Spinoza’s Exodus

…whatever there is in Nature apart from men, the principle of seeking our own advantage does not demand that we preserve it. Instead, it teaches us to preserve or destroy it according to its use, or to adapt it to our use in any way whatsoever. The principal advantage we derive from things outside us – apart from the experience and knowledge we acquire from observing them and changing them from one form into another – lies in the preservation of our body. Spinoza, Ethics4ap26

Introduction

Spinoza’s argument that “the method of interpreting Scripture does not differ at all from the method of interpreting nature” presupposes the fact that the books of Scripture, like all books, are simply things in nature (TTP III: 98 [6]).1 As such, they are subject to corruption, alteration, and the risk of merely being lost. Throughout the Tractatus Theologica-Politicus,

Spinoza reminds us that those few books of Scripture that have somehow been spared from extinction are not available in inviolate form: “Posterity has not preserved these books with such diligence that no errors have crept in” (III: 135 [32]). Nature has no interest in preventing temporarily bound forms such as books from falling prey to the appetite that Spinoza refers to as

“time, the devourer” (III: 106 [46]). That the books of Scripture have only persisted in partially devoured form is not particularly surprising, he suggests, in light of the fact that the tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were written, “the true original of the divine covenant, the holiest thing of all, could totally perish” (III: 161 [16]). People, unlike posterity, have an interest in protecting holy things from oblivion—and in actively consigning them to it.

In the Preface to the TTP, Spinoza suggests that it is priestly theologians who, for the sake of their own advantage, seek to preserve the idea that the books of Scripture are the perfectly revealed word of . As long as Scripture is regarded as being inviolate and mysterious, its understanding will continue to be the special province of privileged interpreters and initiates of the mysteries that it contains. In seeking to preserve the book that, in Spinoza’s 2 account, serves as the vehicle through which they seek to fulfill their “blind and reckless desire to interpret Scripture” (III: 97 [3]), theologians depend upon the collective passions of the people who accept the claim that Scripture represents the revealed, but still mysterious word of God, in order to protect themselves from feeling fear in the face of natural phenomena that they mistakenly regard as mysteries.

In Spinoza’s view, theologians claim that Scripture is the revealed word of God to serve their desire for power that is not granted by consent or checked by reason. People accept the idea of a revealed word of God out of a desire to fix upon an object of love, so that they might gain relief from the vacillations between hope and fear to which, lacking reason, they are prone by nature. Their passions lead them to become enslaved to theologians, so that “loving the remnants of time more than eternity itself,” they worship the books of Scripture rather than “the Word of

God itself” (III: 10 [25]). Spinoza warns that by insisting that Scripture is the Word of God, people run the risk of paying homage to “likenesses and images, i.e. paper and ink, in place of the word of God”(III: 159 [5]).2

Given that Spinoza does not believe that “God,” properly speaking, deigns to express himself in words, his expression of “fear” for the worship of the word of God may be attributed to his awareness that since the books of Scripture are regarded by the masses as a single object of love, any suggestion of their destruction will provoke not only mourning, but rage, while the imagined preservation of them will cause rejoicing. Since Spinoza sought to enhance joy, rather than to diminish it, there was nothing to be gained by openly and directly discarding the concept of a “word of God,” particularly when it could be rendered harmless to the misguided pawns of the theologians, and useful to Spinoza himself. In order to preserve the joy of the masses while managing their fear, and redirecting their away from the images and likenesses 3 paraded before them by ambitious theologians, Spinoza concedes the necessity of retaining some harmless remnant of Scripture. He poses as a purified alternative to the corrupt books of

Scripture what he calls “a simple concept of the divine mind: to obey God wholeheartedly, by practicing and loving-kindness” (III: 10 [26]). It is this ostensibly “simple concept,” not

“some certain number of books,” that Spinoza refers to as “the revealed Word of God” (III: 10

[26]).

