Part 1 (2/2)

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 scholars.h.i.+p: 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 wors.h.i.+p; 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 s.h.i.+p 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 yes.h.i.+va 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 s.h.i.+pmasters. 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 embellis.h.i.+ng 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 makes.h.i.+ft chamber of the Jewish community's place of wors.h.i.+p, 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.

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