SOURCE: “Spinoza's Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 343-82.

[In the essay that follows, Donagan explores Spinoza's fusion of naturalism and supernaturalism in his theology, and discusses his views on particular issues such as revelation, faith, and the immortality of the soul.]

Spinoza's theology, although original, owes much to the cultural soil that nourished it. His parents were among the many “Marranos”—Portuguese Jews who in their native country had been compelled outwardly to embrace Roman Catholicism—who had emigrated to Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century. In the freedom of their new country, the immigrant Marrano community set out to recover its full religious heritage, and to shed beliefs and practices contrary to it. However, some of its members, of whom Spinoza was one, not only remained attached to non-Jewish elements in their Marrano culture, but, having embraced the revolution in the physical sciences associated with Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes, wished to pursue its implications for religion.¹ When he was twenty-three, partly because he would not renounce these non-Jewish interests, the Amsterdam synagogue expelled and cursed him. Yet even among the radical Christians who befriended him, and who repudiated the trinitarian and Christological doctrines he found absurd, only a small circle of intimates were prepared to follow him when he jettisoned the conception of God as a supernatural creator of the natural universe, and developed a “naturalized” theology, in which the natural universe, as conceived in Baconian-Cartesian natural science, derives its existence from nothing above and beyond it.

Despite its radical naturalism, Spinoza's theology is articulated much as are the supernaturalist ones he rejected. It has two major divisions, speculative and practical. Speculative theology treats of God's existence and nature, and of his relation to the natural world and the human beings in it. Practical theology treats of how human beings are to live, given God's nature and their relation to him; and it subdivides into a natural (or philosophical) part, which treats of what can be established by reason in the light of human experience, and a revealed part, which treats of what God has communicated to individual human beings.² While traditional speculative theology likewise had a revealed as well as a natural part, Spinoza's does not. On both historical and philosophical grounds he contended that all divine revelation to individuals is practical. It follows that little can be learned from revelation about the nature of God and his relation to the world: What is known of them that matters is philosophical. It also follows that the nature of revelation is not itself revealed: Knowledge of it is derived partly from historical reports of alleged revelations, some of them spurious, and partly from philosophical considerations.

Spinoza expounded the various parts of his theology in the following writings: his speculative theology in his posthumously published Ethics Parts 1 and 2 (the first half); his historical-philosophical theory of divine revelation and of the limits of revealed theology in the Theological-Political Treatise, which he published anonymously in 1670; and his practical theology in the Theological-Political Treatise and in Ethics Parts 4 and 5. In what follows, I take my primary task to be to establish the sense of what he wrote, never forgetting that, consistently with his motto “Caute,” he was reserved, especially in the Theological-Political Treatise, which he published during his lifetime, and in letters to correspondents who had not proved themselves friends; and that he made free use of recognized literary devices such as irony.

The chief obstacles to understanding these writings are two: one internal, and one external. The internal one is that the diction of his Ethics is apt to mislead readers who are not vigilant, especially if they neglect the Theological-Political Treatise, the Dutch version of his Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being, and his Correspondence, above all his letters to and from Oldenburg. That diction is scholastic-Cartesian; and, as he must have been aware, much of what he wrote, although not all, makes sense if his words are taken in their scholastic-Cartesian senses. However, he assigns new senses to many of the expressions he uses, sometimes explicitly, and sometimes implicitly by the structure of his reasoning or by his examples. Readers who have persuaded themselves that Spinoza is the last of the medievals or the first of the absolute idealists are apt to overlook the passages in which he does so.

The chief external obstacle to understanding Spinoza's theological writings is the notion that they are esoteric, which Leo Strauss has made fashionable.³ According to Strauss, Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, like the writings of Plato, and of medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers menaced by orthodox persecution, has a double meaning: the “exoteric” or surface meaning unintelligent readers like censors will take it to have, and the “esoteric” or hidden meaning intelligent readers, alert to signs such as deliberate contradictions and inapposite examples, will detect in it. The esoteric meaning may not only go far beyond the exoteric one, but may even contradict it. While I have no space to examine Strauss's case thoroughly,⁴ I shall not be able wholly to avoid examining his interpretation of Spinoza's view of Jesus, “whom he regularly calls Christ,” as sinister (Strauss 1988: 171).

1. NATURAL THEOLOGY

In natural theology, Spinoza in Ethics Part 1 breaks with Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy by conceiving God, not as the creator of human beings and of the world they inhabit, but as an infinite being “in” which they exist as finite modes (E 1p15). No substance except God, he contends, can be, or be conceived; and he draws the inevitable inference that the extended and thinking things of everyday experience “are either attributes of God, or affections [i.e., modes] of God's attributes” (E 1p14c2). God, he concludes, cannot create anything outside himself. He is “the immanent, not the transient, cause of all things,” and not of their existence only, but also of their essence, which cannot be identical with their existence (E 1p18, 24, 25).

Notwithstanding these heresies, he implies that two of his three proofs of God's existence in Ethics 1p11d, as well as an additional one in its scholium, are a priori; and of these four, two not only look like the “ontological” proofs offered by Descartes and Leibniz, but one is reminiscent of those of Anselm and of Duns Scotus (E 1p11d, s). Since he also follows many orthodox theologians in deducing from God's infinity the negative “attributes” they ascribed to him, which he denied to be genuine attributes—namely, indivisibility, uniqueness, causal independence, eternity, immutability and the indistinguishability of his existence from his essence—(E 1p13, 14c1, 17c1, 20, 20c2), many commentators have reduced Spinoza's natural theology to a stage in the supposed advance from scholasticism to Hegelian idealism. As they read him, he conceived the infinite positive attributes which he ascribed to God, such as extension, thought, and others to which human beings have no access, as attributes only in the sense that they each appear to some finite beings, human or nonhuman, to constitute God's essence, even though they do not in fact constitute it.⁵ Extension, for example, is no more than a phenomenon bene fundatum (“well-founded phenomenon”), in the terminology Leibniz was to introduce.

While such readings will always captivate those attracted by Hegelian history of philosophy, they are incompatible not only with the great scholium to Ethics 1p15, but also with what Spinoza discloses in his early Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being⁶ about the reflections on his predecessors that led him to the natural theology of the Ethics.

In the “Short Outline” preceding the text of the Short Treatise,⁷ Spinoza's editor describes him as having “an idea of God” according to which: “he defines God as a being consisting of infinite Attributes, of which each is infinitely perfect in its kind. From this he then infers that existence belongs to [God's] essence, or that God necessarily exists.” This reverses the order in which most medieval theologians—Muslim, Jewish, and Christian—derived the divine attributes. Both Maimonides and Aquinas, for example, begin with the identity of God's essence with his existence (esse), and infer, first, that God exists necessarily and not contingently, and then that his existence cannot be limited by his essence, that is, cannot be limited to the power of any given kind of thing as opposed to that of any other. They then conclude, in Maimonides's words, that while we can know that God is infinite in the sense that “all deficiencies are negated” with respect to his essence, this knowledge is merely negative: We “cannot apprehend his quiddity”—what he is (Maimonides 1963: 132-137 [I.57-58]; Aquinas 1964-6: I.xii.11-12).

Maimonides confined nonnegative human knowledge of God to his existence and to his works—his creation of the world and to his interventions in it, as revealed in the Scriptures (Maimonides 1963: 280-359 [II.13-31]; 502-10 [III.25-26]; and 618-28 [III.51]). Aquinas was only slightly less restrictive. He asserted that human beings can demonstrate that nonnegative terms standing for pure perfections (such as wisdom) are true of God, although the only senses they can attach to those terms when applied to God are analogical. Thus they can know that God is wise, not in the only way that human experience enables them to understand positively—the imperfect and derivative one in which human beings are wise—but in a perfect way which they can only understand as not imperfect: the way in which the first cause of all wisdom is wise (Aquinas 1964-6: I.13.1-3). Yet Maimonides and Aquinas were both agreed that, since God cannot be composed of elements, he must, in the technical language of scholasticism, be “simple,” and hence that the many “attributes” he can be shown to possess cannot be really distinct. In predicating different perfections of God, whether negatively or analogically, human beings do no more than ascribe to him, in different imperfect ways, a simple perfection they cannot comprehend (Maimonides 1963: 235-41 [II.Introduction.1]; 249-52 [II.9b-10b]; Aquinas 1964-6: I.13.4ad3).

A caustic remark in the Short Treatise shows that Spinoza derided this medieval consensus at a very early stage in his thinking. “[T]he philosophers,” he wrote, meaning the medieval natural theologians, “sufficiently conceded … that they have a very slight and inconsiderable knowledge of God” when they denied that a “legitimate definition of God can be given,” giving as their ground that such a definition “must represent the thing absolutely and affirmatively, and … [that] one cannot know God affirmatively, but only negatively” (ST I.7). And he went on to attribute their complacency in ignorance to their Aristotelian mistake that legitimate definitions of substances—that is, of beings neither predicated of nor present in another—or of accidents, of which there are nine fundamental categories,⁸ “must be by genus and difference.” Descartes had corrected this mistake by showing that the essences of created substances are only two, each constituted by a single principal attribute that is the subject-matter of a fundamental science, and that Aristotelian accidents of a substance—beings that exist only as “present in” it—are each no more than modifications, or “modes,” of the attribute constituting its essence. Thus a noncomplex body, or corporeal substance, is constituted by the attribute of extension (i.e., spatial three-dimensionality); and its modes at any given time are its shape, size, and state of motion or rest relative to other bodies. Aristotelian accidents of a complex body that are not reducible to modes of extension—for example, its hue as seen—are not present in it at all, but are propensities of the modes of the bodies composing it to cause certain modes of thinking in embodied thinkers.

