From aspiring rabbi to excommunicant
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| Baruch Spinoza |
Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Benedict de Spinoza) is a philosopher whose work I greatly admire. Berthold Auerbach is a German writer of the 19th century who has since faded into relative obscurity, but I have previously enjoyed reading his short story “Christian Gellert’s Last Christmas” and his book Black Forest Village Stories. When I discovered that Auerbach had written a biographical novel about Spinoza, I was eager to read it, hoping the book would provide insight into Spinoza’s intellectual development. This 1837 novel did not turn out to be the masterpiece I had hoped, but it does have its merits, both literary and philosophical.
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, the son of Portuguese-Jewish immigrants who fled the Inquisition to find religious freedom in the Netherlands. Spinoza lived from 1632 to 1677, but Auerbach’s biographical narrative only covers his life from about 1647 to 1657. The novel begins with a teenage Spinoza undergoing studies to become a rabbi in his community synagogue. It ends a decade later with his being excommunicated from the Jewish faith for heresy. In the intervening years, Auerbach focuses on two main plot threads. One is Spinoza’s drifting away from the Jewish faith as he develops his own individual pantheistic philosophy. The second is a love story between Spinoza and Olympia van den Ende, the highly educated daughter of his Latin teacher. Both are freethinkers, but Spinoza was raised a Jew and Olympia a Catholic, and neither of their communities will accept an intermarriage. In addition, Spinoza feels compelled to abandon earthly pleasures such as love so that he may concentrate solely on his intellectual pursuits.
The narrowness of the novel’s scope is a bit disappointing. I was hoping for a more lifelong view of the development of Spinoza’s philosophy, but instead Auerbach concentrates on this one period of its nascency. Auerbach himself was a Jew, and it is clear from this book that he is enthralled by Jewish history and ritual. The entire first half of the book is strictly about Judaism; freethought doesn’t rear its ugly head until roughly the halfway point. There are only a couple chapters where Auerbach really discusses Spinoza’s mature philosophy in detail, but when he does delve into the philosopher’s Ethics, for example, Auerbach explains Spinoza’s ideas clearly and insightfully. We see how Spinoza’s conception of monism emerges from the dualism of Descartes. Much of this is revealed through extensive dialogues between Spinoza and a small circle of friends that includes Olympia. While the scenes dealing with Judaism seem authentic in their level of detail, the love story never really rings true. It feels like fictional license on Auerbach’s part but not necessarily in a bad way, much like Shakespeare’s fictionalizations of the lives of historical figures.
I don’t know enough about Auerbach to say to what extent he was a faithful Jew and to what extent he was a Spinozan freethinker, but as a member of the latter category myself I can say that when all is said and done the author certainly does justice to the philosopher’s freethought. He paints Spinoza as a secular Christlike figure who sacrificed much in his search for rational truth. Spinoza’s pantheistic conception of a deity is portrayed as his attempt to seek out divinity in the universe rather than turning away from God. Reason is a gift from God, Spinoza believed, even when the exercising of that reason clashes with religious tradition and dogma. I wish there had been less about Judaism and more about monism in this book, but in the end I found this to be an interesting, though romanticized, look at Spinoza’s life and thought.
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Poorly written sketches of interesting people
Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers is the American reprint of a work previously published in England in 1857 under the title Half-Hours with the Freethinkers. It is a collection of what appear to have been columns in a periodical, though the title of the journal is never named. The book provides profiles of 23 important freethinkers throughout history, a group that broadly includes atheists, pantheists, deists, and other heretics who publicly disagreed with Christian dogma. The essays are written by Charles Bradlaugh (writing under the pseudonym of Iconoclast), A. Collins, and J. Watts.
Bradlaugh was a prominent spokesman for freethought in his own right, but his writing here, and that of his colleagues, leaves much to be desired. The essays are a mixture of biographical sketches, philosophical summary, adulatory tribute, and textual excerpts. Unfortunately the authors rely far too heavily on the latter. Many of the chapters contain very little biographical content and instead rather lazily reproduce extensive and not judiciously edited excerpts of the subjects’ writings. Baruch Spinoza, for example, led an interesting life, but his chapter is mostly one big chunk taken from his Ethics, which I’d already read. One of the reasons I pick up a book like this is because I don’t want to read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry; I just want to get an idea of his philosophical thought. Bradlaugh, however, chooses to reprint page after page of Shelley’s poetry when two summary paragraphs on the poet’s freethought views would have been more useful and effective. As far as biographical content goes, the best you can hope for is maybe two or three interesting facts about each person’s life, and for some of the lesser known personages you get almost no idea of who they were. Rather than really trying to educate readers, the authors write in a “but of course you already know this” tone that is strange and off-putting.
