It is a particular strength of this excellent book that it engages deeply with the intellectual context of the Theologico-Political Treatise. It explores the background assumptions, unresolved issues and live debates that surround the work – bringing to life the tensions and the polemics that frame Spinoza's thinking. What the book offers is not just a static conceptual frame that enables us to better understand Spinoza's agenda. It brings to life his intellectual environment. We learn, not just who his opponents might have been, but the concerns and priorities they would have brought to the issues. This contextualising brings to the work a wealth of background information, reaching back to ancient philosophy – all packed into a lively, close reading of the text.
The Spinoza that emerges is one that will startle many readers. It is no less surprising than the very different version of Spinozism – as a clandestine politically radical movement – offered in Jonathan Israel's controversial re-assessment.Footnote 1 James, however, offers a much more nuanced treatment of Spinoza's piety than Israel offers of his radicalism. The Spinoza of her book is deeply religious, although the form of his religion is something very different from that of seventeenth century Calvinist orthodoxy. James presents Spinoza as drawing on classical humanist sources to defend a religious way of life which reaches its highest expression in philosophical versions of virtue and piety. For this Spinoza the philosophical life is an alternative – and higher – way of cultivating religious consciousness. This Spinoza is committed to piety – as a personal value, no less than as a socially useful strategy for the maintenance of public peace. There are consequences, not only for the understanding of Spinoza's character and ethical ideals, but also for his views on the proper relations between theology and religion; for his treatment of the idea of revelation; and, more broadly, for his place in the history of the emergence of modern ideas of the secular.
Piety, for James's Spinoza, comes in two forms – both endorsed, though one is of a higher kind than the other. The higher kind is the piety of the philosopher – associated with the life of reason and culminating in the intellectual love of God. The lower, but still valued, kind is the piety associated with imagination – the every-day piety, which it is the responsibility of theologians to inculcate in the masses for the public good. Both are to be distinguished from ‘superstition’ – described by James as an ‘ominous’ psychic condition, involving a rigid clinging to the various beliefs and feelings it sustains.
Central to James's construction of this novel Spinoza is her interpretation of his understanding of the concept of revelation. In the Ethics, Spinoza repudiates the idea of a purposeful God who transcends the natural world. In the God of the Ethics there is no distinction between intellect and will. This God lays down no laws for human beings; nor does he provide for their well-being. There is no purpose for which he acts; his whole being is completely expressed in the interconnected totality of the natural world. Having apparently rejected all notion of what we now call ‘transcendence’ or ‘the supernatural’, there seems little scope for attributing to Spinoza acceptance of any divinely revealed truth. Yet, the Theologico-Political Treatise opens with an assurance that ‘Prophecy, or revelation is sure knowledge revealed by God to man’.
Intriguingly, James argues that Spinoza can and does consistently maintain both his repudiation of a transcendent purposeful God, and his acceptance of the idea of revelation. On her reading of the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza was not speaking ironically in affirming his acceptance of revelation. Nor was he arguing ad hominem. When he talks of the social importance of ‘piety and obedience’, he was not making a strategic concession to the theologians. Rather, he offered his book in all earnestness as a considered contribution to the flourishing of religious piety. For this Spinoza ‘philosophy becomes a form of religion, sharing its capacity to bind, and transforming devotion to the divine law into rational piety. Rather than focusing on a goal external to true religion, this kind of philosophy offers theology its wholehearted support by cultivating the same end.’ (229) On this approach, Spinoza is not concerned – as many have thought – with simply carving out a separate domain for philosophy, free from the intrusions of the presumed authority of the theologians over what should be believed. He regards the practice of his kind of philosophy as itself an exercise in the cultivation of piety.
What then becomes of the idea of revelation? In a fascinating discussion of Spinoza's treatment of prophecy, James argues that Spinoza has reconstructed revelation – as it operates through the prophets – as a ‘natural’ exercise of human imagination. For him, the prophets were indeed ‘extraordinary’; but what made them so was ‘the unusual quality of their imaginations, which gave them access to insights that lay beyond the reach of more ordinary people’. Prophetic imagination amounts to a naturalised version of highly skilled, insightful imagination. The philosopher's capacity to arrive at truth, in contrast, does not depend on imaginative skills or insights; it therefore has no use for Scripture.
