The Love of God and the Radical Enlightenment: Mary Astell's Brush with Spinoza

Abstract

The essay argues that Mary Astell’s support of the theocentric philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche embroiled her in the fray of anti-Spinozism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Because of her dawning awareness of contemporaries’ associations of Malebranche’s occasionalism with the Spinozist doctrine of one substance, Astell retracted her previous endorsement of this theory in 1694. When contemporaries briefly turned the accusation of Spinozism against Locke and his followers in the early 1700s, however, Astell felt free to return to a support of Malebranche.

Mary Astell on Neighborly Love

“…Then, she returns to occasionalism in The Christian Religion. Sarah Ellenzweig (2003) finds the same departure and return to occasionalism in Astell; however, after the conclusion of the letters, Astell came to equate occasionalism with pantheism and Spinozism, and so she rejected it. Ellenzweig also suggests that the departure was "likely a tactical rather than an intellectual move" (390).…”

Astell, Cartesian Ethics, and the Critique of Custom

“…In a recent paper, Sarah Ellenzweig suggests that in the 1690s Astell may have distanced herself from Malebranche and Norris because their philosophy had been unfavourably associated with Spinozism and irreligion. 84 But whatever Astell thinks of occasionalism, she never abandons Norris's central moral-theological claim that God ought to be the sole object of our love.…”