In this largest section of the correspondence, Oldenburg returns, after an interval of ten years, to write or receive ten letters (61, 62, 68, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, and 79), concerned primarily with the TTP and the reaction to it in England. We also meet a new correspondent, a young German nobleman, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, whose questions about the Ethics, which he has seen in manuscript form, give us the most significant discussion of that work in the correspondence. If we count the five letters to or from Schuller as being part of the Spinoza-Tschirnhaus correspondence,1 Tschirnhaus was the author or recipient of fourteen letters (57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 72, 80, 81, 82, and 83).
Less frequent correspondents are often reacting, with considerable hostility, to the TTP.2 Van Velthuysen writes a long, unfriendly critique of that work (Letter 42), to which Spinoza replies irritably (in Letter 43).3 But from Letter 69 it appears that in the end Spinoza and Van Velthuysen came to be on friendly terms.4 There’s no evidence that the correspondence between Spinoza and Albert Burgh had such a happy ending. Burgh was a former admirer of Spinoza, who had converted to Roman Catholicism, and wrote him a most intemperate letter (Letter 67), apparently trying to get Spinoza to convert also. It’s difficult to see how any rational person could have thought such an insulting letter would be persuasive. Spinoza’s reply (Letter 76) is sharp, but under the circumstances, a model of restraint.
There is a similar, though markedly more moderate, letter from Nicholas Steno to Spinoza (Letter 67bis). Steno too had been a friend of Spinoza’s when he lived in the Netherlands, and Spinoza apparently had a high regard for his scientific work. He was also a friend of Burgh’s in Florence, around the time of the exchange between Spinoza and Burgh.
The correspondence with Jelles in this period (Letters 44, 48A and B, 50 and 84) is of interest as illustrating the range of friends Spinoza had. On the one hand we have Adriaan Koerbagh, a radical freethinker, whose critique of Christian orthodoxy landed him in the prison where he died. On the other hand, we have Jelles, a very liberal Protestant no doubt, but still firmly committed to Christianity as he understood it. This edition gives a somewhat fuller picture of Jelles’s views than has previously been available in English.
Arguments adduced by Fokke Akkerman (1980, 272–73) make it seem quite likely that the letter addressed to an unnamed friend, which has long appeared last in modern editions of Spinoza’s correspondence, but which, in the OP and NS, was printed as a preface to the Political Treatise, was in fact addressed to Jarig Jelles. This edition proceeds on the assumption that Akkerman is right.
Some of the letters are primarily of biographical interest. Leibniz’s letter to Spinoza (Letter 45) seems intended to strike up a conversation about the TTP. Apparently it did. Unfortunately, all we have of their correspondence, which was apparently more extensive than that, is Letter 45 and Spinoza’s reply (Letter 46), which focuses on the optical questions Leibniz had raised. Similarly, the letter from Fabritius to Spinoza (Letter 47), offering him a chair at the University of Heidelberg, shows that some people in positions of power in Germany thought it would be a good thing if Spinoza held a chair of philosophy there. But why they thought this, and why Spinoza declined the offer, are a mystery. More about these matters below.
The most substantial remaining correspondence is the entertaining exchange about ghosts between Spinoza and Hugo Boxel (Letters 51–56). Perhaps not many readers of this edition will find Boxel’s defense of the existence of ghosts persuasive, but the correspondence does illustrate that Spinoza could be quite patient with correspondents who differed from him very fundamentally.
In the long time since they last corresponded, Oldenburg’s attitude toward Spinoza has changed. No longer is he encouraging boldness. Now his message to his friend is: caution—your work gives the initial impression of being harmful to religion—on reflection I can see that you are really trying to advance the cause of Christianity—but you need to make your purpose clearer.
