The Courtier and the Heretic.

LEIBNIZ, SPINOZA, AND THE FATE OF G.o.d IN THE MODERN WORLD.

by Matthew Stewart.

1.

The Hague, November 1676.

It is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair. As the autumn of 1676 approached, however, Baruch de Spinoza had ample reason to fear for his safety. One of his friends had recently been executed, and another had died in prison. His efforts to publish his definitive work, the Ethics Ethics, had come to an end amid threats of criminal prosecution. A leading French theologian named him "the most impious and the most dangerous man of the century." A powerful bishop denounced him as "that insane and evil man, who deserves to be covered with chains and whipped with a rod." To the general public, he was known simply as "the atheist Jew."

Among those who seemed eager to bring the infidel philosopher to justice was a young courtier and polymath named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In a personal letter to that same French theologian, Leibniz described Spinoza's work as "horrible" and "terrifying." To a famous professor, he called it "intolerably impudent." To a friend he confided, "I deplore that a man of such evident culture should have fallen so low."

Yet, in the privacy of his study, Leibniz crammed his notebooks with meticulous commentaries on Spinoza's writings. He exchanged secret letters with his public nemesis, addressing him as "celebrated doctor and profound philosopher." Through mutual friends he pleaded for a chance to examine a ma.n.u.script copy of the Ethics Ethics. And, on or around November 18, 1676, he traveled to The Hague and called on Spinoza in person.

LEIBNIZ ARRIVED IN Holland by yacht. He was thirty years old and well on his way to claiming his t.i.tle as the last universal genius of Europe. He had already discovered the mathematical method we call calculus (later than, but independently of, Isaac Newton). He carried in his luggage his arithmetical calculating machine-a small wooden box stuffed with gears and dials that may be counted among the earliest ancestors of the modern computer. He had begun to fill out the long list of his contributions to the fields of chemistry, chronometry, geology, historiography, jurisprudence, linguistics, optics, philosophy, physics, poetry, and political theory. "When one...compares one's own small talents with those of a Leibniz," wrote Denis Diderot in the Holland by yacht. He was thirty years old and well on his way to claiming his t.i.tle as the last universal genius of Europe. He had already discovered the mathematical method we call calculus (later than, but independently of, Isaac Newton). He carried in his luggage his arithmetical calculating machine-a small wooden box stuffed with gears and dials that may be counted among the earliest ancestors of the modern computer. He had begun to fill out the long list of his contributions to the fields of chemistry, chronometry, geology, historiography, jurisprudence, linguistics, optics, philosophy, physics, poetry, and political theory. "When one...compares one's own small talents with those of a Leibniz," wrote Denis Diderot in the Encyclopedie Encyclopedie, "one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner."

He would have been wearing his trademark wig, an elaborate traveling coat, and the kind of ornate vest, knee-length breeches, and silk stockings that were then the latest fashion in Paris. "It is so rare for an intellectual to dress properly, not to smell, and to understand jokes," the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans noted approvingly. He was of smallish frame, with an unavoidable nose and keen, scrutinizing eyes. He carried his head far forward of his hunched shoulders, and he never knew what to do with his arms. His limbs, it was said, were as crooked and ungainly as those of Charon-the old and sulky ferryman of the dead. As he lurched along the leaf-strewn ca.n.a.ls of The Hague, his elaborate robes flapping in the autumn wind, he must have looked like an exotic, gilded bird of prey.

He made up for it all with an elegance of mind, or so his contemporaries thought. "He is a man who, despite his insignificant outward appearance, is in a position to perform what he promises," a German baron advised Louis XIV's foreign minister. To meet Leibniz was to be overwhelmed in a stream of consciousness. The writings that spilled from his plume fill over 150,000 sheets in the archives of Hanover, and have yet to be comprehensively edited. But there was something elusive in him, too-an air of restlessness that amounted to more than a young man's pa.s.sing wanderl.u.s.t. He occasionally left his listeners feeling that, after the dazzling show of words, something still remained unsaid. "I love this man," said a petulant princess. "But I am angry that he treats everything so superficially with me."

SPINOZA LIVED IN a redbrick house along a ca.n.a.l called the Paviljoensgracht on the northern outskirts of town, a few paces short of the kind of flat, windmilled landscape made famous by Dutch artists of the time. He was not quite forty-four years old and had three months left to live. The works on which his later fame rests were complete. With his a redbrick house along a ca.n.a.l called the Paviljoensgracht on the northern outskirts of town, a few paces short of the kind of flat, windmilled landscape made famous by Dutch artists of the time. He was not quite forty-four years old and had three months left to live. The works on which his later fame rests were complete. With his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he established himself as one of the first great theorists of the modern, secular state and a forerunner of the framers of the Const.i.tution of the United States. In the Ethics Ethics, he antic.i.p.ated later philosophical and scientific developments by two and sometimes three centuries. "To be a follower of Spinoza," Hegel once said, "is the essential beginning of all philosophy." When Einstein was asked, "Do you believe in G.o.d?," he famously replied: "I believe in Spinoza's G.o.d."

He was of average height, with a "well-formed body," a "beautiful face," and a "pleasing physiognomy," or so several observers noted. He coughed frequently but otherwise gave little sign of his failing health. He had an olive complexion; frizzy black hair, cut to shoulder length according to the fashion of the times; a thin mustache; long, thick, arched eyebrows; and dark, languid eyes-"so that one might easily know by his looks that he was descended from Portuguese Jews," said one commentator.