From the beginning, as his Short Treatise shows, Spinoza saw Descartes's scheme as the foundation of a new theology as well as of a new physics. A definition in Cartesian science is not by genus and differentia; and that of a substance simply states what its Cartesian principal attribute is. Such attributes “require no genus, or anything else through which they are better understood or explained; for since they, as attributes of a being existing through itself, exist through themselves, they are also known through themselves” (ST I.7). Definitions of modes, by contrast, specify in what modifications of the principal attribute of their substances they consist, and exist wholly “through” those attributes (ST I.7). Like most of his scientifically-minded contemporaries, Spinoza believed that Descartes had shown that the physical universe is an unbounded extended plenum, in which bounded or finite things exist as modifications by virtue of internal motions the quantity of which is conserved. Empty space is a nonthing; for an attribute must be an attribute of something, and the extension of an empty space would be an attribute of nothing. Since a vessel emptied of everything extended must collapse, one that seems to be empty, for example, a glass jar emptied by an air-pump, can have been emptied only of whatever stuff (air) an air-pump pumps, not of the finer stuff it cannot pump. And since no extended body can move from the place it occupies unless some other extended body or bodies replace it, all motion in the infinite plenum must be vortical, like the motion that goldfish swimming in a bowl produce in the water in it. The infinite plenum, however, is not absolutely infinite; for it has no modes that are not modes of extension. It cannot, for example, think. But in its kind—res extensa—it is infinite.

Rightly apprehensive that his physics would prompt heretical theological speculation, Descartes himself protested that the extended corporeal plenum is not infinite in any legitimate sense, but merely “indefinite”:

[I]n the case of God alone, not only do we fail to recognize any limits in any respect, but our understanding positively tells us that there are none. [But] … in the case of other things, our understanding does not in the same way tell us that they lack limits in some respect; we merely acknowledge in a negative way that the limits they have cannot be discovered by us.

(Principles of Philosophy 1.27)

This, however, obfuscates a distinction that Spinoza saw, and is there for anybody to see: that between infinity in a kind and absolute infinity, or infinity in every kind. In discussing the corporeal universe in its kind, that is, as an extended substance, Descartes wrote:

[T]his world, that is, the whole universe of corporeal substance, has no limits to its extension. For no matter where we imagine the boundaries to be, there are also some indefinitely extended spaces beyond them, which we not only imagine but also perceive to be imaginable in a true fashion, that is, real.

(Principles of Philosophy 2.21; emphasis added)

This implies, not only that “we merely acknowledge … that the limits [this world has] cannot be discovered by us,” but that there are no such real limits, because beyond any finite extended thing there are real extended spaces.

What of the scholastic objection⁹ that, since what is extended is divisible, it must be made up of finite parts, and so cannot be an infinite substance? Spinoza had found its refutation as early as when he wrote the Short Treatise, and repeated it in Letter 12 and Ethics 1p15s. Neither the parts human beings distinguish in extended space, nor the whole considered as composed of those parts are “true or actual beings, but only beings of reason” (ST I.2). The extended universe is in fact indivisible, although for some practical purposes we must think of it as divided into parts; but the parts into which we mentally divide it are not true and actual beings, but mere entia rationis, like the hours into which we divide the day. Not only is this infinite extended plenum not created, as Descartes had mistakenly believed, but two predicates are true of it which traditional theology held to be true only of God: namely, “exists in itself” and “is conceived through itself.” In other words, like all infinites, it is a substance.

By saying that the infinite extended plenum “exists in itself” Spinoza meant that it is its own immanent cause, that is, it depends on itself for its existence. Immanent causation is the self-dependence of an independent existent, and the other-dependence, or dependence on an independent existent, of any dependent existent or mode. Although the only laws of immanent causation discovered by human beings about the extended plenum are laws of conservation—that both its infinite quantity and the proportion of motion to rest in it are always the same—it can be inferred from the nature of substance in general that there must be others by which it immanently causes the changing states of motion and rest that occur in it. That inference is confirmed by the discovery of laws of transient causation according to which one state of motion and rest is succeeded by another. When E. W. von Tschirnhaus suggested in a letter that of itself the infinite extended substance must be an inert mass, Spinoza flatly denied it, and declared that the nature of the actual infinite extended substance—that is, the laws by which it immanently causes whatever it does—must determine not only whatever motion and rest occur in it, but also what unchanging laws of transient causation govern the continual changes in the motion and rest of finite bodies in it.¹⁰

Having affirmed what Descartes had denied, that extension is an attribute expressing an essence that is infinite in the strict sense, and that the medieval objections to the infinity of the extended universe are unsound, Spinoza naturally proceeded to inquire whether thought (cogitatio), the second of the really distinct attributes that constitute Cartesian created substances, also expresses an infinite essence.

Jewish and Christian theologians, while speaking with the vulgar in referring to God's intellect and in ascribing infinite knowledge to it, at the same time endorsed a principle which Maimonides had said “should be established in everybody's mind,” namely,

that our knowledge or our power does not differ from [God's] knowledge or His power in the latter being greater and stronger, the former less and weaker, or in other similar respects, inasmuch as the strong and the weak are necessarily alike with respect to their species, and one definition comprehends both of them. … [E]verything that can be ascribed to God, may He be exalted, differs in every respect from our attributes, so that no definition can comprehend the one thing and the other.

(Maimonides 1963: 80 [I.35,42a])

According to that principle, thought, so far as it expresses either the essence of any individual human mind (as Descartes believed) or that of a substance of which individual human minds are modes (as Spinoza believed), neither can be an attribute of God nor can express an infinite essence. Here too, Spinoza boldly rejected both the principle and its implications. Just as he had maintained that a finite extended thing must be a mode of an infinite extended substance through the attribute of which, namely extension, it is conceived, so he urged that a finite set of ideas, which is what a human mind at bottom is, must be a mode of an infinite substance through the attribute of which, namely thought, it is likewise conceived (E 2p1 and E 2p2d). Nothing in any human idea, however inadequate, forbids that it be part of the complex infinite adequate idea that is an infinite mode of such an infinite thinking substance.

Yet even if Spinoza were right—even if all finite bodies and their states were modes of an infinite corporeal substance, and all finite minds and their thoughts were modes of an infinite thinking substance—Descartes's doctrine that essences expressed by really distinct attributes must be of really distinct substances would not be impugned. And if it were true, Spinoza's infinite extended substance and an infinite thinking substance would each be a really distinct substance of one attribute. No infinite thinker who was infinitely extended could be more than a union of two distinct substances, as Descartes believed a human being is. Nor could any such substantial union be a substance, because it would need an external cause.

Spinoza would have nothing to do with this line of thought. “[T]he more reality or being a thing has,” he declared, not only do “the more attributes belong to it,” but each of these attributes “must be conceived through itself”—that is, must express an infinite essence by itself, and not merely in conjunction with the others (E 1p9-10). This doctrine raises two questions that go to the heart of Spinoza's metaphysics and continue to be disputed by commentators on it. First, how can really distinct attributes, which express really distinct essences, each infinite in its kind, constitute the essence of one and the same substance? And secondly, even if an infinite substance consisting of really distinct attributes can exist, is there any good reason to believe that one does?

In Ethics 2p7—“The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things”—Spinoza furnishes a clue to how he conceives the unity of a substance that is both extended and thinking. It suggests that the unity of any substance consisting of really distinct attributes is the necessary identity, under each of those attributes, of the order and connection of its modes. But what are order and connection? Presumably, the order of a thing's modes as constituted by really distinct attributes is the same if and only if, considered in their causal order—both immanent and transient—those constituted by any one attribute correspond one to one with those constituted by any other. Sameness of connection is more obscure. It cannot be determination by the same causal laws, because the causal laws determining the order of the modes under any one attribute must be conceived through that attribute. I conjecture that Spinoza thought that there must be transattribute laws of nature determining, for a substance's modes as constituted by any one attribute, how they are constituted by any other. Given what those laws of nature are, and how the totality of the substance's modes are constituted under any one attribute, it would follow, for any mode as constituted under one, how it is correspondingly constituted under any other. If that is so, and I know of no coherent alternative that does not contradict his text, Spinoza conceived God as a substance consisting of every one of the infinite attributes that constitute an infinite essence, the constitutive laws of whose nature determine, for any mode constituted by any of its attributes, both that it will also be constituted by every other, and how it will be so constituted.

Why believe that God, so conceived, exists? This question reduces to, “Does each of the various attributes that express an infinite essence express the essence of a unique being consisting of infinite attributes, or are those attributes distributed among more than one being?” If the former, Spinoza's God exists; if the latter, he does not. The fundamental argument Spinoza offers for the former runs: “[s]ince being able to exist is power, it follows that the more reality belongs to the nature of a thing, the more powers it has, of itself, to exist. Therefore, an absolutely infinite Being, or God, has, of himself, an absolutely infinite power of existing. For that reason, he exists absolutely” (E 1p11s; cf. ST I.2). This amounts to a principle of plenitude: that the possible substance that has most reality must exist. Unfortunately, Spinoza's argument for it is unsound; for, as Leibniz was to show, possible independent existents are possible worlds rather than possible substances. Spinoza himself recognized that how much reality a substance has is determined by how many attributes it has. If so, as long as all the attributes there are are somehow distributed over substances in a possible world, how much reality it has cannot be increased or decreased by distributing them differently: it must remain the same, whether they all constitute a single substance, or each a different one. Hence an argument on Spinoza's lines can at best show that every attribute expressing an infinite essence must be instantiated in some set of substances, not that they must all be instantiated in a single one.

Although Spinoza presumably never perceived that his form of the principle of plenitude is flawed, in his Short Treatise he supplemented it by arguing a posteriori that the attributes Extension and Thought must both belong to the same substance, “because of the unity which we see everywhere in Nature; if there were different beings in Nature, the one could not possibly unite with the other” (ST I.2). Since the only attributes “we,” that is, human beings, cognize are Extension and Thought, the only attributes we can in any sense “see” united everywhere in Nature are Extension and Thought. But, since we cannot see Thought, how can we see that? Presumably by experiencing in ourselves that the primary object of human thought is the corporeal universe, as mediated through the changing states of particular human bodies. While it does not strictly follow that all the primary finite modes of thinking in the infinite thinking substance have modes of the corporeal universe for objects, if the ones we immediately cognize do, and if there is no reason to believe them unique, then it is at least a reasonable conjecture that the infinite thinking being of which our minds are complex finite modes has for its primary object the infinite extended thing of which our bodies are complex finite modes, and that it truly represents that primary object because the causal order of the modes of that thinking thing and that of the modes of that extended thing are one and the same.

