INTRODUCTION

Ludwig Meyer – philosopher, physician, poet, playwright, impresario – was a man of many parts, some as paradoxical as his treatise, subtitled A Paradoxical Exercise. Holder of doctorates in both medicine and philosophy from Leyden, he was also sometime director of the municipal theatre of Amsterdam – in turn pedant and free spirit: a super-rationalist in his approach to biblical interpretation, he retained a magical view of the Bible; a daring partisan of Cartesian philosophy, he violated Descartes's own strict and prudent directive (enshrined in a decree of two Dutch provinces in 1656) of separation between philosophy and theology; a trenchant critic of some of orthodoxy's dearest first principles, he accepted uncritically some of its characteristic dogmas (e.g., scriptural infallibility, the Trinity); an advocate of religious pluralism and toleration, he blundered politically by providing ammunition to conservatives who warned that the new philosophy was hazardous to established religion, precipitating the condemnation of his own book, along with Spinoza's. Above all, he put a great question before his contemporaries: could the revolutionary new philosophy be an instrument that, applied to biblical interpretation, packed the power to overcome the divisions in Christendom, all of which, he supposed, were caused by disagreements over biblical interpretation?

Collaborators in philosophical scholarship, he and Spinoza were “beginning to become famous” already in the 1660s, following publication of Spinoza's critical work on Descartes (Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, 1663, with Meyer's introduction) and then Meyer's own book, which the latter touted as an antidote to the sectarian rivalries that bedeviled post-Reformation European Christendom.