Fiormichele Benigni
Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’ (fiormichele.benigni@gmail.com; orcid: 0000- 0003-0626-4149).
“Latet anguis sub herba”. Spinozism and God’s power in some theological debates.
Abstract: The article examines some academic theses discussed by German theologians between the 17th and 18th centuries, which focus on Spinoza’s ‘theology’. In particular, the topic of divine power allows Spinozism to be considered as a metaphysics that forces us to redefine the relationship between God’s attributes. In the reading of many theologians, the primacy of potentia Dei is, on the one hand, a paradigm that has immediate consequences for political theory; on the other hand, it is a warning bell for all post-Cartesian theology. The Almighty God urgently raises, in a context marked by Leibnizian and Wolffian discussions, the question of the theoretical foundations of worship, the distance between the creator and the created world, and the regularity of the laws of nature in relation to miraculous events.
Keywords: Spinoza; Disputationes; Dissertations; Cartesianism; Potentia Dei.