When Hendrik van der Spyck returned with his family from church the afternoon of February 21, 1677, he was informed that Spinoza, with whom he had conversed only that morning on a favorite topic of his boarder’s, the preacher’s sermon, had died at around three o’clock, in the presence of the physician for whom he had sent and whose identity remains a mystery.1
It was van der Spyck who arranged for the burial of Spinoza. Mourners, including, according to Colerus, “many illustrious people,” traveled to Voorburg from Amsterdam. There were six coaches that followed behind the wagon carrying the coffin to the cemetery at the New Church in Spuy, where the remains of Benedictus Spinoza were interred.
Van der Spyck was authorized to auction off Spinoza’s clothes, furniture (including his parents’ bed, the costliest article), and books, so that the philosopher’s few remaining debts could be paid and the landlord’s own expenses recovered. But even before he had made an inventory of Spinoza’s effects, van der Spyck had sent the locked writing desk and its contents along to Amsterdam, where Spinoza’s friends, including the printer Jan Rieuwertsz, were waiting for it.
Inside was a pile of letters, as well as the manuscripts of The Ethics, the Political Treatise, on which he had been working at the time of his death, and a Hebrew Grammar, which he had also been composing, so that men might undertake to read Scripture in its original language, using the principles of interpretation that Spinoza laid out in his Tractatus. The Hebrew Grammar recalls the jurist Hugo Grotius’s begrudging comment on advising the authorities to allow the Portuguese Jews asylum in Amsterdam: “Besides, the scholars among them may be of some service to us by teaching us the Hebrew language.”
By the end of the year Spinoza’s friends managed to publish Latin and Dutch editions of Spinoza’s posthumous works, including some of his selected letters, respecting the philosopher’s pronounced preference for privacy by leaving out any of a personal nature. The title pages of the works contained neither the publisher’s name nor the place of publication, in order to protect Jan Rieuwertsz.
Some six years later, in 1683, the Englishman John Locke, who had been born three months before Spinoza and was now in his fifty-second year, took up residence in Amsterdam. He had not yet published, but his tendencies of thought were such that Amsterdam, still the most tolerant city in Europe, was intellectually congenial to him (though his letters reveal him to have been otherwise homesick for England). He stayed in Holland for five years, and his friends were chosen from among the same freethinking members of dissenting Protestant groups as Spinoza’s small group of loyal confidants. Locke almost certainly met men in Amsterdam who spoke of the ideas of that renegade Jew who had lived neither as Jew nor as Christian, insisting on identifying himself through his religion of reason alone.
Though Locke’s strong empiricist tendencies, persuading him to accept probability rather than certainty as justificatory grounds for beliefs, would have disinclined him to read a grandly metaphysical work such as The Ethics, in other ways he was deeply receptive to Spinoza’s ideas, most particularly to the rationalist’s well thought out argument for political and religious tolerance and the necessity of the separation of church and state.
Upon returning to England, John Locke began to publish. The earliest of his writings is his defense of religious liberty, which he addressed to one of his like-minded friends in Holland, Philippus van Limborch, a liberal professor of theology. The Epistola de tolerantia (Letter on Tolerance) was published in Gouda in 1689.
Locke’s writings had a profound effect on the men who first waged a war of independence from the English monarchy of George III and then set about constructing a rational form of government, the likes of which had never before been seen on the face of the earth. The extraordinary document that these men composed, the Constitution of the United States of America, made Spinoza’s principles of tolerance the law of the land.
The founding fathers’ private opinions on the matter of tolerance often read like the words of the renegade Jew himself. Thomas Jefferson, for example, writing to his young nephew in 1787, exhorts him to
shake off all the fears of servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine first the religion of your own country. Read the bible then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their favor in one scale, and their not being against the laws of nature does not weigh against them. But those facts in the bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from god. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change of the laws of nature in the case he relates. … Do not be frightened from this enquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement. If that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. In fine, I repeat that you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven. …2
It is part of our very humanity that we form beliefs by way of processes of deliberation aiming to justify our beliefs — that is, to justify the claim, implicit in believing, that what we believe is actually true. The way that we go about the human business of believing leads to the best and the worst in our species.
The world into which Spinoza had been born, the Portuguese community of Amsterdam, had acquired its distinctive characteristics by way of centuries-long exposure to what can go so tragically wrong in our efforts to justify our beliefs. The Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition was in a sense an epistemological tragedy, born of men believing themselves to be in firm and indubitable possession of truths that they could not possibly have possessed.
Spinoza took this tragedy into himself. He lived the tragedy intensely in his mind, as a child of that history could not fail to do. But his determination to think through his community’s tragedy in the most universal of terms possible compelled him to devise a unique life for himself, insisting on secularism at a time when the concept of it had not yet been conceived.
His determination to think out the tragedy of his community led him to a unique system of thought. Within this system he sought to demonstrate that the truths of ethics have their source in the human condition and nowhere else. He sought to prove that our common human nature reveals why we must treat one another with utmost dignity, and, too, that our common human nature is itself transformed in our knowing of it, so that we become only more like one another as we think our way toward radical objectivity.
The world has been transformed (though not enough) by a long and complicated chain of causes and effects that reaches back to Spinoza’s lonely choice to think out the world for himself.