De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 41

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What if Spinoza never happened?
Joris van Eijnatten

Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment Contested is so enormously rich in its discussion of ideas, books, people and traditions that, unfortunately, I shall have to restrict myself to very briefly discussing one single issue. I want to address toleration, a subject interconnected with many of the topics dealt with in Israel's umpteenth masterpiece. The account of early theories of toleration in Enlightenment Contested illustrates Israel's acute analysis of the various currents in eighteenth-century thought. In Chapter 6 he offers the reader an overview of three theories of toleration.¹ The chapter, interestingly, is called ‘A Contest of Three Toleration Doctrines’. The title neatly illustrates Israel's belief that principles matter and ideas do clash: the eighteenth century was witness to a real contest between ideas.

The three theories were developed by John Locke, Pierre Bayle and Baruch Spinoza. I will discuss only the first and the third, so as to bring out the Age of Enlightenment as an arena of contestation between radicalism and moderation, which is the theme of Israel's books. In setting out the first theory of toleration, Israel debunks the English philosopher Locke. Now, lowering Locke's reputation a notch or two is probably more shocking to English and American readers than to the Dutch. Locke's normative stature and his influence on the course of global history tend to be rather overrated on the other side of the Atlantic. But Locke is a symbol of what Israel calls the Moderate Enlightenment, and it is the flaws in moderately Enlightened thought that Israel seeks to expose. He does so politely but ruthlessly.

Locke's theory of toleration, claims Israel, has at least six significant drawbacks. Firstly, in Locke's view toleration is a gift, not a right: toleration is granted to us with condescension by a sovereign, rather than attributed to us by virtue of our humanity. Secondly, Locke denies toleration to Catholics. Thirdly, he excludes atheists from toleration. Fourthly, Locke's toleration of Jews is conceived only as a temporary measure: in due course they will need to be converted to Christianity. A fifth defect in Locke's theory of toleration concerns his contractual understanding of society. This implies that the majority of citizens in a state could by mutual agreement decide to establish a particular theology as the state religion, and do so to the exclusion of other faiths. Finally, Locke rejects what Israel calls ‘liberty of lifestyle’ - the right to live however you want to live.

The third theory is Spinoza's theory of toleration. Spinoza, of course, is the logical culmination of Israel's triptych, because the seventeenth-century philosopher developed the most far-reaching, most libertarian theory of all. In Israel's presentation it is truly a most impressive theory, making a watertight case for the freedom of thought, speech, expression and publication. Spinoza does not equivocate: either there is free-

1 Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment contested, 135-163.

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dom of thought or there is no freedom of thought. There is no middle way.

Spinoza is not just the logical climax of Israel's monograph; he is also very much part of a rhetorical scheme. Enlightenment Contested is a tour de force by a master of the trade, a gifted and erudite author who knows how to write a book, who knows exactly when hyperboles are called for, and whose book is well crafted. In Enlightenment Contested there is not one road that leads to Rome; all highways and byways lead ultimately to Rijnsburg. The book is written in such a way that the reader is led inescapably to the conclusion that the seventeenth and eighteenth-century world of ideas can be divided into theories that agree with Spinoza and those that oppose him.

Thus we have, according to Israel, two mutually exclusive theories of toleration. The question now arises, which of them was the most influential. The point Israel makes in Enlightenment Contested is that the true Enlightenment, the Enlightenment in its Radical version, the Enlightenment that embodies democracy, secular values, equality, materialism, and universality as the core principles of modern Western civilisation - that this Enlightenment was repressed and marginalised in the eighteenth century. In other words, it is the first theory, Locke's moderate one, which in that century was without a doubt the most influential.

This is not in itself a world-shattering conclusion. No-one will dispute the rise to prominence of the so-called Moderate Enlightenment. So perhaps we should pose the question differently. Perhaps we should ask ourselves, not which of these theories was the most influential, but which of them really mattered. Which of these two theories of toleration made a difference in the concrete historical context of the eighteenth century? Was it through Locke or Spinoza that ultimately a theory and, perhaps more importantly, a practice of toleration developed that was both equitable and acceptable to a majority of the population? A theory that (in Thomas Paine's words) would rid us of toleration as well as intolerance? Toleration, said Paine, is not the opposite of intolerance, but its mirror-image. Both intolerance and toleration are despotisms: ‘the one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.’

Allow me to present a brief historical case. It concerns one of my favourite characters from the eighteenth century, a man who, to all appearance, firmly and solidly stood for Moderate Enlightenment. He is not mentioned in Enlightenment Contested, but he might well have been. He was a cultured intellectual, a man of principle and courage, the respected leader of a religious community in a minor province called Friesland. He was born in 1708 and died in 1790, and thus more or less embodied in his person the whole eighteenth century - that is, the eighteenth century as witnessed

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from the point of view of an obscure backwater town called Harlingen. His name was Johannes Stinstra.²

Stinstra, a well-educated preacher of a congregation of Mennonites, had read such authors as John Locke, the Anglican bishop Benjamin Hoadly, the Dutch scholar of law Gerard Noodt, and the Swiss-Dutch jurist Jean Barbeyrac. He probably translated a treatise by the Huguenot Pierre Coste and he advocated the mildly rationalist ideas of English thinkers such as the Unitarian preacher James Foster, the moral philosopher William Wollaston, and the Anglican Newtonian Samuel Clarke. All this puts him fair and square in the tradition of Moderate Enlightenment.

Stinstra fell victim to persecution. What was he accused of? His only crime was that he found it impossible to agree in conscience with the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Stinstra was an Arian but the Dutch Calvinist clergy charged him with Socinianism. This duly led to his being removed from office, by order of the Frisian authorities, in 1742.

By formally offering the secular authorities a well-wrought text in which he put forward arguments in favour of freedom of expression, Stinstra upset the political and ecclesiastical establishment. He pointed out that liberty was in full agreement with the law of nature, divine revelation, and the historical constitution of the Dutch Republic. He observed that all good Christians accept the Scriptures as the only rule of faith and doctrine, and that they do not and should not subscribe to the rules or sentiments of fallible people like the Pope or a Protestant clergy. He argued that freedom of expression would not detract from the authority of the highest earthly powers. Nor would liberty contradict the laws of the Republic or those of the Province of Friesland, nor would it infringe on individual rights, nor would it lead to disruption of the social or political order.

Johannes Stinstra struggled fiercely for freedom of expression. But he did what he did without Spinoza. In fact, he doesn't even so much as mention Spinoza. To make matters worse, he pays no attention to any radical thinker at all. He certainly did not believe it worthwhile to consider at any length any of the figures whom Israel, with or without good reason, subsumes under the heading of ‘Radical Enlightenment’: the De La Courts, the Koerbaghs, Franciscus van den Enden, Lodewijk Meyer, Johannes Bredenburg, Adriaen Beverland, Anthonie van Dale, Frederik van Leenhof, Bernard Mandeville, Balthasar Bekker, or even Pierre Bayle.

We could interpret this lack of interest in Spinoza, Spinozism, and Israel's Radical Enlightenment in three different ways. First, we could say that Stinstra was an adherent of the Moderate Enlightenment and that he therefore rejected Spinoza either consciously and on principle, or simply by inference. A second interpretation could be that Stinstra was, in fact, a radical Spinozist, but that for all his rebellious audacity and philosophical dogmatism he did not dare give voice to his real opinions. Finally,

2 Joris van Eijnatten, Mutua Christianorum tolerantia.

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a third interpretation could be that Stinstra considered Spinoza outmoded, obsolete, of little consequence, or merely beside the point. It is clear that in each of these interpretations Stinstra would have had no use for Spinoza, Spinozism, or the radical Enlightenment.

But which of these three interpretations, and the implications involved in them, holds true? Did Stinstra and by implication the Moderate Enlightenment retard the rise of modern liberalism, of ‘modernity’, if you will? Or is the Radical Enlightenment far more influential than anybody previously believed, to the extent that it surfaced even in 1742 in a minor whale-hunting town on the edge of the Zuiderzee? Or are Spinoza and by inference the Radical Enlightenment simply irrelevant to the many debates on toleration during the eighteenth century?

I would reject the second argument on methodological grounds. To claim that somebody is saying something which he is not, in fact, saying, seems rather tricky; and we can't assume that everyone who attacks an institutional church has a hidden radical agenda. This leaves me with interpretations 1 and 3. Given the present state of historical research, I would be inclined to opt for the third interpretation. I would claim that Spinoza, and by implication the Radical Enlightenment, was largely irrelevant to eighteenth-century debates on toleration.

Now, I am not making the absurd claim that studying either Spinoza or the Radical Enlightenment is not worthwhile. Jonathan Israel's books are in many respects exactly what the publisher's blurbs on the back covers make them out to be: breathtaking, magnificent, magisterial, ground-breaking, dazzling and highly accessible. But let us for the sake of argument suppose that Spinoza never happened. Imagine that Pierre Bayle had never been born. Picture a world without Denis Diderot. Would the world of ideas in Harlingen, and by extension the Dutch Republic, really have been so very different? I doubt it.

The proof is in the eighteenth century, most of which appears to have been perfectly capable of getting along without Spinoza. And yet that century invented, or reinvented, something we might call liberal thought. Johannes Stinstra demonstrates the point, and with him a host of others. I have found not the slightest shred of evidence for anything even remotely resembling a Spinozist theory of toleration in those minor figures who populated eighteenth-century Dutch history and who each did their bit in spreading a gospel of equality, secularism and universality³. These people include, just to give you some names in alphabetical order, Daniel van Alphen, Gerrit Bacot, Nikolaus Barkey, Bernard Bosch, Willem Deurhoff, Johannes Drieberge, Cornelis van Engelen, IJsbrand van Hamelsveld, Paulus van Hemert, Frederik Adolf van der Marck, Abraham van der Meersch, Gerrit Paape, and Jan Wagenaar.

