Betraying Spinoza (23 page)

One of the bookshops is owned by an extraordinary personage named Franciscus van den Enden, a prodigy of energy and intelligence, who takes a sometimes perverse pride in the outrageousness of his opinions and manner of conducting his life. This freedom-loving iconoclast had once been a Jesuit priest, but his views on sexual ethics alone—he believes that no authorities, neither religions nor civic, should be able to regulate the intercourse of men and women and that freedom should abound in that sphere as in all others—would be enough to make him a most inappropriate representative of the Vatican. Van den Enden remarks that it is a shame that Baruch knows neither Greek nor Latin. When van den Enden’s bookshop closes and he opens his own school in his house, offering instruction in Latin, Greek, and the human sciences, Baruch becomes his student.

Desartes, educated by the Jesuits in the exemplary academy, La Flèche, could take Latin for granted, snubbing it for the vulgate French. But for Spinoza, educated at the Talmud Torah, mastery of Latin is an exquisite pleasure, connoting far more to him than merely the addition of another language. Once he has it, he will always choose to write in it. Besides, what vulgate language would be his? Growing up in the Portuguese Nation, he writes Dutch little better than a foreigner.

Van den Enden is a great lover of the theater, having himself authored a play called
Lusty Heart
, which about sums up the playwright, and which the civic authorities barred from being staged. He has his students of Greek and Latin memorize passages from the classics and declaim them with all the poses and gestures of stage actors. Spinoza, too, partakes in these productions, memorizing passages out of the Roman author Terence that will stay with him his entire life, so that he will often sprinkle his correspondences and other writings with sentences he remembers verbatim from the lively times at the school of lusty hearts.

It’s an exceedingly lively household. Van den Enden, at fifty, is a widower with six children whom he is bringing up with the extraordinary liberality of his persuasions. His eldest daughter is named Clara Maria, and she is unlike any young woman Spinoza has ever laid eyes on. How many young women could there be in all of Europe who are masters of Greek and Latin and all the arts? Her body is frail and ill-formed, but her mind is a delightful display of vigor and healthy-minded robustness. Her knowledge of Latin of course far exceeds Baruch’s, though he is studying hard, still keeping up his business ventures with Gabriel. Her father often has her play the role of Baruch’s tutor.

Love is the sense of one’s own exhilarating expansion— that is, pleasure—attributed to some one object as cause of the pleasure.
Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause
.
²²

The exhilarating expansion of the self that one feels in loving another person and conceiving of one’s love being reciprocated, the exquisitely joyful sensation of joining one’s own self with that of another, presents a pleasure almost comparable to that of rational pleasure. But there is this not insignificant difference between the two. The pleasure of romantic love depends, most essentially, not only on the emotions of one’s own mind but on those of another’s, over whom one ultimately has no control. When we love another person romantically, our sense of our self ’s entire destiny— whether it will flourish or fail—lies in the uncontrollable dominion of another. So it is impossible for romantic love not to include within itself pangs of the most insufferable agony, connected with the idea of the other as cause, which is none other than hate, since that other has now the means of extinguishing our essential project of flourishing, and thereby annihilating our very own self. We have delivered over to another the very thing that we should preserve for ourselves alone. Love’s exquisite expansion into the world ends in the most violently invasive and shattering shutting down, so much so that, in the confusion of its extreme pain, one can even desire the most irrational of all possible desires: the ceasing to be of the self.

Emotional distress and unhappiness have their origin especially in excessive love towards a thing subject to considerable instability, a thing which we can never possess. For nobody is disturbed or anxious about anything unless he loves it, nor do wrongs, suspicions, enmities, etc. arise except from love towards things which nobody can truly possess
.
²³

The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.

Some aspects of Lurianic mysticism still stir his thinking. The esoteric doctrine purports to explain why the world exists at all. How does the profusion of our world emanate from what the kabbalists call the
Ein Sof
, That Without End? The story they tell, once again giving the definitive role to the destiny of one small group of people—the Jews— betrays its ultimate hollowness. But there is perhaps something to ponder in the idea of
Ein Sof
, an Infinitude that would contain in Itself the explanation of why it Itself had to be and how all else followed from it. The kabbalists held that at a certain moment in time the
Ein Sof
had with-drawn—the
zimzum
—in order to make way for the created world, the
Sefirot
. But why did the
Ein Sof
have to do that? Are the kabbalists, too, making implicit and illicit reference to final causes? Yes, of course. Such reference is inseparable from superstitious religion. And then they tell a curious story of the shattering of vessels meant to contain the divine light, of the whole created world’s going awry. This aspect of the story is meant to explain the vast amount of suffering in the world. Jewish suffering is singled out from all other suffering, imbued with special cosmic significance. The Lurianic story makes little sense to him. Its tale is too haphazard, too ad hoc. How could the Infinite have blundered, have shattered three of the ten vessels meant to contain its light? The
Ein Sof
of the Lurianists is no
causa sui
, though it hints of the idea, if one were to purify it of all contingency.

The rabbis’ spies—why had Baruch not been more cautious in the presence of their cunning?—are causing trouble for Baruch. There has been talk in the community that he is now spending more and more time with dissenting Christians and withdrawing himself from his own people. Ben Mannasseh, the most worldly of the rabbis, would have been of some help here—he, too, had many Gentile friends. But ben Mannasseh, no matter how worldly, is also a victim of Jewish messianic delusions. He is off in England, trying to hasten the coming of the
Moshiakh
by completing the scattering of the Jewish people to the four corners of the world.

Spinoza regrets that he had gone to the synagogue when he was summoned there. It was the last vestiges of the old ingrained reflexes of
derekh eretz
prevailing over his better judgment. He had allowed himself to become incensed under the didactic fulminations of Morteira. It would have been better to avoid the confrontation altogether, to remove himself from any further interchanges. He knows that there can be no more communication. He will never see things their way again.

The members of his former community would like to make life a hardship for him. He has, simply by removing himself from them, rendered their vindictive rage impotent. He can never forget the crazed hatred with which the unfortunate Uriel da Costa, that would-be reformer of all of Judaism who was the whipping boy of Spinoza’s classmates, had ended his days.
Kherem
is a punishment only if one experiences it as such. The solution is entailed. Spinoza chooses to experience the banishment as freedom.

As Spinoza is leaving the theater one evening, a man, clearly a member of the Portuguese Nation, rushes at him with a drawn dagger.
²⁴
Spinoza’s heavy cloak—fortunately the season is winter—is the only object pierced. Spinoza will keep the cloak, with its long jagged scar, as a memento for the rest of his life, a mute testament to the deadly consequences of irrational religion.

Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim but to make others as wretched as themselves. Wherefore it is nothing wonderful, if they be generally troublesome and odious to their fellow-man
.
²⁵

Here is what he holds is true—
has
to be true—even before he yet sees fully how it can be true. All facts have explanations, even if we are never able to gain access to all of the explanations. Despite our human limitations, we can know that reality is intelligible through and through. How could it be otherwise? It is an affront to reason to imagine that at the bottom of explanations lie truths that can’t be explained at all. One might as well admit at the beginning, then, that nothing at all is explained.

The awful gnawing when explanations aren’t forthcoming, or come twisted and deformed from violent attempts to jam them into places that they don’t fit, is not a symptom of his mind’s unhealthiness, but rather its health. The feeling of pleasure, of expansiveness and strength, when an explanation falls into perfect place, is an indication of how our minds ought to work. The sheer pleasure in explanatory satisfaction answers to something deep and important in the world itself.

The world is such that the gnawing can be quieted. The world itself is woven of explanations. It
must
be. The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory.

The world itself is the
causa sui
.

The essential thing is to expunge all aspects of the merely arbitrary. To accept arbitrariness is not just an affront to our reason, but to the infinite God. To attribute mere whim, sheer this-is-the-way-it-is-but-it-need-not-have-been-so explanations to the Infinite Intellect is blasphemy. The superstitions are themselves species of blasphemy. If the perfection of our mind consists in its containing perfect-fit explanations, then, too, the Infinite Intellect of God must contain only perfect-fit explanations. The world must somehow offer an explanation for itself; or otherwise we fall back on the explanatory hollowness of divine final causes.
And when men couldn’t come up with final causes, when the world’s suffering seemed to contradict that there were any goals being realized by a good and powerful God, they laid down an axiom, that God’s judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes
.
²⁶

Mathematics provides the model for explanation. In mathematics we see that facts are so because they necessarily
have
to be so. We discover what things are in the course of
proving
them to be that way; the nature of the objects emerges clearly and distinctly only within the proofs. We only know what we have once we have proved it to be. And that is how it must be for all of reality. Since the world must offer an explanation for itself, we know that we have the world only when we see that it must of necessity be the world. Only proofs can reveal the world to us, the world in its self-explicating necessity.
For the eyes of the mind whereby it sees and observes things are none other than proofs
.
²⁷

Descartes was impressed by the mathematical method because once something is mathematically proved we need never concern ourselves over the question of its truth again. The very possibility of doubt has been expelled. Our knowledge is secure. We know we are not duped. For Spinoza, such worries about doubting and being duped are beside the point. The mathematical method is essential because it alone can reveal necessary connections. Since the world itself is composed of necessary connections, the mathematical method—in other words, proofs—can alone reveal the world.

He had not balked at challenging the chief rabbi of the community, and now he has no qualms in finding fault with the great Descartes. The great mathematician and philosopher failed to see that the sort of questions that Rabbi Aboab pondered in his kabbalistic confusions—Why does the world exist at all? How did finitude, the
Sefirot
, proceed from out of Infinity, the
Ein Sof
? How did the flow of time emerge from out of timeless eternity?—could be addressed through the method to be extracted from out of the mathematical model.

Nor does Descartes offer us an answer to the anguished question of Spinoza’s community, of all Marranos and other martyrs, of whom men had provided too many examples: Wherein lies our salvation? What is the meaning of the awful suffering that we are made to go through within our lives? Shall this suffering itself redeem us?

It was a sort of Cartesian kabbalism he was contemplating now: the Cartesian methodology applied to the fundamental questions of the kabbalah, and all of it laid out in the proofs that replicate something of the logical structure of reality.

Ontology shifts in the process of explaining it. We uncover things of which no conception existed in the common-sense view of the world, the view which stops far short of truth, believing in facts simply as they are handed over to us by experience, without subjecting these facts to the processes of a priori reason, which alone can grasp necessity, and thus alone can grasp the true facts. This is why common language, which has grown out of experience, is inadequate to describe the true nature of the world, and why we must bend and stretch and strain almost to the point of inapplicability such words as “God” and “nature” in setting forth their truth.