P H I L O S O P H Y

8 TLS MAY 15, 2020

T EN YEARS AGO, a manuscript of the Ethics,Benedict de Spinoza’s philosophical master-piece, was discovered in the archives of the

Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.The manuscript, labelled Tractatus theologiae andannotated on the last page by an official of theRoman Inquisition, had been handed in to the HolyOffice in September 1677 by the Danish physicianand scientist Niels Stenson, who had been amember of Spinoza’s circle during his student yearsin Leiden, before converting to Catholicism (“asuperb physician, turned into a mediocre theolo-gian” Leibniz complained). As rumours about Spi-noza’s atheism whirled through Christendom,Stensen denounced his former friend at the courtof the Holy Office, demanding “remedies” to stallthe spread of “evil” ideas and to prevent othersfrom being “infected” (non se n’infettino) by them.The Catholic Church added the Ethics to its Indexof prohibited books.

It is an irresistible irony that it was Spinoza’s cen-sors in the Vatican who, fearful of atheism, preserveda manuscript of his most important work. Thanks tothe anxieties of the seventeenth-century Inquisition,twenty-first-century scholars can examine a com-plete version of the Ethics dating from its author’sfinal years. In the autumn of 2011 Johns Hopkins Uni-versity hosted a conference on Young Spinoza, andthe first speaker was Pina Totaro, who with her col-league Leen Spruit had found the Vatican codex theprevious year. As the organizer of the conference washanding out photocopies of the manuscript in prepa-ration for her talk, it turned out that a Vatican librar-ian had emailed Totaro the previous night, asking hernot to distribute scans of the manuscript. Alas, thehorses had already bolted, and upon the organizer’srequest to return the photocopies, few galloped backinto the stable.

Presses Universitaires de France are about to pub-lish a critical edition of the Ethics, presenting a new

Latin text established by consulting the Vaticanmanuscript alongside Latin and Dutch editions ofthe work published shortly after Spinoza’s death. Intheir editorial introduction, Pierre-François Moreauand Piet Steenbakkers describe how the Vaticanmanuscript was hastily copied from Spinoza’s origi-nal sometime in 1674 or 1675 for E. W. von Tschirn-haus, Spinoza’s philosophical disciple and thesharpest of his correspondents, who travelled fromAmsterdam to Rome in 1677. It consists in a packetof ten small paper-wrapped cahiers “made to meas-ure” for this journey – not only in a handy pocket-sized format, but with a view to disguising its con-troversial contents: “sans couverture, sans titre,sans nom d’auteur, sans table des matières”.

Spinoza died before the Vatican banned his Eth-ica, but he had anticipated its getting into trouble.In July 1675 – not long after Tschirnhaus’s copy wasproduced – the forty-three-year-old philosopherwrote to his longstanding correspondent HenryOldenburg, the first Secretary of the Royal Society,announcing his plan to publish a five-part treatise.Spinoza had been working on his metaphysicalopus since the early 1660s, and now he set off fromhis quiet home in the Hague to Amsterdam to getthe work to press. In the autumn of 1675, however,he wrote again to Oldenburg, this time with newsthat “certain Theologians” and “stupid Cartesians”were racing to denounce his views to the Dutchauthorities, since “a rumour was spread every-where that a certain book of mine about God wasin the press, and that in it I tried to show that thereis no God”. Spinoza, whose personal motto was“Caution”, decided to delay publication.

Oldenburg wrote back from London in November,seeking a clarification of his friend’s religious posi-tion. He was especially worried about Spinoza’s viewof the relationship between God and Nature: “a greatmany people think you confuse these two things”.In his reply, Spinoza confessed that “I favour anopinion concerning God and Nature far differentfrom the one Modern Christians usually defend”. Yethe aligned himself with older religious traditions,both Jewish and Christian: “That all things are inGod and move in God, I affirm with Paul, and … with

all the ancient Hebrews, as far as we can conjecturefrom certain traditions, corrupted as they have beenin many ways”. Spinoza’s reference to “certain tradi-tions” may allude to Kabbalistic literature in whichthe identification of God and Nature is ubiquitous.In pre-modern Hebrew, the literal meaning of Kab-balah is “tradition”, and in the seventeenth centurythe Kabbalah was widely regarded as an ancient wis-dom of the mysteries of being, whose true signifi-cance had been corrupted over the ages.

Deus sive Natura, “God or Nature”, is probably themost quoted phrase in the Ethics, and it has oftenbeen taken as a slogan for Spinozism. Over the cen-turies the fame (and infamy) of this striking phrasehas diverted many readers’ attention from affinitiesbetween Spinoza’s doctrine of God and traditionaltheologies. As Oldenburg’s anxious enquiries sug-gest, for most of his Christian contemporaries Deussive Natura was a horrifying idea, akin to atheism.Modern scholars who interpret the Ethics as a heraldof scientific secularism echo this reaction, though ina more positive spirit, by claiming that Spinoza sim-ply reduces God to nature. Conversely, when theearly German Romantics embraced Spinoza, theyseized on the idea that nature herself – consideredas Natura naturans, a dynamic, creative power of“naturing” – is divine.

