Certamen Philosophicum by Isaac Orobio de Castro

This year marks a turning point in the history of the posthumous reception of Isaac Orobio de Castro’s work with the publication of the second revised edition of the first English translation of Certamen Philosophicum. This text of seventeenth-century Jewish philosophy, which for a long time remained inaccessible, is now available with an introduction by Seymour Feldman, including a foreword and notes by Jean-Pierre Rothschild, director of research emeritus at the CNRS, who authored the first translation in French. The revised edition, based on the Latin text of the 1703 edition, reconstructs the chronological order of the arguments exchanged between Orobio and Bredenburg, a Dutch Spinozist who tried to reconcile Spinoza’s thought with revealed religion.
Orobio displayed remarkable erudition, mastering classical philosophy, logic, and theology to methodically refute his opponent’s arguments. He points out the contradictions that arise from the attempt to marry Spinoza’s philosophy with the foundations of the revealed faith and accuses those who attempt this union of pursuing a hidden agenda: to lead people to atheism. Yet, despite Orobio’s argumentation and his intellectual victory, his philosophical combat, waged with the weapons of reason and tradition, was swept away by naturalism and materialism, until its resurgence today as the testimony of an independent intellectual resistance.  

Isaac Orobio acquired the respectful admiration of his outstanding opponents of Judaism, by his integrity and sharp dialectics. After him, no one in Amsterdam, the most cultivated community, could take his place, nor even less outside of it, where these conditions for an independent personage laden with culture were lacking.
— Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, (EP 3, PD 4, B.5, Ch.X). 

Orobio tried to defend the classical principles of faith and theology against Spinoza’s vision, expounded in his Ethics, a deterministic worldview, stripped of transcendence, in which God and nature were one (the famous Deus sive Natura). This philosophy was radical and revolutionary as it was unfounded, for it overturned the millenary classical philosophical paradigms of theology and philosophy.  

If Spinoza had pioneered a new generation of philosophical thought, as Wolfson claimed, Orobio would have served as a shield of the ancestors against rebellious students. The former still lives in the old traditional world, while the latter has opened a door to the modern world. — Seymour Feldman, Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, N° 37 (1988), I, p.224.

The publication of this new revised edition of the first translation of Certamen Philosophicum is a major event in the history of Jewish philosophy.
This edition brings a key text from the 17th-century debate between faith and reason within reach of a broader audience. Published by Le Cercle Hilliger, it contributes to a wider effort to revive classic works in the Veritas e terra orietur collection.
  

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