CHAPTER XXISPINOZA
There are certain things in history which I have never been able to understand and one of these is the amount of work done by some of the artists and literary men of bygone ages.
The modern members of our writing guild, with typewriters and dictaphones and secretaries and fountain pens, can turn out between three and four thousand words a day. How did Shakespeare, with half a dozen other jobs to distract his mind, with a scolding wife and a clumsy goose-quill, manage to write thirty-seven plays?
Where did Lope de Vega, veteran of the Invincible Armada and a busy man all his life, find the necessary ink and paper for eighteen hundred comedies and five hundred essays?
What manner of man was this strange Hofkonzertmeister, Johann Sebastian Bach, who in a little house filled with the noise of twenty children found time to compose five oratorios, one hundred and ninety church cantatas, three wedding cantatas, and a dozen motets, six solemn masses, three fiddle concertos, a concerto for two violins which alone would have made his name immortal, seven concertos for piano and orchestra, three concertos for two pianos, two concertos for three pianos, thirty orchestral scores and enough pieces for the flute, the harpsichord, the organ, the bull-fiddle and the French horn to keep the average student of music busy for the rest of his days.
Or again, by what process of industry and application could painters like Rembrandt and Rubens produce a picture or an etching at the rate of almost four a month during more than thirty years? How could an humble citizen like Antonio Stradivarius turn out five hundred and forty fiddles, fifty violoncellos and twelve violas in a single lifetime?
I am not now discussing the brains capable of devising all these plots, hearing all these melodies, seeing all those diversified combinations of color and line, choosing all this wood. I am just wondering at the physical part of it. How did they do it? Didn’t they ever go to bed? Didn’t they sometimes take a few hours off for a game of billiards? Were they never tired? Had they ever heard of nerves?
Both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full of that sort of people. They defied all the laws of hygiene, ate and drank everything that was bad for them, were totally unconscious of their high destinies as members of the glorious human race, but they had an awfully good time and their artistic and intellectual output was something terrific.
And what was true of the arts and the sciences held equally true of such finicky subjects as theology.
Go to any of the libraries that date back two hundred years and you will find their cellars and attics filled with tracts and homilies and discussions and refutations and digests and commentaries in duodecimo and octodecimo and octavo, bound in leather and in parchment and in paper, all of them covered with dust and oblivion, but without exception containing an enormous if useless amount of learning.
The subjects of which they treated and many of the words they used have lost all meaning to our modern ears. But somehow or other these moldy compilations served a very useful purpose. If they accomplished nothing else, they atleast cleared the air. For they either settled the questions they discussed to the general satisfaction of all concerned, or they convinced their readers that those particular problems could not possibly be decided with an appeal to logic and argument and might therefore just as well be dropped right then and there.
This may sound like a back-handed compliment. But I hope that critics of the thirtieth century shall be just as charitable when they wade through the remains of our own literary and scientific achievements.
Baruch de Spinoza, the hero of this chapter, did not follow the fashion of his time in the matter of quantity. His assembled works consist of three or four small volumes and a few bundles of letters.
But the amount of study necessary for the correct mathematical solution of his abstract problems in ethics and philosophy would have staggered any normally healthy man. It killed the poor consumptive who had undertaken to reach God by way of the table of multiplication.
Spinoza was a Jew. His people, however, had never suffered the indignities of the Ghetto. Their ancestors had settled down in the Spanish peninsula when that part of the world was a Moorish province. After the reconquest and the introduction of that policy of “Spain for the Spaniard” which eventually forced that country into bankruptcy, the Spinozas had been forced to leave their old home. They had sailed for the Netherlands, had bought a small house in Amsterdam, had worked hard, had saved their money and soon were known as one of the most respectable families of the “Portuguese colony.”
If nevertheless their son Baruch was conscious of his Jewishorigin, this was due more to the training he received in his Talmud school than to the gibes of his little neighbors. For the Dutch Republic was so chock full of class prejudice that there was little room left for mere race prejudice and therefore lived in perfect peace and harmony with all the alien races that had found a refuge along the banks of the North and Zuider Seas. And this was one of the most characteristic bits of Dutch life which contemporary travelers never failed to omit from their “Souvenirs de Voyage” and with good reason.
