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ABSTRACT
The Letter of Resolution Concerning Origen and the Chief of His Opinions, published anonymously in London in 1661, is the chief testimony of the renaissance of Origen in early modern Cambridge. Probably authored by George Rust, the later Bishop of Dromore in Ireland, it is the first defence of Origenism, and delineates a rational theology based upon the unshakable foundation of God’s first attribute, his goodness. Trespassing and falling away from God’s goodness, the souls forfeit their original ethereal bodies or ‘vehicles’ and come to inhabit lesser ones made of air and earth. Making responsible use of their freedom, however, they may climb up the ontological ladder again. Rust’s rational theodicy with its stress on God’s universal goodness and the pre-existent soul’s free will is a key document of the Cambridge Platonists’ deeply Origenian philosophy of religion.
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Notes
1 Hutton, ‘Henry More and Anne Conway’, 113. The article quoted is part of one of only two essay collections dedicated to Origen’s reception history in early modern England: Baldi, Mind Senior to the World. The other is Fürst/Hengstermann, Cambridge Origenists.
2 Lewis, ‘Origenian Platonisme’, provides the text with introduction and notes.
3 Patrides, ‘The High and Aiery Hills of Platonisme’, 2.
4 See also this well-argued thesis regarding the origin of Cambridge Platonism in the chapter devoted to the school in Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, 134–83.
5 Quantin, ‘The Fathers in Seventeenth Century Anglican Theology’, 1005. This claim is certainly exaggerated as other Church Fathers like Origen’s Alexandrian precursor Clement and successor Athanasius are likewise frequently quoted by Cudworth and More. See also Dockril, ‘The Heritage of Patristic Platonism’, and Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity for an exhaustive overview of the early Anglican recourse to the Fathers. See esp. 155–202 for the pivotal role of the Greek Church Fathers in early English Arminianism, which finds its apogee in the Cambridge Platonists’ reverence for Origen and other Pre-Nicene Greek Fathers in the Civil War and Restoration era. On English Arminianism and Socinianism which constitute the intellectual backdrop of Cambridge Platonism, notably its commitment to libertarian freedom and rational theology, see Colie, Light and Enlightenment, 1–21, and Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 39–62, respectively. The Cambridge Platonists’ intense reception of Origen, especially his doctrines of the soul’s pre-existence espoused by Henry More and his pupils and its free will defended by all of its representatives, further militates against ‘the non-existence of Cambridge Platonism’ recently argued for by Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 126–37, who fails to take into account the school’s shared Platonic metaphysics and ethics altogether.
6 ‘Freedom metaphysics’ may be the most apposite sobriquet for Origen’s innovative variety of Platonism. See, above all, the German articles by Holz, ‘Begriff des Willens und der Freiheit’ and Kobusch, ‘philosophische Bedeutung’ as well as the latter’s comprehensive depiction of Christian philosophy in the Origenian vein in his Christliche Philosophie. An English account of Origen’s notion of divine being as power and action, based primarily on Holz’s article, is given in Lyman, Christology and Cosmology, 47–58. For a fuller account, see Hengstermann, Origenes und der Ursprung der Freiheitsmetaphysik.
7 See the analysis of the originally Chrysippean definition in Frede, A Free Will, 66–9. Keen on emulating ancient thought both Platonic and Stoic, Origen believes the biblical notion of holiness to be the highest kind of freedom.
8 ComJn I 34, 244; Origen, Commentary on the Gospel, 83.
9 On More’s Origenism, notably his life-long commitment to the pre-existence of souls, see Crocker, ‘Henry More and the Preexistence of the Soul’, reproduced with modifications in his Henry More, 1614–1687, 111–25. A general overview of the Cambridge Platonists’ reception of Origen’s doctrine is provided in Givens, When Souls Had Wings, 147–70.
10 Pioneered, above all, by Dieter Henrich in the field of early German Idealism in Tübingen and Jena (see also his two-volume Grundlegung aus dem Ich), the method of network analysis has been fruitfully applied to Cambridge Platonism by Hutton, ‘Eine Cambridge-Konstellation?’.
11 Origen, CCels IV, 40, translated and subsequently briefly compared to the report in Epiphanius’ Panarion in More, Conjectura Cabbalistica, The Defence of the Philosophick Cabbala, 106.
12 See also esp. the summary of his pre-existence adoptionism in More, ‘Grand Mystery’, 8–10.
13 See also the convincing refutations of More’s alleged eschatological universalism in Walker, Decline of Hell, 133–4 and Almond, Heaven and Hell, 115–6.
14 See also Hutton, Anne Conway, 69–72; ‘Origen and Anne Conway’; ‘Anne Conway und die Güte Gottes’.
15 The Conway Letters, 194.
16 See also esp. Leech, Hammer of the Cartesians, 123–68.
17 Like his fellow Platonists, notably Ralph Cudworth, George Rust may be credited with forestalling the utilitarian concept of disinterested universal happiness and the Kantian notion of an all-encompassing ‘kingdom of ends’. See also the interpretation of Cudworth’s ethics as pre-Kantian ‘ethical internalism’ in Darwall, British Moralists, 109–48.
18 This doctrine of freedom is a distinguishing feature of Cambridge Platonism as a current of early modern philosophy. See also the juxtaposition of ‘free will’, i.e. choice, and ‘liberty’, which designates an immutable virtuous character, in Cudworth, Treatise of Freewill, 196–7, and the definitions provided in More, Enchridion Ethicum, 172–81. ‘Free’ denotes both strictly libertarian freedom of choice, the sine qua non of moral responsibility, and the ontological ‘realization of the image’ (Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen, 73–113), the latter being viewed as the archetype as well as the principle and aim of the former.
19 The work’s attribution to George Rust is based on a brief note in Richard Roach’s preface to his edition of Jeremiah White’s The Restoration of Things of 1712. The preface consists of a selection of patristic and early modern texts about the doctrine of universal restitution, including the relevant chapters of the Letter of Resolution. While not mentioning Rust by name, Roach does identify its author with that of the De veritate or the Discourse of Truth who was indeed to become a ‘Bishop of the Church of England’ shortly afterwards:
But the most full and pregnant Testimony to this Doctrine, we shall collect, and that pretty largely, from that ingenious Letter of Resolution concerning the Opinions of Origen, printed Anno 1661, known among the Learned to have been written by a Bishop of the Church of England, famous for his excellent Tract, De Veritate.
20 Ludlow, ‘Universal Salvation and a Soteriology of Divine Punishment’; Walker, Decline of Hell, 135–6, and Patrides, ‘Salvation of Satan’. Despite the fitting description borrowed from the first of the three articles dedicated to the subject of apokatastasis in George Rust and his fellow Origenists, the older studies mentioned all fail to take into account the twofold interpretation offered in the Letter of Resolution. Significantly, Rust does not espouse universal salvation per se, but rather an endless cycle of the free souls’ sinful fall and apocalyptic annihilation by God, which, surprisingly enough, verges on deep anthropological scepticism in the end. See my more comprehensive interpretation of the fourth and fifth ‘queries’ in Hengstermann, ‘Niedergang der Hölle’.