Justified True Belief

(●) A lens grinder in a rented room who taught that God and nature are one and the same thing, and who taught Europe to read the Bible as a human book. + Spinoza is the quietest revolutionary in the history of philosophy. He never held a university post, never married, belonged to no church and after the age of twenty-three to no synagogue, and published exactly one book under his own name while he lived. He made his living grinding lenses for telescopes and microscopes, glass dust and all, in rented rooms in Dutch villages. And he wrote two books that between them did more damage to the settled religious certainties of Europe than any army of the period. The first, the Theological-Political Treatise of 1670, argued that prophecy is imagination rather than knowledge, that miracles cannot happen, and that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses. The second, the Ethics, published in the year he died, argued that there is only one thing that truly exists, that this one thing is God, and that the world is not something God made but something God is. Both books were banned. For a century afterward "Spinozist" was an insult across Christian Europe, roughly what "nihilist" would later become. Then the verdict flipped. By 1800 German poets and theologians were calling him a saint. The young Friedrich Schleiermacher, about to become the most influential Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century, asked his readers to offer a reverent tribute to the memory of "the holy, rejected Spinoza." That double reputation, atheist and mystic, is the reason a Christian reader has to meet him. Almost every modern argument that God is impersonal, that the laws of nature are unbreakable, and that Scripture is a historical artifact like any other, has a version of Spinoza standing behind it.

(●) 1632 AD: He was born in Amsterdam to a family that had fled the Inquisition, and grew up in the synagogue school. + Bento de Espinosa was born on 24 November 1632, in the Portuguese-Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. His people were what the Iberian authorities called New Christians: Jews whose grandparents had been forced to the baptismal font in Portugal and who had kept the old faith in cellars and back rooms for two generations before slipping north to a republic that would let them build a synagogue. Amsterdam in the 1630s was the freest city in Europe and knew it. His name came out in three languages, Bento in Portuguese, Baruch in Hebrew, and later Benedictus in Latin, and all three mean the same thing: blessed. His father Michael was a merchant in dried fruit and other imports, and a respected man in the congregation. Baruch was the second son, and he lost his mother early: Hanna Debora died in 1638, before his sixth birthday, and his father buried three wives in all. The boy went to the congregation’s Talmud Torah school, where he learned Hebrew and the Bible and the rabbinic commentators, and a later tradition made him the prize pupil his teachers expected to see one day in a rabbi’s chair. The records are thinner than the tradition. They show a boy who went through the congregation’s school, and they give no sign that he ever reached its highest classes, the ones where rabbis were made. He never finished that road anyway. Somewhere in his late teens the family business needed him, and at the same time two other things began pulling him somewhere else entirely: Latin, which opened Descartes to him, and the new natural philosophy. Natural philosophy is a phrase that comes up again and again in his century, and it repays a moment. It was what the 1600s called the study of the physical world, the work we would now break up into physics, astronomy, chemistry and biology, carried on by men who saw no reason to separate any of it from philosophy.

(●) 1654 AD: His father died, and the promising student found himself running a failing import business. + Michael de Espinosa died in March 1654, and his sons Baruch and Gabriel took over the firm. It was not a good inheritance. The first Anglo-Dutch war at sea had wrecked the trade, and the debts came with the name. For two years Spinoza was a merchant, appearing in the commercial records of Amsterdam like any other young man with ledgers to keep. He was also, in those same years, doing something that would cost him everything. He had begun studying Latin with Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit turned freethinker who ran a school in the city, and through Latin he reached Descartes. He was talking to Dutch Christians outside the synagogue as well, Mennonites and Collegiants, small dissenting groups who met without clergy and argued about everything. What he was actually saying in those rooms, nobody wrote down at the time. The nearest thing to evidence surfaced years later, and from an unlikely quarter. In August 1659 two Spaniards gave testimony before the Inquisition in Madrid: an Augustinian friar named Tomás Solano y Robles and an infantry captain named Miguel Pérez de Maltranilla, both of whom had spent the winter of 1658 in Amsterdam. They had met Spinoza there, they said, in the company of Juan de Prado, a physician the same congregation had expelled, and the two men had told them that the law of Moses was not true, that the soul dies with the body, and that God exists only philosophically. Whether they reported him accurately nobody can now say. They were recalling a private conversation from another country, in front of an inquisitor, and they may have had him exactly right. We simply do not know. In March 1656 he went outside his own community for help, to the city’s orphan masters, who declared him an orphan and appointed him a guardian. The device worked. It let him give up his father’s estate, which put the debts beyond the creditors’ reach, and having escaped them he walked away from the business as well.