Spinoza rented his room from an amiable painter and his boisterous family, who apparently got along quite well with the atheist upstairs. During the day, he ground lenses for microscopes and telescopes. At night, by candlelight, he polished his system of metaphysics. Once he remained in his lodgings for a stretch of three months, calling down at odd hours for meals that typically consisted of raisins and milk gruel. According to the inventory taken after his death, he owned two pairs of pants, seven shirts, and five handkerchiefs. His one luxury was a four-poster bed with red curtains, inherited from his parents.

Yet, Spinoza was hardly as simple as his manner of living might have suggested. Friends and visitors often found something deeply enigmatic in him, a strange mix of caution and boldness, of modesty and arrogance, of icy logic and rebellious pa.s.sion. He was a heretic with the character of a true believer, a saint without religion. He had the kind of charisma that could inspire lifelong devotion; but he also had an exceptional talent for making enemies.

SPINOZA LEFT NO record of the event-or, in any case, he left none that survived the efforts of his posthumous editors, one of whom happened to be Leibniz's princ.i.p.al liaison in Holland at the time. Leibniz, in the forty years that remained to him, did his best to avoid the subject. record of the event-or, in any case, he left none that survived the efforts of his posthumous editors, one of whom happened to be Leibniz's princ.i.p.al liaison in Holland at the time. Leibniz, in the forty years that remained to him, did his best to avoid the subject.

When pressed, Leibniz claimed that he had stopped in on his fellow philosopher while "pa.s.sing through" The Hague. He added that they met for "a few hours" and merely exchanged "anecdotes concerning the affairs of those times." As for any philosophy he might have acquired on the trip, he said he thought it was so bad that he would not "waste time in refuting" it.

None of it was true. In fact, Leibniz traveled to The Hague for the specific purpose of meeting its most infamous philosopher and he remained there for at least three days. By his own admission, he conversed with his host "many times and at great length." The discussions strayed well outside the bounds of polite conversation on current events. The one piece of evidence to survive directly from the meeting consists of a single sheet of writing that, according to a note at the bottom of the page, Leibniz penned in Spinoza's presence and then read out to him. It contains a proof of the existence of G.o.d.

The most important clues concerning events in The Hague, however, are to be found in between the lines of Leibniz's philosophy. a.n.a.lysis of his unpublished writings makes clear that a decisive change in the tone and substance of his reflections occurred within days of his visit with Spinoza. In the metaphysical system he first presented to the public ten years after his return from Holland, moreover, no influence is more important, more problematic, more strangely bipolar, and less acknowledged than that of Spinoza.

As he approached his sixtieth year, Leibniz finally seemed to let slip that his youthful interest in Spinoza had been more than circ.u.mstantial. "You know that I once went a little too far, and began to lean to the side of the Spinozists," he wrote in the voice of a fictional spokesperson in a dialogue that he ultimately chose not to publish. But even this belated and suppressed confession understates the depth, complexity, and duration of his relationship with his fellow philosopher. In fact, the meeting with Spinoza was the defining event of Leibniz's life. Everything before points toward it for resolution; and everything after points back for explanation.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY was an age of glitter and strife; of spiritual awakenings followed by religious wars, civil wars, revolutions, invasions, and acts of ethnic cleansing; of explosive growth in international trade, the formation of global empires, rapid urbanization in the major capitals, inevitably accompanied by epic plagues and fires; and, at least in the eyes of a select few, of a new kind of science rising with all the promise of a slumbering G.o.d. Historians have since called it "the century of genius" but informed opinion at the time generally held that it was an age of exceptional wickedness. If there is a single thread that runs through the rich and confusing tapestry of seventeenth-century life, it is that this was an age of transition-the time in which the theocratic order of the medieval era ceded to the secular order of modernity. was an age of glitter and strife; of spiritual awakenings followed by religious wars, civil wars, revolutions, invasions, and acts of ethnic cleansing; of explosive growth in international trade, the formation of global empires, rapid urbanization in the major capitals, inevitably accompanied by epic plagues and fires; and, at least in the eyes of a select few, of a new kind of science rising with all the promise of a slumbering G.o.d. Historians have since called it "the century of genius" but informed opinion at the time generally held that it was an age of exceptional wickedness. If there is a single thread that runs through the rich and confusing tapestry of seventeenth-century life, it is that this was an age of transition-the time in which the theocratic order of the medieval era ceded to the secular order of modernity.

Spinoza did not invent the modern world, but he was perhaps the first to observe it well. He was the first to attempt to answer the ancient questions of philosophy from a distinctly modern perspective. In his philosophical system, he offers a concept of G.o.d befitting the universe revealed by modern science-a universe ruled only by the cause and effect of natural laws, without purpose or design. He describes what it means to be human after our pretension to occupy a special place in nature has been shattered. He prescribes a means to find happiness and virtue in an era when the old theologies have no credibility. And he advocates a liberal, democratic system of government suitable for an inherently fragmented and diverse society. His is the first and archetypal instance of the active response to modernity-an affirmation of the modern world that today we a.s.sociate mainly with secular liberalism.

Leibniz was no less farsighted than his rival, and no less grand in his ambitions. He, too, put his faith in the guidance of reason, and it was this faith that impelled him on his journey to The Hague. But the two men who met in that windy November belonged to their age in very different ways. In circ.u.mstances of birth, in social position, in personal aspirations, in eating habits, fashion sense, and the infinity of small things that make up what we call character, the glamorous polymath of Hanover and the saintly revolutionary of The Hague were nearly perfect contraries. And there are no two finer examples of the dictum that character is is philosophy. philosophy.

