Twice Wretched: On Repentance

by Baruch Spinoza, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

In the fourth part of my Ethics there is a proposition that has given more offence than most of what I wrote about God: Poenitentia virtus non est, sive ex Ratione non oritur; sed is, quem facti poenitet, bis miser seu impotens est. Repentance is not a virtue, that is, it does not arise from reason; and the man who repents of what he has done is twice wretched, or twice without power.

Readers who were not shocked by the claim that God has no purposes were often shocked by this. They took it to mean that I wished men to do harm and feel nothing afterwards, as if I were recommending a hard heart. I wished nothing of the kind. But I do not withdraw the proposition. I want to show here what it means and why it follows, and then to show what the same page says a few lines further down, which is less often quoted and which matters as much.

I begin, as I must, with definitions, because the word repentance carries a great deal that was put into it by the imagination. Among the Christians of my country it meant the day of fasting and humiliation, the sermon on sin; among the Catholics, confession and penance. In the synagogue of my youth it was teshuvah, the return, and the Days of Awe were given over to it every autumn. A word that has been used so long in so many rooms brings its furniture with it. We must clear the room first.

I. What repentance is

Every affect is joy, sadness or desire, or is composed of them. Joy is the passage of a man to greater power of acting. Sadness is the passage to less. Desire is the striving by which each thing endeavours to persevere in its being, when it is conscious of itself. These three are not moral words. They describe what happens in a body and, at the same time and in the same order, in the mind which is the idea of that body.

Repentance, then, is a kind of sadness. Specifically, it is sadness accompanied by the idea of some deed of ours, which we believe we did by a free decision of the mind. Each part of this definition does work.

First, it is sadness: a diminution. The repentant man can do less than before. He sleeps worse, eats without tasting, speaks to his wife with half his attention. Anyone who has lain awake rehearsing a thing he said at table knows that this is not a figure of speech.

Second, it is joined to the idea of a deed of his own. In this it differs from other sadnesses that resemble it. It differs from what we call the bite of conscience, conscientiae morsus, which in my account is the sadness opposite to gladness: gladness arises from the image of a past thing whose outcome we had doubted and which turned out well, and the bite of conscience arises from one that turned out ill. A merchant whose ship is lost off the Texel feels that bite though he did nothing to raise the storm. The repentant man is not sad that something happened. He is sad that he did it.

Third, and this is the hinge, he believes he did it ex libero Mentis decreto, by a free decree of his mind. Take away that belief, and what remains is a different affect. If I come to see that I did the deed as a stone falls, the sadness does not vanish at once, but it changes its object. It attaches to the causes and not to some uncaused point in myself where I might have chosen otherwise and did not.

II. Why the repentant man is twice wretched

The demonstration is short. I will give it nearly as it stands, and then say what it means in a life.

Repentance is sadness, and sadness, insofar as it is sadness, is bad, because it is a lessening of our power of acting. So repentance does not arise from reason, since reason desires nothing for a man except what increases his power to understand and to act. Further, the man who repents was first overcome by a bad desire, and is now overcome by sadness. He was defeated once in the doing, and is defeated again in the remembering. Hence: twice wretched.

Notice what the proposition does not say. It does not say that the deed was not bad, or that he ought to be glad of it. It does not say the harm should be forgotten. It says only that the second sadness adds nothing to the first defeat except another defeat. The harm done to the other person is not lessened by one grain because the doer is miserable. The widow is not fed by his fasting.

Consider a case. A man of business, angry and tired, speaks contemptuously to his clerk in front of others, and the clerk leaves his service. That evening the man repents. What has happened in him? A desire arising from an inadequate idea, the anger, which is a desire born of hatred, drove his tongue. He did not understand the anger while it was in him; if he had, it would not have been a passion. Now a second affect has hold of him, and it too is passive. He does not understand it either. He imagines a moment at which he was perfectly free to hold his tongue, and he hates himself for not using that moment. He turns the scene over and over, and each time he plays the part a little differently, and each time he comes back to the real one and is sad again. He is not acting. He is being acted upon by the image of himself.

And the image is false. That is the root of it.

III. The false image

Men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. I said this in the third part and I say it again because everything here depends on it. The decisions of the mind are nothing but the appetites themselves, which vary as the disposition of the body varies. The drunkard believes that he speaks from a free decision what afterwards, when sober, he wishes he had kept to himself. The angry child believes he freely wants revenge. If a stone, thrown and in flight, could think, it would believe it continued to move because it wished to.

