1. Mersenne 1624. The deists Mersenne attacks in this treatise hold that there is a God and an afterlife, but add that if God is good, he will not want his creatures to suffer eternal torment, and that if he is just, he will not punish them for sins he foreknew they would commit. Since the Christian scriptures appear to be committed to eternal punishment for sins they present God as foreknowing, this led the deists to deny that these scriptures embody a divine revelation and to hold that those who obeyed the moral law common to the monotheistic religions would be saved, no matter what version of monotheism they accepted. Mersenne interpreted this view as a rationalization of the deists’ desire to live a libertine life. For further discussion, see Curley 2000. Van Velthuysen seems to accept Mersenne’s understanding of deism, and to recognize that Spinoza’s position is more radical than deism.
2. The parenthetical comment alludes to a common argument for free will, according to which God’s giving men commands implies that they have the power to obey those commands or disobey them. Cf. Erasmus 1524, 54–61.
3. A great many interpreters have agreed with Van Velthuysen in reading Spinoza’s metaphysics as identifying God with the universe. Cf. “Spinoza,” Remark A (Bayle 2001, 531). But prima facie Letter 43, IV/223b/22–25, rejects (and resents) that interpretation.
4. The “paradoxical theologian” is Spinoza’s friend Lodewijk Meyer, who argued in Meyer 1666 that reason is the interpreter of Scripture. On Meyer and his relation to Spinoza, see Israel 2001, ch. 11. Some have suggested that Van Velthuysen here misunderstands Spinoza’s position in the TTP, conflating it with Meyer’s (in Meyer 1666). But he clearly understands that Spinoza does not think reason should be the interpreter of Scripture, not only here, but also below, at IV/215/15–22.
5. [Spinoza’s note]: “He is wrong to say this, for I expressly showed that miracles don’t give any knowledge of God, but that [such knowledge] is drawn much better from the fixed order of nature.” [This note, written in Dutch, comes from the NS, and is not in the OP. It’s not clear that Spinoza has cause to complain of what Van Velthuysen says here, or that his response is to the point. Spinoza plainly does hold that if we take a miracle to be, by definition, an event contrary to the laws of nature, there are, and can be, no miracles (TTP vi, 7–12). He goes on to allow that if we take the term “miracle” to mean an event whose natural cause we can’t explain by showing it to be an example of the usual order of things—or at least, an event which can’t be so explained by the person who relates the story of the miracle—there can be miracles (TTP vi, 13–15). But Van Velthuysen clearly has in mind the first definition, according to which Spinoza does indeed deny that miracles occur. Note that Spinoza does not accuse Van Velthuysen of misrepresenting him on this issue when he replies in Letter 43.]
6. The words italicized here are also italicized in the OP, normally the sign of a quotation. They don’t quote exactly any passage in TTP vi, but do seem to be a fair paraphrase of views expressed in vi, 3, and vi, 14.
7. I have been unable to locate passages in which Spinoza makes all the claims about prayer which Van Velthuysen ascribes to him in this paragraph. But he does make some of them in the Preface, §§3–4, and in vi, 49. The rest seem to be in the spirit of his philosophy. Spinoza does not reply on this issue in Letter 43.
8. Perhaps an allusion to the doctrine of original sin, which might be an obstacle to virtue if it was thought to teach that fallen man is so corrupt that he has no power to do good, and therefore need not try.
9. Van Velthuysen may be thinking of Philip II’s effort to repress the Reformation in the territories which revolted against his rule toward the end of the sixteenth century, creating the United Provinces.
10. The date in AHW. Van de Ven Facts dates it between 4 and 17 February.
11. Spinoza’s word here is libellum, which can mean a small book or pamphlet. The length of Van Velthuysen’s “letter” may have encouraged Spinoza to suspect that it was intended for circulation. Cf. Letter 69.
12. At this point the autograph shows a passage Spinoza wrote and then struck out: “for both the cunning and the superstitious and ignorant commonly have an evil intention; however that may be, his insults don’t bother me; I know how men like that are accustomed to treat honest men; so to sum up briefly what I want to show, I’ll note only a few of the many things he’s said. You must draw your own conclusions about the rest.” After he deleted this passage, Spinoza replaced it with Sed ad rem, but to the matter.
13. Cf. IV/207/13, paraphrased rather than quoted exactly.
14. Note that Spinoza does not offer this as a definition of atheism, however much it might articulate a popular seventeenth-century conception of that position. He offers it merely as a general, not universal, characteristic of atheists.
15. Here the words italicized are not italicized in the text. But Spinoza gives what amounts to a direct quotation of IV/207/27–28.
16. Spinoza’s example reminds Van Velthuysen that he too might have been subjected to the same accusation: he was a Cartesian, and Spinoza knows it. (IV/222b/23)
18. AHW add italics to words not italicized in the OP. With slight modification, the words are a quotation of IV/218/33–34.
19. Cf. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy I, 40 (AT 1974–86, VIII-1, 20).
20. Cf. Descartes, Meditation III (AT 1974–86, VII, 49).
21. Cf. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy I, 41 (AT 1974–86, VIII-1, 20).
24. Here Spinoza seems willing to accept the proposition that all things emanate from God, but to deny that it follows that the universe is God, and to regard that inference as “offensive” (odiosus). However, in a remark reported in the Stolle-Hallmann travel diary he may accept the equation: “To the objection that if this Universe is God, then men are parts of God, Spinoza used to answer: God or this Universe is infinite, but the infinite is not a whole, and therefore does not even have parts” (Freudenthal 1899, 223; Gebhardt/Walther 1998, 128).
26. Cf. TTP xii, 34.
27. So if we understand pluralism as the doctrine that salvation is possible in many religions, Spinoza is a pluralist. On this topic, see Letter 76 and Curley 2010.
28. Neither the NS nor the OP gives the name. Wolf, followed by AHW, conjectured that it might have been Theodore Kranen, a Cartesian professor at the University of Leiden, mentioned at the beginning of Letter 67. For more on Kranen, see Meinsma 1983, 475. Johannes Graevius, the addressee of Letter 49, has also been suggested (Meinsma 1983, 392).
29. It’s thought that, in addition to the other support Jelles gave Spinoza, he may also have subsidized this translation. The theory is that that’s why it was Jelles Spinoza wrote to, when he wanted to halt publication of that translation. According to Duijkerius (1991, 195), Glazemaker was the translator. His translation did not appear until 1693, when it was published under the provocative title De rechtzinnige theologant, of godgeleerde staatkundige verhandelinge (The orthodox theologian, or theological-political treatise).
30. Israel 1996 argues that “Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was never freely in circulation, or on sale, in the United Provinces, not even in the first few months after its publication, even though there was no formal ban against the work by the States of Holland until July 1674.” On the initial reaction to the TTP, see also Nadler 2011.
31. Homo politicus, published anonymously in 1664, is generally attributed to Christopher Rapp, Chancellor to the Elector of Brandenburg.
32. One example Spinoza would likely have given was the Roman Republic, portrayed by the historians of its declining days as a state whose fall was due to its corruption by greed and ambition. Cf. Earl 1961, ch. 4.
