At a time when populism of both the left and the right threatens freedom of thought, the life and legacy of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza has much to teach us. Through reason, he showed, one can counter the "ultimate barbarism" that comes with unchecked human passions.
MEXICO CITY – “Spinoza has had the virtue of inspiring devotions,” Jorge Luis Borges remarked to me one morning in 1978. The great Argentine author had agreed to an interview with some reluctance, but when I expressed my intention to talk only about Spinoza, he perked up: “We’ll have a ‘More Geometric Breakfast!’”
I asked Borges about the book on Spinoza that he had promised to write. He confessed that he had given up on the idea, and immediately began to trace his own Spinozian devotion, which “dated back forever.” Our breakfast was an evocation of that imagined book.
We evoked Spinoza’s excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, his work as a lens grinder, his philosophical independence from the theologians of his time, and his defense of the Dutch Republic. To document the devotions that Spinoza had inspired through the ages, Borges cited the works of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, quoted passages from Heinrich Heine and Novalis, and offered anecdotes about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth:
“... it was suspected that they were supporters of the French Revolution, and were seen a little bit as possible traitors. Then someone followed them and reported that they were talking all the time about a spy, and that spy was... Spy-Nousa. They set out to look for Spy-Nousa. (Besides nousa is a person who is meddling in things, who is nousing around... who can Spy-Nousa be?) So they stopped bothering Wordsworth and Coleridge and went looking for the one who was, evidently, the head.”
Each Spinozist has his own devotion. That of Borges, who defined himself as “an Argentine lost in metaphysics,” concerned Spinoza’s conception of God as being synonymous with nature. The sole protagonist of Spinoza’s greatest work, the Ethics, is indeed an immeasurable god, devoid of human attributes – one whom Borges, in a poem about Spinoza, calls “indifferent,” “inexhaustible.” With his “translucent hands,” the lens grinder carves
an arduous crystal: the infinite map of the One who is all His stars.
The Dutch Connection
Among modern Spinozist devotions, few are comparable to that of the English historian Jonathan I. Israel. In the early 1970s, Israel wrote Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670, which is the remote seed that would eventually lead him to recreate the Spinozian intellectual universe across three centuries. The book included a chapter on the vibrant Portuguese community of crypto-Jews (secret practitioners of their religion) who lived in New Spain in the first half of the seventeenth century, the same period when their co-religionists were settling in Holland.
The destinies of these two groups of Jews could not have been more different. Those in Mexico ended up disciplined by the Inquisition, burned in autos de fe, dispersed throughout the kingdom, and finally erased by history. Those in Holland lived free from persecution and physical segregation. Israel’s journey through the crypto-Judaism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a journey from the condemned to the saved, and thus he arrived at Dutch history, on which he would become an authority.
Israel has devoted several books to the amazing commercial globalization that unfolded in the Netherlands during this period, partly fueled by its energetic Jewish community. But in recent decades, he has focused primarily on intellectual history, publishing thick, polemical volumes of historical revisionism that seek to prove the centrality of Dutch critical thought – particularly that of Spinoza – in what he calls the Radical Enlightenment (as distinct from the moderate, English, Scottish, French, or German Enlightenments). This, in his opinion, is where one will find the first and purest roots of the democratic, republican, tolerant, egalitarian, liberal tradition in the West.
Israel believes this tradition was partly fulfilled in the American Revolution, but then betrayed by the Rousseauian and anti-Enlightenment populism of Robespierre and the Jacobins. With Israel having laid out these arguments and published other books in a Spinozian vein, such as Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx, one might have thought that his task was finished. But his magnum opus was missing. With the publication of Spinoza, Life and Legacy, Israel has given us a book as vast as Spinoza’s god.
A Contemporary Look
For at least two centuries, Spinozian devotion has generated libraries, symposia, societies, sects, novels, and serious scholarship, leaving one to wonder if there is still any new way to approach the subject. One option is a biographical essay conceived from the circumstances of the twenty-first century. Ours is a censorious era in which political authoritarianism and intellectual intolerance converge – as in Spinoza’s time. The situation demands a brief, agile, reflective book that recreates Spinoza’s life and work, and builds bridges with the present. We now have such a work in Ian Buruma’s Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah.
Born in The Hague in 1951, Buruma seems to come by his interest (I wouldn’t call it devotion) in Spinoza naturally. His paternal grandfather was a tolerant Mennonite minister, his father was an avowed atheist, and his maternal grandparents were secular Jews. None of them would have “called themselves a Spinozist,” Buruma writes, “But in many ways, they were not far removed from him.”
Judging by the universality of Buruma’s own work, neither is he. One hears a Spinozian echo in his writing on issues such as multiculturalism and its discontents, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the relationship between religion and democracy, and modern outbursts of intolerance. Buruma would probably deny that Spinoza was a liberal in the modern sense of the term. But Spinoza’s thought certainly influenced the theory and practice of liberalism, and Buruma’s biography reads like an act of filiation.
Against the Grain
The story of Spinoza’s brief life (1632-77) starts in one of those homes of crypto-Jews originally from the Iberian Peninsula – exiles who had lost neither their fluency in Spanish nor their nostalgia for the land from which they had been expelled in 1492. Though their attachment to the Jewish faith had not been completely diminished, they had lost familiarity with the source texts and liturgies; those had to be concealed, or they would face trial and the stake of the Inquisition.
This long deferment of a repressed faith explains the defensive zeal that characterized the community in which Spinoza grew up, and in which his family played a foundational role. As Israel shows in his rich and revealing opening chapters, both branches of the family boasted prestigious figures. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side, for example, was Duarte Fernandes, an enigmatic character who moved in the worlds of diplomacy, politics, finance, trade (sugar, diamonds), and espionage, while at the same time promoting the exodus of Portuguese Jews to safe lands.
The paternal branch of the family was no less remarkable; it included members who had been persecuted by the Inquisition in the sixteenth century and joined the Portuguese conspiracy to achieve independence from Philip II of Spain. Spinoza’s grandfather Abraham emerged from these battles to become one of the patriarchs of the community. Upon his death, he entrusted to Miguel, Spinoza’s father, his prosperous trading business (olive oil, figs) with its networks in Brazil, North Africa, and Italy.
With this lineage, nothing seemed to foreshadow the heresy of the young prodigy, who received his early education in the Talmud Torah school of Amsterdam under the tutelage of legendary rabbinical authorities such as Saul Levi Morteira and Menasseh ben Israel. Explaining this heresy has obsessed generations of scholars.
