Part 23

The feeling of perplexity thus caused is not diminished by the language of the chapter on miracles. In this chapter Spinoza broadly affirms a miracle to be an impossibility. But he himself contrasts the method of demonstration _à priori_, by which he claims to have established this proposition, with the method which he has pursued in treating of prophetic revelation. “This revelation,” he says, “is a matter out of human reach, and therefore I was bound to take it as I found it.” _Monere volo, me aliâ prorsus methodo circa miracula processisse, quam circa prophetiam ... quod etiam consulto feci, quia de prophetiâ, quandoquidem ipsa captum humanum superat et quæstio mere theologica est, nihil affirmare, neque etiam scire poteram in quo ipsa potissimum constiterit, nisi ex fundamentis revelatis._ The reader feels that Spinoza, proceeding on a hypothesis, has presented him with the assertion of a miracle, and afterwards, proceeding _à priori_, has presented him with the assertion that a miracle is impossible. He feels that Spinoza does not adequately reconcile these two assertions by declaring that any event really miraculous, if found recorded in Scripture, must be “a spurious addition made to Scripture by sacrilegious men.” Is, then, he asks the _vera vox_ of Mount Sinai in Spinoza’s opinion a spurious addition made to Scripture by sacrilegious men; or, if not, how is it not miraculous?

Spinoza, in his own mind, regarded the Bible as a vast collection of miscellaneous documents, many of them quite disparate and not at all to be harmonized with others; documents of unequal value and of varying applicability, some of them conveying ideas salutary for one time, others for another. But in the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ he by no means always deals in this free spirit with the Bible. Sometimes he chooses to deal with it in the spirit of the veriest worshiper of the letter; sometimes he chooses to treat the Bible as if all its parts were (so to speak) equipollent; to snatch an isolated text which suits his purpose, without caring whether it is annulled by the context, by the general drift of Scripture, or by other passages of more weight and authority. The great critic thus becomes voluntarily as uncritical as Exeter Hall. The Epicurean Solomon, whose _Ecclesiastes_ the Hebrew doctors, even after they had received it into the canon, forbade the young and weak-minded among their community to read, Spinoza quotes as of the same authority with the severe Moses; he uses promiscuously, as documents of identical force, without discriminating between their essentially different character, the softened cosmopolitan teaching of the prophets of the captivity and the rigid national teaching of the instructors of Israel’s youth. He is capable of extracting, from a chance expression of Jeremiah, the assertion of a speculative idea which Jeremiah certainly never entertained, and from which he would have recoiled in dismay,—the idea, namely, that miracles are impossible; just as the ordinary Englishman can extract from God’s words to Noah, _Be fruitful and multiply_, an exhortation to himself to have a large family. Spinoza, I repeat, knew perfectly well what this verbal mode of dealing with the Bible was worth: but he sometimes uses it because of the hypothesis from which he set out; because of his having agreed “to take Scripture as it stands, and not to ask how it arose.”

No doubt the sagacity of Spinoza’s rules for Biblical interpretation, the power of his analysis of the contents of the Bible, the interest of his reflections on Jewish history, are, in spite of this, very great, and have an absolute worth of their own, independent of the silence or ambiguity of their author upon a point of cardinal importance. Few candid people will read his rules of interpretation without exclaiming that they are the very dictates of good sense, that they have always believed in them; and without adding, after a moment’s reflection, that they have passed their lives in violating them. And what can be more interesting, than to find that perhaps the main cause of the decay of the Jewish polity was one of which from our English Bible, which entirely mistranslates the 26th verse of the 20th chapter of Ezekiel, we hear nothing,—the perpetual reproach of impurity and rejection cast upon the priesthood of the tribe of Levi? What can be more suggestive, after Mr. Mill and Dr. Stanley have been telling us how great an element of strength to the Hebrew nation was the institution of prophets, than to hear from the ablest of Hebrews how this institution seems to him to have been to his nation one of her main elements of weakness? No intelligent man can read the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ without being profoundly instructed by it; but neither can he read it without feeling that, as a speculative work, it is, to use a French military expression, _in the air_; that, in a certain sense, it is in want of a base and in want of supports; that this base and these supports are, at any rate, not to be found in the work itself, and, if they exist, must be sought for in other works of the author.

