Yuval Jobani’s The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza’s Philosophy: The God-Intoxicated Heretic reframes the canonical image of Spinoza’s seamless Euclidean rationalism by arguing, with relentless textual attention, that contradiction is neither an embarrassment to be harmonized away nor an exoteric smokescreen, but a constitutive motor of Spinoza’s project—governing the political architecture of revised religion in the Theological-Political Treatise and the metaphysical architecture of God, causality, conatus, eternity, and salvation in the Ethics. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in showing, first, how the TTP installs two incompatible models of “obedience to God” to stabilize society, and second, how the Ethics constructs the divine concept through “contradictions of depth” that are methodically hidden yet recoverable. It closes by relocating the ultimate meaning of contradiction in the amor intellectualis Dei, where contradictio becomes the very condition of divine and human beatitude.
Jobani begins by demolishing the reflex that equates Spinoza’s geometric style with systematic consistency. The geometry is a veil; the work must be read against the grain of its form, with “content over form” as the guiding maxim. This reversal makes room for the book’s central thesis: Spinoza’s philosophical concept of God is built out of logical contradictions across each genus cognitionis—in the first kind of knowledge as a social regulator, in the second as a rational totality, and in the third as an expressly soteriological structure. The familiar assurance that “truth does not contradict truth” is acknowledged as Spinoza’s official stance; yet Jobani insists that Spinoza operates with contradictions and strategically conceals them, while leaving fissures through which a patient reader can glimpse the hidden mechanics.
The method is simple to state and exacting to perform. It rejects the pious habit of attributing every difficulty to the reader’s obtuseness, and refuses to canonize the text by making the scholium a mere instrument of doctrinal coherence. The TTP is treated as a stratified book of concealment; the Ethics as no less guarded—geometricity functions like Scripture, a rhetorical armature within which contradiction can both be inserted and dissimulated. On Strauss’s classic account, contradictions in the TTP protect heterodox doctrines from persecution; Jobani extends scrutiny to the Ethics, demonstrating that the esoteric function does not entail a contradiction-free esoteric content. The decisive claim is that, even if concealment motivates how contradictions are deployed, it does not determine that the concealed position is consistent.
From this vantage, the first decisive field is the TTP, where the very key term of Spinoza’s revised religion—“obedience to God”—receives two incompatible determinations in two architecturally distinct halves of the book. In chapters 1–15, obedience to God means obedience to the moral law, whose content is legible to all without mediation; in chapters 16–20, obedience to God means obedience to the civil sovereign, such that impiety becomes disobedience to the state and even unethical decrees demand compliance. The two definitions are not reconciled; their clash is immediate, explicit, and programmatic.
The contradiction ramifies into five conspicuous by-products that Jobani tracks in a compact dossier: the prophet as ethical exemplar versus the prophet as politically subversive rebel; Jesus as primary role model of moral excellence versus Torquatus as the emblem of unconditional civil obedience; ecclesiastics as independent moral teachers versus ecclesiastics as state agents; universal interpretive freedom in matters of faith versus monopoly of interpretation by the sovereign; and justice as perpetual will to give each his due versus justice as assignment in accordance with civil law. These are not scattered anomalies: they form a patterned oscillation whose very visibility argues design.
Jobani’s crucial move is to show that the contradiction is constructive. Each model—moral reduction and political reduction—fails in isolation to secure the end that defines the first kind of knowledge: social stability. A purely moralized piety breeds conscientious resistance to immoral commands; a purely politicized piety forfeits the moral traction needed to legitimize power, thereby making stability hostage to the sovereign’s contingent virtue. The only durable stability arises from the tension between the two reductions, calibrated so that the citizen recognizes civil obedience as a moral obligation while retaining the inculcation of ethical sentiments. The hybrid figure combines Jesus and Torquatus—moral insight and civil obedience—in a deliberately paradoxical civic pedagogy. The contradiction is neither resolved nor dismissed; it is deployed to balance rival imperatives in a polity of the many.