33. I have been unable to locate a source for attributing this argument to Thales, but its first premise, that friends have all things in common, was already proverbial in the time of Terence. Cf. his Adelphi 803, cited in Letter 2. As Wolf noted, the bracketed clause is present in the OP version but not in the NS. Since it seems necessary for the conclusion Spinoza draws, its absence in the NS is a probably the result of inadvertent omission when the letter was set in type and an indication that the OP translation was done from the manuscript, not from the NS.
34. This story is told (very briefly) in Diogenes Laertius (Lives of Eminent Philosophers I, 26) and much more fully in Aristotle (Politics I, 11, 1259a5ff.).
35. I have discussed Leibniz’s early relations with Spinoza briefly in the Editorial Preface to these letters, and more fully in Curley 1990a. Though Leibniz does not mention the TTP, it’s clear from his correspondence that he had read it, and knew full well that Spinoza was its author. Van de Ven Facts, ch. 9, provides thorough documentation. On the general subject of Leibniz’s relation to Spinoza the work to read now is Laerke 2008.
36. Published in Frankfurt in 1671, and now available in the Akademie edition, VIII, i, 131–36.
37. Franciscus Lana (1631–1687) was a Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics in Rome. His Prodromo was published in Brescia in 1670.
38. This is apparently Johannes Heinrich Ott. See Continuum Companion 2011, 28.
39. Apparently Johannes de Diemerbroeck, a correspondent of Leibniz who lived in Utrecht, not IJsbrand Diemerbroeck, professor of medicine at Utrecht, who condemned Adriaan Koerbagh for his impiety. Cf. AHW, 487 with Meinsma 1983, 383n.
40. Leibniz’s Hypothesis physica nova was first published in Mainz, in 1671, in two parts: The Theory of Abstract Motion (dedicated to the French Academy) and The Theory of Concrete Motion (dedicated to the British Royal Society). Now available in Leibniz, Akademie edition, VI, ii, 219–57. Loemker translated the first part in Leibniz, Loemker, 139–42. He comments that it antedates Leibniz’s Paris period, when “under the particular tutelage of Huyghens, [he first] developed [an] adequate understanding of the issues in modern mathematics and physics.”
41. Though Leibniz’s letter is written in Latin, this address is written in French. In addressing Spinoza as a Medecin tres celebre, Leibniz is identifying him as a scientist, not a medical doctor (Gebhardt/Walther 1986). Evidently Leibniz is misinformed about Spinoza’s address, not realizing that at this point he is living in The Hague.
42. That is, capable of receiving all the rays of light.
43. Cf. Letter 40, IV/200–201.
44. In this paragraph and the postscript I have normalized the treatment of titles. Spinoza’s autographs typically use very little capitalization. Sometimes, but not always, they capitalize the beginning of a sentence; normally they do not capitalize the works in a book title. “Prodromus” is probably capitalized because in the Latin it comes at the beginning of a sentence.
45. The signature, address, date, and postscript were omitted in the OP. I take Spinoza’s offer to send a copy of the TTP to Leibniz to be a tacit acknowledgment of his authorship. Leibniz had read the TTP over a year earlier, as we know from a letter to Jakob Thomasius, his former teacher at the University of Leipzig, praising Thomasius’ critique of Spinoza’s work (23 September 1670, Akademie edition, II, i, 66). Johannes Graevius had reported to him that Spinoza was said to be the author of this work (12 April 1671, Akademie edition, I, i, 141–43), a report he sometimes accepted (to Thomasius, 21 January 1672, II, i, 205; to Graevius, 5 May 1671, I, i, 148) and sometimes expressed doubt about (to Von Holten, 17 February 1672, II, i, 208). This is only a small selection of the references to Spinoza’s work in Leibniz’s correspondence, as the indices of these Akademie volumes will show. Perhaps significant is that Leibniz typically referred to Spinoza’s work as a book “On the liberty of philosophizing.”
46. Karl Ludwig (1617–1680), the son of Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart, thus the nephew of Charles I of England and the brother of that Princess Elizabeth who was Descartes’ correspondent, not (as incautiously reported by some editors) the brother of his patron, Queen Christina of Sweden). He grew up in the Netherlands, studied at the University of Leiden, and spent time at the English Court in the 1630s and 1640s. He became Elector Palatine as a result of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. For more details, see the Editorial Preface, pp. 362–64.
47. An “ordinary” professorship was the equivalent, in German academic life, of what we call a full professorship.
48. Perhaps an allusion to the way the subject of the TTP was commonly designated by Leibniz and his correspondents.
49. On the history of this letter, see the Editorial Preface, pp. 367–68.
50. What we have up to this point is Jelles’s introduction to his Profession. What follows is an abridged version of the Profession, omitting the passages from Scripture which he used to justify his affirmations. The affirmations themselves are generally quotations or paraphrases of scriptural passages, predominantly from the New Testament, with a strong emphasis on the letters of Paul, and the gospel of John. The section numbers which I have put in brackets are not in the text as Spruit presents it.
51. From Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004, 12–24.
52. From Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004, 26–48.
53. From Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004, 50–58.
54. From Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004, 60–64.
55. From Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004, 66–70.
56. From Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004, 72–124.
57. At this point—a little over halfway through his text [Jelles/Spruit 1684/2004, 124]—Jelles concludes his Profession, and begins a long discussion divided into four sections: I. An affirmation of the orthodoxy of his Profession; II. On the meaning and interpretation of Holy Scripture, with a refutation of the Catholic position on this subject; III. What the saving faith in Christ really is, and how justification, sanctification, liberation, etc., are consequences of it; and IV. On the saving grace of Christ Jesus, and on its irresistible power. I omit these sections of the work and proceed to his concluding paragraphs.
58. According to Dr. Hallman’s report, Spinoza replied to Jelles’s letter on 19 April 1673. So it seems a reasonable guess that Spinoza received his letter early in that year.
59. On the provenance of these reports, see the Editorial Preface, pp. 371–72.
60. This is rather surprising, since Bayle usually identifies Spinoza as an atheist, e.g., in the first paragraph of his Dictionary article on Spinoza, with elaboration in Remark A (Bayle 2001, 525, 531). But then in Remark I, he quotes Kortholt as reporting that Spinoza declared himself to be a Christian, that he attended Reformed or Lutheran services, and that he often encouraged others to do the same.
61. The italicized words are in Latin (and in italics) in what is otherwise a French context. Essentially they translate into Latin the French Bayle has just used to report Spinoza’s view. This gives the impression that the Latin provides the source, in Spinoza’s letter, of the French just quoted. But any letter Spinoza wrote to Jelles would have been in Dutch, not Latin.
62. Wolf 1966 noted that no statement like the one here criticized appeared in the printed text of Jelles’s Profession, and conjectured that Jelles subsequently omitted that statement in response to Spinoza’s objection. AHW (490) agree that Jelles probably modified what he had said, but also suggest that Hallman may have meant to refer, not to p. 5 of the manuscript but to what is §5 in the printed Profession, where Jelles discusses man’s corruption, though not in a way which might have prompted Spinoza’s comment.
