The Love of God and the Radical Enlightenment: Mary Astell's Brush with Spinoza

The essay argues that Mary Astell’s support of the theocentric philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche embroiled her in the fray of anti-Spinozism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.  Because of her dawning awareness of contemporaries’ associations of Malebranche’s occasionalism with the Spinozist doctrine of one substance, Astell retracted her previous endorsement of this theory in 1694.  When contemporaries briefly turned the accusation of Spinozism against Locke and his followers in the early 1700s, however, Astell felt free to return to a support of Malebranche.