FROM LETTER 29 we learned that by September 1665 Spinoza had begun writing a version of the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP). From Letter 30 we learned what his main objectives in this work were: to expose and refute the prejudices of the theologians, to rebut the charge that he was an atheist, and to defend the freedom to philosophize and say what we think, which he accused the preachers of trying to suppress as much as they could. We may begin by considering some of the theological prejudices to be exposed.
Spinoza’s Preface to the TTP offers an account of the causes and effects of superstition. We are all at the mercy of fortune. However carefully we try to plan our affairs, events we could not anticipate, and cannot control, may obstruct and frustrate those plans. An unexpected illness takes someone we love from us; a hurricane destroys our town; a surprise attack on one of our cities kills thousands, costs millions, and puts fear in our hearts. Recognizing the limitations of our power, and vacillating between hope and fear, we readily accept propositions we would like to believe, which seem to promise some control over our futures, even though those beliefs might not survive critical scrutiny.1
The ancient Greeks and Romans believed they could read the future in the entrails of animals, and might overcome obstacles to their plans if they performed the right rituals. Perhaps they would get a fair wind to sail for Troy if they appeased an angry goddess by sacrificing a beloved daughter. Spinoza begins with examples of pagan superstition, whose irrationality his Christian contemporaries would readily concede. But soon he slides into a critique of his own time. “The multitude are still at the mercy of pagan superstition” (Preface, §13). The ancient pagans believed in invisible powers, personal beings who were supposed to have the ability to protect them from harm, and who might have the will to help them, if approached in the right way. The modern multitude have substituted a belief in one God for the ancient belief in many, and belief in a sacred text for belief in divination. But the logic of the beliefs is the same: it is the result, not of reason, but of the passions of hope and fear, and the desire to control the future.
It’s unfortunate to guide your life by irrational beliefs. But it’s doubly unfortunate when those beliefs put believers in the power of men who claim special knowledge of God’s will and of how to please him. They may have no scruples about using the power this gives them. They may give their blessing to the leaders of civil society, or withhold it, as suits their purposes. They may also have no scruples about trying to preserve their power by repressing criticism which might threaten its basis. In western Europe and the Americas, such clerics have often been the chief enemies of freedom of thought and expression, and a threat to progress in philosophy and science.
One of the most crucial prejudices attacked in the TTP is the idea that religion consists of mysteries we cannot grasp, but which we must accept on the authority of the leaders who propagate them, appealing to sacred texts whose interpretation they claim privileged access to. They substitute for the natural light of reason the idea of a supernatural light, revelation, as our proper guide in life.2 Allied with this prejudice is a dubious principle of scriptural interpretation. Because scripture is supposed to be the word of God, some allege that it must be everywhere true and divine. So if we find in it passages which seem false or inconsistent, we must assume that we don’t understand them, and seek an interpretation which makes them not only consistent, but true (§19).
This is a mistake. The correct procedure, Spinoza argues, is that we must approach the text of scripture using the same philological methods we would use in trying to interpret any other ancient text. Only when we have determined its meaning in that way can we reasonably make a judgment about its truth or divinity. By “philological methods” I mean what Spinoza calls a “history” of the text. This history requires that we determine the languages in which the texts were originally written, have a thorough knowledge of those languages, and understand how the texts were composed and preserved: who wrote them, when, for what audience, for what purpose; and who preserved them, what different manuscript traditions there are, whether the manuscripts have been corrupted, and who decided they were sacred (vii, 14–37). These determinations must be made, as far as possible, from internal indications in the text itself, not from tradition. Spinoza is convinced—and argues forcefully—that tradition is an unreliable source of information on such matters. That is one important implication of the slogan that we must seek our knowledge of scripture only from scripture itself.
If we follow this method, Spinoza thinks we’ll conclude: first, that in many cases we have no idea what scripture means; even the most learned theologians don’t know enough about the history of the text to understand it; second, that the Old Testament3 is not reliable as history, because the historical portions of that text were constructed many centuries after the events they claim to describe, by an editor trying to make sense of conflicting traditions, which have survived only in his amalgam; and finally, that when scripture speaks about speculative matters, such as the nature of God, it is no more reliable than it is when it talks about history. When the prophets speak about God in scripture, they often speak falsely, by the lights of more recent theology, sometimes because they’re accommodating their message to the intellectual limitations of their audience, sometimes because they themselves have an inadequate conception of God. What we can understand, without fear of error, is the basic moral message of Scripture: we must love God and our neighbors, and do what clearly follows from its fundamental prescriptions. We must defend justice; we must aid the poor; we must kill no one; we must not covet what others have (xii, 37).
