‘And then there is indeed no necessity to presume the existence of a Devil; for the causes of hate, envy, anger, and all such passions are readily enough to be discovered; and there is no occasion for resort to fiction to account for the evils they engender.’
In the course of his correspondence with the most learned men of his time, Spinoza was severely questioned concerning his views upon human wickedness, the disobedience of Adam, and so forth. He said—to abridge his answers—If there be any essential or positive evil in men, God is the author and continuer of that evil. But what is called evil in them is their degree of imperfection as compared with those more perfect. Adam, in the abstract, is a man eating an apple. That is not in itself an evil action. Acts condemned in man are often admired in animals,—as the jealousy of doves,—and regarded as evidence of their perfection. Although man must restrain the forces of nature and direct them to his purposes, it is a superstition to suppose that God is angry against such forces. It is an error in man to identify his little inconveniences as obstacles to God. Let him withdraw himself from the consideration and nothing is found evil. Whatever exists, exists by reason of its perfection for its own ends,—which may or may not be those of men.
Spinoza’s aphorism, ‘From the perfection of a thing proceeds its power of continuance,’ is the earliest modern statement of the doctrine now called ‘survival of the fittest.’ The notion of a Devil involves the solecism of a being surviving through its unfitness for survival.
Spinoza was Copernicus of the moral Cosmos. The great German who discovered to men that their little planet was not the one centre and single care of nature, led the human mind out of a closet and gave it a universe. But dogma still clung to the closet; where indeed each sect still remains, holding its little interest to be the aim of the solar system, and all outside it to be part of a countless host, marshalled by a Prince of Evil, whose eternal war is waged against that formidable pulpiteer whose sermon is sending dismay through pandemonium. But for rational men all that is ended, and its decline began when Spinoza warned men against looking at the moral universe from the pin-hole of their egotism. That closet-creation, whose laws were seen now acting now suspended to suit the affairs of men, disappeared, and man was led to adore the All.
It is a small thing that man can bruise the serpent’s head, if its fang still carries its venom so deep in his reason as to blacken all nature with a sense of triumphant malevolence. To the eye of judicial man, instructed to decide every case without bribe of his own interest as a rival animal, the serpent’s fang is one of the most perfect adaptations of means to ends in nature. Were a corresponding perfection in every human mind, the world would fulfil the mystical dream of the East, which gave one name to the serpents that bit them in the wilderness and seraphim singing round the eternal throne.
‘Cursed be the Hebrew who shall either eat pork, or permit his son to be instructed in the learning of the Greeks.’ So says the Talmud, with a voice transmitted from the ‘kingdom of priests’ (Exod. xix. 6). From the altar of ‘unhewn stone’ came the curse upon Art, and upon the race that represented culture raising its tool upon the rudeness of nature. That curse of the Talmud recoiled fearfully. The Jewish priesthood had their son in Peter with his vision of clean and unclean animals, and the command, ‘Slay and eat!’ Uninstructed is this heir of priestly Judaism ‘in the learning of the Greeks,’ consequently his way of converting Gentiles—the herd of swine, the goyim—is to convert them into christian protoplasm. ‘Slay and eat,’ became the cry of the elect, and their first victim was the paternal Jew who taught them that pork and Greek learning belonged to the same category.