Romancing SpinozaAllan Nadler

IN HIS recent memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness,the Israeli novelist Amos Oz recalls discussionshe overheard in the late 194O's as a child in a work-ing-class Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.Everybody, he writes, had "definite views" abouteverything, from the future of Zionism to the nov-els of Kurt Hamsun to women's rights. Amongsome local "thinkers and preachers," Oz adds, werethose "who called for the Orthodox Jewish ban onSpinoza to be lifted." This ban of excommunica-tion, or herem, had been imposed on the greatphilosopher in 1656.

One of the local Spinozist "thinkers and preach-ers" was Joseph Klausner, a renowned professor atthe Hebrew University (and Oz's great-imcle). In a1927 public lecture coinciding with the 250th an-niversary of Spinoza's death in 1677, Klausner, anapostle of "Jewish humanism," took it upon him-self not only to declare "our recognition of the ter-rible sin" that the Jewish people had committedagainst Spinoza in excommunicating him but to re-pudiate the idea that Spinoza was, in fact, a heretic.Haihng "the Jewish character of Spinoza's 'Torah,'"Klausner rose to his peroration:

[T]o Spinoza the Jew we call ou t . . . from atopMount Scopus, out of our new sanctuarythe

ALLAN N A D L E R is professor of religion and direaor of theJewish-studies program at Drew University. He is currentlycompleting a book about the reception of Spinoza in modemYiddish thought and literature.

Hebrew University of Jerusalemthe ban isrescinded! Judaism's wrongdoing against you ishereby lifted, and whatever was your sin againsther shall be forgiven. Our brother are you, ourbrother are you, our brother are you!At the time, Klausner's performance evoked a

decidedly mixed reaction. Among the luminariespresent f^ or the occasion was Gershom Scholem,the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, who wouldlater recall that "many people were laughing at[Klausner's] emotional performance ('our brotherare you,' indeed!)." But Klausner was hardly thefirst, and by no means the last, in a long line ofJewish romancers of Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza,the meaning of whose life and thought has some-times seemed permanently up for grabs.

SPINOZA (1632-1677) was excommunicated vwththe harshest version of the herem (ban) availableto the leaders of Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewishcommunity. Most of these men had, like Spinoza'sown parents, escaped the Inquisition and foundrefuge in the tolerant, cosmopolitan Dutch Repub-lic. Their own tolerance, however, had been severe-ly tested by this renegade among them. Interesting-ly, though the text of the herem alludes to Spinoza's"evil opinions" and "horrible heresies," he wasplaced under ban a full fourteen years before thoseopinions and heresies would be pubhshed in devel-oped form in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theo-logical-Political Treatise).

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Clearly, word about him had gotten out long be-fore the appearance of this work, whose unforgivingand unprecedented critique of revealed religionwould send Shockwaves all across Europe. Alreadybefore the herem, rumors had been circulating inAmsterdam that the young Spinoza was teachingthree basic heresies: that "God can be conceivedcorporeally," that "angels do not exist," and that "thesoul perishes with the body." These rumors, accord-ing to the earliest Spinoza biographers, were whatset off the chain of events that ended with the herem.

As the Tractatus would bear out, the rumors wereperfectly accurate. In both his materialist concep-tion of God and his conception of man as just oneamong the infinite modes of "Substance," Spinozaleft standing no pillar of traditional Jewish orChristian theology. Indeed, given his brazen attackon Scripture and ecclesiastical authority, his cyni-cal mockery of the "madness" of supernatural reli-gious faith, and his insistence on defining God outof any theologically meaningful existence, the Am-sterdam rabbis' prescience in expelling him seemsall the more remarkable.

The terms of the ban were so strict as to severany possible future contact between Spinoza andhis family and community. Yet, far from displayingany interest in contritely returning to the Jewishfoldas had most previous excommunicants inJewish historySpinoza's response to the terribleedict was at best indifferent and, very likely, one ofgenuine relief. Upon receiving word of the verdict(he did not bother to show up for his own excom-munication), he declared, according to his first bi-ographer and friend Jean-Maximilian Lucas:

They do not force me to do anything that Iwould not have done of my own accord if I didnot dread scandal; but, since they want it thatway, I enter gladly on the path that was openedto me.

