Be it confest that, for the first time, seated
Within thy innocent lodge and oratory,
One of a festive circle, I poured out
Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride
And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain
Never excited by the fumes of wine
Before that hour, or since.
And this, from internal evidence, must have been on a winter Sunday afternoon before chapel! For the inebriated poet, always a sad idler at Cambridge, had to run back “ostrich-like” to chapel, where he arrived late and, full of wine and Milton, swaggered up to his place through “the inferior throng of plain Burghers.” Here was a young gentleman who deserved flogging!
But the presence of Milton must not allow us to forget the band of contemplative scholars and philosophers who, in his time, were the ruling influence in the college, and now lie beneath the chapel floor. The course of the reformed and Puritan doctrines was largely determined by the study of Platonic philosophy, just as the Aristotelian system had allied itself to Catholic theology. Platonism in Cambridge is the result of two opposing forces: on the positive side, the teaching of Erasmus; on the negative side, the publication of Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651. This book received many reputations from Cambridge men; two of the best known are the work of Dr Bramhall of Sidney, Bishop of Derry and afterwards Primate of Ireland, and of Dr Cumberland of Magdalene, the painful Bishop of Peterborough. But the most effective opposition to Hobbes’ materialistic and mathematical science came from Christ’s. The first of the Cambridge Platonists was the meditative Mede, who died in 1638. He was a fellow of the college in Milton’s time, and spent his days in wandering about the college backs and fields, absorbed in mystical speculation, of which the eventual outcome was his work on the Apocalypse. In the evening, members of the college would resort to his rooms, and he would ask them “Quid dubitas? What doubts have you met in your studies to-day?” and, having heard their answers, would set their minds at rest and dismiss them with prayer. But Mede was scarcely so remarkable as Henry More, the author of the Mystery of Godliness and other books, who devoted his life at Cambridge to Platonic speculations, and even extended his enquiries to the Neo-Platonic writers and the Hebrew Cabala. Ralph Cudworth* was three years his junior, and survived him one year. This man, the greatest of the company, was Master of Clare for some time, and, in 1654, became Master of Christ’s, where he remained, unmoved by the Restoration, till his death in 1688. He was the most powerful of Hobbes’ adversaries, and his True Intellectual System of the Universe, published in 1678, is a fairly convincing counterblast to the Leviathan. However, Cudworth was rather a talented pedant than a genius: he lessened the value of his work by recondite allusions, and his critical capacity was impaired by prejudice. But, in that age of laborious theology, Cudworth’s book deserves a position next to, although far below, Leighton’s commentary on St Peter.