In this 2012 novel by Irving D. Yalom (ably narrated in my audio-version by Traber Burns), we follow the careers of two men, separated by more than two centuries.

On the one hand we have the son of Jewish Portuguese parents who fled to Amsterdam to escape persecution: Baruch (aka Bento or Benedictus) Spinoza (1632-77). According to Yalom, he "was possibly the greatest intellectual rebel in history". Way ahead of his time, he took a scalpel to most of the religious ideas that surrounded him. Predictably, he incurred the wrath of the Jewish community in Amsterdam, from which he was excommunicated in 1656, when he was just 23 years old. Cut off from his people, and earning his living as a lens grinder, he devoted the rest of his short life to study and writing. He died at the age of 44 (from some sort of lung disease).

On the other hand, we have Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946). A Baltic German, he was born in what is today Estonia, and became a leading ideologue in the NSDAP (indeed, he was a member even before Hitler...) An enthusiastic exponent of all the most odious of the Nazi tenets, he was actively involved in administering the German-occupied Eastern territories of Europe (with all the war crimes and crimes against humanity that this role involved), and also headed up the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Task Force, which systematically looted Jewish art works. He was found guilty at the post-war trials in Nuremberg, and hanged.

This is a novel, but it sits on a well-documented historical foundation, and the author is kind enough to clearly lay out what's what in a concluding section entitled Fact or Fiction: Setting the Record Straight. (He quotes Andre Gide: "History is fiction that did happen. Fiction is history that might have happened." This idea has a lot to recommend it, but I guess I would want to qualify it, by stressing the research that needs to -- and obviously does in this case -- undergird any historical fiction before it can be worth its salt.)

So what connects the alternating chapters that follow each man's story? The clue is in the title. The interpretation given to the phrase "the Spinoza problem" (found in a Nazi document when the contents of the Spinoza museum in Rijnsburg were cleared out by Rosenberg's looting machine) is Yalom's own (he makes clear in the concluding section that all the passages linking Spinoza and Rosenberg are fictional). But we don't really have a better explanation for that curious phrase, and it is quite plausible. It boils down to this: Rosenberg revered Goethe, but hated anything Jewish. Goethe, on the other hand, deeply admired Spinoza -- who was Jewish. How to square that circle constituted, in Yalom's conception, Rosenberg's Spinoza problem.

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The Netherlands, 1993. Spinoza lived for a while in Voorburg (between Delft and Den Haag), and finished his life in what is now the Dutch capital

To like this book you have to prefer talk to action, and you have to have a bit of an interest in philosophy and psychology. Indeed, Yalom pioneered the "teaching novel", and this one is mostly made up of long, intricate conversations between the two protagonists and their fictional interlocutors. They're the kind of conversations that you only get in books: lucid, well constructed, and utterly resistant to diversions or the desire to rest up and talk about the weather for a while.

Definitely not to everyone's taste. But I found the business of following through the step-by-step reasoning of the one figure and the wild prejudice of the other curiously hypnotic. Yalom is a good teacher. He packages quite difficult ideas very expertly, never giving you too much at a time, and building in a certain amount of recapitulation so that you don't get lost. I not only learned a lot (being a blank slate where Spinoza was concerned) but also very much enjoyed the experience.

Yalom is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, so a key interest lay figuring out what made each man tick. There's a pronounced chilliness about Spinoza's life and work (I felt that throughout, and wondered if I was over-reacting, but Harold Bloom also pinpoints his "icy sublimity", describing him as "greatly cold, and coldly great"). What Yalom is undoubtedly probing here is the extent to which his philosophy derives from his isolation. But, as he says in the introduction, he also holds the view that Spinoza wrote much that is relevant to the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy: "for example, that ideas, thoughts, and feelings are caused by previous experiences, that passions may be studied dispassionately, that understanding leads to transcendence".

With Rosenberg, on the other hand, Yalom is seeking the roots of the anti-Semitism that rode him like a merciless jockey. By Yalom's account, Rosenberg too is an isolated character, losing his parents at an early age, and struggling to build relationships. He is highly insecure, and his unshakeable convictions -- he is totally blind to anything that does not feed his preconceived ideas -- seem to act as a substitute for personal security. Constantly enslaved to the quest for approval from Hitler, Rosenberg is prone to depression when the coveted pat on the head remains elusive (he was hospitalized twice for reasons that were at least in part psychiatric). Desperate to be at the Nazi centre of things, he constantly alienates others with his arrogance, and in the latter stages of the war, he is increasingly pushed to the edge of the inner circle. The only time, ironically, when he finds himself truly part of the club is at the Nuremberg Trials, where he's right up there with the rest of the war criminals...



There's not much more to say about Rosenberg, except that he wrote a diary (a real one this time). It went missing after the death in 1993 of Robert Kempner, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, who took the diary for research purposes but then did nothing with it. It was eventually recovered from the "murky world of dealers in Nazi memorabilia", and transferred to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2013. An account of its retrieval and its contents was published in 2015. The diaries only confirm the picture Yalom has drawn. According to reviewer Richard Evans: "[They] underline Rosenberg’s consistently ideological approach to every question, and bring out his monstrous lack of empathy towards human suffering, including that of the Germans... He continued steadfastly to believe in victory almost to the end, and in Hitler beyond it. There’s no hint of criticism or disillusion, in sharp contrast to the doubts frequently expressed in Joseph Goebbels’ diary. What one does find is ample evidence of the petty and quarrelsome nature of the author, who time and again antagonised his fellow Nazis and undermined his capacity for manoeuvre in the internal power struggles of the regime... Overall, Rosenberg emerges from the diaries as weak, vain and petulant, as well as morally blind and indifferent to the suffering he caused."

