Mary Astell

Reason, Gender, Faith

William Kolbrener, Michal Michelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754652649
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317100089
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith includes essays from diverse disciplinary perspectives to consider the full range of Astell's political, theological, philosophical, and poetic writings. The volume does not eschew the more traditional scholarly interest in Astell's concerns about gender; rather, it reveals how Astell's works require attention not only for their role in the development of early modern feminism, but also for their interventions on subjects ranging from political authority to educational theory, from individual agency to divine service, and from Cartesian ethics to Lockean epistemology. Given the vast breadth of her writings, her active role within early modern political and theological debates, and the sophisticated complexity of her prose, Astell has few parallels among her contemporaries. Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith bestows upon Astell the attention which she deserves not merely as a proto-feminist, but as a major figure of the early modern period.

Chapter IV

Astell’s “Design of Friendship” in Letters
and A Serious Proposal, Part I

William Kolbrener

“A true Lover of God,” Astell writes in “Letter XI” of Letters Concerning the Love of God, “is always consistent with himself.” “One Part of his Life,” she continues, does not clash and disagree with the other”; indeed, “that Life only is truly religious which is all of a piece.”1 Though Astell’s works fall within different genres—political, philosophical, and theological—her contributions to the Letters Philosophical and Divine not only blur the distinction between philosophy and theology, but also have implicit within them the categories which Astell would use in her writings on politics and gender. Astell’s reflections on love and friendship in her letters to Norris may have been, at least in their early reception, most generally noted for their theological sublimity.2 Her arguments in the Letters, however, as much they are written in the languages of metaphysics and philosophy, already contain within them the sociological and political categories which would dominate her later discussions of both gender and politics in England—specifically as they would be developed in her A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I.

Ruth Perry has suggested that though Letters was published in 1695, and the first part of A Serious Proposal in 1694, the latter may have actually been written at the same time or after her correspondence with Norris.3 Indeed, the tropes of humility that characterize her introduction to the letters, and her persistent use of the categories from Letters in A Serious Proposal (not to mention the explicit reference to Malebranche), suggest the correspondence with Norris may have, as Derek Taylor and Melvyn New suggest, “emboldened her to speak her mind for the first time … to a public audience.”4 In my argument, in A Serious Proposal (and later in Some Reflections upon Marriage), the typologies of love and friendship developed in Letters would be employed in the service of an analysis of domestic relations, as well as latitudinarian politics. Astell’s writings, in this reading, are not simply unrelated endeavors in different genres, but are consistent with one another—“all of a piece.”

Despite the continuities between the two tracts, there are also significant differences, registered primarily, I will argue, in A Serious Proposal’s departure from the occasionalist metaphysics which characterized what I conceive to be, following Perry, her earlier exchange with Norris. By foregrounding such a disparity, I hope to make Perry’s speculations about the actual dating of the composition of Letters and A Serious Proposal more compelling by showing that the metaphysics implicit within A Serious Proposal dovetail with those articulated in Astell’s “Appendix” to Letters.5 That is, although the theological categories of the Letters allow for the articulation of Astell’s critique of domestic relations in A Serious Proposal, what I call the latter tract (despite its earlier publication date), through its abandonment of the extremes of Malebranchian metaphysics, provides an idealized conception of feminine friendship not present—or even possible—in the Letters.

I

Diagnosing what T. S. Eliot would centuries later call, in a very different context, a “dissociation of sensibility” where “thought” was separated from “feeling,” Norris, in his introduction to the Letters, lamented that in the age of Enlightenment “heads should be so full of Life and Spirits,” and “yet that the Pulse of our Hearts should beat so low.” Though “Knowledge,” Norris writes, “is now in its Meridian,” in “this cold frozen Age of ours,” the “Love of God is declining and ready to set” (L a6r).6 Neither Norris, however, nor Astell, despite the arguments of their critics (like Masham who would attribute “wild” Enthusiasm to their position), argued for love as a merely mystical principal: indeed, for Norris and Astell, the emphasis on love emerged as a philosophical necessity, consistent with the rigors of reason and Enlightenment.7 While Locke of the Essay would argue “that it is the Understanding that sets Man above the rest of sensible Beings,” for Norris, consciously overturning the Lockean philosophical hierarchy, understanding plays a merely secondary role, and has importance only “as it influences and determines our Love.”8 Love, as conceived by Norris, was a principle of philosophical import; indeed, so central was love in not only the metaphysics but in the philosophy of Norris that he accorded it a role parallel to the role of gravity in Newtonian physics. What Norris calls “the Moral Gravity of the Soul” is acted upon, he writes, by the “great Magnet, Good in general or God, and … with as much Necessity as a Stone falls downwards.”9 As Norris would write in Letters, emphasizing the centrality of love for both metaphysics and ethics, “no sooner does a Creature begin to be, but he begins to love” (L 122). Astell would similarly affirm this centrality of love, borrowing the conceptual vocabularies refined by Norris in his earlier tracts: “the Soul,” she writes, “may as well cease to be as cease to love” (L 95).

