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.Putney, Oxford and English Enlightenment 25ganising itself in subordination to any of them.But it is not possible toreconstruct the two streams of opinion as sharply opposed alternatives.The  high churchmen saw their king and supreme governor as a sacredbut not a priestly figure, holy because the natural and social order wereholy, possessing divine right but not special spiritual gifts; the roots oftheir thinking were in Hooker, Erasmus and remotely Aquinas.Whenthey looked back to the  Laudian and  Arminian milieux in which mostof them had been formed, they could see the liberation of humansociability and natural authority from the absolute decrees of Calvinistgrace, quite as clearly as the swing towards baroque ritualism andecumenical respect for even the Pope s authority which had brieflycharacterised  Arminianism in England more than elsewhere.Theirveneration for apostolic origins drew them towards a history of theprimitive church which did not emphasise the Petrine supremacy andpresented the rise of the papacy as a late development, and they couldfollow Erasmus, Grotius and their own ecclesiastical historians in recon-ciling apostolical Christianity with a historical context.There was no-thing here which need set  high and  latitudinarian churchmen at odds,while on the level of philosophy  where the intellect confronted theproblems of the presence of spirit in matter  both groups were equallyresponsive to Cambridge Platonism, which considered a divinely im-planted reason the proper antidote to self-deluded enthusiasm,²x and tothe Baconianism found with other positions in the Royal Society, which,while sharply critical of Platonism as itself enthusiastic, was working itsway towards a view of God as creating matter and giving it laws, whileremaining distinct from and in no way immanent in it.²y The distinctionbetween high-church and latitudinarian Anglicanism, therefore, doesnot itself impede the argument that the origins of Enlightenment inEngland lie in the maintenance by the church of its Erasmian, Arminianand Grotian traditions.³pBut the religious and political tensions of Restoration England, ren-dered acute if seldom edifying by the unstable relations of the crownwith the church, gave rise to a new and militant kind of low churchman-ship, sometimes brutal and sometimes philosophically subtle,originating in the determination that spiritual authority must never²x The best selection and account is Patrides, 1969.See also Cragg, 1968; Ealy, 1997.²y For the alliance between Anglicanism and natural philosophy, see M.C.Jacob, 1976; J.R.Jacob,1978; Gascoigne, 1990.³p Trevor-Roper, 1968, 1988, 1992.Concerning the concept of  latitudinarian(ism) and the role of latitude-men in English intellectual history see Kroll, Ashcraft and Zagorin, 1992.26 England and Switzerland, 1737 1763again be allowed to challenge the supremacy of magistracy and thesocial order, from doing which it was in any case precluded by its nature.This determination could be directed against papalism, rigorous An-glicanism or presbyterianism as occasion required, while even the liber-tinism of Buckingham and the materialism of Hobbes³¹ were suspectedof preparing the way for a return of spiritual claims under the pretenceof exiling spirit from the universe  an enterprise of course disastrous initself.There arose a systematic and resolute identification of thereligious with the social, equally compatible with liberal and withabsolutist views of the political authority by which society was governed;the distinction was of secondary importance compared with theparamount need to maintain that the spirit manifested itself, and evenbecame incarnate, only through social channels, reasonable, humane,and obedient to authority, and never in ways subversive of the humanand sociable order.³² Christ as saviour had been king as well as priestand prophet, and the Christian was enjoined to an unconditionalsubjection to the higher powers; Christ s role as saviour had been to addsupernatural sanction to the natural authority of common socialmorality, through which, rather than through any mystery ofatonement, the individual was to be saved.³³ Doctrines of this kind wereadvanced in ecclesiastical as well as secular circles, but might reach apoint at which the central tradition of Christianity began to be chal-lenged [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]