For his part, Buruma vividly recreates the historical and cultural context of the “Dutch Golden Age,” when customs such as the traditional Dutch gedogen (non-enforcement of certain laws) were particularly beneficial to the Jews. Though this tolerance was less a reflection of empathy than of convenience, owing to the commercial advantages it conferred, it nonetheless made Amsterdam a safe place (a Mokum, in Yiddish). The city was unique among European capitals at the time, and its Jewish community would remain intact until the arrival of the Nazis.
Still, the federation of Dutch republics, seat of the “True Freedom” that Spinoza would eventually embody, suffered severe political and religious tensions. In addition to the old rivalry with Spain came a new rivalry with England (1652-54). Then there was the quarrel between two political traditions and their classes: the aristocracy, headed by the stadtholders of the House of Orange, and the merchant class, represented by the de Witt brothers (Cornelis, the mayor of Dordrecht and military officer, and Johan, the grand pensionary and mathematician).
Parallel to this struggle was a theological battle between the Dutch Reformed Church (of rigid Calvinist faith) and various Protestant sects (Mennonites, Socinians, Collegians) whose members inclined toward tolerance and a simpler faith, detached from dogmas. While they all separated themselves from the freethinkers and abjured the Catholics, they largely tolerated the Jews.
But one also found disharmony among the Jews, owing to the difficulties of reconciling Judaism’s Talmudic orthodoxy with the customs of the almost forgotten Sephardic tradition (which was influenced also by the Kabbalah and growing messianic aspirations). Given these divisions, one can better understand the young Spinoza’s predicament, when he began systematically to doubt his faith.
The Formative Years
Some notable scholars like Harry Wolfson have interpreted Spinoza’s heresy as the result of an intellectual process whose seeds were planted in the medieval Jewish tradition itself, particularly in the work of Maimonides and Hasdai Crescas. Others, like I.S. Révah, attribute it to the influence of heterodox Jews, such as Juan de Prado. The historian Steven Nadler, a major authority on Spinoza, stresses the influence of various freethinkers, particularly Spinoza’s teacher, the eccentric ex-Jesuit Franciscus Van den Enden.
For Israel, the strength of Spinoza’s spirit ultimately lay within his own mind. He documents the long process of introspection that led Spinoza to deny the major pillars of the Jewish and Christian faiths – from their positions on a personal god and free will, to the immortality of the soul and the divinity of the Bible. Still, no intellectual process occurs in a vacuum. Drawing on his own research and Spinoza scholars such as Yosef Kaplan, Israel details the chain of events leading up to his subject’s religious and intellectual rupture. It starts with the death of Spinoza’s frail mother, Hannah Deborah, in 1638, which cast a shadow over the family. Following the death of his older brother, Isaac, in 1649, Spinoza was brought fully into the family business. But owing to a series of robberies and asset confiscations brought by the war against England in 1652, the firm was soon bankrupt.
When Spinoza’s father died in 1654, the young thinker – barely 22 years old – became the reluctant head of a company drowning in debt owed to his co-religionists. But he litigated those claims successfully by turning to the Dutch justice system, rather than to the community courts. In Israel’s retelling of these legal vicissitudes, there is no shortage of physical violence and social repudiation – features that stand in stark contrast to the family’s history of prestige within the community.
In the end, Spinoza managed to free himself of all responsibility. He firmly and haughtily renounced his maternal inheritance. “Neither profit nor monkish abstinence nor battlefield glory, nor loyalty to lords and monarchs, nor any religious cause, are ideals worth any one’s time,” writes Israel about Spinoza. Only the pursuit of knowledge is.
Alone at Last
With his ties to the community severed, Spinoza embarked on an uncertain new path. He had no illusions about the risks of doing so. Years before, a remote uncle, the philosopher Uriel da Costa, had tried to live his own life of the mind in the open. Born a Christian in Porto and educated in Coimbra, he was the embodiment of what Spinoza would call intellectual “fluctuation.” He came to doubt his faith and embraced Judaism; then doubted Judaism and returned to Catholicism; then doubted both and embraced Epicureanism, thus denying the immortality of the soul.
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Twice excommunicated, da Costa was condemned to ostracism and misery. In 1640, he committed suicide, leaving his testimony in a dramatic autobiography: Exemplar Humanae Vitae.
How did Spinoza avoid the same fate? For starters, he had the advantage of being born a Jew, which at that time was a fluctuating and fluid condition in itself. Who was really a Jew? Could someone who had been baptized be a Jew? What about someone who maintained frequent commercial dealings with Catholics, or who had not been circumcised? These were not abstract questions for the young Spinoza: his own ancestors fell into precisely these categories.
For example, his maternal grandfather was a Christian by origin and indifferent to the Jewish faith. Having not been circumcised, Israel recalls, he was buried outside the Jewish Ouderkerk cemetery (whose Spanish and Baroque inspiration – vaguely heretical in itself – Buruma describes beautifully). Spinoza’s maternal grandmother, Maria Nunes, also had been baptized, before being converted to Judaism as a child while living in Venice. The only maternal figure in the philosopher’s life, she asked to be buried next to her husband; but her final wish was not granted.
Israel records these and other grievances that must have fed the young philosopher’s resentment, leading him to repudiate the external rites of the Jewish religion and refuse the gestures of conciliation Jewish communal leaders used to avoid scandal or reprisals from the official Calvinist Church.
Seen from a modern liberal perspective, the intolerance of the Portuguese Jewish community toward Spinoza seems like an inquisitorial act. It was not. Spinoza was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Marranos (Jews who had converted to Christianity) who had suffered unspeakably from the persecution of the Inquisition. Given that suffering, it is understandable that the heresy of the prodigal son was unbearable to them. The quarrel between Spinoza and his community was a historical drama.
The Willful Outcast
Although Spinoza was officially expelled from the Jewish community, he and Judaism would always remain inseparable. Far from denying God, he denied that anything existed outside of God. “Instead of saying that he denied God,” Heine wrote, “one might say that he denied man.” If anything offended Spinoza, it was the charge of atheism. Seeing existence as a natural clockwork, he would dedicate his life to discovering at least a portion of its infinite mechanisms.
