235 / 298
Vico’s Ring
235
ty”» (Id.,
Spinoza and History
, in
The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza
, cit., pp. 171-
195, p. 186).
463
This epistemic direction in Spinoza’s hermeneutics (and scientific
thought, as discussed further below) is commented on by Sandys-Wunsch:
«One can see from Spinoza’s attempt [at biblical theology] that his concept of
what was philosophically true determined what he found to be significant or
not» (Id.,
Spinoza – the First Biblical Theologian
, cit., p. 339). By implication, the
supreme state of intuitive knowledge also, transitively, even affects, and is in-
separable from, the determination of the initial data generated by, and as, the
first kind of knowledge.
464
TTP
, p. 91.
465
Spinoza provides his examples of «those Scriptural pronouncements
which are concerned with moral conduct» in
TTP
, pp. 91-92.
466
Zac commented: «Le fond de la thèse que Spinoza défend dans le
Traité
théologico-politique
, c’est que l’Écriture nous prescrit l’obéissance et non la con-
naissance de l’essence de Dieu (The substance of the thesis that Spinoza de-
fends in the
Theological-Political Treatise
is that Scripture commands us obe-
dience, and not knowledge of the essence of God)» (Id.,
Spinoza et
l’interprétation de l’Écriture
, cit., p. 172). Similarly, C. Chalier: «Inutile en effet,
selon lui, d’étudier la Bible pour découvrir cette idée [l’idée adequate de Dieu]
car […] il soutient que si les “idées” de Moïse ou des prophètes relatives à
Dieu ont tel ou tel sens, elles ne sont jamais varies (It is useless, in fact, ac-
cording to him, to study the Bible in order to discover this idea [the adequate
idee of God] since […] he maintains that if the “ideas” of Moses or the
prophets about God have this or that meaning, they are never true)» (Id.,
Spi-
noza. Lecteur de Maïmonide. La question théologique-politique
, Paris, Les Éditions du
Cerf, 2006, pp. 66-67). On the other hand, the radical opposition intended
here between the second and third kind of knowledge, the “punch line”, is
not perceived by Morrison: «But he immediately contradicts this by saying
that Scripture “does not expressly teach as eternal doctrine” anything about
“what God is” or His providence and that “the prophets had disagreed
among themselves about these things”» (Id.,
Spinoza and History
, cit., p. 182).
This might be an opportune moment to underline Spinoza’s transparency in
relegating Scripture to a philosophically impertinent status by way of reference
to the history of biblical studies/criticism. C. Chalier,
Spinoza,
cit., p. 78, con-
cluded: «De son côté, Spinoza rejette ce langage [biblique] comme privé de
tout contenu philosophique […] (On his part, Spinoza rejects this [biblical]
language as devoid of all philosophical content […])». As pointed out above,
from a “model-theoretic” point of view, Spinoza rejected Meijer’s working
thesis that Scripture was an expression, a “model”, however flawed, of philo-