Betraying Spinoza (9 page)

It is not enough for them to share the delusions of the Greeks: they have sought to represent the prophets as sharing in these same delusions. … And this is further evident from the fact that most of these assume as a basic principle for the understanding of Scripture and for extracting its true meaning that it is throughout truthful and divine—a conclusion which ought to be the end result of study and strict examination, and which they lay down at the outset as a principle of interpretation. …

Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) would do some years later for Christianity what Maimonides had done for Judaism, namely “Aristotelize” it. The Dominican friar, author of
Summa Theologica
and one of the most important of Catholic theologians, was highly influenced by “Rabbi Moyses,” though Christian apologists would often try to conceal the Jewish influence. Scholasticism was the enterprise of translating Christian theology into Aristotelian terms, and it dominated post-Thomistic Catholic thinking. In the early years of the Middle Ages, when Maimonides was alive, Plato rather than Aristotle had been the more influential ancient thinker among those Christian thinkers who tried to reconcile Christian thought with ancient philosophy. St. Augustine, one of the early Church fathers, had been a Platonist, and his influence dominated. Maimonides, a religious thinker with a distaste for the mystical, was far more drawn to Aristotle than to Plato’s brand of rationalism. Aquinas’s influence would mean that Christian thinking of the later Middle Ages was dominated by Aristotelian rather than Platonic thinking, which is why the seventeenth century’s great scientific innovators would have to defeat the hegemonic grip that Aristotle had come to have on Church dogma.

Maimonides’ Aristotelianism was perhaps quite intellectually compatible with his profession as a physician. The body, after all, would appear to be a teleological system, its various processes acting in order to accomplish some end. So, for example, if the body becomes too hot, it perspires in order to cool itself down. If it becomes too cold, it shivers, the muscular contractions causing it to warm up.

Though Maimonidean philosophy, just because it
is
philosophy, has been controversial ever since the Rambam’s own day, raising generations of Jewish eyebrows (the position in my high school was to keep a respectful distance), there was one aspect of his work that became ensconced firmly in the mainstream, perhaps precisely because it eschews philosophical grounding for straightforward faith. This is the Thirteen Articles of Faith, which have become such an accepted aspect of Judaism that they are recited on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. It is as if Maimonides vindicated his dalliance with the dangerous seductions of Hellenistic rationalism with his straightforward assertion of belief:

1. I believe with perfect faith in the existence of God which is perfect and sufficient unto himself and which is the cause of the existence of all other beings.
   

2. I believe with perfect faith in God’s unity, which is unlike all other kinds of unity.
   

3. I believe with perfect faith that God must not be perceived in bodily terms, and the anthropomorphic expressions applied to God in Scripture have to be understood in a metaphorical sense.
   

4. I believe with perfect faith that God is eternal.
   

5. I believe with perfect faith that God alone is to be worshiped and obeyed. There are no mediating powers able freely to grant man’s petitions, and intermediaries must not be invoked.
   

6. I believe with perfect faith in prophecy.
   

7. I believe with perfect faith that Moses is unsurpassed by any prophet.
   

8. I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah was given to Moses.
   

9. I believe with perfect faith that Moses’ Torah will not be abrogated or superceded by another divine law nor will anything be added to or taken away from it.
   

10. I believe with perfect faith that God knows the actions of man.
    

11. I believe with perfect faith that God rewards those who fulfill the commandments of the Torah, and punishes those who transgress them.
    

12. I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah.
    

13. I believe with perfect faith in the resurrection of the dead.
    

Of these Thirteen Articles, Spinoza will aver 1, 2, 4, 5, and 10, though their meanings shift radically in alignment with his system. One might say that the second principle, in particular, is adamantly assented to in his system; the unity of
Deus sive natura
is certainly unlike all other unity. Spinoza denies—though again according to the special meaning he gives the relevant terms—principles 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13. But far more ardent and fundamental than the rejection of some eight of the requisite articles of faith is the philosopher’s rejection of the Maimonidean ethics of belief. For Spinoza, far more thoroughgoing in his rationalism than Maimonides, there is
no
virtue whatsoever in believing with perfect faith. The virtue is in believing because you
know
, which requires proof.

