Steven Nadler’s A Book Forged in Hell offers a rigorously documented reconstruction of how Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise came to be written and a deeply probing account of the extraordinary drama that surrounded one of the most notorious and transformative works in the history of Western thought. The book brings vividly to life the complex circumstances and intellectual currents that shaped the birth of Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, a controversial text immediately condemned at its 1670 debut as an atheistic monstrosity springing straight from the infernal depths. Nadler’s study reveals, with exceptional nuance and philosophical discernment, how Spinoza’s daring meditation on freedom, reason, Scripture, and the nature of the state ignited a conflagration of outrage, fear, and profound reconsideration, while at the same time sowing the seeds of modern secular, liberal, and democratic thought. It is a work that recaptures the shockwaves Spinoza unleashed, detailing the tense exchanges between theology, politics, religion, and philosophy in seventeenth-century Europe, and demonstrates the remarkable immediacy and lasting implications of a book that has shaped the DNA of modern intellectual life.
The work’s outer frame is itself an argument: it begins in the procedural and administrative idiom of Reformed church governance, where “freedom” enters the archive as a term of alarm. Nadler places the reader at the junction where a book becomes an object of collective attention precisely as a public danger. The opening scene is neither a neutral “reception history” nor a merely atmospheric tableau; it is a methodological declaration. The Treatise is approached under the aspect of its effects as registered by institutions that interpret texts as vectors of discipline, sedition, and spiritual contamination. Ecclesiastical committees, district synods, provincial bodies, and town councils appear first as epistemic agents: they read excerpts, classify propositions as “monstrous,” and translate doctrinal anxiety into requests for seizure, suppression, and legislation. The point is not simply that the Treatise provoked outrage; the point concerns the social technology of outrage—how outrage is stabilized into minutes, resolutions, delegations, memos to magistrates, referrals to courts, and strategic delays. Nadler shows that the book’s “scandal” is inseparable from the fact that the Dutch Republic possessed a comparatively elaborate apparatus for negotiating the boundary between ecclesiastic insistence and civic prudence. The scandal thus becomes measurable as a sequence of institutional speech-acts: a denunciation becomes a motion; a motion becomes a request; a request becomes a juridical consultation; consultation becomes advice; advice becomes an edict—eventually.
This framing also performs a conceptual inversion that will recur throughout Nadler’s exposition. Spinoza’s central political question concerns the conditions under which a state can secure peace while allowing free judgment in matters of thought and confession. The opening chapters of Nadler’s narrative present the mirror-image: the conditions under which a religious establishment and its allies attempt to secure doctrinal unity by narrowing the space of publication and disputation. The book is thereby “forged” twice: it is forged in Spinoza’s workshop of arguments and in the Republic’s workshop of countermeasures. Nadler’s method repeatedly braids these two forges together, so that the philosophical content and the political-ecclesiastical reaction form a single explanatory circuit. What looks at first like context becomes, by accumulation, part of the proof. Theological politics is not a background pressure on Spinoza’s thought; it supplies the very materials that the Treatise reworks into a theory of superstition, authority, obedience, and the civil management of religion.
Nadler insists on temporal specificity in tracking how Spinoza’s “theological-political” turn arose out of a change in project. The narrative follows Spinoza as a thinker whose primary labor in the early and mid-1660s was directed toward the work that would become the Ethics—at that stage circulated privately as Philosophia—and who then set that labor aside in late 1665 to address a more urgent complex of hazards. This “abrupt change” is not treated as a biographical curiosity; it is treated as a diagnostic fact about what the Treatise is. The Treatise is not presented as an accidental detour from metaphysics; it is presented as an intervention demanded by the instability of a regime of toleration that many foreign observers admired and many domestic clerics despised. The story’s intellectual center of gravity is therefore displaced from an inner chronology of philosophical problems to an outer chronology of civic and ecclesiastical pressures. Spinoza’s conceptual work appears as an attempt to design a stable boundary between philosophy and theology precisely because the social boundary was being actively contested by ministers, magistrates, and factions.
Nadler’s reconstruction of this shift relies, in part, on the correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, which functions as a witness to Spinoza’s decision to expose himself to danger by addressing Scripture, prophecy, and ecclesiastical authority. The Oldenburg exchange matters because it registers, in real time, the perception that Spinoza was crossing from speculative inquiry into politically combustible territory. The Anglo-Dutch war complicates communication; the war thus becomes a background condition for the form of philosophical sociability itself, as letters become rarer, more difficult, and more consequential when they arrive. In Nadler’s hands, the correspondence supports an interpretive claim: Spinoza’s decision to engage theological materials belongs to a strategic calculus about threats to the freedom of inquiry, threats that are intensified precisely when states are anxious, mobilized, and tempted to sacralize unity.
