Theologico-Political Treatise

About the Book

This edition gathers Spinoza’s principal works in a single volume — the Ethics, the Theologico-Political Treatise, and On the Improvement of the Understanding — in the classic English translation of R. H. M. Elwes.

The work featured here is the Theologico-Political Treatise (published anonymously in 1670). In it Spinoza sets out one of the sharpest critiques of institutional Christianity ever written: the churches turned into theatres, ambition in the pulpit, and hatred passed off as zeal for the Lord — all the while insisting that the moral heart of religion is justice, charity, and mercy. In its thirteenth chapter he takes up the names of God, leaning on Maimonides, and argues that God appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by the name of God Almighty, but was not known to them by His name Jehovah — the reading examined at length in the accompanying reflection, The Forgotten Spinoza, Part III.

Elwes’ is an older rendering (1880s) and takes some liberties with the Hebrew Bible; for close study alongside the original, the Curley translation remains the scholarly standard. But for reading Spinoza’s argument as this essay traces it, this is the same English behind its quotations.