A COMPREHENSIVE study of Spinoza's attitude toward religion would of necessity fall into three parts. For Spinoza, who is known to us primarily as a philopher, was also a historian of religion and a political thinker. As a historian of religion, which in his time meant a student of the Bible, he had certain definite views on the development of religious ideas and institutions in both the Old and the New Testament. These views are to be found in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
As a political thinker Spinoza, like many of his contemporaries, was especially preoccupied with the problem of the relation between Church and State, concerning which he had certain definite views. These views are to be found, again, in his Tractatus Theologico- Politicus and also in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus. Finally, as a philosopher he dealt with all the abstruse and abstract problems of traditional religious philosophy. The discussion of these problems is to be found in the Ethics. It is with the Ethics that I am going to deal tonight
Harry A. Wolfson
The Ethics-contrary to the generally accepted opinion-is primarily a criticism of the fundamental principles of religious philosophy which at the beginning of the Christian era were laid down by Philo and were still in vogue at the time of Spinoza in the seventeenth century. This criticism is constructed according to an old forensic device which may be described as ‘yes’ and ‘but.' The ‘yes' part is an expression of Spinoza's assent to the external formulation of some of the principles of traditional religious philosophy. 'The ‘but’part is a statement of the special sense in which he himself is willing to use that formulation. Between these two parts is a whole chain of complicated arguments. To the general reader this structure of Spinoza's thought is not obvious, for it is obscured by the artificial form in which the Ethics is written--the geometrical form. It is for this reason that the Ethics is one of the most difficult books in philosophic literature. It is for this reason also that the Ethics, in my opinion, has so often been misunderstood and so often misinterpreted
SPINOZA begins from the very beginning. He asks himself What is the most fundamental assumption underlying the religious philosophies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam? And after examining various possibilities he settles on one. It is the belief that over and above and beyond the aggregate of things which make up this our physical universe there is something unlike the universe.
Had Spinoza written his Ethics after the manner of the rabbis and the scholastics he would have quoted here verses from Scripture in which men are challenged to produce something which is like unto God. As to what that unlikeness between God and the universe consisted in, Spinoza must have found a variety of opinions among religious philosophers. Most of them, and Philo at their head, following the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, interpreted that unlikeness between God and the world as meaning that, unlike the world, which is material, God is immaterial. Others, either consciously or unconsciously following the Stoics, argued that the unlikeness between God and the world meant that, unlike the world which consists of one kind of matter. God consists of another kind of matter.
But there is one sense of unlikeness between God and the world upon which, Spinoza must have found, all religious philosophers were in agreement. They all believed that, unlike the world, which is dependent upon God, God is independent of the world. This independence of God may be expressed by the term separateness-separateness in the sense that the existence of God does not necessarily imply the existence of the world. For believing, as all of them did, that the world came into existence after it had not been in existence, they also believed that prior to the existence of the world there was a God without a world. And believing, as some of them did, that some day the world will come to an end, they also believed that after the ultimate destruction of the world there will be God, again, without a world. And since God was and will be without a world, even now when the world exists, God's existence is independent of the world, separate from it, and apart from it.
To this principle Spinoza begins by saying "yes.' Yes, he is willing to admit that there is something over and above and beyond the aggregate of things which constitutes this physical universe of ours. He is not an antiquated Epicurean to whom the world was a mere conglomeration of aimlessly flying indivisible particles of bodies. He is even willing to call that something by the name of God for, as he so often says, he does not care to argue about words. But- and here his first ‘but' comes in--he is unwilling to admit that the something unlike the constituent parts of the universe is separate from the universe. Within the universe itself and inseparable from it, he maintains, there is something unlike its parts. And as he proceeds in his argument, he explains that by that something he means the wholeness of the universe, which he contends is not the mere aggregate of its parts. In support of this contention, he alludes to two old propositions which by his time were already philosophic commonplaces. The first proposition is that the universe is an organic living being, a view which ever since Plato had been expressed by various philosophers in various ways. The second proposition is that in an organic living being the whole is something different from the mere sum of its parts.
This is a clear and simple thought which Spinoza could have expressed in clear and simple language. But being a philosopher, he felt that he owed it to his profession to express himself in technical language, even at the risk of making clear things obscure and simple things complicated. And so, rummaging through the stock- pile of philosophic terminology, he came upon the term substance. This he pasted as a label upon that wholeness of the universe of which we have been speaking: a label used by Spinoza as the equivalent for the traditional term God.