For his part Spinoza makes no attempt to prove himself a Christian. But he is acutely sensitive to any suggestion that what he has written might undermine what Oldenburg refers to as “the practice of religious virtue” (Letter 62). He insists that his work doesn’t do that, that his determinism—which he formulates in Letter 75 as the doctrine that everything follows necessarily from the nature of God—is no more a threat to morality than the determinism he finds expressed in the Christian scriptures, such as Paul’s letter to the Romans, where we are all said to be in the power of God as clay is in the power of the potter.5
But, Oldenburg asks, won’t this imply that no one will be without excuse in the sight of God, contrary to other things Paul said in Romans?6 Spinoza replies that if a man is unable to restrain the desires which make him a danger to others, he may indeed be excusable for being what he is. It would make no more sense for God to be angry with him for that than it would for someone to be angry with a horse for being a horse (Letter 78, IV/327). But Spinoza thinks it’s a mistake to ascribe emotions like anger to God in any case. The essential point is that it doesn’t follow from the causation of the wicked man’s actions that we can’t treat him as we must, if we are to eliminate the danger he poses.7
Oldenburg’s concerns about the religious implications of the TTP lead to some useful probing of Spinoza’s views, and shed light on things which in that work Spinoza had left obscure—deliberately obscure, it sometimes seems. In the Editorial Preface to the TTP we considered the clarification which emerges about Spinoza’s statement that God’s wisdom assumed a human nature in Christ. Spinoza rejects any interpretation of this statement which would commit him to the doctrine of the dual nature of Christ, as being both fully human and fully divine.8
Oldenburg was upset. The gospels state quite clearly that “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). The Word was God (John 1:1). So if the gospels speak the truth, God must have become flesh. That is, he must have assumed a human nature. Oldenburg does not attempt to explain how this view is coherent. But he does want to know how Christianity can be true, if these statements in the gospels are not true. What becomes of our redemption, if the son of God, a wholly innocent human sacrifice, wholly innocent in spite of being human, but capable of excruciating suffering in spite of being God, did not atone for our sins by his suffering on the cross (Letter 74, IV/310)? The doctrine that Christ redeemed us from our sins, according to orthodox theology, required the doctrine of the incarnation.
Gradually Spinoza is drawn out. He says that he accepts Christ’s passion, death, and burial literally. If a non-believer had been present, he would have witnessed the same thing believers witnessed. But, he says, he can accept Christ’s resurrection only if it is understood allegorically. If any non-believers had been present at the post-crucifixion appearances, they might not have witnessed what believers witnessed. No doubt the evangelists believed that the resurrection was just as much an historical event as the crucifixion was. But they may have been deceived about this. And they may have been deceived, without harm to the teaching of the gospel.
What is important about the gospel teaching, Spinoza insists, is its moral message: we must love God and our neighbors, we must be just, and we must do whatever else follows from these fundamental commandments (cf. TTP xii, 37). It is not necessary to believe in the literal truth of what the gospels relate as history. It is not necessary, as he puts it in one place, “to know Christ according to the flesh” (Letter 73, IV/308). It is sufficient if we know him according to the spirit (that is, as I would understand it, if we have learned the moral lessons he taught, TTP v, 46, III/79), and believing that God, out of his mercy and grace, pardons men’s sins, are therefore more inspired to love God (TTP xiv, 28, III/178).
In this section of the correspondence we also encounter a new friend, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708), who later became an important contributor to mathematics and published an art of discovery—the Medicina mentis (Medicine for the Mind)—which showed Spinoza’s influence.9 Oldenburg was responsible for introducing Tschirnhaus to Leibniz, who saw great potential in the young man:
In sending Tschirnhaus to us, you have served me as a friend, for I take great pleasure in his company, and detect in this young man a remarkable intelligence, on which we may base great hopes.10
Tschirnhaus in turn later tried to act as an intermediary between Spinoza and Leibniz, seeking permission from Spinoza to let Leibniz see a manuscript copy of the Ethics, which Spinoza was then willing to circulate only among a limited circle of trusted friends (Letter 70).
Spinoza’s correspondence with Tschirnhaus is dominated by questions about human freedom, philosophical method, the infinite modes, and the relation between the attributes. Of particular interest are Spinoza’s defense of his position regarding human freedom (Letter 58), his explanation of the distinction he makes between truth and adequacy (Letter 60), his response to Tschirnhaus’s query about our knowledge of attributes other than thought and extension (Letter 64), the examples he gives of infinite modes (also in Letter 64), and his assertion (in Letter 66) that each thing is expressed in infinite ways in the infinite intellect of God, with the infinitely many ideas by which it is expressed constituting infinitely many minds. This claim prompted Tschirnhaus’s reaction that in this way the attribute of thought seems to be regarded as more extensive than the other attributes (Letter 70), a reaction which I believe is appropriate, however much it may seem to violate our preconceptions about the “parallelism” of the attributes.11
Schuller (1651–1679) was a compatriot of Tschirnhaus, who had come to the Netherlands in the 1670s to study medicine at the University of Leiden. Eventually he practiced medicine in Amsterdam. On his involvement with Spinoza, and in particular, in the publication of the Opera posthuma, see Steenbakkers 1994, 50–63.
