Ebook: The Sovereign and the Prophets - Spinoza on Grotian and Hobbesian Biblical Argumentation

Tracing Old Testament topics recurrent in Grotian and Hobbesian discourses on the church-state relationship, Atsuko Fukuoka recontextualizes Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise and clarifies its historical import for Dutch debates on religion, state power, and liberty. --------------------- installed on the marble floor of the Burgerzaal in the new city hall of his native Amsterdam. This planisphere symbolized the contemporary progress of the philosophia nova, astronomy and celestial cartography in particular. Amsterdam was the proud host of leading publishers in these disciplines and it was their representative, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, who first produced in print what is considered to be the original version of the planisphere engraved into city hall (cover; the caption of the planisphere reads, ‘Coeli planisphaerium describebat Guiljelmus Blaeu anno 1628’). Spinoza, as a young man, must have been one of those who were fascinated by the new view of the world. The planisphere speaks to an important aspect of Spinoza’s intellectual life: positioned at the heart of city hall, it was a symbolic representation of the fact that scholarship never exists in a vacuum, but is situated in, and correspondingly dependent on, the society and political system within which the intellectual works. Blaeu’s publishing house itself gives an example of this. The company, succeeded by his son Joan, once suffered a raid by the Amsterdam magistracy, who had complied with the requests of Calvinist ministers to supress the Blaeus’ commitment to non-orthodox publications, especially Socinian works, for which Amsterdam was again the well-known host. Later, as an adult, striving to himself be a contributor to the philosophia nova, Spinoza took up the task of thinking fundamentally about the tension between scholarship and society. His involvement resulted in the publication of the Tractatus theologico-politicus (TTP) in 1670. The present book centrally concerns how this treatise redefined the relationship between state and church ( jus circa sacra), and how it articulated a theory for intellectual liberty on that basis (libertas philosophandi). The TTP stemmed from a milieu in which the question of whether or not the government could be the protector of students of truth was crucial. This question embraced another problematic question: How can rulers know truth? It was assumed that God is the one who knows truth, and therefore He should be asked in order that His will be discerned. But given that there are people professionally trained to understand His will, should rulers simply ask them, instead of directly asking God? Most of the time, it may be safe to do so. And yet, in some critical cases, do rulers not need to ask God themselves and judge what is true for themselves, at their own risk and responsibility? To formulate the same idea according to the contemporary frame of thought: Who occupies the position directly below God to transmit His will to the people? In short, who is the true mediator of His will on earth? These are the questions that the present book traces. They entailed the points of debate that were already heated in the early years of the Republic’s history, particularly among the friends and foes of Hugo Grotius in the 1610s. Almost two generations later, the same set of questions must have vexed the Amsterdam city magistrates (schepenen), who in early summer 1668 were to judge a friend of Spinoza, Adriaen Koerbagh (1633–1669), accused of infringing on the anti-Socinian legislation of 1653 issued by the States of Holland, by authoring a highly audacious criticism of religion and church.4 The magistrates might have felt encouraged to assert their own judgment against clerical opposition by a Ferdinand Bol painting decorating their chamber (schepenkamer) in the city hall, ‘Moses’s Descent from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments’. As Michael Rosenthal pertinently contextualized, Bol’s painting had been designed to endorse such leadership by civil authorities. It represents Moses solemnly bringing the tablet of the Decalogue from God to the people, while Aaron, the high priest, kneels to his brother as if humbly remembering his past misjudgment that had wrongly led the Hebrews into the worship of the golden calf.5 Despite the artwork’s message, however, the magistrates examining Koerbagh substantially acquiesced to the judgment of the Calvinist ministers who were demanding that Koerbagh’s deed necessitate a severe punishment. Spinoza’s TTP appeared shortly after this traumatic event, which ended with Koerbagh’s death in prison in October 1669. Bol’s painting is a visual reminder of the larger conversation in which Spinoza participated. The role of the biblical text as a medium for discussing the relationship between state, church and liberty is central to Spinoza’s TTP. The focus of the present book is, in the narrowest sense, to analyse Spinoza’s choice and interpretation of quotations from the Old Testament and how