A Book Forged in Hell Quotes

“Religion as we know it, Spinoza argues in the work’s preface, is nothing more than organized superstition. Power-hungry ecclesiastics prey on the naïveté of citizens, taking advantage of their hopes and fears in the face of the vicissitudes of nature and the unpredictability of fortune to gain control over their beliefs and their daily lives. The preface of the Treatise both makes clear Spinoza’s contempt for sectarian religions and opens the way for his reductive and naturalistic explanations of central doctrinal and historical elements of the Judeo-Christian traditions.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“The state can pursue no safer course than to regard piety and religion as consisting solely in the exercise of charity and just dealing, and that the right of the sovereign, both in religious and secular spheres, should be restricted to men’s actions, with everyone being allowed to think what he will and to say what he thinks.”34 This sentence, a wonderful statement of the principle of toleration, is perhaps the real lesson of the Treatise, and should be that for which Spinoza is remembered.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Spinoza insists—in yet another audacious statement that must have incited the rage of his critics—that any book can be called divine, as long as its message is the proper one and it is effective in conveying it. “Books that teach and tell of the highest things are equally sacred, in whatever language and by whatever nation they were written.”93 Thus, it is still true, in a sense, that God is “the author of the Bible—not because God willed to confer on men a set number of books, but because of the true religion that is taught therein.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“what Spinoza offers is a contextual reading, one that looks at Scripture for what it is: a very human document composed at a particular time for very human purposes.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Spinoza took the historical study of Scripture, and especially the question of its mundane authorship, much further than earlier thinkers. More than anyone else, Spinoza, with his willingness to go wherever the textual and historical evidence led, regardless of religious ramifications, ushered in modern biblical source scholarship.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“they imagine God’s power to be like the rule of some royal potentate, and Nature’s power to be a kind of force and energy. Therefore unusual works of Nature are termed miracles, or works of God, by the common people; and partly from piety, partly for the sake of opposing those who cultivate the natural sciences, they prefer to remain in ignorance of natural causes, and are eager to hear only of what is least comprehensible to them and consequently evokes their greatest wonder.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Indeed, any effort on the sovereign’s part to rule over the beliefs and opinions of citizens can only backfire, as it will ultimately serve to undermine the sovereign’s own authority.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Classical liberals, such as John Locke, propose that government is there primarily to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. The state’s role, according to this variety of liberalism, is to provide for peace and security, the basic minimal conditions that will allow individuals freely to live the lives they choose and pursue what they deem to be of worth, but not to impose on them any substantive values or compel them to follow any particular conception of the good life.47 For classical liberalism, the state is to remain neutral when it comes to competing views of how people should live, and must limit itself to making it possible for them to live how they want.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“For Spinoza, by contrast, fear, dread, and awe of God result only from conceiving God inadequately, through the ideas of the imagination, which lend support to an anthropomorphic notion of God. Since Spinoza’s God is no judge and does not possess the personal psychological life or moral characteristics with which traditional religious conceptions endow him, he is not properly an object of fear or other passions. In fact, Spinoza’s intellectual love of God is the key to dispelling fear and hope, not generating them. Such love is certainly not the kind of religious feeling, mixed with awe, encouraged by traditional religious faiths.25 It involves not passivity but activity and an appreciation of one’s own powers and their cause. It is, in Spinoza’s view, the proper accompaniment of virtue.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“By “Scripture alone” (sola Scriptura), Spinoza certainly means to exclude both the Maimonidean-rationalist recourse to an external philosophical canon and Calvin’s appeal to special divine illumination (the Holy Spirit). On the other hand, he also wants to avoid the individualistic, highly subjective approach to the reading of Scripture favored by certain dissident Reformed sects.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“By “Scripture alone” (sola Scriptura), Spinoza certainly means to exclude both the Maimonidean-rationalist recourse to an external philosophical canon and Calvin’s appeal to special divine illumination (the Holy Spirit).”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“The moral doctrine is the clear and universal message of the Bible, at least for those who know how to read it properly. But the question is, what is the proper way to read it?”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Waving the Bible was (and still is) a powerful means of persuading the masses, not to mention the ruling elites, that the way of the predikanten—sectarian, intolerant, and (in terms of Dutch politics) conservative as it is—is God’s way.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Troubled by the expansion of ecclesiastic power in the Dutch Republic, and especially the meddling of Calvinist preachers in public affairs and in the lives of private citizens, Spinoza recognized that one of their most effective tools for justifying their usurpations was the Bible.11”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“When a person achieves a high level of understanding of Nature and realizes that he cannot control what it brings his way or takes from him, he becomes less anxious over things, less governed by the affects of hope and fear over what may or may not come to pass. No longer obsessed with or despondent over the loss of his possessions, he is less likely to be overwhelmed with emotions at their arrival and passing away. Such a person will regard all things with an even temper and will not be inordinately and irrationally affected in different ways by past, present, or future events. His life will be tranquil and not given to sudden disturbances of the passions. The result is self-control and a calmness of mind.