The Reformed theology that dominated Cambridge in the mid seventeenth century tended strongly towards a voluntarist conception of God’s relation to morality, on which God’s will is the sole determiner of moral truths. This chapter demonstrates that over the same short period (c. 1642–51), the Cambridge Platonists all took a controversial stand against the voluntarism of their Calvinist colleagues, arguing for a kind of moral realism on which God’s goodness precedes, and in a sense even constrains his will. They did this despite the fact that their realist position was routinely denied and condemned in Reformed preaching about predestination. Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s arguments against voluntarism and in favour of realism in this narrow time period suggest close intellectual contact while also matching Tuckney’s description of the doctrinal profile of Whichcote’s ‘learned and ingenious’ Plato-loving scholars.

Chapter 7 discusses the relation between ethics and religion in Kierkegaard’s signed and pseudonymous writings. It is shown that – despite appearances and despite influential commentators – religion cannot possibly conflict with ethics. There is not only strong textual evidence ruling out such conflict but also principled reasons, showing that there is no conceptual room for such conflict, since Kierkegaard is a Christian Platonist who identifies the good with the divine. Indeed, his account of religion is clearly moralized since he takes religion to concern practical questions of how to live morally. For Kierkegaard, religion thus entails ethics and vice versa, although we must distinguish between Christian and non-Christian variants of both. Still, he holds that the former can override the latter to some extent. But this does not involve any break with ethics (as such) or any moral exceptionalism that is beyond or above morality. Instead of suspending ethics, Kierkegaard stresses the overriding nature of morality, seeing what we ought to do all-things-considered as a specifically ethico-religious question. His position is therefore far less problematic than normally assumed.

After a brief overview of Christian Platonism in modern philosophy, the chapter has three sections. The first defends a Platonic account of value, in the second the primacy of consciousness is defended over and against physicalist accounts of mind that denigrate or eliminate consciousness, and in a third section objections are raised to Christian materialism, thus the chapter concludes with a defense of a more Platonic Christian account of the soul and body.