Jennie & Spinoza

"I believe in Spinoza's God," Einstein wrote in 1929.

1672. The French have invaded the Dutch provinces. In the attic above a busy household and workshop, Benedictus de Spinoza grinds lenses and is completing his major work, the Ethica. Down below, the young servant girl flirts with the apprentice and is puzzled by the sick and aging man upstairs. The apprentice says the old man is a doomed heretic. But he is so frugal, so kind when she serves him.

Eventually she dares to ask him a question, and an odd friendship develops. Over time it widens her world beyond trauma brought by war and other dangers. And it is a balm to him as his illness worsens, and his despondency at misunderstanding by friends and correspondents. Few can follow, he writes in the last paragraph of the Ethica, the path I charted to acquiescentia, the vision of God and true contentment of mind. In a supplementary treatise on politics he notes prophetically that the constitution is the soul of a nation. Then he adds the well-known truth that women have no place in politics. Why does he stop there and scribble Sed de his fatis (but enough about this)? He never writes another word, dies mysteriously soon after, and leaves the young woman grieving and thriving.

A novel about the consolation and limitation of philosophy, embedded in an unlikely friendship.