But Spinoza’s scientific curiosity was subordinated to something else: a call for redemption through reason. He believed that by understanding nature, including the nature of human passions, man could find freedom. Only a Jew on the margins of Judaism could think so. The English philosopher Stuart Hampshire, quoted by Buruma, saw this clearly:
“He carried within him not only suggestions from the theology and biblical criticism of Maimonides and from a great line of Jewish scholars and theologians, but also the prophetic conception of philosophy as a search for salvation. Although salvation by reason substituted in his philosophy for salvation by revelation and obedience, his moral severity, particularly if compared with the worldly urbanity of Descartes, is often reminiscent of the Old Testament, even in the tone and accent of his writing.”
Da Costa had failed by stopping at the point of negation – by “fluctuating” without ever arriving at a new port. By contrast, according to Spinoza, Christ (whom he never calls “Jesus”) reached the highest stage of intellectual and moral communion, a feat that he recognized and perhaps secretly sought to emulate. Thus, Heine thought that the purity of Spinoza’s life had brought him close to that of his “divine kinsman Jesus.” Buruma offers a penetrating discussion of this parallel, and sees it as the reason that Spinoza – unlike Descartes, Leibniz, or Kant – is not only respected but also beloved.
Spinoza’s excommunication was not only the central event of his life; given his lasting influence, it was also a central event in the history of Western thought. Rather than embracing the Christian faith, as had been common since the Middle Ages, he pursued the conquest of a new intellectual realm, impregnated with his idea of God, but seeking to transcend the theological and political wars of his time by appealing to reason and freedom of thought. His personal philosophical liberation led him to articulate a vision of universal liberation, making him the messiah of freedom in Buruma’s title.
Grinding God
Buruma recreates the life of Spinoza like a Dutch portrait with a landscape. From varied and selected sources, but relying mainly on Nadler’s books and advice, he dialogues with Spinoza’s letters and the biographical and intellectual interpretations: he doubts, qualifies, and understands. Israel, astonishingly prolix, passionate, and exhaustive (the bibliography of this book consists of approximately 1,500 primary and secondary sources), has created around Spinoza a vast fresco of an era, densely populated with characters, genealogies, situations, ideas, episodes, and conflicts.
Both biographies highlight the material and social factors in Spinoza’s life. Far from wandering in the desert, Spinoza found shelter under the guidance of his teacher Van den Enden, a freethinker, author, publisher, actor, and theatre impresario who gave him work as a schoolteacher and introduced him to the classical authors (Terence, Seneca) who would appear throughout his future work.
Israel dwells at length on Van den Enden’s role in shaping Spinoza’s life and influencing radical liberalism more broadly. A precursor to the French revolutionaries, Van den Enden was eventually charged with plotting against Louis XIV and executed. His disciple, by contrast, was radical only in his philosophical convictions: he would seal his letters with the emblem of a rose and the word “Caute” (caution).
Spinoza became a lens grinder to support himself, a development not merely incidental to his philosophy. Every craft involves some relationship between mind and matter, and between body and mind. That is why Borges suggested a direct connection between the making of lenses and the invention of Spinoza’s god. Moreover, a reliable income gave Spinoza the independence that his philosophizing would require. He could live without ties to his former community, free to criticize the powers that be, especially the religious ones. While neither Buruma nor Israel focuses on the techniques of Spinoza’s craft, both note that his longstanding theoretical and practical interest in optics enabled him to manufacture highly prized lenses for microscopes and telescopes.
Spinoza’s Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663) – the only work published under his own name during his lifetime – was written at this time. It attracted the attention of great philosophers and scientists such as Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens, and Henry Oldenburg. Israel brings to life these figures and examines Spinoza’s correspondence with them. While all disagreed with Spinoza’s denial of a personal god, they recognized his philosophical authority and shared his interests in physics, mathematics, and optics.
Light was a common denominator not only in scientific inquiry but also in the art of the period. As Buruma explains, “seeing more clearly was central to the great paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Whether or not Vermeer used lenses and mirrors to paint sharper images in more detail, as some people insist, he was obsessed with light in all its different qualities.”
Another notable aspect of Spinoza’s leap to freedom in Amsterdam was his participation in an informal study circle (more Socratic than Platonic) that practiced “free culture”: the horizontal exchange of printed pamphlets and books in search of a reading public and conversation. This cultural form was unique, differing from university culture, with its vertical exchange of information from teachers to students, and its attachment to an inflexible scholasticism.
Though always under the censorious gaze of power and religion, practitioners of free culture included groups such as the English Royal Society, the Academy of the Lynx (Galileo), the Collège de France, and literary salons (so prestigious that they merited several comedies by Molière). In Amsterdam, the circle was much more modest, but it did not depend on political patronage, and it could press decisively for religious tolerance.
Its headquarters was the Book of Martyrs bookstore, owned by the bibliographer and printer Jan Rieuwertsz, the publisher of Descartes and future publisher of Spinoza. Presided over by Spinoza, whose religious training and marginalized Jewish status allowed him to confront multiple currents of thought, the group included Cartesians, freethinkers, Collegians, and Quakers, and the bookstore itself represented “True Freedom” in culture.
But in 1661, Spinoza left Amsterdam to take refuge in a small cottage in the village of Rijnsburg. Fortunately, conditions there were ideal for a contemplative life accompanied by epistolary conversation and, eventually, the presence of friends, disciples (freethinkers and heterodox Christians), and some of the major protagonists of the post-Cartesian philosophical awakening. It was here that he completed the book on Descartes and began to make progress on the Ethics. In Rijnsburg, the lens grinder hoped to “carve out” the god of Nature. But Nature had other plans.
Turbulence and Intolerance
After a brief interlude of peace, turmoil returned to Spinoza’s life in 1664. It was a paradoxical time for Europe. While the new scientific horizons seemed endless, the continent had just suffered the “Black Death,” which many attributed to the wrath of God. Were the comets that appeared in the sky natural phenomena decipherable by reason, or were they divine omens? Was the self-proclaimed Jewish messiah Sabbatai Sevi genuine, or a symptom of collective delirium?
It was in this context that Spinoza took refuge in Voorburg, a redoubt even more remote than Rijnsburg, and paused his writing of the Ethics to revive the combative free-culture spirit through work on his Theological-Political Treatise.
In time, the plague subsided, the comets disappeared, and the messiah converted to Islam. But in Dutch society, religious intolerance boiled over, reflecting the tenacity of the human passions that Spinoza would analyze in the Ethics by applying the same criteria he used in his studies of nature.
