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Spinoza
by
The Mennonites in Holland escaped theological criticism by disclaiming to be a church, and calling their institution a college, and themselves “Collegiants.”
All the Mennonites asked was to be let alone. They were plain, unpretentious people, who worked hard, lived frugally, refused to make oaths, to accept civil office, or to go to war. They are a variant of the impulse that makes Quakers and all those peculiar people known as Primitive Christians, who mark the swinging of the pendulum from pride and pretense to simplicity and a life of modest usefulness.
The sincerity, truthfulness and virtue of the Mennonites so impressed itself upon even the ruthless Corsican, that he made them exempt from conscription.
Before Spinoza was twenty, he had come into acquaintanceship with these plain people. His relationship with the rabbis and learned men of Israel had given him a culture that the Mennonites did not possess; but these plain people, by the earnestness of their lives, showed him that the science of theology was not a science at all. Nobody understands theology: it is not meant to be understood–it is for belief. Spinoza compared the Mennonites, who confessed they knew nothing, but hoped much, to the rabbis, who pretended they knew all. His praise of the Mennonites, and his criticisms of the growing love for power in Judaism, were carried to the Jewish authorities by some young men who had come to him in the guise of learners. Moreover, the report was abroad that he was to marry a Gentile–the daughter of Van den Ende, the infidel.
On order, he appeared at the synagogue, and defended his position. His ability in argument, his knowledge of Jewish law, his insight into the lessons of history, were alarming to the assembled rabbis. The young man was quiet, gentle, but firm. He expressed the belief that God might possibly have revealed Himself to other peoples beside the Jews.
“Then you are not a Jew!” was the answer.
“Yes, I am a Jew, and I love my faith.”
“But it is not all to you?”
“I confess that occasionally I have found what seems to be truth outside of the Law.”
The rabbis tore their raiment in mingled rage and surprise at the young man’s temerity.
Spinoza did not withdraw from the Jewish Congregation–he was thrust out. Moreover, a fanatical Jew, in the warmth of his religious zeal, attempted to kill him. Spinoza escaped, his clothing cut through by a dagger-thrust, close to the heart.
The curse of Israel was upon him–his own brothers and sisters refused him shelter, his father turned against him, and again was the icy unkindness of kinsmen made manifest. The tribe of Spinoza lives in history, saved from the fell clutch of oblivion by the man it denied with an oath and pushed in bitterness from its heart. Spinoza fled to his friends, the Mennonites, plain market-gardeners who lived a few miles out of the city.
Spinoza had not meant to leave the Jews–the racial instinct was strong in him, and the pride of his people colored his character to the last. But the attempts to bribe him and coerce him into a following of fanatical law, when this law did not appeal to his commonsense, forced him into a position that his enemies took for innate perversity. When an eagle is hatched in a barnyard brood and mounts on soaring pinions toward the sun, it is always cursed and vilified because it does not remain at home and scratch in the compost. Its flight skyward is construed as proof of its vile nature.
How can people who do not think, and can not think, and therefore have no thoughts to express, sympathize with one whose highest joy comes from the expression of his thought?
Deprive a thinker of the privilege to think and you take from him his life. The joy of existence lies in self-expression. What if we should order the painter to quit his canvas, the sculptor to lay aside his tools, the farmer to leave the soil? Do these things, and you do no more than you do when you force a thinker to follow in the groove that dead men have furrowed. The thirst for knowledge must be slaked or the soul sickens and slow death follows.