The Submerged Dialectic in Peter Sterry’s Vision of Divine Nature
In the obscure yet astoundingly rich corpus of seventeenth-century mystical thought, Peter Sterry (1613–1672) occupies a singular position, suspended between Platonist enthusiasm and Puritan sobriety. A fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, Sterry’s theological ruminations exude a speculative audacity that remains largely unexamined in contemporary scholarship. Among the myriad subtleties woven into his intricate tapestry of theological-metaphysical synthesis stands a particularly exquisite motif: the dialectic between the Divine Nature as stillness and the Divine Nature as eternal fecundity. This dialectical tension, though embedded lightly in his major work, *The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul*, reveals a depth of speculative reasoning that not only anticipates certain German Idealists but indeed transcends them in its metaphysical refinement.
Sterry’s account of the Divine Nature invariably commences with the notion of Stillness. It is a profound and unmoved serenity in which all contradictions are reconciled in perfect identity. “God,” he writes, “is a Calm Immensity of Spirit” in whom “all Motions are gathered up into a pure Rest” [1]. Such an image, strongly evocative of Plotinus’s Henological principles, emphasizes the non-relational aspect of the divine — an absolute Being that is beyond becoming, beyond movement, beyond even the categories of thought. However, it is precisely at the apex of this stillness that Sterry introduces the counter-movement: divine Fecundity.
This fecundity is not a secondary emanation, as in the Neoplatonic schema; nor is it a property momentarily activated by will or external causality. Rather, fecundity is essential to Stillness itself. Herein lies the profundity of Sterry’s insight: Stillness, in its utmost purity, necessitates an internal principle of motion — not by contradiction to its own nature, but by reason of its superabundance. “The Still Spirit,” he says, “is so full of Life, that it overfloweth itself perpetually into new Beauties” [2].
The critical subtlety is the manner in which Sterry preserves the unity of Rest and Motion without reverting to mere paradox or dialectical cancellation. Unlike the dialectic of Fichte or Hegel, where oppositions are synthesized through negation and sublation, Sterry’s metaphysics posits that stillness and movement are co-inherent modalities of the same divine essence. There is no conceptual violence, no Aufhebung; there is instead the continuous glittering self-manifestation of a divine pleroma whose motion is the very articulation of stillness. Thus, the problem of dualism between the Absolute and its emanations — a problem that beset both Gnostic cosmologies and many later Idealist systems — is preempted without recourse to an ontological fall.
Furthermore, Sterry’s view transforms the natural order into a theophanic expression of this dialectic. Every creature, according to him, is a “Spiritual Figure” projected from the interior fecundity of Divine Stillness. Therefore, creation is not an event bounded in linear time but an eternal act occurring perpetually within divine simultaneity. “The World ariseth,” he declares, “in every Moment freshly from the Bosom of God” [3]. Consequently, time itself becomes a veil stretched over the eternal act of divine self-revelation. This sharply distinguishes Sterry from the mechanistic metaphysics of his contemporaries and allies him with the later speculations of Schelling regarding nature as the “visible organism of God.”
However, it must be noted that Sterry’s dialectic is not an abstract metaphysical elaboration devoid of ethical or soteriological significance. The human soul, called to “return into God,” must internalize this same dialectic of stillness and fecundity. Contemplative quietism — absolute resting in the divine stillness — is, in Sterry’s view, the necessary precondition for the soul’s own recreation as an instrument of divine fecundity. To “be still” before God is not mere passivity but a potent act of harmonizing with the rhythms of eternal creativity.
The theological consequences of this are immense and under-acknowledged. Freedom, for Sterry, is thus neither the libertarian spontaneity celebrated by certain Protestant thinkers nor the arbitrary voluntarism of a nominalist deity. Divine freedom — and by reflection, human freedom — is the serene inevitability of expressing one’s own infinitude. Here one may discern the seeds of a yet-unwritten speculative theology, wherein grace and necessity are not opposed but intertwined by virtue of metaphysical abundance.
Sterry’s peculiar dialectic also suggests unforeseen implications for the problem of evil. If creation is the direct overflow of divine stillness, and if each motion within creation reflects a fragment of the eternal fecundity, then evil cannot be a contrary substance. Rather, evil becomes the shadow cast when free spirits misread or distort their participation in divine activity. It is a misalignment with the inherent simultaneity of stillness and fecundity, an existential dissonance produced not by a defect in divine activity but by the misuse of the reflective capacities accorded to finite spirits.
Given these deeper articulations, it becomes clear that Peter Sterry deserves a more central place in the history of speculative philosophy. His thought cannot be consigned solely to the annals of Puritan eccentricity or mystical piety. Rather, he articulates a rigorous metaphysical vision in which Being is not brute stasis nor chaotic flux, but the harmonious self-correspondence of repose and dynamic flowering.
One might, in a final reflection, marvel at the foresight of a thinker who, writing amidst the political and religious turmoils of Revolutionary England, calmly and lucidly built a metaphysical edifice that would only find partial echoes centuries later. It is high time we rescue Sterry from the obscurity into which he has been most unjustly cast, not merely as an antiquarian curiosity but as a genuine contributor to the highest efforts of the philosophic mind.
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[1] Peter Sterry, *Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul* (London: 1683), p. 12.
[2] Ibid., p. 47.
[3] Ibid., p. 68.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
mysticism, metaphysics, dialectics, divine nature, speculative theology, hidden philosophers