Episode 165: Spinoza on Biblical Criticism (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So I think we might want to move on to, on the one hand, giving some of the details that we've skipped over in going pretty fast through these sections. And then on the other hand, as we're doing that, actually doing some evaluation, you know, do we find this convincing? Do we find this valuable? What is he really aiming at? How does it speak to us today, that kind of stuff?

0:20 Seth: Well, I think we should turn back to chapter four and talk about law and the divine law. So again, I think reading is worthwhile. So the beginning of chapter four of the Divine Law, the word law, taken in the abstract, means that by which an individual or all things, or as many things as belong to a particular species, act in one and the same fixed and definite manner, which manner depends either on natural necessity or on human decree. A law which depends on natural necessity is one which necessarily follows from the nature nature or from the definition of the thing in question.

A law which depends on human decree, and which is more correctly called an ordinance, is one which men have laid down for themselves and others in order to live more safely or conveniently or for some similar reason. So I think it's fairly clear that he's setting out to immediately position what we might call natural law or law as a necessity, more like, and to make sure that we don't confuse the notion of law that he's and the divine law that he's going to talk about with something that is to be obeyed or not obeyed. Which is a change, because earlier in the book, when he's talking about prophetic knowledge and God's moral decrees that God is only demanding obedience, but we have the ability to obey or not obey.

Whereas in the case of law here, that's not the case.

1:45 Dylan: I don't want to muddy the waters a whole lot, but that paragraph is translated a little bit different with some words that ring a little bit differently. Not completely contrast, but it seems worth just reading a couple of those sentences.

2:01 Seth: Yeah, let's hear it.

2:02 Dylan: So after that first sentence regarding the word law, it depends in truth, either on the necessity of nature or on the willingness of human beings. A law that depends on the necessity of nature is one that follows necessarily from the very nature of or definition of the thing. One that depends on the willingness of human beings, however, and which is more properly called right, is one that human beings prescribe for themselves and Others for living more safely and more advantageously or in view of other causes. The difference there to me seems to be the use of a word like right and willingness as opposed to decree.

2:38 Mark: Yeah, I think your translation is high because my translation, which is probably the same as Wes, is the Israel. I'm. I mean, I actually read the Project Gutenberg one, which is something different. But in this discussion, I've been using that one, which has different words than what Seth said, but pretty much had the same connotation. It did not have a loaded word like right in there.

2:59 Wes: Well, the right. It's translating jus, which our translation translates as decree.

3:05 Seth: Decree.

3:05 Mark: Yep.

3:06 Wes: But the upshot of all of this is just that there's the laws of nature and then there are the laws of a society, of a state, and they're analogous to each other. And really the laws of nature, actually it's using political laws are primary. And even the fact that we call natural laws laws, we're using the word metaphorically, he says at some point. But I think that the overall question here is, is obeying the divine law something like being a billiard ball in the deterministic matrix of natural causality? Or is it more like reasoning about that causal order in which there's an element of freedom?

Is divine law just a matter of servitude to these decrees that God issues, or is it something else and it will turn out so? He'll. I think it's section four. He'll say, basically, the highest precept of divine law is to love God as the highest good, and ultimately to know God. And we do that by science and philosophy, basically by knowing the world, by knowing natural law. And that's the free element. So it's a difference between obeying God and divine law because we're afraid that we'll be punished, something like that, something that belongs more to superstitious religion, or because through reasoning about God, we've come to know God, which is a free activity.

And the overall point of this is just that he's asking the question here of whether religion is compatible with a free society, whether religion is compatible with free thinking. Traditionally, the answer was no. Free thinking, and even science leads you to be skeptical of miracles, for instance, or it leads you to question all the things that were said in the Bible. And his answer is, look, actually free thinking, not only is it not in conflict, and that's a lot of other chapters we've seen him argue that, but it's actually necessary. It is the way we obey the divine law.

It is the way we connect to God.

5:15 Mark: I just want to add one caveat to what you just said, Wes. By learning about God. Well, since God is everything, learning about human nature, learning about the natural world, all that counts as understanding God.

5:29 Wes: Yes.

5:29 Mark: So you could actually be doing what Sam Harris wants to do about ethics, of just scientifically evaluating human flourishing, as free from religious overtones as you want. And what you'd actually be doing in that case, according to Spinoza, is getting to know God better.

5:47 Wes: Unless you're completely wrong. Which case you're not getting them to know him better, you're straying, do another study. And then in that case, you don't even have the advantage of the prophets who are at least imaginative.

6:01 Mark: Well, it is interesting that we got a picture of science that is very non-Kuhnian, that is very classical, that what you're doing in science is getting closer and closer to the truth. Even if your hypothesis is wrong, then it can only go up as you discover more. So you would always be discovering more and more about God. Not that you're just like going off in some socially contingent, supporting a particular paradigm that then could give rise. There's no room for an advanced, somewhat more relativistic scientific take here. If you take Kuhn and Feuerbach and folks like that to be saying something innovative about science, then this would be hard to square with that.

6:41 Dylan: It's sort of the version of science as the more you look and the more you try to sort it out, discover more about the truth of the universe. It's sort of the accretion notion of science.

6:53 Mark: Although saying that, I guess Hegel gave us a picture that you do go through radically different paradigms, and yet it's all a matter of God's coming to know himself.

7:03 Dylan: Well, I mean, even in this. Right. I mean, just taking the example of the miracles we talked about earlier, if you found something that disagreed dramatically with your frame, such that you called it a miracle, the proper inclination would be to factor that in understanding that it was part of the natural necessity of the universe. And it would lead you to revise how you understood the universe and seems by implication, how you understood God.

7:31 Mark: Yeah, I guess we have to make sense of the fact that Spinoza is pushing us towards socially a religious pluralism. Is that just a result of the fact that Scripture is inconclusive about a lot of these things? You know, he wants to make theology and philosophy into separate disciplines that is very comparable to the more modern, non overlapping magisterium kind of thing. You know, science on One side versus faith on the other side. Spinoza here is not talking about faith anywhere, and certainly we've seen that he doesn't want to draw a distinction between God and science in that way.

No, no, they actually both investigate the same thing, so he can't use exactly that terminology. But the effect if he thinks that there are things that you learn by reason and then there are things that you learn by revelation, it seems like if he's going to allow pluralism about that, that there are many, many legitimate religions that go with different legitimate interpretations that you could have of Scripture or accepting different things as scripture, you know, accepting different books. He thinks that there's a lot of room for difference in judgment.

He's. And certainly not going to say the entire Bible, given how many people it was written by and how many hands went into compiling it and all that stuff. Those are some of the points he makes in the later chapters. He's not going to just say, even if you believe one part of the Bible is divine, that you've then proven that the whole thing is legit. So is he leaving room for pluralism just because of our epistemic position with regard to revelation, that we're not sure which revelations are accurate or we're not sure how to interpret them or how to get to the.

The actual theological truths under there? Or do we have room for maybe theological truth is in itself indeterminate or relative in a way that scientific truth is not.

9:19 Wes: So I'll just recapitulate my interpretation of that, which is that revelation gives you only the very bare bones thing, which is the existence of God and that he cares and that you should obey Him. There is no question of whether the revelation of one religion is true and the other not. They're all true if they do that, if they perform that function, but what they don't do. And this is why there's no conflict. There's no real doctrinal conflict between religions. That's what he argues in chapter seven. There's no doctrinal conflict because every form of revelation does that very, very basic thing.

And it doesn't do anything else. It doesn't say, oh, here's the nature of God. Oh, Islam says the nature of God is this, and Christianity says the nature of God is this. His whole argument is that no religion says anything significant about the nature of God, only philosophy and philosophical theology do. So there can be no doctrinal conflict of that sort. And I think that's the solution that he gives. And then at the level of Philosophy, it's not a doctrinal issue, but an intellectual issue where you have arguments over those things. But piety doesn't depend on which argument you believe.

Your happiness in a kind of virtue ethic sense may that requires knowledge of the good, but piety in a religious sense doesn't.

10:35 Mark: So what if you have one religion that says pork is okay and another religion that says don't eat pork?

10:40 Wes: Chapter five is like, yeah, it's all about that.

10:44 Mark: Well, yeah, let's talk more about chapter five here then. This is where his pluralism actually comes into play that he has to allow. You know, it was interesting. I think it was one of the other secondary sources I looked at, emphasized that he's actually not arguing for freedom of religion so much as he's arguing for freedom of speech and freedom of thought. And the difference is freedom of religion is often about what can religious organizations do. If you're a really pro freedom of religion guy in modern day America, you might be lobbying for the thing that Trump wants to pass about allowing churches to engage in political activity and things.

But Spinoza was specifically not for increasing the power of religious organizations to do things. In fact, he was really against that, like the power that the Jewish community that excommunicated to him had over its members in his society. It was something that even though they weren't the state sponsored religion, they had way, way too much power over those individuals. So that's not the kind of freedom of religion he's going for. He's arguing for freedom of individual religious

11:48 Dylan: conscience in the middle of five. I guess it's your guises, divisions. I guess it's section two. He says no society can subsist without an imperium, without a government force, and consequently laws that moderate and curb the lust and unbridled impulse of human beings. Still, human nature does not abide being simply compelled. And as Seneca says, no one holds a repressive imperium together for long moderate ones last. And he goes on to say, laws in any imperium have to be so instituted that human beings are restrained not so much by dread as by the hope of some good that they long for very much.

For in this mode they will long to do his duty. So thinking back about what you said, about how he has something in common with Hobbes Mark, there is the sense, the Hobbesian sense, that there's a lot of lust and warfare in the world. But what you need to do is you need to have laws that don't constrain by merely instilling fear, but by instilling hope for some good, for some flourishing.

12:58 Wes: And by the way, the point of the ceremonies was to make sure they were doing nothing at their own discretion, Right?

13:05 Mark: Right. For the ancient Israelis, at least, Israelites.

13:08 Wes: So this was then the purpose of the ceremonies that they. That is, the people should do nothing at their own discretion and everything at the command of another, and should confess by their every action and thought that they did not exist in their own right at all, but were entirely subject to someone else. From all this, it is clear that in daylight ceremonies have no connection with happiness and that the ceremonies of the Old Testament and indeed the entire law of Moses related to nothing but the Hebrew state and consequently nothing other than material benefits.

Yeah, so the ceremonies aren't essential. I mean, ultimately, he's saying organized religion is inessential. Right. Ceremonies, as in whether it's eating pork or not eating pork or going to a church or a synagogue or any of that stuff, is completely inessential. It was essential in some sense, as a political matter in olden times for making people obey, but it's not essential for piety.

14:06 Dylan: We said something about like this earlier, that back in the olden times it was necessary that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that there were these structures or this divine inspiration, and that there was this use of prophecy to rule people. And here we were just saying that these ceremonies were necessary for the structure of society. It seems like he's not saying that they're necessary in the sense that that's the only way you had to do it. They were the contingent solutions at the time. Importantly, they're not the only way you would have to solve it. Or do you guys think that he's making a kind of historicism argument that back in the olden days we required as society these kinds of structures, but the fact is we've grown out of them, and we can have a more properly free and less restrictive social order because that works better with our own natural state.

15:12 Wes: And.

15:13 Dylan: And the circumstances of the times now are such that we don't need to have those structures.

15:20 Wes: There's a quick answer to it, which in sections 14 onwards, he says that common people can't handle these long philosophical deductive inferences, which is the only way you really clearly get to know God. And if you want to persuade a large number of common people, you have to appeal to experience, which is what Scripture does. You have to appeal to these stories. And then in section 16, it basically says, from experience alone, Scripture proves there is a God. He's A creator, he's a sustainer, he's wise, he cares, he punishes, but really nothing more than that.

But if you know God by the natural light of reason, you're actually better off. You're actually happier than the common people. So you can go either route. And he makes it sound as if, like most people can't go this philosophical natural light of reason path, which makes it sound as if it's still relevant. Right. Scripture is still relevant in the sense that it's the only way to get the common people on board.

16:20 Seth: Yeah.