An Incomplete Exodus

In this paper, I discuss the process in the TTP by which Spinoza concocts his “simple concept” of “the revealed Word of God” out of isolated fragments of Scripture, extracts it from the “faulty, mutilated, corrupted, and inconsistent…fragments” (III: 158 [1]) of books in which it had been entombed, and figuratively carries it over the border of scriptural (and priestly) authority that stands as a barrier between “Hebrew Theocracy” and secular . This is

Spinoza’s exodus—a figurative movement from the state of bondage described in the preface to the free state described in the last chapters of the TTP.

Given the emphasis that Spinoza places on freedom in the TTP, both in the sense of freedom from the putative predations of ambitious theologians (which condition is to be achieved by taking possession of the book that they use to serve their designs), and freedom to live as if one were reasonable (which is to be achieved by the construction of the free state), it is not surprising that the TTP has frequently been read as an argument on behalf of human freedom.

This interpretation is in keeping with a more general understanding of Spinoza as an emancipatory figure; Feuerbach, for instance, famously regarded Spinoza as “der der modernen Freigeister und Materialisten.”3 That the TTP is centrally concerned with freedom— 4 both in the sense of describing what freedom would consist of and, to some extent, itself serving as a means of emancipation—is a commonplace of scholarship on the TTP and indeed, on

Spinoza’s project in a more general sense. Spinoza’s treatment of freedom in the TTP, however, has never been examined with reference to his employment of an exodus narrative pattern in depicting the trajectory from bondage to relative freedom.4 Despite the extensive attention paid to Spinoza’s literary-critical Biblical hermeneutics, scholars have not considered the question of how the overall literary structure of the TTP itself comports with the argument of the text.5 Here,

I focus on his use of an exodus narrative pattern in this context. By “exodus narrative pattern,” I mean nothing more elaborate than a narrative pattern entailing a movement from some form of enslavement (literal or figurative) to some mode of freedom, through an obstacle-laden middle ground of passage. It is important to note from the outset that the “freedom” toward which this movement tends does not entail the universal casting off of chains.

Spinoza’s goal was not to lead all of his readers into the light of reason away from what he saw as the snare of delusion that is revealed . His exodus out of unreason was hardly an inclusive project. In his view, the attempt to create a that only addressed people through their reason would have been based on the faulty assumption that most people are capable of living according to the guidance of reason when, to his mind, the vast majority of people are swayed primarily by their passions. The best that he could do for them was gradually detach those passions from Scripture, via his novel mode of scriptural interpretation, and re- attach them to a civil religion. For non-, then, the exodus from enslavement is necessarily to be incomplete. In Socratic terms, Spinoza does not hold out hope that non- philosophers may be loosed from the chains that bind us to the wall of the cave. He does, however, suggest ways that we can have our tether slightly extended in accordance with 5 perceived necessity.

The TTP begins with an account of a people enslaved in two respects: first, by their passions, and secondly, by the ambitious theologians who manipulate them. The first sort of slavery is the condition of the latter. The TTP ends with a of the “Free State” (TTP

239 [title of Chapter 20]) .What stands in between slavery and freedom are the books of the

Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, through which Spinoza must chart a new hermeneutical path in order to take his readers where he wants them to go. For Spinoza, the only way of showing others how to get out of Scripture is to go directly through it. The journey toward the free state leads through Scripture, a territory held by theologians, and governed by imagination.

Through Spinoza’s interpretation, the border between theocracy and secular democracy is made passable, but only in one direction: towards a secularized democratic state in which one is free to

“think what he wishes and to say what he thinks” (TTP 239 [title of Chapter 20]). In this new regime of freedom and reason, the “simple concept” (in the form of the ostensibly purged and rehabilitated Word of God) is presented as the province of the state.

Not everyone is to be liberated in the movement toward the free state. The theologians are to be symbolically deprived of the means by which they maintain their grip on the masses and left behind in the figurative wilderness of Scripture through Spinoza’s disassembly of the book they use in asserting their claims. They may enter the “free state”—which is both a state of mind and a form of government—only if they are willing to enter as something other than theological authorities to whom political leaders (and philosophers) must defer. Were they to be admitted without being divested of their ability to interfere in the democratic process, they would, in all likelihood, simply reinstate the “slavery” from which the credulous masses had been figuratively freed by Spinoza (to whom all masses are, by definition, credulous). The 6 priestly theologians, then, whom Spinoza sees as ambitious men, are to have their ambitions thwarted and their freedom to seek their own advantage (which, in Spinoza’s account, is entirely natural) curtailed.

