In due course Spinoza will provide a full account of the interpretative method he favours. At the start, however, he simply employs two standard hermeneutic techniques. Like the Jewish commentators whose works he had studied at school, and the Christian theologians with whom he is now engaging, hefirst assembles and compares biblical passages that are relevant to his chosen theme.
When their meaning is less than transparent, a second technique comes into
28 Ibid.
29 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. and trans. John Thomas McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960–1), I.10.1.
30 Theo Verbeek, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise: Exploring ‘the Will of God’ (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003), p. 99.
play—that of examining the original Hebrew meanings of problematic words or phrases. Here Spinoza aligns himself with a Dutch Protestant heritage that was itself to some extent indebted to Jewish textual scholarship.31The earliest Christian Reformers had brought the fruits of a classical humanist tradition to bear on Scripture, and in the opening decades of the seventeenth century leadingfigures such as Joseph Scaliger, together with his pupils, Daniel Heinsius and Hugo Grotius, had made the University of Leiden a major centre of humanist studies.32As they and their students learned the languages in which the earliest available versions of biblical manuscripts were written, theologians began to use Hebrew sources as a matter of course On the whole, then, Calvinists would have regarded Spinoza’s approach to decoding the Scriptures as entirely natural, and indeed unavoidable.33
Putting his method to work, Spinoza’s first aim is to arrive at a clear account of what Scripture says about the way God communicates with his prophets, and to undermine the supposition that the process is a supernatural one. Surveying the relevant passages, and engaging with a discussion of the same topic by the twelfth-century rabbi Moses Maimonides, he notes that revelations are invari-ably described as consisting of words or images.34These are usually imagined, in the sense that they take the form of dreams or visions, but there are two striking exceptions to the rule. Moses and the Israelites heard God speak with a real voice, and Moses saw God’s back on Mount Sinai. This is made clear, for instance, in Numbers 12.6:‘If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak to him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so. . . With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold’.
The observation that revelations take the form of words and images allows Spinoza to defend a claim that is absolutely vital to his argument: that prophecy occurs by means of capacities that belong to what philosophers
31 For example, to Maimonides’s discussions of equivocal terms in his Guide for the Perplexed.
See Sara Kelin-Braslavy,‘Bible Commentary’, in The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, ed.
Kenneth Seeskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
32 Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1983–93), Vol. 1, Textual Criticism and Exegesis; H. J. de Jonge, ‘The Study of the New Testament’, in Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning, ed.
Th H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Brill, 1975).
33 Calvin had studied Hebrew at Basel and Strassburg, and appeals in his commentaries on Scripture to etymology, usage, and context. He uses, and criticizes, rabbinical sources in order to clarify the meaning of the Old Testament. See Puckett, Calvin’s Exegesis, pp. 57–67.
34 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 1, p. 20.
call imagination.35 As we saw in Chapter 1, one of the points on which Aristotelians and Cartesians were able to agree was that our interconnected abilities to sense, feel passion, fantasize, and remember can all be grouped together as aspects of imagining. With this analysis in hand, and despite the fact that the term ‘imagination’ does not occur in Scripture, Spinoza takes it that we are in a position to see that imagining is the means by which revelation works. To be sure, we cannot give a full account of all the antecedent causes of particular revelations;‘if you ask by what laws of nature this revelations was made, I confess I do not know’.36But we can safely infer the general conclusion that what made the prophets exceptional was their imaginative power, and that this was what enabled them to arrive at insights denied to ordinary people.
To illuminate the full range of biblical prophecy, imagining must be able to account not only for dreams and visions, but also for Moses’ ‘real’ encounters with God. Accepting this challenge, Spinoza rejects a view that he attributes to Maimonides, that because no one can see an angel with his eyes open, revela-tion can only occur in dreams,37 and argues instead that revelations can sometimes be phenomenologically indistinguishable from ordinary perception.
‘Some men, with open eyes, imagine certain things so vividly that it is as if they had those things before them’,38so that Moses’ encounter with God may have been as vivid as one with his brother Aaron. Spinoza elaborates this view in a letter to his friend Pieter Balling, who had written to him about the death of his child, asking for advice. Shortly before his son became ill, Balling recounts, he had woken in the night and heard the sound of sobs like those the dying boy would utter. Was this, he now wondered, a premonition or omen? Spinoza replies that the sobs were the fruit of Balling’s imagination. When a father loves his son with such intensity that it is as if they are one and the same being, he
35 Maimondes is the rabbinical writer to whom Spinoza refers most frequently in the Treatise.
See Catherine Chalier, Spinoza lecteur de Maı¨monide: La question the´ologico-politique (Paris: Cerf, 2006); Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (New York: Meridian Books, 1958).
Here he breaks with Maimonides’s view that prophets are distinguished both for their intellects and for their imagination. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. Michael Friedländer, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1928), II.32. See Howard T. Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001); Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 92–7.
36 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 1, p. 27.
37 This underrates Spinoza’s indebtedness to Maimonides’s discussion. See Maimonides, Guide, II.41.
38 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 1, p. 28fn.
may be exceptionally sensitive to the child’s condition. Balling’s loving atten-tion enabled him to apprehend that his son was sickening, though he expressed this knowledge not in an idea of an impending illness, but rather by association, in an idea of the child’s cries.39
To reassure Balling that intimations of this kind lie within normal human bounds, Spinoza recounts an experience of his own. ‘When I awoke one morning, when the sky was already growing light, from a very heavy dream, the images which had come to me in my dream remained as vividly before my eyes as if they had been real things, especially the image of a certain black and scabby Brazilian whom I had never seen before. This image for the most part disappeared when, in order to divert myself with something else, I fixed my eyes on a book or some other object; but as soon as I again turned my eyes away. . . , the image of the black man (Aethiopis) again reappeared as vividly as before, and again and again until it gradually disappeared. What happened to me with my inner sense of sight happened also with your sense of hearing. But since the cause was very different, your case was an omen and mine was not’.40 Balling’s premonition can be seen as a lesser instance of the imaginative insight attained by the prophets and attested to in Scripture. Where his attentiveness made him aware of his son’s impending illness, the prophets’
outstanding sensitivity allowed them to grasp what the Bible calls the word of God. And where Spinoza’s image of the Brazilian was vivid and lingering enough to make him doubt that he had dreamed it, something similar explains Moses’ waking image of God. Since imagination can account for all forms of prophecy,‘we can affirm without any reservation that the prophets perceived God’s revelations only with the aid of imagination, i.e. by the mediation of words or images, the latter of which might be either true or imaginary. For since wefind no other means in Scripture except these, we are not permitted to feign any others, as we have already shown’.41
This is a significant step in Spinoza’s argument on which much of his subsequent discussion will rely, but it is not yet sufficient to discredit the view he is trying to overturn–that revelation is caused by supernatural as opposed to natural means. As he acknowledges, exponents of this position
39 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 19–23; Genevieve Lloyd, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the Ethics (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 64.
40 Letter 17. Letters: July 1664–September 1665, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I, pp. 352–3. Translation modified.
41 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ch. 1, p. 28. Spinoza explains why the mind’s knowl-edge of the existence of external bodies via imagination is inadequate in Ethics, 2p26c.
are bound to retort that the Bible repeatedly describes the prophets not simply as people of exceptional imaginative power, but as instilled with the spirit of God.42His next task is therefore to consider what this means. Embarking on a close textual analysis, and examining individual passages with an almost gleeful attention to diversity, Spinoza notes that ‘spirit’ translates the Hebrew word ruagh, which can mean wind, breath or breathing, courage and strength, power and ability; it can mean intention, will, mind, decision or appetite, and serves to express all the passions of the heart. Finally, it can mean the regions of the world.43 If these are the available meanings of ‘spirit’, what does it mean to speak of the spirit of God? Again, Scripture sustains many different interpreta-tions. Things attributed to God can belong to his nature or be parts of him, as in the eyes of God; they can be within his power, as in the heavens of God; they can be imparted by him to the prophets as in the law of God; they can be of superlative degree, as when men of exceptional strength are called sons of God, or exceptionally large trees are called the trees of God; they can be beyond ordinary human understanding and therefore sources of wonder, as when miracles are called works of God; they can exceptional of their kind, as when Pharaoh tells Daniel that he possesses the mind of God.
This is Spinoza’s first foray into linguistic analysis, and one might be forgiven for concluding that such a cornucopia of possibilities would make it impossible to arrive at a compelling conclusion about the meaning of ‘spirit of God’.
However, he is confident that particular occurrences of the phrase can be disambiguated by taking account of the contexts in which they occur, and provides a string of examples to illustrate his point. Sometimes, he wryly observes,‘the spirit of God’ simply means a strong, dry wind.44 Sometimes it means the mind of man.45But if we focus on the context of phrases such as‘the spirit of God was in the prophet’ or ‘men were filled with the spirit of God and with the Holy Spirit’, it emerges that they have four distinct meanings: first, that the prophets were endowed with more than ordinary virtue; second, that they cultivated piety with exceptional constancy of heart; and third that they perceived God’s mind or judgement. Finally, the causes of prophecy were referred to God because they were not understood, and were viewed with wonder.46
This compressed survey of biblical usage gives a flavour of one of the argumentative devices on which the Treatise will rely. Rather than providing detailed defences of the scriptural interpretations at which he arrives, Spinoza
42 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 1, p. 21. 43 Ibid. ch. 1, pp. 22–3.
44 Ibid. ch. 1, p. 24. 45 Ibid. ch. 1, p. 25. 46 Ibid. ch. 1, p. 27.
adopts the tone of an authority whose assumptions and inferences successfully cut through centuries of hermeneutic uncertainty and yield readings that are beyond reasonable doubt. As we shall see, some of the analyses he defends are radical; but in this case his conclusion was widely accepted and even taken for granted. Yes, prophets receive God’s word and in this sense perceive his thoughts. Yes, the prophets were people of exceptional virtue and piety. And yes, we do not fully understand the process that results in revealed knowledge.
None of this would have excited particular comment. Nonetheless, Spinoza’s position is deliberately deflationary, because it implies that this is all that is meant when the Bible talks about prophets beingfilled with the spirit of God.
Scripture therefore does not commit us to the view that prophecy is the fruit of supernatural powers bestowed by the Holy Spirit, and to think otherwise, Spinoza contemptuously remarks, would be to dream that the prophets had human bodies but not human minds, ‘and thus that their sensations and consciousness were of an entirely different nature from our own’.47 Instead, it indicates that the way to understand revelation is to view it as the outcome of an imaginative capacity that all human beings possess to some degree. The prophets were indeed extraordinary; but what made them so was the unusual quality of their imaginations, which gave them access to insights that lay beyond the reach of more ordinary people.