As mentioned in her biography, Conway is a one treatise philosopher. And yet, in her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy she writes several compelling arguments that refute the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes. Although those arguments are interesting on their own, the main purpose of the treatise is to refute Cartesian dualism, the notion that all substances are either material or spiritual. Conway’s Principles, despite its length, is actually making one grand argument where the initial chapters act as premises or lemmas to the grand conclusion. Out of the 9 chapters, I'll be focusing on the first 6 since they're the only chapters necessary for Conway to refute Cartesian dualism.
Chapter 1: “Concerning God, and his Attributes”
Conway starts by listing the attributes of God as well as what some of these attributes end up meaning. She starts by saying, “God is a spirit, light, and life, infinitely wise, Good, Just, Mighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Creator and Maker of all things visible and invisible.” Later, she declares that God is also *eternal and unchangeable. Conway uses these premises to demonstrate that God can’t have passions, because:
P1: Passion is temporal. It inherently comes and goes.
P2: If a property has a beginning and an end, change must occur in order to possess such a property.
C: Passion requires change.
But if passion requires change, and God is unchangeable, then God certainly doesn’t have any passions. A simpler way that Conway argues this is to recognize that God isn’t temporal, but passion is, hence God can’t have passion; however, I like to use the prior argument. Conway continues in this chapter stating that God is also *unified. But the most important point that Anne makes throughout this first chapter is that although God is, “a Substance or Essence distinct from his *Creatures…he is not divided, or separated from them; but most strictly and in the highest degree intimately present in them all.” Anne follows this by clarifying that God’s creatures aren’t parts of him, nor can they change into him.
In addition to the main contents of the first chapter, Conway also adds annotations, which she doesn’t do in any of the remaining chapters. These annotations describe how the *Messiah must have God’s dimmed divine light, because God’s creatures couldn’t bear to handle his unfiltered light. And the Messiah was essential, since according to *Kabbalah and the Hebrew account of creation, God wants to communicate with his creatures.
Chapter 2: “Creatures and Time”
Conway goes on to assert that *time has been infinite, and this follows from the attributes of God discussed in Chapter 1. If time was finite and you supposed God couldn’t have made the world any older, then you’re rejecting his omnipotence. If time was finite and you supposed God could have made the world any older, then you’re rejecting his unchangeableness. Hence, the amount of time that has passed in our world is infinite. However, this isn’t to say that creatures are eternal like God, since God is not temporal. “This infinity of times is not the same as God’s infinite eternity, because there’s nothing temporal about the divine eternity: nothing in it can be called past or future; it is always entirely present.”
Furthermore, creatures are necessarily motionful. The only way for creatures to cease their motion is if time ceases itself.
Chapter 3: “Freedom, Infinity, and Space”
In this chapter, Conway makes two primary conclusions. First, God acts freely but also necessarily. God is free because, “anything he does in regard to his creatures is done without any external force or compulsion and without any casual input from the creatures.” He acts necessarily because he has the omnipotence to pursue ultimate goodness and justice, which are his attributes. Hence, God simultaneously acts freely and necessarily. And from this, “It clearly follows that God was not indifferent about whether or not to bring creatures into existence, and that he made them from an inner impulse of his divine goodness and wisdom.” But if God must create, he also must create as much as he can. Therefore, the world is infinite in creatures and every creature has infinite parts.
Chapter 4: “Christ and Creatures”
Anne Conway uses Kabbalah to ascertain the following facts about the Messiah.
Christ, the messiah, is the first creature God made.
All creatures derive from the Messiah’s existence.
Christ is a divine creation, which makes him both godlike and a creature.
He is closer to God than any other creature because of the divinity he has.
But Christ certainly can’t be equal to God. Conversely, he can’t be equal to creatures either. Hence Conway finds the Messiah to be categorically different from both God and creatures.
Chapter 5: “God, Christ, and Time”
Conway uses this chapter to describe the relationship between God, Christ, and God’s creatures. First, she recognizes, again, that God is unchangeable, though that is one of his attributes that he doesn’t share with his creatures. That is to say that “an unchangeable creature would have to be God himself!” She also points out that empirically, we notice that God’s creatures are changing. Since God’s creatures are inherently changeable, so is Christ, but according to Conway, he is changeable in a manner different from creatures. Every state that the Messiah changes into must be good since he is divine. In other words, Christ can only change for the better. Creatures, on the other hand, don’t necessarily have to change into good states. Using these attributes of each, Conway creates a hierarchy or order of “kinds”. At the top is God, who is unchangeable and already the highest form of good. He is followed by the second kind, Christ, who changes but only for the better. Lastly, there’s the third kind, who can change for the better, but might also change for the worse. God is clearly so distinct from his creatures, but he can’t be separate from them since he is omnipresent. Therefore, Christ is actually a necessary creation for God, because he acts as a medium between him and his creations.
Chapter 6: “Change”
Creatures are, as we established, changeable. But just how much can a creature change? Well, creature A certainly can’t change into another creature B for any distinct creatures A and B, because then God would be punishing creature A for sins committed by creature B and vice versa, making him unjust. Can a creature of one species turn into a creature of another species? If species doesn’t refer to God or Christ, then yes, because, “they are not distinct in substance or essence, but only in certain *modes or attributes.” This creates a dichotomy between what’s known as really distinct and modally distinct. Really distinct things have different essences and substance, whereas modally distinct things belong to the same kind of substance. So to ever be really distinct, according to Conway would be to compare creatures, God, or Christ with one another. But a creature can never change into something really distinct from itself, because that obscures the glory of the divine attributes. Conway defines transmutation as this change into a modally distinct species. She allows for transmutation because to limit creatures of such changes would mean that God limits how good a creature can become, but a creature should be able to “continually and infinitely move towards the good.” To be clear, Conway isn’t saying a dog can turn into a cat materially speaking. When she talks about transmutation, it’s most definitely in a spiritual sense. The remainder of this chapter discusses the misconceptions of God before making a final point: that every creature is composed of both a spirit and a body, but that body and spirit are only modally distinct, not really distinct. And the spirit of, lets say, a horse, is only different from that of a human because of magnitude, not because of a difference in type. A horse can’t be as spiritually good as a person might be able to, and that’s certainly not because a horse and a human are really distinct. The same is true for the dichotomy between body and spirit. The two are only different in degree, not in type as Descartes believed. Conway justified this by claiming that our bodies are composed of infinitesimal bodies, and similarly, our spirit is composed of infinitesimal spirits. To Conway, it follows then that, “everybody is a spirit and nothing else, differing from a spirit only by being darker.” What Conway is describing is sort of the composition of bodies, and how their difference from spirit is only in degree, which means they’re only modally distinct from one another. And yes, Conway did believe that because body and spirit are only modally distinct from one another, that a spiritual substance could change into a material one, which Descartes did not believe.
Creatures - All humans, animals, plants, and minerals.
Eternal - Not affected or subject to time.
Kabbalah - A school of thought in Jewish mysticism. Usually, kabbalists believe that sacred texts can help us understand God and therefore develop a greater connection with him.
Messiah - Christ incarnate; A man of middle nature who has the attributes of both God and his creatures. His purpose is to connect God with his creatures.
Mode - Synonym for properties
Time - The successive motion of all creation.
Unified - To not consist of parts.