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THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL MEANING OF SCRIPTURE

Within the history of ideas, [Spinoza] subordinated the truth of Judaism to the reve-

lation of the New Testament. The latter is of course surpassed by the intellectual love

of God, but Western being involves this Christian experience, even if it is only a stage.

Henceforth we cannot ignore the harmful [ne ́faste] role Spinoza played in the

decomposition of the Jewish intelligentsia, even if for its representatives, as for Spi-

noza himself, Christianity is only a penultimate truth, and the adoration of God in

spirit and in truth must still surmount Christianity....Itwasbyprefiguring Jesus

with Judaism that Spinozism managed to introduce [or accomplish,accomplir]a

movement into [or in] irreligious Judaism which, when it was religious, it opposed

for seventeen centuries. How many Jewish intellectuals detached from all religious

belief [croyance] do not regard the figure of Jesus as fulfilling the teaching of the

prophets, even if this figure or these teachings are succeeded in their minds by the

French Revolution or Marxism? For a Le ́on Brunschvicg, whose memory we venerate,

or a Janke ́le ́vitch, whom we admire, a quotation from the New Testament is much

more familiar than one from the Old Testament, and it is often the former that

illuminates the latter....

Thanks to the rationalism patronized by Spinoza, Christianity is surreptitiously

triumphing, bringing conversion without the scandal of apostasy! (108 / 155–56)

In other words, ‘‘Western being,’’ in its philosophical concept, represented here by
these political ideas and thinkers, does not involve Jewish experience (albeit as a stage) in
the same way as it does Christianity, given the emphasis placed on acknowledging the
Gospels as ‘‘an inevitable stage on the road to truth’’ (108 / 155). To avoid this ‘‘mixture
[me ́lange]’’ (cf. 109 / 157) of philosophical reason and Christian ‘‘atmosphere’’ (109 /
156), one would, we have seen, need to return to Plato and Aristotle rather than Spinoza.
Rather than presenting a ‘‘cryptogram’’ (111 / 158) in which philosophy enters into mor-
tal combat with religionin obliquoora tergo(i.e., secretly and indirectly), as Leo Strauss
suggests in his influential interpretation of theTheologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza, in
Levinas’s reading, amalgamates reason and revelation—especially in its Christian articula-
tion—far too much.This is the treacherous and, it would seem,un-Spinozistic or even
anti-Judaic moment in Spinoza, which is not to be confused with the positive, anti-Spinozistic
element on which Levinas chooses to dwell at greater length. Interestingly, and in close
proximity to and distance from Heidegger’s diagnosis of the onto-theological constitution
of Western metaphysics, the moment that amalgamates reason and revelation (as a
wooden iron, of sorts) foregoes philosophy’s truth (theconatus essendi), whose relentless
self-satisfaction Levinas exposes to its ultimate limitation (which is not so much religious
as ethical, an ‘‘otherwise than being and essence’’). Both this un-Spinozistic moment and
the anti-Spinozistic element operate side by side, but do not sit very well with the Spinoz-
ism of the overall rationalist project, which, Levinas agrees with Zac, should not be con-
fused with the inauguration of the historical critique of Scripture for which the

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