Baruch Spinoza: Life, environment and works

The environment from which Spinoza emerged, the Jewry of Amsterdam, and the one in which he lived, are very complex; religious concerns dominated there, but with certain nuances that need to be clarified. The Portuguese Jews, from whom Spinoza emerged, were among those who, in order to escape the threatening Inquisition, came with their Spanish coreligionists to settle in Amsterdam towards the end of the 16th century: they brought with them a spirit very different from that of the Jews of the Netherlands; almost all of them are descendants of the Marranos, that is to say, of those who, made Catholics against their will by an edict of Ferdinand in 1492, had remained Jews at heart; in these circumstances, the traditional teaching of their religion was forbidden to them, and they knew nothing of the Hebrew language or of the Talmudic commentaries on the holy books. Now, they found in Amsterdam a community where the study of the mysticism of the Cabala reigned almost unchallenged, where profane sciences were ignored. Hence the spiritual conflicts among the Jews of Amsterdam throughout the first half of the seventeenth century; those who knew logic, metaphysics and medicine resisted rabbinical teaching: one of them, Uriel da Costa, born in 1585 in Oporto, who emigrated to Holland around 1615, denied the immortality of the soul and went so far as to write that “the law of Moses is a human invention”, because of the contradictions he found between it and “natural law”.

Baruch Spinoza, born in 1632, was the son of a Jewish merchant from Amsterdam and received the very strong but purely Hebrew education given to all the children of the community; seven successive classes where the Hebrew language is learned, where the books of Moses, the Kings and the Prophets are read, to finish with the study of the Talmud. Intended for the function of rabbi, he continued his studies after leaving school, and it was at this time that he was able to know the Cabala and certain Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages: Chasdaï Crescas, whom he quotes once in his Letters (Ep. XII), taught in the fourteenth century that the perfection of God consists not in knowledge but in love, and that the perfection of a creature depends on the part he has in this love; this doctrine, so in conformity with those of the Franciscans, is the one that we find at the end of the Ethics. It is Maimonides or some commentator of the Zohar, to whom Spinoza may allude when speaking of ancient Hebrews who saw that God, his understanding and the object of this understanding were identical (Ethics, II, 7, sch.); it is the Plotinian thesis of the identity of thought, of the thinking subject and of the thought object which thus reached him.

Son and grandson of rich merchants, he directed the paternal house from 1654 to 1656; excluded from the Jewish community by the civil authority (and not, as is often said, by theologians), he left Amsterdam for Leiden; Shortly afterwards, he was in The Hague, where he lived off the resources of his trade as a polisher of glasses, to which he perhaps added that of his business house, if it is true, as is now believed, that he had it managed, after his departure, by an intermediary. Even before his excommunication, he had frequented Christian circles in which he found the masters who initiated him into the profane sciences, as well as friends and disciples. The doctor Van den Ende taught him Cartesian physics, geometry and philosophy; this doctor was a follower of that theosophy so widespread in Italy and Germany of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, according to which there exists nothing outside God; Through him, Spinoza was able to meet Bruno, who, a century before him, supported the unity of substance, the identity of God and nature, and wrote this formula that would hardly seem out of place in the Ethics: “The first principle is infinite in all its attributes, and one of these attributes is extension.”

In these Christian circles, we see the two interdependent traits that we have already noted: a Christianity almost stripped of dogmas and a spirit of complete tolerance. Christianity, in short, much more practical than speculative, aiming more at living according to the precepts of the Gospel than at speculating on the nature of God. Such was, for example, the sect of the Mennonites, which had already been in existence for a century. 1 abstention from all violence, with the prohibition of participating in war, in any public function, and of taking an oath, was linked with the rejection of the priesthood and of all sacraments, even of baptism, and with the denial of all dogmas, except the Trinity, the divine filiation of Christ and salvation by Christ. The sect of the collegiates, in which Spinoza found friends such as Simon de Vries and John Bredenburg, a weaver from Rotterdam, was founded, after the synod of Dordrecht (1619), by the brothers Van den Kodde, on this assurance that the healthy spirit revealed itself to every pious man and that there was no need of theologiens to interpret the Bible; and they were tolerant enough to admit among themselves followers of all communities, from Catholics to Socinians.

