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The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry & Religion
The intellectual atmosphere of the seventeenth century is reflected in a discussion of such men as Locke, Milton, Descartes, and Bacon
315 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1934
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 29, 2018
Most instructive. Among others, Willey was obviously reading T.S. Eliot on metaphysical poetry and Christopher Dawson on western civilization.
4 “For a scientific type of explanation to be satisfying, for it to convince us with a sense of its necessary truth, we must be in the condition of needing and desiring that type of explanation and no other.”
5 “At those turning-points men wanted ‘scientific’ explanations because they no longer wished to feel as they had been taught to feel about the nature of things. To be rid of fear—fear of the unknown, fear of the gods, fear of the stars or of the devil—to be released from the necessity of reverencing what was not to be understood, these were amongst the most urgent demands of the modern as of the ancient world; and it was because it satisfied these demands that scientific explanation was received as the revelation of truth.”
23 “the rejection of scholasticism was not a pure gain. In so far as it led to an undue elevation of empirical ‘truth’, and an attribution to it of a special privilege to represent ‘reality’, it was a disaster. It was not the fault of the early scientists that their methods and their abstractions were mistaken for philosophies, but none the less this is what has tended to happen.”
27 “There is a truth of religion, and a truth of science; and these different kinds of truth must be kept separate. This position is the inevitable result of any attempt to combine nominalism in philosophy with acceptance of religious dogma, and in this respect Bacon belongs with Duns Scotus and Occam. If you hold that individual ‘things’ are alone real, and reject universals and abstractions as ‘names’, mere flatus vocis: if you do this, and yet cling to a body of doctrine like the Christian, which implies that much else is ‘real’ besides ‘things’, you have no alternative but to accept the strange dichotomy of ‘Truth’, and to try, as far as possible, to keep the two kinds from contaminating each other.”
Among other things, Willey is instructive in the precise and sophisticated use of quotation marks. He uses them like tweezers to pick out subtleties and to lay otherwise neglected things out for observation and comparison.
72 “as in other directions, Milton is seen to be one of the rationalizing theologians of the century; and it is therefore not surprising to find that his view of Scripture is substantially at one with that of the Cambridge Platonists, whose attitude is summed up in the phrase of John Smith: ‘To follow Reason is to follow God’.”
82 “Why did Descartes find the idea of a perfect being innate within him? Because centuries of Christian discipline, based upon the religious experience of Christ and the apostles, had written it upon the hearts of Europeans, so that it seemed ‘naturally’ to be there. The possession of the idea of God in the heart, like the revelation of God through Nature, only proves his existence to those who believe it already on other grounds.”
87 “The criterion of truth which is setup, according to which the only real properties of objects were the mathematical properties, implied a depreciation of all kinds of knowing other than that of the ‘philosopher’. And as both religion and poetry (whatever may be our conception of them) spring from quite other modes of knowing, the Cartesian spirit, in so far as it prevailed, was really hostile to them both.”
88 “Instead of being able, like Donne or Browne, to think and feel simultaneously either in verse or in prose, you were now expected to think prosaically and to feel poetically.” This explains so much of the dull academy of today . . .
94 “It would be well if it were more generally realized that metaphysical utterances which appear to be statements of ‘fact’ are disguised imperatives, or at least disguised optatives; and our studies of the philosophers would be more remunerative if we went to them, not for the ‘truth’, but in order to discover what particular fiat or utinam their teaching implies.”
120 “The Cambridge Platonists are the modern analogues of the Alexandrian Fathers, Clement and Origen, with this significant difference—that the Fathers came between a declining philosophy and a rising Christianity, while the seventeenth century theologians came between a declining Christianity and a rising philosophy. The resemblance in the two schools lies in their effort to maintain religion and philosophy as allies, not as strangers or enemies.”
And in that sense both are pre-modern (though the next quotation will implicate the CPs as Cartesians). Also, in that sense, those who wish to maintain the hostilities are guilty of modernity. They are implicated in the assumptions of the destructive fragmentation.
140 Cites Henry More. “In all this do we not recognize the Cartesian self-sufficiency, the Cartesian rejection of authority and reliance upon inward certitude? It was the corollary to this century’s rejection of the errors of the past, that it should find within the soul the Candle of the Lord, whose beams, if only they were free to shine abroad, would show up a divine universe in a divine light. In thus identifying religious knowledge with religious experience, the Platonists found a means, congenial to the temper of the age, of superseding both scholasticism on the one hand, and popular picture-thinking on the other. The concept of ‘God’, like any other, must be realized; each man must make God real by becoming godlike himself. For John Smith there was no doubt as to what it meant to be god-like, or wherein consisted his holy life which is the ‘best and most compendious way to a right belief’.”
