Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

Key dates

A family of Marranos fled from the Inquisition

Baruch's grandfather, Abraham Michael de Spinoza, had been one of the leaders of Amsterdam's Sephardic community, of which he was president (parnas) in 1639^[17]. His father, Michael de Spinoza, a merchant established in the dried-fruit and spice trade, married twice: by his first wife, who died in 1627, he had two daughters, Miriam and Rebekah; by his second wife, Hana Deborah, who died in 1638 when Baruch was only six, he had the future philosopher^[18]. Like most families of Amsterdam's Portuguese community, the Spinozas descended from Jews forced by the Iberian Inquisition into baptism or exile — Marranos who had publicly lived as Christians while keeping, with more or less constancy, a clandestine Jewish practice, before recovering in Holland the freedom to profess openly their ancestral faith.

The Talmud Torah and Baruch's teachers

Spinoza attends the community school of the Talmud Torah, where he receives a classical training in Hebrew, the Bible and Talmudic literature, then, toward the end of his course, an initiation into medieval Jewish philosophy — certainly Maimonides, but also Gersonides and Hasdai Crescas^[19]. He studies under the direction of Saul Levi Morteira, a rabbi renowned for his erudition and doctrinal intransigence^[20]. The old biographical tradition also associates with his formation Menasseh ben Israel, the polyglot scholar, printer and diplomat who would later negotiate with Cromwell the legal return of the Jews to England; contemporary research, however, regards this point as uncertain, the historian Steven Nadler having shown that no documentary evidence establishes it and that the two men seem, intellectually, to have stood at opposite poles from one another^[21]. The Talmud Torah register no longer mentions Baruch's name after the age of fourteen: biographical tradition concludes that he was then called back to help his father in the family business, without completing the higher course of Talmudic studies followed by future rabbis^[22]. He completes his formation as an autodidact: Latin with the former radical Jesuit Franciscus van den Enden, and the Cartesian philosophy which he follows as an unregistered auditor at Leiden University around 1658^[23].

An unprecedented anathema

On 27 July 1656, the parnassim (lay leaders) of Amsterdam's Sephardic Talmud Torah congregation pronounce against Baruch Spinoza, aged twenty-three, a cherem — the severest form of excommunication in Jewish community law. Biographers agree in calling this act the "harshest ever pronounced" by that community before or after him^[24]. The text of the edict, preserved in the community registers, denounces Spinoza's "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds", without however specifying in detail the exact nature of those opinions^[25]. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the questions then circulating in the community about him concerned notably the denial of the personal immortality of the soul, the rejection of a transcendent God distinct from the created world, and the contesting of the binding authority of the Mosaic Law^[26]. The cherem forbids every member of the community to read his writings, to trade with him, to approach him within four cubits or to remain under the same roof as him; it was never lifted^[27].

"None may speak with him by word of mouth or in writing, nor render him any service, nor remain under the same roof as him, nor come within four cubits of him, nor read any writing composed or copied by him." — Usual formula of the cherem as applied by Amsterdam's Sephardic community, as reported by Spinoza's historiographers^[28]

Grounds that remained obscure

No contemporary document explains univocally what, precisely, motivated so severe a sentence: at that date Spinoza had published no work, and the philosophical positions that would become famous were as yet only private conversations or rumours circulating in the freethinking circles he frequented in Amsterdam. Only fourteen years later, with the publication of the Theological-Political Treatise, would Europe's learned world discover the true extent of his thought — the denial of miracles, of particular providence, of Israel's election as a chosen people, and of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch^[29]. The excommunication of 1656 thus appears, retrospectively, as a premonitory intuition of the community leaders rather than as the punishment of a doctrine already fully formulated and published.

The legend of the dagger

A tenacious biographical tradition, reported from the earliest notices on Spinoza, holds that "a fanatical Jew" once raised a dagger against him as he left the synagogue or the theatre, without managing to wound him mortally — Spinoza is said to have kept the cloak torn by that attack as a memento^[30]. The historian Jacob Freudenthal, one of Spinoza's first modern critical biographers, invites caution, however: he suggests that this episode, if it has any real basis, may belong to a personal altercation with Spinoza himself rather than to a premeditated attack in the name of the community^[31]. No independent contemporary source makes it possible to decide between an embellished legend and a real but isolated incident.

Rijnsburg, Voorburg, The Hague

After his excommunication, Spinoza remains for some time in Amsterdam and Leiden, subsisting on private lessons while learning the trade of grinder of optical lenses, in which his mathematical knowledge serves him well^[32]. He lives for a time with a Collegiant friend (a member of a tolerant, anti-clerical Christian movement) settled a few kilometres from Amsterdam, on the Ouderkerk road, near the old Jewish cemetery — whence he keeps up a regular philosophical correspondence with his friends left behind in the city^[33]. Around 1660-1661 he settles at Rijnsburg, near Leiden, where he writes the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being^[34]. In 1663 he moves to Voorburg, near The Hague, where he completes and publishes his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, the only work published under his name in his lifetime^[35], and where he writes most of the Theological-Political Treatise and the Ethics. He finally settles at The Hague in 1670, where he will spend the last seven years of his life^[36].

