‘ Anti-Theological Foundations of Modern Constitutional Theory: The Dutch Revolt, Locke’s Dualism and the Spinozist Basis of Modern Freedom of Expression’

Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

One of the Enlightenment’s principal roots, historians would generally agree, should be sought in the seventeenth-century ‘general crisis’, the deeply divisive effects of confessionalization, the Wars of Religion (1567-1648), and the impact of what Cartesians interpreted as the post-1600 Galilean ‘scientific revolution’. The Netherlands, of course, shared in these experiences like the rest of Europe, no more and no less; yet there are concrete, structural why the Radical Enlightenment’s beginnings and early rise should have first occurred in Holland rather than England, Italy or elsewhere: no other seventeenth century republican milieu had its very existence and rationale so profoundly challenged by an anti-republican alignment as the United Provinces during the seventeenth century. No less than three times - in 1618-19, in 1650, and in 1672 - the patrician oligarchy of ‘regents’ rejecting monarchical and ecclesiastical power and offering extended religious toleration, was dragged helplessly into major conflict with the ‘Orangist’ alliance of the Stadholder, public Church and common people. Prince Maurits, William II, and William III were right in calculating that if it came to a trial of strength, as it did each time, they would gain the upper hand and overpower the republican oligarchy because they had Church and common people, the particular combination of religion with popular sentiment solidly behind them – Arminian theology was strong intellectually in the United Provinces but weak in terms of popular and political support.1 However, in underlining this undoubted reality, the Princes of Orange were at the same time drawing attention to the unremitting predicament from which Dutch republican theorists sought to escape: the relentless preponderance of prince, ecclesiastical authority and common people over the ‘True Freedom’ and republican principles.

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This development is obviously crucial to understanding the Dutch Golden Age, but it is also fundamental to understanding post-1650 English and generally European Enlightenment era history, and especially the post-1660 divergence between the moderate and radical streams of Enlightenment. Identifying the English 1690s as the ‘first decade of the Radical Enlightenment’,2 is especially untenable, I would argue, in that neither early eighteenth-century English deist intellectual originality nor their philosophical coherence stretched especially far. The ‘deists’ were frequently derivative and presented several faces, were ‘multiple personae’, as Wayne Hudson expresses it, adhering to no single stable philosophical frame.3 Their republicanism was vague and usually non-democratic and their subversive stance was permeated by an eclecticism, evasiveness, and instability that prevented their becoming a solid foundation for an enduring international underground movement or tendency. From the 1680s, moreover, when Charles Blount (1654-93), first developed his ‘’, preceding the others, ‘Spinozism’ - especially the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, was unquestionably one of its principal ‘faces’.4 If Blount, Toland, and Collins represent an important intermediary stage in the Radical Enlightenment’s development (while Tindal, Chubb and Morgan do not), the extent to which the early English radicals’ attack on ‘priestcraft’, elimination of divine providence, view of religious ceremonies, anti-Scripturalism and philosophical determinism stem from the Dutch background has in the past been considerably underestimated, a clear example, one might say, of intellectual parochialism.

‘’s intellectual debt to Spinoza is far deeper’, Ian Leask reminds us, ‘than most scholarship (even Israel’s) has hitherto suggested.’5 Rather than Locke’s philosophy, the principal inspiration of Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696) was certainly Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and this is evident on multiple levels, in particular his demolishing the doctrine of supra rationem which was the basis of Locke’s fundamental dualism of reality but also that of his critique of priestcraft and discussion of ceremonies. Although generations of scholars have asserted that Toland simply elaborated and added further emphasis to Locke’s empirical stance, Locke himself was ‘loud in his protestations that he had been falsely coupled with Toland’ by his numerous theological opponents;6 and he was right to publicly to protest about being associated with Toland. For Locke’s citizens are not free to decide whether or not they do believe in God and not free, more generally, to believe whatever they want to.7

