Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise

I love reading Spinoza. He is one of my favorite philosophers. His writings are often profound and meet the basic test of being concerned mainly  with how people should live and behave in the real world, the latter being a hurdle  surprisingly few philosophers clear.  His Ethics is his most famous and influential book and contains many fine insights.  (Of course one cannot take his claim to prove his opinions with mathematical precision seriously, but it is still a very good book.) The less well known Theologico-Political Treatise is also a very important work and one useful for understanding his thoughts and interests. He gave himself a very difficult assignment – defending freedom of thought and conscience, retaining what he sees as the valid ethical imperatives of the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity while criticizing and opposing their mythological and superstitious doctrines and assertions, and being subtle and ambiguous enough to avoid persecution in an age when persecution of deviation from orthodoxy was common. His solution was to declare recognition of  an omnipresent and all powerful supreme being and leading a life of justice and benevolence toward one’s fellow human beings to be the sole content and objective of  true religion  and to label every other religious doctrine and question – including those of the nature and activities of the supreme being, the existence of an afterlife, the specific rituals and dogmas  of every sect and creed, the issue of free will in religious choice, and the authority and accuracy of the Bible – as irrelevant to the objective and hence matters on which each person can  have whatever opinions suit him without effect on his status in terms of following divine law.

He certainly succeeded in being ambiguous. One easily can make a case that by “god” he really meant the universe and its natural laws but could not say so explicitly, but there also are good reasons to think he meant instead a conscious being or some sort of amalgam of the  two.  In most ways neither this nor the other theological arguments matter except for their historical interest. What does are the pleas for tolerance, open mindedness, and acceptance of dissent even in matters people think are most important, the this-worldly focus on living well and justly in accord with reality and one’s better nature, and  the ethical, practical, and psychological insights scattered throughout the book.  As an example of the latter, there is a short passage at the start of one of the chapters in the Treatise where he argues that the wise and good person should seek  his values for themselves and not in any competition with others that is one of the finest statements on ethics I have ever read.

It is a book that is  well worth reading.