In large part as a direct result of his meeting with Spinoza, Leibniz came to represent his own original and ant.i.thetical response to the challenges of the modern era. In his philosophical writings, he articulates a strategy for recovering something of the old ideas about G.o.d and man by means of an a.n.a.lysis of the limits of reason. He claims to discover the meaning and purpose of life in all that modernity fails to comprehend. He presents a vision of a modern society united to serve goals of justice and charity that transcend self-interest. His metaphysical system is the paradigm for the reactive response to modernity-or what today we a.s.sociate mainly with religious conservatism.

In the most widely accepted versions of the history of philosophy, Spinoza and Leibniz are understood to represent a speculative metaphysical program that long ago succ.u.mbed to academic progress.* In fact, taking a broader view of events, it is clear that the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century remain unsurpa.s.sed, and should perhaps be considered the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza and to all that he recorded in his philosophy. And there is no more compelling expression of this reaction than the philosophy Leibniz developed in the long years after his return from Holland. Contemporary debates concerning the separation of church and state, the clash of civilizations, and the theory of natural selection, to name just a few examples, are all continuations of the discussion that began in November 1676. Even today, the two men who met in The Hague stand for a choice that we all must make and have implicitly already made. In fact, taking a broader view of events, it is clear that the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century remain unsurpa.s.sed, and should perhaps be considered the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza and to all that he recorded in his philosophy. And there is no more compelling expression of this reaction than the philosophy Leibniz developed in the long years after his return from Holland. Contemporary debates concerning the separation of church and state, the clash of civilizations, and the theory of natural selection, to name just a few examples, are all continuations of the discussion that began in November 1676. Even today, the two men who met in The Hague stand for a choice that we all must make and have implicitly already made.

2.

Bento.

Even among philosophers, first impressions count. Three facts about Spinoza's origin and circ.u.mstances are crucial in understanding the impact he had on Leibniz. The first is that he was a Jew; the second is that he was expelled from the Jewish community in his twenty-fourth year on account of his heretical views; and the third is that he was born and lived in the golden age of the Dutch Republic. For medieval-minded contemporaries, Spinoza's pedigree marked him as an alien creature-"the kind of monster our dear Holland produces," said one scandalized theologian. For modern observers, the story of Spinoza's youth is more apt to trace the image of an extraordinary individual-the kind of person who can change history. For Leibniz, who remained forever caught between two ages, Spinoza would be both-a freak and a world-historical personality-and therein lay the problem that would determine the course of their meeting and the subsequent development of Leibniz's philosophy.

Baruch de Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on November 24,1632. His given name is Hebrew for "blessed one." The boy was known familiarly by the Portuguese equivalent, Bento. Later, for scholarly purposes, he adopted the Latin Benedictus. In his posthumous work, he was identified only by his already infamous initials, BDS. To the delight of the philosopher's future detractors, the family name, Spinoza (also written as Spinosa, Despinosa, d'Espinoza, and other variants), derives from the Spanish for "th.o.r.n.y" (as in the English "spines").

The circ.u.mstances of Bento's birth owed a substantial debt to the cruel and senseless acts of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, more than a century before. In 1492, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon ordered all Jews in their territories to convert to Christianity or leave the realm. At the time, Spain was home to about 800,000 Jews, who, despite suffering from systematic persecution over the preceding centuries-synagogue burnings, judicial murders, forcible conversions, and being sold off into slavery-had made a substantial contribution to the local economy and culture. A large number of the Spanish Jews responded to Ferdinand's decree by accepting Christ as their savior. Many of these "conversos," however, soon discovered that conversion did little to quench the fires of fanatical intolerance: tens of thousands were burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition. Others boarded a fleet of boats ordered up by Ferdinand and fled to North Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe. The largest share-numbering perhaps 120,000-migrated to the neighboring kingdom of Portugal.

Their reception left something to be desired: 20,000 Jewish children underwent forcible baptism, and 2,000 Jews were ma.s.sacred in Lisbon on one unfortunate day in 1506. But, in time, the immigrants established a thriving merchant community. Around the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the Vatican announced that the Inquisition should proceed "in a free and unimpeded way" in Portugal. After the union of the two Iberian monarchies under a single crown in 1580, the Portuguese authorities showed that they could outdo even the Spanish in their zeal to expose and burn the enemies of the faith.

Sometime around 1590, the Portuguese Inquisition caught up with the family of Isaac Spinoza, a merchant from Lisbon then living in the southern town of Vidigueira. In little doubt about the future that awaited them on the Iberian peninsula, Isaac and his brother Abraham gathered up their families and escaped to the north-or, as the records of the inquisitors have it, they "fled before pardon." Isaac's in-laws, on the other hand, chose to remain in Portugal and receive their pardon-which took the form of imprisonment and torture.

Isaac and Abraham settled in the French port city of Nantes, where the brothers resumed their international trading activities. Abraham soon moved on to Rotterdam and then Amsterdam, where he had a daughter named Rachel and partic.i.p.ated in the founding of a Jewish community. Isaac and his family remained in Nantes. Among Isaac's brood was a young son, Michael, born in 1587 or 1588 in Vidigueira. Michael grew up to become a trader in Nantes, just like his father.

