Cambridge Platonists

Frances Yates interpreted them as scholars who engaged with the Christian Kabbalah but rejected Hermeticism following Isaac Casaubon's redating of the Hermetic corpus.

While he admits that the group "existed as a loose set of acquaintances linked by tutorial relationships," he argues that they were not exclusive in their interest in Platonism, nor did most of them believe in any syncretism or a prisca theologia/philosophia perennis.

[4] Levitin notes that of the Cambridge Platonists, only More saw himself as a philosopher rather than a philologist or theologian and he faced criticism from others, including Cudworth, for his lack of attention to historical detail.

More recently, David Leech has argued that while Levitin makes some important points "it would be a mistake to assume that the category of Cambridge Platonism is a retroprojection of nineteenth century historiography.

The orthodox English Calvinists of the time found in their views an insidious attack, by-passing as it did the basic theological issues of atonement and justification by faith.

To the Cambridge Platonists, religion and reason were in harmony, and reality was known not by physical sensation alone, but by intuition of the intelligible forms that exist behind the material world of everyday perception.