Our study group this evening is meeting to discuss Spinoza. The basic text is chapter 40 of James Carroll's "Constantine's Sword", but we have also read Rebecca Goldstein's "Betraying Spinoza", which has the benefit of being readable, short, informative and interesting.
Spinoza comes across as a very modern guy, living at just the wrong time. He was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community (the precise reasons are not quite clear, but he was obviously a pain in their side) when he was still a teenager, but he never converted to Christianity, so he had to live outside all of the religious communities of his time, when the ONLY communities were religious communities. So when someone says: "I wonder why Spinoza never married", it seems clear to me that (putting aside whether he could find a ready spouse in his situation), but how could he find anyone to conduct a marriage ceremony if the idea of civil marriage did not exist? You can see his problem.
At any rate, here was a modern philosopher who said that the entire universe if a manifestation of God: God is everywhere. Not in heaven sending down his son to die, nor in heaven promising a return to a promised land. Not a God of historical progression, but a God who permeates everything. Not a God who requires specific ritual or observance. There was simply no religion to encompass what today does not sound weird at all. And maybe it did not sound weird then, either. It was just highly, entirely politically incorrect, threatening every political and social structure that existed in this very precarious liberal country in a very precarious world.
Baruch Spinoza: the right man and just the wrong time?
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