Once released from the “corrupt” books in which it had been bound by ambitious and unscrupulous theologians, the “simple concept of the divine mind” (TTP III: 10 [26]), may be partially purified of its taint, without being stripped of the power invested in it by the love of the slavish masses. The masses, in turn, would redirect their passions toward the practice of justice and loving-kindness, realized in the form of tolerance, which would be enforced by the free state.

In such a state, philosophers would be free to philosophize, and non-philosophers would be, if not as free as philosophers, at least legally prevented from limiting the freedom of the latter.

One of Spinoza’s goals in tracing a trajectory from bondage to freedom in the TTP is to delineate the boundary between the theological and the philosophical, so that the former will be disabled from impinging upon the latter. He argues that

there is no connection between , or , and Philosophy… For the goal of Philosophy is nothing but the truth, whereas the goal of Faith… is nothing but obedience and piety… the foundations of Philosophy are common notions, and it must be sought only from nature, whereas the foundations of Faith are histories and language, and they must be sought only from Scripture and revelation… [TTP III: 179 (37-38)].

If the books of Scripture are not the revealed word of God, as he indicates that they are not, why should the search for “the foundations of Faith” be confined to them? It would seem that contemplation of “the simple concept of the divine mind,” considered apart from Scripture, might yield greater insight into those foundations. Spinoza directs searchers to the corrupt books of Scripture if they would seek the foundations of faith while divorcing faith from truth.

In Spinoza’s state-regulated civil religion, the reading of Scripture would function not as a means of searching for truth, but as part of the program of inculcating obedience. The reader 7 would not be exploring mysteries with the aid of priestly theologians, but searching by himself for prompts to obedience, as measured by the practice of justice and lovingkindness towards others. Spinoza’s rather Protestant emphasis on solitary reading as a medium for fostering obedience is suggested by his anachronistic treatment of Deuteronomic history. With reference to Deuteronomy 31: 9-13 and 6: 7, Spinoza notes that “each [Israelite] was commanded to read and reread the book of the alone, continuously, and with the utmost attention” (III: 212 [64]).

But the passages in question refer to the importance of hearing the Torah recited “in the presence of all Israel” (Deut. 31: 11-12), to instructing children, and to orally reciting the Shema “when you stay at home and when you are away” (Deuteronomy 6:7).6

Given his contention that religious differences ultimately didn’t matter, since “all lead the same kind of life” (III: 8 [14]), Spinoza did not want visible or audible signs of religious identity to be used in differentiating one person from the other in civil . He is willing to endorse the wholly private and the completely public use of Scripture, but not for the use of Scripture in ceremonies led by priests, which he decrees to be merely external casings that have been welded around the simple concept of faith by ill-intentioned clerics bent on exploiting the unreason of their followers.

As the TTP (and the narrative and conceptual movement towards the free state that it records) proceeds, the emphasis on God, his divine word, and his justice and loving-kindness is gradually diminished, and the emphasis on the mere fact of obedience (for whatever reason) and freedom is heightened, until there are two significant political actors left standing: the free and obedient individual, on the one hand, and the state who exacts obedience from him in deference to the dictates of the citizen’s own reason, on the other. The sovereign executes the dictates of reason, as authorized by the consent of those individuals. In the end, the idea of wholeheartedly 8 obeying God is much less important to Spinoza’s conception of freedom than is the idea that

“only he is free who lives wholeheartedly according to the guidance of reason alone” (III: 194

[32]). Philosophers, in his account, can live in this way even when the state in which they live is not free. Non-philosophers may enjoy a simulacra of this freedom but only if the state can keep the priestly theologians under control. From the outset of Spinoza’s narrative, then, he must show that the people’s enslavement follows in large part from a corrigible, temporary condition of oppression by a specific group, rather than primarily from what he saw as the relatively incorrigible lack of reason native to non-philosophers and further, that their post-liberation trajectory points towards a free state.

