“By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we
anathematize, cut off, curse, and execrate Baruch Spinoza, in the
presence of these sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen
precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith Joshua
anathematized Jericho; with the cursing wherewith Elisha cursed the
children; and with all the cursings which are written in the Book of the
Law: cursed be he by day, and cursed by night; cursed when he lieth
down, and cursed when he riseth up; cursed when he goeth out, and cursed
when he cometh in; the Lord pardon him never; the wrath and fury of the
Lord burn upon this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are
written in the Book of the Law. The Lord blot out his name under heaven.
The Lord set him apart for destruction from all the tribes of Israel,
with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of
this Law.... There shall be no man speak to him, no man write to him, no
man show him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no
man come nigh him.”
With these amenities, the current compliments of theological parting,
the Jews of the Portuguese synagogue at Amsterdam took in 1656 (and not
in 1660, as has till now been commonly supposed) their leave of their
erring brother, Baruch or Benedict Spinoza. They remained children of
Israel, and he became a child of modern Europe.
That was in 1656, and Spinoza died in 1677, at the early age of
forty-four. Glory had not found him out. His short life—a life of
unbroken diligence, kindliness, and purity—was passed in seclusion. But
in spite of that seclusion, in spite of the shortness of his career, in
spite of the hostility of the dispensers of renown in the 18th
century,—of Voltaire’s disparagement and Bayle’s detraction,—in spite of
the repellent form which he has given to his principal work, in spite of
the exterior semblance of a rigid dogmatism alien to the most essential
tendencies of modern philosophy, in spite, finally, of the immense
weight of disfavor cast upon him by the long-repeated charge of atheism,
Spinoza’s name has silently risen in importance, the man and his work
have attracted a steadily increasing notice, and bid fair to become soon
what they deserve to become,—in the history of modern philosophy the
central point of interest. An avowed translation of one of his
works,—his _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_,—has at last made its
appearance in English. It is the principal work which Spinoza published
in his lifetime; his book on ethics, the work on which his fame rests,
is posthumous.
The English translator has not done his task well. Of the character of
his version there can, I am afraid, be no doubt; one such passage as the
following is decisive:—
“I confess that, _while with them_ (the theologians) _I have never been
able sufficiently to admire the unfathomed mysteries of Scripture, I
have still found them giving utterance to nothing but Aristotelian and
Platonic speculations_, artfully dressed up and cunningly accommodated
to Holy Writ, lest the speakers should show themselves too plainly to
belong to the sect of the Grecian heathens. _Nor was it enough for these
men to discourse with the Greeks; they have further taken to raving with
the Hebrew prophets._”
This professes to be a translation of these words of Spinoza: “Fateor,
eos nunquam satis mirari potuisse Scripturæ profundissima mysteria;
attamen præter Aristotelicorum vel Platonicorum speculationes nihil
docuisse video, atque his, ne gentiles sectari viderentur, Scripturam
accommodaverunt. Non satis his fuit cum Graecis insanire, sed prophetas
cum iisdem deliravisse voluerunt.” After one such specimen of a
translator’s force, the experienced reader has a sort of instinct that
he may as well close the book at once, with a smile or a sigh, according
as he happens to be a follower of the weeping or of the laughing
philosopher. If, in spite of this instinct, he persists in going on with
the English version of the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, he will
find many more such specimens. It is not, however, my intention to fill
my space with these, or with strictures upon their author. I prefer to
remark, that he renders a service to literary history by pointing out,
in his preface, how “to Bayle may be traced the disfavor in which the
name of Spinoza was so long held;” that, in his observations on the
system of the Church of England, he shows a laudable freedom from the
prejudices of ordinary English Liberals of that advanced school to which
he clearly belongs; and lastly, that, though he manifests little
familiarity with Latin, he seems to have considerable familiarity with
philosophy, and to be well able to follow and comprehend speculative
reasoning. Let me advise him to unite his forces with those of some one
who has that accurate knowledge of Latin which he himself has not, and
then, perhaps, of that union a really good translation of Spinoza will
be the result. And, having given him this advice, let me again turn, for
a little, to the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ itself.
This work, as I have already said, is a work on the interpretation of
Scripture,—it treats of the Bible. What was it exactly which Spinoza
thought about the Bible and its inspiration? That will be, at the
present moment, the central point of interest for the English readers of
his Treatise. Now, it is to be observed, that just on this very point
the Treatise, interesting and remarkable as it is, will fail to satisfy
the reader. It is important to seize this notion quite firmly, and not
to quit hold of it while one is reading Spinoza’s work. The scope of
that work is this. Spinoza sees that the life and practice of Christian
nations professing the religion of the Bible, are not the due fruits of
the religion of the Bible; he sees only hatred, bitterness, and strife,
where he might have expected to see love, joy, and peace in believing;
and he asks himself the reason of this. The reason is, he says, that
these people misunderstand their Bible. Well, then, is his conclusion, I
will write a _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_. I will show these people,
that, taking the Bible for granted, taking it to be all which it asserts
itself to be, taking it to have all the authority which it claims, it is
not what they imagine it to be, it does not say what they imagine it to
say. I will show them what it really does say, and I will show them that
they will do well to accept this real teaching of the Bible, instead of
the phantom with which they have so long been cheated. I will show their
governments that they will do well to remodel the national churches, to
make of them institutions informed with the spirit of the true Bible,
instead of institutions informed with the spirit of this false phantom.
The comments of men, Spinoza said, had been foisted into the Christian
religion; the pure teaching of God had been lost sight of. He
determined, therefore, to go again to the Bible, to read it over and
over with a perfectly unprejudiced mind, and to accept nothing as its
teaching which it did not clearly teach. He began by constructing a
method, or set of conditions indispensable for the adequate
interpretation of Scripture. These conditions are such, he points out,
that a perfectly adequate interpretation of Scripture is now impossible.
For example, to understand any prophet thoroughly, we ought to know the
life, character, and pursuits of that prophet, under what circumstances
his book was composed, and in what state and through what hands it has
come down to us; and, in general, most of this we cannot now know.
Still, the main sense of the Books of Scripture may be clearly seized by
us. Himself a Jew with all the learning of his nation, and a man of the
highest natural powers, Spinoza had in the difficult task of seizing
this sense every aid which special knowledge or pre-eminent faculties
could supply.
In what then, he asks, does Scripture, interpreted by its own aid, and
not by the aid of Rabbinical traditions or Greek philosophy, allege its
own divinity to consist? In a revelation given by God to the prophets.
Now all knowledge is a divine revelation; but prophecy, as represented
in Scripture, is one of which the laws of human nature, considered in
themselves alone, cannot be the cause. Therefore nothing must be
asserted about it, except what is clearly declared by the prophets
themselves; for they are our only source of knowledge on a matter which
does not fall within the scope of our ordinary knowing faculties. But
ignorant people, not knowing the Hebrew genius and phraseology, and not
attending to the circumstances of the speaker, often imagine the
prophets, to assert things which they do not.
The prophets clearly declare themselves to have received the revelation
of God through the means of words and images;—not, as Christ, through
immediate communication of the mind with the mind of God. Therefore the
prophets excelled other men by the power and vividness of their
representing and imagining faculty, not by the perfection of their mind.
This is why they perceived almost everything through figures, and
express themselves so variously, and so improperly, concerning the
nature of God. Moses imagined that God could be seen, and attributed to
him the passions of anger and jealousy; Micaiah imagined him sitting on
a throne, with the host of heaven on his right and left hand; Daniel as
an old man, with a white garment and white hair; Ezekiel as a fire; the
disciples of Christ thought they saw the Spirit of God in the form of a
dove; the apostles in the form of fiery tongues.
Whence, then, could the prophets be certain of the truth of a revelation
which they received through the imagination, and not by a mental
process?—for only an idea can carry the sense of its own certainty along
with it, not an imagination. To make them certain of the truth of what
was revealed to them, a reasoning process came in; they had to rely on
the testimony of a sign; and (above all) on the testimony of their own
conscience, that they were good men, and spoke for God’s sake. Either
testimony was incomplete without the other. Even the good prophet needed
for his message the confirmation of a sign; but the bad prophet, the
utterer of an immoral doctrine, had no certainty for his doctrine, no
truth in it, even though he confirmed it by a sign. The testimony of a
good conscience was, therefore, the prophet’s grand source of certitude.
Even this, however, was only a moral certitude, not a mathematical; for
no man can be perfectly sure of his own goodness.
The power of imagining, the power of feeling what goodness is, and the
habit of practising goodness, were therefore the sole essential
qualifications of a true prophet. But for the purpose of the message,
the revelation, which God designed him to convey, these qualifications
were enough. The sum and substance of this revelation was simply:
_Believe in God, and lead a good life_. To be the organ of this
revelation, did not make a man more learned; it left his scientific
knowledge as it found it. This explains the contradictory and
speculatively false opinions about God, and the laws of nature, which
the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles entertained. Abraham and the
patriarchs knew God only as _El Sadai_, the power which gives to every
man that which suffices him; Moses knew him as _Jehovah_, a
self-existent being, but imagined him with the passions of a man. Samuel
imagined that God could not repent of his sentences; Jeremiah, that he
could. Joshua, on a day of great victory, the ground being white with
hail, seeing the daylight last longer than usual, and imaginatively
seizing this as a special sign of the help divinely promised to him,
declared that the sun was standing still. To be obeyers of God
themselves, and inspired leaders of others to obedience and good life,
did not make Abraham and Moses metaphysicians, or Joshua a natural
philosopher. His revelation no more changed the speculative opinions of
each prophet, than it changed his temperament or style. The wrathful
Elisha required the natural sedative of music, before he could be the
messenger of good fortune to Jehoram. The high-bred Isaiah and Nahum
have the style proper to their condition, and the rustic Ezekiel and
Amos the style proper to theirs. We are not therefore bound to pay heed
to the speculative opinions of this or that prophet, for in uttering
these he spoke as a mere man: only in exhorting his hearers to obey God
and lead a good life was he the organ of a divine revelation.
To know and love God is the highest blessedness of man, and of all men
alike; to this all mankind are called, and not any one nation in
particular. The divine law, properly named, is the method of life for
attaining this height of human blessedness: this law is universal,
written in the heart, and one for all mankind. Human law is the method
of life for attaining and preserving temporal security and prosperity:
this law is dictated by a lawgiver, and every nation has its own. In the
case of the Jews, this law was dictated, by revelation, through the
prophets; its fundamental precept was to obey God and to keep his
commandments, and it is therefore, in a secondary sense, called divine;
but it was, nevertheless, framed in respect of temporal things only.
Even the truly moral and divine precept of this law, to practise for
God’s sake justice and mercy towards one’s neighbor, meant for the
Hebrew of the Old Testament this Hebrew neighbor only, and had respect
to the concord and stability of the Hebrew commonwealth. The Jews were
to obey God and to keep his commandments, that they might continue long
in the land given to them, and that it might be well with them there.
Their election was a temporal one, and lasted only so long as their
State. It is now over; and the only election the Jews now have is that
of the _pious_, the _remnant_ which takes place, and has always taken
place, in every other nation also. Scripture itself teaches that there
is a universal divine law, that this is common to all nations alike, and
is the law which truly confers eternal blessedness. Solomon, the wisest
of the Jews, knew this law, as the few wisest men in all nations have
ever known it; but for the mass of the Jews, as for the mass of mankind
everywhere, this law was hidden, and they had no notion of its moral
action, its _vera vita_ which conducts to eternal blessedness, except so
far as this action was enjoined upon them by the prescriptions of their
temporal law. When the ruin of their State brought with it the ruin of
their temporal law, they would have lost altogether their only clue to
eternal blessedness.
Christ came when that fabric of the Jewish State, for the sake of
which the Jewish law existed, was about to fall; and he proclaimed the
universal divine law. A certain moral action is prescribed by this
law, as a certain moral action was prescribed by the Jewish law: but
he who truly conceives the universal divine law conceives God’s
decrees adequately as eternal truths, and for him moral action has
liberty and self-knowledge; while the prophets of the Jewish law
inadequately conceived God’s decrees as mere rules and commands, and
for them moral action had no liberty and no self-knowledge. Christ,
who beheld the decrees of God as God himself beholds them,—as eternal
truths,—proclaimed the love of God and the love of our neighbor as
_commands_, only because of the ignorance of the multitude: to those
to whom it was “given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God,” he
announced them, as he himself perceived them, as eternal truths. And
the apostles, like Christ, spoke to many of their hearers “as unto
carnal not spiritual;” presented to them, that is, the love of God and
their neighbor as a divine command authenticated by the life and death
of Christ, not as an eternal idea of reason carrying its own warrant
along with it. The presentation of it as this latter their hearers
“were not able to bear.” The apostles, moreover, though they preached
and confirmed their doctrine by signs as prophets, wrote their
Epistles, not as prophets, but as doctors and reasoners. The
essentials of their doctrine, indeed, they took not from reason, but,
like the prophets, from fact and revelation; they preached belief in
God and goodness of life as a catholic religion existing by virtue of
the passion of Christ, as the prophets had preached belief in God and
goodness of life as a national religion existing by virtue of the
Mosaic covenant: but while the prophets announced their message in a
form purely dogmatical the apostles developed theirs with the forms of
reasoning and argumentation, according to each apostle’s ability and
way of thinking, and as they might best commend their message to their
hearers; and for their reasonings they themselves claim no divine
authority, submitting them to the judgment of their hearers. Thus each
apostle built essential religion on a non-essential foundation of his
own, and, as St. Paul says, avoided building on the foundations of
another apostle, which might be quite different from his own. Hence
the discrepancies between the doctrine of one apostle and
another,—between that of St. Paul, for example, and that of St. James;
but these discrepancies are in the non-essentials not given to them by
revelation, and not in essentials. Human churches, seizing these
discrepant non-essentials as essentials, one maintaining one of them,
another another, have filled the world with unprofitable disputes,
have “turned the Church into an academy, and religion into a science,
or rather a wrangling,” and have fallen into endless schism.
What, then, are the essentials of religion according both to the Old and
to the New Testament? Very few and very simple. The precept to love God
and our neighbor. The precepts of the first chapter of Isaiah: “Wash
you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine
eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the
oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the widow.” The precepts of
the Sermon on the Mount, which add to the foregoing the injunction that
we should cease to do evil and learn to do well, not to our brethren and
fellow-citizens only, but to all mankind. It is by following these
precepts that belief in God is to be shown: if we believe in him, we
shall keep his commandment; and this is his commandment, that we love
one another. It is because it contains these precepts that the Bible is
properly called the Word of God, in spite of its containing much that is
mere history, and, like all history, sometimes true, sometimes false; in
spite of its containing much that is mere reasoning, and, like all
reasoning, sometimes sound, sometimes hollow. These precepts are also
the precepts of the universal divine law written in our hearts; and it
is only by this that the divinity of Scripture is established;—by its
containing, namely, precepts identical with those of this inly-written
and self-proving law. This law was in the world, as St. John says,
before the doctrine of Moses or the doctrine of Christ. And what need
was there, then, for these doctrines? Because the world at large “knew
not” this original divine law, in which precepts are ideas, and the
belief in God the knowledge and contemplation of him. Reason gives us
this law, reason tells us that it leads to eternal blessedness, and that
those who follow it have no need of any other. But reason could not have
told us that the moral action of the universal divine law,—followed not
from a sense of its intrinsic goodness, truth, and necessity, but simply
in proof of obedience (for both the Old and New Testament are but one
long discipline of obedience), simply because it is so commanded by
Moses in virtue of the covenant, simply because it is so commanded by
Christ in virtue of his life and passion,—can lead to eternal
blessedness, which means, for reason, eternal knowledge. Reason could
not have told us this, and this is what the Bible tells us. This is that
“thing which had been kept secret since the foundation of the world.” It
is thus that by means of the foolishness of the world God confounds the
wise, and with things that are not brings to nought things that are. Of
the truth of the promise thus made to obedience without knowledge, we
can have no mathematical certainty; for we can have a mathematical
certainty only of things deduced by reason from elements which she in
herself possesses. But we can have a moral certainty of it; a certainty
such as the prophets had themselves, arising out of the goodness and
pureness of those to whom this revelation has been made, and rendered
possible for us by its contradicting no principles of reason. It is a
great comfort to believe it; because “as it is only the very small
minority who can pursue a virtuous life by the sole guidance of reason,
we should, unless we had this testimony of Scripture, be in doubt
respecting the salvation of nearly the whole human race.”
It follows from this that philosophy has her own independent sphere, and
theology hers, and that neither has the right to invade and try to
subdue the other. Theology demands perfect obedience, philosophy perfect
knowledge; the obedience demanded by theology and the knowledge demanded
by philosophy are alike saving. As speculative opinions about God,
theology requires only such as are indispensable to the reality of this
obedience; the belief that God is, that he is a rewarder of them that
seek him, and that the proof of seeking him is a good life. These are
the fundamentals of faith, and they are so clear and simple that none of
the inaccuracies provable in the Bible narrative the least affect them,
and they have indubitably come to us uncorrupted. He who holds them may
make, as the patriarchs and prophets did, other speculations about God
most erroneous, and yet their faith is complete and saving. Nay, beyond
these fundamentals, speculative opinions are pious or impious, not as
they are true or false, but as they confirm or shake the believer in the
practice of obedience. The truest speculative opinion about the nature
of God is impious if it makes its holder rebellious; the falsest
speculative opinion is pious if it makes him obedient. Governments
should never render themselves the tools of ecclesiastical ambition by
promulgating as fundamentals of the national Church’s faith more than
these, and should concede the fullest liberty of speculation.
But the multitude, which respects only what astonishes, terrifies, and
overwhelms it, by no means takes this simple view of its own religion.
To the multitude, religion seems imposing only when it is subversive of
reason, confirmed by miracles, conveyed in documents materially sacred
and infallible, and dooming to damnation all without its pale. But this
religion of the multitude is not the religion which a true
interpretation of Scripture finds in Scripture. Reason tells us that a
miracle,—understanding by a miracle a breach of the laws of nature,—is
impossible, and that to think it possible is to dishonor God; for the
laws of nature are the laws of God, and to say that God violates the
laws of nature is to say that he violates his own nature. Reason sees,
too, that miracles can never attain their professed object,—that of
bringing us to a higher knowledge of God; since our knowledge of God is
raised only by perfecting and clearing our conceptions, and the alleged
design of miracles is to baffle them. But neither does Scripture
anywhere assert, as a general truth, that miracles are possible. Indeed,
it asserts the contrary; for Jeremiah declares that Nature follows an
invariable order. Scripture, however, like Nature herself, does not lay
down speculative propositions (_Scriptura definitiones non tradit, ut
nec etiam natura_). It relates matters in such an order and with such
phraseology as a speaker (often not perfectly instructed himself) who
wanted to impress his hearers with a lively sense of God’s greatness and
goodness would naturally employ; as Moses, for instance, relates to the
Israelites the passage of the Red Sea without any mention of the east
wind which attended it, and which is brought accidentally to our
knowledge in another place. So that to know exactly what Scripture means
in the relation of each seeming miracle, we ought to know (besides the
tropes and phrases of the Hebrew language) the circumstances, and
also,—since every one is swayed in his manner of presenting facts by his
own preconceived opinions, and we have seen what those of the prophets
were,—the preconceived opinions of each speaker. But this mode of
interpreting Scripture is fatal to the vulgar notion of its verbal
inspiration, of a sanctity and absolute truth in all the words and
sentences of which it is composed. This vulgar notion is, indeed, a
palpable error. It is demonstrable from the internal testimony of the
Scriptures themselves, that the books from the first of the Pentateuch
to the last of Kings were put together, after the first destruction of
Jerusalem, by a compiler (probably Ezra) who designed to relate the
history of the Jewish people from its origin to that destruction; it is
demonstrable, moreover, that the compiler did not put his last hand to
the work, but left it with its extracts from various and conflicting
sources sometimes unreconciled, left it with errors of text and
unsettled readings. The prophetic books are mere fragments of the
prophets, collected by the Rabbins where they could find them, and
inserted in the Canon according to their discretion. They, at first,
proposed to admit neither the Book of Proverbs nor the Book of
Ecclesiastes into the Canon, and only admitted them because there were
found in them passages which commended the law of Moses. Ezekiel also
they had determined to exclude; but one of their number remodeled him,
so as to procure his admission. The Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and
Daniel are the work of a single author, and were not written till after
Judas Maccabeus had restored the worship of the Temple. The Book of
Psalms was collected and arranged at the same time. Before this time,
there was no Canon of the sacred writings, and the great synagogue, by
which the Canon was fixed, was first convened after the Macedonian
conquest of Asia. Of that synagogue none of the prophets were members;
the learned men who composed it were guided by their own fallible
judgment. In like manner the uninspired judgment of human counsels
determined the Canon of the New Testament.
Such, reduced to the briefest and plainest terms possible, stripped of
the developments and proofs with which he delivers it, and divested of
the metaphysical language in which much of it is clothed by him, is the
doctrine of Spinoza’s treatise on the interpretation of Scripture. By
the whole scope and drift of its argument, by the spirit in which the
subject is throughout treated, his work undeniably is most interesting
and stimulating to the general culture of Europe. There are errors and
contradictions in Scripture; and the question which the general culture
of Europe, well aware of this, asks with real interest is: What then?
What follows from all this? What change is it, if true, to produce in
the relations of mankind to the Christian religion? If the old theory of
Scripture inspiration is to be abandoned, what place is the Bible
henceforth to hold among books? What is the new Christianity to be like?
How are governments to deal with National Churches founded to maintain a
very different conception of Christianity? Spinoza addresses himself to
these questions. All secondary points of criticism he touches with the
utmost possible brevity. He points out that Moses could never have
written: “And the Canaanite was then in the land,” because the Canaanite
was in the land still at the death of Moses. He points out that Moses
could never have written: “There arose not a prophet since in Israel
like unto Moses.” He points out how such a passage as, “These are the
kings that reigned in Edom _before there reigned any king over the
children of Israel_,” clearly indicates an author writing not before the
times of the Kings. He points out how the account of Og’s iron bedstead:
“Only Og the king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold,
his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the
children of Ammon?”—probably indicates an author writing after David had
taken Rabbath, and found there “abundance of spoil,” amongst it this
iron bedstead, the gigantic relic of another age. He points out how the
language of this passage, and of such a passage as that in the Book of
Samuel: “Beforetime in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, thus
he spake: Come and let us go to the seer; for he that is now called
prophet was aforetime called seer”—is certainly the language of a writer
describing the events of a long-past age, and not the language of a
contemporary. But he devotes to all this no more space than is
absolutely necessary. He apologizes for delaying over such matters so
long: _non est cur circa hæc diu detinear—nolo tædiosâ lectione lectorem
detinere_. For him the interesting question is, not whether the
fanatical devotee of the letter is to continue, for a longer or for a
shorter time, to believe that Moses sate in the land of Moab writing the
description of his own death, but what he is to believe when he does not
believe this. Is he to take for the guidance of his life a great gloss
put upon the Bible by theologians, who, “not content with going mad
themselves with Plato and Aristotle, want to make Christ and the
prophets go mad with them too,”—or the Bible itself? Is he to be
presented by his national church with metaphysical formularies for his
creed, or with the real fundamentals of Christianity? If with the
former, religion will never produce its due fruits. A few elect will
still be saved; but the vast majority of mankind will remain without
grace and without good works, hateful and hating one another. Therefore
he calls urgently upon governments to make the national church what it
should be. This is the conclusion of the whole matter for him; a fervent
appeal to the State, to save us from the untoward generation of
metaphysical Article-makers. And therefore, anticipating Mr. Gladstone,
he called his book _The Church in its Relations with the State_.
Such is really the scope of Spinoza’s work. He pursues a great object,
and pursues it with signal ability. But it is important to observe that
he nowhere distinctly gives his own opinion about the Bible’s
fundamental character. He takes the Bible as it stands, as he might take
the phenomena of nature, and he discusses it as he finds it. Revelation
differs from natural knowledge, he says, not by being more divine or
more certain than natural knowledge, but by being conveyed in a
different way; it differs from it because it is a knowledge “of which
the laws of human nature considered in themselves alone cannot be the
cause.” What is really its cause, he says, we need not here inquire
(_verum nec nobis jam opus est propheticæ cognitionis causam scire_),
for we take Scripture, which contains this revelation, as it stands, and
do not ask how it arose (_documentorum causas nihil curamus_).
Proceeding on this principle, Spinoza leaves the attentive reader
somewhat baffled and disappointed, clear, as is his way of treating his
subject, and remarkable as are the conclusions with which he presents
us. He starts we feel, from what is to him a hypothesis, and we want to
know what he really thinks about this hypothesis. His greatest novelties
are all within limits fixed for him by this hypothesis. He says that the
voice which called Samuel was an imaginary voice; he says that the
waters of the Red Sea retreated before a strong wind; he says that the
Shunammite’s son was revived by the natural heat of Elisha’s body; he
says that the rainbow which was made a sign to Noah appeared in the
ordinary course of nature. Scripture itself, rightly interpreted, says,
he affirms, all this. But he asserts that the divine voice which uttered
the commandments on Mount Sinai was a real voice _vera vox_. He says,
indeed, that this voice could not really give to the Israelites that
proof which they imagined it gave to them of the existence of God, and
that God on Sinai was dealing with the Israelites only according to
their imperfect knowledge. Still he asserts the divine voice to have
been a real one; and for this reason, that we do violence to Scripture
if we do not admit it to have been a real one (_nisi Scripturæ vim
inferre velimus, omnino concedendum est, Israëlitas veram vocem
audivisse_). The attentive reader wants to know what Spinoza himself
thought about this _vera vox_ and its possibility; he is much more
interested in knowing this than in knowing what Spinoza considered
Scripture to affirm about the matter.
The feeling of perplexity thus caused is not diminished by the language
of the chapter on miracles. In this chapter Spinoza broadly affirms a
miracle to be an impossibility. But he himself contrasts the method of
demonstration _à priori_, by which he claims to have established this
proposition, with the method which he has pursued in treating of
prophetic revelation. “This revelation,” he says, “is a matter out of
human reach, and therefore I was bound to take it as I found it.”
_Monere volo, me aliâ prorsus methodo circa miracula processisse, quam
circa prophetiam ... quod etiam consulto feci, quia de prophetiâ,
quandoquidem ipsa captum humanum superat et quæstio mere theologica est,
nihil affirmare, neque etiam scire poteram in quo ipsa potissimum
constiterit, nisi ex fundamentis revelatis._ The reader feels that
Spinoza, proceeding on a hypothesis, has presented him with the
assertion of a miracle, and afterwards, proceeding _à priori_, has
presented him with the assertion that a miracle is impossible. He feels
that Spinoza does not adequately reconcile these two assertions by
declaring that any event really miraculous, if found recorded in
Scripture, must be “a spurious addition made to Scripture by
sacrilegious men.” Is, then, he asks the _vera vox_ of Mount Sinai in
Spinoza’s opinion a spurious addition made to Scripture by sacrilegious
men; or, if not, how is it not miraculous?
Spinoza, in his own mind, regarded the Bible as a vast collection of
miscellaneous documents, many of them quite disparate and not at all to
be harmonized with others; documents of unequal value and of varying
applicability, some of them conveying ideas salutary for one time,
others for another. But in the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ he by no
means always deals in this free spirit with the Bible. Sometimes he
chooses to deal with it in the spirit of the veriest worshiper of the
letter; sometimes he chooses to treat the Bible as if all its parts were
(so to speak) equipollent; to snatch an isolated text which suits his
purpose, without caring whether it is annulled by the context, by the
general drift of Scripture, or by other passages of more weight and
authority. The great critic thus becomes voluntarily as uncritical as
Exeter Hall. The Epicurean Solomon, whose _Ecclesiastes_ the Hebrew
doctors, even after they had received it into the canon, forbade the
young and weak-minded among their community to read, Spinoza quotes as
of the same authority with the severe Moses; he uses promiscuously, as
documents of identical force, without discriminating between their
essentially different character, the softened cosmopolitan teaching of
the prophets of the captivity and the rigid national teaching of the
instructors of Israel’s youth. He is capable of extracting, from a
chance expression of Jeremiah, the assertion of a speculative idea which
Jeremiah certainly never entertained, and from which he would have
recoiled in dismay,—the idea, namely, that miracles are impossible; just
as the ordinary Englishman can extract from God’s words to Noah, _Be
fruitful and multiply_, an exhortation to himself to have a large
family. Spinoza, I repeat, knew perfectly well what this verbal mode of
dealing with the Bible was worth: but he sometimes uses it because of
the hypothesis from which he set out; because of his having agreed “to
take Scripture as it stands, and not to ask how it arose.”
No doubt the sagacity of Spinoza’s rules for Biblical interpretation,
the power of his analysis of the contents of the Bible, the interest of
his reflections on Jewish history, are, in spite of this, very great,
and have an absolute worth of their own, independent of the silence or
ambiguity of their author upon a point of cardinal importance. Few
candid people will read his rules of interpretation without exclaiming
that they are the very dictates of good sense, that they have always
believed in them; and without adding, after a moment’s reflection, that
they have passed their lives in violating them. And what can be more
interesting, than to find that perhaps the main cause of the decay of
the Jewish polity was one of which from our English Bible, which
entirely mistranslates the 26th verse of the 20th chapter of Ezekiel, we
hear nothing,—the perpetual reproach of impurity and rejection cast upon
the priesthood of the tribe of Levi? What can be more suggestive, after
Mr. Mill and Dr. Stanley have been telling us how great an element of
strength to the Hebrew nation was the institution of prophets, than to
hear from the ablest of Hebrews how this institution seems to him to
have been to his nation one of her main elements of weakness? No
intelligent man can read the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ without
being profoundly instructed by it; but neither can he read it without
feeling that, as a speculative work, it is, to use a French military
expression, _in the air_; that, in a certain sense, it is in want of a
base and in want of supports; that this base and these supports are, at
any rate, not to be found in the work itself, and, if they exist, must
be sought for in other works of the author.
The genuine speculative opinions of Spinoza, which the _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_ but imperfectly reveals, may in his Ethics and in
his Letters be found set forth clearly. It is, however, the business of
criticism to deal with every independent work as with an independent
whole, and, instead of establishing between the _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_ and the Ethics of Spinoza a relation which Spinoza
himself has not established,—to seize, in dealing with the _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_, the important fact that this work has its source,
not in the axioms and definition of the Ethics, but in a hypothesis. The
Ethics are not yet translated into English, and I have not here to speak
of them. Then will be the right time for criticism to try and seize the
special character and tendencies of that remarkable work, when it is
dealing with it directly. The criticism of the Ethics is far too serious
a task to be undertaken incidentally, and merely as a supplement to the
criticism of the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_. Nevertheless, on
certain governing ideas of Spinoza, which receive their systematic
expression, indeed, in the Ethics, and on which the _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_ is not formally based, but which are yet never
absent from Spinoza’s mind in the composition of any work, which breathe
through all his works, and fill them with a peculiar effect and power, I
have a word or two to say.
A philosopher’s real power over mankind resides not in his metaphysical
formulas, but in the spirit and tendencies which have led him to adopt
those formulas. Spinoza’s critic, therefore, has rather to bring to
light that spirit and those tendencies of his author, than to exhibit
his metaphysical formulas. Propositions about substance pass by mankind
at large like the idle wind, which mankind at large regards not; it will
not even listen to a word about these propositions, unless it first
learns what their author was driving at with them, and finds that this
object of his is one with which it sympathizes, one, at any rate, which
commands its attention. And mankind is so far right that this object of
the author is really, as has been said, that which is most important,
that which sets all his work in motion, that which is the secret of his
attraction for other minds, which, by different ways, pursue the same
object.
Mr. Maurice, seeking for the cause of Goethe’s great admiration for
Spinoza, thinks that he finds it in Spinoza’s Hebrew genius. “He spoke
of God,” says Mr. Maurice, “as an actual being, to those who had fancied
him a name in a book. The child of the circumcision had a message for
Lessing and Goethe which the pagan schools of philosophy could not
bring.” This seems to me, I confess, fanciful. An intensity and
impressiveness, which came to him from his Hebrew nature, Spinoza no
doubt has; but the two things which are most remarkable about him, and
by which, as I think, he chiefly impressed Goethe, seem to me not to
come to him from his Hebrew nature at all,—I mean his denial of final
causes, and his stoicism, a stoicism not passive, but active. For a mind
like Goethe’s,—a mind profoundly impartial and passionately aspiring
after the science, not of men only, but of universal nature,—the popular
philosophy which explains all things by reference to man, and regards
universal nature as existing for the sake of man, and even of certain
classes of men, was utterly repulsive. Unchecked, this philosophy would
gladly maintain that the donkey exists in order that the invalid
Christian may have donkey’s milk before breakfast; and such views of
nature as this were exactly what Goethe’s whole soul abhorred. Creation,
he thought, should be made of sterner stuff; he desired to rest the
donkey’s existence on larger grounds. More than any philosopher who has
ever lived, Spinoza satisfied him here. The full exposition of the
counter-doctrine to the popular doctrine of final causes is to be found
in the Ethics; but this denial of final causes was so essential an
element of all Spinoza’s thinking that we shall, as has been said
already, find it in the work with which we are here concerned, the
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, and, indeed, permeating that work and
all his works. From the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ one may take as
good a general statement of this denial as any which is to be found in
the Ethics:—
“Deus naturam dirigit, prout ejus leges universales, non autem prout
humanæ naturæ particulares leges exigunt, adeoque Deus non solius humani
generis, sed totius naturæ rationem habet. (_God directs nature,
according as the universal laws of nature, but not according as the
particular laws of human nature require; and so God has regard, not of
the human race only, but of entire nature._)”
And, as a pendant to this denial by Spinoza of final causes, comes his
stoicism:—
“Non studemus, ut natura nobis, sed contra ut nos naturæ pareamus. (_Our
desire is not that nature may obey us, but, on the contrary, that we may
obey nature._)”
Here is the second source of his attractiveness for Goethe; and Goethe
is but the eminent representative of a whole order of minds whose
admiration has made Spinoza’s fame. Spinoza first impresses Goethe and
any man like Goethe, and then he composes him; first he fills and
satisfies his imagination by the width and grandeur of his view of
nature, and then he fortifies and stills his mobile, straining,
passionate poetic temperament by the moral lesson he draws from his view
of nature. And a moral lesson not of mere resigned acquiescence, not of
melancholy quietism, but of joyful activity within the limits of man’s
true sphere:—
“Ipsa hominis essentia est conatus quo unusquisque suum esse conservare
conatur.... Virtus hominis est ipsa hominis essentia, quatenus a solo
conatu suum esse conservandi definitur.... Felicitas in eo consistit
quod homo suum esse conservare potest.... Lætitia est hominis transitio
ad majorem perfectionem.... Tristitia est hominis transitio ad minorem
perfectionem. (_Man’s very essence is the effort wherewith each man
strives to maintain his own being.... Man’s virtue is this very essence,
so far as it is defined by this single effort to maintain his own
being.... Happiness consists in a man’s being able to maintain his own
being.... Joy is man’s passage to a greater perfection.... Sorrow is
man’s passage to a lesser perfection._)”
It seems to me that by neither of these, his grand characteristic
doctrines, is Spinoza truly Hebrew or truly Christian. His denial of
final causes is essentially alien to the spirit of the Old Testament,
and his cheerful and self-sufficing stoicism is essentially alien to the
spirit of the New. The doctrine that “God directs nature, not according
as the particular laws of human nature, but according as the universal
laws of nature require,” is at utter variance with that Hebrew mode of
representing God’s dealings, which makes the locusts visit Egypt to
punish Pharaoh’s hardness of heart, and the falling dew avert itself
from the fleece of Gideon. The doctrine that “all sorrow is a passage to
a lesser perfection” is at utter variance with the Christian recognition
of the blessedness of sorrow, working “repentance to salvation not to be
repented of;” of sorrow, which, in Dante’s words, “re-marries us to
God.”
Spinoza’s repeated and earnest assertions that the love of God is man’s
_summum bonum_ do not remove the fundamental diversity between his
doctrine and the Hebrew and Christian doctrines. By the love of God he
does not mean the same thing which the Hebrew and Christian religions
mean by the love of God. He makes the love of God to consist in the
knowledge of God; and, as we know God only through his manifestation of
himself in the laws of all nature, it is by knowing these laws that we
love God, and the more we know them the more we love him. This may be
true, but this is not what the Christian means by the love of God.
Spinoza’s ideal is the intellectual life; the Christian’s ideal is the
religious life. Between the two conditions there is all the difference
which there is between the being in love, and the following, with
delighted comprehension, a reasoning of Plato. For Spinoza, undoubtedly,
the crown of the intellectual life is a transport, as for the saint the
crown of the religious life is a transport; but the two transports are
not the same.
This is true; yet it is true, also, that by thus crowning the
intellectual life with a sacred transport, by thus retaining in
philosophy, amid the discontented murmurs of all the army of atheism,
the name of God, Spinoza maintains a profound affinity with that which
is truest in religion, and inspires an indestructible interest. One of
his admirers, M. Van Vloten, has recently published at Amsterdam a
supplementary volume to Spinoza’s works, containing the interesting
document of Spinoza’s sentence of excommunication, from which I have
already quoted, and containing, besides, several lately found works
alleged to be Spinoza’s, which seem to me to be of doubtful
authenticity, and, even if authentic, of no great importance. M. Van
Vloten (who, let me be permitted to say in passing, writes a Latin which
would make one think that the art of writing Latin must be now a lost
art in the country of Lipsius) is very anxious that Spinoza’s
unscientific retention of the name of God should not afflict his readers
with any doubts as to his perfect scientific orthodoxy:—
“It is a great mistake,” he cries, “to disparage Spinoza as merely one
of the dogmatists before Kant. By keeping the name of God, while he did
away with his person and character, he has done himself an injustice.
Those who look to the bottom of things will see, that, long ago as he
lived, he had even then reached the point to which the post-Hegelian
philosophy and the study of natural science has only just brought our
own times. Leibnitz expressed his apprehension lest those who did away
with final causes should do away with God at the same time. But it is in
his having done away with final causes, _and with God along with them_,
that Spinoza’s true merit consists.”
Now it must be remarked that to use Spinoza’s denial of final causes in
order to identify him with the Coryphæi of atheism, is to make a false
use of Spinoza’s denial of final causes, just as to use his assertion of
the all-importance of loving God to identify him with the saints would
be to make a false use of his assertion of the all-importance of loving
God. He is no more to be identified with the post-Hegelian philosophers
than he is to be identified with St. Augustine. Unction, indeed,
Spinoza’s writings have not; that name does not precisely fit any
quality which they exhibit. And yet, so all-important in the sphere of
religious thought is the power of edification, that in this sphere a
great fame like Spinoza’s can never be founded without it. A court of
literature can never be very severe to Voltaire: with that inimitable
wit and clear sense of his, he cannot write a page in which the fullest
head may not find something suggestive: still, because, handling
religious ideas, he yet, with all his wit and clear sense, handles them
wholly without the power of edification, his fame as a great man is
equivocal. Strauss has treated the question of Scripture miracles with
an acuteness and fulness which even to the most informed minds is
instructive; but because he treats it almost wholly without the power of
edification, his fame as a serious thinker is equivocal. But in Spinoza
there is not a trace either of Voltaire’s passion for mockery or of
Strauss’s passion for demolition. His whole soul was filled with desire
of the love and knowledge of God, and of that only. Philosophy always
proclaims herself on the way to the _summum bonum_; but too often on the
road she seems to forget her destination, and suffers her hearers to
forget it also. Spinoza never forgets his destination: “The love of God
is man’s highest happiness and blessedness, and the final end and aim of
all human actions;”—“The supreme reward for keeping God’s Word is that
Word itself—namely, to know him and with free will and pure and constant
heart love him:” these sentences are the keynote to all he produced, and
were the inspiration of all his labors. This is why he turns so sternly
upon the worshipers of the letter,—the editors of the _Masora_, the
editor of the _Record_,—because their doctrine imperils our love and
knowledge of God. “What!” he cries, “our knowledge of God to depend upon
these perishable things, which Moses can dash to the ground and break to
pieces like the first tables of stone, or of which the originals can be
lost like the original book of the Covenant, like the original book of
the Law of God, like the book of the Wars of God!... which can come to
us confused, imperfect, mis-written by copyists, tampered with by
doctors! And you accuse others of impiety! It is you who are impious, to
believe that God would commit the treasure of the true record of himself
to any substance less enduring than the heart!”
And Spinoza’s life was not unworthy of this elevated strain. A
philosopher who professed that knowledge was its own reward, a devotee
who professed that the love of God was its own reward, this philosopher
and this devotee believed in what he said. Spinoza led a life the most
spotless, perhaps, to be found among the lives of philosophers; he lived
simple, studious, even-tempered, kind; declining honors, declining
riches, declining notoriety. He was poor, and his admirer Simon de Vries
sent him two thousand florins:—he refused them. The same friend left him
his fortune;—he returned it to the heir. He was asked to dedicate one of
his works to the magnificent patron of letters in his century, Louis the
Fourteenth;—he declined. His great work, his Ethics, published after his
death, he gave injunctions to his friends to publish anonymously, for
fear he should give his name to a school. Truth, he thought, should bear
no man’s name. And finally,—“Unless,” he said, “I had known that my
writings would in the end advance the cause of true religion, I would
have suppressed them,—_tacuissem_.” It was in this spirit that he lived;
and this spirit gives to all he writes not exactly unction,—I have
already said so,—but a kind of sacred solemnity. Not of the same order
as the saints, he yet follows the same service: _Doubtless thou art our
Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us
not_.
Therefore he has been, in a certain sphere, edifying, and has inspired
in many powerful minds an interest and an admiration such as no other
philosopher has inspired since Plato. The lonely precursor of German
philosophy, he still shines when the light of his successors is fading
away; they had celebrity, Spinoza has fame. Not because his peculiar
system of philosophy has had more adherents than theirs; on the
contrary, it has had fewer. But schools of philosophy arise and fall;
their bands of adherents inevitably dwindle; no master can long persuade
a large body of disciples that they give to themselves just the same
account of the world as he does; it is only the very young and the very
enthusiastic who can think themselves sure that they possess the whole
mind of Plato, or Spinoza, or Hegel, at all. The very mature and the
very sober can even hardly believe that these philosophers possessed it
themselves enough to put it all into their works, and to let us know
entirely how the world seemed to them. What a remarkable philosopher
really does for human thought, is to throw into circulation a certain
number of new and striking ideas and expressions, and to stimulate with
them the thought and imagination of his century or of after-times. So
Spinoza has made his distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas a
current notion for educated Europe. So Hegel seized a single pregnant
sentence of Heracleitus, and cast it, with a thousand striking
applications, into the world of modern thought. But to do this is only
enough to make a philosopher noteworthy; it is not enough to make him
great. To be great, he must have something in him which can influence
character, which is edifying; he must, in short, have a noble and lofty
character himself, a character,—to recur to that much-criticised
expression of mine,—_in the grand style_. This is what Spinoza had; and
because he had it, he stands out from the multitude of philosophers, and
has been able to inspire in powerful minds a feeling which the most
remarkable philosophers, without this grandiose character, could not
inspire. “There is no possible view of life but Spinoza’s,” said
Lessing. Goethe has told us how he was calmed and edified by him in his
youth, and how he again went to him for support in his maturity. Heine,
the man (in spite of his faults) of truest genius that Germany has
produced since Goethe,—a man with faults, as I have said, immense
faults, the greatest of them being that he could reverence so
little,—reverenced Spinoza. Hegel’s influence ran off him like water: “I
have seen Hegel,” he cries, “seated with his doleful air of a hatching
hen upon his unhappy eggs, and I have heard his dismal clucking. How
easily one can cheat oneself into thinking that one understands
everything, when one has learned only how to construct dialectical
formulas!” But of Spinoza, Heine said: “His life was a copy of the life
of his divine kinsman, Jesus Christ.”
And therefore, when M. Van Vloten violently presses the parallel with
the post-Hegelians, one feels that the parallel with St. Augustine is
the far truer one. Compared with the soldier of irreligion M. Van Vloten
would have him to be, Spinoza is religious. “It is true,” one may say to
the wise and devout Christian, “Spinoza’s conception of beatitude is not
yours, and cannot satisfy you, but whose conception of beatitude would
you accept as satisfying? Not even that of the devoutest of your
fellow-Christians. Fra Angelico, the sweetest and most inspired of
devout souls, has given us, in his great picture of the Last Judgment,
his conception of beatitude. The elect are going round in a ring on long
grass under laden fruit-trees; two of them, more restless than the
others, are flying up a battlemented street,—a street blank with all the
ennui of the Middle Ages. Across a gulf is visible, for the delectation
of the saints, a blazing caldron in which Beelzebub is sousing the
damned. This is hardly more your conception of beatitude than Spinoza’s
is. But ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions;’ only, to reach any one
of these mansions, there are needed the wings of a genuine sacred
transport, of an ‘immortal longing.’” These wings Spinoza had; and,
because he had them, his own language about himself, about his
aspirations and his course, are true: his foot is in the _vera vita_,
his eye on the beatific vision.