Spinoza defines “finitude” as being subject to forces beyond one’s control. We are incurably finite, despite delusions to the contrary. We don’t bring ourselves into being and we can’t prevent ourselves from going out of being.
In between our helpless entrance and inevitable exit we experience events that also lie beyond our control and that affect us deeply, in our souls. That is to say, these events seem either to facilitate our essential project to persist in our being and flourish in the world — our essential conatus— or to hinder that project.
To experience what seems to be an increase in one’s endeavor to persist, to feel oneself flourishing, expanding outward into the world, is pleasure; and to experience a decrease in one’s power to persist, to feel one’s self diminishing, contracting out of the world, is pain. Desire, the third of the “primary emotions,” is the consciousness of our endeavor to persist and thrive, and specific desires, too, just like specific pleasures and pains, come adjoined with judgments; in the case of desires, these are judgments as to what will further our lifelong project to persist and flourish. The judgments adjoined to desires often make for character traits, such as ambitiousness, avariciousness, depressiveness, pridefulness, and humility.
One can’t help being committed in a special way to one’s self. One’s special interest in, and concern for, the one thing that one happens to be is part and parcel of just being that thing. No one else can do for me what I am doing in being me. When there will be no one that has this same stake in my persisting, then there won’t be me.
None of these remarks, remember, are yet ethical. He has not yet moved from “is” to “ought.” He’s simply trying to capture one of the most elusive of all “is” facts: the fact of one’s identity. To be this thing is to be interested in this thing in a way unduplicated by my interests in other things, as vivid as these may be. And nothing else can explain this special interest in myself that I have other than my simply being myself. My keen interests in other things, including other specific people, will call for some additional facts about me and my relation to these others. For example, there are two young women in whose thriving my whole being is involved so that the increase in their pleasure is my pleasure, the increase in their pain my pain. The additional facts that explain this keen participation in their well-being is that these two young women are my daughters.
Spinoza will of course try to close the gap between “is” and “ought,” just as he tries to close the gap between “if ” and “is.” His comments about conatus will serve as the original stance from which morality will be deduced. Just as God is immanent within nature, morality is immanent within human nature. But first, there is human nature to be explored. To this end, Spinoza produces, out of the implications of conatus, a theory of the emotions. “I shall, therefore, treat of the nature and strength of the emotions according to the same method, as I employed heretofore in my investigations concerning God and the mind. I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.”1
All the emotions, Spinoza reasons, must follow from this basic situation: that I am committed to my life’s going well, since that commitment, in all the myriad ways in which it manifests itself, is irrepressibly me; that my life’s going well or not is subject to things beyond my control (just another way of saying that I’m finite); that I make judgments about how various things affect my life for better or for worse, and these very judgments (which may, like all judgments, be either true or false) themselves affect me as experiences of pleasure and pain.
The feeling of love, for example, is simply the sense that things are going pretty damn well, that, at least in some respects, I am flourishing, together with the judgment that there is a certain thing, the beloved object, that is responsible for this flourishing. The judgmental component may be seriously, tragically wrong, of course. I can even be deluded in thinking that I’m really flourishing. The nonpropositional and propositional components of emotion — the raw feelings of pleasure or pain versus the various judgments — are reciprocally interactive. Just thinking that I’m flourishing gives me the feeling of pleasure that reinforces the judgment that I’m flourishing.
All the emotions involve feelings of our self ’s either expanding — our flourishing, our endeavor to persist in the world succeeding — or diminishing, which explains why emotions grip us as they do; and, too, emotions involve our judgments as to what is causing this modification in our life’s project and the reason why it is so affecting us. The greater portion of Part III of The Ethics goes through basic emotions — love, hate, anger, remorse, envy, vengeance, pity, shame, scorn, complacency (he tells us, rightly, that there are far more emotions than there are names to showcase them) — showing them first of all as species of pleasure (the sense of expansiveness) or pain (the sense of contraction) and then the propositional judgments that complete them.
Things can get complicated, in fact lurid, given the combinatorial possibilities. So, for example, Proposition XLI is If anyone conceives that he is loved by another, and believes he has given no cause for such love, he will love that other in return. However, the corollary of this is He who imagines that he is loved by one whom he hates will be a prey to conflicting hatred and love. And the note to this corollary is truly of potboiler potential: If hatred be the prevailing emotion, he will endeavor to injure him who loves him; this emotion is called cruelty, especially if the victim be believed to have given no ordinary cause for hatred.
The deduction of our emotional responses from our very sense of ourselves might suggest that we are helpless, if front-row, spectators at the play of our own lives: “I think,” he says toward the end of Part III, “I have thus explained, and displayed through their primary causes, the principal emotions and vacillations of spirit, which arise from the combination of the three primary emotions, to wit, desire, pleasure, and pain. It is evident from what I have said, that we are in many ways driven about by external causes, and that like waves of the sea driven by contrary winds, we toss to and fro unwitting of the issue and of our fate.”
But the suggestion of our impotence, contained within the vivid image of waves tossed about by contrary winds, is false. As mentioned before, Spinoza is no fatalist. Because our emotions intrinsically involve judgments — it is part of their very makeup — we don’t have to accept them lying down. Rather, we can critically evaluate the judgments that they contain and, if they are wrong, correct them, thereby transforming the content of the emotions themselves, transforming the emotions. Since the very process of correcting erroneous judgments is expansive — to understand is to expand ourselves into the world, reproducing the world in our own minds, appropriating it into our very selves — to understand one’s emotions, even the most painful of them, is necessarily pleasurable. It requires one’s getting out of oneself, seeing oneself clearheadedly as just another thing in the world, treating one’s own emotions as dispassionately as a problem in geometry.
This maneuvering outside of oneself is a difficult thing to do, given the terrifically powerful centripetal forces of conatus, keeping one, quite literally, together, in the process warping one’s worldview, making one’s vision of the world conform to one’s commitment to oneself. But the dispassionate knowledge of oneself is also, to the extent that we can achieve it, the most self-expansive of all experiences, the most liberating, the boundaries of one’s self stretching to incorporate the infinite system of explanations that constitute the very world: Deus sive natura. To see one’s own self from the vast and intricate scope afforded by the View from Nowhere is almost to lose the sense that that one thing in the world — so hell-bent on its own existence among all the other things so hell-bent on their existence — is one’s very own self. One can never inhabit one’s own self quite the same way again, which is to say that one has changed. Among all the wrong things Mrs. Schoenfeld said when she spoke to us about Spinoza, none was more wrong than her charge that Spinoza cynically entitled his work The Ethics. Spinoza’s system is meant to do the hard work of ethics: insinuate itself inside the self and change it from the inside out.
There is an inverse relationship, somewhat paradoxical, between expanding to become more than what you were and the degree of importance with which you regard yourself. The more expansive one’s self, the less the sense of self-importance. The tendency to overinflate one’s significance in the world, simply because of the forces of inward attention and devotion keeping one oneself, undergoes corrective adjustments in the light of the objective point of view. Virtue follows naturally; supernatural directives are not required. One won’t behave as if other people matter in precisely the same way that one’s self matters only because it has been engraved on tablets of stone, and one fears the consequences of incurring the wrath of the Engraver. Rather, one will behave with what he calls “high-mindedness”—the desire “whereby every man endeavors, solely under the dictates of reason, to aid other men and to unite them to himself in friendship”2—because, having stood beside oneself and viewed the world as it is, unwarped by one’s identity within it, one will understand that there is nothing of special significance about one’s own endeavor to persist and flourish that doesn’t pertain to others’ same endeavors. One will therefore, simply as a matter of reason, want for others precisely what one wants for oneself. “The good which everyman, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men, and so much the more, in proportion as he has a greater knowledge of God.”3
The world is such, he argues, that it can be known through and through by the faculty of reason, the faculty of grasping necessary connections, logical entailments. A priori reason alone can give us the world because the world itself is nothing but logic, an infinite system of logical entailments that is aware of itself, and that can be conceptualized alternatively as God or nature: Deus sive natura. Mrs. Schoenfeld was seriously mistaken in thinking that, for Spinoza, nature is nothing but nature. “Who doesn’t believe in nature,” she had demanded, “since it’s what we see all around us?” Not Spinoza’s nature, Mrs. Schoenfeld. Spinoza’s nature can be grasped only through the faculty of pure reason, thinking its way through proofs. “For the eyes of the mind, whereby it sees and observes things, are none other than proofs.”4
The Ethics opens with a definition that will eventually, through systematic deduction, unveil Spinoza’s vision of that vast and infinite system of logical entailments that constitute reality itself: By that which is self-caused (causa sui) I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent. The Ethics closes by speaking of our own salvation: If the way which I have pointed out, as leading to this result, seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
From causa sui to salvation. Salvation is achieved by bringing the vision of the causa sui—the vast and infinite system of logical entailments of which each of us is but one entailment — into one’s very own conception of oneself, and, with that vision reconstituting oneself, henceforward living, as it were, outside of oneself. The point, for Spinoza, is not to become insiders, but rather outsiders. The point is to become ultimate outsiders.
The word “ecstasy” derives from the Greek for “to stand outside of.” To stand outside of what? Of oneself. It is in that original sense that Spinoza offers us something new under the sun: ecstatic rationalism. He makes of the faculty of reason, as it was identified through Cartesianism, a means of our salvation. The preoccupations of his inquisitorially oppressed community come together with the mathematical inspiration of Cartesianism to give us the system of Spinoza.
The ecstatic impulse in Spinoza’s rationalism distinguishes him from the other two figures with whom he shares equal billing in such courses as the one I teach, “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.” But then René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were members of the European majority. They were Christians. They were rationalists who had the luxury of taking their own religious ideas for granted. Neither Descartes nor Leibniz had to solve, as Spinoza did, especially brought up in that particular community, the wrenching problem of Jewish identity, of Jewish history and Jewish suffering. Only Spinoza needed to fight his way clear of the dilemmas of Jewish being, fighting all the way to ecstasy.
Spinoza names the ecstasy his system delivers Amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God. This love, as its name suggests, is at once a cognitive and an emotional state, and it is the very highest state achievable, whether measured on the scale of cognition or emotional well-being.
It is, first of all, maximally knowledgeable, constituting the third, and highest, level of knowledge, scientia intuitiva, or intuitive knowledge. (Below intuitive knowledge lies ratio, or scientific knowledge, which involves the explanation of finite things by their necessary connections to their finite causes. Using ratio, [configurations of] bodies are derived from other [configurations of] bodies via the mathematically expressed laws of nature. And below scientific knowledge lies imagination, which, for Spinoza, includes all the passively received data of the senses, devoid as they are of any inkling of the necessary connections that constitute reality. For Spinoza, unlike Descartes, the distinction between the imaginative and the veridically perceptual is no consequential distinction at all.) In intuitive knowledge, the highest level of knowledge, each thing is grasped in the context of the infinite explanatory system, Deus sive natura, that is, the world, the details of which cannot — precisely because they are infinite — be exhaustibly grasped in their inexhaustible entirety but can nevertheless be holistically intuited. In intuitive knowledge, the whole entailed system — for each implicated thing entails the whole implicative order — is made palpably, if intuitively, present. We can only approach this third level asymptotically. We can never achieve it fully, since to do so would be to possess the mind of God, the thinking with which the infinite order of necessary connections thinks itself.
