I'm interested in pantheism. Anything I should read besides Spinoza and Nietzsche?

I'm interested in pantheism. Anything I should read besides Spinoza and Nietzsche?

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Ribeiro sees the first wave of this expansion as a mercantilist invasion made possible by significant advances in ocean navigation and in firearms. As we have noted, the West invented few of the technics and implements of either. What it did do was to gather to itself the inventions of others and extend them to fuller realizations and ever more ingenious applications. Why it did this lies beyond Ribeiro's concerns but not ours. With the spectacle before us of the invasion of a new world by a whole civilization, we are led as by a dowser's wand beneath politics, technics, and economics to the world of the spirit. And the spirit of the West is to be found in the history of that religion to which all Europe subscribed.

Christianity, as we have seen, had a unique orientation to the world, an orientation that emphasized the capacity of rational thought to render Christians lords of all earthly creation. In the age of exploration Christians of all nationalities and persuasions were united in a conception of the earth as a divinely created thing, there for the enjoyment, instruction, and profit of man. Though the nearest derivation of this view seems to be Augustine, who viewed the world as of no intrinsic interest, its ultimate derivation is Old Testament scripture as rendered through Christian exegetes. There, in the deeply incised record of a new monotheism turning away from the worship of the natural world toward the adoration of a god so otherworldly that his name could not even be written down, is the beginning of the superimposed sacred history.

Max Weber, for one, traces the West's gradual, inexorable elimina tion of the magical or numinous from the world to the influence of the Old Testament, and he finds enormous entailments to Christianity's developed view of the world as neutral and even empty of all spirit life. To Weber this view resulted in the conception of the world as an open field for such human activity as might be pleasing to a god infinitely removed from it. Here human ingenuity and restless creativity might enjoy almost limitless freedom, governed only by the increasingly qualified stricture that such behavior not work unnecessary hardships on fellow Christians. Such a nonsacramental world, bereft of spirit, its gods and sacred groves and megaliths reduced to euhemeristic ciphers, or else banished to devilish realms, could pose no resistance to those intensive investigations of nature that ultimately resulted in the West's celebrated ability to expand.

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A. R. Hall points out in his study of the scientific revolution (1500-1800) that it was precisely this world view that progressively eroded the authority of Hellenistic science. Christianity's conception of the world as the mere material artifact of God, he writes, allowed for increasingly "objective" considerations of that material artifact, rather as if the maker had gone away and left it behind. Such considerations inevitably conflicted with the received wisdom of the ancients so that after a time this wisdom came to be honored in name only, and at last was discarded. For us, this process is perhaps most strikingly illustrated in the field of cartography where the old Ptolemaic conceptions that for centuries had been unassailable now increasingly came under challenge by the observations of Crusaders, voyagers, and casual travelers. For a while cartographers wrenched and stretched Ptolemy this way and that to fit over the newly expanded globe; then he was paid the hollow honor of lip service (as in the famous 1448 map of Andreas Walsperger that claims to be founded on Ptolemy but is in fact largely freed of his errors); and finally he was openly flouted.

But our interest in this goes beyond the process itself and its opening up of the globe to Christian activity. Our deeper interest lies in the fact that the erosion of authority was also at work on the Christian religion itself and for exactly the same reason. For just as the Christian world view had permitted challenges to the scientific wisdom of the ancients, so now with incremental power that view unwittingly permitted, indeed encouraged, covert disregard of the authority of religion through nontraditional investigations of nature that would turn up no "objective" evidence for the existence of spirit life. If the world is wholly susceptible to understanding through rational investigation, then the exis tence of spirits must be denied, and without belief in spirits there can be no true religious conviction. When in the late sixteenth century the English astronomer Thomas Digges extended the heavens of science beyond the borders of the theological ones, he was pointing the way that the West would travel. This was a way abetted by religious authorities, as in their persecution and execution of the mystic pantheist Giordano Bruno in 1600 for his heretical insistence that spirit life pervaded all of nature and welled from its many sources. And writing of Puritan theologians of the next century, Perry Miller notes that they welcomed the scientific investigations of their time only to realize too late that they had let the "wooden horse of rationalism into the Trojan citadel of theology."

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Unquestionably, it was a high achievement to see gradually past the ancient intellectual encumbrances, and Hall's study of the scientific revolution, or that of Marie Boas, gives the modern reader a vivid sense of the courageousness of Western thinkers engaged in their often solitary and dangerous tasks. It is doubtful that any of them could have guessed that his work was preparing the way for a mechanistic conception of nature and man that would have the practical effect of denying the operation of God in a world He putatively had created. This attitude, of course, lies far in the future, and to have uttered it even after a century of work by Galileo, Harvey, and Descartes would have seemed blasphemous and, to a great many Europeans, foolish. For the majority there were still spirits about, but these were mostly malignant ones, such as the fallen angels who had become the nature dieties of the pagans. But the forms and observances of a great religion die slowly, and long after its positive and life-enhancing aspects have fallen into practical disuse, its hag-ridden residues may be keenly felt. So, in the middle of the seventeenth century, one can find Christians who seemed utterly consumed by the life of the spirit and as convinced of the operations of the devil as they were of divine providence. And yet these same Christians were denying life to much of the world and acting upon that world as if it were a passive configuration of matter devoid of its own interior life, laws, and spirit and existing only to be "civilized" for gain.

The great question of the new science of the European Renaissance was: What lives and what does not? Francis Bacon in his classic document of the new science, The Dignity and Advancement of Learning (1605), showed how far the West had traveled from the mythological world view in which everything has life and is infused with spiritual significance by remarking that myths had served long enough as Pillars of Hercules beyond which human speculation dare not venture. Now was the time to sail beyond myths by seeing them accurately for what they had always been-allegorical poems veiling the secrets of nature. Bacon then demonstrated the Christian scientific mind at work as he dissected various mythic narratives to show that they were really parables instructing humans to develop a wholly rational understanding of the natural world.

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Such an understanding did produce its intended result-a greatly increased knowledge of the workings of the natural world-and in consequence the life of humans in the Christian West was remarkably eased and improved. Yet there were losses too, for the spiritual life of the West, already seriously enfeebled by the centuries of relentlessly advancing Christian history, suffered another wound. Lewis Mumford observes that the greatly increased fund of scientific knowledge was accompanied by a "deformation of experience as a whole." The instruments of science, he writes, "were helpless in the realm of qualities. The qualitative was reduced to the subjective: the subjective was dismissed as unreal, and the unseen and immeasurable as non-existent."

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Why dont you explain this as if I am 10 years old.

just read the book this no Kinder Surprise Egg my nigga

Read Ethics and thought it had a lot of resonance with certain strains of Buddhist thought. Has anybody written about this?

>i only know what memes say about buddhism and have no idea what spinoza is writing