This practical Christianity left the field open to religious speculations independent of dogmatic theology. Philip of Limburg, in his De veritate religionis christianae (1687), wishing to classify the various opinions of his time on eternal salvation, divides them into three groups, that of the Christians, that of the Jews and that of those he calls atheists or deists: “I bring them together,” he says, “not because the words atheist or deist have the same meaning, but because most often deism hardly differs from atheism, and that those who call themselves deists are generally inwardly atheists, both of them do not recognize a God, or at least they change him into a natural and necessary agent, and, thus, they completely overthrow religion; Moreover, rejecting all revelation, they have no certain rule of life, or, if they have one, it is not a rule more perfect than that which one deduces from the principles of nature.” With visible malice, Philip of Limburg confuses in this naturalism all the speculations on salvation, independent of dogmatic theology and whose affinity with Spinozism is immediately felt. The collegiates, who met twice a year at Rynsburg, had no qualms about putting into discussion the supernatural character of the mission of Jesus, the authority of the Scriptures or the reality of miracles.

This free speculation, accompanied by the practice of Christian virtues, independent of any confession, is precisely what Spinoza himself, in his Political Treatise, asks the public authorities to ensure the possibility of for all. While Descartes left the concern of eternal salvation to theologians and the concern of public affairs to princes, giving each his own distinct sphere, Spinoza, like everyone in his circle, affirms the radical unity of the three problems, philosophical, religious and political: his philosophy, in the Ethics, contains a theory of society and ends in a theory of salvation through philosophical knowledge; his Theologico-Political Treatise indicates the paths to salvation reserved for men who do not go higher than obedience to the prescriptions of positive religions; his Political Treatise finally describes an organization of the State, which leaves to each the freedom to think; and we know that Spinoza, without actively participating in affairs, was the ardent partisan of Jean de Witt, whose government ensured this tolerance until 1672, the date when the Orangist party triumphed.

Spinoza carefully avoided anything that could alienate his independence; admired by the great Condé, who invited him to come and see him in Utrecht, during the campaign of 1673, he refused the offer of a pension and a stay in France; the same year, the Elector Palatine, brother of Princess Elisabeth, offered him a chair at the University of Heidelberg where he could freely teach his philosophy; he refused again. It must be added that his poor health must have singularly limited his activity; the tuberculosis, from which he seems to have been affected, requires a lot of calm and rest; his life, so orderly, so sober and simple, is not that of an ascetic; it is that of a sick person for whom health is a precious good. He died, aged 44, in 1677.

Spinoza wrote two comprehensive expositions of his philosophy: the Short Treatise composed in Latin in 1660 for his Christian friends and of which we have only two Dutch translations; the Ethics (Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata) whose writing was reworked several times; letters from 1661 to Oldenburg and de Vries give an outline of the first part of the Ethics different from the current form by its layout; and in 1665 he had almost completed a work which then consisted of only three parts. But from 1670 to 1675, he reworked the third part which gave birth to the last three parts of the current treatise, on the Passions, Slavery and Liberty. In addition to these two expositions, Spinoza wrote before 1662 an (unfinished) treatise on method, the De Emendatione intellectus. The Tractatus theologicopoliticus was composed from 1665 to 1670, and the Tractatus politicus (unfinished) from 1675 to 1677. Long before, between 1656 and 1663, he had written Renati Descartes principia phüosophiae, an exposition of Cartesian philosophy for the use of a young disciple; the Cogitata metaphysica, which explains the terms used in philosophy, are from the same period. Spinoza published during his lifetime only Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, in 1663, with the Cogitata as an appendix, and the Theologico-Political Treatise in 1670. But as early as 1677, the Opera Postuma appeared, with the Ethics, the Reform of the Understanding, the Political Treatise, and an important correspondence unfortunately retouched and watered down by his friends.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu