Today, Kris leads us into the life of Baruch (Benedictus) de Spinoza, the 17th Century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher of the 'Dutch Golden Age' who heralded in the Age of Enlightenment. Unitarians may discover that they share a lot in common with Baruch Spinoza.
Expanding Horizons
Spinoza
Today, Kris leads us into the life of Baruch (Benedictus) de Spinoza, the 17th Century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher of the 'Dutch Golden Age' who heralded in the Age of Enlightenment. Unitarians may discover that they share a lot in common with Baruch Spinoza.
- Duration:
- 30m
- Broadcast on:
- 28 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
[Music] You're listening to Expanding Horizons, the podcast of the Unitarian Church of South Australia, a home of progressive spirituality and free religious thought and action since 1854. The views expressed in these podcasts are those of the speaker and are not intended to represent the position of the church itself or of the worldwide Unitarian Universalist Movement. For more information visit UnitarianSA.org.au [Music] How I love this noble man, modern words can say, "I fear though, he and his sacred halo will be all alone." Don't try and put a poor little bloke on the road that leads to freedom. Our modern day leaves him cold. He's jucked around by life in the world. The heights give him nothing but frostbite. That is the intellect of food scraps to him. From start to finish he is consumed by possessions and woman and reputation and home. But give me for thinking of Murn Charles and the only one who could do the trick of feisting himself out of the swamp by his own hair. You think that example shows us what human lessons can give? I don't trust a comforting story. One must be born to reach the heights. Provocative Mr Einstein. Now let's sing together. It's a lovely thing to do. In the green books that have been handed out, we have a hymn called "Him to Perfect Wisdom" based on Buddhist writings. Perhaps if you play it through once, then we'll stand and sing. Thank you. Please stand if you're able. [Music] Now I'll invite Noel up to give a reading and extract from one of Spinoza's best-known works. Thanks Noel. People find, both in themselves and outside themselves, many means they're very helpful in seeking their own advantage. For example, eyes for seen, teeth chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for supporting fish. Hence they consider all natural things as means to their own advantage. Knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use. Right after they considered things as means, they could not believe that but from the means they were accustomed to prepare for themselves, they had to infer that there was a ruler or a number of rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them and made all things for their use. And since they'd never heard anything about the temperament of these rulers, they had to judge it, run. Hence they maintained that the gods direct all things for the use of men in order to bind men to them and be held by men in the highest honour. So it has happened that each of them is filled up from his own temperament, different ways of worshipping God, that the God might love them above all the risks and direct the whole of nature according to the needs of their blind desire and insatiable greed. Thus this prejudice was changed into superstition, and struck deep roots in their minds. Some ways that sums up why people here are Unitarians. Now Spinoza, the topic for today, to understand Spinoza and his courage, I must say something about his time. Western Europe in the 1600s, there were three currents swirling around. There was the dominance of the organised Christian religion, primarily Roman Catholic, but with strong pockets of the new Protestant variation, in most cases just as intolerant of non-Christian belief and indeed non-trinitarian belief. At the same time there was the superstition of the ages. People assuming angels and demons and other beings were responsible for the happiness and calamities that afflicted them. Growing salt over the shoulder, avoiding them the number 13, all this sort of thing. At the same time the 1600s was an exciting time for the intellectuals of Western Europe. Books had started to predominate, knowledge was being shared at an exponential rate. Huge advances were being made in mathematics, physiology, chemistry, biology and astronomy. It was the beginning of the age of reason, but we are going back to a time on the cusp, just before that age of reason really took off, when Baruch de Spinoza was born in 1632. The family name de Espenosa indicates an origin in the Iberian Peninsula, and I'll talk more about his family origin in a moment, but because he was famous, he was given the simple name Spinoza. Baruch means blessed in Hebrew, and he came from a Jewish family, but his baptism certificate gave his name as Benedictus because of the predominant Christian society in which he grew up. Now I don't verbed into telling the story of Uriel Acosta, or Duck Costa, because his story tragically intersects with that of Spinoza, and it gives you the setting of the time in which Spinoza lived. Uriel's parents were maranos, that is, in the 1400s his ancestors had been Spanish Jews, like Spinoza's ancestors, and they'd migrated to Portugal after the vicious expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain at the end of the 1400s. Spanish Jews at that time had the choice of either fleeing the country, converting to the Catholic faith, or facing beatings, house