There has been a lot of misinformation concerning Pantheism on the forum lately, particularly in regard to attempts to conflate Spinoza Pantheism with various New Age belief systems. Although the primary perpetrator of this misinformation has retracted, I believe it is important to state exactly what Spinoza Pantheism means.
For this reason, I am going to define Spinoza Pantheism as best I understand it and ask other members of this forum if they agree with such a definition. This definition will include what Spinoza Pantheism is, and what it is not. Spinoza is notoriously difficult to quote from in any more than one sentence to convey a complex idea, so I will rely on some commentary as necessary.
First, I would like to define what is meant by God under Spinoza Pantheism, which is more complex than commonly thought, and is a difficult task at best.
God is the essential nature/essence that underlies all of reality observed and unobserved. Therefore God is within all of reality and all reality is a part, albeit a minute part, of God. This is what is meant by the term substance as used by Spinoza. Substance is not merely matter, as commonly understood according to our most popular definition but rather means the underlying essence in this sense of the word.
From Wikipedia at
Baruch Spinoza - Wikipedia
quote:
He contended that everything that exists in Nature/Universe is one Reality (substance)and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza argued that God and Nature were two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning "to stand beneath" rather than "matter") that underlies the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect are only understood in part. That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do.
To elaborate further, from page 409 of Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll:
quote:
“Nothing exists save the one substance - the self-contained, self-sustaining, and self-explanatory system which constitutes the world.” This is Roger Scruton’s summary of Spinoza”s metaphysics. “This system may be understood in many ways: as God or Nature; as mind or matter; as creator or created; as eternal or temporal. It can be known adequately and clearly through its attributes, partially and confusedly through its modes . All things that exist, exist necessarily, in throroughgoing interdependence.” This is a philosophy of “both-and,” not “either-or” and it has tremendous implications for religion and politics. If God lives in all that is, then a human being may have no great need of the mediating institutions of church or synagogue to be in contact with the divine.
This definition does not mean that everyone is God, or that God is simply the sum of all observable parts of the universe. It also is not equivalent to Deism, which as best I understand implies a God that is separate from creation and which initially creates the universe and then does not personally interfere with its workings.
There are several implications to any religion that considers an impersonal God the underlying essence or ”substance’ of the universe.
Such a belief does not allow for an anthropomorphic image of an all-powerful male God with white skin and flowing beard such as in Michelangelo’s paintings or the concept of Santa Claus. Concepts such as gender, race, even emotion, do not apply to a supreme being that is obviously far greater than a mere projection of the believer. Often, pantheists are accused of atheism because the definition of religion, among both the majority of believers and atheists, demands an anthropomorphic deity. This is a clear misrepresentation of not only Pantheism, but also Taoism and Buddhism.
God is impersonal and therefore not the source of good and evil as is commonly understood in Western religion. Good and evil are subjective terms that are real only in relation to the observer. Therefore there is no such thing as an absolute morality. To illustrate this Spinoza states:
quote:
“Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf”
Spinoza Pantheism is deterministic, which means that even God did not have free will in creating the universe, rather the creation is a necessary action of God by definition. It also means the individual does not have free will but only the illusion of choice.
The business of free-will vs. determinism is one of the few areas where I am not in complete agreement with Spinoza. However, Spinoza was obviously unaware of quantum mechanics and while he may have been wrong in this particular case under each and every scenario, I do believe that most of what we call free-will is an illusion.
Because all people are in essence, a part of God, all people are equal. As mentioned before, such a belief has political significance.
From page 102 of the Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart
quote:
Spinoza’s advocacy of democracy on the basis of individual rights was extraordinarily bold for its time, and it qualifies him as the first modern political philosopher. He was indisputably the forerunner of the theorists who would later underwrite the Constitution of the United States, the French Revolution, and the rest of the secular, liberal, and democratic order of the day,
Spinoza was the first person to my knowledge to criticize the common interpretation of the Bible and actually die of something other than at a burning stake. He insisted that one must think when reading the Bible and not simply act as a fundamentalist dullard who shuts off their mind to all but the authority of temporal rulers.
From Chapter VII of the Theological-Political Treatise by Spinoza himself:
quote:
When people declare, as all are ready, to do, that the Bible is the Word of God teaching man true blessedness and the way of salvation, they evidently do not mean what they say; for the masses take no pains at all to live according to Scripture, and we see most people endeavouring to hawk about their own commentaries as the word of God, and giving their best efforts, under the guise of religion, to compelling others to think as they do: we generally see, I say, theologians anxious to learn how to wring their inventions and sayings out of the sacred text, and to fortify, them with Divine authority. Such persons never display less scruple or more zeal than when they are interpreting Scripture or the mind of the Holy Ghost; if we ever see them perturbed, it is not that they fear to attribute some error to the Holy Spirit, and to stray from the right path, but that they are afraid to be convicted of error by others, and thus to overthrow and bring into contempt their own authority. But if men really believed what they verbally testify of Scripture, they would adopt quite a different plan of life: their minds would not be agitated by so many contentions, nor so many hatreds, and they would cease to be excited by such a blind and rash passion for interpreting the sacred writings, and excogitating novelties in religion. On the contrary, they would not dare to adopt, as the teaching of Scripture, anything which they could not plainly deduce therefrom: lastly, those sacrilegious persons who have dared, in several passages, to interpolate the Bible, would have shrunk from so great a crime, and would have stayed their sacrilegious hands.
And further on:
quote:
The history of a Scriptural statement comprises -
I. The nature and properties of the language in which the books of the Bible were written, and in which their authors were accustomed to speak. We shall thus be able to investigate every expression by comparison with common conversational usages.
Now all the writers both of the Old Testament and the New were Hebrews: therefore, a knowledge of the Hebrew language is before all things necessary, not only for the comprehension of the Old Testament, which was written in that tongue, but also of the New: for although the latter was published in other languages, yet its characteristics are Hebrew.
II. An analysis of each book and arrangement of its contents under heads; so that we may have at hand the various texts which treat of a given subject. Lastly, a note of all the passages which are ambiguous or obscure, or which seem mutually contradictory.
I call passages clear or obscure according as their meaning is inferred easily or with difficulty in relation to the context, not according as their truth is perceived easily or the reverse by reason. We are at work not on the truth of passages, but solely on their meaning. We must take especial care, when we are in search of the meaning of a text, not to be led away by our reason in so far as it is founded on principles of natural knowledge (to say nothing of prejudices): in order not to confound the meaning of a passage with its truth, we must examine it solely by means of the signification of the words, or by a reason acknowledging no foundation but Scripture.
I will illustrate my meaning by an example. The words of Moses, "God is a fire" and "God is jealous," are perfectly clear so long as we regard merely the signification of the words, and I therefore reckon them among the clear passages, though in relation to reason and truth they are most obscure: still, although the literal meaning is repugnant to the natural light of reason, nevertheless, if it cannot be clearly overruled on grounds and principles derived from its Scriptural "history," it, that is, the literal meaning, must be the one retained: and contrariwise if these passages literally interpreted are found to clash with principles derived from Scripture, though such literal interpretation were in absolute harmony with reason, they must be interpreted in a different manner, i.e. metaphorically.
How many self described Christians refuse to understand the above 350 years later.
While Spinoza strove to understand the Bible, his conclusions concerning religion are not normally associated with Christianity. He held God is worshiped best by using one’s intelligence to understand God, which is basically equivalent to understanding nature. Therefore, of all religions, Spinoza Pantheism holds science in the greatest respect because the act of doing science is holy. To put it simply God is best revealed through the study of the works of God (nature) rather than the words of men (Bible, Quran, etc.).
Spinoza also holds that there is no personal immortality but rather only the impersonal immortality of the truth. The more truth on holds, the more knowledge of nature, the more parts of that person are immortal.
To learn more about Spinoza Pantheism (and there is much, much more), I find one of the best concise sources is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at
Baruch Spinoza (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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Here is a quote from that source to help whet your appetite:
quote:
What, in the end, replaces the passionate love for ephemeral "goods" is an intellectual love for an eternal, immutable good that we can fully and stably possess, God. The third kind of knowledge generates a love for its object, and in this love consists not joy, a passion, but blessedness itself. Taking his cue from Maimonides's view of human eudaimonia, Spinoza argues that the mind's intellectual love of God is our understanding of the universe, our virtue, our happiness, our well-being and our "salvation". It is also our freedom and autonomy, as we approach the condition wherein what happens to us follows from our nature (as a determinate and determined mode of one of God's attributes) alone and not as a result of the ways external things affect us. Spinoza's "free person" is one who bears the gifts and losses of fortune with equanimity, does only those things that he believes to be "the most important in life", takes care for the well-being of others (doing what he can to insure that they, too, achieve some relief from the disturbances of the passions through understanding), and is not anxious about death. The free person neither hopes for any eternal, otherworldly rewards nor fears any eternal punishments. He knows that the soul is not immortal in any personal sense, but is endowed only with a certain kind of eternity. The more the mind consists of true and adequate ideas (which are eternal), the more of it remains ” within God's attribute of Thought ” after the death of the body and the disappearance of that part of the mind that corresponds to the body's duration. This understanding of his place in the natural scheme of things brings to the free individual true peace of mind.
Of course all of Spinoza’s works are directly available full text online so one can learn what he was talking about from the source if one so chooses.
I find it interesting that Spinoza through intense study of the Bible and Judaism independently came to similar conclusions concerning the nature of God and reality as Lao Tse and Taoism did some 2000 years earlier.
To emphasize why Spinoza is relevant today, please allow me to provide some fulfilled prophecy from his pen.
From The Courtier and the Heretic, page 181:
quote:
Because he rose so high above history in some sense, too, Spinoza foresaw its general direction with an often uncanny prescience. He described a secular, liberal, democratic order a full century before the world provided any durable examples of the same. Two centuries before Darwin proposed a theory to explain how the grand design of nature evolves through natural processes, without need of a designer, he effectively announced that such an explanation was inevitable. In an age where the brain was generally thought to be about as complex as a bowl of custard, he anticipated insights from the neurosciences that would be three centuries in coming. The world he describes is in many ways the modern one within which we live.
It is for these reasons I consider Spinoza the true prophet of God in a similar manner in which one considers Mohammed the true prophet of God in Islam. Therefore I consider my belief a religion.
What I seek to debate includes the question is the above a reasonable definition of Spinoza Pantheism and if so, do these beliefs qualify as a religion as opposed to a clever form of atheism?
Faith and Belief I would think.
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