Reading Scripture can be taken literally or figuratively. It is meant as a way to govern our lives and live by an ideal communicated by God. Many if not all religions have prophets who have professed that they were visited by God and had a supernatural experience that left them not only more enlightened, but with words to live by to distribute to any and all his believers and non believers. Spinoza details the way in which revelation and scripture come about and the unique relationship of natural knowledge and divine inspiration (revelation). In his own words he see that revelation does not come to just anyone and takes many forms. In the first chapter of the TTP Spinoza details the different ways God has presented himself to those worthy of him in some of the more obscure ways. He mentions that revelation does not come clearly but at time come by way of images, nature and as man.”…or that Micah saw god seated, Daniel saw him as an old man dressed in white clothes, and Ezekiel as a fire,... (26, TTP), we see God has come in many forms to deliver his word that later became scripture.
The purpose of scripture is to provide followers a moral compass to which God has prescribed and is said to be a good and just life. One major fault Spinoza finds is that though they were the word of God and received though divine revelation, there is a certain vagueness in the writing and leads to a level of subjective argument that cannot be qualified through reason or some measure to which everyone even those in the same religion can agree upon. One of the problems is the language in which it was translated in or handed down. Not only language in the spoken or textual sense. Including dialects, verbiage and/or meaning, the true message he points out can become skew from what the original message is trying to convey to the reader and listener. Idioms in todays language do not translate well and are all subject to interpretation. That being said no one should be able change Gods message either consciously or by unconsciously. But what qualifies Gods word and from whom or what make it so without proof or reason?
Spinoza states that “to enhance their admiration and reverence for scripture, men seek to interpret it in such a way that it seems to conflict altogether with reason and nature” (Spinoza 98). Men get so caught up in the meanings they attribute to scripture that scripture is a pure work of Human Laws. Scripture becomes the word of a god not the word of God. It deals solely with relative and not the absolute knowledge because man has interpreted and made it valuable only to him and those of his kind. “God’s” word is therefor only qualified for the few men to whom it applies.
ReplyDeleteI am going to take it upon myself to mention a particular section in the first chapter of the TTP, reason being that this section may help to clarify (or further obstruct) the idea of god, prophecy and their relation to natural reason. In section 27 of the first chapter of the TTP Spinoza makes a few leaps towards an understanding of prophecy and its relation to the world. In reference to prophets and their findings, claiming that they were revealed prophetic information strictly through their imaginations Spinoza says “These are the only means that we find in Scripture and we are not permitted to invent others, as we already have shown” (TTP 27). Spinoza sets up the attack on revelations and prophets; he limits scripture to this form of attainment of the messages of god, and that form being through imagination. Now that scripture is bound by this, Spinoza goes on to say that if we were to claim that revelations are revealed through god then we are saying nothing useful. Spinoza continues with this “Indeed, because the power of nature is nothing other than the power of god itself, it is certain that we fail to understand the power of god to the extent that we are ignorant of natural causes.” (TTP 27) it is this quote which I wanted to mention, Spinoza seems to link nature with god synonymously and seems to set up where these prophetic images are coming from, god is only nature and an examination of nature is an examination of god, therefore god and nature are synonymous through sheer semantics. Also in reference to your last sentence, Spinoza is qualifying “gods words” because gods words, or rather gods doing, is seen in nature.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find most interesting about Spinoza's discussion of revelation and human law are the means by which he attempts to reconcile contradictory moral instructions from different prophets, what his attempts signify about his intentions in writing, and the question his reconciliation leaves us with.
ReplyDeleteSpinoza illustrates this discussion with the words of Jesus and Moses. The first famously teaches us to "turn the other cheek" when we are struck by an enemy. The second, that injuries must be redressed by the simple, if brutal, formula of "an eye for an eye". (103).
The direction in which Spinoza takes the discussion from here speaks quite a bit to his intentions in writing. When reading Spinoza, who we know felt strongly about the short comings of organized religion, one might expect the author to take this opportunity to focus on the contradiction in teachings, thus discrediting the bible as a source of moral instruction. That instead the author attempts to reconcile these two teachings may point to his genuine belief in the value of the message of the bible.
What ever his motivations S. does attempt to reconcile the two. Spinoza makes this essential suggestion, "where such passages are self-contradictory, we must consider on what occasion, when, and to whom they were written." (103). In the spirit of this advice S. tells us that Jesus' words held value in a time of religious oppression, when "justice was wholly neglected, and he saw that the ruin of the state was immanent." (103). While Moses, speaking under quite different circumstances, was attempting to set up a state. Jesus' teaching would thus hold for any situation in which the people faced oppression, while Moses' words should be taken as the foundation for law. In this way, Jesus acted as a teacher, and Moses as a legislator. (103). To my mind this reconciliation is very successful, but leaves us with an interesting, and possibly unsettling, distinction between the role of morality and that of law.
Moses commands are further distinguished from pure moral teaching in the contradictory way Moses' instruction interacts with his own moral teaching. In Moses' law one is required to prosecute wrongs in court, even though Moses' "condemned vengeance and hatred of one's neighbor." (103). Here we see a tension between legality and morality, or pure moral teaching and the demands of pragmatic legislation and state building.
This tension poses an interesting question, the answer to which Spinoza may have thought obvious. This question may be posed, Should we allow a disconnect between our moral principles and the operation of our laws, and to what extent? Or, if we accept justice as an ideal to be strived for, do we define it in terms of adherence to moral virtue, or to the laws of the state?
We discussed this issue last semester in one of my courses and specifically we discussed prostitution. We read an essay by Martha Nussbaum where she advocated for the legalization of prostitution, comparing it to a model working in medical school receiving rectal examinations while students watch. In theory, I understood her argument, but in reality prostitution is not a good career and has a huge impact on the prostitute's emotional, physical, and mental health. I feel like our moral principles can often be theoretical and not always pragmatic in how the world actually is and how we actually behave within it. I think that we have to have a disconnect between our moral principles and our laws, simply because the world isn't "perfect". I used to live with a woman who went to high school with a man whose daughter was murdered, and then he tracked down the murderer and killed him. When the judge asked him if he regretted it, he said he didn't and he wasn't sorry. The judge felt bad and felt sorry for the man, but he committed murder. I'm sure murder wasn't aligned with this man's value system, but sometimes we don't do things that are aligned with our values. That is why in our judicial system we have tiers for murder: 1st degree (premeditated), 2nd degree (intent to do harm, but not kill), 3rd degree (negligence), and even self-defense or insanity. Simply because murder does happen and pragmatically as a society we need to be equipped with democratically agreed upon ways to sort out what kind of murder happened and how the convicted will be punished. I think morals are a beautiful thing and should be taught and self-taught, but often they are not pragmatic enough to govern a civilized society. We have to have laws that account for what actually happens in the world. The more interesting part of your question though, I have to say we need to define justice in terms of our adherence to moral virtue. I don't think laws have the ability to define morals, they can only create the boundaries at which a person or entity has stepped outside of what is lawfully acceptable behavior. If we use laws as our measuring stick to how moral we are, then we'd be in pretty bad shape! Back to prostitution: I do not think that it is moral to legalize prostitution, but I could almost agree with legalization pragmatically because the prostitutes in Nevada have very low cases of STD's and are treated and paid decently (compared to the unregulated markets). This doesn't mean that I think prostitution is ok on the buying or selling side of the transaction, but it does happen everywhere all the time. So my point is that applying moral virtue doesn't always work in the real world and we have to adjust our vision of "perfection" to what is actually the situation.
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