The decisive pressure points, however, are rendered not as abstractions (“intolerance,” “religious conflict”) but as sharply localized events. Nadler devotes remarkable attention to an episode that could easily be relegated to a footnote in a purely philosophical study: the fate of Adriaan Koerbagh, whose prosecution and death after imprisonment serve as an empirical demonstration that Amsterdam’s reputation as “Eleutheropolis” was compatible with coercive punishment for heterodoxy. Nadler’s account of the Rasphuis/Tuchthuis complex—its moralizing iconography, its Senecan motto, its evolving function from correction to punitive labor—does more than supply atmosphere. It gives the reader a concrete image of how a polity can conceive itself as committed to virtue, improvement, and public order while operationalizing that commitment through confinement and forced work. The philosophical relevance is direct: Spinoza’s critique of superstition and clerical power is shown to have a proximate referent in a system where theological controversy can be translated into civic discipline, and where “rehabilitation” can become a euphemism for fear-driven enforcement.
Koerbagh’s case also brings into view the networked character of radical thought. Nadler traces interrogations in which Koerbagh is pressed on his relations with Spinoza and allied figures, revealing that by the late 1660s Spinoza’s own views on Scripture were already sufficiently notorious that prosecutors treated him as a potential node of contagion. This matters for Nadler’s interpretive approach to the Treatise: the book is written in a world where “association” functions as evidence, where friendship can be construed as complicity, and where the sociality of inquiry—salons, bookshops, manuscript-reading circles—becomes vulnerable to policing. The Treatise therefore emerges as a work that must speak in two registers at once: it must develop a theory of religion and state, while also negotiating the immediate risks of attribution, prosecution, and the rhetorical weaponization of “atheism.”
Nadler embeds these risks in the broader factional structure of Dutch politics under the “True Freedom” associated with Johan de Witt. The analysis here has a distinctive texture: Nadler avoids simplistic heroization of De Witt and avoids reducing Spinoza to a partisan pamphleteer. De Witt appears as a republican statesman oriented toward security and prosperity, operating within constraints and compromises; Spinoza and radical democrats appear as allied in direction but more absolute in their secularist logic. Theologically, the political divide is mapped onto clerical tendencies: Voetian rigorism, resentful of limits on ecclesiastical influence and eager to “Calvinize” social life, stands opposed to more liberal currents that resist the politicization of the church. For Nadler, this mapping is not incidental: it supplies an explanatory framework for why a book about Scripture and prophecy becomes simultaneously a book about political peace. In a regime where clerical factions seek leverage in civic decision-making, interpretive claims about Scripture can become instruments of governance. The hermeneutic is thus political in its consequences, and politics is hermeneutic in its tools.
The Treatise is presented, accordingly, as a work whose internal architecture is designed to neutralize a specific mechanism: the conversion of Scriptural authority into a warrant for civic control over thought. Nadler’s account of Spinoza’s argument begins with a question that is simultaneously epistemological and juridical: what kind of authority belongs to prophetic discourse, and what can be legitimately inferred from it about nature, history, metaphysics, and law? Spinoza’s strategy, as Nadler reconstructs it, aims to reclassify prophecy so that it can no longer function as an epistemic trump-card against philosophy. The crucial move is not a crude dismissal of prophecy; it is an analytic relocation of prophecy into the faculty of imagination, as Scripture itself depicts it. The prophets see images, hear voices, dream, receive visions; their experience is mediated by a power that produces sensory-like phenomena even in the absence of external objects. The consequence is that prophecy becomes, in the biblical sense that matters for ecclesiastical power, a mode of representation rather than a cognitive discipline delivering demonstrated truths. Spinoza’s analysis thus deprives theological authorities of a certain kind of leverage: if prophecy does not deliver scientific and metaphysical knowledge, then Scriptural pronouncements on the structure of nature, the motion of the heavens, and the causal order lose their jurisdiction over philosophy.
Nadler is careful to show that this move is neither a mere polemical gesture nor a purely historical claim about ancient texts. It is rooted in Spinoza’s broader naturalism: whatever occurs occurs in Nature according to lawlike necessity, and any knowledge that comes to a human being comes by natural means. Spinoza can therefore speak of “revelation” in an extended sense that includes knowledge acquired by reason, insofar as adequate understanding depends on the idea of God or Nature and its decrees. This is a delicate point: it allows Spinoza to preserve a form of religious vocabulary while evacuating it of supernatural interruption. Nadler stresses how the Treatise oscillates here between a philosophical reinterpretation of “revelation” and a Scriptural analysis of prophecy as the Bible portrays it. This oscillation is not a stylistic indecision; it is a strategic device. It enables Spinoza to concede that knowledge depends on God as the immanent foundation of intelligibility while arguing that the biblical phenomenon of prophecy, the one marshaled by clerics to justify oversight, is imagination-bound and culturally shaped.
The imagination thesis also generates a second, more socially explosive consequence: prophecy becomes subjective in its content. Nadler shows how Spinoza details the dependence of prophetic visions on temperament, upbringing, social status, and psychological condition, so that the prophets’ disclosures vary with their embedded prejudices and their limited scientific competence. The prophets thereby retain religious significance as vehicles of moral exhortation, yet they lose the status of universal teachers of nature. This reduction is simultaneously an elevation of philosophy’s autonomy and a redefinition of religion’s proper domain. Nadler repeatedly returns to the conceptual hinge: Spinoza requires a separation of philosophy and theology such that neither functions as the rule of the other. The separation has the structure of a juridical boundary drawn inside cognition: different kinds of discourse answer to different standards. Philosophical propositions answer to truth-value and demonstrative adequacy; religious propositions answer to motivational efficacy and the cultivation of justice and charity.