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Indeed, as Hobbes sees it, the credulity of the masses is extremely useful for political authorities, who prefer to see their subjects occupied by religious obligations. This keeps them distracted from political affairs and unable to engage in too close an examination of the governance of the state.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“What Spinoza wants to see is a politics of hope (for eternal reward) and fear (of eternal punishment) replaced by a politics of reason, virtue, freedom, and moral behavior”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“I know that the masses [vulgus] can no more be freed from their superstitions than from their fears. . . . I know that they are unchanging in their obstinacy, that they are not guided by reason, and that their praise and blame is at the mercy of impulse. Therefore I do not invite the common people to read this work, nor all those who are victims of the same emotional attitudes. Indeed, I would prefer that they disregard this book completely rather than make themselves a nuisance by misinterpreting it after their wont.12”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“The end of philosophy is truth and knowledge, the end of religion is pious behavior, or “obedience.” Reason, therefore, must not be the handmaiden of theology, or vice versa, and religion oversteps its bounds when it tries to limit intellectual inquiry and the free expression of ideas.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Since all individuals, in the quest for survival and flourishing, are striving to maintain and even augment their own power, there will naturally be conflict, particularly when this striving is governed by the passions and directed at external goods coveted by others. People will experience envy, jealousy, love, hate, hope, and fear as they compete for the things they value. The virtuous person who is governed by reason, however, will not only see that these transitory goods contribute nothing to real happiness but will also recognize that his own well-being is best fostered when he is surrounded by other virtuous people who are living according to reason—that is, other people who know what the true goods are and pursue them, and who therefore are flourishing.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“The core of true religion, for Spinoza, is obedience not to man-made ceremonial laws but to divine law. While human law is meant to prescribe what one should do to “safeguard life and the commonwealth,” protect oneself and one’s property from others, and ensure the well-being of the state, divine law prescribes what one should do to obtain the “supreme good,” that is, what is most to one’s advantage not as a physical, social, or political being but as a rational and moral being. And what that law commands is, at least on the face of it, quite simple: to know and love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Thus the historical origins of the regulations and ritual observances of Judaism. The ceremonial laws of Moses, Spinoza concludes, “contribute nothing to blessedness” but have to do only with the political and economic well-being of the ancient Israelite commonwealth.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Moreover, Moses realized that a society whose members obey the law willingly, out of piety and devotion rather than out of fear, is a more stable and powerful one. Thus, he persuaded the people that the laws he was laying down were in fact from God and that the state itself had divine sanction. He identified the laws of the Hebrew commonwealth as God’s commandments and thereby created a state religion. To obey the state was to obey God, and even the most ordinary action became infused with religious significance.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“There are religions, and then there is religion. There are organized religions, essentially sectarian cults united by dogma, bound by specific rites and ceremonies, and governed by authoritative hierarchies. And then there is true piety, the simple love of God and of one’s fellow human beings.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Indeed, Spinoza’s view is that were all human beings rational, virtuous, and free, there would be no need for the state.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“True religion, then—as opposed to sectarian religion—is about nothing more than moral behavior. It is not what you believe but what you do that matters.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“For this reason, Spinoza insists—in yet another audacious statement that must have incited the rage of his critics—that any book can be called divine, as long as its message is the proper one and it is effective in conveying it. “Books that teach and tell of the highest things are equally sacred, in whatever language and by whatever nation they were written.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“There is one group, however, for which the Treatise was definitely not intended: the masses. Or, at least, so Spinoza says.

"I know that the masses [vulgus] can no more be freed from their superstitions than from their fears. . . . I know that they are unchanging in their obstinacy, that they are not guided by reason, and that their praise and blame is at the mercy of impulse. Therefore I do not invite the common people to read this work, nor all those who are victims of the same emotional attitudes. Indeed, I would prefer that they disregard this book completely rather than make themselves a nuisance by misinterpreting it after their wont.”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“In Spinoza’s philosophy, in other words, God is not the providential, awe-inspiring deity of Abraham. Rather, God just is the fundamental, eternal, infinite substance of reality and the first cause of all things. Everything else that is belongs to (or is a “mode” of) Nature.²¹”
― Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

“Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state. He also insisted that “divine providence” is nothing but the laws of nature, that miracles (understood as violations of the natural order of things) are impossible and belief in them is only an expression of our ignorance of the true causes of phenomena, and that the prophets of the Old Testament were simply ordinary individuals who, while ethically superior, happened also to have particularly vivid imaginations. The book’s political chapters present as eloquent a plea for toleration (especially “the freedom to philosophize” without interference from the authorities) and democracy as has ever been penned.”
― steven nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age