Note 104 — Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The much more daring and powerful Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670104) was promptly condemned by a Dutch clerical synod, along with Hobbes’s Leviathan, which it greatly surpassed in the matter of criticism of the scriptural text. It was the most stringent censure of supernaturalism that had thus far appeared in any modern language; and its preface is an even more mordant attack on popular religion and clericalism than the main body of the work. What seems to-day an odd compromise—the reservation of supra-rational authority for revelation, alongside of unqualified claims for the freedom of reason105—was but an adaptation of the old scholastic formula of “twofold truth,” and was perhaps at the time the possible maximum of open rationalism in regard to the current creed, since both Bacon and Locke, as we have seen, were fain to resort to it. As revealed in his letters, Spinoza in almost all things stood at the point of view of the cultivated rationalism of two centuries later. He believed in a historical Jesus, rejecting the Resurrection;106 disbelieved in ghosts and spirits;107 rejected miracles;108 and refused to think of God as ever angry;109 avowing that he could not understand the Scriptures, and had been able to learn nothing from them as to God’s attributes.110 The Tractatus could not go so far; but it went far enough to horrify many who counted themselves latitudinarian. It was only in Holland that so aggressive a criticism of Christian faith and practice could then appear; and even there neither publisher nor author dared avow himself. Spinoza even vetoed a translation into Dutch, foreseeing that such a book would be placed under an interdict.111 It was as much an appeal for freedom of thought (libertas philosophandi) as a demonstration of rational truth; and Spinoza dexterously pointed (c. 20) to the social effects of the religious liberty already enjoyed in Amsterdam as a reason for carrying liberty further. There can be no question that it powerfully furthered alike the deistic and the Unitarian movements in England from the year of its appearance; and, though the States-General felt bound formally to prohibit it on the issue of the second edition in 1674, its effect in Holland was probably as great as elsewhere: at least there seems to have gone on there from this time a rapid modification of the old orthodoxy.