If Scripture is to be valued primarily for its moral teachings, not as history, and not as providing an adequate conception of God, it’s hardly surprising that Spinoza had to defend himself against the charge of atheism.4 “Atheist” in this period was often a general term applied, not just to those who deny the existence of God (or of any other divine beings), but to anyone who did not accept the basic propositions on which Christians and Jews agreed. In his essay on atheism, for example, Bacon called the Epicureans “the school . . . most accused of atheism,” not because they denied the existence of gods, which they didn’t, but because they denied that the gods played any causal role either in creating the world or in determining what happens in it.
Spinoza doesn’t deny the existence of God. He affirms it. But he claims that we know God’s existence best from the immutable order of nature (vi, 7–38). And he identifies God’s guidance (his activity in the world) with that order (iii, 7–8), that is, with “the universal laws of nature, according to which all things happen and are determined.” In claiming that the order of nature is immutable, Spinoza rejects the normal Jewish and Christian view of God as a personal agent, who makes choices motivated by his knowledge and goodness, and whose creatures can influence his choices through actions of their own, such as the performance of rituals, or the intercession of saints, or obedience to God’s commands, or accepting Jesus as their savior. Such views presuppose that God’s actions can change, depending on what his creatures do. Whatever means of influence believers might have thought feasible, to accept the idea that God’s activity in nature is nothing but the operation of immutable laws is to give up all hope of influencing his actions.
The distance between Spinoza’s conception of God and common Jewish and Christian conceptions of God makes it understandable that his contemporaries called him an atheist. But unlike many branded with that label, Spinoza does think there is good in both these religions: he thinks the basic moral teachings enumerated above are clearly taught in scripture, and are salutary. If we wish to be blessed, to achieve the greatest happiness humans are capable of, we must follow those teachings as best we can. We must love God and love our neighbors as ourselves (xii, 34). And we must do the things which clearly follow from these basic requirements: practice justice, aid the poor, and so on. But when scripture teaches one thing in one place and something very different in others—for example, that if someone injures us, we must inflict a similar injury on the offender (as in Exodus 21:23–25; Leviticus 24:19–20; Deuteronomy 19:21), and that if someone injures us, we must not retaliate, but turn the other cheek (as in Matthew 5:38–41)—we must use our discretion, and consider what differences in historical circumstances might explain the conflicting prescriptions (vii, 29–33).
Spinoza has a conception of God very different from the one readers are likely to arrive at by reading the scriptures. He believes, as Jews and Christians generally do, that there is a God who is the immutable first cause of the universe, whose existence explains everything in the universe, but does not itself require explanation. But he not only rejects the anthropomorphisms common in Scripture—its tendency to speak of God as having a body, or a spatial location subject to change, or emotions we regard as defects in humans, like jealousy and anger—he also rejects its tendency to speak of God as having emotions we generally approve, like a love for his creatures, and its tendency to speak of God as not knowing things you might think the creator of the universe would have to know (ii, 24–48). In addition, he denies that God performs miracles. Or at least, he denies that miracles occur in the sense the term “miracle” would normally have.5 I believe it is wrong to classify Spinoza as an atheist, if that term is taken to imply the rejection of all belief in God and all religion generally. But to regard him as a kind of theist is to stretch the boundaries of theism. There is no easy way to label his religious position.6
Some nine years before he began writing the TTP, as a young man of twenty-three, Spinoza was excommunicated by the synagogue in which he had grown up. This was not a trivial matter. For one thing, it meant that he was excluded from the Jewish community in which he had been brought up, including members of his own family, and had to give up the role in the family business he had assumed when his father died. For a long time the reasons for his excommunication were rather mysterious. The surviving documents were frustratingly vague about them. But after World War II, a French scholar, I. S. Revah, discovered new documents in the files of the Inquisition, showing that there were three principal grounds: (i) Spinoza held that God only exists philosophically; (ii) he believed that the soul dies with the body; and (iii) he believed that the law of Moses is not true.7
Perhaps Spinoza could have held most of the views for which he was excommunicated without being expelled from the synagogue. Maimonides himself had rejected many of the anthropomorphisms Spinoza complains of, and defended a very abstract, philosophical conception of God.8 The immortality of the soul has long been controversial in Judaism, since the support for it in the Hebrew Bible is at best ambiguous.9 Conceivably the synagogue might have tolerated Spinoza’s denial of miracles.10 But Spinoza also attacks something much more central to the Jewish tradition: the idea of God as a lawgiver, who prescribes to his human creatures how they ought to behave. He argues that if you define God as the philosophical traditions of Judaism and Christianity commonly do, as a being possessing all perfections, including omnipotence, the proposition that God has given laws to his people—given them commands they have the power either to obey or to disobey—involves a contradiction.11 It cannot be true. This probably would have been too much for even the most liberal seventeenth-century congregation to allow.
