Spinoza’s Liberal Republicanism and the Challenge of Revealed Religion

Politics and the Problem of Superstition

The Treatise is composed of a preface and twenty chapters. Chapter one opens by endorsing biblical prophecy and the revelation of the Mosaic Law (i.1, 10). Chapter twenty, by contrast, begins by asserting Moses’ failure as a statesman, and it argues for a republic in which speech and thought are free and commerce and credit, rather than religion, cement the social bond (xx.5, 40; Yaffe 1997, 160–62, 2004, 271; cf. Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws xxv.12 with Bartlett 2001, 30–32 and Pangle 2010, 99ff.). The work’s organization, therefore, invites the preliminary suggestion that its main task is to move society from theocracy toward liberal democracy, with its chapters serving as stages in this cultural transformation (cf. pref.33). If this suspicion about the Treatise’s body is correct, it would seem the aim of the preface is to detail the causes that drove Spinoza to carry out this reform by writing it (pref.13). Thus, the work’s first sentence indicates Spinoza’s guiding problem, but it also hints at what might solve it: “If human beings could regulate all their affairs with certain counsel, or if fortune were always favorable to them, they would not be bound by any superstition” (pref.1).

Spinoza initially indicates that his purpose is to defend Christianity against those who are “vulnerable to superstition and adverse to religion” (pref.3). He suggests that in his time, one can still encounter a crypto-pagan Christianity, which holds that “God” communicates His decrees “not in the mind” but through entrails, bird-omens, and the like (pref.4), and he attributes these errors to the tendency of human beings to long for “the uncertain goods of fortune . . . without measure” (pref.1). Our hopes for the goods of this world are rarely restrained by a sense of what is possible, and this is the psychological illness of which superstition is but a symptom. The most effective cure for it would seem to be a stoic acceptance of the role of chance in our affairs, but assuming such an attitude could never become widespread, perhaps superstition could be dampened if social arrangements—by helping us rely on more “certain council”—could make us more fortunate.

In the present world, however, human beings mostly cannot attain what they long for, and they find themselves alternatively “agitated by hope and dread” (pref.1). At their lowest points, when they are in circumstances so desperate only a miracle could extricate them, they will look for deliverance anywhere and believe any advice, no matter how absurd (pref.1–2; cf. i.30). Just as gamblers down to their last pennies will entertain illusions that riches could be—indeed, will be—just a slot-pull away, so too it is only the desperate and the fearful who convince themselves that psychics and astrologers can provide a path to instant happiness. Superstition, in other words, is born of fear, but that fear ignites a hope in people that there is something out there that can help them escape their circumstances, and it may even be that this hope grows stronger, the more the odds are stacked against them. But as the sole cause of superstition “is dread” (pref.5), it has no place at the other end of this psychological pendulum. It lasts “only while dread lasts” (pref.6). When humans are more fortunate, they become “overconfident, boastful and proud” (pref.1); they spurn all counsel and have no need to look for supernatural help.

Spinoza thus locates the psychological origins of superstition in the naturally controlling desire all people have to seek out their own good. As he later states, utility “is the grit and life of all human actions” (xvii.84), and even if everything we do cannot be traced back to the pursuit of what is truly good for us, it is nonetheless a “universal law” that we will always select our actions with a view what we think our advantage will be (xvi.15–16). Superstition is ubiquitous because the vast majority of us err in this calculation. As Spinoza writes in the Ethics, as all men are born not only ignorant and self-interested but also conscious of their appetites, they give their imaginations free reign, imposing onto the universe the view that all natural things are a “means to their own advantage.” We are thus “inclined by nature” to embrace teleology—which, in its anthropocentrism, appears to be superstition par excellence—because our fearful responses to misfortune lead us to imagine “a ruler, or a number of rulers” who designed nature to provide for us (Ethics I Appendix—Spinoza 1996, 26). Moreover, so great is the appeal of this belief that it affects nearly all those whom we might think would know better. Thus, Spinoza’s sole example of a superstitious man in the Treatise’s preface is Alexander the Great, who desperately turned to prognosticators when he was wounded and near defeat (pref.5).

In highlighting Alexander’s example, Spinoza indicates that superstition is not limited to “the vulgar”—or rather, when he uses that term he includes many whom we would ordinarily call elites. The “vulgar” and those “who struggle with the same emotions as the vulgar” (pref.34) include educated and influential human beings—even great statesmen—who cannot restrain their imaginations and their hopes when facing adversity. ⁷ Those who are “vulnerable to superstition and adverse to religion” (pref.3) propitiate God or the gods “with sacrifices and prayers,” begging for divine help because they “are unable to be of help to themselves” (pref.3–4). “Religion,” by contrast, involves neither sacrifice nor prayer, and it commands, so to speak, that we adopt a spirit of practical and intellectual self-reliance. It is just as self-interested as superstition, but religion’s practitioners know that God’s decrees, which can show them the way to their utility, are not revealed supernaturally but inscribed “in the mind” (pref.4).