The brief correspondence between Leibniz (1646–1716) and Spinoza, though disappointing philosophically, is of considerable biographical interest. Leibniz writes late in 1671, nearly two years after publication of the TTP, ostensibly to get Spinoza’s opinion about matters in optics, but probably with the ulterior motive of drawing him into a discussion of the TTP. Spinoza replies about the optical issues, and reciprocates receipt of Leibniz’s paper by offering to send him a copy of the TTP. No extant letters between them address any philosophical issues. What we would very much like to know is what Leibniz said to Spinoza about the TTP, when he subsequently wrote to him on that topic (as we know he did), and what Spinoza might have said in reply (if he replied, which we do not know).
Leibniz had read the TTP before he wrote to Spinoza about optics, and believed Spinoza was its author. We know this from his correspondence with other German philosophers. From that correspondence we also know that he was very concerned about that treatise, and hoped someone would refute it, though he himself did not feel up to the task.12 His real motives for the inquiry about optics were almost certainly to elicit from Spinoza confirmation of his authorship of the TTP and to draw him into an exchange about the argument of that work.
He succeeded, in part at least. By offering to send Leibniz a copy of the TTP, Spinoza tacitly acknowledged authorship. From Letter 70 we know that at some point Leibniz wrote to Spinoza about that work. But we don’t have his letter, and can only speculate about its probable contents.13 We also don’t know what Spinoza replied, or even if he replied. We do know, from Letter 72, that though Spinoza was impressed by what he knew of Leibniz, he didn’t quite trust him, denying Tschirnhaus permission to let Leibniz see the manuscript of the Ethics.14 For his part, Leibniz was evidently quite upset when the OP identified him by name as the author of the innocuous Letter 45.15 We may lack Leibniz’s correspondence with Spinoza about the TTP because he did not want it to become known. I conjecture that in an attempt to elicit a response from Spinoza, he paid Spinoza compliments on the TTP which he did not wish to be generally known. Chances that the lost correspondence will someday turn up do not seem good.
Another indication of the reputation the TTP brought Spinoza is the invitation he received in 1673 to teach at the University of Heidelberg. Here too, not everything in the correspondence is what it seems to be. In Letter 47 J. Ludwig Fabritius (1632–1697), a Calvinist professor of theology at Heidelberg, writes on behalf of Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine, to offer Spinoza a chair of philosophy. The Elector devoted his long reign (1648–1680) to rebuilding a principate devastated by the Thirty Years War, and was attempting to restore his university to its former eminence. Fabritius says he had not known Spinoza until this occasion, and that the Elector is making the offer because others (unnamed) have recommended Spinoza to him very highly.
One person who recommended Spinoza—the only one we know to have done this—claimed later that the Elector and he knew Spinoza only as the author of the exposition of Descartes. Urbain Chevreau, an expatriate French Catholic who advised the Elector on such matters, wrote in his memoirs that he had spoken
very advantageously of Spinoza, although I knew this Jewish Protestant [sic] only through the first and second parts of the Philosophy of M. Descartes. The Elector had this book, and after I had read him a few chapters of it, he decided to invite him to the University of Heidelberg, to teach philosophy there, on the condition that he not dogmatize.16
That condition—stated in somewhat different terms than we find in Fabritius’s letter17—would seem necessary only if Spinoza were known to be the author of the highly controversial TTP. There would be much less reason for it if he was known only as the author of the exposition of Descartes. Wolf conjectured, plausibly, that Chevreau’s account of these events may have been “intended to exonerate him from the charge of having recommended a heretic to an important post.”18
It’s evident from the Leibniz correspondence that there was considerable discussion of the TTP in Germany and that Spinoza’s authorship of it was well-known in academic circles (Curley 1990a). It’s hard to believe that Karl Ludwig and his advisors knew nothing of Spinoza’s having written this work. Wolf thought the Elector may have found the TTP’s “spirit of undogmatic toleration” congenial to his project of bringing about a union of the reformed churches. Walther has suggested that he may have made the offer to Spinoza, because he was the author of the TTP, not in spite of that fact (Gebhardt/Walther 1986, 357–58).
