I have received both of your missives, and this reply shall need to serve for both. Your persistence is admirable, but you will permit me to question its purpose.
You express no admiration of my philosophy, yet you pretend to perceive its implications more deeply than I have confessed to, basing such claim on rumor of unnamed source. I am by now familiar with those who wish for their own purposes to distort my arguments, extending them into domains of atheism I do not claim. Should this be your intent, I must warn you to cease. My peace is lately harassed by the persistence of one called Van Blijenburgh, who first claimed as you do to seek truth—yet the man has consumed my hours and days in an exchange whose ultimate purpose, it seems, be to hunt amid my thoughts for what he might vilify.
If your purpose like his be to entrap me in my statements, then know that I do not fear my own thoughts, though the world may. Should you wish to understand my philosophy, you may one day read the works I compose even now and will some day bring to light, wherein I write in clearest logic what I profess. All the satisfaction I shall grant you now shall be but to say this: I do not refute the divine, but only its false depiction, and my thinking is maligned by any who say otherwise.
And this: your argument leaps without method.
I wonder that you know of my connection to Rabbi HaCoen Mendes. I’ve not written of him, and he remains, I believe, unknown to any outside the Portuguese community of Amsterdam. Nor would he have the ability, given his infirmity, to make his learning known to Christians in England. I wonder then whence you came by your admiration for him.
If it be so that you admire him—if your letter speaks the truth—then we share at least this one sentiment. Rabbi HaCoen Mendes was a man of great heart, though his thinking could not vault the walls within which it was prisoned. If he still lives, I would wish him know I think of him with respect, though the ban against me must mean he will not acknowledge me. It is for his sake alone that I write you this letter, for I wish no other conversation.
If my tone here has offended, I beg you understand that I must respond in this manner, for you wield my logic in such a way as seems intended to accuse me of being what I am not. As what I am brings me already to great difficulty, I wish no further calumny. If atheism be in your own thoughts, then write it under your name, but leave mine unscorched.
Benedictus de Spinoza
She read, and reread. Then she took a quill and, still in her outdoor cloak, wrote swiftly on a fresh page.
Your caution is sensible, and if I erred in leaping too swiftly into debate, I offer apology. That my intent is good you have my word—this I swear not on my own good name (for in this world a name may be easily taken and shed), but on my regard for the rabbi, whose honor I hold inviolable. If you but understood my own need for caution, which I may be bold to say might match even your own, your apprehensions would dissolve. I write my words in secrecy, my thoughts being unacceptable to man. Thus when I write I can bear to write naught but what I perceive as truth. I wish not to lure you to untoward opinions, but to discover together what truths we may.
You fear, still, that I wish to expose your thoughts while risking nothing? So I shall give you my credo on this very paper: such a God as the theologians would have us pray to—a God who in a world of suffering aids some but not others—cannot contain the mercy ascribed to him. Therefore, I say: such God as we pray to does not exist. And to this I add: there is no divine intervention. There is no divine judge. So we must supply for ourselves notions of good and ill. This is the purview and millstone of the philosophe.
So be my fate, now, in your hands. Should you wish to cry my name to the heavens as atheist you may. You may publish this address where I live, and if it is your will you may make my life a hellishness or perhaps end it altogether. Such questions as I explore, spoken in whispers, are not deadly in London today, so I believe—yet should I be known in plain daylight to propound the views I have just stated, they might swiftly prove so.
Now that I have placed such trust in your hands, may our two minds be honest with one another about the shape of the universe?
The rumors of your thought that have reached me, along with your work in Principia, prove a gift, as they assure my spirit it is not alone in questing after truth. Yet I say again: these words must necessarily be but a part of all your philosophy: a fence girding and holding back the mountain of your true thought.
Writing the long lines of Latin, she did not hear the rabbi enter. Only when he’d made his way to the fire did she hear the creak of the wooden chair.
“What do you labor at this hour?” he asked quietly.
Her hand was poised above the paper. “I’m copying,” she said. “I spilled ink on the work we did yesterday.”
The rabbi said nothing, but frowned.
“I’ll finish later,” she said.
He nodded slowly. He looked as though his afternoon sleep hadn’t rested him. He wasn’t well. She had glimpsed it now and again lately, but never so clearly as she saw it now: the too-faint breaths he drew, the translucence of his skin, the seed of death already sown in him.
Yet he spent his strength, now, on a labor he believed the world had asked of him. She did not know if she’d cursed him or given him a reason to live. Perhaps these were one and the same.
He spoke. “Your mind is occupied with some troubling thought today.”
She didn’t answer.
“You cannot study the holy words, Ester, or even scribe them properly, while your spirit is vexed. If you but untie the knot of vexation, the words of the text will enter your spirit, where they may ease all. This is how I have found it all the years of my life.” He raised a hand gently to his temple, as though trying to share with her what was within. “When God created the world, He created first of all light. It was a great blow, Ester, to lose it. For a time I felt a darkness greater even than the loss of light. Perhaps you too have felt something like it. But these words—this learning—is my light. I believe it’s yours as well.”
She saw that he was distressed for her, was searching her spirit for entry. A gift she didn’t deserve. The words flew from her lips—a bitter plea. “Baruch de Spinoza was beloved by you, was he not?”
The rabbi inhaled sharply. After a moment, he spoke. “De Spinoza was my great sorrow.” He paused. “The Mahamad issued its decree with the approval of the rabbis of Talmud Torah, despite my efforts to persuade all of them. But I believe the severity of their herem banished an honest soul irrevocably from the light.”
She bit her lip—then spoke softly. “And set him free. To write and think as he wished.”
The rabbi stiffened as though smelling something foul. “Understand this, Ester,” he said. “De Spinoza was in grave error.”
Her throat was too tight for speech. She shook her head mutely—a gesture he could not see.
For an instant, memory summoned the young de Spinoza: a slim, all-observing youth, framed a fleeting moment in the doorway as he escorted the rabbi into her father’s household. Whatever heretical thoughts de Spinoza had held in those long-ago years, he’d held them in silence—only allowing his incendiary notions to be known later, after his father’s death. Had he deliberately blunted his words in his youth, loath to betray his living father as she now betrayed the rabbi? What selfishness of spirit, she wondered, reigned in her? What commanded her to set her mind free, though it must wound others?