Confiabilidad del instrumento por Alfa de Cronbach

On what subjects, then, is revelation authoritative? Spinoza’s discussion of this crucial question is surprisingly cursory. The common theme of biblical

95 Ibid. ch. 2, p. 42.

96 ‘The Belgic Confession’, Article 12.

97 On Spinoza’s discussion of Adam, see Paolo Grassi, ‘Adam and the Serpent’, in Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza, ed. Moira Gatens (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). See also Paolo Grassi, L’interpretazione del’imaginario: Uno studio di Spinoza (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2002).

98 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 2, p. 42.

prophecies, he announces, is that they are concerned with‘love and how to conduct our lives’, and yield knowledge of ‘matters of integrity and morals’.⁹⁹ Scripture makes it clear that revelation is not the only source of moral knowl-edge; Solomon, for example, was not a prophet, but evidently understood a number of important moral truths. Nevertheless, the prophets provide an entirely trustworthy account of the way of life we should follow. While Spinoza’s readers would have been comfortable with his claim that the Bible’s fundamental message is about how to live religiously or well, they might nevertheless have wondered how he could be so confident that the prophets’

pronouncements about the good life were not accommodated to their individ-ual minds. What ensured that their moral insights were reliable, although their grasp of God, nature, and history was not? The answer to this worry emerges indirectly from Spinoza’s analysis of prophecy’s epistemological basis.

Any method for acquiring knowledge must provide standards for distin-guishing trustworthy from untrustworthy claims, and in the case of prophecy thefirst step in this process consists in separating genuine revelations from the utterances of false prophets. Sticking closely to Calvinist orthodoxy, Spinoza reiterates three biblically grounded features of authentic revelation: the experi-ence must be vivid, the revelation must be accompanied by a sign, and the heart of the prophet must be inclined only towards the right and good.¹⁰⁰By itself, he explains, the first of these conditions is not a sufficient test of genuine revelation, since prophecy depends on imagination and therefore carries no guarantee of certainty.¹⁰¹ Whereas a philosopher’s clear and distinct ideas are self-affirming, a prophet can be convinced that he has heard the word of God and yet be wrong. Prophets therefore needed further evidence before they could conclude that their revelations were genuine, and the first test they applied was to ask for a sign. For example, when Gideon was told by God that he would liberate the Israelites, he replied,‘If now I have found grace in thy sight, then show me a sign that thou talkest with me’. After he had laid out meat and unleavened cakes on a rock,‘the angel of the Lord put forth the end of his staff that was in his hand, and touched theflesh and the unleavened cakes; and there rose up fire out of the rock and consumed the flesh and unleaved cakes’.¹⁰² An accompanying miracle could therefore confirm a prophecy, but even this was not sufficient to guarantee it because, as Moses warns, ‘the Lord also worketh miracles and signs to try his people’.¹⁰³ Like

99 Ibid. ch. 2, pp. 42, 35. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid. ch. 2, p. 31.

101 Ibid. ch. 2, p. 30. ¹⁰² Judges 6:11–22.

103 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 2, p. 30; ch. 6, p. 87. Cf. Deut. 13:2.

revelations, signs can be deceptive, and in order to determine whether they are authentic it is necessary to consider what Scripture has to say about a prophet’s character. Judging from the biblical record,‘God never deceives the pious and the elect. . . [He] uses them as the instruments of his piety, but the impious as executors of his anger’.¹⁰⁴So if a prophet whose revelations are confirmed by signs is also virtuous, their testimony can be trusted.

Atfirst glance, it is difficult to see how Spinoza can reconcile this means of assessing prophecies with his account of accommodation. If a prophet’s experience of revelation is the fruit of imagination and therefore needs to be tested against further evidence, surely the same will be true of prophetic signs. But if signs are no more trustworthy than the revelations they are supposed to vindicate, how can they be used to distinguish authentic from inauthentic prophecy? Elaborating, Spinoza takes it that signs are indeed part of a prophet’s imaginative experience, accommodated, like revelation itself, to his or her individual personality. For example, when Gideon’s meat and bread bust intoflame, he took this to be a sign from God; but another prophet, for instance one who knew more about cooking in the desert, might have been less impressed.¹⁰⁵ However, because signs unlike revelations are public, their interpretation is not always entirely up to the prophet. Part of their function is to persuade the prophet’s audience that his revelation is genuine, and in order to succeed they must answer to that particular audience’s knowledge and expectations. When Isaiah struck a rock with his staff and waterflowed out of it, his followers were satisfied; but again, another group might have remained sceptical. An aspect of the prophet’s imaginative genius therefore lies in the ability to recognize and interpret signs that both they and their audiencesfind compelling.¹⁰⁶

Viewed like this, signs belong to a practice in which prophets test their experience of revelation against conventional criteria. They provide a standard to which both prophets and others can appeal, and indicate whether an individual is undergoing the kind of experience that is agreed to constitute genuine revelation. In addition, they serve to exclude the claims of prophets who fail to receive a sign or cannot persuade other people that a sign has been given. But this is not the end of the matter. Since signs can be used by false

104 Ibid. ch. 2, p. 31.

105 Ibid. ch. 2, p. 32.

106 See Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), ch. 18; Lorenzo Vinciguerra, Spinoza et le signe: La Gene`se de l’imagination (Paris: Vrin, 2005).

prophets to deceive their audiences, the presence of a sign is not enough to distinguish genuine from merely apparent prophecies. Some additional test is needed, and here the prophet’s character comes into play. When all the evidence indicates that a prophet is honest and attuned to the good, the possibility that he is deliberately deceiving his audience can be ruled out. The combination of revelation and sign then provides grounds for concluding that a genuine revelation has occurred.

To say that a prophecy is genuine in the sense just described does not, however, imply that it is true, and it remains to ask whether or how revelation can qualify as a source of knowledge. As we have seen, Spinoza is emphatic that it does not meet the criteria for philosophical knowledge. The question is therefore whether it can qualify as a species of imaginatively grounded knowl-edge that should command acceptance. Where topics such as God, nature, and history are concerned, Spinoza has already established that the answer is negative. The prophets are often wrong about these things, and there is no reason to treat their views with special respect. But in moral matters the situation is different. Scripture attests that the prophets were men and women of virtue and integrity, and were therefore the kind of people to whom moral authority is rightly accorded. This constitutes a compelling ground for accepting their moral insights, or at least for accepting that the moral content of genuine revelation is true.¹⁰⁷

On Spinoza’s reading, the biblical record belies Cicero’s much-quoted adage that the best prophet is simply the best guesser,¹⁰⁸ and vindicates Hobbes’s suggestive comment that the best guesser is he who‘hath most Signes to guesse by’.¹⁰⁹ The imaginative powers of the prophets made them sensitive to signs that other people could not read, and enabled them to articulate a class of moral truths that are difficult to come by. By reasoning about the character of revealed knowledge (or adding reasoning to imagination),¹¹⁰we can come to appreciate why we ought to accept the prophets’ moral claims and count them among the things we know. To be sure, such knowledge is not indubitable or mathemati-cally certain. But, Spinoza asserts, it has a high degree of moral certainty. It would be absurd to reject it simply because it falls short of the standards of

107 See Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637–1650 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), pp. 72–3.

108 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Divinatione, ed. Arthur Stanley Pease (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1920–3), II.5.

109 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 22.

110 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 2, p. 30.

philosophical reasoning,¹¹¹as if‘to organise our lives wisely, we should admit nothing that can be called in doubt as true’.¹¹² We accept the testimony of people who are well informed about navigation, childcare, or history. Why, then, should we not also accept the testimony of the prophets, whose imagi-native capacities give them exceptional insight into the demands of a moral way of life?

Understanding what prophecy is and how it works shapes our attitude to revelation, and gives us a means of assessing the claims made by individual prophets. But as Spinoza’s analysis has illustrated, this process is a complex one, and relies on several interconnected forms of reasoning. To find out what a prophet actually said we must restrict our gaze to the Bible and interpret Scripture by Scripture. By examining the text we may be able to elucidate the prophet’s figures of speech, or confirm that his words are to be taken in a literal sense. Two other kinds of reasoning then come into play to determine whether the revelation in question is accommodated. A further look at the biblical evidence indicates whether the prophet was an authority on the topic in question. (For instance, the Bible does not give us any reason to believe that Joshua was knowledgeable about astronomy.) And our independent grasp of the limits of imaginatively based knowledge provides another way to answer the same question. (Although imagination can teach us many things about the planets, it will not give us a mathematically certain grasp of planetary motion.) These enquiries will yield one of two possibilities. On the one hand, they may lead us to the conclusion that a revelation is not accommodated, in which case the interpretative quest that Spinoza has so far described is over. On the other hand, they may indicate that a revelation is accommodated to the mind of the prophet, and in doing so open up a wider vista. We are free to disagree with the content of the revelation (for example by rejecting Joshua’s account of the motion of the sun); but the issue of whether it has a deeper meaning, and whether that meaning is recoverable, remains unresolved.

So far, Spinoza has mainly been concerned to show that, because many of the claims made in the Bible are accommodated to the minds of particular speakers or their audiences, we do not need to treat Scripture as a source of natural or spiritual knowledge. This fact about it gives us a sufficient reason to set aside a revealed opinion, and allows us to hold beliefs that diverge from prophetic utterances. For readers who are worried that their philosophical commitments may conflict with biblical doctrine, this is an enormously encouraging result.

111 Ibid. ch. 2, pp. 30–1. ¹¹² Ibid. ch. 15, p. 187.

Using the technique Spinoza has outlined, they can identify and cleave to prophecies that reveal the Bible’s divine teaching, whilst otherwise following their philosophical inclinations. A grasp of the limits of revealed knowledge can quell the anxiety that studying philosophy may endanger their salvation, and release them to enjoy the pleasures of intellectual enquiry.

As well as defending philosophy against an inflated conception of the reach of theological understanding, this perspective is also designed to dampen the pretensions of superstition. By giving individuals the means to arrive at judge-ments of their own about the meaning and force of revelation, it aims to increase their confidence in their capacity to reason about theological issues, and counteract the fears that encourage subservience to religious authority.

Prophecy, it insists, is not a supernatural phenomenon that only an ecclesiastical elite arefit to interpret. Instead, it is an aspect of the capacity to imagine that all humans possess, and can be explained on the same principles as more com-monplace forms of imaginative thought and action. There is therefore no need to conceive of prophecy as a thing apart, or to imaginatively endow prophets with threatening powers that lie entirely beyond our ordinary understanding.

We should approach revelation calmly and rationally, distancing ourselves from the purveyors of superstition ‘whose greatest hatred is directed against those who cultivate true knowledge and true life’.¹¹³

113 Ibid. ch. 2, pp. 29–30.