It’s precise, intricate, and formidable: a philosophical atom bomb. In his Ethics, Spinoza argues that nature, taken as a whole, is a single substance. It has two “attributes” available to human knowledge — intangible thought and spatial extension — as two sides of the same coin.

That substance, lying beneath the changing appearances of its expressions, must be infinite, self-caused, eternal. Only God can possess those qualities, and so God is substance, and God must therefore be Nature: the reality we exist within.

As Spinoza put it, “God or Nature” — Deus Sive Natura.

God, as perfect as God must be, has no desire, no will, no agency. God is impersonal, and our only hope of blessedness and salvation is the understanding of “God or Nature”. Spinoza was cursed, ostracised, physically attacked, and his works were censored for his defence — in his eyes — of God’s perfection.

This is the common story of Spinoza. The God-drunk sage who saw God’s perfection mirrored in pantheism and was inevitably branded a heretic for doing so. Is it even conceivable that Spinoza could be an atheist? A denier of the existence of a god that he devotes so many words to?

This is exactly what Steven Nadler, one of the world’s leading Spinoza scholars, contends in his new book, Spinoza, Atheist: that beneath all the divine language, Spinoza was in fact an atheist.

To reach this conclusion Nadler examines Spinoza’s biography — where you’d typically look for signs of a belief, but finds traction largely in Spinoza’s philosophical system itself. To get to Nadler’s argument, it’s worth first exploring Spinoza’s ideas.

Spinoza’s System

Spinoza’s Ethics was published in 1677, not long after his death. This thin book contains all of Spinoza’s system — an explanation of our world, our place in it, and how we ought to live. This is all laid out in precise and efficient prose in a structure intended to mimic Euclid’s Elements.

The text is systematic, rationally-ordered with a crystalline structure of components with very little figurative language. Each statement is like a facet in the structure of a jewel — all have their place in relation to one another, and none are superfluous.

In Spinoza’s system, substance is the most basic category of existence. This concept, originating with Aristotle, describes an object that is distinct from its properties, and can endure the change of those properties.

To a limited extent, we can say this about some commonplace substances. Wax, for example, can change shape, texture, and form. Heated sufficiently, it’ll take on a liquid-like consistency, but it nevertheless remains as wax — it doesn’t become something else.

For Aristotle, a substance can be an entity such as a person or a horse — both these beings can change, yet remain as person or horse. Spinoza took this idea to its very limit, regarding substance as one and indivisible.

Spinoza had developed his generalised idea of substance from René Descartes, his older contemporary who had revolutionised European thought with his Discourse on Method published in 1637.

For Descartes, there were two substances, mind and extension. Mind is of course the intangible world of thought, while extension is the tangible world of things.

But Spinoza took the notion of substance even further. Being the fundamental stuff of reality, substance must be self-subsisting — entirely independent; it doesn’t depend upon anything else by definition. He wrote,

“By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e. that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.”

In other words Substance is at the bottom of existence — it is what stands beneath all qualities and properties of things. The Latin substantia, translates to “standing beneath”, after all. It is the fundamental “stuff”.

Everything else is dependent on substance. Substance cannot be caused by anything else, since that would mean it would be dependent on whatever is causing it. There can only be one substance.

But if there is one substance, how is there change and difference? How is the world not just a singularity? How do we — in all our complexity — exist?

In the Ethics, Spinoza makes the claim that the one single substance has an infinite number of “attributes”, only two of which seem to be available to human sense — thought and extension.

Whereas Descartes made thought and extension fundamental as the two substances, Spinoza subsumes them within one substance as the primary genus of reality.

While “substance” refers to what reality fundamentally is — attributes are what constitute that reality to the human being. We are part of a palpable world of things, and we are part of a world of thought or mind — we experience reality within these two attributes.

The attributes of substance are the means by which we encounter its modes. Modes are all the properties of things that depend on substance — colour, shape, size, texture, weight, and so on. Modes explain the difference and change in the world — both in the attributes of thought and extension.

Qualities like orange, smooth, light, shiny and so on inhere in substance, they are modes, so are entities like particles, galaxies, trees, ponds and everything that makes up the world.

All modes taken together are an expression of substance. Reality is like a face changing expressions — while the expressions change, the face remains the same; it is still one face. This is how we should think of substance.

Spinoza the… Atheist?

This is where we come to the most surprising and controversial claim of Spinoza. Since substance is limitless, uncaused, existing in itself, and conceived through itself, it must also be God.

God is, by most definitions, limitless, uncaused, existing in itself, and conceived through itself. Spinoza takes this definition of a perfect being and finds it in substance. The claim is startling because substance is everything.

God, in Spinoza’s philosophy, is therefore everything too, not in everything, but actually everything. Stars, planets, plants, umbrellas, watering cans, bleach and orange juice are all part of God; nothing can exist or even conceived apart from God.

Everything, taken as a whole is described as nature by Spinoza, and so he propounded the idea that God and nature are one and the same thing. In the Latin prose of the Ethics, this is phrased as Deus Sive Natura — “God or Nature” — as a descriptor for both. Even in the relatively tolerant Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, this was a claim that could get you into a lot of trouble.

In 1656, long before Spinoza started writing the Ethics, he was spurned and cursed by the elders of the emigre Jewish community of Amsterdam. They wrote,

“By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza.”

Though it’s not known exactly why Spinoza was cursed, the herem mentions “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds”. Spinoza certainly challenged rabbinic authority and criticised religious doctrines, but perhaps there was a need for the community to disassociate itself with a rising intellectual.

Spinoza had by then developed radical ideas not only about Judaism, but about God, ethics and society in general.

The step the elders took was particularly extreme — the harshest ever delivered in the community — and it’s possible that Spinoza’s outspoken ideas endangered the standing and perhaps even the existence of the Jewish community in Amsterdam.

