Spinoza's Heresy
Spinoza’s Heresy
Steven Nadler
New York, Oxford University Press. 2001
225 pp. $35.00
ISBN 0199247072
Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the Jewish community? Despite rigorous research into the life of one of the seventeenth century’s foremost intellectual luminaries, this question remains among the most intriguing unsolved mysteries in the history of philosophy. Of the more than 280 edicts of excommunication pronounced by the elders of the Amsterdam Jewish community in that century, the wording of Spinoza’s was by far the most virulent and condemnatory. Why was this so? Spinoza was accused of “evil opinions”, “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” But what could they have been? These questions will probably never be definitively resolved barring the discovery of a heretofore unknown manuscript or letter.
But informed guesses can be made, and this is the theme of Steven Nadler’s Spinoza’s Heresy. The current volume manifests the same rigorous scholarship and lucid style Nadler employed in his comprehensive biography, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Relatively little is known about the life of Spinoza, which was both brief and devoted to contemplation. It is this paucity of material, and the fact that Spinoza’s biography has been reworked in a significant number of earlier studies, which renders Nadler’s scholarship all the more remarkable. Details from Spinoza’s Hebrew School curriculum when he was a child, to descriptions of Spinoza’s last days, manifest the extent to which the author had gone to unearth fresh material. Nadler is also a cautious and responsible historian. He presents his facts with qualification: he informs us as to what data about Spinoza we can hold with certainty; speculations which are implausible; and those facts, which based on circumstantial evidence must be untrue. My sole criticism of Nadler’s earlier work is that he fails to sufficiently discuss Spinoza’s place and significance in the history of Western philosophy, nor is there as much developed discussion of the philosophy itself as one would like, even in a biographical study.
Nadler handily compensates for this omission in the current work. He concludes that Spinoza’s “abominable heresies” relate to his philosophical views on immortality, which, for reasons, both religious and ultimately political, the Jewish community of Amsterdam found threatening. This speculation provides Nadler an opportunity for a technical philosophical exploration of the place of immortality in Jewish thought, which serves as the sub-theme for the volume. Technical, but not merely of abstract interest, for Nadler illuminates the power of ideas by placing them within an historical context, and by demonstrating the political consequences for Spinoza of philosophizing as he did.
It was Spinoza’s project to use the methods and philosophical categories of the medievals to reach radically modern conclusions. Through a series of deductions, crafted with the exceptionless precision of geometrical theorems, Spinoza logically concluded that there can be only one substance comprising reality, and that substance is God. God and Nature, in all its deterministic causality, are identical. Divine categories inclusive of God’s will, God’s judgment and love, God’s morality and God’s miraculous abilities and the special creation of the world and man are replaced by Nature, sublimely impersonal, deterministic and austere. The end of life, Spinoza proclaimed, is the realization of human freedom through knowing where we fit it in the chain of causal necessity, and how the reality we encounter could not be different from what it is. By studying the laws of Nature, we in a sense, get to know the mind of God, and when we possess this knowledge in a flash of intuitive insight, we have achieved a type of this-worldly beatitude.
While these conclusions reflect Spinoza’s mature thought, as explicated in his magnum opus, The Ethics, he must have developed these ideas in inchoate form prior to his expulsion in 1656 at the age of 23. Holding such beliefs by themselves should have been sufficient to stir the ire of the guardians of the Jewish community, but Nadler concludes that the overall design of Spinoza’s views were not the cause of the ban. It was the particular importance of Spinoza’s beliefs in regard to the immortality of the soul which comprised the “abominable heresies” and came under special scrutiny.
By tracing Spinoza’s philosophy of immortality and eternity, Nadler is also addressing a nettlesome problem within Spinoza studies. In Proposition 23 of Book Five of The Ethics, Spinoza declares, “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there remains something of it that is eternal.” This pithy assertion has confounded students of Spinoza’s philosophy. Central to Spinoza’s metaphysics is his “psycho-physical parallelism” which states that the mind and the body are not separate substances, as Descartes asserted, but the mind is merely a manifestation of the body. At first glance, therefore, it would seem that when the body desists, so does the mind. But the ideas of the mind --however, not all ideas -- are also linked to the unbroken chain of ideas that are the correlate of spatio-temporal Nature. Through the right use of reason, Spinoza believes we can accumulate adequate ideas, which comprise a clear understanding of the causal and rational structure that lies immanently within Nature itself. It is this repository of adequate ideas that survives death. For Spinoza, this survival is assuredly impersonal and does not connote everlasting existence. Rather, it is eternal in the sense of being outside of time, in other words, timeless, as the laws of Nature can be said to be timeless.