However that may be, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Fabritius made Spinoza an offer which he hoped and believed Spinoza would refuse. He had read the TTP in 1671. So it is not true that he had not known Spinoza previously. At that time he is reported to have said: “I shudder when I see that such unbridled license is allowed to state publicly whatever comes to (one’s) mind, and to blaspheme so openly against the Christian religion itself and Holy Scripture.”19 His statement to Spinoza that the Elector believed he would not abuse his freedom to philosophize to the disadvantage of the established religion looks as though it’s intended to discourage Spinoza from accepting the offer. Apparently it did.20
Still, the concluding paragraph of Letter 48 is quite surprising. Up to that point Spinoza had seemingly rejected the offer of the chair quite unequivocally, not just because of his concerns about freedom of expression, but also because he was afraid that the obligation to teach would interfere with his research. But then he asks for more time to deliberate! Was he just being polite? Or would he have been more receptive to an offer which gave him a less ambiguous assurance of his freedom to philosophize? Might he have accepted a renewed offer if it had been suitably revised? We can only wonder.
After these matters of academic politics are six letters (Letters 51–56) which passed between Spinoza and Hugo Boxel, fondly remembered for their bizarre dialogue about ghosts. Boxel was a legal scholar from Gorinchem, and a political figure of some importance in his native town.21 He is sure that ghosts exist and cites a host of authorities to support this proposition. But he wants to know Spinoza’s opinion. Spinoza is skeptical. Boxel has had a bad press, and his position is not easy to take seriously these days. But though he may accept a lot of stories we now reject, he does try to distinguish between credible and incredible sources, emphasizing the ones he thinks are credible. Those inclined to think Boxel just a fool should read Thomas 1971, a classic attempt to explain how such phenomena as astrology, witchcraft, prophecies, ghosts, and fairies, “now all rightly disdained by intelligent persons,” could be “taken seriously by equally intelligent persons” in the early modern period. (See especially ch. 19 in Thomas.)
We have a replay here of the exchange between Spinoza and Blyenbergh in Volume I, though Boxel seems more sophisticated and intelligent than Blyenbergh. One significant feature of the correspondence between them is Spinoza’s rejection, toward the end of Letter 56, of the authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. He attaches great weight, though, to the opinions of the atomists: Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius.
AHW comment (481) that Lambertus van Velthuysen (1622–1685) challenges Spinoza as fiercely as he does precisely because his own position is as close to Spinoza’s as it is. As a defender of the new philosophy (both of Descartes and of Hobbes),22 who nevertheless would not stray as far from orthodoxy as Hobbes did, Van Velthuysen no doubt felt the need to distance himself from Spinoza. But he certainly agreed with one of the TTP’s most Hobbesian conclusions: though individuals have the right to think what they will, the state has the right to determine what the official state church can teach by public authority.
To twenty-first-century readers, this will no doubt seem an illiberal position. But that may betray a lack of historical perspective. In the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, which had given official status to the Reformed Church during the war for independence from Spain, putting the decision about what that church would teach in the hands of the regents, who were generally more interested in political and economic considerations than in taking a hard line on the fine points of theology,23 surely led to more freedom of thought and expression than would have been allowed under the only viable alternative, which would have been for a synod of Calvinist ministers to decide what might be taught in the state church.24
Though a friend of the new philosophy, who agrees that it’s important to cast off prejudices which cannot be supported by reason, Van Velthuysen is not nearly as radical as Spinoza. He opposes Spinoza’s necessitarianism, complains that (as he supposes) Spinoza identifies God with the universe,25 is distressed by Spinoza’s rejection of God as a lawgiver, who will dispense appropriate rewards and punishments in the afterlife, and is concerned that Spinoza represents the prophets as using arguments based on false assumptions about God, which they sometimes shared, and sometimes used only because seeming to share their audience’s prejudices would promote good conduct. It is pleasant to learn from Letter 69 that, in spite of their differences, Van Velthuysen and Spinoza eventually established amicable relations.
