Interessante MA-thesis van Henry Owh over Spinoza's Godsbegrip

Graag wijs ik weer op een ontdekking die ik deed, zoekend naar Spinozana op internet. Terwijl ik naar Emilia Giancotti Boscherini's Lexicon Spinozanum op zoek was, bood Google mij het volgende stuk aan, waarin dat werk in de bibliografie voorkwam.

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology of Emmanuel College and the Department of Theology of the Toronto School of Theology. In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Theology awarded by the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, 2000 [PDF]

Het is een werkstuk dat zich prettig laat lezen. Met de hoofdlijn kan ik instemmen, daar het een uitdrukking geeft aan een indruk die ik ook al geruime tijd geleden heb opgedaan: dat Spinoza’s Godsbegrip te begrijpen is vanuit de achtergrond van de joodse religieuze opleiding die hij kreeg en zijn verwerking van grootheden als Maimonides, op wie hij kritiek had, maar van wie hij veel overnam.
Om een idee te geven van Owh’s aanpak, neem ik hier de eerste helft van zijn slothoofdstuk over.

Conclusion

As discussed in chapter 1, Spinoza has been viewed with hostility by his contemporaries, with hostility by numerous German Romantic philosophers, and with scholarly interest by many modem philosophen and thinkers. He has been called an atheist, a pantheist, a panentheist, a materialist, and a rationalist, to mention only some, by various people for over the past three hundred years for equating God with "Nature," and critiquing religious dogmas concerning revelation, prophecy, miracles and God. Yet, he still eludes our attempts to categorize him. For his views on religion and philosophy are not easy to synthesize. If we place too much emphasis on his critique of religious dogmas in the TTP, and interpret his intention of wnting the TTP as an attempt to free philosophy from religion. we cannot help but see him as a rationalist who is trying to undermine religion in favour of philosophy, and thus label him an atheist at hean. Yet if we overemphasize his expression of God as a philosophical attempt to naturalize God by discussing God within the fiamework of the physical universe and its laws, then we undermine the importance he places on identifjmg the Tetragrammaton as the only name of God, and his cal1 for a separation of religion and philosophy in matten conceming metaphysicai issues that are dealt with exclusively by religion(s), like soteriology.

One way in which we can overcome these problems of categorizing Spinoza with one pithy term is by reexamining Spinoza's views on God as expressed in the TTP and his concept of God as expressed in the Ethics. As discussed in Chapter 2, his concept of God. which is expressed in the Ethics is relatively simple. Our difficulty with his concept occurs when we try to explain what God means to him within a philosophicai Framework. The persisting conflicting interpretations among various scholars are due to this reason. Even though we can turn to people, like Descartes, who have intluenced Spinoza. Our examination of Spinoza's concept of God as strictly a philosophical exercise does not really help us grasp fully the significance of what Spinoza is asserting in the Ethics about God.

What we require in our examination of Spinoza's concept of God is a theologicophilosophical source with which Spinoza himself was familiar, like Maimonides. As discussed in Chapter 3, in spite of the fact that Spinoza is hostile towards Maimonides while critiquing the Scriptural inconsistencies in the TTP, he not only is silent when discussing meaning of the Tetragrammaton, but also reiterates some of Maimonides' comments regarding the Tetragrarnmaton and what this name implies. Even in the Ethics, we find that many of his central ideas about God are derived from his views concerning Jehova, as stated in the TTP, and that these ideas owe much to Maimonides' commentaries in his The Guide for the Perplexed.

The sirnilarity between Spinoza's and Maimonides' explication of the Tetragrammaton does not mean, however, that Spinoza's views on religion are in anyway orthodox. As discussed in the third part of chapter 3, Spinoza does not see religious language to be adequate in expressing his views on God. As he sees it, the religious form of discourse differs from a philosophical form in that the former is to be used to discuss and elaborate on metaphysical issues whiie the latter is to be used to examine everything in Nature in terms of the laws of the physical world. In a sense, what he is asserting by distinguishing the two fonns of discourse can be construed as saying that, since religion cannot make claims about the workings of Nature without subjecting them to ngorous scientific and philosophical inquiries, which base their examination on the laws of the physical universe, religion should give way to philosophy on matters pertaining to Nature.  But this is not the case. What he wants is for all religions to reformulate their dogmas according to what the Tetragrammaton conveys about God and God's immutable laws that govem Nature. For, as his seven points of universal theology attest, he does not see religion and philosophy to be a handmaid to the other. Also. he does not view thern as completely independent of each other. He considers religion and philosophy to converge on the point of the moral imperative. i.e., loving God and loving one's neighbours as oneself. This is because he postulates that the God who exists as the independent cause from which all things came and in whom all things exist has decreed through revelation and through natural law that we should love God for who God is, and love our neighbours oas ourselves since we all belong in one God.