Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. The Regularization of Providence in Post-Cartesian Philosophy

   • Stuart Brown

   Pages 1-16

3. Grotius: Natural Law and Natural Religion

   • Jacqueline Lagree

   Pages 17-39

4. The Paradoxes of Modernity: Rational Religion and Mythical Science in the Novels of Cyrano de Bergerac

   • Margaret Sankey

   Pages 41-59

5. Ralph Cudworth, God, Mind and Nature

   • Sarah Hutton

   Pages 61-76

6. Henry More and the Preexistence of the Soul

   • Robert Crocker

   Pages 77-96

7. Robert Boyle, ’The Christian Virtuoso’ and the Rhetoric of ’Reason’

   • Lotte Mulligan

   Pages 97-116

8. Spinoza and Boyle: Rational Religion and Natural Philosophy

   • Luisa Simonutti

   Pages 117-138

9. Nature, Man and God in the English Enlightenment

   • G. A. J. Rogers

   Pages 139-158

10. Newton’s Theocentric Cosmogony and Hume’s Cometary ‘Seeds’

    • James E. Force

    Pages 159-179

11. The Image of Judaism in Seventeenth Century Europe

    • Richard H. Popkin

    Pages 181-197

12. Scaling the Ladder of Being: Theology and Early Theories of Evolution

    • Peter Harrison

    Pages 199-224

13. Back Matter

    Pages 225-236

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From a variety of perspectives, the essays presented here explore the profound interdependence of natural philosophy and rational religion in the `long seventeenth century' that begins with the burning of Bruno in 1600 and ends with the Enlightenment in the early Eighteenth century. From the writings of Grotius on natural law and natural religion, and the speculative, libertin novels of Cyrano de Bergerac, to the better-known works of Descartes, Malebranche, Cudworth, Leibniz, Boyle, Spinoza, Newton, and Locke, an increasing emphasis was placed on the rational relationship between religious doctrine, natural law, and a personal divine providence. While evidence for this intrinsic relationship was to be located in different places - in the ideas already present in the mind, in the observations and experiments of the natural philosophers, and even in the history, present experience, and prophesied future of mankind - the result enabled and shaped the broader intellectual and scientific discourses of the Enlightenment.

• Religion
• René Descartes
• Spinoza
• philosophy

• University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

  Robert Crocker

Policies and ethics