The Hobbesian Samuel Parker had associated “amorous romance” with fancy and enthusiasm, outside of the realm of philosophical rationality.10 Against the emerging discourses of Enlightenment which had emphasized the philosophical irrelevance of love (associating its excesses with what Pocock calls “Giant Enthusiasm,” and the inferior epistemological realms of emotion and imagination), for Norris, and Astell of the Letters, love would be at the very center of their philosophical systems.11 In the Letters, love and friendship are not merely categories adjunct to the understanding, but rather understanding is subordinate to a love which, properly refined, leads to the proper philosophical service of God. Love, for both Norris and Astell, was not to be resurrected as a mystical alternative to philosophical discourse, but as the central philosophical category within that discourse. Thus Astell’s “Divine Amorist” of the Letters is also a philosopher (L 268). For both Astell and Norris, the cure elaborated in the Letters for the “slow pulse of the heart” is to re-invigorate philosophy through love of the divine.

For Astell, of course, such a love would be defined in relation to its opposite—desire for the creature. Norris had already distinguished in his Theory and Regulation of Love between love as mere desire, properly directed only to the Creator, and love as benevolence, the selfless desire of good to others, which was the proper relation of man to his fellow. Norris’s vaunted occasionalism provides the metaphysical foundations for the conception of friendship as benevolence. Not only because occasionalism directs the creature to the understanding that God is the cause of all things, but because occasionalist metaphysics bequeaths a world which is emptied of any remnant of spirituality. As matter is merely an efficient cause or occasion, sense experience has no independent efficacy or function. As Norris wrote in Practical Discourses, “the whole matter of the Creation” is “an idle, dead, unactive thing.”12 When Astell emphasizes the importance of disabusing her mind of that “early Prejudice that sensible Objects do act upon our Spirits,” she extrapolates to the realm of human relations, re-affirming her own conviction that creatures must be “sought for our good, but not loved as our Good” (L 76). Astell elaborates, in the Letters, the “Design of Friendship” entailed by an occasionalist metaphysics (L 144).

Within the context of occasionalist metaphysics, the relationship that friendship entails only serves as a means to a higher goal: love of the divine. Astell does concede that “the Soul of our Neighbor has the most plausible Pretence to our Love, as being the most Godlike of all the Creatures”; nonetheless, she affirms that it cannot supply “our Wants” or “be the proper Object of Desires” (L 133). The very “Boundlessness of Desire” of human love is for Astell “a plain indication” that such desire “was never made for the Creature,” for there is nothing “in the whole Compass of Nature that can satisfie Desire” (L 131). Man may be the most Godlike of creatures, but in the metaphysics inherited from Norris, there is no resemblance between the divine and human to countenance the love of the creature. Astell, probably troubled by the Biblical conception of man created in the image of God (a seeming proof text against Malebranchian occasionalism), returns to that scriptural notion, and nonetheless affirms that those “that bear the nearest Resemblance to our Maker” are simply “dearest Idols” (L 213). The occasionalism of the Letters thus undermines what Erica Harth describes as an earlier cultural sensibility informed by the “mediation of resemblance” characterized by “metaphorical and analogical thinking,” and licensed by the conviction of the link between spiritual and material realms.13 In the occasionalist metaphysics of the Letters, the principle of resemblance, so characteristic of the earlier Renaissance sensibility which asserted correspondence between divine and physical realms has been completely erased. As such, the creature—always revealing its insufficiency as a proper object of love—comes only to emphasize the need for the understanding of the philosophical priority of the exclusive love of God. The “Tyes” that had “glewed” us to the world, Astell writes, are broken—revealing, in her stark metaphysics of friendship, the creaturely friend as a mere idol of the divine (L 265).

