Scripture and Truth: A Problem in Spinoza’s

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Steven Nadler

The Tractatus theologico-politicus [TTP] certainly does not confront the

modern reader with the same difficulties as Spinoza’s philosophical master-
piece, the Ethics.1 For one thing, on a superficial level, the TTP does not
bear the intimidating format of the geometric method, with its dense tangle
of definitions, axioms, propositions, and scholia. Moreover, while the Eth-
ics presumes facility with a technical philosophical vocabulary that was
common to a number of early modern traditions, especially Cartesianism
and Aristotelian Scholasticism, the TTP, while also written in Latin, speaks
in a more vernacular and accessible idiom. Where the Ethics proceeds by
way of ostensibly rigorous demonstrations, the TTP moves along in a con-
ventional narrative and argumentative mode. It also addresses what are
arguably more mundane and (to the non-philosophical reader) familiar
issues than the Ethics: instead of analyzing the nature of substance and its
modes and presenting an intellectualist account of virtue, the TTP is con-
cerned with how to read the Bible and the proper relationship between
ecclesiastic and secular authority in the state.
This is not to say, however, that the TTP does not present serious prob-
lems of its own. As straightforward as the work may seem, there are many
puzzles to unravel among the philosophical, religious, and political theses
that Spinoza defends in it, as well as numerous secondary questions about

1
Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in Spinoza Opera, 4 vols., ed.
Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Verlag, 1925; henceforth abbreviated as ‘‘G’’),
vol. 3.

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his intended audience, the connection of the book to contemporary histori-

cal developments, and its systematic relationship to the Ethics.2
The goal of this essay is not to offer any bold or novel claims about
this or that topic in the TTP. I have no grand interpretive purpose in mind.
My aim, rather, is much more modest and, admittedly, inconclusive. I want
only to present a small but troubling question that arises in the context of
Spinoza’s views in the TTP on the interpretation of Scripture. More spe-
cifically, Spinoza makes a number of comments in several distinct passages
in chapter six, ‘‘On Miracles,’’ about the relationship between Scripture
and truth that seem flat-out inconsistent with his considered view on the
matter. There seems, prima facie, to be no good reason why Spinoza says
these things, and very good reasons why he should not say them. I am not
entirely certain of how to resolve the perplexity generated by these anoma-
lous passages, and so for the most part I here limit myself to offering them
as a problem to be discussed. I shall, however, conclude by making at least
one suggestion as to how the apparent inconsistency might be settled.
Moreover, despite the relatively small scale of the problem I highlight, I
believe that there is some larger payoff in addressing it, in so far as making
sense of these problematic passages can deepen our understanding of Spino-
za’s Bible hermeneutics, which have had a significant influence on Bible
criticism since the TTP’s ‘‘scandalous’’ publication in 1670.

I.

Let us begin with Spinoza’s considered view on the relationship between

the content of Scripture and truth. And since Scripture is the product of
the prophetic imagination, where we really need to begin is with Spinoza’s
account of prophecy.
One of the goals of the TTP is to secure the separation of the domains
of religion and philosophy so that philosophers might be free to pursue
secular wisdom unimpeded by ecclesiastic authority. In Spinoza’s view,
philosophical truth and religious faith have nothing in common with one
another, and one must not serve as the rule of the other. Philosophy should
not have to answer to revealed religion, no more than revealed religion, or
‘‘faith,’’ should have to be consistent with any philosophical system.
Among the first steps that Spinoza takes toward this goal of defending the

2
I address some of these issues in A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise
and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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‘‘freedom of philosophizing’’ is to combat the notion of the prophet-

philosopher, particularly as this notion is elaborated by Maimonides in his
Guide of the Perplexed.
Maimonides, like a number of medieval philosophers,3 had argued that
the prophet, no less than the philosopher, can do what he does because he
has a perfected intellect or rational faculty.4 Like the philosopher, he, too,
partakes of the ‘‘overflow’’ of knowledge that emanates from God, runs
down through the separate intellects of the crystalline spheres of the cos-
mos, and finally accumulates in the Agent Intellect, the ultimate separate
intellect that governs our sublunary realm. When a person has, through the
proper training, perfected his intellect, he essentially creates a cognitive
union with the Agent Intellect and thereby taps into this body of divine
knowledge, which includes speculative metaphysical and scientific truths.
The difference between the philosopher and the prophet is that the latter,
but not the former, has also perfected his imagination.

Know that the true reality and quiddity of prophecy consist in its
being an overflow from God, may He be cherished and honored,
through the intermediation of the Active Intellect, toward the
rational faculty in the first place and thereafter toward the imagi-
native faculty. This is the highest degree of man and the ultimate
term of perfection that can exist for his species; and this state is
the ultimate term of perfection for the imaginative faculty. This is
something that cannot by any means exist in every man. And it is
not something that may be attained solely through perfection in
the speculative sciences and through improvement of moral habits,
even if all of them have become as fine and good as can be. There
still is needed in addition the highest possible degree of perfection
of the imaginative faculty in respect of its original disposition.5

