Abstract
This chapter evokes two major French Platonists of the last two centuries, Joseph de Maistre and Simone Weil, in order to show that Cudworth was the initiator of a combative Platonism, un platonisme de combat. Of course it is only a simple sketch to identify convergences, rather than to detect influences – an exercise which is always post hoc and can as such result in questionable reconstructions.
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- 1.
See Darcel and Lebrun (1985), 34: ‘Which were the books saved during his precipitate departure? First of all the old editions dear to the bibliophile: five volumes of the Biblia sacra in the Cologne edition, the New Testament and the superb thirteenth-century illuminated psalter Liber Hymorum. He took the collection of Greek and Latin classics in the precious editions of the Elzevirs; the five volumes of the Iliad in the “magnificent and expensive edition” of Samuel Clark and August Ernesti; some of his last acquisitions like those editions of Tasso and of Theophrastus by Bodoni and, of course, Burke, the critic of an “atheist revolution”. Above all, the érudit and scholar took the works that had played a formative role in his intellectual development. To begin with, the treatise De la sagesse of his ‘good friend Charron’ covered with marginal notes by a youthful hand; the Systema intellectuale of Cudworth/Mosheim with two cumbersome [sic] volumes’.
- 2.
Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement and the Sacred, 2011, London: Bloomsbury, 205.
- 3.
Compare for instance Weil (1950a, 64) about Augustine: ‘Cela est directement contraire au Christ (...) C’est de l’idolâtrie sociale, une idolâtrie de l’Église semblable à l’idolâtrie d’Israël chez les Hébreux’.
- 4.
Pranchère, Jean-Yves. ‘Locke’, in Dictionnaire Joseph de Maistre (Maistre 1884, 1214).
- 5.
‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu’, St Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, Quæstio 2, art. 3, argumentum 19. (Aquinas 1972–1976).
- 6.
De Officiis., bk 1, 1: ‘Quanquam…’ (Cicero 1913).
- 7.
Gen, II, 19 ‘… Adduxit ea ad Adam, ut videret quid vocaret ea; omne enim quod vocavit Adam animæ viventis, ipsum est nomen ejus’. King James Bible: ‘… and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof’.
- 8.
Weil (1950b, 74): ‘I have an extremely rigorous notion of intellectual probity, to the point that I have never met anyone who did not seem to me to lack it in more than one regard; and I am always afraid of lacking it myself’.
- 9.
Thibon, Gustave. Preface, in Weil (1948, iii).
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Barthelet, P. (2019). Between Theodicy and Apologetics. Plato as ‘A Human Preface of the Gospel’: Joseph de Maistre and Simone Weil in the Wake of Cudworth. In: Hedley, D., Leech, D. (eds) Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and Legacy. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 222. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22200-0_15
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