Spinoza Sampler / De Aard waar haar een Paradijs / Nu isse meesteen Hel

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Because I spoke no Dutch, and still don't, I prevailed on the very nice hotel manager in Amsterdam to telephone the number I had been given for Spinozahuis in Rijnsburg. She did and spoke for several minutes, and then told me the inside of Spinozahuis was closed to visitors for the time being because the elderly woman who had been the resident caretaker had just died, and regular visits were suspended. But I was invited to visit the cottage and told that the little garden with a bust of Spinoza was always open.

Later that day I was killing time in the bar and the manager came up to me smiling. "I know Spinoza's name, of course, he's very famous. But could you tell me -- who was he exactly?"

My father had used the word "philosoph," pronouncing it in an immigrant's dialect, and left me the impression it was a somewhat pan-European word, so I told her he was a great philosoph, and she nodded and understood; "filosoof" is a proper Dutch word. But much later I learned another Dutch word for what he was: wisgeer. I am tempted to try to pull it apart and get "wise old guy," but without much confidence. "geer" may have entirely different connotations to Dutch speakers. My Translator Bot added Dutch to its repertoire last year, and tells me that "geer" means "geer."

Terwijl men steeds standbeelden heeft opgericht voor den wisgeer SPINOZA ('s-Gravenhage), den dichter VONDEL

I think I stumbled through something like this: "He wrote very -- unusual, controversial ideas. But he found respect and safety in the Netherlands."

"We are a very small country," she explained. "So we have always made room for people like that."

Which is very true, but the logic of it still escapes me. I can think of some very small countries that don't make room or provide respect and safety for people like that; and big country or small country, that seems to be the norm. It's just really not ordinary social behavior to encourage ideological eccentrics to set up permanent residence in your country, but that seems to be the rule of thumb in the Netherlands.

The day before, I'd visited the Jewish Historical Museum, which, until World War II, had been Amsterdam's synagogue for Jews of Northern European heritage. Across Waterlooplein still stands the Portuguese Synagogue which had read the anathema over Spinoza and banished and excommunicated him. I asked the elderly lady at the museum desk if she knew of any Spinoza sights, and her face lit up like a neon sign; to her, Spinoza was a spicy neighborhood Jewish scandal involving "that other synagogue," and she pointed it out through the window. But it's very likely that at the time, her synagogue was as scandalized by and frightened of Baruch Spinoza as the Portuguese Synagogue. She was delighted to give me the phone number to call for information about Spinozahuis in Rijnsburg, she had the well-thumbed card in her Rolodex.

The number may normally have rung directly in Spinozahuis, but now it connected to an academic office at Leiden University which administered Spinozahuis, and they were the ones who told the hotel manager the details. Their involvement dates to the end of the 19th century, when a Spinoza scholar went hunting for the house where Spinoza lived after leaving Amsterdam under such unpleasant circumstances. An Anabaptist surgeon in Rijnsburg, an admirer of Spinoza, had offered him lodging, Spinoza had accepted the offer, and spent many mostly pleasant and quiet years making a steady living as a polisher of glass lenses in the top floor of the cottage. And of course continuing to think and write.

The scholar found an ancient, nearly ruined cottage already scheduled for the wrecker's ball, and on the front wall found a tile plaque in the brickwork with the poem in the illustration. A man who had visited Spinoza had described the cottage in an extant letter and quoted the poem, by the popular poet Dirk Camphuysen (also a painter and religious figure with unorthodox ideas). By the poem the scholar knew he had found Spinoza's house in Rijnsburg.

A syndicate of prosperous gentlemen interested in preserving Spinoza's legacy quickly purchased the cottage and restored it, as closely as possible to its state when Spinoza had lived there, and preserved it as a national historical site. The Queen of the Netherlands cut the ribbon. Today it is the last old cottage in a pleasant neighborhood of undistinguished apartment buildings; the neighborhood is on a highway about five miles from Leiden, across the highway from farm fields. You ask the bus driver for the Spinozalaan stop. The cottage is about two blocks from the bus stop at the intersection of Spinozalaan and Camphuysenstraat.

