Spinoza's Radical Theology

The Metaphysics of the Infinite

Charlie Huenemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317547013
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

The advent of modern science brought deep challenges to traditional religion. Miracles, prophecy, immortal souls, absolute morality - all of these fundamental notions were challenged by the increasingly analytical and skeptical approach of modern scientists. One philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, proposed a new theology, rooted in a close analysis of the Bible, which could fit this new science and provide a sound basis for a social order. "Spinoza's Radical Theology" explains the mechanics and meaning of Spinoza's ideas and how they can inform the questions with which we still struggle today.

1

Reading scripture rightly

Those who consider the Bible in its current state a letter from God, sent from heaven to men, will undoubtedly protest that I have sinned “against the Holy Ghost” by claiming the word of God is erroneous, mutilated, corrupt and inconsistent, that we have only fragments of it, and that the original text of the covenant which God made with the Jews has perished.

(Theological-Political 12.1)

[M]y intellect does not extend so far as to embrace all the means God possesses for bringing men to the love of himself, that is, to salvation.

(Letters 21, to Blijenburgh)

CONTROVERSIES IN INTERPRETATION

Spinoza published his Theological-Political Treatise (1670) in the midst of a controversy over how the Bible is to be interpreted: a controversy that seems to be present in just about every age. The basic tension is always between what the Bible seems to say, at least on its surface, and the various sets of doctrines and beliefs we want to see in it. The two are usually quite different. Broad traditions within Judaism and Christianity understand God to be an infinite, perfect and eternal being, omniscient and omnipotent and perfectly benevolent. Reason itself, it has seemed, even requires this view of a perfect being. But the Bible only occasionally supports such an idea. The same traditions have wanted to see the Bible as coherent, factually accurate and as relevant to our age as to any other; yet the Bible itself seems reluctant to meet this wish, and presents itself as an untamed jungle, with no shortage of puzzles and paradoxes that reason is unable to penetrate. So various strategies of interpretation have developed over time, offering different ways to resolve this basic tension between scripture and reason.

Two possible broad strategies emerge in response to this tension: one can find ways to read the truths of reason into scripture (“biblical rationalism”, so to speak), or one can prefer what scripture says to what reason demands (“biblical literalism”). Both strategies were represented in the controversy as it surfaced in Spinoza’s time.

On the one hand, there was Lodewijk Meijer, a friend of Spinoza’s, who represented biblical rationalism. In his Philosophy as the Interpreter of Holy Scripture ([1666] 2005), Meijer argued that in order to get at the true sense of the Bible, we must find the genuine truth hidden in the Bible. In order to do this, we must first know, through science and philosophy, what is clearly and distinctly known to be true; and then we must find ways to interpret the Bible so that it reflects this knowledge. Now someone might object that this seems more like misinterpreting the Bible than interpreting it correctly. But Meijer had a clever answer to this objection. He reasoned that God would be able to foresee all of the possible ways in which humans might interpret or misinterpret scripture. Moreover, God would also foresee all of the interpretive difficulties we were bound to face, as humans learned more about the natural world and discovered apparent conflicts between what the Bible seems to tell us about the world and what reason tells us about it. (For example, the Bible tells us Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, yet modern science tells us it is the earth and not the sun that moves, and so on.) Since we are rational creatures, it is natural for us to try to find new ways of interpreting scripture, ways that allow us to square it with what reason teaches. (So we interpret Joshua’s command as really being a command for the earth to stop revolving.) God would foresee all this as well, of course, so we reach Meijer’s intended conclusion: that the intended meaning of scripture – God’s own authorial intent behind the work – is the interpretation that we shall construct as we try to square scripture with what reason teaches. God intended for us to use our reason in obtaining the right interpretation of scripture; reading the truth as reason teaches it into scripture gets us to the intended meaning of scripture.

