An explanation of Conway’s philosophy
- Introduction
Lady Anne Conway (1631-1679) is known for her only surviving philosophical treatise, ‘Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.’ This treatise was written at the end of her life and released anonymously, as women were not afforded the same educational rights as men at the time. ‘Principles’ is the only work that is known to have been authored by Conway.
Principles is based on the belief that God is the origin of all things. Conway structures her treatise in a way that attempts to explain the nature of the material world, time, and space. In doing so she describes the nature of God, mind-body relation, causation, motion, and how evil relates to God in regards to perfection of living substances.
She does so by establishing a hierarchy of species; God, Jesus Christ, and Creatures. These three kinds of beings are linked together through principle, that principle being they all share likeness to God. This is because all three species consist of spirit. God is spirit itself, or rather life itself, and all created substances subsequently consist of spirit as well. The key difference between God and all created substances is that the latter consists of a multiplicity of spirit particles. In contrast, God, being spirit/life itself, has no need to consist of multiplicity, for he is actually perfect.
Perfection is a key feature in ‘Principles.’ Living substances cannot be actually perfect, for to be a living substance is to be created by God. God is perfect in that regard because again, he is life itself, from which everything originates from. To live, in other words, is to have the capacity to move and perceive. To move is to change, and to change is to have the capacity to strive towards perfection. God is already perfect, and thus he does not move, does not change, nor does he strive towards anything. He exists fully and eternally. This is what makes necessary the intermediate species of Jesus Christ, who links the two opposite species of God and Creatures by sharing qualities with both of them.
- Three kinds of beings (species)
God, like all species, exists as a substance distinguished by its essence. This distinguishment thus establishes God’s placement in the hierarchy of species. God’s essence, then, consists of a set of properties that is both shared between species and contains properties unique to God. Properties of which God shares with other species are to be called ‘communicable’ attributes of God. One of which is spirit, which all species consists of. However, attributes of God that are not shared are those which require perfection, of which is only found in God. Thus, any mutability or capacity to change in other species is the primary difference between them and God.
God is not capable of changing. To change implies that something is not perfect, and God being the origin of all things is necessarily perfect, lest he wouldn’t be God; the powerful, wise, just, eternal and inherent creator of all things. Analogically, God is the center of a wheel of which the wheel rotates around. The center must remain unchanging and unmoving in order for the wheel to move at all.
Conway elaborates in stating how God must necessarily create. His infinite wisdom and willpower are both in him and of him. They are modes of one substance, that substance being God. “Hence, since God’s will exists and acts from eternity, it necessarily follows that creation results immediately, with no time-lapse, from the will to create.” However, what he creates is not to be considered co-eternal with God, for “you’ll muddle together time and eternity” (pp.3, ch.2, sec.1). This is because time is considered to be “nothing else but the successive Motion or Operation of Creatures” (pp.4, ch.2, sec.6). God is unmovable/unchangeable, hence he is not constrained by time, whereas created substances must be.
In order for there to be a species defined by their capacity to change (creatures), however, there must be an intermediate species that connects that which can be changed to that which cannot be changed on account of its perfectness (God). For, it does not logically follow that there should be no medium, because God is capable of creating a species that is changeable in some regards and unchangeable in others. That is, namely, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is “The perfect and substantial image of God’s word. God can’t be known exactly, barely, without decoration, as he is. Nor can any of his attributes. We are told that the Son is the perfect image of the Father, and ‘image’ signifies something visible that represents something else. So the Son is the visible image of the invisible God, and of God’s equally invisible attributes” (pp.10, ch.4, sec.2).
In other words, God cannot directly create Creatures, and Creatures naturally cannot know God exactly as he is, or they would have to be God. Jesus Christ is the necessary ‘medium’ between the two species, sharing qualities with both, being a ‘vehicle’ for the word of God which Creatures may understand, consequently connecting Creatures and God. Jesus Christ does so through his sharing of qualities between both God and Creatures. While Jesus Christ is morally unchangeable, in that he cannot fall farther from God in terms of goodness, he does have the capacity to improve in his goodness. Christ shares a quality with Creatures by that very nature of mutability.
For example: if looking at a certain light directly would kill you, one could only understand it indirectly through depictions of it. Because one is naturally inadequate in their function to directly see it, there must be a medium to accommodate that inadequacy, like a photograph. Through Christ, Creatures may understand the word of God (albeit not exactly), and strive to be more perfect, or rather more Christ-like. Creatures may strive towards perfection infinitely, and contain the potential capacity to attain perfection, but they cannot reach infinite perfection by the very nature of their mutability. Hence, they are contained within the temporal concept of time.
