David Leech: The Hammer of the Cartesians: Henry More’s Philosophy of Spirit and the Origins of Modern Atheism

Abstract

Henry More (1614–1687), the most influential of the so-called Cambridge Platonists, and arguably the leading philosophically-inclined theologian in late seventeenthcentury England, has come in for renewed attention lately. He was the subject of a detailed intellectual biography in 2003 by Robert Crocker, and in 2012 Jasper Reid published a philosophically penetrating and enlightening study ofMore’s metaphysics (Crocker 2003; Reid 2012). David Leech’s study of More’s idiosyncratic concept of immaterial spirit—and the role that it plays in his philosophy and theology—is as detailed and penetrating as Reid’s study of his metaphysics, but perhaps more farreaching in its ambitions. As the sub-title of this new book suggests,More’s philosophical theology is presented here as leading to the unintended consequence of promoting the incipient atheism of the early modern period. Leech’s study is clearly and helpfully structured in three parts and ten chapters. The first part, “Atheism and Spirit” is concerned with contemporary atheistic attempts to refute the concept of spirit, or immaterial substance, which was seen as “foundational to all religious claims” (p. 19), and with More’s early attempts to take the atheists head-on and establish the truth of the spiritual realm. We see here the beginnings of More’s rejection of what he refers to as holenmerism (he was always ready to coin a neologism), and his dismissal of the “mad jingle”: the scholastic claim that the soul is present in the body tota in toto et tota in qualibet parte (the whole soul is simultaneously in the whole of the body and in every part of the body). Part Two, on finite spirits (i.e., spirits other than God) begins by examining how More deals with the Averroistic concept of the unity and singularity of the human soul. This “Aristotelian Atheism,” so-called because it denied any notion of immortal-