The choice, it must be said, was not a happy one. For already by the time of Spinoza the term substance had a variety of conflicting meanings, and the new meaning which he now gave to it only tended to add to the confusion of those who later began to study his Ethics.
Then from the same stockpile Spinoza pulled out the term mode, which he used as a label for the particular things in the universe. And inasmuch as the particular things are many and can be classified in a variety of ways, Spinoza has a variety of modes variously classified.
The choice of the term mode as a designation for particular things was also unfortunate. For the term mode, historically, had already acquired the meaning of something unreal, something which is only apparent. And so its use by Spinoza led many of those who later began the study of his Ethics to read a false mean- into what he meant by particular things.
Finally, out of several reminiscent terms and expressions. Spinoza coined a new phrase of his own, ‘the face of the whole universe,’ which he uses as a description of the aggregate of particular things of the universe, or of the particular modes, which to him is to be distinguished from the wholeness of the universe.
All this is the first point in Spinoza's criticism of traditional philosophy. He then takes up another point.
To traditional philosophy, God, though independent of the universe, is still not unrelated to it. His relation to the universe which is that of creator and preserver, is expressed by traditional philosophers in their description of God as the efficient and formal and final cause of the world. They could not exactly agree on the manner in which God created the world--whether it was after the manner of a potter who molds a vessel out of clay; or after the manner of a magician who pulls rabbits out of the emptiness of his hat. But whether God created the world out of a pre-existent matter or whether He created it out of nothing, they all insisted that He created it by will and design. For, if He willed it, He need have created no world at all. And, again, if He willed it, He could have created a different kind of world.
And so, not only is the world we live in the creation of God. but also the order we observe in the world was designed by God. For at the time of the creation of the world God implanted in it certain laws, laws of nature and laws of causality, by which it is to be governed. Philo, who first formulated this principle for all religious philosophers who were to follow him, calls it in Greek ‘the divine Logos’; and later medieval philosophers continue to call it their own Latin ‘ratio divina.'
This is a sort of constitution which God Himself has drawn up for His own governance of the world. On the whole, God is conceived by most of the religious philosophers as a constitutional monarch who rules in accordance with the laws He designed for the world. But still they all agree that God, obedient to His own law though He be, has not abandoned His power nor His freedom. Should the good of His subjects demand it, He will upset the laws of nature which He has implanted in the world and produce what is called miracles.
Here again, Spinoza starts with a willingness to adopt the religious vocabulary and describe the relation of his God to the universe--the wholeness of it in relation to its parts from which it is inseparable and with which it is eternally coexistent -as a relation of cause and effect, For cause, in philosophic language, is one of those weasel words which may be used by different men in different senses. In ordinary speech, a cause is what brings about the existence of something. But in the philosophic language of Spinoza's time any kind of relation between two things, or even within one thing, any kind of relation between two distinguishable aspects of a thing, could be described as a causal relation. Especially was the term cause used as a description of the relation of the whole to the part.
But-and here the second ‘but’ comes in---Spinoza is unwilling to admit that there is a God who is the cause of the world in the sense that He created it by will and design, so that if He willed it, there need have been no world, or there might have been a different kind of world; nor is Spinoza willing to admit that, once God created the world after a certain order, He can miraculously upset that order. The world as it now exists, as well as the order which we observe in it, is fixed, immutable and inexorable; and it has so existed, without any change, from eternity.
For Spinoza, we must bear in mind, was an old-fashioned philosopher, who knew nothing of what we now call ‘evolution.' He was in this respect more old-fashioned than the religious philosophers to whom he was opposed. In the case of religious philosophers, homiletical historians of religion may find in their vague descriptions of the process of creation certain adumbrations of evolution. But no homiletical historian of philosophy-even those who have discovered in Spinoza adumbrations of Marxian dialectics, Freudian psychology, and Einsteinian relativity- will be able to find in his conception of the eternally complete and fixed universe any traces of a theory of cosmic evolution.
Spinoza's description, then, of the wholeness of the universe in relation to its parts as cause was simply a concession to his opponents. It was justified only by the license exercised by philosophers in the use of the term cause, and also by his own disinclination to quarre] about words. But, having once expressed his willingness to describe his own God by the traditional term cause, Spinoza goes even further to express his willingness to describe Him as a cause in the various senses in which traditional philosophers described their God as cause. His wholeness of the universe is thus to Spinoza not only a mere cause but also a first cause, a principal cause, a universal cause, an efficient cause, an essential cause, an immanent cause, a free cause. However, in every one of these instances, he shows in what special sense he uses these terms. In some instances, he also shows how his use of these terms is even more justifiable than that of his opponents.
SPINOZA’S criticism of the traditional conceptions of the separability and causality of God- conceptions which, as fundamental principles of Scriptural religious philosophy, were first formulated by Philo-led him to an examination of a philosophy which is quite the opposite of the philosophy of Philo- that is, the emanationist theory of Plotinus.
The philosophy of Plotinus may, indeed, be considered as the counterpart of the philosophy of Philo. Just as Philonism is a rationalization of Hebrew Scripture, so the Neoplatonism of Plotinus is a rationalization of pagan mythology, and, if the truth were known, it originated as a pagan reaction to Philonism. In opposition to Philonism, emanationism denies that God, either after the manner of a potter created the world from a preexistent matter, or after the manner of a stage-magician created it out of nothing. Emanationism maintains instead that, after the manner of a spider which spins its web out of itself, God caused the world to emanate out of His own essence. Again in opposition to Philo, it maintains that this process of emanation is an eternal process and a necessary process. But then, while rejecting the Philonian belief in the separateness of God in the sense that He could exist without the world, it maintains His separateness in the sense of His being immaterial.
Here, again, Spinoza is willing to adopt the emanationist vocabulary and describe the relation between the wholeness of the universe and its parts as a process in accordance with which the parts flow from, or follow from, the whole. Logically, he sees no difference between the emanationist God, who coexists with the world from eternity and acts upon it as a necessary cause, from his own conception of God as the wholeness of the universe. He is even willing to describe his own God as the emanative cause of the universe. In fact, when he decided to build up his few religious heresies into an imposing system of philosophy, it was the system of emanation that he took as his model.
But-and here his third ‘but’ comes in-Spinoza does not admit that his God is separated from the world in the sense that He is immaterial. He shows how, by the assumption of an immaterial God, there is no adequate explanation under the theory of emanation for the rise of matter. Of course, he was aware of the answer provided by emanationists- in their theory of an intermediary mind as the immediate emanation from God and the immediate emanative source of matter. But he shows how the interposition of such an intermediary between God and matter fails to solve the dif- ficulty, how furthermore it gives rise to new difficulties, and how in fact the emanationist theory is really nothing but a disguised form of the belief in creation out of nothing. He concludes, there- fore, that if the relation between the wholeness of the universe and its parts is to be described in terms of emanation, then the wholeness cannot be described as immaterial.
PROCEEDING now to recast his own few simple views into a philosophic system modelled after that of emanationism, Spinoza tries to express the difference between these two systems -his own and emanationism--in technical terms. The technical terms which Spinoza uses for this purpose are attribute, thought, and extension.
Attribute is a term he borrows from the vocabulary of religious philosophy, where it was used as a description of the way we conceive of God and speak of Him in terms derived from His manifestation in the world. Extention and thought are terms used in the more fashionable vocabulary of Spinoza's own time for the oldfashioned terms ‘matter’ and ‘form’. And so he contrasts the emanationist view with his own by saying that to the emanationists God has only the attribute of thought, whereas to him God has both the attribute of thought and the attribute of extension.
Again, to the emanationists, whose God has only the attribute of thought, the immediate thing that follows from God is an intellect; to Spinoza, whose God has both the attribute of thought and the attribute of extension, the immediate thing that follows from God is twofold, an intellect and motion. These he describes, respectively, as the infinite immediate mode of thought and the infinite immediate mode of extension,
As in emanationısm, all particular things in the world are described by Spinoza as following from these two immediate infinite modes, and hence in their totality are described by him as mediate infinite modes or as ‘the face of the whole universe,’ which phrase, as we have said, he himself has coined out of reminiscent terms and expressions. Finally, from somewhere in that stockpile of philosophic terminology he dragged out the expressions ‘naturating nature’ (natura naturans) and ‘naturated nature’ (natura naturata), and used them as designations, respectively, of substance and modes.
BEHIND the imposing facade of Spinoza’s philosophic system, all its intricacies of design and vocabulary, there is thus a simple philosophic faith. Directly, this philosophic faith is presented in opposition to the traditional religious faith. But indirectly, as may be judged from certain expressions in Spinoza’s correspondence, it is also aimed at the old Epicurean faith, which in his time was still the bugbear of both theologians and philosophers. In opposition both to the religious faith, which professed a belief in the creation of the world by the will of an eternal God, and to the Epicurean faith, which professed a belief in the emergence of the world out of the accidental collision of aimlessly drifting eternal atoms, Spinoza’s philosophic faith protested that the world in its present form existed from eternity.