Out of Enslavement

Spinoza begins the TTP by presenting the image of people who are so “thoroughly enslaved” to superstition that they “worship the books of Scripture” (III: 10 [25]). Those who are not as thoroughly enslaved as they might be have little cause to relax because, as Spinoza warns, there are “many” (“many” meaning many priestly theologians) who “with the most shameless license, are eager to take away the greater part of that right, and under the pretext of religion to turn the heart of the multitude (who are still liable to pagan superstition) away from the sovereign powers, so that all things may collapse again into slavery” (III: 7 [13]). The precarious freedom of “all things” depends for its existence upon one unreliable and easily manipulated thing, namely, “the heart of the multitude.” Spinoza depicts the multitude as being hopelessly ill- equipped to defend itself against the predations of priestly theologians, with the obvious implication being that someone else has to draw its heart away from the slavery of superstition.

In his argument, slavery is equated with irrationality, on the one hand, and the idolatrous 9 worship of “a certain number of books” (III: 10 [26]) on the other. The condition of enslavement to superstition does not merely entail a failure of reason, but also a lack of moderation and manliness: “the men most thoroughly enslaved to every kind of superstition are the ones who immoderately desire uncertain goods, and that they all invoke divine aid with prayers and unmanly tears, especially when they are in danger and cannot help themselves” (III: 5 [4]). In the free state, men are to live as rational beings, rather than “beasts or automata” (III: 241 [12]). This state is an alternative to the state of affairs described in the preface, in which priestly theologians “turn men from rational beings into beasts” (III: 8 [16]).

Lacking a certain plan through which order might be achieved, or such favor of fortune as would render the absence of a plan irrelevant, the people described in the preface are in the unhappy position of “vacillat[ing] wretchedly between hope and fear, immoderately desiring the uncertain goods of fortune; so in their hearts they are generally ready to believe anything at all”

(III: 5 [1]). Absent a certain plan, or the counsel of reason, men are constitutionally prone to fear.

Fear, in Spinoza’s account, does not prompt men to deliberate amongst themselves as to how the perceived threat may be diminished or eliminated. From fear, men are led to wonder greatly at what they perceive, but what begins in wonder, in this context, does not prompt inquiry and issue in philosophy. Being decidedly non-Socratic, most people’s wonder leads to witlessness; under the strain of their habitual “tossing in fear,” they tend to “invent countless things and… interpret[ nature] in amazing ways” (III: 5 [3]). Innocent of the means by which they could take in data and examine it, people project fictions onto nature, “as if the whole of nature were as insane as they were” (III: 5 [3]).

In Spinoza’s account, this insanity is fed by poorly managed passions and diffused through superstition, which ends up being established in revealed , especially 10

Christianity. Through Christianity, fear is fortified, reinforced and inflated by the men who

“administer the sacred offices within it” (III: 8 [15]), including the office of interpreting the of Scripture. In the service of their “greed and ambition,” they seek to extend their authority to the state. Within the state, people are drawn to houses of worship by their ignorance and fear, but also by the desire to behold a spectacle, since the church or temple functions “as a Theatre, where one hears, not learned Ecclesiastics, but orators, each possessed by a longing, not to teach the people but to carry them away with admiration for himself… and to teach only those new and unfamiliar doctrines which the people most admire” (III: 8 [15]). The effects of this unseemly spectacle are not confined within the house of worship, rather they spread to individuals outside of it, resulting in “great dissension, envy and hate, whose violence no passage of time could lessen” (III: 8 [15]). The ultimate political consequence of allowing the inconstant passions of the multitude to rage unabated and to be diverted into one form of superstition after another (for the passions are not checked in their attraction to novelties by reason) are “many outbreaks of disorder and bloody wars” (III: 6 [8]).

