An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature. Nathaniel Culverwell
draw between the law of nature, common to man and irrational creatures, and the law of nations, the specific rule of men—a distinction also repudiated by Grotius and Selden. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch are all brought forward to endorse the conclusion that “the Law of Nature is built upon Reason,” to testify to the “harmony that is between Nature and Law,” and to repeat the substance of Culverwell’s view that “the Law of Nature is a streaming out of Light from the Candle of the Lord” [47]. The final pages of chapter 6 are then taken up with a consideration, based almost entirely upon Suárez, of the precedence of the divine intellect or will in the establishment of law.
This scholastic dilemma, finding popular expression in the conundrum of whether God wills things because they are good or whether things are good because God wills them, appears close to being tautological, but it had already had a long history when Culverwell considered it. The tradition of emphasizing the divine volition as the ultimate determinant of moral good, the voluntarism of William of Ockham, has been traced through his fourteenth-century disciples Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson to both Calvin and Luther, and it is an emphasis encountered frequently in Puritan theologians. The realist position of Thomas Aquinas, which stressed God’s rationality and the inherent rationality and morality of the laws governing the universe, was reexpressed for the Elizabethans in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.“They err, therefore,” says Hooker, “who think that of the will of God to do this or that, there is no reason besides his will.”
Suárez’s subtle solution to this inherited problem was to argue that law is founded in reason and formalized by will, or, in Culverwell’s words: “This law of Nature having a firme and unshaken foundation in the necessity and conveniency of its materials, becomes formally valid and vigorous by the minde and command of the Supreme Law-giver; So as that all the strength and nerves, and binding virtue of this Law are rooted and fasten’d partly in the excellency and equity of the commands themselves, but they principally depend upon the Sovereignty and Authority of God himself” [71]. As the immutable essences of things created by divine reason and discoverable by human reason are the foundation for natural obligations incumbent upon men, so the divine will by its command creates moral obligations which bind men in a formal and, technically speaking, legal way.
The clearest understanding of Culverwell’s judicious balancing of the divine attributes is provided by the impressive conclusion to chapter 11, which rises to a sustained endorsement of reason comparable to the paragraphs of Hooker and traceable, like those, to scholastic sources. Here the subtle distinctions of Suárez are transformed by Culverwell’s metaphoric vigor into the humanistic assertion that, “The more men exercise reason, the more they resemble God himself” [117]. Arguing from the premise that “The understanding of God thus being fill’d with light, his Will also must needs be rational” [114], Culverwell concludes that the separation of these attributes is misleading. “Now the understanding of God being so vast and infinite, and his will being so commensurate and proportion’d to it, nay all one with it; all those Decrees of his that are the Eternal product and results of his minde and will, must needs be rational also; For in them his understanding and will met together, his truth and goodnesse kissed each other” [115]. Such emphasis upon the divine reason and reluctance to oppose it to the divine will are thoroughly Thomistic. “All law,” Thomas asserts, “proceeds from the reason and will of the law-giver; the Divine and natural laws from the reasonable will of God; the human law from the will of man, regulated by reason.”
The Candle of the Lord
Another legacy from the Middle Ages is evident in a distinctive feature of the Discourse that sets it apart from other classic works on the natural law: Culverwell’s imaginative and literary incorporation into his argument of the metaphor of the candle of the Lord. Proverbs 20:27 has been frequently cited as a kind of shibboleth for the Cambridge Platonists as a group, but the fact is that it was Whichcote and Culverwell alone who wove it into the texture of their thinking and writing on the light and law of nature, and who revived and explored its special medieval significance. Whichcote was clearly the first to make the metaphor a prominent and integral part of his anthropology and theology in his preaching at Trinity Church in the 1630s. In fact, it was so prominent that he and his former tutor at Emmanuel, the Calvinist Anthony Tuckney, engaged in public controversy over it in three successive Cambridge commencement addresses from 1650 to 1652. None of Whichcote’s writings, however, were published until after his death in 1683, and so it was Culverwell’s Discourse, published four times from 1652 to 1669, frequently plagiarized and echoed, that established the candle of the Lord as a resonant and popular metaphor for right reason and the light of nature.
Both Whichcote and Culverwell viewed man’s reason as more than a dry Baconian light, more than a discursive faculty to “reckon with” in Hobbes’s words. Ancient Judaic tradition had read the expression “the spirit of man” to mean “the higher region of the soul,” and the light of the candle of the Lord was identified by Dionysius of Richel in the fifteenth century with synderesis, that “pure part of conscience” or spark of man’s deiform nature remaining after the Fall that enabled mankind (contra Calvin) to recognize and pursue the good and to be repelled by evil. Rhetorically adapting such ancient wisdom to present philosophical and pastoral needs, and echoing Dionysius’ commentary on Proverbs 20:27, Whichcote spoke of reason or the candle of the Lord as res illuminata, illuminans, a thing lighted by God and lighting the way to God, the discoverer of the moral “principles of first inscription,” or the natural law. Culverwell expresses the same idea in concluding that the light of the candle is an ascendant light: “The Candle of the Lord it came from him, and ’twould faine returne to him” [184]. On that humanistic and affirmative note, Culverwell concludes his persuasive and eloquent encomium of reason, delivered at a surprising time in an unexpected place.
The Text
The copy-text is the British Library copy shelf-mark 1113.d.1, with the addition of Richard Culverwell’s letter from E.676.(1). William Dillingham’s corrections (“the most material escapes of the impression”) listed on a prefatory page of the first edition have been incorporated. Dillingham was an experienced editor of considerable reputation among his contemporaries. In 1658 he gave a first edition of the Discourse to the library of Emmanuel College, where it remains today, inscribing it “Collegio Emmanuele Dedit G. D.”
Certain typographical alterations have been made silently: modern s (for long s) and w (for vv, both capital and lowercase) are used throughout; random italics and wrong-font letters are corrected, and ligature capitals as well as Renaissance Greek contractions have been regularized. All other departures from the copy-text are recorded in the textual notes. Emendations have been made sparingly—in a few cases where the spelling of the 1652 edition is incorrect, eccentric even by seventeenth-century standards, or confusing, that of the second edition of 1654 has been used. Punctuation and syntax have been altered only where the first edition would positively mislead the reader, and all such cases have been recorded. As the textual notes indicate, there are only a few instances, marked “(ed.),” where the second edition of 1654 fails to provide a satisfactory alternative reading.
The second edition, however, has no textual authority. Collation reveals that it was based on the first edition and that no manuscript intervened in its publication. Although some care was taken in the second edition to correct obvious slips made in the first, only half of Dillingham’s corrections were incorporated ([125] to end), perhaps as the result of employing two printers, Thomas Roycroft and E[dward] M[ottershead?]; the table of contents was reproduced with the page numbers of the first edition. Selective collation of the third (1661) and fourth (1669) editions reveals that they too are without textual authority, the fourth having been set up from the third and the third from the first.
After Culverwell’s death, Dillingham first published one of his commonplaces under the title Spiritual Opticks, (Cambridge, 1651). The Discourse itself was published together with eight such exercises, including Spiritual Opticks, in 1652: AN / ELEGANT / And Learned / DISCOURSE / Of the / Light of Nature, / With several other / TREATISES: /
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