After his departure from Amsterdam's Jewishcommunity, Spinoza took his friends from amongliberal, dissenting Christian sects like the Colle-giants, Mennonites, Anabaptists, and Quakers.Upon his untimely death at the age of forty-four,he was given a decent funeral and respectful inter-ment in the New Church graveyard in the Hague.

THE MAIN outlines of Spinoza's thought couldnot be clearer or more sweeping. In the Trac-tatus, he openly questioned the divinity of Scrip-ture and assailed the authority of the Church. Inplace of the first, he offered a "natural," criticallyhistorical and philological reading of the Bible; in

place of the second, a secular state in which reli-gious authorities would enjoy no power.

Anticipating late-19th-century developments inthe critical study of the Bible, Spinoza was inter-ested only in understanding the literal sense ofScripture, not in assessing its philosophical truth (ifany). On this basis, not content simply to deny thedivine origins of the Bible or the inerrancy of itstext, he openly ridiculed many of its narratives, andnone more directly than those attesting to miracles:

God's decrees and commandments, as well asHis providence are in fact nothing more thanNature's order; so that when Scripture describesthis or that having been accomplished by Gk)d orHis will, nothing more is claimed than that itcame about in perfect accord with Nature's lawand order, and not, as the vulgar multitude be-lieve, that Nature's time was suspended [by God]or that her order was temporarily interrupted.To appreciate why Spinoza found miracles par-

ticularly offensive, it helps to grasp the basic prin-ciples of his metaphysics, contained in his posthu-mously published Ethics (1678). Centuries of inter-pretation have had the effect of miring the Ethics ina vast and confusing thicket of scholarly debate; butits core ideas are quite simple and consistent.

At the center of Spinoza's system is the doctrinethat everything in the universeNature writlargeinheres in a single, perfect "Substance."This infinite and eternal Substance is what Spin-oza calls "God, or Nature." It alone is self-caused,absolutely determined, and uncontingent upon theexistence of any other thing.

In this system, there is no room for a transcendent(jod Who willfully created the physical universe andWho stands outside of it as its master, communicateswith prophets, chooses His favorite nations and indi-viduals, judges, rewards, and punishes His creaturesat willor performs miracles. Instead, Spinoza's Godis totally bound by His own immutable laws, i.e., thelaws of Nature. This conception robs the traditionaldeity of autonomy and strips Him of all the anthro-pomorphic, moral, and psychological attributesthrough which He had always been conceived in tra-ditional monotheistic faiths.

And man? The same simple and exacting ideasthat underlie Spinoza's metaphysics thoroughly in-form his anthropology as well. As just one of theinfinite "modes," or individuated things, within in-finite Substance, man is no different in essencefrom any other existing thing. This is a stunningrefutation of the biblical notion that man alone wascreated in the divine image, and was separated byGod to enjoy dominion over all of the inferior

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species of the earth. Spinoza repeatedly derides thevanity inherent in that traditional view, repudiatingthe arrogant delusion that man uniquely possessesa mind, or soul, which lives on eternally after thebody expires.

AND YET, the harsh clarity of his thought not-withstanding, both Spinoza the man and Spin-oza the philosopher have been drowning for morethan two centuries in a vast sea of legends and will-ful misreadings.

In this enterprise, non-Jews have been as activeas Jews. Among the first to re-create Spinoza in amore pleasing image were the early-modern Ger-man romantics, among them Goetie and Herder.They viewed Spinoza's identification of God withNature from, as it were, the other side: not as thematerialist atheism it is but as the very opposite, i.e.,a mystical form of pantheism that eliminates Na-ture's autonomous reality by overwhelming it withan immanent divine presence. Hence Goethe's in-sistence on caUing Spinoza "most theistic [theissi-mum], even most Christian [Christianissimum]," andthe famous description of him by the German poetNovalis as a "God-intoxicated man."

On another front, especially in the 20th centuryand extending to our own day, many liberal Jewishscholars and intellectuals have developed their ownpassionate attachment to Spinoza and have stub-bornly refused to let go of it. Insisting on his es-sential "Jewishness," they have in effect joined theirnames to the motley collection of "thinkers andpreachers" of Amos Oz's youth and, like JosephKlausner, have yearned to rescind the herem andreclaim him as their "brother."