As far as the preservation and or destruction of the books of Scripture is concerned, the books themselves are of interest to Spinoza insofar as they are the weapons wielded by the priestly theologians in the skirmishes that lead up to such wars. Their aim, in his view, is to preserve their own positions by keeping the masses enslaved to superstition. Once the “great desire” for respect, honor and income of the “worst men” (III: 8 [15]) who are drawn to the

Church is coupled with the power that is given to them by the devotion of the multitude, it threatens the freedom and, in fact, the very existence of philosophers (including, of course,

Spinoza himself). His reasonable concern for his own advantage arises from the fact that philosophers are guided by reason, and being guided by reason alone is the definition of 11 freedom. The free man “acts, lives and preserves his being from the foundation of seeking his own advantage” (E4p67d235).

He also presumably seeks to enhance his self-love, since reason itself “demands that everyone love himself [and] seek his own advantage” by working to preserve “what is really useful to him” (E4p18s). To be sure, Spinoza’s own advantage would be served if the books of

Scripture could be rendered useless to theologians, but so too would the advantage of all philosophers and, by extension, all those who value freedom. Spinoza does not explicitly argue that he has every right to adapt Scripture to his own use as he sees fit, perhaps out of an awareness of the fact that that the preservation of his own body (and his freedom to act in accordance with his nature by philosophizing) might be threatened if he did so, given the strenuousness with which the that the books of Scripture are the word of God is held. By counteracting the interest of theologians, he would seem to be working on behalf of those who have been led by their immoderate desires to become enslaved to superstition and to worship the

“remnants of time” (TTP III:10 [25]) that are the books of Scripture as well as on behalf of his own interest. One the power of the masses was freed up from the grip of the Church, it could then be transferred to the absolute sovereign of a democratic state, to whose rule the masses could be persuaded to consent, in exercising the particular sort of freedom that had been carved out for them by the philosophers.

Through Scripture to Freedom

Wresting the interpretation of Scripture away from the priestly theologians and transferring hermeneutical authority to the state, then, is of central importance in effecting Spinoza’s goal of attempting to reduce superstition and enhance freedom. In reading the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza is 12 interested in Moses and the events represented in the literary narratives of Exodus, Leviticus,

Numbers and Deuteronomy for the same reason that he is uninterested in the creation story of the book of Genesis. He chooses to begin his account of Scripture with prophecy rather than creation.7 Prophetic revelation, in his account, is not an event in God’s continual recreation of the world and of human beings. For Spinoza, prophetic revelation, rather than creation, is the point at which human beings become, through their own words, the promulgators and carriers of the word of God.

It is not only prophetic speech that renders the concept of the word of God politically useful, however. From the very fact that multiple meanings are ascribed to the Hebrew term for

“word,” Spinoza draws his concept of an almost infinitely malleable “word of God.” He notes

means “word, edict, utterance, and thing” (III: 162 דבר the term ,דבר יהוה that in the expression

[18]), and suggests that the prophet Isaiah teaches “the true way of living, which does not consist in ceremonies, but in loving-kindness and a true heart, and which he indifferently calls God’s law and God’s word” (III: 162 [19]). In the biblical context, the “word of God” is not broken up into bland suggestions about the importance of loving-kindness and a true heart by being disseminated through the prophet; rather it is mediated with all of its admonitory force intact, such that God is reported to say “I put my words in your mouth” in Isaiah 51:16. Spinoza uses

,as a means of dissipating scriptural authority דבר his observation about the semantic range of while cheerfully using scriptural authority to back up his effort to do so.

In his interpretation of Scripture, Spinoza focuses on the interval in between the end of the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt and their conquest of Canaan. He pays very little attention to the conquest narrative, preferring to direct his attention to the promulgation of the law by Moses at Sinai. Since the conquest narrative concerns the acquisition of territory by violent means, a 13 fuller account of it might detract from Spinoza’s emphasis on the idea that the state is established by consent and guided by reason. He presents significant variations on the biblical theme of the passage from enslavement to freedom. The biblical narrative depicts the movement of “the sons of Israel” who are the slaves of Pharoah out of a state whose sovereign has absolute control over worship, into the desert (which is specifically meant to represent freedom from the complex of state-managed religion in Egypt). Through the Sinaitic covenant, all of Israel is made into “a kingdom of priests” (Ex. 19:6). As priests, the Israelites are not to be enslaved by the nations, but members of the nations may be enslaved by Israelites. Although state-administered slavery is wholly repudiated, Israelites may still hold their fellow Israelites as slaves (21:2-8). Thus, as Jon

