FEW things are more refreshing than stumbling across a paragraph in a modern book that runs counter to the unhealthy beliefs of the present age. Tom Gallaher’s 2020 biography of António de Oliveira Salazar was one of the more recent examples, offering a frank and honest analysis of Portuguese history to the point of risking the author’s entire career.
In a more philosophical regard, Clare Carlisle’s 2021 study of Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) provides another such example. Not to the extent of risking her career, of course, but certainly in terms of suggesting that history may have turned out very differently if people had treated Spinoza with more respect and not actively set out to distort his ideas. The seventeenth-century thinker has, after all, been wronged portrayed as an atheist in a deceitful effort to claim him as one of the first modernists. As Carlisle explains, the religious humanism that arrived in the form of Calvinism and Cartesianism in the wake of the Middle Ages led to serious problems for the Christian faith:
“This early modern anthropomorphic governor-God subsequently ossified into the remote, skeletal God of eighteenth-century deism – which imagined that, having created the universe, God left it to function autonomously according to the mechanical laws he had designed – before crumbling into the vanishing God of nineteenth-century atheism.”
In Carlisle’s opinion, Christianity could have done far more to shore up its defences against the rapid approach of modernity and Spinoza – himself an outcast who had been expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at the age of 23 – may well have presented the religion with a valuable opportunity at the eleventh hour:
“If the seventeenth-century churches had been receptive to Spinoza, he could have been their Aquinas for the new modern era that stretched ahead of them: his profound refusal of anthropomorphism, voluntarism and separation of God from nature might have insulated Christianity from the ravages of secularism to come. Instead, Protestants and Catholics alike denounced him as an atheist. Only after the intellectual influence of these churches had waned, thanks to the growing power of Enlightenment ideas, could Spinozism be taken seriously – but by then, of course, it was too late to save their God from empiricism and positivism, from Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud and their twentieth-century successors.”
Whilst, to Traditionalist ears, the very notion that a subtle reinterpretation of Christian theology may have helped to stem the advance of anti-Traditionalist ideas sounds like anathema, it must be said that Carlyle’s theory does at least contain a certain ring of truth.
