THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SPINOZA I13
so sharply at what was considered the very essence of Christianity. The
formula of retraction and penance required the proud author to lie down
athwart the threshold of the synagogue while the members of the con-
gregation walked over his body. Humiliated beyond sufferance, Uriel
went home, wrote a fierce denunciation of his persecutors, and shot himself.
1
This was 1640. At that time Baruch Spinoza, "the greatest Jew of
modern times/' 2 and the greatest of modern philosophers, was a child of
eight, the favorite student of the synagogue.
2. THE EDUCATION OF SPINOZA
It was this Odyssey of the Jews that filled the background of Spinoza's
mind, and made him irrevocably, however excommunicate, a Jew.
Though his father was a successful merchant, the youth had no leaning
to such a career, and preferred to spend his time in and around the
synagogue, absorbing the religion and the history of his people. He was
a brilliant scholar, and the elders looked upon him as a future light of
their community and their faith. Very soon he passed from the Bible itself
to the exactingJy subtle commentaries of the Talmud; and from these to
the writings of Maimonides, Levi ben Gerson, Ibn Ezra, and Hasdai
Crescas; and his promiscuous voracity extended even to the mystical
philosophy of
Cordova.
Ibn Gebirol and the Cabbalistic intricacies of Moses of
He was struck by the latter' s identification of God and the universe;
he followed up the idea in Ben Gerson, who taught the eternity of the
world; and in Hasdai Crescas, who believed the universe of matter to be
the body of God. He read in Maimonides a half-favorable discussion of
the doctrine of Averroes, that immortality is impersonal; but he found in
the Guide to the Perplexed more perplexities than guidance. For the
great Rabbi propounded more questions than he answered; and Spinoza
found the contradictions and improbabilities of the Old Testament lingering
in his thought long after the solutions of Maimonides had dissolved
into forgetfulness. The cleverest defenders of a faith are its greatest
enemies; for their subtleties engender doubt and stimulate the mind. And
if this was so with the writings of Maimonides, so much the more was it
the case with the commentaries of Ibn Ezra, where the problems of the
old faith were more directly expressed, and sometimes abandoned as un-
answerable. The more Spinoza read and pondered, the more his simple
certainties melted away into wondering and doubt.
His curiosity was aroused to inquire what the thinkers of the Christian
1 Gutz3sow has turned this story into a drama which still finds place in European
repertoires.
a
Renan, Marc AurMe; Paris, Calmann-Levy: p. 65.