Despite his criticisms of organised religion, Spinoza devoted a considerable amount of the Ethics to God. The word “God” is used dozens of times throughout the book, and its opening chapter — “On God” — is devoted to God’s relationship with the universe.

Is it possible that a text drenched in references to God could be evidence of the writer’s atheism? According to Steven Nadler, this is surely the case.

Nadler contends that the very equivalence drawn between God and nature is an outright atheism — an erasure of God by emptying out the very concept of God.

Rather than being an attempt to avoid censorship — as some working in the Straussian approach to Spinoza have argued, it’s an outright atheism that speaks in the terms of a society that is itself drunk with God.

This was, after all, a society hundreds of years away from the comprehensive naturalistic theories — Darwinian evolution, modern cosmology, general relativity and so on — that are taken for granted today.

If God is the universe of which we are a part — a universe governed, according to Spinoza by cause and effect, then what is left of God? We have here a god without distinction, without agency and no existence prior to or after nature. This is a fully immanent, naturalistic God with universally predictable properties much like nature is understood to modern science.

For Nadler, Spinoza is an atheist precisely because he makes it clear that God is nature. When we dispense with all the anthropomorphism and stage-dressing that has accrued around the concept of God, we can agree that God is infinite, necessary, and eternal substance.

It’s from this starting point of definition that Spinoza guides us to the understanding that if God is indeed the infinite, eternal, and necessary substance, then God and nature are one and the same. Coming to this realisation, we can achieve “blessedness” not through obedience to ecclesiastical powers and irrational passions, but by understanding the universal principles inherent in nature.

Nature is fully available to our senses at every moment in our lives, it would be absurd to swap the word “God” for nature in our ordinary descriptions of the Cosmos.

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Religion and Blessedness

By making God equivalent to nature, Spinoza is effectively removing God. The concept of God is emptied of superstition, and nature fills the vacuum left behind. But what about the vacuum of meaning and morality?

Spinoza uses the religiously-charged language to describe the non-transcendent aspects of human understanding. “Blessedness” can be found in the perfect understanding of the workings of nature, taken as a whole. Words ordinarily associated with piety and faith are folded into the eudaimonia that follows from wisdom.

Morality, for Spinoza, is not about pleasing God or securing a place in paradise. Such an attitude is, ironically, in bad faith, but it also conceives of God as wanting of something (your good acts or prayers) and therefore not all-powerful as God necessarily is. In his appendix to the first chapter of Ethics, Spinoza ridicules the very notion of an intervening and personal god. He wrote,

“This doctrine takes away God’s perfection. For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which he lacks […] [the theologians] are necessarily compelled to confess that God lacked those things for the sake of which he willed to prepare means, and that he desired them. This is clear through itself.”

Nadler makes the case that Spinoza “really has no choice but to use the word ‘God’”, in the religious, cultural, and political context he was working within, “if he wants to succeed in drawing in his intended contemporary audience.”

For Nadler, God is an essential “common ground” upon which Spinoza can attempt to persuade his audience to abandon a superstitious and imaginative interpretation of God, and the attitudes and behaviours that come with such a notion (such as divinely-inspired moralisms, belief in divine intervention, and so on).

In this way, Nadler argues, “all the basic attributes that can most reasonably be assigned to God (eternity, infinity, necessity) can be transferred, in a truth-preserving way, to Nature.”

Blessedness and salvation, two words used in the Ethics, are not, then, the rewards of the pious who obey religious law. In fact, these are not rewards at all, but states of being that an individual experiences as a result of understanding nature, and their place within its workings. Blessedness is its own reward.

A God-drenched Text

So Nadler’s thesis is that Spinoza wasn’t espousing a cryptographic atheism in the censorious atmosphere of the Dutch Republic at the time, he was writing for his audience in terms they understood.

On the one hand Spinoza uses the word “God” countless times — the Ethics are washed through with God. But then, on the other hand, the idea of God is emptied out of content: there is nothing there that deserves reverence, nothing extra to nature.

But the question for the reader becomes — is the way nature is described a “thoroughgoing naturalism” as Nadler puts it?

At the heart of Nadler’s argument is really the notion that where there’s no faith in the divine, there is absence of belief in the divine. Implicitly, Nadler contends that a god that you couldn’t worship isn’t a god.

But other readings of Spinoza, such as Clare Carlisle’s, describe a faithless religiosity, a mode of living as being-in-God, which is spiritual as well as logical.

Carlisle points out in her book Spinoza’s Religion that the proposition most referred to within the Ethics is, “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.”

This proposition — number 15 in Book 1 — is referred to directly seventeen times, and indirectly dozens of times within the connected structure of the book.

The Ethics arguably presents a God that we can participate in, rather than vouch for in acts of faith — a new, perhaps truer conception of God.

The interesting question Carlisle raises then is, what does it mean to affirm the existence of God when “God” is not conceived of as transcendent, personal, and purposive being?

This comparison is only to show that Nadler’s claim is bold, but not necessarily untrue. It’s telling that many scholars can examine the same constellation of ideas, and see a tombstone or a prayer mat.

If anything it may demonstrate how cleanly and seamlessly Spinoza’s system is built. Regardless of your own view on Spinoza’s beliefs, Nadler’s appraisal speaks to the profound freedom that the philosopher grants us — that to understand is as much a path to blessedness as it is a moral obligation.

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Marcelle Hamel had trouble sleeping on the night of June 5th 1944, the hum of planes overhead kept her up.

She had earlier watched a distant bombing from her yard with her mother. The sky to the north had turned red with the fire. It was a sight the people of Normandy were used to as Allied bombers unloaded on the German defences.

The two returned to bed when the rumble of the bombings ceased, but the humming continued. Half asleep, Marcelle stared out of the window into the dimness outside.