Here, Buruma offers timely insights into the Spinozian concept of conatus, which refers to a thing’s vital driving force (similar to the Freudian libido), and his paradoxical theory according to which free will is denied, but freedom remains attainable through a “clear and distinct” knowledge of deterministic forces. More Cartesian than Spinozist, Buruma frequently interjects with healthy expressions of doubt. If Spinoza is correct that every living organism seeks to “persist in its being,” he asks, how does one explain suicide?
Spinoza attracted many secret readers and surreptitious devotees. Whether in Israel’s encyclopedic reconstruction of Spinoza’s life and times or in Buruma’s succinct telling, it is moving to read about overzealous followers such as the brothers Johannes and Adriaan Koerbagh. Crusaders against superstition who were far less cautious than their teacher, they took their theological refutations of Christian and Jewish doctrine to extremes that would condemn them to prison, torture, banishment, misery, and death.
The fate of these Spinozian martyrs lent urgency to the final chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise, a seminal work in biblical criticism, more hospitable in its reading than the Ethics. In a critical account of the Old Testament, Spinoza illustrates, with examples, the natural character of the miracles, the moral (not philosophical) value of the prophecies, and the human authorship of the texts.
But he never sought to discredit popular religious devotion, which he considered positive insofar as it brought people comfort and peace. Instead, he directed his criticism at ecclesiastical authorities, the propagators of superstition who had no legitimate claim to power. His purpose was to defend freedom of thought, and to refute the charge of atheism. On this point, Buruma is categorical: “Spinoza loved God as a rational thinker. In that sense he was not an atheist. In any other sense, he was.” Scholars of Spinoza and Judaism would disagree: his complex spirituality led him to part ways with his tradition and his people, but in its core it was a Jewish spirituality. According to Wolfson, his God was already implicit in the Jewish Medieval thought: it was more an act of daring than an invention.
With the war that broke out between England and Holland (beset to its south by Louis XIV’s France) in 1664, the political horizon began to close in. In a comprehensive retelling of that conflict, Israel highlights the evolving relationship between science and power on both sides.
Scientists were grappling with new restrictions on their freedom. Despite his unaltered religious orthodoxy, Oldenburg (the first secretary of the Royal Society, theologian, philosopher, and scientist who had visited Spinoza at Rijnsburg) was jailed in the Tower of London for uttering some indiscretion about his monarch. Witnessing these developments, Spinoza saw that ecclesiastical authorities weren’t the only ones who oppressed men and toyed with their lives; so, too, did monarchs and their aristocratic allies.
The freedom to philosophize also faced new threats in Holland. With the war having strengthened the House of Orange, the official Calvinist Church prepared to deal a deathblow to the culture of “True Freedom.” Thanks to his friend and publisher Rieuwertsz, Spinoza managed to publish the Theological-Political Treatise in 1670 under a pseudonym and a false imprint. But the authorship became known, and it was soon decreed that the book “should be buried forever in eternal oblivion.” It was “a book forged in hell,” like the title of Nadler’s book on the subject. In the event, its prohibition would last at least a century.
The denouement of this political moment came in 1672, with the brutal overthrow of the de Witt brothers, who were lynched by a crazed mob in The Hague, where Spinoza had lived since 1670. “It is the ultimate barbarism,” he exclaimed, according to one of his early biographers. The time had come to write his Tractatus Politicus.
True, given the structure, style, and timelessness of the Ethics (which he did not complete until 1675), politics did not seem a natural outlet for Spinoza’s metaphysical speculations. But he had always been convinced that reason is not only the strongest bond a person can have with himself, but also the best foundation of a life in common with others. Moreover, since history had so directly interrupted his writing on the immutability of human nature, he could no longer avoid it.
Owing to this historical context, many authors consider the Theological-Political Treatise and the Tractatus Politicus to be no less fundamental than the Ethics. What all three share is the conviction that reason leads naturally to civic responsibility and, above all, to an active defense of freedom; it is not only about contemplating the “infinite map of the One who is all His stars.”
As in his previous works, Israel emphasizes the historical novelty of the Tractatus Politicus’s “democratic republicanism”: an order that accommodates popular religion but not religious authority, and that rests on the consensus of the many, not the monarchy and the aristocracy. Although Spinoza shares some of Thomas Hobbes’s premises, he arrives at a very different model than the one in Leviathan.
The proper role of Spinoza’s state is to regulate, not repress, religious passions; to promote justice and charity; and to guarantee freedom. As Buruma notes, Spinoza did not manage to develop the practical mechanisms of democracy, but had the audacity to think openly about the topic – and this despite the dark times that befell him late in life.
Though Spinoza studied power – and even tried personally to mediate between powers (during the war with France) – he was never tempted by it. In his last years, faithful to free culture, he rejected pecuniary support from princes and ministers, as well as offers of university professorships.
Spinoza died serenely in 1677, in his parents’ bed – the only family relic he kept – resigned not to live long enough to see the publication of his Opera Posthuma (which includes all his treatises, studies in Hebrew grammar, and correspondence). That task was left to Rieuwertsz, who, in yet another act of courage, soon published the volume with Spinoza’s face engraved on the frontispiece.
A Thinker for Our Time
“Spinoza has left us a vivid image, he who did not intend to be absolutely vivid,” Borges remarked on that morning almost half a century ago. In Buruma’s lively book and Israel’s summa biografica, the philosopher’s discreet, almost elusive, life unfolds before our eyes.
Readers everywhere should thank them. Returning to Spinoza can help us navigate our present era of fanaticisms – a time very much like his. Whether it is the populism of the radical right, with its ties to evangelical Protestants and reactionary Catholics, or the populism of the left, with its illiberal mob-based power, all threaten free thought. Where once the guardians of religious faith excommunicated and burned heretics, now ideologues of gender, race, language, nation, class, and culture seek to cancel those who think differently. (And similar to the Inquisition, apostates are seen as the biggest threat and most deserving of the bonfire.)
Holy war continues to confer prestige, as does messianic delirium. We thought we had moved beyond imperialist wars and ethnic-cleansing campaigns, but they are back. The cardinal values of the Western tradition – such as the honest search for truth, freedom of expression, science, a belief in objective facts, democratic civility, and, of course, tolerance – are on the defensive.
Spinoza contemplated without despair the “ultimate barbarism” of his time. Now we must do the same. “War is absurd,” he wrote, “but these problems neither make me laugh nor cry. On the contrary, they encourage me to understand human nature better.” Despite his cautious and attentive disposition, Spinoza showed the historic daring to think freely, and to defend freedom of thought. Those commitments remain worthy of our devotion.
