2.6 Non-duality DURING THE LATE Renaissance
- Non-duality & Ethics
- Time: 17th century
- Era: European Renaissance: The beginning of the Renaissance overlaps with the Middle-Ages: Italian Pre-Cento (14th century) • Quattrocento (15th century) and finally, Cinquecento, a late Renaissance extending to the 16th/17th century and reaches all Europe.
- Geography: The Netherlands
- Key thinker: Spinoza
- Movement: Spinozism
- Key events: Multiple. The Renaissance itself is considered a key event in history.
78. More than two millennia later (that is 21 centuries later, exactly), Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza posited that God and nature are one and the same, and that everything that exists is a manifestation of this single substance.
79. Here, a quote from Spinoza’s Ethics to illustrate this form of renewed monism: “By ‘God’ I understand: a thing that is absolutely infinite, i.e. a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence. I say ‘absolutely infinite’ in contrast to ‘infinite in its own kind’. If something is infinite only in its own kind, there can be attributes that it doesn’t have; but if something is absolutely infinite its essence ·or nature· contains every positive way in which a thing can exist—·which means that it has all possible attributes.”–– Spinoza, Part 1, Ethics, 1677
« By ‘God’ I understand: a thing that is absolutely infinite, i.e. a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence. I say ‘absolutely infinite’ in contrast to ‘infinite in its own kind’.
If something is infinite only in its own kind, there can be attributes that it doesn’t have; but if something is absolutely infinite its essence or nature contains every positive way in which a thing can exist—which means that it has all possible attributes. »–– Spinoza, Part 1, Ethics, 1677
Stained-glass window (“vitrail”) representing 16 phases of the life of Saint Anselme in in the cathedral of Quimper (Brittany, France). Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Photography: Thesupermat
This ends subchapter 2.6 on Non-duality at the End of the Renaissance. Let’s move on to the Enlightenment era, when rationalism dominated.