At the age of thirty-four or so, Michael joined his uncle Abraham in Amsterdam, most likely in order to take Abraham's daughter, Rachel, as his bride. Sadly, Rachel died childless a few years later. In 1628, at the age of forty, Michael took a new wife, Hanna Deborah Senior. Hanna's mother hailed from Oporto, where a number of her relatives, too, had come to grief at the hands of the Portuguese Inquisition.

The Seniors, like the Spinozas, can only have considered it their good fortune to have ended their travels in the Dutch Republic. The Dutch revolt against Spanish rule of 1572 marked the beginning of the kind of age that justifiably occasions both marvel at human capabilities and disappointment at the extent to which the rest of history falls short. In a single century, on a piece of land that lay largely below sea level, and a population of two million, which amounted to little more than a rounding error in the continent's total, the Dutch built a global empire, produced an improbable number of history's greatest artists, scientists, and philosophers, and set the standards in economic and political practice that shaped the modern world.

The glory of the Dutch golden age blossomed mainly where the money was: in the city of Amsterdam. Between 1572 and 1640, Amsterdam quadrupled in population and became the undisputed center of world trade. Its merchant ships creaked under a bounty of Brazilian sugar, Spanish wool, Portuguese salt, Baltic grain, Turkish mohair, Mediterranean fruit and wine, spices from the East Indies, a variety of Dutch manufactures, such as fine textiles, tapestries, ceramics, furniture, and tobacco pipes, and, of course, the dyestuffs required by the Republic's frenetic artists.

Many aspects of life in Amsterdam astounded seventeenth-century travelers. Visitors gushed about the magnificent public buildings, the elegant private mansions on tree-lined ca.n.a.ls, the fanatical neatness of the inhabitants, the low crime rate, the plentiful and well-endowed hospitals, the innovations in military methods, the scientific and technological marvels, such as the newfangled street lamps, the clocks, the telescopes and the microscopes, and, inevitably, the universal obsession with the painted image. Spinoza's first biographer and friend, Jean-Maximilian Lucas, writing in 1677, called Amsterdam "the most beautiful city in Europe."

But the feature of life that left the most vivid impression on visitors to Amsterdam-sometimes favorable, more often not-was the extraordinary freedom enjoyed by its people. The Dutch "love nothing so much as their freedom," wrote a scandalized German traveler. Servants and their mistresses dress and behave so much alike, he added, that it is hard to tell them apart. Louis XIV, who saw freedom as a form of vulgarity, scoffed that Holland was "a nation of fishwives and tradesmen." Sir William Temple, the English amba.s.sador in the 1670s, on the other hand, took a much brighter view: It is hardly to be imagined how all the violence and sharpness, which accompanies the differences of religion in other countreys, seems to be appeased or softened here, by the general freedom which all here enjoy.... Men live together like Citizens of the World, a.s.sociated by the common ties of Humanity...under the impartial protection of indifferent laws, with...equal freedom of Speculation and Enquiry.

Leibniz himself could not but acknowledge this newfound spirit of Dutch freedom. "This simulacrum simulacrum of liberty is one of the princ.i.p.al pillars of the Dutch State," he wrote, somewhat grudgingly, in 1671, five years before setting foot in the Republic. "Such is the manner by which the mult.i.tudes find contentment in their freedom of belief and speech," he added, "that the most miserable sailor, in the tavern where he drinks his beer, fancies himself a king, even though he must still bear the heaviest burden to earn his livelihood." Yet Leibniz, ever ambivalent, had to admit that "this imaginary liberty has something real in it: For justice is administered in a very praiseworthy manner, without regard for rank or riches." of liberty is one of the princ.i.p.al pillars of the Dutch State," he wrote, somewhat grudgingly, in 1671, five years before setting foot in the Republic. "Such is the manner by which the mult.i.tudes find contentment in their freedom of belief and speech," he added, "that the most miserable sailor, in the tavern where he drinks his beer, fancies himself a king, even though he must still bear the heaviest burden to earn his livelihood." Yet Leibniz, ever ambivalent, had to admit that "this imaginary liberty has something real in it: For justice is administered in a very praiseworthy manner, without regard for rank or riches."

The same "freedom of Speculation and Enquiry," as Sir William put it, made the Dutch golden age one of the most fruitful periods in the history of science. Among the pioneers of the time were Christiaan Huygens, the brilliant mathematician and physicist who invented the pendulum clock and discovered the rings of Saturn, and Antoni von Leeuwenhoek, the self-taught microscopist who discovered bacteria and observed firsthand the structure of human sperm.

Freedom also left its mark on the extraordinary artistic achievements of the age. Mannered representations of great princes in Arcadian settings were no longer in style; the newly liberated cla.s.ses of Dutch society demanded a new kind of art. Thousands of painters shucked off their day jobs and rose to meet the new demand, and from the battling crowd of brush wielders emerged new masters of cloudy skies, windy seascapes, tousled hair, fleeting glances, rare moments of introspection, and close encounters with divinity over the kitchen table.

For many visitors, there was no clearer sign of this new freedom-nor any surer proof of the depravity of the Dutch-than the manner in which the Jews of Amsterdam lived. These Portuguese Jews numbered perhaps little more than one thousand at the time of Bento's birth and resided mainly in and around the island of Vlooienburg, a neighborhood of lumber warehouses lined by the Amstel and the Houtgracht. Unlike almost all other European cities, however, Amsterdam did not confine its Jewish population to a ghetto. A significant number of Jews-especially among the wealthier ones-made their homes in the city's tonier areas. Conversely, a number of non-Jews-notably, Rembrandt-lived in the (predominantly) Jewish neighborhood.