burning, and death. Those who converted were known as maranos. The young Acosta, baptized Gabriel, became a student of the Bible. Noting that Jesus was Jewish and that the Christian faith had accepted the so-called Old Testament as the word of God, Acosta concluded that Judaism was divinely inspired. Aware of his family history, he resolved to resume his ancestral Jewish faith at the earliest opportunity. After his father's death, he persuaded his mother and siblings to move to Amsterdam, where they arrived in 1617, where Jewish population of just a couple of hundred people. Gabriel changed his name to Uriel, and he was gladly embraced as a member of the small Jewish congregation. Unfortunately, his pursuit of truth and the divine led him to question many of the beliefs and rituals of his synagogue, particularly those which were not dictated by Jewish scripture. Many accretions of belief and ritual had been written in the Talmud, the great series of works over the centuries, which set out to explain, explore, and refine Jewish faith and practice. Not content to keep his thoughts to himself, Uriel published his views on the Talmud. Written with excommunication by his local synagogue, he refused to recant. He was excommunicated. Local Jews were ordered not to associate with him. Unrepentant, Uriel went on to publish conclusions that the scripture did not support the notion of any immortal soul. To him, the soul was the animating force of a human life for just as long as that life endured on earth. Reminiscent of the fate of a troublesome Jewish rabbi of 2000 years ago, the Jewish leadership in Amsterdam reported Uriel to the city authorities. The magistrates found that he was undermining Christianity as well as his Jewish faith. They fined him and burned the book he had written about the mortality of the soul. After some difficult years, Uriel decided to recant, bearing in mind that there was enormous anti-Semitism, so he's outside the Christian realm in which most people inhabited, and he was outside the Jewish community as well. At a time when Jews weren't allowed to join the local trade skills, for example, so it's not as if he could learn a trade and make a living that way. So he submitted to the mercy of the synagogue. In his own words, he privately declared he would live as an ape among apes. He was accepted back into the fold, but his wayward explorations continued. He was undone when two Christians presented to him, saying they wanted to convert to Judaism. He tried to talk them out of it, offering freely his criticisms of the Jewish faith. They reported this to the synagogue leaders. Once again he was communicated, his family turned against him. After seven years in isolation, finding it difficult to make a living, he offered to submit again. This time the conditions were much more onerous. He had to make a full confession before the congregation of his false beliefs. He was then whipped in front of the congregation in the synagogue with 39 lashes. Finally, he was made to lie across the doorway of the synagogue, and all of the male members of the congregation stepped over him as they left. It is likely, although not proved, that the 15-year-old Baruch Desparnosa was present on the day of Uriel's ultimate humiliation. Samuel Herzenberg, in a 1901 painting, imagined Uriel Acosta guiding the young Sparnosa. Now there is no evidence for this, but certainly Uriel's thoughts about his Jewish faith seem somehow to have been in common with the young Baruch Sparnosa's thoughts. For Uriel, the denial of his true self, the compromise of his own earnest commitment to truth and reason, was too much for him. A few days later he shot himself dead. So, we come to Baruch Desparnosa. Like the Acosta family, his ancestors, a little over a century before his birth, had been Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity for their own survival. And they moved to Portugal, where the antisemitic temperature was slightly lower. It was heating up by the end of the 1500s, however, so Sparnosa's grandfather and father moved to Amsterdam. Not only to join, but also to lead the small Jewish community. The Jews were allowed to establish a synagogue. Jewish faith and practice blossomed openly, after more than a century of secret faith maintained under the cover of a famed Christianity. Baruch was brought up with both religious and secular education. He excelled in languages, mathematics and geometry. But suffering was no stranger to him. His mother died when his father died when he was 22. His sister claimed all of his father's estate. He challenged her for it in court and won, and then gave it all to her, except for a bed. Justice was more important to him than material comfort. He learned to make a living grinding and polishing lenses, making use of his mental facility for precision in mathematics and geometry. But Uriel Acosta, before him, loose conversation with friends, led him to be brought before the synagogue elders to be questioned for heresy. Among the allegations was that the Sparnosa claimed the scriptures were written by men for their purposes, not divinely inspired by God. After an initial warning in the form of a 30-day excommunication or timeout, his independence led to permanent excommunication from the Jewish community. In fact, extraordinarily, that was reconsidered quite recently by the Jewish community and confirmed. He ended up moving to a quiet village on the Rhine, where he continued his writing while making lenses for a living. Although not shunning the simple pleasures of life and the entertainment of friends, he