Introduction

Most of my thoughts on this topic are indebted to Melamed, Yitzhak. ““Christus secundum spiritum”: Spinoza, Jesus and the infinite intellect.” Jesus among the Jews. Routledge, 2012. 152-163. In fact, I am not sure if there’s anything new I’m going to say here.

disclaimer: The arguments in this section are not my own, and only consist of an attempt to understand Spinoza’s understanding.

The God of Spinioza

Spinoza’s views on Jesus are somewhat enigmatic. His ‘God’ is nothing like the usual God of the Abrahamic faiths, and so we would expect, at first glance, that a God who does not even possess a will, much less a ‘personality’, cannot possibly have much to do with the Christian God who manifests himself in the person of Jesus, walks around, and interacts with humans. At the same time, however, his works do include references to Christ; the Ethics uses the word ‘Christ’ at least once, and the Theoloigcal-Political Treatise uses the word several times. What, exactly, does Spinoza understand by Jesus?

Wolfson’s Spinoza and the Word of God

Harry Wolfson, on the last page of his monumental work on Spinoza, describes the following moving scene.

And I can picture him, once of a Sunday, at the invitation of the good old Doctor, taking the services in the church. He preaches a sermon which is an invective against what he styles “the prejudices of the theologians of our time.” ‘ In it he inveighs against prevailing credulous beliefs in the spirituality of God, His personal relation to men, his direct guidance of human affairs, the divine origin of the Scriptures, human freedom of the will, the separability of soul from body, and the survival of the soul after death as an individual entity. The sermon over, he pauses and says, “Now let us pray.” And in his prayer he thanks God, “the creator of the universe,” for His bountiful goodness; he begs for the forgiveness of “our sins,” asks for divine enlightenment in the true understanding of “Thy revealed Word,” and petitions for divine grace in “guiding us” in the paths of righteousness, to the end that “we may inherit” life everlasting and enjoy eternal bliss in the presence of “Thy glory.” As he is about to close his prayer, he catches a glimpse of the congregation and suddenly realizes that he is in a Christian church. Immediately he adds: “ In the name of Christ, the mouth of God, whose spirit is the idea of God, which alone leads us unto liberty, salvation, blessedness, and regeneration. Amen.”

If I understand Wolfson correctly, the quotation marks are meant to indicate direct quotes of Spinoza.

What does Wolfson’s passage say about how far Spinoza’s God is from the Christian God?

Wolfson has succeeded in the unthinkable: he has crafted from the words of the “atheist” (see: Nadler) and “heretical” (see: the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam, going strong for 400-ish years) Spinoza a pious and even Christian sermon. Clearly, for Spinoza, Jesus’ spirit is the ‘idea of God’, which — if we take some linguistic latitude and interpret this as meaning ‘the Word of God’, or the λόγος — means that Spinoza is happy to think of Jesus Christ as being the Word of God. But what does this mean? Does this mean that Spinoza essentially agrees with John 1? Let us start from John 1 in its most strongly homoousistic form, and through a series of substitutions arrive at the words of Spinoza.

  1. Word = God
  2. Christ = God (substitute Christ for Word)
  3. spirit of Christ = God (substitute ‘spirit of Christ’ for Christ)
  4. spirit of Christ = idea of God (substitute ‘idea of God’ for God)

Thus, it would be a stretch to say that Spinoza’s identification of the spirit of Christ with the idea of God is in agreement with the words of John 1, and even more of a stretch to say that he is in agreement with the ‘consubstantial with God’ of the Nicene creed. There seems to be little room in Spinoza’s thought for a God who can become incarnate as a human being; it must have been in tacit response to the Christian understanding of Jesus that he wrote in one of his letters (LVI), “A triangle, if only it had the power of speech, would say in like manner that God is eminently triangular”. The pedigree of this idea apparently goes all the way to Xenophanes, quoted on p.451 of The Correspondence of Spinoza, quoting from Burnet Early Greek Philosophy.