this relates to his contemporaries’ comparable biblical readings that were current in the Dutch political context that prompted him to compose the TTP. I thus share Rosenthal’s interest in the TTP’s immediate historical context and the Bible’s function as example within this context.7 And yet my interest does not consist simply in examples as such, but rather in how the examples comprise a complex network of competing interpretations within the context of debate. Crucial, therefore, is an analytical comparison that accounts not only for differing interpretations of the biblical text, but also for the different translations. The axis of the comparison is the paradigmatic question that appears even in Bol’s painting in the Chamber of Magistrates: Who mediates the reign of God? The objects of comparison start with treatises produced in the abovementioned milieu of Grotius during the Remonstrant controversy over the church-state relationship, and most importantly include Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Part III in particular. It is well known that this work attracted significant interest in the Dutch Republic. Joan Blaeu, then a member of the ruling body of Amsterdam, arranged a new Latin translation of Leviathan by Hobbes himself to be included in Opera philosophica.8 The eventual publication of this Latin translation came in 1668, one year after the publication of a Dutch translation which Abraham van Berckel (1639–1686), another friend of Spinoza, had prepared, and a relative of Koerbagh had printed.9 Recent scholarship suggests that Hobbes’s biblical interpretation in Part III of Leviathan could be regarded as a possible ‘prototype’ of the TTP’s engagement with the Bible.10 While it is true that historical clues presently available cannot absolutely determine whether Spinoza did read Leviathan while writing the TTP, this does not diminish the necessity for a detailed comparison between the biblical interpretations of these two treatises. The historical relevancy of such comparison is vouched for, especially because Hobbes shares with Spinoza and other Dutch theoreticians a strong interest in the question concerning divine will’s mediators, and it is in Leviathan that this question receives Hobbes’s full-length investigation based on biblical exegesis. Indeed, a close observation of Spinoza’s and Hobbes’s biblical interpretations reveals that the overlap between their topics and quotations converges, among other issues, on matters related to the question of mediating agents, the direct interlocutors with God, and how they relay God’s revelation and His laws to humankind. Therefore, this book discusses the four subjects that are most pertinent to this question of mediation: (1) jus circa sacra, or the sovereign’s right over religion: Spinoza associates this issue with the role of the ruler to mediate God’s ‘reign’ or ‘kingdom’ (regnum) to humankind;12 (2) the authority of the Bible; (3) media of revelation, or the question of how God spoke to the prophets; and (4) the Spirit of God. With an investigation into the two philosophers’ consonances and dissonances at its center (chapters 4–8), the present book also investigates several major Dutch theoretical works that discuss the church-state relationship. These works were related to the reception of Hobbes in the Dutch Republic and to the issues pertinent to the TTP, and therefore help us to understand the link between Hobbes and Spinoza. The first group of sources comprises those produced during the controversy between the Remonstrants and the Contra- Remonstrants in the first two decades of the seventeenth century (chapter 1). In this period, ‘[t]he main patterns of argument had been laid down’13 for the later debates on the church-state relationship, so that Hobbes’s ideas, which started to exercise influence on Dutch soil from the middle of the century, quickly merged with the ideas that had been raised by Grotius and his friends. And yet the ideas of the Dutch Remonstrants and those of Hobbes contain significant differences, too. After summarizing the pivotal ideas of Part III of Leviathan in chapter 2, the next chapter compares Hobbes’s ideas with those of the Remonstrant polemicists on the one hand, and with representative authors belonging to the new philosophical generation that arose in the 1650s and 1660s, on the other (chapter 3). Interpretation of a topical biblical passage, Deut. 17:8–13, provides the point of comparison for the analyses in this chapter. While the theoreticians discussed in these chapters are chronologically prior to the TTP, chapter 9 concerns one from the period that succeeded it: Ulrik Huber, the Frisian father of universal public law ( jus publicum universale). His theory of jus circa sacra testifies not only to the impact Hobbes and his students had on the landscape of the subject, but also to the centrality that the question of divine will’s mediation occupied in defining the relationship between the sovereign, the church, and the individual. Jus circa sacra, as the right of the secular authority over religious matters was called at the time, is a many-sided concept. The