Justifying Pain through Philosophy in Anne Conway and the Lurianic Kaballah Jacob Hermant

Justifying Pain Through Philosophy in Anne Conway and the Lurianic Kabbalah

Jacob Hermant

Anne Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy synthesizes philosophical monism with Jewish mysticism in a radical reimagining of God and the world that treats individual perfection as an attainable, and inevitable, goal of all beings. Having spent her entire life plagued by severe pain and migraines, Conway’s philosophy provides her with the opportunity to create a rationally consistent worldview in which suffering is proof of the body’s theologically redemptive connection to the soul, leading to the reunification of all beings in Heaven. The Lurianic Kabbalah inspires and supports Conway’s philosophical use for her pain, as she sees her own suffering in Isaac Luria’s tragic theology. This presents the perfect foundation for Conway’s system, which sees one’s pain as means to holy ends. While Luria seeks consolation for an entire people’s trauma and alienation, Conway applies his theology to vindicate individual pain through a collectively positive theological outcome. By aligning Luria’s theology with her own Christianity, Conway’s writing becomes an attempt to philosophically justify the suffering that she experienced as a fundamental and inescapable part of her life. 1

Out of Conway’s lifelong suffering comes the need to create a philosophical system that focuses on mental fortitude as a method to surpass bodily vices in preparation for a future state of spiritual enlightenment and union, thus justifying her constant physical pain. Sarah Hutton, in her biography of Anne Conway, describes how “from her teens, [Conway] suffered from bouts of inexplicable pain,

9 the main symptom of which was an unbelievable headache… [which] grew more intense, more frequent, and more prolonged as she grew older.” 2 The ever-increasing nature of Conway’s pain is crucial, as it shows that her constant exposure to natural, tangible, and medicinal solutions and cures had no effect on her physical condition. Instead, Conway’s shift to aligning her thought with the Lurianic Kabbalah sparked her goal to find meaning and sanctity in her excruciating embodied existence. Her friendship with Francis Mercury van Helmont, a medical practitioner originally hired to treat Conway’s condition, blossomed “from the fact that he had more to

offer his patient than mere medicines… Van Helmont… brought with him… a panoply of new ideas, religious and philosophical, which… contributed profound changes to [Conway’s] religious and philosophical outlook.” 3 The most important of these was the Kabbalah, specifically that which Rabbi Isaac Luria formulated after the Jewish expulsion from Spain. Conway discusses her own pain through Kabbalistic theology, aligning it with her Christian monism to establish a worldview that treats bodily pain and suffering as preliminary to spiritual union. As a theology that transforms the pain of an entire nation into a path to redemption, the Lurianic Kabbalah gives Conway a model on which to express her own journey to spiritually justify her pain.

The core of Conway’s philosophy is mutability, which emerges from her tripartite structure of the world and provides the foundation for approaching theological redemption through pain. Conway begins by establishing the nature of her God, who is utterly separate from His creations. The primary point of this separation is the “indifference of will” that all creatures have, but that God, whose will “is most free… without any external force or compulsion or without any cause coming from the creatures,” cannot possess. 4 This is because “this indifference of will is the basis for all mutability and corruptibility in creatures.” 5 If God is to possess this indifference, He would have, like His creatures, a potential for sin and corruption, which are entirely outside of the divine essence. The

tripartite order is a consequence of this formulation. In it, the three substances “are God, Christ, and creatures; and… these three species are really distinct in terms of their essence.” 6 God, the perfect being, is wholly immutable, while Christ, the mediator, is mutable only for the better, and creatures are wholly mutable for better and for worse. All creatures have the ability to improve continually toward potential perfection, fighting negative corrupting impulses while trying to attain further “degrees of goodness” through multiple lives with “a better spirit than before.” 7 If a creature instead chooses to sin, there is always “punishment, pain, and chastisement

appropriate to the nature of the deed itself, by means of which evil turns back again to good.” 8 For Conway, all creatures have the constant potential for goodness and perfection, despite bodily sin and fault. In this manner, creaturely mutability grounds Conway’s philosophical justification for suffering. Though Conway’s life consisted of continuous, seemingly debilitating physical pain, her visualization of the world finds in it a holy essence, as her constant bodily state becomes a temporary mode through which she can look to achieve total moral perfection.

