Steven Nadler
Si bien Steven Nadler ha escrito ampliamente
sobre la excomunión de Spinoza, en este breve texto
abunda sobre las posibles razones de este hecho que sigue siendo un
misterio. Pues no se sabe con certeza por qué se lanzó sobre Spinoza la más
dura excomunión nunca antes pronunciada contra un miembro de la comunidad
judío-portuguesa de Amsterdam. Lo cierto es que la excomunión ya vislumbraba los "peligros" del pensamiento de
Spinoza.
Bento de Spinoza was a
young merchant in Amsterdam, one of many Sephardic Jews in that city involved
in overseas trade in the early 1650s. The specialty of his family’s firm, which
he and his brother Gabriel had been running since their father’s death in 1654,
was importing dried fruit. Bento (or Baruch, as he would have been called in
Hebrew in the Portuguese community’s synagogue—the names both mean “blessed”)
was, at this time and to all appearances, an upstanding member of the Talmud
Torah congregation. His communal tax payments and contributions to the
community’s charitable funds may have been especially low by early 1656, but
this could have been a reflection only of the poor condition of his business.
Or it may have been a
sign that something else was amiss. On July 27 of that year (the sixth of Av,
5416, by the Jewish calendar), the following proclamation was issued by the
leaders of Talmud Torah from in front of the ark of the Torah in the synagogue
on the Houtgracht:
The Senhores of the ma’amad [the
congregation’s lay governing board] having long known of the evil opinions and
acts of Baruch de Spinoza, have endeavored by various means and promises to
turn him from his evil ways. However, having failed to make him mend his wicked
The document concludes
with the warning that “no one should communicate with him, not even in writing,
nor accord him any favor nor stay with him under the same roof nor [come]
within four cubits in his vicinity; nor shall he read any treatise composed or
written by him.” (Only a Portuguese version of the document is extant; it can
be found in one of the community’s record books in the Portuguese-Jewish
Archives in Amsterdam’s Municipal Archives.)
It was the harshest
writ of herem (a ban or ostracism) ever pronounced upon a member of the
Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam. According to the historian Yosef
Kaplan, forty individuals were put under herem
by the city’s “Portuguese Nation” between 1622 and 1683. One could receive a
ban for a wide variety of offenses: religious (for example, failing to attend
synagogue on a regular basis or to properly observe a holiday), ethical
(gambling, lewd behavior), social (men engaging in theological discussion with
gentiles, women cutting the hair of gentile women), even business and financial
(failing to pay one’s communal taxes). However, none of the other bans issued
by the ma’amad in this period even approaches the wrath and vitriol directed at
Spinoza. The parnassim (or community’s lay leaders) sitting on the board
that year dug deep into their books to find just the right words for the
occasion.
For the sake of
comparison, consider another herem
from the same era. The matter-of-fact tone of the ban received in 1639 by Isaac
de Peralta, who, upset by a decision of the ma’amad, insulted one of its
members and (it is reported) even attacked him in the street, is more typical:
Taking into consideration
that Isaac de Peralta disobeyed that which the aforesaid ma’amad had ordered
him, and the fact that Peralta responded with negative words concerning this
issue; and not content with this, Peralta dared to go out and look for [members
of the ma’amad] on the street and insult them. The ma’amad, considering these
things and the importance of the case, decided the following: it is agreed upon
unanimously that the aforesaid Isaac de Peralta be put under herem because of
what he has done. [N]o one shall talk or deal with him. Only family and other
members of his household may talk with him.
As was the norm,
Peralta was reinstated into the community after he asked for forgiveness and
paid a fine. The ban against the twenty-three-year-old Spinoza, however, was never
rescinded. There is no evidence that Spinoza sought any kind of pardon, and
good reason to believe that he had no desire to return to the community anyway.
