of shared Platonism informs More’s more favourable approach to the Silesian. The problem of what “Platonism” means in this context is thus also addressed. Böhme’s writings were valued by More because of a shared metaphysics that rejected both radical dualism and pantheism, and the Platonic theology of the goodness of God and the freedom of man, together with the rejection of predestination. Spinoza, on the other hand, is rejected because of his radical determinism, his denial of any substantial distinction between good and evil, and the transcendent being of the divine.

Keywords

Henry More – Jacob Böhme – Cambridge Platonists – Spinoza – metaphysics – Platonic theology

* I am deeply grateful to Christian Hengstermann for his suggestions. All the translations of More’s Latin are by Hengstermann. I am also very grateful to Adrian Mihai and Lucinda Martin for very helpful comments and improvements.

‘Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic theosophist, Jacob Behmen?’ s.t. coleridge ∵

The Puzzle of More’s Reading of Böhme

Jacob Böhme’s legacy in England was momentous. Modern disciplinary cate- gories fail to capture the writings of a figure like Böhme, or indeed the Cam- bridge Platonist Henry More (1614–1687). The goals of integrating new science into ancient paradigms, or the improvement of society through Scripture seem anachronistic, yet these were widely shared in the 17th century, including by figures such as Bacon and Newton. One might think of Richard Popkin’s notion of a “Third Force”, a strand of thought alongside rationalists and empiricists, constituted by writers drawing up a Kabbalistic, apocalyptic and millenarian worldview.1 Ernst Troeltsch argued persuasively for the influence of the Radi- cal Reformation upon the development of the Modern World.2 The reception of Böhme by Henry More might constitute a striking instance of the vigor and power of this influence. Yet it contains a puzzle. More was a retiring scholar, a learned correspondent with Descartes and versed with the latest science. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1662 and conversed with Newton in the 1680s. More fought indefatigably against “enthusiasm”; he was energeti- cally engaged in a vitriolic debate with the hermeticist and alchemist Thomas Vaughan.3 Why did he take such an avid interest in the enigmatic mysticism of the Silesian cobbler? One answer is to claim that More regretted Böhme’s lack of philosophical refinement but admired his moral qualities. Robert Crocker claims that More valued Böhme ‘as a genuinely saintly man’, but rejected him ‘as a philosopher’.4 I wish to suggest that there is a genuinely philosophical dimension to the ambivalence evinced by More towards Böhme and it is linked to the shared

1 Popkin, The Third Force. 2 Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus. 3 Crocker, ‘Mysticism and Enthusiasm in Henry More’, 137–155, esp. 144ff. 4 Ibid., 148.

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Platonic or better “Neoplatonic” inheritance of the two thinkers. More defends a Böhme Neoplatonicus. The question of “Neoplatonism” in relation to such an eclectic and idiosyncratic figure as Böhme is a thorny issue. In this essay I wish to contrast the gently critical approach of More to Böhme with More’s savage repudiation of Spinoza. This is not a whimsical or haphazard comparison. More deliberately placed his sympathetic critique of Böhme in proximity to his antagonistic assessment of Spinoza. In his praefatio to Opera omnia ii/1 (xiv–xv), More explicitly links “Behmenism” to Spinozism (and Kabbalism): haec certe mea scripta proximè antecedentibus admodum homogenea sunt. This homogeneity consists in their shared enthusiasm and materialism: laying too much stress on the imagination, Böhme, Isaac Luria and Spinoza end up view- ing the world itself as the Deity. The English Romantic philosopher, poet and man of letters, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), wrote of the ‘contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished themselves by their scorn of Behmen’.5 Coleridge viewed Böhme as an ‘enthusiast’ but not a ‘fanatic’. Hegel viewed Böhme, along with Bacon, as the key philosophers of the early modern period.6 Schelling and Tillich had their debts to Böhme. For Paul Tillich, Böhme is ‘the Protestant mystic and philosopher of life’, the source of ‘the classic statement that all things are rooted in a Yes and a No’.7 This sympathetic account of Böhme is heralded by Henry More. In fact, well before Böhme’s influence on nineteenth-century philosophy, the Silesian thinker was having an impact in England.The contemporary Reformed theologian Richard Baxter (1615–1691) is a witness to the influence of German sources upon many Protestant groups and sects.8 Baxter notes that Paracelsus and the German theology exert a powerful hold upon the radical sects in England.9 Yet it was Cambridge that proved the most fertile ground for the early reception of Böhme. Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), Peter Sterry (1613– 1672) and JohnWorthington (1618–1671) had Böhme in their libraries. Cudworth admired the ‘practical parts’ but rejected the ‘revelations’ as lacking in rational foundation. Sterry seemed unsure as to whether Böhme was a true visionary or the victim of satanic manipulation, yet he evidently admired much in his writings. Worthington placed Böhme alongside Thomas à Kempis and Tauler