The genuine speculative opinions of Spinoza, which the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ but imperfectly reveals, may in his Ethics and in his Letters be found set forth clearly. It is, however, the business of criticism to deal with every independent work as with an independent whole, and, instead of establishing between the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ and the Ethics of Spinoza a relation which Spinoza himself has not established,—to seize, in dealing with the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, the important fact that this work has its source, not in the axioms and definition of the Ethics, but in a hypothesis. The Ethics are not yet translated into English, and I have not here to speak of them. Then will be the right time for criticism to try and seize the special character and tendencies of that remarkable work, when it is dealing with it directly. The criticism of the Ethics is far too serious a task to be undertaken incidentally, and merely as a supplement to the criticism of the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_. Nevertheless, on certain governing ideas of Spinoza, which receive their systematic expression, indeed, in the Ethics, and on which the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ is not formally based, but which are yet never absent from Spinoza’s mind in the composition of any work, which breathe through all his works, and fill them with a peculiar effect and power, I have a word or two to say.

A philosopher’s real power over mankind resides not in his metaphysical formulas, but in the spirit and tendencies which have led him to adopt those formulas. Spinoza’s critic, therefore, has rather to bring to light that spirit and those tendencies of his author, than to exhibit his metaphysical formulas. Propositions about substance pass by mankind at large like the idle wind, which mankind at large regards not; it will not even listen to a word about these propositions, unless it first learns what their author was driving at with them, and finds that this object of his is one with which it sympathizes, one, at any rate, which commands its attention. And mankind is so far right that this object of the author is really, as has been said, that which is most important, that which sets all his work in motion, that which is the secret of his attraction for other minds, which, by different ways, pursue the same object.

Mr. Maurice, seeking for the cause of Goethe’s great admiration for Spinoza, thinks that he finds it in Spinoza’s Hebrew genius. “He spoke of God,” says Mr. Maurice, “as an actual being, to those who had fancied him a name in a book. The child of the circumcision had a message for Lessing and Goethe which the pagan schools of philosophy could not bring.” This seems to me, I confess, fanciful. An intensity and impressiveness, which came to him from his Hebrew nature, Spinoza no doubt has; but the two things which are most remarkable about him, and by which, as I think, he chiefly impressed Goethe, seem to me not to come to him from his Hebrew nature at all,—I mean his denial of final causes, and his stoicism, a stoicism not passive, but active. For a mind like Goethe’s,—a mind profoundly impartial and passionately aspiring after the science, not of men only, but of universal nature,—the popular philosophy which explains all things by reference to man, and regards universal nature as existing for the sake of man, and even of certain classes of men, was utterly repulsive. Unchecked, this philosophy would gladly maintain that the donkey exists in order that the invalid Christian may have donkey’s milk before breakfast; and such views of nature as this were exactly what Goethe’s whole soul abhorred. Creation, he thought, should be made of sterner stuff; he desired to rest the donkey’s existence on larger grounds. More than any philosopher who has ever lived, Spinoza satisfied him here. The full exposition of the counter-doctrine to the popular doctrine of final causes is to be found in the Ethics; but this denial of final causes was so essential an element of all Spinoza’s thinking that we shall, as has been said already, find it in the work with which we are here concerned, the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, and, indeed, permeating that work and all his works. From the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ one may take as good a general statement of this denial as any which is to be found in the Ethics:—

“Deus naturam dirigit, prout ejus leges universales, non autem prout humanæ naturæ particulares leges exigunt, adeoque Deus non solius humani generis, sed totius naturæ rationem habet. (_God directs nature, according as the universal laws of nature, but not according as the particular laws of human nature require; and so God has regard, not of the human race only, but of entire nature._)”

And, as a pendant to this denial by Spinoza of final causes, comes his stoicism:—

“Non studemus, ut natura nobis, sed contra ut nos naturæ pareamus. (_Our desire is not that nature may obey us, but, on the contrary, that we may obey nature._)”

Here is the second source of his attractiveness for Goethe; and Goethe is but the eminent representative of a whole order of minds whose admiration has made Spinoza’s fame. Spinoza first impresses Goethe and any man like Goethe, and then he composes him; first he fills and satisfies his imagination by the width and grandeur of his view of nature, and then he fortifies and stills his mobile, straining, passionate poetic temperament by the moral lesson he draws from his view of nature. And a moral lesson not of mere resigned acquiescence, not of melancholy quietism, but of joyful activity within the limits of man’s true sphere:—

“Ipsa hominis essentia est conatus quo unusquisque suum esse conservare conatur.... Virtus hominis est ipsa hominis essentia, quatenus a solo conatu suum esse conservandi definitur.... Felicitas in eo consistit quod homo suum esse conservare potest.... Lætitia est hominis transitio ad majorem perfectionem.... Tristitia est hominis transitio ad minorem perfectionem. (_Man’s very essence is the effort wherewith each man strives to maintain his own being.... Man’s virtue is this very essence, so far as it is defined by this single effort to maintain his own being.... Happiness consists in a man’s being able to maintain his own being.... Joy is man’s passage to a greater perfection.... Sorrow is man’s passage to a lesser perfection._)”