As we try to
understand the event, over three and a half centuries later, on the basis of
very meager documentary evidence, it is all a bit of a mystery. We do not know
for certain why Spinoza was punished with such extreme prejudice. Spinoza was
not a well-known individual at this time; while his family was prominent among
the Portuguese Jews, he was only a young businessman, and had not written any
philosophical treatises (although he was apparently talking to others about his
views). His fame (or infamy) as a philosopher was still many years away. That
the punishment came from within his own community—from the congregation that
had nurtured and educated him, and that held his family in such high
esteem—only adds to the enigma. Neither the herem
itself nor any document from the period tells us exactly what his “evil
opinions and acts” were supposed to have been, nor what “abominable heresies”
or “monstrous deeds” he is alleged to have practiced and taught. Spinoza never
refers to this period of his life in his extant letters, and thus does not
offer his correspondents (or us) any clues as to why he was expelled. All we
know for certain is that Spinoza received, from the Amsterdam Jewish
community’s leadership in 1656, a herem like no other in the period.
Despite what some
scholars say, the ban against Spinoza was not a minor affair to Amsterdam’s
Portuguese Jews, nor was it issued for some ordinary kind of offense. The
language of the ban is sufficient evidence for this. It is true that Spinoza
had violated a communal regulation when, in 1656, he went to the Dutch
authorities to have himself declared an orphan so as to be relieved of the
debts he inherited from his father. This action explicitly contravened the
requirement that all business and other kinds of disputes be resolved within
the Portuguese community. But the litany of curses directed at Spinoza, the
harshness and finality of the expulsion, especially when compared with the
other bans, testifies to something more serious than a financial irregularity.
We should, in fact, take the herem
document at its word: What really got Spinoza in trouble were his “evil
opinions” and “abominable heresies.”
In light of Spinoza’s
mature philosophical writings, which he began working on less than a decade
after the herem, the mystery of the excommunication begins to dissipate. No one
who reads his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics, or his scandalous Theological-Political
Treatise—which Spinoza, knowing how provocative its theses were, published
anonymously to great alarm in 1670—can have any doubts about how radical and
unorthodox a thinker he was; nor will it be hard to imagine how his ideas must
have appeared to his contemporaries. And if, as the evidence suggests, Spinoza
was already expressing something like these views in the mid 1650s, there can
be little wonder that he was expelled from the Amsterdam Portuguese community.
Among the boldest
elements of Spinoza’s philosophy is his conception of God. Spinoza’s God, as
presented in the Ethics, is a far cry from the traditional God of the
Abrahamic religions. What Spinoza calls “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura)
lacks all of the psychological and ethical attributes of a providential deity.
His God is not some personal agent endowed with will and understanding and even
emotions, capable of having preferences and making informed choices. Spinoza’s
God does not formulate plans, issue commands, have expectations, or make
judgments. Neither does Spinoza’s God possess anything like moral character.
His God is neither good nor wise nor just. It is a category mistake to think of
God in normative or value terms. What God is, for Spinoza, is Nature itself—the
infinite, eternal, and necessarily existing substance of the universe. God or
Nature just is; and whatever else is, is “in” or a part of God or Nature. Put
another way, there is only Nature and its power; and everything that happens,
happens in and by Nature. There is no transcendent or even immanent
supernatural deity; there is nothing whatsoever outside of or distinct from
Nature and independent of its processes.
Spinoza’s God is
definitely not a God to whom one would pray or give worship or to whom one
would turn for comfort.
What follows from
Spinoza’s philosophical theology is that there can be no such thing as divine
creation, at least as this is traditionally understood. Nature itself always
was and always will be. This means, too, that Nature does not have any
teleological framework—it was not made to serve any purpose and does not exist
for the sake of any end. “All the prejudices I here undertake to expose,”
Spinoza says in the Ethics, “depend on this one: that men commonly
suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed,
they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain
end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might
worship God.”
Equally impossible are
miracles, understood as supernaturally caused violations of the natural order.