At this point Nadler’s narrative executes one of its characteristic internal displacements: a discussion that begins as a “theory of prophecy” becomes a theory of institutional power. Spinoza’s critique of Maimonides, which Nadler reconstructs with precision, is not offered for antiquarian interest. The prophet-philosopher model, according to which revelation and reason converge upon a single truth and can therefore be harmonized by interpretive ingenuity, supplies a template for clerical governance: when the Bible is assumed to contain philosophical truths, it becomes legitimate to police philosophers in the name of Scripture. Spinoza’s insistence that prophetic cognition is imagination-based breaks that template. Nadler’s analysis makes clear that the polemic against Maimonides has a political target: the elimination of a justification for theological supervision over philosophy. A conceptual debate about the faculties becomes an intervention in the division of intellectual labor in a republic.
From prophecy Nadler moves to miracles, and here the book’s philosophical density intensifies, because the miracle question functions as a condensation point where metaphysics, popular religion, and political authority meet. Nadler shows that Spinoza treats the ordinary course of nature as the true theater of divine power, because God’s power is identical with Nature’s power understood as necessary causal efficacy. The popular imagination, by contrast, seeks providence in deviation from regularity and interprets unusual events as privileged signatures of divine governance. Spinoza analyzes this popular stance as a theory of two powers—God’s power and Nature’s power—paired with an anthropomorphic picture of God as a monarch who issues decrees and periodically suspends subordinate agents. In Spinoza’s system, such a picture collapses: providence becomes a name for Nature’s order itself, and the language of “God’s will” becomes a manner of speaking about the lawful nexus of causes.
Nadler’s interpretive achievement lies in the way he measures the argumentative risk in this move. The miracle critique is frequently summarized as a straightforward denial. Nadler reads it as a constructive redeployment of religious language that aims to domesticate theological concepts within an immanent naturalism, thereby depriving clerics of a repertoire of fear-producing narratives. Miracles, in the social economy of religion, function as instruments of authorization: they validate prophets, legitimate institutions, and induce obedience by awe. When miracles are reconceived as either misunderstood natural events or rhetorical accommodations to the “common people,” the economy of authorization is disrupted. The disturbance is epistemic and political: it challenges the means by which a religious elite sustains its authority over interpretation and behavior.
This disturbance then flows into the book’s extended treatment of Scriptural interpretation, where Nadler shows Spinoza designing an “objective method” that aims to replace both philosophical harmonization and charismatic illumination. The interpretive thesis is deceptively simple: the task is to discover what the authors intended to say; truth is a separate question. Yet the implications are radical because they relocate interpretive authority from theologians’ claims of inspiration to a publicly discussable procedure involving philology, history, textual comparison, and contextual reconstruction. Nadler emphasizes how Spinoza criticizes theologians for parading their own ideas as God’s Word, using religion as a pretext for compelling assent. The criticism here is not merely moral; it is methodological. Interpretations lacking a stable procedure cannot be verified, cannot be refuted, and therefore cannot serve as legitimate grounds for coercion in a polity concerned with peace. Spinoza’s hermeneutic is thus presented as a civic technology: it aims to minimize the production of sectarian conflict by preventing interpretive authority from becoming an arbitrary instrument of domination.
Nadler carefully shows that Spinoza’s method is not an invitation to interpretive anarchy. It refuses private “inner light” approaches that dissolve Scripture into individual conscience, while also refusing appeals to external philosophical canons that force the Bible into conformity with metaphysical demonstrations. What emerges is an enlarged sola Scriptura—Scripture read through its own textual and historical conditions, including language, social circumstances, and the biographies of authors. Spinoza also registers the obstacles that make the method arduous: the loss of linguistic knowledge, ambiguities of Hebrew, the absence of vowels and punctuation in ancient texts, and the difficulty of reconstructing authors’ circumstances. Nadler’s philosophical point is subtle: the admission of difficulty is part of Spinoza’s strategy. A text whose meaning is hard to reconstruct cannot plausibly function as a transparent repository of metaphysical and scientific truth whose propositions can be used to police inquiry. The fragility of hermeneutic certainty becomes, within the Treatise, a reason to restrict Scripture’s authority to a moral nucleus capable of being grasped even amid textual uncertainty.
That nucleus is articulated as the command to practice justice and charity. Nadler shows Spinoza deriving a minimal “universal faith” whose function is ethical motivation rather than speculative instruction. Here the argument becomes problem-laden in a distinctive way, because Spinoza’s minimalism is paired with a pragmatic tolerance for beliefs whose truth Spinoza, as a metaphysician, does not endorse. The articles of faith include propositions about God as just and merciful, about divine judgment, about pardon for repentance—claims whose truth-value, in Spinoza’s metaphysics, is at best complex and at points negative. Nadler does not resolve this into an easy “double doctrine.” He makes the tension explicit and lets it work as a key to Spinoza’s political psychology. Most persons are not philosophers; they are moved by images of lawgiving, judgment, reward, and punishment. Scripture, as a political instrument, cultivates obedience by representing God anthropomorphically. The philosopher, by contrast, arrives at virtue through understanding and thereby relates to “divine law” as eternal truth rather than as command. The conceptual pressure here is considerable: the state is asked to permit a plurality of metaphysical imaginations so long as they support justice and charity, while philosophy is asked to speak truthfully about Nature without destabilizing the motivational structures on which civic peace depends.
