237 / 298
Vico’s Ring
237
Exegesis of Ancient Texts”, Heidelberg, July 10-13, 2006,
Winona Lake, Indiana,
Eisenbrauns, 2010, pp. 341-356, p. 345). More generally, “minimalism” has
been said to «remind(s) historians that their preferred ways of understanding
the Bible may reflect hopes and ideas about the modern world» (M. Bishop
Moore - B. E. Kelle,
Biblical History and Israel’s Past: The Changing Study of the Bi-
ble and History
, Grand Rapids, Michigan-Cambridge, Eerdmans, 2011, p. 263).
Despite the divergence of the individual approaches to biblical studies,
from a structural point of view, commonality exists in that the Bible is placed
in the position of serving as an “interpretation/model” for philosophi-
cal/ideological commitments. These approaches appear to have more affinity
with Lodewejk Meijer than Spinoza, an aspect that does not seem to have re-
ceived attention in reception historiography.
467
TTP
, p. 93;
mente Spiritus Sancti
and
rei veritate,
if understood as syno-
nyms, or hendiadys, both make reference to the same realm of Spinoza’s on-
tology, accessible only by means of intuitive knowledge, rather than referring,
by the former, to the realm of “Holy Spirit/God”, the realm of the third kind
of knowledge, and, by the latter, on the other hand, to the world of actual
phenomena, the domain of the first kind of knowledge.
468
Ibid.
, pp. 93-94.
469
These suspicions would add to suspicions of a more general kind, as
described by J. M. Forte Monge: «En primer lugar, la sospecha respecto a la
unidad de sentido entre los multiples libros de las Escrituras […], frente a in-
terpretaciones que postulan una sistemática presunción de coherencia, una
sospecha, por lo demás, sobradamente justificada por la propria heterogenei-
dad de autores y contextos históricos que han producido la Escritura (In the
first place, [it is] suspicion with respect to the uniform meaning of the multi-
ple books of the Scriptures […], confronted with interpretations that postu-
late a systematic presupposition of coherence, a suspicion, furthermore, fully
justified by the heterogeneity itself of authors and historical contexts that have
produced the Scriptures)» (Id.,
Hermenéutica crítica y hermenéutica filosófica. Gada-
mer frente a Spinoza
, in «Ingenium», 4, July-December 2010, pp. 125-144, p.
125). As noted above, with respect to Spinoza’s “suspicion” of language, by
virtue of language being part of the first kind of knowledge, such “suspicion”
is less a matter of doxastic attitude, independently, than a side effect of the
structure of his (three-tiered) epistemic system; analogously, his putative “sus-
picion” of the second kind of knowledge (the «meaning» of Scripture) is only
an epiphenomenon of the strategic function of the second kind of knowledge
in contradistinction to the third kind of knowledge. Topicalization of attitudes
runs the risk of trivializing key aspects of Spinozan ontology and epistemology.
470
TTP
, p. 94.