SOURCE: “Spinoza's Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 343-82.

In the essay that follows, Donagan explores Spinoza's fusion of naturalism and supernaturalism in his theology, and discusses his views on particular issues such as revelation, faith, and the immortality of the soul.

Spinoza's theology, although original, owes much to the cultural soil that nourished it. His parents were among the many “Marranos”—Portuguese Jews who in their native country had been compelled outwardly to embrace Roman Catholicism—who had emigrated to Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century. In the freedom of their new country, the immigrant Marrano community set out to recover its full religious heritage, and to shed beliefs and practices contrary to it. However, some of its members, of whom Spinoza was one, not only remained attached to non-Jewish elements in their Marrano culture, but, having embraced the revolution in the...