Spinoza, Atheist?

12 August, 2026 Review of Spinoza, Atheist by Steven Nadler (Princeton University Press, 2026). As its title suggests, Steven Nadler’s new book argues that Spinoza is an atheist. The atheism that Nadler attributes to Spinoza encompasses a metaphysical and a psychological component. First, Spinoza denies that the first cause of the universe a moral, providential, intelligent, or free agent. Second, this being is not one “before whom (or which) it is appropriate to adopt an attitude of reverence, worshipful awe, or some other religious mindset appropriate to a divinity” (p. 151; page numbers refer to Spinoza, Atheist). But as Nadler asks, “if Spinoza is promoting an atheism in the Ethics, why is God so omnipresent in the work?” (p. 175). His response appears to be that this language is supposed to be an argumentative or rhetorical tool. Given that his intended readership would have been perhaps unorthodox but still meaningfully theistic and likely Christian, Spinoza would have been compelled to find common ground with them, and thus had “no choice” but to use traditional theological language. But in strict philosophical truth, Nadler’s Spinoza thinks, we can see from those heights that “all there is is Nature and what follows from its universal principles” (p. 177), an entirely naturalized first cause. Nadler observes that, in several passages in part IV of Ethics, Spinoza uses the turn of phrase “Deus seu/sive natura” rather than, as before, “God.” (Spinoza’s use of sive or seu usually indicates identity: If you see “x sive/seu y,” that means “x, or in other words, y.”) Nadler’s argument next strips away from Spinoza’s God traditional divine attributes. Spinoza’s God has neither indifferent free will (as voluntarists like Descartes would maintain), nor the uncompelled choice of what appears good to his intellect (as intellectualists like Leibniz would maintain), but is only a free cause of the cosmos insofar as nothing external compels him to produce the world: “all things … have necessarily flowed, or always follow [from God’s nature], by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows … that its three angles are equal to two right angles” (E Ip17s1). Spinoza explicitly holds, in fact, that “God does not produce any effect by freedom of the will” (E Ip32c). Nor did God produce the world in a way ordered towards any good, for “Nature has no end set before it, and … all final causes are nothing but human fictions” (E I app), and “[a]s [God] exists for the sake of no end, he also acts for the sake of no end” (E IV pref ). This belief is the purest projection, the prejudice that “all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end” (E I app). According to Nadler, this argument also rules out “anything resembling … emotional states (like desire, anger, and jealousy).” Finally, while Spinoza thinks that God is perfect (he equates perfection, reality, and a thing’s essential causal power in the preface to part IV of Ethics), according to Nadler this perfection lacks any moral features whatsoever. God is thus perfect, but “not in any ethical or normative sense.” He isn’t good, or Good, or the Good, he “just is, period” (p. 129). This is not quite true. Ethics rejects ordinary conceptions of good and evil, but then offers a revisionary definition of “good” as whatever “we know certainly is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the model of human nature that we set before ourselves” (E IV pref ), and “what we certainly know to be useful to us” (E IVd1). The “greatest good” of this kind is knowledge of God (E IVp28). The Theological-Political Treatise says much the same. A “good” is “a means to our blessedness” (TTP IV 20), and “man’s highest happiness and blessedness,” “the highest” and “greatest good,” is the knowledge and love of God. To follow the “divine law” is to devote oneself to the love of God simply from knowledge and love of God rather than fear or promise of reward, and “the knowledge and love of God is the highest good” (TTP IV 14). (Nadler’s characterizations of the “clear and distinct content” of the divine law as involving primarily interpersonal love and justice [p. 83, 96, 100] do not really address this passage, as far as I can tell.) In immediately the next sentence, Spinoza says that “the main point of the divine law, and its highest precept, is to love God as the highest good [emphasis mine] … For the idea of God dictates that God is our supreme good, or that the knowledge and love of God is the ultimate end toward which all our actions ought to be directed” (TTP IV 14). He later reaffirms that he has “explicitly said” that “God must be recognized as the highest good” in a letter to Jacob Ostens (ep. 43). (Nadler discusses this passage [p. 51ff.], but I do not see that he takes note of this endorsement.) This language does not show up in Ethics as far as I can tell. Indeed, it’s not clear how the talk of ends wholesale is compatible with what Spinoza says there about teleology and goal-talk. But Spinoza seems to mean the same thing by “good” in both works, so we should, all else being equal, expect closely related views to be the same as well. This casts some doubt on Nadler’s claim that Spinoza’s God or Nature lacks any normative or ethical characteristics. This notion of “good” is relative to human benefit, but that’s not enough to make facts about the good mind-dependent, or only the