Was Spinoza a Pagan?

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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

^1. Spinoza, Letters, 423. This letter is dated October/November 1674.

^2. In accordance with this interpretation, Nadler claims that Spinoza denies the possibility of miracles (4). Yet Spinoza’s affirmation of God as the cause of himself (causa sui), which he affirms at the beginning of the Ethics (Idef1), surely counts as a miracle or an idea that defies the scientific laws of nature. See Polka, Between Philosophy and Religion, Vol. 1, 168–99. See also Hunter, “Spinoza on Miracles.”

^3. Nadler quotes Ethics, IVp18s.

^4. Spinoza, Ethics, IVp20s.

^5. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 70.

^6. Ibid.

^7. Ibid., 71.

^8. As Spinoza explains in the Ethics (IIp40s2), the first kind of knowledge is based on the imagination, the second kind on reason, and the third kind on the intuitive knowledge of God.

^9. Spinoza, Ethics, IVp37.

^10. As Nadler observes, Spinoza’s “disparaging” remarks about women at the end of his last work, the Political Treatise, conflict with his articulation of justice and charity for all (35, 55). However, Nadler adds that this prejudice does not reflect the spirit of Spinoza’s philosophy. “The intellectual reasoning required for freedom is accessible to all human minds. There are no Spinozistic philosophical grounds for excluding women as a group from the ranks of those who can achieve the life of the free person” (57).

^11. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 128.

^12. Ibid., 265. Nadler follows Spinoza’s distinction between the piety of the “unphilosophical common folk” based on obedience, not truth, and the piety of the philosopher, based on rational understanding, not obedience (194). Yet this distinction obscures Spinoza’s more fundamental teaching, as he explains in Chapter 15, that every “moral doctrine” in Scripture agrees “fully with reason” (280). For an incisive critique of Spinoza’s “oppositional language” which contradicts this teaching, see Polka, Between Philosophy and Religion, Vol. 2, 176–95.

^13. Plato, Phaedo, 67d–e.

^14. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1159a.