`A Mournful Echo of the Prophetic Psalms'

I spent much of the weekend reading Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind, by Steven Nadler, author of Spinoza: A Life, the standard biography in English. The book focuses on the philosopher’s cherem, his expulsion from the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656, when he was 23 years old, had written little and published nothing (his great work, The Ethics, was published posthumously). Nadler reproduces the proclamation that was read in Hebrew, on July 27 of that year, in front of the ark of the Torah in a crowded synagogue. Here’s an excerpt of this chilling document:

“Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.”

Nadler devotes the balance of his book to placing the cherem and its unprecedented ferocity in a dense political, historical, religious and philosophical context – all in fewer than 200 pages. He writes with admirable clarity and his book is accessible to thoughtful, non-specialist readers. That’s an accomplishment to inspire our gratitude. Spinoza’s philosophy is difficult but peculiarly attractive. His brief, often lonely life seems almost to have been scripted to illustrate the intellectual daring of his thought. Here are the final sentences of Nadler’s book:

“Does the cherem mean that there is no portion in the world to come for Spinoza’s soul? We know well what Spinoza would say to such a question.”

Indeed we do, and many writers have been attracted to Spinoza as much for his principled, almost saintly life as for his thought. What follows are impressionistic responses to the philosopher, all pulled from my memory or the books on my nearest shelves. Shelley, for instance, translated Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus – some measure of the book’s radically tolerant politics -- and George Eliot translated The Ethics. Coleridge long wrestled with Spinoza, whom he punned on badly as “Spy Nozy.” Eventually, he concluded that Spinoza was inimitable to Christianity, but in the fall of 1798, from his cottage at Nether Stowey, he wrote in a letter:

“Our little Hovel is afloat – poor Sara tired off her legs with servanting – the young one fretful & noisy from confinement exerts his activities on all forbidden Things – the house stinks of Sulphur – I however, sunk in Spinoza, remain as undisturbed as a Toad in a Rock; that is to say, when my rheumatic pains are asleep.”

Spinoza shows up once, cryptically, in Melville’s Journals, but the notation leads nowhere: “Spinoza, Rothschild &c. &.”

The Spanish thinker Miguel de Unamuno wrote in The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations:

“Let us take the man Spinoza, the Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland. Read his Ethics for what it is, a desperate elegiac poem, and tell me if you do not hear, beneath the unadorned, but seemingly serene, propositions set forth more geometrico, a mournful echo of the prophetic psalms. This is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair.”

Jorge Luis Borges wrote two great sonnets about Spinoza and announced his intention to write a book titled Key to Spinoza. In a 1974 interview, he said, “I am preparing a book on Spinoza's philosophy, because I have never understood him. He has always attracted me, less than Berkeley, less than Schopenhauer, but I cannot understand Spinoza.”

Even so, when asked in 1979 to name his favorite historical character, Borges answered, “Spinoza, who committed his life to abstract thought.”

On Sunday I took my 4-year-old to a birthday party for one of his preschool friends, held in a gymnastic studio thundering Abba and Village People covers over the sound system. After pleasantries, I sat in the bleachers and resumed reading Nadler’s book. An older man sat nearby and opened a volume of his own. I couldn’t see the cover but he was reading intently. During a quiet spell I leaned over and asked what he was reading. He held up a biography of Andrew Jackson and asked about my book. He had never heard of Spinoza but seemed to be listening to my explanation with more attentiveness than mere politeness demanded. As I finished describing the cherem and Spinoza’s resulting isolation, he said, “Sounds like a man of principle. Like Old Hickory here.”