Betraying Spinoza (18 page)

One of the last letters he wrote in his short life, in December 1675, only two months before his death, betrays his emotional affinity with the narrative of Jewish history. There it is suddenly: the sympathetic participation in the story of heroic martyrdom that a scion of the Portuguese Nation, no matter how he might philosophically remake himself, instinctively feels. Instinctive feeling is of course part of that passive identity that the philosopher qua philosopher must resist and transcend. But it is there to be resisted.

It is December 1675 and he is reluctantly responding to a former pupil of his, Albert Burgh, whose parents Spinoza knows (the father, Conraad Burgh, is the treasurer of the Republic of the Netherlands) and whom he had privately tutored on the foundations of philosophy. On a trip to Italy, young Burgh had dramatically seen the light and converted to Catholicism. He wrote to Spinoza, exhorting him, in the most impudent of terms, to follow his example:

Even as I formerly admired you for the subtlety and keenness of your natural gifts, so now do I bewail and deplore you; inasmuch as being by nature most talented, and adorned by God with extraordinary gifts; being a lover, nay a coveter of the truth, you yet allow yourself to be ensnared and deceived by that most wretched and most proud of beings, the prince of evil spirits.

Young Burgh’s letter is long and the vehemence keeps mounting:

If you do not believe in Christ, you are more wretched than I can express. Yet the remedy is easy. Turn away from your sins, and consider the deadly arrogance of your wretched and insane reasoning. You do not believe in Christ. Why? You will say: “Because the teaching and the life of Christ are not at all in harmony with my teaching.” But again, I say, then you dare to think yourself greater than all those who have ever risen up in the State or Church of God, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, doctors, confessors, holy virgins innumerable, yea, in your blasphemy, than Christ himself. Do you alone surpass all these in doctrine, in manner of life, in every respect? Will you, wretched pigmy, vile worm of the earth, yea, ashes, food of worms, will you in your unspeakable blasphemy, dare to put yourself before the incarnate, infinite wisdom of the Eternal Father? Will you, alone, consider yourself wiser and greater than all those, who from the beginning of the world have been in the Church of God, and have believed, or believe still, that Christ would come or has already come? On what do you base this rash, insane, deplorable, and inexcusable arrogance?

This is a depressing sort of letter to get from a former student in the final months of one’s life. Here is an intelligent former disciple, who has had the benefit of hours of private explanation and discussion, falling victim to the crucifying passions of superstitious religion. It tolls a terrible message, bespeaking the futility of one’s life work, for which one had forsaken so much: excommunication from one’s own people, vilification from far and wide. What hope is there for reason’s ever finding an audience? (Every teacher probably has these moments of despondency. As one of my colleagues once remarked to me, in a black moment of pedagogy, “Just what the hell do we think we’re doing? Having some sort of
effect
?”)

But Spinoza has his methods of always regaining his equilibrium. The first and foremost rule to remember is that we have no control over anything other than the progress of our own understanding. And the second rule is to care only about that over which we have control. We don’t have control over the progress of others’ understanding, no matter how hard we may try to help their advance. In the end, it had not been in Spinoza’s power to keep Albert Burgh from descending into narrow-minded confusion; that power would have belonged to the young man himself. Spinoza will do what he can do. But he will not allow his own sense of failure and futility to become inflamed by another’s weaknesses.

Burgh’s letter arrived in September. For several months Spinoza didn’t answer. But then in December, in the dead of his final winter, from out of the leaden tiredness and malaise of the final stages of tuberculosis, he writes back. Albert’s distressed Calvinist father had urged the philosopher to try and exert whatever influence he still might have, and so Spinoza summons the strength to respond:

That, which I could scarcely believe when told me by others, I learn at last from your own letter; not only have you been made a member of the Romish Church, but you are become a very keen champion of the same, and have already learned wantonly to insult and rail against your opponents.

At first I resolved to leave your letter unanswered, thinking that time and experience will assuredly be of more avail than reasoning, to restore you to yourself and your friends. … But some of my friends, who like myself had formed great hopes from your superior talents, strenuously urge me not to fail in the offices of a friend, but to consider what you lately were, rather than what you are, with other arguments of the like nature. I have thus been induced to write you this short reply, which I earnestly beg you will think worthy of calm perusal.

Spinoza’s reply is not so short that it does not contain a fair number of fascinating nuggets. A few times Spinoza loses his famous philosophical cool and shows flashes of fire:

And, poor wretch, you bewail me? My philosophy, which you never beheld, you style a chimera? O youth deprived of understanding, who has bewitched you into believing, that the Supreme and Eternal is eaten by you and held in your intestines?

This is followed by a statement that seems to support the oft-repeated charge of arrogance, made by far weightier minds than Albert Burgh’s, and even Mrs. Schoenfeld’s, who had also declared that Spinoza’s rationalism rested on arrogance.

Yet you seem to wish to employ reason, and ask me, “
How I know that my philosophy is the best among all that have ever been taught, or ever will be taught?
” a question which I might with much greater right ask you; for I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and of what is false.

Spinoza is claiming here that since he has relied on nothing but a priori reason to deduce his system, just as mathematics relies on nothing but a priori reason, his conclusions (granted that his deductions are valid) enjoy precisely the same degree of certitude as mathematics. His conclusions, just as those of mathematics, must be necessary truths, those which could not possibly have been otherwise. We’ll return to this claim in the next chapter.

But another aspect of Spinoza is revealed in the next stage of his reply to Burgh. Burgh had argued that Catholicism must be true since it has been attested to by a continuous lineage, supposedly reaching back to the witnesses of the miraculous events themselves. Spinoza, in answering Burgh, begins by pointing out that this is just the way “the Pharisees” also argue, meaning by this punitive word to indicate the rabbis. Spinoza is adopting here the terminology common to Christian critics of Judaism. He adopted the same terminology in his
Tractatus
, probably for a multitude of complicated motives, the most pragmatic of which would be that he was addressing himself to Christian readers (as he is here), and he does not want to have his arguments dismissed as being put forward by a Jew, even an excommunicated one. So it is that in the
Tractatus
he makes certain to refer to Jesus the Nazarene as “Jesus Christ,” and does him the honor of making him the most important among the prophets, the best example of the virtuous man.

In this paragraph to Burgh, too, he is distancing himself from the Jewish point of view, calling attention to the fact that he speaks of it as an outsider by speaking of the rabbis as the Pharisees.

As to what you add of the common consent of myriads of men and the uninterrupted ecclesiastical succession, this is the very catch-word of the Pharisees. They with no less confidence than the devotees of Rome bring forward their myriad witnesses, who as pertinaciously as the Roman witnesses repeat what they have heard, as though it were their personal experience. Further, they carry back their line to Adam. They boast with equal arrogance, that their Church has continued to this day unmoved and unimpaired in spite of the hatred of Christians and heathens. They more than any other sect are supported by antiquity. They exclaim with one voice, that they have received their traditions from God Himself, and that they alone preserve the Word of God both written and unwritten. That all heresies have issued from them, and that they have remained constant through thousands of years under no constraint of temporal dominion, but by the sole efficacy of their superstition, no one can deny. The miracles they tell of would tire a thousand tongues. But their chief boast is, that they count a far greater number of martyrs than any other nation, a number which is daily increased by those who suffer with singular constancy for the faith they profess; nor is their boasting false. I myself knew among others of a certain Judah called the faithful, who in the midst of the flames, when he was already thought to be dead, lifted his voice to sing the hymn beginning “To Thee, O God, I offer up my soul,” and so singing perished.

Spinoza begins this paragraph by disassociating himself from the Jews; but by the end he has placed himself inside the Jewish narrative—homing in on one of those tales of heartbreaking martyrdom with which his community was constantly being racked. These were the tales of horror and heroism that Baruch Spinoza had been raised on, the communal drama he had participated in as a child.

In May 1655, just fourteen months before Spinoza’s excommunication, news had arrived that a Marrano named Abraham Nuñez Bernal, who had friends and relations in Amsterdam, had fallen victim to the Inquisition in Córdoba and been burned at the stake. Two months before this tragedy, Yithak da Alameida Bernal had been burned at the stake in Galicia. In 1647, when Spinoza was fifteen, the fate of one Isaak de Castra-Tartos had hit the community particularly hard. For he had been one of its own, a member of the Portuguese Nation, La Nação, who had left Amsterdam as a young man, returning to Spain and Portugal to try to convert the Marranos back to Judaism. He was caught, tried, and confessed to his “sins.” As he stood on top of his funeral pyre, he reportedly screamed out the
Shema
: “
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One
.” A funeral service was conducted for him by Rabbi Morteira, with the entire community participating.

Spinoza, addressing the New Catholic bent on saving him, can distance himself sufficiently from the Jews to speak of their habit of “boasting” of suffering. He is the evil son at the Passover seder: what has their story to do with me? But then, on a phrase, he turns himself around: “nor is their boasting false.” Suddenly he pulls out from his extensive knowledge of Jewish suffering, a knowledge that went with the territory in which Spinoza had been raised, a single tale of martyrdom, which he relates in a tone that betrays his own awe and affinity.

The martyr to whom Spinoza refers in his reply to Burgh as “Judah the faithful” was actually known as Judah the Believer.
⁷
He was Don Lope de Vera y Alarcon de San Clemente, a Spanish nobleman who was not a Marrano but an Old Christian, converted to Judaism through the study of Hebrew. He had himself circumcised, was arrested by the Inquisition, refused to recant, and was burned at Valladolid on July 25, 1644. Spinoza was then twelve years old, a boy in Amsterdam, not in Spain. But he was a boy whose participation in this story was so vivid that years later, at the end of his life, he would write of the martyr in a tone so personal that it misled at least one scholar, the eminent German Jewish historian Heinrich Grätz (1817–91), to infer that Spinoza himself must have begun his life in Spain. Of course, he did not. He was born a Jew, not a Marrano, but within a community consisting almost entirely of Marranos.

The meaning of Jewishness was, at least partly for this community, expounded in the historical narrative of suffering—partly, but of course not entirely. They did not try to compress the entire meaning of Jewishness into these tales of persecution and woe, as some contemporary Jewish writers today do, insisting that the Holocaust provides the culminating Jewish experience. Spinoza’s community was actively resisting the reductive definition of the Jewish experience that Christendom had tried to impose, a definition that not only predicted suffering for the nation that had rejected Jesus as savior, but also ensured that the suffering came to pass. The self-realizing logic of Christian persecution is, in its own way, impeccable.

Spinoza’s community did not succumb to that usurpation of the meaning of their history. Judaism is not a religion that exults in suffering, and Spinoza’s community, in actively reconstituting itself as a Jewish community, was actively resisting the claim that the culminating Jewish experience is some form of suffering.

And yet, of course, Jewish history runs thick with martyrs, with, as Spinoza himself says, “a number which is daily increased by those who suffer with singular constancy for the faith they profess.” As misguided as this “singular constancy” in suffering is for Spinoza, it is sublime as well. It is sublime precisely because there is no Jewish virtue per se in suffering. Like Spinoza, Jews are far more focused on the rewards of this life than on those of the afterlife. Martydom is not glorified; it is not a state to be desired. So for a Jew to risk his life for the faith he professes, as the Marranos still on the Iberian Peninsula were doing, for him to give up his life in a terrible blaze of suffering, as Judah the Believer did, is a delusion most sublime. One can hear Spinoza’s paying his respects to the sublimity, in his terse and emotional phrase “and so singing perished.”