CHAPTER FOUR - Spinoza上部分

I. Historical and Biographical

1. THE ODYSSEY OF THE JEWS

1: The story of the Jews since the Dispersion is one of the epics of European history. Driven from their natural home by the Roman capture of Jerusalem (70 A.D.), and scattered by flight and trade among all the nations and to all the continents; persecuted and decimated by the adherents of the great religions—Christianity and Mohammedanism—which had been born of their scriptures and their memories; barred by the feudal system from owning land, and by the guilds from taking part in industry; shut up within congested ghettoes and narrowing pursuits, mobbed by the people and robbed by the kings; building with their finance and trade the towns and cities indispensable to civilization; outcast and excommunicated, insulted and injured;—yet, without any political structure, without any legal compulsion to social unity, without even a common language, this wonderful people has maintained itself in body and soul, has preserved its racial and cultural integrity, has guarded with jealous love its oldest rituals and traditions, has patiently and resolutely awaited the day of its deliverance, and has emerged greater in number than ever before, renowned in every field for the contributions of its geniuses, and triumphantly restored, after two thousand years of wandering, to its ancient and unforgotten home. What drama could rival the grandeur of these sufferings, the variety of these scenes, and the glory and justice of this fulfillment? What fiction could match the romance of this reality?

2: The dispersion had begun many centuries before the fall of the Holy City; through Tyre and Sidon and other ports the Jews had spread abroad into every nook of the Mediterranean—to Athens and Antioch, to Alexandria and Carthage, to Rome and Marseilles, and even to distant Spain. After the destruction of the Temple the dispersion became almost a mass migration. Ultimately the movement followed two streams: one along the Danube and the Rhine, and thence later into Poland and Russia; the other into Spain and Portugal with the conquering Moors (711 A.D.) In Central Europe the Jews distinguished themselves as merchants and financiers; in the Peninsula they absorbed gladly the mathematical, medical and philosophical lore of the Arabs, and developed their own culture in the great schools of Cordova, Barcelona and Seville. Here in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Jews played a prominent part in transmitting ancient and Oriental culture to western Europe. It was at Cordova that Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), the greatest physician of his age, wrote his famous Biblical commentary, the Guide to the Perplexed; it was at Barcelona that Hasdai Crescas (1370–1430) propounded heresies that shook all Judaism.

1: The Jews of Spain prospered and flourished until the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand in 1492 and the final expulsion of the Moors. The Peninsular Jews now lost the liberty which they had enjoyed under the lenient ascendancy of Islam; the Inquisition swept down upon them with the choice of baptism and the practice of Christianity, or exile and the confiscation of their goods. It was not that the Church was violently hostile to the Jews—the popes repeatedly protested against the barbarities of the Inquisition; but the King of Spain thought he might fatten his purse with the patiently-garnered wealth of this alien race. Almost in the year that Columbus discovered America, Ferdinand discovered the Jews.

2: The great majority of the Jews accepted the harder alternative, and looked about them for a place of refuge. Some took ship and sought entry into Genoa and other Italian ports; they were refused, and sailed on in growing misery and disease till they reached the coast of Africa, where many of them were murdered for the jewels they were believed to have swallowed. A few were received into Venice, which knew how much of its maritime ascendancy it owed to its Jews. Others financed the voyage of Columbus, a man perhaps of their own race, hoping that the great navigator would find them a new home. A large number of them embarked in the frail vessels of that day and sailed up the Atlantic, between hostile England and hostile France, to find at last some measure of welcome in little big-souled Holland. Among these was a family of Portuguese Jews named Espinoza.

1: Thereafter Spain decayed, and Holland prospered. The Jews built their first synagogue in Amsterdam in 1598; and when, seventy-five years later, they built another, the most magnificent in Europe, their Christian neighbors helped them to finance the enterprise. The Jews were happy now, if we may judge from the stout content of the merchants and rabbis to whom Rembrandt has given immortality. But towards the middle of the seventeenth century the even tenor of events was interrupted by a bitter controversy within the synagogue. Uriel a Costa, a passionate youth who had felt, like some other Jews, the sceptical influence of the Renaissance, wrote a treatise vigorously attacking the belief in another life. This negative attitude was not necessarily contrary to older Jewish doctrine; but the Synagogue compelled him to retract publicly, lest it should incur the disfavor of a community that had welcomed them generously, but would be unappeasably hostile to any heresy striking so sharply at what was considered the very essence of Christianity. The formula of retraction and penance required the proud author to lie down athwart the threshold of the synagogue while the members of the congregation walked over his body. Humiliated beyond sufferance, Uriel went home, wrote a fierce denunciation of his persecutors, and shot himself.1

2: This was 1640. At that time Baruch Spinoza, “the greatest Jew of modern times,”2 and the greatest of modern philosophers, was a child of eight, the favorite student of the synagogue.