A further conjecture seems natural, although Spinoza explicitly stated it only in a letter. Given that the absolutely infinite divine substance consists of infinite attributes besides extension and thought, and that, as thinking, it cognizes all its modes under all of them, his correspondent Tschirnhaus inquired why human beings, who are modes of the divine substance, cognize only one attribute besides thought, namely extension (Ep 63). Spinoza answered that since, as thinking, God must adequately cognize every one of his attributes, and since each complex idea in him that adequately represents him under a given attribute must be infinite, God as thinking must consist of an infinity of minds, each primarily representing him as infinite in one of his kinds (Ep 66). Human minds are finite modes only of one of the infinite minds in the infinite idea that is an eternal mode of God as thinking, namely, that mind whose primary object is God as extended. God as thinking cognizes all his infinite attributes; but just as each infinite attribute is really distinct from every other, so is the idea of each in the infinite idea of God really distinct from the idea of every other. Accordingly, each finite mind is a mode of the idea that is God's self-cognition of one of his infinite attributes, and of himself as cognizing it. Each human being is both a human body, a finite mode of God constituted by the attribute Extension, and a human mind, the finite mode of God as thinking that is primarily constituted by an idea of that body and of nothing else; and for each further attribute of God, A_i, that same finite mode will also be constituted by A_i and by a mind that is primarily constituted solely by the idea of that mode as constituted by A_i. Hence God, so far as he constitutes the idea of that finite mode, will be a series of ideas, each primarily constituted by an idea of it under a different attribute other than Thought. Not only is the finite mode that as extended and thinking is a human being much more than a human being; but, as thinking, it is much more than a human mind.

In writing the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza thought it prudent to explain to his readers what he meant both by the word “God” and by the traditional theological terms he applied to God. By “God” he meant the absolutely infinite substance, which he identified with Nature, considered as an infinite all-embracing immanent cause, and not simply as the corporeal universe. He wrote:

[S]ince nothing can be or be conceived without God, it is certain that all those things which are in nature involve and express the concept of God, in proportion to their essence and perfection. Hence the more we cognize natural things, the greater and more perfect is the cognition of God we acquire, or, (since cognition of an effect through its cause is nothing but cognizing some property of that cause) the more we cognize natural things, the more perfectly do we cognize the essence of God, which is the cause of all things. So all our cognition, that is our greatest good, not only depends on the cognition of God but consists entirely in it.

(TTP iv.11)¹¹

It follows that to happen according to the laws of Nature and to happen according to the knowledge and will of God are one and the same. Spinoza makes this point with an example from geometry, but he would certainly have accepted one from physics.

[W]hen we attend only to the fact that the nature of a triangle is contained in the divine nature from eternity, as an eternal truth, then we say that God has the idea of the triangle, or understands the nature of the triangle. But when we attend afterwards to the fact that the nature of the triangle is contained in the divine nature in this way, solely from the necessity of the divine nature, … then that very thing which we called God's intellect we call God's will or decree.

(TTP iv.24)

In a later chapter he sums up his doctrine of the identity of Nature, the absolutely infinite substance, with God:

[S]ince nothing is necessarily true except by the divine decree alone, it follows quite clearly from this that the universal laws of Nature are nothing but decrees of God, which follow from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. Therefore, if anything were to happen in Nature contrary to her universal laws, it would also necessarily be contrary to the divine decree, intellect and nature. … We could also show the same thing from the fact that the power of nature is the divine power and virtue itself. Moreover, the divine power is the very essence of God.

(TTP vi.8-9; emphasis added)

Spinoza's theology, in short, naturalizes God.

This naturalization transforms the sense of two terms which Spinoza continued to apply to God: the predicates “eternal” and “perfect.” Following Boethius, both medieval and Cartesian theologians had conceived eternity as timeless existence. Spinoza redefined it as “existence itself, insofar as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the definition alone of the eternal thing” (E 1d8). The existence of an absolutely infinite being, as Spinoza describes it, follows necessarily from its definition because it is defined as immanently causing its own existence;¹² and a thing immanently causes its own existence if and only if it is such that it is a law of nature that it is conserved, that is, can neither be created nor destroyed. Eternity so understood does not exclude the passage of time in the everyday sense;¹³ for motion and rest is an eternal mode of infinite extended substance, and motion is relative change of position in time.¹⁴

Again, both medieval and Cartesian theologians conceived “perfection” a priori, as a standard by which Nature and everything in it can be judged imperfect. Spinoza, without redefining it, treats it as equivalent to “infinite.” Hence, since the extended corporeal universe is infinite in its kind, it is perfect in its kind too, not because it satisfies some a priori standard of perfection, but because, as far as extension is concerned, it is itself the only rational standard of perfection. God, as absolutely infinite being, is likewise absolutely perfect, not as satisfying some a priori human standard, but as providing the only ultimate standard by which human beings can judge anything as imperfect. As Spinoza put it, “[T]he perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power; things are not more or less perfect because they delight or offend men's senses, or because they agree with human nature or are repugnant to it” (E 1ap).

In declaring that the absolutely infinite being whose existence he claimed to demonstrate is the true God whom orthodox Jews and Christians ignorantly worship, was Spinoza concealing his atheism from himself by a play upon words? Maimonides would have thought so:

I shall not say that he who affirms that God, may He be exalted, has positive attributes either falls short of apprehending Him or … has an apprehension of him that is different from what He really is, but I shall say that he has abolished his belief in the existence of the deity without being aware of it.

(Maimonides 1963: 145 [I,60,76b])

When confronted with a letter in which Lambertus van Velthuysen reprobated the author of the Theological-Political Treatise (not knowing who he was) for “teaching pure Atheism with hidden and disguised arguments” (Ep 42), Spinoza indignantly asked, “Does that man … cast aside all religion who declares that God must be recognized as the highest good, and that he must be loved as such with a free spirit?” (Ep 43).¹⁵ But, as Maimonides would properly have answered, anybody who identifies God with Nature confounds the highest good with a being who is nothing like the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He did not make the heavens and the earth, he did not create our ancestors and place them on earth, and he is not, through the calling of the Jews, engaged in blessing all the nations of the earth. Spinoza's God cannot rationally be worshiped as the God of orthodox Judaism and Christianity can: Human beings are not made in his image, and their relations with him are not those of like with like in any sense at all. And yet human beings would have to Spinoza's God, if he existed, something not wholly unlike the relations they would have with the God of Judaism and Christianity, if he existed. They are causally totally dependent on him for their existence. Nobody who is not so insane as to hate his own existence can, as Spinoza pointed out, hate Spinoza's God (E 5p18). Our attitude to him will, however, be one of “intellectual love” in a sense to be defined, which is identical with an attitude Spinoza called “acquiescentia.” If God is conceived as traditionally minded Jews and Christians conceive him, Spinoza denies his existence, and can legitimately be accused of atheism. Not of idolatry; for he does not offer to his “God” the sort of worship that pagan polytheists offered to theirs. Spinoza's God, however, is more like the Jewish and Christian one than like those of paganism; and the intellectual love Spinoza thinks due to his God, while unlike monotheistic worship, has some analogy to it. Spinoza can legitimately claim that his absolutely infinite being is sufficiently like the Jewish and Christian God, and the attitude it would be rational to take to such a being sufficiently like worship, for it to be proper to describe it as “God.”

2. REVELATION, IMAGINATION, AND UNIVERSAL RELIGIOUS FAITH

Those who identify God with Nature, if they have a theology at all, usually confine it to natural theology, and dismiss divine revelation as a superstition. In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza does neither. Defining revelation (or, from its recipient's point of view, prophecy), as “certain (certa) cognition of some thing revealed by God to men” (TTP i.1), he accepts the Jewish and Christian scriptures as records of a long tradition of divine revelation, and economically investigating that tradition, develops a general theory of revelation, and deduces from it the tenets of a universal religious faith.

Spinoza recognized that his definition of revelation is satisfied by natural cognition, or cognition of the second and third kinds as defined in Ethics 2p40s2; for such cognition is both certain and immanently caused by God. However, he also recognized that, while what God certainly reveals through science is in no way inferior to what he certainly reveals in other ways, Europeans generally (the vulgus among whom the Theological-Political Treatise was published) take revealed cognition to exclude the scientific, and recognize as revelation only the specimens of it recorded in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. He himself was no bigot: While accepting the Jewish-Christian revelation as authentic, he took care to point out that the Jewish scriptures attest that “the other nations had their own prophets also, who prophesied to them and to the Jews” (TTP iii.35).

Spinoza's philological principles for studying the Jewish and Christian scriptures were not original. Among philologists in the Netherlands, especially after J. J. Scaliger's appointment to a chair at Leiden in 1594, they were regularly followed in studying nonscriptural texts.¹⁶ As Richard H. Popkin shows in Chapter 9 of the present volume, they had been stated and employed by a succession of Biblical scholars, both Jewish and Christian, most of whom were perfectly orthodox, like the medieval rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra,¹⁷ whose commentary on the Pentateuch was printed alongside the Hebrew text of the Venetian Bomberg edition of the Jewish Scriptures. (A few others were not, like Spinoza's friend and correspondent Lodewijk Meyer.) However, classical philologists tended to leave Biblical studies to theologians,¹⁸ with the result, as Popkin also shows, that nobody before Spinoza explored what would follow from combining good philology with his naturalized theology.

This is how Spinoza states and defends his philological principles for studying scripture:

[J]ust as the method of interpreting nature consists above all in putting together a history of nature, from which, as from certain data, we infer the definitions of natural things, so to interpret Scripture it is necessary to prepare a straightforward history of Scripture and to infer the mind of the authors of Scripture from it, by legitimate reasonings, as from certain data and principles. For if somebody has admitted as principles or data for interpreting Scripture and discussing the things contained in it only those drawn from Scripture itself and its history, he will always proceed without any danger of error.

(TTP vii.8; emphasis added)

Spinoza makes two general claims about what can be established by following these principles. First, it can often be shown whether a sacred text has in fact been transmitted from antiquity or has been interpolated or added to out of “the blind and reckless desire to interpret Scripture and to think up new doctrines in religion” (TTP vii.3). Secondly, it can often be demonstrated that a report of an alleged revelation is a mere fabrication—whether by the alleged prophet himself, or by somebody in a position to ascertain whether or not he claimed to have had this or that revealed to him. By contrast, invalidating the reasons offered for interpolation or addition can approach a proof of authenticity.

