209 After the Death of William III, King of England, The

BOEKBEOORDELINGEN/REVIEWS 209 After the death of William III, King of England, the principality of Orange returns to French sovereignty and is incorporated in Louis XIV's state. In 1703, Louis XIV ordered the some 1400 Protestants of the cap- ital city of Orange to abjure their faith or to leave France. Then, in the final years of the War of the Spanish Succession, the rest of the Protestants were expelled from the other localities of the former Principality. It is these two expulsions that form the book's proper subject. As in many other cases, the Swiss cantons, especially Geneva, served as a temporary asylum, not as a permanent solution for the resettlement of the Orangeois.That permanent solution would be offered by Prussia, the only European state at the time eager to receive and to resettle French Protestant refugees. Felix sets out in great detail how the departure of the Orangeoiswas orga- nized and financed in 1703, which involved a particularly cruel pattern of selection and separation. Here the author's penchant for precision and detail illustrates perhaps better than any histoire larmoyante could how the expelled were made to suffer (e.g., distances people were forced to travel: pastors, 333 km (47 km daily) through France and Savoy; other men, 698 km (35 km daily), and women and children 403 kIn (16 km daily)). Detailed descrip- tions also trace the arrival of the refugees in Geneva and the conference of Aarau in August 1703 which decided how they would be temporarily divided over the different Swiss cantons (v. the exact numbers, 37). Many other lists give details concerning the occupation and social status of the refugees, the planning of their departure to Prussia, their travel, their redi- vision there and the help they received. The final part of the book deals with the second expulsion of the Orangeois between 1711-1713. Finally, the large number of statistics and graphs throughout the text also make this study an indispensable source book for anyone seeking information on details. Again, one is left to wonder what a professional historian would have made of the luxurious abundance of facts and details so generously set out before us here! Myriam Yardeni, Haifa J. SAMUELPREUS, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, xvi + 228 pp. ISBN 0521800137. £37.50/$54.95. In this learned study J. Samuel Preus exposes the radical critique of biblical authority that Spinoza develops in the first of his two great philosophical-theological works, the Theological-PoliticalTreatise, published anonymously in 1670. (The Ethics, his other great work, was published posthumously, and also anonymously, in 1677.) In the central chapters of his study Preus provides an illuminating discussion of the context out of which Spinoza's Treatise arose. In 1666 Spinoza's friend and collaborator Ludwig Meyer 210 published his Philosophy the Interpreter of Sacred Scripture, which immediately drew sharp attacks from both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. At stake were critical issues involving the authority of Scripture that had been increasingly made explicit thanks to the spirited and not infrequently acrimonious struggles, both intellectual and political, that had arisen in Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between Protestants and Catholics and between theologians and philosophers. Preus argues that in his Treatise, while drawing upon this debate, Spinoza advances far beyond it. In holding that the Bible is to be interpreted from itself alone, he is radically modern. In other words, what makes Spinoza truly one of us is that he maintains that the Bible, like any text, is to be read historically, what Preus also calls empirically and naturally, and not either philosophically (in the tradition of the Aristotelian Maimonides or the Cartesian Meyer) or theologically (in the tradition of Jewish and Christian apologists). "What made his break from his contemporaries truly radical", - Preus writes, "was his new explanation of scripture his showing that its origin could be accounted for without remainder through human history alone (this put Jewish and Christian scripture on a level scholarly playing field with all other sacred or revealed scriptures of the world)" (208). Preus writes further that "Spinoza's most original contribution as a biblical scholar was ... his sense and pursuit of historical understanding both of the book itself and of its contents" (210). Preus is right that in his Treatise Spinoza advances a conception of the relationship between revelation and reason, between divine and human authority, between text and reader, between hermeneutics and politics that is no less true (radical) today than it was in the seventeenth century. While addressing the philosophical reader, Spinoza writes a theological-politicaltreatise in order to show how closely bound together are the concepts of biblical authority and political sovereignty (both individual and communal). It's - as if he recognizes that the concept of democratic sovereignty of which, - in this work, he is the world's first systematic theorist presupposes and is presupposed by Scripture. What, then, is Spinoza's understanding of the relationship between the concepts of biblical interpretation and democratic sovereignty? Does Spinoza show, as Preus argues, the "irrelevance" of biblical authority? Or does he show, rather, that the concept of sovereignty fundamental to democracy is biblical and that the concept of sovereignty fundamental to the Bible (the one as infinite and indivisible) is democratic? Preus is correct that, because Spinoza holds that the sensus (the sense: the literal meaning or "history") of Scripture can be constituted solely on the basis of the letter of the text, the distinction that he makes between the sensus of Scripture and the truth of Scripture is fundamental. But Preus then fails to indicate that it is precisely because of this distinction that Spinoza is able to argue that, while the biblical text (due to its faulty trans- mission or history, etc.) is corrupt, the truth of the Bible (its doctrines of .

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