iiro kajanto Spinoza’s Latinity

Spinoza was one of the last great philosophers who wrote almost exclusively in Latin. There may have been several reasons for this. For one thing, as he states in the preface to the Tractatus theologico-politicus, he wrote for an intellectual readership (the ‘philosophus lector’) for whom Latin was still the common vehicle for learned discourse, not for the ignorant and superstitious common people (a 74.11/g iii 12.3). In his age, it was often held safer to express dissident and unorthodox ideas in Latin.1 Another reason may have been the fact that the vernaculars which Spinoza mastered were less suitable than was Latin to make his ideas widely known. These vernaculars were Dutch, which he learned and used in his environment (though in a letter he admitted that it was not the language in which he had been brought up: giv95.12), Portuguese, the language of his parents and the Jewish community in Amsterdam, and Spanish, which was the language of instruction in the Jewish school he attended (Freudenthal 1899, 214.21; 215.2). Moreover, the apology, now lost, which he wrote after his excommunication from the synagogue, was in Spanish (Freudenthal 1899, 30.5). It is possible that Spinoza began to learn Latin when he went to the Jewish school. Colerus, his early biographer, tells us that because Spinoza had a great desire to learn Latin, a German student taught him the language several hours every day (Freudenthal 1899, 36). This may well be true. But it was only after his break with the Jewish community that he began his serious studies of Latin. He attended the school which Franciscus van den Enden, a polymath typical of the age, had opened in Amsterdam. But Spinoza probably enjoyed his teaching only for a few years.2 Spinoza, then, had been grounded in Latin less thoroughly than was usual in this period when Latin was the main subject in schools. Moreover, after school the mastery of the language was usually perfected at university, which Spinoza, however, did not attend at a regular basis. Considering all this, we must acknowledge that Spinoza, who took up Latin at an adult age, had considerable linguistic ability, no doubt fostered by the philological methods of his Jewish school.

1 Similarly Descartes in the preface to his Meditationes (at vii 7.10–13). 2 For Van den Enden and his school, see Akkerman 1980, 1–3 (in French: Akkerman 1989, 9–11); Meininger and Van Suchtelen 1980;Mertens1994.

F.Akkerman & P.Steenbakkers (eds), Spinoza to the letter: studies in words, texts and books.Leiden: Brill, 2005. 36 iiro kajanto

We do not have much information about the didactic system of Van den Enden. But it is improbable that it differed very much from the traditional curriculum, which consisted of the perusal and excerpting of the classics and composition in Latin. Moreover, Latin plays, and especially Terence, were acted, which may explain the great number of quotations from Terence in Spinoza (Akkerman 1980, 3). Spinoza’s library, included in the inventory of his property, listed a number of classical authors as well as a number of textbooks on the ancient languages (Freudenthal 1899, 160). Except for two Greek dictionaries (Nos 3, 85) and three textbooks (Nos 109, 110, 116), there were few Greek classics: Aristotle, Arrian, Epictetus, Hippocrates, Josephus, Lucian, and even they were mostly in Latin translations. Only Homer’s Iliad was certainly in Greek. The great treasure-house of Greek literature was thus almost closed to Spinoza. He himself acknowledged that he had insufficient knowledge of Greek (a 408.5/g iii 150.33). But in this there was nothing very exceptional. In this period, Greek had a subsidiary position in education. It was mainly taught as the language of the New Testament. Spinoza’s collection of the Latin classics is representative but not very large. More- over, it has a prosaic character. Except for three editions of Virgil and two editions of Ovid, obligatory school authors, and for an edition of Martial, the poets are missing. Petronius, Plautus, and Seneca’s Tragedies also belonged to his stock of imaginative literature. On the other hand, he had a good collection of historians: Caesar, Curtius, Livy, Sallust, and two editions of Tacitus. Other Roman authors comprise Augustine, Justinian, an edition of Pliny the Younger and Seneca’s Moral letters in Latin and Dutch, while Cicero is present only by his Correspondence. Other Latin classics, though not from Antiquity, that belonged to his library, were Janus Secundus, Petrarch, Thomas More. But it is probable that the inventory is not quite reliable. A number of his books may have vanished before it was drawn up. Moreover, Spinoza no doubt read books borrowed from others, too. For instance, Spinoza certainly knew Terence (see above), but Terence is missing from the catalogue. The textbooks on Latin are represented by De arte grammatica of G.J. Vossius, intended for more advanced students (No. 52), by the Grammatica philosophica of Gaspar Scioppius (No. 111), and by two Latin dictionaries (Nos 26, 94). Further, Nicolius (No. 7) is probably a clerical error for Nizolius, whose guide to correct classical Latin, Thesaurus Ciceronianus, first published in 1572, had run to several editions. There was also a collection of phrases from Virgil and Horace (No. 154).

In assessing the quality of Spinoza’s Latinity the general characteristics of the Latin current in the seventeenth century should be considered. Generally called Neo-Latin, it had been created by the humanists, who in their desire to return ad fontes purged the debased medieval Latin from grosser solecisms and barbarisms and raised the imitatio veterum to the guiding principle of learning to master the language. The ancient