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Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion Archives Internationales D'histoire Des Idees 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 vii 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.
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