Short Studies on Great Subjects

by James Anthony Froude

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 God 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 God's 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 from a philosophy which issues in such conclusions; 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 such doctrines if they were generally received, in his hands and in his heart they are 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, setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, aside. The objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg. It will be seen at once 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 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, in the same breath, 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 systematised the faith which so many believe, and cleared it of its most hideous features.

Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclusions either from himself or from his readers. We believe for ourselves that logic has no business with such questions; that the answer to them lies in the conscience and not in the intellect. Spinoza thinks otherwise; and he is at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him with instances of monstrous 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.

But once for all (he adds), this aspect of things will remain intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free will remain unremoved.

And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as false as Spinoza supposes them—if we have no power to be anything but what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God, they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. 'The Lord has made all things for himself, even the wicked for the day of evil.'