HE1ERODOXY, SPINOZISM, AND FREE THOUGHT IN

EARL Y-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE

ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'IllSTOIRE DES IDEES

INTERNATIONAL ARClllVES OF THE lllSTORY OF IDEAS

148

HETERODOXY, SPINOZISM, AND FREE THOUGHT IN

EARLY-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE Studies on the Traite des trois imposteurs

edited by

SILVIA BERTI, FRANC;OISE CHARLES-DAUBERT AND RICHARD H. POPKIN

Founding Directors: P. Dibont (paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA)

Directors: Brian Copenhaver (Univers1.ty of California, Los Angeles, USA), Sarah Hutton (The University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom), Richard Popkin (Washington Univer­

sity, St Louis & University of California, Los Angeles, USA) Editorial Board: J.F. Battail (paris); F. Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); J.D. North (Groningen); MJ. Petry (Rotterdam); J. Popkin (Lexington);

Th. Verbeek (Utrecht) Advisory Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); A. Crombie (Oxford); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (paris); K. Hanada (Hokkaido University); W. Kirsop (Melbourne); P.O. Kristeller (Columbia University); E. Labrousse (paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); J. Malarczyk (Lublin); J. Orcibal (paris); W. ROd (Milnchen); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles);

H. Rowen (Rutgers University, N.J.); J.P. Schobinger (ZUrich); J. Tans (Groningen)

HETERODOXY, SPINOZISM, AND FREE THOUGHT IN

EARL Y -EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE

Studies on the Traite des Trois Imposteurs

Edited by

SILVIA BERTI University of Rome, Italy

FRAN<;OISE CHARLES-DAUBERT Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques, France

and

RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University, St. Louis, U.S.A.

University of California, Los Angeles, U.S.A.

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is availab1e from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-90-481-4741-0 ISBN 978-94-015-8735-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8735-8

Designed and typeset in Linotype Janson Text by Jeffrey Dean, 4 Chandos Road, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester M21 OST, Eng1and

Printed on acid-free paper

AlI Rights Reserved © 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1996 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1996

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

Contents ------~(O~)-------

Foreword: The Leiden Seminar RICHARD H. POPKIN

I. HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION OF THE 'TRAITE DES TROIS IMPOSTEURS'

I. L'Esprit de Spinosa: ses origines et sa premiere edition dans leur contexte spinozien

SILVIA BERTI

2. Vne Histoire interminable: origines et developpement du Traite des trois imposteurs

MIGUEL BENITEZ

3. History and structure of our Traite des trois imposteurs BERTRAM EUGENE SCHWARZBACH & A. W. FAIRBAIRN

4. L'Esprit de Spinosa et les Traites des trois imposteurs : rappel des differentes familles et de leurs principales caracteristiques FRAN~OISE CHARLES-DAUBERT

II. AROUND THE 'TRAITE'

5. Freethinking in early-eighteenth-century Protestant Germany: Peter Friedrich Arpe and the Traite des trois imposteurs

MARTIN MULsow

VB

3

53

75

131

193

6. The English Deists and the Traite 241

RIENK H. VERMI]

7. Sallengre, La Monnoye, and the Traite des trois imposteurs 255 BROM ANDERSON

VI CONTENTS

8. The politics of a publishing event: the Marchand milieu 273 and The life and spirit of Spinoza of 1719

JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN

9. Impostors and Revolution: on the 'Philadelphie' 1796 297 edition of the Traiti des trois imposteurs

HEATHER BLAIR

III. THE THREADS OF A TRADITION

10. An eighteenth-century interpretation of the Ethica: 307 Henry de Boulainvilliers's 'Essai de metaphysique'

ROBERTO FESTA

II. Legislators, impostors, and the politic origins of religion: 333 English theories of 'imposture' from Stubbe to Toland

JUSTIN A. I. CHAMPION

12. 'Behold the fear of the Lord': the Erastianism of 357 Stillingfleet, Wolseley, and Tillotson

JAN W. WOJCIK

13. 'Jesus Nazarenus legislator': Adam Boreel's defence 375 of Christianity

ROB ILIFFE

14. Johan Adler Salvius' Questions to Baruch de Castro 397 concerning De tribus impostoribus

SUSANNA AKERMAN _

15. The struggle against unbelief in the Portuguese Jewish 425 community of Amsterdam after Spinoza's excommunication

JosE R. MAlA NETO

16. Worse than the three impostors? towards an interpretation 439 of Theodor Ludwig Lau's Meditationes philosophicae de Deo, mundo, homine