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MEXICO CITY – “Spinoza has had the virtue of inspiring devotions,” Jorge Luis Borges remarked to me one morning in 1978. The great Argentine author had agreed to an interview with some reluctance, but when I expressed my intention to talk only about Spinoza, he perked up: “We’ll have a ‘More Geometric Breakfast!’”
I asked Borges about the book on Spinoza that he had promised to write. He confessed that he had given up on the idea, and immediately began to trace his own Spinozian devotion, which “dated back forever.” Our breakfast was an evocation of that imagined book.
We evoked Spinoza’s excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, his work as a lens grinder, his philosophical independence from the theologians of his time, and his defense of the Dutch Republic. To document the devotions that Spinoza had inspired through the ages, Borges cited the works of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, quoted passages from Heinrich Heine and Novalis, and offered anecdotes about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth:
“... it was suspected that they were supporters of the French Revolution, and were seen a little bit as possible traitors. Then someone followed them and reported that they were talking all the time about a spy, and that spy was... Spy-Nousa. They set out to look for Spy-Nousa. (Besides nousa is a person who is meddling in things, who is nousing around... who can Spy-Nousa be?) So they stopped bothering Wordsworth and Coleridge and went looking for the one who was, evidently, the head.”
Each Spinozist has his own devotion. That of Borges, who defined himself as “an Argentine lost in metaphysics,” concerned Spinoza’s conception of God as being synonymous with nature. The sole protagonist of Spinoza’s greatest work, the Ethics, is indeed an immeasurable god, devoid of human attributes – one whom Borges, in a poem about Spinoza, calls “indifferent,” “inexhaustible.” With his “translucent hands,” the lens grinder carves
an arduous crystal: the infinite
map of the One who is all His stars.
The Dutch Connection
Among modern Spinozist devotions, few are comparable to that of the English historian Jonathan I. Israel. In the early 1970s, Israel wrote Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670, which is the remote seed that would eventually lead him to recreate the Spinozian intellectual universe across three centuries. The book included a chapter on the vibrant Portuguese community of crypto-Jews (secret practitioners of their religion) who lived in New Spain in the first half of the seventeenth century, the same period when their co-religionists were settling in Holland.
The destinies of these two groups of Jews could not have been more different. Those in Mexico ended up disciplined by the Inquisition, burned in autos de fe, dispersed throughout the kingdom, and finally erased by history. Those in Holland lived free from persecution and physical segregation. Israel’s journey through the crypto-Judaism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a journey from the condemned to the saved, and thus he arrived at Dutch history, on which he would become an authority.
Israel has devoted several books to the amazing commercial globalization that unfolded in the Netherlands during this period, partly fueled by its energetic Jewish community. But in recent decades, he has focused primarily on intellectual history, publishing thick, polemical volumes of historical revisionism that seek to prove the centrality of Dutch critical thought – particularly that of Spinoza – in what he calls the Radical Enlightenment (as distinct from the moderate, English, Scottish, French, or German Enlightenments). This, in his opinion, is where one will find the first and purest roots of the democratic, republican, tolerant, egalitarian, liberal tradition in the West.
Israel believes this tradition was partly fulfilled in the American Revolution, but then betrayed by the Rousseauian and anti-Enlightenment populism of Robespierre and the Jacobins. With Israel having laid out these arguments and published other books in a Spinozian vein, such as Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx, one might have thought that his task was finished. But his magnum opus was missing. With the publication of Spinoza, Life and Legacy, Israel has given us a book as vast as Spinoza’s god.
A Contemporary Look
For at least two centuries, Spinozian devotion has generated libraries, symposia, societies, sects, novels, and serious scholarship, leaving one to wonder if there is still any new way to approach the subject. One option is a biographical essay conceived from the circumstances of the twenty-first century. Ours is a censorious era in which political authoritarianism and intellectual intolerance converge – as in Spinoza’s time. The situation demands a brief, agile, reflective book that recreates Spinoza’s life and work, and builds bridges with the present. We now have such a work in Ian Buruma’s Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah.
Born in The Hague in 1951, Buruma seems to come by his interest (I wouldn’t call it devotion) in Spinoza naturally. His paternal grandfather was a tolerant Mennonite minister, his father was an avowed atheist, and his maternal grandparents were secular Jews. None of them would have “called themselves a Spinozist,” Buruma writes, “But in many ways, they were not far removed from him.”
Judging by the universality of Buruma’s own work, neither is he. One hears a Spinozian echo in his writing on issues such as multiculturalism and its discontents, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the relationship between religion and democracy, and modern outbursts of intolerance. Buruma would probably deny that Spinoza was a liberal in the modern sense of the term. But Spinoza’s thought certainly influenced the theory and practice of liberalism, and Buruma’s biography reads like an act of filiation.
Against the Grain
The story of Spinoza’s brief life (1632-77) starts in one of those homes of crypto-Jews originally from the Iberian Peninsula – exiles who had lost neither their fluency in Spanish nor their nostalgia for the land from which they had been expelled in 1492. Though their attachment to the Jewish faith had not been completely diminished, they had lost familiarity with the source texts and liturgies; those had to be concealed, or they would face trial and the stake of the Inquisition.
This long deferment of a repressed faith explains the defensive zeal that characterized the community in which Spinoza grew up, and in which his family played a foundational role. As Israel shows in his rich and revealing opening chapters, both branches of the family boasted prestigious figures. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side, for example, was Duarte Fernandes, an enigmatic character who moved in the worlds of diplomacy, politics, finance, trade (sugar, diamonds), and espionage, while at the same time promoting the exodus of Portuguese Jews to safe lands.
The paternal branch of the family was no less remarkable; it included members who had been persecuted by the Inquisition in the sixteenth century and joined the Portuguese conspiracy to achieve independence from Philip II of Spain. Spinoza’s grandfather Abraham emerged from these battles to become one of the patriarchs of the community. Upon his death, he entrusted to Miguel, Spinoza’s father, his prosperous trading business (olive oil, figs) with its networks in Brazil, North Africa, and Italy.
With this lineage, nothing seemed to foreshadow the heresy of the young prodigy, who received his early education in the Talmud Torah school of Amsterdam under the tutelage of legendary rabbinical authorities such as Saul Levi Morteira and Menasseh ben Israel. Explaining this heresy has obsessed generations of scholars.
