CUDWORTH, RALPH. – English philosopher and (latitudinarian) theologian, born at Aller (Somersetshire) in 1617, died on 26 July 1688 at Cambridge. He studied and taught at Cambridge; he was a man of very extensive erudition, deeply devoted to the Christian religion, and the most celebrated member of the Cambridge Platonist school.
His A Discourse concerning the true Notion of the Lord's Supper (London 1642) had a wide impact. In it, on the basis of I Cor. 10:14-22, he maintains that the Lord’s Supper is not a sacrifice but a symbolic banquet ἐκ τῆς θωλίας. In The Union of Christ and Church a Shadow (there 1642), he defended the view that marriage was instituted by God as a type of the union between Christ and the Church. The work, however, that absorbed all C.’s energies was The true Intellectual System of the Universe, a grand bulwark erected against the inrush of atheism. C. published only The first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated (there 1678). His theory of “plastic nature” (appendix, ch. 3) and his conception of the Trinity (ch. 4) provoked numerous discussions. It was placed on the Index by decree of 13 April 1739. The other two parts were to examine the eternity and immutability of the just and the unjust, and freedom. C. left a very large number of manuscripts on these subjects. The following were published posthumously: A treatise concerning eternal and immutable Morality (Chandler 1731) and A Treatise of the Freewill (Allen 1838).