Spinoza's God

Spinoza's God:

The Almighty Who Doesn't Return Your Calls

If you grew up imagining God as a sort of cosmic Father Christmas, keeping a list of who's been naughty and nice and occasionally parting a sea or two, Spinoza has some bad news for you. Also some good news. Mainly bad news first, though.

The Divine Personality Bypass

Spinoza's God is the deity equivalent of that friend who never replies to texts. Prayers? Unread. Sacrifices? Left on seen. Existential crises at 3am? The cosmic inbox is permanently full.

This is because Spinoza's God has no personality. None. Nada. No favourite colour, no opinions on football, no view on whether you should leave your job. The traditional God is a cosmic CEO with strong feelings about Tuesdays and a complicated relationship with shellfish. Spinoza's God is more like the weather. Vast. Indifferent. Doing its thing whether you like it or not.

You cannot bargain with Spinoza's God. You cannot flatter it. You cannot promise to be good if it just helps you pass this one exam. The universe does not negotiate. It simply unfolds, with the cool detachment of a mathematical proof and roughly the same level of emotional warmth.

God Is Everything, Including Your Ex

Here is where it gets properly weird. Spinoza did not say God made the universe. He said God is the universe. All of it. Every star, every atom, every soggy chip at the bottom of the bag.

This means God is the sunset. Lovely. God is also the wasp at your picnic. Less lovely. God is the cup of tea that warms you on a cold morning, and God is the traffic warden writing you a ticket. God is your beloved grandmother and also, regrettably, your ex. Theologically speaking, you cannot block anyone because everyone is God in disguise, which is awkward at parties.

Spinoza was excommunicated for this, which is fair enough. The rabbis of Amsterdam took one look at his theory and concluded that a young man who thought God was identical to a passing herring was unlikely to be a great fit for the synagogue. He was 23 and presumably very annoying about it.

No Miracles, Sorry

In Spinoza's universe, miracles are off the menu. Not because God won't do them but because God can't. God doing a miracle would be like a triangle suddenly deciding to have four sides. Just not the sort of thing triangles do.

This means every miracle story is either a misunderstanding, a metaphor, or someone making it up for marketing purposes. The parting of the Red Sea? Unusual wind conditions. Water into wine? Probably some clever cellaring. Lazarus? Awkward silence.

You can see why this did not go down well in 17th-century Europe, where miracles were essentially the entire business model of organised religion. Spinoza had effectively published a leaflet saying "Your founder's main claim is statistically improbable," and then seemed surprised when nobody invited him to dinner.

The Free Will Problem

Spinoza's God does not choose. This is important. The traditional God sits up in heaven going "Hmm, shall I create platypuses today? Yes, why not, that'll be a laugh." Spinoza's God could not have done otherwise. Platypuses were always going to happen. So were you. So was that embarrassing thing you did in 2009.

This is either deeply comforting or deeply unsettling, depending on the mood you catch it in. On the one hand, none of it is your fault. On the other hand, none of it is your fault, which rather takes the wind out of the sails of personal achievement. Won the Nobel Prize? The universe was always going to do that through you. Don't get cocky.

And Then He Says He Loves It

Here is the punchline. After demolishing God's personality, miracles, free will, and pretty much every comforting religious doctrine ever invented, Spinoza announces that the highest human good is the intellectual love of God.

You read that right. He spends 300 pages explaining that God doesn't love you back, can't hear you, didn't choose to make you, and won't catch you when you fall. Then he says the best thing you can do is love this God anyway, with your mind, for being magnificently and indifferently itself.

It is the philosophical equivalent of being dumped and saying, "Yes, but have you considered how interesting the dumping was?"

Enter the Modern Pagans

Now, fast forward 350 years. Walk into any modern pagan gathering, druidic gorsedd, or Wiccan moot, and you will hear ideas that would have made Spinoza nod thoughtfully into his lens-grinding equipment.

The divine is in nature, not above it. Modern pagans typically reject the idea of a God who created the world from outside and watches it from a distance. The sacred is here, in the oak tree, the river, the soil, the storm. Spinoza would recognise this immediately. His Deus sive Natura (God, or Nature) is essentially the philosophical foundation for what many pagans feel intuitively.

Everything is interconnected. Pagan thought tends to emphasise that all beings are part of a single web of life. Spinoza got there first, philosophically. We are all modes of one substance, expressions of a single reality, waves on the same ocean. The modern pagan saying "we are all connected" and Spinoza saying "all things are modes of the one substance" are pointing at much the same insight, though Spinoza would phrase it with rather more Latin and far fewer crystals.

Reverence without dogma. Many modern pagans want a spiritual life without creeds, scriptures, or hierarchies telling them what to believe. Spinoza would approve. He wanted reverence grounded in understanding, not obedience to authority. His blessedness is something you arrive at by thinking carefully, not by submitting to a priesthood.

Nature is not a resource. Contemporary pagan ethics often insist that the natural world has intrinsic value, not merely instrumental worth for human use. This aligns neatly with Spinoza, for whom nature simply is God, and treating it as raw material would be a kind of category error. You do not strip-mine the divine.

Cycles, not destinations. Pagan thought often emphasises seasonal cycles, eternal returns, the rhythms of birth and decay, rather than a linear march toward judgement day. Spinoza's eternity is similarly non-linear. His God does not have a plan unfolding through history toward a final goal. Things simply are, in their necessary and eternal pattern.

Where Spinoza and the Pagans Part Ways

It is not a perfect match, however. Spinoza was a rationalist to his fingertips. He believed the path to blessedness ran through rigorous logical analysis, not through ritual, ecstasy, or communion with spirits. He would have raised an eyebrow at drumming circles, found tarot cards philosophically uninteresting, and probably had quite stern things to say about astrology.

Modern paganism often embraces multiplicity: many gods, many spirits, many beings worthy of honour. Spinoza was a strict monist. One substance, full stop. Where a pagan might see the goddess of the river and the god of the forest as distinct presences, Spinoza would see two modes of the same infinite reality, both fully natural, neither requiring its own personality.

And paganism typically involves practice: ritual, festival, and embodied connection. Spinoza's spirituality was essentially a one-person philosophy seminar. Beautiful in its way, but unlikely to draw a crowd on the solstice.

The Surprising Convergence

Still, the resonance is real. Both traditions reject the cosmic dictator model of God. Both find the sacred in the natural world rather than beyond it. Both insist that meaning is here, not somewhere else. Both refuse to treat the universe as a vending machine that dispenses favours in exchange for correct ritual behaviour.

In an age when traditional religion feels too constraining for many and pure materialism feels too thin, both Spinoza and modern paganism offer a third option: a world charged with significance, a nature worthy of reverence, and a humanity that belongs to the cosmos rather than ruling over it.

Spinoza, the excommunicated Jewish philosopher who ground lenses for a living and rarely left his lodgings, would probably be baffled to find himself name-checked at a Beltane fire festival. But the festival-goers, swaying in the firelight and feeling the divinity of the night, would be doing something his philosophy gives surprisingly elegant words to.

Nature is divine. The divine is natural. You are part of it. Reflect on this, the philosopher and the pagan both say, and you might just find your way to something worth calling blessedness.

The herring, of course, is still God. Spinoza was clear on that.

Who was Spinoza?

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish heritage whose ideas were so radical for his time that he was excommunicated from his Jewish community at age 23. His masterpiece, the Ethics, presents a tightly argued system that continues to influence philosophy, theology, and science today.

Alan /|\