Tributes to Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist

Henry Steel Olcott, Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages by Colonel Olcott and Boris de Zirkoff, from the bibliography in the Collected Writings volume IV, pages 658 to 661, revised in February 2025. The tribute calls him one of the truest Platonists of modern times, a precious ornament to our race and a glory to his country — and adds that he was so pure and unselfish that the Masters held him in profound esteem.

Henry More was an English philosopher and theologian of the Cambridge Platonist school, born at Grantham in 1614. Both his parents were strong Calvinists, but he himself, in his own words, could never swallow that hard doctrine — which is the first sign of the independence that marks the whole life. At fourteen he was sent to Eton for Greek and Latin, and in 1631 was admitted to Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1635 and MA in 1639, taking holy orders at about the same time. From then on he lived almost entirely within the walls of the college, except when he stayed with the pupil he called his heroine, Anne, Viscountess Conway, at her country seat of Ragley in Warwickshire, where several of his works were written. He drew round him a number of young men of a refined type and won a high reputation both for saintliness and for intellectual power — and the detail the tribute rests on is that he refused all preferments, to the advantage of his studies and writing. He shrank from bitter theological disputes but had the courage of his very definite opinions. For readers of this library he matters as the English link in a chain: the Cambridge Platonists were the point at which the Alexandrian tradition described elsewhere in this section re-entered English thought.

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