I wonder, in this context, about Jonathan Edwards.
154-5 “The Cambridge school, on the other hand, inspired by the wish to save the religious world-view from what they justifiably felt to be hostile doctrine, made it their concern to criticize the assumptions of Hobbes’s materialism, and to show that it failed to give a complete account of reality. To this end they fused the testimony of Plato and Descartes with their own spiritual intuitions and those of spiritually minded men of all times into an impressive affirmation of the reality of God and of the | soul.” And no matter how elaborate, the dispute is simply an affirmation, each of his belief in what is ultimately real.
158 “What was chiefly needed before a theory of the imagination satisfactory to poets could be evolved, and what was lacking for the most part until Coleridge and Wordsworth, was precisely a confidence as Cudworth’s in the reality of the mind’s images. As we have suggested, intellectual conditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the whole discounted as fictional all mental shapings other than the ‘clear and distinct ideas’ of mathematics and of ‘philosophy’.”
268 “Locke’s prose style is the best index of his mind, and the mind of his age as well. Like Wren’s architecture, it is harmonious, lucid and severe, rising occasionally into a dome of manly eloquence. The prose of Browne, Milton or even Hobbes looks Gothic by the side of it. In reading Locke we are conscious of being in the presence of a mind which has come to rest in the ‘philosophic’ world-view. There is no more of the metaphysical flicker from world to world, none of the old imagery struck out in the heat of struggle or in the ardor of discovery. . . . The very ease of the prose betokens a mind at rest in its own assumptions, and reveals how fully Locke could count on those being also the assumptions of his readers. His vocabulary is almost wholly abstract and uncoloured . . .”
274-5 “Locke’s theory of knowledge reveals that quality which his philosophy shares with the Church of England and perhaps other English things, its power to comprehend in a vague synthesis principles really belonging to oppo- | site schools of thought. . . . Thus knowledge is defined as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas with each other . . . Intuition is the perception of self-evident truths, and has the highest degree of certainty."
4 “For a scientific type of explanation to be satisfying, for it to convince us with a sense of its necessary truth, we must be in the condition of needing and desiring that type of explanation and no other.”
5 “At those turning-points men wanted ‘scientific’ explanations because they no longer wished to feel as they had been taught to feel about the nature of things. To be rid of fear—fear of the unknown, fear of the gods, fear of the stars or of the devil—to be released from the necessity of reverencing what was not to be understood, these were amongst the most urgent demands of the modern as of the ancient world; and it was because it satisfied these demands that scientific explanation was received as the revelation of truth.”
23 “the rejection of scholasticism was not a pure gain. In so far as it led to an undue elevation of empirical ‘truth’, and an attribution to it of a special privilege to represent ‘reality’, it was a disaster. It was not the fault of the early scientists that their methods and their abstractions were mistaken for philosophies, but none the less this is what has tended to happen.”
27 “There is a truth of religion, and a truth of science; and these different kinds of truth must be kept separate. This position is the inevitable result of any attempt to combine nominalism in philosophy with acceptance of religious dogma, and in this respect Bacon belongs with Duns Scotus and Occam. If you hold that individual ‘things’ are alone real, and reject universals and abstractions as ‘names’, mere flatus vocis: if you do this, and yet cling to a body of doctrine like the Christian, which implies that much else is ‘real’ besides ‘things’, you have no alternative but to accept the strange dichotomy of ‘Truth’, and to try, as far as possible, to keep the two kinds from contaminating each other.”
Among other things, Willey is instructive in the precise and sophisticated use of quotation marks. He uses them like tweezers to pick out subtleties and to lay otherwise neglected things out for observation and comparison.
72 “as in other directions, Milton is seen to be one of the rationalizing theologians of the century; and it is therefore not surprising to find that his view of Scripture is substantially at one with that of the Cambridge Platonists, whose attitude is summed up in the phrase of John Smith: ‘To follow Reason is to follow God’.”
82 “Why did Descartes find the idea of a perfect being innate within him? Because centuries of Christian discipline, based upon the religious experience of Christ and the apostles, had written it upon the hearts of Europeans, so that it seemed ‘naturally’ to be there. The possession of the idea of God in the heart, like the revelation of God through Nature, only proves his existence to those who believe it already on other grounds.”
