The Rise of Sympathy and the Question of Divine Suffering

Seventeenth‐century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, writing just at the time when the concept of sympathy was moving from the realm of magic to that of ethics, argued that God must be understood as having a vital sympathy with suffering human beings. Yet while Cudworth invoked sympathy in an attempt to capture God’s intimate relation with creation, in fact, it served as a principle of mediation that tended either to collapse God into the world or to distance God from the world. The broader implications of this problematic conception of divine transcendence can be seen in the secularizing tendencies within sentimentalist ethics and in the work of the late nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐century Anglican theologians, who were the first to affirm divine passibility.