Renewal Through Recovery . . .

Restoration Review · 1969
(Volumes 11)

PREFACE

My work as a teacher of philosophy has led me to identify the woe and weal of being the editor of a religious journal with some of the great thinkers of the ages. Such a one is Benedict Spinoza, the lowly Jew who was excommunicated by his synagogue because he dared to think. He had the character that could qualify him as an editor of a paper that proposes to say something. And character is the word that would please him, for he insisted that it is character rather than circumstance that makes for the good life.

But by character I mean fortitude, industry, dedication, and in­tegrity. A man's worth can sometimes be measured by the way people respond to his efforts. To some Spinoza was an atheist and an enemy of religion, while to others he was so deeply spiritual that they called him a "God-intoxicated" man. Rejecting riches, fame, and pleasures as the way of happiness, he embarked upon a lifetime search for the higher values. Rejected by his own people, he found a haven in the attic of a sympathetic Christian home where he lived simply, making his living by grinding lenses and spending his free time composing his philosophy. He spent twelve years writing his Ethics, one of the most influential moral documents ever published.

Despite his desire for obscurity, he had composed a better philo­sophy and so the world beat a pathway to his door. He received an invitation to join the faculty of the University of Heidelberg, which was perhaps the most renowned university of all Europe at that time. He was assured that he would have "the utmost freedom of philosophiz­ing," but it was also suggested that it was a freedom that "you will not misuse to disturb the publicly established Religion." Like editors should, Spinoza realized that he had been raised up by God to disturb the superficialities of his time, including established religion, and so he declined the offer.

But he did not succeed in achieving oblivion. Today he is recog­nized as among the three greatest names in modern philosophy. Moreover, the grandchildren of those who excommunicated him built a statue to his memory, which stood as a rebuke to the demands of the bull of excommunication, which read in part: "May the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn henceforth against this man, load him with all the curses written in the Book of the Law, and blot his name from under the sky."

Spinoza was pure gold, the dross having been burned away by persecution and deprivation. He is one of the freest men of all history, a freedom that doomed him to an attic rather than a university podium. He was too free a man for a university faculty, and perhaps too free a man to be the editor of a religious journal. Most of us do not deserve to have his kind around. With our desire to be truly free no stronger than it is, we probably deserve the kind of men we have in the pro­fessorial chairs, in the pulpits, and at editorial desks.

So, as we send forth this, our seventeenth volume, to the reading public, we make no greater claim than that a Spinoza of our day may write for this journal, and that we believe in the freedom for which he dedicated his life.