People who have suffered from religious persecution are not always advocates of freedom of thought and expression for others. The Protestants Queen Mary persecuted in sixteenth-century England turned persecutors themselves, once they gained power. The Calvinists who persecuted Catholics in seventeenth-century Holland were descended from victims of Catholic persecutions a century earlier, when Philip II of Spain ruled their land. The leaders of the synagogue who expelled Spinoza were descended from Iberian emigrés in the sixteenth century, who sought in the Netherlands the freedom to practice openly the Judaism they could not practice in Iberia. But for Spinoza defending freedom of thought and expression for all religions was central to his writing on politics and religion.12
Spinoza’s theological argument for freedom tries to show that the true religion does not require having the right beliefs, but only doing the right thing. Here doing the right thing means acting according to the most basic moral teachings of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The true religion has no specific credal requirements, and is compatible with many different beliefs about God—Jewish, Christian, Muslim . . . even the philosopher’s belief in an impersonal God—so long as the moral requirements are honored.13 If this perspective were accepted, it would remove the principal rationales for religious persecution. Coercing belief could no longer be justified as a way of saving the soul of the person coerced, since salvation requires none of the traditional beliefs. Repressing the expression of heterodox beliefs could no longer be justified as a way of protecting the faithful from corrupting influences which would endanger their salvation.14 There is also a political argument for freedom of thought and expression, which we will discuss later.
So far I have tried to give some notion of how Spinoza went about pursuing the ends he mentioned to Oldenburg in Letter 30. Those were not the only ends he had. Credible reports from the seventeenth century tell us that on the occasion of his excommunication Spinoza wrote (in Spanish) a defense of his departure from the synagogue.15 This defense seems not to have survived. But the same reports which tell us of its existence tell us also that some of its themes resurfaced in the TTP. So the TTP may give us some idea of its probable contents, and some ideas in the TTP may go back that early.
It’s hard to believe that Spinoza would not, in that defense, have replied to the principal charges which provided the basis for the excommunication, the charges mentioned in the reports to the Inquisition discussed above. So passages in the TTP relevant to those charges may well have originated in the lost defense. For example, one of the charges against him is said to have been that he held that God only exists philosophically—that is, as I would understand it, that God exists only in the sense that there is a first cause16 of the universe, whose actions are part of the explanation of everything that happens in the universe, but who does not have the personal characteristics the scriptures might lead you to expect him to have, and in particular, does not have the characteristic of being a lawgiver. Here the TTP helps us to understand in what sense Spinoza held the views for which he was excommunicated.
But there are other doctrines in the TTP, not discussed above, which also seem plausible candidates for having featured in that lost work: notably, Spinoza’s criticism of the doctrine that the Jews were God’s chosen people (in Ch. 3), his rejection of ceremonies (in Ch. 5), and his rejection of faith in historical narratives (also in Ch. 5). This is not to say that those chapters have been carried over from an earlier work without significant alteration. The intervening years may well have given him the opportunity to deepen (and perhaps moderate) his presentation of the themes he reprised.
The TTP is a complex work, with multiple agendas, one of which was probably to make the case for rejecting Judaism, as it was understood in the synagogue from which he was expelled. This is not to say that Spinoza rejected Judaism in its entirety. He thinks there is a core ethical teaching in Judaism (which it shares with Christianity and other religions) which is both true and salutary. He does not reject Judaism when its teachings are construed as being limited to that common core.