Nadler’s handling of this tension is exemplary because he ties it to Spinoza’s broader account of affects, superstition, and the political uses of fear. Religious conflict arises when speculative disputes about God’s nature become criteria of membership and obedience, and when clerics exploit uncertainty to entrench authority. Spinoza’s strategy aims to rechannel religious energy away from metaphysical dogmatism and into ethical practice. Yet the strategy depends on a careful delimitation: speculative freedom is extended broadly, even “to philosophizing about God,” while the public face of religion is regulated toward peace. A latent difficulty persists. If each individual is invited to adapt religious dogmas to his own understanding for the sake of obedience, a question arises concerning the limit-case where adaptation yields beliefs that authorize hatred, strife, and persecution. Nadler shows Spinoza marking that boundary: doctrines are condemned as heretical in the civic-religious sense when they promote obstinacy and social conflict, and fidelity is measured by promotion of justice and charity “to the best of one’s intellectual powers.” This criterion is at once moral and political, yet it also functions as a theory of interpretive legitimacy: interpretations are assessed by their capacity to sustain civic friendship.
At this juncture Nadler’s narrative performs another displacement. The Treatise—long engaged in what can appear to be a technical critique of prophecy, miracles, and hermeneutics—turns decisively toward political theory. Nadler emphasizes that Spinoza’s argument for freedom of philosophizing in the state is inseparable from an account of sovereignty, law, and the public good. Spinoza reads Hobbes closely and adapts the vocabulary of natural right, state of nature, and covenant into a distinctive conception of power (potentia) as the basis of right. The state’s task is to secure peace, security, and stability, and its authority extends to all practices that enter the public sphere. This includes religious practice insofar as it is public. Nadler stresses a point that complicates any easy assimilation of Spinoza to later liberal constitutional models: Spinoza assigns the sovereign authority over the external form of religion—rites, ceremonies, public expressions of obedience—because these bear on the commonwealth’s welfare. Private judgment remains inviolable as a right that cannot be surrendered, and coercion cannot produce blessedness; yet the state’s jurisdiction includes the translation of moral religion into public policy and conduct.
This is one of the book’s most constructively difficult theses, and Nadler does not soften it. The standard modern intuition often treats freedom of religion as requiring state abstention from religious regulation. Spinoza offers a different architecture: an expansive freedom of internal judgment paired with a robust sovereignty over public order, including public piety. Nadler’s analysis reveals how this architecture follows from Spinoza’s broader commitments. If the public good is the highest law, and if public conflict is intensified by clerical factionalism, then the state has reason to subordinate ecclesiastical authority and to prevent religion from becoming a competing jurisdiction. The sovereign thereby becomes the final arbiter of the public meaning of God’s law in practice, especially in a democracy where the governing assembly embodies the common right.
This position generates a further tension that Nadler tracks with care: Spinoza’s defense of free philosophizing is directed against clerical censorship, yet his political theory grants the state extensive authority to regulate public speech and practice when these threaten peace. The liberty being defended is therefore structurally linked to a theory of civil power that can, under certain conditions, restrict expression. Nadler’s narrative does not collapse this into contradiction; it presents it as the shape of Spinoza’s solution under seventeenth-century conditions. The Treatise aims to prevent a particular kind of repression—clerical oversight of inquiry—by strengthening a different kind of authority—the secular sovereign’s control over the public sphere. The wager is that the sovereign’s interest in stability and prosperity supplies a more reliable basis for toleration than clerical zeal. Yet the same sovereign, if captured by zeal or faction, can become a new engine of suppression. Nadler’s historical framing supplies the empirical test of that wager, because the Republic’s political winds shift dramatically in the early 1670s.
The book’s account of composition and publication renders this test as part of the narrative logic. Nadler follows Spinoza bringing the completed manuscript to the Amsterdam publisher Jan Rieuwertsz in early 1669, embedding the handoff in a portrait of Amsterdam’s clandestine print culture and the bookshop as a salon for radical ideas. Rieuwertsz’s reputation as a refuge for writings opposed to received opinion is treated as both enabling condition and risk multiplier. The tactics of anonymity—false places of publication, pseudonyms, imprints designed to confuse authorities—appear as a material counterpart to Spinoza’s conceptual strategy of separating domains. The book that defends the freedom to philosophize must itself be produced through a philosophy of concealment. This is not a superficial irony; it shows that freedom of inquiry in this world is mediated by institutions of secrecy. Nadler’s attention to pseudonymous author names and shifting false titles underscores that the politics of ideas is inseparable from the logistics of distribution.
