Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 39–50
From Raisins to Reason: Mennonites, Spinoza, and the Question of Religion
“If you and I are to live religious lives, it doesn’t mean that we talk about religious things but that our manner of life is different.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, remark to Maurice Drury 2
Spinoza characterized rational religion as a form of devotion through which one strives to give attention to and bring one’s life into conformity with God.
JARIG JELLESZ MEETS BENEDICT SPINOZA
It all started with raisins. On the eighteenth day of September in the year 1654, a Dutch Mennonite merchant named Jarig Jellesz purchased twenty-seven casks of long raisins at the Amsterdam Exchange. About a month later, on the sixteenth of October, Jellesz purchased another eight casks of raisins. He was acquiring such a large quantity of raisins because he operated a successful business dealing in dried fruit and spices—as p. 40 both a grocer and a wholesaler. It was through these business transactions, or others very much like them, that Jellesz first encountered a young man who was at that time called Baruch d’Espinoza and whom we now know as the influential early modern philosopher Benedict Spinoza. Spinoza was just twenty-one years old at the time—a minor by Dutch legal conventions of the day—and he was still a member of Talmud Torah, the Portuguese-Jewish congregation in Amsterdam. Due to the death of his father, Michael, he had recently become involved in the day-to-day operation of his own family’s business which also specialized in the trade of spices and dried fruit. At thirty-four years of age, Jellesz was significantly older than Spinoza, and he is also said to have been much more accomplished as an entrepreneur. He had been baptized in the Amsterdam Flemish Mennonite congregation known as the Lam church (Het Lam) on February 24, 1641, and by the time he met Spinoza he was serving as a deacon of the congregation. Jellesz retained his status as a member in good standing of this Mennonite congregation until his death in 1683. By contrast, Spinoza was placed under the ban and expelled from his synagogue in 1656—an event that surely ranks as one of the most well-known and, I think, most dangerously misunderstood events in the history of early modern philosophy.
Jellesz and Spinoza soon grew to become very close friends. Their friendship quickly moved beyond raisins and came to be centered on matters of philosophy and religion in ways that transformed both of their lives. Within a couple of years of his first encounter with Spinoza, Jellesz turned over his business interests to a trusted employee and dedicated himself to the philosophical pursuit of truth and wisdom. In a brief account of Jellesz’s life that was published after his death, one of his friends described this transformation in the following manner:
[Jellesz] ran a grocery shop in Amsterdam in his early years, but . . . realizing that the accumulation of money and goods could not satisfy his soul, [he] sold his shop to an honest man [his former employee, Pieter Loo] and, without ever getting married, withdrew from the turbulence of the world to practice in quietness the knowledge of the truth, looking for the true nature of God and to obtain wisdom. He was engaged in the study of the truth for about 30 years. . . . 3
Discussions of this relationship often assume that the direction of influence flowed only one way—from Spinoza to Jellesz. But there is good evidence that Spinoza learned much from Jellesz and some of the other Mennonites with whom he met for study and whose religious gatherings p. 41 he occasionally attended. 4 In particular, it has been suggested that Jellesz was an important influence on Spinoza’s understanding of religion. 5
Spinoza placed a high value on philosophical or spiritual friendship and the need to cultivate bonds that join people together into a common life. 6 In part IV of his Ethics, he wrote that “[i]t is especially useful to men to form associations, to bind themselves by those bonds most apt to make one people of them, and absolutely, to do those things that strengthen friendships.” 7 Likewise, he emphasized that “a man who lives according to the guidance of reason is bound to join others to himself in friendship.” 8 In a letter to one of his many correspondents, he suggested that “friends must share all things, especially spiritual things.” 9 And from his other writings, it can be determined that Spinoza understood this sort of spiritual friendship to consist of “honesty, love of truth, openness, sincerity and a refraining from sheer flattery.” 10
In addition to funding the publication costs of Spinoza’s work, Jellesz produced two writings of his own. For its posthumous publication in 1678, he was selected by Spinoza’s circle of friends to write the preface that was included with Spinoza’s collected writings. In addition to a brief account of Spinoza’s life, Jellesz is primarily concerned to demonstrate that the philosophy of Spinoza was compatible with the most important elements of Christianity. In 1684, Jellesz published a book of his own, entitled Confession of the Universal and Christian Faith, which he presented in the form of a letter written to Spinoza. 11 He had previously shared a draft of this text with Spinoza, who is said to have responded by writing, “I have enjoyed reading your writing, and find that there is nothing in it that I would change.” 12 Jellesz’s Confession has been described as an attempt to elaborate and defend “a purely rational communion with the divine understanding.” 13 In this respect Jellesz is suggesting that Christianity can and should be understood to expresses something akin to what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. This phrase captures his contention that
the man who is necessarily the most perfect and who participates more in supreme blessedness is the one who loves above all else the intellectual knowledge of God and takes the greatest pleasure in this knowledge. Our greatest good, then, and our blessedness, come back to this: the knowledge and love of God. 14
Between his writings and his own biography, it is evident that Jellesz affirmed Spinoza’s conviction that, as Clare Carlisle nicely summarizes it, “our deepest happiness is not found in production, wealth or competitive success, but in knowledge.” 15 So while it may have been raisins that first brought them together, Jellesz and Spinoza formed a close bond of friendship that was grounded in a common commitment to reason. 16 p. 42
ON RELIGION AND REASON
But this is where things get very complicated due to the oppositional manner in which the categories of reason and religion are so often framed in contemporary intellectual inquiry. Because they expressed a clear commitment to reason, Spinoza and Jellesz are often said to have been motivated by sensibilities that can be characterized as proto-secular if not explicitly anti-religious. In this respect, Spinoza is commonly characterized as having initiated the beginning of the end of religion and thus as one who heralded the emergence of a new age that is taken to be secular rather than religious.
