Part 4

“From Prague he went on to Brunswick and Helmstadt, and there for a time is said to have taught. Then to Frankfurt for the publishing of certain books, and later fell into the hands of the Inquisition at Venice, whence when they had had enough of him, he was sent to Rome. Frequently examined by the Holy Office ... of the Inquisition, convicted by the highest theologians, he now besought eighty days that he might consider, now promised recantation, now defended his point anew, now obtained another eighty days; but was really doing nothing but make a fool of the Pontiff and the Inquisition.

“So that, nearly eight years after he had come before the Inquisition here, on the ninth of February in the Palace of the Grand Inquisitor, there being present the Most Illustrious Cardinals of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, ... theologians of counsel, and the secular magistrate, governor of the city, Bruno was brought in, and on bended knees heard sentence pronounced against him. And it was in this way: the story of his life was told, of his studies and teachings, and with what diligence and fraternal admonishment the Inquisition had sought to effect his conversion, and what obduracy and impiety he had shown. Then they defrocked him, as we say, and straightway excommunicated him and handed him over to the secular arm to be punished, asking that this be done with clemency and without the shedding of blood.

“While this was passing he answered nothing, except this word: ‘In greater fear, perhaps, do you impose sentence upon me than I do receive it.’ So, taken away to prison by the governor’s lictors, he was allowed a fortnight in case he should wish to recant his errors; but in vain. Today he was led to the stake. When the image of our Saviour on the Cross was shown to him as he was about to die, he turned away his head and sullenly rejected it. In great misery he thus died, and is gone, I think, to tell in those other worlds of his imagining after what manner the men of Rome are wont to treat impious blasphemers....”

* * * * *

Surely, he came to that other world of his imagining. It is our world and he dwells among us. Little does he remember of the men of Rome, of their Illustrious Lordships of Venice, of all the toil and travail of that old life of his--hardly enough to fill an idle hour in the telling. But we know him easily for the unchanged soul he was. He is that one who came to us of a day and opened our eyes to new and troubling visions. “Now you are free,” he said, “be glad!” He is that same one who stole back another day and whispered, “But you are afraid! Remember your Father’s House, how safe it was and warm.” He may be there to close the eyes that have seen enough, with what counsel then, who can tell? But once he was fond of saying, “Not only he who wins deserves the laurels; but also he who dies no coward.”

BENEDICT DE SPINOZA

1632-1677

“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” These words which bring to a close Spinoza’s masterpiece “Ethics, after the manner of Geometry,” sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was difficult.

But then, the things that make life difficult are so much a question of the nature that accepts or invites them! We may be sure that few, brought to the lap of Lachesis, would have the courage to pick therefrom Spinoza’s lot. To be born of exiled Jews, to be cast off by family and race as an offender against holy traditions, to live then in loneliness among Christians whose faith one does not accept, to die by inches at the age of forty-five,--even as lives go this would hardly be called an easy one. How seriously then must we take the sustaining power of a philosophy which enabled Spinoza, partly accepting, partly inviting his destiny, to lend it an aspect of calm beauty that touches our wonder!

One is tempted to recall the unhappy Bruno; without, tossed and hunted; within, torn by a conflict between a new science at once grand and desolate, and a memory of things lovable but untrue. In him a lofty philosophy was to have quieted this struggle and consoled this isolation but did not, unless indeed it did at that last moment when he stood at his stake in the Field of Flowers.

There is much likeness but an all-important difference between Bruno and Spinoza, whose names a curious fate linked together first in general condemnation, then in general praise. The two were alike in this, that if anything more lonely can be conceived than the fugitive existence of Bruno, it is the monk-like reclusion of Spinoza; if anything more desolate than the infinite wind-swept universe of Bruno, it is this same universe bereft of the quivering life and all-inspiring purpose that Bruno found in it, this world left on our hands a rolling mechanism fatal and purposeless. But the difference is profound. The philosophy, yes, one may boldly say the religion of Spinoza, sustained him from day to day, from hour to hour. Bruno’s was rather the poet’s vision, vivid enough while it lasted, but dispelled by the shock of reality to return only at such moments as that in which his life went out. Is it in the power of a thought, is it in the temperament of a man that this difference lies explained?