Klausner himself was far from alone in 1927. In-deed, during the course of that anniversary year,Spinoza was feted as the Jews' greatest unjustly-slighted philosopher in communities around theworld, from Warsaw, Vilna, and Paris to New York,Buenos Aires, and Montreal. The Hebrew and Yid-dish journals of Poland and the Americas werefilled with studies documenting the essential Jew-ishness of Spinoza's pantheism. In both New Yorkand Tel Aviv, the ladies of Hadassah gathered tohonor his memory.

Five years later, there were still more elaboratecommemorations of the tricentennial of thephilosopher's birth. Even some rabbis were movedto join the celebrations. In 1933, Dr. Samuel Schul-man, the ultra-liberal "minister" of New York'sTemple Emanu-El, waxed penitential over the of-fense committed by Amsterdam's Jewish authoritiesagainst their "God-intoxicated" son. Decrying theherem as a "tragic event," Schulman concluded by

hailing Spinoza as "a true son of the synagogue....We love and revere his memory."

Not all of the attention devoted to Spinoza wasmindless; nor was the formidably learned Klausnerthe only student of his work to see him as a fore-runner to a peculiarly Jewish form of modern secu-larism, including in its Zionist incarnation. Aroundthe same time as Klausner's speech, Leo Strauss,then a young scholar in Weimar Germany, washard at work on his first book, Spinoza's Critique ofReligion (Berlin, 1930). Strauss was far more skepti-cal than Klausner about the allegedly Jewish natureof Spinoza's philosophy, and had little taste for thephilosopher's contempt for revealed religion. Buthe found in the Tractatus a "natural," secular ren-dering of Jewish history that was compatible withand essentially supportive of the Zionist world-viewa worldview that Strauss regarded as, in-creasingly, the sole answer to Germany and Eu-rope's long-festering "Jewish problem."

Like Jewish romancers of Spinoza before andsince, Strauss cited the so-called "Zionist passage"from the third chapter of the Tractatus:

Nay, I would go so far as to believe that if thefoundations of their religion have not overlyemasculated their minds, [the Jews] may even,if occasion arises, so changeable are human af-fairs, raise up their empire afresh, and Godmay a second^ time elect them.As it happens, this passing suggestion appears at

the end of a chapter otherwise dedicated to de-bunking the biblical doctrine of the divine electionof Israel and rather brutally blaming the Jews' suf-ferings on their own clannishness and seff-imposedisolation. Nevertheless, Strauss joined others inseizing upon it as evidence that this most radicalprogenitor of modernity was also a proponent ofrestoring the Jewish commonwealth.

The Jewisb enthrallment with Spinoza dissipat-ed somewhat in the 4O's, trailing the fall-off of in-terest in him by Western philosophers in general.Neither idealists nor posidvists, it seems, had muchuse for Spinoza's strictly a-priori metaphysics. In aclearly autobiographical anecdote, the late RichardH. Popkin would recall the time, shortly after theend of World War II, "when a young Americanprofessor submitted an article to a leading philo-sophical journal, explaining a difficult point in oneof Spinoza's arguments. In short order, he receivedhis manuscript back with the news, written on it byhand, that 'we are not now, and never will be, in-terested in Spinoza.'"' Popkin's Spinoza (Oxford, 2005) is the best short introduction tothe philosopher's life and thought.

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But by 1956, the 300th anniversary of the herem,the Jewish romance, at least, had revived. Israel'sfirst prime minister, David ben Gurion, himself anavid Spinozist, took the occasion to appeal to Israel'schief rabbi to lift the ban. The May 1956 issue ofCOMMENTARY featured a panegyric by the Czech-born intellectual Eelix Weltsch, "The PerennialSpinoza," whose dialectical thesis was that thanks toSpinoza's strictly rationalist philosophy, later Jewishthinkers like Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweigwere spurred to develop far-reaching counter-theo-logies of their own, centered on a more personal, orexistential, relationship with God. And so forth.

AND NOW, to mark the 350th anniversary of theban, we are in the midst of another mini-revival. Like its predecessors, this one is attuned tothe needs of the hour. Thus, while many earlier re-claimers were struggling to articulate a modern,non-theistic and/or nationalist Jewish identity oftheir own, and discovering precedents for it inSpinoza, today's seem perfectly satisfied with thestandard contemporary version of liberal universal-ism, and want only to be able to affix the label "Jew-ish" to it. Such, at any rate, appears to be the im-pulse behind a widely publicized new book by Re-becca Goldstein, entitled Betraying Spinoza: TheRenegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity.

A novehst and philosophy professor, Goldsteinhere deploys her considerable literary imaginationin an effort to recast Spinoza's philosophy as theproduct of a "working through" of his Jewish iden-tityan identity that, paradoxically, he would em-body most perfectly in appearing to reject it. Thatthere is more than a particle of self-justification inthis exercise of Goldstein's is something she makesno attempt to hide. Thus, explaining her choice oftitle, she confides that her intention is to draw theessentially Jewish Spinoza out of his secular, ratio-nal hiding-place; to rediscover the faithful youngJewish son he was before he went public with theheresies that resulted in his excommunication.

For Goldstein, this mission is as much personalas it is intellectual:

There was a moment long ago when I knewnext to nothing about the . . . [philosophical]system of Spinoza, and yet when I felt I knewsomething about what it was like to have beenhim, the former yeshiva student, Baruch Spi-noza. I would like to know that feeling again.Over the course of some 50 pages that might have

been better devoted to a basic explication of Spinoza'sUfe and thought, the reader is then treated to a mem-

oir of teenage "encounters" with Spinoza throughthe Jewish-history lessons the young Rebecca Gold-stein received at an Orthodox high school for girls onNew York's Lower East Side.

What she imbibed from those lessons, she writes,and what caused her to fall in love with Spinoza, wasthe sense that as a young man, he had repressed hisincipient heresies so as to remain steadfast in his re-spect for his family, thereby showing a deep rever-ence for the traditional Jewish values of filial pietyand domestic peace. The proof of this, she was in-structed as a schoolgirl and still appears to accept,was the fact that Spinoza held back from revealingany of his heterodox thinking until after the death ofhis parents, and after he had dutifully fulfilled "theprescribed mitzvahs for mourning a parent, goingevery day to the synagogue, saying kaddish." It wasthis, the mature Rebecca Goldstein tells us, thatmade her think Spinoza "must have been a lovableman. I sat in . . . class, and I felt that I loved him."

THE THOUGHT Certainly has its charms. Butthere is not a shred of historical evidence insupport of this tale, and it goes no way toward defin-ing anything essentially Jewish in Spinoza's philoso-phy, let alone his emotional makeup. On this score,Richard Popkin's conclusion is definitive:

Spinoza showed practically no interest in hisJewish past. He lived his entire life in theNetherlands and does not seem to have beeninfected by anything concerning his Jewishbackground.. . . [T]he fact is that Spinoza wasessentially stone deaf to Jewish reactions andattitudes.Of course, this has not stopped people from

searching, like Rebecca Goldstein, for even theslightest traces of Jewish sentimentality on Spinoza'spart. One such alleged piece of evidence, adducedby her and others, is the fact that unlike earlier un-repentant heretics or excommunicants, he did notconvert to Christianity. But this, too, is nonsense.

Spinoza was famous for his strong aversion tohypocrisy and his indifference to social prestige orindividual fortune. To convert to Christianity, an-other religion asserting supernatural doctrines,would have made no rational sense to him. Worse,it would have been a betrayal of the very core of hisbelief, boldly articulated in the Ethics, that man'shappiness and freedom are directly proportional tohis submission to sober reason alone.

Nor does his refusal to undergo baptism suggesta lingering attachment to Judaism. The fact is that,^ Schocken/Nextbook, 287 pp., $19.95.

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while never formally converting, Spinoza did clear-ly favor Christianity over Judaism as a reliablesource of "true religion"his term for the univer-sal teachings of morality and virtue that he distilledfrom the Christian Bible and contrasted to the al-legedly tribal and archaic laws of the Torah. In theTractatus especially, Spinoza repeatedly and effu-sively praises the message of Jesus, whom he alwaysrefers to as Christ, invidiously comparing that mes-sage with the narrow-minded exclusiveness of thePharisees (as he nastily dubs the Jews throughouthis writings).