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The most important level of tension was surely the relationship of theology to philosophy. Where Locke safeguards the old scholastic distinction between contra rationem and supra rationem and endorses it, maintaining that ‘it is too hard a task for unassisted , to establish Morality in all its parts upon its true Foundation’,8 Toland, following Spinoza (and Bayle) destroys the distinction by demolishing all ‘supernatural ’. Where Locke thinks the existence of both God and revealed divine law can be proved by reason, he not believe the full content of that divine law can be known without the aid of revelation and divine authority. Toland by contrast eliminates revealed divine law. From this basic divergence between Locke’s duality of truth (the dichotomy of and religious authority) and wholly autonomous reason based on nature’s laws as sole criterion of truth and morality, the rift between radical and moderate Enlightenment derives much of its enduring relevance and force. This is the essential reason that Lockean toleration, and had to be structurally narrower and more constrained than the full toleration of Spinoza and Bayle. From the moment that he arrived in Holland, in 1683, Locke meditated long hard, in dialogue often with his Arminian friends, Jean le Clerc and of the essentials of his toleration theory. He wrote his Epistola de Tolerantia, according to Van Limborch during the winter of 1685-6,9 first in Latin, for the benefit of his Dutch continental as well as his English audience. But at his core was his idea that his toleration had to be a ‘mutua inter Christianos tolerantia’ a toleration that need not wholly exclude Jews but had to place them on a clearly subordinate footing, that had to build in reservations constricting Catholics and that had to entirely exclude atheists.10

All this was inherent in Locke’s conception of Christianity, the churches, and their relationship to society and so were two notable additional features of his toleration theory that sharply differentiate it from that of the radicals - and the toleration of modern democratic modernity. First, Locke’s was a toleration theory which was built on his conserving a sphere of authority above reason and above politics that was the ultimate ground of the moral order, and the path to human salvation, enabling him to transfer the entire question of toleration from the political sphere, from the hands of the sovereign, to the separate sphere of religious authority, faith, conscience and the individual’s autonomous choice of his or her path to salvation.11 Secondly, because the crux of his justification for toleration was his insistence that ‘the care of each man’s salvation belongs only to himself’, saving each person’s ‘immortal soul’ becomes the primary, defining purpose of toleration which should therefore be geared to individual salvation

3 and not to freedom of expression, pleasure-seeking, the quest for worldly happiness, the widening of intellectual debate or the promotion of . It is therefore quite incorrect to state, like Klaus Bärsch, that with his toleration theory ‘arrives at a quite similar result, as did Spinoza’.12 Locke’s toleration rested on - but was also shaped by - his philosophical dualism. Ultimately, the same fundamental philosophical dichotomy pitting Spinozistic naturalism against metaphysics accommodating supernaturalia pervades Leibniz’s Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (1710), essentially a reply to Spinoza and Bayle prefiguring many later quarrels within the Enlightenment.13

Blount, Toland, Collins and Thomas Gordon diffused in English the philosophical culture of the late seventeenth-century clandestine philosophical literature, reworking and widening an early Enlightenment that was essentially Spinozistic, Baylean and Dutch Huguenot heterodox. This applies to their naturalism, determinism, , preoccupation with ‘priestcraft’, critique of religious ceremonies, and exhortations to separate morality from faith and theology. However, early-eighteenth century British ‘deism’ wholly lacked one decisive further dimension indispensable to the wider Radical Enlightenment - the ‘general will’ (of course, I do not mean Rousseau’s more particularlist conception of ‘general will’, but Diderot’s), the philosophical grounding for universal and equal . The ‘carry-over’ of the rights of the ‘state of nature’ into society, universal human rights, the ‘general will’ as expounded in Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, Condorcet and Volney, like their uncompromising elimination of divine providence and full separation of the moral order from theology, hence derive neither from the English ‘deists’ nor Hobbes, nor classical republicanism nor the ‘Levellers’. Radical Enlightenment’s roots and beginnings are thus much more convincingly located via an overlay of Bayle and Huguenot clandestine subversive scholarship, in the democratic, anti-theological commercial republicanism formulated during the 1660s and 1670s by the cercle spinoziste, especially Franciscus Van den Enden (1602-74) who was executed by Louis XIV for conspiring against his crown, Adriaan Koerbagh (1632-69), Lodewijk Meyer (1629-81), Bouwmeester and Johan (and his brother, Pieter) De la Court (1622-60), besides Spinoza himself.

The essential challenge confronting Dutch Golden Age republicans was how to devise some means to broaden support for the and more effectively fight Calvinist rigor, intolerance and popular prejudice. Dutch republicanism solved its harsh dilemma on a theoretical

4 level by taking a step that was entirely new, I shall argue, in European constitutional theory, even though partly presaged by Grotius and the Arminian leap achieved by the ‘Leiden circle’ as it has been dubbed before 1618. By combining rejection of religious authority with a democratizing republicanism. Spinoza and the group around him – and here I especially include Johan and as well as Franciscus van den Enden and Adriaan Koerbagh - more than any predecessor or contemporary, incisively and powerfully formulated this philosophical linkage connecting democratic republicanism to attacking religious authority. But no one person or writer can be said personally to have invented or ‘originated’ this potentially revolutionary new stance that emerged in Dutch republican circles. It was the result of a specific seventeenth-century Dutch structural crisis.

