Aplicación de la estadística inferencial de las variables

The Heidelberg Catechism used by the Dutch Reformed Church identifies the law of God with the Ten Commandments given to Moses.¹ However, as Calvin had explained, the Commandments need to be interpreted with care, because God’s covenant with the Jews was a way of training an unsophisticated and childlike people who could not be counted on to obey the law. To help them, the law was presented in vivid terms and required them to follow various ritual practices; but thesefigures and ceremonies were subsequently abolished when Christ taught the divine law in its universal form, extending it from a single people to the boundaries of the Earth.² However, even in this new version, the truth and substance of the original law remains.³Interpreted as to their spirit rather than their letter, the Ten Commandments are indeed the law of God, and remain a fundamental part of Christian teaching.

Spinoza does not challenge the view that the Commandments identify valuable moral rules, and can—in a sense to be specified—be described as divine laws. However, he also takes it for granted that the divine law, properly so called, is eternal. It does not change, nor does God ordain it sometimes for one group of people, sometimes for another. The view that aspects of the Mosaic Law were abrogated or abolished in a new covenant must therefore rest on a profoundly mistaken conception of divine law itself.

In Chapter 4 of the Treatise, Spinoza will discuss his reasons for holding this view. Here, however, he announces it indirectly by focusing on a biblical narrative that seems flatly to contradict it. On one natural reading of the Pentateuch, God favoured the Jewish people above all other nations by

1 ‘The Heidelberg Catechism’, in The Creeds of Christendom: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, ed. Philip Schaff (New York: Cosimo Books, 2007), Q92.

2 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. and trans. John Thomas McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960–1), II.V.ii.1.

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

Philip Schaff (New York: Cosimo Books, 2007), Article 25.

revealing his law to them alone, and promising to give them an exclusive reward for obedience.⁴But if the divine law is universal and eternal, this story will have to be explained away as an accommodated account of the law that we are not obliged to accept. Taking up the challenge, Spinoza now goes on to offer a thoroughly deflationary account of it. When the Bible says that God promised to reward the Jews, it does not mean that he ordained the divine law for them alone.⁵ Nor does it mean that he promised to reward them by endowing them with capacities that set them apart from other human beings, or by guaranteeing them some special form of salvation. All it means is that God determined that the ancient state of Israel wouldflourish for a compara-tively long time.⁶Moreover, since this state collapsed many centuries ago, the election of the Jews is a historical phenomenon and has no implications for the present or future.⁷Jews have nothing more to look forward to than anyone else.

Modern scholars have puzzled over the hostility that this view seems to embody. Why, they have asked, does Spinoza turn against his own people?

Why does he try to crush the hopes of Jewish communities for whom the assurance that they belonged to a people chosen by God remained a palpable source of optimism? Why does he dismiss an interpretation of Scripture that helped to hold Jewish communities together? And what conscious or uncon-scious aggression is he expressing towards the synagogue from which he had been excommunicated?⁸ There is indeed something harsh about Spinoza’s

4 Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ed. Carl Gebhardt, vol. III, Opera (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1924), ch. 2, p. 39.

5 Ibid. ch. 3, p. 54.

6 Ibid. ch. 3, pp. 47–8.

7 Ibid. ch. 3, p. 54.

8 Commentators who have taken up the topic of Spinoza’s relationship with the Jewish community include Genevie`ve Brykman, La Jude´ite´ de Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1972); Hermann Cohen,‘Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Chistendum’, in Jüdische Schriften, ed.

Bruno Strauss (Berlin: Schwetschke, 1924); Emmanuel Levinas,‘Le Cas Spinoza’, in Difficile liberte´: Essais sur le Judaisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963); Shlomo Pines, ‘Spinoza’s “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” and the Jewish Philosophical Tradition’, in Jewish Thought in the Seven-teenth Century, ed. Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1987); Michael Rosenthal,‘Spinoza, History, and Jewish Modernity’, in Philosophers and the Hebrew Bible, ed. Charles H. Manekin and Robert Eisen (Bethseda: University of Maryland Press, 2008); Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Leo Strauss,‘How to Study Spinoza’s “Theologico-Political Treatise”’, in Jewish History and the Crisis of Modernity (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1997);

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe Ill.: Free Press, 1952); Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1965); Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

description of the Jews as a people whose hearts have been emasculated by their religion,⁹ and these questions have been the source of rich and suggestive speculations about Spinoza’s own passions. However, while he clearly aims to undercut a certain image of what it means to be a Jew, his position has broader implications that are arguably more relevant to explaining what he is trying to achieve in the Treatise. To appreciate the force of his discussion, we need to place it in the context of Calvinist theology, and examine its implica-tions for messianism and millenarianism.

How should we interpret Moses’ claim that God chose the Hebrews for himself before all other nations, prescribed just laws exclusively for them, and revealed these facts to them alone? Should we take them at face value, or do they express some implicit insight in a style that is accommodated to the understanding and situation of the ancient Hebrews and their prophets? Draw-ing on his analysis of revelation, Spinoza opts unhesitatDraw-ingly for the latter alternative. Echoing Calvin, he asserts that Moses was speaking to a people who‘did not know true blessedness’ in terms that accorded with their ‘childish power of understanding’ in order to persuade them to obey the laws he had made.¹⁰His account of the divine law served a theologico-political purpose, and will not stand up to philosophical scrutiny. So far, this argument follows a familiar pattern and, like its predecessors, arrives at a negative conclusion. We do not have to accept the biblical claim that God ordained a moral law specifically for the Jews, complete with rewards and punishments. Now, however, Spinoza takes a further argumentative step and sets out to explain the sense in which the Jews were chosen by God. Thinking back to his analysis of prophecy, one might expect him to appeal to a mixture of biblical and philosophical evidence; but in this case the balance is sharply tipped in a philosophical direction. While he looks briefly to Scripture for support, his case rests principally on a condensed and abstract philosophical argument, which presupposes a good deal of philosophical knowledge on the part of his readers. In addition, as we shall subsequently see, it embodies several contro-versial claims.

As Spinoza presents the matter, the Mosaic prophecies essentially claim that God decided or chose to give the Hebrews some benefit that he did not bestow on other nations. To understand what it amounted to, we therefore need to analyse this proposition,first by examining what Scripture refers to as a choice or decision made by God. We know that all natural events are determined by

9 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 3, p. 57. ¹⁰ Ibid. ch. 3, pp. 45, 53.

universal laws of nature, which are simultaneously God’s eternal decrees, and that these laws govern all human actions. ‘No one does anything except according to the predetermined order of nature’.¹¹ Furthermore, since this order consists of divine decrees, we can describe the entire course of events, human and otherwise, as‘elected’ or ‘chosen’ by God. For example, ‘no one chooses any manner of living for himself, nor does anything, except by the special calling of God, who has chosen him before others. . . for this manner of living’.¹² So, returning to the election of the Jews, the sense in which God

‘chose’ to benefit them is no different from the sense in which he ‘chose’ that Joshua should defeat the Ammonites, or‘chose’ that you should be reading this page. Whatever their election amounts to, it is just one state of affairs among others, explicable as an outcome of God’s natural laws or decrees.

Turning now to the benefit that the Jews were promised, we need to consider how it might have been acquired and what it might have been. In general, benefits can be gained in two ways. One class, which lie within human power in the sense that we ourselves cause them, can be said to come about with God’s internal help. (For example, when Spinoza relies on reason to understand an argument, the process is determined by God; but God acts through Spinoza’s natural capacities or gives him internal help.) A second class of benefits, which can be said to depend on God’s external help, are caused by things other than ourselves, and do not lie within our own power.

(For example, when the wind blows Spinoza along in the direction he wants to go, he is the beneficiary of God’s external help.)¹³The benefit awarded to the Jews will therefore be one of these kinds. But before we can decide which, we need to work out what sort of benefit it was; and in order to determine this, we need to consider what types of benefit exist. Here we can distinguish benefits of three kinds: coming to understand things by their first causes, that is to say coming to understand them in relation to God; controlling one’s passions, that is to say possessing the knowledge of the good that enables one to live virtuously; and living in health and security. The benefit enjoyed by the Hebrews must therefore have consisted in one or a combination of these possibilities.¹⁴

11 Ibid. ch. 3, p. 46. See Spinoza, Ethics, in Curley ed., The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I:

‘God’s intellect is the only cause of things’ (1p17s); ‘we act only from God’s command’ (2p49s);

‘all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature, and happen according to the eternal laws and rules of Nature’ (4p50s); ‘the laws of Nature concern the common order of Nature, of which man is a part’ (4p57s).

12 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 3, p. 46. ¹³ Ibid. ¹⁴ Ibid.

What we are looking for is a benefit that can be exclusively enjoyed by one group of people and denied to others. But, according to Spinoza, neither of the first two types satisfies this condition. Understanding things by their first causes and controlling one’s passions ultimately depend on natural reasoning, an aptitude that all human beings possess to some degree. To put the point differently, these benefits are the fruit of a form of internal help that God makes available to everyone through universal laws of nature. The capacity to achieve them therefore cannot belong specifically to the Jews. God cannot have benefited one nation by giving them exclusive access to wisdom or understanding and thus to the further benefits that flow from them, because this would be inconsistent with the universal laws of nature that he decrees.¹⁵ In addition (and here Spinoza makes a separate though related point), God cannot have given the Jews exceptional knowledge of the true good that enables one to control one’s passions and live virtuously, and thus cannot have given them exceptional access to the salvation that it produces. The reason for this is that the happiness which arises from knowing the true good is not enhanced by the fact that other people do not possess the same knowl-edge. (If you know what the true good for human beings amounts to, the fact that I am ignorant of it will not benefit you.)¹⁶So if God had tried to benefit the Jews by giving them knowledge of the true good, he would not have given them a genuine advantage over other nations. It is obvious, Spinoza urges, that they ‘would have been no less blessed if God had called everyone to salva-tion’.¹⁷Equally, God would have been no less close to the Jews if he had been as close to others, the law would have been no less just if it had been prescribed for everyone, and miracles would have been equally revealing of God’s power if they had been performed among other nations.¹⁸ Since it is inconceivable that God could have made a mistake about this, we can conclude that the Jews are not exceptional as to their knowledge of the good, and thus as to their ability to achieve salvation.

This leaves the last of Spinoza’s three kinds of benefit—living in health and security. It is evident that achieving and sustaining this goal is a precarious

15 Ibid. ch. 3, pp. 47–8.

16 Ibid. ch. 3, p. 44. See also Spinoza, Ethics 4p18s.‘All men who are governed by reason—

that is, men who, from the guidance of reason, seek their own advantage—want nothing for themselves that they do not desire for other men’; Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,}14.

17 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 3, p. 45.

18 Ibid.

business, and does not lie entirely within the power either of individuals or communities. No matter how knowledgeable individuals become, they remain vulnerable to external forces beyond their control, so that a prudent man and a fool have a more or less equal chance of leading healthy and secure lives.¹⁹And even when societies have effective laws and vigilant leaders, they remain exposed to the uncontrollable events that Spinoza describes as goods of fortune. When, therefore, a society manages to endure peacefully for a long time, its survival must at least in part be due to God’s external help, that is to say, to external causes.²⁰ Applying this conclusion to the case of the Jews, Spinoza reaches the culmination of his argument. The Hebrew people were chosen or elected by God in the sense that his laws or decrees enabled them to create a secure state which lasted for an unusually long time.‘The Hebrew nation was chosen by God before all others not by virtue of anything to do with rational understand-ing or the tranquillity of the mind, but by virtue of its social organisation, and the fortune through which it became a state and survived for so many years’.²¹ It ‘excelled the other nations only in that it conducted those affairs which pertain to the security of life auspiciously and overcame great dangers, and all this mainly by God’s external aid alone’.²²This is all that the benefit of election amounted to, and it is, furthermore, a thing of the past.‘Since God is equally well-disposed to all and chose the Hebrews only with respect to their social order and state, we conclude that each Jew, considered outside that social order and state, possesses no gift of God which would place him above other men, and there is no difference between him and a gentile’.²³

This levelling conclusion rests on a number of premises and distinctions that—in the Treatise—Spinoza does little if anything to defend. To be persuad-ed of it, readers must be willing to accept a metaphysical premise about determinism, a claim about the nature of the true good, and the exhaustiveness of two sets of distinctions about the kinds of benefits that humans can enjoy and the ways in which they are caused. Nevertheless—and presumably expecting to carry his readers along with him—Spinoza uses these assumptions to reach a more incisive type of conclusion that any he has so far defended. As well as indicating that a prophecy is accommodated to the mind of the prophet in question and his audience, reasoning can in this case determine the meaning of the prophecy by establishing that only one interpretation of it is compatible with our philosophical knowledge of God and nature. Spinoza pauses as usual to note that the biblical evidence does not contradict anything he has said. For

19 Ibid. p. 47, ch. 3. ²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Ibid.

22 Ibid. ch. 3, pp. 48–9. ²³ Ibid. ch. 3, p. 50.

example, we can infer from the fact that Moses only offered temporal rewards and punishments in return for obedience that the laws he imposed on the Jews were a civil code rather than a moral one.‘For as God chose them only for the establishing of a special kind of society and state, they must have had laws of a special kind’.²⁴But his case is predominantly philosophical. By bringing reason to bear on revelation, we can arrive at well-founded conclusions about the meaning of the prophecies surrounding the law revealed to Moses.

This is a bold strategy, made bolder by the fact that Spinoza relies on some controversial assumptions. His central premise asserts that God’s decrees take the form of universal laws of nature, and while Calvinists would not have doubted that natural laws are one of the means by which God determines the course of events, Spinoza advances the much more contentious claim that God’s decrees and universal laws of nature are one and the same thing. ‘The universal laws of nature, according to which all thing happen and are deter-mined, are nothing but the eternal decrees of God’.²⁵The view that laws of nature are decreed by God was familiar within Calvinist theology. Wefind it, for example, in the Arminian testament, where Episcopius writes that God’s fore-ordained works ‘are wont in one word to be called his decrees’.²⁶ So Spinoza’s appeal to it would not immediately have excited any surprise. In fact, however, the version that he espouses (that divine decrees and laws of nature are the same thing) was unorthodox, and as Van Velthuysen would point out once the Treatise had been published, implies an extremely strong necessitari-anism which leaves no room for God to be able to conceive things which differ from those that exist.²⁷ By the time he wrote the Treatise, Spinoza had explicated this view for public consumption in his Appendix Containing Meta-physical Thoughts,²⁸and defended it in the more private context of his corre-spondence with Blyenbergh.²⁹Members of his intellectual circle and readers of

24 Ibid. ch. 3, p. 48.

25 Ibid. ch. 3, p. 46.

26 Simon Episcopius, The Confession or Declaration of the Ministers or Pastors Which in the United Provinces Are Called Remonstrants, Concerning the Chief Points of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Taylor (London, 1676), p. 97.

27 See The Correspondence of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Abraham Wolf (London: Frank Cass,

27 See The Correspondence of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Abraham Wolf (London: Frank Cass,