Meijer’s conclusion was, at the same time, an ingenious attempt to preserve the widespread conviction that the Bible must be true with a very real and pressing need to find some principled way of adjudicating among competing interpretations of scripture. As the old Dutch saying has it, elke ketter heefi zijn letter (every heretic has his text), and there never has been a shortage of impassioned readers finding passages to oppose one another’s interpretation of scripture. But what reason teaches us, Meijer believed, must be univocal; we never will discover both a claim and its contradictory to be true. Thus reason provides a neutral ground for sorting out which interpretation is correct, and can put to rest the endless wrangling over passages and how to interpret them.

But the wrangling, of course, was not put to rest. The following year, Petrus Serrarius responded to Meijer from a stance that prized scripture, as interpreted through the Holy Spirit, over the truths known by reason. Serrarius was sceptical both of the power of reason to unlock the meaning of scripture and of the legitimacy of religious institutions. He believed our best course is to pray as individuals for God’s guidance and inspiration, and patiently await the second coming (which he had predicted would come in December 1662; see Fix 1990: 72–7, 106–8). In his 1667 response to Meijer, Serrarius argued that it must be the Holy Spirit, and not reason, that decides our interpretations of scripture. He could profitably enlist Paul as an authority advocating the same position:

For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.

(1 Cor. 2:11–13)

It is the Spirit that guided the hands of scripture’s ancient authors, and thus the same Spirit is required for us to understand what was intended. Reason, or human wisdom, has nothing to offer.

One of Serrarius’s motivating worries is easy to appreciate. If, as Meijer had argued, natural knowledge and reason give us all the guidance we need to interpret scripture, then why exactly does anyone need scripture? Why not simply live by reason? If scripture has any value at all, it must be because there are some important truths that cannot be known through reason, and can be known only through some supernatural agency or avenue such as the Holy Spirit. Reason must be insufficient.

Several other books contributed to the controversy. Louis Wolzogen argued in 1668 for a middle way, which urged that natural knowledge or reason should guide our interpretations (when that knowledge was beyond all doubt), but it should not be allowed to touch the central mysteries of Christianity, which must be revealed to us by the Holy Spirit (see Israel 2001: 205–8). Samuel Maresius argued in 1670 that the Cartesian philosophers of the day (such as Meijer) were making difficulties where in fact there were none. The true interpretation of scripture is on its surface, and is accessed easily and naturally (see Preus 2009: ch. 3; see also Israel 2001: 209–12). (So long, we may be tempted to add, as one does not probe very deeply or think too long about it.)

So Spinoza entered into the fray in 1670 with his Theological-Political Treatise. As we shall see, his view was in some ways a compromise. He agreed with Meijer that, at least on the core issues, scripture and reason were indeed in harmony with one another (although Spinoza certainly did not approve of Meijer’s method of interpretation).¹ And he agreed with Serrarius that reason cannot offer everything scripture provides (although he certainly did not share Serrarius’s scepticism towards reason). But this “compromise”, of course, was not in any way a peaceful settlement of the controversy. Indeed, it initiated another controversy large enough to eclipse the earlier one entirely.

According to Spinoza, what we shall find when we study scripture carefully is that it is far less magical and other-worldly than is commonly supposed. We may think initially that it is full of stories of humans communicating with God and impossible miracles. But in fact, Spinoza claims, it is not. The Bible is instead a work that is very open about the fallibility of its prophets and the perfect ordinariness of its so-called miracles. The Bible, in fact, does not present itself as anything other than a set of recommendations about how one should believe and behave if one does not have accurate knowledge of the natural world around them. Spinoza, like the young Cavenian, thinks we can recognize this without losing any of our esteem for this ancient work.

To understand how he makes his case, we shall examine his discussions of prophets, miracles and scripture’s moral teachings. Then, from these discussions, we shall assemble a more general account of Spinoza’s attitude towards scripture.

