Reinterpreting Spinoza’s Religion Through the Five-Stage Developmental Framework

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) occupies a peculiar place in the history of religion. He was condemned as a dangerous atheist, yet he placed God at the very center of his philosophy. He rejected the conventional image of a personal God who commands, rewards, punishes, and intervenes miraculously in human affairs, yet the culmination of his Ethics was not the rejection of God but what he called the “intellectual love of God.”

What kind of religious transformation was Spinoza attempting?

Viewed through the Five-Stage Developmental Framework, Spinoza’s project can be understood as an extraordinary attempt to move religion from Stage 1 dependence upon external divine authority toward Stage 4 intellectual freedom. Yet a further question remains:

Did Spinoza proceed beyond intellectual freedom to the Stage 5 integration of autonomy, empathy, relationship, and collaboration?

The answer may be: almost—but perhaps not completely.

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Religion Begins with Human Vulnerability

Spinoza’s critique of religion begins not simply with theology but with psychology.

Human beings live in an uncertain world. We cannot predict everything that will happen to us. We become frightened by illness, loss, disaster, failure, rejection, and death. When people feel powerless before uncertainty, they naturally search for explanations and protection.

Religion can answer this anxiety by offering an all-powerful protector.

From the Five-Stage perspective, this resembles Stage 1: Fear–Dependency.

The psychological structure is relatively straightforward:

Fear → Dependency → External Authority → Obedience → Security

God can consequently become analogous to an omnipotent parental figure. The believer obeys God, hopes for protection and reward, and fears punishment or abandonment.

Spinoza recognized how easily this emotional organization could produce superstition. When people do not understand the causes of events, they may interpret fortune and misfortune as signs of divine favor or displeasure.

Religion can then become organized around fear rather than understanding.

For Spinoza, this was not merely an intellectual mistake. It represented a form of human bondage.

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God as the Ultimate External Authority

Traditional monotheism generally establishes a vertical relationship:

God

↓

commands

↓

Human beings

↓

obey.

Spinoza radically reorganized this relationship.

His famous formulation was:

Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature.

God is not simply a supernatural person standing outside creation and occasionally intervening in it. God is the infinite reality within which everything exists.

Human beings are therefore not creatures standing outside God waiting for divine intervention.

They are expressions of the same reality.

Developmentally, this is revolutionary.

Spinoza removes the supernatural parent from the sky.

But he does not simply announce:

“There is no God.”

Instead, he transforms the meaning of God.

The vertical relationship—

God above → humanity below

—is replaced by an interconnected ontology:

God/Nature → everything that exists, including ourselves.

Religion is thereby transformed from a relationship of dependency into a problem of understanding.

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Stage 2: Rebellion Against Religious Authority

Spinoza’s life could initially appear to represent Stage 2: Anger/Shame–Defensive Autonomy.

He challenged established religious authority. In 1656, the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam subjected the young Spinoza to a severe herem, or excommunication. He subsequently developed ideas radically inconsistent with conventional Jewish and Christian theology.

Yet it would be misleading to interpret his philosophy simply as rebellion.

A Stage 2 rebellion says:

“Your authority will no longer control me.”

But the rebel may remain psychologically attached to the authority precisely through the need to oppose it.

Spinoza eventually goes considerably further.

His mature philosophy effectively asks:

Why should either of us need religious authority to determine philosophical truth?

That represents a crucial developmental transition.

Stage 2 fights authority.

Stage 4 no longer requires authority as the organizing center of the Self.

Spinoza therefore appears less like a permanent religious rebel than a thinker attempting to transcend the psychological structure that makes rebellion necessary.

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Stage 3: Religion Still Has a Moral Function

Spinoza nevertheless did not conclude that religion was useless.

This is another important feature of his developmental position.

Traditional religion can provide moral organization. It can teach people to practice justice, charity, responsibility, and peaceful coexistence.

This corresponds in important respects to Stage 3: Guilt–Reparation/Regulation.

At this stage, the central question is no longer merely:

“Will I be punished?”

It increasingly becomes:

“What is right?”

Rules, morality, conscience, responsibility, and social stability become important.

Spinoza could therefore preserve the ethical function of religion while rejecting the claim that religious authorities possess privileged knowledge about the metaphysical structure of the universe.

This distinction is crucial.

He did not have to destroy morality in order to destroy theological authoritarianism.

Religion could continue helping organize communal ethical life.

But philosophy had to remain free.

