ABSTRACT
In his correspondence, Spinoza bluntly declares that ‘the Universe is God’ (Ep. 43). The usual name for that doctrine is pantheism. Spinoza’s pantheism has been acclaimed or reviled far more frequently than it has been understood. To his immediate successors, his ‘hideous hypothesis’ seemed a ruseful version of atheistic materialism, honeyed words coating poisoned messages; to the Young Germany of the Romantic period, and later to Arnold and Renan, it seemed the inspired vision of a God-intoxicated man, the last magnificent blaze of the Hebrew religious imagination. Both views are partial and distorted. Spinoza was deeply sympathetic to the scientific aspirations of his era, but he explicitly repudiates materialism. In Epistle 73, he condemns the misunderstanding of those who ‘think that the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus rests on the view that God and Nature (by which they mean a certain mass, or corporeal matter) are one and the same’. And his metaphysical vision, though awesome and exalted, is not the work of poetical sensibility and fine feeling, but the patient elaboration of axioms, postulates and definitions. Spinoza knew that the novelty of his conceptions would bring incomprehension and controversy. He writes to Oldenburgh of his fears that the Christians may ‘take offence and with their customary hatred attack me, who loathe quarrels’ (cf. Gueroult I, pp. 585-6), and he expects to incur their hostility because ‘I could not separate God from Nature as all whom I have any knowledge of have done’ (Ep. 6). This insistence on the oneness of God and Nature is present from his earliest work. In the Short Treatise (I, 8) he remarks: ‘By Natura naturans we understand a being that we conceive clearly and distinctly through itself, and without needing anything beside itself…that is, God’. It reappears mutedly but unmistakeably in the Ethics: ‘that eternal and infinite being, which we call God, that is, Nature (Deus, sive Natura)’.