Nadler then reconstructs the early months after publication as a rapid crystallization of alarm. Reformed consistories in Utrecht, Leiden, Haarlem, and eventually Amsterdam act quickly, seeking confiscation and suppression even while the author remains officially unidentified. What is crucial here is the speed with which the book is classified as a threat, and the fact that the threat is framed explicitly through the theme of “freedom of philosophizing.” The very formula that functions within Spinoza as a principle of civic health functions within ecclesiastical minutes as an index of blasphemy. Nadler’s evidential practice is characteristic: he does not merely assert that the clergy feared freedom; he shows their fear taking the form of resolutions, delegations, and petitions.
The juridical dimension intensifies as synods seek to mobilize existing edicts against “irreligious” books, especially the 1653 Holland edict, to cover the new publication. Nadler traces the matter as it is referred to the Hof van Holland and as the court produces advice identifying the Treatise alongside other notorious works (including Hobbes and Socinian compilations) as illegal under earlier legislation. At the same time, Nadler emphasizes the Republic’s delaying tactics: committees are formed, memos are “further examined,” and municipal authorities, especially in Amsterdam, appear capable of slowing the translation of ecclesiastical fury into enforceable law. The reader is led to see toleration as a practice of administrative friction as much as a principled commitment. The Republic’s partial freedom is preserved by procedural lag, by the difficulty of coordinating provincial and municipal bodies, and by the reluctance of regents to call more attention to incendiary works through public decrees.
This administrative story functions as a displaced version of Spinoza’s own political theory: stability depends on institutional arrangements that prevent any single faction from converting its doctrinal passion into immediate coercion. Yet Nadler shows that this arrangement is contingent. The narrative’s later movement toward the 1674 ban and the end of the True Freedom supplies the historical counterpoint that Spinoza’s conceptual apparatus already anticipates. The book’s final third follows the shift in political conditions after the assassination of De Witt and the rise of a more conservative Orangist regime under William III, yielding a setting in which ecclesiastical ambitions face fewer obstacles. The Hof’s edict in July 1674 condemns the Treatise as blasphemous and soul-harming and forbids printing, selling, and dissemination under penalties anchored in earlier edicts. Nadler’s narrative presents this as the political realization of the danger Spinoza analyzed: clerical influence over the state grows as the state becomes more anxious, more militarized, and more reliant on religious legitimacy.
The phrase “forged in hell” thus returns with a new evidential weight. Nadler records how De Witt’s enemies could portray the Treatise as a diabolical product allegedly published with his complicity, thereby weaponizing a philosophical work as evidence of political criminality. This is not mere rhetoric; it is a mechanism by which factional politics uses religious panic to delegitimize opponents. Nadler’s handling of the phrase is methodologically restrained and conceptually revealing: the infernal metaphor condenses the fear that secularization dissolves moral order, and it supplies a bridge between theological denunciation and political purge.
The book’s “onslaught” section deepens this bridge by tracing learned reactions abroad and at home, including early refutations by figures such as Jakob Thomasius and the involvement of Leibniz as reader and correspondent. Nadler uses these reactions to clarify that the Treatise was perceived as a convergence of multiple threats: a challenge to Scriptural authority, a naturalization of providence, a reduction of religion to moral practice, and a political theory that subordinates clergy to sovereign power. The association with Hobbes, repeatedly invoked by critics, reveals how seventeenth-century intellectual actors categorized dangerous ideas through genealogies of suspicion. Spinoza is read as extending the “politics” and “religion” of Hobbes into a more audacious critique of Scripture. Nadler’s narrative does not accept these classifications as final; it treats them as data about the period’s conceptual fault lines and about how a secularizing argument becomes legible as “atheism.”
Here Nadler stages a final displacement that is among the work’s most instructive: Spinoza’s intent to secure conditions for publishing the Ethics is undone by the Treatise’s reception. Nadler documents Spinoza’s own reaction to the flood of hostile writings and his decision to postpone publication of the Ethics when rumors spread that he was putting “a book about God” into print and theologians complained to the prince and magistrates. The defense of free philosophizing becomes the cause of intensified suspicion toward further philosophical publication. Likewise Spinoza intervenes to halt a planned Dutch translation of the Treatise in 1671 because a vernacular edition would extend the audience beyond learned circles and thereby accelerate prohibition. Nadler’s philosophical point is implicit and powerful: the public sphere is stratified, and the politics of toleration depends on controlling which strata receive which kinds of arguments. A Latin treatise can circulate among elites with a certain plausible deniability; a vernacular version threatens to render the argument politically uncontainable.
This stratification also clarifies Nadler’s larger thesis about the “birth of the secular age.” Secularity here does not appear as a sudden triumph of reason over superstition. It appears as a contested reorganization of epistemic authority and civic governance under conditions where states fear disorder and where religious factions interpret plurality as decay. The Treatise is “secular” in the sense that it constructs a principled autonomy for philosophy and science, grounds Scriptural interpretation in historical and linguistic method, reconceives providence and miracle through natural necessity, and articulates a political model in which public religion is subordinated to the sovereign’s responsibility for peace. Yet the same work retains a functional role for religion as moral motivation for the multitude and grants to the state a significant role in shaping the public form of piety. These features jointly constitute a secularizing configuration that remains tension-filled: it aims to protect free judgment while stabilizing a polity through regulated public practice; it aims to diminish clerical jurisdiction while strengthening sovereign jurisdiction; it aims to weaken superstition while preserving those imagistic structures that can move persons toward justice and charity.
Nadler’s treatment remains consistently attentive to how these tensions are carried by Spinoza’s method. Spinoza’s method in the Treatise is neither purely geometric demonstration nor purely historical narrative. It is a composite procedure that includes conceptual distinctions, psychological diagnoses, textual criticism, and political inference. Nadler’s own method mirrors this composite character. He reads institutional documents with the same seriousness that he reads philosophical arguments, because both are treated as forms of rational action embedded in a struggle over authority. His evidential practice is sober: he reconstructs what could be known by whom and when, he distinguishes formal condemnation from informal suspicion, and he tracks how attribution of authorship diffused through correspondence and rumor before it hardened into published identification. The upshot is a portrait of intellectual modernity as a system of channels—manuscripts, bookshops, clandestine imprints, synods, courts—through which ideas travel and transform, acquiring new social meanings as they move.
One of the work’s deepest virtues as a philosophical book-description lies in how it makes the Treatise’s conceptual core emerge out of a sequence of displacements. Spinoza begins from the threat of ecclesiastical interference; he then displaces the basis of Scriptural authority from metaphysical truth to moral teaching; he displaces prophecy from intellect to imagination; he displaces miracle from divine interruption to misunderstood nature; he displaces interpretive authority from inspired theologians to publicly discussable method; he displaces religion’s essence from ceremony to justice and charity; he displaces political legitimacy from clerical oversight to sovereign responsibility for peace; he then witnesses these displacements being met by counter-displacements in the public world—where “freedom of philosophizing” is displaced into “licentiousness,” where moral minimalism is displaced into “atheism,” and where political secularism is displaced into accusations of sedition and diabolical conspiracy. The book’s narrative arc is therefore dialectical in a strict sense, though Nadler does not theatrically announce such a structure: each conceptual move produces a reaction that forces further clarification, concealment, or postponement.
The stratification of audiences, and the concomitant politics of which claims may circulate where, is already prepared in the Treatise’s own preface, as Nadler explicates it: Spinoza begins from a “natural history” of religion that functions simultaneously as an anatomy of public susceptibility. Religion, under the aspect that concerns political life, appears as organized superstition: a system in which clerics capitalize on the ordinary oscillation of hope and fear that accompanies human exposure to fortune and natural contingency, and transform that oscillation into an instrument for directing belief and conduct. Nadler’s analysis draws out the methodological ambition in this opening. Spinoza does not merely denounce superstition as error; he explains it by reference to psychological regularities and by reference to institutional incentives. The preface thereby establishes, in compressed form, a causal schema that will govern the book’s subsequent reductions of prophecy, miracle, and election: each is treated as a phenomenon whose social efficacy depends on imagistic representation, limited knowledge, and the cultivation of affect. The philosophical stake is that theology’s authority claims can be re-described without remainder as a certain kind of political technology, and that this re-description alters the criteria by which the state should judge religious influence.
Nadler’s narrative makes clear that this naturalistic preface is already calibrated to a world in which fear is administratively actionable. The prologue’s opening in the Amsterdam classis—its procedure of excerpting “abominable samples,” declaring the work “blasphemous and dangerous,” and routing the matter upward through district and provincial synods toward the States of Holland—provides an institutional correlative to Spinoza’s psychology. The same affective economy that clerics exploit in the populace is exploited in the clerical bodies themselves, where alarm is intensified by the performative reading of extracts and by the rhetorical condensation of complex arguments into “monstrous” propositions. Nadler’s framing implies a reciprocal determination: Spinoza’s analysis explains why ecclesiastical reaction takes the form it takes, and ecclesiastical reaction supplies empirical confirmation that the social mechanism Spinoza describes is already functioning.
This reciprocity also clarifies why Nadler treats the Koerbagh episode as more than a cautionary prelude. Koerbagh’s published attacks on “rites and ceremonies,” his reduction of God to the necessary substance of nature, his denial of miracles as violations of law, his insistence on an inward “true religion” of neighbor-love and obedience, and his radical democratic secularism collectively form a nearby instance of the same conceptual pattern that will appear, with greater discipline and philosophical reach, in Spinoza’s Treatise. Koerbagh’s interrogation, and the fact that interrogators pursued links to Spinoza because Spinoza’s ideas about the Bible had become “well known” by 1668, show that the “danger” at issue was already being construed as a networked program rather than as an isolated text. Nadler’s point is that the social perception of “Spinozism” precedes the public availability of Spinoza’s own theological-political arguments, and thus that the Treatise enters a field of suspicions in which the author is already, in a practical sense, classified. This pre-classification intensifies the rhetorical constraints under which Spinoza composes: the Treatise must address clerical power while also managing the risk that any explicit metaphysical disclosure will be seized upon as proof of atheism and, by extension, of moral and political subversion.
Nadler connects this compositional constraint to Spinoza’s decision to keep the theological-political appeal relatively independent of the more radical metaphysical theses developed in the Ethics. The relationship between the two works becomes one of staged disclosure: the Treatise delivers, in a non-geometric idiom and with strategic reserve, the metaphysical lesson that nature follows an immutable order and that nothing occurs outside lawlike necessity, while withholding the full systematic articulation of God as immanent substance that would render the political argument harder for most readers to accept. Nadler’s analysis sharpens the conceptual tension produced by this staging. The Treatise defends the freedom to philosophize as a public good, yet it treats the public as largely incapable of the philosophical path to virtue and thus as reliant on imaginative narratives for moral regulation. The freedom being defended is therefore accompanied by an account of cognitive inequality and by a pedagogical realism: public peace requires a moral minimum that can be taught without metaphysical exactitude.
This realism reaches a particularly precise formulation in Nadler’s discussion of prophecy. The prophetic writings, including the Torah, constitute the core of Scriptural authority; Spinoza’s decision to interpret them as morally oriented products of the imagination functions as a lever against ecclesiastical jurisdiction over “public and private lives.” Nadler articulates the internal logic: prophecy becomes practically valuable precisely because it addresses the imagination of the multitude and thereby motivates obedience to the demands of justice and charity, while philosophy remains the privileged route to stable understanding for those capable of it. The tension here can be stated as a problem of mediation. The state seeks peace; peace requires moral conduct; moral conduct in the many is induced by imaginative representation; imaginative representation, when monopolized by clerics, becomes a source of factional domination; the state therefore requires a way to preserve the motivational efficacy of religious narratives while preventing their conversion into an independent political power. Nadler shows the Treatise laboring to construct precisely this mediation through the separation of theology’s end (obedience) from philosophy’s end (truth), and through the relocation of interpretive authority into a publicly accessible method.
The miracle discussion amplifies the same architecture under the pressure of a more volatile object. Nadler begins this section by demonstrating how, for early modern theologians and natural philosophers, miracles are defined as effects that cannot be explained by ordinary laws and that thus require suspension and substitution of laws. Spinoza’s position becomes scandalous in that framework because it implies that the very definition is misconceived: the laws of nature express God’s attributes and thus admit no exceptions; “miracle” names ignorance, either of the narrator or of the community’s current science. Nadler’s exposition here does not simply report a denial; it traces Spinoza’s reconfiguration of religious language so that the word “miracle” survives as a relative term for events whose causes remain unknown, while the metaphysical commitment to fixed order remains intact. The conceptual friction, which Nadler brings forward, concerns the political function of wonder. Scriptural writers, understood as “unlearned” and pedagogically oriented toward “the common people,” describe natural events in a manner that excites awe and piety rather than in a manner that provides causal explanation. This yields a positive thesis about Scripture’s genre and civic utility: Scripture employs a style suited to moral formation. At the same time, it yields a restriction: Scripture’s style cannot serve as a tribunal over natural philosophy, because its representational aim differs from philosophy’s explanatory aim.
Nadler’s treatment of this genre thesis is philosophically significant because it turns an interpretive observation into a political conclusion. If Scripture’s narratives aim at wonder, and if wonder is a tool for cultivating obedience, then miracle stories become a site where clerics can cultivate dependency by maintaining ignorance and by presenting themselves as the authorized interpreters of divine interruption. Spinoza’s redefinition therefore undermines a key resource of ecclesiastical power. The loss of that resource is then compensated, within Spinoza’s own political theory, by transferring oversight of public religion to the sovereign. This transfer is conceptually consistent with the earlier separations: it preserves the motivational functions of religion while eliminating its claim to cognitive supremacy and its capacity to generate competing jurisdictions.
Nadler’s book repeatedly enriches this conceptual reading by placing beside Spinoza’s argument the surrounding landscape of theological-political writing, most notably Hobbes. The comparison is not treated as mere influence-hunting. Hobbes’s Leviathan is presented as a work that similarly investigates prophecy, miracles, and the interpretation of Scripture, and that portrays ecclesiastics as a “kingdom of darkness” within this life, a confederacy seeking dominion by extinguishing the light of nature and gospel. Nadler uses contemporaneous reactions to show how early readers positioned Spinoza relative to Hobbes: even Hobbes is reported as regarding Spinoza as more audacious, and early refutations explicitly suggest that Spinoza’s critique of Scripture extends seeds already sown in Hobbes. Nadler’s own analytic payoff is subtler. The Hobbes comparison clarifies that the Treatise participates in a broader seventeenth-century attempt to reconceive religion as an object for political science. Yet Spinoza’s strategy differs in its metaphysical background and in its hermeneutic rigor: where Hobbes can be read as subordinating Scripture to a theory of sovereign interpretation grounded in a materialist psychology, Spinoza constructs a philological-historical method that aims to establish Scripture’s meaning on its own terms while restricting its authority to moral practice. The result is a form of secularization that proceeds by methodological differentiation rather than by mere political subordination.