5 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria i, 141. 6 See the excellent work by Cecilia Muratori, The First German Philosopher. 7 Tillich, The Courage to Be, 42. 8 Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus, 26. 9 Bailey, Milton and Jakob Boehme, 95.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded from 18Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 54–74 02:13:40AM via free access censuring the teutonic philosopher? 57 for his ‘savoury truths’ among the ‘stubble and wood and hay’.10 The sibling Böhme enthusiasts, Charles (1615–c. 1672) and Durand Hotham (1617–1691), were educated at More’s college: Christ’s. More’s earliest familiarity with Böhme may date back to Charles Hotham’s Ad Philosophiam Teutonicam Manuductio (1648), a work dedicated to the Chancellor, senate and students of Cambridge.11 This university composition advocated Böhme, albeit with reservations, and the text contains verses written by Henry More:

I Ken no Teutonick, good Charles! Then vent Thy self, and thine own Ingenie depeint. Write Hothamick, & thine own sense explain; So shall thy learned page with force detaine My ravish’d mind. For what-so Piety, Deep-brooding Silence, Alternations sly Of changing thoughts: What-so inspired Love, That with his golden wings doth gently move, Thy heart-blood fanning to an heavenly flame: What any, or all these together claime, Will be the due of those adorned Lines Wherein thine own Soules image cleerly shines. But now through unknown paths and darksome places Thou lead’st us, with wrinch’d feet, and limping paces: In mids of those broke-windings, Cold invades My stonisht mind, and Horror in the shades. Yet while I look upon thy candour bright, To sudden day straight turns this hideous night While I thy Morals and well-meaning Will Consider, in this night I feare no ill: Yea more, well weighing thy far-searching wit then suspect some good lies hid in it.12

More studied the works of Böhme repeatedly throughout his career, from Enthusiasmus triumphatus (1656) to the The Divine Dialogues, where More sees the work of Divine providence in proponents of inner religion in figures such

10 Christie (ed.), Diary and Correspondence of Worthington, vol. 2, part ii, 291–293, 294, 302, 305, 307, 322. 11 On the Hotham brothers’ reception of Böhme, see Muratori, ‘A Philosopher at Randome’. 12 Cf. Hutton, ‘Henry More and Jacob Böhme’, 170. For the original, see Charles Hotham, An introduction to the Teutonick philosophie (translated by Durant Hotham into English).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded 18 from (2018) Brill.com10/01/2021 54–74 02:13:40AM via free access 58 hedley as Böhme.13 In The Two Last Dialogues (1668), Böhme’s invincible obscurity is attacked, as is his claim to divine inspiration.14 Already in 1670 More had written to his ‘heroine pupil’,Lady Anne Conway (1631–1679), that ‘Honest Jacob is wholesome at the botome though a philosopher but at randome’.15 It seems to have been the encouragement of Anne Conway that led to the composition of his Philosophiae teutonicae censura of 1670 (published in 1679). More writes: ‘It is as clear as it can possibly be that such a phenomenon as Jakob Boehme was rather a jewel than a stain in divine providence, even though, as regards his opinion about his own inspiration, he was plainly deceived.’16 Yet Henry More says of himself candidly ‘I have a natural touch of enthusiasm’.17 This is perhaps not surprising since Böhme’s thought is a bewildering mix- ture of eccentric, though not exactly heretical doctrines, fused with some dis- tinctly unorthodox accounts of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Yet More could find much to agree with. When he says that Böhme is ‘a philosopher but at randome’ that does not mean that he is rejecting Böhme’s philosophy tout court. More holds to the priority of Divine love, a prominent theme in Böhme. Sal- vation, for Henry More (as for Böhme), is neither a juridical-forensic nor a quasi-financial redemption but the restoration to a living relationship with God. Scripture is not to be judged primarily as words, characters or ink but through the quickening life of the Spirit. More, further, would have been deeply attracted to the critique of the doctrine of election in Böhme’s thought (a Babel- opinion or product of the “Church of Cain”)18 and he notes enthusiastically that ‘somewhere J.B. writes as if he had held the pre-existence of the soul’:

Besides, it is certainly true that this Jakob Boehme was an uneducated foe and detractor of reason, who, though professing nothing but the Spirit, was patently wrong in his inspirations nevertheless. But did it bring any

13 Hutton, ‘Henry More and Jacob Böhme’, 460–470. 14 Hessayon, ‘Jacob Boehme’s Writings’, 77ff. 15 Cited after Hutton, ‘Henry More and Jacob Böhme’, 159. Cf. Muratori, ‘A Philosopher at Randome’. 16 In the following, I cite from More’s Opera Omnia, giving the title of the specific texts and the section number. Here: More, Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura 5,12, in: Opera Omnia. ii/1, 557. 17 More, Collection, x. 18 Unless otherwise stated, I cite Böhme according to the 1730 facsimile edition by Will- Erich Peuckert. In the footnotes I give the title of the specific text along with chapter and paragraph. Here: Böhme, Signatura Rerum xvi 38. Böhme’s most developed statement against predestination is his ‘Gnadenwahl’.

