El rey Felipe II de España como símbolo de la 'tiranía
| Autor | Jonathan Israel |
| Cargo | Professor Emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, United States |
| Páginas | 137-154 |
137
Revista Co-herencia Vol. 15, No 28 Enero - Junio de 2018, pp. 137-154. (ISSN 1794-5887 / e-ISSN 2539-1208)
King Philip II of Spain as a
symbol of ‘Tyranny’
in Spinoza’s Political Writings
Recibido: enero 25 de 2018 | Aceptado: enero 31 de 2018
DOI: 10.17230/co-herencia.15.28.6
Jonathan Israel**
jisrael@ias.edu
*Professor Emeritus,
Insti tute for Advanced
Study, Princeton, New
Jersey, United States.
Abstract The highly abstr act style of Spinoza’s philosophy has
encouraged some inter pretations of him a s a thinker
with little immediate c onnection with the whi rl
of social and cultu ral affair s around him. Thi s article shows
that all three m ajor Western revolts - those of the Netherla nds,
Portugal and Ara gon - against Philip II (hi s principal symbol
and embodiment of ty ranny, arbitrary a nd illicit governance,
intolerance and repres sion of basic liberties) became in some sense
internationally ent wined and were intensely pre sent in his life,
which helps to understa nd that Spinoza was indeed a revolutionar y.
Key words:
Philip II, tyranny, religious persecution of dissenters, revolution,
historical context of Spinoza’s thought.
El rey Felipe II de España como símbolo de
la tiranía en los escritos políticos de Spinoza
Resumen El estilo sumamente abstracto de la losofía de Spinoz a
ha alentado algun as interpretaciones en l as que se
arma que tení a poco contacto con el ajetreo de
los asuntos sociale s y culturales a su al rededor. Este artículo
muestra que las tres principa les revueltas en Occidente (las d e
Holanda, Portugal y Ar agón) contra Felipe II (que para él era el
principal símbolo y personicación de la tiranía, del gobier no
arbitrario e ilícito, de la i ntolerancia y de la represión de la s
libertades básic as) llegaron a estar en alg ún sentido entrelaza das
y estuvieran prese ntes intensamente en su vida, lo qu e nos
ayuda a entender que Spinoza f ue un auténtico revolucionario.
Palabras clave:
Felipe II, tiranía, persecución religiosa de los disidentes, revolución,
contexto histórico del pensamiento de Spinoza.
138
King Philip II of Spain as a symbol of ‘Tyranny’
in Spinoza’s Political Writings
Jonathan Israel
After sending in an army to conquer Portugal, in the year 1580,
Philip II of Spain made himself also ‘king of Portugal’ against the
wishes of most of its inhabitants. Acquiring Portugal, observed one
of Philip’s advisors, would be a major strategic gain, also “be the
principal, most effective, and decisive instrument and remedy for
the reduction of the Netherlands to obedience, as well as a useful
means of controlling England” (Quoted in Parker, 1998, p. 166).
Conquering Portugal was consciously viewed in Madrid as a step
to gaining world mastery. Appropriately, Philip’s army of invasion
was commanded by the same duke of Alba who was championing
a militantly intolerant, forthright Castilian imperialism more
generally and had previously subjected the Low Countries to a reign
of terror between 1567 and 1573, as part of a brutal and bloody drive
to overwhelm the Dutch rebels, resulting in numerous Calvinists,
Lutherans and other religious dissidents being brought “to all kinds
of martyrdom,” as Spinoza vividly expresses it, in his letter to Albert
Burgh (Spinoza, 1995, p. 341).
After the battle for Lisbon, the historic liberties and privileges
of Portugal, like those of Aragon subsequently, in 1591-1592, were
ruthlessly suppressed by the Spanish monarch. One ominous
consequence of this 1580 ‘revolution’ in Portugal for the ‘New
Christians’, or conversos of Jewish descent, was that the powers
of the Inquisition in Portugal, as might have been expected, were
further extended. Faced by this crisis and disaster in Portugal, and
marked intensication of persecution of all New Christians that
followed, neither Portuguese crypto-Jews remaining in Portugal, nor
those dispersed to other lands, remained politically inert. Thanks
to research in Portuguese Inquisition archives, we know Spinoza’s
own family gured among the active ‘judaizers’ in France, at Nantes,
as well as in Portugal. “At Nantes, the Portuguese were divided in
the late sixteenth century,” as one authority has put it, “between
judaisers and Catholics. Among the former was Abraham d’Espinoza,
grandfather of Baruch Spinoza, the philosopher.” Actually, Abraham
was not Spinoza’s grandfather but his great-uncle, the brother of his
grandfather, Isaac d’Espinoza, who later settled in Rotterdam. But
what matters is that Abraham certainly gured among the two or
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