The repentant man has made a picture of himself as a little sovereign inside his skull, a will that stood outside the causes of nature and chose. He then punishes that sovereign. But there is no such sovereign. There was a body, tired, slighted earlier in the day by a creditor, ill-fed, carrying an old resentment of being thought soft; there was a mind which was the idea of that body and of all those affections; there was the clerk's face, which reminded him of someone. The deed followed from these as the properties of a triangle follow from its nature. Not by the same kind of necessity, perhaps; the chain is long and largely hidden. But not by a different kind of cause either. There is only one order of nature, and a man is in it, not beside it.

At this point someone always objects. If the deed was necessary, then the man is not to blame. If he is not to blame, nothing will stop him doing it again, and nothing will stop anyone else. You have dissolved morality in geometry.

I have answered this before, in letters to friends who put it more courteously than most. A man who has been bitten by a mad dog and goes mad is excusable, and yet he is rightly put down. A man who cannot govern his passions out of fear of the laws is excusable by the same reasoning, and yet he cannot enjoy peace of mind and the knowledge and love of God; he perishes all the same. Necessity does not abolish consequences. It abolishes only the fiction that something in us was exempt from them. The clerk is gone. The reputation is damaged. The habit, unless something is changed, will repeat. All of that is perfectly real and perfectly caused. What is unreal is the uncaused villain the repentant man sees when he looks inward.

So the objection mistakes the point. I do not say nothing should be done. I say that repentance, the sad brooding on one's free and guilty choice, is the wrong thing to do, because it is founded on a false idea and because it weakens the very power that would be needed to do the right thing.

IV. What reason does instead

What, then, does a man who lives by the guidance of reason do when he has acted badly? He does three things, and none of them is repentance.

He first forms, as far as he can, an adequate idea of what happened. This is not an excuse. An excuse is a story told to lessen the sadness; this is an inquiry undertaken to understand the cause. Why the anger? From where? What in my body and my day and my history made that slight unbearable? A passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it. This is the fifth part of the Ethics, and I do not mean by it that understanding makes us feel nothing. I mean that the affect, once understood, is no longer something we suffer. It becomes something we know, and to know is to act.

He then does what can still be done. He sends for the clerk, or writes to him, and says plainly that he was wrong and that the place is his if he wants it. He does this not because he is sad, but because nothing is more useful to a man than another man, and a breach in the bond between them is a loss of power for both. Reason directs us to repair what can be repaired with the same plainness with which it directs us to eat when we are hungry.

And then he makes provision for the future, which is the only time in which anything can still be done. He notices the conditions under which the anger arises, and keeps away from them where he can, or prepares for them where he cannot. In the fifth part I advised that we keep in mind maxims of right living and apply them often to particular cases, so that they are ready to hand when the affect comes. If we have fixed it in our mind that hatred is to be conquered by love and not repaid with hatred, then when an injury comes the maxim is already there, as a sum we have practised is already there when the merchant's bill arrives.

None of these three requires sadness. Each of them is hindered by it. The sad man inquires badly, because sadness pushes the mind to imagine whatever will relieve it; he either blames himself without measure, which is a kind of vanity turned inside out, or he turns at last and blames the clerk. The sad man repairs badly, because his apology is full of himself and asks to be comforted. And the sad man prepares badly for the future, because sadness is a lessening of the power by which anything is prepared.

I have sometimes been asked whether the free man then feels nothing at all after doing harm. He feels something, certainly. He feels the sorrow of the other person, by imitation of the affects, as every man does; and he would be a strange creature if he did not. But reason does not cultivate that sorrow. It turns it toward what can be done. The free man, as I wrote, thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life. In the same way he thinks less of the past deed than of the present power to act well, and his wisdom is a meditation not on his fault but on what he can do.

V. The scholium

Now I must say what follows the demonstration on the same page, because my critics have read the proposition and seldom the scholium, and the scholium is where I usually say what I mean.

Men rarely live by the dictate of reason. That is a fact about them, as their having two hands is a fact. And so I wrote that these two affects, humility and repentance, and besides them hope and fear, bring more advantage than harm. If men must sin, they had better sin in that direction. For if men who are weak in mind were all equally proud, ashamed of nothing and afraid of nothing, by what bonds could they be held together or restrained? Terret vulgus, nisi metuat. The crowd is a terror, unless it is afraid. It is no wonder, then, that the prophets, who took thought for the common good and not for the good of a few, so strongly commended humility, repentance and reverence. Those who are subject to these affects can be led far more easily than others to live at last by the guidance of reason, that is, to be free and to enjoy the life of the blessed.

Some have thought this a contradiction, or else a cynical remark of the kind politicians make in private. It is neither. It is the same doctrine seen from a different place.