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The Great Spinozist Achievement: Stage 4 Freedom

Here we reach what may be Spinoza’s most important developmental achievement.

Stage 4 in the Five-Stage model is Freedom–Independence.

The individual develops sufficient psychological boundaries to think, choose, communicate, and act without excessive fear of external judgment or dependency upon external approval.

Spinoza’s religious and political philosophy strongly embodies this movement.

His Theological-Political Treatise defended freedom of thought and challenged the ability of religious authorities to control philosophical inquiry.

But Spinoza’s conception of freedom went deeper than political freedom.

For him, human beings are often controlled by forces they do not understand.

We experience desires, fears, jealousy, hatred, anger, and ambition. Yet because we experience these desires consciously, we can mistakenly imagine ourselves to be completely free.

In modern psychological language, we might say:

We know what we want without necessarily knowing why we want it.

This makes Spinoza surprisingly compatible with later psychodynamic thinking.

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Spinoza Before Psychoanalysis: Freedom Through Understanding

Psychoanalysis would later make a similar discovery.

A person might say:

“I freely chose this relationship.”

The psychoanalyst might ask:

“Why do you repeatedly choose this particular kind of relationship?”

A person says:

“I simply hate this person.”

Psychodynamic inquiry asks:

“What does this person evoke within you?”

Spinoza’s answer centuries earlier was philosophically different but structurally similar: human beings believe themselves free partly because they are conscious of their desires while remaining ignorant of the causes determining those desires.

Freedom therefore requires greater understanding.

The developmental sequence becomes:

Emotion controls the Self

↓

The Self becomes aware of emotion

↓

The causes of emotion become understandable

↓

The person becomes less passively controlled by emotion

↓

Greater freedom becomes possible.

This resembles an important movement within the Five-Stage framework:

control of others → control of self → autonomous self-regulation → integrated regulation.

Spinoza therefore provides an important philosophical bridge between emotional determinism and psychological freedom.

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But Is Freedom the End of Development?

This is where the Five-Stage model asks a question that Spinoza himself may not fully answer.

Suppose I have freed myself from external authority.

Suppose I understand my emotions.

Suppose I no longer require religious institutions to tell me what to believe.

Suppose I become intellectually autonomous.

Then what?

If development ended with Stage 4, psychological maturity could be defined primarily as independence.

But the Five-Stage framework proposes another developmental possibility.

After differentiation comes integration.

After independence comes inter-independence.

After freedom from relationship comes the possibility of freely chosen relationship.

That is Stage 5.

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Spinoza’s Remarkable Movement Toward Stage 5

Spinoza does not stop with isolated individualism.

This is why categorizing him simply as a Stage 4 rationalist would also be inadequate.

His metaphysics eventually dissolves the idea that the autonomous individual exists completely independently.

Everything exists within one infinite reality.

Human beings, animals, nature, mind, and matter are not completely separate substances inhabiting disconnected worlds.

They participate in the same reality.

Spinoza therefore performs a fascinating developmental movement:

Dependency

↓

Differentiation

↓

Autonomy

↓

Reconnection.

But the reconnection is different from the original dependency.

The Stage 1 believer says:

“I belong to God because I depend upon Him.”

Spinoza eventually says something closer to:

“I participate in God because I am part of Nature.”

These are psychologically very different forms of religious belonging.

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From Fear of God to Love of God

Perhaps the most beautiful evidence of this developmental transformation appears near the culmination of Spinoza’s Ethics.

The journey does not end with disbelief.

It ends with love—the intellectual love of God.

Consider the developmental transformation involved:

Fear of God

↓

Obedience to God

↓

Questioning God

↓

Freedom from an anthropomorphic God

↓

Understanding God/Nature

↓

Love of God/Nature.

This is extraordinarily close to the developmental trajectory proposed by the Five-Stage model:

Fear–Dependency

↓

Defensive Autonomy

↓

Guilt–Regulation

↓

Freedom–Independence

↓

Empathy–Integration.

Spinoza may therefore represent one of the most interesting philosophical examples of religion undergoing psychological development rather than simply being accepted or rejected.

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But Did Spinoza Actually Reach Stage 5?

Here the Five-Stage framework allows us to raise a constructive criticism.

Spinoza appears to reach something resembling Stage 5 at the metaphysical level.

He achieves a vision of radical interconnectedness.

The separation between God and creation collapses.

The isolated Self becomes part of an infinitely larger reality.

Hatred and destructive passions can be overcome through understanding.

Human flourishing increasingly involves relationships governed by reason rather than fear.

