A Sunday Sermon

[Following the publication of my book, "Spinoza's God," my church, The Unitarian Universalists of the Blue Ridge, asked me to deliver a talk focused on the book. The following "sermon" is what came of their request, last Sunday. It seems to have worked.]

Once upon a time, in seventeenth century Amsterdam, there lived a young Jewish man named Baruch Spinoza. Like most young Jewish fellows he had been brought up to revere the God of Moses, and for the better part of the first two decades of his life, that’s apparently what he did. We know he received a thorough education in the Hebrew language and in the laws and traditions of the Jewish faith. I can imagine him as a dedicated attendee in what we might call Religious Education class, like most bright young people, peppering his teachers with questions, in his case, many questions. The word “Spinoza” means, in Portuguese, “thorn” as in the spiny stickers on the stems of roses. And that’s what Spinoza became, a thorn in the side of the Jewish community of seventeenth century Amsterdam.

Somewhere along the way Baruch had run across the works of Rene Descartes, the most famous free thinker of that time. In intellectual circles, Descartes was the rogue in vogue. He was the philosopher you had to deal with if you wished to be recognized as a “learned person.” We know that a bit later, Spinoza’s ideas diverged from Descartes’, but we can easily imagine this bright young man as a teenager, challenging his teachers with Descartes’ new fangled ideas.

But Spinoza wasn’t just playing games. He had not simply read Descartes. He caught on to what that wily Frenchman was talking about. Descartes challenged people like the young Spinoza to question their ideas and to keep on questioning until they knew they had reached the base of their beliefs. It was not good enough to simply know things; it was infinitely more important to understand why you trusted your knowledge as the truth.

Eventually, Spinoza would fine tune that particular thought of Descartes’, but that’s skipping over the juicy part. In the meanwhile our young man of Amsterdam got himself in deep trouble with the Rabbis. His ideas, you see, were not simply challenging the Hebrew faith – they were apparently threatening the safety of the entire Jewish community. We know from our own history that the Pilgrims who eventually settled in America had first migrated to the Netherlands in search of a place where they could worship as they pleased. The Jews were also welcome in Amsterdam. But in the minds of the Rabbis, Spinoza’s ideas were raising dangerous questions about the fundamentals of Christianity. The Rabbis sought to protect their community from the same sort of treatment being dealt out to Jews in Spain and Portugal, so they took action against our young hero.

First they offered him a sizeable pension if he would publicly deny his heretical ideas. When Spinoza refused, they excommunicated him. He did not bother to attend the formal ceremony, but he was no doubt made aware of the harsh words with which he was drummed out of the faith.

Let him be accursed by day, and accursed by night; let him be accursed in his lying down. and accursed in his rising up. May the Lord never more pardon or acknowledge him; may the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn henceforth against this man.

And in what could have been the unkindest cut of all ...

Hereby then are all admonished that none hold converse with him by word of mouth, none hold communication with him by writing; that no one do him any service, no one abide under the same roof with him, no one approach within four cubits length of him, and no one read any document dictated by him or written by his hand.

Spinoza was not yet twenty-four years old.

A scant twenty-one years later, he died, leaving us two books dealing with his philosophy, another on Descartes, and two unfinished books. One of those unfinished books was actually the first he sat down to write. It’s called “A Treatise on the Improvement of the Intellect.” It begins with these romantic words.

I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else, whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.

A page or so later in that book we see Spinoza paraphrasing the thoughts Solomon had written in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Young Spinoza saw that fame, fortune, and the other achievements of what we normally call success, could not fill the bill of affording a joy to all eternity. It was from that awakening that he turned to philosophy.

His first published book was the commentary on Descartes, but in the preface to that book, he says straight out that his intention there was merely to explain Descartes and that he did not in all cases endorse those ideas. As it turned out, though, that was the only book Spinoza published in his lifetime that bore his name on the cover.

His second major work, “A Treatise on Theology and Politics,” not only does not bear his name but, for very prudent reasons, even the name of the publisher was fictitious. Today the TTP, as that book is called, is generally acknowledged as having fired the starting gun for the higher criticism of the Bible. It was the first book ever published that clearly asked and answered the question, “who wrote the Pentateuch,” the first five books of the Bible. Spinoza claimed the author wasn’t Moses, but rather an assemblage of writers and editors who lived as much as 500 years after the death of Moses. The knowledge contained in Spinoza’s TTP has been so thoroughly verified by modern research, that the book is now seldom studied in the higher ranks of academia. It remains, however, Spinoza’s most readable book, one that any group of liberal religionist lay persons would find great pleasure in studying. It’s still in print, and the author’s name is now on the cover. I’ll quote the book’s opening sentence: “If men were able to exercise complete control over all their circumstances, or if continuous good fortune were always their lot, they would never be prey to superstition.” As a Unitarian Universalist, I just love those words.

Spinoza’s final completed work, his masterpiece, is called, “Ethics Geometrically Demonstrated.” This book is not called a masterpiece because of its clarity. The last words of the book read like this, “. . . for all great things are as difficult as they are noble.” I remember thinking, after I had ploughed through the Ethics for the first time, that I wish Spinoza had not made his “great things” so hellishly difficult to understand. But I guess, if the Ethics were an easy read there would be no need for books like the one I just wrote, or the many others that have been written to “explain” what Spinoza was talking about.

What makes the Ethics so difficult, apart from the style in which it is presented, is that its ideas fly harshly right into the face of our superstitions. All Christians, Jews, and Muslims had been taught that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” That verse creates God as a being separate from the universe. God is one thing, the universe is another. But Spinoza spends the first few pages of the Ethics telling us, and trying logically to convince us, that God and the universe are one and the same thing. This idea is so blatantly different from what we’ve been taught that we don’t realize until much later that what Spinoza is actually telling us is this: if God were something apart from the universe, then we humans would have no means to learn of God and no reason to trust anything we’ve been taught about the nature of God. If we cannot deduce our knowledge of God from our experience of the world, then all bets are off as to what God actually is. If God is wholly other, then any and all theological statements about him are equally valid . . . and equally invalid. That is, all faiths based on so-called revelation, however foolish or wise they may seem, have an equal claim to the truth about God – none at all.

I now know that one of the things that made Spinoza’s Ethics so hard to understand for me was the fact that when I first read it I did not want to understand it. It wasn’t that I as an inquisitive young man did not consciously seek understanding. It was that I could not break the unconscious bonds that tied me so comfortably to my inherited beliefs. It’s one thing to be a brash kid challenging his elders, but another thing entirely to truly understand why you’re doing it.

You see, Spinoza was not, with his masterpiece, merely challenging this or that spurious belief. He was setting up an entire new system, one that took in, not only the relationship of Man to God, but of all of us to each other. It was not by accident that the word “ethics” appears in the title of his book. Every word in it is about ethics.

According to the dictionary, ethics is “the branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of actions and the goodness and badness of motives and ends.” Briefly, and philosophically, ethics is the search for the good. Practically every word written by Plato can be understood in terms of that search. Until the late 18th century philosophers were doing nothing other than trying to find a coherent answer to the question: what is the good?

I don’t want to diverge too far here, but it was shortly after Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” appeared in 1784 that philosophers began to take seriously the questions Descartes had asked. The answer modern philosophers finally came up with runs along these lines: everything we believe is a product of the human mind, and the human mind is enslaved by language. All our words were made up by the human mind, so in effect, what we have here Luke is not so much a failure to communicate, but rather a vicious circle in which we make up arrangements of words to justify, prove, or explain other arrangements of words.

You don’t have to think too hard to see that in order to question that idea you will be compelled to use words. And there you will find yourself . . . right in the traps laid by post-modern philosophy.