Indeed, Astell’s own friendships (or rather their failure) become for her, the experiential context in which she comes to recognize the centrality of the love of God. Admitting that “none ever love more generously then I have done,” she nonetheless attributes what she calls “ungrateful Returns” to “the Kindness” of God whom she refers to as her “best Friend.” Seeing “how apt my Desires were to stray from him,” Astell continues, God orchestrated the “frequent Disappointments” of friendship to have her “learn more Wisdom” rather than let loose her “Heart to that which cannot satisfie” (L 49–50). The very persistence of desire in Astell (which so many critics have noted) leads her to understand friendship not as the proper realm for the fulfillment of that desire, but rather as the means for its re-direction to the divine. Thus, she attributes the failures of her friendships to the ostensible “kindness” and “wisdom” of God who disciplines his creatures in the requisites of divine love. How often, Astell asks, “do we force the Almighty to deprive us of these dear Idols that have usurped our Hearts?” For Astell, the idol of friendship is tolerated by God, only “so he may convince us how improper it is to permit our Souls to cleave to any Creature, which [though] allowing it to be able to entertain us at present, can give no Security for the future.” The “Crosses and Disappointments,” as Astell adopts the language of martyrdom to the realm of friendship,

show us experimentally since we will not sufficiently attend to what Reason suggests, the Emptiness and Unsatsifactoriness of all created good, that so we may more directly pursue, and inseparably cleave to the uncreated. (L 182–83)

Love of the divine emerges, in Astell’s merging of the discourses of empiricism and martyrdom, out of the always failed experiment entailed through connection to the creature. Unmoved by the precepts of reason alone, only the failure of human love leads, painfully, but necessarily, to the divine. This ideal of friendship is realized, paradoxically, through its absence: “Our Kindness,” Astell writes, when “he [sic] no longer returns it is the more excellent and generous, because more free.” Though Astell concedes that “it can’t be called Friendship when the Bond is broke on one side,” she affirms that there may be a “most refined and exalted Benevolence on the other” (L 146). Friendship in the context of occasionalist metaphysics, then, does not provide fulfillment, but only a consciousness of that lack which human friendship always entails—the requisite precursor for a true love of God.

The rehabilitation of love for the divine as a philosophical principle only comes, however, through Astell’s more elaborate articulation of the differences between love of the creature and love of God. In Letters, Astell associates the desire for the creature and created world with the degraded realm of fancy and imagination, and the love of God with rationality and philosophical rigor. That is, Astell, like many of her Tory and High Church compatriots, would borrow the distinction between truth and imagination so prominent among avatars of Enlightenment, to associate the former with a philosophical love of God, and the latter with the degraded love of the creature.14 Within this framework, human friendship functions properly only in its failure—a source of censure and correction, presupposed not on a mutuality of shared feeling, but on a distance—even a withdrawal tending towards martyrdom. Already in her 1689 collection of verses, Astell had referred to “Enemies” as her true friends, since they act as “Monitors,” telling her of her “faults,” thus serving as “Benefactors” whose “spurs” come to “correct and mend.”15 To be sure, the emphasis on the importance of c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• I “Dreading to Engage Her”: The Critical Reception of Mary Astell
• II Mary Astell, Religion, and Feminism: Texts in Motion
• III Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), and the Anglican Reformation of Manners in Late-Seventeenth-Century England
• IV Astell’s “Design of Friendship” in Letters and A Serious Proposal, Part I
• V Mary Astell and John Locke
• VI Mary Astell’s Law of the Heart
• VII Religious Nonconformity and the Problem of Dissent in the Works of Aphra Behn and Mary Astell
• VIII “Great in Humilitie”: A Consideration of Mary Astell’s Poetry
• IX “Tis better that I endure”: Mary Astell’s Exclusion of Equity
• X Mary Astell on the Causation of Sensation
• XI Astell, Cartesian Ethics, and the Critique of Custom
• XII Are You Experienced?: Astell, Locke, and Education
• XIII “Cry up Liberty”: The Political Context for Mary Astell’s Feminism
• Select Bibliographies
• Index