This 17th-century design would make a perfect tattoo, except the meaning would say something pitiable about the wearer. It is a rose with the Latin word “CAUTE” beneath. The rose meant secrecy, and _caute_ means “cautiously.” The person who used this sign, Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), did so because he had to constantly keep his head down to stay out of the way of public scrutiny. He vocalized and wrote ideas that confronted the social norms of his day, which threatened authorities so much that they retaliated, verbally, legally, and even physically.
Spinoza was lucky enough to grow up in a part of Europe that was relatively tolerant for the time. His homeland in the Dutch Republic had allowed Jewish communities to settle in after the diaspora of 1492 from Spain, and his Jewish family had migrated there. Moreover, the European Scientific Revolution and Age of Enlightenment had begun, putting Spinoza into contact with a hodgepodge of free thinkers such as the scientist Christiaan Huygens and unconventional Christian groups like the Collegiants, who rejected hierarchies.
But even this atmosphere was not enough to allow Spinoza’s ideas free expression. At one point he was attacked with a knife on the stairs of a synagogue. His Jewish community formally and publically expelled him in 1656, and eventually the city authorities drove him out of Amsterdam. Spinoza constantly worried that his writings would get into the wrong hands.
Indeed, Spinoza’s ideas about God, nature and free will were an about-face in many ways. Whereas religious and secular thought taught that God and creation, or the mind/soul and the body were different substances, Spinoza argued for only a single substance throughout the universe. Moreover, he thought that all human behavior was pre-determined. While we might feel like we have the ability to exercise choice, we are unaware of the forces that actually drive us.
And we should be glad that, despite Spinoza’s caution, his works were eventually published. We study them today as masterpieces of Enlightenment philosophy.
