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Anne Conway, Herrera, and Spinoza on God and God's Relation to Individual Beings

Anne Conway’s understanding of God and God’s relationship to created beings bears important similarities to the philosophy of Platonism embodied in Plotinus and the Neoplatonic tradition of philosophical mysticism. Conway’s Anti-Cartesian stance is generally also applied to Spinoza or Spinozism, a term coined by the French Encyclopedist Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique, 1st ed. 1695-1697 ; but this generalization belies fundamental similarities between Spinoza and Conway, similarities rooted in their shared philosophical background. Conway’s Platonist tendencies emerged under the influence of Kabbalist doctrine contained in the work of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata, as mediated to her through her friend and physician, Francis Mercury van Helmont. What is less known is that von Rosenroth’s work contained in its second volume an abridged Latin translation of Abraham Cohen Herrera’s widely influential Platonic interpretation of the Kabbalah, Puerto del Cielo (Gate of Heaven). Herrera’s interpretation of the Lurianic Kabbala, which he studied under Luria’s disciple Israel Sarug during his sojourn in Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik) at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, was guided by his understanding of Renaissance Platonism, above all Marsilio Ficinus, with its legacy of Plotinian, Proclean and Iamblichean thought. Herrera's syncretistic blending of the tradition of Jewish mysticism and Platonist philosophy, his attempt to explain the "sovereign contemplations of kabbalistic and theological mysticism" using the "humble arguments of human philosophical thought, ” will have made him exceedingly attractive to Conway, in particular as regards the Lurianic theory of tzimtzum. Along with Judah Abrabanel, Herrera’s work also served as a repository of major themes from Neoplatonic philosophy for Spinoza. Herrera left Dubrovnik for Amsterdam, where he spent the final years of his life as a member of the synagogue where Spinoza would receive his early schooling. Of the excerpts of Herrera’s work which appear in the Kaballah denudata, “Much of the first part of the text might be interchangeable with portions of Spinoza's first book of the Ethics.” When Spinoza’s Opera, were published posthumously, his work “was immediately associated with Herrera's ideas, " for example, in the writings of Moses Germanus, Wachter and Basnage. In his Histoire des Juifs, Basnage argues for “the true, Kabbalistic origin of Spinozism.” In the period following Spinoza’s banishment from the Jewish community, Rosenroth frequented some of the same circles as Spinoza and shared some of the same partners for discussion. Although it is not certain whether Spinoza read Herrera's work, it is probable he would have become familiar with its themes and content through his teachers at the Hebrew school, especially Menasseh ben Israel, himself a disciple of Israel Sarug, and Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, who translated Herrera’s works. I argue in my paper, that Anne Conway’s view that spirit or mind and matter form two ends of a continuum and that matter is destined to be spiritualized has parallels in the work of Spinoza which point to their common Neoplatonic background. The spiritual monism offered by Anne Conway as a solution to questions of theodicy related to Christian orthodoxy proves to be closely related to Spinoza’s view of reality, drawing into question interpretations which view Conway’s philosophy as opposed to Spinoza’s “materialism”. In my paper, I argue that Conway’s criticism may properly refer only to Hobbes, as Spinoza’s monistic Platonism is, in fact, both historically and philosophically, intimately related to her own philosophical perspective.

Anne Conway, Abraham Cohen Herrera, Spinoza, Platonism, kabbalah, philosophical mysticism, spiritual monism

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