The story of Spinoza and Albert Burgh has a different arc. Burgh (1651–?) was the son of Conrad Burgh, Treasurer General of the Dutch Republic. Reportedly, he studied Latin with Van den Enden, and philosophy at the University of Leiden in the late 1660s. While in Leiden he is supposed to have become a friend and admirer of Spinoza’s. But then, on a visit to Italy in 1673, he converted to Catholicism.26 In Letter 67 he tries to persuade Spinoza to follow the same path. Spinoza’s reply to Burgh (Letter 76) is quite sharp, and quite revealing about his attitude toward the principal organized religions of his day: he thinks they are all false, to one degree or another, but that they all contain ethical teachings which deserve to be encouraged. There is no evidence that they ever reconciled. I’ve analyzed this exchange in Curley 2010.
Modern editions of the correspondence generally contain the letter (Letter 67bis) Nicholas Steno (1638–1687) addressed to Spinoza—not by name, but as “The Reformer of the New Philosophy”—and published in Florence in 1675. Steno was a Danish scientist, distinguished both in anatomy and in geology. Between 1660 and 1663 he studied physiology at the University of Leiden, where he and Spinoza became acquainted, and where it appears that Spinoza attended some of the dissections for which Steno became famous.27 When he became a Catholic in 1667, he gave up science for religion, took holy orders (1675), and was soon made a bishop (1677). There is a remark by Leibniz, widely quoted, which suggests that he did not approve of Steno’s decision: “From being a great physicist he became a mediocre theologian.”28
There seems to be no reason to think that Steno ever sent his letter to Spinoza, and we have no record of any reply from Spinoza. This may be the reason why it was not included in the OP or NS. Kardel reports that Steno had written his letter and showed it to Burgh before Burgh wrote to Spinoza, and that he decided to publish it only after seeing Spinoza’s reply to Burgh (Kardel 2013, 334–37).
Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro (Spruit/Totaro, 6–26) have recently shown that in the summer of 1677 Steno acquired a manuscript copy of the Ethics—apparently from Tschirnhaus—and that after reading it, he passed it on to the Holy Office in Rome, urging that Spinoza’s works be put on the Index. After investigating, the Church first banned the TTP (November 1678), and then the Ethics, TP, and Letters (February 1679). However, the Church did preserve Steno’s manuscript of the Ethics in the Vatican Library, where Spruit and Totaro recently located it. As a result we have a pleasing irony: we owe our only manuscript copy of Spinoza’s Ethics to an attempt to suppress it.
Finally, in this section of the correspondence there are at least three letters Spinoza sent to his friend Jarig Jelles—Letters 44, 48B, and 50—and one Jelles sent to Spinoza (48A). If Akkerman is right (1980, 272–73), as I believe he is, Letter 84 should also be counted among the letters Spinoza wrote to Jelles. Jelles was among the group who arranged for the publication of the Opera posthuma. He also wrote, in Dutch, a preface to those works which was published in De nagelate schriften and which Lodewijk Meyer translated into Latin for the Opera posthuma.
Jelles was a Collegiant, and a close friend of Spinoza, who in 1673 wrote a Profession of Faith which he sent Spinoza for comment, receiving a very brief, but (so far as we can tell) generally supportive response. We don’t have Jelles’s original letter of 1673, or much of Spinoza’s reply. But we do have a version of his Profession which Rieuwertsz published in 1684, after Jelles’s death the preceding year. Because of the length of the 1684 version (174 pp.), editors of Spinoza’s correspondence have never included it in its entirety. But since AHW’s edition of the correspondence (1977), it has become customary to include an abstract of it, now generally known as Letter 48A. I have made a fuller abstract of it than has been available previously.
Jelles has a pretty traditional conception of God as a personal creator, who always acts for the best. (Not very Spinozistic.) He can accept the Johannine idea that Jesus was co-eternal with God, and was God, not holding merely that he had a sanctifying and life-giving spirit in him. (Not very Spinozistic.) He believes that the whole Christian religion is epitomized in two commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. (Very Spinozistic.) He believes that men don’t love God or their neighbors as they should partly because they don’t know God, but partly also because they have irrational desires they can’t control. (Very Spinozistic.) By the time he writes the final version of his Profession he believes that men are born without the love of God which would enable them to overcome their anti-social passions, but not that they are born naturally evil. It appears from Letter 48B that in the 1673 version of his Profession, Jelles held a more traditional position on original sin, but that Spinoza persuaded him to abandon it, in favor of a position to which Spinoza would have had no objection. Finally, Jelles believes that we can be redeemed from sin through Jesus, if his teachings come to guide our lives. (Again, very Spinozistic.)
