A Brill Calendar: July 27

Few remarks regarding Benedictus de Spinoza can be more trite that the surmise that this Sephardic Jew, banished from his religious urban community on July 27 1656, died at a significantly younger age than other champions of the Western intellectual tradition.

Its corrolary – that this expulsion occurred half-way in his life – is as easily formulated.

The strange thing in this is that this Abraham of rationalism – or this Adam of the European Enlightenment, according to Jonathan Israel in this 3rd millennium – went about his unobtrusive ways, avoiding public controversy and turmoil as much as he could during the second half of his brief life. Expelled from the religious community which shaped his youth and adolescence, Spinoza was an expert in the art of avoiding publicity.

This perfect outsider to academic games like ‘me-too-ism’, ‘one-upmanship’ and back-biting did however enjoy the personal friendship and support of many a great contemporary, embodying as a circle of intimates the ‘Zeitgeist’ of the second half of the 17th century perfectly: not only illustrious Dutchmen like Christaan Huygens and Johan de Witt, but also European celebrities like Von Tschirnhaus and Leibniz.

It is seldom that an oeuvre took so much time to incubate and flourish in the mainstream of Western thought. Calvinist Ministers saw to it that the States of Holland prohibited his works as soon as Spinoza had died; and he was quickly forgotten in Europe’s Academia. His rediscovery, more than a century later, is due to the literary criticism and insight of Lessing, Goethe and Coleridge: to artistry, not to scholarship.