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shame on providence that it allowed this scene of things to proceed so that posterity might learn the following from it: Neither should we trust our reason in its purely natural and not yet sanctified state without the required purification of our minds and the aid of the Spirit of God nor must we profess an illumination of the Spirit in philosophical speculation as long as we have not had the opportunity and experience of making correct use of natural reason yet. […] And since he so obviously was a patron of imperfection, it was possible that even this proved quite useful, since he is closer to those furthest removed from perfection and, therefore, better suited to lend them a hand. If they were to be exhorted by no other people than those whose high praise refers to perfection at once, the task ahead would seem so formidable that they would be deterred from setting out to do anything at all. However, such a person as J.B. is, so extraordinarily sincere and fervid in promoting the internal and living justice without any boasting about have achieved perfection in it, seems to be an instrument more suitable to win those who, while being hindered by great natural impediments, nevertheless have a propensity towards God.19

The Problem of “Platonism” and the Existence of “Cambridge Platonism”

The key to this critique of Jacob Böhme lies in More’s own robust and fervent Christian Platonism. More recognizes an ardent kindred spirit in Böhme, and More’s criticisms are mitigated by a fundamental sympathy for Böhme, based upon their shared Platonism. Even when More is criticizing Böhme, he will note and approve of the deep Platonic strands in Böhme’s thought:

both men and angels are not only μικρόκοσμοι, but μικρόθεοι, etc., i.e. in the Plotinian sense which links the world and God, making them one deity. This is also the sense of that word of Philo who calls the world a μέγας ἄνθρωπος and man a little world. Moreover, such terms seem to me to be absolutely incompatible with divine holiness. Meanwhile, J.B. may be excused for his ignorance and rashness a little, as he did not disagree too much with such great philosophers.20

19 More, Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura, 5,6–7 (ii/1, 556–557). 20 More, Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura, 4,24 (ii/1, 551) μέγας ἄνθρωπος refers to a large human being.

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The term ‘holiness’ stands for the transcendence of the Divine. According to More, the real threat to this transcendence is the Spinozistic view of God. A Christian Platonist like Henry More cannot identify God with the world, and the language of Böhme associating the Divine with material forces suggests an identification of God with nature. The key flaw of Böhme bears favorable comparison with the much graver error of Spinoza’s system. The contrast between the two approaches rests upon the relation to More’s own Christian Platonism. Henry More’s Ad V.C. epistola altera of 1677 was written with polemical speed and intensity after the appearance of Spinoza’s Posthumous Works. Shortly afterwards, More presented another bitter critique, his Demonstrationis duarum propositionum … confutatio (generally known as More’s ‘Confutation’).21 Spinoza, like Henry More, combines Cartesianism with Platonism. More is quite unapologetic and forthright about his own ‘interweaving of Platonisme and Cartesianisme’ while it is Spinoza’s philosophical terminology that draws upon both Descartes and the Neoplatonic tradition of the intellectual love of God. Spinoza’s formidable combination of Neoplatonic terminology and strin- gent systematic reasoning contrasts prima facie with Böhme’s naïve jumble of alchemical speculation and biblical exegesis. Yet More has no doubt that Böhme’s superficially outlandish reflections articulate an essentially salutary and nourishing philosophical theology. This is to be contrasted with Spinoza’s strident and defiant repudiation of the key tenets of Christian Platonism, i.e. the denial of divine transcendence, freedom and the immortality of the soul:

Having reached the age of a toddling and chattering little boy, he inquired into the mysteries of knowledge and confidently, though frequently con- fusedly, declared what he thought about things. And, as I have described above, he most freely and outspokenly reprimanded all the vices that he discovered in his father’s household. Besides, why should we expect from someone at that age that, having said a few things quite felicitously, he could not therefore err in any others? Or why should the Father, only because he could not say all things wisely, have prevented him from speaking altogether, especially since he foresaw that there would be others at a later and more mature stage of life who, having attained a more adult intellect, would correct the earlier errors? Moreover, he was aware that this growth was that of one single

21 Cf. Reid, ‘Henry More and Nicolas Malebranche’s Critiques of Spinoza’, 764–792.

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body only, namely that of the true and living church which gradually grows into perfection, this gradual progress in knowledge being more useful to the growth of the holiness of life and the strengthening of our divine faith than if all of it had been found at the beginning at once. For that which is old oftentimes loses something of its power and the most celebrated medicines would, if they had been invented of old, have long lost their power of curing diseases. Hence, illumination must be gradual, as every device newly-invented constitutes a new attempt by providence to snatch us to faith and holiness of life.22

Henry More’s stress upon holiness is a clue here. One of the key tenets of Platonism, especially in the Christian form of the Cambridge Platonists, is the link between contemplation and holiness.23 John Smith (1618–1652) notes: ‘Were I indeed to define Divinity, I should rather call it a divine life, than a science …’.24 The holiness of Böhme is, for More, a vindication of the essential veracity of his teaching.25 “Neoplatonism” is itself a problematic term. Some major scholars of Neo- platonism, such as Lloyd Gerson, avoid the term as essentially pejorative.26 Applying it to Böhme, a figure whose education was limited and unconven- tional, is problematic. The Notre Dame philosopher-theologian Cyril O’Regan has presented a convincing case for a strong Neoplatonic element in Böhme’s thought.27 This Neoplatonism in Böhme is, however, not directly derived from the classic texts of Neoplatonism but indirectly from Christian sources such as Paracelsus or Valentine Weigel, and presumably the immediate followers of Eckhart.28 Kabbala is probably another source of Neoplatonic lore.29 Böhme’s friends Balthasar Walter (1558–c. 1631) and Abraham von Frankenberg (1593– 1652) were directly familiar with Jewish mystical writings.