As Spinoza explains in the Theological-Political Treatise—vilified by
its critics as “a book forged in hell” by the devil himself—there may be events
whose natural causes are unknown by witnesses, and so they call such events
“miraculous” and attribute them to a supernatural providential agent; this was
certainly the case in the Biblical period. But this is all superstition,
Spinoza argues, and is grounded in ignorance of the true knowledge of God (or
Nature). All phenomena —including human choices and actions, for we are no less
a part of Nature than a tree or a rock—are brought about by Nature’s eternal
laws and processes with an absolute necessity. There is no contingency in
Nature, nothing which could have been otherwise.
What Spinoza is
particularly concerned with are the superstitious beliefs and behaviors that
the notion of an anthropomorphic and providential God nourishes. If we think
that God is like us, an agent who acts for the sake of ends and who, by issuing
commands, makes known his expectations and punishes those who do not obey, we will
be dominated by the passions of hope and fear: hope for eternal reward and fear
of eternal punishment. This will, in turn, lead us toward submission to
ecclesiastic authorities who claim to know what God wants. The resulting life
is one of “bondage”—psychological, moral, religious, social, and political
enslavement—as opposed to the liberating life of reason.
What might have
especially bothered Spinoza’s contemporary coreligionists was his claim that
there is no theological or metaphysical or even moral sense in which the Jews
are God’s “chosen people,” in part because Spinoza’s God does not (cannot)
choose anything! All human beings are a part of Nature in exactly the same way,
and thus there is nothing special or distinctive about the Jewish people other
than the particular set of laws they follow. It is true that for an extended
historical period the Israelites enjoyed good political affairs, with a stable
and secure commonwealth. But this was only the natural effect of wise lawmakers
and geopolitical fortune (with very few and insufficiently powerful neighboring
enemies). So, yes, the Jewish people did, for a time, enjoy divine “favor”; but
this just means that, aided by their own efforts, Nature seemed to bring good
things their way. However, Spinoza argues, with the Jewish kingdom long gone
and its people scattered all over the world, there is no longer anything
special in which the Jewish people may take special pride or see as their
divine vocation. “At the present time, there is nothing whatsoever that the
Jews can arrogate to themselves above other nations.”
What also became
irrelevant with the end of the Israelite kingdom, Spinoza insists, is Jewish
law itself. The commandments of the Torah were tailored for life and worship
around the Temple. But with the final destruction of that edifice, along with
the commonwealth of which it was the center, Jewish law has lost its raison
d’être. The ceremonies of Judaism—indeed, the ceremonies of all organized
religions, including Christianity—are empty and meaningless practices. The acts
prescribed or proscribed by the mitzvoth, or commandments of Torah, have
no validity for latter-day Jews. They have nothing to do with what Spinoza
calls “true piety,” which he reduces to a single moral maxim: Love your fellow
human beings and treat them with justice and charity. This is all that is
essential to the “true religion.” Everything else is just superstition.
Perhaps the most
deleterious superstition of all is the belief in the immortality of the soul.
Like the notion of a providential God, the idea that a person will experience a
postmortem existence in some world-to-come is a part of all three Abrahamic
religions. While there is, of course, much diversity among the major faiths
about what exactly happens to a person when he dies, and while Judaism, at
least, generally does not make the belief in immortality a necessary tenet of
the faith, the eternal fate of the soul was of the utmost importance to the
great majority of Spinoza’s contemporaries, and this is what he found so
troubling. In his view, a robust doctrine of personal immortality, like the
eschatology that accompanies it, only strengthens those harmful passions that
undermine the life of reason. He devotes a good deal of the final part of his Ethics
to showing that while there is, in a sense, an eternal part of the human mind
that remains after a person’s death—namely, the knowledge and ideas that she
has acquired in this lifetime—there is nothing personal about it. When you are
dead, Spinoza is saying, you are dead.
This was an especially
dangerous issue to pick on in Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century.
While Spinoza regarded the religious doctrine of immortality as a pernicious
fiction propagated by power-hungry ecclesiastics seeking to control people’s
lives (by manipulating their beliefs), he also knew that all four of the
Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish congregation’s main rabbis in the period were
deeply committed to the concept of immortality, and had composed treatises or
sermons defending it.
