Prime Removal
The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the
Modern World
by Matthew Stewart
Norton, 2006
(351 pages, $25.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Graeme Hunter
The waning of the Middle Ages left behind a spiritual vacuum that has never been filled. For every self-assured modern who derides the pseudo-comforts, pretended legitimacy, and fallacious certainty of the past, there has always been a reluctant modern who wished them back again, or wished at least for something comparable to take their place. Perhaps the private scholar and author Matthew Stewart is right to say that each of us, as heirs of the modern period, can detect elements of the booster and the critic in his own divided heart.
Stewart had a superb idea for his latest book, The Courtier and the Heretic. He set out to follow the interconnected lives and writings of two of the great philosophers of the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), detailing how they grew up, how they grew toward one another, how they eventually met, and then how they grew rapidly apart, ultimately defining the polar extremes of which modern thought is capable.
In their irreconcilable philosophies Stewart hoped to articulate “a choice [about the modern age] which we all must make and have implicitly already made.” Essentially, Stewart argues, the choice before us is either to spread our soul’s sail to the modern wind, leaving our baggage behind, or to deliberate with care and take as much of our baggage with us as we possibly can.
We can either be radical, in other words, or we can be conservative. To be liberal is simply not to have made up our minds; to be reactionary is not among the intelligent options at all.
The First Modern
Stewart is a fine storyteller. The chapters unfold in counterpoint, recounting first each philosopher’s vastly different childhood, adolescence, and early career.
Spinoza was born into the Jewish community of Amsterdam, a descendant of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal in the late sixteenth century. He was recognized as prodigiously intelligent within his community, though his formal education was cut short by his entering into his father’s import-export business. He did not last long in business, either, however.
Spinoza developed radical political and theological views that alienated him from his co-religionists and ultimately led to his excommunication from the synagogue. On Stewart’s telling, Spinoza then went into a period of intense self-examination, a kind of “dark night of the soul,” from which he emerged as the most articulate spokesman of and for modernity.
“Spinoza did not invent the modern world, but he was perhaps the first to observe it well” and also the first to try “to answer the ancient questions of philosophy from a distinctly modern perspective,” Stewart tells us. His philosophical system
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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