As early as the 1670s, and continually, right through the eighteenth century, one finds numerous references in the contemporary controversial literature, theological, philosophical and historical, in all the Western European countries, to ‘Spinoza’ as supposedly the foremost and most dangerous of the ‘atheists’ threatening Christianity, society and the moral order generally, and the ‘sect of Spinozists’ specifically as the veritable hard-core of the libertine underground challenging all the structures of authority then in place.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "As early as the 1670s, and continually, right through the eighteenth century, one finds numerous references in the contemporary controversial literature, theological, philosophical and historical, in all the Western European countries, to ‘Spinoza’ as supposedly the foremost and most dangerous of the ‘atheists’ threatening Christianity, society and the moral order generally, and the ‘sect of Spinozists’ specifically as the veritable hard-core of the libertine underground challenging all the structures of authority then in place." in the context of "Jonathan Israel, 'Spinoza and Spinozism in the Western Enlightenment: the Latest Turns in the Controversy,' (Araucaria: Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, nº 40, 2018)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.