Baruch or Benedict Spinoza — whom
we should properly call ‘Bento’, his given name, in the Portuguese-speaking
Jewish community of Amsterdam, where he was born in 1632 — is a philosopher who
combines perhaps the greatest systematic rigor in the most concentrated pages
in the history of philosophy (he hardly refers to any other philosophers, and
certainly not to his own life), with a biography that fascinates people. This
produces an unusual blend of anecdote and philosophical narrative: he was
expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, yet he is frequently
‘reappropriated’ by Jewish thinkers; his name was associated with the most
tremendous heresy or forbidden ideas of his time — “Spinozism” remained a
terrible charge well into the eighteenth century, as a synonym of atheism — yet
he was also known as the ‘God-intoxicated’ one; for Hegel he was “Spinoza, the
Oriental”; Deleuze liked to tell the possibly spurious tale, handed down by an
earlier biographer, Colerus, of a favorite pastime of Spinoza’s: catching a
spider and putting it in the web of another spider to watch them battle; and
lastly, despite being such a notorious radical, he served as the very paradigm
of the ‘virtuous atheist’ for Pierre Bayle: a figure whose life could be
exemplary without resting on religious foundations. In the best-known anecdotal
illustration of this, the generally quiet and retiring Spinoza wanted to
respond to the mob killing of the De Witt brothers by going out to meet the mob
with a sign he had made that said “Ultimi barbarorum,” but was locked in by his
landlord.

After all this it may come as a
surprise that there was no biography of Spinoza available in English, until the
publication of Steven Nadler’s Spinoza. A Life. Nadler is a respected
scholar of early modern philosophy, and this biography, although not quite a
page-turner, is of extremely high intellectual quality, taking into account the
latest European research — Dutch,
obviously, and French, for France ever since the late 19^th century
has been a kind of ‘home away from home’ for Spinoza; it is there that the
first modern critical edition is underway, under the general editorship of
Pierre-François Moreau (Presses Universitaires de France), first volume
published: Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Readers expecting a philosophical account of Spinoza’s life may
be in for a surprise, since Nadler mainly provides an enormous amount of
historical detail, occasionally switching to pure textual analysis in a rather
abrupt way.

Most of the story is already known,
but is only available in parts; Nadler has usefully brought many sources
together. Spinoza was the son of a trader, Michael Espinoza, and took over the
business with his brother Gabriel (after Spinoza’s excommunication, Gabriel
emigrated to Brazil); a boy with a solid Jewish religious education, but one
which was not as extensive as is sometimes believed; a man who was exposed to
the free-thinking circles in Amsterdam and The Hague, and attended the
University of Leiden, probably as an auditor; a lens-grinder with an extensive
knowledge of mathematics, optics and physics; finally, a solitary thinker who
declined public honors and lived in rented rooms … yet was visited by eminent
intellectuals and public figures frequently during his mature years.

There are two points at which the
historical details are important for understanding Spinoza’s thought: the
social context in which he emerged, both Jewish and non-Jewish (Nadler
emphasizes the Jewish context), and the greater political context of the Dutch
Republic. I will present these in succession and close with an overview of his
work in biographical form.

The Dutch
Republic welcomed a number of Jews fleeing the Inquisition, sometimes in the
name of commerce, sometimes in the name of religious freedom. In 1609, the
Sephardic Jewish population of Amsterdam was about 200 people; by 1630, it had
reached 1000 (out of a total of 115, 000). Originally composed of three
distinct communities, by 1639 tensions between them on interpretative grounds
(a more rationalistic and moralistic version of Scripture versus a more mystical,
Kabbalistic version which promised unconditional salvation for all Jewish
souls), led to a forced merger into one congregation, Talmud Torah.

The power to excommunicate an
individual (cherem) traditionally rested with the rabbinical authorities
of the community, the Beth Din. But in the medieval era, this became a
contentious issue, as prominent lay members of the community would take over
functions reserved for rabbis. In Amsterdam’s Sephardic community, the
rabbinical council did not have authority in secular matters, such as imposing
taxes, running schools or ritual slaughterings … and, significantly for
Spinoza’s future, it was the secular authority (ma’amad) who pronounced
the cherem: the first article in the congregation’s ‘charter’ states
that anyone who disobeys its orders will be punished with cherem (p.
56). (Rabbis could be consulted if the decision to exclude a member of the
congregation involved matters of halakhic interpretation.) Maimonides had
warned that such a sanction should be used sparingly, but in the Amsterdam
community it was used often: between 1622 and 1683, thirty-nine men and one
woman were excommunicated, for periods ranging from one day to eleven years.
Rarely was the ban never removed, as happened with Spinoza. Nadler surmises
that in a community which had been cut off for a long time from practicing
Judaism, practices such as excommunication became more important in maintaining
a sense of cohesion, of identity. Thus the Amsterdam Sephardim used the cherem
more frequently, for less severe offenses, than the congregations of Hamburg
and Venice.

Spinoza’s cherem was not the
first in the community: in 1640 the radical thinker Uriel Da Costa had been
excommunicated (and committed suicide, an event which Nadler surmises made its
mark on Spinoza). Also, some months before the cherem in July 1656,
Spinoza’s payments to the Jewish community declined, reflecting his financial
situation as a whole, burdened with debts incurred by his father. His
excommunication can also be explained in broader terms, not merely as part of
the internal policing of the Jewish community, but as reflecting the concerns
of the community about its status within Amsterdam and Holland as a whole. The
republican ideas that Spinoza must have begun to put forth in this period were
too radical even for tolerant Holland; and when the Jews were officially
allowed to settle in Amsterdam in 1619, the city council expressly ordered them
to refrain from any attacks on Christian religion, or the law (p. 148). The
Jewish community needed to show that it harbored neither heretics neither
Cartesians (Voetius, the conservative theologian and rector of the University
of Utrecht, had published an attack on Cartesianism as early as 1642).

Curiously enough, Spinoza had not
yet published anything by the time of his excommunication. Why was he excluded
with such violence? Clearly not just because of his lapsed Judaism. The views
he was to develop in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP),
published in 1670, may well have been germinating throughout the second half of
the 1650s. Some authors of the period, including Pierre Bayle, speak of a text
Spinoza wrote immediately after the excommunication, in Spanish, entitled
“Justification for my departure from the synagogue” or “Apologia for my
departure from Judaism,” which already stated that the Pentateuch, the first
five books of the Hebrew Bible, was not given by God but was a human,
historical creation: thus the Jews are not a ‘chosen’ people in any relevant
sense (p. 132). Furthermore, in 1658 two Spanish visitors who were sent by the
Inquisition to Amsterdam to report on activities of the conversos there,
spoke of their encounter with the young Spinoza, and his beliefs that there was
no immortal soul.

Spinoza had
early on grown disenchanted with Jewish life, as well as the life of the
merchant. Through his contacts with radical Christian movements such as the
Collegiants and the Quakers, and with liberal Mennonite merchants (whose views
tended towards anti-trinitarianism or “Socinianism,” emphasizing the personal
experience of divinity, as opposed to established religion), he had already
encountered the denial that Moses’ words have come down to us in intact form,
through all the translations. In addition, encounters with ‘foreign’ intellectuals
impressed on him that his knowledge of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Hebrew
was not enough; he had to learn Latin. So he turned to Franciscus van den
Enden, who ran a sort of Latin institute at his house in Amsterdam. Van den
Enden published radical political works advocating a genuine democracy, which
he felt the Dutch Republic was not yet; a place in which clerics had no
political authority, this authority being held by the people (men and women
— a more radical view than Spinoza’s). At van Enden’s school, Spinoza was
exposed to Greek and Roman philosophy (e.g. Cicero) and plays in which he also
acted (e.g. Terence); to the major political thinkers such as Machiavelli. Van
den Enden also had a reputation as a Cartesian — thus Spinoza would have been
exposed to the “new philosophy” through him. After his excommunication, Spinoza
moved in to the house and also started to teach Latin there.

Another important figure in
Spinoza’s life was the radical political thinker Adrian Koerbagh. Koerbagh and
Spinoza seem to have mutually influenced each other: there is an unmistakable
strain of Spinozism running through Koerbagh’s metaphysical writings, and the TTP
reflects some of Koerbagh’s ideas on the State and Scripture. Indeed, some of
Spinoza’s decision to publish the TTP — interrupting the completion of
the Ethics — was influenced by Koerbagh’s incarceration in 1668 and
subsequent death in prison in 1669 (Koerbagh had had the bad idea of publishing
his writings under his own name: p. 267). The event was prime evidence of the
collusion between secular and religious authorities Spinoza wished to denounce.

What of the broader political
context of the Dutch Republic? It was torn in between the States’ faction,
promoting the ‘republican’ political vision of Johan De Witt, of sovereignty
for the provinces and religious toleration, and the Orangist, monarchist
faction, which promoted the office of the Stadholder as a strong central
authority, in alliance with the conservative theologians. De Witt had abolished
the stadholdership, but it was a short-lived peace: by 1664, war with England
loomed on the horizon. The United Provinces were ruled by De Witt and the
regents, who feared that Charles III, the son of Mary Stuart (sister of King
Charles II of England) and the late Stadholder, William II, would be named
Stadholder, with the aid of England. Thus De Witt pushed for a strong military
victory. The actual sources of the conflict, however, were fishing rights, and
the colonies (by 1664, New Amsterdam had been renamed New York!). War
officially began in March 1665: the English were militarily superior, but
gradually, with the aid of the French and the Danish, the Dutch forced them
into defeat, with the Breda treaty in July 1667. Then France began to threaten
the Dutch, seeking to renew the control it had two centuries earlier, when the
southern Low Countries were ruled in absentia by the Dukes of Burgundy, and
turn the Dutch Republic into a monarchy, using the Orangists. Instead, this
forced the Orangists and the republicans into a consensus in the name of
defense: a Stadholder was elected in February, 1672, with command over the army
and the navy, and war was declared again.

De Witt had always been an able
negotiator, playing off the various European powers against each other. But
now, accusations of incompetence mounted against him. On the evening of June 21^st,1672,
he was attacked by a group of wealthy young men and wounded with a knife. Then
his brother was jailed. A mob gathered, demanding his death; De Witt went to
save his brother, and both were seized to be hung, and torn to pieces before
this could even happen. De Witt had served as a protector for intellectuals
with republican ideas, without being overly committed to them — Spinoza, for
one, was far more radical. Despite this, they were lumped together by their
enemies. Nadler explains that there is no particular evidence that they met, or
discussed any ideas. It is probable, though, that Spinoza sent De Witt the TTP,
which he believed could favorably remind those in power of their original
republican principles. With his death, a purge of Cartesians and liberal
theologians began, which also reached “independent radicals” (p. 309) such as
Spinoza. Secular authorities condemned such propositions as ‘Philosophy can be
the interpreter of Holy Scripture’.

Let me conclude with a brief
summary of Spinoza’s ‘bio-bibliography’ as presented by Nadler. Spinoza’s first
extant writing is the Treatise on the Emendation of the Understanding
(approx. 1659), written during his initial exposure to Cartesian ideas at the
University of Leiden. The Short Treatise, an early version of the Ethics
in non-geometric form, was written in 1660-1662, when he had moved to the
village of Rijnsburg. After this, Spinoza begins to try and cast his thoughts
in a geometrical order, in a Cartesian move to go beyond Descartes’ own chains
of reasoning. For his friends, he prepared lectures on Descartes, published in
1663 as Principles of Descartes’ Philosophy, together with the Cogitata
Metaphysica, in which he focused on the metaphysical problems that
Descartes had left unresolved. Nadler explains that Spinoza published this work
partly to attract the attention of powerful figures who would then view him as
a legitimate scholar and offer him their protection, enabling him to publish
what he already knew to be radical work, his work-in-progress Philosophia,
later retitled the Ethics. By June 1665, a nearly complete draft of this
work was ready, in three parts. Then he broke off to work on the TTP
(published anonymously in 1670; later banned by Dutch and Jewish authorities).
In the early 1670s he returned to the Ethics, reworking what was a large
Part Three into Parts Four and Five: much of his moral psychology, his
description of human bondage to the passions and of the “free human being.”
Thus his account of politics, religion and true freedom in the Ethics
underwent revision after 1670 (when he read the Leviathan). Spinoza’s
plan to prepare the public for his views by publishing the TTP first, so
he could later publish the Ethics, backfired: the existence of the TTP
prevented him from publishing the Ethics in his lifetime.

 In 1673, he was invited to teach at Heidelberg, but declined.
During this period he wrote a Hebrew grammar, as part of his project of a
naturalization of the Scriptures, to demonstrate that anyone can have access to
them. Other grammars existed, within the Amsterdam community itself, but they
were grammars of a holy text, not of a natural language to be spoken
rather than chanted. More pragmatically, Spinoza probably composed the grammar
in response to requests from his circle, to enable its participants to read the
Old Testament. Spinoza’s last work, the Tractatus politicus, was begun
by mid-1676. Instead of presenting an ideal, utopian politics, Spinoza begins
with the real psychology of human beings — that sketched out in the Ethics.
The work breaks off just as Spinoza begins to detail his conceptions of a truly
radical democracy. Having been weakened for some time by pulmonary ailments
tied to his activity as a lens-grinder, he died quietly in 1677, in The Hague;
Nadler’s last chapter title is taken from the Ethics: “a free man thinks
of nothing less than death.”

© 2002
Charles Wolfe

Charles
T. Wolfe, Dept. of Philosophy, Boston University.

Categories: Philosophical