Again, in opposition religious faith, which saw in the order of the universe certain laws of causality which were implanted in it by the will of God, and which God by His will can miraculously upset-and in opposition also to the faith of the Epicureans, who saw in the order of the universe only an accidental equilibrium of stray forces, liable at any moment to be upset—this simple philosophic faith of Spinoza sees in the order of the universe certain eternally fixed laws of causality, with which all the apparently wayward behaviour of particular things is indissolubly connected by an imperceptible chain of causes.
But then a question arose in the mind of Spinoza. How do we know that the Epicurean faith is mistaken? Perhaps, after all, the world is only a conglomeration of atoms which had come together by chance. Perhaps what appears to us as causal order is only the result of a chance equilibrium of atoms. Moreover, what guarantee have we that the order which has existed till now will continue to exist in the future?
When this question occurred to religious philosophers, they answered it by what is known as the proofs of the existence of God. The proofs used by them, with one exception, contain nothing new; they inherited them from pagan philosophers. On the whole, these proofs of the pagan philosophers fall into two classes.
Those philosophers who believed that all our knowledge is derived ultimately from sense perception maintained that the existence of God could be proved only indirectly from our various sensible perceptions of the world. This gave rise to those proofs for the existence of God which are known nowadays as the cosmological proofs, of which the best known is that syllogistic jingle, which begins with the premise, ‘All things that are in motion must be moved by something’. On the other hand. those who believed that some of our knowledge, indeed the most valid portion of it, is born within our own mind, maintained that the existence of God is a direct kind of knowledge within our own mind.
These two modes of proving the existence of God, invented by pagan philosophers, were adopted by later religious philosophers, though some of them rejected the second type of proof. But these later religious philosophers added a new kind of direct knowledge of the existence of God, namely, the historical revelation of God as recorded in Scripture, and the divine illumination which may be experienced by certain favored individuals. Moreover, in imitation of those proofs known to us as cosmological, the various assertions of the immediacy of our knowledge of the existence of God have in later days been resolved into syllogistic jingles which came to be known as the ontological proofs.
Here. again, Spinoza begins by admitting that the existence of what he has already agreed to call God is a direct kind of knowledge within us, for Spinoza belongs to the school of philosophers who believed our mind is a machine that generates knowledge of itself. But he refusesof God either by revelation or by divine illumination. Following itself. But he refuses to admit that we can have a direct knowledge of God either by revelation or by divine illumination. Following in the footsteps of those who asserted a direct knowledge of the existence of God, he is not content with merely stating his profession of faith; he presents his profession of faith in the form of various syllogistic demonstrations, describing these demonstrations by the term a priori.
Altogether he advances three such a priori demonstrations. In one instance, he performs before our eyes the verbal transformation of an indirect proof of the existence of God, or what he calls an a posteriori demonstration, into a direct proof, or an a priori demonstration.
FROM a consideration of God, Spinoza passes on to a consideration of Man.
To religious philosophers, man as the crown of creation occupies a unique place in the universe. In this view, man's uniqueness does not consist in the mere fact that he possesses a soul; for, not only from the works of philosophers but also from their own Scripture, they gathered that other living beings also have a soul.
The singularity of man consisted in the fact that he had a special soul of special origin. Spinoza himself, in his book called Cogitata Metaphysica, which is really not a book but a scrapbook, alludes to the three theories of the origin of the human soul held by various religious philosophers. In technical language they are known as the theories of creationism, preexistencism, and traducianism. In plain English they may be described, respectively, as the theory of custom-made souls, the theory of ready-made souls, and the theory of second-hand remade souls.
According to custom-made theory, at the birth of each child God creates a soul especially for that child. According to the ready-made theory, at the time of the creation of the world God in His foresight created individual souls which in number and variety were sufficient to supply the need of all the future generations of men. These souls are kept in a place the exact name of which is variously given by various authorities who are expert in the knowledge of these matters. At each child's birth a soul suitable to his body is placed within him--though, judging by the great number of misfit souls in the world, one may infer that mistakes frequently occur. According to second-hand remade theory of the soul, God, at the time of the creation of the world, created only one soul, and that is the soul of Adam. All our souls are only slices of the soul of our first ancestor, so remade as to fit our own peculiar bodies.
The common element in these three theories of the origin of the human soul-which is of philosophic interest to Spinoza- is that the human soul is of divine origin, and has been especially created by God apart from body, so that even after it is placed in the body it continues to exist there as something apart from it.
As usual, Spinoza has no objection to adopting the vocabulary of his opponents and describing the human soul as being of divine origin. The technical vocabulary in which he has clothed his thought allows him to say that ‘the human mind is part of the infinite intellect- of God’ (Eth. II, 11, Corol.). In fact, this statement is so phrased as to allude to a medieval discussion of the nature of the divine origin of the soul. But-and here another ‘but’ comes in-he does not admit that the soul is separable from the body.
Everything in the world, Spinoza argues, has a double aspect. In one respect, everything in the world may be looked upon as something simple and isolated. Looked upon in this way, everything in the world has only one simple mode of behaviour. It is always in flux, constantly in a process of change: it is always ceasing to be what it is and becoming something else. Earlier philosophers called it matter, and matter was defined as extension. Spinoza in his own technical vocabulary, calls it extended thing, or a part of the infinite immediate mode of motion, or a finite mode of the attribute of extension.
In another respect, everything in the world, however simple, is composed of parts and, however isolated, is part of something else. Looked upon this way everything in the world, in relation to itself, has a structure and, in relation to other things, has a function. Earlier philosophers called it form. But form is not one single thing. There is a hierarchy of forms. Some philosophers enumerated the several stages in the hierarchy of form by such general terms as cohesion, nature, soul, mind. Other philosophers, however, used a different kind of vocabulary and, instead of speaking of a hierarchy of forms and of everything as having form, spoke of a hierarchy of souls and of everything as having a soul. Spinoza adopts this vocabulary and hence says, ‘all things have a soul (omnia animata)’, adding immediately the qualifying phrase ‘in different degrees’ (Eth. II,13Schol).
And so, Spinoza argues, the human soul is only one of the degrees of soul which all thing possess; and just as the cohesiveness, which is the soul of a clod of earth, or growth, which is the soul of a plant, is inseparable from the body of the stone or the plant, so is mind, which is the soul of man, inseparable from the body of man. In his own vocabulary, mind and body are respectively finite modes of God's attributes of thought and extension: and, just as in God these two attributes are united together, so are mind and body in man. Referring therefore to this argument of his, Spinoza concludes: 'Hence we see not only that the human mind is united to the body but also what is to be understood by the union of the mind and body' (Eth. II, 13, Schol.).
As a corollary of the conception of the soul as being of divine origin, and separate from the body, is the conception of its freedom.
On the whole, to religious philosophers man, though occupying a special position in the world, is still a part of nature, and his actions, like all natural actions in the world, are determined by certain laws of causality which are of divine design and implantation. There are no free actions in man, as there are no free motions in the world. Still there are certain exceptions. In the world, God may change the order of nature and create miracles; in man, the mind is endowed with a similar power to change the order of human nature and produce actions which are miraculously free. Philo, who was the first to formulate the philosophic basis of this kind of undetermined human freedom, says that God endowed the human mind with a proportion ‘of that free will which is His most peculiar possession and most worthy of His majesty,' and that by this gift of free will the human mind ‘has been made to resemble God' (Immut. 47-48). And both the miracles worked by God in nature and the miraculous power of the freedom of the human mind are two forms of the selfsame providence by which God governs the world. What is the purpose of miracles? To protect man against the evils of the external forces of nature. What is the purpose of freedom? To protect man against the evil forces of his own nature.
Spinoza is willing to describe man as free. But he denies that his freedom is undetermined. To him, as there are no miracles in nature, so there is no miraculous freedom in human nature. Freedom is power, the power of reason by which man may control and guide the forces of his own nature, just as by the same power of reason he can control and guide the forces of external nature. Every conflict in man is looked upon by Spinoza as a conflict be- tween two physical forces, which he calls by their old philosophic names, reason and emotion; and as in every conflict between two opposite physical forces, the stronger force will subdue the weaker. Man is called free only in the sense that by an increased knowledge of his own nature reason will grow in strength to overcome all the adverse forces of his emotions.
There is nothing miraculous about this kind of freedom. Referring to those who, like Philo, saw in human freedom an endowment of the human mind with a miraculous power by which it is made to resemble God, Spinoza observes that by the same token ‘they say that the mind can by its own strength create sensations or ideas which do not belong to things, so that in a measure they make it out to be a God’ (Tract. de Intell. Emend. 60). Probably Spinoza bad a direct knowledge of Philo; but the Philonic view is also restated by Descartes when he says that free will ‘in a certain sense renders us like God in making us masters of ourselves' (Les Passions de ľ Ame III, 152). By aiming directly at Descartes, Spinoza indirectly hit Philo.
