Spinoza and Philo

Abstract

Let me begin this chapter with a simple categorical statement: There is no mysticism in Spinoza's philosophy. To most careful readers of the Ethics , such an assertion should seem unsurprising, if not obvious; Spinoza's place in the pantheon of arch-rationalist philosophers would seem to be as secure as that of his seventeenth-century mentor, Descartes. Thus, I do not claim that the thesis of this chapter is particularly bold or even novel. And yet it seems still to stand in need of demonstration. For from the earliest commentators on his work down to the most recent scholarship – and especially including the representation of Spinoza in the popular imagination – there has persisted a significant trend in which Spinoza is seen not as the inheritor of the Cartesian devotion to clear and distinct reasoning, nor of the Jewish intellectualist tradition of Maimonides and Gersonides, but as the descendent of the mysticism of Philo of Alexandria and of the later kabbalists. At the end of the seventeenth-century, for example, it was not uncommon to see Spinoza's philosophy as deeply imbued with kabbalistic and occult themes. In the eighteenth-century, Jacques Basnage, in his grand Histoire des Juifs, depuis Jesus Christ jusqu'a present (1705), included Spinoza in his discussion of kabbalah, which he sees as the source of his “obscure and mystical” ideas. Later that century, Solomon Maimon asserted that “kabbalah is nothing but extended Spinozism,” an opinion that the great twentieth-century scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Sholem, would later second.