The refusal of the Heidelberg chair

On 16 February 1673, Councillor Johann Ludwig Fabritius writes to Spinoza, on the Elector Palatine's orders, to offer him an ordinary chair of philosophy at Heidelberg University:

"His most serene highness the Elector Palatine, my most gracious lord, has commanded me to write to you […] to ask whether you would be inclined to take up an ordinary professorship of philosophy in his renowned university. You will receive the yearly salary now enjoyed by ordinary professors […] You will have the amplest freedom to philosophize, which he believes you will not abuse to disturb the publicly established religion." — Johann Ludwig Fabritius, letter to Spinoza, 16 February 1673^[37]

Spinoza answers on 30 March 1673 with a polite but firm refusal, invoking his exclusive passion for philosophical research and his love of tranquillity:

"If I had ever wanted to take up a professorship in any faculty whatsoever, I could not have wished for a better one than the one offered to me […] But I have never planned to teach publicly, so that I cannot resolve […] to seize this excellent opportunity. First, if I devoted myself to the education of young people, I would cease to progress in philosophy. Moreover, I do not know what limits this freedom to philosophize should have, lest I appear to wish to disturb the publicly established religion […] You see then, Sir, that I hold back not from hope of a better offer, but from love of tranquillity." — Spinoza, letter to Johann Ludwig Fabritius, 30 March 1673^[38]

This refusal, consistent with a whole life spent apart from institutions — synagogue, university, princely court — illustrates the radicality of his intellectual independence: Spinoza deliberately chooses a withdrawn, modest existence, financed by manual craftsmanship rather than by an official post liable to bridle his freedom of thought.

A premature death at forty-four (1677)

Spinoza dies at The Hague on 21 February 1677, aged forty-four — a date established with certainty by a contemporary letter from Georg Hermann Schuller to Leibniz, dated 26 February 1677, which reports that "the excellent and acute Mr Spinoza passed away on 21 February, after having suffered from extreme atrophy"^[39]. He is buried on 25 February 1677 in a rented grave inside The Hague's Nieuwe Kerk; graves being regularly reassigned, his remains were scattered in the churchyard in the 18th century, so that no precise spot can be located today — only a memorial signals the place from outside the church^[40]. The oldest biographical tradition (Colerus, 1705) attributes his death to consumption, often reinterpreted since as pulmonary tuberculosis aggravated by prolonged inhalation of glass dust inherent in his lens-grinding trade^[41]. A recent re-examination of the sources by the immunologist Nanne Bloksma, cited by the specialist Piet Steenbakkers, qualifies this traditional explanation, however: Spinoza's physical constitution seems to have been generally good, and the phrase "extreme atrophy" used by Schuller suggests rather a cachexia linked to a severe chronic illness than classical tuberculosis — the exact cause remains, on the present state of research, uncertain^[42]. Fearing the seizure of his unpublished manuscripts by the authorities, his close friends Lodewijk Meyer, Georg Hermann Schuller and Jarig Jelles discreetly organise, in that same year 1677, the publication of his posthumous works — the Opera Posthuma — comprising the Ethics, the unfinished Political Treatise and an abridged Hebrew grammar^[43]. This precaution proves well founded: the States of Holland and West Friesland formally ban these posthumous works on 25 June 1678, as they had done for the Theological-Political Treatise in 1674^[44].

The geometrical method

Spinoza's masterwork, the Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata), unfolds in five parts: Of God (I), Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind (II), Of the Origin and Nature of the Affects (III), Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Affects (IV) and Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom (V)^[45]. Each part proceeds with the apparatus of Euclidean geometry: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations, corollaries and scholia follow one another so that, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's formula, "from these initial elements the first proposition necessarily follows, and each following proposition can be demonstrated by relying only on what precedes"^[46]. Descartes had sketched, in an appendix to the Replies to the Second Objections of the Metaphysical Meditations, a geometrical presentation of his philosophy without ever applying it systematically; Spinoza radicalises the gesture and extends it to the whole of his metaphysics, psychology and ethics^[47].

A single substance, infinite and necessary

From the opening of Part I, Spinoza lays down his founding definitions:

"By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself." — Spinoza, Ethics, I, Definition 3^[48]

"By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes." — Spinoza, Ethics, I, Definition 6^[49]

From these definitions Spinoza deduces geometrically that there can exist only one substance, infinite and necessary: "God, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists" (Prop. 11); "besides God no substance can be granted or conceived" (Prop. 14); "whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived" (Prop. 15)^[50]. The human mind knows only two of these infinite attributes — thought and extension — between which Spinoza establishes a strict parallelism with no direct causal communication: "a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways"^[51]. The particular things of the world are, in this system, only finite modes — "affections of substance" — and not realities subsisting by themselves.

