Tuesday, September 1, 2026

It is the 1st of September 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Another day, another overlooked thinker, this time a man whose work blends both the Reformation and Enlightenment thinking in 17th-century England. He was the great Cambridge Platonist Henry More.

An older biography of Henry More begins with the following: “A schoolboy musing wistfully on the decrees of God and the mysteries of Predestination, a youth at Cambridge throwing aside his books of dialectic and dogma to seek the mystic[al] way, an older man, eager in study and friendship, treading his cloister in the joy and peace of the heavenly vision: these successive phases characterize the life of Henry More, poet, philosopher, and mystic of seventeenth century England.”

So, let’s break it down, Almanac style…

Henry More was born in Grantham in Lincolnshire, England, in October of 1614 [placing him in the age of King James] and was born to parents that he called “great Calvinists (but with all very pious and good ones”. He went on to claim that “even in my earliest childhood, an inward sense of the Divine Presence was so strong upon my mind, that I did then believe, there could be no deed, word, or thought hidden from Him.”

But he rejected the Calvinism of his parents while studying in both grammar school and at Eton. His parents encouraged him to go to Cambridge, where his uncle was a fellow. More’s own account of his uncle was that he resorted to whipping the boy when he would not come back into the Calvinist fold. Young Henry found the position, as he was taught it, was morally repugnant. He decided that he would develop a theology that conformed to reason. He found like-minded students at Cambridge who began to read the radical writings of René Descartes. At first, this excited him- a mechanical approach to understanding the physical world.

But that “inward sense of the divine presence” led him to Origen and Plato and a sense that the approach of Descartes and those who emphasized the visible-only was lacking. He may have been the first to reference those overly mechanistic thinkers who “dispute how many [Angels]…booted and Spurr’d may dance on a needles point at once”.

He will be remembered as one of the chief Cambridge Platonists- a later term attached to them. They argued against those they saw as overly mechanistic or rational. They wanted to keep a place in the universe for the untestable. He would famously write about various ghost stories and other paranormal activities and argue that they could be a kind of apologetic for the atheist; if evil spirits exist, then the good ones must as well!

He would also rebel against the mechanical theology of his day by composing his earliest thoughts not in syllogism, but in poetry. This was not only a kind of protest, but made for plausible deniability for his more radical doctrines.

Of his radical doctrines, most will point to his curious doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Not only is the soul indestructible in the future, but it also goes back in time. This idea- preexistent souls- followed Greek Philosophy and Origin and was helpful for More because it gave him a way of thinking about the seeming unfairness of God in how people are treated- a preexistent soul and some kind of sin could answer the perennial question “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind”.

He would spend his whole life at Cambridge- despite living through the English Civil Wars and the general angst of 17th-century England, he was made a fellow and lived a life of general leisure. He would write on philosophical and theological issues, but also on biblical studies- as something of an esoteric mystic, it might not surprise you that he wrote a good bit on the books of Daniel and Revelation.

Henry More would be remembered as a Restoration-era Anglican who defended the idea of an immaterial soul, a moral God, and a cosmos still open to divine providence. He was a philosopher and a Christian who wanted to keep space open for the invisible and unverifiable in the early Enlightenment. He would spend his entire adult life at Cambridge, dying on this, the 1st of September in 1687. Henry More, born in 1614, was 72 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and back in Revelation 3 and the letter to the church at Philadelphia:

These are the words of him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open. 8 I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name. 9 I will make those who are of the synagogue of Satan, who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars—I will make them come and fall down at your feet and acknowledge that I have loved you. 10 Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth.

11 I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown. 12 The one who is victorious I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will they leave it. I will write on them the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God; and I will also write on them my new name. 13 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 1st of September 2026 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by “A schoolboy musing wistfully on the decrees of God.” He is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who wonders if the synagogue of Satan in Philadelphia is wherever the Eagles play… zing! I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.