Yet readers have to wait until Part Four of theEthics, titled “On Human Bondage, or the power ofthe emotions”, to encounter the phrase Deus siveNatura. Part One of the book, “On God”, defines Godas an absolutely infinite substance. From this Spi-noza infers other features of God, such as simplicity,uniqueness and eternity. He also argues that every-thing else that exists is a “mode” (or modification)of substance, and thus constitutionally and asym-metrically dependent on God. Substance is in se, “initself” and caused by itself; modes are in alio, “inanother”. Spinoza’s concepts of substance and modelay the ground for his claim, a few pages into theEthics, that “Whatever is, is in God”.

Despite many readings of the Ethics which makethe phrase Deus sive Natura a cornerstone of Spi-noza’s metaphysical system, to say that everything,including the world as a whole, is in God – a positionnow labelled “panentheism” – is quite different fromclaiming that the world is God, the view usuallyknown as “pantheism”. Spinoza’s panentheismleaves room for the idea that God exceeds, or tran-scends, the sum total of all things (or “modes”). TheGod of the Ethics certainly transcends what we nor-mally call “nature”. This is inseparable from the factthat Spinoza’s God transcends human knowledgeand experience. God’s essence is expressed throughan infinity of attributes (or distinct ways of being),and we have access to just two of these attributes:thought and extension.

So Spinoza was not misrepresenting his own meta-physics when he told Henry Oldenburg that he“affirmed with Paul”, along with Hebrew writers,that all things “are in God and move in God” – areference to Acts 17:28. He was also correct in point-ing out that his view differed from the teaching of“modern Christians”. After Spinoza was banned byhis Jewish community as a young man, he lived allhis life in the Dutch Republic, religiously dominatedby the Calvinist theologians of the Dutch ReformedChurch. While Calvin was also fond of quoting Acts17:28 to accentuate human dependence on an omni-present God, his anthropomorphic descriptions ofGod’s wilful character make it difficult to avoid imag-ining a divine Ruler and Judge presiding above theworld.

The separation of God from nature that Spinoza,in 1675, recognized as distinctively “modern” wassharpened in eighteenth-century deism, and foundstriking expression in the image, popularized in Will-iam Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), of a divinedesigner whose relation to the natural world wasanalogous to a watchmaker’s relation to a watch. Wecan now recognize this anthropomorphic deity asthe God of those modern atheists who caricaturereligious belief as a wish-fulfilment fantasy about acosmic father-figure. Looked at this way, deist and

God-intoxicated manThe philosopher who questioned the existence of the world

CLARE CARLISLE ANDYITZHAK Y. MELAMED

Clare Carlisle’s latest book is Philosopher of the Heart: The restless life of Søren Kierkegaard, 2019, and she is the editor of Spinoza’s Ethics, translated by George Eliot, 2020

Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, and is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and thought, 2013

P H I L O S O P H Y

MAY 15, 2020 TLS 9

“atheist challenges to traditional religion, far fromfollowing in Spinoza’s footsteps, are decidedly unspi-nozist. If the seventeenth-century churches hadbeen more attentive to the Ethics they might havebetter fortified their God against the ravages of secu-larism to come. Instead, Protestants and Catholicsalike denounced Spinoza as an atheist.

By the end of the eighteeth century, however, anew assessment of Spinoza’s religiosity hademerged. The Lithuanian philosopher Salomon Mai-mon – admired by Kant as “the sharpest and deepestof his critics” – came to Spinoza after studying theTalmud, the Kabbalah and Maimonides. In 1792 Mai-mon’s Lebensgeschichte, or Autobiography, shockedreaders with the claim that “it is hard to fathom howSpinoza’s system could have been made out to beatheistic, since the two systems are diametricallyopposed. The atheist system denies the existence ofGod; Spinoza’s denies the existence of the world.Thus, Spinoza’s system should really be called acos-mism”.

Since the Ethics repeatedly affirms that whateverexists, exists in God, Maimon was right to emphasizeSpinoza’s commitment to the existence of God, andto the non-existence of anything that is not (in) God.Glossing over this stubborn little word “in”, Maimonargued that for Spinoza, whatever is, is simply God.In his lectures on the history of philosophy deliveredin Berlin during the 1820s, G. W. F. Hegel adoptedverbatim Maimon’s interpretation of Spinoza as anacosmist. Hegel also repeated Maimon’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Leibnizian rationalists, such asChristian Wolff and Moses Mendelssohn, merelystruck a compromise between acosmism and athe-ism when they insisted on the existence of both Godand finite substances.

