Thus the first line of the Torah reads, ‘God created the heavens and the earth.’ Later, however, there appears to be some confusion about the essential difference between a creator and the created thing and the idea came up that God might also be in everything. That He did not put that one tree there, but that He is that tree. In any case, that would make the search for Him a lot easier…
Pantheism
A very long time after creation, in 1656, Benedict de Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish community, probably because of his philosophical ideas. And now that we live hundreds of years later, there is still a significant chance that Spinoza’s ideas will be rejected with the same tolerance in churches, synagogues and mosques. In his philosophy, God completely coincided with all-encompassing Nature with a capital letter. And within the framework in which we can speak of a deity, this philosophy is at odds with that of the major religions, including Islam, since it recognizes the Torah to some extent.
Although Spinoza may have felt lonely at the time, his image of God is widely represented today. Based on his convictions we could say that he was one of the first European pantheists. In 2007, this school of thought has millions of adherents, probably not including many. In the West, pantheism (in its many variations) is increasingly on the rise. Consider that there are roughly five billion Christians, Muslims and Jews and it becomes clear that there are two major camps in direct opposition to each other. And I find it striking that three religions that often fight each other out have to shake hands at this point. In light of these movements, I get the impression that the question of whether God is identical with nature did not end with Spinoza. His philosophy was heretical in his day, but I dare to predict that sympathy for pantheism will only grow. So it is interesting enough to examine the different arguments and see where they all reside.
Benedict de Spinoza
Spinoza is the best-known thinker from Dutch soil. He belongs to the small elite of classical philosophers who laid the foundation for Western thought. Relatively few things are known about his life, but born in Amsterdam as Burach, son of Michael dEspinoza and Hanna Debora, Spinoza, together with his parents, was part of the new Jewish community in Amsterdam.
Spinoza strongly resisted the title of atheist during his lifetime, but nevertheless his teachings were soon regarded as such. His contemporaries were amazed at his life style. After all, they and they do not seem to be so wicked, as you would expect from someone who goes through the wide gate. Testimonies reveal Spinoza as a modest, quiet and gentle person. This bizarre paradox at the time captured the imagination of many and led to a lot of (sandwich) stories being created about him.
Banned
It is suspected that Spinoza was not very old when he developed his philosophical views. As a young man he already came into conflict with the Jewish community, something that does not necessarily have to do with his philosophy. Other causes, such as his refusal to adhere to the rules of the community, his indifference to worship and financial matters, may have equally played a role. It was in 1656 when things came to a dramatic break. On July 27, Spinoza was banished from the community, with the result that all contact with him had to be severed. Spinoza could have avoided the ban, it is said, if he had repented. He apparently had no need for this, despite the fact that his exile was supposed to mean the end of his position in the trading company, which he shared with his brother, Gabriel. After the exile, Spinoza no longer called himself Baruch (or Bento), but switched to Spinoza. He never converted to Christianity, although he maintained good relations with Christians. In his life he stayed at a safe distance from any form of organized religion.
His foundation
In 1675 the manuscript of Ethics was ready for printing. While Spinoza was busy arranging the publication, the rumor was already going around: he wanted to prove with his work that there was no God. Pastors and Cartesian scholars had even gone to the government with complaints. The atmosphere became so hostile that he decided to refrain from publication.
As his end drew near, in 1677, Spinoza ordered his landlord Van Spyk to send his work to the publisher when he died. He died of lung disease on February 21, 1677, and his work was published within a year. Spinoza presented his search for truth as a crisis with existential dimensions: the goal is the attainment of the highest good, the insight into the unity of the mind with all of nature. To achieve this, the mind must be cleared of all possible prejudices and defects, in order to attain higher forms of knowledge. This is only possible when the mind turns to the one true idea that we have been given, the idea of a supremely perfect being alias God. This is the criterion of truth, with the result that it can free us from untrue, fictitious and questionable illusions. This methodical thinking means seeing things in their causal relationship and ultimately: insight into the dependence of all things on a final cause, namely God.
