Frederick C. Beiser bood met zijn terecht veel geprezen studie
(het was zijn eerste boek) The Fate of
Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte [Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1987,– books.google geeft editie 2009] voor lange tijd de beste Engelstalige
studie over de Pantheismusstreit als de achtergrond voor het Duitse Idealisme. Op
blz. 48 had hij deze paragraaf:
“Until the publication of Jacobi’s Briefe über die Lehre von Spinoza in 1785, Spinoza was a notorious
figure in Germany. For more than a century the academic and ecclesiastical
establishment had treated him “like a dead dog” as Lessing later put it. The Ethica was published in Germany in 1677,
and the Tractatus Theologico-politicus
in 1670 (though it appeared anonymously, Spinoza was known to be the author).
Until the middle of the eighteenth century it was de rigueur for every
professor and cleric to prove his orthodoxy before taking office; and proving
one’s orthodoxy demanded denouncing Spinoza as a heretic. Since attacks on
Spinoza became a virtual ritual, there was an abundance of defamatory and
polemical tracts against him. Indeed, by 1710 so many professors and clerics
had attacked Spinoza that there was a Catalogus
scriptorum Anti-spinozanorum in Leipzig. And in 1759 Trinius counted,
probably too modestly, 129 enemies of Spinoza in his Freydenkerlexicon. Such was Spinoza’s reputation that he was often identified
with Satan himself. Spinoza was seen as not only one form of atheism, but as
the worst form. Thus Spinoza was dubbed the "Euclides atheisticus', the 'princips atheorum'.”