The best Goldstein can muster in arguing forSpinoza's mythical self-identification as a Jew is asingle reference in his correspondence to the mar-tyrdom of the Portuguese Marrano Don Lope deVera y Alarcon (remembered by Jews as "Judah theFaithful"), burned at the stake by the Inquisition in1644. The background is this. A former student ofSpinoza's, one Albert Burgh, had converted fromProtestantism to Roman Catholicism. In announc-ing this fact to his former teacher. Burgh pointed tothe long history of Catholic martyrdom as "proof"of the "truth" of the Roman Church. Spinoza re-torted by pointing in his turn to "the same old songof the Pharisees," who "with like arrogance boastthat their church continues to this day . . . in spiteof the bitter hatred of heathens and Christians.""The miracles [these Pharisees] tell of," he mock-ingly writes before invoking the name of DonLope, "are enough to weary a thousand tongues."

Citing this piece of sarcastic derision, Goldsteinsays of it: "One of the last letters [Spinoza] wrote inhis short life, in December 1675, only two monthsbefore his death, betrays his emotional affinity withthe narrative of Jewish history." Hardly. Since themid-19th century, numerous Jewish apologists forSpinoza have seized gratefully upon this same pass-ing reference to Jewish martyrdom, seeminglyunique in a literary corpus that brims with and-Ju-daism. But it is in fact no exception to the rule; itsunderlying animus is of a piece vwth all the rest.

In her search for hidden affinities, Goldsteinreaches back intellectually as well as psychological-ly. Thus, she seeks to connect Spinoza with thegreat Jewish philosophers and kabbalists of theMiddle Ages. At one point she claims that "someaspects of Lurianic kabbalah . . . stirred [Spinoza's]thinking," despite the fact that in all his writingsthere is but a single overt reference to kabbalists, inwhich he dispatches them as "madmen." Not thatSpinoza was ignorant of medieval Jewish sources;quite the contrary, as Harry Wolfson definitivelyshowed in The Philosophy of Spinoza: Uncovering the

Latent Processes of His Reasoning (1934). It is ratherGoldstein who seems imperfectly conversant withthem. Her discussion of Maimonides (1135-1204)is typical:

Though Maimonidean philosophy, just becauseit is philosophy, has been controversial eversince [his] own day, raising generations of Jew-ish eyebrows (the position in my high schoolwas to keep a respectful distance), there was oneaspect of his work that became ensconced firm-ly in the mainstream, perhaps precisely becauseit eschews philosophical grounding for straight-forward faith. This is the Thirteen Articles ofFaith, which have become such an accepted as-pect of Judaism that they are recited on YomKippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.The single correct phrase in this passage is the

very last one: Yom Kippur is in fact "die holiest dayof the Jewish year." But there exists no custom, inany version of the Jewish liturgy, of reciting Mai-monides' thirteen principles of faith on that day.Nor is this the only confusion here. As it happens,this credo of Maimonides is very deeply rooted inhis philosophy; but many elements of it were neveruniversally accepted either by "mainstream" rabbisor by rival Jewish philosophers. By contrast, hisfourteen-volume code of Jewish law, the MishnehTorah, has been a foundational mainstream textsince the late Middle-Ages.

But the most debilitating errors in this book arethose touching on the essentials of Spinoza'sthought, which Goldstein tries valiantly but unsuc-cessfully to conflate witb modern liberalism. Thus,according to her, the Theological-Political Treatise is"one of the most impassioned defenses of a free de-mocratic state in the history of political theory"and a harbinger, no less, of the American Bill ofRights:

Just as relevant to current concerns, particular-ly in America, is [Spinoza's] fundamental insis-

' Betraying Spinoza is pickled with errors of every kind, of whichthis sentence offers an all too typical example. Thus, Spinoza's let-ter to Burgh was indeed composed in December 1675, but that wasnot "two months before his death" in February 1677. In subse-quent references, the exchange between the two men is describedno less erroneously as having occurred "in the dead of his finalwinter" and in "the final months of [Spinoza's] life.""* I can only surmise that Goldstein has confused these thirteenprinciples with the thirteen biblical attributes of divine mercy,whose recitation permeates the High Holy Day prayers.' Goldstein mistranslates this title as The Treatise on Theology andPolitics, an apparently trivial error that exposes a deeper misappre-hension of Spinoza's pointnamely, the utter futility of separatingreligion from politics.