Now, if superstition’s origins can be found in human self-interest, that self-interest is also fundamentally this-worldly. Spinoza contrasts his own view with that of certain “others . . . who deem that [superstition] arises in that all mortals have some confused idea of the deity” (pref.7). He appears to deny that humans are plagued by a restless concern with their mortality—like Alexander, they will look to superstition to escape death when its prospect is immediately before them, but when fortune is favorable, they become so filled with pride and overconfidence they think little of it. But while Spinoza places superstition’s origins in a desire for the goods of this world, his account of it is not silent about how it is we come to believe in another. He begins to describe this when he claims that it should be obvious to everyone that superstition has often provided a means for “prognosticators” to rule “among the plebs” (pref.6). Indeed, this practice has led to the common opinion, which Spinoza attributes to Alexander’s biographer Quintus Curtius, that there is actually nothing that “regulates a multitude more effectively” (pref.8). And yet, Spinoza’s account should initially lead one to suspect otherwise. As “the vulgar always remain equally miserable” (pref.8), to cultivate superstition for a political purpose is to play with fire. Because those who assure the plebs they can improve their lot through the aid of supernatural powers are imposters, unless they are extraordinarily fortunate they inevitably find themselves in the embarrassing position of being unable to deliver on their promises. And this, Spinoza concludes, “has been the cause of many tumults and atrocious wars,” for the vulgar can be counted on to turn tomorrow on those who are manipulating them today: they “are easily induced by a show of religion now to adore their Kings as Gods, and again to execrate and detest them as the common disease of the human race” (pref.8, emphasis added).

Now, it is at this point in his preface, when monarchy and religious violence become prominent themes, that Spinoza ceases to speak of “superstition” or “vain religion” and begins to refer simply to “religion.” Collapsing his earlier distinction, he declares that, to avoid discord, “immense study has been employed to embellish religion, true or vain, with worship and pomp so that it might be taken more seriously than any other motive and always be cultivated by everyone with the utmost observance” (pref.9, emphasis added). Faced with the problem of instability, kings have sought to control the harmful effects of superstition by radicalizing it, or by giving it the greatest place in their subjects’ lives. This is why the transformation of superstition into religion is also one from polytheism into monotheism: it replaces the natural tolerance of paganism with a single, all-encompassing theology that can control human behavior by maintaining total control over thought. According to Spinoza, this solution has been cultivated with the greatest success “by the Turks, who consider it an impropriety even to dispute, and occupy each’s judgment with so many prejudices that they leave no place in the mind for sound reason or for doubting anything” (pref.9). But this strategy has also been cultivated by the teachers of “true” religion—that is, Christianity—as well. Both Christianity and Islam are successful allies of monarchy because they persuade people “to fight for their servitude as though for their salvation” (pref.10, emphasis added). Their teaching about another life trumps all possible worldly promises, and it is therefore the logical solution to the political problem that paganism first incited. And this would seem to be why, to Spinoza, “the spirit of the multitude” in his time is “still vulnerable to the superstition of the Gentiles” (pref.13). Christianity, in other words, is but the most mature version of the kind of piety with which Quintus Curtius was familiar—and so he was not altogether wrong to claim that nothing regulates a multitude more effectively than superstition.

Spinoza’s motives for writing the Treatise thus appear anti-theocratic, but they are not, strictly speaking, anti-religious. After all, in the preface he has used the term “religion” to refer both to the actual practice of Christianity and to an outlook of intellectual self-reliance and “doubting.” Rhetorically, this device allows the latter to masquerade as the former, but in doing so, it also permits Spinoza to draw upon for his own purposes the source of spiritedness employed by his adversaries. Indeed, at this point, he claims that “the chief thing” he has “sought to demonstrate in this treatise” is the possibility of “a free republic” where citizens will stir up seditions if—but only if—opinions are criminalized (pref.10–12). And while it would thus seem that his purpose is to reform society, he insists he is merely describing the Dutch Republic of 1670, “where nothing”—not even life itself—“is considered dearer or sweeter than freedom” (pref.12, emphasis added). This characterization of the Dutch Republic, however, is highly dubious. In a well-known letter, Spinoza (2002, 844) claimed to have written the Treatise in part because freedom of speech in the Netherlands was “in every way suppressed” by religious authorities. In saluting that republic’s “rare happiness,” then, Spinoza presents the Treatise as a work of patriotism, but he also changes the meaning of what that Republic and that patriotism stand for. He replaces the religious spiritedness of the historical Netherlands with one that defines itself in opposition to the religious prejudices that he baldly calls “the traces of ancient slavery” (pref.13). Or rather, perhaps it would be more accurate, if more paradoxical, to say that this republic will remain religious—if, that is, we agree that religion requires each person to use “his own free judgment” (pref.16) to settle theological matters for himself.

Because this claim hardly conforms to traditional understandings of the Bible, Spinoza devotes the first three-quarters of the Treatise to articulating a new method of reading Scripture. That method is meant to show that, once the Bible is freed from superstitious interpolations, it can be seen to oppose the kind of theocracy that, by inhibiting intellectual independence, renders “human beings from being rational into beasts” (pref.16). True piety and religion, in other words, are on the side of humanity in its fullest sense; they sanction and direct us to the kind of rational thinking and liberation from intellectual authority that Spinoza says is our summum bonum and finis ultimus (iii.1–2; iv.10). But, of course, the claim that the Bible facilitates the achievement of our greatest happiness because it commands us to think for ourselves is rather strange, for it would actually render the Bible redundant for those who follow it most closely. To the extent it remained an authority for someone, that person could not truly be said to be pious. And even for the rest, it would be, at best, a starting point—one that might eventually be set aside when no longer needed (cf. xii.11). This may be why Spinoza’s theology in the first fifteen chapters seems to encourage the kind of theological “doubting” that, as the centerpiece of true religion, would seem to render it self-undermining. In those chapters, after all, he teaches that the prophets only imagined God’s voice (ch. i–ii), that miracles are impossible (ch. vi), and that the Bible is a product of human and therefore fallible historical sources (ch. vii–x). This last claim allows Spinoza to assert that as there is nothing holy “outside the mind” (xii.12), to the extent that Scripture conflicts with reason it is “nothing besides parchment and ink” (xii.13).

Spinoza thus suggests that life in a liberal republic will be more satisfying than one of superstition because it will be characterized by the belief in one’s own independent-mindedness that such an education can be expected to produce. And yet, if even Alexander could not escape the pull of superstition, we may be prompted to ask how genuine this widespread belief in independent-mindedness will be. Indeed, it is worth noting that the Treatise’s first fifteen chapters often do not stop at encouraging doubts; they are also filled with declarations of “certainty”—about the impossibility of miracles, for example (iv.3, 10–11; vi.7–19). As we will soon see more clearly, Spinoza is attempting to bring into being a new kind of citizen—someone who, in his commitment to reason and the scientific method, will believe himself free of dogma and prejudice, but who will actually not realize how much he takes on trust. ⁸ To see how Spinoza expects to do this, and why he believes this new superstition will be more politically salutary than its predecessor, it will be necessary to examine his assessment of biblical morality.

Spinoza’s Politics and the Bible’s

Although Spinoza thematically articulates his political science only after his discussion of theology, to see its underlying principles and to understand how biblical morality appears from its vantage point, it is necessary to begin earlier. In chapter five, he introduces his discussion of the Old Testament’s ceremonial law by articulating the political problem whose attempted solution defines every regime. That problem reveals itself once one recognizes that human beings require laws not because they are invariably selfish but rather because they interpret that selfishness poorly: “All do seek what is useful to them, yet hardly on the basis of the dictate of sound reason” (v.21). If people really were rational calculators of their advantage—if they were “so constituted by nature as to long for nothing except what true reason indicates”—“society would need no laws,” for they could agree on a distribution of economic goods conducive to everyone’s long-term benefit (v.20). Unfortunately, “human nature is constituted quite otherwise”; our conception of what is good for us is typically assessed “solely on the basis of lust and the emotions of a broken spirit” (v.21). Our irrational longings and emotions cause us to miscalculate our advantage and to do things that have the appearance—but only the appearance—of willful self-sacrifice. Thus, human beings often long to bring harm to their rulers “even though it comes with great evil to themselves as well,” and they can “least of all abide serving their equals and being regulated by them” (v.22).

All in all, human beings are naturally animated by a kind of democratic pride—an irrational sense of independence, which, if not properly directed, can manifest itself as resentment and a stubborn, self-destructive refusal to submit to authority. ⁹

Each deems that he alone knows everything, and wants everything to be modified on the basis of his own mental cast, and figures something is equitable or inequitable, a propriety or an impropriety, insofar as he judges it to fall to his profit or harm; out of glory, he despises his equals and will not suffer being regulated by them; out of envy for better praise or fortune, which is never equal, he longs for evil to another and delights in it. (xvii.15)

To overcome this recalcitrance, legislators have just two options:

either the whole society has to hold the imperium collectively, if it can be done, so that all are bound to themselves and no one is bound to serve his equal; or, if a few or one alone holds the imperium, he has to have something above the common human nature, or at least endeavor . . . to persuade the vulgar of it. (v.23)

In other words, although political regimes can take a number of forms, they can all be understood with a view to this question: do they concede to our proud sense of independence and try to channel it in a healthy direction, or do they try to overcome it by persuading the population that its rulers are divine? The latter path, to Spinoza, is the classical solution to the political problem, and it explains why the Greeks and Romans lost their liberty. Alexander and Augustus, he says, were merely being prudent when they claimed to be gods (xvii.21ff.), for republican freedom leads to an instability that almost cries out for theocratic absolutism.

But the history of the Greeks and Romans after the loss of their freedom was not simply one of servitude; it was also one of constant fighting and civil unrest. According to Spinoza, this is easily explained, for “unless they are completely barbaric, human beings do not suffer being duped so openly and becoming slaves” (xvii.24). If a legislator cannot succeed to the extent that the Ottoman Turks have at eradicating our capacity for independent thought (pref.9), he will face a dangerous prospect, for we cannot stand being told what to do or think by those whom we believe to be no greater than we are. But here, as Spinoza suggested in the preface, Christianity can step into the breach, for people have now been persuaded “more easily that Majesty is sacred and plays the role of God on earth” (xvii.24). Monotheism can succeed where paganism fails because it has the tools to defeat the latter at its own game. And, as he now goes on to show, it is not surprising that Christian political theorists embraced the divine right of kings, for the moral teaching of both the Old and New Testaments is not one of freedom but “devotion.”

To appreciate the meaning of this, it will be helpful to begin by considering Spinoza’s overall presentation of the Bible’s political teaching. Although he eventually extends his analysis to the New Testament, the majority of his explicit focus is on the Mosaic Law, which he interprets as concerned exclusively with corporeal (rather than spiritual) ends. As he claims that the Hebrew polity was concerned only with security and other temporal goods (iii.20–21), Spinoza has often been taken to find in the Bible, if not a liberal teaching, then at least the beginnings of one. Thus, Smith (1997, xiii, 23–24, 115, 147) argues that because Spinoza presents the Mosaic Law as regulating actions rather than beliefs, he reveals an affinity between Judaism and liberalism. Alternatively, Frankel (2001, 314–15) suggests that Moses gave the Hebrews a good law, appropriate to their condition, but which was eventually made obsolete by Christianity, whose universal teaching of obedience to God requires freedom and is thus best fulfilled under liberal democracy. ¹⁰

Spinoza does occasionally present Moses as a statesman who “labored to institute a good republic” (vii.33)—someone who took a broken people just liberated from slavery and gave it a law that provided the beginnings of an education toward self-government (v.27; cf. Frankel 2001, 293–98, 309). And yet, when he follows his general considerations about political science in chapter five with a discussion of the reasons for Moses’ legislation, Spinoza gives a very different picture. He claims that because Moses recognized that “human nature does not abide being simply compelled” (v.22), he “introduced religion” into the Hebrew polity “so that the populace would do their duty not so much on the basis of dread as on that of devotion” (v.29). To ensure that the people would obey “spontaneously” (v.28), he sought to educate them “from the beginning” so they would depend entirely on his commands (v.25, 30). In other words, while Spinoza does claim that “the whole law of Moses” was concerned only with “the advantages of the body” (v.31), it did not leave thought free. Rather, Moses recognized that, because what we do is a product of what we think, his Law would have to inculcate certain thoughts and emotions.

To accomplish this, Moses instituted “a continual cult of obedience” (xvii.88). By regulating every aspect of life, his Law impressed upon the people that they could “do nothing at their discretion” (v.30) but only at its command. In so doing, it made them confess through each of their actions “that they were nothing in their own right but were altogether part of another’s” (v.31). Thus, they were forbidden to eat, drink, shave, or “do absolutely anything” except when the law mandated it; they were bound to place signs on their doors, their hands, and their foreheads “which admonished them to obedience always” (v.30); and they were required to “give themselves to leisure and rejoicing” at certain times so they would feel genuinely happy, not on the basis of their own spirit, but in accordance with God’s commandments (xvii.89–90). To procure this last sentiment was, to Spinoza, the Law’s most important aim:

I do not deem that anything more effective can be devised to influence the psyches of human beings. For psyches are taken by no thing more than by the joy that arises on the basis of devotion, that is, on the basis of love and admiration together. (xvii.90; cf. Ethics III P52 S—Spinoza 1996, 97)

Devotion to Spinoza is thus an unambiguously negative emotion; it is mentioned frequently in the Treatise, but never favorably (cf., for example, vi.3, 44; ix.34; xii.40; xvii.81). In the context of this last statement, where Spinoza defines it most fully, it is the joy of a slave who would fight for his chains because he does not see his psyche has been “taken.” It is a product, in part, of admiration, which is itself a characteristic of an irrational and imaginative mind-set. Spinoza frequently characterizes admiration as a foolish wonder that causes the ignorant to exalt what they cannot understand, and he places it at the root of the belief in miracles (cf. i.30; vi.3; Ethics I Appendix—Spinoza 1996, 29). Thus, the Mosaic Law cultivated devotion because it governed the political equivalent of “children who lack all reason” (ii.47)—that is, children who will never be capable of autonomy. Far from sanctifying the Israelites (cf. Exodus 19:6), the way of life it created was “more slavery than true freedom” (ii.47). “[He] alone is free who lives with a full spirit solely on the basis of the guidance of reason” (xvi.32), but the Hebrews were required to accept the Law’s edicts “without any consultation with reason” at all (xvii.92).

Spinoza thus presents the Mosaic Law as an instance of the Turkish or theocratic solution to the political problem: it sought to control the prideful individuality of human beings by eliminating their ability to think independently, and Spinoza also claims this same intention can be discerned in the Christian ceremonies (v.32). Now, to be fair, Spinoza also states that he does not know whether Christ instituted any ceremonies, and he leaves the reader with the suggestion that they were corruptions of the faith introduced by a less-than-spiritually-minded Church. ¹¹ He provides a more far-reaching critique of the New Testament, however, when he turns for the only time in the work to the authoritative source of Christian ethics: the Sermon on the Mount.

Spinoza claims that “when Christ says, Blessèd are the mourners, since they will receive consolation,” his meaning can only be understood in reference to his subsequent teaching “that we not be worried about anything except God’s kingdom alone and its justice, which is commended as the highest good” (summum bonum; vii.30; Matthew 5:4, 6:33). As Jesus equated justice with the kingdom of God, or with immortality, we can conclude that by “mourners” he was referring only to

those who mourn for the kingdom of God and the justice neglected by human beings. For only those can mourn for it who do not love anything except the divine kingdom, or equity, and plainly despise the rest of fortune. (vii.30, emphasis added)

Spinoza thus seems to imply that Jesus’ teaching about an afterlife must be understood as arising from a desire to see this world conform to an egalitarian conception of justice. Humans, as he presents them, look to the law not only for the protection of their lives and possessions but also to secure the sense of dignity that is present wherever freedom and the enjoyment of these goods are guaranteed. Thus, when they live in “a good republic”—which he now says Moses established—where the law is enforced and it is known that crime does not pay, they will take great pride in themselves and in their country. To be “held just” by their fellow citizens (vii.33), they will not turn the other cheek but requite injuries

before a judge . . . not on account of vengeance . . . but in the spirit of defending justice and the laws of the Fatherland, and for it not to be expedient for evil men to be evil. (vii.33)

Unfortunately, Jesus lived not in that kind of regime but “in a corrupt republic,” and so Christianity’s moral teaching cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it was originally directed to “oppressed human beings” (vii.32). Because there was no hope of justice in this world for those living under the tyranny of the Caesars, Christ’s audience was naturally attracted to the consolation of another. Moreover, Spinoza also says this applies to Jesus’ injunction to turn the other cheek “and what follows further” (vii.31). “What follows further” are the following commandments: if someone should take your coat, give your cloak as well, love your enemies and “do good to them that hate you,” and, in short, be “perfect, even as your Father . . . in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:40, 44, 48). In other words, Jesus teaches that human perfection, like divine perfection, consists in total selflessness, or in complete devotional love, and he also insists that it is only through such self-abnegation that one can attain immortality. But Spinoza claims that this moral outlook arose only because, in Jesus’ historical context, tyranny had nearly deadened the proud desire for independence that human beings naturally feel. In the absence not only of freedom but also of the robust sense of independence and spiritual self-expression that freedom allows, some of the ancient Jews apparently thought that if they gave up on this world, if they gave their rulers all they asked for and more, they would be rewarded in a life after this one. It therefore follows that in a better regime, such as the one Spinoza is seeking to establish, hopes for immortality will be significantly muted, and morality, though still spirited and even animated by a sense of duty, will be fundamentally self-regarding. ¹²

The central task of Spinoza’s political science will thus be to lay the moral foundations for the kind of free republic mentioned earlier: where “the whole society” governs collectively, where laws are passed “by common consent,” and where “no one is bound to serve his equal” (v.23, 25). If the Mosaic polity (in Spinoza’s negative presentation) was “a continual cult of obedience,” a Spinozistic republic is one where “obedience has no place” because no one has the authority to compel human beings through the use of fear or devotion (v.25). On the contrary, when citizens are motivated not “by dread” but by “the hope of some good that they long for very much,” “each will long to do his duty” because each will understand that duty as part and parcel with his own rational advantage (v.24). Now, whether that understanding will be based on sound reason is highly doubtful, and Spinoza here does not actually affirm that this harmony between the individual’s good and the common good will exist. He does, however, prompt the reader to ask how citizens could come to hold such an opinion in a future society in which the Bible’s teaching of selfless devotion is no longer authoritative. As all political communities require great sacrifices from some of their citizens, how can those who are called upon to serve their country come to see their duty and their advantage as synonymous?

In the present discussion, Spinoza does not answer this directly, but he provides a hint as to where he is going when he twice states that the government of a good republic will remain “moderate” because, “as Seneca the Tragedian says, no one holds a repressive imperium together for long” (v.22; xvi.29–30). In Seneca’s Troads, these words are spoken in angry protest by Agamemnon after he is told that the gods require a human sacrifice. After a long argument, he agrees to let a priest decide the matter, and when the priest says two people must be killed, he falls silent and never speaks again (Troads 258–9; 349ff.). By invoking this line as a rallying cry for republican citizens, Spinoza seeks to ensure that Agamemnon’s conviction that religion is on the side of humanity will finally become authoritative in the world. His citizens will compel their government to consult only “the common good” through the threat of the revolution that would occur were it to command “absurd things” (xvi.29), and they will be willing to start such a revolution because they will possess a spirited attachment to their own preservation as human beings. They will resist bestial cruelty conducted in the name of religion as well as attempts to turn them from rational beings “into beasts” by preventing them from thinking (pref.16; vii.1–5). The legislation of absurdities is less to be feared in a democratic republic because it has a peculiar “foundation and aim, which . . . is none other than to avoid the absurd things of the appetite and to confine human beings within the limits of reason, as far as can be done” (xvi.30, emphasis added). Spinozistic republicanism is thus a great experiment in anti-theocratic politics. Drawing on the proud sense of independence characteristic of human beings, it seeks to push them away from the acceptance of revelation (of the imaginative and affective life) and toward an embrace of reason. Exactly how far that push can extend, however, is an open question with tremendous implications for practical politics. It is to this, then, that we must now turn.

Intellectual Freedom and Civil Religion

Spinoza’s republican political project is thus also a project of civic education. It can be completed only once human beings have been moved away from the biblical morality of devotion and toward a belief in their own political and intellectual independence. But once the attachment to such a belief has been cultivated—and this seems one of Spinoza’s key aims in the theological chapters—we are left with this paradoxical task: how can a legislator take the prideful independence that makes us ungovernable and, on that foundation, construct a society where “everyone” will “put the public right ahead of private advantages” (xvii.16)? To answer this, Spinoza proceeds in a strange manner. Rather than simply describe his solution, he turns to an account of what “divine revelation” apparently taught Moses about political science (xvii.25). Here, as earlier, Spinoza’s account is puzzling, for he again presents two contrasting pictures of the Mosaic regime. On one hand, his initial description of “the Republic of the Hebrews” (xvii, title) highlights its great “successes” (xvii.12) and presents it as a model. On the other hand, the title of chapter seventeen also states that this republic eventually degenerated into a cycle of authoritarianism and civil war. In the course of his account, Spinoza tells us that its laws were bad—in fact, a punishment from God (xvii.95–97; Ezekiel 20:25)—that it was not republican but “Theocratic” (xvii.41, 60), and that it should not be imitated, in part, because it is incompatible with “commerce” (xviii.4). To resolve this contradiction, it will be necessary to look briefly at the reasons Spinoza gives for this regime’s initial flourishing and ultimate decline.

According to Spinoza’s first, favorable presentation, the Hebrew polity reached its peak after Moses’ death, when it was actually a confederacy of small republics whose solemn friendship was ensured by a common religion. “With respect to God and the Religion,” the Hebrews were “fellow citizens. But with respect to the right that one tribe had over another, they were nothing but allies—in much the same mode (if you take away the common temple) as the Sovereign Confederate Orders of the Netherlands” (xvii.54). In the preface, Spinoza identified the results of his political project with an idealized Dutch Republic, and he now purports to discover in ancient Israel a league of small states, governed democratically and defended by citizen militias, whose citizens fought beside one another with “virtue, labor, and great loss of . . . blood” (xvii.67) solely “for the sake of peace and to protect freedom” (xvii.75). In these small communities,

matters of both war and peace were administered by the same human beings. One who in camp was a soldier, therefore, in the marketplace was a citizen; and one who in camp was a general, in court was a judge; and, finally, one who in camp was a commander, in the city was a prince [or the first citizen] (princeps). (xvii.74)

The citizens of this regime successfully combined the peaceful habits and utilitarian spirit of the marketplace and law courts with civic dedication and martial fierceness. Although the Israelites had the liberty to buy and sell as they pleased, they placed restrictions on commerce that ensured that everyone owned property and therefore had a stake in the community. As a consequence, the Jews were willing to give their lives to protect their fatherland for no other reason than the “utility” it offered them:

For nowhere did citizens possess what was theirs with a greater right than did the subjects of this imperium, who had a part of the lands and fields equal to the prince’s; and each was owner of his part forever. (xvii.85)

In other words, they were attached to their property not for the sake of greed or even out of a desire for well-being. Rather, they saw it as the locus or representation of their pride in themselves—a pride that could never be taken away, and that led them, in turn, to run risks on behalf of the country that guaranteed it to them.

And yet, when one reflects on Spinoza’s comment that this regime would be like the Netherlands if only it lacked the “common temple,” it seems he is describing not biblical Israel but a republic that might some day exist. In suggesting that this confederacy could flourish only if it were deprived of the center of religious life that bound its constituent republics together, Spinoza implies that the source of its unity and patriotism was actually quite defective. This is the hinge connecting Spinoza’s initial praise of the Hebrew regime and his subsequent criticism of it. In the Hebrew theocracy (as he now calls it [xvi.60]), religion and politics were identical because God was the head-of-state; the Israelites’ armies fought zealously because they believed Him literally present among them and because they believed their enemies His enemies (xvii.48). But this religious spiritedness was also a source of xenophobia, fanaticism, and inhumanity. It inspired a “Theological hatred”—the “greatest hatred” (xvii.65)—of other nations, leading to savage acts against foreigners and against Jews who committed some impiety (cf. xvii.56–57). This martial religion therefore served ultimately as a source not of unity but of discord, especially in times of poverty and misrule, when prophets tended to appear who used “superficial signs” to “pull an oppressed population to themselves” in opposition to the government (xvii.71). To overcome that opposition, the Hebrew polity tried to instill its “cult of obedience,” but this ultimately failed. After the golden calf incident, Moses took religious authority away from the firstborn of every family and entrusted it to the Levites (his own tribe), but his decision served only to engender resentment against this censorious elite (xvii.96–97). The Israelites bristled under their rule, and not only when “grain was costly” (xvii.99). Rather, it was especially “in times of leisure, when manifest miracles ceased,” and when no prophets appeared, that the Jews abandoned a religion that had become “ignominious and even suspect to them” (xvii.100). With wealth and the free time provided by it, the members of the upper class discovered a concern for their individual dignity, which led them to rebel against Moses’ authority and to doubt his religion: they accused him of being an imposter and shouted at him “that everyone was equally holy and that he had raised himself above everyone contrary to right” (xvii.103).

Perhaps paradoxically, then, Spinoza indicates that the concern for an egalitarian notion of dignity can be expected to arise first and foremost among an educated, leisured elite. But he also notes that whenever this sense of spiritual self-expression was not satisfied, the Hebrew state was challenged with religious pressure from below. Thus, before the monarchy “there were very few prophets” in Israel, but during the monarchy, there were often hundreds (xviii.20). These proved a constant irritant to the kings, just as the “private men” who first taught “the Christian religion” (xix.51–52) engendered an instability that plagued Europe’s monarchies until Spinoza’s time (cf. xix.1–2). Putting all this together, Spinoza’s description of the Hebrews seems a fitting allegory for the cruelty committed by his contemporaries in God’s name. Like ancient Israel, pre-Enlightenment Europe was divided by the very religion—a somewhat altered form of Judaism—which was supposed to serve as its source of unity and concord (cf. pref.14; vii.1–5).

To resolve this problem, Spinoza closes the Treatise by making two seemingly contrary recommendations: in chapter nineteen, he teaches that the state must have exclusive jurisdiction over religion, and then in chapter twenty, he claims it will best utilize that right when it limits religion to a teaching about works and allows citizens to think as they like. These teachings, however, may not be as contradictory in practice as in theory. After all, Spinoza claims that where opinions are criminalized “one is ruled very violently,” and he says such an atmosphere led to Christ’s crucifixion (xviii.23–24). But he had also suggested in chapter seven that this same lack of freedom was largely responsible for the appearance and popularity of Christ in the first place. When these suggestions are put together with Spinoza’s comments about the origins of the Hebrew prophets, the following consideration emerges: under a regime that does not insult people’s dignity by telling them what to think, there will be no more crucifixions of people like Jesus, but there will also be no more people like Jesus to crucify.

