John Spencer's Philosophy

I propose to write a monograph about John Spencer (1630-93), a most remarkable scholar who rose to become master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (1667) and University Preacher. Spencer discovered, more sharply than his contemporaries, the laws of religious evolution. It was during the seventeenth-century transformation of discourse on religion, when a handful of scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, recognized, in distinct ways and from distinct perspectives, the multiplicity of observable religions—past and present. In due course, comparisons would come to be stripped of their polemics, and, would come to recognize the correspondence between cults and beliefs, near and distant in time and place. From Christian perspective, serious scholarship about “other” peoples, mainly Jews and Muslims evolved gradually, alongside a renewed appreciation of, and fascination with, the ancient Near East.

Spencer’s Cambridge was home to a distinguished tradition had been appointed a lecturer in Hebrew at St. John's College. Spencer governed Corpus "with great prudence and reputation" for twenty-six years, after which he became a great benefactor of the College. He also was dean of Ely since 1677. In 1669, Spencer published in Cambridge his Dissertatio de Urim et Thumim, a prelude to the larger work, the De legibus hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus libri tres. Published in Cambridge in 1685 and in Amsterdam the following year, De legibus includes various studies Spencer had written for approximately twenty years. It is his magnum opus and transformed scholarship.

Spencer was an excellent Hebraist, whose abilities and reading were not limited to the Hebrew Bible. Spencer surveyed a wide range of medieval Hebrew works ...

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... (and as was true of Maimonides), the political dimensions of the respublica hebraeorum are the object of constant discussions, in the relatively free political and intellectual English climate. Even in Catholic France, this would later happen, and an intellectual thread can be followed from Claude Fleury's Les moeurs des Israe'lites to Montesquieu's and Rousseau's reflections on ideal society. Scholars and thinkers writing at the end of the seventeenth century, and in the first decades of the eighteenth, studied Spencer: from Bayle and Jurieu to Basnage, Calmet, and Vico. It is the combination of philology and orientalism, of anthropological sensitivity and the will to communicate scholarly achievements to broader audiences, which permitted some of the most impressive intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment, and the work of Spencer looms large in them.