This identification of God with the single substance finds its most famous formula in the Preface to Part IV, where Spinoza writes, in Latin:

"The reason or cause why God, or Nature, acts, and why He exists, is one and the same." — Spinoza, Ethics, IV, Preface^[52]

It is from this formula — "Deus sive Natura", "God or Nature" — that posterity will draw the term pantheism to designate the Spinozist system: God is no longer, for Spinoza, a transcendent reality distinct from the world and its creator, but the single immanent substance of which the whole universe is the necessary expression. Commentators distinguish, within this framework, Natura naturans — "naturing nature", God as producing substance — and Natura naturata — "natured nature", the set of modes it produces^[53].

A determinism without remainder: divine and human freedom denied

From this metaphysics follows an integral determinism, which excludes all contingency and all freedom, including in God Himself:

"There is nothing contingent in the nature of things; but all things are determined, by the necessity of the divine nature, to exist and to act in a given manner." — Spinoza, Ethics, I, Proposition 29^[54]

"The will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary cause." […] "God does not act from freedom of will." — Spinoza, Ethics, I, Proposition 32 and Corollary I^[55]

"Things could have been produced by God in no other way, nor in any other order, than that in which they have been produced." — Spinoza, Ethics, I, Proposition 33^[56]

This determinism extends to the human mind itself: "In the mind there is no absolute, or free, will; but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity" (Ethics, II, Prop. 48)^[57]. In the Appendix to Part I, Spinoza frontally attacks the very notion of final causes, which he judges a pure anthropomorphic projection: "all the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end"^[58]. He draws from it a radical consequence for the notions of good and evil, which he reduces to mere subjective projections: "good and evil indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves, and are nothing but modes of thinking"^[59].

Conatus, affects and the way of blessedness

Part III opens Spinozist anthropology with the concept of conatus — the endeavour by which each thing strives to persevere in its being, an endeavour which constitutes "the actual essence of the thing itself"^[60]. From this conatus derive three primitive affects — desire, joy (increase of the power of acting) and sadness (diminution of that power) — from which proceed, by combination, all human affects^[61]. Man is passive when he is the partial and inadequate cause of his affects, active when he is their adequate cause; it is this bondage to the passions that Part IV describes, precisely entitled Of Human Bondage.

Liberation from this bondage passes, for Spinoza, through three ascending kinds of knowledge: imagination, "confused and mutilated knowledge"; reason, which apprehends things "not as contingent, but as necessary"; and finally intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva), which apprehends singular things sub specie aeternitatis, "under a certain aspect of eternity"^[62]. This third kind of knowledge culminates in what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God:

"The intellectual love of God, which arises from the third kind of knowledge, is eternal." — Spinoza, Ethics, V, Proposition 33^[63]

"The mind's intellectual love toward God is the very love by which God loves Himself." — Spinoza, Ethics, V, Proposition 36^[64]

The whole work closes with its most famous proposition, which sums up the entire Spinozist ethics of wisdom:

"Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; and we do not enjoy it because we restrain our lusts, but on the contrary because we enjoy it we are able to restrain our lusts." — Spinoza, Ethics, V, Proposition 42 (last proposition of the work)^[65]

Pantheism or masked atheism? Bayle, Toland, Novalis

Spinoza's constant theological vocabulary — he never ceases to use the word "God" — never sufficed to convince his contemporaries of his piety. As early as 1697, in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, the Protestant philosopher Pierre Bayle devotes a long article to Spinoza in which he describes him, in a formula that has remained famous:

"He was a systematic atheist, and of an entirely new method." — Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, article "Spinoza", Rotterdam, 1697^[66]

The technical term pantheism, which would become the commonest designation of the Spinozist system, appears only later: according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it was coined — the encyclopedia's cautious formula retains a "perhaps" — by the Irish freethinker John Toland, around 1705^[67]. A century later, the German Romantic poet Novalis proposes a characterisation that has remained famous, popularised in particular by the essay Thomas Carlyle devotes to him in 1829:

"Spinoza is a God-intoxicated man." — Novalis, posthumous fragment, quoted in the Novalis Schriften, ed. Tieck and Schlegel, Berlin, 1837^[68]

This formula, often quoted to stress that Spinoza remains, despite everything, haunted by the sacred rather than simply atheist in the vulgar sense, must be handled with caution: it comes from a posthumous editorial collection of Novalis's fragments, and its exact attestation in a dated manuscript could not be verified with full certainty^[69]. Between the atheism denounced by Bayle and the mysticism suggested by Novalis, the Spinozist doctrine occupies a singular position which the Catholic reader must be careful not to simplify in one direction or the other: it absolutely denies the personal, transcendent and creator God of biblical faith, while just as much refusing the militant atheistic materialism that would purely and simply deny the existence of a necessary and infinite reality.