Time itself should not, however, be confused as being finite. No, time is necessarily eternal, because “how could it be marked off or measured, when it has no other beginning than eternity itself?” (pp.3, ch.2, sec.1). If time was finite, there would be a definitive starting point, and as long as there is a starting point, there exists further possible perfection in having started earlier. So it follows that all things are created from eternity, as made necessary due to the actual perfection of God. Meaning, by the same logic of why there can’t be a definitive starting point, neither can there be a definitive end point, by nature of God’s infinite perfection, power and wisdom. Hence Conway states that “…in every creature, whether spirit or body, there is an infinity of creatures, each of which contains an infinity in itself” (pp.6 ch.3 sec.5). Since all creatures are thus infinite, it follows that God, by his nature, would create creatures with infinite parts, because he can, so he must, and he does. Therefore everything created is infinitely divisible. To have something be indivisible (like the previous example of time being finite) would imply there is an end to God’s power, but since his power is infinite, it would be contradictory to say that God can only create to an extent.
Since creatures are infinite and contain infinity, and thus change infinitely, they can change their bodily and spiritual make-up, based on their relative goodness, a concept I’ll elaborate on momentarily. It must be made clear however that creatures may not change so much as to change species, as they are incapable of acquiring such an ability (as willed by God’s infinite wisdom). Otherwise, they could acquire qualities to the point where they would also be God. (Note: the ‘species’ discussed here are in regards to God, Christ and Creatures. Changing from a human to a giraffe, for example, would not be considered changing species, because humans and giraffes share the same essence by nature of them both being Creatures). Creatures instead exist eternally, in what’s described as a ‘unity of spirits’ composing a spirit known as the creature. The “unity of the spirits composing this spirit is…so great that nothing can dissolve it…thus it happens that the soul of every human being will remain a whole soul for eternity” (ch. 7). Should this not be the case, the soul or main spirit of a creature would be finite, which goes against God’s infinite will and power.
For example, think of a snowflake. Even if it dries up, it simply evaporates and reenters the water cycle. It is not obliterated just because its form is changed. So is the same for the form of a Creature. This is because a Creature, fundamentally, consists of spirit, as all species do (though technically God is spirit itself. Nonetheless, spirit remains the communicable property of God, the one true substance). Therefore everything is spirit according to Conway, whether it be a blade of grass, a human, a bird, a mountain, photograph, etc.
So it is that the ‘soul’ is what constitutes a creature’s morality and subsequent identity throughout its changes. Due to God being infinitely good and just, it follows that Creatures, made possible through their mutability, may have the capacity to strive towards good and become more Godlike. They may strive towards good because, being like God, they can never completely not be good, lest they be so unlike God that they would not exist.
- Perfectionism
To be good is to attain equilibrium between one’s body and spirit. Meaning, to be more Godlike is to be spiritually united with God in terms of goodness. To fall from God’s goodness makes one more corporeal, hardened, or dis-unified with God and indicates a degradation of one’s spirituality. “since the human body was made from earth, which, as has been proved, contained various spirits and gave those spirits to all the animals, the earth surely gave to human beings the best spirits that it contained. But all these spirits were far inferior to the spirit that human beings received not from the earth but from above. This human spirit ought to have dominion over these other merely terrestrial spirits, enabling it to rule over them and raise them to a higher level—to raise them indeed to the level of its own nature, this being the truest ‘multiplication and increase’ of human beings. But sometimes the human spirit, instead of internalizing earthly spirits and making them like it, allowed the internalized earthly spirits to have dominion over it so that it became like them” (pp.20-21, ch.6, sec.6). This is due to God’s infinite justice. “When they become better, this justice bestows a reward and prize for their good deeds. When they become worse, justice punishes them with penalties that fit the nature and degree of their wrong-doing. This justice imposes a law for all creatures and inscribes it in their very natures. Any creature that observes this innately given law is rewarded for becoming better. Any creature that breaks this law is punished accordingly” (pp. 21 ch. 6 sec. 7). So is the reason that after the duration of a human’s life, depending on their morality, they will be transformed by God in accordance with justice; either into something more bestial or something more united with God, the best of Creatures being humans.
It is important to note that in this case, just punishment is for the overall benefit of the Creature. That is why punishment is not eternal, for to punish finite beings with infinite punishment is contradictory to God’s good and wise nature. Rather, punishment is proportional to sin. For example, Conway recalls the Biblical story of The Great Flood, detailing that “The old world’s sins were more carnal and brutish, as God’s word reveals when he said, ‘My spirit will not always strive in man because he was made flesh’ [Genesis 6:3], meaning that man’s obedience to the desires of the flesh made him completely brutish or bestial. The upshot of that was: If that generation (apart from Noah and his family) hadn’t been wiped out, the whole human race (with that same exception) would have been bestial in the following generations; and that is what God wanted to avert by drowning them, a punishment that would bring them back from the nature of beasts to the nature of men” (pp.23 ch.6, sec.10).
Citations
” Lady Anne Conway (Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy) “. Plato.Stanford.Edu, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conway/#PrimSour. Accessed 9 Oct 2020.
Earlymoderntexts.Com, 2020, https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/conway1692_1.pdf. Accessed 9 Oct 2020.