For his part, Buruma vividly recreates the historical and cultural context of the “Dutch Golden Age,” when customs such as the traditional Dutch gedogen (non-enforcement of certain laws) were particularly beneficial to the Jews. Though this tolerance was less a reflection of empathy than of convenience, owing to the commercial advantages it conferred, it nonetheless made Amsterdam a safe place (a Mokum, in Yiddish). The city was unique among European capitals at the time, and its Jewish community would remain intact until the arrival of the Nazis.
Still, the federation of Dutch republics, seat of the “True Freedom” that Spinoza would eventually embody, suffered severe political and religious tensions. In addition to the old rivalry with Spain came a new rivalry with England (1652-54). Then there was the quarrel between two political traditions and their classes: the aristocracy, headed by the stadtholders of the House of Orange, and the merchant class, represented by the de Witt brothers (Cornelis, the mayor of Dordrecht and military officer, and Johan, the grand pensionary and mathematician).
Parallel to this struggle was a theological battle between the Dutch Reformed Church (of rigid Calvinist faith) and various Protestant sects (Mennonites, Socinians, Collegians) whose members inclined toward tolerance and a simpler faith, detached from dogmas. While they all separated themselves from the freethinkers and abjured the Catholics, they largely tolerated the Jews.
But one also found disharmony among the Jews, owing to the difficulties of reconciling Judaism’s Talmudic orthodoxy with the customs of the almost forgotten Sephardic tradition (which was influenced also by the Kabbalah and growing messianic aspirations). Given these divisions, one can better understand the young Spinoza’s predicament, when he began systematically to doubt his faith.
The Formative Years
Some notable scholars like Harry Wolfson have interpreted Spinoza’s heresy as the result of an intellectual process whose seeds were planted in the medieval Jewish tradition itself, particularly in the work of Maimonides and Hasdai Crescas. Others, like I.S. Révah, attribute it to the influence of heterodox Jews, such as Juan de Prado. The historian Steven Nadler, a major authority on Spinoza, stresses the influence of various freethinkers, particularly Spinoza’s teacher, the eccentric ex-Jesuit Franciscus Van den Enden.
For Israel, the strength of Spinoza’s spirit ultimately lay within his own mind. He documents the long process of introspection that led Spinoza to deny the major pillars of the Jewish and Christian faiths – from their positions on a personal god and free will, to the immortality of the soul and the divinity of the Bible. Still, no intellectual process occurs in a vacuum. Drawing on his own research and Spinoza scholars such as Yosef Kaplan, Israel details the chain of events leading up to his subject’s religious and intellectual rupture. It starts with the death of Spinoza’s frail mother, Hannah Deborah, in 1638, which cast a shadow over the family. Following the death of his older brother, Isaac, in 1649, Spinoza was brought fully into the family business. But owing to a series of robberies and asset confiscations brought by the war against England in 1652, the firm was soon bankrupt.
When Spinoza’s father died in 1654, the young thinker – barely 22 years old – became the reluctant head of a company drowning in debt owed to his co-religionists. But he litigated those claims successfully by turning to the Dutch justice system, rather than to the community courts. In Israel’s retelling of these legal vicissitudes, there is no shortage of physical violence and social repudiation – features that stand in stark contrast to the family’s history of prestige within the community.
In the end, Spinoza managed to free himself of all responsibility. He firmly and haughtily renounced his maternal inheritance. “Neither profit nor monkish abstinence nor battlefield glory, nor loyalty to lords and monarchs, nor any religious cause, are ideals worth any one’s time,” writes Israel about Spinoza. Only the pursuit of knowledge is.
Alone at Last
With his ties to the community severed, Spinoza embarked on an uncertain new path. He had no illusions about the risks of doing so. Years before, a remote uncle, the philosopher Uriel da Costa, had tried to live his own life of the mind in the open. Born a Christian in Porto and educated in Coimbra, he was the embodiment of what Spinoza would call intellectual “fluctuation.” He came to doubt his faith and embraced Judaism; then doubted Judaism and returned to Catholicism; then doubted both and embraced Epicureanism, thus denying the immortality of the soul.
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Twice excommunicated, da Costa was condemned to ostracism and misery. In 1640, he committed suicide, leaving his testimony in a dramatic autobiography: Exemplar Humanae Vitae.
How did Spinoza avoid the same fate? For starters, he had the advantage of being born a Jew, which at that time was a fluctuating and fluid condition in itself. Who was really a Jew? Could someone who had been baptized be a Jew? What about someone who maintained frequent commercial dealings with Catholics, or who had not been circumcised? These were not abstract questions for the young Spinoza: his own ancestors fell into precisely these categories.
For example, his maternal grandfather was a Christian by origin and indifferent to the Jewish faith. Having not been circumcised, Israel recalls, he was buried outside the Jewish Ouderkerk cemetery (whose Spanish and Baroque inspiration – vaguely heretical in itself – Buruma describes beautifully). Spinoza’s maternal grandmother, Maria Nunes, also had been baptized, before being converted to Judaism as a child while living in Venice. The only maternal figure in the philosopher’s life, she asked to be buried next to her husband; but her final wish was not granted.
Israel records these and other grievances that must have fed the young philosopher’s resentment, leading him to repudiate the external rites of the Jewish religion and refuse the gestures of conciliation Jewish communal leaders used to avoid scandal or reprisals from the official Calvinist Church.
Seen from a modern liberal perspective, the intolerance of the Portuguese Jewish community toward Spinoza seems like an inquisitorial act. It was not. Spinoza was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Marranos (Jews who had converted to Christianity) who had suffered unspeakably from the persecution of the Inquisition. Given that suffering, it is understandable that the heresy of the prodigal son was unbearable to them. The quarrel between Spinoza and his community was a historical drama.
The Willful Outcast
Although Spinoza was officially expelled from the Jewish community, he and Judaism would always remain inseparable. Far from denying God, he denied that anything existed outside of God. “Instead of saying that he denied God,” Heine wrote, “one might say that he denied man.” If anything offended Spinoza, it was the charge of atheism. Seeing existence as a natural clockwork, he would dedicate his life to discovering at least a portion of its infinite mechanisms.
But Spinoza’s scientific curiosity was subordinated to something else: a call for redemption through reason. He believed that by understanding nature, including the nature of human passions, man could find freedom. Only a Jew on the margins of Judaism could think so. The English philosopher Stuart Hampshire, quoted by Buruma, saw this clearly:
“He carried within him not only suggestions from the theology and biblical criticism of Maimonides and from a great line of Jewish scholars and theologians, but also the prophetic conception of philosophy as a search for salvation. Although salvation by reason substituted in his philosophy for salvation by revelation and obedience, his moral severity, particularly if compared with the worldly urbanity of Descartes, is often reminiscent of the Old Testament, even in the tone and accent of his writing.”
