Wat Spinoza vond van Erasmus - #spinoza

 

Over dit onderwerp kom je geen literatuur tegen. Een boek als dat van Erik de Bom (red.), Een nieuwe wereld. Denkers uit de Nederlanden over politiek en maatschappij (1500-1700) [Uitgeverij Polis / Klement, ] heeft aparte hoofdstukken over Desiderius Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Justus Lipsius, Leonardus Lessius, Hugo Grotius en Benedictus de Spinoza. Maar wat Spinoza eventueel met Erasmus had, komt in z’n boek niet aan de orde. De Duitse Spinoza Bibliografie geeft op één uitzondering na, niets met beide namen samen. De enige titel die de namen van beide denkers in zich heeft, is het boek van Richard H. Popkin’s The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza [Berkeley [e.a.]: Univ. of California Press., 1979. - XXII, 333 pp. – books.google], maar voor zover ik mij herinner van bestudering enige jaren terug geeft ook Popkin daarin niets over Spinoza’s kijk op Erasmus. Verrassenderwijs bracht google mij onder ogen het boek van

Lewis Samuel Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism [Transaction Publishers, 1987 – books.google] dat op p. 72 deze passage heeft waarin de namen van beiden voorkomt (ik laat ze oplichten)

Dit is tegelijk een mooie inleiding op wat ik in dit blog verder breng.

 
Eénmaal slechts verwijst Spinoza naar Erasmus, namelijk in de Tweede Zamenspreekinge in de Korte Verhandeling – waar Feuer al naar verwees. Daarin laat Spinoza Erasmus optreden in een gesprek met Theophilus. Theophilus heeft de rol waarin Spinoza’s leer nader wordt toegelicht; zoals de ondertitel ook aangeeft is de opzet van de dialoog “Dienende eensdeels tot dat voorgaande, anderdeels tot het twede Navolgende Deel”. In een volgend blog – zo ben ik van plan -zal ik deze dialoog tussen Erasmus en Theophilus brengen.  

Hier haal ik graag een deel naar binnen van het hoofdstuk van Russ Leo, “Spinoza’s Calvin: Reformed Theologiy in the Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en Deszelfs Welstand,:  in Yitzhak Y. Melamed, The Young Spinoza. Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 144-159 – books.google. Het is de enige tekst die ik kon vinden, waarin iets dieper wordt ingegaan op Spinoza’s visie op Erasmus – we krijgen er ook iets méér analyse dan bij Feuer.
 

Russ Leo geeft daar een overtuigende toelichting op wat Spinoza daar voorhad met het opvoeren van Erasmus. Hij laat zien dat Spinoza met zijn zorgvuldige behandeling in de Korte Verhandeling van het thema ‘voorzienigheid en predestinatie’ de opzet had een kring van ‘calvinisten’ te bereiken die vertrouwd was met de scholastieke achtergrond van de gereformeerde theologie en de groeiende hoeveelheid spirituele literatuur die in de Nederlanden gepubliceerd werd. Leo ziet dan ook Spinoza met zijn KV zich bevinden tussen de 17^e eeuwse gereformeerde theologie enerzijds en de eenvoudige vroomheid van de Nadere Reformatie anderzijds. En hij vervolgt dan aldus [ ik geef wel het verwijzingsgetal, maar voor de noten verwijs ik naar het boek]: 