In addition to being the highest cognitive state, the intellectual love of God is an emotional state (for Spinoza the cognitive and emotional are constantly, necessarily, merged), and, again, it ranks as the highest state possible, this time judged in terms of one’s emotional well-being. This outward absorption of the self into a vision of Deus sive natura, being maximally expansive, is also maximally pleasurable. The very activity of explanation, the exhilarating sense of expanding one’s ideas to take in more of the world, and thus the exhilarating sense of one’s own outward expansiveness into the world, is, in itself, a sort of love, only now with the explanation of the world — which is the world — as its object. And the exhilaration is aided and abetted by the sense of firm control, the activity of loving expansiveness not to be cut short by the loved object’s independence of (finite) mind and fickleness of spirit. The painful urgency and insecurity of love are eliminated when it no longer seeks to complete itself in another person but rather in the understanding of God, that is, of the vast infinite system of implications from which we ourselves are implied.
Conatus, our essence, which dictates that all of our intentions derive from our concerns with our own selves, leads us, if we truly attempt to fulfill ourselves, to see ourselves from the outside, as it were, from the point of view of the infinite system that explains all. True devotion to ourselves will lead us to an objectivity so radical that even our own demise can be contemplated with equanimity. “A free man,” Spinoza tells us in Part IV of The Ethics, “thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.”
One of Spinoza’s uncompleted manuscripts is called The Treatise on the Emendation of the Understanding. Its subject is knowledge — what it is and how we acquire it — and Spinoza presumably left off completing it because he realized that his hierarchical theory of knowledge would have to be shown to follow — as all else, for him, follows — from the infinity of necessary connections that is the world.
But the interrupted Treatise is of special interest because of its opening paragraph, which is often cited to be the most revealingly autobiographical passage Spinoza ever gave us:
After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else; whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
This is the only place in his writings where he seems to reveal to us something of the person who stands behind the formidably impersonal system, seeming to share the motive that lay behind its production. Spinoza tells us that he, like all of us, was searching for happiness. He even appears to confess that he had a normal appreciation for the sorts of goods that are commonly supposed to bring us happiness: riches, fame, and sensual pleasure. The problems with the three goods, he discovers, is that they fail to deliver maximum pleasure. They fall far short of yielding continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
The problem, for example, with sensual pleasure is that, while we desire it, it so enthralls us that it blocks our vision of all other goals, but once the pleasure is sated “it is followed by extreme melancholy, whereby the mind, though not enthralled, is disturbed and dull.”
(This observation raises a question that I will parenthetically raise merely to parenthetically drop, namely, on what was Spinoza’s knowledge of sexual experience based? I think it’s fair to say that none of us has the slightest idea. It could have involved another person — maybe a prostitute? maybe the Clara Marie who might have rejected him for the suitor with the pearl necklace? — or maybe not. Having another person present isn’t required in order to experience that extreme melancholy that follows sexual satiety. The third part of The Ethics seems to demonstrate some familiarity with the misery of sexual jealousy: for example, the scholium to Proposition XXXV reads: “He who thinks of a woman whom he loves as giving herself to another will not only feel pain by reason of his own appetite being checked but also, being compelled to associate the image of the object of his love with the sexual parts of his rival, he feels disgust for her.” However, since this is a deductive system, this scholium, like any other proposition in The Ethics, might in principle have been inferred a priori, with no experience necessary.)
Then, too, if this sensual pleasure involves another person it exposes one to the problems that likewise plague the pursuit of riches and fame, namely making one vulnerable to factors beyond one’s control. “If our hopes are frustrated, we are plunged into the deepest sadness.” Fame has “the further drawback that it compels its votaries to order their lives according to the opinions of their fellow-men.” And we have seen what Spinoza thinks of the opinions of the multitude. Given that these opinions are, according to his theory of knowledge, basically worthless, since their ideas remain on the level of imagination, why should the esteem of the many, which is what fame is, constitute a good?
The ecstatic rationalism that Spinoza works out for us in The Ethics claims not only to deliver us a world woven out of the very fabric of logic, unlike any that we could perceive by way of our so-called experience of the world, or even by way of our scientific explanations of our experience; it also claims to provide us with an ecstatic experience, the intellectual love of God, unlike any that we could have arrived at in any other way. It is the desire for that continuous, supreme, and unending happiness which Spinoza cites as his motive for his system.
But though this opening paragraph of the unfinished treatise might seem to speak in Spinoza’s most personal voice, the desire for “happiness” to which he confesses is blandly impersonal, a one-size-fits-all motivation for what is the most rigorous project of rationalism in the history of Western thought. The motivation Spinoza was prepared to put to paper was as universal and impersonal as the finished system it supposedly provoked. What he does not tell us — what he cannot tell us — is that his ecstatic rationalism is a solution to a far more particular problem.
It is the problem of Jewish history.
If the supposedly most autobiographical passage in Spinoza’s writings — the opening paragraphs of the unfinished Treatise—yield precious little of the person behind the system, where then can we find him? Certainly not in the sculpted formalism of The Ethics. Here is the View from Nowhere, still and calm, ordered as reality itself is ordered, a matrix of logical entailments, timeless as mathematics and just as impersonal.
The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, however, is a slightly different story. Spinoza interrupted his work on The Ethics to compose the Tractatus, which — as Mrs. Schoenfeld rightly suggested — scholars believe was partly based on the apologia he composed in Spanish immediately after his excommunication. Perhaps that explains the somewhat less guarded tone that pervades it. His anti-clerical denunciations palpably tremble with outrage. Spinoza somehow or other hoped that this work, which argues against the existence of miracles—So those who have recourse to the will of God when there is something they do not understand are but trifling; this is no more than a ridiculous way of avowing one’s ignorance5—and against the special role of the Jews—Therefore at the present time there is nothing whatsoever that the Jews can arrogate to themselves above other nations6—and that the Bible was written by many authors, whose gifts for prophecy resided not in their more perfect mind, but with a more perfect power of imaginations,7 would convince his contemporaries to give him a clean bill of theological health so that he might be allowed to publish his philosophical masterpiece.8 (There is probably a falsifying optimism that accompanies any ambitious writer’s undertakings. A realistic assessment of the chances that one’s labors will produce the desired response would advise one to give up before beginning.)
The Tractatus is far more informal and far less controlled than The Ethics, and in it the first-person voice of Spinoza sometimes speaks, as in this passage, which comes after Spinoza has been arguing that the many chronological inconsistencies and repetitions of the Scriptures argue compellingly that they were authored by several writers, not one, and certainly not by Moses, who could not have had access to many of the facts related:
Indeed, I may add that I write nothing here that is not the fruit of lengthy reflection; and although I have been educated from boyhood in the accepted beliefs concerning Scripture, I have felt bound in the end to embrace the views I here express.
I read these words and my imagination is engaged. The sense of his boyhood world, in certain ways quite similar to my girlhood world, rises up in the phrase “I have been educated from boyhood up in the accepted beliefs.” His life unfolds in the words “I have felt bound in the end to embrace the views I here express.” Spinoza would advise me to disengage my imagination, but I think not.
A page from the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
To indulge in an imagined sense of his life would count perhaps as one more betrayal of Spinoza. If the personal point of view — that substance of one’s mental life that is the accumulated effects of one’s contingently lived history — are intellectually and ethically negligible, then what value can be placed on a novelist’s attempt to imagine her way into another’s life? Of what redeemable value is such an exercise even when it is his life, Benedictus Spinoza’s, the architect of radical objectivity itself, that one is attempting to inhabit? It is the personal point of view, only once removed, blurring the line between truth and fiction (such blurring is of the essence of the art), mixing the actual thoughts of the philosopher (however conscientiously italicized and marked with endnotes) with mere imaginings.
Spinoza argues that the highest level of reason amounts to a sort of love. I would argue that the highest level of imagination also amounts to a sort of love. I would further argue that the imaginative acts by which we try to grasp the substance of others, that specific singularity of them that resists universalizing into the collective rational imperson, are a necessary component of the moral life. Spinoza, of course, would disagree. Spinoza’s proofs were aimed at inducing only an impersonal love in us, Amor dei intellectualis, love for the infinite system that is reality. He does not approve of forsaking philosophy’s proofs, the eyes of the mind, for imaginative sight, no matter how love-infused the sight might be.
What did Spinoza think of this novelist-beloved faculty of the mind, the imagination? Perhaps it is of some consolation to learn that, in Spinoza, imagination fares no worse than does perception. But then imagination fares no better than perception, either. Both are placed together on the lowest rung of the intellectual and ethical progression that the mind must make in its ascent to radical objectivity, that purity of high-mindedness that leaves behind the stubbornly personal residue of selves, one’s own self as well as others’.
The man who first taught Spinoza Latin and helped to introduce him onto the greater stage of the drama of the seventeenth century, Franciscus van den Enden, had perhaps lulled the young philosopher into liking the theaterical arts. There is a single reference to the arts in The Ethics, when he is listing the innocent pleasures that do not interfere with a life of reason, and it is to the theater. Still the mature philosopher could have little considered regard for imagination, a faculty not known for its skill in grasping logical entailments, and therefore a faculty to be deemed both cognitively and ethically negligible.
But here I disagree.
The first thing to notice is the eyes, large and liquid and luminous. When he looks down to read from the Hebrew prayer book on his desk — at this first level in the Talmud Torah the children are learning to read Hebrew from the siddur—his long black lashes seem to rest on his pale cheeks. His face is beautiful, the whiteness of his skin making his eyes appear unnaturally dark, as if they consist of nothing but pupil. His pallor is not only the result of the long hours in the classroom but also of the weak constitution that he has inherited from his mother, who died a year before he started school.
(We know of Baruch’s beauty and of his pallor from the two inquisitorial spies, who both offered physical descriptions of him. According to the account offered by Friar Tomás, the young philosopher is “a small man, with a beautiful face, a pale complexion, black hair and black eyes.” The Spanish soldier adds that he had “a well-formed body, thin, long black hair, a small moustache of the same color, a beautiful face.” The friar uses the word blanco, white, to describe the striking pallor.)
He can’t remember the face of his mother, Hanna, except contorted with terrible coughing. She lay in the grandly carved four-poster bed with the red velvet curtains drawn9 His sister Miriam, three years older than he, was his little mother, his mais velha, until his new mother, Esther, arrived.
Baruch shares a room with his brother Isaac, who also coughs all through the winter nights, terrifying Baruch.10
His family rents a house on the Houtgracht, close to his school. He has only to walk down the street each morning, with his older brother and his father, who is on his way to the synagogue for shakharith, the morning prayer. They cross the canal and then they are there, at the Talmud Torah, set up in two houses that the community rents, right next door to “the Antwerpen,” the house used as a synagogue by the Beth Jacob congregation. The family lives in the heart of the Jewish quarter. As they walk together each morning, they are greeted on all sides by others walking in the same direction as they.
He must be at his desk by eight. The morning class always begins with prayers. The first one they learn is the Shema. His teacher, or rubi, explains carefully that this is the most important Jewish prayer. He tells them what Baruch already knows, that there are many in Portugal who are risking their lives even now, while “you sit safe in Amsterdam.” These “forced ones” hide the holy words in the feet of Catholic statues, and hang them on the doorposts of their houses: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One! Imagining these forced ones, Baruch sometimes carries a stool to the doorpost of the bedroom he shares with his brother. He climbs up so that, stretching, the tips of his fingers almost touch the mezuzah. He brings his fingers to his lips and considers how this act could cost him his life in Portugal.
After the three hours of morning instruction, there is a break in the day, for three hours, when the children return to their homes. Baruch walks with his older brother. Most families have hired private tutors to teach the children during the midday break, and so it is for Baruch and Isaac — and later, when he is older, for Gabriel. Their father takes a strong interest in his sons’ education.
Michael Spinoza has twice served as a parnas on the board of governors supervising the community’s jeshibot. And as soon as the Etz Chaim foundation is established, in 1637, he inscribes his own name and those of his three sons. The foundation provides scholarships for gifted but needy students whose parents cannot afford tuition. Thank God, Michael Spinoza can afford not only to provide for his sons’ education, but has made a charitable contribution of 52 guilders in addition to the 18 guilders required to be a member of Etz Chaim.