In most other parts of Europe, even at that late age, the relation between the Jew and the non-Jew was far from satisfactory. What made the quarrel between the two races so hopeless was the fact that both sides were equally right and equally wrong and that both sides could justly claim to be the victim of their opponent’s intolerance and prejudice. In the light of the theory put forward in this book that intolerance is merely a form of self-protection of the mob, it becomes clear that as long as they were faithful to their own respective religions, the Christian and the Jew must have conceded each other as enemies. In the first place, they both of them maintained that their God was the only true God and that all the other Gods of all the other nations were false. In the second place, they were each other’s most dangerous commercial rival. The Jews had come to western Europe as they had originally come to Palestine, as immigrants in search of a new home. The labor unions of that day, the Guilds, had made it impossible for them to take up a trade. They had therefore been obliged to content themselves with such economic makeshifts as pawnbroking and banking. In the Middle Ages these two professions, which closely resembled each other, were not thought fit occupations for decent citizens. Why the Church, until thedays of Calvin, should have felt such a repugnance towards money (except in the form of taxes) and should have regarded the taking of interest as a crime, is hard to understand. Usury, of course, was something no government could tolerate and already the Babylonians, some forty centuries before, had passed drastic laws against the money changers who tried to make a profit out of other people’s money. In several chapters of the Old Testament, written two thousand years later, we read how Moses too had expressly forbidden his followers to lend money at exorbitant rates of interest to any one except foreigners. Still later, the great Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, had given expression to their great disapproval of money that was born of other money. The Church fathers had been even more explicit upon this subject. All during the Middle Ages the money lenders were held in profound contempt. Dante even provided a special little alcove in his Hell for the exclusive benefit of his banker friends.
Theoretically perhaps it could be proved that the pawnbroker and his colleague, the man behind the “banco,” were undesirable citizens and that the world would be better off without them. At the same time, as soon as the world had ceased to be entirely agricultural, it was found to be quite impossible to transact even the simplest business operations without the use of credit. The money lender therefore had become a necessary evil and the Jew, who (according to the views of the Christians) was doomed to eternal damnation any way, was urged to occupy himself with a trade which was necessary but which no respectable man would touch.
In this way these unfortunate exiles were forced into certain unpleasant trades which made them the natural enemy of both the rich and the poor, and then, as soon as they had established themselves, these same enemies turnedagainst them, called them names, locked them up in the dirtiest part of the city and in moments of great emotional stress, hanged them as wicked unbelievers or burned them as renegade Christians.
It was all so terribly silly. And besides it was so stupid. These endless annoyances and persecutions did not make the Jews any fonder of their Christian neighbors. And as a direct result, a large volume of first-rate intelligence was withdrawn from public circulation, thousands of bright young fellows, who might have advanced the cause of commerce and science and the arts, wasted their brains and energy upon the useless study of certain old books filled with abstruse conundrums and hair-splitting syllogisms and millions of helpless boys and girls were doomed to lead stunted lives in stinking tenements, listening on the one hand to their elders who told them that they were God’s chosen people who would surely inherit the earth and all the wealth thereof, and on the other hand being frightened to death by the curses of their neighbors who never ceased to inform them that they were pigs and only fit for the gallows or the wheel.
To ask that people (any people) doomed to live under such adverse circumstances shall retain a normal outlook upon life is to demand the impossible.
Again and again the Jews were goaded into some desperate act by their Christian compatriots and then, when white with rage, they turned upon their oppressors, they were called “traitors” and “ungrateful villains” and were subjected to further humiliations and restrictions. But these restrictions had only one result. They increased the number of Jews who had a grievance, turned the others into nervous wrecks and generally made the Ghetto a ghastly abode of frustrated ambitions and pent-up hatreds.
Spinoza, because he was born in Amsterdam, escaped the misery which was the birthright of most of his relatives. He went first of all to the school maintained by his synagogue (appropriately called “the Tree of Life”) and as soon as he could conjugate his Hebrew verbs was sent to the learned Dr. Franciscus Appinius van den Ende, who was to drill him in Latin and in the sciences.
Dr. Franciscus, as his name indicates, was of Catholic origin. Rumor had it that he was a graduate of the University of Louvain and if one were to believe the best informed deacons of the town, he was really a Jesuit in disguise and a very dangerous person. This however was nonsense. Van den Ende in his youth had actually spent a few years at a Catholic seminary. But his heart was not in his work and he had left his native city of Antwerp, had gone to Amsterdam and there had opened a private school of his own.
He had such a tremendous flair for choosing the methods that would make his pupils like their classical lessons, that heedless of the man’s popish past, the Calvinistic burghers of Amsterdam willingly entrusted their children to his care and were very proud of the fact that the pupils of his school invariably out-hexametered and out-declined the little boys of all other local academies.
Van den Ende taught little Baruch his Latin, but being an enthusiastic follower of all the latest discoveries in the field of science and a great admirer of Giordano Bruno, he undoubtedly taught the boy several things which as a rule were not mentioned in an orthodox Jewish household.
For young Spinoza, contrary to the customs of the times, did not board with the other boys, but lived at home. And he so impressed his family by his profound learning that all the relations proudly pointed to him as the little professorand liberally supplied him with pocket money. He did not waste it upon tobacco. He used it to buy books on philosophy.
One author especially fascinated him.
That was Descartes.