22 More, Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura, 5, 10–12 (ii/1, 557). 23 On philosophy for Plotinus as a summons to the transformation of life, cf. Hadot, Plotinus and the Simplicity of Vision (30–34). 24 Smith, Select Discourses, 1. 25 Crocker, ‘Henry More: A Biographical Essay’, 10. 26 Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, i, 3. 27 O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse. 28 Cf. Beierwaltes, Platonismus im Christentum, 201–243; Jones, Spiritual Reformers. 29 Cf. the essay in this volume by Elliot Wolfson as well as Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte and Reid, The Metaphysics of Henry More, 255.

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Henry More was well placed to understand the elective affinity between Böhme and Kabbala.30 More enjoyed serious links with Lurianic Kabbalism through his Flemish friend Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698/9). More had introduced van Helmont to Lady Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway in 1670, and she was so taken with van Helmont that she invited him to live at the Conway estate Ragley Hall from 1671–1679.31 Through van Helmont, More became aware of the Silesian Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689) and his Kabbala Denudata (1677–1678; 1684). The great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem was struck by the affinities between Böhme’s thought and Jewish Kabbala: creation as a manifestation of the Divine; especially the doctrine of tsimtsum and the En-Sof that withdraws and the figure of Adam Kadmon. Scholem notes that Böhme’s view of evil ‘bears all the traits of Kabbalistic thought precisely where he is the most original. He has as it were discovered the world of the Sefiroth all over again’.32 In Böhme we find ideas such as God the Father being the “Abyss” or pureWill and the Son as the good that is the express realization of the Godhead; the visible universe as the garb of the invisible Deity and a mirror of eternity, while evil is the condition of the realization of the good.33 Nevertheless, God is love and wrath is ultimately alien to the Divine. More could see the “Teutonic philosopher” sharing some of his own deepest beliefs. Böhme audaciously employs very human images of desire and birth, as well as alchemical language to explain aspects of the transcendent godhead. Moreover, he presents a vivid doctrine of God as the Abyss or Ungrund.34 It might seem obvious that Henry More would have a penchant for the Platonic dimension in Böhme’s rapturous and fervent piety and that this would shape the interpretation of the Christ’s College man. However, Dimitry Levitin has mounted a critique of ‘reductive’ labels like “The Cambridge Platonists”. In his recent and highly acclaimed book Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science, Levitin claims that we ought to abandon the ‘broad framework’ of this ‘supposed group’ and ‘dispense with terms like the prisca theologia’.35 Levitin repeatedly asserts that it is misleading to employ the category of Cam-

30 Katz, ‘Henry More and the Jews’, 173–188. 31 Hutin, ‘Henry More und die Cambridger Platoniker’, 168–182, esp. 179. 32 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 190, 206, 237–238, 365. 33 See Schulitz, Jakob Böhme und die Kabbalah. 34 Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, pp. 320ff. For the Platonic lineage of this idea, see Virginie Pektas, Grunt, Abgrunt et Ungrund. 35 Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 16.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded from 18Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 54–74 02:13:40AM via free access censuring the teutonic philosopher? 63 bridge Platonism, and dismisses what he sees as the whimsical and inaccurate musings of Henry More. Levitin censures the supposed link between ancient wisdom and philosophical Platonism as contradictory to professional scholar- ship, the use of expert continental philology such as that of Scaliger, Causabon or Grotius. Far from being the remnant of a ‘Renaissance’, ‘Platonic’ tradition, Cudworth was part of an advanced scholarly elite that approached the ancient world (including the philosophy of Plato and the Neoplatonists) through the tools offered by European scholars of the first half of the seventeenth century.36 Levitin provides a welcome correction of the common view that the dubi- ous and anachronistic learning of the Cambridge Platonists was a reversion to Ficino and Pico that had been exposed by the brilliance of Richard Bentley and that could not survive the emergence of the new science.37 Levitin is nevertheless quite mistaken to deny the existence of the ‘Cambridge Platonists’! One problem is the very term ‘Platonism’. Whitehead’s much quoted remark that Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato might be reformu- lated.38 Platonism is, rather, the Mississippi river of the Western intellectual tradition. Leibniz in particular recognized the broadly Platonic provenance of much of his own thought while criticizing the somewhat debased Neoplatonic forms of Platonism after Ficino: the language of monads may well be derived from More or Conway.39 Spinoza and Böhme both exhibit traits, arguments or terminology that could be deemed Platonic. Henry More, however, is different. He is an expert scholar of Neoplatonic thought for whom the Platonists are among the ‘wisest and most divine’ of all ‘philosophical men’: More is a vigorous exponent of a distinctively Neoplatonic position.40 He embodies a living tradition of Platonism, not slavishly ‘Platonic’ in the sense of following the letter but rather the spirit of Platonism. Indeed, inspired by the challenges of Hobbes and Descartes, Henry More asserts the primacy of spiritual reality, both in the ethical sense of a dimension of reality transcending the purely material and in the ethical-religious senses as the telos of human happiness. It was through his combination of speculative vigor and profound knowledge of the Platonic tradition that he was able to establish