Moreover, this was a
community founded by refugees from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions;
many of the original Jewish families settling in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the
Netherlands were former conversos, forced converts to Catholicism who
had possibly continued to practice some form of Judaism in secret. When, as
immigrants in Holland, they were finally able to observe their ancestral
religion openly, it was a rather unorthodox variety, and bore traces of
generations of Catholic education and practice—for example, Purim was
celebrated as “the Feast of Saint Esther.” As for immortality, where rabbinic
Judaism tends to discourage speculation on the afterlife, it seems that among
the residual Catholic elements in Sephardic Amsterdam was a vivid conception of
the fate of the soul in heaven and hell.
It should also be
noted that Dutch Calvinists in the seventeenth century took the immortality of
the soul no less seriously than did their Catholic enemies. The Amsterdam
Portuguese-Jewish leaders knew this, and—still sensitive about their status in
the Netherlands as noncitizens, and worried about how they were perceived by
their Dutch hosts—would have taken every measure publicly to reassure the
municipal authorities that their community was no haven for immortality-deniers.
This suggests that there may have been a very political dimension to the herem
against Spinoza. Amsterdam in the 1650s was simply the wrong place and time to
be denying the immortality of the soul.
Finally, to turn to
one of Spinoza’s most important and influential opinions, he denies that the
Hebrew Bible is of divine origin. Neither the Pentateuch (the five books of
Torah) nor the prophetic writings or histories were written by God or by anyone
serving as God’s amanuensis; in fact, they were not even written by the
individuals who, by tradition, are alleged to be their authors or whose names
they bear as titles (Moses, Joshua, etc.). The Bible is, in fact, a haphazard
collection of very human writings, composed over a long period of time by
various authors. These texts were handed down, in copy after copy, through the
centuries and finally collected and edited into a single (but not seamless)
work by someone in the Second Temple period (most likely Ezra, Spinoza
suggests). Thus, what we now have is a “corrupt and mutilated” document, one
whose relationship to any original set of writings (by Moses or other prophets)
must remain indeterminate. If it is at all a “pious” and “divine” document, it
is not because of its origin or the words on the page, but only because its
narrative is especially morally edifying and effective in inspiring readers to
acts of justice and charity—to practicing the “true religion.”
These, then, are the
core doctrines of Spinoza’s mature writings on metaphysics, ethics, religion,
and politics. But is there any reason to think that they were already held by
the young Spinoza circa 1656, and that he was expressing them to others at that
time?
As a matter of fact,
there is. We have testimony from Spanish travelers in the Netherlands in the
late 1650s who, upon returning to Spain, were interviewed by the Inquisition
(the documents were discovered in the Inquisition’s archives by I. S. Revah in
the 1950s). They claim to have met Spinoza while visiting Amsterdam, and that
he explained to them that he was expelled by the Jewish community for saying
such things as “the Law is not true,” that there is no God “except
philosophically,” and that the soul dies with the body. Moreover, Spinoza’s
earliest biographer, who claims to have spoken with Spinoza himself sometime in
the 1670s (before the philosopher’s untimely death in 1677), also reports that
Spinoza was banned for his views on God, the Law, and the soul. This is all
only hearsay, of course, but it does strongly suggest that as a young man
Spinoza had already worked out, at least in embryonic form, some of his more
radical philosophical and religious views.
Spinoza seems to have
taken his herem in stride. By this point he had lost his religious faith such
as it was, and, as his secular philosophical studies progressed under the
direction of Franciscus van den Enden, his Latin tutor, he was drifting away
from engagement with Jewish religious traditions and toward ancient and modern
republican political theory, classical Latin literature, and especially the
writings of René Descartes, the great French philosopher.
Spinoza was certainly
not present in the synagogue when the herem was proclaimed, but when he heard
about it he is reported to have reacted with perfect equanimity: “All the
better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my
own accord if I did not dread scandal. But, since they want it that way, I
enter gladly on the path this opened to me, with the consolation that my
departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from
Egypt.”
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario