Bishop Jeremy Taylor on the reasonableness of Christianity
(He) had the humour of a gentleman, the eloquence of an orator, the fancy of a poet, the acuteness of a school-man, the wisdom of a counsellor, the sagacity of a prophet, the reason of an angel, and the piety of a saint. He had devotion enough for a cloister, learning enough for an university, and wit enough for a college of virtuosi.
These words are taken from the celebrated “Funeral sermon preached at the obsequies of the right reverend father in God, Jeremy, Lord Bishop of Down who deceased at Lysburne August 13th, 1667” by Dr. George Rust, Bishop of Dromore, Ireland. They serve as a powerful reminder of why the church calendar had us commemorate Jeremy Taylor this week.
He was recognised in his own day as one of the greatest theologians and writers of his age, yet — as with so many notable Anglican figures, he is now much less well known than he deserves. The substance of his thought, both in terms of theological range and depth, as well as personal piety, merits our attention, for it has a content very timely for our current age.
He was greatly influenced by a group of divines that came to be known as the Cambridge Platonists. Their favourite biblical text was “The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD” (Proverbs 20:27) And here it is important to know that they interpreted the Hebrew word for “spirit” as equivalent to what in Greek was called psyche, and usually rendered in English as “soul” or “mind”, but typically taken by them as the equivalent of “reason”. Hence for them, it was reason that became the “candle of the LORD” because it was the divine light vouchsafed to guide humanity through the travails of life. 1
This had potentially highly practical impact (and could be dangerous when combined with the Reformation notion of private judgement). Benjamin Whichcote (the Puritan divine and Provost of King’s College Cambridge) was not so extreme, but wrote as the founder of this broad perspective that “A man has as much right to use his own understanding in judging of truth as he has a right to use his own eyes to see his way.” While John Norris maintained that reason is what most distinguishes men from animals, and religion is a man’s most important concern adding that, “hence it follows that the principal use he ought to make of his rational faculty is in religion.”
Influenced as he was by this tradition, Jeremy Taylor felt he was part of a tradition that stretched from Plato and Aristotle through Lactantius, Augustine and even Aquinas right on down to Hooker and Milton. All this led to his strong conviction about the intellectual reasonableness of Christianity, regarding which he observed
Faith gives a new light to the soul, but it does not put our eyes out; and what God hath given us in our nature, could never be intended as a snare to religion, or engage us to believe a lie…. Whatsoever is against right reason, that, no faith can oblige us to believe. For although reason is not the positive and affirmative measure of our faith, and God can do more than we can understand, and our faith ought to be larger than our reason, and take something into her heart that reason can never take into her eye, — yet in all our creed, there can be nothing against reason.
In The Liberty of Prophesying however, although he grants the impossibility of finding an infallible guide to Truth, thereby suggesting that there may after all be no way of quite avoiding the scepticism against which Hooker and Chillingworth protested, Taylor nonetheless asserts the superiority of reason to all other guides. For him it seems clear that in matters of religion, ratio precedes fides:
That into the greatest mysteriousness of our religion, and the deepest articles of faith, we enter by our reason. Not that we can prove every one of them by natural reason: for to say that, were as vain, as to say we ought to prove them by arithmetic or rules of music; but whosoever believes wisely and not by chance, enters into his faith by the hand of reason; that is, he hath causes and reasons why he believes.’
Yet, it needs to be remembered that in proclaiming the fundamental harmony of reason and faith, he was nonetheless elevating a specifically Christian exercise of reason of which W. J. Brown observed it was “not a narrow ratiocinative faculty, nor … a faculty at all, but the whole personality — thought, will, feeling-illumined by the Holy Spirit.”
Accordingly, Taylor did not separate “reason” from the person who reasons, since the rational faculty is a common possession of mankind. Nonetheless, for him there was a crucial difference between the “dry light” of unaided reason, the non-moral activity of logical disquisition, and the dictates of “right reason,” by which Taylor means reason that has been morally purified.
Reason, thus conceived, is “right” to the degree that it seeks, apart from all other ends, the knowledge of absolute Truth, that is, the Truth of Christianity. (Something coterminous with the law as understood in the sense of Richard Hooker)
The realization and actualization of that Truth Taylor regarded as dependent, not so much upon the knowledge of things as upon the ethical purification of mind and heart: “The way to judge of religion is by doing of our duty; and theology is rather a Divine life than a Divine knowledge.” As he further explained his view, while, “In heaven indeed we shall first see, and then love; but here on earth, we must first love, and love will open our eyes as well as our hearts; and we shall then see, and perceive, and understand”
In other words, the knowledge of God rests ultimately, not merely upon intellectual but upon moral grounds, which is to say upon that moral purification which places man in a position to know that which he seeks to know.
What this reflected was a highly practical concern that Christians should not be distracted by fruitless theological controversy, when they should first be concerned with practical religion, as “that which makes us wiser, therefore, because it makes us better.”
This leaves us with an important degree of seeming paradox, for while he says all this with regard to the importance of enabling ourselves to be the kind of person we are called to be, which is to say moral, (since for it is being thus which can in turn allow us to see and understand the real) this very much does not for him render the real subjective.
Hence follows the juxtaposition of his concern for a well ordered society also (which for him was reflected in the Anglican Church and its relation to the Crown even though so many of the Cambridge Platonists had been Puritans).
Something of this sense of the priority of order rooted in what the Mediaevals would have understood as “the great chain of being” is captured by Shakespeare and reflected in Ulysses’ speech in Troilus and Cressida where the last note sounded is one of warning (timely for us now) for the consequences of its decay:
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre,
Observe degree, priority and place, … in all line of order:
O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! (my italics)
(Act I, iii, 11. 85-88; 101-110)
Good order in society was thus a necessary precondition of right thought for Taylor as much as well ordered morals in each person.
It is important to keep this in mind in order to understand fully what is meant when Bishop Jeremy Taylor says saying something so instantly appealing to our current age as the following, for he does so with a deep philosophical underpinning when he observes
“No man can hinder our private addresses to God, every man can build a chapel in his breast, himself the priest, his heart the sacrifice….”
1 The group was originally centered at Emmanuel College and, later, Christ’s College Cambridge. Original embers included Benjamin Whichcote who just quoted and seen as the founder of the movement (1609-1683); Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688); Henry More (1614-1687); Nathaniel Culverwel (c.1618-1651); John Smith (1618-1652); and later John Norris (1657-1711) who was also just quoted (and who adapted its teachings to the philosophy of Nicholas Malebranche).
All these original members came from Puritan backgrounds which they nonetheless in varying degrees rejected. Their moderation however left them occupying a difficult position, resisting most of the trends of their time, as moderates in an age of polarization; sympathizers with the Dutch Remonstrants, or Arminians, after they had been repudiated by the Reformed community at the Synod of Dort; and advocates of toleration in an age of religious warfare. During the interregnum the Platonists largely kept their university posts and had many ties, personal and professional, with the Puritan government which only added to the general awkwardness.
As a group it is also important to note however that they also had considerable influence in the American Cambridge and Massachusetts beginning with such figures as John Harvard, John Cotton, and Thomas Hooker who attended Emmanuel College. Ralph Cudworth’s brother, James, also lived in Situate, Massachusetts. See here Rosalie Colie, Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians Cambridge, 1957); James D. Roberts, From Puritanism to Platonism in Seventeenth Century England, The Hague, 1968; Gerald R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason, Cambridge, 1966 and Cragg, (ed.), The Cambridge Platonists, New York, 1968; Frederick J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists, Cambridge, 1926.