Another possibility which deserves consideration is that the version of Jelles’s Profession Spinoza saw in 1673 was much shorter than the published version. We have no way of knowing how much the original letter may have changed in the ten years between Jelles’s sending it to Spinoza and his death. But if the scriptural quotations justifying his positions were a later addition, then the document he sent Spinoza in 1673 would have been much shorter than the one published in 1684, and his discussion of human corruption might have occurred much earlier, perhaps as early as p. 5 of the manuscript.
63. Dirck (or Theodor) Kerckring (1639–1693) studied Latin with Spinoza’s teacher, Van den Enden, and medicine at the University of Leiden, around the time Spinoza was in Rijnsburg. In 1671 he married Clara Maria van den Enden. According to Colerus, Spinoza competed with Kerckring for Clara Maria’s hand, though many are skeptical of this. Clara was only thirteen when Spinoza was twenty-five, perhaps a bit young to marry even in those days. Cf. Nadler 1999, 108–9. Kerckring used lenses ground by Spinoza in his microscopes, and Spinoza possessed two of the books which resulted from his medical research.
64. Apparently this was the title of a book, but nothing seems to be known about it.
65. Mertens has identified “Mr. Vallon” as Dr. Jacob Vallan (1637–1740), who studied philosophy at Leiden, and received a medical degree there in 1658. He practiced medicine in Amsterdam, and with Lodewijk Meyer was a director of the City Theater in Amsterdam in the late 1660s. It is thought that he came to know Spinoza either through Meyer or Johannes Bouwmeester, who also studied medicine at Leiden around the same time. In 1675 he became a professor of anatomy at Leiden. See Mertens 2011.
66. Apparently Hendrik van Bronckhorst, a Cartesian and a doctor, who wrote the poem praising Spinoza which was used at the beginning of the Dutch translation of his exposition of Descartes.
67. The letter concerning Descartes’ death was apparently written by Johannes a Wullen, an Amsterdam doctor living in Sweden, to W. Piso, a doctor in Amsterdam, on 1 February 1650. According to Wolf, Wullen alleged that Descartes was “wholly to blame for his death, because he did not consult a doctor when he first became ill, and would not accept Wullen’s services when, at the request of the Queen of Sweden, he visited Descartes and offered to treat him. To crown it all, Descartes resorted to excessive blood-letting when he was too weak, in consequence of having taken no nourishment for several days” (Wolf 1966, 445).
68. We don’t know who “Mr. de V” was, but speculation has focused on Burchard de Volder.
69. The OP has a more formal greeting, which might be translated “Most Esteemed Sir.”
70. NS: Stat (= modern Stad = city). So OP: Urbs. AHW note that Spinoza probably meant to write Staat (= Civitas = state). This is probably evidence that Spinoza did not do the Latin translation himself.
71. NS: bevat. OP: percipere, perceives. But when bevat recurs at IV/240/32, the OP translates it: concipere.
72. The Utrecht professor was Reinier van Mansvelt (1639–1671), a Cartesian whose Adversus anonymum theologo-politicum liber singularis was published in Amsterdam in 1674. In spite of what Spinoza says about not buying his book, a copy was found in his library after his death. Perhaps someone gave it to him.
73. Both the OP and the NS have a series of dots here, indicating an omission. AHW suggest “professors” or “booksellers” as possible ways of filling in the blank.
74. The NS have “2 May 1671,” which can’t be right, given the mention of Van Mansvelt’s book. The OP has 2 June 1674, which AHW accept.
75. NS: verschijningen en nachtgeesten, of spoken. OP: apparitionibus, & Spectris, vel Lemuribus. Neither Boxel, nor Spinoza, nor whoever translated their correspondence into Latin, seems able to settle on a stable terminology to refer to these supposed creatures. So I give both the Dutch and the Latin in my notes.
76. Here I follow the OP. The NS reads: zo gy niet ontkent dat zy’er zijn, gy ook niet gelooft dat enigen van de zelfden zielen van gestorve menschen zijn, which would be translated: “if you don’t deny that they exist, you also don’t believe that some of them are souls of dead men.”
77. NS: nachtspoken, of geesten. OP: . . . vel Lemures. It appears that a word has been omitted in the OP.
78. NS: nachtspoken, grillen, en inbeeldingen. OP: Spectra, phantasmata, ac imaginationes.
79. NS: spoken. OP: Spectris.
80. NS: nachtspoken. OP: Spectra.
81. NS: spoken. OP: Spectra.
82. NS: spooken, of geesten. OP: Spectra vel Spiritus.
83. NS: geesten en nachtsproken. OP: Lemuribus, Spectrisque.
84. Added from the OP version of the letter.
85. No date in the OP or NS. AHW suggest these dates.
86. The italicized phrase is in Latin in an otherwise Dutch context.
87. By this I take it Boxel means no heavenly body which is not a source of light, but (like the planets and their satellites) shines only with reflected light.
88. Johannes Wierius (also called Weyer), a sixteenth-century Dutch physician, believed in the power of demons, but was skeptical of many of the stories about the occult. He opposed the persecution of witches, arguing that those accused of witchcraft were mentally ill. His On Ghosts (1577) was one of many books he wrote on this and related topics.
89. Ludwig Lavater was a sixteenth-century Swiss Reformed theologian whose work on ghosts (De spectris, lemuribus et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus, Leiden, 1569) was one of the most frequently printed demonological works of the early modern period.
90. Gerolamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century mathematician and astrologer, whose formulation of the elementary rules of probability made him a pioneer in the field. Wolf describes his De Subtilitate Rerum (1551) and De Rerum Varietate (1557) as attempts to explain natural phenomena in a way which was “highly creditable for that period” because of its commitment to the inviolability of the laws of nature.
91. Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), a leader of the Lutheran Reformation in Germany.
92. Here and elsewhere in the next few lines Gebhardt’s version of the Dutch text has gaps which can be filled on the basis of the NS. The others are not as consequential as this one.
93. Alexander ab Alexandro (1461–1523) was an Italian jurist who published his Dies Geniales in 1522.
94. Petrus Thyraeus was a sixteenth-century German theologian who published his De apparitionibus spirituum in 1600.
95. This paragraph is crossed out in the copy and does not appear at all in either the OP or the NS. Neither the OP nor the NS versions of Letter 52 contain a passage in which Spinoza says he cannot commend Boxel to God without smiling. Probably Boxel had concluded Letter 51 by commending Spinoza to God, in a passage deleted by the editors, and as a result the editors also deleted the passage in Letter 52 in which Spinoza responded.
96. Wolf, perhaps misunderstanding Gebhardt’s annotation, reported that this paragraph, like the one preceding it, did not appear in the OP, and the Hackett editors, perhaps following Wolf, made the same claim. But in fact it is there (and in the NS).
97. The OP, as is typically the case, is more flowery: Amplissime Vir, (say) most distinguished sir.
98. Name omitted in NS. OP: memoratus Consul, the burgermeister you mentioned.
99. Neither the OP nor the NS gives a date, but this date can be inferred from the opening of the letter.
100. OP: Acutissime Vir, Most Acute Sir.
101. From the OP.
102. Cf. Aristotle, 196b10–197a5, 1025a14–29.
103. A work commonly known by its Latin title, De placitis philosophorum, and traditionally included in editions of Plutarch’s Moralia, though now rejected as spurious.