Both the Jewish scriptures and the nonepistolary part of the Christian ones largely consist of historical narratives: some of divine revelations to individuals, of the actions they prompted, and of reactions to them; others simply of revelations and of the situations in which they were vouchsafed. Of those narratives, some purport to have been written by those who received the revelations they record, but most do not. Spinoza argues that the Pentateuch, Judges, Ruth, I and II Samuel, and I and II Kings, “were all written by one and the same Historian, who wanted to write about the past history of the Jews from their first origin up to the first destruction of the City” (TTP viii.42). Who that historian was, he does not claim to be able to prove, but he suspects that it was Ezra (TTP viii.48), and thereafter refers to him, whoever he was, by that name (TTP ix.2). Ezra, however, left his work incomplete. In parts, it is incoherent, although later editors have removed some of its gaps and incoherencies by additions and interpolations of more doubtful authority (TTP ix passim).

Since it can be inferred from the Jewish scriptures themselves that “before the time of the Maccabees there was no canon of the Sacred Books, but the ones we now have were selected from many others by the Pharisees of the second temple, … and those books were accepted only because of their decision”—which neither was divinely inspired nor was claimed to be—Spinoza declares that “those who want to demonstrate the authority of Holy Scripture are bound to show the authority of each separate book,” and the authenticity of any given passage in it (TTP x.43). Yet he doubts neither that Ezra had honestly used authentic materials, nor that his work can usually be distinguished from that of later editors. Hence he does not impugn the authority of most of the scriptures as edited, even though little in them had been written by the prophets whose thoughts or deeds they report. Even less does he impugn the authority of the Pentateuch because of such trifles as that Moses could not have written the whole of it: for example, the preface to Deuteronomy, which implies that it was written after the Jews had crossed the Jordan, which they did not do until after Moses' death (TTP viii.6).

Despite the weight he attaches to philological evidence, Spinoza could not have arrived at his more important conclusions about revelation from it alone. He acknowledges that two philosophical principles are needed as well.

The first is a corollary of his naturalism: namely, that, although the specific causes of nonscientific revelations are usually beyond human knowledge, they fall wholly within the natural causal order, and are not supernatural interventions in it. According to Ethics 1p29, “in nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.” In his discussion of miracles in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza points out what this implies for revelation: namely, “that nothing happens in nature that does not follow from her laws, that her laws extend to all things that are conceived by the Divine intellect itself, and finally, that nature maintains a fixed and immutable order,” and hence that “the term ‘miracle’ cannot be understood except in relation to men's opinions, and means nothing but a work (opus) whose natural cause we cannot explain by the example of some other [to which we are] accustomed, or at least which cannot be so explained by the one who writes or relates the miracle” (TTP vi.13). Far from helping us to understand God's true nature, miracles distract us from it; for “those who run back to the will of God when they are ignorant of something are just silly; it is a ridiculous way of professing ignorance” (TTP vi.23).

The second philosophical principle on which Spinoza's revealed theology rests has to do with cognition. According to Ethics 2pp32-43, to cognize is to have an idea. Cognition is imaginative (of the first kind) if it consists partly of inadequate ideas; it is properly intellectual (of the second or third kinds) if it consists wholly of adequate ones. Adequate ideas are either “of things that are common to all, and are equally in the part and in the whole” (E 2p38), or of what is common and proper both to the human body and to an external thing customarily affecting it, and is in the whole of each and in every part (E 2p39). Cognition by adequate ideas is either (i) discursive—by “reason (ratio) or cognition of the second kind”—in which an effect is cognized by deriving its idea from the idea of its cause, or (ii) intuitive—“scientia intuitiva or cognition of the third kind”—in which the essence of a thing is cognized by forming an idea that presents it as immanently caused by God, the absolutely infinite substance (E 2p40s2). Spinoza also believes that, in Ethics Parts 3 and 4, he has shown how, by analyzing the affects of the human mind functionally, to develop a theory of them that is intuitive in this sense.¹⁹

As he himself observes (TTP i.2), natural intellectual cognition of either kind satisfies his formal definition of revelation or prophecy, that is, “certain cognition of some thing, revealed by God to man”; for “the things we cognize by the natural light depend solely on the cognition of God and his eternal decrees” (TTP i.2). But, as he also observes, most people do not speak strictly. Partly because they spurn their natural gifts, and partly because they thirst for things that are rare and foreign to their nature, they call no cognition revelation or prophecy unless it “extends beyond the limits of [natural cognition] and … the laws of human nature, considered in themselves, cannot be its cause” (TTP i.3).

After examining, in the light of his naturalism and his theory of cognition, the parts of the Jewish scriptures that he considers Ezra to have edited, Spinoza concludes that:

all those things God revealed to the prophets were revealed to them either in words, or in visible forms (figurae), or in both words and visible forms. The words and visible forms were either true, and outside the imagination of the prophet who heard or saw them, or else imaginary, [occurring] because evidently the imagination of the prophet was so disposed, even while he was awake, that he clearly seemed to himself to hear words or to see something.

(TTP i.9)

He also infers, from the report in Numbers 12:6-7, that God made the following declaration to Aaron and Miriam in Moses' presence and by an actual voice: “If there be a prophet among you [i.e., the Jews], I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. With him I will speak mouth to mouth” (TTP i.21). And finally, he endorses the Jewish belief that Moses was unique among the Jewish prophets: All the others received their revelations through imaginary words and visible forms which only they cognized, but Moses received his through real sounds, which bystanders could hear (TTP i.10-13, 19-22).

Here, if anywhere, a doubt intrudes whether Spinoza believed what he wrote; although if he did not, he betrays it neither by exaggeration nor by any other turn of style. If Moses received his revelations from God by a real voice, that voice would have been a miracle, according to his own definition: “a work [of God] whose natural cause we cannot explain by the example of another customary thing, or at least which cannot be so explained by the one who writes or relates the miracle” (TTP vi.13). This conception of a miracle implies, of any reported miracle, either that it really occurred and has a natural cause, or that it lacks a natural cause and did not really occur. If Spinoza had believed that the former is true of the scriptural reports of the real voice through which God revealed to Moses what he did, would not he have speculated about what the natural cause of that voice was?

His treatment of the miracle which the Roman Holy Office adduced as evidence against Galileo's Copernicanism suggests that he would have. That miracle is reported in Joshua 10:12-14:

Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man.

Spinoza acknowledges that, when Joshua said, “Sun stand thou still,” he believed that God would arrest the sun's rotation about the earth long enough for his victory to be decisive, and later, that God had so arrested it; and that Joshua's belief was so far false, because, according to the new physics, the earth is a planet rotating about the sun, and the appearance of sunrise and sunset is not produced by the sun's motion (TTP ii.26). But he denies it to follow either that there was no miracle, or that, since Joshua's cognition of it was false, and hence not certain, it was not prophetic.

Are we [he asked] bound to believe that Joshua, a soldier, was skilled in astronomy? and that the miracle could not be revealed to him, or that the light of the sun could not remain longer than usual above the horizon unless Joshua understood the cause of this? … I prefer to say openly that Joshua did not know the cause of the greater duration of that light. … [He] did not allow for the fact that a refraction greater than usual could arise from the great amount of ice which was then in that part of the air (see Joshua 10:11), or from something else like that, which we do not inquire into now.

(TTP ii.27)

However absurd his scientific speculation appears today, when much more is known about refraction, it was not excluded by the state of physics when he wrote.

Would not Spinoza have offered a similar speculation about the natural causes of the voice by which Moses received his revelations if he had believed it to be real? A parallel should be considered. Just as the reality of Moses' voices is crucial to orthodox Judaism, so that of Jesus' bodily resurrection is crucial to orthodox Christianity. How does Spinoza treat the reports of resurrections of the dead in II Kings 4:31-37 (the Shunammite's son), and in all four gospels (Jesus)?

In the former case, by offering a natural explanation of it, he has no difficulty in accepting that the revival of the Shunammite's son really occurred (TTP vi.47). In the latter, by his striking silence, when expounding the true nature of Jesus' teaching, about his reported resurrection, he plainly implies that Jesus' body did not return to life—an implication which he expressly confirms in a letter to Oldenburg (Ep 75). Presumably part of the reason why he accepts the former and not the latter is that he does not think the restoration to life of the Shunammite's son to be a genuine resurrection: He was merely revived by the warmth of the prophet's body, and so was only apparently dead. By contrast, on the evidence of the gospels, he accepts that Jesus really died on the cross, but maintained to Oldenburg that the reported appearances of his resurrected body, contrary to the Apostles' sincere belief, were imaginary—“not unlike the appearance by which God appeared to Abraham, when he saw three men whom he invited to dine with him” (Ep 75). Oldenburg expostulated that “in the gospels, Christ's resurrection seems to be reported (tradi) equally literally with [his passion and death]” (Ep 79), presumably having in mind the story of doubting Thomas (John 20:24-8); but unfortunately no answer to his letter, dated only a year before Spinoza's death, has been preserved.

Spinoza asserts, as his general conclusion about scriptural reports of miracles,

that everything that is truly narrated in Scripture to have happened necessarily happened, as all things do, according to the laws of nature. And if anything can be found which can be conclusively demonstrated to be contrary to the laws of nature, or not to have been able to follow from them, it should simply be believed that it has been added to the Sacred Texts by sacrilegious men.

(TTP vi.51; emphasis added)

This, however, is far from Hume's doctrine in his essay “Of Miracles” that all reports of phenomena are suspect that are not of kinds customarily observed. By defining a miracle as “a work whose natural cause we cannot explain by the example of another customary thing” (TTP vi.13), Spinoza implies both that phenomena that are not of kinds customarily observed really do occur, and that they are naturally caused. He makes that implication explicit by declaring that, “if we find in the Sacred Texts certain things whose causes we do not know how to give an account of, and which seem to have happened beyond, indeed contrary to, the order of nature, that ought not to cause us to hesitate to believe unreservedly that what has really and truly happened has happened naturally” (TTP vi.45). It is, also, confirmed by his examples. Daylight is not customarily prolonged, even when there is a great amount of ice in the air, as reported in Joshua 10; nor are those whose observable vital functions have ceased after suffering severe pains in the head customarily restored to life after somebody has lain on their apparently dead bodies, as reported in II Kings 4. A consistent Humean would be obliged to reject both reports as fabrications. A consistent Spinozist, however, is obliged only to reject philologically authenticated reports (as Spinoza took these to be) if they are excluded by Cartesian physics; and Cartesian physics, as Newton was later to complain, is licentious in the speculative hypotheses it sanctions.²⁰ With respect to these reports, if it does not exclude those Spinoza accepted, I do not see how it excludes those he did not.