In her dreamy state, she saw “fantastic shadows appearing from nowhere, dark against the chiaroscuro of the sky, like huge black parasols.” They seemed to “rain softly down onto the fields opposite and disappear behind the black line of the hedgerow.”

She got up and walked quietly to the lane outside where she came across an unexpected sight.

Seated on the fence of a neighbouring field was the silhouetted figure of a man. He was heavily loaded, armed “from head to foot” with a rifle, a pistol and a knife. The shadowy figure beckoned her over.

She asked him in English if his plane had been shot down. He whispered back to her in clear French, “It is the great invasion. Thousands and thousands of parachutists are descending here tonight. I am an American soldier….”

June 6 marks anniversary of “D-Day”, the largest seaborne invasion in history. It was the day that the tide of the Second World War turned. Close to 160,000 Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel to liberate France and start a new front in the Second World War.

The sheer scale and complexity of the operation makes it one of the most significant military operations in history. The “skin in the game” required of the United States to take control of the Allied effort created a profound shift in American attitudes towards Europe and a shake-up of international relations. D-Day was a watershed moment in world history.

The origins of D-Day began before the United States had entered the war. Planning for an invasion of occupied France started as soon as the British army was forced to evacuate from Dunkirk in 1940.

Vice Admiral Lord Mountbatten was recalled from Pearl Harbour to take up a new post in England. On his first day, he reported to Winston Churchill, who told him, “The whole of the south coast of England is a bastion of defence against the invasion of Hitler, you’ve got to turn it into the springboard for our attack.”

Churchill said this in October 1941 when Western Europe had been overrun and conquered, the Germans were invading a shocked and unprepared Russia and the United States had not yet entered the war. When it all seemed over, Churchill had his mind set on victory.

Against the odds, Britain had won one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in history, the Battle of Britain. The campaign was fought almost exclusively in the air, as a struggle for air superiority over the skies of southern England. While the Germans sought a negotiated peace from the British, the British fought to survive for another day.

The Nazis employed terror bombing tactics against British cities, killing almost 15,000 civilians in a matter of months. The Luftwaffe outnumbered The Royal Air Force by more than five hundred aircraft, but the British (with the help of aircrews from several allied and occupied countries, particularly Canada) triumphed through bravery and ingenuity.

Securing the skies over western Europe meant that a German invasion was unlikely. The United States soon joined the war and preparations could be made for a western front. Hundreds of thousands of American and Canadian troops amassed in England.

“They are supposed to be coming, why don’t they come?”

The war continued on a number of fronts. The Atlantic and the Arctic saw enormous sea battles as allies fought to maintain vital supply lines to Great Britain and to the northern ports of Russia. North Africa became a major theatre of land warfare when Fascist Italy joined Nazi Germany and attacked Egypt.

An allied invasion of Italy (the “soft underbelly” of the Axis-controlled continent) in 1943 was choked by German defences across the Apennine mountains and staggered to a halt.

Stalin, who had become a reluctant ally of Roosevelt and Churchill thanks to the German invasion of the Soviet Union (and breaking the peace pact between the nations) in 1941, continually pushed his western allies to form a new front in the west.

Soviet forces had gained momentum in repulsing the German invasion thanks to a bitter winter and the seemingly endless reserves of men who could fight — it is believed that there were up to 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side and yet the Soviets still counterattacked all the way to Berlin. But the Soviets desperately needed a new front to draw elite German forces away from the east.

While German generals were concerned at the prospect of such an occurrence, the Nazi hierarchy believed the allies would be broken on their defences. Joseph Goebbel’s goaded the allies with his slogan, “They are supposed to be coming. Why don’t they come?”

The decision was made in 1943 that Allied forces would invade Normandy in early June 1944. The United States, as the largest of the Allied forces, had taken command of the war effort. General Dwight Eisenhower was appointed the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces.

Churchill came to prefer a smaller scale Mediterranean invasion, landing in the Balkans from southern Italy. But the Americans favoured a Western Front, liberating France, believing it to be the fastest route to victory. The invasion was codenamed Operation Overlord.

The most elaborate operation of deception was executed to ensure the Germans could never suspect the time and place of the invasion.

German spies were turned by the XX Committee and sent back with information to mislead their controllers. This is where we got the phrase “double cross” from. The deception plan also included wooden aircraft, inflatable tanks and hundreds of fake landing ships.

Fuel tanks were disguised as ice cream parlours and radio communications were transmitted hundreds of miles by wire before being broadcasted over the air, concentrating radio “noise” far from where troops were amassed.

This all led German command to believe that invasions via Norway, Calais and southern France were possible, spreading their defences thinly along their “Atlantic Wall”.

A seaborne invasion of France of the scale envisaged seemed impossible at first. Beach landings required fine weather, and the weather could not be depended upon to stay fine for the many consecutive days that such an enormous invasion would require.

Capturing a port seemed the only option but ports along the Atlantic Wall bristled with German defences, requiring a bombardment that would render a port useless anyway.

The British conceived of the “crazy” idea of a man-made portable harbour, that could be towed across the English Channel and assembled in Normandy. With the promise of American timber and tugs, the plan was given the go-ahead and codenamed “Mulberry”. Huge concrete caissons were built to be towed then flooded to sink and form breakwaters for ships to drop troops and supplies en masse.

To achieve all this required an all-out assault, starting from the air.

Two Magic Words: Ham and Jam

One of the first objectives of D-Day was a crucial bridge over the Caen Canal now called Pegasus Bridge. 181 British light infantry and engineers were to land in powerless gliders at midnight to secure the bridge for the beachhead to come.

The paratroopers were so loaded with equipment that they struggled to climb the small ladders into their gliders. The troops were very quickly airborne — pulled aloft by Halifax bombers. They sat in darkness, the only light being the smouldering tips of cigarettes.

They sang to keep up their courage, old London songs, music hall numbers like Abie My Boy. Once they were over France, quiet was ordered and the men waited. The glider cast off and the noise of the Halifax engines receded, leaving total silence.