To demonstrate the prevalence of this portrayal of Spinoza and Jellesz, let me cite two prominent examples: In his monumental and well-known work, A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the emergence of secularism follows “a path opened by Spinoza” which sees “[n]ature as identical with God, and then [ultimately] as independent from God.” Again, with Spinoza in mind, Taylor summarizes the secular age as one in which “the immanent order can slough off the transcendent.” 17 I will return to the question of immanence and transcendence later. What is important for now is to highlight Taylor’s contention that the secular age is one that emerges by following a path on which the first steps were taken by Spinoza.
The British historian Jonathan Israel paints a similar portrait. In his influential historical account of the “making of modernity,” Israel maintains that Spinoza was “the first major figure” of what he terms “the Radical Enlightenment.” 18 He describes this approach as an attempt to sharpen, intensify, and bring to their proper conclusion the restraints around religion that others were beginning to impose in the early modern period. Whereas advocates of the moderate Enlightenment like Locke or Leibniz and even Hume “remained anxious to restrict the scope of reason and [to] retain tradition and ecclesiastical authority” in a kind of diminished form, Israel presents the defenders of the radical enlightenment like Spinoza and his Mennonite friends as rare and brave figures who achieved the ultimate triumph of reason over religion. 19
Whatever the status of these questions, one thing can be stated unequivocally: Spinoza was a philosopher whose work was heavily invested in the question of religion. It must be acknowledged that there is a sense in which he was very critical of certain approaches to religion. But it is a mistake to suggest that he was opposed to religion in general. This mistake arises from a failure to pay sufficient attention to the specific characteristics of the category of religion to which Spinoza and his Mennonite friends were so vehemently opposed. And when this happens, it is easy to become blinded p. 43 to the fact that there is equally a conception of religion that they set out to elaborate and defend.
My aim in this paper, if it is not already obvious, is to suggest is that it is possible to gain some clarity on the concept of religion in the philosophy of religion by paying attention to the way it functions in the work of this important and influential early modern philosopher. And by drawing attention to the substantial role that Mennonites played in Spinoza’s thinking about these matters, I hope to demonstrate that they have a greater stake in the philosophy of religion than is often assumed. Moreover, my sense is that these are not simply matters of historical interest but have significant implications for our contemporary understanding of religion as well.
FROM SUPERSTITIOUS RELIGION TO RATIONAL RELIGION
It is important to recognize that for Spinoza and his Mennonite friends, reason does not oppose religion in general but rather superstitious religion. And yet the grammar in which they spoke about this can be rather confusing. An instructive example of grammatical ambiguity can be found in a letter written to Spinoza from Simon Joosten de Vries, another one of his close Mennonite friends. Here, de Vries tells Spinoza that their study group sought to follow his guidance in “defend[ing] the truth against those who are superstitiously religious and Christian.” Taken in isolation, one could easily take such a claim to be suggesting that it is religion and Christianity that are at odds with the truth and identifying superstition as the disposition that might erroneously lead one to embrace these apparently untruthful approaches. But such a reading is difficult to reconcile with the way Spinoza and his Mennonite friends tended to distinguish between superstitious religion and what they called “true religion.” It also contradicts Spinoza’s explicit expression of his desire to see a “religion . . . free of all superstition.” 20 Like Spinoza, the issue for de Vries is neither with those who are religious nor with those who are Christian. It is with those who approach either of those things in a superstitious manner. For this reason, it is important to understand the distinction that Spinoza and his friends are drawing between rational religion and superstitious religion.