87 “The criterion of truth which is setup, according to which the only real properties of objects were the mathematical properties, implied a depreciation of all kinds of knowing other than that of the ‘philosopher’. And as both religion and poetry (whatever may be our conception of them) spring from quite other modes of knowing, the Cartesian spirit, in so far as it prevailed, was really hostile to them both.”
88 “Instead of being able, like Donne or Browne, to think and feel simultaneously either in verse or in prose, you were now expected to think prosaically and to feel poetically.” This explains so much of the dull academy of today . . .
94 “It would be well if it were more generally realized that metaphysical utterances which appear to be statements of ‘fact’ are disguised imperatives, or at least disguised optatives; and our studies of the philosophers would be more remunerative if we went to them, not for the ‘truth’, but in order to discover what particular fiat or utinam their teaching implies.”
120 “The Cambridge Platonists are the modern analogues of the Alexandrian Fathers, Clement and Origen, with this significant difference—that the Fathers came between a declining philosophy and a rising Christianity, while the seventeenth century theologians came between a declining Christianity and a rising philosophy. The resemblance in the two schools lies in their effort to maintain religion and philosophy as allies, not as strangers or enemies.”
And in that sense both are pre-modern (though the next quotation will implicate the CPs as Cartesians). Also, in that sense, those who wish to maintain the hostilities are guilty of modernity. They are implicated in the assumptions of the destructive fragmentation.
140 Cites Henry More. “In all this do we not recognize the Cartesian self-sufficiency, the Cartesian rejection of authority and reliance upon inward certitude? It was the corollary to this century’s rejection of the errors of the past, that it should find within the soul the Candle of the Lord, whose beams, if only they were free to shine abroad, would show up a divine universe in a divine light. In thus identifying religious knowledge with religious experience, the Platonists found a means, congenial to the temper of the age, of superseding both scholasticism on the one hand, and popular picture-thinking on the other. The concept of ‘God’, like any other, must be realized; each man must make God real by becoming godlike himself. For John Smith there was no doubt as to what it meant to be god-like, or wherein consisted his holy life which is the ‘best and most compendious way to a right belief’.”
I wonder, in this context, about Jonathan Edwards.
154-5 “The Cambridge school, on the other hand, inspired by the wish to save the religious world-view from what they justifiably felt to be hostile doctrine, made it their concern to criticize the assumptions of Hobbes’s materialism, and to show that it failed to give a complete account of reality. To this end they fused the testimony of Plato and Descartes with their own spiritual intuitions and those of spiritually minded men of all times into an impressive affirmation of the reality of God and of the | soul.” And no matter how elaborate, the dispute is simply an affirmation, each of his belief in what is ultimately real.
158 “What was chiefly needed before a theory of the imagination satisfactory to poets could be evolved, and what was lacking for the most part until Coleridge and Wordsworth, was precisely a confidence as Cudworth’s in the reality of the mind’s images. As we have suggested, intellectual conditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the whole discounted as fictional all mental shapings other than the ‘clear and distinct ideas’ of mathematics and of ‘philosophy’.”
268 “Locke’s prose style is the best index of his mind, and the mind of his age as well. Like Wren’s architecture, it is harmonious, lucid and severe, rising occasionally into a dome of manly eloquence. The prose of Browne, Milton or even Hobbes looks Gothic by the side of it. In reading Locke we are conscious of being in the presence of a mind which has come to rest in the ‘philosophic’ world-view. There is no more of the metaphysical flicker from world to world, none of the old imagery struck out in the heat of struggle or in the ardor of discovery. . . . The very ease of the prose betokens a mind at rest in its own assumptions, and reveals how fully Locke could count on those being also the assumptions of his readers. His vocabulary is almost wholly abstract and uncoloured . . .”
274-5 “Locke’s theory of knowledge reveals that quality which his philosophy shares with the Church of England and perhaps other English things, its power to comprehend in a vague synthesis principles really belonging to oppo- | site schools of thought. . . . Thus knowledge is defined as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas with each other . . . Intuition is the perception of self-evident truths, and has the highest degree of certainty."