Because of the heavy reliance on excerpts, two of the more interesting entries are about ancient authors whose written works no longer exist: Epicurus and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism). With the exception of these two ancient thinkers and Spinoza, almost all the remaining figures are 17th or 18th century deists, meaning those who believed in an impartial creator god as opposed to the anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian deity who judges man and answers his prayers. The authors themselves are atheists, but they view the heretical thinking of these deists with admiration as necessary precursors toward modern atheism. A few of the subjects were bona fide members of the clergy who departed from church doctrine, and their excerpts tend to be long and tedious catalogs of biblical inaccuracies. Robert Taylor’s chapter consists almost entirely of Bible quotes while Joseph Barker focuses on the error-prone process of translating holy scripture. To 21st century freethinkers, this stuff is old hat and makes for a boring read, unless you are a fundamentalist Christian thinking of leaving the Church, in which case you could probably find a better book to guide you than this 19th century anthology.
I was hoping for a collection of biographical sketches, but what I got was far less interesting. The book did very briefly introduce me to some thinkers of which I was unfamiliar, and for that I am thankful. There are a few choice chapters, like the ones on David Hume or Frances Wright D’Arusmont, the only woman represented here. In general, however, the text was mostly dull and annoying. For those interested in the history of freethought, I would recommend the 1889 work compiled by Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations, a far more interesting work than this collection by Bradlaugh and company.
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The toughest book you’ll ever love
Ethics by Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Benedict de Spinoza) was originally published in 1677 under the Latin title of Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata. Though the title highlights Spinoza’s ethical philosophy, the scope of the book is much broader. Before he ever gets around to discussing how people should conduct themselves, he first examines in great detail the nature of God, the substance of matter, and the processes of human thought and emotion. One thing that separates Ethics from just about any other philosophical text you’re likely to come across is that Spinoza makes his argument in the form of a mathematical proof, similar to the style of Euclid’s The Elements. He begins each of the book’s five parts by defining terms. He then postulates several fundamental axioms. From these axioms, he proceeds to make a series of propositions, each of which builds upon the material that came before. He supports each proposition with explanatory commentary, corollaries, and notes.
The result of this approach is a very comprehensive and coherent one-volume philosophical system of how the universe works. By coherent I mean that its pieces cohere firmly and logically together; I definitely don’t mean easy to read. Never has a book been so orderly structured yet so confusing. Each sentence Spinoza writes is crafted in a circuitous syntax that is quite frustrating to decipher. He pens each statement with such precision that at times its like reading computer code. Yet when kernels of wisdom do emerge from this fog of verbiage the reader reaps the rewards of pure genius. It’s not always a fun read, but it is a work that deserves deep concentration and contemplation. Though the Euclidean structure of the book makes for labor intensive reading, you’ll end up wishing more philosophers would have adopted this logical structure and stated their ideas so systematically.
Spinoza begins by discussing the substance of which the universe is comprised. While dualists like Plato and Descartes posited that the universe consists of two substances, matter and spirit, Spinoza proposes a monism by which matter and mind are one and the same substance. Since only one substance exists, God is also comprised of it, and since God is infinite, the universe (or Nature) is God. Thus, from the philosophy of monism springs the religion of pantheism. In Spinoza’s view, everything is divine. His deity is not an anthropomorphic god, nor does he believe in ideal definitions of good and evil. Spinoza maintains a strictly deterministic view of the universe in which every action leads back to the ultimate cause, the eternal God. Fate is predetermined and free will is an illusion. Spinoza goes to great lengths to explain how human thoughts and emotions are the result of natural processes, even so far as to define a tedious laundry list of human emotions and their causes. His ethics are very similar to those of the ancient Stoics. Man has no control over what befalls him, but he can manage his emotions with rational thought and cultivate happiness by contemplating God and resigning himself to his natural destiny. Despite his continual use of the G-word, Spinoza’s pantheism is about as near as you can get to atheism without calling it as such. The Ethics may be the closest thing to a bible for freethinkers that has ever been produced. Thanks to its Euclidean structure, you can even quote it chapter and verse.
The Wordsworth Classics series has a beautifully typeset paperback edition of the Ethics, with a revised version of the 1883 translation by W. H. White. However, the translation by R. H. M. Elwes (also 1883), found in the free ebook edition from Project Gutenberg, is a little easier to understand. For difficult passages, I found myself going back and forth between the two.
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