16:21 Mark: He makes a point about. Even though some sects say that, you know, just the quote occurred to me from John that is often quoted here, Jesus said to him, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. So that's a claim of exclusivity. And there's maybe not in the Old Testament, although you will worship no other God before me or something. It sounds pretty much like that. But certainly there were traditions that he pointed to, again, familiar with the Jewish community from which he had been excommunicated.

Somebody like Maimonides says, unless you gain your wisdom by studying Torah, then it's no wisdom at all. And Spinoza wants to argue instead that you could use the divine light of reason, and even if you're completely ignorant of Scripture, you could still know God and be happy. Whereas there are plenty of people that study Scripture and don't have a firm grasp of God through reason, and so therefore interpret Scripture poorly and do not achieve the moral goals that are really its purpose.

17:28 Wes: Are you bidding us on the chapter seven we could. Interpretation.

17:33 Mark: When we did our Maimonides episode, there were sections adjacent to our reading about prophecy. And Seth and I, who did that with Danny Lobel, at least, you know, when I was outlining what we should read, I was perfectly like, let's just skip all the stuff about prophecy. And then when we did Schleiermacher, Wes and I, even though Schleiermacher is kind of most famous as a biblical hermeneutics guy, we said, let's not read that stuff. We're going to read this sort of more general religious stuff. So we purposely avoided these exact issues, you know, the things that we could directly compare with what Spinoza has to say here because we deemed it too boring in other authors. But yet Spinoza wrote so few things, and he's so good, that here we are embroiled.

18:20 Wes: So it's section 20 in chapter seven that he talks about Maimonides. What Spinoza objects to is the fact that Maimonides proceeds on the assumption that everything can be rationalized. If there is anything in the Bible that contradicts what we know to be true, then we have to interpret it metaphorically. Oh, they said the sun revolves around the earth, then they only met that metaphorically. And Spinoza actually objects to that. That's against his whole method of. He wants to treat the text itself as sort of scientific data. And that's all we have.

We're not allowed to come at this with external theories about. At least in this context, about when we're interpreting the meaning. That is, there's a larger evaluation to be done about whether the Bible's moral teachings are consistent with what we know philosophically. But in the sense of actually getting the meaning out of the text, you're butchering things by just saying, okay, they all must have known what was scientifically true or even morally true, philosophically true. And we are just going to metaphorically interpret everything to match that.

And the reason why he objects to that so strongly is that then you can justify any position and you can create all these conflicts in doctrine that people fight over or that people use as a wedge for power. If you use his method, you get very little out of the Scripture. You get just a very bare amount that doesn't allow for much conflict. But if you're promiscuous with regard to interpretation, then you get all these different things that people think are important. You say this about God, I say that about God, and therefore we have to kill each other with his kind of interpretation.

You minimize the possibility of that. And I think he thinks Maimonides opens the door to that type of thing because he has a tool which allows him to make the Bible a metaphor for any idea that he wants. And anyone else can do that, too. But I didn't really go to the meat of section 20. So, Seth, did you have any. You're a Maimonides guy, right?

20:25 Seth: No, I wouldn't say that. I mean, I'm more of a Spinoza guy than a Maimonides guy, but Maimonides is a pretty towering figure in the Jewish tradition. So for him to kind of go head on with Maimonides is pretty robust. Now, Maimonides was also not a contemporary, but not so much in the past either, when he was writing, which just goes to show you how quickly his reputation.

20:48 Mark: Well, but he could have also talked about Augustine, or Augustine was maybe one of the inventors of hermeneutics as applied to the Bible and gave These bizarre super. Not attached to the text. Interpretations of, like what we talked about one of his interpretations of one of the parables. Parables in our Jesus parables episode. I don't remember the details, but I think Spinoza would accuse him of the same kind of thing here that a lot of smart people who are faced with this social pressure that you have to say that the Bible is right about everything, that they went through great mental gymnastics to then interpret it in crazy ways that Spinoza thinks are ultimately pretty arbitrary, even though he is in favor of also reading it in a respectful way that takes into account your own intelligence.

But he says, no, no, no. I mean, the Bible was aimed at people of ordinary intelligence and not already believers. So it really can't rely on any sort of magical or super intellectual interpretive scheme to make sense of. It's just we don't know the language, so there could be problems introduced by that. So, yeah, you could maybe have to be a Hebrew scholar, but other than that.

22:00 Seth: Yeah, well, in fact, there's a more pernicious outcome of that, which is that if the Bible requires an intellectual ecclesiastical authority, then you are automatically putting a barrier between most people and moral behavior and love of God, but also potentially creating a social or political strata that could be pernicious. That's ultimately what's really bad is if you say, well, you have to go through all those mental gymnastics and you have to be an intellectual to understand the Bible and you're too stupid to do it, so you have to rely on me. That's actually what's worse than. Or that's the political upshot of.

22:44 Wes: Shall I read the quotation at the end, which sort of gives all of that. This is nice. Section 22, I think it's the last paragraph and chapter 7, or almost so. In any case, anyone is misled by the example of the Hebrew high priest to believe that the Catholic religion too requires a high priest. One must remark that the laws of Moses were the public laws of a country and necessarily needed therefore a public authority for their preservation. If every individual had the liberty to interpret the public laws at his own discretion, no state could survive.

It would immediately be dissolved by this very fact, and public law would be private law. It is wholly different with religion, since it does not consist so much in external actions as in simplicity and truth of mind. It does not belong to any public law or authority. For simplicity and truth of mind are not instilled in men by the power of laws or by public authority. And absolutely no one can be compelled to be happy by force of law, it requires rather pious and fraternal advice, a proper upbringing, and more than anything else, one's own free judgment.

Since, therefore, the supreme right of thinking freely about religion also belongs to each and every individual, and it cannot be conceived that anyone could surrender this right, every individual also possessed the supreme right and authority to judge freely about religion and to explain it and interpret it for himself. The reason why the supreme authority in interpreting the laws and the supreme judgment on public questions lie with the magistrate is simply because they are matters of public right. For the same reason, the authority to interpret religion and make judgments about it will lie with each individual man, because it is a question of individual right.