There is a major interpretive issue which faces readers of the TTP, an issue we need to address before we go any further. To what extent can we take Spinoza to be speaking candidly in this work? Scholars are divided about this. In Persecution and the Art of Writing (Strauss 1988) Leo Strauss argued that Spinoza was writing at a time when he ran the risk of persecution if he ventured too far from orthodoxy; so he had to deploy the art of “writing between the lines,” that is, writing in such a way that readers would have to read between the lines to fully understand what he was saying. The reader might find Spinoza saying things apparently quite orthodox, which he nevertheless doesn’t believe, but expects his most astute readers to recognize that he doesn’t believe. Indeed, he expects those readers to realize that the orthodox things he says are false.
Many contemporary Spinoza scholars—probably most of them—reject Strauss’s position. They find his arguments weak and think that encouraging people to read between the lines of Spinoza’s works gives them too much license to attribute to Spinoza doctrines he did not hold. I have a good deal of sympathy with that reaction. I think Strauss often argued badly for his views, and made oracular pronouncements which a more self-critical author would not have made. But I do think he was right about the fundamental point he was trying to make.17 Spinoza can be, and was perceived by his more orthodox contemporaries as being, remarkably outspoken in his criticism of orthodox theology.18 Some found him intolerably outspoken and wanted his books banned. But Spinoza’s willingness to go as far as he did should not lull us into thinking that he did not sometimes have to make nice judgments about just how far it was safe to go.19 Not only does Spinoza not always write what he thinks, he also does not always think what he writes.20 Sometimes he tries to raise questions without being provably culpable of having done so. Here’s an important illustration of this.
The correspondence provides conclusive evidence that sometimes Spinoza “pulls his punches,” that is, expresses his criticism of orthodox views in ways which do not go as far as he would be prepared to go in a less public forum. In TTP i, he writes of Jesus—whom he always calls “Christ”—that
God’s Wisdom, that is, a Wisdom surpassing human wisdom, assumed a human nature in Christ, and that Christ was the way to salvation. (III/21/10–12, i, 23)
That’s quite a remarkable statement, apt to encourage his readers to think that after his departure from Judaism Spinoza became a Christian. Some readers have apparently thought that. But then Spinoza cautions us not to regard this statement as saying more than it does:
I must warn here that I’m not speaking in any way about the things some of the Churches maintain about Christ. Not that I deny them. For I readily confess that I don’t grasp them. (i, 24)
That’s less than candid. Oldenburg—perhaps not the most astute reader of Spinoza, but no fool—saw that there might be more going on here than meets the eye. Reporting about reactions to the TTP in England, he wrote Spinoza that some of his British readers
say you conceal your opinion concerning Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the World and only Mediator for men, as well as your opinion concerning his Incarnation and Atonement. They ask that you reveal clearly your thinking about these three points. (Letter 71, IV/304/15–18)
Evidently it did not take Leo Strauss to teach us that a heterodox author might find it necessary to be diplomatic about how he phrased his heterodoxies. Spinoza replied:
to reveal my thinking more clearly regarding [that] point . . . I say that it is completely unnecessary for salvation to know Christ according to the flesh. We must think quite differently about that eternal son of God, i.e., God’s eternal wisdom, which has manifested itself in all things, but most in the human mind, and most of all in Christ Jesus. No one can attain blessedness without this [i.e., God’s eternal wisdom], as that which alone teaches what is true and false, good and evil. And because, as I said, this wisdom was manifested most through Jesus Christ, his disciples preached the same thing, insofar as he revealed it to them, and they showed that they could pride themselves beyond other people in that spirit of Christ. (Letter 73, IV/308a/9–309a/2)
So far, I take it, Spinoza is saying nothing which a careful reader of the TTP could not get from that work. As I would understand this passage: it is not essential for salvation to believe the gospel narratives about Jesus (including the doctrine of the resurrection, which later correspondence shows that Spinoza is particularly skeptical about). What is essential for salvation is to adhere to the fundamental moral teachings of Jesus, that is, the teachings enumerated above (p. 47). But then Spinoza goes beyond anything he had said in the TTP:
As for what certain Churches add to this—that God assumed a human nature—I warned expressly that I don’t know what they mean. Indeed, to confess the truth, they seem to me to speak no less absurdly than if someone were to say to me that a circle has assumed the nature of a square. (Letter 73, IV/309a/2–309a/6)
This is quite explicit about what church teachings he had in mind when he said what he did in i, 24. It’s the doctrine of the incarnation which is at issue. But more crucially, Spinoza now goes beyond the TTP, saying, not just that he doesn’t understand that doctrine, but that he thinks it’s self-contradictory. At a minimum Spinoza was pulling his punches in the TTP: not saying the most provocative thing he thought. But wasn’t he doing more than that? After all, in i, 24, he said that he didn’t deny the church doctrines he professed merely not to understand. But in the letter to Oldenburg he says he thinks they’re absurd. That is, in the correspondence he does deny what he had said in the TTP he did not deny.
