Baruch Spinoza

← Encyclopedia

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent whose central work, the Ethics, argues that God and nature are one and the same thing — Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature. There is, on his account, only a single substance, infinite and self-caused, of which everything that exists is a mode or expression. Nothing stands outside it; nothing was created from beyond it. The universe is not the work of God so much as God under one of its aspects. It is the most rigorous statement Western thought has produced of a fully immanent divinity — the divine not above the world but identical with it — and it was worked out, line by demonstrated line, by a man who had been cut off from the community that raised him and who took care, for the rest of his short life, not to be drawn into the open.

The marrano inheritance

He was born in 1632 in Amsterdam, into a community of Sephardic Jews who had fled the Iberian Inquisition. They were marranos — conversos, families forced to the baptismal font in Spain and Portugal and returning, in the comparative tolerance of the Dutch Republic, to the open practice of Judaism their grandparents had been made to abandon. The household tongue was Portuguese; the boy was Bento de Espinosa at home, Baruch in the synagogue, Benedictus in the Latin of his later books — three forms of the same word for blessed. He was schooled at the Talmud Torah of the united Portuguese congregation, in Hebrew and the classical Jewish texts, under teachers who included Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira. When his father died in 1654 he took over the family importing business for a time and, by custom, recited the mourner’s Kaddish. There is no sign, in these years, of the storm to come.

In 1656, at twenty-three, the lay governing board of the congregation — the ma’amad — issued against him a cherem, a writ of expulsion and ban, on 27 July (6 Av 5416). It is among the harshest such documents to survive. The Portuguese text calls down upon him every curse written in the Law, that the Lord blot out his name from under heaven, and forbids any member of the community to come within four cubits of him, to speak with him, to read anything he wrote, or to do him any service. It was never rescinded. Yet the document is silent about the substance of the offense: it speaks only of abominable heresies he practiced and taught and of monstrous deeds, and never names a single opinion. The reasons have to be reconstructed from outside. Three years later, in August 1659, two travelers — the Augustinian friar Tomás Solano y Robles and a soldier, Miguel Pérez de Maltranilla — testified before the Madrid Inquisition that Spinoza and his associate Juan de Prado had come to think the Law was not true, that the soul dies with the body, and that there is no God except philosophically. Those depositions, unearthed and published by the scholar I. S. Révah in 1959, are the nearest thing to contemporaneous evidence of what the ban was for. The familiar tale of a would-be assassin lunging at Spinoza with a knife outside the synagogue comes from much later biography and belongs to legend rather than record.

After the ban he adopted the Latin name Benedict, withdrew from every religious affiliation, and never returned to any. He never married. He declined the offer of a chair at Heidelberg, unwilling to trade his freedom of thought for a salary and the obligations of a public faculty. He supported himself instead by grinding optical lenses — a precise and patient trade whose fine glass dust is sometimes blamed for the lung illness, probably tuberculosis, that killed him. He moved from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg near Leiden, then to Voorburg, and finally to The Hague. His seal bore a single thorny rose and one word, Caute — Caution. He published little in his lifetime and most of it anonymously; the only book to appear under his own name was an exposition of the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663). He died at The Hague on 21 February 1677, aged 44. The Ethics appeared only after his death, that same year, in the Opera Posthuma his friends saw through the press with the imprint deliberately blank and the author given as no more than the initials B.D.S.

The geometry of the infinite

The Ethics — Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata, “Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order” — is written in the form of Euclid’s geometry: definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs, corollaries, and scholia, an attempt to reason about God, mind, and the passions with the same necessity that governs a theorem. It begins from the definition of that which is causa sui, self-caused — that whose essence involves existence — and argues that there can be only one such being. Two substances of the same nature could not be distinguished; an absolutely infinite substance leaves nothing outside itself by which a second could be bounded. So there is one substance, infinite, necessary, self-caused, and Spinoza names it God. Whatever is, is in God; nothing can be or be conceived without God. This single substance has infinitely many attributes — infinitely many ways of being, each expressing its essence — of which the human intellect grasps two: thought and extension. Particular things, every body and every mind, are not little substances of their own but modes, modifications of the one substance, waves in a single sea. Spinoza marks the distinction between natura naturans, nature naturing, God as the active power and the attributes, and natura naturata, nature natured, the whole train of modes that follows from it.