"Nothing happens in nature that contradicts its universal laws"

The sixth chapter of the Theological-Political Treatise, devoted to miracles, lays down the principle that governs the whole rest of the work — including, as we shall see, its reading of the Pentateuch: the laws of nature are, for Spinoza, necessary decrees of God Himself, so that no event could contravene them without God contradicting Himself:

"The universal laws of nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. […] If anyone asserted that God acted against the laws of nature, he would ipso facto be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature — an evident absurdity." — Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chapter VI, §§ 16-18^[70]

From this postulate, laid down before even examining the biblical text itself, Spinoza deduces a general hermeneutical rule: "we must assuredly believe that whatever did really happen happened naturally"^[71]. Accounts of miracles therefore belong, for him, neither to fraud nor to falsehood, but either to the ignorance of secondary causes among the ancient Hebrews, or to a rhetorical device proper to the biblical narrative style, designed to strike the popular imagination:

"Scripture does not explain things by their secondary causes, but only narrates them in the order and the style which has most power to move men, and especially uneducated men, to devotion." — Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chapter VI, § 85^[72]

The Red Sea, Joshua's sun, Noah's rainbow

Spinoza systematically applies this grid to the most famous miracles of the Old Testament. The crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14) would be explained by "an east wind which blew very strongly all night"^[73]; the stopping of the sun before Joshua (Joshua 10) would be only the reinterpretation, by Hebrews convinced of the earth's immobility, of a mere battle day longer than usual, partly designed to confound the neighbouring sun-worshipping peoples^[74]; the rainbow given to Noah as a sign of the covenant (Genesis 9) would be an optical phenomenon of refraction which the ancients reinterpreted as a new prodigy^[75]. This method — explaining each biblical miracle by an underlying natural cause which ancient ignorance transfigured into supernatural intervention — is not a peripheral aspect of the Spinozist system: it is the methodological presupposition that governs, in the following chapter, his way of reading the whole biblical text "like any other book"^[76], presuming neither its divine inspiration nor the reliability of its accounts of wonders.

A Catholic cannot subscribe to this postulate without abandoning the essentials of revealed faith: the Church teaches that God, the free and sovereign Creator of nature, can at any moment act directly in the world He created without contradicting Himself, precisely because natural laws are not absolute necessities imposed on God from outside, but the ordinary order He freely established and remains free to suspend or surpass in order to manifest His glory and His plan of salvation. In laying down that God cannot, without logical absurdity, act "against His own nature", Spinoza confuses the internal necessity of an impersonal nature with the sovereign freedom of a personal God — a confusion that vitiates, from the outset, his whole subsequent reading of Scripture.

The most consequential point of Spinoza's whole work for the history of exegesis is undoubtedly his treatment, in chapters VIII and IX of the Theological-Political Treatise, of the question of the Pentateuch's author. It is there that Spinoza formulates, with unprecedented sharpness and system, the thesis that Moses did not write the Pentateuch as we read it — opening the way, two centuries before Wellhausen, to the whole of modern historical criticism of the Pentateuch.

What Jewish and Christian tradition says: Moses, author of the Pentateuch

Before setting out Spinoza's argument, we must recall what the tradition he contests had unanimously received and handed down for more than two millennia. The Pentateuch attributes itself to Moses in several places: "Moses wrote all the words of the Lord" (Exodus 24:4); God commands him: "Write these words" (Exodus 34:27); Moses records the stages of the desert journey (Numbers 33:1-2); "Moses wrote this law" and handed it to the priests to be placed beside the ark of the covenant (Deuteronomy 31:9 and 31:24-26)^[77]. The rest of the Old Testament confirms this attribution constantly: the book of Joshua presupposes "the law which Moses [gave]" and "the book of the law of Moses" as an already written, normative text (Joshua 1:7-8; 8:31)^[78], and the books of Kings refer to it continually as an already constituted written authority.

The New Testament takes up this attribution as shared evidence: Jesus Himself, in His controversy with the Sadducees, quotes Deuteronomy 25:5 as a text "written" by Moses^[79], and He declares to the unbelieving Pharisees: "Moses wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" (John 5:46-47)^[80]. The Acts of the Apostles take up the same attribution (Acts 3:22; 15:21)^[81]. The ancient Jewish witness is unanimous: Flavius Josephus attributes, in the Jewish Antiquities, the whole Pentateuch to Moses^[82]; Philo of Alexandria "was convinced that the entire Pentateuch is the work of Moses"^[83]. On the Christian side, the Fathers of the first centuries — Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Origen — all attest, with one voice, the Mosaic attribution^[84]. Another weighty argument: the Samaritans, religiously separated from the Jews since the return from Exile, received the Pentateuch as a sacred book by the 4th century BC at the latest — which is hardly compatible with a final redaction as late as the one supposed by the evolutionist scheme of modern criticism^[85].

Ibn Ezra, the first doubt (12th century)

Spinoza himself acknowledges he is not the first to cast doubt on this unanimous attribution. He explicitly designates, at the opening of chapter VIII of the Theological-Political Treatise, a medieval predecessor:

"Aben Ezra, a man of enlightened intelligence and no small learning, who was the first, so far as I know, to treat of this opinion, dared not express his meaning openly, confining himself to obscure hints which I shall not scruple to elucidate." — Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chapter VIII, § 9^[86]

The Spanish rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164), a major figure of medieval Jewish exegesis, had indeed left, in his commentary on Deuteronomy, a few sibylline remarks on certain passages hard to reconcile with an integrally Mosaic redaction — never openly denying the traditional attribution, but hinting, through deliberately enigmatic formulas ("if you understand the mystery of the twelve", "then you will know the truth"), that he perceived difficulties he preferred not to develop publicly^[87]. Spinoza seizes on these discreet hints to build, openly, a thesis which Ibn Ezra had only brushed against.