Major John Howard, the unit’s Commander, described a “tranquilising effect” that came over him seeing the cattle and horses grazing in the moonlight beneath the silently descending gliders.

A battle was to follow in moments. Some of the gliders landed at around one hundred miles an hour. Soldiers described the terror they felt at the sight of sparks from the contact between landing skids and flint in the ground. Some believed they were already under enemy fire.

The gliders bounced and shuddered to a halt, breaking up as they landed. Howard awoke in a deadly silent cabin. He was concussed. Every soldier onboard had been knocked unconscious by the crash, leaving the cabin in an eery stillness. “No one stirred, nothing moved.”

Outside the cabin, he heard the crashes of the other gliders, the noise of crunching wood. Howard looked at his watch. The crash had stopped it at sixteen minutes past midnight.

Many were injured in the landings, one drowned when a glider crash-landed in a pond.

The Lieutenant onboard, Richard Smith, was thrown through the cockpit windows “like a bullet” into the muddy ground and run over by his glider’s undercarriage as it careered onwards.

Despite sustaining a crippling knee injury, he “hobbled” into action covered in thick mud and carrying a borrowed Sten machine gun. Most of his platoon were still unconscious from the crash, he led just seven men into the pitch darkness for the battle.

The German defenders were taken by total surprise and quickly defeated. Pill boxes were blown out with grenades and tracer bullets lit the night sky during the firefight. When the soldiers hunkered down for a counter attack, they were surprised to see a German staff car approach at high speed.

The commander of the German force defending the bridge emerged from the car in a state of hysteria. Speaking in English he demanded to be shot, having lost the bridge and therefore his honour. He was captured and injected with morphine.

The Orne River bridge was captured without much resistance at all. The allies had feared that the Germans would detonate explosives under each bridge at the first sign of invasion, but they were unprepared.

The airborne units exchanged a success signal over their 38 set radios, two magic words: “Ham and Jam”, “Ham” for the canal bridge and “Jam” for the river bridge captured intact. The invasion had begun.

Airborne Assualt

The raid on Pegasus Bridge was part of a wider airborne assault of thousands of troops to secure the eastern and western flanks of the beachheads. In the west Americans were dropped, in the east, the British and Canadians.

More than 800 aircraft took part in the western missions Albany and Boston. They flew in enormous V formations at only 500 feet above the ground and stretching back 300 miles. Their cargo was the 13,000 Americans of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions.

Many of the very young men had not ventured out of their own state until the war. They were dropped in the darkness over a hostile territory thousands of miles from home. Eisenhower watched them take off from England with tears in his eyes.

The airborne men gazed down at the formidable armada making its way from England to Normandy. John Potts described the scene: “as far as the eye could see, there were ships and battleships… it really was an awesome sight.” Rear gunners got the full view of the airborne assault too, describing a dark sky filled with the twinkling lights of aircraft.

The paratrooper that Marcelle Hamel had met in the darkness was a Wayfinder. The elite paratrooper’s job was to find his way to the drop zones and lay markers for the pilots. Having parted with the mysterious soldier, Hamel described what happened next:

“The black silhouettes of airplanes arrive through the clouds and turn around in the sky. One of them passes just above our little school; parachutes open and float down like a mass of bubbles in the clear night…. In a few moments, the sky is nothing more than an immense ballet of parachutes.”

For most of the paratroopers, the landing wasn’t smooth at all. The C47s hit a fog wall at the coast of Normandy, sending a wave of panic among the pilots as flak exploded around them. Some flew too low. The troops they dropped hit the ground before their parachute could deploy and died on impact. Many drowned under the weight of their equipment in the plains that had been deliberately flooded by the German defence force.

To their horror, some of the 82nd’s 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment found themselves descending right into the village square of Sainte-Mère-Eglise as villagers fought to douse a huge house fire. The flames illuminated the men descending from the sky. A firefight opened up as the Americans landed among the German garrison in a scene of utter confusion.

Troops caught in the village’s lime trees were shot by the Germans who had come out to help extinguish the flames. Some were sucked into the fire as they landed, the grenades on their bodies added to the incandescence. Two Americans fought from the roof of the village church, having hit the steeple on their way down.

French civilians tried to distract the Germans as the paratroopers attempted to regroup. Only four men of a platoon of 36 survived to fight in the village as they waited for their comrades landing in the fields outside.

The American paratroopers assembled into groups in the darkness by clicking small metal crickets as a friendly signal to one another. They took the Germans largely by surprise and secured causeways necessary for the troops landing on Utah Beach to advance inland.

In the east, the eye witness accounts describe the chaos of the drop. In the same terrible conditions, confused pilots broke formation, poor radio signals meant that drops occurred in an uncoordinated manner. Men were dropped in the path of other aircraft. Paratroopers were killed mid-air when hit by friendly aircraft or enemy flak. Soldiers about to jump looked on in terror.

William John Le Cheminant of the Parachute Regiment saw “a plane cut a parachute and the occupant in half […] the chap went down and landed and burst into flames because he was carrying phosphorus grenades.”

Pilots taking evasive action to avoid other planes and paratroopers knocked their occupants off their feet. The troops, unable to stand again because of the weight of their packs, had to crawl to their jump, causing them to scatter more widely than intended.

The forces cleared the way for reinforcements and supplies arriving in hundreds of gliders. Jeeps and heavy weapons were unloaded from successful landings. But the battle raged on. Some of the gliders were shot up in mid-air or smashed to pieces in crash landings.

A much smaller British force than intended assembled to take out a fortified artillery battery. They had succeeded in causing a good deal of damage before they dug in for a German counter-attack.

The liberated French were accommodating to the paratroopers. Café Gondrée, owned by a resistance spy, George Gondrée, was opened up as a first-aid post. Gondrée dug up a stash of dozens of bottles of champagne that he’d buried in his garden at the start of the occupation and handed them out to the sick and wounded.