APRIL G. SHELFORD

ApPENDIX

Marchand's article IMPOSTORIBUS EDITED BY JEFFREY DEAN

477

[Foreword]

The Leiden Seminar _0_ RICHARD H. POPKIN

(UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Los ANGELES)

T HIS VOLUME CONTAINS the fruits of the first activities of the Foundation for Research in Intellectual History founded by Con­stance Blackwell to encourage the kind of scholarship in the his­

tory of ideas done by the late Charles B. Schmitt. The Foundation decided as its first venture to conduct a month-long international re­search seminar for advanced graduate students and beginning teachers and scholars from the Old and New Worlds. A topic was chosen for which there was sufficient available material, published and in manu­script, so that the fellows could each undertake an original research project. The topic chosen, the origin and nature of the Traite des trois imposteurs, was also one in which there is ongoing interest and research and concerning which significant contributions can be made. It was decided to hold the seminar in Leiden during the month of July 1990, because of its role in the Republic of Letters, its wonderful ambience, and its marvelous library and university resources. The location of Lei­den also allowed fellows and teachers to use the research resources in The Hague and Amsterdam.

We gathered in Leiden on the first of July 1990. The seminar was under the direction of Richard H. Popkin, with Silvia Berti of Rome and Fran~oise Charles-Daubert of Paris as co-directors. We also had the participation of several visitors, Bertram Schwarzbach of Paris, Miguel Benitez of Seville, Alan Kors of Philadelphia, who spoke formally and carried on informal discussions with the students and staff. Margaret Jacob of New York came to one meeting and led a lively discussion.

Vlll RICHARD H. POPKIN

Ernestine van der Wall of the Department of Church History at the University of Leiden co-ordinated the operation of the seminar. The twelve student fellows were from Brazil, the United States, England, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. After a couple of initial lectures, we met as a seminar group three times a week from 5 to 7 p.m. after the closing of the University Library. The sessions were conducted mainly in English and French, with each participant speaking in a lan­guage in which he or she was comfortable. Members of the group translated when necessary for others. The University Librarians kindly introduced us to the riches of the collection, and allowed us to work all day in the Rare Book and Manuscript section, the Dousa.

All of the participants were residing in the Hotel Doelen or the International House next door. The director, Popkin, had an apartment a block away on the Rapenburg. This allowed for and encouraged discus­sion, debate, and sharing of ideas and data at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and on into the night. Fellows could work direcdy with one or more of the teachers. Almost from the beginning a marvelously exciting rapport developed among all of the participants, fellows, teachers, and visitors.

The teachers and visitors were all actively doing research on some aspect of the topic-the origin, nature, and influence of Les Trois Impos­teurs- and most had previously used some of the resources in the Leiden University collection.

The document, Traite des trois imposteurs (Moses, Jesus, and Moham­med), alternately entided L'Esprit de M. Spinosa, is one of the most radical anti-religious clandestine works that circulated in the eighteenth cen­tury. It exists in many, many manuscript copies in library collections all over Europe and in America. (The Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati has the largest number, eight, some of which have been recendy ac­quired.) The work purports to have been written by the secretary of Frederick II in the 13th century. However, since it contains materials taken direcdy from Thomas Hobbes, Gabriel Naude, Fran~ois La Mothe Le Vayer, and Baruch Spinoza, and since it mentions Descartes, it is obviously of later origin. Silvia Berti a few years ago unearthed the first known copy of the first printed edition of 1719, which was immediately suppressed. This copy was found in the Abraham Wolf-Spinoza collec­tion at the University of California, Los Angeles. This edition has been reproduced as Trattato dei tre impostori, ed. Silvia Berti (Rome: Einaudi, 1994). The work is often attributed to one Jean Maximilien Lucas, a Hu­guenot in the Netherlands in the 1680'S, who wrote what has been called

FOREWORD IX

'the oldest biography of Spinoza', La Vie de Mr. Spinosa, which in the manuscript copies is often followed by L'Esprit de M. Spinosa. Margaret Jacob, in her Radical Enlightenment, contended that the Traite was written by a radical group of Freemasons in The Hague in the early eighteenth century. Silvia Berti has offered evidence it was written by Jan Vroesen. Various discussions in the early eighteenth century consider many possi­ble authors from the Renaissance onwards to whom the work might be attributed.

The Trois imposteurs has attracted quite a bit of recent attention as one of the most significant irreligious clandestine writings available in the Enlightenment, which is most important for understanding the develop­ment of religious scepticism, radical deism, and even atheism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars for the last couple of decades have been trying to assess when the work was actually written or compiled and by whom. In view of the widespread distribution of manu­scripts of the work all over Europe, they have also been seeking to find out who was influenced by the work, and what it represented for its time. Hitherto unknown manuscripts are being turned up in public and private libraries all over Europe and the United States.

The first problem in dealing with the work, of course, is determining its time of composition. The Trois imposteurs is a quite different work than another clandestine writing, the Tribus impostoribus. The works differ both in content and in their histories. (There is in fact no known Latin copy of the Trois imposteurs. An English manuscript copy exists in the British Library, which is a literal translation from the French.) There is a pre-history of both the French and Latin works. Various writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discussed the supposed content of the works, the possibility of obtaining one or the other, and even whether such works actually existed.

In the 1640's mention is made of a work accusing Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed of being political impostors, who used purported religious sanctions to gain political control. It is cited in one of Thomas Browne's writings. Some people of the time even claim to have seen such a work.

Queen Christina, Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrere, among others, sought to obtain a copy. Christina offered a very large amount of money (which may have been an incentive for somebody to write the work).

There is evidence from the mid-1650'S that either the Traite, or a de­scription of it, or the gist of it, was being discussed. Henry Oldenburg wrote from Oxford in 1656 that someone (unnamed) had offered the

x RICHARD H. POPKIN

horrendous view that Moses was a political manipulator, who instituted his regulations in order to gain political control over the Israelites, and that Jesus offered his pie-in-the-skyview for similar reasons, and that the cunning Mohammed did likewise. Oldenburg's letter was written at the same time that Henry Stubbe was translating Hobbes's Leviathan at Oxford. Just a couple of years earlier Oldenburg had been shocked to read a manuscript of Bodin's Colloquium heptaplomeres when he was in Paris. He saw this notorious clandestine work as undermining the belief of faithful Christians. (He made a copy of the Bodin manuscript, which he apparently showed to John Milton and John Dury. Through the latter it got to Germany where Leibniz, Thomasius, and Conring in Wolfen­buttel would prepare a copy for publication, which did not take place.) Oldenburg felt that the view he learned about at Oxford of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed being impostors seemed even more seditious than Bo­din's discussions, and hence in need of rigorous and immediate disproof. So, he wrote to his friend, Adam Boreel, the leader of the Dutch Colle­giants, to urge him to save Christianity by refuting this three-impostors theory. Coincidentally or not, Boreel began work on his major defence of Christianity just when young Baruch de Spinoza was being excommuni­cated from the Amsterdam Jewish community and was taking up resi­dence with the Collegiants on the outskirts of the city.

One can find traces of the three-impostor theory going back into the Middle Ages. Jews and Christians, of course, regarded Mohammed as an impostor from the time of his emergence as a religious leader, and were not reticent in saying so. Even Spinoza, tolerant about so many things, exhibited the usual European Judeo-Christian view on this subject. Jews had been explaining Jesus's unfortunate Messianic claims as due to his madness, or other personal motives. The late Jewish medieval life of Jesus, which circulated in manuscript, incorporated a lot of negative explanations of the alleged divine aspects of the Jesus story. Some' esprits forts', like the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, claimed that Moses was a magician, a juggler, an aggressive upstart on the make, who used his talents to take control of the Israelites when they escaped from Egypt.

We do not know if any of those offering non-divine explanations of the activities of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, had arrived at what we might now call an atheistical point of view. There is much discussion going on about when modem atheism actually began. My own view, subject to change if convincing data comes forth, is that there were a fair number of

FOREWORD Xl

people who were critical of institutional Jewish and Christian religious claims, who were critical of what they had been taught, who were critical of details recorded in the Bible and in religious explanatory literature, without abandoning the Judeo-Christian picture of how the world came to be and how human history developed.

