Theophilus Gale - The Court of The Gentiles

The Court of The Gentiles

Gale worked in the 1660s on manuscripts for a large-scale and erudite theoretical work of intellectual history; a hint in Grotius's De Veritate (i. 16) gave him the idea of the derivation of all ancient learning and philosophy from the Hebrew scriptures. He therefore traced European languages to the Hebrew language, and all the theologies, sciences, politics, and literature of pagan antiquity to a Hebrew tradition. In a similar way he dealt with the origin of all philosophies. He also accounted for the errors of pagan philosophy and Catholic divinity by the theory of corruption by successive apostasies from a divine original. Constructively he proposed a reformed Platonism, and tried to rescue the Calvinistic doctrine of predetermination from difficulties. Work left in store escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Gale's major work, The Court of the Gentiles, taking its name from the Court of the Gentiles in the Second Temple, appeared in parts in 1669, 1671 and 1676. It takes the form of a storehouse of miscellaneous philosophical learning. It resembles the Intellectual System of Ralph Cudworth, though many regarded it as inferior. Gale's endeavour (based on a hint of Grotius) was to provide evidence that the foundation of European Christian philosophy is a distorted reproduction of Biblical truths. Just as Cudworth referred the Democritean doctrine of atoms to Moses as the original author, so Gale tries to show that the various systems of Greek thought may be traced back to Middle Eastern and South Asian sources.

The Court of the Gentiles was attacked by the church and referred to as being chaotic and unsystematic. Biblical scholars claimed it lacked discrimination. Each of the four books is broken into multiple sections and the information organized into dozens of chapters. Most pages have dozens of references to previous authors, a flow of references woven into the text rather than being presented in footnotes.