The five clues of chapter VIII

Spinoza's argument rests on a strictly internal reading of the text, which he presents as irrefutable evidence. The first clue concerns the account of Moses' death (Deuteronomy 34), written in the third person and recounting even the prophet's burial:

"It must also be remarked that the narrative relates not only the manner of Moses' death and burial, and the thirty days' mourning of the Hebrews, but further compares him with all the prophets who came after him […] 'There hath not arisen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.' Such testimony cannot have been given of Moses by himself […] it must come from someone who lived centuries later. […] And as for the place of his burial: 'no man knoweth thereof unto this day.'" — Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chapter VIII, §§ 37-41^[88]

The second clue concerns the preface of Deuteronomy, which locates the discourse "beyond the Jordan" — a geographical position which, according to Spinoza here following Ibn Ezra, supposes a narrator writing from Canaan, whereas Moses himself never crossed the river and never entered it^[89]. The third clue bears on an anachronism noted in Genesis 36:31, mentioning "the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any kings over the children of Israel" — a verse which, according to Spinoza, necessarily presupposes the already established existence of an Israelite royalty, hence a composition posterior to the institution of the monarchy by Saul or David, several centuries after Moses' death:

"It is therefore undoubted that the historian here speaks of the kings the Idumeans had before David subjugated them […] it thus appears clearer than day that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses." — Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chapter VIII, §§ 46-48^[90]

The fourth clue notes internal doublets and inconsistencies, Spinoza's favoured example being the comparison between the two versions of the Decalogue (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5), which differ notably in wording, particularly for the Sabbath commandment, whose theological motivation changes from one text to the other^[91]. The fifth clue, developed in chapter IX, concerns the method of compilation: the same genealogical passage on the kings of Edom (Genesis 36) is found word for word in the First Book of Chronicles, whose author, by the admission of traditional Jewish exegetes themselves, drew his information from earlier historical sources — a sign, according to Spinoza, of a comparable late compilation procedure for the Pentateuch itself^[92].

Ezra, scribe and compiler: the Spinozist hypothesis

From this bundle of clues Spinoza concludes not only the non-Mosaic character of the text: he proposes a positive replacement hypothesis, identifying the true compiler with the figure of the scribe Ezra, active after the return from Exile in the 5th century BC:

"I am led to suspect that Ezra was the man. […] These books could have been written by no one but Ezra — now Scripture bears testimony to no one but Ezra, who flourished at this time." — Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chapter VIII, end^[93]

"Ezra — whom I shall continue to speak of as the writer or compiler of the earlier books of Scripture, until another is discovered with better pretensions to the authorship." — Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chapter IX, opening^[94]

Spinoza goes so far as to specify that the book of Deuteronomy, as handed down to us, would be Moses' own book of the Law, but enlarged and explained by Ezra, who would then have undertaken to "relate the entire history of the Hebrew nation, from the creation of the world to the destruction of Jerusalem"^[95]. He even adds that this work of compilation remained unfinished:

"Ezra did little, in fact, but gather materials from other earlier writers, and then, without much examination or any care for arrangement, set down the results of his labours in a simple style. […] What cause prevented Ezra from revising his work I am at a loss to conjecture, unless perchance it were a sudden or premature death." — Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chapter IX^[96]

This hypothesis also owes something to another, less avowed forerunner: the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, whose work Prae-Adamitae (1655) had already defended a late, composite composition of the Pentateuch. Although no direct personal contact between the two men could be established by historians, the inventory of Spinoza's personal library attests that he owned a copy of La Peyrère's work — material evidence of an intellectual influence which contemporary specialists, notably Richard Popkin, regard as established^[97].

How does the Catholic magisterium answer?

Faced with this reading, which would become in two centuries the dominant paradigm of much university exegesis, the Catholic Church answered substantially, never renouncing the essential Mosaic attribution of the Pentateuch, while admitting nuances which the historical-critical debate made necessary.