Given the extent of Spinoza’s probable agreement with the version of the Profession published in 1684, it’s not surprising that he made little objection to the version of 1673. But in evaluating his response, we must keep in mind that we don’t know in any detail how much the letter Jelles sent him in 1673 may have differed from the published letter which has come down to us. At the end of the 1684 version Jelles asked two questions: (i) is there anything in my Profession which you think is false or contrary to Holy Scripture? and (ii) is someone who builds on this foundation, and tries to live according to it, a Christian? Because we don’t know the 1673 version of the Profession—and in particular, don’t know precisely how Jelles formulated the question(s) he posed to Spinoza—it’s impossible to know just what to make of the letter whose contents are reported in the fragments now generally known as Letter 48B. But the material and the questions it poses are extremely interesting.
The letter from Spinoza to Graevius (Letter 49), despite its brevity and lack of philosophical content, is of some biographical interest: it shows that Spinoza had some degree of friendly relations with a Utrecht professor who in his correspondence with Leibniz denounced the TTP as “most pernicious” and who had spread the word that Spinoza, identified as a Jew excommunicated from the synagogue because of his wicked opinions, was thought to be its author.29 In spite of this hostility, Graevius does seem to have played a role in arranging for Spinoza’s mysterious visit to the French army headquarters in Utrecht in July 1673. On this see Van de Ven 2015.
For the correspondence between Spinoza and Oldenburg in this section our primary source is the OP (supplemented by the NS, which prints Dutch translations of every letter whose Latin original is in the OP). There is one letter (79) which the OP editors omitted, presumably because it was their policy not to include letters Spinoza did not reply to. We know this letter because it was preserved in the Orphanage of the Mennonite Collegiants.
Letter 61, from Oldenburg to Spinoza, is Letter 17 in the OP. Since their last correspondence, each had apparently made unsuccessful attempts at communication. Spinoza had sent Oldenburg a copy of the TTP, which apparently never reached him. Oldenburg had written to thank him for this, in a letter which also seems not to have reached its destination. How Oldenburg would have known to thank Spinoza for a book he supposedly never received is a puzzle for which I have no solution.
In any event, Oldenburg did somehow procure a copy of the TTP, read it, and sent Spinoza his opinion of it, in the lost thank-you letter mentioned above, which we know about from the mention of it in Letter 61. That letter was apparently critical of Spinoza’s work as seemingly harmful to religion. By the time he writes Letter 62 (18 in the OP), he has apparently moderated his opinion of the TTP. But he has also heard, in another letter now lost, of Spinoza’s plan to publish the Ethics, and his opinion of Spinoza has apparently not changed enough for him not to be worried about what might be in that work. Letter 68 (19 in the OP) replies to Letter 62, telling Oldenburg about his self-censorship of the Ethics, and asking why the TTP might have made him worry about the Ethics.
Letter 71 (20 in the OP) begins a dialogue about Christianity which will continue to the end of their correspondence. In Letters 73–75, 77, and 78 (21–25 in the OP) it gradually becomes clear that Oldenburg has been upset by the TTP without realizing how radical it really is. This is partly because Spinoza is apt to appropriate doctrines from the Jewish and Christian traditions which bear a superficial similarity to his own views, and partly because the TTP deliberately conceals some of his disagreements with orthodox Christian doctrine, as we learn from Letters 75 and 78.
For Letters 73, 75, and 78, we have, in addition to the OP and NS versions, copies of Spinoza’s letters to Oldenburg, which Leibniz made when he visited London. Textual variations which we owe to Leibniz’s copies are indicated by the abbreviation LC. Gebhardt prints these in the lower half of the page, but they do not have much importance for the establishment of the text. Leibniz’s copies don’t often differ from the OP text, and in only one case (IV/326/25–26) do they seem to have a better reading. I treat the OP version as the default text, with a note indicating those places where it differs significantly from Leibniz’s copy. For discussion of the textual issues, see Akkerman 1980, 45–47.