What we now call 'Bible criticism' occurs in medievalJewish exegesis. The Spanish commentator, Abraham Aben Ezra around 1200 had pointed out that Moses could not be the author of the last lines of Deuteronomy, which describe his death and what happened thereafter. Erasmus and the people working on the first Polyglot Bible, the Com­plutensis, noticed that the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament did not contain the proof text of the doctrine of the Trinity, and that the crucial text was not cited by any early Church Father. Servetus and the early Socinians insisted on a contextual reading of the Bible, in which the contents were to be explained in terms of when they were written and what was going on at the time. The lines in Isaiah that have traditionally been taken by Christians as foretelling the coming of the Messiah were read as being about events in the sixth century BeE. The Socinian reading of Scripture thus removed the divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity. More radical revolutionary Bible crIticism of the English Ranters and Diggers of the 1640's, following on contentions of some far­out sixteenth-century prophetic movements, saw the existing Bible as just man-made and as the tool of the priesthood. Some of them advo­cated burning up Bibles and writing new ones.

In all of this outpouring of new, critical ideas from theologians, schol­ars, and laymen, I do not find any real advocacy of what we might call 'atheism'. The early Bible critics, Servetus and the Socinians, and the English radicals, all were still within the religious world, and sought to replace a fossilized or false religious structure with a vital true one incorporating major features of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Neither Thomas Hobbes, who denied that Moses was the author of the entire Five Books of Moses, nor Isaac La Peyrere, who believed that there were men before Adam and that the Bible was not the complete history of mankind, actually advocated giving up the Judeo-Christian outlook. Hobbes, in Leviathan, said we should recognize that Moses did not write all that is attributed to him. He then went on, whether sincerely or not, accepting the Christianity of the Church of England as the sovereign's religion, and hence the religion of the commonwealth and of its popu­lace. La Peyrere used his critical data as a basis first for rewriting a bit of the Bible, and then for insisting that Scripture is the history of the Jews,

XlI RICHARD H. POPKIN

not the history of all mankind, but that Jewish history is the inner core of world history. The call, the rejection, and now the imminent recall of the Jews is the central human drama. So La Peyrere used his amazing development of Biblical criticism as a base for advocating a Judeo­Christian political millenarianism, in which France was to playa central role. The Jews would be recalled to France, and would be members of a Jewish Christian church (only for Jewish converts, like himself). Then the Jewish Messiah would come, Jesus in the flesh rather than Jesus in the spirit who came in the first century. He would join forces with the King of France, lead the convert Jews to the Holy Land where they would rebuild Jerusalem, from which the Jewish Messiah, the King of France, and the convert Jews would rule the world in a wonderful fulfillment of human history.

La Peyrere and many others saw the varieties of human religious experience revealed in the rediscovery of the ancient past and in the reports from the voyages of the explorers all over the globe. The wealth of information about the variety of religious belief and practice, about the varying pictures of the history of the world, of the different chro­nologies, threatened to overwhelm true and believing Jews and Chris­tians. Monumental syncretist studies such as J. G. Vossius's Origins of Gentile theology, Ralph Cudworth's True intellectual system of the universe, and Isaac Newton's Chronology of ancient kingdoms amended sought to explain how all of these differences in belief and practice could be compatible with the Judeo-Christian tradition being the true religion. Vossius sought to show that all religions were derivative from the Ur­Revelation, and that pagan religious systems were just degenerative forms of this ultimate religion. This type of approach defused the 'crisis of polytheism', at least until the English deists showed that it was possi­ble that Judaism and Christianity were just derivations from an earlier antecedent natural religion.

Some events that occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century made the possibility of divine impostors a living reality. Alleged or self­proclaimed Messianic figures kept turning up during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period. A most serious Messianic pretender of the time was the English Quaker leader James Nayler, who in 1656 claimed to be Jesus, the King of the Jews. He had raised a woman from the dead. Then he rode into the city of Bristol on the back of an ass, and replicated Jesus's entry into Jerusalem while his followers sang 'Hosan­nah in the Highest'. He was arrested and charged with blasphemy, and was then tried by the Houses of Parliament. Cromwell actually defended

FOREWORD X111

N ayler, but he was nonetheless convicted and dreadfully punished. He managed to survive. He emerged from imprisonment, and ended up a most saintly person wandering around England. He had followers, who were forced to flee the British Isles, and were in the Netherlands, the Caribbean, and the Levant. (In fact I actually met a believer in Nayler as the Messiah in the Friends House in London a few years ago.) A work was published about the Nayler case in early 1657 called The great impos­tor, detailing the claims made about N ayler as a divine figure, as Christ. This work was reprinted many times in subsequent years.

