Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul

two. Spinoza: The Onto-theological Pantheism of Nature

41 two Spinoza The Onto-theological Pantheism of Nature Spinoza is the paradigmatic pantheist. But is he not ipso facto an atheist? This would not mean that he has overcome metaphysics in its onto-theological sense. For if the Good and Humankind (in various modes) can substitute for God as the Highest Being, why not Nature? Still, an atheist could hardly provide us with a model of divine immanence in relation to which divine transcendence could be clarified. So we’d best begin with the question of Spinoza’s atheism. There has been no shortage of those willing to label Spinoza an atheist . At the head of the list is Pierre Bayle, whose 1697 essay dominated the eighteenth-century reception of Spinoza.1 Others include such thinkers as Leibniz,2 Priestley,3 Jacobi,4 and Coleridge.5 1. Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis , Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). The essay begins, ‘‘Spinoza, Benedictus de, a Jew by birth, and afterwards a deserter from Judaism, and lastly an atheist, was from Amsterdam. He was a systematic atheist . . . ,’’ p. 288. Subsequent references stress, among other things, the role of the Tractatus theologico-politicus in preparing the way for the Ethics. See pp. 293, 295, 300–301. Onto-theology and the Need to Transcend Cosmological Transcendence 42 But closer to home and during Spinoza’s lifetime, the charge of atheism was anything but rare. Spinoza gives as one of his motives in writing the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), ‘‘The opinion of me held by the common people, who constantly accuse me of atheism. I am driven to avert this accusation, too, as far as I can.’’6 Far from averting the accusation, the Tractatus evoked from a certain Lambert Van Velthuysen the charge that in it Spinoza ‘‘prompts atheism by stealth . . . teaching sheer atheism with furtive and disguised arguments.’’7 (To which Spinoza responds that Velthuysen would have thought differently had he known ‘‘what manner of life I pursue . . . . For atheists are usually inordinately fond of honours and riches, which I have always despised . . .’’)8 And in 1674 the States of Holland condemned the Tractatus and ‘‘other heretical and atheistic writings.’’9 Later on, Alfred Burgh will tell Spinoza of his own return to the Catholic Church and in urging him similarly to convert will urge him to ‘‘reflect on the wretched and uneasy lives of atheists’’ and especially on ‘‘their most unhappy and horrifying death . . .’’10 2. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Darmstadt: Academie Verlag, 1926), II.1, p. 535. 3. ‘‘The magistrate must define strictly what he means by the term God, for otherwise Epicureans and Spinozists might be no atheists . . .’’ Essay on the First Principles of Government, in Joseph Priestley, Political Writings, ed. Peter N. Miller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 59. 4. Jacobi’s charge that Lessing was a Spinozist set off the pantheism controversy about which we will hear more later on. See The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi, trans. G. Vallée et al. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), p. 123. Cf. p. 81. For fuller documentation, see Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn, ed. H. Scholz (Berlin: Reuter and Reichard, 1916). 5. ‘‘Spinozism consists in the exclusion of intelligence and consciousness from Deity—therefore it is Atheism.’’ Quoted from Critical Annotations by Thomas McFarland in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 190. ‘‘And, were I not a Christian, and that only in the sense in which I am a Christian, I should be an atheist with Spinoza.’’ Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, ed. Thomas Allsop (London: n.p., 1936), I, pp. 88–89. But Coleridge was not of one mind on the subject. See the editor’s discussion of his ‘‘Note on Spinoza’’ and his own comments in the ‘‘Note,’’ Shorter Works and Fragments, Vol. 11 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), I, pp. 608–13; Biographia Literaria, Vol. 7 of The Collected Works, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), I, pp. 152–53 and p. 152, n. 3; and The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon, 1957), I, #1379. McFarland (p. 190) takes the equation of Spinozism with atheism to be Coleridge’s ‘‘considered and final philosophical position.’’ 6...