Again, in the Preface to the TTP Spinoza says he has the rare good fortune to “live in a republic in which everyone is granted complete freedom of judgment, and is permitted to worship God according to his mentality, and in which nothing is thought to be dearer or sweeter than freedom” (Preface, §12). Now anyone who knows anything about the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century knows that it was a remarkably free place, as European countries went in those days. But it did not grant its citizens complete freedom of thought and expression, or complete freedom of worship. Catholic worship was illegal (though this law was not rigorously enforced).21 Spinoza showed that he did not think he had complete freedom to say what he thought when he published the TTP anonymously, with false information on the title page about the publisher and place of publication. He showed it by his evasiveness about the relation of Jesus to God. He showed it again when he wrote to Oldenburg in Letter 30 that one reason for writing the TTP was to counter the preachers’ excessive authority and aggressiveness. So when he says that he has the good fortune to live in a country which grants him complete freedom of thought, he’s not just pulling his punches. He’s saying something not true, something he knows is not true, and something he must have realized that well-informed readers of his work would know was not true. The informed reader has been reminded: the work you are about to read was not written under conditions of perfect freedom; draw whatever inferences seem reasonable about the degree of candor you can expect.
The political theory of the TTP belongs to a family of theories generally called “social contract theories,” whose best-known proponents are Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The basic idea of such theories, which go back a long way, is that political institutions can be explained—and in suitable cases, justified—by appeal to an agreement a group of people make among themselves to set up a government which will make and enforce rules for their cooperation.
In Leviathan Hobbes provided a paradigm of such theories, arguing that, human nature being what it is, when people live without an effective government, there will be enough actual conflict, or reasonable fear of conflict, that no one, no matter what his innate physical and mental endowments, will have enough security in the possession of any good to make life tolerable. He called the condition in which people live without any effective government “the state of nature,” and argued, with pardonable hyperbole, that in this condition “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”22
People create governments, on this theory, to provide themselves with the security they lack in the state of nature, and in general, to make it possible for them to enjoy the benefits of cooperation. Hobbes is eloquent about the economic benefits of cooperation. Without it there would be
no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society. (Leviathan xiii, 9)
But this description also suggests benefits which are not purely economic.
Spinoza would broadly agree with this. He sees the creation of a social order as having many of the purposes Hobbes mentioned. But there are themes in his thought we don’t find in Hobbes. For him the fact that civil society makes possible the cultivation of the arts and sciences means that it gives us a way, the only possible way, really, to achieving our highest good, the perfection of our nature, the knowledge and love of God.23 If this should sound impossibly exalted, remember that Spinoza thinks we increase our knowledge of God by increasing our knowledge of natural things, that is, by increasing our understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe.
Another central theme in Spinoza’s political thought is the idea that in a well-designed civil society people live according to reason. Spinoza does not think most people are naturally inclined to do the right thing for the right reason (iv, 6). So a well-designed society will give its citizens extrinsic incentives—promises of reward and threats of punishment—to get them to do what it would be in their interest to do even without those rewards and punishments. In the best case, this will not be a matter of rulers manipulating the people they rule. The best case is a democratic society, in which
the whole society [holds] sovereignty as a body . . . so that everyone is bound to be subject to himself, and no one is bound to be subservient to his equal. . . . obedience has no place in a social order where sovereignty is in the hands of everyone and laws are enacted by common consent . . . whether the laws in such a social order are increased or diminished, the people nevertheless remains equally free, because it does not act from the authority of someone else, but by its own consent. (v, 23, 25)
The mechanism for creating such a society is an agreement by which each member of society transfers all his power to “a general assembly of men which has, as a body, the supreme right over everything in its power” (xvi, 24–26).
Formally, the power of this assembly is absolute. That is to say: Spinoza thinks, as Hobbes did, that any political order requires an ultimate decision maker, whose power is not checked by any institutional means. As far as the requirements of the theory are concerned, this decision maker could be a single individual, or an assembly made up of a small subset of the population, or the whole population. In the TTP Spinoza does not attempt to argue at length that an assembly of the whole citizenry is preferable to rule by one or a few.24 (That is a task he will undertake in the Political Treatise.) What is supposed to provide the citizens of any government with protection against tyranny is that every government, no matter what its form, has de facto limits on its power. This is easiest to see in the case of a monarchy, where the person who may in theory have absolute power must nonetheless depend on the voluntary cooperation of others to know what situations in his kingdom need remedy and to enforce obedience to his demands. (See the TP vi, 5 on this point.) And there are certain things no king can effectively command his subjects to do, no matter how absolute his power may be in theory. Human nature being what it is, the sovereign cannot command his subjects to love those who have harmed them, or not to be offended by insults, or not to desire to be free of fear (xvii, 2). The sovereign who tries to exceed the de facto limits on his power may quickly find himself deprived of his de jure power (xvii, 3).
This emphasis on de facto power finds an important application in the political argument for freedom of thought and expression which Spinoza mounts in the last two chapters of the TTP. Formally, Spinoza, like Hobbes, is an Erastian, who thinks the church should be completely subordinate to the state (TTP xix). He assumes that there will be an official state church (as there was both in England and in the Dutch Republic). And he insists that only the state has the right to make laws binding on its citizens, that it has the right to determine what is taught in the churches it sponsors, to resolve disputes within the church about the interpretation of its doctrines, to appoint ministers, and to excommunicate members who fail to observe the church’s rules. Spinoza’s defense of freedom of thought and expression, unlike most modern defenses, does not involve maintaining that church and state must be separate.
What it does involve is the claim that rulers act contrary both to the interests of the state and to their own interests when they try to impose too much uniformity of belief. Spinoza is not naive about the powers of the state. He knows, from the Jewish experience in Iberia, that it is possible for the state to use its coercive powers to secure genuine belief, not merely external conformity:
When the King of Spain compelled the Jews either to accept the religion of the kingdom or to go into exile, a great many Jews accepted the religion of the priests. (iii, 54; cf. xx, 4)
No doubt many of the Jews who gave in to this coercion merely pretended to be converted. But Spinoza does not indulge in the comforting illusion that coercion is always ineffective. Many of the Jews who converted under pressure became sincere enough Catholics. (Perhaps they were not very good Jews to begin with.) What Spinoza insists on is that the social costs of attempting to impose more than a very general civil religion—of the kind advocated in xiv, 22–34—are very high. People resent being told what to believe. And the people who resent it most are precisely those people who make the most useful citizens: those who rank high in intelligence and integrity. Rulers who attempt to pressure their subjects into publicly espousing propositions they don’t believe risk generating fierce opposition and weakening their own power. The quest for conformity is necessarily violent, and requires a centralization of authority antithetical to the best form of government, democracy.
When the TTP was published, its title page bore the date 1670, though the work may have appeared late in 1669. There were several subsequent editions in Spinoza’s lifetime, but apparently he was not much involved in these editions. Though they sometimes correct typographical errors, they do not have great importance for the establishment of the text.
The most interesting questions about the text concern the notes Spinoza began adding in the last months of his life. In a letter to Van Velthuysen in the autumn of 1675, he mentioned a plan to clarify some of the more obscure passages in the TTP with notes. By July 1676 he seems to have begun that process, although he had not carried it very far. All told, we have thirty-nine notes, from various sources, with varying claims to authenticity. If we discount sources which merely duplicate other earlier sources, there are five sources for these notes:
Klefmann: five notes, written in Spinoza’s hand, in a copy of the TTP he gave to his friend Jacob Klefmann in July 1676;
Marchand: thirty-six notes in a manuscript of Prosper Marchand (1675–1756), who made a copy of the notes a Mr. Frisch had asked him to inscribe in a copy of the TTP he had (c. 1711);
Von Murr: thirty-three notes which first appeared in 1802 in an edition of the TTP by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr (1733–1811);
Saint-Glain: thirty-one notes in the French translation of the TTP published in 1678 by Gabriel de Saint-Glain (c. 1620–1684);
KB: thirty-four notes in a Dutch translation of the notes preserved in a manuscript in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague.
