How Did Spinoza Declare War on Theology and Theologians?

Abstract

Israel argues that Spinoza’s biblical criticism revolutionized the discipline by combining a historical-critical approach with a philosophical demonstration. It eradicated supernatural agency and miracles from the historical process. Spinoza’s new hermeneutics scrupulously distinguished authorial intention from truth of fact. Taken together with his philosophical naturalism, this challenged the essential reconcilability of reason and faith, of science and religion, which was to become the groundwork of the edifice of the Enlightenment erected by Locke, Newton, Leibniz, and Wolff. Thus Spinozism undermined the claim that theology, science, and philosophy form a single harmonious whole. Standard accounts of the Enlightenment and early modern history fail to grasp the full scope of Spinoza’s critique of religion. Ironically, Spinozism became the intellectual origin of a revolutionary consciousness that threatened the political and religious state of affairs because it was publicized and reinforced by apologetic eighteenth-century observers, who excoriated Spinoza’s legacy.