Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2019)
On the concepts of “the secular” and “religion” of Benedict de Spinoza in the contexts of John Milbank’s hypothesis of the “construction” of the secular
Abstract
According to the English theologian John Milbank, “once there was no secular”. “The secular”, he believes, came into being due to the fact that thinkers such as Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius “constructed” it along with the creation of “modern politics”, and in doing this they employed the new biblical hermeneutics. This new hermeneutics was to supersede the old (the “Catholic lectio”, as it is termed by Milbank) because it posed a permanent threat to secular authorities in the Early Modern Time. This article examines this hypothesis on the material of Benedict Spinoza’s texts and comes to the following conclusions. Firstly, there is no clear evidence that Spinoza had been planning to supersede the “Catholic lectio” with some new “«scientifi c» reading of the Bible” with the aim of creating a “specific sphere of the secular” or a “space of the pure power”. Moreover, there are serious doubts that this “lectio” bothered Spinoza, because in the Netherlands of the mid-17th century the traditional scholastic theology had already given way to Calvinism. Secondly, the analysis of Spinoza’s use of the terms saeculum and religio allows one to state that the Dutch philosopher depended on the traditional (going back to the classical ancient Stoicism) interpretations of these terms much more than it would seem. Besides, it should be noted that Spinoza’s conception of political virtues taken from classical ancient (in the fi rst hand, Stoical) philosophy makes extremely problematic the statement of Milbank that the Dutch philosopher was among those who created the antimoral “modern policy” of “pure power”, whose foundations are tyranny and abuse. Thirdly, it is possible to say that Spinoza’s main aim in his political studies was not an apology of the secular principle in any form, but the sacralisation of the state.
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