Steven Nadler is known as one of the most knowledgeable and accessible scholars of Baruch Spinoza today. One might think that after his numerous books on the subject, he would have run out of unique takes on the Early Modern thinker. Spinoza, Atheist proves that Nadler can still write a fresh and fascinating take on one of Western thoughts’ most important and enigmatic minds.
Spinoza, Atheist has a deceptively simple premise: to analyze whether Spinoza is indeed an atheist or whether he is, in the words of the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg, “God intoxicated.” As Nadler shows, answering this premise requires a lot of philosophical background. In order to determine whether Spinoza is indeed an atheist, he needs to first unpack whether Spinoza’s conception of God counts against a broad claim of atheism. With nuance he unpacks arguments for whether Spinoza is a pantheist (God and the universe are one) or panentheist (God is bigger than the universe but the universe is part of God).
After demonstrating that Spinoza’s conception of the Divine counts as a belief in God — though creative and a major departure from traditional theology — Nadler turns his attention to the definition of atheism in order to measure Spinoza against it. An atheist, as he defines it, can be seen in two ways. First, an atheist “denies the existence of a first cause of the universe endowed with supreme intelligence, freedom, and design.” Second, an atheist is one who pays no reverence or awe to their own conception of God. To them, God is an interesting idea but not the item of religious focus. Nadler argues that Spinoza is an atheist in both senses, but saves most of his most thoughtful analysis for the latter definition. One walks away from the book feeling as if, had Spinoza seen his God though a religious lens rather than a philosophical one, we might be hard pressed to use the term atheist.
Nadler proves this by showing that one can look at nature or God (since they are the same) in two ways. First, one can follow Spinoza and divorce emotion from God, looking at God with reason and active comprehension. Or, one can look at God passively with wonder and awe. As Nadler explains, “knowledge does not encourage wonder; it dispels it.” Since Spinoza knows God but doesn’t feel God, Spinoza is an atheist by Nadler’s definition.
Nadler is not dismayed that Spinoza is an atheist. In fact, one receives the impression that it makes him respect the thinker even more. Nadler ends his book with an epilogue entitled “Virtuous Atheist.” As he explains, Spinoza’s Ethics might not give us a depiction of a God that requires reverence, but it does give us a God that necessitates moral living. For the philosopher, there is a difference between loving God intellectually and loving God emotionally. While the former does not require reverence, it does lead to moral living. In that respect Spinoza may be an atheist but he is indeed a type of religious person. As Nadler explains, “true religion is the practice of justice and loving-kindness to other human beings, whether it is motivated by philosophy and true knowledge or by false but salubrious beliefs about God.”
In Spinoza, Atheist Nadler has written a nuanced defense of Spinoza that unfurls like the best kind of philosophical argument. The book may be about a specific philosopher, but it is a book that supersedes its subject matter and leaves readers asking some of the most important religious and philosophical questions about the universe.
Rabbi Marc Katz is the Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is author of the books Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS) chosen as a finalist for the PROSE award and The Heart of Loneliness: How Jewish Wisdom Can Help You Cope and Find Comfort (Turner Publishing) which was chosen as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
