Spinoza has been called “the father of scientific thought” – journalistic bombast maybe, but acknowledgement of his pioneer status. His writings were lab notes, not really literature, reporting findings. He thought for the hell of it and caught hell for it. Nowadays everybody blabs – or tweets – but back then, it was dangerous. You said what you were supposed to, not what you saw. The penalty for candor was – don’t ask. Rulers hate thinking because it corrodes the myths that sustain their rule. Bosses seek obedience, compliance, marching in lockstep, subordinates who salute. Better docile toadies than smarties with their notions.

Free thought isn’t dangerous in today’s America, but it may become so. More and more bullies insist on blind allegiance to cockamamie claims. Dissenters are purged, truth is mocked. Totalitarian zealotry infects more citizens. Freedom more and more means freedom to salute.

I may never fathom Spinoza the philosopher, but Spinoza the man I’m sweet on. I find him in his story and shavings, not his tracts. He foreswore his boyhood religion – roger that. He resisted enlistment in any of the dogmas howling at his door. He loved jawing with friends but fled controversy. Fame and fortune he eschewed as distractions. He hid in politeness. He seems to have foregone sex, poor guy. His curiosity enslaved him. He wanted to know, know more, dig ever deeper into the intoxicating mystery of Man. He thought freely when thinking freely could be suicidal. He hacked a trail for others to follow.

I feel him in his simple study thinking. A bed, table, a few books, foolscap and quill, a candle, few comforts, he doesn’t care, he’s elsewhere, lost in his thoughts. Discovery is rapture: the amazing things you find if you keep looking. He must have known his prose was impenetrable but how could he do justice to complex perceptions in convenient prose? He wrote for an imaginary reader who might never materialize, but so what? His devotion to truth was pure, passionate as a hermit’s in his cave, private as prayer.

A hero – to this faraway follower: forefather, pioneer. Thinking – for oneself – was so new then and daring. The thrill!

You can hear Spinoza thinking through his prose: if this is true, then this must be, then this, who cares where this trail is taking me! If the God of the Bible turns out to be a communal fantasy, a fraud even, so be it, that’s where the evidence leads. Let’s just make God synonymous with Nature – He’s everywhere, always, everything; that way we don’t need to deny His existence. God is this world He’s created, not separable from it: as Yeats would put it a few centuries later, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Spinoza did not go with the flow, nod automatically as a dashboard doll. He dressed nicely and greeted his neighbors, while thinking his thoughts undeterred. His courage encourages.

This is the fifth of seven reflections on my new pal.