The signature formula, Deus sive Natura, makes the two words interchangeable. Already in the Theological-Political Treatise he had written that to say all things happen by the laws of nature and to say they are ordered by the decree of God is to say the same thing twice. From the single substance follow the two consequences that scandalized his age. There is no free will in the ordinary sense: human beings are part of nature and bound by its causes, and the feeling of free choice is only ignorance of what determines us. Freedom, for Spinoza, is not exemption from necessity but the understanding of it — to be free is to act from the necessity of one’s own nature rather than to be pushed by causes one does not grasp. And the God so described is not a person. It does not choose, deliberate, judge, love any one creature, or answer prayer; there are no miracles, no final causes, no providence bending events toward human ends. To imagine such a God, Spinoza writes, is to feign a deity made in the image of man, with a body and a mind and the passions of a man. To his contemporaries this was atheism in a thin disguise, and for a century “Spinozist” served as an accusation rather than a description.

Yet the Ethics does not end in negation. Its later parts climb from the bondage of the passions toward a kind of blessedness. Spinoza ranks human knowing in three grades: imaginatio, the disordered knowledge of hearsay and random experience, the only source of error; ratio, reason proceeding through adequate ideas and the common properties of things; and highest, scientia intuitiva, an intuitive knowing that moves from the idea of God’s essence to the essence of singular things and grasps them as they follow from the divine nature. To know things this way is to know them sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity — not as enduring in time but as following necessarily from what cannot not be. From such knowledge there arises what he calls the intellectual love of God, and in the most startling propositions of the work he identifies it with God’s own love: the mind’s intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love by which God loves himself. The drive beneath all of this he names the conatus — the striving by which each thing, so far as it can, perseveres in its own being; in a mind, that striving becomes the will to understand. Blessedness, the Ethics concludes, is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

The Cartesian inheritance and the radical departure

Spinoza is one of the three great Continental rationalists, with René Descartes before him and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz after. The debt to Cartesianism is real and structural: much of the technical vocabulary of the Ethics — substance, attribute, mode, the geometric ambition itself — is inherited from Descartes, and his first published work was a geometric exposition of Cartesian principles. But the departure is total. Where Descartes left a created universe of many finite substances overseen by a transcendent God, and split mind from body into two distinct substances joined by a benevolent decree, Spinoza collapsed the whole scheme into one. There is a single substance; thought and extension are not two things but one thing conceived two ways, so that mind and body are the same mode read under two attributes, and the order of ideas is the order of things. The occasionalist solution his contemporary Nicolas Malebranche reached for — God intervening at every moment to coordinate a mind and a body that cannot touch — Spinoza had no need of, because for him there was no gap to bridge. Against Leibniz’s universe of innumerable windowless monads, each a world apart, he set the opposite extreme: one being, and everything else its expression. From Blaise Pascal, his near-contemporary, he could not have stood further — where Pascal staked everything on a hidden God and the wager of faith against an indifferent cosmos, Spinoza offered a God wholly disclosed in the order of nature and a peace reached not by faith but by understanding.

The doctrine of a single immanent divinity has older kin. The line runs back through Giordano Bruno, whose infinite universe was alive with a divine soul diffused through all things, and further still to Philo of Alexandria, whose Hellenistic-Jewish synthesis of scripture and Greek philosophy supplied a long tradition of reading the divine into the structure of the world. Among Spinoza’s own contemporaries the English thinker Anne Conway, working from Kabbalistic and Platonic materials, reached a vitalist monism of one created substance graded into spirit and body — a different route, from different premises, to the conviction that reality is finally of one kind. There is also a deep, contested background in medieval Jewish philosophy. The apophatic theology of Maimonides and Bahya ibn Paquda, with its insistence that nothing positive can be predicated of God, and the Maimonidean rationalism that made philosophy the highest service of God, formed the intellectual air Spinoza breathed before the cherem — and his refusal of an anthropomorphic deity can be read as carrying that tradition past the point its own authors would have followed.

Reception: the making of the “mystical” Spinoza

Whether Spinoza belongs to Western esotericism is a question scholarship treats carefully. He was no occultist, and in the Theological-Political Treatise he was sharply critical of scripture read as hidden code — the book is a founding text of historical biblical criticism, arguing that the Bible is a human document to be read in its own language and circumstances, not a cipher concealing eternal philosophy. The leading biographer Steven Nadler states the case flatly: there is no mysticism in Spinoza’s philosophy, because his commitment to the principle that everything can and must be rationally understood leaves no room for the ineffable union mysticism trades in. And yet his identification of God with the whole of nature gave later thinkers a rigorous vocabulary for an old intuition, and the last part of the Ethics — the intellectual love of God, the eternity of the mind, blessedness as understanding — supplied materials that readers across two centuries have assembled into a “mystical Spinoza.” That figure is largely a later historiographic construct, built from what the texts contain but do not themselves label as mystical.