3
See Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), for a survey of medieval Jewish and Arabic philosophical
views on prophecy.
4
What follows is a highly simplified account of Maimonides on prophecy. For more
detail, see Kreisel, Prophecy, chap. 3; and Jeffrey Macy, ‘‘Prophecy in al-Farabi and Mai-
monides: The Imaginative and Rational Faculties,’’ in Maimonides and Philosophy, ed.
Shlomo Pines and Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1986), 185–201. For a compari-
son of Maimonides and Spinoza on prophecy, see Heidi Ravven, ‘‘Some Thoughts on
What Spinoza Learned from Maimonides About the Prophetic Imagination, Part One:
Maimonides on Prophecy and the Imagination,’’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 39
(2001): 193–214; and ‘‘Some Thoughts on What Spinoza Learned from Maimonides
About the Prophetic Imagination, Part Two: Spinoza’s Maimonideanism,’’ Journal of the
History of Philosophy 39 (2001): 385–406.
5
Guide of the Perplexed, 2 vols., trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1963; henceforth abbreviated as ‘‘P’’), pt. II, chap. 36, 369.

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For the philosopher, the information that comes to him in the divine over-
flow terminates in his intellect; he thus perceives its content in an intellec-
tual—that is, logical and discursive—manner. For the prophet, on the other
hand, because his faculties are appropriately prepared, the information
passes on from the intellect to the imagination. He therefore perceives (and,
eventually, communicates) its content in a narrative and imaginative way.

The case in which the intellectual overflow overflows only toward

the rational faculty and does not overflow at all toward the imagi-
native faculty—either because of the scantiness of what overflows
or because of some deficiency existing in the imaginative faculty in
its natural disposition, a deficiency that makes it impossible for it
to receive the overflow of the intellect—is characteristic of the class
of men engaged in speculation. If, on the other hand, this overflow
reaches both faculties—I mean both the rational and the imagina-
tive . . . and if the imaginative faculty is in a state of ultimate
perfection owing to its natural disposition, this is characteristic of
the class of prophets.6

For Maimonides, then, the content of prophecy is, at least in part, philo-
sophical. The philosopher and the prophet, in Maimonides’s view, both
convey truths—indeed, the same truths that come from the same source.
And because one truth necessarily coheres with other truths, philosophy
and prophecy must, when properly understood, always be consistent. In
Maimonides’s account, philosophical truth and revealed truth will never
clash; a prophet will never, qua prophet, say something that is inconsistent
with reason.7
Now there is one very important point on which Spinoza agrees with
Maimonides, and he uses it to his own polemical advantage. The prophets
of the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza argues, were indeed, as Maimonides says,
men of great and vivid imagination. They were not, however, philosophers,
or even very learned. They did not have training in the speculative sciences;
in fact, many of them were uneducated. For this reason, their pronounce-
ments should not be regarded as sources of theological, philosophical, sci-
entific, or historical truth. The goal of Spinoza’s discussion of prophecy,
then, is to downgrade its epistemological status, particularly in relationship

6
Guide II.37, P II.374.
7
See Guide II.36, P II.372. It does not follow that everything a prophet says can be
rationally demonstrated.

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 Nadler ✦Spinoza and Scripture: A Colloquium

to philosophy and science. Revelation, as portrayed in the Bible, while it

has a very important social and political function to play, is not a source of
truth.
Spinoza defines ‘‘prophecy or revelation’’ as ‘‘the sure knowledge of
some matter revealed by God to man.’’8 On the face of it, this seems per-
fectly traditional, although somewhat puzzling for anyone acquainted with
Spinoza’s philosophical and religious project. Spinoza’s rigorous natural-
ism will not allow for any supernatural facts. Whatever happens, happens
in and through Nature. Thus, any knowledge that comes to a person must
come in an entirely natural way; there are and can be no exceptions to this.
In Spinoza’s system there is no transcendent God exercising supernatural,
ad hoc communications. There is room for divine revelation, but only in a
very particular sense. Because for Spinoza God is identical with Nature,
and all human knowledge is natural, it follows that all human knowledge
is also divine. If God is Nature understood as the active, substantial cause
of all things, then whatever is brought about by Nature and its laws is, by
definition, brought about by God. The human mind being as much a part
of Nature as anything else is, its cognitive states all follow ultimately from
‘‘God or Nature’’: ‘‘Prophetic knowledge is usually taken to exclude natu-
ral knowledge. Nevertheless, the latter has as much right as any other kind
of knowledge to be called divine, since it is dictated to us, as it were, by
God’s nature insofar as we participate therein, and by God’s decrees.’’9
Moreover, the highest form of knowledge available to human beings is
what Spinoza, in the Ethics, calls ‘‘the third kind of knowledge.’’ This is an
intuitive grasp of the essences of things, a deep causal understanding which
situates them in their necessary relationships to each other and, more
importantly, to higher, universal principles: ‘‘This kind of knowing pro-
ceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of
God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.’’10 In the third
kind of knowledge, one grasps the nature of a thing or an event in such a
way that one sees not only what it is, but also why it is as it is and could
not possibly have been otherwise. But the universal causal principles of
Nature just are God’s (or Nature’s) attributes of Extension (for physical

8
TTP I, G III.15. The translation is from Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel
Shirley, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001; henceforth abbreviated as ‘‘S’’), 9. The
word Spinoza uses here for ‘‘knowledge’’ is cognitio. I have also, in some cases, departed
from Shirley’s translation and consulted the forthcoming translation of the TTP by Edwin
Curley, The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor Curley for sharing his translation with me.
9
TTP I, G III.15; S 9.
10
Ethics, pt. II, prop. 40, schol. 2.

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things and their states) and Thought (for minds and their ideas). When a
person connects the idea of a thing with the idea of the relevant attribute of
God—when his idea of a body, for example, is properly cognitively situated
with respect to the idea of the nature of Extension and the principles of
motion and rest—he has a thoroughly adequate knowledge of that thing.
God’s nature thus makes possible human knowledge in this epistemic sense,
by serving as the foundation of our ultimate understanding of things. The
same view is present in the TTP: ‘‘Natural knowledge can be called proph-
ecy’’—that is, it can be called divine revelation—‘‘for the knowledge that
we acquire by the natural light of reason depends solely on knowledge of
God and of his eternal decrees.’’11 Only when we have knowledge of God
or Nature do we truly have knowledge.
When prophecy or divine revelation is correctly understood in this
broad sense, as whatever knowledge causally and epistemically depends on
God, then it includes natural knowledge. More specifically, it includes phi-
losophy and science, as well as other products of the intellect, and is there-
fore ‘‘common to all men.’’ And while God is, in these ways, the ultimate
cause of true knowledge, the proximate cause or the subject to which
human knowledge immediately belongs is always a natural one, the human
mind itself:

Since, then, the human mind contains the nature of God within
itself in concept, and partakes thereof, and is thereby enabled to
form certain basic ideas that explain natural phenomena and
inculcate morality, we are justified in asserting that the nature of
mind, insofar as it is thus conceived, is the primary cause of divine
revelation. For as I have just pointed out, all that we clearly and
distinctly understand is dictated to us by the idea and nature of
God—not indeed in words, but in a far superior way and one that
agrees excellently with the nature of mind, as everyone who has
tasted intellectual certainty has doubtless experienced in his own
case.12

As Spinoza says, however, his aim in the TTP is not to examine the nature
of prophecy properly understood—something which, it might be said, he
does in the Ethics—but to consider prophecy as it is portrayed and pro-
claimed in Scripture, the primary source of latter-day ecclesiastic authority

11
TTP I, G III.15; S 9.
12
TTP I, G III.16; S 10.

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 Nadler ✦Spinoza and Scripture: A Colloquium

and, consequently, of religious meddling in political affairs. And in Scrip-

ture, he insists, a very different picture of prophecy emerges, one that repre-
sents it as an affair not of the intellect, but of the imagination.
Spinoza notes that all prophecy in the Hebrew Bible occurs by way of
words or images. The prophets hear voices and behold flashes of light; they
confront talking animals and angels bearing swords; some even apprehend
God in bodily form. Of course, not all the sights and sounds perceived by
the prophets are real. According to tradition, only Moses heard real words
from God. By contrast, Spinoza explains, the voice of God perceived by
Samuel, Avimelech, Joshua, and others was illusory; it occurred either in a
dream or in a vision. What he believes this shows, then, is that, according
to Scripture, prophecy came not through the intellect but through the imag-
ination, since that is the human faculty responsible for the visual and audi-
tory phenomena in unreal dreams and visions. ‘‘Hence it was not a more
perfect mind that was needed for the gift of prophecy, but a more lively
imaginative faculty.’’13
The fact that biblical prophecy is a function of the prophet’s imagina-
tion accounts for both the way in which the prophet apprehends the divine
message and the narrative form in which he communicates it to others.
Unlike the philosopher, whose material is intellectual and abstract and can
be formulated in demonstrated propositions, the prophet receives and
works with concrete appearances: ‘‘We shall no longer wonder why Scrip-
ture, or the prophets, speak so strangely or obscurely of the Spirit, or mind,
of God . . . and again, why God was seen by Micaiah as seated, by Daniel
as an old man clothed in white garments, by Ezekiel as fire.’’14 What the
prophet sees are visions, and the insights that he gleans from those visions
are, in turn, passed on through parables and allegories. Such imaginative
stories, while they may be an obstacle to intellectual understanding, are
naturally suited for the products of the prophetic faculty and, just as impor-
tantly, for the prophet’s audience.
Indeed, Spinoza insists, contrary to Maimonides, the intellect has noth-
ing whatsoever to contribute to biblical prophecy. The prophets were not
particularly learned individuals. They were usually simple men from com-
mon, even lowly backgrounds. They did not have philosophical wisdom,
theological training, or scientific knowledge, and therefore they are not nec-
essarily to be believed when they pronounce on such topics. Prophecy as
Spinoza sees it is not a cognitive discipline. If, as Spinoza says, ‘‘the gift of

13
TTP I, G III.21; S 14.
14
TTP I, G III.28; S 20.

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prophecy did not render the prophets more learned,’’15 it is also true that
listening to a prophet will not make one any more intelligent. What does
distinguish the prophet from other individuals (aside from his overly active
imagination) and makes his message an important one is his moral disci-
pline. The prophets were supremely virtuous people. Thus, while their writ-
ings are not a source of philosophical, theological, and scientific truth, they
are outstanding guides for ethical matters—not because what they say is
true, but because they offer us an insightful and inspiring model of the love
of God and an effective guide to flourishing as human beings and living a
life of justice and charity.

II.

Unlike Spinoza’s account of prophecy, which clearly but only implicitly

engages that of Maimonides, his theory of Bible hermeneutic is presented
in explicit and highly critical contrast to that of the Guide of the Perplexed
(and, by implication, also to that found in his friend Lodewijk Meijer’s
book Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres [Philosophy as the Interpreter of
Holy Scripture], published just a few years before the TTP).16
For Maimonides (and for Meijer), a literal reading of the writings of
the Hebrew prophets is the primary or default reading. Unless there are
compelling reasons to do otherwise, one should opt for a straightforward,
simple interpretation of the text. However—and this is what would count
as compelling reasons to do otherwise—if such a literal interpretation yields
a meaning that is inconsistent with a demonstrable philosophical truth,
then a figurative or metaphorical interpretation must be adopted. For
example, reason tells us that God cannot possibly have a body. The princi-
ple ‘‘God is one’’ is, Maimonides reminds his reader, the most important
principle in all of Judaism, even a fundamental theological truth for any
monotheistic faith. And it can be rationally demonstrated with absolute
certainty that a being that is essentially one, a simple unity, cannot possibly
be corporeal: ‘‘There is no profession of unity unless the doctrine of God’s
corporeality is denied. For a body cannot be one, but is composed of matter
and form, which by definition are two; it is also divisible, subject to parti-
tion.’’17 Thus, a reading of a Scriptural passage that involves attributing

15
TTP II, G III.35; S 26.
16
Lodewijk Meijer, Philosophy as the Interpreter of Holy Scripture, trans. Samuel Shirley
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2005).
17
Guide I.35, P 81.

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corporeal parts to God runs up against a demonstrated philosophical truth

and, for that reason, must be rejected. Any mention of God’s ‘‘eye’’ is to
be read figuratively as referring to his watchfulness, his providence or his
intellectual apprehension; while prophetic talk of God’s ‘‘heart’’ is to be
understood as referring to his thought or his opinion (although what God’s
thought or opinion is like cannot be inferred from what our human
thoughts or opinions are like).
On the other hand, when a literal reading of a passage, however odd it
may seem, does not contradict any demonstrated truth, it should be
adopted. Thus, Maimonides insists that although some philosophers
(including Aristotle) firmly believe that the world is eternal and necessary,
no one—including, he insists, Aristotle—has yet offered a conclusive proof
of this. Therefore, there is no justification for reading the Bible’s account of
creation figuratively:

That the deity is not a body has been demonstrated; from this it
follows necessarily that everything that in its external meaning dis-
agrees with this demonstration must be interpreted figuratively. . . .
However, the eternity of the world has not been demonstrated.
Consequently in this case the texts ought not to be rejected and
figuratively interpreted in order to make prevail an opinion whose
contrary can be made to prevail by means of various sorts of argu-
ments.18

Maimonides is committed to this rationalist principle of interpretation

because, as we have seen, he believes that prophecy, biblical or otherwise,
is essentially the communication of rational—scientific, metaphysical, and
moral—truths, albeit dressed up in concrete and imaginative form. What
the prophet conveys is, in its substance, philosophical and natural knowl-
edge. Reason, therefore, is the key or touchstone to interpreting authentic
prophetic writings.19 In short, the Bible says nothing that is not true and
consistent with reason and philosophy.
In his examination of ‘‘the views of those who disagree with me’’ on
the matter of Scriptural interpretation, Spinoza goes to great lengths to
show that ‘‘the method of Maimonides is plainly of no value [inutilis].’’20

18
Guide II.25, P 328.
19
For a discussion of Jewish rationalism in the interpretation of Hebrew Scripture, see
Steven Nadler, ‘‘Rationalism in Jewish Philosophy,’’ in A Companion to Rationalism, ed.
Alan Nelson (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 100–118, esp. 101–5.
20
TTP VII, G III.116; S 102.

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Among other things, that method twists the meanings of biblical passages
to make them fit independent philosophical doctrines: ‘‘[Maimonides]
assumes that it is legitimate for us to explain away and distort the words of
Scripture to accord with our preconceived opinions, to deny its literal
meaning and change it into something else even when it is perfectly plain
and absolutely clear.’’21 This is especially inappropriate in the case of the
prophetic writings, whose authors were not philosophically learned and
who were more concerned with (and qualified for) encouraging moral obe-
dience than with communicating intellectual truths.
Moreover, Spinoza insists, Maimonides’s hyper-rationalist method,
which demands that one know the truth-value of a proposition in order to
determine whether or not it is being expressed by a biblical passage, makes
the meaning of the Bible inaccessible to ordinary people without philosoph-
ical training and absolutely certain knowledge of highly speculative doc-
trines: ‘‘For as long as we are not convinced of the truth of a statement, we
cannot know whether it is in conformity with reason or contrary to it, and
consequently neither can we know whether the literal meaning [of a biblical
passage] is true or false.’’ The interpretation of Scripture would need ‘‘a
light other than the natural light,’’ and only philosophers would be quali-
fied to determine what the Bible is trying to say:

If this view were correct, it would follow that the common people,
for the most part knowing nothing of logical reasoning or without
leisure for it, would have to rely solely on the authority and testi-
mony of philosophers for their understanding of Scripture, and
would therefore have to assume that philosophers are infallible in
their interpretations of Scripture. This would indeed be a novel
form of ecclesiastical authority, with very strange priests or pon-
tiffs, more likely to excite men’s ridicule than veneration.22

For these reasons, Spinoza concludes, ‘‘we can dismiss Maimonides’ view
as harmful, unprofitable and absurd.’’
A proper method of interpreting Scripture—one that is accessible to all
who are endowed simply with the natural light of reason—is, for Spinoza,
of the utmost importance, particularly because of contemporary tendencies
to manipulate the meanings of biblical passages for political and social

21
TTP VII, G III.115; S 102.
22
TTP VII, G III.114; S 101.

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ends. Seventeenth-century Dutch theologians and religious leaders, in par-

ticular, are given to finding in Scripture exactly what will suit their pur-
poses. They justify their convenient but unwarranted readings by appealing
to ‘‘the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.’’ This, for certain Calvinists, is the
supernatural illumination that is supposed to be the true guide for under-
standing what the prophets are saying; it is, however, like divine grace,
available only to the favored few:23

We see that nearly all men parade their own ideas as God’s Word,
their chief aim being to compel others to think as they do, while
using religion as a pretext. We see, I say, that the chief concern of
theologians on the whole has been to extort from Holy Scripture
their own arbitrarily invented ideas, for which they claim divine
authority. . . . They imagine that the most profound mysteries lie
hidden in the Bible, and they exhaust themselves in unraveling
these absurdities while ignoring other things of value. They ascribe
to the Holy Spirit whatever their wild fantasies have invented, and
devote their utmost strength and enthusiasm to defending it.24

So pursued, the interpretation of Scripture is without an anchor. These

theologians, guided only by their mysterious faculty, try to pass off ‘‘human
fabrications as divine teachings.’’ The results are ungrounded in any objec-
tive method and, thus, unverifiable. Their readings reflect nothing but the
prejudices they hold and the superstitions they hope to encourage in others.
The inevitable consequence, as history has shown time and again, is reli-
gious feuding and the disruption of civil peace.
The true way to interpret Scripture and discover what exactly it teaches
and what it does not teach—and Spinoza believes this to be practically a
trivial claim—is to seek the meanings intended by its authors. Meijer is
absolutely right when, in his book, he distinguishes the meaning of a pas-
sage from the question of its truth.25 Where he goes wrong is in identifying
the two in the case of the Bible. The goal of the interpreter of Scripture, like
the goal of a sincere interpreter of any work of human literature, is to dis-
cover what the work means, and this—for Spinoza, at least—is simply to
discover what message the author wants to convey through his writing:
‘‘The point at issue is merely the meaning of the texts, not their truth.’’26 It

23
Spinoza explicitly criticizes this approach for its obscurity in TTP VII, G III.112; S 99.
24
TTP VII, G III.97–98; S 86–87.
25
Meijer, Philosophy as the Interpreter of Holy Scripture, 43–45.
26
TTP VII, G III.100; S 88.

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is one thing to ask whether it is true that God is subject to emotions such
as anger and jealousy; this is an inquiry best left to philosophers or theolo-
gians. It is quite another thing to determine whether Moses believed (and
wanted others to believe) that God can be angry or jealous, and this is the
task of the interpreter. His goal is to know ‘‘what was, or could have been,
the author’s intention . . . concentrating [his] attention on what the author
could have had in mind.’’27
It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine the details of Spinoza’s
account of Bible hermeneutic. In brief, Spinoza, with astonishing boldness,
compares the proper procedure for interpreting Scripture (and, presumably,
any literary work) with the methods of natural science: ‘‘I hold that the
method of interpreting Scripture is no different from the method of inter-
preting Nature, and is in fact in complete accord with it.’’28 And just as a
scientific knowledge of nature must be sought ‘‘from Nature itself,’’ with-
out presupposing any substantive, a priori metaphysical or theological prin-
ciples, so ‘‘all the contents of Scripture . . . must be sought from Scripture
alone [ab ipsa Scriptura sola].’’29 More specifically, the discovery of the
intended meaning of any Scriptural passage is to be sought through Scrip-
ture’s words, supplemented by an investigation into the historical, political,
and religious context of the passage’s composition; the biographical back-
ground, values, and beliefs of its author; the nature of his intended audi-
ence; and the language in which it was written.
What should play no role in this inquiry, however—and this is the
important point for my purposes here—is the question of philosophical or
scientific or theological truth. Just because a sentence of the Bible expresses
the proposition p (whatever the subject of proposition p may be), it does
not follow that p is true. And, as a matter of interpretive policy, deciding
whether or not a sentence of the Bible does indeed express p—that is, decid-
ing that p, as opposed to some other proposition, q, is the true meaning of
the sentence—does not at all involve determining whether or not p is true.
To think that it does is to thoroughly misunderstand the nature of Scripture
and the identity and talents of its prophetic authors. On Spinoza’s account,
discovering the meaning of Scripture has nothing whatsoever to do with
deciding what is true or what is rational to believe.
And this is where our troubles begin.

27
TTP VII, G III.111; S 97.
28
TTP VII, G III.98; S 87.
29
TTP VII, G III.99; S 87.

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III.

In chapter six of the TTP, and in keeping with the naturalistic and necessi-
tarian metaphysics that he defends in the Ethics and that informs the TTP,
Spinoza argues that miracles, understood as violations of the laws of
nature, are impossible. Whatever happens necessarily happens in nature
and as a causal result of nature’s principles. There are no exceptions to this,
and the belief that an event is an exception to nature’s processes—that it
has a supernatural cause, with God suspending nature’s operations in order
directly to bring about the event—can only be a product of ignorance.
There may be ‘‘miracles’’ in the epistemological sense that there is no natu-
ral explanation currently known for the phenomenon: ‘‘The word miracle
can be understood only with respect to men’s beliefs, and means simply an
event whose natural cause we—or at any rate the writer or narrator of the
miracle—cannot explain by comparison with any other normal event.’’30
There are not, however, and cannot be ‘‘miracles’’ in the metaphysical sense
that there is no natural explanation for the phenomenon: ‘‘No event can
occur to contravene Nature, which preserves an eternal fixed and immuta-
ble order. . . . Nothing can happen in Nature to contravene her own univer-
sal laws, nor yet anything that is not in agreement with these laws or that
does not follow from them.’’31 For Spinoza, ‘‘ a miracle, either contrary to
Nature or above Nature, is mere absurdity.’’32
Spinoza then applies this conclusion to the events related in Scripture.
This occurs in the first of the passages on which I want to focus. It comes
in the discussion of miracles in chapter six:

(A) So we conclude here, without qualification, that everything

which is truly related in Scripture to have happened necessarily
happened, as all things do, according to the laws of nature.33

So far, so good. One easy and fairly benign way of reading this, consistent
with Spinoza’s metaphysics, is simply that the events narrated in Scripture,
whatever Scripture’s authors may have believed about them, do in fact,
like all events without exception, have natural explanations. However, on
further examination, it seems that such a benign reading of the passage

30
TTP VI, G III.83–84; S 73.
31
TTP VI, G III.82–83; S 72–73.
32
TTP VI, G III.87; S 76.
33
TTP VI, G III.91; S 80.

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becomes difficult to sustain. For a bit earlier, Spinoza claimed that one of
the main points of this chapter is

(B) to show from Scripture that God’s decrees and commands, and
consequently his providence, are really nothing but the order of
nature, i.e., that when Scripture says that this or that has been
done by God, or by the will of God, nothing more is intended
[nihil aliud revera intellegere] than that it has been done according
to the laws and order of nature, and not, as the common people
think, that for some period nature has ceased to act, or that for
some time its order has been interrupted.34

What initially seemed like a benign claim on Spinoza’s part is starting to

look a bit strange. Spinoza now, in passage B and elsewhere in chapter six,
is making a stronger claim—not just that all the events related in Scripture
do in fact have natural causal explanations, but also that this is the message
of Scripture itself. And in the light of Spinoza’s account of prophecy and
Scripture, it is very odd indeed for Spinoza to want to demonstrate from
Scripture that divine providence is nothing but the order of nature. For this
is not likely to be something that the unenlightened authors of Scripture
believed! And therefore it is not likely to be something that the authors of
Scripture intended to mean in their writings. And yet, at the end of chapter
six, after having just argued that even Scripture teaches that Nature
‘‘observes a fixed and immutable order,’’ Spinoza concludes that ‘‘nowhere
does [Scripture] teach that anything happens in nature which is contrary to
its laws, or which cannot follow from them. So these things ought not to
be fictitiously ascribed to Scripture.’’35
Strange indeed. This is not what Spinoza should say. But let us live
with it for now and grant Spinoza’s empirical and de facto claim, however
implausible it may be in the light of his views on prophecy, that Scripture
nowhere teaches that something can happen in nature contrary to its laws.
This first-order issue is not what I am concerned with. Rather, I am inter-
ested in the second-order issue of the principle of interpretation to which
Spinoza is committed throughout the TTP but which he appears to violate
in another, even more troubling passage in chapter six:

(C) And if anything should be found [in Scripture] which can be

conclusively demonstrated to be contrary to the laws of nature, or

34
TTP VI, G III.88–89; S 78.
35
TTP VI, G III.95–96; S 84.

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to have been unable to follow from them, we must believe without

reservation that it has been added to the Sacred Texts by sacrile-
gious men. For whatever is contrary to nature is contrary to rea-
son, and what is contrary to reason is absurd, and therefore to be
rejected.36

Now we are on entirely different ground. It is one thing for Spinoza to

insist, as he does in passage B and elsewhere in chapter six, that Scripture
generally offers the same deflationary account of miracles as he does; it is
quite another thing to insist, as he seems to do in passage C, that as a matter
of principle Scripture could not but offer the same account of miracles as
he does—that is, that the prophets could not be saying or intending to mean
anything that was not true and consistent with reason.
Given everything that Spinoza has said about the nature of prophecy,
the content of the prophetic writings, and the interpretation of Scripture, it
is very surprising to see him say what he does in passage C. In fact, it would
seem to be precisely what he should not say, since it is inconsistent with his
overall account of the interpretation of Scripture. His remarks in this pas-
sage are something that we might expect from Maimonides or Meijer, but
not from Spinoza. According to Spinoza’s considered account of Scripture,
it is perfectly reasonable to expect the Bible’s untutored authors to regard
events as having supernatural causes and thus sincerely to narrate them in
such a way that they ‘‘contravene the laws of Nature,’’ or to possess an
understanding of things that is ‘‘contrary to reason’’ and, from reason’s
perspective, ‘‘absurd.’’ Because the prophets were extraordinarily virtuous,
we can be certain that their writings will not express anything less than
morally superior doctrines, inspirational exhortations to live according to
justice and charity; in this sense, what Scripture truly teaches is ‘‘true’’ and
consistent with (and discoverable by) reason. But the prophets were not
intellectually gifted individuals, much less Spinozist philosophers who iden-
tify God with Nature. Thus, there is no reason to expect, as a matter of
principle, that the prophets believed that every event has a natural cause or
can be explained through the laws of nature. Why, then, should it not at
least be possible to find ‘‘something in Scripture contrary to the light of
Nature’’ without suspecting the piety of its author? As Spinoza himself says,
in his objections to Maimonides’s view that ‘‘there is nothing in Scripture
which contradicts reason,’’ ‘‘I insist that Scripture expressly affirms and
teaches that God is jealous . . . this is contrary to reason.’’37

36
TTP VI, G III.91; S 80.
37
TTP XV, G III.183; S 167.

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This is how one should read another passage from the TTP that might
also, prima facie, seem to be inconsistent with Spinoza’s anti-dogmatic,
anti-rationalist theory of Bible interpretation. In the preface, Spinoza says
that ‘‘I found nothing expressly taught in Scripture that was not in agree-
ment with the intellect or that contradicted it.’’ This might seem to support
a Maimonidean approach to Scripture. However, it seems clear to me that
what Spinoza is concerned with here as what is ‘‘taught in Scripture’’ is
simply the primary and general moral message of Scripture—‘‘Love God
and your neighbor’’—which is something that reason or the intellect can
discover on its own (e.g., the Ethics). For he continues the passage by noting
that ‘‘I also came to see that the prophets taught only very simple doctrines
easily comprehensible by all, setting them forth in such a style and confirm-
ing them by such reasoning as would most likely induce the people’s devo-
tion to God.’’38 On the other hand, the prophets did teach many other
things, not having to do with the moral message, that the intellect will
clearly reject (to take the example that Spinoza himself uses: that God is
jealous). What Spinoza is not saying in this passage is that the authors of
Scripture say or mean nothing that is ‘‘not in agreement with the intellect
or that contradicted it.’’
Given everything Spinoza has said about the authors of Scripture—
who, to repeat, were not learned philosophers, much less Spinozists—why
should we believe that they could not teach a superstitious account of mira-
cles, that any such message would have to have been inserted by an impious
and sacrilegious forger? Since Scripture is not in the business of communi-
cating philosophical or scientific truth, why would it be improper to
‘‘impute’’ such a false doctrine to Scripture, since such a view of nature
does not bear on moral matters?
This latter point is an important one. One response that might be made
to my query is that all that Spinoza is talking about in passage C is the
moral message of Scripture, in which case he would be claiming only that
‘‘there is nothing expressly taught [about ethical matters] in Scripture that
was not in agreement with the intellect or that contradicted it.’’ But notice
that the subject of passage C, like the whole chapter, is not the ethical doc-
trines of Scripture, but what it says about Nature!
The problems raised by these passages have gone virtually unnoticed
in the scholarly literature. When the passages are discussed, they are usually
written off as Spinoza’s misguided attempts to find his own philosophical

38
G III.10; S 6.

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 Nadler ✦Spinoza and Scripture: A Colloquium

opinions in Scripture. Sylvain Zac, for one, does not see any complication
here. He regards the passages as simply another instance of the way in
which Spinoza allows his own philosophy (and especially his metaphysics)
to infect his reading of the lessons of Scripture (although Zac also takes
Spinoza to task for doing so).39 But again, the issue is not whether Spinoza
is right to think that Scripture is in agreement with him on the question of
miracles, or even whether it is legitimate for Spinoza to try to find support
for his naturalistic view of miracles in what the prophets wrote, as odd a
thing as that may be for him to do. Rather, the issue—and it is most clearly
raised by passage C—is why Spinoza believes that Scripture’s authentically
prophetic authors cannot possibly assert anything about miracles that is
‘‘contrary to reason.’’40

IV.

So there you have it. A question, nothing more. Perhaps there is a clear and
easy answer to all this and I am simply not seeing it.
Still, I do have one idea as to what might be going on here, so let
me conclude by suggesting a possible resolution of the apparent tension. It
involves reading C in a different way, and in fact brings us back to what I
earlier called the ‘‘benign’’ reading of passage A. First, it requires a tripartite
distinction between the following things: (1) the phenomenon, or what
occurs descriptively in the experience of an individual (that is, what Spinoza
says truly ‘‘appears to his senses’’); (2) how the individual interprets this
phenomenon that has occurred in his experience (that is, what he believes
to be the reason or explanation for what appears to his senses); and (3)

39
Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et l’interprétation de l’Écriture (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1965), 206. Preus likewise believes that these passages show only that Spinoza
thinks that he can derive his own view of miracles from Scripture itself, and that ‘‘some
biblical authors (not the prophets) apprehended nature somewhat as he did’’ (J. Samuel
Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2001], 198–99). On Preus’s reading, Spinoza is using Scripture to show that
the conventional understanding of miracles—as violations of the laws of nature—cannot
be found in Scripture itself. But as Preus himself concedes, this approach actually intro-
duces ‘‘a severe tension’’ into the TTP, since Spinoza wants both to undermine the
authority of Scripture and to use it to buttress his own philosophical views (200–201).
40
For a long time, and as far as I could tell, only Leo Strauss took seriously the incongru-
ity of these passages with Spinoza’s ‘‘whole principle of interpretation, that objective
truth may not be used as the key for interpreting Scripture.’’ But Strauss concluded
only that all this shows is ‘‘how little Spinoza finds himself at ease in [his] critique of
miracles’’ (Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997], 129).

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what is the true cause of this phenomenon or these appearances. For exam-
ple, what Joshua experiences with his senses, an unusually long period of
sunlight, is one thing; the prophet’s interpretation of what was causing this
phenomenon—namely, that at God’s command (in answer to his prayer)
‘‘the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down for
a whole day’’ so that the Israelites might take vengeance upon their enemies
(Joshua 10:13)—is another thing; and the true cause of the apparent phe-
nomenon, some atmospheric event, is yet another. It is precisely such a
distinction that Spinoza has in mind when he says that the Hebrews, in the
case of Joshua’s victory,

did not relate simply that that day was longer than usual, but that
the sun and the moon stood still, or ceased their motion [Joshua
10:12–13]. . . . Partly because of religion and partly because of
preconceived opinions they conceived and recounted the affair far
differently than it really could have happened. Therefore, to inter-
pret the miracles in Scripture and to understand from the narra-
tions of them how they really happened, it is necessary to know
the opinions of those who first narrated them and those who left
them to us in writing and to distinguish those opinions from what
the senses could have represented to them.41

It is also the distinction at work when Spinoza talks about an author

‘‘[relating] an event exactly as it took place without introducing into it
something of [his] own judgment.’’42
With this tripartite distinction, we may be able to make sense of what
is going on in the passages that I have been discussing, especially C, the
most problematic one. When Spinoza says in passage C that ‘‘if anything
should be found [in Scripture] which can be conclusively demonstrated to
be contrary to the laws of nature, or to have been unable to follow from
them, we must believe without reservation that it has been added to the
Sacred Texts by sacrilegious men,’’ he does not mean that we will never find
in Scripture an interpretation of an event (that is, an explanation of what
has appeared to the senses) that attributes it to causes working above or
contrary to nature; after all, such interpretations are always a function of
the beliefs and preconceptions of the author, and this author may certainly
believe that what is appearing to his or some other individual’s senses has

41
TTP VI, G III.92; S 81.
42
TTP VI, G III.91; S 81.

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a supernatural cause, particularly if he is an unphilosophical prophet.

Rather, I suggest that what Spinoza means in passage C is that there will
never be found in Scripture a phenomenon in an individual’s experience—
that is, something ‘‘presented to his senses’’—for which some perfectly nat-
ural explanation, one that is in accordance with reason, does not exist.
What we will never find in Scripture ‘‘that can be conclusively proved to
contravene the laws of nature, or which could not possibly follow from
them’’ is ‘‘an event exactly as it took place’’ in someone’s sensory experi-
ence.
Notice that this would not commit Spinoza to the Maimonidean/
Meijerian principle of Scriptural interpretation. It does not imply that the
prophets themselves understood (and possibly also narrated) what was
happening to them in philosophical and naturalistic terms, and thus it
does not imply that we cannot find in Scripture, when properly interpre-
ted, anything but explanations of events in accordance with ‘‘the order of
Nature.’’ What it does imply is that in Scripture we will never find the
narration of something occurring in an individual’s experience for which
there is not, in fact, a natural explanation. Because it is absolutely impos-
sible for anything to happen that is contrary to or above Nature, anyone
who relates that such a thing happened to him or directly appeared in his
experience must be a liar, that is, a sacrilegious person intent on deceiving
his readers. (Remember that all that Joshua must have experienced, at
least according to Spinoza, is an unusually long period of daylight—
something for which there is a natural explanation; Scripture does not say
that Joshua saw the sun stand still in the sky, which would be contrary to
nature and reason.)
The prophet may believe that what he is experiencing with his senses
has a supernatural cause, and his narrative may proceed in such terms. But
it cannot be that it does not in fact have a natural cause; nor can he, a
virtuous and honest prophet, sincerely tell us that something happened
directly in his experience or appeared to him that, according to the order
of Nature, could not possibly have happened or appeared to him. Thus,
what passage C is saying is that we will never find Scripture relating that
something happened or appeared in someone’s experience whose occur-
rence would itself be ‘‘contrary to the light of Nature’’ (and, thus, ‘‘contrary
to reason’’), even if the author of that Scriptural passage believed it to have
happened (and relates it as having happened) in a way that is contrary to
Nature, that is, as a miracle.
It is still a mystery why Spinoza believes, as he argues in chapter six,

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that as a matter of fact Scripture itself—or, rather, its prophetic authors—

when properly interpreted does in fact ascribe natural causes to all events,
even those it presents as miracles. But for now that will have to remain one
of those other difficult questions raised by the TTP.43

University of Wisconsin–Madison.

43
I am grateful to audiences at the Spinoza Conference at the University of Groningen
(October 2010) and the New York City Workshop on Early Modern Philosophy at Ford-
ham University (November 2011) for very helpful discussions on this paper. My special
thanks to Carlos Fraenkel and Warren Zev Harvey for agreeing to contribute to this
symposium on the problem at hand.

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