René Descartes was a French nobleman born in that region between Tours and Poitiers where a thousand years before the grandfather of Charlemagne had stopped the Mohammedan conquest of Europe. Before he was ten years old he had been sent to the Jesuits to be educated and he spent the next decade making a nuisance of himself. For this boy had a mind of his own and accepted nothing without “being shown.” The Jesuits are probably the only people in the world who know how to handle such difficult children and who can train them successfully without breaking their spirit. The proof of the educational pudding is in the eating. If our modern pedagogues would study the methods of Brother Loyola, we might have a few Descartes of our own.
When he was twenty years old, René entered military service and went to the Netherlands where Maurice of Nassau had so thoroughly perfected his military system that his armies were the post-graduate school for all ambitious young men who hoped to become generals. Descartes’ visit to the headquarters of the Nassau prince was perhaps a little irregular. A faithful Catholic taking service with a Protestant chieftain! It sounds like high treason. But Descartes was interested in problems of mathematics and artillery but not of religion or politics. Therefore as soon as Holland had concluded a truce with Spain, he resigned his commission, went to Munich and fought for a while under the banner of the Catholic Duke of Bavaria.
But that campaign did not last very long. The only fightingof any consequence then still going on was near La Rochelle, the city which the Huguenots were defending against Richelieu. And so Descartes went back to France that he might learn the noble art of siege-craft. But camp life was beginning to pall upon him. He decided to give up a military career and devote himself to philosophy and science.
He had a small income of his own. He had no desire to marry. His wishes were few. He anticipated a quiet and happy life and he had it.
Why he chose Holland as a place of residence, I do not know. But it was a country full of printers and publishers and bookshops and as long as one did not openly attack the established form of government or religion, the existing law on censorship remained a dead letter. Furthermore, as he never learned a single word of the language of his adopted country (a trick not difficult to a true Frenchman), Descartes was able to avoid undesirable company and futile conversations and could give all of his time (some twenty hours per day) to his own work.
This may seem a dull existence for a man who had been a soldier. But Descartes had a purpose in life and it seems that he was perfectly contented with his self-inflicted exile. He had during the course of years become convinced that the world was still plunged in a profound gloom of abysmal ignorance; that what was then being called science had not even the remotest resemblance to true science, and that no general progress would be possible until the whole ancient fabric of error and falsehood had first of all been razed to the ground. No small order, this. Descartes however was possessed of endless patience and at the age of thirty he set to work to give us an entirely new system of philosophy. Warming up to his task he added geometry and astronomyand physics to his original program and he performed his task with such noble impartiality of mind that the Catholics denounced him as a Calvinist and the Calvinists cursed him for an atheist.
This clamor, if ever it reached him, did not disturb him in the least. He quietly continued his researches and died peacefully in the city of Stockholm, whither he had gone to talk philosophy with the Queen of Sweden.
Among the people of the seventeenth century, Cartesianism (the name under which his philosophies became known) made quite as much of a stir as Darwinism was to make among the contemporaries of Queen Victoria. To be a Cartesian in the year 1680 meant something terrible, something almost indecent. It proclaimed one an enemy of the established order of society, a Socinian, a low fellow who by his own confession had set himself apart from the companionship of his respectable neighbors. This did not prevent the majority of the intelligent classes from accepting Cartesianism as readily and as eagerly as our grandfathers accepted Darwinism. But among the orthodox Jews of Amsterdam, such subjects were never even mentioned. Cartesianism was not mentioned in either Talmud or Torah. Hence it did not exist. And when it became apparent that it existed just the same in the mind of one Baruch de Spinoza, it was a foregone conclusion that said Baruch de Spinoza would himself cease to exist as soon as the authorities of the synagogue had been able to investigate the case and take official action.
The Amsterdam synagogue had at that moment passed through a severe crisis. When little Baruch was fifteen years old, another Portuguese exile by the name of Uriel Acosta had arrived in Amsterdam, had forsworn Catholicism, which he had accepted under a threat of death, and hadreturned to the faith of his fathers. But this fellow Acosta had not been an ordinary Jew. He was a gentleman accustomed to carry a feather in his hat and a sword at his side. To him the arrogance of the Dutch rabbis, trained in the German and Polish schools of learning, had come as a most unpleasant surprise, and he had been too proud and too indifferent to hide his opinions.
In a small community like that, such open defiance could not possibly be tolerated. A bitter struggle had followed. On the one side a solitary dreamer, half prophet, half hidalgo. On the other side the merciless guardians of the law.
It had ended in tragedy.
First of all Acosta had been denounced to the local police as the author of certain blasphemous pamphlets which denied the immortality of the soul. This had got him into trouble with the Calvinist ministers. But the matter had been straightened out and the charge had been dropped. Thereupon the synagogue had excommunicated the stiff-necked rebel and had deprived him of his livelihood.