So this is the significance of all this stuff about interpretation. This is why he's worried about interpretation. He says earlier that you don't need a supernatural light to do this. You don't need to be a special person who's going to hand these things down. As an authority, each person gets to interpret for themselves. And not only is that somehow humane or right, but as he says elsewhere, that freedom of mind is actually essential to truly getting to know God, because intellectual freedom and the study of science and nature and philosophy and all that stuff go hand in hand.

So if you really want to get closer to God, for Spinoza, you don't flee science in the direction of miracles and superstitions and all that stuff, or authorities who are going to tell you what to believe, and you go in the other direction, you go in the direction that actually scares people, and you feel free to interpret these things how you like and to say things that some people might think are heretical.

25:37 Dylan: So it makes me think about which comes first for Spinoza, the freedom of mind, and therefore that this is the way that you must have a political environment, and also the way you have to understand scriptural interpretation and the role of authority in the church, or vice versa, that as a consequence of how to properly understand the authority of the church, then you have this implication for political life, right?

26:12 Mark: And I still have unanswered questions about

26:16 Dylan: maybe it doesn't matter the question of which came first.

26:19 Mark: I had started something that would just lead me to again say, we have to wait until next time to talk about it. But I don't really have a fully. I kind of got distracted during the past few things because I thought I remembered somewhere Spinoza saying basically that people now are still too stupid and because they don't speak ancient, you know, have the requisite ability to do interpretation according to his method that they still need someone to tell them what it means. Right. So that they don't go mad with a. Not heretical, but just a destructive interpretation. And then, Lord, that against other people.

26:59 Seth: Yeah, I know the section you're talking about, Mark, he actually outlines all the things you would need to know to be able to actually understand the Scripture. It's like you'd have to know ancient Hebrew and you'd have to have access to the original documents or at least a record of the changes. You know, all this stuff that we don't have. But I think it's not fair to say that he thinks people are too stupid. I think he's not aiming to turn everybody into Spinozas. I don't think his desire is to say, we want everybody to reach the intellectual level and the level of passion and character that they could intellectually engage the way he is doing.

Because that would, in essence, mean that he was on the same project as Maimonides, who he just criticized. I think instead he set out to say, you know, through reason and intellect, we can understand the divine law and we can abide by it simultaneously. That same divine law can be communicated in a different way to a lay audience. And as long as they're obedient, the end result is ultimately the same, which is the goal is to have good character. You know, ultimately, in chapter 12, he spells it out very clearly, but I didn't want to jump there.

But essentially he wants you to, you know, love your neighbor as you love yourself, love God, and love your neighbor. That's pretty much it. So a big part of this document, this book, is to basically say he's trying to debunk people who leverage Scripture to get positions of authority to push superstition. Right. And I don't know who he thinks was actually going to read this and change their mind, because he was writing in Latin. So it's not for a lay audience. Right.

28:46 Wes: Well, he says in the preface that he hopes most people won't even read it.

28:51 Mark: Yeah, he sounds like Nietzsche in the preface. You know, he says, these are the topics, philosophical reader, that I offer for your examination, blah, blah, blah. As for others, I am not particularly eager to recommend this treatise to them, for I have no reason to expect that it could please them in any way. I know how obstinately these prejudices stick in the mind, that the heart is embraced in the form of piety. I know that it is as impossible to rid the common people of superstition as it is to rid them from fear. I know that the constancy of the common people is obstinacy and that they are not governed by reason, but swayed by impulse in approving or finding fault.

I do not therefore invite the common people and those who are afflicted with the same feelings as they are, that is, who think theologically to read these things. I would wish them to ignore the book altogether, rather than make a nuisance of themselves by interpreting perversely as they do with everything, and while doing no good to themselves, harming others who would philosophize more freely were they able to surmount the obstacle of believing that reason should be subordinate to theology. I'm confident that for this latter group of people this work will prove extremely useful.

29:52 Wes: I knew you would have that passage, like, instantly accessible. Yeah, that's great. Little cantankerousness. Schopenhauerian cantankerousness.

30:08 Mark: I put that at the beginning of everything I write and people don't like that.

30:13 Wes: Why won't people read me?

30:14 Seth: Maybe this is why DeLeuze wrote those two books about Spinoza and Nietzsche.

30:19 Mark: I know that most of you are not going to understand what I'm about to say because you're not cool enough.

30:25 Seth: So who is he writing for then?

30:27 Wes: Us? I was just about to.

30:31 Dylan: Philosophy types?

30:32 Mark: Well, yeah, and in particular, I guess a group of Christian radicals of his time. It was all like, you know, Republicans. I don't mean obviously that in the modern sense, people in favor of a more democratic, non monarchist is who he was writing for. Free thinkers.

30:52 Dylan: The libertines, maybe. Not them.

30:54 Wes: Communists. Sorry.

31:01 Dylan: I mean, in some ways he's clearly wanting to stake out a place for himself to live in a free republic.

31:09 Mark: Yeah.

31:09 Dylan: Maybe not necessarily as a political activist, but that there's room for him to do the work that he does and people like him.

31:17 Wes: Well, he begins talking about how lucky he is to be in the Netherlands at that time. He has a lot of freedom, apparently.

31:25 Mark: Well, somewhere I read, maybe it was in the intro, but that. That was actually meant to be snarky, that. Yes, of course, the Netherlands, you know, had on the books a great degree of freedom. But the fact that he was still being persecuted to the extent that he was.

31:42 Wes: Well, I think it was a refuge for Jews at the time. Right, yeah. Who were being persecuted elsewhere. And in theory it was a liberal republic. Yeah. Who knows how well it was being implemented.

31:54 Mark: But it's kind of like us saying, well, given that we live in a free society where the will of the people is reflected in who gets elected and then continuing to say something bad about Trump or whatever. It's irony, but he's a subtle guy. Yeah. At the very end. Doesn't he at the very end of the preface also say, basically, suck up? And if I've said anything here that is disruptive of the social order, I'll take it back.

32:24 Wes: Really?

32:24 Mark: He said something like that?

32:25 Wes: I don't remember that.

32:28 Mark: Oh, here he is. Yeah. So pretty close. After that, the very last phrase of the preface, I must give notice here, as I do again at the end of the treatise, that I maintain nothing that I would not very willingly submit to the examination and judgment of the sovereign authorities of my country if they judge anything I say to be in conflict with the laws of my country or prejudicial to the common good. I wish it unsaid. I know that I am human and I may have erred. I have, however, taken great pains not to err and to ensure above all that everything I write entirely accords with the laws of my country, with piety, and with morality.

