Angels on the head of a pin

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

In How many angels can dance on the head of a pin Cecil wrote:

“I have not been able to turn up the text D’Israeli refers to (my 17th-century files are just a mess), but it sounds like the work of some would-be comedian. Martinus Scriblerus (dimestore Latin for “Martin the Scribbler”) is a pseudonym of a sort in common use among Enlightenment satirists, and the quoted items are burlesques of actual treatises in Aquinas’s Summa.”

How often does one get a chance to add to Cecil’s storehouse of human knowledge? In my case, never before, so here’s my two cents’ worth.

"Scriblerus Club

English literary group formed about 1713 to satirize “all the false tastes in learning.” Among its chief members were Arbuthnot, Gay, Thomas Parnell, Pope, and Swift. Meetings of the club were discontinued after 1714. The club’s major production, “Memoirs of … Martinus Scriblerus,” was published in Pope’s prose works in 1741, although it is considered to be primarily the work of Arbuthnot. The influence of the club is seen in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Pope’s Dunciad."

Taken from Columbia Encyclopaedia, 2001

2

Actually, Cecil, thanks to some help from Nate and Jane Dorward of Willowdale, Ontario, is one step ahead of you.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001110.html

However, what he did miss was that the 1678 Cudworth reference is not the earliest. It has long been known that several decades earlier William Chillingworth, in his book, The Religion of Protestants (1638), claimed that Protestants theologians, unlike their Catholic counterparts, ‘fill not their brains with notions that signify nothing’, such as ‘Whether a Million of Angels may not sit upon needles point?’ (sig. §§§2v). Chillingworth’s views on the matter were not entirely unbiased, as he was trying to re-establish his Protestant credentials after having notoriously converted to Catholicism and then re-converted back to Protestantism. Cudworth would have almost certainly been familar with Chillingworth’s book, but both were probably just recycling a common academic insult.