Here Jobani’s argumentative register becomes diagnostic and compositional at once. Diagnostic, because the text nowhere acknowledges the tension it engineers; compositional, because Spinoza’s analysis of the ancient Hebrew state furnishes a template for how such constructive contradiction can be institutionalized—in the dual roles of ecclesiastics and the sovereign, in the staggered allocation of interpretive rights, and in the staged pedagogies that first moralize and then civilize obedience. The account rejects both the harmonizing instinct and the skeptical dismissal of the TTP as opportunistic. It treats the contradiction as an intentional lever, consistent with an art of writing that cultivates different audiences and effects at different textual planes.
The book’s pivot—the transition from TTP to Ethics—is defined by a change in the end of religion: from social stability (first kind) to rational adequation (second kind) and to salvation (third kind). The object remains Deus sive Natura, but the vantage changes. In the second kind of knowledge, the contradiction ceases to be purely civil-functional and becomes logical, registered in the very concept of an absolute God that must include all determinations and their opposites. Here Jobani names “contradictions of depth,” nine structural antinomies that arise once one reads definitions, axioms, and demonstrations without smoothing them into a Euclidean tableau. The cumulative effect is to display the God of reason as a concept whose very absoluteness forces the inclusion of the oppositional pairs that finite understanding would normally cancel as inconsistent.
The doorway to these contradictions is the axiom of causality and its application to causa sui. In a methodical reconstruction, Jobani argues that Spinoza neglects his own causal axiom at decisive junctures, a neglect that ramifies into oppositions of finitude/infinitude and immanence/transcendence in the divine concept. The tension appears whenever God, defined as absolutely infinite substance, is made both in se and the cause of things that are outside God only in conception; the axiom’s scope and the geometry’s form do not prevent, but rather stage, a back-and-forth between strict immanence and a functionally transcendent difference in essence. The claim is not that Spinoza avows transcendence; the claim is that the logic of the demonstrations leaves contradictory traces that build the absolute’s range.
The contradictions deepen when Jobani turns to the essence and perfection of things that follow from God. Texts that require the essence of modes to involve existence coexist with texts that make modal existence derivative and thus not involved essentially; likewise, the perfection attributable to what follows from God appears both as absolute and as partial, tied to determinate expressions of God’s infinite nature. The paired claims cannot be reconciled by definitional finesse alone; their simultaneity testifies to a structural demand: an absolute that is truly absolute must be adequate to both invariance and expression, to both the unconditioned and the conditioned, which means its concept must shoulder opposed predicates.
This point crescendos in Jobani’s treatment of unity and multiplicity. Alongside the famous Parmenidean portrait—static, undifferentiated, infinite existence—Jobani recovers a Heraclitean portrait—an entity with infinite parts, in a ceaseless stream in logic, extension, and duration. The Ethics speaks both idioms, and the geometry will not force their liquidation into a higher synthesis. What it forces is the reader’s work of holding them together as co-essential descriptions of Deus sive Natura, each incomplete alone, each contradictory with the other, and yet each textually secured.
At the center of Jobani’s second-kind reconstruction stands the conatus. The principle, elevated by Spinoza to the status of a universal law—each thing strives to persevere in its being—condenses five contradictions that radiate through the system: static versus dynamic, efficient versus final causality, substance versus mode, finiteness versus infiniteness, and the presence of good and evil in God. Jobani shows with particular care how Spinoza’s textual staging juxtaposes a static reading (perseverance as conservation) with a dynamic reading (perseverance as causal efficacy), sometimes within a single demonstration. The result is that conatus both preserves and produces, both remains and acts—two senses that compete for primacy yet together articulate nature’s total warfare of finitudes and its equally total articulation of God’s causal plenitude.
The second contradiction—efficient and final causality—is especially explosive, given Spinoza’s polemic against final causes in the Appendix to Ethics I. Jobani tracks the re-entry of teleology by way of conatus, where the striving functions as an intrinsic orientation toward the thing’s perfection, thereby reinstating, within the geometry’s core, what official polemic banishes. The text equates conatus with efficient causality through God’s causality (I.16 Cor., I.36), yet it also invests conatus with final-causal weight when it functions as the inner aim of perseverance and increase. The symmetry is not rhetorical flourish; it is a live antinomy that the Ethics both requires and conceals.