For months thereafter the poor man had wandered through the streets of Amsterdam until destitution and loneliness had driven him back to his own flock. But he was not re-admitted until he had first of all publicly apologized for his evil conduct and had then suffered himself to be whipped and kicked by all the members of the congregation. These indignities had unbalanced his mind. He had bought a pistol and had blown his brains out.
This suicide had caused a tremendous lot of talk among the principal citizens of Amsterdam. The Jewish community felt that it could not risk the chance of another public scandal. When it became evident that the most promising pupil of the “Tree of Life” had been contaminated by the new heresies of Descartes, a direct attempt was made to hushthings up. Baruch was approached and was offered a fixed annual sum if he would give his word that he would be good, would continue to show himself in the synagogue and would not publish or say anything against the law.
Now Spinoza was the last man to consider such a compromise. He curtly refused to do anything of the sort. In consequence whereof he was duly read out of his own church according to that famous ancient Formula of Damnation which leaves very little to the imagination and goes back all the way to the days of Jericho to find the appropriate number of curses and execrations.
As for the victim of these manifold maledictions, he remained quietly in his room and read about the occurrence in next day’s paper. Even when an attempt was made upon his life by an over zealous follower of the law, he refused to leave town.
This came as a great blow to the prestige of the Rabbis who apparently had invoked the names of Joshua and Elisha in vain and who saw themselves publicly defied for the second time in less than half a dozen years. In their anxiety they went so far as to make an appeal to the town hall. They asked for an interview with the Burgomasters and explained that this Baruch de Spinoza whom they had just expelled from their own church was really a most dangerous person, an agnostic who refused to believe in God and who therefore ought not to be tolerated in a respectable Christian community like the city of Amsterdam.
Their lordships, after their pleasant habit, washed their hands of the whole affair and referred the matter to a sub-committee of clergymen. The sub-committee studied the question, discovered that Baruch de Spinoza had done nothing that could be construed as an offense against the ordinances of the town, and so reported to their lordships. Atthe same time they considered it to be good policy for members of the cloth to stand together and therefore they suggested that the Burgomasters ask this young man, who seemed to be so very independent, to leave Amsterdam for a couple of months and not to return until the thing had blown over.
From that moment on the life of Spinoza was as quiet and uneventful as the landscape upon which he looked from his bedroom windows. He left Amsterdam and hired a small house in the village of Rijnsberg near Leiden. He spent his days polishing lenses for optical instruments and at night he smoked his pipe and read or wrote as the spirit moved him. He never married. There was rumor of a love affair between him and a daughter of his former Latin teacher, van den Ende. But as the child was ten years old when Spinoza left Amsterdam, this does not seem very likely.
He had several very loyal friends and at least twice a year they offered to give him a pension that he might devote all his time to his studies. He answered that he appreciated their good intentions but that he preferred to remain independent and with the exception of an allowance of eighty dollars a year from a rich young Cartesian, he never touched a penny and spent his days in the respectable poverty of the true philosopher.
He had a chance to become a professor in Germany, but he declined. He received word that the illustrious King of Prussia would be happy to become his patron and protector, but he answered nay and remained faithful to the quiet routine of his pleasant exile.
After a number of years in Rijnsberg he moved to the Hague. He had never been very strong and the particles of glass from his half-finished lenses had affected his lungs.
He died quite suddenly and alone in the year 1677.
To the intense disgust of the local clergy, not less than six private carriages belonging to prominent members of the court followed the “atheist” to his grave. And when two hundred years later a statue was unveiled to his memory, the police reserves had to be called out to protect the participants in this solemn celebration against the fury of a rowdy crowd of ardent Calvinists.
So much for the man. What about his influence? Was he merely another of those industrious philosophers who fill endless books with endless theories and speak a language which drove even Omar Khayyam to an expression of exasperated annoyance?
No, he was not.
Neither did he accomplish his results by the brilliancy of his wit or the plausible truth of his theories. Spinoza was great mainly by force of his courage. He belonged to a race that knew only one law, a set of hard and fast rules laid down for all times in the dim ages of a long forgotten past, a system of spiritual tyranny created for the benefit of a class of professional priests who had taken it upon themselves to interpret this sacred code.
He lived in a world in which the idea of intellectual freedom was almost synonymous with political anarchy.
He knew that his system of logic must offend both Jews and Gentiles.
But he never wavered.
He approached all problems as universal problems. He regarded them without exception as the manifestation of an omnipresent will and believed them to be the expression of an ultimate reality which would hold good on Doomsday as it had held good at the hour of creation.
And in this way he greatly contributed to the cause of human tolerance.
Like Descartes before him, Spinoza discarded the narrow boundaries laid down by the older forms of religion and boldly built himself a new system of thought based upon the rocks of a million stars.
By so doing he made man what man had not been since the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans, a true citizen of the universe.