A decade after Nayler's Messianic movement, a Jew from Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire, Sabbatai Zevi, announced he was the Messiah and set off a wild frenzy amongst Jews all over the world, and also among many European Millenarians and even in New England. Both Jews and Christians had been calculating for centuries the time when the Messiah would finally arrive, or when the Second Coming of Jesus would occur. Some Jews (basing their computations upon cabbalistic calculations) expected 1648 to be the crucial year when the Messianic Age would begin. Unfortunately instead the worst pogroms in European history before Hitler took place in Poland and the Ukraine. English Millenar­ians had figured out that 1656 would be the year of the conversion of the Jews, which would be followed by Jesus's return. When 1656 came and went without such sensational developments, 1666 was fixed upon by both Jews and Christians as the crucial year. So when on the J ewish New Year's Day, in the fall of 1665, Sabbatai Zevi announced that he was the Messiah, and then appointed new Kings of the World (his friends and relatives), and further changed the Jewish Law, wild excitement ensued in Europe, Asia, Africa, and even the New World. At least ninety per cent of the Jews in the world, and many Christians, became followers. A year later, after being arrested by the Turkish authorities and threat­ened with death, Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam, causing consterna­tion and dismay among Jewish communities that took years and years to recover. A leading Christian follower, Petrus Serrarius of Amsterdam, explained to Henry Oldenburg concerning Sabbatai Zevi's conversion, that God works in wondrous ways. Serrarius died in 1669 on his way to meet his new Messiah. A new movement developed of followers who believed that Sabbatai Zevi's apostasy was part of his Messianic mission. He converted in order to take on the sins of all mankind. Actually, it was claimed, only his body converted, not his spirit, and he would return in glory as the long-awaited Messiah. In the meantime his followers would become fake Moslems, as they assumed he was. (He actually lived ten

XlV RICHARD H. POPKIN

years after his apostasy, and gave all sorts of clues and hints to his followers.) This movement still exists and is awaiting Sabbatai Zevi's second coming.

In 1666 a German woodcut appeared, showing Nayler and Sabbatai Zevi facing each other, as the two great impostors, impostors who had tried to pass themselves off as divine figures. The first book with the title The three impostors appeared in 1669, and is about two characters in the Ottoman empire and about Sabbatai Zevi, written by Paul Rycaut, the English consul at Smyrna, and published in London by John Evelyn. This work was reprinted many times in the years that followed. One version traced the history of crazy Millenarian expectations back to the first century, then through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, to the English Millenarians, whose mad fervour led to the Sabbatai Zevi move­ment, which was followed by the French prophets (Huguenots) active in France and England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Hence there was a long history of people falsely claiming divine authority, imposing their views and themselves on the credulous from ancient times onward. And Europe had just lived through a wild episode of this in the Sabbatai Zevi movement with deleterious effects in many parts of the world. (To prevent some of the potentially worst effects, English diplomats in Turkey had got Sabbatai Zevi to issue a proclamation to his followers that if they wanted any parts in the Kingdom to come they had to pay their outstanding debts to English merchants !)

Another work called the three greatest impostors was written by Christian Kortholt against Herbert of Cherbury, Hobbes, and Spinoza.

A further element in the background of Les trois imposteurs is the rediscovery of a pagan figure, Apollonius of Tyana, who lived at approxi­mately the time of Jesus and had had a miraculous birth, had worked miracles, and had many followers. The life of Apollonius had been written in the third century in Greek by Philostratus. It was revived in scholarly editions around 1600 and was considered an interesting source of information about ancient religion. Then the English deist Charles Blount translated parts of the text, with notes stressing the impostor problem. How does one tell whether Apollonius or Jesus is the impostor if they lived approximately the same lives? Blount had a Jew and a Mos­lem discussing the cases and bringing out the problem. For the next century there is a large literature about Apollonius and whether he was an impostor. There is also a literature, growing in part out of the Sabbatai Zevi development, about whether Jews can tell a true Messiah from a false one, about whether the Messiah has to be a Jew, about

FOREWORD xv

whether there can be multiple Messiahs, and finally whether anyone,Jew or Christian, can determine who in fact is the Messiah. Sceptical argu­ments reintroduced from Sextus Empiricus are applied to these kinds of problems. (In fact there is an applied sceptical work challenging whether anyone can tell who is the pope, since all data available is sensory and may be delusive. Even the alleged pope may be deceived about his status. And a work of 1699 trying to find a way out of the mounting difficulties, by a Rev. John Bradley, starts with attempting to refute Sextus before turning to resolving the knotty problems about how to determine who may be the Messiah.)