That Moses' voices and Jesus' resurrection were real are each believed, by those who believe them, on the ground of scriptural reports which Spinoza accepts as based on reliably transmitted oral or written records of original observations. If either in the Theological-Political Treatise or in his correspondence Spinoza gives a defensible reason for accepting the former but not the latter I have not found it. The evidence for the latter, while far from conclusive, is stronger. Although some Jewish commentators have accused Spinoza of tendentiously preferring to attack Judaism rather than Christianity,²¹ in the Theological-Political Treatise he chose to accept the miracle crucial to orthodox Judaism while conspicuously refraining from accepting the one crucial to orthodox Christianity. Apart from this, his theoretical treatment of both is even-handed, although some of his remarks about Judaism are not.²²

He endorses as authentic the bulk of the revelations reported in the Jewish scriptures from Genesis to II Kings. He then argues that, when studied according to correct philological and philosophical principles, those scriptures show that the Jewish prophets, even Moses, received their revelations wholly through cognition of the first kind, namely imagination: Moses receiving it through a real voice, and the rest through purely imaginary words and visible forms. That the medium of revelation is imagination supplies a principle for interpreting the scriptural record. The case of Moses shows that the greatest of the prophets was not the one who knew the most. As a man of his time, he was ignorant of much that became commonplace to rabbinical students: for example, “he taught that … [Yahweh] chose, for himself alone, the Hebrew nation and a certain region of the world (see Deuteronomy 4:19, 32:8-9), but that he left other nations and regions to the care of the other gods substituted by him” (TTP ii.38). The same holds for the lesser Jewish prophets. What was revealed to them was “accommodated” to the speculative beliefs about God and his relation to the world they already had, and so did not derive from revelation (TTP ii.41). Since many have been deluded that they were receiving revelations but were not, how does God make a prophet certain that a cognition vouchsafed him is a revelation? Spinoza's answer is that every prophet who receives a new revelation both “has a heart inclined only to the right and the good,” and imagines what is revealed “very vividly” and with “signs” accommodated to his imagination—they differ from prophet to prophet—that render him totally certain of it (TTP ii.10-12). This answer unfortunately fails to tell those who are deluded into thinking that they are prophets how to find that out.

Cognition is either speculative (of what is the case) or practical (of what to do). Hence, if no revealed cognition is theoretical, it must all be practical. Practical cognition, in turn, is either general or particular. The general practical cognition revealed to Moses is the Jewish Law which he promulgated only to the Jewish people, and which therefore only they were bound to observe. It includes, besides general rules of individual conduct (summed up in the Decalogue), ceremonial rules for divine worship, among them rules for instituting a hereditary priesthood and offering various forms of sacrifice, and judicial rules for adjudicating disputes, trying charges of criminality, and punishing those found guilty. Later prophets added other provisions, as when the prophet Samuel anointed first Saul and later David as king. Particular revelations were accorded to political leaders (judges and then kings) as well as to private individuals (those usually referred to as “prophets”), about what should be done, by given individuals (not necessarily the prophet) or by the state, in individual situations.

Spinoza expressed the greatest admiration for “the extent to which [Moses'] way of constituting a government (imperium)”—that is, the way it was constituted before the kings—“was able to moderate spirits (animos), and to restrict those who ruled equally with those who were ruled so that the latter neither became rebels nor the former Tyrants” (TTP xvii.62). He conceded only one defect in it: that the sacred ministry was reserved to the tribe of Levi, although, before the brief apostasy in which everybody except the Levites worshipped the golden calf, it was to have consisted of the first-born in each family (TTP xvii.96-97). The new arrangement caused dissension between people and sacred ministry which repeatedly tempted the political leaders to introduce forbidden forms of worship, which in turn caused the prophets to denounce them. While suggesting that the character of the people made it inevitable that their sacred ministry would either apostatize or cause dissension, Spinoza somberly described the situation in prophetic terms: “At that time, the security [of the Jewish people] was not the concern of God, but vengeance” (TTP xvii.97).²³ Had it not been for this causally intelligible defect, “in the state (republicam) of the Hebrews … the government (imperium) would have been everlasting” (TTP xvii.112). Even as it was, it repeatedly overcame great dangers, but sometimes only because of “God's external aid” through individual prophets (TTP iii.17).

Spinoza offers his conclusion that the nearly flawless constitution of the Hebrew state was the work of prophets and not of political theorists as a matter of historical fact, which, like facts of any kind, theorists ignore at their peril. He recognized that the kind of cognition most needed for competence in practical affairs is the first—imagination; it is not the second and third—reason and scientia intuitiva—although the latter are needed for explaining that competence ex post facto. Here it must not be forgotten that Spinoza uses the words “imagination” and “reason” in connection with prophecy in senses he carefully defines in the second scholium of Ethics 2p40. Executive power accomplishes its particular purposes only by correctly perceiving the individual situations in which it is exercised. Such situations are “sized up” imaginatively, and possession of correct theories does not ensure that they will be sized up well. Spinoza saw clearly that those whose powers of imaginative perception are extraordinary and whose rational attainments moderate often do better in constitution-making and legislation, in establishing creeds and forms of worship, and even in formulating moral codes, than those whose rational attainments are extraordinary and whose powers of imaginative perception moderate. And when somebody of strong imaginative power founds an enduring constitution, although the power by which he does it is natural, he and his followers, believing that nobody could have done it without supernatural help, may well ascribe his doing it to such help.

Because Spinoza finds Christian teaching to be directed to the whole world and Jewish only to the Jewish people, and explains this partly by the mode in which Jesus received the revelation he did, some commentators have imputed to him a prejudice against Judaism. But he is usually even-handed. Just as he dismissed the speculative doctrines of orthodox Judaism as not part of what was revealed to the Jewish prophets, so he dismisses those of orthodox Christianity, which he professes not to grasp (capere) (TTP i.24), as not part of what was revealed to Jesus or to the Apostles. The revelation to Jesus, he wrote, “as the apostles preached it, doubtless by relating the simple story of Christ, does not fall under reason, yet everyone can easily appreciate by the natural light that, like the whole of Christ's teaching, it consists chiefly of moral lessons” (TTP xi.15). And he finds it to differ from the Jewish revelation only in this: “before the coming of Christ the Prophets were accustomed to preach religion as the law of their own Fatherland (Patriae) and by the force of the covenant entered into in the time of Moses; but after the coming of Christ the Apostles preached the same religion to everyone as a universal law, solely by the force of the passion of Christ” (TTP xii.24; emphasis added). The Christianity of Jesus and the early Church was therefore a reduced rather than an augmented Judaism: for example, it lacked laws for a state, for a sacerdotal system, or for religious rites.²⁴ Substantially, it taught what Spinoza called “the tenets of the universal faith, or the fundamental principles of the whole of Scripture,” which are seven: (1) that there is a supreme being, supremely just and merciful; (2) that the supreme being is unique; (3) that the supreme being is omnipresent; (4) that the supreme being has the supreme right and dominion (dominium) over all things; (5) that the supreme being is worshipped and obeyed only by justice and charity, or love of one's neighbor; (6) that only those who obey the supreme being by living in the way prescribed in (5) are saved (salvos); and (7) that the supreme being pardons all who repent. This was the substance of Moses' religious teaching of the Jewish people; the primary function of the Christian revelation was to teach it to all people (TTP xiv.24-28).²⁵

These fundamental principles not only leave it open whether God is identical with Nature or is its supernatural creator, but they also describe God as just, merciful, and forgiving. It therefore falls short of the theology Spinoza expounds in the Theological-Political Treatise in failing to make plain either that God is identical with Nature (TTP vi.7-22), or that it is only because of “a defect in [the multitude's] thinking” that God “is described as a lawgiver or prince, and called just, merciful &c.” (TTP iv.37). In itself, this should not trouble readers. If, as Spinoza has maintained, prophets characteristically receive their revelations through their imaginations, and interpret them according to their antecedent beliefs, Jesus, who had been taught the speculative beliefs of the early rabbinic Judaism, would have interpreted whatever was revealed to him compatibly with those beliefs.

This explanation, however, is excluded by a series of passages in Chapter i of the Theological-Political Treatise. First of all, Spinoza confesses that he believes nobody but Jesus to have arrived at “so great a perfection above others” that it enabled him “to perceive by the mind alone certain things that are not contained in the first foundations of our cognition, nor can be deduced from them” (TTP i.22). He then proceeds to acknowledge that, according to the reports in the Christian scriptures, God did not reveal things to Jesus by appearing to him, or through angels: “if Moses spoke with God face to face, … Christ communicated with God mind to mind” (TTP i.24). To Jesus alone

God immediately revealed—without words or visions, God's appointed conditions (placita), which lead men to salvation. So God revealed himself to the Apostles through Christ's mind, as formerly he had revealed himself to Moses by means of a heavenly voice. And therefore Christ's voice, like the one Moses heard, can be called the voice of God. And in this sense we can also say that God's Wisdom, that is, a Wisdom surpassing human wisdom, assumed a human nature in Christ.

(TTP i.23)

Hence Jesus, and he alone, received God's revelations without the aid of imagination, that is, without the aid of words or of images.²⁶

Finally, in Theological-Political Treatise iv.29-32, Spinoza asserts that, unlike Moses and the Jewish prophets, who “did not perceive God's decrees adequately, as eternal truths,” Jesus “perceived things truly and adequately”; and that therefore “it would be as contrary to reason to maintain that God accommodated his revelations to the opinions of Christ as to maintain that God previously accommodated his revelations to the opinions of the angels [through whom he revealed them], that is [to the opinions] of a created voice and of visions”²⁷ (TTP iv.29-31). And he adds,

from the fact that God revealed himself immediately to Christ, or to his mind, and not, as he did to the Prophets, through words and images, we can understand nothing but that Christ perceived or understood truly the things revealed; for a thing is understood when it is perceived with a pure mind, without words and images. And so Christ perceived the things revealed truly and adequately.

