Anne Conway on divine and creaturely freedom

ABSTRACT

Conway characterizes freedom in apparently contradictory ways. She describes God as the most free, yet he is necessitated to act perfectly due to his wisdom and goodness. Created beings, by contrast, sin. They are not necessitated to do so. This suggests that Conway has a binary account of freedom: divine freedom is a matter of being necessitated by wisdom and goodness, whereas creaturely freedom consists in indifference, understood as a power to act, or not act. Despite the apparently conflicting remarks, I argue that Conway has a single account of freedom as spontaneity. Conway defines spontaneity in terms of causing one’s own action independent of external causes. I suggest that spontaneity is more precisely understood as an intrinsic power aimed at the good in Conway’s metaphysics, and that this account of freedom can combine necessity and contingency. Rather than a binary, Conway offers an account of freedom in creation that has it on a continuum with divine freedom.

KEYWORDS:

• Anne Conway
• Platonism
• freedom
• spontaneity

Acknowledgements

This paper has been greatly improved by incorporating comments from two anonymous reviewers. Thank you to audiences at Grand Valley State University, the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion Conference, the Traveling Early Modern Philosophy Organization Conference, the Atlantic Canada Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, and the New Voices Conference. Special thanks to Krista Benson, Jeff Byrnes, Andrew Chignell, David Crane, Jason Decker, Daniel Groll, Jonathan Head, Sarah Hutton, Julia Jorati, Andrew Knoll, Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco, Getty Lustila, Anna Moltchanova, Allison Murphy, Jasper Reid, Sue Sample, Andrew Spear, Dwayne Tunstall, David Vessey, and Julie Walsh.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All citations of Conway’s Principles are from the Cambridge edition translation by Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse. The passages are cited parenthetically according to page number, chapter, and section. Further, Andrew Arlig, Marcy Lascano, Christia Mercer, and Jasper Reid are working on a new translation of Conway’s work for Oxford New Histories of Philosophy.

2 The term ‘sponte’ appears not only in the description of God’s freedom at III.1 but also in her V.6 discussion of Christ’s embodiment in ‘J.C.’s 1692 Latin translation.

3 See More’s May 5th, 1651 letter to Conway, 486–489 in Nicolson and Hutton, The Conway Letters. For an evaluation of her critique of Cartesian dualism, see Grey, “Conway’s Ontological Objection” and for further discussion of her vitalist alternative to Cartesian matter see McRobert, “Anne Conway’s Vitalism”; Mercer, “Anne Conway’s Response to Cartesianism”; Borcherding, “Loving the Body, Loving the Soul.”

4 Henry More adopts a similar argument strategy that prioritizes divine perfection in accounting for divine freedom in The Immortality of the Soul. See Book 1, Chapter VII, Section 2 in More, The Immortality of the Soul.

5 Edward Southwell’s 1690 English translation of More’s Enchiridion ethicum is cited according to book, chapter, and section.

6 See Head, The Philosophy of Anne Conway, 144; Lascano, “Anne Conway on Liberty,” 167.

7 See section 22, page 33 of Van Helmont, The Divine Being.

8 See section 22, page 35 of Van Helmont, The Divine Being.

9 Lennon, “Descartes and the Seven Senses of Indifference” provides an analysis of different uses of the term ‘indifference’ in early modern philosophy.

10 For further discussion of the distinction between freedom and voluntariness in More, see Hutton, “Henry More’s Moral Philosophy”.

11 The beginning of Van Helmont’s 1693 Seder Olam bears a striking resemblance to Conway’s system in many respects. One intriguing passage, in section 8, page 6 of Van Helmont, Seder Olam, suggests that creatures are mutable with respect to the good and evil until eventually they are “only changeable unto the Good.”

12 Interestingly, Head, “Anne Conway and Henry More on Freedom”, 644 argues that despite Conway’s suggestion, creatures do not overcome indifference because that would conflict with Conway’s rejection of substantial change. Indeed, Conway’s system allows radical changes in modes, say an identity preserving change from a grain of sand to a horse, it precludes a change of substance (CC 30; VI.3). However, Conway’s characterization of creatures only requires that they will change for the worse due to indifference, not that they must always have indifference.

13 For further discussion of Conway’s commitment to universal salvation see Hutton, “Henry More and Anne Conway” and Head, “Anne Conway on Time”.

14 Head, “Anne Conway and Henry More on Freedom”, 642 notes that there is a kind of spontaneity as self-motion that applies to both God and creatures, but that “this parallel is not something explored by Conway”. Although Conway never explicitly makes this connection, my interpretative suggestion is that she is committed to it via her doctrine of vital motion.

15 See page 4 of the preface in Corse and Coudert’s Cambridge edition translation of Conway’s Principles. The preface is signed by Van Helmont. Corse and Coudert, xxxix argue that although the Preface is signed by Van Helmont, it was written by More and a product of their collaboration. However, as an anonymous reviewer pointed out, the Preface describes the author as having attended her death and uses Quaker forms of address like ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ which suggests that More is not the author. I do not take a stand on which view is correct in this paper, though the question is one worth pursuing.

16 Mercer, “Platonism in Early Modern Natural Philosophy”, 106.

17 Reid, The Metaphysics of Henry More, 77.

18 I have cited this Ennead according to its number, treatise, chapter, and line, using a Parmenides Press translation by Corrigan and Douglas. Eliasson, The Notion of That Which Depends on Us argues that scholarship on Plotinus has conflated his concept of “that which depends on us” with issues of freedom. Plotinus’s own views may be different from how his ideas were adopted.

19 An exception to this contemporary trend is Wolf, “Asymmetical Freedom”, as she takes the issue of whether determinism is compatible with freedom to depend on the value of the action.

20 Hutton, “Plato and the Platonism of Anne Conway”, 48.

21 For helpful resources on emanation causation in Conway, see Broad, “Conway and Charleton” and Mercer, “Platonism in Early Modern Natural Philosophy”.

22 Conway is best understood as a concurrentist according to which all agency is shared agency between God and creatures because God creates and sustains their power to move. The other two main medieval accounts of the causal powers of created beings, identified in Freddoso, “God’s General Concurrence”, is occasionalism, where God is the only cause, and mere conservationism, where creatures are causes on their own without God’s intervention. Conway’s insistence that creatures cause their actions suggests against occasionalism, and her talk of creatures as “mere instruments” in generating motion does not fit well with a conservationist position.

23 Conway rejects the three persons in one doctrine of the trinity in favor of the view that Christ and the Holy Spirit are modes of God (CC 10; I.7). For a useful resource on Conway’s view of Christ’s mediating status, see Mercer, “Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy”. Parageau, “Christ in Anne Conway’s Principia” provides an interesting critique of Mercer’s contention that Conway’s case for the necessity of Christ is theologically neutral, i.e. not aimed at conversion to Christianity.

24 The beginning of Van Helmont’s 1693 Seder Olam, section 8, page 6, bears a striking resemblance to Conway’s system. It suggests that creatures are mutable with respect to good and evil until eventually they are “only changeable unto the Good”.

25 For more on Conway’s account of God’s presence in space and time, see Thomas, “Time, Space, and Process”.

26 Lascano, “Anne Conway: Bodies”, 331 emphasizes that divine reward and punishment is immanent, reflected in these spontaneous changes.

27 In the small literature on the topic of freedom in Conway, it has been suggested that freedom applies to all of creation: see Head, “Anne Conway and Henry More on Freedom”, 642; Head, The Philosophy of Anne Conway, 146.

28 Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, 210–11 notes that a shared theme amongst the Cambridge Platonists is that God is the moral exemplar from which goodness is determined.