Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Plato · en
The attraction which this philosophical explanation had for those whose
work reveals its presence is twofold. To the religious mind in which the
metaphysical cast of thought was prominent, the idea of the transcendent
immanence of God in all things as their life, yet apart from all things
as objects in time and space came home with its wealth of suggestion of
the nearness of God to man. In Henry More this feeling is uppermost in
his “Psychozoia.” In the midst of his description of Psyche’s robe he
breaks out into a passage on the constant care which God shows toward
the world. In Psyche’s mirror of Arachnea and Haphe God is aware of all
on earth that falls under sense. The roaring of the hungry lion, the
burning thirst of the weary traveller and every movement of the little
sparrow are all known to him.
“Do not I see? I slumber not nor sleep,
Do not I heare? each noise by shady night
My miroir represents: when mortals steep
Their languid limbs in Morpheus dull delight,
I hear such sounds as Adams brood would fright.
The dolefull echoes from the hollow hill
Mock houling wolves: the woods with black bedight.
Answer rough Pan, his pipe and eke his skill,
And all the Satyr-routs rude whoops and shoutings shrill.”
(I. 54.)
In his second canto, where he repeats the idea of the universal life of
Psyche, he dwells on the fact of God’s immanence in the world. He is the
inmost centre of creation, from whom as rays from the sun the individual
souls are born.
“Dependence of this All hence doth appear
And severall degrees subordinate.
But phansie’s so unfit such things to clear,
That oft it makes them seem more intricate;
And now Gods work it doth disterminate
Too far from his own reach: But he withall
More inward is, and far more intimate
Then things are with themselves. His ideall
And centrall presence is in every atom-ball.”
(II. 10.)
In those minds less metaphysical in nature, the high speculations of
Platonic philosophy opened a way by which they could conceive God as a
principle grasped by the mind rather than as a personal judge and
punisher of sin. In Drummond this contrast in the two conceptions of
God—one feeding itself on philosophy, and the other on the imagery of
the Scripture—is strikingly brought out by a comparison of the opening
and the ending of “An Hymn of the Fairest Fair” with those of “A Prayer
for Mankind.” The “Hymn” begins with a confession of the elevating power
of his subject: