What Form of Latin Did Spinoza Use and Why Does it Matter? part 2

In my previous post (Part 1), I established that Spinoza wrote in neo-Latin and that he was part of the neo-Latin movement which discarded the old medieval thought with their Scholastic 'bad Latin', their Christianized Aristotelianism, dogma, autocracy and censorship in Catholic universities, and worked to usher in the new, democratic, tolerant, free, scientific, open-mindedness era to replace it. 

But why does this matter? What does it tell us about Spinoza? Where did the anti-Scholastic alternative thought come from? 

You may be surprised to learn that the Catholic Scholastics weren't the only intellectuals around in the medieval period. There were strands of non-Catholic, non-Scholastic and even anti-Scholastic thought prior to the Early Modern rejection of Scholasticism. 

It's worth bearing in mind that Scholastics didn't invariably dominate all scholarly work even during their peak in the medieval period. There were intellectual arguments around at that time that didn't go along with traditional Scholasticism which was restricted to religious settings and Western medieval universities. In that era, these were all founded and controlled by the Catholic church and Papal power. So although the Vatican and the Catholic Western universities had a vice grip on academia in the medieval period (a monopoly on academia that I'm sure Catholics would love to regain today), there were pockets of scholarship, both institutional and independent, away from their control. 

Those free from Catholic Scholastic domination were: 

1) a few non-catholic medieval educational institutions, for example: 

i) Islamic madrasas (such as the 'Al-Azhar University' in Egypt or 'al-Qarawiyyin' in Morocco);

ii) Byzantine academies which were theologically opposed to Catholic Scholasticism and combined any Christianity with a heavy dose of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek influence. The most well-known of these Byzantine style universities being the 'Pandidacterium' (ie the 'University of Constantinople', considered the first university established in 425 CE by Emperor Theodosius II, well before the Catholic medieval European ones). 

iii) Secular universities, such as the first secular, state university: the 'University of Naples Federico II', founded by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1224 as a push back against the Vatican dominating European universities, which they are still prone to do these days! 

Unfortunately, we perhaps don't notice this rejection of Scholasticism enough because this secular university focused on educating the next generation of lawyers, judges and bureaucrats, rather than becoming Philosophers or Theologians. Ironically, Aquinas attended this university, perhaps because he came from this region of Italy and his father worked for the Emperor who founded it. 

At the University of Naples, Aquinas studied secular subjects, such as, maths, logic, grammar, astronomy and music, until he fell under the controlling influence of a Dominican preacher (John of St. Julian) who changed Aquinas's entire course of life at the age of only 19. He manipulated Aquinas into the Dominican Order and kept him away from his family simply because they wanted to thwart Dominican designs on their son. 

This shouldn't have been necessary because had Aquinas wanted to go into the Catholic church, he could have simply joined the Benedictine clergy like his uncle. However, sadly, eventually Aquinas did end up a Dominican Scholastic. 

I wonder if Aquinas's life story has set a disturbing habit of Dominican Catholics recruiting and surreptitiously pressurising secular university students into the Catholic church through the kind of evangelizing mentorship you wouldn't wish on anyone! Now that's inappropriate mentoring! 

And we can hear how the Catholic Church is heavily evangelical by the way Pope Leo XIV mentions evangelisation every time he speaks. 

I base this on my own experience of being a non-religious student studying a secular subject (Philosophy) at a secular college within a secular university. The first person to try to 'pick me up' and get me into his social circles was someone who became a convert to Catholicism himself during his student years. He was a Dominican lay religious, although he never admitted that to me, I was just lucky I found that out for myself albeit belatedly. Once I didn't give in to that pressure, despite it potentially negatively impacting my marking and grades, a substitute was suggested to me, this time a young female who, I was told, could walk around everywhere with me. This made me extremely uncomfortable because it reminded me of the Handmaid's Tale I'd just studied in A Level English Literature. 😱This young woman could apparently 'mentor' me. 

Let's be honest, peer to peer mentoring is total nonsense. Someone of your own age cannot mentor you. You need to be different ages so you can mutually share your particular knowledge, your experiences and perspectives and thus learn from each other.  

Nevertheless, this peer to peer mentoring is one that universities are keen on. They only want to censor non-religious mentoring, or should I say non-Catholic mentoring, by mislabelling it with false accusations of abuse of power even when the mentoring was entered into  freely, and with informed consent on the part of both parties and initiated by the student herself. 🤦‍♀️

So the only abuse of power happening is what I encountered: religious people trying to convert an atheist into a raging Catholic, and at the same time, converting her out of being gay. And trying to scare her into dressing like an ultra-conservative woman for fear of being sexually attacked if she continues to dress the way she does (eg. edgy; or gender non-conforming whether unisex, genderfluid or masculine; or merely normal student wear such as a jumper and jeans). However, if you're religious eg. a female lecturer who drops the word 'transubstantiation' in her first lecture then you can invariably wear a unisex outfit of a black t-shirt and jeans and nobody says a word and you can do anything you like and that's fine, even including not marking and returning essays on time, so impacting coursework and exam essay choices if you don't chase her up.

I didn't change what I was wearing, indeed, I became even more punk.

Why include my personal experience here? Surely it's irrelevant?

Because it gives us historical perspective: it shows history isn't linear. Everything was bad back then but now we know better. However, there aren't neat, strict divisions in history, for instance, everything was Catholic Scholasticism then suddenly the Early Modern thinkers were the first to reject it and do things differently. 

Just as we assume that Catholic dominance in European universities is a thing of the past, that was only in the medieval period, not now, in the 21st century when we have secular universities everywhere. My story says otherwise and moreover, for me, I came across the Dominican evangelising from within the university's Philosophy department, whereas even Aquinas didn't find this John the Dominican within his secular university or even at a Church, but somewhere out there, sleeping and preaching on the streets of Naples as a travelling friar (picture a 13th century version of a Street Pastor / Street Angel). 

Hence, I also generally argue:

Firstly, why do Catholics expect us now, in the 21st century, to put up with their evangelising and attempt at total domination of higher education and university life when even way back in the 13th century, the Emperor Frederick II rejected this and boldly set up a secular university free from Catholic power? 

Secondly, why do an increasing number of researchers want to see Scholastic influence everywhere, almost without exception, down the ages, including arguing for potential links between Suarez or Aquinas and Spinoza, when there have always been plenty of non-Scholastic and anti-Scholastic thought in all eras? 

This historical backdrop matters because it informs us both about 1) Spinoza's philosophy, academic situation and his perspective on the world and religion, as well as 2) informing us about our own times, helping us to analyse the backwards direction 21st century scholarship and universities are taking by encouraging a recent, fast growing trend in medieval and Scholastic research. 

Returning to my list of those who were free from Catholic Scholastic domination:

2) Those outside of medieval universities altogether could write freely, away from the framework of Catholic Scholasticism, for instance: 

i) women, such as Christine de Pizan (1364–c. 1430, late medieval/early renaissance)

ii) those of other religions who worked outside of that university setting, for example, Islamic and Jewish thinkers. Perhaps the most famous of these being Maimonides. He's an interesting case in that he's not a traditional theologian in the sense that he wasn't one of the canonical Christian thinkers. However, he is considered mainstream and traditional theology in the sense that 1) he influenced Aquinas and 2) he became the 'cornerstone' of both Jewish Orthodoxy as a religion as well as of traditional Jewish theology. 

Why does this strand of Jewish (hence non-Scholastic), independent medieval scholarship, such as Maimonides, matter in terms of understanding Spinoza? 

Take the perennial debate over whether Spinoza was a religious person or an atheist. Suppose, as Nadler does, we measure Spinoza's outlook according to a general concept of what constitutes traditional theology and atheism. 

However, on my historical picture I've presented, we can begin by moving to the question which is rarely asked: 

Whose Traditional Theology? Whose concept of Atheism? 

I find the religious and atheist criteria usually cited too vague. For instance, that you are religious if you:

Obey religious authority and conform to religious institutions; 

Believe that God is always in heaven;

Believe that God created the world like a potter then stepped away from it; 

Believe that God is providential in the sense of always looking after you and directing you in life and in death and that you should do God's will, however a religious institution interprets that for you;

You are full of awe and wonder and religious emotion, whilst strongly rejecting rationalism and scientific explanation, in case it challenges your faith, asks questions about scripture and ruins the specialness of the divine. 

I argue that this is not an accurate set of criteria for judging whether a philosopher is religious or an atheist. Many of these criteria actually lead to serious theological problems for the existence of God and are not sufficiently substantiated in scripture as required beliefs but rather are merely a way of simplifying complex abstract ideas of God and how the world works. 

As for saying we can define anyone who isn't Catholic or Protestant and doesn't expound their Theology as an atheist: this is simply unacceptable discrimination against other faiths, and is Antisemitic against religious Jews. While this appalling attitude of the Vatican that anything that isn't hardline Catholic is automatically atheistic and heretical, no matter how religious it is, was the Vatican's stance in the Medieval and Early Modern period (and sadly still is, albeit less overtly). This doesn't make it a plausible, acceptable or workable definition of Atheism, be it historical or contemporary. It's merely Catholic arrogance, prejudice and superiority complex about their own faith. This doesn't provide a solid foundation for a definition of Atheism. 

What if we look at specific forms of traditional theology? 

What if we judge Spinoza by a generic, Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic traditional theological standard, with criteria such as: 

Is God a personal, anthropomorphic being, does He have a will, sit in judgement, control the world and show emotions like a human? 

Is God always transcendent?

Is God a creator who made the universe by design?

Is God teleological, does He have a purpose for us? 

Is God omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent?

Is God uncaused by anything other than Himself? 

If the answer to these questions is no, then Spinoza seems like an Atheist. But I argue that this is also misleading. Firstly, although these beliefs are found amongst Orthodox Jews today, they are not all required in Judaism, especially if one wishes to be strictly academically and biblically accurate about it, as opposed to merely conforming to some community's religious expectations. Secondly, these are more distinctively Christian beliefs, so irrelevant to Spinoza. Thirdly, Spinoza rejects these for religious reasons and provides a religious refutation, not an atheistic contra. Fourthly, Spinoza does not reject the last two statements in this list. 

If we judge Spinoza by Scholastic, Catholic traditional theology, then, I argue, he erroneously appears to be more of an atheist and an heretic than he really is which is partly why the Vatican banned his books. However, because Scholasticism was quite technical and metaphysical, it's interesting to note that Spinoza doesn't entirely clash with all of their criteria. 

For instance, Spinoza's concept of God does not deny the Scholastic criteria that: 

God is not made up of parts 

God exists by His own nature and does not depend on anything 

God is not potential, contingent but immutable and eternal 

God is immaterial, does not possess a body, is not limited in space and time

God is not caused by something other than Himself 

One can provide rational arguments for the existence of God because they're not contradiction between reason and faith. 

So Spinoza doesn't even rank as an atheist by certain key Scholastic metaphysical standards, including having a rational approach to religion. So why label Spinoza an atheist when he's rational, but not the Scholastics when they argue for using logic and reasoning, not emotion? 

Where Spinoza and the Scholastics part, is describing God as providential, in the sense of a guiding God who directly intervenes in the world and has a plan. And  their description of God as Creator differs although it amounts to the same thing overall: that the world exists and functions the way it does because of God.

Spinoza even overlaps with some Scholastic moral principles especially their cardinal virtues, such as prudence, justice and fortitude, albeit arriving at them through Judaism not Christianity but nevertheless seeing these virtues as useful to interfaith dialogue since Christians should be able to somewhat identify with these too through their Christianity. Both Spinoza and Scholastics argue for roughly the same moral truths, for instance: love the stranger; and justice as objectively true; and seeing these as compatible with scripture, not merely some human invention. Indeed, even Aquinas has an impersonal God to some extent, so Spinoza is not clearly atheistic when compared to Scholastic acceptance of impersonal concepts of God either. 

Furthermore, Spinoza's ethical truths are cornerstones of Judaism: Tzedek (justice, charity, ethical obligation to act honestly, fairly and more) and Chesed (loving kindness including acts of kindness, termed gemilut hasadim). So there's nothing Atheistic or Humanistic about Spinoza arguing for justice and loving kindness, especially since he does sometimes cite scriptural support for such ethical concepts. 

So what about Jewish traditional theology according to Maimonides? Let's tick off how many traditional theological claims Maimonides makes that we can also spot in Spinoza's perspective: 

✅ A highly rationalist approach to religion

✅ A naturalist approach to religion, whereby we understand God better through the study of nature and science 

✅ Rejection of superstition 

✅ Miracles are part of the natural order that God set up, not a break with the laws of nature hence he provides a naturalistic explanation for miracles 

✅ God is necessary and self-caused 

✅God is One and a perfect, absolute, indivisible unity (Tawhid /Oneness)

✅God is completely incorporeal (no body)

✅ God is not anthropomorphic, indeed he was so opposed to anthropomorphism that he even avoided any standard descriptions of God that might imply human qualities 

✅God was described anthropomorphically sometimes in biblical times for educational and social purposes, not because this is strictly metaphysically accurate 

✅ We can give a naturalistic explanation of how God acts in the world but we cannot know God's emotions 

✅God generally connects with humans through the divine intellect, especially with those humans who develop their intelligence 

✅Divine Providence is through the intellect so perfection of the individual human mind is important and connects you to God 

✅ An anti-idolatry stance 

✅ Prophecy is not magical, it's a mental state and higher mental faculty at work 

✅ The Torah contains the word of God

Atheism and heresy for Maimonides included several features that are not true of Spinoza's Philosophy: 

✅A corporeal, anthropomorphic concept of God 

✅A denial of the existence of God and denying that the world functions according to how God set up the laws of nature 

✅ Polytheism

✅Denying God's unity

✅ Not believing that God existed before all else 

✅ Believing in and using intermediaries between God and yourself 

And more besides. Nonetheless, I'm not arguing that Spinoza agreed with everything Maimonides thought, because he didn't. But Spinoza wasn't obliged to agree unthinkingly with anyone. Rabbinic debate and differing arguments are allowed in Judaism: there's no set religious dogma to unquestioningly obey, unlike in Catholicism. 

Moreover, in Judaism, God is also seen as an imminent being who dwells in the world, this is seen as the female divine presence called the Shechinah. So, in the context of Judaism, this is not pantheism or atheism. And it's very Jewish / Maimonidean, not atheist, of Spinoza to have a naturalistic standpoint and appreciate God through appreciating nature and all it's complexities. 

Indeed, Maimonides himself was accused of heresy in his day and his book: 'Tractate on Idolatry from the Mishneh Torah with notes by Dionysius Vossius' was banned by the Vatican and belatedly placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in the 18th century (1717). Hence, we obviously cannot deduce from accusations of heresy in a thinker's lifetime that the person in question was an actual heretical atheist. Otherwise, Maimonides would be inexplicable: he went from being deemed a heretic to being foundational to orthodox Jewish theology, religion and halakhah (Jewish law). Maimonides was also sometimes considered atypical in his theology yet that did not stop him from becoming a canonical Jewish religious figure. He simply cannot be conveniently dismissed as somehow not counting as traditional Theology or being too unorthodox in his views, when he's a pivotal part of Orthodox Judaism. Hence, I argue, that any common ground between Maimonides and Spinoza counts as evidence of Orthodox Jewish thought being present in Spinoza's Philosophy and worldview. 

But what I am saying though, is that this is still a significantly long enough list of agreement on traditional Jewish theology between Maimonides and Spinoza that I don't find it plausible that Spinoza didn't remain an Orthodox Jew all his life. I also don't find it plausible that Spinoza can be classified as an atheist or that his views were at odds with traditional theology, including Jewish traditional theology. Jewish Theology is the only theology Spinoza was meant to cohere with in an overall sense, given that he was Jewish himself, and I see enough textual evidence of solid Jewish Theology in Spinoza's works to support my Jewish interpretation of him. 

Perhaps most importantly of all, since Spinoza was a Philosopher, not a Theologian, he did not need to expound traditional theology at length, he merely needs to be believed when he states, in his letters as well as his books, that he wasn't an atheist. 

So why not just believe Spinoza when he so strongly and repeatedly denied he's an atheist? Especially when we have clear textual evidence to support it. A striking example of Spinoza arguing against and demonstrating how he was not an atheist by any stretch of the imagination is his Letter XLIX to Isaac Orobio, defending his TTP in 1671:

"But I would ask, whether a man throws off all religion, who maintains that God must be acknowledged as the highest good, and must, as such, be loved with a free mind? or, again, that the reward of virtue is virtue itself, while the punishment of folly and weakness is folly itself? or, lastly, that every man ought to love his neighbour, and to obey the commands of the supreme power? Such doctrines I have not only expressly stated, but have also demonstrated them by very solid reasoning."...........

"......I have expressly stated in Chap. IV., that the sum of the divine law (which, as I have said in Chap. II., has been divinely inscribed on our hearts), and its chief precept is, to love God as the highest good......"

"Thus you see, my friend, how far this man has strayed from the truth; nevertheless, I grant that he has inflicted the greatest injury, not on me but on himself, inasmuch as he has not been ashamed to declare, that "under disguised and covert arguments I teach atheism." " ............¹

¹ Spinoza, Letter XLIX. Spinoza To Isaac Orobio

In: Correspondence, by Benedict de Spinoza, [1883], at sacred-texts.com

Available at: 

 https://sacred-texts.com/phi/spinoza/corr/corr47.htm