Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics by Clare Carlisle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Resting in God

Baruch Spinoza is another intellectual hero of my youth. I have not read him to any significant degree since then. But reading Clare Carlisle’s interpretation of his Ethics reveals to me how much I had assimilated his thought and gradually came to presume it as my own. Perhaps this demonstrates just how important - and potentially dangerous - learning is. We inevitably become what we are taught. The principal task of old age may be to decide if we have been taught well. Carlisle’s book convinces me that I probably was.

Spinoza was an honest man. I mean this is a very specific sense which I think Carlisle captures without giving it a name. His honesty is not simply that of saying what he thought - that trait is obvious from the difficulties which ensued from it - or of following a logic no matter where it might lead - such a compulsion is indistinguishable from a sort of intellectual fanaticism which he didn’t have. Rather, Spinoza’s honesty was about what he didn’t know. Sometimes this appears as ambiguity, but I find what he has to say - about God, religion, and eternal life - as modest and circumspectly precise rather than vague. He is explicit as he can be, but no more than that. In short, Spinoza’s honesty extends to his own intellectual limitations. He doesn’t claim to know how the world works but only his part in it, and not even that with complete certainty.

Carlisle insists that for Spinoza religion has nothing to do with creeds, doctrine, or confessional statements. She’s right to do so. These are words, and regardless of their purported origin, remain words which cannot represent the life of the Spirit. For Spinoza, religion is a virtue, that is to say, a manner of behaving, a code perhaps, that guides our actions in light of their effects on others. His religion is truly ethical in that it begins and ends with consideration of not just the well-being of fellow-humans but also of the entire cosmos. This is the exact opposite of dogmatic religion which attempts to derive ethics from theological propositions. As Carlisle points out, Spinoza was devoted to his work but not a man of passionate obsession with its content. He criticised himself as much as others did.

Spinoza was not a contrarian interested in making a name for himself, with controversial views, in academia, the church, or businesss. He was aware of his attraction to honour and reputation, but rejected them as incompatible with the need to express that which he felt important. Although he started from a different set of intellectual presumptions than those prevailing at the time, he frequently ended with the endorsement of religious views from Judaism, Catholicism, and Calvinism. He ‘purified’ relevant teachings in a manner entirely different from that of Luther, for example, who started with a list of objections from which he created a movement that in time took on the character of the institution he challenged. Spinoza had no interest in a political or religious movement of reform. His goal was intelligent conversation with whoever found such conversation useful. His intention was never to convert, or even convince, but to remind us of truths we might already know.

Spinoza did not engage in his intellectual journey in order to direct the course of the lives of others but to seek the wisdom that would change the plan of his own life that he then shared with others - much in the manner of Ignatius Loyola with his Spiritual Exercises. He practised what he preached as his primary mode of preaching. Later psychological science might call his personality integrated or whole in the sense that his spiritual, intellectual, and physical life were constantly present to his awareness. His ultimate goal was not to do good in the sense that idealists use that term but to rest in the good, to literally enjoy the peace of a reflective existence in a cosmos that wished him neither good nor evil. This commitment conforms with the Christian and Jewish mandate to consider others before oneself. The implication is that the ultimate good, that is God, is literally the service of oneself to the rest of creation however that may arise given one’s abilities and situation.

It was Spinoza who led me into the philosophy of purpose of C S. Peirce, Josiah Royce and a certain school of American Pragmatism. The first rule of life for Spinoza was to speak in order to provoke a response which required listening. Through listening the intentions of others could be heard and incorporated into one’s own purpose. By so doing, one’s own intellect is healed of its deficiencies and in that sense purified. This still seems to me a radical philosophy. Although I am no longer as confident as my youthful self of its feasibility, I remain emotionally committed to its possibility, as I also do to the consequences of what he called ‘a turning of the soul,’ an attitude which doesn’t anticipate redemption in some other world but a life of loving kindness in this world.

It was the first Christian, Paul of Tarsus, who redefined religion as belief rather than virtuous living. His metaphysics of Christus Victor, Christ Triumphant, was an infectious neurosis that spread rapidly because of its simple demand for its followers to have faith in its complex trinitarian God and to state the necessary formulae of their belief publicly. In response Judaism became, even to itself, an opposing faith despite its ethical core and ancient m0nolatry. Islam arose in the context of a world of religion already defined in terms of faith with its belief in an unambiguously monotheistic God. Spinoza was the first to recover the pre-Pauline idea of religion as a ritual and ethical practice. Remarkably, it was Spinoza who anticipated a growing interest in virtue ethics among Catholics from the middle of the 20th century.

The principle of Spinoza’s religion is straightforward: Acting one’s way into a new way of thinking is far more effective than trying to think one’s way into a new way of acting. This is pure Spinoza. I think that this is the path to the place of rest he found for himself and left for the rest of us.

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