The forgotten Spinozist: Romain Rolland,Gilles Deleuze,and the figure of Christ

Abstract

To this day, the thinking of Spinoza serves as a powerful tool for those seeking to negotiate the nexus between theological transcendence and the immanence of worldly existence. This paper explores the thought of one of the most important – and yet least remembered – Spinozists within twentieth-century French intellectual history: the Nobel Prize-winning French novelist, Romain Rolland (1866–1944). Past scholarship has repeatedly identified a divergence between the Catholic orthodoxy against which a youthful Rolland rebelled and the Spinozist non-conformism that shaped his thinking throughout life. By re-reading Rolland’s intellectual engagement with religion through the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, this study counters such critical interpretations and argues that the tension between Catholic orthodoxy and Spinozism cannot purely be seen in terms of a polemical conflict, but rather as the opportunity for a fruitful dialogue that has much to offer our own treatment of the religious question in the twenty-first century.