The notes in Klefmann’s copy are clearly the ones we can be most confident about. Not only are they all in Spinoza’s hand, but each of them occurs in all our other sources. It seems that at that stage Spinoza had not gotten very far in the process of adding notes. So notes which appear in later sources, but not in Klefmann, are presumably later additions to the text. The notes in Klefmann’s copy are only five of the thirty-nine. The provenance of the others is unclear, though most occur in at least four of our five sources, as will be seen from the following tabulation:
ADN I: Marchand, Von Murr, KB [III/15/10]
ADN II: Klefmann, Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/16/7]
ADN III: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/27/20]
ADN IV: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/48/8]
ADN V: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/48/20]
ADN VI: Klefmann, Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/84/24]
ADN VII: Klefmann, Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/107/1]
ADN VIII: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/111/12]
ADN IX: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/120/1]
ADN X: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/122/5]
ADN XI: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/129/26]
ADN XII: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/129/32]
ADN XIII: Klefmann, Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/130/14]
ADN XIV: Klefmann, Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/131/9]
ADN XV: Saint-Glain, KB [III/131/28]
ADN XVI: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/132/12]
ADN XVII: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/132/28]
ADN XVIII: Marchand, Von Murr, KB [III/135/8]
ADN XIX: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/136/7]
ADN XX: Saint-Glain [III/136/12]
ADN XXI: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/141/19]
ADN XXII: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/143/33]
ADN XXIII: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/145/25]
ADN XXIV: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/146/17]
ADN XXV: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/150/2]
ADN XXVI: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/151/29]
ADN XXVII: Saint-Glain [III/156/9]
ADN XXVIII: Marchand [III/181/12]
ADN XXIX: Marchand [III/184/1]
ADN XXX: Marchand [III/188/20]
ADN XXXI: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/188/23]
ADN XXXII: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/192/8]
ADN XXXIII: Marchand, Von Murr, KB [III/195/4]
ADN XXXIV: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/198/13]
ADN XXXV: Marchand, Von Murr, KB [III/201/27]
ADN XXXVI: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/207/14]
ADN XXXVII: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/208/6]
ADN XXXVIII: Marchand, Von Murr, Saint-Glain, KB [III/210/25]
ADN XXXIX: Marchand, Von Murr, KB [III/238/26]
Most editions of the TTP place these adnotations at the end of the text. But it seems to me best to attach them to the text they annotate (as Pina Totaro did in her edition of the TTP). The tabulation above will enable readers to go from the number of the note to its location in the text, and in addition, to see what sources it comes from.
Unsurprisingly, the sources do not always give the same versions of the notes they have in common. The variations in the notes due to Saint-Glain are particularly suspect. We know from his translation of the TTP that he is prone to translate very freely, sometimes producing what is more a paraphrase than a translation, and sometimes adding material not in the text he is translating. Adnotation XX, which occurs only in Saint-Glain, is particularly problematic.26
On the other hand, ALM’s judgment is that, if we discount Saint-Glain’s characteristic liberties of translation, his version is probably closer to Spinoza’s original than the Latin texts of Marchand and Von Murr, which are apparently based on copies (or copies of copies). These seem sometimes to have mistakes not present in the copy Saint-Glain was working from. ALM make the same judgment of the KB translation.
Marchand claims that he has taken his notes directly from notes written in the margins of Spinoza’s own copy, in Spinoza’s own hand. Apparently this is not true. Sometimes he incorporates material from Saint-Glain, reproducing it in French, as if to confess that he doesn’t have it from a Latin source. And Adnotations XXVIII–XXX, which occur only in Marchand, seem most unlikely to stem from Spinoza. (For argument on this, see ALM, 32–33. Preus 1995 treats these notes as being Marchand’s own, and I think he is probably right about that. As my annotation of Chapter 15 should make clear, Spinoza attributes to Alfakhar various positions which he did not hold, but which were held by seventeenth-century Calvinist theologians. The three adnotations Preus ascribes to Marchand call attention to passages in Meyer 1666 in which Meyer is responding to those Calvinists.) Also suspect is the Syriac text in Adnotation XXVI. The Syriac Bible of Tremellius which Spinoza used was written in Hebrew characters. We don’t know that Spinoza could read (or had access to) the Syriac script. So that text may come from someone else.