Baruch returns to school for three more hours of instruction, from two until five, and after that the schoolchildren go with their teachers, and the men of the community, to the synagogue, the Esnoga, for the evening service of ma’ariv and the singing of psalms. The time for ma’ariv is calibrated to the setting of the sun, so in the winter school is dismissed earlier.
A child stays at each level for as long as it takes him to master the subject matter, usually for more than a year. At the first level he learns to read and write Hebrew. At the next level, he learns to recite each week’s parsha, the weekly Torah portion to be chanted in the synagogue on the Sabbath day. By the third grade he is translating the parsha into Spanish, and also learning Rashi’s commentary.
Learning by rote is stressed at the first levels of instruction. A child will be called upon to recite the parsha, and will yell it out in a voice as loud as possible, the more quickly the better, showing with his speed how well he has mastered the Hebrew. Then he explains the passage in Spanish, more quietly. They preserve the Marranos’ respect for Spanish, the language of culture.
Baruch reads the Hebrew with the syllables flowing effortlessly. But his voice is low, sometimes falling to a whisper, and the rubi calls out in his harsh voice, “Louder, louder! The words of the Torah are not to be hidden in whispers but shouted out loud!”
He tends toward solemnity, spurning his classmates’ pranks and high jinks. They don’t care for him much. He makes no trouble for anyone in class, and always listens intently as his rubi speaks. He is quiet and respectful, always with the right answer ready on his lips if he’s called upon, but rarely offering to speak up for himself. The rubi has many children in his classroom — thank God the community grows, the classes are crowded — and has little time to guess at what goes on behind the quiet child’s strange black eyes.
He is a gracile child, not strong to look at. Few would guess the degree of strength inside, the fierceness of his independence.
He is someone who knows, from the very beginning, what a good explanation is. Nobody taught him this. He simply knows. He loves it when an explanation fits firmly into place, leaving no space at all. When he understands why something is the way it is, why it has to be that way, the knowing feels like pleasure to him, like a laughing in his mind. And when explanations are bad, he feels it almost like a physical pain, like some small animal gnawing at his chest.
He knows it’s supposed to be good to believe what his teachers say and he tries hard to do it. His teachers praise his quick mind, his tenacious memory, and he likes them to like him. He’s a motherless child. But he often wonders why those who are so much older than he is, placed in the position to instruct him, try to jam explanations into places that they can’t go. Mostly, he holds his tongue and doesn’t question. Derech eretz has been drilled into him since he was very young.
But by fourteen, fifteen, he is too gnawed by his questions not to pose them in class, though he always deliberates a long time before speaking up. The questions seem so glaring; he is certain that the rabbis have asked them of themselves. The answers he receives astound him with the knowledge that they haven’t. They don’t understand what he is asking at all. They think that they’ve answered him, they produce the preformed explanations, but he knows better. He knows better, and, what’s more, he now knows that he knows better. He doesn’t push them, not only for derech eretz’s sake, but also because he’s come to see that there’s little point. He understands the way that all their explanations go, the general form that they will take.
Engraving of Baruch Spinoza in the National Library in Paris (Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris)
All the answers that the rabbis offer in terms of the will of God produce that telltale gnaw in his chest. These are explanations that make reference to what are called final causes in the Aristotelian system that had so impressed the philosopher Maimonides, whom Rabbi Morteira in turn reveres. The world is explained by reference to God’s final causes, the ends that He has in view. Our Torah lays out the divine final causes. All of its 613 commandments are to be explained by reference to God’s final causes. All of Jewish history is an expression of the divine final causes.
Here is one of the questions that Spinoza asks his rabbis that convinces him of the pointlessness of asking them any more questions: Does God have reasons for his halakhic choices? Either He does or He doesn’t. That’s simple logic. So consider God’s wanting us to refrain from doing all work on the Sabbath, the way the rabbis teach, distinguishing between the thirty-nine varieties of work, and then making their halakhic decisions — their pisakim—on the basis of analogical reasoning from these varieties. But does God have any reason for demanding we refrain from these thirty-nine varieties of work on the seventh day of the week? Does He, for that matter, have any reasons for asking us to refrain from slandering our fellow men and caring for the defenseless orphan? Again, either He does or He doesn’t. If he does, then whatever reasons God Himself has for His choices, presumably ethical reasons, constitute the reasons for the choices, and all reference to God is beside the point. And what could these reasons be that provide God with His reasons, reigning over God, and negating the assertion that God’s choices provide the ultimate explanation?
Or else God has no reasons at all for His choices. That we are asked to refrain from smoking our pipes on the Sabbath day and to not put out our hands to take from our neighbors whatever tickles our fancies are all mere whims of the Almighty, backed up by no reasons at all but His own personal fancies. He might just as well have willed that we do exactly the opposite. Perhaps someday He’ll dictate a new set of tablets to some Mosaic scribe and simply negate all his former precepts, and we’ll have to jump to it and slander our neighbors and steal their property and, by the will of God, commit adultery.
No, he concludes (though he cannot get his rabbis to conclude along with him), all references to the will of God explain nothing.11
His father had died, as had his stepmother a few years before. The passing of his father made a great difference to him. Michael Spinoza could tolerate only so much of his son’s independence of mind. He had been a pillar of the Amsterdam Jewish community, twice serving as a parnas. He had an exaggerated respect for the rabbis. Like so many who had been born in Portugal, he himself knew no Hebrew (his Dutch was poor as well, and he often needed one of his five children to translate official documents for him), and so he tended to be overly impressed with those who made claim to Jewish scholarship.
Still, he had little patience for self-righteousness, and his sharp merchant’s eye could spot a fake. Once, when Spinoza was about ten, his father sent him to collect a debt from one of his customers. The woman was making a great show of praying when he arrived, and made Baruch wait while she finished her psalms, sighing with kavana, devotion. When she was finally done, she stuffed some ducats into a purse for Spinoza, all the while extolling his father for being such a God-fearing Jew, observing the Law of Moses, and simpering to him that he must imitate his father and grow up to be such afine specimen of a Jew. There was something in the woman’s manner that smacked so loudly to him of the false piety his father had warned him about that Baruch steeled himself to receive the woman’s show of outrage and demanded that she count out the money for him. As he’d suspected, the purse came up short; she had a slit in the dining room table where she had secreted some of the missing coins.12 When Baruch came home, he and his father hada good laugh over it, and his father praised Baruch for his good head.
“You’ll be a khakham of the community yourself, someday. You’ll be the first child born here in Amsterdam to lead the community.”
Baruch, seeing the expression on his father’s face, the false light cast backward from this imagined future glory making his dark eyes glow, kept his silence. Even as he grows older, his doubts mounting, he preserves the Jewish virtue of shalom bayis, peace within the household, and keeps his thoughts to himself. And he sits shiva faithfully for his father, keeps all the laws of mourning as they extend over the year following his father’s death, and also keeps up with his pledges to the community’s various charities, since such donations had meant so much to his father.13
The explanations Spinoza hears, even the most rational of them — never mind the wild imaginings of the kabbalistic master Aboab and his followers — feed the doubt in Spinoza’s chest, gnawing now like a hungry beast. Still, he continues to study, even after he officially leaves the yeshiva and goes into business, first his father’s and then, after his father’s passing, founding an import and export business with his younger brother: Bento y Gabriel de Spinoza.
There are various independent learning centers, jeshibot, in the community, supported by the wealthy, so that the men can continue to observe the mitzvah of Torah learning even while they earn their living. After all, scholarship has, ever since the destruction of the Temple, taken the place of the old ceremonies of worship, the pilgrims’ holidays, and sacrifices. Advance in Jewish learning constitutes, in itself, an ethical activity. The rabbis were right in this. The mind’s absolute virtue is to understand. The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind’s virtue is to know God.14
Years later, after Spinoza’s excommunication, a man named Daniel Levi — his alias “Miguel”—de Barrios, a Spanish-born Marrano and a poet, writing in Spanish, and also the Amsterdam community’s official chronicler, alludes to Spinoza’s attendance in Rabbi Morteira’s school, which is called Keter Torah, or Crown of the Law, as well as to that of the other excommunicated heretic, Daniel de Prado, in carefully chosen words:
The Crown of the Law [Corona de la ley], ever since the year of its joyous foundation, never ceased burning in the academic bush, thanks to the doctrinal leaves written by the most wise Saul Levi Morteira, lending his intellect to the counsel of Wisdom and his pen to the hand of Speculation, in the defense of religion and against atheism. Thorns [Espinos] are they that in the Fields [Prados] of impiety, aim to shine with the fire that consumes them, and the zeal of Morteira is a flame that burns in the bush of Religion, never to be extinguished [emphases in the original Spanish].15
He chooses Rabbi Morteira’s establishment, even though the man’s authoritarian manner can be grating on the nerves. The rabbi’s self-regard often pushes him toward putting a wrong construction on others’ words, understanding them to be stating obvious falsehoods. A man like Rabbi Morteira will take most pleasure in contemplating himself, when he contemplates some quality which he denies others.16 Therefore, it is characteristic of the rabbi to deny others’ intelligence.
Still, the rabbi’s rationalistic approach has more to offer than do the kabbalistic ravings of Aboab. One would have to believe that these visionaries’ visions — Ha-Ari’s claimed communiqués from the prophet Elijah — were self-authenticating forms of experience. There is nothing in their content that convinces Baruch that they were. Whatever it is that these mystics are seeing, their sight does not come from the eyes of the mind. If any faculty of their minds is particularly active it is their imaginations.
He is always surprised to hear what it is that others find convincing. He understands, of course, what it feels like to have a powerful need for answers pounding inside. But the answers that people come up with to stop the pounding: he would rather live with the pounding. Better the pounding than the gnawing.
By now Baruch has come to question another constant feature in all the explanations of the rabbis: the special role they incessantly insist on giving the Jewish people. This insistence is a presupposition of all discussions. It is the very air that they all breathe. How startling to consider that one could simply step away and breathe in another atmosphere entirely.
The idea of the separate destiny of the Jewish people is inseparable from explanations in terms of divine final causes. If one gives up the latter, one is forced by logic to give up the former. But if the former is false, then all the woe of the Jews is in some sense brought on them by their own insistence on their separate destiny, and the hatred that this very insistence has incurred, which hatred then, in a macabre dance of reciprocity, ensures their separate existence. That they are preserved largely through the hatred of other nations is demonstrated by historical fact.17
It is distressful to view the history of the Jews from this perspective. One cannot completely overcome one’s passive sympathy for people one understands so well. It is more distressful in some ways than participating vicariously in the litany of their sorrows, as he had long been accustomed to doing, from boyhood up, feeling each lash on the body of the nation of Israel as falling directly on himself. But to think in this way — in the words of the kabbalistically crazed Aboab, to conceive that “[a]ll Israelites are a single body and their soul is hewn from the place of Unity”—is to think narrowly and thus erroneously, from inside a point of view that is simply the passive bequest of the conditions of one’s birth.
