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The Vatican Manuscript of

Spinoza's Ethica
a
Mogens Lærke
a
ENS de Lyon/University of Aberdeen

Version of record first published: 10 Jul 2012

To cite this article: Mogens Lærke (2012): The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza's Ethica,
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20:4, 843-847

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 BOOK REVIEWS 843

Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro (eds): The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s
Ethica. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011, 318 pp. £85.00 (hb.). ISBN 978-9-
00420926-8

The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethics (hereafter the Vat. ms.) is a

critical edition of the only extant manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethics antedating
the publication of the Opera posthuma from 1677 (hereafter OP). It was
handed over to the Inquisition in Rome in September 1677 by the former
scientist and Roman Catholic convert Nicolas Steno. He had received it
from ‘a foreigner of the Lutheran conviction,’ whom we have good reason
to believe was the German philosopher and friend of Spinoza, Ehrenfried
Walther von Tschirnhaus. The Vat. ms. was discovered in the Vatican
Library by Leen Spruit in 2010. Pina Totaro, however, had already
predicted its existence many years ago. Its discovery has generated
considerable excitement among historians of philosophy and the general
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public, particularly in the Netherlands.

So what does the Vat. ms. contribute to our knowledge of Spinoza’s
Ethics? The answer is, I guess, the following paradoxical one: not much
and an awful lot. Not much, because the Vat. ms. contains little beyond
what we would expect given the knowledge we have about the history of
Spinoza’s text. It does not force us to doubt or revise any of the major
theses concerning its genesis. Moreover, although the Vat. ms. differs on
many points from the published OP version of Ethics, only a few of these
differences seem philosophically important. Some variations in the
internal references may have philosophical implications. For example,
where, in the OP, the demonstration of Ethics I, prop. 5, contains
references to def. 3 and def. 6, the Vat. ms. refers to def. 3 and ax. 6.
Another difference is in corollary 1 to Ethics II, prop. 16, where the Vat.
ms. has ‘the human body’ at a place where the OP has ‘the human mind.’
On one occasion, in the scholium to Ethics V, prop. 4, the Vat. ms. has
‘effectus’ where the OP has ‘affectus.’ There are other potentially
significant differences that I leave to the reader to discover for herself.
None, however, forces us to revise our understanding of Spinoza’s
philosophical position in any substantial way. Moreover, it should be
stressed that there is no good reason to privilege the textual lessons of
the Vat. ms. over those of the OP. After all, it is a copy of Spinoza’s
manuscript written in the hand of someone else, namely Pieter van Gent
– a copy that I suspect was not verified and checked by Spinoza himself
(this seems indicated by Spinoza’s reply concerning an obvious
misreading by Tschirnhaus of Ethics II, prop. 5, reported by Schuller.
Spinoza replies: ‘I must wait [to reply] until you explain his meaning to
me more clearly, and until I know whether he has a sufficiently correct
copy.’ On this, see Letters 70 and 72.)
We do nonetheless learn much from the Vat. ms. It dispels some nagging
doubts about the authenticity of the text contained in the OP. Famously,
 844 BOOK REVIEWS

after Spinoza’s death, his friends burned the original manuscripts after
having established the two original editions in Latin and Dutch. The
standards of edition in the seventeenth century were distinctly different from
our own, and it is unclear just how much the editors corrected and modified
the original manuscript. The fact that the two Latin versions now available –
the Vat. ms. and the version in OP – largely correspond gives considerably
more credibility to the text (although it remains clear that the editors did
submit Spinoza’s original to some editorial harmonization). Moreover, from
the transmission story that I will shortly recount below, we learn that the
Vat. ms. was written no later than the summer of 1675. The differences
between the Vat. ms. and the OP may, then, teach us something about the
part of Ethics’ genesis relating to the last two years of Spinoza’s life. In July
1675, Spinoza went to Amsterdam to hand over the manuscript of Ethics to
his publisher, Jan Rieuwertsz, but eventually abstained from having it
printed out of prudence. Commentators usually understand the text to have
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been completed at this time, presuming that Spinoza until his death left
the manuscript in a drawer and dedicated himself to other projects – the
Tractatus politicus and the Hebrew grammar. A comparison between the
Vat. ms. and the OP version does, however, suggest that Spinoza continued
to correct mainly stylistic details in the manuscript in the following two
years.
What is perhaps most exciting about the Vat. ms. is its transmission story
and what it can tell us about the initial diffusion of Spinoza’s philosophy
outside Holland. The Vat. ms. was copied from Spinoza’s original by Pieter
van Gent for Tschirnhaus. Tschirnhaus brought it with him first to London
where he discussed Spinoza’s philosophy with Boyle and Oldenburg, then to
Paris where he met Leibniz and extensively discussed Spinoza, and finally
via a series of Italian cities to Rome, where he met the converted Danish
scientist, Nicolas Steno, to whom he for unknown reasons handed over the
manuscript in September 1677. Steno, in turn, handed it over to the
Inquisition, which explains why the manuscript ended up gathering dust in
the archives of the Vatican.
This story has (at least) two remarkable features, both related to Leibniz
and his engagement with Spinoza’s philosophy. The first concerns the fact
that the Vat. ms. was the copy of Spinoza’s text that Tschirnhaus discussed
extensively with Leibniz in Paris in 1675–1676. Now, the ‘metaphysics à
trois’ (as Mark Kulstad has dubbed it) involving Spinoza, Tschirnhaus, and
Leibniz at that time has generated considerable discussion over the last
fifteen years, and is crucial for understanding the development of Leibniz’s
reception of Spinoza’s philosophy (see Mark Kulstad’s work on this topic,
and part III of my Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza, Paris 2008.) The Vat. ms.
provides an important part of the textual basis upon which the young
Leibniz’s engagement with Spinoza’s Ethics rests, even though Tschirnhaus
probably respected Spinoza’s wish not to transmit the manuscript to
Leibniz, and instead cautiously related its contents (for details, see my ‘A
 BOOK REVIEWS 845