June 26, 2026
An excellent book. Willey correctly identifies the emergence of the mechanical philosophy as the key seventeenth century development in respect of religion and poetry. His thesis is that religion and poetry are all of a piece, having to do with picture-thinking, the imagination, and ultimate meaning. But the tendency of the age was towards cold, hard, philosophical fact - or at least what was then thought of as fact. As a result of the work of Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, 'reality' became to a large extent synonymous with matter, understood exclusively in terms of efficient causality. Thus Christianity, as a necessarily metaphysical system of belief, lost much of its intellectual credibility, and in its place rose a kind of Christian deism which was inherited and developed by the eighteenth century. Though there were some bright spots (e.g. the Cambridge Platonists, and John Milton), overall it was a pretty bleak time for religion and poetry.
May 7, 2025
The seventeenth century, Christopher Hill's 'century of revolution', when the numinous afterglow of scholasticism was receding from England and the 'mechanical philosophy' of science was lighting up its shadows.
Willey traces the development of materialism through the century, as thinkers like Descartes, Bacon, Browne, Glanvill and Locke struggle to find a role for religion in what is becoming a world of inanimate objects. They cannot simply discard it, as we would, but, as Willey suggests, by the time we get to Locke one might as well have, for all the force that has been drained of it.
This is to have a profound effect on poetry. When the only acceptable explanation of natural processes is a materialistic and 'philosophical 'one, what is poetry's role? What use can an imaginative medium have, other than to delight the fancy? For Willey this is the century of compartmentalisation. One has one's religion, one's art, and one's scientific beliefs. Where once all three were united within the medieval world-view (and thus to write poetry was to speak 'seriously') by the end of the period poetry can do no more than titillate us. Hence at the beginning of the 18th century we get a work like Pope's Rape of the Lock, when the host of 'mythology's light militia' are invoked purely as satire. This would not have been possible a hundred years prior, when the gods still occupied a place of gravity in men's minds.
All this eventually leads us to Wordsworth, who gets a concluding chapter. Wordsworth rejects the Augustan style - its decorative language, is airy allusions to what has become a purely poetical canon of gods inexpressive of reality. But what can fill the void in a world where God has been sucked out of Nature? His answer is psychological - his Prelude, rather like Proust's opus, in which the inanimate is invested with a heavenly tinge by the effect it has in shaping the man. In that sense, Wordsworth is inheriting a tradition (of materialism) as much as he is reacting against one.
Willey traces the development of materialism through the century, as thinkers like Descartes, Bacon, Browne, Glanvill and Locke struggle to find a role for religion in what is becoming a world of inanimate objects. They cannot simply discard it, as we would, but, as Willey suggests, by the time we get to Locke one might as well have, for all the force that has been drained of it.
This is to have a profound effect on poetry. When the only acceptable explanation of natural processes is a materialistic and 'philosophical 'one, what is poetry's role? What use can an imaginative medium have, other than to delight the fancy? For Willey this is the century of compartmentalisation. One has one's religion, one's art, and one's scientific beliefs. Where once all three were united within the medieval world-view (and thus to write poetry was to speak 'seriously') by the end of the period poetry can do no more than titillate us. Hence at the beginning of the 18th century we get a work like Pope's Rape of the Lock, when the host of 'mythology's light militia' are invoked purely as satire. This would not have been possible a hundred years prior, when the gods still occupied a place of gravity in men's minds.
All this eventually leads us to Wordsworth, who gets a concluding chapter. Wordsworth rejects the Augustan style - its decorative language, is airy allusions to what has become a purely poetical canon of gods inexpressive of reality. But what can fill the void in a world where God has been sucked out of Nature? His answer is psychological - his Prelude, rather like Proust's opus, in which the inanimate is invested with a heavenly tinge by the effect it has in shaping the man. In that sense, Wordsworth is inheriting a tradition (of materialism) as much as he is reacting against one.
May 23, 2016
From the foreword: "to all whom poetry, and religion, and their relation to the business of living are matters of importance."
From the back blurb quoting a review in the Sunday Times: "The general reader, if he can be persuaded to begin the book, will find himself face to face with a clash between beliefs and feelings which is familiar and important to him."
I found it to be just so. This book is a must for anyone thinking of reading 17th century literature.
From the back blurb quoting a review in the Sunday Times: "The general reader, if he can be persuaded to begin the book, will find himself face to face with a clash between beliefs and feelings which is familiar and important to him."
I found it to be just so. This book is a must for anyone thinking of reading 17th century literature.
March 18, 2009
A very good reference that investigates the 17th century on different levels: culturally, politically, and concerning literature as well!
July 17, 2019
This now classic work describes the intellectual and cultural background in which such men as Milton, Donne, Dryden, Browne and many other writers and theologians produced their work.
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April 27, 2012historia cultural
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