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I. Human Nature Question: a Copernican Revolution in moral philosophy, a shift from thinking of morality as a standard against which human nature as a whole can be measured to thinking of morality as itself a part of human nature. -the birth of modern secular ethics: of ethical thought that is entirely independent of religious and theological commitment. In 1600, almost all English-speaking moral philosophy was completely embedded in a Christian framework. But by 1700, some philosophers had begun to develop moral positions that, while still fundamentally theistic, lacked any distinctively Christian elements. And by 1750, still other philosophers had begun to advance accounts of morality that were disengaged not only from Christianity but also from belief in God. II. The Negative Answer of English Calvinism: -the sinfulness of all humans: humans had originally been created pure and good but through original sin had fallen to the depths of degradation. As a result, each and every human is now corrupt through and through. The corruption of the Fall, moreover, was so complete, afflicting as it did all of our faculties, that we now lack even the ability to do anything to improve our degenerate state. Human sinfulness is inherent and ineradicable. All people deserve eternal damnation in hell...They thought that God had predetermined that some few people – the elect – would be saved. But the vast majority would be damned. And, crucially, even the elect did not deserve salvation. They just happened to be lucky enough to win, as though in a lottery, God’s undeserved grace. Sin suffused the soul of the elect and reprobate alike. -the emphasis on an internal sense of sin: They insisted that the essence of Christianity – the essence of true acceptance of Christ – involved not merely agreement with statements of Calvinist doctrine, but also a vital and fulsome feeling of one’s own corruption. -No one can ever merit salvation: Everyone’s soul is a “sea of corruption.” But God decided to bestow His grace on some people anyway. Why did God elect the people He did and damn the rest? It is impossible for us to know. God’s reasons are not for us to understand. We do know, however, that whatever God decided, He decided before the moment of Creation. For we know that every event that ever takes place has been predetermined by God. -Two central notions: a Negative Answer that proclaimed that everyone is fundamentally evil, corrupt, and sinful, and a fatalism that proclaimed that everyone’s eternal fate has been forever sealed. Coupled to those two notions was a vividly literal conception of hell and a never-ending exhortation to engage in obsessive fault-finding self-scrutiny. III. Whichcote and Cudworh's Positive Answer -Whichcote's rejection of his tutor's Negative Answer: when Whichcote looked within himself, he did not find the wickedness Perkins insisted would be there. What he likely found instead was a self that was fundamentally decent – a self that simply did not resemble the corrupt picture of human beings that was the core of Perkins’s Negative Answer. -Whichcote as a turning point: back toward Plato and forward toward Shaftesbury and other modern champions of self-respect. -Whichcote as a Stoic: “Govern thyself from within,” Whichcote tells us (Aphorisms 178). And he continually insists on being “true to” oneself, on respecting one’s own “integrity,” on conducting oneself in a manner that will allow one to maintain “reverence” for oneself. He insists on such things because he thinks that humans are basically good, and that if we would just follow our true nature we would live as we should. “For such a nature as the nature of man is, intellectual nature, it gives a law to itself, and carries a law with it, and is made with the law, and the law is in its own bowels, and is never extirpated while it continues in being: the law of reason is inherent to human nature” (Whichcote iv.434; cf. iii.21). All humans have and always will have within themselves the law of how to live, and they need only follow the principles of their own soul to achieve righteousness. This is as clear a statement of an anti-Calvinist Positive Answer that one could ever hope to find. And in making this statement, Whichcote both revived the Platonic idea that one’s goal ought to be to live in harmony with oneself and launched a self-respect and integrity-based view of morality that is still in full sail today. -human nature is deiform, or God-like: One of the most fundamental beliefs to which Whichcote, Cudworth, More, and Smith were committed was a deeply theistic conception of the Positive Answer. Every human being is basically good, they believed, because every human soul is God-like. As Whichcote put it, “Reverence God in thyself: for God is more in the Mind of Man, than in any part of this world besides; for we (and we only here) are made after the image of God” (Aphorisms 798). Or as Whichcote put it elsewhere, “He that hath no Reverence for himself, and his own Nature hath no Reverence for God” (Aphorisms 255). This theistic conception of the Positive Answer is best summed up by the claim, explicit in the work of Whichcote, Cudworth, and their friends, that human nature is deiform, or God-like. -"The Spirit of a Man Is the Candle of the Lord": Whichcote and Cudworth, in contrast, insisted that we can and must look to our souls for real guidance. (“Govern thyself from within.”) And John Smith, another of Whichcote’s students and one of Cudworth’s good friends, maintained that true religion is “an inward Nature that conteins all the laws and measures of its motion within it self. A Good man finds not his Religion without him, but as a living Principle within him” (Patrides 1970, 159). But such confidence in the guidance of each person’s own soul requires an interpretation of Psalms 20:27 very different from that of Culverwell and Quarles. It requires that we read the verse as intending to focus our attention on the similarity between God and humans...So as the four Cambridge friends saw it, the lesson of Psalms 20:27 is that each of us has within himself a spark of the divine, something that is literally a piece of God. And to ignore that divine spark within is to disrespect both oneself and one’s Creator. cf. Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" -"the arbitrariness of God's decision to damn certain humans: because it implies that that decision was unguided by any sort of moral consideration. According to this view, morality – and all the considerations we think of as moral reasons – did not exist before God made His decision, for God created morality at the same time that He determined that certain people should suffer eternal torment. So the determination that certain people should suffer was made by His will alone, by a will completely unfettered by any prior constraints or moral requirements, by a will that was arbitrary in an etymologically strict sense. -the counterargument from Whichcote and Cudworth: They argued, first, that voluntarism hollowed out the goodness of God. This point can be put in strictly logical terms. In order for God’s will to be good in a significant or non-tautological sense, there must be some independent standard of goodness against which God’s will can be measured. It is substantially meaningful to say that God does what is good only if the standard of goodness has an existence independent of God’s will. But on the voluntarist view, God’s actions create goodness. His will brings the moral standard into existence. So on the voluntarist view, before God acted there was no moral standard at all. It thus becomes tautological – or empty – to say that God’s will is good, in that goodness is determined entirely by God’s will itself. -Another counterargument: it would have been wrong for God to condemn people to eternal torment before they had ever been born. Whichcote and Cudworth held that it would have been immoral for God to have created a world in which people were predestined to sin and damnation. As Cudworth explained in a letter he wrote late in life describing the development of his thought in the 1630s, “I was not able to ascribe to God those dreadful decrees, which he inevitably condemned innocent men out of arbitrariousness to guilt and sin, for which they are to atone by everlasting torture. . . . And from that time on a very large number of men at our university, influenced by the evidence of this one truth, have gone over to the camp of the Remonstrants” (Cassirer 1953, 79; cf. 122–3). Whichcote made the same point when he claimed that it was “Blasphemy” to say that God had “determined” humans “to Sin or Misery” before they came “into Being” (Aphorisms 811). -Several notable features of their objections to Calvinism: 1) God’s goodness is merely tautological. But the ought-implies-can objection holds that the Calvinist conception of God is inconsistent with moral goodness. It implies that the Calvinist conception of God must be false, since that conception implies the absurdity that God, who is perfectly moral, has acted immorally. 2) Whichcote and Cudworth’s willingness to limit God’s power in order to affirm a particular view of morality. Not even the power of God, according to this objection, can alter the eternal and immutable standards of morality, for those standards are prior even to God’s act of creation. Morality is a necessary feature of reality, and so God’s will must “Answer” to morality, not the other way around. 3) Whichcote and Cudworth placed their own moral convictions at the origin of (or prior to) their conception of religion. Theology, as they saw it, had to conform to their idea of morality, not the other way around. 4) Whichcote and Cudworth’s breath-taking self-confidence -Conclusion: The root idea of Calvinism was the Fall of Man. So for Calvinists, the sin of pride always loomed large, a constant danger. But the thought of Whichcote and Cudworth grew out of a radically different idea, namely, that all humans are deiform, made by God in the image of God. For Whichcote and Cudworth, self-respect merged with respect for God, and worries about the sin of pride withered and fell away. IV. Cambridge Platonists: Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith -Platon as their main ally: We have already mentioned two aspects of Plato’s thought that are in line with the anti-Calvinist Positive Answer: the anti-voluntarism of the Euthyphro and the claim in the Republic that it is possible for a human to “harmonize” with himself, to be “his own friend” or bear his own survey. Later in the Republic, Plato draws this second claim out more fully, developing a metaphysically elevated view of the human ability to grasp the Form of the Good. The Meno, with its story of the slave boy and its doctrine of recollection, is another example of Plato’s confidence in the human ability to get things right. And the Symposium’s speeches, at least as the Cambridge Platonists interpreted them, reveal the heights of true spiritual love to which human beings can aspire. -Socrates as the embodiment of the Positive Answer: There is no conflict within the soul of Socrates. He is self-content. And that is