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Abstract of “Deus sive Natura: The Dutch Controversy over the Radical Concept of God, 1660-1690”

During the seventeenth century, a cataclysmic change was taking place regarding the concept of God and of the universe. A series of scientific discoveries in astronomy, physics, and chemistry began to pose serious challenges to the long-held cosmology and metaphysics of the western world developed during the Middle Ages. Among these challenges was the radical concept of God by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) which was met with fierce and heated controversy in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the controversy by paying particular attention to Spinoza’s radical concept of God as well as to the philosophico-theological responses of the Cartesian theologian, Christopher Wittichius (1625-1687) and of the orthodox Reformed theologian, Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706). By analyzing these thinkers from three distinct philosophico-theological schools, the dissertation demonstrates how the concept of God played a central role both in ushering in the new worldview as well as in defending the older theological worldview in the theologico-political context of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

The dissertation first examines Spinoza’s radical concept of God against its political and theological background in relation to the preceding medieval model and to Descartes’s thought. It then shows how Wittichius tries to maintain a fine balance between Cartesianism and Reformed theology in his response to Spinoza’s concept of God. While Wittichius claims to follow Descartes’s philosophy, his conceptual framework revealed him to embrace the medieval concept of God, differing in crucial places from Descartes. In contrast, Van Mastricht finds no significant difference between Dutch Cartesians and their radicalized representatives such as Spinoza. In considering Spinoza’s radical concept as a logical outworking of Descartes’s concept of God, Van Mastricht attempts a comprehensive refutation by empahsizing both the utter trasnscendence of God and the confused state of the human intellect. The intertextual analysis of these three thinkers elucidates important issues surrounding the controversy over the concept of God in the Dutch Republic between 1660 and 1690.