Maimon helped inspire a new German Spinozism,which found memorable expression in Novalis’sdescription of Spinoza as a “God-intoxicated man”.Suddenly the damned atheist became the hero of aradical Romantic religiosity, which could claim to bemore religious than traditional orthodoxy (insofar asit discovered God’s presence in all things), yet freefrom the old illusions of an anthropomorphic Godand an anthropocentric faith, and from the abusesof clericalism. Heinrich Heine summarized this viewin his Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie inDeutschland (1835): “Only malice or lack of judge-ment could describe Spinoza’s teaching as ‘atheistic.’No one has ever expressed himself more sublimelyabout the divinity than Spinoza”.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the identificationof God with Nature, or with the world, was seenas the distinguishing feature of pantheism; in 1836,S. T. Coleridge equated pantheism with “cosmothe-ism, or the worship of the world as God”. Ratherthan denying the world, pantheism deified it.Christian theologians consider this doctrine a her-esy precisely because it erases the differencebetween God and creation – a difference oftenmarked by the word “transcendence”. Spinozamay force us to reconceive divine transcendence,but he does not deny it. Indeed, the theologicalconcepts of immanence and transcendence, con-sidered as opposing terms, did not emerge untillate in the eighteenth century.

In the Ethics the difference between God and theworld lies in that humdrum yet cryptic word “in”:“Whatever is, is in God [in Deo est]”. In 1943, Éti-enne Souriau, a brilliant yet now overlooked philos-opher who contributed to a remarkable revival ofSpinoza in France, suggested that “the meaning ofthe little word ‘in’ is the key to all Spinozism”. Isthe world dissolved (acosmism) or deified (panthe-ism) in God-or-Nature? Or is the world grounded ina transcendent God in which real entities “live andmove and have their being”? And what differencedoes this make to the way we understand ourselves,and to how we live – which is the ultimate questionof the Ethics?

In his last surviving letter to Henry Oldenburg,written in February 1676, Spinoza concisely summa-rized the conclusion of his Ethics: the highesthuman good is “peace of mind and the knowledge

and love of God”. At the same time, he did nothesitate to criticize official religion. It should gowithout saying, he continued, that “when Scripturesays that God becomes angry with sinners, and thathe is a judge, who finds out about men’s actions,makes decisions about them, and passes sentence,it is speaking in a human way, and according to theaccepted opinions of the common people, becauseits intent is not to teach Philosophy”. In this finalletter Spinoza also warned Oldenburg that he couldaccept the doctrine of Christ’s resurrection only“allegorically”. Throughout his career, he hadresisted friends’ entreaties to convert to Christianitybecause he valued above all his freedom to philoso-phize. He once turned down the offer of a universityprofessorship for the same reason.

Spinoza did not publish the Ethics during his life-time. He bequeathed this task to the small circle ofdevoted friends who had been reading and discuss-ing his work-in-progress since the early 1660s.Between February 21, 1677, the date of Spinoza’sdeath, and the publication of his Opera Posthuma inthe first days of 1678, these friends attended to hismanuscripts and letters. While Stenson was busydenouncing the Ethics in the Vatican, they quietlyproduced a Dutch edition, De nagelate schriften, aswell as the Latin Opera. Their editorial task was for-midable: Spinoza is a sparse, sometimes ellipticalwriter, and a single noun or verb can carry greatmetaphysical weight. Written in a geometrical formmodelled on Euclid’s Elements, the Ethics presents anintricate deductive argument full of cross-referencesbetween its numbered definitions, axioms, proposi-tions, demonstrations and scholia. Due to the veryhigh level of precision Spinoza sought to achieve byhis geometrical method, small transcription errorscould reverberate through this conceptual edifice.

The conscientious, courageous labour of Spi-noza’s first editors – Lodewijk Meyer, JohannesBouwmeester, Jarig Jelles, Jan Rieuwertsz and JanGlazemaker – made a momentous contribution toour history of philosophy: without their Opera Post-huma, and above all the Ethics, Leibniz, Kant,Fichte, Schelling and Hegel would all have thoughtand written differently. This obscure circle offriends were the forebears of successive generationsof editors and translators who have toiled on theEthics. Since no manuscript of the work survived,philosophers and philologists in later centuries hadto navigate differences between the Latin and Dutcheditions produced in 1677. The first German transla-tion of the Ethics appeared in 1744, accompanied bya refutation of Spinoza’s philosophy by ChristianWolff; a French translation was published in 1842;and in 1856 Marian Evans – who was soon to becomeGeorge Eliot – completed the first English transla-tion. Several new Latin editions of the text were alsopublished during the nineteenth century, mostly byGerman scholars. In 1925 Carl Gebhardt presentedhis four-volume edition of the entire Opera as the“editio definitiva” of Spinoza’s writings, and foreighty-five years Gebhardt’s Ethics was indeed thestandard Latin edition of the text.

