Ralph Cudworth
The
relationship between Edward Abney and the
eminent and influential Ralph Cudworth, Master of Christ’s
College, Cambridge, and his wife Damaris was most important in Abney’s
attempt to persuade his father to approve the marriage with Ralph Cudworth’s
stepdaughter Damaris.
Cudworth was a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists, whose philosophy and moral inquiry was hugely influential in pre-Enlightenment intellectual and religious discourse.
Born in Aller, Somerset, Cudworth was elected fellow of Emmanuel College in 1639. In 1645 he became Master of Clare Hall and, Doctor of Divinity in 1651. He moved to Christ’s College as Master in 1654.
Cudworth entered a frenetic and violent political stage in March 1647 at the age of thirty when he delivered a sermon to the House of Commons advocating freedom of conscience yet urging calm and restraint ‘amongst those many opinions about religion, that are every where so eagerly contended for on many sides…so many shadows fighting with each other’. Politically, Cudworth was as close to the republican regime as was pragmatic yet did advise Thurloe on several occasions on University appointments. He greeted the return of Charles II with a set of congratulatory verses addressed to the King.
In brief, Cudworth’s thought and that of the Cambridge Platonists centred on the idea that philosophical reasoning and religion could reach for the same goal and that Reason was ‘the candle of the Lord’. Religion without reason amounted to superstition whilst reason without religion amounted to atheism.