In Conway’s model of the world, suffering acts as a conduit for morality and betterment through its representation of Christ’s passions in the created order. Since Conway treats Christ and creatures as wholly separate entities, with the former mediating between the latter and God, the mutable creatures must be able to mirror Christ’s self-betterment to reach their own perfection. Christia Mercer explains how “the Christian narrative maintains that the human soul will be immortal only if Christ suffers… Conway takes up this idea and makes it a centerpiece of her philosophy. For her, suffering is the key to moral and cognitive improvement.” 9 Even before discussing the Lurianic Kabbalah, Conway expresses a deep connection between pain and theology. When she eventually discovered the Kabbalah, seeing direct connections between it and her own Christianity, Conway found a way to relate Christ’s redemptive suffering with the communal redemption that Luria saw in the wake of exile.

11 Conway explains that “through pain and suffering whatever grossness or crassness is contracted by the spirit or body is diminished; and so the spirit imprisoned in such grossness or crassness is set free and becomes more spiritual and, consequently, more active and effective through pain.” 10 The necessary baseness of creatures wanes in the presence of creaturely suffering—which mimics that of Christ—turning Conway’s tormented existence into one of union with Christ and unhindered mediation with God. Mercer emphasizes Conway’s argument that “in suffering, creatures increase in connectedness and vitality.” 11 The experience of suffering creates the

circumstances for spiritual perfection as it aligns creatures together in life, toward a sense of collective redemption. Just as Christ’s suffering allows for the perfection of the soul, one’s pain allows for advancement toward the communal salvation of all creatures.

Conway’s use of Lurianic theology to justify her pain reflects how Luria incorporates suffering and restoration into his expression of Creation. As Gershom Scholem explains, Lurianic Kabbalah emerged as a theological response to the Jewish exile (Galut) from Spain. It attempts to create meaning out of trauma, as “by connecting the notions of Galut and redemption with the central question of the essence of the universe… [the Kabbalists] transformed the exile of the people of Israel into an exile of the whole world, and the redemption of [the Jewish people] into a universal, cosmic redemption.” 12 Luria wants to rationalize Jewish suffering, just as Conway attempts to philosophically treat her own pain, finding meaning in individual suffering by relating it to the redemption of the world. The Lurianic solution looks to the moment of Creation, seeing a radical moment of God’s concealment which then “enabled the world to be revealed.” 13 This concealment is necessary for God to then “emit beams of light into the vacuum of limitation and build our world,” emanating Himself through his creations and filling them with the divine light. 14 However, the creatures, referred to as the ‘vessels,’ “could not contain the light and thus were broken… henceforth, nothing is perfect… in other words, all being is in Ga-

lut.” 15 When Luria envisions this totalizing exile, he includes God in it, and places the responsibility to restore the necessary state of divine perfection on the Jewish people “through the Torah and the commandments… [freeing] the imprisoned divine light and [raising] it to its proper level.” 16 The state of exile, then, is the constant state of the world. Though it diminishes and weakens God’s presence in all things, there is still the potential to break from the grip of Galut through purposeful holy action. This is the ideal philosophical structure for Conway; by mirroring Christ’s passions with the Kabbalistic interpretation of Galut, she is able to find spiritual meaning for her

suffering that was could not result from conventional medicinal means.

Conway takes up Luria’s ideas of destruction and reparation to philosophically justify her pain, arriving at a new system of thought that expresses her personal lived experience. First encountering the Lurianic Kabbalah from her friendship with van Helmont, Conway “regarded the [Kabbalah] as a source of ancient wisdom” that, at that point in its transmission to the Christian world, “was heavily Neoplatonised… [providing] endorsement for a theory of substance compatible with the nature of God, as [Conway] understood it.” 17 As well, the Kabbalah’s “spiritual monism… carried with it divine sanction for a non-dualistic metaphysic… the [Kabbalah] was a vital means of endowing monism with theistic credentials.” 18 Conway’s tripartite system maintains a gap between creatures and God, using the potential for mutability to differentiate between the different beings of a singular, monist substance, which the Kabbalah seems to support due to its vision of the divine light that connects all beings. From this structure emerges Conway’s use of the Kabbalah to aid in establishing a connection between pain and divine perfection, as “the doctrine of redemption (tikkun) which entails a process of restoration or purification, [provides suffering with] a purgative function.” 19 The centrality of mutability in Conway’s writing directly echoes Luria, as the ability for creatures to improve their base state appears in his conception of the Jewish peo-