Da Costa had failed by stopping at the point of negation – by “fluctuating” without ever arriving at a new port. By contrast, according to Spinoza, Christ (whom he never calls “Jesus”) reached the highest stage of intellectual and moral communion, a feat that he recognized and perhaps secretly sought to emulate. Thus, Heine thought that the purity of Spinoza’s life had brought him close to that of his “divine kinsman Jesus.” Buruma offers a penetrating discussion of this parallel, and sees it as the reason that Spinoza – unlike Descartes, Leibniz, or Kant – is not only respected but also beloved.
Spinoza’s excommunication was not only the central event of his life; given his lasting influence, it was also a central event in the history of Western thought. Rather than embracing the Christian faith, as had been common since the Middle Ages, he pursued the conquest of a new intellectual realm, impregnated with his idea of God, but seeking to transcend the theological and political wars of his time by appealing to reason and freedom of thought. His personal philosophical liberation led him to articulate a vision of universal liberation, making him the messiah of freedom in Buruma’s title.
Grinding God
Buruma recreates the life of Spinoza like a Dutch portrait with a landscape. From varied and selected sources, but relying mainly on Nadler’s books and advice, he dialogues with Spinoza’s letters and the biographical and intellectual interpretations: he doubts, qualifies, and understands. Israel, astonishingly prolix, passionate, and exhaustive (the bibliography of this book consists of approximately 1,500 primary and secondary sources), has created around Spinoza a vast fresco of an era, densely populated with characters, genealogies, situations, ideas, episodes, and conflicts.
Both biographies highlight the material and social factors in Spinoza’s life. Far from wandering in the desert, Spinoza found shelter under the guidance of his teacher Van den Enden, a freethinker, author, publisher, actor, and theatre impresario who gave him work as a schoolteacher and introduced him to the classical authors (Terence, Seneca) who would appear throughout his future work.
Israel dwells at length on Van den Enden’s role in shaping Spinoza’s life and influencing radical liberalism more broadly. A precursor to the French revolutionaries, Van den Enden was eventually charged with plotting against Louis XIV and executed. His disciple, by contrast, was radical only in his philosophical convictions: he would seal his letters with the emblem of a rose and the word “Caute” (caution).
Spinoza became a lens grinder to support himself, a development not merely incidental to his philosophy. Every craft involves some relationship between mind and matter, and between body and mind. That is why Borges suggested a direct connection between the making of lenses and the invention of Spinoza’s god. Moreover, a reliable income gave Spinoza the independence that his philosophizing would require. He could live without ties to his former community, free to criticize the powers that be, especially the religious ones. While neither Buruma nor Israel focuses on the techniques of Spinoza’s craft, both note that his longstanding theoretical and practical interest in optics enabled him to manufacture highly prized lenses for microscopes and telescopes.
Spinoza’s Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663) – the only work published under his own name during his lifetime – was written at this time. It attracted the attention of great philosophers and scientists such as Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens, and Henry Oldenburg. Israel brings to life these figures and examines Spinoza’s correspondence with them. While all disagreed with Spinoza’s denial of a personal god, they recognized his philosophical authority and shared his interests in physics, mathematics, and optics.
Light was a common denominator not only in scientific inquiry but also in the art of the period. As Buruma explains, “seeing more clearly was central to the great paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Whether or not Vermeer used lenses and mirrors to paint sharper images in more detail, as some people insist, he was obsessed with light in all its different qualities.”
Another notable aspect of Spinoza’s leap to freedom in Amsterdam was his participation in an informal study circle (more Socratic than Platonic) that practiced “free culture”: the horizontal exchange of printed pamphlets and books in search of a reading public and conversation. This cultural form was unique, differing from university culture, with its vertical exchange of information from teachers to students, and its attachment to an inflexible scholasticism.
Though always under the censorious gaze of power and religion, practitioners of free culture included groups such as the English Royal Society, the Academy of the Lynx (Galileo), the Collège de France, and literary salons (so prestigious that they merited several comedies by Molière). In Amsterdam, the circle was much more modest, but it did not depend on political patronage, and it could press decisively for religious tolerance.
Its headquarters was the Book of Martyrs bookstore, owned by the bibliographer and printer Jan Rieuwertsz, the publisher of Descartes and future publisher of Spinoza. Presided over by Spinoza, whose religious training and marginalized Jewish status allowed him to confront multiple currents of thought, the group included Cartesians, freethinkers, Collegians, and Quakers, and the bookstore itself represented “True Freedom” in culture.
But in 1661, Spinoza left Amsterdam to take refuge in a small cottage in the village of Rijnsburg. Fortunately, conditions there were ideal for a contemplative life accompanied by epistolary conversation and, eventually, the presence of friends, disciples (freethinkers and heterodox Christians), and some of the major protagonists of the post-Cartesian philosophical awakening. It was here that he completed the book on Descartes and began to make progress on the Ethics. In Rijnsburg, the lens grinder hoped to “carve out” the god of Nature. But Nature had other plans.
Turbulence and Intolerance
After a brief interlude of peace, turmoil returned to Spinoza’s life in 1664. It was a paradoxical time for Europe. While the new scientific horizons seemed endless, the continent had just suffered the “Black Death,” which many attributed to the wrath of God. Were the comets that appeared in the sky natural phenomena decipherable by reason, or were they divine omens? Was the self-proclaimed Jewish messiah Sabbatai Sevi genuine, or a symptom of collective delirium?
It was in this context that Spinoza took refuge in Voorburg, a redoubt even more remote than Rijnsburg, and paused his writing of the Ethics to revive the combative free-culture spirit through work on his Theological-Political Treatise.
In time, the plague subsided, the comets disappeared, and the messiah converted to Islam. But in Dutch society, religious intolerance boiled over, reflecting the tenacity of the human passions that Spinoza would analyze in the Ethics by applying the same criteria he used in his studies of nature.
Here, Buruma offers timely insights into the Spinozian concept of conatus, which refers to a thing’s vital driving force (similar to the Freudian libido), and his paradoxical theory according to which free will is denied, but freedom remains attainable through a “clear and distinct” knowledge of deterministic forces. More Cartesian than Spinozist, Buruma frequently interjects with healthy expressions of doubt. If Spinoza is correct that every living organism seeks to “persist in its being,” he asks, how does one explain suicide?
