Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics by Clare Carlisle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics by Clare Carlisle Hasana Sharp Clare Carlisle. Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Hardcover, $29.95. Despite its contemplative, earnest, and, at times, disarmingly conversational tone, Spinoza's Religion is a rather provocative book. The epithets thrown at Spinoza throughout the early modern period—referring to the Theological-Political Treatise as that most "pestilential book," "forged in hell" by a godless rebel and atheist—are today badges of pride. Spinoza is celebrated among scholars and in popular culture for his uncompromising iconoclasm. He is admired for his refusal, following his ban from Judaism as a young man, to align with any religious faith. Regarded as a staunch critic of religion, Spinoza is credited with paving the way for secular morality, guided by scientific and rational knowledge. With Spinoza's Religion, Carlisle urges us to understand the Ethics as a fundamentally religious text, which, at the same time, transforms our ideas of what religion is. Rather than insisting that her interpretation replace the dominant, secular one, Carlisle proposes that it be allowed to sit alongside it, as an equal. She writes, "We must acknowledge the possibility that the Ethics is positively, irresolvably ambiguous, lending itself to two equally plausible, equally coherent interpretations: either as a religious philosophy or as a secular philosophy" (11). She offers her interpretation as one of several ways to regard the "exquisitely carved crystal" that is Spinoza's Ethics—a complex, reflective surface, where each angle discloses a different aspect, leading to "numerous interconnected chambers and corridors" (35). Carlisle provides an appealing, even beautiful, picture of Spinoza's religio, a term she leaves in the Latin to defamiliarize it, setting it off from our default associations with the word 'religion.' Carlisle cites Cicero and Aquinas, who both observe that the word religio can be translated as rereading (164). Carlisle presents the Ethics as religious in form and content. As a "sculptural" piece of literature, the text ushers its readers through a spiritual practice of repeated reading, drawing our attention, again and again, to our beingin-God. In terms of content, the profound and simple message of the Ethics is that we exist in-another rather than in-ourselves. In contrast to many interpreters, Carlisle presents the satisfaction and peace we feel through knowing and loving ourselves and others as beingsin-God as a higher achievement than autonomy, or self-legislation (132). The religio of the Ethics promises a liberating conversion, but one that does not depend upon any doctrinal or ecclesial commitments. 'Religio' names a virtue, an acquired habit, that follows from a profound affective transformation (acquiescentia in se ipso). Carlisle offers a careful scholarly analysis of this elusive phenomenon but tells us that "the thing itself is very simple." It is a "feeling of being ourselves as a guide to the depth of our self-understanding, the adequacy of our metaphysics and our theology, the truth of our religion" (133). Carlisle's invitation to consider the Ethics through a religious lens as a nonrivalrous alternative to other approaches underplays her defiance of standard Spinoza interpretation. Spinoza's Religion, in fact, rejects any approach that denies the transcendence and "ontological difference" of divinity. In chapter 3, Carlisle declares that "Deleuze was an insightful reader of Spinoza . . . but on the question of immanence his influence has been pernicious" (63). In addition, she contends that the "common-sense secularist reading, eloquently articulated by Steven Nadler" likewise misunderstands transcendence in Spinoza's philosophy (63). With Deus sive Natura, according to Carlisle, Spinoza does not dissolve God into nature. Pace Deleuze and Nadler, Carlisle's Spinoza affirms "an ontological difference between creator and creation, between God and the universe" (63). Spinoza is mistakenly regarded as a pantheist, since he does not maintain that "God is everything and everything is God." On the contrary, he is a panentheist who maintains that "whatever is, is in God" (64). The "in" makes all the difference, marking the irreducibility of the distinction between substance, or God, and finite modes, or things. We must appreciate, she insists, "the asymmetry between God and the universe...