Conjecture about a Textual Mystery: Leibniz, Tschirnhaus and Spinoza’s

Korte Verhandeling,’ in The Leibniz Review, No. 20, 2011).
The second remarkable feature – and this is what is most surprising to
specialists about this whole story – is that Tschirnhaus, a freethinker of
Lutheran background, should hand over a manuscript he had otherwise
conscientiously guarded to an official representative of the Church of Rome.
There are a number of possible explanations. Internal exchanges between
Steno and the Inquisition make it clear that Steno generally tried to gain the
confidence of Cartesians and Spinozists in order to obtain more information
about the new philosophy. Moreover, in a letter to Leibniz, Tschirnhaus
confided that he was impressed by Steno’s persuasive powers. Did
Tschirnhaus hand over the manuscript to Steno in a moment of religious
doubt or because Steno treacherously had managed to gain his confidence?
We should also remember that only about a month later, Steno left Rome to
go to Hanover, where he took up the position as Apostolic Vicar in
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Northern Germany and Scandinavia. At that time, Leibniz had also recently
arrived at the Hanoverian Court. Did Tschirnhaus give the manuscript to
Steno so that he might bring it with him to Hanover to discuss it further
with Leibniz? Leibniz and Steno talked about matters relating to Spinoza,
even though Steno did not bring the text with him. In any case, it seems the
discovery of the Vat. ms. may contribute not only to a better understanding
of the genesis of Spinoza’s philosophy, but also to our understanding of
Leibniz’s philosophical development.
Nonetheless, the thinkers who come out of this fascinating story as
deserving of more attention are not primarily Spinoza and Leibniz, but
Tschirnhaus and Nicolas Steno. The interest in the so-called ‘radical
Enlightenment’ generated by the work of Jonathan Israel has had among its
many corollaries an increasing interest in Tschirnhaus’ curious position in
the Republic of Letters as an initially Cartesian philosopher uneasily
positioned between Spinoza and Leibniz who ultimately became a major
thinker in his own right. He had an influence on the German Enlightenment
comparable to that of Samuel Pufendorf or Christian Thomasius. We still,
however, lack a comprehensive intellectual biography of Tschirnhaus, not to
mention an English translation of his main work, the Medicina Mentis from
1686/87 (an excellent French translation, including an informative scholarly
apparatus was published in 1980 by Jean-Paul Wurtz).
As for Steno, his importance for both early modern medicine and geology
is largely acknowledged. Steno is for many the founding father of geology,
since in his De solido intra solidum (1669) he was arguably the first to
propose dating fossils by geological strata. Moreover, until his abrupt
conversion to Catholicism in 1667, after which he abandoned his scientific
vocation, Steno was one of the most talented anatomists of his time. As the
medical doctor Graindorge, who attended Steno’s dissection sessions at
Thevenot’s Academy in Paris in 1665, wrote to the French Erudite Pierre-
Daniel Huet in Caen: ‘To tell you the truth, we are nothing but apprentices
 846 BOOK REVIEWS

next to him. No butterfly or fly escapes his industry. He counts all the bones
of a flea, if bones there are’ (cit. in A. Shelford, Transforming the Republic of
Letters, Rochester 2007, 125). Recent work by Raphaële Andrault has
highlighted the philosophical interest of Steno’s anatomical works (cf. R.
Andrault (ed.), Discours sur l’anatomie du cerveau, Paris 2009). It is,
however, still the case that, among philosophers, Steno has not only been
largely ignored but even become the object of derision as the fellow who
tried to prove Descartes wrong by slicing up brains and studying the pineal
gland. This reputation as a mediocre philosopher has been partly generated
by Steno himself, by his somewhat bigoted reply to Spinoza in the open
letter entitled De Vera philosophia, ad novae philosophiae reformatorem from
1675, which earned him a deserved reputation as a fideist; and partly by
Leibniz’s remarks in Essais de the´odice´e: ‘He was a great anatomist, and very
well versed in the natural sciences, but unfortunately he abandoned research
and turned from a great physicist into a mediocre theologian’ (x 100). The
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post-1667 Catholic Steno is routinely described by historians of philosophy

