‘Freedom Lies in the Recognition of Necessity’

Jesus is only the most famous, and most troublesome, of the Jewish troublemakers who have changed the face of the world. Moses, Marx, Freud and Spinoza also challenged received ideas, not least about God. Not atypically, Jesus troubled not only the Romans, whose empire his followers were eventually to dominate, but also his fellow Jews, whose orthodoxy he subverted. Ever since the prophets chided Israel’s kings, Jewish fractiousness has released explosive creative and critical energies.

“Radical Enlightenment,” Jonathan I. Israel’s magnificent (and dauntingly detailed) study of the impact of Spinoza and his philosophy on European cultural history at the hinge of the 17th and 18th centuries, cannot be understood without some sense of how much Christianity owed both to Judaism and, more surprisingly, to pagan antiquity. Old religions were inextricably composted in the roots of the church. Central to Christian doctrine--though not to Jesus’ own message--was the legend of the Resurrection and of the miracles Christ was said to have performed. Among them was the casting out of devils. If literally true, as the Gospels (and their interpreters) insisted, this had to imply the genuine existence of dark forces over which the True Faith might triumph; on the subject of other gods, even the Ten Commandments had been ambiguous. If Yahweh instructed the Jews to “have no other Gods but me,” he never explicitly asserted that no others existed.

For centuries the church coexisted and competed with the pagan gods of Greece and Rome. It took more than four centuries to secure the final eviction of Zeus, Jupiter and their divine colleagues from their temples and the silencing of their mischievous oracles. Only then was the Christian pulpit officially vindicated as the sole source of valid divine promises, and threats. If the dragon of the bad old gods had been done down by the likes of St. George, the church never entirely denied their existence or dismissed their devilish potential. During the Middle Ages and beyond, witches and dark powers were forever being said to threaten Christendom. The Inquisition was there to repress and, if necessary, incinerate them.

As for the Jews, their degraded and homeless condition was flagrant proof of the sorry fate of those who refused to recognize the son of God. Unlike Jupiter and Zeus, however, Yahweh had been co-opted into a Trinity which--if unintelligible to Jews and, later, to Muslims--Christians now held to constitute the only valid monotheism. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was not disowned, but appropriated, by Christianity. By the end of the Middle Ages, almost all of Europe’s pagans had been persuaded, or forced, to convert. The Crusaders undertook the righteous genocide of the infidels who held Jerusalem, and of the Jews who still lived there. Alphonse Dupront’s magnum opus, “Le mythe de Croisade,” is a classic modern analysis of the militant intolerance of European Catholicism, dreaming endlessly of the forcible redemption of the Holy Land from Islam. Aristotle was the first to license such a campaign, when he backed Alexander the Great’s all-Greek “crusade” against the Persian empire. Oddly enough, Zionism was perhaps its ultimate mutation.

During the Middle Ages, the Jews of the Diaspora, although often pillaged and not infrequently murdered by pious mobs, were mostly suffered to survive as pariahs and “awful warnings.” Though their doctors were sometimes suspected of diabolical knowledge, which was urgently solicited, in extremis, by sultans, kings and churchmen, Jewish scholars were regarded with resentful respect because they spoke the same language, and (much as it might be regretted) belonged to the same race, as Jesus. If they were wise, they concealed their impenitent cleverness under a cloak of inward-looking resignation.

Even the more civilized Christian apologists, such as Blaise Pascal, advised against the extinction of the Jews only because the True Faith was fortified by the manifest degradation of those who had willfully turned their backs on the son of God. Their furtive synagogues and squalid ghettos contrasted with the soaring monuments and militant prosperity of Christendom. God was not mocked; the Jews were.

