Spinoza’s insistence that the best way to interpret the meaning of the prophets’
utterances is to employ a historical method that relies on ordinary forms of natural reasoning sets him against a range of critics whose views he now goes on to reject. When he was writing the Treatise, philosophers and theologians were still bound by the edict that the States of Holland had passed in 1656, forbidding each group from antagonizing the other.54To avoid being accused of breaking this law, authors had to be cautious about the way they expressed themselves, and one obvious device was to pin objections directed against living opponents on historical substitutes or accredited enemies. Spinoza now adopts this strategy. Rather than targeting his contemporaries, he inveighs against a series of other figures and confessions, casting his critical net over a broader area than the polemics of his argument require.
51 Ibid. ch. 7, p. 111. 52 Ibid. ch. 7, p. 112.
53 ‘The Belgic Confession’, in The Creeds of Christendom: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, ed. Philip Schaff (New York: Cosimo Books, 2007), Article 9.
54 See Chapter 1, fn. 8.
If the meaning of Scripture can be determined by natural reasoning, it is in principle accessible to anyone. While some individuals will no doubt be better than others at interpreting the text, no one has a special kind of access to the minds of the prophets or is intrinsically better placed to determine the signifi-cance of their revelations. Among the various religious groups which reject this view, Spinoza now identifies two: the Pharisees, who believed that they had passed down a knowledge of the divine word originally vouchsafed to them by Moses; and the Roman Catholic Church, which holds that the Pope cannot be mistaken about the interpretation of Scripture. Both these traditions, he claims, should be viewed with deep suspicion, and neither set of claims will in fact stand up to scrutiny.55As we have seen, however, Spinoza is confident that an equally powerful case can be made against the Reformed Church’s belief that the Holy Ghost imbues the faithful with a special capacity to know what Scripture teaches. Along with the Pope and the Pharisees, the Treatise could have singled out the Elect, together with the theologians who took it upon themselves to represent them.
Spinoza’s allusion was hardly likely to go unnoticed, and could presumably have been expected to provoke displeasure among Reformed theologians. In addition, however, his method of interpretation was in danger of exposing him to the grave charge of subordinating theology to philosophy. Since this method is a version of the analytical approach to natural enquiry used by Descartes and favoured by many Dutch Cartesians, applying it to the Bible amounts, as we have seen, to using philosophy to interpret Scripture. From there it was a small step to the charge that not only philosophy, but worse still Cartesian philosophy, can take over the task of theology. For several reasons, this was a dangerous conclu-sion to reach. At a practical level it overstepped the boundaries of free philoso-phizing laid down by the States General and broke the rule that philosophers and theologians must keep off each other’s territory.56Moreover, at an intellectual level it threatened to abolish the division between the two disciplines. Spinoza’s next step is therefore to reaffirm their distinctness by showing that philosophy cannot after all do theology’s work. To hold that properly philosophical methods of investigation are capable of interpreting the meaning of Scripture is, he now contends, a serious mistake.
55 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 7, p. 105.
56 Perhaps this factor contributed to Spinoza’s decision to present the Treatise as published outside the Netherlands. Although it was published in Amsterdam by Jan Rieuwertsz, the imprint on the title page is‘Hamburg. Henry Kunraht. 1670’. Ibid. p. 3. See Piet Steenbakkers,
‘The Text of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’, in Spinoza’s ‘Theologico-Political Treatise’, ed.
Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Michael A. Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 33–5.
Part of the motivation for the argument that Spinoza now goes on to offer lies in a desire to distance himself from the inflammatory position defended by his friend Lodewijk Meijer, to the effect that only philosophy can judge theology, which has no independent authority of its own. Instead of interpret-ing Scripture by Scripture, we must test interpretations of the Bible against our philosophical understanding of the truth. As we would by now expect, Spinoza does not name Meijer as an opponent. Instead, he directs his criticisms of Meijer’s view against Maimonides, who is accused of arguing that, whenever a passage of Scripture asserts something that is contrary to reason, we must interpret it in a way that accords with reason, even when its meaning is perfectly clear.57For example, if Moses says that God is afire and we know that this is contrary to reason, we must reinterpret his utterance in such a way that it comes out true. This is the very approach that Spinoza has just rejected.
As he now explains, Maimonides/Meijer has mistakenly assumed that, despite the apparent diversity of the prophets’ opinions, they all propounded a single speculative doctrine that accords with our philosophical understanding.
To appreciate what is at stake in this discussion, it will be helpful to look more closely at some of Meijer’s arguments. The conviction that the many ambiguities to be found in the sacred texts can be internally resolved is based, he proposes, on a number of false assumptions. In the first place, it presupposes that we can distinguish clear from obscure passages. But since a passage that is obscure to one reader may be clear to another, there is no single way of making this distinction.58 Furthermore, it presupposes that the project of resolving inconsistencies has a single solution. But even if we could settle the meanings of a given set of passages andfind a way to make them mutually consistent, another inconsistency would soon crop up somewhere else in the text. Finally, since the whole enterprise of interpretation depends on independent linguistic knowledge that cannot be derived from the text itself, Scripture cannot be interpreted by Scripture. Since these problems are utterly intractable, the only way forward is to assess biblical claims in the light of some independent standard. But what better standard could there be than that of philosophy, that is to say, the ‘light of reason refined by study, application, experience, and practice’?59
57 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 7, pp. 113–14. See Chapter 5, fn. 58.
