William Cave


William Cave was an English divine and patristic scholar.

Life

Cave was born at Pickwell, Leicestershire, of which parish his father, John Cave was vicar. He was educated at Oakham School and St John's College, Cambridge. He took his B.A. degree in 1656, his M.A. in 1660, his DD in 1672, and in 1681 he was incorporated DD at Oxford. He was vicar of St Mary's, Islington, rector of All-Hallows the Great, Upper Thames Street, London, and in 1690 became vicar of Isleworth in Middlesex, at that time a quiet place which suited his studious temper. Cave was also chaplain to Charles II, and in 1684 became a canon of Windsor, where he died. He was buried at St Mary's, Islington, near his wife and children.

Works

The merits of Cave as a writer consist in the thoroughness of his research, the clearness of his style, and, above all, the admirably lucid method of his arrangement. The two works on which his reputation principally rests are the Apostolici; or, The History of the Lives, Acts, Death and Martyrdoms of those who were contemporary with, or immediately succeeded the Apostles, and Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria. Dowling says that the works of Cave "rank undoubtedly among those which have affected the progress of Church-history. His smaller works greatly tended to extend an acquaintance with Christian Antiquity; his Lives of the Apostles and Primitive Fathers, which may be regarded as an Ecclesiastical history of the first four centuries, is to this very day the most learned work of the kind which has been written in our own language; and his Historia Literaria is still the best and most convenient complete work on the literary history of the Church." Though he is sometimes criticised for not being critical with his sources, that failing means that many of his works, particularly Antiquitates Apostolicae and Apostolici contain a wealth of legendary material, culled from a wide variety of sources, much of which is not readily available elsewhere.
During the course of his work he was drawn into controversy with Jean Le Clerc, who was then writing his Bibliothèque universelle et historique. Cave published a dissertation De Eusebii Caesariensis Arianismo adversus Johannem Clericum, criticising Le Clerc's treatment of Eusebius as an Arian, as the last of three dissertations appended to the second part of his Historia Literaria. Le Clerc replied in a work entitled Epistolae Criticae et Ecclesiasticae, which formed the third volume of the second edition of his Ars Critica ; . Le Clerc said, that Cave, in his Historia Literaria, had concealed many things about the fathers, for the sake of enhancing their credit, which an impartial historian should have related; and that, instead of lives of the fathers, he often wrote panegyrics upon them. Cave responded the same year with his Epistola Apologetica. This was reprinted at the end of the second volume of the Historia Literaria, in the edition published at Oxford in 1743.
Cave is said to have been "of a learned and communicative conversation;" he is also reported to have been "a florid and eloquent preacher," and the printed sermons he has left behind bear out this character.