Ten years ago, researchers discovered in the Vatican archives a rare manuscript of Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics, which had come into the possession of the Roman Inquisition in 1667 because of its theologically suspicious content. While the Church banned the book much as, decades earlier, the Amsterdam Jewish community had expelled the philosopher for his unorthodox opinions, the 18th-century German intellectual Novalis would later proclaim Spinoza “a God-intoxicated man.” In England, Spinoza’s work would later appeal to the secular proto-Zionist novelist George Eliot as well as the religious conservative Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Clare Carlisle and Yitzhak Melamed urge readers to take seriously the possibility that Spinoza was not the atheist many have made him out to be, and that his oft-quoted invocation of “God or Nature” may in fact betray the influences of his Jewish youth:
Spinoza confessed that “I favor an opinion concerning God and Nature far different from the one Modern Christians usually defend.” Yet he aligned himself with older religious traditions, both Jewish and Christian: “That all things are in God and move in God, I affirm with Paul, and . . . with all the ancient Hebrews, as far as we can conjecture from certain traditions, corrupted as they have been in many ways.” Spinoza’s reference to “certain traditions” may allude to Kabbalistic literature in which the identification of God and Nature is ubiquitous. In pre-modern Hebrew, the literal meaning of Kabbalah is “tradition,” and in the 17th century the Kabbalah was widely regarded as an ancient wisdom of the mysteries of being.
The separation of God from nature that Spinoza, in 1675, recognized as distinctively “modern” was sharpened in 18th-century deism, and found striking expression in the image . . . of a divine designer whose relation to the natural world was analogous to a watchmaker’s relation to a watch. We can now recognize this anthropomorphic deity as the God of those modern atheists who caricature religious belief as a wish-fulfillment fantasy about a cosmic father-figure.
Looked at this way, deist and atheist challenges to traditional religion, far from following in Spinoza’s footsteps, are decidedly un-Spinozist. If the 17th-century churches had been more attentive to the Ethics they might have better fortified their God against the ravages of secularism to come. Instead, Protestants and Catholics alike denounced Spinoza as an atheist.
[Yet] Spinoza’s religion does not fit easily into any pre-existent category. Like Thomas Aquinas, he treated religio not as a system of beliefs but as a virtue—the virtue of honoring God.
Read more on Times Literary Supplement: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/god-intoxicated-man-spinoza-philosophy-essay/