Spinoza was convinced that all people, regardless of their religious or cultural background, were imbued with the capacity to reason and that we should seek the truth about ourselves and the world we live in. He insisted that our rational faculties could provide us with not only more precise knowledge, but with a path toward a happier life and better politics. In an essay called “On the Correction of the Understanding,” he wrote: “True philosophy is the discovery of the ‘true good’, and without knowledge of the true good human happiness is impossible.” That true good, in Spinoza’s view, can only be found through reason and not through religion, tribal feelings or authoritarianism.
Unlike Thomas Hobbes, who believed that only an absolute monarch could keep man’s violent impulses in check, Spinoza was an early proponent of a democratic ideal and representative government. But a free republic could only survive under a government of reasonable men who knew how to cope with conflicting interests rationally. As Spinoza put it, perhaps a little too optimistically, in his “Theological-Political Treatise”: “To look out for their own interests and retain their sovereignty, it is incumbent on them most of all to consult the common good, and to direct everything according to the dictate of reason.”
If Spinoza was the devil’s disciple, he was a very gentle one. Nothing in his life gave off even a whiff of scandalous behavior. The German poet Heinrich Heine compared Spinoza to Jesus Christ, as a Jew who suffered for his teaching. A quiet, introspective bachelor, who wore a signet ring with the Latin word for “caution,” he hated conflict, and had the courtly manners of his Iberian ancestry. But his virtuous life only made religious believers even more furious: How could a Godless man be morally irreproachable? Here, then, was a clash which we can still recognize today, between those who believe that moral behavior can only come from religious belief, and those who think it can emanate from reason.
The greatest enemies of his kind of truth-seeking in Spinoza’s time were the orthodox Calvinists who still dominated academic and religious life — and to some extent politics — in the Dutch Republic. Catholics in France, strict Anglicans in England, and the rabbis who expelled him, were no different. Their idea of truth was revealed in the Holy Bible by God’s words. They saw Spinoza’s philosophy as a direct challenge to their authority. And so, his blasphemous insistence on rational thinking, and the freedom to challenge religious dogma, had to be crushed.
Religious dogma is often still used today to crack down on the free thought. This is the case in Muslim theocracies, such as Iran. But it is true also of evangelical Christians in the United States, who insist on the removal of books in public libraries and schools that supposedly offend their moral beliefs grounded in religion.
