The Place of God: Dutch Philosophical and Theological Debates in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Once he has established the separation of the two substances, Descartes seems to be no longer interested in the location of spiritual substances, unless he has to localize the human mind in the pineal gland or discuss the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is only in his correspondence with Henry More that he is forced to address this problem, in a debate that links the question of the infinity of the universe and the omnipresence of God. Even if they received little attention in Descartes’s published output, however, both questions became the central theme of the Dutch controversies over Cartesian philosophy: this was one of the issues, in fact, over which the followers of Voetius and Cocceius were opposed. This intra-confessional controversy is underpinned not only by a different evaluation of Cartesian philosophy and the relationship between philosophy and theology, but also by the need to refute Socinian theses about the presence of God in the world. Our case study can also help to show how the appropriation and transformation of a philosophy can be extremely creative when taking place in a cultural context other than the original environment.