Behind Dutch tolerance of their new neighbors was something perhaps more durable than the love of liberty, namely, an enlightened understanding of commercial self-interest. The Portuguese Jews brought with them an extensive network of trading contacts in Iberia and South America-markets that had only recently opened to Dutch merchants. By midcentury, the Jewish community accounted for as much as 15 percent of Amsterdam's foreign trade.

Leibniz, for one, understood clearly that Dutch tolerance had a distinct profit motive and that it was responsible for an appreciable share of the nation's economic growth. Five years before his visit he articulated a seventeenth-century version of the "melting pot" theory: From Spain came the Portuguese Jews; from Poland, the Socinians expelled by the latest edicts; from England those exiled in the Restoration.... [Each] brought with him his knowledge: the arts, the commerce, the manufacturing industry of his country....Every time troubles start up in Germany and in Belgium (as earlier in France), Holland-the universal refuge of sects and exiles-sees its population and riches grow.

The Jews of Amsterdam, too, saw their population and riches grow through their partic.i.p.ation in the Dutch economic miracle. An English visitor to the city on the Amstel wrote that the Jews were "Ritch merchants, not evill esteem'd off, living in liberty, wealth and ease." With economic success came a new synagogue, a vigorous system of education, a healthy measure of respect from the neighbors, and a desire to partic.i.p.ate in, among other things Dutch, the euphoria about art. One Jewish family was said to have ama.s.sed paintings worth "a ton of gold."

Michael Spinoza was, just like his father before him, a prosperous merchant, occupying an unexceptional rank in the hierarchy of Amsterdam's new cla.s.s of Portuguese Jewish traders. He lived with his family in respectable, rented accommodation in the center of the Jewish neighborhood, just a few doors down from the house of Rembrandt. Michael must certainly be counted an upstanding member of the community, for he served two terms on the board of the synagogue. He traded in Brazilian sugar, candied ginger, raisins, and other dried fruit. No doubt the family fortunes fluctuated. Caught between pirates and the English Royal Navy, which at the time was keen to complicate life for Dutch merchants, Michael's cargoes did not always make it into port; and when they did, the goods sometimes proved to be rotten on arrival.

Bento was the third of five children (as best as can be determined). The eldest was Miriam, born in 1629, and the second child was Isaac, named in honor of his paternal grandfather. After Bento came a son, Gabriel, and a daughter, Rebecca (although there is some doubt about Rebecca's place in the birth order and even about the ident.i.ty of her mother). When Bento was six years old, his mother, Hanna, died, very possibly of the same chronic lung disease that would eventually claim his life. Two years later, Michael married Esther de Soliz, a native of Lisbon, with whom he (most likely) did not have any children.

At the age of seven or so-the year after his mother died-Bento enrolled in the local Jewish school, where the education was as deep as it was narrow. Pupils were divided by age into six large rooms, and they progressed through a program that consisted princ.i.p.ally of memorizing the Bible, studying the Hebrew language, and learning Jewish customs. Cla.s.ses were held for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; in between, during the three-hour lunch break, most of the pupils received instruction from private tutors hired by their parents.

By the time Bento matriculated, the school of the Amsterdam Jewish community had achieved an international reputation. A Polish scholar described his visit to the school in breathless terms: "I saw giants in scholarship: tender children as small as gra.s.shoppers.... In my eyes they were like prodigies because of their unusual familiarity with the entire Bible and the science of grammar. They possessed the ability to compose verses and poems in meter and to speak a pure Hebrew."

There can be little doubt that Bento was one of these precocious "gra.s.shoppers." Spinoza's friend Lucas, along with his other early biographer, Colerus, confirm what would be evident in any case from the philosopher's later achievements: that he was an exceptionally gifted student. "Nature endowed him with a keen wit and quick intelligence," Colerus says. "He was not yet fifteen years old when he raised difficulties that the most learned among the Jews found it difficult to solve," Lucas adds. Spinoza's early training stayed with him for life: well into middle age, he took time off his philosophical work to write a Hebrew grammar. In view of the philosopher's later critiques of the scriptures, his teachers might well have rued the trouble they took to get him to memorize the Bible.

The spa.r.s.e and grainy snapshots remaining from this period of Bento's life reveal not just an infuriatingly intelligent boy, but also one with no lack of confidence in his own counsel. When he was around ten years old, the story goes, his father sent him to collect some money from a certain elderly widow. Bento called upon the woman, and she asked him to wait while she finished reading the Bible. After sighing over her prayers, the pious widow counted out the money owed on her table, making virtuous noises about what an "upright" man the young boy's father was and how "he has never departed from the Law of Moses." Then she scooped up the coins and dropped them into the boy's bag.

But Bento's father had taught him well to distinguish false piety from genuine worship; sensing that the Bible-thumping lady was conducting business on the wrong side of the line, the lad insisted over her strained objections on counting the coins himself. Sure enough, he found that he had to ask the crafty hag for two more ducats, which she had allowed to slip through a slit on top of the table. Bento was elated at his discovery, and so, too, was his father, who gave him praise. The episode apparently excited much favorable comment on the boy from other members of the community.

