Peter Sterry Explained

Peter Sterry (1613 – 19 November 1672) was an English independent theologian, associated with the Cambridge Platonists prominent during the English Civil War era. He was chaplain to Parliamentarian general Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke and then Oliver Cromwell, a member of the Westminster Assembly,[1] [2] and a leading radical Puritan preacher attached to the English Council of State. He was made fun of in Hudibras.[3]

Life

He was born in Surrey. He went to St. Olave's Grammar School, Southwark.[4] He was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from 1636, where he had studied since 1629; but gave up the fellowship quite soon.[5]

He preached to Parliament on important occasions: in 1649 after the surrender of Drogheda and Waterford,[6] in 1651 after the battle of Worcester. His sermons, widely allusive,[7] were considered opaque: David Masson quotes a contemporary opinion:

After the Restoration, he retired to a community in East Sheen.[8] He took part in preaching, for example at Hackney[9] and conventicles.[10]

Literary historian Vivian de Sola Pinto observes that Sterry "had exactly the qualities that Puritans like Bunyan lacked: intellectual freedom, flexibility of mind, imagination, tolerance and loving-kindness."[11] Sterry "united with this tenderness a wide culture, a true humanist's delight in learning and a love of beauty in all its manifestations."

He is commemorated by a stained glass window in the chapel of Emmanuel College,[12] which has an archive of unpublished writings.

Views

Described as a 'Platonizing Puritan',[13] an 'Origenian universalist,'[14] as well as a Behmenist (despite disagreeing with Böhme on much),[15] [16] he was a follower of leading Cambridge Platonist Benjamin Whichcote.[17] [18] As a mystic, he spoke of 'hidden music'.[19] A millenarian, he expected in the early 1650s the Second Coming shortly, with 1656 a decisive year.[20]

He with William Erbery 'had difficulty in distinguishing themselves from Ranters';[21] but he wrote against Ranter 'errors'.[22] He was a sympathiser with early Quakerism,[23] [24] and preached in their defence when James Nayler was under attack by MPs at the parliament of 1656.[25]

Robin Parry summarizes: "In many ways Sterry is an anomaly—a Puritan who was a lover of the arts and poetry, a Platonist who was a theological determinist, a deeply rational mystic, and a Calvinist universalist."[26]

The following excerpt exemplifies Sterry's thought and style quite well:

The divine love covers all things with the divine loveliness and beauty of the universal harmony, which is the righteousness of God in Christ, the first, the fairest image of the invisible God, in which every other image of God stands, as in the original, the all-comprehending glory.[27]

Family

The Oxford academic Nathaniel Sterry was his younger brother.[10]

Works

References

Notes

  1. Web site: 301 redirect.
  2. Web site: House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 31 May 1642 | British History Online. www.british-history.ac.uk.
  3. Web site: Canto I of Book III.
  4. Web site: St. Olave's Grammar School. www.saintolaves.net.
  5. [John Edward Christopher Hill|Christopher Hill]
  6. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=25761 House of Commons Journal Volume 6: 2 October 1649 | British History Online
  7. Reverend Peter Sterry, a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, regularly used pagan mythology, especially Ovid, in his sermons and was known to carry Aquinas, Boehme, Shakespeare and Ovid with him when he traveled.Web site: A Visit to the Spirit in Prison: Resurrecting Sarah Blackborow . 2007-07-06 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20050526075141/http://newmedia.alma.edu/english/420/cannon/sb/sb-vsp.html . 26 May 2005 . dmy-all .
  8. Web site: Former SEP Mirror Site. seop.leeds.ac.uk.
  9. Web site: Hackney: Protestant Nonconformity | British History Online. www.british-history.ac.uk.
  10. CDNB
  11. [Vivian de Sola Pinto|Pinto]
  12. Web site: Emmanuel College - College Life - the Chapel - the Windows . 2007-07-06 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20070208092456/http://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/collegelife/chapel/windows/display.cfm?id=6 . 8 February 2007 . dmy-all . .
  13. [M. H. Abrams]
  14. Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan (1934), 103-104. "Like Origen he refuses to believe in the doctrine of eternal damnation... Sterry's hell is a place not of damnation but of education and regeneration."
  15. Web site: Hill, Milton, p. 330.. 6 July 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070625163213/http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/behmenists.html. 25 June 2007. dead.
  16. [Robin Parry|Parry]
  17. [Richard Popkin]
  18. Web site: DNB page on Cambridge Platonists.
  19. Web site: Make Music for the Lord to hear. https://web.archive.org/web/20070416170732/http://orders.anglican.org/tssf/chrn04w/makemusic.html. dead. 16 April 2007.
  20. Peter Sterry, John Tillinghast and John Rogers concurred in Archer's opinion that 1656 or 1666 were likely dates for the commencement of the Reign of the Saints. PDF, p.2; Hill, Milton, p. 283, p. 301.
  21. Hill, Milton, p. 315.
  22. Hill, Nation of Change and Novelty, p. 214.
  23. Mentioned (with Giles Randall, Francis Rous, William Dell, John Saltmarsh) in connection with inner light: online extract from biography of George Fox.
  24. Jon Parkin (1999), Science, Politics and Religion in Restoration England, p.77.
  25. Worden, Blair (2012). God's Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell. OUP. p.70.
  26. [Robin Parry|Parry]
  27. Peter Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will (1675), preface, as cited in Vivian de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan (1934), p. 131 (excerpt 1), with slightly modernized spelling, punctuation, and syntax.

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