What is more disconcerting than the idea of prophecy as ‘natural’ imagination is that, on James's reading, the philosophers' independence from the authority of Scripture does not mean that their knowledge is distanced from the idea of revealed truth. Indeed, she claims that Spinoza, in the opening sections of the Theologico-Political Treatise offers a ‘vigorous defence of the claim that philosophical understanding qualifies as a form of revelation, because it depends on our idea of God and the natural laws he determines.’ ‘When we acquire knowledge by natural reasoning, God reveals it to us.’ (42) ‘Revelation’ thus comes in two forms, both ‘natural’ rather than ‘supernatural’ sources of knowledge – matched up with the two kinds of religious piety: one for imagination and the masses (guided by the interpretive skills of the theologians); the other for reason and the philosophers.
I think that James's reconstructions of revelation – ingenious and challenging though they are – go too far in attributing these conceptual juggling acts to Spinoza. On the one hand, this Spinoza wants reason to adjudicate the operations of imagination in Scripture, while requiring no authority over its own deliverances. That is what we might expect from the treatment of reason in the Ethics. On the other hand, he wants to present the philosopher as a man of piety – a man who respects and honours revelation as the word of God, and considers himself as having his own access to that revelation. To make it all fit, philosophy (associated with reason) and Scripture (associated with imagination) are presented as alternative ways of knowing the same truths. The object of both is ‘how to live’. To make that plausible, Spinoza has to be presented as offering, not only a stripped back account of the Scriptures, but also an equally succinct and forceful summation of the philosophy he has expounded in the Ethics. Scripture and philosophy converge on the mantra: ‘love God and your neighbour’.
The modern philosopher is thus supposed to know through reason what the ancient prophets knew through imagination – and what non-philosophers can come to know through the wise guidance of non-superstitious theologians interpreting Scripture. The metaphor of reason as God's ‘natural’ revelation to philosophers is evocative. However it is not clear what its non-metaphorical content might be; or what talk of reason as God's revelation might add to our understanding and appreciation of its operations. Nor is it clear how, in the lack of such content, the model of two routes to the same revealed truth of how to live is coherent.
Was Spinoza ‘religious’? Certainly, he was vehement in denying that he was an ‘atheist’ – stung by the connotations of immorality carried by that term in his social context. There are in the Ethics points where he does talk of his version of love of the good in terms of ‘piety’. His version of the highest form of that love – the ‘intellectual love of God’ – is a deeply affective state somewhat akin to religious awe. However, I am not persuaded that such appropriations of terms familiar from religious discourse warrant our thinking of him as a religious thinker with his own distinctive path to a shared ideal of piety. It seems more plausible to regard him as having replaced religious piety with a different – though functionally similar – ideal, grounded in the cultivation of reason, together with a schooled imagination, rather than in supposedly revealed truth.
It is possible to see these issues as largely semantical – as generated by the shifting meanings of ‘atheism’ and ‘religion’ over the centuries. However, the choice of terminology here is not arbitrary. At stake is how we see Spinoza in relation to narratives of the emergence of modern ideas of the secular. Was he a defender of religion against the growing strength of competing secular ideals? Or should he be seen rather as a defender of secular ideals against unjustified encroachments of religious authority? I am not in the end persuaded by James's book that Spinoza was ‘religious’ in any sense that should put him at odds with emerging Enlightenment ideas of the secular. Her interpretation does, however, shake the undeserved image he has acquired as an arch enemy of religion.
James has offered an imaginative and constructive recasting of the intellectual background to our contemporary debates – so often strident and fruitless – about the rival merits of atheism and religion. If he was an ‘atheist’, it was one of different kind from that of some of the more zealous atheists of our own time. He mocked and derided superstition; but he did not denigrate religion. He rejected the supernatural; and he argued against the encroachment of the authority of the theologians on philosophy and on political life. Yet, like many later Enlightenment thinkers, he aimed to accommodate religion – not to destroy it. He defended affects associated with the more positive religious attitudes towards shared humanity, and towards the natural world – joy, love, generosity, awe – developing his own treatment of their role in the good life, and of the conditions of their flourishing.
Whatever one thinks of James's stance on Spinoza's ‘piety’, this book offers an illuminating and significant contribution to the understanding of his Theologico-Political Treatise in its historical and intellectual context. Her treatment of the background to his thought in classical humanist ideals of the well lived life is particularly impressive. Her book is essential reading – not only for those already interested in Spinoza, but also for all who wish to understand the interactions of philosophy, religion and politics in the intellectual history of modernity.