Bento's talents soon attracted the notice of his community's leaders, notably Rabbi Saul Morteira, a man who would figure prominently in later events. Lucas, perhaps echoing Spinoza's mixed opinion of his teacher, calls him "a celebrity among the Jews and the least ignorant of the rabbis of his time." He was born in Venice in 1596 and studied medicine under the tutelage of Doctor Montalto, a Marrano, or Jew from Spain, employed in the court of Maria de' Medici. When Montalto died, Morteira traveled to Amsterdam, bringing with him Montalto's body for burial, volumes of esoteric knowledge from the Venetian Jewish community, and, it was said, "a taste for court life." By the time Bento entered school, Morteira had risen to become the senior rabbi in Amsterdam.

Morteira was a man of hard discipline, an autocrat of the cla.s.sroom-the kind of teacher whose pa.s.sion in advancing the fortunes of those who followed him on the true path to salvation ceded only to his zeal in persecuting those who failed to heed his instruction. Students who raised inappropriate topics (e.g., the trinity) he promptly expelled; and for those Jewish men who remained uncirc.u.mcised he reserved an even worse fate, namely, eternal punishment. When a doctrinal dispute arose with a fellow rabbi concerning guaranteed entry to heaven for all Jews (Morteira took the view that there were no guarantees), he engineered a humiliating demotion for his rival and did not rest until he had hounded the offending rabbi off to Brazil.

Morteira cherished the view that Bento was one of his followers, and a good one at that. "He admired the conduct and the genius of his disciple," says Lucas. Morteira evidently failed to grasp that Bento was not the kind of pupil who seeks a master. With the kind of self-sufficiency that perhaps marks the beginning of all philosophical journeys, the young pupil set out to examine the Bible on his own, deciding to consult no one but himself in this matter. Very soon, it seems, he found he had no need of Morteira's services in interpreting the scriptures.

It was around this time that Bento began to perplex his betters with questions that they could not answer. When he perceived that his doubts embarra.s.sed his teacher, however, Bento-showing the uncanny reserve and the aversion to scandal so evident in his later life-simply nodded his head and pretended to be very satisfied with the answers he received.

The pretense apparently succeeded. Morteira, says Lucas, particularly liked the fact that Bento was "not at all vain.... He did not understand how a young man of such penetration could be so modest." Morteira-like others to come-would learn too late that the source of the philosopher's modesty lay not in a low opinion of himself but rather in the low value he attached to the opinions of those who praised him.

In Bento's late teenage years, a series of blows to the Spinoza family fortunes prevented him from pursuing the most likely fate of a bright young scholar-to become a rabbi-and thereby altered the course of the history of western philosophy. In 1649, when Bento was in his seventeenth year, his older brother, Isaac, died, and Bento was called to take his place at his father's side. At the same time, Michael's trading business reeled from several disastrous misadventures. In 1650, a ship laden with wine fell into English hands. The following year, a consignment of Brazilian sugar was again lost to the Royal Navy. Barbary pirates made off with another 3,000 guilders' worth of goods, and Moorish corsairs soon plundered still more of Michael's cargoes.

Family tragedy added to the business catastrophes. In 1651, Bento's elder sister, Miriam, died in childbirth. Two years later, his stepmother, Esther, pa.s.sed away. The thrice-widowed Michael had only five months to grieve before following her into the grave. By the age of twenty-one, Bento had lost the entire older half of his immediate family and was in charge of a merchant business that was rapidly sinking into bankruptcy.

Together with his younger brother, the budding philosopher now traded under the name of Bento and Gabriel Spinoza. In view of his new responsibilities, it is no surprise that Bento failed to enroll in the advanced courses for training rabbis. It seems, however, that he did continue his studies informally through a yeshiva group led by Rabbi Morteira.

To what extent the man who would later rewrite the history of western thought enjoyed trading in raisins and sugar is not known. The scattered evidence concerning his business activities suggests that he took his duties seriously and was not incapable of pursuing the family's interests through the normal legal and commercial channels. In any case, the experience as a merchant undoubtedly did make an important contribution to his philosophical development, for it exposed him to a much wider community in his home city.

As a merchant of Amsterdam, Bento frequented the city's mercantile exchanges, its warehouses, and the port. He worked alongside brokers, bankers, fellow merchants, and shipmasters. A number of the open-minded, spiritually hungry gentiles he first met in the course of his business activities in fact became lifelong friends. Jarig Jelles, for example, who would write the preface of the philosopher's posthumous works, was a successful grain merchant who retired in early middle age in order to pursue wisdom.

On one of his forays into town, the young trader made his first, fateful visit to a bookshop. Amsterdam in the seventeenth century was a city of bookshops. There were at the time as many as four hundred establishments dedicated to spreading the printed word. Under the tolerant eye of the civil authorities, authors from across Europe sent their wares to Holland for publication, and, as a result, Dutch publishers outproduced their continental rivals in several languages. An important part of the Amsterdam adventure for intellectual visitors as diverse as Leibniz and John Locke was a visit to one or more of the city's bookshops, where one had the opportunity not just to browse the aisles for contraband literature, but also to sniff out new ideas among the freethinking bibliophiles, who with the stimulus of coffee and Dutch-made pipes-for smoking had become a national sport-would while the afternoon away discussing novel theories, plotting revolutions, and bantering about the latest developments in the republic of letters.