Spinoza attracted many secret readers and surreptitious devotees. Whether in Israel’s encyclopedic reconstruction of Spinoza’s life and times or in Buruma’s succinct telling, it is moving to read about overzealous followers such as the brothers Johannes and Adriaan Koerbagh. Crusaders against superstition who were far less cautious than their teacher, they took their theological refutations of Christian and Jewish doctrine to extremes that would condemn them to prison, torture, banishment, misery, and death.
The fate of these Spinozian martyrs lent urgency to the final chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise, a seminal work in biblical criticism, more hospitable in its reading than the Ethics. In a critical account of the Old Testament, Spinoza illustrates, with examples, the natural character of the miracles, the moral (not philosophical) value of the prophecies, and the human authorship of the texts.
But he never sought to discredit popular religious devotion, which he considered positive insofar as it brought people comfort and peace. Instead, he directed his criticism at ecclesiastical authorities, the propagators of superstition who had no legitimate claim to power. His purpose was to defend freedom of thought, and to refute the charge of atheism. On this point, Buruma is categorical: “Spinoza loved God as a rational thinker. In that sense he was not an atheist. In any other sense, he was.” Scholars of Spinoza and Judaism would disagree: his complex spirituality led him to part ways with his tradition and his people, but in its core it was a Jewish spirituality. According to Wolfson, his God was already implicit in the Jewish Medieval thought: it was more an act of daring than an invention.
With the war that broke out between England and Holland (beset to its south by Louis XIV’s France) in 1664, the political horizon began to close in. In a comprehensive retelling of that conflict, Israel highlights the evolving relationship between science and power on both sides.
Scientists were grappling with new restrictions on their freedom. Despite his unaltered religious orthodoxy, Oldenburg (the first secretary of the Royal Society, theologian, philosopher, and scientist who had visited Spinoza at Rijnsburg) was jailed in the Tower of London for uttering some indiscretion about his monarch. Witnessing these developments, Spinoza saw that ecclesiastical authorities weren’t the only ones who oppressed men and toyed with their lives; so, too, did monarchs and their aristocratic allies.
The freedom to philosophize also faced new threats in Holland. With the war having strengthened the House of Orange, the official Calvinist Church prepared to deal a deathblow to the culture of “True Freedom.” Thanks to his friend and publisher Rieuwertsz, Spinoza managed to publish the Theological-Political Treatise in 1670 under a pseudonym and a false imprint. But the authorship became known, and it was soon decreed that the book “should be buried forever in eternal oblivion.” It was “a book forged in hell,” like the title of Nadler’s book on the subject. In the event, its prohibition would last at least a century.
The denouement of this political moment came in 1672, with the brutal overthrow of the de Witt brothers, who were lynched by a crazed mob in The Hague, where Spinoza had lived since 1670. “It is the ultimate barbarism,” he exclaimed, according to one of his early biographers. The time had come to write his Tractatus Politicus.
True, given the structure, style, and timelessness of the Ethics (which he did not complete until 1675), politics did not seem a natural outlet for Spinoza’s metaphysical speculations. But he had always been convinced that reason is not only the strongest bond a person can have with himself, but also the best foundation of a life in common with others. Moreover, since history had so directly interrupted his writing on the immutability of human nature, he could no longer avoid it.
Owing to this historical context, many authors consider the Theological-Political Treatise and the Tractatus Politicus to be no less fundamental than the Ethics. What all three share is the conviction that reason leads naturally to civic responsibility and, above all, to an active defense of freedom; it is not only about contemplating the “infinite map of the One who is all His stars.”
As in his previous works, Israel emphasizes the historical novelty of the Tractatus Politicus’s “democratic republicanism”: an order that accommodates popular religion but not religious authority, and that rests on the consensus of the many, not the monarchy and the aristocracy. Although Spinoza shares some of Thomas Hobbes’s premises, he arrives at a very different model than the one in Leviathan.
The proper role of Spinoza’s state is to regulate, not repress, religious passions; to promote justice and charity; and to guarantee freedom. As Buruma notes, Spinoza did not manage to develop the practical mechanisms of democracy, but had the audacity to think openly about the topic – and this despite the dark times that befell him late in life.
Though Spinoza studied power – and even tried personally to mediate between powers (during the war with France) – he was never tempted by it. In his last years, faithful to free culture, he rejected pecuniary support from princes and ministers, as well as offers of university professorships.
Spinoza died serenely in 1677, in his parents’ bed – the only family relic he kept – resigned not to live long enough to see the publication of his Opera Posthuma (which includes all his treatises, studies in Hebrew grammar, and correspondence). That task was left to Rieuwertsz, who, in yet another act of courage, soon published the volume with Spinoza’s face engraved on the frontispiece.
A Thinker for Our Time
“Spinoza has left us a vivid image, he who did not intend to be absolutely vivid,” Borges remarked on that morning almost half a century ago. In Buruma’s lively book and Israel’s summa biografica, the philosopher’s discreet, almost elusive, life unfolds before our eyes.
Readers everywhere should thank them. Returning to Spinoza can help us navigate our present era of fanaticisms – a time very much like his. Whether it is the populism of the radical right, with its ties to evangelical Protestants and reactionary Catholics, or the populism of the left, with its illiberal mob-based power, all threaten free thought. Where once the guardians of religious faith excommunicated and burned heretics, now ideologues of gender, race, language, nation, class, and culture seek to cancel those who think differently. (And similar to the Inquisition, apostates are seen as the biggest threat and most deserving of the bonfire.)
Holy war continues to confer prestige, as does messianic delirium. We thought we had moved beyond imperialist wars and ethnic-cleansing campaigns, but they are back. The cardinal values of the Western tradition – such as the honest search for truth, freedom of expression, science, a belief in objective facts, democratic civility, and, of course, tolerance – are on the defensive.
Spinoza contemplated without despair the “ultimate barbarism” of his time. Now we must do the same. “War is absurd,” he wrote, “but these problems neither make me laugh nor cry. On the contrary, they encourage me to understand human nature better.” Despite his cautious and attentive disposition, Spinoza showed the historic daring to think freely, and to defend freedom of thought. Those commitments remain worthy of our devotion.
Ian Buruma: Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah, Yale University Press, 2024.