104. De genio Socratis, in Plutarch, Moralia VII, 361–509 (LCL, 1984).
105. Spurina was the augur who warned Caesar to beware the ides of March. See Suetonius, “Life of Caesar,” lxxxi.
106. Date suggested by AHW.
107. NS: by de tast gaan. OP: multa ex conjectura facere, doing many things on the basis of conjectures.
108. Sextus does not say quite this in any writing which has come down to us, and indeed, says the opposite in Against the Physicists I, 310. (See Akkerman in AHW, 494.) He does, however, use certain paradoxes about the nature of wholes and parts to deny that there are such things as wholes and parts (Outlines of Pyrrhonism III, 98–101; Against the Physicists I, 338–49). Spinoza may have thought that claim entailed a rejection of the geometric axiom. Or he may be citing Sextus from memory, and misremembering the passage. Sextus’ works do not appear in our catalogue of the books in his library.
109. I take this to count strongly against interpretations of Spinoza’s metaphysics according to which he was not committed to there being more than two divine attributes. The most notable recent advocate of this view is Bennett 1985, 75–79.
110. NS: iemant van d’Atomisten, of stellers van onzichtbare deeltjes. OP: aliquem ex Atomistis, atomorumque defensoribus, one of the Atomists and defenders of atoms. Akkerman 1980, 55–56, conjectures that the NS gloss on atomisten is an editorial interpolation.
111. What Diogenes Laertius reports (on the authority of Aristoxenus—see his Lives of the Philosophers IX, 40) is that Plato wanted to burn all the writings of Democritus, but that two Pythagoreans prevented him, arguing that Democritus’s works were already too widely circulated for suppression to be feasible.
112. The date is suggested by AHW.
113. The OP does not explicitly indicate any omission of text, but “at least” suggests that some portion of Tschirnhaus’s letter to Spinoza has been omitted (perhaps by Schuller, perhaps by the OP editors).
114. AT 1974–86, VI, 2: La puissance de bien juger, et de distinguer le vraie avec le faux . . . est naturellement egale en tous les hommes.
115. OP: Quis enim mihi negaret . . . quod non possum in meis cogitationibus cogitare. As various editors have observed, the OP has one negation too many.
116. Tschirnhaus does not identify the edition of Descartes’ correspondence he is using, but since he apparently did not know much French (Letter 70), he is unlikely to have used a French edition of the correspondence. There is a Latin edition which is a good candidate: Descartes 1668. In that edition Letters VIII and IX are the letters Descartes wrote to Elisabeth on 6 October and 3 November 1645 (AT 1974–86, IV, 304–17, 330–34). Each discusses free will. If this is right, that would make the third letter the one Descartes wrote to Reneri for Pollot (the second letter in Part II of that edition, pp. 3–10, = AT 1974–86, II, 34–47).
117. Jan Rieuwertsz (the elder), an Amsterdam bookseller, who published all of Spinoza’s works and Glazemaker’s translations of the works of Descartes. His shop was a meeting place where those who challenged received opinions could discuss their ideas. For further details, see Meinsma 1983 passim.
118. The bracketed material is supplied from Tschirnhaus’s Letter 57, IV/262/22–27.
119. Spinoza’s language is close, but not identical, to that in E I D7.
120. Cf. E II P35S, III P2S.
121. Another allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses VII, 20–21, which is thematic for Part IV of the Ethics. Euripedes attributed a similar sentiment to the heroine of his Medea (1078–80), but the context was very different (not the decision to betray her father by helping Jason steal the golden fleece, but the later decision to avenge Jason’s betrayal of her by killing their children). See AHW, 496.
122. This is not quite what Descartes says in the Fourth Meditation, where in the end he makes freedom consist, not in our ability to do either A or not-A, but in our feeling that we are not determined to do what we do by any external force—or, depending on the placement of the negation, in our not feeling (not being aware?) that we are determined by an external force. Cf. AT 1974–86, VII, 57–58. Spinoza’s critique of Descartes in E II P35S seems to depend on the latter reading. But Descartes’ letter to Elisabeth of 3 November 1645 seems to make freedom depend on our awareness of our independence (without, however, explaining how our independence is consistent with God’s infinite power). For a helpful survey of the issues and texts, see Jayasekera 2014.
123. Cf. Letter 57, IV/263/27–31. Note that the superfluous negation in Tschirnhaus’s letter is missing from Spinoza’s paraphrase.
124. Cf. Letter 57, IV/264/6–7, quoted slightly freely.
125. Cf. Descartes, Principles I, 39–41. Also relevant is the Letter to Elisabeth of 6 October 1645 (AT 1974–86, IV, 314).
126. Date suggested by AHW.
127. It’s clear from this letter that Spinoza had discussed with Tschirnhaus at least some of the content of the TdIE, and had led him to anticipate the publication of that work in some form. AHW (496) suggest that the rest of the letter shows a familiarity with the contents of TdIE 96ff.
128. Evidently Tschirnhaus had also seen at least a partial draft of the Ethics. See the physical excursus after E II P13S, II/97/18–102/18.
129. Tschirnhaus apparently assumes that an adequate idea of a (created) thing will satisfy the requirements for a definition of a created thing, laid down in TdIE 96. Cf. II/35/10–28.
130. This is a theorem in Euclid’s Elements, Bk. III, Prop. 35, also referred to in E II P8S. If an adequate idea of a thing is one which provides a good definition of it, then on Spinoza’s principles the idea of a circle as a geometric figure all of whose radii are equal will not be an adequate idea of a circle. Cf. TdIE §95.
131. The ordinates (or applicates) of a conic section are any of the chords perpendicular to, and bisected by, the axis of symmetry of the conic section. They can be used to measure the perimeter or area of a curve. But Tschirnhaus prefers an alternate method, involving the use of tangents. Wolf 1966, 456–57, has an elegant explanation of this.
132. Though Descartes sometimes defines God by listing his attributes (e.g., at AT 1974–86, VII, 40, 45), his preferred definition is that God is a supremely perfect being (AT 1974–86, VII, 46, 162). In Curley 1986 I made a conjecture about the reasons for that preference. Perhaps Spinoza accepted this Cartesian definition in the Short Treatise. So AHW maintain, citing the note attached to KV I, ii, 1. I don’t find this evidence compelling. But certainly by September 1661, in Letter 2, although Spinoza accepts the Cartesian formula as articulating what “we understand by God,” the definition he chooses for his axiomatization is the one he was to adopt in the Ethics. Cf. IV/7/23–8/3. Letter 60 may explain why he made that choice.
133. Date suggested by AHW.
134. Italicized in the OP, but not the NS. So this emphasis may be the work of the OP editors, not a feature of the original letter, which has not been preserved. On Oldenburg’s change of heart regarding Spinoza, see Letter 63, IV/276a, and the annotation there.
135. This letter has apparently not been preserved.
136. The OP and NS omit these first two paragraphs, substituting for them the following sentence, which is also written on the original as an instruction to the printer: “I earnestly ask you to please resolve the doubts raised here and to send us your response to them.”