What I am claiming, then, is that the modern nation state that was born at the end of the eighteenth century, and which imperfectly enshrined values most of us

3 See Joris van Eijnatten, Liberty and concord in the United Provinces.

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today would want to support - that nation state was the consequence of a multifaceted, variegated and very complicated ‘Moderate Enlightenment’ (I am using this term for lack of a better one).⁴ This Moderate Enlightenment did not ‘contest’ the Radical Enlightenment; it mostly regarded what Israel calls the Radical Enlightenment as hopelessly obscure, outrageously impossible or merely beside the point. Instead, the propagators of Enlightenment, the many journalists, editors, novelists, philosophers, political thinkers, theologians, poets, historians and amateur scientists very gradually came to grips with social and political realities, developing inch by inch the set of secular and universal ideas which some of us now may believe are being undermined.

Let me develop my argument one stage further. Israel's terminology, based on the clear-cut differences and distinctions he sees, is problematic, if only because it has become all but current in dix-huitièmiste parlance. That is understandable, since the distinction between Radical and Moderate fits current twenty-first century debates so well. But perhaps we should question the distinction itself. Elements of what Israel calls the Radical Enlightenment were created or recreated at various moments in the eighteenth century by men like Johannes Stinstra. Or, to put it another way, modernity (if such a thing exists) grew out of a complex potpourri of often contradictory claims, the common feature of which is that we could call them in some way ‘Enlightened’. To phrase this differently once more: the eighteenth century presents us with a variety of options, a range of possibilities, and a set of positions which may or may not contradict each other and which will often be found in one and the same person, circle, or institution. There were no two Enlightenments. There was a whole gamut of them. Or, to use another metaphor, there existed in the eighteenth century, not a ‘family’,⁵ but a complicated patchwork of ‘enlightened’ positions. I would even suggest that the twentieth-first century does not, n'en déplaise Israel, present a very different picture.

Magnificent and compelling as it is, I nevertheless have four problems with Enlightenment Contested. The first concerns the book's rhetoric, which tends somewhat to mislead. Israel believes that individuals and institutions are capable of maintaining over longer periods of time the package of concepts he defines as ‘Radical’. He consistently employs language in such a way that both historical actors and students of that history are placed on either side of an unbridgeable divide. In the process those on the ‘wrong’ side of the gap are practically disqualified for betraying ‘modernity’.⁶ The second concerns evidence, which, as I have argued above, simply isn't there. The third concerns methodology: the claim that a coherent doctrine is implicit in all

4 Note that in Van Eijnatten, Liberty and concord in the United Provinces, I have largely avoided the concept of ‘Enlightenment’, and found it quite easy to do so.

5 See the postscript in Israel, Enlightenment contested, 863; family suggests a cosiness and friendliness that did not, of course, exist.

6 E.g. p. 866: ‘a number of recent scholars have adopted a rather different tactic for diverting attention from the radical monism of Spinoza, Bayle, Diderot, and the “nouveaux Spinosistes” (...)’.

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kinds of philosophies does not convince (not to mention the claim that doctrines are necessarily coherent). But the most important issue concerns the political perspective that seems to inform much of the book. One could perhaps qualify it best as a rightsbased fundamentalism. It is the assumption, or rather the utopian illusion, or perhaps even the fallacy, that a rational consensus based on radical Enlightened thought could actually be implemented in social practice. For one thing, such a consensus would obviate the need for politics itself, as an instrument to negotiate and compromise between conflicting rights and interests. But this is not the place to pursue this line of thought.

Let me conclude. Stinstra and the many, many minor authors who disseminated theories of toleration in the eighteenth century didn't need Spinoza, and yet they helped to get us to where we are now. Could we today then do without Spinoza? Of course we could. But please don't get me wrong. We don't need to live in a world without Spinoza. We probably shouldn't want to live in a world without Spinoza. Jonathan Israel has made abundantly clear in his books that a world without Spinoza would be an impoverished one. Spinoza was, at best, a spicy ingredient in the culinary specialty we like to call Enlightenment. Yet even without that pleasant titillation of the palate provided by strong spices, plain cooking is still quite nutritious. Modernity thrived on it.

Enough of metaphors. My point is merely that, if there is any lesson we could draw from the intellectual history of the Dutch Republic, it is that we could live quite happily in a world in which Spinoza never happened.

About the author
Joris van Eijnatten (1964) is Professor of Cultural History at Utrecht University. His main field is the history of culture, ideas and religion in Europe.
E-mail: [e-mail]

Literature

Joris van Eijnatten, Mutua Christianorum tolerantia. Irenicism and toleration in the Netherlands: the Stinstra affair 1740-1745 (Florence 1998).

Joris van Eijnatten, Liberty and concord in the United Provinces. Religious toleration and the public in the eighteenth-century Netherlands (Brill's studies in intellectual history 111) (Leiden etc. 2003).

Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment contested. Philosophy, modernity, and the emancipation of man, 1670-1752 (New York etc. 2006).