The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were cold and violent through much of Europe; Jacques Caillot’s 1633 depiction of “the miseries of war” remains shocking even today. They were also times of social and political transformation. Absolutist monarchs on the continent waged wars and consolidated their powers, and in England there was a revolution. By the last decades of the seventeenth century the political structure of Europe had changed substantially. So had the social order and its ideological underpinnings.
The Medieval world had cultivated transcendence, which, as interpreted from the pulpit, served to justify the social and political order, but that way of life and its religious framing had lost the quality of the given along with much of its intellectual and emotional power. Orientations which had formerly been shared and taken for granted now needed to be reconstructed (or constructed for the first time), made into individual possessions, and justified rationally. Yet thinking remained within an essentially Medieval problematic; any acceptable order had to rest on the firm foundations of the divine. That is why the intellectual climate of this period looks like a Gramscian interregnum, a time of morbid symptoms.[i] All kinds of cosmological theories were advocated and all forms of attunement to the purported operations of the cosmos were tried out. Christian scholars started studying the Kabbalah. Hermeticism, alchemy, magic, and the art of memory all seemed worthy of attention, and for a few years, at least, there were hopes for what Frances Yates, the great scholar of these currents, called a “Rosicrucian Enlightenment.”
To us these seem like occult fantasies, but they did not look that way to contemporaries. God was anything but dead, and celestial mechanics, physics, politics, ethics, and much more, led back to fundamentally theological questions. To address any one of these topics was to make statements about the others, and thus there was an air of plausibility to any theory that proposed connections among disparate fields or inquiries.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century we can see something close to contemporary science. But this was no straightforward triumph of secularization. The age’s greatest scientist, Isaac Newton, was in fact deeply, if eccentrically, religious, and his theories had been shaped by a specific theology and helped to underwrite specific beliefs about the relationship between the divine and the human, a specific image of the human subject, and a specific form of political order.
It was also not the only model on offer at the time. Newton’s contemporary and frequent rival Leibniz had his own. These came head-to-head in 1715 and 1716, in a series of letters between Leibniz and Newton’s associate, the Reverend Samuel Clarke. Their celebrated correspondence pits two incompatible notions of cosmic order against each other, and Clarke, at least, assumed that this was also a contest between two incompatible notions of social order.
Newton’s vision was of independent entities, adrift in an infinite expanse, who were subject to the will of a transcendent God and to the laws of nature which He had ordained. In Steven Shapin’s words, “Newton’s God was an active force in the cosmos, continually ordering, sustaining, and disposing.”[ii] The inherent instability in his celestial mechanics, which required periodic intervention to keep the orbits of the planets from collapsing, was not a flaw. It was a proof of divine governance.[iii]
Leibniz, too, was a theist, but he objected to Newton’s abstract and infinite space and to the discrete beings within it. He wrote to Clarke, “I have said more than once that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time is—that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.”[iv] Those coexistences were also interactions, for everything depended on everything else, and thus what was real was a complex of acts and influences; space and time had no reality in themselves but were implied by the spacial and temporal aspects of those interactions.
In Clarke’s eyes, however, this had strong political implications. Leibniz seemed to make the order of things self-sustaining or, worse yet, self-generating, and that, Clarke worried, could lead to the rejection of all legitimate authority:
“If a king had a kingdom in which all things would continually go on without his government or interposition, or without his attending to and ordering what is done in the kingdom, it would be to him merely a nominal kingdom, nor would he in reality deserve at all the title of king or governor. And … whoever contends that the course of the world can go on without the continual direction of God, the Supreme Governor, his doctrine does in effect tend to exclude God out of the world.”[v]
Leibniz, of course, denied that this was “merely a nominal kingdom:”
“It is just as if one should say that a king who should originally have taken care to have his subjects so well educated, and should, by his care in providing for their subsistence, preserve them so well in their fitness for their several stations and in their good affection toward him, as that he should have no occasion ever to be amending anything among them, would be only a nominal king.”[vi]
But this was not really an argument about theological issues. As Shapin points out, Leibniz—who was hoping, in vain, to accompany his Hanoverian employer to England—failed to see that his cosmology resembled the ideas of certain “elements within English society whose notions of political order were dangerously threatening”[vii] to those of power and influence.
Leibniz’s misfortune was that he had found himself in the middle of a specifically British controversy, debating with the best-known and best-placed of the controversialists. Samuel Clarke was not just Newton’s friend and a scientifically literate clergyman, he was also a leading defender of religious, philosophical, and political orthodoxy, delivering many of the lectures endowed by Robert Boyle to prove “the Christian religion against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans.” Among those “Infidels” were the freethinkers of early eighteenth-century England, some of whom saw sentience as a property of matter and others who advocated “a full-blown pantheistic materialism.”[viii] In a public exchange of letters from 1708 and 1709 Clarke had attacked Antony Collins, who had suggested that consciousness was indeed inherent in matter, and a few years earlier he had taken on the Letters to Serena by the Irish philosopher, political theorist, and theological gadfly John Toland. It may well have been Toland’s radically relational image of nature, not Leibniz’s, which troubled Clarke the most.