not because he is ignorant of his true nature but rather because he knows himself fully.He also has confidence in the human ability to think things through, which shapes his entire life’s project of speaking plainly with people about how they should live. Socrates is the embodiment of the Positive Answer. When you consider, as well, that it was Whichcote who introduced Socrates – Whichcote, whose character resemblance to Socrates his three students must have noted – it’s not too difficult to imagine the attraction for Cudworth, More, and Smith. -Against Calvinist's idea of Platon as one of "Wretched Heathens" consigned to Hell: Conversely, the Cambridge Platonists’ embrace of Plato fits perfectly with their Positive Answer. The human mind, on the Cambridge Platonist view, is God-like, the Candle of the Lord – and that means every human mind, Christian or heathen. We are, therefore, just as likely to learn something from a heathen as from a Christian. All humans come equipped to discover real and important truths, whether they have had the benefit of scripture or not. V. Heaven and Hell - New understanding of heaven and hell: In opposition to the prevailing Calvinist approach, Whichcote and Cudworth argued that ministers ought not to describe heaven as “a place of rest and content” and hell as “a place of fire and brimstone, weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth” (Whichcote II 196–7). Indeed, ministers ought not to emphasize the idea that heaven and hell are places at all. For what is most important about heaven and hell is that they are states of mind that follow necessarily from our awareness of the rightness or wrongness of our own conduct. The essential feature of heaven is not any externally bestowed benefit but rather the consciousness of having lived in a God-like fashion. And the essential feature of hell is not the external torment of being placed in a lake of fire but the internal torment of knowing that one has done wrong – not the “misery and harm” that “proceed from abroad,” but the bite of self-condemnation that “arise[s] from within.” -Whichcote's idea of happiness: "All misery arises out of ourselves. It is a most gross mistake; and men are of dull and stupid spirits, who think that that state which we call hell is an incommodious place only, and that God by his sovereignty throws men therein: for hell arises out of a man’s self; and hell’s fewel is the guilt of a man’s conscience. And it is impossible that any should be so miserable as hell makes a man, and as there a man is miserable; but by his own condemning himself: and on the other side, when they think that heaven arises from any place, or any nearness to God or angels; this is not principally so: but it lies in a refined temper, in an internal reconciliation to the nature of God, and to the rule of righteousness. So that both hell and heaven have their foundation within men.(Whichcote II 139–40) -Heaven and Hell in this world: Whichcote and Cudworth make it clear, moreover, that we can experience the states of mind that constitute heaven and hell in this world, not merely in the afterlife. cf. Marlowe's "Dr Faustus" -Developing a righteous character: So while the Calvinists thundered on about blissful and tormented afterlives, Whichcote and Cudworth spoke of developing a righteous character here and now. Whichcote and Cudworth believed, moreover, that every person can successfully develop a righteous character, that every person can become truly God-like. As a result, according to Whichcote and Cudworth, every person has the wherewithal to free himself entirely from the fear of hell. The most important aspect of heaven is, moreover, within each person’s power to achieve, within each person’s immediate grasp. -Whichcote and Cudworth's real point: righteousness consists of a particular kind of “temper” or state of mind and that to possess that temper or state of mind is to be as happy as one can possibly be. For Whichcote and Cudworth, no substantive distinction can be drawn between righteousness and a heavenly state of mind: they are two ways of describing a single thing. -Summary: 1) Whichcote and Cudworth believed that all persons have within their own souls sufficient motivation to conduct themselves righteously, whereas Calvinism implied that the prospect of externally imposed reward and punishment (i.e., heaven and hell as places) was a necessary motivating tool. 2) Whichcote and Cudworth believed that all persons have within their own souls the ability to discern right from wrong, whereas Calvinism implied that people need the externally bestowed scriptures to determine what they ought to do. 3) Whichcote and Cudworth believed that all persons have within their own souls the wherewithal to become truly righteous and thus achieve salvation, whereas Calvinism implied that one could never make oneself truly deserving of salvation and was thus always dependent on externally administered grace. -Conclusion: The Calvinists had drawn an ironclad distinction between wretched humanity and perfect God. God could not be found within the human soul because the human soul was wholly corrupt. God, therefore, had to come from without; He had to be external to the sinful human soul. Whichcote and Cudworth, in contrast, brought God into every human soul. They believed that there was a sense in which God is present within each of us, a sense in which a reconciliation with God is equivalent to a reconciliation with oneself. That is why we should look within – because within each of us is present God Himself.
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