36 Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 544. 37 See Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 18ff. 38 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 39. 39 Cf. Hutin, Henry More: Essai sur les doctrines theosophiques, 194–197. 40 Jacob, Henry More’s Refutation of Spinoza, 107, Opera Omnia ii 615–635. See S. Brown, ‘Platonic idealism in Modern Philosophy’, 197–214.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded 18 from (2018) Brill.com10/01/2021 54–74 02:13:40AM via free access 64 hedley such a profound mark on seventeenth-century philosophy. Not just a scholar of Platonism, he is an innovative thinker determined to ‘cut the sinews of the Spinozan and Hobbesian cause’.41 It is by recognizing Henry More as a Christian Platonist, drawing on Neo- platonic sources, that we can best understand his sympathy for Jacob Böhme, since More evidently perceived Neoplatonic elements in Böhme’s thought.42 The Cambridge Platonists, unlike many of their medieval forebears, had access to the works of Plato and late antique Platonism.43 Furthermore, 17th-century Cambridge was the site of great critical and philosophical interest in Neopla- tonic texts. Iamblichus’De Mysteriis and John Scot Eriugena’s Periphyseon were edited by Thomas Gale of Trinity College. Eriugena’s striking claim that ‘con- ficitur inde veram esse philosophiam veram religionem, conversimque veram religionem esse veram philosophiam’ (it is settled, then, that true philosophy is true religion, and conversely true religion is true philosophy) could be taken as a motto for the Cambridge Platonists.44

More’s Criticism of Spinoza and of Böhme

Henry More’s hostility to Spinoza may seem perplexing since Spinoza seems to share the Cambridge don’s sympathy for a rational and mystical philosophy that views all things as centered in God and since both believe in the felicity of the soul to reside in the love of God.45 Spinoza, however, for Henry More, is an atheist or an imperfect theist.46 (More’s critique of Spinoza, while certainly polemical in places, is actually far more charitable than the opinions of many of his contemporaries regarding Spinoza). According to More, Spinoza, with his superior education and powers of expression, was nonetheless able to fall into the most serious of errors, whereas the pious Jacob Böhme was able to construct a much more ‘wholesome’ philosophy despite his limitations, and convey a vivid sense of the inwardness, spontaneity and authentic freedom

41 More, Demonstrationis duarum propositionum … confutatio (hereafter cited as Confuta- tion), 101. 42 See Burkhard Dohm, ‘Böhme-Rezeption in England und deren Rückwirkung auf den frühen deutschen Pietismus’, esp. 220ff. 43 There are valuable essays on such questions in Rogers, et al, (eds), The Cambridge Platon- ists in Philosophical Context. 44 Scotus Eriugena, De divina praedestinatione i 5.16–17 (358a2–4). 45 Jacob, Henry More’s Refutation of Spinoza. 46 Leech, The Hammer of the Cartesians.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded from 18Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 54–74 02:13:40AM via free access censuring the teutonic philosopher? 65 of the religious life properly understood. More writes: ‘What, then, does this extremely confident provocation on the part of this puerile athlete amount to, if not to a general reproach of the general profanity of the erudite caste who, though professing the Holy Spirit, nevertheless expect no aid or help in the regeneration of their souls towards the purity and sanctity required of them so that they can make use of their reason all the more safely’.47 Henry More was a philosophical theologian who believed in the compati- bility of reason and faith and tried to integrate philosophy and theology. He was thus concerned with providing convincing reasons for the existence of a transcendent God and the immortality of the soul. More had a largely opti- mistic view of human nature and placed great emphasis on the freedom of the will in opposition to the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination—the tenet that God predestines some individuals for damnation and others for salvation. More was a moderate dualist who rejected the radical dualism of res extensa and res cogitans in Descartes, insisting that mind is ontologically prior to matter and the truths of the intelligible realm superior to empirical knowledge. Indeed, Henry More could be thought of as a via media between the towering contemporary figures of Pascal and Spinoza. These two represent intellectual poles on religious belief: the fideist and the intellectualist. Pascal loved mystery, whereas Spinoza’s God is entirely intelligible. Pascal and Spinoza stand in a certain relationship to Neoplatonism.48 In the case of Pascal, it is a Neo- platonism mediated by Augustine.49 It was Augustine who was the source of the Pascalian view of the heart as the motor of much inchoate knowledge, the mystery of human existence caught between the finite and the infinite. Spinoza also inherited much from Neoplatonism, particularly from Leone Ebreo. For Henry More there is a striking contrast between Spinoza and Böhme. Spinoza constituted for Henry More a perilous and pernicious reduction of religion to science, one which was perversely painted in religious terms, albeit in a terminology largely drawn from Neoplatonism. The language of natura naturans, natura naturata, or the scientia intuitiva, or amor dei intellectualis is of Neoplatonic provenance. Yet the content of these ideas in Spinoza’s system is completely transformed and remote from any Neoplatonic or Christian Pla- tonic application. The very title of the Ethics of Spinoza is a good indication of the frustration felt by the philosophical theist. According to Don Garrett, ‘While

47 More, Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura, 5,5 (ii/1, 556). 48 Kristeller, ‘Stoic and Neoplatonic Sources of Spinoza’s Ethics’, 1–15. 49 See Camus’ verdict: ‘Plotinus’ Reason is already, to a certain extent, the “heart” of Pascal’, in Camus, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, 125–126.

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Spinoza’s metaphysics, epistemology and physics are in many ways Cartesian, his ethical purposes are in many ways Hobbesian’.50 Certainly, the very title of Spinoza’s great work can be misleading since it has little to do with morality from a conventional theistic sense. It is not just that God as a lawgiver or foundation of morality is utterly absent. Spinoza insists that reality is not good, a tenet held by both Platonists and Christians. Good and Evil, rather, are for Spinoza inadequate ideas. God is not a lawgiver and the Divine law is not moral.51 Ultimate Reality is perfection for most of the philosophers of the 17th century. Spinoza starts from a Cartesian view of substance as that which requires nothing but itself. God is primarily substance but so are minds and bodies. Spinoza radicalizes this idea. For him, there is only one substance— that is, God or nature. Since God is infinite, there cannot be anything other than God. Nature is the totality of things and as such is self-explanatory and perfect. All is a unity and this totality is designated Divine. This is clearly not the God of the theistic tradition. More describes this as a ‘putid Behmenism’.52 More writes:

O surprising conspiracy and consensus of two opposing intelligences, one of a mathematician demonstrating everything by geometric method, and the other a consummate enthusiast. Jakob Boehme, indeed a simple and sincere man, not an apostate from Moses, or from Christ, or a promoter patron of any principles which tend to bad conduct, finally rises to the knowledge of those clearer things, and recognizes the fixed, tranquil, and bright Eternity As being wholly distinct from Nature. This one, indeed, immersed in the filth of atheism, as far as I know, has perished impenitent in it. At any rate, a sordid and vile atheist who however in that fourteenth proposition, Besides God not substance can be nor be conceived, is seen to wish to inhale the entire Deity not anything besides, even thou that proposition necessarily involves the crassest atheism.53

While he accuses Spinoza of ‘Behmenism’, More makes it clear that Böhme is far preferable. Spinoza ‘entices the incautious reader into his ways’.54 There is no extramundane deity in Spinoza of the kind required by Henry More’s

50 Garrett, ‘Spinoza’s Ethical Theory’, 267. 51 Deleuze, Spinoza: Philosophie pratique, 27–43. 52 Jacob, Henry More’s Refutation of Spinoza, 69–70. 53 More, Confutation, 70. 54 Ibid., 108.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded from 18Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 54–74 02:13:40AM via free access censuring the teutonic philosopher? 67 metaphysics, and this God cannot be identified with goodness. The love of God is, for Spinoza, the culmination of philosophy but the idea of being loved by God is a palpable absurdity. Secondly Spinoza puts body and spirit on a par. He is denying the transcendence of the spirit over the body. The question of the body is immensely significant for Spinoza. He is reflecting upon the knotty problem of the inter- action between the mental and the physical. His own proposal is a dual aspect theory, whereby mind and matter are both aspects of one reality. Such a view is clearly intolerable for a traditional Platonist, since Platonism (especially in its Neoplatonic form) distinguishes between the physical and the noetic cosmos. The former is subordinated to the latter. Henry More writes: ‘If, therefore, properly speaking, Spinoza makes thought an attribute of God, it is necessary to ascribe thought to God universally, that is to the individual parts of God, so that lead and stones thinks’.55 Thirdly, Spinoza denies the value of sadness, remorse or guilt: ‘The last thing a free man thinks of is death’.56This is clearly a stab at Plato, who in the Phaedo defines philosophy as ‘the practice of death’.57 There is no post-mortem immortality of the soul for Spinoza, though he does propose a kind of participation in eternity. The Ethics of Spinoza is radically deterministic. Spinoza opposed what he views as the vulgar view of freedom, that of uncaused causation. This common conception of freedom is simple ignorance: it is an illusion founded upon not knowing the real cause. Genuine freedom, for Spinoza, amounts to liberation from bondage. It is possible for the sage to emerge from bondage to passive emotions through the transformation of those passive emotions into active ones. More is perhaps harsh but he envisages Spinoza as neo-Lucretian in ‘deriding all religion’.58 While paying lip service to justice and charity, Spinoza is removing its foundation by insisting ‘that everything is borne by the blind and necessary motion of matter, and that whoever is imputed by no one is not to be punished by any one.’59 It is no accident that More refers in this context to the challenge of Lucretius ‘so much could religion persuade to evil deeds’ (tantum religio potuit suadere malorum).60 Fourthly, and finally, More critiques Spinoza’s doctrine of experiencing eternity as a sham substitute for immortality of the soul: ‘For he plainly asserts in

55 Ibid, 72, cf. 77ff. 56 Spinoza, Ethica, iv, proposition 67. 57 Plato, Phaedo 61cff. 58 More, Confutation, 105. 59 Ibid., 105. 60 Ibid., 106.