(●) 1656 AD: At twenty-three his congregation expelled him with the harshest ban in its records, and he never joined another religious body. + On 27 July 1656 the elders of the Talmud Torah congregation stood up and read out a cherem against him. A cherem is a ban, the Jewish community’s formal act of exclusion, and it was not in itself a rare or a terrible thing. Most of the ones the Amsterdam congregation issued were short, conditional, and lifted within weeks once the offender had apologised, rather like being suspended from a club. This one was not that. The document, which survives in Portuguese, curses him by day and by night, lying down and rising up, and orders that no one speak with him or write to him or read anything he writes or stand within four cubits of him, which is about six feet, the width of a small room. It was never lifted. He was twenty-three. The strange thing is what the document does not say. It speaks of "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds," and it does not name a single one of them. Spinoza had published nothing at all. Whatever he had been saying in conversation, he was banned for it before he had written a line for the public. His early biographers tell a story of a man coming at him with a dagger around this time, and they do not tell it the same way. Pierre Bayle, writing in 1697, has it happen outside the theatre. Johannes Colerus, a Lutheran pastor at The Hague who gathered his account decades later from the family Spinoza had lodged with, has it happen as he came out of the old Portuguese synagogue, and adds that he kept the coat the blade went through as a memorial of the evening. The two versions do not agree, and the whole thing should be held as a tradition rather than a documented fact. What is certain is the shape of the rest of the life: he Latinised his name to Benedictus, left Amsterdam within a few years, and for the remaining twenty-one years belonged to no congregation of any kind.

(●) 1661 AD: He settled in a village near Leiden, ground lenses for his bread, and began the letters that carried his ideas across Europe. + By 1661 he was living in Rijnsburg, a quiet village outside Leiden, in a small house that still stands. He supported himself grinding and polishing lenses for telescopes and microscopes, which in the 1660s was skilled work at the leading edge of natural philosophy. Christiaan Huygens, the greatest Dutch scientist of the century, thought his lenses were good. It was also work done bent over a spinning lap in a cloud of glass dust, in a room he could not air out, and it may in the end have helped to kill him. That summer Henry Oldenburg came to see him. Oldenburg was about to become the first secretary of the Royal Society in London, and he is the man who invented the scientific journal, so the correspondence he began that day at the door of a village house ran for years and eventually reached most of the learned men of Europe. Others wrote too, and Spinoza answered all of them. There was a mathematician in Amsterdam who would later serve as one of the city’s burgomasters, which is to say one of the small group of magistrates who governed it. There was a grain merchant in Dordrecht who wanted to know how a good God could permit sin, and a German nobleman studying mathematics. About eighty-eight of those letters survive, and they are the closest thing to a diary he left. He moved to Voorburg, just outside The Hague, around 1663, and in the same year published his one signed book: Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy set out in geometrical form, definitions and axioms and proofs, as a favour to a pupil. His friends printed it because they wanted the world to know what he could do. What he was actually writing, in the evenings, was the Ethics.

(●) 1670 AD: He published the Theological-Political Treatise anonymously, and Europe answered with alarm. + He set the Ethics aside to write something more urgent. Dutch Calvinist preachers were pressing the state to police opinion, and a friend of his, a physician and lawyer named Adriaan Koerbagh, had been convicted in 1668 for a book of his own and had died in a workhouse the next year. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was Spinoza’s answer, and he took precautions: no author’s name, a false publisher, a false city on the title page. The precautions were useless. Everyone who mattered guessed within months. A Leipzig professor denounced it that same year; a Dutch merchant who had once written to him about the problem of evil called it a book full of abominations; one anonymous critic said it had been forged in hell by a renegade Jew working with the devil. The synods petitioned, a synod being the assembly where the ministers and elders of a region’s Reformed churches met and acted together. In July 1674 the Court of Holland formally banned the book, in the same edict that banned Hobbes’s Leviathan. The book had earned the reaction. In twenty chapters it argued that the prophets were men of vivid imagination rather than superior knowledge, that miracles as ordinarily understood are impossible, that Moses did not write the books that bear his name, that Scripture teaches obedience rather than science, and that a free state should let its citizens think what they like and say what they think. Reading it now, a Christian meets nearly every argument the next three centuries would make, already assembled and in order.