2. THE EDUCATION OF SPINOZA

1: It was this Odyssey of the Jews that filled the background of Spinoza’s mind, and made him irrevocably, however excommunicate, a Jew. Though his father was a successful merchant, the youth had no leaning to such a career, and preferred to spend his time in and around the synagogue, absorbing the religion and the history of his people. He was a brilliant scholar, and the elders looked upon him as a future light of their community and their faith. Very soon he passed from the Bible itself to the exactingly subtle commentaries of the Talmud; and from these to the writings of Maimonides, Levi ben Gerson, Ibn Ezra, and Hasdai Crescas; and his promiscuous voracity extended even to the mystical philosophy of Ibn Gebirol and the Cabbalistic intricacies of Moses of Cordova.

2: He was struck by the latter’s identification of God and the universe; he followed up the idea in Ben Gerson, who taught the eternity of the world; and in Hasdai Crescas, who believed the universe of matter to be the body of God. He read in Maimonides a half-favorable discussion of the doctrine of Averroës, that immortality is impersonal; but he found in the Guide to the Perplexed more perplexities than guidance. For the great Rabbi propounded more questions than he answered; and Spinoza found the contradictions and improbabilities of the Old Testament lingering in his thought long after the solutions of Maimonides had dissolved into forgetfulness. The cleverest defenders of a faith are its greatest enemies; for their subtleties engender doubt and stimulate the mind. And if this was so with the writings of Maimonides, so much the more was it the case with the commentaries of Ibn Ezra, where the problems of the old faith were more directly expressed, and sometimes abandoned as unanswerable. The more Spinoza read and pondered, the more his simple certainties melted away into wondering and doubt.

1: His curiosity was aroused to inquire what the thinkers of the Christian world had written on those great questions of God and human destiny. He took up the study of Latin with a Dutch scholar, Van den Ende, and moved into a wider sphere of experience and knowledge. His new teacher was something of a heretic himself, a critic of creeds and governments, an adventurous fellow who stepped out of his library to join a conspiracy against the king of France, and adorned a scaffold in 1674. He had a pretty daughter who became the successful rival of Latin for the affections of Spinoza; even a modern collegian might be persuaded to study Latin by such inducements. But the young lady was not so much of an intellectual as to be blind to the main chance; and when another suitor came, bearing costly presents, she lost interest in Spinoza. No doubt it was at that moment that our hero became a philosopher.

2: At any rate he had conquered Latin; and through Latin he entered into the heritage of ancient and medieval European thought. He seems to have studied Socrates and Plato and Aristotle; but he preferred to them the great atomists, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius; and the Stoics left their mark upon him ineffaceably. He read the Scholastic philosophers, and took from them not only their terminology, but their geometrical method of exposition by axiom, definition, proposition, proof, scholium and corollary. He studied Bruno (1548–1600), that magnificent rebel whose fires “not all the snows of the Caucasus could quench,” who wandered from country to country and from creed to creed, and evermore “came out by the same door wherein he went,”—searching and wondering; and who at last was sentenced by the Inquisition to be killed “as mercifully as possible, and without the shedding of blood”—i.e., to be burned alive. What a wealth of ideas there was in this romantic Italian! First of all the master idea of unity: all reality is one in substance, one in cause, one in origin; and God and this reality are one. Again, to Bruno, mind and matter are one; every particle of reality is composed inseparably of the physical and the psychical. The object of philosophy, therefore, is to perceive unity in diversity, mind in matter, and matter in mind; to find the synthesis in which opposites and contradictions meet and merge; to rise to that highest knowledge of universal unity which is the intellectual equivalent of the love of God. Every one of these ideas became part of the intimate structure of Spinoza’s thought.