Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 34

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same kind of substance as all other creatures) can become part of another type of
creature entirely, an unthinkable idea within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy.9
The affinity between von Helmont and Conway encompassed wider political
issues, in addition to similarities in their philosophical approaches. In particular, they
both had a great interest in the universalist project of bringing all people, including
pagans and Jews, into the fold of Christianity. Such a desire was not unusual for the
time, but what was unusual were the steps van Helmont and Conway were willing to
take to bring about mass conversion, jettisoning some of the more controversial
aspects of Christianity and adopt a more liberal interpretation of others in order to
make the Christian faith as palatable as possible to people of other faiths. As
inspiration for this project, they turned to Jewish Kabbala texts, which at the time
were thought to be ancient and containing wisdom stemming from the time of
Moses.10 On the principle that older texts contain deeper truths (a principle which
would be applied in the following century to religious and philosophical texts coming
out of Asia), some Christian thinkers hoped that the Kabbala could be used to
confirm the truth of the essentials of Christianity and bring about the conversion of
pagan and Jewish believers. More had shared such hopes, but came to realise the
threats to orthodoxy inherent in these texts.
Conway and van Helmont, though, do not seem to have been as worried
about orthodoxy. One of the ways in which Conway seeks to show an affinity
between the Kabbala and Christian doctrine is through her account of the creative
role of Christ, an intermediate substance between God and creatures. Conway
equates Christ with the Kabbalistic notion of the Adam Kadmon, “the great priest, the
husband or betrothed of the church… the first-born son of God”,11 which the “most
learned Jews” subscribe to.12 The reason why even Jews have a Christ-like figure
as part of the content of their religious beliefs is that the necessity of the existence of
such a mediating figure is as certain as the necessity of God’s existence. Once one
reflects upon the nature of