The transformation came in Germany. For most of a century after his death Spinoza was a byword for atheism, the satanic thinker of Pierre Bayle’s dictionary. Then, in 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi revealed that the revered dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had, in conversation, confessed himself a Spinozist, embracing the old credo hen kai pan — One and All. The resulting Pantheism Controversy drew in nearly every major German mind of the age, and its unintended effect was to make Spinozism respectable, even fashionable: a middle path between mechanical materialism and orthodox theism, scientific in its naturalism and spiritual in its depth. The Romantics seized on him. Novalis called him a God-intoxicated man, and the epithet stuck. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the Ethics at a decisive moment and named it among the books that formed him, drawn less to its proofs than to the serenity of a mind that loved a God beyond reward and punishment; the German idealists argued for decades over what to do with his God, some reading the system as a pantheism in which God is the totality of nature, others as an acosmism in which only the one substance is fully real and the world of finite things is deposed before it. Through these readings Spinoza became a principal source for modern monism, for philosophical pantheism, and for the nature-mysticism that runs through later esoteric writing — a current in which his austere geometry was recruited, often against its own grain, to support a perennial wisdom it never claimed. The visionary cosmology of Emmanuel Swedenborg and the universalist constructions of traditionalism and perennialism are adjacent later phenomena, kindred in their reach for an immanent or unified divine, but distinct in kind: Spinoza demonstrated; they revealed. The discipline the man himself practiced — the patient distinction of what is demonstrated from what is merely imagined — is the best instrument for telling his philosophy apart from what was later made of it. His own system, meanwhile, lives on as its own thing, separate even from the -ism that bears his name and from the long career of that word as both creed and slur.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

Spinoza’s works first reached the public in the Opera Posthuma of 1677, the volume his Amsterdam circle — Jarig Jelles, Lodewijk Meyer, and the printer Jan Rieuwertsz among them — brought out within months of his death, gathering the Ethics, the unfinished Political Treatise, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the correspondence, and a grammar of Hebrew. The Theological-Political Treatise had appeared in 1670 under a false imprint naming “Henricus Künrath, Hamburg,” when in fact it was printed by Rieuwertsz in Amsterdam — a precaution the seal’s Caute would have approved. The publication history of these editions, with their textual variants and clandestine reprints, is documented in granular detail by The Spinoza Web, a digital scholarly edition of the early printings. The standard English translation in the public domain is that of R. H. M. Elwes, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (Bell, 1883–84), whose text of the Ethics is freely readable at Wikisource; the modern scholarly standard is Edwin Curley’s Collected Works (Princeton, 1985 and 2016).

The serious academic study of Spinoza was consolidated by Frederick Pollock’s Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (1880; second edition 1899) and Harold H. Joachim’s A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza (1901), both now public domain, and crowned by Harry Austryn Wolfson’s two-volume The Philosophy of Spinoza (1934), which read him as the last of the medievals and unfolded the scholastic and rabbinic architecture beneath his proofs. The contemporary literature turns on two poles: Steven Nadler, whose Spinoza: A Life (1999; revised 2018) is the standard biography and whose Spinoza’s Heresy (2001) anatomizes the doctrine of the eternity of the mind, argues against any mysticism in the system; Yitzhak Y. Melamed, in Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (2013) and a long series of essays, is the central voice on the metaphysics and its German afterlife, weighing the pantheist, panentheist, and acosmist readings against the text. A clear overview of the philosophy, with full bibliography, is the entry by Nadler in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Inquisition depositions that bear on the cherem were established by I. S. Révah, Spinoza et le Dr. Juan de Prado (Mouton, 1959).

He asked, in the end, that thought face necessity without consolation. Among the propositions of Part IV he holds that the free person thinks of nothing less than of death — not from defiance, but because such a mind is occupied wholly with life and its understanding. He was buried in the churchyard of a faith he did not share, having belonged, in the strict sense, to no congregation at all.

→ Related: Rene Descartes · Nicolas Malebranche · Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe · Blaise Pascal · Cartesianism · Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · Giordano Bruno · Philo Of Alexandria · Anne Conway · Spinozism · Pantheism · Monism · Immanence · Substance · Free Will · Atheism · Acosmism · Emmanuel Swedenborg · Traditionalism Perennialism · Jewish Negative Theology Maimonides Bahya · Maimonidean Rationalism