result of projection onto nature. Nadler next turns to Spinoza’s view that everything is “in” God. One prominent interpretation of this view, developed by Edwin Curley (1969), says that “all things are in God” just means that God is the cause of the universe. Another, developed by scholars such as John Carriero (1995) and Yitzhak Melamed (2013), holds that when Spinoza claims that “all things are in God,” he means that we are a way in which God exists, and thus inhere in God the way a wave inheres in the ocean or a shape inheres in a table. Nadler (correctly) favours the second interpretation. He takes it even further, holding that that in speaking of “God or Nature,” Spinoza claims a “literal and numerical” identity between God and Nature (p. 139). When Spinoza talks about “God or Nature,” then, he means to refer to both Natura naturans and Natura naturata (terms defined at Ethics Ip29s as nature qua purely causal agent and qua production of that causal agent, respectively) at once. Why? Because “the properties or states of a thing are the thing, existing in a particular manner. One of God’s attributes is the nature or essence of matter (Extension), and so God is every particular material thing and state of a material thing that expresses or instantiates that nature; another of God’s attributes is the nature or essence of thinking (Thought), and so God is every individual ‘idea’ or mind that expresses or instantiates that nature, along with all of the particular ideas had by these” (p. 143). This interpretation has serious problems. Terms denoting numerically identical things may be substituted for one another in referentially limpid contexts (e.g. substituting “Superman” for “Clark Kent” in the sentence “Clark Kent grew up in Smallville”) without changing the truth-value of a sentence. So if Nadler is right in the claimed identity, we should be able to substitute the terms “God,” “Nature,” “Natura naturata,” and “Natura naturans” for each other salva veritate. In particular, since for Nadler’s Spinoza “God is every particular material thing and state of a material thing that expresses or instantiates” the nature of Extension (p. 143)—occupying three-dimensional space—he ought to hold that we can replace the term “The Eiffel Tower” with “God” in the sentence “The Eiffel Tower has parts of different sizes,” no problem. This leads to contradictions. According to Spinoza, “[a] substance which is absolutely infinite”—God—“is indivisible” (Ip13). So if Nadler’s reading is correct, Spinoza should be committed to both “God is indivisible” and “God has parts of different sizes.” Big news, if true. But maybe this is uncharitable. The statement that God is identical to Natura naturata may, per Nadler, just mean that God, insofar as he is affected in this or that way, is identical to Natura naturata. So really the sentence we get is “God, insofar as he is affected to be existing as the Eiffel Tower, has parts of different sizes.” This response is not without textual basis, since Spinoza does often speak this way. The Latin word Spinoza uses for this “insofar as” concept is “quatenus,” so we might dub this response the quatenus gambit. It is so common in Spinoza’s philosophy that a substantial scholarly literature exists which attempts to make ever so fine distinctions which allow Spinoza to wiggle out of any possible contradiction. So on this response, God is in one respect divisible, but in another respect is indivisible. We might flesh out the quatenus gambit somewhat by extending an idea first developed by Michael Della Rocca (1996). The identity claim “God or Nature” uses Spinoza’s special “or” of identity, so we can treat any such identity claims as referentially opaque. Thus, we cannot automatically intersubstitute coreferential terms and get back true sentences. Here’s another potential strategy, suggested by Locke’s account of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Treat this kind of identity as relative to a sortal. Instead of “x sive y” meaning “x is identical to y,” it should mean “x is the same F as y,” for some sortal F such as “mode” or “mind.” Neither move works, however. Nadler’s claim is that God is numerically identical to the whole of Nature. And when unprefixed by some suitable intensional operator or verb of cognition, a claim of numerical identity is generally neither referentially opaque nor sortal. So numerical identity cannot be recovered by the quatenus gambit. For either version to work, Nadler must either reject the claim that God is numerically identical to Nature or satisfactorily explain why Spinoza is committed to a claim he appears explicitly to deny, that God has parts (as exegetes such as Florian Vermeiren [2026] do). But the former response would seriously harm his argument, and he explicitly rejects the latter route (p. 227). But leave these criticisms aside, since they don’t touch what Nadler takes as his main point. Both pantheist and panentheist agree with the atheist on ontology, since “[b]oth [atheists and pantheists] are committed to a naturalistic and reductive ontology: There is only Nature. There is no supernatural anything, neither outside of Nature nor within it” (p. 154), and panentheism “may … be ontologically indistinguishable from atheism: God is Nature (broadly construed to include what is beyond our everyday experience), and Nature is all there is” (p. 165). What primarily matters, on Nadler’s account, are the psychological attitudes towards God or Nature each view recommends. Nadler holds that “Spinoza is not a pantheist—not because he does not identify God with ordinary nature, but because pantheism is still a ‘theism.’ It divinizes nature. This is not Spinoza’s project” (p. 159). Panentheism, too, “commit[s] to a divinizing of nature” (p. 169), which involves identifying God or Nature with a proper object of certain distinctively religious attitudes, as “sacred, holy, or worthy of reverence or awe” (p. 172) as well as ”[w]orship, wonder … devotion … adoration, [or] any other kind of nonrational attitude or appreciation” (p. 155). Spinoza’s love of God is entirely unlike like religious love of God, according to Nadler. On his reading, love of God in this sense is “the emotionally imbued (actively joyful) intellectually perfected condition represented by the third kind of knowledge, in which we apprehend adequately how the essences of things relate to the essences or attributes of God or Nature. To love God is, in philosophical truth, nothing but to understand Nature and how all things follow essentially and necessarily from it” (p. 183). This first part is more-or-less true. For Spinoza love is “a Joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause” (Def Aff IV), and joy is “a man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection” (Def Aff II ), from having less reality to having more. To love God, in this sense, is to gain that reality while representing God as the cause of this change. It is entirely free of any passionate inadequacy, and thus, according to Nadler, of all religious attitudes. There is another, more mysterious love in Spinoza’s system, the “intellectual love of God.” This is “Love of God, not insofar as we imagine him as present, but insofar as we understand God to be eternal” (E Vp32). Spinoza is using a technical notion of “eternity,” that of “existence itself, insofar as it conceived to follow necessarily from the definition of the eternal thing alone” (E Id8). The intellectual love of God is thus an increase in our reality (and thus causal and affective self-sufficiency) which represents God qua necessarily existing thing as its cause. In the strict sense, Nadler points out (correctly), Spinoza’s God does not love anyone, since “God can pass neither to a greater nor a lesser perfection” (E Vp17dem ). Joy, and thus love, are out the window, since each involve going from less to more perfect. Thus, this cannot be the God of the Abrahamic religions. Instead, God or Nature’s “love for men” is just his intellectual love for himself (E Vp36c). In this picture, “[t]here is nothing here that requires seeing God as any kind of anthropomorphic agent or attributing to God any personal emotional states or moral characteristics” (p. 197). Since this love is not the kind involved in religious worship, the fact that we love God and (in a qualified sense) God loves us back has no religious import. With both the metaphysical and psychological aspects of theistic views driven from Spinoza’s account of God and our relationship to him, Nadler’s argument is complete. Spinoza is an atheist. What are we to make of this? Throughout this book, Nadler contrasts Spinoza’s God or Nature with the God conceived of by 17th century thinkers like (as we mentioned earlier) Descartes and Leibniz. Two other notable points of comparison are Blaise Pascal and Pierre Bayle. Other, lesser but still relatively orthodox religious figures come in for comparison, as do the deists, who construe God as a supreme architect who creates and perhaps sustains the universe but never intervenes in its course. And ever-present is the God of day-to-day religious practice and worship. Almost entirely absent, however, is the God described in the long Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions of philosophical theology. Indeed, literally none of the historical sources in the book’s bibliography predate Pierre Charron’s Les trois veritez, from 1620. When Nadler speaks of the “god of the philosophers,” it is usually only to say things like “[this God] may have brought the world into being and continue[s] to sustain it in existence from moment to moment, but he does not get involved in its moral or salvific affairs” (p. 32). Contemporaneous Aristotelians and Scholastics are mentioned as targets of the TTP and Ethics (p. 87–88), but none by name, and their systems and doctrines go essentially undiscussed. We might reasonably and charitably take Nadler to imply that belief in such a God is not meaningfully distinct from atheism, since “[a] God who merely creates is, for Pascal”—and it seems that Nadler concurs—“no God at all” (p. 32), and certainly not a God towards which we can or should take any religious attitude. Now, it’s one thing to say that the God of the philosophers does not automatically get all the features of the God of Abrahamic religion. This is plainly true. But it’s quite another thing to say that the God of Abrahamic philosophical theologies lacks the features which, according to Nadler’s Spinoza, any God worth worshipping must have. This needs argument. As far as I can tell, though, Nadler does not engage these traditions in any substance. His Spinoza’s target is largely the anthropomorphic God of the masses, and fair enough; Spinoza does have this God in his sights. But so do important figures in each of the great