Betraying Spinoza (27 page)

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 unending 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 can 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.

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.