The comparison of Marchand’s and Von Murr’s versions of the text suggests that neither of them made their copies from Spinoza’s own copy, but that they both derive from the same copy, which had some errors in it. And between Spinoza’s copy and Marchand’s, there was probably another intervening copy which was not part of the sequence leading to Von Murr’s.
In reproducing the adnotations I mark them with two asterisks (plus “ADN.” followed by the number of the note in Roman numerals). If there is bracketed material in the note, that is my addition. Notes marked with only a single asterisk appeared in the first edition, published in 1670. Where a note stems from that first edition of the TTP, I use a second asterisk, at the end of Spinoza’s note, to mark it off from any additions I have made. So, for example, in the Preface to the TTP, §5, Spinoza quotes from Quintus Curtius’s History of Alexander the Great, and has a note which reads: “As Curtius himself says, Bk. VII, §7.” That portion of the note is enclosed in asterisks. The remainder of the note is my editorial comment on Spinoza’s note.
My editorial comments sometimes refer to a seventeenth-century Dutch translation of the TTP, De Rechtzinnige Theologant, of Godgeleerde Staatkundige Verhandelinge (The Orthodox Theologian, or Theological-Political Treatise), published in 1693 (with a title page bearing the usual false information about the publisher and place of publication). Apparently Glazemaker did this translation in the early 1670s, but suppressed it in response to a request from Spinoza, who did not want a Dutch translation of his work to appear, for fear that it would be banned if it became available in the vernacular language (see Letter 44). Spinoza’s efforts to prevent a ban were of no avail. The Latin version was banned anyway. (For details, see Israel 1996.) Anyone who thinks that Spinoza stood in no danger of persecution for this work needs to remember that in its day the TTP was a banned book.
Finally, when Spinoza quotes the Hebrew Bible, he typically gives the Hebrew text first, and then his own translation into Latin. He does not rely on any existing Latin translation. Although it hasn’t been customary to reproduce the Hebrew quotations in the English translations,27 I believe it’s desirable to do so. First, it illustrates Spinoza’s commitment to an important principle of his theory of interpretation: that the interpreter must be able to deal with the original language in which the text was written, and not rely on translations. It also demonstrates Spinoza’s knowledge of oriental languages, which deeply impressed some of his contemporaries. In a letter to Graevius in May 1671, Leibniz wrote that he had read Spinoza’s book, and went on to say:
I grieve that a man of his evident learning should have fallen so far into error. Hobbes’ Leviathan has laid the foundations of the critique he carries out against the sacred books, but that critique can be shown to often be defective. These things tend to overturn the Christian Religion, which has been established by the precious blood of the martyrs and by such great labors and vigilance. If only someone could be stirred to activity who was equal to Spinoza in erudition, but [dedicated?] to the Christian cause, who might refute his frequent paralogisms and abuse of oriental letters.28
Though he praised Spinoza’s erudition, Leibniz nonetheless complained that Spinoza had misused his knowledge of Hebrew and related languages. This, he thought, placed a special burden on those who would refute Spinoza. That may be one reason why he did not undertake a refutation himself.
Recognizing the consistent presence of the Hebrew text in Spinoza’s quotations from the Old Testament also throws into relief a notable absence. When he is quoting the New Testament, he does not quote the Greek text generally assumed to be original, but simply uses one of the existing Latin translations, sometimes Theodore Beza’s, done from the Greek text, but quite frequently Immanuel Tremellius’s, done from an Aramaic version of the text. He does not explain why he does this in any edition of the TTP published in his lifetime. But in Adnotation XXVI, he expresses a doubt that Greek was the original language of the New Testament, pointing out that the native language of the apostles was “Syriac,” i.e., Aramaic. About this he is partly right and partly wrong. He is undoubtedly wrong to think that the passage about which he raises this issue was not written in Greek. (The text in question is from Paul’s letter to the Romans.) But he would most probably be right to suggest that the gospel reports of the sayings of Jesus go back to an Aramaic source. There has been much debate about the language Jesus used in preaching to his Palestinian contemporaries. But the best view seems to be that it was Aramaic. (On this see Meier 1991, 255–68.) This would mean that when the Greek New Testament reports what Jesus is supposed to have said, it gives us a translation of words whose original “text” has not been preserved, making it very difficult to tell how accurate the translation is. On Spinoza’s theory of scriptural interpretation, that uncomfortable fact increases the already considerable difficulties we face in knowing what Jesus actually said.