For the man who lives by reason, repentance is a second defeat. For the man who does not, and that is most of us most of the time, repentance may be the only form in which the truth about his deed can reach him at all. He does not yet know how to form an adequate idea of his anger. He has only imagination to work with. Then it is better that his imagination show him the deed as something grievous, with himself as its cause, than that it show him nothing, or show it as a triumph. A false idea that leads toward reason is preferable to a false idea that leads away from it. Repentance is a crutch. A crutch is not a leg, and no one should mistake it for one. But a man with a broken leg who is told to throw away his crutch before the bone has knit will fall in the street.

This is why I never mocked the penitent in the synagogue or in the church. I wrote in the treatise on theology and politics that the prophets taught obedience and not philosophy, and that the whole of Scripture, read honestly, comes down to justice and charity toward one's neighbour. A people that cannot yet reason is held to justice and charity by fear, by hope, by repentance and by reverence. Remove those affects from them before reason is ready to take their place, and what follows is not freedom. It is the mob.

So the proposition and the scholium together say this. Repentance is not a virtue. It is a passion, founded on a false picture of the self, and it diminishes the man who suffers it. And yet, as men are, it does more good than harm, and the teachers who commended it to the many were not fools. Both are true. A man ought to know which of them is true of him.

VI. Which is true of you

How does one know? I can offer a test, though not a rule.

Ask what the sadness is doing. If it is driving you to inquire into the causes of what you did, to repair what can be repaired, and to prepare differently for next time, then it is doing the work of reason, imperfectly, as a crutch does the work of a leg. Use it, and expect to need it less. If it is driving you only round and round the scene, to the replaying of the moment, the punishing of the sovereign in your head, the long night, then it is doing nothing but diminishing you. It has stopped being a crutch and become a second injury.

There is a further sign, and it is the most reliable. Repentance looks backward and is fixed on oneself. The affect that reason puts in its place looks forward and is fixed on the world, on the clerk and on the next morning's work. The repentant man asks, How could I have done that? The free man asks, What made that happen, and what can now be done? The first question has no good answer, because it assumes a self that could have done otherwise under the very same causes, and there was no such self. The second has many answers, and each of them is a little increase of power.

When the second question has been followed far enough, something changes that I can only describe. The man begins to see his deed as part of the order of nature, not excused by that order but understood through it. He sees that the anger had causes, that the causes had causes, and that he himself, with all his faults, is a mode of the one substance and follows from it as everything does. This does not make him proud of the deed. It makes him calm toward it. He can look at it steadily, the way one looks at a flaw in a glass to find where the grinding went wrong, without hating the glass or himself, and without pretending the flaw is not there. That steadiness is a kind of joy. It is the joy of understanding, which is the passage to greater power, and in it the deed is finally of use: it has become knowledge.

I called the contrary of repentance, in its proper form, acquiescentia in se ipso: the joy that arises from a man's contemplation of himself and his power of acting. People hear this as self-satisfaction, and in its common form it is that, a pleasant fiction about one's merits. But in its true form, when it arises from reason, it is the highest thing we can hope for. It is not the satisfaction of a man who believes he has done nothing wrong. It is the peace of a man who understands what he has done, and why, and what he is, and who has turned all of it toward acting better.

VII. Conclusion

I have said that the repentant man is twice wretched, and I have said that repentance does more good than harm in most men, and I have tried to show that these are one doctrine. I do not think the doctrine is cold. What is cold, it seems to me, is to keep a man in sadness over what cannot be changed, when the same strength could be given to what can.

Perhaps I should say plainly how this stands in my own case, since I have been accused of recommending to others a peace I invented for myself. I was put out of my community at twenty-three, in words as harsh as that community ever used. I did not repent of what I had said, because I did not believe it false. But I did not pass my life in grieving over the loss either, or in hating those who expelled me. I tried to understand why it happened, which was not difficult; I did what could be done, which was to keep working; and I prepared, as far as I could, to say what I had to say in a form that would outlast me. That is not a boast, and I do not offer myself as a model of freedom; no man who lives among causes is that. But I knew which question to ask afterwards, and I tried to ask it more often than the other.

You who are lying awake over something you did: I will not tell you it does not matter. It matters as everything that follows from causes matters. Ask what made it happen. Write the letter that can still be written. Make your provision for the morning. And when you find that the sadness has done what it could and is now only turning in a circle, set it down. It was never a virtue. It was a crutch, and you may by now be able to walk.

All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare. This is one of them.

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Baruch Spinoza, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (19 October 2026), ā Spīnozā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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