“There was a lot of cork-popping going on,” Major John Howard said, “and all my men in reserve at the other side of the canal at the time all wanted to report sick.”

The airborne troops dug in and waited, French civilians were told to stay in cellars. Then it came: the explosive maelstrom opened up.

Philip Crofts, a paratrooper described the man-made storm enveloping the area:

“Even at this distance inland my eardrums were going in and out, I thought they would burst. On top of that there were huge shells passing over us and it felt like they were tearing the skies apart. And we then knew the seaborne forces were coming in.”

Seaborne Assault

The barrage and bombing was immense, the Normandy coast was made a vision of hell. One witness described the French coastline as “all one mass of flame right the way down the coast. A terrific sight.”

Lawrence Alfred Moorcroft, a Petty Officer stationed on HMS Urbana described a swarm of shells and missiles, “Cruisers firing over the destroyers. Battleships firing over cruisers and destroyers and rocket ships. It seemed to us chaos. Never seen so many things firing.”

There were almost 5,000 landing ships and assault craft, escorted by six battleships, twenty-three cruisers, 104 destroyers, 152 escorts. 277 minesweepers cleared the sea ahead of them.

As they had set off from England, a lone piper on the bow a landing ship, wearing a battle dress of a kilt and tunic, played The Road to the Isles, a traditional Scottish marching tune. The sound of the bagpipes elicited cheers and songs from the crews of ships in the convoy, including the Marseillaise from the Free French sailors.

The “Great Abyss”

Despite the excitement and undoubted bravery, the soldiers on board were either inexperienced or battle weary from the campaigns in Africa and Italy. Uncertainty about what to expect occupied many minds. One American soldier wrote in his diary of “approaching the great abyss.”

The bombardment ceased. Thousands of men, sick from the motions of their flat bottomed landing craft, leapt into the shallows and made towards the beach under heavy fire.

“You’re not supposed to stop, get going.”

Sergeant Desmond O’Neill, an army cameraman, described moving in following the first wave of the beach invasion.

“We suddenly saw ahead of us smoke, grey smoke and mist mixed, and as we approached we saw obstacles in the water […] Then we started noticing one or two plops in the water, which must have been mortars, but nothing else. Then we heard gunfire, machine-gun fire, and then it seemed that once we got into the smoke we were in it. I immediately noticed on the left a landing craft tank, which had come in alongside us and gone ahead a little, and it suddenly caught fire. The whole thing seemed unreal. It’s not like a battle scene as one would imagine it or has been on film since. It was a very unreal atmosphere.”

“Each side of us there were wrecked boats, sometimes side on, sometimes upside down. There were bodies floating face down in the sea. There were men halfway up the beach who were in really peculiar positions, legs all over the place, really grotesque positions, and there were shells landing all around the sea and on the beach. The sand seemed to drag at your feet. It just seemed you couldn’t get going.”

“Bullets just came at you like raindrops.” Private William Edward Lloyd said, “You could hear them whistling and passing you and hitting the ground near you but you just kept going on.”

James Anthony Kelly, a Royal Marine Commando, and his comrades were hit by a shell. “There was a blinding flash and a terrible bloody smell of cordite and things like that and Charlie Hall was down on the deck and there was other fellows scattered about. I remember kneeling by Charlie Hall and blood was pumping out of his neck […] I’d only just knelt down and was saying to him, ‘Come on, Charlie, come on,’ and this voice said, ‘You’re not supposed to stop, get going.’”

The landing of American forces at Omaha Beach started disastrously owing to the poor weather conditions and an intact German beach defence force, which included battle-experienced German troops from the Eastern Front. The Americans were met by a barrage of machine gun fire, mortars and flamethrowers.

Hundreds of dummy paratroopers had been dropped at first light to fool the Germans and it had worked. German reserves had been sent on a wild goose chase searching for the non-existent American paratroopers. The wide scatter of paratroopers caused by the fog wall added to the confusion of the Nazi defences.

Mercifully, this bought time for the Americans under heavy fire on the beach. Despite taking thousands of casualties, the troops landing at Omaha formed a hard-fought bridgehead inland.

After D-Day

The Allies had not achieved their objectives by the end of D-Day itself. Only two beach-heads had linked, and the allied front remained unlinked for a further six days. The allies also failed to capture Caen until June 21st, a strategic objective for the landings. Casualties were high but not as high as the Allied commanders had dreaded.

The troops fighting on the coastal defences were only a taste of what was to come. Many German soldiers were handicapped in some way, such as deafness from previous fighting. Around a fifth of German troops were made up of unreliable conscripts from central Europe (mostly Poles) deemed to be ethnically German.

A good deal of the force were volunteers from the Soviet Union (“Osttruppen”). These men chose to fight for the Nazis rather than face the horrors of the eastern POW camps. Many of them surrendered immediately or had already joined French partisans.

The expected counterattack of the Germans’ elite SS Panzer divisions stationed further in-land was slow in coming. Rommel had lost control of the combined forces, they had been placed under the direct command of Hitler in Berlin. The political complications of high command bereft German forces of decisiveness.

They eventually came, and D-Day was only the start of some of the most ferocious battles of the Second World War. The Germans were now fighting for their survival and hit back hard. The SS Panzers were well-equipped, highly experienced and motivated troops.

For French civilians, the fighting was catastrophic. By the unusually bitter winter of 1944/45, a Normandy newspaper wrote of:

“The saddest time we have ever known. Because we still live in a world in flames, in a murdered France, in a ravaged region. No more houses, no more roofs over our head, and grief everywhere around us.”

The fanatical SS troops committed several atrocities, including the murder of 70 French civilians in reprisal for a resistance sabotage mission. Allied shelling and bombing must have seemed indiscriminate to the civilians trapped in Caen and surrounding villages and towns.

Around 35,000 French civilians died during the bombing and brutal fighting of the Battle of Normandy. Many more thousands were displaced and left homeless. Livestock killed in battle was piled high and burned as Allies moved forward.

The Longest Day

In many ways, D-Day was the moonshot before the 1969 moonshot. It was the culmination of an extraordinary exercise of collaboration, imagination, ingenuity, logistics and determination.

One pilot commented in his diary at the sheer complexity of the whole operation. “The airborne assaults, the quantity and variety of shipping, the number of army divisions, the tremendous weight of the air offensive. The scale and the precision of it all made our past efforts look insignificant.” The pilot and his squadron were left almost dumbstruck by the immensity of what they were involved in.

It was the moment that perhaps cemented the “special relationship” of the US and the British. The United States entry into the Second World War swung the balance of the two nations’ economic and diplomatic fortunes.

The former colony had been transformed from a powerful country into a mighty superpower during the war, its economy ballooned to fuel the output required by total war.

The two nations had bonded in the preparations necessary for D-Day, a testing ground for the kind of tight collaboration that formed the basis of NATO.

D-Day was also the making of Eisenhower, who went on to become President of the United States in 1952. Eisenhower was the perfect man to lead the Expeditionary Forces thanks to his cool temperament and diplomatic skills.

The five-star general had to deal with the rivalries of several talented but egotistical generals. George S. Patton and Bernard Mongomery were particularly difficult.

His organisational, diplomacy and oratory skills were no doubt honed by the invasion and contributed to his success as a stable President when the cold war stakes rose so high.

Quo Vadis

D-Day was not inevitable. Alternative histories could have played out. Churchill was ultimately against an invasion of France by the time the Americans had joined the war. The horrors of the Western Front of the First World War loomed in many minds.

Royal Air Force commanders were dismayed that their resources were switched to western Europe. They believed their devastating bombing campaigns would cause Germany to collapse from within.

Had the invasion of Normandy not occurred, the Cold War could have been entirely different. The Soviets had the Germans already on the back foot by February 1943. The war would have been long drawn out as the Soviets fought a war of attrition, but they may well have advanced as far as the Atlantic if D-Day had not occurred or indeed failed.

Whereas the United States’ Marshall Plan empowered their western European allies, the Soviets dominated the nations they “liberated” during the Second World War as client states. A communist Western Europe could well have been pitted against the British and Americans in a Cold War that the Soviets could have won.

It is easy to speculate about the possibilities, but it is hard to imagine what ordinary men and women went through on June 6th 1944.

Gliders taking paratroopers into the night of June 5th each had their name scrawled on them in chalk. One glider was christened Quo Vadis, a Latin phrase made famous by a legend about Saint Peter.

According to the legend, the Apostle fled Nero’s Rome in fear for his life, but on the road he saw a vision of Christ. Christ was carrying his cross on the opposite way — back to Rome. Peter asked, “Domine quo vadis?” (“Lord, where are you going?”) Christ told him he was going back to Rome to be crucified again. Realising his responsibility to face danger, Peter turned back.

All the men aboard Quo Vadis, weighed down by their armaments, descending in silence into the dark unknown — the “great abyss” — would have known that death was a strong possibility. The world would be a darker place without their courage.

Thank you for reading.

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This post was originally published in 2019 on Medium. This version is updated for 2026.

In Book 2 of his Meditations — “On the River Gran, Among the Quadi” — written while Marcus Aurelius was commanding his army on the Danube frontier, the emperor wrote in his famously curt style,

“Human life.

Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. …

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I have a working class accent. As soon as I speak, I can see people’s eyes betray their prejudices about me.

English people’s voices betray their class in a way that’s unmatched in the anglophone world.

The upper classes have “cut glass” accents, also known as “King’s/Queen’s English” or “RP” (received pronunciation). The lower classes speak in regional accents that often border on dialects. My own is a London accent, with glottal stops often taking place of t’s and h’s.

I remember at a birthday party finding myself standing at the bar beside a journalist. We sort of knew each other, having a mutual friend. As soon as I greeted him I could see in his eyes the annoyance that he might be stuck with me for at least a few minutes.

As I got talking to the journalist about civil rights — a matter close to his heart — it became evident that I had a PhD in a related topic. I could sense that I had utterly defied his expectations.

We went on to speak for an hour or so. His new enthusiasm to talk to me was tinged with a guarded disbelief at how the vulgarly-accented nincompoop he was talking to could be so cultured. His snobbery had rebounded and hit him in the face, he was suddenly humbled.

Spiritual Halitosis

Snobbery is commonly considered to be the way we arrange ourselves in the social strata. It’s seen as a trait that’s undesirable but fairly innocuous in the grand scheme of things. Snobbery is a petty sin, a spiritual halitosis: largely unwitting, and so lamentable but not damnable.

But this easy dismissal is itself a symptom of the problem. Suppose we considered snobbery as a deep-rooted and corrosive problem at societal scale? If we solved snobbery (is it impossible?) we’d at least vent the pressure we’re putting ourselves and the world under.

Snobbery is not just thinking you are better than another person. It’s more profound than that. Snobbery is really the belief in a correlation between social or material status and human worth.

The snob is a judge of others, but snobbery is also a judgement of ourselves. We need to audit our own standing to sneer at others’. It’s an affront to human dignity in every way you look at it, and yet it’s so pervasive it’s deemed a fact of life.

The flip side of snobbery is envy. These two emotions are mutually dependent. The snob in us feeds off envious eyes. As Seneca had it, “Nobody dines with a silver plate alone”.

Luxury and success demands an audience, and we willingly spectate. Social media allows us to take delight in the envy of others on an unprecedented scale. Like never before, we’re jostling for position on some great league table of those above us who we envy and those below us who we don’t.

