A man can be deeply religious without engaging in any immutable religious dogma since religion and morals consist solely of the fact that man is guided by the highest truth accessible to him, and in the evolutionary stage in which he finds himself. In this sense, Baruch Spinoza, one of the most celebrated rationalists and philosophers of the seventeenth century within the so-called Modern Philosophy, already denied that there was a need to follow dogmas, rituals and immutable observances to guide man safely in his ascensional pilgrimage towards the encounter with God. Being a Jew of Portuguese origin, he ended up being expelled from the synagogue of Israel for diverging from Jewish ideology. Espinosa was considered by other great thinkers, “the man who had the most profound vision of God” and “an inebriated man of God.”
Evil or sin only exists because man allows himself to be overcome by inferior tendencies and habits, which do not correspond to the higher goals determined by creation, as a potential to develop and achieve self-realization. For a man to be ethically good, it is enough that he be guided by what is the most superior, objectively. So, for example, for the time of Moses, in the environment of the people of Israel, the law of “talion” (retaliation), of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was the highest form of ethics that these people could conceive, because they lived in a time when unlimited revenge was the general rule; subsequently, revenge was strictly limited to the offence (which is rarely observed today). This was a great step forward on the path of the ethical evolution of these people, although, in the light of Jesus' doctrines, revenge is regarded as something immoral.
Consequently, the same norm can be good for a certain evolutionary stage, and it can be bad for a higher one. However, this inevitable “relativism” of the norm of morality is not “arbitrary”, subordinated to the mere caprice of man; and it is also not absolute, but “relatively absolute” for each stage of human knowledge, because man is guided by what he knows at the moment, of what he can best conceive. In other words, the spiritually infantile man drinks the milk that was provided for him to feed, acts and has his morals and ethics, according to this incipient food received. However, the man trained in the University of the Spirit, digests solid food, having as a basis of behaviour, a superior view of reality.
The old philosophical adage, “what is received is in the recipient according to the recipient's capacity” illustrates this truth well. Every finite receives from the Infinite what it corresponds to the greatest or least extent of its finitude. If the finite capacity is equal to 10, the container will receive 10; if it is equal to 50, it will receive 50; if it is equal to 100, it will receive 100. Whoever goes to the ocean with a cup will fill a cup of water; whoever goes with a litre will fill a litre; whoever goes with a bucket will fill a bucket - not because of the ocean, but because of the capacity of the cup, the litre and the bucket.
Espinosa thought that the genuinely religious man should not concern himself with the salvation of his soul. Once, a Catholic lady from Amsterdam, who suffered from anxiety of conscience about her eternal salvation asked the Jewish philosopher for advice, who replied, that she should stay in the reality she was in and that she should not worry about the fate of her soul after physical death, but to put all her efforts into aligning her human will with the will of God because the rest would come by itself and could not help being good.
Albert Einstein, this universal visionary, scientist and mystic, considered Espinosa as the philosopher who most influenced his philosophy of life. Spinoza equated God (infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity. In 1929, Einstein was asked by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein if he believed in God. Einstein replied: “I believe in Espinosa's God who reveals itself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who cares about the destinies and actions of human beings.” Among others, Espinosa's thinking influenced the life and work of Goethe and Argentine writer Jorge Luís Borges, the concepts of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson inspired the English thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as the poets William Wordsworth and Shelley.
The monument erected in honour of Spinoza in The Hague had the following commentary by Joseph Ernest Renan, a French philosopher, theologian, philologist and historian, in 1882: “Curse on the passer-by who insults this soft thoughtful head. It will be punished as all ordinary souls are punished - for its vulgarity and for its inability to conceive what is divine. This man, from his granite pedestal, will point out to everyone the path of bliss found by him; and for all times the learned man who will pass by here will say in his heart: He was the one who had the deepest vision of God.”
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