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 reason 21 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 lu
men 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.
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 18