Spinoza characterized rational religion as a form of devotion through which one strives to give attention to, and bring one’s life into conformity with, God. It aspires to a “kind of union with God, a sharing in God’s nature.” 21 He characterized such a life as one of devotion that is marked by steadfastness, restfulness, and peace of mind. Spinoza describes the rational person as one who “acts not by impulse, but kindly, generously, and with the greatest steadfastness of mind.” 22 A person who lives such a life, that is to say, a person who pursues the intellectual love of God, is said p. 44 to live in a state of blessedness or beatitude. It is precisely such a life that Spinoza and Jellesz sought to pursue when they left the grocery business to embrace a life of philosophy.
Superstitious religion, by contrast, is beset by anxiety, inconstancy, and endless wavering. Spinoza’s term for this is animi fluctuationes, which is commonly translated into English as “vacillations of the mind” and which Carlisle helpfully describes as the lurching of a soul that is torn between competing and incompatible impulses. 23 “Like all delusions of the mind and impulses of frenzy,” Spinoza notes, superstition is entirely “fluctuating and inconstant. . . . [I]t arises, not from reason, but only from the most powerful [i.e., reactive] affects.” 24 A superstitious person is therefore fundamentally unstable and restless, impulsive and unsettled. Far from drawing us into a more intimate form of participation with God, Spinoza claims that superstitious religion leads to a profound sense of alienation from God. It is important to recognize that his discussion of religion presumes the traditional etymological understanding of the Latin word religio as denoting a kind of relational bond. Because its attention to God is disordered and confused, Spinoza suggests that superstitious religion is inherently self-defeating. It undermines the possibility of an intimate bond with God because it is animated by a set of dispositions that are unsuited to any sort of relational binding.
The crucial thing to recognize here is that this approach treats religion as a disposition that gives direction and shape to a way of life. It does not identify a specific kind of objective thing or a type of data of the sort that is the focus of the contemporary academic study of religion. For Spinoza, religion is a virtue, just like it was in the tradition of medieval philosophy with which he was familiar. The historian Peter Harrison has nicely captured this difference between the medieval conception of religio as a virtue and the more objectified or reified conception of modern religion that came to replace it. “There is no sense,” he writes, “in which [the virtue of] religio refers to systems of propositional beliefs, and no sense of different religions [in the] (plural).” 25 Rather, it is a matter of how one should live in relation to God. It is for this reason that I opened my reflections with such a lengthy description of the way Jellesz and Spinoza sought to live in such a careful and disciplined manner.
If Spinoza can be characterized as a critic of religion, it is important to recognize that his criticism is directed at concerns that arise in relation to a category of modern religion that was coming into prominence during his lifetime. Far from advocating the beginning of the end of religion, it is more accurate to describe him as someone who recognized the emergence of a new conception of religion that differed markedly from his own approach. Much of his work sets out to identify tensions and contradictions p. 45 that exist within this new category of religion. Harrison helpfully captures the nature of the change that happens with the category of religion and notes that it parallels a similar change that is happening with the category of the science. He summarizes this situation by suggesting that “religio has been transformed from a human virtue to a generic something typically captured by sets of beliefs and practices.” 26 An example of this shift can be seen in some new grammatical developments pertaining to the use of the word “religion.” In seventeenth-century writing, references to religion increasingly come to include the definite article “the” (as in the Christian religion). Closely related to this, there are a growing number of references to religions in the plural, as in the Christian or Muslim religions. 27
RELIGION WITHOUT COMPETITION
What is at stake for Spinoza in his criticism of this new category of modern religion can be illustrated by considering his disagreement with Descartes on questions of metaphysics. The philosophy of Descartes is built around the suggestion that human beings and God can both be characterized as substances. The difference is that one of these substances (the human kind) is finite and the other (God) is infinite. Spinoza thought that this metaphysical approach was the philosophical counterpart to the theologically problematic tendency to think of God in anthropomorphic terms. This assumption leads us to think that God acts in relation to humans in the same way that humans act in relation to each other, just with a greater degree of power or force. Spinoza’s way of putting this was to suggest that it problematically “compares God’s power with the power of Kings.” 28 Such an approach depicts God as exerting a kind of direct causal influence on our lives. We imagine, for example, that God exists in the same space as we do and acts by getting in our way, pushing us and prodding us, in much the same way as a human being acts when he is trying to control the life of another. This assumes a model of causality in which subjects and objects are causally interacting with each other on a common playing field. It understands the agency of God in terms that are voluntaristic and occasionalist, conceiving of God as subject who is moved to act through a series of discrete calculations. It was precisely this way of imagining God that Spinoza identified as lying at the heart of superstitious religion. People who embrace superstitious religion are anxious and unstable because they are driven by fear over the way God might choose to interfere directly in their lives. Among other things, this fear expresses an assumption that the relationship between God and humans is inherently competitive. It imagines God and humans as beings who are vying for control over a common space in which they both exist. p. 46
If superstitious religion is constructed around a model of competition, Spinoza’s account of rational religion can be seen as an attempt to elaborate a non-competitive understanding of the relationship between God and humanity. Let me demonstrate by commenting on two of the most well-known features of his philosophy: his metaphysical distinction between substance and modes and his account of God’s immanence. It is well known that Spinoza opposed the dualistic metaphysics of Descartes by arguing that there was only one substance (God) and many modes. To rehearse this very briefly, Spinoza defined substance as “what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.” 29 By contrast, modes are not conceived through themselves. Their being is such that they are inherently dependent on something else for their own existence. Substance is infinite, eternal, independent, and uncaused. Modes are finite, temporal, dependent, and caused. Metaphysically speaking, modes do not exist at the same level of substance. Rather, their being is understood by way of their relation of dependence on substance. And it is in this way that Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance and modes can be shown to support an understanding of human participation with God that is inherently non-competitive. Carlisle summarizes this well. In the metaphysics of Descartes, where both God and humans are defined as substance, to participate in God’s nature would require us to become something other than human. For Spinoza, by contrast, “substance does not limit modes, but empowers them.” 30 This means that all modes are somehow understood to have their being in God. While modes will never exist at the level of substance, they can be said to participate in the being of God and thus to express varying degrees of what Spinoza calls “perfection.” Therefore, as Carlisle helpfully puts it, “the more we are in ourselves, the more [we can be said to be] in God.” 31
Another key aspect of Spinoza’s critique of Cartesian philosophy and superstitious religion is his conception of the immanence of God. We are accustomed to thinking of immanence as a metaphysical category that is opposed to transcendence, and this is one of the key reasons why Spinoza’s philosophy is often characterized as a secular or anti-religious force. But it is crucial to recognize that Spinoza does not oppose immanence to transcendence. Instead of transcendence, when Spinoza spoke of “immanence” he used it to oppose a mode of causation that he calls “transitive.” 32 A transitive cause is a cause that is external to the thing upon which it acts. It is like billiard balls colliding or what Aristotle called efficient causality. And Spinoza’s point is that these are not good models for understanding the relationship between God and humanity. So when he is arguing that God is immanent, he is emphasizing that God does not relate to humans p. 47 and other modes as a sort of counter-force that opposes us from the outside. Rather, God is a cause of human existence that is somehow internal to it. The goal of the religious life is to discover the cause of our being that has already been given to us, and to bind ourselves to God in an intimate relationship that can only happen when we become the kind of being God has caused us to be.
Not only does this mean there is room for a notion of the transcendence of God in Spinoza’s philosophy, but there is also an important sense in which it is an essential aspect of his work. Just like Aquinas, Spinoza strove to demonstrate that “God can transcend creation without being separate from it.” 33 He was also, like Aquinas, attempting to elaborate a kind of double movement of giving and receiving in which God is at once the source from which all life originates while at the same time the end toward which we are called back in a relationship of intimate love. Indeed, Carlisle suggests that Spinoza was drawing on the modern terminology of substance and modes as a way of elaborating a vision of divine simplicity that Aquinas articulated by drawing on the Aristotelian categories of matter and form. In this and in so many other ways, his philosophy can be understood as an attempt to reimagine the similarity and difference between God and humans in a way that corrects for the way this is distorted in Cartesian philosophy or superstitious religion. He worries that these approaches make God and humans too similar (as substances) in a way that requires us to cast their difference as a form of competition. By contrast, Spinoza emphasizes the radical difference between God and humanity (only God is substance) in a way that makes it possible to imagine a non-competitive mode of relationship that is inherently intimate. To summarize, we might say that his distinction between substance and modes was an attempt at stressing the difference between God and humanity, while his account of the immanence of God was articulating and defending the possibility of human participation in the life of God.