RELIGION, to religious philosophers, was not only a truth, a way of knowing, but also a good, a way of living. To them God in His governance of the world, by His individual providence, has in His infinite wisdom not only endowed men with freedom but has also revealed to them laws of conduct by which, through the exercise of their freedom, they are guided to their destined good. These divinely revealed laws-it was insisted upon by the religious philosophers-were not the prescripts of an arbitrary ruler; they were based upon reason. In fact, they were the virtues which philosophers, in their fumbling way, were trying to discover by their own faulty reason as rules of conduct whereby men were to attain their highest good.
Here, again, Spinoza begins by saying ‘yes.’ Yes, he admits that the practical teachings of Scripture, unlike its intellectual teachings, contain some merit. But--and here another ‘but’ comes in-he denies that they are divinely revealed, or that they are of the same nature as the virtues dealt with by the philosophers. They are the practical wisdom of simple-minded men, based upon their limited experience in a simple form of life.
And so in direct opposition to traditional philosophy, which presented its ethics in the form of a systematization of the teachings of the various philosophers interspersed with quotations of Scriptural proof-texts, Spinoza reproduces the same systematization without the benefit of any supporting Scriptural quotations. Following in the footsteps of Aristotle, the Stoics, and their suc- cessors, he defines the nature of the highest good, of happiness, and of virtue; and out of the writings of these philosophers, he draws up a list of virtues and vices to take the place of the positive and negative commandments of religious legislation.
In addition to its being a truth, a way of knowing, and a good a way of living, religion is also a promise, a way of attaining happiness.
The promise of happiness held out by religion, as Spinoza sees it, is twofold: happiness in the present life and happiness in what is called the hereafter. Spinoza describes the happiness religion promises in this world by the phrase ‘mentis acquiescentia’. An English translation of this phrase, partly literal and partly free, would be ‘peace of mind’; though, judging by the current lists of best-sellers, it would be more fashionable to translate it by ‘peace of soul.' The God of traditional religion is not only the powerful architect of the universe and the wise lawgiver for mankind. He is also the great provider, the great comforter, the rock of salvation, the refuge in the day of evil. To man, burdened with trouble, old-time religion offers one sovereign remedy. ’Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and Ie will sustain thee,’ ‘Take my yoke upon you . . . and ye shall find rest unto your souls.’
Again, in a way, Spinoza says ‘yes.' He does not deny that religion offers consolation to the true believers. But-and here still another ‘but' comes in-there is a consolation of philosophy as there is a consolation of religion. Reason, he claims, can restore peace of mind, or peace of soul, without benefit of the soothing words of the Psalms or the Gospels. And he thus undertakes to prescribe philosophic remedies for the various ailments of the soul.
In a series of twenty propositions, Spinoza tells us how we can be happy though miserable. He tells us how we may overcome anxiety, fear, worry, desire, ambition, envy, disappointment, frus- tration, hatred, self-pity, and all the other innumerable ills that stem from the emotions. In the past generations, readers of Spinoza saw in these propositions a distillation of the cumulative wisdom of the ages, wisdom writ large in the form of proverbs in the pages of copy-books. Readers of today see in them adumbrations of the newly discovered science of the mind, its traumas and its therapies. Spinoza himself presents them in profound technical language as a philosophic cathartic for the emotions, as a metaphysic for bilious souls.
THE promise held out by religion for happiness in the hereafter is the promise of immortality. Here, too, we may gather from the promise of Spinoza's discussion that, on the one hand, while he is willing to admit that the soul is immortal-or eternal, as he prefers to call it, following one of Cicero's usages--on the other hand, his own conception of its immortality is of a somewhat special kind. But what he means exactly by that special kind of immortality is not quite clear. Let us try to find out,
At the time of Spinoza there were three distinct views of immortality. Each of these views has a long and complicated history, and a variety of subtly distinguishable aspects. But for our present purpose we shall describe them briefly in their main outlines.
The first view may be described as that of immortality by the grace of God. According to this view, the soul is a creation of God and begins its existence as an individual entity.As a creation of God, the soul by its own nature cannot be eternal for only God is eternal. By His infinite grace and power, however, God confers immortality upon the souls of certain individuals as a reward for their conduct during their lifetime. Accordingly, it is only the souls of those who are stamped as righteous that are immortal; the souls of those who are stamped as wicked are annihilated.
This, on the whole, is a conception of immortality to which, theoretically, all religious philosophers would subscribe; though, historically, many of them preferred to see the wicked eternally punished rather than utterly annihilated. But the difference between utter annihilation and eternal punishment is only a matter of taste, not a matter of theory. The belief in eternal punishment does not exclude the possibility of utter annihilation. In fact, certain theologians, learned in these matters, speak of both eternal punishment and utter annihilation and interpret either one in terms of the other.
The second view may be described as that of universal immortality by nature. According to this view, the soul does not begin its existence as an individual entitv, but as part of a universal soul of which each man gets a portion. Since the universal soul is homogeneous, all portions of it distributed among individual men are alike in nature. It is only through their contact with different bodies that the souls of different individuals appear to act differently. But this contact of souls with bodies leaves no permanent effect upon them. As soon as the bodies die, the accidental indi- vidual differences between their respective souls disappear. The souls of all men. in their original undifferentiated nature, return to the universal soul and, reabsorbed within it, retain no trace of their erstwhile temporarily acquired accidental individuality.
The third view is a modification of the one just described. It may be called individual immortality by nature. This view, too, assumes that there is a universal soul, of which the soul of every individual human being is an undifferentiated portion, and that, whatever ever individuality it displays during its existence in the body is owing to its contact with that body. Yet such contact especially as it results in the knowledge of the external world, and of what lies beyond that world, leaves upon the soul a permanent mark It essentially transforms the nature of the soul; it changes it into something distinet and individual, This distinctness and individuality, by the eternal order of nature, is retained by the soul even after it departs from the body, It is as an individualized soul that it returns to its native source, the universal soul. It is not reabsorbed by it; it only finds shelter in it. The universal soul is a sort of heaven, to which the disembodied souls of philosophers, if not of saints, return in their naked spirituality to en joy bliss for evermore in the presence of God,
These are the three views with which Spinoza, we assume, started his speculation concerning immortality. He must have examined each one of them, trying to find out which one he could accept without involving himself in contradictions
The first view he must have found himself compelled to reject at once, for it was contradictory to his entire conception of God and of the human soul.
The second view he must have thought, at first, he could accept, For in the philosophie system he had built up after the model of the emanationist philosophy there is a universal soul which he calls the infinite intellect of God; and of that soul the human soul is, as he has said, a part; and that part of the infinite intellect of God is certainly not annihilated with the death of man: it is reabsorbed in the source whence it came. For with his denial of creation out of nothing, Spinoza also denied the destruction of anything into nothing. Quite consistently, therefore, he could express himself as willing to accept the immortality of the soul in the sense of the universal immortality of the soul,
But after some reflection Spinoza decided, we presume, to reject this kind of immortality. He would only stultify himself, he reasoned, if he were to speak of a universal immortality of the soul, when, on the basis of his own philosophy, he could also speak of a universal immortality of the body. For in his own philosophy there is a universal body as there is a universal soul, and both are inseparably united, and of that universal body the individual human body is a part, and, upon the death of man, just as his soul is reabsorbed in the universal soul, so is his body reabsorbed in the universal body. What sense is there in speaking of the immortality of the soul unless the soul, unlike the body, in its reabsorption in the universal soul retains a certain kind of individuality which is not found in the body in its reabsorption in the universal body?
And so Spinoza must have come to examine the third view of immortality. With regard to this view he must have found that there is nothing in his philosophy to preclude the assumption that by the eternal order of nature, that portion of the infinite intellect of God which constitutes the human mind acquires, through its experience in life, a certain distinctness and individuality which remains with it even after death when it is reunited with that infinite intellect of God whence it originally came. If he were asked how that happened, he would answer that it was so determined by the eternal order of nature. For it must be borne in mind that the eternal order, to Spinoza, was a sovereign explanation for everything inexplicable, just as the will of God was to the Philonic re- ligious philosophers. Nothing is impossible in an eternally ordered world, such as is conceived by Spinoza, just as nothing is impossible in a world governed by the will of God, such as is conceived by Philonic philosophers. It is only in a world where everything new must arise in a process of evolution that certain things may be conceived as impossible.
Having found this third view of immortality not inconsistent with his philosophy, Spinoza accepted it. The terms he uses in his restatement of it reflect exactly the terms commonly used in the descriptions of this view. It is not in all its faculties, Spinoza maintains, that soul is immortal, for the faculties of imagination and memory are destroyed with the body (Eth. V, 21). This is quite in accordance with the third view of immortality. Still, he continues, ‘the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal’ (ibid. 23); and that something of it which remains eternal, he explains, is conditioned upon the acquisition of knowledge of a certain kind. This, again, is in accordance with the third view of immortality. He then concludes, ‘The essence of the mind consists of knowledge... therefore the more things the mind knows. . . the greater is that part of it which remains' (ibid. V, 38, Demonst.). This, once more, is in accordance with the explanation given by the exponents of the third view of immortality for the individual differences between immortal souls.