33:01 Wes: Okay, he's just trying not to get killed.

33:04 Mark: Exactly. So we noticed this in. In Descartes and in Hobbes that. But whenever they're writing, the introduction always has to say something that curries favor somehow with whoever's in charge. I know that, you, Royal Highness will not be offended by my saying that all kings should be killed.

33:21 Wes: Right. What he's saying, though, is really radical, even by today's standards. I think a lot of religious people would be offended by it.

33:29 Mark: Well, let's get a little more specific. So chapters 8 through 11 are him actually putting this method that he was talking about in chapter seven, which we've seen some examples of, I think, in the earlier chapters, but kind of explicitly considering who wrote, as far as we know historically, the Pentateuch, who wrote the first books of the Bible, who wrote the later books of the Old Testament, and can you tell by looking at them? Like, a lot of people say Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and in fact, will accuse you of heresy if you deny that. But look here, right here, it says, and Moses died. And this happened in the 50 years after Moses died. Do you think Moses wrote that? He's pretty snotty about it.

34:15 Seth: Yeah.

34:16 Wes: I think a lot of people could live with that part of it, but would not be so happy about. Oh, all the ceremonies are irrelevant, including all the particular prohibitions, and, you know, the need for baptism or attending church or praying five times a day or even believing in Jesus. Irrelevant.

34:37 Mark: So even though this was aimed in part at Christians in his area. And he did, in this chapter 11, talk about the apostles specifically, like, what is their role? How do they relate to the prophets? Because he has this thing earlier about Jesus, which we actually should just get on the table. But my point in bringing this up is to say he didn't really address, like, the way that these issues would be live for us now is probably more by Christians than Jews worrying about this stuff. At least most of the people in our particular culture that you're going to run into are going to be not talking about the miracles in the Old Testament, but the miracles that were supposedly witnessed by all these people in the New Testament and that you can't explain in the same way.

In that section about miracles in the Old Testament that I was reading before, he says, like, you know, there are always attendant circumstances that they may or may not have described. So it looked like Elijah raised somebody from the dead, but really it even says in the text, like, he had to lie on top of this boy for a long time and warm him up. So, like, obviously he wasn't dead yet. He was just cold. It's a natural kind of resuscitation. And talking about, like, why people would say that the earth stood still, like, he spends a lot of time on that miracle.

And clearly you could have other ways that there could be continued light on this battle without the sun actually standing still. You could just have atmospheric conditions that would allow, you know, so could you give the same kinds of apologetics for the ostensible miracles that he gives about the Old Testament, for the New Testament miracles? And I'm sure there's a crapload of literature that does elaborate on this, even though Spinoza doesn't. And I'm just not sure. I just feel like some of the alleged miracles and other wilder things are just more straightforward in the New Testament.

And so that if you deny them, you can't just kind of give these, like, they were just expressing things poetically or, you know, according to the ancient wisdom of their day. You have to, you know, like we did in considering the historical Jesus stuff that we alluded to on our Parables episode, you might just have to say, yeah, this was written after Christ's death, and probably a lot of these stories were made up. And that's a completely different, a much more provocative way of putting it than Spinoza does.

36:56 Wes: So for Spinoza, you don't need any of these religions at all. In fact, you can be better off without them if you get to God through philosophy. Do you remember that passage that I read you could be happier and know God better. So it's not essential that anyone acknowledge the divinity of Christ. Even people who are willing to give up the miracles and the stories and things like that, they would have a hard time with giving up core doctrinal elements like the divinity of Christ. And I just think that in a way, Spinoza just doesn't think it's philosophically relevant. It's not relevant to knowing God. It's not relevant in the deepest sense whether or not you believe in Christ or something else.

37:39 Mark: Let's go ahead and read at least one of the quotes here about Christ. He says a couple places. I do not believe that anyone has reached such a degree of perfection above others except Christ. He's talking about Moses here, to whom the decrees of God which guide men to salvation were revealed not by words or vision, but directly. And that is why God revealed himself to the apostles through the mind of Christ, as he did formerly to Moses, by means of a heavenly voice. Therefore, the voice of Christ may be called the voice of God, like the voice which Moses heard.

In this sense, we may also say that the wisdom of God, that is the wisdom which is above human wisdom, took on human nature in Christ and that Christ was the way of salvation. So this kind of seemed just a weird throw in. You know, it's recurrent. It's definitely part of his doctrine here, but it really creates a complication for him that needs much more discussion than he gives it.

38:34 Wes: Yeah, it's not that it's not something. It's just that it's not necessary here.

38:38 Mark: It says right after that here. I must point out that I'm not speaking at all of the things that certain churches affirm of Christ, nor do I deny them, for I freely admit that I do not understand them. What I have just said, I infer from Scripture. Nowhere have I read that God appeared to Christ or spoke to him, but that God was revealed to the apostles through Christ, that he is the way of salvation. And finally, that the old law was given through an angel and not directly by God, etc. Therefore, if Moses spoke with God face to face as a man with his friend, that is, through the mediation of two bodies, Christ communicated with God mind to mind.

39:12 Wes: This is chapter one you're reading from, right?

39:14 Mark: Yes, exactly. The rest of the prophets have these imaginative visions, but somehow, just because of what the Bible says, we have to say different things about Moses. That he actually did see God. Not God's face, only his backside. And that Christ did not see God, but That he was God in this

39:36 Wes: way, that there was a mind meld.

39:38 Mark: Yes.

39:39 Wes: Christ communicated with God mind to mind. He says, I don't know if you just read that or not, but Christ

39:44 Dylan: was the first Vulcan.

39:47 Wes: He's granting an exception to the idea that. And in general, it's not simply vivid imagination and that people aren't simply hallucinating and that prophets don't necessarily know God better, they're not smarter.

40:00 Dylan: But it's also an example of the way in which his, it's called scientific reading of the Bible works is Moses and Jesus are exceptions to the general conclusions regarding the prophets based upon the evidence of the Scripture itself. He says that over and over and over again. The only thing we have to go on is what's said in the Scripture. And, you know, the result of those conclusions are the things that we just discussed about Moses being different and Jesus being different, but also the fact that the way you have to interpret prophecy and the way you have to understand prophets is based upon, in a funny way, taking the Scripture utterly seriously and trying to make sense of it. And I guess the only thing you bring from the outside to it is the notion that it should be reasonable. And so how can it be reasonable

40:54 Wes: that Scripture should be reasonable in the

40:57 Dylan: sense that he's not taking the tact that the Scripture is literally true. And so now I'm going to have to figure out how it all fits together. And I'll make a whole bunch of external claims about God's ability to make stuff work. You know, he won't have a kind of funny kind of deus machina for the Scripture to make it all align. He brings a rationalist interpretation to it so that Scripture, you know, it ought to make sense. And he freely admits that plenty of it doesn't make sense on the face of it, so that it requires a process of interpretation of it. But he says that you can only do this activity from the Scripture itself.

41:43 Wes: Yeah. So just to kind of elaborate on that, because it is a little tricky, the difference between him and Maimonides. He's all about having this philosophical conception of God which doesn't require Scripture at all. And he's all about checking Scripture against that conception. But what he opposes in Maimonides is the idea that you bring that conception to Scripture as a theory, as a model, and assume that Scripture must make sense in the sense that it can be made consistent with one's philosophical conception

42:18 Mark: or that the authors understood this complex conception.

42:21 Wes: Yeah. You know, he is saying, yes, all you need is the natural light of reason to interpret Scripture and then the Scripture itself as data. But you cannot bring in any other theories and impose them on that data. And the difference is there turns out to be lots of stuff that's wrong, lots of stuff that we just don't understand. Scripture turns out to be very, very flawed. And then not only that, but at the end of it, what you can squeeze out interpretively out of Scripture is very, very small. It's very minor and circumscribed. That's the thing we shouldn't forget, which is that his mode of interpretation yields very limited results.

43:06 Mark: Well, I think some of what we just read about what he believed Christ was is not small. There's some pretty substantial stuff that he thinks you can get out of this. If it's kind of repeated enough times or like that's the overall gist. He's going to say, yeah, some places in the Old Testament actually just contradict each other. Like give alternate versions of the same history right there consecutively in the same book. They're obviously just like two different stories about the same thing that were gathered together and put next to each other. There's just like piss poor editorship.

43:36 Seth: Well, he actually says that too, just about the four gospels. It's the same story told four different ways. And they don't always agree.

43:43 Wes: You know, it's interesting the way he phrases that. Therefore, if Moses spoke with God face to face as a man with his friend, Christ communicated with God mind to mind. I mean, there's no way to verify that any of the stuff in Scripture is true. And I think he's not trying to do that. He's treating it as data and he's willing to say, well, the stuff that conflicts with what we know philosophically and scientifically, that's just wrong. And we're not going to try and save it. We're not going to try and interpret it metaphorically to make it consistent.

We're just going to acknowledge that it had a particular function to serve historically or maybe even now with people. It performs that function well. Revelation actually performs that function well. And getting people to be aware that there is a God which he thinks is something that's also philosophically true. But all the specific stories and things, I think in a way he's indifferent. I mean, deep down I think he really is indifferent to whether any of it happened.

44:39 Mark: Well, that's why he puts this thing about histories in the same chapter as ceremonies.

44:43 Wes: Yeah.

44:44 Mark: So in the same way that you should worship in this way was necessary to tell to the Hebrews at this time so they would just be a frickin society and not fall apart. You could maybe say in the same way some of the histories were the same thing, like did they actually really know the details of the creation of the universe? Or was it more believing? This is, as we said earlier, a kind of a noble lie, that we need some sort of explanation. This is part of the tradition, this is part of what cemented us together. Now that might be going too far.

45:17 Dylan: I do want to push back again on saying that it was necessary to have those stories in that way. I feel like he's saying that this is what was done and it served that purpose. Well, I guess it's a question to me whether he's saying that you had to have done it this way because of the context and the status of the culture at the time, or whether it was done and served that purpose. Those are two different things.

45:43 Mark: Right? If the story was the result of authentic prophecy which was divine and surpassed common divine ways of knowing things and believing that did in fact lead to success in the society, then just like everything else that prophecy says, I think according to what I was saying a while ago in this discussion, that somehow falls under the category of the laws of God revealing themselves. So it really was a necessity. But that doesn't mean that necessity still holds now and that you still have to believe that stuff. I don't know. Are there any quotes from chapter five about the stories that we need to read to clarify this?

46:23 Wes: What are we trying to determine?

46:25 Mark: You're saying Spinoza was indifferent to whether you believe the stories or not, but does he believe that the stories were socially essential? That the stories were somehow not just utilitarian, but necessarily utilitarian? Are they merely stories or can we say something else about them?

46:43 Wes: Well, we know the ceremonies are completely a matter of preserving the state. Right? So that's our starting point.

46:49 Seth: One of the key distinctions that Spinoza calls out between Hebrew prophets and the apostles is that the prophets were called upon to speak directly and only to Jews or Hebrews, I guess, at the time, and that the apostles were directed to reach out to all audiences, and that the prophets in fact were directed to go speak to very specific groups of specific Hebrews, and they were enabled to do so. Mostly there's some story about them being put in jail, but the apostles were prevented. He has examples where Paul wrote a letter because he wanted to come and speak to him, but he has been prevented from doing so.

47:32 Mark: What it says in the text is they were not legislated to teach in particular places. Whereas that sounds like you're saying that. Yeah, if Moses or whoever it was, Ezra or somebody that told this creation story and that was in the tradition, then they were instructed to do that and that was maybe necessarily utilitarian in a way that the later stories were not, according to Spinoza.

47:52 Seth: Yeah, I think so.

47:54 Wes: So just looking at my notes, I can see he actually directly addresses all this. So in section 13, I move on then to the second topic that I propose to deal with in this chapter, namely for whom and why belief in the narratives contained in the Bible is necessary. And then we go through all the stuff about the need to appeal to experience alone to get to the common people, the minimalistic conception of God that provides. And then he goes on to say, you know, if you don't know those biblical narratives, you're fine. You can actually be happier than the common people if you know God through the natural light of reason.

