Philosophy of Benedict Spinoza

I'm leaning towards concluding that Benedict Spinoza, while a very bright young soul, was only made popular by the Herem against him. Of those who proclaim to carry his banner, few actually bother to go through his works; his detractors - even less so.

Just ten years before "hisgalus" of S' Z' ym'sh, Herem against Spinoza was pronounced in sharpest of terms; his unspecified pantheistic views were condemned as utter heresy. The nusach, in translation of Abraham Wolf went :

The members of the council do you to wit that they have long known of the evil opinions and doings of Baruch de Espinoza, and have tried by divers methods and promises to make him turn from his evil ways. As they have not succeeded in effecting his improvement, but, on the contrary, have received every day more information about the horrible heresies which he practised and taught, and other enormities which he has committed, and as they had many trustworthy witnesses of this, who have deposed and testified in the presence of the said Spinoza, and have convicted him; and as all this has been investigated in the presence of the Rabbis, it has been resolved with their consent that the said Espinoza should be anathematised and cut off from the people of Israel, and now he is anathematised with the following anathema:

"With the judgment of the angels and with that of the saints, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and of all this holy congregation, before these sacred Scrolls of the Law, and the six hundred and thirteen precepts which are proscribed therein, we anathematise, cut off, execrate, and curse Baruch de Espinoza with the anathema wherewith Joshua anathematised Jericho, with the curse wherewith Elishah cursed the youths, and with all the curses which are written in the Law: cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lieth down, and cursed be he when he riseth up; cursed be he when he goeth out, and cursed be he when he cometh in; the Lord will not pardon him; the wrath and fury of the Lord will be kindled against this man, and bring down upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law; and the Lord will destroy his name from under the heavens; and, to his undoing, the Lord will cut him off from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of the Law; but ye that cleave unto the Lord your God live all of you this day!"

We ordain that no one may communicate with him verbally or in writing, nor show him any favour, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor be within four cubits of him, nor read anything composed or written by him.

For a twenty four year old operating in the times of fervent activities of Kabbalists and other radical and new worldviews, he received a disproportionate amount of attention from relatively liberal and enlightened Rabbinical Court of Amsterdam. I am not, G-d forbid, doubting their decision. I am sure they saw something that deserved such treatment. But there are no historical records that tell us what exactly was the cause of all this noise.

At least one source cites that the Court of Amsterdam was very prolific with their excommunications and issued over two hundred and eighty instances in the first hundred years, sometimes for very trivial reasons. If that was the case, it's easy to say that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the pivotal decision to throw him out would've played out differently if it happened in Poland a hundred years later. Was the martyrdom unearned ?

In any case, casual attempt to sketch Spinozism from his own late works does not put forth anything revolutionary or particularly interesting. It is not very consistent even in Cantor's terms, nor very rigorous; but the religious ideas espoused can be encountered in many other sources, many of which are on the "A-list", and even those that aren't are far from being an ultimate revelation of rationalist self-sustenance.

It may be worth spending some effort on figuring out what was it in early Spinoza's head that he probably tossed out right there and then when he and the Rabbinical Court of Amsterdam parted ways.

Of all the uncountable of books on the matter the most interesting and usable one was written by Spinoza's luminous contemporary, some of the brightest minds ever, Gottfried Leibnitz. It is also a source I'm inclined to trust since as long its authorship is unchallenged, it does get as close to the very object of our interest as possible - Leibnitz was born only ten years before Spinoza's excommunication, and that makes him 14 years younger.

Remainders of Spinozist "pantheism" addressed by Leibnitz seem innocent and benign. "Everything is in G-d, that is, G-d comprises the being and the idea of everything" can be explained as normative doctrine - given enough ink and benefit of the doubt - in either Lithuanian, Chassidic or Chabad schools of thought, or in the explicit Kabbalist system of values to which Spinoza and other contemporaries often allude, as it gave them the means and the ways to express hitherto unexpressable.

So Leibnitz, the supergoy and and a thinker of unmatched caliber, wrote "Refutation of Spinoza" to refute a commonly shared belief that he (Leibnitz) was a Spinozist. In it he begins with a claim that while Spinoza has outwardly proclaimed the "divinity of Cr-st", he really kind of does not and really Spinoza is just repackaging "Kabbalistic doctrine". Then, Dr. Leibnitz goes into remarkable depth, although off-beat and naive, into the Kabbalist doctrine, how it's very close to Spinozist views and how he as a Christian does not really subscribe to these views and would like to distantiate himself from such (of course it's deeper and more nuanced, and quite unlike the treatment of genetics and Ac. Vavilov in the Soviet Academy of Sciences by Ac. Lysenko). It's surprising to see an erudite rationalist German to spend so much time arguing about intricacies of interpretations of various Kabbalistic doctrines (especially after it was condemned by the Yemenite and German self-professed rationalists alike). Messianic thought, too, is treated by Herr Leibnitz on more then one page in this very thin and scarcely available work.

Thus by all accounts it appears that Spinoza started off with a conceived relatively thorough system of thought that was deeply intertwined with contemporary religious "mysticism", with some of Descartes' innovate thinking and with approach and reconciliation with classic Judaism. In that, he was somewhat of a predecessor to, lehavdil, the school of R' Bunim, R' Yeshaya Muskat and his saintly father in law, OB"M. We can only speculate the magnitude of good that could have came out of taking the sprouts of this budding "theory of everything" and developing and retaining it further completely within the framework of Yiddishkeit. Instead of being a phony martyr to two-bit apostates who haven't read him, and instead of ending up writing outright heresy, blasphemy and idolatrous beliefs - looks like he did it to make a living and out of desperation - Spinoza could have been the focal point of development of centrist wholesome Jewish thought. And while philosophical contributions aren't particularly valuable because they lack rigor and weren't written with formal model theory in mind, everything could've been so different ...

Part Two :

There was something in the air in the mid-1600's.