(●) 1673 AD: He refused a professorship at Heidelberg to keep his freedom, months after a mob killed Johan de Witt, the statesman under whose toleration he had been free to work. + In August 1672 a French invasion panicked the Dutch Republic. A crowd at The Hague seized Johan de Witt, who had led the republic for nineteen years, along with his brother Cornelis, and killed and mutilated them both in the street. This was not distant news to Spinoza. He had friends in de Witt’s circle, and he had done all his work under the toleration that government allowed. What he did next comes to us from Leibniz, who had the story from Spinoza himself when the two men met four years later. Spinoza wanted to go out to the place where it had happened and post a placard there reading ultimi barbarorum, "the worst of barbarians." His landlord locked the door on him, stopping him from going out and being torn apart in his turn. That is all there is: one man’s note of a conversation, and no other record of it. But it is the one thing anyone remembers about his politics, and it fits the man who wrote that a state exists to make its citizens free. The following February a letter arrived from Johann Ludwig Fabritius, professor at Heidelberg, offering him the chair of philosophy. Fabritius wrote on behalf of Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine, one of the German princes whose votes chose the Holy Roman Emperor, and the offer was generous. It promised the fullest freedom of philosophising, adding only that the Elector trusted he would not abuse it to disturb the publicly established religion. Spinoza wrote back on 30 March 1673 and declined. He did not know, he said, within what limits that freedom would have to be confined, and he preferred not to find out. It is a quiet answer with a hard point inside it. A professor of philosophy who is told in advance not to disturb religion is not free, and Spinoza had already paid too much for what freedom he had to trade it for a salary. That summer he made one stranger journey, travelling at the end of July to Utrecht to visit the French army occupying the city, invited by one of its officers, a Swiss colonel named Stouppe. The prince he had been brought there to meet had already left. He came home having achieved nothing, to neighbours muttering that he had been treating with the enemy and a landlord frightened that the house would be attacked.

(●) 1677 AD: He died at forty-four, and his friends had the Ethics in print before the year was out. + Spinoza died on 21 February 1677 in his lodgings at The Hague, aged forty-four, of a wasting lung disease. Consumption is the usual diagnosis; the glass dust of twenty years at the grinding lap has often been suspected of making it worse, though nobody can now prove it. He was buried four days later at the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague. His landlord’s family, ordinary Dutch Protestants who had lived with him for years, seem to have been fond of him. He owned almost nothing. The inventory of his estate lists a bed, some tools, a small library, and a writing desk, and it was the desk that mattered. His friends shipped it to Amsterdam, to the publisher Jan Rieuwertsz. Inside were the finished Ethics, the unfinished Political Treatise, an early essay on the improvement of the understanding, a Hebrew grammar, and the letters. Jarig Jelles, Lodewijk Meyer and Georg Hermann Schuller edited them, and the Opera Posthuma, which is simply Latin for the works published after his death, appeared before the end of 1677 with only the initials B. D. S. on the title page. The concealment bought nothing. The States of Holland banned the volume in 1678, Rome placed it on the Index of forbidden books in 1679, and for the next hundred years the safest thing a European writer could say about Spinoza was that he had refuted him.

