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Vico’s Ring
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found within the Scriptures themselves. And since the word
«fire» happens to be used in the
Book of Job
also in the sense of
anger or jealousy, the term can be safely taken in a metaphorical
sense. This technical, if not trivial, semantic exercise, however,
actually is not the main point of the illustration. The emphasis,
rather, is on the hermetic approach to Bible language, both in
form (Hebrew) and content: all “input”, so to speak, from any
and all “outside” sources and resources is proscribed. Although
Spinoza does not say so explicitly, on a purely linguistic level
presumably this would include also, for example, ancient Near
East cognate languages
427
and texts that could be useful in clari-
fying «linguistic usage (
usu linguae
)». Whether it is the (presumed)
silence about “oriental languages” that belong to the same lan-
guage family as Hebrew, or the restriction to the Hebrew corpus,
the justification of these constraints given by Spinoza does not
have anything to do with philology, in the usual sense. In this
specific illustration of literal vs. metaphorical meaning, what Spi-
noza emphasizes more insistently and repeapedly than any other
point of argument is that «the meaning of the words» must be
found without the aid of «reason»; the statement “God is fire”
and “God is jealous”, respectively, are unproblematic semantical-
ly, however, Spinoza highlights «their obscurity from the per-
spective of truth and reason» (
TTP
, p. 89). We are thus, subtly
but quickly, redirected from the realm of philology (seman-
tics/pragmatics) that was the purported topic, to an entirely dif-
ferent epistemic domain, the domain of
truth
and
reason,
and into
the heart of Spinoza’s epistemology and worldview. This be-
comes even more transparent at the end of this excursus, where
he comes back full circle to Moses, stating that Moses «nowhere
tells us that God is without passions or emotions», although «this
opinion is contrary to reason» (
TTP
, pp. 89, 90). First, the refer-
ence to «opinion» vs. «reason» points us to
Ethics
, Part II, Propo-
sition XLI, entitled «Opinion is the only source of falsity, reason
and intuition are necessarily true» in the table of contents
428
, but