Matthew Stewart - The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

I t is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair. As the autumn of 1676 approached, however, Baruch de Spinoza had ample reason to fear for his safety. One of his friends had recently been executed, and another had died in prison. His efforts to publish his definitive work, the Ethics , had come to an end amid threats of criminal prosecution. A leading French theologian named him the most impious and the most dangerous man of the century. A powerful bishop denounced him as that insane and evil man, who deserves to be covered with chains and whipped with a rod. To the general public, he was known simply as the atheist Jew.

Among those who seemed eager to bring the infidel philosopher to justice was a young courtier and polymath named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In a personal letter to that same French theologian, Leibniz described Spinozas work as horrible and terrifying. To a famous professor, he called it intolerably impudent. To a friend he confided, I deplore that a man of such evident culture should have fallen so low.

Yet, in the privacy of his study, Leibniz crammed his notebooks with meticulous commentaries on Spinozas writings. He exchanged secret letters with his public nemesis, addressing him as celebrated doctor and profound philosopher. Through mutual friends he pleaded for a chance to examine a manuscript copy of the Ethics . And, on or around November 18, 1676, he traveled to The Hague and called on Spinoza in person.

LEIBNIZ ARRIVED IN Holland by yacht. He was thirty years old and well on his way to claiming his title as the last universal genius of Europe. He had already discovered the mathematical method we call calculus (later than, but independently of, Isaac Newton). He carried in his luggage his arithmetical calculating machinea small wooden box stuffed with gears and dials that may be counted among the earliest ancestors of the modern computer. He had begun to fill out the long list of his contributions to the fields of chemistry, chronometry, geology, historiography, jurisprudence, linguistics, optics, philosophy, physics, poetry, and political theory. When onecompares ones own small talents with those of a Leibniz, wrote Denis Diderot in the Encyclopdie , one is tempted to throw away ones books and go die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner.

He would have been wearing his trademark wig, an elaborate traveling coat, and the kind of ornate vest, knee-length breeches, and silk stockings that were then the latest fashion in Paris. It is so rare for an intellectual to dress properly, not to smell, and to understand jokes, the Duchess of Orlans noted approvingly. He was of smallish frame, with an unavoidable nose and keen, scrutinizing eyes. He carried his head far forward of his hunched shoulders, and he never knew what to do with his arms. His limbs, it was said, were as crooked and ungainly as those of Charonthe old and sulky ferryman of the dead. As he lurched along the leaf-strewn canals of The Hague, his elaborate robes flapping in the autumn wind, he must have looked like an exotic, gilded bird of prey.