13 ple’s responsibility to repair the world’s imperfect state by acting in accordance with the Torah and its commandments. Conway’s alignment of Lurianic Kabbalah with Christianity joins Christ’s passions together with the totalizing form of suffering that Luria sees as fundamental to the creation of the world, forming a created order that justifies and gives meaning to her pain.

Both Conway and Luria use their idea of God to construct their worlds, using their respective physical and theological pain to arrive at an ultimate good. While Conway’s God remains a perfect ideal, making it so all creatures can desire perfection, Luria’s God

suffers and retreats in Creation, requiring human action in order to reveal Himself. In Luria’s God, Conway sees the pain that is necessary for redemption, which she aligns with her own God by viewing Him as what inspires all creatures to seek perfection out of their suffering. In her analysis of the intersections between the Cambridge Platonists and Lurianic Kabbalah, Allison Coudert explains how Conway imagines that “a creature can progress towards the good without limit because God is infinite and infinitely good.” 20 Conway’s God is perfect, which necessitates that His creations can better themselves infinitely. Conway forms a logical progression between her ideas of God and mutability, using Luria’s vision of God’s presence in all things as the ground for her own radical worldview. After the “primal flaw” in Creation, the healing can begin, and Luria maintains that “Man and God are partners in this enterprise… God began the process of reparation, but He left its completion to man.” 21 The state of God in the Lurianic system results in the responsibility to act toward the reparation of the world, echoing Conway’s emphasis on how creatures must work against bodily vices, using their suffering to go beyond their present state. She embraces Luria’s need for creaturely action as a response to suffering alongside her utilization of Christ’s passions in her tripartite worldview, taking up Kabbalistic divinity to formulate a theologically productive end for her pain that exists simultaneously with the centrality of Christian tenets in her writing.

By comparing her pain with the Kabbalistic understanding of Galut, Conway treats Luria’s methods of recovery as philosophically medicinal, aiding in the justification of her suffering. The transmigration of souls, a Lurianic idea that makes up much of the reparatory process, emerges in Conway’s writing as a way to channel one’s pain into bettering both the self and the world. Scholem explains that, through the Torah, “every man amends his own soul, and by the process of transmigration that of his neighbor… [which symbolizes] the state of the unamended world, the confusion of the orders of creation.” 22 This act represents the suffering of the shattered ves

sels and the path to redemption through suffering, mirroring Conway’s use of pain as a step toward perfect union. Just as “all pain and torment stimulates the life or spirit existing in everything which suffers,” the experience of Galut sparks the need for the Jewish people, in exile, to liberate the world through the holiness of Jewish tradition. 23 The ability for self-perfection is a result of Conway’s interpretation of pain, and in Luria’s system the Galut is necessary for the Torah to enact its restorative power. Scholem emphasizes that “every being is subject to the law of transmigration from form to form. There is no being, not even the lowliest, which may not serve as a prison for the sparks of the ‘banished souls’ seeking restoration from their Galut.” 24 Conway’s spectrum of being, in which all of God’s creatures have the potential to improve themselves, takes up the Lurianic vision of the divine light’s presence in all beings, allowing one to overcome the pain of the Galut and work toward redemption. Through the transmigration of souls, Conway uses individual suffering to inspire the improvement of all beings. One’s own pain becomes a source of active theological betterment, helping oneself and the world progress toward an eventual state of perfection, giving meaning and purpose to Conway’s suffering.