The dark, closed, echo-chamber world of Rosenberg contrasts extraordinarily with the questing, light-filled intellectual efforts of Spinoza.

As I said, he is not a warm and fuzzy philosopher. But he's challenging. Having listened to the book, I consolidated what I had gathered by checking out an introduction by Clare Carlisle (start here, and work forward through the eight sections).

Key ideas:

-- God is not the creator of the world; God and the world are not separate, but are two aspects of the same reality.
-- There is only one substance -- "God" (understand God in inverted commas from here on in, because the concept doesn't match what we generally refer to as God) -- and it is infinite, so there can be nothing outside it or separate from it. Carlisle clarifies: "I find it helpful to use the image of the sea to grasp Spinoza's metaphysics. The ocean stands for God, the sole substance, and individual beings are like waves -- which are modes of the sea. Each wave has its own shape that it holds for a certain time, but the wave is not separate from the sea and cannot be conceived to exist independently of it... Each wave is dependent on the sea, and because it is part of the sea it is connected to every other wave. The movements of one wave will influence all the rest. Likewise, each being is dependent on God, and as a part of God it is connected to every other being. As we move about and act in the world, we affect others, and we are in turn affected by everything we come into contact with."
-- Miracles are nonsense. A miracle is just a natural event whose cause we haven't yet understood.
-- We can't interpret the scriptures literally. Much of what they contain is symbolic or imaginary.
-- We should get over our anthropomorphic views of God. Spinoza's God is impersonal, unresponsive to human requests. There's no rewarding, or punishing, or following a purpose.
-- Body and mind are two sides of a coin. When one goes, the other goes. No eternal life, then...
-- And no free will either... That's as nonsensical as miracles... Instead: "The human body is part of a network of physical causality, and the human mind is part of a network of logical relations."
-- We get to know God by learning to understand the laws of nature. Understanding is the key to everything, and we understand something when we know what causes it, and how. This applies to emotions, too: "When the mind knows thoroughly even a painful emotion such as sadness or grief, its activity of knowing signals an increase of power, which generates a feeling of joy."
-- A good life consists in seeking -- with the guidance of reason, as opposed to custom, superstition, or imagination -- to understand what we are, and what is genuinely good for us. If we're all doing this, we'll build a virtuous society...



There is much that resonates with me here.

I sympathize with his dislike of the kind of religion that is just a cloak for superstition (but he does seem to throw the entire religious baby out with the bathwater in that respect...) I warm to his critique of fundamentalist readings of the Hebrew (or any other) scriptures. His challenge to understand -- UNDERSTAND, damn it! -- is a great counterweight to the lazy tendency to blame God when things go wrong. And I think he's probably right that we can't bank on a future existence in which "we" will be "we" (but I retain a belief that our spirit will return to the Great Spirit, just as our bodies -- what Maria Popova calls our "borrowed stardust" -- will return their atoms to the universe that made them).

But I would subscribe to panentheism (God is IN everything) rather than pantheism (everything is God). And Spinoza's fixation with "rationality and nothing but rationality" seems dangerous, from our vantage-point a few centuries on from the onset of enlightenment-influenced thought. (Not that it's easy to make generalizations about the enlightenment, as even this small selection of articles makes clear.)

It is also notable -- if predictable -- that Spinoza's famous "understanding" didn't extend to upending the subjugation of women, with which he seems entirely in agreement... Here he contrasts really unfavourably with Zera Yacob, an Ethiopian who lived from 1599 to 1692. Many of his ideas resonate with Spinoza's, including advocacy for the supremacy of reason, and scepticism towards established religions, their scriptures, and their claims of unique access to truth, but in contrast to Spinoza, Yacob -- very strikingly -- argued that men and women are equal.

Above all -- and I keep returning to this theme -- it's a chilling body of ideas that Spinoza comes up with at the end of the day. For him, our highest joy comes from quietly understanding our place in the whole big web of causality. There's nothing sublime to connect with, no huge God to love or be loved by, no vision of the "history of our 13.7-billion-year-old universe as the rising up of Divine Love incarnate". There is no mysticism. There are no stories. There's none of that productively shadowy "maybe". It's all cold, cold reason.

I return to Bloom, who argues, in 2006, that Spinoza, on the one hand, is a good corrective: "Many Americans are persuaded that God loves each of them, personally and individually. Is that our blessing, in this era of George W. Bush, or is it not the American malaise, partly productive of the daily slaughters on the streets of Baghdad? A transfusion of Spinoza into our religion-mad nation could only be a good thing." On the other hand, however: "Spinoza taught an intellectual love for his God, a God himself incapable of love. Though his enemies called him an 'atheistic Jew,' he himself emphasized his stance as a Dutch democrat, anti-monarchist and elitist, since he overtly despised the multitude of his fellow citizens. I do not think Spinoza would have wept for Amsterdam, just as Socrates would not anguish over Athens, unlike the Jesus who wept for Jerusalem."



To close, a couple of points about Irving D. Yalom:

He was 80 when he wrote this book, and he's still with us, which means he's now over 90... His parents migrated from Russia shortly after World War I, and he was born in Washington DC. As he tells Nick Owchar, "For me, and for all my peers, there seemed to be only one way of escaping the ghetto and becoming a member of mainstream America: become a physician. My peers and I used to joke that we had two occupational choices: We could become a doctor or a failure!" So he studied medicine, and then specialized in psychiatry.

But he also testifies: "Sometime early in life I developed the notion -- one which I have never relinquished -- that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do..." Amen to that.

All in all, then, a very profitable and thought-provoking listen. I already have the next "teaching novel" in my sights...