The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
May 3, 2009
Two weeks ago, at the insistence of Fred Sawyer, I preached about Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth. Fred had purchased a sermon at last year’s goods and services auction. It turns out I sold two more sermons last year. Josh and Christine Hawks-Ladds also purchased one; I turn to their topic this morning.
Sometime last fall Josh sent me an email. He said, “My thoughts of a sermon generally revolve around Benedict de Spinoza’s The Ethics—but more specifically on the general topic of “Why Bother Doing Good?” The thesis is: Why bother doing good deeds at all, since we are only on this planet for a short time, and no one knows what occurs after death? Why not live a life of crime, pollution, carelessness, laziness and thoughtlessness toward our fellow humans and the environment? Some religions teach that such conduct will almost certainly lead to an after-life of purgatory or hell, or life as a dung bug, etc. But if one does not believe in such punishments, then why bother doing good at all?”
Josh actually started writing the sermon himself, which made me very happy—not because he was making my role easier, but because he was asking good questions. He said he could think of three reasons why humans ought to bother doing good. First, what if those of us who don’t believe in hell and everlasting punishment for our misdeeds are wrong? Second, he raised the idea that it is in our self-interest to do good. As we care for the environment, our own quality of life increases. As we address poverty and injustice, our own quality of life increases. Third, Josh held up The Ethics of Spinoza. How did he answer the question? Josh had studied The Ethics in college. He vaguely remembered it—but it clearly impressed him, enough to suggest a sermon many years later.
I didn’t study The Ethics in college or in seminary—but any course involving western philosophy mentioned Spinoza. He was very controversial in his lifetime; very influential for those who came after him; and, honestly, very difficult to read and understand without a teacher. Earlier this week I told a colleague I was preaching on Spinoza. He laughed and said, “Lucky you.”
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632. His parents were Portuguese Jews, members of the city’s thriving Sephardic community. As a teenager Spinoza excelled in Torah study and planned to become an orthodox rabbi. But Europe was entering the Modernity. New philosophies deployed science and reason to challenge ancient religious orthodoxies and ancient arrangements of power. The European Enlightenment was beginning; Baruch Spinoza became one of its early champions.
His thought conflicted so much with the tenets of Orthodox Judaism that the elders of his community issued a cherem. They banished him. He was twenty-three. Many within the community and without regarded him as an atheist. He was not an atheist but he spoke about God in such a radical way—in a rational way, a mathematical way with propositions, axioms and proofs—that his community couldn’t perceive it as anything but atheism. So he left his family, his community, his city. He began using the Latin name, Benedict. For income he became a lens grinder, which many scholars believe hastened his death at age forty-four. He suffered from a lung disease, probably tuberculosis, that became greatly exacerbated as he inhaled glass dust from the lenses.
Throughout his life he continued to write. His work generated such extreme public outcry that he eventually decided to stop publishing—much of his writing, including The Ethics, was published posthumously. He received offers to teach at prestigious universities. He never accepted any a teaching position and continued grinding lenses. It is likely he decided not to teach out of fear, out of not wanting to attract too much attention.
He had no spouse and no children, but I don’t have the impression he was lonely. God was an all-pervading presence in his life. Proposition XV from Part I of “The Ethics” says: “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”1 To our ears it’s hard to imagine why mid-17th century Jews and Christians in Amsterdam would call this atheism, let alone find it controversial. It’s hard to understand what was so threatening about the proposition that “whatsoever is, is in God.” (I would think it would be more threatening to atheists than to theists!) But it was threatening. There are two terms for this kind of theology. One is monism, “the theory that there is…one fundamental reality of which all other beings are but attributes or modes”2 or expressions. “Whatsoever is, is in God.” The other term is pantheism, the theory that God and nature are completely identical.3 “Whatsoever is, is in God.” Today, many scholars point to The Ethics as the most impressive pantheistic system in western philosophy. To Spinoza, everything that exists is part of God. Any distinction we perceive between ourselves and the rest of reality is an illusion, a failure to perceive God.
Certainly today among liberal religious people, knowing what we know about the origins of the universe, about the evolution of stars, about how we are composed of the same elements that compose stars, we are often inclined to agree with the monistic proposition that there is one fundamental reality, one underlying unity, whether we call it God or not. We intuitively utter such phrases as “all are one” or “all are connected,” I often make such claims from this pulpit. When we speak of the seventh Unitarian Universalist principle, the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part, we are likely speaking in monistic and pantheistic terms.
Knowing what we know about the non-dualistic teachings of many eastern religions, we are often inclined to look eastward for spiritual affirmation of the notion that there is one fundamental reality; that, for example, as Hinduism teaches, Atman and Brahman, the individual self and the cosmic self, are one and the same. In our hymnal there is a reading from the 17th century Sikh teacher, Tegh Bahadur, which seems to express a pantheistic theology: “God lives in all, and abides with you too. As fragrance dwells in a flower…so the divine dwells inside everything.”4
There are many hymns in our hymnal that collapse the distinction between God and nature and hint at pantheism. “O God of root and shading of bows above our head, we breathe in thy long breathing, our spirit spirited. We walk beneath thy blessing, thy seasons, and thy way, O God of stars and sunlight, O God of night and day.”5
But orthodox Jews and Christians in 17th century Amsterdam weren’t monistic or pantheistic. In most orthodox theologies God the creator of the universe stands apart from creation; apart from the world; apart from nature. God is separate and above everything else. As long as God remains separate, nature is identified as the source of corruption and evil. Nature is fallen. Nature is Satanic. God remains pure, uncorrupted, good. When we obliterate the separateness as Spinoza did; when we obliterate the distinctiveness; when we equate God with Nature; then we demystify God—we bring God down to earth—we reduce God to natural processes, to physical and chemical dynamics. And then for some, God just seems to disappear. What use is God if we can explain all reality through reason and science? Why have God at all?
Hence the threat Spinoza’s views posed to established religious traditions; hence the charge of atheism. But he wasn’t an atheist. He believed it was possible to know and to understand God. In fact, as we heard earlier, Proposition XXVIII from Part IV of The Ethics, states, “The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind's highest virtue is to know God.”6 This starts to answer the question, “Why bother doing good?” “The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God…[its] highest virtue is to know God.”
So, how does one attain the highest good? How does one know God? Spinoza offers three sources of such knowledge. Emotion is the first, and the most unreliable. Emotions arise out of our experience of desire and pain. They drive much of our behavior. The emotions produce what he called ‘inadequate ideas.’ When we act in response to emotions, we assume we are doing what is best for ourselves, but all we are doing is reacting; we aren’t aware of the reasons why we react the way we do. We aren’t aware of our place in the larger reality. We aren’t aware of ourselves as an expression of the essence of God. This is a condition of bondage. For example, Spinoza was critical of organized religion because he saw clergy manipulating the emotions of hope and fear to keep people mired in beliefs and practices that were little more than superstition.
Today we appraise emotions differently. We value emotional intelligence. We understand the positive role emotions play in the spiritual life. I don’t want us to get stuck on Spinoza’s negative view of emotions. What he is really saying is that when the conduct of our lives is driven or determined by our emotional responses to forces external to us, then we are not free. We are externally-determined as opposed to self-determined. If we are not self-determining we cannot act morally, nor can we know God. Thus, the second source of knowledge, that which produces ‘adequate ideas,’ that which can liberate us from the bondage of the emotions, the bondage of the external, is reason. For Spinoza reason is the path to truth. Reason is the path to knowing and understanding God. The Ethics, Part IV, Proposition XXVI, which we heard earlier: “Whatsoever we endeavour in obedience to reason is nothing further than to understand; neither does the mind, in so far as it makes use of reason, judge anything to be useful to it, save such things as are conducive to understanding.”7 Reason leads to understanding. One of Spinoza’s most famous quotes is “Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.” Through understanding, we become aware of our place in the larger reality; we become aware of ourselves as an expression of the essence of God. When we act out of this awareness, rather than acting emotionally in response to external forces, we become self-determining and we are able to act morally.
The third kind of knowledge is intuition, the immediate apprehension of God without reason. Spinoza doesn’t really define this. It wasn’t the focus of The Ethics. The focus was on explaining the role of reason in comprehending God.
So why bother doing good where, for Benedict de Spinoza, doing good means seeking to know God through the exercise of reason? Because doing good liberates us from inadequate ideas and helps us overcome our bondage to external forces. It aligns our actions with God. It frees us. I like this summation from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Spinoza's ‘free person’”—the person who uses reason to know God—“is one who…does only those things that he believes to be ‘the most important in life,’ takes care for the well-being of others…and is not anxious about death. The free person neither hopes for any eternal, otherworldly rewards nor fears any eternal punishments. He knows that the soul is not immortal in any personal sense, but is endowed only with a certain kind of eternity. The more the mind consists of true and adequate ideas (which are eternal), the more of it remains…after the death of the body….This understanding of his place in the natural scheme of things brings to the free individual true peace of mind.”8
These are good answers to the question, “Why bother doing good?” But ever since Josh raised it, I’ve been wondering if Spinoza’s answers would feel sufficient. I’m not sure they do. His theology is so complicated, so heady, so difficult to explain. While I’m attracted to it for its innovation and its elegance, I’m not moved to approach spirituality the way Spinoza approached it. I’m not convinced we can reason our way to God. Certainly human goodness cannot depend solely on our capacity for such reasoning. Maybe I don’t make a good pantheist.
So why bother doing good? I think in the end those of us who are skeptics, questioners, non-doctrinal, mystics—we will never be fully satisfied with any answer to this question. But the lack of a truly convincing answer doesn’t absolve us from doing good. At least for now, I’ve decided that I don’t need to be convinced. I have faith that doing good matters. I can’t tell you why. I just have faith that it matters. That faith is influenced by Unitarian Universalist principles, by my parents’ and grandparents’ teachings, by the Jewish and Christian wisdom that calls us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. My faith is influenced now by The Ethics of Benedict de Spinoza. But none of these influences will ever fully answer the question, “Why bother doing good?” I will continue to seek answers, but in their absence I will have faith. And that is my prayer for us this morning: that we each may have faith that we ought to do good. And then, to the best of our abilities, let us do good. Because it matters. Amen and Blessed Be.
1 Spinoza, Benedict, The Ethics, Part I “Concerning God,” Proposition XV. See: http://www.yesselman.com/e1elwes.htm#XV.
2 Harvey, Vann, A Handbook of Theological Terms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992) p. 154.
3 Ibid., 173.
4 Bahadur, Tegh, “Why do you go to the forest in search of the divine?” in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the UUA, 1993) # 599.
5 Holmes, John, “O God of Stars and Sunlight” in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the UUA, 1993) # 11.
6 Spinoza, Benedict, The Ethics, Part IV, of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions, Proposition XXVIII. See: http://www.yesselman.com/e4elwes.htm.
7 Spinoza, Benedict, The Ethics, Part IV, of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions, Proposition XXVI. See: http://www.yesselman.com/e4elwes.htm.
8 See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/.
