Quotes:More, Henry

Zirkoff, Boris

More, Henry. English philosopher and theologian of the Cambridge Platonist School, b. at Grantham in 1614. Both his parents were strong Calvinists, but he himself “could never swallow that hard doctrine.” At fourteen, he was sent to Eton School for Greek and Latin studies, and in 1631 was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge. In 1635, he graduated B.A., and received his M.A., 1639. At about the same time he received holy orders, and from then on lived almost entirely within the walls of the College, except when he went to stay with his “heroine pupil,” Anne, Viscountess Conway, 659 at her country seat of Ragley in Warwickshire, where More wrote several of his works. He drew around him a number of young men of a refined type, and won a high reputation both for saintliness and for intellectual power, refusing all preferments to the advantage of his studies and writing. More shrank from bitter theological disputes, but had the courage of his opinions which were very definite and often contrary to the existing current of thought.

More belonged to that little band of Platonists which formed at Cambridge in the middle of the 17th century; he represents the mystical and theosophic side of this movement; mystical elevation was the chief feature of his character, “a certain radiancy of thought which carried him beyond the common life .... and his humility and charity were not less conspicuous than his piety.” The “occult sciences,” of which such men as van Helmont and Greatrakes were in More’s time the apostles, had a singular fascination for him. He was a voluminous writer both in prose and in verse, his most notable work being the Divine Dialogues (1668), which summarizes his general view of philosophy and religion.

Henry More died on September 1, 1687, and was buried in the chapel of the College he loved so well, The most vivid and interesting picture of himself and his life is in his own “Preface” to the 1679 edition of his Opera Omnia. Rev. R. Ward wrote his Life in 1710.

Accounts concerning Henry More which are to be found in various encyclopaedias, while attempting to give a fair idea of the character of this remarkable man, probably fall short of the actual truth. The profound respect which H.P.B. felt for him, and the manner in which she spoke of him, half-reveal a certain occult significance in the life and thought of this figure. Surprising as it may be, the name of Henry More is associated with the writing of Isis Unveiled, nearly two hundred years after his demise. The facts are related by Col. Henry S. Olcott in his Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, pp. 237-39, 242-43:

“..............I was made to believe that we worked in collaboration with at least one disincarnate entity—the pure soul of one of the wisest philosophers of modem times, one who was an ornament to our race, a glory to his country. He was a great Platonist, and I was told that, so absorbed was he in his lifestudy, he had become earth-bound, i.e., he could not snap the ties which held him to the Earth, but sat in an astral library of his own mental creation, plunged in his philosophical reflections, 660 oblivious to the lapse of time, and anxious to promote the turning of men’s minds towards the solid philosophical basis of true religion. His desire did not draw him to taking a new birth among us, but made him seek out those who, like our Masters and their agents, wished to work for the spread of truth and the overthrow of superstition. I was told that he was so pure and so unselfish that all the Masters held him in profound respect, and, being forbidden to meddle with his Karma, they could only leave him to work his way out of his (Kamalokic) illusions, and pass on to the goal of formless being and absolute spirituality according to the natural order of Evolution. His mind has been so intensely employed in purely intellectual speculation that his spirituality had been temporarily stifled. Meanwhile there he was, willing and eager to work with H. P. B. on this epoch-making book, towards the philosophical portion of which he contributed much. He did not materialize and sit with us, nor obsess H. P. B., medium-fashion; he would simply talk with her psychically, by the hour together, dictating copy, telling her what references to hunt up, answering my questions about details, instructing me as to principles, and, in fact, playing the part of a third person in our literary symposium. He gave me his portrait once—a rough sketch in colored crayons on flimsy paper and sometimes would drop me a brief note about some personal matter, but from first to last his relation to us both was that of a mild, kind, extremely learned teacher and elder friend. He never dropped a word to indicate that he thought himself aught but a living man, and, in fact, I was told that he did not realize that he had died out of the body. Of the lapse of time, he seemed to have so little perception that, I remember, H. P. B. and I laughed, one morning at 2:30 A.M., when, after an unusually hard night’s work, while we were taking a parting smoke, he quietly asked H. P. B. “Are you ready to begin?”; under the impression that we were at the beginning instead of the end of the evening! And I also recollect how she said: “For Heaven’s sake don’t laugh deep in your thought, else the ‘old gentleman’ will surely hear you and feel hurt!” That gave me an idea: to laugh superficially is ordinary laughter, but to laugh deeply is to shift your merriment to the plane of psychic perception! So emotions may, like beauty, be sometimes but skin-deep. Sins, also: think of that!

“Except in the case of this old Platonist, I never had, with or without H. P. B.’s help, consciously to do with another disincarnate entity during the progress of our work .... [And yet, there] arises the question whether the Platonist was really 661 a spirit disincarnate, or an Adept who had lived in that philosopher’s body and seemed to, but really did not, die out of it on September 1, 1687. It is certainly a difficult problem to solve. Considering that the ordinary concomitants of spirit-possession and spirit-intercourse were wanting, and that H.P.B. served the Platonist in the most matter-of-fact way as amanuensis, their relation differing in nothing from that of any Private Secretary with his employer, save that the latter was invisible to me but visible to her, it does look more as if we were dealing with a living man than with a disincarnate person. He seemed not quite a ‘Brother’—as we used to call the Adepts then—yet more that than anything else; and as far as the literary work itself was concerned, it went on exactly as the other part of it when the dictator, or writer, as the case might be, was professedly a Master . . . .”

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 4, pp. 658-661