Leibniz saw the physical world as made up of relations, but spirit alone was sentient, and that is why he needed the doctrine of pre-established harmony. Only God could ensure that the reciprocal interplay of material reality was exactly paralleled by the inner lives of windowless monads. All the activities of the material world, then, had to have been charted out in advance by an omniscient deity; its order only appears to be self-generated.
For Toland, though, this was not appearance but reality. He had met and disputed with Leibniz—not impressing the older man—and he agreed with him about the relativity of space and time and the non-existence of the Newtonian void, but, as he wrote to the Queen of Prussia, he rejected Leibniz’s pre-established harmony,[ix] and in the fifth and last of the Letters to Serena he evoked a reality which was entirely action and transformation. Everything was imbued with activity, and what appeared to be an object at rest was merely a stand-off between opposing local manifestations of that activity.[x]
For Toland, as for Leibniz, there was no vacuum or void. But there were no parts, either, and no bodies. In an image close to Wittgenstein’s in the preface to the Tractatus, Toland cautioned his reader that there is a “world of other words [like ‘Body’ which] are invented to help our Imagination, like Scaffolds for the Convenience of the Workmen; but which must be laid aside when the Building is finish’d, and not be mistaken for the Pillars or Foundation. … What we call Parts in Matter, may be prov’d to be but the different Conceptions of its affections, the distinctions of its Modifications; which Parts are therefore only imaginary or relative, but not real and absolutely divided.”[xi] The entire letter is a cogent expansion of what Toland had written to the Queen of Prussia:
“… [S]ince substance, reality, or the universe is infinite, its continuity (so to speak) is never really divided, and consequently there are no independent parts of matter. Particular bodies are only mentally divided from universal extension by their modifications, which themselves, however, are nothing real, but only relative to us and to our way of conceiving things.”[xii]
Ideas like these seem to be uncanny anticipations of German idealism.
Toland’s materialism is consistent with Collins’s argument that matter itself could be sentient, and that is indeed where he was headed. In a late work, the Pantheisticon, or, the Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society, he asserts that “From that Motion and Intellect that constitute the Force and Harmony of the Infinite Whole, innumerable Species of Things arise,” and so, too, do ideas. All ideas “are corporeal,” but since the universe is “Intelligent also. … [t]he Ethereal Fire environing all Things” excites “various Imaginations” and “duly executes all the Machinery of Conception, Imagination, Remembrance, Amplification, and Diminution of Ideas.”[xiii] Our thoughts are no more separate from the business of the universe than are our physical acts.
Toland was careful to keep his real convictions private, if indeed he had any, but his ideas could be read to leave no room for God at all. He insisted that his philosophy “only excludes, what all reasonable and good Men must exclude, an extended corporeal God, but not a pure Spirit or immaterial Being.”[xiv] But that Spirit seems as unnecessary as the real but inactive gods of Epicureanism, and an anonymous critic of the Letters to Serena saw the danger at once:
“What Mr. Toland therefore superadds to Spinoza’s Scheme, is this. He makes Motion to be essential to Matter ; i. e. he makes Matter to be self-moving ; whereby we may suppose that he intends to supply all the Defects of Spinoza’s Hypothesis : i. e. Make the World without a God.”[xv]
And a world without a God was a world without a political authority. Clarke knew, of course, that Leibniz was a good Christian, but he wrote as if the philosopher’s ideas inevitably launched one down a slippery slope to deism and even atheism, and this “would erode the whole system of obligations and sanctions that kept a hierarchical social order in place.”[xvi] Toland was probably the proof of that danger.
What may have troubled him just as much, though, was that the relational cosmos called to mind some of the radical currents of the civil war era, which were political and religious at the same time. The Digger Gerrard Winstanley has been a hero of the Left ever since the late nineteenth century, when Eduard Bernstein published a book on “socialism and democracy in the great English revolution,” but his Marxist fans have tended to overlook the theological roots of his social thought. God, whom Winstanley often called “Reason,” “is the life of the whole creation, by whom every creature doth subsist.”[xvii] “The whole Creation of fire, water, earth and air, and all the varieties of bodies made up thereof, is the clothing of God,” and “he is in all things and by him all things consist.”[xviii]
Winstanley saw the England of the seventeenth century full of sin, but for him the manifestations of sin were as much environmental as they were social and ethical:
“For the Ayre and Earth is all poysoned, and the curse dwels in both, trough mans unrighteousnesse . … Now this mighty sprituall man of righteousnes, Jesus Christ, doth purify humane flesh again; and so restoring the head first, doth new-spirit the Creation, and brings all into order again; taking away the bitternesse and curse, and making the whole Creation to be of one heart and one Spirit.”[xix]
To live as God intended is to act so “that the Creation may be upheld and kept together in the spirit of love, tendernesse, and one-nesse, and that no creature may complaine of any act of unrighteousness and oppression from him.”[xx] It was to live and till the soil together, knitting Creation back together through common labor, and even revolutionary change could be God’s will: “The spirit of the whole creation (who is God) is about the reformation of the world, and he will go forward in his work.”[xxi]
Strikingly, Winstanley’s vision of oneness looks forward to Toland’s “Force and Harmony of the Infinite Whole” and back to Hildegard’s vision of god “concealed in things as fiery energy:”
“And I am life: not the life struck from stone, or blossoming from branches, or rooted in man’s fertility, but life in its fullness, for all living things have their roots in me.
