historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

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Chapter 2. Intellectual context
and intellectual system’ that – ‘with the partial exception only of England
and the United Provinces’ – prevailed ‘in mid-seventeenth-century Europe’.
This system was ‘doctrinally coherent, geared to uniformity, authoritarian,
and formidably resistant to intellectual innovation and change’. According to
Israel, ‘from the 1650s onwards … variants of the New Philosophy’ – ‘which
in most cases meant Cartesianism’ – ‘breached the defences of authority, tradition
and confessional theology, fragmenting the old edifice of thought at
every level from court to university and from pulpit to coffee-shop’. 122 It was
‘under the impact of the New Philosophy’ that ‘the ascendancy of theological
orthodoxy and scholastic Aristotelianism’ weakened. 123 The intellectual European
crisis that unfolded in the second half of the seventeenth century also
had a political philosophical dimension, for one of its children was the Radical
Enlightenment, which was ‘republican’, rejected ‘divine-right monarchy’, and
showed ‘anti-aristocratic and democratic tendencies’. 124
Even if the precise nature of these phenomenons, their causes and effects,
and their impact on European political thought can be debated, it seems a
fair observation that already before the Early Enlightenment in the late seventeenth
century, changes had occured in early modern Europe that had
upset the traditional intellectual heritage. As already mentioned, in the field
of moral philosophy Machiavelli had challenged the age-old connection
between honestum and utile. In the field of science the heliocentric ideas of
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) went against
the tradional religious dogma, shared by both Protestants and Catholics, that
the earth was the center of the universe. Finally, long before Spinoza, biblical
exergesis conducted by Desiderius Erasmus (1467/69-1536) and Joseph
Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) had already come up with disturbing results that
questioned the integrity of the Bible as it had been handed down through the
ages. 125 All in all, we can conclude that if ‘the old edifice of thought’ only seri-
122 Ibidem, pp. 14, 17-18, with quotes on p. 14 and p. 17.
123 Ibidem, p. 20.
124 Ibidem, p. 21.
125 Erasmus found out that the so-called ‘Johannine comma’, a passage in the first letter of the
apostle John (1 John 5: 7-8) that was considered as an important biblical argument in favour of the
doctrine of the Trinity, was missing in the Greek manuscripts that he used for his annotated edition of
the New Testament. ‘Erasmus was prepared to believe’ that the Johannine comma was missing in the
Greek manuscripts ‘because it had never been there’. He therefore did not include this passage in his
first edition of the New Testament (Basel, 1516). See Joseph M. Levine, “Erasmus and the Problem of the
Johannine Comma”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 58, No. 4 (1997), pp. 578, 581-82, with quotes on
p. 582.
Scaliger, the famous French scholar who lived at Leiden from 1593 onwards, believed that he had
found ‘gaps and errors’ in the texts of both the Old and New Testament, but was afraid to publish the
results of his biblical exegeses. Anthony Grafton, Athenae Batavae: The Research Imperative at Leiden, 1575-
1650 (Primavera Pers; Leiden, 2003), p. 10.