establishment of this phrase has been attributed by Johannes Heckel to Grotius’s work during the Remonstrant controversy, De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra (completed in 1617 and first published in 1647), though not in combination with jus, but rather with imperium.14 The designation derived from a similar expression, potestas ecclesiastica circa sacra, which was current among Reformed theologians in the Holy Roman Empire. Differentiated from potestas ecclesiastica ‘in’ sacra, power reserved for clerics alone, potestas ecclesiastica ‘circa’ sacra—the share of lay magistracy—originally carried a connotation that the power of secular rulers was limited to non-essential, if not peripheral, matters of religion. The concept existed under the long shadow of King Uzziah, who dared to administer religious rituals himself, rejecting the help of priests, and who was punished immediately by God (2 Chr. 26:16–23). Though the word circa continued to be used as a part of the fixed phrase, the precise implication of this word—that the secular jurisdiction is limited to non-essential matters of religion—was at issue. As a search for logical arguments that could defend the supremacy of the lay magistracy over clerics, the Remonstrants’ debate in favour of the imperium circa sacra was at the same time a process of conceptually refining the meaning of summa potestas (‘sovereign power / sovereignty’) for the young republic. Still, in the second half of the century, the lack of a clear definition between the two poles of authority was deeply felt among the States Party sympathizers and this accounted for the popularity of Hobbes’s political works among them. Although the Englishman Hobbes employed only the phrase ‘ecclesiastical power’ (potestas ecclesiastica)15 and not imperium / jus circa sacra (or its equivalent in English), the continuity of the problem was clear enough to his Dutch readers. Spinoza’s TTP (1670) signals that he knew the term jus circa sacra as a current catchphrase indicating issues concerning church and state, as the title of chapter 19, ‘it is shown that jus circa sacra belongs wholly to the sovereign powers’,16 testifies. The fact that Ulrik Huber used the word combination jus circa sacra in the title of a section concerning that subject in his textbook on jus publicum (De jure civitatis libri tres: 1672, 1684, and 1694) further illustrates that the term was well established.17 Characteristic of these last two authors is their engagement with jus circa sacra as an issue no longer concerning sovereignty theory alone, but also tightly connected with the defence of what each thought to be freedom—libertas philosophandi for Spinoza, and jus internum conscientiae or the freedom of the believers’ conscience for Huber. Accordingly, the history of jus circa sacra is not only the history of the conceptualization of sovereignty, but also that of freedom of mind. As such, the seventeenth- century Dutch debates surrounding jus circa sacra form an important chapter in the history of human rights. A comparative analysis of the paradigmatic use of Old Testament topics among contemporary writers in the seventeenth century, such as those mentioned here, allows for a more nuanced understanding of jus circa sacra debates and the development of freedom of mind discourse within them. Many of the biblical quotations and their interpretations found in the treatises, including the TTP, are less illuminating when considered independently, but they reveal previously overlooked connections and conversations when considered in the light of a properly identified ‘web’ of parallel interpretations of those biblical verses known to each of the authors. Among these authors, of course, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza stands apart; his way of connecting himself to this web of interpretation is always highly individualistic, and is not improperly called a way of ‘playing with’ the premises of his contemporaries.18 At the same time, however, discussing biblical verses and their interpretation was an accepted method for discussing contemporary political and philosophical issues. This study’s purpose is to explore the TTP as a reaction to controversies in his milieu regarding the relationship between state, church, and liberty, with a comparative analysis of biblical quotes as its principal method. The most immediate historical background of Spinoza’s treatise still waits to be clarified in many aspects, and this book takes on the task of clarifying the context of debates about the church-state relationship, and its intersection with contemporary discussions about the relationship between philosophy and theology. The recurrent question about revelation’s mediators is the thread that runs through the succeeding chapters.

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Tracing Old Testament topics recurrent in Grotian and Hobbesian discourses on the church-state relationship, Atsuko Fukuoka recontextualizes Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise and clarifies its historical import for Dutch debates on religion, state power, and liberty.