Astell, Mary

The Christian Religion… attempts (1) to show how religious belief can and should be grounded in reason, (2) to determine the roles of reason and revelation, (3) to encourage women to examine Christian doctrines rationally, and (4) to examine the obligations that determine Christian practice. Towards these ends, Astell critically evaluates Archbishop Tillotson's sermons, Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity, Masham's A Discourse Concerning the Love of God, and the anonymous Ladies' Religion. In place of the Socinianism and scepticism she finds there, she offers her own rational accounts of revelation and Christian practice, which frequently rely on substantive metaphysical arguments. For example, in addition to an ontological argument for God's existence, Astell offers a cosmological argument that turns on a 'causal likeness principle' different from that of Descartes. Her argument is vulnerable, none the less, to the well-known criticisms of Descartes' version. She also offers a two-part argument for the immortality of the human mind: first she argues for the immortality of immaterial things, and then offers a 'real distinction' argument to prove that the mind contains none of the properties of extended matter. Her Platonic first argument bears a striking resemblance to that of Leibniz for the 'natural indestructibility' of monads: A Being is Mortal and Corruptible, or ceases to Be, when those Parts of which it consists… are no longer thus or thus United…. Hence it follows, That a Being which is Uncompounded, which has no Parts, and which is therefore incapable of Division and Dissolution, is in its own Nature Incorruptible…. If then the Mind be Immaterial, it must in its own Nature be Immortal.