Franciscus van den Enden, in later life also known as 'Affinius' (Latinized form of 'Van den Enden') ( – 27 November 1674) was a Flemish Jesuit, Neo-Latin poet, physician, art dealer, philosopher, and plotter against Louis XIV of France. Born in Antwerp, where he had a career as a Jesuit and an art dealer, he moved later to the Dutch Republic where he became part of a group of radical thinkers sometimes referred to as the Amsterdam Circle who challenged prevailing views on politics and religion. He was a Utopian planning to set up an ideal society in the Dutch colonies in America and a proponent of democracy in the administration of states. He is mainly known as a teacher of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), whose philosophical ideas he may have influenced. Life Van den Enden was the son of Johannes (Hans) van den Enden and Barbara Janssens. He was baptized in Antwerp on 6 February 1602. His parents were manual labourers who worked as weavers. He was a pupil at the Augustinian and the Jesuit colleges of that city. In 1619 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, but in 1633 he was dismissed from the order. In the later 1630s he contributed some Neo-Latin poems to devotional works by the Spanish Augustinian Bartholomé de los Rios y Alarcón. In about the same period he also seems to have been active in the Antwerp art trade, in which his brother Martinus van den Enden the Elder played an important role, as a publisher of prints by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. In 1640 Van den Enden married Clara Maria Vermeeren in Antwerp and in 1641 a first child was born, named after her mother Clara Maria. It is not clear where and when their second daughter Margereta Aldegonis was born. Probably around 1645 the family moved to Amsterdam, where van den Enden started an art shop in the Nes. Only a few engravings and one pamphlet published by him are known. After the bankruptcy of his art shop, he opened a Latin school on the Singel. His pupils performed several classical plays in the Amsterdam theatre and also a Neo-Latin play by his own hand, Philedonius (1657). By then the family had expanded: in 1648 the twins Anna and Adriana Clementina were born, in 1650 a son, Jacobus, in 1651 a daughter, Marianna, and in 1654