Of Prophecy and Piety: Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus between al-Farabî and Erasmus

Michiel Leezenberg

doi:10.3390/philosophies6020051

Abstract

In this contribution, I discuss some less well-known premodern and early modern antecedents of Spinoza’s concepts and claims in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. On the one hand, I will argue, Spinoza’s notion of prophecy owes more to Moses Maimonides than to any Christian author; and through Maimonides, Spinoza may be linked to the discussion of prophecy in The Virtuous City by the tenth-century Islamic philosopher al-Farabî. Spinoza’s concern with prophecy as a popular formulation of the Divine Law may be fruitfully seen in the light of these two authors. On the other hand, Spinoza’s notion of pietas has arguably been shaped by a number of early modern authors from the Low Countries, including Thomas a Kempis and Erasmus: it does not consist in merely obeying the law, but also has a clear devotional and theist dimension of love for God and for one’s neighbors. As such, it may be associated with recent ideas on philosophy and spiritual exercises. These findings have a number of non-trivial implications for Spinoza’s place in the rise of modern, academic Western philosophy. I will discuss these implications in the context of Pierre Hadot’s influential views on philosophy as a way of life and Michel Foucault’s notion of spirituality.

Highlights

The reaction against scholasticism that we find in early modern philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza has been characterized in primarily metaphysical and epistemological terms, whether in the guise of a reaction against final causes in the realm of nature, or against abstract essences or substantial forms; this, fits within the narrative of the gradual professionalization of philosophy
In the TTP and elsewhere, Spinoza appears to proclaim a philosophy of askèsis rather than a philosophy of mathèsis
To the extent that it involves a form of spiritual exercise or amounts to a way of life, Spinoza’s notion of philosophia echoes Stoics like Seneca and Cicero, and—and at least as importantly—late

Summary

Introduction

It is tempting to read Spinoza’s attempt to separate philosophy from theology in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ( TTP) as on a par with the separation of modern science from Medieval scholasticism, and of rational knowledge expressed in purely literal language from the imagination and its illusions, and from the seductive and misleading beauty of rhetoric [1]. Israel’s reading makes Spinoza rather more ‘modern’ than Descartes and Hobbes; it and unlike Rorty’s account of the professionalization and depoliticization of modern philosophy, calls attention to the political dimensions of Spinoza’s work Against such modernizing readings of Spinoza, I would like to argue that we should pay more systematic attention to some of the premodern and early modern sources of both character and content of Spinoza’s thought. Maimonides, and through the latter—at one remove, so to speak—on Islamic political philosophers like al-Farabî; on the other hand, Spinoza’s notion of pietas appears to reflect late Medieval and Renaissance spiritual concerns rather than early modern republican and liberal political theory For this reason, I hope to argue, one may get a better understanding of Spinoza by seeing him as emerging from a tradition that sees philosophy as a way of life rather than an academic discipline, as recently (and influentially) discussed by the French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot

Prophecy

Piety: Spinoza between Thomas a Kempis and Erasmus

Philosophy and Pietas as a Way of Life?

Conclusions