Baruch Spinoza

Based on Wikipedia: Baruch Spinoza

In 1656, a twenty-three-year-old man stood before the leaders of Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community and received the harshest censure ever pronounced in their congregation. The document cursed him "by day and by night, lying down and rising up." It forbade anyone from speaking with him, staying under the same roof with him, or coming within six feet of him. His crime? Thinking dangerous thoughts and refusing to apologize for them.

That man was Baruch Spinoza, and his excommunication would prove to be one of the most consequential moments in the history of Western philosophy.

A Family Forged in Flight

To understand Spinoza, you have to understand where he came from. His ancestors were Marranos—Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity during the Portuguese Inquisition but secretly maintained Jewish practices. The Inquisition was not gentle about this. Spinoza's forebears endured torture and public displays of humiliation designed to break both body and spirit.

In 1597, his paternal grandfather's family fled Portugal for Nantes, France, where they lived outwardly as "New Christians"—a polite term for converts that everyone understood to be a kind of fiction. Eventually, for reasons lost to history, they made their way to Holland.

Why Holland? Because the Dutch Republic was different.

In an era when religious persecution was the norm across Europe, the Dutch had stumbled onto something revolutionary: tolerance. Not perfect tolerance—that was too much to expect from any seventeenth-century society—but enough that Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal could practice their faith openly. Enough that Amsterdam became one of the great Jewish centers of Europe.

Spinoza's father Michael thrived there. He built a trading business with impressive geographical reach and became a respected figure in the community, eventually serving as an administrative officer of the Talmud Torah congregation. He married his cousin Rachel, as was common in the tight-knit Portuguese Jewish community, gaining access to his father-in-law's commercial networks and capital. When Rachel died in 1627, he married Hannah Deborah, who gave him five children.

The third of these children, born on November 24, 1632, was named Baruch—Hebrew for "blessed"—after his maternal grandfather.

The Shadow of Uriel da Costa

Growing up in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, young Baruch lived just doors away from the Bet Ya'acov synagogue. His neighbors included Christians as well as Jews—among them, the painter Rembrandt. The family was prosperous, connected, embedded in a community that had built something remarkable from nothing.

But there was a ghost haunting that community: Uriel da Costa.

Da Costa was a distant relative of Spinoza's through his mother's side, and his story was a warning. He had questioned traditional beliefs, arguing that Jewish and Christian doctrines were human inventions rather than divine revelations. For this, the rabbinical authorities excommunicated him—not once, but twice. In 1639, seeking readmission to the community, da Costa was forced to prostrate himself on the floor of the synagogue while congregants stepped over his body.

A year later, he shot himself.

Spinoza was only eight when da Costa died. He probably knew nothing of their family connection at the time. But as a teenager, he certainly heard the whispers. Da Costa's ideas—his skepticism about organized religion, his denial of the soul's immortality, his suggestion that Moses hadn't actually written the Torah—remained topics of anxious discussion in Amsterdam's Jewish community for years.

The community remembered da Costa as a cautionary tale. What they couldn't know was that they were raising someone who would go much further.

Education and Early Doubts

Spinoza attended the Talmud Torah school, where instruction was conducted in Spanish—the language of learning and literature for Portuguese Jews. Students learned to read the prayerbook and Torah in Hebrew, translate weekly portions into Spanish, and study the medieval commentaries. The senior rabbi, Saul Levi Morteira, headed the school.

But Spinoza's name disappears from the school registry after age fourteen. He likely never studied with the more advanced rabbis like Morteira or Manasseh ben Israel. Why?

The probable answer is mundane but illuminating: he was needed in the family business.

In 1649, Spinoza's older brother Isaac died. Isaac had been expected to take over the family's commercial enterprise. With his death, that responsibility fell to Baruch. His father Michael's health was already declining, so Spinoza increasingly had to manage the trading operation himself.

Then things got worse.

The First Anglo-Dutch War broke out, and English ships began capturing Dutch merchant vessels. The Spinoza firm's ships and cargo were seized repeatedly. By the war's end in 1654, the family was drowning in debt. That same year, Michael Spinoza died, leaving his son to pick up the pieces of a shattered business.

The Break

What happened next tells us something crucial about Spinoza's character.

In March 1656, he went to the city authorities—not the Jewish community's internal arbitration system—and asked to be declared an orphan. This wasn't an emotional appeal; it was a legal maneuver. As a legal minor who hadn't understood the extent of his father's debts, Spinoza could renounce his inheritance and escape the obligation to pay creditors.

The city agreed. He was released from all debts.

But this violated a fundamental rule of the synagogue: business disputes were to be resolved within the community, not taken to outside authorities. Even if Spinoza was legally in the right, his reputation was ruined. More importantly, he had shown his hand. He was willing to put his own judgment above communal norms when he believed he was right.

The evidence suggests that Spinoza had been questioning Jewish doctrines for years—probably since his father was alive, though he'd kept his doubts private then. Now, with Michael dead and the business collapsed, there was no reason for discretion. Spinoza became "public and defiant."

The community was terrified. Amsterdam tolerated religious diversity, but only when practiced discreetly. The Portuguese Jews had built their haven through careful behavior and political savvy. Now here was this young man openly expressing heresies that could give Dutch authorities an excuse to revoke their privileges.

Excommunication

On July 27, 1656, the leaders of the Talmud Torah congregation—including the influential rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca—issued their verdict. The document was written in Portuguese, the community's vernacular language:

The Lords of the ma'amad, having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavored by various means and promises to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds...

The document never specifies exactly what these "abominable heresies" or "monstrous deeds" were. But if Spinoza was already voicing the ideas that would later appear in his philosophical works—denying the divine origin of scripture, questioning the immortality of the soul, reimagining the nature of God—then the severity of the response makes perfect sense.

The excommunication was permanent. Unlike most censures issued by the congregation, it was never rescinded, because Spinoza never showed the slightest interest in repentance. He may have written an Apologia defending his views in Spanish, but if so, it has been lost to history.

A Philosopher Emerges

What did Spinoza do after being cast out from everything he'd known?

He learned Latin.

This might sound like an anticlimax, but it was actually revolutionary. Latin was the language of European scholarship. Without it, Spinoza could read only what had been translated into Hebrew, Spanish, or Portuguese. With it, the entire world of Western philosophy opened up to him.

His teacher was Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit turned atheist and political radical. Van den Enden ran a school where Spinoza boarded for a time, learning not just Latin but the arts and sciences—and, crucially, the philosophy of René Descartes.

Descartes had died in 1650, just a few years before Spinoza began his Latin studies, but his philosophy dominated European thought. His method of systematic doubt, his distinction between mind and body, his proofs of God's existence—these were the cutting-edge ideas of the age. Spinoza absorbed them completely.

Then he began to disagree with them.

The Quiet Life

Around 1660, Spinoza moved from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg, a small village near Leiden. He wanted a quiet retreat where he could think and write, close enough to the university town that he could maintain his intellectual connections but far enough from Amsterdam's distractions and dangers.

He supported himself by grinding lenses.

This was not a metaphor or a hobby. Spinoza became genuinely skilled at crafting lenses for microscopes and telescopes—the high technology of his era. The work suited him: precise, demanding, solitary. It also connected him to the scientific revolution happening around him. When he ground a lens, he was participating in humanity's effort to see the universe more clearly.

But the lenses were means, not end. What Spinoza really worked on was his philosophy.

The Circle

Despite his solitary reputation, Spinoza attracted devoted followers. They gathered to discuss his writings, debate his ideas, and participate in what they saw as a collective pursuit of truth. The core group included Pieter Balling, Jarig Jelles, Lodewijk Meyer, Johannes Bouwmeester, and Adriaan Koerbagh.

Many of these friends were secularized freethinkers or members of dissident Christian groups that rejected established church authority. The Collegiants—a loose association of Mennonites and other Reformed sect dropouts who rejected official theology—played a particularly important role in Spinoza's intellectual development.

The group's reputation in Amsterdam was not good. The Danish scholar Ole Borch called them "atheists," which was both the worst accusation you could make in the seventeenth century and, from a certain perspective, not entirely inaccurate.

Spinoza's response to such criticism was characteristic: he ignored it. He considered intellectual battles a waste of energy. His goal was not to win arguments but to understand reality.

The Works

Spinoza wrote his first significant philosophical text, the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, around this time—but he never published it in his lifetime, knowing it would "enrage the theologians, synods, and city magistrates." The text survived only in Dutch translation and wasn't published until 1862, nearly two centuries after his death.

His first published work, Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, was more cautious. He completed it in just two weeks, presenting Descartes' arguments in a systematic form while subtly testing the waters for his own ideas. The book established his philosophical reputation and helped many readers understand the Cartesian system.

But his great work was yet to come: the Ethics.

Spinoza worked on the Ethics for years, circulating drafts among his inner circle, refining his arguments, anticipating objections. The book would present a complete philosophical system—metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics—written in the geometrical style of Euclid, with definitions, axioms, propositions, and proofs.

The Dangerous Book

In 1670, Spinoza published his most controversial work: the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The title means Theological-Political Treatise, and the book lived up to it.

Spinoza argued that the Bible was not divinely authored but a human document that should be studied like any other ancient text. He questioned the nature of miracles and prophecy. He insisted that religious authorities had no legitimate role in a secular, democratic state. He defended freedom of thought and expression as essential to human flourishing.

The historian Steven Nadler has called it "one of the most important books of Western thought." At the time, it was simply called dangerous.

The book was published anonymously, with a false publisher's name and location. Despite these precautions, everyone knew who had written it. The work was banned in Holland in 1674 and condemned by religious authorities across Europe.

Spinoza continued to live quietly, grinding lenses, corresponding with other philosophers, working on the Ethics. He declined a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, worried that it would compromise his intellectual freedom.

The God Question

What did Spinoza actually believe that was so threatening?

Start with God. For Spinoza, God was not a personal being who created the universe, intervened in human affairs, and judged souls after death. God was the universe—or rather, God was the infinite substance of which everything is a mode or expression. "God or Nature," he famously wrote, treating the terms as interchangeable.

This is called pantheism: the belief that God and the universe are identical. But Spinoza's version was more rigorous than mystical hand-waving. He argued through strict logical demonstration that there could only be one substance, infinite and eternal, and that everything we observe—minds, bodies, rocks, stars, thoughts, emotions—are modifications of this single substance.

This had radical implications.

If God is Nature, then there are no miracles. Everything that happens follows necessarily from the laws of nature, which are the laws of God's own being. Prayer is pointless; God doesn't intervene because God isn't separate from the system God would be intervening in.

If God is Nature, then scripture isn't divinely revealed in any traditional sense. The Bible is a human document reflecting the limited understanding of its authors. It can teach moral lessons, but not metaphysical truths.

If God is Nature, then the soul isn't immortal in the way religion promises. There's no personal survival after death, no heaven or hell. What persists is the eternal aspect of the mind's understanding—the truths it has grasped—but not the individual consciousness that grasped them.

Freedom in a Determined World

Here's the puzzle at the heart of Spinoza's philosophy: if everything follows necessarily from God's nature, if every event is determined by prior causes stretching back infinitely, how can human beings be free?

Spinoza's answer was radical: freedom isn't about escaping causation. Freedom is about understanding it.

We are slaves, Spinoza argued, when we are driven by passions we don't understand. When anger or fear or desire pushes us around, we're like puppets on strings. But when we understand why we feel what we feel—when we grasp the causes of our emotions through reason—those passions lose their grip on us. We become free not by breaking the chain of causation but by becoming adequate causes ourselves.

This is why Spinoza called his masterwork Ethics. The whole elaborate metaphysical system—the proofs about substance and modes and attributes—was in service of a practical goal: teaching us how to live well. How to achieve what he called blessedness: a state of rational understanding and emotional equilibrium that constitutes the highest human good.

Death and Legacy

Spinoza never married. He lived simply, declining offers of wealth and position that might compromise his work. The lens grinding that supported him may also have killed him—inhaling glass dust likely contributed to the lung disease that ended his life.

He died on February 21, 1677, at forty-four years old.

His friends published the Ethics within months of his death. The book was immediately condemned and banned. It would be nearly a century before philosophers began to seriously reckon with what Spinoza had achieved.

But when they did, the reckoning was profound.

The German Romantics rediscovered Spinoza in the late eighteenth century. Goethe called him "the most theistic" and "most Christian" of philosophers—an ironic tribute to a man excommunicated for heresy. Hegel called Spinoza the beginning point of all modern philosophy: "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."

Einstein, asked if he believed in God, said he believed "in Spinoza's God"—the God who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of existence, not a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

The scholar Rebecca Goldstein dubbed Spinoza "the renegade Jew who gave us modernity." It's not an exaggeration. His insistence on naturalistic explanation, his defense of secular democracy, his vision of human freedom as rational self-understanding—these ideas are so embedded in contemporary thought that we barely notice them.

The Thinking That Preceded Thought

There's a beautiful irony in Spinoza's connection to Descartes. Descartes' most famous line is "I think, therefore I am"—the declaration that the thinking self is the foundation of all certainty.

Spinoza accepted Descartes' rigor but rejected his conclusion. There is no "I" standing apart from Nature, thinking thoughts that prove its separate existence. The thinking is just Nature thinking through us. The self that seems so solid, so foundational, is a mode of infinite substance—a wave that imagines itself separate from the ocean.

This might sound like a diminishment of human significance. Spinoza saw it as liberation.

If we are not separate from God or Nature, then our deepest understanding connects us to eternal truth. If our thoughts are Nature thinking, then reason gives us access to reality itself. The lens grinder in his small room, polishing glass and pondering necessity, was participating in the universe's understanding of itself.

That twenty-three-year-old, cursed and cast out by his community for dangerous thoughts, spent the rest of his short life proving that those thoughts were not only dangerous but true. The community that expelled him disappeared into history. The thoughts remain.