Based on a video lecture.

Video lecture: YouTube

On April 24, 1929, Albert Einstein received a telegram from New York rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, and the question was direct: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. Fifty words.” Einstein used fewer than half his allotted words: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

With this telegram Einstein dismantled all the stories about him secretly believing in a personal God, or conversely, being a straightforward atheist. He is quite clear: I believe in the God of Spinoza, meaning the pantheistic God, a God identical with nature and its laws. And it is not at all by accident that Spinoza’s name appears in this reply, because Spinoza is considered the most famous pantheist in the history of philosophy.

A Slandered Man

Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, writes that Spinoza is perhaps the most moral of all philosophers, and this view is very widely shared among Spinoza scholars. There really is a consensus that this philosopher was a man of exceptional integrity who thought not about material goods but above all about the search for truth.

And as so often happens in history, the most morally serious people attract the most accusations of immorality. That was the fate of Epicurus, condemned throughout history as a preacher of sensual pleasure, though his philosophy said precisely the opposite. And that was the fate of Spinoza too. He was cursed, excommunicated, and nearly murdered. And yet he entered history as one of the greatest philosophers of the modern era.

From Baruch to Benedict

The first question worth asking is: where did the name Benedict come from? Spinoza was Jewish, and his religious name was Baruch. Both names mean the same thing: “blessed”, Baruch in Hebrew and Benedict in Latin.

There were two reasons for the change. The first was purely practical: Spinoza wrote in Latin, and the conventions of the time required very clearly that if a work was written in Latin, the author’s name had to be Latinised. Descartes, who also wrote in Latin, is known to scholars as Cartesius. Spinoza could not publish anything under the name Baruch, though, jumping ahead, he published almost nothing under his own name at all.

The second reason was his sharp conflict with the Jewish community, which created a desire to distance himself from Judaism, from his past, and even from his own name.

A Prodigy from the Ghetto

Spinoza was born in 1632 in the Amsterdam Jewish quarter into a Sephardic Jewish family, or more precisely into a family of Portuguese conversos, Jews who had lived for generations on the Iberian Peninsula as nominal Catholics while secretly maintaining Jewish traditions. After the Reconquista life for Jews on the peninsula became unbearable: they were conflated with the Moors, blamed for the crucifixion of Christ, and Spinoza’s family fled to the more tolerant Netherlands.

As a boy he studied at the synagogue, and his teachers saw a great future in him, expecting him to become an outstanding rabbi, so obvious was his intellectual gift. Spinoza knew Scripture extremely well, and you can see this by opening his Theological-Political Treatise, where entire chapters are devoted to careful analysis and critique of biblical texts.

But even as a young man, on reaching intellectual maturity, he began to take a critical view of the Talmudic tradition, and the Talmudic tradition is the heart of Judaism. Spinoza did not conceal his views, and this is precisely what generated the conflict with his community.

Excommunication

In July 1656, when Spinoza was twenty-three, he received the harshest writ of herem, that is excommunication, ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish congregation. The document, filled with curses, declared him excommunicated for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds”, without specifying what these actually were. Spinoza had not yet published anything at that point.

There were several precipitating factors. Beyond his religious heterodoxy, another circumstance played a role: when his father died in 1654, a fairly successful merchant, Spinoza did not inherit his entrepreneurial spirit at all. He wanted to do nothing except philosophy, and he managed his father’s estate so poorly that he effectively dissipated it, and by the laws of the time this brought both moral condemnation and legal consequences.

After the excommunication, life in Amsterdam was closed to him, and he was forced to move from city to city until he finally settled in The Hague.

The Lens Grinder

So what did Spinoza do to earn a living? He ground lenses. This was a rare, highly skilled and extremely laborious profession, no automation whatsoever, only painstaking manual work with specialised instruments requiring particular knowledge of optics, and optics had always been his great passion alongside philosophy.

He was repeatedly offered stipends, pensions, and the patronage of influential people, and he refused everything. He was offered the position of court philosopher to a German prince in Hanover, with physicians, decent food, and full provision. He refused. “I have the little I have; I need nothing more” was his position.

Alongside grinding lenses he wrote his treatises. The lenses gave him tuberculosis, and in 1677 he died from its complications in The Hague, alone, at forty-four.

This is why Russell and many others regard Spinoza as a model of intellectual courage and moral self-abnegation in the highest sense: a man who followed what he believed to be true and asked nothing more from life.

Political Views

Beyond pure philosophy, Spinoza also had things to say about politics. In 1670 his Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously, and its central argument is the following: unlimited power is destructive, and an absolute monarch has an interest in keeping the people superstitious.

Following Cicero, Spinoza drew a distinction between genuine religion and superstition. Contemporary atheists often insist that religion is in no way different from belief in fortune-tellers and wizards. But for Spinoza genuine religion was something quite different. He broke radically with the Judeo-Christian tradition in its historical forms, while at the same time building his own system grounded not in faith but in reason.

Here is what Spinoza writes: “I have often wondered that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred… Love of propagating religion gave place to base avarice and ambition, and the temple itself became a theatre.” These words could have been written in the twenty-first century.

The Philosophy: One God, One Substance

Spinoza’s major work is the Ethics, and it is not easy reading because he constructs his philosophical system on the model of geometry: definitions, axioms, propositions, and each statement is derived from what precedes it with logical necessity. A sensible piece of advice I once encountered is to read not the full argumentation but only the propositions themselves, the theorems, and this really does allow you to follow the logic and grasp the substance.

The most important thesis of Spinoza, the one thing you need to know about his philosophy, is this: there is one single substance, and this substance is simultaneously both matter and God. Descartes had held that the world consists of two substances: extension, that is matter, and thought, that is consciousness and soul. Spinoza dissolves this opposition and arrives at monism. Extension and thought are attributes of one single substance, and that substance, for Spinoza, is God. God is identical with nature, which in Latin is Deus sive Natura: God, or nature.

From this follows the most important conclusion: Spinoza does not believe in a personal God, meaning a being who cares for people, answers prayers, and intervenes in individual fates. God for him is the lawful order that pervades all of existence. This is precisely what Einstein meant in that telegram.

From his system Spinoza then derives an account of the affects, that is the passions. Hatred kindles hatred, and love dissolves it. The primary instrument of human liberation, in his view, is knowledge and reason, which he calls the greatest gift we have.

Spinoza in Soviet Thought

Spinoza was enormously popular in the Soviet Union. The outstanding Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov openly called himself a Spinozist and in many ways followed in his footsteps. Lunacharsky wrote an article in 1932 called “Spinoza and the Bourgeoisie”, where he argued that you should not simply dismiss Spinoza as a bourgeois thinker, but should work out what exactly in him was bourgeois and what made him an intellectual precursor of Marxism.

The Soviet tradition interpreted Spinoza’s pantheism very simply: the word “God” was just a mask behind which lay genuine atheism, and God-as-substance was simply matter given a respectable name for the sake of appearances.

I think this is an insult to Spinoza’s actual teaching. Pantheism for him was not a rhetorical device: he built his monist worldview in complete seriousness, and it was radically new for his time. He was a genuine revolutionary, which is precisely why he was cursed and nearly physically destroyed. Please never think that for Spinoza pantheism was just a mask.

Recommended reading: the Ethics, where you can read just the propositions and skip the full demonstrations, and the Theological-Political Treatise, where the prose is considerably more accessible.