CONCLUSION: ON MENNONITE–MUSLIM DIALOGUE
Let me conclude by reflecting on how I think this discussion applies to what we are doing in this exercise of Mennonite-Muslim Dialogue. We often refer to this exercise as an “inter-religious dialogue.” When we do so, we are speaking of religion in its modern guise—the dialogue is between two different religions. And as Wittgenstein put it in the words I quoted in the epigraph, such an approach finds us talking a lot about religious things. But I think there is also a sense in which we are striving to participate in a dialogue that is carried out in a religious manner. Instead of inter-religious dialogue, we might better describe this as a form of “religious dialogue.” While there are many ways that the modern category p. 48 of religion is problematic, there is also a sense in which we simply must use it. I think this has already been exemplified many times through our dialogue so far. But it is important that we do not forget the other sense of religion that Spinoza and Jellesz were interested in. If we do so, we might find ourselves moving from a dialogue between members of two different religious communities to thinking of this as a spiritual exercise that works through friendships that seek the intellectual love of God and neighbor and thereby bring us closer to the God who is the ground of our being. Here the key point is not that we talk about religious things. It is that we seek to pursue a manner of life that is different.
NOTES
- This paper was first read at the 8th Mennonite–Muslim Dialogue in Qom, Iran, on June 20, 2023. The assigned question to which it was supposed to respond was “What is religion in the philosophy of religion?”
- Maurice O’Connor Drury, The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury on Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry, ed. John Hayes (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 105.
- W. G. van der Tak, “Jellesz’ Life and Business” Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis 59 (1989): 15.
- For a helpful overview of the influential role that Mennonites played in the development of early modern philosophy, see Gary Waite, “The Neglected Role of Dutch Mennonite Innovators in the Scientific Revolution and Early Enlightenment,” 2023 Friesen Lectures delivered at Canadian Mennonite University, March 9, 2023. Recordings of the lectures are available at https://media.cmu.ca/events/lectures#jmf.
- For a small example of this, see Jellesz’s letter to Spinoza (no. 48a), in which he responds to Spinoza’s request to explain the nature of his approach to faith and religion. See Benedict Spinoza, “Letter to Jarig Jelles (early 1673)” in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. 2, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 398-403.
- For a detailed discussion of Spinoza’s conception of friendship and other associated concepts, see Susan James, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
- Benedict Spinoza, Ethics in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 589. Hereafter referred to as Ethics.
- Spinoza, Ethics, 565. p. 49
- Benedict Spinoza, “Letter to Henry Oldenburg (September, 1661)” in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1:164.
- Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop, Piet Steenbakkers, and Jeroen van de Ven, eds., The Bloomsbury Companion to Spinoza (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 155.
- Jarig Jelles, Belydenisse des Algemeenen en Christelyken Geloofs (Amsterdam: Jan Rieuwertsz, 1684).
- Jan Rieuwertsz (presumed author), “Na-Reden [Afterword],” in Jarig Jelles, Belydenisse, 164.
- Steven M. Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 168.
- Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 2:128.
- Clare Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 3.
- Biographical details of the lives of Jellesz and Spinoza are drawn from the following sources: W.G. van der Tak, “Jarich Jellesz’ Origins and Jellesz’ Life and Business,” Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis, vol. 59 (Delft: Eburon, 1989), 11–22; A. M. vaz Dias and W. G. van der Tak, “Spinoza Merchant and Autodictat Charters and Other Authentic Documents Relating to the Philosopher’s Youth and His Relations,” Studia Rosenthaliana 16, no. 2 (1982): 109–195; Andrew Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), esp. 185–214); Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop, Piet Steenbakkers, and Jeroen van de Ven, eds, The Bloomsbury Companion to Spinoza (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); and The Spinoza Web (spinozaweb.org). For a more detailed biography of Spinoza, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 543.
- Jonathan I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 2.
- The quote is from Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11. For a fuller interpretation of Spinoza as a pioneer of the “Radical Enlightenment,” see Jonathan I. Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 159–74.
- Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in The Collected Works of Spinoza, 2:247.
- Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 34.
- Spinoza, Ethics in The Collected Works of Spinoza, 1:565.
- Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 23.
- Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in The Collected Works of Spinoza, 2:68. p. 50
- Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 7.
- Harrison, 16.
- Harrison, 97.
- Spinoza, Ethics, as quoted by Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 61.
- Spinoza, Ethics in The Collected Works of Spinoza, 1:408.
- Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 94.
- Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 94.
- For a helpful discussion of this, see Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 61.
- Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 61.
