Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority

SP IN O ZA A ND THE I R RE LEVA NCE OF BI B L IC A L AUTH OR ITY Spinoza’s Theological–Political Treatise (1670) is a ...

Author: J. Samuel Preus

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SP IN O ZA A ND THE I R RE LEVA NCE OF BI B L IC A L AUTH OR ITY

Spinoza’s Theological–Political Treatise (1670) is a landmark both in democratic political theory and in the history of biblical interpretation. Spinoza championed liberty of thought, speech and writing by discrediting the Bible as the standard for truth and a source of public law. Applying a new historical criticism, he showed that biblical teaching and law were irrelevant for a modern pluralistic state and its intellectual life. J. Samuel Preus highlights Spinoza’s achievement by reading the Treatise in the context of a literary conflict among his contemporaries about biblical interpretation – a conflict fraught with political implication. Preus’s exposition of neglected primary sources surrounding Spinoza’s work offers new evidence regarding his rhetorical strategy and intent in the Treatise. The book provides not only a valuable contribution to Spinoza scholarship but also an important account of the origins of modern methods of biblical interpretation. j. samuel preus is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at Indiana University. His books include From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (1969) and Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (1987).

SP I N O ZA AND T H E I RRE LEVANCE OF BI BL I CAL AU THO RIT Y J. SAMUEL P RE US

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521800136 © J. Samuel Preus 2001 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 This digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Preus, James S. (James Samuel), 1933– Spinoza and the irrelevance of biblical authority / J. Samuel Preus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 80013 7 1. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677 – Contributions in Biblical interpretation. 2. Bible – Criticism, interpretation, etc. – History – 17th century. 3. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. Tractatus theologico-politicus. I. Title. B3985.Z7 P74 2001 199.492 – dc21 00-063095 ISBN 978-0-521-80013-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-09353-8 paperback

For Karin and Michael

Contents

page ix xv

Preface Principal sources 1

Spinoza versus the interpreters

1

2

Rationalism unleashed: Ludwig Meyer’s new hermeneutic

34

3

Disengagement on the right

68

4

The liberal engagement: reason, usage, history

107

5

Starting over: Spinoza’s naturalized Bible

154

Concluding reflections

203 212 225

Bibliography Index

vii

Preface

This project began as an extension of my inquiry in Explaining Religion. Just as the earlier book sought to trace the emergence of the study of religion independent of theology, this one investigates the rise of a critical, historical and comparative study of scriptures independent of their theological interpretation from Jewish or Christian “insider” perspectives. My work thus offers an alternative version of what generally passes for “critical biblical study.” The standard account taught in the theological schools resembles the one masterfully presented in H.-J. Kraus.1 For him, the critical breakthrough was not the separation of interpretation from all theological constraints, but a breakthrough to a new theological perspective that could accommodate criticism, and adapt criticism to itself. This theological achievement, which occurred in eighteenthcentury Germany, succeeded in breaking the stranglehold of the orthodox theory of inspiration.2 In my alternative version, the rise of the study of religion required a more fundamental alteration: the Bible’s uniquely privileged (i.e., canonical) status had to be set aside entirely in order to open the way for comparing the Bible with other ancient texts, and the biblical religions with other religions around the world. I maintain that Spinoza was the first to accomplish this. By making biblical assumptions (especially its religious ones) part of the historical data rather than the norm of his inquiry, he achieved the critical 1 2

Geschichte der historisch-critischen Erforschung des AT. Ibid., 93. Kraus identifies J. S. Semler as a key figure in this breakthrough. As is briefly discussed later, Semler made an edition of Meyer’s Philosophy the Interpreter of Scripture, no doubt seeing in Meyer’s radical rationalism a precursor of the very breakthrough to which Kraus refers (103).

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Preface

breakthrough for the study of both the Bible and religion: theology, rather than being part of the explanation of religion, now became part of its data. My study of the period convinced me that Spinoza’s Theological– Political Treatise (1670) was the most important seventeenth-century work to advance the study of the Bible and religion generally. The fact that it has only recently received its due as a fundamental document in political theory (e.g., in the work of Steven B. Smith)3 posed afresh the question of the relation between the exegetical and the political, and for me the question of the relationship between scholarly innovation and political context. Although scholars have studied the political intent and content of the TTP and recognized the importance of biblical criticism to that aim, I have tried to tie the political and the exegetical together in a tighter and more detailed way: the key to this connection is the critical role of the authoritative public “interpreter.” Spinoza’s radical critique of all religious claimants to that office was grounded in a challenge to the divine authority and present relevance of the very scripture to which the interpreters appealed. Spinoza’s radical proposal ceded the office of interpreter to every reader. His proposal took an important step beyond those earlier humanists and Protestant reformers who also encouraged Christians to read the Bible for themselves. Unlike them, Spinoza was constrained by no assumption that it was the responsibility of ecclesiastical or governmental authorities to insure religious orthodoxy. By rendering their sacred text irrelevant, his new hermeneutic encouraged readers to derive whatever religious message they pleased from scripture; at the same time, by rendering their sacred text irrelevant, Spinoza disarmed the religious interpreters who would enforce conformity. Spinoza’s scholarship, which gave us the outline of a historical– critical method, was thus integral to his political argument. My claim to make a fresh contribution to the considerable scholarship on Spinoza rests on the fact that I have introduced new evidence that helps round out the intellectual context of the TTP in a way not done before. The writings I examine in chapters 2–4 have been left virtually unread even though Spinoza’s Treatise can 3

Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity.

Preface

xi

be located in a debate among those Christian writers over the question who or what is the “interpreter” of scripture. My course down this path of inquiry was prompted by two things: reading Quentin Skinner’s now-classic essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” and the three curious marginal references in chapter xv of the TTP to Ludwig Meyer, Philosophy the Interpreter of Scripture (1666).4 Meyer’s book set off a furious reaction, and so I read it and the Latin works5 of his critics that appeared prior to the TTP; I then read the TTP as part of that debate. The result provides a fresh slant on Spinoza’s relevant intellectual context: what he was up to, where his originality lay, and the significance of his work. My concentration on Christian works is not meant to minimize the importance of Spinoza’s Jewish background or the relevance of his arguments to his earlier situation in the Jewish community up to 1656. But since Spinoza lived at the mercy of a Christian government (once he had been excommunicated from the Portuguese Jewish community), it is illuminating to see how he engages the Christian discussion in order to plead his case before Christian authorities. Spinoza’s engagement in the Meyer debate reinforces my challenge to the claim that Spinoza’s exegetical method is essentially “rationalistic.” Reading Spinoza in context reveals on the contrary that his Treatise is an attack on the rationalistic hermeneutics of Meyer (as well as of the medieval philosopher Maimonides). We shall see how consistently Spinoza carries through his invention of a historical–critical method as an alternative to the rationalistic approach of his friend Meyer. We shall also see how skillfully Spinoza manipulates and subverts the Christian theological vocabulary of his time. Scholars familiar with the work of Edwin Curley, Silvain Zac and Richard Popkin may wonder what more can be said about 4

5

These marginal notes were made by Prosper Marchand (d. 1756), a learned book dealer and editor of the TTP who noticed three parallel passages in TTP xv and Meyer’s PSI. See Gebhardt’s discussion of the annotations in Spinoza Opera iii, 382–86. Marchand’s notations are reproduced in ibid., 262–63, notes 28–30. I cannot be sure that I may not miss important points by limiting myself to Latin writings. But the two Dutch writings I have read add nothing essential to the discussion, and it is Latin writings that were directed to a wider audience and that could have impact outside Holland.

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Spinoza’s biblical scholarship and interpretation. Indeed, my debt to these scholars is incalculable. Curley not only has provided us with insightful interpretation, but read and commented on my manuscript in great detail, saving me from mistakes and forcing me to clarify my arguments. Zac’s book remains the standard for studies of Spinoza’s biblical interpretation. And almost everywhere I went in my inquiry, Popkin had already been there. Many ideas that seem now to be my own probably came from them, although I have tried to specify my debts to them and other scholars in the footnotes. That said, none of the scholars that I know of has reconstructed the segment of specific intellectual context of the TTP in the way I deal with here, by studying Meyer’s work and the responses to it. The local debate of which the TTP became a part provides a compendium of one of the most important debates in early modern Europe, viz., about the status of biblical authority in public life. That debate addressed many questions that are still subject to controversy. There are others to acknowledge and thank. Colleagues at my own university and elsewhere have given advice and encouragement along the way: Jay Harris read an earlier version of the completed manuscript and offered much illuminating comment and critique. Jim Hart, Robert Orsi, Stephen Stein, Hava Samuelson and Michael Morgan at Indiana University; Roger Johnson, Wayne Proudfoot, Ivan Strenski, Robert Segal, Steven B. Smith, Jonathan Z. Smith and Michel Despland offered timely advice and encouragement as well. Special thanks go to Dr. Mary Preus for checking my translations of Latin texts. I am also in debt to librarians at Indiana University, Butler Library at Colunbia University, the New York Public Library, libraries in Holland (especially at the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden, and the Royal Library at Den Haag), and to numerous staff persons working in collections here and abroad that provided me with copies of rare books. A trip to Holland for research in fall 1996 was made possible by funds attached to the Ruth N. Halls professorship and the ready permission granted by Dean of the College Mort Lowengrub and my department chair, Stephen Stein, to take a semester’s leave.

Preface

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Finally I have to acknowledge the heroic forbearance and industry of my wife Bette Rae, who almost single-handedly packed up our house for our move from Bloomington, Indiana, to St. Paul, while I raced (sitting down) to complete a draft of this book for the press.

Principal sources

I have used abbreviated references throughout in my footnotes. Consult the bibliography at the end for full information on publications cited. Below are listed the main and most frequently cited primary sources upon which this study is constructed. Spinoza’s TTP and his other works are the only ones available in a modern edition (see Bibliography: Primary Sources). I have used the 1925 Gebhardt edition for him, which I always cite in footnotes first by page and line number, followed by a slash (/) and page number of the English translation. For the TTP and Spinoza’s letters I have used the Samuel Shirley translations, although I have frequently altered them on the basis of the Latin text. Meyer, PSI: [Ludwig Meyer], Philosophia sacrae scripturae interpres. Exercitatio paradoxa. In qua, veram philosophiam infallibilem S. Literas interpretandi normam esse, apodicticè demonstratur . . ., Eleutheropolus [Amsterdam], 1666. responses to meyer prior to 16 70 1 Arnold(us), Dissertatiuncula: Nicolaus Arnoldus, . . . Dissertatiuncula, de theologiae supra philosophiam dominio, cum brevibus stricturis ad librum sub titulo Philosophia Sacrae Scripturae Interpres, Franeker: S. Arcerius, 1667. Bekker, Admonitio: Balthasar Bekker, De philosophia cartesiana admonitio candida et sincera, Vesalia [Wesel]: Andrea Hoogenhuysen, 1668. 1

Van Velthuysen’s Dissertatio and Wolzogen’s De interprete are both listed in the inventory of Spinoza’s library.

xv

xvi

Principal sources

Comenius, Judicium: Jan Amos Comenius, Judicium, in Serarius (q.v.), 1667, pp. 61–82. Maresius, Disputationes: Samuel Maresius, Disputationes Theologicae prior refutatoria libelli de philosophia Interprete Scripturae . . ., Groningen: Johannis Collenus, 1667. Serarius,2 Responsio: Petrus Serarius, Responsio ad Exercitationem Paradoxam Anonomi cujusdam, Cartesianae sectae discipuli, qua philosophiam pro infallibili S. Literas interpretandi norma orbi Christiano obtrudit . . ., Amsterdam: Christopher Cunrad, 1667. van Velthuysen, Dissertatio: Lambert van Velthuysen, Dissertatio de usu rationis in rebus theologicis, et praesertim in interpretatione S. Scripturae, Rotterdam, 1667. Vogelsangh, Contra libellum: Reinerius Vogelsangh, Contra Libellum, cui titula Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres, Utrecht: Henricus Versteegh, 1669. Wolzogen, De interprete: Ludwig Wolzogen, De Scripturarum interprete adversus Exercitationem Paradoxum libri duo, Utrecht: v. d. Linde, 1668. Wolzogen, Censura: Ludwig Wolzogen, Orthodoxa Fides sive adversus Johannem de Labadie Censura Censurae, Utrecht: J. Ribbius, 1668. Spinoza, Ep.: Benedict Spinoza, Epistolae, in Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt, vol. iii, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925. [Citations are by letter number.] Spinoza, TTP: Benedict Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, continens dissertationes aliquot, quibus ostenditur Libertatem Philosophandi non tantum salva Pietate, & Reipublicae Pace posse concedi: sed eandem nisi cum Pace Reipublicae, ipsaque Pietate tolli non posse (Hamburg: Henricus Küroraht [Amsterdam: Christoffel Koenraad],3 1670), in Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt, vol. i. 2

3

I have used this spelling of Serarius throughout to conform to the Latin texts, rather than the more common spelling Serrarius. According to Petry, “Hobbes and the Early Dutch Spinozists,” 155. Koenraad’s was the same shop that printed the famous “bear emblem” pirate editions of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Most other scholars (e.g., Nadler, Spinoza, 269) say that the TTP, along with Spinoza’s works, was published by Jan Rieuwertsz.

chapter one


. . . an act of communication always constitutes the taking up of some determinate position in relation to some pre-existing conversation or argument. Quentin Skinner1

the exegetical and the political in the T H E O LO G I C A L – P O L I T I C A L T R E AT I S E

The fact that we are not governed by interpreters of divine law, nor intellectually answerable to alleged divine revelations, is a major aspect of modern liberty. For this we are hugely indebted to writers of the seventeenth century, above all to the Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632–77). In formulating his definitive critique of theocratic government, Spinoza ventured beyond all earlier critics such as Machiavelli and Hobbes by attacking the very foundation on which all Protestant theocratic theory rested: the Bible itself and its interpreters. Because this achievement has not been sufficiently appreciated or analyzed, his Theological–Political Treatise (1670), recognized by some scholars as “a classic of modern democratic theory,”2 has been unjustly neglected as a landmark in the history of western political thought whose originality and power comes fully to light only in view of its breakthrough in biblical interpretation. A critical opening point is this: no theoretical contribution to the problem of political sovereignty could be made in Spinoza’s era 11 12

“Reply,” 274. S. B. Smith, “Spinoza’s Democratic Turn,” 360. Nadler calls the TTP “one of the most eloquent arguments for a secular, democratic state in the history of political thought” (Spinoza, 285). Misrahi calls Spinoza “the founder of democratic thought in Europe” (“Spinoza and Christian Thought,” 395).

1

2

Spinoza and biblical authority

without dealing with the claims of religion as the foundation of political legitimacy and order. It is well recognized that Spinoza’s thorough critique of scripture in the TTP was intended to undermine theocratic ambitions in the Dutch Republic.3 But the real link – what explains the dash between “theological” and “political” in Spinoza’s title – is the interpreter of scripture, viz., the person who claimed authority to derive divine law from the Bible in order to make public law, for the eternal benefit (and necessary compliance) of the body politic. Thus, the reader should be alerted at the outset to the heavy freight carried throughout the TTP by Spinoza’s usage of interpretes as a term that usually refers to public interpreters. We are not very familiar with the office of “public interpreter” of scripture (thanks largely to Spinoza!), but must attend closely to it here, for in the seventeenth century it was widely assumed that scriptural authority had legal relevance to society, and consequently that clarifying the role of the interpreter was a critical component in any complete and coherent account of sovereignty.4 Spinoza sought to strip the Bible of its usefulness to such theocratic interpreters – not, as is commonly supposed, merely by submitting it to a critique from the perspective of pure (i.e., seventeenth-century) reason, but by reconceiving and exhaustively explaining the Bible itself and its religion in a radically new way: historically. Under Spinoza’s relentless critique, the Bible would become one ancient book among and comparable to others, irrelevant as an authority. And its interpreters would be reduced to mere scholars of the ancient text. Gone would be the Bible’s unique authority as the dominant text in the western canon; gone its unique majesty as the sole source of saving knowledge and as an 13

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S. B. Smith (Spinoza, Liberalism) has written the best book on the inseparable relation between the religious and the political in the TTP. He describes how the clergy “had used Scripture to interpret the Dutch republic as a ‘new Israel,’ and their own position as akin to that of the ancient prophets. They claimed for themselves the sole right of scriptural interpretation and the eradication of heresy”. Some even “considered themselves as equal to the prophets of ancient Israel and saw themselves, like the prophets, as seeking to create a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (146). See the earlier analysis by Lewis Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, 119–35. We can sort out two other types of intepreter that Spinoza refers to in the TTP, neither of whom receives a lot of attention: the ordinary individual, who should be free to interpret scripture for religious purposes as he pleases, unconstrained by the opinions of public interpreters (cf. TTP vii, 114.31; 115.4/157), and the scholar, who should – and should be free to – interpret following the method laid out by Spinoza.


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eternal blueprint for a godly society; and unemployed would be its magisterial interpreters. Much excellent scholarship has provided deep background for understanding the TTP, and I have no dispute with the general consensus about the powerful influence of Spinoza’s Jewish and Christian predecessors.5 But we do not have a full account of the immediate intellectual context in which Spinoza created and shaped this work. What is especially needed is a reading of the TTP as part of an actual conversation among Christians, one that was both heavily theological and fraught with political implications.6 My intent is to show how Spinoza engaged – among other things – a specific group of Christian writings that have been largely ignored by scholars, even those writing about the religio-political tensions in the Dutch Republic. Understanding the TTP and appreciating its achievement requires some sense of what those writings were and what their authors were arguing about. Only so can we grasp 15

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To give one important example related to the undeniably Protestant principle of interpreting scripture through scripture: Amos Funkenstein (Theology, 218) points out that Spinoza probably learned this important principle initially from Abraham ibn Ezra, who taught that “whether a biblical image has to be interpreted literally or metaphorically cannot be decided arbitrarily from a point of view outside the text, but rather immanently . . . it is with this principle more than in any detail of his interpretation that Ibn Ezra influenced Spinoza’s exegetical approach.” Not only Jewish, but Christian scholarship – for all its excellence – has focused on Spinoza’s predecessors, ignoring his engagement in a local Christian debate about interpretation of scripture. For example, Ernst Bizer, “Reformed Orthodoxy,” treats Meyer, Wolzogen and Maresius (all three included in our account), as well as another Cartesian theologian, Christopher Wittich, but completely omits Spinoza’s part in this debate. Especially thorough work has been done on the influence of Hobbes (and the probable impact of Isaac LaPeyrère) on Spinoza: see Curley, “‘I Durst not Write . . .’” and “Homo Audax”; on other predecessors, see Curley’s “Neglected Masterpiece,” where he stresses the importance of Spinoza’s Jewish predecessors and learning (particularly Ibn Ezra), noting that neither Hobbes nor LaPeyrère was a Hebrew scholar). Curley is critical of Popkin for exaggerating the uncertain influence of Isaac LaPeyrère in his book of that title. Popkin’s summary article (“Spinoza and Bible Scholarship”) provides detailed treatment of Spinoza’s environment in the Portuguese Jewish community, the issue of Mosaic authorship, Hobbes, LaPeyrère and Fisher. But he barely mentions Meyer. Scholars who treat Spinoza’s relation to Jewish authors (especially Maimonides) tend to ignore Spinoza’s contemporaries. A notable exception is Harris (How Do We Know This? ), who studies the contemporary Jewish suspicion of midrash and rabbinic Judaism, observing that “a fundamental part of the debates of the seventeenth century revolved around the viability of a religious praxis rooted in rabbinic exegesis” (105). Strauss (Spinoza’s Critique) has a chapter on Uriel da Costa that gives a view of contemporary Marrano culture, and another on Calvin that provides important general background for understanding the prevailing form of Dutch Christianity.

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the particular issues, categories and arguments with which Spinoza’s own work articulates, and the remarkable ways in which he used them to stake out his own position regarding scriptural authority and interpretation in the free pluralistic society he envisioned. Therefore this book will examine the ways in which he exploited the terms and arguments of that debate in a genuine effort to reach a segment of the Christian public and to win them to his point of view.7 Fuller knowledge of this debate will allow us to develop a more adequate perspective on Spinoza’s argument; it will highlight the novelty of his relentless subversion, through history, of both theological dogma and philosophical rationalism as proper instruments of biblical interpretation.8 Disarming the interpreters as a condition of liberty The publication of the Tractatus was a political act as well as an extraordinary intellectual achievement. My thesis is that Spinoza made his unique contribution to the cause of freedom by systematically linking the problem of biblical authority and the cause of political liberty.9 He had come to realize that such liberty could never be assured as long as the authority of the Bible remained in force. Only by undercutting that authority could he wrest scripture from the hands of the interpreters – ecclesiastical authorities and their political patrons – depriving them of their most potent and persuasive weapon for enforcing religious and intellectual conformity.10 That weapon was their exclusive franchise on the saving knowledge that was available only in scripture – knowledge that 17

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Steven Smith (Spinoza, 20f.) observes that Spinoza’s hope for a “tolerant society was more likely to be expedited by appealing to Christians, rather than Jews, and to those potential philosophers among the Gentiles.” Yet Smith does not pursue the issue by incorporating related Christian writings into his study. Norris (Spinoza, 185) likens Spinoza to Habermas in his belief in reasoned discourse. Its “normative constraints” function as a “regulative ideal that holds out the prospect of uncoerced rational agreement against all the numerous contending forces of prejudice, self-interest and unargued doctrinal adher18 I will treat Spinoza’s assault on rationalist exegesis in chapter 5. ence.” Nadler (Spinoza, 133) notes that apparently no other work was published in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century with the phrase theologico-politicus in its title. S. B. Smith (Spinoza, 28) asserts that Spinoza “attacked the power of the divines in order to undermine the source from which their power derived, namely, Scripture itself.” I am inclined to reverse this statement: Spinoza’s assault on scripture would undercut the theocratic pretensions of the divines.


5

was at once esoteric, requiring expert interpretation, and necessary for salvation. Only by breaking that franchise could Spinoza clear space for a truly democratic state. Paradoxically, then, the TTP belabors the connection between theology and politics in order once and for all to end the influence of theology on politics.11 In the TTP, Spinoza advanced knowledge by creating the Bible of modern scholarship, i.e., the Bible as it is still known and investigated through historical and critical study. And yet his purpose and intended audience were not primarily academic.12 Rather, his entire project was a passionate public engagement in the struggle for intellectual and religious liberty. The scholarly content of his treatise is thus inseparable from its political intent (as its title clearly announces), and no attempt to understand it can succeed without taking that fact into account.13 Voices on behalf of religious liberty had been heard before, and traditional biblical interpretation that justified political coercion of religious belief and practice had been challenged by others.14 But nobody had so clearly seen and unequivocally argued that 11

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As Feuer wrote (Spinoza, 69), the TTP was “designed to terminate the influence of theology on politics.” He accurately observed that Spinoza “carried the polemical warfare into his opponents’ citadel of biblical texts. Scriptural criticism and interpretation provided Spinoza with the grounds for the dismissal of Calvinist claims to hegemony” (70). On a smaller scale, of course, Spinoza was at the same time dismissing claims of the rabbis in their rule of the Jewish community. That is not to deny a scholarly purpose. As Harris points out (How Do We Know This?, 130), Spinoza was working on a Hebrew grammar when he died, a work intended “to provide the grammatical basis for implementing the revolutionary exegetical demands of the Treatise.” Zac writes, “the very purpose of our study is to show that Spinoza has not proposed a work of erudition but, on the contrary, that all his analyses relative to the biblical text are integrated into a demonstration or rather an appeal in favor of the liberty of thought, a condition sine qua non of the philosophic life” (L’interprétation, 166). Bringing all his learning to bear in order to break the grip of Protestant bibliolatry was at once erudite and political on Spinoza’s part. Analyzing the centrality of the concept of power in Spinoza’s thought, Klever (“Power”) makes clear that Spinoza’s project is not a “pure” search for truth, or a “neutral” desire simply to understand, but to understand in order to increase one’s power of self-determination by removing external obstructions to freedom. Cf. especially Castellio, Concerning Heretics (1554), condemning the burning of Servetus at Geneva at the height of Calvin’s power. Castellio challenged pieces of traditional exegesis (e.g., Augustine’s notorious interpretation of “compelle intrare” in Lk. 14.23) that justified coercion of dissenters. William of Orange made use of Castellio’s writing in his own advocacy of toleration for the sake of peace (J. I. Israel, “Toleration,” 4). Israel identifies the late 1620s and following as the period of “the great Dutch toleration debate” (18) and reviews the arguments of the leading advocates, e.g., Dirk Coornhert and Episcopius (Simon Bischop).

6


undercutting biblical authority as such was a necessary condition for permanently securing religious and intellectual liberty,15 and that this could be accomplished only by replacing mythic with historical explanations of the origin and contents of the Bible. Thus, the invention of the historical method and Spinoza’s campaign on behalf of liberty are inseparable aspects of a single story just as, conversely, the invocation of biblical authority and constraints upon liberty were indissolubly linked. So just as the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thought and action cannot be reconstructed without attention to the role of the Bible, so equally Spinoza’s decisive breakthrough in the history of scholarship cannot be understood apart from its role in the development of theoretical justification for a state whose aim is the securing of peace and liberty16 and whose religious policy aims at protecting any number of sects by preventing domination by any.17 spinoza’s s trategy in it s intellectual context Spinoza determined that he must engage and subvert fundamental Protestant assumptions about scripture, because scripture was the ultimate weapon that defeated any challenge to the dominant and sometimes oppressive regime. But it would not do to attack 15

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Hobbes had clearly seen and articulated the claim that biblical authority could not be invoked to advance theocracy and divide sovereignty but granted the state a much tighter rein on religious liberty, which for Spinoza was “an inalienable right” (TTP xviii, 225.20/276: “. . . opiniones, quae uniuscujusque juris sunt, quo nemo cedere potest . . .”). Cf. ibid. xx, 239.10/291: “. . . no one is able to transfer to another his natural right or faculty to reason freely and to form his own judgment on any matters whatsoever, nor can he be compelled to do so.” Spinoza here refers to an earlier chapter (xvii, 201.14/250), where he says (implicitly against Hobbes) that “nobody can so completely transfer to another all his right, and consequently his power, as to cease to be a human being, nor will there ever be a sovereign power that can do all it pleases . . . It must . . . be granted that the individual reserves to himself a considerable part of his right, which therefore depends on nobody’s decision but his own.” TTP xx, 241.7/293: “Finis . . . reipublicae revera libertas est.” Spinoza handles the tension between public peace (order) and individual freedom in this chapter. For disussion of this problem see S. B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism; Bartuschat, “The Ontological Basis”; Boscherini, “Réalisme et utopie”; Blom, “Virtue and Republicanism.” See especially Francès, “La liberté politique, selon Spinoza,” emphasizing this point. J. I. Israel (“Toleration,” 6) puts many of these these same issues in the context of the great debate about toleration – a debate he characterizes as “exceptionally extensive, continuous and complex, charged with great tension” and moving through several phases.


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every Protestant principle regarding the Bible head-on.18 And so his strategy was somewhat devious. His self-presentation was openly political, but not challenging to the government of the Republic. He did not represent himself as an advocate of the new Cartesian philosophy, although generally agreeable to it he was, and already well known as an expert interpreter of that philosophy.19 Nor did he plead his case as an oppressed “enthusiast,” Collegiant or Quaker – although “friendly in his way”20 he was to all of them. Rather, he deceptively aimed his sharpest criticism at long-dead Jewish interpreters, even though his intended audience was not primarily the Jewish community. I am convinced not only that his primary audience was Christian, but that he was in fact surreptitiously taking sides in a debate among Christians over the work of another philosopher – his friend and collaborator Ludwig Meyer.21 An Amsterdam physician and intellectual with degrees in 18

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There is a head-on quality to some passages, of course, above all his trenchant challenge to the a priori assumption that everything in scripture was said on divine authority (TTP, Pref., 9.10/53). Spinoza’s first published work, and the only one published under his own name, was Descartes’ “Principles of Philosophy” (1663) – the work that established a professional relationship between Spinoza and Meyer. Klever (“Spinoza and van dan Enden”) has discovered a diary by a Danish scientist, traveler and reporter, Olaus Borch, which shows that already in 1661 Spinoza was regarded as part of a circle of atheistic Amsterdam Cartesians, an independent critic of Descartes, and already teaching that scriptures were “on the same level as the Koran and the Fables of Aesop; they did not have a special value as God’s revelation that would put them above other writings” (314f.). Yet Spinoza followed both Francis Bacon and Descartes in separating philosophical and scientific pursuits from theology (on Bacon, see my “Religion and Bacon’s New Learning”; on Descartes, chap. 3 below on his prudent reticence on theological issues). The phrase is a Quaker characterization of an Amsterdam Jew from a Quaker letter reporting the progress of a mission to Dutch Jews (1658, William Caton to Margaret Fell). Richard Popkin argues that the reference is to Spinoza and that he had translated a Quaker tract aimed at converting Amsterdam Jews (“Spinoza’s Relations,” 127). Klever (“Spinoza and van den Enden,” 323) challenges this claim, having found evidence of another Jew who better fits the circumstances. The evidence isn’t decisive, but accepting Popkin’s view means that Spinoza was willing to promote the Quaker mission to Jews. Was he that “friendly”? Unlike some modern scholars, contemporaries of Meyer and Spinoza had no trouble recognizing that the TTP was responding to Meyer as well as to Maimonides: see Lambert van Velthuysen’s letter to Jacob Ostens (Spinoza, Ep. 42, 207.14/225) in which he observes, before going into details that touch Meyer’s book, that the author of the TTP, although unknown to Velthuysen, “is not unintelligent, and that his discussion and close examination of the controversies among Christians in Europe is not careless and superficial.”

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medicine and philosophy, part of the inner circle of Spinoza’s philosophical colleagues and devotees, Meyer was also a philosophical collaborator who had seen Spinoza’s commentary on Descartes through the press and written an introduction to it. An enthusiastic partisan of Cartesian philosophy, he published (anonymously) in 1666 an audacious book entitled Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres (Philosophy the Interpreter of Sacred Scripture), seeking to apply the powerful new philosophical instrument to the interpretation of the Bible. The book elicited passionate negative responses from both right and left on the spectrum of Dutch Reformed theologians. Some of these works are entirely forgettable, yet they are rendered important because Spinoza read Meyer’s book too. Four years later he published his Tractatus, the most important book about the Bible written in the seventeenth century; in it we can find three specific references to Meyer’s book, although Meyer is never mentioned by name.22 We shall attend to this series of works in detail in succeeding chapters. Spinoza’s engagement in this conversation enhances our understanding of his complex intentions in writing the TTP: he intended not only to make a political statement, but to instruct and guide (and even correct, in Meyer’s case) his own circle of philosophical friends, and anyone else willing to listen, on how to take the measure of the Bible so as to defend their freedom against the claims of the interpreters.23 Addressing the “learned reader,” not 22

23

I have reviewed the evidence in “Hidden Opponent,” 368–72. Although Spinoza had begun writing the TTP before Meyer’s book was published, three references in TTP xv prove that Spinoza used Meyer’s book. They can be seen by examining marginal annotations that simply refer to places in Meyer’s text. One precipitating cause for Spinoza to set aside the writing of his Ethics and to finish and publish the TTP (according to Nadler [Spinoza, 132] begun years earlier as Spinoza’s Apologia against his own excommunication) was the persecution and death of Adriaan Koerbagh in prison in 1669 (cf. J. I. Israel, The Dutch Republic, 920). Koerbagh was one of Spinoza’s inner circle, and shared his views on the Bible and politics (see Nadler, Spinoza, 266; see also his chap. 7 for discussion of Spinoza’s circle). The group shared Spinoza’s passion for philosophy, read his work and discussed it with him. The group included Simon de Vries, the organizer; Francis van den Enden, an ex-Jesuit and independent teacher-scholar who taught Spinoza Latin and employed him to teach others; Ludwig Meyer; Johan Bouwmeester; Koerbagh; Jan Rieuwertsz, an Amsterdam printer in whose shop intellectuals gathered and who printed Spinoza’s works; Georg Hermann Schuller, probably the physician who attended Spinoza on his deathbed; Walther von Tschirnhaus (M. Francès, Spinoza, 282). They received and discussed pieces of the Ethics in regular installments before its existence was publicly known. After Spinoza left


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the multitude,24 Spinoza says in his preface that he is especially eager to provide guidance to those “for whom a more liberal approach to philosophical questions is prevented by this one obstacle, that they believe that reason must be the handmaid (ancillari) of theology. These latter, I am confident, will derive great profit from this work.”25 This description can cover a wide range of readers in thrall to scriptural authority, beyond Spinoza’s inner circle. Steven Smith has nicely described a wider circle to whom Spinoza would appeal – politically and theologically liberal thinkers, some associated with Protestant groups dissenting against the divisive doctrines of strict Calvinism, all affirming religious toleration and rejecting clerical authority. They include those Collegiants and Mennonites at Rijnsburg who befriended Spinoza following his excommunication.26 My aim is to enhance understanding of the TTP through a detailed reading of that specific cluster of Latin writings, beginning with Meyer’s largely ignored work27 and continuing with those Latin responses to it which predated and – to an extent we cannot exactly determine – informed Spinoza’s Treatise (1670). The best two of those responses (by Lambert van Velthuysen and

24

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Amsterdam, the “reading group” continued, and de Vries explained their procedure in a letter to Spinoza. After thorough discussion, he reports, they made notes of unsolved puzzles in order “to write to you so that, if possible, it should be made clearer to us and we may, with your guidance, uphold truth against those who are in a superstitious way religious and Christian (contra superstitiose religiosos, christianosque), and may stand firm against the onslaught of the whole world” (Ep. 8, 39.14/88). The TTP is a perfect fit for this audience. Yovel reads the TTP as a sort of therapy for the multitude, but it is not clear how it would be administered, since the work is written in Latin and, as Spinoza remarks, is bound to be misinterpreted by them (Yovel, “Spinoza: The Psychology”). No doubt Spinoza would have been delighted if his work could have had the desired effect on popular religion – reshaping it so as to approximate reason. But the actual reading audience (or Spinoza’s implied readers) begins with Spinoza’s inner circle and radiates out from there. TTP Pref., 12.16/56. Strauss (Spinoza’s Critique, 258) takes his cue here in stating the overall aim of the TTP: “He must remove the prejudice that reason must be subject to the revelation contained in Scripture, so that men held fast in the authority of Scripture might be free to philosophize.” S. B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, 48. Leszek Kolakowski entitled his book on these people Chrétiens sans église. Zac, author of the most detailed study of Spinoza’s biblical interpretation, has a brief (two pages) discussion of Meyer’s book, yet makes no attempt to integrate either it, or the reactions to it, into his interpretation of the TTP (Zac, L’interprétation, pp. 27–29). We are indebted to Lagrée and Moreau for their French translation of PSI, which includes a good introduction and a valuable index of authors cited by Meyer.

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Ludwig Wolzogen) were in Spinoza’s own library, and we may assume that he read them.28 The rest were written by people well known to Spinoza (especially Petrus Serarius)29 or who represented theological views with which he was obviously very familiar and whose language he exploited for his own purpose. Spinoza’s work appeared in the middle of an intense public debate, precipitated by the publication of Meyer’s book, over the role of philosophy, reason and history in biblical interpretation. Spinoza mastered the conversation and took it into new territory, exposing its political import and compelling the combatants to engage the stubborn facts of history. In that way I hope to shed more light on the immediate intellectual context of Spinoza’s Treatise,30 and perhaps bring interesting historical perspective on aspects of our own culture, where many of these same issues remain alive. plan of the book In succeeding chapters, I examine three bodies of material en route to a final chapter on Spinoza: Meyer’s book (chapter 2) and responses from the religious right (chapter 3),31 and those from the 28

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See list of my principal primary sources following the Preface. Spinoza did not have a large library, and I am assuming, with other scholars, that he had read everything in it. The works of van Velthuysen and Wolzogen were the two responses to Meyer with which Spinoza could most easily engage. Spinoza would later become personally acquainted with van Velthuysen, probably when Spinoza spent some time in Utrecht in 1673: van Velthuysen claims to have had “many conversations with him” (dum viviret [this was written after Spinoza’s death in 1677] multos cum eo contulerim sermones) (quoted by Klever, Verba et sententiae, 36). One usually finds this name spelled Serrarius, following the French rather than the Latin, which I follow here. For material about the context (seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and its religious profile, both Jewish and Christian) and about controversies surrounding the Bible arising from the intellectual ferment of the age, see my articles “Religion on the Margins: Conversos and Collegiants” and “The Rise and Fall of the Bible.” In those areas, I am indebted to the work of scholars such as Israel, Popkin, Meinsma, Francès, Kaplan, Yovel, McGahagan, Allen, Strauss, Rossi. “Right” is somewhat anachronistic, since Calvinist orthodoxy was the state religion of the Dutch Republic and therefore “mainstream”; on the other hand, both “right” and “liberal” correspond to the language and general perception of things in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, going back to the Synod of Dordrecht, where preciezen designated the strict orthodox, and rekkelijken the moderates (Fred van Lieburg, “From Pure Church,” 411; cf. Derk Visser, “Establishing the Reformed Church,” 404: rekkelyk literally means “stretchable” as opposed to “strict” [precies]). Those on the right not only sought to repress religious plurality and dissent but were defenders of centralized monarchy, a system that could best enforce religious conformity, against the federal system of regents’ government defended by Spinoza. The right-wing writers are readily recognizable as precursors of fundamentalism.


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liberals (chapter 4).32 Then we examine Spinoza’s “sic et non” in relation to each: • yes to Meyer’s reason as the norm of truth, but no to his proposal that philosophy is the key to discovering scriptural meanings; • yes to the right’s radical separation of faith and reason, but no to its crushing denial both of reason and of the relevance of historical knowledge about the Bible where its authority was concerned; • yes to the liberals’ argument that history constituted the essential core of scriptural discourse, but no to its claim of a distinct sacred narrative history embedded in it that must be believed for salvation.33 This absolutely critical move allowed Spinoza to affirm the teaching and “spirit” of Christ while emphatically denying the claims of historic Christianity with its incomprehensible sacred history along with its embodiment in institutions that claimed to represent Christ’s authority34 (from here on, I 32

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In this context, “liberal” means religious thinkers who welcomed the new philosophy and science and sought to adapt theology to new knowledge and to harmonize the two, carrying on the classical strategy of the scholastics – at the same time retaining the authority of scripture and the old adage that philosophy was the handmaid of theology, at least where knowledge “necessary to salvation” was concerned. In this context, Spinoza counts as a radical, given his firm rejection of harmonization and his decanonization of scripture. His radicality shines through as he commends his work to those who “would philosophize more liberally” (liberius philosopharentur), i.e., would not be held back by the prejudice, shared by the “liberals,” that reason is the handmaid of theology (TTP Pref., 12.16/56). E.g., TTP v, 79.21/123: “he who is totally unacquainted with Biblical narratives, but nevertheless holds salutary beliefs and pursues the true way of life, is absolutely blessed and has within him the spirit of Christ.” We will deal more fully with this crucial distinction in chap. 5. Spinoza contends (TTP xi, 156.6/201) that while the essential teachings of Christ can be readily grasped (and embraced) by natural reason, the Christian story regarding the cosmic significance of the life and death of Jesus, as the incarnation of the divine, does not fall within reason. This is what Spinoza means when he says he “does not understand” it (e.g., TTP i, 21.15/64; cf. vii, n. 8; 253.14/301). Zac (“Le problème du christianisme,” 487) stresses this important point. Curley (“Homo Audax,” 84), discussing Spinoza’s precise views on Christ, cites Spinoza’s more brutal assessment of the kerygma in Letter 73 (Gebhardt iv, 309/333) to Oldenburg: beyond saying he does “not understand” Christians when they talk of the incarnation, he here remarks, “to tell the truth, they seem to me to speak no less absurdly than one who might tell me that a circle has taken on the nature of a square.” Perhaps Spinoza’s strongest bond with his radical Christian friends was their common rejection of historic Christianity especially as embodied in “Christendom,” the interlocking of church and state since Constantine, as a persecuting church alien to the “spirit of Christ.” It is amazing how Christian commentators every so often “discover” that historic Christianity is not the religion of Jesus (recently, “Search for a No-Frills Jesus” in the Dec. 1996 Atlantic Monthly).

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shall use the contemporary term kerygma [Greek for proclamation] to refer to the core teaching of historic Christianity, which combines ordinary and sacred history in an apparently seamless narrative);35 • a yes to sola scriptura and scriptura sui interpres (“scripture alone” and “scripture its own interpreter”) with radically altered meaning in comparison with the Protestant reformers who coined these terms; no to the claim that God was the author of scripture. This approach, to read what Spinoza read in order better to grasp his intentions in writing,36 has not been sufficiently used in scholarly discussion of the TTP, which has of course richly treated the more remote and medieval background, both Jewish and Christian. Better knowledge of how the treatise articulates with contemporary Christian discussion, and specifically the debate over Meyer, will further situate Spinoza’s book in the midst of the politically charged quarrels of theologians and preachers, and help bring into focus the places where Spinoza is most innovative. This investigation will also enhance our sense of what Spinoza intended in writing the Treatise, and how first Meyer’s work, and then his own, were read by his contemporaries.37 We shall see Spinoza operating as an astute reader of Protestant theology, adapting fundamental axioms of that theology (especially sola scriptura and scriptura sui interpres),38 perhaps partly to mask 35

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A paradigmatic example of such a mixed narrative is the so-called Apostle’s Creed, e.g., “he was crucified, dead and buried; he descended into hell . . .” Spinoza is not as sceptical as modern scholars about the historicity of biblical narratives, being generally unconcerned with matters that we “hear without surprise”; it is “mysterious symbols, and narratives that exceed all human belief, [that] I call incomprehensible” (TTP vii, n. 8; 253.15/301). This method was developed by Skinner in his classic essay “Meaning and Understanding.” The reprint in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, incorporates essays by Skinner’s critics and his reply. In 1674, the second edition of the TTP was published bound together with Meyer’s book, and many readers apparently thought the two works were by the same author, since for neither author could the authority of deductions from evidence and reason be overridden by scriptural assertions. As we shall see, however, the similarity ends there. Zac (L’interprétation, 13) says that “the novel method, which is his great discovery, is the method of the interpretation of scripture from itself.” The phrase “principe de l’interprétation de l’Écriture par elle-même” is repeated dozens of times in Zac’s book as the philosopher’s innovative and ruling principle. But Zac’s claim must be qualified: Gregory has it right in observing that Spinoza was using and transforming a standard


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his profoundly subversive intent,39 but more fundamentally to transform their meanings to conform to the new method he was proposing. Covertly but persistently, he engaged the logic of various Christian positions (sometimes under cover of Jewish authorities such as Maimonides),40 extending some, rejecting others, exploiting the critiques of one Christian group against another. Always seeking to persuade, and “stretching to establish common ground with as many people as possible,”41 he worked his way through their philosophical and theological arguments about scripture to create a distinctly new and coherent method of interpretation, one which would flourish in a secular context of intellectual freedom. Reading Spinoza in this context, we can see

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Reformation principle (“Introduction,” 41). Spinoza’s “novelty” lay in his naturalizing adaptation of the principle. No doubt Spinoza used pious language in part to tranquilize unwary readers and camouflage his own subversive purposes – and he does so with “snakish cunning” (Peter Geach, quoted by Curley, “Homo Audax,” 103 n. 45 – an allusion, I suppose, to the notorious cunning [callidus] snake of Gen. 3.1). Steven Smith aptly notes the subtle interweaving of Spinoza’s “bluntness” and “passion for concealment” (Spinoza, Liberalism, 39). Leo Strauss (“How to Study,” 177–79) explained how Spinoza made as many concessions as possible to the capacity of the vulgar, even where his own view – which he also incorporated into the TTP – was the opposite. Zac (L’interprétation, 216 n. 1) quotes S. von DuninBorkowski’s view that Spinoza conceals his real intent, and flatly disagrees with him. I think Zac is correct in insisting that Spinoza is primarily addressing a Christian public with intent to persuade, “placing himself on their own terrain” (“Le problème du christianisme,” 484). Yovel also uses the language of “masking” (“Spinoza: The Psychology of the Multitude,” 321). When I wrote “Hidden Opponent,” I failed to mention that Curley (“Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece”) was fully aware of the Meyer connection. Curley observed that Spinoza was explicitly rejecting Meyer’s position even though he did not name Meyer. Citing texts in which Spinoza criticizes Maimonides, Curley notes that “these objections are as applicable to Meyer’s position as they are to that of Maimonides” (79). By focusing on the Christian dimension of this conversation, I do not mean to deny the political context and implication of Spinoza’s experience in the Portuguese Jewish community which, after all, excommunicated him for defying the views of its interpretes, the rabbis. As Nadler (Spinoza, 148–50) reports, the Jewish leadership ran the affairs of the community in a highly autocratic manner. Furthermore, to “reassure their hosts [the magistrates of Amsterdam] that their community was a controlled and orthodox one,” they were perhaps ultrasensitive to the danger posed by renegades such as Spinoza and Juan de Prado running loose in the community. Curley, “Homo Audax,” 83. Two examples of Spinoza’s desire to engage his Christian critics – both written in 1675 as he contemplated a revised version of TTP – in Ep. 68, 299.22/321, he asks Henry Oldenburg to specify what doctrines seemed to “undermine the practice of religious virtue” and what passages “have proved a stumbling-block to learned men” (cited by Curley, “Homo Audax,” 75). And Spinoza responded to van Velthuysen’s thoughtful and severe critique of the TTP, asking him to publish the critique so that he might clarify his position by answering it publicly (Ep. 69, 300.24/323f.).

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perhaps more clearly how, echoing Hobbes (but more radically), he paradoxically argued on two levels: (1) trying to show how the Bible itself – as a reasonably reliable historical source – supported his interpretations and arguments (especially against theocracy), but also (2) trying to subvert biblical authority entirely, in order to undercut the authority of its interpreters. As we shall see, Meyer took an apolitical approach,42 convinced that the bitter sectarian disputes of the day ultimately sprang from disputes over biblical interpretation, and were insoluble only for lack of an adequate method. As a remedy, Meyer had offered a new “Cartesian” hermeneutic,43 proposing philosophy as the key to unlocking the universal saving truths of scripture. Spinoza countered that Meyer’s approach would get nowhere, since such schisms were in fact endemic to Christianity itself – from the New Testament onwards. Furthermore, Meyer had ignored the political dimensions of the problem: first, sectarian differences had become enshrined in public law; second, Meyer’s solution would only substitute a new set of interpreters (i.e., philosophers) for the old.44 Spinoza would also argue that philosophy was part of the 42

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See e.g. his several definitions of “interpreter” (PSI ii.1, 3). None of them has social or political meaning. Furthermore, there is no trace of Hobbes or Machiavelli in his book (unlike the TTP). I put Cartesian in quotes because Descartes himself, scrupulously eschewing theology, would not (at least publicly) have endorsed such a procedure. But in contrast to Spinoza’s work, Meyer’s prominently advertises itself as Cartesian. I find Spinoza’s objection valid here, but contrast the more favorable judgment of Meyer’s work offered by Thijssen-Schoute (Nederlands, 402f.). She judges Meyer’s book to be superior to and more influential than the TTP. Spinoza however, while exposing a weakness in Meyer, opens himself to two other possible objections regarding the interpreters: (1) he explicitly hands interpretive authority over to the state and (2) he hands it over to the critical biblical scholars. I deal with the first objection in n. 48, below: the state’s interpretive right is public and does not clearly extend to the private realm. The second objection is raised, e.g., by Harrisville and Sundberg (The Bible, 48), that Spinoza took the Bible “out of the hands of the people” and turned it over to the professoriate. Here I think Spinoza holds an at least implicit distinction: true, only a historical–critical approach will yield a proper or authoritative historical reading of scripture, but this claim seems to be aimed at the scholars and theologians, and to be irrelevant to ordinary readers seeking religious guidance: Spinoza encourages the latter simply to focus on biblical teaching on justice and charity and not to worry about extraneous matters, whether historical or doctrinal. Here he echoes Hobbes, who wrote that “whatsoever is necessary for them to know [for salvation] is so easy as not to need interpretation; whatsoever is more, does them no good” (Behemoth, 53–55). It is not Spinoza’s fault that the biblical professoriate later constituted in Germany succeeded in establishing critical method as somehow religiously necessary.


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problem, not the solution.45 Thus, he reformulated the question and tried to shift the debate to an entirely new level: the problem was not how rival Christian interpretations could be resolved (in his opinion they couldn’t be), but how, in a diverse society riven by sectarian conflict and struggles for power, religious and civil liberty for all might best be encouraged, at the same time assuring civil harmony and peace. As Madeleine Francès observed, his democratic solution involved reducing the status of all the sectaries (especially those of the Calvinist state orthodoxy), to that of all other claimants to free speech – whether the religious sects or the philosophes like himself – leaving everyone free to urge his opinions by rational argument alone, constrained only by the requirements of the social contract implied in the secular constitution, based on consent of the governed.46 In Spinoza’s democratic state, claims to privileged possession of divine law would have no role in the making of civil law. Such claims were always based on the source of that law – the divine and infallible scripture (which even Meyer affirmed). This explains why the theological part of Spinoza’s theological–political project is exclusively about the Bible, whose true intent he equates with “theology.”47 Spinoza not only rejected Meyer’s proposal in favor of philosophy or any other “interpres” of scripture (here, Spinoza largely echoes the more orthodox of Meyer’s critics);48 he pushed 45

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Noting that each of the Apostles “built religion on a different foundation,” each with his own method (e.g., Paul and James), Spinoza observed that these differences “in the grounding of their religion gave rise to many disputes and schisms to vex the church continually, right from the time of the apostles, and they will surely continue to vex the church until the day comes when religion shall be separated from philosophic speculation and reduced to the few simple doctrines that Christ taught his people”: “. . . non dubium est, quin ex hoc, quod scilicet Apostoli diversis fundamentis religionem superaedificaverint, ortae sint multae contentiones & schismata, quibus ecclesia jam inde ab Apostolorum temporibus indesinenter vexata fuit, & profecto in aeternum [!] vexabitur, donec tandem aliquando religio a speculationibus philosophicis separetur & ad paucissima & simplicissima dogmata, quae Christus suos docuit, redigatur . . .” (TTP xi, 157.31/203; my italics). Spinoza repeatedly informs his readers that the aim of the TTP is the separation of theology from philoso46 Francès, “La liberté.” phy (e.g., TTP Pref., 10.16/54 et passim). E.g., TTP xv, 184.32/232. Here he makes it clear that although reason often contradicts scripture, it does not come into conflict with “the Word of God,” scripture’s real meaning. He does not of course echo the critics when he argues that the state is a legitimate interpres in mitigated form. As with Hobbes, the secular rulers have the right to act as the “interpreters” of public religion, because in the realm of public law, sovereignty must be undivided (cf. TTP xix, 228.30/280: “. . . religion acquires the force of law only by decree

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into uncharted territory by challenging the very premise on which all such claims to divine authority were being made, viz., the divine authorship, infallibility and eternal relevance of scripture itself.49 The key to disarming such claims, Spinoza argued, was not philosophy, but a straightforward and rigorous historical investigation (see chapter 5 below). In developing this view, he engaged and turned to his own advantage some of the arguments that critics

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footnote 48 (cont.) of those who hold sovereignty . . .God has no special kingdom over men except through the medium of temporal rulers.” In their function as “interpreters,” however, it is not the task of the state to establish true religion or to root out idolatry, but “the welfare of the people, to which all laws, both human and divine, must be made to conform” (232.21/284). As Yovel (“Spinoza: The Psychology,” 310) explains, the general principles of universal religion (given by Spinoza in TTP xiv) must be spelled out in appropriate legislation – a task relegated to secular authorities alone. In this sense they are the “sole interpreters of the Word of God.” But it is important to note that the civil authorities may regulate “works” only, not beliefs (xviii, 226.3/276); as Donagan notes (Spinoza, 31), Spinoza’s list of essential doctrines in TTP xiv forbids any inquisition into people’s theological opinions “except to determine whether they embrace practical precepts contrary to justice or charity.” Speech is also free, since Spinoza specifically says (xx, 246.26/298) “that it is impossible to deprive men of the freedom to say what they think.” Spinoza’s view goes directly against that of the Belgic Confession, art. 36, which “stated unequivocally that the civil magistrate wields the sword in order to root out idolatry and false religion and to overthrow the Kingdom of the Antichrist” (Groenhuis, “Calvinism and National Consciousness,” 127). The Confession’s view was faithfully echoed by Voetius (J. I. Israel, “Toleration,” 24). Faur (In the Shadow, 175) seems unintentionally to echo the Calvinist clergy when he observes that for Spinoza the sovereign “takes the place of God.” Rather, he takes the place of the clergy. Hobbes had gone far in this direction, but not so unequivocally (see Curley’s analysis in “ ‘I Durst not Write . . .’ ”). Hobbes had, for example, argued that the sovereign alone determines what writings rate as “word of God” (De Cive xvi.16, 325f., using King Josiah as his example), but also accepts scripture (its interpretation, not the book itself) as the “word of God” in a qualified sense, and as “canon and rule of evangelical doctrine” (xvii.17, 348f.; cf. iii.33, 152). Like Meyer, Hobbes makes a rather pro forma assertion (Leviathan 33, p. 425) that God is “the first and original author” of scripture (as Curley points out, “‘I Durst Not Write . . .’,” 35) but, unlike Spinoza, affirms the genuineness of biblical prophecy, although carefully hedged about: scripture, he says (Leviathan 32, p. 414), supplies the contemporary “want of all other prophecy . . . from which, by wise and learned interpretation, and careful ratiocination, all rules and precepts necessary to the knowledge of our duty both to God and man, without Enthusiasme, or supernaturall Inspiration, may easily be deduced.” I am not sure that Hobbes wholly rejected the Christian kerygma and faith (De Cive iv.24, 163; Pocock [“Time, History,” 160] argues that according to Hobbes “Our knowledge of God is knowledge of his acts, gained through his words, both of which are performed in time and schematize it. Hobbes therefore affirms the existence of a sacred history . . .” This affirmation, however, may only be part of his argument from scripture, for the benefit of believers in its authority, to support his political theory based entirely on rational grounds. In the article cited, Curley is quite convincing when he argues that Hobbes sheltered himself against persecution for disbelief by falsely giving the impression he was a believer (“‘I Durst Not Write . . .’,” 55).


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had already used against Meyer. In particular, he appropriated and transformed two criticisms they had aimed specifically at Meyer’s work: that the essential biblical discourse of salvation was historical, not philosophical, and that the investigation of original meanings must be prior to and separate from the question of truth. Reshaping these ideas, Spinoza laid down principles for a historical understanding of scripture, turning their ideas into axioms of his new historical–critical method. And he did it so persuasively that the outcome in retrospect seems not merely convincing but inevitable. He deserves credit for the fact that there is today wide agreement that scripture has no authoritative role in the making of public law, and that the same historical and critical methods apply to scripture as to other ancient documents. Such is his theologicopolitical contribution. his torical context The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century career of the Bible is a “rise and fall” story if ever there was one. Its essential moments are these: first, the new reformed religions of the sixteenth century were responsible for theologically constructing – as an alternative to the infallible pope – an inspired infallible Bible as both font and symbol of ultimate religious and moral authority.50 But this Protestant Bible, overburdened with unsustainable claims to perfection, could not survive unscathed the withering debates and schisms it generated. Not only did it not, in the real world, interpret itself, but the astonishing advances in fundamental knowledge about the world dramatically “dated” biblically based assumptions and knowledge about time and space. At the same time, scholarship on the Bible itself was revealing new facts about its own historical origins, its compilation, its languages and its perilous course to the present. Whatever else it was, the Bible was a book with an astonishingly complex human history from which no miracle could exempt it. 50

Doctrines of biblical perfection were roughly identical in Dutch and German Calvinism, in Lutheranism and in Anglican and Puritan circles. Each religious community – Rome, Judaism, Protestantism – constructed the same biblical text to serve its own system. In each case, institutions of at least de facto infallibility existed to insure religious conformity.

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Crucial here is that the Protestant doctrine of scripture, exquisitely elaborated by official theologians, was inherently political: as the Protestant movement evolved into state churches,51 their ideological viability and political stability required from the beginning an authority that could substitute for that of Rome. In the Netherlands, biblical authority legitimated the new regime that had led the successful struggle against Catholic Spain and established Calvinism in its place. Calvinism was accepted as the state religion, and as such the only form of Christianity privileged to conduct public worship. But the Dutch reformed church was never established in the English sense, primarily because the Dutch held provincial sovereignty as fundamental, and the church never developed a nationwide organization. The Synod of Dordrecht (1618–19) was the last truly national assembly of the church. Dutch political commissioners, members of provincial courts of justice, sat as members of provincial church synods, jealously guarding the prerogatives of the state and making sure that the church did not overstep the boundaries of its competence. This arrangement – one embodiment of provincial sovereignty – insured that no effective national church body could emerge.52 Observance of other forms of Christianity was allowed in private settings, and the Dutch Republic was the first territory in Europe that allowed Jews to build new synagogues and establish public worship.53 In Spinoza’s day, theologians and preachers still drew heroic parallels between their own struggles for independence and the holy wars of ancient Israel against its oppressors. Scripture thus provided a framework that elevated their national self-understanding into sacred history as the New Israel, and perhaps contributed to the clergy’s support of monarchy rather than of the fragmented regents’ government. Scripture also set forth divine law as adaptable and authoritative for the new as well as for the original Israel.54 Under the aegis of divine law, the civil powers were expected to “cooper51

52 53 54

The term “state,” or magisterial, covers established churches in their various forms – territorial in Germany, urban in the Swiss Confederation, national in England, Scotland. Roorda, “Church and State,” 144–49; Bornewasser, “The Authority,” 154. See Bornewasser, “The Authority of the Dutch State,” 154. On the powerful model of holy war in the Calvinist theocratic ideology, analogizing from Jewish history, and its deep background in the revolt against Spain, Groenhuis, “Calvinism and National Consciousness,” 118.


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ate in Christ’s kingdom on earth, using the sword entrusted to them to root out all idolatry [i.e., Catholicism] and false religion.”55 Spinoza thus had to contend not only with an infallible scripture but with a Dutch “sacred history” not to be challenged lightly. It is against this background that the preachers could wield cultural power through their control of the saving knowledge that came from scripture alone (ex sola scriptura).56 Monarchial government situated in the House of Orange and the power of monopoly over saving knowledge were mutually supportive and inextricably linked. The Calvinist clergy sought to control that saving knowledge by defining the broad outline of scriptural interpretation and by deriving therefrom the will of God for governing a Christian society.57 The case is parallel to the notorious earlier case of Galileo: in that case, the church asserted its claim to be the sole interpreter of scripture even in the realm of natural philosophy.58 Here the issue was political rule itself. For the clergy, scripture functioned as a quasi-constitutional authority that brooked no rivalry and implemented “divine law” in the public realm59 – divine because this constitution was also the “Word of God.”60 55 56

57

58

59

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Bornewasser, “Authority,” 156. While it is true that there was never any danger that a Geneva-style theocracy would be established in the Dutch Republic, the church had considerable power to curb expression and censor publications, even long after Spinoza’s death (cf. J. I. Israel, “Toleration,” 34). This claim was supported by their rejection of the notion that scripture could be ambiguous. Voetius argued that if scripture was not univocal, then “no one could possess a privileged interpretation of scripture, and toleration of different interpretations was therefore an absolute necessity” (McGahagan, “Cartesianism,” 331). “The clarity of Scripture and the explicit nature of faith were essential elements for Voet in establishing the legitimacy of authoritative definitions of dogma by the institutional church” (70). Voet thus defended the Protestant freedom of interpretation in an extremely limited way: Christians could meet among themselves to discuss and apply scripture, but “this freedom was not to be used against ecclesiastical institutions (as was being done by the nascent Collegiant movement at Rijnsburg), but only within the structure of the Church” (48). For a summary of clerical efforts at control, see J. I. Israel, The Dutch Republic, chap. 16; Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch. McMullin (“Galileo,” 272–75) reminds us that for the Catholic Church the main issue with Galileo was not that of one cosmology against another, but who had the right to interpret scripture. For a comprehensive summary of the seventeenth-century experience of the Dutch Republic as background of the Batavian Republic’s 1796 decision to separate church and state, see Bornewasser, “Authority.” An identification peculiar to the reformers and mercilessly attacked by Catholics, Quakers, Deists and scholars as, among other things, “unscriptural” (“Word of God” in the Bible does not refer to a book, and in the New Testament it is Jesus Christ).

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The clergy’s claims that the public meanings and imperatives of scripture were mediated through their interpretation of it were awkwardly dissonant with the classic Protestant claim that scripture’s clarity allowed any reader to grasp its essential meaning. That perhaps explains why (as we see in chapter 3 below) the less “interpreted” their applications appeared, the better, because the clearer the Bible’s information and instructions, the more certainty attended its application. Hence their habit of insisting that their interpretations were in fact merely faithful transmission of the clear and uninterpreted sense of the divinely authored text. how the

INTERPRETES

threaten libert y

Spinoza proposed that the supreme secret of despotism was the “specious title of religion”61 – in this case, the pretense that the Dutch Republic was the New Israel, and that the clergy were entitled to interpret divine law appropriate to it on the basis of scripture. Differences about interpretation were inevitable, Spinoza argued: they originated in the New Testament itself. Problem was, these differences became a threat to liberty when particular interpreters came into power: opponents of freedom exult . . . when they have converted the government to their creed, of which they are regarded as the interpreters. As a result, they even venture to usurp the government’s authority and right, and they unashamedly boast that they have been chosen directly by God and that their decrees are divinely inspired, whereas those of the sovereign are merely human and should therefore give way before divine decrees – that is, their own.62 61

62

Preface, 7.6/51. Machiavelli, whose work Spinoza admired, had observed this. See my “Machiavelli’s Functional Analysis,” 179f. TTP xx, 299/247.9 (my italics): “adversarii triumphant . . . quod imperium tenentes tuae doctrinae, cujus interpretes habentur, sectatores fecerint, ex quo fit, ut eorum authoritatem, & jus usurpare audeant, nec jactare erubescant, se a Deo immediate electos, & sua decreta divina, summarum autem potestatum contra humana esse, quae proptereae divinis, hoc est suis decretis, ut cedant, volunt . . .” Cf. his remarks in Ethics i p36 App., Gebhardt ii, 81.15/Elwes 74f.: “. . . anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those, whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. Such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms their only available means of proving and


21

Spinoza thus stressed what the less politically astute Meyer did not see so clearly: it was not merely scripture, or its rival interpretations, that had brought about the bloody divisions of Christendom and the coercive regimes established by rival factions, but rather the legislation of theological opinions. This is where the theological and the political were joined. “How many divisions in the church,” Spinoza asks, “have arisen mainly from attempts made by magistrates to settle the disputes of scholars by legislation?”63 He cites as the prime Dutch example the fact that Calvinism had been established by rulers who did not found the religion and consequently had to rely on religious experts as its interpreters, thus undercutting the authority of the secular magistrates.64 Spinoza cites the example of political intervention by the Estates of the provinces in the Remonstrant controversy: this action had resulted neither in peace or enhancement of piety, but in persecution and even deeper division.65 Such examples showed that the real schismatics are those who condemn the writings of others and seditiously incite the quarrelsome mob against the writers, rather than the writers themselves, who usually write only for scholars and appeal to reason alone . . . the real disturbers of peace are those who, in a free commonwealth, vainly seek to abolish freedom of judgment, which cannot be suppressed.66

63

64

65

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preserving their authority would vanish also” (“. . . tanquam naturae, Deorumque interpretes. Nam sciunt, quod, sublata ignorantia, stupor, hoc est, unicum argumentandi, tuendaeque suae auctoritatis medium, quod habent, tollitur”). TTP xx, 244.20/296: “. . . quot schismata in Ecclesia ex hoc plerumque orta sunt, quod magistratus doctorum controversias legibus dirimere voluerunt?” Thus Payne (Norris, Spinoza, Introduction, 10) writes: “Spinoza thoroughly understood the terrible consequences of forging links between fanatical readings of scripture and the intrusion of law into the domain of speculative thought, which results in law becoming a sectarian instrument.” TTP xviii, 225.30/276: Such magistrates “are not regarded as interpreters of divine law (ut juris divini interpretes), but as mere members of the sect, that is, as acknowledging the sectarian teachers to be the interpreters (ut qui sectae doctores juris divini interpretes agnoscunt).” See the analysis by Zac, L’interprétation, 161–63. TTP xx, 246.11/298. The Arminian controversy ended with the execution of the leading government patron of the Arminians, Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, Grand Pensioner of Holland, in 1619, setting up the alliance between the orthodox and the Orangist monarchists against the Arminians (and everybody to their left) and the advocates of a Republic based on Regents’ government; see Brad Gregory, “Introduction,” 20. TTP xx, 246.19/298. The last phrase (“. . . eos revera perturbatores esse, qui in libera Republica libertatem judicii, quae non potest opprimi, tollere tamen volunt”) marks Spinoza’s key difference from Hobbes’s political theory.