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Proposition 21, “That the mind can imagine nothing nor can it recollect anything that is past, except while the body exists. That the memory disappears therefore is as plain as if we were to perish entirely, so there will be neither reward nor punishment after this life; that which this philosophaster and his followers so passionately desire”.’61 Without post mortem memory, there can be no intelligible doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and thus Spinoza’s vaunted ‘doctrine of the persistence of the human mind after death disappears into mere vapouring and imposturing’.62 More’s critique of Spinoza as a ‘pernicious babbler’ with his ‘mimo-mathe- matical demonstrations’ is harsh.63 Does not More endorse the amor Dei intellectualis, God as causa sui? Is not his whole system based upon the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata, and the importance of scientia intuitiva as higher than discursive knowledge? More’s ‘Confutation’ may be a polemical document but it does show More the philosopher. He is not beguiled by the Neoplatonic provenance of the key terms of Spinoza. For Henry More, Spinoza stands for the position that ‘God is nothing but matter endowed with life, acting according to certain necessary mechanical laws, without any wisdom or counsel, producing the phenomena in this manner, nowhere indeed intellectual except in men’.64 This contrasts with Böhme’s vision of the Divine as creative shining freedom, ‘the free and shining majesty of the divine’ and the cosmos reflecting that freedom.65 Böhme’s speculations about the eternal God- head as an eternal Nothing (ein ewig Nichts) that is the origin of all (aller Dinge Ursprung) are clearly fired by a broadly theistic outlook.The same applies to his usage of terminology of Ungrund (“Abyss”) and Urgrund (primordial cause).66 One key aspect of the Neoplatonic tradition is the idea of a symbolic correspondence between mind and reality.67 The gods have sown symbolic seeds in the physical cosmos that point back to the intelligible world.68 Böhme’s fanci- ful use of images is criticized by More but he agrees with the principle that the material universe is an image of an eternal and invisible archetype. The outer world is a visible ‘resemblance’ or ‘signature’ of the invisible. This means, fur-

61 Ibid., 108. 62 Ibid., 118. 63 Ibid., 66. 64 Ibid., 115. 65 More, Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura, 4,7 (ii/1, 548). 66 For a brilliant analysis of Schelling and Koyré on Böhme’s Ungrund, see Muratori, The First German Philosopher, 196ff. 67 Cf. Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure, 56ff. 68 Gombrich, ‘Botticelli’s Mythologies’, 7–60.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western EsotericismDownloaded from 18Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 54–74 02:13:40AM via free access censuring the teutonic philosopher? 69 thermore, that Divine transcendence should not be confused with remoteness or physical distance. The Divine presence is radically immanent as well as radically transcendent. Böhme failed to inhabit successfully the territory between a radical apophaticism and a crudely kataphatic theology. More observes:

Now, however, as regards his opinion about God whom, as has been estab- lished in great detail from his Aurora, he makes corporeal and discerpible, an opinion he certainly entertained at that time, we have already indi- cated the occasion of this error, namely that he began from the assump- tion that the process of regeneration was a perfect image of the eternal generation of the Deity. And therefore, as he had felt in himself that bitter- ness, sourness, anguish and fire so crassly and corporeally in the labours of his new birth before the breaking forth of light and love, which is Christ according to the spirit, he, therefore, imagined that the birth of the eternal Son of God could not be any different from that. Nor could the Father out of whom he was generated be any different from one who is so corporeal that, considered without the birth of the Son, he can in himself become bitter, sour, disturbed, passionate, dark, harsh and more of that kind.69

More agreed that Nature is deeply symbolic and the enigmas of the visible cosmos point beyond merely natural processes. He saw a need for correction and refutation because of the rise of rampant naturalism. Hobbes and Spinoza (both in an overtly pious form), as well as Böhme, all made God corporeal and discerptible. Yet Böhme’s philosophy was, notwithstanding specific errors, much less worrisome than that of the naturalists: this correction emerges out of a completely different spirit than More’s critique of Hobbes and Spinoza. The Deus sive natura of Spinoza highlighted the contemporary jeopardy of pantheism. More views Böhme as containing contradictions. While there are errors in some parts of the work of the ‘puerile athlete’, in other passages these errors are contradicted. A characteristic reflection upon Böhme’s thought can be found in the following passage:

Moreover, had he thought through his reasoning more fully and more carefully, he would, I think, have realized that he himself had made God corporeal by arguing that God comprised the whole world of the general forms and orders of things, for that also includes the abyss of physical monads which is material and corporeal. Hence, in a true interpretation,

