Spinoza, Portrait of a Spiritual Hero by Rudolph Kayser (review)

382 BOOK REVIEWS Spinoza, Portrait of a Spiritual Hero. By RUDOLPH KAYSER. With an introduction by ALBERT EINSTEIN. Translated by AMY ALLEN and MAXIM NEWMARK. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Pp. xix +326. $3.75. To the available biographies of Spinoza this work is added. In the preface it is stated: "Industrious scholars have collected and sorted the material for us. But if we wish to hear a man's heart beating behind this material, we must be able to listen long and carefully to the inner music of his soul. And that is the intention of this book " (pp. xviii, xix) . To fulfill his intention the author devotes fifty-three pages to the ofttold tales of the Marranos in Spain and Portugal and of the beginnings of the Jewish colony in Holland. The reader meets some strange assertions. Of the Jesuits it is said, that they " were secular priests who knew and understood the habits of the upper classes of sodety. Hence, young Gabriel [Uriel da Costa] was bound to have a fine and easy existence" (p. SO}. For the Spanish Jews the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is described as " an age in which the great witches' sabbath of the Counter-Reformation was celebrated" (p. 11}. The Dominicans "became the real ' domini canes,' the bloodhounds of God. . . . A mass frenzy surged through the world and lusted for death, a lust that could only be sated with the blood of its victims, and could only be appeased when the hands that had heaped thousands onto the execution pyres became tired of their own gruesome performance" (p. 14). In the midst of twentiethcentury facts, Bjelinsky, a Russian writer, is quoted with approval as naming " the Spanish Inquisition as the most horrible sacrifice that chance and superstition had ever exacted" (p. ~5). Rembrandt, Jan de Witt, and Spinoza are all described as enacting in their lives " great tragedies . . . in which the creative individual went along his way to Calv;ary.... All three men were not understood by their contemporaries; they were rendered powerless, or were put to death. Their lives were filled to the brim with a loneliness which they themselves created and of which they themselves were the martyrs" (p. xv). These quotations will give an idea of the author's style, modes of thought, and approach to his subject. It is unfortunate that Spinoza's life is again presented in this mode and strain. After three centuries it would be well if his story were told in a more objective way. It is more than time for writers to forget the myths and legends of the" poor persecuted Jew" and " the God-intoxicated man'." Spinoza needs to be read and written about in a spirit akin to that in which other thinkers are approached. In his introduction Prof. Einstein writes that " the spiritual situation with which Spinoza had to cope peculiarly resembles our own" (p. xi). Just how our ~ge, the age of world wars and world revolutions, of collapsing BOOK REVIEWS 888 civilizations and cultures, of dictators and dialectical materialism, and of mass rape and mass murder, peculiarly resembles the grand siecle is not apparent. Prof. Einstein also writes that "Spinoza had no doubt that our notion of possessing a free will (i.e. independent of causality) was an illusion resulting from our ignorance of the causes operative within us. In the study of the causal relationship he saw a remedy for fear, hate, and bitterness, the 'only remedy to which a genuinely spiritual man can have recourse " (p. xi) . One may speculate upon how much philosophy Prof. Einstein has studied and what manner of scholarly research he has devoted to the doctrine of free will so as to understand that doctrine and the problem with which it deals. Aside from such speculation, it is difficult to see how a scientist can write with such dogmatism and such lack of reflection . Does the deterministic doctrine really answer the great moral problems? If it does, we must cease to condemn the Nazis for their plan and practice of genocide, the keepers of Dachau for their murders and human vivisection, and Stalin and his associates for their program...