The poem seems a strange announcement for a house, but its sentiments must have pleased the Anabaptist surgeon. And it ended up being the clue that saved the cottage from the wrecking ball. The typography of the poem is a very near match to the photograph I took of it. Then some bicycling girls took my picture standing next to the poem.

The action figure is part of a series of philosopher action figures created by Ian Vandewalker when he was a master's student in philosophy at the University of Indiana; later he became a lawyer and prominent advocate for pregnant women in the odd and unique kinds of criminal troubles that only pregnant women can find themselves in. I couldn't commit the crimes with which they are routinely charged and sent to prison if I wanted to.

Before the Euro extincted the guilder, Spinoza was on the 1000 guilder note, which is certainly one of the reasons the hotel manager was very familiar with him, the same way Americans know all about Jackson and Grant. This is not a shabby achievement -- to be an excommunicated reclusive Jewish lens-polisher who wrote weird and extraordinarily difficult tracts and books about the nature of God and the logical structure of ethics, and end up on the 1000 in one of the world's most prosperous industrial nations.

Exactly what kind of lenses Spinoza made has become a fuzzy question, but spectacles -- reading glasses -- had been common for a long time, and the Dutch had invented both the telescope (Galileo built his after reading a description of the Dutch telescope) and the microscope (Leeuwenhoek). It is known Spinoza had a reputation as a maker of very good lenses. I don't know how he acquired the skill, it wasn't the family business. But it suited him because it was self-employment that kept him free to think and write without financial dependence which was occasionally offered by royalty and nobility; and although Leiden was a short horse ride or brisk walk from Rijnsburg, polishing lenses did not impose any university regulations or influence.

He died young of a lung ailment which most historians attribute to the occupational hazard of breathing in glass dust. But he survived a stabbing attack, and never mended the rip in the cape which had deflected the knife. On another occasion an angry mob gathered outside the cottage demanding Spinoza, but the surgeon confronted them and shamed them and told them to go home, and they did.

It is very difficult today to understand why anyone would get so bent out of shape over Spinoza's ideas that he would want to murder the wisgeer, or to banish him from the synagogue and the religion, but to jump directly to the worst of it, Spinoza believed that God and Nature were the same -- the totality of the natural and physical universe is God, there is nothing more to God than the universe. In the modern form Spinoza advocated, this belief is called pantheism, and nearly all Christian denominations regard it as a serious heresy. Pantheism's conflict with Jewish theology is less clear; Jewish theology essentially requires only a belief in one God, and Spinoza's pantheistic God arguably conforms to that requirement.

But Spinoza's pantheism strips God of His conscious will and His day-to-day relationship with human beings and His concern for and judgments about their souls; Spinoza's God expresses His nature to humans entirely through His amazing, life-sustaining universe and through Nature.

This was a direct threat and challenge to nearly every Christian theological system in Europe at the time. It had political implications to a continent ruled almost entirely by kings, because hereditary kings justified their authority on earlier personal choices from and annointments by God. Spinoza's God was powerless to pick one man and establish him as God's chosen ruler. Spinoza was probably bright enough to comprehend that his new description of God was a direct challenge to the established lawful and religious order of the day. It reduced the king to just another guy who held on to his authority with weapons and muscle rather than by God's grace.

Spinoza has also been frequently accused of being the first modern atheist, his ideas the inspiration for the wave of atheism that has spread throughout the West since his days. Whether Spinoza himself would have agreed, Spinoza is regarded as one of the patron saints of modern atheism. Obscure as pantheism seems today, it is still a theology that can generate anger and great controversy. Recently the Spinoza Society of the Washington DC area put on a lecture describing Spinoza's theological ideas as the historical inspiration for what evolved into the Unitarian-Universalist belief system.

And yet in an age notoriously dangerous for new or different ideas, the Netherlands tolerated Spinoza and let him live, think and write free, and not die a violent death. The Dutch had done the same for the French mercenary soldier, philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. During and after the long, brutal war which liberated the Netherlands from Spanish rule, Dutch royalty and political leaders and the Dutch people themselves just evolved to tolerate intellectual and religious tolerance. There is a state church, the Dutch Reform Church, but the church itself has always been thoroughly comfortable with religious diversity and tolerance.