Correspondence with Oldenburg

Henry Oldenburg (Letter LXXIV) put the question to Spinoza clearly:

Moreover they say that you conceal your opinion of Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the world, and the only Mediator for mankind, and of his Incarnation and Atonement; and they want you to open your mind clearly on [this head].

and Spinoza’s reply,

it is not entirely necessary to salvation to know Christ according to the flesh …

suggests that he does not really believe that being a follower of the person, Jesus, is important to ‘salvation’, i.e., he does not believe that this is an important part of ‘true religion’, such as it is.

He then continues,

… but we must think far otherwise of the eternal son of God, that is, the eternal wisdom of God …

‘far otherwise’ here means that Spinoza thinks that it is definitely important for salvation to know ‘the eternal son of God’, the Word that was with God from the beginning, the logos that undergirds all reality, and the divine Wisdom that is identical with the essence of God. So far so good: Spinoza identifies an entity (“the eternal son of God, i.e., the eternal wisdom of God”) which Christians can take to mean Jesus, whereas Spinoza could take to mean something different. But then he goes on:

… which has manifested itself in all things, more especially in the human mind, and most of all in Christ Jesus.

so the eternal wisdom of God is not something outside the Universe; the eternal wisdom of God manifests itself in the entire Universe; everything can be considered a manifestation of the eternal wisdom of God. We can set up a hierarchy, consisting of ever more restricted spheres within which we can understand the world:

  1. God
  2. the eternal wisdom of God (a.k.a. the ‘eternal son of God’)
  3. which has manifested itself in all things
  4. more especially in the human mind
  5. and most of all in Christ Jesus

Thus, Jesus qua human is not that important for salvation; one might or might not ‘know’ Jesus in that sense. But it is important to ‘know Christ according to the spirit’, as Yitzhak Melamed would say. But for this it is important to simply know the ‘eternal wisdom of God’ which is available to all of us, since it “has manifested itself in all things, more especially in the human mind”.

For without this wisdom no one can attain to a state of blessendess, inasmuch as it alone teaches what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil.

The ‘Word’ comes pre-inscribed in the works of God, especially in our own minds, and it should (in theory) be possible to discover the idea of God and gain a correct understanding of truth and righteousness and be led into salvation, blessedness and everlasting life without having known Jesus.

For the rest, as to the doctrine which certain Churches add to these, namely, that God assumed human nature, I expressly warned them that I do not understand what they say. Indeed, to confess the truth, they seem to me to speak no less absurdly than if some one were to tell me that a circle had assumed the nature of a square.

He ends the note by saying “Whether this opinion will please the Christians whom you know, you will be able to judge better than I can.”

So, how ‘Christian’ (or we should say, how Nicenian/Chalcedonian) is Spinoza’s understanding of Christ?

  • The council of Nicaea declared that Christ is of the same substance as God. Spinoza appears to deny this when he claims to not understand what people mean when they say that “God assumed human nature”. This is not an outright denial, but Spinoza’s metaphysics only allows for one substance anyway. If that substance is God, then either we (and all that exists) are all ‘consubstantial with God’ or nobody is. However, I doubt that we can read Spinoza’s metaphysics to mean that human beings are “consubstantial with God”. As Hegel has put it, Spinoza is something pof an acosmist; he designs the substantiality of the Universe, affirming only the substantiality of God.
  • does that mean he was somewhat Arian? To the extent that Arianism denied the homoousios-ness of the Son and the Father, yes. But Arius also taught that the Son was begotten in time by the Father and was not pre-eternal with God. This too Spinoza denies; he believes that the spirit of Christ is ‘the eternal son of God’, i.e., he does believe in pre-eternity of Christ. However, this teaching of Arius probably only applies to ‘Christ according to the flesh’; it is highly unlikely that a bishop of the early Christian church would dis-believe the plain words of John 1 and deny the pre-eternity of the Word itself. Spinoza is only committed to the pre-eternity of the Word, and not of Jesus Christ; indeed, once a distinction is made between Christ according to the flesh and Christ according to the spirit, it is plainly clear that we are in non-Nicene territory, and Arianism might not be a bad label.