The paper studies the historical background for the ‘idealist’ reading of Spinoza usually traced back to British and German Idealism. Here, I follow this history further back than and focus on one earlier idealist reading, indeed perhaps the mother of them all. It can be found in the _Elucidarius cabalisticus, sive reconditae Hebraeorum philosophiae brevis et succincta recensio_ by Johann Georg Wachter, a kabbalist interpretation of Spinoza published in 1706. I am principally interested in the importance that Wachter’s book may (...) have had for German philosophy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on Moses Mendelssohn’s _Philosophische Gespräche_ of 1755, I argue that, via Mendelssohn, the Elucidarius cabalisticus is perhaps the earliest possible source of the idealist reading of Spinoza that dominated the German _Spinozabild_ from throughout the _Pantheismusstreit_ up to the second edition of Herder’s 1800 _Gott: Einige Gespräche_, culminating with Hegel’s ‘acosmist’ reading of Spinoza in the 1825–26 lectures on the history of philosophy. (shrink)

In my paper, I dispute Christian Hengstermann’s analysis of More’s philosophical system as a form of panentheistic panpsychism in which matter is alive by virtue of being the last emanation from God. I show that, in his mature period, More explicitly rejected such an emanationist doctrine and attributed the non-mechanical powers of matter to an outside immaterial principle, the Spirit of Nature. Ultimately, this leads to a system in which divine space, the Spirit of Nature and the spirit of God (...) are representations of various aspects of the divine essence, as it is at work in the world. On the other hand, matter is not part of this triadic structure and can only be said to be alive at the cost of a rather counterintuitive redefinition of the notion of “life”. (shrink)

Jacob Rhenferd (1654–1712), professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at the University of Franeker in the United Provinces, is a mostly forgotten figure. This article analyses his theological and historical scholarship, with special attention to his use of Jewish mystical texts. It argues that Rhenferd’s conception of philologia sacra was profoundly shaped by kabbalistic insights and that a recourse to Kabbalah provided him with an idiom to articulate anew some foundational Reformed doctrines. Conversely, a comparison with the kabbalistic studies of (...) some of his contemporaries highlights the incipient difficulties faced by a kabbalistic approach to Christian doctrine and its history. The article uses the case of Rhenferd to propose some historiographical revisions about the role of Kabbalah in Christian scriptural philology around the turn of the eighteenth century, about its institutional currency in prominent Reformed academies and, more broadly, about the validity of ‘Christian Kabbalah’ as a category in modern scholarship. (shrink)