In this scheme of things, we too easily and often enjoy our lives indirectly, taking delight in what others would think of our delight.

But it’s a losing game — an arms race of fake fun. The belief that happiness is found in being favourably compared kills any delight we’d experience from directly enjoying what we have and what we do.

Think of all those people who stand holding up their camera phones in concerts to post photos on social media. Those people want evidence that they’re having a good time to show their friends, but diminishing their own fun by doing it. Their fun becomes virtual and second-order.

Time and again studies show that comparing ourselves to other people is bad for us. We’ll always feel envy if we insist on playing the comparison game, because stoking envy has become a proxy of enjoyment.

We rot from within — our outward joys become hollow shows motivated by bitter competitiveness. Theodore Roosevelt put it most succinctly when he wrote that “comparison is the thief of joy.”

Intrinsic Value

Humanity is sinking into a globalised culture in which our self-worth is bound up with the way we consume.

This is no new thing, of course, but advertising, social media and mass production has hosed petrol on the flames of consumerism. Fast fashion, gas-guzzling vehicles and gadgets are harming our environment and etching away at our own souls.

And at the heart of this problem is snobbery. Everybody is looking to raise their standing in the world through excessive consumption. Our needs — like hunger, thirst and shelter — are limited by their satisfaction, but where there’s no need there’s limitless desire. There’s no need to impress others, and so the desire to impress is unlimited.

The relationships between man-made things are really the relationships between people. This may sound complicated, but here’s a simple example:

A designer t-shirt has a surplus value that’s neither linked to its use (warmth), nor the labour that went into it (cotton farmers, factory workers in, say, China), but rather in relation to other t-shirts. Who orders these objects in a hierarchy? We do.

Those designer t-shirts usually cost as little to make as any other, you’re investing in the immaterial intellectual property of the designer to enhance your social standing just a little. The designer’s marketing agencies conjure fantasies of status that we all want by combining those garments with other status signals.

Like religious objects that are thought to have magical properties thanks to the faith of believers, commodities like engagement rings and cars have a magical value thanks to our faith in status — a phenomenon that has no material basis, yet generates its own material consequences in the system of consumer goods.

Accents, education, achievements and reputations are also commodities in the snob-envy complex. Whether inherited or earned, they all add up to our social capital: the imprecise measure by which we assess ourselves and each other.

“Only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we wear like clothing.”

Seneca wrote this in the first century, yet here we are in the twenty-first century, still judging others by their shoes, their jobs, their education, accents and so on.

We’ve inherited all these values which we hold ourselves and those around us — including our loved ones — accountable to. Everybody becomes a balance sheet.

The point here is not to moralise about consumption. I’d never endorse living at subsistence level, or taking to the torture of asceticism. Neither am I a so-called reverse-snob who’s against upper-class accents or a good education.

Man-made goods are as good as they are useful and beautiful. I delight in my (second-hand) iPhone, it’s a whole world at my fingertips and a miracle of the global economy. I like well-made suits and shoes. I marvel at the intricacies of international cooperation that fabricate the humble pen between my fingers.

It’s just obvious that we wouldn’t want so much stuff if we didn’t feel the social pressure to buy it. There’s nothing wrong with materialism per se, it’s the immaterial worth, vis-à-vis status, we place on things that’s hurting us.

Equally, our non-material “possessions” — looks, talents, education, career, sense of humour and so on — hold immense value. Shall we directly enjoy them for what they are, or value them for the competitive edge they give us in vying for status? Should we only assume we’re as successful as others perceive us to be?

The point is that we should delight in the intrinsic value of our possessions and positive traits, not the status value. If we did that we wouldn’t judge ourselves so harshly. We also wouldn’t lie awake at night, worrying about the debt we’ve stacked up by overstretching our budgets on luxury cars and designer dresses to satisfy other people’s measures of success.

A Prison of Our Own Making

One thing that philosophers have taught us for millennia is what is truly us and ours, and what is not.

Seneca teaches us that anything that fate can take away cannot truly be ours. Neither our possessions, nor our occupation, nor even our reputation are “ours” and are certainly not “us”. “Praise in him,” Seneca wrote, “that which cannot be snatched away.”

What cannot be snatched away from us is the content of our character, our capacity to love or hate. Like the functions and forms of beautifully made objects, our character is where our intrinsic value lies.

If we saw human worth as intrinsic, and loved our possessions for their true worth we’d create a better world.

Nothing is stopping us from doing this. Our snobbery is a matter of faith; of attitude, not fact. We’re caught standing in a prison of our own making, the door is open, we can choose to walk out.

To save our minds and our ecosystem, we should enjoy more, not less. We should enjoy our achievements for their own worth, not because we’re getting ahead. We should love our possessions for their beauty and usefulness, not because they are fashionable.

We should enjoy our possessions more and freely, without comparison weighing on us, and change the world by doing just that.

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This article was originally written on Medium in 2020. This new version contains substantial changes.

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“The month is December,” Seneca writes, “and the city is sweating, more than ever.”

It’s the Saturnalia, Rome’s raucous winter festival. For weeks the city is turned upside down. Servants dine at their masters’ tables and speak freely while their masters serve them. Gambling is permitted in public. There is feasting, gifting and drinking. The whole city is a carnival of excess, exhaling a long, alcohol-tinged sigh.

It’s in this moment of sanctioned excess that Seneca takes the opportunity to write his eighteenth letter to his friend and mentee Lucilius. The normal rules are suspended. Discipline dissolves into indulgence. The world temporarily rewards excess rather than restraint.

The image many have of Stoicism is a grim philosophy of joyless self-denial. But Seneca’s letter dismantles this caricature entirely — it addresses how Stoics ought to approach festivals and celebrations.

The answer is not to throw ourselves into the revelry, and not to denounce it either. Instead, we ought to ask quieter, more introspective questions about how we manage the relationship between our principles and the practicalities of a social existence. Seneca advocates not escape into abstinence but self-mastery.

