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14 - The Transcendence of Holiness

Divine Goodness and Human Freedom in Henry More’s Critique of Baruch de Spinoza

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2024

By
Christian Hengstermann
Edited by
Douglas Hedley  and
Daniel J. Tolan
Douglas Hedley
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Daniel J. Tolan
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Henry More, the most speculatively gifted of the Cambridge Platonists, engaged critically with all the major thinkers of the early modern age. He provided an in-depth refutation of the materialist and determinist system of Thomas Hobbes, exposing its shortcomings with great argumentative vigor in his principal philosophical prose work of 1659 entitled The Immortality of the Soul. His critique of René Descartes, first outlined in his celebrated correspondence with the French rationalist in the late 1640s and culminating in his Enchiridium Metaphysicum of 1671, won him European fame and the sobriquet of the “Hammer of the Cartesians.”1 It was in the late 1670s, however, that he combated the most formidable of the early modern foes of his ancient theology of a supremely benign Deity watching over an animate cosmos inhabited by accountable rational agents: Baruch de Spinoza.2

Type
Chapter
Information
Participation in the Divine
A Philosophical History, From Antiquity to the Modern Era
 , pp. 303 - 327
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

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