No, he was not.
Neither did he accomplish his results by the brilliancy of his wit or the plausible truth of his theories. Spinoza was great mainly by force of his courage. He belonged to a race that knew only one law, a set of hard and fast rules laid down for all times in the dim ages of a long forgotten past, a system of spiritual tyranny created for the benefit of a class of professional priests who had taken it upon themselves to interpret this sacred code.
He lived in a world in which the idea of intellectual freedom was almost synonymous with political anarchy.
He knew that his system of logic must offend both Jews and Gentiles.
But he never wavered.
He approached all problems as universal problems. He regarded them without exception as the manifestation of an omnipresent will and believed them to be the expression of an ultimate reality which would hold good on Doomsday as it had held good at the hour of creation.
And in this way he greatly contributed to the cause of human tolerance.
Like Descartes before him, Spinoza discarded the narrow boundaries laid down by the older forms of religion and boldly built himself a new system of thought based upon the rocks of a million stars.
By so doing he made man what man had not been since the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans, a true citizen of the universe.