69 More, Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura, 3,14 (ii/1, 544).

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he should not have held that the sphere of pure divine was corporeal, nor yet the soul of the world or the spirit of nature, but only the external production of the form furthest removed from the centre of pure divinity, i.e. the abyss of physical monads in which the five remaining forms are to be found everywhere. And therefore, when he says that God is all things and that all things, i.e. air, water, earth, stones and everything else, proceed from God, this is to be understood of God in the above-mentioned Plotinian sense, namely as comprising the whole world of the universal forms of things. For earth, water and stones, all the corporeal things of the starry sky and all the sensible things of nature, consist in the abyss of physical monads.70

This passage is intriguing because it refers to Plotinus as offering a means of interpreting Böhme with charity. While Böhme can write of the ‘sphere of universal nature which he has falsely taken for God’,71 he can also seem to reject the Spinozistic identification of God and nature, whereas ‘in a true interpretation, he should not have held that the sphere of pure divine was corporeal’.72 More distinguishes between the totality of Platonic forms and the totality of the physical cosmos. The Platonic division between the intelligible and sensible universe provides a bulwark against pantheism of the Spinozistic strain.73 More remedies Böhme’s enthusiast or materialist error by adding the correspondence of immanent image and transcendent archetype. A beautiful passage in the Censura, contains, in a nutshell, More’s own view:

The trinity of universal nature is like a shadowy projection of the Trinity of pure divinity through the divine soul. It resembles a tree standing above the bank of a river which projects its shadows into the water with the highest of its branches being the lowest in the projection, while the latter correspond to the former and bear a necessary similarity to them. Likewise, the ♃ or abyss of physical monads reflects the image of ☉, the sun, or the supreme good, which the Platonists call τἀγαθόν.74

As part of this charitable reading of Böhme, Henry More stresses the references to the transcendence of the Divine.

70 Ibid., 4,23 (ii/1, 551). 71 Ibid., 4,10 (ii/1, 548). 72 Ibid., 4,23 (ii/1, 551). 73 Ibid., 4,1–8 (ii/1, 546–548). 74 Ibid., 4,4 (ii/1, 547).

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Lest we do any violence to the truth, he does seem to have some idea in chapter 26 of his Aurora that there is some other thing or essence distinct from that body of nature. For after the description of the dark abyss in v. 56, which appears to be a fitting description of the abyss of physical monads, he says that “there are seven spirits of God in this dark valley”. And in vv. 63–64, he continues: “When the seven spirits do not wrestle, but there is universal peace and quiet all over the whole abyss outside, inside and above all heavens, this house is called eternity. However, it is not called God, but the un-almighty body of nature, in which the Deity is not dead, but hidden in the kernel of the seven spirits. And such a house was the whole space of this world when the Deity hid itself from the horrible devil until the sun and the stars began to emit their light” (26, 62–65). This certainly seems to indicate that his mind was even then drawn to an incorporeal Deity.75

Hence, More can cite further passages where Böhme explicitly denies the idea of a materialistic God and asserts an ‘incorporeal Deity’:

Moreover, ch. 2, v. 75 of The Threefold Life of Man quite expressly contra- dicts his earlier view of God the Father as a “dark valley” and a corporeal Deity: “Now that which is still and without an essence in itself, that has no darkness in it, but is merely a still clear light joy, without essence, that is the eternity which exists without anything, and it is called the God above all other things, for there is nothing evil in it, and it exists without an essence. God the Father is so in himself, but without a name, for he is in himself the light, clear and bright eternity without an essence, if we speak merely of the light of God” (2,75–76). And again in ch. 5, v. 29: “The Father’s property is no darkness, but darkness is generated in stern desire. Rather, the Father’s property is the light, clear, free eternity, which has a will to nature”, etc. (5,20). See also The Grand Mystery, ch. 1, v. 4. There, the eternal will is called Father, the mind conceived from the will, Son and the product of will and mind, Holy Spirit. This does not differ much from the Trinity of pure Divinity in our chart, for here, too, he supposes the latter to exist before nature and creation.76

75 Ibid., 4,15 (ii/1, 549). 76 Ibid., 4,16 (ii/1, 549).

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The fact that Henry More is wont to salvage the works of Böhme by point- ing out the incompatibility of such passages about ‘the eternity which exists without anything, and it is called the God above all other things’ or a ‘pure Divinity’ that does ‘exist before nature and creation’ with pantheism of the kind so evident in Spinoza is telling. Jacob Böhme is, for Henry More, worth the rescue effort. The deliverance of Böhme is not based exclusively on his moral qualities. Böhme’s writings contain much of considerable value to More, even if mixed with unpalatable elements. Böhme was for More ‘a philosopher but at randome’, but philosopher of a kind he was.77 The shared metaphysics that rejected both radical dualism and pantheism, and the Platonic theology of the goodness of God and the freedom of man, together with the rejection of predestination, furnished a genuine basis for More’s sympathy for the Silesian mystic and his charitable interpretation of Böhme works.

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