What He Taught

(T1) Only one thing exists in its own right, and that one thing is God. + Think about a wave. A wave is real: you can surf it, it can knock you down, it has a height and a speed and a shape. But a wave is not a thing standing on its own. It is the ocean doing something, and when it stops the ocean has lost nothing. Spinoza held that every person, every stone, every star stands to God the way a wave stands to the sea. The technical word for the point is substance, and it is a word that has changed meaning since, so it is worth getting right. In the seventeenth century a substance was not stuff or material. A substance was whatever exists in its own right and can be understood without reference to anything else. Its opposite was a mode, which is simply a way some substance happens to be arranged, the way a fist is a way a hand happens to be arranged. There is no fist in the world in addition to the hand; there is a hand, doing that. Descartes had counted three kinds of substance: God, minds, and bodies. Spinoza took Descartes’s own definition and pressed on it until it broke. Suppose there were two substances. Then each would have the other outside it, marking where it stopped, and a thing that is limited by something else is a thing that depends on something else for being what it is. But depending on nothing else was the whole definition of a substance. So the two collapse back into one. There can only be one substance, and it must be infinite, since there is nothing left over to bound it, and self-caused, since there is nothing else that could have caused it. That, says Spinoza, is God. His Latin phrase for it, Deus sive Natura, means "God, or Nature," with the "or" of two names for one thing rather than the "or" of a choice between two. This is the doctrine later called pantheism: God is not the maker of the world but its whole reality. Christian readers should feel two things at once here. The first is how much of it sounds right. Spinoza’s God is infinite, eternal, necessary, the source of all being, the one in whom all things are, and Scripture speaks that way too when Paul tells the Athenians that in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). The second is the size of the difference. In Paul the world is in God and God remains other than it; in Spinoza the world is what God is, and there is no other than it left over.

(Q) "Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived." + Source: Spinoza, Ethics I, Proposition 15 (Elwes translation). The Ethics is written in the form of a geometry textbook: definitions, axioms, then numbered propositions each followed by a proof, a form Spinoza chose because he thought moral truth could be demonstrated the way Euclid demonstrates the properties of a triangle. This proposition is the hinge of the whole first part (T1).

(T2) Nothing could have happened otherwise, because God has no will and makes no choices. + A triangle’s three angles add up to two right angles. That is not a decision anybody made and it is not a rule anybody could relax; it simply follows from what a triangle is. Spinoza thought the universe follows from God in exactly that way, and he meant the comparison literally. God did not survey the possible worlds and pick one. There were no possible worlds. Everything that is, is the only thing that could have been. Two consequences follow, and Spinoza drew both of them without flinching. The first is that God has no purposes. The whole habit of asking what something is for, he says in the appendix to Part One, is a human habit read into nature. We act for ends ourselves, so we assume everything else does, and then we invent a God who arranges the world for our benefit and gets angry with us when we misread the arrangement. The second consequence is that we are not free either. Men think themselves free, he writes, because they are conscious of what they want and completely ignorant of the causes that made them want it. He put it best to a friend who had written to him with the question of free will. Picture a stone thrown through the air. If the stone were conscious, Spinoza said, it would be quite certain that it was flying along of its own accord, and it would be wrong in exactly the way we are wrong. Most readers either follow him here or stop here, and the reason is not hard to find. If Spinoza is right, then praise and blame in the ordinary sense are confusions, sin is not rebellion but ignorance, and there is no one to forgive because there was never a choice to forgive. What replaces them, in his own account of it, is not despair but a kind of peace: the more you understand why things had to be as they are, he thought, the less they torment you.

(Q) "Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature." + Source: Spinoza, Ethics I, Proposition 29 (Elwes translation). "Contingent" is the philosopher’s word for what happens to be so but might not have been. That it rained on your wedding day is contingent. That a triangle has three sides is not. Spinoza is denying that anything at all, anywhere, falls into the first of those two categories (T2).

(T3) A miracle would be God acting against his own nature, so miracles do not happen. + When somebody at work tells you they do not believe in miracles, they almost always mean one thing: the laws of nature are too well established to be broken, and a story about a man walking on water is a story about somebody who was mistaken. Spinoza’s argument is stranger than that, and a good deal more religious. It is also the version a Christian is most likely to meet without recognising it, wearing other clothes. Start from what he has already said (T1, T2). The laws of nature are not restrictions God imposed on a world he could have run some other way. They are what God’s own nature looks like from the inside, in the way that the rules of arithmetic are not rules imposed on numbers but simply what number is. So an event that broke a law of nature would not be God overruling the furniture of his house. It would be God contradicting himself. Then Spinoza turns the knife. Our whole confidence that the world can be understood at all rests on nature keeping its order, so a real miracle would be a hole in the floor of reason. The man who believes in one has quietly knocked away every ground he had for believing in anything, God included. Miracles, he says, lead to atheism. He was not finished. In chapter six of the Treatise he goes through the biblical miracles one at a time and reads them as natural events told by writers who described the world as it appeared to them: a strong east wind that dried the Red Sea, another wind that brought the locusts into Egypt and a stronger one that carried them off, a prophet stretching himself over a dead boy until the small body grew warm again. Where the Bible says God did it, Spinoza says the Bible is speaking the way ordinary people speak, ascribing to God whatever they cannot explain. What he never does is call the biblical writers liars. He thinks they were sincere men with a different job than reporting physics, and that whole reading is his own next teaching (T4).