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tence on the separation of church and state.John Locke, who spent some years in Amster-dam afrer Spinoza's death . . . transmitted thisinsistence to the founding fathers of America.The spirit of Spinoza lives on in the first wordsof the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitu-tion, the phrase referred to as the establish-ment clause: "Congress shall make no law re-specting an establishment of religion."But there is in Spinoza no "fundamental insis-

tence on the separation of church and state." Tothe contrary, what he insisted on was state regula-tion and control of all religions and their institu-tions. Nor, as his doctrine of state control is elabo-rated in the nineteenth chapter of the Theological-Political Treatise, does it preclude the possibility ofan established state religion. The chapter headingalone makes this abundantly clear:

It is shown that the right over matters of reli-gion is vested entirely in the sovereign, andthat the external form of worship must be inaccordance with the peace of the Common-wealth, if we are to serve God correctly.As Matthew Stewart observes in an absorbing

new study. The Courtier and the Heretic, Spinoza's in-sistence on state control of religion "sits a little un-easily with many modern conceptions of the secularstate." A little uneasily, indeed: as Stewart writes,Spinoza came perilously close to advocating an offi-cial "popular religion that is consistent with the re-quirements of the state . . . [and] under the strictcontrol of civil (and not ecclesiastical) authorities."

Rebecca Goldstein seems to have missed entirelythis key element in Spinoza's political theory. Nor,speaking of ideas that sit "a little uneasily," does shecite the second part of the First Amendment, the"free exercise" clause. Whether or not her omissionis intentional, it is certainly understandable. ForSpinoza's idea of freedom f^ rom church authorityand religious persecution adamantly excludes anynotion of an obligation by a democratic govern-ment to protect the free exercise of reHgion.

Far from anticipating the Bill of Rights with itslandmark protection of religious liberties, Spinozawould almost certainly have preferred France'smore militantly secular approach to religionanapproach that, for example, allows for legislationbanning Mushm headscarves as well as other "ag-gressive" displays of piety in the nation's pubhcschools. In the Tractatus be rejects the notion ofspecial rights in the exercise of religion as a "sedi-

tious idea," and the very phrase "religious liberties"would likely bave struck him as an oxymoron. Foranyone seriously attached to the First Amendment,Spinoza is no ally.

IT IS deeply ironic that Spinoza, whose most per-nicious heresy was to deny the immortality ofthe human soul, has been repeatedly resurrected;and that, 350 years since his excommunication, thisheresy, in modern form, still holds sway over someof the most hotly debated issues of our dayphilo-sophical, neurobiological, ethical, and political. Indenying the existence of an eternal, divinely im-planted human soul, and in rejecting totally the bib-lical notion that man stands apart from the rest ofCreation and enjoys dominion over it, Spinoza an-ticipated the radical conceptions of "animal-rights"philosophers hke Peter Singer, as well as the casualdemotion of man that is standard among many sci-entists and professional ethicists. Long ago, LeoStrauss fretted that Spinoza's God was farther "be-yond good and evil" than Nietzsche's, and his poli-tics colder than Machiavelli's. Strauss was right.

No less remarkable, despite almost two centuriesof determined Jewish efforts to restore the way-ward heretic to the bosom of his people, is how lit-tle Spinoza has to contribute to current debatesover Jewish identity and Jewish destiny. In this re-spect, the many Jewish romancers of Spinoza, fromJoseph Klausner to Rebecca Goldstein, would havebeen well advised to heed another of Strauss's ob-servations, this one made in 1932:

Spinoza did not remain a Jew, while Descartes,Hobbes, and Leibniz remained Christians.Thus it is not in accordance with Spinoza'swishes that he be inducted into the pantheonof the Jewish nation.... It seems to [me] an el-ementary imperative of Jewish self-respect thatwe Jews at last relinquish our claim on Spi-noza. By so doing, we by no means surrenderhim to our enemies. Rather, we leave him tothat distant and strange community of "neu-trals" whom one can call with considerable jus-tice, the community of "good Europeans."As for everything that has become of that com-

munity of "good Europeans" in the decades sinceStrauss wrote these acute but generous lines, thatis another story altogether, if one from whichtoday's romancers of Spinoza understandably averttheir eyes.

* The subtitle of this book is Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Fate of God inthe Modem World. Norton, 351 pp., $25.95.

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