Spinoza’s view on knowledge
Spinoza divides human knowledge into ascending levels, with at the bottom the knowledge of hearsay and experience, which entails the risk of error, above that rational knowledge, which is achieved through consistent reasoning, and at the top the clear insight or the observational science, which sees through the essence of things without mediation. Only the two highest levels, reason and observation, provide correct knowledge. All error originates at the lowest level of imagination and experience.
Spinoza on the Bible
It was clear to Spinoza that his Ethics completely contradicted all the passionately and fanaticically cherished images of God and salvation of his contemporaries. Although the Netherlands had a relative degree of tolerance, the coast was not safe here either.
Because theologians appealed to the word of God for their claims as revealed in the Bible, Spinoza undertakes what is said to be a comprehensive and fundamental analysis of the Bible. Here we immediately find his most important contribution to modern science. He is considered one of the founders of historical-critical Bible research.
For him, the books of the Bible (contrary to the Christian view that the Holy Spirit inspired the writers) are historically developed texts, created by people, created and handed down in specific circumstances. According to him, the Bible should be explained from within itself, in its own terms and on the basis of its own intentions as far as these could be determined. It then becomes clear that the content of the various books of the Bible must be seen in the context of the specific history of these texts. According to Spinoza, anyone who regards the Bible as the direct word of God turns religion into superstition.
What makes the Bible the word of God in Spinoza’s eyes is that despite all corruption, it teaches the divine law. The principal of the divine law and its highest commandment is therefore to love God as the highest good, namely, not out of fear of some punishment and penalty or out of love for anything else in which we desire to indulge. His conclusion is that the Bible essentially boils down to the commandment to love God above all else and one’s neighbor as oneself.
Spinoza’s workings
Although Spinoza led a retired life and published relatively little, he was either famous or infamous during his lifetime. He quickly gained the reputation as an atheist. His attack on the then generally accepted authority of the Bible and preachers underlined this and strengthened his opponents’ opinion. When Ethics was published after his death, there were already many prejudices against this work. The label Spinozist became a meaningless term of abuse, used to place someone under suspicion of atheism. Everyone had an opinion about Spinoza, although little time was taken to research his works.
Spinoza’s description, given by the universal scholar Pierre Bayle in his Dictionaire historique et critique in 1697, was ultimately of great influence. For Bayle, Spinoza was an athée de système, someone who did not directly deny the existence of God, but whose system left no room for God. That did not prevent Spinoza from being a virtuous man. He was described as an athée vertueux. This has been a determining factor for a long time.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Spinoza’s philosophy came into the spotlight again through the so-called Pantheismusstreit. Intense debates took place, with the result that their works were read again and were able to influence German Romanticism and German Idealism. Because of Goethe, Herder, Schelling, Hegel and many others, there was a greater interest in Spinozism in Germany in the 1800s.
The past century has been characterized by an invasion of scientific Spinoza literature. Nevertheless, his philosophy continues to appeal to a more general audience. Today there is still a fascination with this project, in which everything from physics and epistemology to life theory and political philosophy are developed from the metaphysical basis of God or Nature. The fact that his theories with unique images of God had to make do without traditional religion somewhat hindered their entrance. But perhaps that is precisely why his philosophy will be well received in this century. Perhaps this time of pluralism, relativism and nihilism is the perfect soil in which Spinozism can germinate and in which its ideas, probably beyond Spinoza’s intention, are welcomed with open arms by, for example, the New Age.
Pierre Bayle
Bayle stood at the cradle of modern freedom of thought. His major work Dictionnaire historique et critique has earned him the most fame. Bayle was born in 1647 in La Carla, southern France. He was the son of a Calvinist preacher. The tragedy that the French Huguenots had to go through left its mark on Bayle’s life. French Protestants increasingly became victims of discrimination. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which would lead to the bloody persecutions of the Huguenots.
Due to circumstances, Bayle had briefly converted to Catholicism in 1622. But he turned back and accepted the faith of his fathers, which was considered a crime. Bayle fled to (Calvinist) Geneva at the beginning of his exile, far away from his family. Through friendly ties he came into contact with the influential Rotterdam council member, the Remonstrant-minded Adriaan Paets, who provided him with his position as professor of philosophy at the newly established Illustrious School in the Maasstad.
Calvinism
Characteristic of Bayle’s thinking is his Calvinist background, from which his plea for freedom of conscience and free inquiry, his fight against superstition and idolatry, and his skepticism towards rationalistic philosophical systems arise. Calvinism realizes that human beliefs about the supernatural are inadequate. Bayle took a stand against the view of Socinus, who wanted to refute Christological dogma with rationality. Socinus believed that one only needs to believe what can be reasoned into words. For Bayle, faith remained a mystery at its core. According to him, anyone who bases himself solely on reason opens the door to deism and atheism. In contrast, Bayle was not an outspoken Calvinist. He agreed with Descartes that there are natural truths that do not need the authority of faith. This paradox makes his philosophy open and unbalanced, critical, skeptical and polemical.
Fact and fiction
As a philosopher, Bayle took an eclectic position. In the field of logic he made use of the Aristotelian system of syllogisms. He rejected proofs of God as metaphysical speculations, for example the proof of God that compared the world system to a clock and referred to God as Cosmic Architect, although he found it sympathetic as a weapon against overly materialistic views, but he rejected the proof itself. Richard Popkin described Bayle as a super-skeptic, able to analyze and dissect any theory until an internal inconsistency emerged. He peeled, as it were, every onion until it turned out that there was no core left.
With his critical attitude and with an ironic pleasure, Bayle was able to separate fact from fiction. He also showed his historical skepticism when it came to the Bible and was sympathetic to the historical-critical method of interpreting Scripture, as developed by Richard Simon: the historical record incorporates the experiences of the Bible authors.
Bayle on evil
Evil in all its guises is an irrefutable reality. Bayle had learned this from history and from his own life. For this reason he criticized any attempt to rationally explain the problem of the existence of evil. The Christian must accept as a fact of faith that God is transcendent, holy and good, and experience teaches us that evil exists in all kinds of manifestations. The problem of evil is a mystery, according to Bayle, and in this way part of the Christian faith: against the evidence, the believer must hold on to God’s goodness.
Bayle also rejected the idea of evil as an independent principle in opposition to the goodness of God, because this was incompatible with God as creator of the world from nothing. Confusingly, he also has a certain sympathy for dualism, because it fits better with human experience and because orthodox Christianity has no convincing answer to it.
Bayle on knowledge and faith
Bayle made an unusual and unprecedented separation for that time between rational knowledge on the one hand and Christian faith on the other. According to him, reason could not (or should not) shake faith. Based on this rigorous separation between philosophy and theology, I can quote a true Christian from mocking the subtleties of the philosophers and especially those of the skeptics. Faith will place him before those areas where the storms of contention prevail. He will find himself ensconced in a place where the rumbling of proofs and distinctions is heard below, and he will not falter in the least. That place is for him like the true Olympus of the poets and the true temple of the wise, from where he will look in perfect tranquility upon the weaknesses of reason and the errors of mortals who follow but this guide. With this criticism, Bayle turned himself into a spectator of the theological and philosophical bickering and shared this position with his readers in his writings.
Spinoza’s view
Spinoza’s first attempt to systematically elaborate his philosophy was in a writing, the original of which is unknown. In the nineteenth century a Dutch version of Short Treatise on God, Man and Their Prosperity was published. Spinozas’s teachings force him to start with God, from which he can build further. Central is the idea that God is the cause of everything. The immanent cause, from within, and not to be confused with the idea of a craftsman making products. According to Spinoza, the origin of the world must be understood as an internal process, as if nature produces itself: Natura naturans. God is therefore completely identical with nature in this regard. There is a fundamental unity of the infinite and the all and all finite things are but modifications within the one substance which is God and nature at the same time. And because this is all-encompassing, everything must be understood in this connection, in this unity.
Man himself is part of nature, a form of existence of that one substance. The nature of the human being is 1. causal, 2. determined and 3. natural being. People are subject to all kinds of feelings, and insofar as they have no power over them, they are unhappy. Through increasing insight, the grip on one’s own existence can be strengthened and people can work up to a knowledge of God or nature, which is accompanied by love; a love of God that is at the same time a love of Nature. According to him, this is what human happiness consists of.
It is Spinoza’s deepest conviction that man is not an independent kingdom within the great kingdom of nature. Not an empire within empire. Man is completely part of that nature in which everything is connected with each other in an infinite causal connection: Every individual thing or every arbitrary thing that is finite and has a certain existence cannot exist nor be determined into works if it does not come into existence and to work is determined by another cause, which is also finite and has a definite existence; and this cause again cannot exist nor be determined to work unless it is determined to exist and work by another, which is also finite and has a definite existence, and so on to infinity. Man must be viewed from this big picture.
Spinoza reduces the infinite number of properties of God to just two properties that we humans can know, namely thinking (spiritual) and extension (material). (That God must have infinitely more properties, according to Spinoza, is evident from his definition of God as an absolutely infinite being.) The limitation to thought and extension arises from the idea of body and mind. Based on the idea that man is part of nature and its laws, Spinoza naturally opposes any form of anthropocentrism. That the world was not created for men. And against anthropomorphism, the tendency to explain nature in human terms. The view that God as a person created the world for man and that God is outside of creation is diametrically opposed to this.
Bayle’s critique of originality
The basis of Spinoza’s system is not new, according to Bayle. It corresponds to that of a number of ancient and modern philosophers, both European and Eastern. The difference is that Spinoza turned it into a structured system. But it has long been thought that the entire universe was but one substance and that God and the world are one. Pietro della Valla mentioned certain Muslims who call themselves Ehl Eltahkik, who believe that there are only four elements in total that make up God, man and all things. He also speaks of the Zindikites, another Muslim sect. One of their beliefs is that everything that is seen and everything that is in the world, everything that is created, is God. Among Christians, Bayle says, there have been similar heretics. A certain David of Dinant made no distinction whatsoever between God and the first matter. And according to one Alexander the Epicurean, God is matter, outside of him there is no God; in essence all things are God, and the forms of being are imaginary incidentals: they have no real entity. He also says that all things are the same as to substance, and that God is sometimes called Jupiter, or Apollo, or Pallas. And then Amalricus who taught that all things were God and that the Creator and created things were the same. Bayle observes that the doctrine of the world soul, which is so prevalent among the ancients and which was the most important part of the doctrine of the Stoics, is essentially that of Spinoza. Its followers say that all souls, whether human or animal, are particles of the world soul which reunite with the whole through the death of the body; and to make us understand this, they compare the animals to bottles floating in the sea filled with water. When those bottles break, their water unites with the whole: that is what happens to the individual souls, they say, when death destroys the organs in which they were enclosed. And according to Bayle, they have nothing better to say than these kinds of comparisons that bear no relation to God and are only good for throwing sand in the eyes of an ignorant public.
Bayle’s Criticism of Probability
According to Bayle, Spinoza’s hypothesis is, of all other atheistic hypotheses, the least misleading, because it conflicts with the most distinct concepts in the human mind. The main objection Bayle has to Spinozas’s teaching concerns his monism. This means that there is a fundamental unity of the infinite and the all and that all finite things are but modifications within the one substance which is God and nature at the same time. For Bayle this is ridiculous: not only is God equated with the world and the universe, but each individual object is also deprived of its independence. Spinoza’s assumption that there is only one substance in nature and that this one substance is endowed with an infinite number of attributes, including extension and thought, is, according to Bayle, the most monstrous hypothesis, diametrically opposed to the most evident concepts of our reason. or our mind. Spinoza states that all bodies contained in the universe are modifications of this substance insofar as it is extension; and that, for example, the souls of men are modifications of this substance in so far as that is thought. God, who is the necessary and infinitely perfect being, is therefore the cause of all things that exist, but he is not different from them. There is only one being, only one nature, and this nature produces within itself and by an internal activity all that are called creatures. He is everything at once: agent and subject, cause and subject. He produces nothing that is not his own modification. Bayle calls this a hypothesis that surpasses the accumulation of all conceivable absurdities.
Bayle’s Criticism of ‘One Substance’
It is impossible for the universe to be one substance, because whatever is extended necessarily has parts and whatever has parts is composite, according to Bayle. And since the parts of the extension do not exist in each other, it must therefore be the case that either the extension in general is not a substance, or that each part of the extension is a special substance different from all other substances. According to Spinoza, extension is generally an attribute of a substance. With other philosophers he admits that the attribute of a substance is not really different from that substance. Bayle says that Spinoza must therefore recognize that extension in general is a substance, from which he must deduce that each part of extension is a special (synonyms: separate, unique) substance.
The most intellectual and most immaterial ideas clearly show that there is a very real distinction between things, one having a quality and the other not, according to Bayle. The marks and infallible signs of the distinction are: when one can affirm of one thing what one cannot of the other, then they are distinct. Things separated from each other, in time, in place, are distinguishable. Spinoza cannot deny that these features are correct, for it is because of these features that he sees that stones and animals are not the same modality of infinite being. So he recognizes that there is some distinction between things. The lower end of a pole driven into a river does not have the same modality as the other end: one is surrounded by earth, the other by water. So they have two opposite attributes: one being surrounded by water, the other being not surrounded by water. This means that the subject they modify according to Spinoza must consist of at least two substances: surrounded-by-water and not-surrounded-by-water. This shows that extension is composed of as many distinct substances as modifications.
Bayle’s Criticism of ‘Highly Perfect Being’
Every man has a very clear idea of the unchangeable: by this one means a being that never acquires anything new, that never loses what it once acquired, that is always the same both in its substance and in its modifications. The clarity of this means that one can see with great distinction what moves and what does not. The nature most incompatible with the immutability of God is not only a nature whose existence may begin and end, but also a nature which, as to its substance, always continues to exist. However, it may successively acquire a number of modifications and lose the additions or forms it once had. All the ancient philosophers, says Bayle, have recognized that this continuous series of arising and passing away, as observed in the world, neither produces nor destroys a single particle of matter, and for this reason they say that matter in substance cannot come into existence nor pass away, even though she is the subject of all arising or passing away. For example, the matter that is now burning was previously wood; all its essential attributes remain the same in the form of wood and in the form of fire. It is the purest example one can give of a being that is changeable and actually subject to all kinds of fluctuations and internal changes. It follows that the God of the Spinozists is an actually changing nature that is constantly changing its state. Her conditions differ internally and actually from each other. So He is not the most perfect being in whom there is no change or hint of reversal.
Bayle’s Criticism of ‘People Are Modals of God’
Without a doubt, Spinoza made fun of the mystery of the Trinity and was amazed that infinitely many people dare to speak of one nature bounded by three divine persons. Precisely he, says Bayle, who in fact attributes the divine nature to as many persons as there are people on earth. If there is anything certain and indisputable in human knowledge, it is this rule: Those things are contrary, which neither from one another, nor from the same third party, according to the same thing, to the same thing, in the same manner and time, can be truly confirmed. That is to say, one cannot affirm two opposite terms in the same subject in the same respect and at the same time. For example, one cannot say without speaking the untruth: Pete is doing well, Pete is very ill, or He denies that and confirms it. The Spinozists destroy this rule and falsify it in such a way that one can no longer know what is truth and what is not. If such rules were incorrect, then there are no things that we can still vouch for being true. Bayle shows that the above axiom conflicts with the Spinozist system. So if it is true, as Spinoza would have us believe, that people are modalities of God, then one wrongly says: Pete denies this, he wants that, he affirms something; for in reality (in line with that system) it would then be God who denies, who wills, who affirms. And this has the consequence that everything that comes from the thoughts of men actually belongs to the substance of God. And from this, according to Bayle, it follows that God hates and loves, denies and affirms the same things at the same time. This satisfies all the necessary conditions for Bayle’s rule about opposite terms to be false. Bayle goes further: the opposite terms willing and not-willing fit different people at the same time, which means that in Spinoza’s system they must fit that unique and indivisible substance that Spinoza calls God. So it would be God who at the same time wills and wills not with regard to the same object. Two opposite terms would be true, which overturns the first principles of metaphysics. Bayle notes that just as a square circle is a contradiction, so is a substance when it simultaneously feels love and hate given the fact that hate essentially excludes love towards the same object. That is the false subtlety. Usually one says: quot capita to sensus, so many heads, so many senses, but according to Spinoza all the senses of all people are in one head. And while Spinoza could not tolerate the slightest ambiguity, not from Aristotelianism, not from Judaism and not from Christianity.