(Q) "If, therefore, anything should come to pass in nature which does not follow from her laws, it would also be in contravention to the order which God has established in nature for ever through universal natural laws: it would, therefore, be in contravention to God’s nature and laws, and, consequently, belief in it would throw doubt upon everything, and lead to Atheism." + Source: Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, chapter 6, "Of Miracles" (Elwes translation). The sting is deliberate. Spinoza is telling the theologians of his own country that the miracles they appeal to as proofs of God are the surest road to unbelief, because a universe that can be interrupted is a universe that cannot be trusted (T3).

(T4) The Bible is a book with a human history, and it must be read the way any other ancient book is read. + Imagine someone handed a letter written by a great-grandmother nobody in the family ever met. There are two quite separate questions you can ask about it. What was she trying to say? And was she right? Most of us run the two together without noticing, and Spinoza’s contribution was to insist that they be pulled apart and taken in order. Finding out what a passage of Scripture means and deciding whether it is true are two different jobs, he says, and the first has to be finished before the second begins. The idea is so familiar now that its strangeness in 1670 is hard to feel. The interpreter’s task, then, is to establish what the writer meant to say, in his own language, to his own audience, given whatever we can learn about his times and his circumstances, and nothing else. If a text plainly says that God is jealous, or has a right hand, then that is what it means. No amount of philosophy may quietly reinterpret it into something more respectable while pretending to be reading. He then applies the rule to the authorship of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. He notes that the text describes Moses’s own death and burial, refers to places by names they only acquired centuries later, and repeatedly speaks of Moses in the third person. None of that was newly noticed. The medieval Jewish commentator Abraham ibn Ezra, he says, had seen these difficulties five hundred years earlier and hinted at them cautiously, the way a man hints at something he would rather not be quoted on. Spinoza states them without any caution at all, and proposes that the books were compiled long after the events out of older material, by Ezra the scribe (a different man entirely, the priest and scribe of the book that bears his name), who left the joins showing. And he draws a conclusion about what Scripture is for. Its purpose, he argues, is not to teach astronomy or metaphysics, metaphysics being the study of what is ultimately real and how it hangs together, but to move ordinary people to justice and charity, which is why it speaks in stories and images that anyone can grasp. That last claim is the one Christians have found hardest to answer cleanly, because a great deal of it is right. Scripture really does accommodate itself to its readers. It really does speak of the sun rising without meaning to settle astronomy. The disagreement is not about whether the Bible has a human voice in it. It is about whether that voice is the only one.

(Q) "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." + Source: Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, chapter 7, "Of the Interpretation of Scripture" (Elwes translation). Read on its own the sentence sounds almost like a plea for taking the Bible at its word, and generations of conservative interpreters have in fact insisted on the same separation of meaning from truth. What makes it revolutionary is where Spinoza takes it next: having established the meaning by the words alone, he judges the truth by reason alone, and the two verdicts almost never agree (T4).

(T5) Blessedness is not a reward waiting after death, but the understanding itself. + The last two parts of the Ethics are called "Of Human Bondage" and "Of Human Freedom," and they are the reason the book is called an ethics rather than a metaphysics. Bondage, for Spinoza, is being pushed around by feelings whose causes you do not understand: the grief that will not lift, the resentment you keep rehearsing, the fear that decides things for you. Freedom is not escaping the causal order, which cannot be done, but understanding it, because a feeling changes the moment you see clearly where it came from. Anyone who has ever had an old anger dissolve when they finally understood what the other person had been going through knows the experience he is describing. The summit of that understanding he calls the amor Dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God: seeing your own small life as one necessary thread in the infinite whole, and loving the whole for being what it is. He thought this was the only lasting joy available to a human being, and that it does not depend on anything going well. And he insisted that it is not payment for good behaviour. Virtue is not the fee you pay for blessedness; blessedness is what having virtue feels like from the inside. There is real weight here, and Christians have often felt it. Any spiritual director, meaning anyone whose work is helping another person sort out what is going on inside them, would recognise a great deal of what Spinoza says about understanding healing the passions. But notice what has quietly gone. This is a love that runs in one direction only, and Spinoza says so himself, earlier in the same part of the book: "Strictly speaking, God does not love or hate anyone" (Ethics V, Proposition 17, corollary, Elwes).