D. Levenson has argued in a different context, the Exodus narrative does not mark a decisive rejection of slavery as such.8 What has changed is that the Israelites are free to worship God, whereas they had been forced to request permission from the state to do so in Egypt (Ex. 5:1-2).

The narrative trajectory of the TTP is from the “enslavement” to superstition described in the preface, through a wilderness in which the complex interweaving of ritual and ethical law that characterized the Torah presented at Sinai is undone, into a state where the sovereign has absolute control over worship. The “end” of this state is presented as “freedom,” whereas the end of the state that was to be established in Canaan was, according to Exodus, the freedom to serve God by worshiping him in ritual, as much as in ethical action.9

Had Spinoza wished to retain some closer correspondence between his narrative sequence and the actual content of the Bible, while retaining his focus on Moses, he would have had to represent Moses as the “supreme authority” of a nomadic group of Abrahamic descendants (Ex. 2: 23-25) moving through a wilderness to which they had no claim, either divine or political. Because Spinoza wants to indicate that religious law and civil law were parts 14 of a single theological-political complex of law from the beginning, and to attribute this legislative interweaving to Moses, he is forced to claim that Abraham “did not receive any rites specifically from God.” (He refrains from mentioning the rite of circumcision, which Abraham receives in Genesis 17:10-14). Spinoza’s version of the Sinaitic covenant serves as a prelude to his introduction of the free state, which is based on the principle of tolerance and the premise of consent. The , security and freedom to be enjoyed in a life governed by reason (which can only occur in a properly governed state) are alternatives to the vacillations, turmoil and enslavement characteristic of life lived according to the dictates of the passions. Yet a life lived in large part according to those dictates can, via Spinoza’s exodus, be forced to issue in freedom.

Spinoza makes use of the exodus and conquest narrative of the Hebrew Bible by reconfiguring it to accommodate his representation of the instauration of the theological-political relation between human decrees and divine decrees. He attempts to show how Moses wove the two sorts of decrees together so firmly that they could only be parted by the dissolution of the state itself. In presenting the intertwining of human and divine decrees that characterized law in the theocratic state, he demonstrates how the authority associated with divine decrees can be used to lend greater weight to the relatively fragile constructions that are human decrees.

Spinoza evinces a politic awareness that people are more likely to want to obey human decrees that are represented as being the decrees of a . He is not willing to promulgate what are to his mind apparent absurdities himself, because they are so easily manipulated by theologians, but he is aware that the idea of divine decrees has its usefulness, since (in his view) most people are unlikely to ever wholly see reason. Out of deference to this politically relevant fact, the concept of “divine decrees” must remain, albeit in some less intellectually embarrassing form. The vaguely divine decrees he comes up with, however, must 15 be defined by and subordinated to the human decrees of the state. Spinoza demonstrates that the state, in turn, must be democratic, lest one man assume the power to legislate, interpret and enforce divine-human decrees all on his own, as he claims that Moses did in the Hebrew

Theocracy.

The Less Than Promised Land

Spinoza deliberately refrains from presenting his model of the democratic state as a

Promised Land. His exodus stops short of deliverance into democracy. Rather than ending the

TTP with an utopian image of a world in men could live in harmony (by living in accordance with divine will) Spinoza, who does not believe in the existence of a divine will, presents a model of a state in which men, could live as if they were rational beings, provided that they were reasonable enough to obey the sovereign. This is about as inspirational as the TTP gets. The state of rational beings is still in the political sphere, and Spinoza did not see the political sphere as the context in which the highest good (the love of God-as-nature) was to be enjoyed.