58 Meijer, Philosophia S. Scripturæ Interpres, III.3, p. 7; Meyer, La philosophie interpre`te de l’e´criture sainte, III.3, p. 46.
59 Meijer, Philosophia S. Scripturæ Interpres, V.2, p. 40; Meyer, La philosophie interpre`te de l’e´criture sainte, V.2, p. 106.
Meijer takes pains to show that relying on philosophy to interpret Scripture is not a new idea. Theologians have already employed it to dispel mistaken Catholic and Lutheran interpretations of the Eucharist, by showing that these conflict with our knowledge of physics.60(The same approach had been taken, we might add, to Joshua’s claim about the sun.) In addition, theologians have employed it to confirm the central biblical doctrines that are, as virtually everyone agrees, both clear and necessary for salvation. (Here Spinoza could not but have recognized some of his own arguments.) The approach has therefore already proved its worth. However, so Meijer enthuses, it has had new life breathed into it by Descartes’ innovations. The emergence of a philosophy that guarantees the certainty of its conclusions has provided an indubitable standard against which interpretations of biblical teaching can be assessed. Because we can be absolutely confident of the claims Cartesianism vindicates, we can look forward to an era in which philosophy will reveal the means to eternal life and put an end to the interminable disputes that have torn the Church apart.61
Having observed the furore that arose when Meijer’s book was published, Spinoza undoubtedly had pragmatic reasons for dissociating himself from its opinions; but he is also intellectually out of sympathy with them. While he acknowledges many of the interpretative problems that Meijer raises, he does not accept his solutions. Afirst point of disagreement concerns the construction of a history of Scripture. Spinoza willingly concedes that his method cannot clarify all the obscurities to be found in the Bible,62but remains convinced that if one’s project is to work out what the Scriptures say, one must rely so far as possible on the text itself. It is of course necessary to use external linguistic and historical sources when they are relevant. (For example, the Treatise occasion-ally appeals for support to Josephus’s History of the Jews.63) What we must not do, however, is to use our own beliefs about what is true to decode what a passage says, even when we are absolutely certain that these beliefs are correct. Rather, we must try to let the text speak for itself, and confront it in all its strangeness.
Spinoza is equally unimpressed by Meijer’s treatment of what the Treatise presents as the second stage of interpretation:finding out what the prophets intend or mean. Here again, he rejects the suggestion that we should interpret
60 Meijer, Philosophia S. Scripturæ Interpres, VI.3, pp. 47–8; Meyer, La philosophie interpre`te de l’e´criture sainte, VI.3, pp. 120–1.
61 Meijer, Philosophia S. Scripturæ Interpres, Epilogus; Meyer, La philosophie interpre`te de l’e´criture sainte, Epilogue, p. 249.
62 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 7, p. 109.
63 Ibid. ch. 2, p. 42, ch. 3, p. 49, ch. 6, p. 96, ch. 9, pp. 132, 140, ch. 10, pp. 143, 146.
the prophets’ utterances and actions in the light of our own philosophical knowledge. Anyone who takes this path will ride roughshod over the prophets’
imaginative grasp of their situations, and ignore their capacity to express their insights in a form accessible to ordinary people. In doing so, they will misread their purposes. Many of the things they say are not, and were not intended to be, literally true, and if we try to make them so we shall end up with a travesty of their meaning and significance. So in order to understand Scripture, we have to try to think in the prophets’ imaginative register while being prepared to admit failure.
When Spinoza claims to be interpreting Scripture by Scripture, he means that he is interpreting Scripture by Scripture as opposed to interpreting it against the standard of clarity and distinctness used by Cartesian philosophers.
His method does not prevent him from appealing to non-biblical historical and philological sources; on the contrary, it demands that he do so whenever these can help him to work out, for instance, what a word means or when a book was written. What it forbids him to do, however, is to treat the Bible as a work whose purpose is primarily to present a sequence of clear and distinct ideas; and here, he urges, Meijer/Maimonides misses something important. Maimonides, and by implication Meijer, fail to see that the prophets were neither philoso-phers engaged in demonstration nor theologians aiming to understand the truth about a text.64Rather, they were people of great imagination who were trying to convey their insights in a persuasive fashion in order to encourage a certain way of life.65To try to interpret and test their claims in the light of clear and distinct ideas is therefore to apply an inappropriate standard. Furthermore, the attempt is bound to fail. Since the Bible mainly consists of narratives about individual things, it contains very few clear and distinct ideas on which philosophical reasoning can get a purchase, and the efforts of philosophers to explain Scripture will consequently come to naught.66
Finally, there is an important sense in which advocates of the view that Scripture must be interpreted by philosophy reproduce one of the objection-able features of the Calvinist claim that it can only be interpreted with the help of a supernatural light. It is clear from the Bible that the prophets and Apostles preached not only to the faithful, but addressed the impious as well, expecting to be understood. The Reformed Church’s belief that natural reason is not enough to enable us to grasp their teachings therefore implies that the prophets and Apostles largely preached to people who could not understand them, and