Whatever grows and matures … deviates in no way from the power within.”[xxii]
Hildegard’s understanding of divine power as “greenness,” or viriditas, as Michael Marder stresses*,*[xxiii] could fit within the discourse of her time, because her world nurtured a shared engagement with the transcendent and could see itself as interwoven with God’s order; there was an essential harmony between individual acts and feelings and a global or divine process. Once this engagement was undermined, though, that harmony could only be recreated or abandoned. Winstanley hoped it could be rebuilt through collective attunement to and participation in the whole of creation, and Toland’s likely-imaginary “Socratic society” was meant to achieve it though an embrace of absolute relationality, but it could also be left behind as a dangerous delusion. Humanity was then reimagined on the Newtonian model, as a congeries of independent and autonomous beings who were subject to an external order which could regulate the war of each against all.
That second option won out, but it created its own problems: where would that order come from, and what was the source of its legitimacy? In the age of the English Civil Wars the most notable philosophical response to these problems had been that of Hobbes, with his all-powerful sovereign. But more than half a century before then, as John Bossy wrote, “almost everything … conspired to enforce the conception that the proper description of sin was disobedience—disobedience to God, Church, king, to parents, teachers, and authorities in general.”[xxiv] And for a more enlightened era the Newtonian cosmology was a useful model. It was seen as a support to royal power in the treacherous decades from the Restoration through the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, not least because it taught the necessity of compliance with the law from above. What it could not do, however, was link one individual with another, or with the cosmos in which they happened to find themselves. The split between self and world was written in the stars and planets; we all stood facing one another in the midst of the void, and if God were to quit the scene that void would truly be empty.
I was recently sharing some of these thoughts with a very bright high school physics major, who reminded me that no astrophysicist today is a Newtonian; his model is valid only under certain limiting conditions. She was right, of course. But Newton’s cosmos has had a much longer life as an image of human reality. Physicists no longer think within the Newtonian model, at least in their professional lives. In their social and political lives, though, they—like the rest of us—are still living inside of it.
Notes:
[i]As Philip Oltermann has recently pointed out in the Guardian, Gramsci did not write that this was a time of monsters: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/the-time-of-monsters-everyone-is-quoting-gramsci-but-what-did-he-actually-say
[ii]Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), p. 192. Anyone who has read this essay will recognize my debt to Shapin.
[iii]Laplace was to eliminate this necessity by more detailed and sophisticated calculations.
[iv]Third letter to Clarke, in Roger Ariew, ed., G.W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke: Correspondence. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), p. 14.
[v]Clarke’s first reply, in Ariew, p. 6.
[vi]Leibniz’s second letter, in Ariew, p. 10.
[vii]Shapin, p. 201.
[viii]Shapin, p. 198.
[ix]John Toland, tr. R. Francks & R.S. Woolhouse, Remarques Critiques sur le Systême de Monsr. Leibniz de l’Harmonie préetablie (1701). The Leibniz Review, Vol. 10 (2000), pp. 103-111.
[x]John Toland, Letters to Serena. (London: Bernard Lintot, 1704), pp 173, 198.
[xi]Ibid., p. 174, 173.
[xii]Remarques Critiques, p. 124.
[xiii]John Toland, tr. Anon., Pantheisticon, or, the Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society. (London: Samuel Peterson: 1751), pp. 16, 24, 22-23.
[xiv]Letters to Serena, p. 236.
[xv][William Wotton,] A Letter to Eusebia: Occasioned by Mr. Toland’s Letters to Serena. (London: Tim. Goodwin, 1704), p. 48.
[xvi]Shapin, p. 211.
[xvii]Gerrard Winstanley, Truth Lifting Up its Head Above Scandals. (London: Giles Calvert, 1650), p. 2.
[xviii]Fire in the Bush, in Christopher Hill, ed., Winstanley: ‘The Law of Freedom’ and Other Writings. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 219.
[xix]Truth Lifting Up its Head, p. 12.
[xx]Ibid., p. 8.
[xxi]The Law of Freedom in a Platform, in ‘The Law of Freedom’ and Other Writings, p. 276.
[xxii]*“*A Vision of Love,” from The Book of Divine Works, in Hildegard of Bingen, tr. Mark Atherton, Selected Writings. (London: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 172-173.
[xxiii]Michael Marder, Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021).
[xxiv]John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 135. Foucault’s “disciplinary society” could not have developed without this much earlier transformation.
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