Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) has recently become a subject of great interest. There are many reasons for this fascination. One is its political and religious role in the Low Countries and throughout Europe, in its own day, as a document of radical religious critique and the subject of intense debate. Another concerns its role as a hermeneutical work and an early contribution to biblical criticism. A third reason for recent interest is its treatment of scriptural faith and Judaism within a defense of liberal democracy, toleration, and freedom of expression. A fourth concerns the role of Spinoza and the TTP in a tradition of liberalism that extends to Adam Smith and has provided western European thinkers, in the wake of the collapse of Marxism, with an appealing political perspective.
Furthermore, unlike Spinoza’s system, which was his lifelong philosophical preoccupation, the TTP was one outcome of a very personal struggle at a very particular historical moment. In it Spinoza confronted his Judaism, the Bible and interpretations of it, religious beliefs and practices, and the urgencies of political and religious debate in the Dutch provinces around 1665. Rather than a response to general intellectual developments, the TTP was a response to very particular historical events, and its audience was not philosophical colleagues in a narrow sense but rather a wider public, albeit one with precise skills, interests, and sympathies.
Like his friends Lodewijk Meyer and Adriaan Koerbagh, Spinoza was the object of severe accusations and attack by theologians and the Reformed Church. In 1666, in reaction to the publication of his Philosophica sacrae scripturae interpres (Philosophy the Interpreter of Scripture), with its starkly philosophical, rational reading of Scripture, Meyer was publicly charged with atheism. Perhaps in part in response to the furor over Meyer’s book and in part as an act of self-defense, Spinoza interrupted work on the Ethics and turned to the Bible, religion, science, and politics. In a famous letter of October 1665 to Henry Oldenburg, he described his new project: to expose the prejudices of the theologians, to defend himself against the charge of atheism, and to defend science and freedom of speech. Moreover, his work was further encouraged by the deeply disturbing plight of his friend Adriaan Koerbagh. The Koerbagh brothers, Adriaan and Jan, had known Spinoza since his days in Rijnsburg and his visits to the university in Leiden. Over the years, they had become adherents of Spinoza’s naturalism and in 1668 published an explicit and controversial defense of it, with an attack on Christianity, entitled “A Light Shining in Dark Places.” Arrested, tried, and convicted, Adriaan died in prison in 1669; it is likely that Spinoza, especially in his advocacy of liberal democracy and his defense of tolerance and free speech, was thinking of his martyred friend (Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life [Cambridge University Press, 1999], 266–7).
Published anonymously in 1670 under a false imprint, the TTP unleashed a flood of criticisms and recriminations, from Reformed theologians and Cartesians alike. Spinoza was charged with atheism, sacrilege, and idolatry. Such impassioned furor warned Spinoza against a Dutch translation, the popularity of the book notwithstanding, and in 1671, in a letter to his friend Jarig Jelles, he pleaded for him to prevent the translation. If the intensity of public attacks was new, the material in the TTP was not, at least not wholly so. In a sense, at least in the first fifteen of its twenty chapters, devoted to the Bible and religion, Spinoza was returning to themes and ideas that probably originated for him in the years before his excommunication in 1656.
The TTP can be read as a work of biblical interpretation or hermeneutics and also as a work of political theory. In its first fifteen chapters, Spinoza presents a method for reading the Bible; a treatment of several large themes—prophecy, miracles, and law: an account of the Bible’s authorship, structure, and history; and an interpretation of the Bible’s goals and purposes. In Chapters 16 to 20, Spinoza explains the nature of the state and argues for toleration and freedom of expression. The work is filled with controversial, provocative ideas and views. Spinoza analyzes prophecy in terms of the abilities of the prophets, the context for their teaching, and the attitudes of their audiences. He denies the existence of miracles as traditionally understood, as divine interruptions of the causal order of nature, and reinterprets them as events for which no explanation is currently available. The Bible, he argues, is a human book that teaches a moral faith—charity and benevolence—and that does not contain scientific or metaphysical truths. Moreover, Spinoza defends liberal democracy and the toleration of scientific-philosophical thinking in a way that entails a moral life of reason, justice, mutual concern, and virtue. It is a life free from passion, a life of reason, of cooperation and justice for all citizens. In a world of monarchs, absolute rulers, and aristocratic privilege and a world rife with religious influence and hegemony over the affairs of private life and of government, Spinoza’s scientific, naturalistic account of religion, ethics, and politics is radical. It was inflammatory and very quickly became notorious.
M.L.M.