Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/143

Rh of virtue have endowed with a liberal mind: —


 * Men such as these [he continues] will not be silenced by tyrannous laws, for men are so constituted that they hear nothing less patiently than to have the opinions that they believe true treated as crimes, and to have things reputed wicked, by which they are moved to piety towards God and man.

He concludes


 * that the true schismatics are they who condemn the writings of others, and seditiously stir up the petulant vulgar against them; and not the writers themselves, who write, for the most part, only for the learned, using no other aid than reason; and that the true disturbers are they who in any State endeavor to destroy the liberty of judgment, which cannot be destroyed.

Spinoza has been accused, amongst other odd accusations, of bitterness against Judaism. We have extracted out of this twentieth chapter of the "Theologico-Political Treatise," which may very well be taken as a sample of the book, the most uncompromising expressions that we could find; the reader who is acquainted, even slightly, with the amenities to which theological discussion in this nineteenth century has given rise, may be left to say whether language such as this should be considered a very "bitter" reply to execration, excommunication, banishment, and attempted murder.

The die was thrown. Spinoza was now twenty-four years of age — that is, if we take into account the precocity of his development, in the prime of genius and enthusiasm. Conscious of learning and of talents, and of the not entirely despicable advantages of a handsome face and commanding manners, he must have felt himself richly equipped for a career of honors and of power. Morally, he had but to palter but a little with his conscience, to be able to accept the brilliant career with self-approval. The obstacles that it threw in the way of self-development must have seemed, to all but a very searching gaze, to he more than counter-balanced by the facilities for culture that it afforded in the shape of affluence and security. The social element in which he would have had to move was not one of repulsive "Philistinism." The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, formed at that time a community that we cannot help calling cultured, if not enlightened. With their traditional Talmudist education they connected modern studies. An eminent member of the college of rabbins by whom Spinoza was excommunicated, Menasse hen Israel, was publishing writings in Latin and in Spanish. Dr. Ginsberg tells us that Hugo Grotius has left a very appreciative judgment of this remarkable man, dating from the year 1639. From this it appears that Manasse ben Israel was well versed in ten languages, and composed poetry and other writings in Spanish as well as in Hebrew and in Latin. He is named in state documents theologian, philosopher, and doctor of physic. In 1632, at the age of twenty-seven, he published in Spanish his first great work, "Conciliator;" a writing the object of which is to reconcile with one another all the contradictory passages of the Holy Scriptures. It was the product of five years' labor, and was therefore begun at the age of twenty-two. The author's reading includes not only rabbinical literature, but the Greek and Roman poets, Plato and Aristotle, the Arabo-Hebraic philosophers, and the scholastics of the Middle Ages. More than two hundred and ten Hebrew works, and fifty-four Greek and Latin, Spanish and Portuguese authors, are cited in the first part. The fourth and last part of this exhaustive work appeared in 1651. A society that could produce men such as this could hardly have been an intellectual desert, even for Spinoza; and the temptation to yield, to compromise, to sacrifice this or that moment of the absolute idea of his life to the profit of the rest, must have been a strong one. And as for the interests of humanity, Spinoza's mind was dangerously well furnished with the ethical maxims that justify compromise. He held a doctrine of exoteric and esoteric treatment of truth that we cannot but consider as wearing a dangerous likeness to the principles of obscurantism. Submission to authority, that is, submission to power, political or religious, is the very principle on which depends the whole of his doctrine of political and religious practice. A brave and uncomplaining acceptance of the established fact is one of the most prominent features of his attitude towards all branches of human endeavor; a tendency that in the higher walk of philosophy, in the doctrine of the ideal sage as contained in the "Ethica," appears in the conclusion that places the freedom of the sage in his "contemplative submission to the order of nature. . . ." He did not reject the Scriptures as an authority ruling the conduct of life, he merely contended for liberty in the interpretation of them. He did not even advise that this