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History richly testifies, he claims, that “divisions in the church do not arise from zeal for truth . . . but from lust for supremacy.” Therefore Spinoza urges as a matter of principle that people must “have the freedom to say what they think,” and that “laws established regarding speculative matters are altogether useless.”67 So again we come round to Spinoza’s focus on the Bible in the TTP: he recognized that the decrees of these “interpreters” could be legislated as “divine law” only on the assumption that they were derived from an authoritative divine source. Spinoza’s remedy was to recast the Bible in a new intellectual framework – naturalistic and historicist – in service of his campaign for liberty. Deprived of its halo of infallibility and subjected to the same critical scrutiny due any ancient book, Spinoza’s Bible would also lose its political relevance. But such analysis, Spinoza hoped, would force the theologians to take into account a domain whose relevance they had not recognized: that of historical facts. what count s for knowledge? The question of revelation The contest for control of saving knowledge compelled seventeenth-century epistemological discussion to focus on the issue of divine revelation itself. Who was in possession of genuine religious knowledge, how could it be authenticated and what was its relation to knowledge in general?68 In order to secure their regimes against both papal and spiritualist challenge, biblicist Protestants postulated a historical “era of (Christian) revelation” as a discrete histor67

68

TTP xx, 246.17/298: “. . . schismata non oriri ex magno veritatis studio . . . sed ex magna libidine regnandi . . .”; ibid. 246.26/298; “. . . leges, quae de rebus speculativis conduntur, inutiles omnino esse” (246.35; the Shirley translation inexplicably omits this sentence). These sentiments echo those of Hobbes: “I confess I know very few controversies amongst Christians of points necessary to salvation. They are the questions of authority and power over the church, or of profit, or of honor to churchmen, that for the most part raise all the controversies. For what man is he, that will trouble himself and fall out with his neighbors for the saving of my soul, or the soul of any other than himself ?” (Behemoth, ed. Molesworth, p. 81, quoted in Germino, Machiavelli to Marx, 110). For the background of this question, which he calls the problem of the criterion, see Richard Popkin, History of Scepticism, on both its philosophical and religious dimensions from the sixteenth century forward.


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ical period that had ended already during the formative period of the Christian movement – more precisely, when the last inspired scriptural writer laid down his infallible stenographic pen. This historical myth was in the first instance an alternative to the Roman Catholic claim that the gift of prophecy had not ended but had been institutionalized, i.e., was granted exclusively to the church (not to individuals),69 that the church’s magisterium was the vehicle through which the Holy Spirit promised by Christ was currently leading his church into all the truth (Jn. 16.13) and continuing to guarantee the infallibility of the church’s decisions, based on its own interpretation of scripture.70 In learned Catholic circles, duly authorized biblical interpretation was itself ranked both as the genuine “literal sense” of scripture (i.e., that intended by the author) and as genuinely “prophetic” activity.71 Ranged against the biblicists from the opposite side were the individualistic “Enthusiasts.” A politically and religiously annoying assortment of Protestant dissenters, viewed as cranks and labeled “Schwärmerei” (swarmers) by Luther, they insisted not only that the era of revelation had not ceased, but that God (or Christ, or the Spirit) continued to enlighten people (whether certain elect, 69

70

71

Thus a parallel was drawn to Israel, where also the transition was made from prophecy to interpretation as the vehicle of revelation. See Tavard’s perceptive analysis (Seventeenth Century, 38–43): both scripture and tradition were recognized by seventeenth-century Catholic writers as requiring a “living hermeneut” or “living magistrate,” (42). “Prophecy” was seen as one of the gifts God bestows on the church to interpret scripture, which “does not interpret itself ” (ibid., 23); thus, the church’s interpretation was seen as a prophetic act, on analogy with Israel (49). The claim is based on 2 Pet.1.20 (ibid.). Robert Bellarmine (De verbo Dei iii, 3; cf. iii, 5) focuses the issue with the Protestants on the question, “where is the Spirit,” since all the disputants agreed that that must be the source of true interpretation. Bellarmine asserts that “judgment of the true sense of Scripture and of all controversies belongs to the Church, i.e., Pope with Council, in which all Catholics agree, and is expressly held in the Council of Trent Session 4.” The “heretics,” meanwhile, think each one ought to be judge. The conciliarist Jean Gerson had already provided a precise statement of this position versus the Hussite challenge (as quoted in my From Shadow to Promise, 79): “The literal sense must be judged as the Church, inspired and governed by the Holy Spirit, determines, and not according to the will and interpretation of just anyone”: “Sensus . . . literalis judicandus est prout Ecclesia Spiritu Sancto inspirata et gubernata determinavit, et non ad cujuslibet arbitrium et interpretationem.” The church made precise application of this principle in its case against Galileo (see McMullin, “Galileo”). See Tavard, Seventeenth Century Tradition, 49. John Sergeant asserted (Sure-footing in Christianity [1665], 149) that the “literal sense” as determined by the church was ipso facto “Christ’s sense.” Sergeant contrasted it to the sense arrived at by the “critical [i.e., purely scholarly] method.”

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such as Luther’s rival Thomas Müntzer, or Everyperson, as with the Quakers).72 Thus, in the seventeenth-century context, the very framing of the question of revelation was inherently theologicopolitical: does genuine prophecy – the authentic proclamation of divine will through a prophet with regard to this concrete situation in our own time – still occur as in biblical times? Whatever authority was claimed by the various interpreters, whether Quaker, Catholic or Calvinist, this question turns up in different guises. For example, in the realm of biblical interpretation it was asked: does the same Spirit that inspired the biblical writers also inspire the interpreter? Or more radically, is the Bible itself really necessary as a source of “God’s Word”? Or, as Spinoza uniquely went at the question in the first two chapters of the TTP: historically, what was the nature of biblical prophecy (the locus of biblical “revelation”) in the first place, and what does it have to do with religious authority in the present? Such were the questions which made the issue of revelation itself central for theology (including political theology), exactly parallel to the way in which epistemology came to dominate philosophy. Both had to be addressed in dealing with the definition of knowledge in general.73 Although he did not share the religious illusions of the Enthusiasts, Spinoza found in them political allies and even, in an odd way, spiritual “soul-brothers.” For it was the marginal and dis72

73

The Enthusiast most relevant for the case of Spinoza is Samuel Fisher, an unusually learned English Quaker and Oxford graduate whose opinions and possible personal relations with Spinoza might help account for his adaptation of Quaker language to his own rationalism. On Fisher, see Hill, World Turned Upside Down, chap. 11, and my “Rise and Fall of the Bible.” Although Quakers denied the need for biblical proof texts, their favorite was Jn. 1.9, referring to “the light that enlightens every man coming into the world,” which they interpreted as a universal human capacity rather than, with the orthodox, a reference to the incarnate Christ (the Greek of the passage allows either interpretation). The religious debate constantly intersected with that on epistemology in philosophy, although the division of scholarly labor in our day usually separates them. In chap. 5 we see the extent to which Spinoza parts company with Descartes in favor of a Baconian approach. Descartes was tarred with the brush of Enthusiasm: did he not imply in some places that the certainty of knowledge accessible through his method was guaranteed by divine aid? that one could achieve certainty through pure subjectivity, without any correspondence with objective world? that the soul’s metaphysical autonomy provided metaphysical basis for the claim of ecstatics that they experienced things “out of the body”? See chap. 3, below; cf. also Meric Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, 130f. Another interesting example of the overlap of theology and epistemology is John Sergeant, a British Catholic apologist who used empiricist proofs to establish tradition as an authentic vehicle of revelation (Sure-footing in Christianity).


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empowered (like the Quakers and Collegiants of the Netherlands, along with Jews like Spinoza, for whom marginality in a Christian society was an ages-old way of life) who sought to break free of the oppressive linkage between saving knowledge and political power.74 Spinoza is thus found not only on the side of the Collegiants, for whom the biblical notion of “free prophecy” was emerging as a justification for free speech generally, and the authority of individual interpretation,75 but more radically with the Quakers, who also saw that ending the reign of an oppressive clergy required the disarming of scripture.76 74

75

76

For example, see the readily accessible Winstanley, The Law of Freedom; Fisher, The Rustick’s Alarm. Much has been written about the meaning and significance of Spinoza’s marginality and alienation. That circumstance of his life helps explain his detachment and objectivity in dealing with so much of the religious controversy which surrounded him, as well as his readiness to abandon all religious particularism, enabling rational–historical comparisons between the competing sects. Francès for example observes: “Transplanted from the land of his fathers, then excluded from the Amsterdam Portuguese community as well as from the religion in which he had been raised, he was in a certain way predestined to the role of an essentially disinterested observer” (Spinoza, 351). Kaplan (From Christianity, 379) writes regarding the stressful existence of New Christians in Iberia: “The facts of life in the peninsula goaded many of them into investigating the differences between the various religions, and made them hesitant about swallowing whole the complex of attitudes maintained by the Catholic establishment that was itself responsible for imposing the constrictions to which they were subject: with the result that their ears were alertly tuned to pick up any criticism . . . concerning the way that the church conducted itself.” That said, I emphasize here Spinoza’s “interested” (thought anonymous) engagement. Among writers who commented on Meyer, Bekker (Admonitio) equated the Christian freedom to prophecy with freedom of speech. The arch-enemy of the liberals, Gisbert Voetius, accepted the equation but rejected it as a Christian right (Bizer, “Reformed Orthodoxy,” 30). Cf. Fix, Prophecy and Reason, esp. chap. 7; and his “Radical Religion.” J. Z. Smith offers a critique of contemporary academic enthusiasm (my term): he characterizes the widespread impatience over scholarly preoccupation with texts as “a modulation of one of the regnant Protestant topoi in which the category of inspiration has been transposed from the text to the experience of the interpreter . . . This topos continues to supply the fundamental presuppositions for much contemporary hermeneutic theory. As employed by some [unnamed] scholars in religious studies, it must be judged a fantastic attempt to transform interpretation into revelation” (Drudgery Divine, 55). Spinoza of course was taken in (hospitably, not intellectually) by the Collegiants when he moved from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg after his excommunication. The learned Quaker Samuel Fisher, The Rustick’s Alarm ( Part ii, 139), commenting on the clerical bibliolatry combined with their monopoly claim on interpretation: “Alas poor people, you and yours must be thrust out still (as Christ was) into the manger . . . to keep at your distance from your Doctors, and Lordly Scholars, and to take the lowest room; they must have a dominion over you and your faith too.” Further, they charge the Quaker doctrine with being subversive, because it “turns them [the common people] aside from attending any more to them that teach for hire” (Part iv, 189). Cf. Fix, “Radical Religion,” focusing on the Collegiants and their intellectual–political critique of established religion.

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Spinoza and biblical authority One knowledge or two?

The seventeenth century was laying down the essential structure of what we still consider the criteria for legitimating belief as genuine “knowledge.”77 Knowledge in general was exploding dramatically, bringing with it new methods and ways of knowing.78 These were pitted again religious knowledge claims, long taken for granted, whose authority was founded upon nothing but prior, independently held beliefs about the Bible itself as a unique sourcebook. These beliefs, as we saw, had been grossly inflated by the needs of the Protestant systems,79 and were now themselves being strained to the breaking point by advances in historical scholarship and understanding. Practitioners of the new philosophy and sciences insisted that theirs was a realm that must by definition be free to legislate for itself as it laid down the rules of acquiring and testing knowledge.80 The formidable Balthasar Bekker, for example, observed that philosophy and science were pursuits that followed no script, a characteristic that distinguished them from the practice of law and theology, which had to take account of canonical texts.81 Since the theologians could threaten that sovereign freedom, the quarrel about reason and religious authority came round again to “interpreters” – in this case, the question of who was authorized to draw the boun77

78

79

80

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Gellner, Legitimation of Belief, gives an illuminating picture of the seventeenth century in his discussion of “why modern philosophy has been largely about knowledge and why it matters” (202). The theory of knowledge, he writes, is supposed to tell us “what kinds of cognitive claims are valid, and why, and . . . without circularity or an infinite regress” (46). Such theory searches for “certain final anchorages, which can terminate the regress, which provide justification for this or that vantage point, and which possess some inherent claim to our cognitive loyalty” (46). In his Retreat to Commitment, Bartley (along with postmodernism generally) regards pursuit of justifications that guarantee epistemological certainty as futile, but Bartley clings to a mitigated rationalism, refusing a retreat to relativism or to the despairing “leap of faith” in the face of uncertainty. Urgently relevant for theology and biblical interpretation were advances in astronomy, world chronology (both of civilizations and of nature) and biblical scholarship itself. Voetius, for example, asserted that the physics of the Bible was dictated by the Holy Spirit. (Bizer, “Reformed Orthodoxy,” 34 n.75, quotes the Latin text.) “For the Netherlands the seventeenth century was philosophically speaking a continuing revolution of paradigms” (Siebrand, “Early Reception,” 214). The idea that philosophy must be free to operate with its own rules goes back at least to Francis Bacon, and behind him, the Nominalists. Bekker, Admonitio vii.2, 110. Bekker (notorious for his pioneering critique of witchcraft, The World Bewitched) defended the usefulness of Descartes’s philosophy and protested against the orthodox practice of forcing candidates for the ministry to reveal their opinions about the new philosophy (vii.8, 118).


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dary line in territorial disputes between them. On their side, philosophers wished to legitimate a realm of inquiry that allowed guardians of ecclesiastical doctrine no jurisdiction.82 The theologians, on the other hand, reacted sharply whenever they detected intellectual trespass, just as they had done early in the century with Galileo, and more recently with regard to Descartes.83 Since the Bible was the repository of saving knowledge, even the suggestion of Galileo, repeated by Descartes, that scripture did not speak accurately about nature, could be regarded as intolerable. As astonishing increments of new knowledge and new ways of acquiring knowledge clamored for attention, the Bible became involved in virtually every critical debate, for its canonical authority (in a culture where theology used to be “queen of the sciences” and Calvinist theologians still relegated philosophy to “handmaid” status in relation to it)84 had for centuries stood guard over knowledge in every social, political and cultural domain. Moreover, the Bible had provided the most comprehensive available framework for understanding the totality of things: the biblical epic, beginning with Creation and ending with Apocalypse, definitively revealed the structure and aim of world history and human destiny. Fundamental ideas of western culture were all shaped by interpretations of scripture and legitimated by reference and appeal to it. New knowledge was now rendering that authority problematical,85 82

83

84

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For example, Descartes on the soul. “Philosophers” in this context includes the “natural philosophers,” what we call natural scientists. As today, there were exceptions to those who thought of philosophy as an autonomous enterprise, such as a sometime correspondent of Spinoza’s, Willem de Blyenbergh, who advocated a Christian philosophy (Spinoza, Letters, Ep. 20). Their difference hinged on their understanding of the “word of God”: Blyenbergh distinguished it from the operation of intellect; Spinoza did not. On the Galileo case, see McMullin, “Galileo”; Santillana, The Crime of Galileo; Blackwell, Galileo. Descartes moved to Holland in 1628 and wrote and published his major works there. Thus it was in Holland that his philosophy got its first thorough airing, including its implications for religion. Handmaid/ancilla: a role assigned by Christian theologians to philosophy since Clement of Alexandria allegorically applied the Old Testament story of Sarah and Hagar (Gen. 16) to the relationship between theology and philosophy, extending Paul’s allegorization of the story (Gal. 4.22–26). The most illuminating insight in Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative is his observation of the “great reversal” in frameworks of interpretation that took place in the seventeenth century: “all across the theological spectrum the great reversal had taken place; interpretation was a matter of fitting the biblical story into another world, with another story, rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story” (130). Spinoza is exemplary in that regard, although Frei oddly categorizes him with representatives of “precritical interpretation” (42).

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and the Protestants had set the Bible up for a great fall by burdening it with total infallibility and urging that it must be read and believed literally, as far as possible.86 Doctrines of biblical infallibility thus accelerated on a collision course with unprecedented puzzles posed by new knowledge. Owing to careful management of distinctions between ordinary and “saving” knowledge, interpreters had managed so far to retain biblical authority in matters religious (in fact, a greater threat to its authority had been posed by the Enthusiasts).87 But at the mundane level, particular questions about knowledge intersected with questions about the Bible in a variety of ways. The astronomer for example had somehow to negotiate the apparent discrepancy between the biblical cosmology and that being revealed by the new astronomy.88 Likewise, the chronologer had to negotiate the growing discrepancy between the traditional Jewish–Christian construct of biblical chronology and that being revealed by studies of other ancient civilizations. Did the biblical chronology (with Creation pegged at around 4000 bc) constitute a part of essential revelation? The multitude of seventeenth-century millenarian calculators – both Jewish and Christian – were sure that it did! 86

87 88

Allen, The Legend of Noah, spells out how it was not scepticism but biblical literalism that brought questions about biblical chronology, especially in relation to the Flood story, to a critical level. Funkenstein (Theology, 279 n. 27) notes that “the discrepancy between the biblical and other chronologies was one of the strongest undermining forces to the authority of the Bible.” Most emphastically by Samuel Fisher; see my “Rise and Fall.” Galileo quoted as an axiom of interpretation the observation that “the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes” (“Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” 186). In his letter, he made a critical distinction between interpretation of nature (through rigorous observation and mathematical calculation) and of scripture (through study of its language, as it was accommodated to common understanding). “It is necessary for the Bible,” he wrote (182f.), “in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which senseexperience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.”


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Increasingly, the biblical chronology was exposed as far too shallow.89 The mantra of scriptural infallibility could not make these questions go away. “Saving knowledge” In light of all that, the intellectual problem faced by Spinoza could be framed, with double entendre, as a question of saving knowledge. On the one side stood the claim that there was a discrete body of revealed or supernatural “saving knowledge,” eternal and unchanging, that crowned natural knowledge and could not be constrained or altered by it in any way. Emerging on the other side was the philosopher’s concern for saving knowledge through free discussion and debate. Such pursuits excluded claims to knowledge that had no regard for the public criteria of reason and evidence that were being honed in the quest for more exact knowledge and made available to wider and more critical scrutiny through the medium of print.90 More radically than any of his contemporaries, Spinoza proposed to subject “saving knowledge” itself to the same test of public scrutiny and historical analysis as all other knowledge. Questions about the Bible as a source of natural knowledge had already been thoroughly aired, but Spinoza dangerously advanced the logic of these observations by arguing that the Bible’s saving knowledge (constructed into historiae sacrae by Jewish and Christian tradition), far from being eternal and unchanging, was itself as time-conditioned as its information about nature and history. Accordingly, Spinoza’s challenge to the two-tiered (clerical/lay) political system, in which he sought to demote the clerical elites to the level of the sectaries and philosophers, consigning them all to 89

90

Allen, The Legend of Noah; Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time; Haber, The Age of the World; Patrides, “Renaissance Estimates.” For a study of the dilemma of a great chronologer who was also a pious man, see Grafton, “Joseph Scaliger.” Wolfson (“Veracity of Scripture,” 238) notes that scriptural chronology had already been challenged by the second-century philosopher Celsus, who cited as evidence the deeper Greek and Egyptian time-lines. Curley (“Neglected Masterpiece,” 73–75) provides detailed treatment of this important issue. On printing as an essential component of the knowledge revolution of the early-modern period, see Eisenstein, “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing” and The Printing Press; Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book.

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the “secular” level, was precisely replicated on the intellectual level through his challenge to the conventional hierarchical relationship between two kinds of knowledge, revealed and natural. Meanwhile, in the political realm, where a new (dis)order of nationalisms was displacing that of the Middle Ages, fundamental discussion about the basis of political legitimacy occurred everywhere, and again the Bible was powerfully in evidence. The English case was of course well known in Holland (as the early work of Thomas Hobbes was to Spinoza). Hobbes, writing in the midst of the Puritan revolution, had pinpointed the decisive theologico-political issue of the English civil war: through whom does God speak to the English people? – i.e., through which interpreter?91 Through close analysis of the history of ancient Israel, Hobbes had concluded against Puritans, Enthusiasts and the papacy that no theocracy could be legitimated from scripture, because the God who had ruled Israel directly gave it up when he yielded to Israel’s demand for a king. From then on, God had ceded power to earthly rulers until the eschaton, when he would again assume direct command.92 Spinoza the theologico-politician applied the same type of analogical analysis to his own country.93 But Spinoza was after bigger game than Hobbes: he tunneled beneath Hobbes’s already unusual political method94 of interpretation to an explanation of scripture that reduced it to the level of other ancient texts, once for all depriving the theocrats of the majesty of divine legitimation. For Spinoza, analogies from other ancient civilizations such as Rome could be equally instructive.95 91

92

93

94

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Leviathan iii, 35; 448; cf. Behemoth, 55: the Civil War hinged on the question “by whom Christ speaks to us, whether by the King, or by the clergy, or by the Bible to every man that reads and interprets it to himself, or by private spirit of every private man?” Spinoza did not read English, but Leviathan was translated into Dutch in 1667, after which Spinoza no doubt “studied it very closely” (Nadler, Spinoza, 277). His earlier knowledge of Hobbes was based on De Cive, which he owned (Warrender’s intro. to the Latin ed. of De Cive, 23f.). Leviathan iii, 35. Cf. Pocock, “Time, History and Eschatology,” 160. Hobbes’s acknowledgment of a real “sacred history” is an important difference from Spinoza. Disputes over interpretation in this context were typically battles over appropriate historical analogies. For Spinoza, the relevant analogy was the degeneration of the Hebrew state into a clerical regime (the Levite aristocracy) as a sorry development that undermined the reality and idea of a free state in Israel (for analysis, see Sylvain Zac, “Spinoza et l’état des Hébreux”). Hobbes acknowledged that his political use of scripture to defend secular sovereignty would offend some readers: Leviathan, Dedicatory Epistle, 76. TTP xix, 232.19/284, for a Roman example.


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In such contexts, then, the status of “saving knowledge” came up for critical review, and an old question, whether or not it was strictly knowledge at all, took on new concreteness and urgency.96 Calvinist culture was especially sensitive to this issue, for Calvin had organized his entire theology around the fundamental idea that what God had essentially revealed was knowledge (cognitio, notitia) of himself and of the human condition.97 Such knowledge was both absolutely essential as a component of saving faith and utterly unavailable from any source but the Bible. Even if one accepted the notion (as most Christians did) that selected righteous pagans had achieved some genuine knowledge of God,98 saving knowledge of the divine will and plan was available only in scripture. Spinoza rose up to challenge this entire scheme, denying the capacity of the Bible to function as a privileged source of knowledge in any sphere – most radically, in religion itself. The conventional (and usually offhand) explanation for this is that Spinoza was a “rationalist.” So pervasive is the mental image of Spinoza as arch-rationalist, and of seventeenth-century thought as ahistorical, that the predominance and power of historical analysis in Spinoza’s argument is missed by scholars who repeat the conventional stress on reason.

96

97

98

Not a new question, but a more abstract schoolmen’s question with the fourteenthcentury Nominalists, who contended that theological beliefs belonged to the category of fides, not scientia (vs. Aquinas). Lacking the authority of the magisterium to fall back on, however, the Protestants eventually arrived, through the timely aid of the Holy Spirit working internally, at the conviction that faith, although a special form of knowledge, was both real and “self-authenticating” cognition (but not scientia, so far as I know). Cf. Calvin’s definition of faith as “firm and certain knowledge (certa cognitio) of God’s benevolence . . . founded upon the truth . . . sealed upon our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Institutes iii.2.7; vol. i, 551). Calvin’s Institutes begins: “Nearly all the Wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves” (McNeill ed., vol. I, p. 35). Note the opening titles: “Book One. The Knowledge (cognitio) of God the Creator.” Chapter 1: “The Knowledge (notitia) of God . . .” See esp. nn. 1 and 2, pp. 35f., for further references and Dowey, Knowledge of God. For Calvin, “superstition” was religion uninformed by revelation, based on an innate and genuine but vague and inevitably distorted sense of divinity; for Spinoza, superstition was caused by fear – ”whatever others [e.g., John Calvin!] may say, [viz.] that it originates from the fact that all mortals have some sort of confused idea of deity (confusam quemdam numinis ideam)” (TTP Pref., 6.18/50). Spinoza had a Spanish edition of the Institutes in his library. I summarize Calvin’s view in my “Zwingli, Calvin,” 197f.

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Spinoza and biblical authority the solvent of his tory

Spinoza realized that the key to making his case against the interlocking system of knowledge/power was to force recognition that historical knowledge was relevant to arguments about biblical authority. He pursued this line on two equally important levels, viz., the complex external history, including an account of its origins, formation, canonization and transmission through centuries, and the Bible’s own internal worldview, seen as befitting the ages in which it was written. The first track would establish that the Bible had an immensely complex and largely unknown history of composition and transmission, besides suffering the vicissitudes to which every ancient book was subject. The second inquiry, more daring and original, would radically penetrate the Bible’s religious and political world, exposing the scope of its natural and religious assumptions as entirely different from that of the seventeenth century. Methodical development and application of that twofold historical knowledge would relax the grip of biblical authority by showing that the book and its authors had nothing authoritative to say to the intellectual and political world in which Spinoza and his contemporaries lived: from end to end, scripture was entirely conditioned by and in conformity with the times in which it was written – and so also must its interpretation be.99 Other scholars, Jewish and Christian, had already made it clear that the Bible was a book that itself had an exceedingly complex history.100 Furthermore, in theological debate, Catholic scholars had already made trenchant historical arguments against Protestant claims about the Bible (much as Renaissance and Protestant scholars had used history to subvert the myth of the papacy to undermine its claims).101 199

100

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S. B. Smith (Spinoza, Liberalism, 63) aptly notes this “emancipatory function” of history. Spinoza’s view will be elaborated further in chap. 5. See especially Levita, whose Massoreth ha-Massoreth (1538) demonstrated the late (postTalmudic, around 500 ce) date of the accent and vowel markings of the ancient Hebrew text, and Cappel, whose Arcanum punctationis revelatum (1624), made Levita’s conclusions more readily available to Christian scholars. See Ginsburg’s introduction to the Massoreth ha-Massoreth for details. Contesting the Lutheran critique of the Council of Trent on scripture and tradition, Bellarmine presented a magisterial analysis and critique of the Protestant position in his De verbo Dei (1599). Valla exposed the fraudulence of papal claims in The Donation of Constantine. On the Renaissance sense of history, see Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists, and Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past.


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Drastically extending that line of inquiry, Spinoza developed an unconstrained historical–critical method of biblical study – a method that German scholars would later domesticate for theological use and establish as the predominant modern approach to biblical study.102 In its Spinozan articulation, the method critically engaged not merely textual and historical matters, but the religious substance itself. Spinoza’s historical analysis challenged the claim that there existed apart from reason any infallible font of knowledge and law which escaped the constraints of time and culture, and to which human beings must be eternally obligated. There were not two kinds of knowledge, Spinoza insisted – not two systems of reality to be accessed by different means or presided over by two interpreting elites. Reality in toto was to be construed as a single system. Knowledge was knowledge, and only one authority presided over its domain: that of evidence and reasoned judgment. Chapter 5 will elaborate on these ideas. In the next chapter we enter into detailed analysis of the debate precipitated by Meyer’s publication of Philosophy the Interpreter of Sacred Scripture (1666). We have anticipated some of Spinoza’s response (1670) to this debate:103 in the cause of liberty, Spinoza used historical analysis, rather than philosophy, to undercut all interpretations of scripture that would exert binding authority on others. His radically historical account and his radically democratic answer to the question of who should be its interpreter deprived theocratic intepreters of their platform. In the following chapters, we shall review the relevant issues in the debate to discover how Spinoza took pieces from it and fashioned something quite his own. 102

103

The unsurpassed account of this development is Kraus, Geschichte. Theology could not use Spinoza’s “straight” historical method, since it offered no link to Christian proclamation – an “insoluble problem” (ibid., 52, commenting on Grotius). Of course the debate raged on after 1670, but now it shifted focus almost entirely to Spinoza’s book.

chapter two

Rationalism unleashed: Ludwig Meyer’s new hermeneutic

introduction Ludwig Meyer – philosopher, physician, poet, playwright, impresario – was a man of many parts, some as paradoxical as his treatise,1 subtitled A Paradoxical Exercise.2 Holder of doctorates in both medicine and philosophy from Leyden, he was also sometime director of the municipal theatre of Amsterdam – in turn pedant and free spirit: a super-rationalist in his approach to biblical interpretation, he retained a magical view of the Bible; a daring partisan of Cartesian philosophy, he violated Descartes’s own strict and prudent directive (enshrined in a decree of two Dutch provinces in 1656)3 of separation between philosophy and theology; a trenchant critic of some of orthodoxy’s dearest first principles, he accepted uncritically some of its characteristic dogmas (e.g., scriptural infallibility, the Trinity); an advocate of religious pluralism and toleration, he blundered politically by providing ammunition to conservatives who warned that the new philosophy was hazardous to established religion, precipitating the condemnation of his own 11

12

13

Throughout, I refer to the 1666 Latin edition of Meyer’s work. More accessible is the French translation by Lagrée and Moreau; my references to Meyer’s chapters and sections will afford easy reference to users of the French translation. Some of the material in this chapter appeared earlier in my “Hidden Opponent”; my thanks to Harvard Theological Review for permission to use some of this in revised form. For basic biographical information, see Meinsma, Spinoza, 194–98 and 210 n. 61; Curley, ed., Collected Works i, 161f.; Nadler, Spinoza, 171–73. Bizer (“Reformed Orthodoxy,” 41–45), Zac (L’interprétation, 27–29) and Scholder (Modern Critical Theology, 133–38) provide some exposition of Meyer’s hermeneutical theory. Arnoldus (Dissertatiuncula, ¶54, p. 38) cites with lavish approval the decree of the regents of Holland and West Friesland which orders that “theologiam a philosophia sequestrandam, & illam quidem ex solo verbo Dei scripto, hanc ex ratione sana juventuti tradendam.”

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Rationalism unleashed: Meyer’s new hermeneutic

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book, along with Spinoza’s. Above all, he put a great question before his contemporaries: could the revolutionary new philosophy be an instrument that, applied to biblical interpretation, packed the power to overcome the divisions in Christendom, all of which, he supposed, were caused by disagreements over biblical interpretation? Collaborators in philosophical scholarship, he and Spinoza were “beginning to become famous” already in the 1660s, following publication of Spinoza’s critical work on Descartes (Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, 1663, with Meyer’s introduction) and then Meyer’s own book,4 which the latter touted as an antidote to the sectarian rivalries that bedeviled post-Reformation European Christendom. The second editions of both their books were published together in 1674, and many readers (not careful ones) supposed the two anonymous works were written by the same author. Meyer stated his intentions in writing as follows: the insoluble divisions of Christendom spring from rival interpretations of scripture; the insolubility of those differences arises from the unacknowledged ambiguity of language which in fact defeats the prime Protestant principle that scripture is clear and self-interpreting. To break the impasse, a new method of interpretation is required, one in which the determination of meaning is not dependent on sectarian opinion or constrained by literal–contextual reading of the text. Furthermore, such a method must transcend the futile Protestant insistence that there are clear singular meanings radiating from each text. Instead, Meyer offers a “paradoxical” solution that at once stays within the bounds of theology and offers a philosophical criterion for truth and for sifting possible meanings to isolate the true ones. Finally, he claims, philosophy also serves to engender a fruitful encounter between the biblical text and the reader. The swift and sometimes savage responses generated by the publication of Meyer’s Exercise need little explaining, for he gave 14

Klever (“Spinoza’s Fame,” 361) has discovered a report from Johannes de Raey, a professor of philosophy at Leiden (1653–68), which mentions Spinoza and Meyer and their work becoming famous (coepit inclarescere). The commentary on Descartes, the only work Spinoza published under his own name, is translated in Curley, ed., Collected Works i, 221–346.

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everyone grounds to object. Theologians (especially professionals) would greet coolly any “amateur” philosopher who offered a new discourse on method to the “theological world”5 to straighten out their insoluble problems. Worse yet, he proposed to do it by stripping Protestant theologians of their most fundamental ideological axiom against Rome: the thesis that scripture was “its own interpreter” and therefore needed no external interpreter (whether philosophy or the pope) to tell Christians what it meant. Clearly the man was a traitor to the Protestant cause, and then had the gall to predict irrational attacks on his book by theologians! Meanwhile, the faithful were sorely offended by his naturalizing of the “internal testimony of the Holy Spirit” – calling it reason – to grasp the true meanings of scripture.6 Even potential allies – theologians interested in using Cartesian philosophy in their own work – were appalled by Meyer’s audacious “mixing” of philosophy with theology (their strategy of careful separation was an important defensive measure). Other readers must have found it presumptuous for him to propose to use Descartes to regenerate theology as his hero had done for philosophy.7 Must interpreters be philosophers, then? Finally, textual and historical scholars, whose findings were revolutionizing study of the Bible, would not be pleased to read that finally their work was of marginal importance, since Meyer made the claim that his philosophical method was both easier and more effective than their philology even in establishing true readings where variants appeared.8 We shall not use Meyer merely as a foil for Spinoza: his treatise and the debate it precipitated are too significant in their own right. He ignited a literary skirmish that highlighted the major issues of interpretation of his time in that most vibrant crossroads of culture 15

16 18

PSI Prol., vii f. Meyer held no academic position, although he held a doctorate in philosophy as well as medicine from Leiden (1660). Although both theology and philosophy were solidly professionalized in Protestant universities, this was an era in which scholars and scientists without academic posts made most of the significant advances that make up the intellectual revolution. 17 Among several texts (to be discussed later), PSI xiv.1, 89. PSI Prol., v. Cf. PSI Ep., 110f. A bit arrogantly, he claimed the superiority of his method to that of Louis Cappel (Critica Sacra [1650]), whose work he drew on but in the end all but dismissed. He was familiar, for example, with the fact that the oldest Hebrew and Greek manuscripts were without vowel points, punctuation etc. (PSI iii.24,26).


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at the dawn of the European Enlightenment, the Dutch Republic. Meyer’s treatise is perhaps as relevant to contemporary hermeneutical discussions as is that of Spinoza. The latter invented a severe historical (we would say historicist) method;9 his major critical tool was his unerring sense and relentless application of the principle of anachronism. By contrast, Meyer’s discourse on method emphasizes the reader – the intimate and intricate relationship between the elusive ambiguity and fluidity of language10 on one side, and on the other, the necessary creative labor required of readers as they construct meaning and truth from texts. Especially in his Epilogue, Meyer is at pains to make the efficacy of any text, including scripture, dependent on the intellectual resources that the reader brings to the text. Meyer thus fits easily within a description of contemporary hermeneutics, in which “emphasis has shifted onto the role that the reader plays within or in front of the text; no longer a passive agent, the reader is now considered the predominant creator of meaning.”11 Despite the similarities between Meyer and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides which Spinoza would exploit,12 Meyer proposes a sort of reader-response theory: the reader, not the intention of the biblical author, is the site at which authentic meanings are to be 19

10

11

12

Using the term in a Skinnerian sense, confining interpretation to inquiry about original meanings of historical authors. Both Skinner and Spinoza insist, for example, that we must attend to what an author could have meant, and avoid anachronism. The longest chapter of Meyer’s book, chapter iii, takes up problems of meaning by analyzing clarity and obscurity, absolute and relative meaning, the various meanings of meaning; ambiguity in words, phrases, paragraphs and texts as a whole; whether single texts have multiple meanings; etc. Hughes, “Interpretation,” 64. This approach however tends to reduce text to a few general meanings, as we shall see with Meyer. As noted in chap. 1, J. Z. Smith has clearly seen the connection between “enthusiasm” and much contemporary hermeneutical theory. Meyer is a forerunner of that trend in his attempt to naturalize the enthusiast position even while exploiting it to support his own claim to interpretive infallibility (more below). My “Hidden Opponent” spells this out. My guess is that Meyer had no idea of the similarity of his ideas to those of Maimonides (he makes no mention of him in his PSI); Spinoza, on the other hand, was intimately acquainted with Maimonides, sharply criticizing him by name and, as I have shown, using him as a “cover” for his friend Meyer, especially in TTP vii and xv. Lagrée (“Irrationality,” 27f.) already recognized that Spinoza’s critique of the dogmatists (TTP xv) is directed in part against Meyer; her observation is not surprising, since she is co-translator of the only modern version of Meyer’s PSI. Spinoza, she says (“Irrationality,” 32), “is writing the TTP with Meyer’s book in front of him,” although Spinoza had already formulated the fundamentals of his system before Meyer published. My thanks to Michel Despland for alerting me to this article.

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constructed. This allows a more naturalistic understanding of the biblical writers than Maimonides did, and opens up a greater range of possibilities for the reader of the biblical text. There is no doubt that both Meyer and Spinoza had reason as their norm for truth, in a general sense – and Spinoza more consistently than Meyer, as we shall see. A preliminary quotation from Meyer shows their agreement here, even though Spinoza would not frame a sentence quite like the following: It is with respect to . . . things . . . that concern the highest beatitude of men, and leading them to those things before everything else, but not with respect to the teaching of truth, that scripture is most of all to be placed far ahead of other books in utility.13

Their disagreement does not involve establishing the norm for truth (with the apparently large exception that Meyer professes his allegiance to the orthodox principle that scripture is infallible).14 The radical difference comes over how one is to determine the intended meaning of a text: Meyer touts reason, inspired by Descartes; Spinoza will turn to history, echoing Francis Bacon (see chapter 5). meyer’ s argument Extolling the benefits and rich possibilities for religious thought opened up by the labors of his hero, Meyer adds to this 13

14

PSI Ep., 115: “. . . adeoque illis prae caeteris omnibus conducentium; non autem veritatis docendae respectu ejus utilitas, & maxima, & aliorum librorum utilitati longe anteponenda . . .” My italics indicate where Spinoza agrees, in the sense that there is no scriptural truth that binds reason or is above it. I say “apparently” because his profession was not believed by some of his critics and is still contradicted by some scholars, and because the force of that infallibility is partly undercut by Meyer’s own method, as we’ll see. J. I. Israel states that Meyer “proposed to examine Scripture as a philosopher, suspending knowledge that it was divine revelation” (The Dutch Republic, 919). More precisely, Meyer is attempting to show how scripture’s divine truths might be recovered through a philosophical method. Israel’s summary of Meyer’s findings fits Spinoza, not Meyer, regarding whom he says, “the conclusion of this exercise is that Scripture is full of contradictions, discrepancies, and imperfections and that God, if the original author, cannot be regarded as the author of the text as we have it” (ibid., 919 n.98). Israel’s statement appears to be the result of a misplaced reference, since the ideas he attributes to Meyer are not found at the place he refers to (PSI, pp. 56–57) or anywhere else in Meyer’s book.


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a lively hope in these times when that greatest founder and forefather René Descartes has illumined the world of letters and has led the way by his own example, that the boundaries of philosophy are about to be extended far and wide by others who wish to walk in his footsteps; and also, such things as concern God, the rational soul, the greatest felicity of man [an allusion to Spinoza’s Short Treatise],15 will be brought to light for others seeking eternal life – such things as will explicate each page in the interpretation of scripture . . .16

I take this as a statement of Meyer’s intention in writing his work: to further amplify philosophical ideas that Spinoza had been discussing with his friends, but showing now how the Cartesian method could be applied to the clarification of scripture. There is no evidence that Meyer expected the negative though veiled appraisal that his approach would elicit from Spinoza four years later. The main thesis of Meyer’s book17 is embodied in its title: philosophy is the interpreter of scripture. This claim embodies the “new paradox” referred to in the subtitle, viz., that the task of interpretation, at which the church theologians have failed, now “belongs to true philosophy, the certain norm and least fallible instrument for explicating the sacred texts.”18 Perhaps believing that Descartes’s own refusal to engage theological issues arose from prudence rather than conviction, Meyer boldly begins with a Cartesian principle that theological consensus had spurned, namely, methodical doubt:19 removing in theology whatever can be removed as doubtful and uncertain, finally arriving at something primal (primum) in it which cannot be removed, so as not at the same time wholly to remove and eliminate what 15 16

17 19

According to Lagrée (in her French trans. of PSI, 250 n. 2) and others. PSI Ep., 116: “Quibus adde, quod non levis arrideat spes, Philosophiae pomoeria his temporibus, quibus maximus ille ejus instaurator atque propator Renatus Des Cartes orbi literario facem praeluxit, suoque praeivit exemplo, ab aliis, qui ipsius vestigiis insistere volent, longe lateque extentum iri; ac talia de Deo, Anima rationali, summa hominis felicitate, & id genus aliis ad vitae aeternae acquisitionem spectantibus, in lucem protractum, quae utramque in Scripturis interpretandis paginam absolvent . . .” Arnold, (Dissertatiuncula ¶5, p. 4) agrees with my reading of this difficult passage, as does the modern French translation by Lagrée and Moreau. 18 Meinsma, Spinoza, 327, provides a decent summary. PSI v.1, 40. PSI Prol., vi. Cf. Muller, Reformed Dogmatics, 242.

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would be the principle and foundation (principium . . . atque fundamentum) of all the rest of theological dogma.20

Meyer thus adapts the zero-based mental accounting advocated by Descartes, convinced that it is “better to know a few truths with certainty than many things false or dubious.”21 Then, somewhat incongruously, the first positive principle is immediately stated: “that the books of the Old and New Testament are the infallible word of God.”22 An interpreter placing himself outside this first principle, or rejecting it, would also step outside the boundaries of theology, leaving no grounds for continuing fruitful theological discussion.23 And once outside the theological domain, one would have to resort to mere “historical” arguments, which would be without authority.24 Here, if only briefly, Meyer sets himself on a different course from the “mere” historical one that Spinoza will choose. Note that for Meyer, as for all religious thinkers of that era (as for many in this as well), it was easier to incorporate philosophy into the theological conversation than to include history. 20

21

22

23

24

PSI Prol. vi: “. . . atque in theologia, quicquid tanquam dubium ac incertum, removeri potest, removendo, tandem perveniri posset ad aliquid in ea primum, quod removeri nequeat, quin tota simul corruat atque removeatur, quodque reliquorum omnium dogmatum Theologicorum principium esset atque fundamentum.” Principium and fundamentum are established technical terms in orthodox Reformed theology. Muller (Reformed Dogmatics, 240) notes that “against the Socinians, the orthodox argue that reason cannot be the principle according to which declarations of the faith are proved (principium ex quo fidei dogmata probantur), nor can it be the foundation (fundamentum) upon which faith rests since neither the light of nature nor human reason are capable of discovering the things of faith.” PSI Ep., 116: “Satius . . . meliusque censemus, pauca vera certo cognoscere, quam multa falsa atque dubia, tanquam vera atque certa, & sibi persuadere, & aliis obtrudere.” PSI Prol., vi f.: “. . . Libros V. & N. Testamenti esse infallibile Dei Opt. Max. Verbum” (Meyer’s italics). In his own preface, Spinoza emphatically rejects all a priori assertions of biblical infallibility. In the context of the literature we are examining here, Spinoza’s rejection is unique (and the earliest such statement I have encountered). PSI Prol., vii. Meyer quotes Aristotle’s principle: “Adversus negantem principia non esse disputandum.” Likewise in legal disputes, the parties have to agree on a body of law. Like the orthodox, Meyer refers to the biblical authors as amanuenses (stenographers) of the divine Author (PSI iv.5, 33). PSI Prol., vii: “Siquis enim etiam hoc amovere atque rejicere vellet, ille jam extra Theologiae limites prosiliret, & non rationibus Theologicis, hoc est, auctoritatibus e Scriptura petitis; sed argumentis Historicis . . .”: “For if someone wanted to remove and reject this too, he would now be proceeding outside the boundaries of theology, and would have to be compelled and convinced not with theological reasons, i.e., by authorities derived from scripture, but with historical arguments. . . .”


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the divisions of chris tendom Reflecting the view of the Collegiants, a disparate collection of Protestant liberals and dissenters,25 Meyer steps outside the boundaries of conventional ecclesiastical procedure in order to get new leverage on the conflicts of Christendom. But he wants to anchor religion in scripture still, even while giving philosophy the task of providing the normative and infallible method to interpret it. Adapting a distinction formulated by ancient philosophers to current theological wars, Meyer orients his discussion by dividing the field between “sceptics” and “dogmatists” in order to characterize the religious situation.26 The same division occurs today among theologians, Meyer observes, with Protestants and Catholics clearly in mind: For the greater part of them [the Protestants] have the audacity to claim that they hold true and evident knowledge (notitia) of theological matters derived from the Sacred Letters [alone], and they proclaim that they teach it to others.27

Such are Meyer’s counterparts of the ancient dogmatists. Meanwhile, he goes on, today’s sceptics frankly confess that many, though not all, of the matters concerning Christian religion are probably to be sought and deduced only from the scriptures, but they subject those things that are uncertain and doubtful to the better and wiser judgment of others, and speaking “sub correctione,” as they say, they submit themselves to be corrected by them.28

Meyer’s dogmatists, then, are the ones that think scripture is clear and certain enough for them to derive all Christian teaching 25 26

27

28

Fix, Prophecy and Reason, gives a detailed account. Cf. Kolakowski, Chrétiens. In the ancient world the dogmatists were “those who teach that certain and indubitable knowledge of things is derived from true principles,” while the sceptics were those “who, on the contrary, casting everything in doubt, pronounce that nothing can be known with certainty” (PSI Prol., iii). Spinoza will adopt and revise this distinction at Meyer’s expense to organize his own discussion in TTP xv (see my “Hidden Opponent,” 368–69). PSI Prol., iii: “Audacter namque maxima inter eos pars, se veram evidentemque rerum Theologicarum e S. Literis depromptam habere notitiam, eamque alios condocefacere praedicant.” PSI Prol., iii: “. . . alii [i.e. the sceptics], si non omnia sua, quam plurima tamen, Religionem Christianam concernentia, tantum verisimiliter e Scripturis petita atque deducta esse, ingenue fateantur, adeoque illa, tanquam incerta, & dubia, meliori aliorum, saniorique subjiciant judicio, ac, sub correctione, ut ajunt, loquentes, quasi ab illis emendanda proponant.”

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from it, while his sceptics are willing to submit uncertain matters to the judgment of the religious authorities. Meyer thus approximates the dogmatists to most Protestants, and sceptics to the Catholics.29 Divisions among Protestant/“dogmatist” factions are the object of his opening lament, for they have fragmented and distracted the Christian world: each commends itself against all the others, falsely claiming to have derived clear and evident knowledge (notitia) from the scripture30 that all acknowledge as the sole source of Christian doctrine and morals. Meanwhile, he sets the stage for his own entrance by implying that the voices of the great philosophical interpreters have been drowned out. Now, rising above the sectarian fray, he will bring that great tradition back to center-stage, refurbished by the light of Cartesian philosophy, as a means to transcend conflict.31 As already stated, Meyer is convinced that the lack of a sure method of interpretation is the “single font and origin” of the great discrepancies of opinion.32 Meyer’s primary charge is that the conflicts are insoluble because the Protestants are ideologically committed to a dogma that is contrary to fact, namely, that scripture is clear and so composed by its divine author as to be selfinterpreting (sui interpres). This claim is false. Although recognition of scripture as “God’s word” is the requisite assumption for doing 29

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Meyer’s definition of sceptic aligns perfectly with the Catholic Pyrrhonists described by 30 PSI Prol., iiif. Popkin (History of Scepticism; see esp. chap. 3 on Montaigne). He sees himself reviving an honorable patristic tradition, citing Clement of Alexandria as an authority (PSI vii.3, 51 and 57). PSI Prol., vi: “Hac enim quod caruerint Theologi, fons exstitit atque origo unica, unde tanta inter Dogmaticos scaturivit opinionum discrepantia, & quod nullus suam prae caeteris veram esse certo atque infallibiliter demonstrare potuerit”: “For this [infallible method] which the theologians lack, stands as the single source and origin from which so great a discrepancy of opinions boils up among the dogmatists, and that none of them can demonstrate certainly and infallibly that his own opinion is more true than that of others.” Cf. i.1, 1: “. . . illi, qui verum genuinumque divinarum Literarum sensum indicare valet, ac demonstrare certo atque indubitate, soli concessum esse, de Fide Moribusque firmum quid ac immobile statuere, ac aliud sentientes refutare, atque convincere”: “. . . to him who is able to identify the true and genuine meaning of the sacred letters, and to demonstrate [it] certainly and indubitably – to him alone is it permitted to establish something firm and immovable concerning faith and morals, and to refute and overcome other opinions.” Meyer sets a high standard for any interpretation: it must be both infallible and a demonstration that it is correct. Spinoza (TTP vii, 114.24/157) will vehemently reject this position in developing his political objections to “infallible” philosophical interpreters.


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theology,33 that assumption does not permit us to ignore or violate the universal characteristics of all language and the problems of reading and interpreting any text. Here Meyer attacks one dimension of scriptural exceptionalism: biblical language is not exempt from the ordinary rules of language and the appropriation of meaning. What is needed, Meyer maintains, is “a norm and certain rule, the least possible fallacious, according to which, as to the Lydian stone, all truth of interpretation might be measured, examined and determined.”34 the interpreter⁄interpretation As some of his critics complain,35 Meyer from the outset mixes discussion of the interpreter with norms and rules of interpretation. He first quotes a slew of classical definitions of the interpreter (interpres), such as as mediatrix and conciliator of dissident parts; one who expounds what is obscure; one who publishes the intention (mentem) of the gods to mortals; the judge who interprets the intention of the law; the translator from one language to another.36 Unlike Spinoza, Meyer seems utterly unaware of the political implications of interpreters. From the theologians he accepts the interpreter’s task as a showing of the true sense and use of scripture. In all, the interpreter is occupied with “the external word (sermo) in order that from it he might elicit the internal word”; that is, produce “a meaning that accurately agrees and corresponds with the mind of the author.”37 The material of interpretation is words (as the conventional, not natural, signs of things) arranged into sentences (orationes) consisting of subject (about which something is said) and predicate (that which is said about something else). The interpreter aims to retrieve the sense (meaning) of the oratio. If every oratio were clear, 33

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35 36 37

Cf. Muller, Reformed Dogmatics, 84, 297, on scriptural infallibility as one of two “first principles” of orthodox Reformed theology. PSI i.1, 2: “. . . Norma . . . atque regula certa, minimeque fallaci, ad quam, tanquam ad Lydium lapidem, omnis Interpretationis veritas, exigatur, exploretur, dijudicetur.” E.g., Maresius, Disputationes ii.10. PSI ii.1, 3: all these quoted from classical sources. On the work of the interpreter: “. . . versari atque occupari in sermone externo, ut ex eo internum sermonem eliciat . . . ut earum investiget, atque eruat sensum, menti Authoris examussim congruentem ac respondentem” (PSI ii.3, 4).

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Meyer contends, there would be no need for an interpreter. But the obscurity of many biblical utterances necessitates the interpeter’s intervention.38 Ambiguity and obscurity Meyer begins with an analysis of the universal properties of all words and sentences. Failure of the theologians39 to attend to these fundamental linguistic matters has made their own claims about biblical clarity unrealistic, since in fact ambiguity is characteristic of many of the Bible’s important sentences. He is aware of certain facts already established by historical biblical scholarship, for example regarding the late addition of Hebrew vowel markings and nt punctuation. But these considerations are not so important for him as for Spinoza. Astutely, he observes that some texts are opaque because we cannot hear how they were spoken.40 The mere fact of unresolved disagreement about the meaning of many texts (and of course in the disputatious context Meyer was addressing, examples were endless) should in his opinion be enough to prove that ambiguity and obscurity abound in scripture. This fact renders futile the fundamental Protestant principle of scriptura sui interpres – scripture the interpreter of itself – which depends on the inherent univocity and clarity of language (especially biblical language).41 Nor does supplemental appeal to the internal witness of the Holy Spirit help: by appealing to that, the theologians fatally compromise their own principle that scripture interprets itself.42 Contesting these conclusions is not helpful, since 38

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PSI ii.7, 6: “Si . . . omnis oratio clara ac perspicua esset, nulla obscura, non opus esset ulla Interpretatione, quae illam claram rederet, hoc est, sensum ejus patefaceret.” Meyer points out (iii.4–6, 8) that our unfamiliarity with the biblical idiom often renders uncertain whether the surface meaning of a sentence is the meaning actually intended. Elsewhere (iii.25, 29, quoted below, n. 46), he points out the view of some philosophers that practically any word can have more than a single meaning. E.g., Serarius incorporates and comments on 64 quotations from Meyer’s book in his critique but skips and ignores the core third chapter. PSI iii.24, 27f., with good examples, e.g., Jn. 5.29 about searching the scriptures: indicative, interrogative, or imperative? Meyer’s view is merely a radicalization of a long-standing Roman Catholic argument, but for Meyer (himself thoroughly if somewhat vaguely Protestant), submitting to the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical authority would impose unacceptable constraints on the freedom of interpretation. PSI x.1, 66: Meyer cites with dissatisfaction (charging obscurity and confusion [x.2, 67]) the reformed theologians Marcus Wendelinus, Antonius Walaeus, William Whitaker


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what we are trying to do here is to overcome the divisions in Christendom, whose root cause is the inability to agree on how to interpret scripture. Meyer develops numerous arguments to prove that “in no way whatsoever does scripture seem a sufficient norm for interpreting itself.”43 The theologians’ doctrine of clarity alleges that words and sentences (at least scriptural ones) have objective meanings per se – single meanings that are intrinsic to the text and stable and in principle accessible to the reader – regardless of how differently they are in fact interpreted by various commentators. The orthodox thus blame conflict of interpretation on the flawed interpreters, not on problems with the text. But if per se means that the sense of words is accessible because words have some enduring natural meaning, the interpreter is mistaken. The meanings of words are entirely conventional and therefore variable; they are not like invariable mathematical formulae whose meanings are rooted in universal nature, or like common notions which are the basis of science.44 There seems in fact hardly any biblical utterance that is perfectly clear per se.45 Because so many utterances are troped in some way,

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and Franciscus Scarpius as holding both that scripture interprets itself and that one must discern “the Holy Spirit speaking in scripture.” This dual and apparently contradictory claim was enshrined with special clarity in the Westminster Confession (1647) of England (Schaff, Creeds, iii, 603f.): chap. vi affirms “the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding (salutarem perceptionem) of such things as are revealed in the Word,” while chap. vii asserts that “those things [in scripture] which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation (omnia quae ad salutem necessaria) are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means (ordinariorum debito usu mediorum), may attain unto a sufficient understanding (sufficientem intelligentiam) of them.” This idea was propounded by Augustine; see n. 53 below. PSI xi.8, 74: “. . . utique non videtur esse Scriptura sufficiens se ipsam interpretandi norma . . .” Meyer has already quoted a string of Protestant dogmaticians to the effect that “God so disposed the Sacred Scripture that it is not only the norm, but also the interpreter of itself ” (ibid. x.1, 66). His refutation draws on Robert Bellarmine’s classic critique of the Protestant scripture principle: see Bellarmine, De controversiis: Prima controversia: De verbo Dei, esp. bk. iii, “De interpretatione & vero sensu Scripturae.” PSI xi.4, 71–72. Cf. ii.4, 4. Spinoza will make a similar distinction, but will follow Meyer’s critics and insist that the conventional, contextual language of scripture, which Meyer finally rejects as basis for authoritative interpretation, is in fact the indispensable and exclusive basis. E.g. PSI xi.6, whose heading (p. 68) reads: “Nullum ejus locum esse per se clarum; sed omnes ambiguos”: “That no passage in it is clear per se, but that all are ambiguous.” Cf. 74: “. . . nihil non in S. Literis reperiatur ambiguum . . .”

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almost any statement can have two or more meanings.46 Moreover, the easiest or plainest reading might not be what the author intended. In the last analysis, then, it seems that a text can be called “clear” only when everybody agrees about what it means. Clarity is finally the product of consensus, not its cause. And consensus cannot be imposed by ritual repetition of the principle that scripture is “clear.” “Clear” to whom? The conventionality of language raises another important point: for the Protestants, the alleged objective clarity and sufficiency of scripture was a cardinal principle. The true meaning, they said, was both objectively there and “clear,” at least in those passages whose content was necessary to know for salvation.47 Such passages could in turn be used to interpret other, obscure passages. Behind that claim lay the ahistorical postulate that all the essential saving teachings of scripture are contained in such per se clear passages, and that (by “the analogy of scripture”) all scripture was harmonious in what it taught about saving doctrine. Otherwise scripture wouldn’t “interpret itself ” and Christians would have to submit to external authority, papal or otherwise. But this (circular) argument “fails miserably,” Meyer asserts.48 Because of the very nature of words and sentences, texts of all kinds are inevitably understood or read in different ways by different people. As the Catholic controversialist Thomas Stapleton had observed, something perfectly clear to one person is obscure to someone else, e.g., the notorious “Hoc est corpus meum” or “verbum caro factum” (“This is my body”; “the Word was made flesh”).49 Stapleton used this argument in service of 46

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PSI iii.4, 8; cf. iii.25, 29: “The types of double meaning are innumerable; thus there seems to be no word that does not, according to certain of the philosophers, signify several things”: “Amphiboliae species sunt innumerabiles; adeo ut philosophorum quibusdam nullum videatur esse verbum, quod non plura significat.” See also iii.19, 18, where Meyer cites the four master tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, irony) to support his case for amphibolous meaning. The standard formula, which includes the notion of knowledge, is necessaria scitu ad salvatio48 nem: that is what defines “saving knowledge.” PSI xi.9, 75. PSI xi.9, 75–76. These sentences were frequently cited by those pointing out the problematic nature of the claim that scripture is clear, since both these apparently simple state-


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papal authority; Meyer uses it to prove the necessity of a new method. Therefore, a text that is supposed to prove something clearly, univocally and “dogmatically” fails to account for the variety of socially constructed meanings and the consequent variety of reader responses. And so the allegedly “clear” text does not – cannot – function as advertised, and this fact undermines the foundation of Protestant biblicism. Meyer begs his opponents to enlighten him on how it could be otherwise, since every text encodes at least the possibility of a double sense.50 And even if there were such a thing as a clear and unequivocal text, we could not ascertain that fact from the text itself, since, to repeat, meanings are not intrinsic to words and sentences, but are socially constructed.51 The situation is even worse: it is a mistake to think that you can elucidate the meaning of obscure texts by using other and distant texts whose meaning is alleged to be known and clear.52 The theologians appeal to a classic proof text from Augustine, who says that the essential truths are stated repeatedly and clearly, and serve as a guide for interpretation of obscure texts.53 But Meyer objects: “What business does one passage in scripture have with another? Or by what right or privilege does this text come to be interpreted in, through, or from that one?”54 For example, on what grounds can

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ments were the source of endless controversy. The first (the so-called “words of institution” of the eucharist) had divided not only all Protestants from Catholics, but the Lutherans from all other Protestants. The second had precipitated quarrels about the incarnation. The notorious heretic Michael Servetus had been condemned by both Catholics (who burned him in effigy) and Protestants (who burned him in fact, at Geneva in 1554) for denial of the substantial divinity of Christ. E.g., PSI iii.4, 8. Meyer undercuts his own case somewhat by citing simple-minded examples like “the finger of God” or “I am the light of the world” – expressions that a common person would readily understand as metaphors. PSI II.4, 4: Words (vocabula) denote things, and “this entire denotation takes its rise not from nature, but from the free will of men”: “tota . . . haec denotatio non a Natura, sed libera hominum voluntate ortum ducit.” Charging inconsistency in application of the clarity principle, Meyer (PSI xi.5, 72) taunts the theologians with apparently clear passages whose meanings are traditionally avoided, e.g., the notorious instructions of Jesus 52 PSI xi.1, 68. recorded in Mt. 5. PSI xi.1, 69. The key Augustinian passage is from De doctrina christiana 2.6: “Nihil enim fere de illis obscuritatibus eruitur, quod non planissime alibi dictum reperiatur.” See my discussion in From Shadow to Promise, 12. PSI xi.2, 69; my italics: “Quid enim commercii unius Scripturae loci cum aliis? aut quid juris, aut praerogativae hujus in illum, ut per illum aut ex illo interpretandus veniat?”

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we hold that what Matthew or Mark says obscurely ought to be clarified by what Luke or John says, and vice versa? “Could not any of those [sacred writers], if they were still alive, rightly object to the fact that their own writings had either come to serve for, or be subjected to, the explanation of others?”55 Even if we grant that one place might seem to interpret another, “on what grounds can we be certain that the intention (mens) of one place is clearly the same as that of the other?”56 After all, even use of the same words does not guarantee the same or even a compatible meaning: the same words could be intended literally in one place and allegorically in another.57 Moreover, the author could have intended more than one meaning in a given text, although theologians disagreed about this (Protestants, for example, insisted on one meaning, while rabbis, cabalists and papists admitted of more. We can add Maimonides to Meyer’s list).58 Meyer himself does not see why a writer might not at times intend several meanings, and argues that in such cases several meanings must be assigned to the literal sense of a text.59 For the theologians’ method to work, Meyer contends, we would have to go from one passage to another until coming to a text that is clear in itself and not interpreted from some other text. In other words, we would have to find a text that does not require interpretation at all.60 But such a search would lead us on an infinite regress, since we have no way of knowing when we have come to 55

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PSI xi.2, 69: “An non illorum [scriptores] S. Scriptorum, si superessent, jure merito dolere posset quilibet, sua scripta aliorum explicationi aut inservire, aut obnoxia fieri?” Spinoza will agree with this point (e.g., TTP vii, 104/106; xii, 164/171) because clarification of one author by another, presupposing the doctrine of an inspired scripture, is no part of his adaptation of the notion that “scripture interprets itself.” PSI xi.2, 70. This criticism perhaps has reference to a typical feature of the controversial theology of that time – its relentless proof-texting from disparate biblical verses that typically had nothing to do with each other or with the substance of the interpreter’s argument. PSI iii.28, 30f. The whole first book of Maimonides’ Guide is devoted to biblical anthropomorphisms applied to God. These statements are accommodations to vulgar understanding, but not intended by the author, and not to be taken literally, which would make them false (Guide i, 31, referring to the Bible’s “literal sense . . . which implies the corporeality of God and other false notions. . .”). PSI iii.28, 31: Meyer promises to explicate further “what we observe about the multiple meaning of Holy Scripture, namely how several literal [meanings] are suitable to one of its passages”: “. . . quid . . . nos de S. Scripturae multiplici sensu sentiamus, num scilicet uni ejus loco plures competant literales . . .” PSI xi.4, 71 f.; my italics: “. . . they [the Reformed theologians] seem to understand perspicuity as that by which the meaning of an utterance becomes known to someone skilled


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the end – i.e., to a text that is clear from itself and from no other.61 If this is a fair account of the logic of their position, Meyer argues, then it is clear that they have been making the common everyday usage of the language the norm of interpretation. But such a procedure is grossly inadequate for proper interpretation of scripture. For even if we discover the meaning of the words on the basis of ordinary usage at the time they were written and first read, we gain only the most vulgar and common sense of words and passages. To make such meanings the norm of interpretation of the sublime meanings embedded in scripture leads to serious error: We think that this [common meaning] is truly not the suitable and legitimate interpeter of the sacred letters – nay, rather it is almost the single source of all false interpretations, which is clear from this: the great mass of men, among whom “common usage” must be sought, not only err but hold perverse and monstrous notions of God and divine things, and favor ideas that, if anyone should impose them upon scripture, and apply them to the understanding and explanation of those texts, what can one possibly produce or offer but expositions as remote as possible from the meaning intended by God and the sacred scriptures?62

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and expert in the language in which it is expressed without any interpretation or exposition of the words”: “. . . intelligere videntur illam perspicuitatem, qua orationis sensus cuipiam, istius linguae, qua expressa est, gnaro atque perito sine ulla interpretatione, aut vocabulorum expositione innotescit . . .” PSI xi.2, 70f.: The problem Meyer raises is of knowing when one might end one’s search for the right meaning; how one arrives finally at a statement clear in itself, and known to be such: “Let us concede that the sacred authors might want to imply the same thing in more than one place, and an interpreter apply a known and perspicuous meaning of one text in order to interpret another. But from whence is that [sense] known? If it is recovered from another text, then I will ask the same thing again, and so on continually until at length we come to one, or several . . . in which we may either plant our feet or establish that this text is not explained through others” (“. . . concedamus, Sacros Authores duobus aut pluribus diversis locis idem indicare atque innuere voluisse, debebit necessario loci, qui alios interpretabitur, sensus cognitus esse atque perspectus, alias enim munere suo fungi nequiret. At undenam ille cognoscitur? Si regeratur per alium, de hoc idem denuo inquiram, sicque continuo pergam, donec tandem ad unum, aut plures . . . perveniatur, in quo, aut quibus pedem figamus, aut quos per alios non explicari statuamus”). The only possible answer is that we have come to a text whose meaning is “per se notus”; Meyer confesses that he has been unable to arrive at any solid answer, either from Augustine or the reformers. PSI xi.4, 72: “At vero hunc non esse idoneum legitimumque S. Literarum interpretem; imo omnium falsarum interpretationum fere unicum fontem, ex eo manifestum esse putamus, quod maxima hominum turba, a qua communis loquendi usus petitur, & erret, & perversos monstrososque de Deo rebusque divinis habeat, ac foveat conceptus, quos siquis L. Literis inferat, iisque intelligendis exponendisque adhibeat, quid aliud, quaeso, quam a Dei sacrorumque Scriptorum sensu longissime remotas cudere, ac proferre poteris expositiones.” Note the elitist import of this position. Spinoza will follow Meyer’s critics and radically reject it.

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Note the assumption behind this statement: “common-sense” readings can only rarely be the intended meanings of the biblical text, because such readings are usually crude and vulgar and therefore unworthy of scripture. Here the presupposition of biblical exceptionalism – which Meyer seemed to undermine by his analysis of the properties of language – now shows its power. The discovery of true meanings is going to be constrained in two ways: first, the “language of God” cannot be the commonplace language of the Bible read “straight,” but the refined and elite language of the philosophical interpreter. Secondly, Meyer maintains the thoroughly traditional conviction that the results of every piece of scriptural exegesis must yield truth, because God the Author everywhere teaches and intends to teach nothing but truth.63 But Meyer has abandoned the traditional method of interpreting one text by another after the “analogy of scripture,” by which this disparate collection was rendered coherent in traditional Christian teaching. He insists that each text has the “right” to be interpreted in its own context alone, for plainly its own authority (autoritas) stands firm for each passage of scripture; its own truth is in itself, and its own meaning, which neither depends upon another nor ought to be determined through another. For we nowhere read that something from the writings of one Apostle has been granted any right to interpret another.64

The problem now is how to extract meaning and truth from an atomized text made up of unrelated parts. It seems to be Meyer’s view that each text contains some nugget(s) of truth, nuggets which can have the most tenuous relationship to obvious meanings, or to the literary and historical context in which the sentences and para63

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PSI iv.5, 33f.: God as scripture’s author so guided his amanuenses that they could never stray from the truth, nor will any accurate interpretation yield untruth: “quod S. Literae Deum ipsum habeant authorem, qui talibus usus fuit Amanuensibus, quos in viam veritatis manu quasi duxit, quibusque in scribendo semper adfuit Veritatis Spiritus, in quem ne umbra quidem falsitatis aut fallaciae cadere potest. Unde certissumum est, quicquid in iis exaratum reperitur, nil nisi veritatem continere merissimam, & ab omni falsitatis errorisque consortio liberrimam; adeoque veros divinorum Eloquiorum sensus illi semper consentire, his vero contra continuo repugnare.” PSI xi.2, 70: “Sane cuilibet S. Scripturae loco sua constat autoritas, sua inest veritas, atque proprius sensus, qui nec ab alio dependet, nec per alium determinari debet: nec unquam unius Apostoli scriptis aliquod interpretationis jus in alterius datum legimus.”


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graphs are embedded. Yet Meyer fervently believes he has discovered how to bind truths together with true meanings. To make this work, he resorts to a sort of deus ex machina (he doesn’t call it that, but his critics do). Three things, he explains, have to be considered in the interpretation of any literary text: the plain or obvious meaning, the true (i.e., author-intended) meaning and truth (respectively, sensus simpliciter sic dictus, sensus verus, veritas).65 The first distinction, between the plain (or apparent) sense and the true or intended sense, requires no explanation, except that with scripture apparent sense is not always the sense that the author intended, and only the latter can stand as the true sense. That [both of] these senses occur in utterances is evident from the fact that the sense that the words of a sentence display in their common and vulgar use is not necessarily the sense which the author had in his mind while he was writing or pronouncing these words in the course of interpreting his mind.66

That brings us to the core issue of the controversy: how does one derive the true meaning of the scriptural writer?67 We know he inevitably speaks truth, but what did he intend to say here? That is what the interpreter must get at: 65 66

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PSI iii.7, 8. PSI iii.4, 7. “Hos autem sensus in orationibus occurrere, ex eo apertum est, quod non illico is, quem vocabula sententiae, prout communiter & vulgo sonant, prae se ferunt, sensus sit, quem, dum interpretandae mentis gratia ista vocabula exarabat aut pronunciabat, in animo habuit Author.” Meyer points out that Augustine has already made this distinction in Confessions 12.23, and noted theological mistakes that arise from failure to observe it: Meyer cites the example of the papists, who take the plain sense of “This is my body” as the true sense because it is the “clear and perspicuous” one. But the reformers have shown that this is only the plain, but not the true, sense as Christ intended. Here is a case where the true sense is not clear, but obscure (iii.7, 9). Meyer sometimes refers to this distinction as one between the “outer” and “inner” meaning of the biblical text (e.g., ii.3, 4), terminology which Maimonides uses as well: e.g., Guide ii.30, 353. Maimonides (ii.47, 409) counsels his pupil to “differentiate between the various matters by means of your intellect. Then you will know clearly what has been said by way of a parable.” PSI iv.2, 32: this is the issue debated among theologians, Meyer writes, “not who reveals some meaning or truth of an utterance, but who brings forth the true meaning, i.e., one congruent and corresponding with the mind and intention of the Author, and who shows that this is it”: “non qui [i.e., the interpres] aliquem orationis sensum, aut veritatem exposuerit; sed qui sensus verum, hoc est, Authoris menti atque intentioni congruentem ac respondentem eduxerit, ac talem esse ostenderit . . .” (my italics). In other words, all assume that the text teaches truth, but the question is, how does one determine what the author intended in each case?

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it is evident that the true interpeter ought not to be as concerned with the truth or falsity of the utterance to be interpreted as with [discerning] true or false meaning. And it must be conceded that those who investigate and indicate this meaning by refuting the false sense and confirming the true one, [that is,] by confirming its conformity with the mind of the writer even when this meaning disagrees with right reason and is repugnant to the truth – [that such an interpreter] will have fully satisfied his office and fulfilled all its aspects.68

In this remarkable text, Meyer has momentarily formulated what will become the master distinction of Spinoza’s historical method, viz., the separation of meaning and truth, i.e., the question of what the author/speaker intends from the question of whether what he says is true. But Meyer does not come to rest here. His peculiar convictions about the unique attributes of the Bible drive him on: the distinction between meaning and truth applies without qualification only to profane writings; scripture is different. Not only are all its true meanings also true (or truths), which all Christians acknowledge; Meyer now makes the astonishing claim that the reverse is true as well! Any and all truths that we derive from reading a passage are also true meanings of that place, i.e., truly intended by the author, so great is scripture’s “perfection.” The reader or hearer of scripture encounters no truths of scripture that the Spirit of God has not only foreseen but provided for. And since he is able to extend himself to all [truths], it follows that all those truths found 68

PSI iv.2, 33: “Unde patet verum interpretem non tam sollicitum esse debere de Orationis interpretandae veritate aut falsitate, quam vero aut falso sensu: eosque qui investigaverit atque indicaverit, hunc redarguendo, illum vero confirmando, hoc est, Scriptoris intellectui conformem comprobando, quantumvis etiam rectae rationi dissentaneum, ac veritati repugnantem, suo tamen muneri abunde satisfecisse, omnesque illius partes implevisse censendus est.” As I have detailed in “Hidden Opponent,” Meyer has here already formulated the distinguishing principle of Spinoza’s historical procedure. Indeed, Spinoza’s lapidary utterance that “we are at work here on the meaning of utterances, not their truth” (TTP vii, 100.15/143) seems to echo what his verbose friend says here and at PSI xvi.3, 98: “Let it be noted here about what has been said, that the discussion has not been about the understanding and interpretation of those things that are dealt with and handed down in Scripture by which we judge or grasp their truth or falsity . . . but only concerning that understanding and interpretation by which we bring out the meaning of the words, and investigate the intention of the speaker . . .”: “Animadvertendum vero hic in antecessum, sermonem nobis non haberi de rerum, quae in S. Literis tractantur, ac traduntur, intelligentia ac interpretatione, qua de illorum veritate aut falsitate . . . sed de illa duntaxat intelligentia ac interpretatione, qua sensum verborum, atque mentem dicentis investigamus, eruimus . . .”


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in that place have been intended and signified by him [the Spirit]; and that therefore [those truths] are also true meanings.69

In Meyer’s mind, this insight enables his breakthrough to a philosophical hermeneutic: to make philosophy not only the norm for truth in all domains but also the norm for establishing meaning – i.e., “whether some meaning of scripture . . . agrees with the intention of the writer, or disagrees with it.”70 Such an extraordinary claim can be true, of course, only because God is the author of scripture: he alone can foresee all possible truths that might be derived from any passage, and then actually and intentionally see to it that all such meanings are in fact there.71 Thanks to divine power, all truths are also true meanings, since the defining characteristic of “true meaning” is agreement with the author’s intention.72 So Meyer has nullified his earlier general statement of the interpreter’s task by offering an exceptional hermeneutic that applies to scripture alone. The quest for textual meaning unconstrained by considerations of truth applies only to the interpretation of profane literature.73 On this critical point, then, his method does 69

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PSI iv.8, 36: “. . . in nullas S. Scripturae veritates incurrat lector vel auditor, in quas eum incursurum non praeviderit, imo providerit Dei Spiritus, cumque in omnes incurrere possit, sequitur omnes illas eo in loco ab ipso intentas significatasque fuisse; adeoque etiam esse veros sensus.” PSI xvi.8, 103: “. . . ut veram Philosophiam statuamus tanquam Lydium lapidem, ad quam infallibiliter examinetur, & per quam certissime demonstretur, num aliquis sensus Scripturae sacrae tam nullo negotio intellectus, quam multo labore erutus, intentioni scribentis conveniat, an vero ab eadem discrepet”: “. . . in order to establish true philosophy as the Lydian stone according to which [scripture] is infallibily weighed, and through which it can most certainly be demonstrated whether some meaning of sacred scripture – be it understood with no trouble or dug out with great labor – agrees with the intention of the writer or disagrees with it.” This contrivance is further evidence that (contrary to J. I. Israel and others) Meyer takes quite seriously the inspired or magical character of scripture. PSI iv.9,36f.: it is due to the robor dei that one text is able to contain several truths and therefore several true meanings. “Deus unam ac simplicem protulit orationem, at talem . . . multiplicem continebat sensum”: “God produces a single simple utterance, but such as contains a multiple meaning.” Because of this robor dei, scripture “. . . possit ita suae orationis verba componere, ut una simplicique, plures edoceat auditorem, lectoremve veritates”: “. . . can so compose the words of its utterance that by means of one and simple [utterance] it teaches the hearer or reader several truths.” The practice of exempting the Bible in the analysis of ancient texts and religions is followed by all of Spinoza’s contemporaries, and long after as well: e.g., Bernard Fontenelle (d. 1757) and Giambattista Vico (d. 1744) offered innovative theories of religion, but – long after Spinoza had “repealed” any such exemption – both excluded biblical religion from their analysis. See my Explaining Religion, chaps. 3 and 4.

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not break with but reinforces scriptural exceptionalism: where scripture is concerned, the true meaning and the truth are one, since scripture cannot convey any untruth. Thus in scripture “truths and true meanings are everywhere joined with an indissoluble link (veritates & veros sensus indissolubili nexu ubique copulari), which does not obtain” with profane writings.74 It is this link that Spinoza will dissolve with the acid of historical analysis. Meyer believes that he has solved a related problem that had vexed interpreters, namely, by what criterion to decide whether a text should be read literally or figuratively. Because it can discern what is true, and therefore a possible meaning of any biblical text, right reason is able to “apprehend clearly and perspicuously the meaning revealed by God, and is able to elicit rightly . . . the intention of him who put forth the words.” The text (and God behind it) cannot teach anything that is opposed to reason. Here is the core idea of Meyer’s rationalist hermeneutic; directly contrary to this false claim (whether made by Meyer or Jewish authors such as Maimonides), Spinoza will urge a historical analysis of the context, which alone can reveal any author’s intention and meaning.75 But why does Meyer make this move, which reduces possible meanings to what is rationally acceptable? Not simply because it makes the task of interpretation easier (as he himself notes); and not simply because it relieves one of philological toil and trouble (as he also notes). Nor is it simply because he is wedded to the standard orthodox menu of dogmas which must be “found” in scripture (although he challenges none except creation ex nihilo). Rather, this move is required by the very philosophical method which Meyer is proposing, since philosophy as the interpreter of scripture can do only one thing: yield truths (veritates) and only truths. Meyer is thus not particularly interested or concerned to discover historical meanings, which are only of marginal religious interest anyway. 74

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PSI iv.4, 33: “. . . in his [i.e., scriptura] veritates & veros sensus indissolubili nexu ubique copulari, quod in illis [i.e., scriptis profanis] non obtinet; atque adeo qui illas eruerit, eadem opera simul & hos eruisse . . .” The Meyer quotation from PSI xvi.2, 98. Just as for Augustine any interpretation was acceptable which fell within the boundaries of the rule of faith, so for Meyer any interpretation is acceptable – and divinely intended – which yields some truth or other. Spinoza’s radical alternative (historical literalism, to be discussed in chap. 5) comes at TTP vii, 100.25/143.


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Hence the following revised definition of the task of the interpreter better matches Meyer’s actual program than the earlier one quoted above: we have proved that all truths of scriptural passages are also true senses, and that all expositions of texts not consonant with truth are false. So the true interpreter of the sacred letters is the one who can divulge the truths of the utterances contained in them, and can show that he has divulged them . . .76

Philosophy thus tells us what the possible meanings of any scriptural passage can be by disclosing all possible truths that can be there. Philosophical method being formulated here is normative because it not only provides a complete menu of “truths” relevant to a given text but imposes its peremptory veto on any interpretation that yields an untruth.77 Meyer’s position replicates the Cartesian requirement of true knowledge: not only knowing, but being able to demonstrate that one knows. Notice how different the task of the biblical interpreter is from that of the interpreter of profane works: entirely abandoned as irrelevant is whatever meaning might have been intended by the author or gathered by the original audience. This approach seeks only to extract “truths” from the text. Religious and philosophical truths, for Meyer, are rational/eternal truths only; the historical meanings and contents are of no interest (apparently because they are of no religious relevance to him). He may be right, of course; but he has left himself the problem of explaining why scripture is necessary or even useful at all, and wherein lies its divine efficacy and religious functionality. To answer that, we have to reconstruct some of Meyer’s epistemology to see how it enables an edifying reading of the Bible. According to Meyer, we finally know what possibly is true only 76

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PSI vi.1, 44: “Demonstravimus . . . omnes locorum Scripturae veritates, esse etiam veros sensus, ac omnes eorum expositiones, quae veritati non congruunt, esse falsas: adeo verum S. Literarum Interpretem esse, qui veritates orationum in iis contentarum potest eruere, ac se eruisse ostendere . . .” The unfortunate result of this method is that it seems impossible to learn anything new. Meyer’s approach is still around in different guises. Jay, for example, criticizes René Girard’s theory of sacrifice as follows: “The moment we say, ‘The celebrants do not and must not comprehend the true role of the sacrificial act,’ we have lost all possibility of gaining any understanding beyond the one we already had and brought along with us” (Throughout Your Generations, xxv).

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by way of philosophy. Through philosophy we discover those “clear and distinct ideas” that are infallible and the basis of all genuine knowledge.78 That is why, when we turn to the actual work of textual exegesis, philosophy is not merely an instrument (as the theologians said),79 but the norm of interpretation. The “truths” that philosophy reveals come from the mind’s direct access to the nature of things through common notions. The mind can match scriptural statements to these general truths, which, Meyer contends, have been intended by God the author of both nature and scripture. This makes the interpreter’s job easier, Meyer says, because it is easier for reason to know general truths than it is to extract one intended meaning from each text, as the philological–theological interpreters claim must be done.80 text and reader response The internal mental and psychological mechanisms of the interpreter are a crucial element in Meyer’s method, but unfortunately are not adequately explained by him. As we’ve seen, ambiguity and clarity of statements are in the mind of the reader, not in state78

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Meyer shows his Cartesian orientation here by explaining that “philosophy” does not mean that of Plato or Aristotle, but as practiced by a natural reason cleared of “prejudice” (PSI v.2, 40; Meyer’s italics): “Philosophia . . . nomenclatura intelligimus, non Divini Platonis, non magni Aristotelis aut aliorum quorumvis eo nomine in lucem editas de rerum natura opiniones, ac conjecturas: sed illarum veram ac indubitato certam notitiam, quam Ratio, ab omni praejudiciorum involucro libera, naturalique intellectus lumine . . . ex immotis ac per se cognitis principiis per legitimas consequentias, apodicticasque demonstrationes, clare ac distincte perceptas, eruit, ac in certissima veritatis luce collocat”: “We understand by ‘philosophy’ not the opinions and conjectures of divine Plato or the great Aristotle or of others that have been brought to light from the nature of things, but true and undoubtedly certain knowledge, which Reason, free of every veil of prejudices, and by the natural light of intellect . . . brings forth and lays out in the most certain light of truth, by producing legitimate consequences and certain demonstrations from fixed and per se known principles.” Cf. Muller, Reformed Dogmatics, 243f., 305, on reason’s “instrumental and ancillary” role in Reformed orthodoxy. E.g., PSI Ep., 109: “. . . ex hac nostra sententia non tantis, quantis antea, laborabit difficultatibus interpretis munus; cum enim ostenderimus, omnes Scripturarum veritates esse etiam veros sensus, pluresque cuilibet orationi inesse possint, erunt ex iis pluribus aliqui investigatu inventuque faciliores . . .”: “from this conclusion of ours the office of the interpreter will be less laden with difficulties than before [when he had to discover a single meaning through philological labor], for since we have shown that all truths of scripture are also true meanings, and that several [meanings] can be embodied in any utterance, some of these will be easier to investigate and discover from among those several . . .”


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ments themselves. The scriptural text – even though it is the “word of God” in some objective sense – cannot be “its own interpreter” any more than a watch “tells time.” You have to interpret its signs. That fact points to some internal process that needs analysis. The proposal that philosophy in the Cartesian mode is the interpreter suggests that Meyer’s “truths” – items of true, certain and genuine knowledge – are of the sort generated by the mind alone, after the model of mathematical truths, and thus independent of sense input, which would include reading.81 How the reader derives saving knowledge from scripture, then, is the crux of the Meyerian method. Here is how he resolves it. He seems to presuppose that the mind is stocked with certain essential religious truths of the same character and status as mathematical truths – certain, generated by the mind alone – and these match up with the essential content of scripture which the interpreter seeks to uncover. How essential truths are in scripture, and how one extracts them, must remain sketchy, since Meyer gives no examples of application of this method to the interpretation of particular texts. We can extend the description only as far as Meyer takes it. Just as Descartes postulated God as guarantor of his method, Meyer piggybacks his hermeneutical theory on a characteristic doctrine of the Reformed tradition. That doctrine, formulated by Calvin, assigns “the internal witness of the Holy Spirit” an indispensable role in the grasp (or at least a “saving” grasp) of meanings available in scripture.82 Meyer’s confidence in the infallibility and power of his method rests on his belief that this “internal witness” is in fact an intrinsic attribute of natural reason. He thus reinforces his rationalistic doctrine by borrowing light from the religious Enthusiasts. It was their contention that the same Spirit that inspired the biblical writers is available for readers to interpret 81

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Meyer is aware of the qualitative difference. Cf. PSI xv.1, 93: knowledge per se is derived from common notions, while knowledge of “God’s word” is mediated through the notae divinitatis found in scripture. Cf. Calvin, Institutes i.vii.4; McNeill ed., i, pp. 78f. A summary quotation (78): “. . . the testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.” See also McNeill’s n.12 for further references to this much-discussed doctrine.

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it today. Others as well who sought to give some role to the Holy Spirit debated the axiom that “an author is the best interpreter of his own writing.”83 Debate focused on the meaning and application of that axiom to biblical interpretation. Not wanting to be charged with Enthusiasm himself, Meyer follows the orthodox Protestant line that the special inspiration enjoyed by the prophets, apostles and scriptural writers does not occur in the church today. “And yet,” he adds, “if it denotes the aid of the same Spirit, but working differently, it can be conceded and accommodated to proving our opinion by saying that philosophy is that aid by which the Holy Spirit interprets the scriptures in the present age.”84 The mind perceiving things clearly and distinctly cannot err, because God is the fons et origo of all truth, and therefore will be the “author and consevator” of every philosophical truth.85 Stated in pure Cartesian idiom: Since no perception is clear and distinct which is not able to bring forth consciousness of itself inwardly in us, and since God is the cause of every clear and distinct perception, he will also be the cause of the inward consciousness, and since this persuades, tells, testifies and inspires us that the thing perceived is indubitably true, therefore not undeservedly is [this clear perception] able to be called the persuasion, dictate, testimony and inspiration of God or the Holy Spirit.86

Thus, at the same time that Meyer denies the claim of the Reformed exegetes to special illumination, he appropriates it to valorize reason.87 83

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Meyer cites this axiom with approval, bending it to his own purposes: PSI vi.1, 45: God has empowered human reason as the instrument through which he interprets his own words. In his Responsio, Serarius insists repeatedly, beginning on his title page, that God through the intervention of his Spirit will be the interpreter of his own words; cf. p. 22. PSI xv, 94: “Sin vero denotetur ejusdem Spiritus adminiculo; at diversimode operantis, posset concedi, nostraeque sententiae probandae accomodari, dicendo Philosophiam esse id adminiculum, quo Spiritus S. nunc temporis Scripturas interpretatur.” PSI v.4, 42: “. . . Deus . . . omnis veritatis sit fons atque origo, erit etiam omnis verae Philosophiae seu Sapientiae author atque conservator.” PSI v.6, 43: “. . . quoniam quoque nulla est clara & distincta perceptio, quae non intime sui conscientiam in nobis gignere possit: & cum omnis . . . clarae ac distinctae perceptionis Deus sit causa, etiam hujus intimae conscientiae causa erit, cumque haec conscientia rem perceptam esse veram indubie nobis persuadeat, dictet, testetur, atque inspiret, non immerito, nec incongrue Dei seu Spiritus Sancti persuasio, dictamen, testimonium, atque inspiratio appellari poterit.” Cf. vi.1, 45: God the “author” of philosophy (as well as of scripture); xvi.9, 105. The exegetical payoff of Meyer’s Spirit-enhanced reason is remarkably unoriginal. He


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Meyer leaves his readers in considerable tension between an emerging radical, naturalistic rationalism and residual commitments to the divine and unique status of scripture as well as to the notion that the Holy Spirit underwrites religious conviction. When he insists that the doctrine of the internal witness contradicts the doctrine that scripture interprets itself, and that the theologians have failed to face up to this fact or to define their doctrine clearly,88 he is clearing the way for his own proposal. In chapter 3, he has already argued that clarity and ambiguity are not in fact an attribute of texts at all, but of their reception. The theologians thus argue absurdly when they insist that the biblical text is clear “in itself ” whether readers realized it or not, just as the sun is bright whether anyone is looking or not. The analogy is false. The characteristics of the sun are “absolute,” whereas utterances are occasions of human interaction; their meanings have no existence independent of such occasions of social intercourse.89 The sun sheds its light whether it is seen or not, but the Bible “sheds” no meaning where it is not read or understood. philosophy the interpreter True knowledge lies in reason’s clear and distinct perceptions, and Meyer believes that there will be a match between those

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offers as examples the philosophical solution to the problems of biblical anthropomorphism, the eucharistic verba (hoc est corpus meum, on which the Reformed theologians had been “correcting” the Catholics and Lutherans for a hundred years), and the Trinity (PSI vi.3, 47). There is some justice in Meyer’s charge: see Muller’s summary: Reformed Dogmatics, 304f. Both Spinoza and Meyer expose the theologians’ inability clearly to define the “supernatural light” in distinction from natural reason. PSI iii.3, 7: “. . . manifestum evadit, tam perspicuitatem, quam obscuritatem respicere Auditoris, Lectorisve intellectum; adeoque totam utriusque naturam consistere in relatione ad aliud . . . Unde gravis est illorum Theologorum error, qui, non ut de Relatis, sed tanquam de rebus Absolutis loquuntur, quando de S. Scripturae perspicuitate atque obscuritate disputant, illasque ad Solem ejusque lucem comparatione explicant”: “. . . it turns out to be obvious that perspicuity as well as obscurity has reference to the understanding of the hearer or reader, so that the entire nature of each consists in its relation to something else . . . hence the error of those theologians is serious when they dispute about the perspicuity and obscurity of sacred scripture, for they speak not in terms of that relativity, but as though these were absolute things, and explain them by comparison to the sun and its light.” Meyer seems to be resisting here the emerging ex opere operato doctrine of the Protestant scripturists, i.e., that, owing to analogy with the sacraments as a means of grace, scripture is somehow powerful and efficacious in itself even though one does not understand it – a view indistinguishable from magic.

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perceptions, the intentions of scripture and truth. This is so because both reason and scripture are authored and inspired by the same divine mind, insuring harmony of truth and meaning between the two “inspired” entities. For Meyer, all truths and all scientia are to be found through reason and philosophy; in his most fundamental area of agreement with Spinoza, he generally (perhaps not always consistently) holds that the Bible is not an authoritative source of knowledge. Further, Meyer does not claim (as Maimonides did) that the prophets intended to mask philosophical truths while they spoke their earthy and anthropomorphic “language of men” (the doctrine of accommodation). As we have already seen, he has no interest in the prophet or the biblical author – in fact, no interest in historical investigation at all. Meyer’s interest is in the reader and his response to the text before him. Meyer contends that to get truth out of any text, the reader must bring, and bring to bear, clear and distinct philosophical perceptions from outside the text to elucidate the truths to which it can only obscurely prompt his attention. In fact, it is only indirectly that we can “get truth out of a text” at all. The theologians’ misunderstanding of how books actually work in generating knowledge is a serious flaw in their doctrine of reading for salvation. The biblicists presuppose uncritically that the Bible somehow causes new information and knowledge to be transferred to the mind. But this is not how books work. Their function is to inspire thought in the reader, and their efficacy with regard to truth depends entirely upon clear and distinct ideas that the reader already has and finds within, for in no way can they [books] lead the understanding into the true cognition of things from or through themselves, much less provide, or infuse, or impress, or in any other way engender clear and distinct ideas for the mind, unless they [those ideas] have been infused and inscribed there beforehand.90

Here Meyer seems to be translating a religious idea of Pieter Balling’s into Cartesianese. Balling, a mercantile agent and 90

PSI Ep., 115; my italics: “. . . nulla vero ratione intellectum in veram rerum cognitionem ex aut per se posse deducere; multo minus menti ideas claras distinctasque, si antea infusae, inditaeque non fuerint, indere, aut infundere, aut imprimere, aut alio aliquo modo ingenerare.”


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Mennonite, was a close friend of Spinoza’s and Meyer’s and a conversation partner in their inner circle.91 In The Light upon the Candlestick (1662), Balling wrote that all “external signs” (e.g., words) leading to knowledge of God “must needs presuppose this knowledge.” To explain, he asks his readers to suppose that if God, about to make himself known by words, should say, i am god, and that this should be the sign by which he would make himself known, we see clearly, that it would be impossible for a man at first to know God by this: for if he should comprehend any thing out of the sense of the words, he must needs formerly have had the signification of the word God, and what he is to understand by it. In like manner, if God maketh his will known to man, the knowledge of God (which hath its original from the True Light), must precede and convince him, that that (manifestation) can be from none but God alone, whereupon he is then sufficient assured.92

Meyer had already made a similar idea a basic epistemological principle in his introduction to Spinoza’s Principles of Descartes: For since a certain and firm knowledge of any thing unknown can be derived only from things known certainly beforehand, these things must be laid down at the start, as a stable foundation on which to build the whole edifice of human knowledge; otherwise it will soon collapse of its own accord, or be destroyed by the slightest blow.93

“This is how in general the utility of all books is reckoned and estimated for the things about which they deal, their excellence or 91

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The friendship between Balling and Spinoza may have been due in part to Balling’s ability to converse with the philosopher in Spanish (Shirley, Letters, Introduction, 15; further biographical information in Meinsma, Spinoza, nn. 13ff.). Balling also shared in the translation of Spinoza’s Ethics into Dutch (for details, see Curley i, 405f.). Balling, Light, 693. In his opening paragraph, Balling remarked on the confusion and ambiguity of language, and the necessity to look “within thyself . . . in to the true light. . . .Here thou shalt find a principle certain and infallible” (689; cf. 693). The light, Balling asserts, is “the first principle of religion” (691). The Quaker Samuel Fisher puts forth an identical teaching (see Popkin, “Spinoza and Bible Scholarship,” 393: “. . . one cannot tell whether a given manuscript or book contains the Word of God . . . unless one knows independently what the Word of God is”). For Fisher, this is known by the “inner Light,” but his definition of that is sometimes virtually indistinguishable from Spinoza’s formulations, e.g., Fisher (Rustick’s Alarm, Part iv, 178; my italics) allows the propriety of using the term “right reason” to refer to the Light, which is “not against, but according to right reason, for they are synonymous.” Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (Gebhardt i, 127.9; Curley i, 225): “Etenim cum omnis rei ignotae certa, ac firma cognitio non, nisi ex certo praecognitis, hauriri, ac derivari quaeat, haec necessario ab imo praestruenda erunt, tanquam stabile fundamentum, cui postmodum, ne sponte subsidat, aut minimo impetu pessum eat, totum cognitionis humanae aedificium superimponetur.”

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worthlessness, great or poor.”94 To illustrate this point, Meyer gives as an example the reader encountering the statement that God is omniscient (something not explicitly stated in the Bible). Unless he knows beforehand, and from sources outside scripture, what the terms “God” and “omniscience” entail, the reader will not be able to gain an intellectual understanding of the assertion. The reason is that by themselves, the mere words “God is omniscient” are “not able to effect by true causality” the certainty and evidentness of the idea that omniscience belongs to the very nature of God (a selfevident conclusion of reason clearly and distinctly known by definition). Rather, the words merely provide the “occasion or incitement by which the intellect is aroused and induced to contemplate more attentively the ideas of God and omniscience” until it grasps that the one idea is necessarily included in the other.95 The relevant point for Meyer’s hermeneutic is that nature and philosophical reasoning teach true knowledge of God, and whatever scripture says about the matter will be interpreted along those rational lines – not only as the truth about God, but as the meaning intended by the biblical author even when speaking of God in an anthropomorphic way.96 Meyer anticipates the possible criticism that he has made scripture unnecessary. He tries to reassure readers by arguing that full knowledge of religious truth does not occur independently of reading the biblical text, as though nothing of value were to be discovered from reading the latter. His way of stating this, though obscure, seems aimed at preserving both the function of scripture and the complexity of the relationship between the text and the reader: 94

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PSI Ep., 115: “. . . quemadmodum passim omnium librorum utilitas pro rerum de quibus agunt, praestantia aut vilitate magni aut parvi ducitur atque aestimatur.” PSI Ep., 114–15: “[voces] tantum sunt occasio vel incitamentum, quo intellectus erigitur ac inducitur, ut ideas Dei & Omniscientiae attentius contempletur, ac inter se conferat, ac sic hanc in illa necessario includi deprehendat.” Meyer equates “nature” and “philosophy” as teaching true knowledge of God: PSI vi.3, 46: “. . . Natura, ergo Philosophia . . . naturae lumine, & Deum esse, & quae illi adscribenda, quae deneganda sint, evidenter demonstrat”: “. . . Nature, therefore philosophy, clearly demonstrates by the light of nature both that God is, and what things are to be attributed or denied to him.” Spinoza, while agreeing that nature/reason teaches knowledge of God, vehemently denies that such common notions can function as the “hermeneut” of scripture; what the biblical authors intended can be known only through historical–contextual study of the text.


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Wherefore, in order that those things [concerning beatitude] might stand out clearly, philosophy is to be called upon for assistance, along with whatever else readers possess that is already known and perceived. In that way it will become evident how the predicate agrees with the subject, how the truth of the [scriptural] utterance is brought out, and at the same time how its true meaning (verus sensus) is elicited and drawn out.97

“From which it is clear,” Meyer blandly continues, “that when scripture is interpreted through philosophy, [knowledge of] the truth is not always bound to precede [discovery of] the meaning, and hence it is not at all superfluous to go to the scripture and reflect upon it, that it might suggest the material and occasion for reflection.”98 Meyer offers an additional defense of the necessity for philosophy and liberal and scientific studies generally. In their zeal for scripture, some have advocated that it is possible to draw all knowledge of theology from scripture alone,99 without considering the rest of the world with its riches of genuine knowledge and understanding. This illusion has led people away from the study of philosophy and other vital aids for understanding scripture. Meyer protests that without these [aids] no perfect knowledge (scientia) of even a single thing can be learned from it [scripture], nor any clear and distinct idea be acquired. Nor indeed can any false and perverse [idea] be corrected by reading it by itself. Indeed, those who read the sacred books closely ought to have some [prior] conception of the things that are dealt with in it.100 197

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PSI Ep., 115: “Quod ut Praestent, Philosophia, & quicquid jam cognitum atque perspectum habent, in subsidium vocandum, quo, qui praedicatum subjecto conveniat, perspiciatur, enunciationis veritas eruatur, & simul verus sensus eliciatur atque educatur.” Ibid.: “Unde liquet veritatem non semper, in Scripturae per Philosophiam interpretatione, sensum praecedere debere: adeoque minime supervacaneum esse, Scripturam adire atque consulere . . . ut . . . occasionem materiamque cogitandi suggerat . . .” Perhaps this is what Spinoza has in mind when he complains of the “confusion” resulting from the mixture of philosophy and exegesis (TTP xv, 188/198). nb: Spinoza will insist – in agreement with Meyer’s orthodox critics but for a different reason – that we do draw all our knowledge of theology from scripture alone (cf. TTP Pref., 10/54). Such a strategy serves to quarantine theology from the rest of the realm of knowledge. See chap. 3 for the orthodox, and chap. 5 for Spinoza. PSI Ep., 116: “. . . sine his ne unius quidem rei perfecta scientia inde addisci, aut idea clara ac distincta acquiri: imo falsa ac perversa sola ejus lectione corrigi queat; tum enim omnes, qui S. Codices lectitant, eosdem de rebus, quae in illis pertractantur, deberent habere conceptus.”

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In other words, the readers who get all their information from scripture have no basis for making critical judgments about what it says, and will all end up with the same misconceptions unless they know other things about the world from study in other fields. This critical aid and corrective from the world of general knowledge proposes to fill an important gap in the orthodox rules of interpretation. summary At this critical transition in western intellectual history, Meyer sought to bring scriptural interpretation into the new age of learning he saw dawning in the wake of Descartes’s philosophy. Through his campaign to put philosophy at the center of an ecumenical hermeneutic, Meyer succeeded in bringing to a head the early-modern debate about the role of reason in faith, theology and scriptural interpretation. Although a mostly forgotten obscure local skirmish, the dispute over his book echoed questions that were being debated everywhere in Europe. It attained a wider significance, first from the furious responses to Meyer himself, but especially because Spinoza intervened four years later to define for the first time what it would mean to approach the Bible as the product of ordinary ancient history. Meyer’s treatise threw grave doubt upon essential Protestant claims that scripture was capable of interpreting itself (supplying philosophical reinforcement to an old Catholic charge), and that the illumination by the Spirit was something distinct from both God-given natural reason and the illusions of the Enthusiasts. For Meyer, the Spirit’s illumination and reason’s infallible power were in fact one and the same. The Philosophia thus challenged the critics to specify what sort of relevant religious “knowledge” scripture actually imparted, and in what way such knowledge differed (if at all) from universal philosophical truths. They would have to grapple with the nature of biblical religious truth – especially as history – and its relation to and difference from what philosophy could learn by itself. Meyer was convinced that religious truths were timeless and eternal, and that the divine gift of scripture could be decoded by


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the equally divine gift of reason – both inspired by the same Author of truth. This view echoed that of the Alexandrian theologians of the second and third centuries (whom Meyer quoted), but went further by abandoning the ancient metaphor of philosophy as the ancilla of theology and revelation. Reason was now the norm. By virtue of its endowment with infallible common notions, it could precipitate the pure essence of eternal religious truth from the murky and vulgar sentences of scripture. Indeed, cognition of any general truth occasioned by the reading of any part of scripture could be received as “God’s word” as well as the meaning actually intended by the author. Except for a somewhat pro forma profession that the Bible was the “word of God,” Meyer shows us what a consistent rationalist hermeneutic looks like. As frequently noted, his philosophical method enshrined an ahistorical view of the Bible like that of his most orthodox opponents – a view that early-modern scholarship was already rendering obsolete101 and as Spinoza’s devastating critique would finally make clear beyond doubt. As we have seen, Meyer failed to provide persuasive examples of the novelty or fruitfulness of his proposed method for interpreting texts. His thesis that the divine author of scripture had not only anticipated but intended every possible truth that could be extracted from the text – so that every truth was a true meaning – embodied more magic than method . . . unless Meyer was creating an elaborate joke at the expense of the orthodox.102 101

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E.g., Cappel and Levita, neither of whom is mentioned by Meyer, although he knows of Levita’s demonstration that the vowel markings were a later addition to the Hebrew text. Meyer absurdly claimed that his approach was more valuable than that of the philologists even for establishing the correct text (PSI Ep., 110f.). In her note to this text, Lagrée (PSI, French trans., 250 n. 1) incisively states the difference between Meyer and Cappel: “La différence . . . réside . . . dans le fait que Cappel, en exégète, privilégie la question de l’établissement d’un texte authentique en d’un sens vrai qui soit effectivement le sens de ce texte, alors que Louis Meyer, en philosophe, privilégie la découverte de vérités, et que le texte sacré ne vaut finalement pour lui que comme un indicateur à la recherche de la vérité, comme un opérateur de conversion à la vérité d’ordre philosophique.” In this critical respect, Spinoza sides with Cappel – contrary to Klever, who argues vehemently, without relevant evidence and against most scholars, that “Meyer’s book . . . is completely in line with the theories developed in Spinoza’s work” (“In Defense of Spinoza,” 219). It is tempting to read Meyer as an ironist – driving to its absurd conclusion the orthodox dogma that everything in scripture is true (when rightly interpreted) in light of the obvious fact that when read straight, scripture is full of both self-contradiction and error.

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Yet he presented powerful critiques of the axiom that scripture was “its own interpreter,”103 and exposed the equivocations in Reformed explanations of what scriptura sola really meant (e.g., if it required the aid of the Spirit, then it was scripture-plus, not sola). He also exposed their inability clearly to get beyond rhetoric in distinguishing the “supernatural light” from natural reason. By injecting Cartesian method into the inner precincts of theology, Meyer may have made a strategic political blunder, since it seemed to disprove once and for all the claim of liberal theologians that the new philosophy need not be subversive. Yet by doing this, Meyer forced closer examination of the role of reason in the unavoidable task of interpretation. True, the conservatives seem to have been pushed further in the direction of intellectual isolation, but, as we shall see in chapter 4, the liberals took up Meyer’s challenge in interesting and even daring ways, pointing toward a theological method which would learn how to make faith coexist with the results of the new knowledge. One question that Meyer did not address was the theological–political one: what was the proper public role of biblical authority, especially as embodied in the opinions of its various interpreters? Meyer seems quite oblivious of such issues, although he would hear from some of his critics that his own work was evidence that the teaching of the new philosophy should be banned, and that theological students were being corrupted by such work. And then Spinoza pointedly asserted that the role of the interpreter was no mere scholarly concern, but of primary political import where questions of peace, piety and liberty were concerned. Nobody in that age, with the exception of Hobbes, so acutely described the connections between traditions of biblical interpretation and problems of reconstructing new political theories and systems. From an academic standpoint, the most important result of the

103

footnote 102 (cont.) An ironic reading of Meyer would have him saying: “If absolutely everything in scripture (as you interpret it) has to be true, let me offer you a clean-sweep hermeneutic method that makes it all true – and I challenge you to find a better way.” Upon reflection, having found no other trace of irony in Meyer’s work, I doubt that my suggestion here holds water. I presented Meyer’s critique in detail in “A Hidden Opponent,” 374–77.


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whole discussion downstream from Meyer was the gradual emergence of the category of history in its tension with and triumph over philosophy as the proper intellectual and methodological basis for biblical scholarship and interpretation. As this debate unfolds, history will emerge as the “interpreter of scripture” in opposition to Meyer’s philosophy, but it emerges in two finally incompatible guises: the historia sacra which the theologians set forth as embodying the essential “saving knowledge” of scripture, wholly unavailable to philosophy and known only by faith; and, from Spinoza’s side, a “natural history” which reveals both the origins of the canon itself and the original meanings intended by its authors. In both cases, Meyer’s critics break out of his stifling hermeneutical circle, in which nothing genuinely new, originating from beyond what is already known by reason, can be learned.104 104

Norris (Spinoza, 205) likens Meyer’s method to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s, according to which “all understanding necessarily occurs within the ‘hermeneutic circle’ of interpretive foreknowledge.”

chapter three


To prefer to err with Scripture than be right with the innovators: that is the pathos of orthodoxy. Klaus Scholder1

Meyer’s radical philosophical proposal, for all its faults, deserves credit for breaking new ground. He challenged 150 years of development in Protestant ways to approach scripture. He had defined the insoluble problem for “the religion of Protestants”2 as follows: there could be no intellectual or social peace in Christendom until some metaconfessional criterion was agreed to about who or what should be the interpreter of scripture.3 His critique of the essential Protestant doctrines supporting sola scripturism touched a raw nerve in the already pained body of expert Protestant opinion. The Dutch Reformed church still smarted over the wound left by the Arminian controversy at the beginning of the century. Meyer had exploited the unclarity or open disagreement among theologians regarding both the “objective” (text) and “subjective” (reader) 11 12

13

Modern Critical Theology, 120. The phrase was coined by the British theologian William Chillingworth (The Religion of Protestants [1637], 456): “the Bible, I say, the Bible is the religion of Protestants.” Hobbes had said the same thing, of course, proposing however an essentially political and secular solution (the sovereign as sole interpres). Meyer takes a different direction, basically ignoring the claims of the basic Christian kerygma and the various sectarian confessions, as well as most historical, philological and linguistic questions. Unlike Hobbes and Spinoza, Meyer also thought that the problem could be solved apolitically and philosophically. I have no doubt that as far as influence on Spinoza is concerned, Hobbes is more important than Meyer – indeed (as Curley reminded me), the fundamentals of Spinoza’s method were already in place before Meyer published. In “Homo Audax” (69), Curley quotes a letter of Leibniz’s, in which the philosopher quite accurately noted that “the author [Spinoza] seems to follow not only Hobbes’ politics, but also his religion . . . For Hobbes, in a whole chapter of Leviathan, has also sown the seeds of that very smart critique which this bold man (homo audax) carries out against sacred scripture.”

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dimensions of interpretation. And then he had proposed philosophy – the use of allegedly universal (versus sectarian) principles – as the only cure. The very radicality of his remedy immediately precipitated sharp responses and drove the discussion into areas that had not been explored before. And so he moved the argument to new ground. The Protestant right, subject of the present chapter, responded with indignation at Meyer’s rationalism, reacting dogmatically and sometimes politically against any injury to the immaculate scripture or corruption of public opinion through the proud selfassertion of reason. As we shall see, these commentators tended to respond in two different ways to Meyer’s proposal that philosophy should be the interpres scripturae: one side, most emphatically represented by Samuel Maresius, emphasized the objectivity of the text, insisting that scripture would be its own interpreter, on its own terms. The other side, represented by Peter Serarius, highlighted the internal work of the Holy Spirit as the interpreter. In contrast to both, the liberals (next chapter), though rejecting some of Meyer’s theses, would struggle with the implications of his claim that every reading of scripture was an interpretation. They would take seriously his questions about language and deepen the discussion of the authority of reason. Spinoza would then go beyond them all by combining and reshaping their ideas and proposing a critical, historical and comparative approach to scripture. Meyer’s analysis and critique of the Protestant impasse are perhaps more significant than his rationalist solution. Even though philosophy proved not to be the right instrument for interpreting scripture, his arguments forced his critics to consider more rigorously what their claims about reading scripture meant, and to clarify the similarities and differences between the methods and matter of philosophy and science (based on study of nature) on one side and the relevant methods for study of texts (based on philology and history) on the other. By taking up these issues, some of Meyer’s critics took his proposals as occasion for advancing the conversation and setting the stage for Spinoza’s intervention.

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Spinoza and biblical authority disengagement

The most striking intellectual characteristic of the responses to be examined in this chapter is an across-the-board disengagement from the very kinds of questions being raised by Meyer. More exactly, theologians on the right resisted any suggestion that secular knowledge – even the new knowledge that was burgeoning all around them – was of any relevance for interpreting scripture. In defense of the faith, they seemed ready to opt out of the intellectual revolution embodied in the new philosophy as well as in recent research on scripture itself. Thus Peter Serarius, the earliest respondent to Meyer’s book, raised an alarm of biblical proportions against the new philosophy by elaborating a vast typology on the golden calf. Just as the ancient Israelites had abandoned God’s revealed law and substituted an idol in the wilderness, so now a new golden calf – philosophy – had been raised up by the Anonymous (as Serarius refers to Meyer).4 Serarius seems to speak for them all when he warns that even engaging in philosophical discussion is walking into a trap; better to leave such questions (e.g., where philosophical and theological assertions contradict each other) to the philosophers and stick with “demonstrations of the Spirit and power.”5 This sort of reaction to Meyer warns us that although vigorous and swift, the responses from the right would 14

15

Serarius, Responsio: the title page cites Ex. 32.4: “These are your gods, who led you out of Egypt . . .” Samuel Maresius (Disputationes i.36) offers another metaphor of substitution: like Laban, Meyer has substituted Leah for Rachel. Responsio, p. 36. Serarius was an Amsterdam printer, a Collegiant and a prominent millenarian who befriended Spinoza after his expulsion from the synagogue (1656) and served for years as a regular conduit for correspondence between Spinoza and Henry Oldenburg, who became secretary of the Royal Society in England and kept Spinoza in touch with developments there. E.g., Oldenburg asks Spinoza (Spinoza, Ep. 14, 70.3/117) to send a copy of his work on Descartes to Serarius “for transmission to me.” Like many millenarian Christians of the day, Serarius was philojudaic and ecumenically minded, a friend of Menasseh ben Israel, one of Spinoza’s teachers. Living in the end time, he believed that Jews and Christians awaited the same Messiah. He died en route to Turkey to meet the Jewish Messiah Sabbatai Zevi (Nadler, Spinoza, 253), spared the painful revelation that Zevi finally thought better of it and converted to Islam. Serarius believed that the Spirit of prophecy was still alive, but longed for fresh outpouring of Spirit. He believed that the mystics were the best theologians (Responsio, p. 18, 46f., where he names the Theologiae Germanicae, Tauler, Ruysbroek, Suso, Thomas à Kempis, John of the Cross and Dionysius the Carthusian as better teachers than any philosophers). He indulged his taste for mysticism by making an edition of Johann Tauler’s works. Tauler was a latemedieval Dominican whose writing deeply influenced the young Luther and achieved a kind of canonical status among believers of mystical bent.


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simply not deal with some issues; hence, to notice what issues are passed over in silence is perhaps as revealing as what is included, as we watch the formulations of the Protestant right unfold. We look in vain for real debate. The presuppositions of the theologians treated here were so remote from those of Meyer that the response consists mostly of polemic or – in the case of the theologian Reinerius Vogelsangh – relentless insult. Vogelsangh was a pastor and teacher at the Illustrious School of s’Hertognebosch6 and later, along with Nicholas Arnold, a defender of Labadie against Wolzogen (more on this in chapter 4). From Vogelsangh’s perspective, Meyer’s appeal for discussion on the shared premise of scriptural divinity was simply insincere, especially because he seemed to contradict his professed loyalty to scripture by postulating philosophy as the infallible norm of its interpretation.7 Instead of engaged debate, we find repeated assertions of authority, and where passionate appeals to authority are offered, the political dimension of this entire discussion often surfaces, alerting us to the central problem of the interpreter to be highlighted by Spinoza. For example, Professor Nicolaus Arnold of Franeker University expresses enthusiastic approval for synodal decisions to ban the teaching of Descartes’s philosophy and to prohibit the printing or sale of Meyer’s book.8 And Professor Samuel Maresius of Groningen warns that perhaps the Dutch are enjoying too much freedom of discussion.9 The 16 17

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J. I. Israel, Dutch Republic, 547. Recall Meyer’s statement that scripture as a first principle is both the necessary and sufficient basis for any common discussion among theologians. Arnold taught at Franeker for about 30 years, devoting himself primarily to “disputing against the Socinians and Cartesians” (Scholder, Modern Critical Theology, 172 n. 38). In his Dissertatiuncula (¶54, pp. 38f.), he praises the 1656 decree of the government of Holland and West Frisia (Illustres Hollandiae & West-Frisiae Ordines) against teaching Descartes to the youth as a sanctum decretum. The 1666 ban of the deputies of Frisia (Ordinum Frisiae. Deputati) against printing or selling Meyer’s book is also reproduced in full with Arnold’s imprimatur (pp. 56–58): “. . . omnibus in Provincia nostra Bibliopolis & Typographis strenue mandamus, ne praedictum librum [i.e., Meyer’s PSI] imprimant, aut imprimere faciant, aut alibi impressum in hanc Provinciam inferant, vaenum exponant vendantve . . .” (57f.). Maresius, Disputationes i.2. A French Calvinist, he became one of the Dutch Republic’s best-known theologians, first as rector of the Illustrious School at s’Hertogenbosch, then as professor and rector at the University of Groningen. Politically, he was inclined to allow magistrates a major role in ecclesiastical affairs. He had at first been allied with the Cartesian-friendly theologians, but “the emergence of radical Cartesianism in the late 1660’s” moved him to regard Cartesianism as a menace, and finally to make common cause with the leader of conservative orthodoxy, Professor Gisbert Voetius of Utrecht (McGahagan, “Cartesianism,” 50).

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mentor of the right, Professor Gisbert Voetius of Utrecht, took the position that any admission that scripture had more than one meaning, as Meyer had insisted it had, opened the door to rival interpretations so that “no one could possess a privileged interpretation of scripture, and toleration of differing interpretations was [i.e., would be] therefore an absolute necessity.”10 Publication of Meyer’s book resulted in increasing pressure on young ministerial candidates to disavow all allegiance to the new philosophy – a practice against which Balthasar Bekker eloquently protested.11 And as we shall see in the next chapter, the liberal pastor and theologian Ludwig Wolzogen would be haled before provincial synodal authorities to defend himself against charges of heresy brought by Jean Labadie. In each case, political authority is being asserted on the basis of scriptural authority to suppress ideas considered subversive to true (i.e., Reformed) religion. And in all cases, authority and the threat or reality of coercion dominate rational argument.12 In the general disengagement of the theologians, we see an early example of intellectual compartmentalization and the institutionalizing of discrete academic specialties with their own paradigms. The Reformed theologians labored to elaborate and establish a scholastic theological system that would maintain doctrinal consistency and conformity, and for training a learned ministry for the churches.13 The professionalization of theology encouraged the trend of withdrawing from the intellectual culture at large and created space for theologians to settle into a countercultural stance. Serarius and the Czech philosopher Jan Amos Comenius are an uneasy fit in this chapter, not least because both were out10 11

12

13

McGahagan, “Cartesianism,” 332. Bekker, a learned pastor at Franeker, became notorious for his groundbreaking attack on the culture of magic, devil and witchcraft (The Bewitched World, 1691). In his Admonitio (1668) he had already gained notice as a stout defender of Cartesian learning and of the liberty of philosophy, but was critical of Meyer for mixing philosophy and theology. He boldly protests against the emerging orthodox custom of testing ministerial candidates for philosophical correctness (Bekker, Admonitio vii.8, 118). More on Bekker in Scholder, Modern Critical Theology, 122–24, 128–32. Scholder characterizes The Bewitched World as “the first attempt at a comprehensive ‘demythologizing’ of the world of biblical conceptions” (131). Cf. Bizer, “Reformed Orthodoxy,” 41: not rational argument but authoritative decrees prevail where there is an effective alliance between orthodoxy and the “standing order.” Muller (Reformed Dogmatics, 81f.) discusses the importance of institutionalization.


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spoken advocates of toleration and critics of confessionalism.14 They differed from the others also in their millenarianism, their lack of academic posts and the astonishing breadth of their interests.15 Comenius was a peripatetic religious intellectual whose interests embraced philosophy and educational theory.16 Their spiritualist–eschatological views rendered suspect all institutions that aspired to permanence and authority as divinely sanctioned establishments: the power of the living Spirit relativized all institutions as well as that of the perfect Bible.17 Yet their disengaged religious objections to Meyer put them in this camp. Disengagement takes place along several fronts for our authors. In general, the tendency is to minimize or simply deny that Meyer has raised really serious issues, calling them pseudo-problems or evading them in various ways. As Arnold says, the issues Meyer so laboriously raises all amount to “a big nothing” (omnia magnum nihil).18 They tend to repeat the kinds of dogmatic assertions that had resulted in the very impasses Meyer was trying to cut through. They especially emphasized the miraculous perfection of scripture (infallibility, clarity, sufficiency) and the Holy Spirit’s unfailing internal inspiration of the pious. Serarius wishfully asserts that the 14

15

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J. I. Israel, “Toleration,” 24f. Serarius (with the Collegiants generally) saw postReformation confessionalism as the most recent “golden calf ” erected in the church (Responsio, p. viii). Spinka (Comenius, 93) refers to his subject as a “utopian chiliast.” A leader of the Moravian Brethren and a refugee from Catholic conquests of the Thirty Years’ War, Comenius advocated a visionary educational philosophy seeking the reform of learning by divine light (Popkin, “Third Force,” 105). Descartes and Comenius met, but “each seemed unable to comprehend what the other was doing” (Popkin, “Third Force,” 91). Fix (Prophecy and Reason, 46, 111, 116, 128, 183 etc.) characterizes seventeenth-century millenarianism (or chiliasm) as anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, insisting on free prophecy and free speech. Popkin notes (“Spinoza and the Conversion of the Jews,” 174) that Serarius was a close friend of Adam Boreel, head of the Amsterdam Collegiants – a man who also befriended Spinoza. Perhaps because of his predominantly eschatological frame of reference, Serarius was not one of those spiritualist types (such as Samuel Fisher or Pieter Balling) who saw any kinship between themselves and rationalists such as Meyer. Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶43, p. 29: “And in order to prove Scripture obscure, he [Meyer] with great effort searches out the causes of obscurity, which he judges to arise from the multiplicity of meanings, from ambiguities and amphibolies of words and phrases, the eccentricities of languages, rhetorical figures and schemata: all of it a big nothing.” Some criticism is personal. According to Maresius (Disputationes i.33; cf. vi.11), Meyer’s professed allegiance to scripture is a fraud, since his system is nothing but an “imaginary philosophy,” an ideal that doesn’t exist and can’t be attained.

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divisions of Christendom are to be healed not by some new secular method of interpretation, but by renewal of the same “power and communion of the Spirit” that held the primitive church together.19 In what follows, we shall focus our “disengagement” theme in two general ways that affect all the rest: severing theology from philosophy, letting the contradictions stand, and stressing the uniqueness of biblical interpretation in contrast to other kinds. separation from philosophy Intellectual disengagement is often indicated at the very outset of these works by derogatory characterizations of philosophy (especially its role in theology) and advocacy of its radical separation from theology. This can mean a wide variety of things, of course: Spinoza advocates the same thing from the other end of the spectrum. Meyer’s appeal to Descartes, and his application of the principle of doubt to theological matters, leads two of our authors to challenge Meyer’s definition of “sceptics”: they reject his application of the label mainly to devout Catholics, who are sceptical about the capacity of individuals unaided to interpret the obscurities of scripture, and apply the term to those whom they regard as mere unbelievers, above all the Socinians and freethinkers.20 19

20

Serarius, Responsio p. 5. Cf. pp. 56f.: although the church has long experienced a lack of the Spirit (quamvis jam a multis retro Seculis Ecclesia Christiana Illustri illa Spiritus S. praesentia caruerit), let the widow await the return of her husband and pray for a new outpouring of the Spirit, rather than committing adultery with another. Fix (Prophecy and Reason, 106, and “Radical Religion,” 50) includes Serarius among those Collegiants who rejected the claims of all the churches that their preaching was inspired by the Spirit (but Serarius does not say quite as much in the present treatise). J. I. Israel (“Toleration,” 24) lists Serarius among the champions of toleration who approached the issue as a “mystical spiritualist,” who pleaded for a general toleration and “urged all Christians to contemplate the fallen, decayed, state of the Church and, through this, realize that its restoration would ensue only with the coming of the Millennium” (26). Vogelsangh follows Maresius’s lead in agreeing that “scepticism” should refer to doubters and unbelievers in religion. Maresius, Disputationes i.6, 7: sceptics are those who prefer to believe nothing, leaving everything in doubt. Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶13, p. 21: Socrates was the first sceptic about the gods; today there are many such people. Vogelsangh and Maresius thus would have taken the opposition of the Collegiants, who distrusted all the orthodoxies, and the Arminians, many of whom had defected, as examples of such scepticism. The Socinians pursued a literalistic and rational (not rationalistic or philosophical in Meyer’s sense) interpretation of scripture, rejecting church dogmas (e.g., the Trinity) not explicitly found therein (see Fix, Prophecy and Reason, 135ff.; Williams, Radical Reformation, chap. 29).


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Having it both ways with Descartes Paradoxically, Meyer is blamed both for being “Descartes’s ape” and for betraying Descartes.21 His most fundamental betrayal of the master is his mixing of philosophy and theology, something Descartes had prudently avoided in his publications. Whatever his personal belief, Descartes’s public position was that the new philosophy did not impinge on theological issues, and that the authority of revelation remained intact. He made emphatic statements about this, which Meyer’s critics gratefully acknowledge, lavishly quoting him against Meyer. Thus Vogelsangh quotes Descartes’s statement about accepting things that are beyond reason and philosophy: God is the author of infinite things; we of finite. So if God should perchance reveal something about himself or other things which exceeds our natural capacity . . . we will not refuse to believe those things, although we do not clearly understand them.

Descartes went further: when the harder question of contradiction arose, he stated as an “infallible rule” that “even if reason suggests something contrary, belief (fides) is to be attributed to divine authority rather than to our own judgment.” “Nothing more holy can be said,” Vogelsangh remarks, while Comenius commends the cartesii modestia.22 Descartes had thus stated two cardinal principles 21

22

Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶10, p. 18 (“simia cartesii”); but at ¶42, p. 70, he says Meyer utterly disagrees with Descartes. Vogelsangh, generally at a loss for rational argument, repeatedly characterizes Meyer’s arguments as “stupid.” He also calls him “wretch” (miser), “busybody” (ardelio), “numbskull” (stolidus), etc. Arnold calls Meyer “semi-papist, semi-Socinian, total atheist (totus atheus)” (Dissertatiuncula ¶2, p. 2). Maresius (Disputationes i.14–22) carefully shows why Meyer is not a genuine Cartesian, above all because of his futile attempt to apply Cartesian principles to theology. Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶42, pp. 70f., quoting from Descartes, Principles of Philosophy i, paras. 24f. and 76. i.24f. (Adam & Tannery viii, 14): Descartes warns that, in pursuing philosophical questions, “ut semper quam maxime recordemur, & Deum authorem rerum esse infinitum, & nos omnino finitos. Ita si forte nobis Deus de se ipso velaliis aliquid revelat, quod naturales ingenii nostri vires excedat, qualia jam sunt mysteria Incarnationis & Trinitatis, non recusabimus illa credere, quamvis non clare intelligamus.” i.76 (Adam & Tannery viii, 39): “Et quamvis forte lumen Rationis, quam maxime clarum & evidens aliud quid nobis suggerere videretur, soli tamen authoritati divinae potius quam proprio nostro judicio, fidem esse adhibendam.” Comenius (Judicium ¶14, 67), Maresius (Disputationes i.21, 25) and Arnold (Dissertatiuncula ¶41, p. 27) all quote Descartes to the same effect. These are the texts that warrant our placing Descartes (along with Bacon) among Spinoza’s “sceptics” in chap. 5.

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now embraced by these theologians as proof that Meyer is no Cartesian: reason’s acknowledgment that there are things it cannot understand, yet must believe, and that divine authority overrides even our “clear and distinct ideas.” Ironically, one of these very texts was lifted from Descartes’s own writing and turned against him in the 1656 decree of Holland and West Frisia: that decree forbade the teaching of Descartes’s philosophy to the young.23 The critics frequently appeal to the principle of not mixing categories of discourse (a principle Spinoza will use in his own radical way): using philosophical categories in theology is an example of the fallacy of metabasis eis allo genos (shift into another kind).24 In this regard, the critics use Meyer as “exhibit A” in their case that the new philosophy is dangerous to young minds and to Christendom generally: look, they say, what happens when the new philosophy is applied to theology. Against Cartesian philosophy Against Descartes, the theologians cite several faith-threatening themes from his program: first, they charge that Descartes’s principle of methodical doubt (a principle adapted by Meyer to his own project) leads to atheism. The very principle of doubt, they aver, has its roots in the primal sin of Adam: we all know who first introduced doubt into the world, and who fell for it. According to Arnold, nobody advocated interpretation of scripture from princi23

24

Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶54, p. 38: the decree reads in part: “. . . quicquid in S. Scripturis a Deo revelatum sit, id tanquam omnium certissimum pro firmo & indubitato tenendum, etiamsi ratio humana, utcunque clare & distincte sibi videatur aliud praescribere: semper enim divinae authoritati soli plus tribuendum quam humano judicio”: “. . . whatever is revealed by God in Holy Scriptures is to be held to be firmly and undoubtedly the most certain of all, even if human reason seems to dictate something else for itself, however clearly and distinctly: for more is always to be attributed to divine authority alone than to human judgment.” Compare Descartes, Principles I.76 (as quoted in the preceding note). Cf., e.g., Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶28, p. 18: “Si Philosophia constituatur norma interpretationis Scripturae, tum & resolutio fidei nostrae fiet ultimo in judicium rationis, & confundentur principia disciplinarum, & metábasis committetur eis ’àllo génos, & maximi quique Philosophi optimi erunt Theologi”: “If philosophy is established as the norm for the interpretation of Scripture, then the resolution of our faith will finally be turned into a judgment of reason, the principles of the disciplines will be confused, [the fallacy of] ‘transformation into another genus’ will be committed, and the greatest philosophers will also be the best theologians.”


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ples of philosophy “except the Devil, who suggested to the first man the Cartesian principle of philosophizing, namely doubt, on the basis of which the divine warning not to eat was interpreted.”25 Comenius remarks that Satan can always seduce some Eve with visions of the arbor scientiae (tree of knowledge).26 The patron saint of this view is of course the early-third-century Latin theologian Tertullian, whose name is frequently invoked for his saying that philosophy is the “patriarch of heretics.”27 He had sternly warned against curiosity, and it is probably from him that the equation between novelty and heresy took root – an equation that prevailed throughout the Middle Ages and is echoed by our authors.28 Such a view of intellectual novelty worked against any impulse to adjust intellectually to historical change – or to use such language when one in fact did so adjust.29 Our theologians find heresy in novelty, but it is – paradoxically – always old heresy that they find as they attach ancient labels to new theological errors. Meyer is guilty on two counts: he (like Descartes) is a “Sadducee” because he proposes we accept the notion of a dead nature consisting of extension only, without vital spirit, and because he seems to deny the occult work of the Spirit in the church.30 Descartes is also “Pelagian” because he has vastly 25

26 27 28

29 30

Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶40, p. 27: “. . . nec quisquam Sanctorum aut veterum ex principiis Philosophiae hujus Scripturam interpretatus est, excepto Diabolo, qui primo homini Cartesianum philosophandi principium, dubitationem scilicet, suggessit . . .” Comenius, Judicium ¶9, p. 65. Tertullian, De Praescriptione Hereticorum, 7, quoted in Stevenson, A New Eusebius, 178. They live in a state of denial regarding the radical theological innovations introduced by the Reformation (in their view, going back to pure scriptural teaching does not constitute innovation). Maresius, Disputationes i.20: novelty is acceptable in philosophy, but a crime in othodox theology (“. . . in theologia orthodoxa nihil novari potest sine crimine”). He quotes Tertullian’s dictum (De Praes., 7) that curiosity comes to an end once one has heard the Gospel: “Nobis curiositate opus non est post Christum Iesum, nec inquisitione post Euangelium; Quum credimus nihil desideramus ultra credere; hoc enim primum credimus non esse quod ultra credere debeamus.” On the medieval precedent for this, see my “Theological Legitimation.” The Sadducees, a Jewish sect in ancient Israel, denied the resurrection of the body. Comenius the spiritualist advocates the existence of “vital spirits” in nature, applying the label Sadducee to Descartes (Judicium ¶34, p. 77), connecting this metaphysical doctrine with true theology (¶¶34 & 35, p. 77), since the “occult” work of the Spirit goes on both in nature and in the church. Arnold extends the thought: contemporary philosophers are worse than the Sadducees, denying Spirit “universally, leaving nothing in the world except thinking and extended things (that is, minds and bodies); and now they even seek to remove the Holy Spirit with his own occult operation from the church” (Dissertatiuncula ¶57, p. 42).

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overestimated the post-fall capabilities of the mind, and underestimated the consequences of sin.31 In this identification, Pelagius is made over into a rationalist who taught that “what reason denounces, authority is not able to vindicate.”32 A further theological criticism of Descartes is that he (like Galileo) had suggested that scripture speaks incorrectly about nature.33 Arnold follows this up, however, with a more interesting bit of news: mechanical experiments conducted by an Amsterdam clockmaker named Stephan Koes have proved that Descartes’s theories of nature were themselves seriously flawed. Koes had built a machine (something like a hand bicycle pump), which could both compress and rarify air without changing the size of the metal tube that contained it, disproving the Cartesian principle that apparently empty “space” did not differ from other material substances.34 So much for the claim that the clear and distinct ideas of reason were infallible. Another criticism of Descartes was that he eliminated teleology from philosophy, thus blinding himself in the study of nature and rendering human existence meaningless and futile. This contradicted scripture, which tells us that the world was made for and on account of man.35 It especially defied the historical–eschatological vision shared by Serarius and Comenius. In making this criticism of philosophy, Comenius exemplified the fact that the principle of 31

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Maresius, Disputationes i.26. Bekker (Admonitio v.13, pp. 78f.) corrects this error, pointing out that sin is an act of will, not intellect. Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶107, p. 257: “quod Ratio arguit non potest auctoritas vindicare.” I will not get into the complex question of Descartes’s alleged Pelagianism, a hotly contested issue at that time. In my sources, the concern is to reward Meyer’s high estimation of reason with an appropriate heretical tag, not to advance discussion of the issues concerned. Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶36, p. 24. Descartes’s stock explanation is that scriptural language is perfectly accommodated to the understanding of its readers – a view that Galileo expressed (“Letter,” p. 181). Arnold, Dissertatiuncula, Appendix ¶¶3–14. Because these simple mechanical experiments disproved Descartes’s conception of space, Arnold believed, they discredited his entire philosophy of nature. Comenius, Judicium ¶19, pp. 69f., citing Ps. 8 and Dt. 4.15. This point is important, because Spinoza would identify teleological thinking as the greatest of prejudices that hindered correct thinking about nature, and also constituted the basis of “superstition” (i.e., anthropomorphic religion). Arnold repeats Comenius’s charge, wondering what good Cartesian philosophy could be if it makes no reference to scripture, barely mentions the first cause, and denies us discussion of the ends of nature (Dissertatiuncula ¶59, p. 43).


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“separation” of philosophy and theology was in fact not separation but subordination of philosophy as ancilla theologiae – the handmaid of theology. So the principle of theological authority in the realm of philosophy remained intact: theology, based on the divine Word and Spirit, stood ready to assert itself in all realms ruled by mere human reason. Why philosophy can’t be “interpres scripturae” Plenty of arguments of a logical and rational nature can be raised against Meyer (as we see in the next chapter), but the critics in this group don’t generally raise them. Rather, they protest that philosophy cannot attain the sublimity of revealed mysteries, its competence being limited to matters subject to sense and reason.36 Most radically, Serarius from his eschatological perspective warns that God through his apostle condemns all the wisdom of this world – even the best.37 Furthermore, as Maresius points out, Meyer’s claim that his philosophical method provides persuasive demonstration of the correctness of an interpretation is false, since such persuasion is effected in the mind by God alone through persuasive testimonials, not through the medium of scientific arguments.38 Maresius 36

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Comenius, Judicium ¶37, p. 78: “. . . inferius non judicat de superiore . . . neque Sensus de Ratione, Ratio de Fide, hoc est Philosophia de Theologia, judicare poterit: sed vice versa”: “. . . the inferior does not judge the superior . . . [therefore] sense cannot judge reason, reason cannot judge faith, i.e., philosophy cannot judge theology, but the other way around.” Cf. Serarius, Responsio Praef., p. xiv. Serarius, Responsio, p. 29, referring to Paul’s condemnation (1 Cor. 1 & 2) of worldly wisdom: “manifesto patet, Apostolum . . . perstringere . . . simpliciter & absolute, sine ulla limitatione, omnem Mundi Sapientiam, etiam eminentissimorum Philosophorum, & non vulgarium sed principum etiam hujus seculi, perstringere”: “Obviously, the Apostle . . . reproaches all the wisdom of the world simply and absolutely, without any limitation, even that of the most eminent philosophers, and not of the commoners but even of the princes of this age.” Just as the sun wipes out the moon and the stars when it rises, so God “will abolish even true philosophy of the sort you [Meyer] have described, and the true wisdom of this world . . .”: “. . . abolebit etiam Deus veram Philosophiam qualem tu descripsisti, & veram hujus Mundi & principum hujus seculi Sapientiam” (p. 30). Maresius (Disputationes i.40, 42) contrasts arguments that are “artificialia & scientifica” with those that are “inartificialia & testificativa”. If a method such as Meyer suggests were legitimate, he adds, Christ and the apostles would have used it (i.42). Testimonials, to be persuasive, must be empowered by God’s spirit (unlike rational arguments whose force depends on reason alone).

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provides a list of questions that Meyer’s method cannot deal with satisfactorily but which require the divine persuasion of the spirit of faith: how to prove versus atheists, philosophers or, say, Muslims that scripture is the infallible word of God; versus Jews, that the New Testament refutes their mortalism; versus papists, that scripture contains the whole word of God and that scriptural authority depends on itself, not on the authority of the church.39 Further objecting to Meyer’s contention that the essential matter of scripture is contained in the abstract truths of philosophy, Comenius asserts that scripture teaches by example, not abstract precept. As a pedagogical theorist himself, he knows that “through precepts the way is long and hard; through examples brief and efficacious . . . has not God, to whom no teacher is comparable, understood this?”40 Drawing on the medieval method of discerning the various “spiritual” senses of scripture, Comenius adds that these scriptural examples are signifiers, providing the occasion for drawing spiritually instructive analogies to contemporary situations: because God is eternal and wishes his word to be eternal, we must think of him as foreseeing all ages from his eternity, and having chosen especially from events of prior ages certain histories which he wished to be signifiers which could prefigure similar events in later ages, functioning as a mirror [of those events].41

For Comenius, then, scriptural discourse is history teaching by typological example. Accordingly, he enthusiastically endorses Serarius’s golden calf as the master-example for what has repeatedly occurred in the church every time a new “idol of mammon” appears, whether the papacy setting itself up as Christ’s vicar or now “this new idol of reason and philosophy.”42 39

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Maresius, Disputationes i.34. The list of things Meyer’s method cannot do goes on: viz., that the original authentic biblical texts survive intact, that all versions must be tested against these originals, that these books ought to be translated into vernacular languages. Comenius, Judicium ¶4, p. 62. Ibid.: “Nempe quia Deus aeternus est, & Verbum suum aeternum esse voluit, non aliud cogitandum est, quam Illum ex aeternitate sua omnia secula prospectantem, ex priorum seculorum actis eas potissimum historias elegisse, consignatasque voluisse, quae posterioribus seculis similiter eventura praefigurare, speculique loco esse, possent.” Ibid. ¶5, p. 63. As an heir of the tradition of interpretation that stemmed from Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), Comenius sees the distinctiveness of scripture not so much in its infallible text but in its allegorizeability – its capacity to illumine spiritually “by example,” i.e., by typological interpretation, every era till the end time. He quotes the classic biblical


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Concluding this part of our discussion, we note that the idea of a complete separation of faith from worldly wisdom and knowledge (for which Spinoza is famous) appears first as an invention of the theologians on the right. Like Spinoza, they separate faith (fides) and knowledge (scientia) into categorically different fields or types of perception. The sense of scripture is not demonstrable by speaking philosophically, because philosophical demonstration is directed to knowlege (scientia) while indication of the sense of scripture is directed to faith (fides).43

. . . Except that in each case the implications they draw from that separation are radically at odds: the theologians mean to subordinate knowledge to the authority of faith; Spinoza, rather than simply reversing the relationship, does not subordinate theology (which he defines as scripture, or conclusions drawn therefrom), but rules it simply irrelevant to knowledge. The orthodox will freely admit that some Christian doctrines appear absurd to reason, but with their privileged access to revealed knowledge, that is of no consequence. The result is that religious beliefs are suspended over the abyss of unbelief on the single thread of sheer authority, no longer supported by evidence or reasoning at all.44 One could find all these ideas in older theological works, but perhaps never so radically stated. Arnold, for example, embraces the view of St. Paul that in the light of reason, Christian claims are sheer stultitia.45 He says rightly that if the miracles and mysteries of the faith were subjected to the judgment of philosophy they would not be believed.46 So we have not harmony but opposition between 43

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texts supporting this, such as i Cor. 10.11: “Whatever things happened of old happened in figura, and were written for our learning.” Maresius, Disputationes ii.14. As Arnold has it, “proportion (proportio) is necessary between the norm and that which it regulates (regula, regulata), but there is no proportion between philosophy as norm and the things of scripture as normed” (Dissertatiuncula ¶24, pp. 15f.). Echoing the Nominalists and Luther. On Luther, cf. Scholder, Modern Critical Theology, 100: Luther’s categorical separation of theological and philosophical/rational discourse meant that theology “. . . in no circumstances may be made philosophically comprehensible.” Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶61, p. 46: If reason is norm, we will have to accuse God of stultitia for failing to find a simpler way to remedy sin than by sacrificing his innocent son, vesting our hope for salvation in the death of another. Arnold is merely glossing Paul, 1 Cor. 2.14. Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶28, pp. 18f.: “Si ad Philosophiae judicium exigenda sunt, quae credenda veniunt, neque miracula stupenda, Dei, Christi, neque dogmata, quae rationi

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theological truths and those that can be generated by reason or from ordinary knowledge. As Vogelsangh observes, “There are not a few things in scripture that can by no means be investigated by natural sagacity of reason, and to that extent they are opposed to other truths . . .”47 The more that idea was stressed, however, the more it was necessary to invoke a second knowledge that was not discovered but came down by way of authority and that was entirely “autocratic”48 – independent of any rule of reason or its laws. When such authority spoke, even “clear and distinct ideas” had to yield; the proper role of philosophy was to serve as “handmaid” to authority, by analogy with the relationship between Hagar and Sara. Straying from that role, philosophy becomes the whore of Prov. 7 who tempts every young man coming along.49 These ideas were reinforced by the doctrine of divine authorship (auctor, auctoritas) of scripture and the accompanying notion that the amanuenses of the Spirit were very ordinary folk indeed. As Serarius reminds Meyer, Christ did not pick philosophers, but idiotes piscatores (simple fishermen), rude and unlearned, to lead into all the truth by the Spirit.50 This notion was accompanied by the doctrine that scripture was clear enough so that any reasonably sane reader could extract “saving knowledge” from it. As Arnold boldly suggests, the idiotes get it right more often than the most

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footnote 46 (ocnt.) paradoxa videntur, qualia sunt de virginis Mariae impraegnatione, de resurrectione mortuorum &c. credenda erunt”: “If the articles of faith are subjected to the judgment of Philosophy, then neither the stupendous miracles of God and Christ, nor the dogmas which seem paradoxes to reason (such as the impregnation of the Virgin Mary, the resurrection of the dead etc.) will be believed.” Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶75, p. 152: “. . . in sacra scriptura veritates haud paucae traduntur, quae naturali sagacitate rationis investigari neutiquam potuerunt, manifestum est, eas hactenus etiam reliquis omnino veritatibus opponi.” Again, Spinoza will echo this view repeatedly, but with contrary implications. Vogelsangh (Contra libellum ¶103, p. 248) refers to the Spirit as the “autocratic” interpreter of scripture (“Quia vero Scriptura vox est Sanctissimi Spiritus, hinc & illum quoque Scripturarum interpretem percommode dici supremum & autocratoricum”: “But scripture is the voice of the most Holy Spirit, hence he is also very rightly called the supreme and autocratic interpreter”). Cf. Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶29, p. 19, invoking the Spirit’s authority in lieu of entering into debate with Meyer about matters which seem “impossible and contrary to one’s own reason” (“propriae rationi videbantur impossibilia & 49 contraria”). A favorite image in Serarius, Responsio: e.g., pp. xvi, 8, 21. Serarius, Responsio pp. 55f.


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subtle philosophers.51 This was perhaps a high price to pay to save scripture and the sui interpres from the philosophers. Ironically, the logical implication of the commentators’ opposition between philosophy and theology tended to undercut their own authority as interpreters by putting the “simple believer” in the driver’s seat and reducing religious doctrine to its lowest common denominator – an implication that Spinoza would exploit to the full. Overall, then, we see the growing dichotomy among philosophy/science/reason, operating solely with publicly available assumptions from which persuasive evidence and arguments could be generated, and theology’s privileging of both text and interpeter, claiming not rational or argumentative but charismatic certainty – certainty that depended on the activity of the Holy Spirit – regarding saving knowledge. From this perspective, theologians would be less inclined than the liberals to attempt harmonization between matters of reason and faith, nor did they believe apologetics could achieve anything without divine intervention. agains t interpretation If scripture was the repository (depositum) and delivery system of “saving knowledge” accessible to every Christian without any outside aid, its interpretation had to be at least easy, at best unnecessary. As Maresius writes: since scripture is not nor can be a norm of faith and morals to any mortal (as it evidently is) unless he understands and knows it, and can apply it where needed, it must necessarily be sufficiently understood from its own self, nor must another norm [such as philosophy] be sought through which it is explained.52 51

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Arnold, Dissertatiuncula ¶32, pp. 21f.: “. . . ab omni aevo id deprehensum est, idiotas, & caetera ignavos [sic: ignaros?] homines ac simplices, nudo dei verbo contentos, longe fuisse aptiores ad credendum mysteriis fidei, quam subtilissimos philosophos”: “. . . from every age it is discovered that the ignorant, and other unlearned and simple men, content with the naked word of God, have been far more fit to believe the mysteries of the faith than the most subtle philosophers.” Cf. ¶43, p. 29. Deriding Meyer’s claim that philosophy when rightly used is infallible, Maresius asks: who will be the infallible interpreter of philosophy? (Disputationes vi.16). Maresius, Disputationes ii.12. This line of argument is meant to be reinforced by the notion that scripture is more like a lawbook than a book of philosophy (e.g., i.36).

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Thus it is not surprising that any complication of the process would be heartily unwelcome. Meyer is dreaming, Maresius says, if he holds that “scripture is no norm, and performs the office of norm no further than as he discovers the genuine sense of it through sufficient [philosophical] interpretation.”53 For Maresius, interpretation itself is suspect in the case of scripture, since God has provided a self-interpreting text. In it, Vogelsangh adds, God has accommodated his language so that what is necessary to be known for salvation is “easily understood.” For he so faithfully moderates his own statements that by speaking he interprets himself, nor is there any place for further interpretation, or indeed is anything to be sought outside the boundaries of scriptures. Whatever sort of interpretation is accessed from outside scripture is not suitable for establishing our faith. Only God’s interpretation avails with the force of law for our consciences.54

Here is a masterpiece of mystification: not only did it relieve Vogelsangh of responsibility for formulating any coherent theory or method of interpretation; it also would dignify any reading (interpretation) its advocates might offer as God’s word itself.55 For all these writers on the right, interpretation was something to be minimized – a human operation applied to obscure texts. But since scripture was not obscure, interpretation only intruded undue complexity and human distortion. Therefore interpretation was 53

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Ibid. ii.12: “. . . Scriptura nihil normet, sive officio normae non ultra fungatur, quam prout genuinus, illius sensus per sufficientem interpretationem innotescit.” Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶78, p. 168: “. . . Deus Ecclesiae suae sic in verbo suo locutus est, ut intelligi facile possit; certe quoad ea, quae necessaria scitu sunt ad aeternam salutem. . . .quia . . . ita firme sua temperavit, ut loquendo semet ipsum interpretetur, nec ulteriori deinceps interpretationi sit locus: enimvero nulli, quae petatur extra pomoeria Scripturarum. . . .Extra Scripturam quicquid arcessitur interpretationis, idoneum non est fidem nostram constabilire. Dei solius interpretatio vim legis obtinere valet apud nostras conscientias.” Therefore, to hunt for some norm outside scripture, such as an autonomous interpretation or norm for interpreting (interpretationem autocratoricam, sive interpretandi normam), is to search by erring (errando quaerere; ibid.). Hobbes explained why not scripture, but only some interpretation of it, could properly be referred to as “God’s word” (Man and Citizen, 348 f.: “. . . it is not the dead voice or letter of the word of God, which is the canon of Christian doctrine, but a true and genuine determination. For the mind is not governed by Scriptures, unless they be understood. There is need therefore of an interpreter to make the Scriptures canon, and hence follows one of these two things; that either the word of the interpreter is the word of God, or that the canon of Christian doctrine is not the word of God. The last of these must necessarily be false . . .”


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suspect as the importation of something alien – the human element, or “human traditions” – into the pristine original meaning intended by the divine Author. Suspicion of interpretation as such is clearly implied where Vogelsangh insists that divine truth can be accessed from no place but scripture, “because to infer a meaning from elsewhere is nothing less than to interpret.”56 This is the implication they drew from the principle scriptura sui interpres. Divine authorship rendered scripture capable of performing whatever miracles it took to be “its own interpreter.” Although different people frequently interpreted the same text in opposing ways, the cause was human error, not scripture. It was a deposit of perfectly clear meanings, its perspicuitas an absolute attribute,57 Maresius insisted. Maresius claims that extracting the native sense of scripture is not difficult, “since the very genuine meaning of any text whatever of particular controversy easily becomes apparent (facile patescat), whether from the subject matter, or from the antecedents and consequences [of the text], or from comparison with other places.”58 If one were to ask how, if there are no infallible interpreters, we would know that someone had interpreted a text right, Maresius offers the analogy of our being able to know where someone is from by the way he talks: no interpretation . . . ought to be received as infallible, but may be accepted by each individual as he notices the measure of divine gifts and from the light of faith [recognizes] that this is a legitimate and true [interpretation], so that he can say to whoever . . . proposes . . . it . . ., “Truly you are a Galilean . . . since your speech gives you away” (Mt. 27.73; Mk. 14.70).59

Without a trace of irony Maresius thus offers an extremely subtle interpretation of a text in order to make his case against interpretation. His point, though, is that the individual Christian is free to 56

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Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶79, p. 174 (my italics): “neque video, quinam veri sensus effatorus divinorum ullo modo demonstrari queant, citra notas ejuscemodi petitas ex ipsa scriptura. Nam aliunde sensus inferre nihil minus est quam interpretari.” This is a classic orthodox statement of the orthodox principle that scripture “interprets itself.” Maresius, Disputationes iii.9. This against Meyer’s thesis that scripture, like any other document, is clear only relativè – that is, in relation to the mind of the one reading it. Ibid. ii.13 (my italics); cf. iv.13: the prophets and apostles still speak through scripture, 59 even though they are long dead. Maresius, Disputationes iv.14.

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make his own judgment about any interpretation of scripture (within the bounds of orthodoxy, of course – itself evolved over centuries of interpretation of scripture). Meanwhile, those who emphasized the work of the Spirit rather than the self-interpreting text also minimized the problems raised by Meyer. Serarius, who often sounds like a Quaker of non-rationalist persuasion, tends to answer every difficulty that Meyer raises with a single refrain: “I betake myself to the true norm of all interpretation and all truth, namely the Holy Spirit himself.”60 But despite these attempts to dismiss objections, Meyer had revealed the complexity of interpreting texts, even for the most pious reader. One particularly weak spot that Meyer identified and exploited was the orthodox authors’ disagreement and confusion about the relation between two fundamental claims, viz., that scripture “interprets itself ” and (technically contradictory) that “the Spirit” was the interpreter of scripture, albeit “through scripture.” The necessity of the “internal testimony of the Holy Spirit” meant, Meyer insisted, that scripture did not really “interpret itself ” as the theologians claimed.61 Meyer had dealt with both sides of this interpretive dilemma in detail, and his critics diverged in their responses. The divergence arose over how to parry Meyer’s application of the commonplace thesis that any author is the best interpreter of his own words. For Vogelsangh, Serarius et al., the “interpreter” in question was God; such was the proper application of 2 Pet. 1.20 (“Nullam prophetiam scripturae esse propriae explicationis”: no prophecy of scripture is its own interpreter). As we saw, Meyer had argued that the passage justified using philosophy as a norm external to the text: because God the author of scripture was also the author of philosophy, philosophical interpretation was in fact an instance of God “interpreting his own words.” Against Meyer, Serarius now asserts that “the same Spirit that dictated these words [of scripture] must 60

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Serarius, Responsio, p. 41: “. . . ad veram omnis Interpretationis & omnis Veritatis Normam, nempe Spiritum S. ipsum, me confero . . .” Serarius, however, heatedly denies that any orthodox theologian claimed that scripture interpreted itself all by itself – “as though it would open the genuine meaning of the Holy Spirit per se to any reader who by his own natural light alone studied it ever so earnestly . . .”: “quasi illa per se cuilibet lectori, modo lumine suo naturali studiosissime illam scrutetur, verum Spiritus Sancti sensum aperiret . . .” (Responsio, p. 47).


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also interpret them, for since he alone is the author of scripture, to him alone belongs the interpretation of them.”62 As we can see, the disagreement between Serarius and Meyer has now reduced itself merely to naming the interpreter: philosophy or the Spirit. Except that Serarius’s Spirit apparently excused him from offering any theory or method alternative to Meyer’s. By contrast with Serarius, Maresius more literally takes the Bible as its own interpreter, reasoning that since scripture infallibly sets forth and explicates (proponat & explicet) the sense and mind of God, that sense is none other than is sought in scripture itself and from it, because anyone is the best interpreter of himself and his own words.63

In his view, scriptural clarity was so effective that it rendered interpretation practically unnecessary. The Spirit’s work was necessary only to guarantee that the text was infallible and to provide a “saving” embrace or grasp of the words, which seems implicitly at least to be distinguished from a bare understanding of them.64 Fear of “enthusiasm” – always unpredictable and anarchic – made all the orthodox nervous, but even for the biblicists there was no avoiding some attention to the subjective aspect of interpretation. According to their own arguments, scripture was “absolutely” 62

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Ibid. p. 22: “. . . idem ille Spiritus qui haec dictavit verba, etiam illa interpretari debet: quum enim ille solus S. Scripturarum autor sit, ipsi soli earum Interpretatio competet.” Maresius, Disputationes i.39: Cf. iii.9, where perspicuitas is made an absolute attribute of scripture, “especially in things necessary for salvation, about which God wills to edify his own through it.” Again (ibid.), “its utterance ought to be clear absolutely and in itself, whose author wills and is able so clearly to explain his intention that it is able to be understood, which no one in his right mind will deny with regard to God speaking in scripture.” Scripture speaks in “human style” (stylo hominis) (ibid.); moreover, “common sense” is sufficient to discern when scriptural statements (e.g., anthropomorphisms with reference to God) are to be taken figuratively (iii.16). Maresius says, for example (Disputationes iv.8–10), that we cannot absorb the saving truth without grace; that the Gospel doesn’t persuade by argument but by grace, as even the case of Paul at Athens showed: “Nec vis & efficacia veritatis divinae sita est in persuasoriis humanae sapientiae verbis, sed in demonstratione Spiritus ac potentiae”: 1 Cor. 2.4. Most of our sources in this chapter do not make an explicit distinction between “saving” interpretation (that which spiritually “graces” the reader with saving knowledge) and correct reading (simply getting the meaning of the sentences right). Their exclusively religious use of the text foreclosed interest in such a distinction, except when discussing the unregenerate. However, such a distinction would be critical for Wolzogen (next chapter). He raised the point that the “unregenerate” had to be able to understand the scriptural message (or the apostolic preaching in its time) in order to receive the Gospel.

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clear, like the light of the sun – whether the reader “got it” or not65 – and therefore the entire explanation (and fault) of interpretive disagreement lay with the readers. Rather than confront the difficulties of interpretation or the propensity for innocent error, the biblicists were quick to blame the conflict of interpretations on “sin,” indicating a fault that required a spiritual rather than an intellectual remedy for the subject-reader.66 To answer the question of why some interpreters’ minds were so muddled while others’ were not, the theologians fell back on the tried-and-true strategy of accusing their opponents of moral turpitude or, implicitly, blaming God (they lacked grace). claims of the holy spirit Those who rejected philosophy most vehemently did not necessarily vote for bibliolatry as the alternative. Serarius routinely makes statements that would sit easier with the Quakers than with the biblicists. For example, he boldly asserts that the Spirit worked long before there was any scripture and would continue to work long after scripture was gone, and that therefore scripture was not (as Meyer himself had stated) the “foundation” of theology.67 Plumbing the full typological meaning of the golden-calf story, Serarius is criti65

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As we have seen, Meyer had exposed the falsity of this analogy: the sun gives off its lifegiving rays whether they are seen or not, but the Bible emits no salutary meanings unless it is read and understood. Maresius ignored the force of this criticism and repeated the analogy anyway: Disputationes iv.2.: like scripture, the sun remains perspicuous in itself even if astronomers obscure its true nature. E.g., Maresius, Disputationes ii.18, citing Tertullian’s charge that philosophy is the “patriarch of heresy”; cf. iii.9, iv.4; Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶62, p. 117. Serarius, Responsio, p.xv: Theology is “a certain knowledge (scientia certa) of God and divine things, ingenerate through the Holy Spirit in the soul of man, which, as it was before the books of the Old and New Testament, so also it was with them who lacked these books; and will be after these books shall have perished”: “. . . certa de Deo rebusque divinis Scientia, per Spiritum Sanctum in anima hominis ingenerata, quae ut ante libros Vet. & N. Test. fuit; sic & fuit penes illos qui his libris caruerunt; eritque postquam libri hi perierint.” Samuel Fisher (d. 1665), intellectual leader of the Quakers and graduate of Oxford University, expresses the sentiment often in Rustick’s Alarm: the inner word is the touchstone of religious truth, “which was so from the beginning of the world, 2000 years before the letter was” (Part iii, p. 66; see my “Rise and Fall,” 22–24). Serarius, less nervous than Meyer about being labeled an “enthusiast,” asserts that the Quakers’ problem is not that they speak of “the light and spirit and internal illuminations” but only that “they boast of a certain spirit who carries them above the scriptures . . .”: (Responsio, p. 52). But he agrees with the Quakers that there is still prophecy, and thinks that Meyer’s criticism is too harsh.


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cal not only of philosophy but of confessionalism, that is, the tendency of the state churches and their university theologians to produce and idolize their confessions, catechisms and doctrinal formulae as containing the one and only true sense of God’s words.68 Serarius insists that the Holy Spirit alone – not scripture – is the infallible interpreter of scripture, and the norm of interpretation.69 Thus he ascribes the supreme right and authority of interpretation alone to the Holy Spirit speaking in scriptures; and to establish the true meaning of scripture, full conviction of which proceeds internally from the Spirit alone, and externally from the scripture itself taken in its best sense.

Thus it is to the Spirit, rather than to scripture, that infallibility is properly ascribed.70 It is not that Serarius abandons scriptural authority; rather, he wants to insist that no proper interpretation of it at all can take place severed from the work of the Spirit. Thus, the only proper meaning of the slogan “scripture interprets itself ” is “the Holy Spirit speaking in scripture.”71 Serarius typically 68

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Serarius, Responsio, p. viii, a part of his historical review and lamentation over the church’s fabrication and worship of one “golden calf ” after another. Ibid. p. 40: “. . . we do not say that [scripture] is always the certain and infallible norm of interpretation, but we grant that prerogative alone to the Holy Spirit”: “certam & infallibilem semper esse hanc Interpredandi normam, non dicimus, sed praerogativam illam soli Spiritui Sancto attribuimus.” As norm for interpreting scripture: “I acknowledge no other Spirit than the one from whom the holy men of God [i.e., the biblical authors] have spoken, and by whom the overseers of the primitive church were filled; nor [do I acknowledge] any other norm of interpretation than that same Spirit” (p. 56): “. . . ego alium Spiritum non agnosco, quam ex quo locuti sunt Sancti Dei Viri, & quo replebantur primitivae Ecclesiae Antistites; nec aliam S. Scripturas interpretandi normam, quam eundem illum Spiritum.” Serarius, Responsio, p. 37 (quoting David Tilenus, an Arminian Calvinist theologian, professor first at Sedan and then Saumur; d. 1633), as representative of the proper opinion: “Summum interpretandi jus atque authoritatem . . . soli Spiritui Sancto in Scripturis loquenti vindicare: Stat vereque verum Scripturae sensum, quoad internam quidem plerophorian [in Greek] ab eo solo proficisci: quoad externam vero persuasionem ex ipsa Scriptura optime sumi.” Serarius repeatedly uses the formula “spiritus sanctus in scriptura loquens (the Holy Spirit speaking in scripture)” to interpret the formula “scripture its own interpreter”: Responsio, pp. 46, 47 (twice). For “insofar as in scripture the same Spirit speaks everywhere, and expresses his intention in one place more clearly and to our capacity than in another, to that extent we properly say that scripture (i.e., the Holy Spirit speaking in scripture) is its own interpreter”: “quatenus in Scriptura S. idem Spiritus Sanctus ubique loquitur, mentemque suam uno in loco clarius, & magis ad captum nostrum, exprimit, quam in alio, eatenus non immerito dicimus, Scripturam (id est Spiritum S. in Scriptura loquentem) esse sui-ipsius interpretem” (p. 46).

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attaches the work of the Spirit to the act of reading scripture, but not entirely – e.g., the Spirit, “speaking either in scripture or in the hearts of the faithful,” is the certain norm for interpreting.72 The question urged by Meyer as he pinpointed this muddle was how does the Spirit interpret scripture, and how do Christians know when this is taking place? The long-established answer of the Catholic church was, of course, that the Spirit had long ago institutionalized itself, interpreting scripture through the magisterium of the church, which was endowed with infallibility (the certain charisma of truth, as Irenaeus said). Christians know because the church tells them. What, now, after 150 years of the conflict of interpretations, was the Protestant alternative? privileging religious experience First, against both Meyer and the papacy, Meyer’s critics tried to uphold the classic Protestant position that there was no infallible human person or group who interprets scripture for others, whether pope or philosopher (although Protestant creeds and confessions and synods had been doing so for more than a century). Infallibility belongs to the Spirit alone (Serarius insists), who interprets for us “either immediately, opening our hearts for the understanding of scripture, or mediately by explicating scripture by scripture.”73 Whether one’s own personal interpretation is in any sense infallible is not very clear, but our authors display a tendency to appropriate opportunistically Descartes’s notion of “clear and distinct perception” to characterize their own separate and privileged realm of knowledge independent of philosophy. Thus Maresius draws a careful distinction between general scientific knowledge and the privileged knowledge granted to the faithful:

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Ibid. p. 38; cf. p. 42, where he distinguishes between the Spirit working “mediately through scriptures or immediately through his internal operation speaking in the hearts of the faithful.” Such unmediated inspiration would be suspected of “enthusiasm” by strict biblicists. According to Meinsma (Spinoza, 278 n. 62), Maresius in fact attacked Serarius for taking this position. Serarius, Responsio, p. 47: “. . . certam & infallibilem S. Scripturae interpretationem soli Spiritui S. sive immediate corda nostra ad intelligendum Scripturas aperienti; sive mediate scripturam per Scripturas explicanti tribuamus . . .”


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although clear and distinct perception of divine things and things pertaining to eternal salvation is not given as scientific (scientifica) and from the light of reason, nevertheless clear and distinct perception is given of those same things, of which the pious are most conscious in themselves, from the light of faith and divine revelation . . . this is a privilege of Christ’s faithful.74

So it is the individual Christian, in the very act of devout reading, who “is eo ipso its interpreter for himself.”75 The believer may be confident about this, for scripture promises that he who wants to do God’s will knows his doctrine is from God (Jn. 7.17). Therefore, Arnoldus infers, “whoever wants to know the mind of Christ in his words, let him strive to conform his whole life to the teaching of Christ, and he will soon have his own illuminator with him.”76 Even though such private illumination is neither demonstrable (in the philosophic or scientific sense) nor transferable (because it is divinely granted only to elect individuals), one can testify to others the grounds for one’s own conviction, which may be persuasive (presumably, if they too are among the elect). Looking ahead to Spinoza, it seems that the logic of this position – the rejection of infallible human interpreters and the right of each Christian to expect divine support for his or her sincere interpretation – would have to have led to a politics of toleration. There is no way it could consistently lead to the sort of doctrinal unity aspired to by the authors of the various Protestant confessions. What is emerging here – the modern appeal to religious experience – brings the whole “disengagement” issue into sharp focus. In this process of epistemological self-segregation, the critical 74

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Maresius, Disputationes i.24: “licet enim non detur clara & distincta perceptio rerum divinarum & ad salutem aeternam spectantium, scientifica & ex lumine rationis, datur tamen earundem clara & distincta perceptio, cujus pii sunt sibi maxime conscii ex lumine fidei & revelationis divinae . . . hoc est namque privilegium Christi fidelium.” Ibid. i.39: “. . . ita eo ipso est sibi ipsi illius interpres.” This is a formulation that Spinoza can be comfortable with – albeit for his own purposes. Arnoldus, Dissertatiuncula ¶65, p. 51; my italics: “Quisquis ergo Christi mentem cognoscere vult in verbis ejus, is Vitam suam totam conformare studeat doctrinae Christi, & habebit mox illuminatorem suum secum.” Cf. ¶66, p. 51, where Arnold invokes the authority of the fourth-century Greek theologian John Chrysostom, who speaks of immediate illumination by the Spirit: “statim illustrat mentem nostram, suumque fulgorem largitur, & pro sapientia illa sua, mire industria, omnem veram doctrinam animae nostrae inserit”: “He immediately illumines our mind, dispenses his own glory, and in service of his wisdom, by a wondrous activity, plants every true doctrine in our soul.”

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operative distinction becomes that between the universality and generality of demonstrable philosophical or scientific knowledge on one side, and the particularity of “experiential” knowledge as a special “privilege” divinely granted to believers on the other.77 Meyer had argued that his philosophical method, because it dealt in universally acknowledged truths, could transcend the impasses of particularistic confessionalism. But the theologians would not engage the philosophers’ interest in what was universally true, including the universal characteristics of language, books, reading etc. – all products of intellectual analysis. They simply confronted it with appeals to the privilege and particular “knowledge” of religious belief. Thus Serarius, despite his criticism of confessionalism, and despite his agreement with the Quakers that the Word “enlightens every man coming into the world” (Jn. 1.9),78 still appeals to a Christian experience, charging Meyer with denying it simply because he does not share it and therefore consigns it to mere “feeling and imagination.” Serarius draws on his reading of the mystics to counter with a description of the daily “senses” or “felt” but incommunicable experience of some believers, who sense a supernatural and heavenly something, and daily perceive it even now, because what they feel they either cannot grant to your [natural] perception, or ought not. The result is that you [Meyer] can notice in them nothing but some natural affect of the soul, or the fruition of an imaginary good, and from that a certain natural happiness arising in the mind. Therefore [you say] there exists in man no supernatural or heavenly entity, [and] whatever the saints put forth of refined gold of spiritual illumination or divine revelation you criticize as consisting more in affect and imagination than in the thing itself.79 77

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The Spirit is received only by God’s gift of faith, not through rational persuasion (Maresius, Disputationes i.40). Those who pressed this point usually neglected to distiguish the ordinary process of understanding the meanings of sentences from the efficacious, saving understanding of scripture granted only by the Spirit. Advancing this discussion would require such a distinction as Wolzogen would provide (see chap. 4). Serarius, Responsio, Praef., p. vi. This was the standard Quaker interpretation of the passage as well. Serarius, Responsio, p. 54: “qui supernaturale quid & Coeleste senserant, & quotidie adhuc persentiscunt, quia quod sentiunt tibi percipiendum dare vel non possunt, vel non debent; adeo ut in iis tu nihil aliud animadvertere possis quam affectum aliquem animae naturalem, aut Imaginarii fruitionem boni, ex eaque in animo exortam laetitiam quandam naturalem. Ergo non datur supernaturale & Caeleste quid in homine, quicquid de obryzo Spiritualis Illuminationis aut Divinae revelationis Auro profiteantur Sancti; magis in affectu & imaginatione quam in re ipsa consistere deprehendisti.”


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Vogelsangh also affirms the reality of “experience” of the Spirit when explaining how we understand scripture, and extols the “happy souls who experience in their hearts the vivifying suggestion of that interpreter who has his chair in heaven [not in Rome, in any earthly office, or in Meyer’s philosophical mind].”80 Serarius vehemently rejects Meyer’s naturalistic reinterpretation of the work of the Spirit as the work of reason. We recall that Meyer said in effect that the modus operandi of the Spirit is now reason. Meyer appealed to certain patristic and medieval writers to support his view, but Serarius would not let him get away with it. He replied that Clement, Beda, Anselm and Aquinas seem in some fashion to allude somewhat to your meaning, but none of them held that that knowledge, “which reason [as you write], suffused by its own natural light and acumen of intellect, extracts from immovable and per se known principles through legitimate consequences,” is the same as that true wisdom which the Apostle here opposes to wisdom of the world.81

Therefore, correcting Meyer’s thesis simply by substituting his own words (italicized) for Meyer’s, Serarius asserts that no one is able to be fully certain of the true sense of the sacred letters, from wherever it is drawn and by whatever sort of method it is investigated, unless he perceives the truth clearly and distinctly by the supernatural light of the Spirit and is intimately conscious of that perception within his own self.82 80

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Vogelsangh, Contra libellum, ¶83, p. 186; my italics: “. . . quia Deus exteriorem verbi doctrinam interiore Spiritus Sancti virtute prosequitur, atque corda suorum pulsat, & mentes aperit, ut scripturas intelligant, & arcana sua gratiosumque consilium instillat medullitus, unde animi eorum perfruantur laetissima consolatione. O Felices animas, quae corditus experiuntur vivificam suggestionem illius Interpretis, qui cathedram in coelis habet.” Serarius, Responsio, p. 31: “. . . videntur aliquo modo alludere non nihil ad sensum tuum; sed nullus horum Notitiam illam, ‘quam Ratio, naturali sui intellectus lumine & acumine suffulta, ex immotis et per se cognotis principiis per legitimas Consequentias eruit,’ pro vera ista Sapientia habuerunt, quam opponit heic Apostolus Sapientiae Mundi.” I have inserted quotation marks to indicate where Serarius is quoting Meyer’s definition of “philosophy” (PSI v.2, p. 40 – already quoted by Serarius on his p. 8 and again on p. 34). Spinoza thus appears to be using a commonplace expression of method when he likens the interpretation of scripture to the study of nature, deriving “ex ea [i.e., from scripture] tanquam ex certis datis & principiis mentem authorum Scripturae legitimis consequentiis concludere . . .” (TTP vii, 98.22/141; my italics). More on this in chap. 5, and Spinoza’s clear alternative to both Serarius and Meyer. Serarius, Responsio, p. 47: he is quoting Meyer (PSI xiv.1, p. 89) but substituting the italicized words (my italics) for Meyer’s: “. . . quod nullus veri S. Literarum sensus,

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Serarius thus identifies the central issue of biblical interpretation as the radical difference between the universal operation of natural reason and the particular actions of the Spirit. Meyer required the universalist standard because only general arguments, he believed, could compel intellectual assent and persuade everyone. Serarius responds by telling him he needs the Spirit. So the impasse and distance are deepened. Serarius does not acknowledge that claims resting on religious experience as he describes it are inherently private and therefore a symptom of, rather than a solution to, the problem at hand. But this dimension of the debate, which focused on the inner sources and resources of knowledge, bears close watching, since both spiritualist and rationalist sought the ground of truth within, and the difference between them was narrow, as we have already seen. The issue carries through to Spinoza via the liberals (and perhaps the Quakers), who examine this tension more closely and assign a much larger role to reason (next chapter). the “objectively” perfect bible For these authors, history – the human history of the Bible – was theologically irrelevant and is not mentioned. Whatever its “human” history, the book was ultimately authored and preserved by God, perfect and incomparable in every respect. This doctrine was typically proved in circular fashion out of scripture itself.83 But theologians sometimes also offered the idea – though perhaps only rhetorically – that the Bible’s “divinity” would be evident to anyone who gave it close scrutiny. Thus Vogelsangh argues that the

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footnote 82 (cont.) undeconque etiam ille hauriatur, & qualicunque Methodo investigetur, plenissime queat esse certus, nisi lumine Spiritus supernaturali [Meyer has naturali intellectus lumine illius] veritatem clare atque distincte perceperit, atque illium apud semetipsum perceptionis intime conscius fuerit.” E.g., Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶48, p. 85: “The sacred penmen [nb: not “authors”] explicitly teach and confess that what they themselves have written has been written by God the author”: “Sacri Scriptores exertis verbis inculcant atque protestantur, sese quod scripserunt auctore Deo scripsisse.” Maresius uses the same argument against the Catholics, seeking to counter their insistence that scripture gets its authority from the church by saying that “no right or authority is ceded to the church which is not derived (arcessatur) from scriptures” (Maresius, Disputationes ii.6).


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fair reader will realize that no mere creature could have produced the sort of wisdom contained in the Bible; that once the evidence is examined, it is not hard to discover that it is an . . . uncontaminated deposit of divine wisdom . . . for indeed, whether you attend to the subject matter, or the character of the writing, or the writing agents, or the effects and circumstances of the scriptures, the obvious arguments are innumerable to which the souls of the faithful beneficially acquiesce; indeed even carnal men can be convinced that they are nothing other than the very Word of God . . .84

This very challenge, though rhetorically offered, would be accepted and exploited by Spinoza in the preface to the Tractatus. For the anti-papal churches, the clarity and sufficiency of scripture were its two necessary characteristics. “Perspicuitas,” Maresius explains, “is an absolute attribute of scripture, not merely relative [to the one reading it], especially in things necessary for salvation”; therefore it requires no interpres.85 This fundamental axiom of the reformers was the starting point of the “objectivists.”86 The perfect clarity of scripture meant that the literal meaning (which included commonsense grasp of metaphors etc.) was the one and true (intended) meaning. All our authors insist against Meyer that each text has only one intended meaning. Maresius states it as follows: 84

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Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶48, p. 86; my italics: “. . . difficile uti non sit castissimam & incontaminatam divinae sapientiae traducem disnoscere, modo mens omnino laeva non fuerit . . .Enimvero sive materiam, sive scribendi characterem, sive ministros actuarios, aut effecta vel adjuncta Scripturarum attendere libeat, innumera obvia sunt argumenta, quibus animi fidelium salutariter acquiescant; imo quibus homines etiam carnales aliquo usque convinci queant, illas nihil aliud esse, quam ipsissimum Dei Verbum . . .” Maresius, Disputationes iii.9. Cf. ii.7: Against papal claims, it is held that “scripturam . . . ita perspicue & clare seipsam explicare, ut non sit opus ad alium intepretem in cujus verba juremus confugere”: that “scripture . . . explicates itself so perspicuously and clearly that there is no need to resort to another interpreter to whose words we must swear allegiance.” The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), for example, states (chap. vii; Schaff, Creeds, iii, 604; my italics): “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened (omnia quae ad salutem necessaria sunt cognitu . . . adeo perspicue . . . proponuntur et explicantur) in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means (ordinariorum deito usu mediorum), may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”

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Since no divinely inspired writer speaks with forked tongue, and since “one” and “true” coincide [with regard to meaning], and his single sentences are intended to be expressed by his own single concepts, there cannot be for any speaker any meaning of his own words but one, whether his utterance is simple and proper or tropical and figurated.87

The divine origin of scripture guarantees further that the intended meaning is infallibly true. Thus, these critics dismiss Meyer’s discussion of the difference between plain and true meanings, and the more important one between meaning and truth. The former problem presupposed that the text presented real ambiguity, which the critics deny: Maresius protests that where an author knows what he’s talking about and has no wish to deceive, his meaning will be plain and singular.88 Regarding the distinction between meaning and truth, Maresius regarded Meyer’s point as simply irrelevant to the interpreter of scripture, since there could be no gap between the meaning of a scriptural passage and its truth.89 For Spinoza, as we shall see, no procedure could be more relevant, indeed critical, for discovering historical meanings than separating that task from the determination of truth. Stress on the objective uniqueness of scripture encouraged disengagement from the general cultural trend. Our critics were making the distance between the Bible and other ancient books (as well as Christianity and other religions) into a chasm just at the time when new knowledge of the world outside Europe was exerting tremendous pressure in the opposite direction. Scholarship had qualitatively advanced the knowledge of ancient history, including that of 87

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Maresius, Disputationes iii.41. “Cum nec scriptor ullus theopneusos sit diglottos, ac unum & verum convertantur, & singulae ejus sententiae singulis suis conceptibus exprimendis destinentur, non potest esse suorum verborum verus sensus nisi unus, sive oratio ejus sit simplex & propria, sive tropica & figurata.” Cf. ibid. iii.17: as long as the true sense of an utterance eludes you, you have achieved no sense at all; the one and the true sense are therefore interchangeable. Maresius, Disputationes iii.10: a wise and good author abstains from mendacium and ambiguum. According to Maresius (Disputationes iv.7), the meaning/truth problem is of “no relevance to the interpreter of scripture, since the true meaning of the sentences . . . cannot be separated from their truth . . .”: “. . . haec observatio non potest spectare interpretem Scripturae, cum verus sententiarum Verbi Divini sensus, ab earum veritate separari non possit, aut ‘rectae rationi dissentaneus ac veritati repugnans statui,’ ut his Scriptor statuere videtur.”


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ancient Israel and of the Bible itself,90 and world exploration had brought startling new knowledge of other cultures (which included religion). The realization that the Bible had a history, and an exceedingly complex and hazardous one at that, and that it was embedded in a context of other ancient cultures with their own assumptions and sacred literatures, ended forever the relevance of scholarship that ignored these matters and treated the Bible ahistorically. The era of historical and comparative biblical study had arrived. But theologians on the right fiercely resisted the inference that the Bible was comparable to other ancient texts. They would not allow it to be entangled in the messy historical condition and fate of ordinary ancient books – sometimes to the point of denying the simple facts of history raised by scholars.91 Time and again, when Meyer made some observation about language, utterances or reading, his critics complained that he was reducing the Bible to the status of other books, making its authors like other authors and Christian readers like ordinary readers. All were incomparable, they insisted. Such arguments ignored the indisputable fact, already recognized at the time, that, for all its exceptionality, the Bible could not escape the historical conditions and the linguistic idiom of its own times.92 90

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Let two examples of historical scholarship suffice here. In 1538, the Jewish scholar Elias Levita published his Massoreth ha-Massoreth at Venice with an introduction proving that the vowel and accent markings in the Hebrew text were not part of the original, but a system of insertions created by the Massoretic rabbis of the fifth and sixth century. In 1650 the Critica Sacra of Louis Cappel, a French Reformed professor of biblical studies at the Academy of Saumur, incorporated Levita’s findings with critical work of other scholars to show that the Bible had thousands of variant readings, and that in its long history it had undergone the same vicissitudes as other books. The work of Levita and Cappel ignited a huge controversy, as orthodox scholars – against mounting evidence – defended the divinity and antiquity of the vowel points against the implication that mere “human tradition” and interpretation (rabbinic, at that!) had become an essential part of scripture itself. They were forced to argue (given their premises), either that the Massoretic rabbis were divinely inspired in their interpretations or that Levita and Cappel were wrong – that despite contrary evidence the vowel points had been written in or orally taught by Moses and the other biblical authors. See R. A. Muller, “The Debate over the Vowel Points.” Cappel, Critica Sacra, iv.15, 301, will not condone a pious lie: “. . . away with this unsafe, nay uncertain and dangeous conclusion that the entire authority of the sacred text and the word of God will be endangered if it is conceded that various and multiple readings have crept into it in the course of time, and by the fault and carelessness of copyists. For when that [opinion] is offered and credited, the entire authority of God’s word is overturned and plainly falls down, for it is easy and obvious to demonstrate those various and multiple readings, as I have done and will continue to do.”

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We find an important exception to this pattern of resistance to the ordinary human characteristics of the Bible: against Meyer, his critics upheld common meanings and usage as the basis of interpretation. They insisted that God “accommodated” his word to ordinary understanding – a view that could be deflated to conform to the historians’ awareness of the fact that the biblical writers used the ordinary idiom of their own times. Thus the words of scripture, Maresius insists, are to be taken according to their public and ordinary meaning (prout communiter & vulgo sonant).93 He fails to mention, however, that what those “plain” words meant to him might not be the same as what they meant to those who first wrote and heard or read them. Nevertheless, his point, amplified historically by the liberals and made into a fundamental principle by Spinoza, supported the argument that history and philology were better tools for interpretation than was philosophy. How, they asked, could philosophy help with lexical, grammatical or rhetorical questions?94 So there was unanimity against Meyer that crucial issues of interpretation arose from obscurities in biblical words, references and phrases due mainly to our ignorance of the ancient languages. is chris tianit y comparable? When we ask these writers whether there is any basis for comparison between Christianity and other religions, the answer is a flat no. Maresius has a couple of references to other religions, but they are revealing only in a negative way. In his view, new knowledge of other cultures does not offer any food for thought about the relation between Christianity and the beliefs and practices of other religions. At one point he suggests that Meyer’s method, which is useless for Christians, might perhaps be useful to other cultures, such as among the Bonzes, Japanese and Indian Gymnosophists. Since there is nothing but confusion in this mess of discrepant religions, he says, Meyer’s method might bring some order. But 93 94

Maresius, Disputationes iii.11. Ibid. vi.15. He points out that problems arise for interpreters in matters of “vocabula & phrasiologiae, non res ipsae,” where philosophy might have been of some service.


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surely not among Christians, possessors already of God’s indubitable truth and Spirit.95 Maresius shows the same degree of respect for other religions when looking from them to Christianity. In a passing remark about application of the principle of doubt in theology, he asserts that he especially would not doubt something simply because someone else doubted it. “Shall I doubt that Jesus is the son of God just because Jews and Muslims doubt it?”96 For Maresius, the question had become thinkable, but only rhetorically; he was not really wondering. issues not taken As was mentioned earlier, what the conservative critics leave out (especially in comparison to the liberals of the next chapter) is as revealing as what they stress. Serarius, for example, although he subjects Meyer’s book to a painstaking quotation-and-response treatment that includes sixty-four direct quotations of Meyer, skips entirely the two most critical chapters in the book – chapter iii, where Meyer makes his case for the ambiguity of language and the obscurity of much of scripture; and chapter viii, Meyer’s argument that philosophy and theology don’t contradict each other. Serarius thus simply passes over in silence what in Meyer’s mind are the critical issues on which his entire contribution turns. They also ignored newly understood facts regarding the historical character of scripture as a book. Their failure to take their own modernity into account is perhaps a consequence of their initial conviction that novelty in theology is dangerous or heretical. The idea of seeing both themselves and the Bible in the flow of history, and of themselves adapting to change, does not register in their thinking; or rather it is explicitly rejected. Vogelsangh even repudiates the project of integrating biblical chronology with ancientworld chronology, a comparative inquiry that scholars had been pursuing for a century. That work was inexorably showing that the accepted biblical chronology, which dated the creation of the world between 4000 and 6000 bce, could not possibly accommodate the 95

Ibid. i.22.

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Ibid. i.28.

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facts of ancient history that were being uncovered by comparative studies.97 summary and conclusions Philosophy and theology In the material we are examining, the relationship of theology and philosophy, a very old issue in the west, is getting a new profile which we recognize as part of our own condition. The radical right in theology and the more secular-minded (following Meyer to some extent, and especially Spinoza) are finding apparent agreement on the notion that philosophy and the sciences should be radically separated from theology, and for the same reason: the “absurdity” that attaches to some Christian doctrines in the light of reason, and their consequent disqualification as “knowledge.” But as already mentioned, the theologians do not have two truly autonomous realms in mind. Instead, they assert the right of theology to correct any aspect of knowledge or thought that disagrees with revealed truth. In the next chapter, we see the liberal theologians, heirs of the Alexandrian and medieval scholastic tradition, seeking to hold rational knowledge and revealed doctrine in conversation, and even to bring them into some sort of harmony. At least they seek to show that religious belief is not irrational, even though they regard it as in some cases “above reason.” Philosophy and history Spinoza will set his historical method against the philosophical hermeneutic of Meyer as well as the anti-hermeneutic of the present 97

On the chronologer Joseph Scaliger, see Grafton, “Joseph Scaliger.” On the problem posed by biblical chronology in light of new historical researches, see Haber, Age of the World; Allen, Legend of Noah. Having none of it, Vogelsangh offers a scathing indictment of ancient historians, while dismissing the contemporary harmonistic chronologers, exclaiming (Contra libellum ¶47, p. 83): “Oh what a miserable faith ours is, if it is necessary for the Gospel to search for its authority from such harmony! To answer in a word: what won’t historians dare? How often do they not fabricate and lie?”: “Veruntamen o miseram fidem nostram, si euangelium de tali concordia necesse habet auctoritatem sibi conquirere! Ut verbo absolvam; quid non audent Historici? Quid non saepe fingunt? Quid plerumque veris non admentiuntur?”


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writers. Before moving on, then, we ask what, if anything, our rightward authors have to say about history and historical interpretation. There is not much to report, but there are some straws in the wind. We have already noted Vogelsangh’s wholly negative response to any effort to integrate biblical with other ancient histories. His reasons were wholly theological, part of the general pattern of keeping scripture immaculate by quarantine from anything that would suggest comparability between scripture and ordinary books, sacred and secular history, or Christianity and other religions. He shows no curiosity about the possibility of aligning biblical chronology with other historical sources. But two other theological concerns surface that have a bearing on history: the notions of contingency and of historical periodization. Contingency One limitation of “philosophy” as represented by Meyer’s proposal was that it offered no way of incorporating the contingency inherent in the biblical account, or of dealing with it philosophically. Against Meyer, the theologians flaunted the contingency of “God’s will” in opposition to philosophy, and used the language of history to discuss it. Thus Vogelsangh: . . . many . . . salutary testimonies of scripture are historical (historica), or predictions of future things, or deal with mysteries, or set forth gratuitous promises of the most benificent Numen, or otherwise contain things which depend on the sheer liberty of God (mera Dei libertate), and are inaccessible even to the angels [not to mention reason]. What then? Shall we hear that Philosophy is the interpreter of these things? Shall the blind be the interpreter of colors?98

Under the rubric “sacred history” (historia sacra), the theologians had a distinct advantage over the philosophers: a category in which to place these contingent but necessary (for salvation) truths. They did not develop it richly, but clearly identified what was for believers perhaps the most critical deficiency of Meyer’s approach. 98

Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶79, p. 172: “Atque pleraque pariter et maxime salutaria sacrarum Scrpturarum testimonia vel historica sunt, vel praedictiones futurorum, vel de mysteriis agunt, vel promissiones exhibent gratuitas benignissimi Numinis, aut alioquin ea continent, quae pendent a mera Dei libertate, suntque vel ipsis Angelis inaccessa. Quid igitur? Horum ne Philosophiam audiemus interpretem, caecum de coloribus?”

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Periodization Only Serarius and Comenius among our critics place the appearance of Meyer’s book in any sort of historical perspective, but it is the perspective of the millenarian, of time laden with eschatological import. In that framework, Serarius sees Meyer’s book, with its apotheosis of “human reason,” as a defining moment in the dire scenario of the approaching end time: the victory of Meyer’s point of view would be the final idolatry and utter ruin of the church. In the power of the new philosophy, Serarius sees the power of Antichrist flourishing in the absence of Christ.99 Stripped of the theological frameworks that injected them into the discussion of history, contingency and periodization would become central issues as historical consciousness and thinking emerged. But the interest of these theologians is pointing toward a theology of history, a Heilsgeschichte, rather than to a secular historicism. The only kind of connection they make between their ideas and a historical method for interpretation of biblical texts is eschatological. As we have seen with Serarius, the Spirit makes typology possible but method unnecessary.100

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Serarius, Responsio, Praef., pp. i–ii: The church’s fatal slide began already in the time of Constantine, which spawned the anchorites and monks while bishops and doctors mixed the faith with human traditions. Then came the Reformation: after a noble beginning, failing and destitute of the Spirit, it degenerated into confessionalism. Now, Serarius continues, we witness the substitution of human reason for God, bidding us to submit to the philosophical hermeneuts who would deliver us from servitude, “not spiritually but as they say hermeneutically” into a new era: “. . . rationem pro Deo suo reputant, qui eos ab omni erroris servitute educat: scilicet non quidem subjectivè, sed ut loquuntur interpretativè” (p. vii). In that scenario, Serarius casts Meyer in the role of the Beast of Rev. 11.10, who gets his fifteen apocalyptic minutes of fame by destroying God’s true witnesses (likened by Serarius to the Protestant reformers: pp. 36f.). Serarius is evidence of the occasional convergence between this eschatological vision and the widespread use of historical analogies to interpret scripture, a method that was displacing traditional allegory (cf. Victor Harris, “Allegory to Analogy”). The historical analogy was of course used most creatively by Hobbes and Spinoza wherein the political history of ancient Israel becomes an object lesson for the present. The Serarian apocalyptic framework (shared by his Jewish friend and counterpart, Menasseh ben Israel) endures as a normative perspective in some modern Christianity: insofar as there is any attention to history in fundamentalist biblical interpretation, it finds expression in apocalyptic typologies.


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Interpretation Because they were committed to the position that interpretation is somewhere between easy and unnecessary, the right argued that Meyer had made the issue overly complicated, saying in roundabout and overly academic ways what could have been said more straightforwardly. Maresius, for example, thinks that Meyer makes all books absurdly obscure.101 For while it is technically correct that we do not read a single word without “interpreting,” he and the other Reformed theologians insisted that essential (saving) religious discourse was without ambiguity, so clear that ordinary Christians could grasp it without the aid of expert interpreters. But again, they did not acknowledge history, in this case the historicity of their own theology – viz., that the conclusions they held from “scripture alone” were in reality dependent upon centuries of Christian cultural development and refinement.102 Their argument for single intended meanings was sensible enough,103 and they granted that an ordinary author might not express his own intentions quite effectively. But biblical writers were not technically “authors” at all. They were merely the “penmen of the Holy Spirit,” the sole Author of scripture.104 To them, then, the significance of Meyer’s discussion of the multiplicity of possible received or reader-constructed meanings was only that it highlighted the profound intellectual darkness engulfing sinful humanity. Their failure to deal with the genuine problems of interpretation rendered their mantra of scriptural clarity increasingly empty. 101 102

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Maresius, Disputationes iv.5. Consider, for example, the apparently obvious clarity with which, in orthodox reading, the Bible teaches the doctrines of the Trinity, incarnation, substitutionary atonement, eternal hellfire etc. – in our period, all challenged head-on by the Socinians, who recognized that these doctrines were the product of centuries of post-biblical development. There is also some weight to their argument that clarity of discourse is a social necessity. Nor is Meyer, despite his fresh and radical focus on the problem of reading and “reader response,” assuredly correct in arguing that we can learn nothing new from books. E.g., Vogelsangh, Contra libellum ¶82, p. 183: “Nam Scripturae quidem sic Deus auctor est, uti suos amanuenses extra seductionis & erroris aleam longissime constituerit”: “For indeed God is author of Scripture in such a way that he has established his penmen as far as possible beyond risk of seduction and error.”

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Spinoza and biblical authority Exceptionalism

Only when the dust had settled on this debate, and the fear of thinking like a papist subsided, could the notion of biblical exceptionalism take on a historically plausible meaning, namely, that what makes a literary work “exceptional” or sacred is the significance which the community ascribes to it. The community that produces, reads, selects and transmits the book (or rather the collection) and identifies with the ancient tradition to which it bears witness is what makes a book “sacred.” The Catholics had been essentially arguing this point when they insisted that it was the church that had created scripture.105 Spinoza understood this, for he included that fact as a constitutive part of scripture’s “history” – finding out who it was that had first set certain writings apart as sacred, and how these writings had then become part of a canonical collection. Contemporary scholars take it as a commonplace that the history of any canonical scripture is the history of its own making, intertwined with its continual reinterpretation,106 which in the process produces and refines explanation about its origin and purpose as ultimately divine. But the seventeenth-century orthodox theologians continued their circuitous arguments, proving the divinity of scripture simply by quoting scripture itself, and underwriting the validity of their interpretations by invoking a Spirit that blew where they willed. Disengaging from knowledge Perhaps most profoundly, the theologians relied more and more heavily on an experiential and particularistic insistence that each Christian was vouchsafed certain knowledge by (1) the unique, selfinterpreting perfection of scripture and (2) the special privilege granted by the Holy Spirit. The cost of this position was high. It undermined any claim that “saving knowledge” was knowledge at 105

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See, e.g., Bellarmine, De verbo Dei iv.4, on how we cannot know which writings are “scripture” at all, apart from the church’s tradition (e.g., why Mark, rather than Thomas – an apostle, no less – became scripture). Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel.


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all, once they rejected the public criteria of knowledge (e.g., that the principles on which knowledge is founded are universal, or universalizable, and available for public scrutiny). Their view radically disengaged the theological enterprise from the general pursuit of knowledge;107 religious claims become unabashedly self-authenticating and self-referential. As a result, conversation with intellectual culture at large shut down. Why were the new questions regarding nature, history, chronology etc. not real issues for them? It was because, given their theological presuppositions, all these questions were irrelevant or presumptuous. Historical questions were irrelevant for at least two reasons: first, the Bible, having fallen from heaven, as it were, had no history in the ordinary sense; likewise, its essential content – historia sacra – was not subject to inquiry as was mundane history. Meanwhile, the devout reader, graced with the internal witness of the Spirit, recognized no problems of interpretation as problems (witness especially Serarius). Supernatural causality thus wrecked ventures of secular inquiry, marking out a kind of Bermuda Triangle whose critical points were the divinely authored text, its sacred history and the divinely inspired reader. Political dimensions Not much has been said about the political aspects of the conversation between Meyer and his critics. Yet it has revealed the intellectual stance that supported a polity in which the church was positioned to articulate its unique knowledge of God’s will and law to the secular powers and their lay subjects. By analogy, just as philosophy is handmaid to theology, so also the mere natural knowledge of the secular authorities is subject to instruction by the duly authorized interpreters of God’s word. Thus censorship operated through provincial decrees against books like those of Descartes and Meyer and Spinoza, and through careful inquisition of ministers and ministerial candidates for ideological correctness. 107

Nineteenth-century Romanticism found a path to the intellectual recovery of theology by proposing that “religious experience” as a sense of the infinite was itself a universal possibility and the ground of all religions (cf. above all Schleiermacher, On Religion).

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Consequently, in the conversation we are following, Spinoza’s innovative title, with the word “political” in it, is appropriate not simply because he is taking the discussion in a new direction, but because he is making explicit the political implications already embodied in each theological stance.

chapter four

The liberal engagement: reason, usage, history

I am talking here about histories, which in no way depend on the truth of things. Ludwig Wolzogen1

the challenge of reason In a mode and spirit quite different from what we saw in the preceding chapter,2 the writers we examine here engage Meyer’s book with the kind of critique that significantly advances the discussion of biblical interpretation.3 At the same time, we again see the integrally political character of this great debate – that Spinoza’s “politicizing” of the issue was not particularly eccentric but a 11

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Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 150: “Loquor enim de historiis, quae a veritate rerum nullo modo dependent.” “Liberal” in the chapter title means mainly a determination to engage the intellectual culture at large, particularly the new philosophy. As we shall see, the liberals gave reason a prominent role in interpretation, and would accept nothing as scriptural that contradicted reason. The theological justification was that God or scripture nowhere required Christians to do so. As we saw, Meyer held such a view, and was tagged a Pelagian for doing so. The liberals defended him and themselves against that charge by pointing out correctly that historic Pelagianism had to do with the will, not the intellect (van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 118ab, 125b f.; cf. Wolzogen, Censura, 117; Bekker, Admonitio v.13, 78f.). The liberals did however seek to maintain their theological respectability by asserting that the Bible set forth truths that were “above” reason (a view that Meyer implicitly, and Spinoza explicitly, rejected). Principal works examined in detail in this chapter are van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, and Wolzogen’s, De interprete. For clarification, I will also make occasional reference to a later work of Wolzogen, the Censura. Bizer (“Reformed Orthodoxy,” 45) regards the latter Wolzogen book as “the most important and effective refutation” of Meyer. Bizer fails to mention Spinoza’s TTP. According to Meinsma (Spinoza, 429), Spinoza actually met van Velthuysen at Utrecht in 1673, where, according to van Velthuysen, they had many coversations (Spinoza, Ep. 69; Shirley, 324 n. 344). There is one later letter of Spinoza’s to van Velthuysen in which Spinoza, after responding to van Velthuysen’s severe but thoughtful critique of the TTP, asks him to publish the critique so that he might answer it publicly (Ep. 69; iv, 300/323f.).

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making explicit of what was implicit. The larger context of the debate was a situation long endemic in the Dutch Republic: here was a fragmented country struggling to invent itself as a free republic and at the same time inclined to live under some form of biblical authority as befitted its hard-won Calvinist religious identity. The issue of interpretation and the interpreter had become absolutely crucial. The eminent Reformed pastor and theologian Ludwig Wolzogen made that point clear in the dedicatory letter of one of his writings to “my lords” the magistrates of Utrecht (one of whom was the other subject of this chapter, van Velthuysen). Wolzogen had come under fire from the right for holding that God had “included all religion in scripture,” and that “only the [human] interpreter, not God,” had the task of educing what scripture meant. His critics viewed with alarm this expulsion of “God” from the interpretive process. In response, Wolzogen explains that he wrote this in order to demonstrate to my lords of what great importance this question of interpretation is: I assert that the whole of religion depends upon it, because scripture truly contains [the whole of] religion, but it is only through interpretation that we know what scripture contains.4

The sometimes arcane discussion of interpretation, then, must always be read within this political context, which for both Wolzogen and van Velthuysen sometimes pushed ominously into the foreground. Tension was always high between the Calvinist clergy and others with Orangist sympathies on one side, and religious pluralists with their sympathy for the republic of regents on the other. But the political situation allowed fairly ample room for the liberals, whether clerical, like Wolzogen, or lay, like van Velthuysen. As van Lieburg explains, the Reformed church’s power to dominate was “obstructed by regional authorities, in particular by the powerful libertine, anti-Orangist regents of Holland. 14

Wolzogen, Censura, Epistle dedicatory, 305f. (my italics): the original statement was “religionem inclusit quidem in Scriptura Deus, sed e Scriptura educit solus Interpres.” Wolzogen explains what he meant: “ut ostendam meis Dominis, quanti momenti sit ista quaestio de interpretatione, dico totam religionem ab ea pendere, quia Scriptura quidem continet religionem, sed per Interpretationem demum novimus quid contineat Scriptura.” A few lines later, he specifies “religion” as “points necessary for salvation” (puncta ad salutem necessaria) (307).

Liberal engagement: reason, usage, history

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There could be no question of a Reformed church state [even though Calvinism was accepted as a bond of national unity], let alone a Puritan-Calvinist theocracy.” The religious plurality of the Dutch Republic was, van Lieburg reports, “unique in the international situation of the time,” and this was due to the “confessionally neutral politics of religion of the Dutch regents.”5 Wolzogen, pastor of the Walloon congregation in Utrecht, and later professor of theology at the University of Utrecht in place of Voetius,6 had responded to Meyer’s book in 1668 with a work entitled On the Interpreter of Scriptures against the Paradoxical Exercitator (one of the books we examine in this chapter). A man of suspiciously liberal views and life-style, he wore a powdered wig, liked to play cards, frequented salons and employed a Catholic dancing-master for his children.7 Against Meyer’s implicit elitism, Wolzogen advanced a democratic hermeneutic, holding that every reader was perforce an interpreter through the simple act of connecting words with meanings while reading, and that Christians neither sought nor required any authoritative human interpreter (more on this below). But his work was attacked by a zealous millenarian,8 the French Reformed cleric (and later separatist) Jean de Labadie, who accused Wolzogen of most of the available heresies, both ancient and modern, as well as of making divine scripture too comparable to other books, and of making the devil himself a competent interpreter of scripture!9 Wolzogen was exonerated by 15

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Van Lieburg, “From Pure Church,” 419 (first quote), 411. He goes on to observe that “within the context of the war against Spain they conducted an anti-Catholic policy, but the principle of freedom of conscience was held in high regard from the outset” (411). 17 Saxby, The Quest, 138. According to Bizer, “Reformed Orthodoxy,” 27. Maresius, professor at Groningen who took Wolzogen’s side in the dispute raised by Labadie’s attack, identified Serarius, Comenius and Labadie as the three main representatives of the chiliast temper in the Reformed church (Saxby, The Quest, 166). In the 1660s, Labadie was a “radical proponent of a spiritual, pastoral and moral reform of the decayed [as proponents of the Further Reformation saw it] reformed-ecclesiastical life.” But in 1669 he withdrew from church association and founded a house church in Amsterdam, claiming to restore purity (van Leiburg, “From Pure Church,” 417. This article also includes material on the Further Reformation, akin to the rise of Pietism in Germany). Wolzogen, Censura, Preface, 47–51, 79–81. On Labadie and his movement and checkered career in the Netherlands, see Saxby, The Quest. Labadie accused Wolzogen of affirming propositions that were Socinian, Arminian, Pelagian, Semi-Pelagian, pontifical, profane and blasphemous. The item about the devil as interpreter is based on Wolzogen’s pointing out that according to scripture not only the unregenerate but the demons themselves

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synods of Naarden and Utrecht after making a public defense and publishing a point-by-point refutation of the charges, but the church at Middleburg continued to uphold Labadie’s position. Wolzogen shared the conviction with van Velthuysen, a Utrecht physician and liberal magistrate,10 that the new Cartesian philosophy, in its place, could be of service to theology. The two men knew each other, both belonging to a circle of learned men of Utrecht.11 Van Velthuysen, a friend of Meyer’s from university days at Leiden12 and equally bold intellectually, had long engaged in political polemic with the clergy, seeking “to refute the pretensions of the preachers and theologians”; consequently he had experienced the political consequences of being a theological suspect.13 Not only was his first publication a defense of Hobbes’s De Cive in 165114 (a work Spinoza knew well), but he had been attacked by some of the Utrecht clergy for being the first to defend publicly the work of Descartes and the Copernican system (in 1655), violating an earlier provincial decree forbidding anyone to write for or against the philosopher.15 Later, van Velthuysen was even accused of writing Meyer’s book. Wolzogen defended him against the charge and

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footnote 9 (cont.) understood the significance of the mission of Jesus (Jas. 2.19), and therefore the special aid of the Holy Spirit is not necessary for interpreting scripture. Labadie’s accusations are printed in detail in the Censura because Wolzogen answers them point by point after quoting them. The affair divided the church, and involved others of the writers we examine in this book: Maresius along with the magistrates of Utrecht took Wolzogen’s side; Vogelsangh of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Arnold of Franeker, and Comenius defended Labadie (Saxby, 364 n. 86). For details of the affair, see ibid., 157, 160. The Synod of Naarden that exonerated Wolzogen in 1668 also instructed Labadie to cease from further attacks. According to Bizer (“Reformed Orthodoxy,” 27), Wolzogen was appointed to succeed the far more conservative Voetius when he retired from his professorship at Utrecht. Elected to Utrecht Vroedschap in 1667, according to Klever (Verba et sententiae, 11) and McGahagan (“Cartesianism,” 281). His special responsibility was “to watch over the execution of the council laws and decisions by the preachers of the church,” which meant attending their church council meetings (Klever, 11f.). Nadler (Spinoza, 317, 323f.) identifies him (incorrectly, I think) as a professor at the University of Utrecht; in fact, Klever, in his detailed account (Verba et sententiae, 11), cites van Velthuysen’s Cartesianism and spirited attacks on clerical pretensions as reasons why he was never invited to a pro11 Klever, Verba et sententiae, 12. fessorship. Van Velthuysen studied both at Leiden and Utrecht (McGahagan, “Cartesianism,” 281). They were friends, according to Siebrand, “Early Reception,” 215. The quotation is from Klever, Verba et sententiae, 9 et passim. McGahagan, “Cartesianism,” 283. Bizer, “Reformed Orthodoxy,” 27. Klever (Verba et sententiae) refers to van Velthuysen as a “dedicated Cartesian” who courageously defended Cartestian science “in a time that no professer at any faculty in the Utrecht or Leiden University could do so” (11). Bekker


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vouched for his orthodoxy, and van Velthuysen published his own critique of Meyer, Dissertation on the Use of Reason in Theological Matters, in 1667.16 Wolzogen’s criticism of other theologians was muted, since he was himself one of the corps of Reformed pastors and theologians. But both he and van Velthuysen were wary of the political ambitions of the clergy. Wolzogen accused the enthusiasts of a hidden lust for power. They are either deluded or arrogant, he writes, imagining that their own hearts contain an oracle, when in fact they are simply confused by the vapors of melancholic blood. As a matter of fact, they seek to rule, having rightly discerned that they can achieve rule by no more certain path than if they are believed to be endowed by the Spirit of God. Since all will reverently hear the Spirit, if they think he speaks by the mouth of those men, captive to superstition, they follow with blind obedience.17

Wolzogen charges that superstition, the richest of soils for political demagoguery (as Spinoza also emphasized), is spawned by those theologians who have not learned to apply Occam’s razor to their own production of religious mysteries.18 Wolzogen, then, identifies 16

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(Admonitio vii.9, 119) calls prohibitions of Descartes “papistic and tyrannical” and urges the Reformed churches not to “imitate papal tyranny” (120). Wolzogen, Censura, in his Epistola on behalf of the Synod of Utrecht to Franeker, exonerates van Velthuysen of all suspicion of authorship of Meyer’s book, and of unorthodoxy. Wolzogen admitted he was a “friend of Descartes,” just as he was also of Aristotle – wherever in his judgment either spoke truth. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 258f.: “Regnare cupiunt, nec certiore via ad regnum se pervenire posse recte statuunt, quam si Dei Spiritu esse praediti credantur: quem, cum omnes reverenter audiant, si putent istorum hominum ore loqui, superstitione capti, caeca sequuntur obedientia.” This statement is reminiscent of Hobbes (Leviathan, chap. 36, p. 466): “. . . men had need to be very circumspect, and wary, in obeying the voice of man, that pretending himself to be a Prophet, requires us to obey God in that way, in which he in God’s name telleth us to be the way to happinesse. For he that pretends to teach men the way of so great felicity, pretends to govern them; that is to say, to rule, and reign over them; which is a thing, that all men naturally desire, and is therefore worthy to be suspected of Ambition and Imposture; and consequently, ought to be examined, and tryed by every man, before hee yeeld them obedience.” I am grateful to Edwin Curley (personal correspondence) for pointing out this similarity. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 188–90: “Theologi, qui cum non satis magnifice de Dei verbo se existimare posse crederent, saepe mysteria finxerunt, ubi nulla voluit esse Spiritus Sanctus. . . . Oracula . . . Dei semper legenda cum summa animi devotione, sed non ultra sensum extendenda, quem prae se ferunt”: “Theologians, who, since they believe that they cannot magnify the word of God enough, often identify mysteries where the Holy Spirit does not intend any. . . . The oracles . . . of God ought always to be read with highest devotion of the mind, but not extended beyond the meaning which they present.”

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as two sources of political mischief the political motives of the enthusiasts and the obfuscations of those who promote the mysteriousness of religion beyond necessity. Meanwhile, as already mentioned, van Velthuysen was wary of the political ambitions of some theologians. Indeed, his views were close to those that Spinoza would articulate.19 He attacked the churchmen’s way of exploiting the widespread public acceptance of the authority of scripture to enhance their own authority as its interpreters.20 Out of disproportionate regard, and leaving nothing to reason (van Velthuysen charged), they tried to prove everything from scripture, even where it was not appropriate or possible, “driven by the error of thinking that something is more worthy of trust when it is proved by a text of scripture, however obscure, than when belief in it is grounded in reason.” By publicly touting the omnibus authority of scripture, they would wish to exercise a dictatorship in all the disciplines, and to impose on everyone the proper manner of speaking and thinking. They designate themselves alone as knowing what is true, fair and just; themselves alone as being able to resolve knots and cases of conscience, themselves alone as able to understand the office and task of magistrates and subjects, of husbands, wives and children. In this way they supervise the consciences of every rank of men as they please, and manipulate at will minds captive to superstition. And while they attempt to cast other men down into some sort of menial drudgery, they claim for themselves authority and power in the republic, a serious matter to all ranks and a considerable threat to the highest.21 19

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Cf. Klever’s informative discussion (Verba et sententiae, 26f.) of the “affinity” of views as it shows up in the two authors’ later exchange over the TTP. For example, when the Utrecht preacher and Voetian Jacob DuBois attacked him for his Cartesian views, van Velthuysen retorted by accusing him of papistry, since he claimed that “church assemblies could . . . propound an authoritative interpretation of scripture to which all must subscribe” (McGahagan, “Cartesianism,” 286). Van Velthyusen, Dissertatio, 148ab (my italics): “. . . existiment rem fide digniorem esse, quae loco Scripturae, quamvis saepe obscuro, probatur, quam cujus fides ratione firmatur. Ideo nihil non ex scriptura probare conantur, nihil non in ea tradi & diceri jactitant; ut ideo in omnes disciplinas dictaturam exercere, & omnibus modum ponere velint, quomodo loquendum & sentiendum sit. Se solos quid verum, aequum & iustum sit, scire prae se ferunt: se solos nodos & casus conscientiae solvere posse: se solos quid Magistratus & subditorum, quid mariti & uxoris atque librorum, &c. officium & munus sit, intelligere: quo cuiusvis ordinis hominum conscientias ex arbitrio moderentur; & animos supersititione captos, ex libitu circumagant. Et dum alios homines veluti in aliquid pistrinum detrudere & depellere conantur, ipsi sibi authoritatem & potestatem in republica tribuunt & vindicant, quae omnibus ordinibus gravis, & summis magistratibus formidolosa est.” It


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In response to these threats, the liberals rose to defend freedom of interpretation and reason. But their defense was not unqualified. Even Balthasar Bekker, the dauntless debunker of the witch craze and eloquent defender of freedom of expression and of the reputation of Descartes among the Reformed clergy, praised Descartes because he submitted his own philosophy to the judgment of theological magisterium;22 thus Bekker defended him not on the ground of unlimited freedom to philosophize, but because he knew his place as a philosopher and because (unlike Meyer) he assiduously avoided theological questions,23 and promoted nothing in his philosophy that contradicted scripture or threatened belief in essential saving truth. Bekker bravely objected to the philosophical litmustesting of ministerial candidates, but maintained the old idea (against Meyer) that philosophy was to be the handmaid of theology, and allowed that under certain circumstances – viz., when their doctrine contradicted saving knowledge – philosophers could be coerced and censored.24 As for van Velthuysen, even though his reading of Meyer was as charitable as possible, he clearly did not approve of Meyer’s apparent ambition to operate both philosophically and religiously as a completely free agent.25 The contents of the two works examined here are of great interest as we try to reconstruct more of the intellectual context of

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is no wonder that Spinoza remained friendly to van Velthuysen even after he attacked the TTP. Klever (Verba et sententiae, 17 et passim) in fact documents an increasingly friendly relationship between the two, following their sharp initial exchange (cf. Spinoza Ep. 42 and 43). Bekker (Admonitio iv.3, 47) quotes Descartes’s submission: “I am determined to beware lest the least thing be found in my writings which theology rightly rejects; I call upon pious orthodox theologians, to whose judgment I readily submit.” Note that this precisely fits Meyer’s definition of the Catholic “sceptic,” discussed in chap. 2. Those like Meyer are not true Cartesians, Bekker maintains (Admonitio ii.11, 32f.): “At neque postremi isti pro Cartesianis existimandi sunt, qui ultra quam ipse Magister extra Philosophiae terminos excurrendo in Theologia sacra involant”: “Nor are those to be regarded as Cartesians who by scurrying farther than the Master himself outside the limits of philosophy fly into sacred Theology” cf. iv.5, 49f.). Wolzogen makes the same critique (De interprete ii, 197f.). Bekker, Admonitio vii.8, 118 (against philosophical inquisition of candidates for ministry); viii.1, 121 (philosophy as handmaid), viii.3, 124f. (sanctioning errant philosophers). This heavy sanction surrounding the protected sphere of “saving knowledge” tends to undermine Bekker’s observation that philosophy, unlike theology and law, has no canonical texts to constrain its liberty. Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 158b. Van Velthuysen says he neither knows nor cares about Meyer’s identity (ibid., iii), although they knew each other from university days at Leiden.

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Spinoza’s Treatise. Not only are they the two most substantial responses to Meyer published prior to the TTP, but both works were a part of Spinoza’s library, which makes it probable that he read both of them as he prepared his own work.26 Against the authoritarian habits of mind being nurtured on the right, these two authors broke the discussion open and developed new lines of inquiry. They advanced the discussion of textual interpretation beyond the narrow confines of biblical study by casting their arguments in terms that applied to all ancient texts. Furthermore, they thought more historically about scripture and religion itself, and thus envisaged an unexplored new dimension of the Protestant principle of scripture as “its own interpreter” – an approach developed much further by Spinoza. The full force of their engagement with Meyer can best be appreciated by focusing on the two major moves by which they aimed to topple Meyer’s philosophic method. Since Spinoza would push the argument against philosophical hermeneutics even further, even while sharing Meyer’s faith in reason, the work of the liberals constitutes a key site on the intellectual map that forms the context of the TTP. Against Meyer, the liberals insisted (1) that conventional and ordinary linguistic usage, not “philosophy,” is the master key to recovering the meanings of the biblical texts, just as it is with any ancient text,27 and (2) that the epistemological domain to which the biblical material belongs in its entirety is “history,” or history-like. This is true not only because Christianity is based on a story rather than a philosophy, but because all our actual knowledge of what it relates is based entirely on testimony. We have no other access, and know none of it directly, either from other evidence or from reason.28 These ideas, unremarkable to us, had enormous implications. The emphasis on usage permanently shifted the focus of biblical interpretation to the path on which it goes till today: from the Meyerian (and to a large extent orthodox-theological) project of 26

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Most scholars agree that Spinoza read the few books he owned. Admittedly, we do not know when Spinoza acquired or read these books. Cf. Skinner’s contemporary argument that, as intellectual historians, “we should study not the meanings of words, but their use” (“Meaning and Understanding,” 55). Enlightenment writers of the next century, especially David Hume and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, would exploit this insight in their critiques of miracles.


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extracting (eternal) pre-known truths from the text, to the new primary work of determining original (historical) meanings. Protestants had exhausted themselves debating rival versions of biblical truth; Meyer had proposed substituting non-sectarian and allegedly universal philosophical ideas. Now we see a wellgrounded commitment to face the complexities of actual textual analysis and interpetation. The disentangling of the issue of meaning from that of truth – advanced by Meyer but then hopelessly muddled by his biblical exceptionalism and his aprioristic philosophical method – may be the most lasting contribution of the works we study in this chapter, for that very distinction rigorously observed in practice would be the hinge on which Spinoza’s method would turn. Van Velthuysen and Wolzogen thus performed a great service by helping to liberate the work of interpretation from the iron cage of “truths” – whether philosophical or dogmatic – in which both Meyer and the conservatives had imprisoned it in their own ways. The liberals, with their new concentration on meanings, argued that biblical interpretation was based entirely on reason, grammar and language, observing exactly the same rules as those applied to other texts. For scholars this meant that historical, linguistic and philological skills, rather than expertise in philosophy or dogma, were what counted. Against Meyer’s contention that the interpreter’s first task was to extract “truths,” our authors boldly pointed out that the Bible contained no truths of the type referred to by Meyer, and that its authors were “in no way” philosophers.29 Van Velthuysen recognized that the interpreter was dealing here with something categorically different from philosophical knowledge and discourse, namely “historical cognition.”30 In fact, these two thrusts against Meyer (primacy of usage and history) rendered biblical interpretation increasingly comparable to the interpretation of other literary works – a notion that the conservatives found absolutely 29

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E.g., Wolzogen, Censura, 208: the patriarchs were nullo modo philosophers, and such philosophers as there were in that time lived in a thought-world alien to our own. Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 111a: Discussing revealed truths that are “above reason,” he says that reason in such a context is not the “principle” but plays the same role “as in historical cognition, namely the work of an instrument”: “. . . & rationem hic principii aut argumenti usum non habere, sed plane eandem operam praebere, quam confert in cognitione historica, nempe operam instrumenti.”

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unacceptable. Without abandoning their commitment to the uniqueness of scripture as a book (authored by God, teaching no untruth, etc.), van Velthuysen and Wolzogen focused on its interpretation, apart from which it lies mute. They sought to establish (against Meyer as well as Catholic writers) its essential intelligibility rather than its infallibility, which was not questioned by many Protestants before Spinoza.31 They insisted that that intelligibility was such that it opened biblical meanings to everyone, not only the specially learned or spiritually gifted. Both van Velthuysen and Wolzogen presented their ideas as members of the Reformed church. Wolzogen in fact later became theological professor at Utrecht (after Voetius’s retirement), as well as being a pastor. As we have seen, he defended and publicized the orthodoxy of van Velthuysen, denying the baseless charge that van Velthuysen had written the PSI.32 Both understood that Meyer could be persuaded only by rational arguments,33 and that there was no point in bombarding him with biblical passages and theological slogans when the very authority of theological assertions depended unavoidably on fallible human interpretation. That their conversation partner was Meyer from their student days at Leiden, however, only partly explains why their work concentrates so heavily on the role of reason. They had to ward off not only the censorious interpreters in their own church but inconvenient rival claims of the Enthusiasts and the Catholics as well. This chapter will explicate these ideas in detail and examine their bearing on religious “faith” as these men understood it, and on the biblical text as “its own interpreter.” This will help illumi31

32

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The most remarkable exception I have found is that of Samuel Fisher, Quaker, who attacked the whole notion of scripture as the “word of God,” along with all its accoutrements. On Fisher, see Hill, World Turned Upside Down, chap. 11, and my “Rise and Fall of the Bible.” Wolzogen, writing to Nicolaus Arnoldus, head of the senate at Franeker Academy, on behalf of the church at Utrecht (Censura, unpaginated Epistola preceding main text), absolved the “excellent” van Velthuysen of having written Meyer’s PSI, and of all unorthodoxy. Van Velthuysen was at about the same time publishing the Dissertatio, his own critical analysis of Meyer’s book. E.g., Wolzogen, Censura, 235f.: the Anonymous cannot be refuted nisi ratione; similarly, we cannot argue with Jews except on the basis of the Old Testament, or with Anabaptists except on the basis of the New. Furthermore, Wolzogen adds, scriptural arguments are of no weight when the argument is about rules for interpretation of scripture itself (238).


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nate the intellectual relations bearing on Spinoza’s Tractatus as he develops his historical method.34 “ solus usus magis ter” ( “usage alone the mas ter” ) The idea that common and customary usage35 is the “interpreter,” determining the genuine meanings of the text, is Wolzogen’s substitute for Meyer’s “philosophy.” It is also his instrument for severing Meyer’s “indissoluble link” between meanings and truths. Recall Meyer’s thesis that every truth that could be philosophically extracted from a given passage was also a true (intended) meaning of that passsage. Wolzogen repeatedly counters that the ambiguities and problems of the text of scripture (which Meyer himself so amply documented) are simply not amenable to philosophical resolution – a point Wolzogen once identifies as the most important issue between them.36 How, Wolzogen demands, can philosophy help us interpret the passage where Jesus says to Peter, “diligis me” (= “do you love me?” or “you love me”)? Is it a question or an affirmation? How about “scrutamini Scripturas” (“[you] search the scriptures”): is it indicative or imperative? Again: is Pilate being serious or ironic when he asks Jesus, “What is truth?” “Scripture is full of such examples,” Wolzogen points out, “which are so remote from philosophical inquiry that we may not think them capable of any philosophical explication.”37 Moreover, Meyer’s method tells us nothing about crucial textual 34

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Along the way, we may also gain a clearer historical view of the split that divides contemporary theology right and left, and, more broadly, rankles culture (especially American) itself. The issues have not changed all that much. Since usage is Wolzogen’s theme song, most material in this section comes from him, with light glossing from van Velthuysen. I believe that this emphasis on usage is the seventeenth-century equivalent of the sixteenth-century insistence on the “literal sense” by the Protestant reformers. Focusing on usage is much more precise and reflects deeper awareness of the problematic nature of discovering what indeed the “literal sense” is. This focus leads inevitably to more and more exacting historical inquiry. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 214: “. . . omnis fere ab ea [quaestione] pendeat”: “. . . almost everything depends on that [question].” Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 212f.: “Plena talium exemplorum est Scriptura, quae adeo sunt ab inquisitione Philosophiae remota, ut ne cogitemus quidem posse ulla Philosophia explicari.” All the examples Wolzogen gives of ambiguous utterances (diligis me, etc.), although in Latin, exactly reproduce the ambiguity of the original Greek text. Cf. 271, where Wolzogen presents a list of common text-critical problems, all beyond the reach of any philosophy.

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and historical problems such as knowledge about ancient cults, nor does it provide guidance for correction of faults in the text or ways to deal with variant readings. Furthermore, Wolzogen complains, Meyer fails to provide examples of the kinds of problems that (Cartesian) philosophy really can solve. It is true, Wolzogen concedes, that philosophical reason “judges the thing (res)”38 – that is, makes the determination about the correspondence between words and things – but attention to usage must first decode the meaning and reference of utterances (orationes). And since the whole debate is about extracting right meaning – that is, that which agrees exactissime with the intention of the author39 – we must go to the language itself. Usage alone is the master of languages, and just as in a republic ancient and long-term custom acquires the force of law, so also custom fixes these laws for speakers and writers by means of those signs of words, and has established the standard for all names. It is necessary that anyone who wishes to interpret that [language] must observe this custom and usage of utterance.40

Whether the interpreter is dealing with one particular place in scripture or seeking to illumine one place from another, “usage will be the master everywhere.”41 Meyer had denied that vulgar usage could be the norm of interpretation, because it was the source of countless errors; Wolzogen counters by asking whether the wise are therefore unable to use common speech without error. Moreover, he points out, “there is no language that is not ‘vulgar,’ if it is alive; and even if it is dead, it still originated from vulgar [usage].”42 Wolzogen justifies his moves with theological as well as ordinary reasoning. Some conservatives charged that making usus loquendi 38

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Ibid., 235: “Reason assesses (dijudicat) the thing; the usage of speech the utterance.” Cf. 270: “Reason discovers (disceptat) matters that belong to philosophy; usage those that belong to utterance (oratio).” Ibid., 103: “. . . sensus eruendus est, qui menti congruere censeatur auctoris exactissime”: “. . . that meaning is to be discovered which is thought to conform most exactly with the mind of the author.” Wolzogen, De interprete i, 46f.: “Est . . . solus usus linguarum magister, & sicut in republica vetus & longinquitate temporum inolita consuetudo legis vicem obtinet; ita haec loquentium & scribentium consuetudo leges figit illis verborum signis, omnibusque appellationibus modum statuit. Hanc consuetudinem, hunc usum teneat oportet orationis, qui velit 41 illam interpretari.” Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 241. Ibid., 236: “. . . nec enim lingua est ulla quae non sit vulgi, si viva sit; aut sit a vulgo saltem, si mortua.”


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the norm for interpretation denigrated scripture. Wolzogen fends off their objections by pointing out that this principle itself has divine authority: because God himself in scripture has appropriated ordinary human usage as his own, it “now begins to be usus Dei,” God’s usage, even though its meanings depend entirely on human institution.43 But at the same time that he is using theological reasoning, Wolzogen is also establishing the common ground between the Bible and all other books, beginning with the rules of ordinary language and its interpretation. For exceptional though it is in content, scripture “does not form a new language, but appropriates and applies the common language already existing from the custom of speakers.”44 Since it uses common language, “in its explication one should proceed in a manner no different from that used for other books, and common rules of interpretation must be established from the usage of each of the sacred languages.”45 Wolzogen’s position implies that not only scripture, but any collection of utterances, can be thought of as sui interpres: he says that the principle of scripture being its own interpreter does not exclude the general rules for interpretation of the languages in which scripture is written. It is understood in accordance with those rules, and it is from the context in which the words are embedded that interpretation ought to be made.46 43

44

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Ibid., 262f. “Usus . . . vel consideratur in ipsa loquentium consuetudine, & sic mere humanus est . . . vel spectatur ut adhibitus a Deo, qui vulgarem usum adhibendo suum facit; & ita desumptus quidem ab hominibus est, sed a Deo approbatus & usurpatus, jam dei usus incipit esse. Igitur in Deum quoque refunditur ipsius interpretationis dignitas”: “Usage . . . is observed either in the very custom of speakers, and so is merely human . . . or it is viewed as applied by God, who by employing it makes common usage his own; and thus indeed it is chosen by men, but having been approved and employed by God, it now begins to be the usage of God.” Cf. i, 26: “Cum . . . loqui voluerit Deus, & loqui cum hominibus, voluit quoque verborum signis uti, quae sunt propria sermonis, & iis signis quae humano nituntur instituto . . .”: “When God wishes to speak, and to speak with men, he wants also to use the signs of words which are proper to speech, and those signs which depend on human institution . . .” Ibid. ii, 205: “Ipsa enim Scriptura non formavit linguam novam, sed extantem adhibuit & arripuit vulgatam jam consuetudine loquentium.” Ibid. i, 26f.: “. . . in ejus explicatione non aliter esse versandum quam in aliorum librorum interpretatione, regulasque communes interpretandi ex usu linguae utriusque sanctae esse constituendas.” Ibid. ii, 244: “Quando . . . Scripturae tribuitur sui ipsius interpretatio, non excluduntur interpretandi regulae, quia sane censentur in ea lingua includi qua sunt conscriptae Scripturae: sed intelligitur secundum illas regulas, ex ipso verborum contextu fieri debere interpretatio.”

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If it is asked what these common rules of interpretation are, Wolzogen’s response is not a list, but the fundamental principle that gives priority to meaning. This is the principle that unhinges Meyer’s great innovation, with its claim that any truths derived from reading were at the same time true meanings, i.e., intended by the author.47 Before he refutes it, Wolzogen concisely summarizes Meyer’s method as follows: First he digs out some meaning (aliquem sensum) from the words of scripture, then examines that item by the judgment of reason to discover whether it contains truth. If it does, he only then derives the true meaning from that truth (ex veritate colligit verum sensum). But the sense that he [initially] got from the words of scripture he could not hold as any sense [at all] unless he had consulted the usage of speaking – but that, he states, holds nothing certain. Therefore he cannot say that any sense of any text is certain [including his own].48

Against that method, which allows for multiple intended meanings and seems to assume that scripture is riddled with them, Wolzogen insists that scripture, like other ordinary speech, as a rule intends a single meaning for each utterance, and that although some “truth” or other might indeed be present in a sentence, that truth may have little or nothing to do with the meaning intended in that passage.49 Van Velthuysen thoroughly agrees with this 47

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Wolzogen points out that for Meyer everything depended on his one claim (De interprete ii, 193): “Omnia enim hoc uno nituntur, veritates esse veros sensus”: “For the whole depends on this one thing, that truths are true meanings.” Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 162f.: “Ille enim aliquem primo sensum ex verbis Scripturae eruit, tum erutum illum ad judicium rationis examinat, ut sciat an veritatem contineat, quam denique si deprehendat, tum demum ex veritate colligit verum sensum. Quem vero ex verbis Scripturae sensum elicuit, non potuit pro aliquo sensu habere, nisi usum loquendi consuluerit; hunc autem nil certi habere statuit, ergo neque dicere potest ullum sensum alicujus loci certum esse.” Hence the “absurdity” of Meyer’s procedure. Although he admits of exceptions, Wolzogen argues that the social functionality of language depends on statements having single, intelligible meaning: “. . . the very basis of commerce and the necessity of communicating with each other equally constrain language itself, which indeed would hardly have the function of language if it left the reader or hearer with ambiguous meanings”: “Quod ipsa ratio commercii & communicandi secum invicem necessitas aeque invexit atque linguam ipsam, quae profecto vix usum linguae habeat, si ambiguis sensibus suspendat lectorem auditoremve” (De interprete ii, 119; cf. ii, 239). The point has theological relevance for Wolzogen: “between God and men there must be some convention concerning a whole (or every) utterance, if indeed an utterance of God is to make some sense. But God never produces new signs of words or indicates that he wishes to follow a unique manner of speaking. The fact remains that he is said to have spoken to us in our fashion”: “inter Deum & homines aliqua sit oportet de


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point: sailors for example, rather than philosophers, would be the best source of knowledge about the meaning of navigational terms, despite the fact that ordinary sailors are not always the best judge of the truth of statements.50 Wolzogen objects further that Meyer’s method is reductionistic: strictly applied, it drastically curtails the richness and variety of meanings of scriptural utterances grounded in ordinary usage to a short list of abstract and unchanging eternal “truths” discovered in one’s reason by philosophy. Using such a method, Wolzogen says, is like “imitating children, who are in the habit of accommodating the sounds of bells, always the same and uniform, to whatever concepts they are moved by in their mind.”51 Meanwhile, one of van Velthuysen’s key objections to using this method is precisely the same as will be raised by Spinoza, namely, that the interpreter will be uncertain about the meaning of any passage until he has determined its truth. Van Velthuysen says that, since, according to Meyer, no passage of scripture can be called clear and open, as long as it is doubted whether the thing which we declare is being taught by those [passages] sets forth a contradiction or not: since that can never be the true meaning which includes a contradiction, neither can anyone be clearly persuaded about the meaning of scripture so long as he is uncertain whether it involves a contradiction or not . . .52

50 51

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omni oratione conventio, si quidem apud homines aliquem sensum habitura sit oratio Dei. Nusquam autem nova verborum signa Deus procudit, aut singularem se usum loquendi sectari velle significavit. Restat ut nostro more dicatur nobiscum esse locutus” (120f.). On the typical irrelevance of “truths” to specific textual meanings, cf. 180. Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 121b. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 180: We should avoid this reductionist method, “nisi velimus pueros imitari, qui campanarum sonos, eosdem semper & uniformes, quibuslibet mente conceptis motibus solent accommodare.” Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 111b: “. . . nulla loca Scripturae dici posse clara & aperta, quamdiu dubitatur, num res, quam iis doceri testamur, pugnantia ponat aut non ponat: cum nunquam is verus sensus esse possit, qui repugnantiam includit: nec ullus possit plane persuasus esse de sensu Scripturae, de quo certus non est, utrum repugnantiam importet nec ne . . .” Cf. the remarkably similar statement by Spinoza, TTP vii, 113.9/156, criticizing Meyer under cover of Maimonides, who held that “we cannot be certain of the true meaning of any passage unless we know that, as we interpret it, there is nothing in that passage that is not in agreement with reason, or is contrary to reason”: “nec nos de vero ullius esse certos, nisi sciamus locum illum, prout illum interpretamur, nihil continere, quod cum ratione non conveniat, aut quod ei repugnet.”

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From there, Wolzogen draws the right conclusion more clearly than does van Velthuysen – again in terms we will find in Spinoza. For the interpreter, it stands firm . . . that before he begins to examine the truth of some meaning by reason, he ought to establish that that is the meaning contained in scripture. For scripture must propose to him what he should examine by reason, lest scripture should encumber our knowledge of sacred things with trifles, or indeed even present the occasion for thinking about such things.53

Since it is a question of the meaning of a string of words, and not a question of some eternal, necessary or revealed “truth” for reason to explore,54 the rules for interpreting the Bible are governed by reason, and they are the same rules used for any text; on this Wolzogen and van Velthuysen agree.55 If we ask what these rules might be, Wolzogen says no simple answer is possible, since some rules are sought from reason, some from experiences of things, others from the custom of the nations; most of all from the peculiar character of language – in short, there is no domain from which something cannot be derived to formulate rules of interpretation. But still they all come back to this, that they are established by the usage of speech . . .56 53

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Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 163 (my italics): “. . . antequam veritatem sensus alicujus ratione examinandum suscipiat, debere constare illum sensum Scripturae inesse. Debet enim Scriptura ipsi proponere quod examinet ratione: alias negry [sic], quidem conferret ad cognitionem rerum sacrarum Scriptura; imo ne occasionem quidem praeberet de iis cogitandi.” (I propose to read negry as ne gry, a borrowing from Greek gru, “the least trifle”; see Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary, 830.) Wolzogen is here opposing Meyer’s position that scripture provided the “occasion” for contemplating truths already present in the mind, but which one would not have thought of without the prompting of scripture. Cf. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 137: “. . . ubi de sensu Scripturarum agitur, cum non quaeratur quae sit ista veritas, quam posset investigare ratio . . . patet ejus naturae hanc quaestionem esse, ut a variis circumstantiis pendeat ejus solutio”: “. . . where it has to do with the meaning of scriptures, since the question is not about what sort of truth reason can investigate . . . it is clear that this question is such that its solution depends on various circumstances [of the text].” Among many places, Wolzogen, De interprete i, 27 (quoted above, n. 45). Cf. van Velthuysen, Dissertatio 149b f., where he reviews Meyer’s position on a point he (van Velthuysen) agrees with, that scripture, like other books (for example on military arts), does not contain within itself instructions on how to interpret it, and that the method used to determine what it means is a problem for reason, not a matter of faith. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 245 (my italics): “Aliae enim regulae sunt a ratione petitae, aliae a rerum experimentis, a consuetudine gentium aliae, plurimae a linguae genio, summa nil est unde non aliquid trahi possit ad formandas regulas interpretandi. Sed in eo tamen conveniunt omnes, ut usu loquendi confirmentur . . .”


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Moreover, usage means usage in context rather than meanings of individual words or sentences in isolation, as Meyer sometimes seems to suggest. It is the use of words in sentences or paragraphs that determines meaning, for words can bear different meanings in different constructions – meanings that may also differ from what they mean by themselves. But whatever the case, the possible meanings of words are always determined by usage and tend to be reduced to one when they are put in a sentence.57 This line of argument tends toward philological and historical method, and it will blend easily with Spinoza’s historical application of the principle that scripture “interprets itself,” as I discuss further below. Neither Wolzogen nor van Velthuysen devotes much space to the intricate problems of ambiguity and obscurity raised by Meyer, although they recognize that the problems are real. Wolzogen, for example, agrees that a word might get a meaning from its use in context that subverts the dictionary definition of the word.58 Both are more concerned to undermine Meyer’s approach as a whole, and neither is as impressed by the difficulties of interpretation as is 57

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Ibid., 239: “. . . revera usum loquendi sensum determinare, qui, si pensiculate rem trutinemus, unus tantum habetur in oratione quae secundum leges sermonis est composita. . . .etsi usus illis [i.e., verbis] aliquam det significationem quando soluta sunt, idem ille usus aliam eis imponit significationem quando sunt cum aliis verbis conjuncta. . . .Et his singularis usus generalem illum tollit”: “. . . in truth, usage in speech determines meaning so that if we weigh the matter carefully, only one [meaning] is embodied in an utterance composed according to the rules of speech . . . even if usage gives some signification to those [words] when they are detached, that same usage imposes another signification when they are conjoined with other words . . . and by these means, this particular usage overcomes the more general [meaning].” Cf. ii, 115f.: “. . . verba vocesque & suum habent in se inclusum singularem sensum, & quando aliis verbis junguntur, aut alia atque alia constructione copulantur, accipiunt aliam saepe significationem, quae tamen & ipsa usu recepta sit”: “. . . words and sayings and their properties have particular meaning embedded in them, and whenever they are joined with other words, or linked in one or another construction, they often receive a different signification, which nevertheless is retrieved from that very usage.” See the first quotation in the preceding note. Another example: Wolzogen, De interprete i, 48f., observes that on many occasions a string of words (unlike the case of a military command) confronts the reader/hearer with ambiguity because of the undeniable lack of fixed meanings: “Talia autem esse verborum signa, quis possit negare, qui confiteri teneatur innumerabilibus obnoxia esse ambiguitatibus, cum propter ipsam linguarum imperfectionem, quarum nulla unquam sic fuit exculta, aut potuit humana ulla arte excoli unquam, ut rerum infinitae varietati exacte respondens pari verborum significatione aptaretur sermo”: “Who could deny that words are liable to countless ambiguities. This comes from the unfinished nature of languages. None has been or ever will be so thoroughly refined that every individual word in a language could be applied precisely to one single thing among the infinite variety of things.”

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Meyer. For Wolzogen, the divine authorship of scripture is the lifetime warranty of its intelligibility, and readers need only follow the ordinary rules of interpretation to grasp the sense of a biblical text, just as when they read anything else. words and things In defense of his method, Meyer had argued that reason must apply itself to the things (res) referred to by scriptural words in order to establish truths. Countering this, Wolzogen insists on attention to the utterances themselves: We, who deduce the meaning from the utterance itself, think that it must be gotten not by means of arguments sought from [abstract] reason, but from the rules of age-old custom [regarding usage]. For the issue here is one of fact, not law, and so depends on the circumstances of the utterance, not on the evidence of demonstrations: here it is not a question whether what God has said is true or not, but [simply] what he has said.59

The stress on usage and on what the words themselves mean leads inevitably to asking historical or factual questions, as Wolzogen’s following example reveals: if we wanted to prove that Clodius was killed by Milo (an incident in ancient Roman history), the most exquisite philosophical demonstrations would get us nowhere; rather, we would have to produce witnesses, testimonies or other circumstantial evidence. This example leads us now to investigate the manner and extent to which van Velthuysen and Wolzogen develop the idea that the Bible is history as a way of undercutting Meyer’s proposal that philosophy should be its interpreter. his tory categorically dis tinct The Bible, which consists largely of history and narrative, is simply not amenable to philosophical analysis, our liberals argue. Philosophy establishes the truth of assertions by consulting 59

Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 132 (my italics): “Nos, qui ab ipsa oratione deducimus sensum, non argumentis a ratione petitis, sed legibus inveteratae consuetudinis agendum censemus. Est enim quaestio facti, non juris; quae pendet ab orationis circumstantiis, non ab evidentia demonstrationum; in qua, quid Deus dixerit, quaeritur, non, verumne sit, nec ne verum, quod dixit.”


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common notions or by examining the relationship between words and the enduring qualities of things in nature. It argues by demonstrations, not by authority. Historical narrative, by contrast, offers nothing but itself, only “utterance” (oratio), and therefore history and language, for our examination. Meanwhile, the “things” (in this case, events/facti) to which historical narratives refer, and against which we might test them, are not the regular occurrences of nature, but events irretrievably past.60 Therefore, as van Velthuysen observes, there is no “necessary nexus” between universal truths and factual singularities.61 In both sacred and secular history, we are entirely dependent on testimony, for which reason such cognition (cognitio) can never yield demonstrable certainty. We cannot avoid the necessity of trust (fides), regardless of whether we are depending on a divine or a human source.62 We cannot achieve any cognition of the past except on faith, and on the testimony of another. Thus the history of Christ depends on testimony, as does the whole established cultus and dispensation of our salvation; just as also cognition of profane events depends on men’s faith [or on the trustworthiness of men]. So it is easy for anyone to understand that those events could have happened otherwise, nor have they flowed necessarily from the nature of any thing which, once given [i.e., understood], leads us by recognition of it into the knowledge of such events.63

Furthermore, we are dealing with a different dimension of the knowing mind here. The “light of testimony” and other indices of knowledge of a thing are qualitatively distinct from the “light of reason” on which Meyer depends.64 The obvious fact that the Bible 60 61

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The use of archeological evidence was of course still unknown. Dissertatio, 108a: “. . . nulla natura nobis nota est in universo, quae necessarium nexum habet cum iis singularibus factis, quae in historia . . . narrantur . . .” Ibid. 108ab: “Cognitio . . . talium rerum vocatur fides, quia illa testimonia nititur: & quia testimonium est Divinum vel humanum, ideo etiam fides est vel Divina vel humana.” Ibid. 108a: “. . . in cujus praeterea cognitionem aliter pervenire non possumus, quam fide, & testimonio alterius. Ita historia Christi testimonio innititur, ut & totus cultus institutus, & dispensatio nostrae salutis: quemadmodum & profanarum rerum gestarum cognitio fide hominum nititur. Et cuivis in promptu est inteligere, res illas aliter se habere potuisse; neque eas profluxisse necessario ex natura alicujus rei, qua natura data, illa nos sui cognitione ducit in notitiam talium rerum gestarum.” Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 134: “. . . alterius generis lux rationis, & alterius lumen testimoniorum, aut aliorum indiciorum quibus de rei veritate erudior”: “. . . the light of reason is of one kind, and the light of testimonies – or of other indices by which I discover the truth of the matter – is another.”

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consists of other modes of discourse besides historical narrative does not diminish the force of this point: on the contrary, the point is that all of scripture – its narrative, doctrine, moral teaching – is history-like because all our knowledge of it depends on testimony alone. Once we grasp the nature of the biblical materials as a whole as testimony, then we notice that all, without exception, are to be held as historical – the same sort of things which some Livy or Polybius might have committed to writing for us. Except that the authority of scripture is as much greater as is the authority of God above all Livys and Polybiuses. But I think that once this difference is recognized, no further difference is to be posited in the nature of the case.65

We are then in an entirely different epistemological situation than when we use Cartesian reason to determine truth, and we require a categorically different sort of intellectual grasp – what van Velthuysen calls “historical cognition” – a form of knowing that works exactly the same whether we are dealing with things revealed by God or with ordinary testimony regarding events of the past.66 Wolzogen also recognizes the categorically distinct sort of knowledge when he says that in historical narration – like what happened to Jesus, or what Pilate, Herod or the Jews did – we engage “another class of things” than when we discover truth from reason.67 Meyer’s attempt to extract the message of scripture by way of philosophy is thus like trying to perceive sounds through the organs of sight. 65

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Ibid. i, 27: “Quarum si naturam universe animo complectamur, animadverto, omnes, nulla excepta, pro historicis esse habendas, quales eae possint esse, quas nobis Livius aliquis, aut Polybius scriptis mandarunt. Ea tamen differentia, ut tanto major sit auctoritas Scripturarum, quanto supra Livios & Polybios omnes Deus est. Qua posita differentia, nil diversitatis in rei natura ponendum existimo.” Note that the exceptionality of scripture lies not in some arcane quality of its language and discourse, but only in its truth. Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 111a: Regarding the role of reason in the case of revealed material, he says: “. . . rationem hic principii aut argumenti usum non habere, sed plane eandem operam praebere, quam confert in cognitione historica, nempe operam instrumenti”: “. . . that reason here does not have the function of principle or proof, but plainly does the same work that it does in historical cognition, namely the work of an instrument.” Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 147 (my italics): In such cases: “non est haec a ratione petita veritatis descriptio: est historiae narratio. Quae quidem nos ducit ad aliam classem rerum quae eximuntur numero istarum veritatum”: “this representation of truth is not drawn from reason: it is a narration of history. Which indeed leads us to another class of things which are excepted from the category of those [philosophical] truths.”


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But here it must be grasped that our cognition varies in conformity with the variety of things. We cognize natural things by the light of reason. Such is the nature of these things. But we grasp events with our eyes, from witnesses, from history. To want to bring demonstrative evidence to historical things, or to grant trust to natural things, is a preposterous method of knowing these things. Those who want to follow it are like those who set out to perceive sounds by sight, or to entrap light with their ears.68

It follows that our belief depends utterly on the credibility of the source that relates it (once we eliminate things patently false or impossible). Such belief (fides) is sustained solely by the credibility or authority of the narrator, not by “the light of truth itself ” (lumine veritatis ipsius), with which authority and faith have no necessary connection.69 This is true whether we are reading the Bible or Livy. And reason is competent and its critical faculties are appropriate to test the credibility of all testimony and all interpretation, as I discuss further below. No “truths” in scripture Though critical of Meyer, our theologians are scarcely opposing reason or philosophy. Especially van Velthuysen, whose book is well named On the Use of Reason in Theological Matters, reads Meyer as charitably as possible, and argues forcefully that reason is competent not only to determine the identity and to weigh the trustworthiness of historical sources, but, more important, to discern 68

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Ibid. i, 85f.: “Hic autem tenendum est, variam esse cognitionem nostram, pro rerum varietate. Res naturales lumine rationis cognoscimus, est haec earum natura: res gestas ab oculis tenemus, a testibus, ab historia. Velle demonstrationis evidentiam rebus adhibere historicis, aut fidem dare naturalibus, modus his est cognoscendi praeposterus, quique eum sequi vellent, mihi similes viderentur eorum, qui visu percipere sonos, aut lucem captare oculis [sic] aggrederentur.” (I substitute auribus for oculis in my translation, following a suggestion by Curley.) Speaking about scripture, Wolzogen asserts (De interprete i, 29f.) that the authority of the speaker (in this case, ultimately God) takes the place of every reason: “imo credimus antequam sciamus, & modo Deum dixisse constet, non expectamus donec evidentia rationis confirmemur: Dei nobis dicentis auctoritas pro omni ratione habetur”: “truly we believe before we know, and once it is confirmed that God has spoken, we do not expect to be confirmed further by evidence of reason: the authority of God speaking to us is held in place of all reason.” Herein lies the difference between fides and scientia, revelatio and ratio. On trusting sources, van Velthuysen says (Dissertatio, 109b): “. . . the good faith of the narrator, and his candor and probity, has no necessary nexus with any theoretical or practical principles (nullum necessarium nexum habet cum ullis principiis theoreticis aut practicis), or with any cognition gained by the operation of the senses.”

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what is being said and meant by any particular text. On this matter Wolzogen agrees. Far then from denying a major role for reason in the work of interpretation, our authors affirm and define it with more precision than Meyer did. What their “no-truth” statement alludes to is something that Meyer apparently did not consider: that scripture has no philosophical content, and therefore no truth of that universal sort that Meyer says is awakened in our minds when we read. With full confidence Wolzogen asserts, “I am talking here about histories, which in no way depend on the truth of things.”70 The distinction between natural or philosophical truths and historical truths is further defined by the distinction between necessity and contingency – a notion mentioned but not developed by the right-wing theologians. In the work of interpretation, Wolzogen says, we get no help from those truths about which the Exercitator makes such a big issue. For [historical accounts] do not consist of a constant and necessary series of things, and they can exist in one mode or another. Their ground (ratio) has nothing in common with truth, which is single, unmoved, universal, subject to no change. But those historical matters can be referred either to time past or to the future. For prophecies are also histories, or equivalent to histories, which he is able to weave together who is capable of foreseeing future things with certain knowledge.71

Again, Wolzogen notes that facts and truths are categorically distinct – truths are for always; facts are semel – once for all.72 There are an 70

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Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 150: “Loquor enim de historiis, quae a veritate rerum nullo modo dependent.” Ibid. ii, 148f.: “nil juvatur ab istis veritatibus [Meyer’s philosophical truths] quas tantopere crepat Exercitator. Nec enim habent constantem seriem rerum & necessariam, possuntque alio atque alio modo sese habere. Quae ratio nil habet cum veritate, quae unica est & immota, nec ullis obnoxia mutationibus, commune. Historica autem illa vel referri ad tempus praeteritum, vel ad futurum possunt. Nam & prophetiae sunt historiae, aut instar historiarum, quas pertexere is valet, qui valet res futuras certa scientia previdere.” Cf. i, 69: among things not subject to theoretical reason are all those things which contain no necessity in re, either because they depend on the sheer will of God or because they could have happened in any number of ways. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 171: “. . . non posse omnem Scripturae sensum ad veritates rerum referri, quo semel posito, jam omne per se ruit paradoxum Exercitatoris”: “. . . not every sense of scripture can be referred to the truth of things; where it [i.e., that meaning] is laid down a single time, the whole paradox of the Exercitator is ruined.”


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infinite number of things in scripture which must be referred to this question of fact (facti). Since none of them are truths properly speaking, they will be amenable to no interpretation by our Exercitator. All things that depend on the sheer will of God belong in this category.73

The story of the fall and redemption for example “has absolutely no necessity of truth included in it.”74 Neither do the commands that establish rituals, nor the promises on which faith relies. In other words, the very core of biblical religion as these writers construe it falls completely outside the discovery and verification procedures of philosophy. Moreover, although theological specialists may search deep to understand “causes” – e.g., why God acted in such-and-such a way75 – it is sufficient for ordinary believers simply to embrace the story, even if they do not understand its causes and reasons.76 So far, then, we see these two writers combating Meyer’s proposal by contrasting the historical/testimonial sort of knowledge presented in scripture to the sort of philosophical truths that Meyer claimed would be revealed on the occasion of the reader’s encounter with the text. One additional element of modern historical consciousness we see dawning here is Wolzogen’s appeal to the relevance of “times,” both in the production of the text and in its subsequent interpretation. This insight emerges in the context of his argument that scripture is clear, despite the obvious fact that we do not understand all of it. 73

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Ibid. ii, 143f.: “. . . infinita sunt in Scriptura quae ad quaestionem istam facti sunt referenda, quorum cum nullae sint proprie dictae veritates, nec erit ulla secundum nostrum Exercitatorem interpretatio. Omnia quae a mera Dei voluntate pendent sunt in hoc numero.” Ibid. ii, 145: “. . . nullam habet utique in se inclusam veritatis necessitatem.” Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? (Why a God-Man?) is undoubtedly the paradigmatic case in Christian theology. Regarding the Passion of Christ, for example: knowledge of the “history” is necessary, but not of its causes in the mind of God: Wolzogen, De inteprete ii, 151: “. . . causas rerum saepe tuto possumus ignorare, & in ea versor sententia, multas esse posse mortis Christi quas ignoremus, quia noluit eas nobis aperire Deus. . . .Rerum vero gestarum notitiam ideo nobis esse pernecessarium arbitror . . .”: “. . . we may often be safely ignorant of the causes of things, and I share the conclusion that there can be many [causes] of the death of Christ of which we are ignorant, because God does not wish to reveal them to us . . . But I judge that knowledge of the things that happened is absolutely necessary for us . . .” Spinoza uses exactly this distinction to his advantage in his critique of the elitism of Meyer’s method (vii, 115.8/157f.).

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I say . . . that something can be understood in one time (uno tempore) that is not necessary to understand in every time. Those who were contemporaries of the prophets and apostles could grasp many things which we do not grasp; we in turn seem able to grasp some things which were hidden from the men of those times.77

The theological reason that Wolzogen produces for this is that God long ago decided to provide only one scripture for all ages and places. Consequently, not all of it is “so fitted to every time, place, age and status that all of it will always be understood by everyone.”78 Some allusions in the text for example refer to ancient events, rituals or regions about which no knowledge any longer exists; by the same token some texts are clarified only by future events (e.g., ot prophecies as Christians construe them).79 The same principle that is relevant to readers applies to the writers of scripture; that it was written over a very long period of time accounts for some of its apparent contradictions. Texts reflect “so great a variety of times, places and infinite circumstances that it is impossible that the same word can be accommodated to all, and to every time and to the same things.”80 The writings are adapted to the mentalities of the times and places in which they 77

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Wolzogen, De interprete i, 17: “dico . . . posse uno tempore aliquid intelligi, quod non omni tempore necesse sit ut intelligatur. Multa poterant capere qui Prophetarum & Apostolorum aequales erant, quae nos non capimus: & capere jam videmur nonnulla posse quae istorum temporum hominibus latebant.” Bekker (Admonitio viii.8, 129f.) admits that St. Paul would not understand contemporary theology – a startling glimmer of historical consciousness: “. . . facile adducor ut credam, ne Paulum quidem ipsum, si viveret, magnam Theologiae nostrae partem agniturum: non quasi vera non sit, sed quod discere haberet necesse, quid sit Ens per se aut per accidens, praedicamentale aut transcendentale”: “. . . I am easily persuaded, as I believe that Paul himself, if he were alive, would not recognize a great part of our theology – not to say that it is not true, but that he would necessarily have to learn the difference between ‘being per se or per accidens’ or between ‘predicamental or transcendental.’” Wolzogen, De interprete i, 18f.: He states that owing to the immense variety of readers and diversity of times etc., “. . . omnem Scripturam omni tempore, omni loco, omni aetati, omni statui, omnibus ita non esse attemperatam, ut semper omnis ab omnibus intelligatur . . .” This insight echoes but does not overturn the age-old fiction formulated by Vincent of Lerins, that “catholic truths” are those that have always been held everywhere by everyone (semper, ubique et ab omnibus), since Wolzogen believes that the faithful in every age have been able to grasp the “saving truths” of scripture, which (Wolzogen apparently 79 Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 174f. believes) have always been the same. Ibid. ii, 175: “Habet enim illa tempora, illa loca, & infinitae circumstantiae tantam varietatem, ut impossibile sit idem verbum omnibus perinde, ac omni tempore, & iisdem in rebus accommodari.”


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were written; for that reason we have to adjust to new meanings that arise from new usages, for “as with men, so also with the utterances of men.”81 Thus our attention is driven to usage and hence to the study of history. get ting scripture to interpret it self The Protestant theologians’ passion to understand scripture from itself was fueled by the desire to grasp “God’s word” out of its only available source. That passion of course helps explain historically the Protestant dominance of the modern history of biblical interpretation and its preoccupation with hermeneutical issues.82 For our authors, pursuit of that goal had sharpened definition of the interpreter’s task to a single point: to determine exactissime the intention of the author.83 Success would reveal the mind of God. But since the divine word had been mediated through human instruments, the pressure to understand inevitably focused on the ancient human authors – or rather writers – and problems with understanding them. Up to now, our authors proposed to get the essential meaning out of scripture in one of two ways: by Meyer’s philosophical “matching” of scriptural notions with common notions, or by the orthodox principle of scripture interpreting itself through the 81

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Ibid. i, 76: “Temporum est aliqua scribendi ratio, habentque suas aetates, quemadmodum homines, ita hominum quoque sermones: rursus usum novum agnosco”: “One ground for writing is in some manner that of times, and they have their own eras, just as men do; as men are, so also the utterances of men: again, I acknowledge new usage.” Cf. ii, 168. In the period under consideration, the monumental historical–critical work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon embodied in his Histoire critique (1682) exemplifies this point: unlike the texts before us, it is quite barren of hermeneutical discussion, because Simon dismisses it, leaving it to the magisterium of the church to determine the religious significance of the text. His only interest, he says, is in historical–critical issues, and they are, in his view, religiously irrelevant. Wolzogen, De interprete II, 103: “. . . verus . . . sensus eruendus est, qui menti congruere censeatur auctoris exactissime.” Wolzogen very subtly however points out that we might be wasting our time trying to get at the mens of the author, since the human authors did not always fully grasp what the divine Author might have had in mind as he guided the composition of scripture. We should therefore be confident that the meaning we need to grasp is fully available in the text and its language, since God does not want anyone to be misled (ii, 136, 139).

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analogy of faith.84 Now a significant new approach is emerging: scripture “interpreting itself ” through the linguistic usage of its human authors, examined each in its own context.85 From this starting point Spinoza will drastically expand historical inquiry as he explicates his own method. This new emphasis led Wolzogen and van Velthuysen to some fresh reflection on interpreting the peculiar and perhaps incomparable discourse of the biblical prophets. This issue is worth our notice, since prophets and prophecy were burning issues in the late seventeenth century, seized as it was with millennial dreams. Prophetic discourse also presented a hard knot for biblical interpreters to unravel. And of course analysis of prophecy occupies the first two chapters of Spinoza’s Tractatus. Van Velthuysen supposed that, unlike most other forms of biblical discourse, prophecy had no generic counterpart in profane literature, that it thus presented its own peculiar problems of interpretation.86 For one thing, Christians claimed that the prophets did not always fully know what they were talking about (e.g., the identity of Jesus as the Messiah). Prophecies of events or states of affairs that were hidden (because they were future or private visions) were of course not susceptible to philosophical analysis: “they cannot,” van Velthuysen asserts, “be understood by a spirit other than that by which they were written.” Not that van Velthuysen is finally succumbing to the Enthusiasts. His point is that 84

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This principle states that, in virtue of its divine authorship, all scripture teaches the same essential knowledge of salvation, and its obscure places can be clarified by clear places. Van Velthuysen (Dissertatio, 133b) notes that this characteristic doesn’t appear in profane literature. In the commentary which he provides for his own edition of Meyer’s PSI (Halle Magdeburg, 1776), Semler (Pref., vii) compliments Wolzogen on his substitution of usus loquendi for the analogy of faith as the principle of scriptural self-interpretation (even though Wolzogen’s own emphasis is on the contrast between his principle and Meyer’s “philosophy”). The analogy principle, Semler observes, is “more agreeable to the theological professor than to the interpreter” (for Semler, the “interpreter” is one who uses a strict historical method); meanwhile, Semler observes (ibid.), “everyone today embraces Wolzogen’s rule.” According to Lagrée and Moreau (Meyer, La philosophie, 20), the University of Leiden apparently holds the only existing copy of Semler’s edition. That is the copy I consulted. Spinoza of course would deny this, affirming that other nations as well had prophets. The rest of this paragraph draws on van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 123b.


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we cannot arrive at an understanding of the peculiar and singular modes of speaking and writing [of the prophets] except through knowledge of the signification of certain things and words which scripture presupposes.

But since those significations and presuppositions – the ingredients of the prophetic mentality – are available from scripture alone, “their meaning cannot be extracted from anywhere but scripture, and so scripture has the status of a principle in the explanation of those things.”87 Here van Velthuysen has grasped a fundamental issue of historical interpretation: no text becomes intelligible until one has discerned the commonly understood framework of presuppositions that informs the whole and reveals the sense of its particular sentences. Van Velthuysen has not only articulated an essential imperative of historical interpretation here, but gives a new meaning to the principle that scripture is its own interpreter. Spinoza will drive the logic of this same idea one crucial step further to its ultimate conclusion, namely, that even the religious discourse of scripture rests on presuppositions that we no longer share.88 There are, according to van Velthuysen, two other reasons – both historical – why scripture has to be interpreted from scripture: first, various historical or geographical references have scripture as their only literary evidence, and second, certain key terms of biblical religion have a particular signification that can be gotten nowhere else – terms like faith, election, justification.89 The force 87

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Ibid. (my italics): “. . . nos non posse pervenire ad intelligentiam propriorum & scriptori singularium loquendi modorum, nisi per cognitionem quarundam rerum & vocum significationis, quam Scriptura praesupponit . . .” And “. . . modi loquendi, quibus vaticinia proponuntur, ita saepe Scripturae proprii & singulares sunt, ut eorum sensus non nisi ex Scriptura erui possit; atque ita Scriptura in eorum explicatione eatenus principii locum habet.” This principle in newer form is central to the mentalités school of historigraphy: see LeGoff, “Mentalities.” From these texts we can demonstrate that, contrary to Zac (Spinoza, 12f.), Spinoza is not the inventor of the principle of scripture as the interpreter of itself, even though he alone stripped the principle of the last of its dogmatic trappings. Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 123b; 136a: “Quid fides, quid electio, quid justificatio per fidem . . . &c. in Sacra Scriptura significet, id ex Sacra Scriptura discimus, conferentes loca cum locis, voces cum vocibus, ut ita consequamur cognitionem sensus Spiritu Sancti, quem lectoribus vocibus illis insinuare voluit, atque docere”: “What the words ‘faith,’ ‘election,’ ‘justification through faith’ etc. signify in sacred scripture we must learn from sacred scripture, comparing passages with passages, speeches with speeches in order thus to gain knowledge of the meaning which the Holy Spirit wishes to introduce and teach to the readers by those utterances.” Spinoza occasionally adopts a phrase similar to “sense of the Holy Spirit,” e.g., TTP vii, 98.15/141; vii, 102.18/145.

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of these arguments is that no combination of Meyer’s rationalistic insights with the Protestant axiom that “scripture interprets itself ” can add up to a coherent method. Thus van Velthuysen, who wants to grant as much as he can to Meyer, nevertheless comes down clearly on the side of the Protestant principle of self-interpretation, with some qualification: . . . those who say that scripture is its own interpreter ought also to concede that no interpreter now exists who has achieved all true interpretations, and the true meaning of each and every place of scripture. And yet they think (correctly in my opinion) that they are right to teach that scripture comprehends within itself all the true grounds (rationes) for interpreting it, just as [by contrast] the Anonymous Author says that true philosophy contains in itself all the true grounds of interpretation.90

Making this idea a foundation stone of his historical method, Spinoza will stress that all scripture has to be interpreted on the basis of its own rationes, not ours. For it is only by getting inside the mental framework that produced prophecy as well as all the rest of scripture – its stories, its doctrines, its poetry – can we gain a coherent grasp of the meanings intended by the biblical authors or apprehended by their first hearers and readers. Such are the insights about history developed by the liberals and available to Spinoza as he formulated his entire method of interpretation in historical terms.91

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Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 155a: “Nam qui dicunt Scripturam esse sui ipsius interpretem, etiam concedere debent, nullum jam extare interpretem, qui omnes veras interpretationes, & verum sensum omnium & singulorum Sacrae Scripturae locorum est assecutus: & tamen se vera docere putant; idque (ut existimo) recte, nempe Scripturam in se complecti omnes veras interpretandi rationes: quemadmodum auctor Anonymus dicit Philosophiam veram etiam omnes veras interpretandi rationes in se continere.” Throughout, van Velthuysen’s critique of Meyer is measured, and he tends to interpret Meyer benignly, not wanting to undercut his own commitment to reason as the instrument of interpretation. But he clearly does not share Meyer’s most fundamental thesis about how reason functions in the work of interpretation. He is still committed to the basic Christian kerygma, the (sacred) history; Christianity for him is emphatically not a philosophy. How scripture is to be interpreted, as described here, must be sharply distinguished from the question of how it is to be explained, however. Since Spinoza abandons the ahistorical notion of scripture as a divinely dictated writing, he must explain it in a different way, and does so, as we shall see in the next chapter.


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reason the norm of interpretation Meyer’s book forced its critics to explain more exactly how reason was to function in the work of biblical interpretation, which for all Protestants was the basis of theology. The debate that ensued was only peripherally about Descartes,92 despite conservative attacks on him and all who wrote favorably about his usefulness for theology. Nor was the argument about any particular philosophy, or about philosophy as an emerging academic discipline. This comes as no surprise, since all the disputants were united against Meyer (albeit for different reasons) at least in this, that theology and philosophy were to be kept separate. Even though border disputes would persist, the critics were sure that Meyer had transgressed them. The discussion, then, was about the status and functions of reason itself in the interpretation of scripture. Lambert van Velthuysen takes the lead here, with the most unequivocal and bold affirmation of the powers and key role of reason. Reason and rationalism At the outset we must distinguish between the affirmation of reason’s role in theology and “rationalism,” a term which was not used at the time and is as ill defined as it is common in scholarly accounts of early-modern intellectual history and theology. In the realm of religion, I here define rationalism narrowly as the view that denies revelation as a second source of genuine or necessary religious knowledge above or beyond reason. Meyer in this sense is a rationalist, for even though he marginally affirms scripture as the necessary and infallible “trigger” of essential religious truths, it provides nothing really new, since those truths are a priori latent in our minds. Spinoza is philosophically (but not exegetically) a pure and consistent rationalist in that he affirms unequivocally that 92

E.g., whether Descartes was a threat to theology, and to what extent Meyer was a Cartesian anyway. As mentioned earlier, to the former question the clearest contemporary source by a liberal and learned pastor/theologian is Bekker’s Admonitio (1668). Bekker has a few critical but undetailed references to Meyer’s book: e.g., i.9, 15 (subjecting the word of God to human reason); v.7, 91 (denying the creation of the world ex nihilo).

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reality is a single system and reason and experience comprise the only access to knowledge about it.93 Neither of our two liberal theologians was a rationalist in those senses. Both affirmed revelation as a source of new and saving knowledge that was available nowhere else and that had no corresponding common notions. Wolzogen considered of paramount importance his challenge to Meyer’s reductionist thesis that any and all truths disclosed from reading scriptural passages are at the same time true (intended) meanings. “Everything depends on this one point,” he insists; once we have exposed Meyer’s mistake, “we may omit that whole business about philosophy, since we have despoiled it in its own realm by detaching those [philosophical] truths from [textual] meanings.”94 Spinoza could have used these very words as an epigraph for his own chapters on interpretation. But, like van Velthuysen, Wolzogen goes on to affirm that God reveals new knowledge in scripture that is utterly inaccessible to reason, not necessarily because it contains unfathomable mysteries, but because (as we saw) it deals with “facts,” not “things.” Their discussion about the essentially “historical” character of scripture made that point. They insisted that in two important respects Christian truth was not rational: reason could never discover it, and reason cannot understand everything that is revealed (such as that God is three and one at the same time). More interestingly, our two authors seem to waver about whether, or to what extent, these revealed truths are genuine “knowledge” – a question to which we shall return. Another anti-rationalist point on which our authors insist is that there is (as we already saw) no rational connection between words as signs and that which they signify or mean – no straight path that leads from a word or sentence to some innate or universal idea. Rather, the connection between words and things is, as we would 93

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The essential empiricist dimension of Spinoza’s rationalism has frequently been ignored, but we shall see it breaking out, contra Meyer, in his inductive approach to the data of scripture (chap. 5). See Franck, “Spinoza’s Logic”; de Deugd, Spinoza’s First Kind of Knowledge. Loeb, From Descartes to Hume, challenges standard accounts that too radically separate “rationalists” and “empiricists” into opposing camps. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 193: “Omnia enim hoc uno nituntur, veritates esse veros sensus. . . .totum illud de philosophia possemus omittere, quia regno eam suo spoliavimus, cum veritates illas sensibus detraximus . . .”


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say, socially constructed – established by usage, convention and the natural processes by which languages develop and function. Therefore, any notion that might connect words with unchanging essences or with meanings uncontaminated by vulgar usage – which Meyer’s work seems sometimes to suggest – ignores a fundamental aspect of language. As we have seen, “the usage of speakers alone establishes the standard of speech,” and usage is derived solely from the generally unself-conscious will and consent of ordinary speakers.95 Both our authors are intent on naturalizing and demystifying the work of interpretation. Altogether, van Velthuysen’s arguments set before his readers two fundamentally different paths for a rational interpretive method: one (the right one) approaches the text philologically, ferreting out the meaning of the utterances (orationes), considered contextually, with all attending circumstances; the other (Meyer’s) proceeds philosophically, by treating the text as an abstract system of signs whose meanings are linked to a priori ideas which those signs prompt or awaken in the reader, thus reducing the essential content of the text to ideas already known.96 By focusing on meaning derived from usage, and clearly distinguishing that sphere of inquiry from judgments about truth, whether delivered by tradition or derived from innate reason, interpretation was now to a considerable extent liberated from a priori constraints of religious authority, and free to use all the resources of reason to understand what scripture intended to convey. Here our authors pushed their claims on behalf of reason to the very boundary of its assigned “ancillary” domain, sometimes only a short step from where Spinoza would take it. The powers of reason Despite eschewing rationalism, our authors valorize reason as powerful and normative in the work of interpretation. They reject 95

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Cf. Wolzogen, De interprete i, 46: “. . . solus loquentium usus linguae modum poneret”: “. . . the usage of speakers alone sets the measure of language.” And 45: “sola voluntate consentiunt in eo homines ut hos characteres pro rerum signis ultro citroque admittant”: “by their will alone [i.e., by convention rather than nature] men agree on this, that they reciprocally admit these marks as the signs of [certain] things.” This is the gist of van Velthuysen’s discussion, Dissertatio, 121a.

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conservative charges that their affirmation of reason is a new form of Pelagianism: that, they point out, was a dispute over the capacity of the human will, not the mind97 (note how important this distinction is for liberating reason in its philosophical pursuits: if the church has never condemned overestimation of the capacity of reason as “Pelagian heresy,” then Christian philosophers are free to pursue their explorations and claims along Cartesian lines). The liberals also counter vulgar arguments against philosophy, derived from Paul, produced by those who despise reason and revel in the alleged stultitia of the Gospel.98 Van Velthuysen boldly claims that there is no difference between the apostles and ourselves when it comes to understanding scripture. Such understanding depends on “evident and clear cognition of argument, on which the meaning of scripture depends,” and this cognition “is common to us and the Apostles” – not to mention the unregenerate, heretics, Jews and demons! For how can God call them to account if, while destitute of the Spirit, they are unable to understand the claims that scripture is making on them?99 Thus van Velthuysen exploits a common 97

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Cf. van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 118: Those destitute of the Spirit who cannot perceive the things of God (1 Cor. 2.14) suffer a disability of will, not of cognition: “that impotence is to be understood only of moral impotence, namely, that men cannot know the mysteries of the faith because they do not wish to, and because they never will without the grace of God; not that they do not have in themselves those principles of cognition, and that faculty for knowing by which alone those things handed down in scripture are grasped and understood . . .”: “illam impotentiam tantum intelligendam esse de impotentia morali, nempe quod homines non possunt mysteria fidei cognoscere, quia nolunt, & quia nunquam sine gratia Dei volent: non quod in se non habeant ea cognitionis principia, eamque cognoscendi facultatem, qua ea, quae in Scriptura traduntur, tantum capiuntur & intelliguntur . . .” Cf. Bekker, Admonitio iv.13, 78f., arguing that Descartes’s epistemology cannot be rejected by the theologians “because of servitude to sin.” For, “as Descartes often said, this has to do with things to be understood, not to be done (non de rebus agendis sed intelligendis).” Cf., e.g., van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 139: the argument of the orthodox opponents runs, “If reason must be considered of weight in matters which are known through revelation, the authority and magisterium are taken away from God, and ‘Thus saith the Lord’ is emptied . . .We cannot believe unless we become as infants . . . The Gospel is stultitia to the Greeks and scandalum to the Jews”: “Si rationem pondus aestimandum in rebus, quae per revelationem cognoscuntur, abrogatur Dei authoritas & magisterium, nec obtinet illud, sic dixit Dominus. . . .Nos credere non posse, nisi similes simus facti infantibus . . . Euangelium Graecis stultitia, Judaeus scandalum.” Ibid., 118a, regarding the “clear and evident cognition of the story on which the meaning of Scripture depends, which I declare is common to us and the apostles . . . How can scripture be called perspicuous in things necesssary for salvation, if it is not intelligible to him who is destitute of the Spirit? How can the whole scripture be said to be divinely inspired, and useful for teaching, etc. [2 Tim. 3.16] if it is not intelligible?”: “evidens &


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theological distinction between mind and will (emphasized by Calvin as counterbalance to predestination) to support a rational and contextual approach to interpretation. What this distinction never explained is how God could “call them to account” if he has not by grace removed the obstacle of their wills – a matter ultimately of predestination. The necessity of resorting to reason As mentioned earlier, some particular contextual considerations prompted our authors to affirm reason with confidence, even urgency, against their theological opponents. Besides the fact that they were dealing with someone (Meyer) who would listen to nothing but reason, there was the fact that theologians representing Protestant establishments always argued against its two old opponents: Catholicism and Enthusiasm. The two groups had in common (a point argued as far back as Luther) that they legitimated their claims by a deus ex machina, which they alleged was the charisma of the Holy Spirit. Against both of them, our liberals discarded cognitive privilege and substituted natural reason. The whole realm of critica sacra, van Velthuysen remarks, is subject to reason.100 Anyone who claimed that discerning the correct meaning of scripture required some special illumination deserved the Enthusiast label.101 In its place, natural reason must suffice.

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clara cognitio argumenti, quo Scripturae sensus nititur: quam fateor nobis cum Apostolis communem esse . . .Quomodo Scriptura posset dici perspicua in rebus ad salutem necessariis, si non sit intelligibilis Spiritu illo distitutis? Quomodo tota Scriptura posset dici divinitus inspirata, & utilis ad doctrinam, &c. si non sit intelligibilis?” Scripture is intelligible to the “natural man,” to the heretic and to the Jew (117b, 118b). As we saw, their problem is not intellectual, but an unregenerate, morally incapacitated will (the classic Augustinian problem so vividly documented in the Confessions). Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 124: Reason has to show how to identify arguments from the analogy of faith, how to judge the coherence of speech, how to deal with critical problems arising in the reproduction and transmission of the text: all such problems are subject to reason as principium, and “to it must be referred the whole realm of sacred criticism”: “eo est referenda tota critica sacra.” Here van Velthuysen and Wolzogen agree with Meyer, who tried to drive his Calvinist opponents into the Enthusiast corner by saying that either they were Enthusiasts or they must agree with him that “the internal witness of the Spirit” was nothing more than the operation of natural reason (PSI xv, 94). Van Velthuysen remarks that Meyer’s rightwing critics were so terrified of Cartesian philosophy that they had fallen into the opposite error – Enthusiasm (Dissertatio, Pref., ii).

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This thesis made the procedures of biblical interpretation all the more like those of all the other disciplines involving the interpretation of texts. Van Velthuysen summarizes as follows: In all the faithful, the foundation and principle of faith is argument alone, situated either in nature or scripture, and evidently and distinctly perceived. Any theological assertion is likewise to be approved only on the basis of clearly and distinctly perceived argument, in the same way that argument functions in the other disciplines. Therefore they err who seek still another foundation of interpretation, and introduce on top of that some operation of the Holy Spirit in the mind of man, as though to say: “When men feel an inner influence, only then do they also have a true foundation of their faith.” Such a doctrine must necessarily be defined as Enthusiasm.102

Van Velthuysen likens the Enthusiasts to ancient tragedians who, when they ran into insoluble problems, resorted to a deus ex machina.103 He is convinced that we can gain as much certainty in interpretation as we need through reason, even though it is not (as Meyer claimed) infallible. Even though we may err, we must not for that reason take refuge in some “light of faith” distinct from reasons and arguments, so as to persuade ourselves that we have discovered the true meaning of scripture. For it is not permitted to the light of faith to feign any distinction from these reasons and arguments, lest thereby it spawn Enthusiasm.104 102

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Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 116ab: “In omnibus . . . fidelibus fundamentum & principium fidei est solum argumentum in natura, aut Scriptura situm, evidenter & distincte perceptum. In Theologia itaque etiam non nisi clare & distincte percepto argumento acquiescendum: quemadmodum in reliquis disciplinis id usum suum habet. Errant itaque, qui adhuc aliud fundamentum interpretationis suae quaerunt; & insuper introducunt aliquam Spiritus Sancti in mente hominis operationem, quam sc [scilicet]: cum homines intimo tactu sentiunt, tum demum etiam verum fundamentum suae fidei habent. Quae doctrina necessario in Enthusiasmum definere debet.” Cf. 119b, where he criticizes those who seek another “foundation” from evident cognition: they think what they are only imagining is produced by the Holy Spirit. Spinoza will repeat this argument. Ibid., 120a: “. . . ineunt rationem non Theologis, sed scriptoribus tragoediarum dignam, qui quando rei argumentum explicare non possunt, confugiunt ad Deum”: “they contrive a reason worthy not of theologians but of the writers of tragedies, who when they cannot explicate the rationale of a situation resort to God.” Ibid., 154b: “Neque . . . ad lumen fidei confugiendum, quod distinctum sit a rationibus & argumentis, quibus nobis persuademus nos verum Scripturae sensum assecutos esse. Lumen enim fidei ab his rationibus & argumentis, distinctum nullum fingere licet, quin ilico Enthusiasmo patrocinemur.”


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The reasons and arguments referred to are, of course, to be drawn from scripture.105 But notice that “reason” here must be natural – i.e., “ungraced” and un-Spirited; otherwise the whole argument loses its force. Not surprisingly, statements like these raised suspicion that van Velthuysen was really a Socinian, just as Meyer’s other critics suspected him of the same heresy for making reason the norm for interpretation. The Socinians, who had appeared in the Dutch Republic in large numbers after being driven out of Poland, read scripture literalistically and held that nothing should be affirmed as the teaching of scripture that was repugnant to natural reason, a principle that eliminated from “necessary saving truths” those post-biblical Christian dogmas such as the Trinity and the twonature Christology. Van Velthuysen could distance himself from the Socinians only by asserting somewhat lamely that he believed doctrines that the Socinians rejected, and was prepared obediently to believe them simply because they were revealed. Such doctrines, he argued, were not against but “above reason.”106 In contrast to the Enthusiasts and Socinians, the Catholics presented a different problem, but one which further motivated our authors to turn to a rational method. Against the Enthusiasts they had valorized natural reason; now against the Catholics they insisted on the natural intelligibility of scripture. It was customary for theologians to reason that because scripture was divinely authored it was infallible. But because he was debating a philosopher whose entire argument depended on the obscurity and 105

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Ibid., 156a: Rejecting any appeal to “aliquod lumen, tamquam ad principium distinctum ab argumentis, quae ex Scriptura petuntur”: “some light, as though to a principle distinct from arguments which are sought from Scripture.” E.g., ibid., 130b: Although he does not understand how Christ is the “son of God,” he believes it because scripture reveals it to him. This is the stance of Spinoza’s “sceptic,” who lets scripture override reason where the text clearly teaches something to be believed. Cf. 129a, where van Velthuysen discusses the Trinity as a “res supra rationem” (something above reason); and 130b: “Mihi . . . sufficit me in mea fide de Sacro-sancta Trinitate nullam reperire contradictionem; Sacram Scripturam illud mysterium mihi clare revelare . . .”: “It is sufficient for me in my faith that I find no contradiction concerning the Holy Trinity; that Scripture clearly reveals that mystery to me . . .” Wolzogen is of course also a “sceptic” under the Spinozan definition; Wolzogen asserts (De interprete i, 52): “Non . . . credimus quia ratio dictat, sed quia Deus dicit . . . Manet . . . fidei semper unicum & inconcussum fundamentum, auctoritas divina”: “We believe not because reason dictates, but because God has spoken; divine authority remains always the single and unshaken foundation of faith.” Cf. ii, 129, 221.

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ambiguity of scripture, and which called for an infallible interpreter, Wolzogen emphasized instead scriptural intelligibility, identifying it as “the fundamentum in this entire discussion.”107 Our liberals agreed that the intelligibility of Scripture made it accessible to everyone, without the need for interpreters.108 It required neither a special gift of grace or Spirit to understand it, as the Enthusiasts insisted, or an authoritative interpreter, as the Catholics (and Meyer) claimed. Both our authors, with orthodox Protestants, deny that any infallible interpreter person exists – whether charismatic individual, ecclesiastical magister or Meyerian philosopher. In fact, as Wolzogen notes, we aren’t looking for “an Interpreter person” at all. We already have that in each rational reader. Rather “we seek that [faculty, rule, instrument] by which the not-yet-certain interpreter is persuaded.”109 That instrument is reason applied to the language. Our authors also turn to reason to meet another challenge: one of the unanswerable arguments of Catholic theologians against the Reformers’ claim of sola scriptura was that only the church (or at least somebody or something external to scripture itself) could point out which writings or books in fact were scripture. That could be identified only by the historic community that had set these books apart in the first place. Perhaps lacking the historical sense or freedom from religious presupposition to acknowledge the validity of the Catholic argument, van Velthuysen insisted that reason could do the job. It could judge not only what God proposed in scripture, but whether he has spoken in these writings. Spinoza would cut this knot by simply adopting a secularized version of the Roman Catholic argument: “scripture” was the name of a collec107

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Wolzogen, De interprete i, 10: “. . . fundamenti loco ponendum in tota hac quaestione, ita comparatas esse Scripturas, ut intelligi possint.” i, 9: From the fact of divine authorship, “sequitur, & intelligi posse ac debere Scripturas, & meram veritatem iis contineri, & eam veritatem sic exhiberi legentibus eam ut oportet, ut nequis in errorum inducatur.” E.g., van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 117b, where he points out that the unregenerate and heretics could not be called to account if they could not understand. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 92, argues that there is no such thing as an infallible interpreter person: “Eum vero Interpretem qui faciat aliis certam & invictam fidem, ego nego esse vel fuisse unquam, nego esse debere, nego esse posse.” Rather we depend on natural understanding of scripture’s ordinary usage of the language. Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 95: “Nec enim Interpretem quaerimus; est is quicunque legit intelligenter Scripturas: sed id quaerimus, quo persuadeatur de vera interpretatione nundum certus Interpres.”


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tion whose existence and canonicity could be explained entirely on the basis of its history of community production and acceptance, without resort to supernatural explanations. Van Velthuysen recognizes the futility of long-standing Protestant arguments trying to establish the authority and credibility of scripture from scripture itself. Having pointed out the history-like characteristic of the whole work, he argued that the reader had to judge the credibility of a history on some basis other than the text itself: I have to have known beforehand what those [evidences] are on account of which the witness [author] is to be held worthy of trust, before I would be able to judge this or that [account, teaching etc.] to be worthy of trust, or before arguments were drawn from within it by which the credibility of the historian is wont to be proved. The historian himself cannot provide me these evidences, for that would be arguing in a circle.110

“How,” he asks, “can I judge of the sanctity of some doctrine, if I do not have within me a norm against which true sanctity is to be critically examined?”111 Van Velthuysen boldly proposes that we use the same judgment of reason for both sacred and secular texts: “the judgment depends equally on reason, by which it is established and taught that the Holy Spirit taught something, or not”; put another way (echoing a Cartesian question), the judgment about “whether God has spoken, rather than some seducer, depends on my reason.”112 Fully supporting this view, Wolzogen uses the example of a decree brought from the emperor by one of his emissaries. There 110

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Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 110a: “. . . oportet me antea ex ratione scivisse, quae illa [signa] sint, propter quae testis sit habendus fide dignus, antequam judicare possim hunc aut illum esse fide dignum: aut in eo reperiri argumenta, quibus historici fides probari soleat. Istaec enim signa me ipse historicus docere non potest: committeretur enim circulus.” Ibid., 109b (my italics): “. . . et quo pacto de sanctitate alicujus doctrinae judicare possum, si antea in me non habeam normam, ad quam vera sanctitas examinari possit?” Spinoza may have been prompted by such statements to make two of his own most important assertions: that the “sanctity” of certain texts was itself the product of historical judgment of ordinary and fallible men made long ago, and/or that before we ourselves attribute sanctity to any text, we first must make a rational investigation of it and its history (TTP Pref., 9.9/53). Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 122b: “. . . pariter a ratione pendet judicium, quo statuitur atque docetur Spiritum Sanctum instituisse aliquid docere, aut non docere.” Ibid., 110a: “. . . utrum deus sit locutus an aliquis seductor, hoc a mea ratione pendet.”

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is no doubt it must be obeyed, because it contains the will of the emperor. But it can legitimately be asked (a) if this really is from the prince, and (b) whether the most obvious or some other intention of the prince is reflected in its wording. Such doubts are perfectly appropriate, for they do not call in question the authority of the prince, but only seek clarity about his intentions.113 issues in interpretation Wolzogen offers a simple definition of interpretation: making the connection between words and meaning. The instrument for doing that is reason alone:114 He who reads or hears scriptures . . . must be called an interpreter by me if he reads with understanding. For whoever through [the exercise of] judgment connects the comprehended words with meaning (sensus) is an Interpreter. To deserve that appellation, he need only be endowed with reason so that he can make that connection (facere nexum) which is formed by reason alone.115

Wolzogen thus does not limit interpretation to the work of explaining obscurities and ambiguities. Every reader becomes an interpreter in the act of joining “meanings with words in the mind, and he knows that that [meaning] is in these [words] from the very texture of the words.”116

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Wolzogen, De interprete I, 53f. The text reads in part: “. . . quaeri potest, sitne hoc mandatum Principis nec ne? denique, sitne haec mens an alia Principis? non venit hic in discrimen auctoritas Principis, quam possim agnoscere totam . . . & tamen circa utramque hanc quaestionem incerto judicio suspendi”: “. . . it can be asked whether or not this is the command of the prince. Next, whether this or some other is the intention of the prince. The authority of the prince does not come into question here, the whole of which I may affirm . . . and yet suspend judgment about each of these questions.” Ibid. i, 56: “. . . sola ratione copulari verba cum sensu . . . est Interpretis [officium]”: “. . . to join by reason alone the words with meaning . . . is the [task] of the interpreter.” Ibid. i, 49f.: “Is qui legit auditve Scripturas . . . is mihi Interpres dicendus, si cum intelligentia legit. Quisquis enim judicio comprehensa verba cum sensu connectit, Interpres est, qui, modo ratione sit praeditus, ut facere nexum illum possit, qui sola ratione formatur, jam meretur suam appellationem.” Beasts, who lack reason, cannot interpret. Cf. i, 67: the link between an utterance and its meaning can be made only by the judgment of reason. Ibid. ii, 95f.: “Mihi is est Interpres, qui mente jungit sensum cum verbis, illumque his inesse ex ipsa verborum textura cognoscit.”


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Interpretation, reason and faith An absolutely crucial question inevitably arises here: if the authority to determine both meanings and the credibility of authors rests with reason, does not faith itself depend on reason? This seems to be Meyer’s position,117 and van Velthuysen tries to stave off its most dangerous implications with a saving distinction: It is one thing to prove mysteries of faith by reason, and something else to prove through reason that the meaning of the words is true and genuine, that it ought to be just so and not otherwise – [the words, that is,] by which the mysteries of faith (which no one could have investigated by reason) are revealed to us.118

In short, we believe on the basis of divine authority alone, but cannot know what to believe until reason has disclosed the meanings of the words of scripture. Reason is not therefore “the norm of divine truth . . . but it is the rule for interpretation of the words whose meaning, rightly comprehended, is divine truth.”119 Therefore, says van Velthuysen, even though mysteries are believed because they depend on the testimony of the revealing God, it does not follow that the meaning of the words of the testimony is believed: it is demonstrated.

Van Velthuysen immediately warns of the grave consequences of denying this: “I fear lest those who deny that the meaning of the words of scripture is demonstrable, because it pertains to faith, transform all theology into Scepticism or Enthusiasm.”120 117

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I think Wolzogen interprets Meyer right (De interprete ii, 191f.; my italics) when he says that, according to Meyer, that which we follow as our guide in interpretation “should be most certain of all in the interpretation of scripture, so that faith itself, which depends on interpretation, may be thoroughly certain”: “Debet tamen, ut monet Exercitator, omnium esse certissima res illa quam ducem sequimur in Interpretatione Scripturae, ut ipsa quoque fides, quae pendet ab Interpretatione, sit perinde certa.” Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 154a: “aliud . . . est probare ratione mysteria fidei, aliud probare per rationem sensum verborum, quibus mysteria fidei, quae nullus ratione investigare potuisset, nobis revelantur, verum & genuinum, talem esse debere, nec alium esse posse.” Ibid., 139b: “. . . non autem dico normam veritatis divinae, . . . sed regulam interpretationis verborum, quorum sensus, recte comprehensus, est veritas divina.” Ibid., 154ab (Velthuysen’s italics): “. . . quamvis mysteria creduntur, quia nituntur testimonio revelantis Dei, non ideo sensus verborum testimonii creditur, sed demonstratur. Et metuo ne illi, qui negant sensum verborum Scripturae esse demonstrabilem, quia pertinet ad fidem, omnem Theologiam transforment in Scepticismum aut Enthusiasmum.”

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According to our author, then, it is reason that saves theology from two unacceptable options: scepticism (we can never know with certainty what the texts mean) or enthusiasm (we grasp their meaning by special divine illumination). At the same time, having denied Meyer’s claim to interpretive infallibility, he allows that all interpretations, because they are based on sometimes errant reason and are not themselves de fide, may be doubted until such time as a single interpretation has been demonstrated (he does not give any examples of such interpretation).121 Finally, he seeks to reassure his readers that “it suffices for certainty of faith that we have certain evidences (notae) by which we can know whether we err or not.”122 By emphasizing usage rather than reason, Wolzogen softens somewhat the position of van Velthuysen. Yet he too confesses that “faith depends on interpretation, because unless I interpret scripture, I do not know what God said, and what I ought to believe.”123 He makes this bold assertion before his judges in his self-defense against Labadie. In the De interprete, he had been more cautious, denying that faith was directly at stake in the rational work of interpretation. It was, he explained, only remotely connected to faith, as the path or instrument by which we investigate what belongs to the object of faith.124 A very clear summary, focusing on usage rather than reason, but without diminishing the centrality of interpretation, appears in the Censura, confirming the statement about its importance made in the dedicatory letter to the magistrates (quoted earlier): Since all certitude of salvation depends on the certitude of faith, and faith in fact has nothing which it believes except what it derives from scripture, and nothing can be produced from scripture except through interpreta121

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Ibid., 156b: “. . . quamvis nunquam in dubium vocanda sint, quae fidei sunt, licet tamen omnes interpretationes in dubium vocare, quarum nos fugit ratio; idque eo usque, donec validas rationes invenerimus, quibus singulas interpretationes demonstrentur.” Ibid., 154b: “interpretes . . . errare possunt . . . sufficit . . . ad fidei certitudinem, nos certas habere notas, quibus scire possumus, utrum erremus nec ne.” Wolzogen, Censura, 152: “. . . nititur tamen fides interpretatione, quia nisi interpreter Scripturam, nescio quid Deus dixerit, nescio quid credere debeam.” Wolzogen, De interprete ii, 248f.: “. . . non facit ad fidem interpretatio quicquam nisi remote . . .Viam habet ad fidem interpretatio, non ipsius fidei quicquam. Est tantum instrumentum quo ea investigamus quae fidei objecto continentur”: “. . . interpretation does nothing to faith except remotely . . . Interpretation includes the path to faith, nothing of the faith itself. It is only an instrument by which we investigate what things are included in what is presented to faith.”


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tion, and finally interpretation depends on usage, we must have some certainty about that usage in order to have certainty about salvation.125

the liberal contribu tion Like van Velthuysen, Wolzogen has arrived at the conclusion that the cognitive dimension of faith in its entirety is dependent on the work of reason as it interprets the biblical text following common rules of reading. Since this is true, the work of interpretation by reason cannot be detached from religious faith. A faith preserved immaculate against reason is out of the question once it is shown that reason is indispensable to determine what is to be believed.126 Inevitably, the interpreter will shape and adapt what the text means, and hence “what must be believed,” to his or her own contemporary standard. The contents of the faith will be adapted to what can be believed. Such is the implication of Wolzogen’s and van Velthuysen’s conclusion that reason tells us what in scripture must be taken literally. But that leads them back in the direction of Meyer, even though their method involves real and critical engagement with the text. Unless one adopted an irrationalist stance (for example denying that any interpretation was needed to understand the perfectly clear biblical text), one had to admit that all conceptual formulations of the Christian religion depended on interpretation, and interpretation depended on reason. There was no escape. Once the cognitive aspect of religious faith was stripped of illusions about any hermeneutical magic attached to reading scripture, or about occult influence by private spirits, and thrown into the public realm of reason, it became theoretically impossible for formulations of the faith to be promulgated and publicly enforced on divine authority. This was what Spinoza recognized when he said: let everyone adapt the cognitive content of scripture as they please.127 125

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Wolzogen, Censura, 151: “Cum omnis salutis certitudo pendeat a certitudine fidei; & vero fides nil habeat quod credat, nisi quod sit de Scriptura depromptum; promi autem e Scriptura nisi per interpretationem non possit, & denique pendeat ab usu interpretatio, illum usum aliquid certi habere oportet, ut certa salus habeatur.” The alternative, as Spinoza bluntly puts it, is to act without reason, i.e., “stupidly” (TTP 127 xv, 182.6/229). Ibid., 185.13/232f.

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That thought brings us full circle to the politically charged dynamic of this entire debate. The liberals’ plausible and closely argued interpretation of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura, accompanied by their denial of the need of an authoritative interpreter, would theoretically deprive the rulers of divine authority to impose doctrinal conformity. By subjecting biblical interpretation to rational standards, the liberal theologians made an important contribution to the work of disarming the interpreters. Despite their criticisms of Meyer, therefore, his essential claim that reason rules was sustained, though in the direction of a historical and hermeneutical reason. What prevented them, however, from fully developing the historical dimension of interpretation was their religious conviction that the divinely intended meaning of scripture was its present meaning, authoritative for each generation of believers. For Spinoza, by contrast, scripture was not divinely authored or a source of religious authority; he could fully develop his notion of its authors’ original meanings without regard to consequences for the present. one knowledge or t wo? None of Meyer’s critics before Spinoza bought into Meyer’s reduction of religious truths to those already lurking in the wings of the mind, waiting to make their entrance on cues provided when reading scripture. They suspected that Meyer was disingenuous in making his first premise a theological dogma, viz., that God is the author of an infallible scripture that somehow energizes a realm or dimension of truths that would otherwise remain dormant. They were committed to the idea that essential biblical truths were qualitatively other than those available to natural reason, and rightly suspected that Meyer had abandoned that doctrine. Conflicting ideas – natural and supernatural – jostle each other around the issue, never quite explicit in these texts, about what in general counts for knowledge (i.e., scientia, the equivalent of Greek episteme, or the slightly less precise notitia and cognitio). As we have seen, the conservatives strongly asserted that what believers know is in fact not known but believed. Those writers made such a sharp dis-


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tinction between knowledge and faith that faith’s contents could seem absurd (stultitia) and knowledge and learning denigrated (as in “You must become as little children”). And yet these same theologians never doubted the basic Calvinist thesis that faith was a kind of knowing (cognitio), and that believers derived saving knowledge (notitia) from scripture, or that Christianity itself was primarily a religious system whose core was “saving knowledge.” For them as for the liberals, “truths above reason” made up the core of true religion. This paradox rendered their stance inherently unstable. Against the blunt conservative dichotomy between the two kinds of knowledge, the liberals sought to demonstrate more of a continuum, in the classic scholastic tradition. Yet this saving supernatural knowledge did not easily blend with the emerging contours of natural knowledge being mapped with increasing precision in the late seventeenth century. Religious knowledge was shrouded in at least three disqualifying mystifications: a divinely authored writing as its sole source; the special privilege of “grace” or Spirit as a condition for experiencing its existential power; and the incommunicability of its persuasiveness between one person and another. Knowledge, by contrast, had to be humanly generated, available for public scrutiny and demonstrable. At the same time, the liberals, who wished to keep theology and reason in some sort of engagement, repeated the old affirmation that revelation and reason came from the same source of truth, and therefore ultimately could not contradict each other – a notion that could be infinitely adjusted to new circumstances and epistemological challenges.128 One way to resolve contradiction was Meyer’s – to use the single-source axiom as the basis to claim infallibility for a philosophical method (God the author of scripture is also the author of philosophy, ergo . . .). A slightly different spin was applied by van Velthuysen. Reflecting the seventeenth-century preoccupation with epistemological questions, he argued that not only the source, but the apparently diverse kinds of cognition are one: 128

Thus, like Meyer, they promoted the ancient alternative to the sharp dichotomies of Tertullian in favor of the continuities discovered by the Alexandrian theologians Clement and Origen.

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Each way of knowing (cognitio), of spiritual as of earthly things, is from God, is truth, is the rule according to which men rightly and informed by the precepts of true prudence construct their own life etc. For the same reasons one may conceive of only one kind of light in the mind . . . [Therefore] it is inept and alien from reason to teach a diversity and multitude of lights . . . from which judgment is rendered. True cognition of regenerate and unregenerate [persons] does not differ with regard to the contents and mysteries of faith by reason of the light, nor is the regenerate person’s way of knowing a diverse genus of cognition.129

Equally strong is his assertion that “salutary cognition” – saving knowledge – while it transforms people’s lives in a unique way, is nevertheless the same, qua cognition, as ordinary cognition: “in the cognition of each the foundation is the same, as are also the sign (nota) and the standard (norma) for judging the same.”130 So cognition is one for a subject, even though there are objectively two classes or levels of things known – two “knowledges,” since via revelation people receive genuinely new knowledge. Wolzogen likens such new knowledge to the astonishing discoveries from world exploration: before we sailed the seas we could not imagine what would be found, no matter how deep we might have plumbed the depths of nature. But once found, these things are easily reconciled with the system of the world: so it is with many divine things.131 But here the picture offered by Wolzogen becomes somewhat ambiguous: on one hand, revealed truths belong to the domain of fides, not scientia, because they are derived from testimony, not direct observation, and received on authority, not proof.132 On the other hand, 129

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Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 103a (my italics): “utraque cognitio, tam spiritualium, quam rerum terrenarum, sit a Deo, sit veritas, sit regula ad quam homines recte, & insistentes verae prudentiae praeceptis, suam vitam componunt, &c. Propter easdem rationes unum tantum luminis genus mente concipere licet . . .[ergo] ineptum & a ratione alienum est, docere diversitatem & multitudinem luminum . . . de quo judicium latum est. Regeniti & non regeniti cognitio vera de rebus & mysteriis fidei non differt luminis ratione, neque illius cognitio est diversum cognitionis genus.” There remains, he adds, “always the same formal ratio cognitionis” (103b). Ibid., 119a: “In utriusque cognitione idem est fundamentum; ut & nota, & judicandi norma eadem.” Wolzogen, De interprete i, 35f.: “. . . nescio an a primis descendendo principiis ad singularia naturae, haec potuissent inveniri: inventa vero, & narrata, facile cum systemate mundi conciliantur, & talia esse oportere probantur. Idem de rebus divinis dicendum esse, ex iis quae modo attulimus . . .” Ibid. i, 30: “Hinc illa orta differentia inter fidem & scientiam, revelationem & rationem; illa, a sola pendet auctoritate dicentis; haec a solo lumine veritatis ipsius”: “Here


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he can refer to both theology and philosophy as “sciences,” although of different genera.133 Which leaves us with a crucial equivocation on the question: one knowledge or two? Meyer complicated matters for the theologians when he essentially collapsed revealed scriptural knowledge into universal, natural a priori ideas. Rejecting this claim, van Velthuysen began with the conventional idea that revelation delivers information of new things (nova res). But responding to Meyer forced him to go further out on the epistemological limb: he insisted that God’s operation did not merely add more information, but created in the intellect new simple ideas in the mind – ideas of which beforehand one had no understanding, not only of the connection between subject and predicate [as Meyer had put it], but no cognition at all either of the subject or the predicate – no concept, no idea, nor any similitude or image of them.134

What he described was a kind of creatio ex nihilo in the epistemological realm – but that move put him up against the question clearly raised by Pieter Balling: how could we know such things?135 If concept, idea, image are all lacking, how could one even recognize, much less understand, something so radically and categorically new – except by innate ideas, or infusion of the Spirit, which van Velthuysen did not allow, or by some process of reasoning or cultural furnishing of the mind that van Velthuysen had not imagined? The whole discussion of “revealed knowledge” thus seems

133

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is the basis of that difference between faith and knowledge, revelation and reason: the former depends on the authority of the speaker alone; the latter on the light of the truth itself alone.” The former include also those mysteria tremenda, Trinity and Incarnation (31). Ibid. ii, 264: “Sunt [philosophia & theologia] enim diversi generis utraque scientia, & licet ambae veritatem sectentur, tales tamen veritates proponit Theologia, quas nullo suo acumine assequi Philosophia possit, quaeque idcirco diversi generis haberi debent”: “Each is a science of a different kind, and although both pursue truth, theology proposes such truths as philosophy is unable to attain by its own acumen, on which account they ought to be regarded as of diverse kinds.” Van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 112b: “Mihi nullum dubium est, quin Deus posset ita operari in hominis intellectu, ut in illo excitet novas ideas simplices, quorum antea nullum non tantum nexum subjecti cum praedicato habuit, sed quorum ante nec subjecti, nec praedicati ullam habuit cognitionem, conceptum aut ideam, nec earum ullam similitudinem aut imaginem.” According to Meyer, scripture provided no more than a stimulus to excite in us things known before (res antea cognitas) (ibid., 121a). See chap. 2, n. 92.

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to have wandered into a cul-de-sac of epistemological incoherence. summing up We now have a richer and more detailed intellectual context for Spinoza’s TTP. Critical themes of that work turn out to be central issues in the debate generated by Meyer’s book. Awareness of the political implication of the whole discussion was not an innovation of Spinoza’s. Further, the liberals highlighted the following ideas that would be repeated or expanded and developed by Spinoza: – Without being rationalists, they insisted that natural reason was the instrument and norm of biblical interpretation, as it was for all other books. The liberals exposed the fact that the dogmatic formulations of faith unavoidably rely on interpretations of the text, and since interpretation is the exclusive domain of reason, these formulations have fallible reason as their real basis, subjectively bolstered, perhaps – but only subjectively – by the conviction that one’s belief is confirmed by the Holy Spirit. This theological development grants reason jurisdiction over the question of what “God said” – what he could have meant – and on that basis, whether to construe any biblical passage literally or figuratively. Spinoza shifts the entire question to what the human authors could have meant by adding that reason’s instrument of discovery must be history, not abstract reason working by itself. Only historical research could illumine common usage of ancient texts to reveal their authors’ intentions. – Because usage determines meaning in all languages and in all books, scripture is comparable to other books. There is no “easier” way, no philosophical shortcut, to intelligibility. The only road is through study of Hebrew and Greek languages in their historical contexts and the manner in which texts, translations, versions and interpretations have come down to the present. – On the subjective side, it is granted by van Velthuysen that cognition (the way we know) is one. Where sacred knowledge is concerned, there is no cognitive process or privilege peculiar even


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to elect Christians. Both van Velthuysen and Wolzogen affirm that anyone can be an interpreter of scripture by applying rules common to all discourse. No religious test can result in disqualification (even the demons understand). – Determination of meaning from study of the orationes is the whole work of the interpreter. For both conservatives and liberals, that meaning would ipso facto be the truth as well,136 whereas Spinoza makes the unprecedented claim that a rational judgment about truth is to be made – with scripture as with any other book – only after meaning has been determined. – Determination of meaning depends on an understanding of the historical mentalité of the scriptural authors. Taken together, these realizations expose the necessity of a historical mode of interpretation – an insight reinforced by the observation that all of scripture is “history” in the sense that all our knowledge from it is derived from testimony alone. This fact categorically separates its content from philosophical analysis or verification in terms of common notions. The stage is now set for examining Spinoza’s Tractatus, the most radical text in this series, and the most original. Reading the TTP mindful of the texts we have studied here will provide a better sense of how it resonated with its contemporaries, and allow for a wellgrounded assessment of Spinoza’s originality. 136

E.g., van Velthuysen, Dissertatio, 132b.

chapter five


First and foremost we must be on guard, when seeking the meaning of scripture, lest we be preoccupied by our own reasoning, insofar as it is grounded in natural principles of cognition; but in order not to confuse the true meaning with the truth of things, meaning must be investigated from the usage of the language alone, or from a reasoning that recognizes no other foundation than scripture. Spinoza, TTP vii1

review so far The critical responses of the liberals show that Meyer and his most conservative opponents were using a method that was being surpassed by one that required detailed contextual analysis of the text. The mere fact that Meyer advertised himself as a Cartesian turned out to be no guarantee that he was advancing biblical interpretation. His rationalist hermeneutic in fact resembled that of the medieval philosopher Maimonides more than he apparently knew, even though he and his friend Spinoza shared the fundamental conviction that reason was the final criterion for any truth we could know. Moreover, the religious peace Meyer sought by his proposal2 did not occur, nor would the trend toward a more historical exegesis 11

12

TTP vii, 100.16/143: “Quin imo apprime cavendum est, quamdiu sensum Scripturae quaerimus, ne ratiocinio nostro, quatenus principiis naturalis cognitionis fundatum est . . . preoccupemur; se ne verum sensum cum rerum veritate confundamus, ille ex solo linguae usu erit investigandus, vel ex ratiocinio, quod nullum aliud fundamentum agnoscit, quam Scripturam.” The motivation of Meyer’s effort is reminiscent of Herbert of Cherbury, who identified commitment to specific revelation as the cause of the impasse among rival religions; cf. my Explaining Religion, chap. I.

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be denied. His argument that meanings should be reduced to preknown truths was met with solid opposition. He may have been quite aware that his philosophical hermeneutic ran counter to scholarly trends toward a more historical view of scripture, but he wanted to unveil a new path for gaining peace and religious truth. Perhaps he believed, with his contemporaries, that the current advances in secular (as opposed to “sacred”) history were finally irrelevant to religious life. The conservative theologians who countered Meyer’s proposal with “history” were scarcely interested in history as a disciplined scholarly approach to scripture as the foundation for further interpretation. Their arguments were all theological: they heralded the radical contingency of God’s actions as described in scripture, which were therefore unknown and unknowable to philosophy and beyond philosophical appropriation. But they had no interest in pursuing the connection between that point and the historical character of the biblical text and context, not to mention, more radically, that of its religious content. Their first priority was to emphasize the authority of revelation over philosophical reason, not to explore the relation between revelation and historical knowledge. The liberals, meanwhile, realized that Meyer had to be answered by arguments from reason. To support their perception that their religion was something distinct from philosophy, the liberals stressed that the essential (“saving”) content of scripture was historical rather than philosophical. Boldly asserting that core scriptural meanings had no necessary or inherent connection with rational truth, they insisted that meanings could not be anticipated or excavated from the mind, but must be discovered from the text alone. This line of argument required a more historical exegesis. Nevertheless, their momentum in this direction stalled because their primary interest was focused on deriving present meaning from scripture. Further, theological tradition dictated for them as for Meyer that meaning must sometimes be wrenched so as to align textual interpretations with traditional Christian beliefs. They agreed with the conservatives that scripture could finally intend or mean nothing that was not true. So although the shift to priority of historical meaning had emphatically occurred in some of the

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critique of Meyer, that trend had not emerged as the basis of a new method. The focus on present meaning and the “truth filter” guarding biblical exceptionalism remained in place, because all the authors we have dealt with believed that scripture spoke to every age, and that only true meanings were possible, or possibly intended, by its divine author. natural his tory as spinoza’ s way ou t Spinoza turned to history as a way to break the hermeneutical circle of his time, which straightjacketed the interpreter by demanding that he interpret according to the intention of the author, namely God: God had communicated his intentions in scripture, which, rightly interpreted, could teach nothing untrue; its necessary saving truths were already known, embedded and encoded in confessions and commentaries; “discovery” of those truths in scripture required expert knowledge and technique. Hence, interpretation was a task best left to God’s authorized interpreters, aided by their servant reason. We can easily imagine a rationalist rejecting all this out of hand. Some eventually would. But that would only stop further conversation rather than advance it. Spinoza found a way to lead the argument to new ground by insisting that new historical findings about scripture’s origins, canonization, transmission and interpretation must become decisive elements of its interpretation. This program required not only historical knowledge of the ancient community that created scripture and conferred sacred status upon it, but an internal analysis of the conceptual framework that determined its discourse and formed its idiom. Only such an account could be raised up as effective criticism and alternative to the mythic account and ideological use of scripture that prevailed in Protestant culture.3 13

What Norris says (Spinoza, 218) against postmodernism regarding the necessary distinction between history and fiction is apropos here: “. . . it is hard to see what could count as an objection to some existing narrative paradigm – maybe some potent myth of origins adopted in the interest of a dominant power group – if there is no ground of appeal outside the conditions of intelligibility created by this or that fictive economy of truth.”


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Spinoza’s way to new ground was to dispense with the fiction of divine authorship and to treat the biblical writers and editors as real “authors,”4 human beings possessed of no more than ordinary knowledge of either nature or God. Spinoza thus offered a revolutionary explanation of what sort of book the Bible was and how it had originated, having thrown overboard a whole set of assumptions and starting over.5 Spinoza’s aim was not simply to improve on the hermeneutic proposals of his philosopher friend and his critics by refining them, but to replace these approaches entirely with a method of interpretation based on a radically different – naturalistic – explanation of scripture. Spinoza’s explanation of the Bible’s origin and history is what distinguished his proposals from all others, and that is what earns him credit for inventing a genuine historical–critical method.6 Concretely, this methodological innovation had the social consequence of liberating biblical interpretation from its “self-enclosed realm of preemptive institutional constraints” as well7 – constraints embodied in those scriptural interpreters that were Spinoza’s constant target. So the stage is set for Spinoza’s Treatise, a discourse on method that revolutionized the Meyer debate by introducing elements from other conversations less familiar to Meyer and his critics. Unlike all but Meyer himself, Spinoza was a philosopher; moreover, he was intensely occupied with advances in science and with critical questions of political theory.8 Besides, he was a Jew formed 14 15

16

17 18

TTP vii, 110.23/153. I deliberately echo the language Spinoza uses in his critique of anthropomorphism in Ethics i, App. p36; ii, 79.23/Curley i, 441 (quoted in text below): experience should finally move people to abandon whole structures of false assumptions and start over – something that, unfortunately, rarely happens. Since this explanation of scripture rests in turn on a broader naturalistic theory of religion as such, Spinoza may also be credited with a major role in conceptualizing a coherent anthropological, comparative and historical study of religion distinct from theology. Norris, Spinoza, 204. He was not only a lens-grinder but was especially interested in the new science of optics. He was a friend of Christian Huygens, the foremost maker of microscopes in Holland, and in regular communication with the British Royal Society through correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, its secretary, and Robert Boyle. See Savan’s assessment (“Spinoza: Scientist”) of Spinoza’s scientific work. In politics, he was a close reader of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Pieter de la Court, whose True Interest (1662) was in Spinoza’s library. Petry (“Hobbes,” 155) in fact claims that de la Court’s influence on Spinoza was greater than that of Hobbes: “Spinoza is concerned primarily not with the theoretical nature of political sovereignty, but with the relative merits of democracy and aristocracy,

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by the pathos of the Marrano experience ending in the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. We can partly explain Spinoza’s originality in the field of biblical interpretation by noting how he draws on those “extraneous” conversations to shape his Treatise. Spinoza construed all scriptures and religions as natural products of history rather than as things supernatural. He recognized in fact that the novelty and difficulty of his method consisted of its unusual historical character. But its difficulties did not derive from any defect in the method, he insisted. They arose rather from this, that the true and correct path [that my method] teaches has never been cultivated, nor trod by men, so that over time it has been difficult and almost impassable. . . .9

Carried through properly, this historical method would bring the reader as close as possible to the genuine original meanings of the biblical authors, in contrast to the meanings assigned by the interpreters. Protestant interpreters engaged in polemic against Catholic readings had also called attention to original scriptural meanings but had been constrained by prior doctrinal commitments. Spinoza’s claim to read scripture de novo et libero animo – “anew and with an open mind”10 – presupposed that all such “prejudices” about what the Bible could have meant had been set aside. Our exposition of context in the last three chapters clarifies Spinoza’s rhetorical strategy in formulating his method. We can now see in detail how thoroughly he articulated his own method

19

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footnote 8 (cont.) with the extent to which these forms of political organization can provide a satisfactory basis for the individual’s seeking ethical fulfillment at a higher level than that of the state.” Spinoza’s theologico-political stance perfectly aligns with de la Court’s defense of the de Witt regime (which lasted till the de Witt brothers’ murder in 1672) and of the provincial regents government, which Jan de Witt headed. De la Court’s book eloquently defended free trade, a decentralized, tolerant government, and freedom of religion as necessary conditions for peace and prosperity. TTP vii, 112.10/155: “. . . id [the difficulty] tamen non ex ipsius defectu oritur, sed ex eo, quod via, quam veram & rectam esse docet, nunquam fuerit culta, nec ab hominibus trita, adeoque successu temporis admodum ardua & fere infia facta sit . . .” This may be a deliberate reference to Francis Bacon, who observed the same about his own method, “but yet untried” (Novum Organum xix, 71). Spinoza laments the “negligence (not to say malice) of those in earlier times who failed to produce a history of scripture (historiam Scripturae) while they could,” i.e., before so much precious historical data perished (TTP vii, 112.29/155). Furthermore, “general superstition” raises such resistance to historical knowledge that the method has not been understood by ordinary people (ix, 129.10/173). TTP Pref., 9.23/53.


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by exploiting the language, categories and principles of the Christian writers already on record in this debate.11 His confident and precise handling of Christian language, however, leads to extraordinary results, because he operates on different premises. One of the most striking differences – often commented upon – appears in the famous passage where he likens his method of interpreting scripture to the study of nature. Nobody else had suggested such an approach. Unpacking that master analogy will reveal what “history” means in his usage, what its polemical point might have been, and what its most fundamental premises are. I will argue that Spinoza deploys this analogy in part to contrast his method with Meyer’s, and that, by echoing the language of Francis Bacon, he implies that the empirical and inductive Bacon rather than Descartes provides the appropriate starting point for a method of interpreting ancient texts historically.12 Spinoza asserts early on that, rather than beginning with dogmatic fictions about divine authorship and textual infallibility, one had to begin by providing scripture with its “unadulterated history”13 – in stark contrast to the rationalist Meyer. As we saw, Meyer’s Bible functioned only to trigger or precipitate those ideas that were already in the mind beforehand, in a latent sort of way. Meyer proposed that the reader could determine the meaning of scriptural passages by first filtering possible meanings through the mind’s own innate “menu” of truths. Things we know to be 11

12

13

Spinoza was not unique among Jews (especially those from Iberia) using Christian discourse in their own interest: see Kaplan (From Christianity, 380), who writes that “many of the arguments advanced in defense of the concept of the election of Israel . . . or to confirm the reliability of Scripture, have been borrowed from distinguished Christian writings produced in Spain and in Portugal.” Even in dispute with dissenters in their own community, Jewish writers “advanced arguments drawn from Christian Scholasticism and from new lines of thought current during their own period in Catholic speculation and theology.” Kaplan is writing here about Jews living among Catholics, but Spinoza can be seen doing the same thing, drawing on Calvinist scholasticism. Curley, like most commentators, characterizes Spinoza’s procedure as introducing Cartesian method into theology, but rightly notes that Spinoza means “history of nature” in a Baconian sense (“Neglected Masterpiece,” 79). “Sincera historia,” TTP viii,117.30/161 – “unadulterated” especially by dogmatic “prejudices” and historical anachronisms. The dogmatic fictions shared by Meyer and all his other critics begin with God as author of scripture. From there derives the claim of its inerrancy and the principle of its universal non-contradiction, so that one part could be used to interpret any other part according to the “analogy of faith,” i.e., the orthodox Christian doctrine it everywhere consistently taught (if rightly interpreted).

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literally untrue were then to be interpreted figuratively.14 The key thing was that reason, with its complete inventory of essential truths, could determine beforehand what the biblical authors could have meant – i.e., what meanings one could rightly attribute to them. Applying this rationalistic method, Meyer announced, would make the intended meanings of scripture conform to the truths of reason, which rose above sectarian claims and which were theoretically available to everyone. Spinoza’s critique of Meyer’s view is as explicit as it could be without actually naming him. In TTP xv, Spinoza roundly criticizes all those interpreters who would make scripture conform to reason, i.e., who would reduce its rich and often contradictory meanings to a shortlist of pre-known rational truths (he calls these interpreters “dogmatists” because they subordinate scripture to what reason already knows with certainty). What scriptural passages mean, Spinoza insisted, must be determined solely on the basis of the Bible’s language, understood in its own context, and (especially!) without any prior consideration of whether the statements are true or not. To claim that there is correspondence between biblical statements and contemporary philosophical, scientific or even moral truths violates two prime directives of historical interpretation: to avoid anachronism and the mixing of categories (i.e., those of the mechanical philosophy with those of history). Meyer thought his method revealed what God the Author and his inspired stenographers “could have meant”; Spinoza counters by defining what the human authors “could have meant” – as historical agents belonging to their own time and culture. Everything turns on that difference. Textual meanings would not be determined by theological or philosophical reasoning, but by what was historically possible for particular ancient authors to have meant. When we examine Spinoza’s alternative to the rationalists Meyer and Maimonides, we find him taking a bottoms-up, inductive approach – more British-looking than Continental. Spinoza wants to start not with general presuppositions, whether theologi14

E.g.: if scripture says or implies that God is “jealous,” we check our “truth menu” and immediately rule out the idea that that is what scripture really means, because reason knows that that isn’t true. Since scripture can teach no untruth, Meyer argues, such a passage must be interpreted not literally but figuratively.


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cal or philosophical dogma, but with particulars and facts – with history – and then work his way up to broader generalizations. This approach looks much less like Descartes than like the other great propagator of a new philosophy and patron of the new sciences, Sir Francis Bacon, whose works Spinoza knew in detail. The contours of Bacon’s thought better accommodated to Spinoza’s goals, and on this score brought him closer to the orthodox,15 who tended to be as empiricist regarding nature as they were literalist regarding the biblical text (like Bacon, they were critical of the Copernican theory because it lacked empirical confirmation). The Cartesians, on the other hand, defended the Copernican theory because, as one of them argued, “that system better conforms to mechanics ‘which is all but the only rule in physics.’”16 The hermeneutical counterpart of the mechanical philosophy would be a rationalism such as we see in Meyer. The new philosophy was a product of reason which discovered the regular order of things behind the phenomena; in parallel fashion a Cartesian hermeneutic would discover universal meanings of which the phenomena – the words of scripture – were more-or-less adequate representations. But here is where Spinoza and Meyer parted company. True, Spinoza was able to identify a few scriptural teachings (mainly justice and charity) as universal because they coincided with reason’s teaching, but Meyer, as we saw, seemed to think that any passage might trigger some pre-known religious “truth,” once one burrowed philosophically beneath the obvious meaning. More important, he argued that any such truth was a component of the intended meaning of passages. By contrast, when Spinoza encounters the scriptural text he does not inventory his own mind for its meaning, but turns outward to history just as one would turn to nature for knowledge about nature. 15

16

Cf. Spinoza’s compliment of the medieval rabbi Alpakhar in TTP xv, 181.31/229. Alpakhar serves as Spinoza’s archtypal “sceptic,” even though Meyer’s text, citing an unnamed orthdox Calvinist author of a work entitled An nempe S. Scriptura secundum rectam rationem sit explicanda, provides Spinoza his “Alpakhar” material (PSI xi, 9, 75. See my “Hidden Opponent,” 370f.). “. . . quae est verum & fere unicum Physicae fundamentum” (Verbeeck, “From ‘Learned Ignorance,’” 43, quoting H. Regius, Leiden professor of philosophy, early defender of Descartes and Copernicus and a contemporary of Spinoza).

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Spinoza and biblical authority On method

Both Bacon and Descartes had written extensively about method, and about the necessity of clearing the mind of preconceptions and prejudices. But neither of them was so bold (so imprudent) as to include in that clearing project preconceptions about revelation or scripture: these remained unchallenged authority for both Descartes and Bacon, at least in their published writings. In fact, both of them qualify perfectly as “sceptics” in Spinoza’s labeling – i.e., as philosophers who, opposite the dogmatists, thought that reason should simply submit to the authority of scripture.17 Now, Spinoza would no doubt expect the theologians to uphold the authority of the Bible – that was their job – but he rebukes the philosophers for such submission. In their attempts to derive philosophical truths from scripture, he says, they reveal that their attitude to scripture is one of obsequious submission rather than [genuine] belief. And this is . . . evident from the fact that most of them assume as the foundation for the understanding of scripture and for extracting its true meaning that it is throughout truthful and divine – a conclusion which ought to be the end result of study and strict examination.18

Rather than accept such “human fabrications,” he will examine scripture de novo et libero animo – “anew, and with a free mind, and . . . admit nothing as its teaching which I did not most clearly derive from it”19 – a clever argument indeed: since the Bible says nothing whatsoever about its own divine character, Spinoza offers a certified Protestant defense (sola scriptura) for his radically subversive position. I suggest that in a deliberate counter to Meyer, who had turned 17

18

As Spinoza summarized it (TTP xv, 180f./228f.): “. . . reason should be ancillary to scripture, and completely subservient to it.” TTP Pref., 9.8 /53 (my italics): “. . . magis ostendunt, se Scripturae non tam credere, quam assentari; quod hinc etiam patet, quod plerique tanquam fundamentum supponunt (ad eandum scilicet intelligendum, ejusque verum sensum eruendum) ipsam ubique veracem, et divinam esse; id nempe ipsum, quod ex ejusdem intellectione, et severo examine demum deberet constare: et quod ex ipsa, quae humanis figmentis minime indiget, longe melius edoceremur, in primo limine pro regula ipsium interpretationis statuunt.” The italicized verb assentari means “joining with another in an opinion,” implying an attempt to ingratiate oneself. In vii, 99/142 Spinoza maintains more specifically that any demonstration of the divine character of scripture must stem from recognition 19 of its true moral teachings. TTP Pref., 9.8/53.


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to the rationalist Descartes for the proper method, Spinoza turned to the more empirically oriented Bacon, patron saint of the Royal Society.20 We consider Spinoza’s language as it engages Bacon first, then Meyer. Spinoza kept in close touch with the Royal Society’s activities through conversation and extensive correspondence with its secretary, Henry Oldenburg. The two had discussed the Cartesian and Baconian philosophies in actual conversation.21 A distinctive feature of Bacon’s “great instauration” was his call for natural philosophers to set aside conventional beliefs and “begin to familiarize themselves with facts”22 by making what he called “natural histories” in every realm of learning. These would be the “nursing mother” of science, building-blocks of new knowledge. These histories were essentially collections of uninterpreted data, or “bare facts,” mainly about the natural world.23 Bacon had an almost religious reverence for such facts, because nature was “the book of God’s work . . . a kind of second scripture.”24 The analogy suggests that the study of each is similar. And because nature, like scripture, was produced by God, “readings” from one could not contradict those of the other, even though theological and natural knowledge must be kept distinct. Theologians – including Ludwig Wolzogen, whose book Spinoza owned – adopted this idea.25 We notice here 20

Donagan, Spinoza, reaches a similar conclusion. First he notices that in his famous analogy between constructing a history of scripture and one of nature (to be discussed below), Spinoza uses the verb concinnanda (“put together,” “compose”). This echoes Oldenburg, who in a letter to Spinoza (Ep. 3 [1661], 12.1/65) described his “philosophical group” in London as devoting themselves “to making experiments and observations, and putting together (concinnandae) a history of the mechanical arts” (quoted by Donagan, 16). Donagan observes, “Just as a Baconian ‘history of the mechanical arts’ would be a collection of experimental data about the various kinds of mechanism there are, so a Spinozist ‘history’ of the Jewish Scriptures would be a collection of information of whatever sorts are pertinent to its interpretation” (17). 21 Ep. 1, 6.2/59. Spinoza’s letters leave no doubt he knew the Novum Organum thoroughly (cf. Ep. 2 and n. 10; Ep. 6 and Ep. 13). Zac (L’interprétation, 31) has an extensive discussion of the similarities between Spinoza’s procedure and that prescribed by Bacon, but he does not relate this to Spinoza’s contention with Meyer nor develop it in the way I have done here. Colie (Light and Enlightenment, 70) reflects standard misconception in observing that Spinoza’s “method was certainly deductive rather than inductive, intellectual rather than empirical,” although she acknowledges that Spinoza had studied Bacon’s ideas. 22 Novum Organum xxxvi, 75. 23 Ibid. iii, 275. 24 Ibid. iii, 282. 25 Wolzogen, Censura, 21: The interpreter must “explicate God speaking in scriptures in such a way that he does not contradict himself speaking in nature”: “. . . sic explicare loquentem Deum in Scripturis, ut non sibi sit in natura loquenti contrarius.”

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a move to objectivity: whereas the Cartesian theologians looked inward, linking God and reader by identifying the inspiring Spirit of scripture with the inwardly testifying Spirit in the reader, Bacon’s analogy links two objects of study, nature and scripture, as God’s products. Bacon believed that natural histories would get at things as they really were, in contrast to reason’s imaginative and sometimes distorted constructions when unchecked by facts. Acutely aware of the social dimension of knowledge, Bacon charged that trying to develop genuine knowledge by relying on allegedly universal common notions amounted in fact to relying on “the common stock of opinion.”26 Natural histories, by contrast, rendered the sensus literalis of the book of nature, which would yield new knowledge of God’s works, just as the literal sense of scripture, brought out by the reformers, had yielded new understanding of God’s Word. From the particulars of the natural histories, the method advanced inductively: Bacon writes that it first “derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all.” This, Bacon claimed, was the true way to knowledge, “but yet untried.”27 Although Bacon said that this method of inquiry should be pursued the same way in all subjects,28 it apparently never occurred to him to suggest a natural history of scripture or religion.29 Spinoza was the first to transgress so boldly in theological territory. I suggest he may have been motivated in part by a desire to highlight the contrast between himself and Meyer in a way that Meyer and others in the circle of philosophical friends were sure to grasp. Like Bacon, Spinoza takes a bottoms-up approach that begins with the data, in this case all relevant factual information needed as a foundation for understanding the Bible – its language, its authors and their context; the history of its composition, editing, reception, text transmission etc. In this famous passage, with its echoes of Bacon, Spinoza explains that the method of interpreting scripture is scarcely different from the method of interpreting nature, and is in fact in complete accord with it. For just 26 27

29

Novum Organum cxxv, 157f. Novum Organum xix, 71; xiv, 137f. Cf. Spinoza’s similar comment about his own method, 28 quoted above. Rabb, “Bacon,” 497. See my “Religion and Bacon’s New Learning.”


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as the method of interpreting nature consists essentially in composing a natural history from which we can infer definitions of the things of nature as deriving from assured data; so also for the interpretation of scripture it is necessary to provide its authentic history, and by drawing logical consequences from that, as from assured data and principles, to infer the intention of the authors of scripture.30

Spinoza’s language here bears strong resemblance to that of Meyer in his own programmatic statement about how philosophy operates as the interpreter of scripture.31 So similar is Spinoza’s formulation that it is at least plausible to suggest that he was deliberately “correcting” Meyer, just as Serarius had done earlier when he substituted the Holy Spirit for philosophy.32 Spinoza substitutes history, moving inductively from its data & principiis. Here, not only data but “principles” – i.e., the presuppositions of the biblical authors themselves – must be educed from scripture. They cannot be got from the “natural light” cited by Meyer, because “scripture very often deals with things that cannot be deduced from principles known by the natural light, for it is chiefly made up of histories and revelations,” and these “in truth surpass human understanding.”33 30

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TTP vii, 98.16/141 (my italics): “. . . dico methodum interpretandi Scripturam haud differre a methodo interpretandi naturam, sed cum ea prorsus convenire. Nam sicuti methodus interpretandi naturam in hoc potissimum consistit, in concinnanda scilicet historia naturae, ex qua, utpote ex certis datis, rerum naturalium definitiones concludimus: sic etiam ad Scripturam interpretandam necesse est ejus sinceram historiam adornare, & ex ea tanquam ex certis datis & principiis mentem authorum Scripturae legitimis consequentiis concludere.” Shirley, like Elwes before him, twice drops the word “history” from his translation of this passage. Shirley does the same thing without explanation in other places as well, e.g., vii, 99.31 & 32/142; 100.28/143; 102.17, 21/145; 106.34/149; xv, 185.6/232. Meyer, PSI v.2, 40 (my italics), celebrates the “certain knowledge which reason, free from every veil of prejudices, draws out and places in the most assured light of truth, [working] from permanent and per se known principles, through legitimate consequences and proven demonstrations, clearly and distinctly perceived”: “certam notitiam quam ratio, ab omni praejudiciorum involucro libera . . . ex immotis ac per se cognitis principiis per legitimas consequentias, apodictasque demonstrationes, clare & distincte perceptas, eruit, ac in certissima veritatis luce collocat.” Compare the italicized portion with the Spinoza text 32 On Serarius, see chap. 3, above. in the preceding note. TTP vii, 98/141f.: “Notandum quod scriptura de rebus saepissime agit, quae ex principiis lumine naturali notis deduci nequent; ejus enim maximam partem historiae & revelationes componunt . . . & ipsae revera captum humanum superant.” Note that, like the liberals, Spinoza affirms that both historical and “revealed” material cannot be educed from reason or clearly and distinctly grasped by it. But Spinoza’s argument is that “revelations” surpass reason not by their sublimity but because they are based on imagination, whose products are not strictly intelligible.

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Spinoza’s inductive method34 thus amounts to more than mere data-gathering, for he knows that data are meaningful – are in fact data – only in the framework of some hypothesis or theory. Like a modern scientist, Spinoza seems to have understood that “what can be counted as data is dependent on the theory that is used, in other words, it is dependent on the system by which the whole [realm] of data is ordered.”35 Spinoza has a general theory of religious thought, just as he has a theory of the workings of nature. And it is in that theory of religion that the radical and unbridgeable difference between the “system” of scripture and that of nature emerges (more below). spinoza’s analogy Spinoza’s analogy is often cited, but seeing its relations to Bacon and Meyer helps clear away misunderstandings.36 He says that the interpreter with a text is like someone who is studying nature. I know of no contemporary who drew this sort of analogy; indeed, it embodies what Savan thinks is Spinoza’s most notable innovation as a scientist: “the extension of the scientific outlook and scientific methods to the study of the historical texts.”37 The similarities and differences revealed by this analogy show not only Spinoza’s orientation toward scientific method, but his equally important awareness of the difference between natural phenomena and ancient texts as objects of scientific study. The foundations of philosophy are universally valid axioms (notiones commones), and ought to be derived from nature alone. But the foundations of 34

35 36

Spinoza’s method is too often simply characterized as deductive. But see (besides the present material) Isaac Franck, “Spinoza’s Logic of Inquiry: Rationalist or Experientialist?”; it further reveals Spinoza’s inductive approach to scripture against the rationalist bias of his interpreters. Hubbeling, “Today’s Western Spinozism,” 9. Again, the rationalist bias of interpreters has obscured the significance of Bacon’s approach. For example, Scholder (Modern Critical Theology, 141) sees Spinoza’s exegetical method as purely Cartesian – a “transference of the cartesian method to the exegesis of scripture.” Brad Gregory, “Introduction,” 41, pretty much ignores Spinoza’s innovative method, overweighting the role of Spinoza’s philosophy in his interpretation of scripture. For its stress on Bacon, Zac (L’interprétation, 29–32) is probably the best, as far as it 37 goes. Savan, “Spinoza: Scientist,” 99.


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faith are histories and language (historiae & lingua), and must be derived from scripture and revelation alone.38

First the similarities: to begin with the obvious, the interpreter of scripture is entirely removed from an encounter with a unique and sacred object. He is dealing with something completely natural (just as, on the social plane, the historical religions are themselves natural-historical products).39 Second, like nature, scripture presents us with something like brute data, in the sense that it does not provide its own definitions of things, nor the inferences that we are to draw from its data.40 Here the differences between scripture and nature as objects of inquiry emerge. Unlike nature, scriptural data embody the intentionality of its authors. And they alone are the source of scripture’s own particular “principles” – the implicit or explicit assumptions of the culture that produced its discourse. Thus, the discourse of scripture (especially that of the prophets)41 operates with underlying assumptions, often unstated, that must be inferred from its data (i.e., its orationes), just as the data of nature become comprehensible only as we discover its underlying “principles,” i.e., its necessary and invariable laws. Spinoza thus grasps scripture and nature as two discrete and self-contained “systems.” For that reason, each must be interpreted exclusively from itself – nature from nature, scripture from scripture. “Almost all the contents of scripture must be sought from 38

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TTP xiv, 179.32/226. J. Z. Smith (Drudgery Divine, 46f.) rightly asserts that we must “think about the enterprise of comparison under the aspect of difference.” Spinoza draws on Christian language, but the significance of his words lies in the differences wrought by the unheard-of adaptations he fashions out of familiar words and phrases. Donagan (Spinoza, 34) observes that “while Descartes before him and Leibniz after were trying to synthesize traditional theology with the new science, he [Spinoza] was trying to naturalize it.” TTP vii, 99.25/142: “. . . Scriptura rerum, de quibus loquitur, definitiones non tradit, ut nec etiam natura. Quare quemadmodum ex diversis naturae actionibus definitiones rerum naturalium concludendae sunt, eodem modo hae ex diversis narrationibus, quae de unaquaque re in Scriptis occurrunt, sunt eliciendae.” Cf. TTP i, 28.18/71, where Spinoza confronts the data of prophecy the way he would data of nature: “. . . hic tantum Scripturae documenta investigare conamur . . . ut ex iis, tanquam ex datis naturae concludamus . . .” For example, Spinoza says (TTP VI, 95.7/138) that he was “compelled to compile a history of prophecy (historiam Prophetiae) and from that to formulate certain principles (dogmata) which would give me some degree of insight into the nature and properties of prophecy”; he could make no assertions and draw no conclusions about prophecy “except through deduction from premises that had been revealed.”

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scripture alone, just as knowledge of nature must be sought from nature itself.”42 Only by grasping and respecting the totality and integrity of each system – nature as a unified causal system, scripture as a coherent system of meanings – can we produce both good science and good exegesis. Here Spinoza gives new meaning to the phrases sola scriptura and scriptura sui interpres by making the interpretation of scripture analogous to as well as distinct from the “reading” of nature. the s tructure of religious discourse Nature is an impersonal system of cause and effect, whose “natural history” is constructed through experiment and mathematical calculation (as in the new astronomy). Now Spinoza makes one of his most important innovations: he discovers in scripture an equally complete system, but it is a system of meanings that presuppose a culture and worldview (its “principles”) radically different from that of the modern (seventeenth-century) world – especially Spinoza’s version of it, stripped of a personal god.43 In the biblical case, we encounter a language system whose fundamental construal of reality (both natural and supernatural) is anthropomorphic or “poetic.”44 It is not based on common notions, natural laws 42

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TTP vii, 99.5/142: “Quare cognitio . . . omnium fere rerum, quae in Scriptura continentur, ab ipsa Scriptura sola peti debet: sicuti cognitio naturae ab ipsa natura.” Cf. xiv, 179.32/226. Here is where Spinoza goes beyond Galileo, who had updated the Augustinian view to take in the new astronomy. It was relatively easy to recognize the difference between questions about nature, cosmology etc. and questions about salvation. But Spinoza had further to show how a scientific approach could also be applied to an area where salvation was implicated: the realm of history (including historia sacra). As we see further below, Spinoza “naturalized” history just as Galileo naturalized nature. Popkin in a different way rightly sees Spinoza’s “radically different metaphysics” as the basis of his innovation in biblical interpretation, which sees “the religious world as a human creation” (“Spinoza and Bible Scholarship,” 403). This metaphysic constitutes “Spinoza’s great contribution . . . to the making of the modern mind” (404). I can fault Popkin’s essay only for ignoring the political dimension of Spinoza’s work. The philosopher’s naturalized theory of religion and his biblical criticism are essential ingredients of his case for liberty. Cf. my “Anthropomorphism,” “Prophecy” and “Spinoza, Vico.” Scripture postulates nature as a “personal” causal system – a general characteristic of ancient and popular thinking that Spinoza has described and analysed in the Ethics, Appendix i.36. In order to stir people’s emotions, events are related “in poetical language (poëtice) and referred to God, as is customary in Scripture” (TTP vi, 91.11/134). Again, biblical stories are told “poetically . . . or narrated in accordance with the beliefs and preconceptions of the


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or mathematical calculations. So even though all the events narrated in scripture occurred naturally, “yet they are referred to God because . . . it is not the part of scripture to explain events through their natural causes . . . especially where the style is of a poetic character.”45 Spinoza contrasts this style not only with scientific writing, but with that of secular historians, noting that “if scripture were to describe the downfall of an empire in the style adopted by political historians, the common people would not be stirred, whereas they are deeply affected when all is described in poetical language (poëtice) and referred to God, as is customary in scripture.”46 Moreover, biblical stories are told “poetically” because that style conforms to “the beliefs and preconceptions of the writer,”47 and these preconceptions in turn constrain interpretation because they limit what the writer could have thought and could have meant in saying what he said. In the Ethics, Spinoza revives the ancient theory of religion as anthropomorphism,48 but broadens it from its original form as a theory about ancient gods into a general analysis of how people ordinarily think about nature itself. In that section of the Ethics, Spinoza is especially concerned to bring before the “bar of reason” the fundamental prejudices that hinder clear thinking about nature. The most fundamental of all and the one from which all the rest spring is teleological thinking – “that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an

45

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writer”: “vel poëtice dicta sunt, vel secundum Scriptoris opiniones, & praejudicia relata” (91.20/134). TTP vii, 90.1/133: “. . . omnia quae in Scriptura narrantur, naturaliter contigerint, & tamen ad Deum referuntur, quia Scripturae, ut jam ostendimus, non est, res per causas naturales docere . . . praecipue cum stilo Poëtico canantur.” See Walther, “Spinoza’s Criticism,” on this being scripture’s customary mode of explanation even of the non46 “miraculous.” TTP vi, 91.11/134. TTP vi, 91.20/134: “. . . vel poëtice dicta sunt, vel secundum Scriptoris opiniones, & praejudicia relata.” The classic text from antiquity is Xenophanes of Colophon (ca. 530 bce). K. Freeman, Ancilla, 22: “¶14. . . . mortals believe the gods to be created by birth, and to have their own [mortals’] raiment, voice and body. ¶15. But if oxen and horses and lions had hands or could draw with hands and created works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies (of their gods) in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses. ¶16. Aethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with grey eyes and red hair.”

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end.”49 So the prejudice he is attacking involves personifying the universe, and its main explanatory structure is explanation from final causes (= explaining the existence of something by its purpose or human functionality). He is explicitly extending Descartes’s denial of final causes – so bitterly criticized by theologians – into the forbidden territory of religious thought itself. Teleological thinking informs an entire, comprehensive language system or discourse based on the popular imagination that the universe operates and relates to us in a human-like way. We are bound to misinterpret scripture (or other ancient texts) if we do not take that archaic framework of assumptions seriously, for that is what invests the sentences and paragraphs of the texts with their original historical meanings. How are we to account for the origin, pervasiveness and persistence of that sort of “prejudice”? Spinoza answers: it springs first from our general human condition of ignorance and egocentricity, from which we compound our mistakes in thinking: first, in the way we explain ourselves to ourselves, and then, by analogy, how we model our explanation of the world. Thus, all people are born ignorant of the causes of things, and imagine that all their own actions spring immediately from their free will. Further, “they all want to seek their own advantage, and are conscious of this appetite”; consequently they do all things with a purpose in view.50 Next, using this familiar and to them self-evident explanation of their own operation, they imagine that the universe works in the same way, and so model it after their own way of acting, and interpret it as though it were a human-like system, with contingency the condition and will the engine of cause and effect, rather than impersonal necessary laws. Because of their ignorance of the real causes of their own personal actions, and their habit of acting for their own advantage, they postulate with regard to the external world a similar system, imagining that nature, which provides for their needs, was made for their benefit: 49

50

Eth. i, App. p36; 77.3/Curley i, 439: “. . . quod . . . communiter supponant homines, omnes res naturales, ut ipsos, propter finem agere.” Ibid., 78.15/440: “. . . quod omnes homines rerum causarum ignari nascuntur, & quod omnes appetitum habent suum utile quaerendi, cujus rei sunt conscii.”


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And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use. For after they considered things as means, they could not believe that the things had made themselves, but from the means they were accustomed to prepare for themselves, they had to infer that there was a ruler, or a number of rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom who had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their use.51

This then is the general epistemological framework within which notions of human-like rulers of the universe emerged. That discourse determined the language of religion (or superstition, as Spinoza calls it here). The theory explains why people vie with each other for the favor of the gods, and why they take what happens to them personally, explaining their fortune and misfortune in terms of divine favor and wrath. They persist in this foolishness despite the evidence to the contrary: And though their daily experience (experientia) contradicted this, and though infinitely many examples showed that conveniences and inconveniences happen indiscriminately to the pious and the impious alike, they did not on that account give up their long-standing prejudice. It was easier for them to put this among the other unknown things, whose use they were ignorant of, and so remain in the state of ignorance in which they had been born, than to destroy that whole construction, and think up a new one (quam totam illam fabricam destruere, & novam excogitare).52

Now, in Spinoza’s era of rampant intellectual revolution, the new natural science and philosophy had provided ever more powerful evidence for explanation without regard to final causes. Spinoza thinks these new demonstrations are sufficient to show “that Nature has no end set before it, and that all final causes are nothing but human fictions.”53 Anthropomorphic/teleological explanations, then, depict nature “as if order were something in nature other than a refuge for our imagination.”54 For Spinoza, this analysis does not involve merely a harmless aberration; once again he brings on the “interpreters,” with their 51

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Eth. i, App. p36, 78.36/440f. (the last phrase): “. . . aliquo naturae rectores, humana praeditos libertate, qui ipsis omnia curaverint, & in eorum usum omnia fecerint.” Eth. i, App p36, 79.23/441. Ibid., 80.3/442: “. . . naturam finem nullum sibi praefixum habere, & omnes causas 54 finales nihil, nisi humana esse figmenta . . .” Ibid., 82.8/444.

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power to sway public opinion. Superstition, which attributes everything to the will of the gods, creates a system of mystification in which we are habituated – in face of disaster, for example – to “take refuge in the will of God, in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance.”55 The pervasiveness and power of this superstition can be dangerous for scientific inquirers, since it happens that one who seeks the true causes of miracles, and is eager, like an educated man, to understand natural things, not to wonder at them like a fool, is generally considered and denounced as an impious heretic by those whom the people honor as inerpreters of nature and the Gods (tanquam naturae Deorumque interpretes). For they know that if ignorance is taken away, then foolish wonder (stupor), the only means they have of arguing and defending their authority, is also taken away.56

Spinoza’s “analogy of nature” thus presupposes an analysis that contrasts two complete conceptual schemes – parallel “discursive universes” – that rarely intersect. The distinction between biblical and philosophical or scientific discourse is so severe that there is no connection or interchange at all in the referents of religious language, including even the word “God.” In a letter Spinoza shocks one of his critics by asserting, “I have never learned, nor could I have learned, any of God’s eternal attributes from Holy Scripture.”57 It seems almost superfluous to observe that from such a perspective the entire traditional project (in both Jewish and Christian traditions) of harmonizing internal biblical contradictions with each other, or of biblical notions with those of philosophy, is out the window.58

55 56

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Ibid., 81.11/443. Ibid., 81.15/443f.: “. . . qui miraculorum causas veras quaerit, quique res naturales, ut doctus, intelligere, non autem, ut stultus, admirari studet, passim pro haeretico, & impio habeatur, & proclametur ab iis, quos vulgus, tanquam naturae, Deorumque interpretes, adorat. Nam sciunt, quod, sublata ignorantia, stupor, hoc est, unicum argumentandi, tuendaeque suae auctoritatis medium, quod habent, tollitur.” Ep. 21, 133.5/158 (to Blyenburgh). Spinoza was no doubt familiar with such projects: one of his mentors, Manasseh ben Israel, compiled a massive tome, The Conciliator, presenting to the reader “all the passages of the [ Jewish] Holy Scriptures which are apparently repugnant to each other” (Conciliator, “To the Reader,” ix) and showing how to resolve them. Manasseh states the assumption that informs this (and similar projects) as follows: “And the Bible being in the highest degree true, it cannot contain any text really contradictory to another.”


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the necessity of an au tonomous his torical method Given this disjunctive relationship between biblical and scientific discourse, efforts at harmonization are futile. Any “mixing” of these discourses for edifying hermeneutic purposes results both in hopeless confusion and in absurd exegetical conclusions, especially anachronisms. To avoid such errors, the data gathered from scripture’s “natural history” are indispensable, for deprived of all these facts we cannot possibly know what was, or could have been, the author’s intention. But if we are fully informed of these facts, we are in a position to form an opinion free from all danger of mistaken assumptions; that is to say, we ascribe to the author, or to him for whom he wrote, no more and no less than his just meaning, concentrating our attention on what the author could have had in mind, or what the time and the occasion demanded.59

The prophets, Spinoza writes in an early letter, were not philosophers, so their mode of discourse should be approached by philosophers as nothing but “one whole [anthropomorphic] Parable.”60 They “fashioned complete parables” (integras Parabolas . . . finxerunt) around the central imaginative universal of God as King and Lawgiver. As a result, what the discourse of philosophy calls “causes,” the biblical fiction calls God’s laws or decrees; what philosophy calls “effects,” theology calls rewards and punishments. The reason is that the prophets “adjusted (ordinarunt) all things to the framework of this parable (parabolam) rather than to the truth (veritatem).”61 These thoughts, expressed in 1665, are still compatible with those of Maimonides. But in the TTP, Spinoza puts an end to the traditional doctrine of accommodation. Now when 59

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TTP vii, 109.35/152. The quotation ends: “. . . quas author in mente habere potuerit, vel qua tempus & occasio exegerit.” On this point, Spinoza’s critiques of Maimonides and Meyer merge; on the positive side, Spinoza’s view coincides with that of Skinner. Ep. 19, 93.18/135. The Dutch version has “een heele parabel.” J. M. Harris (How Do We Know This?, 124) rightly sees development (or at least clarification) in Spinoza’s thought between this letter (1665) and TTP. In the letter, “wise prophets, who knew better, spoke in parables to accommodate the needs of the masses . . . In this stage of his career, Spinoza still seems to have felt that philosophy had an important role to play in shaping the interpretation of Scripture.” Once he had learned to study scripture like nature, however, he saw that one must attend “only to the actual and conventional meaning of the words, as established by a study of the overall linguistic data of the text” (Harris, 127). Ep. 19, 93.8/135.

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scripture speaks “in merely human fashion”62 it is speaking the only language it can. In places where it is “accommodating” its language to the capacity of its vulgar audience, it is the human author that is responsible (the philosophically sophisticated St. Paul is Spinoza’s best example). In such cases, the interpreter investigates the historical context rather than assuming that the text is concealing esoteric meanings. Whatever the case, the biblical text is expressing the genuinely anthropomorphic views about God and world that the biblical writers and their contemporaries actually held. Recognizing that, Spinoza rejects the search for “deeper” meanings that would align the text with philosophical, scientific or dogmatic religious truth. Once historically informed, the interpreter knows that all these expressions “are in obvious agreement with commonplace imaginations about God and spirits”63 – grounded, as we have seen, in their general imagination of nature as a whole. Contrary therefore to philosophers and theologians who confect harmonistic readings by blending the categorically distinct matter of scripture and nature, there is in fact no commerce or interchange between these parallel discourses; each stands on a separate footing from the other,64 and in that sense they require equally distinct methods to interpret them. So severe is Spinoza’s application of this principle that even where overlap between scriptural matter and philosophical ideas seems apparent, it must not be taken for granted. The conclusions of the prophets, for example, are not based on “the truth of the thing” (ex rei veritate) as Maimonides and Meyer hold, but, as Spinoza has shown in the first two chapters, are rooted in their very ordinary knowledge, expressed in the idiom of their imaginary conception of nature.65 That is why the meanings we assign to scripture must be extracted “from scripture alone, even when it speaks about things known by the natural light of reason” – or, in the contrary case, even if its meaning contradicts reason.66 This 62

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humano more (e.g. Ep. 19, 92.13/135; 21,132.23/157; etc.). This expression echoes the Jewish 63 TTP i, 29.1/71. tradition, e.g., Maimonides, Guide, i, 26, p. 56; i, 33, p. 71. E.g., TTP xiv, 179.27/226: “. . . ut . . . ostendam, inter fidem, sive Theologiam, & Philosophiam nullum esse commercium, nullamve affinitatem, quod jam nemo potest ignorare, qui harum duarum facultatum, & scopum, & fundamentum novit, quae sane 65 toto caelo discrepant.” TTP vii, 115.17/158. Ibid., 115.24/158: “. . . ostendimus . . . & ratione & exemplis sensum Scripturae ex ipsa


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principle applies not merely in matters of natural science, but even more radically where the moral doctrines of scripture and reason seem to coincide: where such doctrines “can be demonstrated from common notions, it cannot be proved from such axioms that scripture teaches these doctrines: this can be established only from scripture itself.”67 Scripture, not philosophy, must reveal its own meanings out of its own mode of discourse, not ours. It is in that sense that scripture is sui interpres. Since nature and scripture have their own separate histories, “the meaning of Scripture should be gathered from its own history alone, and not from the universal history of nature, which is alone the basis of philosophy.”68 The radical difference was stated in the original analogy: in natural science we are dealing with “things of nature” (res naturales); in scriptural study, with “the intention of authors” (mens authorum). Again Spinoza seems to be deliberately contrasting his own view with Meyer’s. For Spinoza, a “history of nature” (or natural history) would lead to a general account of how the system of nature universally works. Such an account can be constructed from the data because the mind is equipped with “common notions,” the universal principles of thinking rooted in nature that make certain and general knowledge possible. Regarding such matters, we can produce demonstrations. But this is exactly what Meyer had claimed his method could do with scripture, and some modern commentators

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sola Scriptura constare, & ab ipsa sola, etiam cum de rebus loquitur lumine naturali notis, petendum.” This against both Meyer and Maimonides, who hold (in somewhat different ways) that scripture’s true meaning cannot be derived from scripture itself. Cf. xv, 185.8/232 (my italics): we should discern meaning of scripture from itself, and “not be deterred if, after thus discovering the true meaning of scripture, we find that it is at some points opposed to reason”: “. . . nec nobis moram injicere debet, si postquam ejus verum sensum sic investigavimus, ipsam his illic rationi repugnare comperiamus.” This view counters the procedure of Manasseh’s Conciliator. TTP vii, 99.9/142: “Quod ad documenta moralia, quae etiam in Bibliis continentur, attinet, etsi ipsa ex notionibus communibus demonstrari possunt, non potest tamen ex iisdem demonstrari, Scripturam eadem docere, sed hoc ex sola ipsa Scriptura constare potest.” This holds even though Spinoza asserts that there is a close approximation between the teaching of justice and charity in scripture and what can be known by (is revealed in) reason. TTP xv 185.6/232: “. . . jam etiam Cap. vii. ostendimus, ejus [scripture’s] sensum ex sola ejus historia, & non ex universali historia naturae, quae solius philosophiae fundamentum est, determinandum esse . . .” Again Shirley omits the word “history” twice from this sentence.

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have mistakenly attributed this view to Spinoza.69 But Spinoza joined Meyer’s critics in pointing out that the Bible is history. We may achieve moral (not logical) certainty about historical matters, e.g., what the prophets believed or meant.70 Our certainty that the opinions and teachings of the prophets are true, however, cannot exceed that of the prophets themselves, since those opinions were rooted not in common notions of reason, to which we would also have rational access, but in the prophet’s moral certainty. Spinoza illustrates the radical difference by contrasting our grasp of prophetic utterances with our grasp of the thought of ancient geometricians. The prophets’ teachings are grounded in the biblical “parable,” to which we have absolutely no access except through the text itself.71 Hence sola scriptura – in a new key. So even though the methods for studying nature and scripture have much in common, the objects that they study differ radically. The interpreter must keep them separate so as not to get confused or frustrated by the fact that the biblical world, created and accessible from its “history and narrative” alone, seems to work in a way radically different from the world of nature that we inhabit and increasingly understand, thanks to the new historical and scientific 69

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Most egregiously, Bruns (Hermeneutics, 148f.), who actually reverses the force of Spinoza’s careful distinction between meaning and truth, accusing Spinoza of the very rationalism (“Cartesian hermeneutics”) which Spinoza attacks in Maimonides and Meyer. Thus Bruns (148) has Spinoza teaching that “quite apart from what the author might have originally meant, whatever in the text answers to what is rational – what does not impinge against reason – is to be accepted as the meaning of the text. (‘We are at work not on the truth of passages,’ Spinoza says, ‘but solely on their meaning.’)” Bruns reinforces his misinterpretation by again reversing Spinoza’s intentions, this time by truncating a quotation to make it say the opposite of what Spinoza says: Bruns (using the Elwes translation) quotes Spinoza’s admonition to approach the text “‘in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines’ [end of Spinoza quotation] except those which can be perceived clearly and distinctly in the light of natural reason.” On the contrary, Spinoza’s sentence continues as follows: “. . . attributing to it no doctrines which I do not find clearly therein [i.e., in scripture] set down”: “nihilque tanquam ejus doctrinam admittere, quod ab eadem clarissime non edocerer” (TTP Pref., 9.24/Elwes p. 8 [not 9, as Bruns has it]; Shirley 53f. [italics are mine]). Scripture of course includes many doctrines which reason judges untrue (e.g., God’s jealousy). Cf. the text quoted below, n. 72. TTP note 8, 253.15/301 (to vii, 111.12/154). Spinoza spells out the difference between geometric knowledge from Euclid and historical knowledge. Again Bruns (Hermeneutics, 149) reverses Spinoza’s point. TTP xv, 185.28, 186.1/233. The contrast to geometry is brought out clearly in Spinoza’s note 8 to TTP vii (253.14/154).


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investigations. In this light, the biblical world is radically alien, lying beyond the pale of modern intelligibility because in it a human-like God is the immediate cause of events, as we have seen. But once we have done our natural-history homework and understand the principles on which biblical narrative is grounded, we can easily grasp its meaning and decide, on the basis of the authors’ own intentions, which passages to read literally and which figuratively.72 Contrary to Meyer, then, the content of scripture “must be sought from scripture alone, just as knowledge of nature must be sought from nature itself.”73 Precisely this is the principle Meyer failed to grasp: . . . those things which cannot be demonstrated and which make up the greater part of scripture, we cannot examine by reason, nor explain nor interpret by this norm [i.e., infallible reason]. But by following our method instead, we can explain many things of this kind and investigate them with confidence.74

An example of this sort of interpretation occurs where Spinoza is explaining how the apostles presented their message to a world in which the gospel was completely alien: . . . they adapted (accommodaverunt) it, as far as possible, to the character of their contemporaries . . . building on foundations (fundamenta) that were most familiar and accepted at that time.75 72

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Cf. TTP vii, 111.27/154. A nice example: sorting out how to read the Bible’s ascription of “jealousy” to God, in contrast to how Meyer and the orthodox did it. Spinoza insists such texts must be taken literally so long as they fit the framework of assumptions we have discovered by doing our “natural history.” Consequently, Spinoza says that even though such a text is shrouded in obscurity from the perspective of truth and reason, “I classify these sayings as clear. Indeed, even though their literal meaning is opposed to the natural light of reason, this literal meaning must nevertheless be retained unless it is in clear opposition to the basic principles derived from the history of scripture.” (TTP vii, 100.25/143; Shirley translates historia as “study”). By contrast, Meyer and the orthodox said that such texts must be taken figuratively, since reason (both philosophical and pious) knows that God is not jealous, and no untruth can be assigned to scripture. TTP vii, 99.5/142. TTP vii, 115.34 /158: “. . . quae enim indemonstrabilio sunt, & quae maximam Scripturae partem componunt, hac ratione investigare non poterimus, neque ex hac norma [i.e., Meyer’s infallible reason] explicare, neque interpretari: cum contra nostram methodum insequendo, plurima huius generis explicare, & de iis secure disserere possumus . . .” TTP xi, 158.4/203: “. . . quoad fieri poterat, hominum sui temporis ingenio accommodaverunt . . . & fundamentis tum temporis maxime notis, & acceptis superstruxerunt . . .” Cf. vii, 99/142.

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Again, those “foundations” can be known only from scripture (and presumably from other literature contemporary with scripture). Railing against both philosophical interpreters and scholastic theologians, Spinoza anticipates the day “when religion shall be separated from philosophic speculation and reduced to those very few and exceedingly simple doctrines which Christ taught to his own”; such a time would be “liberated again from all superstition.”76 Spinoza’s attack on the philosophers has a novel twist: they were traditionally the sworn enemies of “superstition,” but here he accuses them of perpetuating it by conniving with the theologians. Superstition, more or less harmless by itself, can have dire political consequences, as already noted. Hence, Spinoza’s critique of the philosophers is an integral part of his argument in the cause of liberty and a democratic hermeneutic. After completing his exegetical arguments against Maimonides/Meyer, Spinoza attacks their elitism, noting that if this [rationalistic hermeneutical] view were correct, it would follow that the common people, for the most part knowing nothing of logical reasoning or without leisure for it, would have to rely solely on the authority and testimony of philosophers (philosophantes) for their understanding of scripture, and would therefore have to assume that philosophers are infallible (non posse errare) in their interpretation of scripture.

The result would be “a novel form of ecclesiastical authority, with very strange priests or pontiffs.”77 76

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TTP xi, 157.35/203: Schisms will never cease, he says, “donec tandem aliquando religio a speculationibus philosophicis separetur & ad paucissima & simplicissima dogmata, quae Christus suos docuit, redigatur . . . foelix profecto nostra esset aetas, si ipsam etiam ab omni superstitione liberam videremus.” Here we see a clearly implied distinction in Spinoza between religio and superstitio. TTP vii, 114.24/157. Like Bruns, Harrisville and Sundberg (The Bible, 48) attribute to Spinoza exactly that of which he here accuses Meyer: “. . . Spinoza confines the understanding of scripture to an intellectual elite. Only those few guided by the full light of reason, by virtue of their education and native talent, have the authority to interpret scripture rightly . . . Spinoza seeks to take the Bible out of the hands of the people.” Quite the contrary: this is an excellent description of Meyer. Spinoza even observes that although the vulgi don’t know Hebrew, “it does not follow that the multitude must trust in the testimony of interpreters”: “non sequitur necessario vulgus testimonio interpretum acquiescere” (TTP vii, 114.31; 115.4/157). Unlike Meyer (PSI Pref., vi), Spinoza does not require the reader of scripture to follow “in the footsteps of Descartes” or to apply his procedure of methodical doubt. Such requirements would “deprive the common people of any confidence” in reading scripture for themselves (TTP vii, ll6. 6/158).


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Before Spinoza, all our authors held that scripture was – as Meyer put it – “the infallible word of the Best and Greatest God.”78 Spinoza might have expected such a view from the clergy, but not from modern philosophers. The philosophical interpreters idolize scripture, he says, and then discover the “mysteries” of Aristotle and Plato therein. This is why their approach to the Bible looks more like obsequious flattery than genuine belief. The political implications are clear: already believing that the Bible is a “letter sent from heaven,”79 the authorities will now be persuaded by the philosophers’ collusion in this mystification that scripture teaches mandatory speculative doctrine as well as mandatory divine law, and thus scripture becomes a pernicious weapon against intellectual liberty.80 A repository of esoteric but necessary (saving) knowledge, it requires expert interpretes; political space is thus ideologically carved out for a specialized guild of religious authorities who may exercise coercive power. reading the bible naturally Spinoza’s “leveling” of the Bible in relation to other books disarms the interpreters by negating their exceptional status and privilege.81 Spinoza critically examines the alleged scriptural warrant for this exceptionalism: in chapter iii, “The Vocation of the Hebrews,” he disputes Israel’s exceptionalist claims, pointing out from scriptural evidence itself that other nations were on the same

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Meyer’s contemporaries, e.g., van Velthuysen (Dissertatio, 150a, 150b; cf. 151b), had no trouble seeing Meyer’s elitism. PSI Prol., vii: “. . . infallibile Dei Opt. Max. Verbum.” TTP xii, 158.21/205: “. . . epistola e coelo missa.” This whole chapter is an argument against Protestant bibliolatry (literally, at xii, 162.3/208: literam adorare). Scripture is not to be confused with “the Word of God.” TTP xi, 151.15/197, has already offered a detailed refutation of the orthodox Protestant doctrine of scripture. In these places we hear echoes of both Catholic and Quaker critiques. Cf. TTP xiv, 173.27/220, where Spinoza’s objection is not against the freedom of harmless credulity enjoyed by individual interpreters (anything goes, so long as charity and justice are promoted), but against those who “refuse to grant this same freedom to others. All those who do not share their opinions . . . they persecute as God’s enemies, while those who follow their lead, however dissolute they may be, they cherish as God’s elect.” Spinoza is well aware that the “mixing” of philosophy and theology began in the ancient church. On this point see Francès, “La liberté politique,” on reducing the status of the Bible’s interpreters to the same level as all other parties vying for influence on public law.

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footing, having their own special laws, the favor of God, prophets and diviners, etc. In Spinoza’s view, exceptionalist claims are childish and superstitious inventions.82 He undermines them by exposing the historical and social origins of these claims, and clears the way to a level, that is democratic and non-hierarchical, playing field for biblical interpreters. As seen earlier, the doctrine of the infallible Bible had as its subjective accompaniment the doctrine of the inspired reader – in Calvinist language, the reader whose mere natural understanding was transformed into saving knowledge through the “internal witness of the Spirit.” Meyer had tried to drive the advocates of this view into a corner with logical arguments: either they were Enthusiasts, he argued, or they must admit with him that the “internal witness” is nothing more than the operation of (more or less)83 natural reason. We also saw how van Velthuysen had agreed, and had against all its rivals smartly underlined the authority of reason in the work of interpretation. Spinoza does not disagree, but finds historical arguments to reinforce Meyer’s logical ones. Echoing the liberals, Spinoza observes that the original hearers of the prophets and apostles were devoid of divine aid and had no need of special spiritual infusions.84 Consistent with his own naturalism (although sometimes using Quaker language) and with his overall political intent, Spinoza vehemently denies that there is any evidence that the learned clerics and theologians of his own day are “inspired” interpreters. “If they did indeed possess some divine light, this would surely be known from their teaching.”85 The claim that such a faculty is needed for biblical interpretation is nothing but a subrational “figment.”86 Twice appealing to Paul (Gal. 5.22), Spinoza 82

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TTP iii, 48–53/92–97. E.g.: “. . . concludimus, donum Propheticum Judaeis peculiare non fuisse, sed omnibus nationibus commune” (53.7/96); the presumption of special divine favor is puerilis (44.20/88) – an example of the inventiveness of superstitio (53.12/96). Recall (chap. 2 above) Meyer’s attempt to eat his cake and have it – both rejecting the Enthusiast position and borrowing its aura of divine authority on behalf of reason. TTP vii, 112.32/155: The prophets and apostles “preached not only to the faithful, but especially to unbelievers and the impious. So their audiences must have been capable of understanding their meaning (apti erant ad mentem Prophetarum & Apostolorum intelligendam).” TTP Pref., 9.1/53. TTP v, 80.22/123: “mera figmentum & longe infra [not supra!] rationem.” Strauss’s criticism that Spinoza shows “little insight” on the matter of the internal testimony accord-


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insists that the “testimony of the Holy Spirit is concerned only with good works.”87 Finally, “concerning the truth and certainty of things which are only speculative [including Christian dogma], no spirit gives testimony besides reason, which alone . . . claims for itself the kingdom of truth.”88 dimensions of his tory in spinoza’ s

T R E AT I S E

It is already evident that Spinoza applies history as a universal solvent of theological and philosophical fictions about the Bible. In his respect for the power of facts as a critical corrective of theories he follows Bacon; in the application of a Baconian approach to scripture he is unique, although a supportive scholarly trend had flourished since the Renaissance. Perhaps Spinoza’s most important predecessor in regard to theoretical principle was Lorenzo Valla, whose exposé of the Donation of Constantine had fixed the principle of anachronism in scholarly minds.89 The Jewish scholar Elias Levita had brilliantly applied the same principle to argue that the original texts of the Hebrew Bible lacked the vowel and accent marks familiar in the Massoretic text – an advance in scholarship of which Spinoza was aware.90 But no one came close to Spinoza’s almost obsessive new application of the principle of anachronism to biblical interpretation, just as no one had tried to create a natural history of the Bible. The obvious importance of historical criticism for Spinoza raises the broader question of Spinoza’s “historical consciousness” – or alleged lack of it. That is a virtue without which no thinker is certifiable as truly “modern.” From several angles, it is denied that

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ing to Calvin (Spinoza’s Critique, 206) misfires on two counts: he ignores the context of Spinoza’s remarks, which specifically concern the qualifications for biblical interpretation, not for “saving” grasp of Christian doctrine, and he misunderstands Spinoza’s use of the term “speculative,” by which Spinoza usually means the standard Christian doc87 TTP xv, 187.33/235; cf. v, 80.28/123. trines and not what Calvin means. TTP xv, 188.3/235: “De veritate autem & certitudine rerum, quae solius sunt speculationis, nulla spiritus testimonium dat, praeter rationem, quae sola . . . veritatis regnum sibi vindicavit.” Spinoza can speak of reason as the Word of God either speaking or written in human hearts (xv, 186.33/234: “ipso verbo dei in nobis loquente”; xviii, 221.24/272: “dei spiritu in corde scribi”). Valla, The Donation of Constantine. See Gilmore (Humanists and Jurists, 24f.) on Petrarch’s 90 sense of anachronism; Tully (Meaning and Context, 20) on Skinner. TTP ix.

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Spinoza has anything to say about history. His philosophy includes no category for time.91 More significant for us, Klaus Scholder, tracing the development of historical–critical biblical interpretation back to the seventeenth century, argues that while Spinoza had a keenly developed critical sense, he lacked historical understanding, the other crucial dimension of this method.92 This criticism however equates “historical consciousness” with the German theological notion of Heilsgeschichte (roughly, what Spinoza and his contemporaries referred to as historia sacra), rather than ordinary history. As one might expect, Spinoza dismissed sacred or salvation history as imaginary. Rather than trying to (re)define what belongs to these separate realms of discourse, let us dispose of what we will not find in Spinoza. No Sacred History (“Heilsgeschichte”) The idea of history as the bearer of eternally valid “revelation” would be among those “incomprehensible” items with which the Bible and Christian tradition are replete.93 It would require the anthropomorphic god that has no place in Spinoza’s conception of reality. Naturalizing history (or de-supernaturalizing it), Spinoza became “one of the founders of modern historicism and ‘the his91 92

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Alexander, “Spinoza and Time.” Scholder, Modern Critical Theology, 143f.: “The first to achieve a synthesis between rational criticism and historical understanding was Ferdinand Christian Baur, who thus becomes the founder of the historical–critical theology in the modern sense.” Note that here and throughout (beginning with the title) Scholder is looking toward the achievement of historical–critical study not as a secular enterprise but as an aspect of modern theology. Spinoza does not “anticipate” the innovative conception of theological history launched in Germany by such thinkers as Gotthold Lessing and Herder. Lessing is the key figure: in The Education of the Human Race he placed the history of human religiousness on a moral/evolutionary inclined plane. In doing so, he thought he solved the problem of the “ugly ditch” that emerged from his reading of Spinoza (i.e., the paradox that Christianity was irreducibly rooted in history, but that religious truth must be universal and eternal). His solution was to interpret universal religious history as the history of divine revelation (or divine paideia), a move that made all religious history theologically relevant at the same time as it reduced all earlier religious forms (e.g., Judaism) to “preparatory” manifestations. German biblical scholarship adopted this general scheme, for the discovery of the theological relevance of history made plausible a domesticated version of Spinoza’s critical method by reintroducing historia sacra in a new key. The first chapter of Oden, Bible without Theology, deftly traces this development as an account of “the forging of the alliance between theological history and biblical study” (7).


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torical consciousness’ without intending to.”94 Spinoza conferred no religious significance upon history, but he did accord historical significance to religion, and showed how it could be uncovered by attending critically to its social and political roles. Typically, historical–critical biblical scholarship among Protestant Christians came to be motivated by the desire to get at the “very words of God” in their original meanings. Consequently, the interpreters who practiced this art (professors of biblical studies) emerged as the most authoritative interpreters for a Christian public. Spinoza’s historical–critical study had the opposite motive, of course – to disarm the interpreters by highlighting the Bible’s historical relativity and irrelevance as a norm for contemporary religious ideas. Spinoza is not a “historicist” in the most common meaning of that term (denoting the historical character of all human existence and thought, and the consequent relativity of all “truth”).95 For him, reason provides an internal and history-transcending norm of intrinsic and permanent validity.96 Against those who found in sacred history the core of “saving knowledge” (i.e., mainline Christianity and Judaism!), Spinoza offered this objection: belief in historical narratives, however certain, cannot give us knowledge of God, nor, consequently, [create in us] the love of God. For the love of God arises from the knowledge of God, a knowledge deriving from common notions that are certain and self-evident, and so belief in historical narratives is by no means necessary for the attainment of our supreme good.97 94 96

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95 Cf. Iggers, “Historicism.” Morrison, “Spinoza and History,” 186 n. 26. There may be inconsistency here: Spinoza can perhaps be accused of characterizing the “reason” of earlier eras (e.g., the biblical) as being relative (he cites progress in biblical thought itself) while regarding his own as exempt from history. But if he applied his rigorous historical framework of interpretation to his own era, he would have to deal with the objection that he had transferred to reason the same “exemption” others claimed for scripture – something rationalists generally did. TTP iv, 61.28/105.: “Nec fides historiarum, quantumvis certa, Dei cognitionem, & consequenter nec etiam Dei amorem nobis dare potest; amor enim Dei ab ejus cognitione oritur; ejus autem cognitio ex communibus notionibus per se certis, & notis hauriri debet, quare longe abest, ut fides historiarum requisitum sit necessarium, ut ad summum nostrum bonum perveniamus.” We have already touched on this in chap. 1, at n. 33. Spinoza’s sweeping statement denies at once primary convictions of both Maimonides and Calvin, for whom authentic cognitio Dei was both necessary for salvation and available only through the scriptural deliverance of the “faith of the historians,” i.e., the sacred authors of scripture. Cf. Ep. 73, 308.8/333, where Spinoza explicates for Oldenburg a Christology consistent with his own rationalism: Christ is a manifestation

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The beliefs and opinions of the biblical authors, elaborated by theological tradition, were determined by the prejudices, imaginations, assumptions and political needs of their own times.98 On the contrary – and this is the main point here – against his Christian interlocutors, Spinoza seems intent on showing the religious irrelevance (or at least marginality) of the biblical history outside its own time and circumstances, depriving historia sacra of its authority by exposing the archaic and imaginary foundations on which it rested. Stripping it of theological “fictions,” he replaced the whole with an “authentic history” (historia sincera) which was both a true history and religiously irrelevant except to the extent that knowing any truth is religiously relevant.99 Spinoza was thus enlisting the power of current scholarship to spearhead his liberating theological–political campaign, whose success, as noted earlier, depended on depriving the authorities of a divine and binding scripture. Returning to Scholder’s charge: Spinoza’s failure to appreciate the mythic constructs of theological history is no obstacle to a strictly historical as well as critical grasp of the biblical text, both in the sense of how the book itself was produced and transmitted, and how it it might have been construed by its authors and first

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footnote 97 (cont.) of eternal wisdom as it operates “chiefly in the human mind,” without which no one can attain blessedness (cf. TTP v, 79/122). Knowledge of Christ “after the flesh” is not necessary. A fascinating aspect of this Christology is its focus on the subjectivity of Christ – a focus already developed among those Christians with whom Spinoza associated. Jarig Jelles, in the Opera Posthuma, describes the biblical basis: “. . . Christ has given Apostles, Prophets, etc. to this end, that we might all understand in the manner that Christ understood (ut nos cognosceremus, quemadmodum Christus cognovit); or in order that we might in great measure attain to Christ’s knowledge. Who can doubt that their labor, and the work of the Minister [Holy Spirit?] in it, intended to imbue men with such knowledge? Who finally will deny that through that knowledge, and its acquisition, the perfection of the Saints and so the body of Christ is built up?” (Akkerman and Hubbeling, “Preface,” 129). Spinoza’s strictures against the Gospel narrative line up with the observation of Santayana (“Modernism,” 32): “What would make the preaching of the gospel utterly impossible would be the admission that it had no authority to proclaim what has happened or what is going to happen, either in this world or in another” (quoted by Bartley, Retreat, 58). That is, Christianity cannot do without sacred history, and sacred history cannot meaningfully unfold apart from the activity of an anthropomorphic deity. TTP xv, 180.30/228: We are not bound to “accept as divine things the prejudices of an ancient commoner (vulgus).” On the historical level, this critique includes being aware of the difference between what the biblical authors “imagined” and what probably really happened: e.g., TTP vi, 92/135, with reference to the biblical story of the sun standing still, Josh. 10.


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hearers. That is what historical method in Spinoza’s sense is (present meaning is another story). Some applications follow. The historical nature of canonicity In the course of establishing Holy Scripture as their alternative to the Holy See, the Protestants conferred on it a magisterial infallibility and comprehensive efficacy undreamed of in prior Christian history. Ironically, their critique of Roman claims to divine origin and authority involved historical criticism of the development of the papacy (beginning before Luther), while at the same time amnesia was setting in with regard to the parallel historical development of the biblical canon. That its canonical status was itself merely one item in its long human history was a fact whose importance Catholic critics kept pointing out to Protestants. Spinoza agreed, listing human attribution of sacrality to certain writings as one element in the series belonging to scripture’s “natural history,” which should relate what happened to each book, how it was first received, into whose hands it fall, how many variant readings there were, by whose decision it was received into the canon, and finally how all the books, which everyone now professes to be sacred, were united into a single whole.100

Filling in that part of history, Spinoza notes that those books which we now possess were chosen above many others by the Pharisees of the second temple – who were also responsible for the set form of prayers – and . . . these books were accepted solely on the basis of their decree.

The proper inference is obvious: Therefore those who propose to prove the authority of Holy Scripture are required to prove the authority of each separate book. Nor does proving 100

TTP vii, 101.26/144 (my italics): “. . . enarrare debet haec historia . . . uniuscujusque libri fortunam: nempe quomodo prius acceptus fuerit, & in quorum manus inciderit, deinde quot ejus variae lectiones fuerint, & quorum concilio inter sacros acceptus fuerit, & denique quomodo omnes libri, quos omnes jam sacros esse fatentur, in unum corpus coaluerint.” This was compatible not only with the Catholic view, but with that of Quakers such as Samuel Fisher. They agreed that appeals to divine authority of canonical selection could not be based on scripture itself – a part of history the Protestants had bracketed out (cf. Gregory, “Introduction,” 36).

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the divine origin of one book suffice to prove the divine origin of them all. The alternative is that one would have to maintain that the council of Pharisees was infallible in making its selection – something no one will ever demonstrate.101

So just as the original collection came to be regarded as sacred seriatim, the same procedure holds now. Spinoza reinforces this point by drawing on other critics of Meyer who argued that linguistic usage varies from age to age, that meanings are constrained by their historical context. This includes “sacredness” itself, about which Spinoza makes this observation: if in accordance with usage, words are so composed that readers are moved to devotion, then these words will be sacred, and likewise the book containing this composition of words. But if at a later time (postea) usage dies out, so that the words have no meaning, or the book is utterly neglected, whether from malice or because men no longer feel the need of it, then both words and book will be without use or sanctity . . .Thus it follows that nothing outside the mind is sacred, nor profane or impure in an absolute sense, but only with respect to it [the mind].102

So, according to Spinoza, sacredness is relative to the time, the culture and the communities that confer it. The fact that scripture spoke with divine authority to its own era does not mean that it does so in ours. The makeup of the canon itself is thus subject to criticism, because it is as thoroughly historical and human as every other aspect of scripture’s origin.103 101

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TTP x, 150.2/195: “. . . hos [libros], quos jam habemus, a Pharisaeis secundi templi, qui etiam formulas precandi instituerunt, prae multis aliis selectos esse, & ex solo eorum decreto receptos. Qui itaque authoritatem Sacrae Scripturae demonstrare volunt, ii authoritatem uniuscujusque libri ostendere tenentur, nec sufficit divinitatem unius probare ad eandem de omnibus concludendam: alias statuendum concilium Pharisaeorum in hac electione librorum errare non potuisse, quod nemo unquam demonstrabit.” Cf. ibid., Adnot. 25, 261.16/306, describing how the canonical selection itself was rendered infallible in Jewish tradition by incorporating it into the myth of oral Torah, thus retracing it through Moses to God. TTP xii, 160.21/207 (my italics): Regarding words: “. . . si secundum hunc eorum usum ita disponantur, ut homines eadem legentes ad devotionem moveant, tum illa verba sacra erunt, & etiam liber tali verborum dispositione scriptus. Sed si postea usus ita pereat, ut verba nullam habeant signficationem, vel quod liber prorsus negligatur, sive ex malitia sive quia eodem non indigent, tum & verba, & liber nullius usus, neque sanctitatis erunt . . .Ex quo sequitur nihil extra mentem absolute, sed tantum respective ad ipsam, sacrum aut profanum aut impurum esse.” Cf. TTP x, 142/187, where Spinoza complains about details of the rabbinic selection. Recent scholarship (especially feminist) has revived the relevance of criteria for canonicity.


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Adaptation, anachronism, analogy Once the “natural-history” preparatory work is done, historical method governs Spinoza’s interpretation in three striking ways: he holds that biblical utterances are “adapted” to their own times and circumstances; that anachronism is the cardinal sin of interpreters; and that with regard to present significance, biblical history may yield instructive analogies, all right, but his are radically at odds with those invoked by the Calvinist clergy to legitimate their theocratic ambitions. All three principles illustrate the subversive (and in Spinoza’s case liberating) role of historical analysis against current dogma and power: – What is “adapted” to another time is not meaningful, much less binding, now; – What could not have been meant by writers belonging to an ancient age cannot now be imposed as “biblical doctrine” or “divine law” for this age; – Analogies, rather than allegories (as a higher spiritual meaning intended by the Divine Author), are the best use that can be made of these histories in the present.104 Adaptation, accommodation As we have seen, the traditional doctrine of accommodation has been “put on his head – or, if you wish, on its feet – by Spinoza.”105 He disguises somewhat the radicality of his historical theses beneath a language familiar to Christian readers – the longstanding commonplace in both Jewish and Christian traditions that God, or his inspired scribes, had “accommodated” or “adapted” their messages to the capacity of their audience; that is what accounted for the simplicity and occasional crudity of biblical language.106 The essential presupposition for this claim was that 104

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Cf. V. Harris, “Allegory to Analogy.” But Harris misses the move from allegory and typology to history and historical analogy (as in Hobbes and Spinoza). Funkenstein, Theology, 220. “The Torah speaks in the language of men” in rabbinic tradition (see Maimonides, Guide, i, 33, 71); Spinoza’s scriptura humane loquitur exactly translates the Hebrew. Calvin (Institutes i.17.13: McNeill, 227) explains that God’s self-presentation in scripture, as its author, “must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him to represent himself to us not as he is in himself, but as he seems to us.” When articulating this doctrine, Calvin says nothing about the human authors. For a profound treatment of the doctrine, see Funkenstein, Theology, 202–89; cf. also Benin, Footprints of God.

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a Divine Author generated the text, and that a true and intended religious or philosophical meaning was disguised beneath its simple language and occasional apparent untruth or contradiction. The Divine Intender consciously meant for interpreters to discover deeper meanings, having arranged both the text and the future course of history appropriately.107 And this of course required an expert interpreter, a specialist who knew the arcane rules for extracting spiritual truths from scripture. The Protestant reformers had already disposed of medieval allegory to their satisfaction, but they continued using the notion of accommodation. Spinoza’s deceptiveness in using the language of accommodation at all lies in the fact that in his opinion there was no such hidden intention at all, and no such “intender.”108 This is particularly evident in his analysis of prophecy and prophets: clearly there are no hidden philosophical messages or eternal truths buried in their utterances (contra Maimonides). Nevertheless, the more educated among scripture’s human authors, Paul in particular, were skilled in adapting their message and speech to the capacities and assumptions of their audiences.109 But these “revelations” have “no relevance for us, so let everyone believe of them as much as is consonant with his own reason.”110 Here Spinoza authorizes each reader to make his own “accommodation”: 107

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Cf. Funkenstein (Theology, 223), quoting Augustine’s explanation in Ep. 138 why the ot sacrifices have been abrogated: “It befitted (aptum fuit) God to request sacrifices in earlier times; now however, things are different, and he commands that which befits this time. He, who knows better than man what pertains by accommodation to each period of time (quid cuique tempori accommodate adhibeatur), commands, adds augments, or diminishes institutions . . . until the beauty of the whole history (saeculi), whose parts these periods are, unfolds like a beautiful melody (velut magnum carmen).” E.g., TTP ii, 42.27/86. Spinoza uses the conventional language about God’s adapting his revelations to the understanding and prior beliefs of the prophets: “. . . nempe Deum revelationes captui & opinionibus Prophetarum accommodavisse . . .” Spinoza’s point here, though, is simply that the literal sense of many texts is irrelevant to us, and that there is no esoteric content in them. Paul freely admits that he adapts his message to his audiences. Spinoza notes, TTP xi, 158.3/203, regarding the apostles’ delivery of the Gospel: “. . . they adapted it, as far as possible, to the character of their contemporaries . . . building on foundations that were most familiar and accepted at that time”: “. . . quod fieri poterat, hominum sui temporis ingenio accommodaverunt (vide Epist. ad Cor. 1 cap. 9. vs. 19.20. &c.), et fundamentis tum temporis maxime notis, & acceptis superstruxerunt.” This very human example is far removed from postulating an occult intended meaning. TTP ii, 43.11/86: Regarding the “speculative” aspects of revelations, “. . . nos minime tangunt: adeoque de iis unusquisque, prout suae rationi magis consentaneum videbitur, credat.”


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. . . just as in olden days faith was revealed and written down in a form which accorded with the understanding and beliefs of the prophets and people of that time, so, too, every man has now the duty to accommodate it to his own beliefs, so as thus to accept it without any misgivings or doubts.111

Thus Spinoza constructs a new historical analogy of his own that supports the freedom of every reader to make his or her own adaptation or accommodation to the texts. The political implication is clear: nobody has any business tampering with the individual’s liberty to interpret, for example by imposing a confessionally correct reading. Spinoza not only rejects the traditional allegory of the dogmatists but on the other side blames an indiscriminate biblical literalism of the sceptics for the religious torments and schisms that lacerate society: he who indiscriminately accepts everything in scripture as being the universal and absolute teaching about God, and does not distinguish precisely what is adapted to commonplace understanding (captui vulgi accommodatum sit), is bound to confuse the commonplace opinions with divine doctrine, to proclaim as God’s teaching the figments and arbitrary opinions of men, and to abuse scriptural authority.112

So there is no divine “accommodator” behind the human one, just as there is no divine revealer behind prophetic revelation.113 Instead Spinoza historicizes the term “accommodated,” referring to the way human biblical prophets and apostles accommodated their messages to the capacity of their ancient and ordinary audiences. Since the text was adapted to its own time and lacks any reference to our time, contemporary readers are likewise entitled to accommodate it to their own beliefs in the service of justice and 111

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TTPxiv 178.34/225: “. . . sicuti olim fides secundum captum, & opiniones Prophetarum, & vulgi illius temporis revelata, scritaque fuit, sic etiam jam unusquisque tenetur eandem suis opinionibus accommodare, ut sic ipsam, absque ulla mentis repugnantia, sineque ulla hesitatione amplectatur.” TTP xiv, 173.8/220 (my italics): “. . . qui enim omnia, quae in Scriptura habentur, promiscue amplectitur, tanquam universalem & absolutam de Deo doctrinam, nec accurate cognovit, quidnam captui vulgi accommodatum sit, non poterit vulgi opiniones cum divina doctrina non confundere, & hominum commenta & placita pro divinis documentis non venditare, Scripturaeque authoritate non abuti.” Cf. xi, 158.3/203. This is not to deny that Spinoza has his own doctrine of “revelation.” Indeed, his biblical paradigm of revelation-as-reason is the proto-rationalist Jesus himself, who communicated with God “mind to mind” without mediation of words and texts – just as did Quakers and rationalists in their own ways.

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charity.114 Thus does Spinoza transform the meaning of “accommodated” from a divine or inspired act to an ordinary human rhetorical strategy – at which he happens to be extremely adept, following his own admonition that the philosopher too must be ready to accommodate his teaching to the capacity of his readers.115 Anachronism Spinoza takes on the entire tradition of Jewish and Christian biblical interpretation with his historical exegesis. He corrects what he regards as the two most egregious errors of both traditions, personified as “sceptics” and “dogmatists.”116 The first error lies in imagining that the opinions of ancient vulgi should be regarded as divine truth. The anachronism lies in assuming that beliefs and assumptions, including religious ones, based on ancient worldviews and ethnic conceits are entitled to govern our own conceptions of what is true, possible or even intelligible. The second anachronism is imagining that these same ancient writers (or at least the divine author) intended to conceal later-discovered philosophical or religious truths under the crudities of their anthropomorphic language. Both errors arise from the same fundamental error: confusing the meaning and the truth of passages, an error stemming from the assumption that the genuine meaning of the text must always be true. History is the solvent of such fictions – both of the sceptics who fantasize without reason, and the dogmatists who fantasize with it.117 Spinoza’s rejection of anachronism is by definition built into his historical method, which as we have seen limits our conclusions not about what could be true but about what the ancient authors could have meant – something that could be discovered only through a 114

115 116

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TTP xvi, 173.21/220: “. . . sicuti . . . olim ipsa [Scriptura] captui vulgi accommodata fuit, sic etiam unicuique eandem suis opinionibus accommodare licet . . .” Cf. Brown, “Philosophy and Prophecy.” I have worked this out in detail in “A Hidden Opponent.” Even though his critique names only the harmless dead – Maimonides and Alpakhar – as representatives, Spinoza has, I have argued, contemporary philosophers such as Meyer (dogmatist) and Descartes (sceptic) in his sights. TTP xv, 180.32/228: “. . . uterque, hic [the sceptic] sine ratione, ille vero cum ratione insaniet.”


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“genuine history.”118 This method is important for reading any book, but especially for the Bible, because if we read a book relating events which are incredible or incomprehensible, or which is written in a very obscure style, and if we do not know the author or the time or the occasion of its composition, we will try in vain to apprise ourselves of its true meaning.119

Meyer’s common notions will be of no help here. And we only make matters worse if, confronted by such a text, we are primarily concerned to “make it true,” as the tradition of biblical interpretation had always done. We will miss the point, for our task is to concentrate “not on the truth of passages, but solely on their meaning,” and we must not be led astray by our reason or by our religious convictions. Rather we must rigorously observe the linguistic usage of our text, and explore the style of reasoning as it unfolds on its own “foundations.”120 Meyer and the philosophical tradition violated this cardinal law, bringing their own reason, founded on common notions, rather than explicating the text on the basis of its own particular foundations, discovered in its narrative and history. Thus, siding with the orthodox, but in his own 118

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Contemporary historians who observe this rule first formulated by Spinoza include Skinner and Pocock. See the discussion by Harlan (“Intellectual History,” 589): the two historians maintained that “by studying the conceptual language of a particular culture, we could learn what it was or was not possible for people in that culture to have thought.” Like Spinoza, Skinner seeks to “construct around them [the texts] the framework of their appropriate intellectual milieus” (“Ideological Context,” 317). I follow their example in this work. But cf. current argument among intellectual historians against Skinner in favor of “present meaning” (Tully, Meaning and Context). TTP vii, 109.30/152 (this immediately precedes the text just quoted): “Si librum res incredibles aut imperceptibiles continentum, vel terminis admodum obscuris scriptum, legimus, neque ejus authorem novimus, neque etiam quo tempore & Qua occasione scripserit, frustra de ejus vero sensu certiores fieri conabimur.’ TTP vii, 100.15/143: “For what we are after is solely the meaning of the utterances, not their truth” (the rest of the quotation comprises the epigraph to this chapter): “De solo enim sensu orationum, non autem de earum veritate laboramus. Quin imo apprime cavendum est, quamdiu sensum Scripturae quaerimus, ne raticinio nostro, quatenus principiis naturalis cognitionis fundatum est . . . praeoccupemur; sed ne verum sensum cum rerum veritate confundamus, ille ex solo linguae usu erit investigandus, vel ex ratiocinio, quod nullum aliud fundamentum agnoscit, quam Scripturam.” Funkenstein (Theology, 242f.) singles out Spinoza and John Spencer (De legibus Haebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus libri tres, 1685) as interpreters who try to move beyond merely reconstructing ancient institutions to reconstruct the mens auctorum, i.e., “the mentality that generated – or called for – such institutions”; this move “gave the principle of accommodation a new heuristic power.”

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adaptation of their language, Spinoza repeatedly affirmed that scripture could be interpreted only from itself. Analogy It is not as though scripture is devoid of present meaning. There is at least a family resemblance between scriptural and perennial ethical truths and, in Spinoza’s political context, the analogical “bridge” by which contemporary events may be illuminated – indeed must be, for political and polemical reasons – from an examination of the biblical history. Like Hobbes, Spinoza had to pay careful attention to the political lessons that were being derived from the biblical histories by Calvinist and Enthusiast opponents who advocated theocracy.121 Spinoza produced an analysis of the ancient Hebrew state that denied scriptural license to theocratic pretensions.122 The lessons to be learned from the biblical history were clear: political power should be denied to religious functionaries, and religious beliefs should not be legislated.123 Monarchy and clericalism, especially in combination, had been the ruin of the ancient state of Israel. Furthermore, secular rulers, because they are responsible for maintaining the wellbeing of the commonwealth through the laws, are the only legitimate interpretes of scripture in the realm of public law (as was the case in ancient Israel).124 Later, when Christian prelates became interpretes, the religious teachings of the founders began getting “confused” with philosophy (e.g., the doctrines of classical Christianity), and that confusion reigns until now wherever philosophy and religion are mixed.125 We need now to ask about the extent of some apparent convergences between Spinoza and the Christian right as we met them in chapter 3. It conveys the wrong spatial imagery to picture Spinoza alone way out on the far left of the ideological spectrum, or to blame him for being a founder of liberal Christian theology.126 121

122 123 126

Hobbes, a layman philosopher, rcognized that his own venture into biblical interpretation was somewhat eccentric and would raise objections, but explained that it was necessary “in order to my subject, for [the texts of scripture] are the Outworks of the Enemy, from whence they impugn the civil power” (Leviathan, Epistle Dedicatory, 76). Described above, chap. 1. See Zac, “Spinoza et l’état,” 231. 124 125 TTP xviii, 225.12/275f. Ibid., 232.3/283. Ibid., 237.16/289. Harrisville and Sundberg tend to do this: The Bible, 266f. For Spinoza, unlike ecclesiastically oriented scholarship, historical criticism simply had no religious relevance, nor


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disengagement on the left? In his compliment of the “sceptics” for their literalistic tendencies,127 and in his call for radical separation of biblical revelation from reason, Spinoza seems to be adopting positions taken especially by the right against Meyer: that philosophy and theology should not be mixed, much less harmonized, but operate in separate realms. Of course the theologians were as one in affirming the old adage that philosophy should serve as the handmaid of theology – something Spinoza rejected out of hand. He seems to be ready to cut off conversations with some theologians but not others.128 On discovering, for instance, that Willem van Blyenbergh, one of his correspondents, operated on completely different principles, he ended the correspondence as pointless, explaining that “we disagree not only in the conclusions to be drawn by a chain of reasoning from first principles, but in those very same first principles.”129 Should we then acknowledge a “disengagement on the left” like the one we found on the right – and an ending of further conversation with opposing views? Would not Spinoza be attracted to the right’s appeal to Tertullian130 for his own polemical purposes? After all, Tertullian’s alleged embrace of the “absurd” is echoed in Spinoza’s remark that the presuppositions of prophetic utterance are sometimes “absurd” by the standard or reason, and not to be harmonized with philosophical ideas.131

128

129 130

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did it function for him, an apostate Jew, in service of religious communities. In his view, the Bible could function religiously for individuals without the aid of critics, philoso127 I.e., of Alpahkar: TTP xv, 181.31/229. phers or other “interpreters.” Most interestingly, he sought further conversation with van Velthuysen, “for there is no one whose arguments I would more gladly consider” (Ep. 69, 300.27/323f.). Ep. 21, 126.10/151. On the other side, Tertulliam is the bête noir of the liberals: Bekker, e.g., despises Tertullian (Admonitio viii.15, 139f.). TTP vi, 88.18/131: “. . . prophetic reasonings, or those which are formed from revelation, are not derived from universal and common notions [of reason], but from assumptions – however absurd – and opinions of those to whom the thing was revealed . . .” “. . . ostendimus rationes Propheticas, sive quae ex revelatione formantur, non elici ex notionibus universalibus & communibus, sed ex concessis, quamvis absurdis, & opinionibus eorum, quibus res revelatum . . .” The quibus could grammatically be read as “by whom,” but the context seems to require reference to the audience rather than the speakers. The context is Spinoza’s discussion of the principle of sola scriptura: it requires that we derive the meaning of the prophets on the basis of their own and their hearers’ assumptions, not ours. Against harmonization, which corrupts either reason or scripture, see TTP x, 147.32/192f.; 148.12/193; 148.20/193; 149.30/194; xv, 180.23/228.

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It is of coursse one thing to acknowledge “the absurd”; something else to embrace it. Spinoza thought he had the theologians in a box here: embrace the absurd and you act stupidly; affirm reason and you subject theology to its authority. Spinoza makes many statements about how theology and philosophy, revelation and reason, stand on entirely separate footings, even though it is reason that rules the whole realm of truth.132 Scripture “leaves reason abolsutely free, and has nothing to do with philosophy; each stands on its own footing.”133 Against the charge that he simply reverses the relationship, subordinating theology to philosophy, he could vehemently deny it and point the finger at Meyer. Spinoza does not make theology the “handmaid of philosophy,” and he denies that either should be accommodated to the other. Were we to seek philosophers contemporary with Spinoza, well known to him, and representing a “disengaged” position seeking no connection with theology, two better candidates than Spinoza would be Descartes and Bacon. As we saw, Descartes was regularly quoted by the right (while holding their noses) as part of their critique of Meyer, to prove that Descartes dutifully bowed to theological authority and would never have approved of Meyer’s adventure in theology. In fact, both philosophers qualify as contemporary “sceptics,” hidden behind the name “Alpakhar,” just as Meyer is hidden behind Maimonides on the “dogmatist” side. My identification of Descartes and Bacon on the sceptical side gives symmetry to Spinoza’s argument and indicates how seriously he is writing against other philosophers, both sceptics and dogmatists, who offer support to scriptural exceptionalism. The other cardinal principles of Spinoza’s “sceptics” are their assertion of the hegemony of revelation over philosophy and reason – even when its ideas are “clear and distinct” – and their insistence that we must believe things we do not understand. Descartes explicitly affirmed both principles, and, as we saw, was quoted to that effect by Meyer’s 132

133

On reason ruling the realm of truth: TTP xv, 188.3/235. Spinoza says that the whole TTP is about that distinction and separation. Cf. McGahagan (“Cartesianism,” 293) on Voetius, who also held for separation but argued strenuously that philosophy must be accommodated to theological authority. TTP Pref., 10.16/54: “. . . persuasi, Scripturum rationem absolute liberam relinquere, & nihil cum Philosophia commune habere, sed tam hanc, quam illam proprio suo talo niti.” Throughout the TTP, Spinoza equates “theology” with scripture.


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critics.134 In full (public) agreement, Bacon had assumed the same sceptic stance: “The more discordant and therefore incredible the Divine mystery is, the more honor is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith.”135 Spinoza flatly denies both these principles (the self-advertised Cartesian Meyer simply ignored them): Now if reason [Spinoza writes], even though roundly contradicting scripture, is nevertheless to be made completely subservient to it, I ask, are we supposed to accomplish this with reason or without it, blindly? If the latter, then we are acting plain stupid and without judgment. If the former, then it is at reason’s command alone that we accept scripture, and therefore we would not accept it if it contradicted that command.136

Here is the difference: unlike both the philosophical sceptics who wanted nothing to do with theology and the theological right which refused to engage historical and philosophical questions, Spinoza engaged every issue, including religious, through critical and historical reason, going where Descartes and Bacon never would. Both had denied that their philosophical and scientific conclusions had any deleterious bearing on theology and faith (Descartes was denounced anyway).137 Spinoza not only endorsed Descartes’s denial that final causes could be appealed to in the explanation of nature, but, as we saw above, went on to make the Cartesian critique the very core of his own theory of religion. 134 135

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See chap. 3, n. 22. Bacon, De Augmentis (Works, iii, 346). I do not know Bacon’s work well enough to judge whether or not this is said ironically. It sounds like a line Hume would write for Philo in the Dialogues before springing his trap on the hapless Demea. TTP xv, 182.4/229: “Quod si ratio, quamvis reclamet Scripturae, tamen plane submittenda est, quaeso an id cum, vel sine ratione, ut caeci, facere demebus? Si hoc, stulte sane & sine judicio agimus; si illus? ex solo igitur rationis imperio Scripturam amplectimur, quam igitur, si eidem repugnaret, non amplecteremur.” Spinoza will not believe what is contrary to reason or what he cannot understand. This against “Alpahkar” (actually, using not Alpakhar directly but lifting Christian material from Meyer, as I have shown in “A Hidden Opponent,” 369–73). In his introduction to Spinoza’s Descartes, Meyer observed that Descartes says “that this or that surpasses the human understanding (hoc aut illud captum humanum superare),” but “it must not be thought that our Author [Spinoza] offers this as his own opinion” (Spinoza, Descartes, in Gebhardt i, 132.25; in Curley, Collected Works i, 230). Comenius urgently denounced Descartes’s rejection of final causes in the study of nature (see chap. 3 above). The liberal Bekker, on the other hand, ably defended Descartes’s innocence, and van Velthuysen too (Dissertatio, 158) commended his prudence for not “adapting” (adsciscere) faith to philosophy.

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Although that theory first appeared in the posthumously published Ethics, it was already written at the time that Spinoza composed the first two chapters of the TTP, an application of that theory explaining the imaginative foundation of biblical revelation.138 Confining biblical revelation to prophecy (as scripture itself does), Spinoza is able to make the distinction between biblical revelation and reason all the clearer. Prophetic utterances are not rationally interpretable, he explains, not because they are sublimely beyond reason’s grasp, but because they are predicated on an imaginary picture of nature in which God acts as a potentate delivering decrees. Only after grasping that critical aspect of the natural history of scripture – i.e., the account of assumptions that govern its discourse – are we able to understand why “the prophecies . . . contain only dogmas and commands: God is depicted therein as declaring his will not by reasoning, but by issuing decrees by his absolute fiat.” Which is why “the authority of the prophets does not submit to ratiocination,” for that would accomplish nothing except to submit their teachings to everyone’s judgment.139 In distinction from all his contemporaries, Spinoza has made two decisive moves here: he has radically refined the separation of philosophy from biblical interpretation by separating entirely judgments of truth from determination of textual meanings. In addition, beyond both the theologians and the philosphers, he has used reason to introduce a new explanatory theory of religion itself – one that puts the conceptual material of the biblical religion on a level it 138

139

Note that on the basis of the principle sola scriptura (again), Spinoza equates revelation and prophecy, since no one but prophets (including Moses, of course) explicitly delivers “God’s words.” Therefore, according to scripture itself, revelation is prophecy. Cf. TTP i, 15.5/59, where he begins: “Prophecy or revelation is the sure knowledge of some matter revealed by God to man. A prophet is one who interprets God’s revelations to those who cannot attain to certain knowledge of the matters revealed, and can therefore be convinced of them only by simple faith:” “Prophetia sive revelatio est rei alicujus certa cognitio a Deo hominibus revelata. Propheta autem is est, qui Dei revelata iis interpretatur, qui rerum a Deo revelatarum certam cognitionem habere nequent, quique adeo mera fide res revelatas amplecti tantum possunt.” TTP xi. 152.8/198: “Prophetiae vero contra tantum dogmata & decreta continent, quia in iis Deus quasi loquens introducitur, qui non ratiocinatur, sed ex absoluto suae naturae imperio decernit, et etiam quia Prophetae authoritas ratiocinari non patitur, quisquis enim vult sua dogmata ratione, eo ipso ea arbitrali uniuscujusque judicio submittit.’


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shares with all other religions. His stance, then, was not disengagement from theology so much as creating a discourse that treats theology and the Bible not as the explanation and norm of religion but as part of the data for his historical and theoretical understanding of it. He knows theology, but he knows it in a secular framework of analysis, explanation and interpretation. In other words, he does pretty much what we do in the contemporary study of religion. is spinoza’s method rationalis tic? Everything said so far would indicate that Spinoza is rigorous in keeping the two realms of historical biblical interpretation and philosophy separate, despite his flat-footed assertion of the supremacy of reason.140 But some scholars (as we have noted) characterize Spinoza’s hermeneutic as “rationalist,”141 and there is at least one blatant instance where he steps outside his historical mode (he had stayed within it when he interpreted prophecy). He changes strategy in the treatment of miracles (chapter vi), and this is cited as evidence 140

141

The supremacy of reason is asserted frequently, e.g., against those who would appeal to the “Spirit”: with regard to speculative matters, Spinoza writes (TTP xv, 188.3/235), “no other spirit gives testimony, besides reason, which alone . . . has asserted its claim to the realm of truth.” Spinoza explicitly parts company with the so-called supernatural rationalists, stating that their distinction between “above” (acceptable) and “against” (unacceptable) reason is fallacious, because the terms signify the same thing (TTP vi, 86.28/129; cf. 87.6/130). The view that Spinoza is thoroughly “rationalist” seems to blind some scholars to his historical side. For example, Reventlow (Authority of the Bible, 5) explains that he has not included Spinoza in his book, since “as an apostate from Judaism and one whose thought was consistently within the framework of a strictly rationalistic system, he had presuppositions of his own.” Scholder (Modern Critical Theology) misses a major dimension of Spinoza’s achievement by allowing him credit only for the critical half of “historical–critical.” Spinoza’s notion of “history” was “thoroughly cartesian,” he claims (141). Like Meyer, Spinoza was motivated to apply “cartesian method to the exegesis of scripture and theology” (ibid.). In Scholder’s scheme, orthodoxy provides the thesis, Cartesian criticism the antithesis, and the historicism of Herder and F. C. Baur the first “synthesis” of criticism and historical understanding (143f.). Earlier, Kraus (Geschichte, 64) had rightly asserted that “the principles of a historical–literary hermeneutic were formulated by Spinoza for the first time.” He allowed in a footnote (513 n. 4) that biblical science “achieved a considerable lead in those lands [France, Holland, England] before . . . Germany.” Yovel (“Psychology”) sees only minor historical dimensions in Spinoza’s work: his view of the individual person allows for a “gradual growth of rationality” (325); and his technique of linguistic transformations always “preserves certain elements of the historical term which he reinterprets.” “In this sense,” Yovel adds, “Spinoza, the official proponent of the geometrical method, is more historically oriented than meets the eye” (330).

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of his “rationalist” interpretation of scripture.142 But Spinoza explains this diversion from his own method quite clearly: an explication of the issue of miracle on his own rational grounds is necessary because the subject by definition raises not only historical questions but questions about the workings and laws of nature. Notice that this is so not because of what the Bible says but because conventional opinion defined biblical miracles (anachronistically) as violations of those laws. Spinoza is intent on showing that such opinion is false, and that, far from honoring God, it undercuts the most powerful evidence of his existence: the perfectly orderly and lawlike processes of nature (⫽ the power of God by which everything happens). Without discernment, current opinion imagines that the universe operates off two distinct power sources (duae potentiae).143 Without having any adequate idea of God or nature, people “imagine God’s power to be like the rule of some royal potentate, and Nature’s power to be a kind of force and energy.”144 The problematic nature of such a duality was being greatly heightened in Spinoza’s era of scientific discovery of nature’s regularities, and Spinoza had concluded that the power of God and the power of nature were one and the same. And so he tries to correct popular perceptions, and to explain how the biblical accounts of events are to be understood. Far from suspending or abandoning his customary historical method, he takes care to explain how the Bible itself understood “miracles.” I might have said that a miracle is that whose cause cannot be explained on scientific principles known to us by the natural light of reason [which would be an anachronistic reading of scripture]. However, since miracles were wrought according to the understanding of the common people who were quite ignorant of the principles of science, men of old doubtless regarded as a miracle whatever they could not explain in the way in which the common people are accustomed to explain natural things . . .145 142 143 144

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E.g., by Brad Gregory, “Introduction,’ 41. TTP vi, 81.16/124: “duas . . . potentias numero ab invicem distinctas imaginantur . . .” TTP vi, 81.19/124: “Quid autem per utramque [potentiam], & quid per Deum & naturam intelligant, nesciunt sane, nisi quod Dei potentiam tanquam Regiae cujusdam majestatis imperium, naturae autem tanquam vim & impetum imaginentur.” TTP vi, 84.2/127: “Possem quidem dicere, miraculum esse id, cujus causa ex principiis rerum naturalium lumine naturali notis explicare nequit; verum, quoniam miracula ad captum vulgi facta fuerunt, quod quidem principia rerum naturalium plane ignorabat, certum est, antiquos id pro miraculo habuisse, quod explicare non poterant eo modo, quo vulgus res naturales explicare solet . . .”


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Then, at the end of the chapter, he claims that he could have made his whole case from scripture alone. By appealing to verses from the wisdom literature, he shows that some biblical authors (not the prophets) apprehended nature somewhat as he did. The polemical point he wished to make was not that certain things did (or could) not occur, but that the popular definition of miracle used in his own time did not itself square with scripture’s, for scripture nowhere says “that something can happen in Nature that contravenes her laws or that cannot follow from her laws; so neither should we impute such a doctrine to scripture.”146 Sola scriptura indeed. Spinoza’s decisive comment against current interpretation of miracle, then, was not so much rationalist as historical: it pointed out not the irrationality of belief in miracles but the anachronistic nature of the conventional definition of miracles that was imposed on scripture by its modern interpreters. It has been suggested that Spinoza’s historical method is contaminated by his philosophy.147 Such a criticism rests on a failure to observe Spinoza’s care and consistency in distinguishing what he himself believes and what he attributes to the biblical authors. He believes that reason and evidence drawn from experience are the sole criteria for making critical judgments concerning truth 146

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TTP vi, 95.34/138; “. . . [Scripture says] nullibi, quod in natura aliquid contingat, quod ipsius legibus repugnet, aut quod ex iis nequeat sequi, adeoqsue neque etiam Scripturae affingendem.” Cf. vi, 94.21/137, where Spinoza says that attributing everything to God is the normal manner of scriptural explanation. See Walther, “Spinoza’s Criticism,” 104, elaborating further on Spinoza’s observation. This is Gregory’s thesis in his generally informative “Introduction.” The TTP, he holds, “is permeated by a philosophy which, despite its author’s claims to the contrary, plays a crucial role in the scriptural interpretation” (42). My general disagreement with Gregory is based on what I think is his failure to interpret Spinoza’s assertions within the framework of his rigorous distinction between meaning and truth. Contrary to one of Gregory’s examples (ibid.), we have already seen Spinoza warning that scripture itself never teaches that nature’s laws can be contravened, and that we should not impute such a doctrine to it (TTP vi, 95.34/138). Some specific criticisms are as follows. It seems ludicrous to complain that Spinoza’s hermeneutic principle is itself not found in scripture (“Introduction,” 41), since scripture itself offers no clue how to interpret it. It is also idle to note that Spinoza provides unscriptural definitions (42): as he himself says, scripture, like nature, does not provide definitions of the matters of which it treats. We have to construct them on the basis of linguistic usage from the internal data scripture provides. The teachings Gregory lists (42) are undeniably derived from Spinoza’s philosophy, but they are not items that he claims to derive from the Bible. Curley momentarily leans in the same direction (“Homo Audax,” 102), charging Spinoza with the same fault he attributes to Maimonides regarding resurrection of the body: true, Spinoza himself proposes a spiritual resurrection, but also asserts that the apostles probably believed in a bodily one. Thus he preserves his distinction between meaning and truth.

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(including religious truth). But that is not an opinion that he tries to foist on the Bible in order to make it look rational. Nor does it usually affect his determination of what the biblical authors meant. On the contrary, he repeatedly warns (against Meyer et al.) that we must set reason aside if we are to discover the original meanings of the biblical materials. The critical question for interpretation of texts – as Spinoza never tires of observing – is how one discovers what their authors meant to convey, not the question of what the interpreter thinks is true. The interpreter’s views about what is true or possible or interesting are readily distinguishable from his exegetical procedures. The issue is: what method does the interpreter propose for discovering the meanings expressed in and by the text? Spinoza’s answer, worked out in numerous applications and with remarkable consistency, is that one must attribute to scripture nothing but what its authors could have intended.148 Thus, with more rigor and consistency than any of his contemporaries (and many of ours), Spinoza distinguishes the question of truth from that of meaning. That distinction and the dialectical relation between the two operations (interpreting texts and making truth judgments) is the most fundamental principle of his whole method, and is inseparable from his claim that his method is historical, not philosophical.149 The common failure of both sceptics and dogmatists was their failure to uphold this distinction – even though the sceptics were right in their interest in determining what the text actually said, and the dogmatists were right to let reason rule the realm of truth. All that said, a severe tension runs through the TTP – a tension reflecting Spinoza’s most basic intentions in writing: on the one hand, he wishes to deprive scripture of public authority by showing that none of its teachings, once set in historical context, are relevant to contemporary law and government. But on the other hand, 148

149

Granted, Zac (L’interprétation, 167ff.) is able to cite examples where Spinoza violates his own rules of contextual interpretation for rhetorical purposes, especially when he tries to stretch the views of Solomon and Paul to fit his own philosophical stance. Cf. Chouraqui (“Spinoza et l’interprétation,” 102) recognizes that Spinoza’s “revolutionary principle” is “to explicate the biblical text in the light of historical investigation which situates it in its linguistic and chronoligical context.” This is right, as long as it does not get severed from its critical companion idea: to observe the distinction between meaning and truth.


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for strategic reasons (like Hobbes) he wants to show by historical analogy that biblical history supports his arguments against theocracy; further, that his ethical theory, designed to provide a moral foundation for a peaceful, non-sectarian social and political order, is actually compatible with scripture taken in its universal sense. This strategy however requires a severe stretch between the universal teachings of reason (Spinoza’s real authority) and the teachings he claims are also taught consistently throughout the Bible,150 and which he tries to demonstrate as the last step in his Baconianinductive exegetical method. I do not think that Spinoza quite overcomes this tension, for standing alongside this discovery of moral universals is, as we have seen, the warning that just because certain prophetic moral teachings seem to conform with reason, that does not mean that the prophets actually meant the same thing as we do.151 It is also of course true that Spinoza well earns the label “rationalist” simply because reason is the supreme criterion for judging speculative truth claims. But neither his epistemology nor his method of interpertation is quite rationalistic.152 Most important for our purposes, though, is this: his explanation of scripture, particularly of revelation, stems not just from his own philosophical/scientific view, but also from his historical grasp of its origins, and the implications for biblical authority and interpretation. He grasped the incommensurability of the biblical worldview, made intelligible only by historical (not philosophical) analysis, and his contemporary view, which made the ancient worldview unbelievable because strictly unintelligible. He did not demythologize in the contemporary sense (i.e., make it meaningful by translating it 150

151 152

E.g., TTP vii, 104.18/147, on how scriptural teaching on moral conduct “can be the more easily elucidated because on such subjects there has never been any real difference of opinion among the writers of the Bible”: “. . . quae propterea facilius investigari queunt; nam revera de iis nulla inter Scriptores Bibliorum unquam fuit controversia.” S. B. Smith (Spinoza, 83) concludes that “Spinoza’s attempt to derive a rational ethics from the very words of Scripture is spurious or at best a strategy ‘accommodated’ to the understanding of his contemporaries.” See the passages from TTP vii, 115.24/158, and vii, 99.9/142, quoted above (nn. 66, 67). For a brief but excellent presentation of Spinoza’s experiential epistemology, see Franck, “Spinoza’s Logic of Inquiry”; also Savan, “Spinoza: Scientist,” and Curley’s commentary (“Neglected Masterpiece,” 64f.); see also Curley, “Rationalism,” for a succinct account of Spinoza’s view in its philosophical context.

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into contemporary terms with the help of philosophy, as Maimonides, Meyer and Rudolf Bultmann would do). Nor did he try to derive or defend his own approach from scripture. Moreover, his naturalistic explanation of scripture allowed the text to say what its authors intended without being rendered theologically or politically correct by its latter-day interpreters. Spinoza did not believe in “revelation” as a source of truth and knowledge independent of reason, or as a heteronomous authority over reason. But this does not allow us to infer that his method of scriptural interpretation was “rationalistic.” Rather his reasoning led him to propose a method that dismissed Meyerian rationalism and mapped a new route into scripture by way of history.


the cause of libert y Spinoza’s Tractatus deserves major credit for the fact that our political system is governed by human laws and not answerable to any who would impose their version of divine law on the public. No one before or since has more thoroughly nullified the authority of God’s would-be interpreters in the public realm by exposing as irrelevant the biblical platform from which they held forth. Spinoza accomplished this mainly by a radical historical analysis of scripture that severed the thought-world of the Bible from that of his own time, depriving the ecclesiastical authorities of their intimidating claim that the opinions of biblical authors were eternally valid, and that they, the duly constituted experts, were their interpreters. In particular, Spinoza reexamined biblical history to undercut analogies by which the theocrats sought to legitimate their privileged status; in their place he (like Hobbes) constructed analogies of his own: ancient Israel for him was not a shining exemplar for the brave new world of the Dutch Republic so much as a pointed object lesson in the failure of theocracy and divided sovereignty. Revealing the connection between the theoretical and the social, Spinoza recognized that you could not sustain a democratic state with a hierarchical religious authority situated above the state any more than you could submit philosophy to the authority of theology without creating hopeless confusion and threatening liberty. He further recognized that the most effective arguments for his cause should be historical: his natural histories of scripture and religion replaced theological myths and deprived their authoritative interpreters of further employment. 203

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We have found significance in the fact that Spinoza to some extent engaged a specific theological–political debate among Christians which focused on the role of philosophy in biblical interpretation. Spinoza joined Meyer’s critics in arguing that philosophy was not the right instrument; then he surpassed those same critics by creating a method that would operate without theological authority and thus would help safeguard free inquiry and open debate in a democratic state. He historicized the Bible and turned Protestant axioms to his own advantage, showing that the standard theological and political assumptions of the opposition were not in fact supported by scripture itself, historically understood. He set aside not only contemporary assumptions but also those that had been developed in the classical period of both Judaism and Christianity. By studying TTP in this specific context, we can better understand why Spinoza’s work was vilified or at best ignored in subsequent discussions of biblical interpretation. His work failed to fit either of the grooves into which Christian theology was running, and largely continues to run, between conservative and liberal. His was a “third way” – an alternative to both the conservatives and liberals we have studied here, drawing from each but proposing a non-sectarian, non-confessional, non-traditional method of interpreting scripture. This method, which he called “historical,” failed to derive religious value from the text or to be guided by traditions (rabbinical or confessional) that formed the basic framework for interpretation (e.g., covenant, Torah, kerygma, creed). The religious values that Spinoza found in scripture for his own time were those that could also be derived from reason: they were not, to his mind, historically contingent (Spinoza’s historical method does not imply a belief that all thought is historically conditioned). Seen another way, Spinoza substituted his universal, more or less deistic truths for the particular dogmatic truths espoused by the churches.1 His religious/ethical truths depended on no “sacred history” – no eternally valid narrative of salvation (as in the kerygma). Rather, he resorted to a simpler fiction, finding in the dis11

The fact that Spinoza finds this sort of religious message in scripture qualifies somewhat Popkin’s flat assertion that Spinoza’s reading is “completely secular” (“Spinoza and Biblical Scholarship,” 396).


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parate biblical materials a unanimous teaching of charity and justice that coincided with the findings of natural reason. So even though Spinoza is given some credit for inventing the method almost universally used in scholarly biblical study now, mainline religious groups are more or less committed to sacred history still (the largest Christian body, the Roman Catholic, sees its own history as a seamless continuation). They are far from ready to abandon their histories and traditions and adopt as sufficient the mere ethical principles of charity and justice. As is well known, some of the more radical proposals in the TTP can already be found in the writings of Hobbes, LaPeyrère, Fisher, Juan de Prado, Francis van den Enden and Adrian Koerbagh. Hobbes and LaPeyrère had already undercut belief in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Fisher had virtually decanonized scripture. Spinoza’s views on Judaism were similar to Prado’s, and on politics and scripture to those of van den Enden2 and Koerbagh. But there are elements in the TTP that do not come from any of these, and they are crucial to Spinoza’s argument. Those considerations, while scarcely the only ones, are indispensable for understanding what Spinoza was doing in writing the Treatise, as well as for analyzing particular elements of the text itself.3 One thing that emerges from this approach is detailed recognition of Spinoza’s ingenious adaptation and transformation of Protestant discourse. Example after example can be cited: with Calvin, Spinoza asserts that cognitio Dei (knowledge of God) is our supreme good.4 With all Protestants, he insists that the essential teachings of scripture are clear and easy to retrieve.5 With most 12

13

14

J. I. Israel (“Toleration,” 28) reports views of van den Enden’s in some aspects identical to those of Spinoza: he was an advocate of toleration from the “radical philosophical camp” and launched an “uncompromising attack on organized churches and clergies,” arguing that the “power of the established church, with its claims to authority over conscience and thought, its confessional discipline [exercised through the consistories], its admonitions to obedience to despotic political authority, and its mystifying rites and prayers” all needed to be shattered. He reduced true Christianity to loving God and one’s neighbor. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding”; cf. Pocock (“Introduction,” 12), who insists that knowledge of the context is necessary for recognition of the innovation to be uncovered in a text. Pocock makes this observation in the context of his discussion of how an author’s particular parole (his own specific and adaptive speech acts) can use and perhaps modify the langue (“stable language structures”) within which he writes. 15 TTP iv, 60.11/103. TTP vii, 111.26/154; 115.9/157.

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orthodox scholastics, he argues that the “natural light” suffices to understand scripture, since unbelievers ungraced with the Spirit had to be able to understand the message.6 With the reformers, he insists that scripture has to be understood “solely from scripture” (ex sola scriptura).7 He further agrees that it is not necessary for believers to understand the “causes” of revelation.8 Against all who would authorize themselves as interpretes, he insists that each individual has the right to interpret scripture for himself 9 – a Reformation principle repeated by Wolzogen though fatally undermined once Protestantism itself assumed state power, a status which – until Spinoza – was generally assumed to require doctrinal conformity. Like the Christian scholars, Spinoza asserts that the innumerable textual deficiencies were of no religious importance, since they did not obscure the essential teachings of scripture.10 Manipulating Protestant axioms for his own ends, he transformed phrases such as scriptura sui interpres and sola scriptura into principles of his own historical method through closely argued and plausible adaptations of the conventional Protestant teachings. His Treatise was readily recognized as part of an ongoing Christian conversation,11 and I do not doubt that part of his intention (besides hoping to persuade the powers that be) was to further the education of his circle of Christian friends – something best accomplished by adapting language and categories thoroughly familiar to them.12 16 17

18 10 11

12

TTP vii, 112.32/115. TTP vii, 115.25/158; viii, 124.13/167, etc. For an excellent treatment of Spinoza’s manipulation of Christian language, see Misrahi, “Spinoza and Christian Thought.” 19 TTP vii, 117.1/159. TTP vii, 115.7/157. TTP ix, 135.22/179; Louis Cappel had said the same. I have already noted the letter of van Velthuysen (Spinoza, Ep. 42 [van Velthuysen to Ostens], 207.14/225): Opening his critical review of the TTP, van Velthuysen writes: “I do not know what nationality he is or what manner of life he pursues, and this is not of any importance. The methodical reasoning of the book itself is evidence enough that he is not unintelligent, and that his discussion and close examination of the controversies among Christians in Europe is not careless and superficial” (my italics). Unlike Maimonides’ Guide, to which Spinoza’s work has been tirelessly compared, Spinoza was addressing a broader audience, and although he was sometimes deceptive in accommodating his language to his Christian readers, I find no evidence that he invested his work with esoteric meanings. How could his Treatise have its intended impact or persuasive power as a public manifesto if its intentions could not be understood? Misrahi (“Spinoza and Christian Thought,” 403) has it right: “The use of identical words (decree, free will) for antithetical notions places Spinozism within the cultural back-


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We see from the literature we have covered here that the TTP traverses ground familiar to Dutch readers who followed the debates triggered by Meyer’s PSI. All these works (especially Meyer, Wolzogen and van Velthuysen) were in Spinoza’s immediate foreground and helped shape his treatise. Of special importance: – History as categorically different from philosophy, and as constitutive of the essential matter of scripture, which is foreign to philosophy; – Clear separation of philosophy, or reason, and theology, or faith, without subordination of either; – A method based on a sharp distinction between the investigation of textual meaning and determination of truth; and – Ordinary usage as the sole criterion of meanings of the words in scripture. We have already seen how Spinoza altered all of the above (except the last) for his own purposes. He received no credit from his contemporaries for his labors. Despite his protests, the noisome charge of atheism and his identification of God with nature drowned out other considerations. The charge was just, within seventeenth-century definitions, for his critical natural history of scripture dared not only to decanonize the book but to offer a natural history of God-as-person and of religion as well.13 Even those who drew heavily on him (such as the French Oratorian scholar Richard Simon) dared not give him credit. As Frank Manuel observes, the TTP was “probably the most revolutionary document of seventeenth-century exegesis, but for most Christian as well as Jewish scholars . . . Spinoza remained outside the pale.”14 When his work began to be appreciated about a century later, the radicality and political thrust of his TTP was domesticated for ecclesiastical consumption or simply ignored.

13

14

ground of the period; but at the same time, each term used by Spinoza sounds antagonistic to this background through systematic subversion of the Calvinist senses of these terms.” Atheists by that day’s criteria included, for many, “those who deny Sacred Scripture” – so Uriel de Castro (according to J. M. Harris, How Do We Know This?, 105). Cf. van der Wall, “Orthodoxy and Scepticism,” 123. Spinoza told Oldenburg that one of the reasons for writing the TTP was to refute the charge of atheism against him (Ep. 30, 166.25/186). Manuel, Broken Staff, 141.

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Ensuing scholarship assumed that everything of value in Spinoza was absorbed as historical–critical biblical scholarship evolved in Germany. a new explanation Spinoza’s work marks the beginning of a new type of biblical study and of the study of religion. His approach to scripture comprehended all the discoveries and advances in knowledge that made a new departure necessary. Just as western “modernity” may be thought to begin when an era’s questions become our own, so Spinoza’s advance in biblical study posed all the major questions that are still asked.15 Although it was not his intention, he laid the foundation for what is now an established academic discipline that applies the same historical, critical and comparative method to the explanation and interpretation of scripture and biblical religion as one applies to any other religious text or system. He himself remarked that his historical method was a difficult and littlefollowed path, owing in part to superstitious resistance of the public to any historical study of the sacred text.16 What made his break from his contemporaries truly radical was his new explanation of scripture – his showing that its origin could be accounted for without remainder through human history alone (this put Jewish and Christian scripture on a level scholarly playing field with all other sacred or revealed scriptures of the world). Spinoza held that biblical religion itself – whatever its peculiar virtues – could be understood as one historical instance of his more general explanation of religion itself. Spinoza argued that all discourse about supernatural beings acting upon the world and intervening in human affairs originated from a worldview based on a virtually universal but imaginary general account of experience, and that biblical discourse was an example of such anthropomorphism just as much as books such as the Qu’ran. This approach completely displaced the status and function of theology in the 15

16

John Cottingham, quoted by Bunge (“The Absurdity,” 25), judges Spinoza, although adhering to the principles of Cartesian science, “the most uncompromisingly ‘modern’ of the great seventeenth-century writers.” TTP vii, 112.10/155; ix, 129.10/173.


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study of religion: whereas theology in the Jewish and Christian communities had provided the explanatory framework (as explanans) for biblical interpretation and (at least implicitly) for religion generally, it now became part of the data (explanandum), subject to analysis in a naturalistic–historical framework. Thus when Spinoza repeatedly asserted that all knowledge of scripture must be derived from scripture itself, he was urging that a genuine understanding of biblical words, phrases and ideas demanded understanding the most comprehensive assumptions that governed that ancient discourse, recognizing that those assumptions were drastically different from those of the present. Spinoza’s biblical criticism and his attack on the theocratic pretensions of the interpreters were of a piece in his campaign of demystification. In fact, his dual critiques, political and epistemological – of theocracy and of anthropomorphism – exposed two fundamental ways in which religious ideologies and explanations of things falsify reality by reification. Berger and Luckmann use the term reification to describe (a) how religion obscures the historical, contingent and humanly constructed character of the social order by grounding it in an eternal order, elevating it beyond criticism, and (b) how – reversing the process! – religion also obscures the natural and lawlike system of nature by attributing its events and effects to human-like personal agents.17 A third form of reification vulnerable to Spinoza’s critique was “sacred history” (historia sacra) itself, wherein parts of ordinary human history were mythically reconstructed and assigned eternal significance and divine dignity by making them “acts of God.” In response to the first reification, Spinoza historicized the social order, using the origin of the ancient Hebrew state as a sort of ideal type. His critique of the second reification depersonalized nature and God; in the third case, he identified “sacred history” as the product of archaic human construction alone. Like St. Paul (as Spinoza reads him), Spinoza was himself in the Treatise a master adapter, engaging his audience by using their language (in contrast to the Ethics, where he uses his own). But he did not hide his own convictions. This is part of the fascination of this 17

Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction.

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work, for, as Dominick LaCapra observes, great texts are of interest not merely “in their confirmation or reflection of common concerns but, to paraphrase Nietzsche, in the exceptional way in which they address commonplace themes.”18 What made Spinoza exceptional was the way he took conventional terms, well worn and understood everywhere in Europe, and transformed their meanings by relocating them in the emerging modern discourse of historical and scientific scholarship. Spinoza’s argument, grasped in its context, illustrates the vital role of accurate critical historical scholarship both in the academy and in a democratic society. Like Hobbes, he realized that such scholarship applied to scripture was a powerful theoretical antidote to theocracy, and, reciprocally, that freedom from such religious authority was a condition not only for the advancement of knowledge but for the free exercise of argument in a pluralistic society. Perhaps Spinoza’s most original contribution as a biblical scholar was not his rationalist criterion for truth, but his sense and pursuit of historical understanding both of the book itself and of its contents. He reminds us still that history has political implications – that we cannot, for example, depend on the official “interpreters” and their “official versions” for the truth about the past. And truth about the past is never irrelevant, because, as George Orwell wrote, he who controls the past controls the future.19 In 1984 O’Brien, to complete his relentless project of total mindcontrol over Winston, must at all costs destroy Winston’s memory. Accurate knowledge of the past – whether the biblical past or other – is equally necessary in a free society to puncture the false analogies laid upon us by the spin doctors. To be sure, our lives are enriched by false analogies, and by all sorts of other fictions, illusions, myths. We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we do not die of the truth. But critical history must be ready to analyze and correct these myths when they become ideological obstructions to historical truth. In a day when loud voices proclaim that there is no separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution, or that the founders intended to establish a Christian nation, that religion somehow deserves a higher public status in our 18 19

LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History,” 51. Orwell, 1984, 32.


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political system than it now enjoys, or that the authority of scripture overrides that of modern biology, a better knowledge of the history reviewed here would be salutary. It would enrich public discussion of the meaning and import of the hard-won truth of the First Amendment. As things stand in our culture, historical knowledge of what it took to arrive at the wisdom enshrined in its two prohibitions is grossly lacking. It is little realized that those simple sentences took centuries to write – centuries of painful experience before they could even be thought. It would be unfortunate if we forgot the pain and suffering engendered by the European crusades, inquisitions, expulsions, witch hunts, slavery, persecutions and wars – every one an engine of coercion legitimated with solemn theological argument and endowed with scriptural authority. Such was the crucible in which Spinoza and his compatriots formulated the case for liberty. Informed memory of these things helps us keep our bearings in a world that does not share these ideas and does not remember this history. Such knowledge and memory is of the sort that makes us free.

Bibliography

primary sources Arnoldus, Nicolaus, . . . Dissertatiuncula, de theologiae supra philosophiam dominio, cum brevibus stricturis ad librum sub titulo Philosophia Sacrae Scripturae Interpres, Franeker: S. Arcerius, 1667. Bacon, Francis, The New Organon, ed. Fulton H. Anderson, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960. Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, 15 vols., Boston: Brown & Taggard, 1860–64. Balling, Pieter, The Light upon the Candlestick (1662), Eng. trans. in “Addendum” to Willem Sewel, History of the Rise, Increase and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers, 3d ed. (Philadelphia: Samuel Keimer, 1728), pp. 688–94. Bekker, Balthasar, De philosophia cartesiana admonitio candida et sincera, Vesalia [Wesel]: Andrea Hoogenhuysen, 1668. Bellarmine, Robert, Disputationes de controversis (1599): Liber i: De verbo Dei, Venice, 1721. Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion ed. J. T. McNeill, 2 vols., Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960. Cappel, Louis, Arcanum punctationis revelatum, 1624. Critica Sacra, sive de variis quae in sacris Veteris Testamenti libris occurrunt lectionibus libri sex, Paris: Sebastian & Gabriel Cramoisy, 1650. Casaubon, Meric, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, London: R.D., 1655. Castellio, Sebastian, Concerning Heretics: Whether they are to be persecuted and how they are to be treated (1554), trans. Roland H. Bainton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1935. Chillingworth, William, The Religion of Protestants: A Safe Way to Salvation (1637). In The Works of William Chillingworth, 12th ed., London: B. Blake, 1806; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1972. Comenius, Jan Amos, Judicium, in Serarius [q.v.], 1667, pp. 61–82. Court, Pieter de la, The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland (1662; 2d ed. 1669), trans. John Campbell, London: J. Nourse, 1746; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Curley, see under Spinoza. 212

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Descartes, René, Principia Philosophiae. In Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vol. viii. 13 vols., Paris: Cerf, 1897–1913. Fisher, Samuel, The Rustick’s Alarm to the Rabbies: or, the Country Correcting the University, and Clergy . . ., 4 pts. in 1 vol., London, for Robert Wilson in Martins, 1660. Galilei, Galileo, “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” (1615). In Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. and ed. by Stillman Drake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 173–216. Gebhardt, see under Spinoza. Hobbes, Thomas, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament (1668), ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (1889); 2d ed. M. M. Goldsmith, London: Frank Cass, 1969. De Cive, the Latin version . . ., ed. Howard Warrender, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Leviathan (1651), ed. C. B. Macpherson, Baltimore: Penguin, 1968. Man and Citizen [De Homine and De Cive], ed. Bernard Gert, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Jelles, Jarig, The Preface to Spinoza’s Posthumous Works (1677) and Its Author Jarig Jelles (c. 1619/20–1683). Lias 6 (1979), 103–73. LaPeyrère, Isaac de, Men before Adam, or a Discourse upon the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Verses of the Fifth Chapter of the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Romans . . ., London, 1656. Levita, Elias, The Massoreth ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita. In Jacob ven Hayyim ibn Adonijah’s Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible, ed. Christian D. Ginsburg, New York: KTAV, 1968. Maimonides, Moses, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Manasseh ben Israel, The Conciliator (1842). Notes by E. H. Lindo. Repr. New York: Hermon Press, 1972. Maresius, Samuel, Disputationes Theologicae prior refutatoria libelli de philosophia Interprete Scripturae . . ., Groningen: Johannis Collenus, 1667. Meyer, Ludwig, Philosophia sacrae scripturae interpres. Exercitatio paradoxa. In qua, veram philosophiam infallibilem S. Literas interpretandi normam esse, apodicticè demonstratur . . ., Eleutheropolus [Amsterdam], 1666. Philosophia sacrae scripturae interpres. . . . ed. J. S. Semler, Halle– Magdeburg: I. C. Hendel, 1776. La Philosophie interprète de l’écriture sainte, trans. J. Lagrée and P-F. Moreau, Paris: Intertextes, 1988. Owen, John, Of the Divine Originall, Authority, Self-Evidencing Light and Power of the Scriptures, Oxford, 1659. Serarius, Petrus, Responsio ad Exercitationem Paradoxam Anonomi cujusdam, Cartesianae sectae discipuli, qua philosophiam pro infallibili S. Literas interpretandi norma orbi Christiano obtrudit . . ., Amsterdam: Christopher Cunrad, 1667.

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Index

accommodation, 60, 98, 174, 177, 187, 188‒90, 194 see also adaptation adaptation of scripture to times, 130‒31, 187, 188‒89 Spinoza’s, of theology, 205‒6, 209‒10 see also accommodation ambiguity, see obscurity anachronism, 160, 181, 190‒92, 198, 199 analogy(ies) drawn from ancient texts, 30, 102 n. 99, 201 of faith, 132 n. 84 Spinoza’s use of, 159, 166‒68, 172, 192, 203 anthropomorphism, 168, 169‒71, 173‒74 Arminian controversy, 21 assumptions the Bible’s, 32, 167, 169, 174, 176, 191, 208 of Spinoza’s contemporaries, 204 atheism, Spinoza’s, 207‒8 Augustine, 47, 54 n. 75, 188 n. 107 authority biblical, 4, 5‒6, 15‒16, 17, 32, 66, 200 and rational argument, 72, 147 Bacon, Sir Francis, 161, 162‒64 as sceptic, 195 Balling, Pieter, 60‒1, 61 n. 92 Bekker, Balthasar, 26, 113 biographical data, 72 n. 11 beliefs, 26 formulated by reason, 147 religious, as self-authenticating, 105 biblical study, comparative, 97

Calvin, John, 31 Calvinism, Dutch, 18, 108 canonicity, 142, 185‒86 Catholicism, Catholics, 23, 41‒2, 90, 139, 142, 185 censorship, 105, 113 Christ, 11, 178, 183 n. 97 Christianity divided, 14‒15, 21‒2, 41‒3 as incomparable, 98 chronology, biblical, 28, 99‒100 clergy, 19‒21, 108 ambition of, 112‒13 not inspired, 180 cognition faith as, 149‒50 historical, 115, 124‒27 natural, 127 unity of, 149‒50, 152‒3 Collegiants, 25, 41 confessionalism, 89, 92, 102 n. 99 consciousness, historical, 129‒31, 181‒83 contingency in biblical history, 101, 125, 128, 155 reason above it, 204 critical method of Spinoza, 33 see also historical method de la Court, Pieter, 157 n. 8 Descartes, René, 27, 34, 36, 39‒40, 74, 75‒6, 78 as sceptic, 194‒95 dogmatists as anachronistic, 190 as Protestants, 41‒2 see also sceptics

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226

Index

doubt, 144 Cartesian, 39, 76‒7, 99 Dutch Republic, 18, 109 as “new Israel,” 2 n. 3, 18, 203 Enthusiasm, Enthusiasts, 23, 58, 111, 139‒40 exceptionalism biblical, 50, 52‒3, 54, 96, 97, 104, 194 Jewish, 179‒80 experience, 171 religious, 91‒3, 104‒5 explanation, 30, 157, 197, 202, 208‒9 faith dependent on interpretation, 146‒47 and knowledge, 148‒49 First Amendment to U.S. Constitution, 210‒11 Fisher, Samuel, 24 n. 72 Galilei, Galileo, 27, 28 n. 88 God as author of scripture, 50, 94, 103, 156 as interpreter of scripture, 86‒7, 93 unknowable from scripture, 172 uses ordinary language, 119, 120 n. 49 harmonization, 81‒2, 83, 172 n. 58, 174, 193 n. 131 hermeneutics, 53, 131 Cartesian, 14, 161 contemporary, 37 democratic, 109, 178 rationalist, 65, 154, 178 historia sacra (sacred history), 11, 29, 67, 101, 102, 105, 129 n. 76, 182‒85, 204 see also history; narrative, historical historical method, 6, 17 before Spinoza, 124, 134, 155‒56 Spinoza’s, 154‒202 passim (esp. 177, 183‒85, 198‒99, 200), 208 history as core of scripture, 11, 17, 114, 124‒25 as interpreter of scripture, 66‒7 irrelevance of, 105 natural, 66, 163, 164 of scripture, 32, 97, 159 Spinoza’s use of, 4, 32 Hobbes, Thomas, 1, 16 n. 49, 30, 68 n. 3, 110, 157 n. 8, 192 Holy Spirit, 52

“internal witness” of, 36, 44, 57 n. 32, 85‒6, 91, 180 as interpreter of scripture, 86, 89 as natural reason, 58‒9, 64, 92 as norm of interpretation, 86, 89, 90 preceded scripture, 88 undercuts confessionalism, 73, 91 undercuts institutions, 73 ibn Ezra, Abraham, 3 n. 5 infallibility of the Bible, 16, 23, 28, 40, 73 of Holy Spirit, 90 of the magisterium, 90 of philosophy, 58 intelligibility of scripture, 116, 138 n. 99, 142 intention author’s, 48, 103, 118, 165, 173, 175, 177, 200 divine author’s, 187‒88 Meyer’s doctrine of, 37, 49‒50, 51, 53, 54, 62, 131 interpretation, biblical, 115 and author’s intention, 200 minimized, 84‒86, 87 as purely human, 108 reason in, 127‒28, 135‒44, 152 rules of, 120, 122‒24 and usus loquendi, 118‒19, 146‒47 as vehicle of revelation, 23 as work of Spirit, 86 see also interpretation, historical interpretation, historical, 37, 124‒25, 133 interpreter(s), 2, 108 classical definitions, 14 n. 42, 43 devil as, 76‒7 God (or Spirit) as, 87, 93 individuals as, 91 professors as, 183 state as, 15 n. 48, 192 task of, 43, 55, 153 as threat to liberty, 20, 179 Israel, ancient and Dutch Republic, 2 n. 3, 18 and theocracy, 30, 192 kerygma, 12, 134 n. 90, 183‒84 knowledge, 24, 26, 27‒8 and faith (belief), 81, 148‒49 of God, 183 historical, 32, 156

Index

227

innate, 60‒1, 151 revelation as, 136, 151 saving, 19, 22, 25, 29, 31, 57, 104‒5, 136, 149, 150, 179, 183 unity of, 33, 149‒50 Labadie, Jean de, 109 language ambiguity of, 35, 37, 44 biblical, 119, 133 conventional, 136‒37 usage, 49, 118‒19 law, divine, 19‒20 in scripture, 15, 22 legislation of doctrines, 21 liberals, 11 n. 32, 107 n. 2 views summarized, 152‒53 liberty, 4‒5, 15 literalism, biblical, 28, 189

as ancilla theologiae, 9, 27, 65, 79, 82, 105 establishes meanings, 53 as idol, 70, 102 as instrument of Spirit, 58 as interpreter of scripture, 39, 55, 56, 59‒63, 79, 98, 117, 129, 178 as manifestation of Antichrist, 102 separate from theology, 74 source of truth, 55‒6, 60 and Spinoza’s method, 199‒200 political thought and the Bible, 1‒2, 6 prejudice(s), 158, 169‒70 prophecy biblical, 24, 132, 173‒74, 196 freedom of, 25 as revelation, 196 Protestant(s), 42, 68, 131, 139, 142, 162, 183, 185

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1, 14 n. 42 Maimonides, Moses, 13, 37, 48, 51 n. 66, 60, 154, 174 Manasseh ben Israel, 172 n. 58 Maresius, Samuel, 68‒106 passim meaning in scripture, 50‒1 easily derived, 85 given by Spirit, 93 historical, 114‒15, 160 intended, 103 literal, 48 present, 148 single, 72, 96, 120 and truths, 50, 51‒2, 96, 122, 137, 190, 200 method, inductive, 163‒64 see also historical method Meyer, Ludwig, 7‒8, 34‒67 passim and Maimonides, 37, 154 and Spinoza, 7‒8, 35‒38 views summarized, 64‒7 miracles, 172, 197‒99 mysticism, mystics, 70 n. 5, 92

Quakers, 24 n. 72

narrative, historical, 11, 124‒26, 128, 183 see also historia sacra naturalism, Spinoza’s, 157, 167, 168 n. 44, 180, 182 Oldenburg, Henry, 163 Pelagius, Pelagians, 77‒8, 138 philosophy

rationalism, 4, 135 rationalist, Spinoza as, 31, 197‒202 reader, reading, 56‒7, 60, 89‒90 reason faith dependent on, 145 free of constraints, 194 judges authenticity of texts, 143‒44 right, 54 role in interpretation, 64‒5, 127‒28, 135, 144‒45, 147 as Spirit’s inner witness, 58‒9, 64 universality of, 204 reification, 209 religion and despotism, 20‒1 theory of, 166, 171‒72, 196‒97 revelation, 22‒24, 182, 189 interpretation as vehicle of, 23 n. 69 as prophecy, 196 n. 138 as source of knowledge, 136 right-wing theologians, 10 n. 31 sacredness, 104, 186 sceptics(s), 41‒2 as anachronistic, 190 Bacon as, 194‒95 Catholics as, 41‒2 Descartes as, 75‒6 as literalists, 189 as unbelievers, 74 see also dogmatists

228

Index

scriptura sui interpres, 12, 85, 86‒88, 89, 133‒34, 167‒68, 206 through history, 133, 175 Meyer’s opposition to, 36, 42, 44, 45, 57, 64 through usage, 131‒32 scripture clarity of, 46‒7, 48, 82, 85, 87 n. 63, 87‒8, 95‒6, 103 defined, 142 as divinely authored, 42, 53, 56, 82, 84, 85 as history, 114, 124‒26 incomparable, 97 irrelevant to knowledge, 81 leaves reason free, 194 and nature, 166‒68 obscurity of, 44, 123 see also exceptionalism; truth of scripture Semler, J. S., 132 n. 85 sense, see meaning Serarius, Peter, 68‒106 passim biographical data, 70 n. 5 Socinians, 74, 141 sola scriptura, 12, 66, 167‒68, 176, 199, 206 state as authority in religion, 15 n. 48 superstition, 111, 171, 172, 178

political consequences of, 112, 171‒72, 178‒79, 180 teleology, 78, 170 Tertullian, 77, 193 theocracy, 30, 192 theology, Protestant: Spinoza’s use of, 12‒13, 205‒6 truth(s), 64‒5 philosophical and historical, 128‒30, 155 above reason, 107 n. 2, 149 saving, 141 of scripture, 96, 127 universal vs. particular, 64‒5, 94 typology, 70, 80, 88, 102 usage, usus loquendi, 49 common, 51, 98 determines interpretation, 146‒47, 152 key to meanings, 114, 117‒19, 137 van Velthuysen, Ludwig, 107‒53 passim biographical data, 110 Vogelsangh, Reinerius, 68‒106 passim biographical data, 71 Wolzogen, Ludwig, 107‒53 passim biographical data, 109

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