Another strain of Jewish thinking also emerged from the Iberian soil, though later in the Sephardic experience than Maimonidean rationalism: the mystical tradition known as kabbalah. Here, too, the soil was seeded by ancient Greek thinking—not Aristotelianism this time, but rather Platonism, or rather Neoplatonism, particularly Plotinus and Proclus. It was the Arab scholars who transmitted knowledge of the Greeks, translating their works, and this is how Spanish-Jewish scholars came to know them.

The
Zohar
, which is traditionally translated into English as
The Book of Splendor
, is considered the most important of the kabbalistic writings. It is written as if it were an ancient text, with commentary added to it by the Spanish kabbalists, but modern scholarship has revealed it to be almost incontrovertibly composed in Spain, in the southern city of Gerona, in the late thirteenth century. The author of the
Zohar
was most probably Moses de Leon, though he claims it to be the work of a scholar named Simeon bar Yohai, a second-century sage, who was himself a student of the legendary Rabbi Akiva.

I had heard tales of Rabbi Akiva from youngest childhood. One of the greatest of Jewish scholars, he had not even learned to read until he was a grown and married man. He had married above himself, a rich man’s daughter, and she had agreed to marry him only if he became a scholar. He and his son learned to read at the same time. (I remember learning this in kindergarten, when it had a special enchantment.) He died as a martyr at the hands of the Romans, by legend being flayed to death at the age of ninety. The traditional tale is that Simeon bar Yohai hid from the Romans in a cave near the Dead Sea, fed for years on a spring of freshwater and the fruit of a carob tree that sprang up in his hiding place, and it was there, in the miraculous hiding place, that the mystical form of Midrash, or Torah interpretation, is said to have been inspired, though Rabbi Akiva, too, had possessed esoteric knowledge.

The Spanish kabbalists traced their ideas back to this ancient tradition, but some new spring was flowing into their thoughts as well, and this new spring, too, was very ancient, only it wasn’t Jewish. It was Greek. It was the thinking of Plato, most especially as it had found expression in the Neoplatonists.

The Jewish poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol (c. 1020–c. 1057) was a Neoplatonist living in Gerona. He presented his metaphysics in his major work
Mekor Hayyim
(The Source of Life), which was written in Arabic. (The Arabic version is no longer extant, but a medieval Latin translation,
Fons vitae
, exists.) It is written in dialogue form, as Plato had written, and the only authority who is ever mentioned by him is Plato. Although Ibn Gabirol was an undeniably Jewish thinker whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy,
Mekor Hayyim
is rigorously nonsectarian. As the
Encyclopedia Judaica
puts it succinctly, “
Mekor Hayyim
is unique in the body of Jewish philosophical-religious literature of the Middle Ages, because it expounds a complete philosophical-religious system wholly lacking in specifically Jewish content and terminology. The author does not mention biblical persons or events and does not quote the Bible, Talmud, or Midrash. To some extent this feature of the work determined its unusual destiny.”
⁵
Part of its unusual destiny is that its ideas and even its terminology found their way into Spanish kabbalah.

Kabbalah, in contrast to mainstream Jewish thinking, which concentrates almost exclusively on Talmudic legalistic disputation, speculates heavily on metaphysical questions, especially those concerning the beginning of all things. Why, as philosophers are wont to put it, is there something rather than nothing? Why did God—referred to in kabbalistic terminology as the
Ein Sof
, That Without End—have to create the world? What is the relationship between the
Ein Sof
, existing outside of time, and the created temporal world? How does, how
can
, eternality interact with temporality?

According to kabbalistic thinking, the
Ein Sof
is beyond our understanding, beyond all our words and concepts. But there are what the kabbalists referred to as the
Sefirot
, the emanations of His infinite power, in which the divine attributes are turned into acts of creation, and
Sefirot
can be grasped by the human understanding; they can be gleaned from the structure of being. The
Ein Sof
is unrevealed, non-manifest, and unknowable. Only the emanations of his power (the
Sefirot
) transform the
Ein Sof
into the Creator-God and a personal God.

