Two hostile bishops? A reexamination of the relationship between Peter Browne and George Berkeley beyond their alleged controversy

Abstract

For decades scholars have argued that there was a heated argumentative exchange between the bishop of Cork and Ross, Peter Browne, and the bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley. Thus, they have unduly reduced Browne to a mere adversary of Berkeley. They also thereby distorted the perception of the Irish intellectual milieu in the seventeenth / eighteenth century and the way its participants influenced one another. Contrary to this controversy-reading I establish how ill-supported the prevailing narrative of the relationship between the bishops of Cork and Cloyne is. This, in turn, allows me to demonstrate that the discussion about the problem of divine analogy in seventeenth / eighteenth century Ireland was embedded in a larger context, which has hitherto been too little appreciated. I will illustrate this point by demonstrating that the two bishops not only reacted to William King's solution to the problem of divine analogy, but that they did so by accepting his ‘resemblance-requirement'. That is, King’s notion that divine representation requires resemblance. This indicates how the discussion about the problem of divine analogy in seventeenth / eighteenth century Ireland was influenced by the way these churchmen thought about the relation of resemblance, representation, and knowledge more generally.