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The Epistemology of Religious Experience
from Part III - The Religious Epistemology of the Cambridge Platonists
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2024
This chapter further explores the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by examining their theory of spiritual sensation, a striking fusion of early modern sense theory, early Christian notions of deification, Puritan spirituality, and Platonic metaphysics. The Cambridge Platonists hold that when a soul becomes deified through the practice of virtue, God comes to dwell in it, and that as a result, the soul becomes able to know God directly by looking inward. This knowledge is the fruit of direct, perceptual contact with God, granting it a phenomenal quality that cannot be attained by mere descriptions of God. Conversely though, when a soul marred with vices looks inward in the attempt to know God, it inevitably forms a distorted picture of God that reflects its own moral flaws. Thus, the Cambridge Platonists’ theory of spiritual sensation undergirds their rejection of Calvinist doctrine, providing them with a sort of ‘error theory’ to explain how their theological opponents arrived at the views they did.
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