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.
VI
Epilogue
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.
CHRONOLOGY
711 The beginning of the Muslim conquest of Spain
1070 Rashi, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, writes the most widely read and influential commentary on the Torah and Talmud
1095 Pope Urban II calls for a Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim rule, opening the floodgates of anti-Jewish violence over the next century
1144 The first blood libel takes place in Norwich, England
1190 Mass suicide of the Jews of York during Third Crusade, under King Richard Maimonides completes the Guide for the Perplexed
1233 Pope Gregory establishes the Inquisition, appoints Dominicans and Franciscans to judge heretics
1252 Pope Innocent IV authorizes the use of torture to detect heresy
1263 Nachmanides defends Judaism against the charges of Pablo Christiani, a former Jew, in the disputation of Barcelona
1265 Thomas Aquinas begins to write Summa Theologica
1268 King Louis IX of France decrees that all the Jews of France be arrested and their property confiscated in preparation for their eventual expulsion
c. 1270–80 The Zohar, the primary text of Jewish mysticism, composed in Gerona, Spain
1288 The first mass burning of Jews at the stake takes place in Troyes, France, following a blood libel
Pope Clement IV grants the Inquisition the right to pursue converted Jews who have returned to their former faith
1290 Edward I banishes the Jews from England; first of the mass medieval European Jewish expulsions
1306 Jews are expelled from France; they are permitted to return in 1315
1391 Jews are massacred throughout Christian Castile and Aragon; Jewish community of Barcelona is destroyed; mass conversion of Jews
1394 Jews are again expelled from France; they do not return until the seventeenth century
1412 January 2, Friar Vicente Ferrer proclaims new anti-Jewish regulations in Castile
1412 June, Ferdinand I becomes king of Aragon; anti-Jewish edicts extended to Aragon
1449 Purity-of-blood statutes enacted in Spain as requirement for admittance to guilds, colleges, religious and military orders
1469 Ferdinand of Aragon marries Isabella of Castile; kingdoms united by 1479
1478 Ferdinand and Isabella invite the Inquisition into Spain to root out heretics among the New Christians
1483 Tomás de Torquemada appointed inquisitor general of Spain
1492 Granada falls to Christians; the end of Muslim Spain
Ferdinand and Isabella order all Jews in Spain to convert to Catholicism or leave Spain; many cross into neighboring Portugal
1497 King Manuel I of Portugal declares that all Jews must convert
1569–70 Rabbi Isaac Luria, already a leading kabbalist, moves to Safed
1579 The United Provinces of the Netherlands come into being as a Protestant state through the Union of Utrecht
1580 Spain and Portugal are united
1590 First New Christians arrive in Amsterdam; continue to hide their Jewish faith
1590s Michael de Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza’s father, flees Portugal as a child with his family, arriving in Amsterdam
1596 René Descartes is born
1614 Jews in Amsterdam buy land for cemetery outside Amsterdam; at least two Jewish congregations already functioning covertly in the city
1615 Jewish settlement in Amsterdam officially recognized; Jewish worship still forbidden by city authorities
1616 Uriel da Costa composes his Eleven Theses, rejecting rabbinic Judaism
1618 Beginning of Thirty Years’ War
1619 Amsterdam city council grants Jews the right to practice their religion, at the same time enacting restrictions on their economic and political rights and demanding that all Jews adhere to Jewish law
1624 Uriel da Costa is excommunicated for heretical understanding of Jewish law
1629 Descartes moves to Amsterdam
1632 Baruch Spinoza is born
John Locke is born (dies 1704)
Inquisitorial denunciation of Galileo
1633 Uriel da Costa is readmitted to the Amsterdam Jewish community, but excommunicated again soon after
1635–36 Amsterdam community is divided by bitter feud among its rabbis as to whether all Jews have a place in the afterlife
1637 Descartes publishes his Discours de la méthode
1638 Spinoza’s mother dies
1639 The three synagogues of Amsterdam combine; Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca leaves Amsterdam for Brazil (he returns to Amsterdam in 1654); Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira is appointed
chief rabbi
1640 Uriel da Costa is readmitted to the Jewish community in a ceremony of public humiliation; he commits suicide shortly thereafter
1642 Death of Galileo (born 1564)
Birth of Isaac Newton (dies 1727)
Rembrandt paints The Night Watchman
1648 Cossack uprising in Ukraine, led by Bogdan Chmielnicki, destroys hundreds of Jewish communities
Thirty Years’ War ends with the Treaty of Westphalia
1650 Spinoza studies Latin, natural sciences, and philosophy with Dr. van den Enden of Bremen
Descartes dies in Sweden (born 1596)
1651 Probable date that Spinoza first reads the works of Descartes
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is published
1653 Jan de Witt is appointed Grand Pensioner of the States of Holland
1654 Death of Spinoza’s father
1655 Spinoza is accused of heresy before the gathered synagogue
Mannasseh ben Israel unsuccessfully petitions Oliver Cromwell for right of Jewish resettlement in England
1656 July 27, the Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicates Spinoza
An edict of the States of Holland prohibits the teaching of Cartesian philosophy
1657 Jews of Netherlands recognized as subjects of the republic
1659 Huygens identifies the rings of Saturn
1660 Municipal authorities petitioned by the Amsterdam synagogue to denounce Spinoza as a “menace to all piety and morals”
The monarchy restored in England with the accession of Charles II
1661 Spinoza leaves Amsterdam and moves to Rijnsburg; begins writing The Ethics; meets Heinrich Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society of London
1663 Spinoza moves to Voorburg, outside The Hague; takes up residence with the painter Daniel Tydemann
1664 Spinoza publishes The Principles of Descartes’ Philosophy
1665 Sabbatai Zevi is anointed Messiah in Gaza; he soon amasses followers throughout the Jewish world
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 22