As early as 1893, Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus, solemnly recalls the integral inspiration of Scripture:

"The entire books of the Old and the New Testament, with all their parts, were written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; now, not only can such inspiration by itself admit no error, but it excludes and rejects it as necessarily as God, the supreme Truth, can be the author of no error." — Leo XIII, encyclical Providentissimus Deus, 18 November 1893^[98]

Leo XIII explicitly warns there against the system which then decks itself out "under the honourable name of higher criticism"^[99], anticipating the controversy that would intensify with the spread of the documentary hypothesis. It is in this context that the Pontifical Biblical Commission, instituted by Leo XIII, issues on 27 June 1906 a decree entitled De mosaica authentia Pentateuchi ("On the Mosaic authenticity of the Pentateuch"), answering four successive questions^[100]. To the first — do the critical arguments suffice to deny that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch, against the continuous consensus of the Jewish people, the constant tradition of the Church and the internal indications of the text itself? — the Commission answers negatively^[101]. But to the following questions it brings substantial nuances: Mosaic authenticity does not require Moses to have personally written every word with his own hand, but only to have conceived the work under divine inspiration, entrusting the writing to secretaries faithful to his thought and approving the final result as his own (Q2); Moses may have used earlier written documents and oral traditions as sources (Q3); post-Mosaic retouchings — additions by a later inspired author, glosses, explanations, modernisation of a language grown archaic, copyists' faults — are admissible without calling into question the substantial authenticity and integrity of the work, subject to the judgment of the Church (Q4)^[102].

In 1943, Pius XII's encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu opens the way to a more attentive study of the literary genres and sources employed by the sacred authors, without ever taking up the classical documentary hypothesis or denying substantial attribution:

"The exegete must, as it were, go back in spirit to those distant centuries of the East, so that, aided by the resources of history, archaeology, ethnology and the other sciences, he may discern and recognise what literary genres the authors of that ancient age wished to employ." — Pius XII, encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, 30 September 1943, § 35^[103]

Twenty-two years later, the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum of the Second Vatican Council synthesises this double requirement — inerrant inspiration and attention to literary genres — in a formula that has become the contemporary reference:

"The books of Scripture firmly, faithfully and without error teach the truth which God wanted put down in the sacred Letters for our salvation." — Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, constitution Dei Verbum, 18 November 1965, § 11^[104]

"The interpreter must seek the meaning which the sacred writer, in given circumstances, in the conditions of his time and culture, using the literary genres then in use, intended to express." — Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, constitution Dei Verbum, 18 November 1965, § 12^[105]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church takes up the same doctrine: God chose men whom He employed "making full use of their faculties and powers, so that, He Himself acting in them and through them, they put down in writing, as true authors, all that He willed" (CCC § 106), before literally repeating the inerrancy formula of Dei Verbum (CCC § 107)^[106]. The continuity of this teaching, from Leo XIII to Vatican II, shows that the Church never capitulated before the Spinozist thesis of a purely late, anonymous composition with no substantial link to Moses: it specified the concrete modalities of Mosaic mediation — secretaries, earlier sources, later retouchings — without ever abandoning the substantial attribution that remains at the heart of the 1906 decree and which the New Testament itself, in Christ's own mouth, takes for granted.

What modern exegesis proposes, and its limits

The Spinozist hypothesis of a late compilation by Ezra would find, two centuries later, a learned extension in the classical documentary hypothesis, systematised by Julius Wellhausen at the end of the 19th century: the Pentateuch would result from the fusion of four distinct redactional sources — the Yahwist (J, 9th century BC), the Elohist (E, slightly later), the Deuteronomist (D, identified with the "book of the Law" found in the Temple in 621 BC, cf. 2 Kings 22) and the Priestly Code (P, dated to the Exile period), the whole being assembled in a final redaction in the 5th century BC — Wellhausen himself identifying Ezra as the final redactor, exactly in line with the intuition formulated by Spinoza two hundred years earlier^[107]. The Catholic Encyclopedia's "Pentateuch" article itself reproduces and discusses in detail this J/E/D/P scheme with its traditional datings, before noting its historiographical difficulties^[108].

Part of contemporary exegesis continues to develop and refine this scheme. But it matters to measure honestly the methodological fragility of this construction, which the Ignispedia article devoted to these questions must expose without complacency either for easy apologetics or for historical scientism. First, the classical documentary hypothesis itself has cracked from within the academic world: according to the reference synthesis on the subject, "the consensus around the classical documentary hypothesis has now faltered", a movement triggered in large part by the influential works of John Van Seters, Hans Heinrich Schmid and Rolf Rendtorff in the mid-1970s, who date the J source no earlier than the Babylonian captivity and purely and simply reject the existence of a substantial E source, while renewed interest has turned toward "fragmentary" and "supplementary" models that today make it hard to classify contemporary theories under either of the old schemes^[109].

Next, the very example Spinoza gives as proof of a compilation procedure — the identical passage between Genesis 36 and 1 Chronicles 1 — rests on a contestable presupposition: that verbal resemblance between two texts necessarily proves a late redactional dependence of one on the other, rather than a common use of a shared ancient genealogical source, a hypothesis just as admissible and far more respectful of the Pentateuch's internal narrative unity. Likewise, the argument of the Decalogue "doublets" neglects a solid alternative explanation, put forward by the Jewish exegete Umberto Cassuto: the differentiated use of the divine names (Yahweh/Elohim), the cornerstone of the whole documentary theory since Astruc, "obeys a set of rules based on subject matter rather than source"^[110], and the alleged doublets are often explained by literary devices known to the ancient Near East (chiasmus, solemn recapitulation) rather than by the clumsy juxtaposition of competing sources.

