An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature. Nathaniel Culverwell
of licensing control over printing in 1641 resulted in a surge of religious and political tracts and manifestoes, succinctly described and condemned in the title of a contemporary pamphlet as Hell Broke Loose. On August 9, 1644, the Westminster Assembly sent a message to the House of Lords, complaining of the “great Growth and Increase of Anabaptists and Antinomians and other sects”; and in the year in which Culverwell wrote and delivered his Discourse, Thomas Edwards was composing his Gangraena (1646), the most famous and thorough of the English catalogues of heresy.
It is no surprise, then, to find Culverwell deploring “those black and prodigious Errors, that cover and bespot the face of these times” [125] in the midst of the English civil war, including those on both ends of the spectrum of religious argument. At one extreme, there was the “blundering Antinomian” who transformed the traditional Calvinist assertion of man’s utter depravity into the conviction that redemption of the elect by God’s free grace released them from conventional moral obligations and justified scandalously licentious behavior. At the opposite pole, Culverwell criticizes the Arminianism that “pleads for it self under the specious notion of God’s love to mankinde” [14], a reference to Samuel Hoard’s God’s Love to Mankind (1633), an Arminian rejection of Calvinist predestination. The legitimate claims of reason in religious matters should not be suspect, Culverwell argues, because they can be misused and distorted by such extremists. Culverwell’s plan for the Discourse was to develop a moderate and judicious defense of reason and natural law “standing in the midst between two adversaries of extreme perswasions,” in Dillingham’s words [4]. Had he lived to complete the work, he would have argued that “all the Moral Law is founded in natural and common light, in the light of Reason” and that “there’s nothing in the mysteries of the Gospel contrary to the light of Reason; nothing repugnant to this light that shines from the Candle of the Lord” [16].
In addition to resisting antinomian libertinism on one side and liberalizing Arminianism on the other, Culverwell clearly intended to respond to Francis Bacon’s call for “a temperate and careful treatise … which as a kind of divine logic, should lay down proper precepts touching the use of human reason in theology.” In the first sentence of the Discourse, he echoes Bacon’s Advancement of Learning in declaring that distinguishing the provenances of faith and reason is the task that he has set himself: “to give unto Reason the things that are Reasons, and unto Faith the things that are Faiths” [10]. Although, unlike the Cambridge Platonists, he quotes or refers to Bacon’s writings frequently enough to indicate considerable knowledge and approval of the Baconian gospel, the spirit of the Discourse is basically at odds with Bacon’s plan for man’s intellectual progress. In his emphasis upon scholastic psychology and his indebtedness to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Suarez, as well as in his flourishing rhetoric and richly metaphorical style, Culverwell does not forward the Great Instauration. Accordingly, although the seed for Culverwell’s Discourse may have been sown by Bacon’s call for new works to fill the gaps in human knowledge, the result might well have dismayed him.
The Argument of the Discourse
Delivered as a series of separate sermonlike lectures to students on a specific biblical text, Proverbs 20:27, the Discourse nevertheless presents a continuous and progressive argument. This style of lecturing to students was practiced generally in Cambridge at the time and is exemplified by John Sherman’s A Greek in the Temple: Some Common-places delivered in Trinity College Chapel upon Acts XVII, part of the 28 verse (Cambridge, 1641). The more rhetorical and poetic passages in the Discourse reflect the additional influence of the commonplace and declamation. Unfortunately, Culverwell followed the tradition of the ostentatious declamation in quoting generously from Latin and Greek sources, a habit that has dismayed the student and daunted the scholar.
The general outline of the argument is clear. The first chapter contains a statement of the theme of the whole work. Reason and faith are distinct lights, yet they are not opposed; they are complementary and harmonious. Reason is the image of God in man, and to deny right reason is to deny our relation to God. Chapter 2 concludes the prologue by analyzing the text from Proverbs, “The understanding of a man is the candle of the Lord,” which serves as a touchstone for the whole argument. Culverwell understands the verse to be an endorsement and celebration of the light of nature, that is, reason.
The first of the two major divisions of the work, chapters 3 through 10, now begins. Chapter 3 defines nature in two ways: first, it is God himself, or what the scholastics called natura naturans; second, nature is the principle of operation of any entity, whether spiritual or material. In chapters 4 through 7, law is defined as a measure of moral acts which has as its end the common good; it finds its authority in the will of the lawgiver. The eternal law is the fountain of all other laws: its end is to regulate all things, commanding good and forbidding evil. It is founded in God’s reason and formalized by God’s will, and it is promulgated both by the law of nature and by direct revelation from God. The law of nature applies only to rational beings who are capable of a formal and legal obligation, “for where there is no Liberty, there’s no Law” [44]. God thus publishes his law through reason, the inward scripture or candle of the Lord. Chapters 8 through 10 deal with the light of nature and the related question of how the law of nature is discovered. That discovery is made by “that intellectual eye which God has fram’d and made exactly proportionable to this Light” [71] and confirmed by the consent of nations.
The first half of the Discourse dealt with “How The Understanding of a man is the Candle of the Lord”; the second half, chapters 11 through 18, considers a different question: “What this Candle of the Lord discovers” [16]. This question entails an examination of the powers, nature, and limitations of the light of reason.
Chapters 11 through 13, the first of the three subdivisions, emphasize the limitations of reason, which is described as a “derivative” and a “diminutive” light. The soul does not possess innate ideas. It enters the world as a tabula rasa and discovers common notions by observing and comparing sense impressions, and thus it discerns the rational order imposed by God on creation. Accordingly, the argument continues in chapters 14 through 16, reason can serve as a guide to truth. Reason may be limited, but it is “certain” and “directive” despite the attacks of ancient and modern skeptics. Far from being extinguished by faith, reason is completed by it. The final section, chapters 17 and 18, confirms this endorsement of reason, calling it a “pleasant” and “ascendant” light.
Suárez
The antinomian and Arminian writers and Francis Bacon form part of the circle of influences surrounding Culverwell’s Discourse. Closer to the center lies the De Legibus, ac Deo Legislatore (1612) by Francisco Suárez, the Spanish Jesuit. Despite Culverwell’s expressed indignation at the logic-chopping of the scholastics, “their works are like so many raging seas, full of perpetual tossings, and disquietings, and foamings, and sometimes casting up mire and dirt” [15], the Discourse of the Light of Nature is essentially a Protestant blossom on the scholastic tree; its fundamental philosophic position and spirit are derived from Suárez and Thomas Aquinas.
Chapters 4 through 7 of the Discourse examine the nature of law itself, the eternal law, and the definition and extent of natural law. These chapters contain the philosophic keystone of the work, and they support the views of the light of reason and its place in the divine economy which form the substance of later sections. Culverwell follows the arguments of Suárez on these questions, while omitting many of his subtleties and distinctions, and accepts his definitions and conclusions virtually without exception. For example, his quotations of Thomistic definitions of law in chapter 4 are repeated from Suárez and then qualified by Suárez’s own restatement of them. The notes make this indebtedness clear.
In chapter 6 John Selden’s recently published De Jure Naturali (1640), and Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), are mined for appropriate quotations to illustrate or buttress the points at issue and are at times cited in their own right, but the major insights of the chapter are again derived from Suárez. Natural law, Culverwell asserts, is “intrinsecal and essential to a rational creature”; only an intellectual creature is “capable of a moral government”