Cudworth’s Trinity

Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth offered a novel defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, under assault during the seventeenth century. He thought those who attacked the doctrine and those who defended were both wrong to treat it as a “revealed mystery.” Cudworth thought it was a piece of natural theology.

Both are “confuted from hence, because the most ingenious and acute of all the Pagan philosophers, the Platonists and the Pythagoreans, who had no bias at all impose upon their faculties, but followed free sentiments and dictates of their own minds, did notwithstanding not only entertain this trinity of divine hypostases eternal and uncreated, but were also fond of the hypothesis, and made it a fundamental of their theology.”