Betraying Spinoza (25 page)

Knowing the Portuguese Nation of Amsterdam as he does, Spinoza could have easily deduced the madness that has descended upon them at the word that their Messiah has arrived. It is a madness as transcendent as their history. The fevered dream had always been of redemption. They were waiting—yearly, hourly, momentarily—for their Redeemer. Even in the pardise of
Sepharad
—the legend of which had grown with the years—the longing had been for Jerusalem. Judah Halevy, who had luxuriated in the cultural riches of Moorish Spain, had cried out in his poetry “to see the dust of the ruined shrine.” Could such ancient dreams be displaced by the pretty tulips of Amsterdam? Though he has long ceased to identify with the ongoing dramas of his overwrought former community, he knows these people far too intimately, knows their worldview from the inside, having once inhabited it himself, from boyhood up, not to be able to resist feeling compassion for their plight.
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them
.

Though he is farther away now from Amsterdam, still he keeps up with his friends there, those among whom he had first discovered what it is that true kinship consists in. There are, among others, Lodewijk Meyer, Simon de Vries, Pieter Balling, Jarig Jellesz, Jan Rieuwertsz. Meyer is two years older than Spinoza, a physician and freethinker, with broadly humanistic interests, not only in philosophy but in literature and most especially drama. He is now in fact serving as the director of the Amsterdam Municipal Theater
³⁸
De Vries, whose health is even more precariously delicate than Spinoza’s, had been born into a large Mennonite family of well-established merchants. De Vries has always worried about Spinoza’s finances, believing that it is imperative for the philosopher to enjoy complete freedom from monetary worries. He had offered the philosopher 2,000 florins, which Spinoza declined to accept, and had wanted Spinoza to be his heir, which the philosopher also declined. Balling was also born a Mennonite, though now he translates his religious thinking into Spinoza’s language and will publish a book,
The Light on the Candlestick
, that will blast organized religion for placing dogma at its center where the soul ought to have been. The light of the title is the soul’s light, an idea much spoken of in Protestant circles, but which Balling Spinozistically identifies as the natural light of reason. Jellesz had been a prosperous trader of spices but quit to find a more meaningful life, and he will help to defray the cost of some of Spinoza’s publications. And last of all is Jan Rieuwertsz, a bookseller and publisher. It is from his printing press that all of Spinoza’s explosive writing will emerge to startle the world, and after his death his son will carry on his father’s tradition, continuing to publish Spinoza.

Spinoza has long known the form that his own work must take. The five books of his Scripture must conform to the rigorous logic of reality itself, and this means proofs— rigorous, arduous proofs. His friends clamor to see his writings, and when Balling travels out to Voorburg to see him, Spinoza sends him back to Amsterdam with some pages in his hands, setting out some proofs concerning God and nature. The Amsterdam friends form a discussion group, now to study Spinoza rather than Scripture, devoting the same painstaking interpretative skills as Spinoza himself had taught them to devote to Scripture. Only now they have the benefit of being able to solicit the author himself for elucidation. So Simon de Vries (whose brother, Trijntje, upon Simon’s premature death, will continue Simon’s financial concern for Spinoza, offering him a yearly stipend of 500 florins, which the philosopher deems too much, accepting only 300 florins) writes to Spinoza:

I have for a long time wished to be present with you; but the weather and the hard winter have not been propitious to me. I sometimes complain of my lot, in that we are separated from each other by so long a distance. Happy, yes, most happy is the fellow-lodger, abiding under the same roof with you, who can talk with you on the best of subjects, at dinner, and during your walks.
³⁹
As regards our club, the following is its order. One of us (that is everyone by turn) reads through and, as far as he understands it, expounds and also demonstrates the whole of your work, according to the sequence and order of your propositions. Then if it happens if on any point we cannot satisfy one another, we have resolved to make a note of it and to write to you, so that, if possible, it may be made clearer to us, and we may be able under your guidance to defend the truth against those who are superstitiously religious and Christian, and to stand against the attacks of the whole.
⁴⁰

His friends in Amsterdam grow somewhat jealous of the young boarder who has the benefit of the personal instruction of their master (for so they insist now on calling Spinoza). Spinoza does not trust the young boarder sufficiently to impart his own philosophy to him, and so instead instructs him in the foundations of Cartesianism. As a pedagogical tool, Spinoza is formalizing Descartes’
Principles of Philosophy
, putting it into the geometrical mode that he is employing in his own midnight work. The geometrical method does not ensure truth, since the definitions and axioms might be erroneous, so even a false metaphysics like Descartes’—which errs in its conception of God, of nature, and of man—can be geometricized.

Spinoza’s friends beg him to confer on them the benefits that his young boarder is receiving, to write out for them the geometricization of the Cartesian principles. He obliges them, taking out time from the work of his own proofs, and this results in the only book that he is ever to publish under his own name,
Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy
.

“Some of my friends asked me to make them a copy of a treatise containing a precise account of the Second Part of Descartes’ Principles, demonstrated in the geometrical style, and of the main points in metaphysics,” he writes to Oldenburg, explaining why he has taken so long to respond to the last letter.

Previously I had dictated this to a certain man to whom I did not want to teach my own opinions openly. They asked me to prepare the First Part also by the same method, as soon as I could. Not to disappoint my friends, I immediately undertook to do this and finished it in two weeks. I delivered it to my friends, who in the end asked me to let them publish the whole work. They easily won my agreement, on the condition that one of them,
⁴¹
in my presence, would provide it with a more elegant style and add a short preface warning readers that I did not acknowledge all the opinions contained in this treatise as my own, since I had written many things in it which were the very opposite of what I held, and illustrating this by one or two examples. One of my friends, to whose care the publishing of this little book has been entrusted, has promised to do all this and that is why I stayed for a while in Amsterdam. Since I returned to this village, where I am now living, I have hardly been my own master because of the friends who have been kind enough to visit me.

Loneliness is not a problem. Quite the contrary, the problem is to secure the long uninterrupted stretches of time necessary for laying out the fullness of what he is beholding, through the eyes of his mind, the proofs that reproduce the necessary connections that constitute the one substance, the vast system of necessary connections which must exist, the
causa sui
that explains why it must be and what it must be.
Deus sive natura
.

He had known instinctively, from the time that he was the smallest child, listening to his teachers and feeling the gnawing animal in his chest, that the purely arbitrary element in the divine explanations offered were deeply, blasphemously erroneous.

Reality is determined by divine necessity in the strongest sense possible, since the necessity
is
the divinity. What Reality
is
is the one and only system of necessary connections. That is the
causa sui
, the thing that explains itself, outside of which nothing can be conceived. It is logic itself, not its rules but its applications—the vast and infinite system of logical entailments that are not merely abstract, as we usually conceive of them, but rather coated with the substance of being. Reality is ontologically enriched logic. It is a logic that is animated, alive with thought, infinitely aware of its own infinite self. And it is, simultaneously, a logic that is embodied, a logic that generates itself in space, resulting in the material world.

Outside of this infinite system of necessary connections, there can be … nothing. This infinite system composes the entire explanatory nexus, and were there to be anything outside of it, that something would be ipso facto inexplicable. And there can be nothing inexplicable in the universe—this is the beating heart of Spinoza’s rationalism—no arbitrary elements that are simply there for no reason at all. The denial of a thing’s explicability is tantamount to the denial of that thing’s reality. To be is to be explicable.

So of course there can be only one substance, since this substance constitutes the whole vast system of logic itself, the entire explanatory nexus, the implicative order. What outside of logic could possibly explain—logically entail— logic? Logic alone explains itself. It alone has no need for an external cause. Revising the old Aristotelian notion of “substance” so that it can accommodate reality, he will use it to mean that which requires no external cause, that which itself explains the being of itself. One has to do some violence to existing vocabulary in order to press it into service of the truth. So he shall use the word “substance” to christen what truly exists—not substance as Aristotle and the Scholastics conceived of it. This is then what the one and only substance is—embodied and animated logic. All things, including us, have a determined locus in the nexus of necessary connections: our existence and our nature are entailed by it. Spinoza’s way of saying this is that all things, including us, are the “modifications” of the one and only substance, the all-embracing infinite system of necessary connections.

There is an infinity of modifications, realizing the infinity of logical implications—a vast profligacy of existence burgeoning forth from the logic of the world, crowding out the possibility of contingency and sheer happenstance.
From the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways—that is, all things which can fall within the sphere of infinite intellect
.
⁴²

The world is the all-embracing web of necessary truths, intelligible through and through—and our own individual salvation rests in our knowing this. Our own
personal
salvation, motivated by our essential commitment to our own individual survival and well-being, consists in achieving the most
impersonal
of worldviews. When we have attained an adequate knowledge of the infinite system that is the one and only self-explanatory substance,
Deus sive natura
, and by doing so transformed our very selves, purging our own minds of the illusions of contingency, reconstituting our minds with the divine necessity, then only peace will be possible within each of us, the peace of acquiescence, and only peace will be possible among us, the peace of unity of purpose. And then there will be blessedness.

Thus in life it is before all things useful to perfect the understanding, or reason, as far as we can, and in this alone man’s highest happiness, or blessedness, consists; indeed blessedness is nothing else but the contentment of spirit, which arises from the intuitive knowledge of God
.
⁴³

The midnight work is consuming him now. While he polishes his lenses during the day, he is polishing his proofs of the night before in his head. Both require the most meticulous work. But the midnight work is exhilaratingly expansive—the expansiveness of the self into the world, which is what pleasure is, the love of the object that is causing our pleasure, which now is nothing less than
Deus sive natura
itself.

As the true Christians had realized, as the Jew Jesus had apparently realized, love is the only emotion that can consistently coexist with the true knowledge of God. The emotion that floods the mind in the true contemplation of God is the purest of loves. All the painful emotions that are predicated on contingency—fear, regret, anger, hatred, remorse—are nullified in the vision of God.

To know God is to know the necessity of all, to bask in the refulgent necessity, feeling only love for it: the highest state of blessedness, the intellectual love of God.
Amor Dei intellectualis
.
⁴⁴

He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God, and so much more in proportion as he more understands himself and his emotions
.
⁴⁵

This love towards God must hold the chief place in the mind
.
⁴⁶

He who loves God cannot endeavor that God will love him in return
.
⁴⁷
Love, an emotion, a species of pleasure deriving from the
conatus
that makes finite things the things that they are, is not an attitude that can be attributed to the Infinite Intellect of God, certainly not in the same way it is attributed to us. To wish for God to love oneself, this one modification in the infinite system of modifications, is to wish God not to be God, a wish patently inconsistent with knowing and loving God.
For if a man should so endeavour, he would desire that God, whom he loves, should not be God, and consequently he would desire to feel pain; which is absurd. …