Van den Enden preceded Spinoza, we must remember, in explicitly tying democratic republicanism to eliminating religious authority using the notion that society should be ruled by what he calls the ‘common best’ or ‘alghemeene interest’ conceived as treating all equally.14 Van den Enden also initiated other typical radical constructs including the topos that the Native American Indians had achieved a freer, more equitable and more egalitarian society than Europe in his day. The cercle spinoziste as a group can justly be said to have invented the new anti- theological philosophical social, moral and political opposition culture. But it was the structural need for such an outcome, a particular array of political and social forces in a non-aristocratic but rather politically precarious oligarchic republic that produced the need for such a philosophy. If there was a two-way process with Spinoza influencing, but also being influenced by the others of the cercle spinoziste, equally there was a dialectic between philosophy on the one hand and social and political pressures on the other.

A group launched the Radical Enlightenment in its main essentials in the 1660s, but in doing so blended completely new elements with strands originating further back in the tradition of libertinage érudit, late medieval Averroism, the rediscovery of Lucretius (in fifteenth-century Florence), the ‘Radical Reformation’ and the new mathematical-scientific rigor of Galileo.15 Theophrastus Redivivus, the foremost mid-seventeenth century clandestine manuscript composed in Italy, dating from 1659, offers a pre-Spinozist ‘philosophical ’ already encompassing several components of the subsequent radical tradition. Separating morality from belief in God and religion, and eliminating divine providence, this text locates the roots of the ‘true’ moral

5 order exclusively in nature and society, declaring its social values morally superior to those proclaimed by religion. But in other respects the Theophrastus diverges or falls short of the radical tendency initiated by the cercle spinoziste. While claiming injustice reigns on earth, and using this as an argument against belief in God, the Theophrastus, like Epicureanism, remained mainly preoccupied with the individual’s moral development, attitudes, and state of mind without explicitly assailing the existing social and political order.16 Neo-Epicurean pre-1660 subversive thought evinces nothing like the confrontational republican and reformist politics of Van den Enden, De la Court, Bouwmeester, Meyer, and Koerbagh. In fact, Theophrastus neither challenged monarchical absolutism nor urged liberty of expression and toleration. It evokes no real sense of philosophical ‘reason’ being an advancing, expanding force tackling and eventually vanquishing ‘ignorance’, ‘superstition, religious authority and tyranny.’17 Liberty of thought and expression do not figure as conscious pre-eminent goals as they do among the cercle spinoziste. Rather, Theophrastus Theophrastus, unlike the cercle - and the Enlightenment generally - evinces a marked skeptical tendency not just with respect to belief and theology but also scholarship and science, indeed sought to discredit science and ‘philosophy’.18

The atheistic philosophical undercurrent evolving in Italy before 1660, abjuring belief in a divine providence governing men’s affairs, was essentially neo-Epicurean. This trend characterized the clandestine philosophical literature until the mid-seventeenth century, but rapidly receded during the late seventeenth as the philosophies of Hobbes and Spinoza emerged as potent subversive devices. It was Spinoza in particular, though, who most effectively welded democratic republicanism to eliminating religious authority with a metaphysics that seemingly undermined all teleology, divine providence and the miraculous. He and his circle, adopting Galileo’s mathematical science as the overriding verifying principle, stepped beyond ancient and early modern Epicureanism by combining its millenia-old elimination of religious authority with their distinctive new political concerns, thereby creating a much broader, more active and powerful blend than existed in Western thought previously. These key innovations explain why Spinoza and Spinozism from the 1660s until 1848 consistently retained much greater resonance and rhetorical clout in Enlightenment controversies than Epicurus, Lucretius, Averroes, Hobbes, Sidney or Bayle. Admittedly, the labels ‘Epicurus’ and ‘Hobbes’ intermittently played a not dissimilar rhetorical role in anti-radical polemics, but only ‘Spinoza’ and ‘Spinozism’ were routinely used to tar irreligious foes of the existing order everywhere and throughout.

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Why was the linkage of anti-theological critique with democratic republicanism so crucial for future European history and in particular for the revolutionary era? There would seem to have been much truth in the cercle spinoziste’s insight that unless the ideas of the people can be fundamentally changed the democratic republic cannot arise or survive. After his powerful opening tirade against ‘superstition’, the main point that Spinoza makes in the preface to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the main point of the Tractatus as a whole is that there is no point in trying to resist tyranny and make a better government if one cannot stem and overcome ‘superstition’. ‘It may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government’, he writes, ‘and utterly essential to it, to keep men deceived, and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion , so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance, and will not think it humiliating but supremely glorious to spill their blood and sacrifice their lives for the glorification of a single man’.19 Spinoza insists that it is ‘completely contrary to the common liberty to shackle the free judgment of the individual with prejudices or constraints of any kind’. This is why there cannot be a republic if society insists on shackling the ideas and beliefs of the individual.