64 Ibid. ch. 7, p. 115. 65 Ibid. ch. 2, p. 43. 66 Ibid. ch. 7, p. 115.
that Moses prescribed his laws in vain. Most of their audiences, endowed with natural reason but not with faith, would have been incapable of following their meaning.67Equally, authors such as Meijer, who insist that one must have an education in Cartesian philosophy in order to grasp the meaning of Scripture, place its meaning beyond ordinary reach. People‘who have no knowledge of demonstrations, or are unable to give their time to them, will be able to admit nothing about scripture, and will depend on the authority and testimony of those who philosophise. . . . This would obviously introduce a new sort of authority into the Church, and a new kind of minister or priest, whom ordinary people would mock rather than venerate’.68The supernatural light returns in a new guise.‘This method of Maimonides’, Spinoza bluntly concludes, ‘is utterly useless’.69
One could hardly look for a more uncompromising rejection. But what exactly does Spinoza offer in place of Maimonides’ hermeneutic approach?
Does he succeed in avoiding its deficiencies, while meeting the Church’s demand that theology must be kept separate from philosophy? Spinoza cer-tainly does defend a distinctive view. While Maimonides and Meijer propose that philosophy should take theology over by subjecting its claims to philo-sophical standards of assessment, Spinoza aspires to form a coalition between the two forms of enquiry by bringing theology into the Cartesian fold. As he has argued, both philosophy and theology rely on natural reasoning; more specifically, both employ analysis or the historical method to identify and define the entities that they then attempt to understand. Theologians who study the Bible in the way that Spinoza recommends therefore rely on a method that Cartesians also employ in their study of the natural world, and in doing so interpret Scripture by Scripture as the Church requires. So far, then, there is no methodological divide between the two subjects, and nothing for their exponents tofight about.
It is of course true that philosophers can also do something else that theolo-gians cannot. They can recast some of their conclusions in a synthetic or demonstrative form, and where this is possible it enables them to test the mathematical certainty of their results and demonstrate further clear and distinct conclusions. But the Bible, like some of the things that natural philosophers study, is not adapted to this form of inquiry, and that’s an end of it. We have to accept with Aristotle that different sorts of things require different methods of investigation. So while some areas of philosophy do not use the historical
67 Ibid. ch. 7, p. 113. 68 Ibid. ch. 7, p. 114. 69 Ibid. ch. 7, p. 116.
method that it shares with theology, other areas do. Methodologically, the two forms of inquiry overlap.
For the more orthodox theologians of the Reformed Church, this was not a significant improvement on the position held by Maimonides and Meijer.
Although Spinoza allows that theology undertakes a distinctive task that is not itself a philosophical one (namely interpreting the teachings of the prophets and Apostles), he nevertheless brings theology into the ambit of philosophy.
Theology, he asserts, relies on norms of natural reasoning that philosophers among others also employ, so that some of the skills cultivated by philosophers alsofit them to do theology. Putting the point the other way round, theolo-gians who construct a history of Scripture and draw inferences from it are, from a methodological point of view, philosophizing. Methodologically speaking, there is no sharp boundary between philosophy and theology, and many distinctive features of theology have been lost.
Worse still, the kinds of natural reasoning that are necessary to work out what the Bible’s central doctrines consist in are so straightforward that they are not restricted to any professional group, theological or philosophical. ‘The standard of interpretation must be nothing but the natural light which is common to all, and not any supernatural light or external authority. Nor must it be so difficult that it can only be applied by the most acute philosophers, but must be accommodated to the natural and common intelligence and capacity of men’.70 Ordinary people who can read or hear the Scriptures do not need theologians or other religious officials to identify the fundamental doctrines on which their salvation depends, and to some extent they can resolve interpretative problems by using their ordinary capacity for reasoning.
In defending thefirst of these claims Spinoza is, as we have seen, upholding a view shared by more moderate Calvinists within the Reformed Church. But in defending the second, he is implicitly voicing his support for nonconformist religious movements such as the Collegiants, who treated the interpretation of Scripture as a collective project in which everyone could take part, untram-melled by any authority other than the text itself. This is a far cry from the aspirations of the theologians Spinoza is opposing, who are bent on using their purported authority as a means of maintaining their own power. Even had his diagnosis been fair to them, they were hardly likely to have accepted it.
70 Ibid. ch. 7, p. 117.