preferred a simple, peaceful life. Common to those who tread the spiritual path, he experienced that solitary distance from commonplace human concerns. He wrote, "After experience had taught me that all things that frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile, when I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them except as far as the mind was affected by them. I determined at last to inquire whether there might be anything which might be truly good and able to communicate its goodness, and by which the mind might be affected to the exclusion of all things." His early conclusion was that neither material wealth, welding power, nor physical pleasure were the answers. As all these things are precarious in passing, he concluded, quote, "Only the love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind with pleasure, free from all pain." He studied the Bible extensively, but he could see no basis for a God with personality or a God that would disrupt the laws of nature. Indeed, he could not see the basis for a God who would play favorites with one person or one tribe or another. In his work, A Treatise on Theology and Politics, he wrote, "We may be absolutely certain that every event described in scripture necessarily happened like everything else according to natural law. And if anything is inscribed there which can be proved to contravene the law of nature or not to be deduced therefrom, we must believe it to have been foisted into the sacred writing by irreligious hands for whatsoever is contrary to nature, is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd." This was written at a time when the legal punishment for heresy in England was still death by burning. Politically, he could be described as a libertarian. He wrote, "Simplicity and truth of character are not produced by the constraint of laws nor by the authority of the state. No one, the whole world over, can be forced or legislated into a state of blessedness. The means required for such a consummation are of faithful and familiar admonition, sound education, and above all, free use of the individual judgment. It is in everyone's power to wield the supreme right and authority of free judgment, to explain and interpret religion for oneself." I welcome here. He studied the Christian Bible like the Unitarianism, which was quietly and slowly spreading in England during his lifetime. He could not accept that Jesus was a god on earth, but he highly valued the teaching of Jesus as recorded in Scripture. When a friend invited him to adopt Roman Catholicism, however, he replied, "I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, but I know that I think it is the true one. But you who presume that you have at last found the best religion, or rather the best men to whom you have given over your credulity, how do you know that they are the best among all those who have taught other religions, or are teaching them now, or will teach them into the future? Have you examined all those religions, both ancient and modern, which are taught here and in India and everywhere throughout the world? Even if you have duly examined them, how do you know that you have chosen the best? Knowledge, the reason which God has given you, and cultivate it, if you would not be numbered among the brooks. Spinoza died at the age of 44, probably from tuberculosis. For over a decade prior to his death, he had been working on his greatest work, known as the Ethics. In accordance with his instructions, it was published by friends shortly after his death. Ethics was written in Latin, the full name Ethica ordinate geometropodemus strata, gives a clue to his approach. He sought to use Euclid's powerful method in geometry and apply it to the field of human conduct, ethics. He considered it was possible to do this, so he defined his terms carefully based on observation and then deduced the appropriate ethical responses. Ethics is a work in five books, and the first book was devoted to the concept, or one could say the problem of God. Spinoza refers to the substance, Latin substantia of things, in the sense of the essence which underlies what we can see or otherwise perceive in our minds. There is a reality which is difficult to perceive directly, yet every day we perceive it through the particularities of the people and things and the nature which we encounter and observe. Take away the particular qualities of that thing that we see, its shape, its colour, its size, and there's still an essence of the thing. Underlying everything in the universe is this essence. That essence, Spinoza would say, is God. You can call it pan-theism or pan-in-theism. God is in everything. God underpins everything. Yet God has no personality, no particularity. As soon as a particular feature is attributed to God, we see or imagine only the external appearance that which gives us an impression or an idea. God is behind those impressions and ideas. When it's reminded of Plato's world of ideas and forms, and the different levels of existence described in the Kabbalah, which by the way was taught in the Amsterdam synagogue of the 1600s, had a little graph there of the essential four planes of existence from conception to conception with form to the form of a particular thing and to the material level which we can readily see. What does this mean for followers of God? It means we are invited to become like God. We don't become numb for our body and our relationships still induce us to take action to go in one direction or another to do this or that. But our passions become stilled. We become more temperate. We