The New Gospel

Spinoza was to offer something new under the seventeenth century’s European skies: a religion of reason.  His religion asks us to do something that is far more difficult for us than the most severe practices of asceticism.  It asks us to be reasonable.  It asks us to look at ourselves with unblinking objectivity.  It asks us to subdue our natural inclinations toward self-aggrandizement, our attempts to shore up our dreadful fragility by fictions of a God who favors us because we were born—thank God!—into the right group, or have gone through the nuisance of converting to it.  And it asks us, as well, to face squarely the terror of our own mortality [fear of death].