All ideas have genealogies, and Nadler traces Spinoza’s theories of the eternality of the mind from Aristotle through the Jewish medieval rationalists, Maimonides and Gersonides. It is in the thought of the latter, in particular, who flourished in the early fourteenth century, that Nadler sees a strong kinship with Spinoza’s views. For Gersonides, only what he calls the “Agent Intellect”, which is the part of the mind that apprehends essences, mathematical truths and natural laws, survives. All other aspects of mind, which are connected to sensations and impulses, perish along with the body.
But why should these views prove to be especially offensive, since, as Nadler points out, teachings about immortality in Judaism have long been at variance with each other and do not hold the place of dogma?
It is here that ideas are invigorated by politics. Nadler follows the historian of philosophy, Richard Popkin, in concluding that Spinoza’s banishment was not the result of closed-minded religious bigots oppressing a champion of enlightenment, as the expulsion has been traditionally depicted. For the leadership of the mercantile Jewish community of Amsterdam was itself cosmopolitan, and steeped in the modern world. For example, Saul Morteira, the chief rabbi of the Amsterdam community, was a graduate of the University of Padua, worked at the Louvre, and was conversant in Latin. Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel, Spinoza’s teacher, had been a painter, a friend of Rembrandt, and met Oliver Cromwell in London to plead for the return of the Jews to England.
While the Jewish community was urbane and connected to the wider world, it was also insecure, both with regard to its internal composition and its relation to its host Dutch society. The community was new and primarily comprised of refugees from Spain and Portugal who had lived for generations as marranos, or crypto-Jews. Many had engaged in Catholic practice for generations, and arrived in Amsterdam with scant knowledge of Judaism or with syncretistic beliefs. It was the role of the leadership to educate and restore such Jews to normative Jewish belief and practice. At the same time, the community recognized that, as tolerant as Dutch society was in the seventeenth century, Jewish residence in Holland was conditional upon the broader political climate and the ability of the community to present itself as orderly and religiously proper. Hence the frequent use of excommunication to maintain compliance.
But why were Spinoza’s views on immortality particularly dangerous given the ambiguous status of Jewish teaching about the afterlife? The response is the fruit of Nadler’s inquiry, and it relates to both sources of insecurity just cited. The issue of the immortality of the soul was elevated to great significance because it related directly to the fate of marrano Jews still living under the oppression of Catholic Spain and Portugal. As Nadler states, “The immortality of the soul would seem naturally to be an important issue for a group of recent returnees to Judaism who still had relatives living in apostasy in Spain and Portugal, who were therefore concerned about the eventual fate that awaited the souls of their loved ones. Would those who, under compulsion, publicly reject the Torah nonetheless receive the eternal reward that the Talmud appears to promise every member of Israel?” That Spinoza would deny access to an afterlife in all but the most philosophical and impersonal terms would deeply offend. More significant, however, are the implication of his views with regard to the external relations of the Jewish community. It was a commonplace of religion, both Jewish and Christian, in the seventeenth century that the capacity to be moral was predicated on the existence of a life after death. Immortality and social order were directly linked. By denying the immortality of the individual moral soul, Spinoza was thereby placing the community at risk, or so its leaders feared, in the eyes of their conservative Calvinist hosts. It was a infraction for which only severe condemnation and banishment would do.
Interest in Spinoza comes from many disciplines. Those interested in the history of philosophy, Jewish history, Jewish perspectives on immortality, and humanists who revere Spinoza as a founder of the modern world and secular state, will find great value in this book. As noted at the beginning, Nadler’s conclusions, as he explicitly admits, can only be speculative. But there is much intellectual enrichment to be found by following him down the philosophical road that leads him there.
Joseph Chuman is the leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, New Jersey. He is also a Visiting Professor of Religion and Human Rights at Columbia University and a founding member of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. Dr. Chuman has written for Humanistic Judaism and other Secular Jewish publications and has been published in The New York Times, The Bergen Record, Free Inquiry and other periodicals and numerous magazines of opinion. In January 2003, he spent three weeks in Costa Rica teaching a special accelerated course in religion and human rights as part of an MA program of the United Nations University for Peace in that country.
Spinoza’s Heresy
Steven Nadler
New York, Oxford University Press. 2001
225 pp. $35.00
ISBN 0199247072
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