(TTP iv.32)

As a result, Jesus was able to teach human beings how to live, not merely by promulgating a law to be obeyed, but by revealing the eternal causal truths by virtue of which that law is not simply a command to be obeyed, but a dictate of reason, which only prescribes what is for their advantage (utile). Spinoza did not deny that, when speaking to those who did not understand the kingdom of heaven, Jesus may have taught what was revealed to him as law; but he inferred from Paul's epistles that, when speaking to those who did understand, Jesus taught it as eternal truth, and not as law. By thus writing it in their hearts, he paradoxically both confirmed and stabilized it as law, and freed them from a servile relation to it (TTP iv.33-34).

That these passages are difficult does not excuse the license with which Strauss has interpreted them. According to Strauss,

Spinoza asserts first that no one except Jesus (whom he regularly calls Christ) has reached the superhuman excellence sufficient for receiving, without the aid of the imagination, revelations of supra-rational content; or that he alone—in contradistinction to the Old Testament prophets in particular—truly and adequately understood what was revealed to him.

(Strauss 1988: 171)

As we have seen, Spinoza did assert that nobody but Jesus arrived at “so great a perfection above others” (“ad tantam perfectionem supra alios pervenisse”) that God revealed to him things he did not reveal even to Moses. But that implies, not that his perfection was “super-human,” but that it excelled that of other human beings like himself. Again, Spinoza did assert that Jesus perceived what was revealed to him “adequately, as eternal truths,” and not “as precepts and things instituted,” as Moses perceived what was revealed to him (TTP iv.29). But far from implying that the content of what was revealed to Jesus was “supra-rational,” adequate perception is necessarily rational. Finally, Spinoza did assert that what was revealed to the Jewish prophets was accommodated to their opinions, and that they interpreted it in the light of their opinions. But that does not imply that there was any defect in how they understood what it was revealed to them that they should do. Since nothing speculative was revealed to them, their speculative mistakes were not revelations inadequately understood.

Strauss's misunderstanding of what Spinoza writes in these passages is of a piece with his radical misunderstanding that, in implicitly asserting in some passages that “revelation or prophecy as certain knowledge of truths which surpass the capacity of human reason is possible,” and explicitly denying in others “the possibility of any supra-rational knowledge,” Spinoza “contradicts himself … regarding what may be called the central subject of his book” (Strauss 1988: 169).²⁸ The “certain knowledge” he ascribes to the Jewish prophets is (extrinsically) true cognition of the first kind—imagination—which the prophet is unable to doubt. As cognition, it is subrational rather than superrational, and the cause of the prophet's certainty is natural. It surpasses the capacity of the higher forms of cognition (reason and scientia intuitiva) because, while they can supply the general dictates of reason (roughly, the moral law, and the general principles of politics), they cannot supply certain cognition of how to act to advantage in particular situations. There is no contradiction whatever in asserting that, although the provisions of the Jewish law divinely revealed to Moses through a voice included the moral dictates of reason that apply to all human beings, it was not revealed to Moses that it did include them. Nor is there any contradiction in asserting that, although reason and scientia intuitiva are higher forms of cognition than imaginative insight into particular situations, one variety of which is prophecy, there are many practical problems that can only be solved by recourse to the latter.

Yet a problem of consistency remains after the fogs of Straussian misreading have been dispersed. Spinoza depicts Jesus not as a philosopher, but as a prophet in the colloquial sense: as receiving sure cognition from God, not as philosophers do, “from the first foundations of our cognition” (TTP i.22), that is, from the principles laid down in Ethics Part 1, but in a way that, although natural, nobody yet understands. He is a greater prophet even than Moses; but he is a prophet, not a philosopher. Yet if Jesus understood what he taught “truly and adequately,” must his cognition of it not have been of the second or third kind, and hence philosophical? And in that case, how could he have been a prophet?

Closer scrutiny of what Spinoza wrote in the crucial passages of the first and fourth chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise shows that this difficulty too springs from misreading. What was revealed to Jesus? Presumably, the tenets of the universal faith, various applications of those tenets, and many of the theorems in Ethics Part 4 about the effects of various dispositions to act, both virtuous and vicious, together with solutions, according to those theorems, of many practical problems that confronted him during his ministry. Let us assume that Jesus understood what was revealed to him “truly and adequately.” What would that involve? An adequate idea is one that has all the intrinsic properties of a true idea, as distinct from the extrinsic property of agreement with its object (E 2d4); and this is to be understood in the light of the axiom that “Cognition of an effect depends on, and involves, cognition of its cause” (E 1a4). Because everything is an effect, including God or Nature, which as cause of itself is also effect of itself, adequate cognition of anything whatever is cognition of its cause. Thus adequate cognition that it is advantageous to accept and observe the tenets of the universal faith, or to observe certain rules of conduct, or to adopt a particular course of action, is cognition of such practices and actions as causing advantage. Yet although such causal cognition is attainable by anybody capable of studying the Theological-Political Treatise thoroughly, Spinoza did not think it can be deduced from the first foundations of our cognition, and in the Ethics he showed why it cannot. In advancing to the theories of the affects and of servile and free action in Ethics Parts 3 and 4, from the fundamental metaphysics and theory of mind in Ethics Parts 1 and 2, he makes it plain that six postulates in Ethics Part 2 (stated after 2p13) and two in Ethics Part 3 are indispensable, none of which is deduced from “the first foundations of our cognition” as laid down earlier. They are derived according to the theorem that “if something is common to, and peculiar to, the human Body and certain bodies by which the human body is affected, and is equally in the part and in the whole of each of them, its idea will also be adequate in the Mind” (E 2p39). The practical cognition imparted in Ethics Parts 3 and 4 is all attainable by what Spinoza called “cognition of the second kind”—by certain “common notions,” and by adequate ideas of what is common and peculiar to the human body and to certain bodies that affect it. Such practical cognition is not in itself philosophical; that is, it is not the scientia intuitiva attainable only when its principles as set out in Ethics Parts 1 and 2 have been mastered. What can be adequately cognized (“perceived”) by the mind alone is not the same as what can be deduced from the first foundations of our cognition. The mind alone adequately cognizes certain things from common experience which it cannot deduce from the first foundations of our cognition—even though those foundations determine when common experience yields adequate cognition and when it does not. Adequate cognition remains adequate even though the principles determining its adequacy have not even been thought of.

Jesus' adequate cognition, as Spinoza conceived it, was not accompanied by cognition of the principles determining its adequacy. His perfection exceeded that of his fellow men because he “perceive[d] by the mind alone things that are not contained in the first foundations of our cognition, and cannot be deduced from them,” even though he did not perceive by the mind alone the metaphysical and epistemological principles according to which his perceptions or cognitions were adequate. Jesus' mind, Spinoza declared, “would necessarily have to be more outstanding and far more excellent than the human mind is” (TTP i.22-23); but that does not imply that his mind was raised to that level of excellency by external causes of a kind that do not operate on other human minds, or that it was superhuman by nature, much less divine. No mind, according to Spinoza, is anything but a complex idea; and to act on a mind is to cause the ideas that compose it to be other than they would have been but for that action. Hence God could externally cause Jesus to perceive something by the mind alone only if he directly—without imaginative mediation—caused certain ideas to be among those composing his mind that otherwise would not have been among them. It is not contrary to Spinoza's theory of mind, as far as I can tell, that natural causes might directly introduce into the ideas composing Jesus' mind either the partly inadequate ideas expressed in the tenets of the universal faith, or the adequate ideas set out in Ethics Parts 3 and 4 of the advantage or disadvantage actions of this or that kind tend to cause; and no matter what those natural causes might be, they would be God or Nature acting.

Spinoza's position, in short, is that God introduced into Jesus' mind both the tenets of the universal faith and the dictates of reason stated in Ethics Parts 3 and 4. Jesus' cognition of the latter was adequate, even though he had no notion either of the metaphysical propositions from which a philosopher would derive those theorems, or of their proofs. The difference between Jesus' moral and religious teaching and Spinoza's is that between the conception of God expressed in the first four tenets of the universal faith and that expressed in Ethics Part 1 and the latter half of Part 5; and that difference explains why to Spinoza Jesus is a prophet in the colloquial sense, not a philosopher. Since he lacks cognition of the principles by which his prophetic cognition can be shown to be adequate, he cannot demonstrate its adequacy, as a philosopher must, from “the first foundations of our cognition.”

Spinoza's theory of divine revelation is therefore consistent both with itself and with his natural theology. Yet to most who follow his philological treatment of scripture, his explanatory theory is much more persuasive than his religious conclusions. Given his naturalized theology, not only his explanation of the phenomena of Jewish and Christian prophecy, but his extraction of the tenets of his universal faith as the rational core of both Judaism and Christianity, are alike defensible. True, his universal faith was still-born as a religion, and was not, as a matter of history, the essence of either Judaism or Christianity. But Spinoza's deficiencies as a religious teacher do not show that his theology was defective.

One of the attractions of Spinoza's theory of prophecy is that it explains why this is so. Even the ablest theorists have shown themselves poor at designing institutions, whether religious or political, that work at all, much less that go on working. Spinoza's universal religion, like Hobbes's state Christianity, is designed to subserve political rather than religious needs. Adopting it would certainly curb the persecuting clergy whom Spinoza detested; but it does not satisfy the religious needs that the faiths proclaimed by Moses and Jesus did. In his theory of prophecy Spinoza not only recognized that the two religious faiths embraced by most of his contemporaries were instituted not by philosophers but by prophets, but began to explain why. To complete his explanation, the histories of both faiths must be investigated more thoroughly than he investigated them. Just because he does not try to make the Jewish prophets respectable from the point of view of his naturalist philosophy, his depiction of them is nearer to the truth than his depiction of Jesus and the Apostles.

