Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion

215 Pages·1998·14.336 MB·English

by  Stuart Brown (auth.), Allison P. Coudert, Richard H. Popkin, Gordon M. Weiner (eds.)

LEIBNIZ, MYSTICISM AND RELIGION
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
158
LEIBNIZ, MYSTICISM AND RELIGION
edited by
ALLISON P. COUDERT, RICHARD H. POPKIN
and GORDON M. WEINER
Founding Directors:
P. Dibon t (Paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA)
Director:
Sarah Hutton (The University of Hertfordshire, Uni ted Kingdom)
Associate Directors: lE. Force (Lexington); lC. Laursen (Riverside)
Editorial Board: J.F. Battail (Paris); F. Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory
(Rome); J.D. North (Groningen); MJ. Petry (Rotterdam); J. Popkin (Lexington);
G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht)
Advisory Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); B. Copenhaver (Los Angeles); A. Crombie (Oxford);
H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); K. Hanada (Hokkaido University); W. Kirsop
(Melbourne); P.O. Kristeller (Columbia University); E. Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles);
J. Malarczyk (Lublin); J. Orcibal (Paris); W. Röd (München); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles);
H. Rowen (Rutgers University, NJ.); J.P. Schobinger (Zürich); J. Tans (Groningen)
LEIBNIZ, MYSTICISM
AND RELIGION
Edited by
ALLISON P. COUDERT
Arizona State University,
Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.
RICHARD H. POPKIN
University ofCalifornia,
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
and
GORDON M. WEINER
Arizona State University,
Tempe, Arizona, U.s.A.
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5088-5 ISBN 978-94-015-9052-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9052-5
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
@1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998.
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1998
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
induding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction vii
1. Some Occult Influences on Leibniz's Monadology
Stuart Brown
2. Leibniz and Mysticism
Donald Rutherford 22
3. Leibniz and the Kabbalah
Allison P. Coudert 47
4. Leibniz, Benzelius, and Swedenborg:
The Kabbalistic Roots of Swedish Illuminism
Marcia Keith Scuchard 84
5. Leibniz on Enthusiasm
Daniel J. Cook 107
6. Leibniz and Chinese Thought
Yuen-Ting Lai 136
7. Leibniz as a Lutheran
Ursula Goldenbaum 169
Index 193
v
INTRODUCTION
Some scholars in the history of ideas have had a growing interest in
examining Leibniz's many discussions ofvarious aspects of religion,
Christian, Jewish and far eastern. Leibniz, with his voracious interest and
concern for so many aspects of human intellectual and spiritual life, read a
wide variety of books on the various religions of mankind. He also was in
personal contact with many of those who espoused orthodox and
non-orthodox views. He annotated his copies of many books on religious
subjects. And he was working on schemes for reuniting the various
Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe.
Studies on Leibniz's views on Judaism, on the Kabbalah, on
Chinese thought have been appearing over the last decades. It was decided
by some of us that since there has been a growing interest in this side of
Leibniz's thought it would be a good idea to bring together a group of
scholars working on different aspects of Leibniz's views on religion,
mysticism and spiritualism, in order to h~ve them present papers on their
current researches, and to have the opportunity for lengthy discussion,
formal and informal, in the most pleasant academic ambiance of the
William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. Under the sponsorship of
the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies, a
workshop conference was held November 18-19, 1994. The participants
who came from Israel, Germany, the United Kingdom, and North America,
prepared the final form of their papers, which is what we are presenting
here. Gordon Weiner and Allison Coudert have done the editorial work,
getting the papers re-written, computerized, and prepared for publication.
For a century or more Leibniz has been rescued from the murky
worlds of metaphysics, theology, religion, and occult sciences by
concentrating on his logical papers, and making them the key to
understanding what the great man thought. Bertrand RusselI, in his
Philosophy 0/ G. W. Leibniz, separated the public Leibniz from the private
Leibniz. The public Leibniz had to toady to his patrons, especially
Electress Sophie, and wrote semi-religious works like the Theodicy to keep
them happy. On the other hand Russell portrayed the private Leibniz as
writing a fantastic number of logic papers, purely philosophical and
scientific studies, but which, according to Russell and to far too many who
follow hirn, are the real philosophical thoughts of Leibniz. The Two
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Leibnizes theory could allow for ignoring the large amount of material that
dealt with all sorts of odd and arcane topics, far from the interests of
contemporary philosophers.
We now know that Leibniz's great contemporary and opponent,
Isaac Newton, had a public and a private intellectual persona. The public
man invented the calculus, wrote the greatest work in physics, the
Principia, and other important scientific and mathematical works.
Privately Newton was working away all of his intellectual life on alchemy
and an antitrinitarian millenarian theology. Only after his death did some
of this appear in print - one of his commentaries on the books of Daniel
and Revelation, and two of his letters to Locke denying the historicity of
the Doctrine of the Trinity. The vast amount of Newton's alchemical and
theological writings remained in the possession of his heirs, unavailable to
the learned world, until the Earl of Portsmouth had them auctioned off in
1936 at Sotheby's in London, after the British Library and Newton's
college, Trinity, at Cambridge, refused to house them. These documents,
now scattered around the globe, are gradually revealing the full picture of
the views of the private Newton. Scholars are debating fiercely as to
whether there was one Newton, the man who was a scientific genius and
an antitrinitarian theologian and an alchemist, or whether he had a genuine
split intellectual world in which the scientific side had nothing to do with
the "crazy" Newton. Much is being written and debated about whether one
and the same person had an intellectual view that encompassed har
moniously both his scientific theories and discoveries and his alchemical
and theological beliefs. The Newton "problem" has been developing in the