Most of the letters between Spinoza and Tschirnhaus are known only from the OP (and NS). Letter 57 is Letter 61 in the OP; 58 is 62 in the OP, and so on (59 = OP 63, 60 = OP 64, 63 = OP 65, 64 = OP 66, 65 = OP 67, 66 = OP 68, 80 = OP 69, 81 = OP 70, 82 = OP 71, and 83 = OP 72). The exceptions are Letters 63, 70, and 72, which are known also from autographs. The originals of Letters 63, 70, and 72 are in the possession of the Orphanage of the Mennonite Collegiants, and were first published in 1860 by Van Vloten.
Letter 42 (48 in the OP) is the longest of the letters in Volume II. To make navigation in the text easier I’ve introduced in brackets the paragraph numbers of the OP. Because some of Van Velthuysen’s paragraphs are quite long, I break them up into smaller, unnumbered units. The bracketed OP paragraph numbers show what the original paragraphing was. The NS version includes a note where Spinoza comments (perhaps unfairly) on Van Velthuysen’s letter. See IV/210/32, and the note thereto. Van Velthuysen’s position on the interpretation of Scripture is roughly that of Maimonides and Meyer: reason is the interpreter of Scripture.
Letter 43 (49 in the OP) suggests that Spinoza may have thought Van Velthuysen intended Letter 42 for publication, a hypothesis encouraged by its length.30 It appears from Letter 69 that subsequently Spinoza contemplated the possibility of publishing Letter 42 (or some revised version of it) together with his own reply.
For Letter 43 I translate the autograph version, which Gebhardt prints in the bottom half of the page. Gebhardt preferred the OP text because he thought Spinoza himself had revised his letter for publication in the OP. Following Akkerman (1980, 38–40), I reject that theory. Apart from the interesting passage translated in n. 3 (which Gebhardt gives in his Textgestaltung, p. 412), the differences between the two versions are slight. I assume Akkerman’s emendation of Gebhardt’s corrigito to conijcito on Gebhardt 421.
Letter 69 did not appear in the OP or NS. The original was first published in 1844, in a lithographic facsimile, by Prof. H. W. Tydeman, in the Utrechtse Volks-Almanak. It was subsequently lost.
Letter 44 is Letter 47 in the OP and NS, our only sources for these letters. I take the NS version as the copy-text, and note variations in the OP version. I treat Letter 50 (which is also Letter 50 in the OP and NS) similarly. For a discussion of the issues these letters raise, see the Editorial Preface to Letters 29–41.
Letters 48A and 48B are very special cases. As mentioned previously, in the spring of 1673 Jelles wrote to Spinoza summing up the views he felt committed to as a Christian, and inviting Spinoza’s comment. This letter was not included in the OP or NS. No letter from Jelles to Spinoza was included, even though Jelles was one of the editors of the posthumous works. After Jelles’s death his friend Jan Rieuwertsz published a version of it in 1684. Wolf was familiar with the 1684 version when he published his translation of the correspondence in 1928. By the 1950s and 1960s, however, Mme. Thijssen-Schoute was reporting that the only known copy was missing. When AHW published the first edition of their translations of the correspondence in 1977, they were able to report that it had been found (AHW, 16), and they published the introduction and conclusion of the letter, omitting its central part, and dubbing these extracts Letter 48A. Subsequent editions of the correspondence (Dominguez, Walther, Shirley) have followed their example.
In 2004 Leen Spruit published a modern edition of the Dutch text of the letter of 1684, with an Italian translation on facing pages (Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004). That is the text I have relied on for my translation of the excerpts from this letter included here. But unlike previous editors, I have undertaken to make an abridgment of the central portion of Jelles’s letter, on the theory that knowing more of what Jelles said will help us to better appreciate Spinoza’s response.
Apparently no one now living has seen the 1673 version of the letter. I know of no evidence that it was nearly as long as that of 1684, and there is some reason to think it may have been much shorter. See the annotation to Letter 48B. What we now call Letter 48B is not, in fact, a letter, but a collection of reports on Spinoza’s reaction to (the 1673 version of) Letter 48A, which all purport to quote from a letter (now lost) which Spinoza wrote to Jelles in April 1673. The first comes from a postscript Jan Rieuwertsz the elder added to Jelles’s letter when he published it, and presumably quotes Spinoza reliably (Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004, 232). The second comes from Bayle’s Dictionary article on Spinoza: §1 from the main body of the article (Bayle 2001, 528), and §2 from Remark Y (Bayle 2001, 595–96). I would conjecture that insofar as Bayle reports Spinoza’s opinion of Jelles’s letter, he is depending on Rieuwertsz’s postscript, and has not actually seen the letter (which he seems to think, falsely, was written in Latin). But his report is interesting in spite of this. The third comes from the travel journal of a Dr. Hallman, who interviewed Jan Rieuwertsz the younger, the son of Spinoza’s (and Jelles’s) publisher, when he visited the Netherlands in 1704.31 It is not easy to reconcile Hallman’s report with the first two reports.