Nevertheless, until the Reyes Catolicos , Ferdinand and Isabella, expelled them from Spain in 1492, the Jews had contributed greatly to the prosperity and intellectual standing of Iberia. Forced once again into exile (Christopher Columbus had to sail from Palos, a minor harbor, because Cadiz was choked with ships crammed with dispossessed refugees), many Sephardic Jews found asylum in the officially Spanish Netherlands, where Dutch courage and liberty of thought resisted coercive, and alien, absolutism. Among them were the ancestors of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677).

Despite the widely advertised claims of England and France as the sources of European Enlightenment, Jonathan I. Israel has no doubt that its radiance derived essentially from Holland and that its most radical version was directly inspired by Spinoza. No philosopher had a more profoundly disconcerting effect on European thought; none did more to raise damagingly unanswerable questions about the paramount validity of theology.

Yet Spinoza was neither a crackpot nor a ranting atheist. As all but his most rabid detractors agreed, he was a gentle, self-effacing man of chaste habits and remarkable erudition. His philosophy was expressed in formal Latin, in an almost Euclidian system of definitions, axioms and proofs. Also a practical scientist, he ground lenses for a modest living and died at age 44, probably from tuberculosis hastened by inhaling glass dust. His enemies spread rumors that he panicked on his deathbed and begged for God’s forgiveness, but all the evidence is that, like Socrates, he faced the inevitable with philosophical calm. “Freedom,” he had famously proclaimed, “lies in the recognition of necessity.”

Few philosophers have so conspicuously honored their own ideas or asserted them with such self-assured style. There was in Spinoza (“the prickly one” in Spanish) a mental integrity that refused utterly to compromise with what he regarded as falsehood. He was evicted from the Jewish community for heresy though, like Jesus, he never denied that he was a Jew. He was certainly reviled as one, even by those who admired and, if furtively, befriended him, such as that charmless genius Leibniz (whose funeral, it is said, was attended by only three people). Bertrand Russell regarded Spinoza as the “noblest and most lovable of the great Philosophers.” Who will be surprised that his books were burned and his followers persecuted, and judicially murdered, by the princes and priests whose god-given authority he questioned?

Spinoza always advised his disciples to proceed caute , with caution, but many had hotter heads than he. Although his ideas were revolutionary, he deplored violence. If he favored a republican society, he argued for living peaceably under monarchs and princes. He preferred friendship to passion, persuasion to dogma, tolerance to bigotry. Why then did he excite such furious anathemas from established authority? One simple--some might say innocuous--Latin phrase of his was enough to challenge, and incense, the Roman Catholic Church and all it stood for: deus sive natura (God or nature).

By alleging that God and nature were two names for the same thing, Spinoza could be said to have anticipated the green thesis that we should respect nature as if it were divine. The sting was in the apparent tautological conclusion that God could not, logically, act contrary to his nature, which was nature. Hence--and here was the painful kicker--witches and devilish forces and the whole paraphernalia of the supernatural could only be figments of overheated and unphilosophical imaginations. Since nothing could be “outside” God, which was nature, the “supernatural” was a logically impossible domain. Devils and angels couldn’t, therefore, exist. It followed that Jesus could not have “cast them out.” Belief in miracles was a symptom of unreasonable ignorance.

More scandalous yet, there could be no validity in the notion of divine laws decreed from outside our universe, since there was, by definition, no such location. God was creation, and therefore could not be located outside it; he neither had hopes nor decreed morality for mankind. Men could become free of “human bondage”--from superstition, and the fears and cruelties it engendered--only by recognizing their own modest mortality. It is a safe bet that Spinoza would not have been a fan of TV’s “The X-Files,” nor yet of “faith-based” social funding. He was mature (or naive) enough to favor hard truths over soft options.

