66. - Faith

Summary

In the TTP, Spinoza characterizes religious faith (fides) as follows:

[Faith is] thinking such things about God that if you had no cognition of them, obedience to God would be destroyed, whereas if you are obedient to God, you necessarily have these thoughts.

(TTP14.13, iii/174)

In other words, faith consists of beliefs that are necessary to and promote obedience to God. This account of religious faith plays a crucial role in Spinoza’s attempt to achieve one of the principal aims of his TTP: to show that the state can grant its citizens an almost unlimited freedom to philosophize without threatening its peace and piety. His central idea is that philosophy and theology have different goals and concern different domains. Philosophy seeks the truth whereas theology aims to promote obedience to God’s command to love our neighbor. Because obedience is faith’s defining feature, it is not an intellectual but a practical matter. Consequently, theology has no motivation to persecute those whose religious beliefs diverge from any sectarian doctrine as long as they obediently love their neighbor – a love that consists in the practice of justice and loving-kindness (or charity, caritas). Only those who teach doctrines that encourage hatred and conflict ought to be judged “heretics and schismatics” (TTP7, iii/180).