On the theory I accept, that Jarig Jelles is the unnamed friend to whom Spinoza wrote Letter 84, the original of that letter would surely have been written in Dutch. Akkerman has suggested that Lodewijk Meyer is likely to have translated the original into the Latin version of the OP, and that seems a reasonable hypothesis. Akkerman does not assume that the Dutch of the NS necessarily reproduces an unaltered version of the original letter. He suggests that Meyer or Jelles might have made some revisions in the original for the publication in the NS. (We know from Letter 19 that as late as 1665 Spinoza did not feel entirely comfortable writing in Dutch.) But in the absence of a verifiable original, it seems that the NS version is as close to the original as we are likely to get. So that is what I have translated.
The correspondence between Spinoza and Boxel (Letters 51–56, which are Letters 55–60 in the OP and NS) was conducted in Dutch, and for the most part what holds of the other letters written in Dutch for which we have no original, holds for these letters. See the discussion in the Editorial Preface to Letters 29–41, p. 8.
The exception is Letter 53 (57 in the NS). For a long time we had a copy of the original of this letter, apparently made by the seventeenth-century editors of Spinoza’s works. This copy was destroyed in World War II, but not before Freudenthal and Gebhardt had made copies from it (AHW, 529–30). Gebhardt reproduces that copy in the bottom half of the page, below the Latin version of the OP. AHW reproduce this copy, but emend (by appeal to the NS) some passages where it had been damaged. I translate AHW’s text, which is very similar to that of the NS. The marginal page numbers are from Gebhardt’s version of the copy, which he prints in the lower half of the page. The only other letter in the Boxel correspondence for which Gebhardt gives the NS version is Letter 52. He takes the absence in that letter of Latin terms in the margins to indicate that (contrary to what he thinks is Spinoza's normal practice) Spinoza did not translate the Latin version back into Dutch, and that the NS version thus gives us what he originally wrote. Akkerman 1980 argued persuasively against Gebhardt's theory that Spinoza had generally translated his Dutch letters into Latin for the OP, and then translated them (from the improved Latin versions) back into Dutch for the NS. He allows that the NS versions have probably been reworked somewhat, but by the editors, not Spinoza. I proceed on the assumption that the NS versions are probably closer to the original than the Latin of the OP, and should be the default text for translation, with potentially ineresting variations in the OP noted. This has the inconvenience in the correspondence with Boxel that when Gebhardt does not give us the NS text—as he does not for Letters 51 and 54–56—my marginal page and line numbers are those of the Latin text. Before long, I expect, we will probably have a new critical edition of the correspondence which will give the NS versions of these letters. In the meantime readers worried about unreported differences can procure a copy of the NS through UMI Books on Demand
Letter 67 is Letter 73 in the OP, the generally preferred source for translation, since the letter was originally written in Latin. In one passage comparison with the NS translation suggests an improvement in the text: at IV/285/14. For Letter 67bis the ultimate source is the original publication in Florence in 1675, which was reprinted in a facsimile edition in volume I of the Chronicon Spinozanum.
Letter 76 (Spinoza’s reply to Burgh) is Letter 74 in the OP. In addition to the NS translation, we have a copy made by Leibniz, sent to his patron, the Catholic Duke of Hanover, Johan Friedrich, in 1677, with an interesting cover letter, commenting on Spinoza’s reply to Burgh (Leibniz, Akademie edition, II, i, 301–3). There is a detailed and valuable study of this letter by Piet Steenbakkers (Steenbakkers 2005), which argues, among other things, that the Leibniz copy and the NS version are not independent of one another. This diminishes the possible significance of passages where they agree against the OP text. My default text is the OP. The passages where the Leibniz copy and the NS show more text than the OP seem to be signs of carelessness on the part of the OP compositor.