FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Love of God

Rant Number 330 5 December 2008

Love of God

‘He who truly loves God should not endeavour that God should love him in return.’ A searing statement by Spinoza, much admired by Goethe. A sublime form of self-denial, the poet thought. Goethe didn’t have a clue, Bertrand Russell countered. Not spiritual disinterest but logical necessity. ‘If a man should so endeavour, he would desire that God, whom he loves, should not be God…which is absurd’ Spinoza ratiocinates. Clear as mud? No, again, just logic. God has no passions or pleasures or pains. Now, love is certainly a passion, so how could God feel that?

Spinoza, Goethe, Russell…how could the poor priest even dream to contend with such giants? Yet, he’ll dare. It is so simple. The key that unlocks this mystery is the famous pantheistic tag: Deus sive Natura. God or Nature. For Spinoza, interchangeable terms. Two names for the same thing. Substitute, pray, ‘nature’ for ‘God’. You can love nature or the cosmos all right, I imagine. But could you really strive to have nature – the universe - love you back? And what could it mean? Even tree-huggers might find that a tad difficult, I suspect.

There may be other reasons why the Jewish thinker (whom I much admire) disapproved of the idea of a loving God. The Judeo-Spanish writer Abravanel, ‘Leone Ebreo’, may be one. In a dialogue, Abravanel had pictured the mystic’s union with God in erotically charged language. A line with plenty of biblical support. In the Book of Hosea God is a husband lover pursuing Israel, his faithless but beloved wife. The Book of Proverbs has Wisdom, a female figure, singing of her fellowship with God from ‘the beginning’. The Song of Songs of course is erotic through and through. Christian mystics like St Bernard of Clairvaux had a whale of a time allegorising it all as the Church’s love for her divine bridegroom, Christ.

In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, as it happens, Spinoza deconstructed the Old Testament. Ditching miracles and the supernatural, along with the food laws and rituals of the Mosaic law. Nor did he care a jot for those nasty, Nile-swimming creatures, allegories. (Forgive puny priestly joke…) In that, he was a forerunner of ‘modernity’. But that is not all. Cherchez la femme, that might be it. According to a recent female biographer, Spinoza’s dislike of a loving God is a personal thing. He was a misogynist. An unmarried, shy man, devoted to his young male friends, the philosopher would have loathed the special ‘female power’ that makes men prey to lust, inclines them to superstition and sways them with passions and irrational feelings. (The epithet ‘womanly’ in his writings is not a complimentary one.) Hence Spinoza concluded that women are incapable of reason and excluded them from elections, government and, presumably, from exercising any influence or authority over men. Huh! I wonder what Hillary Clinton would make of that.

In truth, Spinoza’s definition of love always intrigued me. Does it reveal his hang-ups? Amor est titillatio, he wrote. Love is titillation. Ahem…there is something in that but…how much? That is the question.

Anyway, if Spinoza was a woman hater, he’d be at odds with the secular modernity he helped to fashion. Ditto if he was also anti-Semitic. During an academic debate on ‘The state of Israel, ethics and politics’ last night a speaker claimed as much. That surprised and annoyed me. ‘Do you really want to put that great mind into the same league as Jew-baiters like Julius Streicher and Sir Oswald Mosley?’ I asked. I got no joy. Spinoza’s criticism of Judaism as a religion of dead rituals and ceremonies was taken up by German philosophy in an anti-Semitic vein, the fellow replied. With time, I could have retorted that a theological critique is a theological critique. An exercise of the intellect. Human reason. Why should Spinoza, himself a Jew, be barred from it? In this timid philosopher’s case, it took guts to do it. The Amsterdam synagogue offered him money to recant, but he turned it down. Then an assassin sought his life. Eventually the Jewish authorities cursed him with all the curses in the Book and banned him forever from his people. Thereafter Spinoza earned a living as a lens-grinder, while writing philosophy in his spare time. No mean fellow, eh?

Spinoza preferred Christ to Moses, but in a qualified manner. Christ is not divine. God is Nature, remember, and how could Nature become a man? So the Incarnation is an absurd doctrine, a contradiction in terms, like saying that ‘a circle has taken on the nature of a square.’ Nor could the Gospel miracles count as evidence for Christ’s divine origins, as miracles as violations of natural laws are logically impossible. God consists of the laws of nature so how could God violate himself? Christ for Spinoza was the mouthpiece of God, insofar as he taught principles that are ‘universal and true’, such as the exercise of justice and charity towards neighbours. Or perhaps, if he really had misogynist tendencies, he secretly appreciated Jesus as an unmarried man, as opposed to the polygamous Israelites, who knows?

God’s transcendence is sometimes put up as an argument against prayer. God is ‘up there’, so far away, out of reach, how could possibly human petitions reach him? Strangely, Spinoza’s God is the exact opposite. Thoroughly immanent. Indwelling. His God – Nature – permanently pervades the universe – it is the universe. Good news? God is not far away, then. Alas, prayer gets even less of a purchase. Trying praying to the cosmos. Or to yourself. Maybe a thoroughgoing egoist would buy it. Not many will, though. Rightly so. Prayer and navel-gazing ain’t the same thing.

Spinoza loved his peculiar God but God did not reciprocate him. Within the philosopher’s system, he could not. To refute it, you only have to refute the system. In fact, any evangelical Christian from Holy Trinity Brompton could prove Spinoza wrong. ‘God love me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so’, wrote theologian Karl Barth. A knock-down proof. Not that it would convince our Benedict. It is life, not logic and, as Goethe put in ‘All grey is theory but green is life’s golden tree’.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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