While the ends on a note of apotheosis, with the individual enjoying “divine love, or blessedness” (E5p42), the ending of the TTP is decidedly flat in comparison. The absence of a high note at the end of the TTP may be related to the humble materials with which

Spinoza had to work in it, i.e., corrupted books, cunning theologians, and the superstitious minds they manipulated. Still, for all that, the TTP does record a movement from a form of enslavement to a model of freedom.

In the first chapter of the TTP, Spinoza mentions God one hundred and seventy-seven times. In the last chapter, he mentions God four times. First, he mentions the mind and “its devotion to God” (III: 239 [3]). He then refers to “the loyalty of each person to the State,” which 16 is “like his loyalty to God” (III: 240 [23]). God next appears in the context of the statement that

“For the most part men are so constituted that they endure nothing with greater impatience than that opinions they believe to be true should be considered criminal and that what moves them to dutiful conduct toward God and men should be counted as wickedness in them” (III: 244 [29]).

The last mention of God occurs in reference to the boasts of priests “that they have been chosen immediately by God and that their own decrees are divine” (III: 247 [45]).

Spinoza presents loving-kindness and justice as the indexes of piety in his model of the democratic state, but because the practice of justice involves making judgments about what is just and unjust, Spinoza is at pains to make justice a matter of obedience to decree, rather than a matter of obedience to private , individual judgment (considered apart from the state) or to some transpolitical power: “justice depends only on the decree of the supreme powers. So no one can be just unless he lives according to the decrees he has received from them” (III: 242 [17]).

When Spinoza presents justice and loving-kindness in the context of their role in the state, their relevance to divine virtues and commandments is beside the point. The state has become the locus of what Spinoza described in the prefaces as “a simple concept of the divine mind: to obey

God wholeheartedly, by practicing justice and loving-kindness” (III: 10 [26]). However “simple” the commandment to practice justice and loving-kindness towards one’s neighbor appears to be as a concept, however, it has, of course, been found to be extremely difficult to observe. The discrepancy between the words of people who claim to have accepted the commandment to obey

God by loving their neighbor, and their demonstration of that acceptance in action was all too evident, as Spinoza observed in noting that “Everyone says Sacred Scripture is the word of God, that it teaches men true blessedness… But in their conduct men reveal something very different”

(III: 97 [1]). Nonetheless, Spinoza declares that “the whole law consists only in loving one’s 17 neighbor. So no one can deny that one who loves his neighbor as himself, according to God’s command is really obedient, and according to the law, blessed” (III: 173 [9]). Yet in terms of

Spinoza’s model of strictly contextual meaning, the meaning of and motive for the love of neighbors is not apparent. Who is the neighbor that he is more deserving of love than a non- neighbor? Are all neighbors? How would helping a neighbor who could offer no help (and might offer harm) in return be to one’s advantage?

Ultimately, after the body of the state is formed through contract and consent, the mere fact of obedience is what matters, rather than the motive for it. The reliability of the contract that is the bulwark against all things collapsing into slavery “can always be preserved,” but only if it is acknowledged by those who transfer their power to the “supreme authority” of society that

“each person will be bound to obey, either freely, or from fear of the supreme punishment” (III:

193 [25]). Freedom and fear suffice equally as motivations for obedience in the context of the society that has already been formed through the transfer of power signified by the contract; “it is obedience which makes the subject, not the reason for the obedience” (III: 202 [5]).

Spinoza acknowledges that “an action according to a command, i.e., obedience, does, in some manner, take away freedom; but it is not that aspect that makes the slave, it is the reason for the action” (III: 194 [33]). One’s enslavement and freedom would seem to be related to the decisive act of moral choice that follows from judgment and is realized in action. This choice would apparently be made according to a standard against which reasons for actions could be weighed and measured, but because Spinoza does not wish to emphasize the act of moral choice, or to impute free will to individual subjects of the sovereign any more than is necessary, he makes the standard according to which one might assess the reasons for action exclusively that of advantage coupled with reason. The claims of advantage (which are synonymous with those 18 of reason) decisively trump those of any other cause for action.