48:28 Mark: Wouldn't you be happier if you didn't know the story of Job and you didn't know that Abraham being commanded to kill his son? I would be happier if I did not know those stories.

48:37 Wes: Right. Section 17, you know, and then, even then, even for the common people, it's not important they know most of the stories, just a few essential ones. So section 18. The whole point is they're only valuable for their function, which is to move people to obedience and devotion. That's it. Spinoza is indifferent to whether they're true, and it doesn't matter whether they're true. What matters is if they serve their function. And then finally in Section 19, he says, whatever the nature of these histories, belief in them is not relevant to the divine law, nor do they make men happy in themselves, nor do they serve any purpose other than for their doctrine. And this is the only reason why some of them may be more important than others.

49:20 Mark: I wish I could be as confident as you, Wes, that the implications of this means that, for instance, you could just be a believer in a different kind of book altogether in the Quran or Buddhist sacred texts, or that you could be in a religion that doesn't have any sacred text. In other words, an actual true tolerance of whatever religious beliefs you want to have. But since he's so clearly anti atheist, you know, I just have to hear what he has to say specifically about Buddhists or other beliefs. Well, certainly he doesn't want there to be religious persecution.

So, like, he wouldn't want you, I don't think, to lock up atheists either. But he would still want to say, okay, pretty clearly atheists or people who do not buy any of this stuff are wrong in some way. Like he specifically says, people that just deny that God exists, they might be very familiar with these teachings, but it does come down to practical consequences. If they end up turning away, really turning away, then they will be not virtuous, they will not have happiness. So there's the test.

50:20 Wes: Yeah, there's some minimum requirements for. It's not like any belief couldn't do the work that this stuff does. Yeah, Mark, you disappointed one, which is that it can't be atheistic, it couldn't teach that disobedience to God is the way to go. It couldn't teach that God just doesn't care. You couldn't actually be a deist. You actually need God to care in this scheme.

50:40 Mark: Even though as a literal matter, if you're a philosopher, you realize God does not have a personality and so God can't care. Well, you have to believe whatever the philosophically respectable version of that is, I

50:51 Wes: don't know, that God needs a personality to care.

50:55 Mark: What are you talking about? We talked about in the previous Spinoza episode that God can't even know things. We can't even say God is omniscient because there's no subject object distinction to apply to God. So I would think caring is a thing that people do. They care for each other. But there's nothing in here about like, we live in the best of all possible worlds and existence somehow cares about us in some strong way.

51:21 Wes: No, there is. He says it over and over again.

51:23 Mark: Okay, so that's what providence amounts to.

51:26 Wes: So section six, for instance, chapter seven, he's saying, here we get certain universal things out of Scripture, something affirmed by all the biblical prophets as eternal doctrine of supreme value for all men. For example, that there is a God, one and omnipotent, who alone is to be adored and cares for all men, loving most those who worship him and love their neighbor as themselves, etc. These and similar things, I contend Scripture teaches so plainly and so explicitly throughout that no one has ever called its meaning into question in these matters.

But Scripture does not teach expressly an eternal doctrine what God is and how he sees all things and provides for them and so on. And this is one of many places where he just repeats the same thing, which is what I call the bare bones God. You need philosophy really to say what God is and his nature and all that other stuff. But from Scripture you can get your bare bones God that He exists, omnipotent creator should be obedient to him, all that stuff. And I might be wrong about this, but I took caring to be one of these essential things. That's a little bit ambiguous.

Does he really think everything that Scripture is teaching here is essential?

52:32 Mark: But that's the jump between the ethics and this is that if you take the ethics seriously, at least in the part where we're discussing the nature of God, why is God alone to be adored? Why would God care for all men loving those who worship him? Like, no, these have to be symbolic ways of talking about an existential relationship.

52:54 Wes: Sure.

52:55 Mark: You know, a relationship to existence. It's not to a being, God. It's like, you know, God is all.

53:01 Wes: Don't you love all, Mark.

53:03 Mark: So if you are in harmony, the reward for doing this is not that after you die, you go to heaven or something like that. And that's not, again, the kind of carrot and stick thing that we'd want to convince people to be good. This is very much like Boethius. Virtue is its own reward. So if you love God and think of the universe as loving you, then you end up living a harmonious life, which is satisfying in itself. If you reject God and are rebellious, then you end up alone.

53:37 Dylan: But none of that's in the book right now that we're reading, right?

53:40 Mark: Yeah, I was trying to paraphrase this book. Really, I wasn't trying to pull on the other one. Yeah.

53:45 Dylan: The stuff that's in the book right now that we're reading is that if you want to know God, you will get to know the world. And because those two things are in complete alignment with one another.

53:58 Wes: Yeah. He says what the reward is. Finally we see that the supreme reward of the divine law is to know the law itself. That is, to know God and to love him in true liberty with whole and constant minds. The penalty is the lack of these things and enslavement to the flesh or an inconstant and wavering mind.

54:18 Mark: That is exactly the quote I was trying to paraphrase. Yes.

54:21 Wes: Consistently with the whole political theme of liberty. I think liberty as the reward looms large. The concept of being free. Right. Reason is what. What makes us free. The kind of reasoning we do when we're thinking philosophically or doing science. Being liberated from our animality, from mere passion, from what Kant calls heteronomy. Simply being pushed around deterministically by the world, by the objects that we want. That's the transcendent moment of subjectivity, which is the reward. The Reward is being fully human, fully actualized.

54:57 Mark: And I think we can see that right now because those of us who don't have jobs that mean that we have to get up at 5 in the morning, we feel free and thriving. And Seth, who is about to fall asleep and needs to go right now, is enslaved by the things of the flesh, by his job that makes him have to get up.

55:19 Seth: I am.

55:19 Dylan: Dylan isn't far behind.

55:21 Seth: So yeah, one clarification. I'm getting up because I'm flying out early to do a long weekend with some high school friends in Napa. So it's not work. I'm enslaved rather to the passions of wine consumption and friendship.

55:39 Mark: But it's also a long term view. Like you have to transcend your animal brain to think about. If I get up early and undergo this pain, then I'll have pleasure tomorrow.