as a spectacular scientific talent that went completely to waste. Yet it is not
certain that the remarks in Essais de the´odice´e are an adequate expression of
Leibniz’s views on Steno. While it is true that Leibniz did not see much
philosophical force in the exhortation to repent that Steno presented to
Spinoza, there are other contexts where Leibniz praised the Danish
intellectual. For example, in January 1678, Leibniz wrote to Hermann
Conring about Steno that ‘Vir est moderatus, et ut arbitror bonus’ (Leibniz,
Academy Edition, vol. II, I, 579). What is more, the objections written in
Steno’s hand that one finds in the manuscript B of Leibniz’s proto-theodicy,
the Confessio philosophi, also from about January 1678, testify to a keen
philosophical mind. Indeed, there is good reason to think that Steno’s
objections contributed to the substantial revision of his modal philosophy
that Leibniz undertook in the late 1670s. In any case, it is becoming clear
that Steno did not just watch philosophical debates in the late seventeenth
century from religious sidelines, but played a central part as an interlocutor
in the various and often indirect exchanges between the first-rank modern
philosophers who were Spinoza, Leibniz, and Tschirnhaus. He helped to
shape the debates between thinkers who indisputably were insightful. Totaro
and Spruit’s discovery adds another important element to this story and
reinstates Steno to the place in the intellectual landscape of early modern
philosophy to which he is entitled, namely as a key figure of the Catholic
counter-Enlightenment who somehow managed to entertain both personal
and philosophical relations with some of the foremost representatives of the
radical Enlightenment. When Steno in early September 1677 wrote a report
to the Congregation of the Holy Office concerning the dangers of Spinozism,
he proposed to adopt the following strategy: ‘A method to gather more
information would consist in this, that each time one encounters someone
interested in mathematics and Cartesian philosophy who has studied for a
certain period in Holland or in England, to seek his confidence and to seek
 BOOK REVIEWS 847

information from him about the new views and about persons interested in
new philosophical doctrines’ (cit. and trans. p. 12). The more we learn about
this curious Dane, the clearer it becomes that he succeeded very well indeed
in carrying out this scheme.

Mogens Lærke
ENS de Lyon/University of Aberdeen
ª 2012, Mogens Lærke
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2012.696053

Diderot: Pense´es de´tache´es ou Fragments politiques e´chappe´s du portefeuille

d’un philosophe, Textes établis et présentés par Gianluigi Goggi, Postface de
Georges Dulac. Paris: Hermann, 2011, pp. x þ 224. e24.00 (pb.). ISBN 978-
Downloaded by [Mogens Laerke] at 11:52 16 July 2012

2-70566927-0.

This edition brings together the sixteen brief texts that Diderot wrote in
1772 for the second edition of Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s Histoire
philosophique et politique des e´tablissements et du commerce des Europe´ens
dans les deux Indes (1774), but which first appeared under the title Pense´es
de´tache´es ou Fragments politiques e´chappe´s du portefeuille d’un philosophe in
Frédéric-Melchior Grimm’s Correspondance litte´raire. The editor of the
volume, Gianluigi Goggi, is well-established as a Diderot scholar. He is co-
responsible for the impressive and attractive Ferney-Voltaire edition of the
Histoire philosophique et politique. He is also a member of the editorial
committee of the Dieckmann-Varloot critical edition of the Oeuvres
comple`tes de Diderot, of which Volume XXI includes the Pense´es detache´es
that Goggi presents in this smaller volume.
The volume features an introduction and appendices that map out the
history of the Fragments’ composition, publication (thanks to a painstaking
comparative reading of various manuscripts and correspondences) and
reception. This apparatus provides the contexts in which the Fragments
were written, together with accounts of their sources (especially de Pauw’s
Recherches philosophiques sur les Ame´ricains), and follows the inter-textual
relations between Diderot, Madame d’Épinay, Grimm and Raynal. For this
reason, this slim volume is useful and necessary for anyone interested in the
nature of the collaboration that made for the Histoire philosophique et
politique.
The edition will also be of interest to those intrigued by the way Diderot
read, wrote and thought. It provides clear evidence as to how the themes
treated in the Fragments relate to those in the Histoire philosophique et
politique, and to those Diderot discussed in various other works. It also
shows the nature and extent of his engagement with a great many con-
temporary thinkers and political commentators – ranging from Helvétius to