Our knowledge of truth can’t possibly be a function of such brute contingencies. Our apprehension of the truth can’t be passive at all, but active, a function of the exercise of reason — the same reason that exists in all men. He has far more in common with men, whichsoever people they may have been born into, who reason their way to their conclusions rather than accepting them as gifts from the ancestors. In so far only as men live in obedience to reason, do they always necessarily agree in nature.18
And to exercise this reason, to find through it a perfect-fit explanation, is exquisite pleasure. It is the pleasure of feeling one’s point of view expanding outward, taking in more of reality, and this expansion of the mind means that one’s very own self is expanding as well. And the expansion of the self is the very essence of pleasure, as the contraction of the self is pain. So even if the explanation itself is not to one’s personal liking, even if one had personally wished the world to be arranged otherwise — to believe, for example, that one is so fortunate as to have been born into the people most favored by God — still to expand one’s point of view is, in itself, pleasure. It is rational pleasure — rational both because it consists in reason’s work and because it is a pleasure that lies entirely in the mind’s own power to perform— inward and private, like the Marranos’ inner avowal of the hegemony of the Mosaic Law. No outer authority, no inquisitorial ferocity of church or mosque or synagogue, can remove the mind’s own decision to think clearly for itself, to seek perfect-fit explanations, and to find them and rejoice. This is freedom.
Spinoza is engaging in his new business adventure with his brother, Gabriel, and his dealings in the bourse, the mercantile exchange, open up his world somewhat wider. He meets disaffected Christians from some of the dissenting sects — the Mennonites, the Remonstrants, the Quakers— who collectively call themselves Collegiants, because they have meetings, or “colleges,” every other Sunday, when they discuss questions of theology, studying Scripture for themselves and trying to interpret it without the influence of the established answers. The atmosphere of these colleges is vastly different from that of the jeshiva.
It is shocking at first to feel himself to have so much more in common with these Gentiles than with the majority of Jews he has known all his life and with whom he shares his history. It is shocking to discover that he understands these strangers better, as they understand him better, than the members of his synagogue, even of his family. Within his community there is only de Prado with whom he can talk about matters of religious belief. Those he has the most in common with are those who think about the questions he thinks about — and why should those questions be determined by what quarter of Amsterdam one resides in? The world is equally there for all of us to think about, the same world, posing the same questions to our intelligence.
It is impossible that man would not be a part of nature, or that he should not follow her general order; but if he be thrown among individuals whose nature is in harmony with his own, his power of action will thereby be aided and fostered, whereas if he be thrown among such as are but very little in harmony with his nature, he will hardly be able to accommodate himself to them without undergoing a great change himself.19
Knowing ancient Hebrew as he does, he has much to teach his new friends about the reading of Scripture, though of course he does not teach it as he had been taught. He is trying to work out the right methodology of applying scientific principles to these most problematic texts, asking questions of them that have never been asked.20 But the extent of his own ignorance that is opened up to him in his conversations with others amazes him. He has spent a lifetime studying, yearning above all else to attain knowledge, and what, after all, does he know?
He begins to haunt Amsterdam’s bookshops. Amsterdam is famous throughout Europe for its bookshops, of which there are reputed to be upwards of four hundred. The civil authorities here are far more tolerant of the printed word than are those anywhere else, so authors from all over Europe send their manuscripts to this city in order to be published. This makes for unbelievable riches for the bibiophiles who flock here. You can find books in many of Europe’s languages, and also find people who themselves are native speakers of other languages, seeking books here that they can’t obtain in their own countries. There are exceedingly fine conversations to be had in the aisles of bookshops, people to be met here who make one question whether solitude is a state always to be preferred over company.
Nothing can be in more harmony with the nature of any given thing than other individuals of the same species; therefore for man in the preservation of his being and the enjoyment of the rational life there is nothing more useful than his fellow-man who is led by reason21 He learns of the explosive ideas of the Frenchman René Descartes, the author of such works as Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Searching After Truth in the Sciences, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy. Descartes is a revolutionary in diverse ways. Even the language he chose in which to publish wasn’t the Latin that serves as the lingua franca of all scholars, but rather the vulgate French. All men, not only the trained scholars, have the capacity for reason. In fact, it might be easier for the uninitiated to exercise their lumen naturale, their natural light of reason, than those who have had it occluded by the dense fogs of Aristotelian Scholasticism.
Lumen naturale. The phrase delights Spinoza, though perhaps not so much as it had delighted the Frenchman, who often invoked it in place of proofs.
Descartes, too, had made his home for a while in Amsterdam, availing himself of its comparative tolerance. Spinoza had seen him once, he was almost certain, rushing down the Houtgracht. Spinoza hadn’t known then who he was, though he had certainly noticed him, there being something arresting about him even though he was not really much to look at. A short compact body, topped by a large unprepossessing head, walking exceedingly quickly, with short, almost mincing steps, but carrying the great bulk of his head with incongruous dignity. It was the incongruity that had made Baruch, even in his ignorance, take note.
He stares into the face of his ignorance and grows disgusted at its sight. It would be easy to blame the rabbis, blame the narrowed gaze of his insular community, keeping out the new ideas that are setting men’s thoughts on fire with new methods for attaining truth. Some of the rabbis fancy themselves learned in the world’s philosophy — ben Manasseh, Morteira — but the little they know is already outmoded. The old Aristotelian system is crashing to the ground under the intellectual onslaught of such men as Descartes and Galileo, who confirmed that the Polish astronomer of the last century, Nicolaus Copernicus, had been correct in asserting that the earth revolves around the sun rather than, as Aristotle had had it, the entire universe revolving around the earth. This change, large as it is, represents an intellectual change even greater, the switch from thinking of man as always at the center, all explanations revolving around him. Explanations in terms of final causes belong to the old order. The new men of genius construct explanations out of the certainty of mathematics, not the make-believe of teleological storytelling. And of course for the rabbis it is not only the old form of teleological storytelling that they repeat, but always they must have the Jews playing an essential role in the plot.
Yes, it would be easy to blame his old teachers for the hideous aspect of his own ignorance. But it is the responsibility of each person to increase his own understanding. It is the most profound responsibility that we have, as even the rabbis, in their confused way, had perceived, equating a man’s moral progress with his intellectual progress.
One of the bookshops is owned by an extraordinary personage named Franciscus van den Enden, a prodigy of energy and intelligence, who takes a sometimes perverse pride in the outrageousness of his opinions and manner of conducting his life. This freedom-loving iconoclast had once been a Jesuit priest, but his views on sexual ethics alone — he believes that no authorities, neither religions nor civic, should be able to regulate the intercourse of men and women and that freedom should abound in that sphere as in all others — would be enough to make him a most inappropriate representative of the Vatican. Van den Enden remarks that it is a shame that Baruch knows neither Greek nor Latin. When van den Enden’s bookshop closes and he opens his own school in his house, offering instruction in Latin, Greek, and the human sciences, Baruch becomes his student.
Desartes, educated by the Jesuits in the exemplary academy, La Flèche, could take Latin for granted, snubbing it for the vulgate French. But for Spinoza, educated at the Talmud Torah, mastery of Latin is an exquisite pleasure, connoting far more to him than merely the addition of another language. Once he has it, he will always choose to write in it. Besides, what vulgate language would be his? Growing up in the Portuguese Nation, he writes Dutch little better than a foreigner.
Van den Enden is a great lover of the theater, having himself authored a play called Lusty Heart, which about sums up the playwright, and which the civic authorities barred from being staged. He has his students of Greek and Latin memorize passages from the classics and declaim them with all the poses and gestures of stage actors. Spinoza, too, partakes in these productions, memorizing passages out of the Roman author Terence that will stay with him his entire life, so that he will often sprinkle his correspondences and other writings with sentences he remembers verbatim from the lively times at the school of lusty hearts.
It’s an exceedingly lively household. Van den Enden, at fifty, is a widower with six children whom he is bringing up with the extraordinary liberality of his persuasions. His eldest daughter is named Clara Maria, and she is unlike any young woman Spinoza has ever laid eyes on. How many young women could there be in all of Europe who are masters of Greek and Latin and all the arts? Her body is frail and ill-formed, but her mind is a delightful display of vigor and healthy-minded robustness. Her knowledge of Latin of course far exceeds Baruch’s, though he is studying hard, still keeping up his business ventures with Gabriel. Her father often has her play the role of Baruch’s tutor.
Love is the sense of one’s own exhilarating expansion— that is, pleasure — attributed to some one object as cause of the pleasure. Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause.22
The exhilarating expansion of the self that one feels in loving another person and conceiving of one’s love being reciprocated, the exquisitely joyful sensation of joining one’s own self with that of another, presents a pleasure almost comparable to that of rational pleasure. But there is this not insignificant difference between the two. The pleasure of romantic love depends, most essentially, not only on the emotions of one’s own mind but on those of another’s, over whom one ultimately has no control. When we love another person romantically, our sense of our self ’s entire destiny— whether it will flourish or fail — lies in the uncontrollable dominion of another. So it is impossible for romantic love not to include within itself pangs of the most insufferable agony, connected with the idea of the other as cause, which is none other than hate, since that other has now the means of extinguishing our essential project of flourishing, and thereby annihilating our very own self. We have delivered over to another the very thing that we should preserve for ourselves alone. Love’s exquisite expansion into the world ends in the most violently invasive and shattering shutting down, so much so that, in the confusion of its extreme pain, one can even desire the most irrational of all possible desires: the ceasing to be of the self.
Emotional distress and unhappiness have their origin especially in excessive love towards a thing subject to considerable instability, a thing which we can never possess. For nobody is disturbed or anxious about anything unless he loves it, nor do wrongs, suspicions, enmities, etc. arise except from love towards things which nobody can truly possess.23
The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.
Some aspects of Lurianic mysticism still stir his thinking. The esoteric doctrine purports to explain why the world exists at all. How does the profusion of our world emanate from what the kabbalists call the Ein Sof, That Without End? The story they tell, once again giving the definitive role to the destiny of one small group of people — the Jews— betrays its ultimate hollowness. But there is perhaps something to ponder in the idea of Ein Sof, an Infinitude that would contain in Itself the explanation of why it Itself had to be and how all else followed from it. The kabbalists held that at a certain moment in time the Ein Sof had with-drawn — the zimzum—in order to make way for the created world, the Sefirot. But why did the Ein Sof have to do that? Are the kabbalists, too, making implicit and illicit reference to final causes? Yes, of course. Such reference is inseparable from superstitious religion. And then they tell a curious story of the shattering of vessels meant to contain the divine light, of the whole created world’s going awry. This aspect of the story is meant to explain the vast amount of suffering in the world. Jewish suffering is singled out from all other suffering, imbued with special cosmic significance. The Lurianic story makes little sense to him. Its tale is too haphazard, too ad hoc. How could the Infinite have blundered, have shattered three of the ten vessels meant to contain its light? The Ein Sof of the Lurianists is no causa sui, though it hints of the idea, if one were to purify it of all contingency.
The rabbis’ spies — why had Baruch not been more cautious in the presence of their cunning? — are causing trouble for Baruch. There has been talk in the community that he is now spending more and more time with dissenting Christians and withdrawing himself from his own people. Ben Mannasseh, the most worldly of the rabbis, would have been of some help here — he, too, had many Gentile friends. But ben Mannasseh, no matter how worldly, is also a victim of Jewish messianic delusions. He is off in England, trying to hasten the coming of the Moshiakh by completing the scattering of the Jewish people to the four corners of the world.
Spinoza regrets that he had gone to the synagogue when he was summoned there. It was the last vestiges of the old ingrained reflexes of derekh eretz prevailing over his better judgment. He had allowed himself to become incensed under the didactic fulminations of Morteira. It would have been better to avoid the confrontation altogether, to remove himself from any further interchanges. He knows that there can be no more communication. He will never see things their way again.
The members of his former community would like to make life a hardship for him. He has, simply by removing himself from them, rendered their vindictive rage impotent. He can never forget the crazed hatred with which the unfortunate Uriel da Costa, that would-be reformer of all of Judaism who was the whipping boy of Spinoza’s classmates, had ended his days. Kherem is a punishment only if one experiences it as such. The solution is entailed. Spinoza chooses to experience the banishment as freedom.