137. Cf. Aristotle, Prior Analytics II, 14, 62b29–31, where “probative demonstrations” (which start from propositions admitted as true) are contrasted with demonstrations per impossibile (which seek to refute by reduction to a proposition admitted to be false).
138. Wolf (1966, 460) contended that this way of putting things involves “a grave misconception” of Spinoza’s thought. But if Stolle-Hallman’s travel journal may be trusted, Spinoza did sometimes express himself this way (AHW). That journal reports Spinoza as saying: “the world is eternal,” but “there are many worlds” (Freudenthal 1899, 223; Gebhardt/Walther 1998, 128).
139. A: amplitudinis. OP: extensionis. I take it that the “size” of the different worlds which Tschirnhaus and Schuller are hypothesizing would be a question, not of their physical extent, since worlds other than that of extension have no extension—this is why Tschirnhaus and Schuller apologize for putting things the way they do—but of the number of their members. So if the other worlds have the same “size,” that means there would be a one-to-one correspondence between members of one world and members of another. The OP’s way of putting this seems infelicitous.
140. Cf. E I P17S (II/62/34ff).
141. At this point Gebhardt attaches a note which reads: “The face of the whole of nature, which, though it varies in infinite ways, always remains the same. See II P13S.” This note (a quotation from Letter 64) was written in the margins of the original letter, in the same hand which wrote the note at IV/274/21–22. But it was evidently not intended as an editorial instruction to the printer. (Pace the Hackett editors, it was not printed in the OP.) Oldenburg’s language (publico destinati) does not imply that he thought the Ethics was intended for the general public, but just that he thought it intended for publication (as Glazemaker understood it, in the NS).
142. When did this conversation with Boyle and Oldenburg about the TTP occur? If it was before Oldenburg’s letter of 8 June 1675, then Tschirnhaus may have played a role in changing Oldenburg’s mind which Oldenburg’s letter does not acknowledge. If it was after the letter, then the favorable opinion of Spinoza which Oldenburg expressed in that letter was not very stable.
143. It’s unclear just what this direction was. Cf. Wolf 1966, AHW, Hackett.
144. Pieter van Gent was a friend of Schuller and Tschirnhaus, who copied out significant portions of Spinoza’s works at Schuller’s request, apparently preparing them for the printer. See Steenbakkers 1994, 35–50.
145. I.e., II P6.
146. The gender of the relative pronoun, quae, which is feminine, implies that its antecedent must be facies, face, not universum, universe, which is neuter. Some interpretations of this passage seem to imply otherwise. E.g., Garrett 1991, 198.
147. This opening phrase suggests that our text of this letter is a fragment of what was originally a longer letter.
148. I’ve commented in some detail on Burgh’s exchange with Spinoza in Curley 2010.
149. Spelled “Craenen” in the OP, but the NS spelling seems to be more correct. On Kranen, see Meinsma 1983, 475, n. 1.
150. The TTP. Perhaps the point about the title is that it implies a connection between theology and politics which indicates that theology is a tool of politics. See Berti 1994, 1996.
151. Perhaps Burgh is alluding to TTP vii, 16–22.
152. Spinoza believed in Christ crucified, in the sense that he believed in the historical fact of Jesus’ crucifixion, but not, I think, in the sense Burgh probably had in mind: that Jesus’ death on the cross atoned for the sins of mankind. See Letter 78, IV/328a/8ff.
153. Burgh is more a believer in the supernatural than Boxel. Cf. Letter 53, IV/248b/25–27.
154. OP: post Christum. NS: na Christus Hemelvaart.
155. That is: if I followed your skeptical principles.
156. An allusion to 1 Cor. 1:21–25.
157. This classic Catholic argument for the superiority of (Catholic) Christianity to other religions goes back at least to Aquinas (SCG I, vi, 3).
158. The accusation that the Jewish people were responsible for the death of Jesus has been a Christian tradition since the early days of the church, and remains a difficult subject for Christians and Jews alike. Two recent analyses of the gospel accounts which read them in quite different ways are Brown 1994 and Crossan 1996. Cohen 2007 offers a thoughtful reflection on the history of this tradition.
159. OP: Religionis Judaicae, quae tunc vera erat. NS: de Joodsche Godsdienst . . . de welk in die tijt de ware was. If the NS’s definite article is justified, as I think it is, then we must supply a noun, and “religion” seems the natural choice. Shirley (1995) made this choice. Wolf (1966) chose not to use a definite article.
160. This letter does not come to us from any of our usual sources, but from its publication in Florence in 1675. See the Editorial Preface for more details. The book Steno refers to in his first sentence is clearly the TTP.
161. In TTP iii, 20, Spinoza says that the end of every state is to live securely and conveniently. I know of no passage in that work which would justify the gloss Steno puts on this statement.
162. Cf. TTP iii, 12; iv, 9; v, 19, and xx, 12.
163. 2:21 in the Wisdom of Solomon, a work accepted as canonical in Roman Catholic, Greek, and Russian Orthodox Bibles, but not in Protestant or Jewish Bibles.
164. Matt. 8:22 (or Luke 9:60).
165. Ps. 92:5 (Vulgate = 93:5 in Protestant Bibles).
166. Referring, presumably, to the members of monastic orders.
167. alterum idiotarum vestro loquendi modo ita dictorum. An idiota is a common person, who is presumed to be ignorant or uneducated. The “you” is plural, referring not only to Spinoza, but to all non-Catholics. So Steno is claiming that there is a general assumption among non-Catholics that those who are not educated will have ideas of God which are not properly elevated.
168. G: rato, but the first edition has raro, and AHW assume this reading (as does Shirley 1995).
169. Bennett suggests the following paraphrase: “We aren’t impressed by a miracle just because it is a miracle.” This may capture Steno’s intent better than my more literal translation.
170. Perhaps a reminiscence of various phrases in the Vulgate: Exod. 8:10, 3 Kings 8:23 (= 1 Kings 8:23 in Protestant Bibles), 2 Chron. 6:14, Ps. 85:8 (= 86:8 in Protestant Bibles).
171. It’s unclear what Spinoza said about the Pope which might have led Steno to say this. None of the references to the Pope in the TTP seems apt. There’s a passage in Letter 76 (IV/317a/10–17) which might justify the claim. But the probable date of that letter seems to exclude the possibility that Steno knew it when he wrote this letter. In any event, by the end of Letter 76 Spinoza is quite caustic about the Pope. Perhaps Steno is referring to something Spinoza said in conversation in the period when they were friends.
172. An allusion to Exod. 8:19.
173. Previously Steno had used the second person singular of the verb. Here (and below) he switches to the second person plural. I presume his “you” includes Spinoza, Descartes, and any other philosopher defending the “new” philosophy. Cf. AHW.
174. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 C.E.), whose Dialogue with Trypho described his conversion to Christianity by an unidentified old man whom he met one day after a spiritual quest which had led him to examine Stoics, Aristotelians, Pythagoreans, and Platonists. The Trypho of the dialogue is a Jew whose criticisms of Christianity Justin rebuts.
175. As various commentators have observed, Steno’s quotation is a bit free. More accurate would be: “A long time ago . . . long before the time of those so-called philosophers, there lived blessed men who were just and loved by God, men who spoke through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and predicted events that would take place in the future, which events are now taking place.” The speaker (Justin’s “old man”) goes on to say: “We call these men the prophets.” Justin Martyr 2003a, VII, 1. (Similarly in Justin Martyr 2003b.)
