Ecstatic Rationalism

In 1920, in Rijnsburg, the Netherlands, at the home of Baruch Bento Benedictus Spinoza – now a museum – a visitor signed his name:  A. Einstein.

Once asked about God, Einstein said:  “I believe in Spinoza’s God”.

No wonder . . . Spinoza, himself, found that to participate in the divine, one used one’s mind to find understanding.  For Spinoza, to understand is to know God, to walk with God, to be part of God.  He called this: ‘Ecstatic Rationalism’. . . ‘the intellectual love of God’.

“We do have a power of understanding that will seek reasons and evidence just as surely as rocks will fall and planets rotate, and to the extent that we make way for this power, we realize ourselves.”   noted in Nature’s God, Matthew Stewart

In 1918, Albert Einstein had completed his theory of General Relativity and on November 6, 1919, the Royal Astronomical Society announced the results of the Arthur Eddington expedition, which confirmed a central prediction of that theory.  One year later, on November 2, 1920, one week after giving his inaugural lecture as an external professor in Leiden, he visited the Spinoza home.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity, remains, today, the greatest product of human intuitive understanding in the history of humanity, achieving the most powerful, unitary conceptualization of the stuff of reality – spacetime – and its all-encompassing role in the behavior of the cosmos and essentially everything in it, that can be experienced.

“In intuitive knowledge, the highest level of knowledge, each thing is grasped in the context of the infinite explanatory system, . . . that is, the world, the details of which cannot  – precisely because they are infinite – be exhaustibly grasped in their entirety but can nevertheless be holistically intuited.  In intuitive knowledge, the whole entailed system – for each implicate thing entails the whole implicative order – is made palpably, if intuitively, present. . . . We can never achieve it fully, since to do so would be to possess the mind of God, the thinking with which the infinite order of necessary connections thinks itself.” 

        Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.   

. . . God as the thinking of the order of necessary connections . . . holistically intuited . . .  that thinks itself.  And in Einstein’s theory, gravity creates matter and matter creates gravity, and space and time are reciprocals of each other.

Alas, that Einstein . . . If only Spinoza, who died in 1677, could have known that his home would be visited, 243 years later, by someone – this Albert Einstein – who used his faculty of intuitive knowledge to achieve the most profound . . .  and for him, ecstatic . . . understanding of the universe, and thus came to experience God, just as Spinoza, himself, understood would be possible.