On the Recently Discovered Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethics

The extant writings of Spinoza are almost exclusively printed works. Some of these were published anonymously, with fictitious publishers and places of publication, while others bear only the author’s initials. As is well known, the only surviving manuscripts of Spinoza’s philosophical writings are a few letters and two copies of the Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en deszelvs Welstand, one from the seventeenth century, the other from the eighteenth century. These latter are Dutch translations—not autographs and not discovered until the nineteenth century—of a text the author left unfinished and which was not included in either the Opera posthuma of 1677 or its simultaneously published Dutch translation, the versio belgica, De nagelate schriften.

The Ethica is today Spinoza’s most famous treatise, and it originally appeared in the posthumous collection along with the Tractatus politicus, Tractatus de intellectus emendatione, Epistolae, and Compendium grammatices linguae Hebraeae (the Compendium was published only in the Latin edition). We are now, however, fortunate to have a Latin manuscript of the Ethics, a non-autograph transcription that I have recently edited with Leen Spruit, who found the manuscript in the manuscript section of the Apostolic Vatican Library.¹

The manuscript is part of a large group of texts from the Library of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Vatican City), which were later transferred, after 1922, to the Vatican Library. The manuscript consists of one hundred and thirty-three pages recto/verso in small format (167 × 107 mm), bound together with some printed pages from the same period. On the last page, c. 133^v, an official of the Roman Inquisition wrote the date September 23, 1677, with the annotation: Die 23. Septembris 1677. Illustrissimus et Reverendissimus D. Nicolaus Stenonus Episcopus Titiopolitanus, et Vicarius Apostolicus in Ducate Luneburgensi exhibuit presentem librum, et dixit esse librum [expos]itum in eius memoriali S. Congregationi S. Officij porrecto.

The manuscript is in Latin and was never correctly identified as Spinoza’s Ethica. In fact, it has no title and no indication of its author’s name. It is registered in the catalogue of Vatican Latin manuscripts with the generic title Tractatus theologiae. For this reason, in what is one of the most extensive libraries of theological texts in the world, no one had ever bothered to check the real content of this treatise. The title most likely derives from the first words of the work, which begins with the heading De Deo, the famous incipit of the Ethica. Another interesting thing is that the very same institution that was in charge of censorship is responsible for having conserved the manuscript for centuries, thereby insuring the survival of the only manuscript copy of Spinoza’s most important philosophical work.

Some years ago, I found the text of the complaint against Spinoza that was submitted to the court of the Holy Office on September 4, 1677 by the Danish scientist and theologian Niels Stensen.² In the document, Stensen claims to have personally known Spinoza many years earlier in the Netherlands. “When I was a student at Leiden University in Holland,” he writes, “I had the opportunity to become a friend of Spinoza.” Stensen cites episodes from fifteen or sixteen years earlier, dating back to 1662–63. He says that Spinoza studied as a rabbi when he was young and then abandoned his studies (che rinunziato lo studio del rabbinismo nel quale egli s’era esercitato qualche tempo). Stensen remembers the friendship between Spinoza and Franciscus van den Enden, who was suspected of atheism (per mezzo della prattica con un certo van Enden sospetto d’ateismo), and he insists on the influence of Descartes’s philosophy on Spinoza (e della lezzione della filosofia des Cartes). In that way, Stensen explains, Spinoza began to build a philosophy in which material substance constitutes the only explanatory principle of the world (s’era messo a far una filosofia da sé nella quale spiegava tutto per la sola materia).

Through his complaint lodged with the Inquisition, Stensen intended to achieve several objectives. First, at that time—the summer of 1677—Stensen...