Nothing is more dangerous, therefore, to the democratic republic than appealing to the people to condemn the beliefs and ideas of individuals. That was the lesson of the Dutch Golden Age, the lesson that Locke in his Dutch exile had failed to learn from Le Clerc, Van Limborch and the Jewish controversialist whose arguments he also studied, Orobio de Castro. It was equally the lesson of the . Montagnard exaltation of the ‘ordinary’ abundantly exemplified d’Holbach’s and Condorcet’s (and Spinoza’s) axiom that bloody tyranny, dictatorship and oppression feed chiefly on ignorance, illiteracy and gullibility.20 Pervading the Radical Enlightenment’s entire history was a deep apprehension regarding the ignorant multitudo, as Spinoza called it, a fear greatly intensified by Robespierre and the Terror. Montagnard branding of Paine, Brissot and Condorcet as ‘enemies of the Revolution’ and the notion that ordinary folk are morally pure and the chief criterion of legitimacy in politics without need of ‘enlightenment’ or intellectual change, opened an unbridgeable rift between Montagnard revolutionaries and all enlighteners, moderate and radical. To Jefferson, the most resolute among America’s Founding Fathers in endorsing the French democratic republican Revolution, Robespierre was as much a betrayer of its veritable principles and values as the post-Brumaire

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Napoleon. ‘Robespierre met the fate’, he assured Mme. De Stael in May 1813, ‘and his memory the execration, he so justly merited’.21

1 Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 421-49, 595-609, 1047-9, 785-806

2 M.C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment. Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (revised 2nd edn., 2003), pp. xiv, xvi-xix, 63, 67-9, 71, 74-80

3 Wayne Hudson, Enlightenment and Modernity (London, 2009), pp. 12, 16

4 Hudson, Enlightenment and Modernity, pp. 11-12, 132-3; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 609-14 5 Ian Leask, ‘The Undivulged Event in Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious’ in W. Hudson, Diego Lucci and J.R. Wigelsworth (eds) Atheism and Deism Revalued. Heterodox religious Identities in Britain, 1650-1800 (Farnham, 2014), pp. 63-7; Ian Leask, ‘Personation and Immanent Undermining: on Toland’s appearing Lockean’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (2010), pp. 243-8, 255-6

6 John W. Yolton, Locke and the Way of ideas (Bristol, 1996),125-6

7 Claus Bärsch, ‘Politics and Religion in the Philosophy of the Enlightenment 1: Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Rousseau’, in B.C.Labuschagne and R.H. Sonnenschmidt (eds.) Religion, Politics and Law. Philosophical reflections on the Sources of Normative Order in Society (Leiden, 2009), 119-21 8 Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke. A Study of Political Theory in its Intellectual Setting (Cambridge, 1994), p.308 9 Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, 1986), 475 10 Harris, Mind of John Locke.186-8 11 Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 486-99

12 Bärsch, ‘Politics and Religion’, 118

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13 see Jonathan Israel, ‘Leibniz’s Theodicy as a Critique of Spinoza and Bayle – and Blueprint for the Philosophy Wars of the Eighteenth Century’ in L.M. Jorgensen and S. Newlands (eds) New Essays on Leibniz’s Theodicy(Oxford, 2014), pp. 233-44

14 Franciscus van den Enden, Vrije Politijke stellingen en Consideratien van staat (1665) (ed.) Wim Klever (, 1992), pp. 169-73; Wim Klever, ‘A new Source of Spinozism: Franciscus Van den Enden’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (1991), p. 627

15 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 14-22, 46-9, 159-84, 684-93 ; Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 3- 14, 31-4, 480-93

16 Nicole Gengoux, Un athéisme philosophique à l’âge classique: le Theophrastus redivivus (1659) (2 vols. , 2014) pp. ii, 767-79

17 Gengoux, Un athéisme philosophique pp. i, 69-84, 104, 112

18 Gengoux, Un athéisme philosophique pp. i, 135-55 19 Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (ed.) Jonathan Israel (Cambridge, 2007), p.6

20 Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, 698

21 Jefferson to Mme. De Stael, in 24 May 1813, in M. D. Peterson (ed.) , Writings (New York, 1984), 1271

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