And so here again Spinoza begins by admitting that there is individual immortality of the soul. But--and here the last ‘but comes in- this individual immortality belongs to man not by grace but by nature.
YET, while Spinoza's assertion of individual immortality is not inconsistent with his philosophy, it does not necessarily follow from it. It is a gratuitous principle; it is an expression of faith rather than of reason. On the rational basis of his philosophy he could have said-just as he has said in his discussion of God, of the human soul, and of the revealed law-yes, I am willing to use the word immortality and use it even in the sense of individual immortality, but I do not mean by it the immortality of man's soul: I mean by it the immortality of man's achievements. In fact, this is exactly what most students of Spinoza take to be the meaning of his statements about the eternity of the soul. But while Spinoza might have spoken in this vein, he does not in fact so speak; and there is no indication that he meant his writings to be treated as divinely inspired sacred texts which pious readers were constantly to modernize by constantly giving them allegorical interpretations.
And so, while Spinoza's conception of immortality betrays no logical inconsistency of thought, it betrays an inconsistency of mood. As is not the case in his speculations about God. about the soul, or the revealed law, he is here willing to accept more thar the mere use of a term; he is willing to accept a certain belief.
This change of mood is to be noticed also in his attempt to cite Scriptural proof-texts for his belief in immortality. Such citation marks a departure from his general practice in the Ethics. Nowhere in the Ethics does he quote Scriptural verses in support of his view. And yet here, after developing his views on the individual immortality of the soul, he tries, almost like Maimonides or Thomas Aquinas, to tell us how his conception of immortality is in agreement with that of Scripture. He describes the state of immortality by such New Testament terms as salvation, liberty, regeneration, and blessedness, all of which consists in the love of God, or union with Him, and then concludes, ‘This love or blessedness is called Glory in the sacred writings’ (Eth. V, 36. Schol.). In fact, this last statement of Spinoza's is a paraphrase of the following statement in St. Thomas: ‘Hence this blessedness is many times described as glory in the sacred writings’: thus it is said (Ps. 149:5), 'The Saints exult in glory' (Cont. Gent. III, 63). Similarly, Abraham Ibn Ezra, who is quoted by Spinoza in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, commenting upon the verse of the Psalm quoted by St. Thomas, says: ‘Let the saints exult in that glory which awaits them, namely, in the eternal existence that they shall en iov, referring thereby to the eternal existence of their souls. or to what is called the hereafter.’
Still further evidence for this change of mood is to be found in the new kind of opponent whom Spinoza visualizes in his discussion of immortality. As I have said. the Ethics is a critique of the philosophy of certain unnamed opponents. The opponents visualized throughout the Ethics are the religious philosophers. Now the opponent visualized in his discussion of immortality, as may be judged from the context, is a religious heretic, Uriel Acosta, who died when Spinoza was a boy of about fifteen. Eight years before Spinoza's birth Acosta became known as a heretic through the publication of a work in which he denied the immortality of the soul, showing that there was no such belief in Scripture. This book evoked a great deal of opposition, which continued for many years after its publication. In Spinoza's discussion of immortality there are several passages directed against Uriel Acosta,
What brought about this change of mood in Spinoza cannot be exactly determined. If we were writing historical fiction, we might invent all kinds of situations to explain this change. As historians, trying to reconstruct the true doctrine of Spinoza, all we can say is that Spinoza, despite all his philosophizing, even as you and I, felt the need of the consolation of this belief
THE picture which I have drawn of Spinoza in his relation to religion is not the picture with which we are familiar. Spinoza is daring, but he introduces no novelty. His daring consists in overthrowing the old Philonic principles which by his time had dominated the thought of European religious philosophy for some sixteen centuries But in overthrowing these principles, all he did was to reinstate. with some modification, the old principles of classical Greek philosophy. That is what he did in dealing with the concepts of God, the soul, freedom. ethics, and immortality.
Perhaps this is all one could expect of Spinoza or of any other philosopher. For on all these religious issues there are only two alternatives. One was stated in the Hebrew Scripture, and the other in the various writings of Greek philosophers. Thereafter, the great question in the history of religious philosophy was whether to follow the one or the other, or to combine the two. And in the history of religious philosophy, so conceived, two figures are outstanding, Philo and Spinoza. Philo was the first to combine the two; Spinoza was the first to break up that combination.
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