less and less have the need to impose our will as we are more in time in tune with every aspect of the world around us. We're in it, yet one step removed from it. This may sound sterile, but it's not a miserable philosophy. Spinoza's ethical conclusions may be compared to that of Jesus. Spinoza wrote, "The one who rightly knows that all things follow from the necessity of divine nature and come to pass according to eternal, natural and regular laws will find nothing at all that is worthy of hatred, laughter or contempt, nor will the person deplore anyone. But as far as human virtue can go, the person will endeavour to act well and rejoice. People under the guidance of reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humanity. In his Jewish community he was a traitor. The Christians of his time shocked at his depersonification of God, rejected him and some called him Satan. You can perhaps see why some people called him an atheist. If he was an atheist though he was an atheist experiencing joy at the God he saw on the present around him. The combination of religion and philosophy has proved alluring to a minority of people from the German romantic philosophers to the present day. Albert Einstein enthralled in his exploration of the order and workings of the universe identified with Spinoza and his conception of God. Einstein said, "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." Einstein's poem, which we heard earlier, is a kind of eulogy to Spinoza. It is somewhat elitist. But one must admit though that most people live under the sway of their passions and earthly preoccupations. Only a minority find a way to let reason guide their living in every respect. If you still have a commitment to both God and reason, it was ever thus. I finish with a poetic summary of Spinoza's thoughts about God falsely attributed to Spinoza on social media, I see, but quite popular on the internet. Which doesn't mean it's true, but it does mean it's appealing. But I think this piece fairly imagines what Spinoza's God would say to us if there was a God at all that would speak to us in language. Stop praying and giving yourself blows on your chest. What I want you to do is go out into the world and enjoy your life. I want you to sing, have fun, and enjoy everything I've made for you. Stop going into those gloomy dark and cold temples that you built yourself and that you call my home. My house is in the mountains, in the forests, the rivers, the lakes, the beaches. That's where I live and express all my love for you. Stop blaming me for your miserable life. I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner. Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can't read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your child's eyes, you will find me in no book. Stop being so scared. I do not judge you nor criticize you nor am I ever angry with you. Nothing bothers me nor do I devise punishment. I am pure love. Stop asking for forgiveness. There's nothing to forgive. If I made you, I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies of free will. How can I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How can I punish you for being as you are, as if I'm the one who made you? Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who misbehaved for the rest of eternity? What kind of God can do that? Respect your peers. Don't do to others what you don't want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your alert status is your guide. Life is not a test, not a step on the way, not a rehearsal, nor a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing there is, here and now, and the only thing you need. I have made you absolutely free. There are no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues. No one carries a marker or keeps a record. You are absolutely free to create in your life a heaven or hell. I couldn't tell you if there's anything after this life, but I can give you a tip. Live as if there is not, as if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist. So if there's nothing after, then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is, rest assured that I won't ask you if you behaved well or not. I'll ask, did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn? Stop believing in me. To believe is to assume, guess, imagine. I don't want you to believe in me. I want you to feel me when you kiss your beloved, when you play with a child, when you love your dog, when you bathe in the sea. Stop praising me. What kind of egotistical God do you think I am? I'm bored being praised. I'm tired of being thanked. Do you feel grateful? Prove it by taking care of yourself, your health, your relationships, the world around you. Do you feel overwhelmed? Express your joy. That's the way to praise me. Stop complicating things and repeating as a parent what you've been taught about me. The only thing sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders. What do you need more miracles for? Why so many explanations? Don't look for me outside, you won't find me. Find me inside. There I'm beating within you. We hope you've enjoyed this Expanding Horizons podcast. These podcasts are the intellectual property of the presenter. They can be used only with the express permission and appropriate acknowledgement of the presenter. This permission can be obtained by emailing admin@unitariansa.org.au Please feel free to leave a comment or visit us on Facebook or Twitter by searching SA Unitarians or by visiting our website at unitariansa.org.au [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]