It was in this nicotine-laced atmosphere of intellectual excitement that Bento one day met Frans van den Enden. Bookseller, Latinist, medical doctor, amateur thespian, champion of radical democracy, outspoken advocate of free love (until caught in flagrante in flagrante), ex-Jesuit (erroneous beliefs), author of the play l.u.s.ty Heart l.u.s.ty Heart (banned from the stage), accused of "sowing the seeds of atheism" among the youth of Amsterdam (guilty as charged), van den Enden was the bad boy of the early Dutch Enlightenment. One pupil who later repented his own youthful errors described him as "entirely without G.o.d." A widower at fifty, he raised his brood of children according to his own, unorthodox principles of education. His eldest daughter, Clara Maria, was among the very few young women in Europe at the time who could claim to be a master of Latin, music, painting, and theater. "She was rather frail and deformed," says Colerus. "But she made up for it with her keen wit and outstanding learning." She was just the kind of girl, perhaps, who would have attracted the eye of a young philosopher. (banned from the stage), accused of "sowing the seeds of atheism" among the youth of Amsterdam (guilty as charged), van den Enden was the bad boy of the early Dutch Enlightenment. One pupil who later repented his own youthful errors described him as "entirely without G.o.d." A widower at fifty, he raised his brood of children according to his own, unorthodox principles of education. His eldest daughter, Clara Maria, was among the very few young women in Europe at the time who could claim to be a master of Latin, music, painting, and theater. "She was rather frail and deformed," says Colerus. "But she made up for it with her keen wit and outstanding learning." She was just the kind of girl, perhaps, who would have attracted the eye of a young philosopher.

When van den Enden's bookshop went out of business in the late 1640s, he decided to set up a school in his own house, offering instruction in Latin, Greek, and other subjects. Despite his eyebrow-raising reputation, Frans managed to lure students from good families, some coming from as far away as Germany. In order to foster the thespian spirit among his students, he organized them into productions of Roman comedies and other plays.

Frans introduced Bento to a thrilling world of learning he had hitherto glimpsed only from a great distance. It was Frans, no doubt, who told the young man that "it was a pity that he knew neither Greek nor Latin." Having devoted much of his childhood exclusively to the Hebrew Bible, Bento must have felt left behind in the tumultuous progress of the wider republic of letters. The aspiring scholar promptly enrolled in van den Enden's school for scandal, accepting Clara Maria as his tutor in Latin. At some point in his early twenties, Bento moved in with Frans and his family. Now a master of Latin in his own right, he offered tutorials in exchange for his room.

By all accounts, Bento exhibited a ruthless pa.s.sion for learning. The focus of his intense desire to know was Descartes, the great French philosopher whose ideas had sparked controversy throughout the European intellectual world. Descartes resided for two decades in Amsterdam before his death in 1650, and possibly Bento saw the philosopher himself strolling along the ca.n.a.ls. With his short stature and unusually unprepossessing face, the Frenchman cut a recognizable figure in city life. In any case, Bento soon established a reputation as a formidable expositor and critic of the Cartesian philosophy. According to Colerus, he adopted as his guiding maxim the words of his French master: " That nothing ought to be admitted as True, but that which has been proved by good and solid reasons." It wasn't long before he concluded that this maxim ruled out most of the Bible, not to mention Descartes's own philosophy.

The young radical was drifting ever farther from the Jewish community in which he was raised. Back on the other side of the Houtgracht, the tongues wagged. Some of Bento's peers began to whisper that the wandering merchant was retailing some truly execrable ideas. They said that he believed that the books of Moses were made by man; that the soul dies with the body; and that G.o.d is a corporeal ma.s.s. For Jews of the time, just as much as for Christians, such notions were frightening heresies.

The rumors were indeed true, at least in some sense. In his mature works, Spinoza does in fact suggest that the Bible is a human invention, in a manner of speaking; and he explicitly rejects the doctrine of personal immortality. While he nowhere says that G.o.d is a part of the corporeal world, he does indeed claim that the corporeal world is a part of G.o.d (to put it crudely), and the rumormongers should probably be pardoned for failing to worry the difference. The available evidence, furthermore, strongly suggests that the philosopher formed these dangerous convictions well before he wrote them down for posterity-and certainly before his twenty-fourth year. Lucas confirms that Spinoza was "under the age of twenty" when he first conceived of "his grand project."

The crisis began with one of those encounters that, as Lucas puts it, "one cannot decently avoid, even if they are often dangerous." A pair of young men who professed to be his most intimate friends approached Bento and begged him to share with them his real views. They promised him that he had nothing to fear from them, for whatever his opinions were, they had no other motive in their questions than the desire to arrive at the truth. Bento, always reticent in such situations, said nothing at first. Then, feigning a smile, he suggested that they could always look to Moses and the prophets for answers.

This time, the pretense did not work. The youths persisted with their questions. If one reads the Bible carefully, said one, it would seem that the soul is not immortal, that there are no angels, and that G.o.d has a body. "How does it appear to you? Does G.o.d have a body? Is the soul immortal?" he asked, according to Lucas.

Bento responded with the kind of guilelessness he invariably manifested whenever he found himself among those he took to be fellow philosophers.

"I confess," he said, "that since nothing is to be found in the Bible about the immaterial or incorporeal, there is nothing objectionable in believing that G.o.d is a body. All the more so since, as the prophet says [Psalm 48:1], G.o.d is great, and it is impossible to comprehend greatness without extension and, therefore, without body."

"As for spirits, it is certain that Scripture does not say that these are real and permanent substances, but mere phantoms."

"With regard to the soul, wherever Scripture speaks of it the word Soul is used simply to express Life, or anything that is living. It would be useless to search for any pa.s.sage in support of its Immortality."