Spinoza’s thought, whatever its worth, owned a distinguished lineage. When in 1658 he was excommunicated by the Jews at Amsterdam, he turned with eager curiosity to the learning if not to the faith of the Christians. In particular the Dutch physician, Francis Van den Ende, himself a freethinker, became his teacher and friend. From him Spinoza acquired his knowledge of Latin and German, by him was initiated into the sciences and introduced to the works of Giordano Bruno and of one other destined to play a determining part in his thought, René Descartes--“the father of modern philosophy” as he is sometimes called.

Descartes, whose life overlaps that of Bruno at the one end and of Spinoza at the other, is founder of the school of thought the historian calls Rationalistic. Now a rationalist is obviously enough one who is bent on following his reason, but reason as opposed to what? We think first of reason as opposed to authority and revelation; but although rationalism came inevitably to discard these sources of belief--had already discarded them in the thought of our very Spinoza--the father of rationalism had left some room for both; partly because it might furnish a convenient refuge if the official church with which he desired to live in comfortable relation should press him; partly because Descartes was in one or two respects less of a rationalist than his school.

On the other hand the master was emphatic enough on the distinction between the reason and the senses. It might seem to us moderns that the old saying “seeing is believing,” with its implied prohibition against believing aught that might not be seen, erred, if at all, from a very excess of reasonableness. To Descartes, seeing with the body’s eye was still but flimsy evidence. This organ had too often deceived him to be implicitly trusted, and to back its testimony with that of the other senses,--touch, taste, smell, hearing--was but to multiply unreliable witnesses. Their combined voices might give a certain presumption in favor of their opinion but never an assurance amounting to certainty. Not indeed with the eye of the body but with the eye of the mind could we see truth in its nakedness. But what is this organ, this eye of the mind, and who is to teach us to use it? The mathematicians, Descartes replies, have long possessed it and long used it. It is to them we must turn for instruction.

If we do--if we turn to Euclid, say--we find that the whole complex and difficult body of truth that we call geometry is made to follow from a few simple truths so certain that we call them self-evident. Why should not all truths be susceptible of the same kind of proof? Why should we not be able to find an axiom of axioms whose certainty was no mere matter of observation, and why, if we find it, should we not be able to draw from it all possible truth, as we deduce the theorems of geometry from its axioms?

It was this idea that Descartes followed and it was this idea that Spinoza accepted at his hands: To construct a theory of life that should be no mere summing up of various peoples’ experiences, but should, after the manner of geometry, draw from an indubitable source the certainties of morals and religion no less than the truths of science.

But when we learn what is this axiom of axioms that Spinoza received from Descartes and made the fountain head of all truth, we find ourselves spectators of one of those curious tricks of the human mind that make its history always diverting. It may well seem to us as though rationalism were not so much standing on its reason as standing on its head. For that axiom which is to be the simplest and most certain of all truths, more elementary than that 2 and 2 make 4, or that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points,--that axiom is the very proposition before which most of us find our reason staggering, our faith panting and breathless. That axiom consists of two words: “God is.”

I do not propose to develop here the tortured processes of reasoning by which the rationalists were wont to convince themselves that what God is and that He is, were no mere questions of experience. It seemed to them as though the very meaning of God assured his existence. But I question if in the end any of our day would be strongly convinced by their argument about it. The whole matter is of the less importance that Spinoza’s results in the domain of ethics are not so dependent on his method but that one may readily reword the problem of 17th century rationalism in the language of modern science.

Nevertheless it is in the first instance devotion to the method he had received from Descartes that requires Spinoza to differ with his master on two points of the greatest importance to the sequel. This God, this “all-perfect being” as the rationalists commonly defined Him, plays a rather capricious part in Descartes’ thinking. He is represented as the Creator of the physical universe, and in this act of creation as quite arbitrarily choosing this sort of a world rather than another, a world working out a destiny that is not chosen because it is good but is good because it is chosen of God. For the rest, what this end may be is beyond the ken of human reason, and after having done homage to the divine purpose Descartes feels at liberty to confine his attention to studying the mechanism and reconstructing the history of nature as we find it.

Here one can imagine Spinoza exclaiming “What! You would follow the guidance of the geometers, deducing all truth from the axiom of God’s existence, and you leave it to God to decide what shall and what shall not follow from his nature!” Do then the axioms of geometry select the theorems they shall establish, accepting some and rejecting others for a motive whether good or bad? No, says Spinoza, God has neither intellect nor will: facts and laws follow from His nature as the properties of a triangle from its definition.

The other element of caprice in Descartes’ final picture of the world is just man. He alone of all things occupying a place in God’s universe is not subjected to mechanical law. But how, Spinoza may well ask, can we conceive ourselves to be following the lead of mathematicians if we violate the first principles of their science? Does the geometry of a triangle depend upon the place in which the triangle finds itself? How then can the laws of the behavior of bodies depend upon these bodies being in or out of the human machine? The human body must be determined by the same laws of physics that govern all extended things. “And as for the mind,” Spinoza adds, “the order and connection of its ideas are parallel to the order and connection of the bodily states.”

“There is,” he concludes, “in mind no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to this or that volition by a cause which has itself been determined by another cause, this again by another and so on in infinitum.”

* * * * *

That the world reflects God’s choice, that it might to a perfect understanding reveal God’s purpose, that in it the human being is free in body or mind; these are aspects of irrationality which Spinoza is eager to remove from the fair creation of reason. They represent to him last vestiges of vulgar thought of which the master had after all been unable to rid himself. Spinoza is at his best in exposing the psychology of the multitude with its quaint illusions respecting God and man. In the famous appendix to the first book of the Ethics he summons these prejudices as he calls them before the bar of reason: “They all,” he lays it down, “depend on just this one; that men commonly suppose all things in nature to act as they themselves do with a view to some end, nay, even assume that God himself directs all things to some definite end, saying that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God. I shall therefore consider this prejudice. I shall inquire in the first place why most persons assent to it and all are by nature so prone to embrace it. In the second place I shall show that it is false; and lastly I shall show how there have sprung from it prejudices respecting good and evil, merit and sin, praise and blame, beauty and ugliness, and other things of the sort....

“It will here suffice to assume certain facts all must admit, namely, that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that all men have, and are conscious of having, an impulse to seek their own advantage. From this it follows first that men think themselves free for the reason that they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and, being ignorant of the causes by which they are led to will and desire, they do not so much as dream of these. It follows second that men do everything with some purpose in view; that is, with a view to the advantage they seek. Hence it is they always desire to know the motives of action, and when they have learned these, are satisfied.”

Against this background Spinoza sketches in with a few quick, vigorous strokes what we may call his psychology of popular religion.

“Since men find in themselves,” he writes, “and external to themselves, many things which are of no small assistance in obtaining what is to their advantage, as for example, the eyes for seeing, the teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for giving light, and so on, this has led them to regard all things in nature as means to their advantage. And knowing these means to have been discovered, not provided by themselves, they have made this a reason for believing that there is some one else who has provided them for their use. But as they had never had any information concerning the character of this being, they had to judge it from their own. Hence, they maintained that the gods direct all things with a view to man’s advantage, to lay men under obligation to themselves, and to be held in the highest honor; whence it has come to pass that each one has thought out for himself, according to his disposition, a different way of worshipping God, that God might love him above others, and direct all nature to the service of his ... desire. But while they sought to show that nature does nothing uselessly (in other words nothing that is not to man’s advantage) they seem to have shown only that nature and gods and men are all equally mad.”

And Spinoza seizes the opportunity to pay tribute to a respectable, well-worn theology: