Essays in Literature and History

by James Anthony Froude

Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration in this strange logic, (and most admirably indeed is the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it,) we learn that God is the only causa libera; that no other thing or being has any power of self-determination: all move by fixed laws of causation, motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to consider future things as in a sense contingent (see Tractat. Theol. Polit. cap. iv. sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient deceptions which we are obliged to employ with ourselves. God is the causa immanens omnium; He is not a personal being existing apart from the universe; but Himself in His own reality, He is expressed in the universe, which is His living garment. Keeping to the philosophical language of the term, Spinoza preserves the distinction between natura nalurans and natura naturala. The first is being in itself, the attributes of substance as they are conceived simply and alone; the second is the infinite series of modifications which follow out of the properties of these attributes. And thus all which is, is what it is by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other than it is. God is free, because no causes external to Himself have power over Him; and as good men are most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no infringement on God's freedom to say that He must have acted as He has acted, but rather He is absolutely free because absolutely a law Himself to Himself.

Here ends the first book of the Ethics, the book which contains, as we said, the nolianes simplicissimas, and the primary and rudimental deductions from them. his Dei naturam, Spinoza says in his lofty confidence, ejusque proprietates explicui. But as if conscious that his method will never convince, he concludes this portion of his subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain or apologize, but to show us clearly, in practical detail, the position into which he has led us. The root, we are told, of all philosophical errors, lies in our notion of final causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret God's action through our own; we speak of His intentions, as if he were a man; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, and finally erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it assigns to God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously affected, have conceived these opposite influences to result from opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their advantage good, and whatever obstructs it evil. For our convenience we form generic conceptions of human excellence, as archetypes after which to strive, and such of us as approach nearest to such archetypes are supposed to be virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be wicked. But such generic abstractions are but entia imaginationis, and have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing is what it has the means of being. There is no rebellion against Him, and no resistance of His will; in truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing as a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions are good or bad, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent; what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals, and as soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to the former a power of free volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.

"If I am asked," concludes Spinoza, "why then all mankind were not created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason? it was because, I reply, there was to Him no lack of matter to create all things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection; or, to speak more properly, because the laws of His nature were ample enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be conceived by an Infinite Intelligence."

It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn away with no disposition to learn more philosophy which issues in such conclusions; and resentful perhaps that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must claim however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for himself. His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we may think ourselves would be the moral effect of it if it were generally received, in his hands and in his heart it is worked into maxims of the purest and loftiest morality. And at least we are bound to remember that some account of this great mystery of evil there must be; and although familiarity with commonly-received explanations may disguise from us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist; the fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational, if our conscience did not forbid us to listen to it. The objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg; and it will be seen from this with how little justice the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral distinctions between virtue and vice.

"We speak," writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had urged something of the kind, "we speak of this or that man having done a wrong thing, when we compare him with a general standard of humanity; but inasmuch as God neither perceives things in such abstract manner, nor forms to himself such kind of generic definitions, and since there is no more reality in anything than God has assigned to it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good exists only in respect of man's understanding, not in respect of God's."

"If this be so," then replies Blyenburg, "bad men fulfil
God's will as well as good."

"It is true," Spinoza answers, "they fulfil it, yet not as the good nor as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them. The better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of God's spirit, and the more he expresses God's will; while the bad, being without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of God, and through which alone we are called (in respect of our understandings) his servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the artificer, —they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their service."

Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language the extreme doctrine of Grace: and St. Paul, if we interpret his real belief by the one passage so often quoted, in which he compares us to "clay in the hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour and another to dishonour," may be accused with justice of having held the same opinion. If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the philosophy of Spinoza. It is monstrous to call evil a positive thing, and to assert that God has predetermined it,—to tell us that he has ordained what he hates, and hates what he has ordained. It is incredible that we should be without power to obey him except through his free grace, and yet be held responsible for our failures when that grace has been withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher sacrilegious who has but systematized the faith which so many believe, and cleared it of its most hideous features.

At all events, Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclusions either from himself or from his readers. We believe that logic has no business with such questions; that the answer to them lies in the conscience and not in the intellect,—that it is practical merely, and not speculative. Spinoza thinks otherwise; and he is at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him with instances of horrid crime, such as bring home to the heart the natural horror of it. He speaks of Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks if God can be called the cause of such an act as that.

"God," replies Spinoza, calmly, "is the cause of all things which have reality. If you can show that evil, errors, crimes express any real things, I agree readily that God is the cause of them; but I conceive myself to have proved that what constitutes the essence of evil is not a real thing at all, and therefore that God cannot be the cause of it. Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it was a positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the latter lay in his being without pity, without obedience, without natural affection,—none of which things express any positive essence, but the absence of it: and therefore God was not the cause of these, although he was the cause of the act and the intention.