It seems to me that by neither of these, his grand characteristic doctrines, is Spinoza truly Hebrew or truly Christian. His denial of final causes is essentially alien to the spirit of the Old Testament, and his cheerful and self-sufficing stoicism is essentially alien to the spirit of the New. The doctrine that “God directs nature, not according as the particular laws of human nature, but according as the universal laws of nature require,” is at utter variance with that Hebrew mode of representing God’s dealings, which makes the locusts visit Egypt to punish Pharaoh’s hardness of heart, and the falling dew avert itself from the fleece of Gideon. The doctrine that “all sorrow is a passage to a lesser perfection” is at utter variance with the Christian recognition of the blessedness of sorrow, working “repentance to salvation not to be repented of;” of sorrow, which, in Dante’s words, “re-marries us to God.”

Spinoza’s repeated and earnest assertions that the love of God is man’s _summum bonum_ do not remove the fundamental diversity between his doctrine and the Hebrew and Christian doctrines. By the love of God he does not mean the same thing which the Hebrew and Christian religions mean by the love of God. He makes the love of God to consist in the knowledge of God; and, as we know God only through his manifestation of himself in the laws of all nature, it is by knowing these laws that we love God, and the more we know them the more we love him. This may be true, but this is not what the Christian means by the love of God. Spinoza’s ideal is the intellectual life; the Christian’s ideal is the religious life. Between the two conditions there is all the difference which there is between the being in love, and the following, with delighted comprehension, a reasoning of Plato. For Spinoza, undoubtedly, the crown of the intellectual life is a transport, as for the saint the crown of the religious life is a transport; but the two transports are not the same.

This is true; yet it is true, also, that by thus crowning the intellectual life with a sacred transport, by thus retaining in philosophy, amid the discontented murmurs of all the army of atheism, the name of God, Spinoza maintains a profound affinity with that which is truest in religion, and inspires an indestructible interest. One of his admirers, M. Van Vloten, has recently published at Amsterdam a supplementary volume to Spinoza’s works, containing the interesting document of Spinoza’s sentence of excommunication, from which I have already quoted, and containing, besides, several lately found works alleged to be Spinoza’s, which seem to me to be of doubtful authenticity, and, even if authentic, of no great importance. M. Van Vloten (who, let me be permitted to say in passing, writes a Latin which would make one think that the art of writing Latin must be now a lost art in the country of Lipsius) is very anxious that Spinoza’s unscientific retention of the name of God should not afflict his readers with any doubts as to his perfect scientific orthodoxy:—

“It is a great mistake,” he cries, “to disparage Spinoza as merely one of the dogmatists before Kant. By keeping the name of God, while he did away with his person and character, he has done himself an injustice. Those who look to the bottom of things will see, that, long ago as he lived, he had even then reached the point to which the post-Hegelian philosophy and the study of natural science has only just brought our own times. Leibnitz expressed his apprehension lest those who did away with final causes should do away with God at the same time. But it is in his having done away with final causes, _and with God along with them_, that Spinoza’s true merit consists.”

Now it must be remarked that to use Spinoza’s denial of final causes in order to identify him with the Coryphæi of atheism, is to make a false use of Spinoza’s denial of final causes, just as to use his assertion of the all-importance of loving God to identify him with the saints would be to make a false use of his assertion of the all-importance of loving God. He is no more to be identified with the post-Hegelian philosophers than he is to be identified with St. Augustine. Unction, indeed, Spinoza’s writings have not; that name does not precisely fit any quality which they exhibit. And yet, so all-important in the sphere of religious thought is the power of edification, that in this sphere a great fame like Spinoza’s can never be founded without it. A court of literature can never be very severe to Voltaire: with that inimitable wit and clear sense of his, he cannot write a page in which the fullest head may not find something suggestive: still, because, handling religious ideas, he yet, with all his wit and clear sense, handles them wholly without the power of edification, his fame as a great man is equivocal. Strauss has treated the question of Scripture miracles with an acuteness and fulness which even to the most informed minds is instructive; but because he treats it almost wholly without the power of edification, his fame as a serious thinker is equivocal. But in Spinoza there is not a trace either of Voltaire’s passion for mockery or of Strauss’s passion for demolition. His whole soul was filled with desire of the love and knowledge of God, and of that only. Philosophy always proclaims herself on the way to the _summum bonum_; but too often on the road she seems to forget her destination, and suffers her hearers to forget it also. Spinoza never forgets his destination: “The love of God is man’s highest happiness and blessedness, and the final end and aim of all human actions;”—“The supreme reward for keeping God’s Word is that Word itself—namely, to know him and with free will and pure and constant heart love him:” these sentences are the keynote to all he produced, and were the inspiration of all his labors. This is why he turns so sternly upon the worshipers of the letter,—the editors of the _Masora_, the editor of the _Record_,—because their doctrine imperils our love and knowledge of God. “What!” he cries, “our knowledge of God to depend upon these perishable things, which Moses can dash to the ground and break to pieces like the first tables of stone, or of which the originals can be lost like the original book of the Covenant, like the original book of the Law of God, like the book of the Wars of God!... which can come to us confused, imperfect, mis-written by copyists, tampered with by doctors! And you accuse others of impiety! It is you who are impious, to believe that God would commit the treasure of the true record of himself to any substance less enduring than the heart!”