55:50 Seth: Ah, well, I'll tell you, it gets harder and harder as I get older to transcend my animal brain. In fact, I feel more and more like an animal the older I get.

56:01 Mark: So next time we're going to continue talking about this book, we're going to talk about the political stuff and we're going to turn to his Tractatus Politicus. That's different than the Theologico Politicus. It's a different thing. And he didn't even finish it, but apparently it states like a lot of the same stuff, but was written, you know, for a normal philosophical audience, just like his ethics was as opp. This, which, this is basically a tract that could have just gone on salon.com

56:26 Wes: wait, how, how long is the Tractatus Politicus?

56:30 Mark: I'm not sure. We're going to not read the whole thing. All right. But we're going to see if it says anything above and beyond what we. We just want to get a good picture of his politics, that's all. However, we need to do that. So yeah, we'll get to clean up our mess. Maybe we'll have subsequent thoughts about the religious stuff as well going into that. And I think that's kind of where we're going is what does this all mean? To kind of give my closing again, kind of like some of the other religious hermeneutic stuff we've done over the years, Ricoeur and the Parables episode.

I find this stuff kind of interesting in itself, the fact that it's much more fun than actually like reading the books in the Old Testament, reading what Spinoza has to say about them, but I really do feel like this is one of those things that kind of is largely for me, merely of historical interest. Like, it's great that he wrote this in a way that promotes political tolerance, and I will be interested to hear if there are arguments that I can use coming out of this to promote political tolerance. But it seems like his audience was so specific.

You know, it's possible that somebody might reward a sort of new atheist or religious liberalizing project, getting away from destructive interpretations of religion. But since I'm not a person who's bound to be victimized by that normal. The people that I feel like are having that problem right now, they're not going to want to read and be influenced by this. So this was written for an audience that is no more.

57:57 Wes: This particular text, I don't have the same reaction. Predictably, freedom of thought and speech are perennial issues. And it doesn't just have to be about freedom to philosophize theologically under the umbrella of an oppressive religion, religious, political regime or institution. It could be any beliefs to which we are attached unthinkingly, even if we may be thought about them at some times, but unthinkingly, because people say this is the right thing to believe, this is the good thing to believe. You're a terrible person if you don't believe them.

And what we sacrifice in that sense, even if they are the right beliefs, that's not the point. The sense in which we sometimes will sacrifice freedom of thought for the sake of that. For the sake of, as Heidegger might put it, sedimented elements, the sort of unthinking moral precepts that we sort of allow us to deaden ourselves to something that's more free. So Spinoza is reorienting us, just like the existentialists, by the way, in the way de Beauvoir rejects the serious man right rejects the one who simply sunk themselves into their particular set of beliefs, the beliefs that are meant to sort of complete them and have forsaken freedom because of that.

This reorients us towards freedom as the end in itself, as the highest good. That's the larger political importance of this to me. It doesn't have to just be religious beliefs. And it's something to which we are all prone, in the same way that Orwell says we're all prone to nationalism and all prone to the misuse of language, our own orthodoxies. We are all prone to this, to dogma, and to falling into this trap of certain kinds of superstitions. I think we're more superstitious than we think. And our sense of what is good and Pious is often more superstitious than we think and less thoughtful.

So that's the broader implication for me.

59:54 Mark: Well, that sounded like a veiled way of not being PC, and I'm going to boycott you. Write mean tweets about you?

1:00:01 Wes: No, not just about PC, but. But I condemn all political opinions, let's put it that way. So write me hate mail. Whichever part of the political spectrum you're on, it'll be relevant.

1:00:13 Mark: I should let Seth go first because you were the one falling asleep. Seth, do you have a closing?

1:00:18 Seth: Not anymore. I'll just say that it may not have come across in my participation, but he is my favorite or one of my favorite philosophers. This is one of my favorite books. It to me is laugh out loud funny in many places. It's insanely rigorous and simultaneously informed by deep knowledge and scholarly acumen. He makes references to many rabbinical type interpretive moves and things like that that resonate with me, whether he's criticizing them or appealing to them. And I like the message, the simplicity of the message, which will come out when we do our next episode and talk about chapter 12, about the true one religion, the true divide law, and what that means, and the simplicity of the ethical precepts. So onward and upward.

1:01:06 Mark: So, Dylan, I think it was actually your urging that got us to do this, that this was one of your favorite things and you didn't get to be on the previous episodes. Take Us Home.

1:01:16 Dylan: Here I fall much more along the lines of what Wes was saying. I think it's always worth reminding ourselves about the nature of our own freedom and the necessity to preserve that in our minds and in our institutions. And that work is hard. And I take the world that Spinoza was writing against as being something much closer to the natural existence of human beings. And that the nature of the relatively free liberal democracies that we live in now are deeply ahistic, historical, and that they are fragile in a way that it's easy to forget because we live within them. And it's well worth taking Spinoza seriously because he represents a way to that in some ways, we owe our own existence in a liberal democracy to his thinking and the kinds of thinking of people like him that got us there. It's not to be taken for granted at all.

1:02:22 Seth: All right.

1:02:23 Mark: Our closing song is by Dave Nachmanoff, and it's actually about spinoza from his 2016 album Spinoza's Dream. And this very song is discussed on the Nakedly Examined music podcast number 20. Dave has a philosophy PhD and that album is all philosophy themed songs. Check out the full interview@nakedly examinedmusic.com thanks, everybody.

1:02:44 Seth: Good night.

1:02:45 Wes: Thanks.

1:02:45 Mark: Good night.

1:02:53 Unknown speaker: I was baruch but now I'm Benedict they called me heretic but still I'm blessed I had a dream so it was all the same Nature and God Two names for everything but my words they land in silence like the snow on the canal how many years until they hear me and understand the dream I had and realize the oneness of it all? And in my dream I saw the evidence of peace and tolerance in every part I wrote it down in geometric proof to try to share the truth with one and all but my words they land in silence like the snow on the canal how many years until they hear me and understand the dream I had and realize the oneness of it all? And so I wait and grind my lenses here to try to make things clear and still I'm blessed and still I'm blessed and still unblast.