Moderation Versus Moralism

The question at hand is whether the Stoic should join the celebrations or spurn them. This question cuts to the heart of Stoic practice. How do you live virtuously in a world that seems designed to pull you off course?

Seneca’s attitude surprises. He doesn’t tell Lucillius to hole up with his books and avoid the festivities. Instead, he writes positively of controlled participation, and less enthusiastically of being distant and aloof.

We should not make ourselves conspicuous by differing too much from the ways of the community. A student of philosophy shouldn’t parade their philosophy like a badge or use virtue as a means of standing apart from others.

In his fifth letter, he writes of “those who wish to be noticed rather than make moral progress. Don’t be like them, altering your dress or way of life so as to attract attention.”

In the eighteenth letter he is disparaging about philosophy enthusiasts who hole themselves up in “paupers cells” built, ironically enough, into their otherwise comfortable homes.

This is crucial. Seneca understood that there’s a kind of vanity in ostentatious austerity, a pride that masquerades as virtue. The philosopher who makes a show of refusing every pleasure isn’t necessarily wiser than the reveller — they’re just differently vain.

Instead of being a killjoy at the party, we can disappear for a number of days to immerse ourselves in real deprivation — simple food, water, sleeping on the floor in rough bedding. Such a “trial”, an active training of personal discipline, is more effective than making a display of your “ethics” at the cost of other people’s enjoyment.

Abstaining in a showy way becomes an implicit condemnation of those who partake, and such condemnation reeks of moralism.

Stoicism isn’t concerned with moralising. It’s concerned with right and wrong, not good and evil. Moralism is part of the way primitive societies and groups organise themselves — requiring rules and unthinking compliance to those rules.

Being a form of virtue ethics, Stoicism advocates making enlightened decisions in context about what the right action is. Reason, rather than rule-bound conformity, is the guiding principle.

Epictetus, teaching decades after Seneca’s death, likewise advises that philosophers shouldn’t busy themselves condemning or preaching to those who are unprepared for a more thoughtful life. To do so is to become a moralist, compromising your own virtue.

Instead, we should accept people’s habits and customs for as long as those habits and customs do not harm our integrity. He uses the example of Saturnalia festivities to illustrate his point.

“When children come to us clapping their hands and saying, ‘Today’s the Saturnalia, rejoice!’, do we reply to them, ‘There’s nothing to rejoice at in that’? Of course not, we clap in return. Well then, you should do the same — when you’re unable to make someone change his views, recognize that he is a child, and clap as he does. Or if you don’t care to act in such a way, you have only to keep quiet.” (Discourses 1.29)

So Seneca too recommends a similar path: “Do as others do. But not in the same manner.” During festivals like the Saturnalia, the Stoic can relax certain habits, can participate in the general spirit of things.

The wise person ought not live as other people live, but will have the same appearance as them and partake in the same social rituals.

This is because, for Seneca, the “very first thing that philosophy promises is fellow feeling, a sense of togetherness among human beings. By becoming different, we will be cut offf from this. If we are not careful, the very measures that are meant to win us admiration will instead make us objects of hatred and ridicule.” (Letter 5)

Keeping Your Head

So how should Stoic participate in festivities? In On the Tranquility of Mind, Seneca writes,

“we gain strength […] by social meals and a more generous allowance of wine: at times we ought to drink even to intoxication, not so as to drown, but merely to dip ourselves in wine: for wine washes away troubles and dislodges them from the depths of the mind, and acts as a remedy to sorrow as it does to some diseases. The inventor of wine is called Liber, not from the licence which he gives to our tongues, but because he liberates the mind from the bondage of cares, and emancipates it, animates it, and renders it more daring in all that it attempts. Yet moderation is wholesome both in freedom and in wine.”

There’s a difference here between enjoyment and submission. The danger of festivities isn’t pleasure itself but the loss of self-possession that comes when pleasure becomes compulsion. When you stop choosing and start being carried along.

Pleasure in itself is in Stoic terminology an “indifferent”. It is neither good nor bad because the only good is virtue and the only bad is vice. Pleasure isn’t a vice, so the Stoic shouldn’t avoid pleasure, but compulsion compromises control, and control is important to virtue.

Drinking alcohol is particularly pernicious, since we lose the sense of shame that acts as a check on our impulse.

We’ve all seen this happen — at office parties, at weddings, at any gathering where the drinks freely flow. People say things they’ll regret. They do things that seem hilarious or clever in the moment but mortifying the next morning.

If you don’t drink, there’s no good reason to start, and if you do intend to drink, promise yourself you’ll maintain control. The person who wakes up with a pounding head and a churning stomach, unable to remember what they said or why they’re missing their coat, didn’t expand their spirit, they vacated it.

What emerges from Seneca’s writings is a portrait of the Stoic as someone who moves through the world with a kind of loosened vigilance. The good Stoic isn’t rigid, sullen and indignant, but rather bends with circumstances without ever breaking.

When everyone around you is losing their head, there’s tremendous power in keeping yours. Not through teeth-clenched restraint, but through understanding what actually matters.

The Stoic at the Saturnalia can laugh, can indulge a little and can enjoy the party, but what they don’t do is mistake the party for life itself. They don’t confuse pleasure with eudaimonia — enduring fulfilment. They don’t surrender their judgment to the momentum of the crowd.

This is the art of it. To participate without being absorbed. To enjoy without being possessed. To remain yourself even as you adapt to your surroundings.

And perhaps most importantly, they’re someone who doesn’t confuse the performance of virtue with virtue itself. They don’t need everyone to know they’re a philosopher. They just need to live according to their principles, whether anyone’s watching or not.

The festival will end. The party will be over. What remains is you. Seneca’s letter offers a way to enjoy the festival and still proudly face yourself in the mirror the next morning.

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