Betraying Spinoza (26 page)

This love towards God cannot be stained by the emotion of envy or jealousy; contrariwise, it is the more fostered in proportion as we conceive a greater number of men to be joined to God by the same bond of love
.
⁴⁸

All the ceremonies of the superstitious religions, all the slanted versions of their own histories, are founded on the irrational—the irreligious!—desire to make God love us in return, and the indulgence in the jealous fantasy that he loves us—our kind, our people—more than others.

Spinoza is always offended to hear himself described as irreligious, impious.
Whatsoever we desire and do, whereof we are the cause in so far as we possess the idea of God, or know God, I set down to Religion. The desire of well-doing which is engendered by a life according to reason, I call piety
.
⁴⁹

And how different from the rational worship of religion are the superstitious ways of carrying on, the pleading and groveling, that pass in most superstitions as worshiping God. Men worship as if it is an arbitrary and exceedingly vain tyrant whom they must placate and flatter, each religion declaring itself more worthy of His favor. This is how the religions all distinguish themselves from one another— Jews, and Christians, and Turks. Like children fighting for their parents’ attention, they never realize that everyone’s true happiness and blessedness consists solely in the enjoyment of good, not in priding himself that he alone is enjoying that good to the exclusion of others.
He who counts himself more blessed because he alone enjoys well-being not shared by others, or because he is more blessed and fortunate than others, knows not what is true happiness, and blessedness; and the joy he derives there-from, if it be not mere childishness, has its only source in spite and malice
.
⁵⁰

The
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
has been printed by the tried and true friend of philosophy, Jan Rieuwertsz, though Spinoza has attempted to protect him by putting the name of a pseudonymous publisher on the cover. If truth is to be measured by the degree of the protest against it, then Spinoza has succeeded most admirably. Still, the vehemence of holy denunciation and hatred has perhaps made it impossible for Spinoza’s proofs to be shown to the world. So be it.

In the natural light of reason the seeming contingencies melt away, leaving only the indestructible crystalline web, revealed as that much more intricate for having absorbed the seeming accidents into itself. Contingency is a mere illusion, the outcome of not perceiving the web of necessity.
But a thing can in no respect be called contingent save in relation to the imperfection of our knowledge
.
⁵¹
There is only one logically possible world. And it exists because it must.
Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order differently from that which has obtained
.
⁵²
The only rational response, whatsoever the provocation, is to understand and to acquiesce.

These propositions, and all that relate to the true way of life and religions, are easily proved. … Namely, that hatred should be overcome with love, and that every man should desire for others the good
that he seeks for himself. … The strong man has ever first in his thoughts, that all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature; so that whatsoever he deems to be hurtful and evil, and whatsoever, accordingly, seems to him impious, horrible, unjust, and base, assumes that appearance owing to his own disordered, fragmentary, and confused view of the universe. Wherefore, he strives before all things to conceive things as they really are, and to remove the hindrances to true knowledge, such as are hatred, anger, envy, derision, pride, and similar emotions. … Thus he endeavors, as we said before, as far as in him lies to do good, and to go on his way rejoicing
.
⁵³

No painful emotions can survive within the apprehension of
Deus sive natura
. Even the incidents that are personally painful—the falsifications of what he had written in the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
, the ever more violent defamations of him as atheist, materialist, immoralist—that threaten one’s very essence, the project of flourishing in the world, once subsumed under the vision of necessity, lose their capacity to hurt one in quite the same way. To behold how they fit in with the whole immense spread that is the object of one’s knowledge, and thus of one’s pleasure, and thus of one’s love, is to transform them from passive emotions into the active emotions of understanding.

It may be objected that, as we understand God as the cause of all things, we by that very fact regard God as the cause of pain. But I make answer, that, in so far as we understand the causes of pain, it to that extent, ceases to be a passion, that is, it ceases to be pain; therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of pain, we to that extent feel pleasure
.
⁵⁴

Louis XIV has decided to pursue his vision of
gloire
by invading the Low Lands. His standing army is immense, 170,000 strong. His new method of firing muskets, the flintlock, which ignites the powder in the pan with a spark caused by a piece of flint drawn across roughened steel, rather than long fuses of rope, means that the French guns can be held ready and safe at half cock. The well-trained and well-armed French press on across the Low Lands, and in order to impede their relentless advance the dikes are opened as a last and desperate measure. Atop the normal mayhem and misery of war, there is also massive flooding.

I rejoice that your philosophers are alive [Spinoza writes to Oldenburg] and remember themselves and their republic. I shall expect news of what they have done recently, when the warriors are sated with blood, and rest in order to renew their strength a little. If that famous scoffer [Democritus] were alive today, he would surely die of laughter. These disorders, however, do not move me to laughter nor even to tears, but rather to philosophizing, and to the better observation of human nature. I do not think it right for me to laugh at nature, much less to weep over it, when I consider that men, like the rest, are only a part of nature, and that I do not know how each part of nature is connected with the whole of it, and how with the other parts. And I find that it is from the mere want of this kind of knowledge that certain things in Nature were formerly wont to appear to me vain, disorderly, and absurd, because I perceive them only in part and mutilated, and they do not agree with our philosophic mind. But now I let every man live according to his own ideas. Let those who will, by all means die for their good, so long as I am allowed to live for truth.
⁵⁵

It is the
rampjaar
, the year of Dutch disaster. The glorious experiment in republicanism has come to an end. The Dutch have managed to beat back the French, but the losses have maddened the masses and they are looking for someone to blame, and their crazed gaze has fallen on Jan de Witt. It is a stain that will last for all times on the history of this country.