In a democratic republic where “each is permitted both to think what he wants and to say what he thinks” (xx, title), the demands for dignity and recognition that give rise to religious fanaticism will be satisfied in believing that one is thinking for oneself and, consequently, in taking pride in being in charge of one’s own existence. Spinoza’s regime will combine elements of liberalism and republicanism because, paradoxically, it will regard the human desire to think for oneself and to share those thoughts both as a vice that cannot be prohibited and so must be tolerated, and as a moral virtue worth dying for (xx.25). This is a form of self-preservation that is richer and more spiritually meaningful than what one finds, say, in Hobbes: it consists in the desire each human being naturally feels to continue existing as a human being, that is, as a being who lives “full of his own sense of things” (xx.4; cf. xvi.4). As proud members of a community of such self-legislating individuals, democratic citizens will devote themselves to the common good and even undertake great risks on the basis of a desire for peace and freedom, and in this, their behavior will echo in important respects the commitment to intellectual independence that Spinoza elsewhere attributes to philosophers like himself. Indeed, it appears likely that Spinoza expects the creation of this regime to be as beneficial to intellectual life as it will be to civic life. In the vast majority of cases, the widespread belief in intellectual independence will be a new form of superstition, but by giving a select few the moral impulse to think through even this authoritative dogma, it may encourage them to attain a genuine liberation.

Now, that Spinoza regards some form of superstition as a permanent necessity for the vast majority is evident from statements he makes about the limits on thought that will have to be present even in the most permissive of societies. Most notably, in chapter fourteen, he claims that if citizens are to live “peacefully and harmoniously” together (xiv.34), everyone, “none excepted” (xiv.29), must accept a civil religion consisting of seven dogmas, many of which contain the kind of anthropomorphic beliefs about God that Spinoza criticized in earlier chapters (xiv.24–29). As Spinoza claimed in the preface that “it is equally impossible to take away superstition from the vulgar as to take away dread” (pref.33), he seems pessimistic about popular enlightenment. And yet, in his final chapter, he says the “ultimate aim” (finem . . . ultimum) of a liberal republic is “to free each from dread” (xx.11). It appears, then, that the most important task Spinoza will bequeath to his successors will be to push human beings as far as they can go away from a life of fear and imagination and toward a more satisfied and largely secular existence.

How far is that? This is a question to which Spinoza gives vague and contradictory answers. For example, although he states that no one can obey the law who does not accept the civil religion (xiv.20), when he comes to his discussion of the limits of free speech in chapter twenty, he is silent about this. Throughout the final five chapters, Spinoza never mentions the seven dogmas, and he proceeds as though he had never written chapter fourteen. Now, while a full analysis of Spinoza’s civil religion is not possible here, we can make a few observations to indicate the complicated character of its intended place in his republic. First, his seven dogmas contain much internal ambiguity. While all must believe “God exists” (xiv.25), it “has nothing to do with faith” (and hence law-abidingness) if one believes that God “or that model of true life” is “fire, Spirit, light, thought, etc.” (xiv.30, emphasis added). A more traditional (but tolerant) God would be acceptable, but so would a belief that nature or the intellect is the highest being. Indeed, although Spinoza insists it is necessary to believe that those who practice justice and charity are saved, whereas those who do not are lost (xiv.27), he never specifies what these mean (salvos could simply mean “safe,” just as perditos means “lost”), and he even suggests it could be acceptable to believe these sanctions are natural rather than supranatural (xiv.31).

Second, not only are these dogmas flexible, but Spinoza also says they should not be mistaken for truth. Law-abidingness does “not require truth so much as piety” (xiv.33): many tenets of the civil religion may “not have even a shadow of truth,” but this hardly matters so long as one “is ignorant of their being false. Otherwise, he would necessarily be rebellious” (xiv.20). And lest we mistake Spinoza’s meaning here, he provides an unambiguous explanation when he defines the “separation of philosophy and theology.” Reason or philosophy “is the realm of truth and wisdom, whereas Theology is that of piety and obedience” (xv.21). Philosophy teaches “nothing but truth” (xiv.38), that is, it does not teach obedience in any way. Faith or theology teaches “nothing but obedience and piety” (xiv.38)—that is, it has not even a shadow of truth. Obedience is manifest in actions, but, insofar as actions spring from beliefs, good citizenship requires a foundation in thought that is philosophically suspect. Of course, as Spinoza’s own life shows, philosophers may largely keep to themselves, but the lack of harm they do others should not be confused with a willingness to carry out positive obligations, or even to obey the law when doing so would be to their disadvantage (although the law of a liberal republic will minimize such occasions). ¹³ By the same token, the patriotic sacrifices of citizens depend in a crucial respect on their less than complete enlightenment. There is simply an insuperable tension between the demands of philosophy and those of republican politics.

But if popular acceptance of the civil religion is necessary—and if, as previously argued, philosophers have an interest in the cause of liberal republicanism—why does Spinoza proclaim so openly that its dogmas are only for the ignorant (cf. Matheron 1971)? As his citizens will pride themselves on their independence of mind, it seems unlikely they will look on the seven dogmas with respect, let alone reverence. Considering that Spinoza ceases to speak of the civil religion when he turns to his discussion of liberal republicanism, he may intend the seven dogmas—at least in their most superstitious versions—to be only one stage in a progressively unfolding cultural education. What was appropriate for a generation just removed from taking the Bible literally may no longer be necessary for a later era in which moralists appeal instead to reason and natural right. Indeed, whatever Spinoza himself may think about his own teaching about the social contract (cf. xiv.7), he nowhere raises the kind of open questions about it that he does about the civil religion, and this may be because, as he also notes, even the most permissive societies cannot tolerate every opinion (xx.10). “For example, if someone thought that the highest power was not within its right, or that no one had to stand by his promises,” such a person would necessarily be “seditious.” To be sure, this person’s sedition would consist only in “the deed such judgments involve,” but “that he thinks such a thing” itself dissolves the social contract (xx.21, emphasis added). To prevent such doubts, and to supply a source of agreement among citizens, a belief in rationality itself will need to become, as it were, the dogma for a new era and its litmus test for acceptable speech. For while Spinoza never states in chapter twenty that atheism must be outlawed in a free republic (cf. Rosenthal 2001, 2012), he implies that traditional or revealed Christianity would be. As he writes, each citizen will have the liberty to think freely and to make any argument against the government, “provided that he only says or teaches and defends it . . . by reason alone” (xx.14, emphasis added). Appeals to the emotions or to biblical authority will be outside the bounds of acceptable public discussion.

Conclusion

Of course, a rationalism accepted on the basis of authority is really no rationalism at all, and so the pride in their independent-mindedness which these republican citizens will display will be, in most cases, a false one. But from Spinoza’s perspective, it is also a healthy one. When Moses, in his indignation, overturned the original plan to place the center of spiritual life in every family, he showed not only that he failed to appreciate the egalitarian pride that animates human beings but also that he was subject to the same angry passions as his own people (cf. xvii.101–104 with Yaffe 2004, 338–39). Spinoza, by contrast, removes an historically potent source of instability because he does not make Moses’ mistake: by giving a healthy outlet to this pride—one that accommodates and thereby dignifies the desire of human beings to run their own lives and to think independently—he both tames and makes use of these passions. When he writes that his republic will grant the “freedom of philosophizing to each” (xx.23, emphasis added), he flatters the citizens and intellectuals of his new society by obscuring the gulf separating his outlook from theirs. But he also indicates that the morality he is crafting will give the best and the brightest among these citizens the impulse to seek out the truth and achieve a genuine philosophic liberation (cf. pref.34). To Spinoza, such a liberation begins from the insight that the universe is indifferent and that each one of us is merely “a particle” within it (xvi.10). Because this insight is so unpalatable even to the vast majority of educated human beings—for misfortune is inevitable in life, and, as Alexander’s example shows, few can be so stoic as to be wholly resigned to it—superstition will always be needed to give people solace (cf. xv.37). But this is not to say that this majority could not also be moved quite far in the direction of truth. For by cultivating a pride in independent thinking, by softening the devotional aspects of the Bible’s moral teaching, by reinterpreting it so as to sanction rather than condemn intellectual life, and by laying the basis for a society in which economic prosperity will grow in balance with personal dignity, Spinoza seeks to remove many of the root causes of superstition.

Both Spinoza’s hopes for human progress and his sober awareness about its limits are rooted in the belief that superstition is the product of fear, and although fear may be dampened considerably, it remains an inescapable part of the human condition. His limited hopes, however, are based on his more fundamental claim that human beings are utilitarian calculators. To Spinoza, even the most advanced society will need a belief that virtue brings rewards because we are all, at bottom, seeking to preserve ourselves (albeit in a rich and spiritually meaningful sense). Conversely, the experience of devotion, far from an important part of our psychology, is merely a symptom of intellectual backwardness and moral slavishness.

But is this really the case? Here, I think, there is cause to question the presumptions behind Spinoza’s analysis, and to do this, it is not necessary to look further than the testimony of Spinoza himself. At the end of the Treatise, he presents a moving but, by that very fact, extremely puzzling appeal to the beauty and nobility of self-sacrifice. To create admiration for those who may become martyrs for the cause of liberalism and free inquiry, he says those who use the scaffold to silence the independent-minded actually transform it “into a most beautiful theater for showing the highest example of tolerance and virtue” (xx.35). Now, to be sure, a liberal society that considers tolerance the greatest virtue will certainly avoid making such martyrs. But even so, one can wonder how this sense of the beauty of self-sacrifice—rather than its simple necessity or the belief that it will ultimately produce a reward—can be accounted for on the basis of Spinoza’s psychology. After all, he had suggested that religious longings arise because people become indignant when they see that the law is not enforced and that not everyone is treated as “equally holy.” But if there is something in human beings that attracts them to a kind of justice that demands self-transcendence, or that causes them to admire such acts as beautiful or resplendent, then Spinoza’s political project may be faced with a very grave challenge. This is a contradiction that I do not believe can be made consistent, though it is one that reveals a crucial lesson for understanding our attraction to civic republicanism today.

If we are attracted to Spinoza’s thought because it seems to promise us all the goods of individualism together with those of community, this may reflect in part our need to come to terms with an aspect of our psychology that liberalism, from its very inception, has not quite understood. Spinoza’s attempt to square the moral circle by making obligation synonymous with liberty may therefore, through its insights as well as its deficiencies, help to clarify the roots of our present discontent. For if we are indeed attracted to devotion or self-sacrifice in a way Spinoza denies, this may show why a liberalism that does not account for duties will always seem unsatisfying, but also why such duties will always entail certain compromises with liberal freedoms. It may account for why calls for sacrifice on behalf of liberal freedom have proven so compelling, but it may also help explain why traditional revealed religion, with its promise of genuine self-transcendence, has reemerged as a viable challenger to liberal democracy today.