Yet something remains less developed in Spinoza’s system.

Where is interpersonal empathy?

His culminating language remains strongly intellectual.

The highest achievement is not simply love but intellectual love.

That distinction matters.

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Intellectual Integration Is Not Necessarily Emotional Integration

A person can intellectually understand:

“We are all interconnected.”

Yet still have difficulty sitting beside someone who is grieving.

A philosopher may understand the causes of anger while having difficulty emotionally receiving another person’s anger.

A theologian may believe that humanity is one while remaining incapable of empathizing with someone culturally, politically, or emotionally different.

The Five-Stage model therefore makes an important distinction between:

Ontological integration

“Everything belongs to one reality.”

and

Emotional-relational integration

“I can remain myself while emotionally entering another person’s experience.”

Spinoza’s philosophy powerfully approaches the first.

The Five-Stage model places particular importance on the second.

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Stage 5 Is Not a Return to Stage 1

This distinction helps clarify what Stage 5 means.

Stage 5 does not tell the individuated person:

“Return to dependence.”

It says:

“Now that you can stand alone, can you freely stand with others?”

The developmental pattern therefore resembles:

Dependence

→ Counter-dependence

→ Regulation

→ Independence

→ Inter-independence.

This is not circular development.

It is dialectical development.

The person returns to relationship at a different level of organization.

Spinoza’s God/Nature provides a remarkable philosophical analogue.

He first destroys the vertical dependency relationship between humanity and an external supernatural authority.

He then reconstructs belonging at another level.

We no longer belong because we are helpless.

We belong because separation itself was never absolute.

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Three Developmental Forms of Atheism

This analysis also suggests that the Five-Stage model can improve how we understand atheism.

Not all rejection of religion represents the same psychological development.

Stage 2: Rebellious atheism

“God and religion oppressed me. I reject them.”

Authority remains psychologically central because identity continues to be constructed against it.

Stage 4: Individuated secularism

“I do not require supernatural authority to determine truth, morality, or meaning.”

The individual can live autonomously without either obeying or fighting religion.

Stage 5: Post-theistic integration

A further possibility emerges:

“I do not require an external supernatural authority, yet my independence does not separate me from humanity, nature, or a reality greater than my individual Self.”

Spinoza seems to stand somewhere between the latter two.

Calling him simply “atheist” therefore misses the developmental complexity of his thought.

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Spinoza’s Developmental Revolution

The deepest transformation Spinoza accomplished may therefore be summarized as follows.

He dismantled:

God as ruler.

God as judge.

God as supernatural parent.

God as dispenser of reward and punishment.

And reconstructed:

God as Nature.

God as reality.

God as infinite interconnectedness.

God as something understood rather than feared.

This produces a remarkable developmental sequence:

Stage 1

I obey God because I need God.

Stage 2

I challenge the authority that speaks for God.

Stage 3

I retain ethical responsibility without surrendering thought.

Stage 4

I become intellectually free from external religious authority.

Toward Stage 5

I rediscover my connection with the whole without surrendering my freedom.

That final movement may be Spinoza’s greatest achievement.

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Freedom From Religion—or Freedom to Reconnect?

The conventional question about Spinoza is whether he was an atheist, pantheist, rationalist, or religious thinker.

The Five-Stage perspective suggests another question may be more fruitful:

What developmental transformation was occurring in Spinoza’s conception of religion?

Seen this way, Spinoza was not merely destroying religion.

He was attempting to reorganize it.

He moved from obedience toward understanding, from fear toward freedom, and from an externalized God toward participation in an interconnected reality.

But his journey also reveals the boundary between Stages 4 and 5.

Stage 4 asks:

Can I become free from the authority that once defined me?

Spinoza answered this question extraordinarily well.

Stage 5 asks:

Having become free, can I reconnect with others without surrendering myself?

Spinoza’s intellectual love of God moves powerfully toward this destination.

Yet the Five-Stage framework adds another requirement: mature integration is not merely intellectual recognition of interconnectedness. It requires the capacity to maintain autonomy while entering empathically into relationships with other differentiated human beings.

Spinoza may therefore be best understood not simply as a Stage 5 philosopher but as one of history’s clearest philosophical bridges from Stage 4 freedom toward Stage 5 integration.

His achievement was not merely liberation from religion.

It was an attempt to discover what religion—or spirituality—might become after psychological freedom has been achieved.

And perhaps that is Spinoza’s most contemporary question.

After we no longer need God out of fear, can we rediscover connection out of freedom?