But five years after the first great world war, there came Bertrand Russell and his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell saw it first, Wittgenstein later, that 250 years before that great war, Spinoza had seen that post-modernism was where philosophy was headed. Baruch did not say in the Ethics that his philosophy was “true for all possible worlds.” He said it is true for this world. Spinozism is true for beings like human beings whose knowledge of reality is limited by their ability to experience only body-like things and idea-like things. Spinoza saw that we are absolutely free to have ideas – good ideas, bad ideas, true ideas, false ideas – but that we are also, as bodies, just as absolutely bound by the laws of the physical universe. But for each and all of our ideas, good bad, or what-have-you, there exists a physical counterpart in the brain, and that physical counterpart, because it is physical, is absolutely obedient to the laws of Nature.

We may imagine we can fly like birds, we may even believe we can. We are absolutely free to have such thoughts. But the unchangeable laws of God make sure that we cannot actually do it.

It’s not the words of those last few sentences that make them true. Those statements are true because we find it impossible to deny them. We do not need proof that we can imagine ourselves flying like birds; all we have to do is to think that thought, and our freedom to think such a thought is proven. Nor do we need proof that we cannot actually fly like birds. We do not need to flap our arms trying to fly. We know without trying that the unaided human body cannot fly. No philosopher has convinced us of those facts. Out of what we are, we simply know those statements are true.

Plato had his hero Socrates constantly asking: what is justice? He never gave us a clear answer. Here’s what Spinoza might have had Socrates say: Justice is a possibility made possible because God, as Nature, is deaf, dumb, and blind to this or that creature’s needs. Nature treats us all the same. We are in fact all equal in the sight of God. To quote a famous Rabbi, “The rest is detail.”

Some 20th century philosophers, particularly the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps echoing Nietzsche’s infamous declaration that God is dead, expressed a deeply felt anxiety over the fact that we appear to be alone in the universe. Apart from ourselves, there’s nothing in the universe that intends to help us out. That’s a logical conclusion we can draw from the fact that God plays no favorites. We can also conclude from this fact that we human beings are entirely and completely responsible for our thoughts, our feelings, and finally for our behavior.

But still, we’re not alone. If we were actually alone in the universe, we would be like an imaginary thing that obeys no law, but moves in and out of existence, in this or that direction, up, down, sideways, or no way at all, for no intelligible reason. If that were the case we would in fact be absolutely alone, without any sense of what’s possible and what’s impossible. Today, we might actually be able to fly like birds, and tomorrow, be able only to fly like rocks. There would be no order in the universe.

But that does not happen to be the case. We are not alone. We abide with Nature and her unbendable laws. We exist in and as integral parts of the logos, the intelligible whole that Spinoza decided to refer to as God. If we see ourselves committing atrocities, we know it’s possible for humans to do that. If we see ourselves creating great works of art, composing unbelievably beautiful pieces of music, we know it’s possible for us to do that, too. Operating within the logos that is God, we are responsible for all the ugliness and all the beauty we have created. Perhaps it helps us to know that there is no evil in God, nor any beauty, that all the goodness and all the horror are of our making. That leaves us more or less in charge of our destiny.

And perhaps, as Unitarian Universalists, we can begin to appreciate why it is that we do not entrust our souls to dogmatic creeds, but rather place our faith in the final and most convincing lesson Spinoza has taught us: we are the makers of meaning. When we occasionally in our mind’s eye catch a fleeting glimpse of a more meaningful, a more beautiful way the world might be, and then see in the next instant the meaning we have actually created in the world, we see that we have somehow failed as makers of meaning. We see the difference between what we actually have created and what we might have created out of a more perfect understanding of what we are, what God is, and how the world works.

We are the makers of meaning, and until the world is actually working in ways that everyone in his or her right mind would say is good, the meaning we have created will remain, fragmented, confused, incomplete.

Whether we know it or not – and I suspect most UUs do know it – humanity dwells in the shadow of a fact we cannot deny: ultimate beauty consists in seeking the beautiful, ever seeking to create beauty, in ourselves, in each other, in the world. That’s an idea, an idea we are absolutely free to hold dearest and highest in our hearts. Ultimate beauty, ultimate love, is the ultimate task and service of true religion.

[Spinoza's God, 265 pages, $18.95, postpaid, is available at www.alondrapress.com.]