traditions of Abrahamic philosophical theology. For example, after spending the first twenty-five chapters of his Guide of the Perplexed arguing that bodily terms used of God throughout the Hebrew Bible are wholly equivocal, the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides says, outright, that there is “absolutely no likeness in any respect whatever” between God and creatures, not even with respect to their existence (Guide for the Perplexed I 35). Similar things are true of the medieval Islamic tradition. For example, Ibn Rushd (in the Latin West, Averroes) argues at length in The Incoherence of the Incoherence that the terms “will” and “intellect” apply only equivocally to both to human beings and to God. The human will cannot be the same kind of thing as the divine “will,” since the human will involves causal passivity; and the human intellect cannot be the same kind of thing as the divine “intellect,” since human knowledge always must conform to its object, rather than the other way around, which is how God’s “intellect” works. (Perhaps suggestively, Spinoza offers a very similar argument for the same position at Ethics Ip17s.) These views don’t necessarily yield unproblematic conceptions of the Abrahamic deity, nor are they the uniform view on divine predication in either tradition. But both Maimonides and Ibn Rushd seem bent on offering a vision of God which, though radically non-anthropomorphic, is suitable for religious devotion and worship. So too was Thomas Aquinas, though less strictly. On his view, any time we truly affirm propositions like “God is wise,” we “signify [God] through the mode in which our intellect receives him when it has been informed by created things” (Commentary on the Sentences I.4.1.1 ad 2) rather than getting at what he really is. We may thus affirm predicates like “wise” of God analogically, by (roughly) taking the “divine names” and stripping them of anything distinctively creaturely. Our goodness, knowledge and intellect, will, emotional life, personhood (Summa theologiae [henceforward ST] I q6 a2–3, q14 a1 ad 1, q19 a1 ad 3, q20 a1 ad 1, q39 a3) and indeed all our features are greatly dissimilar from God’s (usually because we are causally passive and God is, in Scholastic terminology, “pure act”), as “God is more distant from creatures than any creatures are from each other” (ST I q13 a5 praet). So for Aquinas, God is a moral agent with intentions, plans, love, and so forth, but in a radically different sense than we are. But he also thinks that his non-anthropomorphic God can be the proper object of human religious attitudes—most importantly, for our purposes, love. For him, this is the change in a subject’s appetite produced by some object towards which that appetite is then directed. (“Appetite” here has a technical meaning, that of a change undergone by a subject directed towards some object.) Inanimate objects have “natural” appetites directly from God—stones, for example, have an appetite supplied by the deity which moves them to the center of the universe. Irrational animals have “sensitive” appetites, which arise necessarily when they recognize in themselves a natural appetite. Finally, rational animals have “rational” or “intellectual” appetites, and Aquinas ends up identifying these rational or intellectual appetites, or maybe appetitive faculties, with the will (ST I-II q26 a1 resp). While each kind of appetite has a corresponding kind of love, the love properly classed as an emotion, in Aquinas’ sense, is sensitive love. Emotions are passions: occurrent mental states with cognitive content which we experience qua causal patients; they necessarily involve the actualization of a passive, bodily capacity (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate q26 a3-4). Aquinas discusses another kind of love, however, which he calls a rational or intellectual love (ST I-II q21 a6 resp). This love is not an emotion (since those are psychophysical events) and thus not “ordinary” love. In medieval jargon, ordinary love, love “properly so called,” is called “concupiscible love.” This is a fancy term for (roughly) loving something for some reason or purpose or function external to it, because, for example, of some beneficial purpose it serves to us or to others. By contrast, this intellectual or “friendly love” (ST I-II q26 a4) occurs when we will the good of something for its own sake rather than any instrumental purpose. Its object is loved, not insofar as it benefits the loving subject, but insofar as the subject wills that object’s good. Now, why on earth do we care about Aquinas’ account of the emotions? Well: Charity, the theological virtue consisting of the “friendship of man for God” (ST II-II q23 a1 resp), is precisely this latter kind of intellectual love. While he thinks that even lay religious rituals are parts of human life necessary for salvation, the purpose and function of those practices is to direct us “to the spiritual acts by means of which [we] are united to God” (ST I-II q81 a7 resp). The “exercises” of religious orders aim at removing all obstacles to perfect and fullest friendship with God (ST II-II q186 a1 ad4). In fact, the perfection of charity is the entire goal of the this “religious state” (ST II-II q186 a2 resp). All aspects of religious life are, for Aquinas, directed towards producing this charity the friendship of man with God. We might say, in more loaded