176. Justin Martyr 2003a, VIII, 1.
177. Augustine’s Confessions record his eventual conversion to Christianity after passing through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism.
178. Not that all the Cartesians were hostile to Spinoza. Van Bunge 2001 gives an account of Spinoza’s friends in that camp which includes such names as Lodewijk Meyer, Adriaan Koerbagh, Simon de Vries, Pieter Balling, and Jarig Jelles. But as Van Bunge shows, Cartesians like Van Velthuysen were extremely nervous about being associated with Spinoza.
179. The first indication of a plan for a second edition of the TTP. There’ll be a second mention in Letter 69. On the annotations which did survive in various sources, see the Editorial Preface to the TTP.
180. Date suggested by AHW.
181. Joachim Nieuwstad was secretary of the city of Utrecht from 1662 to 1674, at the end of which time the Prince of Orange discharged him along with various other followers of Jan de Witt.
182. “My treatise” is the TTP, and the manuscript by Van Velthuysen, Letter 42. Spinoza had met Van Velthuysen on a trip to Utrecht in 1673, and apparently the two men then came to a better understanding of one another. See Nadler 1999, 317.
183. Presumably Spinoza means here the opponents who have published attacks on the TTP, and not Van Velthuysen, whose ability he evidently respects.
184. To judge from Letter 72, this must have been a work dealing with a procedure for making gold out of base metals. At the beginning of this letter, just before the salutation, Schuller has placed an astrological symbol for the sun. He will repeat this in Letter 72.
185. Tschirnhaus had instructions to say nothing about the Ethics, as becomes clear later in this letter.
186. Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), finance minister of Louis XIV.
187. That is, the things represented by the ideas.
188. It’s difficult to see how Tschirnhaus could get this out of II P5, which reads: “The formal being of ideas admits God as a cause only insofar as he is considered as a thinking thing, and not insofar as he is explained by any other attribute. That is, ideas, both of God’s attributes and of singular things, do not admit the objects [ideata] themselves, or the things perceived, as their efficient cause, but [only] God himself, insofar as he is a thinking thing.” So P5 quite explicitly denies that the things ideas represent are their cause, as Spinoza points out when he replies in Letter 72, where he asks whether there has not been a slip of the pen, either in Tschirnhaus’s letter or in the copy of the Ethics he is using (IV/305/4ff.).
189. It’s not clear in Schuller’s letter precisely where paraphrase of Tschirnhaus ends and quotation begins. The use of the first person here indicates that by this point, at least, we have a quotation. My indentation is meant to convey my assumption that all the indented material (and hence, the whole of this sentence) is quotation. But AHW and the Pléiade editors take the quote to begin with the words here translated “perhaps (as I rather think).” Shirley 2002 punctuates in a way which would agree with my reading.
190. In spite of these assurances, Tschirnhaus does seem to have shown less discretion when he shared a manuscript of the Ethics with Nicholas Steno. See the Editorial Preface, regarding Letter 67bis, pp. 366–67.
191. Unfortunately this letter seems to have been lost. Leibniz could be quite critical of the TTP in his correspondence with others. Writing in October 1670 to his former teacher at Leipzig, Jakob Thomasius, who had reviewed the TTP quite critically, he praised him for treating as it deserved that “intolerably outspoken book on the liberty of philosophizing” (23 September 1670, Leibniz, Akademie edition, II, i, 66). Wolf ([1966] followed by the Hackett editors) accuses him of professing whatever views were likely to suit his interlocutors. I think this is unfair to Leibniz. I believe he had deeply mixed feelings. While he deplored the tendency of the TTP to undermine Christianity, he admired the ability and learning of its author. So far as I can see, he never condemned it as harshly as his correspondents usually did. And he normally mixed some praise with his criticism, even when writing to vehement opponents of Spinoza. To Graevius, for example, who had described the TTP in an earlier letter as a “detestable and horrible” book, he expressed the wish that Spinoza might be refuted by someone who equaled his knowledge of “oriental letters,” but was dedicated to the Christian cause (5 May 1671, Leibniz, Akademie edition, I, i, 144).
192. Oldenburg’s language (publico destinati) does not imply that he thought the Ethics was intended for the general public, but just that he thought it intended for publication (as Glazemaker understood it, in the NS).
Akkerman points out that although Spinoza’s reply characterizes Oldenburg’s letter as “very short,” it might still have included more about the Ethics than the OP editors chose to reproduce, that material being omitted by the OP editors because Spinoza did not reply to it.
193. OP: illustrare et mollire. NS: verklaren en verzachten. Spinoza’s letter said (IV/299/30–31) that he intended to clarify (illustrare) his treatise with notes, but not that he intended to “soften” (mollire) what he had said. Oldenburg is nudging Spinoza in a direction in which he had expressed no intention to go.
194. This paraphrase of II P5 provides an interesting gloss on the phrase esse formale. Gebhardt’s reading of the text (ideae cujuscumque essentia) is correct, though his Textgestaltung misreports both the reading of the autograph and Meijer’s emendation of V-L. Cf. AHW, 537.
195. See above, at IV/302/18–19.
196. According to Remnant and Bennett, lx, Leibniz was sent to Paris on two assignments, both secret: to arrange the payment of a pension granted to Boineburg for diplomatic services to the French crown, and to persuade Louis XIV to direct his forces against the Turks in Egypt rather than against North Germany and the Low Countries. Had he known about these projects, Spinoza would no doubt have approved the latter plan and been indifferent to the former. Wolf suggests that Spinoza had got wind of Leibniz’s plan for a reunion of Catholics and Protestants, “which could only result in their joint suppression of all freedom of thought and speech” (1966, 47). That may exaggerate the danger, but it does seem that such a reunion would have been dangerous for someone like Spinoza.
197. Parentis. Other translators have generally taken parens here to mean either parent or kinsman. But author is one classical meaning of parens, and Spinoza’s subsequent use of the second person singular suggests he might suspect that Schuller himself is the anonymous author.
198. OP, Gebhardt: Responsio ad praecedentem. In the OP (and the NS) the letters are grouped first by correspondent, then by date. In that arrangement our Letter 73 would come immediately after Letter 71.
199. Referring to Paul’s speech to the Athenians, reported in Acts 17:22–31. The line quoted from Paul is itself, in Paul, a quotation from one of the Greek poets (perhaps Epimenides).
200. Spinoza attempts here to ward off a misunderstanding he had also warned against in a note to TTP vi, 10, where the point seemed to be that Nature is not just the extended world, but a being which has infinite attributes. (Spinoza did not use that technical term there.) The OP here reads: massam quandam, sive materiam corporeum. LC has: massam quandam, sive materiam incorporeum, incorporeal matter. Gebhardt thought that reading might be right, but this seems unlikely. The NS confirms the OP reading.