And Spinoza’s life was not unworthy of this elevated strain. A philosopher who professed that knowledge was its own reward, a devotee who professed that the love of God was its own reward, this philosopher and this devotee believed in what he said. Spinoza led a life the most spotless, perhaps, to be found among the lives of philosophers; he lived simple, studious, even-tempered, kind; declining honors, declining riches, declining notoriety. He was poor, and his admirer Simon de Vries sent him two thousand florins:—he refused them. The same friend left him his fortune;—he returned it to the heir. He was asked to dedicate one of his works to the magnificent patron of letters in his century, Louis the Fourteenth;—he declined. His great work, his Ethics, published after his death, he gave injunctions to his friends to publish anonymously, for fear he should give his name to a school. Truth, he thought, should bear no man’s name. And finally,—“Unless,” he said, “I had known that my writings would in the end advance the cause of true religion, I would have suppressed them,—_tacuissem_.” It was in this spirit that he lived; and this spirit gives to all he writes not exactly unction,—I have already said so,—but a kind of sacred solemnity. Not of the same order as the saints, he yet follows the same service: _Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not_.

Therefore he has been, in a certain sphere, edifying, and has inspired in many powerful minds an interest and an admiration such as no other philosopher has inspired since Plato. The lonely precursor of German philosophy, he still shines when the light of his successors is fading away; they had celebrity, Spinoza has fame. Not because his peculiar system of philosophy has had more adherents than theirs; on the contrary, it has had fewer. But schools of philosophy arise and fall; their bands of adherents inevitably dwindle; no master can long persuade a large body of disciples that they give to themselves just the same account of the world as he does; it is only the very young and the very enthusiastic who can think themselves sure that they possess the whole mind of Plato, or Spinoza, or Hegel, at all. The very mature and the very sober can even hardly believe that these philosophers possessed it themselves enough to put it all into their works, and to let us know entirely how the world seemed to them. What a remarkable philosopher really does for human thought, is to throw into circulation a certain number of new and striking ideas and expressions, and to stimulate with them the thought and imagination of his century or of after-times. So Spinoza has made his distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas a current notion for educated Europe. So Hegel seized a single pregnant sentence of Heracleitus, and cast it, with a thousand striking applications, into the world of modern thought. But to do this is only enough to make a philosopher noteworthy; it is not enough to make him great. To be great, he must have something in him which can influence character, which is edifying; he must, in short, have a noble and lofty character himself, a character,—to recur to that much-criticised expression of mine,—_in the grand style_. This is what Spinoza had; and because he had it, he stands out from the multitude of philosophers, and has been able to inspire in powerful minds a feeling which the most remarkable philosophers, without this grandiose character, could not inspire. “There is no possible view of life but Spinoza’s,” said Lessing. Goethe has told us how he was calmed and edified by him in his youth, and how he again went to him for support in his maturity. Heine, the man (in spite of his faults) of truest genius that Germany has produced since Goethe,—a man with faults, as I have said, immense faults, the greatest of them being that he could reverence so little,—reverenced Spinoza. Hegel’s influence ran off him like water: “I have seen Hegel,” he cries, “seated with his doleful air of a hatching hen upon his unhappy eggs, and I have heard his dismal clucking. How easily one can cheat oneself into thinking that one understands everything, when one has learned only how to construct dialectical formulas!” But of Spinoza, Heine said: “His life was a copy of the life of his divine kinsman, Jesus Christ.”