As the kabbalistic tradition meditates on the beginning of all things, so, too, it ponders the awful mystery of suffering, most poignantly, most bafflingly, represented by the example of children who suffer, children who die. The
Zohar
says of children “who still as sucklings are taken from their mother’s breast” that “the whole world weeps; the tears that come from these babes have no equal, their tears issue from the innermost and farthest places of the hearts, and the entire world is perplexed: … [I]s it needful that these unhappy infants should die, who are without sin and without blame?” Clearly, an answer has to be offered, and here is the one that the
Zohar
offers: “But … the tears shed by these ‘oppressed ones’ act as a petition and protection for the living … and by dint of their innocence, in time a place is prepared for them … for the Holy One, blessed be He, does in reality love these little ones with a unique and outstanding love. He unites them with himself and gets ready for them a place on high close to him.”
⁶

There is a path to be traced from Athens to Gerona, and then from Gerona to Amsterdam, for kabbalism was a distinct aspect of the inner life of the Portuguese Nation. The Sephardic community of Amsterdam, for a host of reasons, was deeply susceptible to the mystical tradition that was part of their Sephardic heritage, especially as that tradition was transformed by the pain of the Spanish exodus and its aftermath, as we shall see, so that it transformed itself into a historical narrative obsessed with the theme of national— and cosmic—redemption. One of the most influential rabbis in the community, Isaac Aboab, was a kabbalist. Manasseh ben Israel, another Amsterdam rabbi who has been briefly mentioned (as having posed for Rembrandt), was also deeply influenced by its redemptive narrative. Spinoza gives ample evidence of being conversant with the esoteric Jewish texts—both Aboab and Manasseh were most likely his teachers in the yeshiva—though he was plainly irked by the kabbalist habit of seeing each word of Torah surrounded by an aura of mystical secret meanings:

[T]hey say that the various readings are the symbols of profoundest mysteries and that mighty secrets lay hid in the twenty-eight hiatus which occur, nay, even in the very form of the letters. Whether they are actuated by folly and infantile devotion, or whether by arrogance and malice so that they alone may be held to possess the secrets of God, I know not; this much I do know, that I find in their writings nothing which has the air of a Divine secret, but only childish lucubration. I have read and known kabbalistic triflers, whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment.
⁷

Nonetheless, despite Spinoza’s impatience with the kabbalistic methodology, despite his emphatic rejection of the specific answers that kabbalah offers for the profound questions it poses; still many have claimed that the spirit of kabbalah was not altogether foreign to Spinoza. I have long thought that the distinctly Platonic tone of Spinoza’s philosophy, which consists not so much in his actual picture of reality but in the ecstatic impulse that irradiates it, and that sharply distinguishes his rationalism from both Descartes’ and Leibniz’s, came to him by way of the kabbalistic influences which were vividly alive in his Portuguese community. And Spinoza’s system will offer us, as we shall see, its own solutions to the two mysteries that are most central to kabbalistic speculations: the ontological mystery of why the world exists at all, and the ethical mystery of suffering: why does suffering—and of such mind-numbing magnitude— exist in this world, if God is both all-good and all-powerful?

As the fortunes of Spanish Jewry declined, the kabbalists’ meditations on suffering deepened and darkened. The meaning of Jewish suffering, in particular, occupied more and more of their mystical speculations, and the theme of national redemption made its appearance. As the travails of Spanish Jewry increased, so increased the redemptive preoccupations of the Spanish kabbalists. In the time of exile, they speculated, the truth, too, had been exiled. The redemption of the world is intimately intertwined with the destiny of the Jews, and they believed themselves to be living in the messianic era. There were esoteric signs that the Messiah’s arrival was imminent, that he would reveal himself in the Jewish year 5250, or, in the world’s way of reckoning time, the year 1490.