In the midst of all these confusing developments about religious be­liefs, the purported work, Les trois imposteurs actually turned up around the end of the seventeenth century. The participants in the seminar offered theories about when it carne into being, from 1672 onward. The work that appeared developed a theory about the political origins of pagan religions that had been set forth by Machiavelli, and applied it to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the actual work, extensive passages from Hobbes are included, as well as material taken verbatim from Gabriel Naude and Fran~ois La Mothe Le Vayer. (Late eighteenth­century printed versions and some manuscripts even had footnotes citing the passages in Hobbes's text.) The psychological theory about why human beings accept religion as presented by Spinoza, especially in the appendix to Book I of the Ethics, was also offered in an exact French translation of Spinoza's text. (This was the first time this portion of the Ethics appeared in French.)

In view of the contents of the Traite, (which are pretty much the same in the large number of manuscripts that have been found), the work has to postdate the appearance of Spinoza's Ethics, in 1677. Lucas, Spinoza's purported biographer, was probably in the circle of Spinozists in the Netherlands, that included the French translator of the Tractatus, Saint­Glain. This has suggested to several scholars that the work comes out of Spinoza's circle. I have even suggested that Spinoza himself was inter­ested in the impostor problem, possibly relayed to him from Oldenburg by Boreel, and that he formulated a benign resolution in the Tractatus, in which Moses pretended to have divine authority in order to save the Israelites who had relapsed into the state of nature after their escape from Egypt and were disintegrating as a social group. Moses, on Spin­oza's reading, benignly created a political community by using pretended divine sanctions to institute a new set of laws. Jesus was no impostor at all, according to Spinoza, since he did not institute any new laws.

XVI RICHARD H. POPKIN

The Traite, of course, offers a much more radical thesis, namely that the three founders of the great monotheistic religions were impostors, doing what they did for self-serving political reasons. The work is not just journalistic chit-chat, or village atheist rhetoric. It also embodies and espouses a view of the world in which no revelatory history is going on, and in which God is not an actor in human events. In fact it sets forth a Spinozistic universe, and as such presents a complete rejection of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as historical religions. These move­ments are just political ones kept alive because of priestly power and human superstition, ignorance, and gullibility. A benign deism or pan­theism is set forth, counter to the malign actual historical religious movements. The Traite does not go to the extreme of the later Enlight­enment view that the world will not be safe until the last prince is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

When could such a document actually have been put together? As late as the time of Pierre Bayle and his contemporaries, debates were going on in the learned literature about whether such a work as the Les trois imposteurs actually existed. The leading scholars, including Bayle, who wrote about this topic prior to its publication in 1719 did not claim to have seen a copy, and regarded the question of the existence of the work as still undecided. Some evidence in letters suggests part of the work may have existed by 1672. Other comments show the work did exist by the early eighteenth century. Very few of the manuscripts are dateable. By now we know that the printed edition of 1719 came from a manuscript in the library of Benjamin Furly, a wealthy Quaker in Rotterdam, who let the scholars of the time use his large collection. But where did Furly's manuscript come from? And who put the work together, and why was it done? Some of the studies in this volume suggest possible sources, and even possible authors or composers.