The role of sin in Conway and Luria’s writing emphasizes how each author uses their pain and suffering to engage with the world, displaying how these traumatic experiences can allow one to approach divine perfection. Out of her conception of God’s infinite

15 goodness, Conway “[denies] the eternity of Hell… she [argues] that punishments are ‘medicinal’ and last for only as long as it takes to ‘cure’ the soul of its sin and redirect it towards the path of righteousness.” 25 If punishments are eternal, and sinners remain in Hell forever with no capacity for repentance and improvement, then not only would Conway’s God be imperfect, but there would be no potential to work through one’s suffering toward holy ends. Conway’s soteriology is founded on a doctrine of apocatastasis, wherein the eventual perfection of the world will find all beings living in heavenly harmony. The punishments that God inflicts “tend… to [the

good of God’s creatures] and to their restoration and they are so medicinal as to cure these sickly creatures and restore them to a better condition.” 26 The language of medicine is critical to Conway’s presentation of sin and punishment. God’s reaction to sin is to administer a punishment that inspires a turn to self-betterment, transforming suffering into a cure for itself and directly vindicating Conway’s life of inescapable pain. In a similar manner, Luria sees the need for holy action as a result of a more primal sin, committed in the earliest days of Creation. While God worked to mend the world, it remained humanity’s responsibility to aid in the process, and “Adam’s sin [in the Garden of Eden] returned the universe, which had almost been amended, to its former broken state.” 27 Though God failed to fill the vessels safely with His light, the fault ultimately belongs to Adam for God’s total exile from the world, which places the task of reparation solely on humanity, and specifically on the Jewish people. Luria takes the Spanish expulsion as “the expression—compelling, concrete, and extremely cruel—of this phase of the world before reparation and redemption.” 28 The pain of the Galut is the pain of all existence, which must work to inspire religious observance in an effort to find redemption. Conway incorporates Luria’s soteriology into her writing by viewing an intimate relationship between her own unceasing pain and the universe’s totalizing exile and suffering. As a result, both of these worldviews enact redemption through trauma in order to apply meaning and justifica-

tion to overpowering personal and communal tragedy.

To engage with her experience of constant and intense physical pain, Anne Conway directs her philosophical and theological interpretation of the world towards an effort to find justification and meaning for her suffering. In taking the Lurianic Kabbalah as her guide, Conway understands its lamentation of a whole people’s exile, and the necessary resultant action, as mirroring her own lived experience, and even finds points of connection between the Kabbalah and her own Christianity. Conway examines a group’s historical reaction to trauma to support her own expression of the world

in which suffering contains the potential for good by placing one on the path to redemption. As a result, Conway displays how one can achieve both individual and communal solidarity through shared experience, finding empathy as the core virtue of humanity’s constant striving for salvation. 29

1 In early modernity, Kabbalah became a major philosophical interest among Christians in Europe. These Christian Kabbalists, including Anne Conway and her friend Francis Mercury van Helmont, aimed to use perceived similarities between Christianity and Kabbalah to try and politely convert Jews to Christianity. While this is certainly an aspect of Conway’s Kabbalistic leaning, this essay will be avoiding this topic in order to focus on Conway’s positive uses of the Kabbalah to strengthen her revolutionary philosophical worldview. 2 Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 30. 3 Hutton, Anne Conway, 148. 4 Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15. 5 Conway, Principles, 15. 6 Conway, Principles, 30. 7 Conway, Principles, 32. 8 Conway, Principles, 42. 9 Christia Mercer, “Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy: G.W. Leibniz and Anne Conway,” in Emotional Minds ed. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 187-188. 10 Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 43. 11 Mercer, “Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy: G.W. Leibniz

and Anne Conway,” 195. 12 Gershom Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 43. 13 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 44. 14 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 44. 15 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 45. 16 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 46. 17 Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 164-165. 18 Hutton, Anne Conway, 166. 19 Hutton, Anne Conway, 168. 20 Allison Coudert, “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 36 no.4, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 643. 21 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 46. 22 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 46-47. 23 Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 43. 24 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 47. 25 Coudert, “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare,” 644. 26 Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 38. 27 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 46. 28 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” 46. 29 Though outside the focus of this paper, Conway also found purpose through her eventual conversion to Quakerism. She saw the strength of the Quakers, and of the women in particular, to be incredibly inspiring, as they found joy even while living in a constant state of oppression, which Conway understood as a socially-instigated suffering.

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Leibniz and Anne Conway,” in Emotional Minds edited by Sabrina Ebbersmeyer, 179-206. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Scholem, Gershom. “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and other essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books, 1975.