In the last chapter of the TTP, Spinoza reiterates the refrain that “nothing is safer for the

State than that piety and Religion should be found only in the practice of Loving-kindness and

Justice” (III: 247 [46]). The “ultimate end” of the free state is that its citizens may “perform all their functions safely, that they should use their reason freely and that they should not contend with one another in hatred…” (III: 241 [12]). Insofar as the practice of loving-kindness and justice entails morally virtuous acts, they could pertain to the good of either the state, the neighbor, or the individual (or all three). The object of such acts does not matter as much as the performance of them, but it is not entirely clear what, other than abstaining from harming one another and tolerating religious differences, “the practice of justice and loving-kindness” involves. It is obedience that appears as the more important virtue, in light of Spinoza’s definition of virtue as power. Obedience rendered to the sovereign protects the particular form of freedom to be found in the state (although not the ultimate freedom that may be achieved by the philosopher in any state). For the non-philosophers, the conflict adumbrated in the preface between obeying wholeheartedly, and obeying with a whole and a free heart has expanded by this point, without being resolved. Freedom is no longer treated in terms of one’s own heart or . It is to be attained through acting in accordance with the recommendations of reason, the laws of one’s nature, and the laws of the state, but it is dependent upon the claim of the sovereign to exact absolute obedience on behalf of the one body of the state. Wholeness and freedom of spirit alike are subordinated to the needs of the one body of the state for peace and security.

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1 All quotations from the Ethics (referred to henceforth as E) are from A Spinoza Reader, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Press, 1994). All quotations from the Tractatus Theologica-Politicus are from Edwin Curley’s as yet unpublished translation. For the purposes of citation, I have used the volume and page numbers from Benedictus de Spinoza, Opera, im auftrag der Heidelberger akademie der wissenschaften Herausgegeben, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1925) as well as the Bruder section numbers in brackets. 2 Spinoza refers to the “books of Scripture” or “the sacred Books” in the plural when he wants to show how they can be broken down even further, into individual words and letters of the Hebrew alphabet, or into isolated fragments. He puts the dissembled pieces back together again into the single closed form of “Scripture” when he wants to use it as the basis of an argument to be made from it. His argument about the corruptible forms of ink and paper in which people imagine the word of God to be contained is made to remind people that books, considered as perishable objects, will ultimately be absorbed back into the earth. 3 See Ludwig Feuerbach, Kleinere Schriften II (1839-1846), ed. Werner Schuffenhauer and Wolfgang Harich in Bd. 9 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer, 16 vols. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1982), 287. 287. Some scholars have commented in passing on Feuerbach’s notion of Spinoza as Moses; see Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 51 and , Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, 51. 4 In his discussion of the political implications of the biblical exodus narrative, Michael Walzer defines this structure in terms of its three most basic units: “Egypt, the wilderness, the promised land”; see his Exodus and (: Basic Books, 1985, 10-11. I do not argue that Spinoza consciously intended to compare himself to the biblical figure of Moses. On Spinoza’s critique of the biblical Moses, see Steven Frankel, “The Invention of Liberal Theology: Spinoza’s Theological-Political Analysis of Moses and Jesus,” Review of Politics 63 (2001): 287-315. On Spinoza’s concept of freedom, see especially Susan James, “Power and Difference: Spinoza’s Conception of Freedom,” The Journal of 4 (1996): 207-228. and Steven B. Smith, Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) and Spinoza, , and the Question of Jewish Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), as well as S. Paul Kashap, Spinoza and Moral Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). 5 On Spinoza’s approach to texts, see Tzvetan Todorov, Symbolism and Interpretation, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 6 All biblical quotations are from the Hebrew-English Tanakh. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999. 7 On Spinoza and prophecy, see, among others, Michael A. Rosenthal, “Why Spinoza Chose the Hebrews: The Exemplary Function of Prophecy in the Theological-Political Treatise,” in History of Political Thought 18 (1997): 207-241 and , Spinoza's Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 8 Jon D. Levenson, “Exodus and Liberation,” in The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 127–59. 9 On liberation in Exodus, see Levenson, “Exodus and Liberation.”