FOOTNOTES:
[183] The Sephardim and the Ashkenazim, as indeed is the case in other countries also.
[184] It is added that he was afterwards compelled to lie on the ground, while the whole of the congregation walked over him.
[185] All the great modern thinkers speak with reverence of Spinoza, with the single exception, perhaps, of Leibnitz. Lessing was one of the first to recognise his profound ability. S. T. Coleridge and Goethe express the greatest admiration for him, the latter affirming that he was one of his three great teachers. Later, Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and others have spoken to the same effect. But though his opinions have exercised a wide and most important influence on the minds of others, he has established no school of adherents to his own peculiar philosophy. It may be doubted whether he ever made one genuine convert.
[186] The sentence of excommunication against him ran thus: ‘Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed in going out, and cursed in coming in. And we warn you, that none may speak with him by word of mouth, nor by writing, nor show any favour to him, nor be under one roof with him, nor come within four cubits of him, nor read anything written or composed by him.’ And this sentence was pronounced by men who had themselves experienced the enormities of religious persecution!
[187] Some have declared him to have been actually a Christian. But though certain passages in his writings may seem to favour that idea, his unhesitating rejection of the doctrine of the Incarnation renders it impossible.
[188] It should be here observed that the Scriptures do not teach anthropomorphism of any kind as actually true, but as the only mode by which man, in the bounded and darkened condition of his intellect, during his present state of being, can apprehend God at all. The Scriptures contain the most distinct denials of anthropomorphism, considered otherwise than as metaphor. Thus, Exod. xxxiii. 20: ‘Thou canst not see My face, for there shall no man see Me, and live,’ i.e., ‘He must be wholly out of the body, in order to apprehend Me’—apprehend Me, that is, with the eye of the spirit, not of the body. See the use of the two words expressing bodily and spiritual vision (John i. 18; John xvi. 16; Rev. iv. 2, etc.). Again, ‘God is not a man, that He should lie,’ or ‘that He should repent’ (Num. xxiii. 19). In the anthropomorphic images of Scripture, ‘God is seen only through a glass, darkly,’ as St. Paul says.
[189] We have in more than one of his writings a distinct denial of his Atheism. ‘His critics,’ he says, ‘do not know him, or they would not so easily have persuaded themselves that he taught Atheism.’ See also his Treatise, De Deo et Homine.
[190] ‘Those,’ he says also in the same epistle, ‘who would identify matter with God totâ errant viâ.’
[191] It is again proper to remark that this theory is wholly untenable. The operations of the human will are as much acts, as the operations of the human hand. Nero, if Spinoza’s view were correct, could be no more free mentally to conceive wickedness, contrary to God’s will, than he was free manually to perpetrate it.