Spinoza’s reply to this was piercing. There were none of the niceties of the other philosophers’ letters, no I have read your missive with interest.
This argument is folly. You admix desire and passion in your reasoning as though these were the same, whereas passion is passive and desire is merely the being’s awareness of Conatus, a finite thing’s striving on behalf of its own existence. As for the passions, they are a bog that snares the philosophical mind. Unless you would have a morality rooted in baseness these must be subdued by reason, and unless you would animate the universe with rageful trees or lusting clouds and call yourself a pagan, you must concede that passion cannot be the essence of the universe.
As for desire, it cannot be the essence of the universe because it is bound to the consciousness of a finite being.
Yet Farrow, in a letter that likewise indulged in no niceties, was not dissuaded.
I propose no dramas of tree and cloud or any such childish mysteries, rather I speak of the impulse behind all life. Let us leave off discussion of passion, for there I accept your argument. Yet I must differ regarding desire. There is nothing inert or impartial in the universe. I mean by this not that rocks possess consciousness or that the earth that opens and swallows a city is a ravening deity, or any such superstitious folly—rather that the impulse that acts through them is that which I call God.
Spinoza’s reply was still sharper:
What you speak of here is no more and no less than Conatus, which already holds a place in my reasoning. Yet your arguments are ill advised and I am not persuaded to carry the point to the regions to which you take it.
Aaron read, and felt as though he were standing in a scouring wind, two great forces buffeting each other over logical points he barely understood. He read, in Ester’s hand,
Yet I maintain that while God cannot be attached to desire, God is the storm that is the sum of all desires. Substance, in all its infinite variety, is a manifestation of that storm, rather than the reverse.
The notion that man’s actions might incur God’s wrath or pleas-ure we both know to be absurd. A correct morality merely guides desire toward that which does not violate the desires and needs of others. When I speak of desire, further, I speak of much that is not finite but infinite—or, to adopt the language of the theologians, holy. I speak not of mere fleeting urges of the senses, but of deeper desire, desire not only of body but of spirit. I speak of your love, and mine, for truth. I speak of the impulse that bids us risk danger to pen these letters. We do this not because we are rational seekers after our own well-being—for we are not driven merely by Conatus. We do this because we are creatures of desire.
You relate in your letter that in your labors on a compendium of Hebrew grammar, you find that all Hebrew words have the force and properties of nouns. Perhaps you will no longer be surprised to learn that I myself know something of the Hebrew language. Yet it seems to me, in truth, that it is the verb rather than the noun that commands the language.
In this perhaps lies the difference in our thinking.
To separate substance from impulse, our reasoned life from our desires, is an error—one I regret though at times I have been forced to it. Your reasoning being the purest and most capacious I have encountered, surely you will not wish to allow such an error to taint your philosophy.
And here, mid-paragraph, Thomas Farrow’s letter switched from Latin to Portuguese.
You and I agree on much, I believe, despite our differences. And I feel we are in accord that, as Nature is one with God, the impulse toward life be of surpassing value. Therefore all imperatives that oppose it, chief among them martyrdom, are in error.
The teachers of the Amsterdam of your youth feared a God of scouring demands. Yet even should I shed my own name and existence, I shall not forget what I learned from those whose sacrifices I witnessed, and all the more strongly will I follow the sole God I know: a vast, blooming thing.
I have come now to understand that all that you have proposed, and perhaps all I believe as well, is not in fact atheism. It is, rather, something for which I do not yet have a word.
Spinoza’s reply—the final letter in his hand—was addressed To the Estimable and Insistent Mister Farrow.
Like a child, Aaron had listened to them battle, and demur, demand clarification, and now, at last, settle into a spent silence. Reaching the final lines above Spinoza’s last signature, Aaron was startled to see that these, too, were in Portuguese.
Therefore, although you and I do not and shall not agree, I will expand my language to address this argument, for which I send my appreciation. I will add that words you penned in your letter regarding the notion of kindness have returned to me of late, and I find much to recommend your thinking on this matter, which I hope to return to at some future time.
The ability to shed one’s existence, Mister Farrow, is indeed a manner of freedom, and may bring comfort, in particular for those who have seen much. You are correct that the teachers of my Amsterdam knew a scouring God. This was true of even Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, for whom you and I share a regard, and whose test at the hands of the Inquisition was one of many stains upon humanity. I learned only lately of his death in London after years confined to his household. You, it seems, were one of few to converse with him in that span.
There were some fatal fires in Amsterdam, I recall. It is a consolation to imagine the survivors have found safe haven.
My text of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus now concluded, I labor in some whimsy on a treatise concerning the optics of rainbows. Yet it eludes me. Perhaps we who struggle much in darkness, as all thinkers must, may be forgiven for faltering at the contemplation of such a wondrous and unbounded thing as freeborn light.
Benedictus de Spinoza
Aaron looked up from the pages. Silently he took in the pub. The low scraping of a barstool; the rough grain of the tabletop under his palm. Each detail etched itself on his senses as though he’d never heard or felt such things in all his life, and every glint of glass from the barman’s rack struck his eyes like glory. He understood why Helen sat with eyes closed, as though in meditation or prayer. On page after ink-damaged page, in documents meticulously restored and borne down to them by the Patricias, they’d witnessed Ester Velasquez starving in plain sight. Yet here, in the pages laid out on this wooden tabletop, that wild, insistent loneliness had at last been sated. Aaron could feel it in the thick ink of Ester’s final letter to Spinoza, in Portuguese: We understand one another well, and I shall now be content. The words had been inked slowly, the quill shaping unusually broad lines on the page, as though each motion of the writer’s hand had laid something to rest . . . and all that remained in the wake of that final now was a satisfaction as heavy as sleep.
And though he knew it was folly to presume, it seemed to Aaron there was a fainter sigh of relief audible beneath the words of the famed philosopher. Spinoza: a man who’d tried, armed with only a placard and his outrage, to confront the mob that had ripped a tolerant leader limb from limb; a man well persuaded of the barbarism of humanity, yet still insisting, despite exile and already failing health, on the sanctity of the mind’s cool reasoning . . . Aaron couldn’t escape the feeling that this man had, in these few pages of logical clashing, met something like a friend.
There was no further correspondence between them.
Standing in the soft light of the pub, Aaron murmured, “He figured it out.”