Jan de Witt had stood for all that was best in the Dutch experiment in enlightened government, an experiment in which Spinoza had taken so lively an interest and pleasure that the only social identification he would ever allow himself was “citizen of the Dutch Republic.” Jan de Witt had been the politician who had wrought this political wonder. Himself a lawyer and a mathematician of no mean talent, he had been the Grand Pensioner of the States of Holland since 1653, when he was elected at twenty-eight, and had been reelected in 1658, 1663, and 1668, holding office until just before his death.

He had led the country to its prosperity (using his mathematical skills for such prosaic tasks as balancing the budget) and secured the peace with the European countries that threatened Holland’s endeavor to persist in its own being and flourish: England, France, Spain.

He was always an opponent of the House of Orange, the royalists who had ruled this country through their office of stadtholder. To countervail against the power of the royalists, he had encouraged the rise of the mercantile class, which had resulted in the unprecedented rise of affluence in the land and power abroad.

Jan de Witt

The country, as he found it in 1653, had been brought to the brink of ruin through the war with England, and he resolved to bring about peace. He rejected Cromwell’s suggestion of the union of England and Holland, though his treaty with them, in 1654, had made large concessions. The treaty had included a secret article, called the Act of Seclusion, by which the provinces of Holland pledged themselves not to elect a stadtholder. Cromwell wanted to thwart the ambitions of William III, the young prince of Orange, just as much as de Witt did, since the House of Orange was allied with England’s Stuarts. William II, young William’s father, had married the eldest daughter of Charles I of England.

But the orthodox Calvinist ministers and regents of The Hague were against the Act of Seclusion and incited the people to revolt against the Republicans. A little later (1669), however, the States of Holland made a new act, the Eternal Edict, which outlawed the House of Orange from holding the office of stadtholder for all times.

De Witt’s pro-French policy had been his undoing. With the devastation wrought by the French army, popular opinion turned against Jan de Witt, the irrational need to blame someone whipped up by the conservative forces in the land, the more orthodox and intolerant of the Calvinists, who had always favored the House of Orange. Jan’s brother, Cornelius de Witt, was arrested under false charges of fomenting sedition. He was tortured, but his captors could not force a false confession out of him. The conspirators—including almost certainly William III, who now became, despite the Eternal Edict, stadtholder—changed their tactics, obviously feeling it necessary to eliminate the de Witts entirely. A forged letter brought Jan to the prison where his brother Cornelius was being held. With both of the brothers there, the crowd—no doubt already alerted by the conspirators— descended on the prison and dragged out the two brothers. Jan de Witt, a friend of philosophy and thus of freedom, was, together with Cornelius, torn to pieces by the mob. The atrocities the crowd inflicted on their bodies is beyond the imagination to comprehend. They fed their organs to dogs and hung their severed limbs from lampposts.

Spinoza’s name has often enough been linked to Jan de Witt’s by their respective enemies. A pamphlet from 1672, the
rampjaar
, states that de Witt gave “the evil Spinoza” the protection to write and to publish the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
, “brought forth from hell by the fallen Jew Spinoza, in which it is proven, in an unprecedented, atheistic fashion, that the word of God must be explained and understood through Philosophy, and which was published with the knowledge of Mr. Jan.”
⁵⁶

Spinoza, on hearing what the mob—which had included respectable middle-class burghers—had perpetrated, is for once ready to ignore his watchword engraved in his signet ring,
caute
. He is moved to violate his own dictate of reason, derived in Part IV of
The Ethics:
“The virtue of a free man is seen to be as great when it declines danger, as when it overcomes it,”
⁵⁷
and the further corollary he had drawn, “The free man is as courageous in timely retreat as in combat; or a free man shows equal courage or presence of mind whether he elect to give battle or to retreat.” He had derived these propositions, true, but even so the time of declining dangers is not now. Timely retreat is not an option, and he elects to give battle. He has prepared a placard proclaiming ultimi barbarorum (you are the greatest of barbarians), which he intends to erect at the site of the assassinations. But his landlord, the sympathetic van der Spyck, has prudently locked the doors and won’t let him out, thinking quite reasonably that the crowd would like nothing more than to rip Spinoza to pieces as well, and feed his remains to the dogs.
⁵⁸
Then, too, it is not unreasonable to imagine them turning their vengeance against the property where the philosopher lived. Van der Spyck double-locks the doors.

The mystery of human suffering, its inevitability and extravagance—he had contemplated it often enough in his boyhood. Suffering was the constant topic of their lives, suffering linked with salvation, each implying the other; otherwise how in God’s name could the suffering be reconciled with God Himself? The tales that had bled the heart of all La Nação, as the Portuguese Nation still insisted on calling itself as it went through the motions of becoming Dutchified, had bled his heart, too: of forced confessions and heroic martyrdom, of “Judah called the faithful” crying out the words of the
Shema
as the flames rose around him. The hideous sounds of anguish had carried from Portugal and from Spain, so that they were always in their ears, making all of them half-mad, never able to distance themselves from the questions always present in the howls of torment: How can God allow such outrages to be perpetrated against the innocent? Where is the Merciful One’s mercy?