If the fictive attribution to God of a royal power has such consequences, must not kings, for their part, have something to do with polytheism and metamorphoses? Must not the call not to confuse the power of God and the power of kings be read in these two senses?

When we read the call in this other sense, we leave behind metaphysics for current affairs. Spinoza wrote the Ethics at a time when Louis XIV had progressively extended his hegemony across Europe, quickly attaining prom-inence over the sovereigns of Spain, England, and the Emperor, encountering immediate resistance only from the United Provinces and particularly from Holland. Outside of its dominant Calvinism and its upstart economic success, Holland represented political alterity in Europe, the refuge for all dissidents and all religious sects; it was there too that lampoons and gazettes were published that would be clandestinely introduced into the kingdom of France. At the same time, the republican regime was itself threatened from within by the ascendence of monarchical absolutism, represented by the Prince of Orange. Louis XIV, though hardly in favour of an Orangist restoration for diplomatic reasons, led the punitive expedition of 1672 that delivered the coup de grâce to the republican experiment. This is when Spinoza, solicited by the diplomat Stouppe, declined the offer of a royal grant.

Everything thus happens as if the claim about the power of God and the power of kings had as its background these current affairs themselves: the relationship is too strong for it to be a matter of a mere coincidence. It seems moreover that the comparison could only have a sense if kings, in the imagination of the vulgar, were already distinguished as exceptional beings, at the limit of the human. But this observation would remain only half convincing if Spinoza had not himself inverted the formula.

The Divinisation of Kings

If we turn to the study of monarchy in the Political Treatise (VI–VII), we see that it is carried out in two stages: first the exposition of a viable constitution (fundamenta), then its reconstruction in a demonstrative mode.