Spinoza’s atheism, or “atheism,” has long been a troubling paradox for the general reader as well as for Spinoza experts. In his own time, and for a century after, practically every published commentator—and there were a great many of them in his native Holland, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, and beyond—condemned him as an “atheist” and his work as propagating outright “atheism.” Meanwhile, Spinoza himself consistently, at times even furiously, denied being an “atheist,” claiming that the last thing he wanted to do was propagate “atheism.” Since the 1780s and the great Spinoza controversy, or Pantheismusstreit , of 1785–1786 among German intellectuals, including Mendelssohn, Goethe, Herder, and the heirs of Lessing, there has been a strong tendency to deny Spinoza’s atheism and refer to him as a “pantheist” or “panentheist.” Meanwhile, no one in the past or today, can deny that Spinoza, especially in his greatest work, the five-part Ethics, affirms a great deal about “God,” or God, and not only that but, despite his attacks on churchmen and theology, has some positive things to say about religion, especially what he calls “true religion,” which no modern philosopher or theologian today can afford to ignore.
Despite Spinoza’s importance as a philosopher, there have been only a couple of first-rate, comprehensive discussions of Spinoza’s concept of “God” combined with a discussion of what he means by “atheism” and “religion” and both are very recent. They are Clare Carlisle’s excellent Spinoza’s Religion (Princeton University Press, 2021) and now Steven Nadler’s latest addition to his lengthening list of exceptionally readable books on almost every aspect of Spinoza’s thought, his 244-page Spinoza, Atheist. With his lucid writing style and marvelously clear mind, Nadler somehow manages to simultaneously provide thoroughly mature, thoughtful surveys of different aspects of Spinoza that sort out particular difficulties in a way helpful to even the most expert in Spinoza studies, with what are, at the same time, simply the best set of introductory works for the beginner and budding student in Spinoza studies. No one has done more to make the abstractness and intricacies of Spinoza’s thought explicable and clear to a great many, and for this he deserves very high praise indeed.
Nadler’s approach in this book is to combine a brief survey of some of the more significant assessments of Spinoza’s “atheism” and discussion of religion in the past, including those of John Locke and Pierre Bayle, the latter termed here the “most interesting seventeenth-century critic” of Spinoza, with a detailed account of the successive efforts to label him instead a “deist,” “pantheist,” or “panentheist.” Among other useful services, this book supplies a helpful discussion of the difference between pantheism and the category, introduced by the German philosopher, Schelling, of pan-entheism. While both the pantheist and panentheist agree that God is immanent in everything in our universe, for the pantheist, God and Nature are identical, whereas for the panentheist, everything in the universe is God and God is in everything, but God is more than just the totality of Nature.
Nadler argues that although Spinoza does indeed equate his “God” with Nature, he is not really a pantheist or a panentheist, let alone a theist, that one finds in Spinoza no effort to “divinize” nature, or view nature as something that one can worship or pray to, and that he never gives the slightest hint that his “God’s” freedom includes any conscious power to steer events in our universe, power to create anything at all other than in perfect accord with the unalterable laws of nature, or power ever to reward, punish, or acknowledge anyone or anything, or intervene in anyone’s life. Consequently, by any rational standard, Spinoza needs to be labeled an “atheist.” To my mind, Nadler is right on almost every point that he makes.
I have only two substantive criticisms. First, it seems to me that he does not make enough of Spinoza’s “true religion.” This is the idea that justice, charity, and the highest moral values are common values at the core of all worthwhile religions and that it is this moral core, discarding all theology, which is the most precious thing humans have for their and their society’s well-being, and it is this that forms the core of “true religion.” But added to this, Spinoza’s “true religion” includes the further insight that most people are incapable of philosophizing, so that the reality of the human condition lays a heavy responsibility for human well-being, one might almost say salvation, on all the divergent religious traditions and their pastors and preachers to teach the highest values to children, the ordinary and the simple-minded. The better the preacher tells the stories belonging to his or her religious tradition and ties the stories to that tradition, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or other, and the more he discards and ditches theology of whatever and every description, the better that pastor serves “true religion.” It is a thought very heartening to modern Christian, Jewish, and Muslim “atheists” who find it impossible to believe the far-fetched, but yet value their own particular religious traditions.
Second, I would suggest that Nadler is just a trifle naïve in his evaluation of Bayle, who applauded Spinoza’s separating theology from “virtue” and moral good more than any other Enlightenment writer. Nadler thinks Bayle “abhorred Spinoza’s philosophy” and takes at face value Bayle’s judgment that Spinoza’s thought was “the most monstrous hypothesis that can be imagined.” I hope to persuade him one day to retract that judgment. Anyhow, whether he does or not, nearly all of Nadler’s many fans, along with those who read this splendidly written book first among his now numerous publications on Spinoza, will rightly treasure it as a helpful and inspiring guide to a longstanding and endlessly fascinating philosophical paradox.