The third contradiction—substance and mode—takes form as a definitional friction. Conatus is predicated of everything in nature; yet if taken strictly, the definition of substance (self-caused, existing in itself) and of mode (existing in another) would seem to bar any univocal predication. Jobani argues that Spinoza both enforces and relaxes the line, such that the conatus of God and the conatus of finite things can be spoken in one breath and by one concept, though the metaphysical statuses diverge with maximal rigor. The fourth contradiction—finite and infinite—marks the point where the striving of finite things mirrors, and thereby conflicts with, the absoluteness of divine being. The fifth contradiction—good and evil in God—exposes an evaluative dimension that the system wants to anchor in human affects, yet which reappears at the divine level in the very structure of perfection and increase.
Time’s status brings these tensions to a head. If eternity is necessary existence—and existence in its entirety is necessary—then everything is eternal, and time devolves into a confused perception of necessity. This standard reading threatens both experience and the system’s own resources (motion and rest, conatus, growth and diminution). Jobani’s counter-reading identifies a double circularity: Spinoza’s formal definition of eternity is itself circular, and the metaphysics of eternity and time is reciprocally generative—time flows from eternity and eternity flows from time. This is no external harmonization: it is extracted from Spinoza’s own definitions and demonstrations, including passages that mark the immediate, infinite modes as both eternal and as having unrestricted duration—semper—and then gloss the “or sive” equivalence between always and eternal. The circularity is deliberate, embedded at the definition that opens Ethics I (cause of itself) and repeated at the definition of eternity (I D8) to seal a system that encodes its own self-flow.
Thus, what commentators often describe as a purge of time becomes, in Jobani’s exegesis, a circular co-implication: abolishing time’s truth-value would eliminate conatus and duration—features Spinoza needs and uses. The geometry keeps indicating, then dodging, the equivalence; Spinoza separates eternity from time to guard the purity of necessity, then quietly binds them to sustain the phenomenology of striving and the physics of motion. The crack through which this can be seen is placed, with care, in the scholium to II.8—a geometric example that silently aligns objective essence and formal essence with distinct temporal bearings. The reader is invited to find, not a doctrinal resolution, but a logical circuit that stabilizes the whole.
At this juncture, the book’s compositional insight sharpens: the Ethics speaks as a double-voiced text—one voice policing the Euclidean line, the other whispering a logic of contraries necessary to the absolute concept. It is this doubleness that prepares the transition to the third kind of knowledge, where contradiction moves from being the scaffolding of rational totality to being the very condition of salvation. Jobani frames the ascent in terms of the natura naturans/natura naturata relation: the derivation of dynamic multiplicity from static unity, of partial perfection from absolute perfection, of essences without existence from existence whose essence includes existence. Each such derivation both marks and enacts absolute otherness; each thereby strains the causal axiom even as it extends its reach. None is logically “solved” at the third level; each receives a new status, a conversion of logical aporia into soteriological function.
The decisive theater for this conversion is the amor intellectualis Dei. Here the system risks its apex: God’s love of himself, in us and through us, threatens to subject God to an external cause, to human affection, to finitude; it appears to transform the divine intellect’s true knowledge into a reflex that would cancel infinitude and freedom. Jobani grants the force of this classical worry—which has “frustrated interpreters for 300 years”—but he argues that Spinoza himself both denies the contradiction and sign-posts its locus. The point is not to make the contradiction vanish; it is to show how, uniquely at this level, the most destructive contradiction for things—to be acted upon by an external cause—becomes constructive for God: through the external cause of the human intellect’s loving, God constructs an increase in his own perfection in the precise sense defined by the Ethics’ affects (love as joy as increase in perfection).
This, Jobani contends, is why Spinoza links, letter after letter in the Blijenbergh correspondence, the problem of contradiction to the intellectual love of God, while refusing in the Ethics to speak plainly. The letters, addressed to a grain merchant “driven only by a desire for pure truth,” are a didactic stage on which Spinoza can point beyond rational antinomies to the ordo salutis without abandoning secrecy. The repeated adjunction of Blijenbergh’s valid logical worry to amor intellectualis signals that the absolute concept is different “in essence from a logical standpoint.” The geometry cannot say this outright; the letters can hint. The contradiction’s meaning—its distinctively religious meaning—emerges only in, and as, the experience of intellectual love.
