The “Style of God”. Language as Historical Mediation and Transformation of Biblical Authority in Spinoza

This article argues that Spinoza’s notion of the “style of Scripture” provides the methodological key to his historical conception of revelation and, more broadly, to a new theory of linguistic mediation. A comparative analysis with Robert Boyle’s theory of accommodation highlights two distinct early modern strategies for stabilizing scriptural authority: one grounded in divinely regulated linguistic adaptation, the other in historical-philological reconstruction. The divergence between these models reflects not a rupture between tradition and modernity, but competing attempts to account for the epistemic status of language and scriptural language in the early modern period.