The Traite is not just a rant against revealed religion. It puts together a picture of a world without any supernatural dimension, in which developments such as the rise of religions and the acceptance of religious beliefs can be completely accounted for in naturalistic terms. In 1662 Edward Stillingfieet, who later became Bishop of Worcester, defended the Scriptural world by arguing that to doubt it one would have to believe in a monstrous conspiracy to defraud the general public, first on the part of Moses and the Prophets as well as the Apostles, and then on the part of those who led and conducted the religious institutions from Biblical times to the present. And one would have to believe that this ongoing conspiracy to gain and hold political control over the world was

FOREWORD XVII

so well conducted that no one was able to glimpse the true state of things. When Stillingfleet set forth this case in his Origines sacrae, the gross implausibility of such a conspiratorial state of affairs was supposed to convince all decent persons that the acceptance of the Biblical world was more reasonable than the questioning of it. Unbeknownst to young Stillingfleet, young Baruch de Spinoza was working on this expose and account of religion at that very time. Hobbes and La Peyrere had already given some reasons for not accepting the religious tradition at face value. Machiavelli, Naude, and Hobbes had advanced accounts of how pagan religions developed from their political origins. The next step, the natu­ralizing of the explanation of all religions including the Judeo-Christian ones, appeared in Spinoza's Tractatus, which, without much detail, por­trayed what a world without the supernatural would be like. Spinoza's Ethics, published fifteen years after Stillingfleet's work, developed a metaphysics for a purely naturalistic world. In the appendix to Book I of the Ethics and in the Tractatus Spinoza also provided naturalistic explana­tions of how Judaism got started and how it has persevered for many, many centuries. The English deists, starting with the work of Herbert of Cherbury and Charles Blount, had offered an anthropological account of religions as the products of human fears and superstitions, an account that embraced pagan as well as Judeo-Christian ones.

Post Spinoza, a conspiratorial explanation of religion no longer looked so bizarre or incredible to reasonable people. The Traiti embodied the Esprit de M. Spinosa in showing how Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed developed their religions out of personal political activities. French liber­tine scholars, radical Protestants in the Netherlands, deists in England, could all see the theory embodied in the Traiti as a genuine possibility, in fact the most plausible possibility to account for the rise and continuance of religions.

The Traiti in manuscript or published form seems to have circulated widely. Manuscripts are being found hither and yon. Some of our partici­pants have found quite a few hitherto unknown ones. Clues in these manuscripts give some idea of who read the work and what was thought of it. Our participants have tried in different ways to construct families of manuscripts and histories of them. The first printing, which may have been earlier than 1719, was suppressed, but apparently the unsold copies were kept and reissued as the second printing over a decade later. Many manuscripts, perhaps as many as seventy, were made of the sup­pressed edition. Later in the eighteenth century more manuscripts were copied and unidentified printings took place, including one by Baron

XVIll RICHARD H. POPKIN

d'Holbach. After the French Revolution a printing took place which claimed it was issued in Philadelphia under the auspices of General George Washington, though it was in fact printed in Paris. An English radical published the work in English in 1846 for mass distribution at a penny a copy.

A later English edition was privately printed by a Freemason in Cleve­land, Ohio, along with some of the supporting materials that were often part of the manuscripts.

In the twentieth century interest in the development of irreligion led to studies of the Traite and the Tribus impostoribus (sometimes confused or merged into one text) in Europe and America. The bibliography of clandestine French literature by Ira Wade gave some indication of how many manuscripts of the Traite existed in France, as well as elsewhere. Dunin-Borkowski's inventory of manuscripts entitled L'Esprit de M. Spi­nosa gave further indication of the wide dispersion of the work. The work by the Dutch historian Jacob Presser, by scholars in East Germany, by people working on the underground side of the Enlightenment has produced more and more interest in the Traite-its text, its history, and its influence. We did our work where the Marchand archives, dealing with what Prosper Marchand knew, or wanted to reveal about the work, were available. We used many copies and microfilms of different manu­scripts. And we related the materials in it to other radical irreligious works of the time. This volume is a testament to our efforts as well as a pilot project in establishing a co-operative international effort of re­search by experts working on the subject and interested students search­ing for material, testing theories, and exploring various areas.

The range of topics covered in this volume gives some idea of the many facets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual history that are in some significant way related to the theme of the three impostors.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are indebted to Constance Blackwell, who has given great editorial and financial help to the preparation of this volume. We hope the resulting volume well represents the aims of the Foundation for Intellec­tual History.

We should also like to thank all the participants in the Leiden Semi­nar, who helped each other in many ways in improving and completing

FOREWORD XIX

their papers. Particular mention is due to Justin Champion and Rob Iliffe for their generous editorial contribution.

Jeffrey Dean has done much to prepare the manuscript for publication and to put it into camera-ready form; we are most grateful to him for all his efforts.