If Spinoza's naturalist theology is true, then the claims of Judaism and Christianity to revealed truth are false. However, his theory of Judaism as founded on imaginative cognition would remain plausible in itself, and extensible to Christianity. The source of their power as faiths would have to be sought in a theory explaining how certain kinds of error about ultimate questions can become foundations of shared ways of living. There is no obvious reason why the Theological-Political Treatise could not be revised along these Spinozist lines. And even if Spinoza's naturalist theology is not true, at least he saw, what few theologians and fewer philosophers see, that religions are sustained by prophecy, not by philosophy or theology.

3. PRACTICAL THEOLOGY

Spinoza's revealed practical theology is that of “the universal faith” which he believed to be the true core both of Judaism and Christianity. It is, like all revealed theology, practical. However, its practical directions are expressed by imagining God as the perfect model for human conduct; and, so far, its expression is false. Spinoza's definitive practical theology is the natural one found in Ethics Parts 4 and 5. Its practical content is summed up in the “dictates of reason” for human life there expounded. It is therefore identical with his ethics as ordinarily understood, which Don Garrett studies in Chapter 6 of this volume. What it signifies theologically is found by examining the dictates of reason from the point of view of the relation of human beings to God.

Everything human beings do or undergo—all their actions and “passions”—are done or undergone according to the laws of immanent causation that constitute God's or Nature's essence. Since God's essence is perfect, it is absurd to wish that anything that happens should happen otherwise. From God's point of view, human violations of the dictates of reason are as necessary to his perfection as human observances of them. As Spinoza explained to his correspondent Willem van Blijenbergh,

if good in relation to God implies that the just man does some good to God, and the thief some evil, I answer that neither the just man nor the thief can cause either delight or disgust (taedium) in God. If it is then asked whether each of those actions, so far as it is something real and caused by God, is equally perfect, I say that if we attend to the actions alone, and in the way proposed, then it can turn out that each is equally perfect.

(Ep 23)

Since God, as even traditional theology had taught, is wholly active, and so without passions, “strictly speaking, [he] loves no one, and hates no one” (E 5p17c). Hence to God, considered as he is in himself, and not as he constitutes this or that individual finite mind, nothing any human being does or undergoes is good or bad, just or unjust. It is irrational even to ask whether anything whatever might be better than it is, because nothing can happen except as it does in God—the absolutely infinite substance that is the only being that can exist.

It follows that, although human beings can and should inquire what is the best way for human beings to act, and what is the best attitude for them to take to God or Nature, and to Nature's course, they should not delude themselves that what is best for them is more than that. Since the nature of everything is a conatus to persevere in being what it is, what is good for a thing is what promotes its perseverance in being—what is advantageous (utile) for it; and what is bad for it is what hinders its perseverance in being. However, a human being does not persevere in being simply because his or her vital functions, such as breathing, continue. The highest good to which any human being can aspire is to be as free as a human being can be; that is, to be able to take advantage of every opportunity to increase his or her power to act that circumstances can make possible. The greatest opportunity anybody can have is to live in a free society as one among many who are fully capable of taking advantage of its freedom; but to take advantage of that opportunity, each must develop the cooperative virtues of good faith and benevolence. Spinoza contemptuously dismissed the objection that the virtues necessary for making the most of the greatest opportunity are not unqualified advantages, because they unfit human beings for saving their lives in circumstances in which they can only be saved by servility, treachery, or cowardice (E 4p72d). If you cannot survive without servile complicity in crime, the lesser evil, that is, what is advantageous (utile), is to refuse and die, as Seneca did (E 4p20s); for nobody capable of saving his life by such complicity can thrive in the only circumstances in which a rational human being can: those in which one can live without violating the dictates of reason.

While he forcibly asserts that reason imposes on the rational a set of dictates very like those of traditional Judaism and Christianity, Spinoza as forcibly denies that it permits them to reprobate those who violate those dictates as both Jewish and Christian preachers have done. He writes of them:

They seem to conceive man in nature as a government (imperium) within a government. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. And they attribute the cause of human impotence, not to the common power of nature, but to I know not what vice of human nature, which they therefore bewail, or laugh at, or (as usually happens) curse. And the more he knows how eloquently and bitingly to rail at the impotence of the human Mind, the more he is held to be Godly.

(E 3pr)

Such denunciations are in fact more blasphemous than godly. The dictates of reason require every human being to produce as much good as he can, and to reduce evil as much as he can; but how much of either he can do depends not on him, but on how things necessarily are. To the extent he can do neither, he should neither decry the state of the world as evil, nor heap contumely on those whose wrong actions he cannot prevent. “He who rightly knows (novit) that all things follow necessarily from the necessity of the divine nature … will certainly find nothing worthy of Hate, Derision, or Contempt, nor anyone whom he will pity (miserebitur)” (E 4p50s; emphasis added). He will try to have only affects that prompt him to benevolent action, which pity, or “sadness, accompanied by the idea of an evil that has happened to somebody we imagine to be like ourselves” (E 3da18), will not. To one already committed to active benevolence, sadness at what he cannot do can only distract him from what he can, and at the same time impair his love of God. Spinoza, however, scrupulously added that “one who is moved to help others neither by reason nor by pity is rightly called inhuman” (E 4p50s; emphasis added).

The love Spinoza's God attracts from those who rightly know him is described by Spinoza as “intellectual.” That love is an action, not a passion: the action of a rational finite being whose essence is a conatus to persevere in being, and who adequately cognizes that, since God is the substance of which he is a finite mode, his own existence would be unthinkable unless God were exactly as he is. Unlike the love of God preached by Moses and Jesus, gratitude for benefits received, whether in answer to prayer or as a reward for worship, has no part in it. Nor is it a due return for God's love to us. It is our participation in “the very Love of God by which God loves himself” (E 5p36); and nobody who so loves God can “strive that God should love him in return” (E 5p19). To love God intellectually is to be intellectually at peace (quies) with how things are: ourselves, and the absolutely infinite substance of which we are finite modes. The highest blessedness (beatitudo) is true acquiescence of spirit (vera animi acquiescentia) (E 5p42s).

Spinoza argues that nobody can hate God, because to the extent that we consider God as immanent cause of all that exists we are active, and so not sad—hate being the passive affect of sadness, accompanied by the idea of an external cause (E 5p18). His premise, however, seems to me false. Considering God as the immanent cause of all that exists is an action so far as one strives to exist oneself, for it contributes to directing that active striving rationally; but it is not an action if external causes so overwhelm one's conatus to persevere in existence that one wishes never to have existed at all. Spinoza might, indeed, save his proof if he could show that extreme pain could not overwhelm one's conatus to persevere in existence without obliterating our power to consider God as immanent cause of all that exists. But he did not show it, and I do not believe he could have. Of course, even if he could not, it would not follow that it can be rational to hate God: that some finite mode in the absolutely infinite being wishes that it had never been does not show that it is irrational for the infinite being itself to will to exist.

Notoriously, Spinoza has embarrassed many of his admirers by claiming to demonstrate that “the human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal” (E 5p23). Most recent commentators have rejected his proof as either fallacious or sheerly unintelligible. It is, however, a natural development of his conception of the human mind as a subset of the ideas that are modes of the eternal mode he refers to as the infinite idea of God, when taken together with his doctrine that a human individual's adequate idea of itself, if that individual has one, is a functional idea of its existence as caused at a certain stage in the course of nature. Given that all adequate ideas are eternal elements in the infinite idea of God, it appears to follow that if an adequate idea of itself is part of an individual human mind, that part of it not only will remain eternally after the individual body that is the primary object of that mind has been destroyed, but has eternally preexisted the coming into existence of that body.²⁹

Theologically, the question raised by Spinoza's doctrine that part of the human mind remains after the dissolution of the body that is its primary object, is what bearing it has on how human beings should live. I think the answer is that the eternal continuance of part of one's own mind in the mind of God cannot but be something a mind that wills to persevere in existence must will. However, it does not have the place in the lives of Spinozists that the hope of resurrection has in the lives of many Jews and Christians. What exists eternally is part of what exists during life, and is neither better nor worse than it is then. If we (that is, God, so far as he constitutes our minds) adequately cognize our lives as worth living, then we (i.e., he, so far as he is us) shall so cognize them forever. Our deaths will not be followed by divine judgment, and our continuation after death will be neither glorification in heaven nor damnation in hell. But neither will our deaths be wholly the end of us.

Notes

1. Yovel 1989 is the best comprehensive treatment of Spinoza as a dissident Marrano. It draws on a large and growing body of studies of the Amsterdam Jewish community and his relations with it. His relations with Protestant groups were authoritatively examined by K. O. Meinsma in 1896, in a book now most accessible in Henri Mechoulan and Pierre-François Moreau's French edition of it (Meinsma 1983), with appendices, entitled Spinoza et son cercle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), and they continue to be closely investigated by many scholars. The influence of Franciscus van den Enden, an ex-Jesuit with whom Spinoza studied as a young man, remained largely unexplored until the recent investigations of Wim Klever, who has announced his discovery of a number of van den Enden's writings, which he plans to present in a forthcoming book, Van den Enden, Biographical Documents and Works.

2. Spinoza's Latin name for God, “Deus,” is masculine; and his name for an infinite being he held to be identical with God, “Natura,” is feminine. He sometimes refers to this individual as “Deus sive Natura”—“God or Nature.” In the genders of the pronouns I use in place of these names, I follow Spinoza for the first two: “he” for “God” and “she” for “nature.” For “God or Nature” I use “it.”

3. See Strauss 1988, Chapter 5. (This book was originally published in 1952.)

4. Only a thorough examination could convince. Errol E. Harris in Harris 1978 has done much of what is needed by showing that what Strauss considers the eight chief signs by which Spinoza indicates the esoteric sense of the Theological-Political Treatise are nothing of the sort.

5. The “subjective” interpretation of what Spinoza meant by “attributum” is sometimes supported by translating “tanquam” in Spinoza's definition of an attribute, namely, “id, quod intellectus de substantia percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens” (E 1d4), as “as if” rather than as “as.” The decisive examination of the question of the objectivity of Spinoza's attributes is Gueroult 1968-74: 1,428-61 (Appendix 3, “La Controverse sur l’Attribut”).

6. Mignini (in Spinoza 1986) has persuasively argued that Spinoza wrote the first half of this work in Latin in the middle of 1660, and amplified it as objections were made or occurred to him. According to Mignini, he permitted a friend to translate it, with additional notes, into Dutch; after which he revised the translation and added to the text. By early 1662, having decided to restate his conclusions more geometrico (in the geometrical manner), he began to rework it into what became the Ethics. Edwin Curley judiciously surveys the theories that have been offered of the composition of the Short Treatise in Spinoza 1985a: 50-3.

7. The author of this outline has usually been thought to be the Amsterdam philosopher, Willem Deurhoff. Some, however, attribute it to Monnikhoff. Cf. Spinoza 1925: 436, and Spinoza 1985a: 53n1.

8. Aristotle, Categories 1a16-2b7; cf. Metaphysics VII.1028a8-1028b8.

9. Cf. Maimonides 1963: 249-52 [II.1.9b-10b]; cf. Aquinas 1964-66: I.3.1 (secundo).

10. Part of this correspondence was conducted through an intermediary, G. H. Schuller. The relevant passages in Spinoza's letters are Letter 64, where he referred Tschirnhaus to E 1p25c,s and to E 2p13le7s; and Letter 83. My disagreements both with Abraham Wolf's translation of Spinoza 1925: IV.334/24-5 in Letter 83, and with his commentary on the passage cited (Spinoza 1928: 61-62,365) are explained in Donagan 1988: 100,120.

11. Here as elsewhere my translation closely follows Edwin Curley's draft of a translation that will appear in the second volume of his The Collected Works of Spinoza (forthcoming from the Princeton University Press). I thank Professor Curley for his kindness in providing me with a copy of his draft, and for permitting me to use it. I have also consulted Samuel Shirley's excellent translation in Spinoza 1989. While I do not record minor divergences from Curley's renderings (mostly intended to be more literal if less elegant), readers should take note that I always render Spinoza's “cognoscere” and “cognitio” as “cognize” and “cognition,” and not as “know” and “knowledge.” My chief reason is that Spinoza held that human beings often cognize falsely.

12. That “necessarily” in Spinoza's definition means “by (immanently) causal necessity” and not “by logical necessity” is plain from the structure of Ethics Part 1. See Donagan 1988: 60-4,73-5.

13. He does deny it in a technical sense. See Donagan 1988: 109-13.

14. This has been denied by some, on the ground of some passages in which Spinoza uses the word “tempus” in a technical sense. See Bennett 1984: 202-3.

15. I have falsely asserted that Spinoza's contemporaries accused him “not of disbelieving what he professed to believe, but of concealing the heretical implications of what he professed” (Donagan 1988: 15). In “Van Velthuysen, Batelier and Bredenburg on Spinoza's Interpretation of the Scriptures,” a paper presented in April 1991 to a conference at Cortona organized by the Sculoa Normale Superiore di Pisa, Dr. Wiep van Bunge has shown that van Velthuysen did what I denied any of Spinoza's contemporaries did. The distinction I drew is philosophically suspect as well as historically false, because the distinction between difference in meaning and difference of belief is (as Quine has shown) indeterminate.

16. For the development of philology in the Netherlands see Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 50-3,65-76.

17. Born c. 1090 in Tudela, Spain, died 1164. Cited by Spinoza as “Aben Ezra.”

18. No other text [than that of the New Testament] posed the problem of the Textus Receptus … in so stark a form; and no other text was necessary to salvation. The character of the Vulgate established by Erasmus, Beza and Stephanus was so obviously haphazard that thoughtful critics, in countries where it was allowable to do so, had the strongest motives for questioning its authenticity. (Kenny 1974: 99)

    Even though, as Kenny adds in a footnote on the same page, “there are almost no doctrinal issues of any significance which turn on the criticism of the text, as was remarked by Bentley”—but thirty years after Spinoza's death.

19. Spinoza's theory of the three kinds of cognition is discussed in Chapter 3 by Margaret Wilson. My own treatment, which is largely derived from Matheron 1969 and Matheron 1986a, may be found in Donagan 1988: 135-40.

20. For a scientific example of Spinoza's licentiousness in hypothesis, see his controversy with Boyle (with Oldenburg as intermediary) about the reconstitution of nitre (Ep 6,11,13). For why Newton found it necessary to formulate a principle limiting what hypotheses scientists should consider, see Hall and Hall 1964.

21. E.g., Hermann Cohen in the nineteenth century, and (less vehemently) Leo Strauss in this. See Strauss 1965: 19-20; and Strauss 1988: 190-1.

22. I say what I think necessary about his offensive incidental remarks about Judaism in Donagan 1988: 26-7.

23. As he acknowledged, he took his words from Tacitus: “[Nec] enim umquam atrocioribus populi Romani cladibus magisve iustis indiciis adprobatum est non esse curae deis securitatem nostram, sed ultionem” (Historiae I.3).

24. As for the ceremonies of the Christians, viz. Baptism, the Lord's Supper, feasts, liturgies (orationes externas), and whatever others there may be in addition which are and always have been common to all Christianity, if Christ or the Apostles ever instituted these (which so far I do not find to be sufficiently established), they were instituted only as external signs of the universal Church, but not as things which contribute to blessedness or have any Holiness in them. (TTP v.32)

    As philology, this is fantastic with respect to the Eucharist (the Lord's Supper).

25. The most illuminating treatment of Spinoza's project for a universal faith, and of its relation to Christianity, is Matheron 1971.

26. “Except for Christ, nobody received revelations from God unless by the help of imagination, that is, by the help of words or of images” (TTP i.25).

27. Spinoza's point seems to be that just as God, in causing a voice or an image that conveys a revelation, does not accommodate the revelation to the (nonexistent) opinions of that voice, so, in causing an idea in Jesus' mind, he does not accommodate himself to the other ideas in that mind. Angels, it must be remembered, are not real, but figments of the imaginations of the prophets who ascribe to them the voices they hear or the visual appearances they see.

28. The passages Strauss cites for the former of the two allegedly contradictory propositions are: TTP i.1-4,6-7,22-23,25; and xv.22,26-27,44 (with vi.65, vii.8-10,78, xi.14-15; xii.21-22, xiii.6-8,20, xvi.53-56, 61,64 for comparison); and those cited for the latter are TTP v.49; xiii.17, xiv.38; and xv.21,23,42 (with iv.20 and vii.72 for comparison).

29. I have examined elsewhere how Spinoza derives Ethics 5p23, and defended its validity, given his axioms, in Donagan 1988: 191-200. Strictly, it is not part of his theology.

Method of Citation

Where references are by author and year of publication, full reference information may be found in the Bibliography.

The following common abbreviations have been used in referring to Spinoza's writings:

CGLH: Compendium of Hebrew Grammar (Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae)

DPP: Descartes's “Principles of Philosophy” (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, Pars I et II, More Geometrico demonstratae)

E: Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico demonstrata)

Ep: Correspondence (Epistulae)

ST: Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en des zelfs Welstand)

TdIE: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione)

TP: Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus)

TTP: Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus)

References to the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the Political Treatise, and the Theological-Political Treatise are by chapter and, within chapters, by the section numbers introduced in the Bruder edition of Spinoza's works and reproduced in many subsequent editions.

References to the Correspondence are by letter number.

References to Descartes's “Principles of Philosophy” and the Ethics begin with an arabic number denoting the Part, and use the following common abbreviations:

a: Axiom

ap: Appendix

c: Corollary

d: Definition (when not following a Proposition number)

d: Demonstration (when following a Proposition number)

da: Definition of the Affects (located at the end of Ethics Part 3)

ex: Explanation

le: Lemma (located after Ethics 2p13)

p: Proposition

po: Postulate

pr: Preface

s: Scholium (Note)

For example, “E 1p14d,c1” refers to Ethics Part 1, Proposition 14, Demonstration and Corollary 1.

Bibliography

Aquinas, St. Thomas. 1964-6. Summa Theologiae. 60 Vols. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.

Bennett, Jonathan. 1984. A Study of Spinoza's “Ethics.” Indianapolis: Hackett.

Descartes, René. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. 3 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Donagan, Alan.1988. Spinoza. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gueroult, Martial. 1968-74. Spinoza. Vol. 1: Dieu (Ethique 1); Vol. 2: L’âme (Ethique 2) 2 Vols. Paris: Aubier.

Hall, A. Rupert, and Marie Boas Hall. 1964. “Philosophy and Natural Philosophy: Boyle and Spinoza.” In Mélanges Alexandre Koyré II: l’Aventure de l’Esprit, 241-56. Paris: Hermann.

Harris, Errol E. 1978. Is There an Esoteric Doctrine in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus? Leiden: Vanwege het Spinozahuis, Brill.

Kenny, E. J. 1974. The Classical Text. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Maimonides, Moses. 1963. The Guide of the Perplexed, ed. and trans. Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Matheron, Alexandre. 1969. Individu et Communauté chez Spinoza. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

1971. Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza. Paris: Aubier.

1986a. “Spinoza and Euclidean Arithmetic: the Example of the Fourth Proportional.” In Spinoza and the Sciences, eds. Marjorie Grene and Deborah Nails, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: Reidel.

Meinsma, K. O. 1983. Spinoza et son cercle. eds. Henri Mechoulan and Pierre-François Moreau. Paris: Vrin.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1925. Spinoza Opera. ed. Carl Gebhardt. 4 Vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.

1985a. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1986. Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en deszelvs Welstand/Breve Trattato su Dio, l’Uomo e il suo Bene, ed. and trans. Filippo Mignini. L’Aquila: L. U. Japadre Editore.

1989. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ed. and trans. Samuel Shirley. Leiden: Brill.

Strauss, Leo. 1965. Spinoza's Critique of Religion, ed. and trans. E. M. Sinclair. New York: Schocken Books.

1988. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Wilhelm von. 1686. Medicina mentis sive Artis inveniendi praecepta generalia. Amsterdam: Jan Rieuwertsz.

1980. Médecine de l’esprit, ed. and trans. Jean-Paul Wurtz. Paris: Ophrys.

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von. 1982. History of Classical Scholarship, ed. and trans. Alan Harris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.