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' Anti-Theological Foundations of Modern Constitutional Theory: The ‘ 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 reasons 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. 1 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 ‘deism’, 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. ‘John Toland’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 2 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 Reason, to establish Morality in all its parts upon its true Foundation’,8 Toland, following Spinoza (and Bayle) destroys the distinction by demolishing all ‘supernatural rationalism’. 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 empiricism 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 science. It is therefore quite incorrect to state, like Klaus Bärsch, that with his toleration theory John Locke ‘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, pantheism, 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 human rights. 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
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