Finally and above all, the whole critical edifice rests on the anti-supernaturalist postulate which Spinoza lays down from chapter VI of his treatise, before even addressing the question of authorship: since nothing can, by definition, contradict the necessary laws of nature-God, no authentic prophetic account is possible, and every fulfilled prediction in the text (such as the announcement, in Deuteronomy, of the entry into Canaan which Moses himself would never know) must necessarily have been written after the event it "predicts". This reasoning is circular: it does not demonstrate the impossibility of prophecy, it presupposes it, in order then to argue against the text's antiquity. A reader who does not admit a priori that God can neither reveal the future to His prophets nor inspire a text including, in the form of a later inspired addition, the account of its principal author's death — a solution precisely envisaged by the Biblical Commission of 1906 — is in no way compelled to follow Spinoza to his conclusion. The clues he notes (Moses' death in Deuteronomy 34, mention of Edomite kings, third-person formulations) are, for the most part, already integrated for a century by Catholic exegesis itself as minor, inspired post-Mosaic additions — which the 1906 decree explicitly admits (Q4) — without in any way denting the substantial attribution of the work to Moses, nor its uninterrupted reception as such by the synagogue, the Fathers and Christ Himself.

Calvinist synods and civil ban (1670-1674)

The anonymous publication of the Theological-Political Treatise in 1670 causes an immediate scandal in the Calvinist United Provinces. As early as September 1670, the provincial synod of Utrecht condemns it as heretical and places it, alongside Hobbes's Leviathan, on a list of works to be suppressed^[111]. The synod of North Holland calls it an "impious pamphlet"^[112]. In 1673, the Synod of Dordrecht of the Dutch Reformed Church publicly condemns it in turn, and, the following summer, in 1674, the States of Holland officially ban its circulation, jointly with Lodewijk Meyer's Philosophia Sacrae Scripturae Interpres and Hobbes's Leviathan — the exact day of this ban not being established with certainty by historians^[113]. A contemporary critic, whose name has not come down to us, sums up in a formula that has remained famous the general feeling aroused by the work: he calls it "a book forged in hell by the atheist devil himself, with Spinoza's help"^[114].

Placing on the Catholic Index

Spinoza's works are likewise placed on the Catholic Index librorum prohibitorum, but the exact date of that entry remains variously reported by the sources: the most frequently cited date is 1679, though some syntheses mention a Roman condemnation as early as 1675, and others note a further mention in 1690^[115]. Whatever precise date is retained, the Catholic Church judged, from the end of the 17th century, the Theological-Political Treatise and the Ethics incompatible with the Christian faith, alongside Spinoza's other posthumous works^[116]. This condemnation is not a mere disciplinary reflex: it sanctions a doctrine which explicitly denies particular providence, miracles, prophecy, the free creation of the world by a personal God, and the supernatural inspiration of the Scriptures — that is, the very framework of biblical Revelation which the Church is charged with keeping and handing down.

A third contemporary, the French Oratorian priest Richard Simon, illustrates the complexity of Spinoza's learned reception in the Catholic world of the time: influenced by certain critical intuitions of Spinoza and La Peyrère on the composition of the biblical text, he publishes in 1678 his Critical History of the Old Testament, which nevertheless includes, by design, an explicit refutation of Spinoza's opinions on that same subject^[117]. Simon's work is nonetheless seized and destroyed by order of the Royal Council, under Bossuet's influence, up to thirteen hundred copies being confiscated — a sign that even a moderate, explicitly anti-Spinozist biblical criticism remained, at that date, highly suspect in the eyes of French ecclesiastical authority^[118].

Diderot, d'Holbach and radical materialism

The historian Jonathan Israel, in his reference work Radical Enlightenment, makes Spinozist monism the intellectual matrix of a whole current he calls the "radical Enlightenment", whose direct heirs in France would be Diderot and Baron d'Holbach^[119]. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy confirms this filiation for d'Holbach, whose ethical enterprise directly follows the Spinozist model: "like his chief influence in the matter, Spinoza, d'Holbach undertakes to explain human beings with the same clarity and rigor employed in explaining geometry"^[120]. D'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), of which Diderot was the discreet editor and contributor, develops a determinist materialism directly inherited from the Spinozist framework — rejection of final causes, of free will, of all providence — but takes a step Spinoza himself had never taken: explicit militant atheism, where Spinoza always retained, at least nominally, the single divine substance^[121].

The Pantheismusstreit: Jacobi, Mendelssohn and Lessing's Spinozism

In 1785, the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi publishes his correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn, revealing that the playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, deceased four years earlier, had privately confided to him that he was a Spinozist, believing in the hen kai pan — "One and All" — and rejecting final causes, free will, providence and a personal God^[122]. This revelation, published without Mendelssohn's consent under the title On the Doctrine of Spinoza, in Letters to Mr Moses Mendelssohn, triggers the famous Pantheismusstreit ("pantheism controversy"), which mobilises Kant, Goethe and Herder, and which, according to several biographers, contributes to Mendelssohn's exhaustion and premature death in January 1786. The Ignispedia article devoted to Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) details this controversy and the fight he waged, until his death, to defend the memory of his friend Lessing.