201. OP, LC: non esse omnino necessaria. NS: gantschelijk niet . . . nootzakelijk. Perhaps the most natural rendering of the Latin would be “not completely necessary.” Wolf 1966 and Shirley 1995 have equivalents of this, as do Gebhardt/Walther 1986 and Dominguez 1988. On the other hand, the most natural reading of the Dutch seems to be “completely unnecessary.” AHW have language which I take to agree with my translation, as do Appuhn and Misrahi (Pléiade). So the translators are quite divided about the scope of the negation. The reading I offer seems to me more consistent with TTP v, 46, and Letter 78, IV/328–29. See also the Glossary entry SPIRIT.
202. If we supposed that a circle had acquired the nature of a square, all the while remaining a circle, we would suppose that it had contradictory properties. If it’s a circle, all the points on its periphery must be equidistant from its center. If it’s a square, the points on its periphery are not all equidistant from the center. The theological analogue would be ascribing contradictory properties to God: for example, omniscience insofar as he is God, limited knowledge insofar as he is man; etc. To have said this explicitly in the TTP would evidently have been to cross a line Spinoza chose not to cross.
203. Accepting AHW’s dating.
204. OP: duraque revoluta manu. I think Oldenburg is using a metaphor inspired by the regular motion of the heavenly bodies in their orbits.
205. The first passage, from John 1:14, involves no translation problems. The second, from Heb. 2:16, does. My translation, minus the bracketed phrases, attempts to give a very literal rendering of Oldenburg’s Latin. I add the phrases in brackets to convey what I take to be Oldenburg’s understanding of the passage, which is quite similar to that of the King James translators (“For verily he took not on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abraham”), though quite different from more recent English translations, e.g., NRSV: “For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham.” Though modern translators might render this verse differently than Oldenburg does, his reading of the passage does not seem unreasonable given the surrounding context.
206. In Letter 74 (IV/310/1–11), articulating the negative reaction of Spinoza’s British critics to the TTP, Oldenburg had complained that Spinoza’s necessitarianism entails that no one will be without excuse in the eyes of God—i.e., that all would be excusable—and that this would make reward and punishment useless. Spinoza draws the opposite conclusion: that no one is excusable, appealing to that passage in Paul’s epistle to the Romans (9:18–24) in which Paul asserts God’s absolute right to do with his creatures what he will, as a potter may do as he wishes with the clay he is working. He will explain further in Letter 78. The metaphor has its roots in the Hebrew Bible (most notably in Jer. 18:1–11). See also Spinoza’s discussions of this issue in the TTP (iv, 47–49, and ADN. XXXIV, at xvi, 53).
207. This puzzling saying, which occurs in both Matthew and Luke, has long been the subject of debate. See, for example, Sanders 1993, 225–26; Anchor Matthew and Anchor Luke. I would suppose that Spinoza interprets this saying to mean: “Leave it to those who are (spiritually) dead—that is, who do not appreciate the significance of Jesus’ life and teachings—to bury those who are (physically) dead.”
208. I take it that Spinoza means here that Paul’s account of the resurrection of the dead in 1 Cor. 15 can only be understood to be true if we interpret the resurrection spiritually, as involving a fundamental moral regeneration in this life, but not that Paul himself understood the resurrection in that way.
209. OP, LC: nos homunciones. Using the same language Oldenburg had used at IV/310/23.
210. These may, as Wolf and others have suggested, have included Burgh’s parents, whose grief at their son’s conversion Spinoza mentions at IV/318a/16–18. Conrad Burgh, Albert’s father, was a wealthy Amsterdammer, former Treasurer General of the United Provinces, and a friend of Spinoza’s. Meinsma reports that when Albert returned from Italy, his father had difficulty tolerating his presence in the house, and arranged for various pastors to try to persuade him to return to the Protestant faith, unsuccessfully, as it turned out (Meinsma 1983, 454).
211. Addition from NS and LC.
212. “Enthusiasts” were Christians who believed themselves to be immediately inspired by God. Cf. Locke, Essay IV, xix.
213. Philip II assigned the Duke of Alva to repress the Reformation in the Netherlands in 1567. He did this brutally. See Israel 1995, 155–68, or Parker 1985, 105–17.
214. Spinoza refers to 1 John 4:13, an epistle traditionally ascribed to the author of the fourth gospel, who in turn was traditionally thought to be the apostle John, son of Zebedee. Contemporary scholarship has cast doubt on both these ascriptions. Cf. HCSB 1815, 2072. Spinoza so liked this verse that he made it an epigraph for the TTP and cited it also in TTP xiv, 17.
215. Referring, perhaps, to 1 John 2:3, “By this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments.” Taken in isolation this verse might seem to require obedience to all the commandments, not just obedience to the commandments to love one another and to be just. But the emphasis on love in this epistle is very strong.
216. Akkerman notes two allusions to Terence in this line: Heautontimorumenos 822 and Adelphi 794.
217. In 1635 Gaspard de Coligny, Count of Chatillon, a Huguenot general in the Franco-Dutch army fighting against the Spanish in Belgium, is said to have fed the Catholic Eucharist to his horses, as an expression of contempt for what he considered Catholic idolatry (AHW).
218. Judah the Faithful was Don Lope de Vera y Alarcon, a Spanish Christian noble, who embraced Judaism after a study of Hebrew literature. He was imprisoned by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in Valladolid in 1644. His story is told in Menasseh 1652/1987, 149–50, the Spanish edition of which Spinoza had in his library. Menasseh cannot have been Spinoza’s only source, since he mentions details not found there, such as Judah’s beginning to sing a hymn as he died. There were many versions of the story. The hymn would have been Ps. 31:6.
219. Ignorance of the history of Islam was common in seventeenth-century Europe. Locke thought all Muslims owed obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, and through him to the Ottoman Emperor (Locke, Letter 134). Sunni Islam dominated in the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim area then best known in the West. The common practice of using an ethnic term “Turk” to refer to Muslims encouraged this confusion. See Southern 1962, Lewis 1993.
220. OP: pro omnibus, qui Christi nomen profitentur. LC: pro omnibus qui Christianum nomen profitemur (Leibniz’s emphasis), for all of us who profess the Christian name. NS: voor ons alle, die de Christelijke naam belijden. So both the LC and the NS have Spinoza identifying himself as a Christian. Akkerman finds the reading of the OP more probable. See Akkerman 1980, 46–47. Similarly Steenbakkers, who argues that the copyist who produced the version of the text used by both Leibniz and Glazemaker would have been more likely to misread profitentur as profitemur than the reverse. See Steenbakkers 2005, 15–19.
221. OP: exitiabilem (= NS: verderffelijke). LC: execrabilem, abominable.
222. Spinoza is no doubt alluding at least to the notorious forgery known as “the Donation of Constantine,” which was supposed to have granted Pope Sylvester I and his successors ecclesiastical supremacy over all Christian churches, and political authority over the western portions of the Roman Empire. Modern scholarship now estimates that this forgery dates from the eighth century; so it comes somewhat later than Spinoza thought. Nicholas of Cusa had challenged the authenticity of the Donation in 1433 (see Cusa 1991, III, ii), but left it to Lorenzo Valla to provide the definitive proof that it was a forgery in 1440. See Valla 2007. Spinoza may have other examples in mind as well, which probably include the False Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore. See Davenport 1916.
