Priority Monism in Anne Conway: Mediation through the Whole

There are passages of Conway’s Principles that treat all of creation as one integrated substance, but others that treat creation as constituted by indefinitely many substances. Recent work attempts to assuage the tension between these possibilities by arguing that Conway is a priority monist about creation, while other work has pushed back on this position, holding that Conway is better interpreted as a straightforward pluralist. In defense of the priority monist reading, this paper entertains a radical thesis: that Conway’s Christ is the most fundamental created substance of which all other created substances are proper parts. On this reading, Christ is identical to the whole of creation, despite Conway’s commitment to substantial distinction between Christ and creatures on the basis of their mutability. While creatures are mutable for better and worse, Christ is only mutable toward the good. Since the proposed view identifies Christ with the mereological totality of created beings, it holds that the world is perpetually increasing in goodness, though any of its parts may intermittently deteriorate.