Being Baruch Spinoza.

“God is dead”, a famous philosopher once said. God is not dead, “he” is alive and very well,
thank you very much. What is dead is humankind’s old erroneous view of God. Time has
moved on and we must raise our consciousness accordingly. That is the challenge facing
Western Civilization, in the main, if the world wants to reinvigorate itself and end its
decline into a moral and spiritual wasteland.

I love scholarship. Reading and books are one of the joys of my life. In particular I adore
philosophy. I have read books on Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer and Hegel but no philosopher has inspired me more than Baruch Spinoza. I
think his perspective on the true meaning of “God” is inspirational and if we in the West
were to embrace his insight I think it could revitalise our dying civilization.

Born a Jew in 1632 in Amsterdam Baruch was a brilliant student, the son of a merchant. In
1656 he was summoned before the Jewish elders charged with heresy. He refused to change
his view of God and was accordingly excommunicated. They did so because Baruch was
fundamentally questioning the West’s view of God as anthropomorphic. (In the image of
Man). They felt the gratitude of their hosts in the Netherland’s who welcomed the Jewish
community after their exile from Spain. Spinoza took his exile from his beloved synagogue
with quiet courage and lived a simple life of reading, reflection and writing, until his
untimely death at the age of 44 in 1677. He lived simply and wrote because he believed the
following:

“After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life
are vain and futile, and when I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had
nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them. (In other
words if I did not think about them they did not matter)……. The greatest good is the
knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature … The more the mind
knows, the better it understands its forces and the order of nature; the more it understands
its forces or strength, the better it will be able to direct itself and lay down the rules for
itself; and the more it understands the order of nature, the more easily it will be able to
liberate itself from useless things; this is the whole method.”

In his quiet studies, as set out in his “Treatise on Religion and the State”, Spinoza
articulates what I love his so much in his philosophy;

“I take a totally different view of God and Nature from that which the later Christians
usually entertain, for I hold that God is immanent, and not the extraneous…. I say, All is in
God; all lives and moves in God…. What the law of circles are to all circles, God is to the
world. …….. Like substance, God is the causal chain or process, the underlying condition
of all things, the law and structure of the world. This concrete universe of modes and things
is to God as a bridge is to its design, its structure, and the laws of mathematics and
mechanics according to which it is built; these are the sustaining basis, the underlying
condition, the substance, of the bridge; without them it would fall.
I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would in like manner say that God is eminently
triangular……”

Thus in other words, for Spinoza God is the complete intelligence, the complete laws, the
complete reason, the “Logos”, behind life, behind Nature, behind the Universe, of which we
are a part. When we seek to understand ourselves we are growing in the knowledge of God
because we are part of the divinity which makes the whole mystery function. Thus when we
observe the stars we observe God; when we observe the vast oceans we observe God; when
we observe each other we observe God because we are all part of the whole. According to
Baruch the biggest mistake of philosophy was to see God in human subjective terms. Such
a view he believed was based on mythical not historical reality.

This is exactly the reason for the collapse of Christianity in Western Civilization; the
concept of the true nature of God has not kept pace with the growth in human
consciousness. According, humanity believes today that God is dead and thus we have lost
all religious luminosity, meaningfulness, spiritual groundedness and mystical connection.
All due to an error of intellect. Thus I believe it is time humanity matured and became
transcendental once more.

I believe that if the West begins to believe the philosophical truths of Baruch Spinoza a
spiritual rebirth could occur and this is exactly what Carl Gustav Jung was talking about
when the wrote the following in his brief classic “The Undiscovered Self”:

“We are living in what the Greeks called - Kaipos – the right time for a ”metamorphosis of
the gods”, i.e., of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time,
which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man
within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous
transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own science and
technology.”

“As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today, we are faced with the problem of
the moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and
social developments. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological
constitution of modern man. …. Does he know that he is on the point of losing the life-
preserving myth of the inner self and which Christianity has treasured up for him. Does he
realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him? Is he even capable at all
of realizing that this would be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that he
is the makeweight that tips the scales?”

“Happiness, and contentment, equability of soul and meaningfulness of life – these can be
experienced only by the individual and not by the State, which, on the one hand, is nothing
but a convention of independent individuals and, on the other, continually threatens to
paralyze and suppress the individual.”
Carlo Rovelli in his brilliant brief book “Seven Brief Lessons On Physics” also truly
indicated that he understood the current crisis and the importance of the insights of
Baruch Spinoza;

“…. As the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza understood with marvelous lucidity in the
seventeenth century ……. There is not an “I” and “the neurons in my brain”. They are all
the same thing. An individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated. …. Our moral
valuees, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared
with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution which our species has
undergone over millions of years…… All of this is part of the self-same “nature” which we
are describing. We are an integral part of nature; we are nature, in one of its innumerable
and infinitely variable expressions. … That which makes us specifically human does not
signify our separation from nature…… Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home.

Lucretius expresses this, wonderfully:

… we are all born from the same celestial seed;

all of us have the same father,
from which the earth, the mother who feed us,
receives clear drops of rain,
producing from them bright wheat
and lush trees,
and the human race,
and the species of beasts,
offering up the foods with which all bodies are
nourished,
to lead a sweet life
and generate offspring ….”

I believe we are living through a time of political, economic, social and philosophical crisis
in the world. Like Jung I believe everybody, every human being, every individual, has a
part to play. Every individual’s insight, courage, creativity and resourcefulness can be the
“makeweight” that changes human destiny. At source of our current world crisis is a
crisis of philosophy, a crisis of belief and a crisis of religion, in essence a loss in
understanding of the true meaning of “Logos”. I firmly believe that Baruch Spinoza and
his teachings have a fundamental part to play in the revitalization of the human spirit,
human morals, human ethics and human interaction. Such revitalization, I believe, will
save the current collapse of the West. This is why I believe the world needs to explore the
philosophy behind what being a Spinozan means *.

“In the beginning was the logos (the Word) and the Logos was with God and the Logos was
God.”

John 1:1
King James Bible.
* Spinozan = Being A Monotheistic Monist. Monotheism = There is only one God.
Monism = Thought and substance are one.

© Christopher M. Quigley 2nd March 2019, Dublin, Ireland.