Spinoza and Hagiography Part One

One of the latest works that has come out on Spinoza is the work of Rebecca Goldstein. It's a fun and highly engaging book, but I think that it suffers from this problem of hagiography. This tendency is crucial to the larger objective of Goldstein and others who attribute to Spinoza great personal virtues: If one is going to pose an alternative to the wisdom of the rabbis, one must assert not only the alternative's comparable or superior wisdom but also the alternative's comparable or superior ethical conduct. Certainly Spinoza's intelligence, his cerebral power, is undisputed, but the matter that is more disputable is his ethical conduct. A meticulous reading of Betraying Spinoza reveals that Goldstein is not sufficiently objective in considering Spinoza's character, tending toward the hagiographical, which is a tendency that has been around since the beginning of biographical monographs on him. Of course, one should - to be fair - acknowledge that Spinoza was also vilified extensively by many writers in the late 1600 and 1700s. I do not intend to act out similar responses, which I regard as both inaccurate and historically contingent. That is to say that the vilifying responses were often conditioned by the state of affairs in Europe, where the dogmatic dimension of religion still held great sway.

In addition, the hostile responses to Spinoza - his thought and his person - during this period were primarily penned by Christians. The Jewish community had rendered its verdict of cherem and, until Moses Mendelssohn, that verdict defined the discourse on Spinoza, the thinker and the person. As modernity advanced, the majority of Jews appeared to embrace Mendelssohn's view of Spinoza, which was favorable. All of this is to say that what I write here - though it places Spinoza's character in question - is altogether different from what was written in the late 1600 and 1700s, where the accounts of Spinoza were far from hagiographical.

With that said, for this post, I will examine one item in Betraying Spinoza that will set the stage for this meticulous reading that I promise. Referring to the controversy that Spinoza's works generated in the 1700s, Goldstein writes, "The holy furor aroused by the name Spinoza is in contrast to the man's predilection for peace and quiet. He confessed himself [in a letter to an acquaintance] to have a horror of controversy" (9). I find this characterization hard to reconcile with the fact that Spinoza was placed in cherem by the Amsterdam Jewish community, an event overflowing with controversy. Of course, one could consider his excommunication a case where a man was victimized by the authoritarian elements in the community. Although cherem is a practice that we should not wish to restore, one must understand how it operated at this time. This understanding will demonstrate that the narrative of Spinoza as the victim of authoritarian leadership is not the whole story.

Before a person was placed in cherem, the threat of cherem was made. Often that very threat was enough to compel a person to conform. If it wasn't, the person was excommunicated. But even then, the Jewish community almost always gave a person a route for readmission. All this is to show that the person placed in cherem was rarely blind-sided and often, if not always, given the chance to accommodate himself to the demands of the community and thus avoid cherem. To support her implicit contention that Spinoza was a victim of authoritarian leadership, she writes, "The terms of his excommunication were the harshest imposed by his community, uncharacteristically including no possibility for reconciliation or redemption." The first point to be made here, which was the original purpose of initiating this discussion to begin with, is that already this is evidence that Spinoza did not "have a horror of controversy." In fact, it seems that he was party to the most controversial - not in the sense of being disputed but in the more notorious, publicized sense of the word - excommunication of that period.

But leaving this point aside for the moment, the silence of Goldstein's account of the excommunication is what is most striking. I refer to her silence about Spinoza - his reaction to cherem, or, rather, his handling of his impending cherem. My sense is that the harshness of the cherem - rather than demonstrating the authoritarian nature of the Amsterdam leadership - is a reflection of Spinoza's own attitude to the prospect of cherem.

To what can this be compared? A couple is about to break up. One expresses his interest in staying together. The other not only rejects this prospect but vows wholeheartedly to never try to revive the relationship. In turn, the first, who initially offered the terms of reconciliation, responds in kind - and then some! Indeed, the words of the first will appear harsh, excessive. But, in truth, it is the words of the second that altered the tone of the whole exchange and led to the invective-laced outburst of the first. In short, neither party emerges clean.

It is the same with Spinoza. The harshness of the cherem does not prove that the Amsterdam leadership was authoritarian, though it may have been; rather it reflects the attitude of the excommunicated party. What this attitude was is a matter that will be discussed more in future posts, but for the time being, I hope that I have exposed a hint of the problem of hagiography in Betraying Spinoza.