Two consequences follow. First, the five contradictions of conatus do not vanish at the third level; they are transferred and re-inscribed. The equivalence of efficient and final causes becomes the key to understanding the mutual derivation of natura naturans and natura naturata: the efficient cause, as God considered as free cause, and the final cause, as the inner orientation of the multiplicity toward the perfection of its source, are each read through the other; and the reading must be done uno intuito. Second, the contradiction between finite and infinite, static and dynamic, substance and mode, good and evil—each receives an eschatological inflection in which salus Dei and salus hominis coincide. The logic’s point is not deduction but redemption; it is not the elimination of antinomy but its ecstatic transfiguration.
Seen from the outside frame, the book thus traces an arc: the TTP teaches us to use contradiction politically; Ethics II–V teaches us to endure contradiction logically; the letters teach us to convert contradiction mystically—though Jobani’s sobriety never permits the vocabulary of mysticism to float free of Spinoza’s definitions of love, joy, and perfection. This threefold movement is reflected in Jobani’s own composition: Part I excavates the TTP’s structural split; Part II catalogues nine contradictions of depth surrounding God, causality, unity/multiplicity, conatus, eternity/time; Part III explicates the letters and returns to the amor intellectualis to argue that God’s being acted upon—in and as the human intellect’s love—is the point at which the system reclassifies what counts as contradiction for creatures into what counts as self-augmentation for God. The reader who seeks the tidy Euclidean tableau finds instead a logic that both requires and rewards a double-register reading, one that constantly cross-references scholarly instincts for coherence against the text’s insistent fissures.
What, finally, is secured textually, and what is inferential? Secured are the two determinations of “obedience to God” and their five consequences in the TTP; secured are the statements that attribute eternity and unrestricted duration to the immediate infinite modes; secured is the circularity of the definition of eternity and its reprise; secured is the appearance of both static and dynamic readings of conatus in the very layout of III.6–7 and their demonstrations; secured is the polemical ban on final causes alongside the re-entry of final-causal structure via conatus; secured is the thematic insistence, in the letters, on pairing Blijenbergh’s contradiction with amor intellectualis. These securements justify, on Jobani’s telling, the inferential claims: that Spinoza’s absolute concept includes contraries as constitutive; that the Ethics esoterically organizes a logic that constructs, rather than destroys, its object through contradiction; that eternity and time function as a circular pair rather than as mere appearance and truth; and that the intellectual love of God is the theatre in which what would destroy a finite thing constructs the divine mode of self-increase.
The upshot is neither iconoclasm for its own sake nor a romanticization of paradox. It is a calibrated re-reading that restores to Spinoza what he takes from himself under the sign of geometry: the license to affirm that an absolute concept must carry opposed determinations; the courage to write so as to hide this affirmation in definitions, scholia, and epistolary obliquities; and the philosophical clarity to make that contradiction do determinate work in politics, metaphysics, and soteriology. In this sense, God-intoxicated heresy names not a mystical enthusiasm but a disciplined readiness to let contradiction become the grammar of the absolute—first as the art of governing the many, then as the science of reading the whole, and finally as the joy of loving what thinks itself in us.
This clarification does not erase the scandal that motivated the tradition’s harmonizing habits. It intensifies it, and thereby purifies the stakes: if Spinoza’s system were Euclidean in substance as well as in style, it would be complete but mute about the absolute; if it were merely contradictory, it would be eloquent but incoherent. Jobani’s reconstruction shows a more delicate equilibrium. The system secures enough Euclidean spine to advance proofs; it nurtures enough fissure to let the absolute be absolute—that is, to include the contraries from which finite logics recoil. The constructive function of contradiction in the TTP gives us a political pedagogy of obedience; the constructive function of contradiction in the Ethics gives us a metaphysics in which immanence can bear the weight of transcendence’s difference; and the constructive function of contradiction in the amor intellectualis gives us a soteriology in which the external cause of our loving becomes the internal increase of divine perfection. The reader emerges from Jobani’s book with a stricter sense of what the geometry conceals, a richer sense of what Spinoza lets the text do for those who refuse to consecrate it, and a keener taste for how contradiction, in Spinoza’s hands, is the one instrument equal to the task of thinking Deus sive Natura without remainder.
Simon Gros 
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