Baruch Spinoza

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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.

He was born in 1632 in Amsterdam, into a community of Sephardic Jews who had fled the Iberian Inquisition. In 1656, at twenty-three, he was issued a cherem — a writ of expulsion of unusual severity — by the city’s Jewish congregation; the document curses him and forbids any contact, though it never specifies the opinions that earned it. He took the Latin name Benedict, never married, declined a university chair, and supported himself grinding optical lenses, a trade whose fine glass dust is sometimes blamed for the lung illness that killed him at forty-four. He published little in his lifetime and most of it anonymously. The Ethics appeared only after his death, in 1677.

The book is written in the form of Euclid’s geometry — definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs — an attempt to reason about God, mind, and the passions with the same necessity that governs a theorem. From the single substance follow two consequences that scandalised his age. There is no free will in the ordinary sense: human beings are part of nature and bound by its causes, and freedom means understanding that necessity rather than escaping it. And the God so described is not a person — it does not choose, judge, love, or answer prayer. To his contemporaries this was atheism in a thin disguise, and for a century “Spinozist” was an accusation rather than a description.

Whether Spinoza belongs to Western esotericism is a question scholarship treats carefully. He was no occultist, and he was sharply critical, in the Theological-Political Treatise, of scripture read as hidden code. Yet his identification of God with the whole of nature gave later thinkers a rigorous vocabulary for an old intuition — that the divine is not above the world but immanent within it. The Romantics seized on him; Goethe called the Ethics one of the books that formed him, and the German idealists argued for decades over what to do with his God. Much of modern pantheism, and a good deal of the nature-mysticism that runs through later esoteric writing, traces back through this one quiet man and his geometry of the infinite.

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.

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