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 unen
ding 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 c
an 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.
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 21