Schelling, Hegel: "being a Spinozist, the beginning of all philosophy"

Spinozist monism deeply structures Schelling's Naturphilosophie from 1797, then his philosophy of identity^[123]. Hegel, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, goes still further in making Spinozism the obligatory passage point of all authentic philosophical thought:

"It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy." — G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, section devoted to Spinoza^[124]

Nietzsche: "I have a predecessor"

On 30 July 1881, in a postcard to his friend Franz Overbeck from Sils-Maria, a few weeks before the revelation of the Eternal Return, Friedrich Nietzsche discovers Spinoza through Kuno Fischer's History of Modern Philosophy, and is overwhelmed by him:

"I am utterly amazed, utterly delighted! I have a predecessor, and what a predecessor! I hardly knew Spinoza: my urge toward him now was an 'act of instinct.' Not only is his overall tendency identical with mine — making knowledge the most powerful affect — but I find myself again in five main points of his doctrine; this most abnormal and loneliest of thinkers is closest to me precisely on these points: he denies freedom of will — purposes — the moral world order — the unegoistic — evil." — Friedrich Nietzsche, postcard to Franz Overbeck, 30 July 1881^[125]

This text, among the most famous testimonies of philosophical admiration left by Nietzsche, shows how Spinoza's posterity runs, by very diverse paths, through almost all of modern European philosophy — from the atheistic materialism of the radical Enlightenment to Nietzschean perspectivism, via German idealism.

What a Catholic can acknowledge

Spinoza's intellectual rigour, his systematic coherence, his courage in publicly assuming the ultimate consequences of his premises, and his insistence that every man must rationally seek the truth rather than rest content with a passively received belief, deserve the intellectual respect owed to every powerful mind, including — especially — when it errs on essentials. His criticism of naive anthropomorphisms in the popular representation of God, and his insistence that man's true felicity lies not in possessing perishable goods but in knowing and loving an infinite reality beyond him, meet, on a purely formal plane, intuitions which the Catholic mystical tradition itself has explored — even though the content of that "knowledge" and "intellectual love" differs radically from theological charity toward a personal God who loves and answers love.

What he cannot follow: pantheism and the denial of a personal God

But Spinoza's central doctrine — the pure and simple identification of God and Nature, the absolute denial of all divine freedom and all final causality, the rejection of miracles and particular providence, the reduction of biblical Revelation to a human text compiled with no supernatural inspiration of its own — is radically incompatible with the Catholic faith. The First Vatican Council solemnly defined that God, "one, true, living, Creator and Lord of heaven and earth, almighty, eternal, immense, incomprehensible, infinite in intellect, will and every perfection", is really and essentially distinct from the world, and not identical with it — a teaching which directly excludes, by its very formulation, every pantheist system, Spinozist included^[126]. Where Spinoza sees a single necessary substance from which the whole universe follows by blind causality, Catholic faith confesses a God who freely creates out of pure love a world really distinct from Him, capable of receiving or refusing His grace — for without true freedom, neither in God nor in the creature, there is neither sin nor merit, neither redemptive Incarnation nor promise of resurrection, but only the necessary unfolding of an impersonal cosmic mechanism.

Why Mosaic authorship remains defensible

On the precise point that earned this article its place in Ignispedia's biblical family, we must conclude with clarity: the Spinozist thesis of a purely late, anonymous compilation of the Pentateuch by Ezra, seductive in its apparent coherence, rests on an undemonstrated anti-supernaturalist postulate, on inferences that too quickly confuse textual resemblance with redactional dependence, and on a reading that neglects the simple, sufficient explanation of minor post-Mosaic additions integrated by an inspired redactor into a text whose substantial author remains Moses. The converging testimony of the Pentateuch's internal sources, of the rest of the Old Testament, of the New Testament and of Christ's own mouth, of Flavius Josephus, of Philo, of the Church Fathers and of the Samaritan reception, constitutes a body of evidence which no modern hypothetical reconstruction, however learned, has ever sufficed to overturn. Historical-critical exegesis has rendered, since Spinoza, real services to the understanding of the biblical text — literary genres, historical context, ancient sources used by the sacred author, all of that is received today by the Church herself — but it never succeeded in establishing with certainty what it sometimes claimed to demonstrate as an acquired fact: that Moses would have had nothing to do with the substantial writing of the Law that has borne his name for more than three thousand years.

• On the Berlin Jewish philosopher whose friendship with Lessing stood at the heart of the posthumous controversy over Spinozism, see Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786).
• On the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher whose biblical allegoresis preceded, in a wholly different spirit, modern critical readings of Scripture, see Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC–c. AD 50).
• On the medieval master whose philosophical work Spinoza studied in his youth at the Talmud Torah, see Maimonides (1138–1204).
• On what the Catholic Church teaches today about Judaism and its biblical heritage, see Judaism.