but not inaccurate language, this intellectual love of God. Recall the two prongs of Nadler’s argument. First, God or Nature is too non-anthropomorphic, too non-divine, to be anything like the normative-load-bearing Lord God Almighty of the Abrahamic faiths. Second, God or Nature is not the sort of being towards which we can or should take the attitudes constitutive of religious life and ceremony. Indeed, Spinoza repudiates explicitly affects he terms “repentance” or “wonder,” since these are passions and inadequate ideas and thus cannot bring us to or constitute blessedness and salvation. I can now state my primary objection to Nadler’s argument. The God which he claims as Spinoza’s, one stripped bare of all projections of the human onto the divine, is quite like the God discussed in the sophisticated philosophical theology of the Abrahamic faiths in precisely those respects. The senses in which God wills, thinks, knows, loves, and so on are either not like ours at all or bear only some analogy to them. And, according to Aquinas anyway, the mental attitude we should take towards God, the one whose perfection is the entire point of religious life, is quite unlike ordinary, “passionate” love, hate, joy, and so forth. For both Spinoza and Aquinas, God is also an action-guiding “highest good.” (Though it’s not clear how Spinoza can consistently endorse this latter.) This extends to beatitude. Spinoza, as we’ve seen, thinks that knowledge and thus love of God is our highest good, salvation, and blessedness. Aquinas claims something very similar. According to him, beatitude (he uses the exact same Latin word as Spinoza, beatitudo) is an intellect’s knowledge of the “very essence of the first cause,” or “union with God just as with an object [of knowledge]” (ST I-II q3 a8 resp). Spinoza would of course reject the Aristotelian framing of this account, along with its distinction between will and intellect, but not obviously its general contours. Thus, if Spinoza is an atheist, so are, or may be, the Abrahamic philosophical theologians before him. I don’t think Nadler’s argument gives a very good reason to accept that inference. Spinoza’s God or Nature is certainly quite unlike the God worshipped by the woman on the street or praised in homilies. But so what? Why should that God and those attitudes be taken as more authoritative a portrait of that religion than those articulated by its hierophants? If Nadler wants to argue that the God of those philosophers is not really divine, fair enough! But I can’t find any such argument in this book. I did, however, say “may.” Despite the apparent similarities between Spinoza and Aquinas, there are extremely important differences. Spinoza denies that God acts from freedom of the will, that God providentially orders the universe for his own ends or the good of humanity, that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are divinely inspired in any meaningful sense, that God essentially has either will or intellect (at least in the human senses), that God became incarnate in Jesus, and so on and so forth. In no conceivable sense was Spinoza an orthodox adherent of an Abrahamic faith or its Scholastic elaboration. Indeed, in the TTP Spinoza ridicules those who “extort from Scripture Aristotelian rubbish” (TTP I 19) or “speculations” (TTP pref 18). But even so, his account of God and humanity’s relation to him make substantively similar claims to those of sophisticated Abrahamic philosophical theology. Spinoza thinks that God is radically non-anthropomorphic, and lacks characteristics such as passions, will, moral agency, and personality in their human sense. But so too do Abrahamic philosophical theologians such as Maimonides, Ibn Sina, and Aquinas. Spinoza thinks that what constitutes our blessedness and salvation is a particular cognitive, agential rather than passionate “love of God.” Aquinas thinks something similar, though he attributes the intellective and volitional aspects which Spinoza thinks are identical to distinct faculties, and thus divides the mental attitude Spinoza unifies. Spinoza has a peculiar notion of good as benefit embedded in his claims that God is the highest good—but is this therefore not ethical, normative, or theistic, the way the same claim is in Aquinas’ system, baroque and at times turbid though it is? Why? There are further differences. But given the convergence of their general views, it cannot be the general tenor of Spinoza’s views that make him an atheist, unless Aquinas is an atheist as well. It must be the details. It is not clear that these can do the job, and Nadler has not given good reason to believe so. Stephen Harrop is Lecturer of Philosophy at King’s College London. He specializes early modern philosophy (especially Spinoza), the history and philosophy of science, and contemporary metaphysics. References John Carriero, ‘On the Relationship between Mode and Substance in Spinoza’s Metaphysics’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 33 (1995): 254–73 E. M. Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Harvard University Press, 1969) Michael Della Rocca, Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza (Oxford University Press, 1996) Yitzhak Melamed, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013) Florian Vermeiren, ‘Spinoza’s God has Parts: The Mereological Reading of the Substance-Mode Relation’, Journal of Modern Philosophy, 8 (2026)