Having revealed his hand, Bento abruptly ended the conversation. The two friends left only after he agreed to resume the discussion at a later time. But, suspicious of their motives, he subsequently refused to return to the subject, and after a while broke off all contact with the pair.

When they saw that he shunned them, the two young men developed an extreme animus toward Bento and decided to exact revenge. They went around the community repeating and embellishing the rebel scholar's comments, murmuring that he "had nothing but hatred and contempt for the law of Moses," that Rabbi Morteira was wrong to think that he was pious, and that, far from being one of the pillars of the community, he would be its destroyer.

It did not help matters that Bento soon struck up an a.s.sociation with Juan de Prado, a physician twenty years his senior, who arrived in Amsterdam in 1655 with an unenviable reputation for failing to get along with his fellow Jews. Prado was a tall, thin, dark-haired man with a large nose, and he did not appear to generate any income from his activities as a doctor. Instead, he lived off handouts from an increasingly reluctant community, which suspected him, too, of disseminating heresies.

Sentiment in some quarters apparently turned homicidal around this time: an attempt was made on Bento's life. As he stepped out of a theater (or possibly the synagogue-reports conflict), he saw an unknown man approach him. He glimpsed the flash of a knife and stepped back just as the blade came swooping down toward him. The knife penetrated his overcoat but missed his body. The a.s.sailant fled the scene. The philosopher kept the coat, tear unmended, for the rest of his life, a souvenir of the incident and a reminder of the perils of a life of the mind.

It would be far from the last time that he incited this kind of extreme hatred in others-a fact that must reflect some aspect of his character or of the way that he moved in the world. Maybe it was a certain look in the overexpressive eyes, maybe it was a subtle curl in the lips-who knows? In his mature writings, it shows up as a chilling frankness in tone as he dismembers unsatisfactory philosophical views with a peremptory chop of the logical cleaver. Clearly, Bento was more transparent than he believed himself to be; he had some not altogether conscious way of conveying the contempt with which he beheld his philosophical inferiors. He exuded an absolute indifference to the judgments of others, and it was this air of inaccessibility, perhaps, that fueled unending conflagrations of loathing on the part of those who, in all likelihood, had suffered only minor slights.

Bento's former friends, not satisfied with peddling rumors retail, took their case to the community headquarters. On a hot summer day in 1656, in the old, wooden warehouse that then served as the synagogue, they repeated to a panel of judges their allegations concerning the young man's heresies. The judges were horrified. Inflamed with indignation, they prepared to excommunicate Bento without delay. After they cooled down, they decided upon a more pragmatic approach. They summoned the deviant for a hearing, to give him a chance to repent or, if not, to see if at least he would be amenable to negotiation.

The extreme anxiety and trepidation of leaders of the synagogue were understandable. More than theology was at stake: when the Dutch authorities permitted the Jews to live and worship in Amsterdam, they did so under the condition that the newcomers stick to their beliefs and not pollute the atmosphere of the city with any additional heresies. The Jewish leaders knew that the survival of their community depended on avoiding scandal.

Bento went "cheerfully" to the synagogue, says Lucas, certain in his heart that he had done nothing wrong. In the makeshift chamber of the Jewish community's place of worship, the young man with the dark, curly hair quietly took his place before the splenetic panel of judges. One witness after another took the stand before him and testified about his loathsome deeds and opinions.

At some point in the parade of denunciations, perhaps during a recess, one of the elders evidently pulled Bento aside in an effort to solve the problem in a different way. He offered the young man a financial incentive to renounce his heretical views in public. According to Colerus, the philosopher later reported that he was promised one thousand guilders for the service-enough money in those days to commission half a dozen portraits from Rembrandt.

Bento refused. He said that even if they offered him ten times as much, he would not accept, for to do so would make him a hypocrite.

When Morteira got wind of the hearing against his disciple, he rushed to the synagogue to see for himself, still clinging to the notion that Bento was destined to be his spiritual heir. Elbowing his way on to the sweltering panel, the rabbi demanded sternly of Bento, in Lucas's words: "Whether he was mindful of the good example he had set him? Whether his rebellion was the reward for the pains he had taken with his education?"

Evidently, Morteira still failed to understand the nature of his "disciple." Seeing that conflict was now unavoidable, Bento dropped the pretense of modesty and, if Lucas is to be believed, delivered a blast of icy sarcasm. "I am aware of the gravity of the threats," he said. "And in return for the trouble you have taken to teach me the Hebrew language, I am quite willing to show you how to excommunicate me."

Morteira was apoplectic. His rage multiplied with the humiliation of such a public betrayal. He "vented all his spleen" at the young monster and then stormed out of the synagogue, saying that he would not return "except with a thunderbolt in his hand."

With Morteira's "thunderbolt" we at last clear the sometimes choppy seas of secondhand accounting and arrive at a piece of solid fact, for there is ample evidence that a "thunderbolt" is pretty much what the rabbi delivered. Spinoza's excommunication, preserved in the Amsterdam archives, was among the harshest ever issued by his community.

On July 27, 1656, this verdict was read out before the ark of the synagogue of Amsterdam: The lords of the Mahamad...having long known of the evil opinions and deeds of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavored by various ways and promises to turn him from his evil ways. But having been unable to reform him, but rather, on the contrary, daily receiving more information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about the monstrous deeds he did, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of said Espinoza, they...have decided...that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel.... Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under Heaven.