This changed when Leen Spruit and Pina Totarodiscovered the Vatican manuscript of the Ethics in2010. At that time a team of scholars had been work-ing for several years on a critical edition of the Latintext for the Presses Universitaires de France, underthe direction of Pierre-François Moreau. Believingtheir volume to be near completion, they might beforgiven if they received news of the discovery asa mixed blessing. Three members of Moreau’s out-standing editorial team – the Dutch philologistFokke Akkerman, and the French Spinoza scholarsAlexandre Matheron and Jean-Marie Beyssade –have died during the last four years, leaving Moreauand Piet Steenbakkers to complete the project. Adecade after the lost manuscript appeared, an Eth-ics based on three seventeenth-century sources –the Opera Posthuma, the Dutch translation, and theVatican codex – is complete, and will replaceGebhardt’s Ethica as the authoritative edition.

PUF’s magnificent Ethics contains a new Frenchtranslation alongside the Latin text. It is prefaced by

a meticulous introduction that combines detailedphilological analysis with the compelling story ofhow the Ethics passed from Spinoza’s hands to thoseof his readers and editors. Its publication will crownthe ascent of a French Spinozism which began withthe publication of Martial Gueroult’s two 700-pagestudies of Parts One (1968) and Two (1974) of theEthics. Through the work of Gueroult, Moreau,Matheron and others – not least Gilles Deleuze,Louis Althusser, Jacqueline Lagrée, Chantal Jaquetand Étienne Balibar – Spinoza emerged as one of themost influential philosophers of the French intellec-tual scene.

The fate of the Ethics in the Anglo-Americanworld is another story. In the 1970s and 80s mostanalytic philosophers regarded Spinoza as anuncritical and extravagant metaphysician, whosestrange ideas might – at best – be allowed into seri-ous discourse only once domesticated. This oftenmeant abstracting his arguments from his complexengagement, constructive as well as critical, withJewish and Christian scriptural and philosophicaltraditions.

This uneasy reception of the Ethics into contem-porary Anglophone philosophy changed dramati-cally with the re-emergence of analytic metaphysicsin the 1990s. A new generation of rigorously trainedphilosophers and historians of philosophy – all ofthem indebted to Edwin Curley’s astute, scholarlytranslation of the Ethics – found Spinoza’s strict nat-uralism, uncompromising systematicity and deepaversion towards anthropocentric il lusionsimmensely attractive. Don Garrett and MichaelDella Rocca did groundbreaking work that reposi-tioned Spinoza as a meticulous rationalist. In 2017Della Rocca assembled twenty-five scholars to pro-duce The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, much of itdevoted to metaphysical issues arising from the Eth-ics, and since then OUP has published significantbooks on Spinoza’s metaphysics by the North Amer-ican philosophers Sam Newlands and Martin Lin, aswell as an outstanding new collection of papers byGarrett. The recent explosion of Spinoza studies –and of contemporary metaphysics and epistemol-ogy inspired by Spinoza – has resulted in a deepreorientation in analytic as well as continental phi-losophy. In many ways, Spinoza is now replacingKant and Descartes as both the compass and thewatershed of modern thought.

Part of Spinoza’s allure is his willingness to followreason wherever it led him. Deliberately remainingoutside both Jewish and Christian communities, Spi-noza gained a remarkably perspicacious insight intotaken-for-granted intuitions and prejudices. Recog-nizing no authority beyond the power of his argu-ments, he presented his reasoning in the most trans-parent manner, as if daring his opponents tochallenge the validity of his inferences.

While philosophical boldness and precisionunderwrite the intellectual power of Spinozism, thereligious element of his thought remains crucial. Forcenturies the Ethics has been religiously question-able, and when we read it today we should take thequestion of religion seriously. This is best treated asa genuinely open question, since Spinoza’s religiondoes not fit easily into any pre-existent category.Like Thomas Aquinas, he treated religio not as asystem of beliefs but as a virtue – the virtue of hon-ouring God. In the Ethics he considers religio along-side other virtues such as piety, nobility, generosityand fortitude. Without concealing his contempt forsuperstitious, anthropomorphic images of God, Spi-noza asks what it means to know – and love – theGod which grounds our being. n

Works cited in this essay:Œuvres IV: Ethica / Éthique by Benedict de Spi-

noza, edited by Fokke Akkerman and Piet Steenbak-kers, translated by Pierre-François Moreau (PressesUniversitaires de France. €32).

Nature and Necessity in Spinoza’s Philosophy byDon Garrett (552pp. Oxford University Press. £47.99).

Reconceiving Spinoza by Samuel Newlands(304pp. Oxford University Press. £50).