Idea of God

Spinoza’s critique of the traditional Idea of God as a transcendental being and the relation to his view of the highest good.

For Spinoza, God as a transcendental being is accepted blindly by the common men to pacify fears and uncertainty. God is often used to advance man’s greed and ambition. God is interpreted in the most inconsistent and incongruous ways by the Prophets’ imagination and this imagination has to source for certainty in signs interpreted by the Prophet. Hence God’s revelations are seldom consonant but varied, particularistic and antithetical because they are contingent on differing dispositions, temperaments, opinions and even ignorance of the Prophets. God is thus perceived as “close to some but not others” [C. 3] or in other words, favourable towards some but not others [C. 3] that people believed in rashly and out of fear and ignorance. Most men hence see God as a lawgiver or prescriber and do not truly understand God.

Yet for Spinoza, the highest good or true happiness and blessedness [C. 2] is to perfect our intellect and have true knowledge thereby loving God with the right disposition and consistently as opposed to loving God or obeying laws out of fear, punishment and ignorance. By perfecting our intellect, we can abjure all doubts and have a clear and distinct idea of God. This is cardinal because for Spinoza, God expresses and is the entirety of nature. God’s essence as Spinoza says causes all things in nature. So, nothing can be understood clearly without first truly understanding of God (or nature). Thus, since God is the entirety of nature, the more we know natural things, the more can we comprehend God’s essence. Also, since God causes all things, to attain true knowledge or the highest good, man would have to have intellectual knowledge of God. Blessed is the one who have knowledge and love God rightly. For Spinoza, knowledge of God is not attainable through plain faith but through certain and common notions as opposed to dogmatic and limited commands and institutions.

With true knowledge and understanding then, one will understand that God is not biased to any person or nation because for Spinoza, God’s decree or guidance is the immutable order and law of nature in its entirety implying universality and eternal truth and necessity in all things. When one attains the highest good then, or true knowledge, one will understand that God begets all things. He “acts and guides all things from the necessity of his own nature and perfection” [D. 34].

Also rather importantly, one will not as like the hoi polloi, see God as having an acrimonious relation with nature and see “miracles” as attesting the existence or providence of God. Conversely, if there are no “ruptures” in nature, nature is seen as being “subdued” by God [E. 3]. The paucity of the understanding of God or the failure to attain the highest good then is a precarious situation because people will start to “feign miracles” to prove their special affinity to God and amplify their own pompous self-importance in society on false grounds for possible dubious purposes. For Spinoza, attainment of the highest good means understanding that nature and God’s will is in tandem with each other. The power of nature or divine power is conflated by Spinoza as one with God’s essence and will or power which is infinite and extended to all things in nature. Nature maintains a fixed and immutable order and has eternal laws [E 12 & 13]. Knowledge of God is as a corollary only attainable by rational inference from the fixed and immutable order of nature [E. 26] (since nature and God is conflated as one) and not miracles. Miracles which is beyond man’s understanding and which occurs contrary to the law of nature or God on the other hand causes us to doubt God’s existence and cannot help us to understand God’s essence and the knowledge of God. Thus it inhibits our attainment of true knowledge and the highest good of man. Moreover, Spinoza seems to argue that miracles are lesser occurrence or in his terms, “limited works” [E. 24] which are finite. From a finite occurrence and lesser occurrence, one cannot infer to an infinite essence such as God. We thus, can only know God and thereby attain the highest Good of man by inferring from the equivalently infinite, fixed and immutable order of nature.