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AN ELEGANT AND LEARNED DISCOURSE
OF THE LIGHT OF NATURE
NATURAL LAW AND
ENLIGHTENMENT CLASSICS
Knud Haakonssen
General Editor
This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
© 2001 by Liberty Fund, Inc. Originally published by the University of Toronto Press.
Cover image from Houghton Library, Harvard University. This view of Emmanuel College was published in David Loggan, Cantabrigia Illustrata (Cambridge, 1690). Culverwell delivered his Discourse in the former chapel of Emmanuel College, identified as "B Bibliotheca" in Loggan’s drawing.
This eBook edition published in 2014.
eBook ISBNs:
978-1-61487-613-7
978-1-61487-237-5
CONTENTS
An Elegant and Learned Discourse on the Light of Nature
Notes
Textual Notes
Index
This edition of Culverwell’s Discourse, edited by Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum, was originally published in 1971 by the University of Toronto Press. The introduction set the work in its historical and philosophical context. This republication substitutes a brief updated foreword by Robert A. Greene for that original introduction. Bracketed page numbers in the text indicate the pagination of the 1971 edition. Bracketed page numbers in the foreword refer to page numbers in this volume. Capitalization of the chapter titles on page 9 and in the text has been modernized. The chapter numbers in the text have been made arabic to be consistent with those on page 9. The following acknowledgments are repeated from the 1971 edition.
The editors wish to express their gratitude to the institutions and libraries that provided assistance, and to the friends who helped them out of difficulties. Leaves of absence from the University of Toronto afforded the opportunity for research abroad, and the Leverhulme Trust, the Canada Council, and the research fund of the University of Toronto supported the project. The work has been published with the aid of grants from the Humanities Research Council, using funds provided by the Canada Council, and from the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press.
We wish to recognize a particular debt to the staffs of the British Library and the Huntington Library, where much of the work was done, and to the Librarian of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Mr. Frank Stubbings, for his generous guidance and advice, which included drawing to our attention the existence of the pulpit from which Culverwell preached his Discourse. The complete list of colleagues and friends who contributed to the solution of individual problems is too long for inclusion here, but we desire especially to thank N. J. Endicott, David Gallop, Allan Pritchard, John Rist, Niall Rudd, D. I. B. Smith, and Peter Walsh; K. H. Kuhn and J. W. Wevers were kind enough to check the accuracy of the Hebrew passages in the text. John Brown’s nineteenth-century edition of the Discourse was of indispensable assistance, and in standing on his shoulders we hope we have avoided the pitfall which Culverwell warned of in his account of the printer who “corrects the old Errata of the first Edition, and makes some new Errours in [his] owne.” Both editors think with affection of the encouragement offered by the late A. S. P. Woodhouse, and with respect (not unmixed with penitence) of the assistance offered by their wives, Barbara and Mary.
R. A. G.
H. M.
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 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”