post World War 11 period as various manuscript collections of Newton's
private writings have become available.
The Leibniz problem has had an opposite history because the
public Leibniz presented a range of religious and theological points of
view attached to a metaphysics. The public Leibniz, a very public man,
made no secret of his intellectual friendships with a range of strange
characters including van Helmont, KnOIT von Rosenroth and Eric
Benzelius. Leibniz's unpublished papers were not hidden away, but became
a treasure trove from the mid-eighteenth century until today for scholars
looking for more of Leibniz's thought. It was really not until the studies of
modern symbolic logic at the end of the Nineteenth Century and the work
of Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell that Leibniz was seen as the first
formulator of this system that would replace Aristotelian logic. Leibniz's
symbolic logic became the center of interest. Then the rest of his enormous
corpus was either in harmony with this, or could be explained away by his
viii
circumstances. His best known work, the Theodicy, the only complete
work published in his life time, no longer had to be taken seriously since it
could be explained away as part of his public duty to his patron, Sophie.
His best of all possible worlds theory that was so brutally ridiculed by
Voltaire no longer had to be defended by Leibniz's admirers, since it was
part ofhis public philosophy.
In the course of this century there has been a growing picture of
Leibniz's thought, often fusing the public and private Leibnizes. It has been
realized that Leibniz was not just a brilliant critical opponent of Descartes,
Hobbes and Spinoza, but that he had absorbed many intellectual traditions
from Scholasticism, Renaissance naturalism, as weIl as various religio
philosophical currents of the period. Leibniz read almost everything that
appeared at the time. He corresponded with people of all sorts of
intellectual and religious persuasions. He personally knew the French
skeptics, Simon Foucher and Pierre Daniel Huet. He corresponded with
Pierre Bayle. Some of the first formulations of his philosophy appeared in
articles against them. He personally knew theologians like Antoine
Amauld, and his Monadology is a discussion with the Jansenist theologian.
Leibniz was interested in the spiritualistic currents, the followers of Jacob
Boehme, theosophists like van Helmont, the Pietists, the Cambridge
Platonists (especially Lady Anne Conway, whose work he leamed about
from van Helmont). Leibniz was very interested in the Kabbalah that was
appearing in Latin translation late in the seventeenth century. He went to
see its editor, Knorr von Rosenroth, for four weeks to discuss kabbalistic
issues. The marginalia in his books reflect this wide variety of interests. He
read leading Jewish thinkers like Maimonides and annotated his copy of
The Guide for the Perplexed. He read lots of orthodox Catholic and
Protestant writers and lots of unorthodox ones as weIl. He was interested in
finding out about the infamous Three Imposters, Moses, Jesus and
Mohammed in both the Latin and French versions, and he was interested in
Bodin's notorious un-published dialogue on religion, the Colloquium
Heptaplomes. He was very concemed to find out what Chinese philosophy
was all about, and corresponded with Jesuits who had been in China, and
he wrote some pieces about the meaning of Chinese thought.
Trying to find the true Leibniz is getting to be a more and more
difficult task, as many vers ions of Leibniz' s philosophy are em erging from
fusing the published and unpublished writings, the public and the private
person. I have previously asked whether we have to have two, three, or
perhaps four Leibnizes to make his various writings compatible, or can we
see all of this as part of the religious context of his ideas?
ix
Our conference provided a chance for people working on aspects
of Leibniz's concerns about religion at1d mysticism from different per
spectives to exchange ideas and interpretations. Some very significant
findings emerged, as weil as perspectives for understanding and assessing
Leiblliz's thought on many matters. Stuart Brown's examination of occult
influences on Leibniz's metaphysics, and Leibniz's later attempts to cover
up how involved he was in occult studies, makes us realize that there is
much more to Leibniz the thinker that just the picture of hirn aS"a supreme
rationalist. Donald Rutherford carefully explores what Leibniz saw as
valuable amongst mystical thinkers of the past and present, and what he
saw as possible dangers in their thought. Allison Coudert's exploration of
Leibniz's intellectual friendship with the spiritualists Francis Mercury van
Helmont and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth throws new light on an aspect
of Leibniz's monadology and his conception of spiritual forces. Marsha
Keith Schuchard's picture of Leibniz's relatiqns with Swedenborg's
brother-in-Iaw, Eric Benzelius, who jointly wanted to set up a center for
the study of calculus and Kabbalah, puts the German thinker at the heart of
illuminist, Rosicrucian and perhaps Masonic ideas and forces current in the
Europe of the time. Daniel Cook deal~ with Leibniz's views about
"enthusiasm," a widespread kind of religious expression in the second half
of the seventeenth century, especially in Germany. Cook shows that
Leibniz was not taken in by any of these kind of thinkers, but had an
amazing tolerance for their views and their persons, even protecting some
of them from the authorities. Yuen-Ting Lai deals with one of Leibniz's
late interests, that of understanding Chinese philosophy and religion. She
stresses the importance for Leibniz, and for other European philosophers of
the time, of fitting the newly discovered Chinese thought into the issues
perturbing European thinkers. Lastly, Ursula Goldenbaum synthesizes
many ofthe threads from the other papers in what at first sight might seem
a pedestrian topic, Leibniz as a Lutheran thinker. However, she traces how
Leibniz throughout his intellectual career kept trying to make Lutheran
theology compatible with mbdern scientific thought and modern
philosophy. Dr. Goldenbaum reports on her discovery of Leibniz's own
copy of Spinoza's notorious, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, with many
annotations by Leibniz.
At the time of the conference I was asked, "Does any of this have
anything to do with Leibniz's philosophy?" It might be interesting gossip
about Leibniz's biography, but does it show anything about whether his
philosophical arguments are sound? The question already makes a great
presumption, namely that philosophy is just the study of arguments. It
x