(Q) "Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but, contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts." + Source: Spinoza, Ethics V, Proposition 42 (Elwes translation). The last proposition of the book. The Ethics then closes with a single sentence of warning, that all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare (T5).

(Q) "I have believed that I should be undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task, in demonstrating that not only can such freedom be granted without prejudice to the public peace, but also, that without such freedom, piety cannot flourish nor the public peace be secure." + Source: Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, preface (Elwes translation). The freedom he means is the freedom to think and to say what one thinks. It is the thesis of the whole book, and it is the claim on which he was most nearly alone in his century and most completely vindicated afterward. It is also, awkwardly for both sides, the reason his fiercest Christian opponents and his Christian defenders have often been arguing about two different men.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His own century treated him as the most dangerous man in Europe, and answered him from every church in it. + The refutations began before the ink was dry and did not stop for eighty years, and they came from everywhere at once. Jacob Thomasius denounced the Treatise from Leipzig in 1670. In the Netherlands, Regnier van Mansvelt of Utrecht and Lambert van Velthuysen wrote against it, and Christoph Wittich, a Reformed theologian at Leiden, answered the Ethics at length in an Anti-Spinoza that reached print in 1690, three years after he died. Wittich is worth pausing on, because he was himself a Cartesian, a follower of Descartes, and a Cartesian in those years had every reason to want the line between Descartes and Spinoza drawn thick and drawn early. In Cambridge the Platonist Henry More wrote a refutation in Latin. In France Fénelon and François Lamy answered him. And Leibniz, who visited Spinoza at The Hague in 1676 and read the Ethics in manuscript, spent years working out privately where the argument went wrong, while being careful in public never to be thought a friend. The most interesting of the responses came from Pierre Bayle, a Huguenot exile, which is to say a French Protestant who had left a country that had stopped tolerating him. His Historical and Critical Dictionary gave Spinoza a long and hostile article. Bayle called him the greatest atheist that ever was and his system the most monstrous of hypotheses, and then, with the honesty that made his dictionary famous, reported that everyone who had known the man described him as sociable, kind, obliging and of blameless life. Bayle set the two halves down side by side and softened neither. Half of Europe read the article, and a good many readers took from it exactly what Bayle had argued fifteen years before in his Various Thoughts on the Comet: that a man may hold no religion at all and still live well. Behind the polemics stood a real question the seventeenth century was right to feel as urgent. If God is the world, then prayer is talking to the weather, the moral law is a description rather than a command, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who calls and hears and forgives, has quietly been replaced by something that can do none of those things.

(†) A century later German writers rediscovered him as a saint, and Protestant theology has been arguing about that ever since. + In 1785 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a small book reporting a conversation in which Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the most admired writer in Germany and recently dead, had confessed to being a Spinozist. Jacobi meant it as an alarm: he thought consistent philosophy always ended in Spinoza and that Spinoza was fatalism and unbelief, and he wanted German readers to see the cliff. Moses Mendelssohn defended his friend’s memory, the whole literary world joined in, and the quarrel became the great intellectual event of the German 1780s. It had the opposite of the effect Jacobi intended. Herder, Goethe and the young Romantics read Spinoza for themselves and found in him not a fatalist at all but a man overwhelmed by the holiness of the whole. Novalis coined the phrase that stuck, calling him a God-intoxicated man. And in 1799 Schleiermacher, a Reformed preacher writing to persuade cultured Germans that religion was not beneath them, offered his famous tribute, here in John Oman’s translation: "Offer with me reverently a tribute to the manes of the holy, rejected Spinoza. The high World-Spirit pervaded him; the Infinite was his beginning and his end; the Universe was his only and his everlasting love." The manes, in the old Roman word Schleiermacher reaches for, are the spirits of the dead, the ancestors a Roman family honoured with offerings. A Reformed preacher was asking his readers to render something close to veneration to a man his own tradition had spent a hundred years calling an atheist. It is hard to overstate how odd that is. Christian readers ought to be able to see both what that recovery got right and what it cost. What the Romantics recovered was a sense that God is not one item in the world alongside others, that reverence is owed to the whole of being, and that piety is not primarily a matter of assenting to propositions. Every one of those instincts has good Christian credentials. What they lost, and what Schleiermacher’s critics have pressed on him ever since, is a God who stands over against the world and can therefore speak to it, judge it, enter it, and save it.

