It's a tale with a bestseller plot, reminiscent of Umberto Eco's murder mystery The Name of the Rose. This true story centres on a mysterious manuscript, a major work of Western philiosophy, finally unmasked after being disguised and tucked away in the Vatican archives over centuries, all to a backdrop of religious conflict, philosophical intrigue and the history of the Inquisition. Joseph Confavreux reports.
-------------------------
Two modern scholars have made an astounding find in the Vatican Library, that of a long-lost manuscript of the Ethics, the magnum opusof 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, considered as one of the most important figures in Western philosophy. It was first discovered last October and, after subsequent verififications removed any doubt over its authenticity, was made public only last month.
All previous editions of the Ethics, in turn considered as one of the most significant works in Western philosophy, were based on the version put together by Spinoza's friends shortly after his death in 1677, published in his Opera Posthuma that same year. Thus it was emended, based on conjectures, or rounded out with recourse, however uncertain, to the Dutch version (De Nagelate Schriften).
"We hardly have anything handwritten by Spinoza, except a few letters," explains Pierre-François Moreau, a professor with the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, south-east France, and a Spinoza specialist. "When a book was printed in the 17th century, as pointed out by the Dutch scholar Piet Steenbakkers, to whom we owe our knowledge of the publishing problems with the Ethics, the manuscript was often then thrown away. And Spinoza, unlike his contemporary Leibniz, whose manuscripts are legion at the Royal Library in Hannover, did not hold sufficient social status for all his writings to be preserved."
The last line of the Ethics is an apt recap of what recently happened to two scholars in Rome: "But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." More importantly, it was the clue that led Leen Spruit, a Dutch historian and philosopher, to the manuscript's location. "It was a dream come true," he said. "Last October, the Vatican Library gave me a list of several manuscripts that were transferred in 1922 from the Inquisition archives to the Holy Office. On that list, call number Vat. Lat. 12838 had neither title nor author, but, as is often the custom, it did show the first and last lines of the manuscript."
After having asked the Vatican Library to dig out the mystery document for him, Leen Spruit contacted Pina Totaro, a renowned Italian Spinozist, who was the first to suspect that a manuscript version of the Ethics was somewhere in Rome. "Until then," admits Spruit, "I generally just grinned at the idea."
But Pina Totaro turned out to be right. Her reasoning was based on her knowledge of the intellectual exchanges of the period and her research at the library of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously in charge, among other things, of targeting heretical works to be banned by the Church. When a book was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, as Spinoza's writings were, it was not only prohibited to publish and distribute it, but even to have a copy in one's own private library.
"When Leen Spruit called me one night, saying, ‘Pina, there might be something interesting here, if you can come with me to the Vatican Library tomorrow,' I was so excited I could hardly sleep," recalls Pina Totaro. "At 8.30 in the morning I was standing at the door to the manuscripts room. And I'll never be able to forget the emotion that overcame me when I saw that it was indeed the manuscript of the Ethics, in full."
'It had to be somewhere in Rome'
The Apostolic Vatican Library may not be suffused with the dark, mysterious ambiance of Dan Brown's best-sellers, but it is far from having revealed all its secrets - or all its treasures. And it is indeed the collection of Inquisition archives, where the Ethics manuscript was found, that holds the greatest hoard. The ban - decreed in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII - on according access to these purportedly sensitive books was only lifted in dribs and drabs beginning in the 1990s.
The trajectory that propelled this original manuscript of the Ethics all the way to the Vatican Library would be ample stuff in itself for a best-selling novel, set against the backdrop of 17th-century scholarly and theological controversy. "I'd need two whole days to tell the whole story," bemoans Pina Totaro. In a nutshell, it turns out the manuscript unearthed at the Vatican Library actually isn't written in the hand of Spinoza, but of one of his close friends, who'd made a copy to discuss it with other European scholars, including in all likelihood Leibniz. It quite certainly travelled all the way from The Netherlands to Italy in the bags of one Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, a German mathematician. The latter then passed it on to Nicolas Steno (in Danish: Niels Stensen), a Danish polymath chiefly famed for his Discours sur l'anatomie du cerveau (a 'Lecture on the Anatomy of the Brain' delivered in Paris in 1669), in which he refutes 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes' animal-spirits-based theories of the human brain.
Steno, an old friend of Spinoza's, had converted to Catholicism upon his arrival in Italy. "Steno settled in Rome," recounts Pina Totaro, "just when the Catholic Church was launching an offensive, a conversion crusade in which he was to become a central figure, tasked with proselytising all the northern European scholars, most of whom were Protestants, travelling in Italy."
Steno must have handed the manuscript over to the Inquisition around that time, in 1677, when he was writing a denunciation (also preserved in the Vatican Library) of his old friend's theories. "It was that denunciation, in which he mentions a highly dangerous heretical work, that convinced me there had to be a manuscript version of the Ethics somewhere in Rome," explains Pina Totaro.
The debate continues
Could such a discovery revolutionize Western philosophy - or at least Spinoza studies? "We haven't found a Book VI of the Ethics," says Pierre-François Moreau, who spoke to Mediapart while readying a new edition of Spinoza's magnum opus to be published by French publishing house Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) in 2012, and which will incorporate the discovery.
The manuscript clearly shows that the Opera Posthuma version is, on the whole, faithful to the original. "Although recently we've been seeing more and more theories suggesting that the editors of the posthumous works altered the text here and there," explains Pina Totaro. "It was claimed, for example, that Spinoza could not have written the end of the fifth part of the Ethics because the passage was too mystical, or that the section in which he speaks of Christ could not be by him."
In Pierre-François Moreau's estimation, "There aren't any huge conceptual differences, we're not discovering any new theorems, but this greater textual solidity can make sense [of passages], by turning an ‘only' into a ‘however', for example."
Above all, this discovery should put an end to an ongoing debate between Spinozist philosophers over the fact that the Dutch version of the Ethics is longer in some spots than the Latin version published in the Posthumous Works. "Several of us figured these additions did not stem from Spinoza, but from the translator, who, as was common practice at the time, did not translate word by word and elucidated certain passages within the body of the text itself. The manuscript discovered at the Vatican bears out this hypothesis," notes Moreau.
What effect will the discovery have on the keen controversy between defenders of the Dutch translation and proponents of the Latin version over the question of whether glory has an internal or external cause in Spinoza's philosophy? "I don't think this new text will decide the issue," says Pierre-François Moreau, "it's a matter of how you interpret the Spinozist system itself." But, he concludes, "such a discovery does hold out hope of unearthing other writings by Spinoza".
-------------------------
English version: Eric Rosencrantz(Editing by Graham Tearse)