PROPHECY, SPINOZA STYLE

Prophecy, according to Spinoza, is “certain knowledge about something revealed to men by God” (Theological-Political 1.1). He immediately notes that, under this definition, natural knowledge could also be understood as prophecy, since “what we know by the natural light of reason depends on knowledge of God and his eternal decrees alone” (Theological-Political 1.2). Indeed, Spinoza argues that natural knowledge has as much right to be called “divine” as any other kind of knowledge, since all the natural truths about the world are ultimately grounded in God’s nature and God’s decrees. But, of course, most people mean something else when they talk about “prophecy” and “prophets’, so Spinoza turns to the knowledge humans might gain through avenues other than the natural light of reason. More specifically, he turns to the way in which the Bible talks about such non-natural knowledge.

What he finds, he claims, is that in every instance of prophecy described in the Bible, the prophets in question never are given truths directly from God (except for Christ – a special case we shall discuss shortly). Instead, the truths are revealed to the prophets always through words or images, either privately (when the prophet is in some kind of dream or “vision” state) or publicly (in such a way as to also be observable by other people). In neither of these cases can it be said that God is communicating directly with the prophets; he communicates only through the mediation of some created thing.

Consider first the prophecies that come in dreams and visions. Abimelech (Gen. 20.6) and Joseph (Gen. 5–11) are explicitly said to have received God’s instructions while dreaming. David (1 Chron. 21:16), Balaam (Num. 22:22–34), Joshua (Josh. 5:13–15), and Isaiah (Isa. 6) all experienced visions of God or of God’s angels. Only Moses, Spinoza argues, heard a real voice; and he deduces from Deuteronomy 34.10 (“And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face”) that every prophet after Moses must have encountered God only through dreams or visions. These “visions”, Spinoza explains, are thoroughly imaginative, meaning that they engage the imaginative capacities of the prophets, which means that they might not reflect anything real in the physical world. Imaginative visions, whether divine or mundane in content, can easily be hallucinations or misperceptions. Furthermore, if we agree with traditional theology and Spinoza’s own metaphysics that God is not any sort of finite corporeal body, we know that any “vision” of God must not be really a veridical perception of God. God is not the sort of being that can be seen, or even heard, in any normal way. Any vision must then be, at most, an imaginative idea meant to somehow represent God.

Traditional interpreters of the Bible would agree, in a way, with this account. But, of course, they would add that the dreams or visions experienced by the prophets had God as their cause, and not the sort of ordinary causes that typically bring about dreams and hallucinations. But here Spinoza agrees in return:

I confess that I do not know by what natural laws prophetic insight occurred. I might, like others, have said that it occurred by the power of God, but then I would be saying nothing meaningful. … For everything is done by the power of God. Indeed, because the power of nature is nothing other than the power of God itself, it is certain that we fail to understand the power of God to the extent that we are ignorant of natural causes.

(Theological-Political 1.27)

So Spinoza agrees that the prophetic visions are caused by God, but insists that this is no different, in the end, from saying that they are brought about by natural causes. He confesses that he is in no position to present any account of those causes (presumably because we do not have enough of an account of the details in each circumstance), but he is confident that there is, in each case, a natural explanation. This is surely not something most traditional theists would accept; we shall see Spinoza’s defence of his claim next, when we turn to his account of miracles.

Now Spinoza also claims that, at least in some instances, God communicates to prophets in public ways, that is, ways that are not purely private mental experiences, as dreams and hallucinations are, but could be shared by more than one observer. His central example is God’s communication of the Ten Commandments to Moses, which he thinks is best understood as a case where God communicated with Moses with a real voice, “that is, in the manner in which two men normally communicate their thoughts to each other by means of their two bodies” (Theological-Political 1.11).² So this is not a case in which some dream or vision fails to correspond to reality; the experience is veridical. And this makes the case especially puzzling to Spinoza:

For it seems quite contrary to reason to assert that a created thing [such as a voice] depending upon God in the same way as other created things, could express or explain in its own person the essence or existence of God in fact or words, that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: Spinoza’s theological project
• 1. Reading scripture rightly
• 2. God, as known by reason
• 3. The genesis of all things
• 4. Our place in the world
• 5. Spinoza’s republic
• Conclusion: Spinoza vs Nietzsche
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index