(†) His way of reading the Bible outlived his metaphysics, and Christian scholarship has worked in its shadow ever since. + His afterlife took a strange shape. Almost nobody today is a Spinozist about substance, and hardly anyone outside a philosophy department could tell you what the word means. Yet almost everybody who studies the Bible in a university works by rules he was the first to set out as rules. Establish the meaning from the text and its own history alone. Ask who wrote it, and when, and for whom, and out of what earlier material. Expect a book like Genesis or Isaiah to have had a history of composition before it reached the form we read. The method spread even through the men who set out to stop it. Richard Simon, a French Catholic priest, published his Critical History of the Old Testament in 1678 partly to answer Spinoza, ended up doing the same kind of work, and was banned for it in his turn. Through Johann Gottfried Eichhorn in the eighteenth century and Julius Wellhausen in the nineteenth, the approach became the ordinary furniture of biblical studies. Christians have answered in two ways, and both are worth having. The first is a matter of ordinary scholarship: many of the specific conclusions have been revised, and confidently reconstructed sources have a habit of dissolving under the next generation’s work. The second goes to the assumption underneath. Spinoza’s method smuggles in his metaphysics, because a rule that only reason may judge the truth of a text, in a universe where God never acts and never speaks, has already decided what the answer will be before the first verse is read. Take that assumption out and the historical work remains useful, because a book with a human author and a human history is exactly what Scripture claims to be. Men spoke from God, Peter writes, as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). Carried along, and still speaking: two authors, not one. There is a smaller debt as well. The argument that a state has no business policing what its citizens think is one Christians have often had to make from the losing side, and Spinoza made it as well as anyone in his century.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who is not a person, a world that could not have been otherwise, and a love that cannot be returned. + Spinoza was not the sneering unbeliever of the pamphlets. He was temperate, courageous, generous with his time, and by every account including his enemies’ a genuinely good man, and he thought he was defending true religion rather than attacking it. That makes the disagreement sharper rather than softer, because it is a disagreement about what God is. - God and the world are not the same thing. Scripture opens by distinguishing them in seven Hebrew words: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). A creator who makes what was not there before is not the sum of what he makes, and Paul names the confusion of the two as the root error of pagan religion, worshipping "the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25). - God chose, and could have done otherwise. If the world follows from God as necessarily as geometry, then nothing was ever given and nothing was ever grace. Scripture’s God acts freely and personally: he calls a man out of Ur, he hears, he relents, he sends. Take that away and you may keep the word "God" but you have lost prayer, providence, and the possibility of thanks. - God loves first. Spinoza is candid to the end: "He, who loves God, cannot endeavour that God should love him in return" (Ethics V, Proposition 19, Elwes). The whole New Testament runs the other way. "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). A love that cannot be returned is not the God of the gospel under a new description; it is a different object altogether. - The miracles are the message. Spinoza’s ban on miracles is not a detail of natural philosophy but a verdict on the Christian claim, because Christianity rests on one event that either happened or did not. Paul saw this more clearly than any of Spinoza’s opponents: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14). - Salvation is not for the clever. The blessedness of the Ethics is reached by hard intellectual work, and the book’s own last line admits how few will manage it. The gospel is given the other way round, to fishermen and tax collectors: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8). What remains is a man who saw, more clearly than most of his critics, that God cannot be one being among others, and who could find no way to say that without losing the God who speaks. He is worth reading precisely because he took his own premises all the way down.