This differentiation becomes visible again when Nadler returns, later in the book, to the question of suppression and the incremental mechanics of censorship. The church consistories’ early resolutions, the appeals to the 1653 edict against “irreligious” books, and the way “Socinian” becomes an elastic category for doctrines that deny providence or the divinity of Christ reveal a classificatory regime designed to gather diverse threats under a single juridical umbrella. Nadler’s narrative shows that the Treatise is, from the start, inserted into this regime: Utrecht requests preventive measures; Leiden’s burgomasters order raids; Amsterdam seeks to subsume the work under older anti-Socinian legislation; provincial synods describe the book as uniquely obscene and demand vigilant measures. The evidence discloses a structural fact about early modern toleration: toleration often survives by avoiding categorical decisions at the highest level, while repression proceeds locally when magistrates cooperate with clerical demands. Nadler explicitly draws attention to the piecemeal suppression that can render a work hard to obtain even before any Republic-wide ban is enacted.
Rieuwertsz’s increasingly devious publishing tactics then become a material analogue of Spinoza’s strategic reserve. Nadler details the shift from comparatively straightforward anonymity to the binding of the Treatise with other works under false titles and false authors, including a composite volume presented as medical writings printed with permission of the Spanish king. The philosophical significance is not exhausted by the curiosity of bibliographical disguise. The disguises show that the circulation of arguments in a semi-tolerant regime depends on a practical theory of appearance: a book must sometimes become something else in order to remain itself in effect. The identity of the text, as an efficacious object in the public sphere, becomes detachable from its nominal identity. Nadler’s narrative thereby supplies an external counterpart to Spinoza’s internal claim that Scripture’s narratives can be understood as imaginative accommodations: in both cases, the surface form is adapted to the cognitive and political conditions of reception.
The eventual 1674 ban, issued under the name of William III and aligned with the end of the True Freedom, is presented by Nadler as the institutional culmination of pressures that Spinoza had already theorized. The book’s outer framing closes the loop established in the opening prologue: the synodical resolutions that sought an edict finally receive one, and the Republic’s earlier reluctance is displaced by a political environment in which fewer obstacles confront hardline ministers. Nadler uses this moment to clarify the conceptual dependency of “freedom of philosophizing” on political arrangements: philosophical liberty requires more than the absence of inquisitorial institutions; it requires a distribution of power in which clerical faction cannot easily convert doctrinal alarm into civil coercion. The ban’s language, and its posting “everywhere,” reveals a desire to transform local suppression into a general public fact, thereby making the work’s illegality part of civic common sense.
The infernal metaphor then reappears in a striking documentary form: a hostile catalogue of books allegedly found in De Witt’s library includes the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus alongside an annotation describing it as forged in hell by an apostate Jew in collaboration with the devil and published with De Witt’s knowledge. Nadler’s use of this document provides an unusually concrete instance of how theological denunciation becomes a political weapon. The Treatise becomes evidence within a symbolic trial of De Witt’s character and governance. Secular politics is presented as diabolical complicity, and Spinoza’s critique is reframed as proof of criminality. The secular age that Nadler tracks thus emerges, in its earliest appearance, as an object of counter-myth: it is narratable as “hell” precisely because it withdraws political legitimacy from ecclesiastical oversight and replaces sacramental unity with a civic order grounded in peace and the management of plural judgments.
This counter-myth also clarifies the nature of Spinoza’s own rhetorical predicament, as Nadler reconstructs it. The Treatise does not merely argue; it intervenes in a symbolic economy in which “atheism” functions as a summary accusation that fuses metaphysics, morality, and political loyalty. Nadler documents how university theologians abroad rapidly produced refutations, demanding immediate banning and identifying the author as an atheist; and he records how Leibniz interprets Spinoza’s method as an extension of Hobbes’s theological politics into a more audacious critique of Scripture. For Nadler, these reactions are not simply errors to be corrected; they are symptoms of how the Treatise’s differentiations—between imagination and intellect, Scripture’s moral end and philosophy’s truth, sovereign authority and clerical jurisdiction—restructure the conceptual field in which “religion” and “politics” are ordinarily bound together.
In this light, the book’s title points to more than the hostility of contemporaries: “Forged” names the labor of composition under danger, the craft of clandestine publication under censorship, and the antagonistic craft of institutional response that seeks to convert a text into a public threat. “Hell” names, at once, the theological imagination’s response to immanent naturalism and the political imagination’s response to a regime that allows plural judgment. Nadler’s achievement lies in showing that these names are not rhetorical ornaments; they register an epistemic and civic transition in which the criteria for legitimate authority over belief are contested at every level, from philological method to prison architecture to provincial legislation.
The final effect is a study that yields something more precise than admiration for Spinoza’s courage and something more concrete than a generalized story about Enlightenment. Nadler shows, with controlled philosophical attention, that Spinoza’s project concerns the engineering of a stable regime of intellectual life: a regime in which philosophy can pursue truth according to its own norms, religion can cultivate ethical conduct according to its own motivational resources, and the state can secure peace by preventing doctrinal factions from capturing public authority. The secular age that appears here is an emergent pattern of institutional and conceptual differentiation: a reallocation of tasks among theology, philosophy, and politics, achieved through arguments whose force is inseparable from the risks of printing them. That achievement remains fragile within the narrative itself, because the same forces that made the Treatise necessary also made it vulnerable to being treated as poison. Nadler closes the conceptual circle by showing that Spinoza’s attempt to protect the freedom to philosophize becomes, under shifted political conditions, an evidential trigger for further repression and for the strategic withdrawal of Spinoza’s subsequent work from print.
Simon Gros 
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