SPINOZA FOUND CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN THE OLD TESTAMENT AND PALACIO VALDÉS MOCKS THE CARCUNDIA THAT'S WHY THEY WERE PERSECUTED AND EXPELLED FROM THEIR SYNAGOGES

  RELATIONS OF PALACIO VALDÉS WITH ESPINOSA

 

Benito Spinoza was a wise Sephardic scholar who created a philosophical system, pantheistic Naturalism, from which all modern philosophy is based: Leibnitz, Hobbes, Kant, Descartes, etc., whom the Asturian writer admired.

  “I wanted to be a philosopher like Baruj Espinoza but I turned into a novelist. “He was one of the best human beings that ever existed,” declared Don Armando in his confessions. 

“For me, writing a novel was as easy and fun as any bookkeeper doing an arithmetic operation, or just as it was evident to that good Jew in the synagogue that creation is something progressive, a building that is always under construction.” , and that everything created by God is good, beautiful, as man should be (pantheism) and there are passages in the Bible that do not fit with such an assertion. 

The Amsterdam Jewry described this assertion as heretical and the good Baruch was excommunicated. 

He continued working on his books and polishing the diamond that was his profession, that of a goldsmith, with which he made a living by making magnifying glasses. 

Espinoza, whose family from Espinosa de los Monteros in Burgos welcomed the hospitality of Portugal after the decree of Expulsion of 1492, ending up in the Netherlands, which at the time was a Spanish province where the long arm of the Inquisition had not reached.

Don Armando was also expelled from another synagogue because of envy and resentment that called him a very right-wing man. Although he made fun of priests and nuns.

  We have come across the church, Sancho. 

If Espinosa's texts exude profound pantheistic philosophy, those of the Entralgo novelist drift towards humor and the desire to live. 

All this wrapped in great expressive ease. The gods gave him that difficult facility that only geniuses enjoy. This is: clairvoyance. 

Beings like this, however, seem to commit the crime of going on their own and thinking on their own.

Thursday, May 23, 2024