Many Happy Returns; Baruch

Reared an Irish-American Roman Catholic, and even with a Philosophy major from the Jesuit University of Detroit, Baruch Spinoza was, till I ran into the work of Princeton philosophy professor Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (she is a novelist as well), just a trivia question: what idealistic philosopher ground lenses for a living. On the 350 anniversary of his excommunication from the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam at age twenty-three, Goldstein makes a strong case for his being a major, perhaps even central, figure in the European Enlightenment, surprisingly, through his influence on John Locke, a spiritual godfather of the constitutional American Republic. (See “A view of the truth: Spinoza’s faith in reason," NYT/ IHT, 31 July 2006.) Talk about not knowing my forebears.

Goldstein, a specialist on Baruch, deplores that so little attention has been paid to this anniversary because “Spinoza’s life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable.” She explains that the reasons for his excommunication remain “murky”. But the “logic” behind his vilification throughout Europe is crystal clear: "Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the creator’s partiality to its beliefs and ways.” In the 21 years before his death at 44, he studied the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he arrived at are amazingly timely in our new era of Islamic martyrs and Christian intransigent theologies.

1492 meant something entirely different to Iberian Jews than it does to American patriots. It marked their banishment from Spain and Portugal to more open minded regimes like that in Netherlands. They either had to convert to Christianity or leave for parts unknown. The Iberians had just “outed” the Moors—so it was theological clean up time, with the Inquisitors keeping a lethal eye even on those Jews who “converted”—they suspected that once a Jew “carrying the rejected of Christ in their very blood” always a Jew. So Goldstein postulates that the Iberian Inquisition was “Europe’s first experiment in racialist ideology.”

Baruch’s response to this all enveloping religious intolerance was to try to “think his way out of all sectarian thinking”. He observed how people have a tendency to view as true which furthers their own programs of aggrandizement. He decided that only Reason could void those “false entailments” He concluded that in so far as each individual was “rational”, each share the same identity. Gifted with this splendid capacity, each of us has the responsibility as well as the right to exercise in life’s crucial decisions.

That is why he considered the emerging democratic spirit as the most superior form of government. That is why he railed against governments which impeded the growth of science which furthered the physical safety that allows us to develop our rational potentials. Analogously he rejected clerical control of government because it was de jure irrational, rejecting all other interpretations of reality

Greater Christian Europe banned his books. But the more banned, the more read they were.Jefferson’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is pure Baruch, just a language away in its Lockean formulations. Baruch believed it was Reason that made each of us a being of unlimited value.

This outraged the Absolutists who thought they needed the revelation of God to make each individual inestimable. It’s a law of nature, Baruch reasoned, not a divine revelation! And in this era of “religion infested politics” many would argue with Spinoza. The happiest 350th anniversary return would be a return of Islamist, Jew and Christian to his clarity and purity. Many happy returns to US, Mr. Spinoza.

(To get the full Baruch, read Professor Goldstein’s new book,”Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity”.)