Abstract

Cassirer’s Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge, of which the present work is a translation, was first published in 1932; it therefore necessarily takes no account of the mass of work on the English Catholic humanists of the Renaissance, beginning with Chambers’s Thomas More, and on 17th-century English religious thought, which has appeared in the last 20 years. This may partly account for the rather old-fashioned impression which the book produces. Cassirer still understood More, Colet, and Erasmus after the manner of Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers, a book which he frequently quotes. But the misunderstanding which, so it seems to the present reviewer, makes the picture given by the book as a whole a distorted one, goes rather deeper. The eminent neo-Kantian author appears to think that authentic Christian orthodoxy is Augustinianism, and Augustinianism interpreted in the manner of Jansenius or Calvin. Hence the philosophy of St. Thomas, to which he gives some fine and understanding pages, appears to him as a heroic but unsuccessful attempt to establish a Christian humanism on an Aristotelian basis which had little lasting effect ; he is led to represent such great and profoundly Catholic figures of the Renaissance as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and St. Thomas More as fundamentally unorthodox; in dealing with his main subject, the Cambridge Platonists, he presents ideas which any Catholic brought up in an enlightened Thomist tradition will naturally recognize as a normal part of his own religious and philosophical inheritance as if they were in the deepest disaccord with the teachings of orthodox Christianity; and he greatly exaggerates the opposition between the Cambridge Platonists and their Puritan contemporaries.