223. The Greek phrase Oldenburg uses as a salutation might be translated: “prosper” or “may things go well with you.”
224. Oldenburg’s point, I take it, is that it is objectionable to limit God’s power to things that men can understand, even if the men whose powers of understanding set the limits are the brightest men. (Spinoza will have some difficulty seeing that he has made the claim Oldenburg objects to [IV/328/5–7].)
225. LC: queri non potest. Both the OP and the NS lack the negation, which is clearly necessary.
226. Bennett notes that Spinoza surely meant to write: “it is no more in our 'power to have a sound Mind than it is to have a healthy Body,” and that this is what Oldenburg takes him to have meant when he replies at IV/329/20ff. Cf. also TP ii, 6.
227. Apparently the suffocation of patients showing symptoms of rabies (using their own sheets, pillows, and blankets) was long practiced as a form of euthanasia, intended to relieve the suffering of those afflicted with a painful disease which was (and still is) almost always fatal once symptoms develop. See Lise Wilkinson’s article on the history of rabies in Jackson and Wunner 2002, or AHW, 511. Spinoza probably thought it also justifiable to prevent spread of the disease. Oldenburg’s reply, confused though it is, suggests that this might be one reason for the practice.
228. Spinoza is evidently alluding to 2 Cor. 5:16, which in a fairly literal translation would read: “So from now on we know no one according to the flesh [kata sarka]. Though (ei) we once knew Christ according to the flesh, we no longer know him in that way.” This is the KJV, lightly modernized. Modern translators of Paul tend to be more free. The NRSV has: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.” Furnish goes further: “So from now on we regard no one according to worldly standards, if indeed we have regarded Christ according to worldly standards, we no longer regard him in that way” (Anchor 2 Corinthians, 306). In addition to the different rendering of kata sarka, this also translates ei as “if,” rather than “though.”
I take it that the tendency to translate kata sarka freely is motivated by the fact that Paul had not known Jesus in person during his lifetime, and so did not know him kata sarka in the most obvious sense. Jesus is supposed to have appeared to him after the resurrection (cf. Acts 9:1–9, 22:1–16, and 26:12–18; and 1 Cor. 15:8), but this post-resurrection appearance would not obviously justify a claim to have known Jesus “according to the flesh,” the resurrection body being of quite a different nature from that of the earthly body (1 Cor. 15:35ff.).
On any of these translations it will be true that Paul does not explicitly claim that he knew Christ kata pneuma, as Spinoza’s paraphrase would require. Nevertheless his paraphrase seems reasonable. I think what he means is that whether or not Paul did, in some sense, know Jesus kata sarka, he did not glory in that fact, but only in the fact that he knew and had absorbed the ethical message Jesus taught.
229. This date is not given either in the OP or in the NS, but can be inferred from Letter 79.
230. C: inexcusabiles, inexcusable. But since Oldenburg is evidently referring to IV/327/10, editors since Leopold have corrected to excusabiles.
231. Another indication that Oldenburg is being a bit careless in this letter. He misreads Spinoza’s example, according to which it was a man who had gone mad from the bite of a dog who would be excusable, but nevertheless rightly killed, not a dog.
232. A classic argument for free will, to be found, for example, in Erasmus 1524.
233. G: maxime. But C, AHW: proxime.
235. Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721) was appointed assistant tutor to the Dauphin in 1670. He became Bishop of Avranches in 1685 and published two books which criticize the TTP: his Demonstratio, and his Quaestiones.
236. NS: in een Brief, aan L. M. geschreven, in a letter written to L. M.
237. See, for example, Descartes, Principles of Philosophy II, 36, or The World, vi–vii.
238. OP: unicam saltem proprietatem. NS: niet meer dan een enige eigenschap. Pace Wolf and Shirley, if unicam is to be given the sense required by the context, saltem cannot be translated “at least.” I owe this correction of an earlier draft to Bennett.
239. OP: ex . . . Extensione infinitâ corporum varietas exsurgere possit. NS: uit d’uitgestrektheit, een oneindige verscheidenheit van lighamen zou konnen ontslaan. The accent mark on infinitâ in the OP makes it an ablative, modifying Extensione: “from infinite Extension, a variety of bodies can arise.” The NS would be translated: “From Extension, an infinite variety of bodies could arise.” Gebhardt deleted the accent mark in his 1925 edition, but had translated the OP text in Gebhardt/Walther 1986. Translators have been divided: AHW, Wolf, Appuhn, and Misrahi all follow the OP. Shirley and Dominguez follow the NS, Shirley without comment, Dominguez with an argument designed to counter Akkerman’s critique of Gebhardt’s decision. He appeals to Letter 59 (IV/268/25ff.), which indicates that Tschirnhaus was puzzled that so many varieties of body could arise from extension. He doesn’t ask there how infinitely many varieties might arise, but his reference to I P16 suggests that he may have interpreted that proposition as implying that infinitely many kinds of extended thing were supposed to follow from the attribute of extension. The situation is unclear, but my translation assumes that the NS text is correct.
240. Spinoza had about seven months to live at this point.
241. Spinoza here takes as a definition of God a formula he treats as a proposition in the Ethics: I P7 (AHW).
242. Wolf (1966) suggests that Spinoza may be referring to either one of two discoveries which at that time were still recent: Newton’s discovery that a prism resolves a beam of light into colored beams with different indices of refraction, or Bartholinus’ discovery of the double refraction of Iceland spar.
243. For reasons explained in the Editorial Preface, p. 372, I assume that Spinoza’s unnamed friend was probably Jarig Jelles, and thus that this letter was probably written originally in Dutch. So I take the NS version to be probably closer to the original than the OP version—which is not to say that I think it must be a faithful transcription of the original. See Akkerman 1980, 272–73. The marginal page and line numbers are those of the OP translation.
244. The NS reads: wat het uitterste is, dat een Staat kan betrachten, which is what I have translated. The OP reads: quidnam sit extremum, & summum, quod Societas potest considerare, what is the ultimate and highest thing a Society can consider. Akkerman (1980, 272–73) has argued, persuasively in my view, that the NS version summarizes more accurately the actual contents of Ch. v. See particularly TP v, 5.
245. AHW conjecture that this letter was written in the last half of 1676. I would be inclined to put it somewhat earlier, say, in the summer of that year. Jelles says, in his preface to the NS, that Spinoza wrote the Political Treatise “shortly before his death” (Akkerman 1980, 248). But it’s hard to believe that he began a work of that length (87 pages in the Gebhardt edition) very shortly before his death (say, within six months of his death). On the other hand, it seems unlikely that he would have begun work on this treatise before late 1675. In Letter 68, which AHW conjecturally date September or October 1675, he still seems preoccupied with his attempt to publish the Ethics. When he writes Letter 84, he is about halfway through the TP. (There are thirty-four Gebhardt pages in the six chapters before Ch. vii, and thirty-seven in the three-plus chapters which come after it. Ch. vii itself is sixteen Gebhardt pages long.) If we assume that he began work on the TP late in 1675, and was able to continue through late 1676, and perhaps into January 1677, then the probable date of this letter would seem to be sometime in the summer of 1676. By early February 1677 he was very ill (Continuum Companion 2011, 36).