Spinoza knew his audience well. Lest we forget, it is his explicit invocation of Erasmus in the dialogue [Zamenspreekinge] between Erasmus and Theophilus (KV 76-79, before 1 3) that frames the chapters of the KV on causality, God's necessary activity, providence, and predestination. Spinoza's Erasmus denies that God can act simultaneously as an immanent cause, a remote cause, and an internal cause; Theophilus, correcting Erasmus gently, proceeds to explain how this is in fact possible. Here Spinoza subtly recalls Erasmus's most famous disputation, his 1524 De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio against Martin Luther, his affirmation of free will and foreknowledge against Luther's versions of justification and predestination, translating their humanist disagreement into distinctly scholastic terms. Spinoza's Second Dialogue works as a sort of fable, through which readers proceed toward his more detailed treatments of causality, agency, and predestination in God. He guides his readers through Erasmus to the Reformed scholasticism of the KV, appealing to a variety of contemporaries between Amsterdam, Rijnsburg, and Rotterdam during the 1650s and early 1660s for whom Erasmus and his legacy were crucial to Dutch politics, philosophy, and religion. Such people were among Spinoza's chief interlocutors—for instance, Jacob Ostens (1630-1678) of the Rotterdam "Waterlanders," or Meyer, author of the Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres (1666).³⁶ The controversial Rotterdammer Joachim Oudaan (1628-1692) is also a signal figure here. Considering his public profile, it is difficult to believe that Spinoza had not heard of Oudaan.³⁷ During the 1650s and 1660s, Oudaan was singularly preoccupied with that most famous citizen of his native Rotterdam, Erasmus. Since 1622, when Remonstrant politicians established control over [156] Rotterdam, Hendrik de Keyser's copper statue of Erasmus stood prominently in the city center.³⁸ Earlier in the seventeenth century, after the exclusion of the Remonstrants following the Synod of Dort. Erasmus could number among his followers the renowned poet, scholar, and jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645); Caspar Barlaeus (1584-1648). the first professor of philosophy and rhetoric at the Amsterdam Athaneum Illustre (the institution founded in 1631 that would eventually become the Universiteit van Amsterdam); and the influential Remonstrant preachers Johannes Uytenbogaert (1557-1644) and Simon Episcopius (1583-1643)—all of whom were crucial authorities in the intellectual world of the Remonstrants and Collegiants. It is during this period that the citizens of Rotterdam erected de Keyser's statue of Erasmus, perhaps as a form of resistance against the Counter-Remonstrant consensus, perhaps as a measure of solidarity among the dissenters who survived the purges and expulsions. We are told that Grotius visited the monument once he returned to the United Provinces from exile in 1631. He is reported as saying, "My first visit to Rotterdam was to show my affection for the memory of Erasmus. I went to see the statue of the man who had so well shown us the way to a measured Reformation. never binding himself on disputable questions to one side or another. We Hollanders cannot thank this man enough, and I hold myself fortunate that I can from afar understand his virtue."³⁹ The statue was removed in 1674. when Countra-Remonstrants and Orangists seized control of the city following the events of the 1672 rampjaar, but it was erected again in 1677—this time upon a new pedestal featuring text by Nikolaes Heinsius and Oudaan.⁴⁰ This was, in many ways. an exemplary gesture commemorating over a century of Dutch interest in Erasmus, championing his alleged irenicism, humanism, spiritualism, and simplicity against what contemporaries felt was the reigning climate of Reformed severity, dogmatism, and intolerance. Among Spinoza and his contemporaries, many of the poets, philosophers. and theologians who were drawn to the Collegiant movement were duly devoted to Erasmus and the spiritual Reformation that never quite happened in the Netherlands. Even among Remonstrants (such as Grotius and, later, Oudaan), for whom a certain version of Reformed theology still held sway, Erasmus was an important authority against the Contra-Remonstrant Calvinism of their opponents. Spinoza. moving from a deliberate admonishment of Erasmus to a distinctly Reformed approach to providence and predestination, engages these readers. as well as those Calvinists for whom Erasmus was just another medieval Catholic to overcome.

Whereas the engagement with Erasmus is brief and strategic, however, Calvin and Calvinism are more than rhetorical turns in the KV. Indeed, upon closer look, Spinoza uses Reformed concepts to structure the distinction between belief and knowledge. In II 4, Spinoza establishes that "true belief is thus only good insofar as it is the way to true knowledge, awakening us to those things that are truly worth loving."⁴¹ This comes after he demonstrates the differences between opinion [waan], belief [geloof], and knowledge [weeten] and, of course, also after his more detailed scholastic expositions of necessary activity, providence, predestination, and causality in God in Part I. The treatment of true belief in Part II rests on the exposition of these concepts in Part I; moreover, consider the strange foundation for human understanding in I 9 on "Natured Nature" [genatuurde Natuur], which Spinoza will later refer to in a Latin register as Natura Naturata, where Spinoza names "the understanding in the thinking thing" [het verstaan in de denkende zaak] as "a Son, Product, or immediate Creation of God" [een Zone, Maaksel, or unmiddel9k schepzel van God] (KV 287-288). It is difficult to miss or ignore the Trinitarian suggestion here, however vague and however disconnected ' from the initial invocation of "the Lord Christ our best teacher" [Heer Christus, onzen besten Leermeester] on the title page (KV 245). Thus it is the understanding in the thinking thing—a "Son" of God, a type of thing that "[has] been for all eternity and will remain unchanging for all eternity" [van alle eeuwigheid zyn geweest, en in alle eeuwigheid onveranderlÿk zullen blÿven]—that men attain either through true belief or clear knowledge [klare kennis], neither of which can err (KV 288, 298). Spinoza, however subtly, allows his more pious readers to locate not just a but the Son as a conceptual mediator between "Natured Nature" [genatuurde Natuur] and "Naturing Nature" [Naturende Natuur]; between knowledge of God in se and for man; and between nature, providence, and predestination, when apprehended either through true belief or true knowledge. At the heart of the KV we encounter a rational Christology buttressed by Reformed approaches to providence and predestination and the knowledges thereof.