All talk of angels, bodily resurrection and the devil derived from the illusion that theologians could speak a higher language, as it were outranking philosophy (and logic). Although Spinoza never (of course) denied the existence of God, he was clearly more deist than Christian or Jew. In his view, none of the arguments for the existence of a moral, still less a specifically Christian, God was anything but spurious. Unlike Rene Descartes, whom he admired in his youth, Spinoza’s radicalism was not based on skepticism: He did not doubt the objective reality of the world. Claiming that “reason and intellect do the real work, proceeding on the basis of experience,” he to some extent prefigured Karl Popper, for whom scientific theories preceded the experiments that might prove or--crucial for Popper--disprove them. Human progress depends on the primacy of rational ideas, not on the accumulation of experiential data, as empiricists such as John Locke seemed to suggest.

Descartes is always regarded as the father of modern philosophy, but--although he had been a soldier--he was a timid and egocentric skeptic who made his nervous peace with Catholicism by rehabilitating the Christian God as the watchful spirit whose benign vigilance guaranteed appearances. Spinoza made no such prudent retreat. His followers were even more reckless. A few weeks ago, I came across a rare copy of “The Three Impostors,” a blasphemous polemic written nearly three centuries ago, which remained too hot to publish until very recently. The text--in which Moses, Jesus and Muhammad are pilloried as fabulators who foisted miracles and divine insights on their gullible followers--was falsely fathered on Spinoza, probably by a publisher eager for scandalous respectability. Whoever the real author was, can we fail to have a certain respect for a writer who solicited fatwas from all three of the dominant monotheisms?

Spinoza’s genius was backed by biblical expertise that even his enemies scarcely denied. He raised disturbingly accurate questions about the quality of scriptural translations. For instance, he pointed out that the Greek world angelos means simply “a messenger” and in no way implies a winged supernatural being. He doubted the literal authenticity of what Jesus and his disciples were alleged to have said, since all the quoted texts--from which unwarranted conclusions were drawn--had been written in languages none of them ever spoke. He highlighted contradictions and denied the divine (or single) authorship of the Pentateuch. He was as punctilious as he was trenchant, as courteous as he was fearless. When an anti-Semitic mob surrounded his house and bayed for his blood, he is reported to have come out and calmly advised them to return to their homes. Such was his cool and unblinking courage that they are said to have slunk away.

Spinoza’s system denied absolute, divinely ordained justice, and hence the divine right of kings, but he was in no way an anarchist. Although his ideas were the fruit of his own logical rigor, there was--as Israel insists--no place more likely to have fostered them than Holland, whose intrepid citizens had defied the might of Spain and where a range of free-thinking Protestant sects had emancipated themselves from the spiritual hegemony of Rome. Unsurprisingly, Spinoza regarded democratic republicanism as the highest, and most fully rational, form of political organization. Because good and evil could exist only in civil society, he argued for general acceptance of the law, and equality before it. The free man, he said, acts rationally and freely even when he obeys laws which he does not believe to serve the common good. Concession to the majority’s view avoided faction, instability, rebellion and self-righteous crusades.

Since it was more civilized to be tolerant than dogmatic, the celibate Spinoza regarded sexual liberty as part of a decent society. Free speech was essential; even what was not deemed for the general good should not be prevented from publication. The effect of such unmitigated generosity of spirit and clarity of expression was to arouse a storm of vilification from which his more obscure admirers were to suffer more than he ever did. Israel tells of dozens of forgotten martyrs who--unlike many two-faced academic careerists--died in humiliating circumstances, hounded, imprisoned and sometimes executed for the wicked crime of disputing ecclesiastic presumption and the insolence of office-holders.

“Radical Enlightenment” could be said to be the longest footnote in history; its 832 pages are an appendix to Israel’s enormous “The Dutch Republic,” which charts the rise and fall of a society almost as remarkable, for its riches and artistic achievements, as 5th century Athens. “Radical Enlightenment” is sumptuous in the energy, clarity and breadth of its scholarship. Its greatest flaw owes nothing to its author: the Oxford University Press--which has been under sustained attack in England for its betrayal of standards and culture--has allowed this masterpiece to be riddled with misprints, compounded by ignorance. Perhaps, some modern Spinoza could grind lenses for the press’ proofreaders, and teach them Latin at the same time.