As Spinoza is leaving the theater one evening, a man, clearly a member of the Portuguese Nation, rushes at him with a drawn dagger.24 Spinoza’s heavy cloak — fortunately the season is winter — is the only object pierced. Spinoza will keep the cloak, with its long jagged scar, as a memento for the rest of his life, a mute testament to the deadly consequences of irrational religion.
Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim but to make others as wretched as themselves. Wherefore it is nothing wonderful, if they be generally troublesome and odious to their fellow-man.25
Here is what he holds is true—has to be true — even before he yet sees fully how it can be true. All facts have explanations, even if we are never able to gain access to all of the explanations. Despite our human limitations, we can know that reality is intelligible through and through. How could it be otherwise? It is an affront to reason to imagine that at the bottom of explanations lie truths that can’t be explained at all. One might as well admit at the beginning, then, that nothing at all is explained.
The awful gnawing when explanations aren’t forthcoming, or come twisted and deformed from violent attempts to jam them into places that they don’t fit, is not a symptom of his mind’s unhealthiness, but rather its health. The feeling of pleasure, of expansiveness and strength, when an explanation falls into perfect place, is an indication of how our minds ought to work. The sheer pleasure in explanatory satisfaction answers to something deep and important in the world itself.
The world is such that the gnawing can be quieted. The world itself is woven of explanations. It must be. The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory.
The world itself is the causa sui.
The essential thing is to expunge all aspects of the merely arbitrary. To accept arbitrariness is not just an affront to our reason, but to the infinite God. To attribute mere whim, sheer this-is-the-way-it-is-but-it-need-not-have-been-so explanations to the Infinite Intellect is blasphemy. The superstitions are themselves species of blasphemy. If the perfection of our mind consists in its containing perfect-fit explanations, then, too, the Infinite Intellect of God must contain only perfect-fit explanations. The world must somehow offer an explanation for itself; or otherwise we fall back on the explanatory hollowness of divine final causes. And when men couldn’t come up with final causes, when the world’s suffering seemed to contradict that there were any goals being realized by a good and powerful God, they laid down an axiom, that God’s judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes.26
Mathematics provides the model for explanation. In mathematics we see that facts are so because they necessarily have to be so. We discover what things are in the course of proving them to be that way; the nature of the objects emerges clearly and distinctly only within the proofs. We only know what we have once we have proved it to be. And that is how it must be for all of reality. Since the world must offer an explanation for itself, we know that we have the world only when we see that it must of necessity be the world. Only proofs can reveal the world to us, the world in its self-explicating necessity. For the eyes of the mind whereby it sees and observes things are none other than proofs.27
Descartes was impressed by the mathematical method because once something is mathematically proved we need never concern ourselves over the question of its truth again. The very possibility of doubt has been expelled. Our knowledge is secure. We know we are not duped. For Spinoza, such worries about doubting and being duped are beside the point. The mathematical method is essential because it alone can reveal necessary connections. Since the world itself is composed of necessary connections, the mathematical method — in other words, proofs — can alone reveal the world.
He had not balked at challenging the chief rabbi of the community, and now he has no qualms in finding fault with the great Descartes. The great mathematician and philosopher failed to see that the sort of questions that Rabbi Aboab pondered in his kabbalistic confusions — Why does the world exist at all? How did finitude, the Sefirot, proceed from out of Infinity, the Ein Sof? How did the flow of time emerge from out of timeless eternity? — could be addressed through the method to be extracted from out of the mathematical model.
Nor does Descartes offer us an answer to the anguished question of Spinoza’s community, of all Marranos and other martyrs, of whom men had provided too many examples: Wherein lies our salvation? What is the meaning of the awful suffering that we are made to go through within our lives? Shall this suffering itself redeem us?
It was a sort of Cartesian kabbalism he was contemplating now: the Cartesian methodology applied to the fundamental questions of the kabbalah, and all of it laid out in the proofs that replicate something of the logical structure of reality.
Ontology shifts in the process of explaining it. We uncover things of which no conception existed in the common-sense view of the world, the view which stops far short of truth, believing in facts simply as they are handed over to us by experience, without subjecting these facts to the processes of a priori reason, which alone can grasp necessity, and thus alone can grasp the true facts. This is why common language, which has grown out of experience, is inadequate to describe the true nature of the world, and why we must bend and stretch and strain almost to the point of inapplicability such words as “God” and “nature” in setting forth their truth.
“I am aware that these terms are employed in senses somewhat different from those usually assigned,” he writes. “But my purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things. I therefore make use of such terms, as may convey my meaning without any violent departure from their ordinary signification.”28
For nature is nothing like what we experience. Nature consists in the whole infinite system of necessary connections that exist between things, which necessary connections are revealed only to pure reason. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.29 The order and connection of ideas is provided by logic, which displays how one idea logically entails another. And the order and connection between things, too, is displayed by logic. When one thing causes another thing the conception of the thing logically entails the conception of the other. We don’t even have the conception of a thing unless we have the conception of the cause that logically entails it. The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause.30
Once he was thrown out of his community, his business venture with his brother had, of course, to end. Gabriel is no longer even allowed to speak with his elder brother and business partner. Spinoza has therefore replaced the entrepreneurship characteristic of one of the Portuguese Nation with lens-grinding. It is an occupation that suits him splendidly, not only bringing him into contact with the latest developments in the new mathematical sciences, but also allowing him the solitude he now requires in order to pursue the progress of his understanding. Now even his means of support separates him from the Jews, severs him from his past.
He and his lathe move first to Rijnsburg, a little village well known for its tolerance, not far from Leiden, which has a university where he has attended some lectures on Cartesianism. Then he moves even farther away from Amsterdam, to Voorburg, a place slightly more cosmopolitan than the bucolic Rijnsburg, but still offering the peace and quiet he finds so essential, especially after the turmoil of La Nação, the human bondage of Amsterdam’s Jewry.
Voorburg is just outside of The Hague, where the astronomer Christiaan Huygens lives. Christiaan’s father, who was Descartes’ friend, had called The Hague “a village that knows no equal.”
Heinrich Oldenburg, originally from Germany but now residing in London, has assumed the office of the secretary of the Royal Society of London, and as such it is his happy obligation to become acquainted with the creative minds of Europe. On one of his trips to The Hague he is persuaded to pay a visit to the banished Jew who lives not far away. Oldenburg forms a favorable impression, initiating an epistolary exchange which will connect Spinoza, via Oldenburg, to important thinkers and scientists throughout Europe.
Spinoza’s house in Rijnsburg
Oldenburg is certain, from his observations of the temperate man with whom he conversed in Voorburg, that the man cannot possibly be, as he is rumored to be, an atheist. For he lives a sober life, free from any trace of corruption or licentiousness, which could not be the case of one who was truly irreligious. Therefore, he is certain that there can be nothing dangerous to the spirit of Christianity in Spinoza’s philosophy, and urges him to publish his work for the benefit of all:
I would by all means advise you not to begrudge to the learned those works in philosophy and theology, which you have composed with the talent that distinguishes you. Publish them, I beg you, whatever be the verdict of petty theologians. Your country is free; the course of philosophy should there be free also. Your own prudence will, doubtless, suggest to you, that your ideas and opinions should be put forth as quietly as possible. For the rest, commit the issue to fortune. Come then, good sir, cast away all fear of exciting against you the pigmies of our time. Long enough have we sacrificed to ignorance and pedantry. Let us spread the sails of true knowledge, and explore the recesses of nature more thoroughly than heretofore. Your meditations can, I take it, be printed in your country with impunity; nor need any scandal among the learned be dreaded because of them. If these be your patrons and supporters (and I warrant me you will find them so), why should you dread the carpings of ignorance? I will not let you go, my honoured friend, till I have gained my request; nor will I ever, so far as in me lies, allow thoughts of such importance as yours to rest in eternal silence.31
As it turns out, though, Oldenburg will be deeply scandalized when Spinoza at last “commit[s] the issue to fortune” and publishes his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Spinoza’s views are less compatible with Christianity than Oldenburg had suspected. Their epistolary exchange — of such interest to Spinoza scholars — will suffer from the estrangement.
One of Oldenburg’s letters to Spinoza makes reference to the fever of messianism that is sweeping through the body of Jewry (to use something of the language of old Aboab, who has now been made the chief rabbi of Amsterdam since the death of Morteira), in the person of Sabbatai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah from Smyrna, Turkey.
Spinoza’s workroom at Rijnsburg
Having gone through the traditional training in Talmud, Sabbatai Zevi had turned at an early age to the study of the Zohar. His interpretation of the distinction between the Ein Sof, the core of Infinity that has removed Itself from the world and so lies beyond our knowledge, and the Sefirot, God’s manifestations in the world, differs somewhat from Ha-Ari’s, so that he is said by some to have carried Lurianic insight to its next stage. He is also reputed to be so serious an ascetic that none of his several marriages has ever been consummated. He is reported to go through long periods of sustained sorrow and racking anguish, when he cannot cease his weeping, to then emerge into an ecstasy of inspired religious frenzy, beholding visions and prophecies, going for days without the mortal need for sleep or any form of physical sustenance.32 Men can see that he is either madman or Messiah. Exigency and yearning dispose Jewish community after Jewish community toward the latter, and least likely, alternative.
Oldenburg writes to ask Spinoza what he has heard of the phenomenon:
Here there is a wide-spread rumor that the Israelites, who have been dispersed for more than two thousand years, are to return to their homeland. Few hereabout believe it, but many wish it. Do let your friend know what you hear about this matter, and what you think. … I am anxious to know what the Jews of Amsterdam have heard about it, and how they are affected by so momentous an announcement, which, if true, is likely to bring about a world crisis.33
Jews across the Diaspora are convinced, Ashkenazic as well as Sephardic (though the latter count more heavily among the followers), that they are at last delivered. It is the conclusion that they had long been awaiting, the expectation of it passed along the generations, drawn from the suffering that also was passed along the generations. The Jewish massacres of the Chmielniki uprising — a Ukrainian peasant revolt that had unleashed a wave of atrocities that had decimated Ashkenazic Jewry — in addition to the relentless torments of the Inquisition to which Sephardic Jewry has been subjected, are seen now as signs that the messianic era is at last upon them.
The Jews of Amsterdam have fallen under the spell of the self-proclaimed Messiah with special furor,34 so that normal life has been for them suspended, and they are reportedly forsaking their businesses to spend all day in the synagogue, praying and purifying, as if every day is Yom Kippur, their personal fates hanging in the balance as the God on High makes up His mind as to who shall be saved and who not.
Shrewd Portuguese businessmen though they may be, they are selling off their properties at great losses. Abraham Pereira, one of the richest of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews, a merchant prince, has offered his entire fortune of several million to the Messiah, a fact of which he makes certain that the Messiah knows. Still the shrewd businessman, he wants to ensure a supernatural return for his outlay.35
The Jews are even preparing to dig up the corpses in the cemetery in Ouderkerk so that they can transport them to Jerusalem, there to be resurrected. One of the rabbis of Venice, to whom the Amsterdam community had been wont to turn for halakhic guidance in their earlier days when they were less certain of themselves, writes to express his astonished disapproval that “the graves of them that sleep in the dust have been disturbed [contrary to Jewish Law] so as to remove the bones of the dead from their graves.”
But the messianic enthusiasm of Rabbi Aboab is not to be dampened by any cool, rational Venetian doubt. His fervor for the approaching Messiah inspires him to write a new prayer to replace the prayer Jews recite each Sabbath and festival for the ruler of the land. Now the Jews of Amsterdam no longer offer their prayer for the Grand Pensionary of Holland but rather for “Our Lord the Great King Sabbatai Zevi, the Anointed of the Lord, the Messiah son of David, the Messiah King, the Messiah Redeemer, the Messiah Savior, our Messiah of Righteousness, the Anointed of the God of Jacob.”
The news that the Messiah had been imprisoned in a fortress in Gallipoli by the Turkish sultan, who had become alarmed by the commotion among the Jews but still does not wish to make a martyr, does not diminish the flames of delusion but only feeds them. Letters arrive from Constantinople bringing the most fantastical news, quickly disseminated by word of mouth and printed pamphlets, and believed with kavana by Rabbi Aboab and his followers. Sabbatai had resurrected the dead and passed through the locked and barred doors of his prison, which opened of themselves. The iron chains with which his hands and feet were fettered had broken of themselves.
Yes, of course, Spinoza has heard of how the Jews of Amsterdam are affected by, in Oldenburg’s words, “so momentous an announcement.” There is nothing in their reaction to surprise him: Partly from piety, partly for the sake of opposing those who cultivate the natural science, they prefer to remain in ignorance of natural causes, and are eager to hear only of what is least comprehensible to them and consequently evokes their greatest wonder. … This idea seems to have originated with the early Jews, in order to refute the beliefs of the Gentiles of their time who worshipped visible gods — the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, Water, Sky and so on — and to prove to them that these gods were weak and inconstant, or changeable and under the command of an invisible God, they boasted of their miracles, from which they further sought to prove that the whole of Nature was directed for their sole benefit by command of God whom they worshipped. This idea has found such favour with mankind that they have not ceased to this day to invent miracles with a view to convincing people that they are more beloved of God than others, and are the final causes of God’s creation and continuous directions of the world.36
In the summer of 1666, it became known in Amsterdam that many communities had sent emissaries, or at the very least letters of homage, to the new Messiah. One of the believers, Rabbi Isaac Nahar, who had been a fellow student of Spinoza’s in the Talmud Torah, has already set off to greet the Messiah, and a letter is sent to him to present to Sabbatai Zevi, signed by Chief Rabbi Aboab.37
And how badly it all ends for them, this delirium of false salvation, when the news arrives that the Jews’ Messiah has not been walking through the doors of his prison but, quite the contrary, is at the mercy of his captors. Given the choice of martyrdom or conversion, he has donned the turban and become Azziz Mehemed Effendi. Some are so committed to their self-deception that they continue to believe in the face of their false Messiah’s apostasy. Indeed, they believe with even deeper faith, because with even more desperation.
Knowing the Portuguese Nation of Amsterdam as he does, Spinoza could have easily deduced the madness that has descended upon them at the word that their Messiah has arrived. It is a madness as transcendent as their history. The fevered dream had always been of redemption. They were waiting — yearly, hourly, momentarily — for their Redeemer. Even in the pardise of Sepharad—the legend of which had grown with the years — the longing had been for Jerusalem. Judah Halevy, who had luxuriated in the cultural riches of Moorish Spain, had cried out in his poetry “to see the dust of the ruined shrine.” Could such ancient dreams be displaced by the pretty tulips of Amsterdam? Though he has long ceased to identify with the ongoing dramas of his overwrought former community, he knows these people far too intimately, knows their worldview from the inside, having once inhabited it himself, from boyhood up, not to be able to resist feeling compassion for their plight. I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
Though he is farther away now from Amsterdam, still he keeps up with his friends there, those among whom he had first discovered what it is that true kinship consists in. There are, among others, Lodewijk Meyer, Simon de Vries, Pieter Balling, Jarig Jellesz, Jan Rieuwertsz. Meyer is two years older than Spinoza, a physician and freethinker, with broadly humanistic interests, not only in philosophy but in literature and most especially drama. He is now in fact serving as the director of the Amsterdam Municipal Theater38 De Vries, whose health is even more precariously delicate than Spinoza’s, had been born into a large Mennonite family of well-established merchants. De Vries has always worried about Spinoza’s finances, believing that it is imperative for the philosopher to enjoy complete freedom from monetary worries. He had offered the philosopher 2,000 florins, which Spinoza declined to accept, and had wanted Spinoza to be his heir, which the philosopher also declined. Balling was also born a Mennonite, though now he translates his religious thinking into Spinoza’s language and will publish a book, The Light on the Candlestick, that will blast organized religion for placing dogma at its center where the soul ought to have been. The light of the title is the soul’s light, an idea much spoken of in Protestant circles, but which Balling Spinozistically identifies as the natural light of reason. Jellesz had been a prosperous trader of spices but quit to find a more meaningful life, and he will help to defray the cost of some of Spinoza’s publications. And last of all is Jan Rieuwertsz, a bookseller and publisher. It is from his printing press that all of Spinoza’s explosive writing will emerge to startle the world, and after his death his son will carry on his father’s tradition, continuing to publish Spinoza.
Spinoza has long known the form that his own work must take. The five books of his Scripture must conform to the rigorous logic of reality itself, and this means proofs— rigorous, arduous proofs. His friends clamor to see his writings, and when Balling travels out to Voorburg to see him, Spinoza sends him back to Amsterdam with some pages in his hands, setting out some proofs concerning God and nature. The Amsterdam friends form a discussion group, now to study Spinoza rather than Scripture, devoting the same painstaking interpretative skills as Spinoza himself had taught them to devote to Scripture. Only now they have the benefit of being able to solicit the author himself for elucidation. So Simon de Vries (whose brother, Trijntje, upon Simon’s premature death, will continue Simon’s financial concern for Spinoza, offering him a yearly stipend of 500 florins, which the philosopher deems too much, accepting only 300 florins) writes to Spinoza:
I have for a long time wished to be present with you; but the weather and the hard winter have not been propitious to me. I sometimes complain of my lot, in that we are separated from each other by so long a distance. Happy, yes, most happy is the fellow-lodger, abiding under the same roof with you, who can talk with you on the best of subjects, at dinner, and during your walks.39 As regards our club, the following is its order. One of us (that is everyone by turn) reads through and, as far as he understands it, expounds and also demonstrates the whole of your work, according to the sequence and order of your propositions. Then if it happens if on any point we cannot satisfy one another, we have resolved to make a note of it and to write to you, so that, if possible, it may be made clearer to us, and we may be able under your guidance to defend the truth against those who are superstitiously religious and Christian, and to stand against the attacks of the whole.40
His friends in Amsterdam grow somewhat jealous of the young boarder who has the benefit of the personal instruction of their master (for so they insist now on calling Spinoza). Spinoza does not trust the young boarder sufficiently to impart his own philosophy to him, and so instead instructs him in the foundations of Cartesianism. As a pedagogical tool, Spinoza is formalizing Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, putting it into the geometrical mode that he is employing in his own midnight work. The geometrical method does not ensure truth, since the definitions and axioms might be erroneous, so even a false metaphysics like Descartes’—which errs in its conception of God, of nature, and of man — can be geometricized.
Spinoza’s friends beg him to confer on them the benefits that his young boarder is receiving, to write out for them the geometricization of the Cartesian principles. He obliges them, taking out time from the work of his own proofs, and this results in the only book that he is ever to publish under his own name, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy.
“Some of my friends asked me to make them a copy of a treatise containing a precise account of the Second Part of Descartes’ Principles, demonstrated in the geometrical style, and of the main points in metaphysics,” he writes to Oldenburg, explaining why he has taken so long to respond to the last letter.
Previously I had dictated this to a certain man to whom I did not want to teach my own opinions openly. They asked me to prepare the First Part also by the same method, as soon as I could. Not to disappoint my friends, I immediately undertook to do this and finished it in two weeks. I delivered it to my friends, who in the end asked me to let them publish the whole work. They easily won my agreement, on the condition that one of them,41 in my presence, would provide it with a more elegant style and add a short preface warning readers that I did not acknowledge all the opinions contained in this treatise as my own, since I had written many things in it which were the very opposite of what I held, and illustrating this by one or two examples. One of my friends, to whose care the publishing of this little book has been entrusted, has promised to do all this and that is why I stayed for a while in Amsterdam. Since I returned to this village, where I am now living, I have hardly been my own master because of the friends who have been kind enough to visit me.
Loneliness is not a problem. Quite the contrary, the problem is to secure the long uninterrupted stretches of time necessary for laying out the fullness of what he is beholding, through the eyes of his mind, the proofs that reproduce the necessary connections that constitute the one substance, the vast system of necessary connections which must exist, the causa sui that explains why it must be and what it must be. Deus sive natura.
He had known instinctively, from the time that he was the smallest child, listening to his teachers and feeling the gnawing animal in his chest, that the purely arbitrary element in the divine explanations offered were deeply, blasphemously erroneous.
Reality is determined by divine necessity in the strongest sense possible, since the necessity is the divinity. What Reality is is the one and only system of necessary connections. That is the causa sui, the thing that explains itself, outside of which nothing can be conceived. It is logic itself, not its rules but its applications — the vast and infinite system of logical entailments that are not merely abstract, as we usually conceive of them, but rather coated with the substance of being. Reality is ontologically enriched logic. It is a logic that is animated, alive with thought, infinitely aware of its own infinite self. And it is, simultaneously, a logic that is embodied, a logic that generates itself in space, resulting in the material world.
Outside of this infinite system of necessary connections, there can be … nothing. This infinite system composes the entire explanatory nexus, and were there to be anything outside of it, that something would be ipso facto inexplicable. And there can be nothing inexplicable in the universe — this is the beating heart of Spinoza’s rationalism — no arbitrary elements that are simply there for no reason at all. The denial of a thing’s explicability is tantamount to the denial of that thing’s reality. To be is to be explicable.
So of course there can be only one substance, since this substance constitutes the whole vast system of logic itself, the entire explanatory nexus, the implicative order. What outside of logic could possibly explain — logically entail— logic? Logic alone explains itself. It alone has no need for an external cause. Revising the old Aristotelian notion of “substance” so that it can accommodate reality, he will use it to mean that which requires no external cause, that which itself explains the being of itself. One has to do some violence to existing vocabulary in order to press it into service of the truth. So he shall use the word “substance” to christen what truly exists — not substance as Aristotle and the Scholastics conceived of it. This is then what the one and only substance is — embodied and animated logic. All things, including us, have a determined locus in the nexus of necessary connections: our existence and our nature are entailed by it. Spinoza’s way of saying this is that all things, including us, are the “modifications” of the one and only substance, the all-embracing infinite system of necessary connections.
There is an infinity of modifications, realizing the infinity of logical implications — a vast profligacy of existence burgeoning forth from the logic of the world, crowding out the possibility of contingency and sheer happenstance. From the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways — that is, all things which can fall within the sphere of infinite intellect.42
The world is the all-embracing web of necessary truths, intelligible through and through — and our own individual salvation rests in our knowing this. Our own personal salvation, motivated by our essential commitment to our own individual survival and well-being, consists in achieving the most impersonal of worldviews. When we have attained an adequate knowledge of the infinite system that is the one and only self-explanatory substance, Deus sive natura, and by doing so transformed our very selves, purging our own minds of the illusions of contingency, reconstituting our minds with the divine necessity, then only peace will be possible within each of us, the peace of acquiescence, and only peace will be possible among us, the peace of unity of purpose. And then there will be blessedness.
Thus in life it is before all things useful to perfect the understanding, or reason, as far as we can, and in this alone man’s highest happiness, or blessedness, consists; indeed blessedness is nothing else but the contentment of spirit, which arises from the intuitive knowledge of God.43
The midnight work is consuming him now. While he polishes his lenses during the day, he is polishing his proofs of the night before in his head. Both require the most meticulous work. But the midnight work is exhilaratingly expansive — the expansiveness of the self into the world, which is what pleasure is, the love of the object that is causing our pleasure, which now is nothing less than Deus sive natura itself.
As the true Christians had realized, as the Jew Jesus had apparently realized, love is the only emotion that can consistently coexist with the true knowledge of God. The emotion that floods the mind in the true contemplation of God is the purest of loves. All the painful emotions that are predicated on contingency — fear, regret, anger, hatred, remorse — are nullified in the vision of God.
To know God is to know the necessity of all, to bask in the refulgent necessity, feeling only love for it: the highest state of blessedness, the intellectual love of God. Amor Dei intellectualis.44
He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God, and so much more in proportion as he more understands himself and his emotions.45
This love towards God must hold the chief place in the mind.46
He who loves God cannot endeavor that God will love him in return.47 Love, an emotion, a species of pleasure deriving from the conatus that makes finite things the things that they are, is not an attitude that can be attributed to the Infinite Intellect of God, certainly not in the same way it is attributed to us. To wish for God to love oneself, this one modification in the infinite system of modifications, is to wish God not to be God, a wish patently inconsistent with knowing and loving God. For if a man should so endeavour, he would desire that God, whom he loves, should not be God, and consequently he would desire to feel pain; which is absurd. …
This love towards God cannot be stained by the emotion of envy or jealousy; contrariwise, it is the more fostered in proportion as we conceive a greater number of men to be joined to God by the same bond of love.48
All the ceremonies of the superstitious religions, all the slanted versions of their own histories, are founded on the irrational — the irreligious! — desire to make God love us in return, and the indulgence in the jealous fantasy that he loves us — our kind, our people — more than others.
Spinoza is always offended to hear himself described as irreligious, impious. Whatsoever we desire and do, whereof we are the cause in so far as we possess the idea of God, or know God, I set down to Religion. The desire of well-doing which is engendered by a life according to reason, I call piety.49
And how different from the rational worship of religion are the superstitious ways of carrying on, the pleading and groveling, that pass in most superstitions as worshiping God. Men worship as if it is an arbitrary and exceedingly vain tyrant whom they must placate and flatter, each religion declaring itself more worthy of His favor. This is how the religions all distinguish themselves from one another— Jews, and Christians, and Turks. Like children fighting for their parents’ attention, they never realize that everyone’s true happiness and blessedness consists solely in the enjoyment of good, not in priding himself that he alone is enjoying that good to the exclusion of others. He who counts himself more blessed because he alone enjoys well-being not shared by others, or because he is more blessed and fortunate than others, knows not what is true happiness, and blessedness; and the joy he derives there-from, if it be not mere childishness, has its only source in spite and malice.50
The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus has been printed by the tried and true friend of philosophy, Jan Rieuwertsz, though Spinoza has attempted to protect him by putting the name of a pseudonymous publisher on the cover. If truth is to be measured by the degree of the protest against it, then Spinoza has succeeded most admirably. Still, the vehemence of holy denunciation and hatred has perhaps made it impossible for Spinoza’s proofs to be shown to the world. So be it.
In the natural light of reason the seeming contingencies melt away, leaving only the indestructible crystalline web, revealed as that much more intricate for having absorbed the seeming accidents into itself. Contingency is a mere illusion, the outcome of not perceiving the web of necessity. But a thing can in no respect be called contingent save in relation to the imperfection of our knowledge.51 There is only one logically possible world. And it exists because it must. Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order differently from that which has obtained.52 The only rational response, whatsoever the provocation, is to understand and to acquiesce.
These propositions, and all that relate to the true way of life and religions, are easily proved. … Namely, that hatred should be overcome with love, and that every man should desire for others the good that he seeks for himself. … The strong man has ever first in his thoughts, that all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature; so that whatsoever he deems to be hurtful and evil, and whatsoever, accordingly, seems to him impious, horrible, unjust, and base, assumes that appearance owing to his own disordered, fragmentary, and confused view of the universe. Wherefore, he strives before all things to conceive things as they really are, and to remove the hindrances to true knowledge, such as are hatred, anger, envy, derision, pride, and similar emotions. … Thus he endeavors, as we said before, as far as in him lies to do good, and to go on his way rejoicing.53
No painful emotions can survive within the apprehension of Deus sive natura. Even the incidents that are personally painful — the falsifications of what he had written in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the ever more violent defamations of him as atheist, materialist, immoralist — that threaten one’s very essence, the project of flourishing in the world, once subsumed under the vision of necessity, lose their capacity to hurt one in quite the same way. To behold how they fit in with the whole immense spread that is the object of one’s knowledge, and thus of one’s pleasure, and thus of one’s love, is to transform them from passive emotions into the active emotions of understanding.
It may be objected that, as we understand God as the cause of all things, we by that very fact regard God as the cause of pain. But I make answer, that, in so far as we understand the causes of pain, it to that extent, ceases to be a passion, that is, it ceases to be pain; therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of pain, we to that extent feel pleasure.54
Louis XIV has decided to pursue his vision of gloire by invading the Low Lands. His standing army is immense, 170,000 strong. His new method of firing muskets, the flintlock, which ignites the powder in the pan with a spark caused by a piece of flint drawn across roughened steel, rather than long fuses of rope, means that the French guns can be held ready and safe at half cock. The well-trained and well-armed French press on across the Low Lands, and in order to impede their relentless advance the dikes are opened as a last and desperate measure. Atop the normal mayhem and misery of war, there is also massive flooding.
I rejoice that your philosophers are alive [Spinoza writes to Oldenburg] and remember themselves and their republic. I shall expect news of what they have done recently, when the warriors are sated with blood, and rest in order to renew their strength a little. If that famous scoffer [Democritus] were alive today, he would surely die of laughter. These disorders, however, do not move me to laughter nor even to tears, but rather to philosophizing, and to the better observation of human nature. I do not think it right for me to laugh at nature, much less to weep over it, when I consider that men, like the rest, are only a part of nature, and that I do not know how each part of nature is connected with the whole of it, and how with the other parts. And I find that it is from the mere want of this kind of knowledge that certain things in Nature were formerly wont to appear to me vain, disorderly, and absurd, because I perceive them only in part and mutilated, and they do not agree with our philosophic mind. But now I let every man live according to his own ideas. Let those who will, by all means die for their good, so long as I am allowed to live for truth.55
It is the rampjaar, the year of Dutch disaster. The glorious experiment in republicanism has come to an end. The Dutch have managed to beat back the French, but the losses have maddened the masses and they are looking for someone to blame, and their crazed gaze has fallen on Jan de Witt. It is a stain that will last for all times on the history of this country.
Jan de Witt had stood for all that was best in the Dutch experiment in enlightened government, an experiment in which Spinoza had taken so lively an interest and pleasure that the only social identification he would ever allow himself was “citizen of the Dutch Republic.” Jan de Witt had been the politician who had wrought this political wonder. Himself a lawyer and a mathematician of no mean talent, he had been the Grand Pensioner of the States of Holland since 1653, when he was elected at twenty-eight, and had been reelected in 1658, 1663, and 1668, holding office until just before his death.
He had led the country to its prosperity (using his mathematical skills for such prosaic tasks as balancing the budget) and secured the peace with the European countries that threatened Holland’s endeavor to persist in its own being and flourish: England, France, Spain.
He was always an opponent of the House of Orange, the royalists who had ruled this country through their office of stadtholder. To countervail against the power of the royalists, he had encouraged the rise of the mercantile class, which had resulted in the unprecedented rise of affluence in the land and power abroad.
Jan de Witt
The country, as he found it in 1653, had been brought to the brink of ruin through the war with England, and he resolved to bring about peace. He rejected Cromwell’s suggestion of the union of England and Holland, though his treaty with them, in 1654, had made large concessions. The treaty had included a secret article, called the Act of Seclusion, by which the provinces of Holland pledged themselves not to elect a stadtholder. Cromwell wanted to thwart the ambitions of William III, the young prince of Orange, just as much as de Witt did, since the House of Orange was allied with England’s Stuarts. William II, young William’s father, had married the eldest daughter of Charles I of England.
But the orthodox Calvinist ministers and regents of The Hague were against the Act of Seclusion and incited the people to revolt against the Republicans. A little later (1669), however, the States of Holland made a new act, the Eternal Edict, which outlawed the House of Orange from holding the office of stadtholder for all times.
De Witt’s pro-French policy had been his undoing. With the devastation wrought by the French army, popular opinion turned against Jan de Witt, the irrational need to blame someone whipped up by the conservative forces in the land, the more orthodox and intolerant of the Calvinists, who had always favored the House of Orange. Jan’s brother, Cornelius de Witt, was arrested under false charges of fomenting sedition. He was tortured, but his captors could not force a false confession out of him. The conspirators — including almost certainly William III, who now became, despite the Eternal Edict, stadtholder — changed their tactics, obviously feeling it necessary to eliminate the de Witts entirely. A forged letter brought Jan to the prison where his brother Cornelius was being held. With both of the brothers there, the crowd — no doubt already alerted by the conspirators— descended on the prison and dragged out the two brothers. Jan de Witt, a friend of philosophy and thus of freedom, was, together with Cornelius, torn to pieces by the mob. The atrocities the crowd inflicted on their bodies is beyond the imagination to comprehend. They fed their organs to dogs and hung their severed limbs from lampposts.
Spinoza’s name has often enough been linked to Jan de Witt’s by their respective enemies. A pamphlet from 1672, the rampjaar, states that de Witt gave “the evil Spinoza” the protection to write and to publish the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, “brought forth from hell by the fallen Jew Spinoza, in which it is proven, in an unprecedented, atheistic fashion, that the word of God must be explained and understood through Philosophy, and which was published with the knowledge of Mr. Jan.”56
Spinoza, on hearing what the mob — which had included respectable middle-class burghers — had perpetrated, is for once ready to ignore his watchword engraved in his signet ring, caute. He is moved to violate his own dictate of reason, derived in Part IV of The Ethics: “The virtue of a free man is seen to be as great when it declines danger, as when it overcomes it,”57 and the further corollary he had drawn, “The free man is as courageous in timely retreat as in combat; or a free man shows equal courage or presence of mind whether he elect to give battle or to retreat.” He had derived these propositions, true, but even so the time of declining dangers is not now. Timely retreat is not an option, and he elects to give battle. He has prepared a placard proclaiming ultimi barbarorum (you are the greatest of barbarians), which he intends to erect at the site of the assassinations. But his landlord, the sympathetic van der Spyck, has prudently locked the doors and won’t let him out, thinking quite reasonably that the crowd would like nothing more than to rip Spinoza to pieces as well, and feed his remains to the dogs.58 Then, too, it is not unreasonable to imagine them turning their vengeance against the property where the philosopher lived. Van der Spyck double-locks the doors.
The mystery of human suffering, its inevitability and extravagance — he had contemplated it often enough in his boyhood. Suffering was the constant topic of their lives, suffering linked with salvation, each implying the other; otherwise how in God’s name could the suffering be reconciled with God Himself? The tales that had bled the heart of all La Nação, as the Portuguese Nation still insisted on calling itself as it went through the motions of becoming Dutchified, had bled his heart, too: of forced confessions and heroic martyrdom, of “Judah called the faithful” crying out the words of the Shema as the flames rose around him. The hideous sounds of anguish had carried from Portugal and from Spain, so that they were always in their ears, making all of them half-mad, never able to distance themselves from the questions always present in the howls of torment: How can God allow such outrages to be perpetrated against the innocent? Where is the Merciful One’s mercy?
But the mystery is no mystery. The world was not created with a view toward human well-being. Logic entails what it does, despite our parochial wishes. It’s not surprising that out of the vastness of logical implications there are a profusion that threaten our endeavor to persist in our being and to thrive. So nature will produce such illnesses and disasters as make men’s lives a misery. And so, too, men will through their blind bondage to their emotions compound the misery of their own lives and those of others. It is only reason that can save us. Why then, we might ask, did not God make men more reasonable? Why did he not make them more intelligent? That is what the problem of evil comes down to: the stubborn stupidity of mankind. Why did God make men so stubbornly stupid? Things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind. To those who ask why God did not so create all men, that they should be governed only by reason, I give no answer but this: because matter was not lacking to him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature are so vast, as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intelligence, as I have shown.59
The midnight work is complete. The proofs — on the nature of the world, and of ourselves, of what our knowledge of the world can consist in and how it can bring us peace — are completed.
He had once begun a treatise on the theory of knowledge but had never completed it. It was ill-conceived to think one could explicate knowledge without first explicating reality. But in the opening paragraphs of the abandoned treatise he had written of the search after the ultimate happiness— continuous, supreme, and unending — that all men desire, he has found this thing: it is reality itself. When we are able to grasp its infinite sweep, to sense the infinite context embracing each finite modification, then there is continuous, supreme, and unending happiness. Whatsoever we understand by the third kind of knowledge, we take delight in and our delight is accompanied by the idea of God as cause.60 It is in a person’s own power, and it is only in his own power, to attain this happiness, so long as he persists in his being, no matter how the world might batter him.
And now it is Spinoza’s desire to offer this thing, reality itself, and the continuous supreme and unending happiness that can be ours in its contemplation, to the world. It is his desire to publish the proofs that he has been perfecting through the years, ever since he entered gladly on the path that was opened to him when the Jews of Amsterdam decreed his banishment.
He travels to Amsterdam in August 1675, to see after the publication of The Ethics, but he finds that the atmosphere there — the aftermath of the rampjaar—has foreclosed the possibility of publication, as he writes to Oldenburg (who has become somewhat reconciled to Spinoza, despite his Tractatus, though a brief imprisonment in the Tower of London has, if anything, increased his cautious approach to anything smacking of blasphemy; it is hard on a man like Oldenburg, torn between his admiration for the exciting science of his times and his own terror at unorthodoxy).
When I received your letter of the 22 July, I had set out to Amsterdam for the purpose of publishing the book I had mentioned to you. While I was negotiating, a rumor gained currency that I had in the press a book concerning God, wherein I endeavoured to show that there is no God. This report was believed by many. Hence certain theologians, perhaps the authors of the rumour, took occasion to complain of me before the prince and the magistrates; moreover, the stupid Cartesians, being suspected of favouring me, endeavoured to remove the aspersion by abusing everywhere my opinions and writings, a course which they still pursue. When I became aware of this through trustworthy men, who also assured me that the theologians were everywhere lying in wait for me, I determined to put off publishing till I saw how things were going, and I proposed to inform you of my intentions. But matters seem to get worse and worse, and I am still uncertain what to do.61
While he is visiting in Amsterdam, there is much talk of the Jews, who are just then celebrating the dedication of their most magnificent new synagogue, the Esnoga, built at the end of Breestraat.62 The building — really a complex, for the synagogue itself is surrounded by a low structure that houses the rabbinical offices, the various charities and foundations, the whole hierarchical organization of La Nação — is the largest, stateliest synagogue in all of Europe, costing almost 165,000 guilders and having been under construction for five years. The date, 1672, resplendent in gilt, is erroneous, inscribing the year when it was supposed to have been completed. But that had been the rampjaar, when all such work had been halted.
How the Sephardim of Amsterdam have risen in the world. It is seventy-five years since they first arrived here in secret and were discovered, behind the locked shutters to which Iberia had accustomed them, saying their Friday night prayers. Now there are eight days of ceremonies and celebrations, which the genteel of Gentile society attend, including members of regent families.
A strange curiosity has come over the philosopher, and he walks over the bridge into the Jewish quarter and goes to stand at a distance from the commotion before the entrance. It is a golden August day, and the synagogue stands as if gilded by the sun. IN THE ABUNDANCE OF YOUR LOVING KINDNESS WILL I COME INTO YOUR HOUSE. He reads the Hebrew words inscribed over the entrance, the words of the psalmist. Above certain letters there is a dot, the so-called peret katan, signifying the year. Aboab’s name, too, is contained acrostically in the verse; the old khakham—perhaps chastised by the Sabbataian madness that had overcome him, though Spinoza rather suspects not — is still the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, and the prime mover behind the magnificent Esnoga.
The philosopher keeps his distance, watching as the carriages arrive. He looks at the children, many of them no doubt the offspring of boys with whom he had once shared the classroom, as he sat there trying to make sense of his rubi, wondering that his respected elders could have been satisfied with explanations that he, a mere grasshopper, found pitifully lacking.
The children, dressed in their Sabbath finery, can barely contain themselves from excitement. There are pairs and pairs of dark eyes sparkling. He would doubtless know all of their surnames. There must be some Spinozas and Espinozas among them. He would not know any of his nieces or nephews, grandnieces or grandnephews, were they to be presenting themselves right at this moment beneath his eyes. He has no idea how many such kin he might have acquired over the years.
Dedication of the new Sephardic synagogue in Amsterdam, 1675 (Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
A philosopher can seem a cold-blooded creature to those who cannot penetrate his reasons. None know the efforts it might have cost him to attain his reptilian detachment.
His sister Miriam had had one child before she died, Daniel. The child had been less than a year old when the mother had died. Miriam, his little mother, his mais velha. He can still remember her kindness to him, though she was only a child herself, eight years old, motherless and no doubt forlorn herself. Her husband, Samuel de Casseres, had married Spinoza’s other sister, Rebecca, and, in addition to Daniel, they had had more children together — Hanna, Michael, and Benjamin — before Casseres died, also at an early age. Samuel had been a rabbinical student, the favored protégé of Morteira. He had delivered Morteira’s eulogy in 1660, and within the year was himself eulogized.
There had been a certain unpleasantness with Rebecca, involving money. He hadn’t thought of it in years. It was the sort of thing that can happen in families, that happens quite often. It had involved the distribution of their father’s assets. Rebecca was already promised to Casseres, with his many ties to the synagogue authorities, and Spinoza could easily deduce how the parnassim would be inclined to decide in favor of Casseres’s future wife. So Spinoza had done the unthinkable. He had brought the case before the state authorities, and they had decided in his favor.
Perhaps this act, more than any of his blasphemous views — whether on God, the Jews, or immortality — had incited the parnassim to fulminate against him with such bombastic excess in the writ of excommunication that they had prepared, and which he had never deigned to recognize.
“All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal; but, since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me, with the consolation that my departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from Egypt.”
His own fury had been something fierce. It had burned in him for years. Now not even the memory of its ashes remain.
He stands watching as the last of the community’s dark-eyed children disappear inside the gates. Thoughts pass over him, memories of a life so distant it seems difficult to believe it once had been his.
One thing he knows for certain. It is not for him to stand here on this corner, an outsider in the Jewish quarter, in human bondage to sorrowful memory. He turns on his heel and, without allowing himself one more backward glance, walks quickly away.
It is impossible that man should not be a part of Nature, or that he should be capable of undergoing no changes, save such as can be understood through his nature only as their adequate cause. … Again, if it were possible that man should undergo no changes save such as can be understood solely through the nature of man, it would follow that he would not be able to die, but would always necessarily exist.63
It has come on him far more suddenly than he would have anticipated had he ever allowed himself to anticipate it. It is the one thought that, even though it be entailed, the free man shrinks from inferring, since it can only induce pain, the contraction of the self in the world.
The winter has been a hard one, but the coldness that has invaded him seems of a different sort, derived from a different source. There is a languor in his body, a heaviness that is beyond tiredness and that no amount of sleep can lighten. The hacking cough wakes him in the night, the wild thing gnawing at his lungs. The young friend, the very one he has sent for now, prescribes various sleeping draughts and other drugs to relieve the pains, which nevertheless deepen so that he knows it is beyond him to resist.
The young physician instructs van der Spyck’s wife to cook an old cock and feed the philosopher the broth. The philosopher dutifully sips it, taking pleasure not only in its heat, which sends some solace to his ragged lungs, but in the smiling complacency of van der Spyck’s good wife. He looks at her beaming ruddy face and takes another obedient spoonful, remembering how she had once asked him whether he thought she could be saved in the religion that she professed. He had answered her as he thought best when dealing with a person clearly not suited for philosophical reason: “Your religion is good, and you need not search for another one in order to be saved, as long as you apply yourself to a peaceful and pious life.”
It is Sunday, and his landlord’s family has gone to the morning services, returned for their Sabbath meal, and are making ready to return to church again. He bids them farewell and climbs the stairs to his forechamber, thinking he will not climb them again.
And now it has come to this. The whole infinite nexus of modifications has condensed itself for him to this one thought: the proofs that are locked away in his desk. He derived them from the world. They must now find their way back into the world.
You will make certain of it? he asks the young man who is sitting beside him, his friend and doctor.
You will secure it?
The obsidian eyes burn darker. Over the pallor an unnatural flush is spreading, rising from the fire within. When the doctor leans over to feel for his faltering pulse, he feels the heat of Spinoza rising in a cloud around him, like the myth of the soul rising to heaven.
His bed is the grandest object in the room, a large four-poster with red velvet curtains. It had been his parents’ bed, and he has moved it with him. The only two objects of any material bulk that have accompanied him on his way are his lathe and this bed. His mother had died in it, so young, younger than her son Baruch is now. He remembers his child terror at hearing her cough, and how he had wondered that God could be so cruel. It is that child terror that chains men’s minds.
He has not let the thought of his own death occupy his mind, even these last weeks, knowing how much faster it is coming upon him than he would have anticipated. The free man thinks least of all things upon death, and his life is a meditation not on death but on life.64
But we are finite, our bodies finite, subject to causes not under their own control. Dissolution comes to each thing.
Still there is that which will remain of him. Not the personal self, this cluster of modifications endeavoring to preserve its identity, to prosper and flourish, even now, gasping for breath, unable of itself to keep from desperately trying to persist in its own being. He knows what it is in him that will persist, the view of himself that he gains when out of himself, in the deepest and most blissful grasp of the whole, the intuitive intimation of full infinity by a finite modification that cannot possibly grasp it all. That particular finite modification that he is will soon be no more. But the thoughts that he has thought that were most true, that have pointed beyond themselves to the great vast system that entails them, as each of us points, however obscurely we may apprehend it, beyond ourselves to the vastness that entails us: this will remain for all eternity.
We feel and we know that we are eternal. For the mind feels those things that it conceives by understanding no less than those things that it remembers. For the eyes of the mind, whereby it sees and observes things, are none other than proofs.
The proofs. You will remember? You will see to it?
In the desk, locked in the writing desk. You understand what I am trying to tell you?
The proofs of his midnight toil. If men could study them so that they might behold what I have beheld. What I behold even now.
Death becomes less hurtful, in proportion as the mind’s clear and distinct knowledge is greater, and, consequently, in proportion as the mind loves God.65
He wishes he could transmit this thought, that it is not just the fire of the disease that is making him burn. He wishes he could speak it to the young friend who looks at him with such an expression of pity and terror.
He is the last man in the world to pity. And if the terror be of this very thing, then there is no need for terror, either.
It is this very thought that men cannot think, the thought of this no more. One’s entire nature repels this thought from entering. And in the repulsion people become confused, forming beliefs that lead them so far astray, into confusion and confusion’s child, cruelty. Frightened, they make the world only that much more frightening.
The eyes of the mind. How glorious are our possibilities.
If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.66
I am not forsaken.
I am free.
I am blessed.