Analisis descriptivo de las variables

Spinoza’s aim is to unmask practices that sustain fear and repress the capacity to reason. But where should his critique begin? According to the corrupted form of Calvinism that he aims to discredit, the two testaments of the Bible are our only public source of religious knowledge. Scripture contains the word of God communicated to the prophets, and the teachings of the Church are justified by the fact that they are based on nothing less than divine revelation. This conception of biblical authority purportedly sustains the hesitations of would-be philosophers, who would-believe that owould-beying the divine law set out in Scripture is necessary to their salvation and are afraid that philosophically grounded con-victions may conflict with the requirements of true religion. Part of the task of the Treatise is to reassure them, by showing that the fruits of natural reasoning do not contradict revelation, so that philosophizing will not threaten their hope of eternal life. If Spinoza can convince them of his own view that‘Scripture leaves reason absolutely free’, he will have removed a major obstacle to the growth of understanding and liberty.¹

The interpretation of the Bible with which Spinoza now begins to engage focuses on prophecy.‘The prophets’, Calvin had explained, ‘did not speak of themselves, but, as organs of the Holy Spirit, uttered only that which they had been commissioned from heaven to declare.. . . the Law and the prophecies are not teachings handed on at the pleasure of men or produced by men’s minds as their source, but are dictated by the Holy Spirit’.² ‘God commanded his servants, prophets and apostles to commit his revealed word to writing’, the Dutch Reformed Church’s Belgic Confession reaffirmed, ‘and he himself wrote

1 Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ed. Carl Gebhardt, vol. III, Opera (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1924), Preface, p. 10.

2 David Puckett, John Calvin’s Exegesis of the Old Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 26. See also Calvin and the Bible, ed. Donald E. McKim (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2006); R. Ward Hodder, John Calvin and the Grounding of Interpreta-tion (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

with his own finger the two tables of the law.’³ Biblical revelation commu-nicates laws that God has decreed for us and enables us to discern how he requires us to live.⁴ ‘Whatsoever man ought to believe unto salvation is sufficiently taught’ in Scripture, and the doctrine it contains is ‘most perfect and complete in all respects’.⁵

At the same time, the Bible reveals God’s plan for humanity. Since ‘nothing happens by chance, but every event in the world depends on God’s secret purpose’, prophecy enables us to discern that the course of historical events is providentially determined.⁶ Together, the Old and New Testaments form a unified narrative organized around a sequence of covenants between God and man, culminating in the promise of Christ’s kingdom on earth. (The covenant made with the patriarchs is so like ours in substance and reality, Calvin had proclaimed, that the two are actually one and the same.⁷)‘Christ promises his followers today no other Kingdom of Heaven than that in which they may sit at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, and on the basis of Scripture we can be absolutely confident that the kingdom of heaven will come about.⁸‘For the very blind are able to perceive that the things foretold in [the canonical books of Scripture] are fulfilling’.⁹

In Spinoza’s own generation, this providentialist reading of Scripture was elaborated by Johannes Cocceius, professor of theology at the University of Leiden and an influential though controversial voice within Reformed theology.

God’s original covenant with Adam was an unequal one, Cocceius argued, resembling that between a master and a slave. As long as Adam obeyed the law that God had set out for his benefit, he won God’s approval and sustained a form of amicitia or friendship with him; but as soon as he broke the law by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, God withdrew his friendship. While the covenant was not altogether nullified, it became impossible for human

3 ‘The Belgic Confession’, in The Creeds of Christendom: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, ed.

Philip Schaff (New York: Cosimo Books, 2007), Article 3.

4 See Calvin’s commentary on 2 Timothy 3:16 (‘All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and for righteousness’) for the view that one can only benefit from Scripture if one concentrates on the prophecies it contains.

John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, trans. Rev. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1856), pp. 248–50.

5 ‘The Belgic Confession’, Article 3. See also Calvin’s commentary on 2 Timothy 3:16:

‘ . . . he who knows how to use the Scriptures properly, is in want of nothing for salvation, or for a holy life.’ Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, p. 250.

6 Puckett, Calvin’s Exegesis, p. 30; ‘The Belgic Confession’, Article 13.

7 Puckett, Calvin’s Exegesis, p. 37.

8 Ibid. p. 39.

9 ‘The Belgic Confession’, Article 5.

beings to abide by it, and put them in a condition of servitudo or bondage characterized by fear of the deity. Fear prompted them to obey, whilst their inability to fully obey fed their fear. In his mercy, God then instituted the so-called covenant of grace with believers, enabling them to acquire a grounded faith that the effect of Adam’s sin will at some point be reversed and friendly relations with God restored. Faith therefore coexisted with a fear that was only mitigated when Christ engraved the law on the heart. Liberated by his inter-vention, the faithful no longer have any reason to fear God; but they must still struggle with their passions—fear included—as they await Christ’s kingdom on Earth and the renewal of an unqualified friendship between God and man.¹⁰

Cocceius’s interpretation of the covenants illustrates how deeply Dutch Calvinist theology was informed by an interpretation of Scripture which located the Reformed Church and its members at a particular stage of history.

In their current state, human beings have to contend with anxieties that originated in Adam’s first disobedience and are plagued by fears that expose them to the threat of superstition. As we shall see, Spinoza will adamantly reject any such narrative, along with the conception of God on which it depends. But he nonetheless reworks some of its most central themes in his own idiom, and retains the theological contrast between human imperfection and salvation around which Calvinism is organized. For Cocceius and other Calvinist theo-logians, fear and the superstition to which it gives rise stand in the way of a form of freedom and salvation that will only be realized in the kingdom of Christ, and until this kingdom arrives human beings will have to struggle against their passions. In Spinoza’s philosophy, too, superstition and enslavement to the passions are obstacles to salvation. But the means to overcome them, insofar as it can be realized, lies in our understanding. Philosophy rather than the pre-destined will of God or the intervention of the Holy Spirit is the route to blessedness.¹¹

These affinities can help us to appreciate some of the ways in which Spinoza’s own intellectual concerns overlap with those of his Calvinist contemporaries.

Despite his hostility to the Reformed Church’s dogmatism, he finds resonant ideas in the work of some of its theologians, and uses them to create a bridge between his own position and theirs. The complex interplay between the two

10 W. J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669) (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 39–47, 127, 249–75; Ernest Bizer, ‘Reformed Orthodoxy and Cartesianism’, Journal for Theology and the Church, 2 (1965), p. 20.

11 Spinoza, Ethics, in Curley ed. The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I, 5p31c, 5p33c, 5p42.

outlooks is one of many indications that Spinoza’s engagement with Calvinism is an authentic one. He is bitterly critical of what he regards as the deformed conceptions of piety sponsored by the churches, and does all he can to discredit them. But he does not straightforwardly reject the Church’s religious outlook.

Instead, he approaches it as a distorted and imperfect attempt to capture the moral teaching of Scripture, which, he contends, can correctly be regarded as divine.¹² The Bible is, therefore, the medium or common ground through which he both criticizes his opponents and articulates his own position, so that when he challenges the Church’s interpretations of Scripture, his objections are not merely strategic or instrumental. On the contrary, he is disputing a reading of a text that, like the theologians of the Reformed Church, he views as a source of profound insight into the nature of true religion. His hostility to Calvinism, and indeed to other biblically based confessions, is therefore by no means unqualified. What makes them so destructive is that, by defending a distorted account of the meaning and status of biblical doctrine, they deprive their adherents of insights that could and should contribute to their freedom and blessedness. Instead of liberating its followers from disempowering ways of life, the Reformed Church promotes superstition and locks individuals into a form of slavery.

To unmask the Church’s misuses of Scripture, Spinoza begins by critically examining a sequence of received claims about what the Bible teaches; and since the core doctrines of the text are held to have been revealed to the prophets, he focuses first of all on prophecy. What is prophecy, how does it work, and what does it teach us? Spinoza will have much to say about these issues, but before taking up the main strand of his argument he pauses to situate his discussion within a sequence of contemporary debates. Prophecy or revela-tion, he boldly announces,‘is the certain knowledge of a thing revealed to men by God, and a prophet is one who interprets God’s revelation’.¹³It remains to ask, however, what range of phenomena this definition applies to. When we discuss prophecy, what are we talking about? Spinoza is on safe ground in assuming that the prophecies recorded in the Bible are indeed cases of revela-tion, and does not expect anyone to disagree with him. But he treads more carefully when canvassing the possibility that there may also be living prophets, whose direct knowledge of the divine word could in principle challenge established doctrines.¹⁴

12 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 7, p. 99.

13 Ibid. ch. 1, p. 15. ¹⁴ Ibid. ch. 1, p. 16.

Not surprisingly, the Reformed Church resisted this hypothesis; but within the nonconformist sects, where‘free prophesying’ was a widespread practice, opinion was divided. Prophecy, in this sense of the term, occurred when a person felt spiritually moved to speak in a religious meeting, and the history of the Collegiant movement to which many of Spinoza’s closest friends belonged illustrates the range of meanings commonly attributed to it. Initially, the Collegiants had regarded free prophesying as a form of inspiration due to the Holy Spirit, but in the middle years of the century they had abandoned this conviction. Under the influence of Galenus Abrahamsz, a leading member of the Amsterdam college, they adopted the view that, although Christ had endowed the members of the apostolic church with a special power to know and proclaim God’s truth, this capacity had atrophied when the purity of the church was corrupted by Constantine. There are thus no longer any living prophets.¹⁵

The contrary opinion continued to be held by sects such as the Anabaptists, whose anti-Trinitarian theology set them at odds with the Calvinist church.

Prophecy, they claimed, was alive and well, and in a sense they were undoubt-edly right. As Spinoza was well aware, self-proclaimed prophets regularly appeared, and sometimes contested the power of existing religious institu-tions.¹⁶ To take a particularly florid example, a charismatic Ashkenazi Jew from Smyrna called Shabbatai Zevi had arrived in Amsterdam in 1666 an-nouncing himself to be the Messiah. Under his influence a section of the Jewish community gave up work in order to spend its time in celebration and prayer, while a number of individuals, both Christians and Jews, sold their property and made plans to decamp to Jerusalem.¹⁷A sense of the international stir that Zevi aroused is conveyed in a letter to Spinoza from Henry Oldenburg who reports

15 Andrew C. Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 94–109.

16 In Holland there was an important distinction between radical Anabaptists and Menno-nites, afissiparous, breakaway sect led by Menno Simmons. More than 200 radical Anabaptists were executed in Holland between 1534 and 1536 in the wake of a plot to seize Amsterdam, and during the first half of the sixteenth century they continued to be persecuted as heretics, libertines, and schismatics. Menno Simmons rejected many aspects of their theology, including their anti-Trinitarianism, and the use of violence. Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 87–94.

17 Michael Heyd, ‘The “Jewish Quaker”: Christian Perceptions of Sabbatai Zevi as an Enthusiast’, in Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Coudert and Jeffrey Shoulson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004);

‘Shabbatai Zevi’, in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference, 2007).

a rumour that the Jews‘having been dispersed for two thousand years, are to return to their country’. What have the Jews of Amsterdam heard about the matter, he asks, and ‘how they are affected by such an important announce-ment, which if it were true would seem to bring a crisis on the whole world?’¹⁸ As matters turned out, Zevi did not live up to his followers’ expectations, and they were rudely disillusioned when, captured by the Ottomans, he converted to Islam. But other self-proclaimed prophets arose to take his place.

Abiding by his personal motto, ‘Caute’ or ‘Caution’,¹⁹ Spinoza treats the phenomenon of living prophecy with circumspection.‘As far as we know’, he writes, ‘there are no prophets nowadays’.²⁰ This careful formulation offers guarded support for the Reformed Church’s view that knowledge of prophecy can only be derived from the Bible. At the same time, it leaves open the possibility that there may have been prophets whose insights are not recorded in Scripture, a point for which the Treatise will in due course allow. For now, however, Spinoza is content to assume that Scripture is our only source of information about prophetic revelation, and to base his discussion on the divine word as interpreted by the prophets of the Bible.²¹

At the same time, he is emphatic that prophecy is not the only means by which God reveals himself to man, so that revelation as he conceives it has a far wider scope than his Calvinist opponents were willing to acknowledge. The opening paragraphs of the Treatise contain a vigorous defence of the claim that philosophical understanding qualifies as a form of revelation, because it depends on our idea of God and the natural laws that he determines.²² When we acquire knowledge by natural reasoning, God reveals it to us. Elaborating this striking claim, Spinoza concedes that there are significant epistemological differences between prophetic and natural revelation. While anyone can in principle acquire and appreciate the certainty of the knowledge that reasoning reveals, the insights that prophetic revelation vouchsafes are only accessible to individual prophets.²³ Furthermore, while biblical revelation is conveyed

18 Letter 33. Spinoza, The Correspondence of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Abraham Wolf (London:

Frank Cass, 1966), p. 217.

19 Steven M. Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 244.

20 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 1, p. 16.

21 The view that there are no longer any prophets was also defended by Johannes Hoornbeek in Summa Contraversiarum Religionis (Utrecht, 1653). See Michael Heyd,‘Be Sober and Reason-able’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 34–5.

22 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 1, p. 15.

23 Ibid. ch. 1, p. 22.

through words and images, its philosophical counterpart is‘dictated to us . . . in a far more excellent way that agrees most satisfactorily with the nature of the mind, as everyone who has tasted the certainty of the intellect has doubtless experienced for himself’.²⁴The brevity and premises of Spinoza’s argument for these conclusions indicate that it is primarily addressed to readers who are familiar both with Cartesian metaphysics and also with Spinoza’s own philo-sophical position.²⁵For this audience, he sets himself against a Calvinist con-ception of reason as a frail and corrupted instrument and extols the pleasures of understanding as revealed by God.

In one form, then, prophecy encompasses the natural knowledge that philosophizing yields, and in the more familiar form known from the Bible it may have been practised by prophets whose insights have been lost to us.

Revelation, it seems, is not always mysterious and extends into the familiar reaches of current life. Nevertheless, as Spinoza now goes on to observe, common or uneducated people are prone to be fascinated by prophecy of the biblical kind, and often fail to recognize natural revelation for what it is.²⁶ Thirsting for things that are‘rare and foreign to their nature’, they ‘spurn their natural gifts’ and prefer to dwell on spectacular events that defy explanation.²⁷ The full extent of revelation is widely misunderstood, and its moreflamboyant manifestations are given a disproportionate amount of attention.

Embedded in this critical analysis is the tacit implication that, when autho-rities such as the Reformed Church go along with the popular conception of revelation, they reinforce the disposition of ordinary people to turn their backs on reasoning and encourage them to take refuge in ignorant wonder. In doing so, they foster conditions in which superstition can take hold, and lend support to the superstitious practices on which corrupt religion thrives. To counteract these tendencies, one might expect Spinoza to develop his conception of the revelatory dimension of reasoning, as he will later go on to do in the Ethics. But here in the Treatise, where he has set himself to win over readers who are half in

24 Ibid. ch. 1, p. 16.

25 It appeals, for instance, to Descartes’ claim that all our knowledge depends on knowledge of God, and draws on the traditional distinction between the formal and objective reality of ideas that he uses in the Meditations. (AT VII.40ff/CSM II.28ff.) If the philosophers for whom Spinoza was writing were predominantly Cartesian in their sympathies, he could safely assume that they would be familiar with these ideas, and wouldfind his argument accessible. In addition, any readers acquainted with his own philosophical position would have seen in the argument his distinctive conception of a God in whom we participate (ibid.). To this extent, then, the demonstration is aimed at a philosophically informed audience of people who are equipped to understand it.

26 Ibid. ch. 1, p. 15. ²⁷ Ibid.

sympathy with his opponents’ anti-philosophical reading of Scripture, this would be a counterproductive course to take. Having given them a glimpse

sympathy with his opponents’ anti-philosophical reading of Scripture, this would be a counterproductive course to take. Having given them a glimpse