The Body of Light in Renaissance England

This chapter engages with the first Anglophone attestations of the term “subtle body.” It appears first in the contentious correspondence between Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes between whom there was some disagreement over who plagiarized the idea from whom. Most of the chapter is taken up with the Cambridge Platonists who came in their wake, who formulated complex philosophical and mythological views of the Neoplatonic vehicles of the soul, now under the English name “subtle body.” It ends with Lady Anne Conway, who fuses the Platonism of the Cambridge group with Kabbalah to create a new form of spiritual monism. This chapter is significantly about how the subtle body concept was employed by Renaissance Platonists arguing against the reductive materialism of Cartesian mechanical philosophy.

Oriental Origins

This chapter shows how the subtle body concept as established by the Cambridge Platonists was carried forward in popular and literary domains and later used as a stock concept in the earliest English translations of Sanskrit texts. It takes the reader through the birth of Indology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing the subtle body concept through early translations of yoga and Sāṃkhya philosophy, focusing on how the authors posited historical connections between Neoplatonic and Hindu philosophies, laying the groundwork for future understandings of the subtle body as a concept spanning a great East-West divide.

More and Cudworth against Hobbes

This chapter considers the criticisms of Hobbes made by two Cambridge Platonists, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. The first half looks at their criticisms of Hobbes’s arguments: More’s replies to Hobbes’s arguments for materialism, and Cudworth’s replies to (what he took to be) Hobbes’s arguments for atheism. The second half of the chapter then looks at how More and Cudworth argued for the existence of immaterial beings that control the workings of the material world (the spirit of nature or plastic natures). These arguments imply that Hobbes’s materialist ontology is radically inadequate to explain the actual phenomena of the natural world.

The Testimony of the Spirit, the Decline of Calvinism, and the Origins of Restoration Rational Religion

The mid-seventeenth century turn to moralism in English Protestant theology – exemplified here by ‘Ignorance’ in Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress – involved a clear rejection of the Calvinistic doctrine of the ‘internal testimony’ of Scripture. The upshot was the emergence of a religious impulse that emphasised the salience of a ‘rational account’ of Scripture's credibility. The shift is conventionally traced through Richard Hooker, William Chillingworth and the Cambridge Platonists. Hooker was, however, more Calvinist and Chillingworth more Laudian than has been recognised. The Cambridge Platonists and their ‘latitudinarian’ successors emerged from and were shaped by puritan culture.