Spinoza, born in Amsterdam in 1632, refused to blindly follow the rigid religious dogmas of his day, arguing instead that everyone should take his or her own path in deciding what to believe.
Spinoza’s beliefs can be likened to those in Hinduism, yet he seems to overlook the beauty of the Hindu religion. Hinduism is rich and well-suited for many different types of people, which is something that seems to be missing in Spinoza’s philosophy.
He loathed groupthink and believed that most organized religions, particularly the Judeo-Christian kind, fueled delusion and sectarianism. At the heart of his critique was the view that religious authorities had radically misconceived what God actually is, distorting truth and corrupting the minds of their followers. They had fallen for the illusion of an anthropocentric God: an external being acting upon the world of human affairs, intervening according to His whims. In this view, God resembled a king.
For Spinoza, however, this conception of God, prevalent in Christianity and Judaism, could not have been further from the truth.
God was not “like a man, consisting of a body and a mind, and subject to passions,” he wrote. That view was “superstitious” and contrary to true faith. Furthermore, believers in such a deity were motivated more by fear than by virtue. The terror of divine wrath was not a healthy foundation upon which to build one’s religion; the framework of salvation and damnation led to emotional instability that was incompatible with a virtuous life. In a letter to a young man named Albert Burgh, a recent convert to Catholicism (and later mayor of Amsterdam), Spinoza wrote: “Having become a slave to [the Roman] church, you have been guided not so much by the love of God as by fear of hell.” There were few institutions more adept, he added, at “deceiving ordinary people and controlling men’s minds.”
Spinoza argued that whatever exists is in God. The divine being is not some distant force, but is all around us. Nothing in nature is separate from Him: neither people, animals, nor inanimate objects. Today, the view that God is synonymous with nature is called “pantheism,” a term often retrospectively applied to Spinoza. Whatever the label, this view has been portrayed as a denial of God’s transcendent power. Spinoza was accused of denying the ontological difference between God and His creations, thereby trivializing the creator.
However, Spinoza’s philosophy does not trivialize God in the slightest. It is true that in his conception, God is intimately bound up with nature. But just because God is not separate from the world does not mean He is identical to it. In fact, He is distinct, as there is a relationship of dependence that flows in one direction: we are constitutionally dependent on God, but God is not dependent on us, argues Spinoza.
For Spinoza, everything we are, and indeed the continued existence of all things, is a manifestation of God’s power. Carlisle uses the term “being-in-God” to describe this aspect of Spinoza’s thought: the way we are created by—and conceived through—God.
In some respects, Spinoza was following a well-established Christian tradition in his conception of the divine. The 8th-century monk John of Damascus said that “toward God all things tend, and in God they have their existence.” Augustine wrote in the 4th century AD that “all things are in God,” a view later echoed by Aquinas. Spinoza, in turn, echoed them all and traced the line of thinking further back to a contemporary of Jesus: “That all things are in God and move in God, I affirm, I say, with Paul.”
Anselm wrote: “In You I move and in You I have my being,” expanding on this thought: “You, though nothing can be without You, are nevertheless not in place or time, but all things are in You. For nothing contains You, but You contain all things.”
It may sound unusual, yet it resonates with those who have experienced an out-of-body experience or lost the identification with their body.
Being in God is not only an ontological reality but also a spiritual imperative. Anselm states: “I pray, O God, that I may know You and love You, so that I may rejoice in You.” Everything exists in God, but we can participate more fully in the divine nature through reason and our intuitive understanding of God’s omnipresence. The more we manage to do this, the higher the state of joy we can attain, bringing us closer to sharing in perfection.
Additionally, there is a real-world ethical dimension to being in God. Spinoza’s faith has practical significance, guiding the believer’s actions. He writes: “The good which everyone who seeks virtue wants for himself, he also desires for other people; and this desire is greater as his knowledge of God is greater.” True religion consists in the exercise of loving kindness.
Of course, Spinoza and his forebears differ on many questions: the existence of angels, the afterlife, and what counts as a fundamental “substance.” Moreover, Spinoza rejected the teleology that gained prominence in the Middle Ages—the habit of making sense of things by emphasizing the final end to which they are (supposedly) pointed.
Instead, Spinoza’s thought treads a narrow line between the old and the new, the medieval and the modern. Much of his philosophy was decidedly modern in its themes and concepts, and he took a keen interest in new scientific discoveries.
“Anyone open to the idea of religious belief but uncomfortable with orthodox teachings should read Spinoza.”
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