Imagining Immanent Causality: Depictions of Neo-Confucian and Spinozist Monism in the Works of Matteo Ricci and Pierre Bayle

This article focuses on the philosophical content of images used to depict immanent causality and monism in Pierre Bayle's refutation of Spinoza's system and Matteo Ricci's dialogue The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven. It will be shown that monism was problematic for both authors because it challenged the Aristotelian understanding of efficient causality by implying an immanent causal relation, in which the agent and the patient were substantially identical. On a more general level, the question wanting to be addressed is why exactly monism or pantheism was deemed an unacceptable philosophical position. It is only when we look at the imagery employed to expose the allegedly absurd implications of the monist worldview that we begin to understand the kind of single-substance world to which the Early Modern authors reacted.