Does Spinoza Think the Bible Is Sacred?

Abstract

Does Spinoza think the Bible is sacred? One does well at first to notice the obvious, that it is Spinoza himself who asks the question in what sense the terms "sacred" and "divine" should "be applied to Scripture and to any inanimate thing." Yet his reply is considerably less obvious. Readers of Spinoza know that he contests God's authorship of the Bible, seems to find indifferent much of its contents, disparages rabbinic and medieval Jewish philosophical interpretations, relegates biblical commandments to the ancient world, and locates the Bible among things inanimate. Yet he also argues that the Bible is divine, grounding this judgment in the hermeneutical principle that "nothing is sacred or profane or impure in an absolute sense apart from the mind, but only in relation to the mind." My paper considers the structure and implications of Spinoza's argument relating the divinity of a text, of this text, to the mind, taking seriously the multiple stakes involved in his day and in ours, as well as the sheer complexity of and tensions in Spinoza's view. While there are many dimensions to Spinoza's attitude towards Judaism, Jewish thought, religion, and the politics of religion, I claim that there is something fundamental about his concept of the Bible and his question concerning the sacred that grounds all of these regions of interest and that renders the Theologico-Political Treatise a single, complexly balanced work, albeit one whose measure we are still assessing.