196 the Extent of Thomas Hobbes's Influence Over Spinoza, And

196 Book Reviews

Fukuoka, Atsuko. The Sovereign and the Prophets: Spinoza on Grotian and Hobbesian Biblical Argumentation. Leiden: Brill. 2018. xv + 425 pages. isbn 978-9004322080.

The extent of Thomas Hobbes’s influence over Spinoza, and particularly over the Tractatus theologico-politicus – though tantalizingly obvious to most readers – has defied precise documentation. Contemporaries, particularly in the Dutch and English contexts, habitually paired them together (usually in hostile polemics). The bishop Edward Stillingfleet, to provide one early exam- ple, linked Spinoza and Hobbes as atheistic materialists menacing the culture of Christendom (and tried to draw Locke into this indictment). Into the 18th century it became a commonplace to cast Hobbes and Spinoza as the patri- archs of modern atheism. Historians have differed on the influence question. Noel Malcolm, among others, has made the case for reading the ttp within the framework of Dutch ‘republican-Hobbism.’ Jonathan Israel, heavily invested in an interpretive scheme of radical and moderate enlightenments, has made Spinoza the hero of the former and minimized Hobbes’s influence over him. Atsuko Fukuoka surveys the evidence toward the middle of her new book, The Sovereign and the Prophets: Spinoza on Grotian and Hobbesian Biblical Argumentation. Spinoza’s occasional references to Hobbes did not attach themselves to specific works. He owned De cive, but could not read English and on his death did not possess any edition or translation of Leviathan. However, during the years (1665–1670) when Spinoza composed the Tracta- tus theologico-politicus, he might well have had access to the arguments of Hobbes’s masterpiece. In 1667 the Dutch translation of Leviathan, executed by Abraham van Berckel, was published in Amsterdam. Spinoza seems to have known van Berckel, and may have been familiar with his translation, which seems to have been in existence some years before its publication. The next year Hobbes’s own Latin translation (and revision) of Leviathan was printed by Johannes Blaeu. Van Berckel seems to have been particularly interested in Hobbes’s theologi- cal views and scriptural interpretations. And while the influence of Hobbes’s account of sovereignty over Spinoza seems fairly clear (particularly in his un- finished Political Treatise), it is indeed these religious themes and their possi- ble influence on the Tractatus that has commanded much recent scholarly attention. Fukuoka’s book responds to this broader scholarly trend: her specific subject is biblical criticism, and the set of common proof texts that Spinoza and Hobbes interpreted within their religio-political projects. “The present book,” she writes, “centrally concerns how [the ttp] redefined the relationship between state and church (jus circa sacra), and how it articulated a theory for intellectual liberty on that basis (libertas philosophandi)” (p. 2).

Book Reviews 197

Somewhat more narrowly, she elaborates, her book presents an array of Dutch thinkers as they confronted this question: ‘Who occupied the position directly below God, to transmit His will to the people? In short, who is the true mediator of His will on earth?’ (pp. 2–3). This is a particular framing of the broader issues of religious authority that so roiled the 17th century. One might instead, and perhaps more conventionally, ask what implications for religious authority are entailed in the various accounts of sovereignty offered by Gro- tius, Hobbes, Spinoza, their allies and enemies. But Fukuoka’s formulation has the virtue of sharply focusing attention on the status of prophecy and biblical revelation (or, as Oldenburg said of Spinoza’s Tractatus, on ‘angels, prophecy, miracles’). Spinoza and Hobbes sit at the center of the study, but Fukuoka positions them within a broader intellectual context. The first chapters of her book ex- tend this context backward in time, sweeping the Remonstrant controversy and the familiar figure of Grotius into her account. Later chapters situate Spi- noza himself within polemics of the 1660s, which pit Amsterdam city magis- trates against church authorities in contests over church property and jurisdiction. Hobbes’s domestic context, in which these issues of clerical jurisdiction were constantly at issue, is not treated, and in truth the political and biographi- cal contextualization offered by The Sovereign and the Prophets is fairly bare- bones. The method of the book is more purely textual, surveying the arguments of an array of Dutch thinkers, across half a century, as they confronted the question of sovereign authority over religious administration, and even over revelation itself. Throughout, Fukuoka keeps biblical exegesis at the center of her analysis, on the theory that a common set of interpretive problems arising from Old Testament history constituted a ‘paradigm’ framing early- modern discussion of religious authority. The Sovereign and the Prophets thus proceeds as a chronologically arranged series of textual précis, only loosely connected to their background political context. That this somewhat staid approach has value is largely due to Fukuo- ka’s discussion not of Hobbes and Spinoza, but her presentation of lesser- known figures from the Dutch context. Scholars unable to read Dutch will profit from her summaries, for instance, of the works of the Remonstrant Johannes Wtenbogaert (1557–1644), who anticipated certain arguments of Le- viathan in arguing for the subordination of ministers to magistracy. This was answered by the Contra-Remonstrant Antonius Walaeus (1573–1639), who re- jected this effort to displace the clergy as ‘mediators’ of divine will. The specif- ics of these Dutch debates will interest those scholars unfamiliar with them, or perhaps familiar with them only through the interventions – in Latin – of Gro- tius and Johannes Vossius, figures also treated in Fukuoka’s account. Perhaps hobbes studies 33 (2020) 177-200