Bayle’s critique of ethical consequences
If physically speaking it is an extraordinary folly that a simple and unique subject should be modified by the thoughts of all men at the same time, then, according to Bayle, morally speaking this is an even worse thought. Is the infinite being, the necessary being, the supremely perfect being still determined, steadfast and unchangeable? Bayle emphasizes unchangeable because being will never be the same for a moment. His thoughts would follow one another without interruption, in the same colorful variety as there are passions and feelings. Bayle already calls this difficult to digest, but according to him it gets even worse: it means that the infinite for one good thought has a thousand other, foolish, exaggerated, impure thoughts. It produces from itself all the madness, all the filth and all the sins of the human race. For since the mode is not really different from the modified substance, that is the identity of the infinite being of which Spinoza speaks. A large number of philosophers, unable to understand how this is compatible with the highest perfection of being, assuming that man is so evil and unhappy, have adopted two principles: one good, the other evil. But here Bayle comes into contact with a philosopher who agrees that God himself causes and suffers all man’s crimes and misery. Let people hate each other, kill each other at the edge of the forest, unite in armies to kill each other, let the winners eat the vanquished. All this can be understood because it is assumed that people differ from each other and that there are different, conflicting are passions. But if men are only a modification of God, then therefore only God acts. And then the same God modifies himself first into a Turk and then into a Hungarian, and then the wars and battles are something that surpasses all the monstrosities and all the vain imaginations of the greatest madmen who were ever locked up in small cells. In accordance with Spinoza’s system, the statement: the Germans killed ten thousand Turks is wrong and incorrect, unless what is meant is: God, modified into Germans, has killed God, modified into ten thousand Turks. And so, according to Spinoza, all statements about what people do to each other must have no other meaning than this: God hates himself, he asks himself for mercy and refuses it, he persecutes himself, kills himself, devours himself, slanders himself, sends himself to scaffold, and so on. This would be more understandable if Spinoza had imagined God as a composite of a number of mutually different parts, but he did not: he saw God as a perfect unity. Bayle calls this infinitely more ridiculous than the work of poets on the gods of the heathen. Bayle therefore wonders whether Spinoza had not realized this or whether he had noticed it, but still stubbornly stuck to his principle.
Bayle’s Critique of Spinoza’s Afterlife
If Spinoza had reasoned consistently according to Bayle, he would not have dismissed the fear of hell as a chimera. Even if one does not want to believe that this universe is the work of God and has a simple, spiritual nature, distinct from all bodies, one must still confess that there are certain things with reason and a will that have been sold into their power . These exercise authority over others, command them, punish or abuse them, and take revenge. According to Bayle, the earth is full of this and every person knows this from experience. The Spinozists, he says, must also recognize the immortality of the soul, because they believe that man is a modality of a being that essentially thinks. Spinozists must also recognize that there are modes that anger others, that shame them, put them on the rack, and that would perpetuate such tortures forever if death did not somehow put an end to them. And since the earth is full of such modalities, there is no reason to think that the sky and the heavens are not full of them. Therefore, Bayle argues, a Spinozist makes a fool of himself if he does not want to recognize that the entire universe is full of ambitious, jealous and cruel modes and there is no reason to think that man can avoid such things after death.